Elements of Style -- Illustrated!!!

I already own a copy of The Elements of Style by the immortal authors William Strunk and E.B. White. But I couldn't resist the new edition, The Elements of Style (illustrated). Artist Maira Kalman has added fabulous color drawings to the famous work on grammar, mechanics and style. "Somebody else's umbrella" illustrates how to properly form possessives. A red-haired boy in his PJs demonstrates dashes: "His first thought on getting out of bed -- if he had any thought at all -- was to get back in again." You can see some of the illustrations on Kalman's web site; check them out here.

Honorable Mentions of 2005

Here are three books I read this year that were really excellent, not quite Top Five, but definitely my honorable mentions for 2005

• Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel (2005). Calling this book a "coming of age" novel is literally accurate, but it doesn't quite convey the eccentric delights of narrator Dwight Wilmerding, slacker and searcher in contemporary Manhattan. Dwight is looking for meaning, but his funny voice and social conscience make stand out. I read another short story by Kunkel in the literary magazine n +1 (Issue 3, it does not appear to be online), and was very impressed with that too.
• Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson (2005). I can identify with Ms. Johnson as a smart woman and a Southerner, and then she takes me a little farther down the narrative road with her, and I can imagine what life is like as a disability rights activist who uses a wheelchair. Her memoir is funny and sharp, and it takes apart of lot stereotypes and preconceptions about ability and disability.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936). I read this for a library science class this year and immediately put it to work on my friends and family. It promotes the fiendish idea of getting people to do what you want by being really polite and nice to them, and by making them feel good about themselves (insert evil cackling laughter here).

Spoonreader's Top 5 Books of 2005

In the wonderful novel High Fidelity, the narrator Rob Fleming compulsively compiles Top 5 lists of everything from his favorite pop songs to his worst break-ups. In tribute to that book, I will be unveiling several Top 5 lists between now and the end of the year. My Top 5 lists, of course, will deal with books, read and unread.

Here are the Top 5 books I read this year. Not all of them were published in 2005, but I read 'em all this year, so here we go. They are in ranked in order.

• No. 5: Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon (2005). Irena and her family live in cosmopolitan, multicultural Sarajevo when it comes under siege during the Yugoslav war of the 1990s. The family, along with their talking African Grey parrot Pretty Bird, survive without electricity or water in a city transformed by sniper fire and violence. By turns tragic, funny and realistic, this important novel captures the atrocity of warfare unleashed on the modern city. Its author is National Public Radio host Scott Simon, who based the novel on his reporting and direct observations from war-torn Sarajevo.
• No. 4: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor (1955). Through her biting, incisive portraits of Southern mores and manners, O'Connor gets at the very essence of life: the loneliness of physical existence, the fragility of genuine emotional connection and the transcendent hope that there is a world beyond the mere physical senses. My favorite story was "Good Country People," in which an angry, educated spinster unexpectedly meets her match in a traveling Bible salesman. O'Connor truly deserves the title "master of the short story."
• No. 3: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (2003). This book is about the art of literature and life. It's also about poverty, about peace activism, about the 1960s, about the Catholic church in the 20th century, and about the elusive nature of moral authority. It's also a beautifully written biography of four Catholic writers who were contemporaries: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor (see above) and Walker Percy.
• No. 2: Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005). Feminist outlier Camille Paglia takes a break from the culture wars to make an analytical, insightful tour of the world's best poetry. She tackles the likes of Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats as well as a few newbies like comedian Wanda Coleman and folk singer Joni Mitchell. It's a fun English lit class with its feet on the ground and its mind on the sublime.
  
• No. 1: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (2004). I wrote about this book -- a novel in the form of a letter written by a country pastor to his young son -- just recently, so I won't add much now. (You can read my previous post here.) Aside from being beautifully written, it also includes an important story of spiritual and social justice.
  

On the ephemerality of rankings

I picked up a copy of Kazuo Ichiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go at a charity book sale this week. You'll remember (from my previous posting) that Time magazine put this book on its best 100 novels since 1923 list, even though the book came out just this year. Personally, I think it takes awhile to draw a true conclusion on the merits of any particular novel, and a book should be out for at least a year before I would include it on my top 100 novels list.
Meanwhile, The New York Times doesn't think "Never Let Me Go" is good enough to make its 10 best books of 2005 list (though they did grant the novel a place on their list of 100 notable books of this year).
I bring this up just to emphasize the point that I think "best of" lists are really interesting conversation starters, but not the end-all and be-all of good taste.
I will let you know what I think of "Never Let Me Go," probably sometime in '06.
Finally, I'm contemplating my own best of list for 2005, but it will be best books I personally read in 2005. I'm not fast enough to keep up with all the interesting books published in a given year! More on this topic later.

2005 Best Books list, part I

It's that wonderful time of year again, when magazines and newspapers start publishing their best of the year lists.
The New York Times published their Top 10 list today, with five places for fiction and five places for non-fiction. The list includes links to the reviews and, in some cases, the first chapter. Yeah!
The whole list is here.
You'll also find links on this page to the NYT's 100 notable books of the year and links to previous years' lists.

There is a Balm in Gilead

When I read the reviews of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, I remember thinking to myself, That sounds boring. The books is a letter written by a preacher anticipating his own death. He's writing about his life to his young son. I just thought that sounded sentimental and hokey. Fortunately for me, a friend recommended Gilead as something she thought I personally would really like. Oh, the power of the personal recommendation! I'm so glad she did, because this book is marvelous. Its writing style is plain and clean and beautiful, like an Iowa sunset. (The book is set in Gilead, Iowa.) And there's a lot of gentle humor and some interesting Civil War history. Robinson also wrote Housekeeping, a completely different novel that is also well-loved by many people. I read that book in college (the class was a literature class called "Work and Gender") but I barely remember it. I will have to go back and read it again.

The Spirituality of Writing

It took me a year to read The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. It is a sizable biography of four writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. They were Catholic and writing at the same time (primarily the 1950s and '60s) and aware of each other's work.
This book is beautifully written, but it's also dense. I would pick it up, read a little, put it down and then pick it back up again. I really got going after I started reading Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. (Read the excellent short story the books is named after here.)
Elie's compelling theme is that these writers were all on spiritual pilgrimage via their writing. The writers themselves are fascinating:

• Dorothy Day: pacifist, journalist, war protester, founder of The Catholic Worker movement.
• Thomas Merton: A Trappist monk and writer who explored Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality.
• Flannery O'Connor: the master of the short story, a wary member of New York literary society who was exiled by debilitating illness to her Georgia farm.
• Walker Percy: a Louisiana gentleman with a strong interest in medicine and science.

Most of the reviews of this book say it is hard to categorize because it is rich and complicated, and I completely agree. All these writers were vibrant contrarians, and Elie admires and accentuates their differences. At the same time, he sees them all as master communicators and even concilitators. In an interesting interview, Elie says he respects them because they had vibrant, complex messages to convey through their writing.

One of the main traits I champion in the people in my book is their ability to write about matters of faith in terms the nonbeliever can appreciate. The ability of Merton or Dorothy Day to maintain a dialogue with the modern world--as Vatican II urged Catholics to do--is just profound. They stayed in touch with the average middle-class person who thinks religion is bosh.
Those who undertook the later protests against the Vietnam War don't seem interested in dialogue. They don't seem to have met those who supported the war with mutual respect. Dialogue wasn't really attempted. That was Merton's objection to them. He said nobody's mind was changed through those symbolic actions.

