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.