__blackink____whitepages__ rt Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Questions 36-65 are archived at blackink_whitepages_ Questions 66-88 are archived at _blackink_whitepages_ Questions 89-112 are archived at __blackink_whitepages_ Questions 113-134 are archived at __blackink_whitepages__ Questions 135-154 are archived at __blackink__whitepages__ Questions 155-182 are archived at __blackink___whitepages__ Current standings; 1. jane=229 2. lostgirl=224 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 100926 ... rt Question 183 The end of this author's extraordinary novel takes readers back to its very beginning. Englishman Serge Carrefax arrives in Egypt as British rule is dissolving. He's an architect studying destruction among the sediment of the earliest civilization. The Rosetta stone mingles with the 1919 revolt. Cleopatra with the Ministry of Communications. Rather than complicate the novel, this mash of cultures serves as a decoder ring. Meaning, quite suddenly, is doubled, tripled. Scenes that were, on first take, merely finely crafted historical fictions are revealed to be the work of a mind entranced by refrains. Only the dullest of readers will be able to resist diving back into the text for a second look. Thoth, god of secret writing, is grafted on top of Serge's own boyhood preoccupation with codes and communication; Alexander the Great stands in for Alexander Graham Bell; and the Rue des Soeurs in Cairo harks back to a name for heroin, "sister," reminding us of Sophie, Serge's beloved and doomed sibling. Culture gets recycled in this novel, but rather than bore us with each reappearance, it provides the dizzying thrill of familiarity. What happens in the book? Serge grows up in the early half of the 20th century. He leaves the silkworm farm of his childhood. He goes to war. He goes to Egypt. He does a lot of drugs, meets a lot of women. And "Ulysses" is the story of a man taking a walk . . . Shortlisted last week for the Booker Prize, the book moves in circuits, forever closing in on its topics: radio, World War I, drugs, Egyptology, seances, sisters, spas and silkworms, to name a few. His genius comes in convincing his reader of the connections between these distant planets. It traipses through such lush locales as a deaf school in the British countryside, a vaguely Eastern European spa, the airspace above France during the Great War, and the spiritualist communities of London. He dwells in the historical, but he is hardly bound by the constraints of time. He selects events that, having once happened, reverberate infinitely. There is the sinking Titanic. There is Marconi sending his first "S" across the sea. And there are the hordes of tourists shuffling past the pyramids. This narrative method is reflected in one of Serge's Egyptian discoveries. Deep inside a tangle of tombs and burial chambers, he points to three ebony statuettes. "What are those?" His companion answers, "They're figures for the ka -- the soul -- to dwell in." "They look like the same person done in different sizes." "They are: if one gets broken, the ka moves on to another; plus, they show the dead man in three periods of life -- childhood, youth, age -- so that he himself can relive all three, enjoying them simultaneously." These circuits speed up and repeat. Patterns and people reappear. Scars are reopened. While recovering from a loved one's suicide, Serge studies a tapestry in a German spa that depicts a scene of torture. In it he sees the face of both his physician and his childhood pediatrician: "Maybe Dr. Filip's just the latest incarnation of a character as old as this town itself, Serge thinks to himself -- a figure who reappears in era after era, like Dr. Learmont's face repeating through the sickbed afternoons of his childhood, but on a larger scale, one to be measured not in the memories of a single life but over centuries." Indeed, after brief costume changes, his characters, images and symbols all play multiple roles. The dead return in slightly altered forms. Even Serge himself works a double shift. It's hard to deny the similarities between him and Sergei Pankejeff, the Russian aristocrat whom Sigmund Freud referred to as "Wolf Man." Representing "a semi-fictitious avant-garde network" called the International Necronautical Society, or INS, the author published a manifesto in 1999 that announced: "Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit. . . . We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies. . . . Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage toward oblivion, mankind's sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways." Colonizing death? Dying anew? No wonder it's hard to say where this book starts and ends. Language and letters are not left out of his cycling. The letter of the title certainly stands for Carrefax, but also for cyanide, Sophie's poison of choice; cysteine, the amino acid that darkens the spa waters; his father's coils of copper wire; the caul Serge was born under; the air corps where he first snorts cocaine; Morse code; and even the cc of Serge's carbon-copied reports. Like these reports, everything here is ink-stained, including the author. He reignites the literary pyrotechnics of Perec, Calvino, Joyce and Sebald. Words are celebrated in vocabularic feats -- Page 117 alone delights a word-lover with "syzygy," "invigilator" and "fusee." Poetry is fired in gunshot blasts that, at times, hit actual human targets: "The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface." As the novel closes, Serge, in a fever, becomes the thing he so often held in his hands: a radio receiver, open to every channel, jammed with all that's come before. In creating a work that recycles itself and our culture, the author has produced something truly original. (Adapted from a Washington Post review by Samantha Hunt, the author of "The Invention of Everything Else," a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100927 ... jane Tom McCarthy C i love the idea that events, no matter where on the map of time, reverberate throughout. there was something in gifts_of_unknown_things that was a parallel idea, only the other side of it - being able to predict aspects of the future in the same sense that you can use the_doppler_effect to "hear" things coming towards you or away from you (red_shift_blue_shift). 100927 ... rt +3=232 jane! the intelligentsia says mccarthy is a genius. 100927 ... rt Question 184 Over coffee one morning here, the conversation jumped from publicists trying to keep her interviews on schedule (“Oh, poo on them”) to women’s fashion (“Structured skirts. Can’t wear them. I’m too short”) to the flood of new writers (“It’s like everyone’s blogging about how they brushed their teeth this morning.”) The author being interviewed is known for her quirky dark humor. But she’s also fearless in jumping, feet first, into serious issues like global debt, the environment, gay rights and censorship. Her arrival at a Hong Kong literary festival last month was noteworthy after she controversially refused to attend a similar festival in Dubai. It was originally meant as a protest in support of a British author, Geraldine Bedell, who said she had been “blacklisted” because her novel featured a gay sheik. That turned out to be misleading. Ms. Bedell had simply not been invited, which is different than being censored. And both women ended up looking silly. The author was a good sport about it. She beamed herself to the Dubai event via a video link, and wrote a self-mocking article in the London newspaper The Guardian about jumping the gun. “This was a case for Anti-Censorship Woman!” She wrote of her own reaction. “I nipped into the nearest phone booth, hopped into my cape and coiled my magic lasso, and swiftly cancelled my own appearance.” The author, 69, made her name with novels like “The Blind Assassin,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Alias Grace.” She is perhaps best known for her fantastical tales, dark humor and prolific output; she has published more than 35 works, and has another novel and an opera on the way. Still, she has reached beyond fiction to comment seriously on issues like the environment and the economy. Her latest book, an extended essay called “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” is now being made into a documentary film. The publication of “Payback” in October coincided with the worsening of the global economic crisis, an issue that piqued the audience’s interest in Hong Kong, which has always been more of a financial city than a literary one. “It made people think I had a crystal ball and I’d tell them what stocks they should invest in,” she said, drawing laughter during one of her four talks here. For her, the story of debt — and the way society has mishandled it — is the story of humankind. It’s a theme that runs deep through her literature. “Debt is part of the human condition,” she said in an interview. “Civilization is based on exchanges — on gifts, trades, loans — and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back. “Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what,” she continued, referring to an ancient script used in the Middle East. “Before cuneiform, in Sumer, there were little clay envelopes, baked so they were sealed. And inside were small objects that represented animals. These were early waybills, early record-keeping. And if you were missing a sheep or lamb or calf from your delivery, you had to pay. That was when debt was tangible.” Now, she said, debt has become “bit-ified,” with, for example, people taking mortgages and breaking them into bits, then selling them to other people. “And when it all fell apart, and they tried to figure out who, exactly, owned the mortgage on a house, they couldn’t.” Meanwhile, she added, “governments hurl taxpayers’ dollars into a bottomless pit.” “Maybe baked clay envelopes and engraved tablets never should have been scrapped,” she said, deadpan. History, mythology and fables play a large role in her work. Her nightmarish, futuristic scenarios have caused some of her books to be tagged as science fiction, though she thinks that genre doesn’t quite fit — “since there aren’t aliens and spaceships and the other usual things,” she said. Her most frightening scenes are of what happens when man’s greed causes nature to go awry. Her sensibilities were shaped by the fact that she was raised largely in the Canadian woods by “two environmentally-aware biologists, back when that was a pretty moony thing to be.” The family often went without electricity. “It was almost like a 19th-century way of life,” she said. She applies the same theory to nature as she does to financial debt: Humankind will doom itself by taking more than it gives back. “Our technology has become so clever that it can chew things up much faster than we can replace them,” she said. These themes are expected to be played out in “Year of the Flood,” to be published in September by Bloomsbury, which describes it as “dystopic masterpiece.” The title of the book is vaguely metaphoric in its reference to the biblical flood. But “there is not a lot of water in it,” she said. In fact, according to Bloomsbury, there will be a catastrophic drought. There will also be the text of 14 hymns, which she is having a composer set to music. The novel is planned to come with its own CD. Another musical project is her first chamber opera, which will be about Pauline Johnson, a 19th-century performer who played up her half-English, half-Native Canadian background. “There was a lot of blood-curdling tales, bloodshed and galloping,” She said. “She did a lot of things that other lady Victorian poets couldn’t do.” She, too, was ahead of her time. When she was growing up, Canada had few world-renowned literary figures, much less female ones. For a woman known as a high priestess of literature (or, as the Canadian press call her, “the high priestess of angst”), she does not seem particularly romantic or nostalgic about books and writing. “The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth,” she said, dismissing the hand-wringing over what some see as a decline in literacy. She also has little sentiment for brick and mortar bookstores, which she predicted would turn into “furniture showrooms” once print-on-demand machines and technologies like Kindle, the electronic reading device, were perfected. “Well, that would save a few trees,” she concluded. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100928 ... lostgirl i just read fifteen poems by this amazing woman and found within every one of them, a direct parallel to my world. thanks....thoroughly enjoyed the past half hour. Margaret Atwood The Moment  The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe. No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round. 100928 ... rt +3=227 lostgirl! many lights are shining. 100928 ... rt Question 185 This author's short memoir might just as easily be called "The Mysterious and Disconcerting World of (insert name here) -- and How He Survived to Tell the Story." A former classical music critic for The Post and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the author has spent his life aware that he is an eccentric -- an anxious and uncomfortable one, whose intellectual gifts have provided no relief from the aching loneliness that comes from living on what feels like the fringe. As a boy, he existed in a perpetual state of vague, and occasionally acute, disorientation. It turned out that he has Asperger's syndrome, but he didn't find this out until he was 45, when he finally received a medical diagnosis and began to better understand his difficult life. Awash in detail, his account reads like a verbal version of the minimalist music he discovered and loved as a teen. "As a listener . . . you settled in . . . as though you had boarded a train and thought nothing about where you'd been or where you were heading but merely surrendered yourself to jostle and speed and passing images." His book itself is a jostling trip. Lists of musical compositions, book titles and authors, as well as excruciating memories of teenage exploits, some of them horrific, are recounted in detail thanks to the author's astonishing recall of minutiae, one of the defining aspects of an Aspie (as he frequently refers to his syndrome). In the midst of this nonstop journey, the wordsmithing is nimble and lyrical, well-tuned by a writer with a musician's ear. But the reader craves more about the people in his life: his infrequently mentioned parents and siblings; the first woman he married, whom he calls his "best friend, a brilliant and intuitive woman . . . to whom I felt and feel enormous loyalty"; the children he fathered, who "fascinate" him but from whom he keeps a certain distance; the later love of his life (and his second wife), who for four years brought him "sustained contentment" and happiness and then left him. The mention of these deeply significant relationships is oddly -- painfully -- brief. While the author seems to have found his way to balance and a taste of happiness, the old ache, in the end, remains palpable. When Tim Page was a teenager, he thought of Howard Hughes, Glenn Gould, Bobby Fischer and J. D. Salinger as role models. He sensed that he too might be famous someday, but he feared that he would be strangely alienated and alone. The first prediction came true, and then some: Mr. Page won a Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism at The Washington Post (he was also a critic at The New York Times). He has written such a superbly incisive biography of the once-forgotten novelist Dawn Powell that she is now well remembered, and edited volumes of Powell’s diaries and letters. Now, in his mid-50s, he has written an improbably lovely memoir about the loneliness that has made him feel throughout his life that he is “not quite a mammal.” “In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to ‘think outside the box,’ ” He writes in his book (an expanded version of material published in The New Yorker). But for him thinking inside the box is at best a mechanical exercise based on mimicry; at worst it’s an impossibility. In fascinatingly precise detail and often to pricelessly funny effect, he describes ways in which his efforts to feign normalcy have backfired. Recalling an adolescent clinch with a young woman who asked if he’d still care about her the next day, he says he pondered the question, then told her truthfully that he had no idea. “Wrong answer,” he wryly recalls. When he was 45, he learned that he had the autistic disorder called Asperger’s syndrome. He was relieved to know that his condition was quantifiable and that others share the same general symptoms. But he was also much too smart and self-aware to feel true kinship with other Aspies, as he calls them. “We are not always natural companions,” he writes. “If, say, you introduce an Aspie devotee of antique piano recordings to one whose passion is vacuum cleaners, chances are that the meeting will result in two uncomprehending and increasingly agitated monologues.” As for his own social skills, he has been married twice and is the father of three sons. Yet he still writes that “it would be easier for me to improvise an epic poem before a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden than to approach an attractive stranger across the room and strike up a conversation.” About his professional abilities, he acknowledges that he was lucky to find work like teaching and writing music criticism. He would have fared horribly with a job in sales. His devotion to music first manifested itself when he was very young. He named a stuffed animal after the tenor and film actor Mario Lanza. (Among this book’s many pleasures are his wildly eclectic tastes and his fondness for the endearingly second rate.) He loved records. When given an elementary school assignment to “write about something we had at home,” he reeled off from memory the precise selections, composers, singers and dates of each band on an opera anthology ranging from 1909 to 1932. He also loved relics of bygone time, ingested horehound drops as snack food and was using the world “talkie” about movies in 1965. Among his extremely colorful examples of his obsessive, controlling boyhood behavior is his having gotten hold of — and then re-edited, following a scene-by-scene description of the original from a library book — an eight-millimeter print of the 12-minute silent film “The Great Train Robbery” because he knew that a distributor had tampered with the original. And there’s more: in 1967 he was directing his own films and became the subject of a prizewinning documentary. His wing-nut film fanaticism led him to discover Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” not for the obvious reasons but because Louella Parsons’s biography of Jean Harlow appears amid the coffee-table clutter on the album’s cover. With seemingly effortless grace this book moves back and forth between his very private idiosyncrasies and those of the wider culture in which he came of age. The fear and rigid conventionality of the 1950s were relatively easy for him. The ’60s took more effort, but he worked hard to adapt. He was sufficiently well assimilated to go with the flow, grow long hair and get a job in a record store, “where I became the very model of the snide know-it-all counterperson we have all met and loathed.” The book is illustrated by a series of expertly chosen photos of the author that amount to a kind of time-lapse photography: from a little boy making an open-mouthed goldfish grimace (“Try as I might, I couldn’t remember how to smile”) to a beret-wearing, contented-looking, broadly smiling professor. He is on a park bench in Baltimore. Thanks to the candid, companionable voice of his memoir, the implied invitation to sit down and discuss, oh, maybe the later Beach Boys records (which he marvelously describes as “vaporous, ethereal, elaborately ornamented musical clockworks, distinguished by a blossoming tenderness and sheer sonic splendor”) is all but irresistible. But there is also a strain of mournfulness running through this book. It’s not about Asperger’s, but it is intensified by the peculiar nature of his Asperger-governed perceptions. Tirelessly logical, sometimes agonizingly so, he lives life in an extra dimension, with a sense of time that irrevocably links past and present, living and dead, ardent love affairs and broken ones. The people who left him — and it seems to have happened a lot — are still with him. The schoolmate who died in his teens has become, in his imagination, his aging contemporary. The music heard at a long-ago party is still playing. And the hardest job of his life, as the book conveys even in its brightest moments, has been to struggle for a way to make peace with it all. (Adapted from a review in the Washington Post and the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100929 ... lostgirl Parallel Play By Tim Page i love the fact that he has filtered his psyche successfully through writing and other avenues and made himself a huge success through his own perseverance despite having aspergers syndrome... what a gift though, to have your questions about yourself 'being different' answered with a confirmatory diagnosis. 100930 ... rt +3=230 lostgirl! Question 186 A boarding school in the British Isles. Reverent children huddle in a gloomy chamber, watching as one of their fellow students assays a devilishly difficult trick. The boy’s hand trembles. And then — success! A jet of fire, a “cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment,” fills the ancient tower with an indescribable illumination. Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of this author's heartfelt and profane new novel, and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles. The extravagantly entertaining book chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. The book then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart. Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a ­Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. And Mario, sweet, stupid Mario, son of an Italian diplomat, whose obsession with sex would become tiresome if it weren’t a source of so many richly comic dorm-room conversations: “He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’ “A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’ “ ‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively. “ ‘But — ’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘ — I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’ “ ‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says. “ ‘Three years,’ Mario says.” Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” ­Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic ­Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I. In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?” Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie ­McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are. That's not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. The book doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope. In fact, the ambitious length of the book allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering. He confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For he remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-­dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” he notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.” One night, Skippy’s roommate wonders about the asymmetricality of the universe, and of love. As Skippy lies in his bed, listening to Lori’s favorite song and thinking of her, Ruprecht realizes that Lori could well be listening to the same song but thinking of someone else, who in turn is thinking of someone else, and so on. “Rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings,” Ruprecht muses, “instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.” “Our universe,” miserable, unloved Ruprecht realizes, “is actually built out of loneliness.” Six hundred sixty-one pages may seem like a lot to devote to a bunch of flatulence-obsessed kids, but that daunting length is part and parcel of the cause to which Skippy dies in the end, is most devoted. Teenagers, though they may not always act like it, are human beings, and their sadness and loneliness (and their triumphs, no matter how temporary) are as momentous as any adult’s. And novels about them — if they’re as smart and funny and touching as the book can be just as long as they like. (Adapted by Dan Kois for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101001 ... jane SKIPPY DIES By Paul Murray often times a book that flips through perspectives can be slightly discombobulating for me, but this type of retrospective investigation piece really gets my attention. 