bookeywookey

Parallel lives of determination and vigor (Books - A Saving Remnant by Martin Duberman)

2012-02-01T07:24:00.005-05:00

Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are social and political radicals who worked during the tumultuous decades that spanned the 1950s - 2000s. Their personal transformation through radical political action is the subject of Martin Duberman's dual biography A Saving Remnant. This sometimes messily organized narrative seemed almost suited to McReynolds and Demings's unusual lives of outward determination and vigor, and their parallel personal journeys which included much internal conflict, however, I was disappointed by the writing, which I found curiously flat and carelessly repetitive. Additionally, in a story whose central characters were active in many political organizations and who published in numerous journals, Duberman gave me too little background to help distinguish the Social Democratic Front from the Students for a Democratic Society or the Socialist Party from the Independent Socialist League from the War Resisters League, and then to keep them distinct from one another as the narrative progressed. This was not the case in reading Duberman's earlier Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, his inspiring and well-researched book on the Black Mountain artists' colony of the 1930s. Despite writing in A Saving Remnant which lacked directedness or excitement, I ultimately became compelled by Demings and McReynolds's invigorating lives, which were devoted predominantly to pacifist activities and the struggle for equal treatment of black Americans, to see their stories through to the end.

The phrase "a saving remnant" has historically referred to that small number of people neither indoctrinated nor frightened into accepting oppressive social conditions. Unlike the general populace, they openly challenge the reigning powers-that-be and speak out early and passionately against injustice of various kinds....One of my intentions in writing this book is to demonstrate that in the mid-to-late twentieth century in the United States, the "saving remnant" included, in some cases prominently, a number of gay people.

What Duberman is very good at is how McReynolds and Deming's sexuality in the context of the repressive 1950s propelled them into activism. How the fact of their sexuality was formative not only of their relationships but of their whole lives, which were fraught with complexity. He is convincing on the psychological motivations behind his actors and their colleagues, parents, lovers, and friends. He is equally good at immersing the reader in the atmosphere of the turbulent sixties, with Bayard Rustin, Edmund Wilson, Allen Ginsberg, and Alvin Ailey all making appearances in the story. It is striking too, in reading this book in the context of the current Jacobean presidential campaign, that there was a time in recent American history during which people were less jaded about politics and when running for office was not just a function of money.

A Saving Remnant is a story of what medical writer Atul Gawande has referred to as "positive deviants," (I don't write now of McReynolds and Deming's sexuality, but of the singularity of their lives of struggle for the good) people whose divergence from the norm makes a positive and necessary contribution to the advancement of some aspect of our lives. Duberman does us a service in conveying the value of their exceptional lives.

Grown-up fantasy that is more than good versus evil (Books - The Magician King by Lev Grossman)

2012-01-24T08:55:00.008-05:00

I had hoped to continue my Tuesday posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend today, but I have been so sick that I had to turn to less dense fare. Hopefully I will be able to return to that book this week.

Since finishing Lev Grossman's dark, magical coming of age fantasy The Magicians almost exactly two years ago, I have been anticipating its sequel - The Magician King. The sequel shares the original's strong plotting, dark tone, and layer of ironic commentary on the fantasy form's popularity and most well-used devices. In the first book, a smart, less than popular boy, is trained at a magic school called Brakebills, eventually travels to Fillory, the land of his childhood fantasy, and is crowned king. When we meet him in the sequel, he lives the luxurious life of a king, but rather than being content with ruling the land of his dreams, he is bored and restless. He decides to go on a quest to far off parts of his realm, making some unplanned for and surprising detours along the way. While the first volume focused on power, love, and fantasy, I would say that the present volume was about a sense of belonging and purpose, and ultimately the putting away of the utopian fantasies of childhood .

I felt The Magician King possessed by an angry streak colored by one of its key characters - Julia, or should I say Queen Julia. Parallel to the account of King Quentin's escapade is the story of Julia's acquisition of magic skill and power, not in the exclusive prep school environment of Brakebills, but through sheer grit and determination and at great sacrifice. This part of the novel is still concerned with power. Here the milder ironic comments on the fantasy form of the first novel became snarky barbs. To my eye the prodigious use of contemporary diction like motherfucking, ass-wipe, and fuck-all give the narrative the feel of straining to be relevant and is worn less naturally than the precise and variegated diction of Grossman's English literature degree: kludgy, wuthering, kibitzed, sinecure, and dysthymic semiotician.

I also had the feeling that Grossman, knowing what worked in the first novel, was sometimes pressured to hit his marks again. The direct references to Dr. Who, Harry Potter, and Narnia, that felt like such clever commentary in The Magicians here felt self-conscious and made-for-tv-cute. But any self-consciousness is ultimately subsumed by Grossman's imagination. Here we meet both a talking sloth and an animated map the size of a room which, as one moves closer, adjusts its resolution to more and more detail - like something out of Borges. The wonders of Grossman's imagined worlds, both real and magical, are rendered with real skill at crafting addictive narrative. Finally, Grossman's books are tougher stuff than the good versus evil antics of Harry Potter because he makes grown-up fantasy out of the interior struggles of human beings. His central characters are ambitious, dissatisfied, hard-up, complacent, unsure of who they are, bored, exploitative - but they aren't evil - they're expressing the dark side of any young soul both as they crave fantasy and as they are compelled to move on from it. In this I find them strong narratives of real value.

The alternative to positive thinking is not despair (Books - Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich) - The Tyranny of Positive Thinking I

2012-01-21T10:59:00.007-05:00

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided is a feisty analysis of the American obsession with positive thinking that includes its hypothesized origins, the areas of culture that it infiltrates - big business, religion, psychology - the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around coaching and products to maintain that cockeyed optimism no matter what the weather tells us, a debunking of many of the beneficial outcomes claimed by proponents of positive thinking such as improved cancer prognosis or material wealth, and finally the usefulness of negative emotions, stress, and vigilance. The anecdotes as well as the facts (if you choose to listen to them) are delivered in accessible prose with a hefty dose of irony. In addition, Ehrenreich is emotionally open about the part her own experience plays with the subject she writes about as in, for example, this about her wait for test results to confirm or reject a cancer diagnosis:

Finally there was nothing left to read but one of the free local weekly newspapers where I found, buried deep in the classifieds, something even more unsettling than the growing prospect of major disease - a classified ad for a "breast cancer teddy bear" with a pink ribbon stitched to its chest.

Yes, atheists pray in their foxholes - in this case, with a yearning new to me and sharp as lust, for a clean and honorable death by shark bite, lightning strike, sniper fire, car crash. Let me be hacked to death by a madman, was my silent supplication - anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear and oozing from the walls of the changing room. I didn't mind dying, but the idea that I should do so while clutching a teddy and with a sweet little smile on my face - well, no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.

and later this about treatment:

In the mainstream of breast cancer culture, there is very little anger... Positive thinking seems to be mandatory in the breast cancer world, to the point that unhappiness requires a kind of apology, as when "Lucy," whose "long-term prognosis is not good," started her personal narrative on breastcancertalk.org by telling us that her story "is not the usual one full of sweetness and hope, but true nevertheless."

Ehrenreich owns up to her point of view not only as a patient, but also as a PhD in cell biology, a rationalist, and a professional skeptic. Her science credentials make her debunking of the blithely and often-repeated connection between positive emotion, immune response, and cancer survival rate particularly good. She gives a layperson's overview of a body of research spanning from the 1930s to 2007. The connection is based on the notion that a positive outlook impacts immune response, but this would only be meaningful if the immune system was playing a role in cancer, a fact for which there is no conclusive evidence. The immune system's role, as far as we understand, is to defeat outside invasions like infection, not alterations in growth that evolve inside our own cells. James Coyne, the author of a literature review of studies of the effects of psychotherapy on cancer in 2007 concludes that

There can be lots of social and emotional benefits. But [patients] should not seek such experiences solely on the expectation that they are extending their lives.

Ehrenreich's point is not merely that she derives no comfort from teddy bears and therefore neither should anyone else, her point throughout the book is that the insistence on optimism is a whitewashing of experience, and that it does not only fail to produce the results claimed by proponents but that the its ultimate outcome can actually be harmful.

But rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. There is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted.

Well-intentioned as efforts may be to encourage benefit finding, it is generally insensitive to the "unique burdens and challenges" each patient must overcome. Indeed, some studies link increased perception of benefits with poorer quality of life compared to those who perceived fewer benefits following their diagnoses.

Ehrenreich's book doesn't focus solely on her own medical issues, in her chapter on motivational speakers and products like The Secret which promise that positive thinking will produce specific, wished-for results, Ehrenreich takes aim at the notion of the unlimited mind or that "we are the creators of our lives and of our world." Their programs involve such advice as eliminating negative people from one's life and not exposing oneself to negative news.

Of course, if the powers of mind were truly "infinite," one would not have to eliminate negative people from one's life...The advice that you must change your environment... is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only "positive" response is to withdraw into one's own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

Many of these programs claim to be based upon quantum physics, or rather, an incorrect understanding of the rules of quantum mechanics, which apply to systems that are waaaaaay smaller than the brain. The argument put forth by such speakers, mourns Ehrenreich, is that "whatever you decide is true, is true." How the hell can you argue with that?

It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. Everything is perfect here, or as perfect as you want to make it. Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated. It's just a god-awfully lonely place.

Although this paragraph is fairly dripping with sarcasm, Ehrenreich gets right to the heart of the fallacy of such claims. Such an imagined system sees the wisher as the only active member of the universe and all other objects and people in it their instruments. Think about it, if your wish involves my decision to, say, give you a job - what is the claim? That I no longer have a free will in making such a decision? That my thoughts and actions become your playthings? And what if I am simultaneously focusing my positive thoughts on employing someone else? What then?

Crackpot ministers and Oprah guests notwithstanding, I would have found the chapter on psychologist Martin Seligman and the "science of happiness" devastating had it not been so funny. By Ehrenreich's account there is little unbiased science going on in the field in which I am currently trying to earn a degree.

So obviously Ehrenreich and I are both misanthropes of the worst kind, and if we want to hate all humanity we can go ahead, by why shouldn't the rest of mankind benefit from thinking only positive thoughts if they want to? What possible harm can it do? Perhaps, cautions Ehrenreich, there are negative people who have something useful to say

...the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

Here is Ehrenreich's chief caveat, if the only information you wish to take in is that which tells you everything is well with the world, you place yourself in "an artificial bubble of constant, uncritical reinforcement." Ehrenreich stresses:

The alternative to positive thinking is not, however, despair...The alternative is to...see things as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity.

Where were all the regulators who were supposed to be watching our financial system, sounding alarms prior to its collapse in 2008? Perhaps they were all right there, but were only willing to see unlimited credit, and the possibility of 40% annual gains. This economic depression we have gone through should by all rights have carried the message with it that the market does not possess an unlimited ability to self-correct, but both economists and politicians are still trying to bright-side us (and, no doubt, themselves). You might wish to give yourself a dose of Barbara Ehrenreich's sober thesis in a very amusing package as an antidote.

This was the first installment of a self-assigned reading project with the tentative title of The Tyranny of Positive Thinking (see my side bar) for which I also intend to read Adam Phillips's Going Sane and Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. After this, I hope to provoke a cross-conversation among these books. Read along, if you care to join me.

Breakfast reading, superpowers, and other important matters...

2012-01-12T08:27:00.004-05:00

It has been a while since I participated in BTT. Here's the meme posted today.

1. What’s your favorite time of day to read?

I'll read any time but end up reading most often before I go to sleep.

2. Do you read during breakfast? (Assuming you eat breakfast.)

I usually read blogs during breakfast but if I'm at the tail-end of a really good read, I'll sometimes try to finish it over breakfast.

3. What’s your favorite breakfast food? (Noting that breakfast foods can be eaten any time of day.)

Eggs, but I don't usually eat them for breakfast. My breakfast is usually some source of whole grain - toast, cereal, meusli, muffin, fruit - often berries, kiwi, melon, and some sort of fermented milk like yogurt or kefir.

4. How many hours a day would you say you read?

At least one. Between my commute and bed time reading about 1.5 is probably most common, and if you count reading on line and reading for work then probably 2. Although, there are some days like a not so busy weekend or vacation days where I might get in three to five. When I was still in classes it could be more like six or seven on the weekends.

5. Do you read more or less now than you did, say, 10 years ago?

I have always read a lot. I may have gotten in more reading before I was in a relationship, but I wasn't happier.

6. Do you consider yourself a speed reader?

No, although others seem to consider me one. My reading has slowed down with age, but I think I read more carefully and perceptively.

7. If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Does this seem like a non-sequitur to anyone else? My cliched superpower wish would be flying or teleporting (it would really be cool to go to Paris for lunch and the great bookstores around the Odeon, see a play in London in the evening, and then sleep in my own bed in New York even if the tube were already closed!) , but if I couldn't have that, then I have always considered speed-reading a sort of superpower and I'd be happy with that.

8. Do you carry a book with you everywhere you go?

Yup.

9. What KIND of book?

Whatever I'm reading, unless it's very inconvenient (like my 1300 page neuroscience text book and even that I had to carry sometimes in order to get my assigned reading done).

10. How old were you when you got your first library card?

Probably around four - as soon as I could read.

11. What’s the oldest book you have in your collection? (Oldest physical copy? Longest in the collection? Oldest copyright?)

The oldest physical book and copyright is a French history of America published in 1817. The books I have owned the longest are probably my early childhood books like I am a Bunny, but those are all at my mom's. The one I have held most consecutively in my apartment is probably the Sherlock Holmes volume I got from my Aunt and Uncle when I was around twelve.

12. Do you read in bed?

Every day.

13. Do you write in your books?

I used to write in them a lot more. Now I usually use post-it tabs to mark a place and once I post on a book I removed them so that when I read the book again my conversation with it can change.

14. If you had one piece of advice to a new reader, what would it be?

Forget obligation, follow your pleasure in reading.

15. What question(s) have I NOT asked at BTT that you’d love me to ask? (Actually, leave the answer to this one in the comments on this post, huh? So I can find them when I need inspiration!

Are there any fictional characters whom you have emulated (or tried to)? Who and why?

Which non-series book would you most like to read the sequel to? Do you have any wishes for what might happen in it?

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Who and what about them did you love?

Have you ever used a book to instruct someone of something or is there anyone for whom you would like to do that? (I don't mean a text book for a class, but a work of fiction or non-fiction that would get a certain message across either through plot or character). What is the book and what do you wish to impart?

False fronts on depression-era Main Street (Books - As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross)

2012-01-11T01:29:00.008-05:00

Although Canadian author Sinclair Ross had to drop out of high school to work, he demonstrates a deep understanding of the human heart and writes in spare, unequivocal prose about life on the prairie during the depression in his first novel, As For Me and My House (1941). In this story of eroded communication between the Bentleys, a preacher and his wife, Ross's first person narrative takes the point of view of Mrs. Bentley through a diary she keeps in their twelfth year of a tense and childless marriage as they assume the parish of a dusty town called Horizon.

And as usual he's been drawing again. I turned over the top sheet, and sure enough on the back of it there was a little Main Street sketched. It's like all the rest, a single row of smug, false-fronted stores, a loiterer or two, in the distance the prairie again. And like all the rest there's something about it that hurts. False fronts ought to be laughed at, never understood or pitied. They're such outlandish things, the front of a store built up to look like a second storey. They ought always to be seen that way, pretentious, ridiculous, never as Philip sees them, stricken with a look of self-awareness and futility.

False fronts might, in fact, be considered the theme of this story. Philip is a passionate artist and non-believer who ends up hiding behind the front of the ministry in order to support himself and his wife. Mrs. Bentley is an accomplished pianist. I learned from reading a little about Keath Fraser's biography of Ross that he also hid behind a front, having been homosexual while growing up on the Canadian prairie in the 1920s. Neither of the Bentley's can talk to the other about the feelings of disappointment and entrapment they feel as sensitive souls who are unable to live from the heart.

Something has happened to his drawing this last year or two. There used to be feeling and humanity in it. It was warm and positive and forthright; but now everything is distorted, intensified, alive with thin, cold, bitter life. Yesterday he sketched a congregation as he sees it from the pulpit. Seven faces in the first row - ugly, wretched faces, big-mouthed, mean-eyed - alike yet each with a sharp, aggressive individuality - the caricature of a pew, and the likenesses of seven people.

You get the feeling from the sheer claustrophobia of their marriage that if either of these two were to give voice to their real feelings, a flood would be unleashed and there would be no stopping it. This diary records its unnamed narrator's growing awareness of how far off track their lives have veered. These two souls have so obliterated themselves, that our narrator doesn't even have a name. Ross's talent for writing about disappointment in small town life brings to mind Dawn Powell's terrific Come Back to Sorrento, though while in her work, you see the subdued sparkle that was the dream, in As For Me and My House you see mostly the cracked facade that cannot hide the the loss. The writing is beautiful and the story not only heart-rending but insightful. Great recommendation, Thomas, thanks!

Dickens Month II - In which the characters, rich and poor alike, attempt to advance themselves (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

2012-01-10T17:17:00.005-05:00

250 pages into Our Mutual Friend and Charles Dickens Month, it has struck me that Dickens is something of a naturalist - sketching studies of his characters that are rich enough in detail so that the reader may see them and that always refer to their habitat.

Reginald Wilfer is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on first acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass windows, and generally the De Wilfers who came over with the Conqueror...But, the Reginald Wilfer family were of such commonplace extraction and pursuits that their forefathers had for generations modestly subsisted on the Docks, the Excise Office, and the Custom House, and the existing R. Wilfer was a poor clerk. So poor a clerk, though having a limited salary and an unlimited family, that he had never yet attained the modest object of his ambition: which was to wear a complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time. His black hat was brown before he could afford a coat, his pantaloons were white at the seams and knees before he could buy a pair of boots, his boots had worn out before he could treat himself to new pantaloons, and, by the time he worked round to the hat again, that shining modern article roofed-in an ancient ruin of various periods.

Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no - it was an easterly corner - the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and close-grained, with a face carved out of a very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rabble sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected - if his development received no untimely check - to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

His most juicily funny chronicles are these creatures' attempts at advancement - a key theme in this novel. This is not terribly surprising, as 1865, the year of publication, came hot on the tail of another Charles's book indexing curious species and describing their advancement - Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Many of Dickens's characters are stuck at a particular rung due to circumstances.

"There am I, continuing with father and holding to father loves me and I love father. I can't so much as read a book, because if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting him, and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I want to have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile I know that I am in some things a stay to father, and that if I was not faithful to him he would - in revenge-like, or in disappointment, or both - go wild and bad."

So says a character sure to be one of Dickens classic heroines - Lizzy Hexam. While Silas Wegg, our wooden-legged salesman appears to have sold off his body in advance of his death in order to profit from it.

"I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions," says Wegg, feelingly, "and I shouldn't like - I tell you openly I should not like - under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself. like a genteel person."

Wegg recently took a job reading aloud to Mr. and Mrs. Boffins, a poor but loyal couple who were formerly foreman and caretaker for Harmon - the wealthy dust magnate - but are now his heirs as his son has disappeared. Mrs. Boffin dresses herself in gaudy finery to advance her lot. Mr. Boffin has decided he would benefit from some education and has engaged Wegg to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While in possession of a fortune from the inheritance, the Boffins offer a generous reward for the murderer of their former boss's son, take in the Wilfer's daughter in order to introduce her to society, and take on a secretary to help them conduct their business. Little do they know that their secretary is not who he has said he is.

What encourages the acidity of Dickens's satire most is the social climbing indulged in by people already in possession of wealth and position but sure, somehow, that if they could occupy the next highest rung of the ladder, their happiness would be assured. It is not class that separates the climber in Our Mutual Friend from those who are aspirational. The destitute, the genteel poor, the lawyer, and the wealthy business owner all seem equally disposed to advance themselves.

Here is my earlier post on Our Mutual Friend.

Bookish things...

2012-01-08T09:55:00.013-05:00

2012 has begun as a less than typical reading year in that I am participating in multiple challenges which involve long books. The result has been that I have finished just one book. So I thought I would do more of a Salon-like post, so I can touch on the many books I have in-progress.

Above and to the left is the main culprit, Our Mutual Friend. In order to keep pace so that I might post the last of five weekly posts on Dickens's birthday, February 7, I must read 200 pages per week. That's not a hardship as the book is delightful, but it is just enough to keep me from finishing anything else on the longer side. For that reason, I found I had abandoned Geert Mak's travelogue/history of post-war Europe In Europe, despite finding it fascinating and beautifully written in favor of...

A favorite of Thomas's, I decided to give As for Me and My House, a Canadian classic of life in poverty on the prairie by Sinclair Ross, a go. It is straightfoward, precise, and rich in human content while utterly bleak in setting. I dont' know yet whether it is about succumbing to the destitution or rising above it.

Friends also gave me a belated birthday present last night in the form of Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, with their notes scrawled next to certain recipes, e.g., this is really good! The many recipes are in the form of a food "diary," in that they are organized by time of year. The recipes look, for the most part, fairly simple and the photographs enticing. I can't wait to try one.

I was reminded of a reading and writing project that I had collected the books for and have been meaning to start for some time by Bookslut. It is loosely about visions of happiness and sanity and how poorly defined these are next to visions of misery and illness. It involves, at this point, the three books pictured above. Adam Phillips book Going Sane is written from the perspective of a psychoanalyst whose basic premise appears to be that the meaning of sanity is so much less fully characterized than the meaning of mental illness. The prolific Barbara Ehrenreich debunks America's tendency towards mandatory cheerfulness in Bright-Sided, something I have referred to as the tyranny of positive thinking. (Actually, I have discovered in my reading that this is not my formulation at all, I must have picked up on it). It is written, at least in part, out of her experience of breast cancer and being subjected to such tyranny. One of the best pieces I have read on this subject was in an unabashed and eloquent essay by Robert F. Murphy - The Damaged Self - about becoming quadrapelegic due to a spinal cord tumor. He writes of its impact on his sense of self, the fatalism and anger he experienced:

They daily suffer snub, avoidance, patronization, and occasionally outright cruelty...but whatever the source of grievance, the disabled have limited ways of showing it...Quadriplegics cannot stalk offin high (or low) dudgeon, nor can they even use body language. To make matters worse, as the price for normal relations, they must comfort others about their condition. They cannot show fear, sorrow, depression, sexuality, or anger for this disturbs the able-bodied. The unsound of limb are permitted only to laugh.

The last of the three books is Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, whose purpose seems to be (having not yet read the book) to counter what is seen as a bias intellectualism has toward pessimism. He argues that food, income, and lifespan are increasing while child mortality and violence are decreasing and, as a result, people's lives are more prosperous and, therefore, better. I'm not sure whether I will buy the prosperous = happy implication I'm picking up in my as yet cursory look at this book, but it's the kind of argument that gets my dander up. Ridley is a smart writer so I'm curious to have my own biases put to the test. I think this trio will make for some interesting cross-commentary. I have no doubt that Steven Pinker's latest book could make an interesting fourth, but its focus on violence is a bit more circumscribed than I'm looking for. I'd appreciate any other suggestions you good readers might have for books specifically on happiness, optimism, and sanity that might add something to the discussion.

Charles Dickens Month I - In which we are introduced to key players (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

2012-01-03T08:45:00.006-05:00

This is the first of my five January posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which I began reading just yesterday in this month preceding his 200th birthday. I have barely scratched the surface at about 50 pages, but at this point Dickens is just introducing us to the key players and plot set-up, so that's not really a problem. Three households figure here. One is the Hexams. They live in poverty and fetch dead bodies from the Thames. The Veneerings are nouveau riche and one of their social circle, Mortimer Lightwood, is a solicitor in the High Court of Chancery and executor of the will of a man who made a fortune as a Dust Contractor, that is to say, he made his money by employing others to dispose of garbage. The will benefits a John Harmon, but includes a provision that he must marry a young woman named Bella Wilfer. Harmon turns out to be a body recently fetched from the Thames by the Hexams. The third household, is that of Bella Wilfer, her father (who was a clerk for the Dust Contractor), her mother, and sister. They are also poor, but a more genteel variety of poor than the Hexams. The Wilfers rent a room to a shady gentleman by the name of John Rokesmith.

Since we're still early days in terms of plot, I will make three observations. One is that the key players here all make their livelihood off human waste - whether it is dust or bodies. Dickens is definitely a chronicler of the bleak, but here he seems to be at his bleakest. I have always loved the way Dickens constructs character. In his first description of the Hexams - father and daughter - before we even know their names, what we learn is what they do not possess and who they are not. If that isn't a depiction of abject poverty, what is?

He had no net, hook, or line, and could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathood and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze.

That is as opposed to the Veneerings who are:

...bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new aurter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, they carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

The most intriguing character so far is the young son of the Hexams who, although he is poor, goes to school.

There was a curious mixture in the boy, of uncompleed savagery, and uncompleted civilization. His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse; but he was cleaner than other boys of his type; and his writing though large and round, was good; and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf; like one who cannot.

The contradictory mixture makes me curious of and hopeful for the role the boy might play in the burgeoning mystery that is taking shape.

Charles Dickens Month, in which I finally tackle The Pickwick Papers, um, correction Our Mutual Friend

2012-01-02T10:57:00.006-05:00

Thomas led me to Amanda's Charles Dickens Month, which excited me because I realized I could indulge in triple action by reading either a copy of The Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend (but not both) that have been festering on my TBR pile: participating in Charles Dickens Month, the Tea & Books Reading Challenge as they are both biggies, and stay true to the TBR Double Dare all at the same time! Rock on.

