Hello Blog, Remember Me?

Merry Christmas to all of you who haven't heard from me in three months.  I am a Slacker.  I feel like I am at a bloggers anonymous meeting.

Sunday the made up word of the week in the New York Times magazine was "exhaustence" ... otherwise known as the life of an overworked individual.  Not only have I been uninterested in blogging, I have hardly read anything.  The book I will review below was due on November 15.  I did squeeze in the December book club's reading but since it was to be at my house, and I could make the selection, I picked Miller's play The Price, figuring everyone else would have as little time during the holidays to read as I did.  Anyway, a snow storm cancelled the club so who knows if anyone but Pat read it besides me.

On the a review, how novel.  Except I read nonfiction ... Brave Genius by Sean Carroll.  It's the intersecting lives of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, both Nobel Prize winners and both active in the French Resistance.  It is a fantastic book, scholarly, well written, 504 pages long and thought provoking.  It is only that last characteristic that I want to address, and use it as a prelude to whatever books I have time to read in 2014.

Camus wrote for underground newspapers during the War, urging his fellow French citizens to oppose the Vichy regime and bring back national pride.  He was writing under an alias, of course, and after the war wrote under his own name.  As much as I detest the political bent of every newspaper published today, I was struck by an ideal Camus espoused, urging his colleagues "to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore the country its authoritative voice ... see to it that voice remains one of vigor rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity."  Furthermore, for Camus, a writer's responsibility was to unite the greatest number of people, not to compromise his art by serving those in power who make history.

I'll admit, I haven't read anything by Camus, and they will be on my 2014 list, having already ordered a few from Alibris.  He appeals to my sense of challenging the imposed what is when he asks "What is a rebel?  It is first of all, a man who says no ... What does he mean by saying no?  He means, for example, that things are hard enough, there are limits beyond which one cannot pass, up to this point, yes, beyond it no or you are going too far."  Carroll interprets this quote "that by saying no, the rebel is in turn affirming that there are limits beyond which his rights are infringed upon.  There is thus something to be preserved, something of value, on one side of the limit.  Moreover, these limits and rights belong not just to the rebel but also to others.  In the act of refusal, the rebel thereby defines a value ... that transcends the individual, which removes him from his solitude and joins him to others."

There are other lengthy quotes from The Myth of Sisyphus that I would include here, but since that is one of the books I have ordered, I will defer and close by saying how "apt" the opening quotes Carroll selected for each chapter are.  When alternating chapters and writing about Monod, he introduces a quote from A. N Whitehead: "In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory."  And from an unknown source, bringing me back to my exhaustence, "Two things rob people of their peace of mind - work unfinished and work not yet begun."  I am sure 2014 will keep me continuously suspended between these two poles of obligations, but hopefully will not freeze my need to write as much as the fall of 2013.

Let's get the overdue books back and the drycleaning picked up tomorrow

As promised yesterday, my best effort today riding the bus to and from work to get Walter Mosley's latest, Little Green, back to the library to stop the overdue charges from piling up.  Leaving the books to return with some cash, and big cash to pick up my fall wardrobe with my at home menfolk tomorrow, I can focus all my tension on one spot:  the likely chance that my scorers will not finish review grant applications by the 18th.  I will get not only gray hair but ulcers from this potential failure.

On to Little Green ... unlike J D Robb whose "in death" series I can no longer finish, there is something about Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries that is always fresh, violent, racial but fresh.  Mosley has a clear, authentic voice for place and time and although I find it alien, it is believable.   Easy has certain primitive ethics that are never breached given drugs, crimes, seedy friends as well as antagonists.

Little Green is a dupe, a pawn, against whom the turmoil of late 60s California hiipiedom is played out.  Drug money, free love, and subcultures of opportunistic sellers and changing family values is played out.  Easy himself is broken and more than half dead as the story unfolds.  He recovers to find his key value is maintaining a family structure, a sort of last ditch Daniel Patrick Moynahan quest before the ghetto culture completely dissolves into fatherless homes, drug dealing, pimping and gang violence.  As bleak as this story is, the reader knows it will only get worse and Easy and his side kick Mouse for all their abilities to dodge bullets and best bad guys are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of their decade.

On page 163, Mosley succinctly describes the voice, culture and fears of his heritage:  "  He and ,I as different as we were in age and temperament. had been reared in the same atmosphere:  the ether of perpetual vulnerability and subsequent lifelong fear.  Black people in America at that time, and all the way back to our first conveyance, the slave ship, had received common traits.  From the so-called white man, these attributes were merely hair texture, skin color, and other physical characteristics.  But our true inheritance was the fear of being notices, and worrying about everything from rain collapsing the walls around us to the casual glance that might lead to lynching.  We -- almost every black man, woman, and child in America -- inherited anxieties like others received red hair or blue eyes."

Easy and Mouse's and many supporting characters share this common DNA and express their actions as dominant genes

I Can't be a Slacker, but I am a Recluse

Well, I will write two abbreviated book reviews and a longer apologia.

Goodness knows how much I owe the library, I've had these books forever.  First is Hallucinations which I'm counting as one of my one word title themed list.  I finished it so long ago, it seems like something I made up, something shadowy and vaguely remembers, ha.  It is by Oliver Sacks of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat fame, in case you ever saw the movie, I didn't.

As I was struggling to find an ounce of sympathy or compassion for the various grant applications I was reading this week, I told my young staff that I only worked six months at Mental Health, glibly saying you had to be crazy to work there.  Similarly, I was comparing the people I cross paths with at Substance Abuse with former evangelical users.  So to seems dear Oliver, trying to credential himself by detailing all the Timothy Leary like drug adventures he had while in medical school.  He is not scientific nor erudite and I feel I got no insight whatsoever from reading this book about people who see things.

OK one bad one down.  The next that I finished today waiting interminably at the mani-pedi shop is Life Time by Liza Marklund.  She is another Scandanavian author who I reckon is riding the coattails of Dragon Tatoo.  Once again, I skip over every town and avenue name that is meaningless to me, not wanting to learn anything geographic about Sweden.  There was some curiosity in me wanting to see if she could do anything new with the parallel lives structure of novels.  She didn't.  In fact, it all seemed too rushed and phony at the ending.  Was Nancy Drew better or was I too naive at 12?

