Deep Wells (Books - Fools of Fortune & The Habitation of Dragons)

The solicitors' offices were in the South Mall, heralded by a shiny brass plate among many similar ones, all of them drawing attention to the services of legal or medical practitioners. Mr. O'Brien was long since dead, but Mr. Lanigan's presence made up for the loss. He was a person of pyramidal shape, a small head sloping into the slope of his shoulders, arms sloping again as he spread them over his desk. A chalk-striped brown suit imposed a secondary shape of its own, with a heavy watch-chain slung across a waistcoat so tightly fastened over the slope of Mr. Lanigan's stomach that it appeared to be perpetually on the point of bouncing a dozen tiny buttons, were almost lost in the smooth inclines of his face, and artificial chins, created by a stern cellulid collar, all but obscured the flamboyance of a polka-dotted brown bow-tie. Mr. Lanigan's smile perpetually twinkled.

Is that not a stupendous description? William Trevor never turns his "secondary" characters into set dressing. If they have a place in the story they always get their fair due.

In Fools of Fortune a family is gutted by a fire resulting from the war in Ireland, I won't ruin your own reading experience with more details than that. The son, still a young boy, observes how his mother changes as she becomes obsessed with the man she holds responsible for the violent act.

My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. 'I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr. Hogan's face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a hunstman. "Now, now Mrs Quinton," he said, "make your effort when I tell you."'

She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:

'It's that man who's on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you're not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.'

She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn't know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.

'The Devil incarnate,' my mother said.

I find that a devastating few paragraphs. The way the mother becomes hollowed out by loss. Life moves from the present, pre-fire, to the past in an instant. I am realizing that this book reminds me of the plays of Horton Foote, but particularly his The Habitation of Dragons so redolent is it of a single moment of tragedy in a family's life. Foote writes in an unfancy American idiom of the dramas that buffet ordinary folk in early 20th century small town Texas, rather than Ireland. His words aren't inherently dramatic, they just contain the simple moments of lives unadorned, but moment builds upon moment until his characters are moved on a mammoth current of action that, in the case of Habitation of Dragons, is heart-rending. Foote is best known for the screenplays of Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful. He has written for the American theater from its heyday in the 1950s and is, I believe, still writing. I have directed and acted in a couple of his plays. I consider them required reading - I cannot recommend The Habitation of Dragons enough. Trevor and Foote - two observers who gently dip their cups into deep wells.

Maybe Homer Had it Right

My final exams are nigh. That's why, when I saw the title of this article today in the Science Times "Lots of Animals Learn, But Smarter Isn't Better," I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Carl Zimmer's article describes the experiments of a lab at the University of Fribourg which involve flies who are conditioned not to like one kind of jelly:

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and the quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour...but the flies pay a price for fast learning...About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much...

"Humans have gone to the extreme," said Dr. Dukas, both in the ability of our species to learn and in the cost for that ability."

Neurosis come to mind as a cost of brain power combined with the cost of leisure (which seems to be the goal of so many developed brains). Do I really need a PhD - especially one to study brains? I don't know... maybe I'm smart enough.

(I'm realizing from TJ's comment that that last sentence sounds conceited. I meant more that I was worried about the liabilities of adding any brain power (whatever my baseline) given the fate of the flies, not that I think I'm smart.)

The irresistable lure of unassigned reading (Books - Fools of Fortune by William Trevor)

Final exams are approaching in the coming weeks and that means I am going to be straining at my tether wanting to read as much unassigned work as I possibly can. In fact do anything I can other than study what I am supposed to - witness two posts today. That is why I have begun William Trevor's Fools of Fortune. With work at the lab as well as several hours of studying for my statistics exam yesterday, I haven't gotten through very much of the book yet but here is a sample of what I have read:

We reached the mill and I accompanied my father to his office, where Mr Derenzy was copying figures into a ledger. A fire was blazing in the grate, its coal recently renewed, the hearth swept. Mr Derenzy brought sandwiches every day and ate them at his desk during the lunchtime break. Afterwards, if the weather was to his liking, he went for a walk and was often to be seen staring down into the water of the leat, a man devoted to Kilneaugh Mill and to my father - and in a different kind of way to Aunt Pansy. Red hair fluffed into a halo about Mr Derenzy's skull-like head and his blue serge suit shone here and there, polished where his bones protruded. Clipped to the top pocket of this suit was a row of pens and pencils, their neat presence a reflection of his pernickety nature. He disliked rain and heatwaves and warned Aunt Pansy against drinking from a cup with a crack in it. He carried a supply of snuff with him at all times, in a tin that had originally contained catarrh pastilles: Potter's,, the Remedy it said, red letters on a blue ground.

