The making of a feeling (Books - Eclipse by John Banville)

The day of which I speak I was walking along the main street of the town. It was November, or March, not cold, but neutral. From a lowering sky fine rain was falling, so fine as to be hardly felt. It was morning, and the housewives were out, with their shopping bags and headscarves. A questing dog trotted busily past me looking neither to right nor left, following a straight line drawn invisibly on the pavement. There was a smell of smoke and butcher's meat, and a brackish smell of the sea, and, as always in the town in those days, the faint sweet stench of pigswill. The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past. Taking in all this, I experienced something to which the only name I could give was happiness, although it was not happiness, it was more and less than happiness. What had occurred? What in the commonplace scene before me, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells of the town, had made this unexpected thing, whatever it was, burgeon suddenly inside me like the possibility of an answer to all the nameless yearnings of my life? Everything was the same now as it had been before, the housewives, the busy dog, the same, and yet in some way transfigured. Along with the happiness went a feeling of anxiety. It was as if I were carrying some frail vessel that it was my task to protect, like the boy in the story told to us in religious class who carried the Host through the licentious streets of ancient Rome hidden inside his tunic; in my case, howeber, it seemed I was myself the precious vessel. Yes, that was it, it was I that was happening here.

This kind of paragraph is why I read. Circumstance transforms person as smells are smelled, sights seen, and a complex experience develops inside a person. An experience that requires a similie, since the circumstances are not extraordinary - only the experience of it is. The person is transformed and then, in turn, transforms the environment - a shop door breathes and not only breathes, but does so 'brownly.' John Banville writes here to get at the birth of self awareness in a boy. This boy becomes the man we then read of in his novel Eclipse - an actor - who has suspended his career having frozen up on stage one night. Banville actually spends less than a page taking us through the interior actions carried out in this man on that day in his boyhood, but I feel like I have known him always, so well imagined is this small moment.

Sheila tells me that Banville has an alternate writing persona in Benjamin Black, where he drops his care and can write fiction in a pulpier vein. It sounds like the way some actors are freed by working in a mask, or playing a character behind a big beard or false nose. Knowing they are 'not themselves' they can take risks they would not otherwise take. Now that I'm getting to know Banville I am going to have to check out Christina Falls and meet his alter ego.

Short stories, short dresses (Opera - Salome with Karita Mattila)

The short story seems to be poking its head up everywhere these days. First C.B.'s challenge this past month. Then Kate's post on Friday, featured an essay by Steven Millhauser that I assumed was in some book of his essays.

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe.

It turns out it is in today's New York Times Book Review and is a clever appreciation. Kate links to the entire essay.

Mark Thwaite posted on Friday from an address by the late David Foster Wallace about the humor of Kafka, but much of what I took away was about the story form in general.

...great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve....

Mark links to the entire piece. The way Wallace puts together words is fierce and incisive, I love the high standards he has for readers as well as writers.

Yesterday The Ragazzo and I saw the Met's fairly recent production of Richard Strauss's Salome. I always appreciate the Met's orchestra's playing of early 20th century music. Conductor Patrick Summers and the orchestra made gorgeously lush dissonnance. The contemporary production by Jurgen Flimms thankfully spared us from the awful quasi-1950s-bad bibilical-hollywood-epic aesthetic that usually graces more "traditional" productions of this opera. This production is the first I have ever seen that gets that the famous Dance of the Seven Veils is not a balletic interlude in which good dance and choreography are necessary to entertain us until we can get back to the singing, it is part of the drama in which Salome baldly mocks Herod's lust for her by doing a striptease. But this production belongs to Karita Mattila, the Finnish-born soprano and consummate stage-creature whose impressive feat is not the literal stripping of her clothes but the emotional full monty she is willing to do. Most of the rest of the cast are simply not at her level and either Flimm or the Met's staff directors remounting the production are unable or unwilling to see when the cast members are not even pretending to do what the text and the drama say they are doing. That or they don't have enough time to find good solutions. For example, Herod sings about the coldness and heat he feels and the sounds he hears when he begins to panic after Salome asks for the prophet Johanaan's head. But Kim Begley merely sings the words. Nothing happens to him as it would to any human being being frightened by the fact that he is having an unfamiliar experience and no one else around him seems to be also be having it. Even the simplest stage-craft types problems seem to be ignored. When Salome climbs down from a scaffold (in a white satin dress and heels) a couple of members of the court stand by the ladder to assist her in her descent (sensibly). However, they appear to know that she needs help only by telepathy, nothing was communicated to them by Salome or anyone else on stage. It is this sheer laziness of stage craft that I see time and again at the Met, that peppers their fanciest and even most astute productions with needless moments of amateurness. This pulls any audience member attentive to story or to the logical progression of human behavior right out of the action. Opera does not have to be unbelievable, but lack of attentiveness to detail will assure you that it will be.

Back to the highlight of this production - Karita Mattila, she plays Salome as an entitled brat, a sort-of 1930s Hollywood babydoll who, when she gets into her head that she wants Johanaan simply will not have it any other way. She is simpering, she is willful, but most of all she is bereft of love and is deeply sick because she can never have enough. Never mind the bare necessities of this role from a sheer vocal standpoint - octave plus intervals to jump, lush orchestrations to soar above on high sustained notes - Matilla has the technical chops, but a good performance asks for way more than that. She climbs that scaffolding like a gymnast, does a full split, she bumps and grinds, she stamps her feet like a child throwing a tantrum, she yells her head off in frustration, she lies on her back with her head hanging off the edge of the stage singing parts of the last scene and she does it all looking and sounding like a goddess and making her music sound inevitable. It is interesting to me that so much emphasis is placed on Salome being attractive. I suppose superficial beauty is desirable to make Herod's lust for her believable, but really Salome is alone and her desperation over that makes her horrific and unattractive. Mattila is willing to go there and it is that kind of nakedness on stage that I prize and that makes this performance such an intense and memorable one. This production is going to be simulcast HD to many movie theatres across the country next Saturday. If you are a little wary of twentieth century opera, Salome is a good introduction because it is short - under two hours, here is a link to the Met's website with information about the simulcast.

Now on from necrophilia to an unbelievable amount of reading on protein synthesis and, if I get the time, I'm going to make some middle eastern tomato soup with cumin, lemon and cilantro.

Suing bloggers and actors unravelled (Books - Eclipse by John Banville)

The litigiousness of our greater society has, it seemed, reached the blogosphere, according to a segment on On The Media, a weekly National Public Radio show that does an excellent job reporting on the media. Now, if you don't pay attention to the law when it comes to copyright infringement or defamation, you could find yourself in court. Blogger membership organizations now exist to educate bloggers about media law and to insure them against the costs of litigation. They express concern that law suits will curtail freedom of speech. It sounds to me like an opportunity to make money off insurance premiums, but I suppose I should watch what I say. The link above provides an MP3 of the complete report as well as links to the organizations so that you can check them out.

