The mysteries of adulthood through the eyes of a child (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic)

Greetings from Marion, OH, as good a setting as any to continuing to enjoy Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Aleksandar attends the funeral of his grandfather, a party member during Tito's Communist government in Yugoslavia. It's his intention to revive his granfather with magic at some opportune moment during the funeral:

The speeches begin, the speeches go on and on, the speeches are never going to end, and I don't want to interrupt anyone making a speech with my magic spells, that would be rude. I'm sweating. The sun is blazing down; cicadas are chirping. Uncle Bora mops the sweat off his face with a pale blue handkerchief. I mop my forehead with my sleeve. Once I secretly watched a funeral where there weren't any long, boring speeches, just a short incomprehensible one. A bearded man wearing a woman's dress sang and waved a golden ball about on the end of a chain. Smoke was coming out of the ball, and death smelled of green tea. Later I found out that the man was a priest. We don't have priests - the people who make speeches at our funerals are sixty years old with badges on their breast pockets. No one tells any jokes. They all praise Grandpa, often saying exactly the same thing, as if they'd been copying from each other. They sound like women praising the virtues of a cake. As the dead can't hear anymore when they're in the ground, the last thing they hear up here ought to make them feel good. But correct as my grandpa was, he would always put anyone who tried sweet-talking him right. No, Comrade Poljo, he would say, I have not been busy reforming our country every single day, last Friday I did nothing at all to lower the rate of inflation, I slept in late on Saturday instead of going ahead to implement the plan in our regional collectives, and on Sunday's I go walking with my grandson the magician.

I love the irony Stanisic finds in juxtaposing the child's wish to revive his grandpa with a magic wand - with the adults own magical ceremonies - whether in religion or party politics - they are equally mysterious to Aleksandar. Stanisic's vision of childhood is fantastical and at times funny but very real - not cute.

Someday, when I'm as old as my great-grandpa Nikola, I will have set sail in a ship, I'll have met a liar and left him an honest man, I'll have persuaded a donkey to go the way I want, and I'll have sung like Great-Grandpa, with a voice as powerful as a mountain range, a ship, the habit of honest and a donkey all rolled in together.

Admirable wish as any for a fruitful adulthood. When I grow up I hope I might do the same.

Reading Frenzy - (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic)

Aleksandar Krsmanovic is a young boy living in Tito's Yugoslavia whose unique view gives voice to the political events that finally propel his family to emigrate to Germany.

I'm looking forward to seeing Great-Grandpa and Great-Granny again. Ever since I can remember they haven't smelled very sweet, and their average age is about a hundred and fifty. All the same, they're the least dead and the most alive of the whole family if you leave out Auntie Typhoon, who doesn't count - she's more of a natural catastrophe than a human being and she had a propeller in her backside. So Uncle Bora sometimes says, kissing his natural catastrophe's back.

It is Sasa Stanisic who gives voice to Aleksandar. He is a 30-year-old Bosnia-Herzagovina born writer now living in Germany and How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is his first novel. His voice lays the sepia patina of well-worn urban-bougeoisie over the bright colors of childhood - its the way the film Amelie looks, if you are familiar with it. Memory tints all the colors slightly brown and odd shots makes someone's ear look bigger than the rest of their face and then the lens swings and focuses on the air vent in the wall. He describes the day his grandfather died in the opening pages of the book.

I noticed that Granny's china dog on the TV set had fallen over and the plate with fish bones left from supper was still standing on the crochet tablecloth. I could hear every word the neighbors said as they bustled about, I heard it all in spite of Granny's whimpering and howling. She tugged at Grandpa's legs and Grandpa slid forward off the sofa. I hid in the corner behind the TV. But a thousand TVs couldn't have hidden Granny's distorted face from me, or Grandpa falling off the sofa all twisted sideways, or the thought that I'd never seen my grandparents look uglier.

I'd have liked to have put my hand on Granny's shaking back - her blouse would have been wet with sweat - and I'd have liked to say: Granny, don't! It will be all right. After all, Grandpa's a Party member, and the Party agrees with the Statutes of the Communist League, it's just that I can't find my magic wand at the moment. It's going to be all right again, Granny.

But her grief-stricken madness silenced me. The louder she cried: leave me alone! flailing around, the less courageous I felt in my hiding place. The more the neighbors turned away from Grandpa and went to Granny instead, trying to console someone obviously inconsolable, as if they were selling her something she didn't need, the more frantically she defended herself. As more and more tears covered her cheeks, her mouth, her lamentation, her chin, like oil coating a pan...

The curling sentences and the quirky humor are a stark contrast to Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, which I'm also reading now. I've been greedy for some real reading time and with exams over and a weekend with The Ragazzo's family near Columbus, Ohio, I may actually get some.

