_blackink_whitepages_ rt Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Questions 36-65 are archived at blackink_whitepages_ Current standings; 1. lostgirl = 107 2. jane = 82 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 Question 66 'I once had a girl / Or should I say, she once had me,'' go the opening lines of a Beatles song whose title the author borrowed for his 1987 novel. It happens to be a neat summary of his basic plot: boy falls for complicated girl and is changed forever. But the song, like the book, is not so easily described. An apparently simple lyric shifts upon closer reading; an oddly haunting snatch of melody repeats in the mind. The title of the song is no idle choice for the title of a book: it creates a subliminal background, both aural and symbolic, for a masterly novel of late-60's love. Murakami has become popular in the West for a very different kind of fiction: novels like ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' feature matter-of-fact narrators enmeshed in bizarre postmodern fantasias. In his native country, however, this is the novel that made the author famous. Jay Rubin's superb translation is the first English edition authorized for publication outside Japan. (True fans may have tracked down Alfred Birnbaum's earlier translation, published for Japanese students of English.) Though it may feel uncharacteristically straightforward to his American following, this novel bears the unmistakable marks of the author's hand. Set against the upheaval of the student movement, it is more firmly rooted in Japan (and in his own experience) than his other work, but this is, nevertheless, a strikingly Westernized Japan, one where people listen to Bill Evans, read Thomas Mann, drink too much coffee and sound like refugees from a Raymond Carver story. Here also is another of his low-key narrators, 37-year-old Toru Watanabe, who recalls the emotional turmoil of his college years with dispassionate detachment. And although what Toru narrates never ventures into the surreal, his story proves that ''ordinary'' love is no less rich and strange. ''What if I've forgotten the most important thing?'' Toru asks as, 20 years later, he tries to set down certain events that took place in the late 1960's. ''What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?'' His question lends the novel a desperate intensity; this is no exercise in soft-focus nostalgia, but an urgent attempt to preserve an exquisitely painful time. In 1968 Toru is 18, new to Tokyo and living in a private dormitory complex. The buildings give ''the impression of being either apartment houses that had been converted into jails or jails that had been converted into apartment houses,'' and the student residents, all male, create a fug of cigarette butts and empty beer cans and dirty laundry -- all except for Toru's roommate, a stuttering geography major whose fanatic cleanliness earns him the nickname Storm Trooper. Neither extreme fazes Toru. Philosophical and almost disturbingly self-contained, he writes off his college years as ''a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom.'' But then one day he bumps into a fellow student from back home. Naoko was his best friend Kizuki's girlfriend until Kizuki killed himself -- a crisis that begins to explain Toru's disconnection from his peers as well as Naoko's increasingly fractured psyche. ''It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself,'' she tells Toru. In the course of their mostly wordless Sunday walks along miles of Tokyo streets, a new relationship begins to form, although neither is quite able to define it. In the spring, on the evening of her birthday, Naoko is compulsively chatty, but when Toru mentions his curfew, she begins to sob ''with the force of a person vomiting on all fours.'' His desperate efforts to comfort her end in her bed. A few days later she is gone, leaving no forwarding address and taking much of Toru's shell of composure with her. It is months before Naoko writes to him from a sanitarium in the mountains outside Kyoto, a place for raveled souls to knit themselves back together. Now it is Toru's turn to be split in two: half of him waiting, suspended, for Naoko's recovery, the other half still rooming with Storm Trooper, going to lectures and starting a new friendship with a classmate named Midori. She is the anti-Naoko, a vibrant girl ''like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring.'' Kizuki's suicide shocked Toru with the realization that death is always present among us, ''and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.'' Midori, who wears her skirts short and wields her candor like a weapon, blows the dust away. In some ways, the landscape of this novel is as disconcerting as that of the author's weirdest work. There are no real homes here, only more or less humane institutions: schools, universities, hospitals. Safe havens don't exist, and love is never truly unconditional. Sanity is a zero-sum game: a person who offers solace to another often does so at great personal expense. Reiko, Naoko's wise and slightly wacky roommate at the sanitarium, describes herself as ''the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox'' -- always helping others to ignite while quietly wearing herself out. Happiness, it seems, is the ability to ignore hidden danger. When Toru goes to visit Naoko, she tells him about the ''field well,'' a dark hole at the border of meadow and forest whose depth is terrifying and whose precise location is unknown. At any moment, ''you could fall in and that'd be the end of you.'' Whether the well exists outside Naoko's troubled mind is irrelevant. The emotional chasm it represents is all too real. Kizuki fell in, and Naoko teeters on its edge. At 20, Toru finds himself if not at a chasm then at a crossroads. In one direction is the ''quiet and gentle and transparent love'' he feels for Naoko, a stalled love with an unhappy present and an uncertain future. In the other is Midori, who inspires in Toru a feeling that ''stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.'' And cruising beneath is the memory of Kizuki, eternally 17, inviting Naoko and even Toru to opt out of adulthood. If this were just a love story, either Naoko or Midori would gracefully cede the field, and Toru would stride forward into maturity with the other by his side. But even when the author is writing fantasy, he doesn't write fairy tales. Toru, trying doggedly to navigate according to his own moral compass, is left with neither resolution nor absolution -- just memories, and a song that will always make him shudder. (Adapted from a review by Janice P. Nimura) For three points, name the author, his novel, and give a personal response... 100615 ... rts brain is weedwacked whoops...looks like the author's last name snuck in there...freebie! 100615 ... jane Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakama this sounds absolutely haunting. i would love to check it out sometime. not to mention, it's one of my favorite Beatles songs. 100615 ... rt +3 =85 go margaux! haruki murakama is a literary god in japan. Question 67 “What used to be doesn’t leave us,” observes Erik Davidsen, the narrator of this author's complex and contemplative new novel, as he reflects on the imprints left on the present by the past. Erik is recalling the way he and his sister, Inga, used to play at their grandparents’ dilapidated Minnesota farmhouse when they were children, innocent of the gloomy associations the place held for their father and grandparents, whose livelihood had failed during the Depression. “It’s odd that we’re all compelled to repeat pain,” Erik notes, “but I’ve come to regard this as a truth.” A psychoanalyst, Erik has had ample opportunity to contemplate this compulsion in others, but now the prompt is coming from his own life, as he and his sister face the death of their father, Lars, a gentle, beloved man who eventually left the farm to become a history professor. Back in his Brooklyn home, Erik pores over the diary Lars kept of his Minnesota boyhood, his experiences in World War II and his adult life (evocative passages taken, we learn in a touching end note, from the author's own deceased father’s writings). A mysterious letter found among Lars’s papers referring to a long-kept secret soon sets Erik and Inga on a quest to explore more fully their family’s Norwegian immigrant past and attempt to uncover the source of their father’s melancholy. They also struggle with grief and longing in their own lives. Inga and her teenage daughter, Sonia, are still grappling with the nightmares caused by witnessing the events of Sept. 11. And they’re deeply mourning the death of Inga’s husband, Max, a novelist whose status as a cult figure may bear some resemblance to that of the author's husband, Paul Auster. An intrusive journalist hounds Inga with insinuations about Max that lead her to wonder whether this charismatic, troubled man may also have died with important secrets. Erik, recently divorced and living alone, becomes increasingly caught up in dreams and reveries about his father. While (frustratingly) reticent about his ex-wife and the reason for their split, he speaks at length about his ambiguous attachment to Miranda, his new downstairs tenant, a Jamaican woman with a lively 5-year-old daughter and a manipulative, sinister boyfriend. Observing himself with the same care he brings to his patients, Erik remarks on his uncharacteristically obsessive behavior in relation to Miranda: “My solitude had gradually begun to alter me, to turn me into a man I had not expected. ... I’ve often thought that none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.” In this novel, she examines some of those personal fictions, probing the gap between her characters’ public and private selves — and exploring the ways that death may, for better or worse, cause that gap to close. Inga, a highly regarded cultural philosopher, shares Erik’s fascination with interdisciplinary research on the workings of the brain, thus allowing the erudite author to explore larger questions of art and madness, mind and spirit, and the construction of the self. The novel is a thought-provoking book that offers pleasures across many different registers. Her descriptions of the immigrant experience and the Minnesota landscape have a spare Scandinavian elegance, while her account of the life of a Brooklyn psychoanalyst feels quietly authentic. She takes unapologetic delight in intellectual characters who understand their lives through far-ranging reading and lively conversation. (In one dense passage, Inga talks excitedly with Erik about her new book, which will incorporate “stories of discovery” from the lives of Pascal, Descartes, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, among others.) She explored the milieu of New York writers and academics in her last novel, “What I Loved” — in fact, Leo Hertzberg, that book’s art-historian narrator, appears briefly at a dinner party at Inga’s apartment — and here again she proves herself a writer deftly able to weave intricate ideas into an intriguing plot. In one late scene, as Erik continues to struggle with depression on the anniversary of his father’s death, his own elderly psychoanalyst reminds him of a quotation from Hans Loewald: “The work of psychoanalysis can turn ghosts into ancestors.” The somber and compassionate Erik encounters many hauntings in his own life and the lives of his patients. His difficult task, at home and at work, is to continue trying to lay some of these ghosts to rest — to turn these spectral figures safely into ancestors. (Adapted from a review by Sylvia Brownrigg) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100616 ... lostgirl The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt there will always be speculation as to whether present undesirable events could have been 'different' had a change occurred in the way the past was handled. what is less considered is how the pleasurable experiences might have been altered had the past been different. no doubt about it, the past shapes the now and the now dictates the future....and the result is all left to the individual's interpretation, and then determination. this work looks like a 'thinker' that i would enjoy. 100616 ... rt +3=110 lostgirl! Question 68 This is the author's fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels "Angels" and "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man," consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked "insensitivity" in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction. In nearly every respect this novel can be more accurately described as a novel than as a collection of stories. The same unnamed young drifter narrates each of the book's 11 chapterlike sections, only six or seven of which can stand as discrete, coherent short stories; each is most fully understood in the context of earlier or subsequent sections. The narrator also makes distinctly novelistic progress as he staggers from habit to addiction -- passively participating along the way in abortions and car crashes, drug deals and murder -- and then toward the first stages of a highly tentative recovery. In the book's Cubist chronology, a man named Jack Hotel dies of a heroin overdose at the end of the third section, while the fourth finds him smoking hashish as he attempts to help a gunshot victim. The second section, entitled "Two Men," involves the narrator's attempts to "ditch" a sociopathic football player; the eighth section begins, "But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one." The narrator's inability to construct a "well-made" story, or even to keep the facts of his life straight, expressively parallels the rest of his dysfunctional behavior. In this and in other aspects he is a younger version of Samuel Beckett's monologuists, who continually fail to execute their often-restated narrative plans, and who tend to feel profoundly ambivalent about the women in their lives, particularly their mothers. There are further similarities, in the focus on physical maladies and failure shared by characters in his and Beckett's works and in the trapdoor cadences and self-deprecating humor of their sentences. After lying to impress a girlfriend, his narrator admits, "Nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me." In his dependence on heroin and illegal sources of income, he also is cousin to Bobby, the hapless but sympathetic young burglar in David Mamet's "American Buffalo." In the end he realizes, as Bobby does, that he's probably better off spending some time in a hospital. The book's centerpiece is the fifth section, "Work," in which the narrator and his friend Wayne burglarize an abandoned house that Wayne dubiously claims to still own. As they rip the electrical wiring from the walls, a speedboat comes up the river that runs just beyond the backyard: "This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope. From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended, belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair." As the two men drive back to town, Wayne stops to visit his wife, with whom he is no longer living. She turns out to be a pale woman with long red hair. The narrator concludes she must be the woman they'd seen gliding above the river. When Wayne denies that, the narrator is forced to make sense of what may be just a bizarre coincidence: "As nearly as I could tell, I'd wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house." This in turn reminds him of a hailstorm he witnessed with his own wife. "Where are my women now," he poignantly wonders, "with their sweet wet words and way, and the miraculous balls of hail popping a green translucence in the yards?" (After a storm he and his wife "walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that.") The narrator, overcome by nostalgia triggered by seeing the red-haired women (or woman), travels back through moments spent with various girlfriends or his wife, to his earliest days with his mother, a period we infer has contributed significantly to his current psychoses. That inference gains support when he gets back to a place called the Vine, where he is delighted to discover his favorite person tending bar, a woman he refers to as "Nurse": "She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass. . . . You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom." In profound, sobbing gratitude for her generosity in quenching his thirst, he silently declares: "I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother." In the narrator's bewildered but subconsciously percipient mind, the author has allowed a telling conflation -- of mother, suckler, angel, destroyer -- and a penetrating glimpse into the chaotic roots of addiction. BY the penultimate section, the narrator has landed in detox. He also has a part-time job with the hospital's newsletter, for which he interviews Bill, a newly arrived patient who has twice been shot in the face: "Once by each wife, for a total of three bullets, making four holes, three ins and one out." Not surprisingly, Bill is unhappy to be in the hospital again. The narrator comforts him: "Hey. You're doing fine." "Talk into here," Bill replies, pointing to a scar on his cheek. "Talk into your bullet hole?" "Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine." Such exchanges succinctly express his compassion and skepticism. His characters' damaged psyches keep the reader off balance, unable to avoid either wincing sympathetically or snorting with laughter. The novel contains dozens of equally hilarious and unsettling passages. By the final section the narrator still has his newsletter job and is learning, with the help of Haldol and Antabuse, to live sober. He has even begun to establish a comparatively stable relationship with a woman crippled by encephalitis. He has not, however, managed to overcome his habit of peeping through windows at couples, which thrills him and fills him with guilt. "How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse." The author's world is a universe governed by addiction, malevolence, faith and uncertainty. It is a place where attempts at salvation remain radically provisional, and where a teetering narrative architecture uncannily expresses both Christlike and pathological traits of mind. The author, whose curriculum vitae reads like a list of stations on an Amtrak schedule, has finally settled in a place called Good Grief, Idaho -- named after a tavern on the highway. "One of the neighbors started a pig farm, so I'll never be able to sell my place," the 43-year-old writer said in a telephone interview from Iowa City, where he is teaching for a semester in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. When he first began what became this novel, his new collection of short stories, he wanted to try writing strictly from memory: "Originally, in fact, I wasn't even going to publish it. But then I added a lot of things that never happened to me, though almost everything in there actually happened to someone I know or heard about," including many shootings and accidents. The narrator "lives in a random world, a certain part of America where wildness is actually expressed rather than depicted," he said. "Some of us go to the movies to see everybody shooting each other, and then there's another bunch who actually shoot each other." "That's who ends up in 12-step programs, people just like this guy," he added. "Jung once said inside of every alcoholic there's a seeker who got on the wrong track." -- (Adapted from a review by SUSANNAH HUNNEWELL) For three points, name the author, his novel, and give a personal response... 100616 ... jane Jesus' Son Denis Johnson The description reminds me of the movie Permanent Midnight - drug-addled films can be difficult for me to watch sometimes, but I always appreciate the time and energy that goes into it. Also reminiscent of "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs - only much more intense and probably a better story in general. 100616 ... lostgirl Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson the road to detox....interesting choice K... from the reviews i've read, the format of this work sounds completely different from anything i've read, which excites me for some reason. it seems more graphic than I prefer, but it has a shot at making my list. 100616 ... lostgirl damn...too late:( 100616 ... rt +3=88 jane sneaks it in! Question 69 Is it just a coincidence that this fantastical catalogue of projects over the years ever so slightly resembles, in its intimate size (23.5 cm x 16.8 cm) and padded cover, a diary? Indeed, the first "piece," which accompanies this French artist's exhibition "M'as-tu vue" (meaning "a show-off") at the Pompidou Center in Paris this spring, consists of excerpts from her own journal. Her work is at its core an exploration of the seemingly infinite number of facets of identity, either mimetic, representational or essential. She has followed strangers to Venice ( "Suite vénitienne,"); had herself followed by a detective, twice ("The Shadow" and "Twenty Years Later"); contacted names found in a lost address book ("The Address Book"); worked as a chambermaid ("The Hotel"); followed instructions given to her by writer Paul Auster for "How to Improve Life in New York City" ("Gotham Handbook") and lived out certain episodes from his fictional character, Maria, in Leviathan ("The Chromatic Diet" and "Days Under the Sign of B, C & W"); filmed her disintegrating relationship ("No Sex Last Night"); was psychologically evaluated in a collaboration with Damien Hirst ("Psychological Assessment"); and developed negatives from the burned apartment of a missing woman ("A Woman Vanishes"), among many other enticing projects. In the pieces, ranging from 1978 to 2003 and generously documented in 500 color illustrations, it is her own intense emotional involvement that prevents them from becoming cold, ironic, detached or overly "conceptual." The preface by Alfred Pacquement and introductory essays by editor Christine Marcel and Yve-Alain Bois are heavy on academic artspeak, but luckily fail to block the immediacy of her intimate reflections. The book embraces numerous media: photography, storytelling, film, and memoir, to name a few. Often controversial, her projects explore issues of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity as she secretly investigates, reconstructs and documents the lives of strangers—whether she is inviting them to sleep in her bed, trailing them through a hotel, or following them through the city. Taking on multiple roles—detective, documentarian, behavioral scientist and diarist—she turns the interplay between life and art on its head. The book presents her best-known works, including The Blind, No Sex Last Night, The Hotel, The Address Book and A Woman Vanishes, as well as lesser known and earlier projects that have largely escaped the public eye. The book also includes diary excerpts and video stills, along with three critical essays, a revealing interview with the artist and a dialogue with fellow artist Damien Hirst. Name the author/conceptual artist, her book, and give a personal response... ...more about her from a story in The Guardian.... When a boyfriend dumped her by email, she asked 100 women to read it - and became the star of the Venice Biennale, reports Angelique Chrisafis Picture this. You're one of France's best-known living conceptual artists. You're 51 and visiting Berlin. Your mobile beeps, it's an email from your boyfriend. In a hideously self-absorbed message about human emotion, he dumps you electronically, saying it hurts him more than you. He signs off: "Take care of yourself." You're heartbroken. Then you think of its potential as art. She has filled the French pavilion of the Venice Biennale with a praised exhibition about her emailed dumping letter. Over two years later, she distributed the missive to 107 women professionals, photographed them reading it and invited them to analyse it, according to their job. The ex's grammar and syntax have been torn apart by a copy editor, his manners rubbished by an etiquette consultant and his lines pored over by Talmudic scholars. He has been re-ordered by a crossword-setter, evaluated by a judge, shot up by a markswoman, second-guessed by a chess player and performed by actress Jeanne Moreau. A forensic psychiatrist decided he was a "twisted manipulator". The temple to a woman scorned is entitled "Take care of yourself" (Prenez soin de vois), immortalising lines that the artist, if she hadn't had recourse to the international art world, might have read again and again in tears. "The idea came to me very quickly, two days after he sent it," she said. "I showed the email to a