Necromancy Never Pays

Necromancy Never Pays has moved!

2011-05-17T08:46:00.003-04:00

After five months of playing around with it and a few days of asking readers' opinions--in the wake of the big Blogger fail of last week--I've decided to take the rest of this blog over to Wordpress. You can find it there under the same name, and certainly I hope you will. Here's the link:

https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/

and here's the first post over there, that tries to say something about how strange it is to be abandoning all these words over here:

https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/maiden-name/

The White Devil

2011-05-16T06:44:00.002-04:00

When I saw The White Devil, by Justin Evans, on a list of books that Harper was willing to send me for review, I couldn't resist--even though it's a ghost story and I usually shy away from anything scary. But it's about Byron...

And it turned out to be one of those mysteries where what happens is driven by a character finding out more about Byron's life. Mmm, total catnip for an English major. If I could have, I'd have read the whole thing in one pleasant afternoon. But deadlines and kids' awards ceremonies intervened, and I ended up having to put it down twice, which was two more times than I would have otherwise.

As Jenny observes, this novel has a lot of plot elements, and I think that's what kept me reading. If I got a little tired of one story line, maybe the teenage boy's puerile meanderings about his relationship with his father, there would soon be another one along to keep me going down the track toward finding out more about Byron's relationship with the ghost.

He's a malevolent ghost, and it's not until a scene at the very end that you find out a little bit about why Byron could have loved him. In the meantime, though, you get some impressions of life in a British boarding school, the realism of which may be due to the author's own year at Harrow. I like the comparison of the attitude of students to their British teachers and their American ones--at Harrow,
"the banter was larded with respectful Sirs, seasoned with eager, show-offy anecdotes from the newly risen Sixth Formers. All this was friendly, even affectionate..."
while at the American school,
"the baby boomer faculty who had chosen such a low-paying career as teaching were treated with suppressed contempt by the students, children of Wall Streeters, who knew that grades didn't matter, didn't help you make millions; that these teachers, then, must be little better than servants."

When Andrew, the American, comes to Harrow, he is told that he looks like Lord Byron and should therefore act his part in the play that a poet and housemaster is writing, about which of Byron's many sexual partners could be shown to be the love of his life. The ghost wants that distinction, and he wants Andrew.

So Andrew has to find out what part this ghost might have played in Byron's life, and who he might have wanted to kill, in order to keep his friends alive.

I particularly enjoy the poet's reply to one of Andrew's questions:
"Ah, children, who want to know what poems mean. They don't mean. They express. They are songs. When you sympathize, you make them mean something...."

I have to admit that I read up until the last few chapters and then put the book aside to finish in the morning, as is my habit if I read anything that might be scary. But I could have gone ahead and read it; it wraps things up nicely without adding anything too horrific.

This was a nice little piece of fiction-candy, suitable for popping all in your mouth at once; one of those attractive, light-colored candies with a dark, chewy center.

Blogger, do I know how to quit you?

2011-05-15T21:58:00.001-04:00

I'm thinking about it. There's a Wordpress version of this blog (thanks to Lass and Amanda and most especially Anna from Diary of an Eccentric), and I'm going to run both concurrently for a little while and see which one wins. If you have an opinion, let me know. If I switch to Wordpress, I'll let you know.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-05-13T14:17:00.001-04:00

Note: Due to Blogger fail, the edition of Trivial Pursuit for Booklovers that I scheduled for today didn't post as scheduled. So I'm posting it again. If you see it twice, you'll know that my cry of "Blogger, I wish I knew how to quit you" is diminishing in volume.

Children's: What book by Lois Lowry finds 12-year-old Jonas rebelling against a futuristic society that has decided he is to become a Receiver of Memories?

Classics: What was Scarlett's original name, in the first drafts of Gone With The Wind--Iris, Pansy or Rose?

Non-Fiction: What famed work of art, unearthed on a Greek island in 1820, had its subsequent history revealed in Gregory Curtis' Disarmed?

Book Club: What inventive Robert Coover novella explores the bond between an errant maid and her master?

Authors: What best-selling British author, convicted of perjury, penned the thriller Sons of Fortune and the memoir A Prison Diary while behind bars?

Book Bag: What character was said to resemble Hoagy Carmichael, in Casino Royale?

Lucky Jim

2011-05-12T08:37:00.000-04:00

When someone in the Imaginary Friends Book Club proposed reading Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, I went downstairs to find my copy, and came back up having found only Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. The paperback I was remembering must have been from my college-professor-parents' house. So on a subsequent visit to a used book store whose shelves struck me as an oddly exact recreation of my parents', I picked up a copy of Lucky Jim, a spoof of British academic life in the 1950s.

I read the whole thing because it was mildly funny in a low-key, David Lodge kind of way. But I have to wonder about the point of digging this one up. Didn't we get over the 1950's already? Wasn't all of Jim's sort of fumbling about with women addressed by the "summer of love"? And if he didn't want to be a history professor, then surely the lesson of the hippies was that he didn't have to be. So why reread this book?

It's very British; I was continually irritated by the reiterations of Jim's feeling that "nice things are nicer than nasty things." Duh! Only the British eat seed cake when there's gateaux to be had.

Jim, whose last name is Dixon, is very irritating. He rarely does anything nice for anyone; in fact, he specializes in making other peoples' lives more difficult. That can be funny, but at--what is, for me at least--a very low level, as in this passage:
"when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."

When another character finally asks Jim why he wants to teach medieval history in a college, he reveals himself to be the 1950's version of a slacker, one who had some choices but didn't care enough to make them:
"the reason why I'm a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It's why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I'd be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff."

Amis' comic genius, if you think he has any, lies in his ability to capture the small details of conversation that can make it so awkward and wearing, like when someone says a word wrong because he's thinking of another word and you start thinking about that instead of what he's said:
"'And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'
The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical."

Every time Jim said something awkward in a conversation, I was torn between laughing at him and identifying with him, which disturbed me because I didn't like him! And yet I often say things like he does out of nervousness when I'm at an academic gathering:
"'Well, it's an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.'
'You're in luck, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing around cigarettes.
Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name."

At one point when they're sitting at a table and Jim Dixon is observing a conversation, his thoughts are petty and mean in almost the exact same way mine would be in a similar situation, which made me grin and cringe at the same time:
"Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it--Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values'--and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence."

The high point of the novel is when Jim finally says to his annoying and manipulative friend Margaret what readers have been longing for him to say for pages and pages:
"Don't be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do."
And then she has a page and a half of hysterics, ending with having her face slapped and being given a glass of whiskey, which she takes and "with eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more."
If there's any satisfaction in the ending, it's that Margaret is revealed as a fraud and Jim gets free of her.

Overall, though, I'd take rereading Lodge's Nice Work over plowing through this old-fashioned relic, if I felt the need for British academic humor. The uncomfortable pleasure of reading the quite awkward bits of conversation is the only reason this particular novel should still be read at all. Have you ever had a conversation at an academic gathering that made you feel you had just said something monumentally stupid? And did you cringe for days afterwords?

The Mysterious Human Heart in New York

2011-05-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

What with awards ceremonies and other end-of-the-school year events, we've been up early and to bed late and I've been seeing all sorts of people I rarely see in between. One of them told me he's trying to "cut through the Gordian knot" of kid sports and school schedules so he can come with us to take a road trip through the inevitably predicted rain to the most crowded part of a nearby city tomorrow night. As my friends used to say about spending too much money getting to the beach, it is a highly inadvisable thing. And yet, well nigh irresistible.

The inimitable poet Dorianne Laux says it best, in her poem "The Mysterious Human Heart in New York," which is from her new volume that I've already touted here once, The Book of Men:

Streetwise but foolish, the heart
knows what's good for it but goes
for the dark bar, the beer before noon,
the doughy pretzel hot and salty, tied up
in a Gordian knot. It takes a walk
through Tompkins Square where
the homeless sleep it off on stone benches,
one shrouded body to each gritty sarcophagus.
The streets fill with taxis and trucks,
pinstripes and briefcases, and the subways
spark and sway underground. The sun
is snagged on the Empire State, performing
its one-note song, the citizens below
dragging their shadows down the sidewalk
like sidekicks, spitting into the gutter
as if on cue, as if in a musical,
as if there's no association between the trash
flapping against the chain link and the girl
with her skirt up in the alley. When the traffic
jams on 110th--a local pain, a family affair--
the Starbucks junkie leans against the glass
and laughs into his hand, a cabbie
sits on his hood and smokes, cops
on skates weave through the exhaust,
billy club blunts bumping against their
dark blue thighs. Everyone's on a cell phone,
the air a-buzz with yammer and electricity
as the heart of the city pounds like a man
caught in the crosswalk holding his shoulder,
going down on one knee, then blundering
into Central Park to lean over the addled bridge,
the sooty swans floating under him, grown fat
on cheap white bread. Oh heart, with your
empty pockets and your hat on backwards,
stop looking at yourself in the placid waters.
Someone is sneaking up behind you
in an overcoat lined with watches,
and someone else is holding a cardboard sign
that says: The End Is Here.

Sometimes your heart feels better when you do what you know is not good for it. As the parent of a high school senior, I would desperately like to tell my heart to go ahead, spend more time "looking at yourself" instead of having to pay attention to the way the doomsday sign is "sneaking up behind."

Fuzzy Nation

2011-05-09T09:25:00.002-04:00

When I read that John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation was coming out, I had to find our copy of H. Beam Piper's The Fuzzy Papers so I could reread the original of the story that Scalzi has enlarged and updated. Then the Piper book sat on my shelf until last week, when Cassandra Ammerman at Tor sent me a shiny, new hardback copy of Fuzzy Nation, and I had to hurry up and read one book right after the other, which turned out to be a fine thing to do, as Scalzi's story is an agreeable addition to Piper's, much more than just a re-hashing of some of the old issues.

The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story The Star Beast was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations). There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.

Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama. There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).

Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.

Fuzzy Nation comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension. I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-05-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

Children's: What type of bird showed Mary Lennox where the rusty key to The Secret Garden was buried?

Classics: What novel sees ambulance driver Lt. Frederick Henry escaping execution by jumping into the Tagliamento River?

Non-Fiction: What 20th-century trustbuster got the royal treatment in Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex?

Book Club: What Texas town did Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae meet up in, before starting a cattle drive to Montana?

Authors: Who had already penned Player Piano by the time he became one of Saab's first U.S. dealers?

Book Bag: What comic included the classic stand-up routine "A Place for My Stuff" in his collection of cerebral scat called Braindroppings?

Starship

2011-05-04T09:14:00.002-04:00

Have I been catching up on my reading? A little. But what I've been doing more of is catching up on my video watching. We're still on the first season of Veronica Mars, the second or third season of Big Bang Theory, we just got the new season of South Park, and then yesterday my kids sat me down and we watched the new Starkid video on YouTube, Starship.

Have you heard of the Starkids? Originally musical theater students at the University of Michigan, they wrote a musical parody version of Harry Potter which is still on YouTube as A Very Potter Musical. Then they veered off into territory I found less delightful--maybe just because I'm old and stodgy--with Me And My Dick. But they came back with A Very Potter Sequel. And now, with the departure of the guy who wrote a lot of the music and starred as Harry Potter--Darren Criss--to the TV show Glee, the rest of the Starkids have formed a company and perform in Chicago, although they always put their entire production on YouTube and have now made a DVD, too, available on the Starkids website.

I thought the Starship parody was delightful, from first to last. You have to watch it in 9-10 minute segments, which actually kind of heightens the humor. I thought the high point was the love song in Act II, scene ii, "You don't know you the way I do." But there's a good villain song and lots of good jokes, not least about the way the "Galactic League of Extraterrestrial Exploration, the G.L.E.E." is "always making twisted abominations of everything" (wink). The bugs on the alien planet are represented by puppets, reminiscent of the way the actors use puppets and animal heads in The Lion King and Avenue Q.

This is inventive parody, good music, and it's free. What more could you ask? Watch it, and spread the word!

What She Said

2011-05-03T09:07:00.000-04:00

I learned a lot, working with high-school-age people for a month and a half, and remembered some of what it was like, being 15 or 16. That's probably why when I read the new volume of poetry by Billy Collins--Horoscopes For the Dead--this poem stuck out, for me:

What She Said

When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.

I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.

As I said, I was like give me a break.

I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,

but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.

And that was close enough
at that point in the evening

even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
give me a break,

for God's sake will you please give me a break?!

No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,

I felt the most I could be was like

to a certain degree

give me a break.

This poem's speaker and I are, you know, like, aging! And this is the kind of thinking that can go on inside an aging person's head when she hears a fragment from a 15-year-old girl's conversation. It's not useful. It's certainly no more pretty than the original phrase. And yet it circles around and around in there.

One of the things I notice about the difference between people who age gracefully and are still interesting to talk to, and people who become curmudgeonly and boring is that the first type stay open to new experiences and ways of saying things. They sometimes listen to music they know they might not like, and they occasionally read books that aren't exactly suited to their tastes. They continue to grow intellectually. I want to, like, know what younger people are saying, if only to make fun of it, in the manner of this poem. What about you?

Maul

2011-05-02T06:09:00.002-04:00

On Saturday night I got a plaque that says "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." That's exactly how it felt to pull off a high school musical in only five and a half weeks of rehearsal.

It went well. Now it's over. I feel like I've been a little mauled by the experience, or maybe that's just because of the title of the YA novel I was reading in very small bits during the last week of rehearsals and performance--Maul, by Tricia Sullivan.

As a novel, I didn't like it. It begins with a scene designed to shock its readers, progresses to a story they don't realize is parallel to the first one for a few chapters, and then starts weaving some details of the story together so readers think there's going to be a satisfying ending for both, and then just...stops. We're told "the game's over now" and that's it. Humph. Not a game I would have let myself get interested in if I'd been able to see that the ending didn't succeed in making sense of the plethora of detail given earlier. Even if you're someone who likes to read the ending first, though, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. There's some video-game-world-echoing-the-real-world stuff going on here.

Despite the fact that I don't think it's well structured, there are some parts that are absolutely amazing, many of them in terms of how well they describe adolescent emotion:
'Did you ever feel so much of something that you just couldn't control it? And you've tried shit like going to the basketball game and screaming your head off for hours and you had the orgasm or six or seven and you drank the SuperSize Chocolate Shake from 7-Eleven but in the end you didn't feel as empty as you hoped to feel. Did you ever feel something so strong you thought it was a physical hunger but it couldn't be satisfied that way, it was thicker than physical, it stuffed your axons, it was a pregnant idea begging to be born and it was using you for that shit, but you just didn't know what it LOOKED LIKE or WHO inseminated you or how to get it OUT.
Did you ever feel that? It feels like being slapped upside the head about 20,000 times a day and you'll do anything to escape it but you CAN'T.
Subversive behaviour. What a fucking world. It's like everyone's flowing along and the only ones stopping are the ones who can't hack it, they are the worldly possessions it hurts YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING DELUDED & HELPLESS and I'm reduced to paying $18.99 for a CD to express this for me because you won't let me do anything REAL until after I've been indoctrinated broken down and seduced into submitting to the same CIVILIZING WILL that's sitting on your face."

Even the little throwaway lines, the random thoughts, are fabulously provocative:
'Then I saw a live picture of myself in one of the TVs. I stuck out my tongue just to be sure. It's a well-known fact that TV is more real than real life so when people say get a life what they really mean is, get on TV. Because either you're watching TV or you're on it, and if you're doing neither it's a little like Schrodinger's cat, neither alive nor dead till observed. So when I saw myself on the video screen I was pretty happy because it meant I was alive."

There's some interesting commentary on gender politics, ending with a logical absurdity about where we could end up if we go on as we have been. This passage is from along that road:
"There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they'd whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides, you're not supposed to let it get to you. You're supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren't allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don't like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don't) who if you're lucky will offer to go beat them up knowng you won't take him up on it because you know perfectly well he'd probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they've been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and grime of uneducated testosterone."

There are also wonderful moments in the Maul (Mall), like when the heroine finds a clothing store with items that help her feel what she needs to feel right then in order to survive, and a bookstore where the books become exactly what she needs to read.

Lots of flashes of brilliance, but no final explosion, no settling of the dust so readers can glimpse the new world that has been created. It's the end of the game just when you've figured out a few of the rules.

Code of the Lifemaker

2011-05-01T20:11:00.009-04:00

Phoenix Pick’s free ebook for May is James P. Hogan’s “Code of the
Lifemaker.”
The Coupon Code for May for the free ebook is 9992144. The coupon will be
effective from May 2 through May 31.
Instructions and download/purchase links at www.PPickings.com (Phoenix
Pick’s catalogue page).

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-04-29T07:47:00.000-04:00

Children's: Who are known as the Trenchcoat Twins, in a top-selling book series?

Classics: What Mart Crowley drama finds Harold getting a hustler named "Cowboy" as a birthday gift?

Non-Fiction: What All Things Considered co-host flits around Orville and Wilbur Wright's old haunts, in The Flyers?

Book Club: What Peter Shaffer play sees Antonio Salieri sadly sigh: "I was born with a pair of ears and nothing else"?

Authors: Who left instructions that his poem "Crossing the Bar" be included at the end of all editions of his poetry?

Book Bag: Who observes, in The Call of Cthulhu: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents"?

Tigana, the conclusion

2011-04-27T06:56:00.000-04:00

Tigana is an interestingly-told story, especially since so much of it has happened before this novel begins. Once I got to the halfway point, I had to go ahead and finish reading it, which is something that happens to me with fantasy less and less as I get older.

The characters all put their hope in the prince of Tigana, Alessan, who is a symbol of his country in exile, since no one in "Lower Corte" except those who were alive when Alessan's father killed Brandin's son in the war can now remember even the name of their former country, Tigana. When Devin looks at Alessan, "he found his avenue to passion again, to the burning inward response to what had happened here--and was still happening. Every hour of every day in the ransacked, broken-down province named Lower Corte."

One bad guy, Alberico, gets badder, killing the messenger who brings him bad news. And the bad news is that the other bad guy, Brandin, who has destroyed Tigana so thoroughly that one day no one will remember its name, has gotten better (through the love of a good woman, Dianora), and has abdicated as ruler of his native land in favor of ruling over his adopted land, the land he has so thoroughly conquered. Brandin is complicated and interesting and you want to like him, but Alberico is just a bully. Alessan's stated goal is to defeat both at the same time, so neither will get the upper hand, but by the end of the novel, it seems a terrible shame and a waste that Brandin can't get past his hatred for his son's killers enough to do something more positive with his power: "He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored him in life, he was here among an alien people he had conquered, asking for their aid, needing their belief in him."

But Alessan's goals are always the ones that seem most important, to the other characters, and to the reader. He is the one who says (he's still in his early twenties, mind) "I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone."

So when Alessan triumphs and both Alberico and Brandin fall, I rejoice, except for the very long shadow that the secret about Alessan's father, the King of Tigana, casts over the ending. I hate the character of Scelto, Dianora's loyal servant. I hate him with a fiery and enduring passion, because he is the one who decides not to tell the King's story. I'd like to believe it is to make sure that all feuds are ended, but I think it is simply despair, and therefore unworthy of its place in the ending of such a long and powerful saga.

Tigana is a well-told tale. I found it reliably absorbing every time I picked it up, until I couldn't put it down anymore.

The Air

2011-04-25T08:42:00.000-04:00

Usually if I have a bit of time on the weekend, I write up a review of whatever book I've finished the week before and set it to post on Monday morning. But this is tech week for the high school musical--opening night is this Thursday--and I haven't quite finished the book I was reading last week. Mostly I've been reading poems, because I found some new volumes at the college library.

One of those volumes is Rae Armantrout's Money Shot. A lot of the poems seem a little spare to me, like there should be more to them. But this one--this one seems to me to be about precisely the situation I'm in this Monday morning. I see it as a poem about not having much to say, but looking for a way to say something anyway:

The Air

1
Our first gods
were cartoon characters--

quirks and quarks--
each dead
wrong,
and immortal.

2
Silence is death
and
silence is dead-air.

Give a meme
a hair-do.

Give it a split-screen.

Make it ask itself
the wrong question.

Make it eat questions
and grow long.

Especially after reading a lot of blogger responses to the "four things meme" lately, I like the lines "make it ask itself/the wrong question." What exactly is the wrong question when you're just looking for something to say? The pointed question? The important question? Or maybe just a question that's mildly amusing and makes people want to know more?

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-04-22T07:26:00.001-04:00

Children's: What author's Just So Stories explain how the leopard got his spots and how the elephant got his trunk?

Classics: Whose famed diaries were originally published as Het Achterhuis, or The House Behind?

Non-Fiction: What book by John F. Kennedy probed moments of integrity by senators like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster?

Book Club: What Robert Olen Butler tale stars a hairless, 16-toed alien who mates with an Alabama beautician?

Authors: Who promised Book magazine that Blood Canticle would be her last novel about "people who were damned or who were condemned"?

Book Bag: What brooding albino swordman is emperor of Melnibone in Michael Moorcock's epic saga?

My New American Life

2011-04-21T08:44:00.005-04:00

I loved After and was less enthusiastic about Goldengrove, so when Harper offered to send me an advance copy of the new novel by Francine Prose, I said yes, send me My New American Life. And the verdict? While I'm never sorry to have read anything by Francine Prose, because she's a good writer and a smart person, this one doesn't address national issues as well as I hoped it would, and as well as I thought After did.

The novel tells the story of Lula, an Albanian girl who came to New York City on a tourist visa and has been spinning tales about her native land as part of her effort to find a way into the American Dream. For the suburban New Jersey dad she calls Mr. Stanley who hires her to watch over his son Zach, a high school senior, she tells folk tales and goes along with the assumption that she is a war refugee. For Zach she tells stories about rebellious teenagers. For the Albanians she sees in New Jersey, Lula tries to tell a tale of her American success, but since none of them believe that success comes without some kind of sinister price tag, they see no real opportunity to capture that elusive American Dream, no house in the suburbs that isn't haunted by the failures of its former occupants.

The darkness and emptiness that are so integral to this story make the story itself feel underpopulated and flat. Here's Prose reading a one-minute segment from her novel. You can see that she believes in its satiric potential, but I don't see that the satiric moments ever coalesce into a meaningful whole.

The moments are interesting and amusing enough to sustain a reader, however. Especially early on in the novel, Lula's "teaching moments" with Zach are wonderful, like this one:

Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening news, educational for them both. The president had come on the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird flu. The word avian was hard for him. His forehead stitched each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he'd been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.
'At home,' Lula marveled, 'that man is a god.'
'You say that every night,' Zeke said.
'I'm reminding myself,' she'd said. Her country's love affair with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescuing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's death squads. Even at home she'd had her doubts about the streets paved with gold, but when she finally got to New York and started working at La Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feelings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula's opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.
Yesterday night, as always, she'd felt sorry for the president, so like a dim little boy who'd told a lie that had set off a war, and then he'd let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice president, who scared Lula too, with his cold little eyes not blinking when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.
'There is no bird flu,' Lula had told Zeke. 'A war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a sore throat and a fever.'
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York subway system.
Lula said 'There is no threat.'
'How do you know everything?' Zeke asked. 'Not that I don't agree it's all bullshit.'
She'd been about to tell Zeke--again!--about having grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha, who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he'd had built in a country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a chance to repeat herself, she'd been distracted by an advertisement for the new season of ER.
'Look, Zeke,' she'd said, 'see that gurney rushing in and doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at you till you figure out who to pay off.'

