Donald Hall's Space (The Romance of Artists' Workspaces)

The New York Times Sunday Arts section has started an Artists' Workspace series. Yay, I'm an incurable addict for those kind of things. They say it will be occasional, I would recommend weekly! This week - poet Donald Hall.

Reading Habits and other truths (Books, books, books)

Dewey made it up and Imani posted it too. I enjoyed reading it so here are my answers.

What are you reading right now?

Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov.

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?

It's hard to say what mood I will be in then, but aside from my school books I might try Heavy Sand, also by Rybakov, or I might start one of the books for the Outmoded Authors Challenge, I'm excited to read some May Sarton again and the Olivia Manning and Ivy Compton-Burnett have my curiosity piqued. His Dark Materials is also in the queue for a reread.

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?

None, unless they're in the garbage can under the sink and they shouldn't be, they're recyclable.

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?

The book on penmanship I had to use in summers between grades in elementary school comes in first. Being and Nothingness is a close second. I threw it across the room. Mostly, I won't finish hateful books. There are too many good ones.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?

The Goldbug Variations, often I give it to them too, because I know they probably won't buy it, but don't let that give you any ideas.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?

Actually not. I reserve books and DVDs online and just pick them up there. There used to be bookstores that knew me, but only 3 Lives and St. Marks get regular visits from me now, and occasionally Strand. Mostly I'll drop into a random shop I'm passing, especially in places other than NYC. Through the internet I can give independent bookseller business and get what I want, they only shame is that I miss browsing and finding new stuff, which is why I still go.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?

For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin. A lot of friends I've told about it have given me a 'huh?' Also Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Moseley which is one of the best books ever, but many of the people I've recommended it to haven't finished it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?

While I eat yes. I don't bathe, I shower and that would be a little inconvenient. I don't have TV, I'll read while the ragazzo watches DVDs on our monitor, but if I'm watching it too then I won't read. While driving, uh...no. While having sex, hell no, but I do read in bed, as well as on public transport, and while I'm waiting for anything or anyone. I love reading in cafes or bars w/ a glass of wine or a cup of tea while I wait for a friend to show up.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?

I was teased for pretty much everything except reading. Most of my classmates were readers too and my friends definitely were.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott was the first fiction book I read after my semester ended, so I read it straight through late into the night just because I could, but The Emporer's Children by Claire Messud kept me very late because I found it a truly compulsive read. Many years ago, one of Iris Murdoch's books, I think it was The Philosopher's Pupil, or it might have been The Message to the Planet actually kept me home from work all day - I had to call in sick.

Poetry Every Friday - A Regular Series - Help Select the Title

Regular readers, occasional guests, and others I am making official my weekly posting of poetry each Friday. I am now searching for a title Poetry Fridays is too boring. 'Free Verse Fridays' came to mind. 'Eh,' was my reaction to that idea. I think I'd rather use the title of a poem. Here are some I like. Cast your vote or suggest another:

Little Poem with Argyle Socks

Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

The Apple That Astonished Paris

An Inflorescence

Poetry gives off smoke...

As Freedom Is a Breakfastfood

All Which Isn't Singing is Mere Talking


I hope if you have ideas for poems or poets you would like to see in this series, you will post a comment and let me know.

Just take two poems and call me in the morning - William Carlos Williams

It's Friday, and I don't know about you, but I think I could use a poem. In fact, I think I might just makes this a series. Now I'll need to t come up with a clever name.

It's William Carlos Williams today (1883-1963). Born, lived and died in Rutherford New Jersey, Williams was a physician by day but was no less a contender in the world of modernist poetry among contemporaries like Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, for either seriousness or prolificacy. He was a champion of simplicity in the use of language, critical of Pound and Eliot for obscure allusions and use of languages other than English. He preferred local themes and plain language. Marianne Moore said that he wrote in "plain American which dogs and cats can read." His motto was "no ideas but in things," and some of his simplest poems could be said to be still lives. Critics might say they are almost the equivalent of Duchamp's readymades - comparing the famous "Fountain," shown in a 1917 exhibit, which was in fact a urinal, with Williams most famous poem, The Red Wheelbarrow. I find his work full of the mystery and freshness of what can make a thing beautiful. The last one is probably my favorite, not only a terrific poem but wickedly funny, I think. No more analysis, just a few poems.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

