The Author is Not an Outlier

Finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and still have Blink on reserve at the library. This is not the mind of a major scientist, nor the writing of a stellar author. His premise in this book is that superstars are a function of their place, time and benefactors. Oh, you didn't know that? At least I watched a good movie last night, Frida. I have hesitated taking it out, never having seen Salma in anything and being averse to watching anything about Communists in Mexico, but it was good ... visually pleasing (no Love in the Time of Cholera, mind you) and Salma was amazing. And of course it appealed to my attraction to the tango.

Back to Outliers. I appreciate scientists who can write up their theses using references that the common nonscientific reader can relate to. But once the book becomes trying to tease theorems out of single stories, they lose credibility. At least now I understand the Oriental mastery of math ... if you count in formula, I guess you naturally have a leg up. The one theory that harkens back to Tipping Point is the extension of the school day/year. How else can the student rack up the "expertise" requirement of 10,000 hours?

Anyway, I've moved on to short stories by Pirandello.

In This Case, Part of the Late Majority

Nine years ago, nine years! How did it take that long for me to finally read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? Me who in many instances consider myself to be quite the maven, innovator and change agent. So being almost a decade old, the theories in the book can seem dated already, especially as it predates web social networking. I felt like I was back in graduate school studying marketing theories because Gladwell is writing something to advise his readers how to spot and manipulate change since they themselves are not trendsetters or thought leaders. With that aura around it, I found it to be as boring as my marketing courses. On the other hand, it is not practical enough to say specifically how to reach the critical mass for broadly launching a new idea/product, a skill set I sorely needed when trying to get shared workspace up on the computers at work six or so years ago.

I am not turned off enough not to read Outliers and Blink. Which brings up a new tack I want to include in the blog. When I was strictly adhering to the annual reading list, it was easy to follow my path; now since that has fallen by the wayside, I need to keep better track of how one book leads into another, documenting both my curiosity and happenstance associations. I started an effort to do that when I listed the books published by Hesperus that were in the back of A Rogue's Life. And now my admission that I will try a couple more Gladwell books. Since he mentions six degrees of separation, this will be my attempt to associate my reading matter into whatever off the wall linkages I create.

Memento Mori

In case I haven't mentioned it before, my way of knowing if I really liked a book is whether I want to grab strangers on the street and tell them to read it; such is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He received a Pulitzer Prize for this book two months after he died at age 49 of cancer. Before writing his book, he was teaching in British Columbia, a pariah in the world of psychology as he challenged the basic premises of Freud's tenets. Becker in the book not only shows the human motivation not to be Oedipal or other sexual causes, but an existential bedrock question of how to reconcile the body and soul/self, the knowledge of our own inevitable death and what it means to be alive.

This book builds tightly from this seminal issue and encompasses so many aspects of not only psychology but also philosophy, ultimately concluding that to be human means to need to recognize the need for a web of support and an inevitability of surrendering to something beyond experience, faith more than belief and an acknowledgment of creation's unknown plan and its creator.

I can't select a couple of passages to quote because, after reading two pages, returning the book to the library and buying my own copy, I underlined probably 30% of it. Which brings me to another truism of my view of literature, if not life: the "story" rings truest when it is the one we are itching to hear. I can't randomly grab strangers to foist this treatise on them; in fact, I treasure its message so that I would even need to selectively recruit friends. It is not a young person's read, although those interest in psychology studies need it to round out and put into perspective pop culture analysis. It might resonate with both my post-cancer buddies or my friends having a crisis of faith or lapse from the church.

I did mark one page as the one to refer to first, 199 in my copy, on the defeat of despair: "... all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control ... it automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focused ... the defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem ... but of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing," but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it." To me this means not "I think, therefore I am," but "I act, therefore I am."

Going back to how exiled Becker must have been, and maybe still is, from Freudian interpretations of man's existence, it is impossible to find his second book, Escape for Evil in the local library system. Sounds like a use for some of my remaining credits at Borders. This book qualifies to join my coffee table top favorites, another book that changed my life and bears periodic rereading.

