Unwriting (Books - Possession by A. S. Byatt)

I have finished my re-read of Possession by A. S. Byatt. It has been so long since the first time I read it that I was almost reading for plot all over again, but I think I was able to read for structure and the pleasures of her writing with more skill this time through. To add one observation to my previous posts, I admired not only what Byatt created by writing in multiple voices and multiple forms, but also what she created via omission. Evidence for a relationship between poets Randolph Ash and Cristabel LaMotte accumulated throughout the book through letters, diaries, and poems of its Victorian era characters, and that could have amounted to nothing but a writing exercise, but Byatt's creation of Ellen, Randolph Ash's wife, grounded the story in the details and the emotions of everyday life. Ellen adds a sadness and a beauty to the book and toward its end, Byatt creates a scene in which Ellen writes a letter in her head which she never sends. Of course Byatt writes that scene so that we read it, thus writing the unwritten thoughts and feelings of this character. By extension, her unwritten words go unread, but meanwhile the involved reader creates 'what ifs' that enrich the novel through possibility. We live not only in the actuality of the ways things turn out but also momentarily in the possible alternatives. We can wish for them or dread them just as Ellen did, but finally we have to come down to earth, and live out only one of them. I really loved this un-writing, if you will, which felt not like a technique Byatt applied, it rather flowed naturally from the details that I had come to know as Ellen's character, and it leant this scene a most life-like sad sweetness.

For my other thoughts about Possession take a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Next up: Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch.

Duality: Science & art, mechanics & intuition, men & women (Books - Possession by A. S. Byatt)

Greetings of the season to all! I hope it is merry or happy or humbuggy, and whether you do trees, eight candles, or simply think its peculiar that everyone can talk about nothing but holidays this time of year, whether you're seeing lots of family or having some quiet, whether you're around snow or beaches, I hope you've had it just the way you like it. We haven't opened our presents at The Ragazzo's parents yet, but so far The Raggazzo hit a home run by giving me Bookeywookey business cards!

I'm Back on the Possession bandwagon, I'm glad to say, even if the cause was the fact that the guests in the hotel room next to our's had the television blaring at 3:00 am. I only have about 50 pages to go and I am taken by the multiple levels of satisfaction to be had - the intellectual mystery, the two romances - one in the past the other in the present - the literary ventriloquism (Byatt writes as the two Victorian writers Randolph Ash and Cristabel LaMotte in both poetry and epistolary prose, a young aspiring Breton author, Ash's wife Ellen, LaMotte's friend and housemate Blanche, and several of contemporary scholars who study each of these people.) One of the novels greatest pleasures is the variations on the theme that Byatt has composed on the inequities faced by women - in romance (past and present), in arts, and in scholarship. Late in the novel, poet Christabel LaMotte takes refuge with her cousin's family in Brittany. Her young cousin is an aspiring writer and in LaMotte finally finds both a role model and an honest reader. The excerpts from her journal to which the reader is privy seamlessly integrate the genesis of the young writer's art and the uncovering of the mystery that sits at the plot's center. The scene in Brittany is set during the Black Months, a time for traditional storytelling around the fire. Byatt puts fine versions of folk tales into the mouths of her characters that form an interesting meeting of the oral and the written traditions:

I can't write down Gode's way of telling things. My father has from time to time encouraged her to tell him tales which he has tried to take down verbatim, keeping the rhythms of her speech, adding nothing and taking nothing away. But the life goes out of her words on the page, no matter how faithful he is. He said once to me, after such an experiment, that he saw now why the ancient Druids believed that the spoken words was the breath of life and that writing was a form of death.

I thought those interesting, perhaps even risky, words to put into a book about writers and writing. As though Byatt were purposely calling our attention to the potential of the writer's words to fail to convince, even as she hopes to convince us of the verrisimilitude of her multiple universes. Or perhaps she is reminding us that what we are reading is, too, a tale and that written words cannot possibly do justice to the actual events.

Byatt takes on her theme of women and where they possess and are denied power as well as another theme - the scientific and rational world versus the world of art, impression, and affect (these are both interestingly embodied in Ash who is both a scientist and a poet) - in verse as well as prose. Here's an excerpt I particularly liked:

Know you not that we Women have no Power
In the cold world of objects Reason rules,
Where all is measured and mechanical?
There we are chattels, baubles, property,
Flowers pent in vases with our roots sliced off,
To shine a day and perish. But you see,
Here in this secret room, all curtained round
With Vaguest softness, all dimly lit
With flickerings and twinklings, where all shapes
Are indistinct, all sounds ambiguous,
Here we have Power, here the Irrational,
The Intuition of the Unseen Powers
Speaks to our women's nerves, galvanic threads
Which gather up, interpret and transmit
The unseen Powers and their hidden Will.
This is our negative world, where the Unseen,
Unheard, Impalpable, and Unconfined
Speak to and through us - it is we who hear,
Our natures that receive their thrilling force.
Come into this reversed world, Geraldine,
Where power flows upwards, as in the glass ball,
Where left is right, and clocks go widdershins,
And women sit enthroned and wear the robes,
The wreaths of scented roses and the crowns,
The jewels in our hair, the sardonyx,
The moonstones and the rubies and the pearls,
The royal stones, where we are priestesses
And powerful Queens, and all swims with our Will.

Narratives nested within narratives (Books - The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant)

When are we 'looking out for number one' (as the saying goes) and when are we simply being selfish? This is the tenuous border explored in Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs. Vivien Kovacs is the daughter of Jewish parents who fled Budapest for London just prior World War II. Her parents' experiences have made them guarded people, nervous of authority, happier to not be noticed, and over-protective of their only child. Her father harbors a deep hatred of his only and much wealthier brother, Sandor, because Sandor earned his money in morally questionable ways. What I enjoyed most about this book is how complex the characters were and yet how unsensational and straightforward the story telling. Similarly to Paper Towns, which I posted on yesterday evening, Sandor exists as a character in other peoples' narratives. He exists is something that happens to them. Life conspires to deal Vivien a tragic blow, and in its aftermath,she feels she must understand who she is. She knows nothing of her parent's past, as they have always been tight-lipped about anything that happened prior to their arrival in London. Her uncle has always figured as a monster, a character so evil that no one talks about him. He becomes a missing piece in her understanding of herself, and she sets out to learn his story.

