Tune in, turn on, drop out

Ann Marlowe reviews Robert Greenfield's biography of Timothy Leary and B. H. Friedman's Tripping: A Memoir at the New York Observer and finds the first "a powerful argument against the inchoate belief shared by many who have used psychedelics—and I was one—that tripping almost automatically makes you a better, more enlightened person. Though Mr. Greenfield maintains an evenhanded tone, the effect of his accumulation of detail is to show that Timothy Leary was a scumbag—a charming, energetic and inventive scumbag—despite decades of taking LSD."

Human freedom and genetic determinism

Jerry Coyne has an extremely good piece in this week's TLS (no subscription required, do take a look) on the thirtieth anniversary edition of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and the collection of essays titled Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Thing. You know what, I am so just going to go ahead and buy those two (even though of course I already have the non-anniversary Selfish Gene), it is wholly justifiable because it's for my book....

Trains and blue denim

Yesterday I made a literary pilgrimage, due to the kindness of a generous intermediary, to meet one of my great literary heroes: Albert Murray. I blogged last summer about the last installment of his miraculously enjoyable novel sequence, The Magic Keys, and as sometimes happens the blog post made a connection and helped this visit come about.

Mr. Murray is far on in years, but it was extraordinarily moving to hear him range widely over topics American and anthropological and literary and cultural--casually talking of "Duke" and "Count," can you imagine?!?--all with a view towards thinking about education and human potentiality. And then he read out loud to us passages from The Omni-Americans and from Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers which clearly is a book I must read in the near future.

If you were only going to read one of Murray's books, surely it should be The Seven League Boots, which is a stunning novel & one I am eager to read again (but though I've bought two or three copies over the years I always press them on someone who I think must read it, it is an extremely favorite novel of mine).

I will not soon forget the sound of Mr. Murray's voice and the expression on his face as he read and chuckled wheezily at Mann's humorous faux-Biblical incongruities.

Demented beach reads

(is it really possible to read at the beach?) at the Village Voice. Go and take a look, it's a highly eclectic mix--and here's my take on Lionel Shriver's Double Fault, which I highly recommend:

Photographed kissing the phallic statuette she received when We Need to Talk About Kevin won the 2005 Orange Prize, Shriver wore a look of satisfaction so intense as to verge on impropriety. Now Serpent's Tail has reissued Shriver's 1997 Double Fault, an utterly compelling tale of love and envy in which Willy (short for Wilhelmina) and Eric meet on a Riverside Park court, fall in love, and marry without adequately comprehending the damage their changing national rankings will wreak on this union between two deeply competitive professional tennis players. The short span of an athlete's career means that Willy at 23 considers herself already middle-aged, and a devastating knee injury proves impossible to overcome. Fortunately, making one's mark as a novelist is not subject to the same physiological constraints.

I loved We Need to Talk About Kevin when I read it last year; this novel is perhaps somewhat less accomplished on strictly technical grounds i.e. prose style (see Cressida Connolly's review at the Telegraph, courtesy of Frank Wilson) and yet it's just as compelling, I have found myself thinking of it again and again in the past couple weeks since I first read it.

You do not often read a really good novel about relationships between women and men that addresses the fact of envy and competitiveness, and this book is exceptional on that count. I can hardly think of anything else I've read in recent memory that so closely captures the painful dissatisfactions of being female:

Willy was ordinarily content with her own figure; it was taut and neat. But as Eric approached in the moonlight, she was aware that her breasts, while small, sagged just enough to fail the pencil test. She recited to herself that she was in good shape, that all women have a layer of subcutaneous fat; when Eric put his hands on her waist Willy heard in her head the very phrase, subcutaneous fat. Her own trunk was smooth and bland, with none of those conniving, thinking ripples musing over his chest. Eric sighed as he traced her hip, but Willy found the slight flare too wide and envied him the clean, parallel shoot to the thigh. . . . He smoothed his left hand from her hip to her thigh, teasing his fingers up and inward, and she panicked at what he could possibly find in the absence between her legs that could compete with the whole fifth limb that arced against her stomach. Maybe, in sufficient thrall, it was impossible to imagine that so riveting a sex could conceivably be attracted by one’s own.

