literarylover

2008-07-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

Moving on

2007-03-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Please visit me on wordpress.com, now posting as bookishcook.

Dennett

2006-07-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

Finally finished "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." I really liked it. Dennett's writing is elegant and witty, rife with metaphors and analogies (although it must be admitted that quite a bit of it was over my head).

I couldn't possibly summarize the book, so I'll just list some of the ideas that resonated for me:

"QWERTY phenomenom" - The letters of the typewriter were arranged that way because the pattern separated the keys most often used because keys tended to stick. Now that keyboards no longer stick, we are 'stuck' with QWERTY because that's the way it's always been done. The social cost of change ensures that keyboard configuration will remain as it is (look at the difficulty we've had in converting to the metric system). Evolution too may have come up with solutions for problems that have disappeared while the solutions remain.

"The Mephistophelian dice game" - If you propose to make one person the winner of ten consecutive dice throws, then discard each loser, you end up with a winner (someone has to win), who might think himself 'a chosen one'. This in answer to those who think the universe was especially designed around us (the lucky winners).

Lots of stuff about 'reverse engineering' and 'adaptionism'. The power of adaptionist thinking - figuring out what Mother Nature had in mind by adopting the intentional stance (an innate talent that humans seem to have).

"Biology as Engineering" was a tough chapter. I had flashes of understanding around the refutation of Locke's "mind first" doctrine, that 'there can be a gradual birth of function and the concomitant birth of meaning or intentionality.'

"Reverse Engineering" - figuring out 'the why' (also called adaptionism). 'One must grant the premise of the argument from design' - a found watch exhibits a tremendous amount of design work. Darwin's path honors Paley's insight by supplying the idea that intelligence could be broken into tiny, stupid bits (algorithms) distributed through time and space. Beware the Panglossian fallacy that natural selection favors adaptations that are good for the species as a whole (the best of all possible worlds).

The Role of Language - this got very interesting as Dennett takes on Chomsky and Gould, among others. More to follow.

New Yorker notes - May/June 2006

2006-07-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

I finally finished the 6/12 Summer Fiction issue, featuring soldier stories. I liked Roger Angell's tale of protesting the Vietnam War with his daughter, but I loved Italo Calvino's fictional "Waiting for Death in a Hotel." It was a simple enough story, but it captured something elemental about death. When one of the protagonists realizes that he will be executed the next day, there were in his words "the simplicity of something long feared and now inevitable." This man starts pacing, when others address them, he stares back, bewildered, 'as though having to return from a great distance to focus on what they were saying. Maybe he was thinking of the void, in order to prepare himself for not existing."

When all the men are spared after all, they understand that 'whatever their destiny, whatever violence, cries and exhaustion awaited them, they would nevertheless savor the bloody taste of being alive, of sharing pain like bread.'

I liked the profile of 'the dog whisperer' in the 5/22 (camel cover) and the profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor in "An Englishman Abroad." Fermor recounts a time in 1944, when he and his men are in flight from German patrols towing a German general. As they are climbing Mt. Ida (in Crete?) the General watches the dawn break and murmers from Horace, "Vides ut alte stet nive candidum." Leigh Fermor also knew Horace and continued the quotation, "nec jam sustineant onus, Silvae laborantes, gulque, Flumina constiterint acuto", and so on to the end. Fermor adds, "for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together."

Anthony Lane adds that "it feels like the end of something: the last, companionable gasp of a civilization-- grounded in the knowledge of earlier civilizations, Roman and Greek-- that had not just held sway in Europe for over a thousand years but had done more than any political truce or chicanery to bind Europe together. Both Leigh Fermor and the general had been raised to recognize Horzce odes 1.9, to get it by heart, and to realize that the poem itself is a crystallization of our common feelings." (p. 64). We are so far from this now.

At the end of the article, Lane asks Leigh Fermor how he will get from Crete to the mainland. He decides to take the overnight ferry instead of a flight. Lane offers to book him a cabin, but Leigh Fermor replied that he would prefer a deck chair, adding, "My dear boy, I have a bottle of red wine and a copy of 'Persuasion', what more could I possibly need?" Lane adds that Leigh Fermor was at 83, "taking ship in the company of Jane Austen, one of his few peers in the art of the imperturbable. I could well imagine the pair of them at close of day: side by side, exchanging compliments, taking a little wine, and watching the old world slip away."

A fun vacation read

2006-07-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

I usually like to read books that relate to the area I am visiting when on vacation (hence the Dickens choice for London), but since my new book about France (Suite Francais, by Irene Demirovsky) is a hardcover, I chose to read Sarah Vowell's Assasination Vacation. I loved The Partly Cloudy Patriot and have been looking forward to this earlier work. It was great. I love her funny, philosophical approach to history and contemporary events. In this book, she visits sites that are relevant to three presidential assasinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley). She has a wonderful way of meandering through the facts in a not strictly chronological way with many asides that are always informative and entertaining. She visits little known monuments, such as the McKinley plaque in Buffalo, where the President was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz during the opening of the Pan-American Exposition in September 1901 (this was also touched on in The Proud Tower and The Devil in the White City). While talking about Garfield, she also sheds light on other obscure Presidents, such as Chester Arthur and Rutherford B. Hayes. Garfield strikes me as a sane, gentle, bookish fellow and his death a sad travesty (shot by a crazy ex-cult --interesting aside about the Oneida cult that became Corningware -- member who felt that he should be appointed Ambassador to France).

