Someone should put copies of George Pelecanos's last few novels in fancy gift baskets and deliver one to each member of Congress and we would have a good gun control law about one week later. Just finished reading his latest, The Night Gardener (courtesy of the divine Sarah). It's excellent. (Also I must say it has the most over-the-top blurbs I think I have ever seen, it's pretty funny: they're by two authors I love, Ken Bruen and Laura Lippman, and it's not that I disagree with what they say, I think they're both quite right about the excellence of Pelecanos, but I hope this doesn't represent a new trend in blurbing, these swathes of hyperbole in the grand style just make me want to laugh. Go and look at a copy and you'll see what I mean; oh, and buy the book!)
Random paragraph I liked (Gus Ramone and Rhonda Willis are both homicide detectives, and here Ramone's visiting the Metropolitan Police Academy):
The academy looked like any high school, with standard-sized classrooms on the upper floors and a gymnasium, swimming pool, and extensive workout facilities below. Veteran police, including Ramone, used the weight room and pool to stay in shape. Rhonda's vanity had shrunk with the birth of each successive child, and she had not exercised in many years. If she managed to put together a half hour of free time, Rhonda felt that a hot bath and a glass of wine were more valuable to her physical and mental health than a visit to the gym could ever be.
Pelecanos has this excellent style that's so understated as to be almost invisible, but if you're really paying attention you know you're reading something far more carefully crafted than most novels. I like the way he handles a large cast of characters, and of course the DC/Maryland settings (and the world of objects--clothes, cars, condiments--and the sounds and rhythms of the different kinds of speech you hear in different contexts and the always-present sense of a high-quality musical soundtrack) are the books' greatest selling points.
I have a ridiculous confession, though: I put the book down to read Edward P. Jones's story in the latest issue of the New Yorker (mmmm, good story), and then afterwards I kept on having to remind myself it hadn't been an episode in The Night Gardener! The two wove together so seamlessly, it was like something in a dream....
Thursday, August 03, 2006
The pros and cons of getting an advance for a book you haven't written yet
Justine Larbalestier posted recently about why she's chosen to write her new book before selling it rather than selling the book on the basis of a proposal, and it led to some interesting discussion in the comments. Here's one of the best reasons not to sell your book first (it's Maev Kennedy writing in the Guardian):
According to new research by a leading expert on the dictionary, rather than working slowly but steadily with his assistants on the dictionary for the full nine years, Dr Johnson became completely bogged down in the work, realised he would miss his deadline, and simply abandoned the job, ignoring increasingly frantic messages from his commissioning editors.
However, Dr Anne McDermott, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, who has spent years studying all the surviving original manuscripts and sources, has a different explanation. She will announce tonight, in a lecture at Dr Johnson's House museum in London, that Johnson was in fact paralysed over the work for years, to the despair of his publishers by whom he had already been paid a hefty advance. In the end, she contends, he finished the dictionary in just over two years with only two assistants.
...
She believes that only a threat to break into his house and seize the manuscript - which the publishers mistakenly thought was almost finished - which got Johnson back to work. He was bribed with a guinea for every page delivered to the printers, and although this time he could afford only two assistants, they raced through the work and finished in two-and-a-half years.
I wish I could have been there to hear the lecture, but perhaps it will be printed somewhere soon--the TLS occasionally does pieces like that. (Aside from her many other accomplishments, McDermott is responsible for the wonderful CD-ROM version of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I use in some of my classes--but I am hoping that they are going to release an online version sometime, the interface of this one is tricky to use and at least at Columbia they never have got it set up on a LAN.)
According to new research by a leading expert on the dictionary, rather than working slowly but steadily with his assistants on the dictionary for the full nine years, Dr Johnson became completely bogged down in the work, realised he would miss his deadline, and simply abandoned the job, ignoring increasingly frantic messages from his commissioning editors.
However, Dr Anne McDermott, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, who has spent years studying all the surviving original manuscripts and sources, has a different explanation. She will announce tonight, in a lecture at Dr Johnson's House museum in London, that Johnson was in fact paralysed over the work for years, to the despair of his publishers by whom he had already been paid a hefty advance. In the end, she contends, he finished the dictionary in just over two years with only two assistants.
...
She believes that only a threat to break into his house and seize the manuscript - which the publishers mistakenly thought was almost finished - which got Johnson back to work. He was bribed with a guinea for every page delivered to the printers, and although this time he could afford only two assistants, they raced through the work and finished in two-and-a-half years.