Read the whole interview here.

Anne Rice & Jesus Christ

I love Anne Rice's vampire and witch novels, and I love her newest novel about Jesus Christ.
Isn't that a funny sentence?

On Reading: Good news/bad news

I read two articles this week that really resonated with me about reading.

First the bad news. Why does the concept of the general reader seem to be in decline? This article hypothesizes that students are forced to specialize their education for a job, so much so that reading for general knowledge has disappeared. Check out the opening anecdote:

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.
Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"
After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."
"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

Read the whole article here.

Now for the good news. A woman in New Mexico who loves to read has purchased the entire Penguin Classic collection. That's 1,082 books for roughly 8000 bucks.

Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.

Read all about it here.

Yann Martel's next novel

Canada's Globe and Mail reports that "Life of Pi" author Yann Martel is working on a new novel about the Holocaust. He recently read excerpts from the unfinished novel in a cafe in Jerusalem.
Their story says Martel knows he it is a difficult subject:

"I'm sure people will say that it trivializes the Holocaust," he said, adding that the other danger in discussing the Holocaust "is universalizing it in way that removes its Jewishness."
But he believes the end is worth the risk.
"The Holocaust has to become part of the rough and tumble of everyday discourse -- as much as that might hurt the survivors," he said, adding quickly,"And I don't mean that as disrespect to them. But you have to realize that those discussing it are trying to find a way to understand it better so that it won't happen again."

Read the whole story here while it's still available on the open Web.

Meanwhile, I recently picked up a copy of "The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios," Martel's short story collection. I've read the first story of the collection. It was very different from "Life of Pi," but has the same compassionate voice.
There's a beautiful passage where he talks about discovering his desire to write and what motivated his storytelling:

My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question is not the point; be it love, envy or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But the story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect -- in other words a good idea that moves -- that was my lofty aim. When such an emotive idea came to me, when the spark of inspiration lit up my mind like a bonfire, the charge was like nothing I'd ever felt.

Read an excerpt here.

Scott Turow's new novel

Scott Turow has a new novel out, it's called "Ordinary Heroes." The Los Angeles Times had a positive review of it. It's about a reporter who uncovers a mystery about his late father's actions during World War II.
Here's an excerpt from the review talking about Turow's novels:

It's been easy to classify — as we have a great tendency to do —these novels as legal thrillers, part of the avalanche that arrived in the time of John Grisham because the tales were spun in and around the law.

It is clear now that's a mistake and always has been. What Turow wrestles with is of a deeper and more complex nature. The correct category for Turow is rather that of a major American novelist rising from the tradition of the Midwest,such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell.

Read the whole review here while it's still available on the open Web.

Reading Ulysses blog

My friend Jill took me up on my carping about never having read Ulysses, by James Joyce. The first meeting of our Ulysses book group is set for Saturday. I've started a new blog for the effort, here's the link.

A Short Story for Halloween

I like to find cool, spooky things to read at Halloween -- stories more in the vein of folklore than horror. Last year, I checked out Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I had mixed opinions on. (Read that post here.) This year, I think I've found something much better.
I got to thinking about the role of the Devil in literature: Old Scratch, Beelzebub, the Dark Man, the Stranger. Probably the Devil's first appearance in literature is Biblical: The temptation in the garden in the book of Genesis, but even more prominently in the Book of Job -- the devil is the instigator for the troubles that beset kindly Job. Then there's the devil as anti-hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost. More recently, there Stephen King's The Stand -- the devil comes to earth after a killer flu wipes out most of the world's population. Even the country music song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" has its lyrical moments:

The devil went down to Georgia
He was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willing to make a deal

But I digress! (Read all the lyrics here.)
This year, spoonreader presents, for your Halloween reading pleasure, the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," by Stephen Vincent Benet. Webster was an actual historical figure, a noted lawyer and orator, and a proud unionist (though he died before the Civil War started). In this story, the farmer Jabez Stone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for bountiful crops and worldly gain. When it's time to pay up, Stone loses his nerve, and turns to his friend Webster to save him from the bad deal he's made. In this scene, the Devil has returned and informed Webster that he intends to collect on the soul of Mr. Stone. Webster responds to the contrary:

Dan'l Webster's brow looked dark as a thundercloud. "Pressed or not, you shall not have this man!" he thundered. "Mr. Stone is an American citizen, and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince. We fought England for that in '12 and we'll fight all hell for it again!"
"Foreign?" said the stranger. "And who calls me a foreigner?"
"Well, I never yet heard of the dev -- of your claiming American citizenship," said Dan'l Webster with surprise.
"And who with better right?" said the stranger, with one of his terrible smiles. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself - and of the best descent - for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster,though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."
"Aha!" said Dan'l Webster, with the veins standing out in his forehead. "Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

And thus Daniel Webster goes to court against the Devil. Read the whole of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" here -- The University of Texas Tarlton Law Library has posted a fine copy with illustrations at their web site.

Zadie Smith on David Foster Wallace

British author Zadie Smith is very high on my must-read list. She's been in the media quite a bit lately with the release of her new book, "On Beauty." (Listen to radio interviews with her here and here.) I love what she has to say about literature and writing. Last month, she was in O, the Oprah magazine, where she wrote about what literature means to her and picked out her favorite books. (This is a regular feature in O -- just about every month a celebrity picks out their favorite books and why. It's usually fascinating.)
So one of Smith's favorite books was David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Smith writes:

Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is "the evil that men do." I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.

Read the rest of her take on Wallace here and read about her philosophy of literature here.
Her take on that book is interesting because I've been feeling a bit guilty about my recent post on "Brief Interviews" where I wrote "the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them." (Read the full post here. ) I'll be the first to admit that might be a misreading the stories. Not all writing should be about love, happiness, etc. As readers, we have to grapple with the ugly, the cruel and the unjust without insisting on black-and-white moral certitude or sentimental mawkishness. Maybe I should go back and re-read "Brief Interviews." It's certainly rich enough to merit a second read and a re-thinking.
On the other hand, if I do that, when will I ever get to Wallace's "Oblivion"? I need more time to read!

Time's Top 100 Novels

Time magazine has published a list of the best English-language novels since 1923, the year Time published its first issue. I love lists, they're fun conversation-starters -- the nay-sayers who claim lists are too reductive need to lighten up.
Time's list has interesting caveats. Because it starts in 1923, that disqualifies perennial favorite Ulysses, written by James Joyce in 1922. It only includes novels (knocking out of contention my beloved Spoon River Anthology, a volume of poetry). And it includes works written in English from all over the world, not just American novels.
Here's my quick riff on the list:

• Books I absolutely agree with: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Infinite Jest, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sun Also Rises, To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchmen.
• Books I haven't read but really want to: All the King's Men, Death Comes for the Archbishop, At Swim-Two-Birds, Lolita, The Moviegoer, The Sound and the Fury, White Teeth
• A book that shouldn't be on the list: Possession by A.S. Byatt -- I just don't think it's that good.
• A book that seems too recently published to have made the list: Never Let Me Down by Kazuo Ishiguro -- Didn't that just come out in 2005???
• Books on the list that I have never heard of, not even in passing, not even heard of their authors: Appointment in Samarra, The Assistant, Call It Sleep, A Dance to the Music of Time, Loving, The Man who Loved Children, The Recognitions, Red Harvest, Revolutionary Road, Snow Crash, The Sportswriter. Boy do I feel ignorant now.

