Me Bad and List for 2013

What was I reading in 2012?  How can there be 20 unread letters on last year's bucket list?  Maybe that was the wrong name ... did I think I would die when I finished the list?  It will be renamed "Fill My Literary Void List" for 2013.

2012 certainly was a year of distractions, faint resolve, and lack of diligence.  Not only do I intend to keep plugging away at these authors, but I will come up with a real, new them for 2013 by tomorrow.

B:  Fire Next Time by James BaldwinD:  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
F:  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 
G:  Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
H:  The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
I:  Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco
K:  Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Keyes and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milos Kundera
L:  The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin 
M:  Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
N:  Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul 
O:  The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
P:  The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil by V.S. Pritchett
Q:  Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
R:  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -- March 18, 2013
S:  Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men by John Steinback
T:  The Art of War by by Sun Tzu and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
U:  Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset
V:  Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
W:  Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton or Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren and Decline and Fall by Evenlyn Waugh and My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
X:  NEED SOMETHING FOR THE LETTER X
Y:  Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates -- March 19, 2013
Z:  We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Here we go 2013:  the tangent-driven, one word search list.

A for Attraction:  Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes by Jena Pincott -- January 17, 2013
Artful by Ali Smith -- March 3, 2013 (Happy Hundredth Birthday Daddy)
B for Bonk by Mary Roach -- April 15, 2013 
C for Celebrity:  The Frenzy of Renown by Leo Braudy -- March 3, 2013  
F for Fashion:  Paris Fashion by Valerie Steele -- January 17, 2013 
G for Gulp by Mary Roach -- May 28, 2012
H for Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks -- September 8, 2013
S for Stiff and S for Spook by Mary Roach -- June 22, 2013
Tangents on Ali Smith:  Girl Meets Boy and There but for the -- March 10, 2013
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann -- July 6, 2012



Off List Tangents:
Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal -- March 18, 2013 
After Visiting Friends - A Son's Story by Michael Hainey -- March 30, 2013 
Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn -- March 30, 2013
Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight -- Juky 7, 2013
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell -- July 28, 2013
Life Time by Liza Marklund -- September 8, 2013
Little Green by Walter Mosley -- September 9, 2013
Brave Genius by Sean Carroll --December 25, 2013

Book Club Books:
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien -- March 3, 2013 
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks -- April 2, 2013 
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett -- April 15, 2013
Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson -- May 28, 2013
The Price by Arthur Miller

Movie Reviews:
The Horse Whisperer -- March 10, 2013
The Motorcycle Diaries -- March 10, 2013 
Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter -- March 18, 2013

Shamed into a Similar Retrospective Assessment

I know this is a venue for book reviews, but my darling daughter-in-law has used these questions to reflect on the passing year and I've decided it would do my psyche benefit to answer the following self-assessments:

1. What did you do in 2012 that you'd never done before? Got a concussion, ah me and Ms. Hillary if that is what happened to her instead of "a gash, a rash and purple bumps."
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? No, my resolutions are public, to wit, the Slackers' 2012 book list which really needs a do-over for 2013.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Unfortunately, no.
4. Did anyone close to you die? Fortunately, no.
5. What countries did you visit? Texas! (This is a copy and paste from my DIL.
6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you didn’t have in 2012? A Triple Crown winner.
7. What dates from 2012 will be etched upon your memory, and why? Of course, Bill and Em's wedding and probably Labor Day, the day of the great fall.
8. What was your biggest achievement of this year? Getting kudos at work and an early confirmation of continued employment in 2013.
9. What was your biggest failure? Letting too many old friends fade away without keeping in more frequent correspondence.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?   Well, duh, the blessedly awful fall.  At least the scars are minimal, I didn't get a blood clot, and I had my family to get me to the ER quickly.
11. What was the best thing you bought? Two gorgeous emerald rings.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Getting at least one tree up for Thanks-mas and all of the presents wrapped, the goose bought and cooked.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?   One woman at work who is losing it, aggressively attacking someone I am trying to mentor and develop.  That woman is jealous.
14. Where did most of your money go? E-bay
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? The grand wedding in Texas, bringing my menfolk with me and Cookie coming as well.
16. What songs will always remind you of 2012? Not really songs per se, but Carlos Santana at SPAC and Tedeschi Trucks at the Palace.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?  I am definitely happier, 7 pounds heavier, and depending on the market, a tad less well off.
    
18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Gone out for dinner, movies, coffee with my girlfriends.
19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Wasting time at work.
20. How did you spend Christmas? We had two holidays, the Texas and the Delmar versions.  Both were special.  Although the food for the Texas celebration was much better.
21. Did you fall in love in 2012? Of course.
22. What was your favorite TV program? Since I really don't watch TV, I was unexpectedly surprised to discover The Midwife on PBS.
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?  No, my political dislikes became more entrenched.
24. What was the best book you read?  Several:  Fahrenheit 451, Closing of the American Mind, Intellectuals and Society, and The Phantom Tollbooth. 
25. What was your greatest musical discovery?  When we went to the Brandenburg Concerti last New Year's Day, I actually recognized most of them.
26. What did you want and get? Loved, adored, and cherished.
27. What did you want and not get? More of the above.
28. What was your favorite film of 2012? Hysteria.
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?  Never ask a lady this question.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? See 27 above.
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept of 2012? Jersey dresses, over the knee boots, and Lutens, Lutens, Lutens.
32. What kept you sane? A dark quiet room at night and a warm puppy on my head.
33. Who did you miss? Too many close people live in other states.
34. Who was the best new person you met?  My boss.
35. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2012.   Eventually, there will be someone who recognizes you for what you considered to be your core values and experiences.

My Last Bucket List Author of the Year

Read two Pablo Neruda poem anthologies:  last night, finished The Book of Questions and earlier in the week, Intimacies Poems of Love.  Neither of them gave me a poem I wanted to read to book club members next week.  Nor did any of them provoke self-examination or personal identification with the themes.  Particularly, TBOQ seemed strained and contrived to me.  Written entirely as questions, these haiku like verses were constructed by putting one sensory perception against a dissonant other:  colors making sound, smells making noise.  They seemed autistic and not universally human.  They were more than the misunderstood curiosity of children, they were not allegorical, they were not the wandering nonsequitors of the elderly.  All together the anthology didn't present topics for meditations or musings.  Nor were his love poems romantic or erotic.  Sorry, bucket list, I have not found a key piece to my missing literary foundations.

Another Year End Easy Read Favorite Author

When James Lee Burke started writing about Montana, I gave him up for lost.  The last New Orleans book of his I read left me flat as well, but glad I took the chance reading Creole Belle, a long violent, family threatening, industry mogol polluters, both morally and ecologically.  Burke many times reminds me of Dick Francis in that his main characters are so likeable and yet the crime, anger, and onslaughts they undergo borders on sensational.  Unlike Francis, Burke sticks with Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell, two former NOPD officers who deal with nasty nasty criminals while Burke begins and ends each chapter, if not paragraph, with some of the most beautiful descriptive writing of peaceful Louisiana bayou geography, nature and atmosphere.  I'd have to go back to my year of reading states to see what I read for Louisiana, but reading Creole Belle, I was lost in thoughts of how this is the essence of the state and of a man who loves his surroundings and home.

