Hybred Genre: The Pattern in the Carpet

Recently, my husband has been receiving unsolicited major league baseball junk in the mail, he thinks because he signed up for insider information to help with his betting on winning teams. Instead he has been barraged with schlock, stuff he wouldn’t ever be tempted to look at in a ball park, let alone buy. It was with similar confusion that I received a package from my college roommate in “amongst” the daily pile of eBay purchases. Inside were two books that she found at a sale, she said silently calling out my name and that of my soon-to-be daughter in law: The latter, a murder mystery about baking muffins, and mine an autobiography of Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet, subtitled A Personal History with Jigsaws. I am a jigsaw junkie. I finished the book more quickly than my usual concentrated efforts on 1,000 piece Pomegrantes.

Drabble set out to write a book about the history of puzzles tracing them back to an origin of teaching tools -- whereby children could put together maps of France or England and learn their geography. Drabble occasionally migrates from this intent to overlay her research with reflections on the place puzzles played in her own childhood and again as an adult. Lots of the book seems to echo my implicit thoughts about puzzles: such as, start with the corner pieces and frame edges, move on to related color segments, join these larger assembled pieces together, then realize that it’s time to proceed from a color-based to a shape-based approach to fill in all the background, sit back and enjoy the finished product for a couple of days, take apart and stow away forever. (I am attempting, as I inch into becoming an eBay seller as well as buyer, to offload my puzzles, so far to no success. But alas, I think I have found a semi-willing pack rat who thinks they will be something to do as she recovers from surgery in December. I hope to get rid of at least half of them.)

Drabble associates puzzles with her aunt, the woman in her family who takes the place of an unstable mother whom she really never likes. Auntie Phyl is no Mary Poppins herself but is tolerant of young children, having been a primary school teacher.

Drabble’s writing style defies the logic of her approach to completing puzzles: she is all over the map, using puzzles as a metaphor to understand her need to impose order and get the big picture of her life and her relationships. She goes on many a tangent, investigating mosaics, comparing the items in museum shops vis a vis their art collections, and digressing into London’s industry of publishing children’s books.

In a way she is like Pamuk's Museum of Innocence and his story of collecting the detritus of his beloved’s life as a vehicle to explain his city and his soul. She itemizes those puzzles depicting English cottages similar to the inn her grandparents operated, trying to capture reality onto a "game" medium. She briefly self-discloses when she writes: “… and now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture. I may never fully know why my mother was so unhappy and so angry … But I cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together.”

In one of those six degrees of separation moments, Drabble writes that Julian Barnes loves jigsaw puzzles and her reprise towards the end of her book hearkens to Barnes’ theme in The Sense of an Ending about making up one’s own life story: “We invent our own family tree, we construct our own ancestry, we collect our own fragments, we ignore the pieces that don’t fit, we deny the stories we don’t like … We throw the extra pieces into a bucket, and pretend they belong to some other design, some other puzzle.”

She makes shorter shrift of the "missing piece," not extending that metaphor into her constructing her life and reflecting on it. Personally, as I work on a puzzle, I am outraged when the dog grabs a piece and chews it into an almost unrecognizable pulp. My goal of perfection has been destroyed, even if I manage to force fit the distended cardboard into the pattern. And a lost piece absolutely negates all of my efforts with the other 999 pieces. So too is my life. So much so, I bought a couple of wine glasses etched with a ring of puzzle pieces to acknowledge that as I continue to go about constructing my life story, all pieces must be accounted for and those long lost cherished as a prodigal.

There is one other apt quote in Drabble's book that makes me wonder whether my roommate looked beyond the inside blurbs. Drabble writes about her Aunt Phyl's little white dog in much the same vein as my friend might describe my Bichon: "the dog became so naughty because my aunt had de-trained him, and that, by allowing him to pee on the carpet, lick her face and feet, masturbate against her ankles, jump at visitors and bounce on beds, she was expressing the bad behavior that had been pent up in her by a lifetime of ... propriety ..."

Somehow I'd rather sit down and tackle a new puzzle than train JJ.

Lust in Translation

Pun on that awful Bill Murray movie, Pamela Druckerman's book, Lust in Translation - The Rules of Infidelity from Toyko to Tennessee, is less than mediocre. Druckerman is a former Wall Street Journal writer so if this were bonds, I'd rate it B-.