It seems to me that the delights of the satire in that passage are offset by the childishness of the caricature of the president, and so like all partisan political rants, the novel is going to end up preaching--to the extent that it succeeds in preaching at all--to the choir. Lula becomes less of an interesting character, and more of a liberal mouthpiece.

She's a canny operator at all times:
"She wanted to give him a consoling pat on the shoulder, but she never touched Mister Stanley, and she didn't want to start now, both of them weakened in body and spirit, both perhaps seeking relief from the damage that alcohol had inflicted on their bodies. Mister Stanley wasn't the type of guy to hit on the nanny, but every guy was a hangover away from being that type of guy. Even a friendly shoulder squeeze was a door best left unopened."
After enough passages like that, it gets harder for me to work up much sympathy for what Lula wants, and cheer for her to get it--she's looking out for herself, and she doesn't need anybody else.

As she gets more sarcastic, she gets funnier, but seems more two-dimensional, so that passages like this one--which should hit me right where I live (and work)--bounce off without much effect except a wry smile:
"It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world."

By the time Lula and Mister Stanley take Zeke to visit a fictional college called Alice Ames, the satire has stopped working. Lula's musings, at this point, are the ravings of someone who is becoming unhinged by months of boredom and disappointment:
"It had tickled her to see Americans taken in by the sort of scam people thought happened only in Eastern Europe. If she had a dollar for every La Changita customer who told her about not being allowed to drive his rental car to Prague because it might get stolen, she wouldn't have had to work there. But now that she'd come to care about Zeke and Mister Stanley, she'd lost the ironic remove from which she watched Americans get conned, and she hoped that Alice Adams was not a dirty trick cynically named after some grifter's favorite hooker."

Satire requires a delicate hand, and Francine Prose is almost good enough to do it well. So even though this isn't the satire about what has happened to The American Dream that I might have been hoping for, it's as close as anyone else has come since Miss Saigon, another "see ourselves as others see us" kind of satire, and it makes an interesting companion volume to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. My New American Life will be available--in bookstores--on Tuesday, April 26.

Antilamentation

2011-04-19T08:37:00.001-04:00

Sometimes how you've come to be reading a poem is part of the pleasure. Last week I was carrying around a volume of poetry while I ushered some very important guests around campus, and when I had a few minutes, I would perch somewhere and read one or two of the poems. On the second day of this, I perched on the side of some cold, concrete steps in front of the Admissions building, where people come and go so quickly, and read this poem by Dorianne Laux, out of her volume entitled The Book of Men:

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit signs on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

And there I was, twenty years later, sitting in a highly visible spot on a campus where I have not achieved fame and fortune, reading this poem and laughing because I'd picked up an onion ring someone dropped on the floor of the dining hall the night before and crying because it was a bright, sunny morning and the rest of my life was all spread before me as soon as my campus visitors opened the door onto those concrete steps.

Every poem in the volume is just about as glorious as that one, and it's one of my recommendations for this year's poetry award over at the Indie Lit Awards, where you should go and nominate it if it made you laugh and cry, too.

One Thousand White Women

2011-04-18T06:24:00.001-04:00

One day when I was looking for birthday gift ideas in the YA section of a bookstore owned by a local children's writer, Bonnie Pryor, she recommended a novel to me, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus. I added it to my pile of books, brought it home, and let it get buried underneath books from the library and others with more urgent deadlines. Then a few weeks ago, looking for something different to read, I unearthed it and read it in a couple of sittings.

The premise of the novel is taken from an actual historical event; in the preface, we are told that
"in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world--a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes' request was not well received by the white authorities--the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do."

At the beginning, I thought the novel was going to consist of Chief Seattle-type propaganda about the noble Native American. The Cheyenne Chief who asks President Ulysses S. Grant for the women explains that "we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People" and proposes the idea of intermarriage so that the white women can "teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone." But the novel becomes more a portrait of a vanished way of life, with the character of May Dodd as interpreter, rather than apologist.

Although I grew up near a state park called Trail of Tears in memory of the Cherokee who died crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1838 (including the "Princess Otahki"), I've never had any experience of prejudice against Native Americans, and have always regarded it as something that existed only in the past. This novel explains some of the prejudice on both sides by showing how May, who grows to love the Cheyenne, experiences hatred from both "civilized folks" and "savages."

Although May does continually praise things like "how cunningly and perfectly these native people had folded themselves into the earth" and criticizes "the white man" for "his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up," she doesn't venerate the Cheyenne blindly, but frequently challenges their "male only" rules and laments their "pitifully low tolerance" for alcohol.

Both the love affair May has with a white man, Captain Bourke, and the love she feels for her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, help her see the deep gulf that lies between their different views of the world:
"According to Captain Bourke...the only true hope for the advancement of the savage is to teach him that he must give up this allegiance to the tribe and look towards his own individual welfare. This is necessary, Bourke claims, in order that he may function effectively in the 'individualized civilization' of the Caucasian world. To the Cheyenne such a concept remains completely foreign--the needs of the People, the tribe, and above all the family within the tribe are placed always before those of the individual. In this regard they live somewhat like the ancient clans of Scotland. The selflessness of my husband, Little Wolf, for instance, strikes me as most noble and something that hardly requires 'correction' by civilized society. In support of his own thesis, the Captain uses the unfortunate example of the Indians who have been pressed into service as scouts for the U.S. Army. These men are rewarded for their efforts as good law-abiding citizens--paid wages, fed, clothed, and generally cared for. The only requirement of their employment, their allegiance to the white father, is that they betray their own people and their own families...I fail to see the nobility or the advantage of such individualized private initiative..."

The way the story is told--with an introduction by a fictional male descendent of May Dodd's, a prologue based on the historical meeting of President Grant with a Cheyenne Chief, and an afterward about the journals kept by May-- gives the story a feeling of authenticity and preserves some of the flavor of the antiquated diction that Fergus uses so well for "Dodd's" writing. I was surprised to be reminded, at the end, that this novel was written by a male author, so deeply had I been immersed in the female point of view.

The greatest strength of this novel is characterization; these well-realized characters will live in your memory for a long time after you've been drawn into their stories.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-04-15T08:18:00.000-04:00

Children's: What classic book, credited to the mythical "Wally Piper," was later discovered to be adapted from an earlier story titled The Pony Engine?

Classics: What Shakespearean comedy includes the chilling stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear"?

Non-Fiction: Who charts her transformation from church choir singer to disco queen sex goddess, in her memoir Ordinary Girl?

Book Club: How many people does Eddie meet in heaven, according to Mitch Albom's 2003 novel?

Authors: Who came out of hiding to record a clip for The Simpsons, where he appeared with a bag over his head?

Book Bag: What novelist introduced the FBI-agent couple Dillon Savich and Lacy Sherlock in The Cove?

(I'll bet the guy who writes Exit, Pursued by a Bear knows one today!)

Toads

2011-04-13T19:12:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking about Philip Larkin's poem "Toads" this week, because the toad called work is squatting on my life.

I am engaged in an endeavor that will either make my work life a lot better, or get me out of this line of work entirely (so I'm also thinking of Iago saying "this is the night that either makes me, or fordoes me quite").

Here is Larkin's poem:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison--
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folks live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts--
they don't end as paupers;

Lots of folks live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines--
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets--and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Even a 1/6-time job can be hard to lose. So I'm hunkering down.

The Maypole

2011-04-12T09:38:00.001-04:00

We had a warm day here on Sunday, and now the lilacs in back and the apple tree in front are all leafed out, and the grass is turning green. I was leafing through a new volume of poetry by Linda Pastan and found this one that's just right for the time of year, a reply to one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems, The Snow Man:

The Maypole
after Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of spring
to regard the cherry tree burdened
with blossom;

and have been warm for days
to behold the boughs of the redbud
prickly with color in the glint

of the April sun; and not to think
of any cruelty in the difficult birthing
of so many leaves, to feel only pure

elation at the sound of the undulant breeze
which is the sound of every garden
with a breeze blowing among its flowers,

the sound the listener hears, watching the buds
which were not quite here a week ago
pushing up from oblivion now.

Since we're still in the middle of "the cruelest month," it rained yesterday and got cold again last night. Our elderly gentleman rabbit who spent most of the winter in our dining room is still coming in at night, because the breeze is still more of a cold wind. But there are a lot of buds. It looks like there are good things to come.

Chess

2011-04-11T06:18:00.000-04:00

One of the four books I brought along to Walker's chess tournament this weekend, the Ohio high school championship, was Stefan Zweig's novella entitled, simply, Chess. I had read about it at Farm Lane Books and probably some other blogs, too, but as usual I can't remember which ones. Anyway, it sounded like a good addition to my chess tournament book pile, a kind of psychological thriller that had to do with a game of chess.

I pulled it out at the end of the first evening, when I was looking for something new to distract me from the nail-biting end of a long game that eventually turned out to be a draw. It took me twenty or thirty minutes to read the entire novella, and afterwards I had time to sit there amid the empty tables set with chessboards, still waiting for the outcome of one of the last three games in the room.

One of the things I've said about chess recently that earned me the stern, nodding agreement of my resident chess expert is that it's a little bit like law, in that if you know the precedent, you can use that to win. The resident chess expert (I'm using the term "expert" in a technical sense, as he's now rated 2065 by the U.S. Chess Federation and therefore falls into that category; only "master" is higher) reads a lot of books about chess, so he has an advantage over other young players who may have had more experience playing games. He can look at algebraic and other kinds of chess notations and picture a chess game, and he's learned to see the results of many possible moves all the way to the end game. This is fairly routine for chess players at his level.

So when I read Zweig's story about a man who, in solitary confinement by the Gestapo, finds a chess book and teaches himself to picture the board and all the possible moves by players on each side, it did not strike me as terribly odd. That it drives him to a state he calls "chess poisoning" did strike me as a little odd, but perhaps not under the circumstances. The interest of the book, for me, ended up being in its historical significance, not in terms of what it had to say about chess.

There were a couple of interesting and, I thought, accurate observations for laypeople:
"I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet's verses from only a few lines."

This is certainly true, even at the high school level; each player knows his opponents and has studied their moves in previous games. Sitting in a room with high school chess players yesterday, I overheard a conversation that included the information that "so-and-so usually opens with King's Indian," which is a series of moves that has its own name and methods of counter-attack.

The other interesting bit, for me, was one that echoed my situation as I read the passage:
"But to be perfectly honest, the gradual development of the situation was something of a disappointment to us laymen, as it is in every real tournament game. For the more the chessmen became interlocked in a strange, intricate formation, the more impenetrable did the real state of affairs seem to us. We couldn't tell what either of the opponents intended, or which of the two really held the advantage. We just noticed individual pieces being advanced like levers to break through the enemy front, but we were unable--since with these first-class players every movement was always combined several moves in advance--to see the strategic intention in all this toing and froing."

I was told (by other players) that the draw at the end of the day was slightly disappointing for Walker, since he had a "superior position" for most of the game and was "ahead on time." His opponent, however, did not make any mistakes.

The only thing I can ever tell about Walker's game when I walk into the tournament room is that if he's walking up and down and smiling, he has a--sometimes momentary--advantage. If he's sitting down holding his head in his hands and looking stern, it's business as usual. As in poker, good players put on a "chess face." And parents try to strike the right balance between supporting the tournament play and letting the players alone.

Walker played good chess all weekend. He drew with the highest-rated player (a 12th-grader who speaks Russian to his chess teacher) and they were both in a 5-way tie for first, which was decided according to an arcane and precise method of "tie-breaker" points, according to which the 12th-grader came in first, and Walker came in second. His friend who went into this tournament with the exact same rating and who shares the Ohio 10th-grade championship with him, came in third. Walker has an embarrassingly big trophy and is happy because he played well, winning four games and drawing two.

After the awarding of the trophy, we went out to dinner with the family of Walker's chess student, Joe, and Walker replayed one of his games at the restaurant table to show Joe what happened and why. Then we drove home, and Eleanor played a song from the musical "Chess" in Walker's honor so we could all sing along: "one town's very like another when your head's down over your pieces, brother."

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-04-08T08:20:00.000-04:00

Children's: What John Reynolds Gardiner tale tells of a lad's science project that turns him green and leafy, and the Feds who want him kept in the dark?

Classics: What J.D. Salinger novel drew its title from a misquoted Robert Burns line?

Non-Fiction: What U.S. government agency saw its dirty laundry aired by former employees in the tell-alls In Search of Enemies and Inside the Company?

Book Club: What biblical patriarch stars in Joseph Heller's God Knows?

Authors: What best-selling self-help author is, according to fellow psychologist Robert Butterworth, "like your mama, without hair"?

Book Bag: Which of John Grisham's first 10 novels did not have a title beginning with the word "The"?

American Fear

2011-04-07T08:49:00.000-04:00

Harriet mailed me some volumes of poetry that arrived last week, and one of the volumes is so suited to my current temperament that I suspect her of picking it out especially. It's about gratitude and wonder, but also fear. It's funny on the way to being even more serious. By Robert Wrigley, it's entitled Beautiful Country, and the epigraph accurately forecasts the tone of the entire volume: "This is a beautiful country."--John Brown, seated on his coffin, as he rode to the gallows, December 2, 1859.

My favorite poem in this volume, the one that made me laugh out loud several times, is "American Fear." It's about the things we fear, and how they're connected to the things we love... written from the point of view of someone who loves words and poems. I thought that even those of you who suffer from a mild case of metrophobia (fear of poetry) would enjoy it.

American Fear
"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright."--Robert Frost

What it is is a company selling "clothing
for the disaffected youth culture."
T-shirts and sweatshirts, mostly black,
someone's marketing vision for a new world,
a twenty-first-century Henry ("You can have
any color you want so long as it's black") Ford,
that old-time anti-Semite, his once nearly bankrupt
namesake corporation supplanted by this other.

A button on the Web site reads "Ready to Order Fear,"
but everywhere you look it's free: fear of wolves,
bulls, and bears: fear of the sun, fear of that one
or this one, fear that all it takes is one. Storm fear,
house fear, fear of frost. Fear of gravity is barophobia.
But there's also Cape Fear, Camp Fear,
and Fear Mountain: you can visit those. There's fear
of God, fear of the odd; fear of night, fear of air.

Fear of hair is chaetophobia. Eleutherophobia's fear of freedom.
There's First Encounter Assault Recon,
"a survival horror first-person shooter developed
by Monolith Productions and published by Vivendi,"
a video game, a generation's modus vivendi, a way of living
in which we agree to disagree violently.
Ephebiphobia is the fear of teenagers; melanophobia,
fear of the color black; caligynephobia,

fear of beautiful women; and anthrophobia, fear
of flowers. You can spend hours on a list like this.
Pantophobia is the fear of everything. After
230-odd years the republic crawls
through its slow-motion youth, democracy requiring not
only equality but a vast sameness many fear,
as some fear guns and others fear their guns
will be taken away, their beautiful guns,

poetry in them, shining assemblages of articulate parts
in which ammo is the main idea. Consider the idea
that a thing can be beyond perfection, as in a more perfect
union, as in the sky and its endlessness
--astrophobia, that's called: the fear of stars
and celestial space. As for fear of oblivion,
there is no word for it. Come home late, Robert Frost
rattled the key in the lock and left the door open

until a light was on, a way of allowing what was inside out.
Later, on his farmhouse porch, Frost trembling,
frightened of the dark, a shotgun in his hands. He thought
he could talk Khrushchev into nuclear disarmament
(nucleomituphobia, bomb fear) and sulked because
JFK didn't call him back. The fear of poetry
is metrophobia, and melophobes fear music, cringing
at the ballgame through "God Bless America."

Regarding the disaffected, the OED suggest they lack
first of all affection. Put that with logophobia,
the fear of words, and philophobia, the fear of love.
Parthenophobia is the fear of virgin girls. WTF
is internet slang and the initials of the World Taekwondo
Federation, member of the International Olympic Committee.
Why is there no word for the fear of committees,
which are so much to be feared? Fear of Germany

is teutophobia. Vestiphobia is the fear of clothing.
The fear of flags is vexiphobia. On American Fear's
logo, you can find the flag's stripes resembling a bar code.
Gringophobia is the fear of Americans, the ones
who fear America ends far north of Tierra del Fuego.
Fear of a white god is leukotheophobia. A snowclone
is a "cliche or phrasal template, multiuse, customizable,
instantly recognizable, timeworn, and open

to an array of variants"--as in, What Would Henry Ford Do?
American Fear's best-selling design:
a mandible-less skull enwreathed by bullets, bunting,
and feathers, on a base of fifties-befinned bombs.
There is no word for the fear of growing up,
though gerascophobia is the fear
of growing old, and old men fear not
how others might read them by their clothes.

Kings wear robes and senators wear suits. The word senator
comes from the Latin senex, meaning "old man,"
and gerontophobia is the fear of old people.
Chronophobia is the fear of time.
Some old men do not wear T-shirts,
because putting one on can be exhausting
and taking it off worse. Imagine fearing a shirt.
Why is there a word like bathysiderodromophobia?

Subways are beautiful in their tunnels and troughs,
their soiled, palatial stations. "Go in fear of abstractions,"
Pound said. He suffered not from metrophobia,
but from madness. "To fear" in Italian is temere.
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross,"
wrote Pound. "Better to go down dignified
with boughten friendship at your side than none at all,"
wrote Frost. He had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Among American Fear's other shirt designs, one called
"Your Pretty Death Bed," a young woman,
her wrists slashed, looking asleep and covered
by the Stars and Stripes. There is no word
for the fear our daughters will commit suicide
beneath a patriotic blanket. Robert Frost's son, Carol,
shot himself with a deer rifle on October 9, 1940.
"I took the wrong way with him" wrote Frost,

who would outlive all but two of his six children.
A citizen opposes the reintroduction of gray wolves
to the American wilderness, because they are Canadian,
as though they might harbor within their genes
a disinclination for revolution and a soft spot
for the queen. Freddie Mercury was a gay British genius,
and homophobic sports teams all across the nation sing his
"We Are the Champions." He's number 50

among the 100 Greatest Britons, four slots ahead
of George Harrison, twelve ahead of Jane Austen,
and a whopping twenty-three in front of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Ronald Reagan is number one on the American list.
The only poet in the top twenty-five is Muhammad Ali,
who comes in just above Rosa Parks but well behind
Elvis, whose pelvis was censored from the television screen.
No word for the fear of free speech,

but a man was not allowed to board a flight at JFK
because his T-shirt, in Arabic and English, read,
"We will not be silent." American Fear's shirts
will not alarm the Transportation Security Administration,
also called the TSA. The fear of silence is sedatephobia.
The TSA is also the Tourette Syndrome Association,
and based on Boswell's descriptions it is theorized
that Samuel Johnson suffered from the malady,

making frequent odd grunts and muttering
under his breath "too, too, too" meaning also
and yes and more, meaning many,
meaning he meant to know all the words,
and the problem with all is everything. All men, all words,
all fears. This beautiful, fearful,
and fearsome country, such as it is,
such as it might yet, someday, become.

Bathysiderodromophobia, by the way, is fear of the subway, which the poet reveals in the next line.

I was laughing out loud about the "fear that our daughters will commit suicide" and the bit about Freddie Mercury. Also, I love the word "ephebiphobia" and think I will be using it frequently over the next month.

After I read "American Fear" I went on to the next poem according to the way I was reading through the volume, which was backwards. "A Rumor of Bears" left me with tears in my eyes. And then I got to the title poem, "Beautiful Country," and "thought about what was wrong and more wrong" but ended up being "promised another day when everything would be better," courtesy of what has become of the American military since Vietnam. And I kept reading and becoming more like Wrigley's picture of Johnson, thinking "also/and yes and more, meaning many,/meaning he meant to know all the words."

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

2011-04-06T10:29:00.003-04:00

Being an adjunct isn't all bad. That's one of the conclusions drawn by the "accidental academic" who wrote In the Basement of the Ivory Tower about his own experiences doing what I have done for the past 27 years, trying to teach first-year college students to write and to enjoy some of the fiction and essays that are put into Introduction to Literature anthologies.

I found the book completely unsurprising, a little discouragingly so, since it seems that things are tough all over, and in pretty much the same way. Nowhere does anyone really know what an adjunct does in the classroom. Nowhere is an adjunct able to turn to a colleague for advice, and infrequent workshops on things like "Learner-Centered Assessment" are little help. Everywhere adjuncts get exactly the same kinds of comments on course evaluations: "before I would of never voluntarily read a book" and the teacher is "enthusiastic...which helps make the three hours go by quicker."

This book was written after the June 2008 article in The Atlantic made such waves, spurring criticism of the anonymity of "Professor X" and much caviling (mostly from the tenured) about the observations he makes about the classes no one else wants to teach or even knows very much about.

What he says about the isolation in which he works rings true to me: "I have worked as an adjunct instructor now for a decade. I have been observed twice, once by each school." I myself have worked as a teaching assistant and then an adjunct instructor for four different colleges over the past 27 years. As a TA, I was observed once, the semester I began teaching. As an adjunct, I was observed for the length of one 50-minute class by two of the three colleges I worked for during the first semester I worked there. (At the other one, I received a phone call from the hospital bed where I had landed after an emergency to verify that I wouldn't be teaching that week, so the personnel department could "adjust" my pay). As Professor X observes, "no one sees what goes on except the students, and their judgments are fallible."

My favorite part of the adjunct discussion is always the obligatory point at which a tenured faculty member declares passionately that the college is "taking advantage" of the adjuncts and not paying them enough, which, as "Professor X" points out, strikes the adjunct as "not honest but smug."

My least favorite part, the part this book explains very well, is the despair that writing teachers witness and perpetuate. "Unsuccessful students grow up thinking not just that their work has no value, but that it never can have any value, and thus they cannot put in the wholehearted effort that college demands." So what they write, as he says, is full of the "commonplace...and the lack of ideas makes for a prose that churns in place. The reading assignments are attempts to "make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading." Many of the students hand in work that is "just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end." The attempt to grade these assignments "rankles and depresses" Professor X, who knows that "when I give a failing grade to a student, I am not just passing judgment on some abstract intellectual exercise. I am impeding that student's progress, thwarting his ambition, keeping him down, committing the universal crime of messing with his livelihood--not to mention forcing him to pay the tuition charge all over again....any poor grade I issue may mean disastrous economic consequences."

And as he says, "we're not talking nuance here. My students who fail do so with an intensity that is operatic." He talks about giving quizzes on whether characters are alive or dead at the end of the work. I didn't know this was universal but am not surprised; I have a quiz in my files entitled "Othello killer quiz" on which there are three questions: Who kills Desdemona? Who kills Emilia? and the last one, the sort-of-trick question: Who kills Othello?

