Three Things I Read This Weekend

1. "Sleep" by Haruki Murakami. (Thanks to Carolline for the link.) As a very good sleeper, I find the opposite of sleep fascinating.

2. "Picturing Auschwitz" by Alec Wilkinson, in the New Yorker. I read this while drinking tea before preparing to drive home from Riverside early in the morning. It made me woozy - the entire disconnect between my peaceful morning and photos in the face of death - but the discovery of a treasure trove of photos from the assistant to the commander at Auschwitz is
truly extraordinary. (More pics from the album online too.)

3. Why Gen X still matters, an article in the LA Times about a new book by Jeff Gordinier. I am a Gen X cusp baby. Technically I was born three years too late (which makes me a Millenial, per the article, but I don't buy that. What happened to Gen Y? Aren't the Millenials the teens of today?) but Gen X values still intensely shaped my early cultural awareness. I discovered music right as Nirvana and Pearl Jam burst onto the scene, and I adored "Singles" and "Reality Bites" and grunge and everything else. I felt utterly Gen X. And even though the lovely dot com boom era polished a lot of that away, I still feel very close to my X-er past.

Dance Dance Dance

I never really bought into the metaphor that creates the title of this Murakami (Haruki, not Takashi) novel, but other than that, I found this book utterly enchanting.

I'm a big fan of Murakami's brand of fatalistic magical realism. And I'm particularly fascinated by his male characters. They are insightful and sensitive, and yet aloof and difficult. And they tend to like women who are like wounded birds. Women love them, and yet leave them more often that not, for whatever (sometimes metaphysical) reasons.

Anyway, am saving up some of my DDD thoughts for my book club (like trying to puzzle out the commentary on late capitalism), but I still want to share a passage, as the protagonist contemplates the teen who has become essentially his charge:

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you're over the summit, it's downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you're still going strong, when suddenly you've crossed the great divide. [and it goes on, but I don't want to type the whole book. It's pages 209-10 of the Vintage trade paperback edition, if you want to find it]

Dancing? or floating along? How do we choose which will comprise our lives? Or do we struggle to find another action altogether?

Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.

Historical (in)accuracy

I blame my parents. Sure, lots of other women love the costume drama. But I seem to have a special affinity for movies and books that involve hoop skirts and bodices and ridiculously uncomfortable-seeming clothing.

This is why I avoided Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl like the plague. Bodices, yes; bodice-rippers, no thank you. And besides, I grew up around Elizabethan history snobs and had become one myself. But then the ads for the movie started. And this reminded me that last year I had decided I was being too stuck-up about the book, and bought myself a cheap copy. So last week, I read the book.

In the end, I think my mom, who watched last year's Elizabeth: The Golden Age on Sunday, and I could have had a "taking historical liberties" competition. (I really enjoyed my time with Wikipedia, which had to my mind a fairly balanced portrayal of the various suppositions by historians about the lives of Queen Elizabeth's mother and aunt.) Gregory was probably never out and out misrepresenting what evidence suggests; but she definitely felt free to choose what made the most exciting narrative.

Which is fine. I was entertained the entire time. But the writing style was a bit simplistic, and many of the characters too caricatured. And this is especially frustrating when Gregory is making the point that courtiers did have real lives and emotions and were forced to constantly play parts. Most frustrating was Mary Boleyn's anachronistic proto-feminism and desire to be a small woman farmer. I was skeptical of that the whole time.

But again, whatever. I was entertained. And sometimes, that's enough.

Wrapping up the inaugural book club meeting

In the last few weeks I've been far more interested in reading than in writing. (There has also been a fair amount of misc. drama and way too many hours at work in front of the computer.) So instead of a standard analysis of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and our first book club meeting, I will just share some passages from the book.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind msyelf of what I once could do, how others saw me.
I want to steal something.

The other two I had marked are too long to retype. But they are about how it all started, with political assassination blamed on Islamic fundamentalism. And about the loss of memory for young girls, who have no idea of a world before this, where they were more than their fertility. And yet, the societal ills of the world before did exist. It wasn't perfect then either; that much is true.

I loved talking with the rest of the group; what was interesting and important to them overlapped and differed in such wonderful ways. In particular the other readers paid more attention to the minor female characters, whereas I got caught up in the central narrative, and then the ways that history is told and retold.

And next month, Haruki Murakami...

Aw! I wanna join the circus!

I mentioned yesterday that I had started reading Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, the second straight book I went into apprehensively.