A visit to Three Lives Booksellers yesterday afternoon turned up more treasures than I actually bought. Three of them - The Lazarus Project an historical novel about the murder of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant in Chicago in the early twentieth century by Aleksandar Hemon, A Curious Earth by Gerard Woodward about the rekindling of love in a lonely widower, and Ian Buruma's insightful political examination of the murder of the provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Dutch Islamic extremist called Murder in Amsterdam and how it has challenged the limits of the famously Dutch political progressiveness- are going on my library list.

I did go home with How the Solder Repairs the Gramophone as well as The Last Chinese Chef, a novel by Nicole Mones the author of Lost in Translation. It is billed as a foodie-mystery-love story. And Margot Livesey's new novel The House on Fortune Street. I really enjoyed her The Missing World, with its neuropsychological theme, and after hearing an interview with Livesey on this new novel, I found myself tempted. As if I'm a hard sell!

The breathless exhuberance that is Frank O'Hara (An Inflorescence but not on Friday)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

Helen Vendler's recent review in The New Republic of Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems introduces me to some I had never read before.

The exuberance of this one is like the breathless laughter provoked by playing as a child.


Blocks

1
Yippee! she is shooting in the harbor! he is jumping
up to the maelstrom! she is leaning over the giant's
cart of tears which like a lava cone let fall to fly
from the cross-eyed tantrum-tousled ninth grader's
splayed fist is freezing on the cement! he is throwing
up his arms in heavenly desperation, spacious Y of his
tumultuous love-nerves flailing like a poinsettia in
its own nailish storm against the glass door of the
cumulus which is withholding her from these divine
pastures she has filled with the flesh of men as stones!
O fatal eagerness!

2
O boy, their childhood was like so many oatmeal cookies.
I need you, you need me, yum, yum. Anon it became suddenly

3
like someone always losing something and never knowing what.
Always so. They were so fond of eating bread and butter and
sugar, they were slobs, the mice used to lick the floorboards
after they went to bed, rolling their light tails against
the rattling marbles of granulations. Vivo! the dextrose
those children consumed, lavished, smoked, in their knobbly
candy bars. Such pimples! such hardons! such moody loves.
And thus they grew like giggling fir trees.




Even in his dark moments, O'Hara can't resist word play which, in this case, does double duty as philosophical play on the subject and object interplay between the lover and the loved.


Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Books and Films

Suggested by: Superfastreader:

Books and films both tell stories, but what we want from a book can be different from what we want from a movie. Is this true for you? If so, what’s the difference between a book and a movie?

Books and films are both not limited to telling stories, there are some of each medium that are distinctly non-narrative and mean to be, but both can. Certainly these media, though I prize both, are not interchangeable; either I want one or I want the other.
Movies are externalized, someone has had to chose what Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca or Margaret Schlegel in Howard's End looked liked and has eliminated all other possible choices with the appearance and behavior of a single actor. Yet at the same time, I find most films a more passive experience - usually I am asked to sit back and let it happen. Reading is private, interior - I create it as I go. I may sit still to do both, but reading requires me to act, movies do the acting for me.

That is not to say that film is not involving, I can get quite caught up. Cary Grant replaces a bottle in the wine cellar during the party scene in Notorious, the suspense Hitchcock creates as he replaces the bottle on the shelf and on the other end of the shelf another bottle is misplaced and seems to take forever to fall was so engrossing the first time that I saw it in the theater I actually got half out of my seat to try to prevent the bottle from crashing to the ground.

Reading asks that I interplay my own ideas and experiences internally with that of the narrative as I read - sometimes as an intellectual discussion other times as more of a day dream, sometimes it is directly of the world of the book but other times it is my personal fantasy interacting with that of the book - whereas film generally is showing me the one and only story I am supposed to pay attention to. I don't think a film director is hoping that I will day dream during the film, if I am caught up it should be in the film's world exclusively.