My reason for not blogging in weeks, nay, months, is work.  I come home not wanting to type anything else on the computer after doing so nonstop from 8 to whenever.  Nor have I wanted to read after rushing through 240 applications, determining that more than half of them were not ours anyway.  So what free time I've had has been devoted to mindless pulling out of crab grass or scraping moss of brick pathways, anything to empty my head of conscientious thought.

Alas, it is now fall.  The football pool is back, my menfolk glued to the television for days on end watching MLB and football; I have to wear a coat walking the dog and waiting for the bus; and it's back to making soup for easy weekday meals, first of the season, to use up the glut of tomatoes from co-workers and neighbors.

So, my own Life Time is equally dull and cyclical.  On to the latest Walter Moseley which is also seriously overdue.

I am a Slacker

How many months ago did I finish Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell?  Am I like my eldest son who seemed to believe that if he kept a library book that he liked way beyond the due date, it was his?  This I believe is a tad of my rationale for not writing a review of said book.  My politically conservative friend from work lent me this book and introduced me to Sowell.  I now look for his editorials in the NY Post where before his small picture left me cold.  It is like spotting a unicorn walking down the street ...the political pundits and newspapers have declared the possibility of an African American intellectual as much an oxymoron as military intelligence or now IRS neutral competence.  

But I proudly join the ranks of Sowell groupies, if such a group exists and would eagerly ready more of his essays and theories.  But on to I & S.  (E McM forgive me for dog-earring the following excerpts in his graciously loaned copy.)  

With another headline to re-emphasize Sowell's disdain for the intellectual elite who consider themselves the true rulers, the penultimate policy setters, as the headlines blare about Bubba and Hellary foisted their wannabe clones of In-Huma and her aptly named Weiner spouse, let me quote:

" ... help 1explain why so many leading intellectuals have so often backed notions that proved to be disastrous.  It is not simply with particular policies at particular times that intellectuals have often advocated mistaken and dangerous decisions.  Their whole general approach to policy making -- their ideology -- has often reflected a critical misconception about knowledge and its concentration or dispersion.  Many intellectuals and their followers have been unduly impressed by the fact that highly educated elites like themselves have far more knowledge per capita .. than does the population at large ... They have often overlooked the crucial fact that the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge ... If no one has even one percent of the knowledge currently available ... the imposition from the top down of the notions in favor among the elites, convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue, is a formula for disaster."  ... "Other forms of this general notion include judicial activiism, urban planning and other institutional expressions of the belief that social decisions cannot be left to be determined by the actions and values of the less knowledgeable population at large."

Why is this not echoing from the rafters of American?  Why isn't Sowell the 21st Century equivalent of the Federalist Papers?  

I am too tired tonight to copy the many dog earred pages that I wanted to quote at length.  Sowell makes one thinks that there could be an intent to, a la 1984, reduce the thinking power of Americans.  How much as school curriculum debased critical thinking and debate?  How intolerant have we become to be normal and not different or logically presenting the other side of an argument?  Debate is replaced by tarnished filibuster?  Dissertation by sound bite and spin.  Has America lost its Sowell?  He should be required reading in any high school participation in government course.  Newspapers, not just the NY Post, should publish him along side the opposition on editorial pages.

Overbuilt

I really wanted to title this blog post "An Awful Book" but I did it to myself,  once again, falling for the ads and reviews in the NYT's book review.  Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight is no We Have to Talk About Kevin.  Kevin broke through family taboos, not so much for having raised a high school shooter, but for honestly having the mother narrator bare her soul and all her emotions.  Kate, the mother of Amelia, postures.

I can just envision this book being added to the agenda laden high school reading list to convey the not too subtle messages:  it's okay to be gay; cliques and bullying in school are bad, even deadly; families headed by lawyer-mothers are conflicted; women who are not sure who the father of their child is suffer; private schools are run by Dickensian monsters and conspicuous consumption parent boards of directors; it's okay to be late or cut class as long as you are with your best friend; etc. etc.

I don't think there is a chapter without forced fed messages directed at the reader, chicks of all ages.  I'm left feeling McCreight herself has a lot of issues to work our family-wise and career-wise herself, nothwithstanding her acknowledgements to husband and daughters.  Her portrayal of Amelia suggests paranoia, almost anyone could have killed her ... yes this is a modern moral play murder mystery.  Zero points.

Staying in Place Traveling

A couple of days ago I finished Trans Atlantic by Colum McCann.  While reading it, the New 
York Times published two book reviews, one favorable, the other more cautious.  Where do I come down?

I think the first chapter soars stylistically and with humming literary tension as the first transatlantic flight from Nova Scotia to Ireland takes place in 1919.  McCann showcases his best turn of phrase and selection of the perfect word, two attributes that I find most often in the Irish, including TC Boyle.  This selection carries forward McCann's up in the air as a feat of human excellence, continuing the Petit and the Twin Towers adventure.   But adding more complication and interweaving of characters, McCann goes beyond people connected in NYC in As the Great World Turns to spanning generations as well as oceans.

You could almost get jet lag if you tried to count how often McCann moves his characters between the Old Sod and the New World.   I found myself inventorying how often I flew across the Pond ... four times.  First to Paris with a high school friend a few years out of college; next the vacation of a lifetime with my mother, three weeks in Switzerland, Austria and northern Italy, staying at only the best of hotels in Venice, Lucarno, et cetera; and then finally, the relevant trips back to Ireland, once before and once after I married my Orange husband.

While McCann uses the women across four generations to tie the book together, it is his chapters on men that I find more enticing.  The post World War II pilots for their adventures and the human side of George Mitchell who said in a role of anonymity throughout the cease fire negotiations so two extremes of human excellence, when the result is more memorable than the actor.

When McCann is at his best, his words soar like tightrope walkers and daredevil pilots.  On balance, Trans Atlantic is a tad too earthbound, even if that weight is peat   

Body and Soul

Golly,May 27th!!! Am I personally turning into a Slacker?