The song of the story teller can be heard in his sentences. There is a sense of precision to the writing. Each word follows the next with elegance, but it is the elegance of simple objects on a kitchen table - it's not fancy. Trevor's prose feels clean, like it has been polished by the wind.

There are three other books sitting on the top of the pile that my exams are making look very enticing, almost irresistable in fact:





Proust and the Squid is about reading and the brain - right up my proverbial alley. I think it was Jonah who told me about it.

The Walter Benjamin books is a compact critical biography of a man I only know as an icon. I know he was an archivist of sort, read about him when I was researching the artist Joseph Cornell, but beyond that I know nothing about him. Hat tip: Mark Thwaite

Magic Mountain if I really do tackle it, will be a re-read, but my first go with this more recent translation. There are some family connections to this book, so I'm looking forward to having another go at it.

I have a little list...

You've probably seen the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die post that has been going around the book blogging community like a bad cold. It has a handy-dandy spreadsheet on which you can figure out not only what percentage of the list you have completed (24.9% or 250 books for me) but also how many books you must read a year to make it before your statistically appointed time. I am pleased to report that I read a good deal more than the 25 books per year, given that I must read that many if I am to fulfill their mission, but most of the books I will read this year aren't on the list. Somehow it's not troubling me too much. I find the list, which takes the trouble to defend itself by saying it is not exhaustive (whew) strangely weighted toward recent popular fiction. Why so many of Ian McEwan, Jose Saramago, Margaret Atwood, and Don DeLillo's books are there, even some obscure and not too great ones, and why Tim Winton, Andre Dubus, Hilary Mantel, or Wallace Stegner are not I can't tell. On the other hand At Swim Two Boys is there! I've never seen that absolutely brilliant book make a list before - John McGahern, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, and Rohinton Mistry are represented, I approve. It did a decent job of pointing out some glaring holes in my reading experience like Philip Roth, who I've never been able to stand, and John Updike, whose novels feel dated to me, V. S. Naipaul, and Rebecca West. I guess I have some work to do but I'm going to do it on my own rather than bring out the competitive in myself by signing up for the 1% challenge that 3M is offering - I'm all challenged out - but please don't let that stop you.

Hat tip: Ex Libris

The earth and the tide (Books - Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri)

The final triptych in Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of stories, "Hema and Kaushik," is again novelistic in scope, following a man and woman - the title characters - through 30 years of their lives, switching between his perspective and hers and between first and third person voices. We witness them meet as children, follow them through adolescence, the typical events of average lives - the choosing of a profession, death, marriages - and to their unsurprising reuniting as adults. Unsurprising not because it is boring but rather because it seems inevitable from the start. If the first part of this volume is earth, then this second one is water - the story titles suggest this loosely - "Unaccustomed Earth," "A Choice of Accommodations" vs. "Going Ashore." There is an interesting juxtaposition of mundane detail and massive sweep. On the one hand, Lahiri, as I mentioned in my first post, finds the deepest emotional resonance in the finely observed details of the lives of her characters - within half a page of meeting Roger, we know how his eyes settle on what they observe, his thwarted ambition to paint, how he wooed his lover, that he lines his bureau drawers, that there is a glass shelf in his medicine cabinet. Roger is not, in fact, one of the primary characters in "Only Goodness." In that same story, we experience the central characters - Roger's wife Sudha and her brother Rahul - over the course of nearly forty years. Lahiri's overarching subject in this volume seems to be loss at it relates to those people and places we love most deeply. In these stories Lahiri examines this subject in the context of a large swathes of time - months and years, not hours or days, because she is looking at how love shapes one over a lifetime. Even while the substance of life is mostly experienced as a series of actions that by themselves seem ordinary - bathing a baby, a single sentence spoken by a young man to two girls - the forces she grapples with in the stories are oceanic, tidal.

Life's little surprises (Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri)

The process of adding years to our lives and coming to points where our years of experience outweigh our years of possibility. Hopefully we feel like some of that experience has made us wiser and yet not so wise that we can never be surprised. The disappointment or contentment we feel with life seems caught up in the balancing act of those two components. We take our measure of them in the little things of life like being able to garden, doing our shopping independently, feeling needed. That seems to be the subject of the first section of Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of stories - Unaccustomed Earth.

In one story A young woman is visited by her widowed father while her husband is away on business. She is pregnant with her second child and agonizes about whether to ask her father to move in with her family, as would be traditional in Bengali culture, or live the freer more independent life to which she is accustomed. Meanwhile her father grows to love her young son while he harbors a guilty secret - he has begun a new romantic relationship. What I admired about this story was the movement between the inner life of both daughter and father - one younger one older - but Lahiri lets us know them with equal intimacy.

