Death-lite (Books - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak)

Everyone has been blogging about how great this book is, so I picked up a copy of The Book Thief when I was in London and began reading it in snatches yesterday as I got ready for a dinner party at our house. Between cleaning and setting out the melon and prosciutto and the figs and cheese (I like lots of cold food at summer dinner parties so that a) we don't roast and b) I don't have to do any work after the guests come) I read the first 60 pages or so. It moves like wildfire, I will say that. It's a meta-fictional creation, that is, it plays with form - featuring little sections in bold surrounded by curlie-cues, bulleted lists, and so on. Liesel, a little Lutheran girl (or is she?), is passed on to foster-parents by her own mother after the death of her brother. The foster mother swears up a storm (in German) while the father offers sweet, accordion-playing companionship. The playfulness of the tone and youthful central character reminds me a little of Sasa Stanisic's How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, which I raved about here, but unlike that book The Book Thief's tone renders the action more distant rather than involving. Within the first few pages Liesel's brother dies and frankly I could have cared less. Neither the language nor the circumstances are particularly imaginative, that story took place during a real tragic historical event too. In addition here the narrator is not the child but death himself. So far I'm finding that's the one idea and it hasn't lifted itself above cute. He's death-lite - could I have a lemon with that? It's an international bestseller, the cover informs me, and everyone from the Guardian to People Magazine to the Canberra Times tells me it is a work of towering genius that will move me to tears. I am ready and willing to have my socks knocked off - both of them - but honestly, it's a holocaust story with a little girl in it who likes books - will anyone be willing to say it's not great and won't move me to tears? I'm barely into it so, who knows, I might change my mind but as yet I am unmoved and un-sock-knockoffable.

The speed and tension of a good chase scene (Books - The Darling by Russell Banks)

In the last chapters of Russell Banks's The Darling Hannah returns to Liberia to be with her husband and children, thinking that her having helped Charles Taylor while he was imprisoned in the U.S. would keep them all safe. For someone whose whole life was about participating in political movements of one kind or another, Hannah comes to see herself as rather naive in retrospect, which is the perspective from which this book was written. Banks does a good job at letting us get into Hannah's mindset as it felt while the events were happening, which is important for making her an interesting character and this an interesting story. The last 60 pages or so take place during the bloody revolution in which Charles Taylor overthrows the corrupt government of Samuel Doe. This is a history lesson but it reads with the speed and tension of a good chase scene in a movie. I tore through it. For more of my thoughts on The Darling these are my other posts 1, 2.

Idealism and imperfection (Books - The Darling by Russell Banks)

In Russell Banks's recent book The Reserve, style is on display - noir, to be exact - and I remember finding myself very aware of the solidity of the third-person narrator but not convinced by Vanessa, the central character (my three posts on it are linked here). In The Darling, his first-person narrator Hannah Musgrave, aka, Dawn Carrington is telling us her own story. I wondered if Banks would pull off an entire book in the character of a woman and so far he has, granted I am still 60 pages from the end, but I haven't questioned his character for the most part and in this book the writing is unselfconscious, I really haven't given it much thought. I'm reading this as a book about an idealist coming to terms with the imperfections of her own humanity. Hannah is a Brandeis graduate (my alma mater) who takes up a radical political life in the 1960s when she graduates, first registering voters in America's South and later joining the underground movement called the Weathermen, performing acts that although motivated by serious politics and good intentions are criminal under the law. She spends a good part of the book on the lam, wanted by the U.S. government for her actions. Her father, a well-to-do physician turned liberal politician and her mother, a loving, clueless wife who Hannah wants desperately never to emulate, can rarely see or speak to her once she goes into hiding. Oddly, she does end up emulating her for a time.

I remembered my vows as a teenage girl and later as a grown woman never, never to become dependent on a man's fate. I'd seen early on how it had paralyzed my mother, and from that vantage point, still a girl's, I had looked ahead at what the world would offer me when I became a woman, and had pledged that I would take it only on my own terms.

Hannah ends up in Liberia, in some ways the American liberal's dream-country - founded by freed slaves in the 1800s, it gave those men and women their own land and a chance to run their own lives with compassion and idealism learned from their years in unjust captivity and with the support of the U.S. government. As with most experiments creating nations, there were problems. The U.S. forgot about the tribes who were already living in that territory and knew nothing about their relationships with each other, and created a cauldron of tribal tensions fueled by a corrupt government. Hannah marries a government minister in Liberia, having three children, and very much living the life of the wife of a politician - the life of her mother - until she is forced out by the coup of Samuel Doe, and leaves her husband and children behind. The book is written in retrospect, with Hannah as an older woman, living a simple life on a chicken farm in upstate New York, she decides to search for her sons and returns to Liberia, remembering her life as she writes it down for us.

While I found some of the political history fascinating (and well integrated with the story), I feel that the strongest writing in the book is about Hannah's relationships - with her sometime lover Carol, with her husband, with the chimpanzees whose humane treatment she champions, but particularly with her parents.

I'm no longer the same person I was when this exchange between me and my parents took placed. But I can see how, just in telling you about the exchange, I revert, not quite to my childhood state of mind, but to adolescence, or even to pre-adolescence. Both my parents are long dead now. In the intervening years I've been married, widowed, and borne three children; I've perpetrated a hundred large and small betrayals and abandonments; perfect lovers have been replaced by other perfect lovers, men have replaced women and boys have replaced men, and Africans have replaced Americans, who have been replaced by Americans again; chimpanzees in cages have replaced a childhood pet, and Border collies, free-roaming farm dogs, haver replaced the chimpanzees; and I've gone on alone, untouched, undeterred, unbetrothed, a woman whose essence is a white shadow, a spirit of the river, on of those mammi wattas.

Russell Banks seems drawn to strong female characters with emotionally frail, clueless Yankee mothers - the same tension was played out in The Reserve but in a much more extreme fashion. I found this relationship better developed and both more compassionate and more believable. The Darling is not a light read, but I have found the events compelling. I do not question the settings in many countries and through several decades that this plot runs through. He seems to always choose the proper details to fill out a world. For instance, when Hannah returns to the U.S. after the coup in Liberia, she ends up staying with Carol and Zack, both former lovers, and Carol's daughter, while she figures out her next move. Banks covers this period in maybe ten pages or so because it is not a vital part of the plot, but he doesn't relegate a scene or character to a "secondary" status. If he bothers to create it at all, he creates a scene with attention to detail that makes is wholly believable. You can see Hannah become part of Carol's household again in one wonderful detail - she begins to braid her daughter's hair like her own every morning and brush it out every evening. There was something about this simple detail that was like the choice of action that an actor would make. People live through actions not concepts, and Banks writing embodies this. Its one of the things that makes the worlds and people he creates so tangible, even when that character or scene is not a central one.

I'm not quite finished with the book yet, but I hope to be by the end of the day. I'll check back in if my experience of the ending seems to add anything to my reactions.

American Idealism (Books - America America by Ethan Canin)

I just have to say, after all my ranting and raving about how many books I have to read this summer - I believe the number was 20, possibly whittling it down to 13 if I was smart about it - I could not resist getting the new novel by Ethan Canin. I have read everything Canin has written and his For Kings and Planets is one of my favorite novels of all time. America America is his latest and I couldn't help starting it as soon as it was in my hot little paws, once again side lining Russell Banks The Darling. Those two will make interesting bedfellows, both are about American idealism and politics over the last forty years.