Shriver writes exceptionally well here about tennis (and in particular about tennis as a way of laying bare character, she is a great novelist of discipline); she also has a really remarkable summing-up voice, I imagine it will not be to everyone's taste but check out these sentences:

While Willy could no longer cash in on the ‘something special’ that had brought her father to his knees when she was ten, Eric was barreling along on his genetic gravy train. His game seemed to mature by itself. Naturals who are still flourishing on knack alone do not understand, as Willy did not in high school, anyone who fails to grow new skills like fingernails. Too, the athlete who has finished mining the seam of his gift has a dronish aspect, marked by sedulous, painstaking progress, as if scaling a cliff with no chinks for sudden ascent; the precocious find handholds to make breathtaking leaps in a day. It was prettier to be effortless, and she worried that Eric found her monotonous two-hour net drills pathetic.

Below you see a third-person voice doing some of what the first-person narrator in Kevin pulls off so effectively, here Willy is muscling in on her husband's rope-jumping fitness sessions in a squash court at the health club & feeling herself slipping behind him & being overcome with a surge of negative emotions (the "zwieback" reference is to his high-scoring Scrabble word in a game Willy mistakenly thought she might win):

She hated his self-righteously sweaty clothes,s he hated his smarmily perfect body, she hated his fancy-schmancy exhibitionist theatrics raised to a power just because a lot of nobody pseudo-sportsmen were gooning at him. In a spreading tide of anathemas, she hated his priggish recitation of who won the Italian in 1963, his look-at-me-I’m-so-dedicated posing in front of tournament videos with a pen and pad, his chuckling superiority slipping out of those zwieback tiles when he’d merely lucked into the Z, and most of all she hated his conceited, swaggering upper-class assumption that just because he deigned to pick up a tennis racket at eighteen he could sashay into the pantheon of her profession when she’d been busting her ass since she was five.

And one more, with a very characteristic swerve of ethical-imaginative sympathies at the end (it's this that makes Willy someone we care about rather than someone we find absurd) (oh, and the reference is to a fancy meal earlier in the book in which Eric is brought the 'man's' menu with prices that Willy's lacks):

For Willy had never understood whether you could be held responsible for your own emotions. As far as she could discern, circumstance had dealt them discrepant menus as the waiter had at Lutèce. Rather than lack prices, Willy’s listed different entrées: rancid resentment, gristly consternation, and prickly spite, all with an aftertaste of self-reproach--a sort of collective squab. After swallowing her pride, Willy’s only just dessert was humble pie. Meanwhile, Eric’s menu cataloged an emotional haute cuisine: tender solicitation, sweet concern, and creamy largess. In fact, she wondered if Eric himself wearied of his princely diet, got full to his eyeballs with his own decency, and coveted her shrieking fits. He was an aggressive, complicated man. Nobility and forbearance morning to night must have bound him like a woman’s corset.

Membership libraries

Anne Eisenberg at the NYT on one alternative to the public library system. I love the free public libraries (I am really a child of the public library, I keep meaning to find some way to get involved with a local library here in a time-and-money benefactorish way but it hasn't happened quite yet), but I also feel the world has room for more alternatives to supplement them: I am still waiting for there to be something like Netflix only for brand-new hardcover novels....