The facts about Lincoln, of course, are the most well-known, but Vowell brings a reverence for Lincoln as well as a lot of minor side-topics to bear. The story of Dr. Mudd, accused of conspiracy for sheltering Booth after his evil deed and the long debate over his guilt or innocence as well as his imprisonment in the Dry Tortugas was interesting. Also, Booth's anticipation that he would be treated as a hero and the dismay of his famous actor brother, Edwin Booth, who gave up his career out of shame.

All in all, this book is like sitting down to a delectable spread of tapas, in the end, it is as satisfying as a full meal.

Dickens

2006-07-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

Just got back from vacation. I read "The Old Curiousity Shop" by Dickens, but mistakenly bought an abridged version at a book sale. It was an engaging story with a bit of bathos toward the end, but with some excellent characters, especially Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness and Sally Brass. The evil dwarf Quilp was a bit too much and Nell, of course, was a bit too good to be true. I hate abridged books. I don't think I can even say I read it, since there was a good bit missing. It was rather like watching a foreign movie without subtitles since sometimes motivations and relationships were not clear. Plus with Dickens, the incidental and descriptive parts are often the best. I also regret not trying to see the actual shop when I was in London, but couldn't get there, nor to his house, though I did see his grave in the poet's corner at Westminster Abbey.

Buried in books

2006-05-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

Besides being behind on The New Yorker, I'm in the middle of reading four books and not making much headway with any of them. The first is a great novel called Shantaram. I put in on the back burner because, although it's a thick book, I'm enjoying it so much I don't want it to end. The other three are nonfiction: Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett, The End of Faith, by Mark Harris and Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax. I also picked up The Best Science Writing of 2005 when I was at the library last.

Dennet's book is great and I like his writing, but it's getting more difficult as I get further into it. He does try to make it easier by including at the end of each chapter a brief synopsis of what the chapter was about as well as a preview of the next chapter.

"Nickel and Dimed"

2006-05-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich. It was an easy and illuminating read. Her experiences as a low-wage earner in several different states in the Union were not a surprise to me – I’ve been a waitress and a retail worker and even did a (very) short stint cleaning offices. I know the bullying, mid-level manager types, the arrogant ‘big bosses’, the troublesome customer, the snide or gossipy co-worker and even the ‘in-trouble’ or ‘just not making it’ co-worker. But doing those jobs when you are young and unencumbered is one thing. It gives you a certain amount of freedom and if you’re lucky you can get by without medical or dental insurance when you’re young. But being tied to the job or being more and more marginalized because the job doesn’t pay enough to cover food, rent and childcare, getting by without health insurance for God’s sake, it’s barbaric!

Jhumpa Lahiri

2006-05-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

I just read the Jhumpa Lahiri story ("Once in a Lifetime") in the May 8th New Yorker. It was a bit like her novel, "The Namesake" in that it portrayed an Indian family transplanted to Cambridge, Massachusetts and the society of fellow-expatriots that they join. As in the novel, the family moves out to a generic Boston suburb and the children experience a very Americanized upbringing, except for being dragged off to visit India every now and then. I was trying to decide why I dislike her writing, and maybe, I'm sorry to say, it is because what she writes about isn't exotic enough and what she describes in such numbing detail is my own childhood - the orange and brown decorating scheme, the Christmas cards taped up around the door, the inane TV shows, like 'Gilligan's Island', the homogeneous school system where everyone strives to conform. Anyway, this story at least had a center, the very well realized young girl narrator, which was lacking in "The Namesake" and that makes a huge difference.

The Kreutzer Sonata

2006-03-03T07:02:00.000-08:00

This novella by Tolstoy was made into a play and performed by our local theatre group last year. The best part of the play was the playing of the sonata by two wonderful musicians in period costume; however, I don't think the material was really right for a play. The play proceeded exactly as the book, with a narrator meeting a strange character on a train and listening to his long tale of woe. The device works in the story, but in the play it is a distraction.

I just finished Anna Karenina and am struck anew by the way that Tolstoy can get inside a person's head, into their very thinking process. The last scenes of Anna's life are so well done: she hesitates between life and death, she imagines death and draws back from it, she imagines that she might still choose to be happy and then by a circular process she returns to the point where death is the only way out. And those last lines of her life, "And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.

Now, from the other translation: "And the light of the candle by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all t hat had been shrouded in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever."

Along with the above, I read some bits of another translation of AK to see if I could notice any great differences, especially since this new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky has gotten so much attention. The differences are pretty subtle, but the only other translation I could find was an updated version of Constance Garnett's now discredited attempt. I suppose if I were to read the Garnett version again in the original, the differences would be more noticeable to me.

It's an interesting topic, especially because KAP recently reviewed a new translation of "Kristin Lavransdatter" while deriding the older version as hopelessly dated and ureadable. I loved the book when I read it a long time ago, and I'm sure it was in the older, dated translation. I didn't have any trouble with it, but then I like to read Victorian novels, too.

