Distinguishing between data & interpretation in popular science can help the public learn to think about the evidence (Books - The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin)

Nowadays, the outcome of every scientific study is expected to be instantly useable by the public.  News media demands ready-made dietary and medical advice, politicians and business people demand data to shore up the opinions they already hold, many funders want only outcomes that will translate to curing disease now.  As nice as it would be to cure on demand, that would be as likely as making a hits of every Broadway tryout.  Scientific "hits" are the product of fortuitous accident and incremental accumulation of knowledge, which usually includes more rejected possibilities than confirmed ones.

Pop-neuroscience satisfies this expectation with books falling somewhere between science and self-help.  Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind (Dutton, 2014) creatively hews to this formula. I thank Dutton, a Penguin imprint, for my copy.  Of course the popularity of science, is not all bad.  It is wonderful to have the ear of non-scientists and encouraging that interest requires that the public enter the discussion somewhere.  But books that realistically convey how experimental outcomes find their way into the fund of general knowledge are in short supply.  The wider the dissemination of half-baked knowledge, the more discerning the eager-to-consume non-scientist must become.  In this age in which everything from raw experimental data and top notch interpretation to crackpot appropriation of small study outcomes and outright lies are easily available on line, and look superficially the same, the scientist has a responsibility to help the public develop a critical eye.

Giving beauty and form to the inexplicable (Books - The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan)

Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) is a stunner of a novel.  The Man Booker committee seems to have thought so too, having awarded it this year's prize.  It concerns a man, a doctor, a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp, a father, a husband, an adulterer - all the same man - one Dorrigo Evans.  Although he is all of these things, Dorrigo Evans is irrevocably shaped by his time as a prisoner of war, suffering abuse and deprivation at the hands of his Japanese captors as he and his fellow prisoners were brutally driven to build the Thai-Burma Railway.  As an officer, he is expected to assume leadership of the prisoners. In this role and as a physician, he feels compelled to save as many men as he can from illness and violent punishment.  His humanity is tested as the circumstances offer only choices among cruelties, warping any possibility of compassion.

An addiction to betrayal (Books - A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre)

Two middle-aged spies are sitting in an apartment in the Christian Quarter, sipping tea and lying courteously to each other, as evening approaches.  They are English - so English that the habit of politeness that binds them together and keeps them apart never falters for a moment.  The sounds of the street waft up through the open window, car horns and horses' hooves mingling with the clink of china and the murmured voices.  A microphone, cunningly concealed beneath the sofa, picks up the conversation and passes it along a wire, through a small hole in the wainscoting, and into the next room, where a third man sits hunched over a turning tape recorder, straining to make out the words through Bakelite headphones.

The two men are old friends,  They have known each other for nearly thirty years.  But they are bitter foes now, combatants on opposing sides of a brutal conflict.

So begins Ben Macintyre's atmospheric, brisk paced A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and The Great Betrayal (Crown, 2014).  You can read this book as fascinating political history, or as a thriller that just happens to be true, but I read it as a book about character.  Kim Philby and his close friend Nicholas Elliott went to English public school together, Cambridge together, and went into intelligence in MI6 together following World War II.  Elliott became a company man who climbed the ranks of British intelligence, while Philby infiltrated himself deeper and deeper into the circles of power.  He stints included several years in Washington D.C. at the height of the Cold War.  At that time he managed to befriend CIA Counterintelligence head James Angleton, a man known for paranoiac secrecy.  All the while he communicated everything he knew about British and American plans to Russian intelligence.  Philby made a hash of key British and American maneuvers for decades.  He did it without a computer, zip line, disguise, or walkie-talkie watch, and for years few people thought to give him a second look. 

When even magic is not enough (Books - The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman)

If you liked Lev Grossman's first two books in the Magicians Trilogy- The Magicians  and The Magician King - you should love the conclusion: The Magician's Land ( Viking, 2014).  Grossman appropriates the YA fantasy form to create a series that is not about glib fixes to the experience of being an outsider. If first volume was about power and love, and the second about belonging and purpose, the third is about loss, what one accepts versus what one fights for, and the possibility or impossibility of rebirth.

