Necromancy Never Pays

Bathtub Families

2009-11-06T10:11:00.004-05:00

Last night I met--live and in person--an imaginary friend, ReadersGuide, who was in town to visit the local college with her younger daughter. And aside from the initial nervousness about meeting someone I knew only virtually (all of our kids said "mom, you're not supposed to meet people you know from the internet!"), it was delightful. Because we did already know each other. And unlike real-life friends, where there's usually some element of catching up, we could take the conversation up where we'd left off, only in a little more depth and with me racing around saying "see? here's this thing I talk about, right here!"

Meeting someone I knew previously only through the written word made me think of this poem by Billy Collins:

Bathtub Families

is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.

No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.

I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

Now I can add a mental image of ReadersGuide when I think about her, but meeting her didn't change my picture of her otherwise. Especially for those of us who love language, it can be "better than reality" because you don't have to bother with airline tickets and driving down deer-strewn highways on windy nights and children who get sick when someone is visiting (as Walker did last night). Eating pizza and drinking wine with someone in real life beats the heck out of doing it virtually. But I enjoy all of you imaginary readers who float in the air around my head and into the comments here!

No Nest for the Wicket

2009-11-04T11:07:00.004-05:00

A friend loaned me Donna Andrews' mystery novel No Nest for the Wicket because she knows I like playing croquet. I like backyard croquet best, preferably with partners so we can play off each others' balls and go for the final post together, rather than suffer the inevitable ignominious defeat when one person hits the post and goes out, leaving his partner at the mercy of all the other players on the field. I have played competition croquet, with the billiard-smooth lawns and tall, narrow wickets. But I have never played X-treme croquet as it is described in this mystery...nor am I ever likely to, because the rules are not explained in enough detail to recreate the game. It would have to be created from hints like that cow legs can serve as wickets and radios can be used to inform far-flung players when it's their turn.

I did enjoy one character's explanation of why croquet was banned in Boston in the 1890s:
"Several prominent clergymen denounced it for encouraging drinking, gambling, and philandering. Men and women playing on the same field. The occasional bare ankle explosed to the leering eyes of the spectators. Young couples disappearing into the shrubbery in search of lost balls."
Come to think of it, my version of extreme croquet should probably include some drinking; makes the game more challenging!

And I very much enjoyed the culminating decision on house rules for the game being played during a murder investigation: "Spectators are fair game, but if you try to murder one of the other players, your team's out."
Croquet, of course, is infamous for having wildly varying house rules. Personally, I don't much care for playing with people whose major fascination with the game is rocqueting balls into the next county and chortling that there's no out of bounds.

The mystery itself, in this novel, was uninteresting. Possibly this is because the croquet one is the seventh in a series (my friend did tell me this), and it's more interesting if you know some background on the characters and their unfriendly dog. I spent three hundred pages with these characters and never got to like them, so I'm not feeling inclined to start at the beginning of the series to see if we could get off on the right foot.

I have started some mystery series novels with one of the middle ones and been interested enough to read backwards after the first one, and then forwards. I did that with Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael tales, and Dorothy Gilman's series about Mrs. Pollifax. Have you ever tried dipping into a mystery series in the middle?

Marriage

2009-11-02T12:41:00.004-05:00

We had a whirlwind weekend at Non-Necromancy headquarters. There were houseguests I would have liked to have seen more of. There were parties I didn't have the energy to attend. Walker and I spent all day Saturday and then all day Sunday at his end-of-the-season soccer tournament an hour and fifteen minutes away. Today we're exhausted and all the fun is over, the houseguests already gone, nothing left but candy wrappers and dirty dishes.

I've been planning tomorrow's classes and not feeling inspired to my usual level of hilarity for talking about Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer. So I decided we'd talk about courtship rituals and I'd read Gregory Corso's poem on the subject, Marriage, out loud. (If I ever decide to vlog, reading you a poem like this will be the reason):

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap-
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son-
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food-
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on-
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd almost be inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce-

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust-

Yes if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup-
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
Not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking-
No! I should not get married! I should never get married!
But-imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream-

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes-
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and-
But there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible-
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait-bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

I do a very good performance of this poem, if I do say so myself, with the climactic line "I deny honeymoon!" delivered at the top of my very considerable voice. And I love the poem, love the idea of all these different possible lives, even though I got married relatively young and never worried too much about courtship roles or possible young married scenarios. Still, having visited Niagara Falls, I can imagine being a young person going into one of those hotel rooms and feeling the way the speaker does, here. And for years I have not felt my shopping lists to be complete if someone hasn't written in "penguin dust."

The House With a Clock in its Walls

2009-10-30T09:36:00.010-04:00

This is my Halloween book review, The House With a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs. I don't read many books I think might be scary because they usually give me nightmares. This one is a children's book, so I thought I could handle it. And although I did dream about it, the dream was interestingly woven around this bit of description:
"And now Uncle Jonathan's back yard came to life. It was full of strange sights and sounds. The grass glowed a phosphorescent green, and red worms wriggled through the tall blades with a hushing sound. Strange insects dropped down out of the overhanging boughs of the willow tree and started to dance on the picnic table. They waltzed and wiggled in a shaking blue light...."

I read it because Nymeth's review mentioned that it features illustrations by Edward Gorey and that reading it reminded her a bit of reading Roald Dahl. And I read it because Amanda's review listed five thing she learned from it, and one of them is that necromancy never pays.

There are two people who live in the house with a clock in its walls, and they are ten-year-old Lewis, whose parents died in a car crash, and his Uncle Jonathan, who turns out to be one of those lovable and slightly ineffectual good wizards. The clock in the walls is eventually revealed to be a doomsday device left there by the former owner of the house, a bad wizard. When Lewis starts looking through magic books in the house for a spell to impress a friend with, he finds one on necromancy and all it takes is to read the book, memorize "some of the charms," and then he "copied one of the pentagrams and the spell that went with it onto a piece of notepaper and put it in his pocket" so he can raise the dead, specifically the dead wife of the house's former owner, who almost immediately begins scheming to activate the doomsday device in the house where Lewis and his uncle are living. There's a visit from Lewis' dead aunt, but I was mildly surprised that his parents don't make an appearance. That would be a far scarier and more adult story.

Lewis makes up for his act of thoughtless necromancy by coming up with a spell that he, his uncle, and their neighbor (a good witch) hope will counteract the effects of the dead woman's schemes. His uncle asks him to think up a silly spell, and it turns out to be a magical version of something like calvinball. First they put lighted candles in all the windows. Then they set the player piano to play chopsticks. Then they play a game of poker until the "Ace of Nitwits" comes up, at which point Lewis directs his uncle to "wear it stuck to your forehead with a piece of bubble gum" and they get Lewis' magic 8 ball, which tells them where the clock is. At a crucial moment, Lewis remembers what he's read in the magic books and is able to destroy the person he brought back from the dead, along with her doomsday device.

My favorites of the Gorey illustrations are the ones featuring the dead woman; mostly what you see of her is the reflection off of her spectacles, floating at adult height above the 10-year-old protagonist.

If you like interesting and mildly scary stories, this is a good one with a happy ending. And I like a happy ending. It helps me sleep at night.

Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris

2009-10-28T09:32:00.005-04:00

My friends' cat died of old age yesterday, and it happened so fast that attending a 2-hour symphony rehearsal Monday night and teaching class from 8:50 am to 12:50 pm on Tuesday made me unavailable to talk to them every time they called.

The leaves from my neighbor's enormous tree that overhangs my driveway and yard have all fallen on the ground and turned from gold to brown. I have a sick parakeet and am keeping the house very warm. The garbage disposal is broken, and it's been a week since I paid for a new one, but since it hasn't come in yet we can't schedule the installation. We're expecting houseguests this weekend.

My youngest child, who is getting almost too old to go out trick-or-treating (at 13) decided what he wanted to "be" for Halloween, and then found out that some adult scheduled the second game of his soccer tournament for the evening of Halloween night.

Up and down all the streets of my small town are campaign signs for a man running for the school board with the express purpose of reinstating the former middle school teacher who burned crosses on his students' arms and taught them young earth creationism as science.

I was initially irritated by the snobbish attitude of this poem--Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris--up until the part where she spends three hours getting her own hair cut and then admits that she adores time travel movies with action heroes in them:

For an hour on the train from Beauvais to Paris
Nord I'm entertained by the conversation of three
American girls about their appointment the next
day with a hairdresser and if there is a subtext
to this talk, I'm missing it, though little else. Will bangs
make them look too dykey? And layers, sometimes they hang
like the fur of a shaggy dog. Streaks, what about blonde
streaks? "Whore," they scream, laughing like a coven of wild
monkeys, and after they have exhausted the present
tense, they go on to the remembrance of hairdos past--
high school proms, botched perms, late-night drunken cuts, the Loch Ness
Monster would be lost in their brains as in a vast, starless
sea, but they're happy, will marry, overpopulate
the Earth, which you can't say about many poets,
I think a few weeks later taking the eighty-four
bus to the hairdresser, where I'll spend three long hours
and leave with one of the best cuts of my life from Guy,
who has a scar on his right cheek and is Israeli,
but before that I pass a hotel with a plaque--
Attila Jozsef, great Hungarian poet, black
moods and penniless, lived there ten years before he threw
himself under a train in Budapest. If we knew
what the years held, would we alter our choices, take the train
at three-twenty instead of noon, walk in the rain
instead of taking the metro? The time travel films
I adore speak to this very question: overwhelmed
by disease and war, the future sends Bruce Willis back
to stop a madman. I could be waiting by the track
as Jozsef arrives in Paris, not with love but money,
which seemed to be the missing ingredient, the honey
he needed to sweeten his tea. Most days I take the B
line of the RER, and one of the stops is Drancy,
the way station for Jews rounded up by the Nazis
before being sent in trains to the camps, but we can't see
those black-and-white figures in the Technicolor
present like ghosts reminding us with their pallor
how dearly our circus of reds and golds has been purchased
and how in an instant all those colors could be erased.

I like the train metaphor going on here, the idea that sometimes it's enough just to stay on track and keep going. And, of course, I like the sense of adventure that the memory of navigating through train stations in and around Paris gives me. I was there! I figured out the RER maps enough to ride over some of the storied ground she rides over in the poem!

And what else is there to do? Kill the bird in the process of trying to transport it an hour away in the cold to an avian veterinarian? Be less brave than my child about the disappointments grownups inflict? Find the source for those campaign signs and impersonate a wacko long enough to get one I can write on and put in my yard? ("Vote Steve Thompson for school board... if you want state-sponsored religion")

Manhood for Amateurs

2009-10-26T09:22:00.008-04:00

Because I was going to my second weekend chess tournament requiring an overnight stay and at the first one I had read Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, I decided to read Michael Chabon's new collection of essays entitled Manhood for Amateurs this weekend. I find that parenthood memoirs are always good reading over a weekend you're dedicating to your child's enjoyment, and since I've already read Fred Waitzken's memoir of being a chess parent, it was on to more general topics.

The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).

And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.

His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.

The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.

I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."

Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."

So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.

Anathem

2009-10-23T09:45:00.005-04:00

We have met the aliens, and they are us. That's what struck me about Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which it's taken me a whole year to read. I had gotten almost halfway through (396 pages in) when I stopped for a while, simply because this is a novel that requires you to read it in large sections, great contemplative swathes of time. Since I'm measuring out my life in coffee spoons, loads of laundry, miles driven, and papers graded, it was hard for me to make the time to read, an extremely frustrating state of affairs. So what was the answer to the question of how to finish it? The excellently performed audiobook, read by Dufris, Wyman, Gilbert, and Stephenson himself. That gave me at least two hours twice a week to re-immerse myself in the twists and turns of the continent-spanning adventure story, underlaid with seeming digressions like an 80-page conversation about the nature of the universe, and culminating in a trip to outer space.

Anathem is one of the novels held up to ridicule by this xkcd comic, but I was as much interested in the words as in anything. They're from alien tongues, mostly from one called Orth, that developed along lines similar to English. Discussion of merely the title word, Anathem, involving both "anthem" and "anathema," takes up an inordinate amount of time in some reviews. My favorite word is the one the main character, Fraa Erasmus (or "Raz") uses to describe the phone/blackberry devices carried by everyone outside his "concent" (similar to a convent but for academic contemplation rather than religious): "geegaws." The degree of onomatopoeia tickles me every time I hear it, to the extent that I now think of cell phones, at least in the back of my mind, by that name.

The main characters of Anathem, the ones you sympathize with and root for, are aliens, living on the planet Arbre and investigating an orbiting alien spacecraft which turns out to be a joint effort originally from four different planets, one of them identified as "Laterra," or--as it turns out--Earth. But that fact is less central than you might expect, providing only one of many opportunities to examine Arbre and its inhabitants from one perspective and then another. One of my favorite parts is the public questioning of Erasmus by a skilled Rhetor, Fraa Lodoghir, whom Erasmus and many of his fraas and suurs suspect of having "the power to alter the past" with words.

More complete reviews of Anathem attempt to summarize the plot or discuss the relationship between science and religion that Stephenson says was based on observation. More interesting to the movement of this immense (935 pages) story are the recurring theoretical conversations about multiple universes, summed up most cogently by Erasmus' teacher and father-figure, Orolo:
"We developed a theory that our minds were capable of envisioning possible futures as tracks through configuration space and then rejecting ones that didn't follow a realistic action principle."
It is this seemingly theoretical conversation that underlies the action of the novel, culminating at first in what looks like the death of the main characters on p. 826 (the end of one of the audiobook cds) and then alluded to by the rest of the main characters for the last hundred pages.

The novel ends with a kiss, and the promise of a new generation in a world made more perfect by the recent actions of the characters. I couldn't have been more satisfied by the ending unless it had been a little longer. Sigh.

Have you ever read something so immense and absorbing that you were disappointed to come to the end?

The Children Star

2009-10-21T10:00:00.006-04:00

Joan Slonczewski is a friend of mine and has been for almost twenty years now, so my copy of her SF novel that is dedicated to me and Ron, The Children Star, was a gift from her in 1998. I reread it recently during the process of getting it ready to be re-issued as a print-on-demand book, and marveled again at the strangeness of the aliens.

At first the characters, some of them familiar from previous novels, don't even recognize the aliens as sentient life-forms. They don't realize the aliens are trying to speak to them. They don't understand the mechanism by which the life-forms control the weather on their planet. They don't even see them. They are as likely to kill millions of aliens as they are to swat a bug.