101001 ... rt +3=235 jane! 101001 ... rt Question 187 "Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them." Imagine for a moment what it's like to be a deaf-mute separated from the only friend you have, isolated and unable to communicate. It cannot be done, not well anyway. Not unless you've experienced it, yourself. But this author penned down a haunting novel which comes very close to experiencing the isolation and segregation coupled with the outrageous ways in which people treat each other, and what for? Because one slightly wavers from the societal "norm" than the other... I had a hard time with this one, with finding the right words. It's a book which had a profound impact on me, for one reason or another, and on many others. Each character is longing for something. Each character is to some extent, suffering with delusion. Each character is isolated. Yet all of them are so similar, similar in their suffering, yet still so entirely different. John Singer cannot communicate with people because he cannot speak. Mick Kelly cannot communicate with anyone because her family do not share her ambition. Biff Brannon is left alone when his wife dies and Dr Copeland is isolated from his family and other black people in the community because of his intelligence and opinionated viewpoints. Similarly, Jake Blout is alone in his radical social notions and this only detaches him further. All it seems are interlocked in some incomprehensible secret suffering. This book is often labelled as a classic, but having read it, I prefer the term "unforgettable". Yes, we have all supposedly moved onto a better time. There is hope. The character of John Singer also reminds us that there are kind, generous people out there, lending an ear to fellow human beings when they are most afraid of going unheard. But prejudice still roams, loneliness has not ceased and the frailty of the human spirit is always at stake - because of the way we treat each other. That is why 'The heart is a lonely hunter' is unforgettable to me, why I agree it should be required reading for anyone. Segregation, isolation and inclusion are not conditions of the past alone, they are in our present and they will be in our future. All the characters feel profoundly alone in some sense or another, and all of them desperately need to communicate their feelings with someone who understands them. All five, bar Biff, confide in Singer the things that trouble them. The author explores the idea that all people feel a need to create some sort of guiding principle or god. Singer becomes this figure for the main characters of the novel; they believe he has endless wisdom about many things and they turn to him in times of turmoil, always asking him to help them accomplish their goals and comfort them during times of doubt. They each create a different idol in Singer. For Mick, he is a man who feels similarly about music as she does. For Doctor Copeland, he is the only white man who understands his passion to achieve justice for black people. Blout finds that Singer is just as deeply concerned about socialism as he is and for Biff, he represents all that Biff sees in himself; a quiet, shrewd spectator of the human state. In reality Singer is none of these things but he provides a wordless objectivity, in a world of conflict and oppression, in which they trust, will bring them peace. (Adapted from a review by Nancy Boland for Helium) For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 101002 ... lostgirl The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers i love the fact that this complex work was written when the author was in her early twenties....it seems like an intricate tapestry of stories delicately woven with threads of desire (which comes in many different forms) and the constant competition with limitations. interesting.... 101003 ... rt +3=233 lostgirl! the kind of thoughts my mother used to have at this author's age. 101003 ... rt Question 188 Is language first and foremost an artifact of culture? Or is it largely determined by human biology? This issue has been argued back and forth for a couple of centuries with no clear resolution in sight. The author's 2005 book “The Unfolding of Language” placed him firmly in the pro-culture camp. Now, in his new book, he examines some idiosyncratic aspects of particular languages that, in his opinion, cast further doubt on biologically based theories of language. He starts with the puzzling fact that many languages lack words for what (to English speakers) seem to be basic colors. For anyone interested in the development of ideas, his first four chapters make fascinating reading. Did you know that the British statesman William Gladstone was also an accomplished Greek scholar who, noting among other things the surprising absence of any term for “blue” in classical Greek texts, theorized that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans when those texts were composed? Or that a little-known 19th-century philologist named Lazarus Geiger made profound and surprising discoveries about how languages in general divide up the color spectrum, only to have his discoveries ignored and forgotten and then rediscovered a century later? Did you know that Siegfried Sassoon’s World War I psychiatrist, William Rivers, carried out the earliest psychological experiments to test the precise relationship between the colors people could name and the colors they actually saw? He does not merely weave little-known facts into an absorbing story. He also takes account of the vast changes in our perceptions of other races and cultures over the past two centuries. Although the strange sequence in which color terms appear in the world’s languages over time — first black and white, then red, then either green or yellow, with blue appearing only after the first five are in place — still has no full explanation, his suggestion that the development of dyes and other forms of artificial coloring may be involved is as convincing as any other, making color terms the likeliest candidate for a culture-induced linguistic phenomenon. But then he switches to another issue entirely, that of linguistic complexity. He brings off a superb “emperor has no clothes” moment by demonstrating that the “fact” (attested in countless linguistic texts) that all languages are equally complex has no empirical basis whatsoever. Moreover, as he points out, such a claim could not be made even in principle, since there are no objective, nonarbitrary criteria for measuring linguistic complexity across entire languages. He then goes on to addresses the relationship between language and thought. Do speakers of all languages think in similar ways, or do different languages give their speakers quite different pictures of the world (a view sometimes referred to as “linguistic relativity”)? He rejects linguistic relativity in its strong form, pouring scorn on its most vehement defender, the early-20th-­century linguist Benjamin Whorf, and again firmly locating his account in the cultural-historical background. His skepticism extends even to promising cases like that of the Amazonian language Matses, whose arsenal of verb forms obliges you not only to explicitly indicate the kind of evidence — personal experience, inference, conjecture or hearsay — on which every statement you make is based, but also to distinguish recent inferences from older ones and say whether the interval between inference and event was long or short. If you choose the wrong verb form, you are treated as a liar. But the distinctions that must be expressed by verbal inflections in Matses, he argues, can all be easily understood by English speakers and easily expressed in English by means of circumlocutions. He does find three areas where a weaker version of linguistic relativity might hold — color terms, spatial relations and grammatical gender. Ever since Mark Twain mocked the pronoun confusions of “the awful German language” — a young girl is an “it” while a turnip is a “she” — most people, including linguists, have treated gender assignment as largely arbitrary and idiosyncratic, devoid of any cognitive content. But recent experiments have shown that speakers do indeed, on a subconscious level, form associations between nonliving (“neuter”) objects and masculine or feminine properties. As for spatial relationships, we English speakers relate the positions of objects or other people to ourselves (“in front of,” “behind,” “beside”) or to each other, but some languages use compass references (“east of,” “southwest of”) for identical relationships. He argues that repeated use of such expressions forces speakers of these languages to develop an internal cognitive compass, so that regardless of where they are and what they are facing, they automatically register the location of the cardinal points. He presents his material in a chatty and accessible (if sometimes verbose) style, and if he had left things at that, he would have written just the kind of language book most readers love — heavy on quirky detail, light on technicalities and theory. But he also burdens his findings with more theoretical weight than they can bear. First, the facets of language he deals with do not involve “fundamental aspects of our thought,” as he claims, but relatively minor ones. Things like location, color and grammatical gender hardly condition our thinking even in the day-to-day management of our lives, let alone when we address issues of politics, science or philosophy. Moreover, with the possible exception of color terms, cultural factors seldom correlate with linguistic phenomena, and even when they seem to, the correlation is not causal. For instance, languages of small tribes tend to have words with multiple inflections, while those of complex industrial or post­industrial societies do not. However, this phenomenon is not directly caused by differing degrees of social complexity. Rather, complex societies tend to have much larger and more ethnically diverse populations, hence they experience far more interactions between native speakers of different languages and dialects. It is this factor that encourages simplification and erodes word endings. Take a hypothetical correlation that ­really might have cultural causes. Suppose relative clauses appeared only when a society entered the market economy. Any such finding would revolutionize our understanding of the interface between language and culture. But not only has no such relationship ever been demonstrated, nothing remotely like it has ever been found. Explaining why he rejects biologically based explanations of language, he states that “if the rules of grammar are meant to be coded in the genes, then one could expect the grammar of all languages to be the same, and it is then difficult to explain why grammars should ever vary in any fundamental aspects.” Actually, it’s quite easy. Simply suppose that biology provides not a complete grammar, but rather the building blocks out of which such a grammar can be made. That is, in fact, all biology could be expected to do. With physical organs, biology can mandate — two legs instead of four, five fingers instead of six. But when it comes to behavior, biology cannot mandate. It can only facilitate, offering a range of possibilities from which culture (or more likely, sheer chance) can choose. Fortunately, relatively little of the book is devoted to these issues. Readers can ignore his broader claims, and enjoy the little-­trodden linguistic bypaths along which he so knowledgeably leads them. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his new book, and give a personal response... 101004 ... jane THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages By Guy Deutscher once again reminding me of the Just-So stories... :) 101005 ... jane "When I say "love," the sound comes out of my mouth...and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we-- we feel that we have connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for." waking_life 101005 ... rt +3=238 jane! nice reference... 101006 ... rt Question 189 When I used to ask my mother about her family village in China, she always said it was three hours from Canton by bus. A hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather left China for good, that couldn’t have been far, but it was certainly no help in locating it. So I was pleased — though still mystified — to read in this author's charming and witty little book that in China, “if you ask someone where their hometown is, they’ll say it is seven hours by bus. Or four hours by train. They won’t tell you where it is.” The author spent three years living in China with her husband. Since she’s a linguist by training, her method of getting under the skin of the country was to immerse herself in its language. In her book, she uses key phrases and concepts to unlock aspects of the society that interested or surprised her, casting light along the way on many idiosyncrasies of the Chinese view of the world. She doesn’t arrive with many preconceptions. Instead, she takes the Chinese as they see and present themselves. And she soon discovers that what the Chinese think is important isn’t always what we think is important. One thing they’re interested in is ensuring good luck. This explains why the Beijing Olympics began on Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:08 p.m. Eight, ba, rhymes with fa, “as in fa cai, which means ‘to become wealthy,’ ” making it a very auspicious number. And even though Aug. 8 was well into the rainy season, it didn’t rain. Auspiciousness also enters into the choosing of names, an art in itself. Most Chinese have three names: surname (there are just 100 common surnames in a population of 1.3 billion people), middle name (to identify your generation and connect you with your cousins) and personal name. Which yields the realization that — in a country where most people are allowed only one child — future generations will have no cousins. On matters that Westerners make a fuss about, like human rights, she presents the common Chinese viewpoint. At a conference on censorship, technology and commerce, she recalls that “one exasperated Chinese participant finally blurted out that people, the laobaixing, aren’t as preoccupied as Westerners about free speech and an uncensored Internet: what laobaixing really want, he said, is . . . a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a color TV.” For ordinary Chinese, material concerns come first. She has an endearing affection for these laobaixing, these common folk. Unlike conventional journalists, she’s not very interested in press conferences, in listening to what the politicians say. Little by little, she finds herself becoming more like the laobaixing: learning to deal with the plethora of rules as the Chinese do — by finding ways around them. Her book is chatty and colloquial, with helpful photographs and drawings, as well as a pronunciation guide. The eager student will learn a fair bit about the history of the language and how its array of characters and tones were systematized, all the while gathering insights into the country’s customs and culture. Rather than draw sweeping conclusions, she sticks to her own experiences and observations, which makes her book all the more valuable. China hands will have many moments of recognition. For others, her book will be a fascinating introduction to a foreign culture. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 101006 ... lostgirl Dreaming in Chinese Mandarin lessons in Life, Love and Language By Deborah Fallows looks like an interesting look into chinese culture with a keen linguistic approach. mike is considering taking chinese as a second language next year....perhaps i will recommend this, as based on some reviews it might be a helpful springboard. 101006 ... rt +3=236 lostgirl! Question 190 I’m currently buried in writing a book about travel writing in the digital age. As I scan existing books about how to be a travel writer, I realize just how much advice out there is hopelessly out-of-date and downright wrong. But this author's great book Smile When You’re Lying follows the “show don’t tell” route instead. It entertains you while it skewers everything (and I do mean everything) having to do with the travel industry. It’s great fun. Thankfully his new book is no sophomore slump. It’s the Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, or Nirvana second album, not the #2 from De La Soul or the Strokes. Really though this book is the literary equivalent of Motorhead. It comes out firing fast and furious and never slows down. Try reading this section out loud in one breath: “And no, it doesn’t make me un-American to have assiduously avoided setting foot in a fabricated dream patch plopped in the middle of a morally rudderless state of bogus elections with a half-baked citizenry who think absolutely nothing of supporting an idiotic fifty-year embargo of Cuba or taking the Camaro with the slave-days flag decals to the corner market for a pack of smokes without bothering to put their shirts on. So, Disney.” The book’s angle is that the author is going to visit four destinations he has always avoided: Africa (the Congo), India, Mexico City, and Disney World. For different reasons, these are his hellholes. All four places are ripe for hilarious observations and cynicism, from the constant bribery and dysfunction in the Congo to the incessant scamming and aggressive selling in India. He captures these two places amazingly well and keeps you entertained the whole time. The latter two hellholes turn out to be, well, pretty nice actually. Some may accuse him of going soft in the second half because of this, especially on Disney. But as a dad I have to agree with him: you can’t help but be impressed by the well-oiled Disney machinery when you visit their parks and as hard as it is to admit, Hannah Montana is actually a better sitcom than most of what’s on the networks during prime time. And as I’ve noted here before, Mexico City is ten times nicer than most people think. (Like me, he gained a belt notch size eating his way around the city.) He was once an editor at Maxim and what he learned there definitely shapes his writing. Every paragraph has a joke in it and the metaphor per inch ratio is the highest I can ever recall seeing anywhere outside the lad magazine world. If you don’t like pop culture references and the phrase “like a…” appearing nonstop in your travelogues, this is not the book for you. By the end of the book I was exhausted. But in a good way. Since I’m throwing out musical references, he is the travel writing equivalent of Joe Satriani or John Coltrane. The virtuosity can leave your mouth hanging open, but don’t expect your girlfriend to get it. Having said that, it all works. I’ve read many painful attempts at this always-on style that fall flat because the writer is not really all that funny. It feels forced. He is a true craftsman, putting serious effort into every sentence on the page and refusing to make anything a throwaway line. Sustaining that for 300 pages is an incredible feat and it shows just how gifted and humorous he really is to keep you reading until the end. This is, without a doubt, the most entertaining travel book I’ve read since The Geography of Bliss and oddly enough, I probably learned as much from this one too. (Adapted from Tim Leffel's travel blog) For three points, name the author, his new book, and give a personal response... 101008 ... lostgirl TO HELLHOLES AND BACK Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism Chuck Thompson i'd be lying if i was to say i never read maxim for the quirky, funny writing. i'll definitely read this as i am a huge fan of travel blogging with absolute honesty, good or bad. plus it's so much fun to listen to other people make fun of places, situations and people in the most politically incorrect ways. (we can always secretly agree without saying a word.) 101008 ... rt +3=239 lostgirl! welcome back to first place! 101010 ... rt Question 191 ALMOST buried, midway through this author's first novel, is a revealing observation on the accordionlike nature of time, which ''can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways.'' The book -- a triptych whose plot unfolds over the course of three Junes (in 1989, 1995 and 1999) -- enacts that very process as each part pushes forward and backward in memory, allowing the lives of one scattered Scottish family to emerge. Subplots involving modern preoccupations like AIDS cocktails and fertility treatments mix with ageless themes of destiny, lost innocence and rebirth. Free of gimmickry, the book brilliantly rescues, then refurbishes, the traditional plot-driven novel. Much of the action takes place on islands -- in Scotland, on Manhattan and Long Island, in Greece -- fitting locales for a novel that illustrates emotional isolation. Maureen, the dog-training matriarch of the McLeod family, has just died of lung cancer as the book opens, and her husband, Paul, has joined a tour group in Greece, trying to erase his grief. There he meets an American painter named Fern; her intelligent beauty captivates him, but his attraction goes unanswered. Six years later, Paul too is dead. His oldest son, Fenno, who has become a reluctant fixture in gay New York society, temporarily abandons his West Village bookstore to help arrange the funeral at the family home south of Glasgow. Fenno's twin brothers and their wives alternately spoil, tease and wound him; while Fenno never hides his homosexuality, he keeps his sorrows closeted. At the heart of the book lies his troubled relationship with his father, who had hoped Fenno would take over the family newspaper. Among the novel's successes is the elegance with which she splices an account of Fenno's New York life in between the goings-on in Scotland. In the American passages, the main attraction is a marvelously drawn character named Malachy Burns, a music critic for The New York Times. Mal, as he is known, has AIDS and can no longer care for his pet parrot, Felicity. He delivers the bird as a gift to Fenno, who eventually agrees to be both caretaker to Felicity and executor of Mal's living will. The dying critic displays a delicious blend of blasphemy and wit. After one visit to Fenno's bookstore, Mal exits with characteristic aplomb: ''At the door, he looked back and said, 'I regret to inform you that a large rodent or a lap dog has recently defecated, not unjustifiably, in front of the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien.' '' †he book affords many pleasures -- sometimes witty, often solemn. Consider, for example, this observation about Paul's lack of interest in Greek souvenirs: ''He might have said that he had come here not to take memories away but to leave them behind, to bring some of the ones he already has and drop them like stones, one by one, in the sea.'' She has also filled her novel with set pieces on a range of subjects, from collie breeding to the culinary arts, which form a backdrop for the McLeods' dreams and disappointments. We learn of Maureen McLeod's strained marital fidelity, of Fenno's sister-in-law's desperation to conceive and of his other sister-in-law's conspiratorial encouragement in her scheming. Told largely from Fenno's perspective, the novel braids these stories into other plot lines about giving life and taking one's leave of it. In the hands of a less talented writer, the range of material would be burdensome. By the third and last June of the title, Fern resurfaces and appears to unite Fenno's experience with that of his father. But nothing is so obvious. The reader remembers that neither the father nor the son was able to express pain -- or affection -- directly. It seems that remoteness, one of the vices under examination in this novel, can be a virtue too. Masterfully, the book shows how love follows a circuitous path, how its messengers come to wear disguises. She has written a generous book about family expectations -- but also about happiness, luck and, as she puts it, the ''grandiosity of genes.'' The novel won the National Book Award in 2002. (Adapted from a review by Katherine Wolff, a writer in Cambridge, Mass. for the NY Times) For three points, name the book, its author, and give a personal response. 101011 ... lostgirl Three Junes by Julia Glass three generations of birth, life, love and death....all wrapped up within a Scottish family. for a first novel the reviews are very positive, although perhaps a bit dramatic emotionally for me to read right now, i might...just to see if i 'hear' a brogue accent. 