I wish I could have been there to hear the lecture, but perhaps it will be printed somewhere soon--the TLS occasionally does pieces like that. (Aside from her many other accomplishments, McDermott is responsible for the wonderful CD-ROM version of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I use in some of my classes--but I am hoping that they are going to release an online version sometime, the interface of this one is tricky to use and at least at Columbia they never have got it set up on a LAN.)
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
One book
The one-book meme, via Kate's Book Blog and About Last Night:
One book that changed your life
I had a bad habit as a child of going over to a friend's house for a sleepover and instead digging in so deeply to some book I found on the shelves that I became deaf to everything else including the increasingly frustrated friend until I finished reading it. At sixteen or so I remember sleeping over at my friend S.'s dad's house, her stepmother had done a master's degree in English and I pounced upon Roland Barthes's S/Z and couldn't put it down. I knew the name Barthes but only older and more conventional literary criticism had hitherto come my way; this book transformed my sense of what would be possible in my own writing and reading life.
One book that you've read more than once
My most-reread book ever has to be Pride and Prejudice. I had a beaten-up garage-sale copy as a child, with the most hideous Regency-romance cover (a very blond and supercilious Elizabeth Bennett in a pink bonnet, plus very tight-breeched Mr. Darcy and a strange bumpy texture to the physical cover). I read it again and again until the covers fell off and the spine started to split. It is possible that I have read this book as many as thirty-five times, and I almost burned out on it five years ago when I found myself teaching it in two different classes (Literature Humanities and an undergraduate seminar on Austen) the same week. I have lectured on it to Columbia parents, I own at least four (five?) different copies, I have taught it at least six times, at times I have felt so sick of it that I can hardly stand the idea of rereading it. It is definitely no longer my favorite Austen novel. And yet its formal perfection and its strange and remarkably intelligent use of the third-person voice mean that every time I read it again (I think I can safely say I will reread it at least twenty more times in my life, assuming I teach for another thirty-plus years) I find something striking and new.
One book you'd want on a desert island
This is a wholly boring and conventional answer, and yet there is no doubt in my mind that I would have to have the Riverside Shakespeare. Which is of course not itself a boring and conventional book at all.
One book that made you laugh
Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature, which should be much more widely read than seems to be the case.
One book that made you cry
Ken Bruen's The Dramatist. Nothing makes me cry, but the ending of this book made me cry.
One book that you wish had been written
Rebecca West wrote a novel called The Fountain Overflows that is my single most cherished top-choice number-one-favorite-novel of all time. It was with some amazement as a teenager that I found on the new books shelf at the public library two further installments in the story of the Aubrey family, both published posthumously: This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. The story is incomplete, though; a fourth volume was projected, and at the end the editor published West's synopsis of the entire sweep of the narrative. There is no book I would rather read than the last part of that story, and no author I would trust to complete it in West's stead. She herself felt (I don't have the book here, so I can't give you the exact words) that she found herself bumping up against the very limits of her own technique and couldn't figure out how to meet the challenge posed by the story's completion, which included among other things Rose Aubrey attending the Nuremberg trials and hearing an account of the behavior of a (deceased) concentration-camp victim and realizing it was her cousin Rosamund, and that the entire shape of her cousin's life had been meant to bring her to that point.
One book that you wish had never been written
This isn't a book, exactly, but I wish Jonathan Swift had not written the poem "Cadenus and Vanessa." I love Swift, but this poem's combination of bad faith and general creepiness make me hate him instead for as long as it takes me to read the poem.
One book you're currently reading
Anne Burt's My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between. This one comes with a funny coincidence: my friend Steve Burt recently recommended an anthology on stepparents edited by his cousin, I followed the link and it sounded interesting but I am neither a step-child nor a step-parent and its acquisition therefore held no urgency for me, though a few days later I sent a copy to a friend who has found herself recently in closer proximity to these issues. Then I found myself a few weeks ago in conversation before Pilates class (yes, yes, it is ridiculous, I know) at the Columbia gym with one of the few other non-undergraduate-age people in the group. And she introduced herself and I suddenly realized that this was Anne Burt, editor of aforesaid volume and cousin of Steve. It was distinctly disconcerting (I had no idea she worked at Columbia) but in a good literary way, and so I immediately ordered another copy of the anthology from Amazon and have been dipping into it. It seems excellent: definitely recommended on grounds of style as well as substance.
