blackink_whitepages rt the first question deals with a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by a Swiss psychologist between approximately 1914 and 1930, which was not published or shown to the public until 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. The book is written using a technique developed by the author which he termed active imagination. As he described it, he was visited by two figures, an old man and a young woman, who identified themselves as Elijah and Salome. They were accompanied by a large black snake. In time, the Elijah figure developed into a guiding spirit that he called Philemon (ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ, as originally written with Greek letters). Salome was identified by him as an anima figure. The figures "brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life." The Philemon figure represented superior insight, and communicated through mythic imagery. The images did not appear to come from the author's own experience, and he interpreted them as products of the collective unconscious. for three points, name the book's name, the author's name, and your personal response... 100511 ... amy costs nada well, i splurged with Christmas money and actually bought this book... it's called The Red Book -- Liber Novus by C.G. Jung. What can I say, I needed the whole Jung story. he started his psychiatric career treating schizophrenia patients. then he had some personal revelations. then he produced his theorical apparatus. those personal revelations have been mostly scattered about, and now, in The Red Book, you've got the premium quality Swiss dark chocolate. I've only gotten a few pages into it, so far. it is somewhat religious: "The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow? The shadow is nonsense. It lacks force and has no continual existence through itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and undying brother of the supreme meaning.... The supreme meaning is great and small, it is as wide as the space of the starry Heavens and as narrow as the cell of the living body." also a scientific worldview. also contains artistic images. it has convinced me that 1) i am not that high functioning or 2) we have already moved on to other times. we are much more broken down than what Jung puts forth in the Red Book. so i find it to be a highly interesting historical piece and piece of the puzzle. Reccomended for any blatherskite, but only if you've got some cash floating around and a place to put it (it's pretty big). 100511 ... rt congratulations amy costs nada! you are correct and have kicked off the blackink/whitepages game with a flourish...thank you! three points for you and you sit alone in first place. 100511 ... amy costs nada just for the record, i don't *desire* to sit alone in first place and feel like a bit of a jerk for doing so. alas, i only felt it would be unconscionable not to act on this post... i'm much happier in the loser's circle so don't choose Marie von Franz's Archeypal Dimensions of the Psyche or Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine next because that'd be too current with me and then i'd have to answer again. 100511 ... rt This novel, published in 1918, tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, and particularly their eldest daughter. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for the girl, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views this girl's life life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens. for three points, name the book, its author, and give a personal response. 100511 ... jane it's My Antonia by Willa Cather i've not read the book, but i can say that any story with "disguised sexual metaphors" sounds quite intriguing! 100511 ... rt well done jane! three points for you puts you into a tie for first place. The next question is an American book written by a noted Transcendentalist. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and manual for self reliance. Published in 1854, it details the author's experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. The author did not intend to live as a hermit, for he received visitors and returned their visits. Rather, he hoped to isolate himself from society to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simple living and self-sufficiency were his other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As he made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, not far from his family home. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100512 ... lostgirl Walden (also known as) Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau is it the real Thoreau or a just a myth? was he really a hermit, or did he simply want people to think he was? alone yet never really lonely, living off of the land while exploring the elements of society, nature, technology, education, and spirituality as well as his personal intellectual expansion. i have not read this book, however i am most intrigued by this statement: "Thoreau concludes the book by writing about truth, which he feels can be found both in nature, and in people who fully live up to their potential." 100512 ... rt welcome to the game lostgirl! three points for you and now we have a three way tie for first place! 100512 ... rt Published in 2000 the novel by a British author focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends - the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London. The book won multiple honors, including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story mixes pathos and humour, all the while illustrating the dilemmas of immigrants and their offspring as they are confronted by a new, and very different, society. The reader can determine certain qualities and negativities about certain non British cultures while they are contrasted in the setting of an altogether different host culture. Middle- and working-class British cultures are also satirised through the characters of the Chalfens and Archie. As part of the characters' experience as immigrants, they are confronted with conflicts between assimilating and preserving their cultures. The novel depicts the lives of a wide range of backgrounds, including Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and Jewish. Just as the quote at the beginning of the novel states, “What is past is prologue.” for three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100512 ... jane white teeth zadie smith i am sure there are plenty of us who can say we have "KEVIN-inspired beliefs!!" :) 100512 ... j the crOwl kind of Kevin, that is. 100512 ... j whoa! and russell brand was in the TV movie version - that's interesting. 