World's Fair and other stuff

2006-02-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

The Devil in the White City, by Eric Larson

Well, I didn’t care much for this book, either the premise or the writing. Not that he’s a bad writer, I just hated the coy way he kept alluding to evil or disasters to come, “only Poe could have thought up the rest”, stuff like that. It got tedious after awhile. And, the story of the serial killer seemed grafted onto the more interesting World’s Fair story with the back-and-forth motif wearing thin rather quickly. It was as if he felt he needed the murderer to sell the rest of the story to us. On the contrary, the murderer’s tale could have been told much more succinctly. The fact that he couldn’t resist dragging in the Titanic disaster as well gave me the impression of someone without the discipline to edit his own work. On the other hand, the many famous characters who had something to do with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was fascinating and he did a good job of capturing the personalities and difficulties and what was at stake. Some of the people involved or touched by the Fair: Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, Theodore Dreiser (of course!), Frederick Law Olmstead, all the most famous architects of the day, even Mark Twain except that he came to Chicago, was ill, and spent the entire time in his hotel room, going home without even visiting the fair. As the author says, “of all people.” I especially loved the Ferris Wheel story – something so commonplace today, that was the centerpiece of the Fair and the invention to rival the Eiffel Tower in Paris (also built for a World’s Fair type exposition). Another minor tidbit but even more fascinating was the fact that Walt Disney’s father was a carpenter or electrician who worked on the Fair. Now, that explains a lot! It explains a certain dated, fantastical yearning at the core of the Disney creations. It explains the whole fake, glamorous, pseudo-scientific soul of those worlds, worlds that Disney dragged forth from the previous century.

The Homecoming

2006-02-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Homecoming, by Harold Pinter…Nobel prizewinner or the worst play ever written? We took four friends to a May 2005 production at the local theatre company, and we hated it. So, when I learned that it had won the Nobel Prize, I was taken aback. The production we saw was so pointless. I was expecting to be disturbed, but instead felt just uninterested and annoyed by the actions of the players. So, recently I picked up a copy of the play and was immediately engaged by the characters (still unsympathetic to put it mildly, but more believable), the dialogue (much wittier than in the production) and the suspense introduced by the interplay of the awful personalities and the addition of a female stranger, Ruth, into the already unstable mix.

So, the play is awful and disturbing, but it’s also very well written. The minor elements, like MacGregor and Jessie, which form a subtle undercurrent to the play’s action, are resolved in the end. The mystery of Lenny’s occupation is cleared up. The only thing that is unclear is Ruth’s behavior, but that is also the thing that makes the play more than just a dated, drawing-room type drama like “Look Back in Anger.” Maybe the play can’t be understood out of context? But, just going on my own reaction, the presence of Ruth is what gives the play suspense. It is amusing to watch the antics of these horrible, dysfunctional people on stage, but once the alien presence in the person of Ruth is introduced, I felt tense and threatened. And disturbed by her seeming to go willingly into bondage to them. It’s true that Ruth seems powerful at the end with the two remaining brothers in thrall and Max on his knees to her, but the situation seems fraught with menace. Actually, Pinter’s work has been called the ‘comedy of menace’ as seemingly simple situations turn threatening and ominous without explanation or warning.

Well, I just found out that the play was written in 1967, not that long after Osborne. Frank Rich recalls that the play was shocking and terrifying at that time and was part of a Pinter campaign against theatrical “literal-mindedness.” Reviewing a more recent (1991) production, Rich notes that the cultural shifts that have occurred since the sixties have rendered the play much less shocking and terrifying; however, the “nastiness and (gallows) humor” still come through. The term “Pinteresque” seems to mean themes of “nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance” – too right! The other Pinter trademark seems to be the famous pause, which occurs constantly (and annoyingly in our production) and seems to symbolize the gaps in our knowledge as we struggle to make sense of the onstage lives. The pauses worked in the written version. I’m not sure why nothing about this play worked for us in the production we saw; what would a good production be like? I may have to sit through it again sometime to find out.

February New Yorkers

2006-02-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

2/6 (Greenhouse flowers on cover) - Malcolm Gladwell's article on profiling, racial or otherwise, was really interesting. It makes you think bulldogs have gotten a bad rap; it's often the aggressive owners who create the aggressive dogs. As usual, Gladwell expands his topic to relate to contemporary events and draws some excellent inferences from his research. I also loved the article entitled "Swamp Nurse" by Katherine Boo, although it was sad to think of these young mothers, named for characters in an old TV show, struggling to learn how to take care of their babies. The nurses who go out to the homes to give advice and support are truly heroic.
2/13-2/20 (Anniversary Issue) - Nora Ephron's cookbook memoir was great. Malcolm Gladwell has another thinking-out-of-the-box article, this one on homelessness.
2/27 (Cheney with a gun, "Watch your back mountain") - Another depressing article about our hidden torture policy and how we are trying to circumvent the Geneva Convention. I loved the book review by John Lanchester entitled "Two Views of Happiness."

January New Yorkers, con't

2006-01-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

The 1/16 issue was pretty dull. The best thing was the "Your three wishes FAQ" in Shouts & Murmurs.

The missing issue (12/26 and 1/2/06) is in my possession, thanks to P&M; so far I've read and enjoyed "The Albanian Writer's Union as Mirrored by a Woman" by Ismail Kadare, an (you guessed it!) Albanian writer. This specialty issue (my feelings on that topic are known) is on International Fiction, so I'll be reading and commenting on that for a bit.

January New Yorkers

2006-01-22T05:51:00.000-08:00

January Issues:
12/26-1/2 – missing in action.
1/9/06 – read it but I don’t really remember it.
1/16/06 – in progress
1/23-1/30/06 – Nothing remarkable in this issue. The review of the 3rd volume of the MLK biography (“At Canaan’s Edge” by Taylor Branch) had some interesting tidbits about the relationship between MLK and LBJ, and also what MLK was trying to do on the fronts of poverty and inequality that went beyond voting rights. The 1/15/06 edition of the Boston Globe had an editorial decrying the current image of MLK as a “Benneton-esque teddy bear” which makes it easy to ignore “his increasing focus on economic equality and his launch of his Poor People's Campaign, a challenge to the most fundamental patterns of the US economy and caste system. ‘Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,’ he told garbage workers in Memphis the month before his assassination.” The editorialists make the point that it’s easy to celebrate MLK (and Rosa Parks) because racial inequality is now considered un-American, while economic inequality is given a pass because supposedly we have equal opportunity for all. The Globe editorial points out that the gap between the wealthiest and poorest in our society has more than doubled since 1960, that more children are growing up poor in America than in any other industrial nation and recent cuts to student aide puts more limits on the opportunities available to low and middle-income families. I was recently accused of being anti-capitalist because I was advocating for the children of undocumented immigrants in Massachusetts to be able to attend state universities and colleges at the residential rate. Isn’t this kind of opportunity the engine that drives capitalism? Isn’t giving people a chance to improve their situation the reason why our country has grown and prospered?