Grant has two narratives nested one inside the other, Uncle Sandor's and that of Vivien herself, and by extension, her parents. These multifaceted characters embody the ways that contradictions can live side by side in a single individual. Character and theme are inseparably intertwined in this story. Along with Grant's exploration of morality, is a second question of surface appearances. The great love of Sandor's life is Eunice - memorably drawn by Grant. Eunice is of West Indian heritage, has dark skin, and is the owner of a dress shop. Sandor himself is portrayed by Grant as a physically ugly man. Sandor, Vivien's parents and Eunice, all embody various legacies of the excuses people give to hate each other - some are hated for what they are thought to have done, some for who they are inside, and others simply for what they look like on the surface. The book's later chapters occur in 1977 during the rise of the skin heads in England, when the book's central characters once again face the terror of overt persecution. While the narrative and its details accumulate apace, Grants's writing is unhysterical. I felt she really earned her climactic scene - set in the midst of both the political tension and the personal tensions that she has patiently set up. It has some real white-knuckled moments of suspense in it. This is humane and well-fashioned story telling - a most worthwhile read. Here is my other post about The Clothes on Their Backs.

Stop the presses! An additional best YA read of 2008 (Books - Paper Towns by John Green)

I was only joking about needing to overturn my best reads of 2008, good thing I didn't promise to eat my hat. I won't overturn my YA selection, but I will add another title to it. Several months ago, our dear, late fellow book blogger, Dewey, posted about Paper Towns by John Green. I put it on my library reserve requests and promptly forgot about it. With finals done, I picked it up yesterday and read it in a couple of sittings today while getting ready to leave for Ohio. It is written with a nerdy teenage audience in mind, but it works just fine for recovering or lapsed members of the community. What a terrific, deep, smart, laugh-out-loud book. It's a joy.

John Green's voice for Quentin, his narrator, is part worry-wart, part grammarian, part romantic, self-centered teenager. On the one hand the language is familiar and accessible:

I was so pathetically easy to forget about Chuck, to talk about prom even though I didn't give a shit about prom. Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

reflective:

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks above various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clock. I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

funny:

both my parent are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted.

dead-on about adolescent nerds:

Ben's voice rose with excitement. "You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.?" I nodded. "Alone?" I nodded. "Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thirty pages minimum!"

"I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing, " Radar said.

"A sculpture would also be acceptable," Ben added.

Radar half raised his hand. I dutifully called on him. "Yes, I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? You six words are : pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy."

"Personally," Ben said, "I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh."

and beautiful:

Margo, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned above the handlebars, her purple sneakers a circuitous blur. It was a steam-hot day in March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might storm later.

Margo is really what the story revolves around. She is that magic someone who exists as a character for everyone around her, even though she is a living, breathing person. In this coming of age story, a young person must learn that other people exist as something other than as a character in his own story. Green creates real contemporary teenage characters, but he gets well beyond ABC Family cardboard cutouts and make real people of the expected types - arty iconoclast, bully, nerd, spoiled princess - his psychological insights are deep but not embarrassing. He puts real words in his characters' mouths - they swear and have real recognizable teenage urges, but not in a gratuitous way. The final 90 pages are a tension-filled road trip that also had me laughing so hard that I was glad I was reading the book at home. Green created a literal mystery plot that houses a more metaphysical mystery, the mystery of our identity. I really love how he made use of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as both a clue to solving the mystery and a meditation on the notion of becoming someone else. Finally I so enjoyed the numerous ways Green makes use of the notion of a paper town, I won't ruin it for you by writing about it. Read this book. It is a delight.

Best fiction reads of 2008

I have come to the hardest category in my personal best reads of 2008 - full-length fiction. I have read nearly 50 novels, not counting my other fiction categories. Considering that I am in a PhD program in a non-book-related field, I'll call that pretty decent. I guess it's one of the advantages of not having television. I'll only list the contenders. For a complete list of my 2008 reads, see my side bar:

The Go-Between - Hartley
Electricity - Robinson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Jackson
Fools of Fortune - Trevor
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone - Stanisic
Netherland - O'Neill
The Changeling - Jenkins
White Noise - DeLillo
Breath - Winton
Eclipse - Banville
Cal - MacLaverty
Old School - Wolff

That's a fair proportion of books I thought were really strong in one way or another. As I mentioned, I will divide the full-length fiction category into two smaller ones. Books from the past year (or two) and fiction older than that.

As for fiction not written in the past year, I would have a hard time chosing between Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Cal falls into the category of a great novel. It is a deep love story, set amidst passionate political blood letting in Ireland. Beautiful and important writing. DeLillo's White Noise is a different kind of animal - of a more show-offy brilliance, heavy on irony.Amazing for its prescience and its thoughts on a culture oversaturated by information that, no matter how plentiful, still does not fill the ultimate void of death. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a perfect little book. A contemporary fairy tale, a macabre tale of horror, a parable about intolerance, judging others. All three of these books share a theme of the lengths people will go to in the name of love, particularly when they are afraid. As I started out saying, I would have a hard time choosing. The nice thing is I don't have to. No envelope, no televised ceremony, no check here. I laud them all, and I'll even throw in a special mention for the elegant and lean loveliness of Fools of Fortune.

In the new fiction category, although Netherland and Breath were both terrific, my favorite was How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic. It is prolifically imaginative meta-fiction that skirts being merely gimmicky. The subject matter is serious but its is warmly tender and richly fantasmagorical. A wonderful novel. I'm looking forward to his next.

Of course, this could all be overturned by some great read I have in the next week. I just finished The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant. I plan to post on it later today While it was very good, so far I'm not expecting any upsets.

Best short fiction reads of 2008

Today, I look back at the shorter fiction I read in 2008. I am going to include what I consider novellas as well as short story collections.

So Long, See You Tomorrow - Maxwell
Chess Story - Zweig
Unaccustomed Earth - Lahiri
Lost Paradise - Noteboom
The Dead Fish Museum - D'Ambrosio

I almost though I was going to include and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, A Private Affair, and Cal too, but when I looked back, they were all nearly 200 pages or more. That would have even made the choice more difficult. How to chose between Stefan Zweig's humane and psychologically acute 90-page tale of suspense and William Maxwell's crispt, elegant American tragedy? This one is tough, but I think I am going to go with Zweig. It is an entwined accomplishment of the heart and the head and I am probably biased by elements of my own family's history. I also want to make a special mention of Charles D'Ambrosio's collection of lean, poetic, and idiosyncratic stories. Really marvelous.