The parts of this book I like best are when he talks about the details of teaching writing, how it's easy to spend "40 minutes on the first paragraph" and how "writing is thinking." It's hard work, teaching writing. It can be immensely satisfying, but it's exhausting, walking others through all those turns and twists of logic and suggesting ways to find evidence for it. Writing teachers, who are like computing experts and medical doctors in being continually asked by friends and loved ones for a little help on the side, are always having to balance their exhaustion with their fondness for the petitioner.

The parts of the book I find least convincing include his conclusion about who should be in college and who shouldn't. Oddly enough, in a book fighting against all sorts of elitist ideas, I found his views a bit elitist. It's true that for some of the students we adjuncts see "the classes are more difficult than they could have dreamed, and there is simply no time to complete all the work," but I disagree that this means those students might not belong in college at all. If it means anything to me (as a person who's gotten out of the game rather than try to reform it), it means that 15-week semesters are too short for writing classes...and I speak as someone who tried to do that kind of work with students during a 10-week quarter.

There are several other things I don't agree with Professor X about. He tries to teach students to write the "composition," something "built, crafted, worked on, composed." I favor teaching the essay--a piece of writing that is a trial or attempt from a personal point of view--because I'm more interested in teaching critical thinking than in teaching the craft of writing.

I don't necessarily think that using Aristotle's various invention techniques, so often featured in composition textbooks as assignments in themselves (narrative, description, compare/contrast, analysis, cause and effect) is the best way to teach writing in college. I find it curious that Professor X doesn't even question the set-up of what I like to call the course in "writing without content," even when he cogently describes the complications inherent in helping students come up with a topic for a research paper. However interested he may be in the topic of the research, it's still a paper for which the research doesn't really matter. It's what he talks about elsewhere, a paper in which the content is not important, but proving that the student can follow the steps is the whole point of the exercise. I think that this kind of assignment is one of the problems with the way we teach writing in college today. Who wants to write for a grader? College students, like other humans, want to write something that will be read. There are ways to balance the requirement that writing be graded with the necessity of finding ways to read some of it, but Professor X doesn't seem to have discovered any of these yet.

Professor X confesses that his acquaintance with the guidelines for teaching writing put out by Writing Program Administrators and his reading of some of the experts in the field of rhetoric and composition is quite recent (since the Atlantic article came out), but he tries to draw conclusions from it anyway, as if anyone who actually goes to graduate school to learn this stuff is wasting their time, even admitting that he "was looking for some magic, for a tool kit." A writing teacher should know that there are no shortcuts.

I don't agree that "women are more empathetic than men" as adjuncts (and wonder why someone who presumably teaches the avoidance of generalization in writing would include one like that in his own writing).

And finally, I wonder why he includes the story of one plagiarizing student only to illustrate the danger he feels alone with such students at night in the "basement," rather than to discuss any of the issues a writer might find interesting about the wide range of options for paper-writing by hire available on the internet today.

I admire Professor X for starting this discussion, and hope that it doesn't end with this one book. There's a lot more to say about this topic, and I applaud his bravery in caring enough to stand up and tell it like it is for one of the people who other Professors don't usually notice except to say what a shame it is that so much of our higher education system depends on his hard work, conscientiousness, and enthusiasm for his subject matter.

Shadow Box

2011-04-05T05:04:00.004-04:00

Fred Chappell's volume entitled Shadow Box contains poems reminiscent of the cleverness of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets because of the way he both incorporates and reinvents form. Each part of the volume (there are five) has a prefatory note explaining what kinds of experiments with form the reader will find therein.

Part One contains "poems-within-poems (enclosed, inlaid, embedded, double, nested)" including "curtal sonnets in which sestets are embedded in octaves." This is the best part of the volume, and the longest section. My favorites from it are "Neverland," "A Face in the Crowd," and "Narcissus and Echo," in addition to this one, a curtal sonnet:

Stopping by the Old Homestead

The Interstate is audible from here.
Five miles east, its low, autonomous hum
disturbs the stillness that then stood, the calm
you found when you came here last time, eight years
ago, climbing the same hard road you toiled
in youth that slants a steeper grade today,
this path by the twisted apple tree whose shadow
tensely holds a darker tone. You breathe
harder than when you stopped to see this farm
back then, where claims your life had made against
the future and never paid to own decayed.
Old times shriveled and largely gone, you think,
and trudge all down the hill to find your Chevy
rust-eaten, blind, jacked up on cinder blocks.

You see how the octave (the first eight lines) has a sestet (six lines) within it, consisting of the italicized words? And then the last six lines, the traditional sestet, has a quatrain consisting of italicized words within it, like half an octave. And isn't it lovely how the back and forth within the logical progression of the sonnet moves us in time as the speaker pictures "you" moving down the hill?

Part Two contains poems which "center upon visual images," of which I think the one entitled "Fireflies" is the loveliest. The poet gets a little too cute alluding to Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" with "Anecdote of the Ironweed," at least for my taste.

Part Three contains "reliquary" poems. This one, I think, is the most finely-turned, the best-sculpted:

Pearl

Her hands were gentle about the ills of children,
Her speech was measured amid the quarrels of kinfolk.
She held the sorrow that had grown unspoken
Till it was perfect as a sphere, a token
Of her secret, with a light that shone within
And stood, in an undropped tear, a sign
Of what enwrapped itself upon the wound
Again, layer on nacreous layer, around
The hurt till it transformed to stone, mild jewel
Priceless, modest, calm, and pure and cool.

Here lies the lucent Pearl on black sateen
That shall not often enrobe her like again.

Don't you like the eulogy of the woman in her coffin, and the image of the pearl within?

Part Four is "counterpoint," and this is the section in which you'll find the title poem, a debate between body and soul with a tribute to Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall" embedded in it ("Poor Ghost, you are no more than guess"). Flesh and spirit take turns surrounding meaning, culminating with a memorable resonance for the words "sheltering" and "grave."

Part Five is a section "in which ancient Christian Latin hymns provide context and subject matter." This is my least favorite section, and it is the shortest. One poem, elaborating on "noctium phantasmata," can't resist the reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"A strumpet image appears in guise
Of Love once lost to compromise;
A taloned Fury in sharp silhouette
Advances, by moonlight ill met."

These four lines are particularly disappointing after my interest has been roused by the wording in previous lines, where "spectral accusers demand/ empathies he cannot profess."

Overall, although there are some moments in the volume that strike me as clunky--mostly to do with literary allusion--there are many lovely moments in these finely-crafted and clever little poems. This is a book I will pick up and occasionally reread with pleasure, finding another turn of phrase to admire, another hidden shadow within these nested boxes.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-04-01T08:51:00.000-04:00

Children's: What name did Russell and Lillian Hoban bestow upon their heroic badger?

Classics: What novels' seven commandments include: "Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy" and "No animal shall wear clothes"?

Non-Fiction: What personal-finance guru promises to give folks The Courage to Be Rich along The Road to Wealth?

Book Club: What Barbara Kingsolver novel gives Kentuckian Taylor Greer a flat tire just a few blocks away from Tucson, Arizona's Jesus is Lord Used Tires?

Authors: Who churned out thrillers under the name John Lange, to pay his Harvard Medical School tuition?

Book Bag: What Mark Leyner novel concerns a seventh-grader named Mark Leyner who is reviewing a screenplay called The Tetherballs of Bougainville?

Spring Awakening

2011-03-31T10:01:00.006-04:00

We took a spring break road trip to Huntington, West Virginia to see a performance of the touring musical Spring Awakening, and it was well worth the time, effort, and expense. We knew the music, but it's always better to see a musical's songs performed in context and it turned out we were missing a good bit of the story by conjecturing what happened between songs. The real show-stopper, of course, is the song Totally Fucked, which I had previously dismissed as trying to be shocking by using a needlessly vulgar word, but I was wrong. At the moment the action of the play freezes and the male lead begins to sing, there's really no other word that would better describe his situation. Here's a video of Jon Groff performing the song on Broadway, but the touring lead, Chris Wood, was even better, I thought, expressing more of his pent-up adolescent male rage and pain with leaps and jerks that added up to one of the most impressive physical performances I've ever seen on stage.

The story is loosely based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 play entitled Spring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy. The translator, Jonathan Franzen, points out in a preface, that the play is "casually and thoroughly amoral" and objects to the way the musical has "maimed" it. I think this is the argument of someone who loved the play first and so misses the point of the musical. Franzen's criticism of a sub-plot in which one of Wendla's friends reveals that she has been sexually abused by her father particularly misses the point, which is that this is a musical making fun of parents who think they own their children.

Wendla's accidental pregnancy is a reflection on her mother's attempt to shelter her by refusing to tell her the facts of life (and her eventual murder by back-street abortion doctor is a discouragingly timely comment on this week's abortion-outlawing effort in Ohio). Moritz's failure at school is a failure for his father, who had bigger ambitions for him (the kind of parental ownership that hits closest to home for me, the feeling that if a child gets into a good college, graduates, and has a successful career, that the parents get some of the credit). The sexual abuse of one girl is just another indicator that these parents think their children belong to them, with some pontificating about how "the Lord won't mind" on the side, the pontificating mostly unheard as "blah blah blah."

Parental ownership extends, as it does in our society today, to the schools, which are run like prisons, with children in uniforms, all learning the same thing with no room (or time) for interpretation, and with overly strict discipline. I found the schoolboys' songs most effective, with their literally knee-jerk rhythms, as each one is another effort to express questions and viewpoints for which they get no answers, no guidance. Hanschen's masturbation to Othello read out loud is a comical and quite effective salvo in the boys' battle against the "in loco parentis" tactics of their school/prison system (not merely a sex for sensationalism scene, as Franzen asserts).

There's always a reason for revivals, and this one is a punch in the face to a supposedly adult society in which adolescents are discouraged from thinking or acting for themselves, in which they are sheltered long past the point of reason, their vibrant physical promise squandered, their ideas born secretly and alone, and too often left to die.

It's another version of one of William Blake's Songs of Experience, The Garden of Love:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

A Position at the University

2011-03-29T11:18:00.001-04:00

We are off on a road trip this afternoon. I don't know that West Virginia would have been my chosen destination for either live theater or getting out of Ohio for a day, but that's the way things work sometimes.

I leave you with the news that I am definitely going to be reading Professor X's new book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower when it comes out on Thursday (see his interview). The interview and comments, with what I see as the circularity of the arguments about why he has to be anonymous and how the tenured don't get that, make me think of this prose poem by Lydia Davis:

A Position at the University

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

Enough of that nonsense, I say! On to some other nonsense, adolescent yammerings about sex and freedom (Spring Awakening).

Fun Reading

2011-03-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

It's spring break for the kids' school, and we celebrated Walker's birthday on Saturday at a chess tournament, so now a bunch of deadlines have been met and all we have to do is catch up on our sleep and play with the new toys.

Because there were so many deadlines in the last week or two, my reading time was spent on amusement. I read the next few Kage Baker novels about the Company. The parts about what we're like in the future from Sky Coyote were good satiric touches, I thought, and I loved the philosophizing about the meaning of time for immortals in Mendoza in Hollywood. My favorite so far is The Graveyard Game, where much of the overarching plot of the story is played out, with scenes like one in which two immortals appear to get drunk on hot chocolate in a public place and the discovery of what really happened to that ninth Roman legion.

Then I topped off the reading week by finding Alexander McCall Smith's new Mma Ramotswe novel, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, on the seven-day-loan shelf at the library, which meant I had to read it right away. I was quite in the mood for the slow pace and simple plot, with asides like:
"So might we fail to see the real sadness that lies behind the acts of others; so might we look at one of our fellow men going about his business and not know of the sorrow that he is feeling, the effort that he is making, the things that he has lost."
Mma Makutsi gets married to Phuti Radiphuti in a pair of really good shoes in this one, so it was entirely satisfactory.

Now we have a bookshelf to put together--to hold all the chess books Walker got for his birthday--a schedule of movies to watch, an excursion to see a musical called Spring Awakening, and pet-sitting duties for the kids. We also have some bags of books that Eleanor found at a used book store to fill out some of her list of books she wants her own copies of to take off to college, so I see some bookshelf arranging in our immediate future. She already had her own copies of the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books, the Harry Potter books, and the Borribles. Now she also has the first three Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, The Thief Lord, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, A Wrinkle in Time, Summerland, Ender's Game, Feed, Hatchet, Nine Princes in Amber, and the Earthsea books. It's interesting for us to see which books she thinks she can't live without. It's kind of like seeing which of the many books people have thrown at her over the years made an impression, which ones "took."

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-03-25T08:37:00.001-04:00

Children's: What agency, according to a Lucy Frank book, controls everything from screaming babies to unopenable pistachio nuts?

Classics: What statesman's six-volume series The Second World War opens with The Gathering Storm?

Non-Fiction: What 20th-century muckraker spent the latter years of his life investigating ancient Athens for his book The Trial of Socrates?

Book Club: What city is under siege in 1204 by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, in Umberto Eco's Baudolino?

Authors: What author died of lung cancer at 42, after writing about her life as a "high-functioning alcoholic" in Drinking: A Love Story?

Book Bag: What science-fiction author invites others to write about his time-traveling assassin Jerry Cornelius?

The Effort

2011-03-24T09:19:00.001-04:00

Working with high school teachers on the spring musical is interesting; I have more respect for what they do and, oddly, even less tolerance.

On the one hand, I admire how these teachers work--I've imitated them by getting myself a loose-leaf binder and a hole punch, so I can keep the papers the kids give me (like their short biographies for the program) in order and as easily accessible as the rehearsal schedule and the sheet music for each song. They are organized people; they come to rehearsal with a plan and God help anyone--even another teacher--who might try to influence that plan once they get going.

On the other hand, I find the teachers rigid and unhearing. It amazes me how patient the kids are with being ordered around and told to sit down and shut up all day and then all evening, too. I know they have some good ideas that are being lost in the chaos of banal chatter that they're shushed for, but I also know that they could easily fritter away the entire two-hour rehearsal chattering, and so being told what to do--told exactly what to see as black, and what as white--is the most expedient kind of guidance for them, even thought it's not the most penetrating.

The experience makes me less snotty, a little less like the speaker of this Billy Collins poem about high school teachers:

The Effort

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts--
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards--

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

I think this poem is about complication and the kind of incoherence it can cause, and about how high school teachers are often more interested in presenting a coherent point of view than in exploring why it's sometimes so hard to say something "straight out," why we write poetry to trace the almost incomprehensible path of one seam in an infinitude of possibly gold-bearing seams in the great, dark mine that is high school.

"Inarticulate wretches" that we all are, I think we sometimes forget that even people who can't express a point of view well still have one, and we run the rink of bellying through our daily jobs believing that if only everyone would see things the way we do, the world would be a better--or at least a more comprehensible--place.

Tigana Part III

2011-03-23T06:16:00.001-04:00

This is the part of the story where I got interested. All the groundwork has been done, and now the Tigana partisans and prince-in-exile go around stirring people up to rebel successfully against Brandin and Alberico. Like the long-planning political operators they are, the prince, Alessan, and his second in command, Baerd (the son of the former king of Tigana's favorite sculptor and also brother to Dianora) visit sympathizers in each little town and tell them to get ready. It's exciting, and we see a lot of it through Devin's admiring eyes, so we love the bravery and courage and strength of the prince and what a good team he and Baerd make.

I especially like the part about how Alberico's increasingly repressive measures result in poetry about him:
"seeing plots hatching in every barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens all over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innuendos thrown in for good measure.
The poems, posted on walls all over the city...were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up. Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn't need to read or hear them more than once..."
This reminds me of British 18th-century satires, about "Farmer George" (King George III--yes, the one who later went mad and who we Americans ultimately rebelled against) and of the Leslie Charteris stories about a character called "The Saint" who liked to leave a stick drawing of himself as a kind of calling card.

What happens when Alessan uses his power to bind a sorcerer to his service is described in some detail, and I found it interesting and not altogether predictable. I especially like the part where Alessan tries to make up for what he's done a little bit by playing music he knows the bound sorcerer enjoys.

I previously skipped over the whole big deal about Dianora and Baerd's incest because it seemed like the rankest kind of sensationalism to me, but then I got to this character Alienor, who has S&M sex with Devin, leaving "marks" and shredding his clothes. I did not need to know that about the two of them, I did not need the pseudo-philosophizing over it ("an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this"), and I definitely did not need to see Devin's symbolic pilgrimage to Catriana afterwards, for a kind of contrition and healing. It's not like you really needed to build her up any more as a perfect mate for Alessan, Mr. Kay.

I like the quiet control and nobility of Marius of Quileia, by contrast--one of the most important of the chess pieces Alessan has set up around the board of little countries he is trying to free.

I also really like this article about cultural omnivores.

Illyria

2011-03-21T06:16:00.000-04:00

Eleanor won a prize from the public library, and with this prize, a gift certificate for Amazon, we ordered a book I'd read very good things about, Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand. I thought Eleanor would like it because it's about performing the play Twelfth Night.

But because Eleanor is rehearsing for the high school musical, submitting senior papers, preparing for band contest, and signing up for AP exams, she hasn't had time to read the book yet. So I picked up Illyria and read it first, and it wasn't what I expected.

The author says it's the fictionalized story of her first love/best friend, so perhaps there was more of a feeling of being bound by actual events than I might otherwise have expected from a novel, but what happens just seems wrong to me. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, are in love with performing and with each other. Rather than embracing the love and the boy's genius, the girl accepts the dictates of her family and leaves him to pursue her own career, one that turns out, not surprisingly, to be a pale version of what his could have been, had he received the same patronage and encouragement.

Aunt Kate, the relative who acts as a patron and gets the girl into her first acting school, says to her:
"talent--if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on a track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless."
But rather than rescue the boy, Rogan, who has shown his willingness to rebel against his non-artistic family, Aunt Kate (who he calls "Aunt Fate") decides to give only the girl, Maddy--whose family is more easily persuaded-- a start in the theater. This is a betrayal of a sort, but worse is Maddy's betrayal. She doesn't even protest that Rogan should be included, but accepts her good fortune and leaves him to be berated and beaten by his father for the discovery of the condoms and blankets the two have been sharing.

Rogan is extraordinary in the central performance of Twelfth Night, and this is the way Maddy describes how he makes everyone feel:
"I've seen spectacular performances since then--Anthony Hopkins's Broadway debut in Equus, Kevin Kline in On the Twentieth Century, John Wood in The Invention of Love. Rogan's turn as the Clown rivaled all of them.
Everyone in that auditorium felt it: everyone was bewitched. I felt drugged, light-headed with desire and raw adrenaline. Whatever envy I had burned away at the expectation of sharing the stage with him. It was like sex--it was sex, magnified somehow and transformed into a vision we could all see, all share in; and there was Rogan, grinning and looking as happy as I'd ever seen him outside of the hidden space in his room."

But then Maddy goes off and leaves him, despite the way he begs her not to go:
"They can't make you," he said. "Not unless you let them. They can't force you to go."
"I know."
"I wouldn't go. If it was me....If they tried to make me go without you. I wouldn't do it."

And then, despite Maddy's betrayal, the story is not a tragedy. It's a mundane little story about a girl who went away to become an actress and spent her life playing small parts and a boy who never got that kind of opportunity and spent his life getting older.

I hated it. Perhaps Eleanor will like it better, because it does capture some of the pathos of what it is to be young and passionate about almost everything. The ending, when Maddy and Rogan meet again, strikes me as pointless and disappointing. He spent his life taking care of the house and the toy theater that meant so much to them. She came back for Aunt Kate's funeral and saw him only incidentally.

She was just a girl; she couldn't help it... I don't buy her story, the heartless bitch.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-03-18T08:36:00.000-04:00

Children's: What Megan McDonald heroine has a bug-eating plant named "Jaws" and a brother she calls "Stink"?

Classics: What Balzac novel concerns Lisbeth Fischer's plans for vengeance on her more fortunate relations?

Non-Fiction: What title for Peter Matthiesen's 1978 account of his Himalayan journey was inspired by an elusive Nepalese cat?

Book Club: What two James Michener books were named after nations?

Authors: What 29-year-old contemporary of Shakespeare's was stabbed to death while arguing over the bill at Eleanor Bull's tavern?

Book Bag: Who wrote The Passion of Artemisia, about the first woman painter elected to Italy's famed Accademia dell'Arte?

Saint Francis and the Sow

2011-03-17T09:17:00.000-04:00

For St. Patrick's Day, the day when all Americans say we're Irish and wear green (because who can tell where we're from, really?) a poem by a famous American poet with an Irish name, Galway Kinnell:

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Today is a day for buds, here in Ohio. I can see them, tightly closed, on the lilac and forsythia.

I got up before dawn and got my kids started on the day, finding green shirts. Today I would like to give each of you a hand on your brow, retelling you in words and in touch that you are lovely. Can you do something you don't usually do, to celebrate the coming of spring? Drink a green beer! Or have Indian food for dinner; that's my (very American) plan.

A something in a summer's day

2011-03-16T07:08:00.001-04:00

I used to be a person who would not go willingly to amateur theater performances. Yes, I'm the parent in the audience who's sitting there thinking very much along the lines of Thaddeus Bristol (a character in David Sedaris' story about an elementary school Christmas pageant, "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol").

Perhaps this is due to the trauma induced by a field trip I once took, during which I was forced to sit through four stunningly awful hours of an attempt at performing Annie Get Your Gun. When we left, they still hadn't gotten through the whole show. I've never seen the end...and never wanted to.

Throughout my childhood, I went to at least four performances a year at the university theater where my father directed plays, and on vacations we saw plays and musicals in New York, London, and Chicago. It takes more than a desire to see a friend or kid on stage to get me into a theater. If I'm going to spend the time and money, I want to see something well written and directed.

So it should amaze you to hear that on Sunday, Eleanor and Walker and I drove to Johnstown, Ohio to see their high school students perform Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. We don't even know anybody in Johnstown; we were just impressed with their audacity and figured it would either have good moments or it would be fun to laugh at. What amazed us is that the entire show was fun to watch. The main problem with a high school show is usually the time it takes for everyone to move the scenery, but the Johnstown students had it down to a science, and all their parents and friends were back there helping crank the chandelier up and down, and turn the boat and the life-size elephant around. The sopranos were up to the job, and the big Masquerade number was a joy, with stilt-walkers and singers surrounding the audience. It turned out to be worth going out in the cold.

There's a line in one of the romantic duets--"turn my head with talk of summertime"--that's been running through my head almost continuously since I heard it on Sunday night. People who don't mind the cold, who say "you can always put on a sweater," don't get how winter, for people like me, is a season of being always clenched, always having your shoulders hunched up against the cold. Spring is a kind of gradual unknotting for my shoulder muscles, with summer the culmination.

Summer is a culmination of wonder in this poem by Emily Dickinson:

A something in a summer's day
As slow her flambeaux burn away
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon--
A depth--an azure--a perfume--
Transcending ecstasy

And still within a summer's night
A something so transporting bright
I clap my hands to see--

Then veil my too inspecting face
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me--

The wizard fingers never rest--
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed--

Still rears the east her amber flag--
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red--

So looking on--the night--the morn--
Conclude the wonder gay--
And I meet, coming through the dews
Another summer's day!