Update: Let's make that, Our Mutual Friend.

Art as access to the authentic experience (Books - Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner)

2012-01-02T08:25:00.008-05:00

I have finished my first read of 2012 Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, a suggestion of Brad Listi's and a gift from my in-laws - thanks! This smart, funny, occasionally infuriating novel is about a young American poet's experience of alienation and the art he makes of his experience while on a fellowship in Spain.

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

Adam, our protagonist, sees a man in the Prado weep profusely before a painting. He and the museum's guards follow him through the museum as though he has committed some crime. Adam doubts the man's authenticity utterly, as he seems to doubt the sincerity of almost any human gesture he meets. He has the most profound case of existential angst I have ever seen. Adam seems worried about the veracity of, well, everything. Not least among these is the words he commits to paper. His solution is to compose poems via random chance (of course, this is an accepted method of composition explored by respected writers, composers, painters, choreographers...) for, he claims, poems have no meaning (he is not the first to do this either). He suspects every word spoken to him. Every laugh someone makes in the room must be about him. He seems to doubt even the authenticity of his own behavior. This may have something to do with being a wordsmith and being involved in a culture where he doesn't know the language. It also, no doubt, has something to do with the copious amount of drugs he takes. His solution is to compose most of his behavior for effect. He claims to be conducting an experiment of sorts, an experiment in which he and the people he encounters are the lab rats.

...Teresa was approaching, the ember of her cigarette describing little circles as she walked, the ice audible in her glass as she drew nearer, and I realized with some anxiety that she would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I'd been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch.

Adam may think he is researching experience, but he is really distancing himself chemically and rhetorically out of panic from every touch of experience offered to him. He is the most fantastic liar - telling some incredible whoppers that made this reader both laugh and cringe with embarrassment. Yet, the way Lerner makes interchangeable the language that is Adam's tool of composition and the behavior via which we communicate experience to ourself is the crux of his astute novel and the source of its entertainment.

That I smoked hash with tobacco was critical during this phase of my project, although I was resolved never to smoke a cigarette again after leaving Spain, and so smoked with particular abandon, critical because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood's Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance...

Lerner smartly places Adam in a context of people who seem to inhabit a realer life than he. The social circles he travel in seem suffused with emotional sincerity (possibly true or possibly a function of the way we interpret behavior when we aren't fluent in a language). The political climate Adam inhabits is that of the tragic bombing on Madrid's Atocha Station and Spain's first election post 9/11, a time during which much of Western Europe assumed a superiority to America. I remember traveling to Holland the week after 9/11 and while I was not in favor of almost anything the Bush administration did, I found the tone of the anti-Americanism that I encountered imbued with a sort of punishing moralism. It was full of the accusation that because of my nationality, the way I lived lacked seriousness and authenticity. Juxtaposing Adam against these backdrops of, shall we say, social and political hyper-reality, depicted the contrast of his existential and compositional worries in bold relief.

Lerner indulged in some moments of arty self-consciousness that could almost be excused by the narrator himself being a poet but not quite:

It was worse than having a sinking feeilng: I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings...

There was also a long disquisition on the poems of John Ashbery that, however brilliant (truly), seemed out of place. But despite these moments and despite despising Adam for his jaw-dropping lies and the way he uses other human beings, I became caught up in his story as he wrote his poems and felt the events of his life. I became hopeful that he would unravel the tangle of his lies and win his battle for authenticity by allowing himself to be touched. This made Leaving the Atocha Station a clever, creative, and satisfying read.

2011 - the year that was... (A meme)

2012-01-01T09:47:00.003-05:00

Happy 2012. I got this meme from Katherine, who, she tells us, is always walking into things, well into bookstores anyway.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

Published an article in a science journal.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
To be honest, I don't remember if I made any. I'm lucky that I can remember the ones I made yesterday, which will, no doubt, be forgotten tomorrow. Did I want to drink more water?

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not immediate family but a friend and former student.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
An old friend's father.

5. What countries did you visit?
England and France.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
More perseverance, more courage, more opportunities to play.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
March 27 - the day I got married.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Tangibly, I passed my oral comprehensive exams and advanced in my doctoral program.

9. What was your biggest failure?
The number of explanations I made was greater than the number of questions I asked.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not in any significant way, though I took a splendid fall last Spring, but several family members were not as fortunate as I in this department.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Books, theatre tickets, and a great bottle of red wine at dinner on the first night of our honeymoon.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
New York's Governor Cuomo's.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Where shall I begin? Actually, I'll wait until I've achieved perfection before doling out demerits.

14. Where did most of your money go?
My honeymoon trip and repairs on the brickwork and roof of my home.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Returning to France.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
See number 38.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
 a) happier or sadder? 
b) thinner or fatter?
c) richer or poorer? 

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Engaged, seen friends, been more accepting of myself.

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

Get anxious.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
On the road, then at the in-laws making dinner and opening presents with the kiddies.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Every day.

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

23. What was your favourite TV program?

Madmen, although we don't actual have television, we watch on Netflix,

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Actually, yes, and it was an achievement. I finally blamed someone I had avoided holding responsible for something for years. Credit where credit is due.

25. What was the best book you read?
See this for fiction and this for non-fiction.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Glyndebourne's new production of Die Meistersinger was pretty damn good.

27. What did you want and get?
Legal gay marriage in New York State.

28. What did you want and not get?
The same 1,000+ benefits that the federal government ties to that non-religious state contract and that straight people receive.

29. What was your favourite film of this year?
I saw few recent films but favorites I viewed last year were:
Pina (2011)
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)
Tie Me Up Tie Me Down (1990)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy (2009 - Swedish Version)
Please Give (2010)
The Best of Youth (2003)

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I worked - didn't celebrate until the weekend, then we went to the theatre and dinner. 49.

31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Equal treatment under the law.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
You're assuming I had one. I manage to get dressed every day, but I'm not sure I would call that a fashion concept.

33. What kept you sane?
Did something keep me sane?

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
The opposition toward a step toward healthcare reform supported by those who imagine that their ideology is more important than reform of a very basic service more and more of us need at some time in our lives.

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

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Although most of my friends and work acquaintances remained steady, I met a couple of patients who were absolutely remarkable people.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
It's barely over, I doubt I've mined all the wisdom that can be gained from 2011 in the last 11 hours, especially considering the party we hosted until 3:45 am.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
(or last night at any rate, courtesy of Noel Coward)

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.

39. So in as few words as possible, how would you sum up your year?
I think that song about sums it up. 2011 was not without its challenges, but it was a fortunate year for me, although I know that was not true for everyone.

My best fiction reads of 2011

2011-12-31T07:19:00.005-05:00

Of the 40-odd works of fiction I read in 2011 I'm going to name some favorites. I'm still working on Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, we'll see if I have time to finish it and write about it. This year, I won't break this group into further sub-genres as the representation of YA fantasy, classic literature, or short works are not significant enough. The original reviews are linked to each title, with an excerpt below. My favorite novels this past year were:

The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
Colm Toibin's 1996 The Story of the Night is a multi-strand coming-of-age novel. In it, Richard, a young gay man in 1980s Buenos Aires comes into himself, learning to love and shedding his naivete so as to operate successfully in the changing political landscape of his country. Argentina tries to grows up to become a playing partner in the international political and economic community. Gay life in Western culture comes out of the closet - in some ways by dint of political determination and to some degree it is forced out by illness. Toibin's three stories meet in the person of Richard. The Story of the Night is compulsively readable, not because the political story is an entertaining thriller, as the blurbs claim. I find Toibin's skill more subtle (or his talent more blatant) in that he takes a rich intellectual understanding of the politic landscape and writes plot of political complexity, keeping its events clear as well as tension-filled. At the same time, he writes a gay love story straight from the heart, that is uncliched, full of character-driven details.

Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane
Deane renders the indignation of a child who knows he is excluded from the mysteries of adulthood with great conviction. In the case of this novel, these are not just the work-a-day mysteries of sexual relations or violence considered too great for a child's understanding. Our first-person narrator is aware of deep secrets that rule the internecine feuds within his family, secrets of informing and murder that haunt his parents' every waking action. They flavor his life like a strong spice one can taste in every bite of a stew and yet not know what it is. He learns the full story in dribs and drabs, sometimes from unknowing truth-tellers. Deane's talent, is withholding it from his reader as well in such a fashion that the not unfamiliar story of an Irish childhood becomes riddled with suspense, and his coming of age filled with the regret that accompanies the realization that being excluded from this knowledge is no less tormenting than possessing it... Some of his paragraphs could be sung, so beautiful are the processions of simple words that accomplish his rich and deeply-felt descriptions. This memoir-like novel is tinged with deep sadness, but the way Deane renders his story is shear pleasure.

A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry
What Barry makes most plain in this beautiful book is the confusion and the utter waste of war, even in the case of a noble cause. It ruins the men (and now women) who fight it, the earth under them, the families they left behind. It ruins lives not even totally formed yet. One of its great tragedies, this book tells us, is that it ruins boys before they ever grow up enough to know their own minds.

To the End of the Land - David Grossman
When Ora's son Ofer decides to stay beyond his required military service in the Israeli army to serve in an important military mission rather than hike with her in the Galilee, Ora feels hurt and deserted. She commandeers Avram, her husband's best friend and her old love, who has been living on the fringes since his capture and torture in the Yom Kippur War, to hike with her in a desperate act of avoidance. If she is not there to receive the news that Ofer has been killed, she reasons, he is not dead. She can indefinitely keep him alive by telling the stories of Ofer, his brother Adam, his father Ilan, and herself, to Avram. This is story telling as an act of defense. People approached with love are bottomless, says David Grossman's powerful new novel, no matter how much you know, there is still more.

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Hardy's last and greatest novel (I think) tells us that people beg for conventions to resolve paradoxes inherent to human nature. They substitute them for deep and independent thinking because they find it so hard to live in the presence of more than one truth. Hardy is not just talking about the uneducated worker, but also of scholars and clergy - the learned men of his time. And when a few enlightened souls discover that they can have richer, happier lives by refusing to substitute convention for lives of courageous independence, those who crave the comforts of convention make sure that they're miserable for trying to do so.

A Change of Climate - Hilary Mantel
Kit... lives in a world in which people are divided into good souls and sad cases. The strength of Hilary Mantel's 1994 novel is that she is not one of the people to so divide the world. This novel is political and domestic, it is ruthless and tender, but it is never preachy. It is comfortable with its contradictions.

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor
Angel is a brilliant study in self-deception. It is wickedly satiric, and a wonderful psychological study of someone who escapes from the pain of the world with fantasy so successfully that she sees no reason to ever leave her hiding place. On the flip-side, however, Angel is also what happens when education amounts to nothing more than learning the minimal skills necessary to make one's living, rather than opening up the student to the possibilities the world has to offer. The adults in Angel's world were all bashed down to size by their circumstances, so they think it practical to curtail their children's dreams to protect them from disappointment...

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.

I don't really see a need to declare a solitary "winner" among this group. The Road and To the End of the Land perhaps stand out among these strong, rich, and humane novels for their sheer indelibility. Looking back on these eight novels, I really had a year of robust and fulfilling reading! The bar is set high for 2012. May you all have a rich and involving year in reading and otherwise.

BIG books in 2012 - (The Tea & Books Reading Challenge)

2011-12-30T08:24:00.006-05:00

For Birgit (and her hero C.S. Lewis) size matters, which is why she has posed the Tea & Books Reading Challenge, which demands that we tackle 2 or more books that are 700 pages in length or greater. I am joining at the Berry Tea Devotee level, meaning I intend to complete 4 of these books before Dec. 31 2012. Given that my TBR pile already has five on these monsters, I don't even have to abandon C.B.'s Double-Dare to do it. I thought I had even more, but two of the long books I wanted to tackle this year were both in the neighborhood of 680 pages. As I will be writing my dissertation this year, reading a few books this length will remind me how short the piece of writing I'm producing actually is. I plan to choose from the tomes below:

Gustav Mahler - Jens Malte Fischer

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

In Europe - Geert Mak

A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes

and if I can manage it, Simon Callow's massive two-volume biography of Orson Welles The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans that Sheila gave me about two years ago. It's not the length that intimidates me, it's Callows obsessional enthusiasm expressed in page-long run-on paragraphs with tiny little margins.

and...evidently, I have added Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

My best non-fiction reads of 2011

2011-12-29T20:17:00.006-05:00

Now it is time for my annual best reads lists of 2011. I will choose from just two categories this year - fiction and non-fiction, beginning here with non-fiction. I read 25 works of non-fiction including the genres of memoir, science, and history/politics. I won't count re-reads, such as two works of Joan Didion's I revisited, as they were re-read because they are favorites. The original reviews are linked to each title, although I excerpt them below. The most memorable given these criteria were:

Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi
In 1943 Italian chemist Primo Levi, a Jew, was captured by the Fascist Militia and eventually transported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he somehow survived until the end of World War II. His Survival in Auschwitz, written just a year later, is, on its surface, a remarkably dispassionate document. It records the conditions under which he and his fellow inmates lived to remind the German people, he wrote in his first preface to the book, what they had done, and it is a portrait of people in extremis - what occupies their thoughts, their code of behavior, how they survive, and how they die. To accomplish this he circumscribes the scope of his job (like any good artist)...The way Levi sets his limits allows him to think enough to engage in the act of writing and permits us the possibility of reading it without simply contemplating a void of infinite horror.

The Mind's Eye - Oliver Sacks
Each chapter in this latest collection focuses on a person whose visual system is somehow compromised or enhanced. ..The characters of The Mind's Eye include a pianist who loses the ability to read music, a mystery writer who looses the ability to read words (but not to write them), and several people who are selectively blind for faces but not necessarily for other classes of objects...Whether exploring case studies, the evolution of neuroscience, or more recent avances, Sacks's writing is probing, accessible, and humane in The Mind's Eye.

The Beak of the Finch - Jonathan Weiner
...a rich book detailing the work that evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have done on the Galapagos Islands. They have observed Darwin's theory of natural selection play out again and again and, in some cases, even observed how new species evolve, by watching the islands' famous finches...Aside from the pleasure of his lucid writing, Weiner elucidates the development of Darwin's own thinking as well as integrating his original work with that of contemporary scientists observing the forces of evolution in action. This book makes plain the great theory's relevance to the natural world in which we live and also reveals the unbelievable drudgery of painstaking observational field work.

The Emperor - Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Emperor (1978) was Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's first book. It is a distinctive blend of political writing, razor sharp psychological portraiture via oral history, and prose that achieves lyricism. It's three brief sections describe the absurd class structure of Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie, Emperor from the 1930s to the 1970s, the foment of rebellion against it, and its eventual downfall, not exactly the expected forum for poetical insight.

The Memory Chalet - Tony Judt
While reading this as the literate reflection of a thinker about history, politics, and class I could not help also seeing it as a metaphor for a free thinker subjected to the tyranny of physical paralysis. I tore through the 200-plus pages of these succinct, erudite and moving essays. I cannot advocate strongly enough for The Memory Chalet as a rich reading experience

These five books were each memorable for their skill at immersing the reader in a world not our own. Sometimes the focus was more on imparting information and other times evoking experience but Tony Judt's memoir The Memory Chalet was remarkable for the way it integrated these two functions completely while making the reading of the prose urgent. It is a stand-out among all the books I read this year.

Living in the World but in Exile from Almost Everyplace (Books - Open City by Teju Cole)

2011-12-28T20:18:00.005-05:00

Teju Cole's Open City received strong responses from crack critics and fellow bloggers and made a number of Top 10 fiction lists for the year, persuading me to check it out. In it Julius, a Nigerian immigrant to America who is completing his final year of psychiatry residency at Columbia, walks the streets of New York City. Although the book is short, it does not invite quick reading. The emphasis is not on any sort of plot, but the novel seethes with ideas and scenes of humanity, otherworldly fantasy, and terrific tension.

The form of Open City is a flaneur's diary, only in the case of Julius, his strolls are not idle. He seems to be running from something. Coles's evocation of the complexity and aggression of the city strongly evoked Dostoevsky, but his stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me most of Virginia Woolf as she portrays the inner journey of Clarissa Dalloway by allowing us to trail her as she runs errands in preparation for her dinner party. Cole's novel follows Julius's movements while revealing his experience, mostly related to identity, as it intersects with geography, politics, and culture. The rhythm of Julius's movement is more desultory than Clarissa's and his task less directed. Julius collects information and regales us with his knowledge - about early Dutch settlers treatment of Native Americans, the music of Gustav Mahler, the photography Martin Munkacsi. The writing lingers in this empirical data but knowledge is not necessarily connection, and Julius's experience is one of exile. This, as I read it, was the theme of Open City - not merely exile from one's place of birth, true for both Julius and for Cole - but also the sense of exile experienced by groups which society has decided to set apart by creating different expectations of them. Cole discusses the experiences of blacks in America, Muslims in America and northern Europe, jews, Palestinians, and gay people, and Cole provokes the reader's expectations of what qualities their identities should confer upon his characters, sometimes by meeting typical s expectations of them and at other times by defeating them. If you're black you're supposed to be a thug, not a doctor, certainly not a Mahler lover. If you are gay, you're supposed to be a club boy, not an octogenarian Asian physician...and blacks are all brothers to each other - aren't they?

At the almost empty subway station, there was a family of out-of-towners waiting for the train. A girl of thirteen sat on the bench next to me. Her ten-year-old brother came to join her. They were out of earshot of their parents who, save one or two unconcerned glances in our direction, were absorbed in their own conversation. Her mister, she said, turning to me, wassup? She made signs with her fingers and, with her brother, started laughing. The little boy wore an imitation Chinese peasant's hat. They had been mimicking slanted eyes and exaggerated bows before they came to where I was. They now both turned to me. Are you a gangster, mister? Are you a gangster? They both flashed gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I looked at them. It was midnight, and I didn't feel like giving public lectures. He's black, said the girl but he's not dressed like a gangster. I bet he's a gangster, her brother said. I bet he is. Hey mister, are you a gangster?

And then, only pages later...

Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad. Hey, I'm African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused, I said, I'm so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don't be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing and faced the road. I wasn't sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me...

Initially, I was unsure as to whether I was reading a fictionalized pastiche of Teju Cole's life and little mini-lectures on every magazine article or museum exhibit he was obsessed with at the moment of writing it, or whether I was reading fiction. I came to understand this novel as fiction and then admire its artistry, even if its origins are partly autobiographical, because Cole's writing makes it clear that he has greater insight into Julius than Julius does himself, because his walks accumulate meaning that is greater than the sum of the individual episodes, and because my very confusion between writer and narrator became obvious in time as the book's artifice.

Despite the largely meditative tone, there were some striking moments, including Julius's encounters with his memorably written friend and mentor, Dr. Saito, and a particularly dramatic scene during which Julius, trying to exit Carnegie Hall, gets locked out on the roof. Here, he is suspended between the heavens he can see on that cold clear night from the roof, and the wailing sirens on the street he may fall on to, the mundanity of practical life and the ephemera of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, here, he tells us, he faced a "solitude of rare purity," an arresting evocation of of the complex state we come to recognize as Julius's.

In a visit Julius makes to Brussels, we learn that...

...there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting...

Julius may seek freedom from burdensome ties in the comfort of information, however, he too seems to live his life in waiting. Contemporary global culture may offer the potential for previously unseen interactions and opportunities but it confers upon modern life almost unfathomable complexity. Coles's novel is a thoughtful meditation on a paradoxical sense of exile that arises in a thoughtful modern man living in just such a world - our world.

Taking on the Double-Dare

2011-12-27T09:48:00.002-05:00

Hope you have had a happy holiday - whatever you like celebrating - christmas, chanukah, kwanza, the winter solstice. Now enough singing songs, snacking, toasts, and boardgames, let's get down to the business of reading. C.B. has double-dared us to read only from the TBR pile from December 31, 2011 until April 1, 2012 and I am taking him up on it. See that picture in the challenge icon? That gets pretty close to my TBR stacks and the holidays have only added to it, with enticing copies of Leaving the Atocha Station, and the recent biographies of Catherine The Great and Gustav Mahler courtesy of my in-laws. Although C.B. has not sworn us to not purchasing new books in that time frame, I am even thinking of trying to do that (ha, ha, who are you kidding?). If you care to join us, click on the words double-dared in the third sentence to link to C.B.'s challenge.

2011 - A little end of the year accounting...

2011-12-23T08:05:00.004-05:00

In preparation for my soon-to-come best-of lists, I always like to do a little end of the year accounting. I know some people find this ludicrous but I love looking back on the year and categorizing what I have read. I have been aiming for an average of one book per week, which has been a stretch in the past three years with my class reading requirements, however this fall I no longer had classes. The result was that I was able to finish a few more books. Even though I plan to read several more books this year, lets see how the numbers look so far.

2011
Total books read so far: 65

fiction: 40

written in the last 11 years: 27
written in the 20th century: 12
written prior to the 20th century: 1
graphic novels: 1
fantasy/sci fi: 3
written for young readers: 2

non-fiction:25

essays (misc): 2
biography: 2
memoir: 7
history/politics: 8
science/psychology: 11

written by women/men: 24/41
written in English/read in translation: 57/8

Not a bad year so far.

A monument to hope in the midst of the apocalypse (Books - The Road by Cormac McCarthy)

2011-12-22T15:24:00.004-05:00

It took me two years to work up to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road after a friend recommended it. I just wasn't craving post-apocalyptic winter. The anticipatory cloud lifted one day and I no longer felt that I would not be able to appreciate the writing or story for the setting. This little personal anecdote befits the book, having now read it, as it is about our worst fears realized. The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.

I have read McCarthy's The Crossing and was nonplussed with how he could mix old testament gravitas,Western American grit, and deep, elemental emotion. Here, he one-ups even that one experience of his work I have had, by adding economy. This is not because being spare is inherently better writing, but rather because it suits the scarcity of his bleak imagined universe.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child had led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared in the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

In this opening paragraph McCarthy uses four of the five senses. The word 'glaucoma' is employed as a simile for the experience of a character we haven't even met - creating a striking impression of impending death and darkness. Sentences later he adds 'eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.' Later McCarthy adds 'a blackness to hurt your ears with listening,' and the descriptors 'impenetrable,' and 'autistic' to evoke the characters' experience of the darkness of this world. Before we have met this character, we learn of what he dreamt. I dread reading dreams in most novels because they are generally so telegraphic about what the author would like them to symbolize instead of, as McCarthy does here, conveying character, circumstance, and setting through experience. Dreams may be culturally apprehended as symbols, but when dreamt they are a series of sensory experiences that are only later analyzed for their meaning. In the present, the moment to moment experience of the dream seems clear and sensible. Later we realize some veil hung between us and that world, some unspoken agreement had been made that, as this is a dream, the rules of progression are different and if it is to continue, the rules are to be accepted without question. Because, as the father tells his son, in this Beckettian universe,

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Numerous dreams come and go throughout this narrative pointing at both the otherworldliness of life after the great and final mistake of mankind and also the mundanity of life's requirements. Even after the apocalypse we eat and we sleep and we dream. If we are a little child, we must learn the difference between the real world and the world of dreams and between bad dreams and good ones. Even in this world, or perhaps especially in this one, a father must teach his child ethics - which things to value, the respect due other living beings. And even in this deeply damaged universe, the son also teaches his father. Some of the most touching moments in this novel are ones in which the boy's inherent knowledge of what is right is challenged by what his father feels he must do to help them both survive in the extremity of the circumstances. This is an old tale - told often in both classical drama and in modern ones like Arthur Miller's All My Sons or Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities and A Fair Country. This is one of the sacred roles of parents. You can feel the deep struggle in this man who on the one hand must do everything that he can for his son to survive, even while he knows he is dying, and on the other wants to give him the same things most parents want to give their children - a safe, predictable world of full of goodness and generosity, and kind acts

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by god. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Yes.

He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

What continually amazed me in this story is that a sense of what the world will be and who the boy could be in it is what motivated the actions of the father. He doesn't just sit down and die, he envisions the future and he walks towards it. This is not merely a book, it's a monument.

Revolutionary Improvisation in the Theatre of East Central Europe and Vaclav Havel Remembered (Books - The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash)

2011-12-20T07:34:00.014-05:00

I was going to write about Cormac McCarthy's The Road but world events will postpone that until tomorrow. Amidst daily skirmishes between 'the people' and the armed forces in Egypt, a stunning year of uprising by the people throughout the Middle East including an overthrowing of Gaddafi regime in Libya, and weeks of somewhat more amorphous protests in cities in the U.S., a beacon of such revolutions has died - Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, one of the leaders of the mostly peaceful revolution of 1989 that broke the hold of the Soviet Union on Central Europe. He was a shy man, and so an unlikely revolutionary hero. But, as Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern, a collection of essays written during the 1989 uprisings in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, makes clear, these were civil uprisings lead by intellectuals and so he became one of the key men of these world changing events.