I am not a number. I am a free man! (Theater - The Adding Machine)

"I am not a number," Patrick McGoohan used to rage on the 1960s show about a former British agent called The Prisoner, "I am a free man." Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine features characters who are all numbered rather than named. They are indeed the antithesis of free men and women, and this play examined the dehumanizing effects of replacing workers with machines. In experiencing it through a beautiful new musical adaptation by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt, I was struck more by the fact that these people dehumanized themselves by living unchallenging lives. Mr. Zero tries so intently to protect himself from risks to body and heart that he seemed to live no life at all. After 25 years adding numbers, sharing his desk with Daisy - a woman who read each number aloud, he is made redundant by the adding machine, kills his boss in a fit of rage, and is sentenced to death. At the beginning of the show we see that everything about Mr. Zero's life has become automated including his marriage, which consists of Mrs. Zero's comparing her life to to others and sniping at Mr. Zero's inadequacies. She is played and sung with gusto by Cyrilla Baer. The composer and librettist have created an interesting score - the opening, for example, is a fugue-like piece, composed largely of numbers both spoken and sung. The music is satisfying for being quirky, complex, and gratefully lacking in pop cliche. Although the singers in this small space were miked, I felt like I was always hearing their voices unamplified. It was a pleasure to hear singers with real voices - not over-amplified screaming. The set it simple and compact and the production focuses its attention where I wish more productions would - on the human beings, their relationships to their circumstances, each other, and themselves. This is not an easy story and it could easily turn into an evening of unadulterated gloom about ruined lives - especially with our current economy and the mainstream media's love of "real" stories - but the evening turns on element of human striving-for-better as embodied in the character of Daisy and the beautiful performance of Amy Warren. This musical is unusual for being a story about middle aged people, past their prettiness but, Daisy shows us, not necessarily their prime. I loved seeing a stage full of performers who have done some living, who know how to use their voices, their souls, and their intellects to create powerful performances full of real behavior driven by human feeling. Mr. Zero is uneducated, white, poor, rough, even bigoted - think Archie Bunker but 1920s and singing - but Joel Hatch gets us to see the heart in him. I love the roughness of his characterization - his voice had a strong Brooklyn accent and there was tons of gravel and growl in it, but he could also sing beautifully. These combine to great effect in his courtroom confession - a musical monologue. It's rare to see an emotional show stopper for a middle aged man on the musical stage. I can't think of one since Sweeney Todd's Epiphany. I loved it! My favorite part of the show was when Daisy and Mr. Zero finally get together (in the afterlife). She sits next to Mr. Zero for twenty-five years on the job in hope, living on a single fantasy of the one company picnic which Mrs. Zero couldn't attend and she believes Mr. Zero showed her some affection. Now she is well past shall we say 'marriageable age,' and she knows it. She had resigned herself to being unfulfilled, but when she meets Mr. Zero in the afterlife she decides she will not allow her second chance to go by the way she did her first. Daisy's Confession is a beautiful outpouring of repressed longing through song and Amy Warren really goes to that private place in front of us. Her singing and acting form a perfect inseparable whole as she cries, rages, and blushes before us. I'd see the whole show again just to see her. Unfortunately it is scheduled to close on July 20. If you are near New York before then, go see this lovely show. It's a commercial off-Broadway production at the Minetta Lane Theater. Here's a link. This is one of those shows I wish would tour, although the road finds it hard to sell unknown work. Perhaps this show is compact enough and can play small enough venues to make a commercially viable tour, but it's more likely that regional theater companies, especially ones with intimate spaces (under 500 seats) will pick this kind of show up and do a locally based production. I hope universities don't pick it up, because it is not a show that will benefit from youthful performances, but however it might get produced near you, if you have a chance to see it, it's a beautiful show.

Limitlessness (Books - White Noise by Don DeLillo)

"I don't know what your personal involvement is with this substance," she said, "but I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

Two of the characters in White Noise, which I finished last night, have a desperate fear of death, so one participates in a study for a new psychotropic medication that inhibits that fear. It made me think about raising kids and how one of the chief roles of the parent is not merely to fill kids up with information about the world - the kids do that naturally provided the right environment - but to create limits so that the child knows where it ends and the world begins, so that the child learns it is not an indomitable force, so that it learns not all things are good, so that it can make choices. I sometimes hear parents talk about their fears of stressing their child out by setting limits - I think the stress is largely their own - those limits are necessary for the child to develop a real sense of the world and to become secure adults. In White Noise it seems like we have become greedy for information, like all babies we're wired that way, but society has provided no limits and that has led to rampant unease.

One of the symptoms of limitlessness and the primacy of information in the world of White Noise is the course that Jack Gladney's colleagues teaches on car crashes in films, as is Jack's own program in "Hitler Studies." In the 1980s holocaust studies programs were rather novel. For some people who lived through the Nazis or lost family to them the notion of studying the holocaust seemed just and necessary to promote better understanding, to not forget, but for others it created outrage - as if one could ever understand such a thing. 'Everything is just a phenomenon,' this idea seems to say, 'it can be learned and then understood fully, and then the fear will go away.' DeLillo takes the notion to its furthest reach with the car crash seminar:

"These are mainly B-movies, TV movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypse in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old 'can-do' spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges. A director says, 'I need this flatbed truck to do a midair double somersault that produces an orange ball of fire with a thirty-six-foot diameter, which the cinematographer will use to light the scene.' I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, this tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream."

"A dream? How do you students reply?"

"Just the way you did. 'A dream?' All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?"

"What about it?" I said.

"I tell them it's not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It's a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, 'Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'"

"What do you say to that?"

"I tell them they can't think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It's a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don't mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach."

"Look past the violence."

"Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun."

I have gone on and on about how this book prefigures our time in so many ways - here is another. We live in an age now in which Hitler has become a colloquial metaphor. Just the other day I had a conversation with someone who described a person as 'a Hitler.' Well, I know what they mean, but the term still makes me wince. Is there really another one? I guess the distance is natural, perhaps even desirable, we don't want to deify the events of a genocide if we are to understand them, but sometimes the way in which they have become ordinary surprises me. It's a moment I can really see time pass right before my eyes. Is that the destiny of Mugabe, Milosevic, Mao, and Stalin - will they all just become metaphors? And I suppose the answer is yes, that is what we write plays and novels about - real pain - whether that of an individual with a broken heart or a nation with millions of war victims. And that writing and rehearsing allows us to analyze, to feel and to remember - not just to file away and forget. The flip side is to endlessly finger our wounds. To be helpless victims who never recover and that is not a desirable alternative, although there are ways in which our culture plays out this game too, and White Noise is right there with its own example. During the toxic cloud event in the novel there is a hilarious sequence in which a simulation is conducted during the crisis, because they have been waiting for an opportunity to have victims upon whom to practice. The fact that they are real victims doesn't seem to disturb them too much as it is their role to simulate. Following that crisis, more simulations are carried out as now the populace are engaged by their fear or their fervor.

"Move it out, get it out. You're in the exposure swath."

"What's that mean?"

"It means you're dead," he told me.

I backed out of the street and parked the car. Then I walked slowly back down Elm, trying to look as though I belonged. I kept close to storefronts, mingled with technicians and marshals, with uniformed personnel. There were buses, cars, ambulettes. People with electronic equipment appeared to be trying to detect radiation or toxic fallout. In time I approached the volunteer victims. There were twenty or so, prone, supine, draped over curbstones, sitting in the street with woozy looks.

I was startled to see my daughter among them. She lay in the middle of the street, on her back, one arm flung out, her head tilted the other way. I could hardly bear to look. Is this how she thinks of herself at the age of nine - already a victim, trying to polish her skills? How natural she looked, how deeply imbued with the idea of a sweeping disaster. Is this the future she envisions?