I have had my head turned, both by thoughts of summertime, and by the magic of theater done well, in the most unlikely of places.

When's the last time you experienced something so full of wonder that you would "clap [your] hands to see"?

The Seduction of Water

2011-03-15T06:23:00.000-04:00

Today the Imaginary Friends Book Club are discussing The Seduction of Water, by Carol Goodman. Ever since I finished reading this book, several weeks ago, I've been trying to get past my first reaction to it, which is that adjunct teaching doesn't really work like it does for the narrator of this novel. College students in an English class won't all come to an art show on another campus, no matter how much you talk it up. Male students who show up in odd places to talk to their female teachers are rarely attracted to them. If you put a big red A on a narrative paper because of "the sheer beauty of the story," despite the fact that the "English is so faltering that it's painful to read," you won't be working as an adjunct for long. That this is the introduction to the world of the novel makes me have trouble suspending my disbelief, even though I'm usually about as credulous as they come.

On the other hand, the narrator, Iris, doesn't work as an adjunct for long. She goes back to the hotel where she spent her childhood and works as a manager while trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to her mother, a novelist whose legacy to Iris is a story she used to tell about a selkie, a story she used in her novels, and one that is gradually revealed to have parallels to her own life as a wife and mother:
"It was like nothing could really touch her because she could always slip away into a world where she made all the rules and everything had to turn out the way she said. And then when she went away I thought for a long time that that's where she'd gone. Like she never really belonged with us in this world and she'd gone back to where she really belonged."

The teacher background does seem true to life when Iris meets someone who says he'll have to watch how he talks around her and she thinks, as English teachers so often do, "no doubt I was paying for some martinet grammar-queen he'd had in the eighth grade."

There's a mystery about an older man who knew Iris' mother (he turns out to be something of a red herring), and about a necklace with magical powers. The necklace mystery entangles Iris in a circle of writers and hotel employees her mother knew, until she finds out that hardly anything she thought she knew about her own mother was true, including the woman's name. Iris does more than walk in her mother's shoes; she wears all of her clothes, one by one, over an entire summer, until she finds out something about what her mother was like as a person, before she became a mother.

That this novel is a story about storytelling is confirmed by the author's note at the end of my copy, in which she reveals that her own mother had a story, similar to the one Iris' mother tells her, and she told it over and over, "making sense of her life by telling it to me."

That's one of the benefits of motherhood; you can tell your children stories about yourself and teach them to believe that's what you're really like. They won't believe it as teenagers, and by the time they get old enough to see the good in you again, you might not be around to tell the whole truth about any foibles you might have left out of the abridged version for small children. It's not so black and white, is it, teaching children not to "tell stories"?

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

2011-03-14T06:31:00.000-04:00

Tom Holt's novel entitled Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages is subtitled A Comedy of Transdimensional Tomfoolery (which makes it slightly less appealing than his Who's Afraid of Beowulf? and Paint Your Dragon). This newest novel seems designed to appeal to lovers of Douglas Adams--OF WHICH I AM ONE--but I wouldn't have heard of it except for the review at Life With Books. In the end, though, I didn't find it funny enough to carry off the absurdity in true Adamsian style. The details, while cunningly arranged, have about the staying power of ripe dandelion fluff.

There were parts that made me laugh out loud, though. What begins all the trouble with the space-time continuum is a man stretching it out to get a parking place, and one of the first symptoms that something is wrong is that a paralegal keeps getting cups of coffee that disappear before she can drink them. The portal between worlds turns out to be a small, mom-and-pop drycleaners. Even the way magic is used turns out to be largely a matter of being able to read the manual, and if there are guidelines, they're a bit like the hippocratic oath ("first, do no harm"):
"Magic could get you out of traffic, but only if you vanished all the other road users. Of course, there were people who'd do that, and presumably that was why magic wasn't used, and why it was kept a secret."
There is a very British sense of humor throughout this book about small actions and large consequences.

Reading Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages is fun the way putting together the answer to a mystery is fun--you can work out what's happening before it's explained, and the clues are fitted perfectly to each other, like in a good thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Also there's the pleasure of allusions--including an explicit allusion to a rationalization in The Lord of the Rings when someone finds a magical object and wants to keep it--and some to Alice in Wonderland, the first Narnia book, and Doctor Who.

One beginning of a chapter shows me that Holt at his best can be almost as good as Adams, even if it takes him a lot more words. Adams' The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul begins with the memorable line:
"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."
And Holt's seventh chapter of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages begins with the following two paragraphs:
"The daily commute is a joyful thing. In our secular society it's taken the place of morning prayers; a time to meditate, reflect, get one's head together, to consider the challenges and opportunities of the day ahead and decide how best to engage with them for the greater good of oneself and others.
Or something like that. In the bus scrum someone grazed his heel down the side of Polly's ankle, laddering her tights and delaminating her skin--but he muttered, "Sorry," so that was all right. The Tube escalator had broken down, so she got some healthy exercise. One handle of her shoulder bag gave way, spilling her possessions onto the pavement like a Medici flinging gold to the masses in the piazza. All good fun."

Also like Adams, Holt throws in an occasional gratuitously silly image:
"Depending on the water pressure and the angle from which the jets were directed, the flames either rose higher, doubled their heat output or played selections from Phantom of the Opera (the original cast recording). Fire-suppressant foam turned the fire purple, with a faint green pinstripe...." Later, when a hired thamaturg comes into an apartment and feels an object of power, he thinks maybe his career is about to reach a pinnacle and he'll get an award, although "these days the Merlins are little more than a popularity contest, a means of recognizing the fact that so-and-so's managed to complete thirty years in the trade without being killed, transfigured or imprisoned for ever in the heart of a glacier."

Reading this book will definitely give you more possible answers than you ever wanted to know to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Who would like this book? People who long for anything Douglas Adams-like now that he's gone. Monty Python fans. Certainly any reader of science fiction who likes it on the silly side (yes, Scalzi fans).

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-03-11T07:39:00.000-05:00

Children's: What Eric Rohmann book finds Rabbit recruiting a bunch of animals to help retrieve poor Mouse's airplane from a tree?

Classics: What reclusive novelist published nine short stories in 1953 under the enigmatic title Nine Stories?

Non-Fiction: What Jennifer Brilliant book on yoga for pooches presents asanas like the Happy Puppy and the Pup's Pose?

Book Club: What supernatural Amy Tan novel opens: "My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes"?

Authors: Who sketched mysteries like The Fraught Setee and The Dripping Faucet from the comfort of Elephant House in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts?

Book Bag: What author loosed 4 Blondes proganist Janey Wilcox on the Hamptons in Trading Up?

When You Reach Me

2011-03-10T06:17:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid that Rebecca Stead took Ursula le Guin at face value when she was exposed to the quotation so beloved among writer's groups: "Sure, it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up." I think she wanted to write the kind of children's book that Madeleine L'Engle described in her Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech:
"Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up."

How else can one explain the plot of When You Reach Me, permeated with references to L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and yet disingenuous about the conventions of any of the time travel literature that preceded it?

When You Reach Me is a time travel story for children who have never read a time travel story before--children who have never read A Wrinkle in Time. It is a story with characters that seem wooden because they're all hiding something until an opportune moment. And it's a 2010 Newbery winner. Go figure.

Here's the spoiler: IT'S A TIME TRAVEL STORY! But since you don't know that until the end, there are no rules. No rules, no fun, I say.

Who could possibly like this book? Maybe a young girl who thinks she only likes realistic fiction.

Tigana Part II

2011-03-09T06:18:00.000-05:00

For the second part of the Tigana read-along, I read about Dianora, daughter of the sculptor mentioned in the prologue and sister to Baerd, the companion of Devin from Part I. Her story is a pretty standard version of the female captive who was sworn to revenge but comes to love her captor, captivating him in return with her arts and graces. Standard, that is, up until the point that she fails to let him be killed.

In her shock after saving the life of Brandin, the sorceror who has destroyed her country and family, Dianora is recalled to her purpose. At the end of Part II, it's clear that she will look for a chance to destroy Brandin. I'm pretty sure that she will become part of a two-prong effort to destroy both Brandin and Alberico at the same time, lest one of them sweep in to fill the void left by the death of the other.

So, 246 pages into this story, and the stage is finally set. I'm hoping it will be worth all the preliminaries.

Poetry of Departures

2011-03-08T09:08:00.000-05:00

It's spring break at the local college, and we're cat-sitting for our friends who were lucky enough to go off to Harry Potter world in Florida.

I think everyone wants a spring break trip to somewhere warm, and few of us get it. Let's try to think of it like this Philip Larkin poem:

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books, china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Or perhaps it would be perfect if I spent all the time I spend wishing to be elsewhere dusting the books, washing the china, and putting clean linens on the good bed. And if Tristan would stop bringing the same dead cardinal in through the cat door.

Do you get wanderlust in the spring? Where would you go, if you could "chuck up everything" at this moment?

Pilgrimage

2011-03-07T06:23:00.000-05:00

After reading Jo Walton's Among Others, featuring the most-beloved science fiction titles of my childhood, I had to find out more about the only author she mentions with whom I wasn't at all familiar, Zenna Henderson. Walton's narrator loves Henderson's novel Pilgrimage, so I ordered a copy, hoping it would be as good as the other books she and I both loved as young readers in the 1970s.

I was moved by the sympathy in Jenny's review of Among Others, in which she says about those of us who were, like Walton and her fictional narrator, young teenagers in the 70s:
"It’s touching to read about these kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and who find these small windows into a world where people are like them and love the same things they love. Poor things, if only they had grown up a few decades later, in this generation of the geek fairly decisively inheriting the earth."

This is part of what Henderson's novel Pilgrimage is about--kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and the stories of how they found others who were like them and loved the same things they loved. Because it's science fiction, the people who are like them are from their home planet, and they love things like being able to float above the ground, make coins glow, and read other peoples' minds.

The first story builds slowly, with readers finding out what make these people different much as any outsider would, through little slips, like a child "lifting" above the ground on the way to school "along a public road" where anyone could see. Once we've seen this, though, we find out a little ahead of the new teacher that
"the members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips, and found Cougar Canyon they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there's something complicated about marketing the stuff....Anyway our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us."
Eventually, the new teacher exhibits talents that reveal her to be a lost member of the People.

In each story, a lost member finds his or her way to the Group and finds acceptance. The over-arcing story is about Lea, who is finding her way to the Group but has been merely filling up her days, thinking that her life is bearable, only to be told, like a gifted child who isn't living up to his potential: "if you won't fill the slot you were meant to you might as well just sit and count your fingers. Otherwise you will just interfere with everything."

When the earth People finally meet some of the People from the Home planet, more technologically advanced and effete, we get a description of the way one character's mother spends her time:
"what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting--she knows all the finer distinctions--then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she's very adept, just barely ahead of the other."
And then we get a look at ourselves as others see us when we think, along with the earth-born speaker, "I can't see spending two days watching a rose bud" only to hear the rejoinder:
"And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times."

So yes, this collection of stories, Pilgrimage, could well have been as dear to me as Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions or Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber if I'd discovered it back when I felt isolated, in the 1970s. It wasn't quite as exciting as finding Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles from reading the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters in Cornelia Funke's Inkheart--that was one of the most exciting literary discoveries I ever made--but certainly Pilgrimage is a book worth reading and owning.

Who would like this book? Anyone who reads science fiction or fantasy. Any imaginative teenager. Anyone who likes reading about the American west, where the stories are set. Certainly anyone who has done any kind of teaching, because the stories are all about teaching children to use their gifts well.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-03-04T07:50:00.000-05:00

Children's: What author sent the Snarkout Boys to battle the Avocado of Death and the Baconsburg Horror?

Classics: What refrain from Young E. Allison's sea shanty Derelict echoes throughout Treasure Island?

Non-Fiction: What tuneful title did Larry Kane pick for his book on being the only U.S. journalist on the Beatles' historic 1964 tour?

Book Club: What National Book Award winner did Carlos Eire originally plan to title Kiss the Lizard, Jesus?

Authors: What New Zealand-born author ditched her first name Edith for her Maori middle name, to pen tales of Scotland Yard inspector Roderick Alleyn?

Book Bag: What anonymously authored 1996 bestseller includes the acknowledgement: "I would like to thank some people who don't know who I am"?

(Take a guess this week, and you'll probably guess right!)

Bedecked

2011-03-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

For about an hour on Tuesday and almost three hours on Wednesday I heard auditions for the high school musical and felt formidable. Really, I'm a friendly person; I smile a lot. But it's hard to appear approachable to a teenager who has to perform a monologue and sing a solo in front of you and two other adults. You throw a long shadow.

My own daughter, who absolutely blew everyone away with her rendition of "Take Me Or Leave Me" from Rent and got the lead in the show--the part she really wanted--said to her friends after the audition:
"There's nothing like an audition to melt away all of that brash cockiness the moment you take one look at a director's nightmarish 'listening attentively' expression."

We have a very good cast, and I have a new appreciation for the bravery of teenagers in a situation that, on some level, really doesn't demand bravery. I mean, it's not like it matters that much if a kid can sing in public! It's like the bravery in this poem, Bedecked:

Tell me it's wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He's bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it's wrong to love the glitter that a
boy's only a boy who'd love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.

Then tell me it's fine--really--maybe even a good thing--a boy
who's got some girl to him,
and I'm right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in
the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means--
this way or that--but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere

and from his own jeweled body he's cast rainbows--made every
shining true color.

Now try to tell me--man or woman--your heart was ever once
that brave.

Some kids have to be especially brave about being different. I think that's a lot easier today than it was in the past, but it's still true that no matter what role you want to play, being a teenager and admitting that you have desires can take as much courage as anything else you work yourself up to for the rest of your life.

Between a Rock and a Hot Place

2011-03-02T06:10:00.002-05:00

When I saw the title Between a Rock and a Hot Place: Why Fifty is Not the New Thirty on a list of books that Harper was willing to send me, I said yes, send this one. I thought it would be something different from the usual baby boomer books about how to stay in charge of the world forever, but, sadly, it's not. Tracey Jackson is somewhat more than fifty, as it turns out, putting her more squarely in the baby boomer generation than I would have suspected, and her attitudes are just not that different.

As you know, I am against baby boomers. So any book that starts out trying to lump me in with them is not going to get any sympathy--much less a sense of identification--from me. I am not the "us" she's speaking to when she says "the image most of us have of being over fifty...is our grandparents." No, honey, it's you. It's ex-hippies who never grow up.

That Tracey is overly focused on appearance is hardly surprising, given what she tells us about her mother, a woman who put her on a reducing diet when she was only eight years old, spent an hour each day washing her face with beauty products, and once traveled to Transylvania to be injected with something called Gerovital H3 that she believed would make her look younger. So Tracey's own obsessions with exercising and having substances injected into her face seem less crazy, by comparison.

I thought maybe I'd get some tips from this book about how to deal with menopause, but most of what I got was a rant about how essential hormone replacement therapy is (despite the horrible physical symptoms it gave Tracey--the most remarkable being lumps on her face).

To be fair, I read Between a Rock and a Hot Place the day after I saw Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, and the depth of the ideas about mortality in the play made the book seem even more shallow than I think it would have, ordinarily.

The part where this book really "jumped the shark" for me was when the author revealed that she had sexual fantasies about Jack Nicholson . . . um, wasn't she just speaking of grandparents? After that, it's impossible for me to take anything else she says quite seriously. Her claim that women over fifty "don't come like we used to" seems to me complete nonsense. Her advice about exercising every day is based on this quotation: "every day your body makes a choice. It's either going to get a little older...or it will get a little stronger," which is a nice example of the "only two choices" logical fallacy, don't you think? And I can think; I have other choices!

But there are two parts of the book I like. One is based on a quotation that the author claims is from Virginia Woolf (who killed herself at the age of 59, you know): "arrange whatever pieces come your way." Tracey's advice about having a career after fifty is that you should "start thinking about and actually setting up some pieces that will be ready to arrange before you have to start scrambling around for them or find yourself left with difficult or unsatisfactory pieces." This makes a lot of sense to me right now, especially in light of the story about how her career as a screenwriter turned into a new career as a documentary film maker when she got to her fifties. Plus, she's written this book!

The other part I like is her chapter about sending your first child to college, entitled "The Biggest Pink Slip You Will Ever Get." Tracey is typically over the top about the experience, so my answer is "yes" to her question:
"Are we needy, clingy women who are unable to acknowledge that time is marching on and our kids are at the front of the parade and we are at the back?"
But it's fun to measure yourself against a hysteric; you come off so much better. And she reassures me that I will be able to sleep next year when my daughter is off at college, something I've actually wondered about recently, and out loud.

So reading this book wasn't a complete loss, despite the fact that telling me that "all the female Supreme Court justices dye their hair" doesn't convince me that all women over fifty ought to have surgery on their faces.

Who would like this book? Some baby boomers. Maybe a few stay-at-home mothers who thought they'd go back to work when their kids were grown up and now find themselves aged out of the workforce. Anyone who wants tips about how to go to great lengths to look younger.

Why Kid Yourself

2011-03-01T08:26:00.000-05:00

February is finally over, and it went out with a series of violent thunderstorms that melted almost all of the snow and flooded a lot of the local roads, delaying school by two hours. When I went to the school to pick up a kid at 5, I drove over a bridge with a river running fast, swirling just inches below the roadway.

We can now see yellow, squashed grass for the first time since the beginning of December. I just found a collar one of our cats lost late in the fall. And despite a few isolated piles of melty ice in the shadows, we can see yellowy-green shoots beginning to poke up in sheltered places next to the house.

Why Kid Yourself

Snow, that white anesthesia, evaporates.
It's gone like a lover after the morning paper.
An entire mountain blushes.
Everything's been at it.
Embarrassing bodies are pushing out.
Plants, animals, swollen with excess
are straining to keep their balance.
Two hot days and the populations explodes off the circuits,
jams the sewers.
Afterbirth reeks in the swamps, gluts the rivers.
And everything that lived through last year
is out fattening itself, eating the babies.

Those "two hot days" won't be here for a while, but it's nice to see the world in something besides black and white.

March's free ebook

2011-03-01T06:37:00.001-05:00

Phoenix Pick’s free ebook of the month for March is Paul Cook’s
“Fortress on the Sun.” Here's what the publisher says about it:

The Fortress refers to Ra, which is a 21st century prison camp that also acts as facility for harvesting metals—from the Sun. The prisoners have all been banished here for extreme crimes, but none of them remembers anything from their past. As a lethal disease slowly spreads through the camp and the prisoners are abandoned, Ian Hutchings must find a way out if he and his people are to survive. But dark secrets lurk, and as they try to survive both the illness and the inferno they live on, they will discover a truth even
stranger than their own circumstances.

The Coupon Code for February is 9992651. Instructions and download link at www.PPickings.com Available from March 2nd through March 31st.

The Tapestry of Love

2011-02-28T06:18:00.001-05:00

In one of the most gracious moves ever made by an author, Rosy Thornton responded to my lackluster review of one of her earlier novels, Crossed Wires, by sending me an email in which she offered to send me her newer one, The Tapestry of Love.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that such an offer, followed by the receipt of the book directly from Cambridge (with a nice note), did predispose me to give the book every benefit of the doubt. So when I say I liked it, that will come as no surprise. But there's also a reason I would be predisposed to dislike it. Let me tell you a bit of a story.

Once there was a young mother who had reached a stumbling block in her academic career and was staying home with two preschoolers. She had a friend who would pass on bags full of paperback romance novels brought to her by her mother. Every couple of weeks, this friend would bring over a new bag of books. The young mother didn't have to dress the preschoolers, (who were often nebulizer-sucking sick), get them in carseats, and take them to the library. She didn't have to worry about when the books were due. She could read for ten minutes, dog-ear the page rather than scrambling for a bookmark, and answer the next pressing preschooler need. A fast reader, the young mother read almost all the books she was brought, passing over only the occasional title with a half-naked Scots warrior on the front. At least a third of the paperback romances she read featured a divorced woman who moves to a new place, starts her own business--usually a restaurant, a bakery, or a catering service--makes good friends very quickly and easily from among her new neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who truly appreciates her talents. The young mother got very tired of this formula.

Okay, fast forward to this same mother, years later, getting a novel in which a divorced woman moves to a new place (the Cevennes mountains, in France), starts her own business (sewing and upholstery--a change from the cooking, at least), makes good friends very quickly from among her neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who appreciates her talents so much he buys and frames something she sewed. I think you're now aware of why I might be predisposed to dislike this novel.

But I didn't. Putting both my predispositions aside, I enjoyed the writing style and got immersed in the story, pretty much from the point where the main character, Catherine, who has moved to the Cevennes, is talking on the phone to her daughter Lexie, in England, and Lexie says to her:
"I know what the trouble is....Completely understandable, you poor thing. All very scenic over there and everything but naturally you're missing me."
Since this is almost exactly what I think my own daughter would say to me in similar circumstances, I started identifying with Catherine.

In fact, Catherine is almost completely happy with her own company and her sewing. Even though I'd personally rather do almost anything than be made to sew, the appeal of it for Catherine is clear to me:
"As she started to stitch....She saw it all clearly, translated into the colors of silk. It was funny how, even as a child, she had been able to visualise a picture or pattern as soon as she began to sew; she had only to begin and the image would emerge, a template for her to follow, like the outline that forms on closed lids after staring at something too long."

It's amusing to watch Catherine adapt to rural life, especially in terms of eating locally. The first time she is offered a dish of fresh wild boar, she "stared at him; she had a horror of killing in the raw. She was no vegetarian, but she preferred her meat without its claws." The dish is delicious, of course, and she asks for the recipe. Later, when she smells lamb cooking after a day spent helping herd a neighbor's sheep to summer pastures, she asks "Is it traditional....Sheep farmers who've walked all day with their flock, keeping them safely on the path, then when they stop for the night, dining enjoyably on a nice piece of mutton. It's a little close to home, don't you think? The matter-of-fact answering question, from the local man she fancies, is "What better than food that transports itself?"

I love the part where Catherine's neighbor Madame Bouschet tells her a story about how hard her husband Augustin has always worked, even on vacation, because it sounds like what my friends always say about our sand castle projects at the beach:
"You should have seen him...with his trousers rolled up to the knee, digging holes in the sand. Jean-Marc wanted him to dig a hole as deep as the well at home, and he was at it a whole morning. I said to him, when the children were in bed, I said, it's typical of you. Supposed to be on holiday, and here you are, digging like it's time to lift the potatoes."

There is sadness in this story but it too is well-described. I particularly like the simile Catherine uses to describe how she felt when her mother died after spending years in a nursing home:
"I don't mean it was a surprise, because it wasn't. I didn't feel surprised, in my mind. What caught me unawares wasn't the fact of her dying, but the force of it. The physical impact, if that makes any sense.
Like standing ankle deep in the surf and knowing full well a cold wave is going to hit you, but the knowledge doesn't lessen the brunt of its strike."