In another story a couple nearing forty go to the wedding of an old female friend of the groom's, leaving their young daughters at home. Their marriage has reached a point of familiarity where experience outweighs surprise, and the alcohol available at the reception is the spring that releases long pent-up jealousies and disappointments between an otherwise typical couple. This story is remarkable for its breadth, spanning 25 years in 40 pages. In the beginning of the story, we are introduced to the couple getting ready for the wedding at their hotel, but in order to build up the meat of the story complicated by the husband's visit to a school he hated and the wife's jealousy of another important woman in her husband's life, Lahiri goes off on eight-pages of exposition which one would expect to call a tangent but I hardly noticed the time shift so interesting were the events, so confidently did she make the move from one time to another, and so necessary were they to the plot. At that point the story didn't seem to be able to go anywhere else.

These stories, lean as they are, feel novelistic. We learn an extraordinary amount about the people in them - always through the small details of life - a late night phone call, the gesture of an older sister to a younger brother that seems to her to seal his fate. The events as Lahiri presents them always seem to me to verge on the petty but it is her attention to detail through which we witness the consequences. It is as if, through one silly comment at a wedding, or one torn dress we learn about their entire lives. You will notice I have not hesitated to talk a little about plot this time, but what I'm not offering you are excerpts. I think that is where the surprises lurk in this reading experience - not what happens per se, but the feeling of inevitable unfolding through simple words - words about the baby's bath, planting a garden, mailing a postcard. There is a good deal of sadness in these stories. I feel Lahiri hovering around a larger theme of loss - but not loss without reward or occasionally redemption.

It's how you play the game (Chess Story by Stefan Zweig)

Unlike some of the victims of the Nazis, Stefan Zweig and his wife escaped Austria in 1938, going first to London and then to Brazil where they later committed committed suicide, having experienced one of the ultimate betrayals - that of the culture they loved, a culture many considered the paragon of intellectual, emotional and artistic progressiveness at the dawn of the twentieth century. This was in fact the fate of my own great-grandfather. He committed suicide, never leaving Germany. Having served his country in the First World War and loving so deeply the spirit of all things German - exemplified by its thinkers, its artists like Goethe and Beethoven -once Germany killed what made those things symbols of the greatness of the human spirit, he no longer had anything to live for. The ultimate victim of the Nazis was Germany itself which, in trying to rid itself of what it considered not 'purely' German, actually robbed itself of the very qualities that made that Germaness great.

Stefan Zweig's novella Chess Story (recommended by both John Self and Verbivore) considers the relationship of two men to the game of chess. One a lawyer, a Dr. B. from Vienna, whose family's practice served the clergy and the family of the monarchy. When Hitler marched in Vienna, he is arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in isolation for months in the effort to extract money or information that the Nazis could use against threats to their power.

Locking each of us into a total vacuum, a room hermetically sealed off from the outside world, instead of beating us or exposing us to cold - this was meant to create an internal pressure that would finally force our lips open. At first glance the room assigned to me did not seem at all uncomfortable. It had a door, a bed, a chair, a washbasin, a barred window. But the door stayed locked day and night, no book, no newspaper, no sheet of paper or pencil was permitted to be on the table, the window faced a firewall; complete nothingness surrounded me both physically and psychologically... I never saw a human face, never heard a human voice; my eyes, my ears, all my senses received not the slightest stimulation from morning till night, from night till morning, all the time you were hopelessly alone with yourself, with your body, and with these four or five mute objects, table, bed, window, washbasin; you live like a diver in a diving bell in the black sea of this silence, for that matter like a diver who has guessed that the cable to the outside world has snapped and that he will never be hauled out of the silent deep.

What saves Dr. B. after months in this state? One day while he is waiting for his next interrogation:

I went on waiting and waiting and stared at the door, wondering when it would finally open and what the inquisitors might ask this time, though I knew that what they asked would be quite different from anything I was preparing for. Yet in spite of everything the agony of this waiting and standing was at the same time a relief, a pleasure, because this room was at least different from mine, somewhat larger and with two windows instead of one, without the bed and without the washbasin and without that particular crack in the windowsill that I had looked at a million times. The door was painted a different color, there was a different chair against the wall and to the left of it a file cabinet with files and a coatrack with hangers on which three or four damp military coats were hanging, the coats of my tormentors. So I had something fresh, something different to look at with my ravenous eyes, something new at last, and they clutched avidly at every detail. I examined every crease in those coats, I noticed for example a raindrop hanging from one of the wet collars, and, as ridiculous as it may sound to you, I waited with absurd excitement to see whether this drop would eventually run off along the crease, or whether it would defy gravity and keep clinging - yes, I stared and stared at that drop breathlessly for minutes on end as though my life depended on it. Then, when it had finally rolled off, I counted th buttons on the coats over again, eight on one, eight on another, ten on the third, and compared the lapels once more; my voracious eyes touched, caressed, embraced all these ridiculous, trivial details with a hunger I am unable to describe. And suddenly my gaze was riveted on something. I had discovered a slight bulge in the side pocket of one of the coats. I moved closer and thought I knew from the rectangular shape of the bulge what was in this slightly swollen pocket: a book! My knees began to shake: BOOK!

It is a book of chess games of the masters, and in his remaining months of confinement, Dr. B's sanity hangs on having his mind, his soul engaged by some source of stimulation.

The other man, Czentovic, is an ignorant young orphan, raised by a rural pastor, who masters the game of chess at 15 by watching others play and:

At seventeen he had already won a dozen prizes, at eighteen the Hungarian Championship, and at twenty he was champion of the world. The most audacious grandmasters, every one of them infinitely superior to him in intellectual gifts, imagination, and daring, fell to his cold and inexorable logic as Napoleon to the ponderous Kutuzov or Hannibal to Fabius Cunctator (who, according to Livy's report, displayed similar conspicuous traits of phlegm and imbecility in childhood). Thus it happened that the illustrious gallery of chess champions, including among their number the most varied types of superior intellect - philosopher, mathematicians, people whose natural talents were computational, imaginative, often creative - was for the first time invaded by a total outsider to the intellectual world, a dull, taciturn peasant lad, from whom even the craftiest newspaper men were never able to coax a single word of any journalistic value...

...Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had not sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

Embodied in Zweig's brief masterpiece we have Germany as the exemplar of intellectual, moral and creative life lost to Germany as a mindless machine run by an idiot savant, lacking all spirit or compassion. The first betrayed by the second at the cost of millions of lives and the deadening of humanity in, some would say, not just Germany, but the entire world as it was touched by the devastation left behind in the wake of the War.

Zweig also succeeds in creating a tremendous amount of suspense in this volume of scarcely 90 pages. I felt remiss in not having read Zweig before now and found this an inventive story. I am looking forward to reading more of the few works he left behind.

Sunday hodgepodge

I don't know what possessed me, but I decided to make salmon last night, actually I do know - it was Jake's plea for recipes for graduate and medical school students. He had numerous responders, including myself, offering their supposedly inexpensive and quick recipes that are nutritious and produce lots of leftovers. When considering last night's dinner, I had started with the idea of chicken and asparagus but after looking through my cookbooks The Ragazzo and I settled on prosciutto wrapped salmon, which sounds fancy but it could not be easier. It was accompanied by lentils with chopped spinach and herbs with yogurt dribbled on top. It even looked good on the plate! It was one of Jamie Oliver's recipes which I find are almost alway easy to make and really tasty. I first discovered the Naked Chef - while sick w/ a flu in a hotel in London and stuck in front of the television. Here's the recipe my only variations - I had pretty hefty fillets and cooked them for 20 minutes not 10. They were perfect. I also cheated and used canned lentils. I have Jamie's The Naked Chef Takes Off which has quite a few recipes I go to again and again. He also has a new book Cook with Jamie that I paged through while waiting for someone at Williams Sonoma that looks like a really good cooking primer. I'm a fan.


On a stomach happily filled with salmon and lentils I finished Russell Banks The Reserve. My enthusiasm for the solidity of his writing and my criticism for the plotting of this novel stand. My suspicions for how the novel would end were mostly confirmed. Banks may not have wished me to be surprised though. In the italicized passages that are flash forwards interspersed with the plot-proper set in 1936, at least one character dies. I won't say who or how, but what that did for the remainder of the 1936 events was cast a completely different light on them. It is like getting terribly caught up in one of life's daily drama's at work or at home - something that feels terribly important - and then suddenly hurricane Katrina strikes or a childhood friend gets a terrible illness and you're left thinking - what was I making all that fuss about? There is a sudden switch in the focus of the novel from a 1930s film intrigue and romance to questions of ethics - of right and wrong. They come a little late if you ask me, but I appreciated them coming at all. They gave me a respect for one of the characters that I hadn't previously felt.