With the single, signal exception of Romania, these revolutions were also remarkable for the almost complete lack of violence. Like Solidarity in 1980-81 they were that historical contradiction-in-terms, 'peaceful revolution'. No bastilles were stormed, no guillotines erected. Lamp-posts were used only for street-lighting. Romania alone saw tanks and firing squads. Elsewhere the only violence was that used at the outset by police. The young demonstrators in East Berlin and Prague laid candles in front of the police, who responded with truncheons. The Marseillaise of 1989 said not 'aux armes, citoyens' but 'aux bougies [candles], citoyens'. The rationale and tradition of non-violence can be found in the history of all the democratic oppositions of East Central Europe throughout the 1980s. Partly it was pragmatic: the other side had all the weapons. But it was also ethical. It was a statement about how things should be. They wanted to start as they intended to go on. History, said Adam Michnik, had taught them that those who start by storming bastilles will end up building their own.

The ruling elite were brought down by mass demonstrations of workers in the streets but the politics that were born out of them, Garton Ash stresses,

...were made by intellectuals: the playwright Vaclav Havel, the medievalist Bronislaw Geremek, the Catholic editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the painter Barbel Bohley in Berlin, the conductor Kurt Masur in Leipzig, the philosophers Janos Kis and Gaspar Miklos Tamas in Budapest, the engineering professor Petre Roman and the poet Mircea Dinescu in Bucharest...As in 1848 the common denominator was ideological.

This book shares the subject matter of Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, but while her book offers more historical perspective, having just been written, Garton Ash's, written in the heat of the moment offers an eye-witness account.

I do not pretend to offer a full analysis of Soviet policy, of economic factors, of developments inside the communist parties and governments, let alone of the longer-term causes... To write about 1989 at the beginning of 1990 is perhaps slightly less foolhardy than to write about 1789 at the beginning of 1790; but it is foolhardy enough...My account is largely from inside the opposition movements and from among so-called 'ordinary people' on the streets - and mainly, as the sub-title indicates, the streets of the capital cities. .. The witness can only be in one place at one times, and tends to attach an exaggerated importance to what he personally saw or heard... What happened afterwards changes our view of what went before. The historian usually knows more about what happened afterwards, simply because he writes later. Finally, there is partiality in judgement.

'I am a camera,' said Isherwood. I was not a camera. A camera would not give an election speech in a Silesian coal-mine.

Garton Ash was there as it happened. In the mine with Lech Walesa, walking across the no man's land that sat between the East and West sides of the Berlin wall with some of the first East German citizens to cross legally to the West, and in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague with Vaclav Havel (even if they did misspell his name on his Identification badge). As such, this book has the excitement of immediacy, but it is, as Garton Ash writes, not a an account of the consequences but is rather a moment-by-moment evocation of events that, when one looks back, one calls the revolution. The Czechoslovak revolution literally occurred in a theatre and Garton Ash's book makes it clear that these men and women were improvising (this is truly a movement after my own heart) that is they were working through the mess of the moment to reach workable solutions.

Through the heavy metal-and-glass doors, past the second line of volunteer guards, you plunge down a broad flight of stairs into a curving, 1950s style, mirror-lined foyer. People dart around importantly, or sit in little groups on benches, eating improvised canapes and discussing the future of the nation. Down another flight of stairs there is the actual theatre. The set - for Durrenmatt's Minotaurus - is like a funnel, with a hole at the back of the stage just big enough for a small monster to squeeze through. Here, in place of the Magic Lantern's special combination of drama, music and pantomime, they hold the daily press conference: the speakers emerging from the hole deisgned for Durrenmatt's monster. Journalists instead of tourists are let in for the performance.

As one end of the foyer there is a room with a glass wall on which it says, in several languages, 'smoking room'. There is another guard at the door. Some are allowed in. Others not. Flash your magic ticket. In. Familiar bearded faces, old friends from the underground, sit around on rickety chairs, in a crisis meeting. A television mounted high on the wall shows an operetta without the sound. The room smells of cigarette smoke, sweat, damp coats and revolution. I remember the same smell, precisely, from Poland in autumn 1980.

This, you think is the real headquarters. But after a few hours you discover a black door at the other end of the foyer. Through the door you go down a metal stairway into a narrow, desperately overheated corridor, as if into the bowels of an ocean liner. Here, in dressing-rooms ten and eleven, is the very heart of the revolution. For here sits Vaclav Havel, with his 'private secretary' and the few key activists from the Forum who are thrashing out the texts of the latest communique, programmatic statement or negotiating position.

It is in this, the longest chapter in this brief book, that we go into the belly of the beast, and it is here that I thought as I read, that this book could serve as an inspirational manual for the foundering Occupy Wall Street movement. One can see, smell, and taste, how these thinkers became doers. How they kept the ear of both the public and the rulers by working through the mess of their own separate opinions to communicate something coherent and, ultimately, useful. Although, as the concluding chapter smartly posits, living under Soviet rule so long may have given the movement a leg-up in that it created a solidarity of "the people."

Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern is an exciting and topical first-hand account. It led me to add Havel's own Memoir To the Castle and Back and de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America to my reading list and it is a fittingly dramatic way to appreciate the important contribution that Vaclav Havel made to changing the political geography of Europe. If you would like a further detailed appreciation of Havel's role in the Czech revolution, my friend Sheila did an excellent post.

Ugly Betty meets Serpico in a parody of a mockery of justice (Books - From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry)

2011-12-15T10:05:00.006-05:00

On the last day of American military presence in Iraq, it's appropriate that I should have just finished From the Memoirs of a non-Enemy Combatant an incisive satire, part-political part-social, and the first novel of Alex Gilvarry. Viking sent me a copy in advance of its January release, thanks Viking.

The first level of this novel I was struck by was the narrative voice Gilvarry lends his lead character Boy Hernandez - it is queeny, misquoting Dostoyevsky one minute and Coco Chanel the next. One could say it is over dramatic, were it not for the overly dramatic circumstances Boy finds himself in. This is a voice ready-made for a one man show in a downtown club.

I would not, could not, nor did I ever raise a hand in anger against America. I love America, the golden bastard. It's where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post-U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive - these are a few of my favorite things!

My story is one of unrequited love. Love for a country so great that it has me welling up inside knowing it could never love me back. And even after the torment they've put me through - tossing me into this little cell in No Man's Land - would you believe that I still hold American close to my heart? Stupid me, Boy Hernandez. Filipino by birth, fashion designer by trade, and terrorist by association.

I hear an over-earnest Diana Ross sound track playing under that opening voice-over. The other delight of this book is its unlikely hybrid of influences - think Ugly Betty meets...I don't know... Serpico. One the one hand, it is utter camp - it creates a pitch-perfect swish of the superficial, over-the-top fashion world and Boy's desperate ambition to get inside the holy tent in Bryant Park during Fashion Week, leading him to accept the funding of Ahmed Quereshi and the PR support of a man with the unfortunate name of Ben Laden (no really). This eventually links him to a terrorist plot and lands him in Guantanamo Bay prison. On the other hand, From the Memoirs... is an outraged critique of the American government detaining people without charging them or providing them access to legal representation because of fears, legitimate or not, that they are dangerous terrorists. What is clever, as opposed to merely entertaining about Gilvarry's paradoxical cross-breed is the way it skewers the extremity of America's dubious legal practices, sends up the superficiality of the bases of our fears, and points to the absurdity of the way life will go on in any and all circumstances. Though we were supposedly dangerously under siege, this did not curtail lavish spending on runway fashion shows, the publishing of Vogue, or the reopening of Century 21, and don't give me the "that would mean the terrorists were winning" crap, if you want to see countries crippled by terrorism or war there is a long list to choose from.

From the Memoirs of a non-Enemy Combatant has its moments of dumb silliness and the end gets a little long and explanatory, but the prose is swift moving and smart and Gilvarry never breaks character. Its best moments offer some really good laughs and the incongruity of its worlds, the thing that sticks with one after reading it, can produce nuanced political satire. For instance, Boy offers an appreciation of his prison bathing partner, Riad, the man assigned to him as they went in twos for their weekly shower. Here is an educated Islamic man from Birmingham who creates a charity to give away both Islamic and Western literature in poverty stricken Pakistani towns. It is somewhat in question, whether these activities may have crossed over the Afghan border. However, one mullah saw him as a threat to his sovereign rule and so informed on him, eventually landing him in the same prison as Boy. Is Riad virtuous or is Boy gullible? Whether one is a paragon of self-motivated superficiality or intellectuality and self-less philanthropy, says Gilvarry's lampoon, one can be equally suspect in the hunt for enemy combatants and equally unlucky at the hands of America's freely elected and democratic government.

Gilvarry is also an editor at the Tottenville Review a smart on-line book review that I enjoyed checking out.

Seeking freedom on multiple levels (Books - The Free World by David Bezmozgis)

2011-12-12T18:21:00.007-05:00

The Free World, David Bezmozgis's novel about the immigration of a Jewish family from Soviet-governed Latvia to the West in the 1970s, has made a few of this year's top ten lists. Although I found much in it to interest me, it isn't quite making mine. The Krasnansky family consists of Alec, his brother Karl, their parents, wives, and Karl's children. They come to Rome - which serves as the purgatory between their old lives (Soviet, Jewish, a world where they have possessed some power, some property, and some sense of themselves) and their new (Italian, Catholic, a world of poverty and uncertainty). Here they wait to find out which country will grant them a visa - their hope of salvation. This novel is about the aspiration to be free in both a political sense and a personal one. Even as Alec and the other characters aspire to escape Soviet economic oppression and anti Semitism, they find they cannot be free of themselves. The abstract realm of this paradox is created smartly and on multiple levels however the tension that sustains a drama, the kind one can feel, remained a distant idea.

Some of my criticism is of the writing itself, which could be excessive and self-conscious.

Alec Krasnansky stood on the platform of Vienna's Western Terminal while, all around him, the representatives of Soviet Jewry - from Tallinn to Tashkent - roiled, snarled, and elbowed to deposit their belongings onto the waiting train. He own family roiled among them...

I don't need everyone to write like Hemmingway, but the squeezing of three less-than-common verbs into the very first sentence, though this could potentially communicate something of the frantic crowdedness of the station platform if I had more context, seemed only to say something about the writer coming so early in the story. I was wary from the get go.

Alec and Karl's stories alternate with letters between Polina and her sister, still in the USSR, and memories of their father Samuil of his early life with his brother Reuven. Although Alec's human frailty is meant to be the glue that holds these stories together, the tension between the spoiled, aimless womanizer he is and the man one wishes he could be so that the aspirations of his family can be realized, is abstract and lacking in pathos until too late in the novel. Samuil's story provides more of the traditional ingredients of drama - namely conflict and emotion - but as his story is not this novel's center, it doesn't root it firmly enough. His memories are dramatically justified, which satisfyingly integrates character and plot. When the government immigration forms ask for details about one's life that could influence a decision about acceptance into the country, this occasions for Samuil a deep examination of his life's choices.

Once he was in the country Josef doubted the Canadians would notice that they'd gained another elderly invalid.

He recommended that Samuil also prepare a contingency plan.

- Contingency plan, Samuil said. What is my contingency plan?
- America, Josef said.
- America, Samuil snorted.
- Well, where else?
- Where else? The other place.
- What other place? Israel?
- The grave.
- I understand your persepctive, Samuil Leyzerovich, Joseph said. But please remember that I speak to you as a friend. It is not too soon to start making preparations. Half an hour. An hour. You fill out some forms, saying you weren't a member of the Party, and that's it.
- My youngest secured himself a job with HIAS. I'm acquainted with these forms.
- So then.
- My hand would turn to stone before I wrote such a thing.
- Yes, I understand, Josef said, it's a problem. But the Americans regard Communists the way the Canadians regard invalids.
- Stone, Samuil said.
- Samuil Leyzerovich, these are not your memoir. In one's memoirs - which are, so to speak, between one's self and one's soul - one must be truthful, but not, I would suspect, on an immigration form that is only between one's self and the American immigration service.

Luckily for us, Samuil cannot make this distinction, as his life's events prove to be some of the more engaging in The Free World. In fact, I found the older generation in this novel - Samuil, his wife Emma, and his friend Josef Roidman - far more moving than their children, possibly because they had a moral center and their choices seemed to motivated by something other than what they could get for themselves. Consequently, I felt their losses, whereas Alec's just seemed to be what he deserved.

The novel is not short on lovely details that are instructive of the specifics of a life as a citizen or a refugee of 1970s USSR. For instance, Polina must write to her sister using an assumed name for her and Bezmozgis writes of the selection of this pseudonym, which was not only a sweet moment, but also exemplified this novel's theme of escaping oneself.

There are also lots of good one liners. For instance, when one destination is eliminated as a possible destination for the Krasnansky family, the agency that facilitates their immigration suggests Canada as another option.

- Now is a good time for Canada. I'd consider it myself but I've been waiting on Australia for so long I already feel Australian, Syomka said.
- Do we have to decide this second? Karl asked.
- No, you can think about it, Syomka said.
- We'll think about it, Karl said.
- You can use the stairwell. It's quiet. I'll come and fetch you in ten minutes, Syomka said, and opened the door that led to the stairwell.

In the stairwell, Karl's sons, sensing the gravity of the situation, hooted once to hear the echo, and then were silenced. Karl remained standing and leaned his back against the door.

- This is how you decide your family's future, ten minutes in a stairwell? Samuil asked.

- Wonderful man, Tal. A true genius. Although he is in Karpov's entourage in the Philippines. What can I say, it's hard to be consistent with one's allegiances.
- For some, yes.
- It's certainly been true of me. If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he's a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we'd all end up in the dark.

Or, when Alex discusses immigration with his roommate, another Soviet in limbo who has already spent some time in Israel:

What you are looking for doesn't exist, and you're not going to find it.

Taking no offense, Lyova said, That may be so. Then again, I'm not looking for perfection. So far I've been a citizen of two utopias. Now I have modest expectations. Basically, I want the country with the fewest parades.

In The Free World, the supporting cast ends up being more compelling than the lead character and individual episodes more engaging than the narrative arc, which left this reader interested at some times, entertained at others, but only sporadically passionately involved.

See what other blogging readers thought: Reading Matters, Kevin from Canada, The Mookse and Gripes.

A history of volatile Central Europe where the political is the personal (Books - The Ghosts of Europe by Anna Porter)

2011-12-08T09:45:00.008-05:00

Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe relates the history of a rapidly changing region - Central Europe - that is Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. She focuses on the twenty years since the 1989 revolution which concluded in the fall of the Soviet empire, but necessarily informs this discussion with a good deal of context, including how these countries and their people were impacted by World War II, as this was so much the making of the region, and sometimes reaching back further to include the influences of the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Though informative, her approach makes no pretense at a broad or objective text bookish approach. Her question is focused and it motivation is personal.

In 2006, I set out to discover whether democracy had taken root behind the Iron Curtain. I chose Central Europe because this part of the world had been the dividing space between East and West, or, as Stalin and Churchill deemed, between spheres of conflicting influence. My second reason is that I am a Central European.

Porter suitably fashions her story out of a series of portraits, telling it through individual lives - apropos for cultures where the political is the personal. They range from an expat Polish cafe owner to the last Communist leader of Poland.

In Stas Pruszynski's smoke-filled Radio Cafe, everyone wants to discuss history. Perhaps they are encouraged by the framed, faded photographs of former Radio Free Europe celebrities that decorate the walls; perhaps it's the Old World atmosphere of the resaurant-bar, the bare wooden tables. Or maybe it's Stas himself (who used to be "Stash" when he lived in Montreal), drawing them deep into his own tales of a childhood irreparably damaged by war... As he talks, Stas leans across the polished mahogany table, his arms folded, his broad shoulders hunched, wishing to share confidences, but his voice carries over the others in the room.
[...]
I visited General Jaruzelski in September 2009. Once he had been among the most feared men in Europe; a general in the second-largest Communist army - second only to the Soviet Union's Red Army; a leader in the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovaki ending in Dubcek's experiment of "socialism with a human face." He was Poland's defense minister during the 1967-68 Jewish purges...Once he would have been closely guarded. Now there is one desultory guard and a single blond secretary who confesses that her schedule is not overly busy.

He is tall, spare, erect in his immaculate grey suit. His hair is thinning, his face impassive, and he still wears his trademark dark glasses. They have lost some of their menace since I read that they hid a weakness caused by the intense Siberian light. His hand is outstretched when we meet. There is an Old World formality of an almost hand-kiss, his thin lips brushing my fingers for a fraction of an uncomfortable second...

These excerpts convey not only Porter's skill at creating atmosphere and character, the starting point of her stories, the first one is a particularly apt metaphor for what Porter does so successfully - playing the host amidst images of history and drawing the reader in to share confidences.

That is not to say that Porter's treatment amounts to history-lite. Not at all. She is a keen observer of shifts of power and their political and economic consequences and how they impact the quality of people's lives - particularly those of minority members of these cultures like the Roma and Jewish people. Porter's analysis suggests that the changes are in-progress and their final outcomes far from sealed and delivered.

The sense of unfairness and failed expectations has led to a toxic atmosphere in Central Europe at the end of the first decade of the new century. The 2009 Slovak presidential elections resounded with nationalist, anti-minority voices. In Hungary, anti- government, anti-minorities, anti-Semitic demonstrations grew in number and ferocity. Those who are disappointed with the results of cozying up to the West, of adopting its capitalist credo, are beginning to yearn for the security of the old order. As philosopher-politician Ralf Dahrendorf predicted, when economic conditions deteriorate, "The ancien regime begins to look to many like the good old days."
[...]
Czechoslovakia's interwar president, Tomas Masaryk, famously remarked, "We now have democracy. All we need are some democrats." When asked how long he thought it would take for his country to become a democratic state, he answered, fifty years. That was in 1918. It is now just twenty years since the advent of democracy in Central Europe.

This may seem to be a book on European history and the consequences of Communism, and of course it is. The discussion of the role intellectuals and dissidents play in society, whether the opening of the sealed files of the Secret Police is the ultimate truth-telling it is meant to be - its advantages as well as its costs, and the legacy of anti-Semitism in the countries of Central Europe, were captivatingly told and instructive. However, I also found Porter's book usefully provocative in considering the influences, positive and perilous, of American style consumer-driven Democracy. The Ghosts of Europe is fluidly written, opinionated, and very engaging - an informative read on an influential and still volatile region whose changes have not fully come home to roost.

Finding the power underneath (Books - The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje)

2011-11-29T07:59:00.002-05:00

Two qualities are evident in Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table right at the outset. The book involves the memory of a writer named Michael, originally from Sri Lanka, who at age 11 travels without a guardian on a ship across the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean to reach his mother in England, where he will start a new life. On that ship he spends his time with two other boys - Ramadhin and Cassius. The first quality of the story is an instantly elegiac nostalgia, a wistful tone that says - I was never as innocent and happy as I was then.

The second quality is an isolation, the sense that this world exists unto itself. The twenty-one day journey is nearly free of adult supervision for the boys. It seems the ship has its own rules of relating to others and it stirs the emotions of all the passengers, bringing them cauldron-like to a boil. Although a ship is a real place, it seems a fantasy world in this novel. There is a prisoner with two keepers who walks the deck in chains late a night, a millionaire dying of rabies who is attended by an ayurvedic doctor, a botanist who keeps a garden of rare and poisonous plants, a kennel, a jazz pianist with two names.

It felt as if a city had been added to the coast, better lit than any town or village. He went up the gangplank, watching only the path of his feet - nothing ahead of him existed - and continued till he faced the dark harbour and sea. There were outlines of other ships farther out, beginning to turn on lights. He stood alone, smelling everything, then came back through the noise and the crowd to the side that faced land. A yellow glow over the city. Already it felt there was a wall between him and what took place there. Stewards began handing out food and cordials. He ate several sandwiches, and after that he made his way down to his cabin, undressed, and slipped into the narrow bunk...

I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper of little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.

This is The Magic Mountain on water, but instead of dying in this rare place. Michael grows up. He learns of love for others, of secrets, of responsibility. The experience gives birth to a certain vision of the world, driven by unanswered questions of events he witnesses on that ship that go underground but that fuel the voice that he develops to record the mysteries of the world around him. It is on that journey that Michael is formed as a writer.

Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname has "Mynah." Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.

The pleasures of The Cats Table are soft and tinged with reminiscence. They are found not so much in the action of specific adventures the boys have - although these can be funny, and a few of them quite intense, as when Ramadhin ties Cassius and Michael to the deck during a storm. The novel has the rhythm of the 21-day sea voyage it recounts. The greatest pleasure I experienced in reading The Cat's Table was the way Ondaatje found to be simultaneously the boy on the ship and the adult writer long after the events, but permanently marked by them. This book is built on layers of memory and even though Michael the character doesn't perfectly understand them, Michael the writer has learned to navigate the world by painstakingly observing the details and recording them, and that in doing so he can make art that reveals even more than he knows.

"But art is never safe. All of this is only one small room in a life." For a man who supposedly loved art, I felt he was scorning it.

"Come with me." And he took my elbow carefully, precisely, as if this was on place on the anatomy which was socially acceptable to touch and therefore take part ownership of. He walked me down the hall until we were in the Grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colours were suddenly brilliant and forceful.

"This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath."

He walked away from the tapestry to the centre of the circular hall, knowing his voice would carry to the perimeter as well as up towards the distant ceiling.

"Probably more than a hundred women worked on this for a year. They fought for the chance to work on it. This thing fed them. This kept them alive in the year 1530, during a Flanders winter. That is what gives truth, depth, to this sentimental tableau."

Georg Grosz meets Bridget Jones's Diary starring Madonna... no really (Books - The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun)

2011-11-20T09:44:00.008-05:00

I learned of German, Weimar-era novelist Irmgard Keun from a post by Bookslut about a New York literary event on the subject of her life and work, as I mentioned here. My friend and I each bought a book and I got The Artificial Silk Girl which, we learned, is a staple of a contemporary German High School education. Thanks to Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month, I actually read it in a timely fashion and in the context of lots of other discerning readers tackling German authors. Check out GLM's pages, they're chock full of links.

One might think The Artificial Silk Girl a serious, historical artifact, written as it was in 1932, depression-ridden German against the background of the rise of the Nazis. Indeed, it is revelatory about what it was like for a poor but beautiful girl with stars in her eyes to grow up in this period and try to make something of herself, careering from actress to prostitute. But really, thanks to the approach of translator Kathie von Ankum, it feels like a contemporary confessional novel or even more, a film. Indeed, Ankum sees this novel as the German answer to Anita Loo's 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a runaway bestseller in the America of its time, and would like the reader not so much to think of Christopher Isherwood or Lotte Lenya as to think of Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw.

It must have been around twelve midnight last night that I felt something wonderful happening inside of me. I was in bed - I had meant to wash my feet, but I was too tired after that hectic night the day before, and hadn't I told Therese: "You don't get anything out of letting yourself be talked to on the street. You owe yourself some self-respect, after all...."

After then I felt so sick at the office, and the old man isn't rolling in dough anymore either, and could fire me any day. So tonight I went straight home and to bed, without washing my feet. Didn't wash my neck either. And as I was lying there and my whole body was asleep already, only my eyes were still open - and the white moonlight was shining on my head, and I was thinking how nice that goes with my black hair and what a shame Hubert can't see me like that, when he's the only one, after all, whom I've ever loved. And then I felt the aura of Hubert surrounding me, and the moon was shining and I could hear a gramophone playing next door, and then something wonderful happened inside of me - as had happened before, but never anything like this. I felt like writing a poem, but that might have to rhyme and I was too tired for that. But I realized that there is something unusual about me. Hubert had felt it too, and Fraulein Vogelsang from my school as well, after I presented them with a rendition of Erlkonig that knocked their socks off. And I'm quite different from Therese and all those other girls at the office and the rest of them, who never have anything wonderful going on inside them. Plus I speak almost without dialect, which makes a difference, and gives me a special touch, particularly since my father and mother speak with a dialect that I find nothing short of embarrassing.

And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I'm an unusual person. I don't mean a diary - that's ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it's going to become even more so.

Initially, the 21st century diction disoriented me. But as I spent time with it, von Ankum's approach wooed me. I realized that if I were to experience Doris's story as having any immediacy and if I were to understand who this young woman was in our own society's terms, that this language was the perfect vehicle for her innocent star gazing and tremendous ambition. She talks of "Women's Lib" and "beer bellies," and uses words like "gross me out" or "yuk," and describes one character late in the novel as "looking like a piece of pukey shit." Her breathless narrative voice reads, but exactly, like a contemporary film voice over, which combines the pleasure of light, no-thought, entertainment with the creeping realization that the sleazy Berlin of 1932, the one of Georg Grosz paintings, is about to implode around her. But coming of age doesn't wait and the world doesn't know it is about to experience an important period of history, and neither does Doris who, despite the Nazis, wants to learn how to come in to her own sexuality and find a way to live independently in her world. Keun's writing, however, is not merely a showcase for von Ankum's thesis about literary parallels, it is vivid in its own right.

If the doorbell rings, I'll go crazy. Dear God, please help me. This is the end of my stardom. It's all over - but for me that means it's just beginning. My heart is a gramophone playing inside of me, scratching my bosom with a sharp needle. Of course I don't have a bosom because it smack of the ordinary, like breastfeeding or an old opera diva where you can't tell what's bigger, her breasts of her voice...

The sense of what Germany of that time was like, the economic depression, and the brewing political unrest reveal themselves as just one more part of this girl's landscape.