So it's time to look back at how successful, or not, I have been in addressing my bucket list.  Obviously, not too successful.  I did not of course kick the bucket but certainly was knocked for a loop from my Labor Day downfall and still find myself reacquiring segments of my personality that seemed to have been deep sixed for months.  For example, I tucked my DVD player in the bottom drawer of the night stand and only brought it out a few days ago, so long disused that I forgot where to plug it in and turn it on.  I thoroughly enjoyed Kinky Boots, recommended by our office's affirmative action officer, and last night watched Bridges of Madison County.  BOMC is definitely a chick flick, probably from before that term entered the lexicon.  The viewer easily enters the story and the era and when it's over, only then realizes how willingly disbelief was suspended and how unlikely many events and emotions were.  Of course that did not prevent me from tears.

I admit I use movies as a safe venue for a good cry.  I hate crying and steel myself against it even during those periods of my life when illness or other hardships would trigger weeping in the average person.  I give myself a sham excuse of equating the activation of my tear ducts with a susceptibility to colds and sore throats, so I don't cry to stay "healthy."  But a movie gives me cover and allows my emotions to flood my brain and measure my life experiences against the women I relate to on screen.  I found myself not getting lost in the lust of Clint Eastwood but in the wifeliness of Meryl Streep.  Her understanding and appreciation of the rules of her choice to be a wife and mother seem the ur-theme of the story more than her liberating four days of sensuality.  I need some more good movies. 

So I end, almost, the year resolving to copy those titles I ignored in 2012 and redouble my vows and resolutions to try to read more classics.  I have my N author at bedside, reading through a couple of Pablo Neruda poetry anthologies for the upcoming book club ... which will probably be as poorly attended as December's.  Not sure I am relating that well to Neruda to choose on of his to read.  As a good fall back Plan B I took out Seamus Heaney's Beowulf to re-read and if the audience is select enough, might just read Shakespeare's Sonnet 155.

Ending the Year with a Few Favorite Authors

Now that I am venturing back into the town library, I have fallen into temptation and grabbed a couple of my favorite contemporary "easy reading" authors' latests to rush through the last week of the year.  Finished JD Robb's Delusion in Death yesterday.  (Probably should have spent more time getting a better taste to Christmas dinner, but anyway ...)  If I recall, the previous one of hers I read this year was quite subpar; this one a bit better although 2060 and its technology does not seem that unusual to me anymore nor does the concept of Urban Wars.  It was an interesting themed book to read after all the mass murders of 2012, showing what damage can be done without guns, and emphasizing the depraved motives of a criminal mind.

The other book I will complete shortly and then review is James Lee Burke's latest Creole Belle, thankfully, he has returned to NoLa from Montana.

Success

Not that I actually read Go Down Moses, but I did find it in the back seat of the Sebring in a cloth market bag so I could get back the $15 lost book fine I paid last week.  And I got through two movies this weekend.  First I needed just to make sense of Eco's Name of the Rose.  Of course the movie cut, cut, cut, but Eco larded his novel -- I realized, almost the equivalent of an illustrated medieval manuscript.  Layer upon layer, requiring not only an in depth understanding of 14th Century order factions, the Franciscans, the Benedictines, the two popes, the Inquistioners, but also his most Italian overlay of honorable doubt and love of the Classics.  The movie does reaffirm the messages I was left with after all the ornateness:  Live in one's brain; Laugh at oneself, one's biases, life itself; and trust the ancient Greeks and Romans for their understanding of man and his place in the world.

Of course, it is easy to look at Sean Connery, wrinkled of brow and shaved bald, but still of the sparkling eyes and iconic ironic wit.  Christian Slater was Aldo, so young, so short.

Also finally watched a movie that a fellow at work recommended highly, especially when he teases me about my impractical, snow unworthy winter foot wear:  Kinky Boots.  It was a great movie, Rich was right.  He is our affirmative action officer at work and I'm sure he wants all of us to endorse the tolerance and understanding illustrated in the movie, but a beautiful human story, lots of pain but lots of personal successes.  The other DVD I picked up today was Bridges of Madison County, which is a year late for my lust list of 2011.

Anyway, the days are getting longer and hopefully so is my powers of concentration to read more avidly and loyally.  The pile next to the bed is getting taller and my resolve a bit more firm.

Missing months

I remember falling and trying to stop myself from hitting the road face first.  I remember staying home almost two weeks, going from one doctor to another, and sitting in the sun in the late afternoons in September to try to dry out the open lesions n my forehead.  Since my eye was swollen shut for days, I attributed that as the reason I stopped reading and blogging.  Eventually, I researched concussions online to learn about becoming depressed.  So there we go ... it still is difficult for me to resume reading and posting reviews.  (Over $25 in library fines and missing books further evidences these doldrums.)

I'm not sure how in depth I can write about those books I managed to get through -- in random order:
Shrub by Molly Ivins; The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (actually on the 2012 list); The Disappearing Spoon by San Kean (the perfect book for the months that disappeared); The Fiction Class by Susan Breen; and Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell.

Let's do Shrub in short shrift.  We have a book swap in the small galley kitchen at work and I traded Fiction Class for Shrub.  I think Molly is witty and clever and can write extremely well and I figured that Shrub as an insider look at W as Texas governor would be tolerable.  Marginally so.  Only because I am a spy in the house of state politics and have had little regard for any of the governors who sat in the Capitol when I worked there, I am not disillusioned by the insider deals and self promotion of W.  His addiction to his father's reputation and money aligns with his legacy years at Yale and Deke.  I did not turn down a single dog-ear in the book and I will re-pot Shrub back on the kitchen shelf tomorrow, hoping to reclaim The Fiction Class to send to my daughter in law.

So on to The Fiction Class:  this book came north with Hammagrael as she visited to rake pine needles early in the month.  Ever so slightly reminiscent of We Have to Talk about Kevin, as the author is blunt about her contrary feelings towards her mother who is in a nursing home.  Both H and I have dealt with this; I could never ask her if her Mom gave her as difficult a time as Nan did me ... but then, that was her modus operandi forever.  The book was a page turner only to the extent that I kept reading Breen would be able to end the book spectacularly.  She didn't ... it was mundane and anticlimactic.

I loved The Disappearing Spoon and decided it could be the inspiration of a new Boticelli like game.  Make up names of make believe elements.  Not happy that promethium has been taken, but how about some of these:
A new noble gas called Kingdum
A new heavy metal called Led Zeppelum
New inert gases called Tedium. Boredum

I had more written down but can't find my list.  Like Kean's Violinist's Thumb and my desire to improve my understanding of biology since the 1970s, I hoped TDS would give me an aha moment for chemistry.  I love books that are histories of topics, Salt, Cod, 1492, and a perspective of science from scientists is interesting but won't necessarily improve one's Regents score.

