here goes

Book processing plan -- how to manage the stacks

Each week, I buy about of two books. Each month, I manage to read about two books. My reading stack is getting huge because on average, I accumulate seven unread books per month. I felt guilty about not reading. My silent stacks of books chide me when I pass them on my way to bed after a couple hours of watching TV or DVDs, so I resolved, near the start of the new year, to do something about it.

My plan is simple: I read the introduction of the non-fiction books and the first chapter of the fiction books to decide if  I really want to invest the time in reading the book. After a couple months of trying this, the approach shows a great deal of promise.

So far, I've read the first chapter of How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. It is definitely a keeper. It's all about language and how medical doctors use and process verbal and nonverbal cues from their patients. It also describes how doctors can err and harm patients just by not paying attention. Other books captured me in and - to be honest - have sidetracked me from reading further first chapters are Elizabeth Samet's book called Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, Lee Siegal's book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Tom Segev's book, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, and Clara Cooper Marcus's book, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home.

Not all books are winners in capturing my interest. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, Azar Nafisi's, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World will be waiting in the stacks a while longer.

She spent her life

The January 21st issue of The New Yorker had an article about Lee Miller. The first sentence explained that Miller was a model and photographer. This much was evident from the topless photo of Miller wearing nothing but a fencing helmet and a wistful look that took up the entire facing page. Later in the  first sentence, I found out Miller spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East.

I stopped reading after that sentence, already jealous of this Lee Miller who knew what it took to seek adventure and how how to one spend an entire life doing it! How would I describe my own life that way?

I would be content to be reasonably confident that people would talk of me as a "writer and photographer" after my death. As of now, that would be a stretch. However, it would be a complete falsehood to say I was an adventure seeker -- at least in the same sense Lee Miller was. I was never much of a traveler, never a war correspondent and never a consort of artists and writers.

How would I respond to the question, "How did you spend your life?"

How would I fill in that blank: "Oh, me? I've spent most of my life (fill in the blank)." The answer I first think of to fill that gap is that I spend most of the week making other people's ideas work. Frankly, that doesn't sound very fun or rewarding. That amounts to saying that I spent most of my life avoiding poverty.

I could say that I spent most of my life seeking interesting and rewarding friendships. Many of my best friendships have been stormy, or long-distance ones, or so brief that I feel I must keep seeking them.

I could say that I spent most of my life looking for another "affair of letters." Those are even more difficult to come by than good friendships, but they never fail to provide fun and excitement.

If I want to feel gloomy and down on myself, I could say that I spent most of my life avoiding work and productive and creative endeavors. If I were writing myself an encomium, I would say I spent most of my life in service on non-profit boards, especially in the areas of housing and human services.

If I change my ways now, and poured all my time, energy and passion to work, say, on an attempt to create a great and heart-wrenching novel, no one could say "she spent most of her life" on something (assuming I live to age 88 or more).

Speaking of heart-wrenching novels, I'm nearly done reading Suite Francoise by Irene Nemirovsky. She was a famous Jewish novelist in the France who was killed by the Nazis during world War II. Her daughter, quite by some miracle, saved her mother's last novel from oblivion, carrying without knowing what it was from safe house to safe house for the rest of the war. Irene spent the first part of her adult life as a party girl and the last part as a writer, an author who wrote as quickly as possible, knowing she faced death almost any day at the hands of an occupying army. Her partial and final book is a marvel.

Lee Miller had no easy time of things either. She was raped at age seven and, perhaps in some demented form of therapy (according to the New Yorker article), her father made her pose nude. Outside. In the winter.

These women overcame what I consider to be great obstacles to create lives where someone could say "She spent most of her life" and "She spent her last days writing quickly."

I aspire for a spilt posthumous assessment like, "She started out playing it safe and getting her balance. Then, she really let loose."

Not for kids -- a magical book series for adults

In all the rush to go out and buy Harry Potter books and see the Harry Potter movies, in all the press of media attention coming at me from TV newspaper and internet stories, it would have been really easy to miss an unassuming little email from Jasper Fforde last week. He wanted me to know that his next Thursday Next Novel, First Among Sequels, was released in the US July 24. Yeah!