Old Times' Sake -- Plus the Hesperus List

Alright. I broke down and read a "picaresque" from the list. But it was more for nostalgia than a commitment to this evasive genre. I read the short, originally serialized, A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins. Know I read The Moonstone in college and think maybe The Woman in White. Basically picked up Moonstone to supplement my planned thesis on Dickens and found Collins a pleasant diversion, falling as he did into my preference for murder mysteries.

And once again, despite the name, this novella is not picaresque. Frank Softly, the would-be rogue, is the black sheep of a minor noble family in England, who cannot find his professional niche in life. The book reminds me of Theophilus North, but Softly is not as self-determining as North is. Softly is lured into careers that are criminal: forging masterpieces and eventually becoming a counterfeiter or "coiner." This last occupation is the result of prowling around the house of his "beloved" Alicia and being caught by her rogue father.

Stacked up against my characteristic elements of the genre, A Rogue's Life fails: Softly has no side-kick; does not innocently pursue an ideal (his ardor for Alicia does not qualify as a quest for an eternal love); he has no enlightenment at the book's conclusion; his "near-escape" is limited to walking away from detectives after Dr Dulcifer drops through the trap door, a much more colorful evasion. Besides all that, the ending is too contrived -- becoming a wealthy landowner in Australia where he had been banished to in lieu of the gallows.

Written in 1855, the book predates Wilkie's descent into opium, but the most quotable sentence from the story hints at the author's own proclivities to antisocial behaviors: "... it takes so little, after all, to represent the abstract principle of propriety in the short-sighted eye of the world."

The best thing I got out of the book was a wonderful list of other famous authors' books published by Hesperus Press. Sort of like the year when I read nothing but minor works of major French authors. Here are some I'm going to track down:

The School of Whoredom and The Secret Life of Nuns both by Pietro Aretino
Love and Friendship by Jane Austen
On Wine and Hashish by Charles Baudelaire
The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog both by Mikhail Bulgakov -- (HoaD) August 15, 2010 and (TFE) August 19, 2010
The Story of Nobody by Anton Chekhov
The Book of Virgins by Gabriele D'Annunzio
A House to Let by Charles Dickens (come on, at this point I never heard of any of these titles) -- August 4, 2010
One Thousand and One Ghosts by Alexandre Dumas -- August 20, 2010
The Popular Girl by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Memoirs of a Madman by Gustave Flaubert
The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo -- August 30, 2010
Words are Stones by Carlo Levi
A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre
The Way of Kings by Andre Malraux
My Secret Book by Francis Petrarch
Loveless Love by Luigi Pirandello -- August 3, 2010
Gargantua by Francois Rabelais
Memoirs of an Egotist by Stendhal
The Diary of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf
For a Night of Love by Emile Zola -- August 3, 2010

OK Slackers: anyone read any of these?

Reading Vertically and Tangentially

Hooked on Linwood Barclay now and since my last posting, have read two more of his books: No Time for Goodbye and Fear the Worst. Barclay's murder mysteries are scary. All the more so since they all are found in the mundane, routine of a settled family, a seemingly settled family where the children or parents disappear, where the protagonist is always the prime suspect, and where family secrets always are the source of criminal motives. His writing style is fast paced, modern but on edge making the lead character frantic. Once I remember how to do it, I will link to Barclay's website.

I also like the fact that his stories are set in the Northeast, either Connecticut or New York, with action moving along the Thruway or up and down the Hudson River. I have a feeling I might have read something by him a year or so ago, but I am now a dedicated fan.

Today, in about an hour or so, I read Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review. My motivation was a call from the hospital to report a questionable reading of my annual MRI and the need to come for more diagnostic tests immediately. Coincidentally, my chemotherapist had briefed me on the incidents of false positive MRIs, but even that caution could not put 24 hours of fear and dread to rest. (Thankfully, it appears to have been a false positive, but with a complete lack of beside manner, the technician only said "there is nothing we can biopsy today, come back in four to six months.")
A reprieve. Cancer is like bittersweet roots -- despite all the weeding I do in the gardens, it always comes back.