So Therese helped me skip town that night. I was trembling all over and full of fear and expectation and joy, because everything would be new now and full of excitement and adventure. And she also went to my mother to fill her in and told her that I would pay back both her and Therese handsomely, if it all worked out. And I know that my mother can keep a secret, which is amazing because she's over 50, but hasn't forgotten what it used to be like for her. But they can't send me any clothes. That would be too dangerous - and so I've got nothing except for one shirt which I wash in the morning and then I stay in bed until it's dry. And I need shoes and many many other things. But it'll come. I also can't write to Therese because of the police who are undoubtedly looking for me - because I know the Ellmanns, how tenacious she is and how she enjoys making criminals out of people.

I don't care if she's in trouble because of me, because she was the one who cooked and ate Rosalie, which was our cat - a sweet creature with a silky purr and fur like white velvet clouds with ink spots. She used to lie on my feet at night and keep them warm - now I have to cry - I ordered a piece of cake for myself, Dutch kirsch, and now I can't eat it because I'm full of grief at the thought of Rosalie. But I took a doggy bag.

I found particularly striking, the stark contrasts which Keun suddenly springs upon the reader to remind one that this was indeed no ordinary time. In one, Doris describes her body to a blind man whom she befriends, seducing him, but as she does she notices a cockroach in a corner. In another, a girlfriend (Hulla) has suffered a beating from her husband (Rannowsky), who spends time in jail. They kill the husband's goldfish and...

And the fish continued to swim belly up. Three others hit him with their snouts. The dead fish's tummy was pale. And that overweight Hulla was kneeling on the floor praying. And she's terrified - "take care of my beloved fish, woman..." He's so brutal. And I say to her: "Hulla, I'll get us some cognac!" - after all, she was completely shaken up.

And Tilli wasn't there. So I say: "Albert, give me the bottle please!" He's drunk and he grabs me. I say: "No - Albert, please, the goldfish!"

Why is it that God gave him this aura that I like - and I was so excited anyway. His eyes. Only for a moment. All that running on the staircase. Tilli - Hulla! And as I come upstairs, there's lots of people there. And Rannowsky. And Hulla jumps out of the window, the moment he enters the room.

Sometimes there are mirrors that make me look like an old woman. That's the way it's going to be thirty years from now.

What a magnificently written moment. The drama and surprise of the chaotic atmosphere, the image of the fish floating belly up, the ridiculousness of it being more dear to Rannowsky than his wife is, and then the woman simply slipping out of the window - one barely notices it - this followed by Doris's reflection on (what else) how she looks! A selfish moment but one that conveys real despair that is somehow the world's despair, not just her's. That's what I found the experience of reading The Artifical Silk Girl to be. On its surface, the light, amusing text about a naive teenage girl swept by like the flow of a quick river, yet at any moment its tide might reach up and threaten to pull you under.

If you find yourself curious about Irmgard Keun, you might also be interested to read to what Isabella has to say about her After Midnight, which I understand Caroline is giving away at her site, which I link above.

Occupying Wall Street and what the Left has done for the American dream, (Books - American Dreamers by Michael Kazin)

2011-11-17T10:06:00.011-05:00

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. - Oscar Wilde, 1891

Given the recent developments in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Michael Kazin's book American Dreamers is a timely one. It recounts the history of the influence that radical, leftist movements have had upon United States history. He allows that the very definition of the left has been historically muddied, as both Barack Obama and Noam Chomsky, who hold polarized views on many aspects of U.S. policy, would be said to be on it. Kazin's definition:

The left is that social movement, or congeries of mutually sympathetic movements, that are dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of ways to attempt such a transformation - from quietly distributing anti-capitalist leaflets on street corners to organizing a revolutionary army to smash the state...but the egalitarian dreamers who form an unbroken chain from the 1820s to the present need a common name, "Left" is what their counterparts in other nations would call themselves, and there is something to be said for adhering to international custom.

These radicals have been abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers, socialists, communists, and anarchists, they have been evangelical christians, jews, and atheists, they have been black, white, and hispanic. As a political movement they have been plagued by

internal conflicts, a penchant for dogmatism, and hostility toward both nationalism and organized religion

and for this reason, Kazin writes, they have rarely posed a serious challenge to the ruling elite in either a government or economic sphere. However, what Kazin claims the left has been able to do is "articulate big dreams." They have given voice to those who felt alienated from authority and have given voice to their outrage, helping to accomplish (though usually as a catalyst or a "junior partner in a coalition driven by the establishment") the end of slavery, the passage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, eight-hour work days and the minimum wage, and a gradual expansion of our culture's acceptance of equal opportunity and equal treatment for women, people of color, and gay and lesbian people, even if these are practiced irregularly, opposed by some, and still have a way to go.

It is interesting, in light of recent politics, to watch the patterns in history repeat themselves in Kazin's book, since most of the news media reports on the obstinance of our ruling parties, behind doors dealing, the establishment of third parties, and the involvement of race and religion in politics as if they had never happened before. For instance, I learned in American Dreamers that in 1840, leftist activists founded the Liberty Party as a mean of opposing the agreement Whigs and Democrats fashioned to keep abolition from interfering with their competition for white voters. The party's slogan was "Vote as you pray and pray as you vote." In other words, they used evangelism to support a liberal position - quite a switch from its current use. But the new party would not stand outright for the federal abolition of slavery, eventually causing a splitting of the movement. Kazin observes:

...the schism of 1840 did reveal an inescapable aspect of left tradition, and that of any other ideological movement: the ongoing clash between self-righteous purists and anxious opportunists.

Indeed, the clash of idealists and pragmatists is replayed again and again in his book, as a seemingly natural outgrowth of the personalities of the players. Kazin's chronicles those activists in the latter half of the 19th century, for example, whose brand of religious idealism led them to preach against the exploitation of the poor by supporting the labor movement, a very different manifestation of the non-sectarian socialist movement that swept through Europe around the same time. The preachers of this "social gospel" included Edward Bellamy, whose novel Looking Backward might be considered early science fiction or future fantasy, as his wealthy protagonist falls asleep during his own age of class warfare to awaken in the year 2000

to a marvelous new America whose inhabitants live an idyll both efficient and harmonious. Every man and woman between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five is a member of an industrial army. As in any well-run military force, they receive instruction in "habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty [I wonder where Stalin got it?]. Whether retired or active, all Americans now live in blissful dependence on one another. They do their wash in communal laundries, eat in communal restaurants, and shop with debit cards at vast communal stores. When it rains, they stroll along sidewalks sheltered by an unbroken covering that replaces the ridiculous single-person umbrellas of old.

Bellamy understood that most Americans mistrusted the very idea of socialism and sought to persuade them of its merits in other ingenious ways. He called his good society nationlist...Edward knew he had to rebut those who worried that incentive would wither in a society where everyone earned the same income. So the new America depicted in Looking Backward features abundant opportunities for workers to rise to higher ranks, where they practice advanced skills and compete for medals and other types of (non-pecuniary) prizes. Talented writers and artists in this imagined future easily find readers and audiences, free of censorship. And all citizens have a standard of living that, during the Gilded Age, was enjoyed only by the comfortable and well-educated. In Looking Backward, everyone dresses for dinner.

Kazin's look at a 200-years swathe of a variety of related political movements makes the choice to be broad. I think his best chapters the ones on labor and socialism. It is not included in typical looks at American history, for example, that when granted statehood, Oklahomans elected to their legislature six Socialists. Between 1908 and 1916 the party won an average of 12% of the vote. Certainly not the picture of the American West 100 years later. Kazin is good at explaining the appeal of socialism in various manifestations in the U.S., how it arose from its historical and economic context, and how the movement differed from its European counterparts. I find Kazin less clear-headed in the chapter on communism. True, communists were virulent foes of fascism early on, except for that little slip-up when they signed a pact with the Nazis.

Knowing that the tyrants in the Kremlin approved all these activities does not diminish their positive impact on American society. Rank-and-file Communists helped make the U.S. a more tolerant, more democratic society - and put pressure on Franklin D. Roosevelt and other New Deal liberals to dismantle barriers between people who were deemed worthy of government help and those who were not.

Kazin makes a structural writing choice in this book that does him no favors. The first five to ten pages of every chapters devotes itself to a broad overview of what the chapter will then get into in detail. The above excerpt is from one of those introductory paragraphs. However, he ends up making poorly supported blanket statements and covering huge tracts of time for which his reader may have little or not context. Although the chapter on communism covers the 1920s to the 1950s, he begins in 1939, skipping the period between the first and second world which includes the Great Depression, major motivator for those motivated to make choices on the right or the left. The above sentence struck me because, although Roosevelt is distinguished from the Socialists as an establishment Liberal (which he was), today there are probably many who would spin him and his heir Lyndon Johnson as practically socialists because they believed in using government to help the poor by employing them. Two pages later, still in his introduction, Kazin's best case for the Communist influence on American culture is listing writers, filmmakers and other artists who were in (or near) the party, who created in such works as The Little Foxes, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Citizen Kane.

...certain leftists who understood what the market would welcome attained an audience larger than any previous Marxist had found. The fact that Stalin was, at the same time, sending freethinking artists in his country to the Gulag or to death added a harsh irony to this episode in the history of the American left.

Now hang on a minute there, buddy. I can see referring to O'Henry's famous story about the woman cutting off all of her hair to buy her husband a watch fob which he sells his watch to get her combs as irony, this qualifies as something closer to tragic self-delusion. Once Kazin gets into the meat of his chapter, he offers a more nuanced understanding. The American CP made serious contributions to advancing democracy in the workplace, they were better at putting their money where their mouths were when it concerns the involvement of black Americans in politics than either of the ruling parties (this included putting a black man up for office in the 1936 federal election), and there is a legacy of valuable literature from people like John dos Passos, Richard Wright, and John Reed, and critical scholarship from writers like Irving Howe, Edmund Wilson that adds much to the body of work that helps us understand our recent past.

Kazin's covers 1950s - 2010 in his last two chapters, both periods of decreased structure for leftist movements in America, or at least, that is his analysis given the lack of perspective afforded by our proximity to these events. Kazin characterizes this period as one during which our culture's idea of whose voice counts broadened. He sees both strengths and weaknesses to the resulting identity politics that emerged in this time. The book makes a good attempt to cover recent events, such as the protests against the International Monetary Fund, but I feel its energy petered out at the end. Kazin's final two chapters had a wandering feel to them, but I found myself supplying my own coda. I was reading them amidst the ever-growing Occupy Wall Street movement which, although some criticize it for taking no positions, is doing exactly what Kazin said the left is best at - being a voice for the outrage of the disenfranchised - which has historically led to some of the most influential social-political shifts this country has undergone.

The book makes a strong case for American as a project of utopianists. This has had its costs but explains, for example, why our democratic system is forever pitting two extremes against each other instead of negotiating coalitions with influential minorities as European parliamentary systems do. On trips through the U.S. over the years, I've made a few stops at communities founded by idealists, like the Amana Colony in Iowa. It's an influential legacy for us and they are not all religious. I think I'd like to do some more reading about other utopian movements in the U.S. to understand this influence better. Do you know of any good ones to visit?

Bookish things...

2011-11-12T08:26:00.004-05:00

As avid bookish folk, I thought you would like to know about the following:

Writer Sarah Salway author of the novel Tell Me Everything, a favorite of mine, will have a new book of poems published by Pindrop Press in March 2012. I don't know what it's called, but it is bound to be juicy. Check out her happily sensual Love and Stationary here.

Lucy Caldwell is an Irish novelist (Where They Were Missed, The Meeting Point) and playwright (Carnival, The Luthier, Guardians, Leaves, Notes to Future Self) whose work has been roundly praised in the English press but, I must admit, was unknown to me. Her The Meeting Point has won the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, a prestigious and generous award for young writers given out annually on the poet's birthday. Now how did she write all of that before age thirty? This, her second novel, concerns a minister and his family, who move to Bahrain and have the certainties that have formed the basis of their lives shaken. I think I will have to become acquainted with her work.

The Bookslut informed me of an event in October about the author Irmgard Keun at Deutsches Haus, which does programming about German language and culture. The panel discussion and short film concerned the life and work of author Irmgard Keun. Who was she, you ask? Keun was German, born at the turn of the last century, and wrote fiction about her society and women coming of age through the Weimar years (between the wars), continuing as the Nazis rose to power. Keun's books, e.g. - The Artificial Silk Girl, After Midnight, Child of all Nations - both gave a less wholesome picture of women than the Nazi's desired and was highly critical of their regime. Consequently, her books were burned and Keun escaped to Holland. However, she missed her home and eventually snuck back in with a fake passport during the war. She survived and eventually wrote again under the name Charlotte Tralow, but without her initial success. The speakers: critic Ruth Franklin, literature professor Maria Tartar, and translator Michael Hoffmann, each read from her novels, and discussed their views on her writing and why it may have fallen from favor. It won't come as a great surprise that the event ended with my buying The Artificial Silk Girl and my friend Radio Woman buying another of her books. We'll trade when we're done. Thanks Bookslut, for the great recommendation! Anything else I should know about coming up?

James Wood had a wonderful essay in the November 7th issue of The New Yorker entitled "Shelf Life." It was an appreciation of his late father-in-law, written after emptying his large library. If you enjoy, as I do, features like Thomas's Shelf Esteem, through which we can imagine the lives of others through their bookshelves, this might be considered a more sober treatment of the same theme.

And finally, Chamber Four would like us all to know that they have just released the second issue of their very cool literary magazine, with lots of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. It can be downloaded in e-book format, if that's the way you do things.

It may be fantasy but it's not for sissies (Books - Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan)

2011-11-10T12:25:00.004-05:00

At a recent party of a friend I will call Radio Woman, the Ragazzo and I met two wonderful writers - Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Delia and I got talking about fantasy fiction, her genre, and whose books we like and I found myself less than enthusiastic about a certain author she admired. What do you like, she asked me? I like dark works with language that can be either inventive or very straightforward but has a sophistication, and, especially if they're written for younger readers, I like writing that assumes those readers to be smart and resilient. I also generally like, if magic is a part of the story, that its use be integral and expressive about something in the world that we come from, not just a fantasy literary device used out of habit because other successful writers in the genre use it. Well then, she said, I think you will love Margo Lanagan. She was right.

Lanagan's Tender Morsels has strong doses of dark. The story begins with, if I am to be plain, a girl's physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father and a gang rape. The book is graphic about the violence committed by its characters, whether it is intended to secure goods, make mischief, or have unconsenting sex, but this is not for gratuitous sales appeal, as on television and in film, without experiencing the true horror of Liga's circumstances, the reader would not understand why she goes to such lengths to escape. In addition, Lanagan creates a rustic, fantastical prose that both creates the feel of a specific time and place that is similar to this world and yet not of it, and also cradles the reader with its poetry, saying - you will be safe if you read these horrible things because they are part of a story told with intelligence and care, a story in which I am showing you that beauty is important.

"I'm reckoning I could have you here in the street and no one wuld stop me. Am I right?" And I grasped her bum-cheek again.

She turned on me such a face! If I had managed up a fist, it would have withered on me right then and there. It was not that she were cold, or angry, or scornful; it was that she were not a woman. She were not even a person. Her eyes were white as skylit windows; the wind whistled through her earhole, through her hollow head. I let her go. To be sure, where is the fun of outraging someone if they are not a someone, if they do not feel the outrage; if there is no rule to break, no punishment to risk? You might as well fondle a tree, or poke yourself into a hole in the wall.

A despicable character, but not everything in life is appealing,the very richest experiences in life have their dark side. There cannot be strong love without loss, nor growth without risk and that polarity of wild animal and intellect, safety and challenge is the point of Lanagan's unsettling fairy tale. Liga, having been battered by life before she even reaches 16 years old, creates through some combination of nature and magic an alternative world built only of her dreams. She goes there to live and to raise her daughters without the threat of violence toward them. In fact, she creates a world with no ugliness, no friction whatever.

Everything was reassuringly the same as usual - goodwives going about their business, greeting her here and there - and around and among them the mysterious affairs of men went on, which seemed to involve standing in confident attitudes together and talking earnestly when they were not driving cars or toiling in smithies and workshops. If she drew near any talkers, she knew, they would gently recoil, and glance at her and nod without greeting her, not interrupting their talk.

At one point in the story, Liga approaches a young man in her village to offer herself. He can do nothing but passively lay his hand in hers.

"What was that?" She was hot with fear. "What happened to you just now? To your eyes?"

"You asked too much of me, Liga." He lowered his eyes, but she had seen the sky rushing in them again. "I was not made for it."

"For what?" She hardly wanted to ask.

"To...to feel anything for myself. Lonely or no."

Liga was still with terror. The wind, the frost, and worst of all, the bast emptiness she had seen behind his eyes translated itself into his voice. If she could see them now, they would be blank as the moon.

The trouble is, that we all have some wild animal in us, despite our well developed frontal lobes. Lanagan makes this idea live in her story with her version of a bacchanal - she creates a festival in which the strongest men of the village in the "real world," upon coming of age, dress as bears and for a night the entire village runs amok. However, strong desires cannot be kept endlessly at bay in any world, and Liga's younger daughter, being a willful and impulsive 15-year-old, finally brings this conflict to the fore.

Lanagan's tale is one of healing, and I don't always cotton to that genre. Her tale can even be a little didactic, but the story is truthful, and the imagined worlds have great integrity. The circumstances she creates earn the flights of fancy she takes on and I was rapt with attention to this vivid and sensitive tale.

How a two-paragraph document written in 1917 shaped the modern world (Books - The Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer)

2011-11-03T12:04:00.006-04:00

The Middle East may at times seem a small and distant part of the world, but with a land area only slightly smaller than the U.S., a population of more than 200 million people, possessing 40% of the world's oil, and the birthplace of three of the world's major religions, its influence upon world politics is not to be underestimated. Yet, today's map of the Middle East did not come into being until recently. The contemporary borders and the names of the countries Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, and Israel were all created in the 20th Century. Imperialist England and France, as well as Russia were highly influential in drawing this map to suit their strategic needs. Jonathan Schneer's 2010 book The Balfour Declaration contends that this 1917 document, a promise to by the British Cabinet to establish a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, was really a means of manipulating Arab nationalists, the Ottoman Empire (which was allied to Germany), and the world's Jewish population (which because of anti-Semetic stereotypes was seen as much more unified and powerful than it actual was) in order to maintain imperialist domination in the aftermath of World War I. As such, Schneer sees it as the origin of the contemporary Arab-Israeli dispute, and his detailed account provides a strong case for this argument.

The strength of The Balfour Declaration is the sheer volume as well as the richness of historical context that Schneer provides the reader. It begins with a brief history of the region pre-1900 and of the nineteenth century persecutions experienced by the Jewish people. The next 100 pages provides background on the key players in the Arab political scene of the early 1900s, whose territories were often a collection of individual types of rule that served local tribes. The Arabs negotiated with the English because they wanted help defeating the Ottoman Empire. In turn, they accepted a vague combination of self-rule and European oversight via the Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916. This document written by Mark Sykes, a Conservative MP of Britain, Francois Georges-Picot, a French ambassador, and agreed to by Hussein, the grand Sharif of Mecca chopped up the Middle East in 1916 into regions controlled by France and England exclusively, those controlled by the Arabs but under British of French rule, and a territory approximating "Palestine," which they agreed would be under the charge of some sort of international condominium. The agreement is extraordinary considering the hubris of its power structure, a given in that most British imperialists' fantasies included the notion that people with dark skin were incapable of governing themselves, and how few specifics were worked out, particularly around the hotly desired territory that was Palestine.

The next 150 pages Schneer devotes to the story of British Jewry, who were (and in some ways ever are) divided between Zionists (seeing Judaism as a nationality and therefore a homeland as a sort of birthright, though not every Zionist of the time or this one requires that that homeland be in Palestine) and assimilationists (those who saw their Judaism as their religious or cultural identity but saw themselves as integrated and loyal citizens of their country of residence - England, France, Germany - and therefore as deserving of the protections of the laws of that land as any other group). Their primary representatives were, respectively, Chaim Weizmann and Lucien Wolf. Their advocacy on behalf of their positions, first to Prime Minister Asquith and then to his successor Lloyd George, and how they wished to ensure the protection of the law for their people results in rancorous debates within the Jewish community in the period of 1915-1917 on which this books focuses, but the story of the eventual outcome of The Balfour Declaration is an extraordinary lesson in diplomacy.

The Middle East in 1914, click on map for a larger format.

The remaining 200 pages reaps the reward of Schneer's careful sowing in that the fifty plus characters he introduced, their allegiances and enmities, the assurances they have given, and the secrets they have told come together in the creation of The Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy.

That being said, one must invest a good deal of careful attention and either have a good memory or frequently consult the ten-page glossary of names to keep track of the leading players and to penetrate the web of their relationships and promises kept or broken. Reading Schneer's book is much like reading a Russian novel. I also found it much easier to remember European names which were familiar to me, than Arabic ones, which were not. After a while, I stopped trying to rush my reading and recognized this cultural blind spot as a playing-out of one of the racial relationships that contributed to this very history. Having done so, I absorbed a lot more of the context which allowed me to experience the tension inherent to the dealings in the swifter moving final chapters. I have to say, this is a dense book but I appreciate how well organized Schneer was in conveying his rich understanding of this critical two-year period of history, and I feel much better informed about how Middle Eastern and European opinions and actions laid the groundwork for today's embittered conflict.

The relentless writer under the tyranny of physical paralysis (Books - The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt)

2011-10-30T11:21:00.005-04:00

This is the second book I have read in as many weeks in which the writing was a sheer act of will, the other being Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. The esteemed historian Tony Judt wrote the essays that became The Memory Chateau by dictating them, having become quadrapeligic due to ALS, a degenerative disease of the motor neurons that eventually killed him in 2010. What impressed me nearly as much as his perseverance while looking death squarely in the face was the fact that the form he chose was a new kind of writing for him - memoir. Given that the form of one's writing becomes a signature of our work and could be said to be integrated with our very sense of self, I thought a change in form a courageous leap so late in the game. Although one could say, that the starkly new circumstances of his disease and the mental state accompanying it necessitated such a shift. In any event, it was a highly successful one.

The book is at once warmly personal and learned. Judt lay imprisoned with the indignities of his medical diagnosis for two years. A state that could leave one obsessed with one's limits. Yet he used his memories of childhood, adolescence, and professional life to naturally integrate reflections on such broader subjects as train travel, French intellectuals, and class. This did not produce an experience of desultory musing in the reading, far from it. Rather, I felt as though a quality of mind was being revealed to me. For Judt thinking of personal history meant considering the movements of cultures - their rulers, thinkers, the quality of life they produced for their people materially and in their freedom of thought, and the value of that legacy. As he says:

In earlier days I might have envisaged myself a literary Gepetto, building little Pinocchios of assertion and evidence, given life by the plausibility of their logical construction and telling the truth by virtue of the necessary honesty of their separate parts. But my latest writings have a far more inductive quality to them. Their value rests on an essentially impressionistic effect: the success with which I have related and interwoven the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt...

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head: full of recyclable and multipurpose pieces of serviceable recollection, readily available to an analytically disposed mind. All that was missing was a storage cupboard. That I should have been fortunate enough to find this too among the trawlings of a lifetime seems to me close to good fortune...

Open this cupboard and diverse, multi-layered riches come tumbling out. I loved, for example, that in the midst of personal memories of Britain's post-war austerity we have access to Judt's historical analysis on the relationship of class and rulers as it changes in war and peacetime.

Austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, had emerged - like Harry Truman - from the shadow of a charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.

Churchill mockingly described him as a modest man "who had much to be modest about." But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history - comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances.

And, one paragraph later, this is followed by this series of wonderful metaphors, as imaginative as they are instructive.

All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained - and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing - and cupidity - of Damien Hirst.

Isn't that fabulous? Learned, and apt, if slightly naughty.

With Judt's memory of London's Green Line buses of his youth we receive his clear-minded analysis of the relationship between city geography, class relations between drivers and riders, and how these produced a ride of different qualities from one on London's double-decker red buses. Judt writes lovingly of his life-long passion for train travel.

Thus to travel in Switzerland is to understand the ways in which efficiency and tradition can seamlessly blend to social advantage. Paris's Gare de l'Est or Milano Centrale, no less than Zurich's Hauptbahnhof and Budapest's Deleti Palyaudvar, stand as monuments to nineteenth-century town planning and functional architecture: compare the long-term prospects of New York's inglorious Pennsylvania Station - or virtually any modern airport. At their best - from St. Pancras to Berlin's remarkable new central station - railway stations are the very incarnation of modern life, which is why they last so long and still perform so very well the tasks for which they were first designed. As I think back on it - toutes proportions gardees - Waterloo did for me what country churches and Baroque cathedrals did for so many poets and artists: it inspired me. And why not? Were not the great glass-and-metal Victorian stations the cathedrals of the age?

...Perhaps the most dispiriting consequence of my present disease - more depressing even than its practical, daily manifestations - is the awareness that I shall never again ride the rails. This knowledge weighs on me like a leaden blanket, pressing me ever deeper into that gloom-laden sense of an ending that marks the truly terminal disease: the understanding that some things will never be.

He is not explicit in making the double entendre, and yet the not-so-subtle double meaning Judt gives the word terminal is what I find most touching about this essay. How Judt uses words poetic word play to allow us to make a connection between his present moment of being (which we experience as the act of writing in a moment of loss) and the importance he attaches to a personal memory creates multiple layers of meaning.