Shadows

Shadows cast by the street light

under the stars,

the head is tilted back,

the long shadow of the legs

presumes a world taken for granted

on which the cricket trills

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Secret writings on Stalin's reign of terror (Books - Children of the Arbat - Anatoli Rybakov)

Above, as the street sign tells you, is Arbat Street in Moscow, photographed about 10 years ago. I wasn't in the mood and yet somehow I've been sucked into Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov, an epic novel highly critical of the Stalinist Russia. Written in the 1960s, it was suppressed by the Soviet government and could be read only in samizdat - secretly produced copies of works that had been censored by the state. Bulgakov's amazing The Master and Margarita was also first available only by samizdat, which translates as 'self-published. ' Although some of these editions were printed, many were produced on typewriters with carbon paper and the limited copies passed from hand-to-hand by enthusiastic readers. What must it have been like to read a work like this in samizdat?! For those of us who love books, the passion that would drive one to literally risk one's life to read and write, can sound almost romantic, but I can't believe there was anything romantic about living under it. I've heard many people who say that "better" art was created under these repressive regimes. For an interesting book about the effect of glasnost on the visual art world in Russia check out Andrew Solomon's The Irony Tower.

Anway, Children of the Arbat was finally published in 1987 and in the U.S. in 1988. I am about 200 pages into the book. There is nothing particularly clever in the writing, unless Harold Shukman's translation does not serve it well. This is a book driven solely by the force of a great story. It is set in soviet Russia in the 1930s and looks at life in the 15 year old utopia across a broad swathe of society - party official and rebel, bureaucrat, student, and factory worker, child and adult, those of a peasant background and those from money. Stalin himself is a character. While the revolution of 1917 overthrew czarist rule, as soon as Stalin defeated Trotsky, he created a plan to make a backward Russia competitive with the world's other ruling powers. To accomplish he instituted a totalitarian government, installing himself as its leader. Along with that came programs to industrialize,create collective farms, and a draconian campaign to repress anyone whom his party officials determined to hold ideas politically contrary to this plan or, more exactly, to Stalin. This resulted in imprisonment and forced labor in the gulags and, ultimately, the death of millions of people. Articles on Stalinist Russia here and Stalin himself here, if you're interested.

What I'm finding impressive about this quickly paced book is that, while I'm learning history, I'm experiencing it through its impact on individual lives. Rybakov brings very much to life the excitement driving the dream of creating an ideal society on the one hand with the terrible costs that resulted when paranoia and a dehumanizing hysteria drove those with power to try to force millions of others to act and think as they wished them to.

Rybakov has been compared to Pasternak and Michner (accurately, I think). He also reminds me of Uris. Rybakov has also written Heavy Sand, about a Jewish family's life in the Soviet ghetto and their participation in the Warsaw uprising, which I've never even heard of. Alibris has several copies for a couple of dollars. One of them is going to be mine.

More on Children of the Arbat as I continue reading.

Thumbing your nose at authority

Imani has posed two challenges of writers fallen from grace - Index Librorum Liberorum is a list devised by the Catholic church of books to stay away from if you want to get to heaven. Imani's challenge suggests instead that we go to hell. The Outmoded Authors Challenge gives us all the opportunity to read from a list of writers proposed by Imani's readers who are no longer popular. So whether you're thumbing your nose at the pope or at fashion, click the links provided and sign up.