These strange aliens are from a planet called Prokaryon where everything is round and poisonous. Humans have to be "life-shaped" to live there:
"merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their "proteins" contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic."

The few human settlers on the planet contend with "wheelgrass" and "loopleaves" when trying to walk, and with "a whirr-clouded tumbleround" stopping outside their window, which "generally rooted and grew in one spot for a long while; but under certain conditions, perhaps nitrogen deficiency, some of its vines would root themselves in the ground at one edge, then contract, pulling the organism to tumble it over slightly. More vines then rooted down, and so forth; once the tumbleround got going, it could travel several meters per day, trampling and digesting whatever vegetation crossed its path. Scientists disputed whether they were more animal or plant, zooid or phycoid."

The scientists at first think that "singing-trees are the real intelligence controlling this planet" because they see bursts of light and correctly interpret them as language. "We did try to respond," one says, "but never caught on in time, and the natives gave up." Why they gave up becomes apparent when the "natives" of the planet begin corresponding with some of the main characters from inside their own bodies. The aliens turn out to be microzooids, capable of taking over the human nervous system and bestowing reward or punishment. Eventually they also turn out to be capable of "life-forming" a human to be able to live on their home planet, and what they want in exchange is space travel, undertaken over generations of microzooid lives and within human ones.

The children star, a myth told to a child before she is rescued from her dying home planet and taken to Prokaryon, turns out to be a world full of sentient microorganisms for whom time passes so quickly that within a few months, entire generations of their "children" have created unique cultures inside each human brave enough to accept a colony.

I'm amazed to claim as a friend a person who seemingly has such an easy time bypassing one of the traditional problems of science fiction, namely how to create an alien who will seem really alien, rather than just another form of a bug-eyed monster. And along the way, she makes suggestions on how to "confront the mutants before they destroy the earth" or any other planet, which gives this novel an exciting plot that makes the details of biology seem almost incidental, like the elven languages in The Lord of the Rings or the map of the world in Eragon.

Do you also like to read fantasy or science fiction based on a world so detailed that only a small part of the backstory makes it into the actual story, or that requires two or more sequels to explore the relationships between some of the most important details?

Famous

2009-10-19T08:47:00.011-04:00

Although I'm impatient with the idea that all poetry should be expressed simply (if it's a complicated idea, the poet will need a complicated way of expressing it), I do like the idea behind Poetry 180--to expose more readers to some of the most accessible poems from today's poets.

One of today's poets whose work is represented there is Naomi Shihab Nye, who recently read her poems to an audience that included Amanda of The Zen Leaf, not a regular poetry fan. I was going to tell Amanda about some of my favorite Nye poems, and realized that I'd never written about one here. So today's the day:

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to the silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it,
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men,
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

. . .
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it did.

Often when I feature poems here, it's because I'm feeling something described in the poem, and that's not so much the case today. I wish this poet would use the word "infamous" to complicate her poem a little more. Right now I'm a little impatient with the kind of "fame" this poem is celebrating. I've had years of being the one children remember because she smiled back. Yesterday at the haircut place while my son was getting his hair cut I had some smiles with a happy 9 or 10 month old whose parents didn't really notice. Total strangers--adults--comment on my smile sometimes; I'm a smiley person in public. And sure, there's a bit of satisfaction in merely being noticed.

Right now it just doesn't feel like enough to me, as it is in the poem. I want to be more like Wallace Stevens, finally revealed as a genius in his forties, than Emily Dickinson, whose genius was discovered in her drawers after death.

What I've got right now is a desk covered with papers to be graded and a yard full of cats who are well-known to the local taunting birds but whose fame has not spread far enough abroad to be known to all the local chipmunk families.

Wait. Perhaps I am feeling something described in the poem after all. Perhaps it's unrelenting everydayness that channels people off the quiet path that leads to fame and onto the easy and instant path of infamy. Maybe if I can hold out one more day without claiming my child has floated off in a balloon or something, I'll be one day closer to revealing the ideas famous only to my bosom.

Maybe as a blogger I should feel satisfied enough because on some days Subliminal Intervention and an unidentified person in Australia make my visitor map look more interesting. And you're reading this, right? Right?

God Hates Us All

2009-10-16T09:04:00.006-04:00

Like most 17-year-olds, I had an extremely dramatic emotional life, and my best friend, Iris, could always restore perspective and make me laugh by intoning solemnly "Jeanne, God hates you." This was years before Slayer's 2001 album and the new novel by a fictional character (Hank Moody of the TV show Californication), both titled God Hates Us All. So when I saw the novel, I had to pick it up and start reading through it.

At first, it seemed to be about someone who isn't much more than 17. Hank's parents from Levittown want him to get a job, but he goes on a road trip with his crazy girlfriend. After she flips out and stabs him on the side of a highway, he falls into selling baggies of weed in New York City and meets all sorts of people living life on the edge. He doesn't shy away from seedy characters or hotels. As ReadersGuide recently pointed out, any coming of age story reminds us of Catcher in the Rye, and this one is no exception.

But then I found out that the actor who plays Moody is ever so much more than 17, and the narrator of the novel claims to be 21. At this point, the blurb on the back of the book started seeming even more exaggerated ("a wry literary masterpiece.... a coming-of-age tale....ironic, optimistic, and unforgettable"). What's optimistic about a novel where the narrator can't hold onto a girlfriend or even keep his job as a drug dealer, and who has to watch his mother die? What's ironic about living for the moment and never looking ahead, other than that it's already been done in the movies (his favorite is Sid and Nancy) and in the sixties with less potent drugs?

Maybe habitual TV-watchers would find the dialogue entertaining, like when Hank goes looking for a party in a seedy hotel and meets a model who says there's no party
"but you're coherent enough to have a drink with me, aren't you?"
"Sure," I say. "I pride myself on my coherence."

There's little or no logic in what happens to Hank. Although he has no sense of shame about trying to get into bed with any woman he meets (his female best friend, who offers, is an exception), he remembers that at the college he dropped out of they called the walk home in last night's clothes "the walk of shame." But even when Hank examines his motives, his thoughts go nowhere. When he rejects his best friend's sexual advance he begins to explain:
"Sex for me is..."
I stop. I don't have any idea how to finish the sentence. What does sex mean to me? Why don't I want to have it with Tana?
But that's as far as he gets.

The title line is spoken in Spanish by a bartender in a Mexican restaurant ("Dios nos odia todos"), and then translated by Hank to his on-again, off-again girlfriend, which makes it seem deep, at least while they're getting drunk. If you want to read a novel while drunk or high, this one might be a good one to try. Maybe it would be easier to just turn on the TV, though; it wouldn't be any more of a waste of time!

What have you wasted your time on lately? Did you regret it afterwards, like I did, reading this novel?

Eve in the Fall

2009-10-14T09:03:00.007-04:00

Monday night I needed my extra-insulated parka to be able to sit outside and watch a soccer game. It didn't seem fair that I was being dive-bombed by mosquitoes when it was that cold. Finally, when we could no longer see the players, the game was called on account of dark.

Tuesday I drove for two hours on 2-lane highways rimmed by trees glorious with the sun shining on fluttering red, orange, yellow, and green leaves, interspersed with fields full of dried corn stalks or covered with dusty purple and yellow blooms.

