Making home on a changing island (Books - Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester)

A capsule will have to suffice for this entertaining read on multiple generations of English ex-pats in Hong Kong.  This is the first novel by John Lanchester I have read.  Fragrant Harbour is itself fragrant with a sense of place.

We went down the hill, toward one of Hong Kong's most amazing spectacles, the Sunday gathering of Filipina amahs around Statue Square, spilling out toward Legco, the park, the Exchange.  You hear it long before you see it, a high fluttering sounds, a cross between a roar and a twitter, like thousands of birds, like no other human sounds you've ever heard.  The noise made by ten thousand Filipinas all talking at the same time isn't like a crowd event, a march or a rally or a sporting match, since they aren't concentrating on an external entity but on one another - eating and swapping picnics, swapping news and reading letters from home, listening to music, shopping at the impromptu market that features carefully targeted goods (like big, cheap folding suitcases, ultracheap towels and T-shirts), swapping photos, but all, mostly, talking, all the time.

Lanchester's writing makes details of time and place vibrate with life.  He tells a good story too, or really, he tells many  - of multiple generations who lived from the 1930s to the present day.  One cares about each of the characters a great deal, but I was not equally compelled by every succeeding story.  And did they ever fuse into one?  The last, a modern-day story, particularly stands apart.  This is partly because we go from times in which people spoke to each other in person, or wrote letters, to one in which we live thousands of miles from someone and communicate with a brief call, email, or text  - and yet, this novel seems to say, we remain miles apart. I'm not sure that this quite comes together, but this is a novel about people who don't hang onto the past but instead remake themselves in a brand new place and, as such, it is about a certain sense of unrootedness and yet, it all relates to a common place.   An unusual paradox, but one that makes enjoyable reading.

Getting in touch in the cold desert of the modern world (Books - A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers)

I'm a fan of Dave Eggers clean, mission-infused writing from having read What is the What, a fictionalized biography of one of Sudan's lost boys.  A Hologram for the King (Vintage, 2012) is more straightforwardly novelistic, that is, it is not about anyone Eggers knew.  And yet.  And yet, it is a portrait of a man we all know, a man of our times.  Alan Clay is an IT salesman and a dreamer.  He is divorced, can no longer pay his mortgage or his daughter's college tuition.  He is trying to make one last sale to hold his work-driven life together.  So he comes to a poorly air conditioned, nearly empty tent in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert to make a business pitch to the King.  Only, neither he nor anyone else know when the king will arrive.  He makes the trip day after day, week after week, hoping for his chance to sell his wares  - a system which includes the ability to have business meetings via hologram - and put his life back together.  And succeed. 

Eggers places Alan thousands of miles from home, separated from his wife, unable to speak with his father on the phone for two minutes without a fight, composing countless openings to a letter to his daughter which end balled up in the waste bin.  He has a frightening growth on his neck.  His life consists of endless waiting, of receptionists who will not let him speak with another person. Eggers creates a sense of place that is barren.  Where most of the things that move and express are electronic.

A the end of the hall he spotted an elevator door closing.  He jogged to it and thrust his hand into the gap.  The doors jerked back, startled and apologetic.  

Here success means that Alan's will connect the king, if he ever comes, with another person who is not really there. 

Everywhere, relationships no longer mattered, Alan knew this.  They did not matter in American, they did not matter much of anywhere, but here, among the royals, he hoped that friendship had meaning.

A Hologram for the King is a man's journey to get back in touch.  To remember the value of other lives.  To move from asking people's name as a sales technique, to having some sort of authentic contact with other living persons, not figments in his head.  To have real encounters with real people, not build holograms for kings.  It is a keenly observed book, the voice reminding me more of Didion's essays than anything else - spare writing which looks, sees, and describes.  The book's effect opines, but Eggers's narrative doesn't preach.  Amidst his clean prose is a message of genuine warmth.