And here I thought I was doing so well ... I am actually returning two books to the library before the due date.

My reading down, into the works of one author, as opposed to across, reading widely, continues.  But maybe these count as entries under both columns because I have finished two more Mary Roach books, Stiff and Spook, but, ta da, the are one word titles, my ancillary theme for 2013 selections.

Now I am not as tired of Mary Roach as I am of J D Robb's in Death series, but I don't think I'll track down Packing for Mars, her first best seller.  Stiff is the body from this entry's title, as Roach details all things scientific about cadavers.  Spook is her logical sequel, a compendium of experiments to measure or document the departure of a spirit at the time of death and to contact any out of living body remnant that might want to be on someone's speed dial or face book friend.

I was thinking today how much more interesting Roach is than good old what's his name who wrote about trying out every health tip over the course of a year.  (I'll add his name in later as I could not get a quick search hit on Wiki just now).  BLANK is funny like Roach but some much more self-promoting; Roach just drops pearls of wit, satire and absurdity as her own unique humorous take on experiments that in and of themselves are primitive, exploitative or downright medieval.

It is her footnotes and asides that I feel I have to preserve in my blog, notwithstanding her personal "soul searching" in Spook as to whether there is a soul, Catholic upbringing beside the point.  So here are some of her best:

From Stiff:
When she is investigating the impact of gun shot wounds on cadaver legs, she digresses into a simulated human tissue invented by the Knox gelatin company in a footnote:  ... "According to the Knox web site, other products made with cow bone and pigskin based gelatin include marshmallows, nougat-type candy bar filling, licorice, gummi bears, caramels, sports drinks, butter, ice cream, suppositories and that distasteful whitish peel on the outside of salami. ... if you are going to worry about mad cow disease, you probably have more to worry about than you thought ... we're all doomed, so relax and have another Snickers."

As she introduces the first man in France to investigate whether the Shroud of Turin was authentic, she quotes the good doctor's qualifications ... "I am well versed in anatomy, which I taught for a long time ...I lived for thirteen years in close contact with corpses, reads the next line.  One assumes that the teaching stint and the years spent living in close contact with corpses were one and the same, but who knows."

This book was published in 2003, long before he became a TV personality ...as Roach questions Dr Oz about harvesting hearts from brain dead humans: ..."When I asked Oz where he thought the soul resided he said "I'll confide in you that I don't think it's all in the brain.  I have to believe that in many ways the core of our existence is in our heart.'  Does that mean that the brain-dead patient isn't dead?  "There's no question that the heart without a brain is of no value.  But life and death is not a binary system.'  It's a continuum.  It makes sense for many reasons to draw the legal line at brain death but that doesn't mean it's really a line."

Pursing a rumor that in China people were eating the dead (no not the ever present cat rumor, but bodies sent to a crematorium) Roach writes about overcoming her not speaking the language: ... "The night before, in preparation for my journey, I had drawn a picture to give to the cab driver.  It showed a body hovering above flames, and to the right of this I drew an urn, though the latter had come out looking like  samovar, and there was a distinct possibility that the driver would think I was looking for a place to get Mongolian barbeque."

From Spook:
From the introduction: ..."My mother worked hard to instill faith in me.  She sent me to catechism classes.  She bought me nun paper dolls as though the meager fun of swapping a Carmelite whimple for a Benedictine chest bib might inspire a taste for devotion."

As she investigates the rumor or legend that the Pope's alarm clock went off the instant he died, she tracks down a source in the Vatican: ..."He agreed to tell my the story but he would not reveal his name.  "I'm better as your Deep Throat,' he said forever linking in my head the US Conference of Bishops with porn movies, a link they really and truly don't need."

As she travels to India to assess a report reincarnation, she comments on the culture: ..."In India, I'm finding, the answers do not fit the questions.  This morning at the hotel, I asked the waiter what kind of cheese is in the masala omelet.  'Sliced,' he said."

Detailing decades of experiments across many countries where "scientists" tried to trap the soul leaving the body, Roach mentions: ..."so the honors for the most elaborate soul-manifesting device go to a pair of Dutch physicians, J.L.W.P Matla and G.J. Zaalberg van Zelst.  Matla believed himself to be in contact with an entity who spelled out communications letter by letter on  Ouija board.   (Hopefully the question "What is my full name and that of my partner was never posed.)"

Several years ago, I read an acknowledge in a book where the author mentioned all the people he went to for information who were an uncooperative pain in the butt.  Because I quoted Roach's introduction where she reveals the paper nuns of her youth, I feel it is fitting to quote her acknowledgements as being again very self-deprecating:  ... "People assume that authors are experts in the field about which they have chosen to write.  Possibly most are.  Possibly I.m the only one who begins a project from a state of near absolute ignorance.  But I do, and it makes me an especially irksome presence in my sources lives.  I ask naive, misguided questions and giggle at the wrong moments.  I stay too long and grasp too little."

Well Maybe More of an Abstract Portrait of a Marriage

After the April book club discussion of Bel Canto, the member who had selected Caleb's Crossing for May said she wanted to change her pick.  (Damn, I really hated CC, another one of those colonial historical New England novels about an important male figure relayed by an oppressed female subject to the chauvinistic, hyper-Neanderthal Christians of her day and age.  Coincidentally, the local paper did a feature story about a group of women who had been convening their book club for 50 years, starting with the Feminine Mystic and teeing up Lean In but talking about Caleb's Crossing.  And another tangent, Caleb, the first American Indian to attend Harvard dies from malnutrition and consumption, hardly a stellar launch for an expansion into students of another culture; as contrasted to my taxi driver's story in DC earlier this week:  he told me he was going to Boston Friday to attend his nephew's graduation; when I politely asked which school, he said Harvard.  His nephew was given a full scholarship to come from Ethiopia and he graduated with a 4.0 in math and computer sciences, going to work in two weeks after a signing bonus, more money focused than his elder brother who was pursuing his PhD at Princeton).

So anyway, back to the story, the host for May changed the book to Portrait of a Marriage - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, as compiled and recalled by their son, Nigel Nicolson.  And I will quote at length about Nigel finding his mother's diary after her death in 1962 and then the opening paragraphs of said diary because these two selections are "hookers" perfectly written and reader engaging.