Lest you think the list was created after exhaustive study and massive polling, you should know that apparently Time's two book critics merely put together their lists of favorite books and then hashed out small areas of disagreement. Not that I'm criticizing that -- the great novels are art, and there are limitations to how objectively you can quantify them.
Read the whole list here. (And thanks to my friend Ryan F. for telling me about it!)

Baseball fever

I don't get much reading done in October because I'm busy watching post-season baseball. It means late night games and mornings spent devouring the sports section. To add to the excitement, our local team the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have new owners and hopes are hesitantly but joyfully higher for the 2006 season. (Read all about it here.)
Meanwhile, my spouse and I are deciding on a baseball book to read together when Spring Training starts.
Here are some of the books in contention:

• Three Nights in August, by Buzz Bissinger. A relatively new book. Bissinger had total access to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a Tampa native, by the way). Read an excerpt herehere.
• Ball 4, by Jim Bouton. A library colleague heartily recommends this one; it's one of baseball's first real insider's accounts. Bouton wrote a memoir about trying to resecitate his career with the elusive knuckleball pitch during the '69 season.
• The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton. It started as an April Fool's joke: Sports Illustrated "reports" on a Zen mystic with 100 mph+ pitch hiding out in the Mets' Spring Training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. (right across the bay from Tampa). The story was a prank, but it got so much attention it was later expanded into a book. I love the original article's lead (how a newspaper story starts). Here it is:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement.

Read the original magazine story here.

A note on copyright and spoonreader

Unlike most people, I find copyright fascinating. It's as old as our country and mentioned in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) as one of the rights of Congress: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
For a library science class, I wrote a paper on the problem of orphan works -- what do you do when you want to preserve or copy something, but cannot locate the copyright holder to seek permission or compensate them? It's a knotty problem, hardly promoting progress. Read more about the orphan works problem here and here.
I quote from a lot of books on this blog. I believe the quotations I use are permissible as a fair use under copyright law -- I'm commenting on the work, and I don't believe my quoting of the works undermines the commercial prospects of the books about which I write. In fact, just the opposite; I hope people will be inspired by my blog to purchase them or borrow them from a library. (Read more about copyright and fair use here.)
I also make a good faith effort not to link to works that I suspect have been posted to the Internet without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright is a funny thing: If there's not enough, people don't have much incentive to create. Too much, though, and it stifles creativity by preventing people from building on the works of others. (This is a particular problem for popular music like hip-hop and techno.) My favorite book on this topic is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Nancy Kranich, former president of the American Library Association, says of his book (and I agree):

Siva Vaidhyanathan has done a big favor for the academic and library communities. In this book, he has spelled out in clear, understandable language what's at stake in the battles over the nation's intellectual property. The issues brought forward are critical to the future of scholarship and creativity. Librarians and academics are wise to purchase this book and add it to their 'must read' lists.

If you have any questions or concerns about copyright and this blog, feel free to contact me: spoonreader [at] gmail [dot] com.

What I'm Reading Now,

I prefer to read one book at a time. But that's the ideal -- the reality is that often I am reading several books at once. Usually this is because I have to read a certain book for book group or some other obligation, or because a book is boring me at that moment but I may be willing to come back to it later. So I'm going to start posting from time to time a list of the books I'm reading and the books I want to read next.
What I'm reading now:

• Shock Wave by James O. Born. A fast-paced Florida crime novel. Born will appear at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29.
• Couples by John Updike. This books reeks of 1960s overpriviledged suburban malaise -- a major theme is adultery as self-actualizing quest. The Amazon reviews are diverse and fascinating -- read 'em here. I don't like the characters, but it's hard not to wonder what these awful people will do next. A few friends who are older than I am say that was just the nature of the era. The philandering couples in this book would be about 75 today.
  
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie. This is a fairly dense biography of four American Catholic authors writing at about the same time: Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy. Elie's style is languid and thematic, well-suited for his exploration of the writers' ideas and intellectual milieu.

What I want to read next:

• "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. I picked this short story collection for my book group because I knew I might not read it otherwise, and it would probably be really good.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. This novel won the Pulitzer a few years back. Subject matter includes the Holocaust, comic books and Harry Houdini. I have high hopes for this one.
• "Oblivion" by David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace on a very visceral, non-logical level. Having said that, I found his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" to be very sad -- the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them. I don't think is really typical of him -- his book Infinite Jest is one of the kindest novels I can this of. So I have some trepidation about reading his most recent work, Oblivion. You can find a couple of (mixed) reviews of Oblivion here, here, and here.

Kunkel's Indecision

I finished an endearing first novel today, Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel. I liked it very much. His hero, Dwight Wilmerding, is an overeducated, underemployed twenty-ish Manhattanite trying to figure out what to do with his life. The answer involves psychoanalysis from his sister, a trip to Ecuador and democratic socialism.
I love Dwight's voice -- it's complicated, ironic, sincere and funny. Sample passage:

The train pulled out of another quiet white-painted town and recovered that slack regular ratcheting sound of all trains. I was on my way to see dad, to play some golf, to sip some scotch, and then in the end, or somewhere in the middle, at an opportune moment, before it slipped past, or maybe, on the other hand, right away, the minute I saw him, first things being first, and just in order to get it over with -- anyway I was on my way to ask dad for some money. I had every intention of telling him I had lost my job, and in the context of my resulting penuriousness I would request a loan. Or ask him to take me in for a while once I got back from Ecuador. Or both things, actually. That would make the most sense from an economic point of view, at least if I could deal with the psychic cost of living with him for the first time in fourteen years, and without mom and Alice around to parry him and distribute throughout the household their various counterpointing moods. It would be interesting to see what I decided to do, always assuming I did decide, which I shouldn't necessarily do.

Kunkel reminds me somewhat of David Foster Wallace, or at least informed by some of the themes that Wallace tries to deal with in his writing -- the self-consciousness of art, the problem of nihilistic irony, and the possibility of sincere emotional connection between author and reader. For more on this topic, or if you have a passion for contemporary fiction, I strongly recommend Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," from his collection of essays and journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
But more than these emotive/aesthetic types of questions, "Indecision" is very much concerned with the inequalities of global capitalism and the appropriate response to the relative abundance of upper-class America. I'm very much looking forward to more books by Benjamin Kunkel.

The End

A rainy Sunday afternoon makes me think of the inevitable: death. Here's Shakespeare's Hamlet on the topic. (The lyricism of the passage is quite comforting.)

If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

The full text of Hamlet is online; read it here. Shakespeare's complete works are here.

