A very long post about running, the soul and the life of learning

Things are likely to be pretty quiet round here for the next few weeks (intense pressures of work will not ease up until the last week of February), so I thought I’d post something I wrote in December in response to a request that I speak during the dinner for this year’s award recipients about a project I was able to pursue as a result of last year's Lenfest Teaching Award. This is a slightly modified version of what I said on that occasion.

I was on sabbatical last fall when I learned I’d been chosen as one of the first group of Lenfest Fellows, so I already had several major writing projects well underway, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the financial security the award represents gave me a kind of mental boost that helped my productivity. But I wanted to speak more directly to something that’s only obliquely related to my academic work, but that turns out to have enriched my teaching and research life in all sorts of ways.

The Lenfest Award led fairly directly by way of one thing and another to me falling absolutely in love with long-distance running, something that I feel has changed my life in the most unexpectedly positive ways, and so I thought I would reflect a bit on how that came about and what it means for my understanding of what I do when I teach or when I write—or, more generally, when I work with anybody who’s interested in subjecting themselves to the essentially transformative lifelong discipline that we call education.

We talk often these days about maintaining a suitable balance between work and life, but there’s no doubt it’s easier said than done when you’re an assistant professor on the tenure track at a place like Columbia. The particular application of the phrase “work-life balance” often comes in the context of family life—raising children, say—but as someone who doesn’t have a family and does have very strong workaholic tendencies, it has a much broader applicability also. Without a family there is virtually nothing to keep the work part of the equation in check!

We all talk about how we should find time for exercise, but it’s hard to make a commitment, and in short when I found myself last September on sabbatical and with real time to write and think and also free from substantive teaching- and service-related obligations I knew that this was the year to make exercise a priority also, and try to undo some of the damage of five years of sedentary nicotine- and caffeine-consuming five-hours-of-sleep-a-night-type tenure-track obsessiveness.

Now, for the natural athletes in this world, it may be the case that internal resources are enough to get you going and enjoying your exercise to the utmost. But for the rest of us, there’s no doubt that resources help. And that’s where the Lenfest Fellowship came in. When resources are tight, it’s hard to justify things like a non-Columbia gym membership, let alone a personal trainer. But what that money meant to me was that I could really throw resources at the problem of getting into shape. And after the initial horribleness of making the transition, I found myself greatly enjoying the project. And what I didn’t expect was how much the whole enterprise showed me—and continues to show me—about the work I do every day in the classroom.

Almost by definition, if we’re professors we were good students. Reading and writing and speaking articulately came easy to us. We enjoyed those activities, and we had the drive to work hard at them—we knew how to work hard at them—and we were rewarded for our exertions and talents in all sorts of gratifying ways that compounded our original commitment.

But there’s one downside to this when it comes to teaching. Of course at Columbia we’re extraordinarily lucky to have such talented students. But not all students find what they do in our classes coming easily. We have constantly to remind ourselves about the students who don’t feel comfortable in our classrooms.

To me, English literature is the most comfortable and easy thing in the world. Writing essays is my natural language. But what about the student for whom English isn’t a first language? What about the student who’s doing an engineering degree and has never read a novel from start to finish? What about the student who doesn’t really like reading, or who’s just plain old shy or awkward or less immediately talented in some way that makes him or her hang back, stay quiet when a question’s asked, avoid office hours for fear of embarrassment?

What about the student who doesn’t yet know enough to know what it means to work hard in that particular discipline?

I like to think that I think about these things all the time, but there’s no doubt the point hits home much more forcefully when you’re a teacher who yourself becomes a student at something you’re not much good at. I have benefited from a great deal of good teaching this year, from trainers and coaches and yoga teachers and so forth. But I also felt far more keenly than usual—more keenly than I ever could do in a college classroom—the small things that might put you off.

You’re the only person with two X chromosomes in the free-weight area at the gym, and the spray bottles for wiping off the machines are sitting on top of a paper towel dispenser that’s too high up for you to reach.

You’re at your first spinning class and the instructor doesn’t explain any of the terminology or tell you what to expect and it is frankly absolutely horrible!

You want to learn how to go for a long run outside but you’re not sure what the etiquette is for running in the park and the first person who brusquely tells you to get out of the way makes you feel like skulking home and never running again.

The feeling you get at those moments is a feeling that’s known to too many of our students in our classrooms. We have to exercise the kind of sympathetic imagination that lets us see when students are having that very unpleasant situation and make education hospitable to them, if I can use that word. Being a student of various fitness-related things this year, a student of a not particularly talented or experienced kind trying to learn things that were wholly new to me—not just individually new, like learning a new language, but structurally unfamiliar and daunting—trying to learn how to work hard at fitness in a way that didn’t come naturally to me—has been immensely valuable.

Now for the fun part, the part I didn’t expect.

I have always had a minor interest in the idea of long-distance running. I ran semi-regularly in my twenties, though never more than three or four miles at a time, but everyone I knew who actually ran seriously or raced was a simply excellent runner. In contrast, I felt myself to be the slowest runner in the world. Which is not a very enjoyable feeling—it is not particularly admirable, but we all like to do things that we’re good at.

However this time I was determined to become a better runner, and in aid of that goal I researched it on the internet (I am an academic in my soul) and found a place called the Running Center on Central Park West which actually offered a beginning running class that promised to take you up to the ten-mile distance. I took it, and it was absolutely wonderful—the coach was a really inspired teacher, someone who managed to break the whole thing down into manageable targets and told us all with great certainty, even when we didn’t believe it ourselves, that we could do the things she was about to ask us to do.

What is it about running? What I didn’t know before, but what’s made me realize it will be a very important part of the next stage of my life, is that running taps into exactly the same thing that at the base of it is what I love about teaching and learning and writing. What gets me up every day in the morning, what has motivated me through many years of education and what keeps me excited about many more years of teaching and thinking and writing to come, is a kind of inner feeling of yearning, a passionate desire for self-improvement that takes us beyond our comfort zone into new places and new things that challenge us. Without this kind of challenge, of stretching, of yearning, our lives are greatly impoverished.

Plato’s Symposium is very good on this, I’ve always laughed to myself when I’ve taught it in Literature Humanities thinking how apt a description Plato provides of this thing that makes life really interesting and enjoyable. It's the part where Alcibiades starts talking about the wholly unglamorous Socrates (I think that really every teacher secretly must want to be something like this): Alcibiades likens Socrates to the busts of Silenus, unattractive on the outside but with images of gods inside them. Socrates has a siren’s voice because of the feelings he induces in his students: “he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians,” says Alcibiades.

It’s hard to talk about the soul these days without feeling a little silly, but there’s a wonderful passage from the Greek physician Galen’s treatise on the soul that I want to quote here also, because it speaks more eloquently than I can as to what I’m trying to get across. This is Galen:

Becoming a perfect man is a goal which requires in each of us a discipline that will continue through practically the whole of his life. One should not put aside the possibility of improving oneself even at the age of fifty, if one is aware of some defect one’s soul has sustained, provided that defect is not incurable or irremediable. If one’s body were in a bad state at that age, one would not give oneself up to the bad condition; one would by all means attempt to improve it, even if one were not able to achieve a Heraclean sort of good condition. No more, then, should we refrain from efforts to achieve a better state of the soul. Even if that of the wise man is beyond us—though we should have a high hope of attaining even that state, if we have taken care of our soul from early youth—then at least we should exert ourselves that our soul be not utterly disgusting, as was Thersites’ body. . . . If one were unable to attain the most perfect good condition, one would surely accept the second, third, or fourth from the top. Such a goal is quite achievable for one who is prepared to exert himself over a long period in a process of constant discipline.

Discipline’s the secret, isn’t it? The authors of Freakonomics had an interesting piece in the Times Magazine this past spring about talent and why it’s overrated. They argued that expert performers are made rather than born and that just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true that practice makes perfect.

They also suggest that it’s important to follow a path that involves doing what you love “because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.” We might stop doing something because we’re not good at it, but what we really lack is the desire to be good and the understanding of what it will mean to work hard enough to get better.

And this is what happened to me with running. I started with baby steps, I found the teachers who would help me learn how to work hard, I worked steadily and without thinking too much about my lack of talent, and I discovered that I am in fact not the slowest runner in the world.

I ran my first half-marathon in November, and it was amazing.

[NB for reasons of tact I did not mention the stress fracture that has been making me absolutely crazy by preventing me from running since that day! Also anyone who saw me that day or any time in the week(s) following might observe that "painful" also seems an apt term. Just saying...]

And in 2007 I am hell-bent on running the full marathon, in New York if possible but somewhere else if not, because I know that training for the marathon and actually running it, with the confidence of some mix of nature and nurture but with the emphasis very much on the discipline of nurture and the help of good training and teachers, will let me understand more about this kind of yearning for self-improvement that seems to me so much a part of the educational enterprise. And for all of this I would have to say that I am extremely grateful.

A strange piece of advocacy

Clive James on Kingsley Amis at the TLS.

"Editors hate me"*

Ken Bruen's interviewed at Things I'd Rather Be Doing. (Thanks to Dave Lull for the link.)

*(I feel I have that Keats quotation floating about somewhere in my book manuscript, must keep an eye out during revisions...)

Humane and psychological

Radhika Jones has a very nice profile of my colleague Edward Mendelson in the latest issue of Bookforum (a periodical with which I am somewhat in love--how did I do without it until so recently?!?).

Puffin and whale and cormorant

I want to go to Iceland.

And this is the perfect opportunity to mention a demented CD that has arrived recently at my place, part of a belated northern-themed Christmas present from Nico: I haven't listened to it yet properly (as with many of the more interesting things I have round here it doesn't really seem suitable for listening to at the gym), but it's Jon Leifs's Hekla and other orchestral works (the Amazon reviews for that one are particularly delightful--a volcano is prominently involved, it's all very Icelandic). It was accompanied by Simon Boswell's The Seven Symphonies: A Finnish Murder Mystery, an extraordinarily strange book that combines a Smilla-type murder mystery set in Helsinski with a series of lectures about the life and achievements of Sibelius (here's the author's website for the book, which gives some of its unusual flavor).

I am entirely in thrall to the idea of the frozen north.

My longtime obsession is the Hans Christian Andersen story The Snow Queen, which provides both title and basic story-line for my sequel to Dynamite No. 1. I am annoyed to realize that I have made no further progress towards visiting an Ice Hotel!

(On a related note, I was reflecting recently--one of those weird nineteenth-century anthropological moments, I guess--on the fact that of all the places I've ever visited the one where I felt most genetically at home [i.e. not the place I loved the most or felt the most welcomed--that, I think, would have to be Moscow, thanks to the loveliness of my friend T.'s friends there] was Copenhagen, I felt in an appealing way as though I blended in on the street as coming from the same genetic stock. Is that weird? It's true, though, and it wasn't the case in Stockholm or Amsterdam either, though you might think it would be more or less the same thing.)

Solid pork

Some particularly appealing sentences in Jim Harrison's NYTBR piece on Karl Shapiro and bourgeois poets (I have mixed feelings about this mode, but you can pull it off if the dandyish apercus are good enough):

. . . Shapiro’s notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire. I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork.

Or this:

Perhaps as a corrective and a cautionary, “The Bourgeois Poet” should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.’s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating. Besides, academic salaries are falling behind and it’s become questionable if poet-professors have truly achieved bourgeois status. Maybe lumpen bourgeois.

J. M. Coetzee on Norman Mailer's Hitler

at the New York Review of Books (no subscription required). Here are his conclusions:

The lesson that Adolf Eichmann teaches, wrote Hannah Arendt at the conclusion of Eichmann in Jerusalem, is of "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" (Arendt's italics). Since 1963, when she penned it, the formula "the banality of evil" has acquired a life of its own; today it has the kind of clichéd currency that "great criminal" had in Dostoevsky's day.