In John Banville's Eclipse a fiftyish actor dries up on stage and leaves the theater, and subsequently his wife. He moves into his childhood home, dilapidated and inhabited by squatters.

I loved to prowl the house like this when I was young. Afternoons were my favourite time, there was a special quality to afternoons indoors, a wiestfulness, a sense of dreamy distance, of boundless air all around, that was at once tranquil and unsettling. There were hidden portents everywhere. Something would catch my attention, anything, a cobweb, a damp patch on a wall, a scrap of old newspaper lining a drawer, a discarded paperback, and I would stop and stand gazing at it for a long time, motionless, lost unthinking. My mother kept lodgers, clerks and secretareis, schoolteachers, travelling salesmen. They fascinated me, their furtive and somehow anguished, rented lives. In habiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. When one of them moved out I would slip into the vacated room and breathe its hushed, attentive air, turning things over, poking into corners, searching through drawers and mysteriously airless cupboards, diligent as a sleuth hunting for clues.

That is an actor all over. Life is a series of opportunities to imagine oneself inside the lives of others. It becomes a habit, you do it everywhere - on line at the supermarket, waiting for a subway. You collect other people's biographical or behavioral detritus - how they use their hands, what they read. You stand as they stand, feeling the shift of weight, if they shake the hair out of their eyes a certain way you find yourself unconsciously copying them just a few minutes later. You try to remember not to stare. I used to read biographies when I acted and find myself unconsciously slipping inside the lives of the subjects. Lives, behaviors are the medium of the actor and as the painter sketches and the writer scribbles in a pocket notebook so too the actor is compelled to practise.

Banville's Alex Cleave seems to have lost his grip.

"So what are you up to? Quirke said. "Down here, I mean."

Last of evening in the window, dishwater light and the overgrown grass in the garden all grey. I wanted to say, I have lived amid surfaces too long, skated too well upon them; I require the shock of the icy water now, the icy deeps. Yet wasn't ice my trouble, that it had penetrated me, to the very marrow? A man thronged up with cold... Fire, rather; fire was what was needed... With a start I came back to myself, from myself. Quirke was nodding: someone must have said something of moment - Lord, I wondered, was it me? Often lately I would be startled to hear people replying to things I had thought I had only spoken in my head...

Banville captures that coming unravlled distractedness perfectly, and more than accurately, he finds a sad beauty in it. I am loving this book.

Tender Curmudgeon Laureate

I was sad to learn from Mark Sarvas that poet, critic (and tender curmudgeon laureate) Hayden Carruth died this week. Here is the Times obituary and here is my Inflorescence post, which includes a bio, a portrait of him done for the University of Chicago Magazine, and several of his poems including an excerpt from Dearest M, an elegy Carruth wrote for his daughter, and the marvelous Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, as a remembrance.

Art Deco Gardens and Schroginder's Cat comes to life (Books - Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson & Eclipse by John Banville)

No posts from our little jaunt north because the wireless service advertised as a feature of our B&B didn't work. I consciously decided to not take a camera on this trip so that I wouldn't be looking at what I was seeing after I had been there. I would really have to look while I was there. The trees had already begun to turn. I didn't expect quite as much color this early. Every time I wanted to take a picture I thought, I will simply have to remember this. We hiked, saw The Mount, the house Edith Wharton built and lived in for a several years. She left this house after her marriage dissolved, so the only parts looking as they did are her library and the gardens. While the grounds are impressive, the house is less so, especially when compared to The Choate summer house, Naumkeag which, unlike The Mount, has been preserved with all its original furnishings intact. It has eight terraced gardens designed by Fletcher Steele over thirty years, including the famous blue art deco steps pictured above. It sits on forty acres that include a working farm and which overlook a stunning Berkshire vista. It is well worth a visit.

Not posting or emailing gave me some extra time to read. I got through several New Yorkers. One article of note was Jerome Groopman's on the danger of mega infections caused, in part, by having antibiotics as a regular part of the food we consume. Small doses of antibiotics fed to the farm animals whose meat, milk or eggs we consume, mean that more of them can be packed into what would otherwise be living conditions they could not thrive in. They are packed into tight quarters that would make many of them sick (living in these close quarters does the same to us, it is called slum living when it is humans living in these conditions). It also is supposed to help the animals grow larger. Having been dosed on antibiotics for years through our food, when the medications are required to treat a bacterial infection in us or in animals who produce our food, resistance develops. We then have fewer alternatives when a major infection strikes and if our food supply were attacked by accident or design, with an infection, we probably would not have any drugs left which could treat it. Another example of how greed thrives when it has no apparent consequences in the short-term and peopole cry against regulation, either self- imposed or by the government, that is until the consequences become apparent. Eating free range and organic is not just for tree-huggers any more. Consider the consequences.

I started Attachment, Play, and Authenticity by Steven Tuber who is a professor of mine. It is a book interpreting the theoretical and practical influence of child therapist D. W. Winnicott. I have only gotten through the first chapter, in which he basically tells me what he is going to tell me so I cannot say anything intelligent about it yet.

I also finished Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck. Despite my criticisms of the writing, the plot did exert its grip on me. It had some fun fantasy features including time travel and a villain who evolves over time from a witch to a scientist:

In the old days she too had passed her hands over the crystal ball and stuck pins into poppets, and sweated over a cauldron to cause a bronze head to speak. All unnecessary now. She was the most powerful woman in the world, and not by magic. She was a scientist.

Both she and Able Darkwater, the book's other villain, want control of time. Darkwater tries to win the pope over to his side. He reasons that, since in 1582 the papacy had changed the calendar, they would want to be an ally to anyone who can dictate the terms to time.

'We may be in Eternity,' began Abel Darkwater, 'but Time is still moving forward in the rest of the Universe, and many things have happened to displease you. There is no God and there is no Church.'

'I could have you burned at the stake for saying such things, Son of Satan.'

'I have been burned at the stake,' said Abel Darkwater mildly. 'It was unpleasant but I am prepared to forget about it today.'

'What do you want, foolish man?'

'If I said to you that we could reverse Time, that we could plan a Universe where the church was again all-powerful, and the Pope as the Head of the Church, the most powerful man of them all, what would you say to me?'

The world is all about power brokering, isn't it? It's nice to bring in the kiddies on that esssential truth of human nature. I do prefer that, however, to the pandering that characterized the first two-thirds of the book.