Doors slam on old identities on a Greek Isle (Books - Skios by Michael Frayn)

I have enjoyed Michael Frayn's plays and memoir, so I was excited to find his Skios on the table at my favorite bookstore.  It is billed as a farcical beach read, a satire of academia, with serious philosophical undercurrents and I thought it would be an enjoyable distraction.  In it, a famous academic is scheduled to deliver a lecture at a philanthropic institution on a Greek Isle while a wastrel with a shock of blond hair has a scheduled tryst elsewhere on the Isle. The two are mixed up, but as they take up residence in the others lives they are each changed, sort of.  Farce? Yes, complete with door slamming and cell phone mishaps.  Satire of academia?  Perhaps.  But its machinations with mistaken identities and the wish to crawl into someone else's life were superficial, hardly philosophical.  I could see every coincidence in Skios coming from nine miles away. But it's good for a laugh or two and there are one or two clever moments.  My favorite: the academic ends up involved with the woman who had expected to have a tryst with the layabout (who is now posing as an academic).  The woman has two moles, and as he reviews his lecture...

He turned over more pages, but his mind was wandering.  Two dark spots had appeared in the air between him and the page like importunate flies.  He brushed them aside.  He turned back to the section about the overall framework of social responsibility.  The two dark spots reappeared.  they were two moles, he realized.  They had become detached from the shoulder blade on which they lived, and taken up residence inside his brain.

Frayn plots cleverly and crafts clear and even elegant sentences, but, philosophical?  Not really

To fly, to dream,...or to stop dreaming? (Books - The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud)

Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), is a school teacher and a dutiful daughter caring for an infirm parent.  She is 42,

...which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.  Neither old nor young, I'm neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blond nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain.  Quite nice looking in some moments, I think is the consensus, rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances, read in quantity in my youth.  I'm neither married nor divorced, but single.  What they used to call a spinster, but don't anymore, because it implies that you're dried up, and none of us wants to be that. 

Nora sits in between the roles fashioned for her by others, templates she's very dependent on (as are many of us), and the role she imagines for herself in some foggy, unspecific view of the future - a future in which she will gain courage and take over herself, a future, in which she will make great art and light the world on fire - well, that, or just accept that she's not the type, that she's just an average Jane, and to like it.

All these years, I was wrong, you see.  Most people around me, too.  And especially now that I've learned that I really am invisible, I need to stop wanting to fly.  I want to stop needing to fly.  I want it all to do over again; but also I don't.  I want to make my nothingness count.  Don't think it's impossible.

The trouble is that Nora needs others to tell her who she is.  She is not willing to reject their formulas, and that makes her angry as hell.  She's believed all this time that she's been mildly disappointed, but it takes meeting the Shahid family, particularly Sirena - a visual artist - someone seemingly free of these demands, to find out she's actually furious.

What I found so wonderful about this shout of a novel is the way it lays bare the duality of human nature through its narrator and protagonist: Nora and Sirena.  Nora is a tight, a New Englander, and Sirena a free-spirited Italian married to a Lebanese.  Nora is a single, a school teacher, Sirena a mother with a unwieldy family life.  Nora a pragmatist, who takes obligation seriously, a ruminator.  Sirena passionate, serving her own needs, alive in the present.  They end up sharing studio space and while Serena makes a sprawling, mythic construction that uses Alice in Wonderland as a jumping-off point.  Her audience can walk through this work.  It features a heart at is center, pumping rose water instead of blood - a playground of the sensual with smells, sounds - one where its heart is literally visible and the interaction between audience and art becomes a kind of improvisation. Nora makes tiny boxes - realistic depictions of great artists - who made art despite the roles their time prescribed for them - Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel - but her audience stands outside and looks in - just like Nora.  

We are the actors in history (Books - The File by Timothy Garton Ash)

The 1989 civil overthrow of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe was one of the most influential revolutions of recent history, and feels somehow quickly forgotten.  Following it, each of the USSR's dominions had to find a way suitable to its culture to transition away from totalitarian communism, and paranoia induced spying. While under Soviet rule,the East German State Security Service or STASI recruited an incredible number of its own populace as informers

According to internal records, in 1988 - the last "normal" year of the GDR - the Ministry for State Security had more than 170,000 "unofficial collaborators."  Of these, some 110,000 were regular informers, while the others were involved in "conspiratorial" services such as lending their flats for secret meetings or were simply listed as reliable contacts.  The ministry itself had over 90,000 full-time employees, of whom less than 5,000 were in the HVA foreign intelligence wing.  Setting the total figure against the adult population in the same year, this means that about one out of every fifty adult East Germans had a direct connection with the secret police. 