101012 ... rt +3=242 lostgirl! Question 192 Peruvian novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. This author is one of the central writers in the Hispanic world, but he began his literary career in Europe. Most of his novels are set in Peru. From his first works, he has used a wide variety of avant-garde techniques to create an aesthetic "double of the real world." Although Vargas Llosa has followed the tradition of social protest of Peruvian fiction exposing political corruption, machismo, racial prejudices and violence, he has underlined that a writer should never preach or compromise artistic aims for ideological propaganda. "His voice was persuasive; it reached a person's soul without passing by way of his head, and even to a being as addlebrained as Big João, it seemed like a balm that healed old and terrible wounds. João stood there listening to him, rooted on the spot, not even blinking, moved to his very bones by what he was hearing and by the music of the voice uttering those words. The figure of the saint was blurred at times by the tears that welled up in João's eyes. When the man went on his way, he began to follow him at a distance, like a timid animal." (from The War of the End of the World, 1981) He was born in Arequipa, but from ages one to then he lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he was brought up by his mother and maternal grandparents after his parents separated. However, he once said, that "I feel very much an Arequipan". He also spent some time in Piura, northern Peru (1945-46), where his grandfather had been appointed as Prefect, and then in Lima. When he was about eight years old his parents reconciled. He attended Leoncio Prado Military Academy (1950-52), and Colegio Nacional San Miguel de Piura (1952). In 1955 he married Julia Urquidi; they divorced in 1964. From 1955 to 1957 Vargas he studied literature and law at the University of San Marcos. He then attended graduate school at the University of Madrid, from where he received his Ph.D. in 1959. His doctoral dissertation about García Márquez (1971) was followed by several books on literary criticism, among them LA ORGÍA PERPETUA (1975), about Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary. Decades later, in TRAVESURAS DE LA NIÑA MALA (2006), he drew on the character of Emma. With Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and García Márquez, Vargas Llosa was among the most famous writers, whose aim was to revitalize the Latin American novel. In the 1950s, while still a student, he worked as a journalist for La Industria. He was a coeditor of the literary journals Cuadernos de Conversación and Literatura, and journalist for Radio Panamericana and La Crónica. His first collection of short stories, LOS JEFES, appeared in 1959. "I liked Faulkner but I imitated Hemingway", he said later. He moved to Paris because he felt that in Peru he could not earn his living as a serious writer. Although the boom of Latin American fiction in the 1960s opened doors to some authors for commercial success, the great majority of Peruvian writers suffered from the problems of the country's publishing industry. In France he worked as Spanish teacher, journalist for Agence-France-Presse, and broadcaster for Radio Télévision Française in early 1960s. From the late 1960s he worked as a visiting professor at many American and European universities. In 1965 he married Patricia Llosa; they had two sons and one daughter. García Márquez became a godfather to his son, but after a brawl in a Mexican cinema in 1976, the friendship of two writers ended bitterly. However, in 2006 he allowed an excerpt from his HISTORIA SECRETA DE UNA NOVELA (1971) to be published in the 40th anniversary edition of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In 1970 he moved to Barcelona and five years later he settled back in Peru, ending his self-imposed exile. He was a member of the 1976 Cannes Film Festival jury, led by Tennessee Williams; Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver won that year's Palme d'Or. In 1977 he was elected President of PEN Club International. The military dictatorship, which started in 1968 when General Francisco Morales Bermudez took over the country, ended in 1980. He was a conservative candidate (Fredemo, the Democratic Front) for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. The development of his political convictions, from a sympathizer of Cuban revolution to the liberal right, has astonished his critics and has made it impossible to approach his work from a single point of view. Sabine Koellmann has noted that the publication of his LA FIESTA DEL CHIVO (2000, The Feast of the Goat) confirmed, "that politics is one of the most persistent 'demons' which, according to his theory, provoke his creativity." From 1991 to 1992 he worked as a visiting professor at Florida International University, Miami and Wissdenschaftskolleg, Berlin. In addition to the Nobel Prize, the author has received many other honors. Among the most notable are Leopoldo Alas Prize (1959), Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1967), National Critics' Prize (1967), Peruvian National Prize (1967), Critics' Annual Prize for Theatre (1981), Prince of Asturias Prize (1986) and Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1994). He made his debut as a novelist with LA CIUDAD Y LOS PERROS (1962, The Time of the Hero), set in Leoncio Prado military Academy, where he had been a student. The book received an immediate international recognition. According to his theory, personal, social or historical daemon gives a meaning to a novel and in the writing process unconscious obsessions are transformed into a novelist's themes. Autobiography and art has been one of the themes in his criticism. One of his own obsessions is the conflict between a father and son, which he has approached from the private level or from more universal or social levels. The Time of the Hero is a microcosm of Peruvian society. The murder of an informer is buried due to the codes of honor to protect the academy's reputation. LA TÍA JULIA Y EL ESCRIBIDOR (1977, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) is a partly autobiographical story of a courtship and marriage, written with uninhibited humor. The tyrannical father threatens to shoot his son, a novelist named Marito Varguitas, in the middle of the street, because of his marriage to the sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia. Marito is eighteen and the marriage is illegal. Eventually his father accepts the situation. The book started to live its own life when Aunt Julia, his first wife, wrote a reply to it. In LA CASA VERDE (1966, The Green House) he returned to formative experiences of his childhood and youth. The complicated novel has two major settings: the first, a provincial city, and the second, the jungle, a challenging, hostile and attractive environment, which the author has depicted in several works. In 1957 he travelled with a group of anthropologists into the jungle, and learned how Indian girls were being drafted into prostitution on the coast. The "Green House" of the story is a brothel, which is burned to the ground but rebuilt again. Another storyline follows the fate of the virginal Bonifacia from a jungle mission; she becomes a prostitute in Piura. LA GUERRA DEL FIN DEL MUNDO (1981, The War of the End of the World) is a story of a revolt against the Brazilian government in the late 19th-century and the brutal response of the authorities. A religious fanatic, known as Conselheiro (Counselor), is followed by a huge band of disciples drawn from the fringes of society. Before the army of the Republic wins, the modern rational world suffers several humiliating defeats with the group of outcasts. He uses Euclides da Cunha's account of the events, Os sertões (1902), as a source. One of the characters, a "nearsighted journalist", is loosely based on da Cunha. HISTORIA DE MAYTA (1983, The Real life of Alejandro Mayta) moves on several narrative levels. It deals with a failed Marxist-Leninist insurrection in the Andes, led by an aging Trotskyist Alejandro Mayta. He is captured and his second lieutenant Vallejos executed. The novelist-narrator interviews a number of people who give a contradictory view of Mayta's personality and the events. Finally the reader realizes that in the process of creating a novel within a novel, the narrator has invented Mayta's life and undermined the concepts of writing and reading history. Besides fiction, he has published a large body of essays, criticism, and literary and political journalism. A writer with an international readership, his foreign reportage has appeared in The New York Times Le Monde, The Times Literary Supplement, El País, and other influential newspapers. His articles about the war in Iraq, written for El Pais, were collected in DIARIO DE IRAK (2003). With his daughter Morgana, a photographer, he traveled to Israel and Palestine in 2005, and recorded his impressions in ISRAEL/PALESTINA:PAZ O GUERRA SANTA (2006). The book was received with mixed reactions among the Jewish community in South America. "Israel had become a powerful and arrogant country, and it is the role of its friends to be highly critical of its policies", he said in an interview. His bitter memoir, EL PEZ EN EL AGUA (A Fish in the Water), appeared in 1993. It focused on his run for the presidency in 1990 - he was supposed to win the little-known Alberto Fujimori. The Feast of the Goat continued the author's political excursion into the recent history of South America. The story is set in the Dominican Republic in 1961, ruled by the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Urania Chabral has returned to the noisy Santo Domingo to visit her father, Agustin Chabral, who is ill. He is a former Dominican senator, a faithful servant of the dictator. "And how many times did you come home saddened because he did not call to you, fearful you were no longer in the circle of the elect, that you had fallen among the censured?" Eventually "Minister Cabral, Egghead Cabral" lost his favor. Urania left the country as a schoolgirl, three and a half decades ago, just before Trujillo's assassination in 1961. Urania wants revenge against father for everything he did not do, and has her own reasons to examine the Trujillo Era. "The most important thing that happened to us in five hundred years. You used to say that with so much conviction. It's true, Papa. During those thirty-one years, all the evil we had carried with us since the Conquest became crystallized." He portrays Trujillo as a superman intoxicated by his political and sexual powers, and worshipped by his demonic henchmen working in torture dungeons. "Oddly, he sees himself as having gotten the short end of the bargain. He whipped his pathetic homeland into shape, modernized its attitudes and highways and in return he got -- old." (Walter Kirn in the New York Times, November 25, 2001) He has structured the story like a thriller, leading the reader into the heart of the darkness. The Feast of the Goat is a highly topical book. The era of strong leaders is not totally over in Latin America, as one of the latest examples, Fujimori, sadly proved. In EL PARAÍSO EN LA OTRA ESQUINA (2002) two exceptional individuals, the socialist Flora Tristan, and her grandson, the painter Paul Gauguin, are inspired by great ideas. Flora devotes her life to serve the humanity, to create a worker's paradise. Gauguin leaves civilization behind and eventually rots alive in Atuana, Marguesas Island, in a tropical paradise. For three points, name the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature... 101017 ... jane Mario Vargas Llosa and in case you want a response: it is a dream of mine to learn a language enough to read a book written entirely in a language other than english. part of this had to do with loving Neruda and wanting to read the original versions of his poems. but i wonder if there will still be something lost_in_translation? 101018 ... rt +3=241+1=242 (added response) i always thought calling an object by its term in another language makes it seem different or even better. 101018 ... rt Question 192 This is an hilarious take on how to be a successful hostess. It's presented completely tongue-in-cheek, but if you sift through the humor, there are some genuinely useful entertaining tips. Pros • This book is very funny. • There are many ideas and pictures to keep you busily occupied for hours. • Entertaining advice for many situations. Cons • Some of the recipes are a bit light on instructions. • Parts of the book are "off color" so I wouldn't leave it around for kids to peruse. • This isn't going to be your one-stop guide to learning how to entertain. Description • Entertaining advice book for all occasions including dates, funerals and lumberjack guests. • Serves up recipes for comfort food such as fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs and sangria. • Includes craft projects using everyday materials including pantyhose, felt, and cans. • General advice, like suggestions of guest combinations to avoid, e.g. astrologer and astronomer. Clearly, this girl likes a lot of people. She gives entertaining advice for situations involving friends, dates, the elderly, children, mourners, lumberjacks, gay friends, sick people, and many others. And while you won't discover the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork, she shares more important advice such as "If the unexpected guest is pressuring you to allow them to crash on your futon for the night, be prepared to pull out one of those excuses you've been saving in your back pocket, like, "I'd love for you to stay, but they're fumigating for rats," or "I found a spider sack."" The advice and humor is wide, ranging way beyond hosting advice to topics like personal grooming, breast self-exams, and housekeeping tips on items like removing vomit stains, wine stains, and urine from your mattress. As you can see, this isn't exactly your most tasteful entertaining advice book. But it certainly is practical, it has lots of her favorite recipes (she really does entertain), and above all else, it will leave you splitting your sides with laughter. So whether you're looking to entertain others, or simply amuse yourself, this is a very entertaining book. (Adapted from a review in About) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 101019 ... lostgirl I Like You Hospitality Under the Influence By Amy Sedaris absurd and surreal entertaining? welcome to my world. at times...in fact most times i entertain the strangest groups....and most often it is more fun for the hostess (that would be me) to be influenced...this looks like just the type of 'crack me up' read that i need... 101019 ... rt +3=245 lostgirl! Question 193 Another one of his delusions has come true. The 32-year-old Shrewsbury native is already known for his work as a standup comedian. Now he is an author, too. As a child, he aspired to be both. His memoir was published this year by Simon & Schuster. Like his comedy, the book describes his life's most awkward moments — without sparing any of the gross little details. It alternates between funny and sad, with anecdotes ranging from his first attempt to kiss a girl, which ended with him hurling off the side of a carnival ride, to the more serious story about his mother's struggle with a back condition that left her delirious with pain. “My goal has always been to write something that is just as funny as any standup, but also has emotion to it,” he said. The early chapters include lots of details about his experience growing up in Shrewsbury. While he was writing the book, the author, now a resident of New York, came back to Shrewsbury hoping that a stroll around the old hometown would help conjure up some memories. “Walking around Shrewsbury was not that helpful,” he said, “because the town changes so much. It's not the same place you grew up, and you're looking at it through adult eyes.” His easy-to-read 190-page book is the culmination of several years of blogging and telling stories to friends and audiences. He started with the blog. “I took pieces of that and used them as seeds of stories,” he said. Then he told stories to his brother Joe, who works with him full time, and Seth Barrish, who directed the one-man show in New York in 2009. “I would basically kick around stories with them,” he said. “If something really struck them as funny or interesting, I would go and write a draft of that story. I probably wrote twice as many stories as ended up making the book.” His success as a writer started in the third grade at St. Mary School in Shrewsbury, where he was named “Author of the Month.” He later went on to earn an English degree from Georgetown University. For years he has been telling stories on stage. With time, even painful experiences become funny, he says. Once, he walked out the window of a hotel room — in his sleep — and ended up with his face in the pavement, his body covered with shards of glass. It was a near-death experience, but he can laugh about it now, and he makes audiences laugh about it, too. He avoided seeking help for years before discussing his scary sleepwalking problem with a doctor. That's when he was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder. Now he takes medication and — here's the funny part — spends every night inside a sleeping bag, zipped up to his chin. And he wears mittens, all to avoid hurting himself by acting out his dreams. “I kinda tie myself in,” he said. “My wife calls it my pod.” The author, the youngest of four siblings, dedicated his book to his parents, Vincent and Mary. But he's not so sure they should actually read the book — at least, not the chapters about them. The book exposes his parents' peculiarities, but also their love and kindness. “It was important to me not to offend my parents, because I love them and feel lucky to be raised by them,” he said. These days he is traveling the country performing standup for his tour with a stop in Boston next Wednesday. After the tour, he's doing another one-man show off Broadway, called “My Girlfriend's Boyfriend.” Then what? He can cross author and comedian off his list, but several of his childhood delusions have yet to come true. He has always wanted to be a break dancer, a rapper, a professional basketball player and the owner of a pizza shop where third-graders can hang out. He may get some inspiration for the pizza place next week when he stops by Shrewsbury, still his favorite pizza town. He makes frequent appearances on This American Life and The Moth Storytelling series. (Adapted from a review in The Telegraph) For three points, name the author/comedian, his book, and give a personal response... 101020 ... jane Mike Birbiglia Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories i love hearing his stories on this_american_life. there was one especially moving story in the episode about returning to the scene of the crime... 101021 ... rt +3=245 jane! we have a tie for first place. i also enjoy him. when i first heard his sleep walking story, i laughed so hard. he is unique in his approach to comedy. it's like a craft for him. do you know the moth? 101021 ... jane i have heard of the moth but i had some kind of weird glitch with my ipod/podcasts so i stopped trying to subscribe to them. that sleepwalking story is brilliant! i'll go through the archives just for his stories (or david_sedaris, or starlee_kine's). 101021 ... rt Question 194 It’s a crying shame that this story is only in print as part of this author's Collected Works: not that there’s anything wrong with the rest of her Collected Works, it’s simply that this story is so perfectly complete on its own; it deserves to be a Penguin Classic, not one of the ugly redesigned ones, but one of the differently ugly older ones with the light green covers that didn’t smack of marketing, only belief in the power of literature. At one point, it could have been a New York Review Book, shelved between James Schuyler’s Alfred & Guinevere and James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz. I don’t know what happened to this story that it should be tied up so; maybe this is FSG’s fault. This story is a weirdly structured book. The first chapter, 34 pages long, introduces Christina Goering, a rich woman, strange from her religion-obsessed youth. Much later, she is visited by Lucy Gamelon, the cousin of her governess, who has heard stories about Christina; though Lucy worked in publishing, she is not up to anything, and she promptly moves in with Christina after her second visit. Some months later, Christina is invited to a party; she sees her acquaintance Frieda Copperfield, who is distraught about a trip she will have to take. She is then distracted by a morose man named Arnold, who she goes home with, thinking this is the interesting thing to do; she stays the night at Arnold’s house, where she meets his parents, who she likes better than Arnold. Christina sells her house and moves to a smaller house on an island. The second chapter, 75 pages long, is about Mrs. Copperfield’s trip to Panama with her husband; Mrs. Copperfield evidently hates to travel, but she leaves her husband for Pacifica, a prostitute. The third chapter, 90 pages long, returns to Christina Goering: she is now living in a house on an island with Arnold and Lucy Gamelon; eventually, they are joined by Arnold’s father. Christina has an affair with Andy, a man she meets in a bar; she leaves him after a week for a monstrous man named Ben who takes her for a prostitute. Five pages from the end of the book, Frieda Copperfield returns, evidently having returned to the city with Pacifica, who is running after a boy. The plot is not why I find myself reading this book over and over again; rather, it’s the way in which the characters behave. In a characteristic passage, Christina Goering and Lucy Gamelon are sitting outside their house; Lucy is thinking about how much she hates Arnold. “He is even too lazy to court either of us,” she tells Christina, “which is a most unnatural thing you must admit – if you have any conception at all of the male physical make-up. Of course he is not a man. He is an elephant.” But Lucy most hates Arnold for freeloading on Christina, which is of course something that Lucy is also doing: They sat in silence for a few minutes. Miss Gamelon was thinking seriously about all these things when suddenly a bottle broke against her head, inundating her with perfume and making quite a deep cut just above her forehead. She started to bleed profusely and sat for a moment with her hands over her eyes.      ”I didn’t actually mean to draw blood,” said Arnold leaning out of the window. “I just meant to give her a start.”      Miss Goering, although she was beginning to regard Miss Gamelon more and more as the embodiment of evil, made a swift and compassionate gesture towards her friend. (p. 115) Within ten pages of this scene, Arnold is calling Lucy “Bubbles” and they are sharing a room, united, perhaps, by their dislike for each other. None of the characters in the story are likeable. They are not pleasant; at one point Arnold describes Lucy as “constantly in either a surly or melancholic mood,” which could be said about any of these characters. There is no pretense of redemption: these characters start out terrible and they will end terrible. This makes it a very funny book; but, in a way, it’s also more realistic. There’s something interestingly off in the way the characters in this book make choices; they are all inscrutable. Here, an interaction between Christina Goering and Andy, her would-be paramour: “Step back a little farther, please,” he said. “Look carefully at your man and then say whether or not you want him.”      Miss Goering did not see how she could possibly answer anything but yes. He was standing now with his head cocked to one side, looking very much as though he were trying to refrain from blinking his eyes, the way people do when they are having snapshots taken.      ”Very well,” said Miss Goering, “I do want you to be my man.” She smiled at him sweetly, but she was not thinking very hard of what she was saying. (p. 166) There’s a disconnect between thought and action that’s funny as well as terrifying: none of their behavior is at all predictable. In another novel, this sort of action could be accounted for by drugs, which would feel like a narrative copout; but these characters are entirely straitlaced, and even drinking doesn’t reliably change their inhibitions. This isn’t quite surrealistic whimsy, though the characters do appear to move in dream-like trances: at least in the sections based around Miss Goering, the sense is less of a world gone strange than it is of strange characters who don’t fit into the regular world, characters who could not be described as surrealist dreamers. Miss Goering and her friends appear to move from Manhattan to a largely rural Staten Island, perhaps the Staten Island that Arshille Gorky painted to look like the south of France; the setting is identified by geography rather than by name, but it maintains the prosaic stolidity one expects from that borough. For excitement, they take a ferry to New Jersey, where things seem to be much the same. (There’s a certain similarity to Kafka’s Amerika, though that would have been published in English after Two Serious Ladies.) The Panama that Frieda Copperfield visits is more fantastical; I find myself less drawn to this part of the plot partially because we’re used to seeing Latin America described as a fantastical place where anything can happen. The drama there is still very much more personal than based on its setting: what happens to Mrs. Copperfield on her trip is not what would happen to anyone else, but Mrs. Copperfield and Pacifica don’t sparkle quite as brightly as Christina Goering and her followers. It’s left to the reader to discern what exactly the narrative of Mrs. Copperfield and Pacifica has to do with the story of Christina Goering; presumably Copperfield & Goering are the eponymous two serious ladies of the title, although Lucy Gamelon appears more often in the book than Frieda Copperfield does. In their final discussion, Frieda gives an idea of what she might have been trying to do: “But you have gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?”      ”True enough,” said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. “I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.” (p. 197) Ms. Goering promptly admits her dislike for Mrs. Copperfield; there seems to be something incompatible about the way that the two of them are working out their lives. When we first meet Christina, she is purifying a young friend’s sins in a ceremony involving a burlap sack and a great deal of mud; through her narrative, talk of sin comes up from time to time. Christina and Lucy, for example, get into an argument about whether sports give Christina a feeling of sinning. Near the end of their affair, Christina realizes that Andy’s self-image has improved and he no longer thinks of himself as a bum: This would have pleased her greatly had she been interested in reforming her friends, but unfortunately she was only interested in the course that she was following in order to attain her own salvation. (p. 172) Christina’s theology seems to be her own brand of gnosticism: like Irenaeus’s description of the libertine gnostics, she seems to be trying to save herself through absorbing the sin of the world, which must be destroyed for truth to appear. Frieda, by contrast, appears to finally be enjoying the broken world as it is. (Adapted from a review in "with hidden noise," a book review blog.) For three points, name the author, her story, and give a personal response... 101022 ... lostgirl Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles a peculiar story you've chosen here....the reviews are so diametrically across the board that it was actually a comical experience in and of itself to read some of them. for two eccentric women of that time period to act so "off the wall" and to ignore most proper etiquette and all social expectation definitely suggests that this read is worthwhile black ink on white pages. 101022 ... rt +3=248 lostgirl hops back into first place. Question 195 This author is a great family man, but it's his mistakes that make these essays worth reading. Despite his claims to the contrary, he clearly is a great dad. Early on in this book he writes that "A father is a man who fails every day". If this collection of autobiographical essays shows one thing, it's that he fails better than most men when it comes to the task of parenting. The author of six novels, including the Hollywood-adapted Wonder Boys (1995) and the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), he nonetheless cooks and cleans and loves his wife, seems to spend countless hours drawing superheroes and watching Doctor Who with his children, and above all else is warmly thoughtful and reflective about the beauty and meaning of these acts. When the time comes to confess his paternal sins, the list is filled with things like answering emails when his children want him to play, and spending a few nights away from home on a book tour. One feels assured, then, about the welfare of his children. The problem for his readers is that the stuff of good, stable parenting isn't necessarily the stuff of persuasive, illuminating writing. Many of the essays resolve themselves into enactments of principles shared by all parents – at least the sort who write novels and live in Berkeley, California. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to answering your children's questions about your youthful consumption of drugs. While it's hard to watch your daughter's male classmates begin to ogle her, you have to face facts (and the box of junior-sized tampons in the bathroom) and deal with her emergent sexuality. Sometimes it's good to share your enthusiasms with your kids, but it's also important to give them room to develop their own passions, even if they're disagreeable. All of this is true, but none of it is news. And while hisfascination with the cultural landscape of his youth during the 1960s and 1970s leads to some valuable insights about popular culture, angling these meditations through the lens of fatherhood far too often leads them toward the same conclusion: a nostalgic, if considerate, regret for the lost freedoms and openness of the America of his childhood. The evolution of Lego from six-colour austerity into Star Wars sets deprives his kids of open-ended imaginative play, just as anxiety about child abduction has foreclosed the freedom he experienced wandering by himself around the streets and woods of suburban Maryland as a boy. The fact that the most interesting moments in the book are those most removed from his present household in a sense proves the point. "Fever" is an abbreviated but intriguingly elusive tale of Rebecca, "the first great love" of his life, and his temporary rescue of her from "the burning-down house of her brain". "The Heartbreak Kid" details the origin of his tumultuous first marriage, to the poet Lollie Groth, in a moment of half-deliberate perversity: "I looked at her, this woman who was not the one I wanted to talk to, and I wasn't even sure if I really liked her much. I remember thinking, as I stood there weighing her offer, This is going to be a mistake." But mistakes make for interesting narratives. His descriptions of the spurned lover of his mother's boyfriend, who would sit smouldering in her car outside his boyhood home, or his brief affair, aged 15, with one of his mother's friends, aren't just interesting because they are sensational. Rather, their sensationalness allows them to open on to issues less easily resolved than the question of what to make of his son's fondness for Captain Underpants or the changing musical selection of his favourite radio station. In 2005, his wife, novelist Ayelet Waldman, caused a stir (and ended up on Oprah Winfrey's show) when she wrote a piece confessing she loved her husband more than her children – and that, in the end, this was a good thing for all involved. The controversy centred on a thought-experiment she called "the parental pastime known as God forbid", in which she speculated about the effects that the death of her children and the death of her husband would have on her. While "there is always a future beyond the child's death", she admitted that she could "imagine no joy without my husband". Reading this book in the light of his wife's essay brings to light a somewhat unsettling truth about the relationship between responsible adulthood and eye-catching writing. Her piece was a luridly packaged argument against the grain of conventional wisdom and perhaps even the best practices of parenting. While his book, on the other hand, contains flashes of insight, its overarching sanity makes it difficult for it to transcend the level of right-thinking banality. The world would no doubt be a better place, and families would no doubt be happier, if there were more fathers and husbands who acted and thought like he does. But we also remember what Tolstoy wrote about happy families, unhappy families, and the difference between the two. (Adapted from a review in The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101023 ... lostgirl Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son  Michael Chabon  could be an insightful read for any parent....but since i live in a household filled with testosterone, it might be nice to look at a completely male point of view of just what goes into 'being a man.' 101024 ... rt +3=251 lostgirl! Question 196 READ no further if you dislike France, consider the French irritating, find French cooking pretentious and the French art de vivre overrated — because this woman liked everything about France. And her memoir is an affectionate merci for all that France gave her. True, she also did a lot for France — and the American palate — by introducing French cuisine to American homes. But this book, written with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, before her death at 91 in August 2004, is really a love story: she loved her husband 10 years her senior; she loved France; she loved French cooking; and she loved life. Listen to her: "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly." And a few pages later: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness and freedom of spirit." Yes, mes amis, that's love! In a foreword, Prud'homme explains that the book had been gestating since 1969, when the couple organized the records of their life in France between 1948 and 1954: hundreds of letters home, piles of black-and-white photographs (79 are in this book, many taken by Paul) and her notes as she prepared her influential cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," published in 1961. But while she often talked about writing "the France book," Prud'homme recalls, it was only in December 2003, nine years after Paul's death, that she turned to him and said: "All right, dearie, maybe we should work on it together." The result is a delight. On one level, it's the story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" — her words — discovered the fullness of life in France. On another, it recounts the making of her America's grande dame of French cooking. Inevitably, the stories overlap. The couple met in wartime Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were working for the Office of Strategic Services. They married in 1946 and moved to Washington. In the winter of 1948, Paul, an amateur painter and photographer, was assigned to run the exhibits office of the United States Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, and she naturally accompanied him. Unlike Paul, she had never been to Europe, spoke no French and had no experience of French cuisine. But on their first day in France, in November 1948, as they drove their imported sky-blue Buick station wagon from Le Havre to Paris, they lunched at a restaurant in Rouen and there her life changed. She recalls the "epiphany" in mouth-watering detail — oysters, sole meunière, salad, cheese and coffee — and concludes: "It was the most exciting meal of my life." Of course, with Paul as her experienced guide, Paris meant many more exciting meals. Soon, inspired by visits to grocers, butchers and markets and aided by a couple of weighty cookbooks, she began probing the mysteries of French cooking in her unheated Left Bank apartment. Then, in October 1949, she signed up to learn the real thing at the École du Cordon Bleu. The making of her as a chef began here, but the road would still be long. For a start, in the school's "short, thin, rather disagreeable owner," she at last met someone in France she didn't like. Then, 18 months later, she failed her final examination. But she had a mentor in the chef Max Bugnard, a jolly soul in his late 70's, who never ceased to teach and encourage her. She retook the exam and graduated. Soon afterward, she met two elegant French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both experienced cooks, who joined her in forming L'École des Gourmettes, which offered cooking classes from their homes. Beck and Bertholle were also working on a cookbook; in September 1952, they invited her to help prepare it for the American market. "And so," sherecalls, "our collaboration began." In the decade that followed, they moved from Paris to Marseille, then to Bonn, back to Washington, then finally to Oslo, before Paul retired and they settled in Cambridge, Mass. She describes their peripatetic lives in a bubbly style, offering asides on everything from the horrors of McCarthyism back home to the exhilaration of her first mistral in Marseille. But her main energy went into the cookbook, organizing the existing recipes and gathering new ones for, say, bouillabaisse and aïgo bouïdo, or garlic soup, then testing them with American ingredients in American kitchens. The book, meanwhile, had grown to 700 pages, and in 1958 Houghton Mifflin rejected it as too long. After it was rewritten, it was again turned down, this time as too expensive to produce. Then, in 1960, Judith Jones at Knopf offered to publish it, requesting only that its working title, "French Recipes for American Cooks," be replaced. The following year, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" came out and fame beckoned for her. The book's success led to her popular television cooking classes and, eventually, to Vol. II of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and many more cookbooks. Meanwhile, they built a stone house next to Beck's in Provence and prolonged their love affair with France. But by 1992, with Paul in a nursing home, Beck dead and Provence no longer a "quiet refuge," she finally said goodbye to the home she called La Pitchoune, or "The Little Thing." "I tried to hold on to my impressions," she writes, "but it was hopeless, as if I were trying to hold on to a dream. No matter. France was my spiritual homeland: it had become part of me, and I a part of it, and so it has remained ever since." But one memory stayed firm, that of her first meal in France. "And thinking back on it now," she concludes, "reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite — toujours bon appétit!" (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name this famous woman, her memoir, and give a personal response... 101024 ... jane MY LIFE IN FRANCE By Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. i love reading stores about people who completely followed and lived their passions, and julia child was most definitely a dynamic human spirit who did just that. 101025 ... rt +3=248 jane! Question 197 It is 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in the New York office of this musician/author's manager, a place that might look ordinary if every wall and shelf were not crammed with some of the world’s most glorious rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. He has a 3 o’clock appointment. “Come on in, he’ll be here in a minute,” an assistant says — and here he comes in a minute, at 3:01. This from a man who once prided himself for operating on HisTime, as in: the security staff ate the shepherd’s pie that he wanted in his dressing room? Then everyone in this packed stadium can bloody well wait. The Rolling Stones don’t play until another shepherd’s pie shows up. Chalk up the promptness to the man’s new incarnation: he is now distinguished author. True, he is far from the only rock star to turn memoirist, and far from the only Rolling Stone to write a book about himself — very much about himself. The raven-haired Ron Wood wrote “Ronnie,” in which he described Brian Jones as “me in a blond wig.” Bill Wyman, the band’s retired bass player and bean counter, wrote “Stone Alone,” in which not a 15-shilling demo disc went unmentioned. Now the keeper has been written; a big, fierce, game-changing account of the Stones’ nearly half-century-long adventure. “It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says about the book. “I’d rather make 10 records.” But he sounds anything but weary. And he seems refreshed, bearing surprisingly little resemblance to the battered, kohl-eyed pirate who looks like 50 miles of bad road. Today, in neutral street clothes and hot-green shoes, he is positively debonair. On his hands: the ubiquitous silver skull ring, swollen knuckles, the thin white scar from a hunk of steaming phosphorus that burned his finger to the bone while he played through a concert without stopping. On his head: both a headband and a raffish, straw-colored hat, gray tufts poking out in all directions. Not a single gewgaw hangs off it. “I’ve been through that phase,” he says. “Don’t know that the hair will take the pressure anymore.” He’s been through quite a lot of phases. And they’re all on the page in the book: the Boy Scout (really); the tyro rocker; the lovestruck kid (mad for Ronnie Spector, unbeknownst to Phil Spector); the astonished new star; the heroin-addicted older one; the jaded veteran of countless world tours; and the longtime sparring partner of Mick Jagger. (Despite tabloid shock over the bickering in the book, these two have seriously been calling each other names at least since the early 1980s.) All of this is recounted with straight-up candor, and some of it is easily sensationalized. But the book’s single biggest stunner is a hand-written note on its jacket flap: “Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it.” How, he is asked, is this humanly possible from a man as well known for stupefaction as “Satisfaction?” “I think my main concern at the beginning was whether my memory was really reliable,” he says. “Fox had to do a little sleuthing.” Fox is James Fox, the journalist and author of “White Mischief,” who has been his friend over many years and was his collaborator in putting the book together. (It was sold to Little, Brown & Company for a reported advance of more than $7 million.) Mr. Fox wound up researching the rocker's past, conducting interviews with those who knew him long ago and drawing upon wonderfully candid old letters and journal entries. “Spent day practising,” the 19-year-old wrote in January 1963, when the Stones were just beginning to play in public. “Worthwhile, I hope!” Also exhumed: a 1962 letter from him to his Aunt Patty describing a boy he had known in primary school, Mick Jagger. He signs off “Luff xxxxx” These artifacts turned out to be the his equivalent of Proust’s madeleines, though he, whose reading taste runs to naval history and the novels of Patrick O’Brian and George MacDonald Fraser, would hardly put it that way. In any case they prompted recollections that he never expected to rediscover, and the book began to click. Once his stories were told and a draft was written, he and Mr. Fox wound up sitting together with separate copies of the manuscript as Mr. Fox read the whole book aloud. “What I couldn’t guess was that he’d be such a very good natural editor,” Mr. Fox, reached by e-mail, says of him. “He cut, accordingly, for pace and rhythm — a real musical cut.” As for the title of the book, he did some editing there too. “My Life” was what the book was to be called. “I said ‘I tell you what, just cut off the ‘My,’ and you’ve got a title,” he says. He might just as appropriately have used another title he likes, “Keep It Dark.” But, he says, “I’m saving it for a song.” The contents of the book are dark enough already. It begins with a 1975 drug bust in Arkansas and a judge who was persuaded to free him after confiscating his hunting knife (which still hangs in the courtroom) and having a picture taken with him. How did he get so lucky? “I really can’t explain it,” he says, deadpan, about that now. “Maybe I’ve got an honest face.” It covers many other arrests too, as well as his grueling efforts to kick his heroin addiction, which he claims to have done successfully 30 years ago. “Stories like this aren’t told very much,” he insists. “There aren’t many people willing to tell them.” Then there are the other health hazards that the book describes. Like electrocution. “My most spectacular one was in Sacramento. ...” he now says with a smile, drifting off into a fond-sounding reverie that involves a guitar string touching an ungrounded microphone and clouds of smoke billowing out of his mouth. He has a good laugh at the memory of finding himself in a hospital and hearing a doctor say, “Well, they either wake up or they don’t.” The book has already attracted undue attention for a schoolyard-sounding anatomical swipe at Mr. Jagger. But this is a book that pulls no punches, and most of its disses are more serious than that. “Cold-blooded” and “vicious” are only two of the more printable words he uses to describe Brian Jones. Allen Ginsberg was an “old gasbag.” Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stone, “didn’t do anything” after he left the band, and Donald Cammell, the film director (“Performance,” starring Mr. Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, his longtime lover and partner in crime), couldn’t commit suicide quickly enough to suit him. (He shot himself in 1996.) When Marlon Brando propositioned him and Ms. Pallenberg, he remembers replying with this: “Later, pal.” As for Mr. Jagger, the complaints are deep-seated. They involve credit hogging, social climbing, egomania, insecurity, unethical business behavior and — here comes a Freudian’s holiday for anyone who’s ever watched the bare-chested young Jagger and he vamp it up together — uncertain sexual identity. There’s also a cool condescension about Mr. Jagger’s contributions to the duo’s songwriting. And a nasty nickname or two, like “Disco Boy.” In conversation about all this, he is emphatically blasé: “It’s bound to be somewhat rough, but the point is I’m trying to tell the story from Day 1 to now,” he says. And sure: “There’s the odd conflict here and there. But if you weigh it all out, those things count for nothing.” He did see to it that Mr. Jagger knew what was in the book ahead of time. “The important thing to me,” he says, “was that Mick had been through it and seen it and knew what was what.” And is there anything that one Stone can say about another Stone and really give offense at this point? “No.” But is there anything new that can be said about the Stones anyway? As the book emphatically demonstrates, the answer is yes. And some of its most surprisingly revelatory material appears in what he jokingly calls “Keef’s Guitar Workshop.” Here are the secrets of some of the world’s most famous rock riffs and the almost toy-level equipment on which they were recorded, like the cassette recorder onto which Mr. Richards dubbed guitar layer after guitar layer for “Street Fighting Man,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and part of “Gimme Shelter.” Here’s how the silent beats in Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” worked their way into some of his most inspired solos. Mr. Fox found that “Heartbreak Hotel” itself was the key to some of his best musical memories. Some of this is by now well known to music critics. But he makes it fascinating at the layman’s level. And he is surprised to find that early readers haven’t been skipping the musicology, even though the book cordially invites them to do so. What he finds most gratifying about having written the book is the chance for both him and his readers to grasp the breadth and range of this book’s material. He is the rare memoirist who can say, without hyperbole, “that what I hoped was worth sharing with people turned out to be far more important than I could possibly imagine.” It’s getting late. Time to leave this bright orange room where his name is emblazoned on a director’s chair; where assorted music awards and platinum records are everywhere; where there’s a discreet little skull in the middle of the wall mirror; where his Louis Vuitton guitar case — he did an ad for Vuitton — is parked in a corner. But the items likeliest to catch his eye are the ones on the coffee table: loose cigarettes neatly arrayed in a holder, a lighter, more cigarettes in a pack. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he had asked when he first appeared. Easy one: Who, aside from himself and certain legal authorities, has ever kept him from doing anything? But an hour has gone by, and he hasn’t touched the cigarettes. He hasn’t even looked at them. He has done not one thing to make him resemble the sullen, haunted, diabolically beautiful creature on the cover of his book, the one with hellfire blazing up from his hand to meet the blurry white thing he’s smoking. “That?” he says innocently when asked about the picture. “Oh, that’s just me lighting a cigarette. That’s all I was doing.” (Adapted from a review BY Janet Maslin for the NY Times) For three points, name the rocker musician, his memoir, and name your favorite rolling stones song... 101027 ... jane Keith Richards Life yay! the Stones are my favorite band of all time. "can't you hear me knocking" has always been up there. 