I forget now who recommended these books to me. I picked up the first book in the series late last year. I started reading it one night in March the night before a plane trip.  (Plane reading is best if you're already engrossed when the plane takes off.) I loved it so much that I stayed up all night before leaving on a trip to read as much as I could before I slept.  The Eyre Affair sucked me right in, had me laughing, crying (well not really), and dreaming again as I read fiction.

The tone and topic matter are completely, refreshingly original -- as engaging and easy to read a well-told children's tale, yet adult enough to make me feel smart for reading and enjoying it. Even better, Fforde targets his markets astoundingly well. By "markets" I mean middle-aged women who actually read fiction and men who are turned on by strong kick-ass female leads. Thursday Next is a not-so-great-looking, very smart, under-appreciated woman in her late thirties.  She also kicks ass when an arch-villain kidnaps Jane Eyre right from the pages of that first-person narrative.  The book comes to a screeching halt till Thursday can return her where she belongs.  What a fabulously rich idea -- blurring the line between fiction and reality!

  The Eyre Affair

Not long after, I read the next book in the Thursday Next series, Lost in a Good Book. The delightful aspect (for me) of this book was that, when Thursday changed jobs from the alternate-reality-based Special Ops to the fiction-based Jurisfication, a police agency comprised mostly of fictional characters, she learned the knack of jumping around from fictional work to fictional work, but occasionally spent time in her "real" world: one where some calamity kept Churchill from leading England, where jet engines were never discovered (people fly in dirigibles) and where gravitubes provide speedy cross-global trips.  It's a wild and fun ride in both worlds.
 

  Lost in a Good Book

Most recently, I just finished The Well of Lost Plots. Thursday mostly spends all her time hiding in unpublished fiction. The frontispiece in this book captured my imagination as well as the thought that words and letters are a finite resource. Thursday wants very much to save her safe harbor book, a bad detective novel from being torn down and dumped back into the "Text Sea".  She succeeds and also manages to save fiction itself from an onslaught of vile new technologies.  At the end, I suddenly understood how Fforde spun off yet another fantastical series.  The lead detective, Jack Spratt, changes jobs gets his own set of books.

The Well of Lost Plots

After I started this post, I got yet another email from Mr. Fforde. He wanted to let me know that he will be appearing here and there around the country to promote his new book, First Among Sequels.

And that's how, quite by accident, the content of my blog is actually current!  I can't say I'll rush right out and buy it -- I still have more in the series to read first, but I'll definitely read it very soon.  These books are now my favorite plane reading.  (I just reread the email from Jasper, who writes

"...to ask you kindly  - and very shamelessly - that if you do generously decide to buy one of my books, to buy it in the window of the 24th to the 28th July, as the flightless bird that is my publisher (Penguin) really want me to leap up the bestseller charts, and if I don't do extraordinarily well, I may have to sell off my children as chimney sweeps or something."

How adorable is that?  Large internet company single-click shopping, free shipping, here I come.  OK, Mr. Fforde.  It's the least I could do.)

Fforde's also an inspiration.  After Rowling's sales numbers were announced this week, W took me aside, put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, "If you want to write a series of books that becomes as wildly popular as the Harry Potter series, you have my blessing."

Actually, writing a series as career-defining, smart, and funny as Fforde's books would be more than fine with me.

Driving all your cars away...

My so-called vacation last month was less than restful. We spent a lot of time sitting in an action to buy the occasional quilt we liked.  Waiting for items to come up at auction is excruciating. I'm not cut out for that sort of waiting game because I have to pay close enough attention not to miss things. The auctioneer's chants drone on and on.  The "Hup! Hup!" of the crowd watchers becomes about as soothing as the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Before long, someone next to you pokes you and tells you your item is coming up and you realize that you've been way too obvious about what you plan to bid on. The mixture of boredom, anxiety and desire does not make for a quiet, satisfied mood.

The other reason our trip lacked in restful was that we spent a lot of time working on our relatives' technology (computers, cameras, printers, and so on), installing DSL here, setting up a Kodak EasyShare printer there.  Interesting, but not calming.

Mostly, the "vacation" was not restful because I wanted to broach the subject of driving cessation with my close female relative. She really, really shouldn't be driving. (I've mentioned her before in my blog.) I even did my homework by reading a book called The Driving Dilemma: The Complete Resource Guide for Older Drivers and Their Families by Elizabeth Dugan. On our drive to my close female relative's house, I practiced the interview techniques with W.

Finally, on day four or five, I overcame my trepidation and broached the subject. Close female relative, it seems, has realized that her driving talents are not optimal. Given her propensity to lose consciousness, she knows she should not get behind the wheel any more.  Yet, she hasn't quite come to grips with the local transit situation.

The good news is, there are people near her who could help her come to grips with her new situation.  The good news also is we contact each other more regularly to use Microsoft's Remote Assistance feature (I can take over her computer from 2,000 miles away to help her fix issues). The bad news is that I'm 2,000 away and cannot do as much as I would if I lived closer.

As for the book, it's a light-weight read (most of it describes the laws in each state.) It's been helpful and so far, I've bought three copies.  I consider it a small price to pay for a family member's dignity and possibly some stranger's life.

A little gift for my co-duprass member

"Reluctant Writer" certainly fits as a blog name, but something equally apt might be "Enthusiastic Reader."

Images from Cat's Cradle have certainly stuck with me, especially a scene where the nearly a whole "karass" is on an airplane flying to the fateful island of San Lorenzo.  If you are not familiar with Bokonon thought, a karass is a group of people, connected by fate or God, whose lives intertwine and whose interactions affect events in unexpected ways. The narrator describes the couple in his row as follows:

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.

The couple was a "duprass," a karass of two.

When I first read Cat's Cradle, the idea that a karass was not merely an invention of Vonnegut's, but also a true and apt description of my relationships certainly seduced me. Now, twenty-odd years later, I'm a bit more jaded about the notion that the unexpected influence of friends and strangers has has any impact over the course of my life or world events.  However, the idea of a duprass, a karass of two, now seems more appealing, more manageable, certainly more comfortable than a karass.

That description in the quote exactly describes our behavior on airplanes, doesn't it, W.?  Well,  our behavior toward each other most of the time, really.

Just thought I'd share...

Horribly delightful reads

So I've taken a break from writing my reactions to books by and about women. I've taken a break from blog writing in general. Now that I have thing to procrastinate about at home, back to blogging!

Lately, I've been reading for sheer fun, much like I used to do in my youth.  I see a book I like and, rather than check it out from the library, I actually buy them. Even the smallest things will send me to the store.  Recently, I read that Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is considered impossible to adapt to a movie. I read enjoyed this book ages ago, so I recently reread it.

Cat's Cradle

Is it impossible to adapt?  I don't think so.  I'm not sure it would make a good movie though.  Perhaps, that's the rub.  The story follows a man who wants to write about the "day the world ended", that is, about the U.S. day the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. The narrator wanted to describe the way people spent the day, especially the scientists that developed the bomb. In his research, he comes across the freakish children of the inventor of the bomb, a new religion, and the infamous ice-nine which could easily bring about the actual end of the world.  There are moments of wry hilarity.  I particularly loved the following quote (obviously written before feminist studies):

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and comfort and enlightenment at top speed."

Even though some people think if anyone tried to film it, Richard Kelly is the man to do so. I vote for David Lynch, perhaps because I just picked up his new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Frankly, Lynch's book reads like a Vonnegut novel -- at least the parts I scanned in the book store.

Why is this book horribly delightful?  Any book about atomic bombs, suicide, and the end of the world are bound to be a bit grim no matter how witty their repartee.

For a gorgeously written and devastating book (if you like that kind of thing as I obviously do), try The Pearl Diver, a lovely book by Jeff Talarigo.

The Pearl Diver

The Pearl Diver is about a young woman's life on a leper colony island in Japan right after World War II. The lepers there were housed in horrible conditions and were kept away from the rest of society by government edict and ostracized from their families. The middle section of the book, which describes the atrocities and moments of mercy and grace, is one of the most moving pieces of prose I have read. I particularly like how Talarigo uses stories about artifacts found on the island to tell the stories of "Miss Fuji" and the other patients she helps. For her, the disease was arrested early by new drugs that became available in the 1940s and 1950s. Even though she didn't appear ill, she was still trapped.

Example of the artifacts: a hand-drawn map of a small nearby island. White urns adorned with calligraphic numbers that represent the remains of the leprosy victims and the order in which they died. Over time, new leprosy patients grew fewer and fewer, the days of those remaining seemed more and more finite. A speaker phone. 

Since I've read the book, I've spent hours, maybe days, thinking of the stories of the artifacts in my own experience.  Each day, my appreciation for Talarigo's delicate artistry with prose grows more pronounced.

I posit that filming a movie about a leper colony in Japan would be a much greater challenge than filming a movie about the end of the world.  Maybe someday, someone will take it on.

Women and careers, a wide range of options -- fictional, actual, or horrible

It's been a long time since I was even close to being caught up with summarizing my reactions to books, a sort of goal for my blog.  To make a concerted effort to do so would make for one-note content for a while.  So, I'll continue my strategy for a while of writing many-books-in-one post summaries.

Lately, I've been reading a lot of "women's books." By quote marks I mean the books are not necessarily written by women, but are told about women. Many of these books have been set in the 1800s.  One thing I noticed that, during that century, women had a wide range of career options, but very few socially acceptable ones.  The other thing I noticed is that women have had it tough.

Let's start with the high-minded women. Sometime soon, I'll move on to the not so honorable. One of my blog readers/correspondents turned me on to Sarah Orne Jewett because he compared my writing to hers, specifically, The Country of the Pointed Firs. Before I bought it, though, I ran across her book, A Country Doctor:

  A Country Doctor

It follows the growth and education of a young orphan girl raised in guardianship by the local village doctor in a inland New England town sometime in the late 1800s.  The young girl decides early on that she wants to study medicine, despite resistance she gets from her family -- an elderly aunt she eventually visits -- and the temptations of romance and a married life. (At that time, being a career woman precluded marriage and family.) Young Nan is motivated primarily by her desire to better humankind and she does go on about it. Of all the books I read, Nan is by far the most selfless and idealistic.

Moving on ....  A friend loaned me Gail Collin's book. Her son bought it for her for Christmas.  She read it immediately and loaned it to me.

America's Women : Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

After a couple years of noticing on my bookshelf and feeling guilty keeping a mother from her son's gift, I finally read it. Even though Collins starts her account of women with women's interaction with the first white men on the North American continent four hundred years ago, (like Pocahontas and hapless, obscure Pilgrim women), she lavishes most of her attention on women who lived in the 1800s. The job options for women were on the rise, then.

Collins mentioned in passing the first woman to graduate from medical school, one Elizabeth Blackwell, but she didn't share the interesting stories about how Blackwell's medical school colleagues initially thought her presence was a joke, but how they jeered her and refused to attend classes with her when they found she was serious. Blackwell never married. Collins certainly lingers on some stories and situations longer than others and despite some passages lifted almost verbatim from other sources, the book reads quite easily.

Quite without planning to, I read yet another book about a woman living in the middle of the 1800s, this time a story by the French master writer, Gustave Flaubert, about a woman trapped against her desire in the backwater towns of France. Madam Emma Bovary's method of dealing with boredom and life were neither as high-minded as Nan's nor as forbearing as the women sketched in Collin's portrayals.

Madame Bovary

Emma, the original "desperate housewife," dealt with her lack of career options by making her poor sap of a husband miserable and by having a single child. I confess that my reaction to the book was an appreciation for its sly humor. In fact, the following description of M. Bovary's reason for motherhood wins her inclusion into my "careers for women" list. She bore a son as revenge for being a woman. That will show those men!

"...this idea of having a male child was like an anticipated revenge for for the powerlessness of her past. A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Both inert and yielding, against her are ranged the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Her will, like the veil strung to her bonnet, flutters in every breeze; always there is the desire urging, always the convention constraining."

What a brilliantly vivid metaphor! Her will is like veil, desire like a breeze and convention like a bonnet.

Wallace Stegner's book, Angle of Repose, by contrast, does not dazzle the mind like Flaubert can (even when translated).  Instead, he writes a solidly detailed, linear fictional story based somewhat (or maybe a lot) on a very real woman artist named Mary Hallock Foote, who captured the western mining towns in etchings and prose for eager readers back East just as Susan Burling Ward did in Stegner's Pulitzer prize winning novel.

  Angle of Repose

On the plus side of the book, I learned things about my region that I didn't realize.  For instance, I did not know before reading the book that there was a mercury mine just south of San Jose in a town named New Almaden.  In fact, I also learned what the word "cinnabar" means.  It's a popular name in these parts for golf courses and housing developments and the like, but the substances itself isn't as tasty as cinnamon.

Susan Ward describes a building in New Almaden, the foreman's house as "trying to be something it's not" with it's wide veranda columns. Not only did the foreman's house exist in the time period depicted, it still does exist! These days, the building is so revered and valued, that American Express Bay Area Initiative Partners in Preservation granted the "Casa Grande" funds for restoration.  One day, I'll go see it for myself and form my own opinion about how its pretention has held up.

The down side of the book was a certain dissonance between Susan's supposed upbringing and her outlook. Susan's pride and judgmentalism clashed with her background as a Quaker, a sect that would not even use the word "you" back in the days when English had a formal mode that the Quakers called each other "thee," even when it was grammatically incorrect. (I looked this up.)  Stegner has Susan say things like:

"Will thee forgive me ... for wanting to make thee over? I'm a foolish woman, I'm too much in love with talk and talkers. Talk isn't that important. What's important is thee. Thee is dear to me."

I grew up in the shadow of the Mennonites who also supposedly shun worldly pride. Susan's tone struck me as false from start to finish.  I admit, I don't know very many East Coast Quakers, but she never even nodded toward the humility young Quakers must have had inculcated into their psyches.

So, another option for a womanly career is pretentious pioneer woman artist.  Great work if you can get it.

Moving on to the pinnacle of job options, I'll now talk about The Morrigan by Annette Maxberry.

The Morrigan: An Erotic Tale of Reincarnation, Magic, and Murder

My book reviews often turn into stories about how I "met" the books I read, and this one has a unique how-we-met story. A co-worker told us that a good friend of a good friend had just published a book. She suggested we could support a new writer by buying a copy.

Soon after that, I found myself unexpectedly in a big branch of a big chain book store, so I asked one of their sales people about the book. The trouble was, I had come unprepared without the author's name or the name of the book.  All I could remember, I told her, was that it began with an "m" (something like "the mulligan") and that it had a picture of a crow and a woman on the front.  Much to my amazement, she actually came up with the title.  Apparently, the book had recently been featured in a new-release publication that goes to big chain book store employees and she was able to conjure up its memory and order it for me! (At that time, it wasn't yet available in stores.)

During my time off this summer (actually while I was on disability), I read it.  Even though it was more violent than I expected, I enjoyed the story and resolution very much. The true situation of the central drama doesn't become clear until very near the end of the book, but I rather enjoyed how it unfolded. (A fine first novel, still, if there is a second edition, I'd like offer a few editing suggestions.  A character says some contradictory things and there are a couple typos.)

The Morrigan even inspired me to read all about the Morrigan and the other Celtic dieties on Wikipedia. The book tracks several women through time.  Career-wise, the title character is a farm girl, a riveter, and aspiring actor in turn, but -- I don't think this gives too much away -- also develops the motto "A goddess is a woman who remembers her power."  Is that not the ultimate career for a woman?  Goddess.

Next time, I'll discuss careers for women from fiction and history that operate south of the law.

Hellfire and don't touch me!

Even before I heard about the Bedtime Fantasy Theater, I wanted to reread the two trilogies in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donalson. I started, at last, with the first trilogy.

  Lord Foul's Bane

  The Illearth War

  The Power That Preserves

Ever since I read the Anne McCaffery trilogy last year, I'd been thinking about revisiting trilogies I had especially enjoyed ages ago. I remembered reading and relishing the misadventures of Thomas Covenant when the rigors of high school to were wearing me down. Roughly 25 years later, when the rigors of the campaign trail were wearing me down, I finally bought the two Donaldson trilogies. (I even found all but one of the old series and the first two installments of the new, third trilogy at my locally owned new and used book store.)

There's nothing quite like reading about a hapless leper with modern faintly modern North American sensibilities as he tries to avoid his messianic destiny in an alternate universe. I've finished rereading the first trilogy, and found I needed an extended hiatus before reading the next one. Don't misunderstand: I relished every minute. However, I feel I need to build up my reserve of schadenfreude and my vocabulary before I take a go at the second trilogy.

Donaldson's writing is over-the-top at times. This passage near the end of the trilogy about a vision Thomas Covenant experiences provides a typical example:

"...Mhoram's whole face had fallen into yellow rot and running chancrous sores; his eyes cried out through the infection as if they were drowning in a quagmire of atrocious wrong. All Lena's hair had fallen out and her bald scalp bristled with tubucular nodules. Atiaran's eyes were drowning in milky blindness... Troy's eyeless face was one puckered mass of gangrene, as if the very brain within his skull were festering..."

Yuck. I was glad the entire book didn't read like that.  However, such hiccups appear at times throughout all the books.  This example, at least, is comprehensible, more or less.

Donaldson also doesn't have a clear, unmistakenly American voice.  For one thing, his main character uses "bloody" as a swear word.  In fact, in each book in the first trilogy, Thomas Covenant repeats one phrase over and over. The first book could even be renamed "Hellfire and Bloody Damnation,"  The second could be called, "Don't Touch Me," and the third "It's Not that Easy." 

Each book comes with a nine-page glossary of words Donaldson made up, including names, geological, botanical, zoological, artistic, and medical words in his imaginary land. Donaldson also uses the same obscure words over and over.  A lot of these words I don't know (or I didn't think I recognized them after being confused by all the other words I thought I knew but which Donaldson used in odd contexts:

Unfamiliar words from "Hellfire and Bloody Damnation" are:

sylph, chiaroscuro, attar, scree, bedizened, bluff, hale, threnody, suasion, ineluctably, argent, plaint, rictus, thew, lea, gloaming, ordure, piquant, eldritch, larch, roynish, shriven, incarnadine, legate, kith, theurgy, laval, belladonna, banyan, stertorous, jacarandas, coigned, serried, orieled, oriflamme, arras, intervaled, gyred, cynosural, wight, vataries, whelmed,denuncation, abrogate, peroration, catarrhally, ichor, rheum, lorn, incondign, sibilated, gangrel, verdigris, surcease, samite, inanition, aegis, fulminating, reft, weal, harrowed, demesne, adumbrated, buckler, arêtes, festal, coruscating, charnel, moil, susurrous, adamantine,

Unfamilar words from "Don't Touch Me"

eyot, thetic, hebetude, buboes, interdict, anile, febrile, pleasance, profligate, durance, irenic, inanation, spilth, argent, tantara, anadem, greensward, rowels, bayamo

Unfamilar words from "It's Not That Easy"

chrism, crenellated, gelid, cerements, wastrel, tremorously, wains, vermeil, puissance, traduce, glaucous, ambergris, eremites, asseverations, despication, frangible, insuperable, bosque, intaglioed, marl, suzerainty, glistering, carious, immedicable, chancrous, suborn, casque, guerdon, dudgeon

Normally, I would claim to know what "banyan" means, but I'm not sure how Donaldson uses it.  Also, I know what "persuasion" means, but I've never heard anyone besides him use "suasion."  I know what "forlorn" means, but does "lorn" mean the same thing. Honestly, reading Donaldson can shake a person's confidence.

That feeling of a lack of confidence when reading Donaldson is the genius behind the Fantasy Bedtime Hour. This San Francisco cable access show features two women reading in bed, both apparently nude. The book they are reading is Lord Foul's Bane. They have their friends reenact scenes from the book on the streets of San Francisco.  They play dumb about the words and concepts in the book, so they invite "experts" on the show to help them dicipher the more obscure passages.  The experts are people who have read the book and claim to understand and like it. One of these days Donaldson himself claims he'll be an "expert" on the show. It appears that the experts join the nude-looking girls in bed. The result is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. 

I would love to be an "expert."  Where do I sign up?  Before I do, I'd better review my vocabulary words.

Going to the source

I'm writing about my reactions to two books I read recently.  By recently, I mean within the past year.  I have such a backlog of books that I'm starting to pair them up.  Stay tune for a massive clearing of my mind on the topic of literature.

Today's pairing is, roughly, books set in the 12th century.  Some time ago, I wrote about the tragic love story Heloise and Abelard soon after I first read the details about it when I read a book about another 12th century person, Hildegard of Bingen.   A few weeks later, I saw this book by James Burge on the new releases table at my library:

Heloise & Abelard : A New Biography

I checked it out, of course.  It recounts a remarkable story of how the couple's daily love letters were preserved nearly intact for centuries. Apparently they would write each other messages on a scroll and would send it back and forth between them. Heloise kept it in her records in the convent, where it moved forward through time unmolested until, one day, a Cistercian monk named Johannes de Vepria in 1471 found it and was fascinated by the elaborate salutations (back then, people took time to write interesting and complex thoughts). He used them as examples in his Latin classes.

Later Ewald Koensgen in 1974, a German scholar, made an off-hand remark about the letters being like something Heloise and Abelard could have written. Just a few years ago, Constant Mews took a bold stand by asserting that they were actually the letters and published them.  The James Burge book I read, put together the stories of their lives with quotes from both sets of letters, the ones people have known of for centuries, and the ones we all just found.

The pain and honesty in Heloise's prose is arresting. I felt moved by her story even though her experiences are so far removed from mine I can barely imagine them.

Contrast that with the debut novel by Judith Healey:

The Canterbury Papers : A Novel

The story is set in roughly the same time period as when Heloise and Abelard were active and alive. It also dealt with a historical figure, the Louis VII's daughter, Aliäs. The account could not be more fictional, primarily because the heroine had the thoughts and sensibilities of a modern American woman. While the book contains a lot of adventure, intrigue, betrayals and twisted sex, the contrast between the manner of speech in the actual letters from the period and the narration of the book was stark.

Unfortunately, even though I found Healy's novel a compelling read, it was clear that she did not attempt to match her character's sensibilities to the sensibilities of the time. I found it much more compelling and moving to the moderated first-person account of someone who lived in the era than to read someones re-imagining of it.

I did appreciate several things about Healy's book very much though.  Healy was not a youngster when she published her first novel (Yeah! There's hope!). Her main character, Aliäs, is not a young woman, either and she has a crippled hand.  She still manages an active love life though. I think that's just great.

Whether or not the letters were all written by Heloise and Abelard, they still provide a remarkable view into what people were like in the 12th century. For those kinds of insights about a period, I'll still go to the source of actual text written in the period. I think that quality of authentic feeling about one's place in the world, in the present, distinguishes great literature, even if the text is a wounded rebuttal to a misdirected letter.

Consuming all impediments

As I was reading this book one day recently,

 

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

I ran into an inspiring quote of Virginia Wolfe praising Jane Austen.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought... and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Fowler's book provides the stories of members of a book club dedicated to reading all six novels by Jane Austen.  In the back of the book, Fowler includes reactions Austen's friends and family members' responses to Austen's work. Many of these excerpts are from Austen's own diaries.  Then, Fowler includes critics comments about Austen's novels.  Mark Twain was not a fan, apparently.  Wolfe, however, was.

I'm not a fan of Austen, or even so far of Wolfe's, but that quote is wonderful. How can I not be inspired to try to devour my impediments like a black hole of genius when I sent down to write when I contemplate a thought like that?