It was not unusual  for people to be informed on by co-workers, neighbors, friends, lovers, spouses or children. The East Germans had quite a bit of work to do to reeducate its citizens about history, economics, law, and and the role of the state.  Most of the adult population in 1989 had known only Soviet rule or, if they were old enough, the Nazis.  So following the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany made the contents of STASI files available to anyone who had one, allowing them to know who informed on them, and what they believed was known about them.  This effort at transparency often became an exercise in counter-recrimination.  In some cases, mostly for higher-ups, justice was pursued legally.  In others, the discovery of betrayal by friends and family was life-altering and devastating.

For Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford student in the 1970s writing his thesis on Berlin under Hitler, it was an opportunity to think about the interaction of the political with the personal on two levels.  On the one hand he sought to understand the impact of the state on these individuals - what motivated his informers (he's now a respected political journalist and author of many books on the revolutions of 1989 - here's a link to my thoughts on his The Magic Lantern ).  On the other, he could examine his own experience as a young man present at a key event in history, considering how subjective memory informs the telling of history.  As he puts it

Film - Hannah Arendt (2012)

Director, Margarethe von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa made Rosa Luxemburg, a film about the life and politics of the provocative socialist.  Though it came out in 1986, I still remember it.  So when I heard they had teemed up again to make a film about philosopher Hannah Arendt, I didn't want to miss it.  Arendt's coverage of the Adolph Eichmann trials in Jerusalem in 1961 in The New Yorker was, to say the least, controversial and provoked incendiary reactions.  Her goal, though, according to this film, was to use thought to understand the man rather than to judge him.  This appears, too, to be von Trotta's mantra.  She makes intimate films about the interior lives of women who profoundly influenced the politics of their era to explore their motives and the consequences of living as they did for a cause.  It is a relief to see a film about the value of thought in the context of politics - especially politics that provokes strong feelings.  We could do with a little of that.  And if that weren't reason enough to see it, Janet McTeer plays writer Mary McCarthy in it.

Holding pain at arm's length (Books - Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy)

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy is a love story, or more than that, a connection story.  The story of a connection between two men and a woman, each incomplete, in their way.  Rebecca, an artist who searches for her mother, George, a drunk, a lover of ancient languages, and Henry, an archeologist who escapes to the past.  They all end up in Athens and, in a nutshell, try to become whole again.

Van Booy looks to Athens for a sort of seedy grandeur and tries to make of the connection between his characters something of (appropriately enough) mythic proportion, only it doesn't quite work.  He uses language to try to grace each character with a sort of specialness.

Her father is out calling the name she's been given.

But her real name is known only by the change in light that comes without sound, and by the worms pushing up through the soaked crust of soil...

His chronic drinking began when he was fourteen, and inspired long walks through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he attended boarding school.  It was a stark gray town, with lingering fog at the windows of houses...

Like her, he was from a small cottage, but in Wales, on a hillside.

"It was like camping every day," he confessed.  "The house smelled of wet magazines and I shared my bed with a dozen animals."  

 But I found a manic desperation in his attempt to make them all so pleasantly quirky.  Trying to give the intersection of their stories a sense of magical coincidence - like the film The Double Life of Veronique - in the end it just came off twee.

At that moment, a French girl living in Paris called Natalie fainted in the supermarket.

These characters all really hurt and I was truly interested in their stories, but I felt like Van Booy's writing was a lot like George's drinking.

Booze washed all that nonsense away.  It shallowed his perception.  As a drunk, he was free to explore the earth without having to digest every moment, as if it were his last.

What he really wanted to write was an opera. Van Booy tries with the lyricism of his language to dull the pain or to encase it in a warm beauty, but what was most interesting about these people was their pain, and in the end, I didn't want to be held at arm's length from it.