One book you've been meaning to read
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind. I've got a whole shelf of new novels that I purchased in various fits and/or frenzies this spring and early summer and now don't have time to read....
One book that changed your life
I had a bad habit as a child of going over to a friend's house for a sleepover and instead digging in so deeply to some book I found on the shelves that I became deaf to everything else including the increasingly frustrated friend until I finished reading it. At sixteen or so I remember sleeping over at my friend S.'s dad's house, her stepmother had done a master's degree in English and I pounced upon Roland Barthes's S/Z and couldn't put it down. I knew the name Barthes but only older and more conventional literary criticism had hitherto come my way; this book transformed my sense of what would be possible in my own writing and reading life.
One book that you've read more than once
My most-reread book ever has to be Pride and Prejudice. I had a beaten-up garage-sale copy as a child, with the most hideous Regency-romance cover (a very blond and supercilious Elizabeth Bennett in a pink bonnet, plus very tight-breeched Mr. Darcy and a strange bumpy texture to the physical cover). I read it again and again until the covers fell off and the spine started to split. It is possible that I have read this book as many as thirty-five times, and I almost burned out on it five years ago when I found myself teaching it in two different classes (Literature Humanities and an undergraduate seminar on Austen) the same week. I have lectured on it to Columbia parents, I own at least four (five?) different copies, I have taught it at least six times, at times I have felt so sick of it that I can hardly stand the idea of rereading it. It is definitely no longer my favorite Austen novel. And yet its formal perfection and its strange and remarkably intelligent use of the third-person voice mean that every time I read it again (I think I can safely say I will reread it at least twenty more times in my life, assuming I teach for another thirty-plus years) I find something striking and new.
One book you'd want on a desert island
This is a wholly boring and conventional answer, and yet there is no doubt in my mind that I would have to have the Riverside Shakespeare. Which is of course not itself a boring and conventional book at all.
One book that made you laugh
Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature, which should be much more widely read than seems to be the case.
One book that made you cry
Ken Bruen's The Dramatist. Nothing makes me cry, but the ending of this book made me cry.
One book that you wish had been written
Rebecca West wrote a novel called The Fountain Overflows that is my single most cherished top-choice number-one-favorite-novel of all time. It was with some amazement as a teenager that I found on the new books shelf at the public library two further installments in the story of the Aubrey family, both published posthumously: This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. The story is incomplete, though; a fourth volume was projected, and at the end the editor published West's synopsis of the entire sweep of the narrative. There is no book I would rather read than the last part of that story, and no author I would trust to complete it in West's stead. She herself felt (I don't have the book here, so I can't give you the exact words) that she found herself bumping up against the very limits of her own technique and couldn't figure out how to meet the challenge posed by the story's completion, which included among other things Rose Aubrey attending the Nuremberg trials and hearing an account of the behavior of a (deceased) concentration-camp victim and realizing it was her cousin Rosamund, and that the entire shape of her cousin's life had been meant to bring her to that point.
One book that you wish had never been written
This isn't a book, exactly, but I wish Jonathan Swift had not written the poem "Cadenus and Vanessa." I love Swift, but this poem's combination of bad faith and general creepiness make me hate him instead for as long as it takes me to read the poem.
One book you're currently reading
Anne Burt's My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren and Everyone in Between. This one comes with a funny coincidence: my friend Steve Burt recently recommended an anthology on stepparents edited by his cousin, I followed the link and it sounded interesting but I am neither a step-child nor a step-parent and its acquisition therefore held no urgency for me, though a few days later I sent a copy to a friend who has found herself recently in closer proximity to these issues. Then I found myself a few weeks ago in conversation before Pilates class (yes, yes, it is ridiculous, I know) at the Columbia gym with one of the few other non-undergraduate-age people in the group. And she introduced herself and I suddenly realized that this was Anne Burt, editor of aforesaid volume and cousin of Steve. It was distinctly disconcerting (I had no idea she worked at Columbia) but in a good literary way, and so I immediately ordered another copy of the anthology from Amazon and have been dipping into it. It seems excellent: definitely recommended on grounds of style as well as substance.
One book you've been meaning to read
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind. I've got a whole shelf of new novels that I purchased in various fits and/or frenzies this spring and early summer and now don't have time to read....