Yes. It's one of the roles people love to play in our culture -victim. We prolong the pain and sense of entitlement as long as we can, professionals look grave and sympathetic, and spokespeople are chosen to advocate for rights we supposedly earn as byproducts of our status. - what a concept! Yet another way this brilliant book anticipated our own age. Except DeLillo is able both to find humor in the situation and to create passages of snowballing beauty. So much of his writing in this book is characterized by cascades of language:

storefronts, mingled with technicians and marshals, with uniformed personnel. There were buses, cars, ambulettes. People with electronic equipment appeared to be trying to detect radiation or toxic fallout...

or

"I don't think I like your potassium very much at all," he went on. "Look here. A bracketed number with computerized stars."

"What does that mean?"

"There's no point your knowing at this stage."

"How was my potassium last time?"

"Quite average in fact. But perhaps this is a false elevation. We are dealing with whole blood. there is the question of a gel barrier. Do you know what this means?"

"No."

"There isn't time to explain. We have true elevation and false elevations. This is all you have to know."

"Exactly how elevated is my potassium?"

"It has gone through the roof, evidently."

"What might this be a sign of?"

"It could mean nothing, it could mean a very great deal indeed."

"How great?"

"Now we are getting into semantics," he said.

"What I'm trying to get at is could this potassium be an indication of some condition just beginning to manifest itself, some condition cause perhaps by an ingestion, an exposure, an involuntary spillage-intake, some substance in the air or the rain?"

These little waterfalls of words not only create the beautiful music of this book's language, they embody the fact that questions are answered in this book with myriad possibilities, not with answers - 'it could be this, this, or this,' creating this overflow of information - technology gone mad, one instance in which knowledge isn't power. Look, now I'm doing it!

My other thoughts about White Noise are here and here.

Drink Your Wine (Theater - The Bacchae)

Do not cross Dionysus - he's the Greek god of revelry, of wildness, of wine - that's the advice of Euripides' 2400-year-old play The Bacchae. The Greeks created mythical beings who represented various aspects of nature (and I include us in nature). In this play Dionysus is crossed by Pentheus, prince of Thebes. Pentheus is upset by the revels of the Maenads, the wild dancing women who accompany the god everywhere, and so he attempts to imprison Dionysus. But Dionysus, being a god, cannot be held. In the end, not only do Pentheus's mother, aunts, and grandfather dance in the mountains with the cult of Dionysus while wine and milk spring from the ground, but Dionysus exacts his revenge by driving the revelers to tear Pentheus to bits. His own mother impales his head on a pike as a trophy, imagining it to be a mountain lion.

A program article by Simon Goldhill describes The Bacchae as

...show[ing] how the forces of sexuality, violence, and irrationality can undermine society's most chrished commitments and offers a dark, lurid, and seductive image of the fragility of civilization.

but I don't think that is the whole picture. In fact, I don't think the play only portrays these forces as negative. Sexuality, violence, irrationality are parts of us to be understood, respected and to be given some play - even celebrated, lest we become unable to deal with them and when they burst forth take us over entirely. That, I think, is what is meant by the notion that we should respect Dionysus. If we don't respect those parts of us which need to revel, to dance, to go a little crazy once in a while, if we fear them, if we control them too much, if we deny in fact that they are a part of us - they will explode despite us and rage out of control, which will end in tragedy as this play does.

I have seen two productions of this play in the past year, one at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU directed by my friend Kevin Kuhlke, and this production by the National Theatre of Scotland featuring a new translation by David Greig and directed by John Tiffany and featuring Alan Cumming as Dionysus, part of this summer's Lincoln Center Festival. The NYU production was very raw, with a marvelously contemporary translation and really great modern music. This production's text is contemporary and colloquial and yet also poetry - I liked the version a lot. Alan Cumming ate the poetry, reveling in his burr to make its speaking full of juice. His physical appearance - he is a god, so he may choose his form - was full-out androgynous human, as you can see in the above photograph. Male, but also female - feminine and sexual but also tough and muscular, his body wide open. Cal MacAninch played Pentheus as all wire and outrage. The highlight of the cast to my mind was Paola Dionisotti as Pentheus's mother Agave. She hurled herself into the revelry with complete abandoned passion and then broke into tiny vulnerable pieces when she realized she had killed her own son. Lovely performance. There was a lot that was good in this production but I took issue with the choice this production made regarding the Bacchae themselves. The NYU production used raw, intense, throaty music in the bodies of the young women who are their students. Here the chorus were all adult women. They were a talented and spirited bunch - coming in all shapes and sizes and they moved really well - but the music and dance created for the production was a gospel-y soul. This could have worked if its performance had had more guts, more, well, soul, but it felt more like I was watching a Vegas Motown medley. Nothing about the work lacked talent it just felt very controlled, very elegant - the opposite of what I wanted the music to evoke in a production of The Bacchae. There was one dance to show us the maenads in their revelry that really had some guts, but sadly only one. I think this production made a choice, both in the casting of Alan Cumming - who is great but who is directed to play a very entertaining Dionysus - and in the use of a very commercial, familiar, and appealing musical idiom - to make friends with the audience. The choice of playing us up, first with god as comedian, and then with Bacchae-as-Dreamgirls was to put us in the role of one who will find the god appealing, enticing, entertaining. We should feel ourselves want to be one of them. It's an interesting choice - but I think the script plays more with a tension of wanting our complicity, our involvement, but also our distance - that's the advantage of having a chorus narrate and delivering the most terrible events by messenger. I never felt the fear and excitement of what was to happen to Pentheus before it happened as I did in seeing a rehearsal at NYU without any set. My heart pounded in anticipation of what I knew was going to happen, even while Pentheus did not. Here I was skillfully entertained, but I only felt the impact of what happened afterward, through the fine performance of Agave. I finally put aside this objection so that I could enjoy the rest of the production, for it did have a lot to offer. I enjoyed the fact that the women of the chorus also played smaller roles of soldiers and the messenger who reports on the murder of Pentheus - the messenger is always a difficult role as it must make drama of events we don't ever see. Hazel Holder handled it beautifully and the physical work of the other Bacchae really added to my experience of the narration.

Information - relevant or toxic (Books - White Noise by Don DeLillo)

The characters in White Noise have an abject terror of death that they attempt to soothe by filling their every waking moment with information. It's as if the information can take the place of meaning. When that doesn't work, there is a time-released neuropsychotropic drug being developed that acts specifically to allay the fear:

"They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector."

"Incredible."

"It's not just a powerful tranquilizer. The drug specifically interacts with the neurotransmitters in the brain that are related to the fear of death. Every emotion or sensation has its own neurotransmitters. Mr. Gray found fear of death and then went to work on finding the chemicals that would induce the brain to make its own inhibitors.

"Amazing and frightening."

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."

"Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses. Don't tell me this. It's unbearable to think about."

"They can trace everything you say, do and feel to the number of molecules in a certain region."

"What happens to good and evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons. Are you telling me that a whole tradition of human failings is now at an end, that cowardice, sadism, molestation are meaningless terms? Are we being asked to regard these things nostalgically? What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. What happens when we reduce it to cells and molecules?

