The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

Stone's Fall

Like most other novel-reading folk, I enjoyed Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, so when I saw his new one--written in the "historical mystery" style of that one--on the shelf at the Kenyon College bookstore, I picked it up and took it home to read.

Well, it's been a busy spring. I said "yes" to at least one more thing than I should have, which is really not like me. I'm contemplating saying "yes" to two more things than I should for this summer. Something's got to give. I don't know yet what it will be. Anyway, I couldn't quite find the time and attention to really settle down with Stone's Fall. I read the first 70 pages in short spurts and couldn't really sustain enough interest, so I was about to toss it aside. Except that I did something I often do at that point; I read the last page.

AND WOW! Having read the last page, there's no way I could set aside Stone's Fall. I began the laborious process of carving out time from my days so I could get from the opening that didn't quite hold my attention to the ending that made my eyes open very wide.

Once I began making time to read the novel in larger spurts, even some of the off-hand remarks from the first 70 pages started coming back to me, like the comment "the rich believe they are allowed anything, and they are right." And as I went on, I met with this observation on a man named Mr. Philpot who is "the very epitome of the English lower middle classes": "If a factory worker kills his wife, or an aristocrat fathers a child, it is scarcely remarked upon; if a Philpot does so, it is a shock. Philpots are held to higher standards than most of mankind, and on the whole they live up to them." The financial underpinnings of the novel, which failed to interest me on first acquaintance, became important in terms of the lives of the characters, which kept me reading.

The novel has a three-part structure, each part told by a different character, starting from the outsider's point of view and moving inwards as the mystery unfolds in all its fascinating complexity. I scarcely had time to resent the switch in narrators, as I usually do when I have to forsake one point of view for another, before I fell under the spell of the second one, who could say things like "I had dreamed of something, and it is the more difficult to put aside dreams which are unformed, for they can never be exposed as mere childishness." One common thread throughout all three of the male narratives is a fascination with "the Countess Elizabeth Hadik-Barkoczy von Futak uns Szala, a woman of exceptional allure."

As more than one reviewer has already noted, the financial themes of the novel are oddly modern. In fact, I was irresistably reminded of a section of Christopher Buckley's Boomsday in which a rich politician funds his own presidential campaign to show that he can't be bought when I read "Do you think that a Rothschild or a Reinach or a Baring can be corrupted? In terms of morality, a banker and a beggar are similar; money matters little to them. One has it, the other does not want it. Only those who want but do not have are liable to be corrupted."

By the time I got to the third narrator, the financier, I almost felt like I had reached the point at which I'd left the first narrator, a journalist struggling to understand the world of finance, because--as in many good murder mysteries--to follow the money is to find out what motivates the characters. It took until the very last page for me to piece together what I knew with what is revealed at the end of this sprawling story. It was exquisitely satisfying. Knowing the ending may even have intensified my satisfaction.

This is a good book to immerse yourself in when you have some time this summer. And if you're contemplating taking on too many things to let yourself have enough time to read this summer, well, you may be in good company. I'm trying not to be right there with you.

Busy Busy Busy

Because we feel all smug and superior that we haven't overscheduled our lives as much as other people (well, a few--yeah, there are some--okay, at least one or two families we know), the kids and I often sing a few lines of Kevin Kline's Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired "Busy Busy Busy" (from Sandra Boynton's Philadelphia Chickens) when other people are too busy to see us:

"Oh, we're very, very busy and we've got a lot to do
and we haven't got a minute to explain it all to you
for on Sunday Monday Tuesday there are people we must see
and on Wednesday Thursday Friday we're as busy as can be
with our most important meetings and our most important calls
and we have to do so many things and post them on the walls."

At the end of the song we sing, gleefully:
"We have to hurry far away
and then we hurry near
and we have to hurry everywhere
and be both there and here
and we have to send out messages
by e-mail, phone and fax
and we're talking every minute
and we really can't relax
and we think there is a reason
to be running neck-and-neck
and it must be quite important
but we don't have time to check!"