Mailer has repeatedly in the past voiced his suspicion of this formula. As a secular liberal, says Mailer, Arendt is blind to the power of evil in the universe. "To assume...that evil itself is banal strikes me as exhibiting a prodigious poverty of imagination." "If Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic"—worse in the sense that there is no struggle between good and evil and therefore no meaning to existence.

It is not too much to say that Mailer's quarrel with Arendt is a running subtext to The Castle in the Forest. But does he do justice to her? In 1946 Arendt had an exchange of letters with Karl Jaspers sparked by his use of the word "criminal" to characterize Nazi policies. Arendt disagreed. In comparison with mere criminal guilt, she wrote to him, the guilt of Hitler and his associates "oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems."

Jaspers defended himself: if one claims that Hitler was more than a criminal, he said, one risks ascribing to him the very "satanic greatness" he aspired to. Arendt took his criticism to heart. When she came to write the Eichmann book, she endeavored to keep alive the paradox that though the actions of Hitler and his associates may defy our understanding, there was no depth of thought behind their conception, no grandeur of intention. Eichmann, a humanly uninteresting man, a bureaucrat through and through, never realized in any philosophically full sense of the word what he was doing; the same might be said, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of the gang.

To take the phrase "the banality of evil" to epitomize Arendt's verdict on the misdeeds of Nazism, as Mailer seems to do, thus misses the complexity of the thinking behind it: what is peculiar to the everyday banality of a bureaucratically administered, industrially organized policy of wholesale extermination is that it is also "word-and-thought-defying," beyond our power to understand or to describe.

Before the magnitude of the death, suffering, and destruction for which the historical Adolf Hitler was responsible, the human understanding recoils in bewilderment. In a different way, our understanding may recoil when Mailer tells us that Hitler was responsible for the Third Reich only in a mediate sense—that ultimate responsibility lay with an invisible being known as the Devil or the Maestro. The problem here is the nature of the explanation we are being offered: "The Devil made him do it" appeals not to the understanding, only to a certain kind of faith. If one takes seriously Mailer's reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents—that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches—then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.

Blessedly, The Castle in the Forest does not demand to be read at face value. Beneath the surface, Mailer can be seen to be struggling with the same paradox as Arendt. By invoking the supernatural, he may seem to assert that the forces animating Adolf Hitler were more than merely criminal; yet the young Adolf he brings to life on these pages is not satanic, not even demonic, simply a nasty piece of work. Keeping the paradox infernal–banalalive in all its anguishing inscrutability may be the ultimate achievement of this very considerable contribution to historical fiction.

A news update

This Times-Picayune article about what happened earlier this month to my friends Paul Gailiunas and Helen Hill had me absolutely foaming at the mouth with rage (I think it's going to be a long time before I can read a crime novel, by the way, without holding it to a very high standard in terms of its representation of the sheer awfulness for family members of dealing with police and journalists following a high-profile violent crime).

Today the paper printed a plea from Paul asking readers in New Orleans for two things:

First, please, if you have any knowledge of the person who killed my wife, please come forward and speak. Please be brave and tell the police or Crimestoppers what you know.

Help bring this villain to justice for filling my wife's final moments with terror and for taking her away from her baby and her family and friends.

He must not be allowed to hurt more people and destroy more lives. Please be brave and speak.

Second, please do everything you can to heal your desperately broken city.

Helen herself was an innocent victim. But her murder, like so many others, is a symptom of a sickness, a terrible sickness caused by grinding poverty, hopelessness, bad parenting, a lack of respect for human life, pre- and post-hurricane neglect and persistent racism against African-American people.

I am begging you to reach out to your neighbors, across the borders of race and class, and help them when they need you. Don't stand by while people hurt each other.

There has been an outcry against violence in New Orleans since Helen's death. Please do not stop until things improve. I am begging you to find a way to get people out of those hellish trailer parks, which are cauldrons for the kind of violence that destroyed our happiness. The people living there need decent, well-maintained, affordable housing and it needs to happen now.

No one is going to fix New Orleans for you. You need to do it yourselves. Please do these things now, for yourselves and for my poor, sweet wife. I know this is what she would want.

The pleasures of collaboration

At the Guardian, A. L. Kennedy contemplates the Ballads of the Book project.

I have only read one book of Kennedy's, but I thought it was a work of utter genius, that woman's got one of the best prose styles going.

Check it out (these paragraphs introduce my favorite sequence in the entire novel):

You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools--which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women's magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it--there is no point to you.

At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because--after all--what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.

At the moment, though, there's nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I'm forced to admit I've been driven to make the drinker's most conventional mistake. I've started working in a bar.

On August Wilson

An appealing-sounding event at Columbia at 6:30 on Monday, January 29, 2007: "Staged Rhythms: The Musicality of August Wilson." Got to see if I can make room for that one...

(Related: John Heilpern's passionate praise of Wilson's art at the New York Observer. Classic sentence: "I prefer Wilson’s people to Mr. Stoppard’s yammering, privileged intellectuals." I haven't seen the Coast of Utopia trilogy, so I can't speak to that directly, also I don't see why we can't have both; but Wilson's plays really are quite extraordinary, and oh! someone who wants to buy me a very expensive present has a good obvious choice now--unless it's possible that someone will send me a review copy...).

Journalism as mission

Victoria Brittain on Ryszard Kapusczinski at the Guardian. I've only read a few of his books, but he really was one of those heroic journalists whose work makes you ashamed of yourself for sitting comfortably at home...

Barmecide feasts

At the TLS, Robert Irwin has a great piece about a cluster of books relating to food and Islam:

“On days when my lord growth listless, what does he need? Rahadlakum.” When, in the 1955 film version of Kismet, Dolores Gray, as Lalume, the wife of the wicked vizier, sings about her power to soothe her frustrated and restless husband by offering him rahadlakum (“His handmaiden hath what he lacketh”), many in the audience must have understood her to be singing in scarcely veiled terms about sex. So it is a bit of a comedown when one realizes that rahahdlakum (or, more correctly, rahat lokum) is merely the Turkish for Turkish delight, for this is the kind of exotic confection that drives her husband “out of his Mesopotamian mind”.

The novelist C. S. Lewis (who went on to pillory Islam in The Horse and His Boy) had already conferred notoriety on Turkish delight, in the first of the Narnia novels, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950): “The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now”. For the promise of a room full of this alien fare, Edmund betrays the Faun, his sisters and his brother to the White Witch who calls herself the Queen of Narnia. Since sweet rationing in Britain was only to be abolished in February 1953, the novel’s first readers must have found the seductions of Turkish delight all the stronger and Edmund’s fall into temptation the more comprehensible. Subsequently the confection gained yet more réclame thanks to a series of television advertisements for Fry’s Turkish Delight in the 1980s. The slow and sensuous awakening of a beautiful, diaphanously clad young woman was followed by the entry of a handsome Bedouin into the tent. A scimitar flashed down, but the lady’s head stayed on her shoulders, as it was the chocolate-coated bar of Turkish delight that was the scimitar’s target. “Full of Eastern Promise” was the slogan of this orientalist cameo.

I try and resist the urge

to post about all sorts of animal-related curiosities, it is not really interesting for most people to read, but there is a rather entrancing Associated Press story at the NYT this morning about the virgin birth of five Komodo dragons at an English zoo:

In an evolutionary twist, the newborns' eight-year-old mother Flora shocked staff at Chester Zoo in northern England when she became pregnant without ever having a male partner or even being exposed to the opposite sex.

''Flora is oblivious to the excitement she has caused but we are delighted to say she is now a mum and dad,'' said a delighted Kevin Buley, the zoo's curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates.

The shells began cracking last week, after an eight-month gestation period, which culminated with the arrival on Tuesday of the fifth black and yellow colored dragon.

The dragons are between 15.5 and 17.5 inches and weigh between 3.5 and 5.3 ounces, said Buley, who leads the zoo's expert care team.

And here is a very adorable picture...

A five-pound presentation haggis

Burns Night is hard upon us....

It's not available online

but Michael Specter has a brilliantly good article in this week's New Yorker, "Kremlin, Inc." Just get hold of an issue and read it (the cover date is Jan. 29, 2007), it will make you want to weep at the fate of journalism in Moscow and yet it is also a mysteriously uplifting read because of the sheer clarity and force of the narrative:

"The majority of the population, they are absolutely happy," Alexei Volin, who served for three years as deputy chief of staff in Putin's government and now runs a hgihly successful publishing house, said when we met in Moscow. "They get more money. Consumption has increased two and a half times int he last six years. People are buying cars, country houses, they are going to big shopping malls--as big as those in the United States." Volin, a trim, clean-cut, forty-three-year-old man dressed in a white button-down shirt and khaki Dockers, smiled. "They are just as happy as they can be," he said. "They don't have a headache because of some political problem or the concentration of power. They don't watch TV news. They don't care.

"There is another group," he went on. "They are unhappy, because political life has been frozen. They don't like the situation with Russian television or the press. Several months ago, I talked to one important Kremlin person and I asked him why is our TV news so awful and dull. And his answer was 'Why are you watching TV? People like you should go read the Internet if you want information. TV is not for you. It's for the people.'"

In this context, freedom of the press doesn't matter much and, increasingly in Russia, doesn't exist.

On rereading

One of the great comforts in life is rereading novels. In a comments thread on a blog I often read (I haven't been able to find the discussion again just now, but it was very interesting) it seemed to emerge recently that there's a relatively small canon of novels with a particularly high rereadability quotient--for me these would include young-adult fantasies (Diana Wynne Jones, Garth Nix, Philip Pullman), a certain kind of crime fiction (Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dick Francis, Lee Child), that rather sedate mid-20th-century British romantic suspense (Mary Stewart, Joan Aiken), Georgette Heyer of course, more recent discoveries like Eva Ibbotson--you name it. (Also Dickens and Austen and Trollope, those are three of my three great ritual rereads; also... but there's no point giving a huge long list.)

Books that are rereadable in this kind of way are not of course infinitely rereadable; each rereading leaches them of some of their meaning, and in the end there's a sickening familiarity that makes them altogether unreadable for some time. (If you're lucky, they then become rereadable again--I hit that point with Pride and Prejudice, a book I must have read between thirty and forty times between the age of eight or so and now; one year I was teaching it in two different classes during the same week, and also giving a lecture on it for the course instructors, and I really grew disgusted! However when I read it again the next year, as always I found things I could not remember ever having noticed before & was struck anew by its technical brilliance.)

What's striking, though, is that new books can strike you immediately with their rereadability before you've even finished reading them for the first time: it's a mark of a certain kind of favorite book. (Other kinds of favorite book do not prompt such avid rereading, especially if there is nothing comforting about them.)

Anyway this is the long way round of mentioning that the last few weeks have been an insane and distracted hodgepodge of light reading. First I reread Susan Howatch's The Wonder Worker (UK title: A Question of Integrity) and The High Flyer--I love these books, but I've already read them too many times, I want her to write a new one! (Brief quotation from the Amazon review of The Wonder Worker: "Though [Howatch] has often been compared to Anthony Trollope, one astute reviewer has termed her 'the love child of Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch.' Other writers might approach her talent, but few would dare follow up a scene in which Nicholas hypnotizes his wife into sex with an even more exciting one in which he is called to order by his spiritual adviser, a nun!" Irresistible, eh?!?)

(Somewhere in there I also read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, enjoyable YA vampire fiction.)

Then I read two books that were new to me but had the immediately appealing patina of rereadability about them: Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword. Quite delightful--there's something Georgette Heyerish about them (as there is about Sherwood Smith's novels also) and yet they are strikingly original too, especially in the narrative voice of the first one--Kushner does something jumping-about-ish with point-of-view that makes me slightly crazy and yet the books are absolutely great.