Without any training in psychology or counseling, she travels the globe attempting to rank the nations from least to most faithful to monogamy -- this as she approaches her first marriage. She is not looking from common traits (or flaws) but wants to compile the effects of various religions, economics and culture on as causes or deterrents to adultery. The behaviors she depicts in Moscow and South Africa lead one to conclude that they would not want to be married there, let alone live in such hotbeds of infidelity. In the former, an increase of wealth spurs cheating; in the latter, lack of any opportunity to make money urges both sexes to get any kind of pleasure whenever possible, and at a huge risk to contracting AIDS.

Her portrait of Japanese marriage is so unappetizing that it's a wonder people start a family. The tradition of Geishas was deteriorated to sex clubs where men go to play. Things are similar in China except there a newly rich class at least can afford to set up a second family in a neighboring town. Druckerman's final observation, I think much to her comfort, is that Americans and the French are way down in the lust poll but for different reasons: in the USA, Puritanism has evolved into a sort of marriage cult where one's spouse equates to the sole person who can fulfill own's pursuit of happiness; in France, the tradition of "five to seven" (PM) still holds some sway.

And perhaps, it is this theory of structuring time, that she leaves least explored. She hints about American women from the 50s and 60s as having more chunks for free time in which to engage in finding a lover as contrasted with overscheduled hours now. She also mentions that there is a notable demarcation in the progress of a relationship when it moves into actually spending the night sleeping with one's lover. But she never explores what do lovers do with the rest of the day when they awaken. Is that those long day light hours that turn lust into obligations? How erotic do partners remain when they rake the lawn together, take each other to the dentist or go to the laundromat? Given those mundane realities, the scales of one's life need to be balanced with some passionate arousal. Druckerman reaches no conclusion of how far one can or should look for such fulfillment.

You Had to be There: 1968 The Year That Rocked the World

After finishing The Belly of Paris, newly translated by Mark Kurlansky, I checked out his other books, remembered I enjoyed Salt and Cod, and reserved 1968. While Kurlansky organizes this book by time rather than commodity, he presents a global view of what was happening concurrently each month, in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, as well as Chicago and My Lai. But this is not exclusively a political reprise. Although focusing primarily on street demonstrations and university occupations, he interprets such events as the cause of an all volunteer army and military control of media coverage, of the rise of image over substance in politicians, oddly traced back to Pierre Trudeau, and of White backlash becoming an underlying platform of the Republican party.

The ability to broadcast news live to my thinking, was the most critical paradigm shift. There were not longer delays, interpretations, cropping of film; news went to an hour, editorial comment seeped in, and the theater aspects of violence came to predominate coverage. All causes had to compete for air time and action-backed clips.

But being there, actually turning 21 the fall of '68 what I remember most is a palpable change in one's sense of security. Concerts on campus were no longer an afternoon with Horowitz, but hours of ear-blasting Cream; diversions were no longer sneaking into the all-male operated radio station but salvaging thrown out stuff on the Grand Concourse. Pill box hats were out, headbands were in. I swore for the first time at one of my roommates whose father was a General in Viet Nam. Graduation was celebrated with John Lindsay as commencement speaker and by the senior class doing its version of Hair.

Those few LPs that have made it through several moves and changes of equipment are cherished and blasted by my youngest son and when my other roommate visits she always asks him "aren't they your mother's records?" even when he has programmed them on Pandora.

68 has deep roots, the kudzu of America and the world. I just toggled over to Internet news and the Basque ETA says they are laying down their arms; my high school friend who occupied Grayson Kirk's office, went to the Democratic convention and to other landmark events of that year, emailed me back as he participated in Occupy Philadelphia.

Strangely, I feel almost like Tony Webster from The Sense of an Ending. I have filtered and made revisionist history of how 68 impacted me personally. Not only do I selectively remember people and events from that tumultuous year, but I pride myself in how much I've changed (or reverted to pre 1967) me. Some of that year's culture remains iconic, most has so infiltrated our daily lives that it is difficult to attribute so much to one span of twelve months. Maybe I should read 1492.

Even a Faster Read: The Sense of an Ending

Finished reading Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, the day after it won the Man Booker award. It is an excellent short novel even if its construction is a bit obvious, sort of like those new ecto skeletal buildings ... you see everything blatantly that holds it together, but still marvel.