The many ways Don DeLillo's 1984 book White Noise anticipates our own time continues to amaze me. There was an article in the last year's New York Times Magazine about the legal system and neurosicence. Here's a post I wrote about it. A man with a brain cyst pushes his wife out of the window - did the cyst make him do it? I have never understood how increasing our knowledge about the cells and chemicals that make up the nervous system eliminates the concept of free will or responsibility. I don't understand it any more than I understand how Darwin's theory of evolution obviates belief in one deity or another. The world is the way the world is. If our ability to imagine or measure our world changes so that we know more or differently than before, our world hasn't changed. I suppose we have changed, and change is very frightening for some people. But the world is the same as it was before. It's fearing that we must give up our concepts about the world that so terrifies Jack in this book. Aside from the neuroscientific information being a little off - there are not exactly neurotransmitters for every sensation, and there is no one brain region connected with fear of death, but the way we are grappling with our new found understanding of the brain, the medications that are being developed, the moral questions the knowledge is raising - these are spot on.

This book, even while a noxious chemical cloud (literally) engulfs the town in which Jack Gladney and his family live, continues to be hilarious. A professor of Hitler studies who speaks no German? Jack has arranged a conference of fellow scholars and now goes desperately and secretly to a German teacher several times a week to try to remedy this problem.

...I continued to have trouble pronouncing the words. Dunlop did not seem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.

We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls and windows - items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once we reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had every handled my tongue before.

It seems that one of the toxic cloud's chief effects on the human body is to create feelings of deja vu.

"Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can't fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We're seeing into the future but haven't learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material."

"Why are so many people having these episodes now?"

"Because death is in the air," he said gently. "It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven't learned about ourselves..."

There were also articles about deja vu fairly recently - here are two: 1, 2. DeLillo's explanations are beautiful narrative and really capture our zeitgeist brilliantly - visions of the future - that's what this book is! And that cloud over us - a toxic load of information - threatening to poison us all with meanings - so much meaning - how do we choose? And, Heinrich asks, to what end?

"Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we're so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn't say, 'Big deal.' Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can't be seen by the eye of man. It's waves, it's rays, it's particles."

"We're doing all right."

"We're sitting in this huge moldy room. It's like we're flung back."

"We have heat, we have light."

"These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you've read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?"

"'Boil your water,' I'd tell them."

"Sure. What about 'Wash behind your ears.' That's about as good."

We saw Greek drama in the ruin of a Greek theatre in Siracusa just a few weeks ago and this afternoon we're going to see a contemporary take by the National Theatre of Scotland on The Bacchae - in New York City. Why do we still watch Greek dramas? Because they knew so damned much about us that they're still relevant. But DeLillo's point is that crowding our world with information is not the same as knowing something that we can put to use. Information can be vital but it can also be toxic. Sometimes our knowledge is useful and other times it is just noise.

Another Silly Meme

Ordinarily I wouldn't do two memes in a row, but I've been tagged and flattered by Toujours Jacques so here goes...

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. Gelato
2. the darkest, bitterest chocolate I can find
   
3. walnuts
4. cheese
   
5. olives
   

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

see above, take away the gelato and chocolate, and add veggies and a dip made w/ olive oil, tamari and lime juice, and fruit especially apricots and blueberries

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Have several nice homes including one in NYC, one in the country near NYC (Hudson River Valley or Berkshires), an apartment in Paris, and a house in the Italian countryside
   
2. Take care of my family and friends and make sure they weren't wanting for anything.
3. Start a foundation that would support good ensemble theater companies everywhere and
   
4. Advocate for equitable laws in my country for the LGBT community
   
5. Stay in school and get a job when I've graduated, I'm not interested in being idle
   

Five (non-academic) jobs that I have had:

1. Magician
   
2. Charge box office telephone 'representative'
   
3. Temp in an advertising company
   
4. Development director of not-for-profit
   
5. Artistic Director of an ensemble theater company

Five habits:

1. Making tea and breakfast including fruit every morning and
   
2. Sitting in front of my computer in silence to write while I have it, no matter how early I have to leave for work/class
   
3. Reading in bed before sleeping no matter how late it is
   
4. Talking too much, especially offering advice, I guess it's the teacher in me. When I get tired enough of it I usually clam up for days.
   
5. Drinking good wine
   

Five places I have lived:

1. Waltham, Massachusetts
2. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
3. Chicago, Illinois
4. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
5. New York, New York
   

Five people I want to get to know better (you're being tagged, but no pressure if you don't like these things):

1. Ms. Alex
   
2. Mr. Lehrer
   
3. Herschelian
   
4. Sarah (consider it a writing prompt!)
   
5. Lotus

But if you're not tagged, it's not because I don't love you.

Glib

Questions to be answered with one word only - and no word can be used twice. (From Sheila)

1. Where is your cell phone? desk
2. Your significant other? Ragazzo
3. Your hair? sparse
4. Your mother? indomitable
5. Your father? remembered
6. Your favorite time of day?dusk
7. Your dream last night? gone
8. Your favorite drink? wine
9. Your dream goal? fulfillment
10. The room you’re in? kitchen
11. Your ex? spoiled
12. Your fear? trapped
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? present
14. What you are not? complacent
15. Your Favorite meal? antipasto
16. One of your wish list items? dvd
17. The last thing you did? read
18. Where you grew up? NYC
19. What are you wearing? shorts
20. Your TV is? large
21. Your pets? desired
22. Your computer? heavy
23. Your life? varied
24. Your mood? engaged
25. Missing someone? always
26. Your car? mom's
27. Something you’re not wearing? ring
28. Favorite store? bookstore
29. Your summer? dwindling
30. Your favorite colour? purple
31. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
32. When is the last time you cried? forgotten
33. Your health? decent
34. Your children? nonexistent
35. Your future? anticipated
36. Your beliefs? skepitcal
37. Young or old? both
38. Your image? intense
39. Your appearance? compact
40. Would you live your life over again knowing what you know? indeed

Fun! Next?

With Charity Comes Responsibility (Books - The Changeling by Robin Jenkins)

The Changeling ends up being a potent story - well written, tough-minded, and compassionate. Jenkins never loses the humorous voice that I wrote about in my initial reactions, but he throws a couple of twists into the plot that quite surprised me. When Charlie Forbes takes on Tom Curdie, a boy from the slums, bringing him along on the family vacation, he he little imagines how it will change everyone involved, so naive is what he would call his charity.

'You've got to give us a chance, Tom. What I mean is, you keep apart from us, you never seem to let us know what you're thinking.' He had deliberately used Gillian's words. 'What Gillian said today at the castle was nonsense. You didn't enjoy killing that rabbit, but did you have any pity for it? No, you kept apart even then. And I haven't heard you laughing yet. You must let your heart thaw, Tom, if we're going to be able to help you.'

In the darkness he could not see that the boy was trembling and biting his lips. If it had been daylight and he could have seen those signs of physical distress, he would not have known what caused them.

Tom knew very well, perhaps better than Forbes himself, what was meant by letting his heart thaw, because it was beginning to thaw, against his wish, threatening his whole carefully built-up system of self-sufficiency. He had, for instance, enjoyed being out in the lonely boat in the dark sea more than anything else in his life; and Forbes, whom he had intended to despise and cheat, he now found himself liking, more than liking, yearning for, so that he could scarcely bear the teacher to be out of his sight. But there was the girl, Gillian, who hated him; there was Mrs. Forbes, who thought that in some way he was doing harm to her children; and there was Mrs Storrocks, who had been insulted because the coachman had taken him for one of the family.

All the time, too, he had to remember that he would have to go back to Donaldson's Court, and if he went back with his heart thawed by too much love for these people, and wish his independence therefore destroyed by them, he would become as lost as Peerie or Chick or his brother Alec.

It is impossible to relate any more specifics of the plot without destroying your pleasure in its unfolding in the reading. The Changeling is narrated in an amusing voice but is far from light in the way it takes on the notions of charity, pity, and responsibility for others. The poor haven't cornered the market on dishonesty and more than the rich have, this book says - both lie, both can be judgmental, both can manipulate, and both try to protect those they love. Thank you, Dovegreyreader, for this great recommendation - I pass it on.

