On self-limiting enzymes, playfullness in science, and mothers... (Books - The Statue Within by Francois Jacob)

Over the last ten days, I attended the annual conference of the International Society for Autism Research, in San Sebastian Spain, where I presented some of my research and heard about the work of many, many others.  It was impressive to see the huge amount and diversity of efforts focused on autism spectrum disorders.  On my travels there and to nearby Barcelona, I also managed to get a little reading done.

I had started The Statue Within, the memoir of French biologist Francois Jacob a while ago, but never really got going.  The conference put me in the mood to pick it up off the pile again and just as I began, I learned that Dr. Jacob had died at 92 years of age.  Dr. Jacob's contribution to our understanding of how living organisms work was to be the first to observe and describe how the level of an enzyme produced in a bacterium can be responsive to its environment, eventually earning him, Jacques Monod and and Andre Lwoff the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.  He saw that e. coli, for example, could digest the sugar lactose for energy instead of glucose, but it produced the necessary digestive enzyme (lactase) only when lactose was present.  How was this possible?  It was learned around the same time that the production of any protein (such as an enzyme) was the product of certain sequences in our DNA (we call those sequences genes).  These sequences became a template for RNA which, in turn, became a template for the production of a protein. The e. coli's genes were always equipped to produce lactase but, typically, a repressor (also a protein) was bound to the portion of our DNA responsible for producing lactase.  In the presence of lactose, the repressor binds lactose instead of those genes.  This accomplishes two things: 1) the lifting of the repression which means that the genes facilitate the production of lactase which digests the lactose and 2) it creates a self-limiting loop such that, when the lactose is gone, the repressor then binds the DNA once again and the production of lactase is turned-off.  This was important to biology not just in understanding how e. coli are responsive to their environment, but because this model extends to any gene in any organism. Dr. Jacob and Jacques Monod realized for us that genes interact with their environment.  Genes being present in an organism are not sufficient to accomplishing their action, they must be turned on" by some signal or, to use the term biologists use, they must be "expressed."  Although, as is always true with biology, it is now understood that this is a general principle and this simple mechanism is, in fact, be varied upon and complicated infinitely.

A little break...

Headed to points east for a conference and a couple of days of relaxation.  Be back soon.

Film - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

I was surprised by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Though predictably sentimental, the persistence of a young boy who is probably on the autism spectrum (Thomas Horn) in trying to make sense of what happened to his father on 9/11, made for a touching story with a sense of adventure and imaginative characters.  I would have liked more time spent developing the people he meets on his journey instead of collapsing them into montage, but there are two good scenes with Viola Davis one with Jeffrey Wright, and a lovely relationship developed with Max von Sydow, who never speaks a word.  Zoe Caldwell really disappears into her performance as the boy's grandmother, I must admit that I didn't even recognize her.  As Sheila pointed out to me, the fact that a 12-year-old carries this feature length film is pretty impressive.

The surreality of celebrity life (Books - The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro)

If you're looking for another Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, that is not what you're going to find in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).  Mr. Ryder, a world-famous pianist, arrives in a small, unnamed Western European city to give a concert, a concert he cannot remember planning.  In long, run-on paragraphs, the surreal action of Ishiguro's book describes the days leading up to this concert on which numerous events seem to be planned, events Mr. Ryder cannot remember scheduling, listed on an agenda he never received.  They not only involve the expectation that he will address local music groups, but that he will take opinions on long-standing arguments in town politics, advise family members on their relationships, listen to amateur musician's practice sessions, revive the reputation of the town drunk, a once great conductor, and perform surgery by the side of the road following an accident.

Theatre - The Big Knife - Roundabout Theatre

Clifford Odet's 1948 The Big Knife takes a big slice out of old Hollywood.  A movie star needs to decide if the studio will own him or if he will own himself.  The lyrical idealist who wrote Awake and Sing is now bitter with the money he has taken from the movies, takes out a big knife, and tries to cut out his own liver.  It's not a pretty play, but it's a good one.  This production, directed by Doug Hughes, has a number of actors who can combine the ability to be vulnerable to their dying careers and their dying souls while singing Odets's theatrical 1940s vernacular.

When autobiography fails to be personal (Theatre - Mayday Mayday - Theatre at St. Anne's Warehouse)

I know Tristan Sturrock's work as a talented member of Kneehigh Theatre, which did, among other works, a brilliantly inventive theatrical adaptation of Brief Encounter.  Mayday Mayday: A True Story by the Man Who Fell is Sturrock's one-man account of his recovery from an accident which broke his cervical spine.  It is presented by his own Theatre Damfino.  It sports a number of creative moments with its spare means, and I have no doubt that its creation was useful therapeutically, but that didn't make it involving theatre. Audiences often seem unwilling to say when autobiographic works about recovery haven't made for captivating works of art, perhaps they fear their reaction will be felt too personally.  In fact, Sturrock opens the performance by saying that this was, for a long time, a story he didn't want to tell.  I can't blame him but unfortunately, I could tell that from the performance. The work uses narrative storytelling to remain distant to the experience of it. While it showcases Sturrock's remarkable physical precision and appealing presence, it doesn't live.  It is emotionally unrevealing of his experience then or his present experience with us.  I'm pleased for his remarkable good luck but wasn't won over by Mayday Mayday as theatre.

Keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities (Books - Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks)

Now nearly 80, neurologist, writer, and keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities - Oliver Sacks - has written his 12th book.  This one is on activations of the perceptual systems that are produced by internal rather than external stimulation or Hallucinations (Knopf, 2012).  They run the gamut.  You can smell them, hear them, see them, and feel them.  They can have their origin in disease processes, chemicals, injury to the nervous system, or sensory deprivation.  They can take the form of geometric patterns, religious conviction, snatches of music, or little people (Lilliputian hallucinations).  I too have seen a patient with this last form of hallucination.  Her's were holding their heads in their hands (detached from their necks), but it didn't seem to cramp their style any.  I think that the term is probably my favorite in neurology. 

I have always admired Sacks's writing about his patients because I feel that I am reading about people rather than cases.  I am a great admirer of Sacks's early books like An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, both are less continuous narratives than Hallucinations or Sacks's recent Musicophilia and The Mind's Eye.  Rather than thematic in nature, these earlier books are simply collections of essays on human beings whose strange neurologic cases make them fascinating, but who otherwise have little or no relation to each other.  I found some of the material included in Hallucinations had to stretch to be subsumed under the book's theme.  While I found most of the material interesting, an episodically constructed book might have been a more natural and satisfying form.

On more than one occasion in this book (and his last, The Mind's Eye) Sacks becomes his own subject. In this case, he writes frankly of his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, a piece that appeared in The New Yorker last year, and of a serious hiking accident during which Sacks says that a voice commanded him to keep going.  I am always impressed by the historical sources Sacks cites that immediately make me want to visit the library, such as Jackson's original papers on epilepsy and aphasias, perhaps not as enticing to the average lay-reader, but for a neuroscientist, these are the golden oldies. Jacksonian seizures were named for John Hughlings Jackson!

Hallucinations makes colorfully clear that the mechanisms in the brain that eventuate patients' perceptions in the absence of external stimulation can be diverse.  The light patterns that are experienced in the aura prior to migraine might be thought of as electrical disturbances like a wave passing across the visual parts of the brain.  Whereas the hallucinations reported around near death experiences such as a floating above one's own body may occur due to stimulation of the right angular gyrus, one of several brain regions implicated in a circuit that according to Sacks mediates body image and vestibular sensations.  The vision of a dark tunnel with light at the end may be the result of decreased circulation to the retina, which narrows the visual fields. 

The most remarkable of the cases Sacks writes of in Hallucinations was that of an 86-year-old English man who already had glaucoma and macular generation, but when a stroke compromises his right occipital lobe he loses vision completely in his left visual field.  What is most interesting is that he is not aware of his loss

...his brain appears to fill in the missing parts.  Interestingly, though, his visual hallucination/filling in always seem to be context-sensitive or consistent.  In other words, if he is walking in a rural setting, he can be aware of bushes and trees or distant building in his left visual field, which when he turns to engage his right side, he discovers are not really there.  The hallucination do, however, seem to be filled in seamlessly with his ordinary vision.  If he is at his kitchen bench, he "sees" the entire bench, even to the extent of perceiving a certain bowl or plate within the left side of his vision - but which on turning disappear, because they were never really there.  Yet he definitely sees a whole bench, with no clear separation between parts composed of hallucination and true perception.

The human brain is a remarkable country and it is always enjoyable to travel there with Oliver Sacks as your guide.

Film - The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

The 1970s was the heyday of a certain kind of American movie which stressed gritty, real performances, scene writing that jumped into the middle of things in-progress, captured accident and unease, told stories with human behavior as the medium, and sported the message - break out and be free.  It was a great time for American movie making that doesn't have a mainstream equivalent now. The King of Marvin Gardens: Bruce Dern as a bullshit artist who believes his own hype, an unusually quiet and vulnerable Jack Nicholson, and a brilliantly unhinged Ellen Burstyn (dir. Bob Rafelson).

Living with integrity (Books - Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach)

In the maelstrom of dissertation and article writing, I have been getting seriously behind here at bookeywookey.  You wouldn't know it, but I've finished reading four books: To the Castle and Back - Vaclav Havel's memoir, The Unconsoled - an early novel of Kazuo Ishiguro's, My Brother's Book by Maurice Sendak, and Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach.  I really had the best intentions to write about all of them.  And I'm nearly finished with Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations.  So I realize that I had better get cracking with some shorter write-ups if I am to write anything at all before I forget my impressions.

Doris Grumbach is a much respected American novelist, memoirist, and literary critic. She served as literary editor at The New Republic in the 1970s, but is little-heard-of these days.  If you check out her very interesting biography, at 94 years of age she still runs Wayward Books with her partner.  This was my second reading of her novel Chamber Music, originally published in 1979 (2008, Pushcart Press), and my respect for its convincing first-person voice, restrained passion, and plainspoken diction was only increased by a second look.

I write this, then, because I am freed by my survival into extreme old age, and because I write in the air of freer times.  Whether this air is entirely salutary, whether the old must of chests, of closets, bell jars, and horsehair sofas is not a better climate for the storage of the private life, I do not know.  But I tire very quickly these days and must speak openly, for once.  I am now free.  Extraordinary for me, and for one of my time, I intend to put down extraordinary truths.

I stress the believability of the narrative voice because, although Grumbach was like the narrator of Chamber Music - she wrote as a lesbian who was born into a more constrained era but lived into the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s (still ongoing).  Grumbach too married a man in her youth and was late to come into herself.  But Grumbach was only 60 when she wrote in the voice of the 90-year-old Caroline McClaren, wife of the famous American composer Robert McClaren.  Yet she creates a confessional tone and a context for writing which are so convincing that they will send you to your favorite search engine (I was going to say to the encyclopedia) to look up Robert McClaren's music and biographical details.   

