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."

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, June 16th, the day when Leopold Bloom wandered through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's "Ulysses." (Read about Bloomsday here.)

It reminds me again of how I've never read it.

I have this idea, I want to start the Very Challenging Book Group.

Here would be the first several books we would read:
Ulysses by James Joyce
"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann
"Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.

The only one of these I've read is Infinite Jest, but I would like to read it again.

Won't you join my Very Challenging Book Group?

g-r-a-s-s-h-o-p-p-e-r

An enormous grasshopper lives in my front yard. He is at least four inches long, with a green body and crimson spidery veins on his head and haunches. I have dubbed him the King of Palm, for he is a mighty creature.
Pay tribute to the King of Palm! Read e.e. cummings' poem "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" here.

A Case Study in Archiving

Last week's New Yorker has a story on the vanishing language of Eyak, spoken by a dwindling group of indigenous people in Alaska. According to Elizabeth Kolbert's report, Marie Smith Jones is the only living speaker of Eyak, and she's 87.
In part of the article, Kolbert writes that a reporter named Laura Bliss Spaan learned of Eyak years ago when she was covering a local festival. She became fascinated with the language and got in touch with the only Eyak linguist, a man named Michael Krauss.
Kolbert writes:

Bliss Spaan arranged for Michael Krauss to give a series of lessons on Eyak grammar, which she videotaped. She then gathered up all the records of the language which she could find -- Krauss's hand-typed dictionary, transcriptions he had made of Eyak legends, audio recordings of an Eyak speaker from the nineteen-seventies, video of Marie Smith Jones -- and computerized them. Altogether, the archive fit on five DVDs. When I arrived in Cordova, Bliss Spaan was there to deliver the archive to the local cultural council. She offered me an extra set of disks that she had brought along. As I took them from her, I had the odd sensation of holding in my hand all that there was -- or ever would be -- of Eyak.

What's so compelling about this archive is that is probably didn't take an unusual amount of skill to create. The papers would be scanned as pdf documents, the recordings would be turned into sound files, and the videos would be digitized. Almost anyone with a small amount of technical expertise or technical help could do it. Rather than skill, the archive needed vision and will -- seeing the culture as valuable and then committing the effort to its preservation. As an archivist, I find this story so inspiring, and I'm going to keep the methodology in mind for the future.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to find Kolbert's story on the web, so I can't link to it. (It's in June 6. The New Yorker with the cover that shows people thinking about housing floor plans. ) I wish prestige magazines like The New Yorker would leave their archives online longer than they do; it seems like it would only garner them more readers in the long run. Though I question whether the Eyak article was ever posted in the first place. But that's a whole 'nother story. (See my previous post on letting the archives run free. )
On a positive note, I did find Kolbert's compelling series on climate change, which includes more of her reporting from Alaska. Part I is here; part II is here; part III is here. Treat yourself: Print them out and bring them with you to the local cafe when you have a couple of hours to spend.

Chicago, City of Books

The alternative weekly New City Chicago has ranked the top 50 most important people in Chicago's book world. It's an intriguing list; it makes me want to live in Chicago!
Check out the entire list here. Entries of note: talk show host and book club maven Oprah Winfrey, legal-thriller novelist Scott Turow, and "Middlesex" author Jeffrey Eugenides.
I was particularly thrilled to see a library representative at No. 4:

Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey is the unstoppable driving force behind keeping our civic literary resources alive. Dempsey has kept "One Book, One Chicago" running strong, this year putting the vintage Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" into the hands of a city of readers. But she's not just perpetuating past treasures: A free wireless network was unveiled in the city's libraries last winter, allowing residents access to all of the city's digital resources.

The NYT, Class and Literature

The New York Times has been publishing an ongoing series on class. A recent installment looked at how popular culture tackles the issue of class, concluding that yesteryear's novels were obsessed with issues of status, money and social mobility. The article (read it here) mentions a lot of classic American literature, including Theodore Dreiser's "American Tragedy" and Frank Norris' "McTeague." Somebody very smart at the NYT linked the book titles to pdf documents of the original reviews --now that's how you use multimedia to write about literature!

In a separate article in the series, the esteemed David Cay Johnston uses two titans of literature to kick off his story about how the tax code benefits the wealthiest Americans.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.
The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

I've written about David Cay Johnson before; he wrote the book "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else." I just can't say enough good things about his journalism. Read my previous post here.
The entire Times series on class can be accessed here.