Preferring to keep my soul intact (and facing the looming start of the semester) I'm signing up for the Outmoded Authors Challenge. There are such great pickings! Dawn Powell, May Sarton, Christina Stead! I'm going to reread one May Sarton book, I suggested her! I've probably read all of Sarton's journals and novels (and some of her poetry) and she's published at least 30 books, but I haven't returned to them. I remember Faithful are the Wounds as a good one and Kinds of Love was one of my favorites, so one of those goes on the list. Fraternity by John Galsworthy has been on the TBR pile for about two years now. The New York Times described it as "among the best novels this century has produced so far," but that was in 1909. But ecstatic reviews aside, it features an interesting conflict between middle class conformity and bohemianism. We'll see. Mostly this challenge intrigues me because of those on the list I've never read. I'm tempted to read something by Olivia Manning, Marian Engel, Ivy Compton-Burnett, E. R. Eddison, and maybe Christina Stead, but that list will probably have to be shortened.

A blend of incomprehensible symbols and unwritable sounds (Which Ancient Language Are You?)

Well, this doesn't bode too well for my writing future - a blend of the incomprehensible and the unwritable. At least it explains the schizoid mess.

You are Akkadian, a blend of the incomprehensible symbols of the Sumerians with the unwritable sounds of the early Semitic peoples. However, the writing just doesn't suit the words and doesn't represent everything needed, so you end up a schizoid mess. Invented in Babylon, you're probably to blame for that tower story. However, crazy as you are, you're much loved and appreciated, and remain actively in use by records keepers long after schools have switched to other languages.

Here's a link to the test if you have a lot of time on your hands. Actually the questions are fun.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test

Hat tip: Books, Words, and Writing

Selling your soul for a couple of lousy positrons (Science & Imagination)

Today's Science Times has an interview with Gino Segre, a physicist and science historian. Most recently he wrote Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, about the landmark 1932 conference of physicists organized by Neils Bohr. Just as the Nazi's rose to power and were to physically displace most of these scientists, the positron was being discovered, and an understanding of nuclear physics was beginning to gel. These great creative thinkers not only exchanged ideas, they also staged a pastiche of Faust in honor of 100th anniversary of Goethe's death, starring Neils Bohr as Mephistopheles. The war soon incited by the Nazis was to hasten the creation of the Atom Bomb. Segre's book seems to take the meeting of the scientific and the artistic one step further, in presenting nuclear physics as the ultimate knowledge Faust sold his soul to attain. Here is Segre's own summary of the book, it sounds like something just up my street - I'm going to have to get a copy.

And if you want to see what the latest Fausts are up to - check out this post at 3 Quarks Daily on the Large Hadron Collider. 20 years and $8 billion in the making, it was created for the purpose of discovering, or should I say revealing, a particle called the Boson; it is 17 miles in circumfrence.

Greatest Love Story Meme

This is courtesy of Imani, who got it courtesy of Classical Bookworm, who adapted it from BookChase.

Legend:

I’ve read it
I want to read it
I’ve seen the movie*
I’m indifferent
I have it on DVD
I want to marry the leading man/lady!

The list:

1 Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847*

2 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813*

3 Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, 1597*

4 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847

5 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, 1936*

6 The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, 1992*

7 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, 1938*****

8 Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957

9 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence, 1928

10 Far from The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy, 1874

11 My Fair Lady, Alan Jay Lerner, 1956*

12 The African Queen, CS Forester, 1935*

13 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald 1925**

14 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen, 1811*

15 The Way We Were, Arthur Laurents, 1972*

16 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, 1865

17 Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier, 1942

18 Persuasion, Jane Austen, 1818

19 Take a Girl Like You, Kingsley Amis, 1960

20 Daniel Deronda, George Eliot, 1876

21 Maurice, E.M. Forester, 1971 (posth.)

22 The Good Solider: A Tale of Passion, Ford Madox Ford, 1915

23The Goldbug Variations, Richard Powers,1991

if you're reading, you're it. Add one title of your own to the bottom of the list.

Oh what to read?! What to read, he muttered nervously

I'm having a hard time finding the next book. The beginning of the school year is approaching like a freight train. I need to escape just a little more. The Savage Detectives strikes me as adolescent and irritating. The Idiot is, well, it's Dostoevsky and either you're in the mood or you're not. I read through some stories of Edith Templeton, Mavis Gallant and Lorrie Moore - no dice. I am liking The Children of the Arbat, an epic novel set in Russian during the time of Stalin's brutal rule, but escapist it is not.

