__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_ Current standings; 1. lostgirl = 152 2. jane = 100 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 Question 89 This novel, initially published in 1992, pretty much caused a sensation on first publication, and even all these years later it’s not too hard to see why. It follows the tale of the college experience of Richard Papen, an undergraduate who has transferred to a small exclusive private college after dropping out of a medical degree. He becomes fascinated with a small, snobby clique who are Classics majors, and by hanging around them almost accidentally transfers into their department as well as becoming part of their group. This is easier said than done: their tutor, Julian, has an elite mentality and is initially reluctant to allow him to join the group. Even as part of the group, as time passes he still doesn't really feel at ease with them or fully accepted. He begins to feel that something odd is going on: the least intelligent member of the group, Bunny, appears to have some strange kind of hold over the rest of them. It seems he can command them to lend him money or do his bidding, as he wills, and they unwillingly comply. This isn't due to any magnetic charm of manner: Bunny's behaviour is boorish and charmless, including to Richard. But Richard has other things to worry about. Despite posing as a Hollywood blueblood with glamorous starlet parents, he is actually from a humble bluecollar home. His parents do not support him financially, and when winter break comes he is on his own, with neither job nor income. Too proud to ask his new friends for help, he finds free lodgings but they are far from ideal. When he falls seriously ill, Henry, one of his new friends, discovers him and takes him to hospital, probably saving his life. This key incident may be what cements his loyalty to the group. That loyalty, when he discovers they plan to flee the country, is what prevents him handing them over to the authorities, despite it being clear that something is very wrong. He suspects that the 'something' is murder. And he isn't wrong. When the group's flight plans break down and they admit the truth to him, he is appalled but unsurprised. And Bunny's behaviour is explained: he is implicitly blackmailing them. Soon Bunny's death begins to seem inevitable: and as soon as it seems that way, it is. Consequences unravel from there, and so do the group, including Richard. This is a fine, fine novel, emotionally satisfying, the kind of intense, dream-like experience that causes you to gasp for air when you come up from being submerged in it. You look around dizzy, and realise that, oh yes, here is real life, allegedly. Not there in the pages of the book. The only flaw is the character – or non-character – of Julius. Never in literature will you have come across such a cipher. He makes me think of a Zelig: a man popping up at crucial points in history, and utterly devoid of personality. Perhaps this is intentional: but it's hard to see how this offensive mass of phoney pretension and inauthenticity inspires such devotion in this unhinged little group. This is more especially the case when you consider that this devotion is of the type that leads to cult-like manslaughter and murder. Perhaps the point is that these fiercely intelligent, emotionally immature adolescents need only the flimsiest excuse, the most gimcrack plastic hook to hang their posturings, dreams and passionate, desperate homicidal schemes from. Julian in the end is incidental. The secret history of the secret clique is what is key. For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... Here is a fascinating article about the author adapted from The Guardian... Many people have a story about this author. I don't mean the people who've met her, although they definitely do, vivid and glorious and possibly not true; no, I mean readers. People remember where they were when they read her first novel, the 1992 debut, mega-successful (multimillion sales, 23 languages, a combination of Dostoyevsky, Euripides, Easton Ellis and Waugh, according to the New York Times) novel. They remember who recommended it to them, and who they were going out with at the time, and how they held their breath on the bus in to work, finished chapters walking down the street. It was only a thriller, and you knew who did it from the first page. But it was gripping and clever and fantastically erudite, and people became a little obsessed. Her persona fed this obsession: her name (glamorous), her size (pocket), her answerphone message (TS Eliot reading), her fascinating pronouncements ("My life is like Candide" or "I'm the exact same size as Lolita" ["ninety pounds is all she weighs/with a height of sixty inches"]), her chaste aura of another era ("Je ne vais jamais me marier," she once said, winsomely). She became one of the most mythologised novelists of modern times, weird and reclusive and very much a Writer. At the same time, the contradictions between hype, success and privacy were already clear: as Bret Easton Ellis said, "You can't be Salinger and be represented by ICM." And after that: nothing. A hungry public waited for her second book, or perhaps a sighting: they never came. Years passed. There were rumours that she'd got devastating writer's block, had a nervous breakdown, bought an island near Tahiti and become a hermit. But here she is, 10 years later, sitting in a wonderful New York restaurant, fizzy and funny and talking about her new novel, which shares with the first one, the theme of a dark incident shaping a life but which in execution is southern and languorous and female and wholly different from its taut, masculine, east coast predecessor. It's a high-earner - she's rumoured to have received £1m from British publisher Bloomsbury alone - and fat - 555 pages - and, you know, "it just took a while to write". In the course of our long lunch, in which she will pick at a tiny portion of calamari and say it's "spoilt her appetite", there will be some interesting revelations, some typically witty and self-reflective remarks, and - I think this is a first for her in an interview - tears. She will reveal the "most horrible moment" of her life and what's on her answerphone these days and what she now thinks of the first novel. But how much of what she tells me can I take seriously? And how much of it is simply part of the her myth? Now 38, she really is tiny, startlingly so; she still has that famous shiny Louise Brooks bob, still wears boys' clothes from Gap Kids, would rather not say from where she bought the stern black jacket and plain white shirt with crocheted buttons. Her skin is white and clear. Her appearance is all neatness and cuteness, in fact, until she opens her mouth: there's a very un-American overcrowded clash of teeth inside her perfect lips. Her voice is perky, still bearing the twang of her Mississippi youth, and she is friendly on arrival, peering over her round sunglasses to say, "I'm so excited to meet you I can hardly speak!" I'm not sure if this was said with warmth or irony. It took a full decade to write the second book. "I can't think of anything worse than having to turn out a book every year. It would be hell," she says. "Part of the problem with success is that it seduces people into overproduction. When my first book came out, I was very confused because I was thrown into a world that I knew nothing about. I just kind of lived like a student, worked like a student. And then all of a sudden - well, the metaphor that comes to mind is a shark tank. It wasn't quite that bad. But it was a shock. It was a bucket of cold water. People you'd meet and talk to and journalists would say, 'Oh, what are you going to do to top this one? If your name's not out there in two years, people will forget all about you.' I mean, jeez, what are they talking about? William Styron said, when he was about my age, that he realised he had about five books in him, and that was OK. I think I have about the same number. Five." I n fact, she says, there was no block or breakdown; she's just a slow writer. "People say that perfectionism is bad," she says. "But it's because of perfectionists that man walked on the moon and painted the Sistine Chapel, OK? Perfectionism is good. It's all about production and economy these days. I don't want to be the CEO of a corporation. I work the way I've always worked, and I don't want a big desk and fancy office and people answering the telephone." The second novelis set in the south of the 1970s. It begins in 1964 (the year of her birth) with the shocking discovery of the hanging body of nine-year-old Robin, mysteriously murdered on Mother's Day. A decade later, Harriet, Robin's younger sister, who is old-fashioned and bookish and serious, becomes convinced that she knows the identity of the killer. It is, in her words, "a frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults in a frightening way". It's also about a changing time for the south, the sweaty weirdness of Mississippi, the absence or uselessness of parents, solidity of love from the older generation, race, families, poverty, affection. It's a big and brilliant book. After the first novel, when asked what was next, she told an interviewer, "I have my life to resort to. And all those subliminal southern stories I haven't begun to explore." So is this her discovering the southern girl within? "After the first book I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level," she says. "I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The first novel was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War And Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form." She reiterates this throughout the interview - that what drives her novel-writing is purely technical, a labour for new writerly challenges, rather than particular concerns or fascinations, such as the return to the south of her childhood, or a search for truth. For example, when asked if superiority over others is something that interests her - which it clearly does, as a throbbing theme throughout both novels (the elite students in the first book are always lauding it over everybody else, the second book's trailer-park whites feel superior to the poor blacks, because they're white; the poor blacks feel superior to the trailer-park whites, because they're cleaner, more moral) - she denies it. "Asserting superiority over others is just a sad theme of human life that you see on the news every day," she says. And when I say that race is a clear element in the second book, she doesn't think there's much truth in this, either. So the fact that Ida, Harriet's maid (black, as was her own), is the person Harriet loves most but who is treated appallingly by her white employers, is "not so much to do with race as the horror of the child who's really attached to the nanny, and then the nanny's taken away". Nevertheless, she has some interesting things to say about the American south, if more the south as a concept than the south of her home. "There's a horrible ethos in rural southern poverty that it's dumb to do well, it's stupid to succeed, and that people will laugh at you," Throughout the novel, you're struck by the grimness of the southern town: it's dark, sweaty, humid, gothic, a place where the "burned-out grocery store" was "struck by lightning, never rebuilt", where brothers hang and cats die and blackbirds' wings get ripped off. "Mississippi is an interesting place," she says, "because before the civil war there were more millionaires in Mississippi than there were in New York. So it has a dark history, because they got their money through slavery. When there was no more slavery, the big houses rotted and were abandoned, and incredibly beautiful painted gardens became all jungly. Then in the 1950s it was all about drive-in culture: drive-in dry-cleaners, movies, hamburger stands. That, too, is abandoned. And then somehow in the 1970s [when she was growing up], they figured people wanted to go to malls instead. So it's all built-up. That's kind of happening in my book - you can hear the bulldozers, things are changing. In America, they build something, and it goes out of style, and then rather than knock it down they just build something else a little further out. So you end up with these wasteland areas in town. It's very creepy." Grenada, the town in which she grew up, is, she says, "almost unrecognisable now. There's still the town square, but they've kind of messed it up. And there's the 'historic district', but that's just phoney heritage. Ye Olde Pewter Pot and Mamie's Kitchen." But how did these changes affect her and her family? "My mother's family has been in the town for a long time. For ever. It's very much the Daughters of the American Revolution [a society to which you can belong only if your ancestors fought in the American war of independence]. They were involved in kind of hateful, clubby things and had some sad connotations [mostly about racism]. By the time I came along it wasn't that bad, it was more of a silly tea-party thing. So when I was growing up there was this kind of tea-party culture, not so different from my grandmother's time, and then all of a sudden the 1970s came along and it was strip malls, McDonald's, rock music. So you get this kind of intense rock and roll energy going on, with this kind of very frozen, formal, ritualised kind of life. It was a very interesting juncture in time to grow up, because you're aware of both of these things, and bits from each would intrude upon you." This is the sort of response she gives often; she manages to be personally evasive by giving you an interesting, if convoluted, answer - but not really to your question. (She has a slightly disconcerting habit of keeping her eyes closed when she's talking to you, especially when she's struggling to make a point.) This evasiveness about her childhood is a surprise, because in 1992 - perhaps before she realised how big her celebrity would become - she wrote a beautiful, and very intimate, memoir of the time for Harper's magazine. It presents the story of a bizarre childhood. She was, she wrote, "too small to wear regular baby clothes", so was instead dressed in doll's clothes. "There exists a hilarious photograph of me lying in a crib and wearing, for an infant, an oddly sophisticated career-girl outfit," she writes. She describes how her great-grandfather, the great patriarch of her family, "had a nearly unlimited faith in the magic of pharmacy" and has spent the last years of his life constantly dosed up with antibiotics, "believing them to be a kind of healthful preventative, or nerve tonic". This influential great-grandfather also insisted that she, although only afflicted with what she calls "bad tonsils" (which nevertheless forced her to stay in bed "an average of about three days a week"), be dosed up with molasses, vitamin syrup, whiskey at bedtime and, most dangerously, "regular and massive doses of some red stuff which I now know to have been codeine cough syrup". Codeine is a derivative of opium, and as a result of taking it, she spent "nearly two years of my childhood submerged in a pretty powerfully altered state of consciousness". She describes the "long drugged afternoons" which made up her "languorous undersea existence", when she would stare for hours and hours at a View-Master reel of Peter Pan flying over London, fantasising that she was with him. However, her "long sabbatical in the Land of the Poppy was by no means all pleasant". She writes that she often woke after terrifying dreams, "screaming for Mother or Cleo [their black maid]". The worst dream, she says, still terrifies her to think of it. "In it, a set of country-club types - smartly dressed, around what would have been my parents' age - are gathered, cocktails in hand, around a barbecue grill. They are snickering with jaded amusement as one of their number - a handsome, caddish-looking fellow - holds a howling Persian cat over the barbecue, pushing its feet into the flames." She seems a little annoyed when I mention the memoir and how much I like it, however. "I'll tell you one big difference between the family in the book and my actual family," she says. (I hadn't asked!) "There are lots of differences. It's basically not my family. I never had a brother who died or anything like that." (I hadn't asked!) "But one of the very big differences is that my mother and I are extremely close." (In the second book, Harriet's depressed mother, desperate with grief from the murder of her son, cares little for her remaining children; the house is filthy, with piles of yellow newspapers stacked high, and they have to feed themselves. Harriet's father, needless to say, is away in Memphis with another woman.) Her mother, by contrast, was described to me by someone who's met her as "a Blanche DuBois figure who said things like 'the south is a defeated nation'." She says about her: "She's funny as hell and I talk to her on the phone every day. She's a big ole southern belle - very over-the-top, in a funny and good way. She's very campy." Her mother loved the new book, she says, but her older relatives back in Mississippi are too old, their eyes too bad to read it. "It's funny - because I'm not tall, they kind of forget how old I am. They think I'm still at college - so the fact that I've written another book seems so much more marvellous to them." They think she's a child prodigy; and, in fact, many people remark on how child-like she is; one friend told me that she's obsessed with childhood, and her mentor Willie Morris said of when he met her: "On the one hand she was immensely grown-up; on the other hand she was a child. It was a very attractive combination." This is the kind of analysis she hates. "When the first book came out, people did not understand it was fiction, and they went off pretty much trying to track down Francis and Henry [characters in the novel]," she says. "They really didn't understand that - you know... " and here she pauses for dramatic effect, and sounds very southern, "... Ah. Mayed. That. Earp." But, once again, it wasn't really surprising that people drew the conclusion that much of the book echoed some truth: it is set at Hampden college, a small, elite, artsy place in Vermont - she went to Bennington, a small, elite, artsy place in Vermont. She had a tutor who, like Julian Morrow in The Secret History, was eccentric and elitist. She was a member of a high-minded, Greek-quoting clique. Her classmate was novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote in The Rules Of Attraction about "that weird Classics group... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals," precisely echoing (or, more likely, parodying) her first novel. There doesn't have to be a murder in real life for the novel to say something about the author; novels are not just feats of technicality, like mending a car, they are works of art, which come from the mind and soul and energy of their authors. Why wouldn't they be influenced by the author's experiences? That is not the same as saying they are the whole truth or the full story. She also, famously, detests any mention of her home life. Ever since the "Je ne vais jamais me marier" quote, journalists and fans have been trying to discover if she really is celibate. Is the quote still true? She turns inarticulate for the only time during our meeting. "Um. I don't know. Now we're getting into kind of - I don't know." She laughs a woodpecker laugh. "Now I'm a little embarrassed. Basically I have nothing to talk about. I - I - I -" She gives a coy smile. Conversation closed. She isn't celibate, by the way - even I know of three men she's been out with, and there was even a rumoured engagement. They were all sworn to secrecy. There might be a boyfriend at the moment - at one point she says "we", quickly changing it to "I", although that could mean her dogs. But her silence creates mystery and inquiry; it brings to mind the gossips in The Great Gatsby, sitting around, making suppositions: "Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once," says one. "It's more that he was a German spy during the war," says another. "He's a bootlegger," says a third. Who knows what's true? Mind you, it's difficult to imagine anyone taking the place of the real loves of her life, her dogs. She now has three - an old pug called Pongo ("he's kind of like Henry James, very stately and stiff and cranky in a good way"), a Boston terrier called Baron ("very radiant, very brave, absolutely fearless") and a baby pug called Cecil ("very roly-poly and cute"). She once said, witty and self-creating: "My dog has a number of acquaintances of his own species - as do I - but it is abundantly clear to both of us that there is little company in all the world which we enjoy so much as each other's." She even has a personal affinity with pets: writing in 1992 about attending cheerleading camp, she described how the big, wholesome cheerleaders treated her like a pet of their own. (And just in case you are baffled by the disjuncture - Cheerleading? - she wrote, "The year I was a freshman cheerleader, I was reading 1984.") There's another story, too - that of the her answering machine, which allegedly played a recording of TS Eliot reading - although, interestingly, whoever told the story couldn't decide which lines of The Waste Land he read (there are two different stories). She tells me that there is no longer any Eliot. "I have a horrible, Kraftwerk-sounding robot man. It's totally mechanically generated and quite unreal and totally frightening and often people hang up. Now you've given away my secret!" And booze. I tell her that I've heard that, despite her size, she takes a drink better than any man (and it's pretty disappointing that she won't drink with me). "That's kind of funny," she says. "I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know if that's necessarily a compliment." (She knows it is.) Then she says - and you get the feeling she can already see this in big type, a modern-day Dorothy Parker - "I like a glass of whiskey in the winter, I like a gin and tonic in the summer, I like a glass of champagne anytime." Always telling new stories about herself, she reminds you of F Scott Fitzgerald, who let it be known that, as a great social climber, his first word was "up" and that he admired James Joyce so much that he once said he would jump out of a window to prove it: the writer as personal myth-maker. She is happiest of all when talking about stories: books, words, reading, writing. The great thing about earning so much money from the first book was that she could buy any book she wanted. "When I had no money I used to grieve, just stand in a very Dickensian way outside bookshops," she says. "I would always prefer to go get another Dickens off the shelf than pick up a new book by someone I've not read yet. I'm a hard reader. I'm bitterly disappointed by books. Sometimes I pick up a book and I'm like - please God, please let this be what it looks like it is." When asked her favourite contemporary authors, she is maddening: "I don't really like to talk about living writers because in saying who you like, you're also saying very plainly who you don't like." Really? "I know so. And who am I to pass judgment on someone else?" (Later, in a moment of weakness, she confesses to loving Ian McEwan's Atonement: "I was crushed, I couldn't sleep." And she's very happy to talk about her favourite living bands - Pulp, Clinic, Cornershop, why the White Stripes are better than the Strokes; I suppose because they're in a different industry.) She had been a voracious reader, however, for a long time: The Wind In The Willows, Winnie The Pooh, Peter Pan, when she was younger. "And Stevenson. I would lay down my life for Robert Louis Stevenson. Borges said that he loved Stevenson so much that he would not allow another book even to touch Stevenson's on his bookshelf, such was his reverence." She also loved Kipling - "he gives you a great sense of language, the rhythm, tick, tock, tick, tock" - but didn't read any southern writers until she left home. Of these, her favourite is the wonderful short story-writer Flannery O'Connor. "It is a grief to me that Flannery O'Connor is dead - she died of lupus so young [aged 39, close to her age], she could have been alive today and still writing. She's horrifyingly funny, we share a sense of humour. She had a much better ear for dialogue than I'll ever have, but her prose is very Johnsonian, very formal. It's that cool, removed style combined with the very black stories." She takes writing very seriously, it's studiedly anti-trivial - "It's like what Melville said: that it's a writer's job to dive deep. And I've been under a long time." This slow and serious approach to fiction may be unfashionable, but it is surely a reason for her success. Barry Hannah, the writer who taught her at university, said that she stood out because most students "have got really bad ears and minds, completely messed over by MTV. There's this generic tone. They forget what language can do. They need to find their own personal music." (Although, as she says, an untrivial approach to work doesn't mean she doesn't like trivia in her personal life. Shoes, for example; twice during the lunch she exclaims, "I'm just spying your shoe! What a great shoe!" Or clothes; she is famously perpetually well-dressed. One former classmate said, in a much quoted line: "If you went to her room at 4am, you'd find her sitting at her desk, smoking a cigarette, wearing a perfectly pressed white shirt buttoned to the top, collar studs, trousers with a knife crease.") She adores writers, and is very enamoured of the idea of the writer as an identity - the writers she loves, she idolises, and she is clearly trying to live up to her idea of a writer and what a writer is, which is not being a media person, not getting sidestepped by fripperies, not letting you in on how she does what she does. There is a story she tells that shows this very clearly, concerning her first meeting with the late Willie Morris, the former editor of Harper's magazine, writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi and the man who introduced himself to her with the words, "My name is Willie Morris, and I think you're a genius." she said that Morris had offered her a Coca-Cola. "No, sir, I believe I'll have what you're drinking," was her reply. (It was bourbon.) She continued: "Terrific roar of laughter. 