close friend asking her how to reply, and she said she'd do this or that. The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary." At first it was therapy; then art took over. "After I month I felt better. There was no suffering. It worked. The project had replaced the man." She feared he might come back seeking a reconciliation, which would have ruined the whole thing. Sitting under a pair of stuffed bull's heads in her warehouse home south of Paris, surveyed by her taxidermy housemates (a bear in a rocking chair, a tiger in a necklace and a zebra), it's hard not to wonder what man would send her a monstrous email like this. He must have known he would be immortalised by French art's game-player in chief, the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry. This is the woman who 30 years ago started her career following and photographing strangers in the street, once trailing a man to Italy. Over a decade before Tracey Emin displayed her soiled sheets, she invited strangers to sleep in her bed for eight-hour shifts over nine-days, photographing and asking them what age they were when they last wet the bed. She got hold of a lost address book, interviewed everyone inside about its owner and published the results in the newspaper Libération, delighted when he sought revenge by publishing a nude photo of her. She got a job as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel to rummage through guests' possessions and photograph the mess people left. Shewon't say who dumped her, only that there is a one-word clue at the start of the book of the exhibition. Did he approve? "He knew about it. He didn't like the idea, but he respected it. So he decided not to meddle." Was she looking for revenge? "No. And a fear that it might be interpreted like that initially made me hesitate." She doesn't use her all boyfriends as work, she insists. Her current partner has asked her not to do anything based on him and she has agreed. Take Care of Yourself is only her second piece about a partner, she says, if you don't count No Sex Last Night, a film about marriage made with her then husband. Her first dumping piece, Exquisite Pain, is to be revisited in a new exhibition with her "guardian angel" Frank Gehry in Luxembourg. It is the record of how in 1985, she won a bursary to Japan for three months and her boyfriend arranged to meet her in India at the end. As she was boarding the plane she got a message saying he was in hospital in France. He had actually met someone else. She repeatedly told the story of her dumping, asking others about their worst moments of suffering. She found it too raw to show the piece for almost 20 years, until a Pompidou Centre exhibition in 2003. Raking through her emotional life for subjects, she has been compared to women artists including Emin and accused of cheap tricks. "Love, life and death - all of that is the most mundane material for artists. It amuses me because people often say, doesn't it bother you to show your private life? I say, well if you ruled out private life, you would have to eliminate all poetry. Victor Hugo, Baudelaire and Verlaine use their emotional life as subject matter. What I'm putting on show is a dumping. All dumping letters are the same, they're unpleasant. This one is neither better or worse than all the rest. It's an aid to a break-up. I don't talk about the man, and all the better. The subject is the letter, the text ... It was the words 'take care of yourself'. Those words made me click. He said 'take care of yourself', he knows how I take care of myself, he knows what my method is." Her "method" of dealing with the suffering the world throws at her is to see it all as a game of chance and coincidence, a ritual ripe for exposure on a wall. The daughter of a doctor who collected pop art and a press officer mother, she never went to art school. She keeps no sketchbooks. "Ideas just come to me," she said. As a teenage left-wing militant she campaigned to legalise abortions and took off to travel the world. When she came back to Paris, aged 26, she began following strangers because she didn't know what to do with herself. "It was a way to force myself to get out of the house without having to decide what I was doing." A prime example of the artist turning pain into art is another piece for the Biennale. she says that when she was told last year that she would be showing at Venice, another call came through: her mother saying she had a month to live. She nursed her at home. But she had heard that people who are dying often wait for the two minutes when their relatives leave the room to slip away. "It became almost an obsession. I wanted to be there when she died. I didn't want to miss her last word, her last smile. As I knew I had to shut my eyes to sleep, because the agony was very long, there were a risk I might not be there. I put a camera there, thinking if she gave a last jump or start, a last word, at least I'd have it on film." This led to another fixation. "The obsession of always having a tape in the camera, changing the tape every hour, was so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape." She was in the room when her mother died. She hadn't shot the footage as a piece and didn't feel ready to use it, but her Venice curator persuaded her. "Pas pu saisir la mort" is a film installation of the last minutes of her mother's life. "I spoke to my mother about the Biennale ... She was so horrified about not being there, I thought the only way I can make her be there is if she's the subject." She says death is part of her life. As a child she lived on the edge of Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. She would cross it four times a day to and from school, invent families on the tombstones and take them food. Her mother would enact elaborate funeral rituals for her pet goldfish and cats. The view out of her kitchen window is a pseudo-cemetery of funeral plaques she built herself. She will continue to deal with what annoys and hurts her by turning it into a game. Her latest project is spotting mistakes in journalists' articles about her art. "I thought to myself, maybe there's material in taking the errors and enacting the works just as they are described by the journalists? So if a journalist mistakenly said I'd done a project with deaf people, I'd have to do a project with deaf people." I think about inserting some wild inaccuracies to give her some space for her work. "Before I got irritated and said, 'it's not true, I never said that', I now rub my hands, when I've found something wrong. It's another way of taking care of myself, a way of turning things around. Instead of being upset about being misinterpreted, I go looking for it, I hope for it, I wait for it. It's the right method, turning things to my advantage in order not to suffer from them." 100617 ... lostgirl Sophie Calle M'as tu vue with Christine Macel,Ive-Alan Bois, Oliver Rolin,Bruno Racine this compilation is voyeuristic fascination at it's finest; essentially an art exhibit in a book showing results of unique observation of the human dynamic. looks like so much fun! 100617 ... rt +3=113 lostgirl! Question 70 Novels and stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff: language, history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal instinct and time’s remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble together anything particularly sublime? This author, a Chilean exile, born in 1953, lived in Mexico, France and Spain before his death in 2003, at 50, from liver disease traceable to heroin use years before. In a burst of invention now legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly becoming so internationally, the author, in the last decade of his life, writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health, constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely such doubts: that literature, which he revered the way a penitent loves (and yet rails against) an elusive God, could meaning­fully articulate the low truths he knew as rebel, exile, addict; that life, in all its gruesome splendor, could ever locate the literature it so desperately craves in order to feel itself known. Is a lifetime spent loving poems in a fallen world only a poor joke? He sprints into the teeth of his conundrum, violating one of the foremost writing-school injunctions, against writer-as-protagonist (in fact, he seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules, against dream sequences, against mirrors as symbols, against barely disguised nods to his acquaintances, and so on). Again and again he peoples his singular fictions with novelists and poets, both aspiring and famous, both accomplished and hopeless, both politically oblivious and committedly extremist, whether right or left. By a marvelous sleight of hand writers are omnipresent in his world, striding the stage as romantic heroes and feared as imperious villains, even aesthetic assassins — yet they’re also persistently marginal, slipping between the cracks of time and geography, forever reclusive, vanished, erased. His urgency infuses literature with life’s whole freight: the ache of a writing-workshop aspirant may embody sexual longing, or dreams of political freedom from oppression, even the utopian fantasy of the eradication of violence, while a master-novelist’s doubts in his works’ chances in the game of posterity can stand for all human remorse at the burdens of personal life, or at knowledge of the burdens of history. In the literary culture of the United States, he has become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight. The “overnight” is the result of the compressed sequence of the translation and publication of his books in English, capped by the galvanic appearance, last year, of “The Savage Detectives,” an eccentrically encompassing novel, both typical of his work and explosively larger, which cast the short stories and novellas that had preceded it into English in a sensational new light. By bringing scents of a Latin American culture more fitful, pop-savvy and suspicious of earthy machismo than that which it succeeds, he has been taken as a kind of reset button on our deplorably sporadic appetite for international writing, standing in relation to the generation of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes as, say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike and Roth. As with Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” in “The Savage Detectives” he delivered a genuine epic inocu­lated against grandiosity by humane irony, vernacular wit and a hint of punk-rock self-effacement. Any suspicion that literary culture had rushed to sentimentalize an exotic figure of quasi martyrdom was overwhelmed by the intimacy and humor of a voice that earned its breadth line by line, defying traditional fictional form with a torrential insouciance. Well, hold on to your hats. This novel is the permanently mysterious title of a manuscript rescued from his desk after his passing, the primary effort of the last five years of his life. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over his final intentions — a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer, the indefatigable translator of “The Savage Detectives”) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book’s present form. They needn’t have bothered. The novel is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: He won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. “The Savage Detectives” looks positively hermetic beside it. This novel consists of five sections, each with autonomous life and form; in fact, he evidently flirted with the notion of separate publication for the five parts. Indeed, two or three of these might be the equal of his masterpieces at novella length, “By Night in Chile” and “Distant Star.” In a comparison he openly solicits (the novel contains a series of unnecessary but totally charming defenses of its own formal strategies and magnitude) these five long sequences interlock to form an astonishing whole, in the same manner that fruits, vegetables, meats, flowers or books interlock in the unforgettable paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo to form a human face. As in Arcimboldo’s paintings, the individual elements of the book are easily cataloged, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. Parts 1 and 5, the bookends — “The Part About the Critics” and “The Part About Archimboldi” — will be the most familiar to readers of his other work. The “critics” are a group of four European academics, pedantically rapturous on the topic of their favorite writer, the mysterious German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. The four are glimpsed at a series of continental German literature conferences; he never tires of noting how a passion for literature walks a razor’s edge between catastrophic irrelevance and sublime calling. As the four become sexually and emotionally entangled, the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest — declines, in fact, ever to appear — inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives. Following dubious clues, three of the four chase a rumor of Archimboldi’s present whereabouts to Mexico, to Santa Teresa, a squalid and sprawling border city, globalization’s no man’s land, in the Sonoran Desert. The section’s disconcertingly abrupt ending will also be familiar to readers of the novellas: the aca­demics never locate the German novelist and, failing even to understand why the great German would exile himself to such a despondent place, find themselves standing at the edge of a metaphysical abyss. What lies below? Other voices will be needed to carry us forward. We meet, in Part 2, Amalfitano, another trans-Atlantic academic wrecked on the shoals of the Mexican border city, an emigrant college professor raising a beautiful daughter whose mother has abandoned them. He is beginning, seemingly, to lose his mind. His genius is for weaving a blunt recitation of life’s facts — his novels at times evoke biographies, case studies, police or government files — with digressive outbursts of lyricism as piercing as the disjunctions of writers like Denis Johnson, David Goodis or, yes, Philip K. Dick, as well as the filmmaker David Lynch. Here, Amalfitano considers a letter from his absconded wife: “In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at 10 and ended at 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning. . . . For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company’s smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.” He has been, because of his bookishness, compared to Jorge Luis Borges. But from the evidence of a prose always immediate, spare, rapturous and drifting, always cosmopolitan and enchanted, his boom should be taken as immediate cause for a revival of the neglected master Julio Cortázar. By the end of Amalfitano’s section a reader remains, like the critics in the earlier section, in possession of a paucity of real clues as to this novel’s underlying “story,” but suffused with dreadful implication. Amalfitano’s daughter seems to be drifting into danger, and if we’ve been paying attention we’ll have become concerned about intimations of a series of rape-­murders in the Santa Teresa slums and foothills. What’s more (if we’ve been reading flap copy or reviews) we’ll have noted that “Santa Teresa” is a thin disguise over the real town of Ciudad Juárez, the site of a dismayingly underreported sequence of unsolved crimes against women, with a death toll that crept into the hundreds in the ’90s. In the manner of James Ellroy, but with a greater check on both prurience and bathos, he has sunk the capital of his great book into a bottomless chasm of verifiable tragedy and injustice. In the third section — “The Part About Fate” — this real-world material comes into view in the course of a marvelously spare and pensive portrait of a black North American journalist, diverted to Santa Teresa to cover what turns out to be a pathetically lopsided boxing match between a black American boxer and a Mexican opponent. Before arriving in Mexico, though, the journalist visits Detroit to interview an ex-Black Panther turned motivational speaker named Barry Seaman, who delivers, for 10 pages, the greatest ranting monologue this side of Don DeLillo’s Lenny Bruce routines in “Underworld.” Here’s a bit of it: “He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances.” At last, and with the blunt power of a documentary compilation, comes Part 4, “The Part About the Crimes.” His massive structure may now be under­stood as a form of mercy: the novel has been conceived as a resounding chamber, a receptacle adequate to the gravity — the weight and the force — of the human grief it will attempt to commemorate. If the word “unflinching” didn’t exist I’d invent it to describe these nearly 300 pages, yet he never completely abandons those reserves of lyricism and irony that make the sequence as transporting as it is grueling. The nearest comparison may be to Haruki Murakami’s shattering fugue on Japanese military atrocities in Mongolia, which sounds the moral depths in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” His method, like Murakami’s, encapsulates and disgorges dream and fantasy, at no cost to the penetration of his realism. BY the time we return to matters of literature, and meet Archimboldi, a German World War II veteran and a characteristically culpable 20th-century witness whose ambivalent watchfulness shades the Sonoran crimes, we’ve been shifted into a world so far beyond the imagining of the first section’s “critics” that we’re unsure whether to pity or envy them. Though Archimboldi’s literary career is conjured with his customary gestural fulsomeness, this book never presents so much as a scrap of the fictional master’s fiction. Instead the titles of Archimboldi’s books recur as a kind of pulse of implication, until the conjectured power of an unknown literature has insisted itself upon us like a disease, one that might just draw us down with the savagery of a murderer operating in a moonless desert. A novel like this one is its own preserving machine, delivering itself into our hearts, sentence by questing, unassuming sentence; it also becomes a preserving machine for the lives its words fall upon like a forgiving rain, fictional characters and the secret selves hidden behind and enshrined within them: hapless academic critics and a hapless Mexican boxer, the unavenged bodies deposited in shallow graves. By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world’s disasters, the author has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable. Now throw your hats in the air. (Adapted from a review by Jonathon Letham) For three points, name the author, his novel, and give a personal response... 100618 ... lostgirl 2666 Roberto Bolano i've not heard of this book, but my mom has probably read it. forming an opinion from the reviews i read through is arduous, as they collectively relate another difficult but terrific read. what excites me most is that it is termed a 'writer's novel' yet it appears to be written more from a journalistic approach than a descriptive novelist approach....meaning there is more content "as told than as shown." wonder if it was because he was hurrying to finish it before he passed or if this was intentional....guess we will never know unless we find him in another lifetime. not sure yet about this one, though it seems like a winner. 100618 ... rt +3=116 i like your soulful inquiry lostgirl. Question 71 I’m aware of one — one — reader who doesn’t care for this author, and even that one seems a little apologetic about it. “Too . . . punny,” my friend explains, resorting to a pun as though hypnotized by the very tendency that sets off his resistance. For others, she may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary Ameri­can writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, she is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows. Her last book, the 1998 story collection “Birds of America,” included the unforgettable baby-with-­cancer story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a breathtakingly dark overture to a decade’s silence — as if the Beatles had exited on “A Day in the Life.” For many readers, the fact that she has now relieved an 11-year publishing hiatus is reason enough to start Google-mapping a route to the nearest surviving bookstore. If American fiction writers largely find themselves sorted tediously into the category of “natural” at either the short or the long form, regardless of the extent of their commitment to both, then she — justly celebrated for her three story collections — has surely been counted as a miniaturist. This book should spell the end of that. This novel is more expansive than either of her two previous novels, the slender, Nabokovian “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” and the structurally dizzy novel-as-set-of-­variations “Anagrams.” It’s also a novel that brandishes some “big” material: racism, war, etc. — albeit in her resolutely insouciant key. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Tassie Keltjin, is a student at a Midwestern college mecca, daughter of a boutique potato cultivator, who finds work as the nanny-in-waiting for a brainy couple awkwardly on the verge of adoption. This ambiguous assignment takes the foreground in a tale ranging over Tassie’s home life and love life — the nest she’s just departed and the nest she’s hoping to flutter into. Her class diagnostics are so exact she can make us feel the uneasiness not only between town and country in a single landlocked state, but between different types of farmers on neighboring plots. The book is also set in the autumn of 2001, a fact she has the patience to barely deploy for 200 pages, and then only with a deft sleight of hand that will make readers reflect on the ways so many other treatments of this (unfinished) passage in American life have resembled heart surgery performed with a croquet mallet. In a 2005 interview, she made an allusion to this “post-9/11” aspect of the work that grew into this novel: “I’m . . . interested in the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings.” The delicacy of this remark fails to disguise its clarity of purpose, and, as it happens, distant inter­national affairs are by no means the only source of “intrusion” in the novel. Her continuing interest in how power imbalances make themselves felt in human encounters fastens here on the Kafka-worthy bureaucracy of adoption agencies and foster homes. Combined with her immaculately tender portrayals of young children, so real you want to pass around their snapshots, this aspect of her novel will do such things to your heart that you may find yourself wishing for the surgeon with the croquet mallet, just for mercy. Her cast is sneaky-large (she’s like an athlete you keep wanting to call sneaky-fast, or sneaky-tough). Any of Tassie’s relationships — like that with her adoption-seeking employer Sarah Brink, or her vivid goof of a younger brother, or her exotic first love interest, Reynaldo (whom she meets in “Intro to Sufism”) — may seem this book’s essential one, at least while it assumes center stage. But the novel’s real essence is its sinuous roving spotlight, in which each character and element is embraced in Tassie’s wondering and exact sensibility, as when with her brother she revisits a childhood haunt: “When the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him, the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpah movie I’d never seen but had read about once in a syndicated article in The Dellacrosse Sunday Star. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a party barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sunsetting light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of ‘Straw Dogs.’ . . . Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for its plonk and plummet. I wanted to say, ‘Remember the time . . .’ But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless. We found more stones and tossed them. ‘A stone can’t drown,’ said my brother finally. ‘It’s already drowned.’ ‘You been reading poetry?’ I smiled at him.” As for the puns, they seem to me less an eagerness to entertain than a true writerly obsession. She is an equal-opportunity japester: heroes and villains both crack wise with Chandleresque vivacity, so you can’t use cleverness as a moral index. The wrinkly recursiveness of her language seems lodged at the layer of consciousness itself, where she demands readers’ attention to the innate thingliness of words. This includes not only their plastic capacity as puns, and the oddnesses residing in the names for food, foliage and products — for instance, the fact that probably no bachelor ever wore the flowers called “bachelor buttons,” or that a fabric’s neutral hue can be awarded names as various as pigeon, parmesan, platinum or pebble — but also their potential use as deliberate uncommunication: “ ‘Sounds good,’ I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good, that same Midwestern girl’s slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless — mere affirmative description.” Finally, this book plumbs deep because it is anchored deep, in a system of natural imagery as tightly organized as that in a cycle of poems like Ted Hughes’s “Crow.” The motif is birth, gestation and burial, a seed or fetus uncovering its nature in secrecy, a coffin being offered to the earth. The motif declares itself upfront in Tassie’s father’s potatoes, which like sleeper cells grow clustered in darkness and then, unearthed, assume names: Klamath pearls, yellow fingerlings, purple Peruvians and Rose Finns. In the novel it is not just potatoes that adapt for the world behind assumed names, but babies and grown-ups too. Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery this author presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once — unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She’s a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. On finishing the novel I turned to the reader nearest to me and made her swear to read it immediately (well, the dog was between us, but she doesn’t read much, and none of what I recommend). I might even urge it on my dissenting friend. (Adapted from a review by Jonathan Lethem) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100618 ... lostgirl A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore a funny, pun filled yet sad story of observation...of the constancy of trying to figure out the elusive truth regarding those people and situations closest...often revealing surprise and shock. lies of all kinds lurk around everywhere. though this received some scathing reviews from those who love Moore’s short stories, i think this one deserves a glance. 100619 ... rt +3=119 lostgirl! Often I'm being asked in interviews whether it's true that ants have personalities, which is what I propose in the conclusion of this book. Certainly! The problem of course is that we ordinarily see ants as specks on the ground, which is much like looking at people from an airplane. Get down to the level of your subject, watch them from within their own beautiful microworld, and the individual differences will become clear. The cliche about ants (tracing back to King Solomon in the bible) is that they are hard working, but as the book describes, this is not true. In a colony, there can be ants that work all day, and others who lie around and do next to nothing much of the time. In fact, my friend Barrett Klein just finished his dissertation at the University of Texas in sleep in the honeybee. It's likely that ants do their fair share of sleeping, too, but as with the bees it is also likely that some get less of a fair share than others. The hardworking individuals are sometimes able to motivate other workers to get an important task done, but at other times they have to go it alone. I show in the book that ants are often born into a certain specialization, but it is nevertheless possible for them get good at certain jobs through repetition, as some people do with a musical instrument. Different ant workers for example become adept at finding different kinds of food, or they come to know a certain area around their home best, and hunt there with special skill. In short, all ants are different, once you get to know them well enough. In the book, I carry this idea to the level of the superorganism (the idea that ant colonies act like single organisms, so that you can think of all the workers as part of this greater whole). What I have noticed is that one colony can be harder working or more risk-taking than another. Even an ant colony, then, might have a personality! The following is from a recent interview on Fresh Air...(highly recommended) Ants are a sisterhood. "The guys don't really do too much," the entomologist says. "They're kind of kicked out of the society soon after they're born. They have a single function: to have sex. OK. They have two functions. To have sex and die. And apparently that's satisfactory for them. They don't participate in the social life." The author is called "the Indiana Jones of entomology" by the National Geographic Society, fell in love with ants when he was a child. He's been studying them professionally for the past 30 years — first as a researcher at Harvard and then at the University of California, Berkeley and the Smithsonian Institution. For his dissertation, he studied Pheidologeton, commonly known as marauder ants, under the Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson. For three years, hetraveled through Sri Lanka, Nepal, New Guinea, Hong Kong and more to track the marauders' social behavior. He discovered that Pheidologeton evolved to avoid swarming attacks from another species called army ants. He maps his journeys around the world to research various species of ants in his new book. Among the species he details include: * Leafcutter ants, which can dice up tough fruit with their strong jaws * Weaver ants, which spin silk cocoons to protect their larvae * Argentine ants, which live in enormous "supercolonies" and are considered an invasive species. (One colony stretched 560 miles down the coast of California.) * African army ants, whiich attack prey in a herd effort and chomp down on any potential threats. (He says the "bites on a fingertip were so agonizing that pulling the ant off wasn't an option: When [he] gripped the offender between two fingers of the opposite hand, she would clamp down even more savagely on the delicate finger pad.") He answers many questions about ants, including why ants attack, how they live communally and what they do when a bystander accidentally steps on their nest. He also explains why he chose to devote his life to one of the smallest creatures on Earth. "My parents say I watched ants in diapers. That was easy because I was small then. Now I have to get down much lower," he says. "What fascinates kids in general is when [animals] do have traits we recognize in ourselves. Checking each other out ... making of nests. Every child can see similarities. My life became devoted to them. And I've stayed close to ground all my life." He has received a lifetime achievement award from the Science Museum of Long Island and the Lowell Thomas Medal from the Explorers Club. In addition, three species (including a frog and a beetle) have been named after him. His other books include The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy and Face to Face with Frogs. On being stung by ants "I don't take them personally. I believe [the stings are] a sign of affection. ... There is a cost to any relationship — human or otherwise — and if you're going to fall in love with anything, whether it's a human or an animal, you have to take the good with the bad. And stings for me are part of the process." On the bulldog ant of Australia "[It's] one of the contenders for the world's most vicious ant. ... The bulldog ... is nearly an inch long, built like [a] tank. [It] is interesting because it has very good vision. So if you're in Australia and you see an ant look up at you and turn and follow you and start running after you, you should probably leave." "The world expert on them, Bob Taylor, once was quoted in National Geographic as saying that 30 could kill a person. I don't think he has any data and I've been stung by over 30, but over a period of about a month. I think it's dosage-dependent." On how he gets close to ants "I tend to lower my body exactly to the ground. My eye, if I'm working and being paid, has to be within 1 inch of the soil and at that point, at that latitude, you can actually take in the ants as if they were aliens in a movie. That's always how I've seen them. Not as small things — as large things." On ant communication "Ants communicate through chemistry. That's the advantage of being fairly small. Scents can travel rapidly compared to humans over distances, [and] that can lead to the ants' signaling large groups, particularly ants that move in dense swarms like the army ants or the marauder ants. They sometimes use sound. If you step on a nest, you cause a disaster — there's all kinds of cave-ins — and the ants that are buried signal with a little squeak that they need to be dug up." On the size of marauder ant colonies "In their case, hundreds of thousands. They're almost all minor workers. There are a variety of intermediate workers — the soldiers are rather rare. The minor workers, the little ones, are the workhorses that do most of the drudgery of the colony. The bigger ones do more specialized tasks. So the largest ones, for example, often serve as school buses, moving bunches of small ones to the battlefield." For three points, name the author/entomologist, his book, and give a personal response... 100619 ... jane Mark Moffett AAA ants - ants and i have a weird relationship, and have ever since i found one in my ear when i was a teenager. One of my coolest experiences with ants was seeing the leafcutter ants when i was in costa rica. not easy to photograph, but lovely to watch. 100619 ... jane AAA= Adventures Among Ants 100619 ... rt +3=91 jane! Question 73 You probably wouldn’t want to take a trip with this author. And more to the point, she probably wouldn’t want you along anyway. Her expeditions are usually solo affairs, often dangerous, almost always uncomfortable, and frequently a hairbreadth from disaster. She’s been caught in a coup attempt in Bangladesh, chased by rebel soldiers in Mozambique, held at gunpoint in Congo, and hunted by a Tuareg gang in Mali. She’s survived malaria, dysentery, and cholera—and that’s the short list. It’s far better to follow her vicariously, through her books and articles (including many for this publication). Her prose is luminous, often deeply personal, and transporting in the pan-sensory way that only the best travel writing can be. At 36, she has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing five times. Her 2001 memoir, Four Corners: A Journey Into the Heart of Papua New Guinea, was the New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year. Now she has written her debut novel. It’s safe to say that you wouldn’t want to travel with her main character either. And vice versa. This 32-year-old journalist named Marika Vecera ventures, almost always alone, into the world’s most dangerous places. A war correspondent, Marika is the type of woman who casually cauterizes a machete wound to her neck with a tent pole she’s heated in her campfire. The plot of the novel revolves around Marika’s quest to find her mentor, renowned journalist Robert Lewis, rumored to have faked his suicide and hidden himself deep in the pestilential jungle of Papua New Guinea. Led by a witch doctor named Tobo, she embarks on an epic journey across the island—searching for Lewis and unearthing her own painful secrets in the process. Marika’s trip is harrowing, minutely observed, and utterly mesmerizing, all rendered in the author's artfully unadorned, fast-paced prose—a style reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, with an ample supply of his bleakness and violence. There are also shades of Heart of Darkness drifting through the book (wait meri is local pidgin for “white woman”)—both books are obsessive searches through inhospitable lands for a lost soul. The narrative alternates between Marika's search in the dense jungle of PNG and the story of all that lead up to her journey, most importantly her relationship with the protective Seb and some traumatic experiences traveling and working in Congo, and I like the way the story ebbs and flows. The travel sequences can be intense and sometimes it was a relief to flash back to Boston and a world I understand a little better. I also found Marika's personality to be very believable and accurate psychologically. She's a hard-living woman who's seen and been through some of the worst things imaginable, and prides herself on her ability to take care of herself, but she pays a heavy price in her ability to maintain an intimate relationship with a man who genuinely cares for her, as well as in her ability to value her own well-being. As would anybody. Some of the things these characters go through are horrific, excruciating- the stuff of nightmares- and it would be naive to think these kinds of experiences would just roll off a person. An important theme in the book is redemption and hope- the idea that even after seeing the worst evil the world has to offer, it's possible, through painful, difficult work, to be happy, to feel joy and to give and receive love. The book can be read as one long metaphor for this journey. I read Marika's journey through the jungles of PNG as her journey through her traumas and demons, and I read Seb less as her lover and more as her conscience, a voice leading her out of the jungle and back to herself. Apart from the psychological truths it offers, The book is absolutely compelling reading. An experienced and lauded travel writer, she based the book on many of her own experiences traveling in PNG and elsewhere, and her knowledge shows in her descriptions and attention to detail. While in PNG, Marika loses her shoes and must make the journey barefoot, and that little fact all by itself stuck with me like the thorns in her soles; just a small thing, but one of the many details that drew me in and helped me experience the journey with her. She includes a good cast of supporting characters as well, most notably Tobo, a PNG sorcerer and Marika's guide, who could have been a boring, stereotyped wise native but instead had a personality and point of view all his own. Excerpt From Chapter 1 The black waters of Elobi Creek show no sign of a current. It is another dead waterway, Marika tells herself, one that will breed only mosquitoes and crocodiles. Another waterway that somehow reflects—in the darkness of the water, in its stillness—all of her failings. These waters, this breathless heat, seem to be waiting for a response from her, a call to action. But she has no answers. And if she’s to be honest with herself, she never had any. Things will unravel. They will fall apart. If she is to be honest with herself—and the pain from self-honesty, but the duty of it, too—she must admit that this time she seems to have started something that is beyond her ability to stop. It is as if the dominoes of her life have begun to fall, and she can only watch each moment disappearing in the futile fractions of a second. She is still looking for her ghost. Nearly three months spent in Papua New Guinea, and no sign of him. Does Robert Lewis know she has given up everything to find him? More to the point, would he care? She ought to go home. Go back. Call this for what it is: a failure. Beauty intrudes upon her. Flocks of red and green parrots. Butterflies of blue and gold dancing over the black waters. Crowned pigeons with their regal headdresses of gray plumage. She would like to know this beauty, not just see it. In the same way, walking down a city street, she might gaze at the featureless crowds and catch sight of a face that awakens something vital in her. A longing, perhaps. A burst of compassion. She looks at the thick, ripe jungle around her: squat sago palms nesting beside the riverbanks; ancient trees rising toward darkening clouds. It should not be so hard, she tells herself, to know this beauty. Thomas, the lanky young man driving their dugout canoe, stops the outboard motor. The intense heat never seems to bother him, his green T-shirt saturated, his exposed black skin glistening from sweat. He picks up his bow and a bamboo arrow ending in four prongs, and aims at a crowned pigeon. Releasing the arrow, he watches it cascade into the rain forest, just missing the bird. As the pigeon flees for the sky, Thomas speaks sharply in a tribal language, putting down the bow and starting up the outboard motor. The jungle didn’t seem to notice. The butterflies continue whirling. The parrots chatter. A white cockatoo fluffs out its feathers and relaxes them. As the sun disappears behind a large gray cloud, Marika yanks down her hat’s brim, staring into the tangled greenery around her. She wants a sign. She would like to know that all the events of her life have conspired to bring her to this exact instant in time, with nothing—none of it—being a mistake. But this world of Papua New Guinea won’t tell her anything. It will just burn her white skin a deeper red. It will suck all the remaining moisture from her, stinging her, biting her, keeping her from sound sleep. The jungle rises thick on either side of the narrowing waterway, interconnecting overhead as if she were entering the bowels of a giant green serpent. Miraculously—or so it seems to her—she actually arrives somewhere at the end of each day, alive. And closer, she hopes, to Robert Lewis. For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100619 ... lostgirl The White Mary By Kira Salak though I have not read this, i have read most of the books that barnes and noble says i would like if i had....so i probably will read this. i like the fact that the author is a travel journalist....her words will paint a picture that comes from her heart as well as her imagination. the storyline seems straightforward enough...encompassing not only adventure, love and loss, but also the ultimate price of chasing down observable as well as introspective demons. 100619 ... rt +3=122 lostgirl! Question 74 How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex. Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal. This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: "I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends." One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones. This is a powerful idea, one that I think is basically—though not entirely—right. (Certain phenomena, including horror movies and masochistic daydreams, require a different type of explanation.) The capacity for imaginative pleasure is universal, and it emerges early in development. All normal children, everywhere, enjoy playing and pretending. There are cultural differences in the type and frequency of play. A child in New York might pretend to be an airplane; a hunter-gatherer child will not. In the 1950s, American children played Cowboys and Indians; not so much anymore. In some cultures, play is encouraged; in others, children have to sneak off to do it. But it is always there. Failure to play and pretend is a sign of a neurological problem, one of the early symptoms of autism. Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children's appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality. We know that children who have reached their fourth birthday tend to have a relatively sophisticated understanding, because when we ask them straight out about what is real and what is pretend, they tend to get it right. What about younger children? Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn't act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified. The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn't have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real. It is an open question how early this understanding emerges, and there is some intriguing experimental work exploring this. My own hunch is that even babies have some limited grasp of pretense, and you can see this from casual interaction. A useful way to spend time with a 1-year-old is to put your face up close and wait for the baby to grab at your glasses or nose or hair. Once there is contact, pull your head back and roar in mock rage. The first time you get a bit of surprise, maybe concern, a dash of fear, but then you put your head back and wait for the baby to try again. She will, and then you give the pretend-startled response. Many babies come to find this hilarious. (If the baby is an eye-poker, you can wrestle over keys instead.) For this to work, though, the baby has to know that you are not even a little bit angry; the baby must know that you are pretending. Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn't it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series led to similar tears. (After her final book was published, Rowling appeared in interviews and told about the letters she got, not all of them from children, begging her to spare the lives of beloved characters such as Hagrid, Hermione, Ron, and, of course, Harry Potter himself.) A friend of mine told me that he can't remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can't bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant. These emotional responses are typically muted compared with the real thing. Watching a movie in which someone is eaten by a shark is less intense than watching someone really being eaten by a shark. But at every level—physiological, neurological, psychological—the emotions are real, not pretend. Does this suggest that people believe, at some level, that the events are real? Do we sometimes think that fictional characters actually exist and fictional events actually occur? Of course, people get fooled, as when parents tell their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, or when an adult mistakes a story for a documentary, or vice versa. But the idea here is more interesting than that—it is that even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it's real. There is something to this: It can be devilishly hard to pull apart fiction from reality. There are several studies showing that reading a fact in a story—and knowing that it is fiction—increases the likelihood that you believe the fact to be true. And this makes sense, because stories are mostly true. If you were to read a novel that takes place in London toward the end of the 1980s, you would learn a lot about how people in that time and place talked to one another, what they ate, how they swore, and so on, because any decent storyteller has to include these truths as a backdrop for the story. The average person's knowledge of law firms, emergency rooms, police departments, prisons, submarines, and mob hits is not rooted in real experience or nonfictional reports. It is based on stories. Someone who watched cop shows on television would absorb many truths about contemporary police work ("You have the right to remain silent . . ."), and a viewer of a realistic movie such as Zodiac would learn more. Indeed, many people seek out certain types of fiction (historical novels, for example) because they want a painless way of learning about reality. We go too far sometimes. Fantasy can be confounded with reality. For example, the publication of The Da Vinci Code led to a booming tourism industry in Scotland, by people accepting the novel's claims about the location of the Holy Grail. Then there is the special problem of confusing actors with the characters they play. Leonard Nimoy, an actor born in Boston to Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, was frequently confused with his best-known role, Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan. This was sufficiently frustrating that he published a book called I Am Not Spock (and then, 20 years later, published I Am Spock). Or consider the actor Robert Young, star of one of the first medical programs, Marcus Welby, M.D., who reported getting thousands of letters asking for medical advice. He later exploited this confusion by appearing in his doctor persona (wearing a white lab coat) on television commercials for aspirin and decaffeinated coffee. There is, then, an occasional blurring between fact and reality. In the end, though, those brought to tears by Anna Karenina are perfectly aware that she is a character in a novel; those people who wailed when J.K. Rowling killed off Dobby the House Elf knew full well that he doesn't exist. And even young children appreciate the distinction between reality and fiction; when you ask them, "Is such-and-so real or make-believe?," they get it right. Why, then, are we so moved by stories? David Hume tells the story of a man who is hung out of a high tower in a cage of iron. He knows himself to be perfectly secure, but, still, he "cannot forebear trembling." Montaigne gives a similar example, saying that if you put a sage on the edge of a precipice, "he must shudder like a child." My colleague, the philosopher Tamar Gendler, describes the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass walkway that extends 70 feet from the canyon's rim. It is supposedly a thrilling experience. So thrilling that some people drive several miles over a dirt road to get there and then discover that they are too afraid to step onto the walkway. In all of these cases, people know they are perfectly safe, but they are nonetheless frightened. In an important pair of papers, Gend-ler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it "alief." Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, "Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!" The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination. Those who get pleasure voyeuristically watching real people have sex will enjoy watching actors having sex in a movie. Those who like observing clever people interact in the real world will get the same pleasure observing actors pretend to be such people on television. Imagination is Reality Lite—a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work. Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space. For stories, though, you have access to information that the character lacks. The philosopher Noël Carroll gives the example of the opening scene in Jaws. You can't be merely taking the teenager's perspective as she swims in the dark, because she is cheerful, and you are terrified. You know things that she doesn't. You hear the famous, ominous music; she doesn't. You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life. This is how empathy works in real life. You would feel the same way seeing someone happily swim while a shark approaches her. In both fiction and reality, then, you simultaneously make sense of the situation from both the character's perspective and from your own. Samuel Johnson, writing about Shakespeare, said: "The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more." Johnson was a brilliant writer, but plainly he had never heard of O.J. Simpson. If he had, he'd realize that we get plenty of pleasure from real tragedy. Indeed, Shakespeare's tragedies depict precisely the sorts of events that we most enjoy witnessing in the real world—complex and tense social interactions revolving around sex, love, family, wealth, and status. I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don't care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet's friends are coping with his death because these friends don't exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering. But there are also certain compelling features of the imagination. Just as artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar, unreal events can be more moving than real ones. There are three reasons for this. First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds. Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends. Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you. So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television? Man is the only animal that likes hot sauce. Women are drawn to more masculine male faces when they are ovulating. When asked, people say they will pay good money for a sweater worn by George Clooney, but a third less if it has been sterilised. The great violinist Joshua Bell made only $32 when he busked in the Washington subway. In front of Vermeer’s painting The Woman Taken in Adultery, people had life-changing experiences. When they were told it was a fake, painted by the supreme forger Han van Meegeren, they didn’t. Strange stories and exotic insights emerge from the frontiers of contemporary psychology. These are from the new book by this author and professor of psychology at Yale. They are all about how and why humans value and enjoy things, from the trivial (Tabasco sauce, Clooney’s sweater) to the exalted (Bell and Vermeer). They are also about the increasingly urgent scientific attempt to explain art, the supreme human achievement. This, perhaps more than anything else, evades scientific analysis. “A question I can’t answer,” the author says, “is, where does the creative impulse come from? What is the nature of artistic genius? What distinguishes Vermeer from van Meegeren? I don’t think we know. I think we are barely asking the question. We are going great in some respects, but when it comes to the big questions people ask, like ‘Where does Picasso come from?’, we just don’t know. Nevertheless scientists hope that two recent developments will help us to find out where art comes from. The first is evolutionary psychology (EP). This is based on the idea that our Darwinian descent — from bacteria to apes to us — must explain much, if not everything, about how our minds work. This is the only grand theory psychologists have ever had. The second is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows in real time what goes in the brain when we have certain experiences. It is at the centre of neuroscience, the current hot science. Thanks to fMRI, put “neuro” in front of anything — neuromarketing, neuroeconomics — and there is money to be made. Popular books inspired by these new sciences of the human mind pour from the presses. They often make excessive claims. For example, much was made of the claim that great artists such as Mozart are created by working for exactly 10,000 hours. Well, of course, Mozart worked at music for 10,000 hours. That was because he was Mozart. If I had done it, I would still be a musical klutz. The mystery of Mozart remains intact. Or, as the author puts it: “Ten thousand hours may be a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. I could play basketball for 10,000 hours and I still wouldn’t be Michael Jordan.” Both EP and fMRI have huge and potentially fatal shortcomings. EP makes an assumption that there is a clear, Darwinian line leading from the first living cell to the human mind. Many creatures have brains, but only humans seem to have minds that can reflect on this fact and have big experiences such as art and religion. We cannot know this, because we have no idea how the mind works, how the brain produces it. Once the brain physically came into existence, the mind may have evolved through non-Darwinian means. It certainly often seems to behave against its own evolutionary best interests — by, for example, using contraception or being gay. “I think there is an occupational hazard for us,” says the author — who calls himself a “card-carrying evolutionary psychologist” — “of underestimating the complexities of the mind, the richness. This shows up particularly in domains such as sex and food, where some psychologists have missed out extraordinary complexity and interests in these things.” The fMRI scanners show things happening, but we don’t know how to interpret them. Professor Lawrence Parsons, at Sheffield University, put Jarvis Cocker and some tango dancers inside his machine and scanned their brains while they performed. (The dancers were able to move their feet while lying inside because Parsons put a board under them.) This gave him lots of information, but he admits he doesn’t know what it means. “We’re not at the point where we can answer these big interpretive questions,” he told me. “There is this overcomplicated thing [the mind] that we barely understand because we’re only at the beginning. We’re still looking at the circuit diagrams.” So given that they may well be completely wrong, what are the scientists saying about art? Music seems to be the art they most focus on. It is the most mysterious and fundamental. Steven Pinker, the psychologist and cognitive scientist, has said music was an accidental by-product of language. Working in the same disciplines, Daniel Levitin disputes this, saying music may be our peacock’s tail, an example of runaway sexual selection. A female peacock likes a male with a tail, then a bigger tail, until, finally, Beethoven pops out. The neurologist Oliver Sacks points out that musicians’ brains are physically different. They are larger in motor, auditory and visuospatial areas of the cerebellum, and the corpus callosum — the great rope that joins the two halves of the brain — is enlarged. Whether this is so because they make music, or they make music because this is so, is unknown. Meanwhile, the neurologist VS Ramachandran has come up with eight “laws of artistic experience”. The most curious of these is the “peak shift effect”. If you can persuade a rat to prefer a rectangle to a square (it can be done), then it will go on to prefer ever more long and skinny — more rectangular — rectangles. This seems to explain our love of caricature and art that is more real than the real. And so on. The problem with all these explanations is that they do not directly address the feeling of being moved by a work of art itself. My experience of a Vermeer is just that: my experience. And telling me why it happens is not the same as saying what it is. The great novelist Marilynne Robinson addresses this shortcoming in her new collection of essays, Absence of Mind. She points out that a driving force in much modern scientific thought has been to deny our own sense of our “inwardness”. She calls the attempts to explain higher human feelings in scientific terms “parascience”: it is not real science because it lacks any experimental or even rational foundation. Our experiences seem to be the central fact of our existence, but it is precisely these that are overlooked by parascientific literature. The virtue of this book is that he does not really make this mistake. His most important point is that humans are “born essentialists”. We see everything as possessing “an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly, and it this hidden nature that really matters”. This is obviously true of people. If I disguise myself, you will not think I have become another person. And in Capgras Syndrome — in which sufferers become convinced that their closest friends and loved ones have been replaced by imposters — it is clear that the mere sight of a person is not enough. Some awareness of an inner essence is also needed. It is also true of things. Show children a toy tiger and they will say it is a tiger. Wrap it in, say, a fox’s skin and they will still insist it is a tiger. We also value gold for no practical reason, only because we think it is imbued with some inner quality. This explains why an unsterilised Clooney sweater is more valuable. There is some magic essence that has passed from the star to the wool (well, probably cashmere) that sterilisation may remove. The implications of this for art are strange, teasing. Why did the “Vermeer” become tens of millions of pounds less valuable when it was exposed as a fake? Nothing about the picture had changed. In the author's terms, the link is the Clooney sweater. The magic touch of the artist had sanctified the originals. In other words, we appreciate art in the context of a story attached to the physical object. Or, indeed, to a performance. People pay hundreds of dollars to see Joshua Bell play the violin in a concert hall, but 1,000 people passed him in that subway and he made only $32. In fiction and the movies, he argues, something similar applies. We love the back story that connects us to the writer. “In stories,” he says, “it matters for everybody that they believe they are experiencing something in the world that really did happen or that sprang from a creative imagination.” This is particularly obvious in fiction that disturbs or horrifies. He points out that the same people who go enthusiastically to see slash horror movies such as Saw or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre will often recoil at the sight of a real blister on a real finger. “The same scene would be grotesque if you thought you were watching it for real, like surgery or people eating monkey brains. But, in the movies, people encode these things in a very different way.” We do a kind of 50-50 deal in our heads. Somehow, half of our mind believes it is real enough to be thrilling, while the other half knows it is unreal. Tabasco sauce comes under the same category. We are thrilled by the pain and consoled by the knowledge it will end. For him, essentialism — the sense of an inner reality that is manifested in art by the unseen link to the artist — pervades everything we do and are. As an evolutionary psychologist, he has an idea about why this may be. “At first, it seems really weird that we value the history of art objects so much. What difference does it make? I think it’s a spill-over from the fact that the history of people really does matter to us. If you are this person who did this favour for me a year ago, or the one who betrayed me — well, it is really important for me to analyse you. This has spilled over into things that people create.” Well, maybe. But what matters is art and whether it is changed by such knowledge. John Keats feared it would be. In his poem Lamia, he wrote of turning the world into “a dull catalogue of common things”. The modern world-view, he thought, would “unweave a rainbow”. This is a good thing, according to Richard Dawkins, the great propagandist for the triumph of the scientific method. Dawkins wrote a book, Unweaving the Rainbow, which argued that the wonders of the scientific world-view were, in fact, greater, more poetic, than the pre-scientific view. The author half agrees. He dissents from Dawkins’s attacks on the wonder of religion because it is far more deeply embedded and important than militant atheists such as Dawkins seem to realise. It cannot be wished out of existence by science, not least because, in many cultures, there is no word for religion. It is just life. In the end, the rainbow will be unwoven only if we want it to be. Dawkins does not argue against wonder, he simply argues for a new kind of wonder. The author identifies our deeply embedded instinct for essences, for the unseen. Wonder and the unseen — in other words, art — survive the science. They are who we are. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100620 ... lostgirl How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom the science behind the reason the imagination always gets what it wants? i want to know all about it. 100620 ... rt +3=125 lostgirl! Question 75 “Trying to read a book by this poet in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What’s inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they’ll start to rip your insides apart.”—Ron Silliman, blog Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. This book brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: “Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience.” The second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as her experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of this book part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. She is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. … Her writing in this book will thus be familiar to her longtime readers for its way of holding meaning (and identification) in uneasy suspension. Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings. …yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox.—Adapted from a review by Tom Griffin, Bookforum Poetry from the book... while all the while the sea breaks and rolls, painlessly, under. If we’re not copying it, we’re lonely. Is this the knowledge that demands to be passed down? Time is made from swatches of heaven and hell. If we’re not killing it, we’re hungry. —from “Simple” What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name? --from "Scumble" 1 The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious. That much I can guess. And that the view is softened by the curtains. That the present moment is an exception, is the queen bee a hive serves, or else an orphan. 2 So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant. It gestures in the distance. Between there and here you ask what game we should play next week. So we’ll be alive next week, continuing what you may or may not mean to be an impossible flirtation --from "Guess" For three points, name the poet, her prize winning book, and give a personal response... 100620 ... rt time's up...the poet is rae armantrout and her book is "versed." Question 76 Time was when the great war books were written either by the combatants themselves or by historians. But it is uniquely the case of WWII--and uniquely a function of the fact that it was truly a "World" war--that two of the greatest, and certainly the most affecting, works of literature to emerge from the war relate the experiences of children. Anne Frank's Diary, though the War itself is necessarily off stage, is informed by our knowledge of its events, and her perilous situation is a result of the War. In this book, our young hero--Jamie, later Jim--is thrust into the very midst of war, and, though he's rarely in the middle of combat, the killing and other horrors (even down to the A-bombing of Japan, which gives the book its unexpected meaning) occur all around him. The author has drawn upon his own four years in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, near Japanese occupied Shanghai, the imaginative and visual techniques of his science fiction writing, the heritage of such writers as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and a dark, but accurate, personal vision of WWII as little more than a prelude to WWIII, to create a novel that captures the bloody-minded nature of the 20th Century as no other author has. Particularly impressive is the way in which he shows that, for young Jamie, the War is, perversely, something of a liberation, freeing him from the normal strictures of the adult world. He's kind of like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territories, but in his case there's not even a runaway slave for a companion. He is also very conscious of the way in which modern media has served to minimize reality, or at least to distance us from it. After the War ends, Jim is watching newsreels and realizes that they are part of what will become the accepted version of events, with arrows sweeping across continents, while the true life experiences of people like him will take on the quality of illusions. In turn, he makes many of the scenes almost hallucinatory or surreal (it's hard to convey just how visual the novel is; suffice it to say that it is so cinematic that even Steven Spielberg made a reasonably satisfying movie version out of it.) Ultimately, it is Jim's triumph, and China's, to have survived WWII. It is the tragedy of the Century that, just as Jim was liberated by the fact that the world had come untethered from the normal rules of a civil society, monstrous forces of human nature were also freed, leading to death, murder, torture, and destruction on a scale which called into question whether the species could, would, or should survive. As the novel closes and he heads to England to complete school, Jim seems uncertain whether he'll survive WWIII, but positive that China, prostrate for so long, will wreak a horrible vengeance upon the world. Though this intuition has so far proven wrong, it is nonetheless true that tens of millions of Chinese were subsequently killed by their own government. This novel comes as close as any can to summing up what was one of the central themes of the 20th Century : The Slaughter of the Innocents. Jim is in many ways the archetypal hero of the age, a worthwhile representative of those who survived the Slaughter. Anne Frank, tragically, represents all those who did not. The author, whose boyhood years in a Japanese prison camp inspired his most famous book and film, explains why it was one of the best times of his life... To return to Shanghai, for the first time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy. I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the street. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand. And I was on an errand, though I had yet to grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the boy in a Cathedral school cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road, smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my shirt. Our home in the former Amherst Avenue was still standing, though in a state of extreme dilapidation. It served as the library of a state electronics institute and metal book-racks had replaced the furniture on all three floors. Nothing, otherwise, had changed and I noticed that the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom. But the house was a ghost and had spent almost half a century eroding its memories of an English family that had occupied it but left without a trace. The same was true of Lunghua, the internment camp where I spent some of my happiest years. It was now the Shanghai high school. The children were away on holiday and all the rooms were locked except for the former family room, now a kind of rubbish store. A clutter of refuse, like discarded memories, lay in sacks between the wooden bed frames, where my mother had read Pride and Prejudice for the 10th time and I had slept and dreamt. I WAS born in Shanghai on November 15, 1930 after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world. Shanghai was one of the largest cities in the world, 90% Chinese and 100% Americanised. Bizarre advertising displays – the honour guard of 50 Chinese hunchbacks outside the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame sticks in my mind – were part of the everyday reality of the city, though I sometimes wonder if everyday reality was the one element missing. It was not a British colony, as most people imagine; but it was home to about 50,000 nonChinese who lived mostly in the International Settlement and the adjoining French Concession. It was celebrated as the “wickedest city in the world”, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing off their sores and wounds. Every day the trucks of the Shanghai municipal council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies of destitute Chinese who had starved to death. Partying, cholera and smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy’s excited trips in the family Buick to the country club swimming pool. Every drive through Shanghai I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal – the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; a vast firework display celebrating a new night-club while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park hotel, “waiting for friends” as Vera, my White Russian nanny, told me. Open sewers fed into the stinking Whangpoo River and the whole city reeked of dirt, disease and a miasma of cooking fat from the thousands of Chinese food vendors. Anything was possible and everything could be bought and sold. At the same time there was a strictly formal side to Shanghai life – wedding receptions at the French club, race meetings at the Shanghai racecourse and patriotic gatherings at the British embassy on the Bund. My mother was a popular figure at the country club. She was once voted the best-dressed woman in Shanghai, but I’m not sure if she took that as a compliment or whether she really enjoyed her years there. I suspect that my father, with his belief in modern science as mankind’s saviour, enjoyed Shanghai far more. He had been sent out from Lancashire at the age of 27 to run a textile mill. When I was six, an old beggar sat down at the foot of our drive. I looked at him from the rear seat of our Buick, a thin, ancient man dressed in rags, undernourished all his life and now taking his last breaths. He rattled a Craven A cigarette tin at passers-by, but no one gave him anything. After a few days he was visibly weaker and I asked my mother if No 2 Coolie (we had 10 Chinese servants and knew none of them by name) would take the old man a little food. She eventually gave in and said that Coolie would take the old man a bowl of soup. The next day it snowed and the old man was covered with a white quilt. I remember telling myself he would feel warmer under this soft eider-down. He stayed under his quilt for several days and then he was gone. I still think of that old man, of a human being reduced to such a desperate end a few yards from where I slept in a warm bedroom surrounded by my expensive toys. But as a boy I was easily satisfied by a small act of kindness, a notional bowl of soup that I probably knew at the time was no more than a phrase on my mother’s lips. By the time I was 14 I had become as fatalistic about death, poverty and hunger as the Chinese. I knew that kindness alone would feed few mouths and save no lives. IN 1937 the street spectacle that so enthralled a small English boy was bathed in a far more chilling light. Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. With their villages and rice fields destroyed by fighting, thousands of destitute peasants from the Yangtze basin flocked to Shanghai and fought to enter the International Settlement. They were viciously repelled by the Japanese soldiers and by the British-run police force. I saw many Chinese who had been bayoneted and lay on the ground among their bloodstained rice sacks. When I began long cycle rides around Shanghai, I was careful to avoid provoking the Japanese soldiers. Friends of my parents lived in the countryside west of Shanghai. When we visited I would slip away, duck through a gap in the fence and run to an abandoned Chinese military airfield. Forgotten in the long grass was the shell of a Chinese fighter plane. I managed to climb into the cockpit and sit on the low metal seat, surrounded by the grimy controls. It was a magical experience, not because I could imagine the sounds of battle, machinegun fire and rushing air, but because I was alone with this stricken but mysterious craft, an intact dream of flight. Decades later this small airfield became the site of Shanghai international airport. When I stepped down the gangway of the Air-bus that brought me to Shanghai more than half a century later, I could almost sense the presence of a small boy still sitting in his Chinese fighter, unaware of the years that had flown past him. THE Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941. In Shanghai, across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, December 8 and I was lying in bed reading when my father burst into my bedroom. He ordered me to get dressed and told me that Japan had declared war. “But I have to go to school,” I protested. “Exams start today.” He then uttered the greatest words a schoolboy can ever hear: “There’ll be no more school and no more exams.” From that point the old Shanghai ceased to exist. The Japanese army aggressively enforced its presence throughout the Settlement and street executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were confiscated and my father bought a bicycle to take him to his office. By March 1943, with the war in the Pacific turning against the Japanese, they decided to intern British and other allied nationals in Lunghua – my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next 2½ years. It resembled a half-ruined college campus. Families with small children were sent to G block, a two-storey building that held some 40 small rooms. I remember how my mother and father sat together on one of the beds with my younger sister, Margaret, staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’ quarters at Amherst Avenue. My first impression was of how relaxed the internees seemed. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear. On the observation roof of F block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from The Pirates of Penzance. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum and many of the adults had lost heart. For the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents. At home we had had our own bedrooms and bathrooms. I had never seen my parents naked or in bed together. Now I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room. I revelled in this closeness. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to, reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did. In the early days when there was still electric power my mother would read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquito net. One night a Japanese officer burst in, drew his sword and slashed away the mosquito net above her head, thrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without a word. I remember the strange silence of people woken in the nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappeared into the night. I think the years together in that very small room had a profound effect on me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same house in Shepperton for nearly 50 years, and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua. I made friendships of a kind with several young Japanese guards. When they were off duty they would allow me to sit in their hot tubs and then wear their kendo armour. After handing me a duelling sword, a fearsome weapon of long wooden segments loosely strung together, they would encourage me to fence with them. Each bout would last 20 seconds and involved me being repeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which I could scarcely see through, every dizzying blow being greeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese. They too were bored, only a few years older than me, and had little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. I knew they could be viciously brutal, especially when acting under the orders of their NCOs, but individually they were easy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were very impressive to a 13-year-old looking for heroes to worship. In the last 18 months of the war our rations fell steeply. As we sat in our room one day, pushing what my mother called “the weevils” to the rim of our plates of congee (pulped rice), my father decided that from then on we should eat them – we needed the protein. They were small white slugs and perhaps were maggots, a word my mother preferred to avoid. I regularly counted them before tucking in lustily – a hundred or so was my usual score, forming a double perimeter around my plate. Despite the food shortages, the bitterly cold winters and the uncertainties, I was happier in the camp than I was until my marriage and children. At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement was that their parenting became passive rather than active – they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or ability to shape events. There was never any friction or antagonism and they did their best to look after me and my sister; but there is no doubt that a gradual estrangement began there and it lasted to the end of their lives. THE first American air raids began in the summer of 1944. Squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and Lightnings, attacked nearby Lunghua airfield. Waves of B-29 bombers followed. I spent every spare moment watching the sky. Then one day in early August 1945 we woke to find that the Japanese guards had gone. Had the war ended? It was several weeks before American forces arrived in strength. In the last days of August I was on the roof of F block when a B-29 flew towards the camp at a height of about 800ft. Its bomb doors were open and for a few seconds I assumed that we were about to be attacked. A line of canisters fell from the bomb bays, parachutes flared and the first American relief supplies floated towards us. Each one was a cargo of treasure. There were tins of Spam and Klim, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, cans of jam and huge bars of chocolate. I remember vividly the extraordinary taste of animal fat, sugar, jam and chocolate. The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world. The camp came alive again as the internees found a new purpose in their lives. Everyone hoarded and guarded their new supplies, listening out for the sound of American engines. (Later, in England, I heard that many of the internees were still living in the camp six months after the war’s end, defending their caches of Spam, Klim and Lucky Strike.) Revived by Spam and chocolate, I decided – although still only 14 – to walk to Shanghai. Without telling my parents I stepped through the wire. Around me was a silent terrain of abandoned paddy fields and burial mounds, derelict canals and ghost villages. After an hour I reached the railway line that circled the western perimeter of Shanghai. No trains were running and I walked along the embankment. As I approached a small station I could hear an odd singsong sound and saw that a group of Japanese soldiers was waiting on the platform. They were fully armed and sat on their ammunition boxes, picking their teeth while one of them tormented a young Chinese man in black trousers and a white shirt. The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a singsong voice. I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by an American sailor interned in Lunghua and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I handed it to him. He flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform. I waited in the sun, listening to the singsong voice as it grew weaker. Peace was supposed to have come to the mouth of the Yangtze; but I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all. They were aware that their own lives would shortly end and that they were free to do anything they wanted and inflict any pain. Peace, I realised, was more threatening because the rules that sustained war, however evil, were suspended. The empty paddy fields and derelict villages confirmed that nothing mattered. Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier had lost interest in me. Whistling to himself, the plastic belt around his neck, he stepped over the trussed body of the Chinese and rejoined his companions, waiting for the train that would never come. FOR a long time after we had been shipped “home” to England, I never talked about my internment in Lunghua even to my closest friends. The Shanghai years would never return and it unsettled me whenever I met friends of my parents and former internees who were detached from the present and living entirely within a cocoon of China memories. In 1980, however, I found myself thinking of Shanghai again and I wrote my novel. Few novelists have waited so long to write about the most formative experiences of their lives and I am still puzzled why I allowed so many decades to slip by. Perhaps, as I have often reflected, it took me 20 years to forget Shanghai and 20 years to remember. (Adapted from The London Times) For three points, name the author, his novel, and give a personal response... 100621 ... lostgirl wow....a little impatient are we? J.G. Ballard Empire of the Sun this book appears totally depressing.....a teenager, a stranger in a war-torn land searching in vain while death, death, torture and more death are all around him.... i am certain there is a good story in there, but it sounds like a very bad dream. 100621 ... rt +3=128 lostgirl! Question 77 THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. The book itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union. At the end of the volume, a series of appendices and a biographical sketch provide, among other things, information about the author of the novellas. Born in Ukraine, she had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed this book in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested her as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17. The date of her death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of this book almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: "The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as 'diary' or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible." We can now see that she achieved just such coherence and irony with an ex post facto view of, at most, a few months. In his defense, Fussell had not heard of this book and neither had anyone else at the time, including the author's elder daughter, Denise, who saved the leatherbound notebook her mother had left behind but refused to read it, fearing it would simply renew old pains. (Her father, Michel Epstein, was sent to Auschwitz several months after her mother and was consigned immediately to the gas chamber.) Not until the late 1990's did Denise examine what her mother had written and discover, instead of a diary or journal, two complete novellas written in a microscopic hand, evidently to save scarce paper. Denise abandoned her plan to give the notebook to a French institute preserving personal documents from the war years and instead sent it to a publisher. The book appeared in France in 2004 and became a best seller. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the back story is irrelevant to the true business of criticism. But most readers don't view books from such Olympian heights, and neither, for that matter, do most critics. If they did, publishers' lists wouldn't be so crowded with literary histories and biographies, those chronicles of messy facts from which enduring art sometimes springs. In truth, the book can stand up to the most rigorous and objective analysis, while a knowledge of its history heightens the wonder and awe of reading it. If that's a crime, let's just plead guilty and forge ahead. "Storm in June," the first novella opens as German artillery thunders on the outskirts of Paris and those residents who have trouble sleeping in the unusually warm weather hear the sound of an air-raid siren: "To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky." (Thomas Pynchon also hadn't heard of the book while he was writing "Gravity's Rainbow," but compare his opening sentence, set in London, a few years later, same war: "A screaming comes across the sky.") The bombardment resumes: "A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose into the sky. Great black birds, rarely seen at other times, stretched out their pink-tinged wings." With the utmost narrative economy, sharp, scattered images coalesce into an atmosphere of dread. Parisians wake up to the realization that nothing, particularly the gallant French Army they have read and heard so much about, stands between them and the Germans, and they decide, as one, to get out fast. To depict the widespread chaos that ensues — railroads hobbled by overcrowding or bombed tracks, shortages of gasoline and food -the author concentrates on a few individuals caught up in the collective panic. While her husband, a government-appointed museum official, remains behind, Charlotte Péricand mobilizes four of her five children (her eldest son, Philippe, is a Roman Catholic priest), her senile father-in law and a retinue of servants into an escape party, burdened by as many possessions as she can salvage from her haut-bourgeois household. Gabriel Corte, a rich, successful and egotistical writer, views the loss of Paris as an insult to his refined sensibilities. On the road, stalled in the choking traffic, he complains to his mistress, "If events as painful as defeat and mass exodus cannot be dignified with some sort of nobility, some grandeur, then they shouldn't happen at all!" As usual, the author offers no comment on this burst of folly; she allows her characters the liberty to display themselves on their own, for better and worse. Maurice and Jeanne Michaud, a middle-aged couple, both work in a bank that is moving its operations to Tours. Suitcases in hand, the Michauds learn from their employer at the last instant that the space he has promised them in his car, helping to transport bank records, has been pre-empted by his mistress and her dog. "Both of you must be in Tours the day after tomorrow at the latest," he tells them. "I must have all my staff." The Michauds laugh as they watch his car disappear; they expect little from life and so are rarely disappointed. Finding the Paris train stations shut down, the Michauds set off on foot: "In spite of the exhaustion, the hunger, the fear, Maurice Michaud was not really unhappy. He had a unique way of thinking: he didn't consider himself that important; in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature most people imagine when they think about themselves." The Michauds are moral beacons among the rampaging selfishness all around them. Their only concern is their son, Jean-Marie, a soldier whose unit is in the path of the advancing German Army. A few chapters later, it is a relief for readers to learn what the Michauds have not: Jean-Marie, wounded in a bombardment, is recuperating in a farmhouse near Vendôme. "Storm in June" is a tour de force of narrative distillation, using a handful of people to represent a multitude. The author's shifts in tone and pace, sensitively rendered in Sandra Smith's graceful translation, are mesmerizing. There are lighthearted moments — one entire chapter is seen from the point of view of the Péricands' cat — followed by eruptions of terror, as when German planes strafe a mass of evacuees: "When the firing stopped, deep furrows were left in the crowd, like wheat after a storm when the fallen stems form close, deep trenches." And it all ends as the facts ordained. News of the armistice — that is, the French surrender — is greeted by the beleaguered homeless as an answered prayer. Survivors straggle back to Paris, where an occupying enemy and a harsh winter await them. "Dolce," the second novella, displays none of the tumults of its predecessor. It is bucolic, becalmed. The French people have lost the outward war, and the battle has shifted to the inner arena of their consciences and souls. The Germans, who seemed as spectral as invading space aliens in "Storm in June," now appear in person. A garrison of Wehrmacht troops is billeted in the village of Bussy. The local men of fighting age are all gone, either dead or prisoners of war; only old people, women and children remain, and they greet the conquerors with sullen apprehension. Conditioned by years of propaganda to fear the bestial, rapacious Huns, the villagers aren't prepared for these actual soldiers, some barely older than boys. The intruders smile, behave deferentially to their helpless hosts and give candy to the children. Yearning for a return to normalcy and the familiar rhythms of their lives, the people of Bussy grudgingly adapt to the new reality. Lucile Angellier lives with her widowed mother-in-law in Bussy's most elegant house. She doesn't regret the absence of her loutish, philandering husband, Gaston, who is in a German prison camp, although she hides her feelings from his mother, who regards him as a saint. Bruno von Falk, a German officer, has been assigned to live in the house. Lucile tries to treat the intruder with the same icy disdain displayed by her mother-in-law, but she finds herself warming to him in spite of herself. He is handsome, he plays the piano beautifully — he tells her he had hoped to be a musician before his military obligations intervened — and he has read Balzac. Night after night, Lucile grows more sensitive to Bruno's presence in the next-door bedroom, to the sounds of his pacing and to the ensuing silences suggesting his sleep. The author deftly establishes the terms of this melodrama and its inevitable question — where will the attraction between Lucile and Bruno lead? — and then adds a dissonant note of reality. A local farmer has killed a German officer, and the fugitive's wife, who happens to be one of the women who nursed Jean-Marie Michaud back to health in "Storm in June," asks Lucile to hide her husband in the spacious Angellier house, which should be above suspicion because of its German boarder. The terms of the inevitable question alter significantly. Will Lucile choose love or honor? "Dolce" predates by nearly 30 years the explosive confessions of wartime collaboration in Marcel Ophuls's documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," which French television declined to broadcast in 1970, even though it had partly paid for the project. The author recorded the best and worst of those times while living in them. Her novella ends as the occupying troops leave Bussy on their mission to Moscow: "Soon the road was empty. All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust." But she had more plans for this book as an appendix to this volume makes clear. In her notebook, she sketched the possibility of a work in five parts. "Storm in June" and "Dolce" were to be followed by: "3. Captivity; 4. Battles?; 5. Peace?" The question marks punctuate her peculiar problem; she was trying to write a historical novel while the outcome of that history remained unknown. The fourth and fifth parts of the book "are in limbo," she observed, "and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens." We now know what happened. She lost her life in what she foresaw as "Captivity." The improbable survival of her two novellas is a cause for celebration and also for grief at another reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced. (Adapted from a review by Paul Gray) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100622 ... lostgirl SUITE FRANCAISE By Irène Némirovsky i will definitely read this book. not actually based upon the events, but more so because of the way it is written. my mother was born in 1943....when we were on vacation last week we had a large family discussion about the movie schindler's list, in addition to much more about that historical era. we also discussed and challenged the catholic faith with whether or not one lives more than one lifetime. she had the most off the wall response to one of my questions that i nearly fell off my chair.   100622 ... rt +3=131 lostgirl! Question 78 How far back can the history of art go? The Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France are thought to be some 16,000 years old. The Venus of Willendorf, a plump and bosomy statuette from lower Austria, may be about 9,000 years older. A few coarse figurines — found in Morocco, the Golan Heights and other places — may be several dozen millenniums more ancient still.But some psychologists argue that the origins of art should be sought much further back. They look to the Pleistocene epoch, which began about 1.6 million years ago, when — in the course of some 80,000 generations of surviving and mating — our ancestors may have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt and Proust. “Darwinian aesthetics” is what this author of calls this idea, and he thinks its time has come. He is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, and the founder and editor of a popular Web site, Arts & Letters Daily. The ideas that are his starting point come from a form of evolutionary psychology that began to catch on in the 1990s. When you hear it claimed that some bit of human behavior is explained by the fact that we are genetically hard-wired to succeed and breed in a Stone Age environment, that — in its crudest, popularized form — is evolutionary psychology. Its terrain is full of pitfalls, and I suspect that Darwin would have been skeptical of it. We know so little about the environment of our Pleistocene ancestors, what they were like, and how they lived, that almost any hypothesis about which strategies might have helped them to reproduce, and thus let their characteristics ripple through the gene pool, is bound to be highly speculative. In addition, the story told by mainstream evolutionary psychology may both start too late and stop too early. When Darwin himself ventured into psychology, with his study of the expression of emotions, he cast his net far wider and looked at the distant common ancestors that humans share with other species. If he was right to do so, the origins of some human psychology may be older than the Stone Age. And evolution is now reckoned to be capable of working faster than was thought in the 1990s: it may well be that the wiring of our minds continues to develop. All of this ought to be a problem for this book, but I rather think it isn’t. Although he endorses the popular form of evolutionary psychology in principle, his practice is more nuanced. His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating, and I doubt whether much of it really depends on the ideas of evolutionary psychology. His considered view (though he sometimes strays into more ambitious explorations) is that Darwinian aesthetics sheds light on literature, music and painting not by demonstrating them to be evolutionary adaptations, but by showing how their existence and character are connected to prehistoric preferences, interests and capacities. This is a reasonable aim, and it is certainly intriguing to hear that the sorts of landscape pictures preferred by 8-year-olds around the world seem to mirror the types of flat, savannah-like vistas in which their distant ancestors may well have thrived. Similarly, when reading of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein’s admission that “what he really liked in a recital was to fix his eye on some lovely sitting near the stage and imagine he was playing just for her,” it’s interesting to consider his theory that the desire to impress potential mates played a role in spreading artistic skills among our forebears. He has evidently spent plenty of time wrestling with the theories of art propounded by thinkers from Aristotle and Kant to Clive Bell and Michel Foucault. He touches on all the major issues of aesthetics in this fairly short book and invariably illuminates them. There are also treatments of such lesser riddles as why we have art of sounds and colors, but not of smells. Of particular value is his discussion of three heated controversies: the role of artists’ intentions; the implications of forgery and plagiarism; and the status of Dadaist provocations, like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” — a urinal put forward for exhibition in 1917. He tests these cases against a cluster of 12 characteristics that he argues are collectively definitive of art and finds that the difficulties stem from conflicts or tensions among these characteristics. Thus a perfect forgery may succeed in producing the same pleasure the original was designed to elicit, but we nevertheless feel cheated because it does not demonstrate the originality of mind we expect to find expressed in art. For him, this expectation of originality derives from art’s ancient function of demonstrating that the artist would make a desirable mate. But it seems to me that his analyses work just as well without such sexual speculations. He quotes Darwin’s hope that in the distant future, psychology “will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.” Note those last two words. What makes a genuine piece of Darwinian science — like the explanation of the development of the eye — so powerful is the way in which a large number of intermediate steps are shown to lead gradually from humble beginnings to a magnificent result. No such progression of intermediate steps seems to be available for inspection in the case of evolutionary explanations of the instinct to make art. Still, his eloquent account sheds light on the role art plays in our lives, whatever its ultimate origins. (Adapted from a review by Anthony Gottlieb, the author of “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100623 ... lostgirl okay blathers_of_red, i worked all day, ignoring this question on purpose, and now i'm home, done for the day, and it's STILL here!!! how about some friendly competition? (please?!) i feel like i'm on the playground all alone trying to play a game of kickball. well anyway, thanks all the same, rt...for the priceless literary content along with the really amazing recommendations within this game. (i'm on my third book now out of seventy some questions...) so, with my eye on the prize... THE ART INSTINCT Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution By Denis Dutton we all know what words are to a writer...pure expression of the contents of the soul...the story of,hmmmmmmm, well, whatever needs or wants to be told. art with words. this book encompasses the evolution of "real" expressive art through the ages, through evolution of humankind. an interesting feat, to be certain, seeing that art has been around far longer than the written word, demonstrating the ultimate inborn need for folks to not only express themselves aesthetically in whatever way they see fit, but also to look at art and appreciate it (or not).... for non-fiction, this might be quite a keeper... 