It Sings: Corelli's Mandolin

I took Louis de Bernieres Correli's Mandolin out of the library last year. It was like having a box of macarons and not wanting to finish eating them because then they'd be all gone. I read short sections of it each night, hearing the story in my head, seeing the Greek island, long before Captain Correlli and his company occupy it. I decided it was a book to own and reread all that I read before and still moved through the book slowly, savoring it and underlining my own copy again and again.

It is so much better than the movie and I actually liked the movie, surprisingly only the second Nicholas Cage movie I can endorse, but that was early in his career, as was Moonstruck. I found it very difficult to isolate the factors that appeal to me and then I read about deBernieres on Wiki and discovered what an influence Garcia Marquez was in his writing. Duh, the story is loaded with South American style magical realism. He writes of a community over long periods of time, where history is myth and contemporary citizens larger than myth. He is a storyteller and the characters are unforgettable.

de Bernieres comes into his story most often through the voice of the doctor who is trying to write a history of Cephallonia, its centuries of occupiers and its links to Greco-Roman cultural heritage. The villagers are wonderful, if a bit stereotypical, at least/most human ... the drunken priest, the widowed mother of Pelagia's fiance Mandras, the gentle giant, the old men in the cafe. The reader loves them for their oddities, their humanity.

Unlike Play It As It Lays and Things Fall Apart, this is a story of triumph. Where the plot weakens is towards the end where the author depicts a more contemporary Greece where the population is skewed towards the vulgarity of ignorant but rich tourists. The ending in the movie is a bit more believable than Corelli returning to Pelagia when they are in their late 60s or early 70s, not that the reader does not believe their love can quickly rekindle, but that he was able to return to the island often not noticed by the villagers or that she could not figure out it was him sending her unsigned postcards from around the world for decades. It is not likely that these two could still hop on a motor scooter and find the old shepherd's abandoned hut where they trysted in their youth, especially since everything else on the island was pretty much destroyed in the earthquake of 1953.

Catching Up: Four Books Behind

If my brain is in as bad shape as my sinuses, these reviews will make absolutely no sense and the linkages in themes I see between them will be just as hallucinatory as the smoke I "saw" waking up with a jolt after taking two too many Contacs.

The first two books are associated with the book club. One of the founding members suggested the latest Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, for April. In our five year history, I think we have read exactly one other nonfiction, and 700 pages seemed way beyond the group's attention span. Nonetheless, I took the book out of the library and carted it all the way to Texas and back ans still only finished it this morning, a month after the wedding. I am a Pinker fan: I loved The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works. His training and career is primarily about how the brain works and how thoughts evolve into language. The is a too-great stretch for him to venture into a "scientific" analysis of why violence has declined.

Perhaps it came too close on the heels of reading The Phantom Tollbooth, but methinks, Pinker is using numbers, graphs and charts to prove his agenda, couple with his linguistic prowess, he merges the worst of Digitopolis and Dictionopolis and makes everything seem logical and backed up with data. Feeling as blah as I do today, and not anxious to incur additional library fines, I can't even bring myself to go back through the text to remove all the post-it notes I scattered throughout. I do agree that we are much "safer" in today's world than under arbitrary rules that punished, tortured and killed innocents for the sake of the communities' biases. But I am left thinking that while Old Testament and Middle Ages' violence was widespread and pervasive, with enormous aggregated totals, the underlying clan and religious fervor continues, with an order of magnitude improvement in the methods of terror. Pinker argues against 9/11 and bombings in Jerusalem on the basis on a score pad tally. He attributes the underlying motivation of Islamic terrorism as being fear and the disruption of daily live. I have not been argued out of my perspective that it is a jihad of conquer. It seems to me like he is covering his ass-umptions when thirty pages before neatly wrapping his theorems with a tidy bow, he reprises:

"Religion: Speaking of ideologies, we have seen that little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas. All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorized the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods ... " He goes on to reiterate the diminution of this compulsion.

Which brings me to the book that eventually surfaced as the more "readable" entrant for April: Daniel Silva's Portrait of a Spy, a novel set in the today present, of a cash poor Dubai, a Pygmalion Saudi Arabia, an ill-advised US President, a demoralized CIA and a group of world saving Israelis. Let me put my lot with the latter. (In fact, I couldn't help but compare Silva's special assistant to the President for homeland security, James McKenna, to Steven Pinker.)

There are some tenets for Pinker's that I hold; the first, that trading with someone diminishes the chance of wanting to harm them, profit trumps violence. And secondly, although it might take a bit longer for me to admit to it, if you can envision yourself as someone else, you are more accommodating to them. That one does not hold in Silva's world of spies, terror and torture. The best spy completely understands the point of view of the other, but that other remains a threatening adversary, and the scales of justice must be balanced by any means.

Industrial Strength Writers' Block

It is difficult, even tonight, to write.  It is only the pressure of having to return weeks-long over due books to the library that compels me to write.  That and reading a book about Catholic guilt, The Name of the Rose.  Yes, I still believe everything is connected.  So, Eco's book both reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 for the flaming destruction of the abbey's library and for what I am enduring at work:  namely, wearing "ears" to drown out the sound of yet another secretary who is addicted to the phone and would talk to a busy signal.  I have been listening to Gregorian chants and Latin Masses, fearing that I would be too apparently enjoying more contemporary music.  In fact, the Masses are therapeutic and have underlined Eco's book.

I am hard-pressed to find the ur-theme of this endeavor.  I know it has won international accolades but I cannot decide what it is about.  It is hardly a murder mystery.  It is a difficult national or religious history book.  I guess it is a personal apologia:  What does it mean to be a contemporary author who acknowledges the classical and religious foundations of his education and culture.  How does one shift through the banality of religious factionalism and propaganda,  How does one reconcile a classical foundation versus one that is based in Catholicism.

I have been reading, a lot, despite my neglect of my blog.  Two other books impinge and intermingle with The Rose:  The Closing of the American Mind and Intellectuals and Society.  I will attempt to get caught up and blog about both of them.  But, today as I was trying to finish Closing as well as The Rose, I was struck by the emphasis on Socrates.  How incendiary he is to both Eco and Bloom.  How important both authors maintain it is to think independently about human defining thought.  What I find cheapening about Eco is dear old William of Baskerville.  Maybe if I watched the movie and linked with Sean Connery as William I'd be more sympathetic, but in the novel he seems unfocused, smart by serendipity, aloof from catecatical controversy, lucky in his mystery-solving.

I dog-eared many pages, but tonight as I ignore the network propaganda about election results, I am left with my residual impressions about the book.  First, let me be perfectly clear that without my scholarly son, I found all the paragraphs of Latin tedious.  Even if I attempted to translate all the sections, I hardly believe it would have clarified or advanced the plot.  Toward the end, I felt Eco was more self-disclosive about why he wrote the book.  The discussion of the need for humor in literature and human perception of dogma is introduced late in the story but stressed at the end.  The absurdity of religious factions stands allegorically for politics as well as Catholic schisms ... in fact who outside Vatican historians care anymore.

So why is this book so well regarded?  It is a struggle.  I probably spent more time reading it than I will reading Gone with the Wind, once I gird my loins and do it.  And with probably much less satisfaction. 