100512 ... rt correct jane. 3 points for you gives you 6 and puts you in first place. thanks for the clever reference. next book... Published in 1930, this novel by a German author is the story of a young man who wanders around aimlessly throughout Medieval Germany after leaving a Catholic monastery school in search of what could be described as "the meaning of life", or rather, meaning for his life. A gifted teacher at the cloister school, quickly makes friends with the young man, as they are only a few years apart, and the young man is naturally bright. After straying too far in the fields one day, on an errand gathering herbs, the young man comes across a beautiful woman, who kisses him and invites him to make love. This encounter becomes his epiphany, and he then knows he was never meant to be a monk. The young man is filled with the desire to experience everything, learn about life and nature in his own hands-on way. With the teacher's support, he leaves the monastery and wanders around the countryside, setting the scene for a story that contrasts the artist with the thinker. It spans many years, detailing specific incidents where the young man learns important things, and he often muses on these experiences and the ways of life. for 3 points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. 100513 ... cocoon oh balls. ive actually read this one and i cant remember its name. google it is. herman hesse - narcissus & goldmund 100513 ... cocoon personal reaction: hmm. i read it a while ago so i dont really remember. but looking at that synopsis, im quite sure i read it, thought 'interesting - but not really my thing.' 100513 ... rt hey cocoon! welcome to the game. you're correct. 3 points for you puts you into a tie for second place. 100513 ... rt This novel, published in 1993 portrays four young people living in and fleeing from the totalitarian police state under the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship in Romania. The narrator is a young woman of the German minority much like the author herself. She wrote it, she said, "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the CeauÅŸescu regime." The English translation of the novel won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest prize for a single work of fiction published in English, in 1998. In 2009, the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has written some 20 books, but just 5 have been translated into English, including the novel, The Appointment. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100513 ... unhinged (once again jane is winning a quiz game...i am not surprised. the last time i was in the same room with her i felt like i was on a quiz show ;-P ) 100513 ... jane herta mueller the land of green plums 100513 ... j have not read but... i love the ideas of the allegories within the novel - all the various symbolism of the green plums. "The officer's [sic] lack of constraint in engulfing the fruit parallels the remorseless persecution of the human race" gives me goosebumps... 100513 ... jane really? a quiz show? how so? i get around jimmy and all sorts of trivia just pours out of me. it's this catharsis of otherwise useless knowledge and it's nice to feel like i can actually access it with a purpose! ;) 100514 ... cocoon the land of green plums - herta muller i know the rules say we can just google it, but it just feels really wrong. on the other hand it did remind me of this movie which was one of the top 5 at the film festival this year: http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/films/die-frau-mit-den-5-elefanten/ From that synopsis, the book just seems really depressing... 100514 ... rt looks like jane snuck in with the correct answer before cocoon. 3 points gives her 9. i watched the trailer for "die frau mit den 5 elefanten" and can easily see your connection between "the land of green plums" and it. well done. on to the next question... Published in 1977, this book tells of the escape of two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, from a government research station in the Lake District in England, where they had been horribly mistreated. They live on their own with help from a fox, or "tod," who speaks to them in a Geordie dialect. After the starving dogs attack some sheep on the fells, they are reported as ferocious man-eating monsters by a journalist. A great dog hunt follows, which is later intensified with the fear that the dogs could be carriers of a dangerous bioweapon, such as the bubonic plague. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100514 ... lostgirl The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams This seems slightly unfair since i am thoroughly enjoying Watership Down right now...this third novel by Richard Adams will carry on with the same genre of intelligent animals and their subsequent adventures. 100514 ... rt correct! 3 points gives you 6 and puts you into second place behind jane. poor snitter. he is perhaps one of the most tragic characters in british fiction. 100514 ... rt next question... Not your usual collection of photographic images, this is more than just a picture book. In it the photographer/ author takes you through life as a photographer, what it means to her and the background of some of her famous, and some not so famous, photographs. It can be fascinating to see one of her shots and read her descriptions of how it came to be: what went through her mind and why she decided to shoot it the way she did. We get to enter the mind of a great portrait photographer. Little bits of information sprinkled throughout the book, the importance of environment, how there is more latitude with digital color than film color (greens photograph too dark without appropriate light on film), the importance of natural light. Not too much technical information here. If you want to know camera settings and lighting set-ups, this will not satisfy you. But she does devote some time to explaining her equipment. She often uses just a single strobe and umbrella to help balance natural light (shades of Strobist!) and is happy with the move to digital, because of the added information it gives to her image. Being tethered to computers leaves her cold; she’s definitely more interested in the creative side. Perhaps best known for her work with Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. 