Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
Only this, and nothing more."
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; -- vainly I had tried to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
This it is, and nothing more."
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
Merely this, and nothing more.
Then into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon I heard again a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind and nothing more!"
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no sublunary being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
Wondering at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster so when Hope he would adjure --
Stern Despair returned, instead of the sweet Hope he dared adjure --
That sad answer, "Never -- nevermore."
But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Let me quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted -- nevermore!
Dr. Rubin had an idea. "We thought, Wait a second, " he said. "If we are mechanically stimulating cells to form bone, what isn't happening? We thought maybe these bone progenitor cells are driving down a decision path. Maybe they are not becoming fat cells."
He paid a visit to Jeffrey E. Pessin, a diabetes expert at Stony Brook, and presented his hypothesis. Dr. Pessin laughed uproariously. He "almost kicked me out of his office," as Dr. Rubin put it.
But when Dr. Rubin decided to go ahead anyway, Dr. Pessin joined in . Their hope was to see a small effect on body fat after the mice stood on the platforms 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 15 weeks. Dr. Rubin was stunned by the 27 percent reduction.
"Talk about your jaw dropping...."
"they could be scared to death, which could affect the study data."Maybe they should just show the elderly study subjects horror movies so they don't have to leave their chairs.
I have very particular ideas about proof. I believe that proofs should be beautiful and, to the extend that this is possible, concise. A beautiful proof should be as slender as one of Shelly's odes, and , like an ode, it should imply vastness. I tried to impress this upon Ramanujan. "A good proof," I told him, "must combines unexpectedness with inevitability and economy." There is no better example than Euclid's proof that there are infinite prime numbers - a proof I am going to walk you through now, just as I walked him through it so many years ago, not because you don't know it (I should hardly wish to insult you by implying such ignorance) but because I want to call attention to aspects of the proof of which your professors, in teaching it, may not have taken note.
Today starts a regular series of simians on Mondays. They are such a window on us. What better way to start the week than with a cute primate. Please feel free to send me an email with a favorite monkey picture or video or a link to one for future "Monkey Mondays." Oh... and credit where credit is due for the name - thank you, Sheila!
So Hardy paces the carefully tended pathways of Trinity College, while Littlewood, in London, goes to the tea shop in South Kensington (he did not mention this to Hardy) where, on those occasions when both of them happen to be in London, he and Mrs. Chase make it their habit to meet. Anne travels up to London only when she absolutely must. She is a creature of the seashore, not the town. As she sits across a teapot and a plate of scones from Littlewood, brushing back her dark brown hair, grains of sand fall onto the table. She is in London only at the behest of her husband. She has left the children behind, in the care of a nanny. Chase tolerates his wife's relationships with Littlewood so long as she agrees to make herself available when his career, his stature as an eminent Harley Street practitioner, requires him to go out in public with a wife on his arm. Tonight it's some sort of charity ball. "I hardly know what to wear," she tells Littlewood, as the sand grains fall from her sleeve, her hem. He can see twinklings of mica in the folds of her ears. He loves this about her, the grit of her that sometimes, on his way back from Treen to Cambridge, he feels on his tongue, in his teeth.
When a mathematician works - when, as I think of it, he "goes into" work - he enters a world that, for all its abstraction, seems far more real to him than the world in which he eats and talks and sleeps. He needs no body there. The body, with its blandishments, is an impediment.... This was the world in which Ramanujan and I were happiest - a world as remote from religion, war, literature, sex, even philosophy, as it was from that cold room in which, for so many mornings, I drilled for the tripos under Webb. Since then, I have heard of mathematicians imprisoned because they were dissenters or pacifists, and then relishing the rare solitude that a gaol gave them. For them, a gaol was a respite from the vagaries of having to feed themselves and dress themselves and earn money and spend it; a respite, even, from life, which, for any true mathematician, is not the thing, but the ting that interferes.It the section I'm reading now. The Nevilles - a colleague of the two mathematicians and his wife, who aspires to be an "adventuress," go to India to convince Ramanujan to come to Cambridge. She writes letters to Hardy's sister about their travels in an effort to make herself like the adventuresses whose diaries she has read (many of these were published and the stories of these self-sufficient women served as sources of inspiration for women who were struggling to emancipate themselves. Leavitt seems to enjoy assuming these two contrasting voices - that of the corseted mathematician and budding adventuress-diarist. I am enjoying them as well.
A slate and some chalk. That's all you need. Not pianos or thimbles or nails or saucepans. Not sledgehammers. Certainly not Bibles. A slate and some chalk, and that world -the real world - is yours.