If any of you care to recommend to me the Russell Banks I should read - I'd be intrigued to hear. I've had one vote for Cloudsplitter. He is the New York State Novelist after all, so I would like to read some more of his work.

I'm choosing between David Lodge's Thinks..., Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, and Stefan Zweig's Chess Story for my next book, but now, despite the fact that you think it may be Sunday, I have to head off to the lab and work.

Crazy debutante alert (Books - The Reserve and others)

Sometimes crazy characters are endlessly fascinating - their psychology creates the kind of unpredictability that makes a story exciting - other times you just want to slap them. Vanessa Cole in Russell Banks The Reserve is the second kind. In fact, it's not only Vanessa but also Jordan Groves, the painter who is entangled with her, Alicia his wife, and Hubert St. Germain who is entangled with Alicia - they all seem bent on mindless self-destruction in a way that just makes me want to throw up my hands for the lot of them. It's as though their little corner of upstate New York has been struck with a case of mass hysteria. I'm still admiring Banks' wordsmithery but his plotting has turned obvious. I'm about 100 pages from the end now and the plot proper and the mysterious italicized passages that I mentioned in my last post are beginning to come together in a way that feels rather melodramatic. **Spoiler Alert** While I joked about it, Vanessa Cole's mental health is actually rather important to the plot, it is rather an important element to her character too - one that I didn't necessarily suspect from my initial meeting with her **Spoiler over,** yet Banks, rather than let us discover this fact slowly, not being sure, as one might in meeting Vanessa several times, he dumps her back story on us unceremoniously in a twenty page chunk of narrative explanation that I found disappointing for being reportorial and unintegrated with the rest of the story. I'm still holding out hope for the rest of the story, with any luck I might finish it today, but I am no longer confident of where Banks is taking me.

That being said, I've heard people sing rhapsodies about Banks writing before now. So when I was trolling around my favorite bookstores with a friend on Thursday, I ended up, among many books, getting The Darling, an earlier novel of his set in the U.S. and Liberia. It focuses on Banks' interest in many previous books - the politics of race. I ended up with many other treasures to boot! William Trevor's Fools of Fortune, Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, Cormac McCarthy's Crossing, a biography of Walter Benjamin, and Proust and the Squid about the neuroscience of reading. But I wasn't done - no - on Friday I finally found some books that I had had trouble locating for a while. There is a trilogy by Wolfgang Koeppen that I learned about in Marcel Reich-Ranicki's memoir (itself a fascinating book)- a German novelist - including Pigeons in the Grass, Hothouse, and Death in Rome which examines the post war Germany through the lives of four characters who each symbolize an element of German culture. Along with them, I ordered the John Woods translation of Magic Mountain. I had an old used paperback edition that is falling to pieces now, and I have heard that this translation is much better.

To be not alone (Film: The Double Life of Veronique)

The Double Life of Veronique is one of those films that makes me feel, hear, see, taste everthing I come into contact with more intensely for a while after I see it. By Polish/French director Krysztof Kieslowski (who made Red, White, and Blue) it is a dreamy fairy tale of two women, doubles of each other, one living in France, the other in Poland. They're not really aware of each other and yet in their innermost thoughts they sense the other's presence. It is about the pain of being truly alone, and also knowing what it is like not to be alone. There is a wonderful romantic story line in which Veronique falls in love with a puppeteer who creates a tragic and beautiful puppet show at the school where she teaches. I love the musical theme which figures importantly in this film. After I first saw it, it ran through my head for days and days. It is visual poetry, shot with a lovely softness and with inventive use of camera angels to add to the dream-like quality Kieslowski goes for to suggest the link between the two women's lives without explaining it. The greatest strength of this film is how it takes a mysterious experience and renders it whole on film without ruining its mystery. It is one of my favorite films.

Does the destruction of libraries herald the death of a society?

Is this not a tragedy? The ruins of an abandoned Russian library, the full series of pictures is here at English Russia.

Hat tip: Hang Fire Books

Spring reading

Do your reading habits change in the Spring? Do you read gardening books? Even if you don’t have a garden? More light fiction than during the Winter? Less? Travel books? Light paperbacks you can stick in a knapsack?

Or do you pretty much read the same kinds of things in the Spring as you do the rest of the year?