But wow, I really really liked it. And went through it like gangbusters. Chapters alternate between the musings of a grumpy old man in a nursing home and his reminiscences of life on a circus train during the Depression, with a considerable emphasis on the latter.

Crotchety old men aren't generally my favorite literary subjects, but this particular one is so adorably frustrated and above all human. He reminded me of my grandmother, and made me rethink her last months with a newfound sympathy. Even when she seemed to be not there at all - or was doing something that seemed designed just to make us give in to her petulance - there may have been more there, a spark of life that she couldn't always communicate in any way we could understand.

Of course the center of the story is how a Cornell student can run out from his final exams and end up in the circus, and have his heart captured by a pair of performers: one human, one pachyderm. Jacob is an interesting young man, both of a gentle heart and a willingness to use his fists. Honorable. Many of the other characters are more caricatured, but in a way that mostly works. Gruen is evoking a time and a culture, and I believe does so admirably, appealing to all five senses. The circus is exotic but also everyday; the love story is romantic and yet also not so unusual. ...Anyway, I may be babbing. But I'm so pleased at finding (alongside thousands of others, it seems) a story that so confounded my expectations of the topic.

Roundup

Between work and illness over the last couple weeks, I just haven't felt like blogging. I have been reading some though, when I can steal time.

First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.

Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."

The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.

Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.

The Journal of Dora Damage

I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.

But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.

And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.

It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.

Suburban Sex Ed: The Abstinence Teacher

I LOVED The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. I first heard about it sometime in October, after finally seeing Little Children sometime in the summer.

There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.

I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.

Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.

You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.

Natasha's Dance, 19th & 20th Centuries

Finishing Figes' book took longer than I expected. (Largely b/c I spent a lot of time in the past two weeks falling asleep. Why is it that I always think I'll get more reading done when I'm sick and I never ever do?)

But I made it through. The last couple chapters dealt with topics I knew pretty well: the Tatar legacy, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet culture. The final chapter however, "Russia Abroad" was about the exiles and what Russia meant and became to them after the creation of the USSR. That I never bothered to study too much, so it made for a lovely ending.

Most of the general comments in my earlier post remain relevant. I'm not sure that I have that much to add. What I did LOVE though was Figes' Guide to Further Reading, 29 pages of suggestions, all in English, so the reader won't get bogged down in a list of sources that may have been fantastic for Figes but probably aren't much good for him or her. That section alone could probably keep me happy for ages, and of course there was the joy of seeing him give high marks to books that I have read/owned/etc.

Getting through Figes in the first 3 weeks of the year means that I have time to catch up on library books (and the book for my new book club!) before turning to book 2 of the challenge.

What's in a Love Story?

It's a little creepy when you are discussing something (or someone) and then it pops up unexpectedly in a different location. Just last weekend I got a MySpace message from a childhood friend I hadn't been in touch with in 10 years, but had just been talking about.

And this weekend, after watching Jeux d'enfants (or "Love Me if You Dare") I had been thinking about what makes a love story. And what relationship the love story has with real-life love. (Thank you to my friends who made v thoughtful comments on this topic.) At any rate, I wondered how necessary conflict was to both the story, and the actual love. Was it strengthened by adversity?

Of course, I am not alone pondering this. (Obviously.) I open the LA Times Book Review this afternoon and discover Louisa Thomas' review of the Jeffrey Eugenides anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. And between them, Thomas and Eugenides restate my thoughts, and then respond to them. Check it out:

What makes a love story? The answer found in "My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead," an anthology of short stories edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, may surprise. The thread that binds these 27 disparate tales -- spanning 120 years -- is loneliness. Love here doesn't join people together. More often than not it cracks them apart.

The objects of love can take many forms: the beloveds who don't love their lovers in return. Or the beloveds who were once in love but then fell out. Or the beloveds who have died. Betrayal knows many guises. In each case, the root of these stories is unhappiness; rain is its sustenance (weather is a recurring motif). The blossom -- love -- can be beautiful, but it quickly withers and rots.

"A love story can never be about full possession," Eugenides writes in the book's introduction. "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name." (Tell that to Jane Austen, but he has a point.)

That quote by Eugenides said - far more coherently than I had been able to - exactly what I had been trying to all weekend long. So thanks.

