The Irresistible Lotus and the Complaints Choir

I headed off to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in Washington with my family last weekend, amidst my usual flurried cacophony of activity: nonstop Olympics-watching, course prep for next semester and worrying about being behind in my course prep for next semester, practicing driving in preparation for acquiring my license. You might very well wonder how I got to a doctorate-getting age without ever earning the legal right to drive. The answer is a potent combination of circumstances: living in cities that are very pedestrian friendly, having very kindly friends who are willing to help on the relatively infrequent occasions when I need a ride, and the keen awareness of the fragility of my own mortality that hits me like an anvil whenever I get behind the wheel of a car.

Luckily I am beginning to get over that.

At any rate, I practice-drove out to Kenilworth with my parents and our friends - my first visit, and a stunner.

The lotuses were out, and according to our friend, just ever so slightly past their peak.

This meant that there was a marvelous array of buds, full blooms, explosively full blooms, and "shower heads" on stalks.


The blooms were endlessly fascinating, each its own unique intricate sculpture.

You could understand how easy it would be to fall into artistic absorption with them, O'Keefe-like.

The gardens were also filled with different varieties of birds and butterflies (slightly more difficult to photograph, and thus not in evidence here): herons, ducks, geese. A few monarchs were even making their gleaming way through.

In fact, they are apparently having quite the problem with a non-migratory and highly aggressive flock of geese that has taken up residence here and are driving everything else off. The solution? An NGO is oiling their eggs, so they never hatch. Who would have thunk it?

If you are in the DC area, take a gander at the gardens: they are in an unexpected neighborhood for tourists and even residents, but as a result they rate high on the "haven" meter. Also, like so many of the best things in Washington, they are part of the National Park Service and free to enter.

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Additional links and tidbits? Mais oui!

• Harold Meyerson has an interesting opinion piece in today's Washington Post about the Olympics. In it, he makes a number of the same observations about the opening ceremonies that I did in my last post, but is rather more alarmed and skeptical about their implications:

  If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou's opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.

• In the LA Times, about a month ago (I am still working through the back list of interesting tidbits I have noted during the busyness of the summer), Charles McNulty talks about the perils of critical deadlines, and the impulsive writing they can produce:

  Harder for a critic to cope with are the failures of language that are an inevitable byproduct of rapid-fire daily journalism. In a morning skirmish with adjectives, as my review of "Curtains" at the Ahmanson Theatre was already past deadline, I concluded by saying that for all its faults, the musical has a delirious showbiz quality that's "irresistible." That final word, blurbed as it inevitably was in newspaper ads, overstated my feelings. What I meant to say was "hard to resist" -- and the distinction, hairsplitting though it may sound, was a source of purgatorial torment to me.

• In the Times of London, Neil Fischer recounts his experience with the phenomenon of the "complaints choir":

  In Finland, where the movement began, valituskuoro, or chorus of complaints, was what angry schoolteachers called recalcitrant pupils, until Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and his wife Tellervo decided to take the expression at literal value. In the UK, they naturally drifted to Birmingham first (“the city with most complaints about the people themselves”, Kochta-Kalleinen says). It got its first complaints choir in 2005, at around the same time as Helsinki and St Petersburg. The simple formula - meet, moan, set it to (mostly original) music - proved wildly popular and easily exportable. There are now complaints choirs from Jerusalem to Buenos Aires, Budapest to Toronto. Some take requests from their local communities for complaints; others simply draw on their own miseries.

Olympics, corpse flowers, and musical bilingualism

I come out of the depths of blog absence to tell you this: I love the Olympics. I am that person who watches the entire opening ceremonies and weeps voluminously when tiny or embattled countries parade with their one or two athletes. This year's games made me really nervous for the same reasons that were worrying everyone: the poor environmental conditions, Chinese policy on Tibet and Sudan, the revoking of visas for athletes who spoke out against Chinese policy, the government's insistence that hotels allow them to spy on foreign guests, etc.

All this remains troubling (very troubling), but otherwise the Olympics seems to be unfolding as it should: a means of connecting athletes and viewers across national boundaries, of expanding our normal way of thinking about patriotism and national identity so that they incorporate concepts of internationalism, cooperation, and mutual enjoyment. How many other circumstances of mutual positive emotion come close to the international idealism of the opening ceremonies? Our moments of mass theatricality, of cultural spectacle, are usually limited to the peripheries of conflict (political or warlike) and are tinged with its violence and nastiness. The Games provide an opportunity for us to bask in the purely positive emotions of world community.

The opening ceremonies were an unprecedentedly classy self-representation on a grand scale by the host nation. 2008 people doing absolutely simultaneous Tai Chi motions in perfect circles unguided by any markings on the floor of the "Bird's Nest" stadium - they formed the shapes with absolute precision based only on a knowledge of where they should be located in comparison to their neighbors. Traditional drummers playing instruments with an ancient history whose motions also triggered the most modern of lighting effects. The whole spectacle spoke internally to a subtle array of Chinese values (a strong strain of Confucianism was undoubtedly much more layered in its symbolism than the English-language commentators had the time to convey) but also externally (to non-Chinese viewers) to the core concepts of Chinese self conception: We are the nation, it seemed to say, who invented paper, printing, and fireworks, but we will marry this history to the most cutting edge of spectacular technologies. And, even more crucially: as a nation our greatest resource is our people, and as a people we do unity really, really well. This obsessive emphasis on precision unity was the foundation of all the most spectacular effects of the opening ceremonies, but it also yielded most of the controversies that surrounded the games, controversies born out of a zeal for universal agreement.


Ah, but what stories have emerged in the first couple of days. There is the 33 year old gymnast who may give Germany a medal in the vault; she has been competing in the Olympics for as many years as most of her competitors have been alive. The American flag-bearer who was one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan and only became an American citizen a year ago. Talk about an amazing display of national self-conception: we said to the world, "We are a country in which a new citizen, seeking out refuge from persecution, is as much an American as someone whose family has been here for hundreds of years." Would that it were more extensively true. Also from the opening ceremonies: the little boy who survived the Szechuan earthquake and returned to the wreckage to rescue his classmates (because, he said, it was his responsibility as one of the designated class leaders). He led the Chinese delegation in the opening games, walking confidently beside basketball superstar Yao Ming (who seemed considerably more ill at ease than his tiny companion) as millions watched. Or from just last night: an American triumph over a (mildly) trash-talking French team in the 100m relay that went against all probability. It produced not just Michael Phelps's second gold of the games but also made the delightful Cullen Jones (whose joy in teaching won the support of everyone in my house) the second African-American to win gold in an Olympic swimming event. The relay (the link above is to the video) was by far the most exciting race of the Olympics so far: the world record was so resolutely shattered that even teams who didn't medal managed to beat it.

Well, I could go on and on. But instead, some links that have been sitting on the back burner for far too long. I need to get them off my chest so that I can (in good conscience) go back to checking all my favorite blogs, and summarizing their glories in a new list of links:

• All those engaged in acquiring a master's or doctorate will appreciate this Onion article that my friend JG sent me: "Heroic Computer Dies to Save World from Master's Thesis." It may, however, be funniest when your thesis or dissertation is finally turned in and safe from the "heroics" of your computer.
• A giant corpse flower bloomed at the Botanical Gardens in Berkeley in July! If the words "giant corpse flower" are not enough to pique your interest, consider this: the name of this specific giant corpse flower is "Odoardo." For pictures intriguingly labeled "Odoardo's decaying body" and for other information, see the University of California website.
• A bilingual revival of "West Side Story" is set to open on Broadway this winter, under the direction of Arthur Laurents, who seems to feel that his original book for the musical had undergone a taming transformation in its various stagings and filmings over the years.
• The World Archeological Congress urged its members in July to refuse any requests by the military for guidance on how to avoid bombing priceless historical sites in Iran. I am confused about my own opinion on the ethics of this: is a stance of non-collaboration with war efforts that will inevitably cause tremendous cultural and human damage worth the cost of greater harm to unique archaeological sites? The WAC seems to think that any advice from them wouldn't be heeded, so perhaps it is a moot point.

More soon, I hope! (If I can tear myself away from the Olympics coverage.)

Another Review (!!), this time of "Translucent Tree"

Stop me if you've heard this one, but I seem to recall that judging a book by its cover is generally frowned upon. Or perhaps that was a metaphor for some wider sphere of human behavior. At any rate, I have to tell you that I have sinned against the commandant that forbids cover-judging: the new Vertical edition of Translucent Tree, by Japanese novelist Nobuko Takagi (whose work is translated for the first time into English here) has a truly stunning cover design. A fanned spray of pine needles graces the golden front cover, the word "Translucent" lurking quietly next to it. The transparent (and thus, of necessity, translucent) dust jacket layers a pine cone on top of this fan, and echoes the "Transparent" with a word on the other side of this botanical embrace: "{TREE}". It is lovely, I judged it, and I bumped this up the queue of my LibraryThing Early Reviewer books. I blush to admit it.

Not as much as I blush to contemplate this: I encouraged my octogenarian grandmother (a great appreciater of any well-designed thing) to read the book, on the basis of the cover alone. I did this despite the fact that every book I have ever loaned to my grandmother without reading it first has proved to be among the most luridly erotic books in my library. Now, my grandmother is no prude. But still, I can imagine she would have been somewhat surprised (though probably her reaction would have stopped well short of alarm) at the anatomical explicitness of the love scenes in Translucent Tree, a novel in which love is fixedly, defensively, obsessively defined by the two protagonists in the most bluntly sexual of terms, as if physicality alone could keep the real world at bay.

Chigiri first met filmmaker Go decades ago when he assisted in the making of a documentary about her father, one of a dying generation of great swordsmiths in Japan. She was just a teenager, lurking at the edges of the filming. On an impulse, the middle-aged Go returns to their town years later and seeks out the elderly swordsmith, who now suffers from the bewilderment of Alzheimer's, and Chigiri, now divorced with a daughter of her own. They are confused by the desire that strikes them both (a coup de foudre, as the French would say), so they begin to refer and joke about it in the least vulnerable terms possible: Go offers the impoverished Chigiri money on a kindly whim, and when she asks him why, he bluntly admits that he wants her. He says it in such a way, however, that rather than emphasizing the tenderness of the impulse, he equates it to the purchase of her body. Alright, she says boldly, I will sell myself to you. He wants to backtrack to a more literary route for their romance, but it is too late: they have committed themselves to the narrative of prostitution and it is only through economies of sex and cash that they can express their love.

This is a bold narrative strategy, and it provides a suitable degree of torment to consume the characters throughout the novella. As you can probably imagine, it is a jarring and not entirely satisfying novel to read. There is a minimalism here that I associate (in my very limited experience with the translated literature of this nation) with a certain school of Japanese literature, and when it is combined with the straightforward physicality of the love scenes, the result can be somewhat alienating. This might be an effect of the translation process, or it might be an intentional device of the author's. Indeed, this is a novel that refuses us any of the conventions of romantic fiction: the lovers are middle-aged and riddled with physical flaws, they are adulterers with little time to spend with one another and no prospect of "ending up together," they place their interactions intentionally in the most self-consciously debased of terms and create transcendence out of this debasement, and we see their physical and mental disintegration vividly over the course of the 188 pages of the novel. So yes, perhaps Nobuko Takagi is intentionally cultivating an alienating and alienated style.

An interesting novel, if not an enjoyable one. Quietly unconventional, while avoiding flamboyant innovation.

A Review (!) of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

It has been a while since I have posted a straight-up review, hasn't it? Well, here you have it!

The protagonist of Mohsin Hamid's Booker-nominated novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist approaches a foreign stranger on the streets of Lahore and declares himself "a lover of America." "I noticed you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services" (1).

Over an uncomfortable meal, this "lover of America" unfolds his amorous tale: his absorption in the romance of American college life; his obsessive friendship with a Princeton classmate who (like the nation which she stands in for erotically in the mind of Hamid's hero Changez) is creatively brilliant, thoughtlessly privileged, and terminally nostalgic in the most painfully literal of ways; his fundamentalist devotion and radical disillusionment with the religion of capitalism in his first job with an elite corporate risk appraisal firm.

Changez actually strives both to attract and repel his audience. He is travelling internationally for business on September 11, 2001, and he recounts his reaction to this assault on his national beloved with an unusual level of starkness:

I stared as one - and then the other - of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.

Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. But please believe me when I tell you that I am no sociopath; I am not indifferent to the suffering of others. [...]

But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack - death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes - no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. (72-3)

I read this passage and felt the very surge of anger the narrator observes in his interlocutor, but this is knee jerk anger, unconcerned with Hamid's interest in how symbolism works up and is worked by individuals. In fact, I was reluctant to quote this section, which seeks to enrage with its forthrightness, when so few of my readers would have the context of the previous 71 pages of sympathetic, studious, enamored politeness (boardering frequently on an excruciatingly comprehensible but hardly justified self-loathing) of Changez's first years in the States to mitigate the impact.