The "sponsored" archive

Advertising for the new film Capote has created an interesting nexus between journalism, archiving and literature. The marketing of the movie includes a "sponsored archive" at the newspapers web site. The url is -- note the "ads" -- http://www.nytimes.com/ads/capote/ .
The web page includes articles from The New York Times about Truman Capote, his star-studded private life, his great "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, and even his obituary. It has a timeline, too, with lots of photos. All in all, it's a beautifully done archive showcasing a great writer. And of course, there are prominent links to the official movie site.
A note at the top reads "The reprinting of these articles was paid for by Sony Pictures Classics. The Times was not involved in the selection of these articles or the production of this archive." If there was Times article saying "In Cold Blood" is a boring waste of time, I'll assume we won't see it here. I'll also assume that such a hypothetical article does not exist -- the book is a true classic.
Does it bother me that the Times is letting its content be used this way? Nope. The purists may balk, but the newspaper holds the rights to its own work. It is free to accept or reject such advertising solely at its discretion. On the positive side, the archive opens up a lot of free content for anyone to read.
My favorite bit is from Conrad Knickerbocker's review of "In Cold Blood," published Jan. 16, 1966. Knickerbocker begins by referencing an interview with Capote printed in the same day's paper:

As (Capote) says in his interview with George Plimpton, he wrote "In Cold Blood" without mechanical aids -- tape recorder or shorthand book. He memorized the event and its dialogues so thoroughly, and so totally committed a large piece of his life to it, that he was able to write it as a novel. Yet it is difficult to imagine such a work appearing at a time other than the electronic age. The sound of the book creates the illusion of tape. Its taut cross-cutting is cinematic. Tape and film, documentaries, instant news, have sensitized us to the glare of surfaces and close-ups. He gratifies our electronically induced appetite for massive quantities of detail, but at the same time, like an ironic magician, he shows that appearances are nothing.

Merry Michaelmas!

Today is day all Jane Austen fans should mark -- it's Michaelmas!
Michaelmas, the feast day of St. Michael, is a holiday regularly remarked upon in Austen novels. It's pronounced "Mickle-mus" -- kinda rhymes with "nickel bus" -- to sound like "Christmas".
There's a wonderful full-text copy of "Pride and Prejudice" on the web. Find it here.
Here are the references to Michaelmas in the novel.

Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bennet, referring to the eligible bachelor Mr. Bingley.

``Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.''

and, much later, Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bingley.

``I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People did say you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood, since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled. And one of my own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have seen it in the papers. It was in the Times and the Courier, I know; though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, "Lately, George Wickham, Esq. to Miss Lydia Bennet," without there being a syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or any thing. It was my brother Gardiner's drawing up too, and I wonder how he came to make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?''

Happy J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

Why pick the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to base a mock holiday around? The short answer is that my friends and I loved this poem in high school, and it's a locus around which we reminesce about our emotionally intense early exposure to literature. But Prufrock has a number of virtues that I think anyone could appreciate.
On first reading, Prufrock sounds good. It's that simple: its words please the ear. Its hip-hop cadences promise comradery ("Let us go then, you and I"), adventure ("through certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels") and yet-to-be-revealed secrets ("Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'"). There's the chanted "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse", the lament "I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and the great question, a balanced scale of alliteration and assonance: "Do I dare to eat a peach?"
The poem's themes allude to unease and isolation, disappointing romance, and the damnable, inescapable interiority of the mind ("That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.") Yes, alientated teenagers like this sort of thing (I did), but as adults we learn the disturbing, gnawing truth behind the cool styling: We die alone.
Most critics will say that Eliot's greatest poem is "The Waste Land," and I agree with that. But I think Prufrock remains a great work in its own right. The Waste Land is vast; Prufrock is personal. The Waste Land is bankrupt society, Prufrock is the depressed iritability of an evening alone.
Over the past few weeks I've been thinking a lot about sadness: the hurricanes, a devastated New Orleans, the lingering horror of 9-11, the poisoned partisanship of our politics, and a far-off war. Then I've thought about Eliot's poetry and felt strangely comforted.
Today is the 117th anniversary of Eliot's birth. This is my salute.

Freedom to Read

Banned Books Week, promoted by the American Library Association, begins this week. It's worth taking time to think about the price of intellectual freedom. I have to confess that I am the sort of person who, when hearing of a book that someone wants banned, will say to myself, "Hmm, I want to read that and see what it's all about."
Here are the top 10 most challenged books of 2004, according to the ALA.

• "The Chocolate War" for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence

• "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence

• "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint

• Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey, for offensive language and modeling bad behavior

• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content and offensive language

• "What My Mother Doesn't Know" by Sonya Sones, for sexual content and offensive language

• "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak, for nudity and offensive language

• "King & King" by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, for homosexuality

• "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, for racism, homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language and unsuited to age group

• "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, for racism, offensive language and violence

Read more about Banned Books Week here.

Eliot reads Prufrock

Listen to a recording of T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" via this link.
It is very cool.
I love the way he says the long I in "time."
It works for me only when I click on Download: MP3.
For some reason, when I click on Stream: Real Time, I keep getting an error message.
I particularly invite you to comment on this recording.

Who is T.S. Eliot?

I've searched for short but rigorous biographies of Eliot on the web.
The most extensive one is here, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sample passage:

In a period less engaged with politics and ideology than the 1980s and early 1990s, the lasting strengths of his poetic technique will likely reassert themselves. Already the strong affinities of Eliot's postsymbolist style with currently more influential poets like Wallace Stevens (Eliot's contemporary at Harvard and a fellow student of Santayana) have been reassessed, as has the tough philosophical skepticism of his prose. A master of poetic syntax, a poet who shuddered to repeat himself, a dramatist of the terrors of the inner life (and of the evasions of conscience), Eliot remains one of the twentieth century's major poets.

For a much shorter bio, check out Who2.com via this link. Who2 calls Eliot's The Waste Land "the most famous English poem of the 20th century."

Help with a Tough Read

Meghan O'Rourke has a charming article about reading William Faulkner with Oprah's Book Club. It sounds like a stimulating and useful experience. I'm kicking myself for not joining in on this one. (I read John Steinbeck's East of Eden with Oprah's Book Club and was quite pleased.)
O'Rourke writes:

It looked like one of the oddest pairings around, and yet Oprah-meets-Faulkner turned out, in a curious way, to be an inspired match. It's easy to forget just how radical a writer Faulkner still is, because he's been so thoroughly absorbed into the canon: a process by which, as one critic once put it, "the idiosyncratic is distorted into the normative." Faulkner is anything but normative. Figuring out what is going on in a book like The Sound and the Fury is so hard—and demands such a leap of faith—that every reader struggles in similar ways.

Read the whole story here.

Anticipating Prufrock

Every year, a few friends and I quietly celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock Day. It is Sept. 26, which is the birthday of T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; it was published in 1917.
I'll be blogging about Eliot and the Love Song this week in anticipation of the great day. I will also explain why I celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock, and what it is about the poem that so appeals.
To kick things off, why not read the poem via the Bartelby web site? (Bartelby.com is a great source for full-text copies of great literature.)
The poem is here: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
It begins:

LET us go then, you and I, ...

High Fidelity

I recently read Nick Hornby's new novel "A Long Way Down." It's sarcastic, generous and insightful, much like his famous debut High Fidelity. If you haven't read "High Fidelity," I would start with that first.
In "High Fidelity," Rob, a record shop owner, is breaking up with his girlfriend. The book is essentially his thoughts on pop music, girls, sex, love and growing older. It's one of those books that didn't seem all that remarkable to me when I first read it, but it has aged so well that about once a year I read it again. (See other books I have re-read here.)
A favorite passage:

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it'’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn'’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Interestingly, I disagree with the gist of that passage, and in the book Rob learns not to be such a culture snob. I still think it's an amusing sentiment with a little bit of truth in it.