This work offers the rare artistic accomplishment of wholeness.  Its pieces, its technique are integral, they never call attention to themselves - it achieves artistic integrity.  And via that form, Chamber Music conveys a subtle message of the human costs of living covertly because the societal majority has  conferred shame upon what you are.  And don't think that this is a purely contemporary concern.  It is, and in this novel it feels like it, a classic artistic subject - think of Jude the Obscure.  So the integrity of this novel's form reflects its content, which concerns living with integrity.  Lastly, is the pleasure of its tone - one of dignity and joy. This lesser-known novel and writer deserves a renaissance.  Consider reading Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach.  

Theatre - Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is certainly the most amiably nihilistic play ever written and is most appositely titled....With every exchange between the fencing lovers, the abyss glitters, and their mutual wit does not so much defend against other selves as it defends against meaninglessness. - Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Critics are fond of declaring the near impossibility of this play's swift switches from screwball comedy to tragedy, but I thought the current production at Theatre for a New Audience pulled them off admirably, largely because they didn't overplay what is supposed to be funny and the actor's were capable of being moved by the seriousness of their characters' predicaments. Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake (above) as Beatrice and Benedick were particularly strong.

Theatre - Old Hats

Old Hats is a delightful vaudeville from master clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner with music by Nellie McKay (dir. Tina Landau).  It's classic clowning but there's nothing old hat about it.

Film - Out of The Past (1947)

Out of the Past (1947, dir Jacques Tourneur).  A man (Robert Mitchum) tries to escape his past (Kirk Douglas) but a femme fatale (Jane Greer) won't let him.  This film is classic noir and noir is not about second chances. 

A modern novel of compassion and contradiction - (Books - A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki)

A Hello Kitty lunchbox, a ziplock bag containing what first appears to be a volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, some letters written in Japanese, more writing in French,and an unusual wristwatch wash up on the shores of a small coastal town in British Columbia. Ruth, a writer, finds this treasure trove while on a walk on the beach and assumes them to be the detritus of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The Proust volume turns out to be a diary written in English by a Japanese teenager named Nao.  Her father loses his job and Nao enters a new school where she is brutally bullied and they both contemplate ending their lives.  Meanwhile, Ruth is trying to finish writing a book about her mother, whom she cared for during her last years with dementia. As sometimes happens when you get stuck in writing, the diary ends up looking much more interesting than the subject she meant to be writing about, and Ruth gets pulled into Nao's world which becomes more real to her than her own. Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (Viking, 2013) plays with a few elements - narrative, time, and buddhism - yet it is a complex and rangy work.  I appreciate the copy sent to me by Viking/Penguin.

Film - Our Man in Havana (1959)

Noel Coward, Alec Guinness, and Burl Ives in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.  Political satire on Cold War spying, it was released just as Castro was seizing power.  It manages to be critical without being jaded because of its whimsy.

Film - Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

A guy places an ad because he wants a companion for time travel.  A magazine picks up on it and sends a team to write a story on him.  Safety Not Guaranteed (dir Colin Trevorrow) is an indie, totally-play-it-straight, completely un-jaded little surprise of a movie.  Dee-lightful, and it will keep you guessing.

A revolution without a cause (Theatre - Neva by Guillermo Calderon)

Neva, by Chilean writer and director Guillermo Calderon, is about making drama in the context of revolution.  It is set in 1905, when the Czar's troops murdered civilians for demonstrating, an event that likely helped sow the seeds of the 1917 revolution. The great playwright Anton Chekhov has just died of tuberculosis.  His wife comes to St. Petersberg, still mourning him, to rehearse his Cherry Orchard.  What is the meaning of their drama made of personal loss and love when there is real drama, with life and death stakes, taking place in the street outside?  The actors demand scenes of each other, they concoct emotions from fantasy in order to escape the pain of their lives.  Then they just a quickly knock their fantasies down, criticize each other, and turn to gossip.  The turn-on-a-dime rollercoaster ride demanded of the cast would provide for tour-de-force peformances, but the cast is a little long on effort and a little short on real feeling.  The question of the uses of drama is a provocative one to ask in a theatre, with your play as the means of asking it, but I imagine it would have been very different to ask it in Chile. Because here one has no revolutions in the street. People make fortunes to live in Brooklyn, stress about their carbon footprints, and dress like they play for a grunge band.  The disjointed Occupy Wall Street movement lasted, what - five minutes - and disappeared in time for the election. Caldeon's demand of emotional acrobatics and effects like cold, rapid-fire delivery, and mock over-dramatization would have been useful foils in actors and for a public who are already charged with political emotion.  But here, where most people come to escape fighting for their ideals so that they can earn a living, and where artists mostly romanticize being political, what you end up seeing is the strain of these artists to be filled with meaning. Calderon would have needed to alter this production for our political and social context but was evidently not able to.  As a result, I could see what he wrote, but don't think this production gave us his play at all. 

Film - My Week With Marilyn (2011)

Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn (2011) starring Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh is a failed exercise based on the memoir of the third assistant director on the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl.  It is a shame that the historical legacy of this film's characters burden rather than inspire the creative team.  The actors and particularly the writer are as starstruck as the poor assistant director. The screenplay is only capable of tying the end of one cliche to the beginning of the next. Why is it that British films based on history (this was also the case with Iron Lady) are obliged to tell their stories via a parade of montages?  Isn't anyone capable of writing a scenes that lasts more than 30 seconds?  The point of telling this story, it would seem to me, is revealing the distance between the image of the star of legend and the person we now know they were.  This superficial approach they took hamstrung even actors of the caliber of Simon Russell Beale and Judy Dench because they didn't have the time to behave as real people.  God, what a bore. 