I find films more agitating. Usually I cannot watch a film and go to sleep. I write about it first, or talk about it, or I read a book. I habitually read and fall or go to sleep after reading. I think the difference between a book and a film is often most visible when a film adapts a book. My single requirement is that the adaptation has something to add. If the book has already done it well, and the new medium does not actually create something that stands on its own as a film - why bother? I don't need a film so that when the book is assigned in a class and I haven't bothered to read it I can get the movie the night before the exam. Take Midnight Cowboy - one of my favorite films ever. It's a great adaptation. You can taste the grit
and I felt like somehow film brought out the atmosphere even more palpably than the book, while the book excelled at the characters and their relationship with each other more satisfyingly. I love adaptations that dare to take their original form to the next place - like Clueless - which sets Austen's Emma in a 1990s Hollywood high school. It's a mediocre movie if appreciated simply for its teeny-bopper angst and scenes in the mall, but when layered with the knowledge of the book it adapts it's really kind of brilliant. But they can fail too - take the Great Expectations with Ethan Hawke and Ann Bancroft - oh dear. "Faithful" adaptations can fail miserably as well. Take the film of E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, I should say - take it, please! It tries desperately to tread in Merchant and Ivory's footsteps and ends up as a bad imitation. Whereas A Room With A View seems gets the closest of any film I know of transferring a book to the screen. It is perfect. I have to watch that film once a year. I don't know whether I like Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett (a chaperone) or the magnificent Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson (an English tourist) better. Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala make a powerful and beautiful work of art that stands on its own, capturing the characters and tone of the narrative perfectly and perhaps even one-upping it as far as the experience of the settings are concerned.

Writing that doesn't hold your damn hand (The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy)

He was very cold. He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again.

There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking for him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn't tell him where he'd been nor what he'd seen. He never told anybody.

Cormac McCarthy's writing is so precise and so packed with detail that in thinking about what I was going to write about this passage, I was sure I had read about that crunching and squeaking sound that the snow makes when it's really cold out. I had heard it in reading that scene and I realized that at the point when the wolf held its forefoot raised I had scarcely breathed because I didn't want the wolves to hear me. McCarthy does not give you a list, he gives you one or two items very thoroughly. Patiently - leaving some space for you. His writing in The Crossing involves not just the senses he enlivens with his words, it fills my whole being with the sense of what it is like to be there so that I am not having the scene imagined for me, I am imagining it with his help and create details with my own senses. He's not holding my damn hand, is what I'm saying.

The cabin when they opened it was dark and musty and had about it a waxy smell like freshkilled meat. Their father stood in the door a moment and then entered. In the front room was an old sofa, a bed, a desk. They went through the kitchen and then on through to the mudroom at the back of the house. There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon labels edged in red upon which in Echols' neat script were listed contents and dates. In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. The jars stood webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice as soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owed its being. Their father took down one of the jars and turned it in his hand and set it back again precisely in its round track of dust...

I am standing right there. Those octagonal labels with the red border hang in my mind for minutes after. The waxy smell puts me with one foot in that cellar in their lives and the other in my own memory of an old fashioned butcher shop with sawdust on the floor, rolls of white wax paper, and bloody meat in fat hands - because that is my source for that smell which sears my nostrils like coldness.

I didn't think I would be able to read anything with all my studying for finals, but the first forty pages of this novel whipped by last night before I knew it. My final final is this afternoon and I'm taking this book along for the long commute back afterwards. Soon, very soon, I intend to do some serious reading!

Seranading brain and body

David Dobbs's article in Today's Science Times speaks of Dr. Conrad Claudius, a surgical resident, whose research on music and healing suggests that music's effects could result from a combination of increased production of pituitary growth hormone combined with a drop in stress hormones, although not every one agrees.


And Sara Reistad-Long reports on research that older brains may broaden their focus of attention:

"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelly H. Carvard..."It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."

For example, in studies where subject are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

Sleep, memory and dreams about kidneys

I took Curious Expedition's advice several few weeks ago and went to Obscura, an antique shop in my fair city, to see the antique anatomical model they have lurking in a glass case in the back of the shop. Fun, but as usual with antique shops I never actually find what I think I came into the shop for. My friend and I, I shall call him The Quiet One for the sake of anonymity, found an antique dream symbol encyclopedia which had all sorts of useful information in it such as that if you dream about your abdomen it portends news about your house, or some such nonsense. In any case, I woke up this morning having had a dream about my kidney (one of them) and I wished I had bought the book. Maybe if you dream about your kidney it means you will do well on your Cognitive Neuroscience Final and you can stop studying. OK, maybe not.

Yes, it is finals time. I have one Tuesday and one on Wednesday, hence the dearth of posts on my reading. Reading? What reading. I'm studying 12 hours a day and when I finally get into bed with a book I fall asleep. And then I thought, why I could kills two birds with one stone, I'll write some little neuroscientific tidbits for those of you curious about such things. For example, those of us interested in studying the elusive phenomenon of attention have all sorts of little complications on our hands - besides the fact that no one can exactly say what it is, but we all know it when we see it.