And through it all I was rereading in small chunks a favorite book by a favorite writer that I must also have read many many times before, Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine. I love this book, and I also love the way she weaves in these bits and pieces from Plato and Thucydides and stuff that made those guys seem totally familiar to me when I first read them as a Young Person (I don't think I've reread this since teaching the Literature Humanities course here, and it was very enjoyable to see more clearly where she'd borrowed the bits from).

This is a ludicrous but true admission. Poppy Z. Brite recently had an aside in her blog where she said the following: "I don't believe in reincarnation per se [. . .] but if I did, the East End of Victorian London is one of the three places I'd expect to have lived. As long as I can remember I've had a compelling image in my mind of a single cobblestoned streetcorner somewhere near Tower Bridge (though I didn't know where it was for a long time and don't think Tower Bridge would have been built yet), lit by a single gaslamp late at night, dreadful yet somehow alluring. The other lives I'd expect to find I'd had are in a temple in South India and in one of those villages with the round thatch-roofed huts in sub-Saharan Africa, landscapes that have always felt intensely familiar to me despite my never having laid eyes on them."

I don't believe in reincarnation either, and obviously it's totally sketchy to fantasize about having been, you know, an Egyptian princess or whatever (it has been often observed how infrequently people remember past lives as wretched peasants), but if I had a past life that I could choose for myself as suitable I would be a teenage boy from a good Athenian family in the time just before the Peloponnesian War, a student of Socrates and a contemporary of Plato....

The claims of the person

From D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003):

Of that godlike authority which we think of as the default mode of narration in the traditional novel, Jane Austen may well be the only English example. Whether our standard is Fielding in the eighteenth century, or Thackeray in the nineteenth, the omniscient narrator's divinity proves constantly betrayed by his human verisimilitude, the all-too-familiar "character" with which he can't help tending to coincide. Pronounced with the thick accent of the sociolect that immediately sits him down on one or another chair of distinctly institutional, unmistakably male authority, his omniscience seems hardly more than a poetically licensed exaggeration of the kinds of empowered knowledge that are already possessed, already displayed and exercised, by various men in the nonfictional world: a learned magistrate, say, or a gossipy clubman. Far from enacting a fantasy of divine authority, the noisy personalities of Fielding and Thackeray relentlessly humanize that authority, never let us forget its earthly origins as a glamorization of some garden-variety male know-it-all. Even George Eliot, when not occupied with simulating such a figure, ventriloquizes the well-remembered voice of that all-knowing, all-understanding, and all-forgiving woman to whom--uniquely--everyone has been accustomed to submit: the mother. These canonical examples of omniscient narration are only canonical in that they represent the Feuerbachian tendency everywhere present in it to bring the gods down to earth. By contrast, Austen's divinity is free of all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of power/knowledge in the world under narration. It does not carry on either from the authority of the commanding, intelligent, but hardly style-conscious hero, or from that of the elegant, witty heroine, with a mind "darkened, yet fancying itself light." However doubtful it must be that Jane Austen is a writer for all time--who could ever prove this?--she always writes like a real god, without anthropomorphism. Nowhere else in nineteenth-century English narration have the claims of the "person," its ideology, been more completely denied.

Memory played me false!

It is a well-known fact, of course, that memory is highly unreliable, and yet I am still struck with horror when it happens!

As I wrote about Helen Hill the other week, I considered all sorts of details for their accuracy--was the little dress the cat wore really blue and white with yellow flowers, or am I conflating it with something else? was that visit during the fall of 2003 or the spring of 2004?--but ended up with a WILD MISREPRESENTATION OF ART HISTORY in my parenthetical aside about Dollar-A-Pound!

The true originator of the project described there, evil genius/eminence grise Elijah Aron, has kindly provided me (in response to my desperate request) with the text for a lovely correction; I've appended it to the original entry and given it here also for your enjoyment and edification.

(Also I am making a resolution to do more art of a non-writing kind, I forgot how things used to be when I was a Young Person!)

Here's Elijah, in any case:

Very well, Jenny, my old friend,

As I recall, Helen, Paul, some other friends and I were at Dollar-a-Pound when we found about 12 white jumpsuits. We washed them and then I (Elijah!) came up with the idea to spraypaint numbers on the back of the suits and have 12 people wear the suits for an entire week. It was an experimental art piece.

The only important rule was that you couldn't take off the numbered suits except in private (people were allowed to go to the restroom and shower, contrary to some rumors).

David Gammons (I still called him Avatar at the time) was enthusiastic about the project. He never claimed credit but a lot of people thought he was responsible since he was always doing crazy art pieces and was far more popular than me.

The only other people I definitely remember donning the suits were Thomas Lauderdale, Arik Grier and Victor Ortiz de Montellano. Our best friend at the time, Jane Yeh, refused to wear a white suit as she was dedicated to a personal fashion philosophy that involved only wearing bright colors.

I chose to spray paint the number one on my suit, thinking it would clearly delegate me as the leader. But I let the other participants choose whichever number they wanted. Three choices I recall were 0, 13, and the infiinity symbol.

Some of the white suit wearers gave up after a day or two. I can't remember who, but I consider those people to be small-minded conformist cowards. But most people managed to wear the suit the entire week.

People who didn't know each other previously felt an intense bond with their fellow white-suit wearers. At least one Harvard sociology class discussed the project while it was happening. In Adams House, a lot of people felt jealous and excluded from the white suit brigade. Most of the rest of the campus just thought we were weird nerds.

So there you go--thank you, Elijah, and if anyone has any further recollections regarding suit-wearers, numbers, etc. please leave details in the comments.

NB on an only obliquely related note, I have this perverse fondness for the production design of dystopian movies, though I believe we are generally supposed to find such visions off-putting--really it seems to me that a navy blue jumpsuit and combat boots is basically the ideal outfit--I would like it if life involved this kind of a uniform--in fact I am also herewith making a resolution that I will try and find a really good jumpsuit that is utilitarian-looking enough to suit my esthetic but fashionable enough to be worn in a wide range of settings without making me look like I should be sweeping up leaves on the sidewalk--the only risk would be that if I found a really good one I would become psychologically incapable of wearing anything else!

An ice-cream war

William Boyd at the Sunday Times on Edward Paice's history of the Great War in Africa:

In the winter and spring of 1980-81 I was living in Oxford, busy writing and researching my second novel, An Ice-Cream War, which had as its setting the first world war in East Africa, or, more precisely, the long inter-colonial conflict between British East Africa (today’s Kenya) and German East Africa (Tanzania). How I would have welcomed Edward Paice’s superb history of that strange and calamitous war. Sidelined by the greater carnage and momentous events of the European theatre, the war in Africa had produced few definitive books. There were a couple of popular histories, the odd novel, long out of print, but I remember searching the catalogues of the Bodleian library and Rhodes House for anything that would throw real light on the campaign. Even the multi-volumed official history of the great war Great Warwas deficient. Of the two volumes meant to be devoted to the African campaign only one had been published, its author dying before volume two could be completed.

Really I have no bohemian tendencies

and I like a nice quiet life in an apartment building where the super will come and fix anything that goes wrong with the plumbing on a moment's notice--I am against drugs and free love!--but Allen Salkin has an awfully appealing profile of R. Crumb and his wife Ms. Crumb in the Times and it is hard not to fantasize momentarily about Crumb-style life in a medieval castle in the south of France...

The alive form of physical intelligence

At the FT, Toby Moore attractively reviews two appealing-sounding books on physical culture, Marcus Trower's The Last Wrestlers and Wayne McLennan's Tent Boxing. Go and take a look, here's how it starts out and there's some bizarre stuff about wrestling and semen later on too:

My grandmother developed a passion for wrestling late in life, an odd counterpoint to a world where even the library books came by post from Harrods. Every Saturday she settled delicately in front of the television with her small, spoilt lap dog, to watch portly men with names such as Giant Haystacks preen in leotards and grapple in violent intimacy. She winced and oohed as bodies slammed on to the floor. But mainly she laughed, because the fights were a rare combination of absurdity and ferocity, even to a fan in her eighties.

A bending-forward position like a monkey

Wild girl found in Cambodian jungle.

(Thanks to A. for the link. Also, here's that feral children website again for those who missed it the first time round...)

Puppetry

It's been a bit of a light-reading hodgepodge round here, about which more shortly (the perversity of human nature also means that this first week of the new semester, just when I need to bend my thoughts to course packs and library reserve lists and dissertations and such, is also the first week I've really found my head in the breeding book--I must just maintain double or perhaps triple consciousness and keep on doing everything at once--the third strand is for more light reading of course), but last night I saw a decent puppet performance that made a change of pace at least: Famous Puppet Death Scenes at the Public Theatre.

I had unrealistically high hopes for it, parts were very good but the whole thing was marred by whimsy, a sort of knowing archness that would have spoiled considerably funnier jokes than these ones actually were. (I wish people would realize that genuinely demented and delightful art is not likely to be coy and/or self-conscious. Lots of audience members were laughing preemptively with that sort of smug self-satisfaction that's involved in being in on the joke, this always makes me feel very stony-faced and annoyed....)

The aesthetic was somewhat reminiscent of Shockheaded Peter, which I liked very much but which for me really worked because of the excellence of the Tiger Lillies' music (and also of the source material--those stories are genuinely uncanny--the production itself might otherwise have toppled over the edge into archness); the best parts in this case were the meta-puppetry ones, very good use of a huge box disguised as a book in which you move closer in (sort of powers-of-ten style) to an American Gothic-y house in which some kind of violence is happening, and also a great vignette near the end in which we are disconcerted to realize that we're seeing the puppet from above.

I spent most of the duration, though, sitting & thinking obsessively about the massive expertise and craft and above all time that goes into making something like this, and wondering whether it is at all possible that I could make a Helen Hill-inspired short animated film. (One of my students the other day was just encouraging me--as per conversation about stress fractures and obsessive athletic activity--to take up a lower-impact hobby that involved neither reading nor writing nor injury-producing physical activities--she recommended knitting--she quite rightly did not think triathlon training or blogging fit the bill--making a camera-less animated film by hand might be suitable, though...) I think it is too much of a leap from my existing skill set; when your talent and expertise prods you to make things out of sentences and paragraphs it would be awfully frustrating to go back to square one and have to learn how to draw a stick figure, and yet I see that you might get considerable freshness from tackling a new medium.

More to the point, I started mulling over some puppet-related possibilities for the live theater thing that I've been contemplating for some time, which is to say a beautiful & mysterious adaptation of The Bacchae that would really be about the same things my new novel's about, namely the struggle between reason and the emotions.

At any rate it was a stimulating hour of thinking with occasional delightful moments of puppet-watching and afterwards we had a rather sublime meal at Indochine, all the food is delicious but they have an absolutely sublime fresh raspberry tart, I remembered it from the last time I ate there a few years ago and it was just as good this time round.

Old books

Anthony Grafton at the New Republic on an exhibition of bibles from before the year 1000 (via the Powell's blog).

Here is the gallery link (it's the Sackler, in Washington), but I am sorry to see it's already over. (Isn't there something magical about the word scriptorium?) Might be worth getting the catalog/book, though...

I am making a resolution (related to a conjectural new project) to learn much, much more about the history of reading, especially from the quite early days of reading and writing. But I'd also like to see more artists' books and such, they're something that appeals to me greatly but they're often hived away in rare book collections where you have to known in advance what you're looking for. The Yale Center for British Art has some extraordinary ones: doesn't this list make you drool?