Theatre - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennesse Williams 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof still plays as strong and relevant in the current Broadway revival with Scarlett Johansson, Ciaran Hinds, and Benjamin Walker (dir. Rob Ashford).  Williams was the greatest lyrical voice of the American theatre. The lengthy outpourings of his tormented characters play more like arias than monologues.  All of his plays were personal, if you ask me, but this one seem to be an outpouring of his rage against duplicity in every corner of life - family, medicine, law, and religion.

Mendacity is the system that we live in.  Liquor is one way out an' death's the other.

Why is it so damned hard to talk?

Like E.M. Forster, he exhorts us to stop lying and connect to others, even if it's tough.  They couldn't have been more different writers, but both were gay, so they were familiar with the ways that society expected them to lie.

Are we many selves or just one self? (Books - Dark Matter by Juli Zeh)

I have actually finished three books in the last two weeks, started two more (the new Oliver Sacks - Hallucinations - and a review copy of A Tale for the Time Being), and attended two interesting science talks, but you couldn't tell that from a visit to bookeywookey lately.  I have had some very long days at work and every moment of writing time has gone to my dissertation, so I have been letting things slip around here. I'm afraid I may not remember Tenth of December, the much-talked-about short story collection by George Saunders, well enough to write about it. I don't know that I will have time to write about the discussion of collaborations between scientists and educators, or the other on how scientists and members of the media communicate relationships between brain and behavior.  I hope I can get to Vaclv Havel's memoir To the Castle and Back, but for the moment, I'll write something about Juli Zeh's Dark Matter, because it is freshest in my mind.

Juli Zeh is a German writer and the sometimes stilted, but still involving, translation is by Christine Lo.  I learned about Dark Matter from Lizzy Literary Life - an excellent recommendation, thank you Lizzy.  It is a smart, inventive mystery by a German writer about two physicists and two detectives each, in their way, struggling with love and each, in their way, struggling with time. The two physicists, Oskar and Sebastian, share a long, tangled past full of deep love. This love has persisted even as their diverging opinions about the nature of time and the universe has created an animus between them.  Rita Skura, one of the two detectives, is an odd duck.  A self-conscious giant, brusque, married to her work, Rita is so acutely sensitive to, and also alienated from, people that she has terrible judgement about them.  She would seem to be miscast as a detective, but learned from her mentor, Detective Schilf, that if she went with the opposite of her instincts, she would be dead-on.  When she fails to solve a particularly sensitive series of murders in a hospital in the city of Freiburg, where she lives and works, Schilf is called in.  Schilf is a schlumpy, asocial being, but the combination of a recent fatal diagnosis and a new relationship has spurred him to action.  Although he is meant to help solve the hospitals murders, these overlap with another murder and the kidnapping of Sebastian's son.  These two detectives are likeable, idiosyncratic creations that add much enjoyment to the reading of this unconventional mystery. 

Film - Mary Queen of Scots (1971)

Mary Queen of Scots (1971) suffers from a turgid, 1970s script, some wooden acting from Patrick McGoohan and Daniel Massey, however the young Glenda Jackson manages to combine being commanding and vulnerable.  It is a pleasure to watch the young Vanessa Redgrave, Ian Holm, and Timothy Dalton before they grew into themselves, and history has provided a cracking good story.

Scientist as harridan, Hollywood icon, and bad dresser

Dr. Patricia Fara, historian of science at Cambridge, bemoans in Nature today the role biographers have played in reinforcing stereotypes of women in the sciences and mathematics in Women in Science: Weird Sisters?.

It seems that being an ordinary woman with a stellar scientific career is simply not enough: to be marketable, she must also be odd. Dust jackets entice purchasers by rebranding an overlooked character as a unique female individual — in other words, as a weird woman.

Converting female scientists into publishing opportunities may sell books, but it does the cause of equality in science no favours.  

Her critique offers a list of recent biographies which, despite any shortcomings, profile some important scientists such as Rosalind Franklin, Dr. Jocelyn Bell, and, Hedy Lamarr, no really.

The allure of the counterintuitive - is it good or bad for science?

There is a good critique on how the popular press hypes social science research in The American Scholar: The Allure of the Counterintuitive by Jessica Love.  Well worth a look.  I very much agree with her point that the press gives very little space to studies which are

incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions...

But Love seems to feel that the appeal of the counterintuitive is damaging to science because people will bee so entrained to hype that they will not support studying brain processes that appear to be obvious.  However,  I would argue that interest in counterintuitive conclusions is an opportunity to argue for why we study the brain, its behaviors, and its less visible processes (like the electrical and chemical signalling whose outcome are our cognitive functions) in the first place.  Even though our minds are are own, we do not have conscious access to all its processes.  This is an opportunity to explain just that, and in the case of neuroscience conclusions are even less obvious.   Although our minds 'think' our neurons do not.  We do not know before studying brain processes which will confirm our common sense notions and which will not. So, while I get a little tired of "hey wow" science and do not like inaccurate popular press interpretations of studies, the allure of the counterintuitive offers an opportunity to better explain critical thinking and experimental processes if it is used well.