After reading Christopher Hitchens' review of the last volume of Harry Potter and this morning's Elegant Variation, I took His Dark Materials off the shelf and stuck it by my bed for a rereading. It sounds like just the thing.

Home is where the books are

As a companion piece to Matt's post about those who buys books by the yard, here's a lovely story by Jim Dwyer from Saturday's New York Times about a man whose home is books - Kurt Thometz. And I didn't know this was possible, he owns a New York book store I have never heard of - Jumel Terrace Books. It's in a neighborhood full of gorgeous old homes and lovely gardens, that receives little traffic by those who visit New York - North Harlem. There's also a tie-in with one of this blog's topics as Mr. Thometz son, Adam, is said to have autism:

By the age of 5, Adam had not yet spoken an intelligible word - not Mommy, not Daddy, not milk or no. Mr. Thometz read to him every night for two and a hlaf years. With Adam in the crook of his arm, the weight of the day on him, Mr. Thometz was reading Thomas the Tank Engine for the 200th time.

"Henry the engine," he read.

"Green," Adam interrupted.

Yes: the proper name was Henry the Green engine. Mr. Thometz had dropped the word. "He supplied it,k" Mr. Thometz said. "It was the first time he had used a word on purpose." And it was the first rung on the ladder he climbed from his isolation.

This is not a story of scientific explanation - I don't know how or by whom his son was diagnosed, etc., and the reading is not discussed as formal "treatment." But it is a lovely story about a man persisting and finally reaching across the divide to his son with the power of a story.

New Eyes Through Which to see Cruelty (Books -Truman Capote's In Cold Blood)

I've finished Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, it's journalism of a heartless and ugly crime written with a sort of dignified grace - as though we sat on the sofa above at the invitation of someone's aunt and ate cake as we watched open heart surgery. The first half was written with a drive that sagged particularly when the murderers were on the lam and there was a good deal of flashback. But I felt that his certainty returned once Hickock and Smith had been apprehended. I felt like the "chase" scene became too extended and the tension flagged - partly because he wanted us to feel how long it was, how long it felt to the town and especially to Dewey - the detective on the case. Capote wanted us to know the almost leisurely progress of the two men, they vacation in Mexico after the crime, so we could see how oblivious they were to what they had done. Mostly, he seemed to want time to set up the backstory of the murderers' - particularly Perry Smith's.

I don't know if I would feel this way if I hadn't seen the movie Capote, but I felt like I was reading it in the book too, Capote seemed in love with Smith. He knew his actions were irredeemable but his heart ached with the shame of who Smith had become as a result of his life. He seemed to look at them as animals, they performed cruel acts out of their nature - and not because it was their nature to be cruel, just because they knew no other way of acting to get what they needed at the time. Like the cats Capote describes:

Among Garden City's animals are two gray tomcats who are always together - thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grilles of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travelers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds - crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds - and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square.

With this paragraph, not only does Capote create an extraordinarily detailed metaphor, he also brings us to the Courthouse for the arrival of Hickock and Smith following their confessions in a most unexpected way. He has shadowy lighting - as it is twilight - and blood and feathers littering the scene without ever mentioning the crime. Capote masterfully creates the atmosphere of this moment that would otherwise be a description of a waiting crowd, tension, and a car - and he accomplishes that courtesy of two cats.

Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their excort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed men, white-faced and blinking blindly, glistened in the glare of flashbulbs and floodlights. The cameramen, pursuing the prisoners and the police into the courthouse and up three flights of stairs, photographed the door of the county jail slamming shut.

No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the townspeople. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year's first snow began to fall.

Now were those cats really there in that square? Was that really the first snow on that precise evening? If not, it sure makes a good story.

There are many other singular touches - the Meiers a couple who are caretakers of the courthouse prison and the relationship that evolves between Mrs. Meier and Perry. A description on the sumptuous meal she makes when an army friend of Perry who has volunteered to be a character witness, visits him in his cell. It is she to whom Perry gives a photo of himself at 16 - the way he wishes to be remembered - before being taken to the penitentiary and the gallows. She tries to feed the squirrel that Perry befriended in his cell, but says "...he won't have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked."