Drunk Dialogue

Some years back, a friend gave me an anthology called Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. It's a better idea than the book itself ... probably because of permissions and copyrights, that sort of thing. Its omissions are pretty substantial. It doesn't have Hunter S. Thompson (though I suppose that's more drugs than drinking). It doesn't have any D.H. Lawrence (a little sentimental but still quite good). It doesn't have anything from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (i.e. Mack and the boys).
It also doesn't have any of the best drunk dialogue in English literature, which must be from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. So much of it is good, but I'll content myself to quote just a few little lines here:

"Certainly like to drink," Bill said. "You ought to try it some times, Jake."
"You're about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me."
"Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public."
"Where were you drinking?"
"Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George's a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted."
"You'll be daunted after about three more pernods."
"Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I'll go off by myself. I'm like a cat that way."

Top Ten Most Harmful Books?

A conservative weekly called Human Events has ranked the top 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. No. 1 is "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (Read the whole list here.)
"Traditional values" groups come out with these lists from time to time, and usually they're jeered by librarians and the press. But I don't jeer them. If books matter, if ideas matter, then books that advocate bad ideas can indeed be classified dangerous. Maybe I'll compose my own list of dangerous books ... Although I think TV shows and commercials are much more dangerous than books. Buy enough crap and have enough supermodel sex and you'll be happy for ever and ever! ... But I digress ...
My disagreement with dangerous books lists are twofold: First, I usually disagree with what ideas are dangerous ("The Kinsey Report"? "The Feminine Mystique"? I don't think so. And I dearly love Michel Foucault, who made their list of honorable mentions.) Second, even if a book is dangerous, these lists usually get used by people who want books removed from library shelves. That's wrong, wrong, wrong. You combat dangerous ideas with better ideas, not with statist oppression.
On a final note, I find it truly ironic that John Maynard Keynes has made their list of dangerous books, since the current "conservative" administration seems to have utterly abandoned balanced-budget fiscal policies for raging deficits intended to stimulate economic growth. And if you don't believe it, read today's New York Times Magazine story by Stephen Metcalf on rising gold prices here. Pertinent excerpt:

A low-level panic about the debt crisis, and its possible effect on the American economy, is gathering strength. ''Our little post-bubble workout is not over, not by any stretch of the imagination,'' Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley and himself a noted pessimist, told me recently by phone. Roach says he firmly believes that an adjustment is necessary and inevitable, and that when it comes, it will be very, very painful. From appearances, Warren Buffett, the savviest investor who ever lived, agrees. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has placed a $21 billion bet against the U.S. dollar.

I hope they're wrong; I fear they're not.

If you move ...

This is a little esoteric, but I can't get it out of my head, so here it is:
I read a story last week in The New York Times about metabolism, and how scientists conducted a study that shows people who fidget a lot are much thinner than people who don't fidget.
Here is the lede (the beginning of the story):

If you move, they will measure it. If you don't move, they will measure that, too, along with what you eat.

The full story is here.

I strongly, strongly suspect that this lede was inspired by Rudyard Kipling's story of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Rikki is a mongoose who lives with a boy named Teddy and his mother and father. Rikki and the father work together to kill Nag, a deadly Cobra. But Nag's wife Nagaina is still on the loose, until ...

Teddy and his mother and father were there at early breakfast; but Rikki-tikki saw that they were not eating anything. They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. Nagaina was coiled up on the matting by Teddy's chair, within easy striking-distance of Teddy's bare leg, and she was swaying to and fro singing a song of triumph.
``Son of the big man that killed Nag,'' she hissed, ``stay still. I am not ready yet. Wait a little. Keep very still, all you three. If you move I strike, and if you do not move I strike. Oh, foolish people, who killed my Nag!''
Teddy's eyes were fixed on his father, and all his father could do was to whisper, ``Sit still, Teddy. You mustn't move. Teddy, keep still.''
Then Rikki-tikki came up and cried: ``Turn round Nagaina; turn and fight!''

You can read the rest of Rikki Tikki Tavi's tale here.

Jim Wallis on his book tour

We don't get many authors coming through Tampa, so on the rare occasions that I attend a book signing, I will make an extra effort to document it here.
I saw Jim Wallis speak recently at a book signing here in Tampa. Wallis is the author of God's Politics: How the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Wallis is what I would call a progressive evangelical; his book makes the case for an anti-poverty, anti-war social movement that would demand accountability from both political parties.
I enjoyed Wallis' speech -- just the fact that he questions the Republican/Democratic dyad made him interesting to me. He took questions afterward. Most of the crowd seemed pretty anti-war. But one woman asked him why he downplayed the evangelical mission of conversion. He said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that you can convert people more effectively when they see you living out your religious convictions consistently.
Here's an excerpt from his book (read more at Wallis' web site here):

The values of politics are my primary concern. Of course, God is not partisan. God is not a Republican or a Democrat. When either party tries to politicize God or co-opt religious communities to further political agendas, it makes a terrible mistake. The best contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable nor loyally partisan. Both parties, and the nation, must let the prophetic voice of religion be heard. Faith must be free to challenge both the Right and the Left from a consistent moral ground.