'Why,' he shouted, staggering back as if dazed by my prodigy, rolling his rich old eye around the assembled company, 'this girl is a writer!'" One wonders what she thinks of the first book now; it's such a different, more populist, book. "I hadn't read it for 10 years, and just recently I read it aloud, unabridged, the whole thing for a recording - it took 14 days, a marathon," she says. "It seemed quite alien, like something I didn't quite write. But what I remembered very clearly was where I was when I was writing this particular part - staying at a friend's house, the view out the window. It caught me very vividly." Did she like the novel? "There are some good things about it. But there are some things about it too when I just think: oh no! Some parts were really hard to read aloud, that bothered me terribly. One wasn't as good technically then, in terms of constructing things. I see loose ends that I would never have allowed in the new book. It's natural. In 10 years you learn to be better at working." She is very funny on the trend, more pronounced in Britain, for novelists to weigh in on the big issues of the day. "I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur." She cackles with laughter. This lack of interest in politics is confusing, because one of her friends had described her as a "very political person". And yet, when pressed, she will only declare an interest in - I'm not making this up - the Puppy Protection League. ("Well, somebody's got to look after puppies, because they certainly can't look after themselves.") Meanwhile, one person tells me she's "quite rightwing"; another that she's "definitely a liberal". How can we be sure which of them is right? "She said that she used to support herself with a foolproof system for betting on horses - but then that could be myth-making," says one friend. "I suspect her love life is pretty complicated, while she likes to give the impression of being chaste," says another. Was she making fun of me? (One thinks of Carraway of Gatsby: "For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg... My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines." And Vanity Fair called her "a character of her own fictive creation".) Does she see herself like Henry in the first book, "a propagandist, routinely withholding information, leaking it only when it served his purpose"? Another (former) friend says that "she seems to have a natural love of intrigue", and you wonder if this myth-making and mysterious self-creation are to protect the creative process, or are just her being a storyteller. Self-consciously writerly. There is an extraordinary moment in our meeting, when perhaps I see her beyond the myth, beyond the construct, a little unadorned. It happens when I ask, as you do of New Yorkers, what it's been like living in the city since September 11. "I was actually finishing up my book in Virginia [where she has a snake-infested house] when it happened," she says. "I came back up a week after; it was a week to the day, and it was one of the scariest drives of my life. The roads were absolutely empty and it felt like the world had ended. There were big American flags hanging off bridges and when you'd stop at one of the rest-side stops, cops would come up to you and they'd talk to you and ask you, 'Where are you going?' They'd be like, be careful, God bless you. There was nobody travelling whatsoever. And you just had no idea what you were heading into. And even though you tried to reassure yourself that you knew what to expect, it was the most horrible moment of my life. Really. I thought I was looking out at New Jersey. I didn't recognise it as New York. The towers were just how you recognised the city, they were the city, you could see them from miles afar. There was just this kind of smoking - you thought you were looking at some kind of factory in New Jersey and you were just like - what has happened to Manhattan? It was just awful, awful, awful." At this point, I notice that the tip of Tartt's nose is turning pink, a clear contrast to her porcelain skin, and I think she's going to sneeze. I suddenly realise she's about to cry. The whites of her eyes redden and clear tears drip delicately down her cheeks. "I'm so sorry, it was terrible, terrible," she says. "I'm so embarrassed." She reaches into her big leather bag (half the size she is, and packed with stuff - fancy patterned sunglasses case, little containers) and pulls out a compact with which she powders her nose. "I'm so embarrassed," she repeats, and I believe her. Changing the subject, I ask her innocently about her unusual ring, a plaited silver band; she is clearly relieved to get back to where she's happy, reciting a story. "This is a replica of a Viking ring," she says. "I was in Finland on my book tour last time and I was literally leaving my hotel in Helsinki and this young man rushed up all out of breath and said that he was a Finnish poet and he really liked my work and he wanted to meet me. And he gave me a copy of his poems, in Finnish, and a present which I wasn't allowed to open until I got on the plane. Now, you couldn't do that. But once I was on the plane, I opened it - and it was this ring! It's very funny - I really don't take it off. I wear it to remind me that nice things can happen. You can meet nice people. It's about unexpected surprises happening when you're looking the other way." 100630 ... lostgirl The Secret History By Donna Tartt one review claimed that this novel is a college curriculum in one nearly 600 page volume! a fast paced page turner with action, murder and suspense among great intellect and philosophical weight, all strung together with Latin, Greek, French and English literature...yummy. plus i love the ivy league type of setting with the diversity of characters unwittingly enmeshed... can't weight to read this one, but my only struggle is that my pile of 'to read' books is growing more rapidly than the amount of time i have to read. 100630 ... rt +3=155 lostgirl Question 90 The paperback cover of this author's cult classic, "Kitchen Confidential," depicts him as a lean Hollywood heartthrob, James Dean in chef's whites. Certainly, his early writings about "the culinary underbelly" are those of a rebel with a cause. Cooks rule! In his essays, he assails the food establishment, explains why you should never order fish on Monday, portrays chefs as sexual athletes (to whom even brides succumb during their wedding banquets) and writes with an altogether piratical exuberance and chutzpah. Look now, as Hamlet might say, on this other picture. Ten years have passed since "Kitchen Confidential," and the cover of his latest book no longer suggests some dashing musketeer of the gas range. Instead, it shows us a Mafia godfather at the height of his power. He wears a dark suit, dark blue shirt, dark tie. The face is still handsome but somewhat puffy, there are bags under the eyes and lines around the mouth, a bit of jowl. The once-black hair is now salt and pepper. Still, the look in the man's eyes is as piercing as ever -- and he delicately fingers a long chef's knife, a quiet reminder to anyone who might question his authority. As he emphasizes repeatedly throughout the book, he has grown older. He tells us that he wrecked his first marriage, went through a period of extreme dissolution even by his standards (oiled supermodels!), and reveled in his travels around the globe for his popular television program, "No Reservations." Now in his mid-50s and remarried, the former heroin addict, cokehead and eager Lothario has actually become a family guy, settled in sybaritic ease on New York's Upper East Side. But does all this mean that he has lost his chops as a writer? That he's suddenly cast off his maniacal Dr. Gonzo persona and settled into the harrumph mode of a New York Times columnist? Not at all. If anything, he's probably more unrestrained now, knowing that he can get away with pretty much anything. Even the snarkiest blogger could learn from his effortless mastery of vulgarity, profane and obscene language, and acrobatic sexual imagery. But the man is clearly obsessed with the idea of having sold out. He admits he would have "given Oprah a back rub and a bikini wax, had she asked me when her people called. Fifty-five thousand copies a minute -- every minute Oprah's talking about your book (according to industry legend)? . . . So I guess I knew -- even back then -- what my price was." While candidly relishing his celebrity, he does so with a slightly mocking tone, almost a guilty conscience, like an aging '60s radical who's been co-opted by the establishment and suddenly finds himself a mortgage banker. Only partly tongue in cheek, the author at one point describes himself as "a loud, egotistical, one-note [obscenity] who's been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the [obscenity] up." As many others have remarked, his prose at his wildest can sound like Hunter S. Thompson's, yet he can also produce much quieter work, such as "My Aim Is True," a brilliant portrait of Justo Thomas, the man who fillets the fish for Le Bernardin, New York's great seafood restaurant. A.J. Liebling couldn't have done it better. Above all, when you read him, you never quite know what's going to happen in the next sentence, but you can be sure you're in for a treat, a shock, a surprise. For instance, one bittersweet reminiscence, "The Rich Eat Different Than You and Me," opens this way: "I was holed up in the Caribbean about midway through a really bad time. My first marriage had just ended and I was, to say the least, at loose ends. By 'loose ends' I mean aimless and regularly suicidal." Then he meets a rich, beautiful woman, and they enjoy each other's company -- until the cracks in her facade start to appear: "I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It's an unpardonable sin as far as I'm concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy. From the first time I saw that, our relationship was essentially over. She accused me of 'caring about waiters more than I cared about her,' and she was right." Whatever he writes, he makes personal. In his most hilarious essay, he relates his ongoing campaign to poison his daughter's mind against fast food by insinuating that Ronald McDonald has cooties. Other pages of the book might almost be called service pieces: an outline of the basic cooking skills that all young people should know, a plea that hamburger be made of real meat rather than trimmings and scraps soaked in ammonia, an elegy for small-course tasting menus as no longer fun or worth the time and money. One especially long chapter lists his current heroes and villains, another offers a cook's tour of some of his favorite cuisine from around the world, starting with Vietnamese pho and ending with Sichuan hotpot. Not least, there is a sustained attack on critic Alan Richman, a substantial profile of the eminent chef David Chang, and a meditation on Alice Waters, the legendary founder of Chez Panisse. About Waters, he is full of complicated feelings -- he agrees that one should use organic, regional produce but finds the woman herself immensely irritating. Perhaps she is. Many people will doubtless appreciate the book even more than I do: I've never watched the Food Network, know how to cook only a small number of rather ho-hum dishes, and would hardly describe myself as a gourmet or foodie. No matter. Once we read him because of what he told us about restaurants and chefs, but now we read him simply because it is him. Still, it does seem paradoxical that the book is more like a bag of potato chips than a fine dining experience: Anyone who starts the book is liable to lose all control and simply gobble it right up. I certainly did. (Adapted from a review by the washingtonpost.com/readingroom.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100701 ... jane Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook By Anthony Bourdain wow, K, this sounds wild. i love confessional-type stories, as one may have guessed from my formerly-ongoing escapade from blue. (don't go back and read it, it's horrible). the Raw in the title brings on a double meaning, which i think is totally groovy. 100701 ... rt dig it jane. +3=103 Question 91 Why must one feel so defensive about liking this author? Detractors complain about her twee self-deprecation and New Age filigree, but I suspect there's something offensive about her success, her perfectly calibrated NPR appeal. After all, she's written three essential books, titles that seem assured of gift-giving immortality at yuppie weddings and baby showers: "Operating Instructions" (1993), her moving advice for beginning mothers; "Bird by Bird" (1994), her practical advice for beginning writers; and "Traveling Mercies" (1999), her soulful advice for beginning churchgoers. But her fiction has always seemed somewhat ephemeral next to these nonfiction classics. ("Blue Shoe," anyone? Anyone?) That could change with her new novel. Not only is it a moving and perceptive portrayal of raising a substance-abusing teenager, but it implicitly offers the kind of advice that many parents need to hear. One hopes that concerned friends and school counselors will begin passing the book to beleaguered moms and dads just as they've long given copies of "Operating Instructions" to expectant parents. (Roxanna Robinson's "Cost," about a mother dealing with her heroin-addict son, is a better novel -- one of the best I've read in years -- but it's so devastating that giving it to any parent in the throes of that trauma would be cruel.) This novel opens during the complicated moment in a family's life when a child is hovering between adolescence and adulthood. "Life with most teenagers," she notes, "was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurt, but you had to tough it out." Rosie Ferguson is 17 years old, an accomplished athlete and student in a quiet, tie-dyed, vegan community outside San Francisco referred to as "Mayberry on acid." Her mother, Elizabeth, is anxious about the "many evils that pull on our children," but she has reason to be hopeful, too. With the comic hyperbole we love her for, she captures the conflicted feelings of many parents counting down to high school graduation: "On good days, when everyone got along, Elizabeth believed she'd die when Rosie left, keen forever like an Irish fisherman's widow. On bad days, she felt like a prisoner at the Level 1 Reception Area in Pelican Bay, marking off the days on the prison wall until Rosie's graduation." That's the tension that powers this story, the parental schizophrenia that she describes with such sympathy and tenderness: feeling disgusted by your child's behavior and living in terror of losing her. What parent can't relate to Elizabeth's late-night prayer: "Could you please do only a little bit of everything, and not get in trouble with it, and live to be eighteen, and not scare me to death? Very often? Please please please." And what teenager hasn't delivered Rosie's urgent plea? "Can't you pay less attention to me?" The story that develops is not particularly plot-heavy, but it never seems slow or static. Elizabeth is a recovering alcoholic doing her best to stay clean and upbeat. Her husband, Rosie's stepfather, has recently gotten a job writing a column for public radio, which begins to absorb more and more of his time. "They gave Rosie a lot of independence," she writes, "partly because she seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders, had never gotten into any real trouble, but mostly because she did so well at school." She takes us through Rosie's summer before senior year and shows us the girl's gradual slide into a life of reflexive lying, risky sex and ecumenical substance abuse: friends' ADD medication, parents' Valium, cough syrup, ecstasy, mushrooms, acid, marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes, ketamine, cocaine, LSD, horse tranquilizers, etc., etc. And Rosie is an accomplished chemist when it comes to beating the urine tests her mother resorts to. The perspective switches back and forth from Rosie's self-destructive behavior to Elizabeth's panicked efforts to figure out what's going wrong. But she remains impressively dispassionate, recording Rosie's descent without a hint of "Go Ask Alice" preachiness. Instead, she allows the slow burn of this tragedy to smolder. It's a startlingly honest depiction of middle-class teenage life in all its baffling contradictions. Rosie is a wonderful girl, funny, bright and loving, a great counselor at the local Bible camp. She's absolutely right when she tells her mom: "I got all A's last term. I'm holding down two jobs. I'm a good kid." She just also happens to be a shoplifting, sex-bartering, pill-popping liar. And the author never loses that arresting sense of Rosie's conflicted mind. Even in the middle of her most irresponsible behavior, this young woman "craved a moment with her mother, on the couch at home, doing nothing together, letting her mom comb her hair with those mothering fingers." What's so frightening is that this tragedy takes place even though Rosie and her parents have such a good relationship. Elizabeth talks to her daughter openly and freely about sex, about alcohol, about her friends' crazy behavior. She's old-fashioned enough to read her daughter's diary, but modern enough to feel guilty about abusing her daughter's trust. Rosie and Elizabeth fight and make up the way you'd want any family to function. If there's a New Age voice in this novel, it's mercifully off to the side, in the form of a friend whom Elizabeth adores but treats with refreshing skepticism. When Elizabeth hears that LOVE means Letting Others Voluntarily Evolve, she writes it down, but notes that it sounds "very kicky." She has spent enough time thinking about the hard elements of a spiritual life to know that not every inspiring platitude has real substance. This is a mature, thoughtful novel about an all-too-common family crisis, and in the author's typical fashion, it doesn't ignore the pain or exalt in despair. The salvation she offers in these pages is hard-won. (Adapted from a review by The Washington Post Book World.) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100701 ... lostgirl Imperfect Birds By Anne Lamott Oooooh this is a scary topic, but looks like an essential read for the mom of teens. It is always easy to believe I'm doing everything right as a parent, as I have never been a stand down and hope for the best type of mom, but teens can be tricky...even when parents have their proverbial fingers on the pulse. This should prove to be a hands on manual for what to look out for, but instead of a "to-do" nonfiction this novel will mimic a real life story. 100701 ... rt +3=158 lostgirl! Question 92 Few people, aside from truckers, semi-well-known country singers, and maybe a few highway-obsessed hobbyists, have been to as many places in the United States of America as the author of this book. He refers to himself, justly, as “an elder of the road.” His book “Blue Highways” (1982), which he began in a van on the day his wife and his job left him, is in a lot of ways synonymous with the transcendent experience of the American road trip — the regional meal as opposed to Applebee’s “special,” a luxury-condo-free view that Lewis and Clark might have discovered if they had traveled by Airstream rather than canoe. A quarter-century later, the very phrase “blue highways” is still shorthand for those mini-­nirvanas, those epiphanylike road moments that, in his latest book, he now refers to by the disused word quoz (rhymes with schnoz): “a noun, both singular and plural, referring to anything strange, incongruous or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious.” “I’m speaking about a quest for quoz,” he writes as he sets off, “of which I’ll say more as we go along, but until then, you might want to see Quoz as a realm filled with itself as a cosmos is with all that’s there, not just suns and planets and comets, but dust and gas, darkness and light and all we don’t know, and only a fraction of what we can imagine.” Since “Blue Highways” — which was followed by “PrairyErth,” a slow and low-mileage book about a single Kansas county, and “River-Horse,” about a cross-country trip by boat — his M.O. has changed: This book is not one long road trip, but a series of shorter ones, taken over the past few years: a circumnavigation of Maine’s North Woods by car; a trip along the coast from Baltimore to Florida by boat; and a voyage in Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains by rail bike (a bicycle retooled to cruise along abandoned railroad tracks), on which, he writes, “the movement was that in a dream where gravity doesn’t exist.” Though the trips are short, the book feels long, in part because the author defiantly refuses to offer any kind of thesis: he praises quilts, wandering and moseying precisely at moments where we start wondering where we’re headed. He gestures toward various schemas for the nation — mapping territory according to fondness for Moon Pies or lack of plausible martinis — but his point is serendipity and joyous disorder. “A genuine road book should open unknown realms in its words as it does in its miles,” he writes. “If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it’s just to the Quickee Mart.” Sometimes the moseying leads to lovely moments. On a bluff at the end of the Ouachita River, in Louisiana, the author’s wife, nicknamed Q (after her interest in all things beginning with the letter, beginning with the Mexican revolutionary Quintana Roo) says, “I wish somebody would come along.” Enter Tuffy Parish, a retired rope-company worker, who takes them to a little spot the locals use to meditate on the river’s end, where they stand quietly. Seeing the author's notebook, Parish says, “You put in how we take care of the end of the river.” Sometimes this sort of trip leads to wonderful people: Jack Kerouac must be happy in his Buddhist Catholic afterlife to know that the guy taking care of the 120-foot-long scroll manuscript for “On the Road” is an ancient text-loving Buddhist Hoosier named Jim Canary, who carries his “Jack in the box” and who has been waived through by excited airport security officials who mistook it for the Dead Sea scrolls. Sometimes the book is mostly about the book itself, and the exertions it required of its author. “In a few weeks, this sheet of paper before me at this moment and on which I am setting down these words with a fountain pen — and the subsequent typed revisions — will all be inside a box in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri,” he writes after his encounter with Canary. “Perhaps someday you, a distant reader, might see this very manuscript page, and I’ll be honored by your curiosity. As for the hand, the arm, and the other attached parts directing the pen, they will lie unboxed and nowhere other than wherever, as dust is wont to do.” The road almost inevitably tricks a road-book author into adding sentences he will one day wince at, having only imagined they were good, like a mirage. The difference between “Blue Highways” and this book is that the author has gone from what feels like a love of the road to a love-hate of it, or at least an impatience with aspects that are unavoidable, such as other people. The fisherman who doesn’t seem to appreciate his river locale as much as the author would like him to; the couple who say grace over a meal in a way that strikes him as insincere; the woman reading romance novels on a cruise down the Southeastern coast (“I judge by the cover,” he writes) whom he later slams in a journal entry (“Without her grievances, Mrs. Y.’s life seems nearly without purpose”) — we hear a little too much of what might be better off as motel pillow talk between the author and Q. The road gets to all of us, especially after thousands and thousands of miles. But in the end, it’s best not to let the road get your quoz out of joint. (Adapted from a review by Robert Sullivan who is the author of “Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America.” His book “The Thoreau You Don’t Know” will be published in March.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response. 100701 ... lostgirl ROADS TO QUOZ (An American Mosey) By William Least Heat-Moon quoz~"anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious." okay, first, i’m really into strange coincidences, happenings and the mysteries of the inexplicable and unexplained...plus, a good (short or long) road trip is always fodder for some really cool stories. the world is merely a stage just waiting for the actors to appear, and i have a feeling the author has seen some great acts to translate into his own words. and the fact that his wife’s nickname is Q... suffice to say that alone is a complete coincidence relative to me... 100702 ... rt +3=161 lostgirl! Question 93 This book is a young woman's cynical thoughts while waltzing with a young man. She's just told him she'd . . . waltz with him, and then we read how she really feels . . . . Grimly, she acknowledges there's no way to say no when a man asks her to dance . . . . so she goes along with the social game . . . . The double consciousness -- the complete split between what she does and what she thinks, the embracing-denouncing game -- is funny. So is the exaggeration, the way time stretches when you're not having fun. But the young woman really doesn't have an alternative: how can she be rude? She can't say what she considers saying . . . . Only at the Algonquin Round Table -- and even that had its limits -- could a young woman say exactly what she thought, and be considered witty instead of monstrous. . . . Otherwise, the social rules for women were as this author depicts them in the book: women were expected to please men. Her satirical target, then, is neither the clumsy young man nor the bruised young woman, but the social roles they're locked into -- in short, the affections and hypocrisies of a patriarchal society. . . . . I began to wonder if this book were really as funny as everyone thought. The persona, a young woman, at first seems to be the stereotypical chatterbox until one notices that the bulk of her "chattering" consists of a serious discussion with herself. Even though she speaks politely to the clumsy man with whom she is dancing . . . , her thoughts reveal her distaste for the social role she is expected to fill . . . . Her witty and sarcastic thoughts reveal her true inner rage . . . . The pattern of sharply conflicting overt and covert messages in this book characterizes the ironic tone of her fiction, a tone also evident in poems such as "Love Song." . . . This book is so sharply caustic that we forget the stereotyped situation it elaborates (and forget having ourselves been in it). What holds our attention is the ever-fertile imagination of the speaker in thinking of ways to be ironic about herself, so as not to recognize her own joy in the dance. Indeed, for all the obviousness of its formal organization, this book presents us with a highly complicated verbal structure that whose ostensible commitments are continually disintegrating. The language cannot finally sustain the clear divisions it has created. The structural boundaries between inner and outer speech dissolve and the two voices, despite their formal and semantic differences, collapse to form a story that is, in the end, talking about itself. . . . Only a language-centered analysis which looks closely at the linguistic features and verbal form can offer a satisfactory account of the story's problems and concerns: any other kind of analysis may actually end up misrepresenting what the story says about women, and about their relationship to men. "The Waltz" does not really offer a contrast between the external language of the world and the internal language of the self. Instead it offers a series of verbal redundancies that play upon each other -- a trap. It is a study in self-subversion. . . . the story returns us to its beginning . . . and encloses the speaker in a circle of her own words. The waltz is without end, and, in these last lines, without the accompanying internal monologue that subverts her acquiescence. Her words display her customary compliance, but further, energetically assert her willingness to go on waltzing. She participates in perpetuating the situation which called for what we were made to believe was intolerable hypocrisy. Her compliance demands that we reevaluate our perceptions of that hypocrisy. The ending of the story reveals that the speaker has been lying to us as much as to her partner. It denies our sense that we have had access to her true feelings. . . . What are we to make of such complicity? In exercising her narrative authority, the author abandons her protagonist to the story's language. As we return to the beginning of the story, we see our interpretation of it as shallow and duplicitous is not accurate: what seemed to be duplicity is in fact complicity. The language does not mock social realities but affirms them. . . . Women's literature records the working out of a series of personal, political, and artistic motives in verbal terms. Each move toward rhetorical change is compromised by the prior commitments of the language and by the pressure literary history exerts on the individual use of literary forms. The vision of what might be must struggle with what has been. Thus this book simultaneously satirizes ritualized social interaction and embodies it. It is essential that study of women's style acknowledge and document this paradox. . . . Speaking primarily to female readers about the conditions of the lives they share, female humorists have on the surface seemed to accept and even condone the trivializing routines of women's lives and the unflattering stereotypes of women commonly used in humor. From the early nineteenth century to the present, the sketches, stories, and light verse that constitute this tradition are filled with female figures who are concerned with their appearance, afraid of technology, competitive with each other, and dependent upon men. The familiar stereotypes of the nag, the scold, the "clinging vine," and the gold-digger are present in women's humor just as they are in the humor of men. But beneath the surface runs a text that directly counters these images and seeks to deny them. By presenting the results of women's cultural conditioning and subordination, America's female humorists implicitly address the sources of women's self-doubt, dependence, and isolation from the mainstream of American life. . . .Most of the personae in women's humor are less aware than their creators of the reasons for the inherent craziness of their lives. . . . The author employs a more obvious method of presenting "official" and "unofficial" responses in her monologue. Here the speaker uses two voices, one to speak aloud to the man who asks her to dance and the other to provide the reader with her actual responses to the experience. The contrast between her polite "public" voice and her witty and angry "private" voice is both the source of humor and a clear statement of woman's outward conformity and inward rebellion. . . . This book ultimately becomes metaphoric of man's brutality and woman's powerlessness. . . . The sketch ends with the speaker encouraging the man who she has privately identified as a "creature" to pay the band to keep on playing. The hyperbolic language that she uses in both the public and private utterances of her persona is at once an example of comic incongruity and a clear indication that the "waltz" emblematic of a continuing cycle of male domination and female submissiveness. The speaker in her sketch is able to articulate her dilemma, but is doomed to go on repeating it. (Adapted from a review by Modern American Poetry) From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, this author rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. She went through three marriages (two to the same man) and survived several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and her sparkling wit have endured. For three points, name the author, her book described here, and give a personal response... 100702 ... jane the waltz dorothy parker Reminds me a bit of some Virginia Woolf I've read - estranged views on femininity and what it means to be a woman. Sounds very jarring. 100702 ... rt +3 =106 jane! Question 94This poet acknowledges that his relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii, will be disturbed by the Library of Congress’s announcement on Thursday naming him the country’s poet laureate. “I do like a very quiet life,” He said by telephone after learning of his appointment. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.” He said he does relish “being part of something much more public and talking too much,” however, and the job of the nation’s premier poet will enable him to do both. Of course, no matter how many public appearances he may ultimately make, for most people he speaks most eloquently through his verse. At 82, he is an undisputed master, having written more than 30 books of poetry, translation and prose over the course of six decades. “He is an inevitable choice for poet laureate,” said Dana Gioia, a poet and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “He has created a distinctive style. His poetry is lyrical, elliptical and often slightly mysterious.” The poet, who retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth, has won just about every major award an American poet can, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, for “The Shadow of Sirius” in 2009 and for “The Carrier of Ladders” in 1971; and the National Book Award in 2005 for “Migration: New and Selected Poems.” He is one of a bumper crop of poets born in 1926 or 1927 that included A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, James Wright and John Ashbery. What distinguishes his work from the other poets of his generation who were forging a new style in the wake of modernism, Mr. Gioia said, is how he “combined the intensity of English-language modernism with the expansive lyricism of Spanish-language modernism.” The son of a Presbyterian minister, he grew up in Scranton, Pa., and Union City, N.J. At the age of 5 he started writing out hymns for his father, who ran a tense, strict and sometimes violent household. Fathers figure in his 1983 poem “Yesterday” : My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand he says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know At 18 he sought out the advice of Ezra Pound, who told him to write 75 lines every day. Pound also suggested taking up poetry translation to learn what could be done with language — advice that he followed. He attended Princeton University on scholarship, studying with the critic R. P. Blackmur, who he has called “a kind of mentor and parent,” and John Berryman, who he said was one of the brightest people he ever met. He has said that he used his initials because doing so seemed serious and adult, in the manner of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. From his earliest scribblings, he has had a conception of poetry that is strongly tied to music. “It’s close to the oral tradition,” he said. “It’s close to song. You have to hear it before you can understand it.” His first collection, “A Mask for Janus,” was selected for the Yale Younger Poets Prize by Auden, whose style of long unspooling sentences had influenced the novice’s own verse. In the 1960s he began writing poems without any punctuation, and later, without capital letters, except for the beginning. “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page,” he once explained. “I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.” He came to wider attention for his hard-edged political allegories that condemned the Vietnam War and environmental destruction, starting with his 1967 collection, “The Lice.” James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, heard advice from several writers and scholars before choosing him to succeed Kay Ryan as the nation’s poet laureate, its 17th. He plans to be in Washington on Oct. 25 to open the library’s annual literary series with a reading. The position does not carry many formal duties, though laureates have traditionally undertaken projects that reach out to potential audiences. The one-year term carries a $35,000 annual stipend. Mr. Billington said he is confident that the poet can broaden the audience for poetry through technology, if not in person: “We even discussed the possibility of doing something using remote technology from Hawaii.” He moved there in the mid-1970s to study Zen Buddhism, and now lives with his wife, Paula. He said he has cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants on the formerly denuded plantation, including the hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from extinction. Using his home as a backdrop would illustrate the connection between Mr. Merwin’s work and “his extraordinary interest and devotion to the natural world,” Mr. Billington said, adding that no definite plans have yet been made. A high-tech solution to the geographical problem is somewhat unexpected for Mr. Merwin, who said he has never composed a poem on any sort of mechanical or electronic device, preferring a small spiral notebook or even a paper napkin. “It’s the nearest thing to not writing,” He said. “The more self-conscious it gets, the stiffer it gets.” During his tenure, he said, he wants to emphasize his “great sympathy with native people and the languages and literature of native peoples,” and his “lifelong concern with the environment.” Although raised in the Western tradition, he said he feels more affinity with an Eastern one, “being part of the universe and everything living.” With that exhilarating connection comes responsibility, however. “You don’t just exploit it and use it and throw it away any more than you would a member of your family,” he said. “You’re not separate from the frog in the pond or the cockroach in the kitchen.” That sentiment can be heard in his poem “For a Coming Extinction,” from “The Lice”: Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing (Adapted from a NY Times review) For three points name the poet and give a personal response... 100703 ... lostgirl Beggars and Kings In the evening all the hours that weren't used are emptied out and the beggars are waiting to gather them up to open them to find the sun in each one and teach it its beggar's name and sing to it It is well through the night but each of us has his own kingdom of pains and has not yet found them all and is sailing in search of them day and night infallible undisputed unresting filled with a dumb use and its time like a finger in a world without hands W. S. Merwin gotta love this one! 100703 ... lostgirl Beggars and Kings In the evening all the hours that weren't used are emptied out and the beggars are waiting to gather them up to open them to find the sun in each one and teach it its beggar's name and sing to it It is well through the night but each of us has his own kingdom of pains and has not yet found them all and is sailing in search of them day and night infallible undisputed unresting filled with a dumb use and its time like a finger in a world without hands W. S. Merwin gotta love this one! 100703 ... Sorry double post 100703 ... rt +3 =164 lostgirl exploding like mountain fireworks Question 95 “Try always,” says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in this author's fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s turbulent court, “to find out what people wear under their clothes.” Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can’t produce an heir, wears a nun’s habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won’t let the king know what she’s wearing until their wedding night; she says “yes, yes, yes” to him, “then she says no.” Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king’s dirty work just as he once did the cardinal’s, what is he hiding under his lawyer’s sober winter robes? Something “impermeable,” Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell’s forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone. Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein’s great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his “good eyes’ stern, facetious twinkle,” in Robert Lowell’s description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, “sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.” One of the many achievements of Mantel’s dazzling novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours. Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel — tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were “a sheet of metal”; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because “France is where they have wars.” Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family. In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian “art of memory” (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel “Fludd”), in which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images. Cromwell is also, as the author sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther’s battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the “brutal truth” of the Scriptures. “Why does the pope have to be in Rome?” Cromwell wonders. “Where is it written?” Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn’s “resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom” caught the king’s eye. The author, with the novelist’s license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: “Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked.” Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For the author, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry’s divorce is the impetus for Cromwell’s “Tudor Revolution,” as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule. In this novel it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the “quaking world” aright. “Utopia,” Cromwell learns early on, “is not a place one can live.” More’s refusal to recognize Henry’s marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” and its 1966 screen version. To her Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt’s title, seeks a way out for his old rival. There’s a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? “You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again.” Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell’s. “That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash.” In her long novel of the French Revolution, “A Place of Greater Safety,” she also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of this novel. Yet, although she adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels — the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase — her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, “the man in charge of everything,” falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel she will tell us. Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. She has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. This novel has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, the author can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator’s day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society — not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia. “When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power,” Cromwell reflects. “Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.” This novel is both spellbinding and believable. (Adapted from a review by Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of “Degas in New Orleans” and “A Summer of Hummingbirds.”) For three points, name the author, her Mann Booker Prize-winning novel, and give a personal response... 100704 ... rt Hilary Mantel~"Wolf Hall" There is a fascinating interview with her on the BBC World Book Club. Question 96 When the author was coming of age on the shores of the Firth of Forth, I was growing up a lonely, feral youth a couple of hundred miles to the north. In our old house under Ben More Assynt, there was no television, so I filled my time with books of the sort he would go on to write, not least the travel writing of Bruce Chatwin, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Jonathan Raban. He is four years older than me and astonishingly precocious, published In Xanadu, about his journey from Jerusalem to Shàngdu, in 1989. This was two years after Chatwin's The Songlines had appeared, a book he calls in his latest work "that wonderful study of restlessness". The Songlines clearly affected him deeply; he describes setting out to write in the old fort outside Jodhpur, a day's drive from Delhi, where Chatwin had written before him. I mention my own childhood only to remark on the profound effect that travel writing can have, or at least had on my younger self, for it was The Songlines that led me out of the hills. It inspired a form of longing. Yet since it was published, something has shifted. Chatwin and Kapuscinski have died, while Raban set up home in Seattle, turning to novels. For much of the past two decades, lonely young readers in search of adventure would have had to look for inspiration in tales of those setting up home in Provence, in journeys with aunts, cats and even fridges, or in books with titles such as A Stingray Bit My Nipple!. None of which would be awful, I'm sure; but I doubt it would sate the romantic earnestness of youth. Fifteen years ago this author himself turned from travel writing to history. In a recent newspaper article, he argued that the future of the form lies not in "the epic journeys, often by young men, conveying the raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is endless, and deadlines and commitments are non-existent". Instead, it lies in the writings of "individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately". This could describe his life so far, since he has ended up on a farm outside Delhi, and made a lifelong study of those around him. This is a travel book, but it is also a series of biographies which unpick the rich religious heritage of the subcontinent. The book opens with the story of Prasannamati Mataji, born in 1972 into a wealthy family of merchants in Raipur. Loved and protected, she dismays those closest to her when she is drawn to the ascetic purity of Jainism, for which she must pluck out each strand of hair, wear unstitched white cotton saris (the men go naked) and walk the world's roads wholly reliant on charity. In terms of travel writing, she is the perfect exotic subject, but her tale loses its foreignness when we learn that she fell in love with a fellow nun, a love that ended in her losing the will to live. Prasannamati is a character who burns for a chapter and then becomes a memory, restless and unforgettable, as we turn to the next life. At the book's beginning, there is a pretty, hand-drawn map showing where each of these nine people have settled, for almost all have travelled themselves, whether because of war or instinct, until they discovered some sort of tolerable existence propped up by faith. So it is that later we find Lal Peri Mastani, the "ecstatic red fairy" of Sehwan Sharif in Pakistan. The author, told about her by a fakir, asked how he would find her, and is told that she is "dressed in bright red, is very fat, and... carries a huge wooden club". He keeps the style simple. He hears of a character and then hunts them down, telling us of the first meeting. Then, having arranged to meet them again, he takes down their story, much like one of the anthropologists who used to travel the subcontinent recording the epics told by illiterates. He lets the stories do the work. So Lal Peri, an Indian from Bihar, is exiled three times as the political strife following decolonisation buffets her, until, beside herself with loss and pain, she dreams of an old man telling her, "Now you are all alone, I will be your protector. Come to me." Shortly afterwards, she is handed an amulet containing the image of the same old man and is told that it is Lal Shahbaz Qalander, a great Sufi saint, an ascetic who purged himself with fire, and she is directed to his shrine. The celebration conducted by the tomb is, again, an image that my younger self, caught in the darkness on a Scottish winter, would have imagined crawling into: "The drumming rapidly gained pace, and the long line of dreadlocked dervishes began to move as they felt the rhythm pound through their bodies. Old men began to sway, arms extended or cupped in supplication, mouthing softly murmured prayers... One man fell to the ground in a gesture of namaaz, then amid the jumping, jerking, dancing men, stretched out full-length on the floor. The air was hot with sweat, and the rich, sweet scent of rose petals mixed with incense and hashish." And yet, he has another purpose here: to deliver an argument he has honed while watching the damage wreaked on India and Pakistan by Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi Islam. The glorious "tomb worship" practised by the dervishes of Sehwan Sharif is anathema to those who run the 8,000 or more madrassas now operating in Pakistan. In March, in the Observer, he bemoaned the dynamiting of the tomb of anther Sufi saint, Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass, and it is a story he relates again in this book. He compares the spread of Wahhabism to the reformation in Europe, when abbeys were burned and great works of art destroyed, and stands against such intolerance. It's a strange thing: at a time when the row between Richard Dawkins-style atheists and fundamentalist Christians grows increasingly wearisome, this book celebrates faith's ability to offer peace and sanctuary to those who have suffered horrifying lives. Take Tashi Passang, whose story follows Lal Peri's. Passang is a Buddhist monk. "The main struggle, especially when you are young, is to avoid four things: desire, greed, pride and attachment," he says. "There are techniques for diverting the mind. They stop you from thinking of yaks, or money, or beautiful women and teach you to concentrate instead on the gods and goddesses." The atheist might ask why you would. After all, to paraphrase John Betjeman, you can't have too many yaks. Well... Passang was a young monk when China invaded Tibet in the 1950s. He decided to renounce his vows and go to war – something monks are allowed to do only when the faith itself is threatened – actions that led to the Chinese torturing his mother to death. Passang left Tibet with the Dalai Lama in a trek across the mountaintops that sounds like the retreat from Stalingrad. He joined the Indian army to fight the Chinese – the specific act his faith allowed – and found himself, in an astonishingly unjust turn of events, sent to kill Bangladeshis instead. Following that life, he crawled back to the monastic life, seeking succour for his troubled soul. Earlier this year, at the Dolman travel awards – the only travel writing award left in Britain – the solitary judge, the unfairly neglected Hispanophile Michael Jacobs, said in his speech: "This should be the most important literary prize of all..." Gathered around him was a small group of publishers and agents who remain true believers in the form; all had to pay for their own dinner. The winner, Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus and an acolyte of this author, told me a "huge proportion" of her readership "is now in India and Pakistan". Perhaps in the age of mass travel, familiarity has bred contempt. The shelves in the travel bookshops are now weighed down with guidebooks, while readers who yearn after other places seem to choose detectives stories set in the likes of Scandinavia (Henning Mankell), Cuba (Leonardo Padura Fuentes) and Botswana (Alexander McCall Smith). Yet at its best travel writing beats fiction, firing the imagination with tales of foreign peoples drawn close by our common humanity. If I had read this book as a boy, I would have felt that desire to strike out. That this book also makes its political points more powerfully than any newspaper article, while quietly adjusting a reader's attitude to faith, builds its importance. It meets the author's own criteria as set down in his recent article, displaying a deep knowledge of the culture, yet is intimate with each interviewee. This is travel writing at its best. I hope it sparks a revival. (Adapted from a review by Ruaridh Nicoll for The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100705 ... lostgirl 'Nine Lives' by William Dalrymple a story of journey through unknown lands decorated with religious and social changes and challenges as told by the spiritually connected...there should be some material to satisfy my thirst for knowledge here. 100705 ... rt +3=167 lostgirl! Question 97 For a brief but intense period in 2006, this author logged on daily to Flu Wiki. This is a Web site (fluwikie.com) devoted to the concerns — the very deep concerns — of people convinced that a worldwide outbreak of influenza is imminent, and that it will make the ravages of the Black Death seem like a mildly unpleasant interlude. “Here could be found a great milling together of fiercely articulate and freaked-out people from around the world, posting to discussion topics like ‘What Will We Do With the Bodies?’ She writes. Visitors to the site offered suggestions on how to turn back the infected, zombie-like hordes who, in a desperate search for food, will try to invade the fortified homes of the healthy. The writer, also the author of the highly amusing “Area Woman Blows Gasket,” sees the humor in Flu Wiki, but she too worries about pandemics. A lot. She also obsesses about sudden liver failure, possibly cancerous moles, flying insects, the supervolcano underneath Yosemite National Park and the possibility that her car will blow up. All of this seems potentially hilarious, but the humor quickly freezes as she describes a lifetime of absurd but crippling fears. Like 40 million Americans, she suffers from anxiety, which she pithily calls “fear in search of a cause.” Her own case fascinates her, and quite rightly. It presents her with the opportunity to examine modern civilization and its discontents, as well as her own miseries, which she does, thoughtfully and incisively. Her subject is elusive. Unnamed until Freud coined the term “anxiety neurosis,” the uninvited stranger lurks at the margins of history. When King David, in the Bible, says that “fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,” is he suffering an anxiety attack? She cites an 18th-century English treatise blaming city living for “a class and set of distempers, with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors,” that is, “nervous disorders” afflicting a third of the population. Could this be it? Everywhere and nowhere, anxiety, she writes, is “unbearably vivid yet insanely abstract.” In many cases it is the fear of fear itself, a free-floating, nebulous entity that, like a mutant virus, feeds on any available host. Reason is powerless against it. She argues, in fact, that rationalism, intended to banish superstition and fear, has instead removed one of the most effective weapons against anxiety, namely religious faith and ritual. Even worse, the worship of reason and science, by encouraging the notion that human beings can control their environment, has created a terrible fault line in the modern psyche, although not all societies suffer equally. Mexicans have lots to worry about but don’t. The World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002, found that only 6.6 percent of Mexicans had ever experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. Meanwhile, to their north, 28.8 percent of the American population has been afflicted with anxiety, the highest level in the world. Mexicans who move to the United States adapt, becoming more anxious. In searching for the roots of her affliction, she finds a common thread connecting her traumas and her phobias, the fear of losing control, of being unable to cope. As a child, caught up in the India-Pakistan war in 1971, she cowered in her family’s house in New Delhi, waiting for bombs to fall. She was terrified of the dark. At 23, she suffered a nervous breakdown after her boyfriend casually informed her, on a visit to her family’s summer house in Canada, that he was seeing another woman. A diagnosis of “generalized anxiety disorder” ensued. She never finds satisfactory answers to her self-interrogations, but the professionals do not do much better. The angriest pages in her book are devoted to the psychiatrists who put her on a regimen of anti-anxiety medications, which dulled the static in her brain but left her “in an emotional half-light,” secure but disengaged. “I’d watch movies without being stirred by them, listen to music without real interest,” she writes. “In truth, I began to feel faintly sociopathic.” She became addicted to Effexor, and late in the book drops the small bombshell that, as she writes, she has been off an antidepressant called Lexapro for only six weeks. She married and had children. She has a successful writing career. But the woman she describes can barely hold her life together. One night she dreams that she is lying on a cushioned bench admiring the Grand Canyon. Suddenly she realizes that the bench is attached at one end to a cliff face but is otherwise suspended in midair. “If I moved even an inch in any direction, I would fall for miles,” she writes. “The choking panic that I felt was extraordinary. I felt a perfect — a Platonic — sense of terror.” That, in a nutshell, is her situation, one that she addresses through therapy, pull-up-your-socks willpower and a blend of religion and the insights of writers like the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. It all seems touch and go — but give her major points for wit and flair. The author biography on the dust jacket reads: “She lives in Toronto with her husband, her two children and her dread.” (Adapted from a review by William Grimes for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100706 ... jane A Brief History Of Anxiety: ... Yours and Mine Patricia Pearson 100706 ... jane this looks like a really intense and historic look at something that has plagued me since childhood (yes, i suffered from childhood anxiety)... i would really like to take a look at it. seems like something that hasn't been done before. thanks for making this a question, K. 100706 ... rt +3=109 you're welcome jane... Question 98 Winner for the 1999 Outstanding Book Award given by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts are just a few examples of the American tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles. This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Indians to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. The author points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. He suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure. The book is also a study of how non-Indians in America have utilized the Indian items, clothing, ceremonies and lifestyles for their own purposes or gains throughout history, from the Colonial era to the present, and how "playing Indian" has affected the Native Americans. America is a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal, yet there has never been equality among the races. Many whites have turned to the Indian lifestyle in an attempt to quiet their inner turmoil, especially during times of civil or racial unrest. Many have been curious about how the "others" live or what they experience in life, especially within the psychology and sociology fields. And many enterprising whites have seen a chance for profit from commercialization of the Indian culture. This book puts all aspects of this racial interplay under a microscope to reveal how Indians have been abused, humiliated and misrepresented; while at the same time they have been empowered by the increased exposure and public awareness of their situation. It has historically been a good-bad situation. Two points that really stand out in this book are the war between Canadian author and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, Ernest Thompson Seton, and American Daniel Carter Beard over how patriotism should be symbolized to the young boys of America and what type of scouting experience would best develop character. Beard felt that "non-citizen" Seton was un-American in his approach to developing character through association with nature and Indian crafts, even though his program did radically alter the behavior of problem children. His program taught the positive nature of Indians. Beard wanted the boys to mimic Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and other famous pioneers. He preferred a white-based program that emphasized the heroic nature of the Indian killers and encouraged "pioneer" boys to wage war on the Indians. His program taught only negative Indian images. Seton withdrew from the scouting program, while Beard maintained that he had been dismissed. This case demonstrates how American leaders have instilled racism into our youths from a young age and have created an entirely negative Indian image while perpetuating a white-based history. The second point that stands out is the way minority veterans came home from war to a second-class citizenship and decided to rock the boat. They felt they had proven their patriotism to the most extreme point and refused to accept the way they were being treated. They were instrumental in Civil Rights and could be called the pioneers of the movement. The author writes in a flowing narrative that is easily understood and thoroughly engaging. He takes a scientifically technical subject and turns it into a thrilling read. If more history professors presented their information in this style and tone, the world would be filled with history buffs. He opens with the fast action of the Boston Tea Party and never lets up the action or tension, examining one incident after another. This is history from a different perspective -- one we should all carefully consider. Notes in the back provides extensive further reading suggestions. This makes it easy to locate the books that will take you as far into specific incidents as you wish to go. This book is history in the finest form. More importantly, it is a study of how racism in the form of perceived/portrayed Indian identity and culture in America has affected the entire population of the nation. While this book is groundbreaking in the arenas of history, psychology and sociology, it is also great for pleasure reading. He will convince you to look at white-native history from a different angle. (Adapted from a review by Alicia Karen Elkins, Rambles.net) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100707 ... jane Playing Indian Philip J. Deloria 100707 ... jane not enough attention is paid to the indigenous history of this nation. we have sequestered "native americans" into small pockets of the country. it's interesting to see a narrative that addresses such a subject. 