Devoutly to be wished but not to be expected

It’s a holiday weekend here in the U.S., so let’s keep today’s question simple–What are you reading? Anything special? Any particularly juicy summer reading?

Here's my answer (with a little glimpse of my workspace thrown in):

And here are my thousand words:

Simple!?! On the left you see my pile of summer pleasure reading, mostly fiction, including books already in-progress: The Changeling, White Noise, Red Cavalry, and The Darling (two-word titles seem to be the order of the day) and books devoutly-to-be-wished: The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Breath by Tim Winton, The Road Home by Rose Tremain, Thirteen by Sebastien Beaumont, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, Grace Notes and The Anatomy School by Bernard MacLaverty, Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, and The Pickwick Papers. Yeah, right. And that's just the column delicately toppling on the left. On the right my school/work related reading hopes: a text on Sensation & Perception, another on neuroanatomy as told through case histories, a third called Patient-Based Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience, a text on attention, The Poetics of Mind, and Reading David. This does not include the six issues of The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience festering next to my big purple armchair, nor the articles I should be reading for my studies.

I'm taking bets folks - will I make it? I think not. My prediction is I will never even touch the Dickens, a shame since reading a Dickens novel has become an annual summer project with me. It started with Dombey and Son three years ago, then The Old Curiosity Shop, and the magnificent Bleak House last summer. I've already taken my hopes of re-reading Middlemarch off the docket. I think I'll only spot-read the texts, never get through The Poetics of Mind or Proust and the Squid and read Reading David with resentment, because it's a quick read but I hate the my-experience-with-disease-X books. I'm afraid I may hate the new Andrew Sean Greer, though I'm going to give it a chance, I've already looked into The Book Thief and while everyone raves about it, it seems rather cutsey and gimmicky to me. I have hopes for the rest. That would take the wrecking ball to my towering list, hewing it from 20 to a more manageable 13 for the remaining two months of the summer plus some reading around in the texts. Hmmmm, maybe if I don't go to work, turn off my phone, and cut down on sleep. Oh, and there are two books reserved for me at the library - so what am I doing writing here?

The end of skepticism (Books - White Noise by Don DeLillo)

The last time I saw Sheila we argued about which was Don DeLillo's better book, I went for Underworld and she for White Noise. I found, when thinking about it, that I couldn't really remember White Noise well enough so I'm re-reading it.

I felt like the book told me what it is about point blank on page 27 - "the end of skepticism." Jack Gladney lives in a generic American college town where he has started a department of Hitler studies. He and his third wife and their children from various marriages seem to inhabit a purely relativistic universe, one where no moral choices can be made, in fact no choices of any kind. So heavily blanketed with information is their atmosphere, it seems Jack and his wife cannot have sex without reading pornography aloud and first choosing which era the reading material will come from - the sex is endlessly delayed while they discuss how they will go at it, each claiming that they will get more pleasure from giving the other what they want, and so trying to pass on the decision to the other. All this while the television plays in the background - usually on some sort of educational nature program.

"I want to read, Jack. Honestly."

"Are you totally and completely sure? Because if you're not, we absolutely won't."

Someone turned on the TV set at the end of the hall, and a woman's voice said: "If it breaks easily into pieces, it is called shale. When wet, it smells like clay."

We listened to the gently plummeting stream of nighttime traffic.

I said, "Pick your century. Do you want to read about Etruscan slave girls, Georgian rakes? I think we have some literature on flagellation brothels. What about the Middle Ages? We have incubi and succubi. Nuns galore."

"Whatever's best for you."

"I want you to choose. It's sexier that way."

"One person chooses, the other reads. Don't we want a balance, a sort of give-and-take? Isn't that what makes it sexy?"

"A tautness, a suspense. First-rate. I will choose."

"I will read," she said. "But I dont' want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered."

"Agreed."

This is without a a doubt the intentionally funniest bedroom scene I have ever read! What amazes me continually as I read is how the book, written in 1984, prefigures how we live now. I graduated from college in '83, and we were barely seeing the birth of Women's Studies, Gay Studies, African Studies Departments - the industry of identity education that is now commonplace (for better or for worse) and that DeLillo's Hitler Studies satirizes. It was also prior to the time of every home having a personal computer, multiple channel cable, cell phones, and internet - we were not yet quite inundated with such an ocean of information and so many perspectives each battling for ownership of it that we began to drown in it. But we live in that time now. And while there is a pleasure in being able to download images of the Guttenberg Bible in seconds from your home by Googling it, one also gets videos of scholarly lectures, opportunities to buy replicas, someone's dissertation, an evangelistic blog, and someone having sex dressed as a priest all on the same page - all without reference to their value or validity. In our world, they are all the same and you must choose if you can.

In DeLillo's world the adults are mortified by death, living forever in the shadow of it. Every item in the stream of information that surrounds them either being a source we must avoid for fearing of encouraging it or something we should be doing to ward it off. Jack observes that his fourteen year old son - Heinrich - is losing his hair.

Did his mother consume some kind of gene-piercing substance when she was pregnant? Am I at fault somehow? Have I raised him, unwittingly, in the vicinity of a chemical dump site, in the path of air currents that carry industrial wastes capable of producing scalp degeneration, glorious sunsets? (People say the sunsets around here were not nearly so stunning thirty or forty years ago.) Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

Doesn't this feel like now? One of the children is obsessed with reading the Physicians' Desk Reference, trying to keep abreast of all the side effects of the drugs her parents use. In fact, she tries to control everything her parents consume:

Denise watched her mother pull the little cellophane ribbon on a bonus pack of sixteen individually wrapped unites of chewing gum. Her eyes narrowed as she turned back to the address books on the kitchen table before her. the eleven-year-old face was an expert mask of restrained exasperation.

She waited a long moment, then said evenly, "That stuff causes cancer in laboratory animals in case you didn't know."

"You wanted me to chew sugarless gum, Denise. It was your idea."

"There was no warning on the pack then. They put a warning, which I would have a hard time believing you didn't see."

She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness. [What would he write today!!]

"I'm happy to do it either way," Babette said. "It's totally up to you. Either I chew gum with sugar and artificial coloring or I chew sugarless gum that's harmful to rats."

Steffie got off the phone. "Don't chew at all," she said. "Did you ever think of that?"

Two details add credence to this scene - one is the fact that ideas are communicated through behavior by well established characters, and the other is that they perform behavior other than that which will function to illustrate the main idea of the scene (they live lives in this book, Babette transcribing her address book). This is one of DeLillo's skills as a writer. He imagines the lives of these characters so completely. And then later...

I forget that Steffie doesn't like to be called Stephanie. Sometimes I call her Denise. I forget where I've parked the car and then for a long, long moment I forget what the car looks like."

"Forgetfulness has gotten into the air and water. It's entered the food chain."

"Maybe it's the gum I chew. Is that too farfetched?"

"Maybe it's something else."

[...]

"To the best of my knowledge, Jack, I'm not taking anything that could account for my memory lapses. On the other hand I'm not old, I haven't suffered an injury to the head and there's nothing in my family background except tipped uteruses."

"You're saying maybe Denise is right."

"We can't rule it out."

"You're saying maybe you're taking something that has the side effect of impairing memory."

"Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps."

"Sounds like a boring life."

"I hope it lasts forever," she said.

Man is that ever our self-conscious era in a few brief sentences - forever trying to get it right, to control all, to push away death. The two notions that DeLillo connects in this book are avoidance of death and relativism. One sentence really hangs in the air in that scene - We can't rule it out. Jack's son, Heinrich, the balding one, exemplifies a child brought up in an age of pure relativism:

"It's going to rain tonight."