A son and historian's attempt to understand the world of his father (Books - Year Zero by Ian Buruma)

Ian Buruma's Year Zero: A History of 1945 (The Penguin Press, 2013), as is clear from its title, is a history written from the perspective that the legacy of World War II was so uniquely pervasive that it reset the clock.  The immediate post-war political,cultural, and moral spheres may be said to have been newly created out of the devastation of  that experience.  If you lived on earth in the 1940s, you were on one side of the moral battle or the other, and you were unlikely by its end to have been untouched by death as a result of it, as I have written before here.  I was drawn to this book because, aside from what I know of the quality of Buruma's storytelling, this book was said to use the story of Buruma's father, a Dutchman imprisoned by the Nazis in Berlin, and his subsequent journey home through a ravaged Europe, as a touchstone, and I am drawn to the use of personal narrative as a device which can turn intellectual interest into experiential engagement.  Buruma does write about his father as an inciting reason for his seeking understanding about this period in history in the prologue, setting the stage for a literary driving force like that in Greek tragedy, as Buruma himself recognizes:

The story of postwar 1945 is in some ways a very old one.  The ancient Greeks knew well the destructive force of the human thirst for revenge, and their tragedians dramatized ways in which blood feuds might be overcome by the rule of law; trials instead of vendetta.  And history, in the East no less that the West, is littered with dreams of starting afresh, of treating the ruins of war as an open building site of societies based on new ideas, which were often not as new as people thought.

Two short comedies on knowing oneself and being known by others (Books - The Uncommon Reader & The Laying on of Hands by Alan Bennett)

When Virginia Woolf collected her essays on the uses of reading (the Elizabethans, Montaigne, Austen, etc) in a volume she called The Common Reader in 1925, she commenced

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.  "...I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours."  It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man's approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.  Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole - a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing...

Woolf's unassuming introduction to her essays is something of a pretense. Woolf as a woman of her time and of certain means, was meant to occupy herself with her appearance and her household.  She did not attend Cambridge like her brother, but her father's library permitted her to educate herself liberally, and her tongue is fully planted in her cheek in calling her opinions common while, at the same time publishing them. Remember that even in the hallucinations produced by Woolf's mental illness, the birds spoke in Greek.  Alan Bennett's novella The Uncommon Reader (Picador, 2007) continues the joke by imagining it's way into the experience of another reader possessed of no ordinary library, whose standing might be described as anything but humble, and whose life is among the least private of any person's on earth.  Yet for all that, she has acquired a habit, perhaps out of professional obligation, of not be too interested in any one thing more than another.

Bringing order out of chaos in Wisconsin by way of the Soviet gulag (Books - The Mathematician's Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer)

Stuart Rojstaczer is a funny guy.  A joke-telling, Jewish, geophysicist/applied mathematician from Milwaukee, Wisoconsin who has written a debut novel about a Jewish meteorologist of hurricanes from Madison, Wisconsin. Sasha Karnakovitch is mourning his mother, Rachela, a brilliant Russian-Polish mathematician who may have solved one of the great, problems in mathematics, the Navier-Stokes problem, whose solution is worth $1 million. Wait, I'm not done.  The very top mathematicians in the world descend upon the home in Madison to which Rachela emigrated after fleeing  the Soviets, for her shiva, not to mourn and remember her as is usual in the seven-day ritual, but to get into the house so that they may find out if she solved the problem and, if not, perhaps find enough in her notes, to solve it themselves. The Mathematician's Shiva (Penguin, 2014) takes on mathematical concepts, narratives in multiple time periods, death, Jewish culture, broken marriages, and the Soviet gulag and, despite being a first novel, manages levity, charm, and a humanly engaging story. I'm grateful to Penguin for my copy.

Longing for a world both near and far (Books - The Emigrants by W.S. Sebald)

The force of the praise for W.G. Sebald from  the likes of Susan Sontag, A.S. Byatt, Richard Eder, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Dirda in The New Yorker, The New York Times, TLS and elsewhere, make it pretty near impossible to come to his work unswayed.  I felt less like I dove into a new narrative world with anticipation in reading Sebald's The Emigrants (New Directions, 1997, Trans. Michael Hulse) and more like I had been invited to an exhibit of fine porcelain at a small museum.  I mustn't run, I mustn't touch, but I may walk through the hallowed rooms, look, and breathlessly admire. Whatever the use of literary criticism, or even book jacket blurbs, I don't imagine that that was the intention of these writers.  Whatever I came to like about The Emigrants on my own, was come to slowly, after I was able to drop the obligation I felt to search for evidence of his genius yet, it was worth the effort.

Hating often, easily, and beautifully (Books - Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill)

Jenny Offill has written an unusual novel in Dept. of  Speculation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and I thank John Self for making me aware of it.  Angular, full of sarcastic wit and bitter rage, its 177 pages are composed of short, Neruda like paragraphs that are enigmatic on their own, but that one tears through at break neck pace.  In fact, I challenge you not to read this compact, forceful book in one sitting.  It would be impossible.  You would lose the satisfaction of figuring out whether the accumulation of Offill's short lyrical bursts will give up the goods and yield a plot in the classic, recognizable sense of the word, or whether you will be left sifting through the bits to figure out what happened to her characters, named The Wife and husband.