Nineteenth-century ninjas

Jane Yeh has a very funny review of Boris Akunin's latest at the Voice:

Bestsellers in their homeland, the Fandorin novels have made author Grigory Chkhartishvili a celebrity. Formerly an unknown academic specializing in Japanese literature, Chkhartishvili chose his nom de plume ('B. Akunin') as a nod to the 19th-century anarchist and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. But apart from the occasional name check of Pushkin or Tolstoy, the series has few intellectual pretensions, instead offering straightforward detective thrills in a period setting. In Fandorin, Akunin too often relies on genre cliches like catchphrases (the sleuth enumerates clues by announcing, 'That is one,' 'That is two,' etc.) and character tics (he has a stammer). Still, The Death of Achilles is Akunin's paciest work yet�if perhaps his most ludicrous. Already a master of disguise, Fandorin now wields throwing stars and nunchakus, practices jujitsu and calligraphy, and is accompanied throughout by a faithful Japanese manservant/sidekick named Masa. Who knew 1880s Russia was so ninja-tastic?

I want to read

the collection of essays titled Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (is it just me, or is that subtitle a bit awkward?); here's Nicholas Wade's review for the New York Times.

A photographer's memoir

reviewed by Andrew Motion at the Guardian: it sounds strikingly well-written, and also includes descriptions of being sent to boarding school at age three and sex with his mother in his late teens. The book is Michael Ward's Mostly Women; looks like Amazon UK only?

William Empson's letters

selected and edited by John Haffenden and reviewed by Matthew Creasy at FT.com:

Two days after she gave birth to a child by her lover, Peter Duval Smith, poet and critic William Empson wrote to his wife:

My dearest Hetta,
Very glad to hear that all went well. I shall come home next Thursday 13th, and will visit you on the Friday (if they allow that, as they presumably do; no doubt Helena will know). Helena wrote and told me how things were going, also that she was improving Jacob's Latin.

Much love, and I am glad you are happy.
William

Lego mash-ups

Michael Chabon on Lego then and now:

By the late nineties, when we bought that first Indian set, abstraction was dead. A full-blown realism reigned supreme in the Legosphere. Legos were sold in kits that enabled one to put together, at fine scales, in detail made possible by a wild array of odd-shaped pieces, precise replicas of Ferrari Formula 1 racers, pirate galleons, jet airplanes. Lego provided not only the standard public-domain play environments supplied to children by toy designers of the past fifty to one hundred years�the Wild West, the middle ages, jungle and farm and city street--but also a line of licensed Star Wars kits, the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined environments derived from movies and other media. Instead of the printed booklets I remembered, featuring suggestions for the kinds of things one might want to try to make from his or her box of squares and rectangles, the new kits came encumbered with fat, abstruse, wordless manuals laying out, panel after numbered panel and page after page, the steps that must be followed if one hoped--and after all, why else would you nudge your dad into buying it for you?--to arrive, in the end, at a landspeeder just like Luke Skywalker's (only smaller). Where Lego building had once been an open-ended, exploratory kind, it now had far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward a ideal, pre-established solution.

The spirit of competition

Lionel Shriver on romantic partnership and competition at the Daily Mail. (Link via Return of the Reluctant.) It's the backstory to her excellent novel Double Fault, to be re-released in the US & the UK later this summer. (I've got more to say about the book but won't do so until the short review I wrote a few weeks ago is in print.)

Tonsilized

Hmmm, this may be a bit too X-rated for what is on the whole a mostly PG-13ish or R-rated blog (barring occasional excursions into Heather Lewis, Ken Bruen et al.), but Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair on the sex act that's as American as apple pie is worth a read. (Thanks to the New York Observer's guide to highbrow oral sex reportage.)