Dry, a recovery memoir

I feel like I've been wading around in the muck with my reading the past few weeks. I've read all the news reports I can about Katrina -- very depressing. I've also been slogging through parts of Disneywar (previous posts here and here) and the novel "Couples" by John Updike. (I'll post more about Updike soon.)
Then last night, most fortuitously, I received in the mail from my friend Lanore W. a copy of Dry, a memoir, by Augusten Burroughs. I've read about half of it -- it's about his attempt to recover from alcoholism. This book, like his first memoir, Running with Scissors, is so compulsively readable I have a hard time putting it down. It's dark, but funny. His subject matter, in both books, is his own troubled life. He writes about child abuse, alcoholism, and depressingly anonymous sexual encounters. Yet I'm of the opinion that his writing is suffused with an underlying moral clarity that affirms the value and uniqueness of every living person.
Having given this ringing endorsement of Burroughs, I have to add that he is not for everyone. Many will find his writing grotesque and disturbing -- but not me! I expect to finish Dry in the next day or two.

Reading about the storm

To be honest, I've spent most of the past week reading every scrap of coverage I can find about Hurricane Katrina. I was born and raised in rural Louisiana. Like many people who live in the state but outside the city, I love New Orleans and visited it often. Its sophistication, its debauchery, its fun, its grittiness -- New Orleans is a fascinating, cosmopolitan beacon rising out of the swamps. (I can't bring myself to write "was." It is and will be again.)
At any rate, the media coverage has been amazing. It sadly seems reporters realized the magnitude of the problem much faster than the federal government.
I could link to lots of coverage of the storm and its aftermath, but I will content myself to link to only one item: An editorial written as an open letter to the President in New Orleans' great newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
It reads, in part in part:

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. ...
Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. ...
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

Read the whole editorial here at Nola.com or here via the Editor & Publisher web site.

There is no B-list

A friend of mine recently read I, Fatty, a novel about silent film star Fatty Arbuckle. Should I read it?, I asked. I don't know, he said, it was OK. Maybe you could put it on your B list.
Ahhh, I said, but there is no B list. The A list is full up. If it's not great, I can't spare the time for it, I said.
And that's so true. There are too many good books and too little time. In fact, I might stop reading a book I'm in the middle of: Disneywar, a nonfiction account of Michael Eisner's rise and fall as head of Walt Disney. It's not holding my interest, and I had such high hopes for it. It's too much a story of neurotic Hollywood powerbrokers maneuvering for position. That's too bad, because I usually love James B. Stewart's work. His book Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story Of A Doctor Who Got Away With Murder is excellent.

New Orleans and the storm

Say a prayer for New Orleans and her people ... the muse of great authors such as John Kennedy Toole, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner.

The power of reading

National Public Radio has been running a series of commentaries called "This I Believe." Today's installment was by author Rick Moody on the power of reading. It made me cheer at my breakfast table. Here's how it starts:

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind. ...

Read the whole commentary here.

Out

I don't read many crime thrillers, but Out, by Natsuo Kirino, is a cool, creepy walk on the dark side. The novel, translated from Japanese, centers on four women struggling to make ends meet while working at a boxed lunch factory. In Kirino's novel, Japanese society is depressingly sexist -- women are denigrated as a matter of course by both by their families and their employers. Nevertheless, the female characters are smart, cynical, manipulative and eager to carve out their own destinies. When one of the women kills her philandering husband for gambling away their life's savings, her co-workers come together to help her get rid of the evidence. That cover-up leads their entanglement with Japan's brutal underground criminal world.
The book has several scenes of startling, disturbing violence, much like a Quentin Tarantino movie. The dismemberment of a dead body is particularly graphic.

Lunar Park

I have no intention of reading the newest Bret Easton Ellis novel, "Lunar Park." When I was young and alienated, I read his novels "Less than Zero," and "The Rules of Attraction," books about extremely wealthy college kids doing lots of drugs and having lots of anonymous sex. I enjoyed them at the time -- it's ironic that when you're feeling alienated, it's comforting to read books about other's people's alienation. (This is part of the enduring appeal of The Catcher in the Rye.)
Fortunately for me, The New York Times Book Review has an excellent review of "Lunar Park" by A. O. Scott, and it's well worth reading the whole thing.
The clincher:

The problem with this novel is not that it is a fast, lurching ride to nowhere. Of course it is; it's a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The problem is that it does not have the honesty to admit that it wants to be more, the faith that readers will accept more or the courage to try to be more. It is the portrait of a narcissist who is, in the end, terminally bored with himself; that it may also be a self-portrait doesn't make it any more true.

Books about journalism

Mediabistro.com asked professional media watchers to name the most useful book they've read about the media. The answers would fill a shelf with excellent books.
Here are the commentators who picked the books I want to read next:

Keith Kelly
Media Reporter, The New York Post
I don't think it sold like a rocket, but I thought Hard News, Seth Mnookin's book on all the problems at the New York Times involving Jayson Blair scandal and the eventual ouster of executive Howell Raines, was terrific. He took a story that had been covered to death, gave it a new perspective and unearthed lots of new material.

And in what I consider a unique twist, in the paperback version, he also printed a long line of corrections. Now what author has the integrity to do that?
...
Jack Shafer
Media Critic, Slate
I never travel far without a copy of W. Russell Neuman's The Future of the Mass Audience in hand. Published in 1991, well before the web arrived, it accurately predicted that evolving media technology would fragment the mass audience before economics and entrepreneurs conspired to reaggregate it. It was Neuman who first alerted me to the fact that the digitization of media meant that for the first time all media would speak a common language and that the cartels and monopolies dominating radio, TV, newspapers, motion pictures, recordings, etc. would finally be forced to compete with one another.

Read the whole article here.
Some of the commentators picked more than one book, and I will, too. My first most useful book is We the Media by Dan Gillmor. The former tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News rights about how interactivity and the Web will open up journalism, making it a virtual conversation between the reporters, the sources and the readers. (I've blogged about this book before here.)
My other pick is "Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment," by Anthony Lewis. (Read a review from Columbia Journalism Review here). The book is about The New York Times vs. Sullivan, a landmark Supreme Court case that established important standards regarding freedom of the press and libel. Lewis was covering the court at the time of the case, so the book has a wonderful you-are-there quality.

Lafayette's Confederacy of Dunces

One of the great Louisiana novels is "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole. Some would argue that it is a New Orleans novel, and it is. But it also contains a whole lot of things that mark the general south Louisiana area - particularly a rollicking sense of fun and a fear of the bland hinterlands. The plot: Ignatius J. Reilly, medieval scholar and all-around eccentric, navigates his way through New Orleans condemning violations of taste and geometry, while his mother hectors him to get a job. I think it's hilarious, but it's also a novel that draws love-it-or-hate-it reactions.
The Independent, a smart weekly in Lafayette, La., recently published a story about the year that Toole lived there teaching English at the local university (now named the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). It's been local legend for years that Toole based Ignatius J. Reilly on a UL professor; The Independent's story connects the dots.
I love the quotes from Pat Rickels, one of the UL professors who knew Toole when he taught at the school in 1960. She called him Ken, and she said his inspiration for Ignatius was a medievalist by the name of Bobby Byrne.

