Dutiful, but not Insightful Reading

Trying to clear the decks of library books before I head off for a couple days vacation, I finished the third Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink. This one has two diametrically opposed observations. First, that trained people can make accurate decisions in about two seconds because they ignore everything that is irrelevant and zero in on the key element. Hoving from the Met is used as an example of someone, who it appears can intuitively spot a forgery, but who in reality has trained for years (harken back to Gladwell's theory of 10,000 hours to expertise). Just when you want to trust your own gut first impressions, Gladwell flips over to illustrate split second biases of the cops in the Amadou Diallo case and how conductors are prejudiced in whom they place in their orchestras unless auditions are held behind screens. This is not a message of "trust but verify;" rather I can only conclude that Gladwell is more comfortable when that instant discern affects inanimate objects rather than people, especially those one does not know. I really have nothing else to say. Sorry this took longer than two seconds to read. But I think you get my impression.

Vacant House, Empty Book

Another Hesperus 100 pager down: this time A House to Let "by Charles Dickens." Well, not actually. The book is a collection of six short stories, one of which is a horrible poem, with the only thing in common being a thread of speculation as to why a dilapidated house across the street from the narrator is vacant with no chance of being rented. Inside the cover, the table of contents credits only one of the stories as being exclusively written by Dickens, two co-authored with good old Wilkie Collins, one singularly by Collins, and the other two by little known women, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. The book emerges more as a marketing device for Dickens' magazine, especially to promote the circulation of work by these lesser female writers. The two strongest selections are the story's "book ends" first and last installments which happen to be the two co-authored pieces.

The writing is crisp and witty as it introduces Sophonisba, an old lady with a clever perspective on her long life, an appreciation for her servants and a curiosity about her surroundings. Moving to London for a change of scenery as recommended by her physician, she lets lodgings across the street from the titled "abandoned" building. She charges both her butler, Trottle (a wonderful Dickensian name) and a long suffering, doddering suitor, Jarber, to find out what they can about former owners and the house's history. This challenge becomes the device to introduce "stories" about previous occupants whose eccentricities have absolutely no bearing on the denouement. In fact, it appears that the women's contributions had been previously published independent of this literary collection.

Despite its strong first chapter, the book falters and even the second best last chapter seems contrived and a vehicle for Dickens' more familiar social causes of broken families and lost and abused children. At least I only devouted a couple of hours to reading the book.

Hesperus Published Books as Diversions

The pile of books to read is now quite numerous if not tall and threatening to topple. Simply because, the selections published by Hesperus tend to be slender paperbacks of around 100 pages of either a collection of short stories or a novella. Two I polished off last night are Emile Zola's For a Night of Love and Luigi Pirandello's Loveless Love. (Notice a mini-theme here?)

This small edition contains the title story, a second Nantas, and a really short story called Fasting which theme-wise has nothing to do with fated love but deals with the religious/quasi-sexual ecstasy induced by a zealous Catholic priest as he raves about repentance and denial of the body in his sermons to a largely female audience while himself then visiting each duchess, marquise, and lady for lavish glutinous dinners. A nice little contemplative diatribe against the sham and pretense of ritual over faith.

Putting that filler piece aside, the two other stories are magnificent. I can only paraphrase the foreword to echo Zola's talent as being his depiction of the world in hyper-focus; his layering on of minute details in his characters' lives and appearance. He outlines the male characters so thoroughly before the real action takes place that their responses to stimuli and opportunities are natural and fully understandable. But his females! Ah, what predators. Written in 1876, almost 20 years ahead of Thomas Hardy's Tess, these "love affairs" pulse with longing, frustration, no, emotional abuse. Wow what writing.

Pirandello in contrast, although writing 20 years later, while depicting weaker males, cannot make the females into femme fatales, and according, the stories are blase. The mismatches and thwarted loves could be infused with Shakespearean twists; but Pirandello, maybe given his time approaching the 20th century, has his characters blind to their motives and emotions. A nice couple of stories to read about the frustrations of life but neither a quick, exciting read nor a cast of memorable lovers.

The Author is Not an Outlier

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

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

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

In This Case, Part of the Late Majority

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

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

Memento Mori

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

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

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

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

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

Old Times' Sake -- Plus the Hesperus List

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK Slackers: anyone read any of these?