__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 = 188 2. jane = 121 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 Question 113 The “locavore” movement says we should only eat what is grown within a few miles of where we live. How about a few feet? An experiment in Brooklyn-style subsistence farming, starring smelly chickens, an angry rabbit, a freak tornado, a vegetable garden to die for, two psyched kids, and a marriage in the weeds. At 6:40 a.m. on August 8, the tornado hit my house in Brooklyn. Most people viewed it as a snow day in summer, a meteorological oddity. Not me. After a sleepless night listening to the wind and the rain intensify, I watched the sky turn green, then heard the hemlock tree in the yard next door split in two, clip the gutter on the third floor of my house, and bounce off the roof of what used to be our garage and had come to be known as “the barn.” As the wind torqued up even further, the limb of an oak torpedoed the most productive quarter of my vegetable garden, smothering a thicket of tomatoes, snapping the fig tree, pulverizing the collard greens, burying the callaloo, and splintering the roof of my main chicken coop. That’s right, my chicken coop, which happens to be in my tiny backyard farm—800 square feet of arable land. A tornado hadn’t struck Brooklyn since 1889, when Flatbush was farmland; this one laid waste to the lonely little farm that I had planted in my backyard and that, within days, I planned to rely on as my sole source of food for an entire month. I started my farm, hereafter referred to as The Farm, in March, with my eye on August as the month I’d eat what I had grown. It was, in original conception, equal parts naïve stunt and extreme test of the idea that drives the burgeoning “locavore” movement. According to this ethos, we should all eat food produced locally, within 100 miles—some say 30—of where we live, so as to save our planet and redeem our Twinkie-gorged souls. Now that the “organic” label has rapidly become as ubiquitous and essentially meaningless as the old “all-natural,” the locavores have established a more sacred code, one meant to soothe our anxieties about what goes into the food we eat. The philosopher kings of this movement are Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a bracing look at how modern food production has become unmoored from anything natural or normal, and novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who earlier this summer published the best-selling memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s yearlong effort to eat only locally produced food in rural Virginia. “Our highest shopping goal,” Kingsolver wrote, “was to get our food from so close to home, we’d know the person who grew it.” Taking inspiration from Kingsolver, Adam Gopnik wrote a story for The New Yorker the week before last about assembling a diet of food produced within the five boroughs of the city. It turned out to be pretty salubrious fare that included neither pigeon nor rat. The city’s Greenmarkets have spawned a backyard industry; within the city limits, there are people raising chickens and growing lettuce and keeping bees for honey, as a way to make a living and feed the food purists. But as far as I know, nobody has attempted to do it all, all by themselves, in one little backyard, and then live off it. It’s a stunt, for sure, but one with a serious purpose. To evaluate the locavore lifestyle, I planned to take its philosophy to its logical conclusion. The locavore movement thus far has been about moving us closer to where our food comes from, narrowing the gap. I was trying to do something different. I wanted to erase the gap. In those giddy, delusionally hopeful first days, as The Farm took shape in my mind, I had occasional moments of clarity. I realized, for example, that there are things I need that I could never grow. So I allowed myself what I considered three reasonable exemptions: salt, pepper, and coffee beans. Beyond that, I identified dairy, cooking oil, and bread as the biggest conundrums. Because it was March already, it was too late to plant wheat, which has a winter growing season. Okay, no bread. As for dairy: It is illegal to have a cow or a goat in New York City, but I figured I could at least hide a goat in the garage. Was it worth the risk? Cheese would be nice, but have you ever put goat’s milk in your coffee? Black seemed the way to go. Finally, cooking oil: I didn’t have enough garden space for all the plants I’d need to produce vegetable oil, so I’d have to make do with animal fat of some kind. A pig, maybe? Duck fat was another good possibility—I could confit everything. What couldn’t I do? Worried about going cold turkey on booze, I explored distilling vodka from potatoes. In a mere five days, I had been told, you can make passable hooch. I daydreamed about pond-raising tilapia, a freshwater fish that rivals the cockroach for adaptability. The options seemed tantalizingly limitless. But as I looked at the calendar, a certain urgency took over. I had only five months until harvest. I needed to quit dreaming and get crops in the ground. I live in a verdant part of Brooklyn where the houses are detached and fairly big, but without much land. My backyard is 20 by 40 feet, prone to flooding in the lightest rain and thus unsuitable even for grass; the only living thing back there was a half-dead cherry tree, which, in my first chore as a farmer, I chopped down. Then I sent out soil samples for analysis, and the results were dire: No nutrient content to speak of and high levels of lead. A toxic wasteland. It wasn’t so much dirt as clay, and before it was buried by five and a half tons of fecund topsoil trucked in from a Long Island farm, I had to excavate a drainage system, a crosshatch of graded trenches, with a deep hole in the middle that went all the way down to sand. You ever dig through clay? It started as a fun weekend family project. The kids—daughter Heath, nearly 5, and son Jake, 3—pitched in, mopped Dad’s brow, brought him cold beers, ran around like it was recess. We got down through two and a half feet, exchanged high fives all around, and called it a day. Dad, wheezing as if in the early throes of a heart attack, used what strength he had left to shuffle to the fridge, pull out a bottle of white wine, and pour himself three huge glasses in quick succession. The next day, standing in the same hole, now five feet deep and not much wider than a trash can, I asked Carlos, the Salvadoran foreman of the local landscaping company, if there was any hope of finding sand beyond the clay. “In my country,” he said, “sand always follows clay. I’m sure it is true here also.” I flashed to the 200-foot-high clay cliffs on Martha’s Vineyard, smiled weakly, and continued digging. The hole, which I thought might consume the better part of one morning, killed the entire weekend. My wife, Lisa, who did not have intensive manual labor on her list of weekend plans, stopped checking on me, and eventually the kids grew bored and disappeared with her somewhere. I kept digging. At seven and a half feet, I hit sand, tossed out the posthole digger I had been using, and sat cross-legged at the bottom of my spider hole, victorious. When I scrambled out, our neighbor Jane Feder called to me. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said from the other side of the fence, “but what are you doing back here?” When I answered that I was building a farm I planned to live off for a month, she said, “I knew it. I told Al”—her husband—“that you were gonna build a farm.” Jane was ecstatic, not at all put off by the growing mountain of refuse or the presence of earthmovers in the driveway. Not even my plans for putting stinky farm animals within mere feet of her kitchen window fazed her. When I later installed the squirrel traps to protect my produce, she was thrilled to see them working properly. Occasionally, she’d even bring friends and neighbors to the back of her house to proudly show off her neighbor’s farm. Lisa had been worried the neighbors might think I was Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters—hah! They were my biggest supporters. The night after the soil delivery in April, it was threatening rain, and I slept out on my back porch to see if my drainage system would perform. As it poured, I went out into the backyard in my underwear and bare feet and felt around the now-buried spider hole, testing whether it would cave in. Miraculously, it did not. Score one for Manny the Self-Taught Engineer. While prepping the backyard for its new, central role in my life, I commenced planting in my basement. To have any credibility as a locavore, I thought, I had to grow all the plants from scratch. I bought dozens of seed varieties, everything from acorn squash to green-zebra tomatoes, embedded them in little premade mounds of peat, and put them under full-spectrum light bulbs mounted on the ceiling. The plan was to move them outdoors when the weather got warm. Within days, I had growth. I felt exactly like Jake had when his dry red kidney bean had exploded as a seedling at play school—score one for Manny the Born Naturalist. Over the next couple of weeks, my plants literally grew like weeds. The whole enterprise started to seem easy—too easy. I gave a tour of my basement hothouse to my cousin Gabe, who knows from grow lights. “Your bulbs are in the wrong place, Cuz,” he said apologetically, as though delivering the news of a terminal diagnosis. “These seedlings are too spidery to make it outdoors.” “Balls,” I replied. “They’ll do fine. They’re standing stock-straight down here, aren’t they?” “There’s no wind down here, is there?” Well, there’s no wind in my backyard either, I didn’t say, as I began to absorb another lesson in my own ignorance. The nascent plants were, as diagnosed, too spidery. Most of them started failing before they left the basement. As an interim step, I put them on the sun porch, protected from the elements, but I arrived down there one morning to find an apocalypse, hundreds of seedlings lying across water-swollen peat pellets. This was mid-April. It suddenly was very late in the growing season. With the clock ticking on my August deadline, I would either have to give up or compromise and go with young plants, transferred to the backyard. Locavore purists would shun me, but what choice did I have? Even at this early stage, I was acutely aware of what economists call “sunk costs”—I couldn’t get back the hard time, sweat, and cash I’d invested so far. Just the damn hole alone—that couldn’t come to nothing. So I went out shopping for crops, which is not easy in a major metropolitan area. Herbs can be found anywhere, as can tomato plants, but you’ll get funny looks if you ask about corn, rhubarb, carrots, and potatoes. It took me weeks to locate C. Verdino & Sons in Ozone Park, where I loaded my cart with broad beans, cantaloupe, beets, eggplant, cucumbers, callaloo, fennel, cabbage, and four kinds of peppers. I worked like a fiend to get all the plants in the ground in my backyard, aided by Caleb, the teenage son of family friends, who didn’t want to spend his last summer before college working indoors. He’s a good kid, his crazy, heavy-metal hair notwithstanding, but he had not one iota of relevant experience. He’d never cooked a meal for himself, much less grown one. But I was grateful for the company and took him on as my farmhand. We exerted extra effort on the potatoes, putting them in their own long rectangular box, called a “drill.” They would be my hedge against starvation, as they have been for civilizations across the centuries, a hard-to-mess-up crop that survives when nothing else does. Having conquered the dirt, I had to make the difficult decision of what kind of meat I would raise on my farm. Tilapia fell out of the picture when the guy I called repeatedly about them never called me back. Chickens, the obvious consideration, were ruled out because they’re noisy, smelly, mean, dirty, and fond of running around (not good for neighbor relations), and because after you slaughter them, they have to be plucked. I figured I’d need a chicken a day. That is a lot of feathers. Rabbits, by comparison, seemed like a breeze. Ideally, you want to eat very young rabbits, when their meat is tender, and as we all know, the species multiplies like mad. According to the pro-bunny-eating propagandists, a single doe can produce 1,000 times her body weight in edible offspring per year. Also, rabbits do okay in small cages, which meant I could stack them up efficiently in the barn. After a bit of research, I learned that the perfect breed is the Flemish Giant (adults top out heavier than twenty pounds), whose offspring get to “fryer weight” in a few months. I ordered three does, one mature buck, and one juvenile (which I intended as a playmate for the kids) from a breeder in Litchfield, Connecticut, then picked up an extra doe and a second big buck in New Jersey as an insurance policy. It was June; I had plenty of time for them to reproduce and serve as my primary source of protein. Immediately, complications set in. The rabbits kept themselves cool in the summer heat by kicking over their water dishes. The wet conditions invited flies to lay eggs, which turned into maggots, which attached themselves to the does. I lost a doe and the kids’ buck to hideous infestations that I care not to describe further or ever think of again. I was not a farmer so much as an undertaker, stuffing their bodies in plastic garbage bags, covering them with a scoop of lime, and leaving them in cans at the curb to be picked up. Meanwhile, the surviving does took zero interest in my Jersey buck, which meant all the marbles were riding on the Litchfield buck, an American Chinchilla who was only half the size of the does. Thus I discovered that my farm broke one of the inviolable rules of nature—my rabbits didn’t fuck like rabbits. Standing in my underwear in the predawn, which I understood to be the optimal hour for bunny boot-knocking, I watched incredulously as the doe rejected the earnest efforts of the big, sand-colored buck. Every morning for two weeks, I took my coffee out to the barn and witnessed the same nonevent. I drove the does back up to Connecticut, where the breeder mated them with six of his most virile bucks. The Litchfield doe got properly knocked up, but the Jersey doe couldn’t get any action to save her life. “Sorry, Manny, that is one old rabbit,” he said. Upon my return from Brooklyn, Lisa and I retired/promoted her to house pet. The kids loved her. She died of heat stroke two weeks later. Amid all this commotion, I miscalculated the due date of my only pregnant doe. When she had her first litter, I had not yet built the all-important kindling box, the vessel in which baby rabbits, or kits, are stored and weaned. The literature makes it very clear that a box must be introduced to a pregnant doe one week in advance of the birth so that she has time to fill it with fur—build a nest. After discovering the newborns, I scrambled to build a proper box and in my haste miscalculated the measurements. The result was disastrous. The box was too small; consequently, the doe could not enter it to feed her brood, forcing the newborns to come out of the box and scramble around the cage. The logistics of keeping track of her first litter proved overwhelming to the doe, and she panicked. And when a mother rabbit panics, apparently, she devours her offspring. I had read about this behavior and quietly dreaded it as I recalculated the measurements of a new box. But I figured it was a rare enough phenomenon and neglected to warn Lisa. When the weekend arrived, I took leave of The Farm and went with Jake to watch the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. Hoping for a mother-daughter bonding moment on The Farm—it’s gotta be good for something—Lisa took Heath to visit the baby rabbits. Only moments before their visit, the doe had set about destroying the remaining kits in her first litter, crushing two and tearing the head off a third. Seeing the carnage, Lisa managed to keep from retching just long enough to push Heath away from the cage. All along, to an extent I didn’t realize until later, Lisa had been trying to keep her simmering resentments about The Farm under wraps. She hated the mess, was embarrassed by the growing pile of refuse in our driveway and disgusted by the stink of manure coming from the barn. The fact that I wore dirty work clothes all the time and that I never left the property except to run errands for The Farm didn’t help things either. Then there was the ring of filth I left in our tub after I took a bath at night. Lisa hadn’t signed up to be a farmer’s wife. She has a demanding career in midtown and, in fact, had just earned a big promotion when I started farming in earnest. She needed our home to be a sanctuary, not the abattoir I’d turned it into. A career and two children were hard enough; what did she need with a husband playing with dirt and shit all day? By the time I returned from the parade with Jake, I think it is fair to say that Lisa’s empathy for me and my agrarian adventure had been placed in a garbage bag, covered with lime, and put to the curb for pickup. We avoided each other for the balance of the day. While she fumed, I was consumed with worry—the rabbits had been a tactical blunder. It was early July, less than a month from my start day. I needed a new protein source. On Monday, I drove to the Agway in Englishtown, New Jersey, and returned with 26 baby chickens and 4 little ducklings. Lisa arrived home from work just as Caleb and I were unloading the birds, the kids dancing at our feet among a score of day-old chicks. Feeling ambushed, Lisa seriously contemplated packing a bag and taking the kids to a hotel (she told me this later; at the time, she kept up her stony silence and made herself scarce, as was becoming her habit). Her anger boiled over when Jake, in his excitement, tripped over one of the ducklings, maiming it so badly that I had to scoop it up and dispatch it before he realized what had happened. Home less than an hour, we were already down a duck. “You’re going to turn the kids into ax murderers,” Lisa told me. Then came the last straw. The following afternoon, Caleb and I constructed most of a high-rise chicken coop in a few hours. We decided on a vertical design filled with ramps so that it would take up a minimum of the garden’s square footage (another concession to our urban setting). We equipped it with wheels and tracks so the poop could be removed from under it and the coop rolled back into place. The work was going well. At about 5:30 p.m., Caleb scrubbed up and got on his bike in order to get home in time to tidy up and attend his bartending class. At 6:30, I was putting the finishing touches on the rig. Inspired by the coop design in Nick Park’s animated film Chicken Run, I was using the table saw to mill eight-inch plywood into strips to make footholds for the entrance ramp when the blade of the saw tagged my right pinkie, destroying the second knuckle. Parts of my finger were left on the saw and on the ground. I pried my cell phone out of my work pants using my left hand and, holding my right hand above my head, called Josh, a childhood friend who is now a firefighter and, more to the point, lives around the corner. He ran over immediately and field-dressed the mangled wound while I stood there scared—not so much of the wound, which I figured was not going to kill me, but of Lisa, who probably would. I expected her to come through the door with the kids at any moment. After another long day at the office, this would be quite a scene for her to stumble into. Deciding not to take me to an emergency room, where we’d get stuck at the end of a long queue, Josh located a hand surgeon named Danny Fong on Canal Street, and he agreed to see me and my pinkie immediately. But before we could get out the door, Lisa turned up with Heath and Jake. Before even a hello, I said, as casually as I could muster, “Hon, I’ve banged my finger and I need to go to the doctor.” “How?” she asked. “How bad?” “Not too bad,” I lied. Then I came clean: “With the table saw.” She screamed in anguished frustration. She couldn’t just resent me for my silly folly; now that I’d maimed myself in the process, she had to feel sympathy too. One afternoon, shortly after the pinkie incident, while Caleb and I were scraping shit out of the rabbit hutch—one of the many farm chores that keep you perpetually busy while seeming to accomplish nothing—a clutch of women from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden gathered at the top of the driveway. They were judging the Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition and had been attracted by the planter boxes I had in front of the house filled with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and cantaloupe. They wanted to congratulate us on setting such a public example for how food could be grown in the city. Caleb and I exchanged a look and ushered them into the backyard. The Farm blew their minds. Their excitement allowed me to see my garden through fresh eyes. The corn stood five feet high in uniform rows, green beans shooting runners up their substantial stalks. Butterflies skimmed above the fanlike leaves of the collard greens, and cucumbers hung heavily from the lattice I had built for them. The herbs were glorious—the fennel blossoms tasting powerfully of licorice, the dense rosemary bush promising years of service. Amid the greenery, bits of color flashed out—a yellow squash, a bone-white eggplant, an orange tomato. The potato plants stood so tall and thick that we couldn’t have anything less than a bumper crop. The judges from the Botanic Garden marveled at our spectacular achievement, and so, for a moment, did I. That was one week before the tornado. The bad joke of August 8 wiped out the corn, the squash, the pumpkin, half the eggplant, most of the beans, and the fig tree. As the storm subsided, I stood on the porch for a while, chuckling to myself darkly that Mother Nature had accomplished what Lisa could not—the experiment was hereby terminated. At least I had an excellent excuse. A tornado—who could’ve predicted that? I went out into the garden. Wandering the wreckage, I noticed two ripe figs lying in the dirt, brushed them off on my pants, and ate them. Then, without really thinking about what I was doing, I set about wrangling the escaped chickens and harvesting the damaged vegetables. I picked tomatoes, ran them through the food mill, and put them in the freezer, then salvaged the leaves off the smashed collard greens, blanched them, and put them in the freezer, too. In all this work, I noticed something. Beaten down as it was, The Farm had survived. You may have noticed, careful reader, that I missed my original deadline. By August 8, I should have been a week into the eating phase. However, that proved impossible. On August 1, the tomatoes were still all green, the chickens well under the four-pound minimum slaughtering weight; there were only four eggplants of a size large enough to eat, and just one cucumber. No beets and no carrots. The self-imposed start day that I’d considered immovable all along had to be moved. The new date was August 15. This gave me time to, among other things, boost my egg yield. Eggs had not been part of the original plan (I don’t know why, just an oversight), but they became one after a salesperson at Agway foisted a mutant chicken they had no use for on me and Caleb. It was nearly featherless, with scabrous legs and feet. To our surprise, it turned out to be a hen, and after we put her on a diet of dry cat food, she produced a perfect, warm brown egg. There was great joy on The Farm. On Day 2, she laid another egg—but then ate the damn thing before I could get my hands on it. I doubted the bird would make a habit of this disgusting, cannibalistic act, and waited hopefully for Day 3, when exactly the same thing happened. And then again on Day 4. The score was Chicken 3, Human 1 by the time I did some research and learned that the taste of her own egg has the same effect on a hen (any hen, not just my ugly freak) that crack has on an addict. Nothing else will do. What ensued was a battle for every egg. The hen lived in a cage designed with a sloping floor specifically to preserve eggs. The bird laid the egg, the egg rolled out of the cage. The bird—very dumb—never noticed it was there in the first place. But after the hen, by some twist of fate, got a gob full of her own yolk, she learned to whirl around and shatter each egg with her beak and gobble whatever she could before it dripped through the wire floor to the guano tray below. My first move was to increase the angle of the cage and pad the wire catcher so that the shell would not crack as the egg tumbled at speed away from the hen. I yielded two eggs—tie score!