The postwar establishment

Self-confessed "le Carré bore" Christopher Tayler offers a perceptive critique of the le Carre style at the London Review of Books:

Prep and public schools are always suspect places in le Carré, but his early thrillers wouldn’t be so good if their intelligence agencies didn’t also have a romantic, vaguely upper-crust ideal to fall short of. The Circus, as Smiley’s service is known, might be shabbily unscrupulous, vulnerable to moles, short of funds, and riddled with time-servers and self-promoters. But it still has living memories of such glamorous figures as Steed-Asprey and ‘Fielding, the French medievalist from Cambridge’ – representatives of an incorruptible officer class whose prewar exploits are only ever hinted at. Tinker Tailor says a sentimental farewell to that class while frostily exposing its last-ditch pretensions in the person of a disappointed romantic imperialist who’s revealed to be the hollowest man of all. The fading of the early 1960s establishment, with its obsessive class gradations and competitively worn college ties, probably had a more deleterious effect on le Carré’s writing than the end of the Cold War. The novels after Tinker Tailor often seem more interested in the social comedy of the emerging post-gentlemanly dispensation than the construction of neatly engineered plots. We start hearing more – more than we need to – about dislikeable characters’ ‘violence with auxiliary verbs’. And le Carré shows that he can write brilliant dialogue for the likes of Toby Esterhase, a Hungarian-born surveillance man with an ingratiating manner and a shaky grasp of English idiom, which is fun for a while, but only for a while.

A lot of his writing since the mid-1970s is overripe. Phrases he’s especially pleased with – ‘the permanent night-time of his elected trade’, for example – have a way of getting repeated and recast (‘the remaining disparate articles of her uncertain faith’). There are too many adverbs, too many jaunty nicknames, too many characters given to aphoristic witticisms. And when he wants to conceal what someone’s up to or inject ambiguity he adopts a style that soon grates:

There remains the mystery of the telephone transcripts. Did Jerry ring Lizzie from the Constellation, or not? And if he did ring her, did he mean to talk to her, or only to listen to her voice? And if he intended to talk to her, then what did he propose to say? Or was the very act of making the phone call – like the act of booking airline passages in Saigon – in itself sufficient catharsis to hold him back from the reality?

What is certain is that nobody – neither Smiley nor Connie nor anyone else who read the crucial transcripts – can be seriously accused of failing in their duty, for the entry was at best ambivalent.

This passage from The Honourable Schoolboy isn’t much more comprehensible in context, though the effect being aimed at is indicated when Jerry is shown reading Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The Little Drummer Girl (1983) features an Israeli operative called Kurtz whose actions are similarly shrouded in uncertainty: ‘At what stage in the chase he had hit upon his plan,’ we’re told, ‘probably not even Kurtz himself could have said.’ In these cases, the grace notes being struck or plot points being fudged don’t mitigate the ostentatious skirting of unspeakable mysteries. And even when there are sound plot-mechanical reasons for limiting the narrator’s knowledge, le Carré often overdoes the inventing of different points of view. Leamas’s stage-managed ejection from the Circus in The Spy who Came in from the Cold is dealt with in ten deft paragraphs – most of them told from his colleagues’ generalised viewpoint, with a few comments from Elsie in Accounts. The Honourable Schoolboy, on the other hand, summons a cast of office cranks just to decide where the story should begin: ‘One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that . . . To less flowery minds, the true genesis was . . .’ And so on.

Demolition file

Gavin Stamp has a quite delightful piece in this week's TLS about Ian Gow's Scotland's Lost Houses, which sounds to me like a total must-read (here's the Amazon link--expensive but surely it's worth it, I have just ordered a copy for a person I know who is its perfect target audience):

I have only once witnessed the sudden destruction of a building. This was in 1993 when Glasgow decided to remove some of the catastrophically flawed public-housing blocks in the rebuilt Gorbals, by means of high explosives. Tower blocks in the East End of London had already been blown up, to the delight of local residents and television companies; now it was Glasgow’s turn. Typically, the Council had chosen to destroy with fanfare the only such structures in the city which were of any conceivable architectural merit: the powerfully monumental Brutalist slabs forming Queen Elizabeth Square in Hutchesontown designed by the firm of Sir Basil Spence (a Scot) in 1960. A public spectacle was organized, rather like a public hanging, and down they came in a series of controlled explosions. Unfortunately, the blasts were less controlled than intended and a woman spectator was killed by flying masonry. Glasgow then decided to conduct future demolitions more discreetly.

The question must arise as to whether the Scots take a peculiar delight in blowing up buildings, in addition to simply demolishing them. That, at least, was the conclusion reached by Marcus Binney, John Harris and Emma Winnington when they compiled the report on the Lost Houses of Scotland produced by SAVE Britain’s Heritage in 1980. “Scotland seems to have specialised in dynamiting its houses. Scottish sappers and lairds delighted in making a thunderous bang.” This publication was a sequel to the momentous Destruction of the Country House exhibition mounted at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974 by Roy Strong, Binney and Harris, for it had revealed how very many houses had been destroyed in Scotland – a much higher proportion in relation to their number than in England. Over 400 substantial country houses had disappeared since 1900; a few had perished through accidental fire, but most had been deliberately destroyed.

An appealing phrase

(sometimes a strange sequence of words just catches your eye) in this week's NYT Dining section article about the thus-far inadequate food at Starbucks: "[A]ccording to Tom Miner, 'The food has to be fast, it has to be handheld, and No. 1 across the board is egg and cheese on a bread carrier.'"

Egg and cheese on a bread carrier!

(What I like: the way that the emphasis on the first syllable of carrier is just a little bit different than if you had the word carrier by itself or the more conventional "bread carrier" as in a person or vehicle who carries bread--"bread CARRier" rather than "BREAD carrier.")

What I'm looking forward to

This Friday at 7pm at the Whitney Museum (scroll down), the Composers' Showcase features a full program of Nico Muhly's music (here are details, and here's the link for Nico's album Speaks Volumes).

On pug dogs and Harlequin Danes

From Maupertuis's Venus Physique (1745):

Nature holds the source of all these varieties, but chance or art sets them going. So that people whose work is to satisfy the tastes of curiosity seekers become practically creators of new species. We find new breeds of dogs, pigeons, canaries appearing on the market, though they did not exist in nature. At first they were individual freaks, but art and repeated generations turned them into new species. The famed Lyonnés creates each year a new variety and destroys the ones no longer in style. He corrects the shapes and varies the colors to the point of inventing species, such as the Harlequin Dane and the Mopse [Pug dog].

Why is this art restricted to animals? Why don’t the bored Sultans in their seraglios, filled with women of all known races, have them bear new species? Were I reduced, as they are, to the only pleasure that form and features can give, I would soon have recourse to greater varieties. But, however beautiful the women born for them might be, they would know only the smallest share of love’s pleasures as long as they remained ignorant of the pleasures of the mind and the heart.

Although we do not find among ourselves the creation of such new types of beauty, only too often so we see human beings who are of the same category for men of science, namely, the cross-eyed, the lame, the gouty, and the tubercular. Unfortunately, in order to fix their strain there is no need of a long series of generations. But wise Nature, because of the disgust she has inspired for these defects, has not desired that they be continued. Consequently beauty is more apt to be hereditary. The slim waist and the leg that we admire are the achievements of many generations which have applied themselves to form them.

A Northern king was able to elevate and beautify his nation. His taste for men of height and fine faces was excessive and he induced them to come to his kingdom by various means. Fortune came to men whom Nature had made tall. Today we now see a singular example of the power of kings. This nation is distinguished for its tall men and regular features. So it is with a forest whose trees dominate all the neighboring woods, if the attentive eye of the master forester takes care to cultivate only trees that are straight and well chosen. (II.iii)

Two-legged telephones

From Roger Luckhurst's excellent book The invention of telepathy, 1870-1901 (2002):

The connections between scientific and occult inter-phenomena sometimes make demarcations difficult. Heinrich Hertz's experiments with 'spark-gaps' in 1889, his detection of 'sympathetic' sparks produced at a distance in secondary circuits, produced a succession of new inter-phenomena in the 1890s. Wireless telegraphy and X-rays astonished and bewildered many. When the leading British experimenter in wireless telegraphy came to the Royal Institution to honour and remember Hertz, he traced the route from Hertz's spark-gap to Guglielmo Marconi's ongoing trials with 'wireless' technology from ship to shore in the English Channel. This lecture began with the sympathetic vibrations of tuning forks, and demonstrated how a discharge of electricity in one circuit could produce a spark at a distance in a secondary circuit, provided they were in sympathy or 'syntony'. The lecturer was Oliver Lodge, a physicicist present at early thought-reading experiments in Liverpool in 1884, and who had proposed in the pages of the PSPR that 'just as the energy of an electric charge, though apparently on the conductor, is not on the conductor, but in all the space around it . . . so it may be that the sensory consciousness of a person, though apparently located in the brain, may also be conceived of as also existing like a faint echo in space, or in other brains'. Telepathy had been coined by Frederic Myers and syntony by Arthur Myers, Frederic's brother.

Roentgen's demonstration of X-rays in 1898 could also be traced back to foundational experiments on anomalous inter-phenomena investigated in vacuum tubes by William Crookes. In 1879, Crookes rehabilitated himself with his lecture 'On Radiant Matter' to the British Association. It was termed 'exquisite' and 'unique' by Nature, and was reprinted in full. Crookes's lecture was replete with evidence of some form of contact made between distant electrical poles in high vacua, whether demonstrated by producing a vividly phosphorescing diamond, by a paddle-wheel being pushed along a track, or by forming shadows by interrupting the path of phosphorescing radiant matter. These ingenious apparatuses rendered visible what Crookes called 'matter in a fourth state of condition'. 'In studying this fourth state of matter,' he suggested, 'we seem at length to have within our grasp and obedient to our control the little invisible particles which with good warrant are supposed to constitute the physical basis of our universe.' His speech steered close to his previous enquiries into psychic force and his vacuum tubes mischievously abutted onto the same terrain: 'We have actually touched the bornerland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between the Known and the Unknown which for me has always had peculiar temptations.' Crookes was wrong about the nature of the particles at work; J. J. Thomson's work at the Cavendish laboratory later reconceived these inter-phenomena as streams of electron particles. Yet Thomson, too, became involved with his Cambridge colleagues in psychical research, insisting in his memoirs in the 1930s that 'the investigation of short-range thought transference is of the highest importance' and that such experiments would support the view of his colleague Lord Rayleigh that 'telepathy with the dead would present apparently little difficulty when it is admitted as regards the living'.

Truth in advertising

See William T. Vollman's devastating NYT review of Anthony Swofford's new novel for some interesting material (this isn't his main point at all, but it's related) on authenticity in fiction versus memoir. It is my opinion that some writers just do better with one than the other--I heard an interesting observation once, for instance, by someone who'd been in a writing group with Mary Karr when she was first working on the book that became The Liars' Club, that the book only started to work--that the language only came alive--when she stopped thinking of it as a novel and began to consider it a memoir instead. In other words, there's no reason "authenticity" (authenticity the aesthetic effect of language, not authenticity in the sense of "actual" truthfulness) should be available to every writer in every genre--for some writers, it comes much more easily in one than another (you might even think, say, of the poet who writes essays whose language rings false or in some other respect lack that quality of truthfulness found in his/her best poems).

(Thanks to Ed for the link.)

F****** middlebrow

At the Sunday Times, Rod Liddle rants appealingly against much contemporary literary fiction.

The life of a professional novelist

Neil Norman profiles William Boyd at the Independent. (I am not sure this is the piece to win over the Boyd hold-out, it is rather adulatory in a fairly funny way, but Boyd's fiction really is absolutely excellent.)

Reading/disordered

Simon Garfield has an interesting piece at the Observer Magazine on dyslexia and its treatment (here's a longish chunk from the middle):

The classic symptoms - difficulty in reading, writing or spelling among those who otherwise possess an average or high level of intelligence - naturally led educators to believe it was solely a linguistic problem, and there was no reason to search for automatic correlation with impairments in the brain. The phonological theory, which states that reading problems are due to children not detecting the correct sound of written letters and words, is still pre-eminent, but the refinement of brain-scanning techniques and genetics has established beyond doubt that there are often significant differences in the brain between those who are dyslexic and those who are not. The core of John Stein's research has been devoted to showing what causes these differences, and in so doing suggest potential advances in early diagnosis and treatment.