And using that as my meager metaphor, lead to Broyard's book. When he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer wrote several essays about dealing with his disease through the need of humans to tell stories, to set up metaphors and to reflect on other literature as defining his reactions.

"I am not a doctor, and even as a patient I'm a mere beginner. Yet I am a critic, and being critically ill, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on my condition. My initial experience of illness was a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative. Always in emergencies we invent narratives. We describe what is happening, as if to confine the catastrophe."

That quote reminded me of the essay I wrote and sent to one of the Slackers who was then taking a fiction writing class. Her assignment was to write about herself in the voice of someone else. I decided to try to do that and sent my effort to her. I wrote as if I were the head nurse at the chemotherapist's office when I went into full-blown allergic shock to my first 15 cc's of Taxol. I wrote as though this nurse so through my guise of being a "good" patient because she had seen so many others and their "patient" facades. Broyard makes me remember the poses I assumed.

Not wanting to make this depressing, because it is not, Broyard makes it real and his first person singular approach, like Didion's in A Year of Magical Thinking, hits everyone who has gone through a bout, or two with cancer: "What goes through your mind when you're lying, full of nuclear dye, under a huge machine that scans ... for evidence of treason? There's a horror-movie appeal to this machine. Beneath it you come the Frankenstein monster exposed to the electric storm? How do you appear to yourself when you sit ...beneath a scanty cotton gown in a hospital waiting room? Nobody, not even a lover, waits as intensely as a critically ill patient." MRI's are miserable for me. I am on my stomach, hanging into holes big enough for Pamela Anderson, with a horribly painful IV jammed into one of the few remaining visible veins on my right hand. And today with the sonogram, I kept waiting for a heart beat, remembering that sound from the fetal ultrasounds for the boys, and feeling it was only dead tissue the technician was finding since I couldn't hear it.

Broyard's cancer is the male equivalent to my bouts of breast and uterine cancer and his ruminations of the effect of his former sex life rang true: "Somebody other than a doctor ought to write about the relation between ... cancer and sexuality ... It's not unusual for the patient to think that it's sex that is killing him and to go back over his amatory history for clues. And of course this is splendid material for speculation, both lyrical and ironical. " His delving on this topic goes on, deliciously so, and can be an apt teaser to read his book.

Running in the opposite direction of the "encouragement" I wanted to give a former co-worker who has been diagnosed at Stage 3, when I told her to come to the conclusion it was not her fault, Broyard comments: "If you reflect that you probably helped to bring your illness on yourself by self-indulgence or by living intensely, you own up to it, instead of blaming something vague and unsatisfactory like fate. Anger is too monolithic for such a delicate situation. It's like a catheter inserted in your soul, draining your spirit." Why couldn't I tell her the most real analysis and conclusion: "... whatever I did, it was worth it. I have no complaints in that direction. I wouldn't change a thing, even if I had known what was coming."

What I find disturbing about Broyard's determination to die with style and to maintain his vanity is knowing how difficult it is to keep up a pose, the pose of the woman who can take it all, who has lived only to make her family a perfect home, who can make a facade of health and stability through weight loss, hair dye and fashion. Broyard avoids such accouterments, although he does emphasize that our dying is an image retained by our survivors.

Finally, Broyard acknowledges a deadly disease changes the perspective of time, from not reckoning our age by counting from birth forward, but from death backwards. From this angle, the ledger of life experience are full and appreciated. Although not hinting at a bucket list, this perspective also encourage optimizing new experiences and savoring them. IBNI becomes the third leg in my milking stool of life, along with Didion's AYOMT and Orianna Fallachi's Letter to an Unborn Child. Each resonates with inevitable human experiences with death, of a child, spouse and one's own. Each tells the reader how best to live.