I am left with thoughts about censorship (back to Fahrenheit) and admiration for champions of foundations in classics of philosophy and the humanities.  I hope my brain can do justice to Bloom and Sowell  .. I resolve to get them blogged by the weekend, as well as The Disappearing Spoon, aka the disappearing book.

Lived to Tell the Story

Back to my bucket list, this time Zora Hurston Neale’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.  It is a simple story of one woman’s life and loves as interpreted by her community and told to her best friend.  Sort of a female Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, although Janie is a long survivor in her early 40s and the water-related catastrophe was a Florida hurricane.  Although other reviews of the novel laud it as an African American classic, it seems to me more of a theme of the necessity to interpret one’s life by recounting it to a neutral but sympathetic listener.  

That theme is echoed with Janie’s forced alienation from the life of her assumed home town of Eatonville when her second husband forbade her to participate in the gossip and humor of the men-folk gathering in front of the store.  But her silence is associated with a deeper gender bias.  Janie’s grandmother and both her first and second husband Logan set expectations for her that assigned her to a time and cultural fixed role:  either is helpmate or accessory.  Janie’s urge to find the fullest expression of her womanhood only comes about through her marriage to Tea Cake.  As passionate and lively her love and life was with Tea Cake, it was hardly a match between equals.  Tea Cake hits her, more to have her bruises prove his manliness when he suspects her of falling under the spell of the town’s matron’s brother.

The ending still points out that Janie isn’t comfortable with her own voice.  She tells Pheoby that she can tell the town what has happened to her while she was away.  Janie seems to be happy with the voices and visual memories she has in her head as she recalls her love for Tea Cake behind closed doors.  She no longer owns the town store; she recreates herself as the rich widow holed up in a house.  The reader senses she will not emerge again to join the conversation.

Do I think  this book should rank in the top 100 American novels?  I have mixed feelings.  It is as simple as The Old Man and the Sea and Neale has an ear for realistic dialect ... things she must have overheard growing up are expressed lyrically.  I did fall into her story rabbit hole but not to the extent that I have with The Name of the Rose.  Still and all, a worthy entry for the 2012 list.

Finally, One From My Bucket List

Maybe I had to feel at death's door to recommit to my must read list for 2012.  I got Fahrenheit 451 from the library in July and left it with my son so he could read it.  Now he is back in school; I renewed it and it sat on my night stand.  Then came the fall.  Not only didn't I have the mental stamina to read but I couldn't even get my glasses on from my eye swollen shut.  What a perfect book to rejoin the ranks of readers.

And that's Bradbury's point:  he saw a future where no one reads, where talk is prattle and not conversation, where wall size TVs entertain (he got that right but missed the lure of pornography as well as round the clock sports and "reality" programming).  His television is mock interactive but I wonder how close on the horizon is contributing programs ... if computer games can progress on alternative lines based on a players actions, how long will it be before the television audience will direct its own happy endings.

In my lengthy recuperation, I'm back to watching some of those shallow information shows like the Dr.s.  On Dr Phil yesterday, a "renowned" psychiatrist promoted his theory and book about the Demise of Guys from there addiction to computer games and pornography and instant gratification with a false sense of control.  A nation of avatars.

I think 451 is the book on my list that I like the best so far.  In a sense it reminds me of both The Phantom Tollbooth and A Wrinkle in Time.  First because it, like them, is close to its 50th anniversary of being published.  All three seem to represent a more innocent time, a sense of looming change -- negative at that -- and yet a celebration of humanity and its resilience.

Like all my favorite books, I but it under my mental microscope to diagnose where I think the author leaked into the story.  I believe some cousin or friend teased him about getting a dime if he could fill a sieve at the beach.  What a wonderful image.  His words spoken I recall through Faber about three principals of good writing aligns with those from the literary analyses I read last year:  the layering of meaning at the same time the minutiae of details; the leisure to interpret; and the commitment to act after thought.

I also was entranced with the theme of anti-intellectualism and covert censorship.  In the back of the "dime" paperback copy I read, Bradbury rants on a text book of short stories that were edited, dumbed down.  Resonated with me for a couple of reasons:  my younger son who is taking Greek tragedy and already read Oedipus Rex and Antigone in high school was appalled when his professor asked the class how many had read the Old Testament and none raised their hands, and this a Catholic college; and I must get back and finish my two nonfiction books, Sowell's Intellects and Society and Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.  How Bradbury made Bloom's points, earlier and with an allegory.

Back to subtle, societal effective censorship.  How often this year have I been tempted to read a book advertised or reviewed in the NYT's weekly supplement, and how many times, like every time, has that recently published book been both shallow and sensationalistic.  Making me feel like Mildred and her friends.  How often, especially after the boys left private school, was I angered by the agenda driven teacher reading lists, that pandered to minorities and advocated a philosophy if bland indifference and entitlement to mediocrity.    How often do I recoil at the titles selected by my reading group.

Which brings me to a short review of City of Light juxtaposed against an unlikely counterpoint of The Empty Glass.  What possibly could they have in common?  (Why does this seem like a final exam in college where I wrote up what I did the night before -- never studying -- and how that related to required reading.)  Both tales "star" a woman who has "sexual relations" with a President:  in CoL with Grover Cleveland (yuck shades of Stanford White from American Eve -- White even appears in this book as the architect of Buffalo's grandeur) and Monroe with JFK, and various other cabinet members and/or touch football buddies.  Both women are powerless, viewed by adoring fans, either as a respected school marm and pillar of the community in Buffalo or as the sex icon of the 60s by the world, as enviable.  But both are clueless and powerless and manipulated by money and political agenda. 

So what are the uberthemes of these two novels:  not female intellectual inferiority, but maybe a Bradburian reinterpretation of history, a dumbing down and appeal to sensationalism and the human negative trait to see plots in order to lessen personal responsibility and accountability. 

This is a long essay like review and I am happy to have my brain almost 100% back, off oxycoton and my personality no longer timid and cowering.  Feeling restored, I feel like Bradbury's Clarisse, eager to be outdoors and talking.  Guess what -- today's talking is a one-way blog posting.

The Empty Glass and City of Light

Too wrecked to write

Don't Know Much Biology

I loved biology, back in its infancy it seems from the 1950s and 60s.  So much of  what is summarized in Sam Kean's essays in The Violinist's Thumb recap discoveries that accelerated after I finished drawing one celled animals with my beautiful colored pencils for extra credit.  I picked up this book as Kean's latest ... I was much more interested in reading is Disappearing Spoon which I am still either savoring or slogging through.  At least that one has inspired me to make up new names for fallacious elements ... a parlor game to take over Botacelli?

The book is fine, but nothing more special than leafing through back issues of Science in the labs downstairs at work, except for an occasional groaning pun.  I only turned down one corner to refer to in a review, and that was the effect of environmental factors on sperm and the risk for disease passed on to children from exposure to chemicals, either accidental or intentional bad habits.  Why does science take so long to validate old wives' tales and myths and hunches. 

I really will have more so say about spoon, simply because like taking Bayesian statistics and then understanding univariate, this book would have helped me get a better mark in Regents chemistry.