The novel is told by Changez in an unusual mix of first and second persons, and the relationship this establishes between the protagonist and his unknown, unspeaking new American acquaintance is both the great strength and great weakness of the novel. Second person narrative is a notoriously difficult tool to wield: here it results in a lot of "You look [insert emotional response here]. You must be thinking [insert stereotypical and stereotyping American attitude here]" moments in Changez's conversation. Each time one of these arrises the narrative jars with gimmicky resonance.

On the other hand, the mystery of this encounter drives the short book forward with increasing urgency: How random is their meeting in Lahore? Who is the American, and what is he doing there? Is his perpetual distrust of Changez and the other Pakistanis they encounter merely the jumpiness of a stranger in a strange land? Is it prejudice? Or does he have good cause to think that people mean him harm? Is Changez's account of his reactions even to be trusted, or does it (and perhaps even Hamid's novel?) rely too strongly on broadly stereotyped American behaviors? We are encouraged by the conventions of the novel to sympathize with Changez (the narrator) while also being implicitly identified with his unpleasant, frightened, and voiceless audience. This speaks volumes about the unusual relationship with readers that Hamid is setting up here. Will the effect of this device differ if the reader is not (like the "tourist" Changez directs his tale to in Lahore, and like me) American? The ambiguities of this relationship add a great deal of complexity to what can sometimes seem a too-straightforward novel that retreads ground covered abundantly by the American and international media. To uphold these complexities, I wished for an even more ambiguous ending than the rather striking one Hamid gives.

If any of you have read the novel, I would love to hear what you think about this relationship between Changez and his American interlocutor, what this does to the way we feel about ourselves as readers, or how effective the ending of the novel was in the spoiler-welcoming comments.

The SECOND Unread Authors Challenge

Behold! The Second Unread Authors Challenge is upon us!

Last year I ran this challenge from September to February, and the premise was this: almost all of us have authors who we have long meant to read, but somehow never gotten around to (you can see a long list of mine at the bottom right of the blog). Perhaps you have always been intrigued but intimidated by their work. Perhaps "required reading" and your favorite authors have taken up most of your time. Perhaps they have been sitting on your shelves for years, continually trumped by new fascinations. Well, now is their time.

The rules:

1. The challenge will run from August 1, 2008 to January 31, 2009. You may join at any time before or during those six months.
2. During those six months, read at least SIX books by an author whose work you have never read before.
3. You may choose six different "unread" authors to introduce yourself to, or you may choose just one or two and explore their work in greater depth.
4. Authors may be drawn from any genre of literature. The only requirement is that they be authors whose work you substantially regret not having read yet.
5. Your choices may overlap with other challenges you have underway.
   

To join the challenge or to get ideas from the posts of last year's participants, go to the Challenge Blog. You will find instructions on how to join in the post at the top of the blog.

Last year I failed spectacularly in my goals (amidst, in my own defense, the madness the surrounded the completion of my dissertation), so I will address my list this year with new found zeal. Many parts of my lists will remain the same from last year, although I was spurred on (during at after the period of the challenge) to read a number of authors from my list.

I list six authors on the primary list below with (in parentheses) ideas about which book I might start with). After that I have listed a number of "extra credit" or alternate authors/works.

• Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy)
• Friedrich Durrenmatt (The Physicians or The Visit)
• Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red)
• Richard Powers (The Gold Bug Variations)
• China Mieville (Perdido Street Station)
• Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

Alternates/Extra Credit:

• John Fowles (The Magus)
• Joyce Carol Oates (Bellefleur)
  
• Stendhal (The Red and the Black)
• Iris Murdoch (The Black Prince)
• Nadine Gordimer (Burger's Children)
• Tim Winton (Cloudstreet or Dirt Music)
• Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang)
• Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)
• Caryl Phillips (Crossing the River)
• J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace)
  

The Pie of Dorian Gray, and other tidbits

Last week I made a pie. My first ever pie. Not one to be lured in by a classic recipe, I decided instead that my first attempt should be with a Meyer Lemon Shaker Pie. It sounded so delicious! And I had these lemons from the farmer's market that D instantly identified as Meyer lemons.

It was a beautiful pie. What can I say: this was an ideal pie for television. It was perfectly flaky-golden-crusty, with terribly authentic-looking crimps along the edges and holes cut in the top. There was just one problem: it was inedible. I don't want to blame this wholly on D's lemon-identification abilities, but those suckers were not Meyer lemons. Of course, D would probably blame the eye-crossing bitterness of the pie filling on the fact that I left the peel on the lemons. Look: the recipe didn't say to peel the damn things, and it is part and parcel of my manically literary way of relating to the world that I am an exact, some might say obsessive-compulsive, follower of recipes. (D, by contrast, went into the kitchen last night and made a delicious pesto and an odd but highly intriguing spiced, mashed yam dish without ever making reference to anything but his own whims.)

To his credit, however, D did perform (I choose my verb carefully here) the supreme act of love when I gave him the first slice of the photogenic, but deeply bitter pie. [It seems appropriate, since I am now in LA after several weeks' stay in London, that the food I make should feature Hollywood surfaces that skillfully conceal acerbic, neurotic inner lives. That's right, my pie had an inner life. It was my first EVER pie, alright?] He admired its appearance thoroughly, then gamely took the first bite. "Mmm...," he said, miraculously avoiding pulling a face of horror, "Tasty. The, um, crust is particularly good."

I took my first bite. "It is AWFUL!!" I yelled, at the top of my lungs. "No, no!" he replied, "Just a bit sour, that's all."

And then, when it became clear that we weren't going to be able to eat a second bite of the Pie of Dorian Gray, he (recipe-liberated as I have told you he is) tried to make sorbet out of the innards. And it was still awful. "That pie," I told D, "has broken my heart. Not the heart that loves you, but a separate 'pie' heart. It is like when I was little, and I convinced my parents that I had a separate 'dessert stomach' that explained how I could be too full to finish my dinner but still have plenty of room for dessert. My pie heart is broken. I may never love again."

So the next night, I just sat in front of the TV, despondent, and ate my empty, beautiful pie crust.

And that, my friends, is an allegory for life in Los Angeles.

~ ~ ~ ~

Other tidbits, many of which have been on my "To Blog" list for some time:

I am newly in love with the Apartment Therapy blog and its culinary sibling The Kitchn. While I was in London, The Kitchn introduced me to a delightful concept of the Iron Chef Party, in which guests are invited to participate in a cooking smackdown, eithers as chefs or judges. I love Iron Chef in both its Japanese and American incarnations, so I am saddened to think of how unlikely it is that I will be able to host such a party in the foreseeable future.

~ ~ ~ ~

Speaking of the foreseeable future, D brought this story to my attention with a level of enthusiasm that made me nervous that perhaps splinter-nationhood loomed in our future together: the lone inhabitant of a small Shetland island has declared independence from the UK. He calls his domain Forvik, and there is some good news for all the truly idealistic libertarians out there: he is opening his country's doors to new Forvikians!

"I also invite anyone from any country in the world, who supports these aims, namely to become free of liars, thieves and tyrants in government, to become a citizen of Forvik," he added.

~ ~ ~ ~

There is much more to be said, but that's all I have time for right now, I am sorry to say. I have to return to the Peach Caramel Pie I have in the oven. Hope springs eternal in the human pie-heart.

Book Awards Reading Challenge... the Second!

The time has come for another Book Awards Reading Challenge! And, lucky for me, I failed so spectacularly at completing the first one that my list of possibilities is extremely easy to formulate this time: my list for the second challenge will largely consist of the unread books from the first challenge, with a few key additions. What a delightful challenge, and what a joy to get a second chance at completing it!

You can read about the challenge in greater detail (and sign up for it) at the challenge's blog, but the basic rules (as laid out on the blog) are these:

1. Read 10 award winners from August 1, 2008 through June 1, 2009.


2. You must have at least FIVE different awards in your ten titles.


3. Overlaps with other challenges are permitted.


4. You don't have to post your choices right away, and your list can change at any time.


5. 'Award winners' is loosely defined; make the challenge fit your needs, keeping in mind Rule #2.

And here is the "list of possibilities" from which I will draw my ten titles:

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (NBCC Award, Pulitzer Prize)
  
• Small Island by Andrea Levy (Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Costa/Whitbread, Orange Prize)
  
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Hugo Award)
  
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (Nebula Award)
  
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (Hugo Award, Nebula Award)
  
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize)
  
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (Booker Prize, Miles Franklin Literary Award)
  
• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (Booker Prize)
  
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (Giller Prize)
  
• March by Geraldine Brooks (Pulitzer Prize)
  
• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (The Governor General's Prize, Pulitzer Prize)
  
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Booker Prize)
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Alex Award)
• The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Costa/Whitbread)
• The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (Edgar Award)
• The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart (The Governor General's Prize)
• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (IMPAC Dublin)
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (IMPAC Dublin, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize)
• Saturday by Ian McEwan (James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• Looking for Alaska by John Green (Printz Award)
  

Such is my need to work through my ginormous TBR pile that I made it a criteria of inclusion on this list that I must actually OWN a copy of the book. And still I needed to weed the list pretty heavily to get it down to 20 possibilities.

For those of you who love a good challenge, keep an eye out for my second "Unread Authors" challenge, which will run from August to January, and which I will be announcing (officially) soon!

The Things to be Learned at Mark Twain's Hearth

Apologies for my long absence: I have been out of the country, with extremely shaky internet access and a distinct lack of free time. But more on that soon: first, a long promised tale.

Virtually my first action as a doctor was to undertake a visit to the home of Mark Twain (who clearly could rock the academic attire with the best of us) an easy drive from my university home of the past six years, but one (since I am not a driver) that I have never made. So, naturally, after a perfect party thrown by my delightful friends and family, after robing and hooding and receiving my diploma, after almost everyone had gone home and D had headed off to Philadelphia on a 24 hour work trip, where else would my parents and I go but the very eccentric home of Samuel Clemens, whom my father happens to resemble to an uncanny degree.

In fact, I was disappointed when only a couple of our fellow visitors remarked on the likeness. It must be admitted that the resemblance was strongest when my father was in his twenties and had not yet grown a goatee. This choice of facial hair and a reluctance to don white linen suits as Clemens self-consciously did in his later years means that although Père Sycorax at college age almost exactly resembled the photo to the right, he currently looks only distantly like the older Twain shown above.

At any rate, off we went to the home of my father's doppelganger, which, it turns out, is a very interesting house indeed. When he bought the house, Clemens was not yet a successful writer, having sold just a few pieces. He bought and built it with his wife's money (she had a considerably more genteel upbringing than her husband), which unfortunately ran out just as the house was constructed but before it was decorated. When they finally scrounged up enough money for the decoration, their dreams were glamorous but their budget was still small. As a result, the social rooms of the house are models of trompe l'oeil tricksiness, with (for instance) elaborately painted enamel covering all the surfaces of the entrance hall, which then appeared to be absolutely awash in expensive mother-of-pearl inlay. A sign of how struck Clemens was by the luxuries of his new home: The bed in the master bedroom is made up backwards, with the pillows at the foot. Apparently Clemens was insistant that, having paid so much money to secure a beautiful bed, he wasn't going to be cheated out of the sight of its best feature, the headboard.

Other tidbits to be learned at the Mark Twain house:

• A man of exuberant glibness, his truest truism (or at least my favorite) may be: "An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth." How visceral...

• Clemens loved Hartford for the sobriety of its citizens and its extensive green spaces, and he reportedly considered it one of the most beautiful places in America. This may come as something of a shock to those who know the modern Hartford.

• Clemens was never quite comfortable in the strict, formal world of society in which his genteel wife and he moved. At dinner parties, his children would play a "game" that involved hiding behind a screen in the room that adjoined the dining room, and signaling to their mother when they saw "papa" committing a faux pas (monopolizing one guest's conversation, for instance, while ignoring another). His wife would then say, "My dear, did you happen to see the card I left out for you?" and Clemens would know that he had wandered into dangerous social territory.
  

• You can see in the photo above that the house is possessed of an abundance of intriguing balconies on the attic floor. This floor, apart from the butler's room, was entirely taken up by Twain's study, which, with its desk, billiard table, and perpetual haze of cigar smoke, was deemed so offensively masculine by Mrs. Clemens that she would never allow women or children onto the third floor. Twain was so social in the house that he despaired of getting any work done, and he eventually instructed the butler to tell all visitors that the master of the house had stepped out. As soon as Mrs. C. caught wind of this, she paid her husband a little visit: did he realize, she asked, that he was actually lying to guests in his home, and that if these lies became known, no one would ever trust them again? He was perturbed, and soon gave his butler new instructions: if the guest was someone Clemens didn't care to talk to, the butler should tell him or her that the author had "Just stepped out" as before. As he was carrying this message back to the guest, Clemens would step right out onto one of these many balconies with his cigar, and wait there until the guest left. What a truth-teller!