Hat tip: The Dish

Opera and the Holy Grail - Parsifal

The Met's new Parsifal directed by Francois Girard, with beautiful sustained singing, precise rich playing from the orchestra, and intelligent performances by Rene Pape, Peter Mattei, and Jonas Kaufmann. Wagner bombastically told us that his five-and-a-half-hour quasi-pagan-quasi-christian-sci-fi myth shouldn't be staged. In my opinion, it is his best score, so I'm glad no one has listened to him.  It wasn't the first thing Wagner was wrong about.  The production smartly doesn't focus on the action of the story or try for ridiculously literal effects like flowers and grass on stage. These are symbols.  Instead, it directs our attention to the themes and lets the human beings convey what it is like to be players in a grand scheme.  Taking on the pain of mankind is an experience on a geological scale.  This production is physically stark but striking, communicating the reach of the myth with clarity and gravitas.

Film - The Scarlet Empress (1934)

Having just read Robert Massie's vivid biography Catherine the Great, we got Josef von Sternberg's very loose film adaptation of her diaries - The Scarlet Empress - an absurd, expressionist, Hollywood-ized concoction starring Marlena Dietrich as the sex-starved naif turned dominatrix- Empress.  In an interview done in the 1960s, Sternberg who was born in Vienna without the 'von,' emigrated to New York at the age of two, and dropped out of a Queens high school, described himself as 'having no influences' and doing everything himself - design, cinematography, etc.... This film reeks of such arrogance.  He clearly allowed no one to interfere with his vision and it's too bad.  He could have benefited from hearing the word 'no.'  The film has that sort of amateurish hysteria marked by someone who thinks that all he has to do to make a great film is control every lighting angle and the texture of every closeup, but he simply has no idea what to do with the human beings cluttering up the set and he is clueless about casting.  Louise Dresser plays the Empress Elizaveta (daughter of Peter the Great) looking like one of those classic 1930s Hollywood middle-aged matrons and sounding like Lucille Ball playing a slattern.  The man cast as the head of the Russian orthodox church read his lines like John Wayne.

Who says people who play early music don't know how to have fun?

 Philippe Jaroussky singing Ohime, ch'io cado by Claudio Monteverdi

 Hat tip: The Ragazzo

Of moral compasses and light-meters - on becoming sensitive (Books - The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont)

Amber Dermont's much-talked-about novel The Starboard Sea (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012) begins when a wealthy, intelligent teenager, Jason, experiences the death of his friend and sailing partner, Cal, to suicide and everything that once worked in his life goes to hell.  His father arranges his transfer to Bellingham, the last chance in prep schools, the school to which boys and girls are transferred when they have screwed up one to many times.  There, a boy who by most standards has it all - decent looks, smarts, he plays the piano, he's a star on the sailing team, he's rich, and he even fits in - there Jason proceeds to pull to the side-lines, notice the hardships of other people, and become an outsider who cares. 

Film - Songcatcher (2000)

A university-educated musicologist (the passionate Janet McTeer) goes 'up the mountain' to collect the authentic folk music of Appalachia.  Songcatcher (2000) is not the strongest script in the world, but it has Janet McTeer and Pat Carroll in it and it tells a good story about having the strength to go one's own way.

Film - The Iron Lady (2011)

Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent are wasted on The Iron Lady (2011) dir. Phyllida Lloyd. The film tries desperately, if not to portray Margaret Thatcher sympathetically, at least to trace the origin of her rabid fiscal conservatism and inhumane governing choices.  It doesn't succeed.  Being a shopkeeper's daughter or being laughed at by school chums needn't make one unempathic. In fact, it could easily do the opposite.  Meryl Streep has so much age makeup on that she looks like a lizard, and the film chooses to tell its story of fairly recent history via so many cliched montages, with such a baldly commercial soundtrack, that I wondered why they didn't make a 10 minute music video and have done with it.  The endless montages - Maggie at home, Maggie losing the election, Maggie winning the election, Maggie ruining the British economy, the masses mad at Maggie and rioting in Brixton, Maggie fighting in the Falklands, in addition to being banal, seemed to wish to skirt actual scene writing so that the film wouldn't have to have an opinion on her politics.  Want a lesson in what austerity does to an economy, America?  Look at Thatcherism.  Anyway, her austerity was a lie.  She was glad to spend millions of pounds when it came to a war in the Falklands.  Given the way she decimated funding for the arts in Britain, as a director I certainly wouldn't have wanted the job of directing her biopic.

What we go to art for (Books - Artful by Ali Smith)

I fell over a review of Ali Smith's Artful (The Penguin Press, 2012) by happenstance this past week, thought it sounded interesting, and then walked into my favorite bookshop the next day looking for something else, and I thought - there's that book I read about.  I can never resist browsing the books stacked on the big tables at Three Lives Booksellers.  I read a page and thought - oh, I really do have to read this: its art criticism but it's also a dialogue between a woman and her dead lover, and it was originally delivered as a series of lectures, which really means she has written a dramatic dialogue.  So anyway, I bought Artful as well as the novel I had come in for and even though I was really looking forward to reading the novel, something made me start Artful on the way home in the subway that evening and I was stunned, hooked instantly.  I did not want to stop reading it.

Ted's Library Tour!

Danielle takes a wander through my stacks at her blog - A Work in Progress.  Pay her a visit and check out my library while your at it!

Happy Valentine's Day

Something to sweeten your day.

The solo voice in NYC

The 105th Helicon Symposium, a series of salon-like chamber music concerts in intimate settings, presented solo works by Bach, including Johnny Gandelsman playing the Chaconne from the violin Partita #2 in D Minor. It's meditation listening to an extended piece for a single instrument while New York's own never-ending score plays in the background.


Brooklyn Rider
The Knights

Film - L'Illusioniste (2010)

L'Illusioniste, a melancholy and beautifully detailed animated film from the makers of The Triplets of Belleville. 