From the book it is clear to see that Winterson is obsessed with physics. She creates several physical manifestations of quantum physics principles in the book which I enjoyed. They include a nasty little room containing a black hole which stretches its unlucky inhabitants into endless strands of human spaghetti and a kind woman who rescues our young heroine. This woman, of course, has a cat, but the cute part is that it is Schrodinger's cat. Ha-ha-ha! I guess you have to be in on the joke. Erwin Schrodinger devised a thought experiment in 1935 as a response to some of the notions suggested by quantum physics, that illustrates what he saw as a paradox. This brings that cat to life, or to death - depending on when you look at him.

I am glad to say that this hodgepodge of a story eschews a pat and sentimental ending. I am not sorry to have been entertained by this book - see my other thoughts here and here, but I think in future that I will stick to Winterson's more idiosyncratic and skillfully written fiction for adults.

I also started John Banville's Eclipse (a recommendation of Verbivore's). The narrator is a former actor, now forgotten, it seems:

When I was young I was often dismissed as a matinee idol. This was unfair. True, I could, as I say, be the flaxen-haired hero when occasion called for it, but I played best the sombre, inward types, the ones who seem not part of the cast but to have been brought in from the street to lend plausibility to the plot. Menace was a speciality of mine, I was good at doing menace. If a poisoner was needed, or a brocaded revenger, I was your man. Even in the sunniest roles, the ass in a boater or the cocktail-quaffing wit, I projected a troubled, threatening something that silenced even the hatted old dears in the front row and made them clutch their bags of toffees tighter. I could play big, too; people when they glimpsed me at the stage door were always startled to find me, in what they call real life, not the shambling shaggy heavyweight they were expecting, but a trim lithe person with the wary walk of a dancer. I had mugged it up, you see, I had studied big men and understood that what defines them is not brawn or strength or force, but an essential vulnerability. Little chaps are all push and self-possession, whereas the large ones, if they look at all presentable, give off an appealing sense of confusion, of being at a loss, of anguish, even. They are less bruiser than bruised. No one moves more daintily than the giant, though it is always he who comes crashing down the beanstalk or has his eye put out with a burning brand. All this I learned, and learned to play.

The writing is really tasty, isn't it? And this narrative voice reminds me of Charles Arrowby, the chief character in Iris Murdoch's Booker-winning The Sea, The Sea. He also was an actor - and that book is a wonderful combination of a story in which you have to know what happens next and one in which it is agony to see how Arrowby will next embarrass himself. I've barely started Eclipse but am loving it already. Thanks, Verb.

Lastly:
Jude the Obscure
Middlemarch (in progress)
Tanglewreck
Among the Russians
Proust and the Squid
Red Cavalry (in progress)
Eclipse (in progress)
Darkmans
The Solitudes (started, don't know if I'll get through it)
Rhythms of the Brain
Neuroscience of Cognitive Development (in progress)
Attachment, Play, and Authenticity (in progress)
The Dead Fish Museum
In the Land of No Right Angles

Best of 2008 in advance

Dewey is going to cull a list of best books published in 2008 from her geeky compadres, so here is my contribution and I encourage you to create a list too and post your link at Dewey's place so she can count your vote! I link to each of my posts on these novels on my side bar, in case you're interested.

Life Class - Pat Barker

Unacustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

The House on Fortune Street - Margot Livesey

Breath - Tim Winton

The Lazarus Project - Aleksandar Hemon

...and if you are willing to count English Language editions:

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone - Sasa Stanisic (trans. Anthea Bell)

On the loss of time & on knowing when to stop (Books - Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson & Side Effects by Adam Phillips)

Preparing to do a quick get-away in the Berkshires this wet, wet weekend. It was a mistake to try to do laundry yesterday, everything is still damp, but I was down to my last rags and patches. Anyhoo, a couple of days off from classes means that I didn't have to do as much school reading yesterday and got to dip into a few other things. But while I'll have you here, is anyone else having the problem of Mozilla Firefox crashing when they try to compose or edit a post on Blogger? It just started with me although, as you can see, Internet Explorer works just fine. Any advice? I have posted to the Blogger Help Group.

I have made a fair bit of progress in Jeanette Winterson's jaunt into fantasy for young readers, too bad the writing hasn't also made progress. Winterson is very into physics, according to Sheila, who I would trust on such matters. And she tries to get some into Tanglewreck every chance she gets. The trouble is, it is not very well integrated.

The River Thames at Limehouse bows away from the City. The river glitters darkly. The river reflects the starless London sky. The river flows on to the sea. The river flows in one direction, but Time does not. Time's river carries our spent days out to sea and sometimes those days come back to us, changed, strange, but still ours. Time's flow is not even, and there are snags underwater, hesitations in Time where the clock sticks. A minute on Earth is not the same length as a minute on Jupiter. A minute on Earth is sometimes a different length all by itself.

The paragraph starts out nicely enough, but it all seems an excuse for a physics lesson with no attempt at integration into the plot, just the omniscient authorial voice descending to give us a lovely little lecture on time - thanks for that Jeanette. This all seems to be driven by a theme emerging in the novel:

'It is strange, but the machine age and the computer age both promised to give mere mortals more time in their lives, but less time is what it seems we have. We are using up Time too fast, just as we are using up all the other resources of the Earth...'

This seems to be the driving force behind the plot which, despite how artlessly its components fit together, is still fun enough to keep me reading. In this case, the notion is least spoken by the character Abel Darkwater - one of the book's villains - a man who desires to possess all time. He apparently also has a nemesis name, Regalia Mason who, we learn

...had an office in part of New York City called Tribeca. She was so high up that the clouds sometimes snowed outside her window while lower buildings were still in sunshine.

In her vast white office she gave orders to people who had never seen her. People knew her name and they were afraid of her, but only a very few knew what she looked like.

She was beautiful.

And cold.

Brrrr. Honestly, just because some of the readers of this novel are supposed to be kids, does that really mean it requires this infantile style of delivery? Looking at the diction, I would say the book was written for a child of six. But looking at the mini-lectures on the fabric of time, I would say perhaps eleven or twelve. It's a shame to watch a talented writer end up being so misguided. At six I certainly wasn't reading string theory, but at twelve I read Agatha Christie, James Herriot, Bram Stoker, Josephine Tey, and Arthur Conan Doyle quite comfortably. I am sticking with Tanglewreck, however, as I am counting on the plot delivering something that is at least entertaining.

I have also read the next piece in psychoanalyst/essayist Adam Phillips's
Side Effects about knowing when to stop. A theme he explores from the point of view of relationships in general and the therapist/patient relationship specifically.

...to adapt Valery's famous remark about completing a poem - that an analysis is never finished, it is only abandoned. And in this, despite suggestions to the contrary, the so-called analytic relationship is like, or at least similar to, every other so-called relationship. The language of completion is unsuitable for what goes on between people. It is possible to know that one no longer sees someone, no longer has sex with someone; it is less possible to know whether one no longer thinks of someone. Indeed, one of the things psychoanalysis reveals is just how haunted we are, in spite of ourselves, by other selves, by bits and pieces of others. It is impossible, though, to know when or whether a relationship has ended. Or what it is for a relationship to end, rather than change.