The Memory Chalet allowed me to connect present social-political circumstances to personal history, despite the fact that that history was not my own. The quality of the writing stripped the reading experience of distance. Judt's reflections on the revolutionary movements in the late 1960s in France and Eastern Europe, for example, gave me opportunity to consider my thinking about the present Occupy Wall Street movement. Particularly strong was the essay on Czeslaw Milosz, Lithuanian thinker and writer and the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, and his book The Captive Mind. Judt writes, for example, on the concept of the economy:

..."the market"... is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason ( it is not open to question). It has its true believers - mediocre by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers - who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

fighting words from someone unable to move, eat or breathe without assistance.

We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently "Washington consensus" in vulnerable developing countries - with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation - has destroyed millions of livelihoods...

Yes.

I particularly enjoyed Judt's admiration of Milosz's writing about the Persian phenomenon of ketman. This is a type of elective identity permitting one to live with the contradiction of saying one thing and believing something else, a mechanism Milosz sees played out in the intersection of psychology and sociopolitics under totalitarian regimes, like those he lived in under the USSR. Milosz quotes Arthur de Gobineau's Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia extensively:

Officially, contradictions do not exist in the minds of the citizens in the people's democracies. Nobody dares to reveal them publicly. And yet the question of how to deal with them is posed in real life. More than others, the members of the intellectual elite are aware of this problem. They solve it by becoming actors...

"There are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one's true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses in order to deceive one's adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one's own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit. Thus one acquires the multiple satisfactions and merits of having place oneself and one's relative under cover, of not having exposed a venerable faith to the horrible contact of the infidel, and finally of having, in cheating the latter and confirming him in his error, imposed on him the shame and spiritual misery that he deserves.
"Ketman fills the man who practices it with pride. Thanks to it, a believer raises himself to a permanent state of superiority over the man he deceives, be he a minister of state or a powerful king; to him who uses Ketman, the other is a miserable blind man whom one shuts off from the true path whose existence he does not suspect; while you, tattered and dying of hunger, trembling externally at the feet of duped force, your eyes are filled with light, you walk in brightness before your enemies. It is an unintelligent being that you make sport of; it is a dangerous beast that you disarm. What a wealth of pleasures!"

This way, Judt reflects, one can adapt freely to the requirements of the rulers who dominates one

while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker...

While reading this as the literate reflection of a thinker about history, politics, and class I could not help also seeing it as a metaphor for a free thinker subjected to the tyranny of physical paralysis. I tore through the 200-plus pages of these succinct, erudite and moving essays. I cannot advocate strongly enough for The Memory Chalet as a rich reading experience, perhaps the best I have had this year.

For those in hearing an informed appreciation of Tony Judt. Here is the obituary by Timothy Garton Ash from The New York Review of Books

Lyrical coming of age story in post-war England (Books - The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam)

2011-10-27T07:12:00.007-04:00

Jane Gardam's post-World War II coming of age story, The Flight of the Maidens, features three very different young women who share the honor of prestigious university scholarships as they graduate from a small Yorkshire high school. The time is 1946. Hetty tries to extricate herself from what we would nowadays call a co-dependent relationship with her mother, alternating between childish reliance and virulent rebellion. Una dates a "bad boy" as she is raised by a single mother who keeps a beauty salon. Liselotte is a German Jewish refugee, taken in by Quakers when she arrives via the Kindertransport.

Gardam's book has two strengths. Her observation of character is razor- sharp, edged with an irony that stops shy of adolescent meanness only because, although it comes from the pen of a third-person narrator, that meanness is suited to the point-of-view of her character.

The vast vicar flung himself about in his chair, helped himself to more fruit salad and poured condensed milk (thirty-five coupons) round and round his pudding bowl from the flowery tin. 'Your mother has given up a very great deal for you, Hetty.'

Mrs Vane was proud of her drier, which was one of the latest power-filled domes. Her mother, who had been a hairdresser too, though trained, had had to sit her clients in front of a coal fire with a towel over the shoulders and a cup of tea while they held their heads to the flames. Mrs Vane's mother's clients had looked like the victims of shipwreck. Mrs Vane's were like apprehensive pupae.

That and they are dead funny. And she captures essential moments, like this one, with a photographic 'snap.'

It was an amazement, an impossibility, this freedom. Nobody in the world knew where she was. Nowhere in the throng, anywhere in North Kensington, was there a living soul who had seen her before, or would ever see her again. She had sixteen-and- elevenpence in the world, and no bed to sleep on. She walked on and on.

That amounts to as lyrical a summation of the book as one can get. Its second strength is strong bones. The book begins with the three young women together in their town as they leave school. It follows each of their narrative threads, alternating them more and more closely until they come back together with a cinematic surge as the plot-lines converge, a structure that was both touching and satisfying. Where the book could let one down was in the plotting. I'm not sure I buy the rosiness of the story's resolution, which I won't detail so as not to spoil it. Gardam's story does include losses for the young women, but she obviously sees the flight of these maidens as a sort of deliverance, one I remained a little skeptical of as the book drew to a close. The Flight of the Maidens is an entertaining read with richly detailed characters and a good sense of time, yet the total effect fell a bit short of the mark.

Writing one's way to the story (Books - Slouching Towards Bethlehem & The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion)

2011-10-16T12:04:00.005-04:00

I went on a quest a week or two ago to try to discover what it is about Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking that makes it such a stunning book. That lead me to re-read a couple of Didion's essays from Slouching Towards Bethlehem prior to re-reading the memoir. Take this essay On Morality.

As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119^o. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about "morality," a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.

Yes indeed, her mind does veer toward the particular, relentlessly so. Asked by a respected publication to write on the concept of morality and what does she put on paper? Her global location, the temperature of the room, how she reacts to it, and who she is (someone asked by The American Scholar to...). A conventional journalist would give you the lede: who, what, where, when, and why. Didion roots the reader in her own concrete circumstances because her point of view is that of the artist. She covers the basics like a good actor, to root herself: who am I, where am I, what am I doing, what do I want? She does this for several pages while intermittently describing stories she has heard in the desert, one about a roadside accident, another about divers trying to retrieve bodies from an underground pool, all of which allows her to do her job, that is to reflect on the concept of morality, but as it impacts real people in real places, and the way that she knows its impact is by discovering through the act of writing how it impacts her.

The widow of one of the drowned boys is over there; she is eighteen, and pregnant, and is said not to leave the hole. The divers go down and come up, and she just stands there and stares into the water. They have been diving for ten days but have found no bottom to the caves, no bodes and no trace of them, only the black 90^o water going down and down and down, and a single translucent fish, not classified. The story tonight is that one of the divers has been hauled up incoherent, out of his head, shouting - until they got him out of there so that the widow could not hear - about water that got hotter instead of cooler as he went down, about light flickering through the water, about magma, about underground nuclear testing.

Are you there with her? I am. This is someone who knows how to sequence words so that you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. No wonder she worked in film. This film has the unsettled soundtrack and the bizarre lighting of a Twilight Zone episode. All that, so when she finally delivers the goods, you are with her in her "here and now," and can she can talk to you as a cohabitant in place and time.

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing - beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code - what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going one, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why.

Now she has come in for the kill. Doesn't mince words, does she? But she knows words as painters know color. ' Factitious' anyone? And it doesn't sound from this passage like much has changed since 1965, does it.

In the essay Goodbye to All That Didion begins by rooting herself, and by extension, her reader, in the here and now of memory.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

Her creative process becomes clearer and clearer as I read, and what a pleasure to watch her work - as that is the experience I am having. I don't feel as though I am reading a finished product, rather like I am watching a story being made, making the acquaintance of both the writer and the story as I go. Like any story teller, actor, painter, Didion enters her studio, sits at her desk and sometimes she must ask: how do I begin. This is the ending place for many actors, painters and writers because, having no answer, they stop. Not Didion. She sits down knowing her assignment is 'the place where it ends' but all she can think of is the beginning, so she writes that. She tries to see ending in her mind's eye and she sees only the beginning and it makes her physically tense, and so she writes that. Didion knows her craft. Her craft is to write, to place words on paper out of her experience. To practice that craft you do just that. You do it with the experience you have right now, not the experience you wish you had.

Of course one could complain - but she is able to do that because of confidence, possibly even arrogance - she has many successes behind her. Perhaps. Sometimes past successes breed confidence, other times they breed anxiety. For all we know, she did it with tremendous insecurity, but words are put on the page nonetheless, until she arrives at some clarity about how she will do what she has to do. But she has not waited for that moment to arrive to begin the the business of writing, that she has been doing all along.

Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots - the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York.

Now she doesn't merely use the techniques of film - she calls the reader's attention to that fact. I admire her voice so much because the art and the artist are one. The story I am going to tell you begins with the fact that I am I (as Gertrude Stein might say) and that I have to tell you a story. It is a little incoherent as I start, so I'll simply begin there, with the incoherence. I would do an exercise with my actors back when I was teaching acting that was developed by Lee Strassberg at The Actor's Studio. I used it continually with them, and whenever I worked myself as an actor. It is called "Speaking Out." All it asks is that the actor speak out of their experience of the present moment on a physical, mental, or emotional level. That is harder than it sounds, because one's present experience while creating work that matters to us isn't necessarily so pleasant to contemplate. It is full of anxieties around the pressure of appearing competent before an audience of your peers. It is full of the imperfections of which we are all composed: fears, needs, jealousies. Let's face it, when working under pressure at something that matters deeply to us, and when doing so in public as the actor's job requires, none of us are exemplars of anything. And let's be clear - speaking out of the experience of the present moment is quite different that speaking about it. One can speak about the experience from knowledge of it, and this usually comes with distance. To speak out of the experience means you are in it, right now, and whatever unattractive mess you are is what you expose with your words and actions. And if and when you find that the stream of words and actions flow from the 'you' of that moment, the skilled teacher will guide you back to the scene or monologue on which you are working, so that your experience flows into the reality of that moment. That is not because the story is about 'you,' which is so often the criticism leveled at the Method approach to acting, this is because this is an exercise in vulnerability. It is a relentless pursuit of the flow of human experience that is woven into one's practice of one's craft over time, the goal being to fulfill the character's relationship to their circumstances with human behaviors that have an inevitability and an authenticity that is like those we encounter in the world. It is often imperfect, as we are. It is often less than completely in- the-moment, but it is a place to begin.

This is just what Didion does. What makes The Year of Magical Thinking so remarkable, yes I am finally getting there, is the fact that she does this while being stripped to the bone by loss. Rather than making vulnerability the reason to do something else, she inhabits the moment of nine months after her loss, and relentlessly puts down one word and then another. The act seems, if anything, more determined than ever to write from the here and now. Just look at these words.

It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.

It is now. How bare can you get? It is not descriptive of loss or vulnerability per se, but it's an act of facing the present out of that vulnerability as well as Didion can at the moment (it is speaking out), and it is practiced in the medium of her art - words - instead of the behavior of the actor.

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, as the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death...

Just the facts of his death over and over. That is where her minds dwells and so that's how she begins the writing process and, if we wish, we're along for the ride. Didion's act of writing leads to beginning the story telling task which, in typical Didion fashion, is the visible subject of the story until it can become the invisible means.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines.

The inadequacy of the medium to the richness of experience - if that isn't a well trodden theme for the experienced artist! How quickly has Didion evolved from mourner to writer, returning to the concerns of a seasoned artist - impatience with her medium - once setting pen to paper. As with her earlier work, the writing begins from wherever she is. Who she is, where she is, the thoughts, activities, or sensations that occupy her. Then she writes her way toward her task, whether assigned or discovered, until she tells the story of telling the story. In doing so she faces, from time to time, creative limits. Often, she then refers to film - another medium she has worked in, one with different advantages and limits. She seems to have created a career-long creative dialogue, but rather than creating a dissolve or an edit with words (techniques she can as has used) she puts the conflict between forms directly on the page. This experience of conflict with her medium, she says, this is the story. This is useful because in a moment in which she could be removed from her chief action - telling a story - she makes a technical aspect of that act visible so that the story may continue.

I thought I was going to write about The Year of Magical Thinking. I had lots of pages tagged that were examples of writing I admired but in starting with Slouching Towards Bethlehem this became a story about creative process and, especially, beginnings. This is a favorite theme of mine as an artist and a teacher of process, so I guess that isn't terribly surprising. When I think of it, the aspect of The Year of Magical Thinking that most impresses me is that Didion could begin writing at all, so perhaps that was my story, or at least it is. It is the story because that is what I wrote.

The usefulness of lying, genetically speaking (The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers)

2011-10-14T07:44:00.015-04:00

Acerbic critique of Robert Trivers's new book on evolutionary biology Deceit and Self Deception, by Jenny Diski in The Guardian this week (hat tip: Book Slut).

...Now, decades on, he has arrived at a big, new universal theory, also essentially based on the arithmetic of gene selection. Deceit is useful where telling the (unpleasant) truth would hamper your progress. Progress towards what? Trivers would say your fitness, which is defined as raising the chances of replicating your genes into the next generation.
Your genes, apparently, would agree with him; but they would, wouldn't they? That is if they were capable of agreeing. I want to hang on to the fact that the building blocks of ourselves do not want or intend anything. Chemicals aren't conscious, although by amazing chance they can combine to make a conscious organism.
Once self-conscious humans begin to do science, and with the benefit of language, start to describe the nature of the chemicals that make them what they are, but having to use regular language if they want a large audience (maths is a much better language, but fewer people can read it), they cannot help but slide into the notion of intention. Dawkins's selfish gene gained an absurd life of its own because most people don't speak arithmetic.

It's an excellent point, in fact, genes aren't really even actual things per se, they are more an idea advanced to characterize chemical function, but many of those who advance our understanding of evolution find the notion of genes necessary, or let's say helpful, as they find Trivers's work influential. Indeed, it's interesting to consider the usefulness of deceitful behavior since, if we look at our psychological development, once we learn how to speak we generally learn how to lie and thereafter we must be taught when and when not to do so. For instance, you should tell mommy the truth about spilling the powder all over the bathroom, but you should not tell the lady who works in the bakery that she has a fat tushy. The review has made me most interested to read the book despite the fact that all the science with which I'm familiar links genes to the production of proteins not behaviors. Genes are no doubt necessary to produce behaviors as cold is necessary to produce snow, but just because it's cold doesn't mean that it's snowing. Behavior evolves in the context of individual bodies and collective environments and is the product of many genes upon many proteins and subsequent neurotransmitters upon neurons via mechanisms that are many steps away from the initial genes, but still, somebody has to ask the questions at the level of behavior if we are ever to understand the answers. This book is made all the more interesting after learning a little more about the author from Andrew Brown's profile, also in The Guardian. Trivers seems a fascinating iconoclast. The book appears to be called The Folly of Fools in its American version, at least I believe they're the same (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

Crime and Punishment meets Princess Di in Paris (Books - An Accident in August by Laurence Cossé)

2011-10-13T07:39:00.004-04:00

I am a huge fan of Laurence Cossé's A Novel Bookstore, so I was delighted to stumble across her 2003 novel An Accident in August at one of my favorite New York haunts. The premise is simple. Lou, who works a simple job and lives a largely uneventful life in Paris, happens to drive into the Alma tunnel on her way home one night as a Mercedes speeds by her, swerves, and crashes headlong into a post killing its passengers. The passengers were Princess Di, Dodi, their bodyguard and driver. When Lou discovers the identity of the passengers she becomes consumed by paranoia. Too frightened to come forward, she begins trying to cover her tracks.

When I began reading An Accident in August, I found it gimmicky. It reeked of its own clever opportunism, and its language (though this could have been the translation) was hyperdramatic, sensationalist.

And the question kept coming at her, nagging, the question with no answer: why did I run away? Why didn't I stop? What came over me, turning me into some terrified rabbit, not even a thought about stopping to help or act as a witness, thinking only of saving my own skin?

Saving my own skin, no one else's; like some rabbit about to be skinned, yes, bushy-tailing it out of there.

Then it came to her, like a bolt of lightning. It was death she had run away from...

But Cossé is skilled at creating a claustrophobic sort of trappedness. The book this one most reminded me of was Crime and Punishment in that most of the "action" occurs in the head of someone who has committed a crime as they run from themselves. However, it isn't merely being blamed for what happened that Lou dreads, it is the media attention this will attract and the fact that she will forever been known at "the driver who..." I find it interesting that both An Accident in August and A Novel Bookstore share this theme of being exposed by the media. Cossé, who worked as a journalist, seems to cast journalists as the bad guys. This sense that Lou's life will never again be her own drives her to some irrational choices, but the thing that really got me to stay with this book wasn't wondering whether she would get caught, since we know the driver was never found, the real point of interest was the way being in this position made Lou change her life. Raskolnikov is tormented, but he only succeeds in running towards himself. Lou tries to run away. This kind of attempted transformation of character (since I won't tell you whether she succeeds or not) is something most people dream of doing at some point in their lives. If only I had.... If only I was..... If only I looked.... One function of a good piece of art is that it can help us imagine such a metamorphosis. Cossé's novel does that in spades and that, I found, was the fun of it.

A noisy signal buried among amusing anecdotes and formulae (Books - Noise by Bart Kosko)

2011-10-10T08:11:00.008-04:00

Noise, Bart Kosko, tells us, is unwanted sound. In everyday life we might use the word to describe the car alarm we hear blaring off the street while we are trying to sleep, or the background music in a restaurant that obscures the words of the person with whom I'm conversing. The sciences have a specific use for the term noise.

Noise is a red rose that grows in a cornfield. It is a signal that does not belong there.

Noise is a signal we don't like.

Noise has two parts. The first has to do with the head and the second with the heart.

The first part is the scientific or objective part: Noise is a signal. But then what is a signal? A mathematical answer is that a signal is what we describe with a variable such as x. The broad answer lets light or dollars or red blood cells count as signals because they can vary in time or space.

A physical answer deals with energy.

A signal is a source of energy such as an electrical pulse or a chemical pattern or the acoustical roar of an audience. It is structured energy... Yet we see a signal as still more than energy.

A signal is anything that conveys information.

All fields of science search for signals. Physicists look for particle signals in bubble chambers. Geologists look for earthquake signals in crust data. Botanists look for hormone signals in a pruned peach branch. Political scientists look for voter signals in polls and election an results. Psychologists look for mating signals in barroom behavior and underarm sweat. Neuroscientists look for electrochemical signals in the bast synaptic webs of our brains.

The same holds for engineering but with a key difference: Engineers shape signals as well as search for them...

The second part of noise is the subjective part: It deals with values. It deals with how we draw the fuzzy line between good signals and bad signals. Noise signals are bad signals. They are the unwanted signals that mask or corrupt our preferred signals... But for whom are they bad?.. One person's signal is another person's noise...

This excerpt from the first chapter of Kosko's book gives you a good idea of both the subject he covers in his book and his writing style. Somewhere within the relaxed verbiage that make up the 160 pages of Noise is a good 50 page discussion of the concept of noise, examples of how it is manifest in the sciences - particularly in information theory - how different types of noise are characterized (as measurements of frequency magnitude ), how noise can be overcome, and how it can be useful in enhancing the intelligibility of a signal (a concept known as stochastic resonance). The trouble is, Kosko's writing is a little, well, noisy.

Kosko's excitement for his subject comes through loud and clear, but the flood this unleashes tends to diffuse his writing. When one good example will do six are offered. When he intends to organize a reader's thinking, as he did in dividing noise into two parts: 'head' and 'heart,' that will define an argument in the ensuing pages, he cannot resist a tangent. Above, following a paragraph of examples of noise in different sub-areas of science, is another paragraph about how engineers are different from other scientists. Once he returns to the second half of his organizing structure, I had forgotten that I was supposed to organize my thinking into two halves.

Kosko is not merely effusive on the sentence by sentence level. The book makes five or six excellent points, but these would realistically make up a lengthy article. To fill out the longer book format, each chapter is padded with nine epigraphs. These make the same points made in the chapter, only more succinctly. In addition, Kosko repeats material unnecessarily in the body of the text. For instance, he covers stochastic resonance very adequately with good examples and a clear image in an early chapter. There is no need to cover it again toward the end of the book.

Lastly, I'm not sure if the writer or his editor were clear about what audience they were writing for. One the one hand, Kosko maintains a chatty style, offering very approachable examples for tough to understand concepts - this is a talent that makes me understand why he might have written a book on such a subject for the lay-reader. He is also great at the perfect three-sentence description of a key scientific concept to orient his reader. There is an excellent one on photosynthesis, where he characterizes humans as sugar parasites. I think it might be more accurate to say plant parasites, since as a living organism that is the source of our sugar and oxygen, plants are our host, but that's a quibble. He's also good at dropping entertaining anecdotes related to the idea of interest - like film actress Heddy Lamar's 1942 patent for a frequency-hopping spread spectrum (no...really). However, in the discussing power laws of statistics gets blinded by his own facility with mathematics in a way that would leave the average reader in the dust.

The scheme says that the noise is white if the noise spectrum does not depend explicitly on the frequency f. That corresponds to the case of 1/f raise to the power zero because the zeroth power gives the constant value of unity: 1/f⁰ = 1. Pink noise falls off or decreases with the inverse of the frequency. So pink noise has a spectrum that falls off with the first power of the frequency or 1/f.

Or he writes one of those mind-boggling waterfalls of terminology that physicists like to think explain the universe but always make me feel like I fell down a hole and hit my head:

The earth would form a black hole if we somehow compressed it down to the size of about a marble. That would cross the critical limit where the dense object's gravity would in effect turn in on itself and suck all its matter down to a point or "singularity." A marble-size black region or event horizon would surround the infinitesimal singularity in the space-time continuum. The sun is not massive enough to become a black hole when it burns up the hydrogen in its core in about five billion years. It will instead expand into a red giant and then cool off and die quietly as a white dwarf. The sun would become a black hole if we could compress it to a dense ball with a radius of about one kilometer.

Red giant. White dwarf. Right. Crystal clear.

Noise is an exercise in contradictions. I find its subject matter fascinating to think about, but the discussion goes on a bit longer than the raw material permits. The writing alternates between technical and colloquial, embedding the information in what I would say is too little context for the engineer and too much noise for the lay reader.

The impermeability of love - an Upper West Side romance (Books - Eight White Nights by Andre Aciman)

2011-10-08T10:22:00.003-04:00

A twenty-something man meets a bold and unusual woman named Clara at a christmas party and a spell was cast. For the next week they spend hours of each day with each other, drink at all hours of the day and night, attend Eric Rohmer films, and invent a playful language all their own. In some ways one could say there is nothing new about this spell. It is called love and it has happened to billions of people before these two. What is distinctive about Andre Aciman's Eight White Nights is the way in which reading it echoes the isolation of such a romance.

Halfway through dinner, I knew I'd replay the whole evening in reverse - the bus, the snow, the walk up the tiny incline, the cathedral looming straight before me, the stranger in the elevator, the crowded large living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition, the piano music, the singer with the throaty voice, the scent of pinewood everywhere as I wandered from room to room, thinking that perhaps I should have arrived much earlier tonight, or a bit later, or that I shouldn't have come at all, the classic sepia etchings on the wall by the bathroom where a swinging door opened to a long corridor to private areas not intended for guests but took another turn toward the hallway and then, by miracle, led back into the same living room, where more people had gathered, and where, turning to me by the window where I thought I'd found a quiet spot behind the large Christmas tree, someone suddenly put out a hand and said, "I am Clara."

[...]

In someone else, I am Clara would have sprung like a tentative conversation opener - meek, seemingly assertive, overly casual, distant, aired as an afterthought, the verbal equivalent of a handshake that has learned to convey firmness and vigor by overexerting an otherwise limp and lifeless grip. ...

Here, I am Clara was neither bold nor intrusive, but spoken with the practiced, wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence with strangers...

I am Clara. It barged in unannounced, like a spectator squeezing into a packed auditorium second before curtain time, disturbing everyone, and yet so clearly amused by the stir she causes, that, no sooner she'd found the seat that will be hers for the rest of the season than she'll remove her coat, slip it around her shoulders, turn to her new neighbor, and, meaning to apologize for the disruption without making too much of it, whisper a conspiring "I am Clara." It meant, I'm the Clara you'll be seeing all year long here, so let's just make the best of it...

It was a cross between a ribbing "How couldn't you know?" and "What's with the face?" "Here," she seemed to say, like a magician about to teach a child a simple trick, "Take this name and hold it tight in your palm, and when you're home alone, open your hand and think, Today I met Clara."

Aciman's tone is elegiac. He writing is urbane, contemporary, and can be colloquial, but it can also be precious. It's not that phrases like "no sooner she'd found the seat" doesn't have lovely music, but they call attention to the writing and removed me from the spell that is this novel's focus. Set in Manhattan's Upper West Side, now a privileged enclave of Banana Republics, Starbucks, Whole Foods, the restaurants of Power Chefs, multiplexes, and Equinoxes - it's basically a high-end mall dotted with expensive highrise coops and vestiges of its old self in simpler, family-owned restaurants, the neighborhood branch of the public library, and more stolid, old-world apartment buildings - it comes by its urbanity honestly. The characters spend a good deal of time at Rohmer's films. Aciman liberally references literature and music, particularly opera, often without preamble. Boris Godunov, Feodor Chaliapin, Don Giovanni, and the final duet of L'Incoronazione di Poppea, all make appearances. For example:

"Without wasting another second, Clara smirked back and, out of the blue, shook her hand and made a totally obscene gesture. "Printz Oskar to you, dickhead!" The man seemed totally trounced by the gesture and raced ahead of us.