Breathing life into a world of hoplessness and decay (Books - The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble)

I wonder sometimes if Margaret Drabble has it easier or harder as an author being the sister of one prolific, well-respected writer, and the wife of another.  But she herself has written 17 novels so it doesn't seem to have compromised her productivity any. I have read her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet (2009) which I wasn't crazy about, the novel The Peppered Moth (2001) which wasn't bad, and the novel The Needle's Eye (1972) which I thought was quite good. Recently, I picked up her The Witch of Exmoor (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and although I read it through, I found most of its characters irritating, its voice snide, and the foray into experimental magical technique in the final pages a stretch that didn't pay off, but that is not to say that it is not worth reading.  

Being private in public - Film: Amour (2012)

It really is as good as everyone says it is.  Amour directed by Michael Haneke with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Hupert depicts an elderly couple as the circle that encompasses their active lives shrinks to a point when one of them becomes ill.  The camera takes it's time, watching them as they eat their dinner, read, listen to music, wash the dishes.  The action is what takes place inside them.  These are actors who know that their job isn't posting billboards with their thoughts and feelings written all over them. Their job is to fill themselves.  Then they can do something or they can do nothing, any behavior will reveal them.  If only that were simple.  Among the many remarkable qualities of this film is the sense that these characters seem so private.  It is not just that they become isolated in their lives, they do, but when the camera is close up on the face of Jean-Louis Trintignant as he walks down the hallway of his apartment, I had the feeling he really was completely alone.  No camera.  He was in some private space in his head, subsumed by the events of his life, and the camera was an invisible witness.

Film - Looper (2012)

Rian Johnson's Looper with Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis is a really well-done time-travel/dystopian thriller, but the real star of the flick is a performance by 8-year-old Pierce Gagnon - wonderful actor. 

I hear god's voice: symptom or calling? (Books - Lying Awake by Mark Salzman)

Sister John of the Cross is a nun, a member of an order that despite being located smack in the middle of Los Angeles, devotes itself to prayer and contemplation as Carmelite orders do.  After her initial calling, she spends her life in service to the church, but never really feels the touch of god.  She goes through years of patient, unremarkable service and then, finally, ecstasy is rained down on her.  She feels the presence of her god, and begins prolifically writing poems, but at the same time, she experiences violent headaches.  Sister John is finally diagnosed with temporal-lobe epilepsy as the result of a meningioma and given the option of surgery to relieve her debilitating headaches and seizures. Generally, with this type of epilepsy, the seizure activity does not manifest itself in full-body convulsions and the frothing at the mouth that are commonly associated with epilepsy.  The symptoms here are more psychological in nature.  They can include mystical hallucinations and prolific writing such as that seen in Sister John.  In fact, there are those who attribute St. Teresa of Avila's visions to temporal-lobe epilepsy.  The meat of Mark Salzman's short, interior novel Lying Awake (Vintage, 2000), itself an act of contemplation, is Sister John wrestling with the decision of whether to take this treatment available for her pain and risk losing the sense that she is finally graced with the presence of god or whether to stay as she is.

Film - Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010)

Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child directed by Tamra Davis captures the feel of the early 1980s NYC downtown arts scene and the vibrant painter Jean Michel Basquiat.  He went from living on the streets of the Village to being a millionaire in a couple of years.  He was called some sort of savage innocent, but Basquiat thought that they wouldn't have used such language if he had been a white painter. 

New York's Mayors In the Spotlight

He was a three-term mayor of New York City from 1934-45.  Just five feet tall and energetically motivated to do right by the common person.  They wrote a Broadway musical - Fiorello! - about him in 1959, which I saw last night, presented by Encores.  He was Fiorello H. LaGuardia.

He was another three-terrm mayor of New York City from 1978-89.  Irrepresively fiesty, he pulled the city out of near bankruptcy.  There's no musical...yet, but a documentary film about him premiered just a few days ago.  He was Ed Koch and he died this morning at 88. 

Film - The Horse's Mouth (1958)

Alec Guinness did his own adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's Mouth directed by Ronald Neame in 1958.  Painter Gully Jimson (played by Guinness) is a single-minded bastard who lives only to transfer what is in his head to paint - and to drink occasionally. The story is hilarious and excruciating.  It let's one imagine what the world would look like if everyone were pure, unregulated id.  

Theatre - Opus No. 7

Saw this last weekend - wonderful improvisatory and lively piece of theatre.

Opus No. 7

Dmitry Krymov Lab - Moscow School of Dramatic Art

St. Ann's Warehouse

Film - Almost Peaceful (2002)

Because of my dissertation writing schedule, I'm feeling a little restricted in the additional writing I can do.  One book post per week seems to be the limit right now, but that shouldn't keep me, I'm now thinking to myself, from posting a picture or a few words on the other cultural or scientific encounters of my NY existence.  So I'll start with the film I saw last night.  No review, just an image or two from Almost Peaceful, a French film released in 2002 about a group of Jews who work for a tailor in Paris after World War II and how they try to get back on their feet.  The film really focused on the meaning of people being with people.  You know how you can sometime know you are going to like a film because of the way people are arranged in the frame?  Well, I feel I can, at any rate.