• The Clemenses left the house after many happy years there in a morass of financial difficulty that made it an impossible burden to maintain. They toured Europe (Twain, like Dickens, was a famous performer of his own work) in increasing financial comfort. Many years later, their eldest daughter Suzy decided to return to Hartford to visit with friends and family, and she stayed in the house. While she was there, she contracted spinal meningitis and died. The Clemenses were an extremely close family, and they were undone by this news. When they did return permanently to America, they never felt they could live in the house without Suzy. Twain entered a serious depression. Eight years later Mrs. Clemens died, and Twain and his daughter Clara (the only member of his family to survive him) cared for his epileptic daughter Jean until her death five years after that. The post-Hartford years were hard ones for the Clemens family.

• I will leave you on a jollier note, however, with this picture of Twain's favorite room of the house (and mine), the library. Twain was (as you might imagine) a voracious bibliophile, although I can't agree with every aspect of his taste. He famously despised Jane Austen, saying, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." (Does anyone else find it delightful that amidst this flamboyant, overinvested act of criticism, Twain admits that he has nonetheless read P&P multiple times?) On the lefthand side of the picture above, you can see the glass of a small greenhouse that forms the end of the library. This room was the space in which the Clemens family spent most of their time together, reading or, when the children were small, pretending that the trees and plants in the greenhouse were a jungle, and that "papa" and the butler were ferocious beasts for them to hunt and ride. Oh for a library/jungle of my very own!

A postscript: In the aftermath of my delightful visit to the Mark Twain House, I was alarmed to see this article about the dire financial straits that historic houses in America (including Twain's and Edith Wharton's) find themselves in. If you get a chance to stop in and support these landmarks and museums, grab it!

Doctor Sycorax, I presume

Let's see, what have I gotten up to since last we spoke? Oh yes ... I became a doctor.



Not, admittedly, the useful sort of doctor who can prescribe medicines, take out your diseased appendix, or moderate your neuroses (although I feel I have from time to time performed that last cure for some of my students). I can't give you any advice about strange rashes that might recently have broken out all over your arms, but if you are being kept awake in the middle of the night with questions about the status of national theatre movements in the twentieth century, then by god I would be willing to point you in the right direction.

Yes, that is me in the center of the above photo, making my speedy way through a congratulatory line of professors from my department mere moments after receiving the diploma from the Dean of the Graduate School (the man in red in the bottom left). And, yes indeed, I am wearing a ceremonial velvet tam o'shanter, and, frankly, I think I am rockin' it. Not to mention the doctoral hood, which D insists I must wear as a hood over my head, in a manner which makes me look like something straight out of Tolkien (Sycorax the Cerulean?).

The highlight of the ceremonies? Well, perhaps it was a moment during the Graduate School's convocation when the chosen speaker, an expert on China, was reflecting on how little he knew about the country or its language when he first came to graduate school. At a certain point, he adopted a more somber tone to speak about his beloved mentors, who, he said, had themselves been graduate students in Beijing at the time of Pearl Harbor. With the outbreak of war, they were rounded up as enemy aliens and confined to internment camps. No sooner had the words "internment camps" left his lips, then my parents' cell phone went off. Embarassing? Excruciatingly. All the more so because my parents' ringtone is the sound of an exuberantly clucking chicken.

For a moment I wondered, in the recesses of semi-conscious thought, why I had never noticed that there was a flock of chickens in the courtyard of the Hall of Graduate Studies. Then, in horror, I turned around to see my father (who never carries the cell phone, and thus doesn't have that instinctive urge to turn it off at the start of solemn events), perplexedly patting his pockets to determine the location of the offending poultry commotion.

Or perhaps the highlight was the fact that I received my doctorate in tandem with a Beatle:

Sir Paul (or should I now call him Dr. Sir Paul?) was receiving an honorary doctorate in Music, and was subjected to an endless stream of terrible wordplay based on the Beatles canon.

Or, for that matter, perhaps it was the sight of the Forestry graduates, whose commencement headgear instantly made them my favorite of the professional schools:


Well, there are more tales to be told of post-commencement activities, including a visit to Mark Twain's house, but they will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, I will savor the exhilarating joys of trying to figure out how to spend the gift-cards to bookstores that I received as graduation gifts. Mmm... new books.

Delighted Listiness

You know how I love a good list - of books and of films, in particular. Seeing a "best of" list makes my hands just itch to take up a highlighter and mark off the ones I have already read/seen, and to formulate grotesquely idealistic plans for devouring the remaining works.

Thus the implicit challenge in the titles of the books 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die was the red flag before the bull of my list addiction from the moment the tomes were published. I have been pursuing the completion of both lists for years now, and have made some significant progress, especially in the films list, which I have been conquering in roughly chronological order (I have been stalled out since in the mid-50s, I am sad to say, since the great dissertation crunch of early spring.).

This obsession was lent a new fervor when, a couple of weeks ago, I encountered a site that contains a downloadable spreadsheet of the "1001 Books" list. I had a spreadsheet before, I admit geekily, but nothing like this. This sucker allows you to mark off the books you have read, and tallies them up for you automatically. You then enter your age, and it tells you - based on your gender, and with an actuary's grim sense of prophecy - how many books you need to read a year in order to complete the list before you drop dead.

I need to read 16 a year.

"That's not so bad!" my mother assured me.

"It's more than one a month!" I mewled in panic. "And some of these books are, like, $%#*ing Finnegan's Wake!"

So my zeal for the list has been revived. I added a slew of the twentieth century books to my BookMooch wishlist, and took stock of the immense pile of "1001 Books" I already own. I began to consider (savoring the experience like a gourmand lingers over a scoop of foie gras) what the most evenhanded method of attack would be. I recalled Mee's new challenge, which asks participants to tackle the list in sub-lists of ten, choosing one from every group of ten in a grouping of 100 books from the list. But I couldn't confine myself to any group of 100. Sigh.

So here is my new approach (we will see how long it sticks):

1. Divide the list of 1001 into groups of 20, chronologically.
2. Choose one book to read from each group of 20.
3. Starting with the earliest group of 20, progress through my chosen works. When I reach and complete the most recent group, return to step 2.

Here is how the beginning of my new list looks:

• Don Quixote - already halfway completed. Of course, that means I still have about 400 pages left to wrassle with.
• Tristram Shandy
• The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Ivanhoe
• The Charterhouse of Parma
• Walden
• Our Mutual Friend
• Far from the Madding Crowd
• King Solomon's Mines
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Lord Jim
• The Jungle
• Ethan Frome
• The Age of Innocence
• The Professor's House
• Swann's Way
  
• The Sound and the Fury
• The Glass Key
• Tender is the Night
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
• Embers
• Cry, the Beloved Country
• The Memoirs of Hadrian
• Watt
• A World of Love
  

Summer, with all its travel, might prove to be a tricksy time to start this sort of a project, since lugging around tomes the size of Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy can be a bit of an unwieldy prospect. We will see how it goes, and whether I manage to keep up a pace of about a book and a half a month.

On the theme of women's achievements (and alienated computers)

I have been blog-absent for several weeks, to my very great regret. What have I been up to in this period of dead air?

Well, first the absence-motivating event: my computer lost the ability to recognize its own power cord. After the academic year I've had, I frankly sympathized with its general alienation from even the idea of energy. But this alienation left me sadly computerless and internet-isolated for a couple of weeks, as I sent it away to be repaired. The latter end of this period coincided rather disastrously with the densest grading time of the semester, so by the time my computer was returned I had a couple of piles of assignments waiting to be analyzed and processed. Still, if the eMidlife iCrisis of my wee laptop had occurred just a couple of months earlier, during the Final Dissertation Push, the psychic consequences would have been infinitely more dire. So I feel strangely grateful that the old thing held itself together for long enough to see me through my own crisis time.

In the meantime, I attended my tenth high school reunion. I went to what might best be described in hyphen-saturated terms as an achievement-obsessed, all-girls, mildly-religious school, a school which is rumored to have been the primary source of research material for Queen Bees and Wannabees, the book that inspired the film Mean Girls. For most of the past ten years, amidst my college and grad school friends' tales of high school experiences defined by isolation and bullying, I had managed to construct quite a rosy mental picture of my own time in high school, one in which the term "academic rigor" made frequent appearances, the concept of "cliques" appeared not at all, and I fondly recalled the fact that I used to wear one of my several capes (I was a theater person, which naturally yields the corollary that I was, in a broader sense, a drama person) to school regularly without encountering any trace of public mockery or bullying. Would that I were so unselfconscious now.

It was only recently, while talking to a student who had attended our brother school (by which I mean the boys' school that was associated with our girls' school), that someone expressed skepticism about this rosy picture. His impression of my high school, which his sister was currently attending, had considerably more in common with Mean Girls than my nostalgic construct. Suddenly I remembered all sorts of things that might have been better repressed: the fights we had our senior year, for instance, about whether our "senior theme" should be "the military," a proposal which seemed to be largely motivated by a desire to parade about in fatigues hazing underclassmen. After that came the memory of having to repeatedly protest the addition of what Stephen Colbert might now call "On Notice" and "Dead to Me" boards in the senior lounge, on which members of our class could post the names of underclassmen who offended them, so that they could be shunned by the rest of the seniors. Or the recollection that we were so out-of-control tense about college admissions that we were actually forbidden to speak about where we had been accepted while on school property. Of course, boasting finds a way: as admissions letters trickled in, girls soon began driving their cars up the school drive with prominent college stickers affixed to their windshields and bumpers.

So I approached my reunion with some trepidation. What did I find when I got there? That there were myriad friends I had fallen out of touch with whom I was desperately happy to see. That I hadn't felt bullied in high school because I didn't have the slightest desire to be friends with the "mean girls." (And that these girls still didn't have even the inkling of a desire to engage in conversation with me.) That we were all fairly dispirited by the falling college admission achievements of more recent classes, but that this was because it seemed to us to represent a shift away from the academic rigor we all remembered (that part of my nostalgic construct, at least, was proved right), and a failure to recruit and retain the excellent teachers we had loved. That when a group of former high school acquaintances get together in their late twenties, the ring fingers of left hands attract an unseemly amount of attention. That, despite this attention, the "boys" at our brother school's tenth reunion seemed much more interested in showing off wives/girlfriends/fiancées, while we (by contrast) were busy flaunting our advanced degrees. That we are a highly, HIGHLY educated group of women. About half of my class showed up to the reunion, and I only met one person who was not in the process of (or had recently obtained) a degree higher than a bachelor's. She, to our very great admiration, was working on an organic teaching farm, and planning to start her own agricultural venture. And that, as my delightful friend E commented while we tallied up all the MBAs and MAs and PhDs and JDs in progress, "counts. I mean, really, doesn't it? She has a FARM!!"

In the aftermath of the reunion, D. joined me on the east coast, where he will stay with me (hurrah!) until shortly after my graduation in a week and a half. At the moment, I am with him in Philadelphia, where he has been called up to do some film work. I haven't set foot in this city for at least ten years, and luckily our hotel is smack in the middle of the historic district, so the last couple of days have mostly consisted of wandering desultorily around beautiful gardens and antique houses filled (bizarrely) with people dressed in Revolutionary garb who insist on calling me "Madam" and telling me tidbits from the biography of Betsy Ross. I hadn't quite realized (see how much I have learned from the anachronistic strangers!) that, when the maker of our first flag apprenticed as an upholsterer, it was not at all a common trade for women, since it involved quite a lot of very heavy labor. What's more, Ross owned and operated her own shop through several marriages, which was (according to my temporally dislocated new friend) virtually unheard of in New England at the time.

There's certainly more to be said, although I can't quite put my finger on what it is at the moment, but I have the vague feeling that this is rambling on a bit long for a single post (look how much bloggery I have stored up in my absence from you!). Other stories will have to wait for another time...

Musings on Reality TV: Look what you have wrought, Writers' Strike!

The fallout from the writers' strike is finally hitting my household hard: in the absence of original dramatic programming on our TiVo, we are turning increasingly to reality shows of all stripes. And my GOD are they fascinating.

"The Hills" currently has us in its well-manicured clutches, and it has yielded some truly philosophical conversations, especially in the wake of the New Yorker article on the show's strange phenomenon. The program follows a small group of Orange County women (constantly jostling for dominance in their friends' loyalties) as they attempt to start their careers in fashion and similarly well-groomed careers. The two main characters (the show is so obviously staged, and shot with the glossy polish of a film, that it is possible to think of them as purely fictional constructions in discussing the show), Lauren and Heidi, have been warring for the better part of a season, reportedly (this is the first season I have watched) because Heidi and her gleefully villainous boyfriend spread a rumor about the existence of a sex tape starring Lauren. Thus I found myself in my living room one evening last week, listening to my roommate A and friend J have this conversation:

A: Who do you think is justified in the fight between Lauren and Heidi?
J: I don't think justice can take root in this soil.

We went on to watch "Dancing with the Stars" a show which has not only captivated my attention beyond what I would have thought possible (I mean, they have a sub-competition for dancing children! Who could resist?), but also reminded me of how much I used to love Christi Yamaguchi. I think she may have been the last figure skater about whom I felt an affection unfettered by irritation with how ... cute the sport could be. This may just have been because I was young enough at the time to feel idealism untouched by teenaged surliness.