Tinned pineapple and glace cherries

It is an absurdity, but this paragraph in Trev Broughton's piece at the TLS on the novelist Elizabeth Taylor's relentless Englishness made my mouth water in nostalgic sympathy:

Food, in Taylor's fictions, becomes a battleground as well as an index of character. When, in A View of the Harbour, the successful novelist and chaotic housewife Beth accuses her husband of belittling her work ('an irritating and rather shameful habit'), she clinches the argument, and confounds her spouse, by adding triumphantly that there is nothing else to eat: 'The junket has not set and there is no cheese'. In a Summer Season's housekeeper, Mrs Meacock, has learnt her culinary skills from an American family: 'it was rare for a dish of meat to go to the dining-room without its rings of tinned pineapples'; she embellishes her glamorous whips, souffles and mousses with ostentatious glace cherries. Her spare time is devoted to compiling an anthology of 'Five Thousand and One Witty and Humorous Sayings': 'such a contented woman', thinks her self-absorbed employer, 'dividing her enthusiasm between puddings and literary work'. Despite the consoling omnipresence of cigarettes, fish and chips, and the 'desultory' biscuits served up to unwanted guests, to read Taylor's fiction is to encounter a vivid cultural history of the post-war English pudding. Julia feeds her sickly son arrowroot mould, but likes to get her recipes from good literature. She accommodates to wartime austerities by serving up baked apples from Villette. A Masonic ladies' night in the 1960s, in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, features a dessert named for the hostess: 'Peches Denise' turns out to be 'half a tinned peach sitting on sherry-soaked sponge cake'. The 1970s see the rise of petits fours and foreign cheese, of cheesecake smuggled in from the delicatessen, of ice cream in the freezer.

I am still fond of making luridly iced cupcakes, and when I was little my very favorite job at my English grandmother's house was decorating the sherry trifle: you blobbed on spoonfuls of whipped cream, then dotted each little mound with a slice of green angelica, a quarter of a glace cherry and two slivers of blanched almond (this was the ritual, sometimes disrupted if one of the ingredients had run short but otherwise impervious to alteration--also kept in the same tin were sugared violets and various other bits and bobs, some of which later ended up at my mother's house, things like the little cardinals and toadstools and so on that you prodded down into the icing-and-marzipan layer on top of a Christmas cake). The idea of these English sweets has me in their thrall, it is not that I actually want to eat them (I really don't like sherry trifle, I don't like custard or sherry and I only like cake insofar as it is an icing delivery system) but that things like iced gems were a once-every-two-years-when-we-went-to-England treat and accordingly quite irresistible though intrinsically rather cardboard/food-coloringy....

The human voice

Anne Karpf's new book excerpted at the Guardian:

Apart from humans, birds' vocalisations are vastly more complex and precisely modulated than those of any other animal. Most remarkably, songbirds too learn from experience. Some songbirds even have 'dialects' - defined, localised, particular acoustic features that are culturally transmitted. And songbirds come to use their voices only if they're exposed to the communicative signals of adults of their species. Just as human infants who don't hear the human voice or speech don't develop normal vocal capacities of their own, so songbirds raised in isolation produce abnormal 'isolate' songs.

On Trying to Keep Still

Just finished reading Jenny Diski's latest book, On Trying to Keep Still (UK release only, as far as I can tell); it's not perfect, but it's that something almost better than perfect that her books so often are (intelligent, grumpy, always stimulating, extremely funny, flawed/human--she reminds me very much of Rebecca West).

For some reason Diski's writing creates in me the feeling of a special affinity, though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's just one of her talents & all her readers feel like that. In any case this book is just up my alley, travel writing by someone who prefers to stay at home reading in bed (and she goes to visit the Sami people in Lapland, my obsession; even her freezing-coldness--and, worse, her words of scorn for Swedish-tourism-for-rich-people & the ice hotel--cannot stop me from desperately wanting to go to the ice hotel, apparently if you get too cold you can move into a regular heated cabin though I feel that I would never forgive myself for copping out; Diski admits to feeling "a faint flutter of thrill" on these moonlit journeys over ice, although she claims that her sense of adventure is a segment of herself "as thin as a slice of proscuitto" and her description of the awfulness of having to go outside to pee when you are female and spending the night in a nightmarishly frigid and sort-of-open-to-the-air reindeer tent is truly horrifying).