"That'll teach him."

Her gesture left me more startled than the driver. It seemed to come from an underworld I would never have associated with her or with Henry Vaughan or with the person who'd spent months poring over Folias and then in the wee hours sang Monteverdi's Pur ti miro" for us. I was shaken and speechless. Who was she? And did people like this really exist?

Any reader can appreciate that this paragraph conveys something about Clara's duality - the rarefied areas of knowledge to which she has access coupled with an impulsivity that is coarse and close to the surface. I directed opera productions for over a decade, so the first line of the duet pur ti miro immediately starts the music playing in my mind's ear. The result is an enveloping experience mixing the sexual anticipation that is the engine of the novel, with pictures of New York roadways in winter, and a gorgeous baroque soundtrack. This perfectly conjures the exclusivity of the world that these two characters create, however, it is a world that Aciman seems willing to risk excluding readers from. Now, maybe I'm being snooty in imagining I can follow this story better than other readers. If Aciman has created the same sense that this novel speaks especially to me for all his readers, he has succeeded in ways I cannot assess. However, it bothered me that Aciman's first-person narrator is every bit as ready with classical literary allusions and lines from opera as she, but that we never know how he came by his knowledge. Aciman spends many, many pages establishing the origin of his narrator's reticence to take a risk - a key character trait that establishes him in opposition to Clara. However, he doesn't question for a minute the fact that he can burst into Leperello's Act I aria from Mozart's Don Giovanni. I know nothing of the origin of this side of his character. I don't know what he does for a living, if, indeed, he needs to hold a job at all, since he is able to take an entire week off from work, yet inhabits a building with a doorman and eats out constantly. The strength of this choice is the way in which it evokes the impermeable fantasy of the early days of intense romance. The flip-side, however, is it makes me wonder who the hell he is. The implication I came away with is that maybe he was Aciman himself, only younger, but not possessing this knowledge distracted from abandoning myself to the narrative at times. That was especially true in that the main action of the novel was about his learning to be himself. But I only learned about one side of this character, the side that needed to be "fixed," the rest of him remained a cipher.

The quality I most enjoyed in Aciman's writing is its spaciousness. You need to give this novel time, not in that it takes long to read, it actually accumulates quite a bit of momentum, but that requires an investment in the relationship. The opening chapter doesn't merely establish the details of meeting Clara. It is an extended riff on the phrase I am Clara that went on for tens of pages. If you enjoy steeping yourself in words that slowly conjure a feeling, you will eat this book up. If you like cutting to the chase, this is not the novel for you. I identified with the world of these two characters, so wondering what would happen to them created suspense for me. I found my investment in it warmly rewarding.

Inflorescence - Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

2011-10-06T20:47:00.004-04:00

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.

Today's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer, has long been a favorite of mine.

Dream Seminar
Four thousand million on earth.
They all sleep, they all dream.
Faces throng, and bodies, in each dream -
the dreamt-of people are more numerous
than us. But take no space...
You doze off at the theatre perhaps,
in mid-play your eyelids sink.
A fleeting double-exposure: the stage
before you out-manoeuvred by a dream.
Then no more stage, it's you.
The theatre in the honest depths!
The mystery of the overworked director!
Perpetual memorising of new plays...
A bedroom. Night.
The darkened sky is flowing through the room.
The book that someone fell asleep from lies still open
sprawling wounded at the edge of the bed.
The sleeper's eyes are moving,
they're following the text without letters
in another book -
illuminated, old-fashioned, swift.
A dizzying commedia inscribed
within the eyelids' monastery walls.
A unique copy. Here, this very moment.
In the morning, wiped out.
The mystery of the great waste!
Annihilation. As when suspicious men
in uniforms stop the tourist -
open his camera, unwind the film
and let the daylight kill the pictures:
thus dreams are blackened by the light of day.
Annihilated or just invisible?
There is a kind of out-of-sight dreaming
that never stops. Light for other eyes.
A zone where creeping thoughts learn to walk.
Faces and forms regrouped.
We're moving on a street, among people
in blazing sun.
But just as many - maybe more -
we don't see
are also there in dark buildings
high on both sides.
Sometimes one of them comes to the window
and glances down on us.

Fire Jottings
Throughout the dismal months my life sparkled alive only when I made love with you.
As the firefly ignites and fades out, ignites and fades out, - in glimpses we can trace its flight
in the dark among the olive trees.

Throughout the dismal months the soul lay shrunken, lifeless,
but the body went straight to you.
The night sky bellowed.
Stealthily we milked the cosmos and survived.

Romanesque Arches
Inside the huge romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle-flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
'Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that's how it's mean to be.'
Blind with tears.
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr and Mrs Jones, Mr Tanaka and Signora Sabatini
and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.

A Page of the Night-Book
I stepped ashore one May night
in the cool moonshine
where grass and flowers were grey
but the scent green.

I glided up the slope
in the colour-blind night
while white stones
signalled to the moon.

A period of time
a few minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering waters
was the other shore
and those who ruled.

People with a future
instead of a face.

More of Tomas Transtromer's poems are linked via my side bar under the heading Inflorescence and then his name.

Individual lives caught in the tide of history (Books - The Greater Journey by David McCullough)

2011-10-01T10:26:00.007-04:00

I've been seized by a bout of non-fiction reading. I was going to claim this was a rarity for me, but that's really not true. I had been reading plenty of non-fiction the past few years, but most of it was assigned for class. Now that I'm done with classes, I can read the non-fiction I choose and I made a good choice in David McCullough's latest, The Greater Journey - Americans in Paris.

This is an unusual history in that it doesn't so much focus on names, dates, and events of a single place or movement as on a swath of time, 1830 - 1900, in which France underwent great political change, and the influence of that time upon individual American artists, political figures, inventors, and doctors - the men and women of ideas. In that time, France's Second Republic underwent a coup d'etat by Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, resulting in the creation of the Second Empire. The city of Paris was given a grand overhaul under the charge of Georges-Eugene Haussmann, one whose basic plan survives today. Paris underwent a siege by Germany, and the bloody reign of the Paris Commune, liberated by the establishment of a Third Republic, which lasted until the French government collaborated with the Nazis in the formation of the Vichy government. However, none of these events are, themselves, the point of McCullough's narrative. McCullough portrays Parisian culture in that tumultuous time as remarkably stable in its influence. It was a city known for great painters, sculptors and writers, and for the quality of education available in the arts, medicine, law, and the sciences. Paris was the center of a highly developed culture which included not only arts and sciences, but a renowned cuisine. Really Paris was a place devoted to the art of living. In many ways it still is. The thrust of McCullough's book focuses on the ways in which exposure to such a way of life through a visit to Paris was an important component of a good American education. The Greater Journey is the story of the way Parisian life influenced Americans like painters Samuel Morse, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, writers James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and medical students Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Blackwell. As well as the mutual influence of the French and American governments and of their statesmen. Charles Sumner, the great American lawyer and early spokesman for the abolition of slavery, was profoundly influenced by his time in Paris studying at the Sorbonne and the free black men and women he encountered both as fellow students and in the rest of daily life, an experience which proved revelatory for him. The diary of American ambassador Elihu Washburne was, until now, an unknown primary source of the Siege of Paris. It is one McCullough relies on heavily in chapters integrating Washburne's life story with the history of that decisive political standoff.

This synthesis is the success of The Greater Journey throughout. It is less a traditional history of government figures, acts, and battles, than it is a series of short, intertwined biographies set in the context of history. Though some of its key figures might be considered secondary characters in the feature film treatment American education, film and television gives to history - painter George P. A. Healy, pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk and feminist Margaret Fuller are not exactly household names - each one of their stories became interesting as McCullough showed them swept up in the tidal wave of nineteenth-century Parisian art and ideas. I didn't even know that I would want to know their stories, but I found myself easily reading 60 - 70 pages in a sitting and eager to return. Sweeps of influence are at least as important to the consideration of the lessons we can derive from the history of a person or time as the toe-nail-clippings-and-all variety. McCullough makes coherent narrative out of a collection of disparate lives as they were influenced by a place that was itself influenced by great changes in its physical landscape and architecture, and its form of government. The Greater Journey is a reminder that, amidst the cataclysmic rhetoric we Americans hear on an a daily basis about our security, our economy, and the danger of the evil other party from our power-obsessed political representatives, great cultures survive strong upheaval. Large parts of Paris were burned to the ground in the 1871 siege and more than 50,000 lives were tragically lost, yet the government reorganized and Paris rebuilt, and the 1889 World's Fair was attended by millions who came to visit one of the most beautiful and influential cities in the world.

My earlier post about this book is here.

After the revolution, the soap opera continues (Books - The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta)

2011-09-24T06:56:00.005-04:00

And then it happened. The biblical prophecy came true, or at least partly true. People disappeared, millions of them at the same time, all over the world. This wasn't some ancient rumor...this was real. The Rapture happened in her own hometown, to her best friend's daughter, among others, while Laurie herself was in the house. God's intrusion into her life couldn't have been any clearer if He'd addressed her from a burning azalea....

"Something tragic occurred," the experts repeated over and over. "It was a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture."

Interestingly, some of the loudest voices making this argument belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn't help noticing that many of the people who'd disappeared on October 14th - Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever they heck they were - hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn't be was random. The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.

Millions of people disappear without any explanation, but if you've been waiting for the rapture, they're the wrong people. What does life become for the Billions left behind, asks Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers. The novel chronicles the lives of the citizens of Mapleton, one small American town, living in the wake of an event which makes no sense. Is this a life with no meaning at all? Or is it, rather, one with the ultimate meaning? The meaning you provide with your will, your intellect, your heart (or for that matter, your entrepreneurial spirit) from this point forward.

This world becomes peppered with monuments and movements. Healers who hug. A cult in which members take a vow of silence and smoke to show their faith. But amidst all the questions of meaning, life goes on, as it always does. Adolescents still go to high school, are still popular or unpopular. People fall in love, and out, they get diagnosed with illness, they learn to drive. Perrotta gets this exactly right and creates, for this reader, particularly in reading this two weeks ago, a potent post-9/11 metaphor. Some of its potency comes from the satiric tone of the book. Perrotta has not written a laugh-riot. He doesn't mock recent events, but he creates an absurd happening in a rational world which the inhabitants of that world take seriously, and then takes it to its absurd ends. This is the real strength of The Leftovers. Its description of the experience of loss is dead on.

As the holiday season begins, members of the cult Guilty Remnant, watch a presentation "Christmas" is meaningless. "Christmas" belongs to the old world." Claim the slides. Yes, when you lose a central source of meaning in your life - whether that's a loved one, all your possessions, or some essential fact you held on to that helped made life meaningful - everything must be re-defined. Perrotta includes parallels in the story line to send home the point. A woman discovers that her husband had been having an affair, a re-organizing loss on a domestic level, and yet a very similar one. This woman counted on her husband's faith (if not his love) as a fact. Something that she was sure she had. And yet, for months while she continued to feel certain, it was not there. If those things of which you feel you can be certain aren't there - what is?

Tom Perrotta's use of language sometimes, for my taste, was too rooted in the relaxed diction not of easy-to-read writing, but of speech. It's a little TV-efied. I tend not to enjoy this quality in writing, but the flip-side of this style is that it makes reading effortless. In this case, Perrotta writes so that we know his characters quickly and care for them. He is an astute cultural observer, a crack psychologist, a useful provocateur, and he's very entertaining. After the revolution, the soap opera continues, to find out what happens read The Leftovers.

Always have a book...

2011-09-22T07:23:00.002-04:00

Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world? And, do you ever try to hide the covers?

Are you kidding me? I carry at least one book everywhere I go and at pretty much any time. I carry something on my commute to work, if I'm going downtown to meet someone for dinner, to the gym, on a walk. I carry something to read when I walk between the bedroom and the livingroom. One thing to understand is, I live in New York City. Most of us non-celebrity types either walk where we are going or get there by mass transit. To own a car is prohibitively expensive, it takes ages to drive anywhere, and I hate the way cars clog up our already crowded city with noise and pollution. There is nothing like a subway ride for reading! Usually I allow a little extra time to get where I'm going and I'm always sorry if I end up getting delayed, not just because I don't like to be late, but because I won't have those few minutes when I'm on my own at the restaurant bar and I can pull out my book and read! Sheila and I joke that the first time we met, we knew we'd be friends because we both arrived early to the bar with a book to read. We still do.

As for covering the covers - no, why would I? I'm not into bodice rippers or anything. I don't really have time to read stuff I think is too embarrassing. Sometimes I will admit to feeling a little self-conscious about reading something I judge as being too popular, you see, I have a thing about following the crowd. But that's because I have been known to be a little snobbish about my reading. But if I'm reading Harry Potter or some other best seller when everyone else does, I always do the full monty. It serves to remind me that sometimes I'm not all that different from everyone else. Also, a book cover can be a great conversation starter. I remember a great conversation I had when I finished reading The Da Vinci Code in an airport with a man who was certain that the symbols, the sect it describes, the whole thing was absolutely real. He was dead certain. He went on and on about the symbols, he had nearly memorized the thing. I remember a certain point in the conversation with The Ragazzo said: 'You do know this is fiction, don't you?' The man first looked perplexed, then a little defensive, and answered, 'well, sure. But wouldn't it be great if it were real?' Yeah great. We could all be chased by rabid albino priests.

Calisthenics while his empire crumbles.... (Books - The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski)

2011-09-21T22:01:00.004-04:00

The Emperor (1978) was Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's first book. It is a distinctive blend of political writing, razor sharp psychological portraiture via oral history, and prose that achieves lyricism. It's three brief sections describe the absurd class structure of Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie, Emperor from the 1930s to the 1970s, the foment of rebellion against it, and its eventual downfall, not exactly the expected forum for poetical insight.

Kapuscinski presents his lyricized version of memories of Selassie's courtiers, servants, and associates, each identified by their initials only, alternating with brief interpretive commentary. What is remarkable about the stories shared in this concise history is the lengths the courtiers went to assure themselves of the King's irrefutable superiority to themselves. The class hierarchy they describe is rococo in its absurdity - it rivals that of the Russian pre-revolutionary civil service parodied by Gogol. Their titles: 'keeper of the third door:'

When His Most Exalted Majesty left the room, it was I who opened the door. It was an art to open the door at the right moment, the exact instant. To open the door too early would have been reprehensible, as if I were hurrying the Emperor out. If I opened it too late, on the other hand, His Sublime Highness would have to slow down, or perhaps even stop, which would detract from his lordly dignity, a dignity that meant getting around without collisions or obstacles.

the 'pillow bearer:'

I was His Most Virtuous Highness's pillow bearer for twenty-six years. I accompanied His Majesty on travels all around the world, and to tell the truth - I say it with pride - His Majesty could not go anywhere without me, since his dignity required that he always take his place on a throne and he could not sit on a throne without a pillow, and I was the pillow bearer. I had mastered the special protocol of this specialty, and even possessed an extremely useful, expert knowledge: the height of various thrones. This allowed me quickly to choose a pillow of just the right size, so that a shocking ill fit, allowing a gap to appear between the pillow and the Emperor's shoes, would not occur. In my storeroom I had fifty-two pillows of various sizes, thicknesses, materials, and colors. I personally monitored their storage, constantly, so that fleas - the plague of our country - would not breed there, since the consequences of any such oversight could lead to a very unpleasant scandal.

Isn't this like something straight out of satirical science fiction? 'The Minister of the Pen' (necessary as 'his highness' never read or wrote). Evidently, when the king traveled, he hand-selected which of his court members would accompany him. There would be bitter in-fighting for such privilege and each person who accompanied him would know his number in the hierarchy, so that who was above and who below whom would be crystal clear. As rebellion encroaches this elaborately structured society is slow to crumble, so weighed down by greed, ambition, and a simple inability to re-conceive an idea in which they are secure, boggles the mind.

Particularly striking is the emperor's own reaction to the opposition. During the period in which his palace was occupied by invading forces, the emperor employed Swedish physicians who scheduled calisthenics to counteract the 'sluggishness' experienced by the remaining court members.

...it was the desire of His Majesty and the Crown Council, just then, that all the Palace people should take very good care of their health, take full advantage of the blessings of nature, rest as much as necessary in comfort and affluence, breathe good... air. His Benevolent Majesty forbade any economizing in this regard, saying often that the life of the Palace people is the greatest treasure of the Empire and the most valuable resource of the monarchy.

It is notable that even members of the rebellion found themselves consulting the emperor on the steps they were taking as they dismantled his regime. As usual, Kapuscinski brings a relatively recent episode of political oppression strikingly to life. I have yet to read a book of his that wasn't a stunner.

Novelties XI

2011-09-18T17:57:00.008-04:00

Eating:
Fresh tomatoes, anyone? With mozarella and basil, with vinegar and sardine salad (sardines, Dijon mustard, chopped cilantro, and lime juice), or cooked with smashed garlic and pasta.

Drinking:
The air has been hinting at fall this week - how about a red Cotes du Rhone tasting of smoky berries and herbs? We've been drinking this one.

Looking:
The theatre season has begun! The Ragazzo and I went to the revival of Sondheim's Follies last weekend and the Elevator Repair Service's (they're a theatre company) fantastically energetic adaptation of Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises called The Select last night.

Listening:
Jeff Buckley Grace. Dvorak Piano Quintett in A major.

Surfing:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Learning:

this super piece by Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera on an a physicist's app that allows one to visualize wavelengths of light in the night sky that are beyond the range our eyes can see. Very cool.

This superb article by David Dobbs on adolescent brains and how they develop to make teenagers the infuriating risk-takers they can sometimes be. (Hat tip: Ed Young)

Its discomfitures become its pleasures... (Books - Good Behaviour by Molly Keane)

2011-09-15T14:30:00.002-04:00

I received Molly Keane's Good Behavior as a prize for my participation in the First Annual Anita Brookner Day (thank you, Thomas). The Virago small-sized hard back was a pleasurable format both to hold and to read. It reminded me of the hard backed editions that were available when I was a kid, but enough of showing my age, now on to the contents.

Molly Keane has created in Aroon St. Charles a heroine of striking contrasts. She is a 'big' girl yet she cowers. She is of an aristocratic class and yet poor. She has an enormous and loyal heart, capable of great love, yet offers it only where it cannot be appreciated. Oh, does Aroon want to love and to be loved. It is the force that drives her. In this wickedly perceptive and humorous tale, Aroon grows up and claims her power. Keane creates character and atmosphere with sensuous detail.

Rose smelt the air, considering what she smelt; a miasma of unspoken criticism and disparagement fogged the distance between us. I knew she ached to censure my cooking, but through the years I have subdued her. Those wide shoulders and swinging hips were once parts of a winged quality she had - a quality reduced and corrected now, I am glad to say.

Keane is an economical writer both by being precise in her diction and by not explaining away every last detail of her story. I suppose some could say she is being oblique, but Keane is not unclear, she maintains Aroon's naivete in making the choice of assuming a first-person narrative voice. This is a sexual innocence, not a lack of sophistication in understanding the minds of others.

'Out for a walk.' She laughed deeply. She was as full of happiness and as eager to share it, as she had been desolate and removed all the afternoon. 'Suppose we have a Marie biscuit and a drop of hot milk.' She bustled towards the spirit stove and her tidy milk jug with the bead-weighted muslin cover over its top. Again, as on the evening by the sea, I knew that a space widened between us. I had felt closer to Mrs Brock, she had been nearer to me when I thought she needed my comfort.

Aroon can be deeply perceptive, however, the progress of her relationships start with a hunger for intimacy, but as others' needs get fulfilled elsewhere, Aroon fills herself instead with food and drink and the space widens, as she observes, between herself and others. Indeed, the primary action of this book is the valiant and unsuccessful attempts of its characters' to conceal their ungainly desires beneath a facade of 'good behavior.' Early on, I found Keane's writing a trifle too neat. Each chapter had a stand alone quality, ending with a short-story-like button. As a consequence, the narrative sacrificed continuity and I found the each characters' through line hard to hang on to. That neatness dropped away as the story accumulated momentum and Aroon blossomed as a character, becoming more desperate and more ruthless. Don't be misled by the bunies on the book's cover. Its discomfitures become its pleasures, and I can recommend Good Behavior highly.

Millenium approaches, then unravells (Books - The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott)

2011-09-04T07:49:00.004-04:00

Henry Cage puts forward the picture of an upstanding man - well-spoken, well paid, well taken care of by his housekeeper. He runs the company he founded, he lives in the perfect London House, when his wife fools around on him he cleanly divorces her. He knows where he will eat his breakfast each day.

Most afternoons, Henry was content to stay at home. Over the years, in addition to his photographs, he had built up a collection of twentieth-century British art, without ever owning a single first-rate painting. He had bought the works of Meninsky, Shephard and the like - artists with talent, but no great originality; painters who had needed to teach to pay the rent.

Henry was moved by their work. He admired their tenacity and was comfortable with their status. He viewed his walls with constant pleasure. He often said that he was surrounded by paintings that looked like the work of gifted relatives. He would have been uneasy living the art that was too obviously expensive. A Lucian Freud of Francis Bacon would have been impossible - like hanging your bank balance on the wall. In the same way, he could drive a Mercedes, but not a Bentley - live in Chelsea, but not Belgravia.

Henry complies with what is expected of him, he makes sensible choices because he does not want to stand out. Then, around the turn of the millenium,Cage's departure from his company is orchestrated and thus begins the dissolution of his well-ordered world. David Abbott's The Upright Piano Player chronicles his losses. Loss of loved ones, of dignity, of his illusions, and of his sense of control. Abbott makes the choice to open the book with the most devastating of these losses which, on the one hand, lets us know what the book is all about and, on the other, means he never again lives up to the graphic, gut-wrenching scene that starts the book. We then return to 1999 and the progress of the book reveals how Henry Cage got to where we eventually see him.

The book had one quality that irked me. Occasionally the writer veered off course from Henry's story, certain instead that we needed three paragraphs of insight about the design of a coffee shop. No doubt, having worked most of his life in advertising, Abbott's insights into the subject are expert, but they were beside the point as concerned Henry's story. There were a few others moments that partook of the same advisory tone regarding the most pictaresque road in England or the size of a doctor's bill. With some of them, Abbott makes an attempt to integrate them with Henry's character but unsuccessfully; they startle and distract, derailing me from Henry's narrative. It's a pity no editor had the sense to advise against them. Aside from those moments, the prose, like the man, is dignified, measured, the story memorable, and the results touching.

Trying to get justice done and have lots of sex while your life is a train wreck (Books - Europa by Tim Parks)

2011-09-02T07:22:00.007-04:00

I've finished Tim Parks's Europa, which I first wrote about here.

Plato did not believe in the realm of pure forms. That much is clear from any reading of The Republic. Nobody saw more plainly than he that the world was a place of change and betrayal, and if he chose to deny that place any ultimate reality and spoke insistently of an ideal, more real realm beyond, it was perhaps his way of expressing his outrage, expressing a mental space, a place of yearning that is in all of us. For things to be still. Like my wife, like the foreign lectors at the University of Milan, like the visionary architects of our United Europe, he longed for the world to declare its final form and be still, or at least for all motion to be neutralized in repetition, in ritual, as the rigidly ordered world of his philosopher-kinds must reflect the eternal harmony of the cosmos. He longed for each man to assume his definitive station, forever, each role to be exactly defined and assigned, forever, authority imposed, balance achieved, justice done. Thus Europe. Thus our final home. Our permanent job. The end of conflict. The end of poverty. The end of history. The shape of an apple defined. The ingredients of an ice-cream defined. Pure form. Ultimate solidarity in a world where perfected technique will remove all suffering. All wrongs righted. By the effective agency of the Petitions Committee...

After figuring out that Jerry's screwed-up relationships are a metaphor for the European Union I was not sure where to go with this novel. Parks forwards the plot with some impressive word-smithery toward one great big "shocking" surprise (as the book cover's blurbs announce, I suppose to keep us reading) while telling us again and again what the novel is about. In the end, I don't know what all of our divorced, philandering, ex-pat English professor in Italy's stream of run-on consciousness amounted to. I never felt a thing for his characters, with the possible exception of Jerry's wife, who was really shit upon by her sex-obsessed ex. All Jerry seems to walk away with is the insight that:

There is generally no point and above all no merit in telling the truth...

The accomplishments of Parks's narrative leaves me with no doubt that he is smart and talented at putting together prose, but I found Europa jaded, sophomoric, and depressing. I suppose there are many people with lives like Jerry's; maybe they will like this novel better than I did.

On the edge of chaos and some kind of order (Books - Europa, The Great Journey, At Home in the Universe)

2011-08-21T07:56:00.013-04:00

I have the second of my comprehensive exams coming up. Although this has not resulted in reading nothing at all, it has meant that I have not finished anything. I guess I'm a less constant reader these days. Anyhoo, I thought I'd report on what's in the works.

Tim Parks's Europa (1997) concerns Jerry, a philandering middle-aged English professor and writer living in Milan, who considers the hash he has made of his life while he rides on a bus to the European Petition Committee to air grievances regarding his college's teaching contracts. With an international group of faculty and students who posture, who lecture, who flirt, drink, try to impress, to get into each others' pants, all while Dead Poet's Society plays on the bus video system in the background. It's written as a first-person monologue that switches from interior to exterior perspectives, a sort of string of pathetic parenthetical justifications for his screwed up marriage and loss of ambition, laced with bitter whining about "totties" who will and won't put out.