100707 ... rt +3=112 jane! Question 100 Roseanne McNulty, forgotten centenarian, long-time resident of the Roscommon regional mental hospital, is facing an imminent upheaval. The decrepit Victorian institution is soon to be demolished, leaving its residents displaced in a starkly changed modern Ireland that has all but buried its violent origins. Attempting to organise her memories, some reliable, others shifting, she embarks on the writing of a chronicle. Her account forms the main part of this author's compelling new novel, in which Roseanne's testimony interweaves with that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene. A man who feels fatherly, "even motherly", towards his patients, he is plagued by memories of an uneasy marriage. He and his late wife were "like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation". He writes about loss, broken promises, failed hopes. This novel of crippled perspectives and ducked responsibilities comments on his 1998 book The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, a story about "scraps of people, blown off the road of life by history's hungry breezes". In addition, the new novel offers itself as a kind of thematic cousin to his Booker-nominated masterpiece A Long Long Way and his award-winning stage play The Steward of Christendom. The author, in effect, is making one operatically extended fiction comprising discrete but interrelated novels and plays, often inspired by his real-life ancestors. It is an astoundingly ambitious body of work, which establishes that family trees, like national histories, sprout "the strange fruits in the cornucopia of grief". He writes with a dramatist's timing and a poet's exactitude. (One character, a priest, is "cleaner than the daylight moon"; panic is "blacker than old tea".) The result is a richly allusive and haunting text that is nevertheless jagged enough to avoid the anaesthetic of high lyricism. This is a novel in which swans enduring a rainstorm are "like unsuccessful suicides" and the accents of Sligo corner-boys are "like bottles being smashed in a back lane". The setting is the western Ireland of traditional literary depiction - subtle Yeatsian references abound in the novel - but his destabilising of inherited images gives the book a punkish energy as well as fiery beauty. Roseanne's voice is urgent, colloquial, strange, a song of insinuations, non-sequiturs and self-corrections. It sifts the troubled memories it purports to be organising while always keeping faith with the impossibility of the task. Shards of stories intrude; fragments of lost narratives jostle. Half-forgotten quotations and scraps of ancient folklore blow around her mind like old leaves. Is she chronicler or creator? How much is reliable? "No one has the monopoly on truth," she points out. "Not even myself, and that is a vexing and worrying thought." Her turn of phrase is bleakly funny and there are warm, vivid reminiscences, for a girlhood in rural Ireland "is not all knives and axes", but as recollection coheres into a devastating story the nature of her sufferings becomes clearer. Dr Grene is both detector and hider of truths, and he finds himself in paradoxical reversal with his baffling patient, speaking to her of his own losses and hurts. But the book is arranged and imagined with immense tact, so that it is never unbalanced by its ironies. Roseanne and Dr Grene, though hardly ever described, are incarnated with such commitment and narrative astuteness that you feel you are standing in the rain of their lives. You are reading them, not reading about them. As often in his work, Irish history is a malignant omnipresence, its antediluvian hatreds and innumerable betrayals forming not so much a backdrop as a toxic sludge through which the characters must wade, as best they can. The terrors of civil war have led to incurable enmities, the "sad, cold, wretched deaths of boys on mountainsides". Innocence is murdered and idealism compromised by the dirty truths of sectarianism. The newborn state professes fealty to republican slogans but its bitterest irony is that liberty, equality and fraternity have proven so viciously incompatible. Trust is unaffordable. Love is a risk. The neighbour is the assassin, the former comrade the enemy. In this territory of "murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous", identity itself is contested. Roseanne, as a working-class Presbyterian and a woman, is presented both as traumatised outsider and intimate commentator, a spectator of warring men whose allegiances and concomitant hatreds will have woeful consequences for her own family. Perhaps the act of telling her story is in some sense redemptive, but behind the mistrust of patriotism are more elemental questionings. This is a novel of masculinities; the damage done by men, to women, but also to themselves. Students of militant Irish nationalism may be tempted to read Roseanne as a sort of personification. Certainly, the image of Ireland as a forlorn old woman has for so long been central to republican iconography that the novel can be filtered through the lens of those meanings even as it cleverly subverts them. But he is doing something darker and more daring than image-breaking. He makes enthrallingly beautiful prose out of the wreckage of these lives by allowing them to have the complication of actual history in all its messy elusiveness. "History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens," he writes, "but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth." His achievement in this magnificent and heart-rending novel is a kind of restitution. (Adapted from a review by Joseph O'Connor with The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his novel, and give a personal response) 100707 ... lostgirl The Secret Scripture By Sebastian Barry this looks like another difficult but worthwhile read. i am of irish descent (catholic as well) and i look forward to the historical portion of the social, political and religious struggles. a novel narrated by two characters may be a bit confusing, then throw in a psychiatrist, some mental health issues and a troubled priest.... my interest is certainly piqued. 100708 ... rt +3=170 lostgirl! ... a book about alex the african gray parrot got skipped...should have been #100...blame it on the oppressive heat, wasp stings, poison ivy in my left eye, and a fucking rock-lifting fox in my henhouse. Question 101 For a brief but intense period in 2006, this author logged on daily to Flu Wiki. This is a Web site (fluwikie.com) devoted to the concerns — the very deep concerns — of people convinced that a worldwide outbreak of influenza is imminent, and that it will make the ravages of the Black Death seem like a mildly unpleasant interlude. “Here could be found a great milling together of fiercely articulate and freaked-out people from around the world, posting to discussion topics like ‘What Will We Do With the Bodies?’ She writes. Visitors to the site offered suggestions on how to turn back the infected, zombie-like hordes who, in a desperate search for food, will try to invade the fortified homes of the healthy. The writer, also the author of the highly amusing “Area Woman Blows Gasket,” sees the humor in Flu Wiki, but she too worries about pandemics. A lot. She also obsesses about sudden liver failure, possibly cancerous moles, flying insects, the supervolcano underneath Yosemite National Park and the possibility that her car will blow up. All of this seems potentially hilarious, but the humor quickly freezes as she describes a lifetime of absurd but crippling fears. Like 40 million Americans, she suffers from anxiety, which she pithily calls “fear in search of a cause.” Her own case fascinates her, and quite rightly. It presents her with the opportunity to examine modern civilization and its discontents, as well as her own miseries, which she does, thoughtfully and incisively. Her subject is elusive. Unnamed until Freud coined the term “anxiety neurosis,” the uninvited stranger lurks at the margins of history. When King David, in the Bible, says that “fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,” is he suffering an anxiety attack? She cites an 18th-century English treatise blaming city living for “a class and set of distempers, with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors,” that is, “nervous disorders” afflicting a third of the population. Could this be it? Everywhere and nowhere, anxiety, she writes, is “unbearably vivid yet insanely abstract.” In many cases it is the fear of fear itself, a free-floating, nebulous entity that, like a mutant virus, feeds on any available host. Reason is powerless against it. She argues, in fact, that rationalism, intended to banish superstition and fear, has instead removed one of the most effective weapons against anxiety, namely religious faith and ritual. Even worse, the worship of reason and science, by encouraging the notion that human beings can control their environment, has created a terrible fault line in the modern psyche, although not all societies suffer equally. Mexicans have lots to worry about but don’t. The World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002, found that only 6.6 percent of Mexicans had ever experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. Meanwhile, to their north, 28.8 percent of the American population has been afflicted with anxiety, the highest level in the world. Mexicans who move to the United States adapt, becoming more anxious. In searching for the roots of her affliction, she finds a common thread connecting her traumas and her phobias, the fear of losing control, of being unable to cope. As a child, caught up in the India-Pakistan war in 1971, she cowered in her family’s house in New Delhi, waiting for bombs to fall. She was terrified of the dark. At 23, she suffered a nervous breakdown after her boyfriend casually informed her, on a visit to her family’s summer house in Canada, that he was seeing another woman. A diagnosis of “generalized anxiety disorder” ensued. She never finds satisfactory answers to her self-interrogations, but the professionals do not do much better. The angriest pages in her book are devoted to the psychiatrists who put her on a regimen of anti-anxiety medications, which dulled the static in her brain but left her “in an emotional half-light,” secure but disengaged. “I’d watch movies without being stirred by them, listen to music without real interest,” she writes. “In truth, I began to feel faintly sociopathic.” She became addicted to Effexor, and late in the book drops the small bombshell that, as she writes, she has been off an antidepressant called Lexapro for only six weeks. She married and had children. She has a successful writing career. But the woman she describes can barely hold her life together. One night she dreams that she is lying on a cushioned bench admiring the Grand Canyon. Suddenly she realizes that the bench is attached at one end to a cliff face but is otherwise suspended in midair. “If I moved even an inch in any direction, I would fall for miles,” she writes. “The choking panic that I felt was extraordinary. I felt a perfect — a Platonic — sense of terror.” That, in a nutshell, is her situation, one that she addresses through therapy, pull-up-your-socks willpower and a blend of religion and the insights of writers like the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. It all seems touch and go — but give her major points for wit and flair. The author biography on the dust jacket reads: “She lives in Toronto with her husband, her two children and her dread.” (Adapted from a review by William Grimes for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100708 ... rt +3=170 lostgirl! ... a book about alex the african gray parrot got skipped...should have been #100...blame it on the oppressive heat, wasp stings, poison ivy in my left eye, and a fucking rock-lifting fox in my henhouse. My interest in the Titanic was mostly fuelled by an early film entitled History is Made at Night. It starred Charles Boyer, that man with a vein throbbing in his forehead whenever he got emotional. This widely acclaimed American film (a remake was produced more or less at the same time as my novel) never mentioned that the launch of the Titanic had been delayed by a coal strike. Nor did it mention that Captain Smith, bravely seen sinking below the seas, had, in the months preceding the collision, been in command of another ocean liner which had undergone a similar, if less catastrophic, disaster. Strike over, the newly constructed White Star liner, Titanic, was the first to be given supplies of coal. In those long-gone days, quantities of coal thundering down into the boilers to ignite the engines often started fires, immediately extinguished by hoses. A similar blaze erupted in the depths of the Titanic as she prepared to leave Southampton, in spite of which she was passed as seaworthy and set sail on 10 April 1912. As she left the dock she narrowly avoided colliding with the American liner, New York. The fire continued to burn for two more days, and it's my belief that it was this combination of heat followed by contact with the icy waters of the Atlantic which caused the fatal outcome. In writing a fictional account of a real-life event it is important to get the historical facts right, even though the characters can be drawn from the imagination. At least, that's what I think. Once I'd learnt about the layout of the ship and the resulting tragedy - there were numerous icebergs, not just one, and all other vessels, aware of this, had dropped anchor - it remained for me to conjure up the men and women on board. The opening two or three thousand words of a book are the most difficult, in that they must be compelling enough to ensure the turning of the remaining pages. In 1995, a year before my book was published, I was in a taxi circling Manchester Square, London, when I saw a man collapse outside the railings of a house. I was about to draw the driver's attention to the incident when a woman pelted down the steps of the house and cradled him in her arms. The taxi drove on. Later that day, in the character of a young American man about to travel to Southampton to board the Titanic, I wrote the opening pages of my novel: At half past four on the afternoon of 8th April 1912 - the weather was mild and hyacinths bloomed in window boxes - a stranger chose to die in my arms. "Please," I said, as he pitched forward and clutched me round the waist. We both fell to our knees. Over the road a crocodile of Girl Guides sashayed sing-song through the ornamental gates of the public gardens. I tried to free myself, but the man was drowning. His face was so close that his two eyes merged into one. I had thought he was drunk, yet his breath smelt sweet. Lay me down, he whispered, and a tear rolled out of that one terrible eye and broke on the swell of his lip. Arching a middle finger and foraging beneath the cuff of my shirt he feather dusted my beating pulse. A sudden gust of wind shook the trees in the gardens and a prolonged sigh echoed along the street. The finger stroke of love, he said, quite distinctly, and soon after, died. In the rest of the book, involving the characters, I just remembered things that had happened in my own life. There's really no need to make anything up. The ending was easy, told by those in the lifeboats. In all that ghastly night it was the din of the dying that chilled the most. Then silence fell, and that was the worst sound of all. There was no trace of the Titanic. All that remained was a grey veil of vapour drifting above the water. (Adapted from an article by the author in The Guardian. She recently passed away at the age of 75.) For three points, name the author, her historical novel, and give a personal response...) 100708 ... rt sorry about that last question. it's a repeat of the book on anxiety. tried to stop it before it posted but, gulp, it posted anyway. so...what is question 101 anyway? wait, let me put some gel on my eye, ok, it is, wait, let me put some gel on this wasp sting, ok, it is, wait, let me fix the hole in the coop, oh, i already did that...question 101 is...who wrote the fictional book about the titanic? 100708 ... lostgirl you are having a rough day....have a glass of wine:) lostgirl with her eye on the prize: Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge i have had a love-hate relationship with the titanic tragedy since i was a child. the fascination has always been there, the curiosity about the "why" of it came later, and then as an adult, the tragedy really sunk in (pardon the terrible pun) of the voluminous death that occurred. i actually left the movie during the part where the family realized together that they were not going to get out alive. i am an avid swimmer, and the thought of being suffocated by water still freaks me out. this book received great reviews for her extraordinary descriptive writing and amazing character development, however it will not make my "to read" list. 100708 ... rt +3=173 lostgirl! Question 102 Take this author's 64 new food rules and eat them. The American author/journalism professor’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual has just been released. It’s the third in a food series that started with The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals in 2006 and continued with In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in 2008. Food Rules distills what he has learned into 64 rules. Here’s an edited version of a telephone interview with the author, a professor of science and environmental journalism at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California. Q: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” is a powerful, memorable statement that was in In Defense of Food and now Food Rules and sums up your food philosophy. What effect has it had? A: It has kind of entered the culture as a meme. I hear it all the time and see it on T-shirts. The idea was to make some very easy rules people would remember. The “mostly” (mostly plants) is controversial. It seems to annoy both carnivores and vegetarians. Q: Now you’ve given us Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual with 64 digestible points/rules/personal policies. Why? A: I did this because I was hearing from lots of medical professionals, doctors and parents that they would love to have something – a pamphlet, really – that pared things down to the essentials. I wanted to reduce the message and get it out to a lot of people who might not be ready or willing to read a whole book. I wanted to preach to beyond the choir. I spend a lot of time talking to upper-middle-class, affluent people, but talking to them about obesity and diabetes. I’m trying to reach a very broad audience. It’s meant to be user friendly, something where you can dive in anywhere and come back. Q: You’ve nailed one of the biggest food problems with the term “edible foodlike substances.” Did you coin this phrase? A: I think I did coin this phrase. I felt a big part of our problem is that we should eat “food” and a whole lot of things don’t deserve that designation. I felt I needed a counterpart to food to draw that distinction. I tried to be as value-neutral as I could. Q: Rule 17: Eat food cooked by humans, not corporations. Does anybody want to cook anymore? A: Yes and no. Many people feel they don’t have enough time to cook. Many people feel intimidated by cooking. Many do want to cook but are stymied by a lack or knowledge or equipment. I see inklings of a shift back to cooking, somewhat due to the economy. I think there are people rediscovering the kitchen right now. The more I look at this question, the collapse of cooking is a very big part of our problem all the way down to the farm. Q: Rule 28: Buy a freezer. What’s in yours? A: I have half a lamb in my freezer right now that was given to me by a farm around here – Full Belly Farm. So we’ve been gradually working on that. It’s in cuts, not a whole carcass. When we find a good source for grass-fed beef, we get assorted cuts of that, too. Q: Rule 46: Stop eating before you’re full and try to eat only to 67 to 80 per cent capacity. Easier said than done? A: Once you start paying attention to it, it’s just about being mindful. Yeah, for most North Americans it is hard. We’ve been sort of taught by the culture to eat until you’re stuffed. The French say: “Je n’ai plus faim” – I have no more hunger. Ask yourself, before you take that bite, is my hunger gone? Q: My 10 minutes are up but I have more questions, like, what have you eaten in the past 24 hours? A: Yesterday for lunch I had a little bit of yogurt with trail mix mixed in. For dinner we had brined, organic chicken served with whole grain couscous and oven-roasted brussels sprouts. This morning for breakfast I had steel cut oats and that’s as far as I’ve gotten today – it’s 11: 45 a.m. Q: That’s not very much food. A: I should say in the afternoon I was helping a chef friend prepare cassoulet and had some boudin blanc sausage. Oh, and I had an apple actually for dessert. Q: Are you done with writing about food? A: Um, no. I’m not. I have more to say. I want to write about cooking, and I want to learn how to cook better. I also have not written very much on the international food question – how you feed the world. Q: Rule 64: Break the rules once in a while. Which have you broken lately? A: Well you know I don’t really have trouble going along with these rules on an everyday basis. There’s not too much that I miss. I guess the “stop before you’re full.” I don’t have a big sweet tooth. I do have a fat tooth. Cheeses are a bigger weakness for me than pastries, but cheese is real food. French fries – that’s one rule that I break. I’m not cooking my own french fries. What should we have for dinner? This question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to the author, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. In Omnivore's Dilemma, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, he follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time he sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers he offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same. Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what he calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become. But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals. The author proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part. In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. His bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating. His last book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100709 ... jane Michael Pollan i am a foodie, for sure. and i can't necessarily afford to be one! but i do wish people thought more about the kinds of things they put in their body. one time, when i was particularly preoccupied with a health kick, i opted for a bag of trail mix as a snack instead of chips, and was appalled to see the amount of chemicals in the trail mix (and the chips had all natural ingredients). it's a very interesting subject. 100709 ... rt +3=115 jane! Question 103 One Sunday morning about two weeks ago, the phone rang. "My name is Irving." I didn't catch his last name. Shipolsky or something. "I live in Bayside, Queens and I'm 90 years old." Cool. Mazel tov! But...what's up? "I just called to tell you about the first time I rode the subway by myself." Ah -- got it! He'd tracked me down because I am The-Mom-Who-Let-Her 9-Year-Old Ride-the-Subway-Alone. Like Irving in Queens, you may have heard about me, too, thanks to the fact I've been on every TV show from Dr. Phil to Nightline to The View. (I love those ladies! Yes, even Elizabeth!) Or it could be because I've been lauded and/or lambasted in newspapers and magazines from Chile to China to Malta. (An island. Who's stalking the kids there? Dophins?) Or it could be you heard me on NPR one of the six or seven times they interviewed me about the topic. Or on the BBC. Or on the Today Show. Or Australian TV. Whatever. Suffice to say that last year, when I wrote a little column for the late, great New York Sun about letting my fourth-grader ride the subway solo from Bloomingdale's down to 34th Street and from there, to take a bus by himself to our apartment, it hit the proverbial "nerve." Then, last month, when my book came out, the nerve got hit again, which is why Irving wanted to talk. I wanted to listen. "You got time?" he asked. "Sure." "Well, I was 10 years old and I was going to my grandmother's house. It was for Hanukah. She lived in the Bronx. My mother made me take my little sister along, who was 8." I could hear the smile. "We got on the train and we stood in the front car so we could look out at the tracks. It was snowing..." Now here's a guy who has been married for 66 years. He has children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and even two great great grandchildren, which I wasn't sure was humanly possible. He fought in World War II. But one of the defining moments of his LIFE was that first time he did something "grown up" by himself. In 1929. So these past few weeks, when I've found myself on talk shows that attract callers who would like to personally tie me to the subway tracks (or tie my son, to teach me a lesson), Irving became my new touchstone. My whole point - lost on these lovely callers -- is not to deny that there is danger in the world. It's just to put that danger back in perspective so we can give our children exactly what Irving has treasured for eight solid decades: The chance to say: "I did it myself!" A chance we've started denying our kids. As parents, we all want to raise children who are self-confident and independent. And we all want them to be safe. What's happened in the past generation is that our fear for their safety has overwhelmed any old-fashioned notion of the benefits of letting them knock around and make their own fun. Even make their own mistakes. I don't blame us parents for feeling so scared. I blame the things that got us to this point: *A litigious society that has trained us to consider every situation in light of, "What if?" and dream up worst-case scenarios. *A kiddie safety industry that keeps warning us about remote childhood dangers so we'll run and buy their products, from baby knee pads to toddler helmets. (Yes, for real: helmets your child is supposed to wear to protect his brain while learning to walk. As if evolution hadn't already come up with that whole "skull" thing.) *A legion of parenting magazines and advice books eager to point out the hideous and lasting effects of giving our kids the wrong food, book, toy, feedback, praise, discipline, hug, class, or rattle, so we'll buy their words of wisdom (that worry us even more). *I even blame Sesame Street. Because if you go get the collector's DVD, "Sesame Street: Old School," featuring highlights from 1969-1974, all you'll see are delightful scenes of kids playing follow-the-leader and tag and such without any grown-ups around. And even though this show was created to model the IDEAL safe, happy childhood as envisioned by a battery of psychologists and educators, this nostalgia-fest comes with the warning: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups." Like a porno movie! The wimps at PBS refuse to sanction any notion that kids can play on their own anymore. So now it's modeling the NEW norm: Constant parental supervision. But ball-less as Big Bird has become, I blame our parental fears on the other channels even more. Not PBS -- CBS and the rest, including, of course, cable TV. Consider that when our parents were raising us, they were watching Dallas, or Dynasty, or even Marcus Welby, MD. His patients usually lived. Today's parents are watching CSI. Not only does almost everyone except Gary Sinese end up covered with maggots, a Mayo Clinic study comparing two seasons' worth of crimes on CSI to two seasons' worth of crimes in real life found that CSI (and by extension, most TV crime dramas) totally misrepresents what's really going on in America. On TV, the majority of crimes are committed by strangers who, be they brilliant psychopaths or just plain creeps, pick their victims at random. In a world like that, it would be crazy to let your children out of your sight because they're being plucked, every weeknight, like daisies. But in reality, most criminals do not hide in the bushes outside school. They know their victims. Often, they live with them. And rather than being fiendishly clever, a lot of them are just drunk (so said the Mayo Clinic, too). So the idea that kids are being snatched right and left by lurking pedophiles is wrong. As is our perception of the crime rate. Since its peak in the early '90s, the crime level has plummeted by about 50%. Nationally, crimes against kids and adults are back to the levels of 1970. Here in New York, they're back to the levels of about 1963. So if you were growing up and playing outside in the '70s or '80s, your children are actually safer than you were. It doesn't feel that way because when you go to CNN.com, there's another wide-eyed child staring out at you - a cold case they'll plaster on the screen if it's a slow news day (i.e., a day when no white girls were abducted). Leave CNN and you're back to CSI, or Law & Order SVU, where it's the same story, served up with a bow of duct tape. So our brains are filled to overflowing with terrible stories and heartbreaking pictures, and scary advice and hysterical products, all very much out of whack with the fact it's a great time to be a kid, especially in New York City. That's why it was so nice to hear from Irving. Irving not only remembers what life was like before this fear set in, his first foray into adventure has become a part of his very soul. He shared it with me because it made him who he is. I share it with you because our kids deserve no less. They don't have to ride the subway by themselves. They could shop for groceries, or make dinner. They could pick a sibling up from school or spend Wednesday afternoons in the park, without a coach, a uniform and a guaranteed trophy. They deserve a chance to fall and fail and get themselves back up again and come home shouting those magic words: "I DID IT MYSELF!" And 80 years later, give or take, they'll thank you. (This article is written by the author and appeared in Huffington Post) For three points, name the author, her book the article was based on, and give a personal response... 100710 ... lostgirl Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) by Lenore Skenazy oh my....my mother's philosophy was always to raise confident able children. i recall walking to first grade seven blocks beyond her site....nowadays the bus picks the kids up within eyesight of the house. sure, times are different now, and the world can be scary. but kids still need to learn some ways to navigate it. i just took a beating from my mother in law for sending my son across the country on a plane by himself. what if someone kidnaps him...or he misses his plane.....or,or,or.....but i can already tell he is a different kid because of it. i may not go as far as the author does with raising a free range kid, but i love the idea here....thanks for the recommendation. 