My plan was to never get married.  I was going to be an art monster instead.  Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.  Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella.  Vera licked his stamps for him. 

Only through time time is conquered (Books - Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden)

Deirdre Madden, an Irish fiction writer, is one of my favorite authors writing today.  Her work is elegantly structured, economical, her characters drawn with precision and warmth, and her stories often capture an ordinary person confronting the unordinary.  She subtly explores the discomfort that results and creates for the reader the impression that these surprises are what makes a life worth living.  In no book does that seem truer than in her latest: Time Present and Time Past (Europa Editions, 2014). 

Today's brilliance is brought to you by the letter "S" - a meme

I couldn't resist playing along with a meme I saw at Danielle's and Stefanie's blogs.  Danielle gave me my algorithmically generated (and therefore not completely random) letter of the alphabet, and I am charged with telling you my favorite book, author, song, film, and object beginning with that letter, as well as telling you that I will happily generate a letter for you if you would like to play along.  Just leave a request in the comments.

Book

A favorite book beginning with 's' is Sonya Hartnett's Surrender.  She is a lyrical, imaginative, and thematically serious Australian author who, although she writes books for young people, assumes them to be mature and intelligent readers. Surrender is a suspenseful, veiled, poetic tale related by two first-person narrators - an angel and a demon.

Author
I think I'll go with May Sarton, poet, diarist, and novelist. This underappreciated American writer has long been a favorite of mine. I wrote about her 1955 Faithful are the Wounds for the 2007 Outmoded Author's Challenge.




Song
The second of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs - 'September.'  Sung here by Renee Fleming.

Film
Michel Gondry's fantasmagorical low-tech The Science of Sleep in which Gael Garcia Bernal is delightful.

Object
If you are an asparagus fan, as I am, you will certainly never want to be without your spargel schäler.  This highly specific kitchen utensil, mine was made in Germany, so I call it by its German name.  It is specifically designed to trim and peel asparagus.  If you manage not to overcook them, they come out perfectly every time.

Care to play along?  Leave me a comment and I'll give you a letter.

Grabbing the arts-science zeitgeist by the short and curlies (Books - Orfeo by Richard Powers)

In Richard Powers's most recent novel, Orfeo (Norton, 2014), a contemporary composer, Peter Els, performs experiments with the DNA of bacteria in a his lab at home - his hobby - using what he learns about the coding as the basis for his musical compositions.  The police come across his lab by accident and suspect him of bio-terrorism and Homeland Security turns an experimental composer whose career has been largely irrelevant to his field, into a world renowned fugitive from the law.

On reading Herzog with and without assumptions (Books - Herzog by Saul Bellow)

There are books one has read, or believes one has, but they are read too soon or too late and so carry no weight. No emotional frame in which to fit them exists...During a recent conversation about life after a long marriage, in what at a stretch may still be called middle age, a friend said of my unanchored state, “Yeah, Herzog.” I was sure I had read the novel, I had my Saul Bellow season long ago, but his comment lodged in my mind. A few days later, on a whim, I bought “Herzog”

So wrote Roger Cohen in a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Hezog at 50, on his reread of Saul Bellow's novel. Odd thing, my book club had just opted for Herzog (Avon Books, 1976), and I was in the middle of it.  Must be something in the New York water.  Cohen experienced the novel as apropos to his own life, full of resonance.  On the contrary, although I truly admired the writing, I experienced the story as dated, not in the sense of being irrelevant, but in being of another time.

A meta-thriller for our self-reflective age (Books - The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker)

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2014) is the American fiction debut of 28-year-old Swiss writer Joel Dicker.  Published by Penguin, who furnished my copy, it is a thriller, originally written in French.  After becoming the phenom of the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, it was translated into 68 different languages, ok maybe not 68, but probably everyone working for the U.N. could have read it, and after selling 2 million copies who knows, perhaps they have.

In The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair Marcus, a young author, is facing writer's block in trying to produce a second novel for a fast approaching deadline, after a wildly successful debut.  He goes to the small town of Somerset, New Hampshire to visit Harry Quebert, his college mentor, who is accused of the murder of a teenage girl after her body is discovered in his back yard, the original manuscript of Quebert's most successful novel buried with her. Marcus, determined to clear Quebert's name, sets about investigating the 33-year-old crime and generally making a pest of himself.  As he uncovers old secrets, he finds in them the subject for his second book.