This is my busiest time of the year, as far as the work I get paid for goes. And that means I can't make as much time to read. I read shorter things, because I'm trying not to get caught up in anything that would keep me from working on my stack of papers that still need to be graded. This is a very real possibility, for me. I'm the only person I know who has ever been forbidden to go to the library. It was when I was in third grade. My third grade teacher and my parents had a meeting with the school librarian and told her that I was not allowed to even come into the library. They thought it was the only way to keep me from reading through all my other classes. I just thought it was cruel, and so determined not to give anyone the satisfaction of thinking that forbidding me to read would make me pay attention to any other school subject. I guess I showed them; to this day, I still don't know the multiplication tables, which is more of an inconvenience than I might have predicted. But I get around it.

At any rate, I'm only reading short things (mostly poetry) and trying to be calm during the day, instead of like a "busy busy busy" adult, who will
"have to do it faster
or it never will be done
and we have no time for listening
or anything that's fun."

But sometimes I still have those early morning sleepless periods when I've saved up all my worries. You know, the worry that people are telling you they're busy because they don't want to see you. The worry that you've dropped one of the balls you're supposed to be juggling. The worries about politics and the economy and religion and whether you should have gone ahead and gotten the roof fixed, like in the poem "Things" by Fleur Adcock:

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
there are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

There are certainly worse things than politics this morning. I'm surprised and pleased to read that Christopher Buckley, author of Boomsday and son of the National Review founder William Buckley, has endorsed Obama. Because I have time to read the newspaper. Yes, I do SO have time. Do you?

The Book That Follows a Masterpiece

I feel sorry for Christopher Buckley's new novel, Supreme Courtship, because it follows Boomsday, which is his masterpiece.

Supreme Courtship is enjoyable, like Florence of Arabia and Thank You For Smoking. It just doesn't have lines like Boomsday's motto of the Association of Baby Boomer Advocates (ABBA): "Ask not, what can your country do for you. Ask, what has your country done for you lately?"

The U.S. President in Supreme Courtship is that rarest of Buckley characters, a good man. "Faced with a national debt mind-boggling even by Washington standards, Donald P. Vanderdamp had rolled up his shirtsleeves on his first day in office, unscrewed the cap of the presidential veto pen, and gone to work. He wrote No on every spending bill that the Congress sent to his desk." He is not well-liked by anyone in government, and so has trouble getting his supreme court nominees approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. After nominating two judges with "impeccable credentials," indeed, one who "seemed to have been put on earth precisely for the purpose of one day becoming a justice of the United States Supreme Court," and seeing them thrown out because one wasn't enthusiastic about seeing To Kill a Mockingbird in elementary school and the other offered to marry a woman he'd gotten pregnant, Vanderdamp gets mad. He nominates a television judge who is so overwhelmingly popular with the public that the Judiciary committee can't find a way to sabatoge her nomination. She becomes a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and then gets to decide the result of the next U.S. presidential election.

It's wonderful satire; I enjoyed it and recommend that you read it this fall, during the final months of the presidential campaigns. But if you're going to read only one novel by Christopher Buckley, let it be Boomsday.

Favorite Books

When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.

My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.

So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.

A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.

My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.

Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.

With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.

Boomsday

Last spring I went into a bookstore and a book on the shelf caught my eye (the cover looks like an explosion). When I stopped to read the cover blurb, which describes it as a book about "generational warfare between profligate Baby Boomers and younger Americans who don't want to be stuck paying the bill," I remember thinking to myself, standing there in the aisle, this is the book I've been waiting for all my life.