Hardy and Ibsen
Paul Binding on connections between the two, at the TLS. In general I feel I have the perfect job but my one regret about being an academic is that I can't very often throw over the traces & read intensively and waywardly for a month here or there--not pleasure reading, more intellectual-exploration reading--I was drooling as I read this piece with the thought of how much I would like to delve into Hardy and Ibsen, and I am still feeling a Beckett itch that is not going to get scratched any time soon....
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
In a very exciting development
(actually I am quite thrilled, this is the kind of writing I've been wanting to do for a long time) I've got an essay in this month's issue of The Believer. The full text is available online if you click that link (of course you should also think about getting a subscription, as a reader I find it very good value for money), and here's the first paragraph:
I fall in love with individual books all the time, books I praise passionately, even promiscuously, to anyone who will listen. Out of the hundreds I read every year and blog about, though, only a few speak to me so loudly that I bestir myself from torpor and plunge into fanatical book-fiendish evangelizing. Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories came to me for review this January in the form of a ridiculously cumbersome wad of xeroxed eleven-by-seventeen pages, inadequately secured by binder clips: it weighed three or four pounds, at a guess, with the flat cartilaginous heft of a stingray. Once I recovered from the format, I felt the shock—painful, delightful—you experience when you encounter something so perfect you’re furious you didn’t know about it sooner. My list of such things includes the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” Paradise Lost, Fabergé eggs, and the taste and texture of meringue. You will have your own list, but find a place on it if you can for this collection of the columns Schlesinger wrote for the Village Voice from 1997 to 2006 under the rubric Shelter.
Here's a previous blog entry on why Toni Schlesinger's a genius and here's the Amazon link for Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories (which is a very, very special book--please read my essay so that you will understand why and feel compelled to go and experience it for yourself).
I don't believe in having resolutions, in my opinion you either decide to do something and then go ahead and do it or else you don't really want to do it after all and you might as well not fool around with pointless verbal flourishes. But I do have a resolution for the coming year, which is to write at least a couple more essays in a similar vein to this one. So this is more of a promise to myself that I'll jump at the next chance I get to do one, whether that's because I find the perfect topic or because someone invites me to contribute to something. I really love the essay, it's a particular favorite genre of mine and one that I feel called to write as well as to read, but it's been edged out of my life for many years by novel-writing and academic writing (both of which I also love). But now it's time to put it back into the mix--blogging has been an interesting way of developing something akin to an essay-writing voice, and I must make good use of it.
I fall in love with individual books all the time, books I praise passionately, even promiscuously, to anyone who will listen. Out of the hundreds I read every year and blog about, though, only a few speak to me so loudly that I bestir myself from torpor and plunge into fanatical book-fiendish evangelizing. Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories came to me for review this January in the form of a ridiculously cumbersome wad of xeroxed eleven-by-seventeen pages, inadequately secured by binder clips: it weighed three or four pounds, at a guess, with the flat cartilaginous heft of a stingray. Once I recovered from the format, I felt the shock—painful, delightful—you experience when you encounter something so perfect you’re furious you didn’t know about it sooner. My list of such things includes the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” Paradise Lost, Fabergé eggs, and the taste and texture of meringue. You will have your own list, but find a place on it if you can for this collection of the columns Schlesinger wrote for the Village Voice from 1997 to 2006 under the rubric Shelter.
Here's a previous blog entry on why Toni Schlesinger's a genius and here's the Amazon link for Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories (which is a very, very special book--please read my essay so that you will understand why and feel compelled to go and experience it for yourself).
I don't believe in having resolutions, in my opinion you either decide to do something and then go ahead and do it or else you don't really want to do it after all and you might as well not fool around with pointless verbal flourishes. But I do have a resolution for the coming year, which is to write at least a couple more essays in a similar vein to this one. So this is more of a promise to myself that I'll jump at the next chance I get to do one, whether that's because I find the perfect topic or because someone invites me to contribute to something. I really love the essay, it's a particular favorite genre of mine and one that I feel called to write as well as to read, but it's been edged out of my life for many years by novel-writing and academic writing (both of which I also love). But now it's time to put it back into the mix--blogging has been an interesting way of developing something akin to an essay-writing voice, and I must make good use of it.
Monday, July 31, 2006
And now for something completely different
It was a comments thread at Tingle Alley that made me realize I wanted to read Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert: I had previously assumed it was not for me.