Capote write a portrait of another inmate Andrews - a remorseless, bookish psychopath - who becomes Smith and Hickock's neighbor on death row. Through his story, he engages in an interesting analysis of the laws regarding insanity pleas and the doctor's evaluation of these three killers.

In an odd twist at the end, Hickock requests that his eyes be given to a needy recipient upon his execution. One of the witnesses to the execution muses:

Can't say I'd want to be that somebody. I'd feel peculiar with them eyes in my head.

In a way, that's what In Cold Blood is like, being temporarily given a new pair of eyes through which to see a cruel murder, an act about which one has a certain predictable sense of one's expectations. It is still cruel and we can see that, but we see certain things with those new eyes that challenge our usual expectations.

Here are my other posts on In Cold Blood 1, 2, 3

Frank O'Hara redux - because too much was never enough for him

POEM
"A la recherche de Gertrude Stein"

When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off
and all is wiped away revealing life's tenderness
that we are flesh and breathe and are near us
as you are really as you are I become as I
really am alive and knowing vaguely what is
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong
and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine
and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me
sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured
by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs
spread out making an eternal circle together
creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic
the faint line of hair dividing your torso
gives my mind rest and emotions their release
into the infinite air where since once we are
together we always will be in this life come what may



POEM

Light    clarity    avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but his, intensified by breathing

New York as muse. Poet Frank O'Hara - immortalizer of fun

Frank O'Hara was a contemporary of poets John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler and painters Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock who were all the denizens of the Cedar tavern, the 1950s equivalent of the Algonquin round table. A lover of modern art, O' Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, first as a clerk at the sales counter just so he could be near the Matisse retrospective of 1951, later as a curator of important shows of Robert Motherwell, David Smith and Franz Kline.

Thin, brilliant, and fast-paced, O'Hara always wore clean sneakers, had a broken nose and a characteristic strut - walking on his toes. He was hit by a car and killed in 1966, at 40 years old. His approachable, colloquial poetry, immortalized 1950s New York. Here is a link to books of his poems. They were described by David Lehman in The Last Avant-Garde as two parts melancholy, three parts joy, and were often written at the Cedar or on his lunch breaks. His poems are more like being in love than any I know. If I had to pick a favorite poet -it would probably be O'Hara.

POEM

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mikes' painting, called SARDINES.

Don't forget - participants in the Summer Poetry Challenge are still likely to be posting over the next week or two. Check out my sidebar for links to their blogs and their poems.

Smart is the new Sexy! (The evolution of behavior and the brain)

Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption

From The Economist

Hat tip: 3 Quarks Daily

GEOFFREY MILLER is a man with a theory that, if true, will change the way people think about themselves. His idea is that the human brain is the anthropoid equivalent of the peacock's tail. In other words, it is an organ designed to attract the opposite sex. Of course, brains have many other functions, and the human brain shares those with the brains of other animals. But Dr Miller, who works at the University of New Mexico, thinks that mental processes which are uniquely human, such as language and the ability to make complicated artefacts, evolved originally for sexual display.

Geeks everywhere will be vindicated. Smart is the new sexy...or the old sexy, I guess you would have to say. You can read the complete article in The Economist. Miller and his collaborator, Vladas Griskevicius recent published their theory in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the article is careful to point out (thank you for responsible science reporting) that testing it will take all long time. They have begun by examining two traits - conspicuous consumption and altruism toward strangers. The second, the article claims, has "no obvious payoff" for humans.

I find the construction of hypotheses about human behavior fascinating. The best inquiry, I have been taught by one of my teachers, looks at a problem on multiple levels. For example, if you are examining a question about cognition - say, problem solving - your idea should have support on the anatomical level (one level lower, if you will) and should be applicable to how we take tests (one level higher). Cognitive neuroscience is by its nature multi-disciplinary. Questions about language and behavior often have one foot in evolution in that inquiring minds want to know what every 4-year-old scientist asks multiple times a day - "Why!" I have read more than once recently that altruism toward strangers has no payoff, and I'm confused by it. Given the fact that we have evolved as social creatures, wouldn't acts for the good of society be valuable to the preservation of the species - or does our own personal strand of DNA always take precedence? I guess I should really take a course in evolution and genetics and find out. I enjoy hypotheses about behavior because this question of 'why' necessarily combines imagination with science.