When skin starts showing and heads start snapping around on the street and puppies are straining at their leashes to sniff at each other and the soft ice cream truck is chiming its sickly little ditty, it's spring time in New York - a restless time - and my reading habits probably do shift. Lately at the beginning of spring I tend to want some YA fantasy. That may be due to the fact that the end of the term is at hand and I'm trying to run away from papers and exams. I definitely start picking up some travel books to plan our summer trip. Sicily this year! No gardening books here - no garden! But we are looking for a guide to NYC flora and fauna. We run into dozens of birds, trees, and flowers on our walks in the park, but aside from the hawk we saw last week, some blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, and robins, and the familiar forsythia, tulips, and daffodils, we can't identify most of them. The other thing I know I'll be reading in spring are study notes. In fact, I had better start preparing some. But my preference for novels stays constant and it can be paperback or hardcover, large or small, size doesn't matter. I stocked up on a few just last week.

From A to Z

Who can resist a book list? Not I. I got it from Random Jottings... who got it from Stuck in a Book.

An A-Z of favorites:

A is for Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
B is for Pat Barker - The Regeneration Trilogy (Emily & Charlotte Bronte are close seconds)
C is for Ethan Canin - For Kings and Planets and it has to be for Chekhov too
D is for Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
E is for George Eliot - Middlemarch
F is for F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby and it also has to be for E. M. Forster too - Howards End
G is for Doris Grumbach - pretty much everything, a precious observer
H is for Herman Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game
I is for Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
J is for James Joyce - The Dubliners
K is for Tony Kushner - Angels in America Parts I & II
L is for Sinclair Lewis - Arrowsmith
M is for Iris Murdoch - anything! The Black Prince is a good start. But you won't go wrong with Toni Morrison - Sula or Ian McEwen - Atonement or Nicholas Mosely Hopeful Monsters either.
N is for Pablo Neruda - anything! The Love Sonnets are breathtaking
O is for Clifford Odets - Awake and Sing! The Country Girl or his diaries (awesome) or Frank O'Hara's poems
P is for Richard Powers - The Goldbug Variations (need you ask?)
Q is for Hm... I'm stumped, actually
R is for Ray Robinson - Electricity
S is for J. D. Salinger, May Sarton, Wallace Stegner, and ok William Shakespeare
T is for Tolstoy (I like the fact that the Russian writers only require last names) - Anna Karenina
U is for Barry Unsworth - Morality Play
V is for Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace
W is for Virginia Woolf - The Waves
X marks the spot but I can't think of an author
Y is for A. B. Yehoshuah - Mr. Mani
Z is for Stefan Zweig whom I haven't read yet but intend to!

Writing you can stand on (Books - The Reserve by Russell Banks)

After a day of writing a paper about alpha-2 adrenergic receptor agonists and monoamine oxidase inhibitors I was really glad to fall into bed with Russell Banks' new novel The Reserve. At its core are a willful debutante, Vanessa, and a stubborn artist/political idealist, Jordan Groves. Groves lands his plane on the lake outside Vanessa's father's home in Upstate New York and takes her flying on the same night that her father dies of a heart attack. The story of these two people is interspersed with short italicized chapters set in Europe full of border crossings and forged passports. The book is said to be a thriller which I have to take on faith. In the 75 pages I've read it hasn't felt like one to me. What Banks seems to do in those pages is built two very strong characters from the toes up. Often he describes what he does and what she thinks. It feels a very 30s film idiom - the man of quick action, the woman who is strong because she watches everything and is very active too, but circumspect, social mores don't expect her to be aggressive.

Vanessa followed the two men, but kept a few feet behind them, silent and watching and listening, like a reluctantly roused predator, operating more on instinct than need. She liked the artist's hard concentration, how he stood before each painting and literally stared at it for long minutes, as if it were alive and moving and changing shape and color before his eyes; and she liked that he offered no comment, no praise, compliment, or critique; just looked and looked and said nothing and moved on to the next, until he had seen them all, then returned to three or four of the landscapes for a second long looks.

Banks really takes his time so that you can feel the time Jordan takes to look at those pictures and the time Vanessa spent watching him do so. His style is very...what, solid, you could say manly if you want to stay in the 1930s idiom. Lots of 'ands' and semicolons, as though he chopped his sentences out of wood. When he describes a thing he is damn-well going to describe it.

Now Vanessa could hear the airplane clearly and steadily. Though she could not see it, she knew it was coming in from the north, flying low, tracing the Tamarack River to the First Lake and one to its headwaters here at the Second. Suddenly the airplane appeared in the northern sky just above a line of black silhouetted spruce trees. It was rising in the distance over the water quickly, its gleaming belly exposed to the waning sun, as if the pilot had decided to take in the view of the entire lake and surrounding mountains and the darkening sky, when she heard the engine cut back. The airplane - a pale gray biplane with scarlet trim and two open cockpits, a goggled, hatless pilot in the forward cockpit, the other empty - slowed there, seeming almost to pause in flight and hover, when it banked to the west, heading toward the mountain wall that plunged straight into the glittering water.