101027 ... rt +3=251 jane! first place tied up again... Question 198 There is a way of getting inside your characters that renders them intimately known and comprehensively exposed -- at once privileged and gutted -- and this author is very good at it. Her people convict themselves out of their own mouths. Or, rather, through the silent and shameless flow of their inner voices, contradicting the anxious display of decency on the surface of their lives. Sometimes, hilariously, the wrong words jump out, revealing hidden sins. But mostly we're eavesdropping on a running interior commentary of bottled-up paranoia and want. Ted Swenson, the central character in this novel, is as indelible as Landau in her previous book, ''Guided Tours of Hell.'' A writer touring a death camp, Landau is seized with envy of a famous colleague, a camp survivor and flamboyant rival whom he would secretly like to kill. Since we are imprisoned in Landau's head, we can't help sharing his shocking but all-too-plausible private view. With Swenson in this book we're in the same boat; he too is a character caught in a web of powerful false pieties. Swenson is a 47-year-old college professor who teaches creative writing, a blocked novelist and family man whose life has been passing in tenured tranquillity while inwardly he seethes with discontent. Then one day the college president presents the new code on sexual harassment, and all Swenson's guiltless years of not abusing his students' trust rise up to accuse him: ''What really bothers him -- and he can hardly admit it to himself; if he weren't driving through the half-dark, he couldn't let himself think it -- is that he was too stupid or timid or scared to sleep with those students. . . . The point is: he adores Sherrie, he always has. He would never hurt her. And now, as a special reward for having been such a good husband, such an all-around good guy, he's got the chill satisfaction of having taken his high-minded self-denial almost all the way to the grave. Because now it's all over. He's too old. He's way beyond all that.'' And so he sets out on the primrose path to disgrace, driving -- driven -- into the real dark, a ludicrous sacrifice to the righteous spirit of the age. The beauty of Swenson's story is that not even his sin is sincere; he talks himself into it, more or less. In an atmosphere of moral panic, it's horribly easy, as he discovers, to seem unquestionably bad. But he and we know better. Indeed, you might almost say that he's the one who's taken for a ride. At least his victim, a scrawny punk named Angela Argo, the most talented student writer he's ever come across, looks more and more like the prime mover of the harassment plot. Flattered, roused, befuddled Swenson (he's drinking more than ever to help keep things out of focus) even imagines himself, at one particularly tasteless and abject moment of role reversal, as ''one of those unfortunate girls who manage to get pregnant while convincing themselves they're not really having sex.'' It will be apparent that this novel is the sort of scandalous book that zealots would be well advised to shun. Once you start reading it, you'll be hooked. It's not that she has simply reversed the politically correct line for mischief's sake. Rather, she has upped the stakes by making Angela as unknowable as Nabokov's Lolita, but -- utterly unlike her nymphet predecessor -- plain, ambitious and rebelliously an artist on her own account. ''Jane Eyre,'' she tells Swenson, is her favorite novel (not counting his own, of course), but he doesn't see what that portends. Swenson's blindness is as much a matter of the generation gap as of gender politics. There's an excruciating subplot about his wrecked relationship with his daughter, Ruby, and some of the book's best comic scenes describe the fiction-writing workshops that break in on his obsessive reveries -- embarrassing and horribly credible little playlets in which his students trade fragile ''identities'' and demonstrate how very difficult it has become to imagine other people's lives. To speak for others, to impersonate someone of another class or color or sexual orientation, not only requires talents and skills they don't have but has come to seem almost criminal in itself. No wonder they're writing stories about ''relationships'' with animals. Except for perverse Angela, who's writing a novel about a love affair with a teacher. For a long time, Swenson manages to persuade himself that she's making it all up; only too late does he glimpse the awful possibility that she's been plotting the future, ''sucking details from his life, using them in her work.'' He is the disgusting creep in her latest chapter: ''I thought, This guy is my father's age. His stomach pillowed into me. His whiskers scratched my face. He was a whole other species than the smooth boys I'd kissed in school.'' Angela has got Swenson's number, all right. He used to think you could separate art and life. When he called his own first novel after the movie in which Marlene Dietrich turns the besotted professor into ''a slobbering clown,'' Swenson was in fact in love with Sherrie and about to settle down. Only now is that plot coming home to roost. When he goes to New York to see his editor in the hope of interesting him in Angela's work in progress, Swenson faces a shaming interrogation on his own future: ''Have you considered a memoir? You don't need me to tell you that what's selling these days has to have the juicy gleam, the bloody smell of the truth. . . . Better a hot new memoirist than a middle-aged midlist novelist.'' But then Swenson has just alienated this man, as he's alienated those close to him, by his brooding indifference to their concerns, by his tactless gibes and exasperated self-absorption. One of the novel's most riveting effects is the fascination of watching him commit slow moral suicide. She doesn't suffer from any inhibitions about impersonating others, and she deplores the decay of lying. With her own style of outrage, she portrays a fissile world where the sexes and generations are forgetting how to mix, becoming as remote and unintelligible to each other as creatures of separate species. When Swenson at his lowest meets a deer on the snowy campus lawn, they exchange a look that speaks volumes about this sad state of affairs. It's a scene that's been prepared for with meticulous cunning and can stand fittingly as an emblem of the high comic despair that has become the hallmark of her fiction. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 101028 ... jane BLUE ANGEL By Francine Prose 101028 ... jane it reminds me a bit of Wonder Boys, as far as characters go. but the plot itself seems really fascinating. it almost seems he is trying to work out the kinks and the karma of his wrecked relationship with Ruby by what he is doing. 101028 ... rt +3=254 jane! back in first place Question 198 The large and malevolent tiger at the center of this nonfiction hunting tale bears a striking resemblance to its fictional seafaring predecessors: the white whale and the movie-star shark (both of which, by the way, are said to have been inspired by real creatures). The structure of this author's book echoes that of “Moby-Dick,” alternating a gripping chase narrative with dense explanations of the culture and ecology surrounding that chase. “Jaws” fans will recognize the dramatic strategy of keeping the beast offstage as much as possible to allow terror to fill in the blanks, as well as a certain lurid detail at the book’s end, which I won’t reveal. What makes this book a grand addition to the animal-­pursuit subgenre is the sensitive way in which the author, a journalist and the author of a previous book, “The Golden Spruce,” that’s in the same murder-in-nature mode, evokes his cat. Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose. He writes about the difficulty of tracking a tiger that doesn’t want to be found: “This was not an animal they followed, but a contradiction, a silence that was at once incarnate and ­invisible.” When the tiger stalks, the book soars; when it hides, the book sags, but only a little. He is an obsessive researcher who marshals his battalion of facts in service to the story, which is a nice way of saying that some of this book can be rough going, but it’s all interesting and it pays off. It’s the late 1990s in the Pri­morye region, on Russia’s far eastern border. An area about the size of Washington State, a “meeting place of four distinct bioregions” that include a subtropical forest and the Siberian taiga, the Primorye is home to a human population devastated by the fallout from perestroika, and a few hundred Amur tigers. The largest tiger subspecies, the Amur can survive in virtually any climate, think strategically, rip bears to shreds and eat almost anything. What these tigers don’t do, in the Primorye, is eat people. Apparently, they’re more into human flesh in parts of India. Go figure. That is, until one very big, very smart animal breaks the Primorye’s longstanding people-tiger truce, acquiring a taste for humans and satisfying that taste in ugly fashion. Enter Yuri Trush, the commander of a tiger-­preservation team, who must now destroy this tiger. While Trush tries to solve the mystery of where the tiger is, he tries to solve the mystery of why the tiger went rogue. To do this, he takes the reader deep into the tiger’s world, creating an intimate portrait of its inner life. Nonfiction writers usually deal with words and actions, not thoughts. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a journalist to tell us what a human is thinking, much less a tiger. But here’s where all that research comes in handy. He knows so much about the Primorye, its tigers and this particular tiger that he’s able to draw plausible conclusions. Like this explanation of why the tiger — which is said to have enjoyed lying down on one victim’s mattress — awaits its prey in a cabin: “Building on his success with cabin stakeouts and with mattresses, he combined the two here in a way that also warmed him in the process.” He struggles, however, to make the people and the place of the story as vivid as the cat. He seems humbled by the cruel environment he’s chosen to work in. The Primorye is just too foreign. The geography remains indistinct, the people remote and with a disorienting thicket of names. In the end, it’s the tiger alone that burns bright. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101029 ... jane THE TIGER A True Story of Vengeance and Survival By John Vaillant I have to say, I think I'd have a problem with a man-vs-tiger story, even with complexities. 101029 ... rt +3=257 jane! Question 199 Fantasy novels involve magic and are a little bit like magic themselves. To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions. They affect us most powerfully as teenagers, but then most of us move on to sterner, staider stuff. Yet we carry the memory of the reading that first transported us, and no book ever quite has that flashlight-under-the-bedsheets urgency. This author's third novel is a homage to that early wonderment. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is a Brooklyn teenager obsessed with “Fillory and Further,” a Narnia-like pentalogy “published in England in the 1930s.” One day, after his alumni interview for Princeton is aborted, he’s mysteriously conveyed to Brakebills College, which is kind of like the M.I.T. for magic. Even though Quentin discovers that magic is eminently real and that he’s got talent for it, he still pines for the imaginary land of Fillory. There are even hints that Fillory might exist. Worlds within meta-worlds. Does it surprise you that the author's bio states that he “holds degrees in comparative literature from Harvard and Yale”? Brakebills will remind readers of Hogwarts, though with more illicit fondling. He has written what could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults. He takes the rudiments of that story — an alternate society of magicians bumpily coexists with our own — and injects mature themes. Quentin and his circle sleep around. They cook great meals and slosh wine. They also mope about and ponder the purpose of the magical life. It turns out that it can be kind of boring. You have great power but no meaningful way to apply it. Kind of like comp lit majors, or faded rock stars. His story is most entertaining when documenting life at Brakebills. The school has a cantankerous dean whom I particularly liked. “Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?” he asks, not unreasonably. The author, the book critic for Time magazine, is also very good at imagining what magic might feel like when trying it for the first time. There’s an amusing interlude where — spoiler alert! — half the class gets turned into geese and they fly to the Arctic. When everyone is back in human form, they all make honking jokes. There’s the punk, the aesthete, the party girl, the fat slacker, the soon-to-be-hot nerd, the shy, angry, yet inexplicably irresistible narrator. Believable characters form the foundation for flights of fantasy. Before he can make us care about, say, the multiverse, we need to intuit more about Quentin’s interior universe. The Narnia books and the Harry Potter series captivate the young by putting young people in a world where adults are a distant, unsteady presence. This book is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life. Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101101 ... jane THE MAGICIANS By Lev Grossman less than being fooled, i think fantasy novels require the reader to have a twinkle in their eye, and an open imagination. this is easier if one starts early on fantasy reads. one of my favorite books growing up was a fantasy book. i think this is what segued me so easily in to science fiction as a kid. a couple years ago i read the phantom tollbooth for the first time and loved it. but it would have been so much more magical as a child. i haven't read any of the harry potter books, and i've only seen the first movie, and i think that would make me enjoy this book even more. 101101 ... rt +3=260 jane! 101101 ... rt “The act of writing is always an act of solitude,” says this author . Though he’s primarily known for his short stories and novels, over the last couple years he’s segued into film and TV. But how different are the two mediums? “It’s always about trying to write sentences that have clarity and that are interesting,” he explains . “But the structures are different. Scripts keep the prose to a minimum. And it’s a very collaborative experience. With the novel you can take time. ... you’re the [director of photography], the casting director, wardrobe, location, set design. But with a script, you have to work with all these other people to make this happen.” The Extra Man, the first movie, came out Friday, Aug. 20. Based on his 1998 novel of the same name, it concerns young New York dandy transvestite Louis (Paul Dano), who gets pulled into the world of Kevin Kline’s Henry Harrison, an “extra man”—basically a nonsexual gigolo—to the city’s heaping helping of lonely dowagers. This microcosm, bizarre as it seems both in print and in the film adaptation by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, is “very close,” the author says, to the real deal. “The ‘extra man’ or ‘walker’ is a longtime fixture of New York society, Palm Beach and, I’m sure, Philadelphia’s Main Line. Blue-blood culture has a lot of walkers.” He himself was an “extra man” at one point, and also lived in squalid conditions, as Louis does, though how closely Extra Man mirrors his life he won’t say. “Everything is made up once you’ve change a detail,” he says. “It did mirror my life to a certain extent. But the Louis character is so much different from myself.” Henry was a composite of three different men he knew. He gets a screenplay credit along with Berman and Pulcini, but says the only work he did was on the Henry character, particularly his amusingly grandiloquent turns of phrase. Our ultimate perspective on this crabby, sexist, operetta-singing sycophant is complex, but the character comes off alternately despicable, pathetic and hilarious. “In the novel and the film he’s meant to be a full portrait of a man,” he says. “How I want people to see him is as this incredible life force that’s pressing on to the next event, no matter what.” Both Extra Man and Bored to Death, the HBO show he writes that’s about to head into its second season, feature protagonists who long for the past. Louis idolizes F. Scott Fitzgerald; Bored ’s lead, who is named after himself and played by Jason Schwartzman, yearns for the private-dick noir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, even starting his own Craigslist-based detective agency. “It’s the intellectual thing to long for the past,” he says, adding, “I’m sure the past was just as horrific as the present. It’s a futile longing.” He describes the character named after him as a “postmodern detective. He would like to be hard-boiled. He would like to be tough. He’s something of a Don Quixote. Don Quixote wanted to become a knight after reading too many books about chivalry. The character played by Jason thinks he’s a detective after reading too many detective novels.” His segue into TV and film isn’t unexpected. In addition to his many story collections and novels, he’s had a one-man off-off-Broadway show (Oedipussy), written a graphic novel (The Alcoholic) and acted in both the IFC show The Girl Under the Waves. Moreover, he’s had two amateur boxing matches under the name “The Herring Wonder.” “I do other things because I’m curious,” he says. “I have fun performing. It’s a way to be social, a way to meet people.” Much of his work, and especially Extra Man, straddles two sensibilities: a highbrow world of luxury and class and a lowbrow world of sexual frankness and scatalogical humor. (In addition to knowing good cocktails, Henry also has a foolproof way to urinate on the street without being caught.) “I think I’m drawn to the sophisticated,” Ames says. “I like the novels of Thomas Mann and Graham Greene. And then I love the Three Stooges. I’m not a snob, I guess. Or I’m a snob who likes a good fart joke.” (Adapted from an interview in Philadelphia Weekly) For three points, name this writer and give a personal response... 101102 ... jane The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames i have wanted to see Bored to Death since i saw the preview for it. this novel/movie looks like it has particularly dynamic characters, and i like explorations of sexuality (which i think are invoked even when unintended). 101103 ... rt +3=263 jane! by all means watch "bored to death." it's not only hilarious but its shot in brooklyn and nyc, in locations you'll probably recognize, depicts the contemporary scene with sardonic expertise and jason schwartzman is near perfect as the bumbling fool who gets the women. kathy and i spill our guts laughing. Question 201 In the nine stories in his first book, this author has invented a world of rough men and strong women. Often the men are older, battered, no longer successful, and the women have had their patience sorely tried. The husband’s affair in “The Brown Coast” is discovered in a novel way — when his wife realizes that the small footprint on the front window of their car doesn’t match her own. After she throws him out of the house, he retreats to his uncle’s shack on a rocky, unappealing island in Florida. The narrator of “Retreat” has been through two amiable divorces and is now living on a mountain in Maine that he plans to subdivide into one-acre plots, suitable for men like himself. He thinks there are probably lots of them out there, “sad, paunchy hordes” of them,“nightly pacing carpeted apartments from Spokane to Chattanooga, frantic for escape hatches of their own.” Although the narrator and his nerdy music therapist brother have always been almost murderous rivals, when he calls to invite him for a visit (“From Stephen’s end came the sound of someone doing violence to a tambourine”) the invitation is accepted. But it’s no surprise that every­thing turns out badly. Stephen’s plane arrives when it’s not expected; stranded in a muddy field, he’s already fuming. The next day, the two brothers go hunting with a neighbor and — well, I don’t want to spoil the story, but let’s just say things don’t turn out as expected. In “Down Through the Valley,” Jane has left the narrator for her meditation teacher, Barry, and has taken their daughter off with them to an ashram. When Jane undergoes a long “isolation” at the retreat and Barry breaks his ankle, the narrator is persuaded to drive Barry and the little girl back home. The situation that ensues is fraught — and ultimately violent — but along the way there are hilarious insights into the feelings of two male rivals. “No belly,” the narrator reports, checking out Barry, “smooth skin, full head of hair, ­better-looking than me.” When Barry picks up the child to carry her to the car, the narrator sourly observes that this practiced gesture “showed he’d held her like this many times before.” Nor can the narrator stop conjuring up images of Barry the Meditation Meister in bed with compliant Jane: “You don’t want to get into thoughts about Hovering Butterflies or the Jade Stalk, or the Door of the Holy Abode, when you can remember one time, a few times actually, when you came home late under a fair amount of liquor and you got on top of your sleeping wife going, ‘Come on, Mother, can’t we poon?’ ” If the narrators and antiheroes of his stories are half-defeated he-men, bumbling and only partly tamed, then their rivals or antagonists are self-­satisfied shamans or therapists or frontier socialists. In “Leopard,” a young boy has a hateful stepfather who does nothing but make mulch and think up chores for the kid to perform. Addressing himself in the second person, the boy thinks, “As a young liar, you can generally get pretty far on the assumption that adults have more important things to worry about than catching out a kid for every little fraud he tries to pull. But your stepfather seems to have plenty of time to study and doubt everything that comes out of your mouth.” If the intersection between hotheads and cool customers is one of the aspects of his fiction, another is class conflict. In the story called “Wild America,” a middle-class girl flirts with a louche stranger who plies her with beer, and for a moment she forgets the ordinariness of her life. But when he drives her home, her heart sinks: “At the sight of her father, the fear went out of Jacey, and cold mortification took its place. There he stood, not yet 40, bald as an apple, and beaming out an uncomprehending fat-boy’s smile. His face, swollen with a recent sunburn, glowed against the green dark of the rosebushes at his back. He wore the cheap rubber sandals Jacey hated, and a black T-shirt airbrushed with the heads of howling wolves, whose smaller twin lay at the bottom of Jacey’s closet with the price tag still attached. Exhausted gray socks collapsed around his thick ankles, which rose to the familiar legs Jacey herself was afflicted with, bowed and trunk-like things a lifetime of exercise would never much improve. Her humiliation was sudden and solid and without thought or reason. But the wordless, exposed sensation overwhelming her was that her father wasn’t quite a person, not really, but a private part of her, a curse of pinkness and squatness and cureless vulnerability that was Jacey’s right alone to keep hidden from the world.” I quote this passage at such length because it reveals all the tensile strength of his remarkable style. His syntax, though always easy to follow, is supple enough to wrap itself around several shades of meaning in the same sentence. His understanding of previously under-recognized feelings (in this case, the humiliation of family resemblance) is rich in detail and passionate in utterance. And his familiarity with the whole ghastly world of malls and “cute” commercial culture is serious, even plangent, certainly not merely satirical. Every one of the stories in this book is polished and distinctive. Though he’s intrigued by the painful experiences of men much older than he is, he can write with equal power about young women and boys; about hell-­raising, skull-bashing ancient Vikings and an observant housebound old man of the 21st century, even about a cheerful, insouciant pedophile. His range is wide and his language impeccable, never strained or fussy. His grasp of human psychology is fresh and un-Freudianizing. Ezra Pound once said that the most memorable passages are those that encapsulate kinetic movement rather than static images. He would have liked his description of a power boat as it “bullied its way through the low swells, a fat white fluke churning up behind us.” And he’d have appreciated his rendition of a broken exhaust, which sounds “like someone in a suit of armor getting dragged up the street.” His dialogue is as crisp and contemporary and offbeat as Lorrie Moore’s and his vision of Ameri­ca as despairing as Joy Williams’s (to cite just two of our greatest short story writers). I once wondered why Surrealism never really caught on as a literary strategy in America. This author makes me think that nothing bizarre someone might dream up could ever be as strange as American life as we live it. The “beyond” that the Surrealists talked about so much, the au-delà, is America itself. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101104 ... lostgirl Everything Ravaged Everything Burned by Wells Tower well written, comical, true to life descriptions of masculinity, huh? well, the title communicates to my current shitstorm, but perhaps these short bursts of situational literature may help me to understand the male mind? hmmmmm. 101104 ... rt +3=254 lostgirl! Question 202 Our legions increase, we urbanites tired of bland eggs and feedlot beef, we suburban mothers worried about chemical additives and food safety, we consumers eager for some connection to the sowers and reapers who feed us. We haunt farmers’ markets, join CSAs, extol the glossiness of local eggplant, the complex flavors of heirloom tomatoes and the sweetness of freshly picked corn. We praise our farmers — and take their work for granted. How little we know, really, of the farm life and labor needed to fill the cornucopia that spills from market stalls, the vegetables like jewels, the meat in its neat, hygienic packages.