Some of this research is at a primitive level due to limited funds, and cohort studies are small. Stein's clinic has had good results with the use of coloured lenses in reading glasses (about a third of the 500 children assessed by the DRT each year show improvements with blue or yellow lenses), and an increased intake of fish oils rich in omega-3 benefits another third (possibly because omega-3s can improve the function of the magnocellular systems in the brain that help to stabilise visual perception).

Some of the research being done at Oxford is backed up by large international studies in Europe and the United States, particularly the genetic work. It is now accepted that over half of the differences in children's reading is due to genetic factors inherited from their parents. Inevitably, the hunt is on for the specific gene that may identify this predisposition, and Stein's colleagues have identified a gene on chromosome 6, known as KIAA0319, a key factor in the way the brain develops. When this gene is removed in mice, cell growth in the brain is reduced; a similar, though milder, deficit is visible in dyslexic brains post-mortem.

More news

The latest news story on what happened to Paul and Helen last week. I am just so sad not just for Paul and Francis Pop and all Helen's family but for everyone who's lost someone to violence in New Orleans in the past few weeks and beyond; meanwhile, here's where you can go to donate money for Dinerral Shavers' family and funeral expenses care of the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund.

Meat in dough

Colson Whitehead's featured in the latest "New York Diet" column at New York Magazine. And I see that he and Kevin Young are reading at the Strand from 7 to 8:30pm on Thursday, January 18--hmmm, maybe I should try and get to that one...

(What I really went to the NY Mag site for was to read this article about getting a dog in New York, I think I am really on the verge of doing it only not until the summer. It would be sensible to get a small dog that I could carry in a bag, but I think I would do better with a medium-sized mutt that might like to go for longish runs. I can see that really all this is going to end in me finally being forced to get a driver's license, which will be for the greater good of my maturity and usefulness in the world--when you find yourself bemoaning the anti-dog policies of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit and wondering how much a livery-car driver would charge to drive you and a dog round-trip to Philadelphia for the holidays, you know that things have tipped over the edge into compete insanity/eccentricity...)

(UPDATED: And I am also going to get a bicycle. So that I can train for triathlons...)

On reading

An appealing piece about novel-writing by Zadie Smith at the Guardian. Here's the part I liked the most:

It's my experience that when a writer meets other writers and the conversation turns to the fault lines of their various prose styles, then you hear a slightly different language than the critic's language. Writers do not say, "My research wasn't sufficiently thorough" or "I thought Casablanca was in Tunisia" or "I seem to reify the idea of femininity" - at least, they don't consider problems like these to be central. They are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves. Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers, like Clive, to grasp at first. A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere - for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the "soul" would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator. That's why, in the public imagination, the confession "I did not tell the truth" signifies failure when James Frey says it, and means nothing at all if John Updike says it. I think that fiction writers know different. Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.

It would be comforting as well as efficient if time spent improving the self could conceivably have some payoff down the road in the fiction, eh? I find in particular as a reader that my doubts about a particular writer's style (his/her sentences, say) can rarely be expressed in strictly aesthetic terms, it always shades into questions of character--it is good to see Zadie Smith saying that so clearly here.

Cintra Wilson

has an excitingly demented blog. (Thanks to Phil for the link.)

Here's me raving in October 2005 about why Cintra Wilson's a genius, and here's the Amazon link for Colors Insulting to Nature, which must be one of the couple funniest books I've ever read. Good stuff....

Squalid Danish

I've just read the best thing about language/writing that I've seen for ages. Go and take a look, even if you're not interested in cooking: the FT reprints Elizabeth David's critique c. 1964 of the early supper menu's at London club Annabel's. If I were teaching a writing class, I would totally assign this as inspiration for workshop critiques:

The first course dishes should be set out with the utmost precision and clarity. This must be the most orderly and organised section of the menu. Oysters, caviar, smoked salmon, smoked eel, smoked trout and sardines should come first. (Couldn’t they be called French sardines? Vintage sardines sounds awfully affected.) Then charcuterie such as foie gras, rillettes, pâté if any, Parma, Bayonne or San Daniele ham, smoked turkey, Salame. Why don’t you have a dish of three or four kinds of Italian salame? No single restaurant in the whole of England offers a choice of authentic salame. Never anything but that dreary mass-produced Milanese or squalid Danish. But there are good salame imported. They must be freshly sliced, brought to table on a dish and left on it, not on the customer’s plate. Then cooked or raw vegetable hors-d’oeuvre, ie asparagus, celéri-rave rémoulade, broccoli, artichoke vinaigrette. Then eggs in jelly, egg mayonnaise, langoustines mayonnaise, potted shrimps. Then avocado and melon. No need to go on about the melon or what kind it is. It should be understood that Annabel’s provides the best of what’s going.

On climate

At the TLS, interesting pieces on climate science by Richard Hamblyn and John North. (I must read that Homo Britannicus book of Chris Stringer's; it doesn't seem to be out yet in the US, but I bet I can get it from the library.)

Also a great essay by Stephen Romer on perfume, both the novel/movie adaptation and the thing itself (mmm, I did not know that French word "sillage" before, how excellent).

Pewter versus platinum

Geoffrey H. Goodwin interviews Nick Mamatas at Bookslut and it's a good one (I must get a copy of his new novel Under My Roof). Here's what he had to say about editing Clarkesworld, a new online science-fiction magazine (well, he had a story of mine in there so I may be biased):

The main issue is that with Clarkesworld I want language and voice to be important, and 90% of the writers who submit their work to me have absolutely no interest in language and voice. Imagine running a factory and soliciting bids to create some necessary widget that must be made out of platinum, and getting twenty proposals a day for pewter widgets. No matter how slowly or carefully I say "plat-i-num," most of what I get involves someone holding up their story and saying, as
slowly, but surely not as carefully "Peeeeew-tuuuur." Then some small fraction gets huffy. Everyone wants pewter widgets, dammit. In fact, pewter is so popular that cultural alchemy takes place and it becomes platinum.

Timor mortis

William Boyd praised lavishly at the Guardian.

Coincidentally I just finished Restless this afternoon, and I have to say that I absolutely loved it: it's an extremely satisfying and fast-paced read, yet morally thought-provoking also. One of those good ones that gives me that itchy yearning feeling of wanting to write a new novel myself, in fact I found myself thinking almost constantly at the back of my head (even though I was also quite mesmerized) I must write a novel like this one.

A few observations:

1. Boyd has an excellent style, but it's unobtrusive enough that certain of his books can pass for transparent/simplemindedly thrillerish. (Personally I think this is a good thing, I just don't want the actual goodness of the writing to go uncredited. It doesn't just magically come out this way, you have to know how to do it.)

2. I can't remember now exactly how I came to fall in love with Boyd's writing, but I think the first book of his I read must have been Armadillo. I was completely smitten with it (in fact I must reread it to see if I still think it's pretty much the perfect novel...), went and read most of his others; and Brazzaville Beach in my opinion really is the perfect novel, I don't need to reread it to say so either. (Come to think of it, I just feel like I'm on the same psychic wavelength as this guy. Chimpanzees! Insomnia! Hmmm....)

3. It's for good reason that spies are such a perennial topic for literature. Comes back to old questions about personality and character and deceitfulness; they're, like, the limit case for the ways that we keep parts of ourselves secret even from those we know best. I think John Banville has not written a better novel than The Untouchable, for instance.

4. What I most appreciate about Boyd, perhaps, is that he's one of a quite short list of male writers who seem to me to write female characters that think the way that I do. Of course this makes me say "he writes female characters so well!" but perhaps all I'm really making is a more modest assertion that the female narrators/point-of-view characters remind me of aspects of myself--important aspects--that I do not seem to see particularly often in novels about women by men or women. The interior life of the female protagonists in chick-lit-type novels seems to me unbearably impoverished. Crime novels are better because the "what happened, and what shall I do about it?" motive (which tends to drive the actions of a main character in this kind of fiction regardless of sex) seems to me more pressing as an analogy for the kind of thinking we do about things in our ordinary lives; and of course I've got a huge soft spot for fantasy novels, it may be a bit silly that it's always a high-stakes battle of good versus evil & the fate of the world but the idea, for instance, that the hero(ine)'s training should take up many chapters of the book makes for more appealing stuff than the conventional marriage plot is likely to do in this day and age.

5. I associate Boyd in this respect (of writing female characters in whom I see myself) with only a handful of other writers: Peter Dickinson (especially The Lively Dead, which is an astonishingly good novel & should be much better known than it is);* the Iain Banks of Whit or The Business, perhaps the protagonist of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. (I often like the lead female characters in cyberpunk, but it would have to be said that in some cases their sex is virtually irrelevant as part of a larger syndrome of undercharacterization, it is agreeably egalitarian to make some of your interesting under-characterized intellectual mouthpieces female though...)

6. Boyd has something in common with those writers of an older generation who I grew up reading & who I still love though often with more complicated feelings: V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux (well, he's not so much older), Anthony Burgess. There's something backward-looking about Boyd's cast of thought, particularly vis-a-vis the choices he makes about how to depict non-English places: his imagination is postcolonial but with emphasis on the -colonial part rather than primarily the post-. And yet there's also something so fresh and clear about the way he thinks about things, it's more tempting to ally him with the Banks-Gibson kind of stuff than with, let's say, the authors of avowedly historical fiction. He writes novels about the past as though they're science fiction, that's what I like. Strange, interesting.

7. Finally, a passage that caught my attention, in part for the obvious reasons but in part just because I think it's so well-written (the setting's Oxford, mid-1970s):

Some students, wearing gowns and carrying champagne bottles, burst out of University College, singing a song with a nonsensical refrain. They capered off down the street, whooping and laughing. Exams over, I thought, term nearly finished and a hot summer of freedom ahead. Suddenly I felt ridiculously old, remembering my own post-exam euphoria and celebrations--an aeon ago, it seemed--and the thought depressed me for the usual reasons. When I took my final exams and celebrated their conclusion my father had been alive; he died three days before I had my results--and so he never learned that his daughter had got a first. As I made for my car, I found myself thinking about him in that last month of his life, that summer--six years ago, already. He had looked well, my unchanging Dad, he wasn't unwell, he wasn't old, but in those final weeks of his life he had started behaving oddly. One afternoon he dug up a whole row of new potatoes, five yards' worth, tens and tens of pounds. Why did you do that, Sean? I remember my mother asking. I just wanted to see if they were ready, he said. Then he cut down and burned on a bonfire a ten-foot lime sapling he'd planted the year before. Why, Dad? I just couldn't bear the thought of it growing, was his simple, baffling reply. Most strange, though, was a compulsion he developed in what was to be his last week on earth, for switching out electric lights in the house. He would patrol the rooms, upstairs and down, looking for a burning light bulb and extinguish it. I'd leave the library to make a cup of tea and come back to find it in darkness. I caught him waiting to slip into rooms we were about to vacate, poised to make sure the lights went off within seconds of their being no longer required. It began to drive me and my mother mad. I remember shouting at him once: what the hell's going on? And he replied with unusual meekness--it just seems a terrible waste, Ruth, an awful waste of precious electricity.

I now think he knew that he was soon going to die but the message had somehow become scrambled or unintelligible to him. We are animals, after all, and I believe our old animal instincts lurk deep inside us. Animals seem to be able to read the signals--perhaps our big, super-intelligent brains can't bear to decipher them. I'm sure now my father's body was somehow subtly alerting him to the impending shutdown, the final systems malfunction, but he was confused. Two days after I had shouted at him about the lights he collapsed and died in the garden after lunch. He was deadheading roses--nothing strenuous--and died immediately, we were informed, a fact that consoled me, but I still hated to dwell on his few, bewildered, frightened weeks of timor mortis.

