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.