When does attention happen in the brain? There has been a battle raging around the field for years as to whether attention happens early or late (we're talking in miliseconds here folks, that's thousandths of a second). As with most questions about attention, the answer is - it depends. It depends on whether the difficulty of your task is high or low, it depends on whether the response required of you is complementary to is distracting from the behavior you have used to perceive your environment, and it depends on whether you have done it before. Think about how much attention it required to learn to walk down a flight of stairs and think now about not only how little attention it requires but really how distracting it is to think about walking down stairs as you walk down them. But we can actually measure the fact that the brain is paying attention even before it is perceiving. For example, if a cue prepares you for the fact that you will receive information in either visual rather than auditory form, you can see with an fMRI that the brain appears to give more activation to the regions that process visual as opposed to auditory information prior to that information even appearing. There is nothing to see yet but the brain is readying itself to see rather than to hear (Hopfinger et al, 2000).

Other questions attention researchers ask are - when attention selects something what does it select? Is there attention to areas of space? Is there attention to objects within that space? Are those two phenomena or one? And when the brain pays attention does, as Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen say, accentuate the positive or eliminate the negative? Once again, we can see instances in which it does both. If a monkey focuses the center of his vision on an object, we can measure individual brain cells firing faster that correspond to that area in space he perceives, and in the presence of a distracting object to ignore, we can measure cells corresponding to the area ignored as not only not firing, but actively suppressing their rate of firing.

We have also been reading about the role of sleep in memory, which is dangerously tempting for finals time. I am sure I will do much better on my exams if I could only take little naps between articles. The stages 2, 3 and 4 of Sleep are very active in the consolidation of memories, which is a process that takes what we have learned and makes it less resistant to interference without additional practice. Walker and Stickgold's 2004 article is a pretty comprehensive review of the research. They trace a path through the many studies done in humans and animals, on declarative memory (requiring our awareness) and non-declarative memory.

1. Working with animals on procedural memory - learning a physical task - you can actually observe the patterns of activation seen in the brain during training played out again during REM sleep. Upon waking the amount of improvement is strongly correlated with the amount of reactivation seen.

2. Brain patterns seen in slow-wave sleep seem to rapidly play out that same activity and the waves seen in REM sleep can actually be shown to facilitate physical changes in the hippocampus - a part of the brain important in consolidating memories. This is strengthened by the fact that if you inhibit protein synthesis (which is necessary for those physical changes to take place) you inhibit the learning improvement ordinarily seen on the following day.

3. A genes associated with learning-promoting environments is seen "turned on" during REM sleep, and stimulation of regions of the hippocampus associated with making the physical changes that are our memories also turns on this same gene.

Their article makes a pretty strong argument for the role of sleep in memory by bringing together a large body of research.

In my other class - Neurochemistry/psychopharmacology - what I have found most interesting to learn about is how drugs teach us about disease. Illnesses of the brain are necessarily illnesses of the mind and the body. It is often very difficult to learn about the mechanisms behind them because you have to be very inventive to not simply test people who are already ill. If you test people with a disorder it is hard to know whether you are observing causes of a disease or manifestations of it, or of the medications prescribed to treat it. Much can be learned sometimes through drugs that successfully treat those illnesses. Depression has been one such case. Whether we're looking at Major Depressive Disorder, cyclothymia, reactive depression, or post-partum depression the same medications tend to be effective in treating them for most people. As diverse as these conditions might appear, it seems as though the underlying mechanisms are similar. The actions of some of the major classes of anti-depressants - tricyclics and SSRIs - have been the basis of a lot of research that has unraveled some of the physiological mechanisms in common behind the depressive disorders. As anyone familiar with these meds knows, their anti-depressive actions tend to take two-four weeks to kick in. So these cleverly designed studies looked not just at what happened in the body when someone took at SSRI, which as with any drug is many things, but the time course of these changes. There are literally observable structural changes that distinguish a depressed brain from a treated one. It's fascinating stuff that I'll save for another day.

Fanatatical Archivist (Books - Walter Benjamin by Esther Leslie)

The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) by R. B. Kitaj

Reader, literary critic, translator of Proust, Baudelaire, and Balzac, philosopher, radio broadcaster, and fanatical archivist - Walter Benjamin - kept notebooks as the home for his thoughts, Esther Leslie tells us in her fascinating critical biography Walter Benjamin:

When he was without a notebook his thoughts were 'homeless.' Seven of his notebooks and three notepads still remain. These are crammed with drafts of articles and letters, ideas, diagrams, quotations to be used as epigraphs, bibliographies and diary entries, and often every single centimeter of their pages is covered with tiny handwriting. These books were portable. With them he could indulge his inclination to write on the move, in cafes across Europe. He fostered a cult around his notebooks, relishing in particular those with thin and translucent leaves and supple vellum covers. They survive for, once complete, they were placed with friends, with the request 'please store the manuscript carefully,' and the proviso that they could be recalled at any time by the author.

He is probably best known, if he is known at all, for his unfinished Arcades Project, a massive collection of writings that is an aesthetic appreciation of the street culture of Paris - named for the little glass-covered passages that continue the streets indoors and that were the haunts of Paris's famous flaneurs.