*Re: The Lively Dead, I can't resist the temptation to quote the sole review of this book on Amazon, it is pricelessly good & distinctly apt & will I hope prompt one or two of you to get hold of the novel itself: "I love Peter Dickinson novels. He writes extremely well, sort of extremely good in a very subtle way, & you keep wanting to read more of him. This is a really nice one about a semi-Marxist landlord/housewife/carpenter with a pre-school age child, and a Baltic government-in-exile renting out the top floor of her house. One of her other tenants keels over and dies, a hot dude comes to work for the government, everybody follows each other, & the main character and her husband (who is recovering from depression/a nervous breakdown) have lovely cozy moments. I wish I had a nice relationship like that with someone."

If you have ever

attended the MLA, and in particular if you have ever interviewed for a job at the MLA, I strongly recommend that you go and read what Geoffrey Chaucer & co. have to say on the matter.

Yesterday

in the New York Times: a terribly moving piece by Billy Sothern in remembrance of Helen Hill and in mourning for New Orleans.

Helen's funeral yesterday in South Carolina was uplifting but so sad I was really almost undone by it. I remember this feeling (I know it's apples and oranges, I am not saying anything else is the same...) from the days and weeks following September 11, 2001, a kind of distraction and sorrow and sickness at heart that makes it difficult to do much else.

I barely made it to the airport on time on Tuesday morning--I expect I come across here as rather scatter-brained, but in fact I am usually very well-organized and in particular compulsively punctual, I always get to the airport two hours before the flight's due to leave, I'm not even exaggerating (I know it's mildly neurotic). I vacillated on bus versus taxi (I always take a taxi to LaGuardia, but a bus seemed more in the spirit of the occasion), left it a bit late for the bus and resolved on the taxi but then the bus was right there at 116th St. as I crossed over Broadway for an uptown taxi. So I hopped on, then started digging around in my wallet for my Metrocard. A block later I suddenly realized with a sinking feeling that I had left both the Metrocard and my only credit card in the pocket of the jacket I'd worn to the deep-water running class the night before (not sensible to leave your whole wallet in a strange locker-room, you know?).

The bus driver could presumably see I was in a complete state, asked me where I was going and when I said it was the airport and helplessly waved around a handful of useless dollars he amazingly, benevolently, told me to sit down and relax and not worry about the fare.

As the bus turned east onto 125th St., though, I realized that not only did I have no credit card & barely enough time to get to the airport for check-in, I had also left my cellphone plugged into the charger in the wall....

One of the best things (there were a lot of best things, including the time to talk with dear friends about serious things) in South Carolina was the screening of some of Helen's films earlier in the day before the funeral. I've seen a number of them before, but only on video transfer; it was quite extraordinary to see these magical and haunting shorts in that magical actual space of a real movie theater where the lights go down as the projector starts running and the clattery slightly shaky image comes up on the screen. I see movies so infrequently that I forget the strange alchemy of film, but Helen's work was very much about the actual chemicals and materials of old-school film-making and the work had a remarkably forceful effect under these technical circumstances.

There is almost certainly going to be another screening in New York, perhaps sometime in February; I'll post details here when they are available, but everyone should come and see these, not just Helen's friends and fans, they are quite extraordinary ("Mouseholes" in particular--but they are all amazing).

The anthropology of human skin

Claudia Dreyfus interviews Nina Jablonski at the New York Times. It seems a silly thing to say, but she sounds very nice as well as interesting, the personality's coming across very appealingly here...

New Orleans and related matters

At the memorial website for Helen Hill there's now a link to the Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres website, where you can make donations in Helen's memory. (Just fill in her name, and the family will be notified--I think the address in this case is not needed.)

Sara Gran has very kindly provided a short list of arts-related New Orleans organizations that I feel sure Helen would also have liked the thought of people giving to:

The Neighborhood Story Project (which is pretty much what it sounds, it's a great thing--I know a bit about them already because they also work with Soft Skull)

The Tipitina's Foundation (rebuilding the music culture of New Orleans post-Katrina, including the purchase of new instruments for musicians who lost their possessions)

The Backstreet Cultural Museum (preserving New Orleans culture and especially African-American culture in New Orleans – Mardi Gras Indians, Jazz Funerals and Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs - and oh, how strongly that makes me think of Helen - I so vividly remember a particular prize possession of hers on that last visit I paid in 2003, it was one of the much-sought-after Zulu coconuts which had come almost miraculously to Helen during Mardi Gras, placed directly into her hands by someone on the parade float who must have been taken with her bright eager face)

The Ashe Cultural Arts Center (committed to arts and community development in Central City New Orleans)

Last but not least, Ken Foster and others are spearheading a massive anti-violence rally that will take place this Thursday in New Orleans. Check back at this site for details the night before, but here are the essentials:

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

11:00am - Meet at the World Trade Center
11:30am - March begins
12:00 Noon - Rally at City Hall

A separate group will meet up at 10:30 near Paul and Helen's old house on Cleveland Avenue and then walk to join the others at City Hall.

Anyone is welcome to leave further suggestions in the comments about practical ways to remember Helen and help the city she loved.

Swan terrine

Some news stories are simply too bizarre and funny to be believed. This one at the Scotsman comes by way ofNico:

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, was cautioned over the discovery of the remains of a protected species at his house in Orkney.

He said the bird died after hitting a power line. When police called at his home he offered them swan terrine.

Police would not comment but confirmed that a protected bird has been removed from a property in Sanday.

Northern Constabulary said their enquiries were continuing.

Sir Peter said he did not believe he had done anything wrong but, given his position with the Queen, he was prepared to spend time in the Tower of London.

Swans are protected under UK legislation.

However, in the islands a Norse right called Udal Law is still assumed to hold sway, possibly making swans the property of the people.

And there's more (it is like something out of a novel by Margery Allingham or Peter Dickinson)...

A demented corgi

The proprietor of The Dizzies recognized the names in one of my earlier posts as having appeared in the poem "Teen Spies" from our dear friend Jane Yeh's wonderful book Marabou.

Without further ado, I give you Jane Yeh's "Teen Spies":

Elijah, Helen, Paul, and me
Clocked the cat by the bikesheds. 1.43. Kept an eye
Peeled for falsies. Hid in the bushes from Aunt Kay.
Made a dead letter drop and drank Russian tea.

I'm the smallest; Elijah is our control.
Our mission? That's undercover for now. We can't tell
How this enigma will unfold, but we're so full
Of energy we can't come down.

We've got our own lingo and wear special suits--
Study the codebook, radio for supplies,
Draw our cryptic pictures, stay up all night.
We kill time waiting for our lives to start

With log notes: Saw a demented corgi piss
On someone's shoe. Shadowed DF back
To his flat. Observed a parrot sat
On someone's head. I am past

seventeen and have never been kissed.

Something to do

Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray has posted an extremely helpful thing at the Voices of New Orleans blog (the relevant information can be found at either of those links, and I'll paste it in below also):

This is an American city that is dying - the same city we watched in shocked horror and swore to save not even two years ago. If you are anywhere close to New Orleans then join in the march [on Thursday] and for those of you, like me, who are too distant to march then a virtual march is in order. We will fill the fax machines of Mayor Nagin, Gov. Blanco and the leaders of the Congressional Committees dedicated to overseeing the New Orleans rebuild with our thoughts on this senseless and preventable violence. We will tell them all enough is enough. We will tell them it is not about New Orleans anymore, it is about America, it is about Americans.

We will tell them they shouldn't worry about tourism because we won't be going to New Orleans for fun. We will tell them it about making New Orleans a safe and viable and working urban space that welcomes residents and visitors with ease. We will tell them this is a test of what America stands for that is just as important as Iraq or North Korea or Iran.

What is happening in New Orleans everyday is killing Americans, if that is not as significant as terrorist threats, then we are seriously distracted by international affairs to the detriment of domestic concerns. It is not about competition with foreign threats, it is about acknowledgement of what is happening here, on American soil.

We all have a stake in New Orleans and it is way past time that we acknowledge that responsibility.

Emails will not work for any of these folks, not for those of us outside of their districts, anyway. (Tricky isn't it - they block you if you aren't from their voting area.) But if hundreds, dare I say thousands of faxes arrive in various offices then maybe we will still be heard. Just send a note (the same to all of them to save time) and let our leaders know that as an American you will not tolerate the continued violence in New Orleans and you demand action on every level of the government to fix this problem. That means more competent police, more assistance to the courts, and more help in the schools to provide programs to curb juvenile violence.

It's twenty minutes out of your day and you can do this - we can all do this. Just be sure to include your full name and address in the letter - that way our congressmen and senators know you are a real voting member of American society and they can't dismiss you - they can not ignore you. Here are the fax numbers:

Louisiana Gov Kathleen Blanco: 225-342-7099

Rep. James Oberstar, Chairman, House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure: 218-727-8270
Rep. John Mica, ranking Republican, House Comm on Transpo and Infra: 202-226-0821

Sen Daniel Inouye, Chairman Sen Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation: 202-224-6747
Sen Ted Stevens, ranking Republican, Sen Comm on Commerce, Sci & Transpo: 202-224-2354

These are the Congressmen & Senators who have been holding hearings for New Orleans - they are the right ones to let know how you feel. Tell them you support the Thursday march on City Hall, and tell them you are angry. Tell them we are all angry and we aren't going to go away.

I'll be back with contact info for the City of New Orleans - so far no luck finding a fax number for city hall. If someone can help with that, send me an email at colleenatchasingraydotcom.

For Helen Hill

Helen Hill chose to be good.

Helen was good naturally also, being good came easily to her as a matter of temperament, but it would be a mistake to think that Helen lived the life she did because she was just made that way. It was a choice. That amazing childlike innocence that she and Paul have practiced all these years has to be considered very much as a practice—like any other form of self-discipline worth striving for.

Helen knew as much or more as anybody else about the darker sides of human nature. Rather than despairing in the face of evil, though, or of compromising her own virtue in the way that most of us do as we let right things and wrong things intermingle in our lives and actions, she found a way of living well that spoke quietly and strongly against evil in all its forms.

My favorite memory of Helen: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993-94. My beloved cat Blackie: still rather kittenish and hyperactive, but considerably smaller than he is these days. Paul and Helen were in town for a visit, one important component of which was the ritual trip to the thrift-store shopping experience known simply as Dollar-a-Pound.

(I am a great hater of shopping and also not a natural early riser, so I never went with any of my dear friends to Dollar-a-Pound early on Saturday mornings, but I remember some of the prizes they brought back, and a number of those memories involve Helen also: do you remember, for instance, the time that Dave Gammons found a whole set of weird white jump-suits, the kind of thing you picture the nuclear power-plant clean-up workers wearing in a postapocalyptic landscape, and got everyone to wear them for days? And Paul and Helen and Elijah were of course exactly who you’d enlist for a cheerful and demented performance-art-leaning project of that sort.)* [IMPORTANT CORRECTION APPENDED!]

In any case Paul and Helen brought back a great haul of stuff to our Inman Street apartment, and Helen with the gleeful and mischievous look that I have seen many a time rummaged around in the bag of clothes and took out a pretty little blue-and-white-with-yellow-flowers dress, the kind of thing that you snap on down the front of your little baby girl once you’ve squeezed her arms into the sleeves. She hauled up poor unsuspecting Blackie and deftly tucked his little arms into the sleeves and snapped the dress up around him and I really cannot even tell you how awful and funny it was watching the poor little guy run around the room in this adorable little dress. Of course she only let it happen for a minute, then she rescued him from his awful plight; and I will sound heartless when I say that it was one of the funniest and most delightful things I have ever seen. I can picture right now that look of mischief on Helen’s face as she set the whole thing into motion.

I read a lot of books—I love books more than almost anything else in the world—but once or twice a year among those many hundreds of books I read something that strikes me dumb with amazement and awe. The philosopher John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man is one of those books. It’s a history of the idea that human beings can be perfected, a chronicle of perfectibility’s vicissitudes from the ancient world to the present.