Pretty Little Mistakes - a gimmick that mostly works

I don't know if there's still around, but kids of my generation read a fair amount of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, where every couple pages you faced a decision and "chose" which path you wanted your protagonist to take. While there would be occasional overlap, generally your choices (obviously) influenced the course of the narrative, resulting in different endings.

The only one of these works that I remember at all was a time-travel one, set in Elizabethan/Shakespearean England. One of the endings involved being a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and watching her try to get some ring off as she died. (Why do I remember these things????)

All of this takes me to Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes, which is billed as "a do-over novel." It's a clever premise, beginning with a single decision: do you go to college with your boyfriend, or do you go travel? What major you choose, where you choose to travel, etc. sends you on entirely different paths. (Although crystal meth seems to figure in an awful lot of them.)

But therein lie the three problems I had with this book. 1 - I didn't know when I was finished. I still don't really. Each life takes about 10 minutes (probably less) to read, but I don't really want to try to ensure I hit all 150 of them. At this point, I feel pretty well over it. Maybe I'll try to find a couple more paths I missed. 2 - I didn't care about the characters. Because "you" are the protagonist (and this "you" wasn't much like me), she isn't defined, and the other characters pop in and out. It's not about plot or character development. And as a result, kind of boring. 3 - My first two complaints are kind of weak, b/c McElhatton's project wasn't meant to have a defined "I've read this" or rich characters. But the intellectual conceit of the gimmick is that the decisions you take send your life in wildly different directions. But really, one person wouldn't potentially make all the decisions in these pages. They require personalities that are just too different from one another. So it's hard for me to think of "you" as a single person.

Am I over-thinking this? Probably. It was fun to be a pharma rep and a lesbian in Ireland and to marry into the mafia and die of hepatitis in the London flat of an Indian transsexual. But do I feel enriched from having read Pretty Little Mistakes? Unfortunately, no.

Another thing I'm behind on...

For some reason, I never get around to reading Boldtype in a timely fashion. It arrives in my inbox once a month of so (except when it gets filtered into spam) and there it sits, waiting for me to realize that it'll only take me about 5-10 min to go through it.

BT is part of the Flavorpill network, which describes itself thusly: "Flavorpill loves culture. We embrace the high-brow, the underground, the low-brow, and the mainstream, and everything in between – as long as it's good." And BT does indeed have some good selections, alongside things that are just too too hipster for me. (And that link doesn't really get at the depths of hipsterdom.)

So why can't I get around to reading it? What is this procrastination?

BTW, did you know that Lily Allen, whose "Smile" brightened much of my spring, is a "passionate reader" who will be judging Britain's Orange Prize? Nor did I, until I read Boldtype.

SMART goal accomplished!

I don't know if it's officially a smart goal since I don't think I ever set a deadline or anything, but this evening I submitted my application for library school. Left to do: sending two transcripts and a one-page form. So maybe it's not entirely accomplished, but my credit card is being charged $64.75 (application fee plus Berkeley's fee to send my ONE CLASS transcript), so I'm not backing out.

A Big Book of Russian Culture

Happy New Year!

I decided to start off 2008 with a tome - and one from the Russian Reading Challenge in order to get started on that list - and I'm while reading is harder now that work has begun again, I am making decent progress.

The book? Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance. Figes became one of my favorite Russian historians when I was in grad school; he was so personable and witty and vast. There was plenty to quibble with in his scope and analysis, but that was part of the fun too. In Natasha's Dance, he takes on the oh-so-manageable task of writing "a cultural history of Russia."

One of my happy discoveries thus far is that I haven't forgotten all my history in the 3 years since leaving Georgetown. Several times I've wondered "will he talk about this?" a few pages before he does. (In particular: philanthropy among the merchant classes in late 19th century Moscow, which btw was the topic of the first scholarly book I read in full in Russian) Another surprise: the Natasha of the title is the imperious heroine of War and Peace. The passage Figes references - where Natasha instinctively performs a peasant dance - represents for him Russian cultural history, the interplay between Western aspirations and the "Russian soul."

A little lighter on the history than maybe I would like, but lots and lots of books and art and music. Hooray! Oh, and architecture. Plus, I loved this little ditty by Turgenev, about one of the foremost critics of the day:

Argue with someone more intelligent than you:
He will defeat you.
But from your defeat you will learn something useful.

Argue with someone of equal intelligence:
Neither will be victorious.
And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.

Argue with someone less intelligent:
Not from a desire for victory
But because you may be of use to him.

Argue even with a fool:
You will not gain glory
But sometimes it is fun.

Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.