My memory of dramas of the "triple axel" Albertville Olympics proved to be highly selective, however: I edited Tonya Harding completely out of the proceedings, perhaps because of her later unsavory behavior (she and Midori Ito were battling to become the first woman to land a triple axel in Olympic competition, if I now understand the situation correctly), and only vaguely remembered the Ito-Yamaguchi rivalry. In other words, I had forgotten Ito's name completely (unfairly, since she was an extraordinary competitor) even mixed up her nationality, substituting our current global superpower rivalry (I remembered her being Chinese) for the industrial rivalry of the 80s and 90s (she is in fact Japanese).

Long story short: I still adore Kristi, and she is phenomenal in "Dancing with the Stars."

Our friend J, however, couldn't disguise his contempt for our new reality TV fascination, our ballroom beloved. He did, however, say some words that brought delight to my soul:

Someday, you know, you will being seeing Tyler Hansbrough on "Dancing with the Stars.

Being a Dookie (our longtime nemeses in college basketball), J snorted with derision at the idea of our team's MVP gallumphing gracelessly around the dance floor. So of course I was quick to shoot back a response about Tyler's perfectionism and work ethic: if he decided to become a ballroom dancer, you can be sure that he wouldn't be satisfied until he was the best damn ballroom dancer in the competition, foxtrotting his enormous form oh so delicately to and fro.

Sadly for those who love ballroom dancing, but happily for those who love Carolina basketball, it looks like Tyler will be staying in college for another year. I can't tell you how this information lowered my stress level.

In other news, my computer is having a bit of a social crisis: it refuses to acknowledge its good friend the power cable (or its other longtime buddy, the alternate/backup power cable) a good 50% of the time. So it looks like I will be sending it in for repairs this week. Luckily for me I have the best roommates ever, and they have offered the loan of their computers, but I may still find myself a bit more blog-absent as the week unfolds. I will try to sneak in entries wherever I can.

OK: Off to grade papers.

Sunday Salon: Week Five

This was the last week of classes, so all that remains of my teaching load for the semester are some massive piles of grading and the preparation of an exam that I hope will be easy for those who came to class and did the reading, and will unmask (!) those who did not. For the most part, my students did a great job keeping up with the heavy reading load (if their participation is a good indicator, which for the more confident of them perhaps it is not), so there shouldn't be any instances of red-ink carnage in grading these suckers.

My reading load has been picking up steadily this week as I finally began to relax into my post-dissertation, (almost) post-teaching, (mostly) post-job market persona. I finished Agent Zigzag (an impossibly dashing nonfiction account of a double cross agent who volunteered to spy for both the Germans and the British in WWII) yesterday in a mad sprint of reading after it was recalled by the library. My reviewing is still about a month behind, however - hopefully I can remedy that in the near future (perhaps even today?).

In my reading pile for today:

• Finish the first volume (1950-1952) of The Complete Peanuts. You may have noticed that I have been reading this for several consecutive Sunday Salons. Now I am finally within ten pages of the end, so there is no excuse not to finish it off today. In fact, I am no longer reading the strips themselves, but am deep into the very interesting back matter, which includes an interview in which Schulz admits that he doesn't care, on an artistic or professional level, for Garry Trudeau, and an essay by David Michaelis, more recently the author of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. As Michaelis observes,

[The strips] explained America the way Huckleberry Finn does: Americans believe in friendship, in community, in fairness, but in the end, we are dominated by our apartness, our individual isolation. (292)

• Continuing on through the list of "things that have been on this TBR pile, half-completed, for far too long," I hope to finish, at long last, George Ryga's drama of exploitation and violation, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. It is the brutality of the subject matter that has stymied me between acts for several weeks, but this increasingly feels like a rather feeble excuse for not finishing one of the most acclaimed and assigned plays from the Canadian dramatic canon.

• I am still reading a bit of Gabrielle Calvocoressi's thought-provoking, vintaged collection of poems, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, every day. Yesterday's reading, from the first half of her long poem "Circus Fire, 1944," contained this stunning passage from a section titled "A Word from the Fat Lady":

When folks scream or clutch their hair

and poke at us and glare and speak
of how we slithered up from Hell,

it is themselves they see:
the preacher with the farmer's girls

(his bulging eyes, their chicken legs)
or the mother lurching towards the sink,

a baby quivering in her gnarled
hands. Horror is the company

you keep when shades are drawn.
Evil does not reside in cages. (34)

Calvocoressi continues to play with point of view in describing historical events that hover anxiously between the public (left to us in fragments through newspaper accounts and archival interviews) and the intimate (passed down through half-remembered storytellings), piecing together the last departure of a famous aviatrix or a hideously deadly fairground fire from the triangulated tales of very different observers.

As in "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart," the long poem from the collection that I described a couple of weeks ago in Sunday Salon, you can see Calvocoressi using the extended poetic format to weave complex fabrics of imagery: the chicken legs and bulging eyes of the preacher with the farmer's girls not only underline the grotesquerie of this mundane (and increasingly disturbing) grouping, but also tie them back to an earlier section in which a "geek" describes his work biting the heads off chickens ("Women swoon but stay / until the bleedings done, / pocket feathers: souvenirs" [32]) and forward to later descriptions of the tortured bodies melting together in the flames. This is an infernal poem: a short epic descent into the underworld, in which the underworld and the mundane world melt into each other in the intensity of the heat. "Evil does not reside in cages."

Today I would like to finish "Circus Fire, 1944," which extends across 23 parts.

• I have just started Dreaming in Cuban, Christina Garcia's novel of revolutionary Cuba, which I want to have finished in time to post about it with the Slaves of Golconda at the end of the month. I have only read about five pages so far, but already it is not what I expected: more searing, more dreamlike.
• I would like to make some serious progress on Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, which you may remember has also made several appearances on my Sunday Salon "to do" lists. Sigh. Progress will be made! The book itself is skeptical about the nature of progress. It is a novel about vividly unhappy women who feel unexpectedly smothered by their suburban lives. One has just described seeing each of her family members off to work or school as "a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon" (43).
• Last week I noted that I had to return Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to the library half-read when it was recalled from me. In a library miracle, I recalled it right back (which usually means that the other reader has a shortened time of several weeks before having to return the book) and it made its boomerang way back to me two days after I returned it. Now I feel it is my biblio-civic duty to finish it and return it as quickly as possible for any other readers who may want it.
• If, amidst all these mighty plans, I can slip in a couple of chapters of Don Quixote, with which I am about 3/4 of the way done, that would be, well, a source of great surprise and pride.

What's up next, after this whopping pile? Probably Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (so long half-finished that I may have to just start at the beginning again), the collected plays of Howard Brenton, and my first Octavia Butler novel, Parable of the Talents.

Happy reading, all!



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Sunday Salon: Week Four

Two great accomplishments this week: I learned that my dissertation had been accepted (and, by extension, that I will be graduating in about a month, fulfilling a lifelong dream of getting "Doctor" attached to the front of my name while acquiring absolutely no medical skills or knowledge) and I finished Joyce's Ulysses. It is really neck and neck as to which felt like the more epic feat.

So today, unlike the past few Sunday Salons, I will not be whinging about how much Ulysses reading I have on my plate. I will, however, be whinging about how much paper grading I have to do. (A lot.)

If I get some time amidst paper commenting, I hope to read a bit of Arlington Park, Rachel Cusk's (thus far beautifully written) tale of terribly unhappy mothers wending their way through suburban London lives. Perhaps I will also dip into the first volume of the Complete Peanuts. I have been reading about 25 pages a day all week, which seemed for a time to be the magic number which allowed me to perceive the wit in Schulz's strips rather than finding them cloying. About three quarters of the way through the volume, however, I am finding it decreasingly wry and increasingly cute, which is unsettling. For those of you who are regular readers of this complete compilation: does the quirkily (almost darkly) philosophical strain of the early strips return? Soon? Am I just experiencing Peanuts fatigue?

This week I had been reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but in the aftermath of the Pulitzer win it was recalled by the library (alas), and now I must wait at least a couple of weeks before I can pick up the trail of the story again. Boo. Bright side: I can return with renewed vigor to my other reading projects, like Arlington Park, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (which I began almost a year ago, I think), and Dreaming in Cuban.

Happy reading, everyone!

Hurrah! (and Phew!)

I just learned last night that my dissertation was unanimously approved by my department, and that I will indeed be graduating in May! I went to pick up my readers' reports and found that (on a grading scale that ranged from Fair to Distinguished) I received one grade of "Very Good" and two of "Distinguished." Now I feel the MOST profound relief (almost edging into glee, really).

Hurrah!

Trombonophobia and Theatrical Utopias

The UK (and I don't think they are alone) is suffering from a hypergendered system of music education:

Although the authorities have concentrated on tackling sexist attitudes in sport, the study shows that stereotypes are just as prevalent in music classes, with the "smaller, higher-pitched instruments" and singing lessons being overwhelmingly favoured by girls, while boys, although reluctant to learn any instrument, tend towards electric guitars, drum kits and music technology classes.

Some 90% of harpists are girls, as are 89% of children playing the flute. In contrast, 81% of guitarists are boys and 75% of drummers. The smallest gender differences are in African drums (an increasingly popular option), cornet, French horn, saxophone and tenor horn.

While girls have become slightly more adventurous in their choices in the past decade, boys are as conservative as ever.

OK, personal admission time: when I was wee, I dreamed of playing the tuba. I mean, I thought the tuba was the most miraculous invention ever to grace the earth. My parents took a quite tiny me to an event I can now barely remember (perhaps overcome by the quasi-religious ecstasy of the experience?) called "A Tuba Christmas." In the aftermath of this epiphanic encounter, I wanted more than anything to play this elephantine monster of an instrument. But then one night, after some talk of sending me to music lessons, I had a dream that I was chased around a band room by a maniacal trombonist. I awoke in terror and steadfastly refused to attend even a single music class.

And that, my friends, is why I have not even the tiniest shred of musical ability today. I did take up the cello* for a brief, excruciating time in high school. The sounds I made... (sigh) ... could best be described by likening them to the moans of a tone-deaf cow simultaneously in the grips of a searing digestive disorder and a broken heart. But my lifelong distrust of trombone players has scuppered my dreams of jolly tubaing.

Nonetheless, I am sad to see that students' choice of instruments is so clearly gendered because I am hardly the only one of my female friends to lean towards the portlier, less prim instruments. I have two female friends I can think of off the top of my head who play the bass (an instrument particularly cited in the coverage of this study as suffering from a lack of female attention). But I don't, I'm afraid, know many male flautists. And that, I think, is the rub.

~~~~

Did Leonardo da Vinci illustrate this chess manual?

~~~~

Kansas City is apparently experiencing something of a theatrical Golden Age, with Equity theatres and small indy spaces springing up (and staying open) all over the place. As this article points out, in a single eight-hour period this week, audiences have a choice of 12 different shows in the town. Most interesting is the article's impulse to trace this boom back to its regional or historical sources:

Asked to explain the growth, Byrd said in some ways Kansas City theater people still embodied a version of frontier optimism that has been part of this town since the 19th century.

“Self-producing is easier in Kansas City than in the larger markets,” she said. “It’s more of a can-do spirit.”

This gets at an interesting point: self-production as the key to a nation in which cultural riches are dispersed evenly across the whole community (rather than just in rich urban centers). Surely this is where governmental organizations like the NEA could be most helpful: providing advice and support (often financial) to foster cultural communities in medium-sized towns across the nation. Most urgently needed (if my experience with the arts in a college town was any guide to go by) are spaces for artists: studios, exhibition spaces, salons where writers can meet/give readings/have workshops, tiny black-box theatres. These don't need to be large and they don't need to be glitzy. They just have to be made available to the town and engage with it on a level that will allow the creation of a community of artists (through classes, support groups, workshops, affordably rentable gallery or performance spaces) as well as a supportive audience culture. Is this too utopian? Probably. But it is the sort of opportunity that universities and colleges offer their students all over the nation. The Kansas City boom is largely the result of a small group of committed professors and the artists they drew to the region (this gives me hope, as an educator, that I might actually accomplish something lasting someday):

“If you build a community of artists and they choose to live here and work here, it spawns community interest … and that community builds on itself and gets bigger and bigger,” Carrothers said of McIlrath’s vision. “I think you’re finally starting to see that.”

Can America emulate some of the success that Britain has had with its regional arts endeavors? We shall see.

~~



* As you can tell, my taste still ran to the beefier instruments, which I somehow thought were unloved and in need of championing.

Sunday Salon: Week Three

9 a.m.

Last week I became so caught up in my preparations to teach Ulysses that (alas!) I never got a chance to write the second, promised Sunday Salon post of the day. I suspect the same problem might rear its exhausted head later today, since this is my last day of prep for Joyce's novel. Soon the semester will be over, and I will (I hope) return triumphantly to unfettered pleasure reading on Sundays.