Phillips enjoys using art as metaphor for understanding the process of analysis and the role of both therapist and patient in it.

...they are both, in different ways and in quite diferent contexts, telling us that there is something valuable, from a psychoanalytic point of view, in not being impressively coherent, something about not being wholly plausible, or, in a conventional sense, intelligible, that psychoanalysis might ignore to its cost... Of course, the ideas that we should be suspicious of intelligibility is itself paradoxical. As an aesthetic principle, it
is perhaps best captured in the poet John Ashbery's remakr that 'the worse your art is the easier it is to talk aobut.' This might translate as: 'The more defensive you are the more plausible you will seem to yourself (and other people).'

One of Phillips strengths as a writer about psychoanalytic process is that he finds metaphors for describing aspects of theory which would otherwise remain undefinable abstractions. He offers much less in the way of case study than, say, Oliver Sacks does in writing about his discipline. Phillips is writing about ideas, not about patients, and his examples can be quite erudite (John Ashbery), but this doesn't seem to cost him a readership. This could render his books interesting only to specialists, but judging from his sales and his paperback editions, he seems to have found his niche. I am impressed by his prose, although it is, at times, repetitive. He is a champion of his process. I will leave you with this.

Knowing when to stop means feeling cured; knowing about people in a cured state, so to speak. But what of the afterlife of relationships, which is as real in its own way as is the life of relationships? And yet, as everyone knows who likes the sound of psychoanalysis, it is not solely or simply a problem-solving exercise. For some people, the relationship can end when the presenting problem has been solved. It is a kind of common sense that if you go to a psychoanalyst with claustrophobia, your involvement with the analyst will finish either when you are no longer claustrophobic or when you have finally given up hope of ever being changed by this kind of therapy. But you may also find, given a psychoanalytic opportunity, that whether or not you get symptom relief, you may want to go on; you may even come to believe that symptom relief may not be the be-all and end-all of the process. Not suffering matters, but not living as well as you can may matter more, and that is likely to involve suffering.

I will write next hopefully from in front of the fireplace in the Massachusetts hills.

Recording the revolution (Books - Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel)

For some reason, I have been starting and finishing book after book while ignoring Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry, which I had begun early this summer after Sasa Stanisic mentioned it as an influence at his NYC reading of his novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Last night after several hours of studying and an episode of Rome, it seemed like just the thing.

The burned-out town - broken columns and the hooks of evil old women's fingers dug into the earth - seemed to me raised into the air, comfortable and unreal like a dream. The naked shine of the moon poured over the town with unquenchable strength. The damp mold of the ruins blossomed like a marble bench on the opera stage. And I waited with anxious soul for Romeo to descend from the clouds, a satin Romeo singing of love, while backstage a dejected electrician waits with his fingers on the button to turn off the moon.

Blue roads flowed past me like rivulets of milk trickling from many breasts. On my way back, I had been dreading running into Sidorov, with whom I shared my room,, and who at night brought his hairy paw of dejection down upon me. That night, luckily, harrowed by the milk of the moon, Sidorov did not say a single word to me. I found him writing, surrounded by books. On the table a hunchbacked candle was smoking - the sinister bonfire of dreamers...

Babel's collected stories of life in Russia during the period immediately following the Bolshevik coup in 1917, were published in magazines in the 1920s. This period of intense disarray and bloodshed is depicted in such richly imagined and dramatic prose that the horror of its events are made readable by their sheer beauty and sometimes their hilarity. In this vignette, Italian Sun, the writer's roommate, wounded and no longer able to fight for one of the many factions vying for power, writes his girlfriend about his insane plans to murder the royal family of Italy.

Save me, Victoria! governmental wisdom is driving me insane, boredom is inebriating me. If you won't help me I will die like a dog without a five-year plan! And who wants a worker to die unplanned? Surely not you, Victoria, my bride who will never be my wife...

What is impartial journalism? People only cry for journlism to be impartial when it doesn't reconfirm their ideology. Otherwise the complaint is never heard. This is political writing I can eat in big mouthfuls, and give me a chunk of bread so I can mop up the gravy. His colorful, dreamlike palette reminds me of Chagall sometimes, but without the childlike wonder. I find his powers of observation sharper than that, his humor could shave a Cossak's beard.

A unicorn in a donkey suit (Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson)

Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck, a fantasy for young readers, is not only a departure in genre - Winterson has written sophisticated fiction for adults for the last two decades - it is also a departure in writing style. Winterson's adult writing has always been more interested in the trip than in the destination, or as Bruce Bawer's New York Times review of Gut Symmetries put it,

At a time when many publishers expect literary novels to have the relentless forward motion of an Indiana Jones movie, Ms. Winterson refuses to shift into narrative drive; eschewing the Interstate, she favors the bumpy, meandering byways of interior landscapes. At every turn, furthermore, her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration. ''In 1959,'' Alice recalls, her successful father ''was in the fullness of his present,'' having seen that the key to success was to ''pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it.''

Tanglewreck prefers a more straightforward idiom. Modern-day London is apparently being struck by phenomena called time tornadoes, in which evidence of times past are momentarily glimpsed - a woolly mammoth walks the streets, Roman chariots gallop on the surface of the Thames - and then any person or thing in its path is swallowed up, never to be heard from again. Take this description:

Then, from downstream, there was a sudden terrible crack, like the sky breaking.

I guess if we are going to make a so-called rip in time, let's be done with it. Or this:

Abel Darkwater knew that all time is always present, but buried layer by layer under what people call Now. Today lies on top of yesterday, and yesterday lies on top of the day before, and so on down the layers of history, until the layers are so thick that the voices underneath are muffled to whispers.

Ok then, all time exists right now but the other dimensions are buried just beneath the surface, or something like that. I'm not complaining exactly. Winterson is laying out the rules of her new and troubled world with clarity. I must say I do know where I am. But she is doing the job with a dispatch I did not expect. I'm so used to working for my supper when I read her books.

There is the obligatory hero or heroine on the verge of adolescence - in this case our heroine is Silver, 11 years old, parentless, and relegated to shoveling coals in the basement for her evil Aunt, Mrs. Rokabye. So far, I cannot get a grip on who Silver is, aside from the protoype Harry/Lyra with whom the young reader is supposed to identify. What I am enjoying is Winterson's villains. She has painted these characters and their badness in broad strokes.

Abel Darkwater was never late - unless he intended to be; and his watch was nevber wrong - unless he wanted it to be.

Some people are alwas short of time, but Abel Darkwater had all the time in the world - well, nearly all of it - and it was the nearly that was the problem, and the reason why he had come to Tanglewreck.