It was a seaplane with two large pontoons, and she thought she was watching a man about to crash his airplane deliberately against the thousand-foot vertical slab of gray granite, and she forgot her cold thoughts and grew almost excited, for she had never seen anyone kill himself and realized that in some small way she'd always wanted to and was surprised by it. The pilot seemed about to smash the airplane against the rock face of the mountain, when, less than a hundred yards from it, he banked hard to the left, dipped the wings back to horizontal, cut the engine speed nearly to stopping, and swiftly descended toward the water. The airplane touched down at the far side of the lake, broke the surface, and slid into the water, unfolding high fans of silver spray behind the pontoons. Vanessa was relieved, of course, but felt a flicker of disappointment too.

I knew I liked that passage when I first read it, but I hadn't realized how much until I just typed it. Writing hewn of wood. It's deliberate, structural - like it is built and fastened with bolts - and when it's done you can stand on it. But a thriller? This writing takes too much time. It creates no cheap thrill. I'm not breathlessly turning pages, I'm hunkering down in a deep leather club chair with my scotch, the ice clinking, and reading that passage again.

Mistakes, music, language, and individuality

It's Tuesday and you know what that means.... the Science Times. A few articles caught my eye today, one by Karren Barrow about a man who lost his ability to speak following a stroke (aphasia) and was able to learn to speak again with the help of melodic intonation therapy. This therapy seems to take advantage of the fact that certain aspects of singing, especially the melodic part, are typically accomplished by the right hemisphere of the brain while most language functions are housed on the left, where this patient experienced damage from the stroke. It's almost as if the right hemisphere is dragging the left along. It seems to be particularly helpful with speech spontaneity.

There is a little blurb by Henry Fountain that describes a study by Tom Eichele, a Norwegian researcher, and his colleagues that images the brain prior to making errors to learn what is different from when we perform well. There were two things I appreciated about this article. One was a few simple words in the writing which did not use the typical language of popular science with regard to fMRI.

** a little lecture about fMRI follows, which you are welcome to skip**
Usually authors describe the brain "lighting up" and make a direct link between the brain's relative use of oxygen in some parts of the brain as compared to others and its activation. The basis of this type of fMRI (there are several but this is a pretty common one), is that the 'f,' standing for functional, gives us a picture of a brain in action. It does this by measuring which regions of the brain are metabolizing the most oxygen at a certain moment in time, and describes those as the regions which are most active. Not an unreasonable assumption. The fMRI is a giant magnet, sensitive to the oxygen level of hemoglobin - the chemical in our blood which carries oxygen. That chemical is more strongly magnetic in its deoxygenated state than when it is bound to oxygen. That difference is what the magnet senses, and tiny regions measuring only a millimeter by a millimeter can be coded as to their relative blood oxygen levels. There has to be an adjustment for the time lag that exists between the metabolism of the oxygen and the blood oxygen level which is not directly measured, rather the fMRI is sensing the by-product that remains once the oxygen is used up. This is one of the many complications inherent in designing a meaningful fMRI experiment. There is in addition some disagreement as to exactly what physiological state is being reflected by the difference in oxygenation level. Most fMRI literature suggests that blood oxygen level is directly analogous to 'activation' of brain regions but what does that mean? The firing of a nerve cell or many cells within that 1mm volume (known as a voxel)? Neurons can be excitatory or inhibitory. Are those neurons all excitatory? Doesn't an inhibitory neuron firing also use up energy? Are we seeing a net measure of activation? My point is that fMRI is a complex measure. What a given series of brain images suggest should be described thoughtfully as the brain is not actually 'lighting up' at all. This article chooses to do that by carefully describing fMRI as a 'measure of oxygenation' and I appreciated that. Whew long tangent.
**Lecture ends here**

The other thing I liked about this article was the science itself. This experiment makes use of a fairly controversial idea - the so-called default mode region - which is a network of brain regions that are more relatively active when a person is relaxed and "at rest." Don't get me started with the scientific and philosophical problems of measuring rest. I won't go there today. This study suggest that those regions become more activated just prior to an error. As problematic as the whole default-mode idea can be, I enjoy the scientific sense behind the idea that a brain preparing to rest rather than to perform an activity would perform it less well. It almost sounds liking going to sleep at the wheel!

I also really enjoyed the article by Christine Kenneally on the impact of language on thought. One of my main research interests is top-down impact on perception - how an individual brain's experiences mold perception. This article about is written in a thorough format and offers a reading list on language and thought that many of you might enjoy.