Not Spellbound:The Storytelling Animal

Once again, I was tempted by a New York Times book review to reserve a book at the library; this time, The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.  Despite a quoted endorsement from Steven Pinker on the back cover, the book is superficial in that it approaches creating a tale, story, myth, or legend from a psychosocial need rather than analyzing the merits of plot construction or literary merit.  Here is his major premise:  "As the linguist Noam Chomsky showed, all human languages share some basic structural similarities -- a universal grammar.  So too, I argue, with story.  No matter how far we travel back into literary history, and no matter how deep we plunge into the jungles and badlands of world folklore, we always find the same astonishing thing: their stories are just like ours.  There is a universal grammar in world fiction, a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome."

 

Gottschall observes that everyman is creating the story of his life every day, editing memories and forgetting facts.  He also emphasizes the time humans spend in the head, imagining as they dream at night or daydream.

He provides some evolutionary time line to storytelling, tracing its oral tradition all the way to World of War virtual creation of characters and conflict resolution.  I don’t think he makes a strong enough distinction between memoirs and novels.  Does everyone think their created life is conflict ridden wherein they can emerge as the hero?  

Ranging a bit out on a branch, Gottschall posits about why people fall for and promote conspiracy theories, as a corollary to a listener's willing suspension of belief from the storyteller:  "Conspiracy theories are not, then, the province of a googly-eyed lunatic fringe.  Conspiratorial thinking is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy.  It is a reflex of the storytelling mind's compulsive need for meaningful experience.  Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition:  why are things so bad in the world?  They provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil."

As I am always reading more than one book at a time, I must compare Gottschall to Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.  Bloom does a wonderful job in describing the denigration of American culture, morality, faith and patriotism; he shows in there place, America's reliance on values and communication.  As a perfect illustration of this insidious seepage into pseudo-scientific analysis of literature, here are two more of Gottschall's observations which are nothing to brag about as being core to the human condition:

"Put differently, the past, like the future, does not really exist.  They both are fantasies created in our minds.  The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in.  The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation too.  Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened.  They are reconstructions of what happened, and many of the details ... are unreliable."  Thus spake Nietzsche.

"Psychotherapy helps unhappy people set their life stories straight; it literally gives them a story they can live with.  And it works.  According to a recent review article in the American Psychologist, controlled scientific studies show that the talking cure works as well as newer therapies ... A psychotherapist can therefore be seen as a kind of script doctor who helps patients revise their life stories so that they can play the role of protagonists again."  Morality is individualistic and relative.

 

This book is nowhere near as insightful as those I read last year about writing and developing a story that immediately says both something new and something resonant.  It really can’t be used as a source for literary analysis of device and structure.  An indication of its superficiality is that I read it in about two and a half hours.  It is the equivalent of an online essay, not really scholarly, too anecdotal and not presenting an integrated thesis.

What Is and What Should Never Be

Well, I thought I had Graham Green on the bucket list this year, but alas not.  Should have taken that as a hint not to read The Heart of the Matter. It reminded me of the awful Kingsley Amis book I read last year:  too Brit, too mid-century, too no-action.  Scobie the protagonist is a police detective in an unnamed African British colony during World War II.  He is a staunch Catholic who only seems to love his wife as a joint corporeal and spiritual work of mercy.  He sees his role as a protector, a shelterer, a road smoother.  Not much different from his look the other way attitude towards dealing with suspected diamond smugglers.  When Scobie's wife deserts him for South Africa, he has an affair with a young widow who survived being torpedoed.  The affair again smacks of protectionism not lust.  The story is really one of Catholic guilt ... how his wife rather than angrily confronting him of her suspicions triangulates him into having to go receive communion publicly as proof of his being without adulterous sin.  That's what drives him baffy ... the Catholic trappings.  Nonetheless, he decides suicide, the most mortal of sins, is the only way out.  Who cares?  Get over it.

In stark contrast and along a much more contemporary vein, Lionel Shriver explores adultery from the perspective of a thoroughly modern woman, of sorts.  Irina has lived with Lawrence without the commitment of holy matrimony for nigh on ten years.  He is a policy wonk and set in his ways as much as Scobie, providing for her, letting her explore her own talents, but never kissing her.  They are Americans living in London and Irina continues a bizarre tradition of entertaining Ramsey on his birthday even though R has divorced his wife, Irina's "friend" and Lawrence is in Sarajevo.  That dinner is her point of no return.  She wants to kiss Ramsey but does she or doesn't she is the entire premise of Shriver's novel.

Alternating chapters about what happened if Irina kissed Ramsey or ran away back home, the story is really about how much one's life and understanding is all a mental exercise.  Each option is equally valid and the reader can freely decide which is preferred.  Women readers can easily recognize the penultimate decision of choosing a stable but dull provider versus an exciting bad boy.  Ramsey is a high school drop out, a snooker player with a god-awful Adele like West End accent.  In his chapters, they verbally fight continuously and make up torridly.  Ramsey is a native free soul who speaks his mind without regard to social niceties.  Lawrence perpetually balks.

The theme of life being what you choose and somewhat malleable but predictable no matter which option one picks is echoed in the plots of the children's books Irina creates.  In one life scenario, she wins the top international illustrator award; in the other, she loses to Ramsey's ex-wife.  It all really doesn't matter is Shriver's point.

Despite her strong engaging theme and style, a couple of plot developments are banally predictable:  Lawrence has been cheating on her all along and Ramsey gets prostate cancer.  The point being, you can't orchestrate your life for perfection.  Yet should one give up delirium for comfort?

Do You Like Me Yet? Breaking into Siena

Slacker Hammagrael got Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi when she was home last week and said “read it.”  So I did and finished a few days ago, in time to return it to her and let her sister read it this week before it is due back at the library.  I think she motivated in part by the Track opening too early in July and there is a nice horse on SSiS.  (I only hope she didn’t connect the title instead with my younger son transferring into the Saints college … four seasons should do it for him.)

Rodi exposes all of his personality foibles and weak traits as he longs to become Sienese.  At times, he seems like a Mafia wannabe.  The idea of there being geographic/cultural enclaves still closed to new-comers is not an uncommon observation.  Rodi’s efforts at times seem like Sisyphus:  every year, he’s back in Italy and back at square (not the Piazza) one, regarded as a recognized tourist.  Siena is depicted as perfect, a sunny Brigadoon, where the teenagers are polite to their elders and respect traditions, where all the food is scrumptious, the women dressed in Giorgio Armani.  What’s not to like.  But Rodi writes that even those who married into one of the competing neighbors are labeled as an outsider.  You must be a centuries-old born and bred and genetically pure Worm; if you wear the colors around your neck you are still a poseur.

So is this a story about a place or about an outsider?  To me, Rodi seems penultimately insecure, returning to answer the question of “do you remember me?”  All the chores he assumes, all the routines, cannot easily graft to his alienation.  He travels annually without his partner; he exhausts his meager savings to pay for transatlantic flights.  He seems like Gulliver trying to be a Brobdingnagian.  