"God's politics" are therefore never partisan nor ideological. But God's politics challenge everything about our politics. God's politics remind us of the people our politics always neglect - the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind. God's politics challenge narrow national, ethnic, economic, or cultural self-interest, reminding us of a much wider world and the creative human diversity of all those made in the image of the creator. God's politics remind us of the creation itself, a rich environment in which we are to be good stewards, not mere users, consumers, and exploiters. And God's politics plead with us to resolve, as much as possible, the inevitable conflicts among us without the terrible destruction of war. God's politics always remind us of the ancient prophetic prescription to "choose life, so that you and your children may live," and challenge all the selective moralities that would choose one set of lives and issues over another. This challenges both the Right and the Left, offering a new vision for faith and politics in America and a new conversation of personal faith and political hope.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The New York Times devoted the cover of today's Book Review to a new biography of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Romantic Era aficionados and feminists will remember her not only as an intrepid freethinker, but also as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
It's sounds like a fascinating book, and the review is keen.
Here's a bit from the review that summarizes Wollstonecraft's masterwork, "The Vindication of the Rights of Women." I like how the reviewer punches up the sentence's end with a modern reference.

''The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,'' [Wollstonecraft] wrote, continuing: ''Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.'' So begins her uncompromising polemic, a document as necessary an admonition today as in her own in its plea to the owners of wombs to invest in that invisible fortification called character before fluffing their petticoats or tattooing their bellies.

A Memory of Summer Reading

Memorial Day weekend is the beginning of summer, as far as I'm concerned. And summer reading is just the best; I love it when the newspapers and magazines come out with their reading lists.
During the year between my junior and senior years of high school, I read more great books in a single summer than anyone has a right to. I was dreading an excruciatingly boring summer in rural Louisiana, away from all my overachieving, boarding school friends. (To give you an idea, our unofficial class motto was, "We're not arrogant! We're just superior!")
I believe it was my mother, smart woman that she is, who suggested I go to my favorite English teacher and ask for a list of books to while away the summer.
Now this particular teacher remains my most favorite teacher ever in my life. He was quiet and stoic, and he talked very slowly. But in his own way, he was very passionate about the subject matter. Once, some smart-ass suggested that John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning ("'Twere profanation of our joys/To tell the laity our love.") was about vampires. My teacher's response was to storm out of the classroom in a rage. We were all freaked out by that, but also very impressed.
So he gave me a list of great books to read over the break. And of course I decided my new goal in life would be to read the whole list.
I don't remember if I actually finished the list. I know I must have gotten pretty darn close, because I read and read and read some more. It was a good summer. I wish so badly I had kept that list, I can still see it written in his cramped handwriting.
Well, here's a partial list, strictly from memory, of some of the books I read that long ago, sweet summer.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Meridian by Alice Walker
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Dale Carnegie and I ... Try to Take Over the World!

I recently read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People for a library science class, of all things. I got such a kick out this book. It's a motivational, quasi-self-help book about, you guessed it, how to win friends and influence people. (See my previous post on self-help books here.)
A lot of it is pretty obvious -- get people talking about themselves, ask people about their passions, etc. But it's presented in such a charming manner. Carnegie was writing in the 1930s, so a lot of the writing has this yesteryear lilt to it. It's almost Hemmingway-esque.
Sample passage:

Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don't think so. Don't condemn them. Any fool can do that. Try to understand them. Only wise, tolerant, exceptional people even try to do that.

So I've been using my Carnegie method on friends and co-workers. It makes me feel sneaky, but also kinda smart. And definitely goofy. If you've ever seen Pinky and the Brain, the cartoon about the two mice who wake up everyday and launch a new plan to try and take over the world ... It's like that. Check out the Pinky and the Brain World Domination Page here.

Talking about books

I went to a journalism conference this weekend where I had some truly superior conversations about books with my fellow attendees. During a couple of rare lulls in conversation, I asked people what are their favorite books. They seemed to really like the question, and I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising. Doesn't our taste in books say something important about ourselves? Certainly people who love books like to think so.
Naturally, I seized the opportunity to advance the cause of Spoon River Anthology. (See my earlier post on "Why Spoonreader?" here.) Others mentioned the books A Farewell to Arms and The Grapes of Wrath as their favorites. Those are both fine, fine books, too.