100623 ... rt +3=134 hey lostgirl...thanks for trying to drum up some competition. it is what it is. you're in first place. the winner at the end gets the prize. Question 79 In late July, a story appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, then quickly sprang onto the international news loop: a cat named Oscar, who lives in a Rhode Island nursing home, can predict which residents are about to die. Mild and fluffy but reticent by nature, Oscar gives his elderly neighbors a wide berth until one of them is about to slip into a fatal decline — at which point he leaps onto the bed, cuddles up to the patient and mews vociferously if anybody tries to remove him. Opening this author's new novel, you understand how relatives of Oscar’s chosen might feel when they learn that the cat has singled out their loved ones. A sense of foreboding descends, the wait begins. She writes sensitive, quietly distressing fiction about ordinary people waylaid by misfortunes great and small. Her 1994 collection, “Mendocino and Other Stories,” included 10 tales rinsed in loss. Her wrenching first novel, “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” which appeared five years ago, deservedly became a best seller. In uncannily true-to-life language, without exaggeration and at an unhurried pace, she told the story of Carrie Bell, a diffident 23-year-old Midwesterner whose fiancé breaks his neck in a diving accident at a time when the couple’s relationship, like the water level at Clausen’s Reservoir, is at a dangerous low. Methodically and without judgment, she follows Carrie as she wrestles with guilt, avoidance and defiance, trying to gauge her responsibilities to her now quadriplegic fiancé, his family, her friends and herself. “How much do we owe the people we love?” Carrie asks herself. Finding no answer, she flees to New York. “What does it say about me that I’d leave?” she asks her mother over the phone. “Bad isn’t the issue,” her mother, a therapist, replies. “You do what you do. Not without consequences for other people,” she concedes. “But it’s not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves.” The extraordinary authority of her voice lies in her refusal to make heroes of the victims of mischance or villains out of the friends, lovers and family members who sometimes fail them. She has firsthand knowledge of this difficult moral landscape: her father was partly paralyzed by a stroke when she was a child, and took his own life almost four years later. In 2002, at the time of the release of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” she explained in an interview on the literary blog Beatrice.com that she suspected she had been moved to write the book because she was “thinking about how people cope with both the unthinkable tragedies that happen in life and their own reactions to those tragedies.” Like Auden, who wrote that tragedy strikes “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” she seems to be fascinated by the randomness of human suffering and the continuity of everyday life around it. In this novel, calamity visits a placid, prosperous California family — a homemaker, Liz Mackay; her handsome Wi-Fi executive husband, Brody; and their adolescent kids, Lauren and Joe — all of them so vanilla and photo-friendly they could be cast in a T-Mobile “Fave Five” commercial. Liz has lived an unusually lucky life. Growing up secure and well loved in a happy family, she gave in early to an inclination to look after others — particularly her childhood friend Sarabeth, whose mother committed suicide when Sarabeth was in high school. Now in her 40s and still single, Sarabeth wallows in regret for her life’s missteps, but Liz nurses only one sprig of misgiving: embarrassment that she never yearned for a career. “All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother,” she explains. “Lauren and Joe were her career — her work, her life.” When disaster touches her family, Liz is completely unprepared. To give too many particulars about the crisis that overtakes the Mackays would be unfair, since she builds toward it slowly and elliptically. Suffice it to say that the role the diving accident plays in her first novel is reprised here by a suicide attempt. The incident smashes the Mackay family’s smooth surface like a meteorite landing in a pond. Liz blames herself. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she tells her husband, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless — you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” He replies, “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what.” Can the Mackays regain the illusion of serenity that had been their terra firma? Will Liz and Brody’s marriage survive this blow? And what will become of Sarabeth, who has leaned on Liz for three decades? Like the accident in “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” the suicide attempt in this novel turns a spotlight on achingly normal, decent people whose uneventful lives might otherwise have passed unnoticed by anyone but the paperboy. Yet this novel lacks its predecessor’s urgency, perhaps because the diving accident in the first book occurs just a few pages in, acting like a springboard for the narrative, while here the crucial action takes place after nearly a hundred pages, slowing the story’s momentum. Apart from the disaster device, the two novels also share significant structural details and plot points. In each, a wholesome family of five provides refuge to an only child who grows up to let her caretakers down; in each, a needy friend emotionally blackmails the female lead; in each, eccentric elderly ladies befriend eccentric younger women. Other overlaps include gay male friends and sporty, uncomplicated younger brothers, even soothing memories of butter-pecan ice cream. While both novels are written in a flowing style and compassionate voice, rich in solace for any reader familiar with the traumas she explores, this novel conveys the eerie sensation of having been re-gifted — we’re unwrapping the central struggle of the previous novel in new packaging. Here, as in her other writing, she admirably deploys delicate perceptions of adult unhappiness and intergenerational need, especially when her focus lands on Sarabeth. In a memorable scene, Sarabeth is sitting on the steps of her house, gazing, as she often does, at the yard next door, when one of the neighbors’ children asks her, “Did you make any friends yet?” When Sarabeth seems puzzled by the question, the child explains: “My mom says that’s why you look at us. Because you’re lonely.” But is Sarabeth lonely or lazy? At a time when Liz could use some comfort, Sarabeth doesn’t rush to her side. She’s used to taking from Liz, not giving; and adversity, she likes to show, isn’t always character-building. As the author interweaves the two women’s crises, the story lines don’t so much mesh as compete for resources. Liz’s family and her friends both need her, but sometimes charity has to end at home. (Adapted from a review by Liesl Schillinger) a conversation with the author Q: This is your first novel since The Dive From Clausen’s Pier. Did the success of Dive surprise you? A: It was a huge surprise. The first hint I had was at a booksellers’ dinner just before publication, when I was surrounded as soon as I arrived and asked rather passionately how I could have ended the book as I had. I remember thinking it was strange that they seemed to care so much. Then several of them told me they’d been unable to put the book down, and I was really surprised—I’d had no idea it would be suspenseful. Funny how little you can know about the other side of the experience. Q: SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, like Dive, explores the ties that bind both family and friends. Does the friendship in this novel mirror one in your own life? A: Not a single friendship, no. I think it comes more from the sense I have from many of my friendships, and also from observing other people, that the dynamic between people can remain the same for a very long time—often way beyond its usefulness. In general, I’m very interested in how we rely on, or try not to rely on, each other. Q: The main characters -Liz and Sarabeth-lead different lives: Liz is a suburban mom who goes to yoga class and makes dinner for her kids while Sarabeth lives alone and routinely forgets chores like washing the dishes. Do you think the bonds we forge in childhood outride our differences as grown-ups? A: Yes, I think that’s the case a lot of the time. We have friends in order to be known—that’s one of the reasons, anyway. And we have the idea about our oldest friends that they know us better than others do because they’ve known us longer. Also, I think enjoying the same activities or living the same kinds of lives as your friends becomes less important as you grow older—especially for women. Q: You are a mother of two and your daughter is around the same age as the teenage girl, Lauren. Did this make it easier to write this character, or harder, given the difficulties Lauren faces? A: It’s funny—I started writing the book when my daughter was nine or ten, not focusing on the fact that it would take a while and that when it came out she might well be fifteen, Lauren’s age in the book. I had Lauren in mind before I ever had a teenage daughter. Writing Lauren was surprisingly easy for me—she was by far the easiest character in the book, and the one who changed least as I revised. Q: This novel deals with the anxieties of contemporary parenting (Liz is a stay-at-home mom who feels tremendous guilt about not recognizing her daughter’s cry for help). Is this a common fear among parents: the fear of helplessness, of missing warning signs from their children? And have you had personal experience with teen depression? A: I think fear in general is incredibly pervasive among my generation of parents: of missing warning signs, of making poor choices, of doing the wrong thing. The idea of not seeing something until it is too late and your child is really in trouble: the specter of that—really, of the regret it would create—is very powerful. It could be depression we’re afraid of missing, or it could be something very different—though of course with depression the stakes are terrifyingly high. As for me and teen depression: I don’t think I have any experience as an observer—certainly not as an adult observer—but I was a depressed teenager myself, though not nearly to the same degree as Lauren. Q: This novel looks at the impact of a teenage girl’s attempted suicide on her life, and the life and relationships of her family. It also gives us a portrait of a woman, Sarabeth, whose mother committed suicide decades before the main action of the book. Do you think tragic events such as this redefine the way people look at the world? A: I think events like this can have an enormous influence. What I find especially interesting is the way the influence can be occult: not something you could easily observe or identify, and yet fundamental to the way people look at or live in the world. Q: In interviews about Dive, you responded openly to questions about your father and his suicide, and suicide plays a large role in this novel. Is it hard for you to write about this or does writing provide an outlet to deal with the feelings you have about his death? A: It isn’t hard, but it isn’t really an outlet, either. At least, I don’t think of it that way; I don’t choose themes in order to process my experience. But of course that’s what happens. Though not exactly: it’s not really a matter of processing, it’s more a matter of making something—art, one hopes—out of what you’ve got. Transmuting might be the right word. And having done that can bring you to a different stance about your experience. Q: Your novel is bound to touch people in similar circumstances. Can novels help us through difficult experiences? A: I think novels help us know how many different ways there are to experience life. I think they can be tremendously helpful, but I suspect the help is often not immediate. Reading a book about loss may prepare us for losses we have yet to face, just as reading a book about people much younger than ourselves may help us understand who we were at an earlier time of life. When I think of the books that have meant the most to me emotionally, I come up with a map of life experience, but with the territories completely out of order. Q: In the novel Lauren’s depression is treated by therapy and antidepressants. Teens and anti-depressants are a hot button issue these days. What are your thoughts on medicating teens? Are you nervous to address something that is so rabidly debated in the press? A: It is a hot button issue, and I particularly didn’t want the book to come down on one side or the other. My understanding is that if suicide has been attempted most doctors will medicate, so that’s what I chose for Lauren. Since finishing the book, I’ve learned that in the studies that prompted the worry that anti-depressants can cause teens to attempt or commit suicide, medication was given at a point in the illness when the kids in question were so severely depressed that they had almost no energy. It’s thought that the medication offered just enough relief, restored just enough energy, that these kids regained the capacity to act. I was glad to learn this—it made sense, and it’s heartening. Q: The protagonist in Dive used sewing as a mechanism of escape and to help cultivate her identity. Sarabeth in this novel makes artistic lampshades as a therapeutic-and somewhat lucrative-hobby. Why are you drawn to the metaphor crafts allow in your writing? What does the lampshade-making represent? A: When I first started writing Sarabeth, I had a sense that she had a kind of patchwork existence professionally, but I don’t remember how I came to lampshade making as one of the things she was going to do to earn a living. She had to make something—her life would have been too barren otherwise. I don’t think analytically in the early stages of writing, but I can see now that it was a way of planting some hope for her, some idea that her feeling of being not whole might wane a little or even be replaced by something steadier and more satisfying. If she is able to complete these objects, the thinking would have gone, objects that are going to be useful to other people, then readers will have reason to believe she might eventually be able to complete…what? Her development, I suppose. Or continue it, anyway, picking up from where it was stalled, first by her mother’s life and then by her death. Q: What’s next for you as a writer? A: My next book will be a collection—a novella and stories. I’m working on the novella now. It’s based on some pages I wrote a really long time ago, and it’s been fun finding my way back to this old material, remembering what drew me to it in the first place but also seeing things I’ll have to change in order for it to be interesting to me now. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100623 ... jane ann packer songs without words i can't even conjure up words for a response on this one. i am silently adding it onto my "to read" list. and lostgirl - i do my very best to catch questions all the time. due to - i think - the time difference between our coasts - there may be times you wait hours before someone else even reads the question. it's frustrating to me - my computer accesses are extremely limited. you're not the only one who feels frustration at this. and yes - be appreciative you are in the lead! 100623 ... lostgirl SONGS WITHOUT WORDS By Ann Packer oh, the complexities of friendship, children, and other familial ties....the reviews are mixed on this one, but i'm intrigued by them all the same. suicide, accidents, quadriplegia, etc. there is a lot to deal with in real life, especially challenges so heavy that they can either tear a family apart or bring it closer together. been there and living something like it right now.... 100623 ... lostgirl ah shit!!! you got me! 100623 ... rt =3=94 jane! Question 80 Since I became a father, I have read stories about parents and their children with a humiliating lack of emotional armor. Right after our son was born, someone gave me a copy of Scott Berg’s biography of Charles Lindbergh. I thought it was wonderful until the Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, and then my stomach knotted up so badly I had to put the book away. Instead I read Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger,” a story of a homeless writer almost starving to death, and it was like a light comedy by comparison. This book is written by a father as well as a novelist and former film critic. It's a memoir about his decision to allow his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of his father's choosing. Because it smacked of a plot gimmick from one of the movies he used to review, I feared the book would be similarly cute and tidy. But it’s a heartfelt portrait of how hard it is to grow up, how hard it is to watch someone grow up and how in the midst of a family’s confusion and ire, there is sometimes nothing so welcome as a movie. Given that the author was a film critic, a lot of the book is about the films he and Jesse watch. Their discussions give you a quick and appealing sense of the kind of people they are. You can wonder at the the father and son's acuity or insanity, depending on how close they are to your own opinions. I do not share the author's view that Gene Kelly has a “malignant phoniness” in “Singin’ in the Rain,” nor his view that “The Exorcist” is the scariest movie ever made — if you’re interested in malignant phoniness, I’d look no farther than “The Exorcist.” I am certainly not “bewildered” as he is by the praise for John Ford’s beautiful and haunting film “The Searchers” — John Wayne’s unnervingly dark performance alone makes it essential viewing. On the other hand, I agree with him about Clint Eastwood and “Psycho” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The 400 Blows.” And he made me curious to see some films I didn’t know. But the book is not a catalog of film recommendations. He uses the movies and, more important, the time he and Jesse spent together watching them, as an opening to explore and maybe understand who each of them is. The book chronicles Jesse’s troubles — mostly with girls, but also with drinking and drugs. And it does not spare himself: he is out of work when the story starts, at an age when finding something new is both difficult and embarrassing. But he is modest about his own problems and doesn’t ask for pity. Like any good parent, he focuses on his son and he makes us care very much about what happens to him. Like the two men at its center, the book itself stumbles every so often. Early on, I wanted to know more about his decision to let his son quit school in exchange for watching three films a week. That doesn’t seem like much of a standard for a boy as quick and smart as Jesse; I wondered why he set the bar so low. I also wanted to know more about why he felt that watching movies was a worthy equivalent to a more formal education. Or even an informal one. He is a novelist, yet he never made reading a part of the deal; I wondered why. I’m not trying to set up a home-schooling system for them. I just would have liked to hear his case for why he felt movies were a better way to reach his son than museums or books or Outward Bound. This is a minor sin of omission; there was for me a more bothersome sin of commission. He has a fondness for simile that sometimes exceeds his gift for it. There were phrases that many times took me out of the story, making me think about things that temporarily severed my connection to the material. For instance, he writes: “How little I can give him, I thought — just these little apple slices of reassurance, like feeding a rare animal at the zoo.” (Is an apple really an image of reassurance? Hasn’t he ever read Genesis? Is feeding rare animals at the zoo a way to comfort them or just a way to feed them?) Later he writes: “The trees, budding at their very tips like fingernails, appeared to be extending their branches toward the sun.” (Do the tips of budding trees really look like fingernails? I know he was distracted with his son, but maybe he needs a manicure.) Or: “For the moment we were on the porch, his spirits temporarily lifted from their coffin, to which they would return, like ghosts at sunset.” (I’m not that up on the afterworld, but do ghosts go back to their graves at sunset? Don’t they get up at sunset and sleep during the day? Or are those vampires?) These are not the things I wanted to be thinking about as I read the book not only because they distracted me from a story I was interested in, but because he is as capable of the deft phrase as the daft. I loved his reference to someone’s boyfriend as “a damp-handed nightmare.” Or this quick and vivid description: “I went out that night, got ecstatically, knee-walking drunk.” The movie “Bullitt,” he says, “has the authority of stainless steel” — a perfect image for that tough and shiny film. Best of all was this sentence that captured the reality-altering magic that movies cast: “I remember emerging from the Nortown theater that summer afternoon and thinking that there was something wrong with the sunlight.” My regard for his best writing, my sympathy for his struggles and my engagement in his story make my complaints seem small. If his style sometimes irked me, he has my admiration as a father for making his son, not himself, the very winning hero of this story. Not only did I find Jesse smart and funny, but more than once I was moved to tears by his battle to find his place. At the end of the book, the author, helpless with love for his son, watches him onstage performing, and recalls a line from “True Romance,” a movie they’d both loved: “You’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool!” Not only as a reader but as a father, too, I know how he feels. (Adapted from a review by Douglas McGrath who is a writer and director. Among his films are “Emma,” “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Infamous.”) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100624 ... lostgirl The Film Club By David Gilmour as I wrestle and struggle with new and creative ways to help my teenage boys grow up, this book looks delightful and insightful. 100624 ... rt +3=137 lostgirl! Question 81 There was a time when this garden writer took her sense of smell for granted. That was before she lost it. In her memoir, she tells the story of the traumatic loss of her sense of smell, starting with the cold that she treated with a zinc-based nasal spray that wreaked havoc on her olfactory — smelling — nerve. The Food and Drug Administration eventually recalled the spray, but not in time for Blodgett. Suddenly, the comforting, complicated smells of her great-grandfather's wing chair and the rich springtime aromas of her garden were gone. They were instead replaced by vile, metallic phantom smells that she tried to pretend came from sour milk or dog poop. Then, eventually, there was nothing at all. "I kind of knew at that point that my brain just wasn't working right," she tells NPR's Melissa Block. When she finally got confirmation from a doctor, she was devastated. "I had no way of knowing before what it would be like to not smell anything," she says. "When I woke up and sniffed and there was nothing there — I don't know how to explain it — I felt completely disconnected. I truly felt as if colors were more flat. The voices in conversation felt like a TV soundtrack to me." She had never realized the role that even the most subtle smells played in the world around her until they were gone and she was left shocked by the emptiness and sterility of her surroundings. "Smell is tied into the other sensory systems and into the emotions," she says, "and, in a way, that causes everything to be kind of thrown out of whack when you lose it." For her, that meant getting thrown into a deep depression that wasn't helped by the fact that friends had trouble understanding or relating to the experience she was going through. "It's not a visible disability," she says. "It doesn't inconvenience other people. You seem to be perfectly fine, and so, of course, one assumes that you are and you assume that you should be. There's a whole combination of sort of self-loathing on top of sadness." That is, until the day her smell slowly started to return. "I didn't want to get my hopes up," she says. "I walked by a popcorn shop, and I swear I smelled that popcorn. But I wouldn't allow myself to believe it. It would have been too disappointing." It wasn't until she was in her garden, taking in the aroma of the flower beds, that she knew it was back. And that's when the floodgates opened. "I was going around smelling everything," she says. "Being able to smell lilacs again was just — I don't think I'll ever get over it." Excerpt: I'm told my nose is my best feature. It's long and straight and has a high bridge with a bump at the top that is a perfect perch for my thick glasses. My nose is large for my face, but I have an unusually small face. That makes me thankful for my nose. No one would describe me as mousy. When I enter a room full of strangers, I can trust my nose to announce that here is a serious, thoughtful person. And by the way, where are the appetizers? Do we smell a touch of cumin? But even though I could pick out the Chanel No. 5 from among ten other perfumes in a crowded room, there was a time when I took my sense of smell for granted. I assumed that it was indestructible. I certainly never asked myself which I valued more, my long, straight nose or what went on inside it. My story begins on a Wisconsin interstate just before half of it veers south toward Chicago and half goes west to places you've probably never heard of — like the Wisconsin Dells, Altoona, Eau Claire — and then finally to the Twin Cities. I was driving home to St. Paul after a weekend visit with my daughter Caroline, a student at UW–Madison, when my nose began picking up a weird smell. Had I stepped in something? What could be causing this peculiar odor? I pulled into a Kwik Trip to top off the tank and check my shoes. Nothing suspicious there. Maybe the heater fan was sucking up the smell from the engine and blowing it through the vent. Was a dead bird in there? Ridiculous. The smell was all in my head, not my nose. Nerves. Saying goodbye to Caroline had been more difficult than usual. She was as lonely and homesick at Madison as her older sister, Alex, had been happy there. How different my girls were. My own college years weren't exactly blissful. While other students were getting acquainted with one another, I was out foraging for plant materials, mainly tree branches of a certain shape and size, with which to transform my cinder-block cube of a dorm room into a leafy forest glade. The smells of oak leaves and pine sap soothed my homesickness for Minnesota. Years later, when my husband, Cam, and I settled down to raise a family, I couldn't wait to plant a garden. I dug up the patchy lawn in the backyard. Gardening to me is an artistic endeavor, and a garden of one's own represents the ultimate in creative freedom. In fact, in my forties I became so greedy for that anything-goes fix I got when planning a new border or rigging up a water feature that I decided to quit my job editing a city magazine to launch a publication of my own, the Garden Letter: Green Thoughts for the Northern Gardener. When my little magazine won an award from the Garden Writers Association for the Art of Garden Communication, a category invented just for it, I realized I'd turned a corner: I was a garden writer. For three points, name the author, her memoir, and give a personal response... 100624 ... rt Bonnie Blodgett, Remembering Smell Question 82 Consider the state of literature at the moment. Consider the rise of the memoir, the incidences of contrived and fabricated memoirs, the rash of imputations of plagiarism in novels, the overall ill health of the mainstream novel. Consider, too, culture outside of literature: reality TV, the many shades and variations of documentary film, the rise of the curator, the rise of the D.J., sampling, appropriation, the carry-over of collage from modernism into postmodernism. Now consider that all these elements might somehow be connected, might represent different aspects of some giant whatsit that will eventually constitute the cultural face of our time in the eyes of the future. That is what the author proposes in this book. He further argues that what all those things have in common is that they express or fulfill a need for reality, a need that is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature. To call something a manifesto is a brave step. It signals that you are hoisting a flag and are prepared to go down with the ship. His clarion call may in some ways depart from the usual manifesto profile — it doesn’t speak on behalf of a movement, exactly — but it urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum and have just been waiting for someone to link them together. His is a complex and multifaceted argument, not easily reducible to a bullet-point list — but then, so was the Surrealist Manifesto. The book does contain quite a few slogan-ready phrases, but they weren’t all written by him, and some are more than a century old. One way in which the book expresses its thesis is in its organization: it is made up of 618 numbered paragraphs, more than half of them drawn from other sources, attributed only at the end of the book. This will remind readers of Jonathan Lethem’s tour-de-force essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” published in Harper’s in 2007, in which every single line derives from other authors — note that Lethem acknowledges a debt to this author's essays. But what reality is such magpie business enacting? He answers: “Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” He is, of course, quoting Emerson. There is an artistic movement brewing, he writes. Among its hallmarks are the incorporation of “seemingly unprocessed” material; “randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; . . . criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; . . . a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.” He briefly summarizes the history of the novel — set in stone by the mid-19th century — and that of the essay. One form is on its way down, the other on its way up. The novel, for all the exertions of modernism, is by now as formalized and ritualized as a crop ceremony. It no longer reflects actual reality. The essay, on the other hand, is fluid. It is a container made of prose into which you can pour anything. The essay assumes the first person; the novel shies from it, insisting that personal experience be modestly draped. The flood of memoirs of the last couple of decades represents an uprising against such repression. So why have there been so many phony memoirs? Because of false consciousness, as Marxists would put it. The author (echoing Alice Marshall) is disappointed in James Frey not because he lied in his book, but because when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show he didn’t say: “Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be.” After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would treat every non-novel as if it were reportage or court testimony, and only a fear of the slipperiness of life could perpetuate the cult of the back story. “Anything processed by memory is fiction,” as is any memory shaped into literature. But we continue to crave reality, because we live in a time dominated by innumerable forms of extraliterary fiction: politics, advertising, the lives of celebrities, the apparatus surrounding professional sports — you could say without exaggeration that everything on TV is fiction whether it is packaged as such or not. So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. The paradoxes pile up as thick as the debris of history — unsurprisingly, since that debris is our reality. His text exemplifies many of his arguments. “The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention,” he writes (quoting John D’Agata and Deborah Tall), and so it is with his book, which argues forcefully and passionately, but not like a debate-team captain, more like a clever if overmatched boxer, endlessly bobbing and weaving. And for all that so much of its verbiage is the work of others, it positively throbs with personality. This is so not simply because he includes a chapter of autobiographical vignettes; he puts his crotchets on display. He is serious perhaps to a fault. The decision to identify the authors of the appropriated texts was, he tells us, not his but that of his publisher’s lawyers, and he suggests that readers might want to scissor out those nine pages of citations. This is a noble and idealistic stance, of course, but it overlooks a human frailty that is undeniably real: curiosity. His asceticism seems also to govern his view of narrative. He is “a wisdom junkie” who wants “a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation,” and thinks that “Hamlet” would be a lot better if all the plot were excised, leaving the chain of little essays it really wants to be. But while it’s true that Shakespeare’s plots can sometimes seem like armatures dragged in from the prop room, they are also there to service the human need for sensation. Sometimes Shields can give the impression that he dislikes the novel for the same reasons Cotton Mather might have: its frivolity, its voyeurism, its licentiousness. On the whole, though, he is a benevolent and broad-minded revolutionary, urging a hundred flowers to bloom, toppling only the outmoded and corrupt institutions. His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come. The essay will come into its own and cease being viewed as the stepchild of literature. Some version of the novel will endure as long as gossip and daydreaming do, but maybe it will become more aerated and less controlling. There will be a lot more creative use of uncertainty, of cognitive dissonance, of messiness and self-­consciousness and high-spirited looting. And reality will be ever more necessary and harder to come by. (Adapted from a review by Luc Sante) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100625 ... lostgirl whoa, question 81 was not posted, sir.... REALITY HUNGER, A Manifesto By David Shields realism in contemporary literature, huh? one review stated that in order to love is book one needs to love the abstract and be willing to read on with a sense of not knowing what is going on. likely some nice twisty tangly words....goes on my list for sure. 100625 ... lg at least i don't think I missed that question. hmmmmmm.....unless my computer had a heart attack and/or i'm going blind, that is.... 100625 ... rt not sure about your blindness or your computer glitch bt somehow you missed 81 crowli...but you didn't miss 82...+3=140. you are rocking the casbah. Question 83 In 1976, a 15-year-old boy named Jakkie de Wet comes home from boarding school at Easter to Grootmoedersdrift (Grandmother’s Crossing), the farm in the Cape Province of South Africa that has been in his mother’s family for generations. On such visits, Jakkie’s handsome, bullying father, Jak, usually drags the boy off on manly expeditions — hiking treacherous kloofs (ravines) and ridges, and scrabbling up (and falling off) rock faces — both to monopolize him and to vengefully deprive his mother, Milla, and his nanny, Agaat, of his company. The father is at war with both women; resentful of his wife’s sentimentality and agricul­tural know-how, and mistrustful of Agaat’s bond with his reticent son. To Jakkie, Agaat is second mother, confidante and almost-sister. To Milla, she is house servant, livestock expert and begrudged support — an almost-daughter in tidy apron and serving cap. Born in 1948, when Milla was 22, Agaat was the castoff child of laborers on Milla’s mother’s property, malnourished and barely clothed, with one good arm and one stunted one. When Milla first met her, she was called Asgat (Bottom-in-the-Ashes) because she crouched in the hearth of the hovel where she lived, a black Cinderella. Milla gave her a new name: Agaat (Dutch for Agatha, which means “good” in Greek) believing that “if you call things by their names, you have power over them.” She resolved to turn the girl into someone “sound and strong, grateful and ready to serve, a solid person who will make all my tears and misery worthwhile,” and brought her into her household. This was a compromised act of charity, if it was charity: the benefactress seeking too large a recompense for her generosity, too self-­interested a cure for her loneliness. Milla’s husband protested her decision from the start. To Jak, Agaat was a “woolly,” a “hotnot” (an Afrikaans insult for a person of color) and a threat to the established social order. But in this, as in little else in her marriage, Milla insisted on her way. On that 1976 Easter holiday, Agaat schemed with Jakkie so he could relax with his two mothers, “the white one and the brown one,” while his father stormed off to Luipaardskloof with his ropes and his rucksack. At the homestead, the three of them play Scrabble, building off one another’s words. When Agaat wins with “karooquickgrasses,” Jakkie challenges her, but Agaat finds the word in a well-thumbed copy of the Handbook for Farmers, and Milla supports her. “There’s more to a language than is written in a dictionary,” she tells her son. She knows this because Grootmoedersdrift holds many unofficial repositories of language. There are Milla’s diaries of her married life, written in Afrikaans in blue exercise notebooks “to get a grip on your times and days on Grootmoedersdrift, to scrunch up and make palpable the hours, the fleeting grain of things in your hastily scribbled sentences.” And there is Agaat herself. “She was a whole compilation of you, she contained you within her,” Milla thinks. “That was all that she could be, from the beginning. Your archive.” Books like this one, set in the last five decades of the departed century, are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them. It’s a monument to what the narrator calls “the compulsion to tell,” expressing truths that are too heartfelt, revelatory and damaging for proud people to speak aloud — or even to admit to themselves in private. Observed from the distance of time, they present a pattern of consoling completeness. Through incantatory visual and aural imagery, it brings to life a landscape whose significance lies not only in its outward appearance (“deep kloofs overgrown with protected bush, the old avenue of wild figs next to the two-track road, . . . hills with plots of grass and soft brushwood for the sheep to overnight”) but in the inward imprint it has left on its inhabitants. How startling, how awe-­inspiring, how necessary it is that the ­story she assembles here is relayed by a woman who cannot speak. The year is 1996, and Milla Redelinghuys de Wet, now 70, is in the final stages of A.L.S., “locked up in my own body,” dying in a bedroom at Grootmoedersdrift. Milla, speechless and bedridden, depends utterly on Agaat, as Agaat once depended on her. They communicate with their eyes, as they did from their earliest acquaintance. Agaat searches Milla’s blinks for signals, and interprets them as best she can: pain, hunger, sorrow, pique and, sometimes, irreverence. “That she can’t meet my every need, that she doesn’t know everything I think, that frustrates her beyond all measure,” Milla notices, still conscious, in her physical powerlessness, of her emotional power over her ward. It is a complete reversal of their original roles. Yet Agaat misses very little. As she tends her afflicted mistress, she converses with her as if Milla’s interior monologue were audible. When Milla craves a bath, Agaat senses it, carries her into the tub on her back, and gets in with her, shoes and all, since there is no other way. And when Milla yearns to see a map of her property, pining (silently), “I want to see my ground, I want to see my land, even if only in outline, place names on a level surface. I want to send my eyes voyaging,” Agaat struggles to construe what it is her patient craves. “She wants to see something, something that’s outside and inside,” Agaat tells the doctor when he visits. He wonders if the nurse is losing her marbles, but Agaat persists until she cracks Milla’s code. “You can rest assured I won’t give up,” she tells her. “I don’t give up and you don’t give up. That’s our problem.” These days, Agaat calls Milla “Ounooi,” an Afrikaans honorific for “old white woman.” Once, she called her Même, Mother, but that’s a long-buried chapter neither woman would open, even if Milla could speak. These two are not tender people — life has hardened them — but their love for each other emerges in Agaat’s solicitude and in Milla’s private thoughts and journal entries, which this book lays bare. When Milla, her feet cold and immobile, falls into a fretful sleep, she wakes feeling strangely warm and comforted. She finds Agaat asleep, exhausted, at the foot of her bed, cradling her feet, “her head turned aside on her strong arm, the little thin arm is drooped over my ankles.” The ounooi’s feet lie “against her chest, as if she’d gathered them there to hold them, like a child going to bed with a teddy bear.” As death nears and Agaat sits in the sickroom, embroidering, as Milla taught her in girlhood, Ounooi at last loses the capacity to signal with her eyes. She thinks: “Agaat, now that language has forsaken me and one eye has fallen shut and the other stares unblinkingly, now I find this longing in my heart to console you, in anticipation, for the hereafter. Am I vain in thinking you will miss me?” Three years earlier, when she could still speak, Milla would never have said such a thing, nor, had she said it, would Agaat have acknowledged it. Milla’s speechlessness, and her body’s surrender, free them both to speak their hearts at last, one in the book of her mind, inaccessible but through fiction; one in the sickroom, where only her patient hears and reads her. This novel was first published in South Africa, in Afrikaans, in 2004 — 10 years after the end of apartheid, the racial segregation policy that came into effect in South Africa in 1948, the year of Agaat’s birth. The novel first appeared in English in 2006, fluidly translated by the novelist Michiel Heyns. His pitch-perfect rendering of the music of the author's prose reappears in the first American edition, which was released this year (by no coincidence) on April 27, the anniversary of the 1994 elections that brought the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela to power. South Africans call this date Freedom Day. Her first novel, “Triomf,” a dark satire of an incestuous Afrikaner family in a ­working-class white suburb of Johannesburg (built on the rubble of the black township of Sophia­town), appeared in that historic year. “Triomf” was a sharp, rollicking, bitter allegory of the politicized ­Afrikaner hysteria that accompanied the demise of apartheid. This book of course, is also an allegory, but one that covers a greater range, in a more generous and humane register. It is apartheid itself that Agaat and Milla embody, two women, black and white, ink and paper, who together, over 50 years, inscribed upon each other a scroll of wrongs, betrayals and sacrifices that cannot be redressed, only reread. Decades earlier, before she let circumstance distract her from her vows to her ward, Milla felt a moment of exultation, on the evening when she first coaxed the mute young girl to speak. “It doesn’t matter who is who,” she realized. “We are one, Agaat and I.” (Adapted from a review by Liesl Schillinger) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100626 ... lostgirl AGAAT By Marlene van Niekerk (Translated by Michiel Heyns) so, i suppose i really did miss that question. the mysteries of the unexplained.... i got caught up in the reviews for this book. what an intriguing story. a crappy marriage, the relationships intertwined of nanny to mama to boy, all riddled by troubles related to intricacies of those intimate bonds. then throw in the complication of role reversal when the illness comes into play. i had a patient with ALS and it was one of the most frightening diseases to watch progress. good choice there rt!! 100626 ... rt +3=143 lostgirl! Question 84 This novel, about a dying man's recollection of and relationship with his father, a tinker in Maine, was turned down by every major publisher over the course of several years. It was finally published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small publisher associated with the NYU Medical School. Even after its publication and the excellent reviews across the board, few hoped for it to rise to the top. And when the author was awarded the Pulitzer, the Boston Globe reports, he only found out by checking the award's website -- nobody had bothered to call him. This book is the first novel from a small press to win the Pulitzer since "Confederacy of Dunces" won in 1981 and everyone in the publishing industry is scrambling to take some part of the credit for the book's success. The Boston Globe published an article about the people who pushed for the book early on, claiming the success of the book as proof of the power of word of mouth. It began with Bellevue Press Editorial Director Erika Goldman saying, "It was so exquisite that I found myself -- and this has never happened -- weeping for the beauty of the prose." Publishers Weekly's Michael Coffey stayed up past midnight reading it -- "not something I normally do." Lise Solomon, a sales representative in Northern California vowed, "I was going to make it a Bay Area bestseller." Whatever the chronology of the events, it is clear that readers across the board have fallen head over heels for it. Publishers Weekly called it a "gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship," Booklist said that it is a "rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense," and Chris Bohjalian, writing for the Globe called it "a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can't go anywhere at all." (HuffPost Books also recognized the novel in our "Best of the Best Books Lists" feature in December.) The New York Times, notably, was left in the dark about this book, and never reviewed it at all, as Gregory Cowles sheepishly admits in a PaperCuts blog. For the author, the success has been incredible. A former drummer for a rock band, he said that he was "stunned," according to USA Today. "It was a little book from a little publisher that was hand-sold from start to finish," he said. He looks at the win in a practical sense, though: "I can afford to continue doing what I love to do." Summary of the book... An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. This novel is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100627 ... lostgirl Tinkers By Paul Harding what an interesting plot...time and clocks are ultra_metaphorical in and of themselves...and way this story transcends generations elevates "fixing time" to a new level. 