Or Mrs. Rokabye,

Mrs. Rokabye has a pet rabbit called Bigamist, on account of his habits. The house if full of small-scale Bigamists, so that wherever you go, there's a pair of yellow eyes watching you, and a black nose twitching, and an ear cocked at your business, and a scut just hiding under a chair as you come into a room. They're all her spies, but Bigamists is the worst. He tells her everything I do.

Evil rabbits - that is definitely a touch I like.

Mrs Rokabye was standing at the low kitchen door, smiling. It was a horrible sight; the corners of her mouth were drawn up towards her eyebrows, and her eyebrows were pulled up towards the hairnet she always wore in the house. She had been practising smiling all morning, but it was not nearly for long enough...

I was hoping by page fifty to have a better idea who Silver is, not merely the function she fulfills and the circumstances in which she has been placed, but I guess I will have to be patient for a bit longer. What I will say is that midterms are two weeks away (already) and I need a comfort read alongside Middlemarch and my neuroscience stuff and this would seem to be it. Anyway, I promised Sheila I would read it. It does move along at a clip and I am enjoying the plot set-up, I am just disoriented by difference from Winterson's adult writing. Perhaps it's appropriate to a younger reader, although one might say it is pandering. I was looking forward to see how her interests as a writer would be adapted for a younger reader and they seem to have been merely abandoned. I feel like I came to see a unicorn, but whoever was showing the creature got afraid we'd be freaked out and dressed it in a donkey suit.


And as the fall progresses:

Jude the Obscure
Middlemarch (in progress)
Tanglewreck (in progress)
Among the Russians
Proust and the Squid
Red Cavalry (in progress)
Eclipse
Darkmans
The Solitudes (started, don't know if I'll get through it)
Rhythms of the Brain
Neuroscience of Cognitive Development (in progress)
The Dead Fish Museum
In the Land of No Right Angles (in progress)

The Neuroscience of Reward

The thrill is gone? Blame your brain, says a little blurb by Eric Nagourney in today's Science Times. A study by Dr. Karen Faith Berman and colleagues in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared brain scans of people in their 20s and their 60s while playing a slot-machine-like-game on a computer in two conditions - one when they anticipated winning money and the second in which they actually won. In the anticipation condition, the people in their 20s showed three brain areas associated with reward activated and it sounds like dopamine levels were also elevated, whereas the people in their 60s showed increased activity in only one of those three reward areas and produced less dopamine. Now I became curious about the methods and although the PNAS would not let me read the article without paying a fee, I could read the abstract. There I learned that two measures were employed - a special kind of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan that sounds like it can stain for dopamine - getting a measure of its production in the midbrain, and fMRI which measures comparitive increases in metabolism of oxygen (a measure said to be associated with increased "activation") in prefrontal areas. In the younger people increased dopamine production was positively correlated with activity in the prefrontal areas which in other studies have been activated in conditions associated with "reward." However, the older group (whom the abstract indicated were healthy) showed a negative correlation, which the Times indicates means that less dopamine produced less reward, although a negative correlation would mean that more dopamine produced less reward. I can't tell without reading the article which is the case, but suffice it to say that the association between dopamine and reward was different for the older group. I also cannot tell from the abstract if the two levels of dopamine levels produced by each group were compared outright, i.e. the younger people produced more than the older, or if each group had a baseline level of dopamine measured and if the difference in production was compared to that baseline in the 'anticipation of reward' condition. My biggest question had to do with the experimental conditions themselves. Are the experimenters sure that the money acted as an equally rewarding influence on both groups? And most importantly are they sure that a randomly selected group of people in their sixties would respond with the same 'reward' to a computer game as people in their twenties? Anecdotally, I could report a very different relationship between computers and people in their 20s versus people in their 60s. Just wondering.

Journey from perfect child to flawed grown-up (Books - In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal)

How much can we do for other people? Is it possible to make their lives better? Can money accomplish that? Can words? What if their actions show us that they don't want the same things that we do, what then? Does our kindness make their lives better than their autonomy? Or is that just a form of arrogance? Certainly Alex, the narrator of Daphne Beal's novel In The Land of No Right Angles makes her third trip to Asia, this one to India rather than Nepal, with the idea that she can make her Napalese friend Maya's life better. But she ends up with rather different ideas than those she arrived with. What I like about Beal's story is the way Alex, the Midwestern colllege-graduate photographer, comes of age - in her social awareness, in her sexuality, in her spirit. She arrives a perfect child and leaves a flawed grown up ready to begin some kind of life. But I won't tell you how - that is the enjoyment of reading Beal's book.

Another pleasure is its exotic setting and Beal is an adept hand at creating a sense of place.

...I booked a ten-dollar room at the Kathmandu Guest House in Thamel, which turned out to have its own kind of charm - a garden cafe, big skeleton keys for the door, and my own pigeonhole at the front desk with a Kathmandu Post waiting for me every morning. The other guests were older than the bakcpacking crowd - thirty-something American couples adopting Nepali kids, artists, and people working there for a few months. I was completely unbeholden to anyone in Neapl for the first time, and suddenly I felt like I could see the city for what it was. I still loved the low rough-and-tumble skyline composed of leaning buildings and temples, whose shapes reminded me of elaborate, winged haridos. I loved the dinging-bleating-rumbling of the streets, the buzzing of the scooters swerving around the rickshaws swerving around the coes. Monkeys visited the flat rooftop outside my window daily, and the street boys in Thamel with their cheeky grins implored, "TigerBalmmadam? TigerBalm? Verygood-verynice-goodpriceforyoumadam!" I lied being justled and stared at and spoken to, compared to the slamon-swimming-upstream sensation of living in New York. but at the same time, something seemed changed and deeply wrong since I'd first spent time there. Before, when people said, ke garne, or "what to do?" it sounded philosophical and good natured. Now it sounded bitter and helpless..

Or her characterization of Bombay's red-light district:

All along the wide street for as far as I could see, women, girls, and transvestites stood in open doorways of crumbling four-and five-story buildings with sagging shutters and barred windows. Wearing grimy, once-bright saries and salwar kameezes and painted-on makepu that melted down their faces in the wet heat...The youngest of them couldn't have been more than thriteen or fourteen, and some of the youngest were Nepali. These girls in particular looked dead to me, with thei caked-on makeup and spidery lashes. Boys and men sauntered down the sidewalk, arm in arm or holding hands, as they did here, and the girls made kissing noises or clicked their tongues as they passed. But there was not even a trace of the seedy glamour that the old Times Square or any other red-light area I knew about (real or cinematic) possessed...

One of the things I enjoyed learning about Napli culture had to do with an idea akin to 'soul,' mon, it is called. It becomes particularly alive in hearing Maya speak of it:

"Does he have a girlfiend?"

"Probably. I don't know."