Best young-adult fiction & fantasy/sci-fi reads of 2008

To continue my personal best reads of 2008, I'll move on to the young-adult and sci-fi/fantasy categories. I do enjoy the occasional book written (or marketed) with mostly the younger reader in mind. Although I'm not as avid a fan as some grown-up readers I know. Or perhaps this year I simply wasn't as nostalgic, as I didn't read very many. The Book Thief is the only title that doesn't also double in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category:

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Tanglewreck - Jeanette Winterson
The Book Thief - Mark Zusak
Lirael & Abhorsen both from the Abhorsen Trilogy - Garth Nix

And my favorite in the YA category is The Book Thief a compulsively readable and imaginative book about the humanizing power of narrative set in a little town on the road to the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.



I read some additional sci-fi/fantasy reads not specifically for younger readers:
Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass for His Pillow, and Brilliance of the Moon which together comprise the Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn, which had been a trilogy but has lately become a quartet. I haven't gotten to the fourth book yet.
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick

In the sci-fi/fantasy category I call my favorite the entire Tales of the Otori trilogy. The books were satisfying on numerous levels - romance, adventure, history, fantasy, and battle. The first book dealt with the theme of the outsider, one that always appeals to me. The final one asked many questions about personal and collective responsibility - especially as it relates to violence - whether isolated or as acts of war.

Coming up short fiction, and best fiction which I am thinking about splitting into at least two categories - books published in the last year or so and fiction written before that.

Best non-fiction reads of 2008

Finals over. Just the papers now, and only one of them is due before break, Monday in fact. The other I'll deal with after the new year. So now, onto the lists.

It's time for the best reads of 2008. I think I'll drag this out over multiple posts and start with non-fiction. This is a no-brainer, having read so little non-fiction that wasn't for school this year. Hands down, my best 2008 non-fiction read of the year is Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a recommendation of ever reliable Sheila. The link will send you to my multi-part reflection on this melange of history, psychology, politics and travel writing. It was, sadly, the only book of 8 that I completed for the Russian Reading Challenge, pathetic slob that I am. Maybe I can remedy that before the end of 2008?... er, um... probably not. Another by Kapuschinski, probably The Soccer War, will be on the docket for 2009.

Book me

Do you give books as gifts?

To everyone or only to select people?

How do you feel about receiving books as gifts?

Yes, but not exclusively. Yes, but not always. I love it, unless I don't like the book.

There are two kinds of gift giving. With one kind you give someone what you know they want because you ask them - 'is there anything special you want for your birthday... chanukah... christmas...whatever?' That's sort of parental gift giving (in-laws included, or in my case in-not-laws) . It's safe. It either comes from fear of disappointing someone, or a life-long habit of giving your children what they want. So on the one hand, it's really generous. The receiver gets exactly what they want, but they don't get a surprise, nor do they get one of the important by-products of the other kind of gift. I'll explain in a minute. Giving what you know the recipient wants is safe and generous, but it's unimaginative. Going to someone's Amazon gift list is a second cousin of this approach, there's an added surprise of which of the many things you want you will receive. Gift cards is another relative of this approach - the recipient can get themselves whatever they want whenever they want it, and these days, the buyer doesn't even have to get their lazy ass to the actual store. I saw cards for Barnes and Noble, Loews, Macy's, Starbucks, and who knows what else, all spinning on a rack at Staples, which is a mere block from my house. Granted, it's awfully convenient to shop this way, given how busy life can get.

The second kind of gift means the giver has to imagine what the recipient might like. Now this is Rorschach-like test of the giver, the giver puts themselves into the gift (there's that important by-product I was talking of earlier) because at the end of the day they only have their own taste, their own intellect, or the courage of their convictions, that this gift will be meaningful, useful, or appreciated. You are also giving the gift of reflection. You are telling the receiver what you think of them with your choice. That is an act of boldness, a risk taken for the person, which is itself a gift. (That, or you are one of those gift-givers who gives something you think will be good for the recipient. Yuck, is all I have to say to that! That's like inviting someone to dinner and feeding them a vitamin.) Another relative of this kind of gift is making someone something. With any type 2 gift, you have thoughtfulness and the element of surprise, but the recipient could already have one or, worse yet, have never wanted that hideous duck-shaped lint brush to begin with.

I do frequently give books as gifts because, let's face it, I like books. The receiver knows they are getting something that I, think is valuable and desirable. And when I do, I give a book I think the recipient would enjoy or find meaningful. If a child doesn't like to read, I might still consider giving what I think is a really great book in the hopes that they will. But I won't give a adult who I know to be a non-reader a book. That's just obnoxious. When I meet and get to know a person, one of the ways I characterize them is by what they read (if they are an avid reader). I know I am someone's friend when I know what they have read. And then I sift through my great reading experiences and think - of those, what would this person like? I am really asking how can I take a great experience that I had alone and share it with someone. And I cannot think of a better gift than that. Or sometimes I haven't read the book and I am asking them to have the experience for me by proxy. If someone reads I won't buy a book every time. Sometimes some music, a tin of tea, or those funky martini chillers just seem the right thing. But usually I will buy a book. For one thing, I can go to a bookstore, preferably a real, old-fashioned one with a door on the front and books on shelves. Although on-line ones with free shipping really rock with my graduate student's schedule. It also means I can avoid the hated task of waiting on line at the post office.

As for receiving books as gifts, I love them, except when I don't. That's the risk the giver takes. But I appreciate them no matter what. The real fun is getting a book I don't already have, that I never asked for (or even better, that I have never heard of) and loving it! I read On Beauty after receiving it as a gift from a friend. I got A Night at the Opera - which is a guide to opera plots, singers, and such, but written as a spoof. It's a hoot, and not only did I not know it. I would never have thought to buy it for myself. I have also received the book-equivalent of the duck-shaped lint brush. But not every gift has to be wildly imaginative. I love getting a gift card for a book store. I'm thrilled when someone takes a title off my wish list. Really. It's a gift. Bring it on - I love getting stuff. My birthday was just last week and I don't mind late gifts, but we already have a duck shaped lint brush, thanks.

Picking out the detail that sings (Books - The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant)

I had begun Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances this weekend, but am finding that it's not doing it for me. I'm chalking that up to finals-time finickiness. When I have this much to do and this little time for reading, I want a very particular kind of reading experience. I want a story, told unselfconsciously about people who I care for; it can have plenty of depth, but I don't want tricky, I don't want peculiar, and I don't want complex. So far, Atmospheric Disturbances has struck me as highly intelligent but quirky, and its tone has kept me from engaging with the characters. And if I read one more book about someone with Capgras syndrome, I'm going to scream. I'll give the book one more try after finals.