This morning it is cloudy; we had to get up in the dark. There are fallen leaves scattered across the driveway. In the words of Hopkins, it is the start of "goldengrove unleaving." The dim light makes me understand something about this poem by Debora Greger, entitled Eve in the Fall:

Summer torn down, petal by petal.
Had the father of storms spent himself at last?
An avalanche of stony silence fell.

And then my eyelids fluttered open
as they had that first morning
I saw you beside me, strangest of creatures,

the one most like me. But this time you were old.
When I looked closer, I saw myself
in your eyes, a fallen leaf starting to curl.

I heard a rustling, insistent,
a tree trying to shake off the past
or a river feeling its way past a wall

toward some vast body of tears
it hadn't known existed. Down the street,
trucks trundled their dark goods

into eternity, one red light after another.
Though it was morning,
street lamps trudged down the sidewalk

like husbands yawning on the way to work.
On puddles, on rags of cloud,
they spilled their weak, human light.

With shadow my cup overflowed.

It is becoming the season of shadows. I'll bet FreshHell will agree with me that the description of winter coming as "a river feeling its way past a wall/toward some vast body of tears" pretty much sums up the way we feel after the first frost. My father used to relish the crispness, rubbing his hands together and intoning "the frost is on the pumpkin." I hate to come outside and see the impatiens have turned to brown slime overnight. It makes me sad to haul the pots in, sad to see my Mother's Day begonia turn slowly from red to brown outside the window.

I get the feeling of deep winter's endlessness in this image: "trucks trundled their dark goods/into eternity, one red light after another." Right now, to twist Shelley's words, spring feels unreachably "far behind."

Rereading

2009-10-13T14:37:00.003-04:00

I'm rereading Othello for the three hundred and thirty-second time (kidding--you know I don't like to count), and there's always something new. This time through I thought more about whether I could direct a production of the play in which Othello and Desdemona never get to consummate their marriage. It would explain how quickly he dismisses Cassio from the service--he's called out of bed before he completes the act, and by the time he finishes with all the paperwork, it's morning (Cassio says to Iago in III,i "the day had broke before we parted"). It would certainly explain why he grows increasingly inarticulate as the play progresses. And it explains the repeated "put out the light" line in a way I don't think I've yet seen it delivered.

I like to reread, and it's not for lack of attention the first time around. The first time I read Jane Eyre I was 14, and it would have been a shame if I hadn't gotten reacquainted with her at least once when I had passed the age she is when she declares "Reader, I married him." The story is more disturbing if you're old enough to have seriously considered getting involved with someone merely because it seemed the right thing to do, rather than because you were head over heels in love with him.

We never get rid of a book at my house. Well, hardly ever. I have sometimes cleaned out a few outdated "how-to" books, like guidebooks for places we've been and child development manuals (What To Expect When You're Expecting went to the library or Goodwill years ago). My guideline for buying books is that I buy them when I think I'll want to reread them. If I like a library book, it goes on my wish list of books to own, so I can dip back in whenever I feel like it. I could never be like the sausage-maker grandfather who pulled out each page as he read it and sailed it out the window of his truck. Although there is a certain alluring freedom in that image.

If you're not in the habit of rereading your books, why do you keep them? Or do you?

Reading questions

2009-10-12T11:55:00.009-04:00

from Readers Guide by way of BeanPhoto:

Most memorable experience reading a book? When I was in graduate school, I lived in an apartment that had a pool. One hot summer day when I was reading books on the list for my comprehensive exam, I decided to take my copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse out to the pool, since I hadn’t been able to get interested in reading it any of the other times I’d tried. For some reason, that did the trick. I was transfixed, and ripped through the entire book at one sitting.

Most unusual place for reading a book? At sporting events. I go to my son’s soccer games and sometimes one of the other parents has a book because we’re reading during the half hour warm-up before the game starts. But when I bring a book to a professional sporting event to read before it starts--because I’m the designated parent--I don’t see other folks in the stands who are reading.

Most dangerous place I’ve ever read a book? I think we won’t count the fiction I read behind my textbooks during most of third grade. (That got me banned from using the school library.) So I’ll say reading on the metro trains in Washington D.C. The danger was always that I’d miss my stop, plus when I read I’m pretty unaware of what’s going on around me.

Most luxurious experience reading a book? The final Harry Potter book came out when I was on vacation with my whole family in Hawaii—my husband and kids, my brother and sister-in-law and my nieces, and my parents. The kids read some of it on rented beach chairs under a rented umbrella on Waikiki Beach. I read almost all of it on the airplane from Kona to Phoenix. We all felt lapped in luxury because we were in Hawaii on our long-planned dream vacation, plus we were rich enough in time and money to buy the book and read it right away.

Funniest experience reading a book? Well, the book was so funny it made the whole experience funny—I was waiting with my daughter in the parent waiting room for my son to finish a swimming lesson, and I was reading “Six to Eight Black Men” by David Sedaris. When I got the part about what the Dutch parents get to say to their children on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t stop laughing. I have a very big laugh, and I had been trying to hold it in, but when I got to that part it just came out in big booms punctuated by gasps for air. My daughter was embarrassed, so I kept trying to control myself, and then I’d just break out again. I waved the book and said “there’s a funny part” and then kind of backed down the hall, collected my kid, and managed to drive home wiping the tears of laughter from my face.

Like to answer these questions? You’re tagged. I'd especially like to hear from Kristen at Booknaround, Care at Care's Book Club, and Florinda at The Three Rs

Crystal Healer

2009-10-09T09:23:00.000-04:00

I had the book Crystal Healer with me while waiting for some kid event, and my daughter looked over at it and said "what on earth are you reading?" thinking it was some kind of new age book, from the title. In fact, though, it's science fiction and the healer does not use crystals to heal--she tries to heal the ailing crystals. Yeah. This is the tenth book in the "Stardoc" series by S.L. Viehl, and if you haven't read the previous ones, you're not ready for this one. There's quite a build-up.
(Previous Stardoc novels: Stardoc, Beyond Varallan, Endurance, Shockball, Eternity Row, Blade Dancer, Rebel Ice, Plague of Memory, Omega Games.)

If you have read the previous ones, though, this one has a tremendous payoff in terms of what happens to the main characters. The Stardoc, now calling herself Jarn, travels to a planet on which the natives live in primitive rural societies by choice, having disdained the technology of their forebears. One of her colleagues cautions the group of "healers" from the spaceship, telling them "The oKiaf have been exposed to advanced technology, so it is unlikely their healers have remained dependent on native treatments and religious rituals. Yet these will still be important to the people, and may be incorporated with what technology they continue to use."

Jarn and her husband Duncan have become functionally immortal without their consent, and their interest in understanding what the crystals are, how dangerous they can be, and how they work is tied up with their deliberations about their mortal daughter and beings on other worlds they feel some responsibility towards, one the larval form of a creature so fearsome that if anyone else knew it existed, it would be summarily destroyed--or at least an attempt would be made to destroy it. As they learn more about the dangers of the crystal, they discover that one world's translation of the word for it is "eternity" or the "afterlife."