—before she learned to stretch her neck through the same break in the cage that allows the egg to pass. I lost another and responded by stringing wire in the front of the cage from floor to ceiling. This rig yielded me three eggs before, with a junkie’s furious ingenuity, the hen learned to weave through the wires and crane her neck out the cage as before. I replaced the forest of wire with a sheet of mesh in the front of the cage that gave her just enough room to assume the laying posture but created a secondary floor wide enough so that no matter how much she strained—and she did strain—she could not reach beyond the front wall of the cage. As the commencement of my farm diet neared, I was winning the war of the eggs, and had almost a dozen stored up. The first meat birds were slaughtered five days after the tornado. The plan was to take the five heaviest chickens and hang them by their feet to lull them. That’s as many as I could do because the other twenty were still underweight. According to what I determined to be the best practices, the birds were placed headfirst into a stainless-steel cone. The cone keeps the infamous “running”—senseless flapping and leaping, really—to a minimum. The birds’ throats are then cut using a fourteen-inch blade, and when they have finished bleeding out, they are placed in the scalder—a fiberglass container filled with water heated to 155 degrees—so that their feathers come loose easier. Once plucked, the chickens are gutted, relieved of their feet, and dunked in ice water. The process takes hours, and while I’ve killed animals on hunting trips before, I somehow wasn’t prepared for the psychological toll. Harvesting the chickens was tedious and grotesque work. When it was done, I laid down on the driveway with three bottles of beer. On August 15, the first day of the diet, I surveyed my stockpile of chicken, greens, tomatoes, eggplants, a serving or two of cucumbers, a couple of other odds and ends, and those eggs. One thing was for sure: I was going to need those damn potatoes. I’d put off taking a census of the potato drill, because I didn’t want to interfere with what I hoped was their wild, bounteous growth. My father, who’d grown potatoes in his native England, had consulted on this part of the project, and having him involved gave me confidence. I was counting on 100 spuds in there, possibly as many as 200. I pulled the plywood berm away from the drill and attacked the soil with a gardening fork. I hit something solid and dug for it with my hands, only to realize it was a clump of dirt. I repeated this futile exercise until I had gone through four cubic yards of soil. Zero. Sifting through the dirt more closely, like a miner panning for gold, I scored seven of the tiniest potatoes the world has ever seen. I called my father. “The potato crop failed, Dad,” I said, by way of greeting. “Failed?” he spluttered. “How?” “I dunno,” I whined. “But I could only find seven, and they’re hardly as big as shirt buttons.” “But I was there,” he said, incredulous. “We planted them together. What could you have done wrong? Maybe it was all the rain.” “Your potatoes grew in England, Dad.” Maybe with another month in the ground things would have been different, but at least for now, my farm diet would be potato-free. I had hoped to share the occasion of my first meal, if not the actual food, since there wasn’t very much, with Lisa and the kids, but Lisa was steadfast in her boycott of all things farm, most especially the farmer. She scheduled drinks for after work and arranged for Heath and Jake to stay with my mother. So I invited my friend Dan to join me. Originally from Alaska, he knows his way around homegrown poultry. He was less excited to wash it down with water. “Nothing but water for a month?” “I didn’t grow any booze, Dan,” I replied, remembering for a second that I originally intended to. That seemed like a very long time ago. “Of course not. Still?” “You’re welcome to open a bottle,” “No. Not if you’re not drinking. It wouldn’t seem?…” “It’s fine, Dan. Open a bottle.” “Well, don’t mind if I do.” I roasted one chicken on my outdoor grill, then split the bird and piled each half on a bed of greens I’d blanched, then sautéed in chicken fat, green onions, and garlic. I put thick slices of raw tomato, dusted with coarse sea salt and black pepper, on the outside of the plates and garnished them with parsley. It looked beautiful, easily good enough to serve in a restaurant. The taste was even better. I cut along the thigh bone with a knife and fork, and took a big mouthful. The skin was thick and crisp, like pork crackling, and dripping in delicious fat. The meat underneath was a revelation, dense but not at all chewy, with the concentrated flavor of a dozen store-bought chickens. It tasted like something that had been alive, the way a line-caught fish does. Dan enjoyed it, too, but it didn’t matter so much to me what he thought. He was there to witness my satisfaction, which was complete. So complete I didn’t even begrudge him his gulps of white wine. When Lisa arrived home with the kids, I practically accosted them in the doorway, urging them to try some of the remaining chicken. Lisa refused outright. Jake looked at his mom and then the chicken and said, “No thanks, Dad.” “Really? Not even a taste?” “I’m fine,” replied Lisa. Jake just watched the two of us. “Come on, Jake, try it. It’s totally amazing!” I insisted. Desperate for an ally, I tried to split the family along gender lines. “Not like regular chicken at all.” “I like regular chicken,” Jake said. The next day, I made another plate as perfect as the ones I’d made for me and Dan, and served it to Caleb, my loyal farmhand. He looked at it as if he wished it were a slice of pizza and remarked, with undergraduate panache, that it “smelled a bit like underpants.” But when he finally ate some, he had to admit it was delicious. For the next four days, I ate nothing but self-farmed goods. There was not much variety. The eggs were a godsend; I ate one every morning. Then nothing until an early dinner, which I started preparing around four and ate, by myself, at five. The meals were all minor variations on my first one—I alternated between roasted chicken and chicken stewed in tomatoes and onion. I had collard greens and fresh tomatoes on the side and, every other day, some eggplant. Once or twice, I admit, I cheated, using olive oil to cook the eggplant because it was so dreadful boiled. My dining schedule was dictated by the fact that I didn’t really have anything for lunch, at least not anything that was different from what I had for dinner, and by the fact that I still sat with the kids when they ate their decidedly non-farm supper at seven. Never before in my life have I salivated at the sight of a frozen fish stick, but that started to happen. The images of sushi dancing in my head had a psychedelic edge. Time slowed down. I tried to live a normal life, but leaving The Farm inevitably brought me into contact with food I couldn’t eat, and I found the temptation for almost everything unbearable. I walked to the deli to pick up milk for the kids and just about got down and begged for a bag of microwaved popcorn. Normally I hate microwaved popcorn. On Day 6, I was in fact driven to my knees—by severe gastrointestinal distress. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that I had to forgo The Farm diet in favor of saltines as well as maintain, at all times, an unobstructed path to the toilet. Whether this ailment was caused by The Farm I do not know. I am proud to say, however, that after two days of suffering, I was able to return to The Farm diet and, with the exception of a steak dinner on my birthday (sadly, I burned the beautiful piece of meat my mom brought over for me, probably an act of the gods), I have stayed on course as of this writing. n three weeks of eating nothing but Farm-fresh food, I lost 29 pounds, down from my pre-Farm weight of 234. Abs: That’s the upside of only two meals a day. The downside is the expense. Not counting my own labor, which was unending, I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month. But I did learn something about food: Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising it is miserable, soul-crushing work. Eating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful. Few, if any, serious locavores would see my experience as having much to do with what they advocate: eating regionally and seasonally in order to save the planet. But I now better understand what will be needed to back up the slogans. Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world. Our bountiful era is predicated on the division of labor: We don’t sew our own clothes, we don’t build our own houses—and we certainly don’t farm—because we’re too busy doing whatever it is we do for everyone else. But locavores also preach the importance of valuing all the time and energy and care that go into producing good food, and there I’m with them. So, too, in the end, is Lisa. As I joined her and the kids for supper one night, after finishing my own, Lisa remarked that after seeing how hard I’d worked to put a simple plate of chicken on the table, she’d never shop the same way again. It wasn’t just a matter of buying regionally, or seasonally, or organically—the important thing was to consume responsibly. “I’ll never be as wasteful,” she said. “We throw away more food than we eat.” There, at long last, was our Hallmark moment of mutual understanding. (This article based on the author's book appeared in NY Times Magazine) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100715 ... rt whops forgot one... Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Questions 36-65 are archived at blackink_whitepages_ Questions 66-88 are archived at _blackink_whitepages_ Questions 89-112 are archived at __blackink_whitepages_ Current standings; 1. lostgirl = 188 2. jane = 121 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 100715 ... rt Manny Howard, "My Empire of Dirt" Question 115 This poet served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006 she received the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan — see the press release, newspaper coverage and photos), in 2007 she became a Chubb Fellow at Yale University, in 2008 she was honored with the Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2009 she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and the Premio Capri (the international prize of the Italian "island of poetry"). She was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. She is the editor of Best American Poetry 2000, and from January 2000 to January 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post. Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the spring of 2009. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn. Some of her poetry: Wiring Home Lest the wolves loose their whistles and shopkeepers inquire, keep moving, though your knees flush red as two chapped apples, keep moving, head up, past the beggar's cold cup, past the kiosk's trumpet tales of odyssey and heartbreak- until, turning a corner, you stand, staring: ambushed by a window of canaries bright as a thousand golden narcissi. Exit Just when hope withers, the visa is granted. The door opens to a street like in the movies, clean of people, of cats; except it is your street you are leaving. A visa has been granted, "provisionally"-a fretful word. The windows you have closed behind you are turning pink, doing what they do every dawn. Here it's gray. The door to the taxicab waits. This suitcase, the saddest object in the world. Well, the world's open. And now through the windshield the sky begins to blush as you did when your mother told you what it took to be a woman in this life. Dusting Every day a wilderness--no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knicknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a "rainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael-- something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun's accomplice, the tree. Maurice. For three points, name the poet and give a personal response... 100716 ... jane rita dove i love these videos of her dancing!! http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/video/index.html 100716 ... rt +3=124 jane! Question 116 If there were a writer of whom it could be said, “No introduction is necessary,” this author would be the one. His publisher seems to think so as the dust-jacket biography on Yellow Dog, his novel reads, "his most recent book was Koba the Dread. He lives in London." The author, is, of course, the son of a writer and attended Oxford University, where after graduation he wrote for the New Statesman. During his seven-year tenure at that publication, he became its literary editor. It was at the New Statesman that his long friendship with fellow Oxonian Christopher Hitchens was firmed up. His works of fiction beginning with The Rachel Papers in 1973 are Dead Babies, Success, Other People, Money, Einstein's Monsters, London Fields, Time's Arrow, The Information, Night Train and Heavy Water. His non-fiction includes Invasions of the Space Invaders, The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Experience, The War against Cliché and Koba the Dread. Yellow Dog follows a brutal attack on actor-writer Xan Meo and its aftermath, which presents his wife, Russia, and daughters with a traumatized and troublesome father and husband. Add tabloid hack writer Clint Smoker to a cast of characters that includes Henry IX, the King of England and his Chinese mistress, various hit men and pornographers, Xan's first wife Pearl, a corpse knocking around in the hold of a jet liner—and well, you get a picture of a novel of some narrative complexity. It is with this odd crew that Amis unleashes his withering humor and derisive critique of 21st century English society. In any case, as he offers below, the author believes Yellow Dog to be one of his two or three best works. This is my fourth conversation with him beginning with the publication of Time’s Arrow, later with The Information and Experience. Robert Birnbaum: I heard you speaking a few weeks ago on a radio program in honor of the 50th anniversary of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March with James Wood — I can't remember if there was someone else also? The author: No, it was just us. RB: You said something to effect that Saul Bellow was the greatest author ever? MA: The greatest American author ever, in my view. RB: What does that mean to say that someone is the greatest author of any category? MA: I have written a piece about it in this month's Atlantic [Dec. 2003, unavailable online at the request of the author], and I do go into the matter that value judgment cannot be demonstrated or proven. But I still feel you can make an educated guess about literary futures. It all comes down, I think, to weight of voice. His sentences seem to weigh more than anyone else's. He is like a force of nature. There is a nice part in a short story about when there is a storm in Chicago. And the main character and his father have this terrible mission to go and bum some money off a couple of do-gooders and they have a terrible journey through the storm. He says, "When we emerged from the subway the storm was still having it all its own way in the street." I always thought that one force of nature was recognizing another. He breaks all the rules— RB: What rules? MA: Well, the rules about universality in fiction. One of the supposed limitations of autobiographical fiction is that unless the characters are works of the imagination, creations of the imagination, they will lose universality. They will be locked into the particular. Now the people in Bellow's fiction are real people, yet the intensity of the gaze that he bathes them in, somehow through the particular, opens up into the universal. I don't know of another writer who does it that way round… I think it is fair to say that many a novelist will use someone they know as model, and perhaps this is more the Philip Roth method. You take someone's appearance and then give them someone else's character and you can put a fictional character together that way and I have done it myself, many a time. But with Bellow it's a specificity that excludes all else. And he is taking a reading of people he has met and encountered of such depth that any addition, any fabrication would skew it. He is staring absolutely unflinchingly at entities that he has encountered. RB: You have written recently—within the context of the ruckus that erupts around the publication of your books—something like, posterity was what writers were really creating for. Did I get that right? MA: Yeah, the phrase was "that prizes as sales and sashes and rosettes… RB: [laughs] MA: “…are just show biz. And the real action starts with the obituaries.” It's a symmetrical thing too. Because I think it keeps you honest. You are not going to be around for that, by definition. RB: Well, if you have friends at the New York Times you already know what your obituary is going to say. MA: [both laugh] The obituary is only the beginning. My father always used to say he didn't care about posterity, "It'll be of no fucking use to me because I won't be here." But I think he did [care], really. RB: And you do. I think all writing answers the very human desire—not for immortality but for some extension of your mortal span. MA: Yes. I think all writing answers the very human desire—not for immortality but for some extension of your mortal span. I think that is a powerful motive for having children too. That the story doesn't end with your death, somehow. That story line like the family line continues. And it's an intoxicating thought that your words and your way of seeing things will go on after your death. RB: It does create a cottage industry of people sitting around writing and speaking at length about who, in fact, will be recognized or consider giants many years hence. MA: Yeah, but you can't fix it, though. No amount of politicking and ass kissing is going to get you that. RB: The bickering and politicking or honest conversation does go on in real time and occupies a fair amount of space. Whatever its value, entertainment or education, it can be distracting. At any rate, do we care about readers? MA: Yes. RB: Who don't give a shit about posterity in the same way your father characterized it. MA: Well no, but the readers of the future will be determining this. RB: And living readers? MA: Oh yes, passionately. But it's their chance to make the judgment. No longer will it be the pundits, the opinion formers. They will sink into the shadows. The eternal, universal reader will decide. RB: It's a noble thought that writing will not be mediated and that cultural arbiters, though they must a make a living… MA: It's nice to do without them. RB: Still I wonder—setting aside the issue of an elite —do smart, serious readers care about posterity, about the future ranking of current works they are reading? Ought they to care? MA: Um, I don't think probably it matters. It's the continuation of this notion the reader—the good reader, the fit reader. They'll have some sense of it. But it’s of no immediate concern to them. Except there is a word of mouth. My sons ask me who to read and I tell them. So we see, again, the story line continues. RB: You, of course, enjoy traveling around the country under these conditions. You do go around talking to people who are readers and do go to bookstores and such. And you do it regularly. MA: That's right. Yeah I have done it. I think it this my last time. RB: [laughs] MA: This is the last. RB: Shall I alert the media? MA: [both laugh] Um, that's right. Meet the author is for me, meet the reader. It's fortifying to gaze into the eyes of people who often say they have many hours of pleasure under your auspices. And it makes up for all the other shit you have to— RB: I suppose many friendships can be termed unlikely friendships. How is that you become friendly with an older Jewish guy from Chicago? martin amis photoMA: Because I went to interview him. And wrote a piece that was so friendly that his agent at that time read it out to him on the phone, and when she was done, he said—and it was a long piece—"Read it again." So even the most lauded writers, Nobel Prize winners feel, not under appreciated but perhaps not always appreciated in the right way. Anyway, then we did a TV program together when he was in London. RB: Did you do any songs? MA: We have him on video tape singing "I'm a Gigolo." [both laugh] RB: I think it might be "Just a Gigolo." MA: And then when I was in town I would see him and then it's become an absolutely regular thing, going to see him in Vermont in the summer. As I say in the original piece that when you interview an author you admire, in one sense you are hoping for hot news. In other words, you would like him to have nervous breakdown or a heart attack while you are talking to them so that you've got your scoop. But in the other sense, you are hoping for the birth of a flattering friendship. So it's proved—so I saw him last night, and I am going to see him tonight. RB: How is it that you didn't do the introduction to the 50th anniversary Viking edition of Augie March. Or the Library of America edition of the three novels which includes Augie March? You passed it on to [Christopher] Hitchens? MA: I have already done the Everyman [edition] of The Adventures of Augie March. It's in the War Against Cliché—I've written a long piece about Augie March and I have written a lot about Saul, eight or ten pieces. The one I wanted to do but couldn't because I was finishing my novel was the Introduction to the Collected Stories [intro by James Wood], which I think is his greatest book—the accumulation of brilliance there is greater than any one novel. RB: Is it possible that in the twentieth century many writers' best work is in their short stories? MA: I don't think you can say that because not all novelists write short stories. Although a pretty fair number—has Philip Roth since Good Bye Columbus—written a short story? I don't think so. To me the short story is a totally natural adjunct to the fiction. You are going to get little impulses that you think, "No, this isn't a novel but certainly a short story." You need it so that certain ideas just don't die and then can be developed without entraining an enormous wedge of words. Saul Bellow himself wrote that as he gets older everything he reads—he agrees with Checkov—everything he reads strikes him as not short enough. RB: [laughs] MA: I was doing a class with him last year on Conrad's The Shadow Line, one of Conrad's novellas, and we were saying, “What was this novel about?” And someone said rhetorically, (I mean you can't say what's a novel about) "What's Augie March about?" And Saul replied, "It's about two hundred pages too long." And when he looks back at Augie March, it's not that it's without interest, these long riffs, it's just that they're not as artistically controlled as he'd like. RB: Suggesting that he learned something as he went forward? MA: Except that Augie March is Augie March, and a big novel has a way of pushing aside these little fastidious objections. I am just saying this is something of considerable size and therefore the longer book, the less you actually worry about artistic symmetries and so on. You just think, “Never mind about form, we are going to go with the voice.” And it's a tremendous liberation. RB: There is apparently a conventional writerly wisdom that novels are more forgiving, big sloppy puppy dogs and short stories are taut little show terriers? MA: Well, exactly. Muriel Spark said, "Every novel is a failed short story. And every short story is a failed poem." But I think that makes a fetish of brevity. Things just—it's one of the things that Bellow embodies. You obey your instinct—easily or not at all. Let it flow. RB: Is that taught in writing programs, do you think? MA: Not enough. But again it is an enormous risk to go with the voice. I did it in Money, and when I read it through before taking it in, I was completely horrified. I had great fun writing it over three years, but when I reread it, I couldn't put my finger on it but I thought I had gone insane. RB: That would be a sign of insanity—not being able to put your finger on it. MA: Yeah. I just was tremendously uneasy, sick to my stomach with anxiety, reading it through. What caused that feeling was that I had taken an enormous risk and put all the eggs in one basket. Not eked out with suspense and plot and all the rest of it—high risk. So, I'd called these novels talent novels, where the talent just takes over. And Bellow himself says when he was writing Augie March it came in a thunderstorm and all he was doing was bringing in the buckets. RB: You mentioned recommending books to your sons. What catches your attention and what are you reading these days? MA: History—I read Saul all the time, and I am always dipping into Ulysses and other staples. But history is my passion. RB: History of what? MA: It has to be said, history of disaster and violence and horror. RB: Is that where Koba came from? MA: Yes. My wife sometimes says to me, "You are reading another book on Stalin? Haven't you done Stalin?" I am reading Gita Sereny Into That Darkness [From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder] and she said, "Are you going to stop this? Haven't you had enough?" and the answer is, no, and the reason is that I don't understand it. I don't understand merciless brutality. RB: I happened to hear an interview that NPR's Terry Gross did with Philip Roth and she questioned him about a part in The Human Stain where the protagonist opines that life makes no sense at all. Gross wants to know, is that the character or Roth. He says, "Of course that's what I think, though I try to act and live my life otherwise." So, you think life makes sense otherwise but for your not