That being the case, I picked up The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, which Man Booker shortlisted this past year. It had just arrived in a box with gifts for other people (but I felt no need to pay for shipping and so topped off my order with a book for myself. Oh alright, two books). So as I was saying, I started The Clothes on Their Backs with my eyes bleary from a full day of studying and writing a last-minute abstract to submit to a conference, and I don't know whether I'm happy or sad to have begun it. It is so good I wound up not just reading for ten minutes and drifting off, but being reawakened by the clarity of the characters Grant has created and captivated by the easy flow of her unfussy prose.

This morning, for the first time in many years, I passed the shop on Seymour Street. I saw the melancholy sign in the window which announced that it was closing down and through the glass the rails on which the clothes hung, half abandoned, as if the dresses and coats, blouses and sweaters had fled in the night, vanished down the street, flapping their empty arms.

The tone is set in two simple sentences. The story will look back and there will be much sadness in it. Such a clear image, those clothes have created for me, and I haven't yet met a single character. Grant does this with each person and place that we meet - she walks around in its details, picking out a few choice bits that end up singing out - like the really great voice in a big chorus.

Our flat was rented, for a pittance. The bowler-hatted ladies of the Women's Royal Voluntary Service found it for my parents when they arrived in England in 1938 as young refugees from Budapest. There is a photograph of them turning the key in the front door, their smiles like wooden postboxes. Safely on the other side, they bolted it, and tried to come out as little as possible. They had brought with them a single piece of furninshing: an ivory Chinaman with an ebony fishing rod which was a wedding present from my mother's aunt. For the Coronation of the Queen they bought a television which they coddled with their constant anxious attention, worryin that if they left it off too long it would refuse to turn back on, for sets in those days needed 'warming up,' and supposed it got too cold? Would it die altogether, out of spite for their neglect?

It was at 'smiles like wooden postboxes,' that I myself smiled, though not particularly like a postbox, and settled in for a good read. More to come.

On tulip mania, big egos, and an opportunity for building a more balanced sense of well being

The financial crisis is evidently taking its toll in a place one might not have thought to look - the egos of men who work in finance - or so says an article in today's Science Times by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman. And yes, it appears to be disproportionately the men rather than the women who are reacting with anxiety and loss of self-esteem, at least in Dr. Friedman's practice. As I read I thought, this is one of those times when a loss of self-esteem might not be inappropriate. I am one of those people who feel there should be some connection between the quality of one's behavior and the level of esteem at which one holds oneself. Dr. Friedman's article is thoughtful about this delicate balance. The most puzzling thing about the article for me was they way the word 'mastery' (as in attaining a high level in a skill or art) and master of the universe as in, well, some kind of god, were used almost interchangeably. If one attains a level of expertise in something, to feel one has lost it is painful. However, to allow the acquisition of a reasonable combination of skill and luck in anything - finance, golf, writing papers - to fill you with the sense that you run the universe would seem to be a failure to form a picture of the world based in reality. A crisis of confidence feels lousy, but if through it you build a more real perception of the world and yourself in it, that would strike me as a real opportunity for two people engaged in a mental health interaction - one who is serving the function of improving the mental health of others when possible, and the other engaged in an interaction that will hopefully lead to greater self knowledge and a more balanced sense of well being.

Dr. Friedman also brings up the neurotransmitter dopamine, and its key role in the reward circuitry of the human brain. He theorizes

for many of them, the previously expanding market gave them a sense of power along with something as strong as a drug: thrill.

He made me think anew about this crisis. One theories of drug addiction these days is that there may be a subset of people who live in a perpetual state of "unrewardedness" because they lack one of the receptor subtypes for dopamine (D2). They may end up becomming addicts to self-correct this natural void within. How many of those who worked in investment firms did so not because they enjoy a thrill but because they need one? When I read about past economic booms and their subsequent busts - e.g. tulip mania - a period in seventeenth century Holland during which the price of tulip bulbs soared to exceed the annual salaries of the average skilled worker by many times - the people involved appeared to participate in a kind of mass madness. When we have enough distance from the delusion that perpetuated our recent greed and the crisis of confidence that popped the bubble, perhaps it will strike us that this period was no different. Building reality checks both for individuals who need a thrill and for institutions who need profit might be desirable if they cannot help pursuing them. It further might be useful for us all, if their pursuit perpetuates a delusional sense of power, since we all seem to end up sharing in the delusion... or so Dr. Friedman's article made me reflect.

On continual intoxication (Books and other stuff - The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Slings & Arrows, and a little Baudelaire)

Barry McCrea's The First Verse delivers a suspense-filled punch. I read the final 200 pages in a single sitting. For my earlier posts on necessary plot details, go here and here. McCrea really drummed up not just a feeling of sympathy with Niall, his central character, but one of identification. I really cared about our young hero, despite the lies he tells and the people he hurts as he is drawn into a web of synchronicities. The strange world of texts into which he is subsumed starts as a search for identity as experienced by a young gay man after he first leaves home. But I didn't read this as a 'gay' novel per se. I saw it more as anyone's search for a whole to be a part of, as told from an experience of otherness. That sense of exile is by no means the soul purview of someone who is gay. Most people feel unmoured and alone at some point in their lives. Sometimes its in matters of identity - sexual or otherwise - but many people struggle to find a meaninful synthesis of the parts of themselves and it is on that point that I expect most readers will be able to identify with Niall.

This book reminded me a bit of another book I enjoyed this year - Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont. In that novel, a man enters an altered state in which the number thirteen plays a prominent role. It has a really fun plot and functions as a parable about the role of engagement with others and control in a mentally healthy life. In The First Verse, similarly, a man is led into a maze of coincidences but this time through text rather than numbers. He lives then too in an altered but parallel universe:

As I looked at the fragile pair, Ciara and Patrick, a whole human life seemed to be passing me by Time still turned away on a reliably rotating axes, but I had jumped off, and I stood watching it revolve from a distance, distant and unreal and above all silent, just as when we were children, Ciara, Patrick and I used to see the big wheel at the centre of Funderland amusement park in Ballsbridge. Their timed world drifted across to me like faraway fairground music, indeed, heavy with nostalgia, but, compared to the life I now had, repulsive and banal.

It is as though, through playing with these texts, that Niall is able to unravel the narrative thread that is his life. Where once he had a sweater that held its shape and that could be useful to warm him, he now simply has a tangle of yarn. There is also a theme of mental wholeness here, but it is more subtly interwoven with the story than in Thirteen.