Film - The Great Gatsby (2013)

There have been three film adaptations of The Great Gatsby that I know about: The 1949 film starring Alan Ladd, The 1974 film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and the most recent incarnation with Leonardo DiCaprio directed by Baz Luhrmann.  None of them have worked.  I can't remember why that was my impression of the earlier versions, but the new 3-D blockbuster is mostly a disaster. There are some nice touches melding 1920s and contemporary choreography and music into an interesting hybrid.  And I loved the billboard advertisement for spectacles that gazed down on the fictional wasteland between glitzy Long Island and New York City, but it seems as though Baz Luhrmann has forgotten he's no longer making Moulin Rouge.  The film is all surface with no insides.  It's as though Luhrmann were Nick at the film's beginning - completely dazzled.  It's a shame considering that the whole story is that Nick grows up and becomes disillusioned by superficiality.  Luhrmann used the text of the novel as narration rather than having Nick inhabit the action of the film. That may have worked had he chosen someone other than Tobey Maguire.  Unfortunately Maguire can't play text and has no gravitas. Nick grows old beyond his years and tries to teach Gatsby not to live in the past, Maguire still seems to be trying to act the ingenue, even though he's almost 40.  Had he felt his age, it might have been interesting.  Luhrmann's idea of justifying the narration by having Nick talk to a psychiatrist was a misguided anachronism and having lines of type fly across the screen had no point other than to telegraph how self-conscious Luhrmann was about adapting a great novel.  I loved Luhrmann's work when he had no money to waste.  Strictly Ballroom and his wonderful La Boheme were all heart. I hope he finds some creative moxie again instead of hiding behind production values that communicate nothing but sheer hysteria.

Longing for the underside of oneself (Books - Harvard Square by Andre Aciman)

Andre Aciman is a contemporary voice of longing - longing for home while in exile, longing for lost love.  I really enjoyed his Eight White Nights, a retrospective story of an intense romance.  Harvard Square I found more difficult to enter, but not in a bad way.  What I mean is that I had to work at it, particularly because one of the main characters is so unlikeable.

A father and son visit Harvard for a tour, as the son is about to apply to college.  Harvard is the father's alma mater and the visit to his old stomping ground kicks up the dust for the old man.  He remembers the final year of his graduate studies there: his classes, his girlfriends, but particularly a cab driver he meets at a cafe - Kalaj.  Our narrator is Egyptian, Jewish, literature student, a sensitive intellectual like Aciman.  Kalaj is Arab, by way of Paris, obnoxious, volatile, a sponger.  They share a love of speaking French and drinking coffee and cheap wine.  While our narrator tries to help Kalaj from completely destroying his own life through impulsivity, Kalaj tries to teach our narrator how to take the risk to live ferociously, honestly.

It began with the prologue, which I found unnecessary.  I know that Aciman wants us to see which kind of man the father has become, but there was something obvious about the excuse he creates to visit his memories.  I would have preferred something more integrated into the story proper.  And Kalaj is intensely dislikeable, so to begin with I didn't want to spend much time with him, but knowing the rewards of an Aciman novel, I stuck with it.  What unfolds is putatively the a story of friendship between two very different people but really, it's the story of two potential ways of living life that are present in everyone.  Aciman makes no bones about it:

One of the things that drew me to Kalaj at first had nothing to do with his mischievous sixth sense, or his survivor's instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around you till they choked you before they turned into laughter.  Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to me, because it brought to mind those instant friendships of my childhood, when one insult about your mother followed by another about mine could bind two ten-year-olds for a lifetime.

Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I'd lost track of and sloughed off living in America.  My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft.  Me unmasked, unchained unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged.  Me without books, without finish without a green card.  Me with a Kalashnikov.

That's what I ended up liking about this book.  It's all out there. As Kalaj becomes more and more recognizable as the flip side of, well, just about anyone who might pick up an Andre Aciman novel, the story grows compelling and, finally, quite touching. Here Aciman seems to be writing about longing for the underside of himself. His lost (or perhaps never found) ferocity. The story is honest and elegantly told, and its encompassing vision of the sides of human nature present in everyone that aren't simple or easy is compassionate.   

Film - Oslo, August 31st (2011)

On Sheila's recommendation I saw Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st recently, starring Anders Danielsen Lie a triple-threat: musician, actor, and doctor.  It's a beautiful interior portrait of a day in the life of an addict who, after time in rehab, is about to move back into society.  He gets a pass for a job interview and visits people and places from his former life, aware only of the gulf between where he was when he exited that life and the present.  Lie is one of those actors knows that the work is in preparing yourself to be inside the experience of the character and then to perform simple actions of living and let that work reveal itself.  You never watch the effort to communicate a thought or feeling, the wish to be something other than he is, you only see him where he is.  This film feels so private - a man trapped by his decisions, a man for whom disaster seems inevitable. What a beautiful film.