There's an exciting space battle towards the end, complete with shape-shifters called Odnallak who assume the form of whatever you're most afraid of (like boggarts in the Harry Potter series). Part of the fun is seeing how the Odnallak appear to characters from various worlds--to Jarn, one appears as "six-legged death cat." To another character, it appears to be a blind, venom-spitting creature that can feel movements in the air. To another, it's a tusked animal. To Duncan, it's a fearsome warrior lizard from a race that once held him as a slave.

At the very end, some of the mysterious appearances in previous books are put into a new and fascinating context when the crystal appears to speak to Jarn. Finally this character, who I habitually react to as damaged from her years on a misogynist ice planet, fulfills her destiny. I could probably stop reading these books now, because this one provides an ending. But if Viehl comes out with any more, you know I'm going to be pouncing on them like, well, a six-legged death cat.

I'm afraid I'm like Ron Weasley about the form my boggart would take. I've always thought that what would wait for me in Room 101 (from 1984) wouldn't be rats in a cage they'd put on my face, but spiders in a cage they'd put on my feet. How about you--what form would your worst fear take?

Liar

2009-10-07T08:35:00.008-04:00

Ever since the cover controversy, I've been waiting to read Justine Larbalestier's new YA novel, Liar. There's a lot of secrecy surrounding this book; even specifying the genre could reveal something that it would be more fun to discover as you read. So I decided to read it sooner rather than later, using the general guideline that as much as I enjoyed the first novel by her I read, How To Ditch Your Fairy, I was also likely to enjoy her second. The first novel was fun, and the second one is also fun but in a slightly different way--it's playful about its narrative technique. How far can you believe in a fictional world being narrated by a self-described liar?

Far enough to get interested, is my answer. I'm going to try not to spoil your reading of this novel in my review of it, but if you want to be sure, stop reading this, go get the book and read it. I mean it, NOW. I'll wait for you.

Okay, at this point I'm assuming that you've either read the book or you don't mind me talking about some of what happens. The narrator, Micah, is a senior in high school and she has more to hide than the typical adolescent. She's interested in only two of her classes (which seems pretty typical to me)--Biology and "Dangerous Words," which seems to be an English class focusing on censorship. When one of Micah's classmates asks a guest speaker "what is it about writing for teenagers that leads to so much censorship?" I leaned forward, at least metaphorically, because I expected that this speaker, this creation of Larbalestier's, would have a lot to say about that. But I didn't get an answer. Instead I got Micah's thoughts:
"I knew the answer to that one but I didn't raise my hand. It's because grown-ups don't remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that's where they want to keep us. They don't like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheremones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way to the parts of us our parents wish didn't exist."

Micah claims to be telling her reader the truth, although she also says "I'm at least a third-generation liar. Though I bet it goes back earlier. If I could get Grandmother or Great-Aunt Dorothy to talk about it." She makes a confession on p. 169 that changes the reader's entire view of the truth about her (my daughter guessed it on page 63, partly because she reads a lot in the genre to which this novel belongs).

The one lie that disappointed me on first reading--about Micah's brother--turns out later to have been only a partial lie based on wish fulfillment. Like all the best lies in the novel, it's a lie based on what Micah wishes had been true, and it's related to all the other lies of her existence. Her parents, she says
"stopped loving me....[they] still said they loved me, still kissed me good night, still let me live in their home and eat their food, but it was pretend: they were waiting for the right time to get rid of me.
For five years I lived a shadow life with shadow parents and never knew the difference.
Except that I did.
I just couldn't admit it to myself.
But they never admitted it either. They abandoned me.
Who's the bigger liar?
Me or them?
Isn't lying about love the worst lie?"

Nothing is simple in this novel. Nothing turns out to be what you thought. The ending is ambiguous, mostly because you can't tell exactly how the adults in Micah's life might have actually responded to being told her truths. In other words, reading this novel makes you feel a lot like being seventeen.

Or To Begin Again

2009-10-05T09:26:00.001-04:00

Amid some counting that I couldn't escape doing last week (counting is like listing; I avoid it when possible), I realized that I have been teaching writing to first-year college students for over a quarter of a century. By some standards, that's a career--and I'm not talking about the cushy kind where one gets sabbaticals and health benefits and conference funding. I'm thinking maybe it's about time to put away my Don Quixote pen.

I read a poem recently that reinforces that feeling; it's the title poem from Ann Lauterbach's volume Or To Begin Again. The poem has sixteen stanzas, and each one except the first and the last begins with "or to begin again." To me, it's like all these falls, meeting new groups of students who are new to college, and trying to teach them the same (new to them) concepts and practices. Here are two stanzas that speak to me the most:

7
Or to begin again
some got lucky, came rushing
toward the giant appeasement of the given.
Singing along with the anthem
they distributed coupons to the rest
to redeem, solace for those who do not
begin but stay back in the infrastructure
of the singular: what you said, what I said, before
the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted
one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?
In which language? And what were we meant to
carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?
Light strays across the dry grasses.
The arm lifts, the head turns.
A gathering, an image, a dispersal
in whichever order. The end.

14
Or to begin again: lavish permission,
ribbons placed back in their bag,
pulled through the sleeves
of the prisoner's coat, the suicide's
gun. The Arab men
are playing backgammon in the courtyard.
The preacher's voice fills the chapel
with iconographies of faith.
Our tears turn to ice
and the mourners stop along the path,
informal now, unrestrained, makeshift.
So that with nothing held back we sigh,
beyond time, for that green pasture where time
stands still. Does not. Does. Go back
before the beginning, before
a promise was made. The end.

I keep trying to tell myself that the feeling of fall as a new beginning that I had before one of my friends unexpectedly lost his job at the end of August can be recaptured. That what I'm feeling is just a momentary lapse in my enthusiasm for doing what turned out to be...my life's work?

Are you also in the business of beginning again? Got any thoughts about persistence and the point at which it turns into foolishness?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

2009-10-02T08:50:00.002-04:00

In honor of banned books week, I thought I'd try to finish reading a frequently banned YA book I've been reading for the past year, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I recently re-discovered my copy in a pile in the car, which is unusual, because usually I'll retrieve a book from the car by the end of the day to read before bed. This one wasn't compelling enough to make me do that; it had been in the car for a few months by the time I turned it up.

It's obvious why this book has been banned--it has everything that parents who think they can shelter their kids usually object to (sex, homosexuality, abortion, child abuse, drugs, drinking). But I spent the first part of my reading (before I left the book in the car) trying to figure out what's wrong with the narrator, Charlie. Why does he cry all the time? Is he autistic? Is he stupid? When I finally picked up the book again and read to the end, I found that the answer to these questions turns out to be no, and there is sort of a reason he cries so much, although this big secret of the novel seemed pretty contrived to me.

There are some nice bits along the way, though. Charlie's thoughts can be interesting, like about how some people have "glory days" in high school and then their children need to be told that they are as happy now as their parent looks in old photos, and about how in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" he wishes "the angel would come down and show us how Uncle Billy's life had meaning."