Byrne retired in 1985 and passed away in 2000. Rickels says she is probably the last person alive on the faculty who knew Toole and Byrne well. "Any day I can spend talking about Ken and Bobby is a happy day for me," she says. "When we first saw that chapter in New Orleans magazine," Rickels says, "We thought, 'How awful.' We thought it would destroy Bobby.

"Finally I had the courage to ask Bobby if he liked Confederacy of Dunces," she remembers. "Apparently he never saw it. He knew he was the inspiration for Ignatius, but he didn't care. He didn't read modern books and said he never read best sellers. He was reading Boethius."

Bill Wilson biography

Is there such a thing as a warts-and-all hagiography?
If so, Susan Cheever has achieved it with her book "My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous."
She writes about many of Bill's character defects, most notably his nicotine addition, his infidelity to his wife Lois, and how he begged for a drink on his death bed. But she always comes back to his remarkable genius in founding AA, and how that organization has saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Cheever makes a strong implied case that, due to his background and character, Bill Wilson was uniquely qualified to begin AA. So his flaws are not that significant. I came away from the book admiring Wilson but not really liking him, but also thinking that it's irrelevant whether I like him or not -- he was a great man.
From a literary point of view, I enjoyed reading about Bill's friendship with Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. Bill experimented with LSD after he got sober but before LSD was made illegal. Huxley was interested in psychedelic drugs as well; he wrote about his experiences in his book The Doors of Perception. Both men believed that the drugs might be used to treat addiction. But beyond LSD, both Bill and Huxley were interested in how change is possible, both on the level of the individual person and society in general. Huxley called Bill "the greatest social architect of the 20th century," according to Cheever.
Cheever's writing is elegant and efficient. Here, for instance, is a beautiful passage she writes about Huxley and death:

Later, when Maria Huxley was diagnosed with breast cancer, both Huxley's acted on their belief in the friability of the line between the living and the dead. Huxley talked his wife "through" death, urging her toward the light as she gradually expired. It was a calm letting-go. In 1956, when Huxley was dying, he instructed his wife, Laura, to inject him intradermally with 100cc of LSD as he died and to talk him through it in the same way. She did, urging him on lovingly toward the light, hour after hour until his last breath.

Authoritative Self-Help

After reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, I was captivated with the ideas of Dr. John Gottman. Gladwell visits Gottman's marriage clinic, where Gottman and his researchers videotape couples talking about an area of conflict in their marriage. It can be any conflict, it doesn't matter what. Gottman and his clinicians then code the coversation based on emotional values he's developed over the years. Gladwell writes:

On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

I thought this idea was so fascinating, and I wanted to read more about Gottman's theories. So I got a copy of The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family and Friendships, by John Gottman and Joan DeClaire.
Just one of Gottman's intriguing ideas is that we make emotional connections with bids. "How was your day?" is a bid for emotional connection. A one-word answer like, "Fine" is actually turning away from the bid. To turn toward the bid, you'd say something like, "Really good, I got to do research on the space shuttle. Did you know .... " That way, you're opening up the discussion instead of closing it down.
Gottman uses lots of examples to illustrate this point. For instance, a contradictory, turning-away response:

Friend A: Would you like a tangerine?
Friend B: That's not a tangerine. It's a Satsuma orange.

There's lots more to this book -- including facial expressions, emotional instincts and finding shared meaning. If you're interested in self-help, I highly recommend it.
My previous post on "Blink" is here; my secret confession to liking self-help books is here.

Sarajevo

Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon, is a troubling, fascinating chronicle of the effects of modern warfare. The city of Sarajevo is under siege during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, its citizens held captive by the firepower of nationalists seeking to create an racially monolithic Greater Serbia. The novel centers around a teenaged girl, Irena, who becomes a sniper as part of the efforts of Sarajevans, many of them secular Muslims, to fight back.
You may know Scott Simon as the anchor for National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday. He was a war correspondent for NPR during the war in Yugoslavia, and he's said in interviews that much of the novel is based on his first-hand observations. He talked about the novel, his first, with Terry Gross on the radio program Fresh Air. Listen to the interview here.
On my friend Kristin's recommendation, I then read a memoir called War Cake by Linda Flynn Beekman, who lives in the Tampa area. She subtitled the book, "A Witness in the Siege of Sarajevo," and it's a first-person account of her travels back and forth during the war. Beekman would bring small amounts of medicine and supplies to the people, with the additional goal of serving as a witness for peace. Many of the details in "Pretty Birds" and "War Cake" are identical, such as the people going to the old beer factory for water because its sits over natural springs, or the tunnel dug over the course of months as a secret way for people to leave the city.
One of the many things that fascinates me about these books is that both Beekman and Simon say they were generally pacifists, but changed their minds once they were on the ground.
Beekman writes:

I came to Sarajevo believing I am a pacifist, but now I join Sarajevans in hoping for NATO air strikes. I believe NATO has the capability to bomb the tanks and weapons on the mountains surrounding Sarajevo without killing anyone if they give the aggressor ample time to leave before the attack. Civilians in Sarajevo are hostages in their own homes. The attackers have cut the electricity, water, and food supply, and bombard residents daily with mortars and sniper fire. They deliberately shoot children. Sarajevans deserve to be helped or at least allowed to defend themselves. The one time in my life I am in favor of U.S. intervention, it does not come.

Both books also show the everyday effects that warfare has on a modern city. It's impossible not to think that this is close to what a war in the United States might look like. Not that I think a war on U.S. soil is likely. But given the way warfare seems to be such a lingering blight on all humanity, it also seems foolish to think it could never happen here. These books made me queasily consider what that might be like. And that made me think a little more deeply about my opinions on U.S. foreign policy.

Newspapers report on The End of the World

Those fine folks at McSweeney's have imagined "Anecdotal Leads For News Stories Reporting The End of the World."
Sample:

Mo Bushnell was not happy.
Not happy at all.
With a wheezing gust from his 84-year-old lungs, the opinionated former Ashtabula steelworker had managed to blow out all the candles on his large chocolate layer cake. But it was abundantly clear that Bushnell's birthday wish would not be coming true.
Not this year.
Not ever.

Read 'em all here.

Unhappy Families

One of my favorite opening lines for a novel is: "Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That's from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
I'm in the midst of two novels about unhappy families. The first is "The Winter of Our Discontent" by John Steinbeck, the other is "Out" by Natsuo Kirino.
"Winter" is about a man of reduced circumstances whose wife and children don't think he makes enough money. He's about to do something desperate to try and make more money, I suspect. In "Out," a woman kills her husband for spending their life savings on prostitutes and gambling; her factory co-workers help her cover up the crime.
PS I'm visiting dear mama and her Internet connection is slooooooow, hence no groovy links on this post.