On self-limiting enzymes, playfullness in science, and mothers... (Books - The Statue Within by Francois Jacob)

Over the last ten days, I attended the annual conference of the International Society for Autism Research, in San Sebastian Spain, where I presented some of my research and heard about the work of many, many others.  It was impressive to see the huge amount and diversity of efforts focused on autism spectrum disorders.  On my travels there and to nearby Barcelona, I also managed to get a little reading done.

I had started The Statue Within, the memoir of French biologist Francois Jacob a while ago, but never really got going.  The conference put me in the mood to pick it up off the pile again and just as I began, I learned that Dr. Jacob had died at 92 years of age.  Dr. Jacob's contribution to our understanding of how living organisms work was to be the first to observe and describe how the level of an enzyme produced in a bacterium can be responsive to its environment, eventually earning him, Jacques Monod and and Andre Lwoff the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.  He saw that e. coli, for example, could digest the sugar lactose for energy instead of glucose, but it produced the necessary digestive enzyme (lactase) only when lactose was present.  How was this possible?  It was learned around the same time that the production of any protein (such as an enzyme) was the product of certain sequences in our DNA (we call those sequences genes).  These sequences became a template for RNA which, in turn, became a template for the production of a protein. The e. coli's genes were always equipped to produce lactase but, typically, a repressor (also a protein) was bound to the portion of our DNA responsible for producing lactase.  In the presence of lactose, the repressor binds lactose instead of those genes.  This accomplishes two things: 1) the lifting of the repression which means that the genes facilitate the production of lactase which digests the lactose and 2) it creates a self-limiting loop such that, when the lactose is gone, the repressor then binds the DNA once again and the production of lactase is turned-off.  This was important to biology not just in understanding how e. coli are responsive to their environment, but because this model extends to any gene in any organism. Dr. Jacob and Jacques Monod realized for us that genes interact with their environment.  Genes being present in an organism are not sufficient to accomplishing their action, they must be turned on" by some signal or, to use the term biologists use, they must be "expressed."  Although, as is always true with biology, it is now understood that this is a general principle and this simple mechanism is, in fact, be varied upon and complicated infinitely.

A little break...

Headed to points east for a conference and a couple of days of relaxation.  Be back soon.

Film - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

I was surprised by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Though predictably sentimental, the persistence of a young boy who is probably on the autism spectrum (Thomas Horn) in trying to make sense of what happened to his father on 9/11, made for a touching story with a sense of adventure and imaginative characters.  I would have liked more time spent developing the people he meets on his journey instead of collapsing them into montage, but there are two good scenes with Viola Davis one with Jeffrey Wright, and a lovely relationship developed with Max von Sydow, who never speaks a word.  Zoe Caldwell really disappears into her performance as the boy's grandmother, I must admit that I didn't even recognize her.  As Sheila pointed out to me, the fact that a 12-year-old carries this feature length film is pretty impressive.

The surreality of celebrity life (Books - The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro)

If you're looking for another Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, that is not what you're going to find in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).  Mr. Ryder, a world-famous pianist, arrives in a small, unnamed Western European city to give a concert, a concert he cannot remember planning.  In long, run-on paragraphs, the surreal action of Ishiguro's book describes the days leading up to this concert on which numerous events seem to be planned, events Mr. Ryder cannot remember scheduling, listed on an agenda he never received.  They not only involve the expectation that he will address local music groups, but that he will take opinions on long-standing arguments in town politics, advise family members on their relationships, listen to amateur musician's practice sessions, revive the reputation of the town drunk, a once great conductor, and perform surgery by the side of the road following an accident.

Theatre - The Big Knife - Roundabout Theatre

Clifford Odet's 1948 The Big Knife takes a big slice out of old Hollywood.  A movie star needs to decide if the studio will own him or if he will own himself.  The lyrical idealist who wrote Awake and Sing is now bitter with the money he has taken from the movies, takes out a big knife, and tries to cut out his own liver.  It's not a pretty play, but it's a good one.  This production, directed by Doug Hughes, has a number of actors who can combine the ability to be vulnerable to their dying careers and their dying souls while singing Odets's theatrical 1940s vernacular.