I also got a lot of wicked enjoyment out of the conversation in which Charlie and his friends conclude that their parents compare all their music to the Beatles because "it kills them when they can't relate to something." My enjoyment is wicked because I feel like the kids about this--I'm tired of hearing baby boomers relate everything to their era--and then I realize that I'm doing exactly what the conversation is about--trying to relate, when I'm too old. So in a more age-appropriate way, I also like the melancholy reminder of what it can be like to be a teenager, at least some days: "I tried to help my mother in the kitchen, but I dropped the casserole, so she told me to read in my room until my father came home....he told me to stop 'hanging on his shoulders like a monkey' because he wanted to watch the hockey game. I watched the hockey game with him for a while, but I couldn't stop asking him questions about which countries the players are from, and he was 'resting his eyes'....So, he told me to go watch television with my sister, which I did, but she told me to go help my mother in the kitchen, which I did, but then she told me to go read in my room."

Although I appreciate the way Charlie deals with his problems and decides not to blame anyone else for them, I was relieved to emerge from his world. The simplicity and directness of the way he speaks irritates me: "We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them." I think Charlie is always trying to be profound, and that readers closer to the agonies of being sixteen respond to that more positively.

Me, I can take this book or leave it. But certainly I think all teenagers should be able to read it.

The Smart One and the Pretty One

2009-09-30T09:33:00.008-04:00

Occasionally a free book offer comes my way when I'm in the mood for something completely different (in the Monty Python phrase). So I said yes to the offer of Claire LaZebnik's new novel The Smart One and the Pretty One, and it was sent to me by Miriam at Hachette book group.

It's about two sisters; the smart one, Ava, is a lawyer who prides herself on being responsible and not caring much about her appearance, and the pretty one, Lauren, is a clothing saleswoman who loves to show off her best features and can't control her spending. When Lauren loses her job and her apartment because of all the money she owes, Ava lets her move in but makes her sign a contract agreeing not to spend any more money for six months. Lauren, in turn, produces the man that their mother jokingly signed a contract "betrothing" Ava to as a child. Each sister learns a bit about what is important to the other one as the novel progresses. It's pretty standard chick-lit, which is what I expected.

What I didn't expect is the cogent treatment of how appearance matters even for "the smart one." Ava doesn't want to pay any attention to how she dresses and looks because she thinks it will make her seem less serious about her career. The funny thing is that she looks enough like her clotheshorse sister for various people throughout the novel to mistake them for twins, as here:
"The resemblance is striking. Are you twins?"
They both shook their heads and Lauren said, "Nope, she's older."

At first I thought Ava and Lauren were going to be opposites--mere foils to each other--because of passages like this one:
"Lauren crouched down and sorted through some shoeboxes she had stacked on the floor of Ava's closet, seized on one with a shout of joy, and extracted from it a pair of silver high-heeled sandals. "There you are, my beauties!" She jumped to her feet, clutching them to her chest.
"Please tell me you're not hugging your shoes," Ava said.
"I love these shoes."
"How can you love a pair of shoes?"

But then I saw what Ava was up against at her firm:
"One of the male lawyers was leaning across the table toward Ava and saying "I can name five female lawyers in our firm who left within the last three years because they wanted to stay home with their kids. I can't think of a single man who left for that reason. Why shouldn't that factor into our hiring decisions?"
"Because it's punishing future candidates for choices other people have made," Ava said...."And I've known far more women who haven't left the firm after having kids than ones who have."
A woman who is still being forced to participate in debates like this during social events with colleagues probably has had to work to project a more serious image than other women. The thing I like about Ava's characterization is that you see the process she goes through as her sister insists she broaden her idea of what a serious female lawyer can look like.

One morning Ava wakes up to find that Lauren has laid out her clothes and insists on doing her hair and makeup. When she's ready to go to work, she asks her sister why and Lauren says
I'm just proving a point....It took all of ten extra minutes--not even--to get you ready this morning and you look a thousand times better than usual."
"It's still ten wasted minutes. And I think 'a thousand times' is an exaggeration."
"How wasted?" Lauren asked. "What would you have done with those ten minutes otherwise?"
"I could have worked," Ava said. "I bill at three hundred dollars an hour."
Notice that she doesn't say I could save another innocent client, but I could be making money. Ava is loosening her heels from the way they've been dug into the moral high ground.

Lauren manipulates Ava into several dates with Russell, the boy Ava was "betrothed" to as a child. He is now the "managing director" of a "clothing line," and on one date he takes Ava, who has always ordered her unflattering but practical clothes from catalogs, to try on some of "his" clothes. "You look fantastic," he tells her; "I knew there was a great pair of legs under those dowdy skirts. You need a different bra, though." Russell insists on giving her a few of the clothes that suit her best, and following it up by buying her a pair of expensive shoes to match. Ava is furious, certain that he's doing it because he doesn't like the way she looks. She's like the seventies feminists who thought it showed they were serious if they wore denim overalls all the time, or the two female academics of my acquaintance who refuse to shave their legs, even now that it's no longer true that "women in Europe never shave theirs." When Ava finally confronts Russell, she says
"you only seem to be attracted to me when I'm dressed a certain way. Your way."
"That's stupid,"Russell said. "I'd be attracted to you no matter what you wore. In fact, you could be naked, Ava, and I'd be attracted to you. Really. I mean that."
But rather than charmed by his jokes, Ava remains skeptical of his motives for liking to see her in the kind of clothes he sells.

By the end of the novel, Ava realizes that rather than living free from the tyranny of caring about what she looks like, she has been living in "fear of being judged and found wanting." It's not a big point...but I really enjoy the passage where she stumbles in her new shoes "and wanted to curse her shoes because their heels were too high--but then she remembered that the shoes were also pretty and expensive and a perfectly lovely gift for a man to give a woman he liked, and if she slipped in them, it was because of her own clumsiness and not some fault of theirs."

I agree with Lauren, who initially irritated me, about the importance of having a little fun with your appearance every once in a while; I get so tired of hearing people say they don't like to dress up. I don't believe that the comfort of a pair of shoes is always more important than how pretty they look. I look forward to occasions for wearing the string of pearls my parents gave me when I finished my PhD.

What do you think? Here are some questions from the author's "book club guide" to her novel: Have you ever been in a relationship where you felt your significant other was trying to change you in some way? Have you ever tried to change the person you were with? How do you feel if someone gives you a gift that is more for the way he/she thinks you SHOULD be than the way you ARE?

A Merry Heart

2009-09-28T06:49:00.003-04:00

It was February, a very low time of the year for me. I was in the library grabbing some audiobooks and picked up one entitled A Merry Heart, thinking that at least it wouldn't plunge me further into seasonal depression. But it did depress me, even though it's not a sad story. It's told badly enough to make you sad, but not so badly that it gets amusing.

I listened to it all the way through for two reasons. One is that I like to finish books; if I don't, I keep imagining different possible endings, so if I do not like a book, it's best for me to go ahead and see how the author imagined the ending. The other reason I finished it is because after a while, I developed the kind of morbid fascination that I sometimes get this time of year looking at a particularly big and ugly spider (orb spiders inspire this reaction).

A Merry Heart is so badly written that it wasn't able to articulate some of its main points about life and stuff:
"Anna felt something soft and furry rub against her leg, and she opened her eyes. One of the calico barn cats sat at her feet, staring up at her with eyes half closed, peacefully purring. She leaned over and stroked the animal behind its ears. 'I think Miriam could learn a lesson from you, Callie. She needs to take the time to relax more, enjoy each precious moment, and carefully search for the right man to love.'
The cat meowed as if in agreement and promptly fell asleep."
Probably because Anna had already bored it with her "tell and don't show" philosophy.

