Top-notch literary profile

The New York Times Magazine has a wonderful profile of young author
Jonathan Safran Foer. (Read it here.) The serious but non-boring literary profile is so rare these days, it's wonderful to see. Sample passage:

Although Foer has been called a poet of missed connections, the paradox is that it is hard to think of another person who makes such large and heroic efforts to stay in touch. During the weeks I was working on this article, he answered the questions that were put to him and reported on his whereabouts on a nearly daily basis; indeed, sometimes on an hourly basis. A kind of epistolary climax was reached one Sunday earlier this month, when I received a total of 19 e-mail messages from him, all of them uncommonly thoughtful and well written.

At times, he would e-mail to express his regret that he could not e-mail. ''I have lots of time to think here,'' he wrote one morning from San Francisco, ''but not too much to write.'' On a subsequent trip to Italy, where he had gone to deliver a lecture -- it was titled ''Imagination Is the Instrument of Compassion,'' after a line from the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert -- his time was even briefer: ''This will be far too short,'' his message opened, ''as I am writing from a public computer in the hotel in Venice. And I am suffering motion sickness. And the inability to use contractions, as I cannot find the apostrophe. . . . ''

I really liked Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated. Unfortunately, some of the critics went hog-wild with overpraise, basically calling it the best first novel in the history of mankind, etc., etc., etc. I will say that it was very, very good, but not perfect. I can think of several recent novels I found superior. (Most notably Life of Pi by Yann Martel.) But Everything is Illuminated is still, as I said, very good and well worth a serious reader's time.
Interestingly, Foer's new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is about a child's grief after his father dies in the World Trade Center. One of the elements of the story (as reported in the profile above) is that the child's grandfather survived World War II in Dresden. That brought my memory 'round to my recent post here about Kurt Vonnegut. Only a few days after I made that post, it was announced that it was the 60th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, which I hadn't known. Interesting, isn't it, how everything connects like that?

Books about Mice

This week, I found myself in the strange position of saying, "Well, they sure don't write kid's books about mice the way they used to!"
My book group read a children's book, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. She also wrote Because of Winn-Dixie, which has been made into a movie that opened this week.
I didn't like The Tale of Despereaux much. The plot seemed contrived and made up on the fly.
On the other hand, here are three kids books about mice that I simply adore:
The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary - Our hero, Ralph the mouse, learns to ride a motorcyle and makes friends with boy named Keith.
Stuart Little, by E.B. White - No, NOT the movie! This book is about a young man who looks just like a mouse. He falls in love with a little bird who flies away, so he leaves home to find her. Very charming, but also somewhat bittersweet. E.B. White also wrote Charlotte's Web ("Some pig!"), and a serious book about writing called The Elements of Style (with William Strunk).
And my all-time favorite children's book ... drum roll, please ...
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien - Mrs. Frisby's son Timothy is sick and can't survive moving day. If the mouse family doesn't move from the field where they live by spring, they will perish when the farmer's plow comes. Mrs. Frisby must ask the mysterious rats to help her save her son.
In my favorite scene, Mrs. Frisby gets advice from a very old owl. He concludes by telling her he understands her dilemma all too well:

"I have lived in this tree, in this same hollow," the owl said, "for more years than anyone can remember. But now, when the wind blows hard in winter and rocks the forest, I sit here in the dark, and from deep down in the bole, down near the roots, I hear a new sound. It is the sound of strands of wood creaking in the cold and snapping one by one. The limbs are falling; the tree is old, and it is dying. Yet I cannot bring myself, after so many years, to leave, to find a new home and move into it, perhaps to fight for it. I, too, have grown old. One of these days, one of these years, the tree will fall, and when it does, if I am still alive, I will fall with it."
With this sad prediction, the owl stepped through his doorway, spread his great wings, and was gone, soaring silently downward into the shadowy woods below.

You Yahoo!

Before it was a search engine or an '80s pop song, Yahoo was a type of creature to be found in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Our hero, Lemuel Gulliver, travels to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a peaceful, intelligent race of horse-like creatures. Say their names like a whinny: "Wiiiiiiin-nimmmms!" The Houynhnhnms keep a nasty, treacherous race of monkey-like creatures to do their bidding -- the Yahoos. Of course, the Houynhnhnms are astounded that Gulliver looks like a Yahoo but seems to be intelligent. Gulliver soon learns the Houynmhnhnm language, and then we get lots of coversation about humanity and how Gulliver's race really isn't that different from the hated Yahoos after all. Humans lies and steal, for instance, actions of which the Houyhnhnms are not capable.
Which all brings me to the article in today's Boston Globe about the etymology of the word Yahoo and how it's starting to take on other shade's of meaning. This article is in the Globe's Sunday "Ideas" section, which is always interesting reading.

Vonnegut's tribute to Madame Librarian

This article isn't new, but it's still interesting. It's Kurt Vonnegut's tribute to librarians, in light of the Patriot Act.

I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

The article is also a fiercly anti-war statement. Read it here.
Vonnegut is the author Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the great anti-war novels (though in the book, someone tells him, "Why don't your write anti-glacier book instead?").
Vonnegut is also a World War II veteran and survived the terrible bombing of Dresden.