Back to the New Yorker review: He alienated Johnson by speaking out against the war in Vietnam, (the reviewer draws a great analogy by likening them to Henry II and Thomas a Becket.) and finally: “He rose above the particularism of his own people in an almost quixotic and ultimately tragic attempt to deliver the entire country from racism, war, and greed” (pg. 91).

Anna Karenina, random thoughts on

2006-01-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

I think I must have read this book three or four times, maybe more. I don't even know which translation I read but it was probably the Constance Garnett. I always loved it but the one I am reading now seems to have an immediacy and freshness that I don't remember noticing in the past. Every few pages, a thought, a phrase, an insight seems to leap from the page. It is the most vivid and yet at the same time the most delicate and subtle writing!

Back to Mary Poppins

2006-01-16T06:41:00.000-08:00

Back to Mary Poppins! It’s hard to imagine a time when movies were not readily available for our viewing pleasure. I remember when watching “The Wizard of Oz” on TV was a major event. It was only on once a year, so the time my grandfather turned the channel to a football game stands out quite clearly in my mind. As the “New Yorker” article points out, the movie “Mary Poppins” ‘left a deep impression on the generations of children who saw it during its three theatrical releases, in 1964, 1973, and 1980.’ That was it, three chances in almost two decades to see a great movie. All that changed rather quickly with the advent of the VCR, with movies and taped TV specials becoming daily fodder for our children. But the interesting thing about the Mary Poppins article in the New Yorker is the described dichotomy between the book and the movie. The actual character of Mary Poppins and the tone of the books (apparently there was a whole series) were very different from the Disney version. So much so that the author wept at the premiere. Disney spent fifteen years ‘wooing’ Travers to get control of her story and despite her caveats, including the ‘unheard of at Disney’ script approval, she wasn’t able to control the finished product. Well, she became famous, the movie won five Academy Awards, and the rest is history. What saddens me is that the books seem to be for the most part forgotten. And that is the true crime of the Disney empire, to have co-opted children’s literature so that some greatest stories ever written are no longer read but are packaged in a sentimental, yet cynical way for easy consumption, like fast food. I’m thinking in particular of “Peter Pan”, a book I read many times and loved. I can still remember something of the strangeness of it and the wonderful phrasing (“’My name is Wendy Moira Angela Darling. What’s yours?’ ‘Peter Pan,’ he replied, thinking for the first time that it was a rather short name.”) I’m sure no one reads that book any more, or if they do, it is in a ‘Disneyfied’ version.

Books Read 2005

2006-01-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

Books Read 2005
January:
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Master & Commander, Patrick O’Brian
Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian
February:
March:
The Sunday Philosophy Club, Smith
The Kalahari Typing School for Men, Smith (audio)
April:
The Big House, George Howe Colt
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
May:
The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
The Kiterunner, Khaled Hosseini
A Late Education, Alan Moorehead
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank

June:
After the Plague, T. C. Boyle
The Clothes They Stood Up In, Alan Bennett
The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett
The Art of Deception, Ridley Pearson
The Track of the Cat, Nevada Barr
A Superior Death, Nevada Barr
Ill Wind, Nevada Barr
July:
Endangered Species, Nevada Barr
Blind Descent, Nevada Barr
Liberty Falling, Nevada Barr
Deep South, Nevada Barr
September:
Love Creeps, Amanda Fillipacci
October:
Flashback
High Country, Nevada Barr
November:
Closers, Michael Connolly
The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connolly
December:
My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, J.K.Rowling
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby

January seems like a good month for making lists and summing up the past year. So this is all I have to show for my year. I was hesitant to post this list since it shows what a lot of 'non-serious' reading I do (as my summer obsession with Nevada Barr shows), but well, it is what I do.

I realized I never posted on the Nick Hornby book. That was a last minute gift for someone else; someone who might be reading this blog and who I haven't seen to give the gift to. As soon as the deed is done, I'll post about the book.

"Feral, destructive and spreading"

2006-01-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

Republicans or wild hogs?

The above quote refers to Ian Frazier's article in the Dec. 12 New Yorker (still haven't found the Christmas issue, by the way). The article entitled "Hogs Wild" is about, you guessed it, wild hogs, which may or may not appear interesting at first glance; however, as is typical with Frazier, he takes a quirky turn somewhere in the middle when he studying a map with various shadings of green showing the spread of the wild pigs across the United States. He is reminded of the red-blue state maps that became ubiquitous during the 2005 Presidential election and spends a good part of the rest of the article expanding on this theory, that states and counties that voted for Bush have a high or expanding feral hog population (Texas, for example, has the highest population of feral hogs of any state). The theory doesn't hold up internationally though, since Australia now reportedly has more wild hogs than people (23 million to 20 million) and they are pretty much anti-Bush).