" I took a final look round her sitting room in the tower ... a room I had entered only half a dozen times in the previous thirty years ... and came upon a locked Gladstone bag ... The bag contained something ... and having no key, I cut away the leather from around the lock to open it.  Inside there was a large notebook ... page after page filled with her neat pencilled script.  I carried it to her writing table and began to read.  The sixth page was headed July 23rd, 1920, followed by a narrative in the first person that continued for eighty more.  I read through it to the end without stirring from her table.  It was an autobiography written when she was twenty-eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love that possessed her ..."

And this hidden away diary that has so much delicious sound, lilting, caressing, scandalizing, whispering, that I had to reread it immediately out loud to my sole audience, JJ:

"Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section:  but to the whole picture not one is initiated.  Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass -- for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his -- I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast."

I loved the book.  Two things I found wanting:  first Nigel Vita's son after admitting that he could not put the diary down once he started reading it has interspersed her chapters with pictures and his backdrop story to explain the characters and the time.  Maybe no one would read such interpretation if it was appended as an epilogue; certainly Nigel is too wordy to use footnotes that would make his mother's scandalous life too pendacious and scholarly.  
 
And then there's Vita herself:  a girl who romps through childhood unrestrained exploring the natural surroundings unaccompanied.  A young woman whose sense of freedom is starkly curtailed by the culture of her family to marry well.  Her ultimate selection of Harold as he goes off to war and spends most of his life thereafter in the diplomatic corps oversees mopping up the consequences of the war, again leaving Vita to her own device.  Although Vita had several lovers during her marriage, that part reads to much like a travelogue, running  off to Paris, Venice wherever with her husband's blithe acceptance, how very English "carry-on" of him.  What I want is an exploration of the landscape of Vita's libidinous soul.  Her lust motivates her wandering, but I don't want a story of wanderlust, just give me an idea of the lust part.  So discrete.  

For a woman who lives to be alone, in her tower, in her garden, in her thoughts, she does not disclose to her diary any inner turmoil or side by side analysis of what she has at home and what she seeks away from it.  When her lover marries, the boiling pot of her compulsive love is not kept on simmer but seems extinguished.  I wanted a candy thermometer reading of this affair.  I want my generation's TMI.  Wait wasn't I the person who complained about self-promoting celebrities in an earlier blog this year?

Vita's portrait is on the cover of the book.  She strikes an aloof, unapproachable pose, almost of indeterminate or questionable gender.  Virginia Wolfe wrote Orlando to describe her aura and Tilden Swinton, of similar allure, portrays her in the film, which I cannot find at my library, alas. 

Better than Bonk

Well,one could argue that my literary output has been sluggish.  Mary Roach's Gulp moves things along.  Actually, I preferred her observations about the alimentary canal when laid side to side against her odyssey of all things reproductive.  So much of those experiments were resurrected in the recent film Hysteria; but apparently now that scientists have decided they know what women want, now they are dead set on discovering how she goes about enjoying what she wants -- witness the blind tests of something called Lybrido which an entire sector of the world dreads will turn women into nymphomaniacs.

But I digress.  That is not to say that there is not an absence of fulfilling the senses.  Starting with a vaguely Rolling Stones' reminiscent craving mouth, Roach documents the importance of smell in tasting food, why internal organ meat repulses many and the qualities of saliva.  Articles I've read in the past few weeks on the Internet now are touting the benefits of mothers cleaning their children's pacifiers with a quick spit and polish maneuver in mom's mouth.  Duh, Roach spends quite some time describing that an infant's first bacterial intestinal bioreme is acquired through the messy exit of birth.

I personally am fascinated by the concept of bacterial symbiosis.  As someone who has ingested horrible chemicals to fight bouts of cancer, Lyme disease and other raging infections, I know firsthand that those side effect warnings really do great harm on the lower digestive tract.  I believe as much as the health care industry wants to prescribe by genotype, knowing what kinds of critters keep you alive and healthy given their "undying" role in your body, should hopefully redirect or cause to run in parallel experiments on improving our internal flora.

Once again, Roach brazenly authors satiric footnotes zeroing in like a middle schooler to point out the irony of a person's chosen profession given their name:  Sleeter Bull wrote Meat for the Table; and in a longer footnote:

"In a more perfect world, Whitehead would be a dermatologist, just as my gastroenterologist is Dr. Terdiman, and the author of the journal article Gastrointestinal Gas is J. Fardy, and the headquarters of the International Academy of Proctology was Flushing, New York."

And another on folks who unfortunately are employed in the manure pits and sewage tank industry - where a couple of breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation:  "Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians ... coined a name for it - dung lung.  (FN One of the physicians was a Dr. Crapo, who would, you'd think, have long ago ceased to find that sort of thing amusing.)"

One of my personal favorites:  "Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant.  Studies of three different disease causing bacteria have documented migration ... periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotheraphy." 

Roach also flaunts her love of punning and slightly risque readings:  "... the soft palate - home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite (FN It's full medical name, and my (Roach) pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula) ..."  When debunking Jonah and the whale in her chapter about How to Survive Being Swallowed Alive, she writes and footnotes:  "...While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale's stomach would seem to present a new set of problems."  True enough and to the point about a watery death at sea, until I read Roach's footnote when I laughed out loud on the train to DC:  "I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words, sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman.  And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me."

Read Gulp to find out more about professional wine tasters, how the folks at Purina come up with a dog food formula and appearance that meets the needs of pet owners; and how Elvis really died.

To end at a less vulgar note, Roach writes about human food preferences;  "In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis ... Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days."  Hence my dinner menu last night of rib eye buffalo steaks, poached fiddle head ferns, and baked rhubarb pudding.  Image is everything and venturesomeness is its fellow traveler.

Aah, My Idea of One Word Books for 2013

There is a woman author named Mary Roach who has been writing one word humorous science books about bodily functions.  I heard about her when I read a review about her latest, Gut, about the human intestinal tract.  I want to read this instead of making an appointment for a colonoscopy.  So that book is on reserve and meanwhile I read Bonk about well sex.  Seems like my lust list keeps going on and on.

