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.

Persepolis, or why a country that changes its name along isn't always so stable

It took awhile to get there, but I finally got my library copy of The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and read it in 3 sittings on Sunday. (The complete version, by the way is Persepolis 1 & 2 - or 1-4 in the French. So it takes you from her childhood in Iran through schooling in Vienna and back to Iran for college and young adulthood.)

Without wanting to look for proof of this, I am sure that others have written more eloquently that I will about the ability of the graphic novel to address trauma and tragedy. (See also: Maus, by Art Spiegelman) Because in some ways it is really seeing the innocence in Marji's big dark eyes that hits home... but without feeling so overwhelming that the reader just turns away. (I was discussing this recently in terms of the way we deal with war veterans, and how our guilt in some ways makes us unwilling to hear and understand them.)

I'm not sure what all to say about the book. I am glad I got the complete version and got through everything at once. But I think that reading about the younger Satrapi separately from her teenage and older self would have been good. Clearly, the Islamic Revolution and its impact is a central theme throughout - but in many other ways the child and the teen have very different stories. All very eventful though. To say the least.

This is one of those times where I wish I felt more willing to write an insightful review. But I am not there. Maybe because there was an earthquake - and it's still earthquake weather - or maybe just because so much has already been said about Persepolis, the book and when it came out as a film as well. And I have yet to see the film. But I will.

(Oh, and I've written about memoirs of life in Islamic Iran before (and here). Just wanted to mention.)

PS - I loved the artwork. I was particularly fond of the depiction of all the little girls in their veils, and God, and more disturbingly the ghosts of the all the lives lost.

LibraryCat

Simon loves my books, or rather loves lounging in front of them. He also likes walking on newspapers.

Also, this is what happens when you have people bring over books to swap...

(Also, I would like to point out that Simon's book pile includes Catch-22, William T. Vollman, Bros. Karamazov, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. It also has some cheesy historical mysteries too. Plus! My Name is Will!)

Minus 2 points for sarcasm

Maybe I'm biased, because I seem to have a soft spot for Turkey, or at least for its Nobel laureates. So this story on Treehugger both attracted my attention and raised a little bit of pique.

It turns out that the Turkish government has provided free textbooks for schoolchildren. (Yay, obviously.) Except that they give them away, at a cost of $800 million and lots and lots of trees, and then they mostly get thrown out at the end of the year. And so they produce all new ones and the cycle continues.

"So [and here comes the snark] they’ve come up with an ingenious remedy that some folks have been practicing for centuries, book lending." Students will now return the books at the end of the school year, which is what I did through my years of public education. Not only is this good environmentally and economically, but it can offer Turkish children the opportunity to engage in such fun activities as seeing who had your textbook in years past, and writing in fake "funny" names to entertain future generations of textbook users.

Hopeless romantic

That is me. I kind of like this about myself - I think it's endearing. (If you don't think so, please don't burst my bubble by telling me as much.)

Anyway, I've been reading more sporadically than usual (and catching up on Stanford magazine, actually) but after several nights in a row where something kept me from the final 40 pages of The Painted Veil (by W. Somerset Maugham), I am through it.

This is the July book club selection, and is a particularly exciting choice because there will also be pizza and movie during the meeting. (Hooray!) I don't like to blog about books before the meeting, b/c then I am over all my "interesting" thoughts. But then I don't like to blog after, b/c by then I'm ready to move on. (This is clearly a dilemma. If you have solutions, let me know. Perhaps I could live-blog the meeting? Because that clearly wouldn't be annoying.)

I really liked this book. I could just start and end there; it was thought-provoking and human and obnoxious and unsatisfying and thus terribly satisfying. I was often distracted thinking about the film adaptation and wondering what they would change and whom they cast, etc. And I also found myself drawing analogies to Gone with the Wind, which I think was first published a decade later than this.