100710 ... rt +3=176 lostgirl! (or is it yodeler goat skipper?) Question 104 People tend to stare at this author. He's cute, fit, funny and a champion skier. But he knows the stares are usually inspired by something else. He was born without legs, though that has hardly slowed him down. In fact it drove him to become a raging competitor, both in sports and in life. His book, out now in paperback, is a memoir built around some of the photos he has taken around the world — portraits of the people he catches staring at him. He thinks it began in Vienna, not long after he left the relative cocoon of his Montana hometown for a trip that took him to New Zealand and through Europe. "I was more or less having to confront the reactions," he tells NPR's Scott Simon. "I think the first photo, the first snapshot, came from a more or less cathartic or combative stance." He decided that if people were going to stare — "I think in the book I mention a group of teens taking a cellphone picture of me," he says wryly — he had a kind of right to turn such an encounter "into an exchange." "To fire back with the lens," is how he puts it. A 'Butt Boot' With A Birkenstock Tread Connolly was born in Helena in 1985. His condition is the result of bilateral amelia, a birth defect that prevented his femurs from growing into his hip sockets. He quickly adapted as a child by walking on his hands. There was one problem with this method: "Since I was running on my hands, my parents would be saving all this money on shoes," he recalls, "but I'd burn out a half-dozen pairs of pants in a weekend" because they'd be dragged along the ground. His father solved the problem by designing a contraption he calls the "butt boot." Originally, he says, "It was just a pair of leather pants held up by bright red suspenders." As he got older, the device got a little more complicated: "We started adding in plastic inserts, and we gave it a sole, and it actually has a Birkenstock tread on it now. So we've even gotten a little style added to this device." Clearly, his father had a gift for invention — inspired in no small part by a certain crafty TV character. He remembers watching MacGyver with his father, who'd tell his son to pay close attention whenever the shrewd secret agent built something extraordinary out of ordinary objects. His father helped him in another unorthodox way. He says that his father sports a big mustache and long, grey hair — "kind of like Sam Elliott did" — and that he decided on this look because he wanted to draw attention away from his son. "I think his train of logic was, 'I think if I look a little weirder than him, maybe they'll stare at me a bit more instead,'" He xplains. One Instinct To Stare, Many Assumptions About What We See People often do more than just stare at him. As he was traveling around the world, taking the pictures that would end up in this book, the author encountered any number of different reactions. "When I set down the camera, people would sometimes give me money," he says. "People would bless me." Most commonly, though — especially in English-speaking countries — strangers would ask him what had happened to him. Some would guess. And the realization that informs both the book and a Web-based photo project he calls The Rolling Exhibition was this: While the instinct to look is the same everywhere, the guesses about the backstory behind his appearance varied depending on the place. "Like, one kid in New Zealand" — where there are lots of surfers and lots of great whites — "asked his mom very loudly at the checkout counter if I'd been eaten by a shark," He recalls. Back home in the U.S., "in my hometown of Helena, I had one guy in a pub ask me if I still wore my dog tags from Iraq." The reactions that he encountered in Sarajevo, though, were more powerful for him than most. As he traveled through the city, he saw people with missing limbs — people who had lost their legs or arms to mortars or mines or shrapnel in the Balkan conflicts of the early '90s. Before publishing his memoir, he narrated an audio slideshow for 'The Bryant Park Project' in 2008: 'I Just Happened To Get Lucky' "And I was just at the right age where it would be very easy to assume that I [had been] a little kid running where he shouldn't have been," He says. "And so on top of people coming up to me and giving me money, sometimes handing me food, I had people actually apologizing to me. Or assuming that I was part of this." It jarred him. It left him off guard — to the point that one day, in the Turkish quarter of the city, he found himself on the wrong end of the stare. "I saw this guy; he was missing, I think it was his left arm and his right leg. And I sat there eyeballing him and really thinking, 'What happened to this guy? Why'd he find himself in this position?'" he remembers. "I was doing exactly the same thing that so many other people had been doing to me, both in the city and around the world," he says. "And it really struck home, because I felt especially there, regardless of my choosing to do so, I was bringing up a lot of bad memories or bad stories for people around the city — history that they maybe didn't want to be constantly inundated with." The experience deeply affected him. In the book, he even says that Sarajevo made him think about giving up on his project. An Inheritance Of Invention (And Persistence) Quitting, it turns out, isn't in his DNA. A silver medalist at the 2006 Winter X-Games, he's still competing — he filed a long blog post in February about his run at the 2010 games, and posted YouTube footage of himself in action — shot from a camera on the tip of his ski. And like his dad, he seems to be something of a tinkerer: One current project is an ingenious set of "jumping crutches" designed to help him navigate stairs, rocky terrain and other inhospitable turf. For the moment, he gets around mostly via skateboard. "All the parts to it are replaceable," he says, and it's more compact than a wheelchair. Of course, those aren't the only reasons he favors his particular mode of transporation. Riding one, he says, is also "really fast — and phenomenally fun." An excerpt from the book... Birth Day "You were an exclamation point on a really tough couple of years," is what my mom says about my birth. I am calling my mother from my apartment in Bozeman, to ask her about something I've always wanted to know but have been a little reluctant to delve into. Up until now, I'd always avoided asking too much about the time directly following my birth for fear that it might bring back feelings neither of us wanted to deal with again. But first we must have the obligatory talk about Montana's mercurial spring weather. After a week of blizzards and deliriously frigid temperatures, the cold had let up long enough for the snow to turn into a brown goulash of dirt and ice. It's the time of year when most people become homebodies, seeking anything that is warm and dry. Except, as Mom quickly tells me, a good portion of our home is now submerged in water. Earlier in the day, a pipe had sprung a leak and had emptied gallons into the kitchen, soaking through the floorboards and down into the basement. "The kitchen is totally flooded. The whole floor is going to have to be replaced." She sighs, then laughs. "Oh well. Been through worse." I imagine the kitchen, swollen and bloated, weeping out the old mold and dust of our family's history. I know that Mom and Dad will patch it back together themselves, and Dad confirms my speculation by yelling over Mom that he's going to the hardware store later. He's already had a couple of beers, by the sound of his laugh. My parents don't have much money; they never did. There is a picture in the entryway that shows our house in the state that my parents first purchased it. Weeds that came up to my head (three feet, one inch, incidentally) made up the front yard and lined a dirt ditch, driveway, and road. The ranch house five miles outside Helena cost $2,000; in 1984, it was what they could afford. They purchased the house a year before I was born, in the midst of a run of family disasters. Mom's sister, Mickey, had been diagnosed with brain cancer; by the time of my mom's pregnancy, she had become terminally ill. A single mother with four kids, she asked my mom to take custody of her children. She died in March when Mom was four months pregnant with me. Even before Mickey passed away, Mom had started attending court hearings to decide who was to get custody of her children: my parents or Mickey's ex-husband. As my mom's stomach grew, so did the question of whether she would be caring for one child or five. As Mom split her time between court and visits to her sister in the nursing home, her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Shortly thereafter, her mother was diagnosed with skin cancer. It seemed impossible to have this much bad luck all at once. Recalling all this, Mom pauses for a moment. I imagine her sitting in the living room with blue carpet under her feet. The smell of water and rotting wood emanating from the kitchen. The sound of Dad's television upstairs. Our golden retriever, Tuck, in the entryway. Frost on the windows and the dim light of sixty-watt bulbs filling the interior. Lining up her thoughts before letting them all out in one rushed breath. I finally hear her exhale, slowly. "There were two sides to this stretch of time. My personality is pretty resilient, but there was so much going on: my mom and dad getting cancer, Mickey dying, fighting for her kids…it was hard not to get down. The one positive in all of this was my pregnancy. We'd been married for three years, and your dad and I really wanted a baby. So we were leaning pretty heavily on the excitement of having our first kid." I listen on the other end of the line, knowing how the story ends, thinking about the crisis my birth must have been. The final surprise began on August 17 around six in the morning. Sleeping in their old waterbed, my mom woke up in a puddle, her nightgown drenched. "Brian, I think the bed broke!" she cried, shaking him awake. "Marie, I don't think it's the bed." Two weeks before I was due, Mom's water had broken. An hour later, they were at the local hospital. Their doctor was on vacation, and Mom's parents were in Utah for cancer treatment. After twelve hours, Mom was still waiting for her first contractions, so the doctors decided to try to induce the birth. Loaded up on Pitocin, a drug that jump-started a series of painful contractions, Mom went into hard labor around seven that night. Three hours later, I still hadn't come out, and Dad began to get excited. "Hold on! A couple more hours and you can have him on your birthday!" Indeed, the hours inched along, and Mom's labor continued past the midnight mark. On August 18, I was born. She turned twenty-eight; I turned zero. I don't really like this bit. It's awkward asking my mom what those first few moments of having a legless kid were like. She must have wondered what kind of life her child would have. I can hear the tension in her voice as she tiptoes around the answer. "Kevin, you were an exclamation point on a really tough couple of years." The rest of the phone conversation comes between pauses, white noise between the sighed-out details. "I could tell from the look on the nurses' faces that something was wrong. I hadn't heard you cry. So I started asking, 'Is he crying? Is everything okay?'" "The doctor looked over at me and said, 'He doesn't have any legs.' I told him, 'That's not very funny.' He said, 'I'm not joking.'" Silence, as she collects her thoughts. "The doctors handed you over after that. You were pretty tightly swaddled up in these white hospital blankets. The first thing I did was pull the end of the blanket out so that you looked long enough. "It was a long process of us becoming comfortable with who you were." I don't think that I would know what to do if I were to become the father of someone with a disability. At the very least, I'd probably be ashamed and disappointed. Knowing that I'd react this way makes me feel guilty for what my parents had to go through. I'm not as strong as my parents, I think to myself. Mom pulls me out of the spiral. "I remember asking if stress could've caused … this. The doctor smiled at me. 'If stress caused it, there'd be babies without legs all over the place.' "After that, I can't remember what we asked out loud and what we thought inside." It all boiled down to one basic question, though: What could we have done to have caused this? My parents felt that there had to be an explanation; something like this couldn't just happen for no reason. In a way, knowing that a certain drug had been misused, or that there was a problem during my birth, would have been more comforting. At least then, this accident would have a cause. The doctors sent off the placenta for testing. A panel in another state found the pregnancy to be normal and the placenta to be healthy. Mom didn't take or do anything she shouldn't have. Dad raced home to ring his parents in Connecticut. They originally weren't going to come out for my birth, But once the information reached them about my lack of legs, Grandma and Grandpa hopped the next flight to Montana. My dad's parents met my mom's at the airport the next day. Already aware of the gravity of the situation, my grandma asked in a solemn tone: "So … how are things?" My mom's father laughed. "Everything's fine as long as you don't sling him over your shoulder, 'cause there's nothing to grab." While the concern, apprehension, and fear were real, a bit of black humor helped to loosen the knot of tension. Everyone had his or her own crack. The doctors: "He'll never be a professional basketball player, but that probably wasn't going to happen anyway." My dad: "Hell of a birthday present." Twenty-three years later, even I chime in: "After all that labor? Must've been like climbing forty flights of stairs for half a chocolate bar." Soon after the tests returned, I was given a label. "The doctors said it was bilateral amelia. And I asked what that meant," Mom said. It basically means "no limbs." It's pretty simple. "Treat him like a normal guy, and he'll have a normal life," the doctor told her. Except "normal life" couldn't really begin yet, since the hospital held me for a week while I was placed under bright lights and tested to see what else could possibly be wrong. To top it off, only my mom and dad were able to hold me — an activity that I'm told grandparents prize highly. Needless to say, the four grandpas and grandmas were getting pretty impatient. The doctors didn't budge or give an inkling as to how long they expected to keep me in the hospital. Finally, Dad had had enough. There was a house and a sock drawer retrofitted into a crib with my name on it. "This shit isn't happening anymore," Dad said. "I'm taking him home." "Well, you can't. The medical proce—" "I don't give a damn. I'm taking him home. You can figure out the rest." Excerpted by permission of HarperStudio. Review adapted from NPR. For three points, name the author, his memoir, and give a personal response... 100710 ... lostgirl Double Take: A Memoir by Kevin Michael Connolly long live the butt boot..... i will definitely read this. he will never experience jelly legs, but he gets it all the same. 100710 ... rt +3=179 lostgirl! 100711 ... rt Question 105 The first punctuation mistake in this book by the author, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. The book presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax. The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by the author, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’ ”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.” Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: “I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).” Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as “Luke, xxiii, 43” and another, a page later, as “Isaiah xl, 3.” The word “abuzz” is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’ ”) A line from “My Fair Lady” is misquoted (“The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning”). And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.” Then, there is the translation problem. For some reason, the folks at Gotham Books elected not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers. As the author herself notes, some conventions of British usage employed in the book are taboo in the United States—for example, the placement of commas and periods outside quotation marks, “like this”. The book also omits the serial comma, as in the title of the book which is acceptable in the United States only in newspapers and commercial magazines. The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of her departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about her writing is its inconsistency. Either she needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Still, the book has been a No. 1 best-seller in both England and the United States. "I am not a grammarian,” She says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, she is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses—that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf. And she admits that her editors are continually removing the commas that she tends to place before conjunctions. Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation? The author, a former sports columnist for the London Times, appears to have been set a-blaze by two obsessions: superfluous apostrophes in commercial signage (“Potatoe’s” and that sort of thing) and the elision of punctuation, along with uppercase letters, in e-mail messages. Are these portents of the night, soon coming, in which no man can read? She warns us that they are—“If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago”—but it’s hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can’t always separate the sense from the sensibility. And that, undoubtedly, is the point, for it is the sensibility, the “I’m mad as hell” act, that has got her her readers. A characteristic passage: For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker. Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that “language is always evolving,” or some other slice of liberal pie. They don’t even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. She is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place. Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, she doesn’t want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. Her book is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). She has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships—the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words. What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. When deli owners put up signs that read “ ‘Iced’ Tea,” the single quotation marks are intended to add extraliterary significance to the message, as if they were the grammatical equivalent of red ink. She is quite clear about the role played by punctuation in making words mean something. But she also—it is part of her general inconsistency—suggests that semicolons, for example, signal readers to pause. She likes to animate her punctuation marks, to talk about the apostrophe and the dash as though they were little cartoon characters livening up the page. She is anthropomorphizing a technology. It’s a natural thing to do. As she points out, in earlier times punctuation did a lot more work than it does today, and some of the work involved adjusting the timing in sentences. But this is no longer the norm, and trying to punctuate in that spirit now only makes for ambiguity and annoyance. One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t. When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences. Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation. The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony. The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece; some write one draft, at the pace of a snail after a night on the town. But chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as “like speech” are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right—so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed. Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunny person who is a humorous writer does not think, of her work, “That’s not really me.” Critics speak of “the persona,” a device for compelling, in the interests of licensing the interpretative impulse, a divorce between author and text. But no one, or almost no one, writes “as a persona.” People write as people, and if there were nothing personal about the result few human beings would try to manufacture it for a living. Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer’s control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice. A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don’t have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That’s how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural. What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage. (Adapted from a review in The New Yorker) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100711 ... lostgirl   EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss an obsession for punctuation?! a deadpan humorous look at the importance of the proper use of commas and such....dig it                       100711 ... rt +3=182 lostgirl! Question 106 "I was raised among books," writes Daniel Sempere, "making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day." Young Daniel's father runs a used bookstore in Barcelona; his mother died when he was 4, and he misses her desperately. One afternoon in 1945 the older Sempere informs his not quite 11-year-old son that he is taking him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. "You mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today." They wander through narrow winding streets, then finally stop before "a large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Before us loomed what to my eyes seemed the carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows." Inside "a labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry." Daniel's father tells him that "according to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive." Daniel chooses -- or perhaps is chosen by -- "The Shadow of the Wind," by Julian Carax. Daniel loses himself in the book -- we are never told too much about its gothic-thriller plot -- and soon asks for other works by Carax, who seems to have been a Spaniard living in Paris during the 1920s and '30s. He learns that his works are virtually impossible to find. Rumor has it that over the past 10 years or so a dark figure with a limp has bought up every Carax available, and that libraries and private collections have had their Carax titles stolen. It's hinted that all the copies -- never plentiful to begin with -- have been burnt and that the man with the limp goes by the name of Lain Coubert. Daniel knows this name. In "The Shadow of the Wind" it is the one used by the devil. About this same time, our young bibliophile comes to know a well-to-do bookseller and his gorgeous blind niece, who dresses all in white. The boy takes to visiting Clara in the evenings to read to her, naturally falling in love with the young woman. Meanwhile, he keeps trying to find out more about Julian Carax. Time passes. Then, one night, the now adolescent Daniel is unable to sleep, and he looks out into the night. "A motionless figure stood out in a patch of shadow on the cobbled street. The flickering amber glow of a cigarette was reflected in his eyes. He wore dark clothes, with one hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, the other holding the cigarette that wove a web of blue smoke around his profile. He observed me silently, his face obscured by the street lighting behind him. He remained there for almost a minute smoking nonchalantly, his eyes fixed on mine. Then, when the cathedral bells struck midnight, the figure gave a faint nod of the head, followed, I sensed, by a smile that I could not see. I wanted to return the greeting but was paralyzed. The figure turned, and I saw the man walking away, with a slight limp." This passage occurs on page 37, and the real story of The Shadow of the Wind has just begun. Gradually, Daniel learns that Carax was born in Barcelona, the son of a beautiful French piano teacher and the owner of a local hat shop. It's said that someone other than Antoni Fortuny was Julian's actual father but that Sophie Carax, even when beaten and abused, would never reveal his identity. When Julian grew to adolescence, he joined a group of four other boys -- one later becoming a priest, another a cold-blooded government assassin, another the financier of his books. He also fell desperately in love with the fourth boy's sister, Penelope. Meanwhile, the reader notices that Daniel himself -- now 18 or 19 -- is oddly replicating the life of Julian. As he delves into Carax's past, he meets people who casually mention that he looks a little like the novelist. Daniel eventually discovers that Carax fled Paris after a duel on the day he was to marry a wealthy and elderly woman. His body was found in an alley in Barcelona a month later, just as the Civil War broke out. Virtually all those who befriended Carax appear to have ended up impoverished, crazed or dead. The house of his beloved Penelope has been long abandoned and is said to be haunted. As the reader tries to figure out the links between modern Spanish history, two passionate and forbidden love affairs and an enigmatic novelist, the author periodically lessens the tension of his dark melodrama by introducing humorous interludes or eccentric secondary characters. The Semperes give work to a beggar who claims to have been a secret agent and many other things. Fermin is worldly, tough, shrewd, utterly loyal and bawdy: "For the life of God, I hereby swear that I have never lain with an underage woman, and not for lack of inclination or opportunities. Bear in mind that what you see today is but a shadow of my former self, but there was a time when I cut as dashing a figure as they come. Yet even then, just to be on the safe side, or if I sensed that a girl might be overly flighty, I would not proceed without seeing some form of identification or, failing that, a written paternal authorization. One has to maintain certain moral standards." The author -- at least in the fine English of Lucia Graves -- can also turn a witty phrase: Describing a learned priest, he writes, "Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to." Some of the wit -- or is it symbolism? -- can be subtle: When Fermin happens to mention the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on one page, on the next he is knocking over a set of the novels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose best known book is the once wildly popular bestseller The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Not least, like his partial model Sancho Panza, Fermin also specializes in peasant wisdom: "Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it." And so, in a sense, Daniel does go for it, plunging deeper and deeper into the enigma of Julian Carax and his accursed books, and along the way risking the lives and happiness of all those he loves. It grows ever more apparent that much that has seemed random or mad or unlucky -- the burning of Carax's novels, sudden disappearances, the blighting of so many lives -- may be part of a larger insidious plan, that there are wheels within wheels. I'd like to say more about this superbly entertaining book but don't dare to hint any more about its plot twists. Suffice it to say that -- and here's yet another critical formula -- anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up this novel. Really, you should. (Adapted from a Washington Post review) For three points, name the author, his book which has been translated into 35 languages, and give a personal response... 