"If he does," she said, "he'll ruin her the way he does everyone, spoil her mon." That favorite word of hers, of ours. And bigrinchha, "spoil," was the same word used with meat or produce, as if your mon were a bruised mango or a hunk of rancid goat meat. "It's like he has a disease of the mon. You know, I didn't sweat before I met him, and now a stink comes off me."

Finally, this book, although the concerns of its plot were largely domestic - a triangle of friendship and mutual responsibility - one could read it as reaching beyond individuals to how whole cultures relate. It is a story of someone trying to grow up, not by graduating, getting a job and getting married, that is, hitting pre-fab milestones thoughtlessly because that is what she saw on TV. But by trying to learn how others live in and see the world, taking the risk of involving herself in a way of living nothing like her own. Getting herself a little dirty. Forming a view of the world she is going to live in by doing more than reading Newsweek or watching the Discovery channel. I felt like this book, not just its narrator, was forming a view of the world that is about learning compassion for others but also respect. Finally whether country or individual, there are times we may feel free or filled with rightiousness, or even kindness, but we are all contained by boundaries of one sort or another and part of growing up is learning where those are and respecting them.

Here are my other thoughts on reading this book 1, 2, 3.

Book Reviews as News, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and an appreciation (Books, books, books)

I managed to catch up on three weeks of Times Book Reviews and still get a good deal of my school reading done, take a walk in the park, cook buckwheat pasta with tomatoes onions mushrooms and broth, and watch an episode of Rome - a productive Saturday for feeling so completely lacking in energy as I did. And we drank cups and cups and cups of tea. To no avail. I felt as floppy as Raggedy Andy.

The Books Reviews, read in sequence, are like a little snapshot of our zeitgeist. Just say Käse. Really they are more news than the news. Take the two weeks bookending September 11 - what was the theme? The new Paul Auster, the new Philip Roth, the new Francine Prose - they all deal with death. I'm a fan of Paul Auster so I'm likely to read his new Man in the Dark despite the lukewarm reception it has gotten everywhere including in this review by Tom LeClair. What did he expect writing about an unfulfilled book critic with terrible insomnia! I love to read about Philip Roth; I love hearing interviews with him about his writing, but I have yet to make it through a single of his books. Maybe it's a generational thing. I have heard those who do admire him say that his latest, Indignation, is not the book to start on. Maybe that means I'll like it. In his gushing encomium on the front page of this week's Book Review David Gates cannot stop himself from telling the book's secret. Although, the way he described the book, I had guessed it before he gave me a chance to debark. So if you are at all interested in reading this book, don't read this review until after you have read the book. Of her twelve novels and host of other books I have only read Blue Angel by Francine Prose. I thought it wicked and well crafted but haven't yet tried another. Any recommendations from fans of her work? Leah Hager Cohen's assessment of Goldengrove, Prose's latest, is unenthusiastic at best. As a writer, how do you like up to a name like Prose? It does make me want to read Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem Spring and Fall: To a Young Child though, which figures prominently in the novel:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Again, the theme seems to be aging and death - as with Auster and Roth - but this time addressed to a child who can not yet know of her loss consciously, but feels it just the same. The poems brilliance is, I think, that this rich juxtaposition of innocence and the perspective that comes with self awareness is packed into fifteen lines cloaked in the lilt of rhyming couplets. It gives the verse an almost wry smile, while the eyes of its 'I' are filled with tears. As if that 'I' could be speaking those words to the child and because of the lovely sounds made by the lines she would feel comforted, despite their content.

Speaking of the price of self awareness, today's Times has an appreciation of recently deceased author David Foster Wallace, by A. O. Scott that is really, well, appreciative, and quite beautiful.

Finally two other books that stood out in these weeks of reviews other than the three biggies were Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey, The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Fortey, who works for London's museum, catalogues the contents of its back rooms, pickling his description with anecdotes about its former employees and its store of ephemera. And the other book I was drawn to was The Time of Their Lives, Al Silverman's portrait of The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors. Bruce Jay Friedman writes an amusing and informative review that despite any criticisms still leaves me wanting to read 500 pages of anecdotal nostalgia about my favorite topic - books! There is a world of fresh print out there for us to covet (in the inimitable style of our trusty Dewey) so I am getting off my duff and reading some of it.

Odds and ends (Books - In the Land of No Right Angles & Film - Dream with the Fishes)

This is one of those meandering weekend posts. First let me say, I am not going to allow the fact that a neuron has capacitance, that is the ability to store charge, cramp my style today. It cramped most of my style yesterday and that was not at all pleasant.

Dream with the Fishes is a film made in 1997 that I remember seeing several times when it was first released. David Arquette is the most familiar face in it. It's written and directed by Finn Taylor. I really liked this film a decade ago and so it had been on my Amazon wish list and I ended up getting it for christmas. For some reason I didn't get around to watching it until now. I think I was afraid I wouldn't like it as much any more. Although I found some of the writing and acting a bit obvious now, it remains a really good and even touching story. A man terrified of risk lives as a voyeur and can't stand himself anymore, so he decides to end his life. He meets a man who, let's just say, has every reason to take what risks he can. The film is the story of their unlikely friendship. It's well worth a watch and has a great soundtrack.

The Ragazzo and I also got the DVDs of the first year of BBC television's Rome from the New York Public Library and watched the first two episodes over a tray of salami, cheese, salmon pate, salad, crusty bread and red wine. It is a well written dramatization of historical events in around the first century BCE. These episodes were wonderfully directed by Michael Apted. He and his team manage to introduce character and plot lines, create the feel of the bustle of an ancient city, and battle grounds, and give a very thorough sense of period while the behavior still has the haphazzard, accidental feeling of verissimilitude (I love that word) that we expect from contemporary film and television. The only odd touch is the theme music, which is so reminiscent of the title music for Carnivale that it made me smirk. There are loads of wonderful actors like James Purefoy, Lindsay Duncan and Ciaran Hinds to enjoy. It was filmed largely in Rome and at some points they had five acres of backlot and six sounstages in action at the famous Cinecitta studios.

And I'm close to finishing In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal. The college educated Alex returns to Nepal for a second and third time, ostensibly to photograph, but perhaps really to try to capture something of who she was when in the grip of innocence (as I did when watching the film Dream With The Fishes again), or to assuage her guilt for what has happened to the young girl, Maya, whom she brought from the country to the big city at the behest of her guru friend Will. It's later sections are full of you-can't-go-home-again insights that are, I expect, part of Alex's coming of age, as this is a coming of age novel. I feel a melancholy atmosphere descend in the book's home stretch, but I still have 50 pages to go so I will hold off until I have read it completely.