Barnes' protagonist, Tony Webster, is a man who decides how to construct his own life, making it comfortable and avoiding conflicts. He is not a person typically lost in the past nor analyzing how he came to be where he is -- divorced, retired, pretty much out of contact with friends from the past. When that past intrudes, it comes back almost with footnotes. Webster filters out his memories of school lessons, outings and events so that they inform and reinforce his perceived character. It is a lesson in filtering past experiences, assigning import, and force fitting patterns, a worthy uber theme of novel writing itself. What does the author purposefully include to advance the plot, provide a subtheme and develop characters and relationships? Barnes asks the reader to think how are these intentions different from how a person writes his own internal autobiography.

An interesting book and marvelously written. I have already reserved a couple other of his novels to appreciate his complete oeuvre, novels that contributed to the Man Booker this time around after four previous nominations.

Damn the Snooze Alarm: Sex at Dawn

Now here's a 300 page book that can be read, avidly, in a day: Sex at Dawn -- The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. The authors are both research psychologists but the book focuses on their interpretive view of anthropology and evolution brought crashingly up against social mores and dictates. Ryan and Jetha's intent is blow to smithereens the long held "scientific" given that human monogamy is biologically preordained and that human sexuality is a zero sum economic transaction of trading a clear paternal line of heritage for protection and material benefit. R & J say, nope, humans are more like bonobos and present evolutionary physical bodily manifestations to support their theory that by nature, both men and women came from a prehistoric age of foragers who readily shared and sought out many sexual partners. And they do this all with wit and laugh out loud quotes.

In the introduction, they state what they want to prove in the book: " What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? ... we'll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago (basically, the shift from foraging to farming) rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by the moralizing therapists."

Getting a bit more polemic, the authors go on to espouse: "The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species' sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life's irreplaceable joys ..."

By chapter three, the humor is more prevalent, making an otherwise scholarly thesis a fun read: "Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As ... Schopenhauer pointed out, One can choose what to do, but not what to want."

In a chapter on jealousy, R & J align sex against other loves: "First-born children often feel jealous when a younger sibling is born. Wise parents make a special point of reassuring the child that shell always be special, that the baby doesn't represent any kind of threat to her status, and that there's plenty of love for everyone. Why is it so easy to believe that a mother's love isn't a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource?"

I love the following analogy about the difference between male sexual sprinters vis a vis female marathoners: "The symmetry of dual disappointment illustrates the almost comical incompatibility between men's and women's sexual response in the context of monogamous mating. You have to wonder: if men and women evolved together in sexually monogamous couples for millions of years, how did we end up being so incompatible? It's as if we were sitting down to dinner together ... but half of us can't help wolfing down everything in a few frantic, sloppy minutes, while the other half are still setting the table and lighting candles."

And the 180 view of When Harry Met Sally: " ... but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn't be funny -- it wouldn't even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is a full-on opera."

Of all the non-fiction books on the lust list this year, this was certainly the most fun, the most thought provocative, and the lustiest.

Trying Out Another Deadly Sin: Gluttony

A week or so ago, the New York Times magazine did the entire issue on food. Most of the articles were written in question and answer format, and one in particular caught my hungry eye: what was the best book about food ever written? Several were mentioned, but the responder acclaimed The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola as the hands down winner. Even though I could not progress very far into Zola's lust list book, Nana, I devoured TBOP.

The novel is set in 1858 Paris in the neighborhood of the recently completed Les Halles market place. It is the depiction of the various food stalls, the delivery wagons' congestion in the approaching streets, the smells of the slaughtering of live animals in its cellars that makes the book an overstuffed panorama. What keeps it from being a glossy spread from a mad version of Gourmet is the overlay of the people who keep the stalls and their small business owner counterparts in the becoming gentrified neighborhood. These characters are the worms in the apples, the mold on the meat.

Zola writes unforgettable characters, all flawed, some idealistic, some simple, but most devious and self-serving. Most memorable are the Beautiful Lisa and her challenger for local ideal woman, the Beautiful Norman (not a man but from Normandy); and the three neighborhood magpies whose gossip more than any political intrigue brings down the key male characters and sets the supporting females and other minor inhabitants back into their bourgeois orbits.

All the people who populate the story in one way or another have jobs in the "food industry." Florent the convict who escaped from his exile in Devil's Island because an inspector at Les Halles; Gavard sells poultry; Quenu, Florent's brother, owns a charcuterie; with the exception of Q, most men meet nightly at the local bistro to drink and conspire yet another popular uprising to overthrow the latest corrupt French government. (How odd to be reading about a conspiracy to pack the streets with dissidents as the "Wall Street" demonstrations spread to other cities and people I know whose blood still boils from the anti-war movement of the 60s rush to participate ... making Florent's internalized, personalized oppression wrapped in idealistic reform seem more believable.)

