Upstairs Girl in the Big City Library

This Station Is Now Closed.

2010-02-17T12:18:00.000-05:00

Okay, everybody, this is the last post. The look over at the new blog, Melina Stories, is still undergoing some tweaks while I experiment with the new Blogger tools, but the site is ready to go, and I'm itching to talk about stuff, so please switch your feed readers over and change any links you might have to the main page. I'll be leaving this up so that links to archive pages don't go dead, but I won't be updating anymore. Thanks for reading along!

Everything Changes

2010-02-05T21:13:00.000-05:00

It's been awfully quiet in here lately! Why is probably not that important, but, I'm going to be making some changes, starting with moving to a new URL. The new blog will be Melina Stories, and it will basically look and feel exactly like this one, except that instead of pretending to be a book blog with a lot of writing, culinary misadventures, and cat crap thrown in, the focus will actually be on reading and writing, with a side of culinary misadventures and cat crap thrown in. Mind-blowingly different, right? Right.

I think I'd mentioned previously that recently a lot of the hits I've gotten have been people who got lost on the internet looking for something else (Google will tell you what, but I'm not going to link to it). That doesn't help anyone. Hopefully this'll be better, though evidently I share a first name with a "professional" "wrestler," which might make this interesting.

I'm not sure exactly how the migration will work or how quickly it will happen, but the goal is to pull everything from here and move it to the new site as quickly as possible. Basically, this is part of getting more serious about my writing, and getting more comfortable with putting my name on what I do, writing-wise, and starting to put together a more professional web presence for the writing part of my life.

I'll keep posting updates here as the migration happens, and let you know when it's time to change your feed readers & etc. (If you followed the link, you can see the new site is totally empty.) As always, I'm grateful for everyone who bothers to read what I say here, and reaching even a few people through writing has been a great gift to me over the past couple of years. Thanks, everyone!

We Are All Totally Screwed, Part 7,000

2009-10-20T12:59:00.000-04:00

Okay, first of all, for those of you who are seeing some weird shit pop up in your feed reader, we are having some technical difficulties up here, which seem to be limited to my continuing ability to mistake the enter key for the apostrophe key. Oops.

Second, you may have heard that Wal-Mart is attempting to give Amazon a run for its money in the discount book department, specifically on new releases and books likely to be big sellers. I would probably not bother to read Sarah Palin's memoir if it fell out of the sky and into my hands, free of charge, but you will apparently be able to purchase it for the tidy sum of $9 at your local Wal-Mart, if that is your thing. A lot of the talk surrounding this event focuses on how Wal-Mart and Amazon can duke it out, lose money on the books in question, or even on books altogether, and make up the difference on other, higher-margin books they sell, whereas actual book stores, like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and, say, your much-loved local independent bookseller, basically can't.

Pimp My Novel has some commentary on this today as well, and one of the commenters there talks about how Wal-Mart's method of doing business basically involves convincing suppliers to increase capacity to meet Wal-Mart's demand - an investment that takes time to recover - and then refusing to pay as much for the same goods from the same supplier in the future. So that's not great, if that's what happens to publishers; it's less great for the authors whose books won't see print because publishers suddenly discover they can afford to print even less stuff that's not about vampires or aging supergenius Harvard professors.

I'm wondering what kind of effect, if any, it'll have on what kinds of books get published. I'm not coming up quickly with a good article on the influence of large states (like Texas) that centrally purchase textbooks on the content of those textbooks, but I imagine if you're reading this you've heard about it. Texas buys frillions of textbooks, approves them centrally (i.e., at the state level) and has fairly specific criteria for what can and can't be in them. Other states - smaller states, ones with less specific requirements, and ones where individual districts or schools purchase the books - spend less money in the process, have less influence, and wind up getting, in a lot of cases, what that first group of states requires. Wal-Mart, crusader for the moral and financial well-being of everyone but its own employees, evidently has a policy against selling "potentially offensive materials" which apparently includes Jon Stewart's book, pregnant dolls, and Cheryl Crow songs that suggest Wal-Mart sells guns to children. What happens if (when?) Wal-Mart becomes the go-to place for books? I'm curious about how this will play out for a number of reasons, but I'd be interested to see some debate on that particular aspect of Wal-Mart's drive, here.

Don't Forget About the TN Contest!

2009-10-14T09:42:00.000-04:00

Contest: Who's a good little bear? You are! You are! Seriously, look at Sars's nephew. SO CUTE. Do it for the kids; you know you want to. (Sorry for the continued harassment, people who also see my Facebook page. I love you! And also, go donate through the TN page.)

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Everybody Hurts

2009-10-12T20:47:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the Nation, kid. After backing awkwardly into the playoffs, the Sox have effectively run screaming out of them, and the Twins have flamed out as well. I am now rooting for the Phills, because of my secret crush on the Phanatic. Who doesn't love a furry... thing... with a big green butt?

Site Updates, Stairs, and Other Fun Crap

2009-10-10T18:10:00.000-04:00

I've updated the reading list recently so you can see what I've been up to. Apparently my ground speed is about 46 books a year, which seems fairly respectable, given what else I have to do with my spare time. I note that my second anniversary passed without any fanfare, since I did not post through the entire month of August, which is shitty, but oh well. Better luck next August.

I've also updated the sidebar for the first time in a while.

Furthermore, if you find yourself with even a few extra dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you should totally wander over to Tomato Nation and donate to the fall contest. Forward your receipt to Sarah and win all manner of wonderful prizes AND feel good about supporting public education in America, which really, really needs it.

On Thursday, I had another one of those work experiences that sounds like it happened in a sitcom but didn't really. As is typical, I was running late. Over an hour so, as it happens. I had gotten as far as my boss's assistant's desk, and was discussing the even more egregious lateness with which I'd handed in a recent project, when the fire alarm went off.

Back in December, there was an actual fire at Temp Law Towers, where I've been working since last fall. Something in the elevator... head house? Apparently burst into not-especially-threatening flames, and the lovely, manly firemen of the BFD (...hee) came to our office, sirens blaring, axes at the ready, ladder trucks extended, and did their magical thing. So The Lovely Assistant and I turned around and headed for the stairs, because, drill or not, it's a good excuse to go coffee it up at one of the seven thousand coffee places within spitting distance of the office. But first...

Temp Law Towers is actually a lovely old (really old) office building from the 1880s, and though the inside's been renovated all to hell (weird angles, bizarre doors, and that awful seagreen paint that was so popular in the 1950s) the emergency stairs have been largely untouched and have old, anachronistic tiled walls, stone treads, and iron railings with wood posts. They're mostly unused, because our office building has an ancient, whimsical, terrifying pair of elevators (see above re: fire) and you need a key to get up through the gate between the first and second floors. Of course, you don't need a key to get down through the gate (they think of everything!) but it's kind of a heavy gate, and the stairs are kind of steep, and the gate's a little sticky, and when I hit it, I pushed, and then I pushed harder, and when the gate let go I... went right along with it. Fortunately, my shins and ankles broke the fall as I skidded down the last two treads and onto the landing, with The Lovely Assistant and half the third and fourth floors on the stairs behind me. Stone cold sober, y'all. Haven't had a drink in like six weeks. Sufficiently caffeinated. FELL DOWN THE GODDAMN STAIRS IN A FIRE DRILL. Thank GOD I'm not trying to outrun quadruped predators in the prehistoric wilds.

What have we learned? Well, if this had been an actual fire, thirty people would have tripped over my clumsy, bleeding ass, caused a traffic backup in the stairs, and died. Fortunately, it was indeed just a drill, but I've added yet another notch to my "NOT GOOD IN AN EMERGENCY" belt. Subsequent leg usage suggests that while I am stupid, malcoordinated, and bruised, I am not in fact broken as a result of my misadventures.

The Lobster Coast, Colin Woodard

2009-10-09T19:36:00.001-04:00

The Upstairs Girl's book posts will be taking on a new look, courtesy of the FTC, which fucking hates book bloggers. Herewith:

Book Source: purchased used at Raven Used Books, Harvard Sq.

Personal or Professional Connection to Author or Publisher: He grew up in Maine; I used to go to the beach there.

Economic Connection to Author or Publisher: none whatsoever.

Woodard's history of the Maine coast is interesting, if not especially well-written. It rambles a lot, careening between oceanography, marine biology, North American history, sociology, fisheries management, local, state, regional, national, and international politics, property rights, Hobbes, economics, urban planning, and anecdote. He's on an island! He's on a lobsterboat! He's scuba diving and picking up juvenile lobsters! He's every damn where! He knows a lobsterwoman who was once on a reality show!

If you can get past the ADD nature of the narrative, though, there's a lot of interesting stuff in here. I'm not sure how widely-known it is that Maine didn't become a state until 1820, when it seceded from Massachusetts. It's a fact I always forget until I'm doing research and come up with an Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case from Kennebec County, and I'm like, "But there's no Kennebec County in... oh, right. The District of Maine." The history of the settlement and governance of Maine is pretty bleak and brutal - it was badly ruled by Englishmen and badly ruled by new Americans, all of whom had upsetting ideas about class and wealth and governance and Native American tribes and Irish people. Woodard also gets pretty deep into the appalling conflicts between European settlers and Native Americans in a way I haven't been exposed to before. It's straight-up awful.

A significant portion of the focus of the book is on the fact (or perception, but it seems pretty solidly-grounded) that the traditional Maine ways of life are being destroyed from the outside, which has basically been true for Maine's entire history, but is becoming more and more true with increasing rapidity as Maine's local economy comes more into line with the national economy. It's not a screed against in-migration, exactly, but Woodard's clear point is that real Mainers DO NOT LIKE YOU, and that they resent outsiders moving in and outvoting them at town meeting, complaining about the noise of harbors, and remaking Maine in their own image.

I don't doubt that it's a wrenching change - the book is full of stories of people who have been priced out of places where their families have lived for generations; people forced to move because outsiders have bought up property, caused assessed property values to skyrocket, and caused a concomitant increase in property taxes that ordinary working people, like fishermen, can't afford. Young people wind up moving away from their hometowns on the coast just so they can afford a house. None of this is A Good Thing.

I suspect Woodard's intended audience is really Mainers, and that he's not really intending to shame people like me who've always secretly dreamed of being wealthy enough to retire to some quiet place on the Maine shore where we could listen to the gulls and the bell buoys and the foghorns and the lobster boats, people who have fond memories of summers up there back before lighthouse automation and cell phones. But that's the effect, for me, anyway.

Now Regulated by the FTC

2009-10-06T12:51:00.004-04:00

The other day I came across a passing mention of some FTC plan to fine book bloggers $11,000 if they positively review books they get from publishers without mentioning that they got them from publishers, and I sort of ignored it, because it seemed too ridiculous to be true.

PhiloBiblios, however, reports today on changes to FTC rules about advertising and commercial speech that appear to suggest that while fines in the thousands of dollars are not exactly on the table, endorsements of books received for free might become problematic in the very near future.

Sound insane? Yes. The regulations are primarily aimed at stuff like Marie Osmond saying she lost one frillion pounds on NutraSystem and making sure that ordinary consumers watching the ad don't also believe that they will lose one frillion pounds. (This is why all those diet/home gym/workout video ads say "results not typical" at the bottom in tiny print.) It's also meant to prevent a company from setting up a blog posing as Joe Q. Unaffiliated Random Citizen Who Thinks Company X Fucking Rocks and saying only awesome things about their products - Joe Q could become an influential internet celebrity and people might think that his opinion is totally unbiased, when in fact it's just the PR department of Company X, lying through its collective teeth. (Whether or not this is actually a good or helpful thing is a topic for another post on someone else's blog, but that's how we've chosen to roll, at this point.)

Still, evidently - my brain shut off about 12 pages into the 81 page review of comments that PhiloBiblios links to - the language can be read in such a way that the FTC may well wind up regulating what I have to say about books I get through LT's Early Reviewers program, and that makes me itchy. (Y'all, the review of comments is so boring. I do this for a living, on and off, and it makes my eyes glaze over.) I usually do give a little backstory about a book and why I'm writing about it here, I think, whether it came from the library or was a gift or how I got interested in the author or whatever, but I'm not wild about the suggestion that I might have to do that, nor about the suggestion that the publishers who so generously provide free books to LibraryThing for the Early Reviewers program might be subject to some kind of legal action for deceptive practices because I write up a book here and forget to mention that I got it from them.

In a way, though, this is a really interesting problem, because it exposes some ways in which our methods for dealing with problems in the past can be inadequate to an age characterized by instant, widespread, and ever-evolving methods of communication. This doesn't mean that either the system or the changes are bad things, it just means that it's becoming ever more important to think creatively, strategically, and broadly about potential solutions to real problems, and to the consequences of those solutions, both intended and unintended. Does the FTC (or anyone else in the world, for that matter) really care about book bloggers enough to fine or prosecute them? My guess is no. But just because the FTC doesn't care about a group doesn't mean that it can't be negatively affected by new regulations, and that possibility has to be part of the calculus any agency engages in when they set about to change rules to better address current problems.

Department of Zombie Studies

2009-10-05T10:04:00.003-04:00

Zombies are apparently almost as hot as vampires lately, and at least twice as hilarious (vampires are reportedly broody, tortured, and/or sparkly), and this gem, allegedly from the University of Florida, offers some helpful references for those of you concerned about zombies, Zombie Behavior Spectrum Disorder, and zombie defense. I came across it via Library Preservation, which is, of course, in my feed reader. I have no earthly idea where it is really from, but it is seriously the funniest thing I have run across in at least three days, including but not limited to the TN Fall Contest launch video AND the crab hat (not a euphamism) I wore on Saturday.

Adventures on the 71 and Other Things

2009-09-29T11:14:00.005-04:00

Dear elementary school teachers of Greater Cambridge:

The 71 bus at rush hour is not an appropriate place for you and twenty of your second graders (especially you, with the too much makeup and the Aquanet, you know who you are) under any circumstances, unless the apocalypse is actually nigh and we all must flee into the subway tunnels for safety, and even then I recommend that you wait until at least 9:30 to herd your gaggle onto the bus.

Confidential to the cranky businessman:

Despite the annoyance of having to wade through a sea of hobbit-sized creatures to reach the door, an imperious and pained "Hello, gotta get off, gotta get off," is both inappropriate and unnecessary as a means of excusing yourself through the giggling hoarde. "Excuse me," is a perfectly legitimate interjection, and one that even second-graders can understand. Why don't you try not treating kids like creatures of inferior intelligence?

Confidential to the driver of said 71 bus:

Hint: when a flotilla of hobbit-sized creatures invades your bus at 8:55 on a Tuesday morning, the answer is in fact not to roadrage your way down Mt. Auburn Street, speeding up unnecessarily and stopping abruptly, especially in unexpected places like the busway tunnel.

love to you all! The Upstairs Girl.

Hi there! I've been on unexpected hiatus for a while, for a bunch of reasons that aren't really that important. I've been doing some thinking about the direction I want to take this site, and trying to do more other writing - stuff way outside the boundaries of this blog - and generally running up against the demands of real life.

One of the most important things is that, over the last six months or so (or more?), a lot of the hits I've been getting are from people who are clearly looking for something else (something far less intellectual than this site, to which I will not waste time linking), so I've been thinking about whether it's time to cede my territory here and get a new URL and make some other changes to go with that. Feel free to weigh in. I'm reluctant to give up this little corner, but I don't think it really helps anyone if most of the people who find my corner are pissed off that they did. ...Seriously, my stats are depressing. I'm not going to do any math, but I estimate that maybe one out of 10 visitors is actually looking for something related to the content of the site, and the other 90% are looking for someone's youtube channel.

In the meantime, I've been reading a lot of great stuff. You should totally check out Kate Flora, who writes excellent murder mysteries - I think her best is Steal Away, which you can find under the author Katherine Clark - that you should read if grisly murders will not give you palpitations. If you are in the Minuteman Library Network, I am the asshole that has them all out and overdue; I have to enter them in LibraryThing and scan the covers before I can return them all. Sorry about that. Anyway, I just read everything she's written, and, as with Elizabeth George, I probably won't post about every one of them, but they're great. Right now I'm working on The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodard, which is a history of coastal Maine and quite interesting from a factual standpoint, though I'm not sold on Woodard's narration or his immersion of his own self in the tale he's trying to tell. I'm not convinced he's doing Mainers a lot of favors. I've also managed to drench the book twice in two days, which is a first for me. (Woke up in a puddle in a tent Sunday morning, next to said book, which was treading water; got caught in a hurricane at a ballgame last night and drenched it up again after spending an hour and a half drying it with a hairdryer Sunday night.)

I also stumbled across this, which fills me with an intense dread. I tried very hard to get through the audio, and I really did enjoy it through the beginning of the book, but then they go to sea, and my brain just shuts down in protest. I can't imagine what a modern film version will look like - and, honestly, do you eve see Ahab's wife in the book? That part makes me especially nervous.

Finally, since this is becoming a bit of a linkdump, I remind you that it is Fall Contest Time over at Tomato Nation, and that the fundraising goal this year is E! Normous! And so you should scrounge up your loose change and do as much as you can for schoolkids this fall, and win prizes and encourage perfectly insane and hilarious stunts by doing so.

Running from the Law, Deborah Arron

2009-07-16T13:00:00.001-04:00

Have I mentioned before about how I'm an angry out-of-work lawyer? (For the three of you who occasionally read this who don't actually know me personally. To the other three of you: Hi!) Last summer I started on the career advice follies trying to figure out whether it was time for me to get out of the legal profession or what, and this was one of the books I wound up starting. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, and I am... sort of irritated I spent time tracking it down.

This is not really that great of a book. It wants to be a hard look at why lawyers are getting out of the profession, and maybe it really was telling truth to power in 1989, but the only striking thing about this book in 2009 is that not a lot has really changed.

The most irritating thing about this book - and it's at the top of a not-inconsiderable list - is that it focuses on the kind of attorneys who went directly from law school into lucrative big firm life (possibly with a pit stop clerking in some court or other in between) and are unhappy. Predictably, there's a lot of "I have all this money and I'm so unfulfilled" kind of whining going on as a result; there're a lot of lawyers profiled whose biggest obstacle seems to be making the lifestyle adjustment necessary to find more fulfilling work, rather than, say, already struggling on a legal aid salary, not qualified to do anything else with their lives, and with no financial safety net to depend on as they make their exit. Since I fall into this latter category, I had kind of a hard time getting through the book.

This isn't to say Arron's criticisms aren't valid; the legal profession is pretty much made of crazy with a heaping helping of misanthropy and a loathing for anything that's not income-generating. I don't know anyone who's been super-happy with their big-firm life, even if they were pleased with their paychecks. More of the government and public interest lawyers I know are happier (maybe not actually happy?) but Arron's not out to address those issues, really. And she's not really out to help you make the transition, unless all you need is to get mentally ready for it. She doesn't identify a lot of possibilities for transition jobs that'll keep a student debt-addled girl afloat while she migrates to a profession that has no steady employment, or steady paychecks, or benefits. She just tells a lot of stories about unfulfilled successes who bailed.

The sad fact is that after reading the book, I had almost zero respect for any of the navel-gazing misfits she profiles; even though I sympathize with their desire not to be lawyers anymore, I judge them for being weak and stupid. (Especially the girl who was shocked, shocked to discover that being a lawyer is literally whoring your brain out to the highest bidder. She? Was clearly too dumb to have gone to law school.) Similarly, the first person to use the phrase "golden handcuffs," a "metaphor" of which Arron is excruciatingly fond, in my physical presence? Is getting punched in the head.

I am also reading What Can You Do With a Law Degree?, also by Arron. It apparently grew out of Running, and... you can tell. If you're going to read one, read What Can You Do?, because Arron repeats herself endlessly in both, and that one at least has some self-assessment exercises that'll help you decide whether it's time to jump ship. I think they're both more useful to a certain kind of lawyer (i.e., not the kind like me, someone who's failed by every traditional measure) but I have slightly higher hopes that What Can You Do? will at least contain some useful information for people who don't have a nest egg and a 401(k) to cash in.

Careers for Writers and Others Who Have a Way With Words, Robert Bly

2009-07-13T12:55:00.004-04:00

Okay. I'm trying to clear some of my backlog out. I read this ages ago, and it was interesting. It's more focused on things you can do with a talent for writing that aren't in the "starving artist and beyond" vein, but it's very clear, easy to understand, and up-to-date in terms of trends and resources. It's a little scary, if you're actually thinking of trying to make a living using your words, because he is particularly up-front about the fact that you are unlikely to become even moderately well-off by doing so, but it's not actually discouraging, if such a thing is possible. I don't have much to say; this book is a tool, in that it's useful if it fits in with your purpose, but unlike some of the other writing and career books I have read/am reading, it's not something that I'd suggest you pick up just for giggles.

Watch Your Drinks, Ladies

2009-07-10T07:22:00.002-04:00

Pink Slip pointed me in the direction of this well-written and kind of terrifying article about date-rape drugs and how little can be done to test for what you may have been slipped after you wake up in the morning. Be careful out there, everybody.

Ow.

2009-06-30T23:44:00.004-04:00

I only caught the last 38 minutes of this evening's Sox game, and it was like I was a little kid again. This, for those of you who are a little new to this? Is what it used to feel like to watch the Sox ALL THE DAMN TIME. Ow.

A Little Bit of Awesome

2009-06-27T20:01:00.003-04:00

Check out this little bit of radness. Apparently, somewhere in America, there is a really awesome girl running a banned books library out of an empty locker. If that is true, I want to meet that girl and shake her hand, because she RULES.

Some of the books are old standbys for book burnin' types, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Pullman's His Dark Materials, and The Catcher in the Rye, and then things like Candide, which... is dirty, I guess? And Chaucer, who's a little bawdy, but it's not like they're going to be reading the original text at 15, and I can't believe there's no sanitized translation out there, but the list also includes Dante, Paradise Lost, and the Koran, and then some standbys of 9th grade English as I knew it, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. (OK, I never read those last two, either in high school or out of it, but my specific section of English was the only one I know of.)

I really, really hope that this girl goes through the rest of high school doing this and never gets caught. She is awesome, and brave, and what I admire most is that I'd never have dared to do something like this at that age, had I found myself in a similar situation. As far as I'm aware, the closest my high school came to censorship of any kind, really, was taping over the seven seconds during which you can see Romeo's butt in the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. (We were thirteen. None of us really wanted to see any of the movie.)

The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

2009-06-26T19:58:00.001-04:00

I read The Elements of Style for the first time ever this week, at the suggestion of Francine Prose, whose book I have yet to write up. (Read it, though, it's rad.)

I'm one of the few children of the eighties, apparently, who had a solid instruction in English grammar as a... grammar school student, and between that and my English-teaching mom, it really stuck with me. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge or anything (...boy do I not) but I somehow become the grammar maven of every office work in (except the current one, where my boss has, I now realize, memorized Strunk and White). My secret, though, is that I can barely remember the names of the parts of speech, I just read a ton and have a pretty good ear, and a pretty good internal foundation.

But between the current temp assignment, and Francine Prose's suggestion, and the fact that I've had the book on my shelf and never even cracked it for at least three years, I figured maybe it was time. And it is. It turns out, it is nearly always time to read Strunk & White. The rules are few, and easy to understand (for the most part) and they are essential to good writing. If you write anything, ever, for any purpose, you should read this book on a regular basis. I think I want to make a poster of the rules and tape it up above my desk.

I wound up somehow with an illustrated edition; the illustrations are self-consciously modern and whimsical, and are essentially the visual equivalent of doing exactly what Strunk and White tell you not to do with your prose, so I wouldn't bother to spring for that one. (It's the one illustrated by Kalman, with the red cloth cover embossed with a colon on the front and a semicolon on the back.) It's pretty, and solid-looking, but you'd do just as well with the regular low-end edition, without the added distraction of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in the color plates.

Required Reading

2009-06-24T12:25:00.004-04:00

There was a man on the 71 Bus this morning reading a book entitled What to Say When You Talk to Yourself. If you have ever ridden the 71, you understand how that fact pretty much sums up the parade of weirdos that is a ride on the 71, even if the book somehow turns out not to be a handbook for talking to yourself out loud. (What are the odds?)

Listening to Moby Dick

2009-06-23T10:14:00.003-04:00

Well, as reader RJO suggested in the comments, I'm listening to an unabridged recording of Moby Dick, read by Frank Muller. So far I've made it to the middle of CD #3 (of... 18) by taking a car trip to my parents' house, and then to my fife practice. I still maintain that the parts before Ishmael ships out on the Pequod are hilarious, and since we haven't yet left Nantucket, I'm still interested. It is good for listening to, I think - Ishmael's narration is rambling and a little schizoid and really un-selfaware, particularly when he's making an anthropological exercise out of poor Queequeg, which is... most of the time, at this point. I'll be interested to see if my preference for the audio holds up when Ishmael starts lecturing on natural and nautical history.

In other news, since the sidebar is totally out of date at this point, I'm currently reading The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, and Watching Baseball Smarter, by Zach Hemple. Writeups for approximately one thousand books are, as usual, in the works (see the sidebar link for the complete reading list), but I doubt I'm going to get back to the bit about Oxford's professor of poetry at this point, which is unfortunate, because I think the NYT wrote a crappy article about the whole sordid affair, and I think not enough attention has been paid to the most important of the questions that were raised by what transpired.

An Ode to My New House

2009-06-20T20:57:00.004-04:00

So there are some things about my new house that I haven't previously mentioned, despite the fact that at this point the house is not actually so new to me anymore, since I've lived here three months.

But the thing is, my house wasn't actually new to me when I first moved in, 'cause I sort of moved into Camper's old house, when she... decamped. Camper lived here for four whole years, during which I heartily abused her hospitality, because I lived even further away then than she does now. I logged a lot of hours sleeping in weird places in this house, is my point, here. I once even lived here for two weeks, when I first moved back to Boston, because I found the job before I found the apartment. (That was two apartments ago, now.) And now it's my house!

Camper's first real apartment was in a three decker that hadn't been redone but had been kept up wonderfully. She had this gigantic pantry with shelves and drawers and outlets and crap, and a built-in in the dining room, and super-nice wood floors, and the old-style molding around the windows and the doors, and did I mention the pantry? 'Cause the pantry was rad. And the built-in. God, the built-in was awesome. I coveted it hard. I loved that house, and I was super-sad when she moved out. Until I saw this house, which is so awesome in so many ways it's sort of hard to talk about.

So, like I said, I've lived here for three months or so now. And every third day or so, I have a moment of, "Holy crap, I LIVE HERE." And right now, I'm sitting in my living room, with my cats, watching the Sox have a better night against Atlanta, in the dark, with the windows open and a little tiny breeze coming in, listening to my neighbors set off bottle rockets and smelling someone's really good cookout, and I? Am in love with the world. And my house. All at the same time.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

2009-06-10T21:15:00.002-04:00

It's sort of amazing to me that I managed to get a degree in English, in America, without reading this book. It's amazing that I grew up in New England without reading this book. Honestly, it's amazing that anyone's read this book. It's long, it's not fun, it's not easy, and you don't even meet the titular marine mammal until page five hundred.

Ahab, as everyone knows, is insane, a monomaniac in pursuit of the bloodthirsty, vengeful whale who ate his leg. Ishmael, however, is also a few fries short of a Happy Meal, a novice, peregrinating sailor who signs onto a doomed whaling voyage apparently for lack of anything better to do with his time for the next several years of his life. Through the happy accident of sharing a bed, he becomes fast friends with the harpooner Queequeg, whose taciturnity becomes ever more appealing as Ishmael prattles on about the Linnaean classification of the whale, the whale's innards, the whale's outards, the whale's relatives, the whale's mating habits, the whale's diet, the proper way to catch a whale, what you do with the whale once it's caught, the parts of the whale-ship... it's interminable.

On reading Moby Dick, I found it incredibly off-putting that the reader's education in all things whale and whaling comes from Ishmael, who is if not the least-experienced whaleman on the doomed voyage, at least a contender for that title. The discourses really do go on for hundreds of pages, with a fanatical intensity and a sort of socially awkward cocktail party tone-deafness for what another person might want to hear or know. It's comical, but it's also really hard to slog through, and it works to keep the reader even more outside the story than Ishmael himself is. (You notice, as you read, that Ishmael seems to be more of an observer than a participant in much of what goes on, which I think is not an accident.)

It's been pointed out to me, though, that there are subtle clues that even early on in the story, it's an older, more mature, more well-read Ishmael who's telling us the story, from a vantage point of experience, learning, and temporal distance. I think it's easy to loose sight of them, though, while you're trying to pretend to care enough about whether a whale is a mammal or a fish to get through to the part where the crew first sees the white whale. I think, either way, the effect is to hold the reader at bay, but it at least makes the fevered, insistent lecturing less galling.

I finished this up quite a while ago (I am way behind on writeups) and it's been stewing in my brain ever since. I initially never wanted to see the thing again. It took me almost three months to read it - I started it while Tucker was sick in February and didn't finish it till about mid-May. I think it's a book better read in larger chunks than my typical reading habits make possible, and I'm starting to think I'd like to take a second pass at it, when I've cut down my to-be-read list a little more (currently at 170 books in my own library alone, plus six that I'm more or less "currently reading" or intending to pick back up soon). I wanted to enjoy it, but I just couldn't, and I think I sort of hope that a less fragmentary reading will help out a little in that department. I am pretty sure that is an irrational hope.

The Gardner Heist, Ulrich Boser

2009-05-30T20:59:00.005-04:00

In March of 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed. I was in 6th grade at the time, living outside of Worcester, and I have absolutely no recollection of hearing about it. I've never even been to the Gardner, an oversight I intend to rectify immediately. The theft has never been solved, and no one has seen the paintings, sketches, and objects, since. (Well, probably no one. Some might have been seen in a warehouse south of Boston; one might have been seen in various places in Ireland.)

Ulrich Boser's recent book about the theft, The Gardner Heist, is absolutely fascinating. It's a crazy true-crime memoir filled with the most outlandish characters, and a list of suspects as long as my left arm. (I? Have monkey arms.) Boser is a journalist by trade, and he stumbles onto this story after reading about an insurance adjustor, Harold Smith, who made it his personal mission - despite having no professional stake in the case - to try to figure out what happened to the artworks and to bring them back to the museum. Boser begins a profile of Smith, who, suffering from cancer of the just-about-everything, dies shortly thereafter. Boser finds himself trying to pick up where Smith left off.

Ultimately, the book is a little unsatisfying, and it has to be - the theft has never been solved, and the paintings are still missing. But it's a fascinating ride through the myriad theories surrounding the theft, the investigation, and the current whereabouts of the paintings that really makes you want to quit your day job and hunt down art full-time. (Maybe that only happens if your day job involves reading about chicken parts and strip steel; your mileage may vary.) The bizarre characters Boser encounters along his path to unenlightenment are almost too much to be believed - a kid from Marshfield who started out as a rockstar and became America's premiere art thief, big time criminals, small time criminals, egomaniacs, questionably-reformed criminals who spin conspiracy theories over Red Bull and espresso, FBI agents, private detectives, shady lawyers, and reclusive former museum guards living in obscurity in Vermont. It's unreal.

The most interesting part of the book for me - and maybe the most uncomfortable - is the sharp, dispassionate light it throws on the seedy underside of Boston. It appears clear from Boser's narrative that Whitey Bulger was involved, somehow, at some point - probably not in the planning, and certainly not in the physical theft, but he almost definitely had contact with the paintings or the person in possession of them afterward - and the likely suspects are similarly violent, sociopathic types with similar ties. Boser believes, with good reason, it appears, that the reason the paintings have stayed hidden for 20 years is that just about everyone who might have known where they were has met a grisly end.

Growing up, I heard about the Winter Hill gang, obviously; and now everyone knows what a wretched hive of scum and villainy the Boston office of the FBI was, with a number of agents literally in bed with Bulger, helping him to build and maintain his criminal empire. But Boser lays out what's really just a small part of that - just the murders and heists that are (most likely) connected in one way or another with the Gardner heist - and it's awful. It's ugly, and awful, and violent, and terrifying. Some of the theories surrounding the art stolen from the Gardner Museum center around the Irish Republican Army, and Bulger's ties with and support of Sinn Fein; Boser ultimately comes to discount them, but I was surprised to read about some of the ways in which the Winter Hill gang provided support (particularly in the form of small arms) to the IRA. I don't remember any of this stuff happening, even though I read the paper kind of a lot for a teenager.

Boser has taken a break of sorts from his investigation, since the release of his book, and you can see why. He talks about it being addictive - someone else calls it the crack cocaine of art thefts, I think - and it's very easy to see how that could be true. However, he's still got a website and a tip line for the Gardner case, though, and there seems to be a surprising amount of optimism that the art will find its way home, somehow, someday. (There is rather less optimism for the condition it'll be in when and if it does.) It's a great read - I read it in about a day - and I highly recommend it, even if you think you don't care that much about art theft or true crime. Good stuff.

My reworking of the piece on the Oxford Professor of Poetry scandal is in the works; I want to do some more research before I put it back up, but hopefully that'll happen this weekend.

A Rather Bitter End

2009-05-27T12:52:00.004-04:00

I'm taking this down for a bit to rework it. As Miss Murgatroyd points out in the comments, a significant portion of what I had to say misconstrued the facts. It turns out this is partly because I misread the New York Times article on the issue and partly because the New York Times article on the issue was less than clear on some points. It'll be back up in a bit. Thanks!

Teeny, Tiny Visions

2009-05-21T20:36:00.003-04:00

On my way home from work tonight, I walked past an empty storefront in Downtown Crossing that had been plastered with advertising for Intel, which has proclaimed itself to be "Sponsors [sic] of Tomorrow." This is stupid enough, but what they'd like you to do is text them your vision of the future so they can stick it in the storefront ad. This has to be the stupidest fucking thing I have heard of in at least a week.

How small and weak does your conception of the future have to be to fit in a goddamned text message? From a literary standpoint, we're not a culture known for our grandiose, hopeful visions of the future, I don't think - most of the "set in the future" stuff I've read is angry, dystopian, and horrifying, but... none of it's especially short. Calling an idea for the future that'll fit in the space of your average text message a "vision" is like calling Spam food. It's just wrong.

But what's even more hilarious is the absolute crap that this is generating. Go take a look at the hilariously stupid things floating across the globe at the end of this absurdly information-free festival of stupid advertising. In case I'm being a little too incoherently, get-off-my-damn-lawn ragey, the reason this makes me crazy is that it's so small and trite and cheap, and yet Intel's billing this as a meaningful exercise. It's crap. It's everything that's wrong at the intersection of a soundbyte culture and instant communications. It's utterly thoughtless, when the subject itself is one we as a culture (and, really, as a species) don't give nearly enough thought to.

Calling Oaklanders!

2009-05-19T11:42:00.005-04:00

First of all, if you are not reading pamie.com, you totally should be. Pam is a hilarious lady who writes fantastic books and does other awesome things that she writes about. One of those things is the Dewey Donation System, which has been dormant for a while but which rocks when it's in action. She got a letter from a librarian in Oakland, CA, who needs some help. Here it is, reposted in its entirety:

Dear Pamie,

I'm happy to see your blog is still going strong and that you are still writing.

I'm writing, because I am frantic. I have a request that will cost nothing to anyone but the time to send a batch email.

In order to save Lakeview and 5 other Oakland libraries from having hours cut from 6 days to 3 or 2 days a week, starting in July, we need people to contact City Council telling them to vote against this plan. City Council will decide at the end of June, so we only have a few weeks to turn this around.

Could you ask your blog friends to help us? If any of your blog friends are in the Bay Area and want to help in person we are having our first Save Oakland Libraries, Again!

meeting:

Saturday, May 23rd 2:00-3:00
Lakeview Branch Library
550 El Embarcadero
Oakland, Ca 94610

Please email:

Ron Dellums officeofthemayor @ oaklandnet.com
Larry Reid lreid @ oaklandnet.com
Nancy Nadel nnadel @ oaklannet.com
Jean Quan jquan @ oaklandnet.com
Ignacia De La Fuente idelafuente @ oaklandnet.com
Desley Brooks dbrooks @ oaklandnet.com
Jane Brunner jbrunner @ oaklandnet.com
Patricia Kernighan pkernighan @ oaklandnet.com
Rebecca Kaplan atlarge @ oaklandnet.com
Carmen Martinez cmartinez @ oaklandnet.com

Here are some specifics about Lakeview, where you spoke when you visited a few years ago.

Lakeview provides in additon to books, dvds, music cds, wifi, public internet computers, audiobooks, newspapers and magazines:

1 or 2 adult programs a month (booked through April 2010)
Two art galleries, which have exhibits scheduled through October 2010
3 children's story times a week
The Lakeview Writers Group which meets monthly and has done so for many years and has printed out two small volumes of original writings.
The Book Club, which meets monthly and has done so for many years.
1 teen program every other month and often more
A chess club which meets weekly after school and has done so for years
A knitting club for all ages which meets weekly and has done so for years
A new chess club starting monthly meetings on the 3rd Saturday of every month
1 Large special children's program a month and/or 1 Small special crafts children's program a month.
School visits and class visits
Currently we have 15 regular volunteers who donate 3 or more hours a week.
Our garden which surrounds our beautiful small building is totally maintained by volunteers
Over 10,000 people were inside Lakeview in April.2009!

This is a library that deserves to be SAVED!

Thank you, Pamie, if you even have time to read this.

Sincerely,

Mary Eileen Farrell
On my own time
From my own computer

I'm about a million miles from there, obviously (if 1,000,000=3,090) but if any of you live in or near Oakland, or know someone who does, take a moment to speak up for their library system. Times are tough everywhere, and everyone's looking to save money however they can, but it's at times like these that people need libraries more than ever, both for their books and for the other services that they have come to provide (wifi, photocopying, computer access, etc...). They're not cheap to maintain, though, and communities have to make hard decisions. Let your community know that library access is one of your priorities - by speaking up, and by using the library. Take your kids! Take your mom! Take your dog! (Maybe not.) It's fun for the whole family! And it's vital for the whole community.

Holy Crap!

2009-05-17T11:24:00.002-04:00

So, one hundred thousand years ago, I was writing a thesis about Malory's Morte D'Arthur and taking a crash course in Latin so that I could go to graduate school in Medieval Studies. Then I got hit on the head by something very, very heavy (evidently...) and chose to go to law school instead.

Boys and girls, if only that unfortunate accident hadn't befallen me, I could be doing something as cool as Got Medieval. Well, probably not that cool; this guy has a Bacon number of 4 and is fucking hilarious; I'm just angry and sarcastic. I'm telling you all about it because it's awesome, but I'm not sure I can read it ever again because it makes me really, really wish I had gone to grad school instead of doing what I do. Even if this dude and his awesomeness are at yale. It has a cafepress store! With this! Which I clearly desperately need.

I'm gonna go console myself with bread, since it's still too early for beer.

And on the Pale Horse.... The Digital Age. Sigh.

2009-05-17T10:17:00.005-04:00

From the title of this, I expected some of the usual, ubiquitous melodramatic handwringing that has been occurring constantly over the last few years about books, booksellers, print matter generally, and the evils of the digital age. This piece, however, is a little bit more well-thought-out, once you get past the deliberately Luddite and unhelpful description of something called the "Espresso Book Machine," which is apparently an in-store print-on-demand device in use in England.

The author of the piece, Nicholas Clee, gets into quite a bit of detail about the way the publishing industry works - how it obtains its inputs, and what it does with its outputs - that is actually very interesting. Although I think Clee assumes on the part of the read a background that I don't have (partly because he's talking about the UK, obviously), it does seem clear that his point that the way things are currently done is both wasteful and unsustainable, is well-taken.

Like everyone else to take up this topic lately, Clee is a bit short on solutions to the perceived problem. (Don't get me wrong. If actual books stopped existing, I would have a serious problem. And also a lot more money in my pocket.) I'm not sure there is a solution, really, but I think this is at least a step in the right direction of defining the size and shape of the changes that are going on. I'd have liked to see a little more data - I know the piece is musing rather than scholarly - because I think this is an important issue, and I'd like to see more serious, levelheaded treatment of it than I've run across since starting this project.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François

2009-05-04T13:21:00.004-04:00

Have I mentioned before how I don't really cook? I can bake cookies, and make stew in a crock pot, and boil pasta (and then do things involving pasta and cheese). Beyond that, though, I'm an idiot in the kitchen. Even more importantly, though, I'm also incredibly freaking lazy. Why dirty two pans and a baking dish to make a grown-up supper when I could... boil some penne and throw some jar sauce on it? I'm just saying. But Camper occasionally e-mails me and says, "Okay, so in the freezer section at Trader Joe's, there's this salmon, and if you toss it in a pan with some olive oil and..." and then I try it, and it's good, and... then I am lazy again. I am not good at food.

However. When I moved, Camper gave me a book about how you can make bread in five minutes a day. She does this all the time, of course, because she is absurdly handy in the kitchen, and it works great - when she does it. I was not convinced it would work when I did it. First of all, I'm scared of yeast. It's fussy about temperature, and it is kind of weird looking, and sometimes it does positively crazy shit inside the little envelopes. (Hint: don't get the kind in the envelopes.) The catch is that it's kind of an equipment-intensive effort: you need a tupperware vat, first of all, and a place in your fridge for said vat, and then you need a pizza stone and a broiler pan and they strongly suggest you have a pizza peel and then there's calibrating the oven and a serrated knife and also a part where you are POURING HOT WATER INTO A PREHEATED BROILER PAN THAT'S STILL IN THE OVEN. But. There is no kneading. No punching, no poking, no mixers, no up-to-your-elbows in flour, and no loaf pans.

Having finally assembled most of the required items (turns out I'm gonna need a bigger knife, and probably one of them pizza peels, if I can't master the cutting board technique, but more on that later) I gave it a try yesterday. This was the result:

It sort of tripped over itself while it was "sliding" off the back of the cutting board and onto the pizza stone, half-exposing the bottom and causing a lumpy tumor-like protrusion to form on the front side. (I sat in front of the oven and watched it as it baked. It was horror-movie style seepage.) I have a distinct feeling it's easier to handle this kind of thing deftly with a pizza peel, and also when you are not terrified of burning your hands off. Anyway, the result tasted so good I almost ate the entire loaf for supper last night, plain.

This is the beginner recipe that the authors suggest you learn inside-out before moving on to the frillion variations they've tested. It's really stupid easy, but I'm not sure I'd have believed I could do it if Camper hadn't said so. (It's possible I called her all, "Holy crap, my dough is rising!" yesterday afternoon.) My point is, the book makes it sound a little scarier than it actually is. I... wonder if that is actually true of all cookbooks. Anyway, it's good bready fun, and the recipe sits in your fridge quite happily for two weeks and will make three more loaves! Awesome!

Trouble for Templates

2009-05-02T11:36:00.005-04:00

So I finally decided to upgrade my Blogger template from old to new, because I wanted to put in a tag cloud. As you can see, (if you aren't reading this in your RSS...) the tag cloud is... absent, from the space I've so nicely created for it. My HTML skills are pretty basic, but this thing is supposed to be completely idiot-proof, and it's not working for me. Help.

UPDATE: Well, it's working now. Apparently the problem was that it won't handle double quotes, which... doesn't work for me, but I've been at this changeover a while now, and I'm not going back. Unfortunately, the thing is ugly as sin, so now I get to spend more time trying to make it prettier. Argh. Also: I use a lot of tags.

UPDATE UPDATE: Still not sure how I feel about it, but at least the colors are better. In other developments, it seems like there's a long hang time now before the LibraryThing widget loads. Sigh.

His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman

2009-04-26T12:08:00.001-04:00

This is hopelessly late, as I read these in October of last year. I'm not sure why I let this sit in the draft queue so long - I wrote it back in January. At any rate, I'm going to talk about all three books at once, because it's easier, and because I don't have a huge amount to say about them. (Once again, I liked them.)

I'd been curious about the series since The Golden Compass was made into a movie and there was all the hue and cry about whether or not it was anti-Christian and Pullman hates the church and C.S. Lewis and God and blah blah blah blah blah. (I just took a quick tour of the Internet on this subject and if I read the words anti-Inkling ever again it'll be too soon. Good grief. It is a book, boys and girls, not a neutron bomb.) So when I saw a copy in the used section of the bookstore, I picked it up to take to Florida and read on the beach, and I immediately fell in love with Lyra and wanted to know more about her adventures.

I think I'd like to read them again; knowing how the story turns out, knowing who and what Lyra is and what she's meant to do, I think certain pieces that didn't quite fit for me will make more sense on a second reading. As I'm writing this, I'm trying to think of an easy way to explain Pullman's premise, and I'm finding there are gaps in what I remember, but whether that's because there are things left vague in the book or because my brain is like a sieve, I'm not sure. I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the deeper meanings of Pullman's constructs, because I don't think I could do it well and it doesn't really interest me that much anyway, as the Internet is replete with people far crazier than I who've taken over the task quite nicely. But in the linked worlds he's created, God is a sort of dotard monarch who has ceded his authority to a corrupt and grasping regent who has perverted the beautiful things of creation and is in league, basically, with the elements of the world that want to take all the fun out of life. (This is both oversimplified and not totally accurate, probably.) Inside all of this, everyone is concerned about dust, a mysterious and powerful substance that seems to be leaving the world. Or some of the worlds. Or something.

Unfortunately, the story seems to break down as we get deeper into the third book, and the logic starts to fray a little at the edges, or maybe it's just lost on me; this is one of the reasons I think I need to read it again. I understand, basically, the relationship between the worlds and the theory of Physics on which it's based. Actually, right around the time I was reading this, I went to a lecture on the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Wikipedia) and Hugh Everett related to a NOVA film that explains it really excellently. (It was quite clear that I was the dumbest person in that room, and if you can understand the Stanford and Wikipedia links I put up there, you are much smarter than me.) (Everett's son has also recently written a book called Things the Grandchildren Should Know, which I'd like to get my hands on someday.) Right. Anyway. So the basic premise is about as clear to me as it will ever be; like a lot of Physics, it fascinates me, even though the finer, mathier details elude me completely.

Where the god of these worlds fits into this, though, is a little less clear, as is the statement Pullman is making about the relationship of the people in his worlds with that god. Lyra's destined to re-enact the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden, apparently, and the forces at play in the book are striving consciously and unconsciously either to make sure that happens or to make sure it doesn't. And as this part of the plot is slowly revealed, everything gets weirder and weirder. I don't know if the book needed another edit, or if Pullman got lost inside his own story, or if, again, I just failed to grasp what I was reading, but the ending left me confused and wanting a rather plainer explanation.

None of this is to say I don't admire Pullman as a wordsmith and a storyteller; the story is great, and I loved every second of it; I probably will read it again, as soon as I get through everything else on the list. But it left me feeling something was missing, something I secretly suspect another read-through is not going to give me.

On a totally unrelated note, Philip Pullman gave one of the email pep talks for NaNoWriMo this year, and it was really excellent. I haven't read anything else of his, though I am trying to track down locally-sold copies of Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North. (Have since done this; both are also loads of fun.) He's also got other series, some of which have made their way onto one of the Masterpieces on PBS; I'm curious, but they're at the bottom of a very long list right now. Anyway, I highly recommend these. Good fun.

Hopefully, I haven't just earned myself an Internet full of pitchforks.

Telegram!, by Linda Rosenkrantz

2009-04-21T11:12:00.002-04:00

This is another bargain-basement remainder selection from the Harvard Bookstore, the place that I should just sign my paycheck over to every other week.

Telegram! wants to be a fun and informative history of the rise and fall of the telegram as a communication form, but it suffers from poor structure and poor research and writing, and, while entertaining, it ultimately falls short of its goal. I was disappointed with it, but not nearly as disappointed as I'd have been had I paid more than five dollars for it.

Rosenkrantz leads with the funny stuff, which I think is a mistake. She's got some great stuff in there - like a telegram from Cecil B. DeMille to Sam Goldwin, declaring Flagstaff useless for movie purposes and seeking authority to rent a barn in a "place called Hollywood" for seventy-five dollars a month - but, unsurprisingly, this is where all the best stuff is, and I'd have saved it for last. There are telegrams from politicians, great wits of the early twentieth century, famous writers begging their agents for money, movie stars, and others, sometimes with profound messages and sometimes with absurd ones. That part of the book is worth five dollars, but I'd have packaged it differently, and not subtitled it "Modern History as Told Through More than 400 Witty, Poignant and Revealing Telegrams." The other thing that really bugs me here is that many of the funniest or most moving of them aren't fully explained - there's clearly more to the story than what Rosenkrantz offers, but she either couldn't or didn't get it, and chooses not to comment on that lack, which makes it feel either unintentional or callous, neither of which is really a good thing.

Because Rosenkrantz does want this to be a history. Her second section handles historically significant telegrams, mostly wartime (or almost-wartime) messages between heads of state, and to and from the leaders of armies. She gets into the significance of the telegram as a means of military communication, and its development for and because of those purposes - interesting, but not as much fun as the first section.

Finally, in the last section of the book, Rosenkrantz really gets into the history of the medium of telegraphic communication and its development. I can't understand why she didn't lead with this; it would have given so much more context to the first two sections. The funny telegrams are like dessert, but I really, really wished I'd had the history of the medium and the medium's role in history before I ingested the part about all the hilarious things that have been said with it. It continues to bother me a lot, considering the book took maybe three hours to read. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd spend money on it.

However. It makes me want to end every sentence of my text messages with "stop."

Software Breakup

2009-04-18T09:27:00.005-04:00

Is this a blog about books? I forget.

I broke up with Symantec's Norton products a while ago. There's been tension in our relationship ever since I tried to re-up my antivirus subscription... who knows when, really, I don't remember, and it made me download this whole software package that cost like eighty dollars and made my computer about one hundred times slower than it used to be. I finally uninstalled it, and I've never been happier. (That's a lie, but I'm pretty excited about the drastic reduction in the length of time required for the computer to complete its startup sequence and let me check my e-mail, that's for sure.)

I'm also breaking up with Turbo Tax.

It's no secret that I'm a procrastinator. I swore I wasn't going to wait till the 14th to do my taxes this year, and I didn't! Well, not really. I waited till the 10th, when I discovered I didn't have a form I needed, and then it turned out that the office I needed to talk to was closed for Easter Monday (...don't ask, seriously) so I couldn't get the data until Tuesday. Which meant that when I got home from band on Tuesday night (WHAT.) it was time to fire up turbotax.com and do my taxes. No sweat, right? Turbo Tax was built for last minute idiots like me.

My taxes are easy. I can actually do them myself, but without the form I needed, I was a little unsure of my ability to get everything in the right boxes, and since Turbo Tax is free for people like me who make no money and have no assets, it seemed like the right answer. And, given my misadventures with TaxAct last year in trying to file my state return, I figured it was worth the 30 dollars to just get my state return filed and over with. So, around midnight on the 14th, I went to bed, secure in the knowledge that I'd done my civic duty and filed my taxes on time.

At 7:30 on April 15th, I got a message that my state return was rejected, because my Schedule HC was improperly filled out. TurboTax suggested that this was because I am in some way too stupid to follow basic instructions, so I... followed their shitty, obscure, inaccurate instructions to delete my information and start the form over. Aaaand when I got to work on the 16th, my taxes had been rejected AGAIN, for the same error.

It was time to consult the internet. But first, for those of you who aren't Massholes yourselves, Schedule HC is the part of your state taxes where you have to prove you had health insurance or that you couldn't afford it or that your religion makes it unnecessary for you to maintain it, so that you don't pay a penalty for being an uninsured drain on the hospital system. On the one hand, this law is the only way I had coverage at all for most of last year, on account of the unemployedness; on the other hand, I didn't qualify for the free stuff, and even when you go through the state to buy it on your own, it is not cheap. And there are tight deadlines, so I wound up being uninsured for July. And that's where the problem lies.

The form requires you to list your carriers, and to list the months you were covered and not covered. It's pretty simple, actually (despite Turbo Tax's hilarious protestations that you absolutely should not try to fill them out yourself because you might fuck it up, made all the more hilarious by the fact that it cannot itself fill them out correctly). And apparently if you are insured for the whole year, the Turbo Tax folks have you covered. So to speak. But if you were insured for part of the year, and have no gaps in coverage greater than 4 consecutive months, they can't help you. According to the rules, people with gaps shorter than 4 months only have to list their carriers, and are supposed to skip the rest of the form, and that's where Turbo Tax gets hung up. It'll skip the religious exemption parts, but it doesn't skip the affordability part. And, it turns out, if you send in a tax form that has that part filled in, the state won't take it.

How do I know this? I called the DOR on the 16th, and spoke to a very nice guy who explained to me exactly what was wrong. (Turbo Tax was telling me I was fucked up on page 2 of the form, but, in fact, it was on page 3 that I was having issues. Hate.)

For people using the low-end software, Turbo Tax's "support" consists of something called "ask the community" where idiots like you can post questions and have them answered by other random idiots like me. A very quick look let me know I wasn't the only last-minute moron to have this problem, and, in fact, there were plenty of people who couldn't decipher Turbo Tax's instructions on how to "fix" the problem. A deeper look revealed that this has been a problem since...wait for it...February.

Turbo Tax support opens at 11AM Eastern Time and at 11:01 I was on the phone with some poor guy who probably hadn't even finished his coffee, demanding my thirty bucks back and in high dudgeon because not only had I been at this for several days, at this point, but also, I was now in penalty land, 'cause I owed money, and when they reject your return, they... also don't process your payment. Even if what you owe has nothing to do with what's wrong with your return. God bless this guy, 'cause in under five minutes I had an e-mail confirming my refund was being processed. (Hint: I got to an actual human by using the cheaty instructions in the ask the community section that some other disgruntled DOR reject put up. Call the customer service number and when it asks for an incident number punch in any random nine digits, twice. It won't find your info, and it'll send you to a rep. Awesome!)

I was pretty well mollified; my penalty's going to be under $10, it looks like, which isn't great, but whatever, at least it's done, and apparently the state can use the cash. However. When you contact customer support, Turbo Tax sends you a survey about how they did. I dutifully filled it out and clicked "Submit." At which point I got an error message, because something in the survey code is broken. So I'm done. Doing my taxes the old-fashioned way from now on! Hate!

Preemptively Eulogizing the Globe

2009-04-15T20:50:00.005-04:00

I am so tired of media making itself the story. I do not, in fact, care about the impact that covering a story had on a particular journalist. I care about the story. A reporter's job is to report what happened, from an objective point of view, and not to engage in the kind of famewhoring behavior one expects from a reality-show contestant.

That said, the media is the story a lot lately, and legitimately so in some cases. Quite a while ago, the Thingology blog at LibraryThing posted about the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, which put together a video of its last day in existence. As someone who's lost a job and had to abandon projects mid-stream, I had a lot of sympathy for the reporters in the video.

The New York Times Company has recently threatened to shut down the Boston Globe if unions there don't agree to massive cuts on top of what they've already given up, and there's been a lot of back and forth in the media here in Boston about it. In particular, I wound up in the car listening to Radio Boston on WBUR one night... last week? Over the weekend? I'm not sure. Anyway, they were doing an absurdly self-indulgent navel-gazing segment bemoaning the practically inevitable demise of the Globe.

The media's not good at covering itself, and this piece was exactly like all the other pieces out there. In addition to positively tone-deaf vintage ads for the paper, like one putting Dan fucking Shaughnessy and Mike goddamn Barnacle in the same league as Shakespeare (something about great writers working for The Globe, like, har dee har har vomit), there was the usual whining screed about how the internet, blogs, and iPods are ruining the world, disconnecting people from each other and making us more miserable, disconnected, culturally deprived, illiterate morons. I have an iPod and a blog, and you know what? I can also put together a sentence with a subject and a verb that match more reliably than a number of people employed to do such a thing on a daily basis, which is why I don't, in fact, read the paper.

I'd like to be a paper-reader. I'd like to live in a world where sitting with my coffee and the paper in the morning didn't turn me into a raging, red-pen wielding lunatic, but... I don't. I don't have the time for it, I don't have the money for it, and quite frankly, between the mangling of the English language and the content, the news makes me incredibly angry no matter what medium I'm pulling it from. So... I've sort of chosen to stay ignorant. I'm not proud of it, but life is too short to deliberately get myself worked up. So much of what is labeled as news these days isn't actually news, anyway. I do not care about celebrity gossip (or, even worse, reality-show contestant gossip), made-up trends, or how the recession is impacting people who make in a month more than I make in a year. None of this is news.

What irritated me most about the whole segment, which went on for some time, was the continuing helpless bemoaning of the current state of things. Newspapers of the world: Craigslist is not going anywhere. Neither is the Internet. Whining about it only makes you look petulant, unreasonably aged, and totally out of touch with the people whose business you so desperately need.

I don't pretend for a second to have the answers to this problem. People in charge of the Globe and the Times make a lot more money and have a lot more experience in business than I do, and I'd think for what they pull down in a year they ought to be able to come up with some better ideas than whining about how the public is too stupid to appreciate what they're offering. The phrase "lifeblood of the community" was bandied about a great deal in the radio segment, and... methinks the lady doth protest too much, really, because the community's turning away from it and doing just fine. Should the newspaper be the lifeblood of a city? Maybe it should. But, clearly, it's going to have to earn the right to be that, and the Globe doesn't seem to be all that interested in adapting itself to make that happen. I don't really want to live in a Boston where the Herald is the only paper available. The Globe isn't great, but the Herald is a piece of trash, useful only for the amusement value of its absurd headlines and its incorrigible politician-bating. But I work too hard for my money to spend it on the Globe as it is now, and nothing that they have to say about their own impending demise makes want to rethink that position.

Like I said, I don't want to see it go. I'd like to see it transform itself into the kind of well-written, locally-relevant, engaged, engaging, deeply analytical, intelligent, and serious news outlet I think a city of Boston's caliber ought to have. But unless and until it does that, I'm not selling what they're buying. Or buying what they're selling. Whoops.

Tweenbots

2009-04-13T09:42:00.002-04:00

I've got a couple meatier posts in the works at the moment (while I continue to slog away at Moby Dick, and also shut up) but I ran across this in Evil Mad Scientist's linkdump, and it is fascinating. A grad student at NYU has been working on a project involving little tiny robots interacting with random strangers in order to get from point A to point B in New York City. Her first robot's mission - to traverse Washington Square Park - was successful, and involved the help of 29 random people, one of whom actually told the robot out loud that it couldn't go the way it was going because it was towards the road. It's a tiny, crazy, grand social experiment, and I am fascinated.

A Horrifying Ride Down Amnesia Lane

2009-04-05T20:38:00.004-04:00

I'm a pack rat.

There's nothing I can do about it, really; genetically, I'm predisposed to hold onto stuff way past its usefulness, either out of laziness or sentimentality or an irrational fear of getting rid of stuff, or all three. My parents are pack rats too. They've lived in the same house for almost forty years now, and it's crammed to the eaves with weird crap, like Econ texts from 1974 and uncomfortable civil-war era couches and VHS tapes from the Video Connection at Webster Square that have pirated Disney movies and weird-ass cartoons on them. (Does anyone else remember Free to be You and Me? I do, and I'm not sure I want to, but man I loved that movie as a kid. And also Mickey's Christmas Carol, which has these hilarious old McDonald's and toy ads in the commercial breaks...)

Ahem. Anyway. So, I'm on my fifth address in three years, as of this last move. After the second beer-and-pizza move in under fifteen months, I'm no longer the only person in my life for whom that tendency has become titanically inconvenient. Not only do I have seven hundred books, I have two giant plastic bins full of craft supplies and another couple full of extra blankets, as well as a kitchen full-to-busting with dishes and pots and pans. I have a Bundt pan. Do you know how many times in the last thirty years I've made a Bundt cake? None. No times. Same goes for the angel food cake pan. I have eight loaf pans! And not the tiny cute ones, either. No, these are no-nonsense aluminum ones. Well, and the glass one that I really can't live without. And don't forget the melamine one for the microwave! (One thing I don't have: a microwave.) Also six round cake pans. Last time I made a layer cake? 2001. Two pizza pans! (I had three, but left the grossest one at my old apartment.) I have a box full of glassware that belonged to my Nanna and is too fragile to use. I have a broken bunny rabbit in a basket that someone gave me for my first Easter, thirty-one Easters ago. Am I ever going to glue the handle back on? Probably not. Can I throw it out? ...It's in a ziploc in my study right now. No. No, I cannot. (Camper put her foot down, though, when it came to the rubber troll-in-a-barrel that one of my exes brought back from Norway one time, back when we all drank enough gin on a regular enough basis to make such a thing hilarious. It is now being hilarious at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.)

Anyway. It was agreed (by people who are not me) that the most illogical and irritating part of my packrattitude is the part where I have been lugging around a 1997-vintage Dell desktop that I haven't turned on since 2002 and a ten-pound ugly-ass laptop I haven't used since 2005. ...Yeah, I don't know what their problem was, either.

In my defense, I felt that I needed to wipe the hard drives clean before I put an ad on Craigslist saying, "It's in a box on the sidewalk; trash man cometh at 8AM, so get it while it's hot." Such a thing takes time (...if only I'd known how much, I might not have made it a project for this weekend) and I kept putting it off for a litany of reasons, involving floppy drives and "but it was the first big thing I bought with MY OWN MONEY" and the four hundred feet of cable involved in the desktop and hey, weren't the power cords for the laptop recalled because they might burn your house down? But yesterday, I bit the bullet.

An old computer is like a really, really embarrassing time capsule. I thought some really truly mortifying, inane stuff was important when I was 19. And apparently I still thought it was vitally important when I was 22, because when I shut the stupid thing down for the last time, I had decided it was all too important to delete. (Fortunately, this meant that I had a D-drive - remember partitioned hard drives? - full of old music I thought I'd lost. Unfortunately, it meant reacquainting myself with the knowledge that I thought somebody's .plan was significant enough to copy into a word document and save, probably in a drunken haze, during my senior year of college. Oops.) Thank GOD I never downloaded the contents of my college e-mail account when I had the chance.

So I transferred everything off the desktop onto the old laptop, because the new laptop (...yeah, it's not really new anymore...) won't talk to the desktop; it's too worried about its street cred. But I knew from past experience that the old laptop would talk to my flash drive, so I figured I was set. More on that in a second, but first, the MS-DOS follies. I handily reformatted the D drive, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself, and followed instructions to format the C drive using the DOS prompt. Was I sure? I was going to lose all the data on Drive C. Hell yes, I said, Y key in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Format away! It went brilliantly, and then I put the boot disk in the A drive to reinstall Windows 95. (WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?)

Nothing happened.

Okay, that's not precisely true. What happened was, the DOS spit back all this stuff about an error in line 8 and the command.com file was missing or corrupted and could I type the location of the command.com file. It turned out I could not, but I figured it was no sweat because I could pop the CD into the CD drive and do it that way.

Turns out the CD drive no longer opens. Oops!

I should point out that not only is this computer almost old enough to start high school, it's also spent the last two years in two dank, nasty, dusty, damp, stinky, gross basements. Before that, it lived in an assortment of closet bottoms, unused and unloved. It has not seen the inside of a proper box since I came home for the summer in 1998. It has been driven hundreds of miles sitting on the floor of the backseat of my car. In short, it has been ill-used. At any rate, nothing I told the DOS prompt made any difference in its inexorable refusal to load Windows again, and... then the computer took away my DOS prompt. I suppose it (correctly) discerned that I had absolutely no fucking idea what to do with it anyway, and that, if one of us was going to get hurt, it should probably be me. I... can't say I disagree with that logic.

So I put the thing on Craigslist, loosely claiming that it was running DOS and came with all the original documentation and software if you wanted it. Within fifteen minutes approximately four hundred crazy people were trying to convince me they were going to give it a good home, like it was a kitten, or something. Y'all... It is a twelve-year-old computer. I am giving it away for free because I want it to leave my life as quickly and as hassle-free-ly as possible. The fact that you want to give it to your twenty-year-old daughter for her birthday is either a really terrible lie or the saddest fucking thing I have heard in my life.

Anyway, that accomplished, I went to work on the old laptop, which, it turns out, sometime between 2005 and now, had stopped speaking to the flash drive, over what real or imagined insult I cannot possibly say. This was at about eight. At eleven, I was recklessly downloading drivers and cursing, hunched over the coffee table and trying to coax files from one stubborn old coot of a computer to the other.

Ultimately, seventeen rounds of hard drive removal and forty yards of USB cable later, we were watching 8 gigs of hard drive take a frillion years to wipe clean. (We'd decided that perhaps reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows 98 was not the right answer, not that that decision saved us any damn time.)

Happily, I was able to unload both albatrosses in one fell swoop, and there are now approximately forty fewer pounds of random, useless crap in my life. And now I am watching the latest installment in the Festival of Dickens on Masterpiece Whatever-the-Fuck (it's the Laura Linney version; I forget which one that is). This week's offering is Little Dorrit, which appeared in this space previously as a perfectly hilarious example of the great Dickens's work, and which is extremely well done.

Truck Day Can't Come Soon Enough.

2009-03-09T20:29:00.004-04:00

...Previously in this space, there appeared some splenetic and wine-fueled rantings. Sorry about that...

No, not that Truck Day. I know that one happened a while ago. It's my own personal truck day that means I'm moving out of Slummerville and to the heaven of Watertown.

So, things are going to be scantier than usual around here. (Also, y'all, Moby Dick is kind of a slog. I am having a really hard time getting through it.) I'm packing packing packing, and cleaning up a storm. ...In other news, check out method cleaning products. They smell amazing, and work just as good as the regular stuff. They are not as cheap, but they are environmentally friendly *and* come with witty text! Love!

Update on Tucker, and Some Other Fun Stuff

2009-02-27T12:55:00.004-05:00

Somehow, this is becoming a blog about Tucker's urinary tract. Oops. Little dude finished up his first round of meds on Tuesday night, and was still doing much better, but demonstrably not back to normal. I had talked to my regular vet on Tuesday afternoon, and her take was, "Well, sometimes they need to be on the bladder spasm meds for a little longer; keep an eye on him and bring him in if it keeps up." Which... that last bit is sort of what they had to say at the vet's office when this whole mess started. So I called the hospital that took care of him, and they were like, "Yeah... you know what? Bring him in." So. Back to Woburn, where they took a pee sample and sent us home with antibiotics and more bladder spasm meds. His Fatness got himself a little infection, and now we're doing two pills twice a day, but the improvement has been rather dramatic. Phew. I? Love the Massachusetts Referral Veterinary Hospital. The staff there are fantastic (I'm pretty sure Tucker stayed sick 'cause he has a crush on the doctors; he has NEVER been so calm at the vet as he was Wednesday night) and incredibly compassionate. I can't say enough nice things about them.

In other news, I am reading about seventeen books at once right now. One of them, The Lie that Tells A Truth, by John Dufresne, is so fantastic I kind of can't wait to talk about it, even though I'm only on page 37. Dufresne is a Worcester boy and so close a contemporary of my mother's I'm surprised she doesn't know him personally (though they were from opposite ends of the city and therefore went to different churches). This particular book of his is about writing, about being a writer, about how using alchemy on memories and stories and words to turn them into fiction, into something real. I am in love with it. His style is strange and faintly crazy and so appealing, and there is something about listening to him talk about places in my hometown and having that moment of, "I know where that is!" and remembering my childhood in the redheaded stepchild of New England cities that is so comforting and wonderful. I think, even if you don't particularly care to become a writer, that this is a fun read and you should check it out. I will have more to say once I've read the other 9/10ths of the book, but I am at work, I am bored, and I am really, really excited about this book.

Three Decades of Nonsense

2009-02-21T16:53:00.004-05:00

I've once again disappeared without meaning to. There are a couple of reasons for this. I've been dealing with some cat problems, is the biggest one. We've got three cats in our house. My two little oranges, who have made previous appearances in this space, and The Smuggler's beautiful Maine coon, who has not. My cats were not wild about cohabiting with a third feline, but for the first eleven months we lived here, things were going fine. Then, in January, someone started peeing in places that cat pee is not supposed to go.

At first, we thought it was just the tree skirt. But it started happening in my room, too, and it didn't take long to catch Tucker in the act. Do you know what happens when your cat is peeing inappropriately? The vet gives you a baggie full of plastic litter granules and a syringe and tells you to get a pee sample. Which, it turns out, the cat who was peeing every damn where refused to give. When, a week later, I was finally able to suck some up off the hardwood with the syringe and take it to the vet, it came back normal, and the vet and I concluded it was angry pee.

Well, it wasn't. A week later Tucker was as sick as I've ever seen a cat. He spent last weekend at the wonderful vet hospital in Woburn, Mass, and now he's home, as ornery as ever and eating the kind of food your cat has to eat when he gets a urinary obstruction before he's two years old. Here's a glamour shot of his giant, naked belly (he got him an ultrasound, because they initially thought he had bladder stones).

So that took up a lot of emotional energy, and pilling Tucker is not, as it turns out, the most fun you can have with a cat. I'm exhausted, and I think, so is he. But he's doing much, much better.

Tucker came home from the hospital on my thirtieth birthday.

Anyway, so there's that. Plus, I'm reading Moby Dick, so it's gonna be a while before I have anything bookish to say. Last night my friend The Good Doctor and I went to a comedy show at a Chinese restaurant and drank our weight in scorpion bowls, and I don't know if it's that I'm woefully hungover or what, but when I saw this story about ironworkers putting the names of child cancer patients on the I-beams they're building a new building at Dana-Farber with, I burst into tears.

So that's what I've been up to. I feel like shit, and it turns out I'm too old to drink all night, even if I did get carded on the way in. Gah.

Links for Friday

2009-02-06T07:33:00.005-05:00

I have a couple of fun links I've been saving for a rainy day, and I figure I frozen day when I don't actually want to get off the couch and put on clothes so I can go to work is approximately the same thing.

The first is Evil Mad Scientist Labs, which is so crazy I don't even know how to describe it, but where else can you learn how to make mobius strip circuit boards, zombie stuffed horses, and shortbread cookie valentine hearts? I think Google Reader turned me on to them (either that, or something else in my reader linked to them) and I am totally not either tech- or kitchen-savvy enough to try anything that they do in there, but the things they do are hilarious and they play with all sorts of fun fancy techy stuff that I didn't even know existed.

Next up is the blog Pink Slip which I totally need to add to the sidebar one of these days when I get around to doing the link upkeep I've been neglecting lately. The woman who writes the blog, Maureen Rogers, is a contemporary (generationally speaking) of my mother's, and not only that, but she's from the very same neighborhood where my mother grew up and with which I associate almost my entire childhood. She posts interesting, insightful and witty thoughts about the state of the economy, corporate excess, and commercial stupidity. I've been following it for about a month now, ever since she posted about the Woolworth's at Webster Square in Worcester. The Woolworth's was gone by the time I remember the plaza. I guess it was a pretty miserable little strip mall, but for me it was full of fun and adventure - there was a fabric store and a craft store, and a Hallmark store where my dad would let us run wild picking out birthday cards for various relatives. (I would always pick out the prettiest card, regardless of what sort of occasion it was actually for; I suspect my relatives got a lot of sympathy and wedding cards for their birthdays when I was small...) I remember being at the Zayre's there, in the middle of a horrifying rainstorm that had literally turned the giant, sloped parking lot into a wide, fast-moving river, shopping for... jelly shoes. Clear ones with embedded silver sparklies, if I recall correctly. God, what a horrifying fad. I think the last time I was at Webster Square I was hurriedly picking up unsalted butter and heavy cream to take to a friend's house one New Years' Eve so I could make scones for breakfast the next morning. Most of the stores I remember are long gone now. (Zayre's was replaced by Ames, which went out of business in like 2003.) Anyway. Pink Slip is well-written and thoughtful, and worth a read or a spot in your reader.

The Disappearance, Efrem Sigel

2009-02-05T16:24:00.006-05:00

This is my second LibraryThing Early Reviewers book, and I'm not as impressed with it as the first. So far, there are three other reviews up over on LT, and everyone seemed to like it a great deal more than I did, so I wonder if I've been unnecessarily harsh to the guy. But I did feel really strongly that he had what could have been a great story, and he just couldn't get out of his own way in the telling of it.

Those of you who have been following along know I'm from central Massachusetts; to be more specific, I am from a microscopic town west of Worcester with exactly one traffic light, two churches, and three police cars. (It also has three cemeteries. Apparently it's a better place to be dead than alive.) It does not have a post office, a gas station, a pharmacy, or a high school; it does, however, have a Dunkin Donuts, which is how you know you haven't completely fallen off the face of the earth. All this is in the service of saying, "I know from small towns."

Sigel, though he would like you to think he knows from small towns, does not. His patronizing, superior description of the hamlet he's created, in a geographically suspect part of my fair state, reads like he learnt everything he knows about small-town New England from watching Gilmore Girls. (The Stars Hollow town meetings were hilariously awesome, and nothing like any town meeting I ever had the misfortune to attend, but Sigel fails to temper his outright contempt for the participatns with anything like the sympathy and humanity with which the Gilmore Girls writers infused their gentle satire.) So... Sigel kind of lost me around page five, I guess, and it's not that I can't bear to hear anything against what I'm sure can appear to be a baffling way of doing business, but... we in New England have been at this for hundreds of years and haven't fallen into the ocean yet, so maybe you want to dial back the contempt a notch. That Sigel holds up outsider New Yorkers as a rational alternative to the small-minded townies is another strike against him; that trope has been played out hundreds of times by more skillful writers, and the man he chooses to be the hero in that tired big city/small town faceoff - Joshua Sandler - comes across as too weak, unnecessarily combative, and compensating to shoulder this burden adequately. (He also later turns out to be a philandering idiot, which loses him a milliard of points in my book.) It's not even clear what Sigel wants the reader to take away from his banally evil Board of Selectmen; Josh gets his GO CHILDREN SLOW sign, and life goes on, and... nobody cares, the end.

The disappearance that is the subject of the title is the disappearance of Dan, son of the philandering Josh and his nervous wreck of a cellist wife Nathalie. But the book is less about Dan's disappearance than it is about the effect of the disappearance on Josh and Nathalie, and, as such, it has an interesting premise. What does such a thing do to a person, to a marriage? But I don't think Sigel was able to draw a convincing or compelling portrait of it. There are glimpses of Josh and Nathalie that make them feel like real people, but in between, it feels like Sigel is ticking off a list: 1) husband becomes obsessed with tracking down witnesses 2) wife withdraws emotionally and sexually 3) husband has an affair 4) wife takes Prozac 5) husband becomes paranoid 6) wife takes more Prozac... and so on. Nothing about it feels organic or connected, and honestly I think that's a flaw throughout the book.

It feels obnoxious to complain about it, but Sigel doesn't have a feel for naming people or places. Boring, unimaginative, incongrous names, of which Nathalie and Collegeville are only two, pull me out of the story. His adult dialogue is okay, but he has no sense of how teenagers talk or act, and this comes to a head when he has, in quick succession, several local teens describing to the police chief what happened the day Dan disappeared, using the present tense. It's unnatural and it's jarring, and it only serves to draw attention to the fact that Sigel's underlying mystery (what actually happened to Dan?) is not especially tightly constructed. His inapt metaphors serve the same purpose - you get pulled out of the story, wondering how the police chief who moonlights as a mall cop is familiar enough with cappucino machines to liken Nathalie's emotions to one - while also making you kind of hate his writing. (My favorite is when Nathalie bobs "like a dinghy" during sex. Sigel has trouble deciding how frank he wants to be about Josh's sexual escapades, vacillating between crass and something more vanilla, but... whatever image he was going for with this one is just not right.)

Like most poorly-constructed plots, this one wraps up a little too neatly; the missing piece was, as always, there all along if only someone had thought to look for it, and the red herrings are as red and stinky as you'd expect. Much is made of a land-development deal that Josh was involved in; although you are meant to view the sentiment against it as a possible explanation for Dan's disappearance, it's quite clear that literally no one, even Sigel, believes someone would actually kidnap a kid to stop a resort from being built; it's a halfhearted way of filling out the book, because part of the stress on Josh and Nathalie is the not knowing, and so they have to keep not knowing long enough for that to play out.

I wanted to like the book, and I think there was a good story here; I don't think Sigel is entirely untalented, but I think he needed either a little more honest criticism from someone he trusted or a little bit of a heavier hand from his editor in order to make it a story really worth reading. If early returns are any indication, I'll be in the minority on this on LT, but his writing just isn't that good.

Fun with Words!

2009-01-31T21:35:00.005-05:00

Lovely reader KJ always sends the best links. Save the Words is like the Compendium of Lost Words, but more proactive. I adopted the word "rimestock," which is an almanac written in runes. I'm going to try to work it casually into conversation every day from now on. Go adopt a word! (And turn on your speakers. Trust me, just do it.)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

2009-01-30T15:20:00.002-05:00

Somehow, We Have Always Lived in the Castle manages to be both delightful and incredibly creepy. Jackson's narrator, Mary Katherine, leads the reader on a tour of sociopathology, horrifying groupthink, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and crippling agoraphobia as she and her sister Constance tremble through their lives as social outcasts, objects of fear and loathing but themselves fearing and loathing the village outside which their castle sits. Much as in Jackson's most widely-read short story, "The Lottery," the reader is presented with an upsetting view of social structure gone nightmarishly awry. The book is dark and upsetting, but also a quick, engaging, and brilliantly-written.

Johnathan Lethem's introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition offers some insights into Jackson's inspiration for the novel and the way in which Jackson is viewed as having split her own personality into the two Blackwood daughters. I rather wish I'd saved the introduction until after reading the book, as I think Lethem's lengthy discussion of the parallels between this story and "The Lottery" deprive the reader to some degree of discovering what is really going on under Mary Katherine's serious and rambling narration.

This is not in any way to say that Lethem's introduction isn't interesting; like most people, I read "The Lottery" in school (unlike most people, I suspect, that school was middle and not high school) and was shocked and upset by it, Although my junior high English teacher, who was singularly awesome, was a huge fan of Poe and the verb "to die," I was totally unprepared for the denouement, unable even until the last possible second to understand what was about to happen. I re-read it after reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, because of Lethem's introduction, and... there is a lot to be repulsed by in that story, in terms of what's going on. I grew up in one of those small New England towns, and Jackson did an amazing job of rendering that slightly oppressive, invasive atmosphere where everyone knows everyone else's business. I don't know if it appeals to you in quite the same way if you haven't had that experience, but I think that feeling of instant familiarity that I encountered when I read the story for the first time made the revelation of what the lottery actually was that much more traumatizing.

This novella is different from the short story in many ways, but Lethem notes that both are drawn from Jackson's experiences living in (and feeling outcast from) a small New England town with a stifling atmosphere. These tiny, seemingly sleepy places become sinister and menacing; to me it feels like all the other characters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle inhabit some kind of Bradburyesque landscape (though perhaps that is only because one of the most upsetting scenes in the novel involves the town fire department), like they've been imported from some other universe... and, of course, they have; the Blackwood sisters and their enormous house exist in a completely separate intellectual and psychological space than the rest of the town.

I remember talking in a Shakespeare class once about the scene and the "obscene," the out-of-the-scene, where the sense - and I'm not sure this is linguistically or lexically supportable, but bear with me - was that the obscene was a place where normal strictures didn't apply and anything could happen. (My recollection is that this was in connection with A Midsummer's Night Dream, because I connect it up with "If we shadows have offended / think but this and all is mended," but I might be wrong about that.) For both the Blackwood sisters and the loathed, loathing townspeople, each others' turf is the obscene. In town, Mary Katherine can allude to the ghastly murders at the Blackwood estate, and engage in behavior openly intended to keep the townspeople away; at home, these things are kept silent and attended to with secret, magical measures on Mary Katherine's part. By contrast, on the front lawn of the girls' house, the townspeople can give full vent to their terror and blind, almost frenzied hatred of the girls which in town is confined to just edging out over the established limits of politeness.

Jackson is very good at letting the reader see only what she wants him or her to see until the time is right for the revelation she wishes to make. As I said, Lethem's introduction, by hinting darkly at various things, undercuts that some and deprives the reader of the horror of discovery in a way that is unfortunate. But the story itself is excellent; it feels weird to call it an enjoyable read, because it is so creepy, but it totally was.

Charming Billy, Alice McDermott

2009-01-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

This is another of my October reads I'm just now getting around to writing up, for no good reason, because it was really good.

McDermott gives us the story of Billy's life third hand, from the daughter of a cousin he was close with, and she does a great job of creating that sort of unearthly mythological moss that grows over family stories as they are passed down and retold and retold and retold. I don't know if all families have these stories, but mine sure does, of how grandparents met through friends or in line at the Park Theater, how people went missing in floods or train accidents and reappeared unexpectedly alive, of hardships and absurd living situations and tragedies and triumphs that form part of the family history but are still stories that happened to other people, stories out of which some of the detail and color has leached in the intervening years, stories into which the intervening years have inserted secrets and subsequent events and what-really-happeneds, and if you have a family like that, you will feel right at home in this book.

The story itself is pretty ordinary, Billy is your standard Irish drunk, charming and tragic and always trying but never quite managing to reform himself; his long-suffering wife is everywife, doing what she's got to do to get it done, but a minor character in the constellation of mythological figures surrounding Billy, a hard little nut sitting stiffly on the periphery of things. What makes the story special is the way McDermott tells it, through the cousin's daughter, who, it turns out, is telling the story to her husband (fiance? I don't remember) in exactly the way I have explained to friends and boyfriends the horrifying and hilarious story of my own family. It's subtle, and brilliant, and instantly accessible. I've strayed from my purpose, at this point, and am reading way too much stuff that I like. Sorry about that folks!

Password to Larkspur Lane, Carolyn Keene

2009-01-07T13:41:00.001-05:00

Oh, Nancy Drew. I have a handful of these in my collection, some from when I was younger, some I've bought as I've seen the most recent release available used or remaindered.

I loved these as a kid. I think I read all of them and most of the Nancy Drew Case Files where Nancy was much more of an 80s girl and wore pants and drove something a little more modern than a roadster, and the mysteries were a little less quaint. I get that they're kids books, but... they are not good, y'all. There are some serious plot holes. I guess it is not really a surprise that I was reading Agatha Christie by the time I was ten. They're fun for a trip down amnesia lane, and they are absolutely unintentionally hilarious? But wow. I cannot believe there are like seventy of them and they sold like crazy for years and years and years. My god.

I think I love this lady.

2009-01-06T22:29:00.003-05:00

I do not know this woman personally, but Women Do! is the awesomest thing I have read in quite some time. Everything I would say on the subject, she's saying better, so go check it out. And SHUT UP, Boston Globe.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road, M.S. White

2009-01-04T12:39:00.005-05:00

I went to town on this one over at LibraryThing; it is without question one of the worst books I have ever read. The subtitle is "A Harvard Psychologist's Guide to Becoming a Superstar," which probably tells you everything you need to know, but it was recommended to me as a collection of stories about how successful people had recognized their strengths and weaknesses and failings and such and used that knowledge to their advantage in the course of becoming successful.

There's a little bit of that in the book, but not in any kind of coherent form or sequence. White married herself to an absurd, literal, chronological parallel with the movie The Wizard of Oz, and breaks up her narration with life lessons you're supposed to draw from the movie - which seem to me to be missing the point, as they are entirely focused on the way Dorothy and her companions use each other, rather than on the more uplifting message about friendship and cooperation I've always taken from that film - and then breaks up the life stories of her chosen superstars into random, isolated anecdotes which she fails to analyze in any meaningful way that would allow a reader to apply the lessons in his or her own life.

Having said all that, I'm just going to make fun of some of the absurd crap she says in the book. In re: Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton has always loved campaigning. He is fascinated by people and the stories that they tell. After his first campaign trip for public office, her returned home "higher than a kite."

I think if that had been on page 25 instead of 205 I would have put the book down, because anyone who can quote President Clinton saying such a ridiculous thing without a hint of irony or self examination is a humorless, fatuous idiot.

She also holds up Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, as a continual example of how to be a totally awesome businessperson. And there is no denying that the guy built himself an empire and was very good at what he does. That said... the only people who want to be good at doing the kinds of things his company has become infamous for doing (mistreating workers, selling cheap and crappy merchandise, driving local merchants out of business, undercutting wages, busting unions, and generally profiting off the misery and misfortune of others) have absolutely no soul. So please, tell me more about how I should be emulating the guy. A large part of White's message seems to involve focusing on your own success, regardless of the cost to others, and she actively advises that you identify people you can use, and use them shamelessly to promote your own interests. Awesome.

Or, how about Bill Gates. This is priceless:

Bill Gates would still be working on his original DOS operating system if he had insisted that it be perfect. Software for large computer systems is complex and there are so many ways in which bugs can arise that it is impossible to produce a perfect product. Bill Gates' [sic] approach is to develop good products and then work out the bugs that appear as people use the software.

(I... guess she didn't talk to Steve Jobs at all.) Again, if you want to be wealthy and infamous, and you are also not bothered by a total lack of narrative coherence, this is probably your book; otherwise, leave it the hell alone. White also has a spectacularly horrifying section about people with bad tempers, in which a future pediatric neurosurgeon stabbed his friend in the stomach in 9th grade in a fit of pique one time, and... somehow faced no consequences, or at least none that we're told of, but the situation totally forced him to get a grip on his anger. And then some other doctor who almost got himself court-martialled (?) for questioning a senior doctor at the NIH, and who - as White tells the story - became obsessed not with helping the patient whose condition sparked the fight, but with proving the senior doctor to be wrong. It's entirely unclear to me what these are supposed to be examples of, but as far as I'm concerned, it's of nothing good.

It would be interesting and probably helpful to be able to draw concrete, widely-applicable lessons from the lives of successful people. I think such a thing might be easier to do in a context of linear, coherent biographies of perhaps rather fewer than fifty-two separate "superstars," as White repeatedly calls them, but ultimately, this is a meandering, disjointed, poorly written, poorly structered, self-congratulatory, fatuous, totally unironic piece of tripe. It was not worth the money I spent on it nor the time I took to read it.

As a side note, it features a preposterous cover with the gang in a red convertible, Dorothy in sunglasses at the helm, the Tin Man riding shotgun with a... laptop?, Toto drooling out the backdoor on the Scarecrow's lap (and who knows that the fuck he's doing; it's a complete mystery), with the Cowardly Lion wearing stupid giant red boxing gloves, and a lot of tripe about how the insufferable Mitzi White is a JD and a PhD and an instructor at Harvard Med. It's a good thing she lets us know through numerous unsubtle hints, 'cause you'd never guess she was a fucking supergenius otherwise.

Careless In Red, Elizabeth George

2009-01-03T14:45:00.000-05:00

I've got a lazy day and I'm trying to catch up some on the enormous stretch of Year 2 books I've read and not written up. I don't know why I never posted this, as it was nearly complete BACK IN AUGUST, but here it is, anyway. Sigh.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to post one last time about Elizabeth George. Careless in Red is her latest Inspector Lynley mystery, and it does really show up her strengths. It's a complex mystery, with a flotilla of suspects and and an unexpected twist putting one person's selfish, vengeful, slightly demented actions at the center of two deaths decades apart, one of them her own son. George is good at setting up a seemingly random event and then creating the layers of backstory to dig through for the ultimate cause. She's also good at deflecting attention from the chosen murderer without making you feel too much like that's what she's doing - though, I think, how she does this is by having so many characters (i.e., potential suspects) to focus on that you can't be sure where to look or who to believe. She shows you lots of characters with erratic behavior and something to hide, and she's good at making that interesting rather than tedious.

Her characters, though, aren't really that complex. Oh, they have complex histories, and complex reasons for the weird shit they do, but they themselves are not that complicated. They tend to be pretty flat - not predictable, exactly, but unreal, two-dimensional, inserted into the story for a specific purpose, though it may take a while to figure out what that purpose is. Ultimately, it's all verbal sleight-of-hand. It makes for good reading, but I'm not sure it means that she's a master mystery-writer. It also... kind of means you don't care about the characters who aren't Havers and Lynley, which is fine, but since Havers and Lynley are not really the focus of this book (or the last one), it is starting to wear on me.

Joker One, Donovan Campbell

2009-01-01T18:18:00.007-05:00

Happy New Year!

Despite my promises, I've been neglecting both my reading and my writing this month, between the holidays and the goddamn frozen chicken parts, but I finally finished a book to write about.

LibraryThing, which I love, has an Early Reviewers program where members can enter a lottery for (free!) copies of newly- or about-to-be-released books which they are then obligated to review on LT, and Joker One is my first such book.

I was surprised to get it. I requested it purely because it sounded interesting, not imagining that I'd be a good match for it, as I seldom read memoir, nevermind military memoir (though I do have a lot of crap about the American Civil War). LT has an algorithm which chooses reviewers based on the content and organization of their libraries, and, as it's been explained to me, it figures out who among the interested potential readers has a library the book is most likely to fit into, subject- and genre-wise. (This is a gross oversimplification, there is math and computer programming, I do not understand it, please do not ask me.) I do not know what it is I have in my library that makes LT think I'm a great match for a book about a Princeton grad who became a Marine and spent five months in Ramadi in 2004, but I'm glad it did.

The book is tough to read in places. Campbell doesn't varnish what happened, and the details are bluntly gory on a number of occasions. I mean, I don't have some trite thing to say about how you see the war happening on TV but this made me understand it a lot more, because that is not the case, though it certainly made me understand it differently. What's clear to me after reading this book is that no three-minute story on the NBC Nightly News or whatever is going to give you any kind of a picture of what life is like for anyone in Iraq, and even five years of three-minute stories isn't going to do that for you. There are a lot of stories, none of them are pretty, most of them are terrible, and any of them that purport to give you a right answer to the problems of war, of terrorism, of Iraq specifically, are full of crap.

Campbell's prose isn't perfect; he loves the phrase "the fog of war" a little too much, and there are places where I have stylistic quibbles, but it's straightforward, easy prose, and he is, I think, unstintingly honest and remarkably un-self-aggrandizing throughout. Campbell does a good job of giving you a sense of what he and his guys were trying to do without getting into American politics, armed forces politics, Iraqi politics, or world politics. Though it would be easy to stray into that repeatedly in telling any story about the war, he avoids it, and I think that's one of the things that makes his narrative as strong as it is. He does a good job of portraying the confusion and frustration of being in a combat zone - something M*A*S*H did comically - in a businesslike and evenhanded way. The biggest flaw in the book, in my opinion, is the first chapter, which he notes is intended to bring the reader into the heart of his platoon's life in Iraq, but which is really just off-putting, full of stilted prose, aiming at being cinematic but really just sounding awkward and kind of pompous. I started reading on the subway one morning, and I was like, "Oh, god, if I have to get through three hundred pages of this guy angling for a scriptwriting gig and describing geometric fucking ironwork I am never requesting another ER book again," but that tone and style disappear instantly in Chapter 2 and never come back, so if you pick this up, don't let the opening pages deter you. (You... can't pick it up till March, though.)

There were two big things that Campbell left unexplained that I'd like to know more about. He's a little close-lipped about why he decided to join the Marines. Though the blurb for the Early Reviewers program and the back cover both note that he's a Princeton grad, he never mentions that in the book, and one of the things that intrigued me was his path to the Marines. I think he - possibly quite rightly - left out any explanation of that as irrelevant, and I suspect it would not be interesting to the majority of people, but Random House is harping on it a little, and it's a little odd.

The second thing is Campbell's faith, which plays a pretty important role in his leadership of the platoon and in his own feelings about his responsibility for them and his participation in the war. Campbell is open about his faith but never preachy or evangelical about it, which I think is a wonderful... trick, for lack of a better word, I guess; that's not easy to do, but he's equal to the task. (I may be explaining this poorly. You don't get the sense he's trying to evangelize you as a reader, but he also is not apologetic or demure about it; it's a fact, much like everything else he tells the reader.) What we don't get, though, is a grounding or context for it, and I'd have been interested to know whether it's routine for Marines to have a platoon prayer before each mission (you get the sense that it is, but it's not stated directly) and whether his faith was something he came to the Marines with or something that developed after he joined. Similarly, though Campbell is clear that being in combat has had an impact on how he understands his own faith and the nature of god, it's less clear what that impact is because he doesn't give us a baseline. Again, this is probably not relevant to the story, but I kept waiting for him to offer some sort of context, even in passing, and I wish he had, because - as a nosy person - I find that stuff interesting. Probably, the book is better, and more appealing on a wider basis, for his not having done so. The marketing notes on the back cover of the advance review copy note that Christian websites are part of Random House's marketing campaign as well, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that.

Joker One has a website; I haven't been, because I am pretty sure I don't want to know what the AV component of this book looks like, but it apparently contains some background information about the people portrayed in the book and some helps for people (like me) unfamiliar with military terminology. I will say the book does a great job with that stuff - Campbell takes a lot of care to make sure to pull the reader in on the military jargon he uses, and to explain what things are and how they work, which is enormously helpful, and the book includes a map of Ramadi, a dramatis personae, and a glossary - and I didn't find it difficult to understand at any point what was going on, despite my total unfamiliarity with all things military and Iraqi. I didn't expect to really enjoy the book - and it still seems wrong to say I enjoyed a nonfiction book about a war, particularly one that's still going on - but it was a good and interesting read, and well worth the time it took. It's being released on March 10 of this year, for those of you interested in picking it up.

Hopefully with the holidays over I'll settle back into some more regular reading and writing on this site. I hope all of you had wonderful holidays and that your new years are looking bright and shiny and full of promise. I, for one, couldn't be happier to be quit of 2008 and its extra goddamned second.

Don't Get Your Car Towed.

2008-12-08T21:45:00.003-05:00

Don't ever get your car towed. First of all, it's embarrassing. It's also expensive. And the horrible sinking feeling of coming back to the place where you left your car and FINDING NO CAR THERE is awful awful awful.

Not that I'm speaking from experience, or anything. (Helpful hint #2: don't park in a 24-hour tow zone.)

However, if you do happen to get towed, you should make sure you are getting towed by Phil's Towing of 333 Webster Avenue in Cambridge. They are the nicest people in the world and they take Mastercard, and they do not give you a hard time even when you are an idiot and park in a 24-hour tow zone. Again, not that I am speaking from experience. Anyway, they are wonderful (I... they towed my car and I had to pay them $115 to get it back. I cannot believe what a positive experience it was) and they also tow when your car is broken, not just when you are stupid.

In other news, I started temping last week. The job is mindnumbingly boring and a lot of the paperwork is about frozen chicken parts. And the office is approximately as warm as a meat locker. Gah.

And Now For Something Completely Self-Indulgent

2008-11-27T19:42:00.005-05:00

It's 7:45 on Thanksgiving night. I've gorged myself on turkey, squash, stuffing, Italian soup, Italian cheese, potatoes, Italian cookies, and pie. The Upstairs Family Holiday Horror Show was less horrible and more family-filled than usual, and I didn't get stuck in any of the crazy holiday traffic. I'm sitting on my bed in my blessedly empty apartment, reading about what other people are thankful for, and it occurs to me that there are a number of things I am thankful for too. So, in no particular order:

I am thankful for my Grandmother, who, at 90, had five glasses of Prosecco lined up in front of her on the dinner table, and a Scotch in one hand. She is awesome, she is tough, and I am proud to be her grandkid.

I am thankful that we can have eighteen people across four generations at one dinner table for five hours, even if we couldn't get everyone from all the generations at once. I am thankful for a big family full of crazy people, even though sometimes I hate having a big family full of crazy people.

I am thankful for Unemployment Insurance. (And extended benefits!)

I am thankful for all the wonderful friends I have, without whom I would have absolutely lost my mind these last six months while I've been puttering around aimless, jobless, listless, cashless, pantsless, trying to figure out what the fuck I want out of my life, and what I should be doing to get it. I am also immensely grateful for my career counselor, who has managed shake loose in a couple of months all of the crap that ten years of therapy only sort of nudged at.

I am thankful for The Admiral and his Lovely Lady Friend, who has survived two Thanksgivings with the Fam.

I am thankful for my beautiful sweet kittens, one of whom is hilariously, inexplicably, in my purse and the other of whom is curled up on my bed right now, purring away.

They are my little sunshines, except when they wake me up at six in the morning just because they're bored. I can't imagine my life without the little furry monsters, and I wish I could just snuggle them forever.

I am thankful for books, for libraries and for LibraryThing, all of which give me a place to escape to. I'm also thankful for NaNoWriMo, even though I'm going to fail spectacularly at it again this year.

I am thankful for blankets.

I am thankful that, whatever else goes wrong, I am living on the doorstep of the greatest city in my world, where I get to watch the greatest baseball team of all time and be surrounded by everything that I love about being alive.

I am thankful for Shays, my favorite place to be the angry girl at the end of the bar reading anything, and for the magic bus that takes me right there from the bottom of my hill.

Finally, I am thankful that every once in a while someone stops by here to see what inane things I have to say about books and other random crap, and that some of you occasionally stop by more than once, even though my updates are erratic and my thoughts aren't usually very profound. As always, I will try to be less neglectful of this space in the future. Thanks for reading. I hope all your Thanksgivings were as full of warm and yum and wonderful as mine was.

Jane of Lantern Hill, L. M. Montgomery

2008-11-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

Cataloging every book in my library has led me to realize not only how many of my books I haven't actually read, but also how many of the ones I have read I really want to read again. LibraryThing lets you enter all kinds of information about books, and after entering the first lines of Jane of Lantern Hill, I just kept reading.

I love this book. I love Jane, who is brave and smart and has a preternatural ability to understand people that I still covet, twenty years after reading the book for the first time.

Not everything you read as a child or a teenager enthralls you and captures your imagination again when you read it as an adult (Salinger, I am looking at you, buddy), but this book does, for me. Despite how incredibly distant the worlds of Gay Street and Lantern Hill are from the one we inhabit, where America just elected an African-American to be president and communication occurs instantly, all the time, around the world - a long distance phone call from the Maritimes to Toronto was a huge deal, in that world, remember; I can call from Boston to San Diego for FREE, for as long as I want - the people it in feel incredibly close and incredibly real to me, still, just as they did when I was ten. Montgomery's been accepted into the pantheon of great literature, now, and I think the honor is well-deserved. Am I a rank sentimentalist? I might well be, and I do not care.

Unfinished Tales, J.R.R. Tolkien

2008-11-05T17:40:00.003-05:00

Unfinished Tales fills in some of the gaps in the backstory of Middle Earth, as it were, covering a portion of the material covered in The Silmarillion in more detail, from unpublished notes and drafts of J.R.R. Tolkien's, and with comments from his son Christopher interspersed.

I'm not a Tolkien scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I'm madly in love with the complexity of the idea he had, with its internally consistent languages and mythology and geography and blah blah blah, but I'm no expert on any of this. I found the book a really interesting read, but it was a hard slog; I think it took me almost a month to get through it, and there are a couple of reasons for this:

The geography of Valinor and Numenor, as well as of the early days of Middle Earth itself, becomes really important. There aren't really maps of this available in the book itself or online, and I had a terrible time keeping places straight. I now own an atlas of Middle Earth (thanks, used book department of Harvard Bookstore!) so this is less of a problem, but... bear this in mind. Partly, this may be a lesson about not trying to read the book in fifteen minute chunks on the subway. It's hard to say.
I suspect all of this is easier to keep track of if you have read The Silmarillion rather recently. I have not. Unfinished Tales refers to the earlier text frequently, and even where it doesn't, it assumes that you have that background. I'm pretty familiar with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but I've only read The Silmarillion once. I didn't have the content or context at my fingertips the way I'd have liked, and by the time I figured that out, I was not really willing to go back and re-read that first. (It's interesting, but, again: not an easy read.)
It's dense. It's heavily endnoted (...I so prefer footnotes, for stuff that's essential to understanding the text rather than simply interesting), to the point that I wound up reading with two bookmarks so that I could flip back and forth easily. I want to stress, it's really interesting, but it is really not intended for someone with a casual interest in the story. I, nerd that I am, own the twelve volumes of the Histories of Middle Earth, and I am officially terrified of getting into them now.

I enjoyed it, and someday I probably will re-read it a little more closely with the other stuff. I usually re-read the Lord of the Rings once every couple years, and though I do not especially enjoy The Hobbit, I'm curious to read it again in light of what Unfinished Tales reveals about Gandalf's motivations for getting Bilbo involved in the recapturing of the Arkenstone and the rest of the treasure. Whatever you think of the story, you have to admire the amount of mental energy Tolkien put into creating the world, and the degree to which its existence must have consumed his thought. It's stunning, really; I'd like to be that smart, that organized a thinker.

The Upstairs Girl Went to Florida...

2008-10-31T07:52:00.004-04:00

...though that only covers about a week of the October radio silence. So! Happy Halloween! May your tricks be extra tricky and your treats extra sweet.

I have added a widget! It pulls books from my LibraryThing account and apparently sends you to Amazon if you click on them. I do not have an Associate account with them, so I make no money from that, and I encourage you to buy books you like at your local independent purveyor of printed material or to check them out of your friendly public library. If the widget is looking weird for you, let me know in the comments; my HTML skills are pretty poor.

Tomorrow, November 1, is the start of National Novel Writing Month. You can still sign up! It's only 50,000 words in 30 days! That's fewer than 2000 words a day - you can totally write that much. Give it a try. Plus, they have some pretty rad t-shirts, and do some really great work helping teachers to encourage kids to find their voices.

I did, while I was lazing on the lovely, lovely Gulf Coast, read a metric ton of books (including Nancy Drew, Philip Pullman, and Alice McDermott) and will be posting about some-or-all of those soon. I'm going to be entering a career advice books phase for a little bit, starting with the embarrassing cultural punchline What Color is Your Parachute?, which I may or may not write up.

Exactly.

2008-10-03T08:57:00.005-04:00

I've said this a bafrillion times here already, but JBD (and David Eggers) say it much better than I ever have. Reading is not dead. (See? People are still reading Esquire.) I'm not saying we shouldn't be aware of and concerned about the need to continue to encourage reading, because, I think, like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, reading just needs a little love. What's important, though, is not hollering about kids these days needing to get off our collective lawns but instead a) modeling reading behavior (i.e., practicing what we goddamn preach) and b) making sure that reading is available to everyone, that school and public libraries are open and full of books and inviting spaces, and doing our best not to make reading an intergenerational, ideological, or political battleground.

Odds and Ends

2008-10-02T20:49:00.006-04:00

Awesome

First! If you are not reading Tomato Nation, you really ought to be. Like, right now. What are you waiting for? The TN Fall Contest is on now, so head on over, click through to Donors Choose, and make the world better for some kids.

Go Sox!

My flesh is weak, so I fell asleep before the end of the game last night (fucking California, man), but the ALDS is ON. Do not mistake my excitement for cockiness; I have been at this much too long. If you lean towards the National League, go Cubs!

Booky Stuff

Lovely reader KJ, who always sends me the best links, lives in the strange and faraway land of Alaska, home of everyone's favorite bespectacled vice-presidential candidate. (Seriously, y'all, The Early Show tells me she's bringing back glasses. That's some hard-hitting reporting.) The folks at Epicenter Press find themselves suddenly on the NYT bestseller list as a result of their having published biography of Governor Palin. Among the other things they've published is a book entitled Good Times Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush. As the Fairbanks Daily News - Miner (is... that the right name? Their website is kind of spare...) reports, one of the authors of that book and one of the co-owners of Epicenter promised that if she ever made any money off Good Times Girls, she'd buy a headstone for a woman named Georgia Lee, one of the most successful and sought-after prostitutes in Alaska during the Gold Rush. The lady keeps her promises, and in two weeks, Madam Lee will no longer lie in an unmarked grave. Awesome.

Where I've Been

Nowhere, mostly. I'm slogging my way through Unfinished Tales, which is not an easy read, and if you decide to venture in that direction, you should really make sure the last book you read beforehand was The Silmarillion, because it refers to that text incessantly, and it is really, really hard to keep everything straight when you're flipping between two books and two sets of footnotes.

Yesterday, I went to see U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings speak at Harvard. It was about what I expected, in that I disagree with her in just about every conceivable way, but what she had to say raised (to me, anyway) some interesting questions about how we approach education and education reform. It's such a complex issue, it's hard to even wrap your brain around all the factors and inputs and results and data and intangibles and funding and blah blah blah, nevermind develop a comprehensive solution that leads to actual results. About the one area in which I do agree with her is that something needs to be done, and more really smart people need to get involved in caring about the problem, not just at a policy level, but on the ground level. So, go do your part at Donors Choose, thank a teacher who made a difference in your life, and think about what you can do to be a part of the solution to the problem of public education.

Crooked House, Agatha Christie

2008-09-22T09:14:00.000-04:00

I... have nothing much to say about this that won't give away the ending. Christie is a master at letting her narrator fall into the same bits of intellectual laziness or blindness that the reader will fall into without drawing attention to it or giving those blindnesses away until the appropriate moment, and of hiding the sinister inside the very, very ordinary. The end.

Seriously, go read this one. It's good.

The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant

2008-09-16T10:02:00.004-04:00

I couldn't sleep the other night, so I pulled this off the to-be-read shelf and... read it in one night, basically. It's set in the Florence of the Medicis, at a time of social and political turmoil. The heroine is a girl more interested in art and learning than in attracting a husband, and she's madly in love with a silent unknown painter her father's hired to decorate the walls of the family's chapel.

Obviously, it's a quick read. The bulk of the book is a lengthy explanation of how a nun comes to have a gigantic tattoo of a snake and a fake tumor, both of which are discovered upon her death. Like many such things, the explanation is somewhat unsatisfying, but the story itself was interesting enough to keep me occupied for a couple of hours.

It's hard to get into Dunant's premise without giving away what she clearly thinks are the two big surprises at the end; to me they're unnecessary to the story. I think, besides those, my biggest problem is that the impetus for the entire adventure seems forced. Essentially, the French are about to invade Florence, and our heroine's choices are marriage or the convent. Because she's awkward and booky and not at all pretty, she isn't really marriage material, apparently, but she's also not convent material for reasons that are never made fully clear to me. The choice appears driven by the idea that marriage, at least to the right guy, will allow her greater freedom to paint and to be booky, but then later, when she winds up in a convent, she has free reign with her intellectual pursuits, so... and furthermore, in the case of an invasion, I find it difficult to believe that there was no possibility of being within a convent without actually taking the veil. I'm not an expert on medieval history, but my recollection is that young women from well-to-do families were not infrequently educated in convents and then left them to marry. I mean, I could be completely wrong about that; that may not have been done in all parts of Europe, or I may be thinking of the wrong time period, but the driving force behind the narrative doesn't hang together, and though the narrative is interesting, that really bothered me. It's too bad Dunant couldn't come up with a better foundation for the action, because the overlying familial resentment and intrigue is well-done.

All of this is to say, I liked the story fine, I just wasn't especially impressed with the writing. As usual.

A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines

2008-09-13T18:01:00.003-04:00

This is another Big Read selection from Somerville's wide-ranging YA classics section; it was also apparently an Oprah's Book Club selection at some point in history. (As was the next Big Read book on the list, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about that, vis-a-vis the goals of the Big Read program. Anyway.) It was a quick read, but heavy and hard to look at. It amazes me now how vivid and how harsh the realities of some of the things considered to be YA classics are.

A Lesson Before Dying is a long, hard look at the late-forties American South and about what it means to inhabit and navigate that complex social and intellectual space between "free" and "equal" and it's unlike anything I've ever read before. The narrator, a college-educated schoolteacher desperate to get away from where he grew up but held there by ties of family and obligation, struggles - as do those around him, including the wrongly-convicted young man sentenced to die at the start of the book - with the gap between what's expected of him, what's necessary for him to survive in a society that views him as not just "other" but "less" and what's consistent with his basic human dignity. What's particularly compelling about it is that he doesn't struggle in epic terms but in little moments. Gaines is excellent at letting his showing do his telling, and he doesn't allow his narrator to drift off into extrapolating his experiences or his feelings; instead, he gives you a series of ordinary defeats and defiances, starkly rendered and yet not not at all devoid or warmth or emotion.

I've never read anything with this kind of perspective before; most of what I've read about the postwar South is either from a white perspective (Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird) or exists either more or less outside of a racial relations context (Their Eyes Were Watching God) or inside a bizarre, disorienting dreamscape (Toni Morrison). I suspect this is much more a fault of or gap in my education than it is an actual cultural or literary lack, per se, but it was a little bit mindblowing to have it presented in just this way. Having never been in the supremely dangerous position of actually having to choose between getting by and maintaining my own dignity, I'd never stopped to consider what that could mean, or how that would look in this particular context.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed this book; it's not a book you enjoy. But it was a fascinating read, really well written, and it's one of the few things I've read in a long time that made me look at the world a little differently. You should pick this one up if you have the chance.

The Boomerang Clue, Agatha Christie

2008-09-08T18:08:00.001-04:00

I keep picking up Agatha Christie mysteries that don't feature one of her regular detectives. I don't know how I keep doing it. The Boomerang Clue is to mysteries as Northanger Abbey is to Gothic novels, except that in this novel, what appears to be sinister actually is, and our faintly ridiculous heroine and her rather doughy chum wind up in all sorts of danger, and get rescued by a buffoon of a practical joker mutual friend. We also end with an engagement, for good measure, though at least this time the parties thereto have known each other for more than a week.

As usual, it's an excellent story full of exquisitely-crafted red herrings and potential-but-false villains, where suspicion rests on and moves away from multiple characters multiple times. It's fantastic, once you get into it, but... wow. You're a murder and a half in before the thing starts to pick up any speed, and it's a tough murder and a half to wade through, complete with lots of exclamation points and an unfunny bit about a golfing Bobby Jones who isn't the golfer Bobby Jones but some random and rather shiftless dude from Wales. Relevant in its day, I suppose, but did not age well. Gah.

...It's established, now, isn't it: I love Agatha Christie, and I have nothing new or interesting to say about her. Too bad! There's another in my latest library haul!

The Big Read Upstairs, Book 11

2008-09-07T08:02:00.003-04:00

Book 11 will be A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, if you feel like playing along at home and in the comments. (A girl can dream. Anyway my OCD demands that I post one of these for each of the Big Read books; since I started doing it, I have to finish.)

I started this one last night and I expect it to be a pretty quick read; it was, once again, from the YA section at the library, and, once again, pretty heavy, subject-matter wise. But I like it so far; the writing is pretty excellent.

Iceland's Bell, Halldór Laxness

2008-09-06T15:47:00.000-04:00

Phew. Finally finished.

I'm not sure where to begin with this one, exactly. Reader Professor Batty suggested that I check out Halldór Laxness, and since Iceland's Bell happened to be available at the library when I went, that's what I started with. It is a straaaaange book, sort of Canterbury Tales meets Kerouac meets Bleak House, but altogether unlike any of those things either. It is also hilarious, though I'm pretty sure I don't quite appreciate how hilarious.

I feel sort of weird about this book. I liked it, I really did, but I don't have a whole lot to say about it. I almost feel like I need to read it again, which isn't going to happen anytime soon, on account of the huge pile of other books I've got to get through.

I always find it hard to talk about books in translation, I think because I'm never sure what kind of footing I'm on, language-wise - how much of the language is the author's and how much is the translator's. I feel fairly confident in saying that Laxness likes to play around with language, and with linguistics. Language barriers are continually present in Iceland's Bell, sometimes even among fellow-countrymen, which seems like it creates a complex framework of conversational custom and double meaning. The world of the novel itself is like a vast nightmare-scape, in which anything can and does happen. Time seems to be fluid within the narrative structure, in that the story is told in an almost-but-not-quite linear fashion, with the same characters appearing over and over in different times, places, and guises, with shifting loyalties, emotions, and purposes.

I guess I'm reluctant to go through a response of the usual length here because I'm pretty sure I didn't fully understand the book. I enjoyed it, but I put it down feeling kind of baffled, which I think is probably the problem with reading any satire without having a background in (or at least some sense of) what it's satirizing.

Procrastination Thing Update

2008-08-30T14:01:00.004-04:00

Okay, so. LibraryThing is awesome, you guys. In seventeen days I managed to catalogue 579 books and pieces of music, which is approximately everything I own (I feel fairly certain that there are a few things still hiding out at my mother's), and it was so much fun I want to go out and buy more books just to have something to catalogue, because I am a FREAK. There's a permanent link in the sidebar, if you're curious. And you should be. You should be so curious that you sign up.

No updates lately because it's taking me forever to slog through Iceland's Bell. It's a strange, hilarious book, but - and this is not to say I'm not enjoying it - I'm having a terrible time getting into it (possibly because of all the LibraryThinging I've been doing). I've got a stack of books to dig into, though, so I'm trying to get through this one sooner than later. Have a happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone, and thank a union worker!

Donnie Brasco: Deep Cover, Joseph D. Pistone

2008-08-24T18:40:00.004-04:00

First of all, I don't even know why I own this book, but getting a LC call number for it was next to impossible, which is where this story starts. I'm obsessed with getting LC call numbers for all the things in my LibraryThing library that I possibly can, and I have the time to fuck around looking for them, since I have literally not one better thing to do with my life at the moment. So initially, the LC call number popped up as "PISTONE J" which I knew was wrong, but I was getting no joy from my sources at LibraryThing.

Then I found OCLC and the WorldCat, which is good clean nerdy fun. Apparently there are other Donnie Brasco books out there; I don't know a fucking thing about him, or them, or Pistone, or anything, but the ISBN for my paperback pulls up hits for a book with a slightly different title with subject headers that suggest it is something other than the mystery fiction I'd assumed it to be when I initially entered it into LibraryThing. (I was making that assumption in part based on the little "this is a work of fiction any resemblance blah blah blah" disclaimer on the back of the title page.)

It was this apparent confusion over whether the book was, in fact, fiction or memoir, that led me to start reading it this morning, and then I just kind of... kept reading. And now I'm done. It wasn't that great of a story, really. You spend the whole thing trying to figure out what the hell, and then at the end it gets summed up in about three sentences that completely fail to explain why everything was so fucking important, one murder goes completely unexplained, and most of the bad guys wind up dead. Donnie bugs because he's portrayed as all empty and conflicted and tragic about the undercover thing and how it's separated him from his wife and his kids, and who is he really anyway, blah blah blah existential crisis, and I think if you're going to get the reader to believe in it, in him, you've got to give us a little more of a window on what drives these people instead of making them relatably regretful, because if he were really relatably regretful, he'd be done already, but he's not, so I don't care about how much he misses his wife and how much he wishes he'd gotten to see his girls play T-ball. Show me what's on the other side of that equation that's more compelling.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

2008-08-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

If I'd let it, this could have been a quick read. It's not a long novel, only around 50,000 words, and - though I could be wrong about this - I don't find it especially complex. I first read it as an eighth grader, I think; it's in the YA section at the Somerville Public Library, which I perused a little more thoroughly when I returned it, and... there is a lot of stuff in there that I would not think of as YA lit, unless you think high school and college students are still YA readers. I think of YA stuff as being on a junior-high level; Faulkner, James, and Hugo do not, to my thinking, fall into that category, so much.

I loathed this book, and I still don't like it. It made me angry, as a twelve-year-old, but at the same time I could sense that it was meant to make me angry, and I didn't like feeling manipulated, though I'm pretty sure I couldn't have explained that at that age if you asked me to. Now that I'm older, it's much easier to see what Bradbury's doing and why. The library's copy was the 50th anniversary edition, including an Afterword and a Coda by Bradbury himself, which I did read, and an interview of Bradbury by someone at Del Ray books, which I did not. If you have a chance to read the Afterword and the Coda, do it. In the Afterword, Bradbury talks about writing in his garage and getting harassed, only sort of reluctantly, into playing with his daughters instead of writing, and of discovering the rental typewriters in the basement of the UCLA library, where he spent just under ten dollars (at a dime per half hour) furiously typing out the first draft of the novel. The way he talks about loving libraries and about writing a book about burning books in an enormous university library is totally awesome. Then, though, he starts to totally lose his shit. He talks about school anthologies of literature and how everything in them is sanitized, about how subsequent printings of his book edited out curse words and whatnot, and about how some university refused to perform a play of his that had no female parts. And then he gets into "the minorities," which is everyone who doesn't like any bit of any book written ever, so I guess it's more or less equal-opportunity, but it reads to me like, "It's your fault if the deliberately offensive thing I said offends you," even though that's not exactly what he's saying, and it's an oversimplification of what is, in reality, a really complex issue. (Specifically, the issue of what goes into school anthologies and what gets taught in English classrooms is a hugely complicated sociopolitical and economic issue that I'm absolutely not getting into here.) Bradbury's not obligated to like it if people want to excerpt or censor his work, and he's not obliged to play quietly along or give permission to textbook publishers to excerpt his work (unless he is, which sucks for him, but that was not the impression I got from these two addenda). But everyone else in the world is not obligated to like his work, or to think it's appropriate for a given setting. It's hard to tell if he realizes that. Ray Bradbury portrays himself as an angry little man who thinks the road to hell is paved with Title IX, the ERA, and political correctness in the addenda, and it's not an appealing portrait to me.

I mean, I agree that sanitizing literature for school purposes is stupid. I'm with the guy, but when he lays it out like he does here, I want to be as far on the other side of the room as I can get. I think there's a way to put forth these ideas that doesn't make you sound like a raving lunatic, but this isn't it. None of this is to say that I could find a better way of saying it; I'm having enough trouble intelligently deconstructing and disagreeing with his point.

ANYWAY. The story itself is really the point. I still hate this book, I am not kidding. It still makes me angry, I still feel manipulated while I'm reading it, and I now additionally recognize that it lacks some internal consistency and plays so fast and loose with the idea of its own history that it pulls me right out of any story that I might have gotten pulled into, though I sense that Bradbury doesn't care all that much about having a reader identify with Montag. (Much like the Joads are not really the point of The Grapes of Wrath, in my opinion, Montag is not really the point here, either, I don't think. He's really just a means to an end, and in the service of that end he's basically faceless and featureless.)

There's no question that Bradbury has a talent with language, and for putting the reader inside a sort of dust-devil of words that makes the words hard to catch and hold onto and that keeps the reader off balance - much, I think, in the way the inhabitants of the world inside the novel are kept off balance by the speed of the cars and the volume and constancy of their TV programs. He has an excellent, well-defined set of recurring, sinister images - the permanent grins of the firemen, the orange salamander - that leave the reader cold but which seem to have little effect on the characters in the story.

Again, though, it's the internal inconsistencies that bother me. We're seeing the story from Montag's point of view, but when he describes how a possessor of books has usually been removed from the house before the fire department arrives, he notes that "the police [usually] went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars." (Emphasis mine.) Why "victim"? Is it a revelatory slip on Montag's part? On Bradbury's? He's so careful with language that seems unlikely, but it's unclear to me whether this is an indication of a shift in Montag's thinking, an early pebble in the avalanche that follows, or what. Within the world of the novel, the "victim" is also a criminal and a serious threat to society, so for that word to show up in a description of what usually happens feels... off, to me. Maybe I'm just being obtuse.

There's also Captain Beatty, who knows where the old woman's quotation comes from, and who throughout the book displays a surprising knowledge of literature. Why? It's never made clear. He is the mouthpiece for all the reasons for burning books, but he is also, of all the firemen, apparently the only one who really knows what that means. Beatty is the much more interesting character, in that sense - what turned him so soundly against books? But the real question that leads to is when? When did he have this anti-textual epiphany? How could the manufactured history of the firemen and the bookless world exist in the same time frame as aging "Harvard degrees" still running like jackrabbits through the countryside? How could all of this have been accomplished in less than a generation? Maybe I'm reading too much in and deliberately missing the point; maybe the unfathomability of the timeline is intentional (...that seems probable, actually, but it annoys me anyway) and you're just supposed to accept the universe of the novel as it is.

On raybradbury.com there is video from 2001of Ray Bradbury discussing what Fahrenheit 451 is really about, which is not censorship so much as, in his words, "the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news" and the factoids on "all the popular shows" on these days. (I guess he's not a Jeopardy! fan? What other popular shows, ever, have been about factoids? I guess there were a handful on at that time, The Weakest Link, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I didn't really watch them much, but okay. I'm not sure they were really the most popular shows on television, though.) Bradbury professes himself not to be worried about censorship, and views McCarthyism and the occasional book bannings in various school districts and public libraries as aberrations in the national intellectual landscape (...okay, Mr. Bradbury, I'm glad you feel that comfortable; I sure don't). Instead, more or less, television and pop culture need to get off his lawn, because in his view the dire prediction of intellectual sterility in the novel has finally come true. I persist in being not so convinced that that's true.

What Came Before He Shot Her, Elizabeth George

2008-08-15T06:16:00.000-04:00

I have not been commenting on the Elizabeth George novels I read, mostly because, as I said, I don't have a lot to say about them. This one's not actually much different in that respect, but it is rather different from her other Inspector Lynley novels, so I thought I'd talk about that for a bit. At some point, if I get my act together, I'll post about the novels as a series compared to the BBC drama series, which was sort of my plan all along.

What Came Before He Shot Her, explains just that: what happened that led a twelve-year-old to shoot a woman on her own front stoop, an event that occurs near the end of George's novel With No One as Witness. (Except that the twelve-year-old is not actually the shooter, apparently? And if this book is purely about getting you to guess who the adult accomplice is, I am actually irritated that I spent time reading it, because that accomplice is not going to be caught, and I therefore do not care.) It's a faintly tragic tale of angry, damaged, abandoned kids, trying to fend for themselves, but mostly what it is is a story about human stupidity and failure to communicate. Can I indict a twelve-year-old for being stupid? Watch me. It's possible I read too many of these in a row and am fed up with George (another post for another time) but I had a really hard time bringing myself to care about what happened in this story.

I've read on the Internet that Inspector Lynley fans were furious about the outcome of With No One as Witness; I... don't subscribe to that theory of collective ownership of characters, though. They're the novelist's creations, and she can do as she likes with them, really. Taking it personally is ridiculous. On the other hand... this is hard to do without giving away plot points, y'all. I do see where George may have wanted to justify what appeared, from within With No One As Witness, to be a random, pointless act, and to in fact join it up in an unexpected way with the main action of that novel by giving us an inside look at the young killer's life. It's not badly done, really (though I can't say I enjoyed the novel); I just couldn't bring myself to care. If you've been reading along, you know what the kid's crime is already on page one, and you know he's already gotten caught for it. Watching the process? Seeing all the points at which the shooting could've been prevented but wasn't? Is... not interesting, to me. It amounts to toying with the reader, and, again, I understand why an author might feel as though killing off a major character in a random act of violence and giving no explanation whatsoever is not an especially good idea... but this was also not an especially good idea, in my humble opinion.

George's strength is in constructing mysteries: complex mysteries with casts of thousands and multiple, mostly inscrutable motivations. Her middle name is "red herring" really, and she does manage to keep you guessing about who the adult accomplice/shooter might be. But her weak point is characterization. With the exception of Lynley himself, she relies on the Dickensian trick of giving a character some instantly-recognizable quirky handle - like red high-top sneakers, or spiky purple hair, or whatever - that endlessly repeats itself; creating organic motivations, sympathetic internal monologues, or consistent personalities are not among her talents, and many of her characters, especially the women, are irritatingly unable draw any sort of a bead on the reality they allegedly inhabit. Once in a while, a paranoid person in power is interesting, especially if it has any bearing whatsoever on what's going on. A parade of red-herring borderline personalities? Gets old after a while. It's a crutch rather than a plot point, and that becomes evident... again, this is another post for another time.

This is not a complex mystery. We have criminal, we have crime, we have three hundred pages of how we got from A to B full of almost-but-not-quites and an expose on the appalling risky behavior of young disenfranchised Londoners, and I... do not care. The denouement of With No One as Witness is no less pointless at the end of What Came Before He Shot Her than it was at the beginning, and... I get why George thought this was a good idea, but it just doesn't make any difference. In my not-so-humble opinion.

Procrastination Thing

2008-08-13T13:11:00.000-04:00

So I've been hearing about Library Thing for a while now, and trying to decide how I felt about it, by which I mean, trying to resist putting all my books on it immediately. As of yesterday, I've given up. As I have very little else better to do, I'm going to catalogue the contents of my never-large-enough library.

If you are interested in monitoring the progress, or if you're curious about how I've spent my spare cash since I was old enough to have any, my catalogue is here. Library Thing is overwhelming in a lot of ways; there is so much information, and the design does not exactly make it easy to process, but it does make it possible to uncover interesting... factoids, I guess.

I'm not rating, summarizing, or reviewing my books; for one thing, I do that here already, and for another, I read a lot of these a long time ago. (Or... never, in the case of some of them.) Anyway, it's a huge time suck, and I am not entirely certain I won't get bored before I finish. (I'm anal, but this might be pushing it.) So far I've put in the books that live on top of my desk and a handful that happened to be lying around unshelved for whatever reason. It took forever, and I have five more crammed bookshelves to go through.

T is for Trespass, Sue Grafton

2008-08-12T18:45:00.000-04:00

This is a bit of a departure, in that you know who the villain is right from the start, but you're not sure exactly how awful her crime is going to turn out to be; the fun is in watching Kinsey and her octogenarian sidekicks trying to figure out not just what she's doing, but how to prove she's doing it.

As part of this departure, Grafton takes the reader into the mind of a sociopathic opportunist identity thief and serial killer who is good at disappearing to avoid prosecution, but not so good at not attracting attention to herself. It's interesting? But it feels icky, and I'd rather just hang out with Kinsey. That said, I'm not sure if you tried to tell this particular story in another way it would work as well.

...I have so much less to say about the books I read solely for fun. "It's a good quick beach read. The End." I like that Sue Grafton is trying new things - I wonder if she sometimes regrets taking on a project of this length. I wonder if she ever sits in front of her computer with a glass of wine and goes, "Really? I have to write six more of these? I have to come up with something crime-related that begins with a Z? What the hell was I thinking, honestly." (On the other hand, maybe she's had the whole series planned out since day 1. Which would be so awesome. I wish I had a mind like that...) But she's found a way to make the first twenty different and interesting, and to create primary, secondary, and even tertiary characters that you don't get sick of, giving you enough detail but leaving you hoping for more of the rest of the backstory without being unnecessarily stingy or deliberately obtuse. Even, as here, when you know where the linchpin (see... Blogger assures me I want "linchpin" but I really like the vairant "lynchpin" better) is, you don't feel smarter than Kinsey. You just kind of desperately want to tell her what you know.

Shakespearean Dirt

2008-08-08T07:55:00.003-04:00

Archaeologists from the Museum of London have unearthed what they believe to be the foundations of an Elizabethan theater, aptly named The Theatre, at which Shakespeare got his start with The Lord Chamberlain's Men. The Guardian also has a piece on this, but The New York Times's coverage is surprisingly scanty.

However, The Museum of London has a pretty neat website, with a separate section for its Archaeology Service, that has articles about all kinds of neat things they've found around London. Their article on the discovery has, of course, the most detail and the best pictures. The site was being excavated as part of the construction of a new theater, and the company building the theater is hoping to be able to preserve the archaeological finds in the new structure. So neat!

Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya

2008-08-04T07:50:00.002-04:00

This is a strange little novel that I found hanging out in the YA Classics section of my local library. I don't know anything about Anaya, and I'd never heard of either him or the book until I started doing this Big Read project. I don't really know what criteria the NEA used to select books for this project, and it's quite different from everything else I've read so far -- all the previous books, and a number of those I've yet to read, are pretty squarely within the canon I was exposed to as a public school student.

I was surprised to find this in the YA section (as I was to find Fahrenheit 451, the next book up), and having read it, I think I understand why it was there - the language is easy to understand, and the main character is a child - but the themes of the book could not be much heavier. Tony, who is only eight or nine, sees violent death and towering hate, and he struggles not with superficial questions of going to church when he'd rather be playing baseball or some crap, but rather with the deep, unanswerable questions of religion: why God? Which God? Can there be more than one? Why does evil exist? Why do earthly misery and earthly happiness seem to be meted out without respect to the relative merit of the recipients? How do you sublimate the human need for vengeance into divine forgiveness? What does it mean to say a god is a loving god or a vengeful god? Where does the Virgin Mary fit in? What is the power of prayer? Is magic the antithesis of religion? Is it separate? Just how close by is the devil?

Tony is a strange, thoughtful child. He's distinctly different from all his other siblings, and while aware of the fact, if not the nature, of the difference, he is still very attached to all of them, particularly his older brothers, whose wanderlust leads them off to war and keeps them from staying with the family once they return. He is keenly attuned to the wildly divergent dreams and desires of his mother and father, and to the natural beauty of the world around him. His connection with the elderly Ultima is nearly instantaneous, and she becomes his mentor; he becomes her shadow. All of this makes him seem older than he is, and while it is clear that the story is written in a looking-back tone, Anaya is able to convincingly depict the thought process of a shy child and his terror both of the events in the world around him and of the unanswered questions floating around in his head.

Having grown up in a Catholic household, it is in some ways easy for me to understand the relationship of Tony and his family with their religion, and to understand the insuperable unknowableness of everything that he feels as a child trying to do the right thing, and his confusion and emptiness when the sacraments don't answer his questions about God's place in the world around him. But there's also a much more present and overwhelming mysticism in Bless Me, Ultima that is at once totally foreign to me and yet so like the boxcarload of Irish and Canuck superstition that we laugh off as simple family history but that we secretly all fear to ignore. I've never even visited the southwest; I don't know if the magic and mysticism is meant to keep you at bay or if it is a language you instantly understand if you share Tony's world, his geography and his vistas. Ultima's acts as a curandera, her successes where religion and medicine have failed, seem too much to be believed, as do the evils she cures. Similarly, the Golden Carp seems like something out of a Disney movie, and the oddball kids and adults who know of the carp's existence don't help to make a case for it as something you're meant to take as literally true. Though these things do keep the rational part of your mind (or my mind, anyway) at bay, they also draw you in to the carefully, beautifully constructed world Anaya has created. It's absolutely compelling. This book is excellent, and I bet it's especially excellent for kids at an age when they are just starting to think for themselves. Tony's only eight or nine, but I can imagine that this book would have resonated with me incredibly when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, just on (or over) the edge of being too old for the YA section, when I was the right age for Salinger, just beginning to understand that I could, in fact, question everything, which I'm sure I did in the most irritating way possible. (Sorry, Mum! At least I didn't cut as much class or smoke as many cigarettes as you and Dad did when you were that age! It could've been worse!)

I feel like I haven't taken away everything I am supposed to take from this book, so I feel uncomfortable talking about it in depth. I didn't expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did, especially once I realized it was in the YA section, and it was such a quick read I never even got around to updating the sidebar. It was a really wonderful surprise, and you should really check it out if you get the chance.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

2008-08-01T10:23:00.000-04:00

Public service announcement: This is not a good book to read when you've just lost your job. Not that I speak from personal experience of any kind.

I did not enjoy this book. I am able, now, to appreciate why it is so well thought-of, and why I was forced to read it in American Lit, but I did not, in fact, enjoy reading it, even though I think I understood it better this time around.

I think one of the reasons I don't like this book is because it really bothers me on a fundamental level. The Joads are wanderers, essentially, in a world that they don't understand and have no hope of mastering. Their helplessness makes me angry because it's an unsolvable problem, and I don't like unsolvable problems.

The background information in the Penguin Classics edition I own talks about why the book was important from a social and political perspective, how Steinbeck talked to an actual manager of a migrant camp (the "Tom, who lived it" of the dedication) and based some of what's in the book on the manager's notes of his time at the camp, and how Steinbeck's goal was to turn a glaring light on the plight of migrant workers in California. In a certain sense, then, the Joads are really just our ticket into this world of exploitation, oppression, squalor and violence. They could be anybody; they are indistinguishable from any other family they encounter on their travels. They are faceless, essentially, less characters and more vehicles for the exposition of other faceless characters' greed or kindness or prejudice or philosophy. I think that bothers me, too, though I am pretty sure I couldn't have formulated that thought as a teenager. They don't seem real, and they're not the point of the story, really; but I bet at sixteen I wasn't able to make that kind of distinction. I don't think this takes away from the importance of the story, really; it just makes it that much harder for me to get emotionally invested in what happens to the Joads and the people around them.

Steinbeck once wrote, "I, as a novelist, am a product not only of my own time but of all the flags and tatters, the myth and prejudice, the faith and the filth that preceded me...A novelist is a kind of flypaper to which everything adheres. His job then is to try to reassemble life into some kind of order." As with Faulkner, I'm not such a fan of Steinbeck's works, but I can easily see how you could fall a little bit in love with a mind that thinks like that. (Then I remember that Steinbeck is also responsible for The Red Pony, one of my least favorite books of all time, and I fall comfortably right back out of love.)

Well. That Went By Fast.

2008-08-01T08:33:00.004-04:00

So. I started this project a year ago today. Let's review what we've got so far, shall we?

The Classics

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Light in August, William Faulkner

Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

My Ántonia, Willa Cather

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I've also finished The Grapes of Wrath and Bless Me, Ultima, with writeups yet to come.

The Mysteries and Other Fun Stuff

Back Bay, William Martin

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

S is for Silence, Sue Grafton

Towards Zero, Agatha Christie

The Hollow, Agatha Christie

Candy Girl, Diablo Cody

Thirteen Clues for Miss Marple, Agatha Christie

The Once and Future King, T.H. White

The Book of Merlyn, T.H. White

The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester

I, Richard, Elizabeth George

I've also just finished T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton, and the writeup on that is coming soon as well.

Random Statistics

Number of Elizabeth George novels read but not written up: 14

Number of histories of public housing in Boston read but not written up: 1

Number of re-reads: 8

Number of library cards held in the past year: 3

Number of pot shots at perfectly ridiculous Boston Globe columnists: 1

Number of times being the angry girl reading at the end of the bar did not stop a random dude from trying to strike up a conversation: 3

Number of times it did: 0

Number of distinct tags created: 121

Total number of books written up: 27

Total number of books read: 45

Overdue fines racked up: $1.75 (NOBLE network), $.60 (BPL)

Google Is, In Fact, Stalking You

2008-07-30T20:27:00.004-04:00

This has nothing to do with anything, but for a long time, I've felt a little like Google might know too much about me. (Since they have all my email, and my chats, and my deepest thoughts about the books I read... not to mention the part where they know everything I've ever looked for on the Internet, ever.) But around the time I moved back to Boston, a little over a year and a half ago, I started to feel like something odd was going on with my search results. I'd look up something for work - something generic, like drywallers, or workplace safety regulations, or union hiring halls - and my top couple of hits would be Massachusetts-based. It was like Google knew - or thought it did - where I was and what I was most likely to be needing. I commented on this to my friend Camper, and we kind of laughed it off, but I was a little creeped out.

Today, Camper sent me this link. Oh, Google. You thought we hadn't noticed, didn't you? All this time, you thought the average former English major, slogging away at her deadend soulkilling lawfirm job, would never notice that you had somehow homed in on her location and were serving up local links for her browsing pleasure. But I knew it, Google. Just as sure as I knew something was amiss when you started showing me ads for handmade cornhole sets when I was e-mailing back and forth about tailgates with my guttermindedest friends, just as sure as I knew you were up to something when you thought I might like a condo in a converted factory building over by Clark University (fabulous neighborhood, y'all, no joke, down the street from where I learnt to swim)... I knew, Google. I knew you were stalking me. And now I know how.

'Sokay, though, 'cause you're giving me walking directions on your maps now. I still love you. I'm just disappointed that you thought you needed to keep secrets from me, Google. I'm just disappointed you thought I wouldn't see what you were up to. This is a relationship built on trust. Well, that, animated texty emoticons. Love! Let's not do anything to subvert that, ever again, all right?

...The Internet is Still Destroying the World

2008-07-27T12:01:00.006-04:00

I am officially weary of commenting on stuff like the article in today's New York Times about kids and reading on the Internet, so I'm just going to point you towards it, and the rest of what is apparently a series.

One bit of information I did find interesting in this article is that there is a movement, internationally speaking, to measure kids' Internet literacy as distinct from traditional literacy, which is already measured within an inch of its life here in the United States. (The US Department of Education is not jumping on this train just yet. I can't decide if that's surprising or not.) That feels weird to me, but it's an interesting thought. (And depressing: do we really need more ways to measure kids?)

I think part of my general ennui on this point comes from the fact that the coverage of it feels pretty shallow and one-sided, even when it takes pains to appear to be otherwise. These articles are continually, "here are some anecdotes!" and then acknowledge briefly that there's little research available on this subject and nothing at all that's comprehensive. "It's rewiring our brains! Maybe! But the neurologists don't have any data on how or why or whether it's good! Also, kids these days don't know how to spell, don't care about culture, and need to get the hell off my lawn with their texting and their fanfic!" TIRED. SO TIRED. Come back when you have something actual, and can stop describing teenagers' use of the Internet in terms other than those used to describe drug addiction.

Of the limited hard data the article cites, there's a survey showing that just north of 20% of 17-year-olds read for fun on a daily or almost-daily basis. (This is in 2004; apparently in 1984, about a third of 17-year-olds read on at least an almost-daily basis.) I was a 17-year-old in 1996, when I was a senior in high school and a college freshman. I hardly did any reading for fun, because I was too busy reading for class, except in the summer, when I read whenever I wasn't at one of the two jobs I was holding down to pay for college. My point here is that I'm not sure how useful a statistic this is by itself, and I'd appreciate a little bit of background to explain to me why this meant it was a crisis statistic, especially when you consider the other handwringing stories about how much kids are expected to do these days to get into college and how overscheduled everyone under the age of 18 is. Anyone want to back me up? Or shoot me down? I want someone to treat this as a complex issue and not a zero-sum game in which the forces of culture and literacy are sitting around playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on a frigid April night in the North Atlantic!

Nobody Puts Google in a Corner

2008-07-25T08:22:00.007-04:00

Through the magic of the Internet, I tripped over an article - well, maybe it's more of a column or an opinion piece than an article - about how our ever-increasing use of computers is changing the way our brains work.

The concern expressed in the article is that the Internet, because of how it provides content and because of how it encourages people to interact with that content, is chipping away at our ability to concentrate on and process longer works, like scholarly articles and novels. Instead of reading, we skim, scanning through the headlines of our Google search results, and then skimming through the content once we click through. The author's anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon comes from other well-educated individuals used to reading lengthy works in a thoughtful, in-depth fashion who now profess to be unable to focus on something as mentally demanding as Tolstoy. One individual claims that even a blog post of more than four paragraphs is too much - he just skims anything that length. This skimming man is a pathologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan. I am unimpressed, both with his assessment of himself and his willingness to admit to this weakness in print. And that's what I think it is: weak. (Pardon my arrogance, if you please.)

This is not to say that the article is not interesting or well-written; it is definitely both. The advents of writing and the printing press were similarly heralded as harbingers of doom, and here we all are, hundreds of years later, doing just fine. The Internet is bigger and scarier and grows more rapidly than either of those inventions, and it's newer; we're not far enough into it to fully anticipate or appreciate the long-term effects, for good or ill, that it will have. It's good to be wary, and it's good to be aware of the changes in ourselves. But the article treats these changes as inevitable, and I simply don't believe that's true. (When I had a job, I worked with snippets of online content basically ten hours a day, searching, processing, synthesizing. It was boring, most of the time, and it was because it was boring that I was easily distracted; I can still sit in my rocking chair and read for five hours if I damn well please now that I don't have a job.)

What I do think, though, is that there are several things going on here. The article doesn't talk about how different reading anything on a computer screen is from reading anything in print, which I think is an important distinction. I'm 29. I was exposed to computers and the Internet as means of research as early as high school, so while I didn't grow up with it the way my friends' kids will, I'm also not of the barefoot uphill both ways barefoot through ten feet of snow can't get used to this newfangled blah blah blah generation either. I've adapted. But I'm Luddite enough that I need to print out my online sources once I've found them, as environmentally unfriendly as I feel when I do that, and I can't fully explain why that is. Maybe it is only because I am a reader and a lover of books at heart; I can't help thinking, though, that there's a component of difficulty to reading online, either because of flashing ads or eye strain from the screen or something that drives me to need something solid in my hot little hands.

Another component, I think, has less to do with the Internet per se and more to do with the speed at which modern life is moving. (Is that speed only due to the Internet? Maybe? I don't know, but I find it difficult to believe.) Communication occurs at ever-increasing speeds, work bleeds into home bleeds into work, and even preschoolers need Day-Timers, apparently, so there are more obligations, more distractions. As the world shrinks because of informational ties and economic ties, more and more information becomes not only relevant but also vital to everyone's existence, the amount of time in which to process all of this remains static. Making time for reading, when it isn't something required of you for your day job, becomes difficult. (I used to snatch my novel reading on the subway, in bed, or over an end-of-the-week pint, for instance. The pathologist, though - I can only imagine that his day job requires him to do a kind of in-depth reading as part of his research that the Internet has apparently rendered him incapable of doing - is it only in recreational reading, as it were, that he encounters this difficulty? Is he exaggerating? I find these anecdotes rather less than believable, frankly. It's fine not to like books; it's fine not to have time for reading or to prefer to do something else with your leisure time. (Well, I mean, I probably won't be your friend, and I'll probably judge you a little, but, you know, it's okay. I get that there are other fun things out there too.) It's even fine to prefer the Internet as a source of information and reading material. (I... guess, anyway. I think it's weird, but if it works for you, right on.) But if you are blaming the Internet, instead of owning your own preferences or lack of interest? Or instead of taking steps to combat a change in yourself that you recognize is happening and consider to be negative? You are an ass.

...I guess that's where my contempt comes in. In general, I believe you can force yourself to concentrate. I mean, sure. We all have terrible days where we can't focus on a damn thing because of whatever else is going on in our lives. We all run across deadly boring crap we're expected to read for whatever reason, and you have to do what you have to do to get it done; in my world, if it's boring and I don't have to read it, I generally don't (with the exception of books selected for this site). The Internet really does give me access to a lot more boring crap than I would otherwise have come into contact with, but I'm still able to differentiate between what interests me and what doesn't (and to read what does). But part of being an adult is being able to recognize distractions, and to take steps to eliminate them so that you can concentrate on whatever is at hand. Maybe the concern is that the majority of people might be unaware of the rewiring that's going on in their brains, but if you are aware that that's happening to you, and you let yourself get swept along on the tide, as seems to be the case in the anecdotes presented here? Then you have no one to blame but yourself.

The article also talks about Google, and searching, and data collection, and AI, and having the knowledge of all mankind stored in some sort of external hard drive for your brain, directly accessible without even the intermediary of a computer, even if it can't all be stored in your own personal gray matter. Are these things benefits or curses? They're certainly frightening. Google probably knows more about me than my own mother, at this point, and although I love Google, I am not totally comfortable with that. Actually, I'm completely uncomfortable with it, as I am with the idea that anyone out there has collected - and owns - information about me that I do not have access to. (This includes my doctors, by the way, so at a certain point there is really no fighting it.) I don't really want a direct line from my brain to the Internet; I think robots are creepy. But I also think that the Internet has not, in fact, stolen anybody's free will.

Yet.

I, Richard, Elizabeth George

2008-07-18T20:15:00.004-04:00

I have a closet addiction to Elizabeth George. I have been working my way through her oeuvre, as it were, for some months now, having been prompted by the Inspector Lynley series on Mystery! starring the scrumptious-if-slightly-goofy Nathaniel Parker. I haven't been writing about the Lynley novels because I have little to say about them individually; they're perfectly serviceable murder mysteries, but I'd have gotten bored long ago if I weren't comparing the novels to the series. Like many mystery authors, George can concoct a good mystery; her writing, however, irritates me in small but unavoidable ways.

I, Richard, however, is a set of short stories, only one of which features the 8th Earl of Asherton, and... it's not good, man. There are five short whodunits, but they all read like O. Henry, Asimov, or other selections from your junior high literature textbook; you're left at the end with a murder and a revealed murderer or murderess, but they are somehow unsatisfying. George's talent is definitely in amassing the details and withholding the crucial ones (or their connection) until the final seconds; as a talent, it really requires a novel-length work as a showcase. Similarly, her talent for characterization, which is certainly exhibited in the regulars in the Lynley novels, is just absent from these short stories. Motivations and personality quirks feel forced and unearned (as do all of the endings); everyone comes across as flat, uniform, undistinguished. The villains are more or less interchangeable, and therefore disappointing. Further, many of the stories, while set in the U.S. (several in California), have a narrative tone suggesting a foreign-ness, an English-ness, that we all know George does not actually posses. I suppose part of the problem is that I read these stories on the heels of T is for Trespass, also set in California and very native-feeling (also: I have loved Sue Grafton since I was much too young to be reading her) but... you're from California, lady. We all know; you can dial it back a few notches.

I like George. She's a Californian who's created an English world that holds my interest, even though she has verbal tics and tendencies that I don't particularly care for. But I, Richard, while a short read, felt like a waste of my time, to the point I felt it necessary to say something here. I've planned for a while to have something to say, once I finish her most recent Lynley novel, about the whole Lynely series, for some time now, and that's still my plan, though I've been devouring them steadily in between weightier fare since last summer. This, though, prompted me to write sooner. It feels like a vanity project (an impression which is not dispelled by George's introduction to each story explaining its origin), experimental rather than serious, drafty rather than finished. I was unexpectedly disappointed, and not just by the lack of Lynley.

In other news, I'm getting to be on a first-name basis with the librarians at the East Branch of the Somerville library. I've been in there three times this week after Elizabeth George novels, photocopies, or both. I'm pretty sure they think I'm nuts, especially the one who reminds me of nothing so much as my arts and crafts counselor from 4-H Camp fully twenty years ago. (The branch library? Is approximately the size of the only library in the town I grew up in. I love the city.)

The Upstairs Girl is Taking a Murder Mystery Break

2008-07-17T09:46:00.003-04:00

I have, in the last several days, devoured two Elizabeth George novels (about which I will probably not post) and am well into Sue Grafton's latest offering (about which I almost certainly will). The Big Read will resume sometime before books nine and ten are due back at the library, but possibly not before I read about a few more gory made-up murders.

This has been a public service announcement from The Upstairs Girl.

The Big Read Upstairs, Books 9 and 10

2008-07-12T17:21:00.004-04:00

I made my first trip to the main branch of the Somerville Public Library this week to pick up some Big Read books, since I've exhausted my home-grown supply. Book 9 will be Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, and Book 10 will be Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I am kind of dreading Book 10.

The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester

2008-07-11T08:28:00.004-04:00

This book is somewhat hilariously subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and it's about as sexy as that promises. (How sexy it promises to be depends in large degree on how sexy you yourself find the OED and/or mental illness; I think the OED is hot goddamn stuff.) Winchester gives us the life stories, more or less, of Professor James Murray, the principal editor of the first edition of the OED, and Dr. William Chester Minor, a yale-educated American Civil War Army surgeon, lunatic, and murderer, who contributed tens of thousands of illustrative quotations for the first edition of the dictionary from his cells (he had two, apparently) at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Surrey.

The book is a fun, quick read; thoroughly researched, it appears, but with an unstinting helping of interpolative fiction when it comes to the causes and manifestations of Dr. Minor's madness. Winchester is pretty well taken with his subjects, and justifiably so, I think, but he struggles with the question of what it means to be insane, and of what it means that proper treatment (at least, proper treatment by modern standards) for the disease, in Dr. Minor's case, would have in all likelihood meant that he would never have had the inclination to become involved in the dictionary project. While the text itself never loses sight of the fact that Dr. Minor was unquestionably unstable - he did, after all, shoot a completely innocent stranger quite dead - Winchester seems to have difficulty with the idea that such a person should have been made to suffer the consequences either of his act or his illness, and there's an undercurrent of disdain whenever an asylum official fails to bend the rules in some way for Dr. Minor. (Dr. Minor was allowed an extraordinary degree of freedom as an inmate at Broadmoor, and the same was true later when he was allowed to return to the U.S. to be housed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.) Winchester is clearly conflicted, and it's possible that that's as it should be. Still, some parts of the narrative come across as surprisingly, almost disingenuously, naive.

The illustrative quotations in the OED were collected largely through the efforts of volunteers throughout the English-speaking world, and in 1999, as part of the first complete revision of the dictionary, Oxford University Press issued a new call for volunteers to track down illustrative quotations, particularly for slang words. A list of the words they are currently looking for is available here, and the site also contains information about how to look for and submit quotations.

Happy Hundredth, Anne!

2008-07-09T08:02:00.008-04:00

The Modern Library has issued a new edition of L. M. Montgomery's classic Anne of Green Gables in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the book's publication in June of 1908. My dog-eared, beat-up $2.95 Bantam Classics edition is now old enough to drink legally in the United States. (The cover is a photo from the CBC miniseries starring Megan Follows, which I watched incessantly once we got the Disney Channel.)

Slate, which I don't normally read, has an interesting article on Anne, which, while not especially scholarly, outlines a convincing case that Anne, as a character and a cultural force, is on a par with Tom and Huck. Certainly, Mark Twain approved heartily of Anne; the endpaper bio of L.M. Montgomery in my copy notes that he called her "the sweetest creation of child life yet written," which, from Twain, could have been either a compliment or a damnation, but was apparently the former. (Thanks to my fabulous friend Woman in a Dark Theatre for the Slate link.)

For more on L.M. Montgomery's life and works, check out the University of Prince Edward Island's L.M. Montgomery Institute. The Institute was apparently founded in 1993, and there is a surprising amount of scholarship devoted to her work now. I wonder if kids still read her books with the intensity that my friends and I did twenty or so years ago. L.M. Montgomery was definitely prolific, but I read most of what she wrote, I think, before I finished middle school. (I believe, though, that I have not read any of the many short story collections published after her death in 1942.)

...And now I want to re-read the whole series. Because my reading list isn't long enough.

Shitty Neighbor Chronicles, Vol. 1

2008-07-07T08:23:00.004-04:00

My neighbors inaugurated their brand-new home theater last night. How do I know this? My bedroom is directly under their living room. They watched Casablanca. How do I know that? It felt like Sam's piano was IN MY DAMN ROOM. Also, I could hear every word of the dialogue with stunning clarity. I guess they picked a pretty good system. (It took the little guys from Tweeter home installation two days to put the goddamned thing together, so I've known it was an expensive system for a few days now.)

It's going to be a long summer.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

2008-07-06T09:45:00.001-04:00

Well. I only read this book SIX MONTHS AGO, so this should be pretty fresh. Have I mentioned that I hate Catherine?

I cleverly marked a number of pages I wanted to talk about while I was reading A Farewell to Arms, so at least I have some idea of what seemed important. Although it was not my intention to write solely about Catherine, most of the passages seem to deal with her. It seems somehow unfair to continue to indict Hemingway for the way he portrays women, but... maybe he shouldn't have been so colossally bad at it. Take a look at this, from page 27 of my edition:

"Oh darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.
"You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."

The two have, at this point, known each other for exactly ten pages, and Catherine has already revealed that she was engaged to her childhood sweetheart who was killed and that she'd have married or even just slept with him "if she had known." It's never entirely clear which particular bit of knowledge she felt herself to be lacking in that instance. (There are so many bits of ordinary human knowledge she seems to be lacking.)

Also on the list of concepts Catherine can't grasp: desertion. She and Henry find themselves fleeing to Switzerland so that Henry doesn't get arrested for deserting the Italian army. Henry's worried about getting picked up by the Swiss navy crossing the lake; Catherine wants to know if they can have a great big breakfast once they get to Switzerland.

I could go on about this, but it feels kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, and I'm getting bored. However, there's one other gem I can't let pass. In Chapter 16, Catherine and Henry have a rather lengthy chat about whores. I'm going to reproduce the whole thing, right here, because it is hilarious.

"It's all right. Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do. Were they pretty?"
"I never stayed with any one."
"That's right. Were they very attractive?"
"I don't know anything about it."
"You're just mine. That's true and you've never belonged to any one else. But I don't care if you have. I'm not afraid of them. But don't tell me about them. When a man stays with a girl when does she say how much it costs?"
"I don't know."
"Of course not. Does she say she loves him? Tell me that. I want to know that."
"Yes, if he wants her to." [It's never been clear to me why Henry stops lying, but it's never been clear to me why Catherine is all, "No, no, don't tell me. But tell me!"]
"Does he say he loves her? Tell me please. It's important."
"He does if he wants to."
"But you never did? Really?"
"No."
"Not really. Tell me the truth."
"No," I lied.
"You wouldn't," she said. "I know you wouldn't. Oh, I love you, darling."
...
"And that's it?" Cathering said. "She says just what he wants her to?"
"Not always."
"But I will. I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "I'll do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I?"

Essentially, Catherine is saying she'll be his whore. Interestingly, there's a very similar exchange between Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. There's not even any variation in fantasy - Maria and Catherine are like versions of the same Barbie doll in different costumes: Nurse Barbie and Geurilla Fighter Barbie. They're both not just willing but eager to surrender their own volition and thought to the narrators of their respective tales of woe. To me, this is boring.

I get that Hemingway did not get famous for his realistic portrayals of women, and that what is interesting and praiseworthy about his work is the way he uses language and the (at that time) new and different things he was doing with sentence structure and narrative structure. I can appreciate that, even if I don't like his work. But WOW do I hate Catherine.

Catherine's friend Fergy is also a cipher, though in a rather more interesting way. Though both Henry and Rinaldi dismiss her as not worth their time from a romantic perspective, she remains really oddly emotionally involved with Catherine's relationship with Henry. Fergy seems to take it personally that Henry's gotten Catherine pregnant, that they are unmarried, that Catherine doesn't feel any shame about it or any particular urgency to get married. It's never clear why she's so invested in this little soap opera; I can't tell if we're supposed to take it that Fergy's jealous of Catherine because she's not getting any attention from men, or if Fergy's religious sensibilities are offended, or if Fergy just naturally shows an absurdly matronly concern for the state of Catherine's virtue. Was it narratively necessary to have someone disapprove of the state the doomed lovers are in? Is it really, purely, that Fergy is afraid to be left alone once Catherine runs off with Henry? I'm not sure it even matters; maybe the only point is that Catherine is more alive in the imaginations of the people around her - Henry and Fergy - than she is in her actual real life.

As this is a re-read, I think I can safely say I appreciate the book more than I did at sixteen or twenty, but I don't actually like it any better. I'm not sure if that's really an example of growing into literature or not.

More on T.H. White

2008-07-02T20:35:00.004-04:00

For all one of you who were waiting for my response to miss_murgatroyd's comment on The Book of Merlyn, I finally got around to posting it here. I feel weird drawing attention to it like this, but it's fallen off the front page, so. Sorry for the delay, and, as always, thanks to all of you who read (and leave comments!). It makes my day to know that anyone gets intellectually engaged with what goes on in here.

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

2008-06-29T07:28:00.000-04:00

It's been a rough couple of weeks in the downstairs home of the Upstairs Girl. Not only have I not been doing much writing, I have not really been doing much reading, at least not of anything relevant to this site. So, several weeks after I finished it, here's The Age of Innocence.

Newland Archer thinks of his betrothed as a "terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything." He himself, of course, holds sophisticated, urbane notions about what position women ought to be able to occupy in society, but is also fully aware that actual freedom is perfectly inappropriate for women. "'Nice' women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore - in the heat of argument - the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State." This is really all you need to know about Newland Archer: utterly full of himself, and without a lot of cause to be, smugly convinced of his own superiority in everything to literally everyone around him.

Edith Wharton is adept at skewering people and ideas with an absolutely straight face, and while Newland is ostensibly the hero of the story, it's clear that Wharton doesn't view him or his kind as something to be emulated. She exposes Newland's own lack of self-awareness by contrasting his professions against the mores and strictures of the very best of Old New York society with his unacknowledged but ever-present expectation of and demand for the benefits of its deference and double standards.

I don't have much to say about this one, as is usually the case with the reads I enjoy. I've grown to like Wharton, though I can't explain what's changed, exactly; I have approximately the same vague grasp of history and social anthropology that I had at the age I first read her - certainly, I haven't had very much more formal education in either area - though I guess my experience with literature generally is significantly more vast than it was. I do not, however, believe that this means I will someday appreciate Ethan Frome. I'm going to have to get pretty fucking bored before I even consider testing that theory out.

Fun fact: the film version of this novel was filmed in the first floor of my brother the Admiral's fraternity house (albeit well before he was a resident there). I rented it from Netflix once and the disk had a giant chunk missing out of the back of it (...I don't know, really) and the first half hour of it was so fucking boring I didn't even bother to ask for a replacement. I'm tempted to rent it again, just to see if it's any easier to sit through when you know the story. Visually, it was fantastic, but wow: zzzzzzzzzzz.

Random Shit that Happens in the City, #3

2008-06-28T15:49:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, when you hear an argument out on the street? It turns out to be an shouting match between your neighbor and some lady who stiffed him ten bucks on the price of a baggie of pot.

Other times, it turns out that his crazy girlfriend really wants her cell phone back.

The Big Read Upstairs, Book 8

2008-06-18T20:25:00.003-04:00

Up next is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I hated this book as a teenager; I'm finding I dislike it rather less now, but it's still bonecrushingly depressing, and I know it only gets worse. Comments on The Age of Innocence coming soon, and I still haven't forgotten about Hemingway. (Wish I could!) This is a fun project. I'm really glad I took it on. No, really.

The Big Read Upstairs, Book 7

2008-06-10T08:12:00.003-04:00

Book 7 will be Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. I have to say, though I hated Ethan Frome (...which I guess I'll have to get around to re-reading one of these days) I've grown awfully fond of her in the last fifteen years. Let's not talk about the fact that it's been fifteen years since Sophomore English, shall we?

Into the Wild

2008-06-09T10:47:00.003-04:00

Sorry, this is totally off the subject of the site, but I couldn't not say something about this movie.

My roommate, The Smuggler, and I wound up watching this last night because it was too hot to do anything but sit in the living room and melt. I am watching a lot of stuff I might not otherwise watch because of The Smuggler, some of it good, some of it not so much. What I have to say about it can basically be boiled down into two comments.

If you are going to make this movie, in this way, of course you get Eddie goddamn Vedder to do the music. Of course you do. Aaaargh.

The interesting characters in the movie are not the character the movie is about. He? Is a fatuous asshole who read too much Thoreau (and probably too much Salinger and Hesse) in high school and decides to bum around the country bemoaning the seedy - and, well, it is kind of seedy, I will give the kid that - underbelly of his overprivileged upbringing and generally behaving with a cringe-worthy lack of self-awareness that better befits a kid about eight years younger than he is when he starts out on his ridiculous journey of self-location.

The scenery is beautiful, and there are a lot of gigantic cinematic lovesongs to the west in it - I love that stuff. I think there is a peculiar American kind of romance in a wheat harvester trudging along the plains, and clearly so did the cinematographer. I wish they'd done a little more with the Alaska parts; mountains are nice, but other than the snow and the moose, most of the time Alex/Chris spends in the bus could be in any damn woods anywhere. But it's beautiful to watch.

What kills me, though, is the utter lack of irony. Alex/Chris has all the absurd earnestness of a sixteen-year-old fresh off his first introduction to Transcendentalism and Buddhism, except it's really not credible in a college graduate, who should by now have put two and two together and realized that Thoreau all but pitched a tent in his own damn backyard and called it living in the wilderness. Okay, so the kid's concerned about poverty and whatnot and the morality of having twenty-five thousand dollars at his disposal while kids go hungry in Africa; that's admirable, and it's really great to donate a huge chunk of somebody else's cash to Oxfam. But if your answer is to hitchhike into the desert and then... burn the rest of your money? You've got some growing to do, is all I'm saying.

So there's little unironic Alex/Chris, whose musings I find unintentionally hilarious, and apparently, his magical little journey brings him into contact only with other people who are...equally unironic. (With the notable exception of an angry little railroad security dude who doesn't stop to talk but just beats the shit out of him, apparently because the railroad's lawyers say hobos are bad, and the hilariously disengaged park ranger whom we're clearly meant to hate because he's enforcing permit regulations that prevent idiots with kayaks and no training from cruising down the Colorado.) Hippies, old reformed drunk Catholic men without families, farm workers, starry-eyed jailbait - no irony anywhere. Vince damn Vaughn shows up on the screen, for Christ's sake, and... no irony. Really? Nothing? Nope. He takes the whole thing seriously... and then starts talking about aliens.

The most interesting character is maybe the sister, of whom we see little but from whom we hear frequently. She never questions her brother's motives or actions and never really thinks critically about them - when she finds herself realizing that not only has he cut off their parents, he's cut her off too, she rationalizes it to herself, as she does everything else. She clearly idolized him, and, I think, let her thinking be shaped by him, which makes sense for a much younger sibling, but I kept hoping for her to break free of his rather stifling worldview instead of holding it up as something to be admired. I wanted her to start thinking for herself.

I'm saying way more than I meant to about this. It's two and a half hours of unremitting adolescent deep thoughts, and while I think maybe Alex/Chris was starting to grow towards the end of it, part of his epiphany seems to have been inspired by Doctor Zhivago, which seems hard to take seriously, and the degeneration of any discernible narrative arc or timeline at the end of the film makes it difficult to know for sure whether that's true. (Or, it could be that I got kind of disgusted and started brushing the cat.)

Anyway, unintentionally funny and beautiful to look at; not worth it, in my humble opinion, unless it is literally too hot to even contemplate doing anything else.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

2008-06-07T18:57:00.001-04:00

Incidentially, I've always thought that The Great Gatsby sounds like some sort of caped crusader or a character in a YA novel.

This was one of the few books I enjoyed in American Lit in high school, but as I noted, I've discovered that it hasn't worn so well. Maybe this is because on a second reading I come at Daisy and Tom with more of Nick's ultimate contempt and disgust, and can't muster up his initial aimless fascination now that I know how the story ends - except that I had, in fact, forgotten what pointless, unenlightening tragedy in fact ensues. Maybe it's because when you already know Gatsby is a fraud, you don't need the lesson hammered home by his rainy, underpopulated funeral. At any rate, I found myself getting angrier and angrier at Nick as I worked my way through the first draft of this write-up, and I've been thinking a little about why that is.

I faintly recall, from discussions of this book thousands of years ago, that there was significance to the names Daisy and Carraway, something about naturalness or whatever, and I think you're meant to feel that Nick is just along for the ride - separate from and above, in some sense, the ridiculous behavior that surrounds him, but... why doesn't he just get off the ride? He is clearly put off by Tom, who is a boor, a drunk, a philanderer, a braggart, and a jackass; his "interest" in Jordan Baker is apparently entirely intellectual and/or situational, as there's nothing in particular about her that he seems to like except that she's there. Daisy might be the center of gravity and the catalyst for everything that happens in the novel, but she's also its biggest cipher, and though, like Nick, I think you're meant to understand that she lacks... volition, or at least the ability to act on her own will, between the marrying of Tom and the staying married to Tom and the fact that Gatsby has to stop the car after the accident. You're meant to see her as hazy and dreamlike, pleasant-looking and pleasant-sounding, without any actual substance (viz. Nick's repeated assessments of the musical qualities of his voice, blah blah blah blech), but I don't believe that's true. First, you're also meant to see her as shrill and slightly hysterical, and in fear of her absurd husband, but, especially in those portions of the book - for instance, the ridiculous trip into New York that precipitates the fatal accident with Myrtle Wilson - she acts like a subtitled, silent-film version of a person, all exaggeration and exclamation points. Secondly, it's quite clear she's made a deliberate choice, in spite of Tom's endless string of girls-on-the-side, in spite of whatever fear or discomfort we’re supposed to believe she experiences, she quite clearly makes a decision to stick with Tom. After the accident, Nick watches them through a crack in the blind on the pantry window. “They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale - and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” Spoiler alert: she has only lately struck and killed his mistress with someone else's automobile. But they're sitting down over cold chicken and beer, conspiring. They conspire to leave town, and my take on it is that they essentially conspired to shift the blame for Myrtle Wilson’s death to Gatsby, whether by express agreement or by Tom’s actions and Daisy’s silence with respect to her own role amounting to tacit approval. What it is about her that inspires Gatsby to hire a gigantic mansion and throw outlandishly lavish parties in the hope of attracting her, like a moth, when clearly that analogy works only in the other direction, is a mystery to me, even with Nick’s post-hoc rationalization that she represented everything about a world he had never belonged to but always dreamed of.

They’re all frauds, the five of them. They lie to themselves, and they lie to each other. Gatsby’s chief virtue might be that he alone is aware, however dimly, of his own fraudulent-ness. Daisy and Tom and Jordan live in a world without responsibilities and without consequences, and while Nick recognizes this about them, he continues to associate himself with them, not only by shaking Tom’s hand when they meet much later on the street because “it seemed silly not to,” even after listening to how a box of dog biscuits made Tom burst into tears in the apartment he’d shared with his dead mistress, he lumps himself and Gatsby together with the three of them in concluding that they are singularly unsuited for East-coast life, born as they were in the middle West. (…please note: Nick’s geography includes Kentucky in the mid-west, which doesn’t work for me, really, but what do I know.) I mean, I think I’d be done with Long Island after a summer like that too, but “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”? That seems to me to be taking it farther than it needs to go, and excusing their collective colossal failure to be redeemable members of the human race and effectively reducing it to a fish-out-of-water tragicomedy utterly devoid of any meaning. Why Nick lumps himself and Gatsby in with the Buchanans and Jordan Baker is a mystery to me, but he does, and that makes it hard for me to accept at face value much of anything he has to say about anyone else. If they’re all of a kind, where does his faint moral outrage at Jordan’s utter untruthfulness come from? Whence his disgust with the bright-lights-drunk-city of Gatsby’s parties and the Buchanans’ opulence?

None of this is meant, exactly, to knock on Fitzgerald’s ability to tell a compelling story, eyes of god watching over the ash-heaps of humanity blah blah blah green light at the end of the dock blah blah. The East vs. Midwest crap at the end feels distinctly tacked-on. What on earth about a place where everyone knows everyone else and houses are referred to by last names rather than addresses means that the vices of a Long Island summer – drunkenness, late nights, bizarre affairs, and even murders – won’t or cant happen? The world may end not with a bang but with a whimper, but casting the whole sorry sequence of events as merely geographical, when it is, in fact, the result of the self-absorbed actions of a set of singularly shitty human beings who are in fact a product that same claustrophobic small-town paradise reachable only with a long green train ticket in the dead of winter, seems like a decision to come to an end that the author wasn’t really feeling, yet, to me, and it grates. If the point is that such horrible things can only happen, or only be allowed to happen, in the East, then I’d say the five of them adjusted just fine to the coast.

The Book of Merlyn, T. H. White

2008-05-31T11:03:00.002-04:00

The preface to the edition I own notes that all that kept this ostensible book 5 from inclusion in The Once and Future King is the paper shortage in England during World War II. You can believe whatever you like, but The Book of Merlyn kind of sucks, in my humble opinion. Buckle up for another rambling, incoherent analysis...

White, as I noted earlier, is all about the totally unveiled sociopolitical commentary, and he's at his angriest, and also his most rambling, in this book. I feel like it would've needed a lot more work before it was ready for inclusion with the remainder of the epic, in part because it is so different stylistically, and in part because nothing really happens for 200 pages. The introduction notes that young Wart's experiences with the ants and with the geese in Book I of The Once and Future King are lifted from The Book of Merlyn and appear "somewhat out of context" there; I had never noticed that they felt any weirder from any of Wart's other animal adventures. Maybe they're more didactic, I guess. My point is, there's something beautiful about leaving the King at the dawn of the last battle, having entrusted the seeds of his story to a very young Sir Thomas Malory, that gets lost when Merlin suddenly - and rather improbably - reappears to take him off to the College of Life to have a bizarre and depressing colloquy with the union of concerned representatives of the animal kingdom in the Combination Room. White, I think, liked the idea of ending there; liked the idea of Merlin having been imprisoned there rather than in a crystal cave. It doesn't work for me. I think I understand why he couldn't let go of the story yet, and I definitely feel that impulse too. (It's why I have a a shelf and a half of Arthuriana in my book collection, y'all, and why I watch every terrible film adaptation of the story that comes out.) But from a narrative perspective... it has to end. And to me, it ends better without The Book of Merlyn than with.

The book of Merlyn is just... it's awful. White's prose (and his characters) are frenetic-feeling. It all tumbles over itself to get the point out, and Merlyn is endlessly and with deliberate obtuseness ignoring the fourth wall, as it were (is there a literary term for that? I'm too lazy to look it up), and commenting about the readers of the book that he and Arthur are in, and what they will and will not understand. White insults his readers by having Merlyn call them stupid, arrogant, and backwards, and then by likening them to the dreaded communist ants. Merlyn tells everyone that "Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion...are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think...Opinion can never stand beside truth." He goes on to note that out of every hundred men, only one is wise, and the rest are led by the most knavish among them, under whatever banner (i.e., philosophy of government) is in fashion at the time. I don't even know how to respond to this, except to say that it creates an incredibly narrow view of the world and sets the bar awfully high for human thought. You can argue all you want about the nature of truth and whether it's in the eye of the beholder or what; I don't feel like getting into a big long postmodern thing about it, but I think it's awfully simplistic to suggest that, somewhere in the interplay of individual human minds, there is a single monolithic truth to which all thought ought to aspire. It also seems to me ridiculous to concede a world of individual human minds and individuality in general - and to extol such a world above all other worlds - and then suggest that opinion is worthless. "You're all individuals with individual brains, but there's only one real way to think, so you need to develop a hivemind." I disagree, and I think White does too, but this particular line of bullshit reasoning leads in only one direction.

I mean, maybe there is, somewhere, a monolithic truth; maybe it exists in the mind of God, or maybe it is God, or whatever, but it seems pretty clear to me that it is beyond the capacity of humankind to appreciate it, if it exists, and it seems utterly inconsistent with White's elevation of individuality to suggest that appreciating and adopting it is a worthy goal. Am I missing something? Maybe I'm missing something. I've been puzzling about this for a while.
White's furious screed is meandering, confusing, irritating, contradictory, and unstintingly didactic. It is self-referential, deliberately offensively erudite - though the lovely people at Ace Books have at least translated and footnoted White's most obscure references for those without the benefit of an English public-school education. The introduction suggests - as does White's latinate post-script - that White's many demons were fed by the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of the second World War, and that his despair on behalf of the human race were also coupled with his own feelings of cowardice and inadequacy, and with his fear that he might be pressed into military service.

I think that White could not bear to leave his King on the brink of his own destruction, but needed, for his own peace of mind, to build a bridge to the idea that Arthur had not died, or, at the very least, had the ability and intention to return. It seems to me that, while the fatalism of the story has a deep, romantic pull that anyone raised in a society which has as its base an Anglo-Saxon way of thinking must feel, there is a modern desperation to rewrite the ending, to infuse it with more hope, to make sure that it remains possible to believe in a second coming, if not of the Son of God, then at least of the reluctant King and his uneasy, fleeting peace.

Weird Search Phrases, Nos. 1 and 2

2008-05-29T14:17:00.008-04:00

Thanks to the lovely folks at StatCounter, I can tell you that someone found their way here searching for "big girl gone wilds." Somehow, I don't think he found what he was looking for. (Neither, I suspect, did Mr. "girl flashing at subway," when he landed on the post about my abusive relationship with the stairs into the Downtown Crossing station.)

The Once and Future King, T. H. White

2008-05-25T13:09:00.002-04:00

I probably should've broken this one up and posted about each of the four books separately. They're all so different, and (as usual) I have so much to say that I suspect this is going to feel like a really disjointed post.

I can't remember when I last read this one; all I can say for sure is that it was before I took a semester and a half of Irish language in college. It's a huge, surprisingly dense book, and I had forgotten most of it. (I've also forgotten most of Malory, to whom White refers liberally throughout the book, even though I read him approximately a thousand times my senior year of college.) For whatever reason, I remember both enjoying it and getting through it much faster last time around. Book I, which most people know through Disney's The Sword in the Stone is of course the most fun, but even it isn't devoid of an undercurrent of awfulness. Disney, of course, left out White's sociopolitical commentary and Communist ants, and the appalling Morgan le Fay. I myself don't have a lot to say about them.

What I have the most to say about is Guenever. She has always been a cipher to me, and, especially in older tellings of the King Arthur legend she's entirely beside the point except as a conduit for the doomed King's fated downfall, but White's Guenever, considering the other liberties he takes with the story, is especially puzzling. On the one hand, you have Lancelot, desperately in love with Arthur, or perhaps more accurately, Arthur's brain - such as it is, in White - and ideals coming to the conclusion that, despite his jealousy of her, "She was not a minx, not deceitful, not designing and heartless. She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel." Leaving aside for the moment the question of what it is that Lancelot's hero-worship of Arthur says about the Ill-Made Knight and his emotional intelligence and psychological issues, this is an extraordinary statement in light of Guenever's later behavior - which includes, among other things, a willful refusal to behave anything like an adult with respect to her marriage, her lover, his relationship with Elaine, his relationship with God, or, in fact, anything else about Lancelot that makes him Lancelot. Whatever thinking and feeling she's doing, she's not doing it about the things that make him him - though, to be fair, it's not clear to me that his interest in her is not in fact an offshoot of his adoration for Arthur, rather than a feeling with a life and origin of its own. White, however, makes it particularly impossible to understand the relationship between Lancelot and Guenever. She is demanding, unreasonable, petty, vengeful, petulant, inconsistent - really just plain ugly in her words and actions with respect to him, but he can't keep away. It's impossible for me to explain what it is about her that he loves so, and I guess it must have been for White, too, for it to come through the story so insistently, but to a certain extent it doesn't matter because the denouement is already written; White's not at the helm of the story, and he has to throw them together, because it is through them that the doom that flows inexorably from the sins of Uther comes home to roost, really. Not that it matters; Uther did enough evil that doom could've come from any corner of Orkney - it ends up being his cheating wife, but Mordred was resourceful and would've found a way to screw Arthur with his own principles in any case. Anyway, my point is: she's repellent. I don't recall a single story that does a good job of making Lancelot's interest in her seem organic, and that's always bothered me, but in White, the obsession, and its interminable length, is particularly unbelievable, and it's tiresome. I wonder how much of that is a function of knowing how it ends; maybe it's unfair to even try to hold the story to a standard of believability because in this late age it's not meant to be believed, and maybe it was never meant to be believed so much for the story itself as for the lessons it contains.

Of course, in White, there are two layers of lessons. The first layer is the lessons of the legend, about honor and chivalry and feuding and not sleeping with your sister and whatnot, and the second is White's oppressive, omnipresent sociopolitical commentary on might vs. right, private property, the feudal system, democracy, communism, and the equality of man. I'll get into the second layer a little more when I post about The Book of Merlyn, where the commentary is at its most intrusive, with respect to the story. Suffice to say, White is not shy about his moralizing, on a wide range of topics, and though he does it with wit and dry humor, it's still about as subtle as a piano falling five or six stories.

The Once and Future King is touted, by Berkley Books (the publisher of my battered edition) as "The world's greatest fantasy classic!" and, like most of the other fantasy classics, it is not really a children's book at all. Much of what's hilarious in it is hilariously awful (viz. the Orkney boys, in particular) and it slowly devolves into pure awful - a window into the worst of human nature, into greed and self-justification and vengeance not even for vengeance's own sake but for mere amusement. This, of course, coincides with Mordred's increasing involvement in the events. Like Guenever, Mordred himself is almost irrelevant; he's a vehicle for something sinister, a physical manifestation of sin and evil and the futility of intergenerational penance. White describes him thus, when he has come to harass Guenever "In a way it was tragic to watch him, for he was doing what his mother did. He was acting, and had ceased to be real." He's a vehicle for his mother's hate and vengeance, as White says, "robbed of himself - his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives on in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seemingly innocent of ill-intention." It's no accident that his most loyal partner in crime is Agravaine, who has the same fucked-up lust for their mother, only to a slightly lesser degree.

The two mothers that we see are Morgause and Elaine. Morgause, who is insane, controlling, and emotionally abusive, drove her confused sons into the arms of her hated brother but also used them as tools to wreak her vengeance on him. King Lot, her husband, is utterly absent as an influence on their children. Elaine, by contrast, dotes on Galahad and smothers him in religion and stories of his father, and raises an obnoxious, arrogant, sinless prig of a grail knight whose sole purpose appears to be to show up Lancelot - who is also absent as an influence in his son's life. (Don't get me started on Galahad, but: ick. Hate.) White is not fucking around; mothers are A Bad Influence, and must at all costs be stopped. Dads are apparently irrelevant; if you are going to turn out to be all right (or narratively important) then what you need is the guidance of a mad genius, like Merlyn, or Uncle Dap, or the bizarre St. Toirdealbhach. The message there might be that it's better not to have parents at all - as Arthur apparently hadn't - or, if you have them, to make sure that they're distant, indistinct figures whose influence is cancelled out by that of someone else. On the other hand, distance didn't save Arthur from the sins of his own father - though he seems to be confused about the source - he tells Gawaine, "When I was a young man I did something which was not just, and from it has sprung the misery of my life. Do you think you can stop the consequences of a bad action, by doing good ones afterwards?" [For those of you playing along at home, I believe he is referring to his decision, supported by Merlyn, to set adrift in a boat all babies born within a certain time frame in order to do away with Mordred - obviously, this was not a success.] But the roots of the conflict go back much earlier, to Uther's rape of Igraine - also assisted by Merlyn, according to the story as Gawaine tells it, which... is bizarre, and Merlyn should have known how that would turn out, but okay - and the insult to the Orkneys, whose clannishness would not permit the insult to go unrepaid. From that insult flowed Morgause's hatred of Uther and Arthur, on which she fed her five children and Mordred most of all. Did Arthur need to set him adrift in a boat as an infant for him to grow up full of hate and vengeance? I submit not, but I accede to his argument that penance only goes so far.

Anyway, as I said: rambling and incoherent, because I bit off too much at once with this book. I love this book, but there's a lot about it that irritates and confuses me. I want to re-read Malory now, but a) get in line, Sir Thomas, and b) I'm not sure I'm up to the task of the original. (Both time-wise and linguistically speaking.) If you haven't read it, you should, but it is dense and kind of heavy, and not at all the light read I was thinking it'd be.

The Big Read Gets Bigger

2008-05-19T12:46:00.003-04:00

The Big Read is adding books! By which I mean, they're adding books faster than I can possibly read them, which is mildly distressing to me. Does anyone else think it's odd that there's no Faulkner on the list yet? I suppose it's because he's so daunting, but: like Tolstoy isn't? Like Steinbeck isn't? Clearly, I need to start reading faster.

The Big Read Upstairs, Book 6

2008-05-16T10:53:00.005-04:00

It's the return of the Big Read Upstairs! My brief foray into something "not so heavy" turned out to be a colossal failure. Book six in this neverending project is The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read this in American Lit in high school, approximately a thousand years ago, and really liked it. I am now the same age as the narrator, Nick Carraway, is meant to be, which is unsettling, to say the least, on several levels.

I started this project to discover whether I could grow into the great literature I hated reading as a teenager, and I'm discovering that some of the stuff I loved at that age... doesn't wear well, I guess. I was not expecting that; I would not have said I'd changed so very much since then, though that sounds absurd even to me. Not to tip my hand on the eventual writeup of Fitzgerald, or anything.

While plowing my way through The Once and Future King I decided I should probably throw in The Book of Merlyn as well, which I have owned forever but never made it through (and with good reason). Writeups of those to follow soon as well.

Fun With Public Transit

2008-05-01T11:00:00.002-04:00

The Future MBTA site is maybe the most fun thing I've stumbled over on the web in the last week. It's all my delicious public transit dreams come true, plus, it's mappy and nerdy and fabulous and colorful.

...And now, back to my reading.

A New Procrastination Tool

2008-04-05T14:18:00.004-04:00

I'm pretty sure a significant portion of this goes right over my head, but the parts I do understand are kind of awesome. Google Reader introduced us. (Hi, Google Reader! Please stop introducing me to things I can't stop reading!) It kind of makes me wish I had taken a little more math in college.

Random Shit That Happens in the City, #2

2008-04-01T19:28:00.005-04:00

Sometimes, you can be morose-ing along, thinking about how April is the cruelest month, and feeling all tragic and windblown and generally being perfectly ridiculous for a woman of your advancing age...

...and then you fall down the stairs in the subway station, handily flashing all the people buying Charlie tickets and incense at the Orange Line end of the shopping concourse at Downtown Crossing.

Fortunately, when this happens, you can generally be spared the indignity of being helped up.

Baseball Season Is Back...

2008-03-26T07:44:00.003-04:00

...and I am watching the Sox on TV while I'm getting ready for work! I'm taking a brief break from the Big Read project to re-read The Once and Future King, which happened because I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God on the T on my way home on Friday, and then it was Easter, which meant a) cleaning, b) a drunken festival of recrimination and regret, and c) no time to get to the library before I needed a book to read on Monday morning. Plus, I need a break from deep and depressing literature for a while. Also, I don't know if I mentioned this, but... the Sox are on TV. In the morning. Before work.

Of course, they're also losing, but it's okay. You can't have everything.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

2008-03-23T08:15:00.006-04:00

I have a confession to make. I've never quite liked this book, and I'm not sure why, which is why I always forget that I don't really like it until I get into it.

I read the book twice in high school, I guess; or, at least, I know I've read it twice, and since the copy I "own" is not actually mine but is my mom's teaching copy (the Upstairs Mom teaches high school English), my guess is that the second read was not, in fact, in college, but maybe it was in AP. I don't dislike the book, exactly; but it's probably not something I'd read a fourth time on purpose.

My first problem with it is the way Hurston writes in dialect, and let me say that she does it extremely well, I think, though I have no frame of reference for how accurately she reproduces the dialect she's actually using. The rhythm and flow of the dialect and the more-or-less regular English around it doesn't feel forced or put on, the way that kind of thing often does to me, but it still pulls me right out of the story, especially when Janie is giving her little monologue to Phoeby at the end. Dialect is just one of those things; I understand why it's done and why it's sometimes necessary, and I think it probably is necessary here, but no matter what the dialect, it always bothers me, even when it's done well. So there's that.

I'm also bothered by the framing - the way the story is set up, we're hearing Janie tell Phoeby her own autobiography, which is fine, but there are a handful of really obvious occasions where the story slips into information that Janie can't have known personally (the mule's funeral; several bits of Tea Cake's rabies) and... I get why we're getting that, and we need to get that information somehow, but I feel like there's a way to do that consistent with the structure of the story Hurston's chosen, and it grates. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about it, and not viewing the frame in the proper light, which is not the frame as such but that Phoeby is to be the messenger or the vehicle for the telling of the story, because Janie's tongue is in her friend's mouth, and Janie doesn't need to talk about it because she did it, except she does because otherwise how's anyone going to know about it, and when I try to tease the whole thing out it just makes me grumpy. The hierarchy of words and actions in the book has never made complete sense to me; part of the point seemed to me to be that by the end of the book Janie has some words for the nameless peach-blossom dream she's having at the beginning of the book, but by that time she herself is already devaluing the idea of talking when it's divorced from doing, and I get that she's talking about ignorant judgy people who want to criticize the choices she's made, but it's a little too shrewdly self-justifying to me - which seems inconsistent with Janie's character, so to be fair I could be really reading it wrong - and unjustifiably dismissive. It's as if she's saying it's not that she doesn't care what they have to say because she's secure in having done the right thing for herself, it's that she doesn't care because they're all too small-minded to understand; they're so small-minded she can't be bothered to explain for herself what she did and why she did it. She's leaving the explaining to Phoeby. She's not interested in helping people to understand. There're two sides to it, sure - she's probably right that people would rather judge than understand; I think that's true of most of humanity, probably - but I'm not sure that's really what she's saying when she names Phoeby as her emissary.

The other thing, I think, is Janie herself. I know a lot of people look at this story as one of her personal growth and strength, but she also seems to be drifting along, to me. I think, sometimes, in discussions of this story, her own agency tends to get overstated. Even with Tea Cake, it's still kind of, "Tea Cake likes me in blue, so I wear blue;" "Tea Cake likes X for dinner, so that's what I fix." She certainly gets to be more herself with him than with Jody, or with Logan, but it's more "what he wants matches up with what I want," than "I feel free to disagree and/or define myself," and while that might be a fine (or even meaningless, what the hell do I know, really) distinction in real life, I think those are not the same thing and too much of what's said about this story (or any story) blithely glosses over that difference. Janie is chosen rather than choosing; she's defined rather than defining; she's reacting rather than acting, and that is the entire story of her life, really. The only exception, I think, is Tea Cake's funeral, where she really does just arrange things according to what she wants, but even then she relies on Sop-de-Bottom to be her messenger, and it's clear from the tone the story's taken there that the part of her that interacts with the world is just shut off for a while; afterwards, she sticks around the Everglades so that their friends won't feel like she's angry, even though she has no interest in being there. My point is, she has this one grand moment of being totally and singly in control of the situation, but she backs off from that really quick. Maybe the one moment is all that really matters, just to know that it's in you and you could, if you had to, but if that's true, that's really unsatisfying to me. (I mean, she has that other moment where she basically tells Logan to get stuffed, but I feel like whatever volition is in that gets quickly overshadowed by the force of the peach-blossom dream, which is practically a character all by itself, for the degree of control it exercises over Janie's behavior, and by Jody, who looks all shiny and peach-blossomy out by the pump, but who turns out to be a hollow pot-bellied shell of a man, in the end. It's like she has a split second of not control, but of self-definition, I guess, before her head winds up back under the water of other people's will that's sweeping her along.)

I guess that's my fundamental problem. It's not that I hate the story or find it uninteresting, it's just that it's deeply unsatisfying and its internal logic isn't entirely consistent, in a way that makes it impossible for me to figure out what exactly I'm supposed to take away from the story. I suspect I am in fact taking away all the wrong things.

The Worst Sentence Ever

2008-03-21T17:55:00.005-04:00

I read a lot of sentences where all the words are words in English and are words with which I am familiar, but I still don't know what the sentences mean. This is partly because I have a friend who is a physicist (Hi, KJ!), and partly because I read court decisions all day at work--where, by the way, in five short weeks, I have managed to expose myself as the resident grammar police. I can only suppose that the three usage books and two dictionaries on my desk gave me away.

This, though, might be the worst sentence I have ever read IN MY LIFE:

"Concepts which employee gave during course of his employment with employer in respect to electrically conductive plastics and gaskets and which were mere possibilities or vague mental conceptions which, though they may have resulted in a more economical gasket containing less than 10% silver, did not go beyond the state of imaginative muddled suspense which preceded successful inductive generalization were not protectible [sic?] as either trade secrets or confidential information and, hence, did not form a basis for misappropriation claim in absence of evidence that employee ever regarded or treated concepts as having any trade value or that employer so regarded concepts or at least regarded them as having value to its own business or to potential competitors."

This is probably because it is a gigantic and possibly run-on (what? I get bored before I get to the end of it; I can't remember where all the subjects and verbs are) summary of several sentences which were sub-par to begin with, by someone who gets paid even less than I do. Today's festival of grammatical and syntactic stupidity also included the phrase "extremely substantial," which kind of puts me in mind of a mutant vitamin-infused steak-and-mashed-potatoes dinner, but which in reality refers to someone's rights to a piece of property. Unreal, y'all.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

2008-03-18T22:08:00.004-04:00

Commenter Simon Evans wondered how I feel about the idea that the first half of this book is better than the second, and so I read the book with an eye to that proposition. This isn't something I've heard anyone say about the book before, and I've just discovered I'm too lazy to craft a Google search that'll get me more information about it, but I thought it was kind of intriguing.

The first half is really the setup, and the second half is the payoff, if you want to look at it that way. In the first half, Harper Lee gets you comfortable in Scout's mostly harmless, imperturbably familiar little world, where the big dangers are primarily imaginary, and adults are able to control the few real threats, even if those threats expose them to Scout in a new and unfamiliar light. At the age of six, she is entirely and unconsciously confident that she knows How Things Are, because that is How They Have Always Been, and if you are from a small town, where everyone knows everyone's business, that world is instantly familiar to you. The second half is where the real action is; it's where the real unmasking of humanity takes place to really horrifying effect.

I think, on the whole, I disagree that the first half is better, as such. The first half goes down easier and feels more comfortable because it's dry and bucolic and hilarious, marked subtly by the gap in understanding between our pint-sized narrator and us as readers. The second half is hard to take because underneath Scout's somewhat muddled but growing understanding of what's going on around her is an absolute horror show of ignorance and cravenness and violence and misery, the cost of which ultimately is a man's life. That gap in perception suddenly stops being so funny and starts making you feel a little sick. Even though the awfulness of it is blunted by Scout's narration and Lee's masterful prose, the contrast between the two phases of the book is uncomfortably sharp. I think also in the second half it becomes much clearer that there are two voices inherent in the narration - Scout as a child, and Scout as an adult looking back on what's happened. The combination becomes less seamless, I think, and I don't mean that as a criticism; I think it's deliberate and necessary, partly because some distance is required in order to properly tell the story, and also because Scout is, through the process of telling the story, growing up. I think the first half is more fun, I guess, but I don't agree that it's better. And without the second half, the first half wouldn't be much of a story to me, either, I guess, because you'd lack the contrast between the real and imagined terrors, between the folk-myth of smalltown busybody wisdom and the real people underneath the streaks and oddities and family feuds. Conversely, I think the second half's power to shock you and make you uncomfortable comes from the first half's sleepy setup.

I can't remember what it was like to read this book and not know what was coming, though I'm sure that I didn't, when I first read the book. I suppose that's the thing I hate the most about re-reads, is that you can never read something for the first time a second time. I had intended to have something more profound to say about this, but a) I've forgotten what it was now, and b) I'm nearly done with Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I'm already a book behind as it is.

Random Shit That Happens in the City, #1

2008-03-15T20:14:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, when you walk out your door on a Saturday afternoon, there's a totally random stranger dude in an ugly-ass hoodie, toking up on your front steps.