And, really, any day will be instantly better if you try La Tur, a cheese from Italy made from sheep's cow's and goat's milk, all blended into this incredibly light spreadable mild cheese. Yum. Great on whole grain toast. I had it with a glass of black cherry juice mixed with bubbly water.

Lots of studying to get started on now. Hope it is as nice where you are as it is here. We're finally heading towards autumn in NYC.

Changing leaves, hot cider, and neuroanatomy

Autumn is starting (here in the US, anyway), and kids are heading back to school–does the changing season change your reading habits? Less time? More? Are you just in the mood for different kinds of books than you were over the summer?

This kid has headed back to school, that's for sure, and you can bet it has changed my reading habits. This summer was a time of luxurious indulgence. I could read whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted - more than 25 books from June through August. That meant lots of fiction including Netherland, the new Margot Livesey, the new Tim Winton, the new Charles Baxter, reading Man Booker winners Rose Tremain and Allan Hollinghurst, Sasa Stanisic's wonderful How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, re-reading some Chiam Potok and Don Delillo, discovering the fiction of Bernard MacLaverty and Robin Jenkins, as well as some books on how the brain reads. See my side bar for links to all those posts. Now classes have begun. It's not that I am reading any less, au contraire, but suddenly my on-going reads fester - Daphne Beal's new novel is taking me a couple of weeks to read, Middlemarch is likely to take me until the end of the year, and books I want to read on neuroscience take a back seat to my assignments. This is the reading you never hear me talk about. Books with titles such as: From Molecules to Networks: An Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience or Principles of Neuroscience - this is one of the classics in the field. Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases, or on the psychier side of my classes Diagnostic Psychological Testing or Development of the Rorschach Technique. That and loads of articles every week. This weekend was taken up by The Contribution of Psychoanalytic Theory to Psychological Testing, Interaction of Dynamic and Reality Factors in the Diagnostic Testing Interview, The Development of Cortical Multisensory Integration, and Action-Based Body Maps in the Spinal Cord Emerge from a Transitory Floating Organization. Forget images of hot spiced cider, soft comforting sweaters, and walks in the russet leaves and think: twice as much coffee, a new knapsack, and purple patches beneath my eyes. Am I in the mood for different books than I was over the summer? No, not particularly, but they won't help me pass my test on Friday or get my research into the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. And you?

Midwestern Reserve Meets Karma (Books - In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal)

It is the contrast between cultures rather than the plotting per se that is keeping me interested in the triangle that forms the center of Daphne Beal's novel In the Land of No Right Angles. Alex, a young Midwestern photographer, Will, a sybaritic guru, and Maya a rural Nepalese innocent end up living together in Kathmandu. They have three ways of seeing, three ways of loving, three ways of expressing themselves. The setting throws these differences into further relief. On a walk to the market, Alex and Maya see posters with photos of political protesters who were brutally beaten, many of them killed. One of the victims was Maya's brother and Maya breaks down in the middle of the street:

People didn't have these open, emotional displays in Nepal. There was no weeping or shouting, nothing the least bit melodramatic or Mediterranean, but the equanimity here wasn't the same as the Midwestern forbearance that I grew up with either. It was simply as if people experiences, good and bad, dropped like stones into a deep well. I think it had to do with a strong sense of karma and with the inevitability of things. Here, if your child died, that fact did not orbit your head or become your identity the way in would at home, yet it remained deeply a part of you.

Beal's writing has become less spare as the novel has progressed. The tone has become less reportorial, more contemplative. A little less than 100 pages into the book, we are privy to some backstory - a relationship Alex had with a filmmaker in the United States - that writing, in contrast to most of the rest of the book, is personal and tinged with strong emotions. I don't know whether the shift is the writer's or the narrator's - perhaps both. It places her emotional reserve up to the point in context and this reader wonders if the unusual setting and circumstances won't be the catalyst for Alex to gain access to this more passionate side of her nature.

Progress notes

And, if I may indulge myself in a little update on the fall TBR list...

Jude the Obscure
Middlemarch (in progress)
Tanglewreck
Among the Russians
Proust and the Squid
Red Cavalry (in progress)
Eclipse
Darkmans
The Solitudes (started, don't know if I'll get through it)
Rhythms of the Brain
Neuroscience of Cognitive Development (in progress)
The Dead Fish Museum
In the Land of No Right Angles (in progress)

Finished Charles D'Ambrosio's very strong collection of stories The Dead Fish Museum. My thoughts on the final story will have to wait for some time in the not-too-distant future. But see my thoughts on the others here, here, here, and here.

Pain and numbers

Today's Science Times has two pieces related to the neuroscience that I found interesting. One by Kate Murphy on how sensations in one part of the body can cause pain in another - so-called referred pain. Researchers see two kinds - one that is caused by the transfer of signals to adjacent nerves that overlap as they come together at the spinal column. The second type does not see such an overlap, here the referred sites seem to be concurrent with acupuncture meridians or the phenomenon of trigger points, a notion anathema to many doctors who practice 'Western' medicine.

Natalie Angier writes about the ability of the mind to approximate numbers versus the ability we cultivate to take the symbols for the abstract concept of quantity (numbers) and manipulate them (compute). Researchers are investigating both whether there is an actual link between these systems - anatomically or whether suceess in one arena can predict success in the other - and also whether those approximating skills can be usefully applied to teaching computation.

Bukowskian revelry (Books - The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio)

I continue to be impressed by the battered little worlds Charles D'Ambroiso conjures up in his short story collection The Dead Fish Museum.

We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife's eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

I felt like I knew so much about the relationship between these two people at the end of this, the opening paragraph of Up North, and yet D'Ambrosio had written nothing explicit. In it the odd balance of this relationship between a husband and wife unfolds as we learn of the woman's rape, and see her husband try to function in the machismo-driven world of the womans' father, brother and cronies. It is a grotesque meeting of bravado, of promiscuity, and of a wish for intimacy.

The Scheme of Things is the story of two down-and-out scam artists and is an oddly tender and even sweet little tale. The title story is in a bleak, Bukowskian vein. A man gets out of prison and finds project carpentry work on a pornographic film. The stunning writing and the grimy, disturbed mileu make for an odd marriage.

Behind a thick sheet of acrylic, the desk clerk's face rushed up at him; it spread and blurred, white and without features, but never seemed to reach the surface. Ramage leaned forward and looked through a circle in the slab of glass, cut like a hole in ice. On the counter was a dinner plate with chicken bones and a few grains of rice hardening in brown gravy, and next to the plate was the splayed and broken spine of a romance. The clerk had been working over the chicken, cracking the bones and sucking the marrow. Her hair was tin and her teeth were leaning gray ruins in her lipless mouth. Her blue eyes were milky and vague, the pupils tiny beads of black. Ramage could not imagine a youth for her - it was as if she'd been born fully ruined...

God that's good.