When autobiography fails to be personal (Theatre - Mayday Mayday - Theatre at St. Anne's Warehouse)

I know Tristan Sturrock's work as a talented member of Kneehigh Theatre, which did, among other works, a brilliantly inventive theatrical adaptation of Brief Encounter.  Mayday Mayday: A True Story by the Man Who Fell is Sturrock's one-man account of his recovery from an accident which broke his cervical spine.  It is presented by his own Theatre Damfino.  It sports a number of creative moments with its spare means, and I have no doubt that its creation was useful therapeutically, but that didn't make it involving theatre. Audiences often seem unwilling to say when autobiographic works about recovery haven't made for captivating works of art, perhaps they fear their reaction will be felt too personally.  In fact, Sturrock opens the performance by saying that this was, for a long time, a story he didn't want to tell.  I can't blame him but unfortunately, I could tell that from the performance. The work uses narrative storytelling to remain distant to the experience of it. While it showcases Sturrock's remarkable physical precision and appealing presence, it doesn't live.  It is emotionally unrevealing of his experience then or his present experience with us.  I'm pleased for his remarkable good luck but wasn't won over by Mayday Mayday as theatre.

Keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities (Books - Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks)

Now nearly 80, neurologist, writer, and keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities - Oliver Sacks - has written his 12th book.  This one is on activations of the perceptual systems that are produced by internal rather than external stimulation or Hallucinations (Knopf, 2012).  They run the gamut.  You can smell them, hear them, see them, and feel them.  They can have their origin in disease processes, chemicals, injury to the nervous system, or sensory deprivation.  They can take the form of geometric patterns, religious conviction, snatches of music, or little people (Lilliputian hallucinations).  I too have seen a patient with this last form of hallucination.  Her's were holding their heads in their hands (detached from their necks), but it didn't seem to cramp their style any.  I think that the term is probably my favorite in neurology.

I have always admired Sacks's writing about his patients because I feel that I am reading about people rather than cases.  I am a great admirer of Sacks's early books like An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, both are less continuous narratives than Hallucinations or Sacks's recent Musicophilia and The Mind's Eye.  Rather than thematic in nature, these earlier books are simply collections of essays on human beings whose strange neurologic cases make them fascinating, but who otherwise have little or no relation to each other.  I found some of the material included in Hallucinations had to stretch to be subsumed under the book's theme.  While I found most of the material interesting, an episodically constructed book might have been a more natural and satisfying form.

On more than one occasion in this book (and his last, The Mind's Eye) Sacks becomes his own subject. In this case, he writes frankly of his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, a piece that appeared in The New Yorker last year, and of a serious hiking accident during which Sacks says that a voice commanded him to keep going. 

I am always impressed by the historical sources Sacks cites.  They immediately make me want to visit the library.  Jackson's original papers on epilepsy and aphasias, are cited in Hallucinations.  Perhaps this is not as enticing to the average lay-reader, but for a neuroscientist, these are the golden oldies. Jacksonian seizures were named for John Hughlings Jackson.

Hallucinations makes colorfully clear that the mechanisms in the brain that eventuate patients' perceptions in the absence of external stimulation can be diverse.  The light patterns that are experienced in the aura prior to migraine might be thought of as electrical disturbances like a wave passing across the visual parts of the brain.  Whereas the hallucinations reported around near death experiences such as a floating above one's own body may occur due to stimulation of the right angular gyrus, one of several brain regions implicated in a circuit that according to Sacks mediates body image and vestibular sensations.  The vision of a dark tunnel with light at the end may be the result of decreased circulation to the retina, which narrows the visual fields.