100514 ... rt clue assessment presentation: she was married to susan sontag. the point value has now increased to six points. 100515 ... lostgirl Annie Leibovitz Life Through A Lens “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” A gifted and famous photographer to be certain, yet this philosophy is actually quite down to earth. 100515 ... lostgirl "A Photographers Life 1990-2005" is the title of the book (sorry!) its early and my brain is waking up. 100515 ... rt that's not the title of the book i was looking for...another clue now makes it worth seven points. it is her latest publication. 100515 ... jane from what i understand "a photographer's" life is the most recent, being published in november 2009, but the one before that was "annie liebovitz at work" from november 2008. 100515 ... jane sorry, so my final answer is annie liebovitz at work and i do have a lot to say about annie liebovitz. my parents had one of her books on the coffee table at our house when i was growing up, and it was one of the first times i remember being captivated by the nude form in these incredibly artistic ways - one of the images that comes to mind is this one of lauren hutton: http://www.leninimports.com/lauren_hutton_main_1.jpg i don't even think that is the full version of it, which is a shame. anyways, i am a big fan of hers. i can leave it at that. :) 100515 ... rt i was wrong with my second clue like jane said, but the book's name i was looking for has always been, "at work." therefore, with the rule change in effect, i'm giving lostgirl 4 points for the name and personal response and jane 4 points for the title and personal response. is that acceptable lostgirl and jane? 100515 ... rt jane now has 13 and is in first place lostgirl has 10 and remains a close second place. Next question... This novel, written by a Columbian author, is set between the 1870s and 1930s in an unnamed city along the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It tells the story of a man who waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days to be with the woman he loves. The novel begins with the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a sixty-year-old photographer who decided long ago that he would never be old. His friend. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, 81, arrives on the scene and recognizes the lingering scent of bitter almonds left by gold cyanide—a scent that always reminds him of unrequited love. That afternoon, Dr. Urbino wakes from his siesta with the feeling that he, too, is nearing the end of his life. He dies moments later when, attempting to retrieve his parrot from a mango tree, he falls from a ladder and lands in the mud. His wife, Fermina Daza, 72, arrives just in time to hear him speak his final words. Present at both the funeral and the wake is Florentino Ariza who, at 76, is a man convinced that he has loved in silence for a much longer time than anyone else in this world ever has. After the wake, he repeats to Fermina Daza the "vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love" he first made to her over half a century ago. As abundant publicity surrounding the book's appearance in December 1985 revealed, the author was already working on a sequel to his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold when the Nobel committee's decision was announced. With the award there came numerous public commitments obliging the author to interrupt the progress of his project until January 1984, when he resumed work on the existing material. This novel was eventually completed in August 1985 and published three months ahead of schedule. Initial critical response took the form of summary notices and reviews, the most enthusiastic of which asserted that this novel was one of the great living classics of the Spanish language. It has been called a masterpiece of sensuous prose, because of its ability to summon up the textures, sensual pleasures, tastes, and smells associated with living in a particular place at a particular time. Overblown yet controlled, this author's story of life, love, and lust in a convention-bound provincial city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia displays great imaginative and narrative freedom. In addition, it has an almost novella-like discipline in its structuring of recurrent ideas. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. 100516 ... lostgirl "Love in the Time of Cholera" Gabriel García Márquez "the heart's eternal vow has run up against the world's finite terms" sounds like a good one to read... 100516 ... rt correct! 3 points puts you into a first place tie with jane. 100516 ... rt Next question... Dear Reader: I was once primarily known for saying the word "poop" and getting paid above market rates for it. But those days are over, because I am now going to be known for having written a book. Why did I write a book, you might wonder? Because it just seemed like the right time to be getting into the publishing industry. I'm kidding. Publishing is rotting like an abandoned possum carcass on the shoulder of I-95. I know that for a fact, because shortly after my book deal was announced, I kept hearing people lament the imminent demise of literature. These days there is only one reason to write a book: to be taken seriously. And that is exactly what is about to happen to me. I'm an author now! Like Ernest Hemingway and Fyodor Dostoevsky! When I was asked to provide text for an author page, I decided to approach it in a scholarly manner, because that's what authors do. I looked to other author pages for inspiration, and I learned so much. For example, while Hemingway and Dostoevsky do not have their