From what little I have known of him, I have always thought of Walter Benjamin as the literary equivalent of artist Joseph Cornell - another stroller through cities, observer of urban life, and fanatical archivist. They both preserved the unusual connections they observed between phenomena.

Benjamin organized his own archive of materials meticulously. Files, folders, envelopes, boxes, and cases harboured correspondence, manuscripts by acquaintances, private and business affairs, memoirs, diaries, photographs, postcards, drawings, and notes, index cards, inventories, a list of books read since his school days and a list of his publications, as well as copies of his writings, in various drafts and replete with further amendments or curious markings to indicate associations and cross references. He archived scraps of paper, sketches of essays jotted on the back of library book return reminders, diagrams in the form of compass roses and co-ordinate planes that plotted ideas in relation to each other. Even the most ephemeral objects found a place in his archive, evoking an idea from one of the poets who most fascinated him, Charles Baudelaire, who observed the twinning in modernity of the fugitive and eternal, the transitory and the immutable.

It makes one wonder what his life would have been like in the age of the internet.

Robert Rauschenberg, Artistic Experimenter

"Being right all the time can stop the momentum of a very interesting idea."

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics... That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Robert Rauschenberg, the influential artistic experimenter, died on Monday at 82 years old. Above some excerpts from The New York Times obituary and here's the Washington Post and The Guardian. You can feel the creative energy, the possibilities he saw in the materials around him still bouncing off those canvases. The prince of the unexpected.

Sarah Salway's Top Ten

Mark Thwaite (a favorite blogger) in his Editor's Column at The Book Depository (as opposed to ReadySteadyBlog, his other haunt, presents Sarah Salway's (a current favorite author) top ten books. I'm a sucker for book lists of artists I admire so here it is. And if you haven't read her Tell Me Everything I recommend it most highly. I rave about it on the side bar and at great length here.

London Underground (The Water Room by Christopher Fowler)

I am glad I have stuck with Christopher Fowler's The Water Room, the second in the Bryant & May series of mysteries because, my initial reservations notwithstanding, it's gotten much more interesting. There is a link between the suspicious death of an elderly Indian woman in a residential neighborhood, an expert in London's underground waterways, and some shady dealings in Egyptology that felt rather coincidental when it was introduced, but 150 pages later I seem to be able to ignore that. And I have gotten used to the televisiony tone that this book takes. The initial book in the series was mostly set in World War II London, so the tone was much different and I felt Fowler established a sense of that time very convincingly. There are two things I am particularly enjoying in this book. One is the hay Fowler makes of how different Bryant is from your average cop and how different Bryant and May's Peculiar Crimes Unit is from your average MET department:

Land hastily moved on down the corridor. Amidst the newly purchased equipment in the unit's crime lab, he found Kershaw and Banbury tinkering with an oven tray full of wet sand and a toy truck. 'What on earth are you two up to?' he asked.

'Giles is explaining the physical dynamics of accidental death,' Banbury explained, not at all clearly. 'My territory, reall, but Giles got there first.'

'So this is your doing.'

'Mr. Bryant gave me the idea. It's all right, I've got a job number for it.'

'Why am I not surprised?' Land asked the wall as he passed on. At least Bimsley seemed to be doing something useful, scanning reams of figures on his computer, but Meera Mangeshkar was lying on the floor. She scrambled to her feet as Land entered. 'Sorry, sir, spot of yoga - put my back out last night.'

'On your own time or in the course of duty?'

'Duty, sir. Apprehending a suspicious character.'

'You booked him?'

'No, sir. Vanished into thin air. Literally. Quite impossible, I know, almost as if he flew away, but there you are.'

They're all mad, thought Land. This is Bryant's doing. He tainted them with his lunacy. John's marginally more rational. I'll appeal to his common sense. He headed for the detectives' room...

Land stood in the doorway, fuming. Bryant had decorated the area around his desk exactly as it had been before the fire. Statuettes of Gog and Magog, voodoo dolls, his beloved Tibetan skull, books with reeking singed covers rescued from the conflagration, some odoriferous plants that lay tangled in an earthenware pot - tannis root, probably, marijuana, certainly - an ancient Dansette record player scratching and popping its way through Mendelssohn's 'Elijah', papers and newspaper clippings everywhere, a half-eaten egg-and-beetroot sandwich dripping on to a stack of uncased computer disks.