being able to get a handle on disaster, evil and man's inhumanity to man? MA: I think life would make pretty good sense if violence was excised from it. Violence is the great human difficulty. It's like a category mistake— RB: You say that in Yellow Dog. I think life would make pretty good sense if violence was excised from it. Violence is the great human difficulty. MA: Yeah—that we blundered into. The lesson is that actually things achieved by violence don’t last. They all have to be done again. We think that violence solves things. And it never has. I mean retaliatory violence is sometimes necessary and so on. And revolutions have their own beautiful rationale. If you are oppressed there is a sword up there in the sky that you must reach for. And so on. But this tit-for-tat business that we have been doing for millennia doesn't get us an inch further. We can't seem to take that in. So a great deal about life makes perfect sense. The energy of violence commits us to a road where nothing does make sense. RB: And what do you recommend to your sons to read? MA: My elder boy used to be completely dismissive of any view that didn't proclaim that George Orwell was the greatest writer of the twentieth century. He was going through his common-sensical, middle-teen years. But now he reads the Iliad and he looks back and says, "Compared to Orwell this is just magnificent." But I am steering them to my particular line, you know, Nabokov, Bellow, Joyce. And we'll see what happens. MA: Do you pay attention to contemporary literature? MA: Well—I think I offend people by saying this, but there is a great reluctance to read your youngers. I read some. It's usually because I am friends with a younger writer. RB: Will Self. MA: Yeah, Will Self. I am fascinated by what he writes. But the only way that I can justify this is as a general rule is that when you read your elders, those of a generation or two ahead of you. There is a pretty good chance that Judge Time will have had the opportunity to do some grading for you. If you read your youngers, it's pot luck isn't? Who knows? RB: What is the end, the teleological concern? What are you going for? What's the point of your reading? MA: I think Dryden gave it, "What is the point of literature? It's to give instruction and delight." Certain writers will tip more toward instruction, others tip more towards delight, but it's a combination of the two. I want to be getting as much out of it as I can. I think this is very much against the spirit of the time. Certainly in England, where they don't want to be instructed or indeed, delighted much. They want a fifty-fifty, across the table kind of "you're not telling me anything I don't know, and I could tell you things." RB: Would that be exemplified by a general snideness and cynicism in literal and cultural dialogue? MA: I think it's much exaggerated this notion that writers are so much at each other's throats. I don't think they are. RB: I am thinking more about the literary press? MA: Yeah, sure. RB: Here in the States the issue of literary snarkery has had some attention and, of course, you seem to be a regular target. The publication of one of your books seems to repeatedly put you and everything about you under the microscope. MA: Yeah, ever since The Information, really. When I got too much press for a literary guy. Salman Rushdie is a far more extreme example, but once you do start getting that kind of attention, then you get rejected by the so-called literary stratum. We are only talking about a stratum of reviewers, but they are not reading for the same reason that we read. They are insulted by any idea that any writer has something to tell them, and their anti-elitist feeling is so profound, that my stuff reads like a drawl of Oxonian self-congratulation. They are saying, “Come on, come down off your bloody mountain." You know, that sort of feeling. My stuff reminds them how thick and numb and smug they are. RB: [laughs] MA: And they hate it. When I read I like to think how thick and smug and numb I am. I want that pierced, you know. For them, it's fighting terms. RB: People talk about career arc or trajectory. It seem to me not an apt or at least it's a misleading term when applied to writers. MA: Well, life has an arc. Tragedy has an arc. It's like the mouth on a tragic mask. It starts at a certain point and you go up and then you go down again. And comedy is the other way around. Where you start at a certain point and you go down into complication and trouble and then you come back up again. And certain things you get better at and certain things you get weaker at and just the energy level and brainpower certainly decline. I don't think there are many writers who like Saul Bellow write terrific novels in their eighties. I don't think there are any. This will change as— RB: That's arguable. That is to say, that I have heard grand pronouncements and dismissals of Bellow, such as "he hasn't written a good book since the Fifties." photo of martin amis by robert birnbaumMA: Nonsense. Nonsense—yeah, because they are dying for you to fail. I think medical science will up this into the eighties more commonly. But it is a painful truth. RB: Alan Lightman who— MA: The Einstein's Dreams man, yeah. RB: —started out as a scientist and has become a novelist having written five novels. When I talked with him recently, he brought up the notion of being served by your youth as a scientist. And that a loss of a kind of mental agility as one aged was detrimental to being a productive scientist. But as a writer and artist, he felt that you got better as you got older. MA: It's certainly true of painting and largely because that's the shape of it. It takes twenty years to learn how to paint. Whereas you just start writing with a pad and a pencil and you are away. Philosophers are finished by the time they are twenty-five, you know. It's all over for them. Technically, your brain does start to rot in your thirties, and for that real sharpness, avant-garde sharpness, you do need a brain that is still, growing, perhaps. So one has to bow to Anno Domini, but just not yet. RB: In addition to what you just said, how do you feel about it? Do people still talk about you as an ‘enfant terrible’? MA: Yeah, it's embarrassing. The bad boy of English letters…it's about time… RB: The Mick Jagger of English Literature, is that still bandied about? MA: Yeah, why don't they call him the Martin Amis of the rock world? RB: Exactly. Why don't they call you the Eminem of Brit Lit? MA: Yeah, why don't they at least call me the bad man? RB: [laughs] MA: They think that subliminally I was born in 1922, when my father was born. I nevertheless wrote Lucky Jim when I was seven and I am now in my eighties and yet I am only 54. So I am going to be around for another twenty years at least. And it's unbearable in some subconscious way. I do occupy an odd place because of my father. It was never a trouble to me when I was starting out as people assumed it must have been. I think I am paying for it now. RB: How much do you think about growing older? MA: Oh, every moment. RB: [laughs] No, not every moment? MA: To the exclusion of all else. But no, one thing it isn't, is boring. It's fascinating and tragic and the great limitation of art and writing is that it doesn't prepare you for these things. You'd think it would, but with something like this, you can only experience it fresh. And that's encouraging in a way. You'll have a lot to say about it that no one else has said. It's whole new subject coming in. RB: So let's talk about Yellow Dog, your novel for which you are here, ostensibly to talk about. You are a student of things American, did you ever concern yourself that the phrase "yellow dog" in the US has a political connotation. MA: It's a Southern Democrat. RB: Right. MA: No. I think it has other applications too. RB: I've told many people that though you have met my dog Rosie, it was not connected to her. Certain writers will tip more toward instruction, others tip more towards delight, but it's a combination of the two. I want to be getting as much out of it as I can. I think this is very much against the spirit of the time. MA: [laughs politely] RB: What to say about it? There have been many reviews, much review attention. Are you happy with it? MA: With what? The reviews? RB: No, the book. MA: Yeah. I think it is among my best two or three books. RB: Wow. MA: I mean, I am a critic as well as a novelist and that's just my feeling. You can be wrong about your own stuff. RB: I wasn't challenging you. Someone recently was asked in New York Magazine what he would do to advise you in light of the attention that you garner. Was it Hitchens who said that you should publish under another name [laughs]? MA: Yeah, Martin Davis. RB: Why hasn't Hitchens been asked to review the book? He did speak well of it in that same New York magazine tidbit. MA: Well, he should't. Too close friends— RB: That never happens? Well, perhaps not in honorable venues. MA: He reviewed Koba a lot. He wrote three pieces about that. No, I wouldn't review a book by him. You don't expect that. I think it is quite right to be careful and New York Timesish about that. RB: What do you mean New York Timesish? MA: Well, they have all sorts of rules about back scratching. RB: If they do, they don't seem to apply to back (and front) stabbing. And I am not sure that there isn't some logrolling allowed, also. recently there was an unseemly conflict of interest around a Midge Dechter book on Donald Rumsfield. MA: I thought they were quite vigilant or meant to be. They have rules. They can only be a third cousin after six months. That sort of thing. l think they have a code of conduct. RB: I suppose that they do, but they don't go out of their way to prevent axe-grinding reviews. MA: I think every editor has a weakness every now and then. I think that Charles McGrath is a principled man. More generally, I started not reading my reviews and another method is to get them sorted out by your wife or your agent. So you only read the good ones. But if you are not going to read the bad ones you shouldn’t read the good ones, either. It's actually a relief. RB: Is that based on the notion that you might learn something from reviews and that no longer pertains in your case? MA: I think maybe once in your life you'll learn a little thing from a review. You could write the bad review. You know what weaknesses there are. And it at no point overlaps with what is said about you. What you are getting is either stuff that's that going to make you angry or stuff that's going to make you smug. So [you] abjure it. RB: I have become aware that English language books may have two or three editors (in the case of Janette Turner Hospital, she had an Australian, an American and an English editor). I bring it up for a couple of reasons. I never see references to how much of your writing is translated. Is much of it? MA: In a good fifteen languages. RB: I wonder how that goes because I have some difficulty reading you because you certainly use some very specifically British colloquialisms and perhaps neologisms. MA: Sure and also I don't know a foreign language, so I don't know what my translations are like. But I ask people who have French and Spanish… RB: What does 'wanker' translate into, in French and Spanish? MA: I wonder. [both laugh] 'Asshole' is what you would say in America. RB: No, I would translate it as 'jerk-off' [a form of asshole]. MA: Jerk-off artist is as close as you can get. But it doesn't get the derision of 'wanker'. I think for other reasons I must be difficult to translate. RB: What are those reasons? MA: The writing isn't clear as a mountain creek, is it? It's not that kind of writing. Some writers translate—Kafka translates beautifully, Thomas Mann is hopeless in translation. People who have German say he is bliss to read in German and yet he is very heavy in English. Kafka is transparent. Some writers are transparent, others are not. What's a translation of Finnegan's Wake like? Probably in French it is easier to read than in English. I am translated, but I shudder to think what enormities are perpetrated by the translators. RB: Is there a [foreign] language that you are most popular? author martin amisMA: Experience was very popular in France. But I'd say Spain —I think it’s to do with [my] cruel humor. It's a cruel country, Spain. You wouldn't know it now. I can remember watching donkeys being flogged on the side of the road. Don Quixote—Nabokov can hardly bring himself to read it, it's a such a crude and cruel, old book. It’s for the man who liked to watch some poor wretch in the stocks having people throwing glass bottles at his face. People who like kicking a dog's bladder around. I think it is a cruel culture. RB: It’s a cruel culture, and yet one looks at how Yellow Dog presents the British culture of "60 million superstars," that strikes me as a cruel culture. MA: Yes it is. In a different way. A bitter culture. Coming down off empire. More and more I think countries are just like people and not very rational people. And it's all about face and humiliation and to going to war for face. And you remember your lost greatness. You mourn that and you feel traduced and humiliated. Just like a prima donna. RB: How much time do you spend in England? MA: I live in England. RB: I know, but how much time do you spend there? MA: We spend—what's changing in our lives is that we are spending more time in Uruguay. My wife is half-Uruguayan. RB: Are you familiar with the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano? MA: No. [Does he live] In Montevideo? RB: I think so. A wonderful writer. Loves what most of the world calls football, if that means anything to you. MA: Oh yes and I love football too. RB: Is Montevideo nice? MA: It's sort of second world. Not Mercedes and BMWs— Ciats and Scottos. RB: Galeano was mentioned in piece that Lawrence Wechsler wrote in the New Yorker [later becoming the book, A Miracle, A Universe] and he was asked why he lived in Montevideo since he is half-Argentine. Galeano, who is a leftist in the Latin American political spectrum, said, "If I killed in Montevideo people would know it was my enemies, but if I was killed in Buenos Aires people wouldn't know if it was my friends or my enemies." MA: It's a civil society now with strong traditions, and I have never seen any unpleasantness in the six or seven months that I have spent down there. But I did talk to an Uruguayan novelist and she said Uruguay can't support any writers because the population is small and shrinking. It's the size of England and Scotland and has a population of three million and falling. There is nothing there and all the beef industry is gone and it’s got some wine and that's about it. RB: No tourism? MA: The Argies come and have their holidays there, on the cheap. But it suits us and it feels—I don't know, your heart lifts when you go there. RB: And when you touch down at Heathrow? MA: Horror, yeah. RB: [laughs] MA; Coming in through the mist from the train. And you realize that most of the time that you are in London that you are in a state of mild depression. When you go there, you realize that. [pause] Low level, daily depression. RB: I am running through Yellow Dog's characters and — MA: There's the king. RB: Yes, I remember the characters —he is blissfully disconnected from almost everything. MA: Yeah. RB: I am trying to recall if there are any characters that showed any vitality or signs of life or joie de vivre— anything? Maybe Pearl, the malicious ex-wife… MA: Yeah she has a bit. Xan and Russia too, they have a sound and even enviable marriage. But it gets threatened by a very extreme situation—when she is told to regard her husband and marriage as a completely new relationship. What a horrifying thought that is. RB: Nostalgia would not be the right word, but were reminiscences of the birth of your children at play as you completed Yellow Dog? MA: Yeah, a lot of the book and certainly a lot of Xan Meo's turmoil is frustrated feelings about protection. And I started this book four or five years ago, put it aside to write the two memoirs, and then resumed on September 12, 2001. Not very good timing. Once the shock had worn off and so on, I do think that the agony of this is that your feelings, your protective feelings are made even more moot and contingent. You never could protect your children, but it's another great injection of arbitrariness and randomness and madness and nihilism. And that was the feeling I ended on. It turned out to be very important to me that there is a sort of hopelessness about that project— about protecting them. It's always getting more hopeless. There must have been a time when you could [protect them], but you can't in the modern world. RB: Yeah, I am sure there was. MA: When they never went out of your sight— RB: Or at least many of these atrocities and abuses went unreported. MA: Hmm, yeah, now it's all in your face. RB: Abuse, serial murder, sexual predation— MA: Yeah, stolen off the streets. RB: Your purchase of milk is a reminder of missing children. MA: We don't have that in England, but it's a very striking thing. RB: Are the problems we are talking about all manifested in England as well? MA: Oh yeah. The only difference is that the self-respecting American serial murderer prides himself on his mobility, and England isn't such a mobile society. These shits in their vans with their weapons in the back and the chloroform--the culture of the serial murderer is more developed here. RB: George Orwell and Yellow Dog aside, what will England be like in twenty years? MA: It's a more contradictory culture than here. Here you have rampant individualism, and we have it in England too, but the opposing force is egalitarianism. And fraternity yes, liberty certainly, but equality has never been an American idea. Freedom, not equality. RB: We have lots of space to act out our cultural quirks—hence we have conclaves of serious Second Amendment individualists in Montana and other remote regions. MA: Yes you have. We are all crushed together. Our countryside is just bollocks. A friend of mine wrote a poem called “Bollockshire” about the English countryside. It’s so cute and fake. We have no wilds left. RB: What is the Lake country like? I gather from reading Alain de Botton there are lots of Japanese tourists there. MA: Yeah, infested with—lots of tourists and "ye olde" bullshit. In England you have individualism running up against egalitarianism, totally contradictory ideas. And it's in that mess that the future of England lies. RB: So have you built your house in Montevideo? MA: Yeah, we are going to hunker down over there. RB: It’s not even a skip and jump to Buenos Aires, one of the mythical, great cities of the world? MA: Yeah, it’s a forty-minute flight. RB: The Argentines seem to be in perpetual tough shit. MA: Argentina is recovering. Although we went through one day when there was a national strike and just before the [economic] collapse. And Brazil is very volatile and, by the way, there is a huge area of Paraguay and Brazil of Al Queda down there. Whole province of Al Queda. RB: Ungovernable. …they are not reading for the same reason that we read. They are insulted by any idea that any writer has something to tell them. MA: Ungovernable, no go. Meaning no one goes there. But Uruguay is this little jewel of civility even though they suffered when their giant neighbors groan, they groan too. But lots of voluntary stuff, very American like and a unitarian feeling. We got through fine. And unless there is a cataclysm, unless the emigration goes on until there is no one left, it's heaven for us. RB: How far ahead are you charting your course? MA: You mean writing? I have sort started what I think will be an autobiographical novel. I left myself alone for thirty odd years. My first novel was autobiographical because what else is there when you are in your early twenties? RB: Some would argue they all are. MA: Well, they all are— bits of you. And it's by now, for me, a big subject. It’s gone on long enough there is plenty there. Enough deaths and births. RB: Do you recall your thoughts as a young man about what reaching fifty might be like? MA: I always thought I was going to kill myself on the day before my twentieth birthday. RB: [laughs] On purpose or by some fated thing or accidental thing? MA: On purpose. And then you think well, twenty-ninth birthday and then thirty-ninth, all ridiculous little deadlines. I was talking to Christopher Hitchens the other day, and he said, “This is just gravy because I never thought I would l live this long.” But I don't feel that really. I feel you owe it to your children to stick around a bit longer than that. Although I am still a smoker—getting surrounded and nagged by all my family. RB: It must be hard on you. I am not struck by your willingness to take advice. MA: Hitchens says I don't want to be a non-smoker. Even my four-year-old says, [in child's voice] "You said you were going to give up when you finished your book. [raises his voice] And you didn't!" RB: [both laugh] I read an Australian writer this week whose name escapes me but he was lambasting writers for their lack of political engagement. I remember you wrote a piece in the Guardian before the Iraq war called the "Palace of the End," and I thought there was another piece. Is it your sense that writers are failing their responsibilities? MA: I think in America people have looked with interest to see what writers are saying about what goes on. In England the tradition is that a writer's view on politics is of rather less interest than the man in the street. RB: [laughs] MA: They do. "You don't stick your oar in. Keep on what you're good at," you know. It's like the exchange between Saul Bellow and Milton Friedman where Saul said something about economics and Friedman said, “When I have a question about literature, I'll come to you.” And Saul says, “But you never will have question about literature.” [both laugh] There should be more inter-penetration. The politicians should read more fiction and we should write more about politics. I wrote about September 11th and I wrote about Iraq. And the piece was printed in many European papers and was taken seriously, but in England it is considered pretentious. RB: I am riding a high horse recently because Susan Sontag won a German Peace Prize and gave a compelling Sontagian acceptance speech, and there was no coverage here of the award or her speech. MA: But she has made a lot of enemies I suppose. She has taken a lot of hits in the culture wars. RB: Normally, that translates to more attention. MA: You'd think. But my sense is that America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was. RB: Still doesn't. MA: Still doesn't, and looked to its writers to say, "Are we just a bunch of Italians and Greeks and Jews? Or are we a nation with a soul and a heart?" But England has never worried about what it was. Its identity goes so far back. And it doesn’t look to anyone to tell it what it is, so they prefer that the writers just shut up. Robert Birnbaum, a bookish journalist, was born in Germany, grew up in Chicago, lived for too many years in Boston. He is editor-at-large at Identitytheory.com and something or other at The Morning News. For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100717 ... rt martin amis...check out the friendship he had and still has with christopher hitchins. Question 117 In her short stories and her 2001 novel, "An Invisible Sign of My Own," this author brought magical realism to the suburbs. Her matter-of-fact surrealism and breezy style often yielded fiction of surprising depth and subtlety. Her new novel has the narrative momentum and clockwork plotting of any good mystery, but its bleak whimsy and clear-eyed rendering of domestic sorrow are the author's own. The novel begins a few days before its narrator's ninth birthday and follows her into young adulthood. After a typical third-grade day, Rose Edelstein comes home to find her mother making the title cake. When she takes her first bite, the flavors give way to "something new . . . a cover over something larger and darker" that has to do with her mother. The sensations increase until she realizes that the cake holds all her mother's "absence, hunger, spiraling, hollows." From then on, the more Rose eats her mother's food, the more she feels the yearning and melancholy of a woman desperate to believe that marriage and motherhood satisfy her. Rose begins to intuit how her father's detachment and older brother Joseph's reclusive brilliance have drained the household of emotional warmth. In one scene, she becomes so overwhelmed she frantically wipes bits of food off her tongue and tries to pull her lips off her face. As Rose gets older, her knack matures so that she can identify the locations of the farms and factories where her meals originated. As in many fairy tales, she discovers her gift is a family inheritance that curses her with unwanted knowledge, but that can also lead to transformation. I tripped over the author's use of awkward sentence fragments, but the story pulled me right along. I felt so committed to the characters and their troubles that I ended up wanting more, not fewer, pages. As many honorable storytellers do, the author sets stock characters in motion to reveal the irony and pathos of their authentic individuality. Unfortunately, too often she doesn't push far enough past the fairy-tale elements: unsatisfied wife and mother who finds partial fulfillment in fine woodworking (the Pinocchio echoes enrich this material); emotionally distant, breadwinner husband (an inside-out sitcom character); and the troubled brother's only friend (too good to be true). But the passages devoted to Joseph are splendid. All the agonized love and well-intentioned guidance in the world won't keep this heroic, inexplicable Bartleby from fulfilling his harrowing destiny. The behavior of the family toward this savant --especially Rose's bewildered adoration -- is accurate in every detail. No one quite knows what or who Joseph is; everyone fears his strangeness, determined to solve or ignore it. The ending is a touch too facile, but the story contains much to disturb and delight. As the cake might say to Alice: "Eat me." (Adapted from a review in Cleveland.com). Your short stories remind me of modern fairy tales. Did you read fairy tales as a child? A: Yes, especially Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. I liked Hans Christian Anderson because the tales were so dark and tragic. My favorites were "The Tinderbox" and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." BT: What inspired you to want to write? A: As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon. BT: Did you grow up in an environment that fostered a love of the arts and of writing? A: Definitely. I was read to a lot, my mom loved dance, and she really encouraged all the arts, visual arts, music. I took a lot of dance. BT: If writing wasn't your medium, would you have pursued one of these other art forms? A: I like to view it as a little triangle, with writing at the top, and they're all sort of at the bottom, and they're all all interesting to me. Theater is particularly interesting to me, but I'm also taking a sculpture class right now and I feel all of those help my writing. There's also a certain kind of joy I get without any of the pressure of writing. BT: Your writing is kind of magical, what's your sculpture like? A: Well, it's a figure sculpture class. It would have been totally magical, I like surreal and absurdist things, that's definitely where I lean, but the teacher was insistent that we just do the body. I wanted a third eye, but she wouldn't allow it. BT: What writers do you point to as influences, and what excites you about their work? A: There are the fairy tale writers we mentioned earlier, and I still go back and read them. I think it has something to do with the fact that fairy tales present plot as metaphor. I guess it's that combo that I really like. I also really love Italo Calvino, because he's just weird and great. I love all these people that I've read that I feel that they write about something that feels profound, but from an unusual angle, and that give me the feeling of freedom and permission. I really like this playwright named Carol Churchill who wrote a play called Cloud Nine. Oliver Sacks writes about these neurological disorders that are incredible. I love the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, William Maxwell, James Baldwin--he's just really emotionally true. Garcia Marquez. I just reread One Hundred Years of Solitude and it made me mad, it was so good. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100717 ... rt Aimee Bender, "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake " Question 118 Rob Fleming is a London record store owner in his 30s whose girlfriend, Laura, has just left him. At the record shop — named Championship Vinyl — Rob and his employees Dick and Barry spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics and constructing "top-five" lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music. Rob, recalling his five most memorable breakups, sets about getting in touch with the former girlfriends. Eventually, Rob's re-examination of his failed relationships and the death of Laura's father bring the two of them back together. Their relationship is cemented by the launch of a new purposefulness to Rob's life in the revival of his disc jockey career. Also, realizing that his fear of commitment (a result of his fear of death of those around him) and his tendency to act on emotion are responsible for his continuing desires to pursue new women, Rob makes a symbolic commitment to Laura. "Top Five" lists from the book Most memorable split-ups (chronological order) 1. Alison Ashworth 2. Penny Hardwick 3. Jackie Allen 4. Charlie Nicholson 5. Sarah Kendrew Rob's top 5 subtitled films (p. 28) 1. Betty Blue 2. Subway 3. Tie me up! Tie me down! 4. The vanishing 5. Diva Rob's Top Five Films (p. 28) 1. The Godfather 2. The Godfather Part II 3. Taxi Driver 4. Goodfellas 5. Reservoir Dogs Floor-fillers at The Groucho (p. 87) 1. "It's a Good Feeling" by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles 2. "No Blow No Show" by Bobby Bland 3. "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight 4. "The Love You Save" by The Jackson Five 5. "The Ghetto" by Donny Hathaway Rob's Top Five Elvis Costello Songs (p. 98) 1. Alison 2. Little Triggers 3. Man Out Of Time 4. King Horse 5. Everyday I Write The Book Rob's Dad's Top Five Films (p. 137) 1. Genevieve 2. The Cruel Sea 3. Zulu 4. Oh! Mr. Porter 5. The Guns of Navarone Rob's Mum's Top Five Films (p. 137) 1. Genevieve 2. Gone With The Wind 3. The Way We Were 4. Funny Girl 5. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Rob's top 5 episodes of Cheers (p. 142) 1. The one where Cliff found a potato that looked like Richard Nixon 2. The one where John Cleese offered Sam and Diane counseling sessions 3. The one where they thought the chief of staff of the US armed forces had stolen Rebecca's earings 4. The one where Sam got a job as a Sports Presenter on TV 5. The one where Woody sang his stupid song about Kelly Rob's Five Best Side One Track Ones (p.147) 1. "Janie Jones", The Clash, by The Clash 2. "Thunder Road", Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen 3. "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Nevermind, by Nirvana 4. "Let's Get It On", Let's Get It On, by Marvin Gaye 5. "Return of the Grievous Angel", Bruno Grégoire, by Gram Parsons Rob's Top Five Bands or Musicians Who Will Have To Be Shot Come the Musical Revolution (p.160) 1. Simple Minds 2. Michael Bolton 3. U2 4. Bryan Adams 5. Genesis Rob's Five Dream Jobs (p. 229) 1. NME journalist, 1976-1979 2. Producer, Atlantic Records, 1964-1971 3. Musician (any kind except for rap or classical) 4. Film director (any kind except for German or silent) 5. Architect (eventually changed to owner of a record store) Favourite Records (singles) (p. 313) 1. "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye 2. "The House That Jack Built" by Aretha Franklin 3. "Back in the USA" by Chuck Berry 4. "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash 5. "Tired of Being Alone" by Al Green Name the author, his book, and give a top five list of your own... 100718 ... rt Nick Hornby...High Fidelity this writer recently was nominated for an oscar for the screenplay of the film, "An Education." 100719 ... rt Question 119 This author's second novel is a marvelous if slightly improbable tale of women, gin-making and the building of the first Brooklyn Bridge (not the one you may be thinking of, but that's part of the story). As a small child in late-18th-century America, Barton's central character, Prudence Winship, looks across the East River from the village of Brooklyn (or Brookland) at Manhattan, believing it to be the City of the Dead — a preoccupation that portends much in this narrative of her life and her consuming interest in getting across the river. Prudence and her sister Temperance (their names appear to be the mischievous whim of a hard-drinking, blasphemous but good-hearted father, who escaped the seminary to become a successful gin distiller) are the owners and operators of Winship Daughters Gin. The wonderfully inventive world they inhabit is both familiar and foreign: New York in the years from 1772 to 1822. When her novel begins, Dutch is still spoken on the streets. There are windmills and slaves. British troops are garrisoned in Brookland. Taverns are the center of social life and balladeers travel the countryside: "disreputable-looking characters, with scruffy hair or gaps in their teeth; but they arrived almost as frequently as the New York papers and sang about the war and news in other towns, providing a good evening's entertainment." So much modern fiction thinks small, feels small. This author will never be accused of either.The large and complex storytelling in this book is divided between a traditional third-person narrative and the much older Prudence's letters to her daughter. Both feature a large and complex cast including, among others: a drunken physician; a minister who drones on in Dutch, German and English; a blind black slave; a ferryman constantly sailing back and forth across the harbor; and a tavernkeeper with a sideline in patent medicines. But the three Winship sisters — Prudence, Temperance and the mute and spooky Pearl — are her best creations. The sisters, who inherit the distillery at their father's death, prove eminently capable of running a gin works in this male-dominated world — maybe because Prudence is rarely prudent and Temperance is never temperate. They have been reared in their father's trade, and if you learn nothing else reading this book you'll pick up more about making gin than you would have thought possible. (Nothing wrong with that.) Prue and Tem, as they're called, are fiercely independent. They're tough, smart and resourceful. But they live — and they know this all too painfully — in a world where they must be subservient in many things. She fills her novel with information about the customs, food and clothing of roughly 200 years ago. The reader will be told, for example, that tansy and pennyroyal taken as a tea, along with a brisk gallop on horseback and plenty of exercise, will act as birth control; that the dying should be given a tonic called Eugenic Water (a mix of laudanum and moonshine); that asparagus grows best over the graves of British soldiers. At the heart of the letters Prudence writes to her daughter, who has moved away and chosen not to follow her mother and aunt into the family business, is an account of her dream of building a bridge to connect Brookland with Manhattan (well before the actual Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883). In that quest, Prudence enlists her lover and eventual husband, Ben Horsfield, who also happens to be a surveyor, and her sister Pearl, who plays a critical and terrible role in a scheme that brings much tragedy and grief to the Winships. The novel turns out to be a story not just of risk, daring and ambition but of the courage to fail — and the courage to live on after failing. (Adapted from a review by Christopher Corbett, who is the author of "Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express.) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100719 ... rt Brookland by Emily Barton Question 120 This travel writer is given to romantic gestures. Few come more laden with implications for this book than the decision he took one fine Welsh summer's morning after he saw five swallows on the wires at his mother's house. This seemingly trivial encounter with a favourite bird led him to hatch a hare-brained plot to replicate half of the swallow's biannual journey between Europe and Africa. Within weeks, he had armed himself with visas and equipment to cover 14 countries in three months. Heading for the Cape of Good Hope, where the vast majority of Britain's swallows pass our winter, he kicks off with the most glorious of all hirundine spectacles - a roost near Bloemfontein that numbers more than a million twittering birds. Once he had experienced these "dark whirlwinds funnelling down" into the South African reedbed, he had then to settle for far more quotidian swallow encounters. In fact, all we really get thereafter to remind us of his original project are glimpses of the birds flickering across African landscapes. Herein lies the problem with this romantic gesture. Swallows do not migrate in one vast observable swarm that can be tracked, nor do they take a single identifiable path between, say, Bloemfontein and the Welsh valleys. Rather, swallow migration, perhaps involving a fifth of a billion birds, is a diffuse, almost osmotic filtering of these tiny feather scraps from one continent to the other. You can intercept it, by standing in a single spot and letting parts of this delicate current of blue pass you by, but you cannot meaningfully replicate the journey yourself. The problem is not merely down to the vagaries of swallow flight. The human landscape is equally resistant. For instance, when he arrives in southern Niger he is balked from further progress north by civil war and the larger danger of travel through Algeria. He improvises by flying to Algiers on the Mediterranean coast, at a stroke abandoning any possible encounter with the Sahara desert, the most critical and mysterious portion of the swallow's entire journey. He recognises the narrative bind he has created for himself, and the real subject of this book becomes his own experience. He, truly, is the single swallow of the title. But an ancillary dilemma here is that the schedule has been defined, not by the requirements of a good African travel book, but to mimic the swallow's own migratory timetable. The three months allocated to traversing the entire continent means that his time is always short. His reflections on people and places seem, therefore, rather fleeting, while his travel narrative feels momentary and thinly stretched. No African state enjoys coverage of more than 40 pages. Some get far less: Niger, for example, takes up just six. Within these constraints, the author deploys some fine lyrical writing and a gift for inventive, unexpected metaphor. Examining a tissue envelope of tiny gems, he describes how a Namibian salesman unfolds "a shining little city of green stones". The Brazzaville airport is said to have a "flaked, one-eyed look as though it had recently been shot up". He gives notice of his real abilities when he is forced to stand still. Visa restrictions in Algeria oblige him to remain for his total five days in the capital. His romantic attachment to this once great Mediterranean city draws from him both his finest prose and his deepest insights. It feels like the best-spent 120 hours of the book. His other great asset is his brave, modern, multicultural and open-hearted approach to travel itself. If he is not an explorer cut from the mould of Redmond O'Hanlon, he is at least an adventurer of the metropolitan kind. He enjoys a fleeting sexual liaison with an Ivorian beauty in Brazzaville. He is fleeced by hash dealers in Casablanca. He loses all his belongings in Spain. In Marrakech - where else? - he falls head over heels for a British-Asian from Rochdale and vows to marry within hours of meeting her. When he gets back to England, one is barely surprised to hear that his family seeks to have him sectioned. One also senses that this hopeless dreamer has found his next big theme, with perhaps a honeymoon in Algiers watching swallows above the rooftops. (Adapted from a review by Mark Cocker for The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response..... 100719 ... rt Horatio Clare, A Single Swallow Question 121 "People are aware of the heart, slopping about like a piece of lively meat inside the chest, as if it isn't snug, as if it hasn't been fitted right." This author knows how to write a good sentence. Her ripe, tangy prose, as effective on landscape as it is on people's minds, gave her an auspicious start as a novelist, pushing her first novel, The Electric Michelangelo, on to a Booker shortlist and winning the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for her third, The Carhullan Army. This novel will not disappoint her champions. It is a stylish novel, as replete with ideas as it is technically ambitious, interweaving four separate strands and characters across different times and places. Two of the strands take place in Umbria in the 1960s. A renowned Italian painter, having roared through life as a lion, now finds his footsteps moving inexorably towards death. In parallel with his decline runs the delicate, ecstatic story of Teresa, a young flower seller in the same village, whose creeping blindness opens up a seam of inner vision while exposing her to the predatory dangers of the world outside. The other two strands are set 40 or so years later in contemporary Britain. Northern artist Peter Caldicutt, once a student correspondent of the famous artist and now a successful sculptor, is striding through messy middle age, while his daughter Suse (the nearest the novel comes to a central character) is in London reeling from shock and grief at the death of her twin brother. In each of these stories there is much to admire, although you have to have your wits about you to handle the fractured sequence of time (the contemporary British material is sliced into half a dozen layers). She builds her characters as a pointillist uses paint: intense vivid dots; instances, images, observations, some precise and punchy, others digressing into meditations on life, death, art and creativity. How far you revel in this mix of detail and tangential thinking, or yearn for a more dynamic structure and pace says as much about how you read novels as about how she writes them, but there is no denying the confidence of her style and her emotional intelligence. Of the four strands, the British ones work best. The novel was obviously partly inspired by a residency in Umbria and you can feel the slow, romantic pull of another rhythm of life as the experience mulches down in her imagination. But travel can also sharpen the mind to appreciate what's left behind, and her homeland (both external and internal) is keenly alive in this novel. Both father and daughter are complex, solid human beings. Suse's childhood struggle with her own identity as a twin is beautifully drawn, as is the lacerating grief caused by her brother's death and the affair she indulges in to try to drown out the pain. She is good on sex, that raw, nervy adrenaline of desire, substituting life for death, even if in the end it leaves you emptier. She is even better on the landscape of Cumbria and the character of Peter. He is a splendid example of a particular kind of masculinity: bolshy, bluff, sentimental and vulnerable. The scene where he falls in his beloved gorge land- scape and gets his foot stuck between two rocks, spending the night caught between agony, memory and existential terror, is marvellous. I was worried he wasn't going to make it - I skimmed over the intervening, more ruminative chapters in search of resolution. Clearly that marks me as a reader who needs, even craves, narrative to balance the pleasures of style. Nevertheless, I may not be alone in becoming occasionally impatient with the novel's meditative aspects, not least because the author can do a lovely job of teasing and eking out tension. Perhaps at some point down the line she will be more drawn to marrying the two. For now I am willing to wait. There is pleasure enough to be had here. (Adapted from a review by Sarah Dunant for The Guardian) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100720 ... jane How to Paint a Dead Man Sarah Hall 100720 ... jane that first story rather reminds me of Stealing Beauty 100720 ... rt +3+127 jane! "stealing beauty" is one of my favorite films of all time. i have a secret story of something that happend the first time i saw it in a theatre. Question 122 A young woman climbed a 200-foot 1,000 year-old redwood in December 1997. She didn't come down for 738 days. The tree, dubbed Luna, was ready to be cut by a corporation and this woman's action was part of an Earth First! devised tree sit-in to protest the logging. The book she wrote, part diary, part treatise, and part New Age spiritual journey, is the story of her two-year arboreal odyssey. On December 18, 1999, her feet touched the ground for the first time in over two years, as she descended from "Luna," a thousandyear-old redwood in Humboldt County, California. She had climbed 180 feet up into the tree high on a mountain on December 10, 1997, for what she thought would be a two- to three-week-long "tree-sit." The action was intended to stop Pacific Lumber, a division of the Maxxam Corporation, from the environmentally destructive process of clear-cutting the ancient redwood and the trees around it. The area immediately next to Luna had already been stripped and, because, as many believed, nothing was left to hold the soil to the mountain, a huge part of the hill had slid into the town of Stafford, wiping out many homes. Over the course of what turned into an historic civil action, she endured El Nino storms, helicopter harassment, a ten-day siege by company security guards, and the tremendous sorrow brought about by an old-growth forest's destruction. This story--written while she lived on a tiny platform eighteen stories off the ground--is one that only she can tell. This twenty-five-year-old never planned to become what some have called her--the Rosa Parks of the environmental movement. Shenever expected to be honored as one of "Good Housekeeping's" "Most Admired Women of 1998" and "George" magazine's "20 Most Interesting Women in Politics," to be featured in "People" magazine's "25 Most Intriguing People of the Year" issue, or to receive hundreds of letters weekly from young people around the world. Indeed, when she first climbed into Luna, she had no way of knowing the harrowing weather conditions and the attacks on herand her cause. She had no idea of the loneliness she would face or that her feet wouldn't touch ground for more than two years. She couldn't predict the pain of being an eyewitness to the attempted destruction of one of the last ancient redwood forests in the world, nor could she anticipate the immeasurable strength she would gain or the life lessons she would learn from Luna. Although her brave vigil and indomitable spirit have made her a heroine in the eyes of many, her story is a simple, heartening tale of love, conviction, and the profound courage she has summoned to fight for our earth's legacy. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100720 ... rt julia butterfly hill. legacy of luna Question 123 Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of this author's book, an unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or “crank,” on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew. The book, wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type that’s disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main Street, isn’t chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us, we learn, and once again, as happens in America whenever our collective attention wanders from the gray struggles of the little guy to the purple capers of the big wheels, attention must be paid. Right now. Or else. The book begins quietly and solemnly, with a ballad of cultural invisibility. The author, a loyal native of the Midwest who’s frankly sentimental about its past and starkly lucid about its likely future, invites his rushing readers to gaze down at the “flyover country” of America and see not a grid of farms and county roads but a patchwork of failed institutions and aspirations. There’s the hospital, groaning under a load of uninsured patients with ­minimum-wage jobs and maxed-out household budgets. There’s the school, imperiled by dwindling tax receipts and students with ever more grown-up problems. And there, on a street in a district of drab houses not far from the faltering central business district, is a passel of latter-day Tom Sawyers on bikes, riding along not for the summertime heck of it but to shake up batches of low-grade speed contained in plastic soda jugs lashed to their back fenders. It’s magnificently potent stuff, this meth, whose crudest versions are concocted from a mash of over-the-counter cold pills and flesh-eating bulk industrial chemicals. Just a few grains of it, snorted through scarred nostrils and allowed to saturate stressed synapses, can keep a person awake and going for days. And that’s not an entirely bad thing here, where survival means working harder for less each year, from late shift to day shift, until perception blurs. Soon, he brings us even farther in, introducing a cast of local characters whose trust it must have been a feat to gain, so wobbly and troubled are their lives. Nathan Lein, the crusading county prosecutor, is the 28-year-old son of pious farmers who’s come back to Oelwein to help clean up the meth mess after obtaining degrees in philosophy, law and environmental science. Lein, a big guy, but not quite big enough given the monstrous foes confronting him, is afflicted by a nervous “habit of slowly raising his hand to his face and then rubbing the tip of his nose in one quick motion, as if to remove a stain that only he can perceive.” Manning another fortress against the siege is Dr. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s leading physician and a chain-smoking, trembling alcoholic who likes to swill cheap canned beer in his garage. Oddly, like Lein, he’s an amateur philosopher, given to quoting Kant and reading Chomsky and trying to fit his hometown’s woes — ghoulish orgies of domestic violence, toxic explosions of backyard crank labs, psychotic episodes at Do Drop Inn — into overarching historical patterns. He and Lein share a longing, perhaps even a mania, to achieve an enlightened perspective on decline, if only because it lifts them temporarily out of their harsh grass-roots struggle with its effects. The effects themselves are hardly abstract. In the tradition of James ­Agee’s writings on Depression-era share-­croppers, he displays the faces of the damned in broken-capillary close-ups. In the grisliest passage of the book which deserves to be quoted at some length so as to convey its hellish momentum, he invites us to share in the torments of Roland Jarvis, a paranoid small-time meth cook, in the Dante-like interlude after the combustion of his improvised home lab (just one of hundreds in the area). “Jarvis looked down and saw what he thought was egg white on his bare arms. It was not egg white; it was the viscous state of his skin now that the water had boiled out of it. Jarvis flung it off himself, and then he saw that where the egg white had been he could now see roasting muscle. His skin was dripping off his body in sheets. . . . He’d have pulled the melting skeins of skin from himself in bigger, more efficient sections but for the fact that his fingers had burned off of his hands. His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.” Too many scenes of sulfurous agony might chase away the most calloused, ambitious reader, so he recounts these nightmares sparingly, surrounding them with stretches of patient journalism tracing the convergence of social vectors that made the meth plague nearly inevitable and its eradication well-nigh impossible. He details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant. The agricultural conglomerates that have gobbled up Oelwein and similar farm towns may feed the world, but they starve the folks who work for them, breeding a craving for synthetic stimulants that conveniently sap the appetite while enlarging the body’s capacity for toil. These offal-streaked Dickensian mills are also magnets for desperate immigrant laborers who, in some cases, blaze the smuggling trails that run up into the Corn Belt from Mexico, home to the gang lords who own the superlabs that, increasingly, dominate the meth trade. “Vicious cycle” is not an adequate term. As he painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens, expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns. A photon of cheer at the end of this grim tunnel emerges toward the end of the book when, thanks to tireless efforts by a new mayor, a shaky economic revitalization succeeds in sprucing up the town and brightening its prospects. At the same time, the embattled Lein and Hallberg manage to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps just as they’re about to plunge over sheer emotional cliffs. How all are faring in the current downturn isn’t revealed, and perhaps that’s for the good, because readers who’ve followed him into the underworld deserve a measure of hope for their devotion. What’s clear is that the golden rolling heartland that Americans used to think symbolized stability beats fitfully and irregularly still and almost certainly remains inclined to seek out sources of chemical optimism. And no one, least of all the author, who knows what’s what on an intimate, human level as well as on the astral plane of globalism, can tell us where it will all end — only that, all things being equal in an increasingly unequal land, it doesn’t have far or very long to go. (Adapted from a review by Walter Kirn for the NY Times Book Review) For three points, name the author, his Sidney Hillman prize for Journalism book, and give a personal response... 100721 ... jane METHLAND The Death and Life of an American Small Town Nick Reding 100721 ... jane Wow - for some reason it reminds me of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair - in The Jungle there is the devastating effects of alcoholism on the industrial era workers, but it's more subdued in the story - i suppose as subdued as alcoholism was in the time, and here you have meth becoming rampant in a place that is perfectly set up for it to do so. the characters seem really dynamic and not as stereotypical as one would imagine the "country folk" to be. Reding seems to give them quite a bit of dimension. i would never think i'd be interested in such a book, but the review makes it seem quite compelling. 100721 ... j on a side note, i tried meth once, before i moved to new_york. i have been very blessed with the ability to sample substances and have never experienced a devastating addiction. i can say that now that i have tried it one time, it was the worst drug i have ever done, and i will never do it again. it sickens me to even think about it. 100721 ... rt +3=130 jane! "breaking bad" the television series on showtime gives a peak into the life of cookers. Question 124 From “The Thorn Birds” to “Brideshead Revisited” to “White Teeth,” the multigenerational family tale can almost always be described in certain ways: it will be long, it will take place over several decades or centuries, its narrative will be tethered to the history of a particular place. But while we may think we know what such a story looks and sounds like, this author uses her third novel to quietly redefine the genre. Although the novel takes place over several generations and more than 80 years of American history (and nearly 400 years of world history), it’s less than 250 pages long. How can something so slim cover so much ground? This breadth is achieved through a series of haunting impressions that trace the story of a family, the history of 20th-century America and the evolution of American music. The premise is that the past sits in our own bodies, buried beneath our muscles and bones. The framing narrative introduces us to Honor, a 21-year-old massage therapist who has been hired to treat Milo, a taciturn Iraq war veteran with both a spinal cord injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is 2005, and Milo is a patient at the oldest veterans’ hospital in New York, an institution with its own complicated, tragic history. Wherever Honor touches Milo — shoulder, palm, neck — a story is released. The first begins in 1936 in New York, where Joe, a saxophone player, is debarking at the harbor after playing a gig on a cruise ship. He is met at the dock by his wife, a practical and devoted young woman named Pearl, and her flamboyant cousin Vivian. Pearl, we soon learn, has had a number of miscarriages, and the couple’s inability to have a child will threaten their marriage. Honor visits Milo weekly, and the more invested in “her soldier” she becomes, the more characters and stories emerge and re-emerge. One, set in 1969, hovers around Iris, mysteriously obsessed with an older female photographer and married to a doctor who has been dismissed from the Army. Another concerns a teenager named Anna, who, in the 1980s, when “telephones were heavy and stayed at home,” gives birth to a baby girl whom she insists on keeping, despite her parents’ wish that she give the child up for adoption. Another story, about Parvin, a young concubine, takes us back to Turkey in 1623. Forced into the sultan’s harem, Parvin appears strangely detached from the other characters, and she is the least believable. But when she is rescued by an adoring alchemist, the relationship becomes clear: her section of the narrative introduces a story about the art of making cymbals, whose percussive rhythms informed that quintessentially American sound called swing. Astutely, Mendelsohn connects the cymbal to her American characters when Joe attends Count Basie’s New York debut at the Roseland Ballroom: “The sound of cymbals reminds him that it is impossible to keep time.” Eventually, Basie will change the course of each of the American characters’ lives. When Joe dances with his wife’s cousinat Roseland there’s a wildness to the prose, reminiscent of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” that contrasts sharply with the calm, spare writing in the rest of the novel. After the show, Vivian complains, “I didn’t think that the band was all that great.” But Basie himself “will remember this night not as a fiasco of missed opportunity . . . but as one of the highlights of what will become an illustrious, a shimmering career.” The performance will be transformed in his, and the public’s, imagination into a thrilling night, an event not to have been missed. It will become the stuff of legend. That’s just one of the messages of her novel: over time, the past turns mythical. And so these lives, coaxed forth from Milo’s body by Honor’s strong, loyal hands, are tethered to mythical moments in American history: the Depression and the Vietnam War; the set of a Cecil B. DeMille movie; the Christmas Eve that Count Basie played Roseland. These moments are linked in surprising — and sometimes not so surprising — ways. The story is a puzzle whose missing pieces the reader needs to fill, flipping back and forth to ensure that information is correct, confirming that, yes, that phrase (and many others) appeared like code in the opening pages. There is ample reward for these efforts. The pivotal scene that knits everyone’s lives together is exacting, moving, devastating. This novel is a story told in often dazzling images. “The sky lit up,” she writes of a fireworks display, “and the world appeared to be taking a picture of itself.” In addition, the novel’s structure means that our encounters with the stories have a fleeting quality, like a light flicked on and off as photographs develop in a darkroom. And yet, although we meet these characters hastily, we come to know them well. It is a testament to her skill that she can decode a lifetime in an image. Eventually Milo’s silence ends, and we learn how his own story of tragedy is entwined with his physical self. But why do these stories emerge from Milo? How does this soldier’s wrecked body come to express a history it can’t escape? Is all history shared? Who, then, lays claim to our separate memories? These are some of the questions posed by this wise, sad novel. Our past, the world’s past, the fleshy weight of war, are buried deep within us. How, the novel asks, if a little too plaintively, do we free our stories? How, in essence, do we let them swing? (Adapted from a review by Jennifer Gilmore in the NY Times Book Review. Her latest novel is “Something Red.”) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100721 ... rt American Music by Jane Mendelsohn Question 125 Sorry, Bella. No sparkly underwear models flex their way through this massive new vampire thriller. But just about everything else has been sucked into the great maw of this summer's most wildly hyped novel. The author is the latest indication that no one, not even an English professor at Rice University who's written a couple of small literary novels, is safe from the count's bloody fangs. You'd think his degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop would repel vampires like a garlic necklace, but who can resist Dracula's mesmeric gaze, not to mention that $3.75 million advance? (Rumors of Marilynne Robinson's upcoming werewolf novel could not be confirmed at press time.) Of course, you're skeptical. So was I. But by the third chapter, trash was piling up in our house because I was too scared to take out the garbage at night. It's a macabre pleasure to see what a really talented novelist can do with these old Transylvanian tropes. In the same way that "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" gave us a mature alternative to "Harry Potter," this book is for adults who've been bitten but can't swallow the teenybopper misogyny of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series. As a writer, though, he is more Dr. Frankenstein than Dr. Van Helsing. This book, the first volume of a planned trilogy, doesn't have any interest in pursuing ol' Count Dracula; it's all about stitching together the still-beating scraps of classic horror and science fiction, techno thrillers and apocalyptic terror. Although a clairvoyant nun plays a crucial role, he has stripped away the lurid religious trappings of the vampire myth and gone with a contemporary biomedical framework. Imagine Michael Crichton crossbreeding Stephen King's "The Stand" and "Salem's Lot" in that lab at Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon's "Swan Song," "Battlestar Galactica" and even Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." A pastiche? Please -- he is trading derivatives so fast and furious he should be regulated by the SEC. But who cares? It's alive! The story opens a few years in the future, when the war on terror has come home with frequent attacks on American shopping malls and subway stations. A secret government project wants to create a new breed of soldiers by reengineering a virus found in some nasty Bolivian bats. The last 12 test subjects are death row inmates -- murderers and rapists -- just the kind of people you'd want to endow with lightning speed, impenetrable exoskeletons and a rapacious thirst for human blood. But relax, what could possibly go wrong? These are government experts. They've got, like, double locks on the cages and everything. (I walk home a little faster now past the NIH biohazard lab in Bethesda.) As you might expect, "mistakes were made." Soon the entire country is overrun by indestructible, blood-sucking fiends -- like a presidential campaign that never ends. The second part of the book picks up about 90 years later with an abrupt jump in locale and tone. From here on out, we follow the fate of a small community of descendants hanging on in a walled compound powered by antique technology. It's an engrossing if vampiric version of Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us": Nuclear plants melt down and explode, vegetation retakes the cities, and the Gulf of Mexico fills with oil from untended wells (like that could ever happen). He proves himself just as skillful with the dystopic future as he is with the techno-thriller that opens the book. This second section sinks deep into the exotic customs of these beleaguered survivors. We meet a vibrant cast of citizen warriors, who have to ask themselves each day if it's worth fighting against the dying of the light. (If those wind-powered bulbs go out, the "virals" will swoop in.) Their best fighter is a stoic bombshell named Alicia, who was raised by an old soldier to kill -- and could teach Lara Croft a few things about being hot and deadly. I was initially less impressed with Peter, the earnest young man who gradually becomes the center of this epic. He's about as sexy as a Sears shirt model, but there's something endearing about his modesty and determination, and eventually I saw the wisdom of placing this good-hearted everyman at the center of all these bizarre crises. Fortunately, he has a wry sense of humor that runs from macabre to silly. A passing reference to Jenna Bush as governor of Texas may be the scariest thing in these pages. Soldiers watching an old reel of Béla Lugosi's "Dracula" in a post-apocalyptic vampire wasteland is a particularly nice touch. And in the final pages of the novel, one of my favorite characters "lapsed into a kind of twilight," but not Stephenie Meyer's kind. Yes, once in a while, he can't resist sucking on a few supple cliches. A traumatized survivor obviously heading toward something terrible says, "I wonder if we are heading toward something terrible." There's a prostitute with a heart of gold, a little child holds the key to humanity's salvation, and some exhilarating chapters have needless cliffhangers grafted on to the last line, e.g., "Something was about to happen." Duh. But once vampires start leaping from the treetops, you're not going to notice those little flaws. You'll be running too fast. Part of what makes these light-sensitive monsters so terrifying is that he never lets us see them much or for long. For hundreds of pages, we remain like the harried survivors of this ravaged nation, peering into the darkness for those telltale orange eyes, the last thing we'll see before we experience the new sensation of being ripped from crotch to neck. It'll be interesting to see if Ridley Scott, having reportedly paid $1.75 million for the movie rights, can exercise such restraint. But even if he can't, late in the novel there's a climactic gladiator scene with Wild West overtones that will blow the top of your head off. About halfway through the chewy center of the book, I was whining that he should have cut out a few hundred pages, but by the end, the only thing I wanted was to get my sweaty hands on the next two volumes. Till then, I'll be keeping the lights on. (Adapted from a review in The Washington Post) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100722 ... jane THE PASSAGE By Justin Cronin this looks awesome! i can totally get into vampire stories (except the twilight nonsense). and i love that it's in the future. it seems to give it more of a sci-fi influence, as opposed to fantasy. groovy. 100722 ... rt +3=133 go jane! this one is definitely for you. it's the first of more to come. Question 126 When I blogged a couple weeks ago about Sarah Silverman's hilarious new memoir, I wrote that as the mother of three little kids, I now enjoy activities I used to dread for the private time they provide. Flying solo to New York and back to San Francisco a a couple times this month, I read a lot, including this beautifully written memoir... Lauren, a nice Jewish girl from Jersey, drops out of NYU to pursue her dreams of stardom. To pay her Manhattan rent, she supplements her income with stripping and then gets involved in prostitution via an expensive escort service. Eventually, at eighteen years old, she's invited to travel to Brunei, as a guest of the Sultan, to spice up his parties. No one tells her exactly how much she'll get paid for her services: "Don't worry, you won't be disappointed." For those who don't know (as I didn't) where or what Brunei is, the author writes it's a Malay Muslim monarchy located North of Borneo. Independent from England since 1984, Brunei still retains strong cultural and diplomatic ties with the Queen. At that time, the Sultan of Brunei was, thanks to oil and investments, the richest man on the planet. There's more than a few memoirs and polemics about sex work out there, but this woman's book is unique. In part, just the location makes it fascinating, traveling to a palace in Southeast Asia and meeting the exotic, power hungry, soap opera-ish men and women who inhabit it-- it's like The Other Boleyn Girl meets "The Hills" but much better writing than either. (Yes, the "The Hills" is scripted.) There's an on-going debate in Third and Fourth wave feminism about sex work, whether it's empowering or degrading for women. Her book doesn't preach or pick a side, just describing her experience in a brutally honest and insightful way. A woman telling the truth about her sexual life like this is rare and revolutionary. She writes: "To those who haven't profited financially from their sexuality, those of us who have often inspired an extreme range of emotions: Why would we take off our clothes for money? What makes us take the initial plunge? What makes one financially strapped girl into a hooker and another into a Denny's waitress and another into a med student? You want to connect the dots. You all want reassurance that it won't be your daughter up there on the pole. Shitty relationship with my father, low self esteem, astrologically inevitable craving for adventure, dreams of stardom, history of depression and anxiety, tendency towards substance abuse- put it all in a cauldron and cook and the ideal sex worked emerges, dripping and gleaming and whole. Her writing about her family is also eloquent and excruciating. Before her decision to leave home, she's rude to her mother, ignoring her when she enters the house. Her mom asks if she's on drugs and her father flies into a rage, calling her an ungrateful little bitch. With every punctuation mark, my father pulled me forward by my throat and them slammed my head back again. When he let go, I crumpled to the floor and pulled my knees to my chest. I called it my civil disobedience trick. I closed my eyes and made myself the tiniest ball. I showed no soft bits. I worried about her reading the book, her crazy parents and her recklessness. But I knew she'd come out of her story okay because she's so smart. Here's my interview with the author. Her book just hit the New York Times best-seller list. You flew by private plane with another "party girl" from Brunei to Kauala Lampur to shop. You were driven to malls accompanied by men who carried suitcases of cash so you could clean out Chanel and Armani. As one of the prince's favorite girls, there was no limit on what you could spend. But you were never allowed to leave your hotel room except with that entourage for that purpose. It seems claustrophobic and suffocating-- just being in Stonestown mall in San Francisco can feel oppressive, and you shopped for over twelve hours. Was it fun? Were you thinking I'll be able to write about his someday? I was an avid journaller, but I was definitely never thinking of writing anything beyond that. The shopping was a whirlwind. It wasn't exactly fun, but it was an adrenaline rush. I was excited and yet sort of disgusted with myself at the same time. You were a guest of the Sultan's brother, Prince Jefri, though one day, "Robin," as he was called, shared you with his sibling, sending you to the royal yacht where female kitchen workers, wives, and girlfriends were cruel to you before you met the Sultan. You write: My survival instinct kicked in. I didn't have any reason to believe that if I was unwanted, was deemed uninteresting and undesirable, I would be thrown off a cliff or stoned to death in public or shoved in the trunk if a car never to be seen again. Yet I was ready to fight with all I had to stay on the tightrope of royal favor. Maybe there didn't need to be a threat of corporeal danger; maybe the threat of being unlovable was enough. In your book you call yourself a "feminist sex activist" but your beliefs and feelings seem more complicated than "sex positive" feminism. Can you elaborate? I really came into the feminist movement with a very particular viewpoint. And in the early nineties, when I was coming of age, there was this sex-positive explosion in the feminist movement. There was Susie Bright and Carol Queen and a bunch of bright, incredible women who were very vocal about being sex positive. Now I'm friends with a lot of these women. I do absolutely consider myself part of that camp. However, Its not simply about, "Sex work is so empowering, hooray." Because that's not how I feel anymore, now that I'm out of it and have lived with the consequences for 20 years. Sex work affected my relationship with my body, with my sexuality.It still has a ripple effect in my life. Taking your clothes off for money is a valid choice. For some women, maybe it's the only choice. Certainly decriminalizing prostitution and having health care available for sex workers would help. But I don't think it's the greatest thing women can do for our souls, for the most part. Did you make any lasting friendships in Brunei? Do you know what happened to those girls? What did they seem to want out of their experience there? I'm absolutely still friends with some of the girls and they've been very supportive of me telling my story. But I can't speak for them; I can only speak for myself. It's up to them to assign meaning to their own experiences. When you went back to Brunei a second time, you describe having sex with Robin again and this time, the intimacy startles you because you've been away and you've forgotten to click your "off" switch. For a moment, he's human you're shocked by the feel of skin and his hair. Were you able to recover from turning yourself off? Is it something you have control over? It took me many, many years to come back to my body. The end of the book is really only the beginning of the journey. I still struggle with disassociation but I have tools with which to address it now. You write a lot in your book about your childhood dreams of stardom, wanting to become a performer, a singer, a dancer. You never mention wanting to grow up and be writer yet that's what you are now. Was becoming a writer something you ever wanted? The second time you went to Brunei, you brought a computer and exchanged short stories with a friend in New York, though you made fun of those writings. Was this the beginning of your writing career? I never wanted to be a writer, but ironically writing was the thing I was generally doing the most of. I've kept journals since I was probably around eight or nine. Brunei was the place where I unknowingly started to develop a daily writing practice and that practice has been the most important thing to my writing career. So in a way, I guess my career did start in Brunei. What happened in the years after Brunei, before you got married? Did you stay involved in sex work? I was still involved in sex work for a while on and off until a terrible substance abuse problem pretty much made it impossible for me to do anything else. It wasn't until I got sober that I met my husband and my life started to resemble the life I have now. How did you make the transition into married life and motherhood? I made the transition into marriage and motherhood not by any one big choice but with a series of small daily decisions through which I learned to take better care of myself and the people I love. Did you know you wanted to marry your husband? What made him different than the other men? Was it the right time? My husband is that rarest of things...he's a truly good man. Besides being cute and funny and a great musician and all that other stuff. I knew almost immediately that I was going to marry him. Your parents do not come off well in the book-- your father is abusive and your mother neglectful. What is your relationship like with your parents now? I don't think my parents come off badly. I think they come off as complicated. I tried to the best of my ability to treat their portrayal with compassion and love. They're still very upset about the book but I have faith that we'll work it out. We've been through worse. What is your new book, Pretty, about? Pretty is a girl who survived a horrific car accident that killed her boyfriend and is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway house, while attempting to complete her last two weeks of vocational-rehab cosmetology school. It's about trying to find faith in a world of rampant diagnoses, over-medication, compulsive eating, and acrylic nails. (Adapted review and interview by Margot Magowan from City Brights For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response.... 