The First Verse made an interesting companion piece to Slings and Arrows the Canadian television series about theatre folk that The Ragazzo and I watched for the first time last night. We don't have television, so we only see programs that make it to DVD and come to the NY Public Library. I've been told by several friends how wonderful this program is and how much I will like it because it's about the theater, but my usual reaction to something like this (or Waiting for Guffman) is 'that's not funny; that's my life!' Through the first episode of Slings and Arrows I was constantly cringing with recognition. But the writing is so good and the conceit so clever that I found myself won over. The parallel between the novel and the program is about how we use narrative to give form and credence to our lives. In Slings and Arrows, there's a marvelous flashback scene to communicate backstory, in which three young artists - the actor playing Hamlet, his girlfriend and the actress playing Ophelia, and the director of a production so intense and marvelous that early during the run, the actor playing Hamlet goes completely crazy and never acts again. The scene is late that night, following the first night party. The three go drunkenly carousing through the streets of their small city feeling the spell of electrical power that can be cast by living the fullest moments of one's life through creating huge feeling and thought (one's own feeling and thought) but in the context of crafted text, music and effects specifically designed to drive an audience to catharsis and to do that in public. It is a weird and wonderful thing (let me tell you) sexy and alluring, on the one hand, but ultimately it can be destructive. It can be hard to feel that the rest of life lives up to those moments. The scene in the first episode captures that but exactly. But even though the actors feel seized by that power, and Niall feels seized by the power of the texts he plays with, the whole spell begins with an act of will. It's paradoxical, we cannot demand that the experience come, but we conspire (and can practice so as to do so skillfully) with the ingredients that finally produce it. Some people gain this skill and feel it is the only way to live - nothing else is worthwhile. The French poet Charles Baudelaire was certainly of that opinion:

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

But just as we can gain the power to create this atomic explosion of intensity, we can lose it. It is an unstable foundation on which to hang all one's existence - exciting, momentarily satisfying - but unsustainable. The First Verse and Slings and Arrows share this theme and involve the audience in a taste of that intoxication. Slings and Arrows does so with much more irony, I'm looking forward to continuing to watch it. The First Verse is more naive and more intimate - Niall is so young, which on the one hand makes him an unfortunate victim, but on the other gives the reader hope that he can escape and reconnect with the world around him. I won't tell you whether he does, but I found the journey McCrea sent him on both involving and rewarding.

20 Favorite Actresses Redux

In the great footsteps of fearless friend Sheila, I will amend my 20 favorite actresses (of this time) meme, to include my favorite performances of their's (of this time).

Lois Smith - That's a hard one. I really loved her in The Trip to Bountiful live on stage, I also have a fond memory of the first stage role I ever saw her in - a one act comedy called Bite the Hand by Ara Watson in which she played a World War II era whore with a heart.
Judy Garland - Judgment at Nuremberg
Vivien Leigh - hands down A Ship of Fools
Diane Wiest - that's a toughie, I loved her in Hannah and her Sisters but there is a special place in my heart for her stage performance in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska, she was other-worldly
Julie Walters - gorgeous in The Wedding Gift, a sleeper also w/ Jim Broadbent - great flick!
Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake
Jennifer Jason Leigh - Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
Vanessa Redgrave - Howard's End, she seems to float on air
Isabelle Huppert - Medea live on stage, which I saw televised in France
Kim Stanley - as Masha in the flawed but gorgeous Three Sisters directed by Lee Strasberg
Ellen Burstyn - Resurrection
Ingrid Bergman - Notorious
Emma Thompson - Carrington (that was hard, The Winter Guest is great too, and she is hilariously over the top in Peter's Friends)
Maggie Smith - The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn (and I'll take her in A Room with a View any day)
Betty Buckley (as I said in the first post - her 5 minute cameo in Another Woman)
Jeanne Morreau - Jules et Jim - it's essential
Geraldine Page - The Trip to Bountiful
La Streep - Angels in America, Postcards from the Edge, Kramer vs. Kramer
Geena Rowlands - Opening Night
Juliet Stevenson - Truly, Madly, Deeply

Coincidence or prognostication? (Books - The First Verse by Barry McCrea)

Barry McCrea's The First Verse is an alluring and literate page-turner. It is Niall's first year at Trinity in more or less modern-day Dublin. He is a verbose, book-smart naif trying to figure out just who he is. He lives a duplicitous life, not yet able to come out of the closet, even to his friends. Like most young people leaving their home for the first time, he is trying on his future possible selves like they are clothes on a rack, trying to understand exactly what life could hold for him. All the strangeness starts one night during what seems to be a party game. Guests ask a question, take the nearest book, open it randomly, choose a passage, and look in it for the answer. The trouble is, the books' answers are dead on, and as it gets later and there are only two players left, it is clear that they don't treat this as a game, but rather as some sort of tool for divination. Niall is a young man hungry for some answers and he stands on the brink of getting sucked into a world of mysterious synchronicities and apparent power:

As I felt my hand falling over the bookspines I already knew that over this hung worlds. Two mutually exclusive universes were in the balance, teetering over the tiny gap in the space-time continuum which was my choice. As I went back to the beginning of the rows of books and touched each title as I ran my finger along, I knew that the passage I chose would be either ambiguous and a confirmation of what Fionnuala was saying, a triumph for Ian, for all those people, for all those adolescent dreads of emptiness to follow; or else it would be something else, the opposite, unimaginable. I wished so deeply for it to work, a choice between a past I knew stretching drearily on out into an eternal, colourless future, and the possibility of fullness and newness and things I didn't know. I could feel the inevitability of the dull and the mundane creeping in, the ridiculousness of anything except that the world was as Fionnuala said, and these two were just arrogant and unfriendly thrity-year-olds who took their party games extremely seriously and were irritated by our undergraduate enthusiasms and fears. I tried to push that out of my mind as I stopped at a thick book, but my heart was already falling. I flicked through Ulysses and the probability waves all came crashing down around each other and collapsed into a singularity...

The coincidences begin to pile up and Niall wants to know what this ritual is really all about, but his new friends become mysterious and evasive. McCrea is acute in his depiction of the psychological complexities of a young man moving from adolescence to adult-hood, but he's not pat. That personal Bildungsroman is mirrored by another, this one of the city of literature - Dublin. McCrea can also write thriller-like scenes that have me tearing the pages, I'm trying to turn them so fast, but the book constantly eschews what is obvious. The First Verse is an enticing mix of the supenseful supernatural and the literary that has this reader in its thrall. Think of the addictiveness of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, only the reach of the story's themes is broader and the writing style more elegant.