The other is the important role the underground waterways of London are playing in the plot of this mystery. While the link was clear from the get go, the extraordinary amount of arcana heaped on the reader was making me feel damp. But the sense of a nearly invisible world racing beneath the everyday visible one has become an essential part of this mystery and I now find myself looking forward to the next tidbit I am going to pick up on the submerged rivers which also figured prominently in The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's fascinating book about the 1854 cholera outbreak in London (I wrote about it here). I am making a quick jaunt to London in about a month and wish I had enough time to take a walking tour about this underground network of water (if one exists). I used to think I was going to visit this urban center of theaters which also had a funny bridge and a quaint royal family - now I feel like I'm going to the swamp and should look out for alligators!

For those of you familiar with London, which is your "don't miss" bookstore(s)?

Drowning (Books - The Water Room by Christopher Fowler)

Bryant was taking tea with two of the workmen who had set up a primus stove in the hall to make their own refreshments. 'Ah, so what's the score with your cuckold? he asked. The carpenters looked at May with fresh interest. They clearly enjoyed chatting with Bryant, and had settled in so comfortably that May suspected they were hoping to drag out the work until Christmas.

'I do wish you wouldn't call him that,' snapped May, uncomfortable at having to discuss his private affairs in front of strangers. Such openness never bothered Bryant, who always behaved as if there was no one else in the room.

'I'm sorry, the situation intrigues me, that's all. You know how unlucky I've been in my own romantic affairs.'

'Oh, come one, it hasn't been all that bad. There was that girl in 1968.'

'Exactly. The only person in London who didn't have sex in 1968 was my Uncle Walter, and that was because he was in an iron lung. The trouble is, I've spent too much time on my own. I suspect I've started to behave abnormally.'

'Not at all. You've always been horrible to people.'

'That's very hurtful,' Bryant complained, attempting an emphatic response. 'Do you have any idea how alone you can feel when you think differently from everyone else?'

What Christopher Fowler is very good at is creating detailed characters. Bryant and May, the two detectives who run the Peculiar Crimes Unit in London, are beginning to get up there in years. Fowler handles with imagination and humor how their age and Bryant's trademark eccentricity will play out to give his mysteries the interest of real human beings, and the obstacles as well of the advantages of being 'different.' But why do I get the idea with this novel that Fowler is making a play for a television series? A large swathe of the first part of this novel is spent catching us up on who Bryant and May are, which I guess is to be appreciated if you have not read the excellent Full Dark House, the first Bryant and May mystery, but I have. Learning who these people are through their behavior worked through the first book and it would probably work in this one too, but Fowler seems a little less secure that those who didn't read the first book are going to have all the necessary information. The events of that mystery result in the renovation of the office of the PCU and much of the books opening 100 pages are also spent describing the inconveniences of the office renovations. I do appreciate having things fleshed out, but the amount of human interest and scenery in The Water Room has almost made the crime feel like an inconvenient detail, it's like an episode of ER when the characters romantic affairs take over and I'm wishing for a nice gurney to come in and someone to yell out a few critical stats and say 'clear!' On page 127 there is a party in the murder victim's neighborhood (it is a murder mystery after all) where I felt like the action of the mystery finally got going. The underground rivers and streams of London also figure prominently in the plot of this mystery and we're certainly getting a good deal of information on what is probably a very interesting bit of history and geography of London, but I feel like the number of jobs Fowler has given himself to do before he can cut to the chase is overwhelming the mystery, which is what I came for. Fowler is a handy and entertaining writer so I'm going to give this book a bit more time.

A Meme

This from Sheila, whose answers are probably much more fun than mine!

1.ONE OF YOUR SCARS, HOW DID YOU GET IT? Won a relay race in first grade (for the milk carton), fell over the finish line landed on both knees, then both elbows, then my face. The only lasting scars are on my knees.

2. WHAT IS ON THE WALLS IN YOUR ROOM? In my bedroom - a print of various flying machine designs from a 19th Century French magazine, a poster of the David Hockney Parade from the Metropolitan Opera, several paintings by my cousin Sylvia, a linolium print by her friend Casper, and a few other paintings.

3. DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME YOU WERE BORN? I think it was 11:10 am but the time did not make a huge impression on me at the time.

4. WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW? Right now? A glass of wine, which is easily solved. Excuse me while I do so.

5. WHAT DO YOU MISS? Acting.

6. WHAT IS YOUR MOST PRIZED POSSESSION? My most valuable possession, I guess, is my piano but prized - would probably be memorabilia of family, friends and the things I've created - so photos, things I have written and that were written to me, and the production books of my productions.

7. HOW TALL ARE YOU? 5'6"

8. DO YOU GET SCARED IN THE DAY? Sometimes.

9. WHAT’S YOUR WORST FEAR? Getting horribly, painfully ill and having things stuck down my throat .

10. WHAT KIND OF HAIR COLOR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX? If you're asking about the hair color of the sex I'm attracted to, then you did not phrase this question in a way that is meaningful for me. If you mean to ask about my preference of hair color for the "opposite sex" in my case, female, it doesn't really matter to me. But the same would be true for guys.