100722 ... jane Some Girls: My Life in a Harem Jillian Lauren not sure how i feel about this one. although i am enticed by that third- or fourth- wave of feminism that believes in the empowerment of female sex workers, part of me wants to dismiss the story that seems so full of narcissism - is there a lesson learned here? and then another part of me thinks that that part is just kind of jealous, because, wow, what an amazing life experience. 100723 ... rt +3=133 go jane! Question 128 This book is a controversial 1965 novel which describes the world as seen by a young boy, "considered a Gypsy or Jewish stray," who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland) during World War II. The book describes the boy's encounter with peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality and rape, and in a huge amount of violence – often at the expense of the child. While the book has been said to depict Christian Polish peasants in a derogatory fashion, some argue that it was not a particular ethnic or social group, but all people, who are viewed as inherently predisposed to cruelty. The title is drawn from an analogy to human life, described within the book. The boy finds himself in the company of a professional bird catcher. When the man is particularly upset or bored, he takes one of his captured birds and paints it several colors. Then he watches the bird fly through the air in search of a flock of its kin. When it comes upon them, they see it as an intruder and tear at the bird until it dies, falling from the sky. According to Agnieszka Piotrowska, it was "described by Arthur Miller and Ellie Wiesel [sic] as one of the most important books in the so-called Holocaust literature. Wiesel wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was: "One of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity" Richard Kluger, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine, wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering ... one of the most powerful books I have ever read".] And Jonathan Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than this novel. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it. It enriches our literature and our lives"."Cynthia Ozick later gushed" – wrote Norman Finkelstein – "that she 'immediately' recognized the author's authenticity as 'a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust'. "Time" magazine included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". Soon after the book was published in Poland (where it was banned for 23 years), the people with whom the the author's family lived during the war became highly indignant about how they were depicted. He and his parents “had lived through the years of Nazi occupation not only in safety, but in comfort” protected by them. The author as a boy was baptized and received Holy Communion; he served as an altar boy. His parents even employed a maid. Norman Finkelstein, professor of political science at DePaul University, wrote in "The Holocaust Industry": "Long after he was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his "remarkable body of work." Finkelstein wrote that this book “depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic” even though they were fully aware of his Jewishness and “the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.” The reception of the book in Poland was far from uniform nevertheless. Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw professor, Pawe? Dudziak, noted that the book is a "great, if controversial" piece. He stresses that since the book is surreal - a fictional tale - and does not present, nor claims to present real world events - accusation of anti-Polish sentiment are nothing but misunderstanding of the book by those who take it too literally. In June 1982, a "Village Voice" article accused the author of plagiarism, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. ("Being There" bears a strong resemblance to "Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy" – "The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma" – a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Do??ga-Mostowicz). The article also claimed that the author's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic differences among his other novels. New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey, who in American biographer James Sloan's opinion was embittered by his own lack of literary success, claimed to have written this book. Reavey's assertions were ignored by the press. The "Village Voice" article presented a different picture of the author's life during the Holocaust – a view which was later supported by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and Sloan. The article revealed that this book assumed by reviewers to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. The article maintained that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, the author had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never been appreciably mistreated. In a Publishers Weekly article, Les Pockell, the editor of "Passion Play" and "The Devil Tree", said that the charges were "totally ludicrous. It's clear no one in the article is asserting that he or she wrote the book." Because he was "obsessive" about his writing, Pockell continued, "he retained people to copy edit." Pockell told the Los Angeles Times Calendar that he felt the article's authors "played upon the ignorance of the general public about the conventions of publishing," and "to turn Kosinski's working methods into something sinister makes one wonder about their motives". Terence Blacker, an English publisher (who published the author's books) and author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in response to the article's accusations in his article published in The Independent in 2002: "The significant point about him was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's "Reds". He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy." (Adapted from a n essay in ??????? ? ?????????) For three points, name the author, his controversial novel, and give a personal response... 100723 ... rt "the painted bird" by jerzy kozinski Question 128 If there were a “Ms. Globalization” title, it might well go to this author, the Somali woman who wrote the best-­selling memoir “Infidel.” She has managed to outrage more people — in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her — in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now she is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir. Her new book argues that Islam creates dysfunctional families — like her own — and adds that these distorted families constitute “a real threat to the very fabric of Western life.” Western countries, she says, should be less tolerant of immigrants who try to preserve their lifestyles in their new homelands. It might seem presumptuous to write another memoir so soon, but she is a remarkable figure who has plenty of memories to record. She was born in Somalia in 1969. Her family fled to avoid political repression, and she grew up in Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, collecting languages the way some kids collect postage stamps. For a time, she was a fervent Muslim, but when her father ordered her to marry a stranger, she struck out on her own, disgracing the family and shocking herself, and settled in the Netherlands. She studied political science — she is clearly intellectually brilliant — and ended up as a member of the Dutch Parliament. If the rapid transformation of a Somali girl into an outspoken black, female, immigrant member of Parliament seems extraordinary, it was just the beginning. Soon her critique of Islam was leading to death threats, her citizenship was threatened by Dutch officials and she moved to a new refuge in the United States. Even now, she needs bodyguards. That’s partly because she is by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex. After her father’s death, she connects by telephone with her aging and long-estranged mother living in a dirt-floor hut in Somalia. She asks forgiveness, but the conversation goes downhill when her mother pleads with her to return to Islam. Near tears, her mother asks: “Why are you so feeble in faith? . . . You are my child and I can’t bear the thought of you in hell.” “I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny,” she thinks to herself. “I am feeble in faith because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman — because I don’t want to be like you.” What she says aloud is: “When I die I will rot.” (For my part, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps her family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: “I love you.”) Since she denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry, I expected to dislike this book. It did leave me uncomfortable and exasperated in places. But I also enjoyed it. She comes across as so sympathetic when she shares her grief at her family’s troubles that she is difficult to dislike. Her memoir suggests that she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase, but also that she would be a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party. She is at her best when she is telling her powerful story. And she is at her worst when she is using her experience to excoriate a variegated faith that has more than one billion adherents. Her analysis seems accurate in its descriptions of Somalis, Saudis, Yemenis and Afghans, but not in her discussion, say, of Indonesian Muslims — who are more numerous than those other four nationalities put together. To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or ­Judaism. Where she is exactly right, I think, is in her focus on education as a remedy. It’s the best way to open minds, promote economic development and suppress violence. In the long run education is a more effective weapon against terrorists than bombs are. Because she is an immigrant, she emphasizes the difficulties that immigrants, particularly Muslims, have in adjusting to life in Western societies. In the course of telling her own story, she identifies three central problems. First is Islam’s treatment of women. “The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. . . . They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks.” Second is the lack of experience that many Muslim immigrants have had with money and credit. She recounts how, after her arrival in the Netherlands, she received an apartment through the government with the option of a loan of up to $4,000 to furnish it and pay utilities. A Dutch friend offered to take her to a discount furniture store, but she had dreamed of something upscale. So she and her Somali roommate, Yasmin, went to a high-end store and bought wall-to-wall carpeting and wallpaper — and that used up almost the entire loan. “The money was worth nothing here. Was the whole loan about just a carpet? We quickly decided it was God’s will. There was no need to quarrel: Allah had willed it thus.” Soon she was thousands of dollars in debt, and she argues that many foreigners have similar troubles with Western credit and finance. The third problem is a propensity to violence in the family, as well as in religious vocabulary and tradition. “I don’t want to create the impression that all people from Muslim countries or tribal societies are aggressive,” she writes — and then she proceeds to do just that. She declares: “Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence. Muslim children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with violence, taught to perpetuate violence, taught to wish for violence against the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan.” This is the kind of exaggeration that undermines the book. If the points about women and money are largely true, the point about violence seems to me vastly overstated. Yes, corporal punishment is common in madrassas, as it was in the rural Oregon schools where I grew up, and as it continues to be in Texas. Beatings may be regrettable, but they don’t typically turn children into terrorists. During a recent trip to Sudan, I was speaking to a Muslim Arab in Khartoum. When I said I was from the United States, he looked quite shocked and said worriedly: “Oh! It is very violent there.” I’ve had similar experiences in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with people in those countries expressing concern about my safety in violent New York. They generalize too much from American movies. It’s true that public discussion in some Muslim countries has taken on a strident tone, full of over-the-top exaggerations about the West. Educated Muslims should speak out more against such rhetoric. In the same way, here in the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems — while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated. (Adapted from a review by Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist at The NY Times and the author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”) For three points, name the author, her memoir, and give a personal response... 100724 ... rt Nomad by Ayaaan Hirsi Ali Question 129 Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie wanted to see the scars. Show us the scars, Boy, they said. They cornered Miracle Boy after school one day, waited for him behind the shop-class shed, out beyond the baseball diamond, where the junior high's property bordered McClung's place. Miracle Boy always went home that way, over the fence stile and across the fields with his weird shuffling gait and the black-locust walking stick that his old man had made for him. His old man's place bordered McClung's on the other side. Show us the scars. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie knew all about the accident and Miracle Boy's reattached feet. The newspaper headline had named him Miracle Boy. MIRACLE BOY'S FEET REATTACHED IN EIGHT-HOUR SURGERY. Everybody in school knew, everybody in town. Theirs was not a big town. It had happened a number of years before, but an accident of that sort has a long memory. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie wanted to see where the feet had been sewn back on. They were interested to see what a miracle looked like. They knew about miracles from the Bible--the burning bush, Lazarus who walked again after death--and it got their curiosity up. Miracle Boy didn't want to show them. He shook his head when they said to him, Show us the scars. He was a portly boy, soft and jiggly at his hips and belly from not being able to run around and play sports like other boys, like Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie. He was pigeon-toed and wearing heavy dark brogans that looked like they might have some therapeutic value. His black corduroy pants were too long for him and pooled around his ankles. He carried his locust walking stick in one hand. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie asked him one last time--they were being patient with him because he was a cripple--and then they knocked him down. Eskimo Pie sat on his head while the other two took off his pants and shoes and socks. They flung his socks and pants over the sagging woven-wire fence. One of the heavy white socks caught on the rusted single strand of bob-wire along the top of the fence. They tied the legs of his pants in a big knot before tossing them. They tied the laces of the heavy brogans together and pitched them high in the air, so that they caught and dangled from the electric line overhead. Miracle Boy said nothing while they were doing it. Eskimo Pie took his walking stick from him and threw it into the bushes. They pinned Miracle Boy to the ground and examined his knotted ankles, the smooth lines of the scars, their pearly whiteness, the pink and red and purple of the swollen, painful-looking skin around them. Don't look like any miracle to me, said Eskimo Pie. Miracle Boy wasn't fighting them. He was just lying there, looking in the other direction. McClung's Hereford steers had drifted over the fence, excited by the goings-on, thinking maybe somebody was going to feed them. They were a good-looking bunch of whiteface cattle, smooth-hided and stocky, and they'd be going to market soon. Eskimo Pie and Geronimo were brothers. Their old man had lost three quarters of his left hand to the downstroke of a hydraulic fence-post driver a while before, but that hadn't left anything much to reattach. It's miracles around us every day, said Miracle Boy. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie stopped turning his fee this way and that like the intriguing feet of a dead man. Miracle Boy's voice was soft and piping, and they stopped to listen. What's that? Geronimo wanted to know. He nudged Miracle Boy with his toe. Jesus, he made the lame man to walk, Miracle Boy said. And Jesus, he made me to walk, too. But you wasn't lame before, Geronimo said. Did Jesus take your feet off just so he could put them back on you? Miracle Boy didn't say anything more. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie noticed then that he was crying. His face was wet, shining with tears and mucus. They saw him bawling, without his shoes and socks and trousers, sprawled in his underpants on the ground, his walking stick caught in a pricker bush. They decided that this did not look good. They were tempted to leave him, but instead they helped him up and retrieved his socks and unknotted his pants and assisted him into them. He was still crying as they did it. Eskimo Pie presented the walking stick to him with a flourish. They debated briefly whether to go after his shoes, dangling form the power line overhead. In the end, though, they decided that, having set him on his feet again, they had done enough. Miracle Boy's old man was the one who cut Miracle Boy's feet off. He was chopping corn into silage. One of the front wheels of the Case 1370 Agri-King that he was driving broke through the crust of the cornfield into a snake's nest. Copperheads boiled up out of the ground. The tractor nose-dived, heeled hard over to one side, and Miracle Boy slid off the fender where he'd been riding. Miracle Boy's old man couldn't believe what he had done. He shut off the tractor's power-takeoff and scrambled down form the high seat. He was sobbing. He pulled his boy out of the jaws of the silage chopper and saw that the chopper had taken his feet. It's hard not to admire what he did next. Thinking fast, he put his boy down, gently put his maimed boy down on the ground. He had to sweep panicked copperheads out of the way to do it. He made a tourniquet for one leg with his belt, made another with his blue bandanna that he kept in his back pocket. Then he went up the side of the silage wagon like a monkey. He began digging in the silage. He dug down into the wet heavy stuff with his bare hands. From where he was lying on the ground, the boy could see the silage flying. He could tell that his feet were gone. He knew what his old man was looking for up there. He knew exactly. Miracle Boy's old man called Lizard's mother on the telephone. He told Lizard's mother what Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie had done to Miracle Boy. He told her that they had taken Miracle Boy's shoes from him. That was the worst part of what they had done, he said, to steal a defenseless boy's shoes. The next day, Miracle Boy's old man came to Lizard's house. He brought Miracle Boy with him. Lizard thought that probably Miracle Boy's old man was going to whip the tar out of him for his part in what had been done to Miracle Boy. He figured Miracle Boy was there to watch the beating. Lizard's own old man was gone, and his mother never laid a hand on him, so he figured that, on this occasion, Miracle Boy's old man would likely fill in. Instead, Lizard's mother made them sit in the front room together, Lizard and Miracle Boy. She brought them cold Coca-Colas and grilled cheese sandwiches. She let them watch TV. An old movie was on; it was called Dinosaurus! Monsters tore at one another on the TV screen and chased tiny humans. Even though it was the kind of thing he would normally have liked, Lizard couldn't keep his mind on the movie. Miracle Boy sat in the crackling brown reclining chair that had belonged to Lizard's old man. The two of them ate from TV trays, and whenever Miracle Boy finished his glass of Coca-Cola, Lizard's mother brought him more. She brought Lizard more, too, and she looked at him with searching eyes, but Lizard could not read the message in her gaze. By the third glassful of Coca-Cola, Lizard started to feel a little sick, but Miracle Boy went right on, drinking and watching Dinosaurus! with a enraptured expression on his face, occasionally belching quietly. Sometimes his lips moved, and Lizard thought he might be getting ready to say something, but he and Lizard never swapped a single word the whole time. Miracle Boy's old man sat on the front porch of Lizard's house and looked out over the shrouded western slope of the Blue Ridge and swigged at the iced tea that Lizard's mother brought him, never moving from his seat until Dinosaurus! was over and it was time to take Miracle Boy away. Geronimo and Eskimo Pie got a hiding from their old man. He used his two-inch-wide black bull-hide belt in his good hand, and he made them take their pants down for the beating, and he made them thank him for every stroke. They couldn't believe it when Lizard told him what his punishment had been. That, Geronimo told Lizard, is the difference between a house with a woman in charge and one with a man. Lizard saw Miracle Boy's shoes every day, hanging on the electric wire over by McClung's property line, slung by their laces. He kept hoping the laces would weather and rot and break and the shoes would come down by themselves, and that never did. When he was outside the school, his eyes were drawn to them. He figured that everybody in the school saw those shoes. Everybody knew whose shoes they were. Lizard figured that Miracle Boy must see them every day on his way home. He wondered what Miracle Boy thought about that, his shoes hung up in the wires, on display like some kind of a trophy, in good weather and in bad. Nestled together nose to tail up in the air like dogs huddled for warmth. He wondered if Miracle Boy ever worried about those shoes. He took up watching Miracle Boy in school for signs of worry. Miracle Boy kept on just like before. He wore a different pair of shoes these days, a brand new pair of coal-black Keds that looked too big for him. He shuffled from place to place, his walking stick tapping against the vinyl tiles of the hallway floors as he went. I'm going to go get the shoes, Lizard announced one day to Geronimo and Eskimo Pie. It was spring by then, the weather alternating between warm and cold, dark days that were winter hanging on and the spring days full of hard bright light. Baseball season, and the three of them were on the bench together. Geronimo and Eskimo Pie didn't seem to know what shoes Lizard was talking about. They were concentrating on the game. Miracle Boy's shoes, Lizard said. Geronimo and Eskimo Pie looked up at them briefly. A breeze swung them first gently clockwise and just as gently counterclockwise. You don't want to fool with those, Eskimo Pie said. Lectrocute yourself, Geronimo said. Or fall to your doom, Eskimo Pie said. Lizard didn't say anything more to them. He kept his eyes on the shoes as they moved through their slow oscillation, and he watched the small figure of Miracle Boy, dressed in black like a preacher, bent like a question mark as he moved beneath the shoes, as he bobbed over the fence stile and hobbled across the brittle dead grass of the field beyond. The trees are beginning to go gloriously to color in the windbreak up by the house. The weather is crisp, and the dry unchopped corn in the field