Half-Blood Prince Review (no major spoilers)

I bought "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" on Friday night/Saturday morning at midnight at a book release party hosted by Inkwood Books. I finished it about 9 p.m. Saturday night. National Public Radio has an amusing report on people who read the book over the weekend. It begins, "If it is possible to 'chug' a novel, then that is exactly what countless Harry Potter fans were doing over the weekend." (Listen to it here.) What an apt analogy!
On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate it about an 8. It has a compelling storyline, with a good deal about the origins of uber-bad-guy Lord Voldemort. There's much teen romance among Harry's cohort, and a lot of that bit is quite funny. But I'm not particularly objective about Harry Potter, because I'm so very fond of the characters.
There is one notable, disturbing, saddening death at the very end, and thematically it felt quite similar to the notable death in the previous book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." I keep wondering why J.K. Rowling kills off her best characters. I don't see why these characters have to die. In literature, we expect characters' deaths to serve a narrative purpose, and I don't really see what that is in these cases, except to show that Lord Voldemort is evil, evil, evil and wants to kill all the good guys. But we knew that already.
Of course, a narrative purpose could be revealed in Book 7, and I think it likely will be. But that's about two years from now! Meanwhile, I feel pretty darn depressed. Rest in peace, oh notable character from Harry Potter, whose name I will not reveal here!
A lot of the Harry Potter fan web sites essentially shut down on Saturday to allow the web masters and the fans time to read the book. Some of those fan sites are already back online, and the commentary and theories are fascinating. My favorite, Mugglenet.com, comes back online on Monday. This is one of the best parts about Harry Potter, that there's an online community willing to discuss the book ad infinitum.
One thing I know for sure ... When the next and final installment of Harry Potter comes out in a few years, I'm going to buy it at midnight, and then I'm going to stay up all night and read it in one sitting. I won't bother going to bed!
UPDATE: Several groups of fans got to interview J.K. Rowling over the weekend, and those interviews are starting to hit the web this week. She pretty much directly addresses my complaint about character deaths:

Sorley Richardson for Publishing News - Why did you have to kill Sirius when it was the best thing that happened to Harry for years?
JK Rowling: We are back to me being a murderer, aren't we? People have asked me this a lot. I have been repeatedly told Sirius was my favourite character, why did he have to die? You can imagine how bad that makes me feel and in fact after I killed Sirius I went on the Internet and somehow stumbled across a fansite devoted entirely to Sirius and I killed him in the last 48 hours, so that wasn't good.
I think you will realise why he had to go in terms of plot when you read the seventh book. It wasn't arbitrary although part of the answer is the one I have given before. It is more satisfying I think for the reader if the hero has to go on alone and to give him too much support makes his job too easy, sorry.

Read the whole interview here.

Truman Capote, writer, artist

The New York Times has an insightful take on Truman Capote and his impact on journalism and writing. (Read the article here.) These sentences from David Carr's article really capture the heart of Capote's appeal:

Most anyone who types today owes something to Capote. A novelist who developed a passing interest in real events, he transformed the hackwork of journalism into something far more literary and substantial.
"There was no one ever in American life who was remotely like Truman Capote," said Mr. (Norman) Mailer, who once suggested that Capote was the best sentence writer alive. "Small wonder, then, if people are still fascinated by him."

The article is inspired by two new movies on Capote's life, one based on the biography Capote, by Gerald Clarke; the other based on an oral history of Capote's life by George Plimpton called Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. I've read both books, and they're excellent. The Clarke book is a thick, comprehensive yet readable biography that will likely be the definitive work on Capote's life for years to come. The Plimpton book, on the other hand, is a breezy but fascinating compendium of first-hand anecdotes told in observers' own words. Pick your pleasure.
When I was younger, I thought Truman Capote was just the coolest ... a great writer, a party boy, a gay nonconformist. Basically, what a cosmopolitan literary type should be. Now that I'm older, I see a lot of sadness in his life, most especially in all the potential that was lost after he wrote "In Cold Blood." The book ended up eating away at him, maybe even destroying him -- the biographies agree that he never seemed to recover from writing it. His decline into drugs and alcohol is usually tacked on to biographical writing about him almost as a footnote. But I think it was much more significant than that. It was the result of the abyss he had to confront when writing "In Cold Blood." He was trying to medicate himself into feeling good again, but it didn't work. It killed him.
The book had a tremendous impact on other people as well. The Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World published a superb special section to mark the book's 40th anniversary (read it here). It mostly looks at the impact the book had on the people of Kansas, but it also has an interesting piece on Harper Lee's role in the book. Yes, Harper Lee of "To Kill a Mockingbird." She was a childhood friend of Truman's, and she went with him to Kansas and helped him research it.
You can read an excerpt from "In Cold Blood" via Amazon here.

Harry Potter

The countdown to Harry Potter, Part 6, is in its final stretch. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" goes on sale a week from tonight. Yes!
I adore these books for several reasons. First, J.K. Rowling is a gifted writer. Her plots are full of twists, her characters are true-to-life, her humor is warm yet sophisticated. Second, the topic of magic holds enduring interest. I think most people believe that forces beyond our physical senses are at work in the world, whether we call it God, love, imagination, or creativity. Magic is a fanciful explanation for those things that are beyond empirical explanation. Third, the books deal with some of the weightiest, most universal topics: loyalty, sacrifice, integrity. Most importantly, they grapple with death. As the series has progressed, we readers have learned that the evil wizard Voldemort's motivation is his quest for immortality. "There is nothing worse than death!" Voldemort declares as he fights with Harry's mentor Dumbledore at the end of Book 5 ("Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"). Here is Dumbledore's response.

"You are quite wrong," said Dumbledore, still closing in upon Voldemort and speaking as lightly as though they were discussing the matter over drinks. ... "Indeed, your failure to understand there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness ... ."

Children's literature often deals with these primeval issues better than adult literature, because it's not embarrassed to address them directly, again and again.
Finally, Harry Potter has an extensive and active online fan base that writes endlessly about the series and what it means. My favorite site it MuggleNet. (Muggle is the name for a non-magical person), particularly the brilliant editorials that fans write explaining the books. My favorite recent editorial is about the role of death in the books. Read it here.
Here are a few of my own predictions for the series:
I think Harry or Dumbledore will inevitably die before the end of the series. Dumbledore's death would fall into the Obi Wan Kenobe archetype of the loyal teacher who sacrifices himself, thereby passing on the mantle of wisdom to his student. Harry's death would fit into the Christ archetype, the innocent who gives his life for the greater good. There's a great deal of Christian symbolism in the Harry Potter books, because the books draw on a lot of European folklore and symbolism. (But I don't think the Harry Potter books are a Christian allegory in the way that C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are.) If Dumbledore dies, it will be in Book 6; if Harry dies, it will be in Book 7.
My sister and I have read all the Harry Potter books and discussed them together. One of my earliest childhood memories is my sister saying, "Let's play 'WITCHES!'" We'd then make frightening concoctions that included my dad's discarded aftershave, flower petals and food coloring. Yikes!
One final addendum ... McSweeney's has published a note about what we can all learn about the book based on the previously released cover art work. Read it here. Sample insight:

Given his prominent placement on the cover, it is unlikely that the first line of the book will be "Harry was surprised and saddened by Dumbledore's sudden death, and he vowed to never think of the old wizard again."

You can see the cover art work here.