100711 ... rt "The Shadow of the Wind" by Calos Ruiz Zafon Question 107This author began writing about movies for The New Yorker in 1967. She was not a “discovery.” She was forty-eight years old, and she had already written for just about every well-known magazine in America but The New Yorker, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Holiday, Vogue, Life, and McCall‘s. Before coming to New York in the mid-Sixties, she had made weekly radio broadcasts about movies on KPFA in San Francisco; she had been contributing regularly to journals like Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound since 1954; and a collection of her pieces, I Lost It at the Movies, had come out in 1965 and become a best seller. Mr. Shawn was not taking a gamble on a rookie. In 1967 The New Yorker was the most successful magazine in America. It owed its prosperity to a formula that can no longer be duplicated: it was a general-interest commercial magazine for people who disliked commercialism and who rarely subscribed to general-interest magazines—a magazine, essentially, for people who didn’t buy magazines. For in the Fifties and Sixties, a literate and unstuffy anti-commercialism was still a cherished ingredient of upper-middle-class taste, and by catering to it, The New Yorker was able to deliver to advertisers several hundred thousand well-educated and affluent people who could be reached through practically no other medium. It did so with an editorial product rigorously manufactured to avoid any semblance of the sensational, the prurient, or the merely topical—any semblance, that is, of the things educated people could be assumed to associate with the commercial press or television. It also avoided, less famously but with equal diligence, anything that hinted at cultural pretension. And this policy, too, was based on a genuine insight into the psychology of its audience. For New Yorker readers, though proud of their education and their taste, were intellectually insecure. They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them. They were intelligent people who were nevertheless extremely wary of being out-browed. The New Yorker was enormously attentive to this insecurity. It pruned from its pieces anything that might come across as allusive or knowing, and it promoted, in its writing and cartoons, a sensibility that took urbanity to be perfectly compatible with a certain kind of naiveté. The New Yorker made it possible to feel that being an anti-sophisticate was the mark of true sophistication, and that any culture worth having could be had without special aesthetic equipment or intellectual gymnastics. This author made it possible for people to feel this way about the movies, and although that sounds like a modest accomplishment, it was not. It required disarming both phobias in the sensibility The New Yorker had so successfully identified: the fear of too low, and the fear of too high. It meant overcoming the intelligent person’s resistance to the pulpiness, the corniness, and the general moral and aesthetic schmaltz of Hollywood movies, but without refining those things away by some type of critical alchemy. The New Yorker‘s readers did not want an invitation to slum, but they didn’t want to be told that appreciating movies was something that called for a command of “the grammar of film,” either. They needed to believe that it was possible to enjoy the movies without becoming either of the two things New Yorker readers would sooner have died than be taken for: idiots or snobs. This was precisely the approach to movies she had devoted her pre-New Yorker career to perfecting. She heaped scorn on the moguls, and she heaped scorn on the cinéastes. She joined the magazine at the moment the movies seemed to many people suddenly to have caught up with the rest of American culture: her second piece was a seven-thousand-word defense of Bonnie and Clyde. She kept the attention of the magazine’s readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them. And she continued to keep it well after the movies ceased being important in most of those readers’ lives. By the time she retired, in 1991, The New Yorker‘s traditional readership had lost its cohesion as a distinctive taste-group, and the type of movies she had made her name by championing had nearly vanished, too. But she had produced a generation of epigoni, and although the moment for it has long since passed, the manner of appreciation she invented has become the standard manner of popular culture criticism in America. Her latest book is a greatest-hits package drawn entirely from previously published collections of her work. She estimates, in the introduction, that the book represents about a fifth of her total output. Reviews naturally make up most of it, but some of her retrospective appreciations and most of her occasional “state of the movies” essays are included. She has also reprinted her slightly swoony piece about Cary Grant, “The Man from Dream City” (1975), and her long essay on the making of Citizen Kane, “Raising Kane” (1971), which is easily the finest piece of writing she ever did. It is not, however, the most famous piece of writing she ever did. There are three candidates for that prize: her enthusiastic review of Last Tango in Paris (1972); her unenthusiastic review of Shoah (1985), which Shawn initially balked at publishing; and her attack on auteur theory, “Circles and Squares” (1963), which won her the undying (or, at any rate, undead) enmity of its chief punching bag, the film critic Andrew Sarris. Only the first of these appears in this book, which suggests that the idea was to create a history of what mattered in the movies, rather than a history of what mattered in her career. The result, of course, is a history of what mattered to her, and although a volume of almost thirteen hundred pages is possibly not the most convenient way to get it, such a thing is certainly interesting to have. The simplest way to put it is to say that the author in her youth fell in love with two completely different kinds of movies, and then awoke in middle age to find them miraculously reborn together on a single screen. Her first infatuation was with the Hollywood genre movies of the Thirties: newspaper pictures like The Front Page (1931), comedies like Million Dollar Legs (1932) and Duck Soup (1933), and, especially, the screwballs, which began appearing in 1934—”the year,” as she put it in the Cary Grant essay, “when The Thin Man and Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night changed American movies.” It was also the year she turned fifteen. She thought these were great movies, but it was not “as movies” that she admired them. She did not esteem them for their realization of the possibilities of cinematic form. She esteemed them for their indifference to the possibilities of cinematic form, and in particular for the death blow they delivered to the high-minded sentimentality—what she described as the “calendar-art guck”—of the silent tradition. The silents, she thought, had encouraged a kind of “dream aesthetic,” which associated film with the movements of the subconscious, and led to the production of a lot of misty allegories about “purity” and “morality.” When characters started speaking, the mists went away, and so did the purity and morality. “The talkies,” as she once put it, “were a great step down.” Two things, in her view, made those Thirties movies go: the writing and the acting. The essay on Citizen Kane is usually remembered as an attack on Orson Welles and the cult of the director—in effect, a sequel to “Circles and Squares.” But the point of the essay is that the reason it is wrong to talk about Citizen Kane as a bolt from cinema heaven is not that Welles was not really a genius; she thought he really was a genius. It is that Citizen Kane (released in 1941) was the crowning achievement of Thirties movie-making, the capstone of the tradition The Front Page had started. It was, she thought, simply “the biggest newspaper picture of them all.” What made it great was the script—by Herman J.Mankiewicz, who had been involved, as a writer or producer, in many of the movies she loved, including Million Dollar Legs and Duck Soup—and the acting. Charles Foster Kane was the one role in his career in which Welles was perfectly cast; for Welles was a sort of Kane himself, a theatrical monstre sacré, a boy wonder and a mounte-bank. Welles, according to her, may have stolen half the writing credit from Mankiewicz; but Mankiewicz showed Welles naked to the world. Then the parade ended. The commercial failure of Citizen Kane—the critics acclaimed it, but the industry, intimidated by the other real-life Kane, William Randolph Hearst, failed to stand behind it—drove Welles into the movie wilderness. And it marked, she believed, the demise of the supremely smart but supremely accessible Hollywood entertainments of the Thirties. Except in odd corners of the business, such as the comedies of Preston Sturges, irreverence disappeared from the screen. The movies fell into the hands of self-righteous, fellow-traveling hacks: earnestness was prized above wit, and politically correct mediocrity was promoted over talent. “Morality” was back in the saddle. It remained there for twenty-five years. She had a second infatuation, though, and it was with a kind of movie that had nothing generic about it, a kind of movie in which the director was the star. This was the European realist tradition, above all the early movies of Jean Renoir—Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), La Grande Illusion (1937), and The Rules of the Game (1939)—but also the work of the Italian neo-realists, like Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Vitorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Miracle in Milan (1951), and of Max Ophuls, particularly The Earrings of Madame De… (1953), a movie she called “perfection.” The technical term for the quality these movies share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left, at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution. When she arrived at The New Yorker, these were her touchstones—Cary Grant and Carole Lombard, Rossellini and Renoir. It was a canon exceptional less for what it included than for what it left out. Her taste for genre pictures, for instance, was not indiscriminate. She had a distant respect for the early westerns of John Ford, like Stagecoach (1939), because they handled popular iconography in a classical spirit; but she hated High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) for their moralism and their mythic fakery, and she rarely passed up an occasion to say so. She had no special enthusiasm, either, for film noir, a genre barely mentioned in this book or for other low-rent forms, like horror and science fiction. Her line about Frank Capra is famous: “No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can,” she said of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), “but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.” She dismissed most of Hollywood’s postwar efforts at serious moral drama, like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), as embarrassing imitations of European art films. She regarded The Red Shoes (1948) as kitsch on stilts. She considered Fellini pretentious and overrated, and Bergman a “northern Fellini.” And for the high-end imports reverentially mulled over by cinéastes in the early Sixties—Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Red Desert (1964)—she had pure contempt. She called them “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties,” and she considered them prime specimens of the Philistinism of anti-Philistinism, intellectual clichés to which repetition and obscurity had given the illusion of profundity. There were two imports, however, which she did admire: Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). She was drawn to them because they were, in effect, the sum of the two types of movies that had captured her heart in the Thirties. They were genre pictures whose forms had been imaginatively opened up: pulp plus poetry. So that when Bonnie and Clyde, directed by an American disciple of Godard and Truffaut, Arthur Penn, appeared in 1967, it was as though a dream she had been having for twenty-five years had come to life. Bonnie and Clyde announced, for her, a Hollywood New Wave. It was a movement that lasted a decade, and produced a series of stylish entertainments people could care about without feeling gullible or pedantic. The first two Godfather movies (1972 and 1974) define the type as it existed in her mind: straight gangster pictures, but with the visual and moral depth of field of Renoir. In the Seventies she consequently became, despite her disparagement of auteur theory, a devotee of directors. Her favorites—Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Jonathan Demme, Paul Mazursky, Steven Spielberg—were artists of the popular. They loved, without condescension, exactly what the audience loved, and went to the movies to see: pursuit and capture, sex and violence, love and death. They loved the story. Spielberg won her over, in his first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), by his orchestration of one of the most mundane staples of Seventies movicmaking, a car chase, which she described in her review as though it had been a masked ball shot by Ophuls: He patterns them; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. He handles enormous configurations of vehicles; sometimes they move so sweetly you think he must be wooing them. These sequences are as unforced and effortless-looking as if the cars themselves—mesmerized—had just waltzed into their idiot formations. and so on. Even the most authorial of her auteurs, Bertolucci, showed his understanding of big-screen aesthetics in his casting: Trintignant, Sanda, Brando, De Niro, Lancaster, Depardieu. People go for the faces. The reverse side of Kael’s taste for cleverness was her distaste for cynicism. She disliked most of Stanley Kubrick’s movies because she thought they were unfeeling and aloof; she disliked most of John Cassavetes’s because she felt that they showed contempt for the audience’s desire to be entertained. She disliked The Graduate because it seemed to her patently manipulative while pretending to be original and sincere; and she disliked the Dirty Harry movies because they exploited the visceral appeal of blood. She despised any film maker who assumed that because a thing is popular it must also be cheap, or that an audience drawn to sex or violence deserves to have its nose rubbed in it. This standard is the nub of the problem with her critical judgment. For the more powerful the movie, the trickier the distinction between cleverness and cynicism becomes. It’s not just that there is an element of cold-bloodedness calculation in all successful entertainment; she was the last person to have disputed that. It’s that the cold-bloodedness in some of the movies she championed can sometimes seem a little more genuine than the entertainment. Barbara Harris’s pathetic anthem in the final scene of Nashville, the protracted slow-motion of the pig’s-blood sequence in DePalma’s Carrie, Brando sticking his chewing gum under the railing at the end of Last Tango in Paris: these are scenes that seem to have been created not so much to rip away the last veil of our innocence as to gratify the director’s desire to have the last laugh on humanity. She didn’t defend moments like these in the movies she admired. She just read them differently. She knew perfectly well that De Palma enjoyed being manipulative, but she found his movies playful and witty, rather than smarmy and cynical, just as she found Nashville generous and funny, rather than patronizing and dyspeptic. She sensed pathos where less partisan or less enraptured viewers sensed satire and even disgust. She wasn’t interested in satire and disgust. She was a romantic. Between 1967 and 1978, the American film industry turned out Bonnie and Clyde, written by Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty; Shampoo, produced by Beatty and written by Robert Towne; Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, written by Towne; Coppola’s first two Godfather movies and The Conversation; George Lucas’s American Graffiti, produced by Coppola; Altman’s M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville; Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs; Scorsese’s Mean Streets, which he wrote, and Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader; Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he wrote; Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which he wrote with Marshall Brickman; Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, written by him; Midnight Cowboy; The Graduate; Five Easy Pieces; The Outlaw Josey Wales; Easy Rider; The Last Picture Show; and The Deer Hunter. She did not admire all these movies; she panned a few. But she responded intensely to most of them (she divided her column during those years with Penelope Gilliatt), and she shared the sense many of her readers had that these were movies that somehow cut to the bone of the American experience. She was old enough to appreciate the serendipity of the phenomenon, and she assumed the role of its grand interpreter. She was the Hollywood Dr. Johnson. Then, in 1978, she went there. She was invited by Warren Beatty, who wanted her help with a movie he was producing. That project fell through, and she became a story consultant at Paramount instead. After six months, she was back at the magazine. She denied it in interviews, but the sight of Hollywood from the inside seems to have turned her stomach; and in 1980, she published a jeremiad called “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers,” which blamed everything on the money. Well, it usually is the money. That happens to be the flag commercial culture salutes. But whether it was because material conditions really had changed, as her essay claimed, or because Hollywood’s imaginative juices had somehow dried up, or simply because the major screen breakthroughs had all been accomplished, by the end of the Seventies the connection between enjoying a movie and feeling a shock of recognition, a connection that had come to seem almost automatic in the decade before, was severed. It might have been adolescent to have walked out of Shampoo or Five Easy Pieces or Mean Streets feeling that you must change your life, but not even adolescents walked out of Beverly Hills Cop or The Empire Strikes Back or Batman feeling that way. They were happy to feel they had gotten back the price of the ticket. She responded to this decline in the cultural authority of the movies in a peculiar way. She began to overpraise. Hyperbolic abandon had always been the virtual signature of her style. The stakes could never be too high. She equated Nashville and the second Godfather with Melville and Whitman; she equated the opening night of Last Tango in Paris with the opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps. “There are parts of Jaws,” she wrote in 1976, “that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach.” And when she didn’t like a movie, she wasn’t just irritated or bored; she was the victim of an intellectual mugging. She condemned The French Connection as “total commercial opportunism passing itself off as an Existential view” (well, yes, but how was the picture?). She condemned the earnest Lenny as “the ultimate in modern show-biz sentimentality.” Words like “corrupt,” “dishonest,” “decadent,” and, for a while, “fascist” were part of her regular critical vocabulary. Dirty Harry she pronounced “a deeply immoral movie.” “Shallowly immoral” would probably have done it. But you cannot compare the movies you love with Moby-Dick and then let the ones you hate off with a shrug. You have to keep writing as though souls are being saved and lost down at the cineplex every night. In the years when many of her readers found it exciting to treat movies as tests of character, her rhetoric was just excessive enough. You argued about the movie with your friends, and then you picked up The New Yorker and argued about it with her. But when the same people eventually found themselves content to describe the movies they enjoyed as “a lot of fun” and the movies they didn’t enjoy as “pretty stupid,” her rhetoric began to seem a little curious. So did her judgment. It became possible to read one of her rapturous reviews—of, for instance, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) (“It may be the best movie of its kind ever made”) or Robert Zemeckis’s Used Cars (1980), which inspired comparisons with Bringing Up Baby, Shampoo, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Melville’s The Confidence Man—and then find the actual movie, when you went to see it, almost unrecognizable. What had caused her pulse to race so fast? The less portentous the buzz around a movie she wanted to like, the more hyperkinetic her exertions seemed to become. Unpopular or unexceptional efforts by old favorites began to receive shameless raves—as in: I think De Palma has sprung to the place Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is the artist’s vision. She was reviewing Blow Out (1981). And when the whole movie couldn’t honorably be rhapsodized, a single scene or even a single line would be given a prominently placed homage, a sort of verbal trailer. This is the lead paragraph of her review of Tequila Sunrise (1988), a slightly underpowered romance/thriller that happens to have been written and directed by Robert Towne: Michelle Pfeiffer tells Mel Gibson how sorry she is that she hurt his feelings. He replies, “C’mon, it didn’t hurt that bad,” pauses, and adds, “Just lookin’ at you hurts more.” If a moviegoer didn’t already know that Tequila Sunrise was the work of a master romantic tantalizer, Gibson’s line should cinch it. That’s the kind of ritualized confession of love that gave a picture like To Have and Have Not its place in moviegoers’ affections. What makes the line go ping is that Mel Gibson’s blue eyes are wide with yearning as he says it, and Michelle Pfeiffer is so crystalline in her beauty that he seems to be speaking the simple truth…. It’s a line that Gary Cooper might have spoken to Marlene Dietrich…. Stop! I give up! I’ll see the movie! What had evaporated, of course, was the consensus that it all mattered. The result was a dissociation between the experience and the commentary. In the Eighties, her disquisitions on the psychology of the American movie audience, which characterized her early criticism, gave way to page after page of word-painting. She would paraphrase almost the whole storyline, and every clever bit in the movie seemed to end up in the review. After you had read her review of Zelig, the movie itself felt like something you had already seen, and not quite as ingenious as you remembered it. She was a pioneer, in effect, of the condition movies suffer from today, when by the time a big-budget production hits the screen, it has been so overexposed in magazines and on television that there is almost no point in bothering to go see it. Which is fine, of course, with magazine publishers and television producers. The coverage competes with the product. Her manner of overpraising and overdamning has itself been so overpraised and overdamned that rereading her reviews is a little like rereading Hemingway after listening to too many parodies: Why can’t she stop trying to sound so much like herself? The trademark lines now leap out from every page: the second-person address; the slangy heighteners, “zizzy,” “zingy,” “goosey,” “plummy,” and so on, and put-downs, like “frowzy,” “whorey,” “logey” (her word for Shoah); the high-low oxymorons, like “pop classic” (for the remake of King Kong) or “trash archetype” (for Carrie); and her most exasperating locution, the conditional universal superlative, which she used promiscuously and frequently bathetically: “The scene is perhaps the wittiest and most deeply romantic confirmation of a marriage ever filmed” (The Right Stuff); “He may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived” (Jeff Bridges). More general defects are also obvious when the stuff is consumed in bulk. The writing is all in the same key, and strictly molto con brio. There is no modulation of tone or (which would be even more welcome) of thought. She just keeps slugging away. She is almost always extraordinarily sharp, but she is hardly ever funny. And (as she concedes in the introduction to this book) she is clearly working her way through her feelings about the movie as she writes, and this produces garrulousness and compositional dishevelment. Writing in The New Yorker gave her a huge space advantage over other reviewers; she did not always profit by it. Her reviews are highly readable, but they are not especially rereadable. James Agee, in his brief service as movie critic of The Nation, reviewed many nondescript and now long-forgotten pictures; but as soon as you finish reading one of his pieces, you want to read it again, just to see how he did it. She does not provoke the same impulse. Still, the attractions of the prose are not the whole story. W. H. Auden once praised Agee’s column by saying that he never went to the movies, but that he looked forward to reading what Mr. Agee had to say about them every week. Some people have said the same thing about Stanley Kauffmann, the longtime reviewer for The New Republic who is, in critical terms, pretty much the opposite. She was not a reviewer for people who didn’t go to movies. She was the ideal person to read when you had just seen a movie and couldn’t make up your mind what you thought about it. At her best, she argued it through on the page for you. You know what you think about Bonnie and Clyde by now, though, and so her insights have lost their freshness. On the other hand, she is a large part of the reason you think as you do. And her influence is everywhere. She was, by all accounts, a journalistic queen bee. If she did not orchestrate opinion (something she was accused of many times), she certainly took pleasure in orchestrating the orchestrators. She maintained, even before her New Yorker days, a circle of admirers whose careers she cultivated and whose degree of orthodoxy she monitored closely; and she became an object of personal infatuation for many younger writers who never met her. She has a number of protégés and ex-protégés among active movie reviewers: Terrence Rafferty, who succeeded her at The New Yorker, David Denby, Michael Sragow, David Edelstein, John Powers, Peter Rainer. But her impact extended beyond movie reviewing. The television critics James Wolcott and Tom Shales, the art critics Jed Perl and Sanford Schwartz, the music critic Greil Marcus, and the sportswriter Allen Barra are all her fans, and there is a long list of other writers, in many other genres, whose work would be almost unimaginable without her example. There are also two celebrity epigoni: Camille Paglia, whose style is a virtual pastiche of her’s but who (such is the anxiety of influence) has hardly ever mentioned her name in print; and the Hollywood Wunderkind Quentin Tarantino, who mentions her name at almost every opportunity. And properly so; for Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a dish for which she spent forty years writing the recipe. Her followers are known, a little dismissively, as “the Paulettes.” The usual complaints about them are that they imitate mindlessly her enthusiasm for the cheap-thrill element of popular culture, and that they are all parrots of her journalistic mannerisms. There is no question that her style proved highly infectious; and there is no question, either, that her appetite for sensationalism, for blood and sex, helped shape educated movie taste. Cataloguing stylistic tics, though, is not the most accurate way to measure her influence. For her importance has, in the end, very little to do with her style of writing or her taste in movies. It is much greater than that. The problem she undertook to address when she began writing for The New Yorker was the problem of making popular entertainment respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the highlow problem—the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow technique bends his or her attention to an object that is too low, when the professor writes about Superman comics. In fact, this rarely is a problem: if anything profits from (say) a semiotic analysis, it’s the comics. The professor may go on to compare Superman comics favorably with Homer, but that is simply a failure of judgment. It has nothing to do with the difference in brows. You can make a fool of yourself over anything. The real high-low problem doesn’t arise when the object is too low. It arises when the object isn’t low enough. Meet the Beatles doesn’t pose a high-low problem; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band does. Tom Clancy and Wheel of Fortune don’t; John le Carré and Masterpiece Theater do. A product like Sgt. Pepper isn’t low enough to be discussed as a mere cultural artifact; but it’s not high enough to be discussed as though it were Four Quartets, either. It’s exactly what it pretends to be: it’s entertainment, but for educated people. And this is what makes it so hard for educated people to talk about without sounding pretentious—as though they had to justify their pleasure by some gesture toward the “deeper” significance of the product. One of Hollywood’s best-kept industrial secrets is that the movies are entertainment for educated people, too. This was a finding that surprised the studios when, in the 1940s, they first undertook to analyze their audience: frequency of movie attendance increases with income and education. Even today, when people complain that they don’t make movies for grown-ups anymore, the percentage of people who say they are “frequent moviegoers” is more than half again as great among people who have gone to college (31 percent) as it is among people who have only finished high school (19 percent). The belief that education makes people snobbish about movie-going is the opposite of the case: 20 percent of people who have been to college say they “never” go to movies, but the figure is 39 percent among adults who have only finished high school and 57 percent among adults with even less education than that. Movie-going is a lot more expensive than television-watching, of course, and no doubt this helps to account for the difference. But the numbers make it clear that film is not truly a mass art form to anything like the degree that television and popular music are. Movies since the Thirties have been designed for the people who have the money and the leisure to afford them. Kael didn’t persuade New Yorker readers to go to the movies; they were already going. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was teaching them how to think critically about them. One way to think critically about them, the way consistent with thinking about the arts generally during the Fifties and early Sixties, was to identify the formal properties of the medium, and to judge movies by how fully and intelligently they used them. So that the assertion “Stagecoach is a great movie” might be defended against the person who wants to know if that means it is as great as King Lear by replying that Stagecoach is great “in cinematic terms.” This is to defend your judgment with an abstraction; for when you say things like “in cinematic terms,” you are on your way toward developing a theory of film. She had devoted her pre—New Yorker career to demolishing this way of thinking. By 1967, her antiaesthetic has been completely worked out. She hated theories. She didn’t oppose only auteur theory: she opposed all theoretical preconceptions. “Isn’t it clear that trying to find out what cinema ‘really’ is, is derived from a mad Platonic and metaphorical view of the universe,” she wrote in an unreprinted essay in 1966, “—as if ideal, pure cinema were some pre-existent entity that we had to find? Cinema is not to be found; but movies are continuously being made.” And in “Is There a Cure for Movie Criticism?” (1962), an attack on the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer: “Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it…. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?” She was the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time, and she made it possible to care about movies without feeling pompous or giddy by showing that what comes first in everyone’s experience of a movie isn’t the form or the idea but the sensation, and that this is just as true for moviegoers who have been taught to intellectualize their responses to art as it is for everyone else. The idea that a movie critic needs to work from sensations was not new with her, of course. Agee’s persona in The Nation had been that of the ordinary intelligent guy who happens to love going to movies (and who also happens to write like James Agee). Robert Warshow, who wrote about movies for Commentary and Partisan Review in the Forties and Fifties, warned that the critic who trucks a load of sociology and aesthetics into the movie theater will end up missing the show. “A man watches a movie,” as he once famously, and perhaps a shade sententiously, put it, “and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” When Warshow wrote about Scar-face and Agee wrote about National Velvet, they didn’t have much trouble being that man. But that’s because the high-low problem doesn’t kick in with Scarface and National Velvet, movies that don’t tempt viewers to detect “significance.” It kicks in with a movie like Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin’s black comedy about a serial killer, which few people have patience for any more, but which Agee and Warshow both went solemnly bananas over. Agee and Warshow thought that Chaplin had Something Important to Say in Monsieur Verdoux, and they therefore bent over backward in their appreciation of the movie in order to give him credit for his good intentions. She never gave anyone credit for good intentions. “Art,” as she put it back in 1956, “perhaps unfortunately is not the sphere of good intentions. She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it does have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of the sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover—which is why nothing irritated her more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform. “If a lady says. ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’ ” she explained to the readers of Holiday in 1966, “that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.” She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair were either pretending or were Puritanical about the straight-forward pleasures of trash. She thought these people missed the essentially erotic nature of the movie experience. There were a lot of people like that around before 1967. “What did she lose at the movies?” asked a puzzled Dwight Macdonald when he reviewed I Lost It at the Movies in 1965. Case in point. Her contention that “serious” movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. For it rests on an empirically sustainable proposition, which is that although people sometimes have a hard time deciding whether or not something is art, they are rarely fooled into thinking they are having a good time when they are not. It was her therapeutic advice to the overcultivated that if they just concentrated on responding to the stimulus, the aesthetics would take care of themselves. What good is form if the content leaves you cold? The academic term for the kind of antiformalism she promoted is “postmodernism.” Postmodernism in the arts simply is anti-essentialism. It is a reaction against the idea, associated by academic critics in the postwar years with modernist literature, painting, and architecture, that the various arts have their own essential qualities—that poetry is essentially a matter of the organization of language, that painting is essentially a matter of composition, that architecture is essentially a matter of space and light. The undoing of these assumptions is often taken to have been the work of high critical theory, of semioticians and Derrideans, and “postmodernism” is thought to refer to highbrow, avant-garde art and literature—to be a distinctly elitist cultural movement. In fact, the cultural work was done long before “postmodernism” became a theoretical concept in the academy, and it was done by people whose audience was entirely mainstream. If we need to give it a brow, postmodernism was a middlebrow phenomenon. Its champion practitioners were Warhol (in painting), Mailer (in fiction), and Tom Wolfe (in journalism)—all perfectly accessible figures who played to a large nonacademic audience. Its “theoreticians” were Susan Sontag, who was an independent writer, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who were architects, and she, who never finished college. For the notion that serious art must be appreciated formally was not so much a feature of modernist art itself—it’s not something most of the great modernists would have claimed about what they were doing—as it was the result of the way modern art and literature were taught to people like the people who read The New Yorker in the Fifties and early Sixties. Excessive critical concern with the formal properties of art—with the “elements of style”—was a middlebrow oppression. It didn’t intimidate poets; it intimidated moviegoers. It made them think there was something they ought to know about called “the grammar of film.” This liberation of art from abstract prior conceptions was one of the great achievements of American culture in the Sixties. It is now being attacked for encouraging the supposedly dangerously relativist notions that “It’s art if I say it’s art,” and “Anything goes.” People said those things in the Sixties, and I suppose people say them now, but those are not the necessary conclusions of the lesson she helped to teach. A dislike of formalism does not entail a dislike of form. And openness to mass culture does not entail identification with the mass audience; it doesn’t require an attitude of épater les intellectuels or a belief that if it’s “of the people” it must be counter-hegemonic. The critical attitude she represented only means approaching a work of art without bias about what “a work of art” is supposed to be. It is predicated on the belief that modern culture is fluid and promiscuous, and therefore that nothing is gained by foreclosing the experience of it—particularly if you are a critic. She understood these things, and she consciously built her practice as a reviewer around them; and that is why she is a supremely important figure even for writers who, although they grew up reading everything she wrote, always strived, in their own work, never to sound like her (Adapted from a review by Louis Menand for The New York Review of Books) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100712 ... lostgirl For Keeps 30 Years at the Movies by Pauline Kael a 1200 page behemoth chronicling 30 years of film...wow! there have certainly been times when i've seen a film that was 'well loved' by the public and i hated it. then there are those films that the critics hated, that tanked in the theater but i still loved. the point is, there is an honest opinion lurking in everyone. i like the fact that the author does not profess to be an expert of the industry...it seems to me that she simply looked at film as an art form, and used her literary expertise to create as well as to express herself. 100712 ... rt +3=182 lostgirl...well said. can't agree with you more. Question 108 This author's critically praised first novel comes with a largely self-explanatory title. It purports to be a compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s epic. What that title cannot possibly convey, though, is the unusual journey of his manuscript on its way to publication by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A promotional Trojan horse that contained a copy of the book. The author, 35, a computer scientist specializing in search recommendation systems and keywords, once worked at Amazon.com. He avoided writing workshops and M.F.A. programs as a matter of principle, and produced the novel at night, during lunch breaks and on weekends and vacations. “I’ve been writing for many years, but just small stories or fragments of things that could become stories,” he said. “I decided after a long time that if I was going to be serious about writing, I had to do a book. So I started looking through my notes, looking for things I thought were worth preserving, and some things jumped out at me. And so I sort of extracted them from my notebooks, and they seemed to imply a shape, and the shape was this book of themes and variations.” Early reviews of the book have been enthusiastic. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it a “dazzling debut novel.” In person, the author is extremely soft-spoken and tends to talk in a flat, unemotional tone, though he does note with regret that he “turned down Google two weeks before their I.P.O.” (He’s now employed at a Silicon Valley start-up.) He approaches literature almost as if it were a branch of science, governed by laws that are quantifiable and predictable, as when he talks of devising an algorithm, later discarded, to determine an optimum chapter order for his novel or when he compares writing to the annealing of metals. “What I’m interested in scientifically is understanding thought with computational precision,” he explained. “I mean, the romantic idea that poetry comes from this deep inarticulable ur-stuff is a nice idea, but I think it is essentially false. I think the mind is articulable and the heart probably knowable. Unless you’re a mystic and believe in a soul, which I don’t, you really don’t have any other conclusion you can reach besides that the mind is literally a computer.” Without an agent to help him, he was just as methodical in his effort to get the book into print. In 2007 he entered it in a competition sponsored by Starcherone Books, a small, independent press based in Buffalo, and won first prize: $1,000 and publication. “This book was so perfect from the moment I first saw it that it was obviously destined for something spectacular,” said Ted Pelton, Starcherone’s founder. “It didn’t even feel to me like a real person had written it. Instead, it felt like one of those born-from-the-head-of-Zeus things.” Hoping to call attention to the book, he sent it to some reviewers wrapped in high-grade paper, with the opening stanzas of “The Odyssey” in calligraphy, and to others, including The New York Times Book Review, inside a custom-made miniature wooden Trojan horse. He assumes that it helped him land a favorable review in The Los Angeles Times early in 2008, “but that didn’t lead to anything, to my disappointment,” he said. (The Times Book Review blogged about the horse, but did not review the novel then.) Still convinced that the book had a future, he entered it in the New York Public Library’s Young Lions competition, for writers under 35. When the book became a finalist last year, “suddenly I was getting mail from agents every day, instead of never in my entire life,” he recalled, and winning the praise of established writers and editors. “It’s a very generative and constructive book, designed with repetitions and elongations that suggest someone with a mind for patterning,” said Mary-Beth Hughes, a novelist and a member of the Young Lions committee. “But the thing that is most beautiful is that out of this construction comes moving poetry, with wonderful interplay between the intellectual puzzles and soulful reading.” As a result, the book also came to the attention of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus. After acquiring rights to republish the book, he and the author set about fashioning version 2.0 of the novel, which is two chapters shorter, drops the tongue-in-cheek author’s biography in which he described himself as a “professor of Archaeocryptography and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford” and also eliminates the original preface and appendix. “I think you could see his artificial-intelligence training more in the apparatus for the first edition, and that has sort of been expunged, in a way,” Mr. Galassi said. “There were some things that seemed overly complicated and distanced the reader from the magic of the storytelling itself. This way, without the protective layering he didn’t really need, you’re really dealing with the myths more immediately.” In some of the alternate histories Odysseus returns to Ithaca only to find the island abandoned, or Penelope a ghost or married to a man who is “soft, grey and heavy.” In others Achilles is a golem who slaughters Greeks and Trojans alike, while Odysseus marries Helen or kills her, doesn’t make it back home at all, becomes the author of “The Odyssey” or is confined to a sanatorium for a psychiatric evaluation. Reviews of the book suggest that he has absorbed a variety of postmodern influences, including Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and others from the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians: in her review Ms. Kakutani said that he had created “an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive.” He cheerfully describes himself as an avid reader of all the above, as well as of science-fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem and William Gibson. Greek and Norse mythology also interested him early on, he added, because of their “magic and wonder” and ability to address “things that are deeply and universally resonant.” Born and raised in the Silicon Valley area, the only child of a probation officer and a librarian, he was an extremely precocious student, graduating from high school at 14, starting work on his doctorate at 19 and eventually writing a thesis at Brandeis University that he described as “a corpus-based computational model or method for conventional metaphor detection and analysis.” As the excitement about his novel grows, he continues to write. He has a long-term project that he describes as “still more inaccessible and recherché than this book ” consisting of “the imagined literature of artificial intelligence, like a fictive translation of the stories the machines tell themselves.” But since that book is advancing only in fits and starts, for relief he has been experimenting with a retelling of a Roman-era text, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” “I don’t want to be the guy who rewrites ancient authors for a living, but I started playing with Ovid, and it was working well,” he said. “I feel like it is a good complement to ‘The Odyssey.’ ‘This book is a very rational and masculine book, and Ovid is all Eros and Thanatos. I hope they will form an interesting pair, and then I’ll really be done with the classics.” (Adapted from a review by Larry Rohter, NY Times) An excerpt from the book: Chapter 1: A Sad Revelation Odysseus comes back to Ithaca in a little boat on a clear day. The familiarity of the east face of the island seems absurd — bemused, he runs a tricky rip current he has not thought about in fifteen years and lands by the mouth of a creek where he swam as a boy. All his impatience leaves him and he sits under an oak he remembers whose branches overhang the water, good for diving. Twenty years have gone by, he reflects, what are a few more minutes. An hour passes in silence and it occurs to him that he is tired and might as well go home, so he picks up his sword and walks toward his house, sure that whatever obstacles await will be minor compared to what he has been through. The house looks much as it did when he left. He notices that the sheep byre's gate has been mended. A rivulet of smoke rises from the chimney. He steals lightly in, hand on sword, thinking how ridiculous it would be to come so far and lose everything in a moment of carelessness. Within, Penelope is at her loom and an old man drowses by the fire. Odysseus stands in the doorway for a while before Penelope notices him and shrieks, dropping her shuttle and before she draws another breath running and embracing him, kissing him and wetting his cheeks with her tears. Welcome home, she says into his chest. The man by the fire stands up looking possessive and pitifully concerned and in an intuitive flash Odysseus knows that this is her husband. The idea is absurd — the man is soft, grey and heavy, no hero and never was one, would not have lasted an hour in the blinding glare before the walls of Troy. He looks at Penelope to confirm his guess and notices how she has aged — her hips wider, her hair more grey than not, the skin around her eyes traced with fine wrinkles. Without the eyes of homecoming there is only an echo of her beauty. She steps back from him and traces a deep scar on his shoulder and her wonder and the old man's fear become a mirror — he realizes that with his blackened skin, tangled beard and body lean and hard from years of war he looks like a reaver, a revenant, a wolf of the sea. Willfully composed, Penelope puts her hand on his shoulder and says that he is most welcome in his hall. Then her face collapses into tears and she says she did not think he was coming back, had been told he was dead these last eight years, had given up a long time ago, had waited as long as she could, longer than anyone thought was right. He had spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it had never occurred to him that she would just give up. The town deserted, his house overrun by violent suitors, Penelope dying, or dead and burned, but not this. "Such a long trip," he thinks, "and so many places I could have stayed along the way." Then, mercifully, revelation comes. He realizes that this is not Penelope. This is not his hall. This is not Ithaca — what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god. The real Ithaca is elsewhere, somewhere on the sea-roads, hidden. Giddy, Odysseus turns and flees the tormenting shadows. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100712 ... rt Zachary Mason "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" Question 109 There is a madness to this author's method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time. The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law. All of the above takes place in 13 chapters covering 40 years or so, ranging backward and forward across time, each composed from a different point of view, which means 13 different centers, 13 different peripheries. And yet everything hangs together, connected by a tone of simmering regret arising from love’s wreckage and time’s relentless devouring. Is there anything she can’t do in this mash-up of forms? Write successfully in the second person? Check. Parody celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time? Check. Make a moving narrative out of a PowerPoint presentation? Check. Write about a cokehead music producer who demands oral sex from his teenage girlfriend during her friends’ band’s performance? Check. Narrate another chapter from the perspective of the above girlfriend’s best friend, standing at the same performance on the other side of said producer? Check. Compose a futuristic vision of New York? Check. Although shredded with loss, tis novel is often darkly, rippingly funny. She possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart. Certainly the targets are plentiful in rock ’n’ roll and public relations, the twinned cultural industries around which the book coalesces during the period from the early ’80s to an imagined 2019 or so. No one is beyond the pale of her affection; no one is spared lampooning. Often she embraces and spears her subjects at the same time. Moved to ecstasy by the singing from a convent, Bennie signs the nuns to a record contract, only to blow the deal when, in a moment of boyish enthusiasm, he kisses the mother superior flush on the lips. This is one of many “shame memories” he is dredging up. Her depiction of Jules, the celebrity journalist, embodies her sophisticated sympathy. Such types are normally easy prey for fiction writers, cheap signifiers of corruption. But she understands that the manufacture of image in the modern world is as routine as the assembly of Model T’s in the old industrial economy. Which is to say it’s done by regular people like you and me, not villains but folks just trying to get by. Here she parodies not only the celebrity profile Jules writes but his effort to break away from a hackneyed genre and compose an original piece. It’s probably the only such profile where (a) the author is writing from jail and (b) he confesses to the attempted rape of his subject. Jules is stymied, however, when the starlet under scrutiny stabs him with a miniature Swiss Army knife as they roll around on the lawn in Central Park. “I think I’d have to call that the end of our lunch,” he concedes. Likewise, she writes with pointed affection for the disgraced P.R. executive La Doll, who, desperately in need of work, starts freelancing for a genocidal general in the tropics. First she tries to soften his image by dressing him in teal blue caps with fuzzy flaps; then she enlists the actress victimized in Central Park, also down on her luck, in a scheme to fawn over the general and make him smile, revealing an unseen tender side. The actress embraces the general and then, showing more spine than expected, berates him in front of his men. “Do you eat them?” she asks the dictator about his victims. “Or do you leave them out so the vultures can do it?” Is this a photo-op or what? In such a world, the children have to grow up fast. Where J. D. Salinger’s kids are all precocious little Zen masters, too innocent for the treacherous adult world, hers are cold-eyed observers of their parents’ deficiencies, judging grown-ups with the severity of a kangaroo court. Of La Doll’s daughter, passing through military checkpoints, she writes: “She met the eyes of the machine-gun holders with the same even look she must have used to stare down the many girls who had tried in vain, over the years, to unseat her.” For a book so relentlessly savvy about the digital age and its effect on how we experience time (speeded up, herky-jerky, instantaneous, but also full of unbearable gaps and pauses),the book is remarkably old-fashioned in its obsession with time’s effects on characters, that preoccupation of those doorstop 19th-century novels. Hanging over her book is a sense that human culture is changing at such warp speed that memory itself must adapt to keep pace. The last chapter, which literalizes this sense perhaps a little too much, depicts a futuristic New York, in which babies signal their consumer choices with handsets and audiences are manipulated by selected enthusiasts known as “parrots.” Here she attempts to bring a centrifugal narrative full circle, which, given the entropic exhilarations on display, isn’t really in keeping with the story’s nature. But this is perhaps the only shortcoming (and a small one at that) in a fiction that appropriately for its musical obsessions, is otherwise pitch perfect. (Adapted from a review by Will Blythe for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100713 ... lostgirl okay mr.impatient....missed the lost books of the odyssey....i will pick that up, seeing that i am one of those dorks who loved the classic original.... and i'm not sure how I missed another question! anyway.....if anyone else would like to play...... A Visit from the Goon Squad By Jennifer Egan one reviewer relates that this is "a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates." there's nothing like complex drama, but i am intrigued by this because the two main characters are chronicled with interlocking narratives but it is the reader who discovers their secret lives, their pasts... 100713 ... rt +3=185 lostgirl! thanks for your intriguing responses. i appreciate your effort. Question 110 I suppose it’s justifiable to describe “best-selling” in quasi-tsunami terms because when it happens it’s partly a wall and partly a tide: first you see a towering, glistening rampart of books in Costco and the nation’s airports and then you are hit by a series of succeeding waves that deposit individual copies in the hands of people sitting right next to you. I was slightly wondering what might come crashing in after Hurricane Khaled. I didn’t guess that the next great inundation would originate not in the exotic kite-running spaces at the roof of the world but from an epicenter made almost banal for us by Volvo, Absolut, Saab, and ikea. Yet it is from this society, of reassuring brand names and womb-to-tomb national health care, that this author conjured a detective double act so incongruous that it makes Holmes and Watson seem like siblings. I say “conjured” because he also drew upon the bloody, haunted old Sweden of trolls and elves and ogres, and I put it in the past tense because, just as the first book in his “Millennium” trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was about to make his fortune, he very suddenly became a dead person. In the Larsson universe the nasty trolls and hulking ogres are bent Swedish capitalists, cold-faced Baltic sex traffickers, blue-eyed Viking Aryan Nazis, and other Nordic riffraff who might have had their reasons to whack him. But if he now dwells in that Valhalla of the hack writer who posthumously beat all the odds, it’s surely because of his elf. Picture a feral waif. All right, picture a four-foot-eleven-inch “doll” with Asperger’s syndrome and generous breast implants. This is not Pippi Longstocking (to whom a few gestures are made in the narrative). This is Miss Goth, intermittently disguised as la gamine. Forget Miss Smilla’s sense of the snow and check out Lisbeth Salander’s taste in pussy rings, tattoos, girls, boys, motorcycles, and, above all, computer keyboards. (Once you accept that George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman can pick up any known language in a few days, you have suspended enough disbelief to settle down and enjoy his adventures.) Miss Salander is so well accoutred with special features that she’s almost over-equipped. She is awarded a photographic memory, a chess mind to rival Bobby Fischer’s, a mathematical capacity that toys with Fermat’s last theorem as a cat bats a mouse, and the ability to “hack”—I apologize for the repetition of that word—into the deep intestinal computers of all banks and police departments. At the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, she is for good measure granted the ability to return from the grave. With all these superheroine advantages, one wonders why she and her on-and-off sidekick, the lumbering but unstoppable reporter Mikael Blomkvist, don’t defeat the forces of Swedish Fascism and imperialism more effortlessly. But the other reason that Lisbeth Salander is such a source of fascination is this: the pint-size minxoid with the dragon tattoo is also a traumatized victim and doesn’t work or play well with others. She has been raped and tortured and otherwise abused ever since she could think, and her private phrase for her coming-of-age is “All the Evil”: words that go unelucidated until near the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire. The actress Noomi Rapace has already played Salander in a Swedish film of the first novel, which enjoyed a worldwide release. (When Hollywood gets to the casting stage, I suppose Philip Seymour Hoffman will be offered the ursine Blomkvist role, and though the coloring is wrong I keep thinking of Winona Ryder for Lisbeth.) According to Larsson’s father, the sympathy with which “the girl” is evoked is derived partly from the author’s own beloved niece, Therese, who is tattooed and has suffered from anorexia and dyslexia but can fix your computer problems. In life, the author described himself as, among other things, “a feminist,” and his character surrogate, Mikael Blomkvist, takes an ostentatiously severe line against the male domination of society and indeed of his own profession. (The original grim and Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women, while the trilogy’s third book bore the more fairy-tale-like name The Castle in the Air That Blew Up: the clever rebranding of the series with the word “girl” on every cover was obviously critical.) Blomkvist’s moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels, because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval. Sweden used to be notorious, in the late 1960s, as the homeland of the film I Am Curious (Yellow), which went all the way to the Supreme Court when distributed in the United States and gave Sweden a world reputation as a place of smiling nudity and guilt-free sex. What a world of nursery innocence that was, compared with the child slavery and exploitation that are evoked with perhaps slightly too much relish by the crusading Blomkvist. His best excuse for his own prurience is that these serial killers and torture fanciers are practicing a form of capitalism and that their racket is protected by a pornographic alliance with a form of Fascism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bikers and meth runners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s politics! Most of the time, he hauls himself along with writing such as this: The murder investigation was like a broken mosaic in which he could make out some pieces while others were simply missing. Somewhere there was a pattern. He could sense it, but he could not figure it out. Too many pieces were missing. No doubt they were, or there would be no book. (The plot of the first story is so heavily convoluted that it requires a page reproducing the Vanger dynasty’s family tree—the first time I can remember encountering such a dramatis personae since I read War and Peace.) But when he comes to the villain of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a many-tentacled tycoon named Wennerström, his prose is suddenly much more spirited. Wennerström had consecrated himself to “fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.” That’s actually one of the best-turned lines in the whole thousand pages. If it sounds a bit like Bertolt Brecht on an average day, it’s because his own views were old-shoe Communist. His background involved the unique bonding that comes from tough Red families and solid class loyalties. The hard-labor and factory and mining sector of Sweden is in the far and arduous North—this is also the home territory of most of the country’s storytellers—and Grandpa was a proletarian Communist up toward the Arctic. This during the Second World War, when quite a few Swedes were volunteering to serve Hitler’s New Order and join the SS. In a note the 23-year-old author wrote before setting out for Africa, he bequeathed everything to the Communist party of his hometown, Umeå. The ownership of the immense later fortune that he never saw went by law to his father and brother, leaving his partner of 30 years, Eva Gabrielsson, with no legal claim, only a moral one that asserts she alone is fit to manage his very lucrative legacy. And this is not the only murk that hangs around his death, at the age of 50, in 2004. To be exact, the author died on November 9, 2004, which I can’t help noticing was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Is it plausible that Sweden’s most public anti-Nazi just chanced to expire from natural causes on such a date? His magazine, Expo, which has a fairly clear fictional cousinhood with “Millennium,” was an unceasing annoyance to the extreme right. He himself was the public figure most identified with the unmasking of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations, many of them with a hard-earned reputation for homicidal violence. The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: in the footnotes to his second novel he reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody. A report in the mainstream newspaper Aftonbladet describes the findings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unraveled a plot to murder the author that included a Swedish SS veteran. Another scheme misfired because on the night in question, 20 years ago, he saw skinheads with bats waiting outside his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to further speculation: one blog is preoccupied with the theory that Prime Minister Palme’s uncaught assassin was behind the death of him too. His name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apartment of a Fascist arrested for a political murder. His address, telephone number, and photograph, along with threats to people identified as “enemies of the white race,” were published in a neo-Nazi magazine: the authorities took it seriously enough to prosecute the editor. But he died of an apparent coronary thrombosis, not from any mayhem. So he would have had to be poisoned, say, or somehow medically murdered. Such a hypothesis would point to some involvement “high up,” and anyone who has read the novels will know that in his world the forces of law and order in Sweden are fetidly complicit with organized crime. So did he wind up, in effect, a character in one of his own tales? The people who might have the most interest in keeping the speculation alive—his publishers and publicists—choose not to believe it. “Sixty cigarettes a day, plus tremendous amounts of junk food and coffee and an enormous workload,” said Christopher MacLehose, his literary discoverer in English and by a nice coincidence a publisher of Flashman, “would be the culprit. I gather he’d even had a warning heart murmur. Still, I have attended demonstrations by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly frightening. I also know someone with excellent contacts in the Swedish police and security world who assures me that everything described in the ‘Millennium’ novels actually took place. And, apparently, he planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how people could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped.’” He left behind him enough manuscript pages for three books, the last of which—due out in the U.S. next summer—is entitled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and the outlines and initial scribblings of a fourth. The market and appetite for them seems to be unappeasable, as does the demand for Henning Mankell’s “Detective Wallander” thrillers, the work of Peter (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) Høeg, and the stories of Arnaldur Indridason. These writers come from countries as diverse as Denmark and Iceland, but in Germany the genre already has a name: Schwedenkrimi, or “Swedish crime writing.” Christopher MacLehose told me that he knows of bookstores that now have special sections for the Scandinavian phenomenon. “When Roger Straus and I first published Peter Høeg,” he said, “we thought we were doing something of a favor for Danish literature, and then ‘Miss Smilla’ abruptly sold a million copies in both England and America. Look, in almost everyone there is a memory of the sagas and the Norse myths. A lot of our storytelling got started in those long, cold, dark nights.” Perhaps. But this author is very much of our own time, setting himself to confront questions such as immigration, “gender,” white-collar crime, and, above all, the Internet. The plot of his first volume does involve a sort of excursion into antiquity—into the book of Leviticus, to be exact—but this is only for the purpose of encrypting a “Bible code.” And he is quite deliberately unromantic, giving us shopping lists, street directions, menus, and other details—often with their Swedish names—in full. The villains are evil, all right, but very stupid and self-thwartingly prone to spend more time (this always irritates me) telling their victims what they will do to them than actually doing it. There is much sex but absolutely no love, a great deal of violence but zero heroism. Reciprocal gestures are generally indicated by cliché: if a Larsson character wants to show assent he or she will “nod”; if he or she wants to manifest distress, then it will usually be by biting the lower lip. The passionate world of the sagas and the myths is a very long way away. Bleakness is all. That could even be the secret—the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author’s demise. If Larsson had died as a brave martyr to a cause, it would have been strangely out of keeping; it’s actually more satisfying that he succumbed to the natural causes that are symptoms of modern life. (Adapted from a review by Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair contributing editor.) For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100713 ... lostgirl didn't have to look too far for this as all three books are sitting in my kitchen screaming "me next!" they will have to wait in line behind possession which is killing me slowly with romantic poetry and double lives, and watership down which really is next in line. thanks for all the work you put into this rt....i love this game. Stieg Larsson is our author of these highly regarded novels. 