100627 ... lostgirl clocks suck. goddamn fucked-up attempt at governing life. clocks steal time and hide it in a memory book. constantly trying to measure the space between this and that between you and me. between here and there. time tries and fails at standardizing and quantifying a unit that is unquantifiable, undefinable. 'running out of time' is a fixed, false fucking loser idea. it is impossible to run out of time because more keeps coming at us...i don't have time, be on time, what time is it, last time, next time,this time,remember the time... time time time.... how about this...get busy and create some time, and while you are at it stuff it to the brim with all that can possibly fit inside... and have the time of your life while you're at it. so yeah, clocks, they suck. 100628 ... oh shit! mis-blathed this was supposed to be its own thing under clocks....pardon the rant. 100628 ... rt "They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's so verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world, and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else, but truly doesn't know how..." an excerpt from the book Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and like many kids with AS, Jacob has a special focus on one subject -- in his case, forensic analysis. He's always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do...and he's usually right. But then his town is rocked by a terrible murder and, for a change, the police come to Jacob with questions. All of the hallmark behaviors of Asperger's -- not looking someone in the eye, stimulatory tics and twitches, flat affect -- can look a lot like guilt to law enforcement personnel. Suddenly, Jacob and his family, who only want to fit in, feel the spotlight shining directly on them. For his mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication of why nothing is normal because of Jacob. And over this small family the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder? Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, this novel looks at what it means to be different in our society, how autism affects a family, and how our legal system works well for people who communicate a certain way -- and fails those who don't. In between the court scenes, the author presents a fascinating picture of home life with a teen with Asperger’s Syndrome. Jacob displays many of the quirks of the disorder which is defined as being a type of high-functioning autism. His behavior includes the following characteristics: * Aversion to touch * Aversion to bright lights * Aversion to loud noise * Obeys rules * Works well with routines and structure * Obsessed with certain favourite topics * Takes everything very literally * Cannot understand body language Throughout the novel, the reader glimpses the frustrations and joys of having a child like Jacob. The Main Characters in the book: Jacob Hunt is the central focus of the story, followed closely by his brother, Theo, and his mother, Emma. Oliver Bond is Jacob’s inexperienced lawyer and Rich Matson is the detective assigned to his case. Helen Hunt is the fiery red-haired prosecutor. Jess Ogilvy is the deceased social skills tutor. In the second part of the novel, Henry Hunt, Jacob’s father appears. He left the family soon after Jacob started displaying odd behavior patterns at the age of three. He remarried and has two young daughters by his new wife. On re-acquaintance, Emma and Theo both notice that Henry appears to have a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome himself. Children with Asperger's Syndrome often struggle to fit in at school and other social settings. While there is no cure for their condition, they can be trained to cope. The Message in the novel: Jacob Hunt is ostracised by his peers and misunderstood by adults. This is a direct result of Asperger’s Syndrome and his inability to read social cues. The author highlights his dilemma and gives the reader a glimpse of the pain that often comes when people are different and don’t fit in. She also raises questions of what individuals can do to make life more comfortable for teens with special needs. For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100628 ... lostgirl Jodi Picoult House Rules autism is astonishingly close to my heart in so many ways...society doesn't know how to take these beautiful people for who they are. (sorry about the mistake above...but the correct answer was still present!) 100628 ... rt whoops +6=149 lostgirl! Question 86 For five years American soldiers manned a series of outposts in what was perhaps the most hostile corner in all of Afghanistan. The place was the Korangal Valley, which unfolds beneath the crags and terraced ridges of Kunar Province about 25 miles from the border with Pakistan. The idea was to put Americans on the ground to intercept Taliban fighters who were passing through to fight in other parts of the country. It worked, sort of: the Korangal became a magnet for insurgents, if not much else. Resident Korangalis loathed the Americans, whom they regarded as invaders. American soldiers got into firefights whenever they stepped outside the ramparts. Only six miles long, the Korangal Valley is a tiny place, yet 42 American soldiers have died in it. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of “The Perfect Storm,” spent months shadowing an American infantry platoon deployed in the valley between 2007 and 2008. The result is this book, his absorbing and original if sometimes uneven account of his time there. The best way to describe this book is to say what it is not. It does not attempt to explain the strategy behind the American war in Afghanistan, or the politics of Afghanistan, or even the people of the Korangal Valley. As the action unfolds, he makes no attempt to connect it to anything else happening inside the country. Instead, he uses the platoon (the second of Battle Company, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) as a kind of laboratory to examine the human condition as it evolved under the extraordinary circumstances in which these soldiers fought and lived. And what a laboratory it is. The men of Second Platoon are young, heavily armed and crammed together inside a tiny mountain outpost supplied by helicopter and surrounded by enemies determined to get inside. Indeed, there aren’t many places on earth where such intense and bizarre circumstances could be duplicated. He starts with the place itself. “The Korangal Valley,” he explains, “is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too ­remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off.” Second Platoon’s job, as with the rest of Battle Company, was to kill insurgents and, with whatever time they had left over, persuade the Korangalis they were friends. It was a hopeless task. During the time of its tour, Battle Company, a mere 150 out of 70,000 NATO troops, was experiencing a fifth of the combat taking place in the entire country. At one level, his book is a chronicle of Second Platoon’s days. He takes us up the mountains, along the valley floor, on helo-lifts, into firefights. We sit with the men in their bunks — infested with fleas and tarantulas — and we listen to their low-grade (and sometimes hilarious) ­philosophizing as they pass the hours. He captures some nice moments. Here is one, some months into the tour: “As the deployment wore on and they got pushed farther into enemy territory it was sometimes hard to tell you were even looking at American soldiers. They wore their trousers unbloused from their boots and tied amulets around their necks and shuffled around the outpost in flip-flops jury-rigged from the packing foam used in missile crates. Toward the end of their tour they’d go through entire firefights in nothing but gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips.” And here is Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund, the battalion’s commander, instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan, “seemingly immune to heartbreak, way more knowledgable than most of the press corps that came through and capable of working 18 hours a day for 15 months straight,” He writes: “He had such full-on enthusiasm for what he was doing that when I was around him I sometimes caught myself feeling bad that there wasn’t an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my own life.” But he is aiming for more than just a boots-on-the-ground narrative of the travails of American fighting men. As the book’s grandiose title suggests (along with its three sections, “Fear,” “Killing” and “Love” ), it strives to offer not just a picture of American fighting men but a discourse on the nature of war itself. This is no small ambition, and while he offers some incisive insights he does not always fulfill his larger goals. At times, he appears to use virtually every moment in the Korangal as the occasion for an extended riff. He tells us what happens to a soldier’s body: levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, actually drop in trained soldiers during combat. He tells us about the unusual physics of fighting in the Korangal: you can see a gunshot but not have enough time to move before it hits you. He even tells us about the odor emitted by the men as their tour drags on: they reek of ammonia because their fat is gone and their bodies are burning muscle. And he writes some beautiful sentences about this ugly world. Here he is on Second Platoon’s outpost. “It’s a miraculous kind of anti­paradise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait.” He has found a novel and interesting lens through which to view the conflict in Afghanistan, and he captures many things a lesser writer might miss. But perhaps the most poignant moment for the men of Battle Company occurred after the book went to press. In April, the United States Army closed its bases in the Korangal Valley and sent the soldiers to other places. After five years of fighting and dying, American commanders decided the valley wasn’t worth the fight. War indeed. It wasn’t something he felt had been done successfully in Iraq or Afghanistan by journalists--himself included, in his previous stints as a war correspondent. He has spent most of the last decade as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair covering international conflicts, including torture and executions in Liberia, the civil war in Sierra Leone, and war crime atrocities in Kosovo. The Korengal Valley was by far the most dangerous place he had ever been. While he was there, a fifth of all the fighting in Afghanistan was being waged in this six-mile-long valley near the Pakistan border. “I’d never been in this much actual combat,” he says. Two close calls–a bullet striking just inches from his face and an IED blowing up a Humvee he was riding in–made war feel personal to him for the first time. The Humvee experience, which he captured on film, was a turning point in his reporting. “I was like, fuck you. You’re not going to kill me,” he says. “I had all these somewhat irrational anger responses and I started to understand how killing works. I don’t want to kill anybody, but I felt that impulse come up in me. And I’m not even carrying a gun, I’m just carrying a camera, but still, there it was.” A documentary film, directed by the author and Tim Hetherington, named "Restrepo," which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is based on the contents of the book. (Adapted from a review by Dexter Filkins who is a foreign correspondent for The Times. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan.) Name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100628 ... jane War Sebastian Junger I think i'd have a hard time reading something like this. i usually cannot watch war movies and often just have difficulties viewing photos. for whatever reason it affects me deeply. 100628 ... rt This book is about the author grieving for her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. The couple had been married since 1964. Dunne died of a heart attack at the end of 2003. His death came suddenly, just as the couple was sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital, who had fallen into a coma after being treated for pneumonia and septic shock. In her memoir, she contemplates how the rituals of daily life are fundamentally altered when her life's companion is taken from her. Her impressions, both sharply observed and utterly reasonable, form a picture of an intelligent woman grappling with her past and future. The year referred to in the title would take its toll on her in another way, as well: Despite showing signs of recovery, her daughter died in August of this year, several weeks after she submitted her final manuscript. Read an Excerpt from the book... Chapter 1 1. Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact. For a long time I wrote nothing else. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. "He was on his way home from work — happy, successful, healthy — and then, gone," I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an "ordinary Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States." "And then — gone." In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me. Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until Jose came in the next morning and cleaned it up. Jose. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went. Jose was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time Jose saw the blood he understood. I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning but I could not face the blood. In outline. It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004. Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as "Beth Israel North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. 2. December 30, 2003, a Tuesday. We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North. We had come home. We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in. I said I would build a fire, we could eat in. I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink. I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat. The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad. John was talking, then he wasn't. At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first drink. "Good," he had said. "I don't know why but I don't think you should mix them." At another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed. I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War One, at the instant he stopped talking. I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable. I remember saying Don't do that. When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York–Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance. Someone else. I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come. When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection. (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent, there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again. "He's still fibbing," I remember the one on the telephone saying. "V-fibbing," John's cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. "They would have said 'V-fibbing.' V for ventricular." Maybe they said "V-fibbing" and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given. I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John's doctor had made of his medical history. When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York–Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver, then turned to me. "I'm your social worker," he said, and I guess that is when I must have known. I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew." This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. "But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't tell me. And then it—none of that would've happened. So he kept saying, 'Ma'am, I need to come in.' And I kept telling him, 'I'm sorry, but you can't come in.' " When I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking as my own. Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated — New York Hospital was the Cornell part of New York–Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency — but I could make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception area. "You can wait here," he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes. (Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100629 ... rt oh jane...forgot your points from your last correct answer...+3=97 100629 ... lostgirl The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion after the excerpt, i am not at all sure this would be one for me. everyone has experienced emergent, traumatic situations involving loved ones that drastically alter their lives. i have, and remember "not being right" for a long time following. to write about from deepest crevices of the heart about losing her soul mate had to have been gut wrenching (but hopefully cleansing...) and is likely to be insightful and beautiful, but still...to read about it, not so sure about discovering a life after a death... 100629 ... rt +3=152 lostgirl! Question 88 A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death-obsessed, Mahler is more alive in the 21st century than ever before. Why does a Jewish musician from a land without a name capture the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society? Is it the music, it is the man, or is it the affinity we feel with his productive peak – a decade when Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Joyce and Mahler reconfigured the ways we understand life on earth? In this highly original account of Mahler’s life and work, the author– renowned writer, critic and cultural commentator - explores the Mahler Effect, a phenomenon that reaches deep into unsuspecting lives, altering the self-perceptions of world leaders, finance chiefs and working musicians. The book is a multi-layered exploration of the role that music plays as a soundtrack to our lives. I didn't like Mahler when I first heard his music. Actually, that's an understatement. I remember staring up at the conductor Neeme Jarvi from my seat in Glasgow's City Halls, and in an exquisite torture of boredom and frustration, offering up a 12-year-old's prayer to make him and the Scottish National Orchestra stop the appalling racket of the first symphony. What was this music trying to do? Why was it so static and then suddenly so violent, so tragic and then so sentimental? Why did it include silly little tunes like Frere Jacques , then melodies for a vulgar, souped-up wind band? And when would this gigantically noisy, then tediously slow and seemingly interminable final movement actually finish? The orchestra's principal flautist, a family friend, promised me afterwards that in a few years' time I would end up enjoying Mahler. I doubted it. But he was right. Mahler is now an essential composer for me, just as he is for music lovers all over the world. A generation ago, you couldn't escape cycles of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky on concert programs; now it's Mahler's that orchestras most want to play, that conductors most want to conduct and that audiences most want to hear. This year marks the first of two consecutive Mahler anniversary years (it is 150 years since Mahler's birth in Kaliste, now in the Czech Republic; next year will be a century after his premature death, aged just 50), an excuse for the classical music world to indulge in Mahler-mania with a super-glut of memorials. The Sydney Symphony begins its two-year journey this month through Mahler's symphonic oeuvres, starting with Symphony No. 8. Mahler 8 will also be the finale of Paul Grabowsky's first Adelaide Festival. Orchestras and record companies from New York to Budapest will be releasing the latest instalments of their own Mahler cycles, with the Sydney Symphony recording its two-year cycle. Mahler's own prediction about his music - that its time would come after his death - has come true. And how. When did Mahler become so popular? How did his huge symphonies move from the margins of the repertoire to the centre? To find out, we have to understand why Mahler's music has divided opinion so violently. As a Mahler-resistant 12-year-old, I was in good company: Ralph Vaughan Williams called him a ''tolerable imitation of a composer''; Yehudi Menuhin thought of him as the last, overripe burgeoning of self-indulgent late Romanticism. They were reacting against what they heard as Mahler's tortured subjectivity. And although it's a cliche of Mahler criticism to describe him as a divided character, there is some truth in it. He was one of the most important composers ever, yet he wrote music only in his summer holidays; he was a non-observant Jew who converted to Catholicism to ease his Vienna appointment; and, though a self-assured, uncompromising character in his professional life, he was torn apart by the jealousies that followed his marriage to Alma Schindler. It was precisely these dichotomies that were so disturbing to Mahler's critics. Writing about a performance of the Third Symphony in Vienna in 1909, the Austrian critic Robert Hirschfeld said: ''It is necessary to resist the Mahlerian impulse, because it contains something that is potentially dangerous … Our epoch reveals itself as playful, doll-like, and powerless in Mahler's symphonies … For this reason the jeering funeral marches, the pensive jodler [yodels], the ironic sixpenny dances, and the philosophical posthorn are simply not convincing.'' Hirschfeld was right to hear Mahler as ''dangerous''. His music is defiantly and definitively connected to his life story. The manuscripts and sketches of that last, unfinished symphony are a palimpsest of the most emotionally devastating time of his life: his discovery in the summer of 1910 of Alma's affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. The effect was shattering and Mahler poured out his insecurities and grief in the new symphony, veering from almost suicidal depression to heights of ecstasy in the fleeting moments when he imagined he had won Alma back. Mahler also wrote the sounds he heard in the Alps into his symphonies, and the popular music that he remembered from childhood: those sixpenny dances, military fanfares and cowbells. In 1907 he met Jean Sibelius, whose symphonies are the polar opposite of Mahler's: compressed, distilled, self-referential. The composers discussed the meaning of the symphony. Sibelius admired its ''profound logic and inner connection''. Mahler completely disagreed: ''A symphony must be like the world,'' he said. ''It must embrace everything.'' And Mahler really did turn that all-encompassing embrace into sound: in a piece like the Eighth Symphony, you hear the whole world, in a range of references from ancient hymns to Goethe's Faust, and in music that is the apotheosis of every large-scale musical form. The piece that made a Mahlerian of me was the Ninth Symphony, thanks to the way Leonard Bernstein talked about it in his televised Norton Lectures (first broadcast in 1973), and the way Otto Klemperer conducted it on the recording I bought. However well you think you know the piece, there is always more to hear in it. In discovering more about the music and Mahler, you learn more about yourself. The end of the Ninth is one of the most confronting places you can be as a listener or performer - a few halting phrases that carry this 80-minute symphony over the threshold of audibility into silence. A Mahler symphony is an experience that should be as disturbing as it is life-affirming. That's what we need to remember in the next couple of years as we all immerse ourselves in thrilling, terrifying, dangerous and occasionally consoling Mahler-mania. (Adapted from a review by Guardian News & Media) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100629 ... jane Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World by Norman Lebrecht It was very interesting for me to take a cultural studies class at NYU and as a requirement go to the opera. I had another class that focused on The Spectacle and we had an emphasis on music as well. There is something about music that is just so universal, that transcends language and culture. This review makes me want to listen to Mahler, to transcend all these things, to understand what Lebrecht is experiencing as a writer as he processes this music. 100629 ... rt +3=100 jane! 100630 what's it to you? who go blather from