Leewenhoek grinding a lens that provided powerful enough magnification to see microbes changed what we knew about the world concretely. The existence of microbes is confirmable. But what motivated the evolution of our brain - can we ever comfortably conclude that - yes indeed, our brain DID evolve for the purpose of wooing our mates. What a relief to know! In a discussion involving natural selection, were talking about understanding which characteristics were advantageous to survival given the environment millions of years ago. This inquiry must necessarily combine some parts imagination with some parts science. Good research does involve imagination, I believe, and its product is useful to us in how we understand ourselves if it can produce a compelling narrative.

Roberto Bolano and Truman Capote - Poetry and Body Fluids (Books - In Cold Blood and The Savage Detectives)

I just noticed I'm reading In Cold Blood and The Savage Detectives at the same time - such violence in my choices. What's with that? In Cold Blood continues to startle me. I'm half-way through now, reading about the early life of Perry Smith, one of the two murderers, a man with a hard shell encasing an artist's soul. They are about to be caught and I feel kind of sorry. I started reading the Capote to keep up with the Joneses, or to keep up with the O'Malley actually, but I also started it in desperation to get out of reading the Bolano. Can anyone tell me why I'm supposed to be liking The Savage Detectives? I read and enjoyed Last Evenings on Earth - the volume of short stories that served as the wider reading public's introduction to this highly praised Latin American writer, who died a few years ago. Francine Prose and John Banville are hyperbolic on the book jacket, Susan Sontag gushes. I'm 75 pages in, it's 1978 and Juan Garcia, a 17-year-young Mexican boy, stops going to law school to become a groupie with a bunch of underground literary types who publish a subversive magazine and who have decided that novels are heterosexual and poetry homosexual. Poets could be further subdivided into the categories: faggot, queer, sissy, freak, butch, fairy, nymph and philene. Evidently Whitman was a faggot, Neruda, Blake and Octavio Paz were Queer and Verlaine a freak.

Our first-person narrator is a wannabe at literature and manhood - and the translation - particularly the dialogue - reads very stiffly to me:

"Sometimes I dream that I'm in a city that's Mexico City but at the same time it isn't Mexico City, I mean, it's a strange city, but I recognize it from other dreams - I'm not boring you, am I?"

"Hardly!"

"As I was saying, it's a vaguely strange and vaguely familiar city. And I'm wandering endless streets trying to find a hotel or a boardinghouse where they'll take me in. But I can't find anything. All I find is a man pretending to be a deaf-mute. And worst of all is that it's getting late, and I know that when night comes my life won't be worth a thing, will it? I'll be at nature's mercy, as they say. It's a bitch of a dream," he added reflectivley.

The stiffness makes a novel about literature, a chore to read. Adolescent obsession is something I really don't have to live through a second time. I find Juan Garcia's utter lack of self awareness makes it completely uninteresting to read about. At least Holden Caulfield had a sense of humor. And the dream of machismo Juan Garcia is so eager to fulfill in this world of pimps and poets just seems silly and dated. I find nothing to admire in machismo, and am not as drawn to the romance of seedy as I am to some other kind of environments, but I don't think I am limited in this way when the medium compels me - I'm a big fan of the songs of Jacques Brel. I thought that the movie The Beat That My Heart Skipped was great. Both the book and film of Midnight Cowboy, though as seedy as can be, are somehow romantic - it's a real love story. These aren't worlds I want to live in, but they were made accessible to me through works of art. But this endless series of all-night cafes, semen, and a literature that is talked about but that we never see, is wearing thin on me.

Have any of you read this? Does it get better?