"It's raining now," I said.

"The radio said tonight."

I drove him to school on his first day back after a sore throat and fever. A woman in a yellow slicker held up traffic to let some children cross. I pictured her in a soup commercial taking off her oilskin hat [in the moment of this scene with his son he daydreams, which is perfectly realistic and a nice character detail, but his daydream is sourced in TV.] as she entered the cheerful kitchen where her husband stood over a pot of smoky lobster bisque, a smallish man with six weeks to live.

"Look at the windshield," I said. "Is that rain or isnt' it?"

"I'm only telling you what they said."

"Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses."

"Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they're right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don't you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There's no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don't hear a sound doesn't mean it's not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I'm sure there are sounds even dogs can't hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere."

"Is it raining," I said, "or isn't it?"

"I wouldn't want to have to say."

"What if someone held a gun to your head?"

"Who, you?"

"Someone. A man in a trenchcoat and smoky glasses. He holds a gun to your head and says, 'Is it raining or isn't it? All you have to do is tell the truth and I'll put away my gun and take the next flight out of here.'"

"What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed of light in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit around a neutron star? Maybe if these people could see us through a telescope we might look like we were two feet two inches tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today."

"Hes' holding a gun to your head. He wants your truth."

"What good is my truth? My truth means nothing. What if this guy with the gun comes from a planet in a whole different solar system? What we call rain he calls soap. What we call apples he calls rain. So what am I supposed to tell him?"

"His name is Frank J. Smalley and he comes from St. Louis."

"He wants to know if it's raining now, at this very minute?"

"Here and now. That's right."

"Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can I say it's raining now if your so-called 'now' becomes 'then' as soon as I say it?"

[...]

"Just give me an anwer, okay, Heinrich?"

"The best I could do is make a guess."

"Either it's raining or it isn't," I said.

"Exactly. That's my whole point. You'd be guessing. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

"But you see it's raining."

"You see the sun moving across the sky. But is the sun moving across the sky or is the earth turning?"

On one hand this is a scene between a very clever, very literal teenager and his father. But on the other it hyperbolizes how we become paralyzed by information. When everything might be right what should we believe? Skepticism ceases - we fear everything, we believe everything, we commit to nothing. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and I'm finding White Noise scathingly satiric, brilliantly observant, prophetic, and laugh-out-loud funny (I hardly ever laugh out loud while reading). I may have to revise my opinion, Sheila.

Resisting hyperbole

Prof. Lars Linsen, Int'l University Bremen & Institut für Diagnostische
Radiologie und Neuroradiologie, EMAU Greifswald

I found myself irritated by an article in today's Science Times by Benedict Carey about a neuroscientific imaging technique called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) that we are sure to be hearing more about. It was the first Science Times article I have seen to mention this relatively new, hot lab toy so I wish it had been more thorough.

By way of introduction the article offers background on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - assumed the current imaging gold standard as far as answering the question - where in the brain activity is taking place.

In previous studies, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valleys of neural activity when people are doing various things, like making decisions, reacting to frightening images or reliving painful memories. But these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved - about which brain regions speak to one another and when. Previous estimates of network structure, based on such imaging, have been sketchy.

The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine.

1. When "scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valley of neural activity when they are doing various things..." they use fMRI (functional MRI) but that is a quibble. I suppose it is accurate to say that scientists have used MRI for such a purpose, but it would be more accurate to say that making this claim is itself controversial and then describe what MRI actually measures. Scientists who love fMRI love to say that the pretty colored images of the brain that one can see everywhere nowadays gives us a picture of which brain areas are 'on' and which are 'off' during a given task, but that is not a fair picture of what MRIs depict. 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. THAT is what fMRI measures - which regions of the brain are metabolizing the most oxygen at a certain moment in time relative to others- one must make a leap from the measure of metabolism to the claim that that shows us which regions in the brain are most 'active.' It's not an impossible leap but there are problems with it. For one thing, neuronal activity can be excitatory or inhibitory - that is the electro-chemical messages traveling down the neurons can facilitate OR inhibit a behavior. When thousands of neurons are active at once- some excitatory and some inhibitory - it is their net activity which determines whether a given behavior occurs. A great deal of activity (which would presumably require a great deal of metabolism, and would hence be measured as highly active by fMRI) could sum to zero. I.e., nothing could happen. Scientists and science writers need to be very careful about the inferences they make about that activity. Much is dependent on well-designed experiments. I have ranted in greater detail about fMRI before so I'll spare you more now - here's a link if you're into it. Here's a link to another critique of fMRI by my favorite pedant, Jake Young. And yet another by literary science phenom Jonah Lehrer. My point regarding this article is, if you are going to start an article about an innovative scientific technique by introducing its forerunner, at least be specific about what it does.

2. "...these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved..." Not true. Scientists have done their best using available techniques to measure "functional connectivity" between brain regions, examining the correlation of activity in disparate regions at the same time with fMRI, and by combining fMRI which is specific about where activity occurs with event related potentials (ERPs) which is very specific about when. But wait a minute, you say, you just said that fMRI was suspect. Well, yes I did, but it seems to me that to claim in one breath that fMRI is an undisputed picture of brain area function without preamble and in the same paragraph critcize it for an inability to measure connectivity is more about creating a dramatic story for the sake of glorifying DSI than it is giving an accurate picture about fMRI, which is the current state-of-the-art measure, whatever you think of it. Both rely on inferences. If you are going to be critical about it, be critical about it. But don't criticize the aspects of fMRI that are going to give you a sexy story about DSI, which brings me to my third point - glorifying DSI.

3. "The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine...The technique allows scientists to estimate the density and orientation of the connections running through specific brain locations." Ok, he does say 'not conclusive' and 'estimate,' but from what I understand about diffusion tensor imaging (DTI, the basis of DSI, which is not much, which is why I was looking forward to a more informative article) it measures the probability of the diffusion of water molecules in brain tissue. There is a physical phenomenon known as Brownian Motion - which is the random movement of particles suspended within a liquid or gas. Mathematics allows one to predict the probability of the location of such a particle at any moment in time. Normally water molecules would diffuse isotropically - the probability is equal that they could go in any direction. However, the architecture of brain fiber tracts (white matter) as opposed to regions of cortex or other brain areas (grey matter) is that they impose physical boundaries on the movement of these molecules, changing the probability from isotropic to anisotropic - it is more likely that the molecule will travel in a given direction than equally probably that they could travel in all directions. It is evidently four times more probably that the water molecules will move parallel to the fiber than perpendicular to it. The myelin sheathing the axons is thought to direct the diffusion of water molecule along their path. The imaging technique compares diffusion of water molecules, looking for those regions where anisotropic diffusion in more prevalent than random - and creates an image of those areas by brightening or color coding those regions. If you follow the logic and trust the inferences behind this technique - that this mathematical model of the placement of water molecules is indeed accurately depicting fiber tracts - then you could say, as this article does, that it 'creates a wiring diagram to test and refine.' But this model of connectivity is easily as inferential as other functional connectivity models made via fMRI at this point. Testing and refining is precisely what much of the current DTI and DSI research is doing now - comparing the measure taken with actual brain tissue samples to confirm the accuracy of the technique. There are problems with the leap made from water diffusion to 'picture of white matter,' just as their are controversies surrounding the leap from BOLD measures to 'brain activity' in fMRI. DTI voxels (3-dimensional pixels) are 2mm - this is not great resolution given that nerve fibers are microscopic in scale. There is lots of room for error in "tractography." Points where multiple fibers cross can be particularly tricky, which is where DSI is making an improvement over DTI in ways that I understand too little to describe. My point is, when introducing this technique to the public, it would be more responsible to say what it does and doesn't do (and some of its possibilities are very exciting) than to offer as the first information we receive (and therefore the best remembered) hyperbole and spin. Especially when the pictures these techniques create are so alluring. Pretty pictures can be awfully persuasive, but it is useful to think critically and certainly it is the job of scientists and science writers to encourage that.