And finally, you can't beat this novel for a happy ending. The local man turns out to have been wildly in love with her all along, and he finally has the sense to say it to her:
"When you ate my wild boar with such delicious reluctance. I fell at once. I have been quite enslaved."
If you're going to use a romance novel plot, you might as well do the romance part right. But there are other good parts to this novel, and I enjoyed them all. It's like one of the wonderful French casseroles it describes, full of unexpected ingredients that end up better in combination than I could ever have hoped.

So who will like this book? Women, particularly women over 30. Anyone who wants a good story with lots of descriptions of French food in it--I got some of the same pleasure from reading The Tapestry of Love that I always get from rereading Peter Mayle's books about Provence. Anyone who loves France and is curious about what life is like in the donkey-trodden Parc National des Cevennes.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-02-25T08:48:00.000-05:00

Children's: What Elizabeth Enright classic sends Portia and Julian to a deserted resort community on the shores of a forgotten body of water?

Classics: What name did Jem and Scout use to address their father, in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Non-Fiction: What mystery writer set out to chronicle the year following her 77th birthday in Time to Be in Earnest, but ended up with a full autobiography?

Book Club: What European nation is the setting for the final days of The English Patient's title character?

Authors: Who's written 55 books under her own name, and 77 as Stephanie James, Amanda Glass, Amanda Quick, Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley or Jayne Castle?

Book Bag: What horror writer received instant acclaim in 1984 for his debut three-volume Books of Blood series?

The House at Riverton

2011-02-24T06:15:00.001-05:00

Do you believe in the kind of altruism that would cause a person to give up her own happiness in order to serve another and never even tell that other person what she'd done? Can you possibly believe in a nineteenth-century female character who would make plans to run away with the love of her life and then shoot him because she thought he was threatening her sister? If so, have I got a shaggy dog story of a novel for you!

The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton, is intriguingly structured, with the story of what happened to the narrator's employers told at the end of their former housemaid's life. And some of the dialogue is fun:
"I'm tired of reciting The Lady of Shalott while she snivels into her handkerchief."
"She's crying for her own lost love," Emmeline said with a sigh.
Hannah rolled her eyes.
"It's true!" Emmeline said. "I heard Grandmama tell Lady Clem. Before she came to us, Miss Prince was engaged to be married."
"Came to his senses, I suppose," Hannah said.
"He married her sister instead," Emmeline said.
This silenced Hannah, but only briefly. "She should have sued him for breach of promise."
"That's what Lady Clem said--and worse--but Grandmama said Miss Prince didn't want to cause him trouble."
"Then she's a fool," Hannah said. "She's better off without him."
"What a romantic," David said archly. "The poor lady's hopelessly in love with a man she can't have and you begrudge reading her the occasional piece of sad poetry. Cruelty, thy name is Hannah."
But, as in this passage, the foreshadowing is unrelentingly heavy-handed. Yes, these sisters will end up quarreling over the same man! Surprise!

The writing only occasionally takes on the flavor of the early twentieth century, with bits of odd nineteenth-century tone completely pulling me out of the story:
"It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation."

In the end, what happens is simply unbelievable. People do not act like this, no matter how much the narrator protests that they were different back then. I felt cheated that I had actually read more than 400 pages, only to have such a wildly improbable ending thrust upon me. It was like listening to one of those shaggy dog stories that goes on and on and then has a stupid ending, and you discover that the only funny thing is that you actually listened to that nonsense for so long.

Tigana

2011-02-23T06:29:00.000-05:00

Because I kept seeing enthusiastic reviews of it, I had Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, on my wish list, and got a copy of it as a Christmas present, just in time to sign up for the Tigana read-along, which begins today.

And if I hadn't wanted to at least get through the prologue and Part I for today's discussion, I might have put the book aside. I think that a lot of good fantasy and science fiction requires you to read like a teenager, in large swathes, without anything else pulling at your attention. I don't get those large swathes right now. But I kept reading the seemingly disconnected sections until they finally came together. Now that I'm ready to start Part II, I find I have a reason for continuing to read, and it's the same reason that the good guys are fighting. We want revenge; I want to see the bad guys get what they deserve for what they've done to these good guys that have become my friends.

Another way in which I'm no longer able to read like a teenager is that I don't identify as much with the obvious hero, and so I relate to Devin like a mother when I'm told that "a certain kind of pride at Devin's age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal man" because if that isn't an apt description of what's been going on with my almost-fifteen-year-old son, I don't know what is.

The badness of the bad guys is duly testified to by the brutality of Alberico, a sorcerer who "cannot...be poisoned" and who mercilessly tortures and kills entire families for both imagined and real slights against him, and the mercilessness of Brandin, who not only killed all the women and children of a country, but used magic to make sure that "no one living could hear and then remember the name of that land." The land, of course, is Tigana.

The good guys are smart and they're also good musicians. Devin's Tigana ancestry is revealed by his father's decision to teach him a melody. He is told that:
"Your father chose not to burden you or your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you--a tune, wordless for safety--and he sent you out into the world with something that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one else."

Devin learns to appreciate a lesson taught by the prince of Tigana, who is going by the name of Alessan and traveling with him:
"There will be people put at risk by everything we do, the Prince had said." This is a lesson that I think you do have to begin learning at 14 or 15, and one of the reasons that the last two videos we've watched at my house have been Charlie Wilson's War and The Three Kings.

So even though I'm too old to be reading Tigana, I'm enjoying it in a more detached, intellectual way. I think the ideal reader for this book is a teenager who can identify with Devin or be immediately infatuated with him, or both.

Peas

2011-02-22T08:32:00.002-05:00

It's easy to startle me. Come up behind me and say something, I'll leap six inches into the air. The other afternoon in the movie theater, when the characters on screen were in a haunted house, I knocked over my almost-empty drink cup. And if I get woken up by an alarm, I'm jumpy all day.

This morning I got woken up by the telephone. It's actually a cell phone, and it plays a gentle little melody, but nevertheless it made me sit up in bed, heart pounding, dreams rushing away from me.

It's a snow day here; we got four or five inches. I would have liked to sleep through more of it, but now here I am, very wide awake indeed, feeling like the titular peas in this poem by Michael David Madonick:

Some things don't want to be
uncovered. My son, in the morning
especially, doesn't want to be

uncovered. The egg, deep in its shell,
tight as the can of coffee, or
the milk, quiet in cardboard, or the chicken,

almost gone in the ice-box, they don't
want to be uncovered. They give you a hard
look, like you've caught them by

surprise, you've been rude when there
was no thought of being rude.
I remember how black sea bass would run

close to the shore at low
tide. Sometimes I would see them there,
through the water at my knees,

darting like comets after crabs or
smaller fish. They were fast.
I imagine if they bothered to look up,

they'd look like my son,
startled, unnerved, insulted by the fact
they were being watched,

simply observed. Sometimes when I open
a can of peas I think
about the universe, about the depth of

darkness, about whether if
the sky full of stars were turned back
like the top of a can, I'd

be angry, annoyed, or would someone
else, looking in
from the other side, complain.

Now I'm thinking of the Heinlein story "Goldfish bowl" and whether the bunny who is spending the winter in our dining room minds when we do have to get up for school and someone turns the light on, rather than letting the dawn illuminate his room slowly, the way he's used to from all his years outside.

Waking up to this much snow was a kind of rude awakening all by itself, I think. Did any of you have a rude awakening this morning?

Among Others

2011-02-21T08:43:00.004-05:00

Saturday we took our non-necromancy show on the road and entertained ourselves in the city an hour away while Walker played three chess games on the first day of a tournament. He now plays at the "expert" level, which means there's less drama; he knows many of his competitors and more of the games end in a draw. So we left him to it. Eleanor and I got haircuts while Ron sat in a next-door coffeeshop, and then we had a fancy lunch at the restaurant next door on the other side (Eleanor had her favorite, brie and pear pizza). We went to see Gnomeo and Juliet, which was mildly amusing. Walker went out to dinner with us, and then we took him back for the evening game and headed for the place we always go when we've done everything else and need somewhere to hang out: the bookstore. We all found some books and settled in for a while. When the while was over, I discovered that I was totally hooked on the book I'd picked up to see if it was as good as I'd read over at Things Mean A Lot-- Among Others, by Jo Walton. I had to buy it and carry it with me on the long, moonlit road home and wait until the next day after I'd taken Walker back for the second day of the tournament until I could finish reading it.

The first-person narrator of Among Others is a young girl who reads a lot of the kind of poetry and science fiction and fantasy I read when I was her age. Throughout her story, she says what she thinks of this book and that, and--especially because we don't always agree--it's kind of like having a conversation about the kind of most-beloved books that live deepest and longest in your imagination, the kind that have provided you with the metaphors through which you've always seen the world, like thinking that huorns should be coming to help when you've finally had the courage to do the thing that will vanquish evil.

Among Others is, first and foremost, a book about books-- not a genre I often like, because it usually strikes me as somewhat artificial and precious. This book isn't like that, though; it's more like a Victorian children's book in which the children have read a lot of the same books you have and loved them for most of the same reasons. She reads and talks about J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Plato, Poul Anderson, Mary Renault, C.S. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon, among others. And if you've read some of the same books she has, you know exactly what she means when she says that sometimes a person she knows "gives me the creeps. Who could help wanting to Impress a dragon in preference? Who wouldn't want to be Paul Atreides?"

At one point when the narrator has to make a choice between life and death, she chooses life simply because "I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out."

The book-loving theme is the main attraction of this book, and it has an ending more fulfilling and satisfying than any I could have imagined. There are huorns, finally, and a reference to Burnham Wood, and the narrator says she had tears in her eyes, and I definitely had them in mine. This is the line you want to get to in this book: "If you love books enough, books will love you back." I'm glad I hadn't read Jo Walton's "big idea" post over at Whatever before I read her book, but now that I have, I like what she says about this line.

The other thing this book is about is fairies. Yeah, but don't look at me like that. Again, it's more like a Victorian children's book where the fairies are treated matter-of-factly than the kind of thing you might be imagining. Part of what the book is about is magic. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not mentioning the narrator's name.

Let me try to give you some of the matter-of-fact flavor:
"One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has....They couldn't believe I didn't know....It turns out it's a Bentley--I wrote and asked--which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want me to be able to place everyone very precisely....
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."

The narrator occasionally wrestles with the necessity for using magic:
"I think I ought to do something about the way the universe is unfolding, because there are things that need obvious and immediate attention, like the fact that the Russians and the Americans could blow the world to bits at any moment, and Dutch elm disease, and famine in Africa..."

And she thinks about the way magic works:
"I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn't exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming around the corner, it isn't as if I'd be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they're going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I'd have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn't have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that's just for a bus."

What I like best about the magic, besides her descriptions of what particular fairies look like, is the way she always wonders about what she's trying to do in the world: "was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it?"

There are people you meet who fall in step with you, like the friends the narrator meets in town who turn with her towards the bookshop because they're "bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop." Reading this book is like meeting friends like that. And the book is about people who know how books can be friends--reading it gave me the pleasure of seeing how this new friend--Walton's narrator-- first met many of my old friends, and the pleasure of adding her story to theirs.

This book is for anyone who loves reading, anyone who claps during a performance of Peter Pan, and anyone who has been a teenager.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-02-18T07:25:00.002-05:00

Children's: What Harry Potter confection comes with a wizard card in every package?

Classics: What novel by Aldous Huxley shipwrecks reporter Will Farnaby in the faraway utopia of Pala?

Non-Fiction: What best-selling high-tech author described his fascination with spoon-bending and other psychic phenomena, in Travels?

Book Club: What novelist contrasts the marriages of two Bangladeshi sisters in her debut novel Brick Lane?

Authors: Who helped Zora Neale Hurston turn her short story "Mule Bone" into a play, before a rift caused it to go unpublished for 60 years?

Book Bag: What William Goldman book included the first chapter of its unpublished sequel, Buttercup's Baby, in its 25th anniversary edition?

Company of Liars

2011-02-17T08:54:00.004-05:00

In the mood for some light winter reading, I picked up Karen Maitland's medieval mystery entitled Company of Liars, and enjoyed it immensely all the way through. It's the story of a small band of wanderers trying to avoid the plague and also too much scrutiny. They are all "liars" in some way, and as their stories are told or revealed, the reader grows to care about them as their companions do.

There are lots of secrets and lots of stories, and the fun of reading is in discovery, so I won't tell much about what happens, but there are lots of incidental pleasures. Maitland has done her research, and so the details of medieval life on the road are interesting in themselves; I'd never thought about the fact that glass-blowing apprentices had to be more than usually intelligent and disciplined: "get careless with a rod of molten glass and a man could be burned so badly his wounds might never heal. They were quick, eager lads and they needed to be. This was not a profession for dullards."

Even to a twentieth-century person living in a house with central heating, some universal truths appeal, like when one character asserts that "it is only when you get truly warm that you realise how cold you have been."

It's not until p. 314 of this 453-page novel that readers get the first big clue about the "lie" that the first-person narrator, a Camelot, or (according to the glossary at the back) "medieval peddler who also sold or carried news" has been carrying around. The very medieval kind of black or white judgment which puts lies absolutely on the side of evil finally leads to a confrontation at the end of the novel. And the last chapter, in which we learn "the truth about scars"--and a few other things that we might otherwise have believed were supernatural--is unforgettable, and a deeply satisfying end to a sometimes scary story.

The Market Economy

2011-02-16T08:24:00.003-05:00

It's hard to feel lucky in February. I think it's easier to feel that you're putting together a lot of the details that will make good things happen in subsequent months, things that aren't even noticed now but will soon come poking up like green shoots out of melting snow.

I spent a month working on a proposal for my 1/6 time job last September, and even though it wasn't accepted by the people I pitched it to, I've pasted an idiot grin on my face and continued to wave around the thick sheaf of paper describing it. Now another proposal is in the works--a bigger one which includes the first as an appendix--and it offers a chance that my job will be classified as at least half time in the next few years.

I thought I needed to give this work most of my attention for a year, to see if I can turn it into more of what it should be, but it's hard going some days. I think of my life in the village where I work as if I'm a character like Auden describes Brueghel's Icarus in "Musee des Beaux Arts," someone who is "not an important failure," but that's not the perception of the people I pass on the streets of the small town where I live. Their situation is a lot more like the one in Marge Piercy's 1977 poem "The Market Economy":

Suppose some peddler offered
you can have a color TV
but your baby will be
born with a crooked spine;
you can have polyvinyl cups
and wash and wear
suits but it will cost
you your left lung
rotted with cancer; supposed
somebody offered you
a frozen precooked dinner
every night for ten years
but at the end
your colon dies
and then you do,
slowly and with much pain.
You get a house in the suburbs
but you work in a new plastics
factory and die at fifty-one
when your kidneys turn off.

But where else will you
work? where else can
you rent but Smog City?
The only houses for sale
are under the yellow sky.
You've been out of work for
a year and they're hiring
at the plastics factory.
Don't read the fine
print, there isn't any.

Where else will you work? I keep asking myself that. Why did you quit commuting, with college costs looming over your head like a cartoon anvil? Suppose you get what you want--you get paid for working full time--and then you have to do this work for the rest of your life?

"What if" is a wearying game. It's easier to plod along doing the same thing every day without ever thinking about it, except then one day the snow is all melted and you realize that you're older without having gotten any wiser.

Jonathan Franzen is giving a talk at the college tonight, and I'm going to put on my insulated parka and venture out to hear it. You know the saying about ventures, don't you?

Hamlet's BlackBerry

2011-02-14T10:18:00.000-05:00

I read Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building A Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers, because of the review at Sophisticated Dorkiness. And really, I don't know what I was expecting--something I didn't already know? Some kind of magic solution?

The book begins with a delightful analogy and goes on to identify the problem of busyness, which is that it's inevitable in a culture where "it's good to be connected, and it's bad to be disconnected." (If you don't believe that of our culture, think back to the last time you visited a parents' house, a hotel or a restaurant that didn't have a wireless connection.)

Although I believe that there are some problems with what he calls "the Vanishing Family Trick," I don't believe that parental authoritarianism, his recommended remedy, is the solution. As he points out in a later chapter on Ben Franklin, people have to see the positive in their resolution to give up something they want, and the children in his family, while they may like the parentally-mandated internet free weekends, as he asserts they do, have had it chosen for them; I'm assuming that they're younger than my teenagers.

I've recently been dealing with my teenage son's struggle for independence, and I'm trying hard to see his side--so hard that this book may have just come at the wrong time for me. It does affect my reaction to sentences like "my most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared about put everything and everyone else aside to be with me alone...." which seems to me to be a version of the "only two choices" logical fallacy--either you spend this much time with someone without answering the call of electronic devices, or you give in to their lure entirely. Wouldn't teaching a kid good manners solve some a lot of these problems--you know, like talk to the people you're with rather than ignore them because of your phone? Powers does mention changes in the etiquette of telephone use: "for much of the twentieth century, when the phone rang it was customary to drop whatever you were doing and answer it....And we're still learning to live with phones."

The section in which Powers proposes we have something to learn about how to construct our own versions of the good life from Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan seemed contrived and spun-out to me, as if a small, clever idea Powers came up with had been plumped and cosseted so it could stretch out to book length. He's dug up several references to an erasable "table" mentioned in Hamlet and asserts that "it played a central role in people's lives for hundreds of years and helped some of history's most brilliant minds organize their time and thoughts" while comparing its usefulness to that of his own moleskine notebook, and he's usefully inserted an interpretation of Walden back into the context of Transcendentalism. But I found nothing relevatory here.

Powers ends with some personal suggestions about how to live a good life amid a myriad of screens demanding some of our time and attention. One of them that I particularly like--because it's one I already do and it works well for me--is "to start using other people as your search engines....it's more enjoyable listening to the latest developments through the interpretive lens of a person you know, and it saves a lot of trouble."

Other suggestions I like less: "Have a disconnected party where all devices are confiscated at the door." Again, wouldn't good manners dictate that when you go to a party, you voluntarily put them away when you come through the door? Maybe where Powers lives it isn't considered rude to use electronic devices while visiting someone else's house, but where I live, unless you're a medical doctor on call, you're expected to be able to live without your devices for a couple of hours when the pleasure of your company has been requested.

This book inspires me to begin concluding my reviews with an audience recommendation. You could see this series building in my previous posts--one of my most urgent criticisms of Stanley Fish's book How To Write A Sentence was that I didn't think he had a very good idea of who he was writing it for, and the audience for Eleanor's Brown's novel was also a subject for my speculation. It seems like a good direction, to recommend the book based on who I think would most like to read it.

Who would most like to read Hamlet's Blackberry? Someone who would not think to pick it up. Someone who has never thought about designing a "philosophy for building a good life" but who lives from moment to digital moment, rarely reading a printed book. Someone who would text in the theater (and surely there's a special circle of hell for those folks).

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-02-11T08:20:00.002-05:00

Children's: What tomboy detective solves the mysteries of the Hollywood Mummy and the Runaway Elf, in Wendelin Van Draanen novels?

Classics: What novel edged out Sinclair Lewis' Main Street in 1921, to earn Edith Wharton her only Pulitzer?

Non-Fiction: What racer notes in his second memoir, Every Second Counts: "Generally, one of the hardest things in the world is to do something twice"?

Book Club: What did Julia Alvarez title her 1997 novel that gives everyone except Yolanda a chance to talk?

Authors: Who dreamed up her first crime novel, Death at La Fenice, while backstage at the opera, chatting with a singer about how to murder a difficult director?

Book Bag: What detective did creator John D. McDonald describe as a "tattered knight on a spavined steed"?

A Decade

2011-02-10T06:07:00.000-05:00

Today is the 31st anniversary of my first days of wine and honey with the person I married. So it's been more like, um, three decades . . . but who's counting?

A Decade

When you came, you were like red wine
and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth
with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your
savour,
But I am completely nourished.

Message to Sylvia Massara

2011-02-10T06:02:00.003-05:00

There's a romance novel writer named Sylvia Massara who writes a pink-bannered blog called "Writers Helping Writers." Yesterday she felt the need to lash out at the "unprofessionalism" of two unpaid bloggers who had the audacity to give one of her books a less-than-glowing review. At first she named the bloggers, but now she's taken the names out of her post. She had gotten 180 comments before she evidently decided that to comment on her post, you had to be a "member" of her blog.

This is blogging at its worst: indulging in a word-tantrum when you don't get your way, name-calling, and then metaphorically covering your ears and humming.

I've been blogging about books for three years now, and I'm increasingly distressed to find that when I make any kind of critical comment about a book (I'm using the word "critical" in terms of "criticism," which is the business of a reviewer), a few readers--sometimes including the author--jump to the conclusion that I didn't "like" it. It's as if a review has to be all good or all bad.

Massara's objection to her "bad" reviews is that they weren't "objective"and that the reviewers didn't provide evidence for their views. Obviously I agree that bloggers should back up what they say, but that's completely unconnected to the subjectivity of the view. Why shouldn't a blogger be subjective? No one's paying him or her to do this, there's no publication philosophy standing behind what is being written, and any audience members have freely chosen to read what this blogger says.

There's only one way that what Massara is complaining about makes sense, and that's the possibility that sending a free book to a blogger obligates her to bend over backwards to find something nice to say about it and avoid exposing what she sees as its shortcomings.

And what's the solution? It's nothing new, but let's go over it again for Sylvia's benefit. Bloggers, if you don't want to shill for publishers, go to the library and buy your own books, for the most part. If you find publishers who will continue to send you advance review copies even when you review some of them negatively, stick with them. Authors, if you want honest reviews, look around and find some bloggers whose views you generally agree with and whose taste you trust. And if you can't find enough people who like the stuff you like, then create your own club and put a "no dirty bloggers allowed" sign on it by instructing your publisher to send review copies only to club members.

The Weird Sisters

2011-02-09T06:17:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of reasons I felt I had to read Eleanor's Brown's new novel The Weird Sisters sooner rather than later. There's the fact that she has said the college is a combination of Kenyon and Oberlin. There was Eleanor saying that she must have gone into the future to write it (as she said, the author's got my name, it's about where I grew up, and they talk in literary tropes like we do). And then there were Kim's "5 Reasons You Should Read The Weird Sisters."

But the book didn't live up to my expectations. The most interesting thing about it is the way it's told, as if the three sisters could share each others' thoughts. Still, the use of the archaic definition of the word "weird" as "fate" to define the sisters just doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't have a sister and am not infrequently irritated by the cutesy way some of my friends and relatives have taught their daughters to act with each other (a problem with relating to the characters in this book that my own daughter will share), but I don't understand or much like the whole premise about how a sister's life is defined by her place in the birth order and her role as a sister.

Brown is a good storyteller, and she gets a lot of the details about a small, college town just right. Things are just too tidy in the story, though. What she misses are the rivalries and small, petty annoyances that grow inevitably between proud, intelligent people who have to rub elbows with each other for too many years. All of the small-town folks in The Weird Sisters are pleasant and welcoming to the sisters when they come back home. They offer them jobs and food and love. Not one reveals any festering jealousy from way back when.