Capote's relentless look straight into the sun

I'm a little over one-quarter of the way through In Cold Blood. Capote takes until this point to show us the bodies, and yet refers obliquely to the murder which we all know is the subject of the book from the beginning, which creates incredible tension. I found myself almost wanting it to happen so I could get it over with.

When we finally get to the crime scene, his camera's eye is unflinching. He makes us look right into the sun. I first thought to myself, those poor, 1950s Kansans, they had never seen such devastation and now we're almost inured to it. You can turn on the television any day of the week and watch "real crime" shows, three different flavors of Law and Order, or Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect - all full of grizzly detail. Of course, the readers of the literary New Yorker were probably pretty innocent to this kind of mayhem themselves. And yet, were there never murders with multiple victims? Of course there were. Were there never acts of senseless violence? These happened as well. And those living in the 1950s were much closer to the recent devastation of two World Wars than we are now. Yet, there is something about having an act of senseless violence happen in your midst that no amount of television of reading prepares you for, because these events still send us reeling. He places us right in the center of the community, the shocked voices of the postmistress and the next door neighbor swirling around us. We walk through the house, first with the narrator and later with three friends of the victims who volunteer to clean up (I had to ask myself, would I do it? I honestly don't know the answer).

The men worked from noon to dusk. When the time came to burn what they had collected, they piled it on a pickup truck and, with Stoecklein at the wheel, drove keep into the farm's north field, a flat place full of color though a single color - the shimmering tawny yellow of November wheat stubble. There they unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy's pillow, the bed clothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoecklein sprinkled it with kerosene and struck a match.

Of those present, none had been closer to the Clutter family than Andy Erhart. Gentle, genially dignified, a scholar with work-calloused hands and sunburned neck, he'd been a classmate of Herb's at Kansas State University. "We were friends for thirty years," he said some time afterward, and during those decades Erhart had seen his friend evolve from a poorly paid County Agricultural Agent into one of the region's most widely known and respected farm ranchers: "Everything Herb had, he earned - with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life." But that life, and what he'd made of it - how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this - smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

Capote accomplishes two narrative effects that I really admire. The first is a shift in time and the second in point of view. We first get a narrative view of the men - we read that "they worked from noon to dusk." A wide angle shot - we see the act from a distance, without experiencing much detail at the moment. Then we see them building a fire, and then the camera pulls in as we see it is Nancy's pillows that are being loaded onto the pyramid. Then the match is lit but as the fire starts (which is not mentioned) he pulls the lens even closer - a 'close-up' right on Erhart, with a voice-over - letting the reader travel in memory with Erhart in a different relationship to time, succeeding in placing this reader in precisely the contemplative mood that Erhart experiences, and finally pulling out for a wider shot and returning to real time, encompassing the narrator's view at the end of the paragraph. This creates not just "identification" with the character - it accomplishes a transformation of sorts.

This transformation is beautifully done, but I did not expect Capote, to shift the scene to the rooms where the murderers slept after the crime, so that we continue from their point of view with the same elegance of phrasing and the same detailed depiction of state of mind - that's when things get creepy.

Far off, in the town of Olathe, in a hotel room where window shades darkened the midday sun, Perry lay sleeping, with a portable radio murmuring beside him. Except for taking off his boots, he had not troubled to undress. He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind. The boots, black and silver-buckled, were soaking in a washbasin filled with warm, vaguely pink-tinted water.

It was a brilliant choice to depict the murderer as victim. This whole sequence surrounding the murder evoked Medea or The Orestia. Bloody devastation is all around us as the chorus beautifully comments on the action allowing us to connect it to our own lives.

And for more things Capote, check out Sheila's place for her post today on his last book, Music for Chameleons.

Zeitgeist Alert - Autistic Girls are Different from Autistic Boys

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an excellent article on autism in girls. Boys are four times as likely to be diagnosed autistic as girls, and the ratio for Asperger's syndrome is even higher - perhaps 10:1 (boys:girls). Since girls are diagnosed so much less frequently, there are less data on them - leading to less frequent diagnosis, less research, etc...- an unfortunate catch-22.