I'll add just one other thought. Recently I read a criticism of imaging techniques, I can't remember where, it was that fMRI couldn't accomplish a certain measurement it claimed by itself. For example, I've explained that current research is comparing direct examination of brain tissue with the images generated by DSI - please don't interpret that as a criticism of the technique. Understanding in the sciences is always improved by multiple measures. We must begin with models based on inference and we forever improve our measures and deepen our understanding by testing and resting from multiple perspectives. Our understanding is improved not reduced when we have behavioral studies, brain lesion studies, fMRI, and ERP all converging (or not) around the same neuroscientific phenomena.

Born bad or just our bringing-up-kee? (Book - The Changeling by Robin Jenkins)

Charles Forbes, a portly Glaswegian school teacher, does more than try to see the best in his clever, poverty-stricken student, Tom Curdie, he decides to take him along on his family's summer holiday and that, in a nutshell, is the story of The Changeling by 20th century Scottish novelist Robin Jenkins. Recommended by Dovegreyreader, I couldn't find this book in the U.S. so I bought it in London while on my trip. Forbes fellow teachers think Curdie is a born thief and that Charles is s mad:

'Good old Charlie. What's biting him now? Last time he was objecting to your unchristian practice of allowing pupils to be strapped who'd forgotten their Bibles.'

'You remember little Curdie? You sent him on to me a year ago.'

'One of my brightest ever.'

'Yes, but would you call him an example of magnanimity and indomitability?'

'Jack, I wouldn't even call myself that if I could get my tongue round them.'

They laughed.

'I don't think I'd even call Charlie that,' he added.

They laughed again.

'He's a nice enough fellow,' said Bob, 'but an awful humbug.'

'Curdie's a sly wee rogue though, isn't he?'

'Isn't he just? Have you met his mother?'

His wife feels that Curdie will be a danger to their children:

'He'll not be clean. He'll have lice. He'll swear. He'll lie. He'll have all kinds of disgusting habits.'

But Charlie is determined. If Tom can only be given the advantages of other children he will prove to be at least as good as them if not better, given his superior intelligence.

I enjoy the way Jenkins constructs his characters. Forbes:

Their garden was tiny, which Charlie regretted in theory but welcomed in practice: he was too big in the belly, and too assiduous a planted of exotic hopes, to be zealous in the cultivation of leeks or even gladioli; but he liked to watch Mary plant, weed, mow, and chase neighbours' cats.

Curdie is every inch the sly wee rogue Forbes's colleagues say he is, but not in the way they think. He is brought up in dire poverty in the Glaswegian slums. As his mother is continually drunk, he is often left to procure food for his brother and sister or sing them to sleep. Yes, he steals an apple but his brother is ill and Tom reckons he needs fruit. He even takes one bite out of the apple to give to a dying neighborhood cat, who Jenkins depicts as Tom's comrade - suspicious of kindness, pity rarely shown him, always hungry:

The cat, not much liking apple, was nevertheless eating. He smiled in approval. Never to whine; to accept what came; to wait for better; to take what you could; to let no one, not even yourself, know how near to giving in you were: these were his principles by which he lived, and he honoured them in this old dying cat.

Tom's is unwilling to feel shame for his circumstances. I marvel at his doggedness. Jenkins is good at getting inside Tom's logic.

He was wondering what Forbes's true reason was for so strange an invitation. The teacher had spoken about good food, fresh air, and scenery; he had said they would do Tom good, physically and morally. Tom had understood very well what he had meant, but he could not see what Forbes hoped to get out of it. He knew that Forbes was supposed to be conceited and rather stupid, and that other teachers laughed at him behind his back. Was this invitation then just an act of conceit and stupidity? Or was Forbes really trying to be kind?

Once before Tom had been befriended by a teacher. It was in the Primary. Miss McIntosh, who was always bothering him with kindness, one day brought clothes for him; they had belonged to her young brother. Tom had accepted them, but he had taken them straight after school to a junkshop where the man had given him ninepence for them. Next morning, when Miss McIntosh had whispered why he was not wearing them, he had announced loudly so that all the class would hear, what he had done with them. He had expected her to strike him with her hand or the strap; indeed, he had wanted her to. Instead she had just stood and stared at him, with tears in her eyes. She had not reported him to Mr. Black the headmaster. He had been nine then. Even now he could not forgive her for her pity. She had come hearest to coaxing him to give in.

Jenkins is tackling an interesting moral subject but he consistently maintains a tone just shy of arch. There is a humorous twinkle in his words that keeps the novel from being heavy. I'm nearly half way through and am enjoying it heartily.

Vacation Reading (Books - The Chosen, Lost Paradise, The Soul Thief, The House on Fortune Street, Netherland

I find sitting for any length of time pretty unbearable, so I have never really enjoyed long plane flights but the enforced reading time almost makes up for it. Two nearly seven hour flights, several train rides, and two weeks away from computers, cell phones, and other responsibilities gave me time to get through five and a half books while I was away.

Sam inspired me to re-read Chaim Potok's The Chosen, when he wrote about one of Potok's novels a few months back. They had been comfort reading for me when I was in high school and college. I had read this novel probably ten times, but had not read it in at least 15 years. My Name is Asher Lev is the only Potok novel I had re-read recently because it is one of my all-time-favorites. The Chosen concerns two teenage boys, Danny and Reuven, both Jews but of a very different kind. Danny is the son of a Hasidic rabbi and heir to the head of his highly devout and segregated mystical sect. Reuven is the son of a Jewish scholar who is a devout and practicing religious man, but whose religion is more integrated with modern life and less profoundly Orthodox. An unusual accident throws them together and an intense friendship ensues. Through the book they grow up together morally, intellectually, and emotionally and learn about who they are.

In case this sounds to you like an exotic book which would have little to do with your own life, think again. Though there are scenes in this book for anyone interested in the details of these two boys very different religious lives, but the real theme here is friendship and love - and learning how to be your own person in the context of ones family and ones broader cultural context. I might add that this all takes place during the 1940s, when the world was in the throws of the second World War - not an easy time no matter who you were, but additionally difficult if you were Jewish. This adds another layer to the novel's events. Certainly developing a sense of who you are and what you think is meaningful to anyone interested in thinking in the first place, but moral and religious identity become particularly charged in this setting. Potok is not a brilliant writer as far as beautiful stringing together of words is concerned, his strength is building strong characters, putting them together in a detailed environment you can perceive with ease, and having them behave with one another in a plot that breathes. The story is intensely human and moving and I cannot recommend it enough. I was excited all over again by reading a book about kids growing up who don't just think about who to date or beat up (although orthodox Jewish children are teenagers too) but who THINK. I would give you an excerpt of two, but my old copy of the book is enroute from Lewes, England to New York City via the slowest of snail mails. That is a story in itself! As I mentioned in my travel posts, we attended the opera at Glyndebourne, which is a formal affair - literally, it's black tie. So we have our evening wear with us but didn't want to lug it around with us through Sicily, so we shipped it home, with anything else we were finished with at that point. It turned out to be a rather expensive affair, so my tux and copy of The Chosen are on the slow boat. Perhaps to China, who knows.