So I got it from Amazon (evil, evil Amazon Prime...) and read it (seriously) in two great gulps on Saturday, the first hundred pages in what seemed like the blink of an eye in a brief early-evening piece of down-time and the rest of it late that night after a hot but pleasant evening with two old friends and one six-year-old boy. (Whose funniest contribution to the evening's conversation--he and his mother have been reading the Greek myths--was telling me that I would be Aphrodite, the goddess of love [needless to say I was quite horrified, this is not at all my style!] and that this meant I had a special belt that made me--wait for it--unbearable! His mother hastily corrected this to "irresistible," but the damage was done, we were all laughing hysterically and making ourselves hotter than ever.)
The book's in three sections, each detailing one component of the author's tripartite strategy for recovering from a difficult and draining divorce: Italy for pleasure, India for meditation, Bali for the balance between the two. Indeed as I was reading the first section--Italy/pleasure--I still felt that I was not the ideal reader for this book. I had three problems, all of them rather unreasonable (and I hasten to add that I think it's a very good book as well as an enjoyable one, I reconciled myself to all three of these things by the time I hit the middle India part, which was definitely my favorite):
1. When I read a book that's self-consciously divided into 108 small chapters (on the model, in this case, of the string of beads called a japa mala), I unreasonably expect it to be formally perfect, like something written by Georges Perec or Primo Levi (whose The Periodic Table is one of my favorite books of all time). This book is not formally perfect or even, really, formally interested; it is book as means rather than book as end in itself, book as a way for the writer to communicate with the reader who will as a result feel rather as if she's spending an evening in the writer's company rather than consuming her work as a separate entity. I found this disconcerting: not unpleasant, but distinctly disconcerting.
2. The Italy section seemed to me the one where the narrator most opens herself up to the charge of self-absorption. Privacy concerns mean that she has to tell us rather than show us how she got herself into such a dire state in the first place, and I found a bit too much concentration in this section on the love-related personal problems. (I was sorry, too, to realize that the resolution at the book's ending also involves a new romantic partner, I thought this felt unconvincing or troubling or at least too pat based on the setup at the beginning of the book.)
3. (This is the most unreasonable.) I am pigheadedly resistant to charm! Seriously, some teachers are just genuinely boring, I am not defending those ones, but I have always preferred the superficially dry but deeply interesting teacher to the obviously charming and funny one--I couldn't take those classes taught by, you know, the famous scientist who shoots into class on the first day in a sort of rocket-car and uses it to tell you about propulsion and momentum, and I get an awful stony-faced hostile expression when a speaker keeps cracking jokes, I just don't want to give in and feed the person's ego. (Of course my own lecturing style relies heavily on deliberate charm, but that is partly why I'm so suspicious of it in others....) And Gilbert's authorial voice is all about charm, and I really held out against it.
However once she gets to India I found the rest of the narrative much more engaging--there's an extremely good description in chapters 62 and 63 of Gilbert (a gregarious soul) deciding maniacally that she is going to become the most silent and contemplative member of the community, and scrub temple floors while smiling beatifically, then being called in to the work assignment office and asked to serve as special allowed-to-talk-a-lot hostess to the hundreds of guests who are about to arrive for a silent retreat. It's really a great read, I highly recommend it.
In my opinion the single best passage in the whole book, strictly on the grounds of the writing, comes pretty early on, and that's what I'll leave you with, but stop reading here if you're already very hungry:
Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one non-stop oven. It's about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain, don't even worry about it, just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00pm, the streets outside the pizzeria have become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like they're trying to get space on a lifeboat. There's not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it.
The only thing distracting me while I was reading Gilbert's book was the question of which out of the many, many people I know who would love the book to send it on to. My friend A. (for some reason a huge proportion of my friends have names beginning with A.--this is neither my main New York A. nor any of my A. students nor either of my Cambridge A.'s), who grew up partly on an ashram and whose spiritual hometown is Napoli? Or perhaps B., who has done a string of great yoga posts recently? But in the end I realized that of course I have to send it on to my lovely sister-in-law who works at an alternative health center and is about to go to Italy for her honeymoon, it seemed the aptest choice.