Re-reading books

I often read the same book again and again. Some people I've met think that's pretty weird. Others do the same thing.
Here's a highly unscientific list of books I've read again and again. None of these books are what I would call difficult. And mostly I'm reading them again and again because I find it very relaxing to so. I'm reading them to escape and think about something else for a while

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Number of times I've read it: About 20
I always get something new out of reading this, some nuance or sharp point. The book is written from the point of view of a child who observes adults, so some of the clues about what's actually going on are very subtle. (For instance, the scene where the country men confront Atticus at the jail.)

Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow
Number of times I've read it: About 20
This is probably the best legal thriller I've ever read. If you know of a better one, please email me! My favorite scenes are when Judge Larren Lyttle dresses down the prosecutors.

Summer Switch, by Mary Rodgers
Number of times I've read it: About 15
This is a kids book, but it's so sophisticated I can't help reading it again and again. Ben "Ape Face" Andrews magically switches bodies with his father Bill, a Hollywood mogul. Ben-as-dad goes to Hollywood to take on the sharks, Dad-as-son goes off to summer camp. Hijinks ensue. I love how sarcastic and vitriolic the father is about being shipped off to camp. Then he decides to take the place over.

The problem of the interesting failure

My earlier post on "The Kite Runner" got me thinking about the difficulty of writing about what I call "the interesting failure." It's when a book is very good, but still has profound flaws.
Maureen Corrigan is a book reviewer I like a lot; usually I listen to her book reviews on Fresh Air, the radio show from National Public Radio.
She recently reviewed the new novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of "The Remains of the Day," which became a touching film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson). Her mixed review definitely fell into that category, and it was very interesting to hear how she handled it in a review. Listen to her review here.

The problem with endings

I just finished The Kite Runner, which is No. 1 on Book Sense's bestseller list. (Booksense.com is the web site of independent booksellers and a great place to get reading ideas. )
"The Kite Runner" is the story of an upper-class boy growing up in Afghanistan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His mother is dead, his father is withholding, and his best friend is the servant's son.
The beginning of this book is amazing, startlingly strong, utterly gripping.
The middle part is interesting, very good.
The ending is bad, too many coincidences and loose ends coming together, almost over the top.
Don't you hate it when that happens? Where was the author's editor? All he needed to do was throttle back a little bit.
On the whole, though, the good outweighed the bad, because the good was so very good.

Blink review

I wrote a review of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Read the whole thing here.
Here's how it starts:

When we contemplate the power of unconscious thought, it’s usually in the context of swirling sexual desire or perhaps a drug-fueled reverie—think Oedipus, Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, or Timothy Leary. But Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, makes the case that unconscious thought can help us with practical decisions in both work and life. According to Gladwell’s hypothesis, our brains are powerful organic computers that arrive at highly technical yet accurate decisions without having to make much of an effort.

Librarian by day, BATGIRL by night!

I just learned that superhero Batgirl's alter ego is Barbara Gordon, librarian!
Yippee! Now I have another cool comics role model to praise alongside intrepid reporter Lois Lane.
Check out Batgirl's history at fan web sites here and here.

Comic books are kind of like the soaps ... The characters have long, complicated life stories with all kinds of improbable plot twists. So Barbara Gordon starts out as Batgirl, but then she gets shot by The Joker in a special one-issue comic called "Batman: The Killing Joke" by Alan Moore. Moore, by the way, is one of the most celebrated and respected comic writers of our day. He wrote the postmodern apocalyptic classic, The Watchmen. I actually have a copy of The Killing Joke, which I bought when it came out way back in 1988. (Read a quick synopsis and review of The Killing Joke here.)

So Barbara Jordon is shot by the Joker and left paralyzed, which means Batgirl's crime-fighting career is thrown for a serious curve. But no! Barbara Jordon becomes ORACLE! As a fan web site puts it:

She used her researcher's talents from her job as a librarian and a grant from the Wayne Foundation to begin anew, this time using computers as her library, community and her battlefield.

(Here's the link. Recall that the Wayne Foundation refers to Bruce Wayne, Batman's millionaire playboy alter ego.)

So Barbara Jordon enters the 21st century as Oracle, librarian, computer diva and super-researcher extraordinaire!

I love it!