The plot is fairly standard chick-lit fare (when I described it to a friend of mine who is a tenured professor at Kenyon, she called it "highbrow chick lit"). One sister realizes, towards the end of the novel, that her mother, a homemaker (there's an accurate detail; there are more of those in small college towns than in the world in general) was probably more self-actualized by cooking, gardening and reading than she would have been by getting a job. I do love this passage:
"Barnwell is full of people like our mother, married to spouses who dragged them to the middle of a cornfield and set off for the academic races with no more than a kiss and a cheerful exhortation to go ahead and build a life for themselves in the middle of nothing."

Despite the fact that I really don't like any of the characters--the thieving, adulterous sister, the blindly ambitious one, or the apathetic hippie wanna-be--I do like some of the ways they relate to the world. They think it's natural to always have a book with you, as does almost everyone I know. And they have one of the most satisfying answers to the perennial "How do you have time to read" question that I've heard in a while:
"Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces?"

Readers will like this book, and women with sisters will like it even better. I like it for its description of the dynamics of a family which "has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years," although I do find this fictional family's adherence to quoting only one author oddly narrow.

Perhaps I expected too much from this book. If I had gone into it thinking it would be like a new novel from Jennifer Crusie or Weiner, I'd have been pleasantly surprised.

Bill Hastings

2011-02-08T09:10:00.002-05:00

The AEP trucks that were all over town have mostly disappeared now, leaving us with as much heat and light as we can afford to pay for inside our house while outside the snow and ice continue to decorate the Christmas tree, still in its stand, that we got as far as our deck. It seems to me that snow has fallen every Monday night since December, but maybe that's just when I notice it because I have symphony rehearsal on Monday nights.

I'm grateful that we have power, especially since the radio just informed me that the wind chill tonight will feel like 15 below. I've been thinking about a passage from the novel Saving CeeCee Honeycutt (which I found otherwise forgettable) in which a character says "There's no doubt in my mind that certain temperaments do better in some climates than others."

But I am grateful, oh yes indeed I am--daily, now--to have power in this climate. My recently renewed feeling of gratitude for electricity--along with the uncharacteristic advice I got last night from my daughter's former gifted teacher about how to get her through college and into a well-paying job as fast as possible--makes me think of this 1990 poem by Todd Jailer entitled "Bill Hastings":

Listen to me, college boy, you can
keep your museums and poetry and string quartets
'cause there's nothing more beautiful than
line work. Clamp your jaws together
and listen:
It's a windy night, you're freezing the teeth out
of your zipper in the ten below, working stiff
jointed and dreaming of Acapulco, the truck cab.
Can't keep your footing for the ice, and
even the geese who died to fill your vest
are sorry you answered the call-out tonight.
You drop a connector and curses
take to the air like sparrows who freeze
and fall back dead at your feet.
Finally you slam the SMD fuse home.
Bang! The whole valley lights up below you
where before was unbreathing darkness.
In one of those houses a little girl
stops shivering. Now that's beautiful,
and it's all because of you.

So thank you, unnamed AEP workers who got our power back on after the icepocalypse last week. We waved to you when you parked in front of our house, but you were busy. I think of you when I feel sullen because the ice still won't go away, and I try to call up the memory of that joy I felt when you first slammed that fuse home or whatever it was you had to do to make our lives liveable again.

The Golden Spruce

2011-02-07T06:32:00.000-05:00

If you could recommend one book that everyone in the world should read, what would it be? Hard question, isn't it? I'm not sure I could come up with just one. But I notice that readers of non-fiction often have one particular pet book, and it's almost always interesting and rewarding to read it. In addition to what I learn, I see the person who recommended it to me from an unexpected angle.

So when a friend of mine on FB recommended The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, by John Vaillant, I told her I wanted to read it and she brought her copy right over to my house. Feeling like I'd better seize the moment, I plunged into it immediately, and fairly soon got bogged down. I kept plugging away, though, and discovered by the end that reading this book is like going to the opera--you really should know the story ahead of time. I think it would have been a better book if the newspaper story that appears in the epilogue had appeared instead in the prologue:

Picea Sitchensis 'Bentham's Sunlight'--Fresh Graft $20.00
NEW! A piece of history from a legendary 300 yr. old Golden Sitka Spruce growing wild on fog shrouded Queen Charlotte Island in Canada, sacred to the Haida Indians, with a tragic end. In 1997 a protestor felled this tree in protest to general apathy towards clearcutting. He disappeared before he made it to his court appearance, presumed dead, with only the remains of his broken and battered kayak to be found, and some rudimentary camping gear. A story that has it all--history, sacred symbolism, tragedy, mystery. Grafting material was taken from the downed tree and efforts have been made to graft on to the original rootstock.

There, now, you're ready to read this book. And it really is a fascinating story; I was glad, by the end, that it had been so enthusiastically recommended.

The prologue tells the story of someone discovering a wrecked kayak on an island near the Canadian border, and then the first chapter plunges into an explanation of the climate and conditions in "North America's coastal temperate rainforests"--you know, a bit north of where the photos of giant redwoods come from and where one of my favorite childhood movies, The Gnomemobile, was filmed. The first chapter ends by zeroing in on the Queen Charlotte islands and one particular tree that grew there, a golden spruce that was "sixteen stories tall and more than twenty feet around" and is described (in a later chapter) as a tree that had "peculiar radiance, as if it were actually generating light from deep within its branches" and was called "the Ooh-Aah tree, because that's what it made us all say."

After many chapters about the dangers of the waters off the coast of British Columbia, the history of logging in the Pacific Northwest, and the childhood and logging career of Grant Hadwin, the person who destroyed the golden spruce, you finally have enough background to understand the story of greed. After that you get to hear the story of myth and finally Hadwin's madness. The background is essential, though. One of the points of the book is that most people--certainly me--are even less aware about where the paper for their books and houses comes from than they are about the origins of the beef they eat. Not only that, but "there is another reason we are so far removed from this process...and that is because, in most cases, the process is so far removed from us. Old-growth loggers are latter-day frontiersmen letting the light into the last dark corners of the country; we don't see them because they are pushing deep into places where the bulk of the population wouldn't last twenty-four hours."

Vaillant made me think of other books I've read, like the one by Conrad Richter about prehistoric Ohio entitled The Trees. In fact, Vaillant observes that "out here, the empty spaces still look like wounds, like violations of the natural order, but back east--that is, from Chicago to Babylon--we find this hard to visualize because the clear-cutting happened generations before any of us was born. Treeless expanses look normal to us--'natural,' even."

Also, as I said, Vaillant made me think of that 1967 movie The Gnomemobile, which centers around a lumberman setting aside some acres of forest rather than cutting down all the trees that are home to the gnomes and their forest friends. Vaillant tells me that "these 'set-asides' were generally miniscule, seldom amounting to more than five or ten acres--nowhere near big enough to serve a significant conservation function for the ecosystem. Their primary purposes were recreational and symbolic--the briefest of nods to the great forest that had once stood there."

The Haida Indians' myths about the golden spruce are myriad and at least partially untranslatable, but Vaillant tells some of the variations that center on humans becoming trees, one a complete story about a boy and his grandfather fleeing from winter's destruction of their village and tribe, with the grandfather instructing the boy not to look back, and the boy disobeying and becoming rooted, eventually turning into the golden spruce.

The madness of the man who destroyed the golden spruce in an effort to protest the methods of modern logging is told in all its complexity and pathos. This is the part of the book that gave me some insight into why the friend who lent it to me finds it such a fascinating book, as she's a psychologist by day; there's a revealing passage about Hadwin seeing himself as a visionary:
"Nowadays someone who gets blindsided by such a sudden and mind-altering experience might call it an epiphany, an awakening, or a religious experience while a professional might call it a delusion, a hallucination, or a psychotic episode. The truth is often somewhere in the elusive middle, and yet billions of people continue to be guided in their lives by just such liminal figures--most of whom--like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and Brigham Young--are long and safely dead. Were they alive today, they might be languishing in a heavily medicated limbo."

Hadwin's symbolic act didn't produce the results he wanted in the local community; Vaillant reports that "most people up here feel about Hadwin the way people in the States feel about Timothy McVeigh: he's an outsider who came into their place and killed something precious." But since Vaillant published this book in 2005, the act's symbolic resonance has been amplified.

From the person who reacted with some degree of scorn to a handwritten sign on a dispenser in a midwestern campus restroom reminding me that "these towels come from trees" to the person who is now thinking about the many rolls of paper towels we use each week for cleaning out our rabbit cage, Vaillant's book has brought me to a new degree of tree awareness.

Do you have a pet book I should read? (I can't promise I'll get to it right away unless you bring it to my door.)

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-02-04T08:25:00.002-05:00

Children's: What type of beast is Hathi, in The Jungle Book?

Classics: What Bernard Malamud debut novel introduced aging baseball phenom Roy Hobbes?

Non-Fiction: What four-letter title did Leora Tanenbaum pick for her book subtitled Growing Up Females with a Bad Reputation?

Book Club: What story by Andre Dubus III inspired the award-winning Sissy Spacek film In the Bedroom?

Authors: What Caribbean nation's revolution inspired Madison Smartt Bell's historical novels All Souls Rising and Master of the Crossroads?

Book Bag: What author briefly abandoned the supernatural in the 1980s to pen The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven?

Bloggiversary

2011-02-03T19:36:00.000-05:00

This blog began three years ago with a post about how it got its title. Thanks for being one of its readers!

Merengue

2011-02-02T08:14:00.000-05:00

With dark cloud cover looming low again every single day, I can think of nothing but litany poems. Everything seems to be repetition. Nothing seems to have much of a point except drinking or dancing or anything that, at least for the moment, might bring me out of the moment...

So I offer you Mary Ruefle's poem "Merengue":

I'm sorry to say it, but fucking
is nothing. To the gods, we look
like dogs. Still, they watch.
Did you lose your wallet?
Did you rip up the photo?
Did you pick up the baby
and kiss its forehead?
Did you drive into a deer?
Did you hack at the grass
as if it could kill you?
Did you ask your mother for milk?
Did you light the candles?
Did you count the buttons on your shirt?
Were you off by one? Did you start again?
Did you learn how to cut a pineapple,
open a coconut?
Did you carry a body once it had died?
For how long and how far?
Did you do the merengue?
Did you wave at the train?
Did you finish the puzzle, or save it for morning?
Did you say something? Would you repeat it?
Did you throw the bottle against the wall?
Did it break? Did you clean it up?
Did you tear down the web? What did you do
with the bug the spider was saving?
Did you dive without clothes into cold water?
Have you been born?
What book will you be reading when you die?
If it's a good one, you won't finish it.
If it's a bad one, what a shame.

I'm reading two books that I don't want to be reading when I die because then, well, "what a shame." How about you? Are you reading a good one? What do you figure your chances are for getting to finish it?

This month's free ebook

2011-02-01T16:51:00.001-05:00

from the publisher:
Phoenix Pick’s free ebook of the month for February is the complete
anthology, “The Best of Edmond Hamilton,” edited by his late wife, Leah
Brackett.
Edmond Hamilton is considered by many to be one of the original masters of
the genre. He is also credited as the author of the first science fiction
hardcover compilation “The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of
Planetary Horror” in 1936.
This anthology collects Hamilton’s best works from a repository of
hundreds of stories he had written over a period of nearly fifty years, as
selected (and edited) by his wife.
Leah Brackett (Hamilton) was a distinguished science fiction author in her
own right, and her novels include the classic, ‘The Long Tomorrow,’
considered by many to be one of the finest works about post-nuclear
holocaust America (to be re-published by Phoenix Pick, February 28, 2011).
She was also a highly accomplished Hollywood screenwriter and her credits
include adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’ and ‘The Long
Goodbye,’ as well as Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back.
The Coupon Code for February is 9992371. Instructions and download link at
www.PPickings.com (Phoenix Pick’s catalogue page).
The new book will be available from February 2nd through February 28th.

Running the Books

2011-01-31T06:12:00.000-05:00

Our friend Miriam says it's hard to find books that Ron and I haven't read, so she sent us Running the Books by Avi Steinberg for Christmas. It was not a book I'd heard of, and definitely not one I would have picked up on my own, but it dovetailed with other things I was doing and reading.

I'm looking for more work; I spent the fall making the case that the local college should hire me full-time, or at least more than my current 1/6 time. That could be a very long-term project, so in the last few weeks I started looking around for other work I could do without having to commute. And then, of course, the high school finally put through enough of the paperwork that the director decided we could do an abbreviated musical this spring, so we're doing a little 90-minute, one set, contemporary costume, 7 song show entitled Olivia Twist. For coordinating parent volunteers (ticket selling, set construction etc.), listing and collecting props, writing synopses, ads, cast biographies, and the program, decorating the set, and being there for auditions, rehearsals, and performances, I will earn almost exactly as much as I make in a month at the 1/6 time job.

So as I'm still trying to decide what to be when I grow up, I started reading two books simultaneously. One made me cry with frustration and longing, about being the kind of idealized adjunct professor whose students become a sort of extended family--more on that later--and the other told me about what it's like to be a prison librarian. Well, I've tried the former, and as I read Running the Books, I imagined being the latter.

But I learned something from this book--I'm not a librarian at heart; I'm an archivist. At one point, a fellow prison librarian tells the author that he is, too:
"He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.
'They like everything,' he said, 'gum wrappers as much as books.' He said this with a hint of disdain.
'Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,' he said, 'they're too crazy to throw anything out.'
I think the line about gum wrappers is a bit much, but they are paper, and I do have to make myself throw away letters sometimes; there's a box of letters written by my grandparents to each other in my basement.

Books in a prison library are often used as delivery systems for notes, or "kites," and Steinberg saved some of the ones he found, saying that "there was some part of me that thought, Who knows, maybe these letters will be important to someone in the future? I majored in history and literature, and wrote newspaper obituaries. I spent many hours looking at letters and artifacts that some oddball had decided not to throw out. There is no history, no memory, without this."

The stories Steinberg tells about his experiences working in a prison range from the kind-of-heartwarming to the horrifying. When he tells about being mugged by a former inmate, he notes that "if this were an inspirational prison movie, this would be the point at which he would have given the money back to me, cried, and thanked me for believing in him....But that's not what happened." He finds that "a surprising number of inmates were the emotional age of children....it was almost the norm....I recognized a childlike earnestness is the inmate, aged thirty-six, who pleaded with me to give him tape so that he could stick his name, which he had printed out in a colorful, calligraphic font, to his school folder." He watches both male and female inmates hold baby dolls. He says that "In the library, I saw a murderer suck her thumb."

Although Avi Steinberg--a short, slight, intensely Jewish urbanite--couldn't be less like me, he manages to make me and any other bookish reader identify with him; one of the ways he does it is with intensely personal observations and the other is with finely-tuned humor. At one point, talking about how a prisoner reminds him of his grandmother, he observes that "the talking cure doesn't do much for me. I tend more toward the brooding cure."

Occasionally--very occasionally--I reacted to the meaning he invested in his job with the same kind of skepticism with which I react to anyone who is over-reaching for meaning. For instance, I couldn't quite buy the depth of meaning he invested in a note that read:
"Dear Mother,
My life is"
He claims that it is "a life indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white space."
Yeah, okay, but as he points out in other places, it could just be a letter written by a brutish person who got interrupted.

Like all good teachers, Steinberg learns from his students, and in his story about one named Jessica, he displays a sensitivity and earnestness that shows better than he can tell how out-of-place he was for a short while as an employee of the prison system. Another story that shows the kind of dilemma a prison librarian can find himself in is one about an inmate writing a biography who asks Steinberg for help, and how he has to weigh the risks:
"I kept imagining the tabloid headline, Outraged Parents: Our Tax Dollars Helped Our Teenaged Daughter's Rapist Write His Tell-All! The article would be accompanied by my prison ID photo, with my crew cut and my bewildered grin, bearing the caption 'I thought it was a good read.' These paranoid scenarios kept me up at night."

Sometimes you want to find a way to earn a living that will make a change in the way you live--and often when you feel that way, it's good to read a book that tells you all about that way of life so you don't have to experience its excitement and pitfalls on your own.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-01-28T09:14:00.002-05:00

Children's: What William H. Armstrong classic tells the tragic tale of an unlucky mutt and his sharecropper masters?

Classics(?): What 1957 Ayn Rand opus devotes 57 pages to a single discourse on the principles of objectivism?

Non-Fiction: What Tidewater novelist devotes Fridays to writing nonfiction, some of which was published in The Friday Book and Further Fridays?

Book Club: What play, set in a Chicago real estate office, earned David Mamet a Pulitzer Prize?

Authors: What women's college hired Jill Ker Conway, author of The Road from Coorain, as its first female president?

Book Bag: What novel about a struggling Dublin band kicked Roddy Doyle's writing career into high gear?

Litany

2011-01-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

It's been a hard week so far. I've tried all my best remedies for winter: eating my favorite comfort food ("death chicken"), drinking glasses of wine, going to an indoor pool with sauna, taking vitamin D, watching DVDs with the family, looking at the price for various destinations on Expedia, sitting in front of a "sunlight lamp," and finally reading Todd Davis.

Still, every day seems like a repetition. Every night I'm tired again. The world stays black and white--black asphalt, black tree trunks, white snow, white sky. The Todd Davis volume I was paging through yesterday had this one in it, "Litany," and it's just the right poem for today:

We assure each other the days must grow short.
Yet our lamentations over the darkness that binds us
to this season are like the grouse's cry, useless

in its petition for the sun to return, to rise on wings
and roam freely above our heads. And so on this
Thursday in January, cold rain seeping from the sky,

ground closed and water running off
with the river, we know no language can hurry
the light from its perch. Like the litany the minister asks

us to speak each Sunday in church,
words will not make God walk across the earth
any faster, heat of the sun flying at his back.

What can we do but repeat the same words over and over to ourselves, waiting to get past this Thursday in January?

The Book of Tomorrow

2011-01-26T06:17:00.000-05:00

Cecelia Ahern is the daughter of Ireland's former prime minister and the author of P.S. I Love You, among other novels, so when I saw she had a new novel coming out, The Book of Tomorrow, I asked the people at HarperCollins to send me a copy. And I liked it even more than I expected to; it's a real page-turner.

The first-person narrator of the novel is a teenage girl named Tamara who is about the age of my daughter. She has been given everything in life, and appreciated very little of it--until her dad went bankrupt and killed himself, and she and her mother were forced to move in with relatives. The relatives have a lot of secrets, and that's part of what keeps you turning the pages.

Another thing that keeps you turning the pages is the actual book of tomorrow, which turns out to be some kind of magical blank book or diary. When Tamara looks in it, she sees diary entries from the next day. The interesting thing is that she's then free to try to change what will happen the next day. And the way she does it isn't mystical or anything like that; in fact some of the fun of reading the novel is in how she'll forget a detail and then understand why she's written about it:
"It was only when I landed on the grass and looked up at the house, at my bedroom, at the closed window, that I understood the meaning behind my message to myself to leave the window open."

The final thing that kept me turning pages is the quality of some of the writing, like the comment Tamara makes about her mother, early on:
"She wasn't a comfortable person and so had no comfort to give anybody else." It seems to me that the longer Ahern writes, the better she's getting.

This particular novel, though, has some unevenness in the the writing, probably due to her unfamiliarity with the genre that I'll here call "speculative fiction." One of the characters in The Book of Tomorrow is gradually revealed to be a one-dimensional, cardboard cut-out of a person, and it's quite disconcerting--you think you're reading a novel about how people relate to each other--and for the most part you are--except that towards the end, one character practically whips out a big black moustache, puts it on, and begins laughing fiendishly.

The character of Tamara herself, though, is very true-to-teenager-life. Most of her dialogue sounds like the kind of stuff I hear from the teenagers who flit in and out of my house, like this conversation between Tamara and the oddly-named Weseley:
"Where's your dad from?"
"Madagascar."
"Cool, like in the movie?"
"Yep, exactly like the animation" he said heavily.
"You ever go there?"
"No."
"How come he moved here?"
"Because."
"Ah." I nodded understandingly. "Always a good reason."
We both laughed.

Tamara's explanations of why she does some of the things she ends up doing are convincingly adolescent, too:
"My life felt so out of control that I wanted to lose control of me too. Just for a little while, at least."

So, despite the cardboard-cut-out character and some of the clunkiness of the way Ahern takes her chick-lit-writing skills to the next level, I thought that reading this novel was quite a pleasant use of the couple hours it took me to get through it.

How to Write a Sentence

2011-01-25T06:21:00.000-05:00

Harper Collins sent me a copy of Stanley Fish's little book entitled How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One and I'm wondering who, exactly, it's written for. It's not for me and my over-educated ilk; we play with sentences the way he describes all the time. It's not for people who don't read; he assumes familiarity with the works of 17th-century poets like John Milton and George Herbert. The chapters remind me of nothing so much as the blog posts of Amateur Reader, little musings on the style and sense of a previous era in which how you said something was nearly as important as what you were trying to say.

Fish tries to appeal to a broader audience than usual by sketching out the inclusiveness of his project:

"Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences....some of my fellow sentence appreciators have websites: Best Sentences Ever, Sentences We Love, Best First Sentences, Best Last Sentences. Invariably the sentences that turn up on these sites are not chosen for the substantive political or social or philosophical points they make. They are chosen because they are performances of a certain skill at the highest level. The closest analogy, I think, is to sports highlights."
(Note: some of these websites don't exist by anything like the name he gives them, and for others I can only guess he might mean a site like 100 best first lines from novels.)

So is he trying to appeal to sports fans? It seems heavy-handed and awkward to me, like an elderly, bespectacled professor assuming that the football players in his class can only appreciate ideas in terms of sports analogies, and that bird watchers will appreciate being singled out from the other "fauna watchers."

The distance between Fish's privileged position as an academic and his floundering attempts to connect with the "common man" results in sentences like these:
"This, then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free. I call this the Karate Kid method of learning how to write."

This imagined common man will, I predict, get tired of the more lectur-y parts of the book, like where Fish feels compelled to define "essay" and use the correct rhetorical term for a coordinate construction; Fish himself evidently feels this, as he inserts a parenthetical remark:
"(Don't worry about the term; you don't have to learn it, but it might be useful at a cocktail party.)"
Yes, Stanley, when we travel back in time to the 1950's and the Dean invites us over for drinks.

The writing is better later in the book, when Fish lets himself get more carried away by the raptures of George Eliot and Philip Sidney--although he slips back into his fake, jocular "appeal to the common man" when he describes the speed of an effect as "almost like fuel injection." When Fish allows himself a full academic expanse of utterance, he can illuminate his subject like no one else. Discussing a section from Milton's Apology, he says:
"This sentence, a mini-essay on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, enacts what it describes. It argues implicitly against the commonsense assumption that the craft of writing is one thing, the moral worth of the writer another. Milton insists that the two are one, and that without the latter, the former is impossible."