Wasting time

2006-01-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

I spent the day working on the diabolically hard Sudoku puzzle that was in the Sunday Globe magazine. I really have to limit myself to one of these a week since they become all-consuming. I was even dreaming about it last night. I've been trying to prove to myself that I can solve even the hardest puzzle through logic, not guessing. Today, I finally had to posit one number of two in a cell and follow it through to see if it worked, but, in the process, I found a clue that I had overlooked, so was able to solve the thing logically. Tomorrow, I'll be getting back to Mary Poppins, Anna Karenina and the latest New Yorker.

Oddly enough, I seem to be missing an issue - was there a 12/26 issue? If so, what was in it, what was on the cover, can someone save it for me?

Mary Poppins

2006-01-02T18:12:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid in the pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-Tevo days, movies were rare events and not the stuff of daily life as they are now. I still remember the first movie I saw; it was “Mary Poppins” and the year must have been 1964, which means I was 7. We went to the movie and loved it and bought the soundtrack, on a 33 record album of course, which we played over and over again. I knew all the words to all the songs and could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (sp?) backwards. Walt Disney was also a family hero. We watched “The Wonderful World of Color” (in black and white) every Sunday night at 7:30. I remember when Walter Cronkite announced Walt Disney’s death on the news; I think it was a Thursday (I just looked it up on Google, and I was right – he died of lung cancer on Thursday, December 15, 1966). Besides JFk, his was the first death that I remember, and the first that I felt as personally affecting me, more than that of the President since I was only in first grade at the time. (The fact that my teacher was crying was the most shocking thing to me about JFK’s assassination.) Anyway, I am trying to get to the point of this entry, which is to discuss the article in the Dec. 19 New Yorker about the author of the original Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers. But now, I’ve run out of steam and will have to continue this thought tomorrow….

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

First, I must describe my Christmas present from L. – The Complete New Yorker! It has eight discs with every issue from 1925 to 2005 (the anniversary issue in February). There is a searchable archive, which seems a little limited in its search capability, but I was still able to find the article on malaria that I read a few years ago (July 2001). It was by Malcolm Gladwell and described the near-eradication of malaria. There was a recent article on malaria with some shocking statistics about its resurgence, so I kind of wanted to refresh my memory about the previous article – now I can do that. So, you can see what a colossal time-waster this is going to be for me (almost as bad as Sudoku!). Still, it’s one of the best presents I ever received.

On Art

2005-12-16T07:08:00.000-08:00

While cleaning up my office - the more I clean the messier it gets - I came across a New Yorker clipping from the 5/27/96 Talk of the Town segment about a speech by art critic Robert Hughes. It is entitled "The Case for Elitist Do-Gooders" and was written when the NEA (along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) were under attack by the Republican Congress. Here is some of what Hughes said:

"Of course, the economic argument is the merest flimflam. The drive to abolish the NEA (or to cut its funds to the point where it's unworkable...) has nothing to do with the economy--not in a Congress that last year voted the Pentagon seven billion dollars more than it had asked for. Eliminating the NEA is simply a bone that Congress can throw to the extreme right. It is a cheesy piece of political symbolism, mounted by opportunists who want to show their populist credentials, and who don't care what the destruction of the NEA does to the public culture of America."

And further on:

"One of the ways you measure the character--indeed the greatness--of a country is by its public commitment to the arts. Not as a luxury; not as a diplomatic device; not as a social placebo. But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens is weakened. ......The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desires alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning."

Wow! I love that line "where solitudes can meet."

Thinking about Gogol

2005-12-14T08:25:00.000-08:00

What do people think of Gogol, I wonder? I listened to a couple of his short stories on tape last year (“The Overcoat” and “The Nose”), but I don’t quite know what to make of them. As an aside, the only interesting thing (to me, I know others liked it) about last year’s pallid novel, “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lhahiri was the father’s connection to Russian literature. His grandfather advised him to “read the Russians, and then reread them. They will never fail you.” He is reading Gogol’s “The Overcoat” when the train crashes, which ends up saving his life. He names his son Gogol as a tribute. The reason I bring it up is that while reading the Introduction to AK, Gogol is mentioned as a contemporary of Tolstoy’s. I'm reading Tolstoy now (well, rereading, actually) and I've read Pushkin and Turgenev and some of Dostoeyvsky. I think I should read some of Tolstoy's short stories. Reading the introduction to AK, I realize how little into Russian literature I have really delved.

12/5/05 New Yorker

2005-12-12T05:13:00.000-08:00

The December 5 issue (Bush and Cheney as the odd couple on the cover) has a great article on the Pennsylvania trial on teaching intelligent design in high school biology classes. The author, Margaret Talbot, skillfully evokes the courtroom scenes and the personality of the judge and lawyers. She says the trial was like “the biology class you wish you could had taken.” She also draws a funny parallel about the way “creationists have adapted (evolved if you will!) to new environmental conditions.” They went from trying to ban the teaching of evolution to calling for a balanced approach to insisting that evolution is just a theory. And, Talbot predicts, they will doubtless come up with more subtle methods for promoting their agenda. She quotes a line from the play “Inherit the Wind” (which opened in a local theatre near the courthouse on the last day of the trial) where the Clarence Darrow character says, “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished do you?”