Roach brings back my bias that the Irish have a wonderful gift of language and humor.  I left out loud when Roach compared a certain adapted stimulating machine to a buffing shoe shiner.  A lot of her recounting of early 20th century scientific experiments were flash backs to my lust list reading but her perspective is more an SNL or Mad magazine take.

As I mentioned in my review of Bel Canto, I am typing this while watching the endless loop of the Boston Marathon bombing.  All else pales and I won't even be writing this except I want the books returned tonight or tomorrow.

The Notes are a Little Flat

April's book club was Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.  We were all very polite in our comments.  The club sometimes seems too false:  we don't want to hurt the feelings of our hostess or those among us who consider the selection to be one of their favorite books.

Bel Canto was published in 2002 long after the prevalence of hostage taking political tactics.  This one occurs in an unnamed South American country at an international event honoring an Asian potential investor who only attends the event because it is a birthday party for him where his favorite opera singer is performing.  Despite being called Bel Canto, the book themes the importance of all arts as civilizing factors in an otherwise hostile, threatening and incomprehensible world.

I struggled to finish the book in order to be done before our meeting and the ending is absolutely dissonant and did not make sense given the plot development preceding it.

I really can't write more about the book or the club meeting as I am typing this while watching the bombs at the Boston Marathon, thinking about how political extremists no longer take hostages but kill.

They All Die

I have jumped over the book club selection for April to read May:  Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks.  Believe it or not, a Pulitzer Prize winner.  Not.  Who gets to sit on the awarding committee?  Liberal leaning balance the history types who feel compelled to "honor" an oppressive time in American history?

I strongly disliked this book.  It reminded me a lot of Ahab's Wife, another historical novel about a notable male told from a woman's perspective in an age when women were oppressed downtrodden ignored demeaned discriminated against under-educated yadda yadda yadda.

Essentially the story is Bethia Mayhew's life:
Her twin brother dies
Her mother dies in childbirth
That baby drowns in the back yard
Her father drowns at sea
Her best friend, Caleb, an Indian on Martha's Vineyard, dies of consumption after graduating Harvard
His best first Joel is clubbed to death returning to Boston to give the valedictory speech

Have we pulled enough heart strings to reach the conclusions that:
Harvard was racist
All of Massachusetts colonists were sexist
Women were indentured officially or de facto
Indians were exterminated but also heathen brutalizers

Enough said

Girl Gone

The other good-read I discovered in a NYT's review is Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn (maybe I should do a year of just Irish surnamed authors?).  I've already put Flynn's other two murder mysteries on reserve at the library.

The two main characters in this story are Nick and Amy Dunne, a 21st century over-exaggerated George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe.  Actually, this could be a story about how they become undone.

The structure is a big part of the story.  I failed to notice the big black almost bland pages that separated the book into three sections.  I was plowing along as the girl was gone and her husband is investigated as the only subject of her disappearance/kidnapping/death.  Half way into the book, it seems like the story is over and then I noticed part two.  In that section, although Flynn continues to alternate chapters from the male and female perspective, it is Amy whose psychological profile and posing comes more clearly into focus.  Now she is more like Delmar's own sociopath.  Now Nick really wants to kill her.

But it is the third part that makes this book more than a clever mystery or thriller.  It is here that Flynn obliquely articulates her over-theme:  are we all actors and actresses in the tragi-comedy of love?  Was Amy, like most young women today, assuming a popular persona or type to be attractive to eligible males?  Did she assume another societally-imposed role as happy young wife?  At what point in a relationship do such veneers begin to crack?  How easy is it for two people to live together without falling into typecasting?  Amy's parents play out the older saccharine version of a happily ever after couple but their entire life has been dedicated to profiting off a fabrication of an ideal girl, the children's series of Amazing Amy, were Amy always triumphs.  So with this upbringing, Amy becomes the author of her own life and any and all nonconforming subplots are summarily ended.

Similarly, Amy comes to realize that Desi, her boyfriend from college, cannot be her savior because he too is in "character" and has prescripted (no pun intended) what their relationship had to be: ..."I look at Desi with outright disgust now.  Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden ... The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying.  A man who finds guilt erotic.  And if he doesn't get his way, he'll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion."  Wait a minute, is Amy looking in a mirror or projecting?

However, Nick is equally programmed to assume postures and dialogue that has leeched into his personality from popular culture.  As he is investigated by the police, he thinks in the interrogation room:  ..."I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing ... is the second hand experience is always better.  The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore.  I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.  If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say ... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters." 

Part three shows the couple being "catastrophically romantic."  Where they are quasi-comfortable in their Punch and Judy hostage taking marriage.

I think Flynn's forte is not the plot twists and turns but the entire idea that if "real" people are less than real, how can an author possibly make her protagonists believable!  She does so, unforgettably so.

Need to Know

Hooray.  I have just finished two excellent books.  Can I hope for this streak to continue?  Considering that I discovered both of them in that unreliable compendium of miserable current books, the Sunday New York Times book review section, this takes on an even more special aura ... pearls before swine.  Although I finished this one last, I will review it first.

After Visiting Friends is Michael Hainey's story about finding out under what circumstances his father died when he was six years old.  I don't really want to describe Hainey's father's death, the cover up or his family's omerta like repression of talking about it.  Nor do I want to focus on Hainey's dogged research as an expression of his inherited and ingrained reporting instincts.  I loved the book for his family.  

The best metaphor I can come up with for his mother is Lot's wife.  After her husband dies, she becomes as rigid, silent and steadfast as a pillar of salt, her only animation is to drive on the well being of her two young sons.  Growing up in the late 50s early 60s, she has the blessing of an extended family to help her cope.  Hainey's maternal grandmother and his uncle, also a newspaperman, anchor him, but anchor him next to a gaping emotional hole, the space where a boy's father should reign.

The sworn to secrecy "old boys club" of his dad's contemporary writers at the paper through up blocks and dead ends as he tries to find out any information.  From decades of his mother slicing the air with her hand as the penultimate gesture of "don't go there" Hainey's search/adventure becomes more classic, more daring.