Perhaps because he's in full-blown academic discourse mode by the end of the book, Fish ends up twisting some of his own sentences into tortured grammatical form:
"...a novel nearly every sentence of which merits a place in this book."
Such an awkward phrase distracts me from the sense of what he's saying, and makes me aware of that elderly, bespectacled speaker again.

But then he regains his place in his lecture notes and all is well again. The reader can be carried away by a quotation from John Donne to the conclusion that "The same imperfection and finitude require from us the writing of sentences (as opposed to the instantaneous knowledge of everything), and some of those sentences, like this one...reflect self-consciously on the conditions of their performance."

The oddity of publishing these kinds of thoughts in book form at this point in the twenty-first century is highlighted by the epilogue, in which Fish invites "those readers who can't believe I failed to include their all-time favorite sentence to send it to me" without specifying a mechanism by which this might be possible. He needs to have a graduate assistant set up a website for him. If he did, would you send him your favorite sentence?

Half in Love

2011-01-24T06:36:00.000-05:00

One day a couple of weeks ago, I opened my front door to find a package from Anne Sexton's daughter stuck inside the screen. It was a copy of her memoir, Half in Love: surviving the legacy of suicide (by Linda Gray Sexton). I got the book because I agreed to be part of the TLC book tour, and I agreed because I was intrigued; Linda Gray Sexton is the editor of my edition of Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems and, as her mother's literary executor, the author of Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters.

Since Anne wrote "confessional" poems, the whole poetry-reading world knows about Linda's "brown mole/under your left eye, inherited/from my right cheek" and that her mother ended the poem about taking a nap with her by saying "I promise you love. Time will not take away that."

It's hard for me to imagine what it's like to grow up with parts of your childhood so publicly on display, and also to understand why someone, especially a mother, would want to kill herself. Linda Gray Sexton is most successful at conveying the pain that can drive a person to consider suicide by giving the accumulation of detail that can lead to such a choice. The first paragraph of Half in Love is a description that I certainly identify with at this time of year:
"...I fell into a pit of loneliness and sorrow and couldn't climb out. I couldn't talk with those I loved about my grief or my despair, so afraid that by speaking about such things, I would make them even more real. I worried, unconsciously, that even if I described the pain wrapped around my heart, I would not be heard. I worried, consciously, that others--no matter how close--would perceive me to be preoccupied with myself in unattractive ways."

But it seems incredible that a beautiful woman whose professional life consisted of one literary triumph after another could ever experience depression; Anne "experienced success nearly immediately; prestigious literary magazines like the New Yorker and the Hudson Review quickly accepted her efforts, as well as other, smaller publications. Houghton Mifflin Company published her first collection of poetry....She went on to write nine volumes and established an enormous following of dedicated fans." And yet she attempted suicide multiple times, eventually succeeding.

Linda says that after her mother's suicide, "her oldest sister and her father's sister both killed themselves, handing the legacy down and on to another generation in their own families. I wondered about my cousins. Did they feel this same push, this intense desire to look out over the edge? And, if so, was that impulse simply a response to the way suicide expressed itself genetically, a bad balance of chemicals in the body? Or was it the influence of living with someone who was mentally ill? Or was it both?"

Anne's parents and siblings, Linda says, "did not understand why she couldn't simply 'keep a stiff upper lip.'" So Anne's daughters and husband also kept quiet about what it was like to live with her: "we didn't talk about the violence any more than we talked about her mental illness." This seems to be the major difference between Linda's experience and her mother's: Linda is not reticent about discussing what she at one point calls the "slide down into the rabbit hole inside my mind," even when one psychiatrist yells at her that her kid isn't difficult, but she is "a difficult mother!"

Linda chronicles the years she spent swinging back and forth from depression to strength, and lists all the drugs she was prescribed, starting with Prozac, the initial effect of which, she says, was "like driving with the parking brake off, for the first time in my life."

She becomes a cutter, which is the part of the memoir I am least able to understand, despite her characteristically bald description: "it's a way of letting the poison out. Taking control again." Reading about the cutting, at least, makes me aware of how fortunate I am to have never felt the kind of despair that can be temporarily relieved in this particular way.

This is Linda's gift, to explain what a state of mind most people have never experienced is really like. I doubt that many of her readers will be as clueless as the police chief who says "it had never occurred to him that a suicide could be driven by intense pain," but a few of them might be brought to understand a little more about the inescapability of depression. I particularly like her use of metaphor:
"I was still a novice at dealing constructively with my depression...and, despite my desperate attempts to combat it, I lay at its feet, day by day, feeling unbearable guilt that my love wasn't strong enough to help me to rise."

Even though Linda's own sister still evidently feels that her suicide attempts were "manipulative...an indulgence," the level of detail in the story Linda tells about her struggle will make it harder for readers to dismiss the idea that there can be a legacy of suicide, and easier to see where help might be available and maybe how it can be most effective.

Guest Post

2011-01-24T05:29:00.002-05:00

Today at The 3 Rs, Florinda is allowing me to try to convince her readers to read Carolyn Ives Gilman's Halfway Human, a book I think everyone should read.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-01-21T06:58:00.000-05:00

Children's: What Little House book tells of the Ingalls family's prolonged snowbound existence on the Dakota plains?

Classics: What Norman Mailer epic lands a squad of unlucky Marines on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei?

Non-Fiction: What author admitted in her memoir Operating Instructions that she thought motherhood "would be more like getting a cat"?

Book Club: What tale of two U.S. academics in London won Alison Lurie a Pulitzer?

Authors: What author once starred with his brother Malachy in a two-man musical review called A Couple of Blaguards?

Book Bag: What author landed his novels Bloodbrothers, The Wanderers and Clockers on the big screen?

Courage

2011-01-20T06:15:00.000-05:00

We woke up to black cold and saw Wednesday's paper delivered again on the ice of the driveway. All of us have somewhere to drive this afternoon, and it's supposed to snow. The rural roads do not see enough snowplow here.

In other words, it's a day I need more courage. I've been re-reading Anne Sexton and found a poem entitled "Courage," which seems to me another good one for the end of January:

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Today will be a day when getting through the small things takes courage. Sometimes the small things take more courage than the big dramatic events-- although, ironically, one of today's small things is getting my kids to their last dress rehearsal for a dramatic event that opens tomorrow night, a local production of The Laramie Project. Help me hope for no literal broken legs.

Greenery Street

2011-01-19T09:19:00.001-05:00

I won a pretty little paperback book a few weeks ago at Books and Chocolate, a copy of Greenery Street by Denis Mackail. One of the purposes of the giveaway was to introduce new readers to Persephone Books and their reprints of "neglected classics" from the early twentieth century. This one is fun to read; it's about a newly-married couple, and will make any married person reminisce fondly about the first year of marriage. It made me remember the young matrons I worked with (as a file clerk in a medical office) when I was a newlywed, and some of the quelling things they'd say to me about what would change as I became an "oldywed."

One of the things I read about this book before it arrived is that the narrator has reminded at least one reader of the sometimes-intrusive narrator in the tv show Arrested Development. So in the time between finding out I'd won the book and receiving it, I watched some episodes of the tv show, but have so far failed to be charmed by it.

The narration of Greenery Street, however, is quite charming, often in a slightly self-deprecating manner:
"This is how Greenery Street thinks and acts. This is how Felicity and Ian thought and acted now. They wouldn't deny that they'd had a shock; but, as Felicity pointed out, so long as they'd still got each other, what did anything else matter? One expects these little jolts occasionally, so they told one another, but in Greenery Street there is an ancient phrase which will fetch its inhabitants through worse troubles than these. You find it in those multi-coloured fairy books on Felicity's hanging bookshelf. 'So they were married,' it runs, 'and lived happily ever afterwards.'
For 'and,' say the inhabitants, please read 'and therefore.'"

Felicity and Ian go through all the conventional stages of courtship and marriage. When Ian first meets her father, there is some awkwardness which reminds me irresistably of the time my father, stuck for conversation, genially asked one of my teenage boyfriends whether the large car he was driving was difficult to park, and the boyfriend, head full of the phrase "parking," which meant "making out" in teenager parlance of that day, was left almost completely at a loss for words.

This is what Ian and Felicity's father Humphrey say and do upon first meeting:
"'How do you do, sir?' said Ian, courageously. As before, he extended the right hand of salutation.
But old Humphrey, who was at least ten times more embarrassed than anyone else in the room, found himself incapable of making the necessary contact. Instead, he nodded at Ian with an odd kind of familiarity--rather as though they had secretly spent the whole day together in not very respectable surroundings--and began rubbing the tips of his fingers against each other.
'Infernally cold,' he observed."

Some modern readers find Felicity a little sillier than the spirit of the novel requires, because of things like her inexperience with keeping financial records. I find her experience true to life, as an increasingly rare modern woman who went directly from her mother's house to setting up a household with a husband. As newlyweds, we once went two months thinking we didn't have much money in our account because I'd forgotten to record our paychecks in the "deposit" section.

Felicity is as sheltered as a nice turn-of the-century upper-class British woman should be, and so her husband's process of learning about her is laced with something that is close to--but not quite--condescension:
"Ian pigeon-holed this information--delivered with such careless certainty--in the section of his mind which was invisibly labelled 'Felicity's philosophy.' He was always turning over the contents of this compartment, smiling at them, piecing them together and separating them again. Sometimes they made him feel that he was really learning a lot about life; at other times that he was learning a lot about Felicity; oftener still that the whole collection represented just so much childishness and general inaccuracy. But when he had finished, he was always careful to put everything back. He had no intention of losing any of it."
Wouldn't it be nice if that tolerant attitude could last for thirty years or more? And yet it rarely does; it's a bit fragile for long duration, like some of the wedding gifts.

One of my favorite parts of the novel is when Felicity wants to go to a dance, and Ian is initially reluctant. They are so in love that, by the end of their disagreement, Felicity isn't sure she wants to go, and Ian is positively enthusiastic, lest he disappoint her. It reminds me of a discussion Ron and I once had about where to go for a romantic Valentine's day lunch. I suggested one place, and he suggested another, and on Valentine's day we each went to the place the other had suggested and waited, wondering where the other was.

Almost as good is their attempt to meet each other halfway about settling into a hotel:
"She was unpacking... conscientiously, and Ian--who preferred to take things from his suitcase as the occasion arose--showed a little impatience....And then, because she was a good wife, she controlled her desire to rearrange all her things in different cupboards and drawers..." Since I'm the one who prefers to take things from my suitcase as the occasion arises, I appreciate Felicity's efforts to get on with the holiday.

There are a few situations a modern reader will have absolutely no experience with--the difficulty of firing a servant, for instance-- but since the strength of this novel is in the evoking of experience through details that are as often timeless as dated, many readers will find plenty to sympathize with and remember as fondly as Ian and Felicity end up looking back on Greenery Street, the first place they live together as a couple.

If you've ever been married, you know how the most absurd things about the first place you lived together can become fond memories. Our "honeymoon cottage," as my father still calls our first apartment, had roly-polies (sow bugs) that would sometimes crawl up the wall and partway across the ceiling before dropping, and I was afraid one would eventually drop onto my face while I was sleeping. Ron used to gallantly promise to stay awake and guard my face; that's a fond memory now.

And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

2011-01-18T10:07:00.002-05:00

At this dead and frozen time of year, I'm looking for ways to get through each day, and so I've been reading more poems by Todd Davis. One of his poems is a strong enough tonic to get me through one more day towards spring; this one, "And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible":

Everything shines from the inside out--
not like the blaze of the sun, but like
the moon, as if each of us had swallowed
a piece of it. Our flesh opaque, milky,
indefinite--the way you see the world
when cataracts skim your vision.
What so many mistake as imperfection--
bulge of varicose, fatty tumor's bump--
is simply another way for the light to get out,
to illuminate the body as it rises.
We're caught up all the time, but none of us
should fly away yet. It's in the darkness
when your feet knock dew from leaves
of grass, when your hand pushes out
against the coffin's lid. Just wait.
You'll see we had it right all along,
that the only corruption comes
in not loving this life enough.

My favorite line of this poem is "we're caught up all the time." I like that it can be read at least two ways, one of them about how we get caught up in the busyness (business) of our own lives and forget to get a birthday card sent in time (sorry Sarah; happy birthday today!) or just to think about what someone else is going through at the moment. Sometimes I think about how nice it is not to have a sore throat. I don't have one now. Do you?

This poem makes me think about the time I spend in doctor's waiting rooms. In December I was at an ophthalmic surgeon's office, having a consultation about a little growth that was removed from my eyelid and turned out to be nothing worrisome, and I saw a lot of old people complete with things like red eyes and fatty tumors, some of them shuffling behind walkers. It helps me to be patient when I'm behind someone like that--let's say an old person who is confused about how to fill out the insurance paperwork--to try to see a physical imperfection as a daughter or son would, something so slight and so gradual that if you noticed it, you would only feel more love for the person who had to bear such a frailty.

Tomorrow I go to the orthopedist's office for the yearly checkup on my artificial knee, and I'll see a lot of old people who have been in pain so long it's affected their personality. I used to be like that, but part of my body has already risen. Now I can love this life enough--even in January, if I squeeze my eyes closed so the old snow in the background looks like light.

Clockwork Angel

2011-01-17T06:09:00.000-05:00

Clockwork Angel is Cassandra Clare's latest YA offering; she's taken the basic plot and character types from her City of Bones/Ashes/Glass series and steampunk-ified them back into the Victorian era. The surprise is that it's still fun.

When Tessa, the main character of this one, tells Will, a Shadowhunter, that she loves to read books by Wilkie Collins, he observes that he's "never seen anyone get so excited over books before," and she asks "Isn't there anything you love like that? And don't say 'spats' or 'lawn tennis' or something silly" to which he replies "Good Lord...it's like she knows me already."

One character, a friend of Will's, seems to be very obviously dying of consumption, until it turns out that it's something else altogether which ails him. Another character tells Will and his fellow Shadowhunters about the threat posed by "mechanical monsters meant to destroy the ranks of Shadowhunters" and the "binding spell that would animate these creatures not with mechanics but with demonic energies." So it's Victorian England, only not quite.

I also particularly enjoyed the part where Will kills one of a pair of demons, only to find out later that "her sister brought her back via a necromantic charm."

And I relished the histrionic descriptions, like this one of the demons' lair:
"A great crystal chandelier hung overhead, fronded with strings of gray cobweb that drifted in the disturbed air like ancient lace curtains. It had probably once hung over a grand table. Now it swung over a bare marble floor that had been painted with a series of necromantic patterns--a five-pointed star inside a circle inside a square. Inside the pentagram stood a repulsive stone statue, the figure of some hideous demon, with twisted limbs and clawed hands. Horns rose from its head.
All around the room were scattered the remains of dark magic--bones and feathers and strips of skin, pools of blood that seemed to bubble like black champagne. There were empty cages lying on their sides, and a low table on which was spread an array of bloody knives and stone bowls filled with unpleasant dark liquids."

It makes me think of the "children catcher" from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the first kind of steampunk story I ever read. The description gives me the same delicious shiver, and the same feeling of removal--this is quite clearly a different world from our own.

My one complaint about this book is that we don't learn what the Clockwork Angel of the title is for, or what it does. True, the book cover warns that this is only "Book One" of a series that will be entitled "The Infernal Devices." Clare gets credit for bringing the events of the story to a satisfying conclusion. But why use the title to make a point about the angel itself, only to string readers along? That kind of cliffhanger served to bring my father back to the movie theater every week to see Flash Gordon, but I don't think it's necessary to coerce Clare's legions of readers into seeking the next installment of anything she cares to write.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-01-14T07:24:00.002-05:00

Children's: What bestseller did Dorothy Kunhardt come up with in 1940, after pasting tactile objects into a book for her three-year-old daughter, Edith?

Classics(?): Who was the first of Vito Corleone's sons to bite the dust?

Non-Fiction: What sport's early history, including Merkle's Boner and Snodgrass' Muff, did Lawrence Ritter bring to life in The Glory of Their Times?

Book Club: What 1980 novel introduced a blue-eyed Cro-Magnon orphan adopted by Neaderthals?

Authors: What San Francisco novelist insists his name is real, despite its suspicious anagram "is a man I dreamt up"?

Book Bag: What debut Roy Blount novel tells the story of Guy Fox, the first man to impregnate a U.S. president?

Container Gardening

2011-01-13T08:49:00.004-05:00

One of you recommended that I read Ellen Steinbaum's volume of poetry entitled Container Gardening, and I did. I was so grateful for the recommendation that I actually went back and tried to figure out who told me about it, but to no avail. My no-credit-no-blame system is too efficient.

My favorite one in the volume is this poem, "standing at the shore":

afterwards we will
look at it and say
this was when we still or
this was before
but then we will not be
at that same soft moment
grouped in pastel shirts
the children giddy with being
on the beach at nearly bedtime
digging their toes into the sand
wild to escape to the waves
get their clothes wet
looking back we may see
the messy instant of everyone
trying to be perfect or
we may see it
framed by then
glowing
that minute
when we did not know where
we would be looking back from

Possibly this is my favorite simply because this is the time of year when I call on memories of our once-every-two-years trip to the beach in South Carolina to sustain me through the long, northern winter. I think it's also my favorite because I tend to think of my own poems as snapshots; the last time I made a collection of them, I gave it the title "Preface to Photo Albums Three and Four." Most of all I like the lines "this was when we still or/this was before," because my photos of our beach trips cover years before one of the children was born, years when my parents sat on the porch with my friend's mother, years with portable cribs, and, recently, years with adult-size children who each require a bed of their own.

Steinbaum has a number of "snapshot" poems in this volume. "One Photograph" begins with the line "She will not become my mother for another thirty years." Another poem, "At the Time Exchange," demands that we "Picture them: the old/whose every waking is/a disappointment...." And in "How We Become Ordinary," you can see the process of a woman becoming "just a mother" in her child's future photo album: "It starts in such small ways...." The best of the lot, after "Standing at the shore," is the poem entitled "The Time Emporium" which asks "which was your favorite/bauble--the perfect summer evening....Or maybe the birthday/when you were six....Which, looking back, would you never/exchange for what was coming next?"

The title poem, "Container Gardening," is about plants that have to "sip water doled out by the cup" on a balcony where "no earthworms/ crawl among these roots, no weeds invade." It's similar in tone to "Order," in which the speaker informs us "I always know where/the tape measure is now." The idea of control pervades this volume, and each page gives readers the sense that the pot won't be big enough to contain all the days, "more days, if we are lucky,/than we will think to count,/piling up like shelter/at our door."

This is just the right volume for this time of year, at least for someone like me, who hates the dead of winter and can be sustained for a while by images of growing things.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

2011-01-12T06:16:00.001-05:00

After repeated recommendations from Sophisticated Dorkiness, I found a copy of Anne Fadiman's nonfiction book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures). It begins as a story of culture clash between immigrant Hmong parents and arrogant American doctors, and tells both sides of the story without blaming either one.

As I read it, I got angrier and angrier. I'm an upper-class, well-educated American who speaks good English, but during the times that I've been subject to the dictates of our medical system, I've experienced some of the same bullying that Fadiman attributes mostly to cultural difference. Doctors are interested in lives, not in souls, she demonstrates, using one doctor's own words on the subject. It's bending to the needs of immigrants to do something like allow family members to stay in the room with a critically ill child. Why? Why do most Americans routinely knuckle under to the demands of doctors who don't see us as people, but as broken body parts?

I am the survivor of five hospital stays, three for knee surgeries and two for childbirth. I know first-hand how demeaning it is to be treated like a purely physical object who is required to obey every recommendation or be labeled "noncompliant." I was consistently bewildered to hear laments over "drive-through delivery," because I was forced to stay in the hospital longer than I wanted to (12 hours for my second birth) and not allowed to have my baby with me except at the whim of the nurses.

Perhaps you think that going to a hospital should require me to surrender my will entirely to modern medicine and its dedication to health at any cost, without any regard for quality of life. I would not agree--and as a result, reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (the title is a Hmong description of epilepsy) made me very, very angry indeed.

Let's take what happened to Lia Lee, the "Hmong child" of the subtitle. Her doctors got frustrated because Lia's parents, who speak no English and in fact have no written culture, were not carrying out the instructions that were written in English on the various medicines they prescribed, medicines that had--as so many do--unwanted side effects, both physical and behavioral. So what did the doctors do? They had Lia taken away from her parents and put into foster care!

Fadiman quotes the doctor responsible for this outrage as saying "I felt that there was a lesson that needed to be learned....I felt it was important for these Hmongs to understand that there were certain elements of medicine that we understood better than they did and that there were certain rules they had to follow with their kids' lives. I wanted the word to get out in the community that if they deviated from that, it was not acceptable behavior." Lia's parents did not see their child "for more than a month," and they weren't even told where she was "for several weeks."

Fadiman tells story after story of the arrogance of modern American health workers, from the ones at a refugee camp who "failed to win the cooperation of the camp inhabitants because they considered the relationship one-sided, with the Westerners holding all the knowledge" to the California home health care worker who told the Lees not to give a quick-acting laxative to their incontinent and brain-dead child "because if you keep using the medicine, then Lia will always have to have the medicine, and that is a bad thing."

Only after their "culture of biomedicine" fails to cure Lia do her American doctors seem to have any sense of perspective about what they've done to her. Her chart notes that after brain death, she no longer has seizures, and her soft food diet has "cured her obesity," prompting one of her doctors to observe that "she was real healthy....She was the healthiest she'd ever been. She was just perfect. A perfect vegetable." Another doctor observes that she had become "just the sort of patient nurses like" because "she had metamorphosed from a hyperactive child with a frightening seizure disorder and inaccessible veins into an inert, uncomplaining body who would probably never need another IV."

Fadiman tells some stories about medical professionals who succeed in communicating with and treating Hmong patients, like a man who was hospitalized for an infection and was upset about the "routine admission form" question about whether he wanted to donate his organs if he died. He clearly demonstrated unease in this situation; how many of us would have been more quietly upset, filling out such a form for ourselves or a loved one?

Stanford Medical School, Fadiman says "is trying to bring back what has been called the 'whole doctor--whole patient' model, in which the doctor brings his or her full humanity...to the hospital, and the patient is viewed as a complete person (not just the appendix in Room 416). This model is nothing new; in fact, it is what all doctors used to be taught."

In so many areas, we're learning that science alone is not the answer to all our problems. The popularity of Michael Pollan's books, for instance, is one indication of our dawning awareness that a narrow focus on nutrition has not been effective at improving the eating habits of Americans.

Medicine is only one of the difficult topics Fadiman addresses in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, but it's the one that I obviously reacted to most strongly (here's a different review). Do you think I'm over-reacting?

The Broom of the System

2011-01-11T06:10:00.002-05:00

I won an audiobook version of David Foster Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (read by Robert Petkoff) over at A Bookworm's World this fall. And I could barely stand to finish it because I was so exasperated by the characters and their situation. I ended up driving around yelling at the sound system in my car, trying to get to the end of the long walk across the desert. I mean that literally, as various narrative threads come together in a fictional manufactured desert near Cleveland (the Great Ohio Desert; note the acronym). Obviously, the situation of the novel is comical, and so a reader's response, however incensed, is going to be commensurately comical.