around Miracle Boy and his old man chatters and rasps and seems to want to talk. Miracle Boy (though he is not Miracle Boy yet-that is minutes away) sits on the fender of the tractor, watching his old man. Soon enough, Miracle Boy will be bird-dogging whitewings out of the stubble of this field. Soon enough, his old man will knock the fluttering doves out of the air with a blast of hot singing birdshot from his 12-gauge Remington side-by-side, and Miracle Boy will happily shag the busted birds for him. When the snow falls, Miracle Boy will go into the woods with his old man, after the corn-fat deer that are plentiful on the place. They will drop a salt lick in a clearing that he knows, by a quiet little stream, and they will wait together in the ice-rimed bracken, squatting patiently on their haunches, Miracle Boy and his old man, to kill the deer that come to the salt. Lizard made a study of the subject of the shoes. They were hung up maybe a yard out from one of the utility poles, so clearly the pole was the way to go. He had seen linemen scramble up the poles with ease, using their broad climbing slings and their spiked boots, but he had no idea where he could come by such gear. In the end, he put on the tool belt that his old man had left behind, cinched it tight, holstered his old man's Tiplady hammer, and filled the pouch of the belt with sixtypenny nails. He left the house in the middle of the night, slipping out the window of his bedroom and clambering down the twisted silver maple that grew there. He walked and trotted the four miles down the state highway to the junior high school. It was a cold night there in the highlands of the Seneca Valley, and he nearly froze. He hid in the ditches by the side of the road whenever a vehicle went by. He didn't care for any one to stop and offer him a ride or ask him what it was he thought he was doing. He passed a number of houses on the way to the school. The lights were on in somse of the houses and off in others. One of the houses was Miracle Boy's, he knew a few hundred yards off the road in a grove of walnut trees, its back set against a worn-down knob of a hill. In the dark, the houses were hard to tell one from another. Lizard thought he knew which house was Miracle Boy's but he couldn't be sure. His plan was this: to drive one of the sixtypenny nails into the utility pole about three feet off the ground. Then to stand one-footed on that nail and drive in another some distance above it. Then he would stand on the second nail and drive a third, and so on, ascending nail by nail until he reached the humming transformer at the top of the pole. Then, clinging to the transformer, he imagined, he would lean out from the pole and, one-handed, pluck the shoes from the wire, just like taking fruit off a tree. The first nail went in well and held solid under his weight, and he hugged the pole tight, the wood rough and cool where it rubbed against the skin of his cheek. He fished in the pouch of nails, selected one, and drove it in as well. He climbed onto it. His hands were beginning to tremble as he set and drove the third nail. He had to stand with his back bent at an awkward angle, his shoulder dug in hard against the pole, and already he could feel the strain grinding to life in his back and in the muscles of his forearm. The next several nails were not hard to sink, and he soon found himself a dozen feet up, clinging to the pole. The moon had risen as he'd worked, and the landscape below was bright. He looked around him, at the baseball diamond, with its deep-worn base path and crumbling pitcher's mound and the soiled bags that served as bases. From his new vantage point, he noted with surprise the state of the roof of the shop shed, the tin scabby and blooming with rust, bowed and begin ning to buckle. He had never noticed before what hard shape the place was in. He straightened his back and fought off a yawn. He was getting tired and wished he could quit the job he had started. He looked up. There was no breeze, and the shoes hung as still as though they were shoes in a paint ing. He fumbled another nail out of the pouch, ran it through his hair to grease the point, mashed his shoul der against the unyielding pole, set the nail with his left hand, and banged it home. And another, and another. His clothes grew grimy with creosote, and his eyes stung and watered. Whenever he looked down, he was surprised at how far above the ground he had climbed. McClung's Herefords found him, and they stood in a shallow semicircle beneath the utility pole, cropping at the worthless grass that grew along the fence line. This was a different batch from the fall before. These were younger but similarly handsome animals, and Lizard welcomed their company. He felt lonesome up there on the pole. He thought momentarily of Miracle Boy, seated before the television, his gaze fixed on the set, his jaws moving, a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich in his fingers. The steers stood companionably close together, their solid barrel bodies touching lightly. Their smell came to him, concentrated and musty, like damp hot sawdust, and he considered how it would be to descend the pole and stand quietly among them. How warm. He imagined himself looping an arm over the neck of one of the steers, leaning his head against the hot skin of its densely muscled shoulder. A nail slithered from his numbing fingers, fell, and dinked musically off the forehead of the lead steer. The steer woofed, blinked, twitched its ears in annoyance. The Herefords wheeled and started off across the field, the moonlight silvering the curly hair along the ridgelines of their backs. The nail on which Lizard was standing began to give dangerously beneath his weight, and he hurried to make his next foothold. He gripped the utility pole between his knees, clinging hard, trying to take the burden off the surrendering nail as it worked its way free of the wood. A rough splinter stung his thigh. He whacked at the wobbling nail that he held and caught the back of his hand instead, peeling skin from his knuckles. He sucked briefly at the bleeding scrapes and then went back to work, striking the nail with the side of the hammer's head. The heavy nail bent under the force of his blows, and he whimpered at the thought of falling. He struck it again, and the nail bit deep into the pine. Again, and it tested firm when he tugged on it. He pulled himself up. Resting on the bent nail, he found himself at eye level with the transformer at the pole's top. Miracle Boy's shoes dangled a yard behind him. Lizard felt winded, and he took hold of the transformer. The cold metal cut into the flesh of his fingers. There was deadly current within the transformer, he knew, but still it felt like safety to him. He held fast, shifted his weight to his arms, tilted his head back to catch sight of the shoes. Overhead, the wires crossed the disk of the moon, and the moonlight shone on the wires, on the tarnished hardware that fixed them to the post, on the ceramic insulators. These wires run to every house in the valley, Lizard thought. He craned his neck farther and found the shoes. Still there. The shoes were badly weathered. To Lizard, they looked a million years old, like something that ought to be on display in a museum somewhere, with a little white card identifying them. SHOES OF THE MIRACLE BOY. The uppers were cracked and swollen, pulling loose from the lowers, and the tongues protruded obscenely. Lizard put a tentative hand out toward them. Close, but no cigar. He loosened his grip, leaned away from the pole. The arm with which he clung to the transformer trembled with the effort. Lizard trusted to his own strength to keep from falling. He struggled to make himself taller. The tips of his outstretched fingers grazed the sole of one of the shoes and set them both to swinging. The shoes swung away from him and then back. He missed his grip, and they swung again. This time, he got a pur chase on the nearest shoe. He jerked, and the shoes held fast. Jerked again and felt the raveling laces begin to give. A third time, a pull nearly strong enough to dislodge him from his perch, and the laces parted. He drew one shoe other fell to the ground below with a dry thump. He wondered if the sound the shoe made when it hit was similar to the sound he might make. The shoe he held in his hand was the left. In the moonlight, Lizard could see almost as well as in the day. He could make out McClung's cattle on the far side of the field, their hind ends toward him, and the trees of the windbreak beyond that, and beyond that the lighted windows of a house. It was, he knew, Miracle Boy's house. Set here and there in the shallow bowl of the Seneca Valley were the scattered lights of other houses. A car or a pickup truck crawled along the state road toward him. The red warning beacons of a microwave relay tower blinked at regular intervals on a hogback to the north. Lizard was mildly surprised to realize that the valley in which he lived was such a narrow one. He could eas ily traverse it on foot in a day. The ridges crowded in on the levels. Everything that he knew was within the sight of his eyes. It was as though he lived in the cupped palm of a hand, he thought. He tucked Miracle Boy's left shoe beneath his arm and began his descent. When Lizard was little, his old man made toys for him. He made them out of wood: spinning tops and tiny saddle horses, trucks and guns, a cannon and caisson just like the one that sat on the lawn of the county courthouse. He fashioned a bull-roarer that made a tremendous howling when he whirled it overheadbut that Lizard was too small to use; and what he called a Limber Jack, a little wooden doll of a man that would dance flat-footed while his father sang: "Was an old man near Hell did dwell, / If he ain't dead yet he's living there still." Lizard's favorite toy was a Jacob's Ladder, a cunning arrangement of wooden blocks and leather strips about three feet long. When you tilted the top block just so, the block beneath it flipped over with a slight clacking sound, and the next block after that, and so on, cascading down the line. When all the blocks had finished their tumbling, the Jacob's Ladder was just as it had been before, though to Lizard it seemed that it ought to have been longer, or shorter, or anyhow changed. He could play with it for hours, keeping his eye sharp on the line of end-swapping blocks purling out from his own hand like an infinite stream of water. He wanted to see the secret of it. I believe he's a simpleton, his old man told his mother. You think my boy wants anything to do with you little bastards? Lizard wanted to explain that he was alone in this. That Geronimo and Eskimo Pie were at home asleep in their beds, that they knew nothing of what he was doing. Miracle Boy's old man stood behind the closed screen door of his house, his arms crossed over his chest, a cigarette mugged in the corner of his mouth. The hall way behind him was dark. I don't necessarily want anything to do with him, Lizard said. I just brought him his shoes. He held out the shoes, but Miracle Boy's old man didn't even look at them. Your mommy may not know what you are, Miracle Boy's old man said, and his voice was tired and calm. But I do. Lizard offered the shoes again. You think he wants those things back? Miracle Boy's old man asked. He's got new shoes now. Different shoes. Lizard said nothing. He stayed where he was. Put them down there, Miracle Boy's old man said, nodding at a corner of the porch. I'm sorry, Lizard said. He held on to the shoes. He felt like he was choking. It's not me you need to be sorry to. Miracle Boy appeared at the end of the dark hallway. Lizard could see him past the bulk of his old man's body. He was wearing canary-yellow pajamas. Lizard had never before seen him wear any color other than black. Daddy? he said. The sleeves of the pi's were too long for his arms, they swallowed his hands, and the pajama legs lapped over his feet. He began to scuff his way down the hall toward the screen door. He moved deliberately. He did not have his walking stick with him, and he pressed one hand against the wall. His old man kept his eyes fixed on Lizard. Go back to bed, junior, he said in the same tired tone that he had used with Lizard before. Daddy? Miracle Boy brushed past his old man, who took a deferential step back. He came to the door and pressed his pudgy hands against the screen. He looked at Lizard with wide curious eyes. He was a bright yellow figure behind the mesh. He was like a bird or a butterfly. Lizard was surprised to see how small he was. Miracle Boy pressed hard against the door. If it had not been latched, it would have opened and spilled him out onto the porch. He nodded eagerly at Lizard, shyly ducking his head. Lizard could not believe that Miracle Boy was happy to see him. Miracle Boy beckoned, crooking a finger at Lizard, and he was smiling, a strange small inward smile. Lizard did not move. In his head, he could hear his old man's voice, his long-gone old man, singing, accompanied by clattering percussion: the jiggrog wooden feet of the Limber Jack. Miracle Boy beckoned again, and this time Lizard took a single stumbling step forward. He held Miracle Boy's ruined shoes in front of him. He held them out before him like a gift. This short story appears in a collection of recently published short stories. For three points, name the author, the collection's title and give a personal response... 100724 ... rt miracle boy and collected stories by pinckney bendict Question 130 In 2000, this author's older brother Michael died unexpectedly in Copenhagen. It took two weeks for the news to reach her, a Canadian-born classicist and poet, because Michael’s widow couldn’t find her number in her husband’s papers. Michael had run away from home in 1978, and he and the author had spoken a half-dozen times in all the years since. After his death, she began to construct a notebook of memories, or, as she puts it, “an epitaph.” It is a curious word—usually it refers to a commemorative inscription on a plaque or headstone, but Michael’s ashes were scattered into the sea. The notebook itself is that headstone; now published as her new book, it has the squat gray aspect of a stone tablet. It is also a personal, and deeply moving, meditation on the contours of absence. The book is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by the author. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed. Translation, the act of renaming, is clearly crucial to her method of coming to grips with loss. The first page is a yellowing, blurred poem in Latin: Catullus’ poem 101, an elegy for his brother, who also died on a distant shore. (To achieve the yellowing effect, she soaked her typescript of the poem overnight in tea.) Most of the left-hand pages that follow are given over to lexicographical entries, defining each word in the Catullus elegy. The right-hand pages meditate on the difficulty of elegizing a brother who had disappeared from her life long before his death. Despite the inclusion of personal details, the book, whose title means "night" in latin, is as much an attempt to make sense of the human impulse to mourn as it is a story about a lost sibling. In poem 101, Catullus writes: Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed— I arrive at these poor, brother, burials so I could give you the last gift owed to death and talk (why?) with mute ash. The author, whose quite faithful rendering this is, wants to memorialize the dead, but she also wonders why she does—why we feel the need, as Catullus says, to speak to silent ashes, to assemble trivial remnants of a lost presence. The book is also the Roman goddess of night—perhaps the oldest of the Roman deities, the mother, by many accounts, of sleep, fate, and death—and in her elegy Night becomes a kind of elusive character, with whom the mourner repeatedly attempts to engage. It’s as if to look Night in the eye would be to understand the tangled relationship between character, fate, and memory. Her first entry in the book displays a characteristic combination of the lyric and the gnomic: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.” Elegy and history are akin, she notes, and she invokes Herodotus, the father of history, as her guide. Herodotus considered history “the strangest thing that humans do,” she observes, in part because history can be at once “concrete and indecipherable.” That’s certainly true of her brother’s. Michael was a troubled boy. The family moved a lot, and he had difficulty making friends, always trying to hang out with older boys. (There is a photo of Michael, at ten, standing beneath a tree house; the three boys in it have pulled the ladder up after them.) He didn’t do well in school; she did, and he took to calling her “professor” or “pinhead.” Somewhere along the way, he began dealing drugs and he ran away to avoid going to jail, after staying with her a few days (and leaving cigarette butts everywhere, even in the frying pan, “sunny side up”). He travelled through Europe and India on a false passport, “seeking something,” sending occasional postcards. He wrote once, to say that he had fallen in love with a woman named Anna who died suddenly; he married at least two other women. She includes a fragment of a letter by her mother asking Michael for an address where she might send a “box for Christmas.” The details are affecting, but she doles them out sparingly. The book shifts between the analytic and the lyrical. Even the lexicography turns out to be surprisingly complex and moving (dictionaries hardly being tearjerkers, as a rule). The entries read like litanies—words you might utter as a stay against panic or darkness—and when you look closely you see that she has messed with the Latin examples, introducing the word “night,” creating atmospheric little prose poems of the translated phrases. Here’s what we get under the word aequora (aequor, aequoris, neuter noun): [AEQUUS] a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain; inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of night? the surface of the sea especially as considered as calm and flat, a part of the sea, a sea; per aperta volans aequora soaring over the open sea; the waters of a river, lake, sea; tibi rident aequora ponti the waters of the sea laugh up at you. Elsewhere we find illustrative phrases that pretend to explain a word but really speak of her brother: “he lets in night at the eyes and the heart” or “made sadder by the brother’s night than by the brother himself.” If all this orchestration sounds elaborate, even artificial, it’s quintessential. Her work has always been an exercise in reinvigorating the clichés of autobiography by refracting them through her vast knowledge of classical literature and her deadpan, self-undermining wit. (“I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.”) She understands personal experience as much through philosophy and spiritual writings as through the register of psychology and interiority. There is always some ritualized distance between author and reader. As a writer who trained as a classicist, she is accustomed to shuttling among stories and idioms; the classicist has to learn the concepts or attitudes that have been lost with the years, and that must, like a decayed bridge, be reconstructed before the ravine can be crossed. Where Shakespeare built his great plays through the structure of a double plot—a main plot offset by a subplot—she builds her narrative lyrics by means of triangulation, or what she once called “a third angle of vision.” (In her 2005 assemblage “Decreation,” she writes, “Nonagons are not useful. / But a triangle is true!”) Her autobiographical writing is always offset by some other story; one of her best-known works, “The Glass Essay,” which appeared in 1995, is narrated by a woman who, devastated by the end of a relationship, goes home to see her mother, and reflects both on her ex-lover and on Emily Brontë’s poems; her interest in Brontë’s severity comes to bear on her understanding of her own heartbreak. She has been stripped down to an essential self that must now find some recovery through art. Her method involves a kind of mashup of old and new; she proceeds through juxtaposition rather than metaphor-making. What you get is the over-all action of the mind rather than the high-shine lacquer of the apt image. Although she is referred to as a poet, she writes in prose at least as often as she does in verse. Still, only poetry seems capacious enough to encompass her cut-up, sui-generis style. She favors lines in which words that can double as nouns and adjectives bump against each other (“a solid unlit white sky”), or even meld into one word (“overtakelessness”), without the governing aid of punctuation, making reading into an act of translation, and restoring strangeness to language. She likes, too, to introduce narrative information flatly, almost as one might in a screenplay. “The Glass Essay” opens: I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking of the man who left in September. It’s the literary equivalent of the contemporary habit of exposing seams in garments. She’s drawn to themes of desire and privation (she titled her study of Paul Celan and the ancient Greek poet Simonides of Ceos “The Economy of the Unlost”), and the urge to get away from “self.” T. S. Eliot said that poetry required “an escape from personality,” and she seems to take that seriously, but with her it’s a cleansing compulsion akin to an anorexic’s or a saint’s. “You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough,” she wrote in “Plainwater” (1995), a peculiar assortment of essays, “short talks,” and long poems with faux-scholarly introductions, the kind that might be written by someone steeped in Gertrude Stein and French theory. (The series “The Life of Towns” opens with the observation “Towns are the illusion that things hang together, my pear, your winter.”) She has written affectingly about Simone Weil dying from self-starvation and about Marguerite Porete, a French mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310 for the heresy of writing a book about divine love. “The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people.—But at a certain point he feels a lack,” She has written. “He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.” In “Decreation,” she asks, “When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.” In her work, this poverty is figured as a form of unexpected wealth. To leave the self behind is to no longer be slave to its limitations; it is a form of power as well as transcendence. As she wrote in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”: My personal poetry is a failure. I do not want to be a person. I want to be unbearable. Lover to lover, the greenness of love. Something unbearable cannot be turned into metaphor (the word comes from the Greek “to bear across” or “to carry over”); it is larger than language, and not subject to the buffeting forces of Eros. Her first book, “Eros the Bittersweet,” was an idiosyncratic and ebullient academic study of the Greek notion—found in Sappho and Plato—of Eros as a form of “lack” that offers both pleasure and pain. The geometry of desire, which we usually take to be a two-way street (I love you; you love me), is actually a triangular circuitry of lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. “The lover wants what he does not have. . . . All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies. . . . Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this.” In her subsequent books, most notably in “Plainwater,” “Glass, Irony & God” (1995), “Autobiography of Red” (1998), and “The Beauty of the Husband” (2001), she developed her interest in sex, identity, and ecstatic transformation, in the form of lyric narratives that often seemed highly personal. In many of her strongest pieces, such as “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Differences Between Women and Men” (a series of prose fragments which appeared in “Plainwater”), her speakers appear to be preoccupied by the troubling proximity between what they experience as the annihilating transport of sex and the visionary transport of the sublime. “Just for the Thrill” describes a camping trip with an anthropologist who likes sex (but not marriage), and whom the narrator calls “the emperor of China”; it’s a lushly written yet hard-edged meditation on loneliness and gender, containing powerful descriptive writing (“Rattling through the ghost cornfields of Indiana at 3:00 AM”) as well as ironic philosophical questioning (“Camping is radical economy. We use the world for space, its light for fear”) and smutty bedroom talk (“Make me your boy slut”). Her work has a starkness that can seem Greek, perhaps because its emotional hues are painted with such intense physicality—and, perhaps, because her imagination is so unusual. “Autobiography of Red,” for example, chronicles the unhappy youth of Geryon, a young boy who “is also a winged red monster” (Geryon is best known as a monster Herakles killed in his tenth labor). Infatuated with Herakles, Geryon wonders (as many infatuated lovers do), What happens if you love the person who is going to destroy you? It’s an old question, but in her hands it becomes vibrant with physical drama: Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying Geryon please. The break in his voice made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn first thing in the morning when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night. Put your mouth on it Geryon please. Geryon did. It tasted sweet enough. I am learning a lot in this year of my life, thought Geryon. Her singular gift for resuscitating the ancient theme of desire is complicated by a postmodern habit of pastiche and fragmentation. “Autobiography of Red” includes fake interviews; elsewhere she refers intimately to both Artaud and Lenin. Detractors, and even some of her fans, wonder why she needs to junk up her crystalline narratives with so much formal detritus. And the question is a reasonable one: her lesser work can seem mired in the frills and furbelows of its own presentation. But in this book the question doesn’t arise. She has always been interested in pockets of experience that can’t be approached directly but must be courted obliquely. This style is peculiarly suited to capturing grief, which is irrational, physiological, mutable—and, often, mute. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.” Because the dead person is absent and voiceless, the bereaved is always experiencing the lost through other things: books, ideas, language, memory. A sense of this is what the memory book provides; its process of assemblage dramatizes the way the mind in mourning flits from pain at the specific loss to metaphysical questioning about what, exactly, constitutes a mortal life. Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go and yet letting go cannot happen immediately. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace is mainly in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace and also, This has been going on a long time. In this book the impersonality of loss—the fact that it has been going on for so long—is evoked through its classical scaffolding. She tells of an ancient writer named Hekataios, who recounts the story of an Arabian phoenix that travelled to Egypt every five hundred years to bury its father: The phoenix mourns by shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light. He seems to take a clear view of necessity. And in the shadows that flash over him as he makes his way from Arabia to Egypt maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanism in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying—composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backward by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking. She means for her accordion to capture that shadow play, these fugitive visions. In the case of her brother, who had absented himself while still living, the visions are twice fugitive. To remember him, she has to remember, too, his silence, his flight from the law. She recalls the few times they talked. “What he needed from me I have no idea,” she recalls. “When he telephoned me—out of the blue—about half a year after our mother died he had nothing to say. (“Mother is dead. Yes I guess she is. She had a lot of pain because of you. Yes I guess she did. . . . Are you happy? No. Oh no.”) Even as she tries to describe Michael, she tries to convey what she calls “a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” The photos, the fragments of letters, the scraps of translated language enable her to “show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” Michael hides in these images, and the point is that all the words and analytical exercise in the world can’t rescue him—can’t lower the tree-house ladder, can’t recover “the starry lad he was.” He is gone. “Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light,” she writes. “The luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.” This book is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss. Instead of imposing baroque form on the material, she lets Michael haunt the work, writing into its lacunae, through the eeriness of his handwriting, of the airmail stamps he used. Her method is less to try to solve the mystery of his life and death than to enact it, to dramatize the mourner’s mind as it seeks to understand what happens to the vanished. “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself,” she writes. “Nox” is that asking: a questioning, unsentimental excursion into the meaning of not understanding. When Herodotus was recounting a story he didn’t fully believe, she notes, he wound up “with a remark like this: So much for what is said by the Egyptians.” On the next page she has pasted a typed phrase on a slip of paper, which is folded over on itself so that we must strain to make out these sentences: “I have to say what is said. I don’t have to believe it myself.” It’s a piercing summation of the mourner’s secret position: I have to say this person is dead, but I don’t have to believe it. ? (Adapted from a review by Meghan O'Rourke for The New Yorker) For three points, name the author, her art/memory book, and give a personal response... 100725 ... rt Anne Carson, Nox Question 132 Early on in this book, her travelogue of spiritual seeking, the novelist and journalist gives a characteristically frank rundown of her traveling skills: tall and blond, she doesn't blend well physically in most places; she's lazy about research and prone to digestive woes. "But my one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody," she writes. "I can make friends with the dead. . . . If there isn't anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock." This is easy to believe. If a more likable writer than this author is currently in print, I haven't found him or her. And I don't mean this as consolation prize, along the lines of: but she's really, really nice. I mean that her prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in. Her previous work of nonfiction, "The Last American Man" (she's also the author of a fine story collection and a novel), was a portrait of a modern-day wilderness expert that became an evocative meditation on the American frontier, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Here, her subject is herself. Reeling from a contentious divorce, a volatile rebound romance and a bout of depression, she decided at 34 to spend a year traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia. "I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," she writes. "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two." Her trip was financed by an advance on the book she already planned to write, and this book is the mixed result. At its best, the book provides an occasion for her to unleash her fresh, oddball sensibility on an international stage. She describes Messina, Italy, as "a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, 'It's not my fault that I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!' " Later, she sees a Balinese mother "balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck — a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it." She also takes pleasure in poking fun at herself. At an Indian ashram, she winningly narrates the play of her thoughts while she tries to meditate: "I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. . . . If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That'd be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue. . . . Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: . . . How about this, you spastic fool — how about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?" The book is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; she suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of "The Last American Man," she has a harder time when it comes to herself. Often she short shrifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: "They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives," she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, "and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can't get my act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be." But wait a second — she is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I'm willing to believe that she despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn't tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it. What comes through much more strongly is her charisma. On a trip to Indonesia well before her year of travel, she visited a Balinese medicine man who read her palm and proclaimed: "You have more good luck than anyone I've ever met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. . . . You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much." He then invited her to spend several months in Bali as his protégé. At another point, she petitions God to move her husband to sign their divorce agreement and gets a nearly instant result; later she devotes a love hymn to her nephew, whose sleep problems, she learns the next week, have abruptly ceased. Putting aside questions of credibility, the problem with these testaments to her good luck and personal power is that they undercut any sense of urgency about her future. The book suffers from a case of low stakes; one reads for the small vicissitudes of her journey — her struggle to accept the end of her failed rebound relationship; her ultimately successful efforts to meditate; her campaign to help a Balinese woman and her daughter buy a home — never really doubting that things will come right. But even her sassy prose is flattened by the task of describing her approach to the divine, and the midsection of the book, at the ashram, drags. By the time she reaches Indonesia, she admits that the stated purpose of the visit has already been accomplished. "The task in Indonesia was to search for balance," she writes, "but . . . the balance has somehow naturally come into place." There would seem to be only one thing missing — romance — and she soon finds that with a Brazilian man 18 years her senior who calls her "darling" and says things like, "You can decide to feel how you want to, but I love you and I will always love you." she acknowledges the "almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story," but reminds us, "I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing she touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if she were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," she writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about the book: we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn't begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out. The book is being made into a film starring Julia Roberts. (Adapted from a review by Jennifer Egan for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100726 ... rt Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Question 133 On weekday afternoons in San Francisco, the sunlit, airy cafés that seem to stand on every street corner are always puzzlingly full. Not with pensioners or parents with babies, but with single people in their 20s and 30s in well-cut casual clothes. Most Americans of that age and apparent level of wealth are stuck in offices, but in San Francisco and other liberal American cities a different form of young middle-class life seems to flourish. The author calls them "urban tribes", and describes them as "the fastest-growing demographic group in America". They have been to university, they have confidence and money, but they are uninterested in what comes next in the conventional middle-class life: a structured career, marriage, children. Instead, Watters's subjects form groups with like-minded peers, and spend the decades between early adulthood and middle age going out together, bonding and gossiping with their new extended family, earning money by freelance means, and drinking a great number of leisurely coffees. A few of the many tribe members he interviews live in Britain and other nations besides the United States. The phenomenon he has identified, he implies, is becoming apparent in all wealthy countries. But essentially this is a book about America. Foreign readers are expected to understand its references to "Seinfeldian" situations and "Costco-sized" supermarket products and - as with all the other trendspotting American popular sociology books that have crossed the Atlantic in recent years, such as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and John Seabrook's Nobrow - to consider the insights here about American society as relevant to non-American lives. The author, a freelance writer in his 30s, lives in San Francisco. Until recently, he was a member of exactly the kind of peer group he writes about here, and he cites his and his friends' experiences at length. But the whiff of narcissism about this book feels entirely appropriate. The world he describes is inward-looking, self-sufficient, cut off from the rest of society. "In certain hipster areas," he writes, "you could literally go days without seeing a child." Working and playing in their small peninsular city at the very edge of America, he and his fellow bohemians can ignore the traditional family values of the Bush era: "I lived in a social microculture to such an extent that the national zeitgeist was felt only as a small shifting of the breeze." He writes vividly about his tribe's existence: a perpetual present of parties, noisy dinners and group excursions, whole years passing in a pleasant blur in the seasonless San Francisco weather. The group share houses, collaborate on freelance writing and art projects. They drive to a festival in the desert to build a sculpture. For them, and their counterparts in Seattle and New York and elsewhere, money is not much of a worry. They have saleable skills and contacts - a hippyish-sounding artist mentioned here turns out to be making a chandelier for the architect Frank Gehry. They do each other favours - the writer Po Bronson, another member of the author's group, provides a favourable cover quote for this book. And they know their actual families, with whom they remain in sporadic contact, may one day hand them substantial inheritances. The property and savings acquired by more conventional generations usefully underwrites the urban tribes' years of fun and experiments: as he says with commendable but slightly shocking directness, "Why worry about saving for retirement when your parents have done it for you?" He is sufficiently self-aware to see that the lives he depicts can seem "comically selfish and self-absorbed". But he argues, quite convincingly, that urban tribes cannot simply be dismissed in those terms. The spirit of cooperation and mutual reliance also present in these gangs of friends is presented here as a throwback to the collective American traditions that existed before modern working patterns and consumer capitalism created a nation of office addicts and lonely shoppers. All this material is presented in a conversational, informally researched way. At one point, he mentions "searching the web with words like 'friendship', 'loyalty', 'meaning of' ". There is little of the erudition and sharp-elbowed argument that animates the older, non-American tradition of writing about city subcultures, exemplified by Peter York and Dick Hebdige in the 70s and 80s. They defined urban tribes in a more political and class-connected way - as skinheads, punks, Sloane Rangers - that fitted a more overtly political era; his soft-edged portrait of a generation fits its time and its subject matter, but at times feels a bit unfocused and shallow by comparison. There is not much here about ageing, or the biological difficulties of having children late. There is a long section speculating about why the author and his peers have delayed getting married that could be a vaguely argued women's magazine article. But the book regains its momentum in the final chapter, as his train of thought heads off in an unexpected direction. He has hinted already that being in a tight gang of friends well into your 30s might have a time-filling aspect. The relentless, heavily ritualised activities of the groups he describes - weekly group dinners, group parties held at the slightest excuse - do suggest a fear of being alone and thinking about the trajectory of your life. In the long term, he says, this has a cost: "[You] dam up certain desires, hopes, and plans. With each passing year, the pressure builds a little." Yet close groups do not always let their members leave easily. He is good on the ways groups have of discouraging relationships with outsiders: the murmurs against "unsuitable" partners, the maintenance of an "ambient sexual charge" within the group itself, through "long-standing flirtations, unexpressed crushes, and glimmers of mutual attraction". By the end of the book, his lifestyle feels less free and appealing. Abruptly, he reveals he has left his and got married. Perhaps a conventional career awaits him after all, as a repenting bohemian in the Daily Mail. But he'll have to harden up his prose style. (Adapted from a review by Andy Beckett in The Guardian) 100727 ... jane Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? by Ethan Watters it's kind of like the "Slackers" era, only the complete opposite. in the 90s, the slackers were these incredibly intelligent 20-somethings who were wasting away their potential at clerk jobs. and the reason it's different is because now we have these young adults who have applied themselves enough to have a degree and a good job, and they are just so bored. and yet coffee shops seem to be the home base for each group :) 100727 ... rt looking back up at the game i noticed i gave you 133 points twice jane...sorry. +3=139 now we're all good. 100727 ... rt Question 134 This author's new novel has so many appealing ingredients. Where, then, to start the list? Perhaps, as with food labels, it would be best to begin with the biggest: an irresistible story. Then add four strong characters: two sisters, and the two men who orbit them. Then there’s the narrative voice: sweet but not cloyingly so, nourishing but not heavy, serving up zesty nuggets of truth. And the spicing is piquant but not too assertive, thanks to memorable appearances by (among others) a Bialystok rabbi, a bookshop called Yorick’s, a collection of letters from a long-dead mother and a tribe of tree-huggers. This novel might seem an old-fashioned concoction, with its obvious echoes of “Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen’s first published novel, which came out in 1811, its author listed simply as “A Lady.” But although Austen’s narrative forms the spine of this book — with two sisters of different emotional persuasions, wrong and right men, the seductiveness of real estate — this thoroughly modern story takes place at the brink of 9/11, in a world where old-school hackers have given way to a new generation of money-lusting geeks who draw venture capitalists like flies to honey. One of these sisters goes to M.I.T. to learn about life; the other reads Hume to understand human nature. Jessamine Bach, a heedless romantic, is 23 and a graduate student in philosophy; her older sister, Emily, is carefully analytic. At the tender age of 28, Emily, the M.I.T. graduate, is the chief executive of Veritech, a start-up company built around (appropriately enough) a “new paradigm for large-scale data storage and retrieval.” She is, paradoxically, old-fashioned in her private life; in the midst of an insanely paced initial public offering, she finds herself yearning for marriage, a couple of children and the scent of fresh-baked muffins wafting through the house. Even while she’s getting one company up and running, she’s pursuing a new scheme for a password authentication system. And yet, in spite of her deliberate nature, she’s unable to verify the integrity of the man to whom she’s engaged. He turns out to be a self-serving cad, the sort of person who thinks that lies are “only futures waiting to come true.” There’s nothing patient about Jess, the sister who rushes headlong into love affairs that are half-baked at best. In fact, one of her roommates accuses her of attracting fanatics. But Jess is also the sort of woman who wanders into magical encounters. One of them takes place in a dim and dusty bookshop owned by a first-generation Microsoft millionaire. At the age of 39, George Friedman has “not aged gracefully.” An eccentric, independent, rumpled, slightly paranoid, antisocial, competitive book dealer, he is unmarried, “although not for lack of trying. Admittedly, all the trying had been on the part of his girlfriends.” George is predigital in his affinities, an excellent cook and a wine snob. He’s also disappointed, fearful, handsome and grumpy, “hard to please, and difficult to surprise.” In short, a dreamboat. Jess has a vivid, if somewhat refined, imagination. She accuses Emily of being a throwback to the 19th century, then corrects herself: “No. Eighteenth. You can be 18th,” she insists. “I’ll be 19th . . . early-19th century.” I suppose some sisters really do talk like this — the ones who majored in English, anyway. If it feels heavy-­handed, here’s fair warning: In addition to Jane Austen, you’ll be bumping into references to “Tristram Shandy,” Berkeley (the philosopher and the city), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Chopin, David Hume and Henry James. And that’s just in the first 20 pages. This is shorthand for a value system that cherishes literature and learning — as well as cozy corners with comfortable sofas, the better for reading and pondering. George’s house in the Berkeley hills, designed by the prominent Arts and Crafts architect Bernard Maybeck, is just this sort of lair. George is fiercely proud of the meticulous restoration he has bestowed upon his home, lavishing money on every detail, down to the door hinges. He has fashioned a jewel-like — and treasured — retreat. His “great beamed living room glowed blood-red and deepest green and glinting gold.” Showcased throughout are carefully framed antique maps, shelves full of first editions of poetry, platoons of typewriters. “George told his life history with objects,” Goodman explains. I was ready to move in as soon as we crossed the threshold. As in the novel by “A Lady,” we can only wonder why it takes so long for the obvious to happen. For his part, although he has “established bulwarks of skepticism against disappointment,” George is consumed with yearning. “How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.” The plot thickens when Jess meets a rabbi who lends her the money she needs to take advantage of a Friends and Family offering of shares in her sister’s company. Rabbi Helfgott (whose name handily translates as “With the Help of God”) loves computers almost as much as he loves the Torah; he created the first Bialystok Web page. Jess invests in Veritech, and the rabbi invests in her, with life-altering consequences. Rabbis are a good device for the unearthing of family secrets. Helfgott, who represents the magical interconnectedness in human relations, shares Jess’s interest in abstractions: “Ah, the biggest question in Jewish philosophy is very simple: When?” It is, of course, a Messianic issue, but the question shadows every dimension of Goodman’s novel. When will we meet our death? When will love come? When will we be betrayed? When will we find happiness? And when will we recognize the value of what we already have? A cache of cookbooks becomes the bonding medium for Jess and George. A mysterious, ashen-faced, gray-eyed woman with long gray hair — a veritable shade — arrives at the shop one day with a request that George inspect a collection of 873 cookbooks left to her by her uncle, a lichenologist. She had promised the old man she wouldn’t sell his books, but she can’t afford to honor that agreement. They’ve been stored in his kitchen: every cabinet and shelf, even the oven, is stuffed with ancient, valuable cookbooks. Clippings, drawings and notes, held with rusting paper clips, are jammed into their pages. George asks Jess to help him catalog and appraise the collection, but what he really wants is to cook for her, nourish her, feed her. Clearing the table after an elaborate dinner with his friends, George slips into a sensual fantasy of abundance. He imagines serving Jess succulent clementines, pears, strawberries, figs. He sees himself poaching Dover sole for her, grilling spring lamb, roasting whole chickens with lemon slices under the skin. “That would be enough for him.” To which I can only add: me too. Such are the pleasures of early-19th-century sensibilities — and the delicious company of English majors and book collectors. You know how the story ends, of course. But it’s the journey that counts. We’re always told there are recipes for disaster and recipes for happiness, but where exactly those recipes are to be found is anyone’s guess. In cookbooks hidden in ovens? In parables hidden in novels? If you’re hankering for a feast of love, let yourself fall under the spell of the author's abundantly delicious tale. You won’t leave hungry. (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100728 ... jane The Cookbook Collector By Allegra Goodman ah, just reading the review made my mouth water! i wish i was better at cooking. i enjoy watching the food network but i am horrible when it comes to cooking. i can mix flavors well so i usually end up making pastas :) 100728 ... rt +3 =142 go jane! penne pasta with olive oil, lemon juice, yogurt, and feta cheese...now that is making my mouth water. 100728 what's it to you? who go blather from