So I got it from Amazon (evil, evil Amazon Prime...) and read it (seriously) in two great gulps on Saturday, the first hundred pages in what seemed like the blink of an eye in a brief early-evening piece of down-time and the rest of it late that night after a hot but pleasant evening with two old friends and one six-year-old boy. (Whose funniest contribution to the evening's conversation--he and his mother have been reading the Greek myths--was telling me that I would be Aphrodite, the goddess of love [needless to say I was quite horrified, this is not at all my style!] and that this meant I had a special belt that made me--wait for it--unbearable! His mother hastily corrected this to "irresistible," but the damage was done, we were all laughing hysterically and making ourselves hotter than ever.)
The book's in three sections, each detailing one component of the author's tripartite strategy for recovering from a difficult and draining divorce: Italy for pleasure, India for meditation, Bali for the balance between the two. Indeed as I was reading the first section--Italy/pleasure--I still felt that I was not the ideal reader for this book. I had three problems, all of them rather unreasonable (and I hasten to add that I think it's a very good book as well as an enjoyable one, I reconciled myself to all three of these things by the time I hit the middle India part, which was definitely my favorite):
1. When I read a book that's self-consciously divided into 108 small chapters (on the model, in this case, of the string of beads called a japa mala), I unreasonably expect it to be formally perfect, like something written by Georges Perec or Primo Levi (whose The Periodic Table is one of my favorite books of all time). This book is not formally perfect or even, really, formally interested; it is book as means rather than book as end in itself, book as a way for the writer to communicate with the reader who will as a result feel rather as if she's spending an evening in the writer's company rather than consuming her work as a separate entity. I found this disconcerting: not unpleasant, but distinctly disconcerting.
2. The Italy section seemed to me the one where the narrator most opens herself up to the charge of self-absorption. Privacy concerns mean that she has to tell us rather than show us how she got herself into such a dire state in the first place, and I found a bit too much concentration in this section on the love-related personal problems. (I was sorry, too, to realize that the resolution at the book's ending also involves a new romantic partner, I thought this felt unconvincing or troubling or at least too pat based on the setup at the beginning of the book.)
3. (This is the most unreasonable.) I am pigheadedly resistant to charm! Seriously, some teachers are just genuinely boring, I am not defending those ones, but I have always preferred the superficially dry but deeply interesting teacher to the obviously charming and funny one--I couldn't take those classes taught by, you know, the famous scientist who shoots into class on the first day in a sort of rocket-car and uses it to tell you about propulsion and momentum, and I get an awful stony-faced hostile expression when a speaker keeps cracking jokes, I just don't want to give in and feed the person's ego. (Of course my own lecturing style relies heavily on deliberate charm, but that is partly why I'm so suspicious of it in others....) And Gilbert's authorial voice is all about charm, and I really held out against it.
However once she gets to India I found the rest of the narrative much more engaging--there's an extremely good description in chapters 62 and 63 of Gilbert (a gregarious soul) deciding maniacally that she is going to become the most silent and contemplative member of the community, and scrub temple floors while smiling beatifically, then being called in to the work assignment office and asked to serve as special allowed-to-talk-a-lot hostess to the hundreds of guests who are about to arrive for a silent retreat. It's really a great read, I highly recommend it.
In my opinion the single best passage in the whole book, strictly on the grounds of the writing, comes pretty early on, and that's what I'll leave you with, but stop reading here if you're already very hungry:
Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one non-stop oven. It's about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain, don't even worry about it, just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00pm, the streets outside the pizzeria have become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like they're trying to get space on a lifeboat. There's not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it.
The only thing distracting me while I was reading Gilbert's book was the question of which out of the many, many people I know who would love the book to send it on to. My friend A. (for some reason a huge proportion of my friends have names beginning with A.--this is neither my main New York A. nor any of my A. students nor either of my Cambridge A.'s), who grew up partly on an ashram and whose spiritual hometown is Napoli? Or perhaps B., who has done a string of great yoga posts recently? But in the end I realized that of course I have to send it on to my lovely sister-in-law who works at an alternative health center and is about to go to Italy for her honeymoon, it seemed the aptest choice.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Fucking Hyde
John Crace "digests" Irvine Welsh's The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. I don't know, I still think it sounds like a pretty funny book! I am fond of those Scottish evil-twin novels, starting with Hogg's brilliant Confessions of a Justified Sinner. (Oh, and from the comments after my post the other day, here's the link for Neel Mukherjee's absolutely scathing review--thanks to G.H.)