I am already somehow half-way through this novel, although I can only afford before-bedtime reading in this final week of the semester. I am thinking that I may not write too much more about it, because it is very plot-driven and I don't want to ruin it for those of you who want to read it.

They reign supreme... (20 Greatest actresses meme)

I could not resist this meme: My 20 greatest actresses of all time. Which I prefer to call my 20 favorite actresses of all time today. Thanks, Sheila.










And they are: Lois Smith, Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh, Diane Wiest, Julie Walters, Imelda Staunton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Vanessa Redgrave, Isabelle Huppert, Kim Stanley, Ellen Burstyn, Ingrid Bergman, Emma Thompson & Maggie Smith (2 for the price of one!), Betty Buckley (would have to be on this list for her 5 minute cameo in Another Woman alone), Jeanne Morreau, Geraldine Page, La Streep, Geena Rowlands, and Juliet Stevenson

(It killed me to leave out Cherry Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Hannah Schygula, Anne Bancroft, Kate Hepburn, Lili Taylor - but what could I do?)

Care to join in the fun?

Ladies and gentlemen...Hart Crane

- And Bees of Paradise

I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel - all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms -

Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.

    Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward.  We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,

By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.



Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Opening salvo (Books - The First Verse by Barry McCrea)

I have barely had time to dip into Barry McCrea's debut novel The First Verse, a recommendation of Eve's Alexandria, but the opening salvo has my interest piqued. In it, a young, contemporary man from Dublin is drawn into a mysterious literary cult in his first year as a student at Trinity.

An unremarkable swottishness and a cheap, almost corrupt knack for exams had got me easily through secondary school at the Jesuit Gonzaga College, and covered me with the scalps and headdresses of local competitions. And then in my last year of those mediocre gifts, in combination with a modest flair for foreign languages, had brought something more exciting my way. It took the form of a new Trinity College scholarship, only two in Ireland, the Beckett Foundation Fellowship, to study French and English literature. It entitled me to "Commons" - dinner in the huge Dining Hall every evening at six - and, more importantly, to roms (which means a room) in Trinity, a fact which enabled me to move out and leave, after nineteen years, the draughty Victorian house of my parents and of my childhood, atop the sad swell of the sea at Dun Laoghaire.

And if his knack for exams is cheap, could one perhaps call his knack for words rich? Our narrator tell us not soon after:

I would have been more aware of this as a rite of passage, the extreme unction of my childhood, setting off into the city to seek my fortune, but my mind had room only for Ian O'Neill.

The plot already has me in its grip, but not a paragraph is left unfestooned with deft metaphor or filigreed adverb - 'extreme unction of my childhood,' 'cannibalistic fervour.' I don't have a feeling yet for whether I think the tone belongs to the writer or the character, but I find it a little cocky. That may turn out to be appropriate, or to be worth it. If the man can write, why hide his light under a bushel?

Mirror images across the century (Books - Possession by A. S. Byatt)

This will no doubt be a little rambling as I am writing a final paper, and this is priming the writing pump - but I cannot resist, being deep in the epistolary romance that forms the centerpiece of A. S. Byatt's Possession. The two 19th century poets woo each other with the sharpness of their minds and the music of their pens:

I find I am at ease with other imagined minds - bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair, teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull - making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seem important that these other lives of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch. For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst of smoky London - and what is peculiar to him is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing pin-point of observation - before and around and after - whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelves full of Plato and Feuerbach, St. Augustine and John Stuart Mill.

That, by the way, is a love letter.

I am also watching how Byatt creates a two couples of women who mirror each other across 100 years of separation. Val lives with Roland, the recent graduate of a contemporary scholar of poet Randolph Henry Ash. Val is also possessed of an English degree but she takes secretarial work to support the two of them. At this point in the story has become almost literally crazy with disappointment and boredom. While Ash writes important lyric poems and spends time as an amateur marine biologist learning about the world that will give him inspiration, his wife Ellen, like Val, stays in the hot London summer working - supervising cleaning of curtains and chandeliers, firing pregnant serving girls, and suffering from migraine - so that the house can be ready for her husband to create in upon his return.

The other couple are the poet Christabel LaMotte who, throughout the love letters fights to retain her independence:

The precious - letters - are too much and too little - and above all and first, I should say, compromising.

What a cold sad word. It is His word - the World's word - and her word too, that prude, his Wife. But it entails freedom.

I will expatiate - on freedom and injustice.

The injustice is - that I require my freedom - from you - who respect it so fully. that was a noble saying of yours about freedom - how can I turn from...

I will put in Evidence a brief History. A History of little nameless unremembered acts. Of this our Bethany cottage - which was named for a reason. Now to you and in your marvellous Poem - Bethany is the Place where the master called his dead friend to resurrection beforetimes and particularly.

But to us Females, it was a place wherein we niether served nor were served - poor Martha was cumbered with much serving - and was sharp with her sister Mary who sat at His Feet and heard His Word and chose the one thing needful. Now I believe rather, with George Herbert, that "Who sweeps a room as for They laws - Makes that and the action fine." We formed a Project - my dear Companion and myself - to make ourselves a Bethany were the work of all kinds was carried on in the Spirit of Love and His laws. We met, you are to know, at one of Mr. Rusin's marvellous lectures on the dignity of handicraft and individual work. We were Two - who wished to live the Life of the Mind - to make good things. We saw after thought that if we put together the pittances we possessed - and could come by by giving drawing lessons - or by selling Wonder Tales or even Poems - we might make ourselves a life in which drudgery was Artful - was sacred as Mr. Ruskin believes is possible - and it was shared, for no Master...we were to renounce. Not the lives that then encompassed us - cramped Daughterly devotion to a wordly mother - nor the genteel Slavery of governessing - those were no loss - those were gleefully fled and opposition stunachly met. But we were to renounce the outside World - and the usual Female Hopes (and with them the usual Female Fears) in exchange for - dare I say Art...

I wish as I read the letters for the satisfying snap of the the two lovers flying together after being held apart for months by convention, propriety and lengthy sentences. And yet, simultaneously, I hope that they never will. LaMotte is a poet in her own right whose hard won freedom is in itself a creation. She deserves to keep it. Her twin in the present is the scholar Maud Bailey who, though successful, works in a somewhat isolated realm of all women scholars making careers of studying women's literature or the wives of literate men.

Bailey is covertly researching the relationship of poets Ash and LaMotte. At one point she wishes to confirm some information in the diaries of Ash's wife Ellen. She goes to see Beatrice Nest, the scholar devoted to her papers.

"Was it important?" asked the grey voice, with no indication of whether the "importance" was scholarly, passionate or cosmic.