own author pages on Amazon.com, Paris Hilton does. And so does former teenage porn star and multi-tasking fellatrix, Traci Lords. Hemingway and Dostoevsky might be wondering, quite literally, "Whom do I have to blow to get my own author page?" If someone had a cruel sense of humor, they might respond to Hemingway, "How about your head off? Oh wait – you already DID that!" But such a remark would be in bad taste, and as a serious author, I'm above all that. I also learned that Paris' dog, Tinkerbell Hilton, has her own book too. I read a few pages and found the prose to be overwrought, but you can imagine that, being a dog, she'd be coming from a place of needing to prove something. By the way, here's a quote from a review of Paris' book that I found on her Amazon.com author page: "Heiress, socialite, model, actress, singer and media darling Hilton loves her life, knows how to get what she wants and matter-of-factly explains how anyone can be a glamorous, fun-loving, tiara-wearing heiress just like her… [Paris’] advice to 'channel your own inner heiress, create your own image, and project an extreme sense of confidence' is an empowering message for young women." This was profoundly inspiring to me. It made me realize: if young women can read Hilton's book and become heiresses, they can likewise read my book and become anxiety-ridden bedwetters. And amidst this generation of disposability that favors the digital over the physical, shopping online rather than in stores (oops, this is awkward!), and reading from LCD screens rather than from print on paper, it's nice to know that I will have left a permanent stain by which future generations shall know of my existence. So read this book, if not for me, then for the children. For three points, name the book, the author, and give a personal response. 100516 ... jane sarah silverman the bedwetter i never cared for her, but S read a different book by her and said that i would really enjoy it. i still don't know - i really trust his taste in reading but she has just never been funny to me. if i do try it, i'll let you know what i think ! 100516 ... rt correct! 3 points gives you 16 and puts you back into first place. next question... This best-selling novel written by a Dominican author. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where he was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. It has received numerous positive reviews from critics and went on to win numerous prestigious awards in 2008, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The title is a nod to Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" The novel is an epic story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas and Lola de Leon and chronicles not just an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels, with comic books and role-playing games and with falling in love, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean (and perhaps the entire world) since colonization and slavery. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. 100517 ... jane junot díaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao i have not read this, but the description reminds me of this other book that i read in a latin-american studies class at nyu called "the hour of the star" by clarice lispector. it was beautifully written, and it's not very long at all if you want to pick it up and read it. 100517 ... rt 3 points gives you 19...cozy first place New Question... The 1970's events in Soweto form the background against which this novel is set. Confronted by armed rebellion, the Smales, a white family, flee with the help of their boy, to his own village, where they have to survive in a primitive, evacuated hut. As time goes by, the master-servant relationship is turned upside down by the family's increasing reliance on their boy. The ambiguity of the novel's title etches itself fast - these people are the white family he still serves but also the members of his tribe. The description of the cultural and physical coarsening which the circumstances evoke is masterly. Communication between husband and wife dries up. The ones who find it easiest to adapt, both linguistically and socially, are the children. The author has her reasons for using the children's relationships to cast light on those of the adults in the novel. The author has has always aspired to live as a private individual outside the public eye, but international fame and the many major awards which followed (among them the Booker Prize in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1991), honorary doctorates abroad (she has declined one in South Africa), various positions (she is, for example, Vice President of International P.E.N.), and her continual involvement on behalf of literature and free speech in a police state, where censorship and persecution of books and people exist, have made her "the doyenne of South African letters". For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100517 ... lostgirl "July's People" Nadine Gordimer An interesting look at racial role-reversal as a servant becomes 'depended upon' rather than the other way around; all within a fictitious setting that could just as easily happen in real life. 100517 ... rt correct! 3 points gives you 13 and puts you only 3 points behind first place... next question... Published in 2008, this best selling author's sixth book assembles essays on various situations such as trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, associations in the French countryside, buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina, having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane, armoring windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds, lancing a boil from another's backside, and venturing to Japan to quit smoking. The first-edition cover was designed by Chip Kidd. It features an early painting by Vincent van Gogh. For three points, name the author, book, and give a personal response. 