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Reading with the eye
James Fenton sets the record straight: despite the scene in the Confessions in which Augustine expresses surprise at Bishop Ambrose's habit of reading silently to himself, it is a (very widespread) "myth that the ancients only or normally read out loud." Makes sense to me--there's no doubt it's a very striking scene, but as an extremely avid silent reader myself I always found the claim unlikely, it seemed to me just not cognitively plausible even given, you know, the whole no-spaces-between-the-words thing. There's an interesting though rather technical book on this topic, Paul Saenger's Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading.
The sloth's pilgrimage
From Blumenbach's Contributions to Natural History (1806), in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe (1865):
There was a time when the origin of all petrifactions, and the general revolution of the earth itself, was deduced from the Noachian deluge. But, as one of the most sagacious and also certainly one of the most orthodox theologians, R. Walsh, has assured me, we are far from doing the slightest violence to the authority of Holy Scripture, when we deny the universality of the flood of Noah; and in like manner, I cannot for my own part form any satisfactory idea, after what I gather from the history of animals themselves, about the universality of that deluge. Thus, for instance, the pilgrimage which the sloth (an animal which takes a whole hour in crawling six feet) must in that case have performed from Ararat to South America, is always a little incomprehensible. We are obliged, with St Augustine, to call in the assistance of the angels, who jussu Dei sive permissu, as he expresses himself, first of all collected all the animal kingdom in the ark, and then distributed them again ad locum inde, in the distant islands and quarters of the globe.
There was a time when the origin of all petrifactions, and the general revolution of the earth itself, was deduced from the Noachian deluge. But, as one of the most sagacious and also certainly one of the most orthodox theologians, R. Walsh, has assured me, we are far from doing the slightest violence to the authority of Holy Scripture, when we deny the universality of the flood of Noah; and in like manner, I cannot for my own part form any satisfactory idea, after what I gather from the history of animals themselves, about the universality of that deluge. Thus, for instance, the pilgrimage which the sloth (an animal which takes a whole hour in crawling six feet) must in that case have performed from Ararat to South America, is always a little incomprehensible. We are obliged, with St Augustine, to call in the assistance of the angels, who jussu Dei sive permissu, as he expresses himself, first of all collected all the animal kingdom in the ark, and then distributed them again ad locum inde, in the distant islands and quarters of the globe.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Hex!
James Lasdun reviews Irvine Welsh's latest at the Guardian. It's an excellent example of a mixed but genuinely sympathetic review--I really like what he does here, he's firm but not at all condescending.
(Lasdun's two novels were eye-opening and amazing literary discoveries for me this spring, and indeed--in keeping with the creepy and sinister tone of his fiction--everyone I've met who's read either of these books lights up with a slightly insane fervor when the name Lasdun is mentioned, merely to read him is to recognize his great genius!)
(Lasdun's two novels were eye-opening and amazing literary discoveries for me this spring, and indeed--in keeping with the creepy and sinister tone of his fiction--everyone I've met who's read either of these books lights up with a slightly insane fervor when the name Lasdun is mentioned, merely to read him is to recognize his great genius!)
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Daedalus, or, Science and the Future
From J. B. S. Haldane's Daedalus, or, Science and the Future (1924):
Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up-to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.
I have just fruitlessly tried to get a link to a fascinating article from the TLS a month or so ago (the title was "Sixty years in socks") about Haldane's decision to move to India for the later part of his life, but can't seem to get into the subscriber archive. If you happen to have the old issues lying around, though, and didn't read it already, it's well worth a look (issue of 16 June 2006).
I've always been interested in Haldane (it was Daniel Kevles's book which sent me off to get this one at the library), but I've also got a particular interest in Haldane's sister Naomi Mitchison; her memoirs were one of my best sources when I was writing Dynamite No. 1, though they applied more to Sophie's great-aunt's generation than to Sophie herself.
Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up-to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.
I have just fruitlessly tried to get a link to a fascinating article from the TLS a month or so ago (the title was "Sixty years in socks") about Haldane's decision to move to India for the later part of his life, but can't seem to get into the subscriber archive. If you happen to have the old issues lying around, though, and didn't read it already, it's well worth a look (issue of 16 June 2006).
I've always been interested in Haldane (it was Daniel Kevles's book which sent me off to get this one at the library), but I've also got a particular interest in Haldane's sister Naomi Mitchison; her memoirs were one of my best sources when I was writing Dynamite No. 1, though they applied more to Sophie's great-aunt's generation than to Sophie herself.
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