To me there seems to be two major personality types:  those who are deeply rooted to the land of their birth, their town, and reluctant or even incapable of living happily anywhere else (e. g., younger son); and those who are born to be adventurers, explorers and pioneers, jumping out of their nest and seeing the world (older son).  Rodi introduces me to another hybrid class:  people who want to transform and be successfully grafted into another world.  So I find it disappointing that he doesn’t become a full émigré or at least an international snow bird.   Having tasted Siena, how can one give up this addiction?

America's Helen of Troy

See, I can find a tenuous theme to link together all these random books that fall into my lap.  This weekend, I set myself a goal of finishing at least three of the books that I have been dabbling in for months.  One down:  American Eve - Evelyn Nesbit/Stanford White - The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu (herewithing to be referred to as A-Eve).  While I longed to read more about the tempting wiles and motives of Helen in The Song of Achilles, Uruburu gives more than equal time to A-Eve Evelyn, her paramour White and her husband Thaw who murders White.

Evelyn was the real person, the young teenager actually, behind all those turn of the Century advertising photographs, the Heidi Klum, or for you older Slackers, the Twiggy of her day.  She came from Pittsburgh equipped with her own stage mother of sorts, a widow with no real intention of working herself, but who realized she could make money, fame and connections by exploiting her daughter's looks.  Evelyn eventually breaks out of Pennsylvania and hits New York City and the stage.  There she catches the eye of Stanford White, the famous architect and notorious seducer of vulnerable, naive young women.  Evelyn's mother practically throws her at White because she collects rent and living expenses as well.

The tale exposes naivete against lust, at a time when the entire country was moving from a time of high morals and honesty to an era of selfishness, corruption and titillation.  She was the personification of her time, the scandal journalists needed to sell their headlines.  

Uruburu is an English professor at Hofstra who was looking for examples for her course, Daughters of Decadence (I want to audit).  Occasionally, her use of alliteration is excessive and obvious, but the story moves along both quickly and comprehensively ... unless of course, like me the reader is juggling an entire book shelf of material at the same time.  

Another Orange Prize for Fiction Winner

I read The Song of Achilles (2012) after We Have to Talk about Kevin (2005).  Shriver is more memorable and forceful than Madeline Miller.  I selected the novel as an attempt to have some more depth in classical literature when going off tangent with my Latin scholar son.  Somehow I think he regards my efforts as “Homer for Dummies.”

So why would Miller rewrite or update the story of the Trojan War?  Is her intent to compare and contrast this Middle East war with the more current ones; to display cultural DNA; to show that base motives and degeneration into petty vanity is inevitable?  When I read the write up on the Orange Prize website, it mentioned that Miller threw out her first attempt after five years of writing.  Her “do-over” was to emphasize the voice of Patroclus, Achilles boon friend and homosexual lover.  So is she intentionally overlaying a gays in the military theme?  Where does one draw the line on revisionist history?

But are the writings of the ancient Greeks factual or mythical or hybrid?  Why does my son want his family, friends and students to read these classics, if possible, in their original tongue?  Are these Greek warriors patriot models for the current world?  Do we admire them as military role models, national heroes, literary prototypes? Does this version of Achilles loving Patroclus tarnish his reputation at the expense of making him more identifiable to a contemporary audience?

Sorry, the re-write doesn’t work for me.  Yes, it is better than the epic Troy movie which strikes me as so much computer animation and sweating muscles.  But Miller’s book imposes too much of personal motivation speculation rather than the call of honor, nation and valor.

Earliest Shriver

Once you read the acknowledgments and Qs and As at the back of We Have to Talk about Kevin, you would think that Lionel Shriver wrote nothing but clunkers previous to her Orange Prize winning book.  Not so, and my efforts to read most if not all of her earlier works has begun ... sort of adding box car books to this Lionel train (ooh, bad one).

Finished The Female of the Species last night, her first novel, with a picture of her on the back when she was only 29.  Although the plot outline could not be more different from the household tension in Kevin, there are nascent sub themes that carry forward.  Gray is a 59 year old anthropologist, single, never married, childless, tall, athletic and completely independent, in part due to the subservient devotion of a fellow anthropol, Errol, 12 years her junior and with a decades old crush.  Errol is the novel's narrator whose personal fantasies and frustrations permeate his rendition of Gray's enchantment with a 24 year old graduate student, Raphael.

While Gray's descent into sensuality is the story's main exploration.  Gray has many characteristics in common with Eva from Kevin:  she is highly intellectual, aloof, self-involved, with female "BFFs" and most herself when traveling the world, far from American culture.  Raphael previews most of Kevin's sociopathy:  he is completely manipulative, sarcastic, amoral, and plotting.  So here we have it:  Shriver's view of the sexes.  Men are the fatal attractions; personal decisions are open to judgments regarding their morality or impact on society.  Shriver is still in a bad guys die young structure and it will be interesting to see if that continues.  Her female "heroines" are left to age alone, opining about the interactions.

What is clever about this novel is having Gray be an anthropologist who can see patterns in primitive cultures and even extrapolate them the the burnt out, crack infested Bronx.  But she cannot understand people on a one to one basis.  It is like those eye charts of optic degeneration we have at work:  all she has is peripheral vision.  She cannot see the moral equivalence of Raphael to the WWII deserter she encountered in Africa when she began her career -- only the physical resemblance.

Early in the novel, Shriver introduces what her characters will continue to experience, as she describes Gray interacting with the threatening, attractive AWOL, Charles Corgie:  "The two of them stood face to face.  Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence:  to know exactly how little they cared.  Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo:  Who cares about you, or anyone?  Who needs you, or anyone?  I blink and you disappear.  I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always.  I am tall and smart and powerful without you ... You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know ... So if ... you dissolve into the heavy air ... I will not care -- I will be thinking about my important work."

The following quote could just as easily have been placed in Kevin:  "... How did you get like this?  We have always been like this.  There was something before ... That was the mystery.  There was no explaining.  Raphael was a certain way and he had always been ... in his crib his eyes shone like that, like the metal on airplanes in the sun, and there was nothing to say about that, no explanation."

On to the next one.  

Talking Heads

The book club selection for last month was Lionel Shriver’s We Have to Talk about Kevin.  I decided I did not want to talk about WHTTAK in a setting where the “bookies”-- for the most part -- work for or retired from the Office of Mental Health.  In fact, in April, one bookie asked the group what she should do to try to socialize a young boy in her Hebrew class who seemed to have no empathy at all and whose parents saw no problem.  Sort of a preview of the plot and continuation of this diagnostic conversation.  

But even with piles of books on the night stand and my blog list unattended I was curious.  I am so glad I picked up WHTTAK.  First, I loved Shriver’s juxtaposition of an 18^th Century epistolary novel with a 20th Century character who is aloof, lives only in her head, and over-analyzes everything.  Second, I loved Eva and Franklin, who, to me, represented the ultimate married couple.  I tend to look at married couples and decide if they look like salt and pepper shakers; when I conclude they do, what I am concluding is that they sort of match, definitely are a pair, and are "put together" for the same intent or purposes.  While Eva and Franklin resemble more a box of dried prunes and a overripe bowl of cherries, psychologically, they are a marvelous study in parental child rearing conflict.  I was about to type compromises, but neither can move from their entrenched personality traits.  