Anna is the Amish mother of the main character, Miriam. They live near Lancaster, PA, where Miriam's mood changes are signaled by descriptions of nature, as here:
As Miriam approached the stream, she noticed a change in leaves on the trees and realized that they were on the verge of being kissed by crimson colors as fall crept in. Something about the peacefulness of the water gurgling over the rocks and the gentle wind caressing her face caused Miriam to think about Nick McCormick. Perhaps it was only the fact that the two of them had visited in this same spot several months before that brought his name to mind."
A man and woman of marriageable age meet in an isolated rural spot and the word for what they did is "visited"?

Nick "visits" with Miriam again, speaking to her as if he were a first-year college student assigned to write a paper about her: "I find you to be quite fascinating, Miriam, yet your ways are a bit strange to me and hard to understand. I'd like to find out more about you and your Amish traditions....I know you're expected to remain separate from the rest of the world, but I don't grasp the reasons behind such a lifestyle." After Miriam delivers a little infomercial about the Amish way of life, Nick tells readers how we're supposed to be reacting: "It sounds pretty hard to live like that, but I supposed if you're content and feel that your way of life makes you happy, then who am I to say it's wrong?" The infomercials continue throughout the second half of the book, including this scintillating bit of dialogue spoken to Miriam by one of her closest friends: "As you know, divorce isn't an acceptable option among the Old Order Amish."

Miriam habitually speaks in cliches, especially when anyone questions whether she's doing the right thing: "Life is full of hardships and pain, but each of us has the power within to rise above our troubles and take control." At the end of her story she tells her mother that she was right all along, that all Miriam needed was to find the right man: "You've been right all along, and I just couldn't see it. God wants His children to have merry hearts. It's my hope that anyone in our future generations who see this sampler will know that the only way to be truly healthy spiritually is to have a merry heart." (Notice the subject-verb agreement error?)

You can find "inspirational" books like this one in racks by the checkout at Wal-Mart. Here in the heart of Amish country the rack is sometimes labeled "devotional." It's not a kind of book I would have picked up had I seen it in that context. But since I picked it up unknowing at the library, it has now become my second entry in the Critical Monkey contest. Seriously, if you want to get all inspired about religion, read something else. (Something by C.S. Lewis, perhaps.)

Because It Has To Be This Way

2009-09-24T15:43:00.005-04:00

Sometimes on days when I drive an hour listening to an audiobook and then teach two 1-hour-and-50-minute classes back to back and then drive an hour home listening to my audiobook some more, I get a headache from so many ideas and images crowding into my head; it starts to feel too full. It felt like that today.

So I was sitting in the parking lot of the kids' school with my full head and instead of resting it, I felt I had to put something more in there; I was reading through a volume of poems I'd brought with me (It is Daylight by Arda Collins). When I got to this one, I started laughing, because somehow it seemed like the perfect epigraph to my day (at only 2:45 pm):

Because It Has To Be This Way

It's been a while since I've been so
blah blah blah, he says.
Blah blah, she says.

She thinks that the universe is expanding like a giant lily.

You don't know
these people. They're off
in a little theater. The set
is a bedroom with a modest
bed on which they lie. It's
lit with a bedside
lamp and rhythmic night sounds
come in from the dark
all around. He sleeps on his back
with his hands folded
demurely, waiting
to be exported by great forces.
She wonders if somewhere
there is a lake made of melted butter.
Outside the dark
the sky is golden-clouded
like a bible illustration. Jesus is there.
He's white, with a
chestnut beard and soft, brown eyes.
He's wearing a white robe.
His wounds are no longer
bleeding. He's doing a peaceful
pantomime, standing in the air,
two feet above the ground. And you know
what? He's really nice, and he has no
sense of humor. Or if he does,
it would have to do with
smiling and petting a deer, and
you feel like you might like each other
at first, but
you wouldn't. Jesus is hovering
in a green pasture, like in a storybook,
the one about the Country Mouse and
the City Mouse, which had a lovely
picture of the Country Mouse running
away over the hills, the smokestacks
soon small behind. He lets you run
over the green hills, and you never get tired.
He reaches out one arm
with his palm upturned, and raises it
towards the pasture. He tilts his chin
to the golden sky, like he's
singing, and taps his foot,
which is bare. Jesus has long nail beds
and a hairy big toe. Below,
the universe is forming other universes.
Jesus is doing an experiment. He needs to expand
right now. They'll mainly be used for storage.

Why was this poem the perfect epigraph? It's about rising perspective--to me, the part where she thinks about what's outside the dark of the little theater is like when you lift your eyes from what you've been reading and thinking about and notice that there's a world out there with leaves in the underbrush turning red amid gold and purple and green, and that you've been kind of missing it, even while doing something like piloting two tons of metal at breakneck speed down crowded 2-lane highways crossing deer-filled fields.

The part about smiling and petting a deer struck me as almost unbearably comical, after yet another afternoon in my long line of years worrying about confronting the blood and guts of one stoving in the front of my car. The bucolic ideal met the physical reality of deer in my brain, and released some of the pressure. I could almost hear my radiator hissing. Now my car and brain are home, quietly ticking themselves into silence.

Do you ever get yourself so worked up that you need to switch gears to restore perspective? If you don't use poetry, what works best?

Move over Jane Austen, here come the Brontes

2009-09-23T22:22:00.003-04:00

After the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, someone just couldn't resist. And they're actually titling it Wuthering Bites.

Owning The Year of the Flood

2009-09-23T11:30:00.004-04:00

When I reviewed Margaret Atwood's new novel The Year of the Flood, I said you should read it. And now you can--in fact, you can own it if you have the money. So go find a copy. I'm buying a copy for myself as soon as I have time to get to a bookstore!

Although for a while in the spring and summer I was reviewing Advance Reader Copies loaned to me by the local college bookstore, things have changed at the bookstore and I'm not doing that any more. I'm back to reviewing mostly books I own and ones I borrow from other people and places, including libraries, of course.

Fox in the Henhouse

2009-09-22T06:19:00.012-04:00

It's clear from the comments on a recent post--"Getting to Know Me"--that saying you love Alan Rickman is a non-controversial thing to say on a book blog.

I mean, really--what's not to love? He was the best thing in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, stalking around looking like he'd as soon push you into the cooking fire as eat breakfast and sneering "cancel Christmas!" He could sing the low notes as the evil, masochistic Judge Turpin. He had a German accent as the villain in Die Hard. And, of course, he captured the collective heart of the world with his sensationally sneering Snape in the Harry Potter movies. But he also made hearts flutter as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, and he could make you feel the tiniest bit of sympathy for the befuddled husband in Love, Actually. He even played an action hero in Galaxy Quest. Those are just some of the highlights of his career, for me. Feel free to talk about what you, personally, love about Alan Rickman in the comments here.

What are some other non-controversial things to say on a book blog? Um, how about "the book is better than the movie." "An e-reader would be nice for travel because books are heavy." "Sometimes it's good to read a 'chunkster' book, because blogging can make you value speed of reading too much." "Twitter can help you strengthen your relationships with other book bloggers"* "Rereading a book can give you valuable insight into it"--oh no, wait, scratch that last one--it's actually (sadly) a controversial thing to say on a book blog!