After his mother, my next favorite character is the woman at the morgue, one of those true Christians who can read Hainey's anguish and fear and who prays with him to give him strength, courage and stamina.  Now I am sure many jaded cosmopolitan East Coast GQ readers will construe this as a literary device, especially attributing a deus ex machina like quality to her random call years latter with no new information but just the need to bring him to closure.  No, I know these people exist.  They are not preying on our weaknesses, they are praying for our peace.  Even lapsed faithfuls like me and Hainey are moved by their public displays of unselfish faith and trust in a guided purpose to our actions.

The counterpoint to Hainey's need to break through a code of silence is his parallel struggle of when and how much to tell his mother about what he finally discovers.  Are family secrets best kept in the closet?  Should adult children discuss a parent's infidelity with the other spouse?  Should Hainey remain as silent as his mother?

The book ends with him and his mom at the kitchen table after she has told him her own personal hidden secrets about his father.  There can be no further tarnishing, yet no further polishing of their reputations.  He is reconciled with her.  But who is he and what secrets has he still kept about himself from his readers?

Y ... Why

After getting 2013 off to a slow and unsatisfying start, book-wise, I decided to venture back to last year's bucket list and nibble away at the unreviewed letters.  Where I picked up many of these titles, I don't know, though probably Amazon, as now I discover our library system does not have many of them on the shelves.  I hit on Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.

Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road.  Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel.  It is.  It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics.   Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.

It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all:  Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving.  The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:

I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.

So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now.  If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent.  If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.

Give me less self-involved novels, please.

Movie War Stories

As a complement to All Quiet on the Western Front, I wanted to watch one of my favorite actresses, Audrey Tautou, in A Very Long Engagement.  (Seeing recent pictures of Audrey on the Internet, it strikes me that she is no longer the French gamine/ingenue she was but is maturing into a woman who looks like my great aunt, not the Busold side, the Trembley side.)

Anyway, the stupid DVD from the library kept skipping and stalling and all I got to watch last night was the first few minutes and actually that was enough to depict the horrors that Remarque's couldn't do justice to with its scattered pen and ink abstract sketches.  It was the disc and not my player as I inserted the other movie I picked up this weekend and it played fine.  If I can find another copy of AVLE I want to watch it because it dawned on me that the "engagement" referred to a troop engagement as well as to moving slowly towards a marriage.

So the pitch hitting movie last night was Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  Somewhere in this unruly blog I think I wrote up how much I liked the book, vampire junkie that I am.  Hated the movie.  For two reasons.  I resent saying what I liked most about a film was its special effects; and given my sons proclivity to all things Southern and my husband's south of the Mason Dixon line family tree, I could not entertain a version, however fantastical, of Jefferson Davis conspiring with vampires to win the war.  One of the most moving days of my life was visiting Gettysburg.  It was bloody hot and dusty that day and the boys hung out with the reenactors on the Gray side, sitting with Lee and getting pictures taken with other generals who walked among the tents.  I was heart sick when a battle began, mourning both sides, the unnecessary losses to life, family and the flower of our nation's youth.  Demonizing one side was a sacrilege to both.  I've already decided not to see Lincoln despite my interest in Day-Lewis performances.  I recognize Hollywood demonizes certain aspects of history to get across its own political agenda.  This took it beyond the pale.

Wars are Different, Wars are All Alike

I think I mentioned how much I disliked the book club's selection of The Things They Carried.  I vowed to read a "good" war story and went back to last year's bucket list to All Quiet on the Western Front.  I really to want to write this blog as a good old school compare and contrast essay, because both seem so entrenched in the specific warfare prevalent in its time and with perceptions of the enemy determined by how far the fighters were from neighboring states.

The introduction to the version I had succinctly summarized the author's intent to concentrate solely on helpless human beings, buffeted by chance, exploited by martinets, unable to exercise any intelligent control over their destinies.  To me, the story shows a disillusionment of an entire age of men, men who were about to entire the mainstream of life but who became completely exiled from their community, heritage and values by the front.  Unlike Tim O'Brien and his displacement in a country he doesn't understand, Paul is a soldier with his fellow classmen, often with former teachers as their military superiors:  ..." For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future.  We often made fun of them ... but in our hearts we trusted them.  The idea of authority, which they represented was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier vision.  But the first death we saw shattered this belief ... They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness.  The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."

What I find more readable than O'Brien's book is Remarque's identification with all his fellow soldiers; O'Brien, despite his descriptions of his comrades high jinx or injuries, seems to write more as a cathartic exercise in PTSD.  Remarque wants his audience to know what the war did to a generation: ..."I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality case over an abyss of sorrow.  I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.  I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.  And all the men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me ... What will happen afterwards?  And what shall come out of us?"

Why has the military complex now decided to nation-build after a conflict but to do nothing to repair the souls and spirits of its disillusioned, depressed soldiers?  Today, our newest employee returned to work after two or three days off to go home to a friend's funeral.  When I welcomed her back today, she told me it was a boy who served who committed suicide.  Will drones be better or worse?

Tangent to Political Treatise/Essay

Ah for the Federalist Papers or at least a politician who wants to, and can, speak at length about the issues and his or her deeply held convictions and positions about them.  I was standing by a fellow worker's desk and when another woman I know dropped off a book he lent to her.  When I saw it was Bobby Jindal's Leadership and Crisis, I asked if I could take it to read next.  It is a quick read, over and done with in three short evenings and the book owner said Jindal's later books were more in depth.  Nonetheless, Jindal makes a good governor, especially for a State like Louisiana which had a lot to recover and reform.

Because I was a proponent of his advancement nationally, there were little surprises and it was not until Chapter 12 when I found dog-ear worthy quotations.  In that chapter, Jindal emphasizes it is the cultural heritage of America that makes it great, not its government or economy, and it is that defining characteristic that is most at risk.  He does not quote Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations but another of his works "... The Theory of Mortal Sentiment, which he considered his most important work.  Smith argued here that the free market system would not work well -- and could even bring out the worst in some people -- in a society that lacked a strong moral foundation.  Values like propriety, prudence, and benevolence are needed to check our inherent selfishness ..."