One version of that idea is the thing called the Pelagian heresy, the assertion (contra Augustine, who believed that man could be redeemed only by God’s grace) that man could perfect himself by the exercise of free will. A less attractive version would be the idea of genetic perfectibility, which came to be very strongly associated with eugenics and Nazi ideology; another morally loathsome idea of perfectibility is associated with the large-scale social reengineering projects of Stalinism or the Cultural Revolution.

Across all critiques of perfectibility runs the idea that perfectibilism is itself inherently dehumanizing: that to become perfect we would have to cease to be human. Yet this is Passmore’s conclusion:

In spite of these reflections, which might lead us to reject perfectibilism in any of its forms, it is very hard to shake off the feeling that man is capable of becoming something much superior to what he now is. This feeling, if it is interpreted in the manner of the more commonsensical Enlighteners, is not in itself irrational. There is certainly no guarantee that men will ever be any better than they now are; their future is not, as it were, underwritten by Nature. Nor is there any device, whether skilful government, or education, which is certain to ensure the improvement of man’s condition. To that extent the hopes of the developmentalists or the governmentalists or the educators must certainly be abandoned. There is not the slightest ground for believing, either, with the anarchist, that if only the State could be destroyed and men could start afresh, all would be well. But we know from our own experience, as teachers or parents, that individual human beings can come to be better than they once were, given care, and that wholly to despair of a child or a pupil is to abdicate what is one’s proper responsibility. We know, too, that in the past men have made advances, in science, in art, in affection. Men, almost certainly, are capable of more than they have ever so far achieved. But what they achieve, or so I have suggested, will be a consequence of their remaining anxious, passionate, discontented human beings.

I like this passage partly because I hear a very human doubt in that qualification “almost certainly”: “Men, almost certainly, are capable of more than they have ever so far achieved.” We wouldn’t be sensible if we didn’t doubt it at least a little bit, at least sometimes (and perhaps particularly at a time like this). But when I think of Helen I think of someone who believed in the idea that individual human beings can come to be better than they were before, and that it’s our proper responsibility to care for those around us (not just children) in a kind of husbandry that means cultivating even the smallest and frailest germs of goodness.

*The historical record has been corrected by Elijah Aron:

As I recall, Helen, Paul, some other friends and I were at Dollar-a-Pound when we found about 12 white jumpsuits. We washed them and then I (Elijah!) came up with the idea to spraypaint numbers on the back of the suits and have 12 people wear the suits for an entire week. It was an experimental art piece.

The only important rule was that you couldn't take off the numbered suits except in private (people were allowed to go to the restroom and shower, contrary to some rumors).

David Gammons (I still called him Avatar at the time) was enthusiastic about the project. He never claimed credit but a lot of people thought he was responsible since he was always doing crazy art pieces and was far more popular than me.

The only other people I definitely remember donning the suits were Thomas Lauderdale, Arik Grier and Victor Ortiz de Montellano. Our best friend at the time, Jane Yeh, refused to wear a white suit as she was dedicated to a personal fashion philosophy that involved only wearing bright colors.

I chose to spray paint the number one on my suit, thinking it would clearly delegate me as the leader. But I let the other participants choose whichever number they wanted. Three choices I recall were 0, 13, and the infiinity symbol.

Some of the white suit wearers gave up after a day or two. I can't remember who, but I consider those people to be small-minded conformist cowards. But most people managed to wear the suit the entire week.

People who didn't know each other previously felt an intense bond with their fellow white-suit wearers. At least one Harvard sociology class discussed the project while it was happening. In Adams House, a lot of people felt jealous and excluded from the white suit brigade. Most of the rest of the campus just thought we were weird nerds.

This is why

(can you tell I'm totally scatter-brained today?) I ended up with a stress fracture. (Needless to say, I am not Lance Armstrong, but the fundamental combination of a new addiction to long-distance running, a very strong drive to succeed and a high pain threshold sounds familiar; my skeletal system was lagging behind my aerobic conditioning and my muscles, how maddeningly annoying--I've got a doctor's appointment at the end of the week, but I think that all common sense is telling me I must wait some weeks more before starting to run again at all, which is very disheartening.)

Another post

for Helen.

The best thing I have read

about Paul and Helen.

Another article

at the Times-Picayune about Paul and Helen. I'll have more information soon about making donations in Helen's memory to Doctors Without Borders; that will be up on the website also.

A disturbing trend

in book reviewing: the aggressive proclamation of the reviewer's boredom/ignorance in the opening paragraph. I don't really hold it against the individual reviewer, it is sometimes very difficult to come up with the right hook and you take what you can get (one of the reasons blogging is more fun than book reviewing is that you can just plunge in medias res and make your point or two without worrying about the formalities), but surely there is something deeply anti-intellectual about this particular opening move.

Here's Allan Sloan at the NYTBR on P. J. O'Rourke's new book about The Wealth of Nations:

Before we had radio, telephones, television, the Internet and iPods, we had books. Long books. Complicated books. Books that got read, their length and complexity notwithstanding, because before talk shows and chat rooms, what else was there to do?

Back then, people like Adam Smith wrote long, long, long volumes like “The Wealth of Nations,” which revolutionized economic thought and theory when it was published in 1776. Smith’s treatise, as transformational in its own way as the American Revolution, established the intellectual foundation of capitalism, free markets and individual choice, which are taken as givens in American life the same way that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are.

Today, however, almost no one other than the obsessed (or the assigned) is likely to read Smith’s book, which runs more than 900 pages; the author’s convoluted prose makes it seem even longer than that.

Well, of course I'm totally taking offense at that, I have read The Wealth of Nations several times through (and will read it several times more I hope before life is altogether and conclusively over) and it's pretty much a great read and also the prose is NOT CONVOLUTED, there is good reason for Smith having been considered one of the most masterful stylists of his day. Seriously, I promise you, I know I am fanatical about the eighteenth century but Adam Smith is a great read; and is this shtick really necessary, anyway?

I don't think it would have struck me so strongly if I hadn't then gone on to read Paul Gray's piece on Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games":

This immense, demanding novel can be recommended, with scarcely a cavil, to well-educated Indians who have lots of free time, are fluent in (at the very least) English and Hindi, and have a thorough knowledge of South Asian politics; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious practices; and the stars and story lines of hundreds of Bollywood films. Longtime Bombay residents will have an extra advantage, since they will know, without consulting a gazeteer or Google, why the city is now called Mumbai. Prospective readers who don’t fit this profile will have some catching up to do.

Fortunately, “Sacred Games” supplies the uninitiated with enough information to prevent them from giving up in despair — although not, it must be mentioned, with much solicitude for slow learners. If Vikram Chandra were a swimming instructor, he’d be one of those no-nonsense types who toss pupils into the deep end of the pool and then walk away, confident that immersion and panic will provide sufficient motivation for staying afloat.

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words(“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication. A “selective glossary” appears at the back of the book, but consulting it is more troublesome than simply forging ahead. Context and repetition can work wonders, though, and those who persevere will discover that what one character describes as “some knocked-together mixture, some Bombay blend” of English and Hindi, begins to make sense — especially the naughty bits — in the same way that Anthony Burgess’s futurist Russian-English in “A Clockwork Orange” eventually becomes comfortably ho-hum.

Come on! First of all, by what stretch of the imagination can anything about the experience of the idiolect Burgess produced in that novel be called "comfortably ho-hum"? And do we really feel that novels should only tell us about things we know already? On this count, there would be no point reading War and Peace or Bleak House or any of the other big novels that are not just "classic" in some abstract-timeless-value sense but are also among the most entertaining and satisfying reads of all time. Every great novel makes its own language and asks us to enter into an imaginative compact during the time we spend reading in which we stretch and expand our own sense of what's possible; a gesture like this seems to me in that sense morally as well as aesthetically inadequate.

There's a hint of defensiveness in both cases about the reviewer's own intellectual engagements. I would rather see the reviewer worry less about a conjectural reader's interaction with the book and think more about his/her own engagement with it. If you're reviewing books in the first place, you should be beyond worrying about whether people think you're a nerd, but insofar as you do care what people think of you you are surely better off throwing yourself into things and being passionate than being all, like, "Oh, I am too cool to read Adam Smith."

(Nobody is too cool to read Adam Smith. Adam Smith is cool!)

On a ridiculously tangential/associative note (I have noticed before that I am excessively literal-minded and often more or less hostile to metaphor), I had a swimming lesson myself yesterday, it was very good. Other small consolations of the last few days: blogging (obviously--whistling in the dark in the purest possible form); yoga (first time I have been able to do it since the wretched MRI, I'm not clearing myself for running till I'm a whole stage further better than this but getting back to yoga in moderation will be a great relief); a very good production of The Yeoman of the Guard last night; an absurdly delicious helping of baklava ice-cream served in a brandy-snap cup.

Especially during the first act, I was mesmerized by the strangeness of the whole Gilbert and Sullivan phenomenon. It is really almost science-fictional, like something from the kind of science fiction that's closely allied to anthropology: can it really have come about (how contingent, how frail these cultural developments seem) that a hundred years later fanatical devotees gather to celebrate a bizarrely English and seemingly completely outmoded form of light opera in an outmoded kind of performance space all over the world?

But of course the quality of the material is exceptionally high, and you can also distinctly feel the continuities of a certain kind of English humor, it runs from my eighteenth-century guys (Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith) down to Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson and so forth. The whole thing is immensely soothing.

I also found myself wondering about why a certain kind of comedy seems to thrive disproportionately on collaboration: I love the novels of Neil Gaiman and I love the novels of Terry Pratchett, but I also think that their collaboration Good Omens is pretty much one of the funniest and most altogether delightful books I have ever read, bearing the stamp of both authors but somehow moving up to an even higher plane of genius....

(I need a sabbatical so that I can have more time to make good things--teaching is a different kind of good-thing-making, I find it enriching but also very tiring, the writing kind of making things leaves me bizarrely invigorated in a way I have really missed this fall--thinking about my dear lost friend Helen over the last few days has reminded me how strongly she believed in the value of creative work, and the goodness of made things whether they are vegan biscuits or zines or hand-made animated films or whatever.)

Voice recognition

Richard Powers at the NYTBR on having dictated his last half a million words to a computer while lying in bed. An interesting and thought-provoking piece, go and take a look. Here's my favorite paragraph:

Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page. “From your lips to God’s ears,” goes the old Yiddish wish. The writer, by contrast, tries to read God’s lips and pass along the words, via some crazed game of Telephone, to a further listener. And for that, no interface will ever be clean or invisible enough for us to get the passage right. As Bede says of Caedmon, scrambling to transcribe the angelic hymn dictated to him in a dream: “This is the sense, but not the words themselves as he sang them in his sleep; for however well composed, verses cannot be translated out of one language into another without much loss of beauty and loftiness.”

I like the idea of working only in bed (in fact I do mostly work in bed, isn't that awful?!?) but I am wedded to a method that involves writing everything out first in longhand from start to finish without skipping around; there are other things I like about it, including the fact of its being a longstanding and productive habit, but the thing I like most is the effect I believe (hope?) it gives to the final product of a kind of sweeping start-to-finish arc, like a lecture or a sermon with a really clear spoken shape that has to be take-in-able through the ear.

After a rave review in the NYT Circuits section this summer of a new voice recognition program called Dragon Naturally Speaking, I bought a copy in the hope that it would streamline various things: transferring the handwritten drafts to the computer, for instance (though I am a very fast--fast but inaccurate--typist so this is strictly speaking more useful because it's less stressful/tiring rather than because it's actually more convenient), but also for things like comments on dissertation chapters or reader's reports on manuscripts or whatever.