Why do we go on saying non-controversial things to each other? Things that make us end up sounding like the "cream crackers" in Roddy Doyle's children's book The Giggler Treatment, who say boring and obvious things like: "toilet paper is usually white but not always. Isn't that interesting?" and "If you put your feet in water, they get wet. Isn't that interesting?"

Perhaps we say non-controversial things to each other because women are behind 99% of the book blogs out there (sorry Matt, Bart, and Clark--I think it's true), and women like the feeling of community that agreeing on something gives us.

Sometimes I get a really bad feeling about our tendency towards consensus. I think of what David Sedaris says in his essay "Chicken in the Henhouse" (included in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim) about folks who call in to agree with each other on talk radio:
"It was, for talk radio, one of those easy topics, like tax hikes or mass murder. 'What do you think of full-grown men practicing sodomy on children?'
'Well, I'm against it!' This was always said as if it was somehow startling, a minority position no one had yet dared lay claim to.
I'd been traveling around the country for the past ten days, and everywhere I went I heard the same thing. The host would congratulate the caller on his or her moral fortitude, and wanting to feel that approval again, the person would rephrase the original statement, freshening it up with an adverb or qualifier. 'Call me old-fashioned, but I just hugely think it's wrong.'"

One of the jokes of "Chicken in the Henhouse," of course, is that the saying is "Fox in the Henhouse" and the caller gets it wrong. More and more often I wonder if we, as book bloggers, are getting it wrong, all chickens. Sometimes I want to leave comments on other peoples' posts detailing what I hate about the books they're reviewing. And occasionally I give into that urge, when I think it could be important. Mostly, though, I try not to ruffle anyone's feathers.

I think we need a fox in the henhouse--Fantastic Mr. Fox, who lost his tail to save his family in the story by Roald Dahl. Because one of the pleasures of talking about books should be disagreeing and learning to see books from another's perspective. Without the freedom to significantly disagree about someone else's point of view (e.g. not just writing in to say that you don't love Alan Rickman), then we're just all sitting around shaking hands with ourselves and looking silly, like the protagonist of Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero.

To tell you the truth, what I'm really thinking is that we need more than one fox in this henhouse. Care to join me? Together we can be more critical and seem more polite, and we won't have to go on feeling like so many of us evidently have, that "this blogging thing reminds me of high school." Let's graduate. As Colleen at Chasing Ray says, let's try to get to the point where "you grow up and your work speaks for itself." Let's pull together to do something good by occasionally having the courage to say something bad--to show, as My Friend Amy, the queen of book blogger community-building puts it, "the power of a community in extremely difficult times." These are difficult times to do anything but gush about what we love, and the value of declaring our love for a book is being undermined by our unwillingness to disagree about what makes a book worthy--or unworthy--of love.

*(update) at the time I wrote this, most commenters were agreeing that no, twitter did not make you a better blogger but could help strengthen relationships. Since then, there's less agreement, as is usual on that particular blog (Farm Lane Books), which I love partly because of the consistently high level of intellectual engagement.

Ink Exchange

2009-09-21T06:28:00.003-04:00

Last week was the kind of week that required some escapist fiction at the end of the day. I also find that kind of fiction easier to read in small bits, which is all I have sometimes, in between all the other stuff I've got to do. Speaking of which, Walker's MRI results came in and there's no news. That's good, because it means I can worry less that he'll hurt his growth plates if I let him play soccer with his age group team. It's bad, because it means there's no quick fix for it. His patellar tendon is overstretched and painful because he's been growing fast, and that may last for a while. The doctor did say that if the pain is still as bad when the season is over and he's rested it for a couple of months, then we could try immobilizing it for a couple of weeks in January. Immobilizing a knee involves a brace so the knee won't bend, and getting around on crutches. Sounds hard in an Ohio winter and while attending a multi-level high school. But the doc says that can relieve the stress on the tendon enough that it doesn't hurt the same way afterwards.

At any rate, I was reading Melissa Marr's Ink Exchange this week. It's the second in a YA series that began with Wicked Lovely, which I read and liked, but not enough to write a review. I went on to read Ink Exchange on the recommendation of J. Kaye, who said she liked it even better than the first one. I have to agree. The first one was fun, but the second one was a bit more interesting. And you don't have to have read the first one to enjoy the second.

In Ink Exchange, Leslie, one of the ubiquitous sexually abused teens populating current YA fiction, decides that getting a tattoo will make her feel better about herself. But she goes to a tattoo parlor run by a half-breed faerie, and he gives her a special tattoo that connects her psychically to the King of the Dark Court of Faerie, Irial. There's a love triangle between Leslie, Irial, and Niall, the Gancanagh who was formerly attached to the Dark Court but left to join Keenan's Summer Court.

The story becomes, to some extent, about all three of the would-be-lovers' capacity for self-control, not to mention self-abegnation. We don't hear as much about Irial's struggles for control as we do about Niall's:
"If Niall kissed Leslie, pulled her into his arms and let himself lower his guard...she'd be his, willing to press her body against his, willing to follow him anywhere. It was both the temptation and the trouble with mortals. The caresses of some faeries, Gancanaghs like him and like Irial once was, were addictive to mortals. Irial's nature had been altered long before Niall ever drew breath. Becoming the Dark King had changed him, made him able to control the impact of his touch. Niall had no such recourse: he was left with memories of mortals who'd withered and died for lack of his embrace. For centuries, those memories were reminder enough to restrain himself. Until Leslie."

Of course we hear the most about Leslie's struggles. When she looks at Irial, she sees a now-traditional-supernatural-bad-boy:
"Her mind flashed odd images--sharks swimming toward her, cars careening out of control in her path, fangs sinking into her skin, shadowy wings curling around her in a caress. Somewhere in her mind she knew she needed to step away from him, but she didn't, couldn't. She'd felt the same way when she'd first seen him: like she'd follow him wherever he wanted. It wasn't a feeling she liked."

But Irial, the Dark King, is interestingly complicated and turns out to be not entirely uncaring--as fey, especially "dark" fey and especially royalty, are traditionally depicted, manipulating mortals for their own amusement. Ink Exchange depicts a world in which mortals and faeries have a strong emotional impact on each other, and as any mortal knows, the strength of an emotion can be difficult to judge, and the strength of a painful emotion can be the most difficult for the sufferer to judge.

The escapist appeal of Ink Exchange, for me, included a feeling of relief. Because I'm no longer a teenager, with overwhelming emotional choices to make every day. Because even though I always clap for Tinkerbell to recover, I don't think fairies are at all interested in my life. Because when I finished reading and put the book down, all I had to do for Walker to make the pain better was hand over an ice pack.

Goals

2009-09-18T14:09:00.004-04:00

Today's book blogger appreciation week topic is goals, specifically what goals do I have for this blog. Well, I'll tell you. I like to wander around and explore things; if I have to have a system (like a list) it starts sounding too much like work to me. So this is what I will say about goals--I'll try to consciously read some better books, write some more interesting reviews, and visit other blogs as often as I can. As for the rest, I will quote Thoreau, who says "We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success."

To end book blogger appreciation week, I say a word of thanks to everyone who visited here, and especially to Pages Turned and Sophisticated Dorkiness, who were kind enough to spotlight my blog as one of their favorites. The feeling is mutual.