100713 ... rt +3=188 lostgirl! this butterfly is sipping up all the nectar... Question 111 Early in this author's funny and melancholy first book, she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft. “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?” she asks. “All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits — of omitting needless words.” Her search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel. And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? She is a young writer whose family background is Turkish, not Russian. Born in New York City, she grew up in New Jersey before graduating from Harvard and earning a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford. Her career, thus far, has seemed blessed. Her first piece of journalism, a profile of a former Thai kickboxing champion, ran in The New Yorker. The longish essays in this book first appeared in that magazine, as well as in Harper’s and n+1. In one of these essays, she delivers a paper at a Tolstoy conference in Russia. In another, she picks up Babel’s daughter for a conference at Stanford. In yet another, she travels to Uzbekistan to learn its language. Each of these essays unfolds both comically and intellectually, as if she were channeling Janet Malcolm by way of Woody Allen. Among the charms of her prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her. One professor’s mustache and mobile eyebrows give him “the air of a 19th-century philanderer.” A boyfriend steps off an airplane looking “as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy.” Even the Tolstoy scholar who becomes incontinent on a chartered bus trip and refuses to throw out his soiled pants becomes, in her hands, a comic figure out of Isaac Bashevis Singer. She lets her opinions fly freely. She describes feeling “deeply, viscerally bored” by an Orhan Pamuk novel. About reporting on Turkey for a Let’s Go guidebook, she bemoans the “exasperating 20th-century discourse of ‘shoestring travel.’ ” She explains: “The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of ‘sticking it to the man’ to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls.” About trying to secure academic grant money, she writes, “Translation jobs always made me want to jump out a window.” Perhaps her best quality as a writer, though — beyond her calm, lapidary prose — is the winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty. She’s the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she’s feeling. About Chekhov’s story “Lady With Lapdog,” she writes, “I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives — one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other ‘running its course in secret’ — and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold the most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one.” She describes two historical types of Uzbek writers: “the aristocrats, who loved beautiful women, nature and kings; and the democrats, who loved mud and head colds.” Her defense of literary theory is lovely. “I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?” She is almost helplessly epigrammatical (“Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you”), and it’s tempting to keep quoting from her book forever. There are moments in the book where she loses the threads of the stories she’s trying to tell, moments where plot summary or historical précis drag on too long. But these data-dump moments are rare. She is clearly one of those people whom Babel described, in one of his Odessa stories, as having “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Her autumnal impulses are balanced by jumpy, satirical ones. It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times Books Section) An excerpt from the book... When the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author's Collected Works, they aren't aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with. The "millennium" edition of Tolstoy fills a hundred volumes and weighs as much as a newborn beluga whale. (I brought my bathroom scale to the library and weighed it, ten volumes at a time.) Dostoevsky comes in thirty volumes, Turgenev in twentyeight, Pushkin in seventeen. Even Lermontov, a lyric poet killed in a duel at age twenty-seven, has four volumes. It's different in France, where definitive editions are printed on "Bible paper." The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade manages to fit Balzac's entire Human Comedy in twelve volumes, and his remaining writings in two volumes, for a combined total weight of eighteen pounds. The Collected Works of Isaac Babel fills only two small volumes. Comparing Tolstoy's Works to Babel's is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch. Babel's best-loved works all fit in the first volume: the Odessa, Childhood, and Petersburg cycles; Red Cavalry; and the 1920 diary, on which Red Cavalry is based. The compactness makes itself felt all the more acutely, since Babel's oeuvre is known to be incomplete. When the NKVD came to his dacha in 1939, Babel's first words were, "They didn't let me finish." The secret police seized and confiscated nine folders from the dacha, and fifteen from Babel's Moscow apartment. They seized and confiscated Babel himself, on charges of spying for France and even Austria. Neither manuscripts nor writer were seen again. In the next years, Babel's published works were removed from circulation. His name was erased from encyclopedias and film credits. Rumors circulated—Babel was in a special camp for writers, he was writing for the camp newspaper— but nobody knew for sure if he was dead or alive. In 1954, the year after Stalin's death, Babel was officially exonerated, and the dossier of his criminal case made public. Inside was just one page: a certificate attesting to his death, under unknown circumstances, on March 17, 1941. Like Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Final Problem," Babel had vanished, leaving behind a single sheet of paper. Nobody really knows why Babel was arrested when he was. He had made powerful enemies early in his career with the publication of the Red Cavalry stories, which immortalize the botched Russo-Polish military campaign of 1920. In 1924, Commander Semyon Budyonny of the First Cavalry publicly accused Babel of "counterrevolutionary lies" and character assassination. In later years, as Budyonny rose in the Party system, from marshal of the Soviet Union to first deputy commissar for defense and Hero of the Soviet Union, Babel found himself on increasingly thin ice—especially after the death of his protector, Maxim Gorky, in 1936. Nonetheless, he survived the height of the Great Purge in 1937–38, and was arrested only in 1939, when World War II was just around the corner and Stalin presumably had bigger fish to fry. What tipped the scale? The Nazi-Soviet pact might have played a role: because of Babel's close ties with the French Left, his continued existence was necessary to maintain Soviet-French diplomatic relations— which became a moot point once Stalin sided with Hitler. Some evidence suggests that Babel was arrested in preparation for one last show trial that was to accuse the entire intellectual elite, from the film legend Sergei Eisenstein to the polar explorer Otto Schmidt, but which was called off in September when Hitler invaded Poland. Some scholars attribute Babel's arrest to his bizarre relationship with the former people's commissar Nikolai Yezhov: Babel had had an affair in the 1920s with Evgeniya Gladun- Khayutina, Yezhov's future wife, and it was said that, even in the 1930s, Babel would visit the couple at home where they would all play ninepins and listen to Yezhov tell gruesome stories about the gulag. When Lavrenty ("Stalin's Butcher") Beria came to power in 1938, he made a point of exterminating anyone who had ever had anything to do with Yezhov. Others insist that Babel was arrested "for no reason at all," and that to say otherwise is to commit the sin of attributing logic to the totalitarian machine. When Babel's box in the KGB archives was declassified in the 1990s, it became known that the warrant for his arrest had been issued thirty-five days after the fact. Following seventy-two hours of continuous interrogation and probably torture, Babel had signed a confession testifying that he had been recruited into a spy network in 1927 by Ilya Ehrenburg and for years systematically supplied André Malraux with the secrets of Soviet aviation—the last detail apparently borrowed from Babel's late screenplay, Number 4 Staraya Square (1939), which chronicles the byzantine intrigues among scientists in a plant devoted to the construction of Soviet dirigibles. "I am innocent. I have never been a spy," Babel says in the transcript of his twenty-minute "trial," which took place in Beria's chambers. "I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others . . . I am asking for only one thing—let me finish my work." Babel was executed by firing squad in the basement of the Lubyanka on January 26, 1940, and his body was dumped in a communal grave. Nineteen forty, not 1941: even the death certificate had been a lie. The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even "realized" the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: "You're going to die. And you're going to die. And you're going to die." I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused. In this class we were assigned to read "My First Goose," the story of a Jewish intellectual's first night at a new Red Army billet during the 1920 campaign. Immediately upon his arrival, his new comrades, illiterate Cossacks, greet him by throwing his suitcase in the street. The intellectual, noticing a goose waddling around the billet, steps on its neck, impales it on a saber, and orders the landlady to cook it for his dinner. The Cossacks then accept him as one of their own and make room for him at the fireside, where he reads them one of Lenin's speeches from a recent issue of Pravda. When I first read this story in college, it made absolutely no sense to me. Why did he have to kill that goose? What was so great about sitting around a campfire, reading Lenin? Among the stories we read in that class, Chekhov's "Lady with Lapdog" moved me much more deeply. I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives—one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other "running its course in secret"—and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one. In fact, this theme of a second, secret life is extremely important to Babel, but I didn't figure that out until later. The second time I read Babel was in graduate school, for a seminar on literary biography. I read the 1920 diary and the entire Red Cavalry cycle in one sitting, on a rainy Saturday in February, while baking a Black Forest cake. As Babel immortalized for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalized for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which came out of the oven looking like an old hat and which, after I had optimistically treated it with half a two-dollar bottle of Kirschwasser, produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup. There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover. Often, it's the material circumstances themselves that make you remember a book that way—but sometimes it's the other way around. I'm sure that my memory of that afternoon—the smell of rain and baking chocolate, the depressing apartment with its infl atable sofa, the sliding glass door that overlooked rainy palm trees and a Safeway parking lot—is due to the precious, almostlost quality of Babel's 1920 diary. The diary starts on page fifty-five—Babel lost the first fifty-four pages. Three days later, another twenty-one pages go missing—a month's worth of entries. "Slept badly, thinking of the manuscripts," Babel writes. "Dejection, loss of energy, I know I will get over it, but when?" For the next couple of days, despite all his efforts, everything reminds him of the lost pages: "A peasant (Parfenty Melnik, the one who did his military service in Elisavetpol) complains that his horse is swollen with milk, they took away her foal, sadness, the manuscripts, the manuscripts . . ." The diary isn't about war, but about a writer during a war—about a writer voraciously experiencing war as a source of material. Viktor Shklovsky, who invented the theory that literary subject material is always secondary to literary form, was a great admirer of Babel. "He wasn't alienated from life," Shklovsky wrote. "But it always seemed to me that Babel, when he went to bed every night, appended his signature to the day he had just lived, as if it were a story." Babel wasn't alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought it out—but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature. The epigraph to the 1920 diary could be the famous phrase from the beginning of Don Quixote: "since I'm always reading, even scraps of paper I find in the street . . ." In Brody, in the aftermath of a pogrom, while looking for oats to feed his horse, Babel stumbles upon a German bookstore: "marvelous uncut books, albums . . . a chrestomathy, the history of all the Boleslaws . . . Tetmajer, new translations, a pile of new Polish national literature, textbooks. I rummage like a madman, I run around." In a looted Polish estate, in a drawing room where horses are standing on the carpet, he discovers a chest of "extremely precious books": "the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the 18th century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the 16th century, writings of monks, old French novels . . . French novels on little tables, many French and Polish books about child care, smashed intimate feminine accessories, remnants of butter in a butter dish—newlyweds?" In an abandoned Polish castle, he finds "French letters dated 1820, nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines. My God, who wrote it, when . . ." These materials are assimilated and expanded upon in the Red Cavalry stories, for example in "Berestechko," whose narrator also finds a French letter in a Polish castle: "Paul, mon bien aimé, on dit que l'empereur Napoléon est mort, est-ce vrai? Moi, je me sens bien, les couches ont été faciles . . ." From the phrase "nôtre petit héros achève 7 semaines," Babel conjures the full precariousness of time, a point as delicately positioned in human history as a seven-week-old child, or a false rumor of Napoleon's death. Reading the whole Red Cavalry cycle after the diary, I understood "My First Goose." I understood how important it was that the suitcase thrown in the street by the Cossacks was full of manuscripts and newspapers. I understood what it meant for Babel to read Lenin aloud to the Cossacks. It was the first hostile encounter of writing with life itself. "My First Goose," like much of Red Cavalry, is about the price Babel paid for his literary material. Osip Mandelstam once asked Babel why he went out of his way to socialize with agents of the secret police, with people like Yezhov: "Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? 'No,' Babel replied, 'I don't want to touch it with my fingers—I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like.' " But of course he had to touch it with his fingers. He had to shed blood with his own hands, if only that of a goose. Without that blood, Red Cavalry could never have been written. "It sometimes happens that I don't spare myself and spend an hour kicking the enemy, or sometimes more than an hour," observes one of Babel's narrators, a Cossack swineherd turned Red Army general. "I want to understand life, to learn what it really is." The imperative to understand life and describe it provides an urgent, moving refrain in the 1920 diary. "Describe the orderlies—the divisional chief of staff and the others—Cherkashin, Tarasov." "Describe Matyazh, Misha. Muzhiks, I want to penetrate their souls." Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always "what," not "who." "What is Mikhail Karlovich?" "What is Zholnarkevich? A Pole? His feelings?" "What are our soldiers?" "What are Cossacks?" "What is Bolshevism?" "What is Kiperman? Describe his trousers." "Describe the work of a war correspondent, what is a war correspondent?" (At the time he wrote this sentence, Babel himself was technically a war correspondent.) Sometimes he seems to beg the question, asking, of somebody called Vinokurov: "What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?" "What is Grishchuk? Submissiveness, endless silence, boundless indolence. Fifty versts from home, hasn't been home in six years, doesn't run." "I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe." "Describe the forest." "Two emaciated horses, describe the horses." "Describe the air, the soldiers." "Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern." "Describe this unendurable rain." "Describe 'rapid fire.' " "Describe the wounded." "The intolerable desire to sleep—describe." "Absolutely must describe limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment." "Describe Bakhturov, Ivan Ivanovich, and Petro." "The castle of Count Raciborski. A seventy-year-old man and his ninety-year-old mother. People say it was always just the two of them, that they're crazy. Describe." Babel's "describe" in his diaries shares a certain melancholy quality with Watson's mention of those of Sherlock Holmes's cases that do not appear in his annals: "the case of the Darlington substitution scandal," the "singular affair of the aluminum crutch," "the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra . . . for which the world is not yet prepared." All the stories that will never be told—all the writers who were not allowed to finish! It's much more comforting to think that, in their way, the promises have already been executed—that perhaps Babel has already sufficiently described limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment, and that the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra is, after all, already the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Babel does return to the Raciborskis in Red Cavalry: "A ninety-year-old countess and her son had lived in the castle. She had tormented him for not having given the dying clan any heirs, and—the muzhiks told me this—she used to beat him with the coachman's whip." But even with the Zolaesque note of hereditary vitiation, the Turgenevian kinkiness of the coachman's whip, and the hinted Soviet rhetoric of a knightly Poland "gone berserk" (a phrase from Babel's own propaganda work), the "description" is still just two sentences. (Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100713 ... jane The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them Elif Batuman 100713 ... jane actually, one of the things i liked about creative writing was how informal it could be - how unstructured. very blather-like in that way. that's way it was "creative" writing. there were no rules, unless you wanted to follow them. (that was my initial reaction to the review and i had a hard time getting past that!) 100713 ... rt +3=118 jane! Question 112 In high school, this musician/author wanted to start a band called Organized Confusion. His published journals are disorganized confusion: They are presented raw, with ridiculously skimpy explanatory material. Here's some advice to help you make sense of his scribbles, based on Charles Cross' definitive bio Heavier Than Heaven (which presents some of the same excerpts, but more intelligibly than the new book does) and my own conversations with the author and his family as Entertainment Weekly's grunge reporter: 1) Don't picture the author as a rock star. His peak journal-writing period was 1989-90, when he was unemployed, living off his maternal girlfriend Tracy Marander (who inspired "About a Girl"), and jotting lyrics and delusional plans that came true: "Nirvana No. 1 on billbored top 100 .. 2 times on the cover of Bowling Stoned." Picture him as only a few years removed from an 8 Mile-like upbringing: He was an ambitious outsider musician with a blond kid sis and a gorgeous divorced mom who drank, dated a guy barely older than her son, and refused to press charges against a lover with money coming in who sent her to the hospital. (But unlike Eminem, he only lived in a trailer when he stayed with his dad.) 2) Don't feel guilty—it's not like reading a normal diary. He often invited people to read his journals ("Hey, read this story I wrote about me lactating!"), and I'll bet he wouldn't mind your doing so—if you're sympathetic and smart. 3) Don't read simplistically. Pete Townshend was not smart to describe the journal entry, "Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend" as the "infantile … stinking thinking" of a suicidal addict. It is that, but also a bit of sly boomer-bashing agitprop. As he writes, "Elitism = punk rock." Also, it's not a simple cri de coeur; he used the journals to rehearse snappy lines for interviews and got the Townshend dis into BAM magazine in 1991. He was wary of being pinned down to single, simple meanings, in lyrics or in his journals. "My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions," he writes. '90s punk irony was a style of discourse permitting the speaker to suggest two meanings, earnest and "sarcastic," while taking full responsibility for neither. (His suicide note was addressed to Boddah, the imaginary childhood friend to whom he as a toddler attributed his naughty deeds.) "This is not to be taken seriously," one journal entry warns. "This is to be read as poetry." 4) Get used to it: Death was his default tactic. The journals are rife with it. Nirvana means "snuffed" in Sanskrit, and he threatened to have two authors "snuffed" if they didn't stop writing his unauthorized biography. When I exposed this plot (and got threatened), he phoned a mogul pal and got the innocuous book killed by threatening suicide. He threatened suicide in a Rome concert when his PA system malfunctioned, and when he got stressed over a list of favorite albums the highly sympathetic Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad requested. The day after his daughter was born, he eluded his doctors, presented a .38 to Courtney Love, and demanded double suicide; she thwarted at least a dozen of his suicide attempts. His was the fifth suicide in his family; his great-grandpa hara-kiri'd his own belly, then ripped the wound open when doctors weren't looking. (Cf. the journals' account [written for some reason in the third person, like a news report, though most of the book is first-person] of him in concert accidentally getting a cut eye: "It wasn't too deep at first until he rammed his head into the wall next to him in protest. It opened more.") In junior high, he told at least seven friends variations of the vow, "I want to be rich and famous and kill myself like Jimi Hendrix." At 15, he made a suicide movie. One of his first recorded songs was "Samurai Suicide" (shades of great-grandpa). Parts of Journals seem scary after 9/11: He sketches a lynched GI in a football helmet, and the most-repeated phrase in the book, linked to the "Teen Spirit" video, is "Revolutionary debris litters the floor of Wall Street." 5) He was the sensitive type. At 6, he was traumatized by the sight of the Beatles' album cover with bloody meat and decapitated baby dolls; his own collages on In Utero and elsewhere are similar (though far superior). A TV ad about starving African kids could drive him from the room. He passionately identified with rape victims and helpless animals, despite the fact that he also killed a cat and fed tadpoles to turtles. His last suicide note reiterates the word "empathy" five times. The journals pullulate with instances of morbid empathy, and murderous rage. 6) He was funny. Gus Van Sant likened him to a perverse, laconic "standup comedian," and the journals bear him out. The plan for a Nirvana T-shirt reading "Fudge-packin', Crack-smokin', Satan-worshipin' [sic] motherf--kers" is admirably droll, as is the story of the narrator's rape and murder by the cast of Andy Griffith in his song "Floyd the Barber." It's hard to pull other examples free of their context in the journals, but be alert for horror twinned with humor. 7) He wanted to tell it his way. Besides being a chronicle of addiction and an inexplicable pain condition, the journals, like the late Nirvana tunes, record his volcanic anger at other people's counter-narratives about him. He clipped out his head from the comic book dramatization of his life story and sarcastically drew an emaciated body onto it. He read his press obsessively and wrote meticulously wrongheaded rebuttals. Many entries begin as pop-encyclopedically learned essays and degenerate into foam-flecked rage, like John Belushi's editorials on "Weekend Update": "When I say I in a song, that doesn't necessarily mean that person is me. … I wont calmly and literally complain to you! I'm going to f--king destroy your macho, sadistic, sick right wing, religiously abusive opinions. … Before I die many will die with me and they will deserve it. See you in hell. Thanks for the tragedy I need it for my art." The tragedy was self-consciousness: He could not ignore what people said about him. He needed to correct their lies—most urgently when what they said was true. Sarcasm failed him. In the end, all he had was a denial, repeated ad infinitum, like the finale of "Teen Spirit." (Adapted from a review in Slate Magazine) For three points, name the author/musician and give a personal response... 100714 ... jane kurt_cobain journals 100714 ... jane i don't want to go into too much detail here, but S was friends with Kurt. S was in a pretty big band back then and that is how they met. kurt used to call him up and eventually S stopped answering his calls because he was tired of hearing about all of the bullshit that was going on in kurt's life, he didn't have time to listen to the complaining. he feels very guilty about what happened. feels like if he had just answered the phone, if he had just listened, maybe the tragedy would not have occurred. i wish i knew more about it but i know it's better not to ask. i know that S respects him very much, as a songwriter who was doing the same thing in the same era. it hurts my heart to even relay this information, knowing its permanence, but you did ask for a "personal" response. 100714 ... jane p.s. i do own the journals, and have read them. it took a bit of cynicism and also *empathy* to get through them. i often wonder about frances_bean. 100714 ... rt +3 =121 jane! whoa. i'm stunned. i will call you to talk more about this... 100715 what's it to you? who go blather from