I do think the software's amazing. Example: I spent only about 10 minutes training it, and then it asked for permission to read through all the word-processing files on my computer. I gave it permission. Then I started dictating from the draft pages of the last chapter of my academic book, which includes a bunch of stuff about Gulliver's Travels. And so there I was reading away, and I came to the word Houyhnhnms and I could not believe it, the word just popped up there on the screen in a perfect transcription. So you can see it is well worth getting (the wonders of the modern age!)--in the end I don't think it's so good for transcribing academic writing, there are simply too many quotations with unorthodox capitalization and spelling in the stuff I write and it makes more sense to get it right the first time and with the use of the eye, but I think it will be very useful for the more you-think-it-and-it's-just-a-nuisance-to-write-it-down kind of writing. (My paper comments are notoriously illegible, I always have to meet in person and go through page by page, so I must get more systematically on the Dragon Naturally Speaking thing when I'm giving suggestions for revision.)

On false notes

James Fenton at the Guardian on the relationship between writing and personal experience:

"I read your poem," said a friend some years ago, pausing before adding solicitously: "Are you all right?" The answer is almost always in my view "Yes". However depressing the content of the poem, if you've managed to write one, and get it published, then you are going to be in a good mood (at the very least about that one important thing). So it is that a last line, expressing the deepest spirit of depression, may be written in a mood of complete professional elation.

What's going on is a simultaneous introspection (supposing the poem to be based on one's own, as opposed to someone else's, feelings) and purposeful tinkering. If the feeling described is one of depression, it cannot logically be experienced to the point of paralysis in the act of composition. There must be some kind of excitement of the faculties, some spirit egging us on, saying "That's good! ... No, that's not it ... That's got it precisely."

This must be the case even for a writer like Paul Celan, in those moments when he is putting the words down on paper. It must have been the case (to take another suicide) for Sylvia Plath when she was writing "Daddy" - indeed, you may feel that you can hear that triumph in the poem itself. It carries its own sense of an extraordinary feat pulled off - a sense that perhaps runs counter to the ostensible meaning of the poem.

That seems to me extraordinarily apt--"complete professional elation"--one of the strongest feelings known to mankind....

A memorial website

for Helen.

UPDATED: A number of us are going to gather on Sunday afternoon to mourn Helen and also to celebrate her most wonderful qualities (all Helen's qualities were wonderful); if you're a friend of Paul and Helen's and New York-based and would like to join us, please e-mail me at jmd204 at columbia dot edu and I'll send further details.

UPDATED: There are a number of news links at the memorial website, but here is the fullest news story (if you can stand to read it--not for the faint of heart, in fact do not feel that you must look at it) and here is a very good blog post by B. Rox who has a quite lovely piece of video up here that I think you should watch because it shows you Helen Hill as she lived, in the pre-Katrina house that Helen and Paul made such a delightful home (it is a comic segment about the Atkins Diet--Paul and Helen were vegans, though Helen as of 2003 allowed herself one dairy day a week because she loved ice-cream, and shared their house with a large pot-bellied pig called Rosie who also makes some apt contributions to this video).

The bleakest most existential noir

I have just received some news that makes me absolutely sick with sorrow and despair, so much so that I hesitate even to write anything here. I will write properly about it later on, but here are the essentials.

Ever since 1988 I have had a very dear pair of friends, Paul Gailiunas and Helen Hill, the best people in the world (now with a little boy also): both wise innocents, extraordinarily generous and self-abnegating, absolutely lovely in their temperaments and deeply creative also, genuinely devoted to the good of their community in a way that can be said of very few people in the world. They had been living in New Orleans for quite a long time, Paul working as a doctor in a clinic serving low-income patients and Helen making experimental animated films. They had to evacuate to South Carolina after Katrina; they moved back to New Orleans in August. And early this morning someone broke into their home and shot Helen dead. Paul was shot also, but he is in hospital in stable condition, I gather; their little boy is safe.

Here are the reports from the Times-Picayune and the Associated Press.

Just yesterday I received my copy of Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?. I stayed with Paul and Helen in New Orleans in the spring of 2003, a visit that I have often already looked back on with elegiac spectacles, but now it hardly bears thinking about.

The dilemma of the two fathers

Mark Anderson has a good essay up at Bookforum on Sebald; thanks to Golden Rule Jones for the link.

More pants

Ann Brashares and her husband (artist Jacob Collins) profiled in the Home and Garden section of the New York Times. The final installment of the Traveling Pants books is due out next week, I must get that: I really liked the earlier ones, which Lynn introduced me to (they are very much the "you read the first one and then you cannot rest until you have gone and bought and read all the others in an instant" kind of thing). My only complaint is the whole "magical pants" pitch, really they are quite naturalistic books and there is nothing literally magical about the pants at all--I would have read them sooner if I had not been put off by the marketing whimsy of the "magical pair of jeans fits four different girls" thing....

Realia

At the TLS, David Malouf on Patrick White and Christopher Benfey on Longfellow's neglect.

Benfey quotes a poem I had never heard of until very recently when I came across a quotation in Marina Warner's latest book and tracked it down on the internet, a rather delightful poem called Hiawatha's Photographing written by Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson (this will be self-evident, but it's a satire on portrait photography written in the Hiawatha meter) that opens with these stanzas:

FROM his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

This he perched upon a tripod--
Crouched beneath its dusky cover--
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence--
Said, "Be motionless, I beg you!"
Mystic, awful was the process.

And so forth....

Sexistential

At the New York Observer, Adam Begley reviews Walter Mosley's new novel.

A long account of calamities

Finding my brain too dull and stuporous to make today the first real writing day I'd have had for some time (it will have to be tomorrow instead), I fell back as an alternative this afternoon on two books that I've just now finished reading in a kind of dozy haze, books I had never read before although they were both incipiently familiar to me in a dreamlike way (you know how you come to have a very clear idea of certain books, their arguments and their style, without having actually read them?!?).

They both seem to me centrally about the same thing, not perhaps a coincidence as they have been awaiting my attention on the pile of books loosely related to my nearly-finished academic project: power, knowledge and history in modernity, the nestled and argumentative complementarity of immanence and transcendence (more brutally described as a late twentieth-century archeology of ashes). They are written in curiously different vocabularies, to the point where I found myself thinking in alternate-universe kind of ways about which elements I find myself most drawn to: I will write, I think, in neither of these modes, and yet both books are compelling and important and the second in particular has given me a feeling I treasure, a yearning feeling of oh-now-I-see-the-book-I-need-to-write that is not actually very comfortable (it is as though I am digging my hands deep into my chest and cracking open the ribcage to show my heart like something in Brueghel or Bosch) especially as it cannot be acted upon for some time.

(I must make my writing time in the next few weeks count--I see it's closely analogous to a situation in which you can only have a certain number of athletic workouts due to injury-related or other constraints and have to make them really intelligently strenuous ones rather than blowing the time on mindless and insufficiently demanding repetition--it's less product-driven than process-, it is also true that I must finish this book before the end of the month but it is even more important that I should give myself the satisfaction of some really and truly high-quality writing sessions to tide me over until May when I'll have some months again for full-time writing.)

The first book, in any case, was Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern. Interesting, intelligently brash, forceful, persuasive. More polemical than I'm inclined to be myself, and also written in a conceptual/abstract vocabulary that I find mildly inhospitable: yet I can see that for him as for others (Bourdieu?) it's the clearest and best way of saying what he's thinking. Here's a taste of where he gets to at the end, at any rate:

We have been modern. Very well. We can no longer be modern in the same way. When we amend the Constitution, we continue to believe in the sciences, but instead of taking in their objectivity, their truth, their coldness, their extraterritoriality--qualities they have never had, except after the arbitrary withdrawal of epistemology--we retain what has always been most interesting about them: their daring, their experimentation, their uncertainty, their warmth, their incongruous blend of hybrids, their crazy ability to reconsitute the social bond. We take away from them only the mystery of their birth and the danger their clandestineness posed to democracy.

Yes, we are indeed the heirs of the Enlightenment, whose asymmetrical rationality is just not broad enough for us. Boyle's descendants had defined a parliament of mutes, the laboratory, where scientists, mere intermediaries, spoke all by themselves in the name of things. What did these representatives say? Nothing but what the things would have said on their own, had they only been able to speak. Outside the laboratory, Hobbes's descendants had defined the Republic in which naked citizens, unable to speak all at once, arranged to have themselves represented by one of their number, the Sovereign, a simple intermediary and spokesperson. What did this representative say? Nothing but what the citizens would have said had they all been able to speak at the same time. But a doubt about the quality of that double translation crept in straight away. What if the scientists were talking about themselves instead of about things? And if the Sovereign were pursuing his own interests instead of reciting the script written for him by his constituents?

The other book was altogether more charming (I am ashamed of myself for not having read either of these sooner, it is an absurdity): W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. I sadly abandon any idea of borrowing techniques from Sebald for the conclusion to my academic book, I will have to wait and pillage him in future for a non-fiction book I'm currently lusting over but will not get to for a while, but the style is fascinating. I am particularly interested by the way he phases in and out of the first-person testimonies of people and books he's in conversation with, like changing from one radio station to another. It is a great book of Norfolk, I was reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro of course (here was my post on the Norfolk of Never Let Me Go) and the landscapes of Margery Allingham. I have never been to East Anglia, I would like to pay that county a visit.

Here's the first passage I loved, describing the author's stay at a run-down hotel in Lowestoft staffed only, it seems, by an eye-contact-avoiding young woman dressed in the style of the Thirties:

That evening I was the sole guest in the huge dining room, and it was the same startled person who took my order and shortly afterwards brought me a fish that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years. The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it. Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was a hideous mess once the operation was over. The tartare sauce that I had had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs, and the fish itself, or what feigned to be fish, lay a sorry wreck among the grass-green peas and the remains of soggy chips that gleamed with fat.

Good, eh? There are all sorts of excellent touches: Sebald buying in a village shop an ice-cold can of Cherry Coke which he "drain[s] at a draught like a cup of hemlock," Sebald having a Learesque moment with choughs and cliffs.

Perhaps the book's most memorable image, for me, was of the child survivors of a Croatian cleansing operation carried out over fifty years earlier in a camp in Bosnia, later sent in cattle wagons to the capital of Croatia. "Many of those who were still alive were so hungry," says Sebald, "that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags they wore around their necks and thus in their extreme desperation had eradicated their own names." But there are all sorts of other striking things as well: Sebald in 1947 revisiting his native city, destroyed by British bombs, and coming upon a cleared site where the bricks retrieved from the ruins have been stacked "in long, precise rows, ten by ten, a thousand to every stacked cube, or rather nine hundred and ninety-nine, since the thousandth brick in every pile was stood upright on top, be it as a token of expiation or to facilitate the counting"; the idea of the great European art museums in many cases having been "endowed by the sugar dynasties" or otherwise connected to the sugar trade, with his interloctur telling him that at times it seems to him "as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergom created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy."

And here is a suitably grim image in closing:

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.

Other light reading: I did finish rereading those last couple Susan Howatch novels while I was in Philadelphia, but they have rather spoiled me for anything else (except I did pluck from the shelves of the spare room I stayed in on the 26th, which is a kind of shrine to light reading, Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel which I reread with considerable satisfaction on the train back from Philadelphia--interesting to see how much more violent and cold that voice was in the early books, it's much humanized and made elegant/stylized later on). An interesting running-related memoir, verging on too subdued but in some ways more satisfactory for its very low-key-ness than certain more melodramatic memoirs that come to mind, Chasing the Hawk: Looking for My Father, Finding Myself, by Andrew Sheehan, son of running guru George Sheehan. The first half of Chris Adrian's exceptional novel The Children's Hospital, but I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to finish it (it is quite magical, really something special, but perhaps too postapocalyptic--literally--for my current frame of mind).

Absurdly the only thing I can think about--the absurdity comes from the fact that I have barely ridden a bike or swum a lap in the past twenty years--is how much I want to train for a triathlon! However I must take things one step at a time. Swimming lesson on Friday. Get a bike in the spring. Run my first marathon in the fall. Then the triathlon can be the project for 2008....