Instead of getting into all of those things, I'll just leave you with this early passage:

He did not speak because he had nothing to say. But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

ugh, depressing

So I read a novella last week when I decided to take the bus to work. This book was on my dresser, and I honestly don't remember how it came into my possession. Based on the handwritten notes inside, it belonged to one of two friends (was it you, Jen?) and was from some course or another.

What was this mystery book? Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons. It is a coming-of-age tale of sorts. Really more just a girl's look back at how she survived a seriously f-ed up situation. And fortunately for her - and even more so for us as readers - we know that she survived. And has created/found a safe space for herself.

I found Ellen's voice fascinating. But I couldn't get into this book. I just wanted to escape. And to take Ellen with me. Too much of a downer for July. But I think it probably makes for excellent young adult fiction (for girls, at least).

Sometimes pretentious can be okay

I don't remember how I heard about Maynard & Jennica, by Rudolph Delson. Doesn't really matter - it ended up on my list so I requested it from the library. It's billed as a love story, with a lot of minor characters. In this it is perhaps like Beginner's Greek. But this is missing a lot of the sweet. You're not rooting against these lovers, but I'm not convinced that you like them very much.

I'm having trouble knowing what to say about the book, and perhaps that's because it is a very talky novel. It's a little like a written documentary - a series of (mostly) monologues by a variety of different characters, explaining what's happening from their point of view. And the characters include family, childhood friends, a kid on the subway, and a rap artist. Somehow this all makes sense. And they all have plenty to say, mainly about an ambitious California girl seeking an "illustrious" life in NYC, and a completely pretentious filmmaker who dresses like he's someone's grandpa. These are Jennica (aka Jenny) & Maynard (aka Arnie, aka Manny, aka Gogi). And these monologues are introduced like this: "Maynard Gogarty, in paradise, tells us something he isn't certain of." The uncertain thing, by the way, is whether Jennica knows he can be a jerk. Jennica follows up by being uncertain about whether or not he plans to propose.

Anyway, etc. etc. For just under 300 pages. Also there is September 11, and a really fantastic indictment of the way non-New Yorkers appropriated the city's grief. (I'm not entirely sure I agree, seeing as how I was not exactly innocent of the charge and seeing as how the attacks were on a nation, not just a city, but nonetheless...) And some very funny moments. Which is all to say... what? I liked it; I did. Maybe despite myself.

The Places We Go For Love

A thematic, dual review...

First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.

(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)

Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.

(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)

Bewitched by Beginner's Greek

It really is the best word I can think of - bewitched. I wasn't even sure I liked James Collins' novel while I was reading it, but I just could not put it down. He manipulated my emotions perfectly, so that I was utterly invested in the outcome of the novel.

Peter and Holly fall in love as seatmates on a cross-country flight, but Peter loses her number, killing the romance before it has a chance to flower. Until fate brings them back together, except now she's with his best friend. Cheesy, I know. Except it works. One thing that particularly pleased me as Collins laid out the scenario was that he skipped the re-encounter. We jump from a heart-stricken Peter looking desperately for the lost number, to him three years after Holly has returned to his life. The meeting happens in flashbacks. A lot of important moments in the novel happen in flashbacks. And we spend a lot of time in various characters' heads, seeing how they see themselves and the starcrossed couple. Holly though? We don't really meet her until page 280, by which point I'm ravenous for her to become more than a cipher onto which others attach their own aspirations.

The rarefied air in which the characters move can be a little annoying - um, why am I not that rich and clever? - but forgivable in the same while Jane Austen & Edith Wharton's settings are forgivable. And like Austen, Collins loves skewering self-interest and hypocrisy. But also like her, he is gentle about it. No one tends to fall very hard or very far.

In fact, therein lies a central theme of the story: "[...] here she was setting off to grab all the love and happiness she could get. He hoped she would succeed. Whenever good people who were weak and timid showed strength and got things that bad, arrogant people always had handed to them, Peter was moved." Indeed.