"I don't know. It might change our views of - of his work, I supposed a bit."
"What do you want of me?"

"A Xerox of those two letters. If it can be done, a copy of the Journal, between those dates. Not to tell Professor Cropper. Or Professor Blackadder. Yet. We discovered this ourselves - "

Beatrice Nest seemed to think for a longish time, her face propped in her hands.
"This - what you're so excited about - it won't- it won't expose her to ridicule - or - misapprehension? I've become very concerned that she shouldn't be - exposed is the best word I suppose - exposed."

I found this moment so, well, - exposed. Here is someone who has devoted her life to knowledge of one arcane subject who would gladly repress others' knowledge of her to protect her character. The woman is long dead. It's pathetic, really - and so perfect. I can imagine Beatrice Nest so clearly. This book is remarkable. Part romance, part literary ventriloquism act, part detective story, part social criticism of the roles to which women are relagated in the patriarchal machine, and part send up of academia - both the aspect of it that is all hallowed halls and the part that is more like cut-throat industry. The pairing of contemporary and historical figures adorned with the accoutrements of meta fiction - is now a well worn fictional form - but it is hard to not make the structure into mere conceit. This novel's structure is rock solid, but it is structure, that is, it lies beneath. Byatt is subtle with it, driving the story with character, with plot, and with great writing, not by exposing the cleverness of its underpinnings. Another book I have always felt does that successfully is Richard Powers' novel The Gold Bug Variations. Interestingly they came out at around the same time. It might be interesting to ponder what that is all about. Maybe in some future post.

Walking around in the mystery (Books - The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman)*updated*

Our dear reading friend Dewey, who blogged at The Hidden Side of a Leaf, sadly passed away just a few days ago. I will miss her energetic and inclusive spirit, her bright contribution to our collective conversation, and, probably most of all, her recommendations - especially when I was in the mood for anything in the YA fiction category. Oddly, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman was her last recommendation to me. I would say that young people's fiction about death is a neglected category. People can get so uncomfortable trying to find answers for kids about the deeper mysteries of being alive - particularly the big two - love/sex and death. Neither are realms that benefit from the solutions so many people come up with - pat answers or "protecting" kids from any discussion about them at all. I think richly imagined fiction can play a role, not just for kids, but for adults too. It does that not so much by inventing answers as by letting the reader walk around in the mystery in a safe way. As I read Gaiman's new book, that came through as its strength.

In the book, a family is murdered, except for the youngest child, a toddler. He escapes, running into a graveyard, where he is dubbed Nobody - Bod for short - and raised by its denizens - which include everything from garden variety ghosts, to witches and warewolves. The book has a thankfully non-partisan take on religion, dancing around some basic idea of sacred ground and the like without ever falling in, although it does rather obviously fall on the side of life after death or there would be no story at all. Gaiman deals with ideas young people have to come to grips with if they are going to live life in the full knowledge of its transitory nature. The book deals with larger notions of loss, fear, and I say 'play' because Gaiman allows Bod to acquire some skills normally reserved for the dead - fading, haunting, and coming to life in other people's dreams - which serve as metaphors for the ways in which life and death intersect for us all. Gaiman creates the kind of beleagured child-hero through whom more bookish youth can have some very satisfying moments of vicarious revenge against whatever bully haunts them. I found myself smiling even with more than 30 years between me and my tormentors. But finally I had to experience all this at a distance. I never became fully engaged and I think that was because of the writing. I cannot say I was wowed. That was not my experience with Coraline. Here I found the plotting obvious, several inconsistencies in character bothered me, and I was jarred by what I saw as some careless moments. Usually these were little details, as when our narrator tells us that:

He wondered how he would ever be able to sleep when he was this worried and hopeless and then, almost to his surprise, for two or three hours, he slept.

It's a quibble, I know, but you cannot be surprised that you are going to sleep, because you cannot be aware of going to sleep. That surprise could only happen retrospectively, upon waking. And while I understand that Gaiman has employed an omniscient narrator, his narrator's voice tries hard to keep us close to Bod's own experience at most times. Moments like this pulled me out of the narrative flow of time. Mostly I found myself amused by this book, but never deeply engaged by the story, or warmed by the fires of nostalgia that can be stirred when reading evokes the excitement of a great childhood reading experience. But I was appreciative of its playfully imagined "other side," as a means by which a young hero could take on one of the great mysteries.

I would like to add that Neil Gaiman had a terrific exchange on the First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) in the U. S. this week on his blog. It is a subject on which he is obviously passionate. Check it out.

Cultural riches, cultural poverty...

Philip Kennicott writes an excellent review in The Chronicle of Higher Education of two books about the life of the much admired and much maligned late founder and director of the Opera Company of Boston - Sarah Caldwell. The reach of Caldwell's work and the extremes of her personality would need at least two books. Kennicott quotes Daniel Kessler's The First Woman of Opera:

Is that why she grew so obese? It seems a ridiculous question, the sort that would never be asked of a male conductor...Caldwell's physical size very quickly became a kind of shorthand for her reputation. In her best years, during the 1960s and 70s, the artist with a charming indifference to her physical self was seen as a maverick and an eccentric. But when everything started to fall apart, the overweight impresario was seen as out of control and undisciplined.

The truth was, she was all of those, and as long as she could scrape together the money, the maverick could do her astonishing work. But when the money ran out, memories of the maverick were almost instantly effaced. Her cultural exchange with the Soviet Union was a critical triumph, but she never bothered to cover the bills. Personal pressure from no less than Secretary of State George P. Shultz was required to keep the thing from becoming a fiasco.

Indeed, her unkempt appearrance would have been given less emphasis if she had been a man, but opera has a pretty glitzy veneer. The first class of every year of teaching opera singers acting, I would have at least one student show up to class in a suit or evening gown until I posted notices that sweat pants were preferred. Anyhoo, what I like about this review is how it recognizes the contradictions that were embodied in this single person (as is true of most of us) and sees these two books as a more honest portrait than either one of them alone. I really enjoyed this one excerpt Kennicott quotes from Caldwell's own memoir Challenges: A Memoir of my Life in Opera, not so much for the discussion as to the degree of Caldwell's self knowledge but because it places in context the job she took on as an artistic director in the United States:

The closest that Caldwell comes to acknowledging her deeper flaws in Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera is an observation she borrows from one of this country's most influential leaders in the arts: "McNeil Lowry, head of the Ford Foundation, once said that when he went into a room he could always spot the arts directors because they all appeared to be somewhat wounded," she writes. "They were too thin or too fat; they smoked too much, or were nervous, because their fund-raising responsibilities weighed so heavily on them."