The article talks about the fact that boys with autism and Asperger's often manifest their social deficits by isolating themselves from other people, whereas girls seem to wish to connect socially but lack the tools, which often leads to severe anxiety and depression. Depression is co-morbid with autism in girls at a rate much higher than that of boys.

Boys with Asperger's, while exhibiting social deficits generally are seen to excel in subjects like math and engineering, but girls exhibit their strong abilities in more in realms such as writing and reading.

One of the conundrums in researching autism is the many ways symptoms can be manifest are not consistent. It is not the same as studying polio, where the presence or absence of a single biological market, i.e. the virus, determines a diagnosis. Leading researchers agree that one single cause for what we now call autism is very unlikely. That complicates an already complicated puzzle because the target is moving. Are girls not diagnosed as often because not as many of them have autism or because girls manifest the condition with different symptoms? If not as many cases are seen in girls should autism be redefined or is that because fewer girls have it? Since we haven't completely figured out what "it" is, that's not a question we can answer right now.

SUMMER POETRY CHALLENGE WRAP-UP - Thank you participants!

It's been a week of poetry at the sites of our eight participants:
Imani, Dewey, Siew, Sheila, Loose Baggy Monster, Eva, Nyssaneala, and me, featuring Milton, Prevert, Plath, Yevtushenko, Whitman, Sexton, and many others. Thank you for participating and sharing such great poems with us. If you have any feedback for me on the challenge please let me know. Some of the participants are still posting, so I'll keep the directory on my side bar up for the next few weeks so you can continue to check in with them through my site, if you haven't bookmarked them already.

Haunted by Truman Capote's elegant account of a dreadful murder (Books - In Cold Blood)

Sheila has been trying to get me to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood for years. Capote origianlly began writing this now famous journalistic account of the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959 and the two men who committed it, for The New Yorker. I think I've been afraid of it. I bought a copy maybe 15 years ago, and tried reading it several times and it creeped me out. It sat on my shelf taunting me. I finally sold it, probably before I moved back to New York. After seeing the wonderful movie Capote, I bought a copy on line for $1.99 - it still has its sticker. I tried reading it. I found the close scrutiny of all that horror and violence upsetting. I put it back on the bookshelf that faces me when I'm in bed. It bothered me. I moved it to another shelf, so it wouldn't stare at me. Do you have any books that stare you down? I don't like to have Donna Tart's The Secret History on that shelf near my bed. It resides elsewhere. I worked on a biographical play of Virgnia Woolf by Edna O'Brien for about five years before I was able to get it produced. That involved reading every word by and about her that I could find. I had an entire shelf devoted just to Woolf, Sackville West, Leonard Woolf's journals, Roger Fry - the whole gang. After the play was produced and played for the better part of a year, every time I looked at that shelf I felt haunted by her life and her madness to such an extent that I couldn't stand to have them around any more. I packed the entire shelf into two boxes and stuck it in the basement for several years. After I moved I was able to give them a place in apartment again.

Anyway, I read Gerald Clarke's marvelous biography of Capote instead. But Sheila keeps talking about what a marvelous writer Capote is and that this is his best so I'm starting to feel competitive. Yesterday I picked it up while taking a break from the pile of articles I'm reading for work. His descriptions are remarkably clear, his word choices precise and unexpected:

...it was from her that he inherited his coloring - the iodine skin, the dark, moist eyes, the black hair which he kept brilliantined and was plentiful enough to provide him with sideburns and a slippery spray of bangs.

or:

The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois

But great stories are not restricted to telling, and even though Capote was not actually on the scene until after the crime, he introduces us to both the murderers' and their victims' lives prior to the event with an exactness that makes me feel a voyeur. Creating scenes or dialogue. Rather than describe Mrs. Clutter's state of mind with several sentences (although he does that too), he puts a single line of dialogue in her mouth:

All my children are very efficient. They don't need me.

Does anyone need any clarification?

Finally, I am just admiring the quality of his prose. His sentences can be quite long, but they proceed with such decorum, it's like driving down an elegant avenue lined with trees.

I'm hooked, Sheila.