Ordinarily I detest novels with misogynist characters, set in academia (and that rules me out of quite a few). The fact that Tim Park's is himself an ex-pat Brit living in Milan translating Italian literature while teaching at a university adds an autobiographic layer that turns my impression of this book from a novel about misogynist characters to a misogynist novel, however, what I am finding impressive about the book is a) the ferocity of its voice: high-velocity sentences drive on and on in a rhythm that compels me to keep reading:

You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the driver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What's up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach's movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriage, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who cam to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story - told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Stations, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face, I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said, they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures.

and b) while this piece often feels grossly personal either about the narrator, the writer, or both, it also manages to be a novel about the European Union. The EU, as you probably already know, is a supra-national body of independent governments charged with negotiating political and economic decisions made for the good of all its members while at the same time maintaining their autonomy. It's an arrangement that is a lot like, well, this narrator's relationships - with his employment, his marriage, his lover, his daughter. That may make it sound trite, but actually, it is a book driven by ideas while not being a book of ideas. Jerry is mostly outraged because his ex-paramour is now having an affair with someone else. The bus (a subset of the institute where he teaches) is polyglot. Everyone speaks a different language, has different priorities, and in the end they are all out for themselves, so no satisfactory union (or at least no easy union) is possible, the book seems to imply.

I am finding it particularly interesting how the interior personal concerns of this novel interact with the exterior, geo-political - exemplified in the seating arrangements on the coach as each rider vies to pair off with a suitable other as their roommate in the hotel that evening. It is striking me as I read that, if this were an American novel, the personal would not interact with the political but rather with the pervasive metaphor of technology or, these days, the brain. It's a different zeitgeist 14 years later. Even as I find myself liking the characters less and less, I am compelled by how Parks makes a dialogue of these two realms, and so I read on.

Speaking of ex-pats, historian David McCullough's latest book The Greater Journey tells the story of mostly well-known American writers, painters, and doctors who came to Paris between 1830 and 1900, that is, post- Napoleon and pre-World War I, what drove them there, and how that visit contributed to what they became. As with his fantastic biography of John Adams, McCullough links places, personages, and ideas with seamless narrative that is a pleasure to read. The experience of the month-long oceanic voyage, the contrasting squalor and splendor of 1830s Paris, the cholera epidemic of 1831, are all vividly portrayed. I am finding the contrast of the shared political influences of France and the United States, what staunch allies we were, and the difference in what French and American culture value in living daily life striking, particularly in light of the recent Strauss-Kahn scandal.

Lastly, Stuart Kauffman is feeding me lots of beautiful narrative about how a certain degree of complexity in a system can perpetuate self-organization out of initial chaos, particularly in the context of biology. In his book At Home in the Universe, Kauffman offers these self-organizing principles as endemic to all kinds of systems - economies, cultures, microscopic molecules, and macroscopic universes. He speaks particularly of when systems, such a the molecular morass that makes up the biosphere, are balanced along the edge of order and chaos and is talented at turning complex mathematical ideas into visual metaphors:

This poised edge of chaos is a remarkable place. It is a close cousin of recent remarkable findings in a theory physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld called self-organized criticality. The central image here is of a sandpile on a table onto which sand is added at a constant slow rate. Eventually, the sand piles up and avalanches begin. What one finds are lots of small avalanches and few large ones. If the size of the avalanche is plotted on the familiar x-axis of a Cartesian coordinate system [that's a conventional graph with two axes], and the number of avalanches at that size are plotted on the y-axis, a curve is obtained. The result is a relationship called a power law. The particular shape of this curve, to which we shall return in later chapters, has the stunning implication that the same-sized grain of sand can unleash small or large avalanches. Although we can say that in general there will be more tiny avalanches and only a few big landslides (that is the nature of a power-law distribution), there is no way to tell whether a particular one will be insignificant or catastrophic. ... At this poised state between order and chaos, the players cannot fortell the unfolding consequences of their actions. While there is law in the distribution of avalanche sizes that arise in the posed state, there is unpredictablility in each individual case...

In other words, you are going to have to do some work to follow Kauffman's argument, he is writing at a fairly sophisticated level. But he combines complex mathematics and biology with a real appreciation for the beauty of the world, which phenomena in it can be predicted, as well as which cannot. I'm finding the reading well worth it and the concepts applicable to all sorts of observable phenomena.

Novelties X

2011-08-14T08:04:00.008-04:00

Well, you know what I'm reading, so what else is new?

Eating:

The farm where we get our vegetables has given us fresh beets several weeks in a row. I used to be afraid of them because they stained everything red - my pots, the sink, the sponge, the cutting board, my hands. Now I've found a super-easy way to prepare them. Take a pound of beets and cut off the ends. Scrub them with a brush under running water. Don't peel them, just stick them in a steamer over boiling water and steam them - 15 - 20 minutes for little ones, 40-50 minutes for big ones. They are done when it's easy to pierce them with a paring knife. While they're cooking, combine 1 finely chopped onion a bowl with several tablespoons white wine or sherry vinegar, a little salt, black pepper, and a tablespoon or so of pistachio oil (it's worth the trouble you may have finding it) maybe a sprig or two of fresh marjoram. Let this sit for an hour or more at room temp (covered). When the beets are done, let them cool enough to touch them. The peel will easily come off. Chop them into small wedges or matchsticks and combine them with your onion dressing. Voila. Serve with toast and a nice feta. (Adapted from Patricia Wells's The Provence Cookbook).

Drinking: Super cold tomato juice (one with as little salt as you can find, I've found a Bulgarian brand with only a pinch),some fresh lime juice squeezed in. Mmm.

Looking: Season 2 of In Treatment (the American version - it was created in Israel). This is an HBO series about a psychotherapist and his patients. Monday through Thursday are sessions with the patients and Fridays he goes to his own therapist. The therapist is played by the marvelous Gabriel Byrne and his therapist by Dianne Wiest. The patients are equally good - Allison Pill, Hope Davis and John Mahoney were in this season. It's a strongly made series from both a therapeutic and an aesthetic point of view and other people's problem look so much easier to solve than one's own!

Listening: If you haven't yet listened to Radio Lab they combine well-produced dramatic story-telling with science to create some very interesting pieces. I found this one on how the brain helps us navigate in space interesting, and this one was really touching.

Surfing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Learning: I finally got around to reading an article by Jerome Groopman in a February issue of The New Yorker about what might contribute to the apparent prevalence of food allergies.

This piece by Phillip Gourevitch about cyclers in Rawanda is also particularly good.

Jonah Lehrer teaches us that there is really no such thing as a spoiler. (Hat tip: Not Exactly Rocket Science)

And in the No... really department: Carl Zimmer's riff on Greenfieldism.

Denial as an art (Books - Angel by Elizabeth Taylor)

2011-08-11T06:36:00.003-04:00

I have heard about author Elizabeth Taylor from fellow readers for years now, but Angel is the first novel of her's I have read. Wow - what a smashing, hilarious, disturbed creation. Angel Deverell is fifteen when the story begins. Living in a drab English brewery town over a shop in Volunteer Street, she is the daughter of a widowed shopkeeper, who spends what little she has to send Angel to school. There, Angel writes an essay which her teacher considers vulgarly over-written and therefore, it is assumed, she could only have plagiarized it. It happens that telling romantic, overly ornate tales is Angel's talent. It wins her her only friends in school and provides an antidote to a life of poverty that promises the hope of only modest opportunities - in a secretarial position, or as the maid in a house of means, like her aunt who worked at Paradise House, serving The Lady and her daughter, also named Angelica.

Lax and torpid, she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day - with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps - beyond anything her aunt had ever suggested. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history-books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do; and there were portraits in the Municipal Art Gallery which would do; as would the cedar trees at school. As the house spread, those in it grew more shadowy. Angel herself took over Madam's jewel-box and Madam's bed and husband. Only that other Angelica balked her imagination, a maddening obstacle, with her fair looks and all her dogs and horses. Again and again, as Angel wandered in the galleries and gardens, the vision of that girl, who had no place in her dreams, rose up and impeded her. The dream itself, which was no idle matter, but a severe strain on her powers of concentration, would dissolve. Then she would open her eyes and stare down at her hands, spreading her fingers, turning her wrists.

At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face - not beautiful, she saw - in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.

However, telling fantastic tales creates nothing but trouble. Embittered by the demand that she adhere to the British,middle-class mantra - to know one's place - Angel she vows revenge on her nay-sayers by becoming a published author. And Gilbright & Brace become her ticket to a wildly successful career as a writer.

Gilbright & Brace had been divided, as their readers' reports had been. Willie Brace had worn his guts thin with laughing, he said. The Lady Irania was his favourite party-piece and he mocked at his partner's defence of it in his own version of Angel's language.

"Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury. Ask yourself - nay, go so far as to enquire of yourself - how do we stand by such brilliant balderdash and live, nay, not only live, but exist to..."

"You overdo these'nays'," said Theo Gilbright. "She does not."

"There's a 'nay' on every page. M'wife counted them. She took the even pages, I the odd. We were to pay a shilling to the other for each of our pages where there wasn't one, and not a piece of silver changed hands from first to last."

"So Elspeth read it, too?"

"Read it? She devoured and gobbled every iridescent word."

There always has been a reading audience for ridiculous romance with little basis in truth. Look at 'reality TV.' The trouble is, while Gilbert & Brace are ready to milk a joke for all its worth, Angel fails to see any humor in either her writing or her success.

Angel is a brilliant study in self-deception. It is wickedly satiric, and a wonderful psychological study of someone who escapes from the pain of the world with fantasy so successfully that she sees no reason to ever leave her hiding place. On the flip-side, however, Angel is also what happens when education amounts to nothing more than learning the minimal skills necessary to make one's living, rather than opening up the student to the possibilities the world has to offer. The adults in Angel's world were all bashed down to size by their circumstances, so they think it practical to curtail their children's dreams to protect them from disappointment. People will always dream. Repression of those dreams is a pity, but complete indulgence is equally disastrous. Angel is what happens when those extremes are all that is offered.

Standing apart while the parade marches on... (Books - Today by David Miller)

2011-08-05T16:53:00.004-04:00

David Miller's Today (another recommendation of John Self's) is set around the death of the author Joseph Conrad, but it is less about his death per se than about the inner life of those affected by it, most notably his younger son, John, and also his typist, Lilian. Although the novel is sharply focused on this one event and brief in its duration, Miller's writing has an old fashioned thoroughness.

Lilian Hallowes was an unhurried, fastidious woman in her mid-fifties who was used to doing what she had been told to do. For this reason amongst others, she was held in high regard. Few noticed her; she was shrouded from most of them by a shawl of gossip, which told all of them nothing. She was happy not to be known.

The novel also offers a contrasting modernist quality - mixing event with inner life in a seamless flow of narrative that evocative of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room or To The Lighthouse. It was the quality of the novel I found most involving and satisfying.

John is the book's focus because he is changed most by JC's death. Everyone is touched in their way, but he is isolated in a spotlight, his thoughts become arias, and he is ennobled, somehow, moving from childhood to adulthood through his experience of this event.

After the dinner plates had been cleared, Curle said he was going up to see Jessie and Joan followed him upstairs, to check on the baby. Borys stood and walked from the table to the door that led to the small orchard. The sky was bruised with darkening blue, more rain on the way. He glanced behind him and John looked up.

'Jackilo,' he said, quietly, 'come outside with me.'

For the last time in his life John did as his brother told him and stood, following him...

Miller's all-knowing pronouncements match oddly, but effectively with a knack he has for capturing the incongruity of moments that one knows are life-changing as one is in them.

... The garden was fresh, lush, basking in the after-dawn. It smelled of green. He looked down the orchard to the yew hedge, closing the door behind him, his palm still on the handle the grass all fo a sudden shockingly there between his toes. In the garden he saw runner beans and their odd flowers beside them, like starfish dried in the sun, only thinner. My father is to be buried this afternoon.

John stood still by the kitchen table for a while, and then stood, mindlessly tidying the rest of their breakfast things for Audrey. When he opened the door to the store supboard to replace the butter, he looked inside and walked towards the shelves. He touched a jar and looked at the wooden shelf. There, in his father's hand, he saw a label stating Redcurrant Jelly, '22 and in that instant John felt his eyes begin to water again, an involuntary thing, and his whole body seemed as though it had been sliced, and shredded, cut down.

These passages have a very experiential, I would go as far as to say, autobiographical, feel to them. It is certainly John's point of view with whom Miller is most intimate and these are the segments of this novel that feel most real. Least fussed over. That being said, loss is a nearly universal experience and Miller's displays his talent in this ability to so aptly catch its current in a way that resonates. The entire action of the novel, if there is action to be had, could be summed up in this paragraph.

John was there in the world, and the world was continuing, the whole parade was going on: but he was not part of it - none of them were part of it. They all remained inept, in a bubble of respect.

If that doesn't describe mourning, I don't know what does.

The sinister lure of complacency (Books - All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills)

2011-07-31T14:07:00.004-04:00

When I finished Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate last week, I just couldn't find fiction that would satisfy. I was more drawn to reading non-fiction, and did take a chunk out of Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, a fascinating book on the emergent properties of complex systems, but before I go to sleep what I really like to read is fiction. I started both Solo by Rana Dasgupta and The Lessons by Naomi Alderman, but neither hit the spot. Then All Quiet on the Orient Express arrived in the mail. I had ordered it a few weeks back on the recommendation of John Self. Imagine, if you can, the hapless, deadpan quality of Buster Keaton in the guise of a modern-day, well not a slacker exactly, since our narrator can be quite industrious, but keenly passive young unattached male with motorcycle. A go-where-the-wind-blows kind of personality. Happy to eat baked beans from a can for every meal seven days per week. Happy to drink at the only pub in town. Happy with ale if it is on tap. Happy with lager if it's not. Then put him into one of Harold Pinter's plays, in which anything from a birthday party to reminiscences with old chums can take on threatening overtones, and you might begin to approximate the strange, delightfully entertaining world Magnus Mills conjures up in his 1999 novel. It all starts rather innocently.

He opened the palm of his hand and for the first time I noticed he was holding a wooden tent peg.
'This yours?' he asked.
'No,' I said. 'Mine are all metal ones.'
'Do you want it? You can have it as a spare if you like.'
'Is it nobody else's?'
'There's no one else left,' he said. 'They've all gone.'
I glanced around the field. 'Oh yes, you're right. Shame really.'
'One speck of rain and they all flee. Then the sun comes back and they miss it.'
'That's always the way, isn't it?'
'Almost always. Do you want this then?'
'OK,' I said, taking the peg. 'Thanks.'
'Would you like to pay some rent?'
'Oh yes. How much do I owe you?'
He adopted a businesslike smile. 'It's a pound a night.'
'That's six pounds so far then.'
'If you've been here six nights, yes.'
'Right.' I took a five-pound note from my back pocket and handed it over, and then began fishing for some coins.
'That's quite expensive really, isn't it?' he remarked. 'Just for you, your tent and your motorbike.'
'Seems alright to me,' I replied.
'I ought to be giving you a bit of discount if you're staying another week.'
'A pound a night's fine.' I said, giving him the balance.
'Alright then,' he said. 'That's grand.'
Now that the transaction was over I expected him to make his excuses and move on, but after he'd taken the money he replanted his feet and looked up at the sky.
'On holiday, are you?' he asked.
'Not really,' I said. 'Well, sort of.'
He smiled again. 'Which?'
'Well, I'm between things at the present. I've been working all summer to save some money so I can go East during the winter.'
'You mean the east coast?'
'Oh, no,' I said. 'Sorry. Abroad East. You know, Turkey, Persia, and then overland to India.'
"I see,' he said, nodding towards my bike. 'You'll be going on that, will you?'
'Probably not, actually,' I replied. 'There's a train you can catch a good part of the way.'
'Is there now? Well, that's handy, isn't it?'
'Yes, I suppose it is.'
He looked at my tent. 'So what brings you to this part of the country then?'
'Well,' I said. 'I've always fancied seeing the lakes, so I thought I'd have a couple of weeks here first.'
'And do you like it so far?'
'What I've seen, yeah.'
'That's good. You going out today?'
'Not sure what I'll be doing really.'
'We've noticed you go out most days.'
'Have you?'
'Yes, we don't miss much from our window.'

In a way I wanted to throttle our guileless narrator as his watchful host, Mr. Parker, engages him, first for one odd job, then for another, pulling him further and further from his Eastern excursion. It becomes evident, in fact, that Mr. Parker, though he says little and pays nothing, has plans for our narrator and that this is not the first visitor he has so engaged. Despite the mundanity of the dialogue and the action, I got a sinister sense that our man was being manipulated like a puppet, loosing what little will he had arrived with. This lends this brief novel its comedy and an unlikely narrative drive.

Our narrator observes the crowd in the local pub early in the book.

Both junior barmen appeared to be roughly the same age as me, and I felt an affinity with the pair of them. I was unable to tell, however, whether they were permanently attached to the Packhorse. They each seemed the type who would probably have been expected to do something 'better' than just work in a pub, and I liked to imagine they were only doing this until something else turned up. The idea of just staying here for every, and never moving on, seemed quite unthinkable.

But then isn't this just like so many lives? Should have done better, but end up doing a job just for one week, and then the next, and then the next, until one looks back thirty years later and asks - how did this become my life? I was always meant to do something better. In this way, Mr. Parker becomes Nick Shadow to our narrator's Tom Rakewell, only Tom is drawn not to the wild pleasures of London here, but ensnared by a quiet village where everyone knows everyone's business, and every one lives off credit from everyone else. I certainly enjoyed the comedy of All Quiet on the Orient Express but along with the uncomfortable laughter, there is a critique of complacency in Magnus Mill's wry observations, and I enjoyed that most of all.

I have a little list... (Lists - The Sunday Times 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945)

2011-07-30T07:12:00.006-04:00

This this has been going around like a bad summer cold - everyone has had it: BooksPlease, Books and Bicycles, My Porch... It’s from the Sunday Times - The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945. Since I consider myself a strong appreciator of British lit, let's see how many I have read. Red numbers indicate that I have, black that I haven't.

1. Philip Larkin - This is not starting off well. No, he is a hole in my poetry reading
2. George Orwell - Animal Farm and 1984
3. William Golding - Lord of the Flies
4. Ted Hughes - Oh yes. His translation of The Orestia is my favorite by far
5. Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, the Canopus in Argus series
6. J. R. R. Tolkien – I have not been able to get through a single book of his and I have tried
7. V. S. Naipaul - no.
8. Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
9. Kingsley Amis - not a thing
10. Angela Carter - no.
11. C. S. Lewis - the Narnia books, The Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces
12. Iris Murdoch - Nearly everything. She is smashing
13. Salman Rushdie - He is another one I have tried and not succeeded with
14. Ian Fleming - No, but I have seen the movies
15. Jan Morris - No.
16. Roald Dahl - Yes.
17. Anthony Burgess - No.
18. Mervyn Peake - I haven't read Gormenghast, but I saw the miniseries
19. Martin Amis - I have tried and find him obnoxious.
20. Anthony Powell - I consider A Dance to the Music of Time one of those projects I have to get to
21. Alan Sillitoe - No.
22. John Le Carré - several
23. Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop, The Blue Flower, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels
24. Philippa Pearce - never heard of her
25. Barbara Pym - no
26. Beryl Bainbridge - No, but I'd like to
27. J. G. Ballard - No
28. Alan Garner - The Owl Service.
29. Alasdair Gray - No
30. John Fowles - The Magus
31. Derek Walcott - I saw his adaptation of The Odyssey on stage and have read Omeros
32.Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go, Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans
33. Anita Brookner - Yes, The Debut, A Closed Eye
34. A. S. Byatt - The Children’s Book, The Game, Posession, Babel Tower
35. Ian McEwan - Saturday, Atonement, The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam
36. Geoffrey Hill - No
37. Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia, Gabriel's Gift, and I have seen his films of My Beautiful Landrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
38. Iain Banks - The Business is sitting on the shelf
39. George Mackay Brown - never have
40. A. J. P. Taylor - No.
41. Isaiah Berlin - One essay, I don't remember the title
42. J. K. Rowling - Read em all
43. Philip Pullman - Excellent
44. Julian Barnes - No
45. Colin Thubron - Among The Russians
46. Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines
47. Alice Oswald - No
48. Benjamin Zephaniah - Never have, he's quite prolific, isn't he
49. Rosemary Sutcliff - No
50. Michael Moorcock - wow, what an output, but no

That's 23 out of 50. Not bad, but I clearly have some work to do. And I just wouldn't be playing the list game without bitching at the end about who I think is missing. Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, John Betejman, D.M. Thomas, Daphne DuMaurier, P.D. James, Elizabeth Bowen, Harold Pinter, Howard Barker, Olivia Manning, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Salway, Margaret Drabble, Charles Lambert, Allan Hollinghurst, Caryl Churchill, J. B. Priestley, and Zadie Smith could easily have replaced J.K. Rowling on my list, but having just 50 spaces makes the job difficult and it is evident that The Sunday Times wanted to be inclusive of a variety of writing and perspectives. How did you do?

A world not merely divided into good souls and sad cases (Books - A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel)

2011-07-25T20:26:00.004-04:00

One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.

The woman Joan was sixty years old, and wore a polyester dress from a charity shop. A housewifely type, she had chosen to drip her blood into the kitchen sink. When Kit touched her on the elbow, she threw down the knife on to the draining board and attempted with her good hand to cover Kit's eyes.

Kit, as the prelude of A Change of Climate concludes, lives in a world in which people are divided into good souls and sad cases. The strength of Hilary Mantel's 1994 novel is that she is not one of the people to so divide the world. This novel is political and domestic, it is ruthless and tender, but it is never preachy. It is comfortable with its contradictions. Kit is one of three children of Ralph and Anna, a Norfolk couple who, having started their lives as missionaries in South Africa, dedicate themselves to social work as employment for their adult lives. Ralph and Anna live their mission, taking runaways and addicts into their home, never having enough money for a functional car or new clothing for their children. They are people of admirable conviction, but that makes them far from perfect, and their cause is so just that they can use it to forget past wrongs. If they devote themselves fully to the hardships of others, perhaps they will never have to think of the burdens they bear themselves. This makes for complex lives for both themselves and their children.

During the novel's action, a local child is kidnapped and Julian, another of Anna and Ralph's children, decides he will accompany his younger sister everywhere in order to protect her.

Anna looked up. 'And will you be her escort for life, Julian? Thirteen-year-olds are at risk, but then so are eighteen-year-olds. So are forty-year-olds. You hear of battered grannies, don't you?'

How much can we do for others? And who, really, are we doing it for? I'm afraid all this emphasis on the message of A Change of Climate makes the book sound like a real downer, but it's not. It's humorous, suspenseful, and touching, but never maudlin. There is hardly a sentence that isn't exquisitely crafted. Take the opening sequence excerpted above. Not merely does it open the novel with a bang. In its first sentence Mantel is creating a rich sensoral envelop of experience - contrasting the red of blood with the white of milk. The world weary liquid with the liquid of childhood innocence. In another example, Mantel tells us that Ralph is not in the habit of drinking alcohol.

Alcohol, for Ralph, was a medicinal substnace only. Brandy might be taken for colic, when other remedies had failed. Hot whisky and lemon might be taken for colds, for Ralph recognized that people with colds need cheering up, and he was all for cheerfulness. But drink as social unction was something that had never been part of his life. His parents did not drink, and he had never freed himself from his parents.

What a character observation. Like a zinger interpretation from a really great psychotherapist, summed up in a single sentence. These are the details that steer the subject matter of the politics of apartheid, adultery, and loss of faith away from diatribe. The richly drawn human beings in this novel embody their complex moral conundrum rather than serve as the mouthpiece for it, rending Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate a work of art. I really thought this novel stunning. Compassionate, tense, meaningful, and well-crafted, but don't fear for all this, that you won't also then be entertained.

Solving the mystery of one's self (Books - The Last Letter From Your Lover by Jojo Moyes)

2011-07-23T07:55:00.003-04:00

From Jojo Moyes, an English journalist, comes The Last Letter from Your Lover inspired, she says, by watching girls trying to interpret a text message from a boy reading 'Later X.' Was he saying 'I'll call later' or 'Later, never?' So Moyes, mourning the old fashioned love letter, placed an advertisment in the newspaper asking for real-life kiss-off letters. These became the creative fuel for this smart romance with a bit of mystery. I was fearing pure chick-lit, a sort-of You've Got Mail predictability, but The Last Letter offers much more than that. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm grateful to Viking Press for my advance copy.

Jennifer Sterling, the perfectly-put-together wife of a wealthy industrialist, begins a sort of romance with someone whom she now knows only as B. This is because a car accident has rendered her without any memory of the time preceding it, something known as retrograde amnesia - not uncommon with a serious head injury. Everyone around her is curiously cagey about the exact events of the accident, and Jennifer can recall nothing - not how she dressed, not the name of her housekeeper, nor how she formerly behaved toward her, nor the nickname she had for her husband. Nada. Love letters begin turning up in the dresser drawers she is told are her's and in books that she finds on her shelves. This device isn't just a cute way to jazz up a romance, Moyes has created with it a woman whose whole life is literally an utter mystery to herself. She has found a way to externalize this experience many people have of waking up and wonder just how they ended up with the kind of life they did.