The character names alone are ample warning that nothing is to be taken seriously in this novel--especially if you hear them out loud, rather than reading them to yourself, silently: Mindy Metalman, Wang-Dang Lang, Biff Diggerence, Rick Vigorous, Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht, and Peter Abbott, just to name a few you're introduced to in the first pages.

Listening to these characters tell stories to one another and become disconcertingly aware that they themselves are in a story while driving around rural Ohio may in fact be the ideal way to experience this peculiar novel. The novel's concern with communication between people and the difficulty of defining the self and the Other comes across well out loud, although the supremely irritating psychiatrist, Dr. Jay, reaches the unbearable level sooner on audio than I think he might on the page. As is my habit, I had to find a library copy of this book after listening to the audio version so I could give you one of Lenore's therapy sessions with Dr Jay:

Jay: Rick knows he must forever remain an Other to you. Rick knows the meaning of membrane. Rick is like a sperm without a tail. An immobilized sperm in the uterus of life. Why do you think Rick is so desperately unhappy? What do you think he means by the Screen Door of Union?....He means membrane! Rick is trapped behind his own membrane. He hasn't the equipment to get out.
Lenore: Hey, you're not supposed to talk about your other patients.
Jay: Why do you think he's so possessive? He wants you in him. He wants to trap you behind the membrane with him. He knows he can never validly permeate the membrane of an Other, so he desires to bring that Other into him, for all time. He's a sick man.
Lenore: Look, stop trying to swim around. You've made your point.
Jay: No, you've made your point. All distinctions are shattered. I am not here. I am the sperm inside you. Remember that you are half sperm, Lenore.
Lenore: Pardon?
Jay: Your father's sperm. It's part of you. Inseparable.
Lenore: What does my father have to do with all this?
Jay: Admit.
Lenore: Admit what?
Jay: That you want someone truly inside you. That your membrane is crying out.
Lenore: Jesus.
Jay: Listen. . . Hear that? The faint cry of a membrane, isn't it? "Let me be an ovum, let--"
Lenore: He loves me.
Jay: He does? The Adonis? The valid Other?
Lenore: Rick, you dingwad. Rick loves me. He's said so.
Jay: Rick cannot give us what we need. Admit it.
Lenore: He loves me.
Jay: It's a sucking love, Lenore. An inherently unclean love. It's the love of a flabby, unclean membrane, sucking at an Other, to dirty. Dirt is on this membrane's mind. It wants to do you dirt.

This is the point where I got completely fed up and started yelling at the sound system in my car. That worsened as Rick continues to tell Lenore stories and she becomes less and less able to play his game. The reader--or listener, in this case--is similarly unable to play the novel's games anymore, and so I drove around aimlessly waiting for the resolution and relieved when the desert was finally traversed and I could put these characters back into their can.

It was an absorbing, if exasperating, journey. The point of it, as one character comes out and says, in the final pages, is to "play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone." It might put you off of psycho-therapy forever, though.

Crossed Wires

2011-01-10T06:09:00.001-05:00

Last week I read what struck me as a mildly entertaining romance novel, Crossed Wires by Rosy Thornton. It's fairly recent, published in 2008, but it reads like something out of the 1970s, with a character getting indignant about racism and the person being discriminated against keeping a stiff upper lip about it.

Part of the interest of the novel, for me at least, is that it's very, very British, and an American reader is left to imagine what kind of prejudices the male protagonist, a professor at Cambridge, has about the people in Sheffield, where the female protagonist lives, and vice-versa. When the female protagonist, Mina, thinks about the male protagonist, Peter, she "didn't suppose [he] had to spend his coffee breaks listening to people wittering about shoes. Although she found it hard to imagine what people in universities did talk about...."

The author, quite obviously of the professorial class herself, is at her best when describing the hysterics of a graduate student who has just handed in her thesis and is now discovering mistakes that she hadn't seen before. The scene reminded me vividly of a conversation I had years ago in a shared graduate student office with an older woman who told me that I had just veered over the line to what she described as "baroque worry."

Peter has a friend named Jeremy who livens things up every time the author allows him to make an appearance. As soon as he's introduced we learn that he has a partner named Martin and that "'Partner' was Jeremy's own word; when in company, he liked to follow it with the explanatory gloss 'partners in crime' and a lascivious leer." Peter suspects him of selecting packages of cookies "especially with innuendo in mind" on at least one occasion, when he is offered a "Viennese chocolate sandwich."

The novel ends predictably, with even the children of the couple falling immediately in love with each other. I feel a bit churlish about my lukewarm reaction, since The Zen Leaf and Moored at Sea had such nice things to say about it.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2011-01-07T07:49:00.002-05:00

Children's: What author uproots a Massachusetts family to the Gold Rush town of Lucky Diggins, in The Ballad of Lucy Whipple?

Classics: What followup to The Web and the Rock was Thomas Wolfe's last novel?

Non-Fiction: What nation did David Halberstam describe in Ho and The Making of a Quagmire?

Book Club: Whose 1998 novel Filth interrupts its narrator, Edinburgh detective Bruce Robertson, with comments from the 10-foot tapeworm inside him?

Authors: What pen name did Mary Challans grab from a 17th-century British play, for eight novels set in ancient Greece?

Book Bag: What real-life politician is skewered by Garrison Keillor's satire Me, by Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente?

Hard Rain

2011-01-05T08:49:00.003-05:00

It was the fall of 2004, when Ron and I heard Eleanor's sixth-grade band begin to stomp their feet and clap their hands--stomp, stomp, clap! stomp, stomp, clap!--that we became aware that what we thought of as the rebellious songs of our adolescence had been fully taken over by elevators and middle school band directors.

Then, in the spring of 2008, we realized that it wasn't enough to be relieved when our kids weren't assigned to the creationist middle school science teacher, that we should have protested the first time we heard about him giving handouts about how dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and then collecting the handouts at the end of each class so parents wouldn't see them.

Now it's 2011, and 17 degrees outside. I've been thinking of going out to one of the two stores in town looking for a bouquet of cut flowers to help me bear having to take down the Christmas decorations. But I'm not sure I'm up to the whole ordeal--a parking place far enough away from the door that I'll have room to extend my stiff leg into the frozen slush to get out of the car, cheery smiles for the people I pass, soft muzak on the store speakers, displays of the headline in the local paper about three murders near the lake we like to frequent in warmer weather...it might all be too much.

It's like this poem, "Hard Rain," by Tony Hoagland:

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hold golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

"You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy,"
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
"about all those people you killed--
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time--"

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood--
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present.
Should I say something?
Signed, America

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth--

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

I like the line about how "the level of deep feeling has been touched" because it seems to me to get right to the heart of the matter--what business is it of yours if my deep feeling is wrongly bestowed? Who gets to define "wrong" and why? Is there such a thing as evil, and if so, can I point my finger at a person and say that there's no more room for forgiveness, that he's already "History"?

Well, yeah. Not only can I, but I probably should. Although it would be a dreadful world if everybody stalked around showing their true feelings every day (no more of what Holden Caulfield calls "phoniness"), maybe one thing January is for is facing some of the gritty realities that get covered over with lovely growing things during the rest of the year.

Hmm, I'm not the only one thinking like this today; see this xkcd.

Three Seconds

2011-01-04T06:24:00.001-05:00

Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, is a Swedish crime mystery being released today in the U.S. in a new English translation by Kari Dickson. I was sent an advance copy by Katrina Alvarez, marketing director for the digital agency Wiredset, who is also providing two copies for the giveaway.

The winners of the giveaway, chosen by Random.org, are:
(comment#2) FreshHell
(comment#5) ReadersGuide
Congratulations! I'll be providing your addresses to Ms Alvarez, who will be sending you a copy of the book directly.

So what kind of mystery is this? I'd call it gritty; I learned all kinds of things I had no idea about that are evidently true, according to the authors' appendix at the end of the novel. Realistic details are part of the appeal of the novel; the book jacket identifies Anders Roslund as an "award-winning journalist" and Borge Hellstrom as an "ex-criminal." Here's an example of something I didn't know: amphetamine, evidently a popular drug in prisons, can be processed with and hidden inside tulip buds.

The protagonist of the novel, a secret operative named Piet, murmurs to himself a seemingly lovely but puzzling line about how he loves poetry and tulips, before it turn out that he uses the tulips for drugs and he doesn't read the poetry, but uses little-read library books to smuggle drugs and gun parts into a prison.

The real interest of the novel is taking the little bits and pieces of the mystery and trying to put them together to figure out what Piet is going to do before he does it. I failed. I had no idea what he was planning most of the time, especially the elaborate set-up with "the barrel of diesel and the window" in a prison workshop. The title doesn't turn out to be much of a clue, by the way.

The plot has to do with corruption of the police force in Sweden, a topic that isn't going to carry the interest of an American reader very far unless she assumes that cops are much the same everywhere:
"This damned system....Criminals working for the police. Criminals' own crimes being covered up and downplayed. One crime is legitimized so that another one can be investigated. Policemen who lie and withhold the truth from other policemen. Damn it...in a democratic society."

The ending, in which Piet's story finally dovetails with the story of Ewert, a murder cop, is extremely satisfying, and the mystery is entertainingly complex. But the characters are quickly sketched, for the most part, and most of them are full of gratuitous angst. The writing is workmanlike and spare:
"The strong sunlight had become uncomfortably warm and made his jacket itch on his neck and his shoes feel too tight....Piet Hoffman had a dry mouth and swallowed what should have been saliva, but now was anxiety and fear."
These depictions of the Swedish spring sunlight and Piet's fear are so baldly stated that there's not a lot of room later to enlarge the description to evoke the even hotter sunshine of an Atlanta summer and the extremes of fear that the protagonist feels as his predicament worsens. He's got a dry mouth for the entire length of the novel!

If you like excitement, read this one fast. That's one clue the title does provide.

Three Men in a Boat

2011-01-03T08:45:00.002-05:00

We've always had a good time on road trips with the whole family, except for the first year of each child's life (neither one of them could stand their infant car seats), and part of our tradition is to go to the library and find an audiobook we all want to listen to together. For our most recent trip, I got the audio version of Jerome K. Jerome's comedy classic Three Men in a Boat, because it's long been one of Ron's favorites while I'd never gotten very interested in it, and the kids had never heard of it before.

I chose Ian Carmichael's reading of this book because of a review at A Striped Armchair; that was the review that decided me, after reading about this book at Booklust and Things Mean A Lot. Although I don't usually remember who spurs me to read something, I always wonder what spurs a blogger revival of a particular classic, and note where the revival first comes to my attention. Also, I was looking for audiobooks for our upcoming trip.

Our enjoyment of the traveling tale was enhanced by the teenagers' insistence that we sing along to "I would walk 500 miles" (featured in a road trip episode of the tv show How I Met Your Mother) after every stop along the way.

Another thing that greatly enhanced our enjoyment is how recognizable the characters in the tale are--we grinned at the portrait of Eleanor--the hypochondriac--and then at a second portrait of her as the person afraid of two feet of water. Scarcely were we done grinning at that when we were amused by the portrait of Ron as the expert on packing who wants help with the manual labor. And then came the bit about singing comic songs, which, while not true in the details to the way Walker sings them, made us laugh in recognition anyway.

One of our very favorite parts was this true-to-dog-life portrait:
"he labored under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted."

Another good part is when the three men try to open a tin of pineapple, using a pocket knife, scissors, a sharp stone, and finally the mast of the boat. They are ultimately unsuccessful and end up throwing the oddly dented tin into the river "...and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot..."

Three Men in a Boat is the kind of book that is best read at leisure; you'll enjoy the humor so much more if you're not in any particular hurry because it's a kind of quiet, subtle humor that builds to absurdity. Take this long example:

I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent.
"When I have caught forty fish," said he, "then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that, because it is sinful to lie."
But the twenty-five per cent plan did not work well at all. He never was able to use it. The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can't add twenty-five per cent to three--at least, not in fish.
So he increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third; but that, again, was awkward, when he had only caught one or two; so, to simplify matters, he made up his mind to just double the quantity.
He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew dissatisfied with it. Nobody believed him when he told them that he only doubled, and he, therefore, gained no credit that way whatever, while his moderation put him at a disadvantage among the other anglers. When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two dozen.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish--you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.
It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in general. Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Anglers' Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago, but some of the older members opposed it. They said they would consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish counted as twenty.

To make a long story short, this is a great book for a road trip; it makes short stories long and its effect is to make a long trip seem short.

Free E-book of the month

2011-01-02T20:30:00.000-05:00

From Phoenix Picks science fiction publisher:
Our free give-away for January (by popular request) is Nancy Kress’ novella ‘Act One’ which was a Hugo and Nebula nominee in 2010.
Gardner Dozois of Locus writes that Act One is “one of the best of the
year...a compelling novella about a once-famous actress and her devoted
manager who get much more publicity of an unfortunate sort when they
inadvertently become embroiled with an act of biological terrorism with
potentially world-changing results.”
As a special treat for the new year readers will also be able to download
a short story by Hugo and Nebula winner, Alexei Panshin. ‘Sky Blue’ is
taken from Alexei Panshin’s critically acclaimed anthology, ‘Farewell to
Yesterday’s Tomorrow.’

The Coupon Code for January is 9992365. Instructions and download link (as
usual) at: www.PPickings.com.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2010-12-31T06:31:00.000-05:00

Children's: What red-haired orphan is saddled with the middle name Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim's Daughter?

Classics: What 1873 novel gets moving after a 20,000-pound wager at London's staid Reform Club?

Non-Fiction: What book did Pat Conroy base on a year teaching poor kids on South Carolina's Daufuskie Island?

Book Club: What Pulitzer-winning author returned to the Chesapeake of his youth in three stories published as A Tidewater Morning?

Authors: What trend-setting author coined the expression "social X-rays" when describing extremely thin society women?

Book Bag: Who "co-authored" the 2001 novel Candyland with his alter ego, Ed McBain?

O Taste and See

2010-12-30T15:48:00.006-05:00

League of Imaginary Friends--

Harriet the Spy, Mr and Mrs Unfocused, Lemming, Permanent Qui Vive, Mr and Mrs Non-Necromancy

As Denise Levertov says in her poem--talking back to Wordworth--the world was not with us enough, so my small-town family set out on an expedition to the big city over our holiday break. We went to Chicago. Our group consisted of my family, my brother's family, and my parents--ten people, the youngest 10 and the oldest 81.

Our first scheduled delight was lunch and champagne under the enormously instrument-laden Christmas tree at the Walnut Room in Macy's, where a fairy princess came by and waved her wand over the head of each kid (including my 17-year-old), saying that she could grant their "New Year's wishes."

Next we met the League of Imaginary Friends in a sushi bar right in the hotel where we stayed, the Fairmont. It was an extraordinary delight to meet each of them in person, but somehow also a bit anti-climactic. I feel like I know these people; I talk to them almost every day; seeing them in the flesh really doesn't add that much. But it is much more fun to have real drinks together than virtual ones. We had to leave after a couple of hours and as we went up in the elevator, Eleanor turned to me and said "You know, I could see them too."

That evening we went to see White Christmas, which is delightfully schmaltzy and features a song my father sang almost every sunny day throughout my entire childhood, Blue Skies.

The next day we went to see the modern wing of the Art Institute, which hadn't been open the last time we were in Chicago. We sometimes display a moderately irreverent attitude towards modern art and I personally laughed so loud at a comment Eleanor made about a Dali painting that a woman in the gallery hissed "shhh!" at me, which made us scurry off with our noses in the air whispering a line from the movie Love Actually: "it's not funny, actually, it's art."

We went to tea at the Drake, in honor of my parents' 53rd wedding anniversary. It was elegant and fun, as having afternoon tea at a nice hotel always is, and one of the best moments was when the tea was drawing to a close and my ten-year-old niece came up to her sister saying "I brought you something from the bathroom" (it turned out to be a paper towel with a dragon on it).

That evening we went to see Wicked, which was fine spectacle. As my theater-director father said, it's all done with lighting. All of us had seen it before and had been eager to repeat the experience--Eleanor observed that she liked it better this time because she hadn't read the book so recently, and we all agreed.

The next morning we went to see the Chicago History Museum, partly because it had been particularly recommended to us by Lass and partly because we'd all read The Devil in the White City and wanted to see some of the 1893 World's Fair exhibits. We lingered over the White City diorama for a while, placing where the Wooded Isle must have been and where the Ferris Wheel, and then we went back to the hotel and looked out the window at the Field Museum, and after that we took taxis down to the Museum of Science and Industry and walked around inside the dome looking up at the lighted Christmas Tree and thinking a little about the building's 1893 origin.

The ten of us had a farewell dinner at Morton's of Chicago in a private dining room, which was really fun although the food was absurdly expensive. We were living the high life. This is kind of how I felt about the whole holiday:

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry and plucking
the fruit.

After all these delights, we had to pack our things and return home, where we will live the small-town life for a long while.

My mother says we eat black-eyed peas for good luck on New Year's as a relief from the rich holiday food and to remind us of our southern roots. I've met Americans with Scandinavian roots who eat herring, and Americans with German roots who eat sauerkraut for the same reason. What do you eat for good luck in the New Year?

Unplugged

2010-12-23T06:26:00.000-05:00

There will be no "Trivial Pursuit for Booklovers on Friday, Dec, 24; it will be back--as will I--on Friday, Dec. 31.

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day

2010-12-21T09:51:00.004-05:00

I'm a believer in long winter's naps. I think if I lived by myself, I would pretty much hibernate for the winter. So I didn't get up--or worse yet, stay up--to see the lunar eclipse last night. I did see that the moon on the crest of the old-fallen snow gave the luster of sunset to objects below. That would have been around 4 am U.S. eastern time.

I share John Donne's fear of the dark in his poem about the winter solstice, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day"--a poem written after the death of his beloved wife:

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm the hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by love's limbeck, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means, yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her Vigil, and her Eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

When I think of the line about "absence, darkness, death," I also try to think of the ending of this poem, in which the speaker resolves to "prepare towards" summer and to "call/This hour her Vigil." I like the way it implies that a person will be nobler after suffering through these long nights.

How about you--do you curse the darkness or light a candle?

If Moore's "A Visit from St Nicholas" were written by Robert W. Service

2010-12-20T07:09:00.000-05:00

Have you ever read a poem by Robert Service? He's probably best known for "The Cremation of Sam Magee."

This is a parody of "A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore, written by Frank Jacobs (in the style of Robert Service).

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up on a Christmas Eve one year,
All full of cheap whiskey and hoping like hell that St. Nick would soon appear,
When right through the door and straight out of the night, which was icy and cold as a freezer,
Came a broken-down sled, pulled by eight mangy dogs, which were whipped by an old bearded geezer.

His teeth were half missing, and flapping his frame was a tatter of red-colored clothes;
He was covered with snow from his head to his toe, and an icicle hung from his nose;
The miners all cheered when the geezer appeared, and the poker game stopped in mid-bet;
Each sourdough smiled like a young, happy child at the thought of the gifts he would get.

They pushed him aside and went straight for his bag to be sure that they'd all get their share;
And, oh, how they cried when they found that inside there was nothing but old underwear;
So they plugged the old geezer, which was a great shame, for if anyone there had been sober,
He'd have known double-quick that it wasn't St. Nick, 'cause it only was early October.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

2010-12-17T07:06:00.000-05:00

Children's: What Ted Hughes story of a misunderstood metal monster, minus its Australia-sized "space bat" nemesis, became an animated movie classic?

Classics: What 1965 Thomas Pynchon novella introduces a heroine with the unlikely name of Oedipa Maas?

Non-Fiction: Who took time off from spinning tales of the high seas to pen Picasso: A Biography and Joseph Banks: A Life?

Book Club: What John Fowles epic brings a Hollywood writer back to Oxford to bury a college chum?

Authors: What novelist was known as Alyssa Rosenbaum in her native St. Petersburg, before changing it to protect her family from Stalinist retribution?

Book Bag: What quadriplegic sleuth uses cohort Amelia Sachs as his eyes and ears, in Jeffrey Deaver thrillers?

Three Seconds giveaway

2010-12-16T06:05:00.000-05:00

Three Seconds is a crime novel by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom that most recently won the award for Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, an award previously won by Stieg Larsson.

The novel will be released in the U.S. on January 4, 2011. I have two copies to give away to U.S. residents in honor of the U.S. release, courtesy of the Marketing Director at Wiredset.

My review will appear on the release day, January 4, and that is also the day that I will pick two winners (with the help of Random.org). So if you're interested in this book and you're a U.S. resident, please leave your email address in the comments.

Zombies Vs Unicorns

2010-12-15T06:02:00.001-05:00

Either a book I've already read or a book of short stories is what I prefer on my nightstand, for reading right before I go to bed. For the last couple of weeks I've been enjoying one story each night from Holly Black's and Justine Larbalestier's collection entitled (pictorially) Zombies Vs Unicorns. I preferred the nights I could go to sleep after a unicorn story (go Team Unicorn!), but the zombie stories weren't that bad, either.

My favorite story is Naomi Novik's "Purity Test," about a unicorn who appeals to a skeptical girl for help:
"So there's this wizard--"
"Wow, of course there is," Alison said.
"--and he's been grabbing baby unicorns," the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.
"You know," Alison told her subconscious, "I've got to draw the line somewhere. Baby unicorns is going too far."
"No kidding," the unicorn said. "You don't think I'd be wasting my time talking to a human otherwise? Anyway, wizard, baby unicorns, where was I--Oh, right. Probably he's trying to make himself immortal, which never works, except wizards never listen when you tell them that, and we would really prefer if he got stopped before he cuts off the babies' horns trying."
"Let me guess,"Alison said. "Is his name Voldemort?"
"No, what freakish kind of name is Voldemort"? the unicorn said.

What happens when Alison asks where the unicorn comes from is fun, at least for a ailurophile:
"we're always here, you idiots just don't notice anything that doesn't shove itself in your faces. You've never spotted the elves, either, and they're taking up half the tables at Per Se every night."
"Hey, Belcazar," a cat said, walking by.
The unicorn very slightly flicked his tail. "Social climbers, cats," the unicorn said with a sniff after they had passed farther on.
"Belcazar?" Alison said...."So, if I help you get the baby unicorns back, this is all going to stop, right? I don't need to be hearing cats talking."
"Who does?" the unicorn said evasively.

The climax of the story, involving the titular "purity test," is great fun--such fun that I really don't want to spoil it by saying any more.

My second favorite story from this collection is Diana Peterfreund's "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn," which is set in a world in which unicorns are known to be dangerous creatures.

If I have to pick a favorite zombie story--ew--I think it might be Maureen Johnson's "The Children of the Revolution," which includes a celebrity caricature, or Scott Westerfeld's "Inoculata," in which he presents an interesting solution to a zombie "plague."

Truthfully, though, all of these stories are favorites in the sense that I savored the chance to read one--just one--each night. It was a nice little treat at the end of the day. I highly recommend rationing your reading of the Zombies Vs Unicorns stories so they'll last as long as possible.