11. WHAT ABOUT EYE COLOR? See above.

12. COFFEE OR ENERGY DRINK? Tea.

13. FAVORITE PIZZA TOPPING? I like it best plain - cheesy and well done crust - but onions, olives or pepperoni would all be ok. Do you deliver?

14. IF YOU COULD EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Some tortellini and a nice light tomato sauce would go down well right now.

15. FAVORITE COLOR OF ALL TIME? Purple.

16. HAVE YOU EVER EATEN A GOLDFISH? If you don't mean the Pepperidge Farm kind then - no. Although I have sushi all the time, so raw fish is not a big deal for me if the water is clean and they've been kept fresh.

17. WHAT WAS THE FIRST MEANINGFUL GIFT YOU EVER RECEIVED? Probably my first camera.

18. DO YOU HAVE A CRUSH? Yup.

19. FAVORITE CLOTHING BRAND? Outlet mall, hear me roar. The brand is immaterial.

20. WHAT KIND OF CAR DO YOU WANT? I hate driving and don't want a car at all. But if you want to give me the equivalent amount in cash I wouldn't say no.

21. WOULD YOU FALL IN LOVE KNOWING THAT THE PERSON IS LEAVING? If I'm falling in love, would I have a choice? Since when has anything practical mattered when you're falling in love.

22. HAVE YOU BEEN OUT OF THE USA? Yes.

23. YOUR WEAKNESSES? Olives, cheese and the combination of dark chocolate and marzipan have been known to make me eat compulsively, Campbell Scott has made me swoon, Mahler's Fifth and Jeff Buckley singing Halleluiah make me cry - will that do?

24. MET ANYONE FAMOUS? Lots - I worked in theater and opera for over twenty years. I'll give you one - Geraldine Page not only an influential talent for me but also warm and gracious.

25. FIRST JOB? Magician (birthday parties and the occasional nursing home). If you would like to begin your work life with humility this is the way to do it.

26. EVER DONE A PRANK CALL? Not one I can remember.

27. DO YOU THINK EVERYONE OUT THERE HAS A SOUL MATE? Are you one of those people who is going to tell me that everything happens for a reason? Yawn.

28. WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE YOU FILLED THIS OUT? Grocery shopping.

29. HAVE YOU EVER HAD SURGERY? Twice - sinus.

30. WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST? Looking younger than I am, my teaching talent, and my extraordinary modesty.

31. WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY? It's too far away, ask me later.

32. HOW MANY KIDS DO YOU WANT? None, I see kids at my work and don't need to take any home.

33. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? No.

34. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST TURN OFF WITH THE OPPOSITE SEX? Again, if you are asking me about the sex I'm attracted to, you've not asked me the question you intend to. But the answer is equivocation.

35. WHAT IS ONE THING YOU MISS ABOUT GRADE SCHOOL? Playing imaginary games in the school yard during lunch.

36. WHAT KIND OF SHAMPOO DO YOU USE? I don't know. Something with a lot of natural junk in it that doesn't have a conditioner because they make me break out.

37. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? It's crap. I hate writing anything by hand. I'm a lefty and it's very inconvenient with a lot of pens you get smudges all over the outside of your hand.

38. ANY BAD HABITS? God, yes.

39. ARE YOU A JEALOUS PERSON? Sometimes.

40. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? It would depend who I was, wouldn't it?

41. DO YOU AGREE WITH FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS? My agreement is unimportant and so is your's. But my opinion is that two consenting adults can make any kind of relationship they damn-well please and it's nobody's damn business.

42. HOW DO YOU RELEASE ANGER? By scowling, yelling, and screaming, it's usually taken out on inanimate objects and not people.

43. WHAT’S YOUR MAIN GOAL IN LIFE? I'm in grad school in my forties. I am not that focused that I have just one main goal.

44. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TOY AS A CHILD? Pooh (that's the bear, I was not throwing feces at the walls).

45. HOW MANY NUMBERS ARE IN YOUR CELL PHONE? No idea.

46. WERE YOU A FAN OF BARNEY AS A LITTLE KID? Barney? I'm pre-Sesame Street.

47. MASHED POTATOES OR MACARONI AND CHEESE? Blech. How old are you, five?

48. DO YOU HAVE ALL YOUR FINGERS AND TOES? Yes, thanks.

49. DO YOU HAVE A COMPUTER IN YOUR ROOM? Which room is that? I have a lap top, it goes where I go.

50. PLANS FOR TONIGHT? Dinner, getting the place cleaned up for Mother's Day. Mom is coming for brunch tomorrow.

51. WHAT’S THE FASTEST YOU’VE EVER GONE IN A CAR? 80 ish.

52. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO? The Ragazzo tinkling on the piano and singing.