I picked up a copy of Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom at the London Review Bookshop, across the street from the British Museum. This one wasn't on my list, but their tables were just too enticing and I had been curious about Nooteboom after seeing his books everywhere in Amsterdam, where he is a very prominent author. It concerns Alma, a woman in recovery from a cruel attack, who ends up traveling to Australia and befriending an Aboriginal artist. Alma and her traveling companion Almut end up being employed in Perth as Angels in an environmental performance project. This intertwines with a second story about a Dutch writer, who could also be described as being in recovery, who travels to a spa and meets again a woman whom he had once known when she played an angel. The prose of the translation is light and airy, which is a good thing because otherwise I think I would have found this story ponderous. It is self-consciously new-agey and while the book contains a passage which reads

Angels are mythical creatures. In this day and age, however, they are usually relegated to the realm of kitsch, irony or theatre. And yet that tiny curled-up body, those bare feet, the whole of that womanly being...

And yet... and yet for me this book never rose above the realm of kitsch. ***SPOILER ALERT *** While the whole point of book seemed to be the surprise of finding the extraordinary through something hackneyed - finding the spiritual in ones cup of coffee - the redemption attempted in this novel rang wholly false to me. Perhaps if one is more in-tune with new age language in general, or angels specifically, one might find this book more meaningful but it was not my cup of tea. It is, however, compact and pleasantly readable in a two-hour plane flight. The writers shows evident imagination, compassion, and an interesting way with words so I would like to attempt something else by him - any recommendations?

I am a huge Charles Baxter fan, so I was really looking forward to The Soul Thief after reading about it, I think, at Scott Pack's. In it Nathaniel, a graduate student, ends up meeting a intellectual poseur - Jerome Coolberg - who is capable of sounding erudite but is actually wholly empty. Nathaniel seems to have a hidden attraction for poseurs, also forming a romance of sorts with Theresa:

She admits her yearning to inhabit an intellectual realm that she had not by rights acquired citizenship to. "Oh, everyone else around here is so smart." she confesses, "and all I can do is to put on an act." Really, she says, she is just a simple girl brought up in buttfuck Iowa, the daughter of a manufacturer's rep who sold prefabricate silos. She's afraid of being dumb, a silo salesman's daughter - that's her breathy assertion.

She has mastered somehow a tonal mixture of the bogus and the seductive, so Nathaniel interrupts. "But you were quoting Valery last night!" he says. "Who else does that?"

"That line, that's the one line I know," she says. "That one. I always quote it. 'Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regard-moi qui change!' That gets me in the door, that line, it's the key to the city."

The two actors conspire to steal his soul, having none of their own - or do they? This is the interest of this curious little book. It's one of those stories where the characters are really interesting and I end up raising my eyebrows at a lot of the events. The narrative voice is distinctly distancing - Baxter has his reasons for that, which although it is couched as a surprise was rather obvious to me. At any rate, I enjoyed the book well enough, but if you're coming fresh to Baxter, I would say that Saul and Patsy, The Feast of Love, First Light, and Shadow Play are all better than this one.

It is the friendship of Abigail - actress and theatre director, energetic and scrappy survivor of an impoverished and unstable background - and Dara - psychotherapist and unconfident child of a fairly comfortable and loving upbringing, that forms the centerpiece of Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street. The novel is told not only from their points of view but also from Dara's father's and Abigail's boyfriend's. Their lives all end up intersecting at Abigail's house on Fortune Street.

When Abigail was asked about her first memory, what she most often recounted was the afternoon she and her grandfather had gone for a walk and found a Roman plate buried in the muddy foreshore of the River Medway. She would describe herself in her T-shirt and shorts, skipping along beside her grandfather. He was wearing a white shirt, faded gray trousers, and a straw hat that was almost the same color as his mustache. The tide was out, and he had said they should dig for Roman remains, or Saxon as a second best, but only for twenty minutes.

"We can't excavate the entire shore, " he said, "so we depend on luck. Without it, we could dig all day and find nothing but stones and worms."

"I like worms," Abigail said, thrusting he trowel into the mud. What she did not like was her grandfather mentioning the mysterious phenomenon which played such a large and aggravating role in the lives of her parents.

I enjoy this passage not only because it lays bare one of the centers of this book - fortune - but because it gets at what became the chief theme for me - unearthing the past. How we are composed of the stories that lie beneath us. An act can have an effect years later, just as an ordinary plate come become a treasure if it is found. If we do exhume the remains of the past we will all tell a story to complete them and that story is likely to be something slightly different for each teller. This was given particularly interesting context given that I read this book while wandering through the Greek and Roman ruins of Sicily.

There are some tumultuous happenings in this novel, some very dark events, a great deal of loss, but Livesey's story telling is quiet, and eschews the hysterical. While I didn't feel everything necessarily hung completely together satisfyingly as I read it, I finally appreciated how the events collected through different eyes and eyes mounted over time to yield a rich and multi-faceted narrative with material that could easily become preachy and melodramatic.

Hans and Rachel come to New York thinking they will spend a few years of their generously salaried existence living the loft-life of culture and fine food, returning to the sanity of their native London in a few years time. But the world does not always accept payment for delivering on the plans we make.

"We won't be gone for very long," I said, playing down my good fortune. That was, in fact, the plan, conceived by my wife: to drop in on New York City for a year or three and then come back.

"You say that now," he said. "But New York's a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave..." The S.V.P., smiling, said, "I still miss it, and I left twelve years ago."

It was my turn to smile - in part out of embarrassment, because he'd spoken with an American openness. "Well, we'll see," I said.

"Yes," he said. "You will."

His sureness irritated me, though principally he was pitiable - like one of those Petersburgians of yesteryear whose duties have washed him up on the wrong side of the Urals.

But it turns out he was right, in a way. Now that I too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, literally refers to a second moving of grass in the same season. You might say, if you're prone to general observations, that New York city insists on memory's repetitive power - on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course. None of this means that I wish I were back there now; and naturally I'd like to believe that my own retrospection is in some way more important than the old S.V.P.'s, which, when I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing. But there's no such thing as a cheap longing, I'm tempted to conclude these days, not even if you're sobbing over a cracked fingernail.

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is a retrospective look at Hans's time in New York which coincides with September 11th 2001, forcing him and his wife to relocate to the Chelsea Hotel and removing, particularly for her, any sense of certainty. Rachel moves back to London with their child, telling Hans she does not wish him to accompany her. Hans, originally out of nostalgia, takes up playing cricket in New York. Far from the great American past-time, the leagues are mostly comprised of West Indian immigrants and the games played in out-of-the-way greens on Staten Island and in the Bronx's Van Cortland Park. He meets a small-time shyster named Chuck Ramkissoon with a hearty passion for giving cricket in its rightful place in the sports economy, and so begins an almost dream-like existence for Hans and he is drawn further and further into his association with New York cricket while he commutes to London to see his three-year-old son and try to revive his broken marriage. It is amazing to me how much detail O'Neill goes into about the game, how well that interwove with the story, and how interesting it actually was to me, and I'm about as into competitive sports as I am to knitting sweaters.

O'Neill's prose is fluid, intricately descriptive but in a way that is always fascinating, and contemporary but not gimmicky (like its making it easy for anyone who wants to turn it into a film script). He weaves in and out of two time periods - one in the very recent past and the other a few years earlier - effortlessly and that never left me wondering where I was. This is a deeply thoughtful story of a crisis in confidence and a crisis in love both between two people and in the world-at-large. It is an achingly familiar and powerful book about the birth and death of dreams. I can see what everyone is going on about.