Banal Rather Than Humiliated

An allegedly picaresque novel, Diary of a Humiliated Man by Felix de Azua, has been sitting next to the computer for weeks. It took a similar number of weeks to plow through after getting off to a promising start. Written in Spanish in 1987 and translated into English in 1996, the book is impossible to find. I guess there isn't any demand.

de Azua calls the first part "A Banal Man" and the second "The Dangers of Banality" so where the "hero" gets humiliated must have been lost in translation. After five months of diary entries, the hero explains who is trying to debase him -- his "employer" the Chinaman: "It us very clear that the Chinaman feels a visceral antipathy toward my banality and that he wants to teach me a lesson. With that idea in mind, he keeps me under control, tries to humiliate me. But his teaching method is corrupt. He doesn't even use fear, just disgust." But upon reflection, I conclude that only those whom we love and admire can humiliate us; we expect some social reciprocity. If we ignore or look down on someone, their attempts to diminish us has no effect as we do not adhere to their measure of man but our own.

de Azua maybe is modeling this life on Kafka. (Since I haven't read Metamorphisis, I don't know whether it is better to be an insect or banal.) How can one have banality as a quest goal? What insights there are on contemporary Spanish governmental corruption is gratuitous when the protagonist chooses not to interact with his community.

I have one more book from the 2010 list queued up to read. All these failures to inspire hold me back from opening it. This year's resolution is nothing to hold to.

Reading Non-List Books at a Breath-Taking Speed

Not since the summer I discovered Nancy Drew have I read a book a day. Almost at that pace now, but unfortunately, most of them are not worth the time and effort of writing up a Slackers' review. Over the past couple of days, I finished three that merit some critique.

At one of the Slackers urging to read books set in Portland Oregon, I read Lis Wiehl's Hand of Fate. I probably never should have taken it out of the library when I skimmed through the endorsements, all from provocative radio talk show hosts. Wiehl, herself in the business, has pandered her murder mystery in the best Time/Warner conglomerate style. Sure these guys live for generating hate mail, any kind of mail ups their salaries. But the reader has no sympathy for Fate's demise and the three female leads are as indistinguishable as the Sex in the City trio. The one time I got interested was at the mention of the store Oh Baby which I thought might be developed into a subplot, perhaps on cross-dressing male radio talent. But alas, this wonderful store where I purchased my favorite lilac slip was merely a throw away line -- or another attempt to get local support behind the book.

Next I picked up a book that itself had local anchors for me: mentioning the area malls and newspaper. This mystery, Never Look Back by Linwood Barclay, was much, much better, driving me to pick up two more of this author's books at the library this afternoon. Set in a town that harkens of Glens Falls, Barclay weaves a complicated story of a falsely accused reporter whose newspaper has replaced on-site coverage of town meetings by feeding You Tube coverage to India, who is battling attempts to privatize the near-by prison, whose four-year-old is kidnapped twice and whose wife's disappearance makes the detective focus on the reporter as the lead suspect. Lots of twists and turns deftly handled if not summarily and oddly tied up at the conclusion.

Finally, to pose for my face-to-face book club as a serious reader, I decided to reserve a couple more Gabriel Garcia Marquez books after advocating that the group read something life-changing like One Hundred Years of Solitude. In less than two hours, I finished Memories of My Melancholy Whores.written when Gabito was 77 and almost 20 years after Love in the Time of Cholera. Although I haven't read LITTOC, I watch it on DVD periodically. It is one of the most romantic stories I know. And MOMMW repeats its major theme of all-consuming love happening only once in a lifetime, here at the end of the hero's life not at its start, and that all other therapeutic sex can be counted and recorded much like changes in weight or blood pressure. As GGM writes: "Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."

It is also a wonderful self-assessment on aging. To quote at length: "... I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time."

The other theme that recurs from LITTOC is the hero's writing love-lorn articles (letters) that resonate with the community at large. Those thought in the story appeal to all ages, but the novel is best at portraying love and lust in that part of the population thought not to still be engaged in thinking about it, let alone physically dealing with its issues.

By the way, in case I forgot to mention it, I also read a recently published biography of GGM in the years leading up to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It does take some of the mystery out of the novel because it tracks the historical events that inspired his reworking and personalization; but it was written by a true believer, one who read OHYOS at one no-stop sitting. And I thought I was quick with three days (but then again, I slept).