Life to Eva is a glass half-full.  She tries to fill up the emptiness with world travel and business acumen and a standard of perfection that is stratospheric.  Franklin not only wants the glass to be bigger, overflowing and its contents carbonated, but also to be the source of all solace.  Franklin’s idealized view of America extends to his desire to make the perfect family, creating a dialogue and scenes that match up with the Happy Days reruns he watches. 


As NYC yuppies, E&F agree to accessorize their carefree life with a baby as Eva approaches 40.  As soon as she gets pregnant, Franklin sets out to mold her to his idealized stereotype of a mother:  no strenuous exercise, no alcohol.  Not that she was an alcoholic athlete, but Eva resents the loss of her personality.  Kevin is born more than cranky and /or Eva has PPD. Maybe she just doesn’t smell maternal.  Anyway, I find Kevin more a symbol against which Shriver expresses Eva’s existence.  Instead of being a high school mass murderer, he could have easily caused a major traffic accident or blown up the house like one boy did down our street.  The stigma on the family and the self-doubt about family life that outsiders see as having been the prime cause of a deviant or delinquent child seems the major, ur-theme.

The more I thought about vehicles Shriver was using in her writing, I kept coming back to the family/society issue.  Maybe this train of thought spilled over from the book club's discussion of the June book, our re-reading of The Great Gatsby, where the group concluded Fitzgerald was writing an allegory about American characteristics using the traits of his characters.  Along that line of analysis, Shriver seems to be saying that while it is the basic building block of society, the family in the late 20th Century is torn between being a "re-enactment" of an earlier ideal and being completely an incohesive unit of self-involved individuals, each ranking themselves above the needs and demands of sustaining a marriage and raising unruly children.

I kept my copy way beyond its due date so I could finish this blog entry with selected quotes, only to realize this morning I didn't dog-ear any pages.  For whatever reason, The Band's Cripple Creek is running through my head to describe Shriver's voice for Eva, when lyrics describe Spike Jones' music as the girl not liking his songs but loves "the way he talks."  No one would expect that preference and I did not expect to love Eva's internal dialogues.  I can't imagine the movie captures this even with Tilda Swinton ... and I prefer to keep the scenes of violence in my imagination rather than sensationalized on the big screen.

Everything to Excess

One of my favorite recently published books is Mr. Know It All by A. J. Jacobs which I came upon displayed on a table in a small bookstore in Portland, Oregon.  What I great book to keep your nose in flying home across the country, quietly giggling so as not to have the steward engage any TSA agents on the plane.  AJ’s premise in that book was to complete an adventure that was abandoned by his father:  to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.  Because AJ didn’t know what facts and characters he would stumble across in this effort, it was all rather innocently joyous:  his conclusion that to be assured of being mentioned as famous in the EB one had to either be a king’s mistress or invent a new type font; his citing of a misnomer, that is should be Daffy Drake; and his interviewing of the tomes themselves with taking the Mensa test and trying out for Jeopardy as surrogate measures about whether he was learning anything to improve his IQ.

In Drop Dead Healthy, AJ again dedicates a couple years to a single pursuit, this time trying to learn everything he can do to be the healthiest person on earth.  This time there is no logical alphabetic ordering approach, so he devotes a month to each organ in his body.  It doesn’t work as well as his first book:  sure he still has his trademark background of how his family reacts to his compulsions, his eye-rolling wife, his frail and ailing grandfather, and his eccentric aunt, but it ends up too gray.  He tracks down every ultra, maximum, intense approach to diet, exercise, mediation, et cetera, but each chapter ends with hallow partial endorsements.  It is risk-free, he does not chance recommending any action as beneficial.  

Soon, I was comparing it to the last medical quackery book I read from that guy that wants to read everyone’s protein chains.

How did I stray so far from my alphabetical 2012 listing of books I needed to read to make my literacy have fewer gaps?  I’ve concluded the problem is my reference to this year being a bucket list.  That conjures up thoughts to being at the tail end of one’s life and probably facing poorer health; ergo, these quasi-medical selections.  It also suggests one is approaching the ebbing golden years; hence, my need to read about my contemporaries, Carole King, Frank Langella, Greg Allman, to say to myself, well it least I led a better life, if less glamorous than theirs.  I must, I must, I must return to Tara.

Stations of the Cross

I finished the third of three autobiographies in the past month:  Carole King, Frank Langella and now Greg Allman.  I find myself asking this question:  “What am I looking for that can’t be found on Wiki?”

I mentioned in my Langella review that I preferred the writer sorting his or her life by impact rather than chronology.  Greg falls into the latter category.  If you follow ABB like I do, you know the origins and changes to band members.  Celebrity headlines, whether you avidly follow those kinds of magazines or not, have bombarded the public with tales of his marriages and substance abuse.  So what did I want to find in the book?

Personal insight.  Especially when the person writing about his life is at least 60, some reflection and self-assessment, if not wisdom, should come across:  why did I do these things, who got hurt in the process.  Greg’s last paragraph:  “I must have said this a million times, but if I died today, I have had me a blast.  I really mean that – if I fell over dead right not, I have led some kind of life.  I wouldn’t trade it for nobody’s, but I don’t know if I’d do it again.  If somebody offered me a second round, I think I’d have to pass on it.”  That tells me nothing.  Is it just post liver transplant that Greg doesn’t have the physical strength to party hardy.  No one could probably live the same life, but he has no inkling of how to avoid the crises without giving up the successes perforce.

Furthermore, I am left unsettled to how much of the book Greg actually wrote.  A couple of times, he protests about being smart, a "valedictorian" in either grammar or junior high school. (huh?).  His co-author is a man named Alan Light who wrote for Vibe and Spin and is an Ivy League grad.  Which way does the scale tip for you?

Greg plays with one of his song titles for the book, naming it My Cross to Bear, whereas the song is It’s Just Not My Cross to Bear.  His sins are heavy, pride being the greatest unacknowledged one. 

You're Known by the Company You Keep

I was almost through Frank Langella’s Dropped Names before I realized all his brief encounters with the famous were reminiscences about people who had died … Frank makes them all seem so vivid and alive I never noticed they were obituaries  (or exposes that could not be regarded as libelous).  Obviously, some of these famous men and women are so well known that a reader remembers the times and circumstances of their deaths; others because they live on in legend and on the silver screen seem to be eternal icons.

I was almost two thirds of the way through the memoir before I realized how self-disclosive Frank was even when he seemed to intend on to only recount the characteristics of his friends and the special circumstances of their meeting, parting and discreetly doing other things in between.  Some of the names Frank drops are luminaries who simply cross his path – like Marilyn Monroe whom he sees on the street in New York City as a truant teenager escaping from New Jersey for the afternoon.  Those close encounters only show Frank’s luck and fortune.  