I'm a member of what Jonathan Pontell calls Generation Jones. Isn't that a good name? It's anonymous, like Smith, because for so long we were just lumped in with the end of the baby boom. It's also about having a craving for drugs, which in our case was a craving for all sorts of unfulfilled expectations raised by the boomers but enjoyed only by them. I can't even tell you how much I identify with Boomsday's main character, Cassandra, when she says "Here it comes. Where were you when JFK was shot? If I hear one more Baby Boomer tell me, in mind-numbing detail, I think I'll throw up." Also when she says "So we've gone from 'Don't trust anyone over thirty' to 'Don't drink any Scotch under thirty? Is this what's become of your revolution?"

The way Cassandra foments revolution among younger folk is by typing on her blog, Concerned Americans for Social Security Amendment Now, Debt Reduction and Accountability. The acronym is, of course, symbolic as she says: "She warned that the city would fall to the Greeks. They ignored her."

What she types on her blog is a proposal (and yes, she mentions the word "modest") that Boomers who "transition" (voluntarily suicide) at age 65 or 70 in order to save social security will get "a package of incentives. Free medical. Drugs--all the drugs you want. Boomers love that kind of pork. The big one is no estate tax....if only twenty percent of seventy-seven million Baby Boomers go for it, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will be solvent."

The Boomer lobby, ABBA, eventually supports transitioning when it becomes a bill with enough pork attached to make it ineffective (their motto is "From cradle to grave, special in every way"). Cass gets the attention of Gen X by asking them "what would you say if I told you that one-third to one-half of everything you earn over your lifetime will go to paying off debt incurred before you were born?" The novel taps into my resentment of Boomers very nicely. You know, they never did work out satisfactory day care or lasting knee replacements for themselves so I could come along later and reap the benefits.

I ordered this book for my classes in the fall of 2007, and my students, part of the echo boom generation, were surprised to see how little the facts have to be exaggerated to make satiric points. Since I'm blogging about the book, I have to say that the power of blogging and texting, as opposed to calling people on the telephone and knocking on doors, seems to me to be little exaggerated--and that's a good thing. My daughter and I agree that tv shows should be available when you're ready to watch them. Same for news and political advertising. Just as it's important to have a free press, it's important to have a free world wide web (as recent attempts to censor--or in China, to uncensor--the web have shown us). In Boomsday "the FBI, invoking some obscure antiterrorism statues, had shut down CASSANDRA, but Cass's followers kept starting new ones, called CASSANDRA.2, etc. The latest CASSANDRA was .54."

As Cass says, "in cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream." And isn't that a heck of a good thing, as long as you can tune in selectively?

Book of Nightmares

Last night, later than I meant to stay up after the spectacular lunar eclipse, I finished reading Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Once I got to the last 100 pages, I had to finish the book lest I find myself trying to finish the story all night in my dreams. It is a book designed to give a woman nightmares, second only to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Why is Atwood's first as a book of nightmares? Because it happens here. It's the picture of what an American theocracy could look like: a fertile woman is "a national resource" and she must "be a worthy vessel." The first-person narrator says "we are for breeding purposes" and "we are two-legged wombs." This is the world as some pro-lifers would like to see it.

Hosseini's book takes place in Afghanistan, a place that I started reading about in the 1980's when newspaper columnists began pointing out the many parallels between the treatment of the handmaids in Atwood's novel and the treatment of Afghan women under Taliban rule. And what have I done to improve their lot? Not enough. Reading about women in the middle east always makes me think of Germans who managed to block out their bits of knowledge that something wasn't right about what was happening to the Jews. Ignorance is no shield against such evil.

It particularly offends me that those who should be standing up and pointing out the evil (here I think of Buckaroo Banzai pointing his finger and shouting "Evil! Pure and simple! From the 8th Dimension!") are instead doing a mealy-mouthed multicultural dance around the issue. Whatever possessed the archbishop of Canterbury (pun intended) to speak out in favor of any law based on religion? What an unworthy successor to Thomas More.

Sharia law is bad, mmkay? Let us count the first ten ways:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons_why_sharia_is.html

Of course, a good antidote to A Thousand Splendid Suns is Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley.