Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.

Twilight update

That series is like crack or something. I don't understand it, but I'm willing to concede that I have really enjoyed spending three straight weekends working through the first three books. The fourth, well, that's going to wait until after finals.

A couple quick things worth noting: I know Romeo & Juliet and Wuthering Heights are fairly typical teen fare; now I'm trying to decide whether Meyer's explicit use of them has made them more accessible or has otherwise turned young readers onto the classics. Also, I love this poem. And well before I saw it as the beginning quote to Eclipse, I had been thinking of it in conjunction to this series. However, I think about it kind of a lot, so maybe that's not such a coincidence.

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Now playing: Dave Matthews Band - Warehouse
via FoxyTunes

My new president supports my new career

I know it's just one line from one speech to a special interest group, but still, yay!

“More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward. ... That’s what libraries are about. At the moment that we persuade a child, any child to cross that threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better. It’s an enormous force for good.”

-Barack Obama, speaking at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, 2005

Edit: 11/10 - so, apparently I already knew about this quote 3 years ago... See, I was an Obama fan back in the day. Glad so many Americans caught up with me.

Okay Twilight

So the Facebook application "Pieces of Flair" may have gotten its inspiration from Office Space, but I sometimes wonder if it would manage to keep going were it not for Twilight, Stephenie Meyer's crazy-popular young adult vampire series. (I would post some, but it kept making the margins all funny, and also some of them seem to need spoiler alerts attached. Suffice it to say, "Team Edward" "I'm in love with a fictional vampire" and "I'm sending this to you because I needed more points for Twilight flair" are popular.)

I don't remember when/why I decided I would have to get around to reading these. Maybe it had to do with my teens. Maybe it was my way of punishing myself for all the times I have mocked my mom for her vampire craze. Or some sort of cruel irony since I missed the last young adult novel phenomenon that was Harry Potter. Anyway, doesn't really matter. The point is, last Friday I came home from the library, big book in hand, and only wondering a little if the librarian was smirking at me.

Twilight is back at the library, so I don't have a copy nearby to help with this post. (On the other hand, I do have New Moon, a fact about which I am not proud.) It is a ridiculously fast read, by the way. I am sure that someone could do a better recap than this, but here we go: Bella moves from sunny Phoenix to rainy Forks, WA to live with her dad. And she falls in love with a vampire, who may or may not want to eat her. And hijinx ensue. Well, not exactly.

To my mind, clearly the best part of the novel is the "will they or won't they?" aspect to Bella and Edward's relationship. I believe that Meyer knows her Jane Austen well, and was not surprised when Bella breaks out a copy of the collected novels. Edward is very much the Austen hero: wicked smart, extremely honorable, and tortured by his own imperfections. (This may be a coincidence, but as in Austen, any declarations of love are also oddly embarrassing for this reader, who feels both as if she is intruding on something private and wanting to correct the lovers - er, are you sure you want to say it that way?) Yet, unlike legions of Facebook users, I don't feel about Edward the way I feel about Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. (And given that the character is 17 going on 107 or whatever, that's probably not a bad thing.)

So, as far as teen girls go, I totally get it. (Do teen guys read Twilight? Anyone have statistics for me?) Since the protagonists are teens, I imagine it has limited adult appeal. Vampire buffs can get their fix from other series, and romantics will probably seek out something with more sex. But it's awfully charming, and a little addictive - hence Book 2 on my couch and Book 3 somewhere in transit between libraries. I will try to put off Book 4, since really? There has to be delayed gratification somewhere along the way.

Cue Anxiety

Anxiety is actually a pretty good topic for a chick lit novel, as it Aurelie Sheehan's The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, which is almost not quite chick lit. But still is. I mean, it's important for the protagonist to be lovably neurotic, right? And what says lovable neurosis better than anxiety? (This is what I tell myself.)

Anyhow, TAOEO is the title of Winona's movie project, which she dreams about while working as a legal secretary. This is what it means: "Do you ever look at a sign and you think it says something different than it really does? Like the sign says TURN AHEAD and you read it as TURN AROUND, and you feel as if it's a personal message just for you?" [... questions from love interest, including whether this is magical realism or surrealism] "It doesn't have a name. That's part of the anxiety."

I liked this theme, but I never thought it got played to its full potential. I also never really understood Winona's infatuation with new attorney Sandy, who is beautiful and takes Winona out for a facial and as a result is somehow magical. Or something.

Perhaps the best way to put it is that I wanted to like this book more than I did. Which isn't exactly to say that I didn't like it. Maybe I just wanted a little more.

Blog Action Day: oh yeah, I signed up for this

Today, bloggers are harnessing the power of the web (or something like that) to foster a massive conversation on poverty. Thus... Blog Action Day. Last year was about the environment, and this year they are taking on an equally weighty topic.

I could probably have a lot to say. I could ponder about how John Edwards did so much to bring the issue of poverty out of the shadows during his campaign. Or I could make a pitch for the awesome microfinance site Kiva (here's my lender page.)

Instead, I'm going to revisit an old post from 2005 where I discussed economist Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty. Here's some of what I said:

I am heartened by the fact that Sachs sees the impoverished as people, not just numbers. And that he believes in the free market, but sees a role for governments and institutions in breaking the cycle of poverty. And I hope that he is going to do what he says, provide a step-by-step plan to ending poverty. (It will be interesting to see how "liberal" and humanitarian this is, and also how well it meshes with last week's G8 discussions. I know he believes in debt relief.)

Oh, I forgot. Foreword by Bono. He's kind of a funny writer. But he is lavish in his praise for Sachs, and credits him for providing the kinds of insight and knowledge that have made the rock star a credible speaker for third world debt reduction.

I'm reading a new book

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Aurelie Sheehan)

It seemed appropriate.

"This bright brute is the gayest"

...of his novels. This is how Nabokov described King, Queen, Knave, which he first wrote in exile in the late 1920s and which his son translated into English in the 1960s. Set in Berlin, the king is the moneyed entrepreneur Dreyer. He's a bit of a buffoon, like the caricatures of Germans in French literature from the late nineteenth century. (I did a paper on this in grad school. Don't ask. Actually, you can ask. It was really fun to read kids' books that made fun of Germans in Alsace.) The queen is his wife, Martha. She's kind of a cipher, beautiful and cold and bewitching. Except maybe also not that attractive. The knave is our naive (and any pun there is an accident of translation) Franz, Dreyer's nephew, who has come to Berlin for a job at his uncle's store and soon becomes a fixture in the Dreyer household.

I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?

I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.

Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.

Library girl (that would be me)

I've been busy with school. The bulk of my reading has had to do with information science, or management theory (or political blogs or the ever-present New Yorkers, which have gotten the best of me again.) And even my airplane reading on the flight back from Hawaii turned out to be related to school...

Which takes me to Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, from McSweeney's contributer and Anaheim librarian Scott Douglas. Douglas is about my age. Except he started working as a library page in college, and then went straight to library school. So he's been official for something like 5 or 6 years. And working in libraries for more like 10. (Also, most of my classmates are already longtime employees of some library or another. This makes me nervous for my future career prospects. How am I going to get hired when everyone else already has way more experience? Answer: quit my day job and get unpaid internships?) Anyway, I'm going to say that Douglas has certain writing quirks that mark him as part of the Dave Eggers cadre. (I'm not sure what I even mean by that, and am afraid of getting myself into trouble, so I'm just going to link to a wiki post for Eggers, and make a vague reference to a sort of self-referential, insouciant, nerdy hipsterism.) He also reminded me - with his penchant for wanting to share more information than he can possibly fit in through use of footnotes and "for shelving" asides - of David Foster Wallace, which just makes me sad.

Anyway. Douglas is funny. I laughed. He is good at noting the ridiculous. Yet everytime he edges toward being mean, he tries to take a step back, and I believe he is fundamentally a good guy who just happens to love telling a good story. None of the story of his time in school at SJSU or his early days at the library particularly makes me excited about what lies ahead. In fact, I sat at the airport wondering if I could run out of there and just live on my uncle's couch in Honolulu and swim in his building's beautiful new saltwater pool. But that's a life dilemma for another moment.

And Douglas isn't all "working in a library with librarians is C.R.A.Z.Y." He mocks them, and says they really don't read (working with books too much kills some of the joy, like Dr. Franzblau in this episode). But still, libraries will always be "the gateway to something greater." And the community that they inspire as they serve the community (tortured sentence structure, I know) is really something special.

Erin reads The New Yorker

...and links to random things that catch her fancy.

from July 28:
Jonah Lehrer, Annals of Science, "The Eureka Hunt," The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, p. 40
I knew I was right about this!

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation stage is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers."

fave Aleksandar Hemon has a new book, and is separated at birth from another fave?

(left, Hemon; right, Vladimir Mayakovsky)



from Aug. 4:
Sasha Frere-Jones explains contemporary popular rock:

The main antecedent [to Coldplay's sound] is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

from Aug. 11 & 18:
Matthew Dickman writes a lovely and haunting poem mostly about suicide, that includes the following line: "If you are/travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially/on a train." Sound advice.

The Golden Compass

One of the reasons I was slow in getting to The Girl with No Shadow is that I was determined to finish the next book club selection first. Some date tbd we are going to meet to discuss Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first entry in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

While reading, I was reminded of how lovely stories for young readers can be. How magical, and allegorical, and balanced between danger and safety. I was too old when this series first appeared to read it as a child, and I often found myself wondering what the experience would have been. Would I have identified with young Lyra? Or were there little moments in which Pullman hit false notes? Would they have mattered? (I have always leaned toward getting swept away by books - I am good at suspending my disbelief.)

Reading the novel now, I thought instead about the parallel universe in which Lyra lives, where people's souls (to oversimplify) reside in animal daemons. I thought about the little nods toward history - or moments in history where two paths diverged into separate universes. I wondered about how different things would be if the emotions you normally learned to keep hidden were on overt display. I meditated on the notion of loneliness - Lyra is terrified by the very notion of what it would be like to ever be without her daemon, Pantalaimon - and whether children feel that intense loneliness. I puzzled over the class distinctions, particularly at first before the plot took off and left most of those questions behind.

And perhaps most strangely, I stopped and thought about this passage, and wondered why it reminded me of Derrida:

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Not only did I play with it as far as an idea of meaning residing on the margins, which is where Lyra leaves her plan so that it cannot disappear, but I also stopped to consider myself and my friends. Our predilection toward overanalysis. This right here seems to me an simple and elegant explanation for why we should stop making ourselves crazy by overthinking. Grasping at straws (to begin some fun mixing of metaphors) we cause the very soap bubble we desire to pop.

I'll eventually take on books two and three. Looking forward to seeing where Lyra's adventures take her.

CHOCOLATE (and magic)

I read Chocolat sometime during the spring of my sophomore or junior year in college. I am unclear on how I had time to read a pretty little tale on domestic witchcraft and the joys of food and love and identity and acceptance and friendship, etc. while I was taking classes. But I have very clear memories about where I sat in our backyard and everything. The movie was not as good, despite my love for Juliette Binoche. In part I blame an intransigent movie-mate, and in part I blame the subterranean theater, and the NYC subway trains that shook the whole place every 5 minutes or so.

All of which leads me to Joanne Harris' sequel, The Girl with No Shadow (or The Lollipop Shoes in the UK) which I read in a great big rush at the beginning of the week. [We emphatically do not like the LAPL's new loan period. It is hard to begin a 440 page book on Sunday and turn it in on Tuesday.] But this was a good book to read all at once. It's immersive and fast and mysterious and (literally) magical. We meet Vianne and her daughter four years after the events in Chocolat. They have new names, and there is a new daughter, and a new witch on the horizon. Plus Vianne has abandoned magic in an attempt to create a normal and safe life for her family. And obviously this is not going to work. No surprise.

I was often swept away by the book in that lovely way that books can sweep you away. Where the magic of storytelling just makes you feel safe and free and alive with possibility. But I was also very deeply troubled. The dark aspects of the book were very dark, and the villain's cynicism seductive. The result for me was a kind of dissatisfied turmoil, not a black mark against the novel, but all the same enough to knock me off-kilter.

My Name is Will - actually about the book

This was my favorite line from the whole book. Totally simple, and yet it really got to me. (Maybe because it was in italics?)

"One minute I'm going too slow; the next too fast. We as a society have a very narrow window of acceptable behavior."

Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

I've had some time to get over being disturbed by the whole Drench-a-Wench thing. Certain commenters didn't help, but I am being zen about it all. And so I finished reading Jess Winfield's My Name is Will.

I enjoyed the novel - Winfield is witty and evocative. And his two young Wills are human and flawed and clever and likable. (I have also had fun listening to Winfield on the NYT's Book Review podcast, which has utterly out of date archives, and on KQED Forum.)

Since watching him and the rest of the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet was such a part of my childhood - and really the only part of the Faire other than the cinnamon sticky buns and lemon shaved ices that I liked - I feel this odd possessiveness. Like, I knew this guy (or my mom did? Whatever.) back before other people did.

So, reading the novel ended up being only about 20% reading the novel - and I'm sorry about that! I wish I could have experienced just as it is, like most readers probably will. Instead it was revisiting my childhood. (I would have been 6 at the time of the book, and hanging out in the Glade reading a totally unperiod book and sulking about how my costume wasn't pretty enough. And 2 or 3 years later the Agoura Faire would be bulldozed and I would be dancing and the Faire would be irrevocably past.) I was amazed by how clearly I remembered the small details - the potholes and the "5 miles per hour" signs at the entrance to the site, the huge tankers that sprayed water on the paths to keep the dust down, the rough locations of various stages and areas - that Winfield mentions during Willie's drug-induced stay at the Novato Faire. And it reminded me again of how different my early childhood was from that of my friends, whose parents hadn't spent the weekends playing high-caliber dress-up. And reminded me of all the things I did and didn't like about the experience. And more than anything, how it shaped me, and how long ago it was. How I am 3 years older than the swaggering Russian diplomat who came to Elizabeth's court and met my mother. And how strange it is to see my childhood in print.

So I guess Jess that I have to thank you for that.

Oh dear lord

From My Name is Will:

He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."

Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.