Any localvore who wants to pierce that screen will stay up after midnight, as I did, devouring this memoir, the engrossing story of the first year in the life of a 500-acre diversified farm just a short ferry ride from Chittenden County. 

The author, 39, was a Harvard-educated New York City freelance writer when she fell in love with farmer Mark Kimball, 38, and moved with him to start their horse-powered organic farm near the shore of Lake Champlain in 2003. He dreamed of a farm that would provide virtually all the food its customer-members eat — meat, milk, eggs, vegetables, grains, legumes, maple syrup — 52 weeks a year.

They began with a gift, one year’s free use of the derelict farm where rats ran rampant, buildings collapsed and farm implements rusted in the rain. In a blur of 16-hour days, they built and repaired equipment, learned to milk their first cow and to work the land with draft horses. Dogs almost killed the cow. Equipment failed. A draft horse went lame at the height of the growing season. Their meager savings melted like spring snow.

 She writes about all this in vivid but unsentimental language, equal parts dirt and poetry. Her story, leavened by a ready sense of humor, arcs from first love through the challenges of the farm’s first year and a crisis of doubt to a happy marriage and a thriving farm. It is a tale with enough plot and character to have provoked nibbles of interest in the movie rights.

“Farmers toil. Nature laughs. Farmers weep. There’s your history of agriculture in a nutshell,” she writes. 

And thus, while it is the tale of one, singular farm, it also is shot through with anecdotes, emotions and experiences common to the growing number of new Vermont farms founded on the belief that locally grown food is a gift worth the labor.

 Farmers aren’t book reviewers, but when I passed it along to two Vermont farmers — Rachel Nevitt of Full Moon Farm in Hinesburg and Mark Fasching of Jericho Settlers’ Farm — they recognized much of their own daily life in it.

“I’d read a section and say, ‘Yup, yup, I’ve got a story just like that.’ She gets the immediacy and direness of farming and how you are held over a barrel,” Nevitt said as she took a break from harvesting green beans on Labor Day, which on a farm means farmers continue to labor. 'Thanks, chicken.' Whack It is a Friday afternoon in late August in the seventh year of Essex Farm, and farm members are arriving for their weekly food pickup. In an open-sided shed they help themselves to as much as they will eat that week of sweet corn, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, hot peppers, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, edamame, zucchini, cukes, green beans, melons, cabbage, spinach, lettuce, sage, mint, sorrel, parsley, cilantro and lettuce.

 They load up on tomatoes for canning, on wheat flour and cornmeal produced on the farm, on dry beans and popcorn and raw milk from 10 Jerseys in a red barn out back.

In a refrigerated trailer behind the shed the air seems to glow red from the stacks of T-bones, ribeye and porterhouse steaks laid out for the taking on a long metal counter.

“This is Felix,” butcher Courtney Grimes says, gesturing at the piles of beef from one of the farm’s Scotch Highland steers as a member arrives with a small child on her hip.

“ Is he still Felix in your stomach?” the woman jokes as she scoops up a great mound of fresh hamburger to take home.

 Essex Farm has been transformed. Some 150 people have joined its whole-diet CSA. A person pays up to $2,900 to join the farm and receive most of the food he or she will eat in a year. The farm employs 12 full- and part-time workers and this year expects to gross $220,000, the author says, from which its owners expect to net $10,000 for their labor. 

The changes on the farm are nothing compared with Kimball’s own transformation, the story at the emotional center of the book.

She was a high-heels-and-makeup-wearing vegetarian urbanite when she moved to Essex Farm and learned to kill chickens, carry 40-pound buckets and wrestle heavy harnesses onto horses taller than she. 

One by one, elements of her old life fell away.

“I had never in my life been so dirty,” she writes of her first winter on the farm. “The work was always dirty, beyond what I’d previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures. ... Slowly the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward.”

 The former vegetarian grew into a farmer’s attitude toward life and death.

“I cleared my throat,” she writes of the first time she killed a chicken. “I could feel the weight of what I was about to do — take life from a healthy, sentient creature that would much prefer to stay alive. ... ‘Um, chicken?’ I said. ‘Sorry about this. I hope it’s quick. Thanks a lot.’ Whack.”

 “As much as you transform the land by farming, farming transforms you,” she writes elsewhere. “It seeps into your skin along with the dirt that abides permanently in the creases of your thickened hands, the beds of your nails. It asks so much of your body that if you’re not careful it can wreck you as surely as any vice by the time you’re fifty.”

 In August, the author, a diminutive woman in blue jeans and a maternity top, was awaiting the birth of her second child, giving tours of the farm to booksellers and reporters. She was settling into a life as a “half-time writer, half-time farmer, full-time mother.”

“I have the best life in the world,” she says as her daughter, Jane, 3, bounced down a 100-foot row of cherry tomatoes, plucking fruit to feed her mother. 'It's us or nature - and I'm bigger' Twenty miles away as the crow flies, Nevitt watched her own daughter, Addie, 4, play with a friend in the cavernous barn she and her husband, Dave Zuckerman, have converted from milking cows to cleaning and storing vegetables. 

Full Moon Farm grew more gradually than the Kimballs’ enterprise, starting as an incubator farm in Burlington’s Intervale before moving last year to 155 acres of conserved farmland south of Hinesburg village. Full Moon sells winter and summer vegetables shares and separate shares of meat grown on the farm as well as cider, cheese, raw milk and bread provided by other Vermont producers.

Nevitt always had wanted to be a farmer; she planted her first vegetable garden at 8. She found herself unsympathetic to this author's city self, she said, but was captured by the book when the scene moved to Essex Farm.

She saw herself in the woman who could tell something was badly wrong with her draft horse simply by glancing at his posture, the woman too busy to mow the lawn before her farm wedding, the woman with kitchen walls splashed with tomato sauce, the couple too exhausted by farm work for intimacy at bedtime.

“ She got farmer s-e-x all right, or lack of it,” Nevitt grinned, as her daughter pulled at her hand.

Nevitt, too, is a former vegetarian who once romanticized the natural world. Both women grew into the countrywoman’s matter-of-factness about the realities of farming. The sow doesn’t produce enough piglets? She’s tomorrow’s sausage.
She wrote, “Before that first year I’d filed ‘agriculture’ in the card catalog of my head in the same general place as ‘nature.’ As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is continually fighting to overtake the fields.”

Nevitt, speaking of her own transformation, echoed that thought. “I used to be a pretty darn good Buddhist. I’d brush mosquitoes away,” she said. “Once you have your own farm, and mice are eating the sweet potatoes in the field and the winter squash in the barn, and the cucumber beetles are marring the skin of every cucumber, you lose the romanticism and face the reality: It’s us or nature — and I’m bigger than them.” 

Feeding the body, and the soul Through all the stories told by all these farmers runs a single theme: Farming is hard, endless work with the primal rewards of physical tiredness, meat on the table, tangible connection to the dirt of the dirty life.

“You are dead tired at the end of the day,” Fasching said. It was nearly 8 p.m. on a September day. He was headed back to his tractor to disk in a field of bean plants. “You want time to play with your kids, have a beer when you’re done. But the hardest lesson of farming is that it will always take twice as long as you think to do a task.”

 “Sometimes it is so hard,” Nevitt said, recalling one spring day when wind ripped a thousand feet of row covers from young plants, and she wrestled the fabric alone. “I thought, what on earth am I doing? This is too hard, battling nature all day. Farming isn’t always a dream. Sometimes it’s a nightmare.”

But Fasching, also talks of the reward “of incredible food year-round.” Nevitt would not trade in her work.

“We have such a rich life. I get exercise every day. I work with great people who work hard and believe in the right things. We laugh; we eat wonderful food. You have to consider this life a gift, or you will hate it,” she said. 

Or, as this author writes:

“Farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world. ... A farm asks, and if you don’t give enough, the primordial forces of death and wildness will overrun you.