Exposing the lie of consistency (Books - The View from the Tower by Charles Lambert)

A cursory look at Charles Lambert's Any Human Face or his new The View from the Tower and you might believe that he writes thrillers set in Rome which, rather than playing with the history and the grandeur of that stage set of a city, expose its seamier side. But the thriller, in Lambert's case, seems more a container for a story in which the main character's action becomes, through the arrival of a crisis, to uncover something that changes everything they thought that they knew.  Lambert's books are about how we face the unexpected.  Now, any good mystery does deal with the unexpected, but the difference here is that Lambert is not just willing to deal with the uncomfortable feelings this evokes in the protagonist, I would go so far as to say, that he courts and exposes those uncomfortable feelings, that they are the point of his novels and that the thriller is a form he appropriates, perhaps so that his novels about being uncomfortable might be widely read?  Perhaps simply because discomfort stems from the unknown.  Perhaps I should ask him!

Wet your whistle over a little science...

I'm a big fan of grass roots projects that advance the public understanding of science. Large scale and television infotainment are great for the numbers of people they reach, but there is nothing like one person meeting with another in a small relaxed setting for engaging and sometimes even changing minds.  A group of scientists began a venture in England called Pint of Science, where scientists meet a bunch of interested thirsty folks in a pub and give a talk aimed towards a general listener about their work - over a pint, of course.  That venture has crossed the pond.  Talks over libations will be held in pubs in 5 different cities across the U.S. - New York, Chicago, Tampa, Philadelphia, and San Diego. Topics range from environmental science genetics, and particle physics, to stem cells, antibiotics, and neuroscience.  Have them wet your whistle at Pint of Science U.S.

Fragmented genius became the conscience of 20th century physics (Books - Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk)

I have finally finished Ray Monk's behemoth of a biography Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (Doubleday, 2012).  It's strength is its comprehensiveness.  There doesn't seem to be a thought Oppenheimer had, or an event surrounding him, that Monk does not cover in depth.  The man and his times (1904 - 1967) are fascinating for the advances that occurred in the field of physics, Oppenheimer's leadership of the construction of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, his subsequent leadership of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and for the stripping of Oppenheimer's security clearance by Senator McCarthy's infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.  However, as I mentioned in my initial thoughts a few weeks back, I found Monk's biography lacking in coherence and narrative drive. It's ironic, given the book's subtitle, that it seemed to have no center.

Reading to live (Books - An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine)

If you love books, have perhaps wished to live in the world of the books you read, as I have, Aaliya Saleh, the 72-year-old protagonist of An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2013) will be utterly recognizable to you.  Rabih Alameddine's straightforward prose illuminates the paradox of an intelligent Lebanese woman who is acutely self aware but whose sarcasm cushions her from knowing herself deeply. 

First, you should know this about me: I have but one mirror in my home, a smudged one at that.  I'm a conscientious cleaner, you might even say compulsive - the sink is immaculately white, its bronze faucets sparkle - but I rarely remember to wipe the mirror clean.  I don't think we need to consult Freud or one of his many minions to know that there's an issue here. 

Aaliya celebrates language and narrative, she is deeply steeped in the Western canon of literature, quoting Spinoza and Heiddeger, Pessoa, Dostoyevski and Tolstoi, Sebald and Zizek, but she has replaced human intimacy with relationships to the characters and text in her beloved books.  She is relationally crippled.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word.  Literature is my sandbox.  In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.  It is the world outside the box that gives me trouble.  I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain.  Literature gives me life, and life kills me.

It is not accidental that the key metaphors here is childlike.  Aaliya, for all her literary sophisticatedness (she translates the books she loves most into Arabic) really hasn't grown up. Alameddine, a gay writer who has roots in the Middle East but was educated in the West and spends part of his time in San Francisco, renders the experience in narrative form of a modern Arab woman who is both literate and unmarried. I found this juxtaposition effective in another translation - making what I assumed was a foreign perspective to me immediate and recognizable.

His narrative functions on multiple levels.  One is an appreciation of writing from the pleasure of the printed symbol to his infusing his observations of person and place with literary references.  Beirut street cleaners are "the Sisyphuses of our age."  In describing the death of her ex-husband, who was impotent in life but priapic at his death, Aaliya quips

In death Eros triumphed, while in life Thanatos had. My husband was a Freudian dyslexic. 

There is not a little literary background it is helpful to have to keep up with Alameddine's humor.  Another level on which the narrative functions is the history of Aaliya's relationships from distant and disconnected to present and accepting of closeness.  Yet another is a story of the dependence of several different characters on fictions, whether this means works of literature, or made up versions of other people's experiences.  Alamedddine's novel is rich, variegated, human, and surprising, and full of reading recommendations.  If I made a list of every worked referenced by Aaliya that I haven't read, it could keep me busy for a couple of years. A delightful and full reading experience.