Elsewhere in the issue are some stunning poems by Franz Wright (Pulitzer Prize winner in 2004), a depressing article about Iraq (no big surprise there!) by Seymour Hersh. There is also a great book review by Adam Kirsch about William Wordsworth (reviewing Juliet Barker’s new biography). Between his idealistic phase when he was influenced by the thrilling ideas of the French revolution and his didactic phase where he “handed down moral instruction from on high,” he wrote some truly great poems. As Kirsch says, he explored his own inner life and shared his findings, which “continues to define the highest aspirations of modern poetry.” This reminds me of the saying of Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

I’m not a person who notices different typefaces typically; although I do love this font, Comic Sans Ms, so I wasn’t that eager to read the story about a typeface designer (“Man of Letter” by Alec Wilkinson). That said, it was actually quite interesting, especially the biographical details. He describes his father as “austere.” Apparently the father did not entirely approve of his son’s choice of career, but his only comment was “he thought that the conversation at the dinner table might have been more interesting if Carter (his son) had chosen another field.”

Harry Potter VI

2005-12-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

I was holding off reading the latest HP, but finally sat down with it last week. It was a lot of fun at first, and seemed much lighter than the dark and angst-ridden "Order of the Phoenix". The sorting out of the teen boy-girl issues was handled well. The escalation of violence up to the horrific ending was consequently even more shocking.

I remember when I first read "The Sorcerer's Stone" after hearing how great it was. I was disappointed in the writing, especially since I had just finished reading J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" out loud to B. The difference in style and language was jarring to say the least. However, I soon became caught up in the characters, the clever plotting and the consistently interesting juxtaposition of magic and muggle worlds. The books only get more interesting and with the seventh and final book now in sight, the pace is intensifying.

The missing New Yorker

2005-12-09T14:49:00.000-08:00

I knew something was missing in my life and I discovered it while going through and discarding a stack of catalogs – the Oct. 24 New Yorker (Ballerina cover)! I was most impressed with the article about malaria, which Bill Gates is determined to eradicate. I read an article about malaria some years ago, which described the comeback of the disease after it’s near-eradication. And it has come back strong – with drug-resistant strains, so that nearly 3 million people (mostly poor African children) die of it each year. Gates is using his charitable foundation to pour money into malaria research, an area that has been mostly neglected because malaria is no longer a problem in the developed world. Here is a statistic: ‘less than 10% of all investment in health research is devoted to the diseases that affect 90% of the world.’ There is some controversy about Gates’ method – he wants a cure, dammit! But no one has ever come up with a vaccine that works against a parasite and some suggest that money would be better spent in delivering the proven solutions – especially nets that are treated with insecticide. Nets do help prevent the disease, even living near someone who has a net can help a child survive, but hardly anyone has a net. One doctor says that 30 to 50% of at-risk children could be saved with nets alone.

Post-Thanksgiving reading

2005-11-28T06:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I just finished another Michael Connolly book, this time a new character, but still in LA.  He is such a prolific writer and he seems to get better and better. This book, The Lincoln Lawyer, was one of his best.

The 11/21 New Yorker was pretty good. The story by Haruki Murakami was strange and rather pointless.  I have read several of his books and short stories. They all have a suffocating quality to them. The main characters live diminished, closed-in lives; interactions with others usually turn out badly; yet there is something about his writing that I like and that sticks with me. Even this story, if nothing else, was an interesting meditation on spaghetti. One of my favorite short stories of all time was by Murakami and involved the woman who read Anna Karenina.  (I have been collecting references to AK in other literature and this was one of the best). The woman lived a busy enough life as a wife and a mother but found that she couldn’t sleep at all. So, she spent each night reading – it’s a dream come true! It turns into a nightmare at the end, but I loved the general idea. The name of the story might be “Sleeping.” It’s in his collection, The Elephant Vanishes, which has many pretty good stories in it. I also loved his nonfiction work about the gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, called Underground.  After the attacks of 9/11, I felt I had to read this as a way of coming to terms with what had happened.

Elsewhere in this issue, the article about Iranian youth, “The Fugitives” was interesting. It made me think about my long political argument with mon pere.  He feels that our intervention in Iraq was worth it because we got rid of a tyrant. It’s not that I think anyone should live under tyranny and I feel for the Iranians who are losing their youth and their dreams under a worsening regime, it just that our motives are suspect. We didn’t go into Iraq because we were attacked by them or because we wanted to free the people – we went in for oil and revenge and to use our military toys – or so it seems to me.  We dropped Afghanistan and now things are worsening there. If our motive was to free the people, why did we go in unilaterally and why are we ignoring countries where the human rights abuses are even more rampant?

Adam Gopnik’s article about C.S. Lewis is interesting, especially as it contrasts English and American perceptions of the author.

The New Yorker (11/7)

2005-11-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

The Nov. 7 issue of the New Yorker (Egyptian theme cover) had some great articles. I especially liked “The Translation Wars”, which made me want to read the new translation of Anna Karenina, my second-favorite book. I bought it last year when it came out, but haven’t gotten to it yet. The article on Zola and Cezanne was interesting, tying in slightly with my recent readings on the Dreyfus affair. I also thought Ian Frazier’s “Pensees d’Automne” was really funny. (I usually don’t read the “Shouts and murmurs” column, probably for the same reason I don’t like jokes.) The short story, “The God of War” was another exception to my rule that New Yorker fiction isn’t that good – I liked it a lot. Maybe I need to rethink that rule.

The New Yorker - specialty issues

2005-10-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

This is a pet peeve of mine! I read the New Yorker to get the big picture and I don't want narrowly focused issues. I have the Food issue, the Fashion issue and now the Art and Architecture issue sitting around. They have all come out in the last two months and I haven't even taken the plastic off the fashion issue. Okay, but I am a foodie; you might think that I would enjoy the food issue, but I still haven't finished last year's! I do enjoy many of the articles about food, but it's not the true New Yorker experience, and it's not why I read the New Yorker! These specialized issues do not give me the well-rounded magazine-reading experience that I crave. I blame Tina Brown for starting this, but she's long gone and now they seem to be adding more specialty issues.