The Fowler novel, well, I had mixed views of it. It is more "literary" than another book about consumption I read recently, namely Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats, because it leaves more questions unanswered. Things are left more open at the end. In fact, I need to log my questions about it because my friend, who adores Austen has read it too and wants to discuss it with me.  If I don't write down my questions and irritations now, I will forget by the time someone asks me about them. I will provide some spoilers, sort of, so...

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

The Fowler book was written from a mix of viewpoints, especially for the character's back stories, including first person "I" from different viewpoints and third person accounts.  However, the primary narrator was an anonymous member of the group talking in the first person.  I found this incredibly irritating. I wanted the mystery of the identity of the narrarator to be solved.  Essentially, six people meet to discuss six books. Several reviews of the book claim the participants are transformed by reading.  I would dispute that. None of the people undergo any fantastic changes, just changes in circumstances any normal six or 8 month period may bring to a life. 

Only one of the book club participants is a man and he is by far the most weakly drawn, least plausible, contrived character in a book of contrived characters. Why is he attracted to a woman 10 or 15 years his senior, a member of the group?  Why does he attend fantasy conferences?  I know plenty of people who read science fiction who do not attend fantasy conferences. Is this a stereotype of some kind on Fowler's part?  In fact the male character has reason to hate Heinlein novels.

The other thing I did not like about the book is its overreliance on popular culture references.  This book will not age well at all.

On the other hand, I found it interesting in a way and found myself engrossed in the back stories of several of the characters, such as the lesbian whose girlfriend steals her secret stories and writes them into literary short stories and the high school French teacher who is attracted to her students just a bit, still, and the early middleaged man whose sisters rescue him from embarrassing social situations and bad love affairs.

*** END OF SPOILER ***

The next day, I finished a book that attempts to set up impediments to consumption:

Ruth L. Ozeki: My Year of Meats

Ozeki would not qualify for praise from Virgina Wolfe because she certainly wrote with a bit of preaching in mind. One protagonist is a very tall Japanese-American woman, a documentary filmmaker, who takes a job creating a TV show in Japan called "My American Wife!" (exclamation point included)  During the course of each show, the sponsors of the show want to present a "wholesome" American family cooking and eating meat.  The filmmaking protagonist pushes the envelope of "wholesome" and "meat eating" as much as possible by featuring vegetarian lesbians, Cajuns with unwed pregnant children. The other protagonist, the wife of the advertising account executive who landed the beef-producers account, learned not only a bit about American culture from watching the show and cooking meat (both under duress), she also learned how to leave her abusive husband.  Both women dabble with reproductive issues and the book winds up with a happy ending where both women get what they want, more or less and the bad guys are suitably humiliated.

While I enjoyed Ozeki's trip around America to visit different families (with the possible exception of the spiritual Southern black family) seen through the eyes of a Japanese crew, and I felt comfortable with the more-or-less timeless nature of the issues raised, I felt the book lacked a certain "literary" quality that the Fowler book had. Even though I laughed aloud on several occassions (for instance when the ultra tall Jane finally acheived a level of professional acceptance in Japan when she died her hair green, started dressing as a man, and taking on the masculne forms of speech because otherwise she was considered too odd), the happy ending depressed me a bit. The author took up such a bully pulpit from her character's mouths about the evils of modern beef production methods that I felt she could have left more of an impression that one crusading, lucky documentary film maker could not do much to solve the world's food problems. In fact, the main character is hypocritical in taking on a job about something that offends her while barely examining her complicity.  Releasing an not-quite tell-all documentary film at the end is supposed to redeem the main character's past? The book seemed to read more like a description of author's shower fantasies than any attempt to call forth the essense of what it means to act with integrity in a duplicitous age.

Despite its flaws, I liked the Fowler book's mystery narrator better in the end just because I like the irritation of uncertainty more than I like a neatly packaged, pellucid fantasy. I feel Fowler indeed came through her text more clearly than Ozeki (a pseudonymn, of course) came through in hers. Wolfe described so well the essense of "literary" writing that I am pleased to have so clear a way to measure texts.  I only wonder if it will do me any good to assess my own fearless writing. (I wish.)