Meanwhile, a quick update on the week:

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I caught up a bit with my groaningly full Tivo, watching both Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander(not my favorite Bergman so far, but really terrifying and delightful in, among other things, its Shakespearean use of ghosts*) and Hal Ashby's cult classic Harold and Maude (the most frolickingly upbeat film about death I know**). I also finally got around to posting a review of The Lambs of London, which I read a full month ago. Next up for review, two quite opposite reading experiences: The Translator, Daoud Hari's account of his time guiding journalists through the perilous situation in Darfur, and The Light Fantastic, my second experience with Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

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I am continuing to read the first volume of The Complete Peanuts, which contains at least one wryly philosophical or historically prescient shock per week of strips, like the day in May of 1951 when Charlie Brown rushes to the more literate Patty to get her advice on a letter he has received. She tells him with perplexity that it is just an advertisement. "*Whew* What a relief ..." he says, with an enormous grin, "I thought I had been drafted." I have just gotten to the point (about nine months into the show's life, appropriately) when a baby appears who will later become of central importance to the strip: Schroeder. Of course, first he will have to grow up to the age of the other characters, while they remain eternally young, in defiance of all temporal laws.

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Although it has been a long, long time since I have actually finished a book (I blame Ulysses and its monstrous and engrossing vastness), and my "Currently Reading" list is reaching impossible lengths (see sidebar), I have also recently picked up a copy of Gabrielle Calvocoressi's brilliantly titled The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart in honor of National Poetry Month. The title poem is a ten-part reflection on the famous aviatrix, on the desire to disappear and the incomprehensibility of absence, and on the need for figures on which to screen the dramas of psychological projection. Ten witnesses, of sorts, describe their last encounters with Earheart (the ground control officer, a bystander from the crowd that saw her off at the field, a miner whose daughter is obsessed with the possibility for escape, her husband). At first what is so striking about these memories is their imprecision, the inability to hold on to iconic moments in the hubbub of real living. "I was distracted / by a bird, which was no more / than shoal-dust kicked up by wind," says the bystander, "I missed her waving good-bye, / saw only her back, her body / bowing to enter the thing" (4). This imprecision has its echo in the final, wrenching testimony from Earhart's husband, who also catches a Magritte glimpse of Amelia from behind:

The last time I saw Amelia Earhart
she was three steps ahead of me,

crossing to the other side
of the street. I almost died trying
to reach her, called her name over

the traffic and when she turned back
it was a young man, startled
by my grasping hand, saying sorry

but I was mistaken. (14-15) ***

Calvocoressi has a real genius for revealing the way loss echoes through the simplest, most direct (even sometimes reportorial) of language. Earhart's stepson testifies that

Even at home or on the street

you would look away and she
would be gone, walking between
cars or just standing there not

answering as you said her name
or touched the arm of her coat.
She was already gone. I knew

because there was no difference
between the sky swallowing her
and living in her house. (7)

And in the next section a housewife argues that "It's easy to lose someone," telling of her shock at turning to find her son has run off into the street in a mere moment of inattention from her. This is how figures disappear, in the slight forgetfulness of the quotidian, the traffic of a street-crossing, individuals disappearing into the crowd, until everyone begins to look like the one you love, because you didn't pay quite enough attention (how could you?) to freeze them in their individuality before the inevitable loss.

[You can hear Calvocoressi read at the Fishouse.]

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In a grim turn of events for my pocketbook, I discovered Amazon's Bargain Books section yesterday. How could I have avoided this Siren song for all these years? I can only attribute it to a subconscious self-defense mechanism. At any rate, these books are now speeding their way towards my library:

• Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 Tony Judt
• Sacred Games Vikram Chandra
• One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding Rebecca Mead
• Consequences Penelope Lively
• The Janissary Tree Jason Goodwin
• James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon Julie Phillips
• The Hungry Tide Amitov Ghosh
• The Brooklyn Follies Paul Auster
• The Tenderness of Wolves Stef Penney

Does anyone have any urgent recommendations of which of these should make their way to the top of Mt. TBR?

~~~~

So, the order of the day is Ulysses-reading. Wish me luck. I will try to break up the tsunami of modernist prose innovation with short interjections from Peanuts, To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever (a book about the North Carolina-Duke basketball rivalry that I am finding it very difficult to finish now that Carolina has exited the season so ignominiously), and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I have only just started). Happy reading to you all!




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* I was particularly impressed by the scene in Fanny and Alexander in which the young Alexander, staying at the house of a family friend, gets lost in the middle of the night after going in search of a chamber pot, and wanders through room after room filled with grotesque and unnerving puppets. The scene ends with a sort of a restaging (with a puppet-God) of the phenomenal mad scene from Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, in which the heroine is convinced that a god is about to reveal itself to her through the tattered, peeling walls of an empty room, but what emerges is in fact (or rather, in mind, for we don't see it) a horrific vision of a violating spider-god. It shows how much I love Bergman that a film with such a phenomenal scene can still be "not my favorite Bergman film so far."

** Hear that, Ingmar Bergman? Your films about death are just not very jolly by comparison. Although, to be honest, the 8 or 10 films I have seen by Bergman haven't really been that death-obsessed (with the notable exceptions of The Seventh Seal and The Silence). They are more compulsively focused on the nature of human connection, and are fairly rarely utterly hopeless on the subject.

*** Notice the complex way in which this innovates the mythic archetype of Orpheus and Eurydice: a husband pursues his wife even unto/into death, but in this poem, it is the pursued who turns and thus reasserts the finality of death. This makes me wonder: is the point of the Orpheus myth that the real problem is not that he turned back in distrust to make sure Eurydice was still there as he rescued her from death, but rather his original turning back, his desire to rescue her in the first place - the urge in grief to turn back to what is of necessity forever lost?

15) "The Lambs of London" by Peter Ackroyd

My grandparents started taking me to see Shakespeare on stage when I was 6. It was a production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in the Regent's Park outdoor theatre in London, and the play was not lacking in some dark subject matter from a six-year-old's point of view. Fittingly I remember only two things about it (the light and the dark): that Beatrice came speeding onstage on a bicycle at the play's beginning (it had an Edwardian setting), and the long torchlight procession to Hero's "tomb" midway through the play. Pretty good recall for a wee tot, eh? It obviously made a big impression. Two years later, they took me to a production of "Comedy of Errors" and I was so enthralled I demanded to see it a second time. I remember it more vividly than almost any other play I have ever seen.

In the years that followed, my grandmother was firm in her insistence that I would get a great deal more out of the plays if I read them first, or (barring that) read the account of the plot in the edition of "Lambs' Tales" that always graced their shelves. "Tales from Shakespeare" was a summary of Shakespeare's stories written for children by Charles and Mary Lamb at the start of the 19th century. Apparently they divided their efforts along the lines of genre, Charles devoting himself to the tragedies, Mary to the comedies. Now that I have read Peter Ackroyd's fictionalized account of the siblings' private lives, I have to wonder whether the idea was that the turbid family dramas of the tragedies would be too much for Mary's strained psyche. But this surely underestimates the incredible violence that underlies the wit of plays like "The Winter's Tale" and "Measure for Measure." Not to mention the fact that Mary was apparently responsible (oddly) for covering "Romeo and Juliet."

Ackroyd's novel (which - hurrah! - is on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list) takes as its subject the Lamb siblings' relationship with William Ireland, a bookseller's son who comes forward with a series of astonishing unknown manuscripts of Shakespeare's. Ireland has ambitions to become a writer and scholar like Charles, who is himself wallowing in disappointment that his intellectual pursuits have failed to lift him out of the drudgery of a clerk's life. Mary, constantly under the eye of a highly critical mother and preferring the company of her increasingly senile father, allows herself to be drawn into the romance of Ireland's cult of the Bard. She is desperately frustrated by the lack of an outlet for her keen mental abilities and emotional energies. These situations come to a boil remarkably quickly, finally burbling over in a shocking moment of violence.

Let's say no more about that: Thar Be Spoilers. The book itself felt surprisingly slight, like it needed several more strands of plot or characterization to form a tapestry large enough to be a novel. The strands there were, without others to act as counterpoints, seemed conventional and unsurprising: the unfulfilled 19th century woman, the intellectually smothered clerk, the manuscript mystery. The loveliest and most interesting moments, I thought, dealt all too briefly with Mary and Charles's serenely nonsensical father. Their mother treats his utterances as almost oracular commentaries on whatever situation is in front of them. Mary, by contrast, enjoys a facet of his conversation that might later be characterized as Dada; talking to her father, she says at one point, is like having a conversation with language itself, in its purest form.

A quick and enjoyable read, but not as convention-shaking as I had hoped it would be.

The Lambs of London(2004)
Peter Ackroyd
March 12, 2008
***

Bathroom Guerrillas, Body image, and Kniticons

An admission: I watch just about any reality show that Bravo throws my way. Did I just fall several notches in your esteem? I can't help it! I yam what I yam. In fact, the only one of their shows I have found myself unable to watch is "The Real Housewives of New York City," and that was because the women on it (in contrast to the real housewives of Orange County, whom we were sort of encouraged to mock and affectionately deride for their misguided affectations) seem so incredibly vicious and self-satisfied.

But I have most recently been watching (*blush*) "Step it up and Dance," a contest in which dancers are asked (a la "Project Runway") to compete in high pressure challenges of precision, creativity, and style. In the last episode, a black dancer (trained intensively in ballet) expressed what she called "not even a hate-love, just a hate" relationship to her curvy figure, and in particular her chest, which was apparently consistently deemed too full for ballet. Sure enough, when judging time came round, the observers critiqued her for the way she used her shoulders to distract attention from her bust, which had a rather self-effacing effect. Flaunt your curves, they exhorted her (as she wept).

This was deeply saddening to me, since I have long admired dance as both an art form and a means of therapy or exercise, but have also felt leery about sending my (as-of-yet-totally-hypothetical) children into a pastime that wreaks havoc with body image.

I had, coincidentally, just read this article in The Guardian about the lack of non-white dancers in most British companies, and I found it deeply, deeply shocking:

Dancer and choreographer Cassa Pancho, whose father was Trinidadian and mother English, started Ballet Black, her company for black and Asian ballet dancers, six years ago in an attempt to redress the balance. She says that black ballerinas find it difficult to rise to the top, partly because of misconceptions about their body shape.

"Ten or 15 years ago you'd hear that black women didn't have the physique for ballet," she says. "You'd hear 'they have big bums and flat feet'. I've spoken to some who were told to go and get their feet broken and reset for pointe work as it was felt they were too flat."

Sigh.

~~~~

A retired couple (formerly a postal clerk and a librarian) have decided to donate their painstakingly amassed collection of modern art (they must have been brilliantly canny with their salaries) in "mini-collections" of 50 works apiece to 50 museums in 50 states.

~~~~

Transformers knit too! There is really nothing I can add to the brilliance of Amanda of The Blog Jar on this subject.

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Art students stage an unauthorized show in MoMA's exceptionally clean bathrooms.

Sunday Salon: Week Two

9 a.m.

This week has not been as readerly as I anticipated. I had thought I would have all the time in the world to read after I submitted my dissertation a few weeks ago, but it turns out that teaching prep and long-neglected housework can expand to fill any amount of time you allot them.

I did, however, pick up a copy of the first volume (1950-1952) of Charles Schulz's Complete Peanuts from the library this week, and found it so effortlessly thoughtful and wry that I immediately rushed out and ordered a copy of my own. In the very first strip, a little boy sees our hero approaching, baldly, and remarks to his wee friend with period quaintness: "Well! Here comes Ol' Charlie Brown! Good Ol' Charlie Brown .... Yes, Sir! Good Ol' Charlie Brown." He trails off as the smiling form recedes, and a furrow of discontent appears over his eyes: "How I hate him!"

This reversal really sets the tone for everything I have read so far; none of the cloying, eventless sentiment that we might associate with Peanuts in its later reign over the canon of classic comic strips. My comics-wise friend J had recommended this to me long ago, but I was a doubter. Well, now Complete Peanuts is to me what my Battlestar Galactica recommendation was to him: an endorsement that looked absurd on paper, and ended up being totally converting.

So, my goals for today: There is a lot of Ulysses yet to prepare for tomorrow's class, so that will undoubtedly loom large on my reading horizon (as if a tome like Ulysses could do anything but loom!). I would like (time permitting) to make a habit of reading a play and a graphic novel on each of these Sundays. This week: the first volume of Mark Oakley's Thieves and Kings, which has been recalled by the library, and George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the depressing subject matter of which has doomed it to lurk on my "Currently Reading" list for far too long. I would also like to make a little progress in To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever (an account of the Duke-Carolina basketball rivalry), to soothe my fevered brain after last night's incredibly depressing Final Four game (I don't want to talk about it. Let's never speak of this tournament again).

On a practical note: last week my updates to my original post never - alas! - showed up in either my feed or Sunday Salon's. So this week I am going to post a series (possibly a series of two, but no matter) of separately published updates, and see whether that is the only solution to the problem. Does anyone have any alternate strategies to offer by way of advice?

The Final Four

I am despondent. Let's never speak of this game again.

I, unlike nature, do not abhor a vacuum

What have I been up to this week? Well, I bought a vacuum - a vacuum that has both the Inteli-clean system (little lights that tell you how dirty your carpet is) and surprisingly stringent standards of cleanliness. The first day I had it, I became entranced by how dirty our apartment was; I swear to you that this vacuum cleaner was as engrossing as a video game. I was also, somehow, desperate to impress this Victorian schoolmarm of a household appliance - to convince it that I was willing to put in the many hours of elbow grease it demanded to upgrade me from the filthy wasteland of a red light to the civilized dustlessness of a green light. And when I realized the level of satisfaction, self-affirmation, and indeed entertainment I was gleaning from housework, I felt terribly, terribly old.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my week. The long, boring slog through the basketballess limbo between the Elite Eight and the Final Four. (Go Heels!)

~~~~

Ever since reading Manjula Padmanabhan's wonderful play Harvest, about a dystopian near future in which citizens of developing countries are paid by aging first-world moneybags to keep their organs and body parts in good condition for future "harvesting" and transplant, I have wondered why there wasn't more science fiction in the theatre. Now Andrew Haydon, blogging at the Guardian, asks the same question.

There is plenty of science in the theatre; plays like Copenhagen and Arcadia are productively obsessed with finding ways to get theatrical forms (like blocking, plot structure, games with theatrical time and space, etc.) to echo scientific content (chaos theory, entropy, the Uncertainty Principle). So why aren't there more utopias, dystopias, alternate histories, artificial intelligences, etc. in contemporary plays? Is it a prudish fear of being invaded by the pop forms of cinema, TV, and mass market fiction? That fear is surely absurd, as the eagerness of mainstream publishers to pick up works that "transcend genre" attests. Or is it rather a limitation of resources, the difficulty of constructing a world of futuristic effects in the limited spaces and financially strapped budgets of most theatres? This is a pressure that film and literature don't have to worry about, but that sci-fi TV often shows the burden of in cheesy parades of low-budget special effects. But, no - there is nothing that the theatre cannot represent, given a sufficiently loose relationship to realism, and realism is in fact one of the most expensive addictions of the theatre, much less financially viable than the fantastical.

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The first excavation at Stonehenge since 1964 is about to start. Sounds like a setting ripe for a Dan Brown/Elizabeth Peters hybrid thriller-mystery.

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Shakespeare's 444th birthday's a-comin' (on April 23, or thereabouts - we aren't actually that sure of Willy the Shake's exactly birthday, but we are sure that he died on that date many years later), and theatre groups around the world will celebrate by performing his plays simultaneously.

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In the continuing saga of operatic oddities, a conductor for the Pittsburgh Opera had to sing the male lead in Aida after the tenor lost his voice as a result of illness. Even odder: the conductor/understudy never left the orchestra pit, "dubbing" (in a sense) the singing while the tenor continuing to act the part.

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A little more than a year ago, UNC endured a tragic loss when our mascot, Jason Ray, was struck by a car as he walked by the side of the road in New Jersey, where he had accompanied the team on their trip to the Sweet Sixteen. The tributes to Ray by the other teams in the tournament games that followed (cheerleaders wore mourning bands, fellow mascots wrote messages to Jason on their costumes) made me feel hopeful that sports was a connective, fraternal pastime rather than a sublimation of our divisive, violent, warlike social instincts. I felt this way again when the teams of the ACC came together to support the Wake Forest community after the death of Skip Prosser, their basketball coach, and the Carolina community after the murder of student body president Eve Carson (both in the last year).

I have been watching the lead-up material to the Final Four in the background of my chores all day, and CBS just aired a long piece on Jason Ray, his decision to become an organ donor, and the people who now live every day with a part of Jason inside of them. I bawled uncontrollably throughout the entire piece.

I can't find a copy of the segment I saw, so here is another, older piece about Jason and those he donated his organs to (a text version of the story, which goes into more detail about a reunion Jason's parents held with some of the organ recipients, can be found here):

The inescapable network of mutuality

Today was the fortieth anniversary of the day on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, and the memorial events sparked a desire in me to reread his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." I first encountered the letter in eighth grade, a year which was devoted to African and African-American studies in my middle school, and I remembered being profoundly moved - thinking that its indictment of moderate passivity was one of the most persuasive pieces of rhetoric (although I might not have expressed it in those primly academic terms at age twelve) that I had ever read.

It still is a profoundly moving piece, a piece that recalibrated my moral compass. Where are the Kings of our era? Where are the leaders capable of speaking directly, persuasively, intelligently, and imperatively about injustice in such a way that faith and morality become a means to unify rather than divide, to fight for freedom rather than institutionalize discrimination? Why aren't I someone like that? Are you? Could we be? Can I be the sort of teacher who inspires the profound respect and active defense of human dignity?

Writing to his fellow clergymen, who had publicly rebuked Dr. King for, among other things, being impatient for change, intervening from the outside in Alabaman events, and the lawbreaking at the core of his civil disobedience strategies, he addresses each of these points with an urgent but nuanced moral argument, but first he argues to the second point:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
-Dr. King, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

In this case, Dr. King is speaking largely within national bounds, of the sort of mutual identity we should have with our fellow citizens that was so badly forgotten after the crisis of Katrina. But implicit in this inescapable network of mutuality that binds us together is a fundamental human commonality, the ties of empathy with those we don't know that is so easily elided in the hurlyburly of everyday life. Why am I so obsessed with my own piddling problems when injustice is no less rampant in today's world than in the world of forty years ago? I am not sure how to answer these questions, but greater consciousness of them is surely the necessary first step.

Although until today I hadn't returned to the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" for many years, there is one passage that has often been at the forefront of my mind, particularly during discussions in which people told me that this was "not the right time" for the Democratic Party to work for gay rights or immigrant rights:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
-Dr. King

Filled with the delight of this prose, I rushed out to order a copy of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, the first volume of Taylor Branch's much acclaimed history of the civil rights era. I was brought up short, however, when I tried to find a reputable collection of King's writings, speeches, and sermons that is still in print. Does any one know why this (surely a rather necessary volume, not to mention a potentially quite profitable one from the publisher's point of view) is so hard to find?

Ok, now a few more notes on various subjects.

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Philip Hensher, writing in Prospect Magazine, suggests that the current popularity of "state of the nation" novels among British writers has its roots in their lack of a national epic. But is this true? The definition of a "national epic" keeps shifting: is it a long work that defines how a nation conceives of itself or an account of origins? If the latter, how many nations or cultures (besides Rome) can really claim to have one? And wouldn't most attempts at this sort of national epic play a dangerous game with the boundaries of propaganda (as The Aeneid does)? The first option seems more plausible as a definition, since it accounts for works like Don Quixote and the epics of Homer that aren't explicitly accounts of national origins. So does Britain have a national epic in this first sense? Sadly, the marvelous Faerie Queene is hardly central to any widespread conception of what it means to be English (although it conceives of itself in those terms). Could one argue for The Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare's plays as a collected work as a national epic? What would America's national epic be? I would love to hear opinions.

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This has been all over the litblog world: is a difference in literary taste, no matter how extreme, a viable reason to ditch a relationship? Can reading habits kill love? Not in my experience. The only literary difference that I could conceive of as a deal-breaker is one that revealed a fundamental difference of politics or morality (and it would have to be a fairly insurmountable difference - like adoring Ann Coulter as a civic visionary and master prose stylist). D doesn't have the daily habit of reading that I do, so I sometimes cajole him into a date that just involves us reading together. The problem is this: once he starts a book, he is incapable of concentrating on anything else until he is finished it. I, by contrast, am so filled with delight at the avidity of his reading that I continually interrupt to ask about what he is reading, attempt to engage him in conversations about it, and generally demand attention. Ah well.

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In a truly bizarre bureaucratic turn of events, the Arts Council of the UK is now demanding that arts organizations report the sexuality of their board members when applying for state funding. The intention, warped though it may be, may very well have been to foster greater inclusivity or diversity, but effect is one of unadulterated claustrophobia under the governmental gaze. Can you imagine the kind of work environment that would be created if your colleagues began speculating about or demanding to know your sexual orientation to report it to the government? Why, Arts Council, why???

~~~~

The shortlist for the Impac Dublin Prize has been released, and I have eagerly added the books to my BookMooch list:

1. The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (Spain)
2. The Sweet and Simple King by Yasmine Gooneratne (Sri Lanka)
3. De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanon)
4. Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australia)
5. Let it Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israel)
6. The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algeria)
7. The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russia)
8. Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Ireland)

I particularly love this prize for the number of totally new titles it presented me with.

Described as the largest literary award in the world both for its size (100,000 euros) and its scope (it is open to books published or translated into English in the year before the longlist is put together), the Impac also has a delightful longlisting process that involves polling a huge list of international libraries.

14) "Weight" by Jeanette Winterson

British publisher Canongate's "The Myths" is one of the most ambitious and intriguing publication projects of recent years, the sort of undertaking that I wish were more characteristic of the mainstream publishers which have such tremendous connective resources at their disposal. Canongate recruits major authors to write reflections on and retellings of major world myths (so far Ali Smith, Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, Philip Pullman, and Jeanette Winterson have graced the list), and then lead a consortium of 24 publishing houses in releasing the individual "myths" simultaneously worldwide.

The first two works I have read from "The Myths" series - Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and now Jeanette Winterson's Weight - have made intriguing choices that reveal them as representative members of the arc of the authors' whole body of work. Atwood's novella turns a critical gaze on the misogynistic injustices of Telemachus and Odysseus in Homer's work (where indeed the hostile suspicions the two men hold about Penelope's fidelity are excruciating to witness) and gives a crucial choric voice to the maids they so brutally murder at the epic's end, filled with a gendered viciousness disturbingly out of proportion to the crime committed by the girls. Sadly, for all these interesting moves, I found it to be surprisingly straightforward in its "revisions" of the myth, and not nearly as intricately written as the best of Atwood's novels.

"Weight" also seems a bit like Winterson Lite (I am going to suffer in the Underworld for that pun someday). She weaves some wonderfully surprising strands into the fabric of her tale of burdened Atlas and the repellently phallus-obsessed Hercules (who, you may remember, agrees to take on the weight of the world for Atlas - doomed to hold up the universe for all eternity - while he fetches some golden apples, only to trick poor old Atlas into taking up the world again when he returns with the fruit). Winterson's characteristic self-reflexive move (drawing attention to the ambiguities of her persona as an author) makes an appearance:

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go one believing the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct a narrative of your own.

In a way I was lucky. I could not allow my parents to be the facts of my life. Their version of the story was one I could read but not write. I had to tell the story again.*

I am not a Freudian. I don't believe I can mind the strata of the past and drill out the fault lines. There has been too much weathering; ice ages, glacial erosion, meteor impact, plant life, dinosaurs.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately the record is far from complete. (139-140)

The traumatizing story of Laika, the first animal sent out into space (and not, crucially, brought home), also makes a strange and not wholly well-integrated appearance in the novel. I couldn't help but recall My Life as a Dog, where a Swedish film where the resonance of Laika's tale with the personal experience of isolation is set up so much less cheesily.

Altogether, the different strands don't seem to make the final step to being a coherent or at least finished whole. I don't mean this so much in the sense of narrative incompleteness, because ambiguity and instability are clearly two of Winterson's favorite strategies, but rather (as in the case of The Penelopiad) that this novella always feels like a side-project, written in the margins of the "real books" the authors have underway. They are a bit drafty (in at least two senses of the word), the sentences letting in little gusts of readerly doubt through every slight awkwardness.

Nonetheless, Jeanette Winterson's fragmentary, aphoristic style seems better suited to the project of the mythological novella, being nearer to poetry than the novel. Still in both cases I wish a ruthless editorial hand had questioned the small infelicities of style and the large jarrings of narrative obviousness. There is no reason, in the hands of these skilled and authority-questioning authors, why archetype should settle into stereotype, even for a moment.

Weight (2005)
Jeanette Winterson
March 4, 2008 (Yikes, I have fallen really behind in my reviewing.)
***1/2


* Winterson's upbringing by her fundamentalist adoptive parents (who were not what you might call comfortable with the emerging knowledge that she was a lesbian, or for that matter a voracious reader of non-Biblical literature) is the subject of her utterly fascinating novel/memoir hybrid, Oranges are not the Only Fruit. I highly recommend it.

Sunday Salon : A Ulysses Marathon

The stroke of noon

My first ever Sunday Salon. I am filled with delight.

Sadly, because I teach tomorrow (and it is a particularly busy moment in the syllabus) there will not be very much time for the three pleasure-reading books I have underway: The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (a Canadian play), Arlington Park (a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book about women's lives in the suburbs of London), and To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever (a reflection on the Duke-Carolina basketball rivalry in which I am so deeply entangled). In reference to the last of these, which is the book I am farthest along with, those of you have been following my blog know that I have been so deep in March Madness that I eat, sleep, and drink college basketball. Well, last night that was taken to a new level, when I actually dreamed that Tyler Hansbrough (our star player at UNC) came to live in my house, and was a perfectly lovely guest, although he did have some strange dietary requests.

My other preoccupation of late (I believe I have spoken of both it and Tar Heel basketball as being labyrinthine obsessions, in their capacity to absorb my attention) has been my reading of Ulysses, which I am teaching to a wonderful group of students who are having, well, intense and diverse emotional reactions to it. Last class was the first in which literary discussion actually reached the level of yelling, and I loved it. So today will be a marathon of Ulysses reading and paper grading. I will keep you updated as I go.


9 p.m.

Slow but steady progress in Ulysses. My favorite (obscure) line so far is one in which the young hero, Stephen Dedalus is being mocked by the imagined voices (inside his own stream-of-consciousness monologue) of family members who are filled with derision for his attempts at saintliness. This is the exchange he has with his internalized taunters:

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. (34)

Frankly, reading 7 books simultaneously at a rate of two pages a day sounds like EXACTLY the sort of project I would undertake.

Joyce's sense of language and character is remarkable for how palimpsestic it is: you can see through the layers of connotation and allusion to all the other layers, and the relationships between them create a continuously shifting body of meaning. Whole sections of the book shift perceptibly, like a hologram, as you read them from different symbolic or formal viewpoints.

We had a fascinating argument in class last week about translation, as students insisted that Ulysses, in all its linguistic richness or chaos (depending on your opinion of it), was untranslatable. How does this differ from other authors, I asked, like Shakespeare or Cervantes? Shakespeare, they reluctantly admitted, might also be easy to lose in translation, but Cervantes's language just didn't have the requisite linguistic complexity. You don't think, I followed up, that we feel that way because we just read Cervantes in translation (albeit a very good one), rather than in the original Spanish? They looked skeptical. Except, perhaps, my bilingual students, who had been reading Don Quixote in the original.

Now, I would never argue that the language of translation is lacking in richness or nuance, but I think the way we approach a translation's language is quite different. We are reluctant to do close readings, because the language has been divorced, in our minds, from the "intention of the author." Unless we view the translation as either miraculously accurate and trustworthy or an autonomous work of art in its own right this is a hard analytical hurdle to jump.

Ok - I must return to paper grading and Ulysses-reading. But first, a note on my reading goals for the next week. I would love to finish off both The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever (something has got to tide me over, basketballwise, until next weekend's Final Four game. Go Tar Heels!), and to make significant progress with Ulysses (she says virtuously) and Arlington Park. The next thing I will embark upon will probably be The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, which, if I remember correctly, was on last year's Booker short list, and which has gained a newly urgent reading status when it was recalled from me by the library. Happy reading, everyone!

[To participate in The Sunday Salon, follow this link.]

The perils of art, superbooks, and my Stephen Curry crush

I am deep in the dual labyrinths of teaching Ulysses and watching March Madness, and I have to admit that I am finding these to be two of the most narratively rich experiences I have had in some time. I have also developed a bit of a team crush on Davidson, another North Carolinian team who are in the midst of a Cinderella surge in the NCAA tournament thanks to their star player, the delightfully childlike Stephen Curry, who has made three 3-pointers in a row since I began typing this post a couple of minutes ago. What a charmer he is.

And of course, this is only compounded by the fact that Davidson was responsible for sending Georgetown home in the last round. Georgetown has been my back-up nemesis (understudy to Duke, of course) since they sent us home ignominiously, soul-shatteringly in last year's Elite Eight round. Now that both Duke and Georgetown have been knocked out of the tourney, I feel dreadfully lost. How am I to get at any sense of self-definition without a nemesis? I am utterly unmoored without my ire.

~~~~

Art can be a perilous craft, and not merely because of the famous fickleness of the muse. The inspired leader of an Uzbek theatre company (which is contrarian and avant-garde to the point of dissidence) was assassinated outside of his home late last year, but his colleagues are still stoically touring. Their work sounds quite fascinating.

Meanwhile, a Russian artist named Anna Mikhalchuk, who had been persecuted for art her opponents called "blasphemous," has disappeared from her Berlin home. Very worrisome.

~~~~

I can understand the appeal of the book-as-art-object or of a really stunningly crafted tome, but is there any bibliotrend tackier than the "superbook"? I have two separate reactions of revulsion: On the one hand, consider how many books (new, shiny, author-supporting volumes or used tomes rich in history) you could buy with the $2000-$15,000 one of these superbooks costs. On the other, it is utterly alien to my experience of reading to think of owning a book that is always kept under a "crystalline tower case." Surely the point of a really beautifully made folio is that it enhances all the sensory pleasures of reading a book? Still, if there were a spare Shakespeare quarto looking for a good home, I might consider taking it in and keeping it in a crystalline tower.

~~~~

Tom Stoppard's politics have always been a source of unease for lefties like me who love his work. Still, much of what he says, in his art and in his own persona, seems more classically, idealistic liberal than truly reactionary. Maybe this is what really makes readers like me uncomfortable: our own unease with the possibility that we might fall under the much maligned rubric of liberalism when we really wish we were radicals. In this article on the 1968 protests and riots, Stoppard's distaste is startling but ultimately commonsensical. I love this anecdote:

In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll.

What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.” The article that I subsequently wrote about Belarus was published almost on the very day that Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Labour party member, was forcibly ejected from the party conference for heckling the foreign secretary. I received a gleeful postcard from Harold Pinter.

~~~~

Every year the Serpentine Museum, tucked into Kensington Park in such a way that I only ever manage to find it by wandering with careful aimlessness about the gardens until it suddenly appears before me (I like to think of it in fairy tale terms), erects a temporary pavillion designed by one of the world's foremost architects and then, well, they serve tea in it. I always enjoy visiting, when I can. This year, Frank Gehry has been tapped for the project, and he has created a model which looks like a freshman year woodshop project gone terribly wrong. So terribly wrong that not even a concerted effort to put it down using a nail gun could overcome the foul beast. (Click on the link for a picture, and scroll through for shots of previous years' pavillions, including one which inflated and deflated throughout the day.) It looks like it will be very interesting indeed; I can't wait to sip a drink primly in it.

~~~~

I have made NO pleasure-reading progress lately. Boo to me. Blame the minotaurs with whom I am doing battle at the heart of my labyrinths of March and Joyce Madness. So my short term reading list remains:

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
   
2. To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe
   
3. Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
   
4. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
   
5. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga
   
6. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
7. Ulysses by James Joyce
   

March Madness, MetaClooney and Mt. TBR

So I am happy as a clam amidst all this March Madness and Don Quixote-reading. A few notes on assorted oddities:

~~~~

Avant-garde and physical theatre companies in the UK are now turning to children's theatre. And I really mean children - my favorite of the projects listed is the one for tots with the emerging ability to walk but not (yet) the ability to speak:

The younger the audience gets, the more focused the shows have to be. Oogly Boogly's audience has a window of six months. If you're younger than a year or older than 18 months, you'll be either insufficiently mobile or too good at talking. "That age group has the most exciting thing in the world to do, which is to try walking," says Manley. "It's hard to sit them down when they want to do this thing. Oogly Boogly [the "play"] works specifically with that age group because of that."

Try to present the same group with a piece of slapstick, however, and they're more likely to be distressed than amused, having yet to see the funny side in falling down. Rearrange the furniture in the nursery's lunch room, as Starcatchers recently did, and you risk upsetting your audience. But show them a never-ending thread, as Manley does in My House [a work by another company], and they find it hilarious. "I suppose it's something to do with cause and effect, where something doesn't behave in the way they expect it to," he says, a tad bemused.

Indeed, these are "plays" in more than one sense of the word, and I can't say I am any less fascinated by them than the children are. After all, who in the world is more avant-garde, more capable of seeing the world outside the boundaries of learned convention, than toddlers?

~~~~

It may be that the Metropolitan Opera is cursed: they are now working with their fourth Tristan in a single production (three understudies had to be called in, in sequence, because of medical issues) and their second Isolde. Is it possible that Tristan and Isolde is to opera what the Scottish play (as theatre practitioners superstitiously call the cursed Macbeth) is to unsung drama?

~~~~

I am always fascinated by tales of what it is like to be a judge for a literary award, and have been since I read a tale (I don't remember where, alas) from one judge about how her life was dominated by the prize: she would come home after work (as a journalistic editor- not a time consuming job at all, no) to read a whole novel every day, and on weekends she would read three a day. How can anyone read that quickly? Where do I acquire that skill?

So I am pleased that tales about judging these prizes (see here for the Booker experience, and here for the PEN/Faulkner) are coming out of the woodwork nowadays.

~~~~

There is really only one word for this Esquire article by A.J. Jacobs: MetaClooney. Jacobs takes George Clooney on a tour of his own celebrity internet presence: Wikipedia entry, gossip sites, and all.

~~~~

I wanted to set out my short term reading list, with the idea that it might be easier to make progress by focusing on the near at hand, rather than the vastness of Mt. TBR in its entirety:

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
   
2. To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe
   
3. Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
   
4. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
   
5. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga
   
6. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
   

13) "The Hothouse" by Harold Pinter

An asylum drama that almost forgets to populate its world with patients, from one of Britain's preeminent playwrights. Written at the very beginning of Pinter's career, and then shelved until he decided to stage it virtually unchanged two decades later, this play partakes in the long tradition of linking the structures of institutionalized mental health treatment with the conventions of farce. Apart from some looming, haunted-house presences, we see nothing of the patients, and the drama dwells instead on the ludicrous, power-mad, and barely sane conversational struggles of the "rest home's" staff. This is careerism as torture.

The Hothouse
Harold Pinter
written 1958, first staged 1980
***1/2
March 4, 2008

[I am a bit behind on my reviewing, so I am hoping to catch up with a series of abbreviated reviews, of which this is the first.]

Once Upon a Time... the Second!

Hurrah! Carl has revived the Once Upon a Time Challenge for a second go. I love a good annual challenge; it lends such a sense of stability to my reading life. This is why I am thinking of reviving the Unread Authors Challenge for a second go round later in the summer. At any rate, last year I had a rare challenge success with the Once Upon a Time Challenge, combining the fun with the virtuous to read Grendel, The Golden Ass, Something Rotten, Morphology of the Folktale, and A Wizard of Earthsea. All were delightful and rich with new knowledge, and I am now eager to plunge back in to my mountain of fantasy-tinged unread books.

To see the rules, or join the challenge, go to Carl's site. Here they are in brief:

There are three quests you can follow in your journey through the four relevant genres of fantasy, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.

• Quest 1: Read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within the Once Upon a Time II criteria. They might all be fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology…or your five books might be a combination from the four genres.
• Quest 2: Read at least one book from each of the four categories. In this quest you will be reading 4 books total: one fantasy, one folklore, one fairy tale, and one mythology.
• Quest 3: Fulfill the requirements for Quest the First or Quest the Second AND top it off with a June reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The challenge runs from March 21, 2008 to June 20, 2008.

This year I am again going for Quest 1. Here is a short list of five, with a few alternates thrown in:

1. Ovid Metamorphoses
2. Octavia Butler Parable of the Talents
3. Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness
4. Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces
5. Susanna Clarke The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Alternates/Extra Credit:

• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
• A Sudden, Wild Magic by Diana Wynn Jones
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
• The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles II (Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra & Philoctetes)

I like to combine a little bit of classic(al) literature, a little bit of academic study, a little bit of self-defined genre fiction, and a little bit of mainstream borrowing of fantasy's trappings. I can barely wait till it begins!

More miscellany

What other news? I have just started an intriguing tale of the London suburbs that LibraryThing sent me as part of the Early Reviewers program (I fell behind in reviewing these a bit during the dissertation-finishing craze, so I am now making them top reading priority): Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park. So far the characters seem deeply sad in their utter lack of redeeming features and painfully accurate humanity. I am busily preparing to teach the second half of Don Quixote when I return from Spring Break, which presents a veritable mountain of reading for the next few days.

D and I have been watching Dexter digitally - it's amazing how much of the day can be frittered away with unlimited digital movies from Netflix, when one has access to a PC rather than an ineligible spinster of a Mac. Michael C. Hall is quite brilliant in it, as he was in Six Feet Under, but the rest of the cast often seems strained and under-rehearsed (or too broadly conceived to begin with). The opening credits are as terrifying a piece of mundanity as has ever been produced by the human mind (my friend C warned me about their creepy genius, but I still wasn't adequately prepared). In fact, it is this play between banal monstrosity and serial killer abnormality that is the show's greatest strength. Although it is (famously) about a sociopathic serial killer who works for the Miami cops as a blood spatter specialist and only kills other murderers who have eluded more conventional justice, Dexter (for all his inability to *feel* as a human should) is no more numbed and insensitive to the crimes they investigate than any other character in this fictional force. All of them have, in one way or another, dulled their humanity in the face of ambition, distraction, or (at the very least) the deadening scraping of repeated horror.

Other bitlets of interest:

• In America, Mondays are theatrical "dark days," but in Britain, where they have the same standard M-F workweek, theatres are dark on Sunday. Now the National Theatre is following patron demand and moving to stage Sunday performances as well.
• Are prizes that limit submissions by the gender of the artist (like the Orange Prize for Literature) inherently sexist? I am sorry to admit I hadn't really given it any thought, despite the large part of each day I devote to feminist rants against the gender-machinations of pop culture (a ritual that I perversely feel absolves me of guilt for addictedly consuming said culture). I was intrigued to learn that a number of prominent female authors refuse to allow their publishers to submit their novels for the Orange Prize, on feminist grounds. Food for thought, certainly.
• I have also been catching up on my blog-reading (a monumental task), and have decided to join the Sunday Salon. I'm absurdly excited about the opportunity to devote time every Sunday to guilt-free pleasure reading and blogging. I won't be able to participate this Sunday, because I will be traveling back to the East Coast, but I hope to start the following weekend.

A Miscellany of Updates

Last night D took me out to Osteria Mozza in LA for a delightful dinner in celebration of finishing my dissertation (fingers crossed that it actually gets accepted). Could I have been any happier than when I saw that this restaurant offered no fewer than FIVE varieties of burrata (mozzarella that has been mixed with heavy cream midway through the cheesemaking process)? I could not. I briefly considered ordering all five variations on my new gastronomical beloved before I finally agreed to have merely one (it is a sign of the depth of my love for D that I even gave him half, without growling possessively at him), as well as a pasta course (the most roll-your-eyes-back-in-your-head delicate and delicious goat cheese ravioli) and a steak in a balsamic sauce. As we were finishing our main courses, I remarked that I was getting moderately full. D replied: "I don't know: if you saw a bucket of burrata I don't think you would pass it by." I closed my eyes: "Are there any words in the English language more beautiful," I asked him, "than 'bucket of burrata'?". (This was not the first time this week that I had eaten burrata, I blush to admit. I had a really excellent dish of my dairy darling at a dissertation-celebrating meal at Obelisk in DC with my parents. God, it was good.)

But then I woke up this morning to more rejections from jobs I had applied for, which, truth be told, made me too depressed to get out of bed. (There is an important lesson here: don't check email in bed.) I can't even describe how brutal the academic job search has been emotionally. Best not to dwell on it, I guess. So I finally wrenched myself out of bed, cleaned the kitchen, and headed out for the farmer's market, where I bought strawberries, some very tasty looking asparagus, and the world's most expensive tomato.

Now it is time for a concerted dwelling on the positive. The goodness of having my dissertation finished (PLEASE let it pass, ye gods of higher education) goes without saying, but a more immediate, if no less anxiety-inducing, source of happiness is the fact that UNC is the number one seed in the nation in the NCAA tournament. Go Heels! Oh, college basketball, what a balm you are for my life's woes. I give you, just as a taste of the delights of this season, the game winning shot that Tyler Hansbrough tossed off against Virginia Tech in the ACC Championship, and (even more delightful) the goofy, loose-limbed dance of joy he (normally utterly taciturn in his concentration) did after watching it go in:



What's more, it emerges that UNC has the best academic record (measured by graduation rates) among its tourney-bound athletes of any of the #1 and #2 seeds, a considerably better showing than its posh nemesis, Duke. The story of the conflict between the two parts of the term "student-athlete" that this study tells is a grim one, but I feel proud of UNC for defying the national statistics. It is good to be able to feel positive about the pedagogical soundness of college sports (and about public education in general) even as I am donning elaborate UNC-themed outfits, enacting vast superstitious rituals to guarantee our continued sportive success, and yelling obscenities at the television and its representations of our foes.

Egging me on through this cathartic madness is Will Blythe's delightful account of his lifelong experience of the Duke-Carolina rivalry (he is a Tar Heel, not to worry), which was loaned to me by my kind and surprisingly open-minded Dookie friend. Here is one of many tales Blythe tells in To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, of the time when he had to interview Uma Thurman just after the season opener against Santa Clara, a game which seemed certain to be a Tar Heel blowout:

I was scanning the box score to the Santa Clara game when Thurman arrived. She was lovely, a long pink scarf draped around her swan's neck.

"This is unbelievable," I said.

Out on the West Coast, North Carolina had lost to Santa Clara, 77 to 66. I explained the shocking nature of the upset to Thurman, the way it had ripped a hole in my sense of normalcy, toyed with my expectations, screwed my sense that the world would deliver justice and satisfaction. [...]

Thurman was very kind and tried to keep my spirits up. She was going through some hard times herself, like the tag end of her marriage to Ethan Hawke, which I had to admit was painful, having myself gone through the dissolution of a long matrimony. On the other hand, that was just life. Theoretically, you could always get another spouse. This was basketball. You couldn't get another season with Sean May, Marvin Williams, and Rashad McCants on the same team. No way.

"I'm so sorry," Thurman said.
"Let's not talk about it," I said.
"It might make you feel better," she said.
"You don't believe that," I said.
"Not really."
"How's your love life?"
"Let's not talk about it." (20-21)

I have just reached the part in which Blythe, who has written for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review as well as Rolling Stone, uses the work of 19th century English essayist William Hazlitt on hatred to illuminate his feelings for Duke. Yes, indeed. It was a good, if, mmm, multifaceted education we got at Carolina.

The Book Awards Reading Challenge: A New Strategy

As I was joining new challenges in the dawn of the post-dissertation period, it occurred to me (with some degree of shock) that I still have a challenge open: the Book Awards Challenge, which lasts a full year, and which has about three and a half months left in it. I had promised to read 12 books in that year, which means that I have {blush} ten books to read in the next three and a half months. Looking back at my list, I realize it was filled with dense and intimidating chunksters (as well as books that would have qualified for my 2007 Year of Australian reading, which is now over). It sounded like it was time for a reconception of my challenge goals, if I was even to have a small hope of finishing the challenge (or making a valiant attempt at it).
So here is a rather short list of the two books I have already read:

1. Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin [Nebula]
   
2. Citizen Vince by Jess Walter [Edgar]
   

And here is a new list of 15 possibilities from which I hope to draw my final ten challenge books:

• Small Island by Andrea Levy [Orange, Costa/Whitbread, Commonwealth]
  
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons [Hugo]
  
• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields [Pulitzer, NBCC, Governor General's]
  
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson [NBCC, Pulitzer]
  
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler [Nebula]
  
• March by Geraldine Brooks [Pulitzer]
  
• Neuromancer by William Gibson [Nebula, Hugo]
  
• The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard [NBA, Miles Franklin]
  
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter [Pulitzer, NBA]
  
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey [Booker, Miles Franklin]
  
• Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee [Booker, Commonwealth]
  
• Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje [Governer General's, Giller]
  
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin [Hugo, Nebula]
  
• Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett [NBA]
  
• Them by Joyce Carol Oates [NBA]
  
• Mao II by Don DeLillo [PEN/Faulkner]
  

You can find the blog for the challenge here.

Notable Books Challenge (2008)

The tedious fullness of my schedule this year has prevented me from participating as I should in the Notable Books Blog, Wendy's successor to the 2007 New York Times Notable Books Challenge (drawn from the 2006 New York Times Notable Books list). Now, at long last, I am ready to leap back into the breach with a list for my own 2008 challenge. I enjoyed the New York Times list last year, so this year my goal will be to read (or more accurately, to have read, since some of these books I read in their actual year of publication) 12 books from the 2007 list. Here they are:

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2. Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
3. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan [READ]
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
5. Remainder by Tom McCarthy
6. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
7. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
8. What is the What by Dave Eggers
9. Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre
10. Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
11. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling [READ, click for my review]
12. The Gathering by Anne Enright

To visit the blog, see the very supportive rules for participating in it, or to join, go to the Notable Books Blog.

The Non-Fiction Five Challenge: A Second Attempt

Last year I participated in the wonderful Non-Fiction Five Challenge, because I truly do delight in non-fiction, which doesn't make enough appearances in the annals of my pleasure reading. Ultimately, I only made it through 3 of the 5 required books, and I am not totally convinced I read most of those within the time scheme of the challenge. Boo to me.

Well, this year I, unabashed, make another attempt at Joy's Challenge. Here are the rules:

1. Read 5 non-fiction books during the months of May - September, 2008 (please link your reviews at Thoughts of Joy)
2. Read at least one non-fiction book that is different from your other choices (i.e.: 4 memoirs and 1 self-help)

You can sign up for the challenge, see the list of participants, or read all about it here.

For me, a number of books will be reappearing from last year's list. Like last year, I will have a list of five, with six alternates, some of which may change over the course of the challenge:

1. 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro
2. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
3. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
4. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
5. A Brief History of the Caribbean by Jan Rogozinski
   

Extra Credit:

1. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
2. The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
4. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
6. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

Since the start of the challenge is still a way off, I won't be able to include a book I just finished and hope to review soon, The Translator by Daoud Hari. Nor will I include a truly gripping account of the North Carolina/Duke basketball rivalry that I am currently reading while I watch UNC progress to the ACC championship (Go Heels!): To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe. Also unincluded will be (probably) my next non-fiction venture, the library's copy of a biography of Cary Grant that has been sitting on my shelf for months. I am now experiencing a rampant desire to read all the books I have named in this post simultaneously. Best just to back away and return to the many reading projects I already have underway, at least until May.

The Pub (2008) Challenge

Now that the dissertation is in (this accounts for my recent small bout of quietness - more on this soon, I hope), it is challenge-joining time. I am trying to be more moderate this year, and to make my way through as much of Mt. TBR as possible (whom did I pick up that designation for my unread book pile from? I can't remember.).

So, Challenge #1: The Pub (2008) Challenge. Its rules:

1. Read a minimum of 8 books published in 2008. (Library books are acceptable!)
2. No children’s/YA titles allowed, since we’re at the ‘pub.’
3. At least 4 titles must be fiction.
4. Crossovers with other challenges are allowed.
5. Titles may be changed at any time.

The link above will take you to the challenge's site, where you can join, see a list of participants, or find collections of reviews.

It is hard to form a list for this challenge, since many of the books I will hopefully include on it haven't yet been released and haven't come to my attention. Nonetheless, here are a couple I hope to start out with:

• The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari (March 2008)
• The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merril Block (April 2008)

In fact, I have already read the first of these, although I haven't had a chance to blog it yet (soon, I hope!). Both are courtesy of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

20 minutes of Shame and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance

(I wrote the original version of this post yesterday, conscientiously using Word in case Blogger proved tricksy as it has with past drafts. Alas, my version of Word was suddenly possessed by a demon of deletion, which crashed the program just as I attempted to save my post. So I took a day to mourn its loss before trying again.)

I have just been bobbing along of late, trying to accomplish a plethora of irritating tasks (you know, minor ones, like submitting the final, revised copy of my dissertation, and trying to get a job). I have been devoting most of my time to preparing Don Quixote for class, which is equal parts delight and weight-lifting (both intellectual and physical), but I have also been trying to put my toe back in the water of blogging, blog-reading, actual reading, and movie-watching, after many months of starvation in all of those activities. Last night I finished off both The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Ingmar Bergman’s Shame while trying to get to sleep, and enjoyed them both tremendously. I will admit that my schedule is still crazy enough that I am forced to watch films episodically, rewarding myself for having completed fixed work goals with a short segment of film. This is hardly an ideal way to watch a movie, but it has created a rather odd feature in my work planning over the last several days: my To Do list has been dotted regularly with entries that read “20 minutes of Shame.”

So here are a few more notes before I have to return to the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

~~~~~

Polaroid has announced that it will stop producing film, and Geoff Dyer writes a wonderful essay that reflects on the peculiarities of a form that is photographic but not endlessly reproducible - a photograph for which there can be only one copy in existence, and where you can be almost certain that every subject performed the exact same ritual mere moments after it was taken (flap flap flap – [peer peer] – “not ready yet” – flap flap flap). How often can you suppose such unity of experience for the subjects of any other art form?

~~~~~

Iliana at Bookgirl’s Nightstand was seeking suggestions for literary podcasts to listen to on her iPod, and this led me down the long procrastinatory lane of wondering which podcasts on a range of different subjects I would deem my favorites at the moment. (I am, you see, a mad podcast fiend. If there were a podcast den where people did nothing all day but listen to talk radio and its offspring on their iPods, I would be there. Actually, my podcast addiction mostly rears its ugly head when I am doing what I might call transitional tasks that preclude reading, like doing the dishes or walking to work.)

So, a list. What are my favorite podcasts right now?
1) On film: Filmspotting
2) On food: KCRW's Good Food (thanks for recommending this one, R!)
3) On poetry: alt.NPR: Poetry Off the Shelf
4) On journalism/media issues: On the Media
5) On literature/cultural events: Start the Week with Andrew Marr
6) On life: This American Life.

Does anyone else have a favorite podcast they would like to share with me, thus becoming an enabler of my rampant addiction?

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Last, but not least, a delightful twist of form - a short story in footnotes by Gregory Norminton. I think I will put his novel Serious Things on my “to acquire” list.