The latest Michael Connelly

2005-10-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

I spent two days reading "The Closers": the latest book by Michael Connelly. While the writing isn't the best, he does a consistently great job with his characters and setting. After reading this series of books, I feel like I know Los Angeles intimately. The character of Harry Bosch seems to expand a bit with each book and the minor characters are always done well. Plus he earns the reader's interest with his attention to detail. You are down in the trenches with Harry - getting a coffee, driving the freeway, answering a cell phone call. It's all very real.

Test of a good short story

2005-10-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Let's face it: they're short. They don't have the luxury of a novel which, if done well, creates a whole world for the reader to inhabit. So, my informal test of a short story is when something from it stays with you, it leaves a bit of itself behind; rather than being consumed and forgotten, it adds to your worldview. So, I have to add a recent Thomas McGuane story entitled "Cowboy" (NYer, 9/19 - drowning Bush administration on cover) to those worth reading. It reminded me of Alice Munro because of the sense of being of a certain time and place as well as the underlying humanity of the writing. I was also reminded of Annie Proulx (who wrote so eloquently about ranch hands and drifters in some New Yorker short stories a few years back).

New Yorker Fiction - 8/1/05

2005-10-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

George Saunders does it again with another incredible, out-of-the-box short story entitled "Commcomm". As always, it takes the reader some time to get oriented in the world Suanders conjures up, usually some kind of futuristic dystopia where ordinary people struggle to find value and meaning or even a foothold in reality. Like "Sea Oak", the first Saunders story I read, "Commcomm" uses a bizarre premise along with a matter-of-fact tone to draw the reader into the hellish world of overblown consumerism or corporate megalomania that rules the lives of his characters. As in "Sea Oak" the ending of "Commcomm" is a somehow plausible leap to a higher plane.

Required Reading! (New Yorker (8/29/05)

2005-10-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

The article entitled "The Moral-Hazard Myth" by Malcolm Gladwell should be required reading for everyone, because it exposes policies that are being put in place that will have an effect on everyone's well-being. Gladwell begins with a graphic description of tooth decay, leading up to the point that people who can't afford dental insurance end up not going to the dentist. He concludes that bad teeth have become "an outward marker of caste." He quotes from the book by Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, "Uninsured in America" that the U.S. health-care system "has created a group of people who increasingly look different than others and suffer in ways that others do not." He explains that one reason health-care is such a mess is an idea known as 'moral hazard' that seems to come out of think tanks and other places where policies are formulated. The idea is that people with health insurance spend more on health-care and this is true, but those without health care cut back on useful as well as frivolous care, whatever that is! I don't believe that most people go to the doctor just because they can. But many don't go if they have to pay for the full cost out-of-pocket. Recently, my family was offered a health savings account, which is how the Bush Administration wants to solve the health-care problem in this country. Under this plan, we would get catastrophic insurance only and pay for our own health-care out of a tax-free savings account into which an amount equal to the plan deductible, $5000 plus, could be deposited. Once we have paid out the deductible, we would be covered by the plan. If we don't use the money, it stays in our account and can be rolled over into the next year's plan. Sounds great, right? The problem is that it undermines the whole idea of 'social insurance', that is spreading the risk out among everyone. Under social insurance, healthy people pay into the system to subsidize the care of the sick and rely upon others to subsidize their care when needed. Under the new plan, the sick will pay more than the healthy. As Gladwell concludes, "in the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be." In addition, the U.S. has 45 million people who are uninsured. The health care savings account does nothing to address this problem.

New Yorker fiction

2005-09-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard that the New Yorker used to be known for the high quality of its fiction; however, in the years that I’ve been a reader (since 1989), I can’t say that the fiction is all that great. That said, there are some works that stand out as not being self-indulgent drivel and linger in the mind. The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro is always great and her most recent Nyer story “The View From Castle Rock” (Aug 29 issue) is no exception. The story of a family emigrating from Scotland to Canada, it is humane and harsh and real, as are all her stories.

The poignant ending reminds me of a novella by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, that draws the reader into an intimately realized historical setting and then as suddenly douses the imagination with the actual facts and dates of all the characters’ deaths. It’s funny because I was just talking to J. about how I hate that in novels. It occurred in both The Kiterunner and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and I think many more books (The Poisonwood Bible is another), where the early intensity of the story is diluted by the author’s need to tell the whole story – everything that happened to everyone, and the emotions and actions start to feel unearned and inauthentic. It is as if you are looking through binoculars and are very close to the action and then the binoculars are turned around and you are suddenly distanced. This is not the case in Munro or Fitzgerald’s work because they are not imagining what happened to the characters, they are not loading detail upon detail of the unfolding of each person’s destiny, forging toward a predetermined ending, they tell us what actually happened and leave us to fill in the gaps, to make the leap between imagination and reality. In both cases, it’s just great writing.

Herzog and Edmund Wilson

2005-09-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

The NY Times Book Review also had an article about Edmund Wilson and draws an interesting connection between Wilson and Saul Bellow, saying that "Writing a biography of Edmund Wilson is like taking one of Saul Bellow's better-known protagonists and reducing him to a sober set of themes." Apparently Bellow and Wilson had some kind of mutual effect on each other, with Bellow dropping in on Wilson's classes at the University of Chicago or listening to him lecture at Princeton. The Times notes "the sheer passionate untidiness of Wilson's personal life" as belonging to a Bellow's novel, and that would certainly fit in with what I've read so far in Herzog. I'd been thinking that what Bellow achieved in Herzog is an amazingly complex portrait of a person, and it's done in a unique and subtle fashion. Through painstaking accumulation of detail, action and emotion, the man, Herzog, takes shape in our minds, almost as a real person might after several meetings start to impress his or her personality upon us.