“So naturally you give, and then you give some more, and then you give to the point of breaking, and then and only then it gives back, so bountifully it overfills not only your root cellar but also that parched and weedy little patch we call the soul.” (Adapted from a review in the Burlington Free Press) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 101105 ... jane The Dirty Life Kristin Kimball It sounds lovely, except I truly could never kill a chicken. I'd have to hire someone else to do that. 101105 ... rt +3=266 jane! Question 203 Could you cut off your own arm if it were the only way to save yourself? This author made headlines by doing just that. This account of how he was trapped in an isolated Utah canyon for six days, and how he methodically went about extricating himself, is more than just another tale about those who head into the wilderness seeking their bliss and get lost. A former Intel engineer, he identifies with Chris McCandless, the introspective seeker of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which raised true adventure to a new level -- and to the bestseller charts. But McCandless was a loner and hobo who abandoned his possessions, burned his money and died of starvation in Alaska while acting out what Krakauer believed was a complicated rebellion against his father. By contrast, this man initially comes across as a cocky adrenaline junkie, loving son and punctual employee who nevertheless courts danger. Born in 1975, he was scared of snow when his parents first moved from Indiana to Colorado. But he adapted spectacularly. While still in his teens he was skiing, climbing, rafting and planning to climb in winter all 59 of Colorado's Fourteeners -- peaks over 14,000 feet high. He graduated from college with a double major in mechanical engineering and French, as well as a minor in piano performance, although strangely he says nothing of his musical ability or the accident's effect on it. His resumé was filled with close encounters. A bear stalked him in Grand Teton National Park. He nearly drowned in the Grand Canyon. He was trapped high on a mountain in a snowstorm. While he was back-country skiing, his "cavalier attitude" led him to choose a route that triggered an avalanche. It nearly buried him and two friends -- both of whom, he admits, have refused to talk to him since. "Rather than regret those choices," he writes, "I swore to myself that I would learn from their consequences. Most simply, I came to understand that my attitudes were not intrinsically safe." As we know now, he didn't learn. It is as exasperating to read his confessions of hotdogging and recklessness as it is inspiring to see how logical he was once he got stuck. His fateful weekend begins with climbing a major peak in Colorado, then speeding off in his jeep to mountain bike to a remote trailhead for what he expects will be a fun day of slithering through sandstone labyrinths, his headphones blaring Phish music. He takes almost no food and very little water. Nor does he tell anyone where he is headed. Then he accidentally jiggles loose an enormous rock that wedges his arm against a canyon wall. Realizing quickly that he might be facing death, he videotapes heartfelt goodbyes, including instructions on how to locate his IRA portfolio. Warding off morbid thoughts, he launches ingenious self-rescue maneuvers. He tries chipping away pieces of the boulder. When that doesn't work, he rigs a pulley system in a futile effort to move it. As he describes, in excruciating detail, hour upon harrowing hour of dehydration and then delirium, we learn that he actually tried sawing off his limb early on, but failed. The moment that he figures out he must break the bones in his arm first so he can cut through soft tissue sounds horrible, yet he feels triumphant. If he had been just an accident waiting to happen, why should we care about him? First, because there are thousands of potential victims like him. Colorado officials estimate that a half-million people climbed at least one Fourteener last year. Adrenaline fever is contagious; on occasion it is deadly. Heedless wilderness tourists routinely wander off without so much as a water bottle. And anyone who has hiked solo has probably taken a wrong turn or a scary fall. Has it ever dawned on us what the consequences might be should we break a leg or get caught in a flash flood? We also care because he writes very well. His thoughts ricochet from anger to anguish to acceptance. He recounts the joy of risk, and he takes full responsibility: "The boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. . . . You did this. . . . You chose . . . to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. . . . You created this accident. . . . You have been heading for this situation for a long time." His recital even takes on a weird humor as he notes that his self-amputation is more successful than his botched dissection of a sheep's eyeball in a ninth-grade science class. Once he frees himself, the story accelerates into a riveting drama as he rappels one-handed down a cliff and staggers through rough terrain for miles, blood leaking through his tourniquet as he tries to find help. He went to Utah as just another rock jock; he emerges as a Gen X action hero. An excerpt from the book... In this meandering section of the narrow canyon, silt residue from the most recent flood coats the walls to a height of twelve feet above the beachlike floor, and decades of scour marks overlay the rosy and purplish striations of exposed rock. The undulating walls distort the flat lines of the strata and grab my attention in one spot where the opposing walls dive in front of each other at a double-­hairpin meander. I stop to take a few photographs. I note that the time stamp is a minute slow compared to my watch: The digital ­camera’s screen says it is 2:41 p.m., Saturday afternoon, April 26, 2003. I bob my head to the music as I walk another twenty yards and come to a series of three chockstones and scramble over them. Then I see another five chockstones, all the size of large refrigerators, wedged at varying heights off the canyon floor like a boulder gauntlet. ­It’s unusual to see so many chockstones lined up in such evenly spaced proximity. With two feet of clearance under the first suspended chockstone, I have to crawl under it on my belly—the only time I’ve ever had to get this low in a canyon—but there is no alternative. The next chockstone is wedged a little higher off the ground. I stand and brush myself off, then squat and duck to pass under. A crawl on all fours and two more squat-­and-­duck maneuvers, and I’ve passed the remaining chockstones. The defile is over sixty feet deep at this point, having dropped fifty feet below the sand domes in two hundred feet of linear distance. I come to another drop-­off. This one is maybe eleven or twelve feet high, a foot higher and of a different geometry than the overhang I descended ten minutes ago. Another refrigerator chockstone is wedged between the walls, ten feet downstream from and at the same height as the ledge. It gives the space below the drop-­off the claustrophobic feel of a short tunnel. Instead of the walls widening after the drop-­off, or opening into a bowl at the bottom of the canyon, here the slot narrows to a consistent three feet across at the lip of the drop-­off and continues at that width for fifty feet down the canyon. Sometimes in narrow passages like this one, ­it’s possible for me to stem my body across the slot, with my feet and back pushing out in opposite directions against the walls. Controlling this counterpressure by switching my hands and feet on the opposing walls, I can move up or down the shoulder-­width crevice fairly easily as long as the friction contact stays solid between the walls and my hands, feet, and back. This technique is known as stemming or chimneying; you can imagine using it to climb up the inside of a chimney. Just below the ledge where I’m standing is a chockstone the size of a large bus tire, stuck fast in the channel between the walls, a few feet out from the lip. If I can step onto it, then I’ll have a nine-­foot height to descend, less than that of the first overhang. I’ll dangle off the chockstone, then take a short fall onto the rounded rocks piled on the canyon floor. Stemming across the canyon at the lip of the drop-­off, with one foot and one hand on each of the walls, I traverse out to the chockstone. I press my back against the south wall and lock my left knee, which pushes my foot tight against the north wall. With my right foot, I kick at the boulder to test how stuck it is. ­It’s jammed tightly enough to hold my weight. I lower myself from the chimneying position and step onto the chockstone. It supports me but teeters slightly. After confirming that I ­don’t want to chimney down from the chockstone’s height, I squat and grip the rear of the lodged boulder, turning to face back upcanyon. Sliding my belly over the front edge, I can lower myself and hang from my fully extended arms, akin to climbing down from the roof of a house. As I dangle, I feel the stone respond to my adjusting grip with a scraping quake as my ­body’s weight applies enough torque to disturb it from its position. Instantly, I know this is trouble, and instinctively, I let go of the rotating boulder to land on the round rocks below. When I look up, the backlit chockstone falling toward my head consumes the sky. Fear shoots my hands over my head. I ­can’t move backward or I’ll fall over a small ledge. My only hope is to push off the falling rock and get my head out of its way. The next three seconds play out at a tenth of their normal speed. Time dilates, as if I’m dreaming, and my reactions decelerate. In slow motion: The rock smashes my left hand against the south wall; my eyes register the collision, and I yank my left arm back as the rock ricochets; the boulder then crushes my right hand and ensnares my right arm at the wrist, palm in, thumb up, fingers extended; the rock slides another foot down the wall with my arm in tow, tearing the skin off the lateral side of my forearm. Then silence. My disbelief paralyzes me temporarily as I stare at the sight of my arm vanishing into an implausibly small gap between the fallen boulder and the canyon wall. Within moments, my nervous ­system’s pain response overcomes the initial shock. Good Christ, my hand. The flaring agony throws me into a panic. I grimace and growl a sharp “Fuck!” My mind commands my body, “Get your hand out of there!” I yank my arm three times in a naive attempt to pull it out. But I’m stuck. "127 hours," a film based on this book, directed by Danny Boyle and starring James Franco is currently in theatres. (Adapted from a review by Grace Lichtenstein, who formerly covered the Rocky Mountain West for the New York Times. She is an avid skier, hiker and cyclist.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 101109 ... jane Between a Rock and a Hard Place Aron Ralston wow, it sounds absolutely captivating. i would love to see the film (i love james franco). i like the quote: "He recounts the joy of risk, and he takes full responsibility: "The boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. . . . You did this, Aron. . . . You chose . . . to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. . . . You created this accident. . . . You have been heading for this situation for a long time." " 101109 ... rt +3=269 jane! Question 204 When this author was 18 years old, her indie rock band Throwing Muses recorded its first album, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and she became a mother for the first time. In her new memoir, based on her diary, she chronicles an extraordinary year. I'm willing to bet that there are very few budding teen rock stars who have to figure out how to avoid the smoke in clubs, how to position their guitars over swollen bellies, and what maternity clothes are best for headlining concerts. (she says '50s style dresses, if you were wondering.) Her original journal entries appear to have been fleshed out with dialogue in the published version, plus there are vignettes from her early childhood and snippets from her songs inspired by real-life events. But the book is not really a chronicle of music or mental illness or even teen motherhood. She writes that her book is a love story, "one with no romance, only passion." It is not about her baby's father, nor is it about falling for music: It's about the exaggerated passion of adolescence. For her that means breaking into pools, driving around in old cars, dressing like a grandmother, befriending aging former Hollywood starlets, living in comfortable semi-squalor in punk houses. It's going to the park and dyeing your hair blue with Manic Panic because "real is a dumb color for hair." By describing the particulars of her atypical experience, she evokes the bored-but-excitable mindset of most teenagers. Not only does the book benefit from avoiding adolescent autobiography clichés, but she also stays away from rock memoir banalities by focusing on just one year in her life. She doesn't just reel off formative events, lovers, and excruciatingly detailed discussions of recording sessions like fellow indie rockers Juliana Hatfield and Dean Wareham do in their memoirs. In fact, with its reined in plotline and ethereal prose style, the book reads more like a novel. (Adapted from a review in Slate) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 101110 ... jane Kristin Hersh Rat Girl i would love to read this. the anecdotes alone seem incredibly dynamic. i think S would like it as well. 101110 ... rt +3=272 jane! another girl that looks like you. Question 205 This author has a theory. A lot of them, actually. He has a theory about why grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain was like the late cult leader David Koresh, why the read-option offense signifies something deep and meaningful about football, why ABBA will never reunite, and why Garth Brooks created that goofy alter ego a decade ago. "I've spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things," He writes in this book of essays. So true. His trick is to use stupid-sounding subjects as grist for smart, funny essays. He has built a career on this, gaining early attention for defending '80s hair metal bands and later writing about popular culture for Spin and Esquire. He performs literary high-wire acts with his essays: they're great when he succeeds but things hit with a thud when he missteps. He mostly succeeds in this book. He has more insights per page than most cultural critics and he really does think these things through. His riff on the different ways major sports leagues market themselves is dead-on and funny. His quirky takes on laugh tracks and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's manifesto are worth reading. And while many people have written about the cultural impact of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," He is probably the first critic to compare it to Keith Richards's guitar playing and Snidely Whiplash's mustache. In the same sentence. He is so entertaining that readers might gloss over his tendency to pepper his arguments with ridiculously broad statements and the occasional sophistry. Consider this assertion: "People who follow politics closely cannot comprehend people who aren't partially lying." And his argument tying the late Nirvana frontman Cobain to infamous Branch Davidian sect leader Koresh based on some similarities in their personalities is clever, but silly. By his same rules, you could argue Cobain was like Bill Clinton (talented with strong appetites, peaked in the '90s) or Lindsay Lohan (brushes with trouble, long blonde hair). Here's another comparison in the spirit of this author: The essays in this book are like guitar solos by his beloved Eddie Van Halen. They show exceptional talent and are original. They can soar and part of the fun is trying to guess where they'll end up. The difference is that Van Halen didn't record the occasional bum note. ... on the ‘Difference Between Hipsters and Retards’ We admit it: We harbor a secret crush on this author. He has a nerdy hotness about him not unlike what Natalie Portman must have seen in Moby. We even almost joined the Facebook group "If he spit in my face, I'd stop taking showers," but then we promised our career counselor we wouldn't. Er, anyway, last night we went to the Highline Ballroom for a reading of his upcoming novel, (even though we found it a little hard to follow). Over the course of the next half hour, we learned a few things about our little demigod: • he used to have a few nicknames back in the day: Curtains (after a pair of unfortunate sweatpants his mom made him), Facehead (also interchangeable with Headface), and Joaquin Andujar. • he does not think that rock and roll is dead. In fact, he thinks "it is pretty good right now." • No one ever has sex in his books because he identifies more with people being rejected. • he is going to be teaching in Germany for fourteen weeks and what he will miss most is his girlfriend. We raised our hand to ask a question. So, how do nerdy guys get chicks? "Well," he said, "it's like this. You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know." And in that moment, nerdy man got just a little bit hotter. —Lauren Salazar from Daily Intel (Adapted from a review in Masslive) For three points, name the author, his book of essays, and give a personal response... 101111 ... jane Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman 101112 ... jane sounds like a good book for people who are into random trivia. and appreciating the normally overlooked details of events. i like the idea of weaving interconnectedness where some may see none. 101112 ... rt +3=275 jane! Question 206 Most of the concerts I remember best are ones that have a side story that’s ended up having more personal, symbolic meaning to me than the actual show. Like Cheap Trick in a tiny Salt Lake City club in ‘86 when a kleptomaniac friend of mine crept into the backstage area under the speakers to see what he could find. He ended up mangling up the electrical cords so badly on his way there that the entire stage blacked out in the middle of the group’s first encore and everyone had to go home disappointed. Or my 80-year-old grandmother sneaking me, her underage grandson, into the nightclub at a San Francisco Hotel in ‘87 so I could experience Bobby Bland. Or Jeff Buckley in a small Austin coffeehouse in ‘93. My wife and I had gotten in free because I’d given the clubowner a Tim Buckley mix tape sometime before the gig. But the Christ-child aura surrounding JB was so unbearably heavy for us - even back then - that four numbers into the show, a grizzled, old-timer friend of ours leaned over and said “let’s go to Denny’s” and we did. And JB ended up being a mere bit player (gasp!) in what nonetheless ended up being an entirely memorable evening. I guess it’s no surprise, then, that most of my favorite pieces in this book, a collection of reminiscences of fifty (mostly fiction) writers, are ones where the pre- and post-show personal contexts are weightier than the shows themselves. Jerry Stahl can’t separate a David Bowie show from a kind gesture Bowie had given him earlier in an interview, both of which nonetheless pale in comparison to Stahl’s personal situation. David Ritz takes an unbelievable post-gig car ride with Jimmy Reed that’s got nothing, overtly, to do with music. Richard Burgin finds himself having a candid, private conversation with Bill Evans in which music plays second fiddle. Heidi Julavits’s encounter with Rush is a mere incidental in her relationship with a high school boyfriend and, on a larger scale, her hometown. Because the number of contributors who are either regular music writers or actual musicians is in the single digits, the book benefits from so many fresh interpretations of musical experience (even while sagging from overloads of writerly wit). I especially like how this collection reveals how seasoned fiction writers can find themselves grasping for words in the face of a great pop music show (Diana Ossana, Samantha Hunt, John Haskell), and how seasoned music writers, on the other hand, can run the risk of squelching similar experiences with boots of authoritative exposition (I felt Gary Giddins, Harvey Pekar and Charles R. Cross were running this risk). A small handful of pieces falls into the almost-too-slight-to-merit-inclusion category (Chuck Klosterman, Marc Bojanowski, Thurston Moore), and another falls into the too-recent-to-believe category (Alice Elliott Dark, and the closing piece by Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer which is clever, but untrustworthy). But best of all are those pieces that are able to locate the concert experience as a memorable thread in a complex web and tell us how it fits. Yes - music listening and concert going are most satisfying when done for their own sake. Writing about them, though, happens to be a whole different story. Here’s my list of ten pieces I’ll never forget from the book: 1-David Ritz on Jimmy Reed 2-Ron Carlson on the Steve Abbot Benefit Concert 3-Richard Burgin on Bill Evans 4-Paul Muldoon on Horslips (some serious word pleasure here) 5-Heidi Julavits on Rush (featuring Neil, the armless, blind, and toothless drummer) 6-Robert Polito on The Pogues 7-Carl Newman on Redd Kross 8-Rick Moody on The Lounge Lizards (featuring a “rebuttal” from John Lurie) 9-Jerry Stahl on David Bowie (you start this one cringing then end up glowing) 10-Max Allan Collins on Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin (Adapted from a review in Boneyard Media) For three points, name the author, his book, and list the show you will never forget... 101113 ... lostgirl The Show I'll Never Forget By Sean Manning this one is a toughie....there's the rod stewart show that we sat in the front row, and the heart concert when i drank wine from a box and fell asleep in the chair.....then there was jamboree in the hills when lee greenwood sang 'god bless the USA' and they let thousands of red white and blue balloons fly into the sky.....or the green day show i saw with four teenage boys....or the sold out springsteen show at three rivers stadium. the fact is, experiencing music is up there on my list of favorite things to do. but the show that stands out was my very first concert. i saw jimmy buffett perform live at the magic attic in myrtle beach when i was about 13. about 500 young, barely dressed bodies shagged to beach music in the balmy ocean air with the sounds of the waves crashing in the background and the amusement park lights all around us....and all before buffett became a big star. yep....that one shines in the memory banks as the winner. 101113 ... rt +3 =257 lostgirl =3 more for the awesome response. =260 101113 what's it to you? who go blather from