The penultimate tale, Blessing, is like many in this book, one of a person finding themselves in a duo of some kind - a marriage, a friendship, a father-son relationship - but I mean in this case - really finding themselves. These stories seem to be acts of discovery that come upon the characters in the midst of the mess of daily living. I guess one could say they are insights. And in that way they are, I suppose, moments of brightness, or at least of clarity, though that doesn't mean that they necessarily look very 'nice.' But that is, I feel, the value of the experience of reading them - that and the sheer beauty of D'Ambrosio's language - it is revelry.

Books that...

This from Verbivore, our 'man' in the Alps.



A book you have read more than once

I read Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince more than once. Once for the pure joy of reading it, the second time to prepare for an audition for a theatrical adaptation that, so far, hasn't taken place. At least not in New York. I've read Franny and Zooey countless times. I've read Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves multiple times and Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund and Chiam Potok's My Name is Asher Lev.


A book you are currently reading

As you can tell from the pictures on my side bar, that would be books, plural. As in too many. Middlemarch, The Dead Fish Museum, In the Land of No Right Angles, and Cognitive Development are the ones that are seriously in progress. Oh, and Side Effects, which is not up there. I got hijacked by C.J.'s short story challenge which is how The Dead Fish Museum came about. I knew the author of In the Land of No Right Angles in a past life and I just couldn't resist reading it. I have really got to get back to the other two. I'm missing Middlemarch, but I have only been able to sit down to read some fiction after 11pm and I would have to be able to stay awake through a whole chapter to warrant opening it.


A book you would want on a desert island

I'm pretty consistent on ye olde desert island question - the complete works of Shakespeare. That may be cheating as one book, but it is a common single volume and it has variety enough to last a lifetime, if that would be what I spend on this island. For writing of quality of interest for its form as well as its sheer range of human content, Shakespeare cannot be beat. If forced to pick a volume with only one work in it, maybe Hopeful Monsters because it's about so many things I don't know if I could get bored with it.


A book that made you laugh

Woody Allen's Side Effects - funny, it's the same title as the Adam Phillips book I'm reading now. I guess one is a book by a psychiatrist writing about neurotics and the other is a book by a neurotic writing about psychiatrists. What made me laugh in Allen's book is an essay about the invention of the Heimlich maneuver by inducing choking in rats. I haven't yet had a laugh at Adam Phillips book. It is largely about Freud and mental illness so I don't expect that will change.


A book that made you angry

Sartre's Being and Nothingness. I had to read this book for a class in existentialism in my final year of undergraduate school. My god, is it infuriating. I threw it against the wall of my room.


A book that made you cry

Nicholas Nickleby., The death of Smike. Every time. The end of Tony Morrison's Sula, read in an ice cream store in Pittsburgh.


A really intense book

Sula, see above. Crime and Punishment would be right up there. At Swim Two Boys was fairly intense - great novel and I never see anybody mention it any more. The Goldbug Variations is an amazing experience - such range, such intellectual energy, such passion - a scientific puzzle, a mystery and a love story all wrapped up into one.


A book you wish had never been written

There may have been books I wish I had never read, I'm not sure there are books I wish were never written. Well, that's not true. Some of the utter crap, like books telling people not to read Harry Potter because he practices magic from the devil. Books that teach people that some people are good, that others are not, and that there is a formula you can follow to be good. Any book that encourages anyone to evangelize.


A book you would recommend to almost anyone

For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin, although many people I have recommended it to didn't like it as much as I did. I think Canin is essential contemporary writing and think this one the best of his novel-length works. Charles Baxter's Shadow Play. My Name is Asher Lev - great, great story and I think everyone should experience reading Chiam Potok. Tim Winton's Cloud Street - without a doubt. Great moving story, beautiful inventive language. Truly a great reading experience.


A book that changed your life

Them's big words. I'm going to contradict every rant I have ever had about self help books and mention one I read, liked, and used - Coming Out to Parents. It's full of practical and compassionate advice and it is not as narrow as it sounds. It is about 'coming out' to anyone about anything. But that one literally changed my life. My Name is Asher Lev was my bible of the outsider experience. It was a book that gave me courage to be what I wanted and not what others wanted me to be. Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters was the book I read in my adolescence that introduced me not merely to the wonders of science and to experimenting in the lab in particular, but also to the idea of relentlessly pursuing your curiosity about anything and having that be worthwhile. Great book for young readers. The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art by Nikolai Gorchakov. A book that taught me there was another director who thought about theater the way I did. Brilliant book about the great student of Stanislavski who ended up founding a satellite studio of Stanislavski's own at the Moscow Art Theatre, directing several brilliant projects, and dying at around age 40. And The Music Theatre of Walter Felsenstein by Peter Paul Fuchs - a book that taught me there was another director who thought about opera the way I did. Anecdotes about the marvelous head of the Director of the Komische Oper in East Berlin from the late 1940s until the 1970s.

Coming of age in Kathmandu. (Books - In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal)

What I am enjoying most about Daphne Beal's debut novel In the Land of No Right Angles is the setting. A young American woman, freshly graduated from college, decides to take photographs in Nepal and trek around this little known mountainous haven for the spiritually hungry. Before she leaves on a trek, her friend Will gives her an assignment:

"It'll take you an hour out of your way. Two, tops," he said as we looked out at the low slung, ancient city twinkling before us.

"Sure," I said. Two hours was nothing when you were talking about a two-and-a-half-week trek. Besides, the errand sounded interesting. He wanted me to find a girl he'd met the year before and give her a message. As it was, the purpose of my solo trek was not only to take pictures, but to say good-bye to the people in a remote, hardscrabble village called Jankat where I'd lived for a month in the winter, and it all seemed a little melancholy. I was pleased to add a more cheerful mission.

Of course it turns out to be more than two hours, or there wouldn't be a story. And it begins to rain and our heroine from Des Moines wonders to herself, if this wasn't one of Will's exercises for spiritual growth. She finally finds the house and the girl, or at least a girl who says it is she but there is reason to doubt it as she is desperate to escape her druken mother and violent father. And so the drama begins. The book is very much like the travel experience, in which the activities of the day - moving from site A to site B, buying fruit, finding a post office - necessitate learning about a new culture. Beal (who I know as she worked on a project of mine in Milwaukee in 1988) is adept at creating the kind of tension that keeps a reader interested but along the way one can learn about the traiditional dress of women in Nepal, the class-based rules of drinking alcohol, and that a gentle rain is called sim-simi in Nepali - like little beans. Her writing is straight forward, contemporary, and relaxed without being exactly breezy. It reminds me of Hemmingway in its lack of frou-frou, its getting-the-job-done-ness. I am looking forward to really getting into it a bit this weekend, between articles on multisensory processing and psychological testing. Got to keep this bare of frou-frou as well, I have a test this afternoon.