Birds eye view (Books - Fly Away Peter by David Malouf)

David Malouf, an Australian writer, was new to me.  His novella  Fly Away Peter (Vintage International, 1982) has an elegant, even polished voice and an pensive, elegiac tone.  It concerns two young men, Ashley Crowther, an English-educated Australian man of means who returns to live on his father estate.  He hires Jim, a man well-versed in the birds of his native land, to document all the species which live on his property so that they might start a sanctuary.  Through this work, they become much more friendly than men of their distinct classes might ordinarily become.  When World War I breaks out, both men join up and serve.  That's it.  If you're looking for action-packed writing you should look somewhere else. This is a contemplative reading experience about interaction between men and nature, men and themselves, men and each other.  Usually World War I is put forward as the start of mechanized warfare and the birth of a new brand of cruelty, but Fly Away Peter, while not selling the horror of the war short, also sees it as a leveler. Along with the death of chivalry, came the death not of class exactly, but death of the notion that the higher born were somehow more favored by the gods.  If a bomb went off in the trench, it could kill a poor woodsman or an Oxford-educated estate owner equally efficiently.  Fly Away Peter is about the rewards of gaining the perspective of other men or other creatures and, in that it offers some solace amidst all the inhumanity of war.

A socio-political, musical, map that is the zeitgeist of NW London (Books - NW by Zadie Smith)

Zadie Smith is an artist of our time.  She brings an acute ear for the rhythm and melody of contemporary speech to compositions that feel like the music of our multi-cultural urban life. At the same time, she brings an educated awareness of the narrative form that never lets the reader forget what she knows. In her first novel White Teeth, it was that musical ear that was emphasized in its sprawling story and rococo diction.  In On Beauty, a leaner story of racial politics in academia, it was her formalistic prowess that shone in a brilliant appropriation of E.M. Forster's plot of  Howard's End.  In her new novel NW (The Penguin Press, 2012), Zadie Smith synthesizes her two sides to fashion a work that feels equal parts her gifts and her technique.    

In the harsh light of day... (Books - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy)

Deborah Levy's Swimming Home (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) made a lot of critics favorites lists for 2012 as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize but, although Levy is effective at setting a pervasively creepy atmosphere, I was not as completely taken as everyone else.  A few paragraphs from the retrospective opening offer a good example of Levy's modern, brightly-illuminated diction.

He leaned his head out of the window and felt the cold mountain air sting his lips.  Early humans had once lived in this forest that was now a road.  They knew the past lived in rocks and trees and they knew desire made them awkward, mad, mysterious, messed up.

To have been so intimate with Kitty Finch had been a pleasure, a pain, a shock, an experiment, but most of all it had been a mistake.  He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.

'Yes,' she said.  'Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.'

Her prose shines the garish light of a hangover over all she surveys - things are too brightly colorful, too clear, they make your eyes hurt, and her characters get now how perfectly obvious the whole mess was before.  The thing is, I've not been drinking, and I felt like I got it from the start.

2012 - the year that was

A New Year's Day meme. I did this last year and it turned out to be a pretty good year, maybe it will work again. Feel free to steal and modify it.

 1. What did you do in 2012 that you’d never done before?

Published an article in a non-science journal. Created a book club. Ate zucchini, hazlenut chocolate cake while looking at the Julian Alps.

 2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't know what I said I would do last year and, doubtless, I didn't do it.  This year I will write my dissertation and defend it.  That is the one and only plan I am making.

 3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes, a friend in the midwest.

 4. Did anyone close to you die?

Parents of childhood friends and a remarkable Prof in my PhD program.

5. What countries did you visit?
England, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy. 

 6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?
A PhD.  A salary.  Hair on the top of my head, but let's be reasonable.

 7. What dates from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
My 50th birthday.  Well, because it was my 50th and the Ragazzo got really sick, and 20 children lost their lives in CT.  It couldn't quite be called joyous.

 8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Reaching 50, I guess, although all I did was look before I cross, buckle in, and take my vitamins.

 9. What was your biggest failure?

I said this last year but I'm not sure that I improved: I talked more than I listened. I answered more than I asked.

 10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Aside from a rotten sinus infection, and an annoying stomach thing, I was pretty fortunate.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
I got a great tie and scarf in Vienna and saw a lot of terrific theatre performances. 

 12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

President Obama stood up for gay marriage in an election year.  How the world has changed.   

 13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Is it too much of a cliche to say most of the United States legislature?

 14. Where did most of your money go?

To living in New York, but I wouldn't say that it's not worth it.  You don't get something for nothing.

 15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Obama's standing up for gay marriage.  Our train trip to Slovenia.  Cute puppies.  Seeing the play Scenes From an Execution after imagining it for 25 years.  The Halloween party we did at work for the kids two days after Hurricane Sandy. A meeting that I had regarding future work. Seeing a number of my old students perform.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
None comes to mind.

 17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
 a) happier or sadder?

 b) thinner or fatter?
 c) richer or poorer?
 - you don't say in what, so if we're not counting dollars and cents, definitely  richer.

 18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Had meaningful exchanges with friends, family, and new acquaintances. Written. Followed through.

 19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Acted without awareness. Made commitments I couldn't keep.

 20. How did you spend Christmas?
At the in-laws making schnitzel, cucumber salad, opening presents with the kids, and singing carols.

 21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Once or twice.

 22. How many one-night stands?
None, thanks for asking.

 23. What was your favourite TV program?

The BBC adaptations of A Dance to the Music of Time and Daniel Deronda were both very good.

 24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Yes, and I'm much better at it.

 25. What was the best book you read?
See non-fiction, biography, and fiction.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I'm loving Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's recording of Les Nuits d'Ete
 


and Radu Lupu's recording of Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor

 

  27. What did you want and get?

A more unified experience of myself.