A delayed account of bookeywookey's New York cultural wanderings (Books - The View from the Tower, Robert Oppenheimer, Night in Shanghai) (Film - Les Petits Mouchoirs) (Art - Gaugin, Sonnabend, and Jasper Johns)

I have gotten hopelessly behind with a regular accounting of my reading this year, never mind the theatre, films, operas, and exhibits that make up my New York life.  Take this week.  I finished the new Charles Lambert thriller The View from the Tower which I heartily enjoyed (I'll link the post when I write it).  I dipped again into Ray Monk's Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, a biography of the influential physicist which I have had going since late last year.  While Monk makes the case for an interesting life full of internal conflict, his rendering is too comprehensive.  You lose the forest for the trees, the forest in this case, being the narrative throughline.  I'm disappointed by biographies that seem to be nothing more than repositories for the totality of an author's research plopped on the page in chronological order, rather than the crafting of a narrative which has an opinion about that life.  To be fair, Monk has a strong point of view about Oppenheimer's judaism which, he asserts was repressed and the source of tremendous interior conflict,however, that opinion fails to cull his narrative.

I started and gave up on Night in Shanghai (thank you Henry Holt for this copy) which was promising for its setting in 1930s Shanghai and the way the author Nicole Mones created atmosphere, but I couldn't for the life of me keep track of the characters.  The unfamiliar language impeded my remembering who was who and my lack of historical knowledge added to my difficulty remembering which side of the nationalist versus communist struggle they were on, so I couldn't follow what motivated the plot and, unfortunately, I lost the thread.  The sense of place was successfully pervasive and the writing entertaining, so don't let my faulty memory discourage you.

I went to the Antiquarian Book Fair yesterday, which, given the average price of the items displayed there was more of an antique book museum for me.  I came across a novel by Tennessee Williams I had never heard of called Moise and the World of Reason and would have bought the beautiful first edition if I had had $295 to spare.

I then wandered down to MOMA where I saw a very interesting exhibit of Gauguin's prints, how they interacted with his painting, a show whose theme was the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend and the works she brought to public attention at her Paris and New York galleries.  I have to say I found this more interesting for its history than likeable for the work in it.  I also saw a small exhibit of Jasper John's latest works: Regrets, based on a photograph of Lucien Freud.  Small, tightly curated shows are always my preference.  I didn't merely enjoy the work for itself, I appreciated how the prints and paintings on grew from the original photograph, which is also on display. This is a show that's about creative process more than anything, and how the act of an artist doing something as a result of their experience of some source, becomes the seed of new work. Wonderful show.

Finally, I made my chilly, rainy way home, poured a glass of red wine, got under a blanket and watched Guillaume Canet's 2010 Les Petits Mouchoirs; the English title is Little Whie Lies. This is a French Big Chill, complete with a tight ensemble cast of solid actors, great music choices, and a somewhat sentimental story of a group of middle aged friends minus one.  The love and pathos of old friendships is beautifully captured by the cast in that undemonstrative way that French films are so good at, where people seem like people because they are free to feel but not getting off on showing you that they can.  Be prepared to use at least one mouchoir if you're at all moved during films.

The startlingly original voice of James Purdy (Books - Eustace Chisholm and the Works; Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue by James Purdy)

James Purdy's voice is dirt plain and when he is telling a gritty story of desperation in depression era Southside Chicago, as he did in Eustace Chisholm and the Works (GMP Publishers Ltd., 1967/1987) his diction is almost like the furniture.  It it is part of the world.  You expect it to be there.

"What do I do, Ace?" Daniel covered his eyes with his palms.

"Tell him you're crazy about him."

"I can't do that."

"Let him tell you then."

"If I had the money, I'd take him with me to some far-off place."

Eustace Chisholm stared at Daniel, incredulous at having heard the last sentence, then, in exasperation, said: "You're in the farthest away place in the world now, mate.  You couldn't get any farther away than where you're living with Amos.  You're in the asshole of the universe and you don't need to waste more than a half cent of shoeleather to get back.  Go home and take him in your arms and tell him he's all you've got.  That's what you are to him too, and you'd better hurry, for it won't last for long for either of you, and so why spend any more of your time, his, or mine."

That story is one in which the main character, a gay poet, is dealt with cruelly by life.  It gives Eustace a cruel eye, from which he writes, and a hard disposition.  But in Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (William Morrow & Co, 1997), the protagonist is an older woman, diminutive, frightened, and the plot more fantastical. One feels constantly - this is a work of art - but still it is about the cruellest of subjects, the grief of a parent (Carrie) for a deceased child (Gertrude).