This 2009 translation is by Mark Kurlansky whose books Salt and Cod I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. His style is probably what is making this particular Zola easier to get through than Nana. I reserved a couple other of Kurlansky's book and in keeping with the political rather than the epicurean theme, the first one I started reading in the pile is 1968.

Same Time, Next Year: Nostalgic but Still Teared Up

I saw this play on Broadway either in 1977 or 1978, just about the time when the story line ends in the movie version that covers 1951 when Doris and George first meet to 1977, not when they stop their annual rendezvous but when George asks Doris to marry him after his wife dies.

Although I can't remember who starred in the production in NYC, several of the key events remained etched in my memory and I always held the premise of such a long term affair as believable and natural. What struck me more this time was how each of the lovers tried on different personae through the years, displaying outward poses and contemporary facades that often clashed with their lover's ideology at that point in time. But despite chafing politics, out of sync cycles in business careers, and other events of everyday life, their relationship rested on bedrock.

What also dated the premise is of course, the setting is well before cell phones and email and they never contact each other the other 363 days of the year. At times of stress, they might have called but hung up before anyone answered. Trying to catch up on a year of experiences over a long weekend strikes me like those horrible notes people stick in their Christmas cards to recap to long lost and seldom thought of acquaintances only those banner headline events that happened over the past twelve months.

Although Doris does not accept George's marriage offer, she is in anguish, trying to balance an annual weekend of passion and love against those other 51 weeks where she lives with a family who knows who her favorite movie actors are and the name of her perfume. George does not give her up despite her saying no, because it is not a negation of their long lasting love. They have a treasure that does not tarnish or diminish from time or distance or convention.

Product Placing: City of Secrets

Eventually, I stopped reading Kinky Friedman murder mysteries because he spent more time and words describing his cigars and espresso machine than he did on plot or character development. His smoking and drinking habits overwhelmed his story telling, like those of a resident barfly at a local pub who never had anything new to say.

So too I find Kelli Stanley. Even before finishing her second novel, City of Secrets, I wished I could deface this library book with a highlighter, coloring in the many sentences on every page that referenced her Chesterfield cigarettes and the various lighting implements she used to strike up her “sticks.” I really believe the book would be fifty or more pages shorter. It was one long ad for smoking. (Why aren’t the anti-smoking police, so avid in their monitoring of movies, focusing on the printed word, yellowed with nicotine?) While I was reading this book, coincidentally, I was selling an old Chesterfield tin on eBay, one that I found in my mother’s flotsam and jetsam from before my long deceased from lung cancer father switched brand loyalty to Camels. It was not getting much attention at auction and I was sorely tempted to contact Ms. Stanley and tell her it had her name written all over it for a mere $5.00; eventually, I believe it was some college student in North Carolina who snatched it up.

I digress into my own issues because there is so little to say about CoS. Yes it has won a couple of awards, but the type that is the equivalent of a ceremonial key to a city, praise for her depiction of pre-WW2 San Francisco. Perhaps the setting rings true, but the detective, Miranda Corbie, the Chesterfield addict, does not. Stanley mimics a choppy, phrase as sentence, noir style of dime crime novel detectives, but grafting them onto an ex-hooker seems forced and too much of a contemporary revisionist device. Corbie deals with crimes against a background of anti-Semitism; I guess her previous novel used a similar backdrop of anti-Japanese.

Which brings me to the uber-question I ask about each storyteller: why does she write the book; what truth is she trying to have the reader discover? Rather than answering what I got or didn’t get out of CoS, I only want to comment that as I’ve asked myself such questions, I’ve come to realize that the more blatant the message, the less interpretative and personally identifiable, the less I enjoy the writer’s effort. Kelli Stanley is a novelist who I will neither read again nor recommend to others, even as we in the “real world” book club focus more on the importance of place to plot. Could these murders only have happened at this time in San Francisco … probably; could they have been solved by Miranda, never.

Second Thoughts on Courtesans

You know how sometimes you lie awake at night and give your pillow the most perfect speech or write the most literary op ed ... both without a recorder or lap top? So it was last night as I rethought the book about courtesans and whether they were, in fact, lusty lovers. I decided not.