It is interesting that Jennifer awakes with so little memory of the details of her life, but with such a clear sense of who she feels like. That sense we might call character. I haven't yet experienced a patient who becomes suddenly amnestic, so I don't know what that can be like, but as Jennifer discovers the flawless, socially calculating creature of leisure she was, she seems to despise this former self. And as the love letters turn up, she is determined to know who B was and what they felt for each other. Moyes also creates with this device someone who gets the chance to decide what kind of person they will be.

The vestiges of Jennifer's former life are only available to her by report, or traceable in the clues left in the clothing and posessions that she knows to be her's, but only because they can be found in her closet or her drawers. Now she can make a choice. Will she re-inhabit her old role, learning her lines and her behavior from the clues left behind? Or will she follow the niggling suspicion that these don't truly belong to the person she feels like and chose a new road? The chapters of the first half of the novel flip back and forth between pre- and post-accident so that we uncover the truth slowly. Moyes's has a good feel for 1960s detail and she can write a scene with dialogue with great wit and verisimilitude:

Her hair fell from her head like paint from a pot, in a sheet of silky blond ripples that ended just above her shoulders. Not his normal type. He liked less conventionally pretty women, those with a hint of something darker, whose charms were less obvious to the eye. "Aren't you drinking?"

He looked at his glass. "I'm not really meant to."

"Wife's orders?"

"Ex-wife," he corrected. "And no, doctor's"

"So you really did find last night unbearable."

He shrugged. "I don't spend much time in society."

"An accidental tourist."

"I admit it. I find armed conflict a less daunting prospect."

Her smile, when it came this time, was slow and mischievous. "So you're William Boot," she said. "Our of your depth in the war zone of Riviera society."

"Boot..." At the mention of Evelyn Waugh's hapless fictional character, he found himself smiling properly for the first time that day. "I suppose you could legitimately have said much worse."

A woman entered the restaurant, clutching a button-eyed dog to her vast bosom. She walked through the tables with a kind of weary determination, as if she could allow herself to focus on nothing but where she was headed. When she sat down at an empty table, a few seats away from them, it was with a little sigh of relief. She placed the dog on the floor, where it stood, its tail clamped between its legs, trembling.

"So, Mrs. Stirling - "

"Jennifer."

"Jennifer. Tell me about yourself," he said, leaning forward over the table.

"You're meant to be telling me. Showing me, in fact."

"What?"

"That you're not a complete ass. I do believe you gave yourself half an hour."

"Ah. How long have I got left?"

She checked her watch. "About nine minutes."

Literary references, sexual frisson, and then that lady with her dog strides through the room. Good writing. Writing you could transfer right to the screen, and I don't mean that the book is necessarily angling for that. But when Moyes writes dialogue, it is fresh and clever and feels like it would fall from the mouths of the characters with whom we have been made acquainted. Much more happens in the 1960s half of the book, but Moyes structures what would otherwise be a romance in such a way that there is a good deal of page-turning pressure. This reader wanted to know what would happen next, so if you're drawn to this kind of story, I don't want to spoil the fun of it for you.

Cut to 2003, Ellie, a contemporary journalist with work problems, relationship problems, let's just say she's lost the sense of who she is too, though not because of amnesia, discovers one of the love letters and is driven to know who the players were and, like us, what the heck happened. This more-or-less contemporary section of the book also has a very good sense of the social zeitgeist and about the machinations some of us go through to keep our calendars full but our lives empty.

Moyes also poses a rather topical question - if a hungry journalist gains possession of private love letters which would be the fodder for a brilliant story that could save her life, or her career anyway, should she go to press with it or protect the privacy of innocent people? Given the American release of this novel about 10 days ago, could the Murdoch hacking scandal make it any more topical? In fact, one of the reasons that Moyes's book is more than a light romance is because of the way questions of responsibility toward others keeps arising. In the realm of personal relationships, in the realm of business, and in the business of writing and reporting, the question of whether one should do what is best for oneself or whether one should consider the consequences of that choice for others becomes a refrain. It is this, Moyes's writing chops, and her talent for capturing the feel of a certain time and place, that make what would otherwise be a page-turning romance into more sophisticated fare. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone optioned it for a film.

A dance of opposites to the music of repressed passions (Books - A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner)

2011-07-16T08:56:00.004-04:00

I'm really pleased that Thomas and Simon gave me an excuse to read another of Anita Brookner's novels. In a certain way A Closed Eye (1991) is the kind of story I expect from Brookner: a repressed English woman becomes aware that she is not living her live fully, she meets opportunities to change that, and she reflects on it (I won't say whether she does change it or not). What is notable about the two Brookner books is I have read is, given this formula, they are not banal but rather involving and surprising. Here the devil is in the details.

Harriet, has a strawberry mark on her face, but is born to outgoing parents, determined to enjoy life.

They were so young, so dashing, that Harriet's birth passed almost unnoticed. Except, 'Oh, Lord,' said Merle, when shown the baby. 'It may fade as she gets older,' said the nurse, pulling the shawl a little tighter round that baby's face, where the red mark appeared so incongruous beneath the wise innocent eyes. Merle felt for her, as well as love, a kind of reluctant pity, almost a distaste. She was glad to leave the child with her nurse and to put on the little black dress, the fur cape, and the cocktail hat to go off to her young husband, equally dashing in his air force uniform, with the officer's cap pushed back from his forehead, and the white silk scarf draped carelessly round his neck. How they drank! How they danced!

And so, as if in response, Harriet grows up retiring where they are spirited, practical where they are frivolous. She makes three friends: Tessa, Pamela, and Mary, but assumes their friendship is almost a form of pity. She spends evenings reading. She goes to secretarial school and takes pleasure in a day's typing. She is introduced to a contemporary of her father's - Freddie. They marry. Her mother, Merle, worries that Freddie is too old. Her thoughts sing a Brooknerian tune:

Her own marriage, which had begun so rapturously, had ended in disappointment. Privately, she wondered if all women were disappointed, and concluded that this was probably the case but was never admitted. She felt better when she had managed to persuade herself of the truth of this. The prospect of spending money, after the years of careful parsimony, cheered her considerably, and in a while she forgot about Harriet, for the furnishing of the new flat made her feel as if she were the heroine of an adventure, a fresh start, while her daughter, who looked on solemnly and without comment, seemed oddly static, as thought the roles were reversed and she were now the adult. Sometimes Merle hid the prices on the articles she now bought so feverishly, as if Harriet might disapprove and order her to return them to the shop.

It is Tessa "tall and fair and commanding" of whom she is almost enamored. Tessa marries Jack Peckham, a handsome man who travels the world, wears his hair long, and his beard unshaven. It is Jack whom awakens in Harriet desire for something outside the bounds of her stoic existence.

When Harriet first saw Jack Peckham she put up her hand, instinctively, to shield her face. With no one else had she ever done this. The gesture was symbolic, as if she were hiding more than her face, as if she were hiding herself, for she recognized in him the stranger of her dreams, and in the light of day did not wish to be found.

Brookner is brilliant at these sort of gestures. It like something an actor would discover in playing a character, or a painter would capture. It's the moment of a person distilled into a single movement, which Brookner then revisits as a kind of refrain. It is the pleasure of the book to read what Harriet does regarding Jack, but how it functions in the novel's progress, I can tell you without a spoiler. It slaps Harriet into the arena of the living. It exposes her to the risk of, as Brookner so bluntly puts it "succumbing to self-knowledge."

This is a novel of comparisons. Comparison of Harriet to her parents, to Tessa, and then when Tessa has a daughter - Lizzie - and Harriet has Imogen - the next generation seems to repeat it, only with ironic variation. Lizzie becomes the reclusive reader - socially ill-at-ease, and Imogen selfish, willful, indulged, and domineering. Lizzie, in fact, becomes a foil of Harriet, but she is not trapped by the social conventions of the 1950s and doesn't have to marry. She is determined, she awkwardly but self-possessedly informs Freddy when still a teenager, to become a writer.

'But not straight away, not until I'm old.' 'How old?' Harriet had persisted. 'Forty,' was the answer. Freddie, behind a newspaper, had laughed; he was already over seventy. But Harriet had taken her seriously. 'You will have to travel, I suppose, and have lots of interesting experiences.' 'Oh, no,' Lizzie had said. 'It will all come out of my head.' That was all that she would say.

Here is a different version of whom Harriet could have become. Someone who knows herself and finds a purpose for her quietness, her desire to remain apart, her love of books, and her talent to observe. I suppose it's inevitable that, in this passage, she becomes the representative of Brookner herself. The writer who chronicles reclusive bookish women and who doesn't start writing until mid-life. Although, Lizzie tells us, her work will be invented - so we shouldn't apply her story too literally.

This book, like its subject, has a quiet and intelligent surface, beneath which the hungers of life have been kept at bay by a combination of some innocence and also subtle self-deception - the 'closed eye' referred to in the title, and borrowed from Henry James, whose writing many think Brookner's evokes. In A Closed Eye these hungers are brought to a boil. The novel's elegance is in the structure of opposites Brookner constructs - bold and shy, indulgent and austere - these become partners in a dance of gains and losses. A dance to the music of repressed passions. Better a life that is modest, considerate, and half-lived, or one careless of consequences, but where one strides boldly, unafraid of asking and of taking? Or is there a third route? One of patient observation, satisfying work, and pleasures taken in the solitary company of one's imagination? But then, what of love?

Now check out the rest of the posts over at the International Anita Brookner Day website.

The courage to question what we live for (Books - Appassionata by Eva Hoffman)

2011-07-10T08:00:00.003-04:00

I read Eva Hoffman's thoughtful novel Appassionata while on my trip. It concerns Isabel Merton, a concert pianist, whose encounter with Anzor a passionate Chechen exile, leads her to question her life as an artist, one tuned to suit her needs for temperature control, practice on world-class instruments, solitary time before curtain in which she cultivates vulnerability - one in which seriousness is served by intense self-focus and in which such self-focus produces results that music lovers the world over value deeply.

She's free, free as a woman has ever been. Freedom is the element through which she moves, and she peers into it as into a milky fog, trying to discern what she is moving toward, what she so restlessly, so keenly desires. And yet maybe the man is right, maybe there's something hard about her life, in its deluxe later-capitalist way. She thinks of the stages she will have to cross before reaching the piano, the interviews, she'll have to give, the dinners she's promised to attend. Bourgeois heroism is what Peter calls it, the acrobatics of being in so many places practically at once, and doing so many amazing things in one day, and then conversing over dinner with unflagging energy. She'll have to be on the qui vive, it is expected. You must never be tired. You Must Love Your Life.

Although there are a few key events, this book's conflicts and action are largely internal. Anzor is indeed the mirror image of Isabel:

"...my country has been very hurt. Very damaged." An odd expression crosses his face, a setting of the jaw, a hooding of the eyes, as if to fend off vulnerability, or a private anger..."Not that I didn't want to leave when I was young," he resumes. "Or at least to travel. I felt so...restricted. To tell you the truth, I was almost excited when I was forced to leave. I was going to see the world."

"And Now?" she asks.

"Now I've seen it," he says tersely. "Now I think about my country. My mission."

The contrast couldn't be clearer, in fact, I sometimes found the clarity a bit pedantic. Isabel was richly drawn, and her combination of qualities fully believable, but I found Anzor somewhat illustrative of a position taken to fuel the conflict of this story. But Hoffman evokes their relationship with tenderness as well as tension and what she really accomplishes beautifully in this story, and this is key, is making Isabel's work serious and valuable so that her conflict becomes our own.

Hoffman has big talent for writing characters with powerfully motivating interior engines (even when they are externally quiet, as is true of Isabel's ex - Peter). She seems to me less precise with the details of her diction. Either she has a taste for or does not police her use of cliche:

Music which was nothing but shaped yearning, fierceness, lament, praise, lust. Blood, sweat and tears.

"But that music expresses our very own, special character, " he asserts, his eyes flashing. Yes, his eyes flash.

So, okay, perhaps she is conscious of her use of cliche - but its mustiness and imprecision occasionally pulled me out of this otherwise erudite and involving story.

Hoffman pits Isabel's internal struggle against the artistry of two other musicians, one her mentor, Wolfe, whose journals she reads throughout the course of the story, and the other a fellow disciple of Wolfe, Jane Robbins. In Jane we find the artistic opposite of Isabel, carefree where Isabel is careful, naive where Isabel is sophisticated, enthusiastic where Isabel is restrained. The passages in the journal are marvelous ventriloquism - the spirit of the opinionated charismatic guru artist is pitch-perfect , and some of the entries are downright hilarious.

A lesson with the cellist today. Jane Robbins, Admit it, old man, these young women pose a challenge to you. They vex your critical criteria. This one is particularly provoking. She burst into the studio almost rudely, with a wide white-toothed smile. Her breasts were bouncing freely underneath her blouse. There is something aggravating about the way she picks up her bow, as if it were a baseball bat. when I pointed this out, she informed me that she is "a very physical person," and has played not only baseball but basketball and girls' hockey in high school. She would have gone on without any self-consciousness, had I not interrputed. As far as I can tell, she has no inhibitions. She is like a big happy child who hasn't yet learned it may not be allowed to do everything it wants. She hurtled through the first movement of the Dvorak as if on a roller coaster, from one burst of excitement to another. Of course, it is an old warhorse and there was undeniable energy in her playing. But nothing else. No restraint, no tension, no wistfulness. Just this unrestrained...enthusiasm...She plays as if milking an ever-compliant cow.

Wonderful writing. What Hofmann creates in interleaving the journal entries about Isabel's artistic education, with this story about her as a mature artist, is multiple layers of awareness about the same person which resonate with each other in a way that evokes the harmonies and dissonances of a musical composition. I will not tell you whether the central tension of the novel is resolved, the pleasure is in accompanying Isabel on her struggle and finding out. Appassionata probes the contexts of art, and history - among the strong forces that motivate what we live for - and presents in Isabel a courageous character, in that she is willing to question mid-career why she does what she does and whether it is meaningful. A rich and entertaining read.

Magic and a case of the cutesie-wootsies (Books - The Chronicles of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones)

2011-07-09T08:47:00.001-04:00

Every so often I find it fun to dip into a the ya fantasy genre, and so Diana Wynne Jones's The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, including both Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, came with me on my trip. They were both written in the tried and true mold - insecure child is left parentless, through his hardships discovers he has magical powers which makes he strong although he learns it is also a burden, wars are fought and won... you know, the usual. These serve as useful metaphors to the trials of what it feels like to be a child without being to directly preechy.

Gwendolyn gave vent to her fury in her room after dinner. She jumped on her bed and threw cushions about, screaming. Cat stood prudently back against the wall waiting for her to finish. But Gwendolyn did not finish until she had pledged herself to a campaign against Chrestomanci.

Gwendolyn and Cat are the parentless children, he's the insecure one and she become the force to be reckoned with. He's a cat, so he has nine lives, there end up being parallel universes, all interesting plot ideas to be sure. The trouble for my money is that Cat was blandly passive and unsure and Gwendolyn was such a cliched bad witch/tantrumy child that I remained unconvinced of his uncertainty or her evil. Had her anger been convincing, I could have gotten caught up in the story but the cleaned-up, televisiony exaggeration of emotions and twee style of narration left me lightly entertained but uninvolved. I'm not sure what a genuine kid would think about it. They might have a grand time, but this book left me wondering why so many writers for children pander to them. It is possible to write stories kids want to read that treat them intelligently - Sonia Hartnett is a whiz at it.

Recent acquisitions department

2011-07-04T08:08:00.012-04:00

Our stay in London included the addition of a few new goodies I thought I'd share. They were acquired at the personable Primrose Hill Books, a recommendation of Thomas's, and a good one - thanks Thomas! We chose to walk to get there, which took us from the Wellcome Collection's excellent exhibit on Dirt (yes, Dirt. We've found this venue on the Euston Road well worth a visit on our last two trips to London), through Camden which has a lively High Street, past the canal adjacent to the London Zoo, and then up Regent's Park Road which turns into Primrose Hill's main drag. This has the feel of a charming village street within a city (something like New York's Park Slope), with abundant shops and restaurants, the book shop, and places to buy things for a picnic if you want to walk up the hill and take in the well-known view of London.

After forty minutes or so in the shop, I had narrowed down my take to:

I had heard of author Rosamond Lehmann but have never read anything of hers and was not familiar with this novel, The Ballad and the Source. It seems to be a dark gothic myth of revenge written during World War II. If it were a film, it looks more like Jean Cocteau would make it than Hitchcock. I may need for the weather to turn cold again before I read this one.

Naomi Alderman's The Lessons has the evil, seductive feel of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, only set in Oxford rather than a small American college. I had not heard of this novel when it was released. She quotes Cavafy in the epigraph, so it can't be all that bad. It looks like it could be an addictive read and I'm looking forward to one or two of those this summer.

I love Hilary Mantel's writing and A Change of Climate looks like it might be challenging. It concerns a couple who were missionaries in Africa and who begin to adopt orphans as a way not to see the crises going on in their own family. At least that's what I gather from the blurb.

A retired teacher tries to get rid of an evil investor who has built an ugly new
development in her village. Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett looks as if it pits the eccentric individual against homogenous corporate greed, I hope to good effect.

The drudgery of field science reveals abundant evidence for the mechanisms of evolution (Books - The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner)

2011-07-03T08:09:00.005-04:00

We've been back from vacation for almost a week but it has taken me until now to get back to writing. Our trip to the Dordogne, Paris, London, and Sussex allowed for far less reading than is typical of my vacations, but we did see The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre in London, Die Meistersinger and L'Elisir D'Amore at Glyndebourne, and saw a wonderful new 3-D documentary film by Wim Wenders about the late choreographer Pina Bausch called Pina which I recommend looking out for. In addition, we drank some terrific wine, ate splendidly, saw some impressive chateaux - all in all, a lovely time.

Amidst all this, I finally had time to finish Jonathan Weiner's splendid The Beak of the Finch - a rich book detailing the work that evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have done on the Galapagos Islands. They have observed Darwin's theory of natural selection play out again and again and, in some cases, even observed how new species evolve, by watching the islands' famous finches.

It is the twenty-fifth of January, 1991. There are four hundred finches on the island at this moment, and the Grants know every one of the birds on sight, the way shepherds can tell every sheep in their flocks. In other years there have been more than a thousand finches on Daphne Major, and Peter and Rosemary could still recognize each one. The lock was down to three hundred once. The number is falling toward that now. The birds have gotten less than a fifth of an inch of rain the the last forty-four months: in 1,320 days, 5 millimeters of rain.

The Grants, and the Grants' young daughters, and a long line of assistants, keep coming back to this desert island like sentries on a watch. They have been observing Daphne Major for almost two decades, or about twenty generations of finches.

Aside from the pleasure of his lucid writing, Weiner elucidates the development of Darwin's own thinking as well as integrating his original work with that of contemporary scientists observing the forces of evolution in action. This book makes plain the great theory's relevance to the natural world in which we live and also reveals the unbelievable drudgery of painstaking observational field work. Holy cow. Months upon successive months on a small hot island of rock and guano, measuring finch beaks and seeds per square meter of island.

Peter Grant combined the measurements of seed size and seed hardness and rated each kind of birdseed as the finches might themselves, in a sort of Struggle Index. The small soft ones of Portulaca score lowest on this index, only 0.35. The big hard seeds of Cordia lutea score highest, almost 14. Any of the finches can handle Portulaca in its beak, but very few are up to Cordia.

The Grant team also kept a census of the numbers of each kind of seed on the lava. To do this objectively they used a random-number table to select a single plot of lava, one meter square, somewhere in each grid. Then they counter every single fruit and seed they could find on that square of lava, whether it was dangling from the top of a cactus tree or lying in the middle of a cactus patch. Next they chose a much smaller plot within that square meter, again at random, and they sifted the hot cindery soil, collecting every fruit and every seed they found. Finally they withdrew to their tents and spread out their trophies on white trays to count one by one. And they repeated the whole routine fifty times...

"People think fieldwork is so romantic," Boag says, "but a lot of it is real slog. This was absolutely the worst."

Seed hardness and beak size are important because, in certain environmental situations the length of a beak determines how much food a finch can access to get it through a dry season and a miniscule difference in size is literally the difference between living and dying in these cases. As Weiner so emphatically puts it:

...the birds were not simply magnified by the drought: they were reformed and revised. They were changed by their dead. Their beaks were carved by their losses.

But I have to say, my skin shrivels up just thinking about the work they did. Then again, the Grants might think the same of my measuring the brainwaves of 6 year old children. Weiner conveys the passion the Grants have about their data and the great satisfaction of seeing such painstaking collection and patient calculation yield a story, otherwise their slog would be the reader's as well.

The isolated Galapagos archipelago precipitated Darwin's theory because they hosted many unique creatures that clearly bore a resemblance to relatives on the South American mainland and a fossil record of extinct relatives of those living forms existed

to help reveal a Law of succession that links the living to the dead, the same law that links the fossils of one stratum of rock to the fossils in the strata below...

"It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified"

Of course, the story of Darwin's monumental deduction has been told again and again. What is different about Weiner's book is that he observes contemporary scientists, the Grants, as well as their students, many of whom develop into credible scientists in their own right, collect the evidence needed to confirm the original hypotheses. The argument has been made time and again against evolution that the workings of natural selection and sexual selection cannot be observed, that the processes necessarily takes thousands of years and so one is left only being able to infer it from the trail of fossils left behind, as Darw.in did. They also argue that it is impossible to make quantitative predictions based on data in nature, i.e., "proof" is not possible. However, both of these statements are incorrect. The lifespan of many species is short enough to observe the infinitesimal changing of the frequency of a particular feature across a species in response to both the physical characteristics of the environment they inhabit and the amount of competition they face from similar other creatures, and how these small variations can diverge into new species under certain conditions. This is exactly what the Grants's work with finches as well as Endler's with guppies reveals. Furthermore, the Grants have successfully made quantitative predictions based on their work, and over time have seen them to be correct. Weiner is particularly strong in making clear how this can result from an undirected process of random mutations in individual animals. Weiner's talent for writing about natural science is making that story as palpable as well as exciting to the reader.

Weiner has a particularly good chapter on resistance, not only of certain ideological groups to teaching of evolution but also the resistance of moths or ticks to insecticide or E. coli to antibiotics. This is a particularly important part of the story, in my view, because it makes clear the ubiquity of evolution as it impacts our daily lives and the importance of seeing that a basic understanding of the process is gained in the general populace, as billions of dollars are thrown at developing insecticides and antibiotics when biology has clearly shown us that these are only temporary solutions. Bacteria and insects will not cease to evolve and eradication will not be achieved by these means. The target is always moving and these solutions are leading to more and more successfully resistant strains of streptococcus, tuberculosis, salmonella, pneumococcal pneumonia, and gonorrhea. We ignore the lessons of evolutionary biology at our own peril, so if you would like to read a book that depicts the mechanisms of this great theory via abundant example and does so in a style that feels very much like a good adventure story, I would recommend The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner.

Vacation Time for me and Contest for You

2011-06-10T18:07:00.007-04:00

We're about to head off on vacation (at last!) with, in my case, a pile of books, walking shoes, and a good appetite. I'm looking forward to attacking at least the following:

Here is one picture for each of our destinations. List our itinerary (only the region of the country is necessary in the first case, but the specific locations are needed in the other three), and I'll enter you in a drawing to win a book about destinations exotic (Burma, Russia, and Serbia are among the possible choices so far). You can live anywhere. Put your answer in the comments and I'll read them when I return.

Meditating on Matisse (Books - Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl)

2011-06-10T16:43:00.005-04:00

I've been wending my way through another of Patricia Hampl's books, following her lovely and insightful I Could Tell You Stories and, although there are stops along the journey where I enjoy the view, I'm much less taken with Blue Arabesque. I Could Tell You Stories was a perfect marriage of form and content. While it was a book about art, specifically the autobiographical form, it was itself a memoir, whereas Blue Arabesque, while also about art, and also a memoir, is about painting. Its subject is Henri Matisse's odalisques, and as in her previous book, Hampl builds outward from the quiet and thorough contemplation of a single subject. The difference here is a lack of expertise. While Hampl is a writer and an autobiographer, she is not a painter, and her observations, though often beautifully written and intelligent, feel touristic.

A painting must depict the act of seeing, not the object seen. Even if that object represents an entire exotic world, it must pass through the veil of the self to be realized - to be art. For it is the artist's fully engaged sensibility - mind/heart/soul - that is really at stake for modernity. For all the critical complaint about the narcissism of modern artists, the twentieth century demanded self-absorption of its great ones: Don't give us your skills, give us your attitude. We have wanted to look not at the thing but at the mind beholding and rendering itself in the act of attention.

This self-absorption, or self-refection - to be more friendly about it, is what I had liked in Hampl's first book, but somehow I feel here like there is too little of her here. I'm just being lectured about art. In this case, it's art Hampl doesn't know all that much about (although she does not pretend otherwise). The literature and episodes from her own life Hampl does include feel less integrated into the work as a whole. Perhaps I should have allowed more time between her books so that my expectations of the second wasn't quite so primed by my experience of reading the first. Hampl remains a talented writer, so I may yet give her another try.