(NB the next book I must read now has been sitting here for a while & has now jumped to top of queue on basis of Diski reindeer scenes, Piers Vitebsky's The Reindeer People.)

Anyway, here are some of my favorite passages from the book, which is a collection of linked essays (of somewhat variable quality--perhaps the one that works best as a self-standing piece is "On anatomy," they're all really rather captivating though) written during Diski's year of trying to keep still and mentally idle, a year in which the search for idleness and stillness nonetheless took her to New Zealand, Lapland and (almost more extreme than the others--two months in a cottage...) the English countryside.

On bungee-jumping:

For most of the history of the world, it has been the goal of humanity to attempt to get up into the air and stay there for as long as possible. Up was always the desired direction. The Babel builders wanted the heavens not the depths. Up. The big idea of Daedalus was to fly, not to fall. Up. Icarus may seem to be the patron saint of freefall, but at the time of his maiden flight he was a tragic failure. We looked at the birds with envy, longing to find a way to emulate them, not at the nasty mess under the tree that was all that remained of an incautious monkey that had been trying to make its way amongst the branches of the canopy. Apes were so pleased to get on to solid ground that they stood up on two feet and beame hominids capable of clapping their hands and dancing a jig of happiness. Only the desperate jumped from great heights, and they expected to do it just the once.

From an essay "On taking walks" (which might more aptly have been titled "On not going for walks"):

The exhortation of others works wonders of indolence on me. Fresh air, nature in its season or the adrenalin rush of the inner city, when pressed on me, though I don't doubt their charms and excitements, make me shrink in my chair, wishing the room smaller, the windows shaded, the chair deeper, the door locked. Leave me alone, was, I think, born with me, my invisible twin, before language, when company was nothing but an incoherent threat of alteration. Leave me alone must have been my embryonic remonstration with whom-or-what-ever it may concern about the whole damn bother and dislocation of being born, and it stuck. I was not born idle, I was foetally idle. I can imagine with a clarity far more piercing than memory the dreadful initial interruption that signalled the end of my perfect, timeless, still existence. I like small rooms; I love to float and hate to swim--I am temperamentally suited to uterine life.

Here's an opening salvo from the essay appealingly titled "On spiders and respect for sheep" (this one I totally sympathize with, I always feel like this though I know it's completely irrational):

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

That last sentence is amazingly good, isn't it? "I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future." Hmmm....

And I am left with the picture of Diski irritably giving in and sweeping (with a broom, dustpan and brush left int he corner) the autumn leaves off the flags of a "redundant" church in the countryside near that cottage:

I really hoped no one would come in and see me. It was an act of tidiness, but to someone coming through the door I would look like a devout parishioner dusting and arranging the flowers at her local church. It would appear to be an act for God whereas it was actually an act for neatness. Which was bad enough. A human taking a hand in the battle of nature versus indoors. Sweeping away the leaves in this redundant church was an obsessively human act. I wouldn't have wanted it either misunderstood or even simply witnessed. I would not have wanted anyone to think that I was either giving thanks or tidying up. I do so hate the idea of being good.

On an unrelated note, posting will probably be lightish round here in the next couple weeks; I've got a fiendishly huge amount of work-related reading to do, I firmly and puritanically plan on reading very few novels though I expect I will give in once or twice a week and read one anyway. Puritanical discipline will be needed; in fact I've got only twelve weeks or so to write all the rest of my book about breeding & nature & nurture in the eighteenth century and revise the manuscript for a mid-September submission date, which will mean working like a maniac all summer. Fortunately there is really nothing I enjoy more than reading and writing like a maniac; but I expect the blog will suffer. In any case I can't write about the real work stuff as I come to it, it takes the edge off the writing, but I expect I will come across various funny passages that can't get squeezed into the chapter (I've got about 15 eighteenth-century books about horse-breeding, for instance) and that accordingly may make an appearance here if I find them irresistible. So I'm not planning on vanishing, just more short posts with links and fewer long ones like this.