Finally, Carl Zimmer writes interestingly and amusingly on diversity at the bacterial level. With the simplicity of a bacterial life form, you wouldn't expect much possibility of individuation, but research on the E. Coli belies that expectation.

Spring has sprung!

Out for a walk today...the park in walking distance from our apartment is in full bloom!

The fantasy is over... (Books - Abhorsen by Garth Nix)

The fantastical struggle against evil in Garth Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy came to an exciting conclusion in the ultimate volume. Nix does a good job with satisfying coming of age fiction as I mentioned in the last post. In this book I was aware how, through the trilogy he had created an enveloping mythology for his alternate world that includes not just your usual run-of-the-mill forces of darkness but a creation-story, an afterlife, and a variety of races or tribes which, in the conclusion he whips into a raucous conclusion. My post on Lirael is here and Sabriel here. And the end of this fantasy means I'm supposed to return to my homework, boo-hoo.

Web finds

I discovered artist Jacob Whibley while trolling around this morning. I particularly like his collages (left).

Hat tip: scout holiday


This really cracked me up - courtesy of raincoaster.

Of Books and Bicycles muses on her summer reading plans to get her through the end of the semester. I'm planning on The Pickwick Papers for my annual Dickens novel, Middlemarch, and Revolution on my Mind for the Russian Reading Challenge, which has sadly ended up on the back burner lately.

Scott Pack rants on the Times Top 50 Crime Writers (list freaks - go forth and be outraged). Have you noticed that whenever someone draws up a literary list it provokes nothing but rants and raves? I include myself in this. I've yet to read someone post a list and say something like, 'The Guardian posted this great list of the top 50 books to read before you drop and it's brilliant - I wouldn't change a thing.' Scott makes his case for adding John Connolly, which made me think that I've read nothing of his besides The Book of Lost Things. It may be time to remedy that - any suggestions?



Curious Expeditions who I can always count on for, well... curiousities, taught me about Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux, 19th century French anatomist and his paper mache and resin anatomical models, one of which is tucked into the back of an antique shop called Obscura. You know where I'm going this week. That's one of his brains above.

How blind children learn the verb "see" - at the Cognition and Language Lab.

That ought to keep you busy. Happy Sunday.

In which I have a day off... (Books, books, books)

I began our week-long spring break from class (but not from lab) yesterday with a day-off. I really needed one. It was a gorgeous summer-like day in NYC yesterday, everything is blooming. I had a Japanese lunch, went to the stationary store (read grown-up toy store), the library, 3 Lives Booksellers (my favorite New York independent bookstore of the variety selling new books, see picture to the left), took a walk in the park with my mother and had bloody Marys on the patio of the cafe beneath the cherry blossoms, ordered dinner in with The Ragazzo, and was in bed reading before 10.




My library find was Thinks... by David Lodge. I've read Lodge's book on writing The Practice of Writing but, oddly enough, I've never read his fiction. The jacket descriptions are too hyperbolic to repeat here, but from my little dip in while making my selection between this and Cynthia Ozick at the library, it looks like a satiric take on yet another aging male academic who can't keep his hands off women he is not married to, along with some literate stuff on - you know, the usual - love and consciousness. Let's hope it's better than I make it sound here.

There were way too many choices to make at 3 Lives, I confined myself to two - The new Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, which I'm really looking forward to. Her stories are filled with such insight and don't feel formulaic. I also decided on Russell Banks The Reserve on a complete whim. I saw the film adaption of The Sweet Hereafter but have never read anything of his. This is set on the eve of World War II and involves a manipulative socialite her relationship with an artist... you know trying to summarize any book before you've read it is simply pointless. I'll let you know what I think it's about after I've read it.

I tore my way through about half of Abhorsen, the third book in Garth Nix's trilogy by the same name. This enjoyable YA fantasy continues the story of Lirael - the seer from the second volume - and Sameth the prince of the realm - in their efforts to overthrow darkness and, you know, save humanity. I can take or leave the magic, what I like about Nix in general, but this volume in particular, is seeing these teenagers who were both outcasts in their own ways, learn who they are both in terms of their strengths and their limits and come to own themselves. Nix manages to do this with the minimum of preaching assisted by a magical dog and a bitterly sarcastic cat who add a dose of irony whenever things get too serious.

CD Cover Meme

A totally nifty meme courtesy of {feuilleton} and the perfect thing for a Friday at 2:28 am. Build your own CD cover!

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4: Combine all three elements in your photo editing software.

5: Share

Here's mine, a mark of prudence, by the hot young newcomers (disambiguation):


If you think it would be fun to do your own, consider yourself tagged.