He goes to describe his take on the mortgage meltdown "... Predictably, after the meltdown liberals called on the government to adopt strict new regulations to ensure it will not happen again.  (Good luck with that.)  But more regulations can't solve what is largely an ethical problem within the culture.  Unchecked avarice at every level has taken its toll on our economy."

And finally ... "To sum up, American capitalism is great, American democracy is great, and American military power is great ... But the success of America does not rely on these things alone.  The success of America and the realization of the American Dream rely on our common sense of culture, a culture that admits some things are right and some things are wrong, a culture that respects and honors the dignity of the individual, a culture that defends the defenseless, values human life ..."

With these thoughts in my mind, it was fun to play dominoes this weekend with my husband and our younger son.  We have been playing weekends for the past month or so, and I think of all the rounds, our son has only scored 300 points and won once.  Sunday's game was going in the same direction, with me jumping off to an early lead and my husband catching up, while John had no points.  In his best political satire, he, who was keeping score, looked at the tally sheet and explained "You too have too much.  It should be redistributed to me who is poor."  Jindal would have said "You're so lucky to be in the game."

Not Really Silence vs Noise

When I checked out The Horse Whisperer and The Motorcycle Diaries at the same time, the talkative old guy behind the library counter commented on how mutually exclusive they would be sound-wise.  He seems to have watched every movie in the stacks and I demurred to his joke.  Not, Redford only stares and crouches and clucks at the horse and Ernesto and Alberto's motorcycle conks out half way through the movie.

Of course, no one else in this family would be caught dead watching The Motorcycle Diaries.  Any of my comments about it being set in 1952, long before Che Guevara became a famous Communist, were still met with derision and charges that deep in my bones I was still a hippie sympathizer.  Not, but it is interesting to think back now that the old guard is dying in Cuba and Venezula.  What little progress.  What impossible lofty, dreams.

Here again, like the scope and vista of Montana in The Horse Whisperer, TMD shows off the beauty of the geography and people of Argentina, Chile and Peru.  The poverty of indigenous peoples is presented aloofly, without the heavy handed Hollywood messaging that a more current version of the story might overlay.  Ernesto is young, idealistic in his need to help lepers.  The extent to which is journey across South America abetted his radicalization is subtle, almost tangential.

The casting is superb.  The actor who plays Alberto jumps off the screen; Che is more moody and shy.  Is this the balancing buddy movie to the chick flicks I've been watching?  It is Uneasy Rider.  

Can It Be 15 Years Ago?

Back in the days when the boys were younger, I was working longer hours on the job, and I didn't have a DVD player, I watched way fewer movies.  So when I selected The Horse Whisperer from the racks at the library last weekend, it felt like I would be watching a relatively recent movie.  1998.  When that horrific accident with the horses and lumber hauler on an icy narrow road occurs, I was back in 1998.  That scene was filmed up here, near Albany.  As my "I hate celebrities" review indicates, I am not one to watch local movie making, forget Salt or from Beyond the Pines, and would never ever audition for being an extra.  I even seem to recall that Redford rented a home near Siena.

I just checked out Wiki before writing this blog and unsurprisingly, it compares THW with The Bridges of Madison County, aging or at least middle aged actors and actresses, finding some version of love, a snippet to cherish and store away as the female leads decide their pre-affair lives are inevitable and "right."

I love horse movies.  The scenery of Montana was striking.  Scarlett Johansson, at least a foot shorter than she is now, is a believable look alike daughter of Kristin Scott Thomas.  Another six degree of separation instance, as KST is a take off on Tina Brown, who was also portrayed of sorts by Streep in TBOMC.  Is America's cadre of actors/actresses so thin that these people recycle through films that are targeted to certain market sectors?  Streep keeps aging and Hope Springs.

I really thought Redford was completely miscasted as the whisperer.  The story would have been more real if the male lead was not one of the industry's icon idols ... a more average looking man with special horse taming talents, someone who looked more natural around a farm and didn't always wear ironed dungarees under his chaps, would have made the attraction seem more based on talent instead of testosterone.  Although I have to admit, Redford's compression of Thomas spine through her clothes as they dance is damn sexy.   

Last Interest in Books of Ali Smith

Maybe I will learn that until I am sure, positively sure, that I want to read everything by a particular author and then go about reserving everything that I can find by him/her.  From now on, I put them aside one after another.  Sequence is important:  I learned that yesterday ... do not put the garlic in with the onions and peppers when frying them for a recipe, add garlic later; similarly, add the tomatoes later or else you get skins and pulp and nothing round and red.

There but for The, is the cryptic title of Smith's book from 2011.  It reminds me of Crash and all those movies of parallel interpretations of one event witnessed by or entailing several different, diverse people.  Here someone invited to a dinner party in Greenwich, London, brings a friend with him and that friend locks himself in the hostess' guest room for months, for no apparent rhyme or reason.  Smith chunks up the story into four chapters, there, but, for, the, told by respectively a woman who traveled with the subject, Miles Garth, on a school trip decades ago, the person who brought him to the dinner, the dying mother of a childhood friend of Miles' and a precocious ten year, the child of another couple at the dinner.

I draw out from Smith's stories her interest in concurrent time, perception and narration.  In the first chapter, Smith uses Anna's voice to ponder the importance of talking:  "... What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking?  Hour after hour of no words.  Would you speak to yourself?  Would words just stop being useful?  Would you lose language altogether?  Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks?  Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife?  ... Would all things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?"

Smith opines a story wherein the main character has nothing or very little to say, emphasizing the receiving/observing end of human communication.  We are saying what we hear, even when we are only talking in our heads to ourselves -- as May Young (Smith punning with surnames again) does in her stroke-addled mind.  But it is the gifted child, Brooke, who I believe is Smith's intended alter ego, the Cleverist.  Brooke is babbling (ha) but not childish prattle rather encyclopedic trivia seen through the eyes of a grammar schooler.  Brooke is the only one who can sneak inside and talk to Miles, who can exchange knock knock jokes with he who is self-barracaded on the other side of the door.  Brooke who plays with time as well as words, skipping school to stand on the GMT meridien.