 28. What did you want and not get?
Although gay people can now marry in nine of the United States and D.C., the federal government does not confer more than 1,000 benefits upon us that it gives straight people who have paid the same fee and sworn to the same terms of that contract.

29. What were your favourite performances this year?
Films:
Margaret (2011)
Another Year (2010) - appropriately enough
Blue Valentine (2010)
This is Not a Film (2011)
Copie Conforme (2010)
Red Riding Trilogy (2009)

Theatre:
Uncle Vanya by the Sydney Theatre Co. w/ Cate Blanchette
Orpheus and Euridice chor. Pina Bausch by Paris Opera Ballet
Scenes From an Execution - Nat'l Theatre, London
Timon of Athens - Nat'l Theatre, London (HD simulcast)
Donka: A Letter to Chekhov - BAM
The Other Place - Broadway w/ Laurie Metcalf

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I worked, went to a very elegant restaurant and turned 50.

 31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Equal treatment under the law, as detailed in #28.

 32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I manage to get dressed every day, occasionally that included a tie. Fashion concept?  Let's not go crazy.

 33. What kept you sane?
Did something keep me sane?  If so, it was probably the Ragazzo.

 34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Where do I begin?  I am appalled at the resistance to offering healthcare as a basic right of citizenship in this rich and technically advanced country.  I am amazed that when so many people are murdered in cold blood all some can think about is their personal right to own a gun.  I am terrified that Antonin Scalia actually imagines that he or anyone else interprets the Constitution exactly as it was written.  We would still have slavery and women would not be able to vote if that were the case. I continue to be amazed that relatively smart people imagine that the only thing between them and better lives is government.  They are in denial about how reliant we all are upon each other for basic services.  If they want electricity coming to their homes, trash collected, safe meat and dairy to eat, coordinated help after hurricanes, relatively safe household products, we need to have regulation and we need to pay taxes.  Making everything answerable only to profit has been disastrous for so many industries - look at the airlines, health insurance, for-profit prisons are a true desecration of justice.     

 35. Whom did you miss?
My dad. My grandparents.

 36. Who was the best new person you met?
I met a really cool woman at a wedding two days ago who works on biodiversity in cities.

 37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
I worked on being more mindful of things as they are.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This doesn't sum up my year, but I think Noel Coward is as good a way as any to ring in the New Year.

Quite for no reason
I'm here for the Season
And high as a kite,
Living in error
With Maud at Cap Ferrat
Which couldn't be right.
Everyone's here and frightfully gay,
Nobody cares what people say,
Though the Riviera
Seems really much queerer
Than Rome at it's height,
Yesterday night-

I went to a marvelous party
With Nounou and Nada and Nell,
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell.
Poor Grace started singing at midnight
And didn't stop singing till four;
We knew the excitement was bound to begin
When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin
And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvelous party,
I must say the fun was intense,
We all had to do
What the people we knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence.
Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour,
Some shells and a black feather boa,
Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb
Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome,
But the weight was so great that she had to go home,
I couldn't have liked it more.

People's behaviour
Away from Belgravia
Would make you aghast,
So much variety
Watching society
Scampering past,
If you have any mind at all
Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall
Seems pretty flimsy,
No more than a whimsy,
By way of contrast
On Saturday last-

I went to a marvelous party,
We didn't start dinner till ten
And young Bobbie Carr
Did a stunt at the bar
With a lot of extraordinary men;
Dear Baba arrived with a turtle
Which shattered us all to the core,
The Grand Duke was dancing a foxtrot with me
When suddenly Cyril screamed "Fiddledidee"
And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvelous party,
Elise made an entrance with May
You'd never have guessed
From her fisherman's vest
That her bust had been whittled away.
Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti
And talked about esprit de corps.
Maurice made a couple of passes at Gus
And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss,
Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvellous party.
We played the most wonderful game,
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess at her name!
We talked about growing old gracefully
And Elsie who's seventy-four
Said, "A, it's a question of being sincere,
And B, if you're supple you've nothing to fear."
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier,
I couldn't have liked it more.

Rediscovering art in suffering, rediscovering language in silence (Books - The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine)

Barely a few pages into Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man (Trans. Geoffrey Strachan, Graywolf Press, 2012), I had a feeling it was going to become a favorite novel of 2012.  It is a literate paean to the life of a simple man, made memorable by his fierce and determined love.  It begins in Paris as Shutov, an emigre Russian writer, mourns a break-up with a much younger woman.  He mouths appreciation for Chekhov that is learned, indeed he speaks on television as a member of literary panel of experts, yet in his appraisal he is distant, formulaic, and, as one ambitious for a different kind of success, he is soured by fear of his own mediocrity. He is a man caught in between - in between old age and youth, in between success and ordinariness, in between the refined, educated life of a Frenchman-of-letters and a victim of the Soviet repression of anything humanistic or beautiful.

I'm not Russian, Lea.  I'm Soviet.  So you see I'm filthy, stupid, and vicious.  Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about.

Bookeywookey's best fiction reads of 2012

And now, my favorite fiction reads of the year (excluding re-reads which are obviously already favorites).

Toby's Room by Pat Barker
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan
Nineteen-Seventy-Four by David Peace
The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine

I enjoyed looking over all the fiction I read this year.  The worlds I inhabited thanks to the authors were so varied, full of strong characters, sharp observations, and the narrative technique, particularly in this short list, was sure.  I'm not sure whether I am going to end up wanting to add Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man to the list of contenders (addendum: see above) , as I'm in the middle of it now, but here are the four, upon looking back, that I think the best of the best. Click the titles for links to my posts about them.