Having both run and assisted the running of several small theatre companies in the U.S., and knowing many others who have and do run them, I got a big chuckle out of that. And as I write this with the radio giving reports of hysteria over that abstraction called "the economy," and wealthy industries desperate for bailouts, my thoughts turned to a different kind of poverty we experience here by virtue of how little emphasis is placed on culture, on experiences of beauty and richness in the course of educating our children and living our daily lives as adults. How much better the world can be for those who would sacrifice everything - their possessions, their health, their physical attractiveness - just to make something that looks or sounds exceptional, and how mistrustful and disrespectful we can be of that impulse. It may not seem on the same order as the drop in the Dow but that is a kind of poverty too.

Hat tip: Books, Inq.

What on a Wednesday...

Mark Thwaite runs a delightful feature at his Editor's Corner blog on The Book Depository website in which you can get to know a little more about a book blogger each Wednesday. This week I'm it. I guess if I'm to be outed, I'd rather have Mark do it than anyone else. And while you're there, check out the rest of the Book Depository website. They seem to have nearly everything and they ship worldwide (I believe for free!) Check out some of the past interviews too, you might recognize a few familiar faces.

Mirror mirror on the wall... changing our form to change ourselves?

Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own.

"You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa."

In today's Science Times Benedict Carey reports on soon to be published research which suggests that people will not only be convinced that they have temporarily assumed a new physical form, but that this experience can alter behavior - making people "less anxious about racial differences," when they assume another skin color, convincing people to exercise more after seeing themselves as someone more fit, or giving people extra confidence when they felt they had become more good-looking. Many psychotherapies work with techniques that help people get outside their own perspective into another's - transforming marriages in some cases, or getting criminals to view the world from the point of view of their victims. I can see the temptation to create some great science fiction with this idea, but the leap to claims of lasting behavioral benefits seems far fetched to me if we are talking about a single instance of experiencing an optical illusion. This article does not specify the amount of time subjects spent either as realistic film versions of others in one study, or as more conventional computer avatars in another.

Very often, those of us who study the human mind and brain create studies imagining we are manipulating behavior in a certain way. But we have to be cautious about believing we are actually having that effect. I can imagine from reading this article that I might be able to change a man's experience of himself to believing he has the body of a woman. Perhaps I tried it on myself and it made me feel more tender. Does that immediately make another man more tender or more sympathetic toward women too? Toward all women or only the sweet young thing I turned him into? Perhaps instead of spending the session becoming more sympathetic, what he will really discover is what it is like to have breasts. Just because we can manipulate an avatar doesn't mean we can instantly leap to controlling behavior. Does this also mean that writers and actors - those who have practice assuming the character or psychology of others - are more healthy, have greater sympathy for others? Do they have better relationships or are they more easy to manipulate through certain kinds of therapy? Maybe we can change the image of the actor to those people in our society with the most stable family lives, or change all writers into instant teetotalers. I'm being facetious, of course. I have known many actors who exercise a lot of empathy in their decision making (perhaps even romantically so). I have also found some of them to exercise an extraordinary amount of self-centeredness. Finally, we do have to inhabit ourselves in a multitude of complex and changing contexts. So it makes me wonder about whether, if these illusions are as useful as the tone of this intriguing story suggests, we and our therapists would have any less work integrating our new behavior with the rest of our old selves or our families. Changing behavior is a tricky business and it sounds to me like this sort of research is in its infancy. The notion, however, is tantalizing - check out the article and see what you think.

More like sweet than savory (Books - Possession by A. S. Byatt)

I am enjoying the multiple layers of A. S. Byatt's ventriloquism act in Possession. As author not only of a contemporary romance between two scholars, but also of a 19th century epistolary one between the two poets studied by those writers, Byatt then gives herself the additional burden (or fun) of having one of those poets write about a third poet - Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That would be a writer writing about a writer, writing about a writer.

I have not had occasion to tell you - though I tell all I meet, with the regularity with which dear Crabb tells his tale of retrieving Wieland's bust - I once met Coleridge, I was once taken to Highgate - when I was very young and green - and had the chance of hearing the Angelic - (and mildly self-important) voice speak on and on - of the existence of angels and the longevity of yew-trees, and the suspension of Life in Winter (the banal and truly profound thick and fast upon each other here) and premonitions of the Duties of Man (not Rights) and how Napoleon's Spies had been hot on his heels in Italy on his return from Malta - and on True Dreams and Lying Dreams. And more, I think. Nothing on Christabel.

I was so young and green, I worried inordinately that I had no chance, in all this spate of brilliant monologue, to interpose my own voice - to be heard to be able to think in that company - to be remarked. I do not know what I should have said if I could have spoken. Very likely something futile or silly - some erudite and pointless questioning of his doctrine of the Trinity, or some crude wish to be told the end of the poem Christabel.

I might describe this book as a layered confection of the imagination. It is more like eating sweet than savory (at least at the moment). This extended section of letters might be a bit of marzipan. Delicious but densely sweet and I find myself not wanting to gorge too much of it in one sitting. Imagination is also a subject of this novel, as the two poets correspond about their creative inspirations, frustrations, and habits.

What will you be thinking of me now? I told you - I cannot think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind's eye and ear. So, as I said, I have the clearest mental vision of yr unseen Porch, overarched with Clematis - one of those delightful deep-blue violet ones - and little clambering roses. I have also the clearest vision of your parlour - with its two peaceful Human inhabitants employed - I will not say at netting, but perhaps at reading - aloud, some work of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Malory - and Monsignor Dorato all lemony plumes in a filgree dome - and your little dog - now of what kind is he?

What a delightful game, both for the 19th century poet who employs it as a sort of flirtation and for Byatt, the 20th century writer, imagining what he would imagine. I recognize this skill instantly as the sign of the kind of artist I respect - a well-exercised and fertile imagination is not sufficient to artistry, one needs craft too, but it is necessary, as without it one would have nothing to exercise one's craft for. If you're a creative process lunatic like me, then you are constantly looking for clues about that process in every work by an artist and any biography of them. And if said artist has written letters, diaries, or - on rare occasion - a book on their creative journey, then what a treasure I have found (see list below)! As I read the letters between these two fictional writers, I find myself wondering how much of Byatt's own process is in each of them.

My Life in Art by Konstantin Stanislavski
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Growing Pains - The Autobiography of Emily Carr
Chaliapin - by Victor Borovsky
The World According to Mike Leigh by Michael Coveney