Other famous movie stars are portrayed with their flaws bared, but never viciously – Frank writes of Paul Newman’s eyes but more of his frailty.  Frank does not regard Paul as having much sex appeal despite his eyes because he never had “danger,” a quality that Frank believes is essential for a great actor (Palance, Cagney, Clift, Brando, Dean, McQueen are Frank’s personification of using one’s self-destructiveness to advance one’s art and conquests).  This last encounter shows Frank’s sensitivity and respect more than it shows Paul’s decline:   “… I turned around and looked into the baby blues I’d looked into some forty years earlier.  An old man now, face thin and ravaged, a beard for his next role, fine sparse hair blown around by the wind … I instinctively reached up to put his hair in place, smoothing it down with my fingers and making it neat.  I then moved my hands down to his cold cheeks and kissed them both.  He fixed me with a look of heartbreaking tenderness and I thought for a moment he might be fighting back tears.  There. Now you look like Paul Newman I said.  And what man wouldn’t want to look like Paul Newman.  It occurs to me no, as I write this, that perhaps he might have been that man.  Frank’s instincts outweigh his speculations, his hands defy his logic.

When Frank writes about what he liked in his friend Alan Bates, he discloses how his fellow actor imprinted him to aspire to the qualities he wanted to internalize:  “… Had Alan allowed himself the final call he so much deserved, he would have known how much they did adore him. He was a gentle, loving man whose humor, grace, kindness, and humanity constantly humbled me.  To watch him backstage as he struggled to his place before we took our curtain call together, clearly in pain and exhausted, then gather himself, smile at me across the way, and turn to fact the audience, was a lesson in gallantry I carry with me still.  No matter what, Alan was going to go on, not because the show must, but because his personal sense of integrity required it.  I’d give anything to have twenty minutes with him again.”

I only saw Frank on the stage once, in NYC when he appeared as Dracula.  I was at that point more interested in the Edward Gorey stage sets than in Frank as lead.  I never attended any performance at the Berkshire Playhouse or in Stockbridge despite their being a stone’s throw away.  Many of the actors Frank knew for decades became friends of his from his early career in these summer stock shows in Massachusetts.  That’s where he met Anne Bancroft.  This was an especially good chapter where the depth of their friendship resounds despite years apart.  He closes:  “…And when the death knell of cancer sounded inside her body, she managed to keep it a secret from most of her friends.  She did not reach out to me in her final years, and I was unaware of the extent of her illness … She died … I opened the French doors to (my) patio and walked out listening to the Pacific, remembering the night thousands of miles across it in Malibu that I had thrown away a close relationship with a woman who could be funny, warm, and smart, but a friend I could no longer endure (they argued when Frank told a story about her downing Valium with scotch before a performance which she vehemently denied).  Any relationship in which one party feels even the slightest sense of diminishment had become for me a relationship not worth enduring.  I did not so much regret my decision to pull away from her ultimately corrosive aura as I did bemoan the demons that held sway inside her; they becoming the friends she most listened to and believed.  I have never asked Mel if Annie found some respite during her illness in her final years.  I’m not certain that I want to hear the answer.”  I think Frank doesn’t want to find out he reached the wrong conclusion.  He can be a great friend, but a cool one.

The biography is rife with sex, recounting some stars' joy in hearing the dirtiest of jokes, and dealing openly with who was gay and who was seducing whom.  Frank admits himself regarding Raul Julia as his “boyfriend.”  Unlike Carole King’s Natural Woman which I found stale and flat in its adherence to strict chronology, Dropped Names, moves freely across countries and time; its structure is Frank’s conscious vehicle to tell his life story as reflections of those he knew.  

He lived in rarefied air.  He does not descend into the banal, never flaunting his own lusts, affairs, marriages or family life.  He calculates, he is “in role.”  Nonetheless, the reader becomes a fan, a part of the audience that he needs but cannot see.  Unlike Carole, there are no promotional shots or photographs of his younger self:  there he is on the back cover, a man in his 70s, 35 pound heavier that his Count Dracula days, but still with that Julius Caesar glorious head, now gray.  The last movie I saw him in, forgetting the title, the one with Liam Neesom and January Jones as spies in Berlin: ; Frank is the aging old school international bad guy spy, almost looking as large as Orson Welles, cold, calculating, righteous rage … portraying under the surface emotions only hinted at in the book.

Can’t Believe Robb Wrote One I Don’t Like

A secret vice of mine is reading J. D. Robb’s “In Death” series, murder mysteries set in New York City in the 2050’s-60’s.  What made these books quick fun reads was not only Dallas and Rourke, the main two characters, but the setting, so futuristic and ethically challenging given the advance of science and the loosening of old fashioned morals.  Unfortunately in her latest, Celebrity in Death, Robb has written a story that could have taken place in 1930, so devoid of setting and science fiction.  Robb is capitalizing on her cult fans, writing only a soap opera like update on what is going on in D & R’s love life and how Peabody is developing as a nascent detective.  Dallas doesn’t even have a meaningful argument with her butler!

The murder is classic Hollywood who killed the movie star schlock.  It is predictable, formulaic and way too easy to figure whodunit.  Robb, herself a celebrity, has turned deadly in her writing.

The Virtual Road to Wellville

Why does David Agus’ book The End of Illness remind me of John Harvey Kellogg and cereal advertising claims?  Not because his ideas for promoting personal health are “flakey,” but because his arguments seem to be self-promoting.  Agus has founded Applied Proteomics, a company that hopes to eventually be able to analyze a person’s molecular proteins much like their DNA is decoded today.  Does an endorsement by Al Gore make the reader think of this effort more favorably or remind one of inventing the Internet and global warming inevitability?

Whenever I am home during the week, I inevitably watch Dr Oz hoping that the foods he talks about will be the magic ingredients to perfect wellness.  Then one day, Dr Oz had A J Jacobs on as a guest.  A J the comic wise ass who tried to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover, and I guess he did, more recently spent two or three years trying out every health fad to see what works.  A J still looked a little pudgy and was going bald and he wisely did not put himself on the cover of his book a la Jane Fonda.  So with this context, these books about I know where curing the curse of human disease is going seem to me to all be put together by medical quacks, each touting their one elixir.

Agus other than promoting statins post-40, shunning vitamin supplements, and learning about one’s intestinal flora, does not have any formula or magic bullet.  So he hearkens back to the future:  maintain your body’s homeostasis by a regular schedule of daily living patterns and whole food diets.  He takes the command, “physician, heal thyself” to a “patient, know thine metrics.”  He recaps in chapter 14:

“…. Keep to a schedule.  Move throughout the day … Eat real food to absorb all the nutrients you need.  Reduce your daily dose of inflammation.  Stay abreast of new technologies that can enhance your health or help you to plan your future health.  Share your medical information with the world wherever possible.”  And this guidance from an oncologist?

It is not enough for him to expound an empowered patient who is so in tune with his own personal preventive approach that he will live a relatively healthy and long life … based on technology and huge databases that “will change diagnosis and care as we know it.”  It is a Seventh Day Adventist approach to care, trust in the gods of technology and research, and let your body balance itself too good health.

When oh when will I find another good book after this spell of mediocre?  I am even thinking about bringing back another two library books after trying out the first chapter or two, one of which is even the latest J D Robb “In Death” sequel.  Gone With the Wind, here I come.