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?