Every poet wants to have that great, transcendent renunciatory power of Whitman, the access to other sites and other persons, that amplitude, that confidence and authority as a voice. Even the most narrowly private or confessional poets want that. 99% of them didn’t get it, and that’s roughly the percentage of poets in any given mode that don’t succeed, so I don’t think confessionalism offers any worse odds than any other modeIn his poem Your Stone the narrator prays to be made inanimate - is that confessional? When asked for what advice he would give a young poet:
Develop an effective camouflage. I think camouflage is important in establishing a talent and a sensibility that will be individual and different from the group. I’ve always avoided the tribal markers of being a poet.
The risk with camouflage is that when you’re not writing, the camouflage becomes the real thing, and then you think I’m just a phony, I’m just this person who gets to be a little sullen at Thanksgiving dinner or opt out of taking my kids to the playground. That’s what being a poet amounts to: being perceived as a poet, when in fact you are just this suburban voluptuary. This mere “guy.”
The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocraphyl. There is the one about the barber, Eddie Alexander, who was paid handsomely to remain on "day and night standby" in case Hughes wanted a haircut. "Just checking, Eddie," Hughes once said when he called Alexander at two in the morning...These paragraphs are from Joan Didion's insightful essay 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38, a 1967 riff on the American dream, private and public from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. As I read it tonight I wondered if we could say the same now. I think not. It seems to me that Americans today are openly materialistic in their aspirations, unashamed about power. I don't mean politically, I mean socially - we think in the language of power - in the office, in the 'hood, on the playground. Our sitcoms are about manipulating it successfully for sex or money, preferably both. Today we brag about our possessions, we rent stretch limos for high school proms. Today we openly admire the man who lives by his own rules - look at The Bourne Identity. We try to be that man every day. We each insulate ourselves in our own music. To make sure we have enough, we take 24,000 songs - just in case the other 23,999 don't please us at a given moment. Today we expect to be a free agent - to be served what we want when we want it, and to have it delivered.
Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tell us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed the the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.
Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another...There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
Computers record the cells' firing in real time and can broadcast it over speakers. "I would listen to this background music of the brain sometimes when the animals were asleep, and I started hearing this section that sounded very much like the pattern when the animals were in the maze..."The article does point out that other scientists contest this interpretation of events, as nothing about the research demonstrates that the brain is not performing this process when awake.
The Cranleigh vicar had taken him for a walk - at his mother's request, because he seemed not to be paying attention at church. It was foggy out; now he can imagine the gears shifting in the vicar's brain as he landed upon the idea of using the fog to explain faith. The fog, and something the boy would like. A kite.
"If you fly a kite in the fog, you cannot see the kite flying. Still, you feel the tug of the string."
"But in the fog," Harold said, "there is not wind. So how could you fly a kite?"
The vicar moved slightly ahead. In the humid stillness, his torso blurred and wavered like a ghost's. It was true, there was not a touch of wind.
"I use an analogy," he said. "You are, I trust, familiar with the concept."
Harold did not answer. He hoped the vicare would mistake his silence for pious contemplation, when in fact the young man had just eradicated any last shred of faith that the boy held. For the facts of nature could not be denied. In fog there was no wind. No kite could fly.
They returned to his house. His sister, Gertrude, was sitting in the drawing room, practicing reading. She had only had the glass eye a month.
Mrs. Hardy made tea for the vicar, who was perhaps twenty-five, with black hair and thin fingers. "As I have been trying to explain to your son," the vicar said, "belief must be cultivated as tenaciously as any science. We must not allow ourselves to be reasoned out of it. Nature is part of God's miracle, and when we explore her domain, it must be with the intention of better comprehending His glory."
"Harold is very good at mathematics," his mother said. "At three he could already write figures into the millions."
"To calculate the magnitude of God's glory, or the intensity of hell's agonies, one must write out figures far larger than that."
"How large?" Harold asked.
"Larger than you could work out in a million lifetimes."
"That's not very large, mathematically speaking," Harold said. "Nothing's very large, when you consider infinity."
The vicar helped himself to some cake. Despite his emaciated figure, he ate with relish, making Mrs. Hardy wonder if he had a tapeworm.
"Your child is gifted," he said, once he had swallowed. "He is also impudent." Then he turned to Harold and said, "God is infinity."
Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating, "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate. So poets keep on trying and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvres."
[...]
The world - whatever we might think when we're terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we're embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, or people, animals and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain?); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead, still dead, we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose life span is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.
[...]
Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases such as "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events." But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not any one's existence in this world.
The shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes, we enter an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex. Just as a painter interprets a picture, we interpret our sensations.
"of no interest except for the student of pathology and the speicalist in abnormality." Cezanne, the critics declared, was literally insane.And a second discussing Baudelaire's 1859 invective against the photograph:
It's accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even - and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import - a materialist.... Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored: "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent."
No matter how precise our neronal maps become, they will never solve the question of what we actually see, for sight is a private phenomenon.