Fava Beans

It's fava bean season, and I've made them twice in the past two weeks, inspired after reading an article by the incomparable Amanda Hesser in the "The New York Times Magazine" food section. (Read it here while you can; it may eventually retreat to the paid archives.)
I became a major fan of hers after reading Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes. Ms. Hesser is now editing the magazine's food page, and it's one of my favorite Sunday reads. Most newspapers publish their food sections on Wednesdays, which, I must admit, is very practical -- it gives you time to plan meals for the weekend. But most of my free time is on the weekends, and I like to read food writing then.
Now if you are of a certain pop cultural bent, you thought of a something immediately when you read the words "fava beans." You were thinking, "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. FFFfffftt!" That would be from the movie version of Silence of the Lambs. But if you have read the excellent novel by Thomas Harris, you know the original line is, "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone." I didn't drink Chianti or Amarone with my fava beans, but the spouse and I got quite a kick out of saying the movie line three or four times while I prepped the beans.
***SPOILER ALERT*** Plot points to be revealed about "The Silence of the Lambs" and its sequel "Hannibal"!
I really love the novel "The Silence of the Lambs," and I read it regularly from time to time. It's a well-constructed thriller, much like "Presumed Innocent." (See my previous post on re-reading books here.) The sequel, "Hannibal," on the other hand, makes me laugh. At the conclusion of "Hannibal," the serial killer psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter gets together romantically with young FBI agent Clarice Starling. It's hard to explain just how improbable and inappropriate this plot development is. I've been trying to think of a literary equivalent ... It's as if Holden Caulfield decided to go back to Pencey Prep and really apply himself. Or if Atticus Finch decided he'd be better off focusing his law practice on personal injury cases ... It just undermines the character of the characters.
I will stipulate that reasonable people can disagree. There's an interesting, raging debate on the book on Amazon.com, in the personal reviews section. You can find that section here. Make sure you scroll down to get to some of the negative and mixed reviews.

Poetry on the Web & Camille Paglia

I like to hear poetry read aloud. A great source is sound files on the Web. I like to cruise over to one of the "Canterbury Tales" web sites and listen to recordings of professors reading it aloud. (The best source is here.)
My favorite is The Wife of Bath's Prologue. I'm working on memorizing the whole thing for myself, but right now I only know the first three lines:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynough for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage:

Recently, humanities professor Camille Paglia was a guest on the public radio show, "On Point." Paglia and show host Tom Ashbrook listened to some interesting examples of poets reading their own work: Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy," Robert Lowell reading "Man and Wife," and William Carlos Williams reading "The Red Wheel Barrow."
It gives me the shivers to hear Plath say:

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time --

Robert Lowell, meanwhile, has a reputation as New England's chosen son, but he sounds like a Southerner to me. I love the way he recites:

... Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:

You can hear the interview with Paglia here; the poems are interspersed.
I strongly recommend listening to that interview; it's fascinating. Paglia's new book, "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems" is simply wonderful. It will particularly please those who enjoy poetry but have little patience for academic jargon. She writes plainly but with great intellectual rigor. Her book has very much stimulated my interest in poetry.
I love how Paglia is essentially conservative -- she takes on the poems honestly, not trying to subvert the author's intention. But she's also willing to see contradictions, sexual connotations, or pop culture implications. She's an old-fashioned nonconformist.
Paglia's web site is here.

Commencement Speeches

There are two truly fine commencement speeches floating around the Internet right now. Both are from actual, bonafide 2005 graduation ceremonies. Both go beyond pithy aphorisms. And both are a pleasure to read.
The first is from Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer. He spoke at Stanford University; read the entire speech here. Jobs talks about loving your work, taking risks, and finding the connections in your own life story. And he talks about death.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The second speech is by Senator Barack Obama, who spoke at Knox College; read it here. His speech is quite different -- it's closely reasoned political rhetoric, in the best sense of the term. He argues, in a wonderfully down-to-earth style, that the American experiment has been built on the importance of community. Maintaining the value of community in the face of a global economy is the best thing we can do for our country, he argues.. In this brief passage, he urges the graduates, for their own sakes, to embrace the challenges of making America a better place. I love how he ends up bringing it back to his central point.

There is no community service requirement in the real world; no one is forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and go chasing after the big house, and the nice suits, and all the other things that our money culture says that you should want, that you should aspire to, that you can buy.
But I hope you don't walk away from the challenge. Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It's primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

McSweeney's Humor

The good folks at McSweeney's have a new book out, this time a humor compilation. Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category is brainy, pop culture fun. I almost don't know where to start on this one, but here's a few gems from the table of contents:

• Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002 for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Part One
  
• Four Things I would Have Said to Sylvia Plath If I Had Been Her Boyfriend
  
• On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor

My favorite, though, is "Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon." If you ever read the kid's magazine "Highlights," you'll be familiar with illustrated vignettes of Goofus and Gallant (i.e., "Goofus runs and pushes ahead of everyone; Gallant holds the door open and lets others in first.")
Now we get the real story from their friends and family.

Paul, Gallant's college acquaintance:
Gallant just didn't get it when it came to relating to people. He would say words the "proper" way that no one normal ever does -- you know, "Don't act immatoor." Always the authority. One night I'm walking to dinner with him and another student, a friend from England, and we're ragging on each other -- he's calling me Yank and I'm calling him Limey. Gallant breaks in to inform us that "Limey" comes from the British navy, eating limes to avoid scurvy, blah, blah, blah. Gee, thanks Gallant. Dork.

Trading Dante references with the AC guy

I've been thinking about Dante this week, because our air conditioner is out. It's been three weeks now. Nights are miserable. So I was on the phone with one of the many repair guys we've been dealing with, and he was being a wise guy. So I said, "Look, we don't have air conditioning. And it was like the sixth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno here last night!"
Dropping in a good Dante reference was fun. But then I got to thinking, I just said "sixth circle" because it's alliterative. Maybe that's not the best circle to use in this case? A quick check reveals the sixth circle is home to heretics, locked in their burning tombs. So that's not bad. Mostly I just wanted to make sure that the sixth circle=HOT. Imagine the embarrassment if I had said "ninth circle." Then the AC guy would have come back with something like, "Well, we better call the HEATING guy to come unthaw you from the frozen lake of ice!"
A good summary of Dante's vision of hell is here.
Here's my favorite passage from the Inferno; it's so lyrical. This is from "The Portable Dante," (Penguin Classics) edited and translated beautifully by Mark Musa. In this passage, Dante has not yet started the descent through hell. He meets his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil tells him about limbo, the netherworld that's neither heaven nor hell.

Then the good master said, "You do not ask
what sort of souls are these you see around you.
Now you should know before we go on farther,

they have not sinned. But their great worth alone
was not enough, for they did not know Baptism,
which is the gateway to the faith you follow,

and if they came before the birth of Christ,
they did not worship God the way one should;
I myself am a member of this group.

For this defect, and for no other guilt,
we here are lost. In this alone we suffer:
cut off from hope, we live on in desire."

The words I heard weighed heavy on my heart;
to think that souls as virtuous as these
were suspended in that limbo, and forever!

"Tell me, my teacher, tell me, O my master,"
I began, (wishing to have confirmed by him
the teachings of unerring Christian doctrine),

"did any ever leave here, through his merit
or with another's help, and go to bliss?"
And he, who understood my hidden question,

answered: "I was a novice in this place
when I saw a mighty lord descend to us
who wore the sign of victory as his crown.

He took from us the shade of our first parent,
of Abel, his good son, of Noah, too,
and of obedient Moses who made the laws;

Abram, the Patriarch, David the King,
Israel with his father and his children,
with Rachel, whom he worked so hard to win;

and many more he chose for blessedness;
and you should know, before these souls were taken,
no human soul had ever reached salvation."