The most remarkable of the cases Sacks writes of in Hallucinations was that of an 86-year-old English man who already had glaucoma and macular generation, but when a stroke compromises his right occipital lobe he loses vision completely in his left visual field.  What is most interesting is that he is not aware of his loss

...his brain appears to fill in the missing parts.  Interestingly, though, his visual hallucination/filling in always seem to be context-sensitive or consistent.  In other words, if he is walking in a rural setting, he can be aware of bushes and trees or distant building in his left visual field, which when he turns to engage his right side, he discovers are not really there.  The hallucination do, however, seem to be filled in seamlessly with his ordinary vision.  If he is at his kitchen bench, he "sees" the entire bench, even to the extent of perceiving a certain bowl or plate within the left side of his vision - but which on turning disappear, because they were never really there.  Yet he definitely sees a whole bench, with no clear separation between parts composed of hallucination and true perception.

The human brain is a remarkable country and it is always enjoyable to travel there with Oliver Sacks as your guide.

Film - The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

The 1970s was the heyday of a certain kind of American movie which stressed gritty, real performances, scene writing that jumped into the middle of things in-progress, captured accident and unease, told stories with human behavior as the medium, and sported the message - break out and be free.  It was a great time for American movie making that doesn't have a mainstream equivalent now. The King of Marvin Gardens: Bruce Dern as a bullshit artist who believes his own hype, an unusually quiet and vulnerable Jack Nicholson, and a brilliantly unhinged Ellen Burstyn (dir. Bob Rafelson).

Living with integrity (Books - Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach)

In the maelstrom of dissertation and article writing, I have been getting seriously behind here at bookeywookey.  You wouldn't know it, but I've finished reading four books: To the Castle and Back - Vaclav Havel's memoir, The Unconsoled - an early novel of Kazuo Ishiguro's, My Brother's Book by Maurice Sendak, and Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach.  I really had the best intentions to write about all of them.  And I'm nearly finished with Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations.  So I realize that I had better get cracking with some shorter write-ups if I am to write anything at all before I forget my impressions.

Doris Grumbach is a much respected American novelist, memoirist, and literary critic. She served as literary editor at The New Republic in the 1970s, but is little-heard-of these days.  If you check out her very interesting biography, at 94 years of age she still runs Wayward Books with her partner.  This was my second reading of her novel Chamber Music, originally published in 1979 (2008, Pushcart Press), and my respect for its convincing first-person voice, restrained passion, and plainspoken diction was only increased by a second look.

I write this, then, because I am freed by my survival into extreme old age, and because I write in the air of freer times.  Whether this air is entirely salutary, whether the old must of chests, of closets, bell jars, and horsehair sofas is not a better climate for the storage of the private life, I do not know.  But I tire very quickly these days and must speak openly, for once.  I am now free.  Extraordinary for me, and for one of my time, I intend to put down extraordinary truths.

I stress the believability of the narrative voice because, although Grumbach was like the narrator of Chamber Music - she wrote as a lesbian who was born into a more constrained era but lived into the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s (still ongoing).  Grumbach too married a man in her youth and was late to come into herself.  But Grumbach was only 60 when she wrote in the voice of the 90-year-old Caroline McClaren, wife of the famous American composer Robert McClaren.  Yet she creates a confessional tone and a context for writing which are so convincing that they will send you to your favorite search engine (I was going to say to the encyclopedia) to look up Robert McClaren's music and biographical details.   

This work offers the rare artistic accomplishment of wholeness.  Its pieces, its technique are integral, they never call attention to themselves - it achieves artistic integrity.  And via that form, Chamber Music conveys a subtle message of the human costs of living covertly because the societal majority has  conferred shame upon what you are.  And don't think that this is a purely contemporary concern.  It is, and in this novel it feels like it, a classic artistic subject - think of Jude the Obscure.  So the integrity of this novel's form reflects its content, which concerns living with integrity.  Lastly, is the pleasure of its tone - one of dignity and joy. This lesser-known novel and writer deserves a renaissance.  Consider reading Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach.  

Theatre - Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is certainly the most amiably nihilistic play ever written and is most appositely titled....With every exchange between the fencing lovers, the abyss glitters, and their mutual wit does not so much defend against other selves as it defends against meaninglessness. - Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Critics are fond of declaring the near impossibility of this play's swift switches from screwball comedy to tragedy, but I thought the current production at Theatre for a New Audience pulled them off admirably, largely because they didn't overplay what is supposed to be funny and the actor's were capable of being moved by the seriousness of their characters' predicaments. Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake (above) as Beatrice and Benedick were particularly strong.