There But For The ...
Specificity
Structure   
Chronology
Predictabilty
Standardization
Ambiguity
"dear reader, you do not need it"

English Flicks

(This is a review from several weeks ago that was languishing in draft unpublished status.)
 
No I am not reading as diligently as I vowed.  Movies beckon especially after the intriguing previews included in the Iron Lady DVD.  So a couple of nights ago, I did a double feature of My Week with Marilyn and W/E.  Both were good, if perhaps chick flicks … although what male would be opposed to watching Michelle Williams as Monroe.

MWWM had a great supporting cast, most notably Kenneth Branaugh as Larry Olivier.  I found it difficult to watch “a week in the life of” knowing too well how short that life would be and how much worse than the pains, drugs and loneliness of Marilyn’s time on the set of the Prince and the Showgirl.  How everyone either wanted to glom on to her fame or use her to advance their own.  (See I still am thinking about The Frenzy of Renown even though I am only as far as Plutarch.)

W/E was beautiful but I felt the over-story of the contemporary young woman at Sotheby’s was a bit contrived.  A flashback vehicle in the context of the sale seemed legit, but striving to make too many parallel experiences across the decades between a fan and her idol was stretched too thin, as thin as Wallis herself.  Now, there was a woman of with and backbone as compared to the naïve and malleable MM … the difference between a penultimate flatterer and one being fawned over.

I still have one more British film to go, Anonymous, so expect one more installment of movie reviews before I once again pick up my two bedside books.

After Artful, I Curious About Why Ali Smith

Was either nominated (Orange and Man Booker Prize) or won (Encore and Satire First Book Award).  So I reserved a couple of her books that I could find on the library website.  Started with Girl Meets Boy - The Myth of Iphis.  Not sure which came first, Smith's rewriting of Ovid's Metamorphis story or her publisher's decision to issue a collection of contemporary rewritings of these myths.  I suspect the latter as after getting through this one, I rechecked the library to see if any others of the Canon  Gate collection were available and they were not ... maybe it is yet another one of those soley Brit things.

Apparently this is the only one of Ovid's stories with a quasi-happy ending.  Smith just updates and politically corrects the denoument to make it no longer necessary for a girl brought up as a boy to be changed into a boy at a wedding ceremony.  Smith conveniently uses this myth as another opportunity to disclose the wonderous normalcy of her being a lesbian and entailed to public affirmation of her love.  (She even uses the term "artful" to describe the perfection of this ecstasy.)

Smith's version is larded with almost Shakespearean collections of gender under disguise:  the book's first sentence is "Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says."  He then relates to his twin granddaughters an incident where a female revolutionary dresses up as a messenger boy to elude arrest.  The twins, Imogen/Midge and Anthea, live in Scotland and both are employed at a water bottling corporation, another example for Smith to use to propagandize.  Melding this message with Canon Gate's intent, Smith writes:
..."I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society ... as if they emerged from society's subconscious?  Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces?  For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making?"

The plot focuses on Anthea, the twin who dawdles about joining the firm, and tarries outside watching a demonstrator smear anti-corporate slogans on the company's facade.  This being Scotland, the graffitist is wearing a kilt.  As the protestor slides down the ladder, kilt a-flaring, Anthea falls in love with Robin Goodman.  This is Smith at her Woodhouse best:  she lives for puns.  Robin, is of course, a woman, and she and Anthea become lovers, ultimately marrying at the end of the story. 

I'll write up my review of another Smith novel next but I do not have to read her entire opus.  These books have been sufficient for me to decide she is not my cup of tea, nor snort of Scotch.  However, there are flights of writing were she sings; where she stands on the shoulders of other British Isles writers, and acknowledges not only the reiteration of recurring plots/themes but also echoes styles.  Her she reminds me of Joyce:  "... Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone.  A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveler on the road.  Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen (today's gimmicky NYT's puzzle clues), or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another ..."  If his, if is

I Hate Celebrities

I feel like this book was the required text for a college level course.  The Frenzy of Renown:  Fame and Its History runs almost 600 pages and traces the concept of fame from Alexander the Great to Grace Slick.  Oh how the mighty concept has fallen!  Leo Braudy wrote this book in 1986 and to my mind, things have only gotten worse.

I decided to read this book, because as this blog title boldly states, I hate celebrities.  Steeped at home during my youth in healthy skepticism, I always look for the feet of clay in any hero.  I now find it perplexing:  my mother had outrageously high standards of excellence and nothing less than perfection attracted her praise.  Yet I learned that others broadcasting of their perfection was bound to be suspect.  I thought maybe this book would help me understand my distaste for what I consider to be unworthy poseurs.

Braudy does a scholarly job in tracking fame from when it was directly correlated to military exploits to governmental talent during classical ages.  He contrasts the definition of other-worldly fame with the rise of Christianity.  But the book didn't grab me until he got to the point where the describer of the famous overtook the man who sought fame.  Aha, mespoke.  The rise of the author, the one career I find meritorious of fame.  Braudy starts with Horace, Ovid and Virgil as realizing they could determine and crown who was worthy of remembering and thereby become the arbiters of status, gaining status themselves.  I loved it.

The book goes on and on detailing how individuals' sense of being noticed and remembered degenerated into the outlandish and outre.  Ending as it does in the mid '80s, it has only gotten worse.

The main idea I garner from the book is the conceit that a person's posture or exploits are only performed to attract an audience, the ultimate bestower of renown.  This is almost a Venn diagram of how to become famous:  the actor, the audience, and the time all need to overlay to have a person's "life" and acts live beyond death.

This impulse to "look at me" still strikes me as unbecoming.  I seek anonymity.  I love being a ghost writer, the power behind the throne, or at least the public face.  My efforts still seem transistory and nothing to etch on a tombstone.  I want to live only in the memory of a select chosen few who understand who I am as well as how I present myself publicly and what I "do."  Notice me:  I dress well, I smell good, I am witty.  So are many others (maybe not in this State capital).  But remember me more as a progenitor, not as a "star."