As both the author and myself believe, milieu is everything. Given that these women had no other options for financial success, the life of a well-kept woman was an economic decision above all. Not to say that modern women don't weigh a mate from a cost benefit perspective, but that is an assessment for the long run. Passion and lust rarely looks that far in advance. The payback must be immediate, yes recurring is nice, but intense is better.

A passionate lover does not look to trade up like a courtesan. There is no rational thought involved. Body rules mind. Body wins.

A courtesan scorns social rules as does a passionate lover. Both can parade their attachments proudly, publicly. But a courtesan does so to array the trappings: the clothes, the jewels, the salon. Consumed lovers are oblivious to the afterglow spectacle they present, not offering a show, and shocked by the comments of observers because they are not conscious of their appearance.

Because Griffin is writing about the "career" of being a courtesan and not the inevitability of being a passionate, lustful lover, she omits characteristics such as abandonment, oblivion, and a complete rationalization of otherwise adhered to morals or standards. Her courtesans are too calculating, misers, hoarders, if you will. Lovers do not keep ledgers.

Virtuous Courtesans

There is a horse running this summer who has the best name ... Seven Lively Sins. There is something pulsating about a "good" round of sinning and who better to be the paragons of lusty virtues but notable courtesans.

Susan Griffin compiled a catalogue of virtues possessed by courtesans across the centuries from 15th Century Rome, through the Renaissance, as best typified by Parisian kept women from the courts of the Louis to Belle Epoque, up to Sarah Bernhardt's time. Griffin does not array her courtesans chronologically, even though she stresses that to be the penultimate courtesan, the setting must be perfect, aligned. Instead, she illustrates their talents over seven chapters: timing, beauty, cheek, brilliance, gaiety, grace and charm, sort of the basic merit badges of kept women. At the end of each chapter, she adds in an erotic station, a corruption perhaps of the stations of the cross, themselves with come-hither titles: flirtation, suggestion, arousal, seduction, rapture and afterglow. What promises these end notes seem to promise but alas, Griffin teases us with minuscule vignettes written about lovers seen from the wrong end of binoculars. The boudoir is never entered. The charms are all those publicly flaunted, granted with much more style and taste than over-sexed movie, reality TV and rock stars.

Griffin is a historian, not an author of how-to manuals, yet she does interpret the virtues, especially charm, as key to an arousing relationship:

"Although it is clear that the courtesan would need to have carnal knowledge, what has not always been so evident is the profound nature of what she knew. The realm of sexual pleasure is also the realm of the psyche. To love or be loved, to touch, be touched, feel pleasure, passion ecstasy, to surrender and release engages every human faculty, not sensual adroitness alone but intelligence of every kind. As well as being willing to give pleasure, a good lover must be sensitive and aware, registering what kind of touch, for instance, on which part of the body arouses desire, knowing which mood calls for a robust approach, which moment requires gentleness, able to laugh or tease while at the same time probing both the mind and body of the loved one for gateways to greater feeling."

Remember charm schools? Maybe they were important after all; Griffin writes:
"Faced with a charming woman, for instance, you will feel yourself ceding control almost immediately. Suddenly, your body seems to have a mind of its own. Perhaps you sense a spreading feeling of warmth and then an excitement, one that enlivens both body and soul, almost as if you were being reborn. It hardly surprises you therefore that soon you find yourself letting down your guard. You may reveal to her what you never intended to reveal to anyone or laugh at what you never found humorous before. Then you realize you have agreed to what, in different company, you might have found to be rather wild propositions. And all the time you feel loser somehow in your limbs, closer to liquid than substance. Have you become putty in her hands? Even if this were true, the pleasure is too delicious for you to worry about and such consideration. On the contrary, you are more than happy to stay in her hands for as long as it is conceivably possible and by any means necessary."

These two quotes are the closest Griffin comes to Anais Nin.

Her organization, by quality rather than character, and her erotic vignettes closing out each virtue make the book choppy. The stations seem to have no connection to the virtue under discussion and often focus more on the feelings of the courtesan's protector than on her embodiment of a given talent.

Griffin has other books with tantalizing titles: The Eros in Everyday Life, What Her Body Thought, and Women and Nature - The Roaring Inside Her. Hoping for a bit more lustiness, I reserved the last title, written in the mid-70s. How dated ... what a feminist polemic against male domination. Has Griffin come a long way baby in the past 35 years? Nah