The New Yorker - Aug. 8 & 15

2005-08-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

(It's the one with the creeping cat on the cover)
I've been telling everyone to read "My Bird Problem" by Jonathan Franzen. He cleverly combines bird-watching, his relationship problems and fears of global warming. I like birds and some of my best friends are bird-watchers, but I do think there's a lot of potential for comedy inherent in the topic. All these somewhat fanatical people creeping about with their special binoculars and life lists; it would make a good set-up for a murder mystery. Anyway, Franzen's bird problem becomes evident to him when he realizes that he has to care about global warming because now he cares about birds.

I loved his novel, The Corrections. I was sorry about the backlash that was engendered by his comment that he didn't really want his book chosen as one of Oprah's book club. As I recall, he wrote a rather funny article about that situation, too.

In the same issue, I really liked Louis Menand's article on Edmund Wilson, especially at the end when he summarizes Wilson's career as "devoted to the principle that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important, and, by doing the homework and taking care with the exposition, make it interesting and important to other people." This reminds me of some of the writers about whom I am reading in "The New, New Journalists."

The New Yorker - Aug. 22

2005-08-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

(It's the one with the yellow cover, two boys playing with a beach ball)

"Lone Star" by Dan Halpern is funny and irreverant, like the subject, a guy named Kinky Friedman who is running for Governor of Texas (one of his slogans is "how hard can it be?").

Looking for some truth...

2005-08-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

La vérité n'est pas faite pour consoler comme une tartine de confitures qu'on donne aux enfants qui pleurent. Il faut la rechercher, voilà tout, et écarter de soi ce qui n'est pas elle. --Gustave Flaubert

I switched over to Herzog for the weekend. I really like it. It's so funny, as when he says he has to be Herzog, there was no one else to do the job, or 'unless you are utterly exploded, there is always something to be grateful for.' It's also sad, this attempt to grasp truth and pin down the meaning of life, once and for all. It's as if he's trying to hold all the ideas of philosophy and life and death in the palm of his hands, a futile effort, as it runs like water through them, but a valiant effort nonetheless.

L'Affaire

2005-08-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Now I'm reading about the Dreyfus affair, which is the fourth section of The Proud Tower. Of course, I've heard of Dreyfus and I know Zola was involved and wrote J'accuse in response and that there was anti-semitism involved, but that was pretty much all I knew about it. The way it polarized the country and the intensity of the debate is amazing. Also, the fact that many justified the injustice of the Dreyfus trial by saying that to reopen the trial would undermine the army and lead to war with Germany.

Many of the Dreyfusards felt that France was betraying the values of 1789 through the injustice of the original trial and the refusal to reopen it. As Clemenceau wrote, "There can be no patriotism without justice....As soon as the right of one individual is violated, the right of everyone is jeapordized." These words should be heeded today when people bandy about the word patriotism while sanctioning the oppression of others.

Thinking back to the previous section, I am reminded how the American anti-imperialists felt that those who wanted to take over the Phillipines were betraying the original values of liberty on which the country had been founded, thus the title, "The End of the Dream."

Reading Tuchman

2005-08-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I never read anything by Barbara Tuchman before this. Coming from a family of history majors who have all read all of her books many times over, it seems strange. I guess I was too busy reading Jane Austen! In any case, I am enjoying The Proud Tower. The first section, entitled "The Patricians", seemed like an extension of all the Victorian novels that I've read. The second section about anarchists set off many bells of recognition. Wasn't Henry James' novel, The Princess Casamassima, about anarchists?

"The End of the Dream" about the United States becoming an imperialist power shed a lot of light on the political situation at the end of the 19th century. Since I'm currently listening to Truman, there is some overlap. When Truman was young he heard William Jennings Bryan speak at the democratic convention, and he and his father were fervent Bryan supporters. I always remember my brother quoting Bryan's famous speech: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Stirring oratory, but who knows what he meant, something to do with silver, I think.

An interesting website

2005-08-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

I googled the Francis Bacon quote in my first post to see if I had the wording right, which as it turned out, I didn’t (I thought it was ‘speaking makes a ready man’ when it turns out to be ‘conference makes a ready man’). Anyway, as so often happens when googling around the Internet, I came across this strange and interesting site.

It seems to be about the craft of writing, written by famous writers and annotated by users of the site, I think. I haven’t had time to read through the site, but I’m intrigued by the idea.

Why blog?

2005-08-22T17:53:00.000-07:00

There are probably a lot of blogs out there about reading, so why add another one? I guess I like the idea of a semi-public forum in which to express my thoughts about what I am reading. While it is probable that no one will read this, there is the off chance that someone will, which adds a certain anxiety to the process. Effective writing can't occur in vacuum, so anxiety is important, like baking soda or yeast when baking, it adds a certain frisson. That's one reason to blog. I'm not sure why others blog. Another reason is a favorite quote of mine by Francis Bacon, "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man." If you think of reading as a vocation, then it seems important to have the discipline to write about what you are reading, to process it, and not just consume one book after another. Life has to be more than appetite.

So, to jump right in, here is what I am currently reading:

The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman
Herzog, by Saul Bellow
The New New Journalism, by Robert S. Boynton
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

Books on list to read next are:

Harry Potter VI, by J. K. Rowling
My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
The new Nevada Barr mystery (Hard Truth?)

I am listening to a book on tape as well, Truman, by David McCullough