The Art of the News Obit

When they're at their best, nobody does a better news obituary than The New York Times.
(When they're at their worst, they're dang boring, but that's a post for another day.)
The news obituary is a fine art: It should be comprehensive yet compact, objective, even critical, but still respectful and providing a sense of closure.
The NYT did a fine, fine job this week on the news obit of Pope John Paul II. Perhaps you could argue that it does not fulfill my criteria of compactness -- it is quite long -- but it is interesting and comprehensive. I read it Sunday afternoon, not on the Internet, but in the newspaper itself, and it was pleasant reading.
Read the entire obit here.
In this excerpt, the writer Robert D. McFadden describes the assassination attempt on the Pope's life. Notice how he neatly summarizes the investigation that concludes years later:

John Paul's life as a robust, traveling teacher-pope appeared to have been altered on May 13, 1981, when a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, shot him as he rode in an open car before 10,000 people in St. Peter's Square. Bystanders seized the gunman as the pope's car sped away to Gemelli Hospital. Shot in the abdomen, right arm and left hand, he underwent five hours of surgery, and part of an intestine was removed.

Investigators searching Mr. Agca's past learned that he was a murderer who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979 and had ties to a neo-Nazi group, the Gray Wolves. But no evidence of a conspiracy to kill the pope was found. Mr. Agca was tried by the Italian authorities and sentenced to life in prison.

The assailant later said the shooting was a Soviet-inspired plot involving Bulgarian and Turkish agents, and investigators uncovered tantalizing details that seemed to support some of his assertions. But an Italian court in 1986 found the evidence ambiguous and acquitted three Bulgarians and three Turks of conspiracy in the case. A link between the attack and the Bulgarian government was often asserted, but never proved.

Humility, the forgotten virtue

The ever sensible Don Wycliff, public editor for the Chicago Tribune, writes about changes in newspaper readership in his column this week:

Besides the overwhelming shift by readers from telephone and snail-mail contacts to e-mail, the most notable change I've seen is the willingness of people--readers, commentators, activists, everybody--to eschew humility and display what can only be called unabashed moral and intellectual arrogance.

I thought that these displays couldn't get more shameless than they were during Bill Clinton's presidency, when it seemed all restraint had been lost and all of his critics were ready to pick up stones and have at him, presumably after having examined their own consciences and found themselves "without sin."

But the advent of George W. Bush has given rise to a viciousness and loss of restraint unparalleled in my experience. People seem to have lost completely their moral compass.

Read the column in its entirety here.

Cod, Salt, Zero

Here's another interesting list from Nancy Pearl, inspiration for the librarian action figure with amazing push-button shushing action! (For Christmas ... please?) She's become something of a regular on National Public Radio, offering up interesting book ideas. A recent installment addresses microhistories (check out the show here), those nonfiction books that look at a seemingly small phenomenon from a historical/anthropological perspective. Here's her list:

1. Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life, by Toby Cecchini

2. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky

3. Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, by Henry Petroski

4. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

5. E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

6. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw Witold Rybczynski

7. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

8. Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

I have read three of these books: Cod, Salt and Zero. They were all good. I liked Zero the best. Interesting tidbit: Some ancient cultures found the abstract idea of nothingness to be so alien that they didn't even have zero in their number system. It makes sense if you think about it. And then you start to realize the mysterious, terrifying power of 0!!

Nancy Pearl also has an intriguing list of best spy novels. I'm thinking of choosing her No. 1 pick, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre, for my book group, as an eclectic change of pace.

Perceptive writing on the Schiavo debate

If you've been reading about Terri Schiavo in the news this week, rest assured I have, too. Mrs. Schiavo (pronounced SHY-voe) lives in Pinellas Park, in a hospice about a half hour from Tampa. As you can imagine, there has been intensive local media coverage.
One of the more gripping commentaries I've read about the case is an essay in Slate.com by Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights lawyer and all-around fascinating woman from Charleston, S.C. (Here's the link.)
She wrote a fascinating and candid article for The New York Times Magazine not long ago about her debate with philosopher Peter Singer. Ms. Johnson is what the mainstream culture would call profoundly disabled; Singer, on the other hand, practices a philosophy of utilitarian happiness and finds euthanasia morally acceptable in more cases than probably the rest of us would. He's also an ardent vegetarian. This limited synopsis glosses over some pretty big issues -- but you can read Johnson's article here. It begins:

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''
It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

The thing I love about Johnson is that she writes so wonderfully, with such honesty and humor, that you feel as if you're right there with her, seeing things as she sees them. I think that's particularly true of the article about her confrontation with Singer.

Johnson has a new book out this spring, called Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life.

God Lives in St. Petersburg (Russia)

I wrote a review of a new collection of short stories called God Lives in St. Petersburg. Check it out here.
Sorry for the sporadic posts of late, but I've been in the process of moving from Palm Harbor to Tampa and didn't have Internet service for awhile. Hopefully I can pick up the pace on posting now.