On average, cooperation increased by about 20 percent if the gossip was good, and fell by 20 percent if the gossip was negative.
Now, you might think the gossip mattered just in borderline cases - when the partner had a mixed record...but even when a player saw his partner had a record of consistent meanness, he could be swayed by positive gossip to reward the partner anyway. Or withhold help from a perfectly nice partner just on the basis of malicious buzz.
These two separate discoveries of umami receptors on the tongue demonstrated once and for all that umami is not a figment of a hedonist's imagination. We actually have a sense that responds only to veal stock, steak, and dashi. Furthermore, as Ikeda insisted, the tongue uses the taste of umami as its definition of deliciousness. Unlike the tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, which are sensed realtive to one another (this is why a touch of salt is always added to chocolate, and why melon is gussied up with ham), umami is sensed all by itself. It is that important.In twenty pages Lehrer manages to weave together a discussion of the binding problem (how we keep together information from our separate senses to construct one percept, i.e. if in the middle of a conversation, a red car drives down the street, how do we know to put the sound of the tires against the pavement together with the car and not the speaker?), - the influence of belief on the experiences of the senses, and the "ghost in the machine" phenomenon. This is amidst drool-worthy descriptions of preparing food.
This, of course, is perfectly logical. Why wouldn't we have a specific taste for protein? We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it. Our human body produces more than forty grams of glutamate a day, so we constantly crave an amino acid refill. (Species that are naturally vegetarian find the taste of umami repellent. Unfortunately for vegans, humans are omnivores.) In fact, we are trained from birth to savor umami: breat milk has ten times more glutamate than cow milk. The tongue loves what the body needs.
Escoffier lectured cooks on the importance of extracting flavor from bones: "Indeed, sotck is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory meal." What every other chef was throwing away - the scraps of tendon and oxtail, the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot - Escoffier was simmering into sublimity...
...Deglazing was the secret of Escoffier's success. The process itself is extremely simple: a piece of meat is cooked at a very high temperature - to produce a nice seared Maillard crust, a cross-linking and caramelizing of amino acids - and then a liquid, such as a rich veal stock, is added. As the liquid evaporates, it loosens the fronde, the burned bits of protein stuck to the bottom of the pan (deglazing also makes life easier for the dishwasher). The dissolved fronde is what gives Escoffier's sauces their divine depth; it's what makes boef bourguignon, bourguignon. A little butter is added for varnish, and, voila, the sauce is complet.
...everything was merely matter, and matter obeyed a short list of cosmic laws (like gravity and inertia), knowing the laws meant knowing everything about everything. All you had to dop was cranki the equiations and decipher the results. Man would finally see himself for "the automaton that he is." Free will, like God, would become an illusion, and we would see that our lives are really as predictable as the planetary orbits. As Laplace wrote, "We must...imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of it sprior state and as the cause of the state that will follow it. Freedom has no place here."
give[s] us a vision of ourselves "more sure than shifting theory." While scientists were searching for our biological constrainst - they assumed we were prisoners of our hereditary enheritances - Eliot's art argues that the mind was "not cut in marble." She believed that the most essential element of human nature was its malleability, the way each of us can "will ourselves to change." No matter how many mechanisms science uncovered, our freedom would remain.
"So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honest! But to me the Development theory [Darwin's theory of evolution] and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the process." Because evolution has no purpose or plan - it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes - our biology remains impenetrable.
Every chromosome, gene, and base pair would be sequenced and understood. Our textual underpinnings would be stripped of their mystery, and our lack of freedom would finally be exposed. For the paltry sum of $2.7 billion, everything from cancer to schizophrenia would be eradicated.Isn't that marvelous? I do have a few quibbles with this chapter's omission of the selection part of Darwin's theory. It would have been less convenient to a discussion of random error as the scientific equivalent of free will, but it bugged me. However, I suppose Lehrer's ability to make choices is why his prose is so much more economical than, say, mine. He also discusses introns - the vast amount of genetic code that no use can yet be attributed to. Is junk really the only explanation anyone has for them? Has no one posited their function as extra yarn for nature to knit with? I.e. the code may be repeated more times than seems necessary now, but that leaves was more possibility for error and hence there are more opportunities for mutation and more chance for a developments useful in a world whose context we cannot yet imagine. Sorry for that little diversion, if I'm curious I guess I should look it up. Lehrer's science writing is mostly transparent and focused but I occasionally wonder if a general reader is going to get lost in something like: "their auditory cortex now resembled the typical ferret visual cortex, complete with spatial maps and neurons tuned to detect slants of light." A couple of words of context on what a spatial map and the visual cortex are could be useful there, unless my perspective is off on how well general science jargon is understood.
That was the optimistic hypothesis. Nature, however, writes astonishingly complicated prose. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake...
If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry.
Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