53. LAST THING YOU DRANK? Glass of wine.

54. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT? Tired.

55. DO YOU HAVE A LOW SELF ESTEEM OR A HIGH SELF ESTEEM? Depends on the day and the arena. I consider emphasis on self esteem misplaced. I do aspire do deserving the esteem of others and hope that will sometimes include myself.

56. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? Fools of Fortune by William Trevor.

Play along if you have a spare hour.

Signifying Something (Theatre - The Sound and the Fury)

In April Seventh 1928 - the first part of the psychedelic-poetic masterpiece that is The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner (you know you're important in literature when they drop your first name) evokes that day in the life of the Compson family and their servants as experienced through Benjy, their mentally retarded son. It is Benjy's thirty-third birthday and he is cared for by a teenage servant, Luster. He experiences the world around him as a series of sensory impressions which evoke memories, particularly of his sister, Caddy, but the world of past and present are indistinguishable for him. He sits in a chair, for example, catching his shirt on a nail and that reminds him of another moment in which he got caught on the same nail and instantly he is there in the sensory experiences of that previous moment. In a large way the book chronicles the dissolution of this family - the mother's hypochondria, the father's alcoholism, the sister's promiscuity, the brother's suicide (and some might say by extension the dissolution of a certain way of life for America's Southern gentry). Elevator Repair Service, the 17-year-old experimental theater ensemble that adapted this first part of of novel, has evoked this continual journeying to the past as a kind of longing. It's not uncommon for someone whose present circumstances are less than pleasant to become nostalgic. It is as if Benjy is in a perpetual loop of nostalgia, which makes his character function symbolically as the spirit of a more innocent South now gone. Theatrically he functions as our tripwire into a place where time will not stand still. His psychedelic-synesthetic experience of all times as one renders people as smells, objects as texture, and the tumult of his less than perfect home circumstances as a raucous repetitive dance for which this wildly inventive company find a physical life on stage that is appropriate to the novel and theatrically enveloping, even hypnotic. Multiple actors plays the same roles irrespective of their ages, sexes, or skin color. The set is a meticulously detailed dining and living room section of the house in which they create all the other spaces theatrically - a tree is created by piling up furniture, an armchair becomes a horse and buggy. They read directly from the novel on stage, taking turns as narrators, but also playing their own narrators as they play the characters. I believe they actually adapt every word of this section of the novel, including 'Caddy said.' Evidently they did the same with their marathon adaptation of The Great Gatsby - performing in that case the entire novel - I am absolutely dying to see this production called Gatz. For some reason I cannot understand, the rights were not given for a New York production. With every word, of April Seventh 1928 they are constrained to a 2 hour and 45 minute evening which ends up feeling just a little long. There are just two things I wished they would have done with this fantastic adaptation - their theatrical story telling is so inventive but they use up all their tricks in the first act, leaving the physical life of Act II without any surprises. I wished they had saved us one surprise. There is a moment in Act II in which Benjy is, I believe, taken off to a hospital. A white-figure appears and whisks him out through the door and following him Dilsey, the family's cook, sadly shakes her head and returns to the kitchen. It was extremely subtle and beautiful moment - but I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing, so quickly did it go by. It occurred perhaps 20 minutes before the end - what was going on there? Was that Benjy's medical castration? It passed in a flash but seemed important thematically. It seemed to herald a change, an ending which could have been evoked visually to effect an ending to the play. The one element of the adaptation that didn't quite work for me was the fact that the novel revolves around the men's relationship to Caddy while the play, adapting only one section, revolves around Benjy. I think it's smart to center the play around Benjy's but the words of the chapter's ending center around Caddy. Visually when Benjy's was whisked out the door, I felt the evening had ended and then the rest of the act felt long. That said, I hate it when people respond to something I've made on stage by telling me what I should have done differently. Do your own version, I want to say. The best response would probably be Faulkner's own description about the creative process that produced The Sound and the Fury (from the supplemental information on the New York Theater Workshop's website) :

... I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed [the novel] in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed,but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away,like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, but she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.

I guess that means that ERS should get at least four chances. There probably isn't going to be an adaptation of this famously complicated novel that is likely to get much better than this one. In its totality I found this was an affecting and involving evening of theater, full of invention, with a mesmerizing, multi-layered sound scape that I have to single out as one of the most effective contributions to the evening. It was designed by Matt Tierney. The production hosted by New York Theatre Workshop, one of my favorite off-Broadway companies, has been extended until June 1. If you're in the area I highly recommend it and the link to the theater can lead you to tickets. ERS also tours both around the US and Europe so you may be able to catch them some time at a theater closer to home.

...Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.