100517 ... lostgirl David Sedaris "When you are Engulfed in Flames" The table of contents of this one makes me want to go and buy it right now...he has a freaky sense of humor as it is, but i have to say i am interested in a good laugh and this will likely provide it. 100517 ... rt correct...since i calculated your points incorrectly last time, (should have been 16 instead of 13), you now have 19 and are tied for first place with jane. 100517 ... rt This author is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Her work is multi-faceted and highly controversial. It has been by turns praised and condemned by leading literary critics. Likewise, her political activism evokes divergent and often heated reactions. Despite the public controversy surrounding her work, she has won many distinguished prizes, among them are the Georg Büchner Prize in 1998; the Mülheim Dramatists Prize in 2002 and 2004; the Franz Kafka Prize in 2004; and the Nobel Prize in Literature, also in 2004. Prevalent topics in her prose and dramatic works are female sexuality, its abuse and the battle of the sexes in general. According to the author, power and aggression are often the principal driving forces of relationships. Her provocative novels contains graphically-delineated descriptions of sexuality, aggression and abuse. They received poor reviews by many critics, some of whom considered them little more than pornography, but were considered misunderstood and undervalued by others, who noted the power of the cold descriptions of moral failures. In 1988, she published a novel which was later made into a film by Austrian director Michael Haneke, with French actress Isabelle Huppert as the protagonist. For three points, name this novel, the author, and give a personal response. 100518 ... jane elfriede jelinek the piano teacher 100518 ... jane looks like isabelle huppert played the protagonist in the film. she was in one of my favorite movies, "i heart huckabees." :) 100518 ... rt correct! 3 points gives you 22. back in first place Jane! Next question... A note from the author... The inspiration for this novel has its roots in a project I worked on more than twenty years ago, while I was still in college. I was taking a seminar on modern Korean history, and I decided that I would conduct an interview with my father to fulfill the writing assignment, conceiving a reporter-at-large-type piece that would offer personal testimony and narrative set against a historical backdrop. I wasn't sure if he would agree. My father was twelve years old on the eve of the Korean War, and although over the years I had asked him a number of times about his experiences, his responses were typically vague and hurried; he never seemed to want to talk about that time, only briefly mentioning that his sister had died during the war from an untreated bout of pneumonia. But since I was taking a course with a special focus on Korea, he agreed to speak in more detail about that period. My father's family was originally from Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, and they had joined the throngs of refugees who were heading south in an attempt to get behind the line of American forces. He first recounted a story about his favorite older cousin, who was pregnant and just about to give birth as the rest of the extended family was frantically packing up and leaving. My father was dispatched to tell his cousin that everyone was departing—explosions could be heard in the distance—yet even though she and her husband desperately wanted to go, she had already started her labors. She couldn’t be moved. Everybody soon left, and that was last time the cousin and her husband were seen alive; to this day no one knows what happened to them, whether they perished or survived the war and ended up living in North Korea. Telling that story of his cousin seemed to break the grip of something on my father. He recounted again that his sister had died of pneumonia during the refugee march, then added, casually, that in fact his younger brother had died during their travels, too. This disclosure surprised me. I knew that he had lost a brother, this from asking him, as children often will, about how many siblings he had, matching the number against my uncles and aunts, but I remembered his saying that his brother had died in a "subway accident." I didn't think there was a subway in either Pyongyang or Seoul during his childhood, so I asked him when his brother had died, and how. My father told me that in fact his brother had been killed not by a subway car but by a boxcar of a train full of refugees. They were among the hundreds who filled the cars. The car holding the rest of their family was packed tight, so he and his brother had to sleep on top of the boxcar. In the middle of the night the train halted violently, and his brother, who was eight years old, fell off, the train then lurching forward for a short distance. My father jumped down and went back and found his brother, whose leg had been amputated by the wheels of the train. My father carried him back to the car, to the rest of their family, as the blood—and his life—ran out of him. I've been haunted by that story since I heard it, not only by the horror of the accident but also by the picture of my father as a boy, a boy who had to experience his brother's death so directly and egregiously. I was struck, too, by how unperturbed my father had always seemed to me, this cheerful, optimistic man who certainly didn't appear to be haunted by anything. But of course this was not quite true. The events of the war had stayed with him, and always would. In recent years I began to consider writing a novel about that time, and what happened to my father and his brother kept coming back to me. I finally decided to try to write that scene, wondering whether a larger story might be instituted. Naturally the details changed quite drastically as I began to write, the story expanding in every direction, developing its own world and aims, and soon enough it was not my father's story at all. But the kernel of what had happened grew to become the first chapter of this novel, which for me is not so much a war novel as it is a story concerned with the effects of mass conflict on the human psyche and spirit, the private odysseys that those who have experienced conflict must endure. Name the book, the author, and give a personal response... 100518 ... jane Chang-rae Lee My Inspiration, My Father's War Story This may be way off base but the casual recounting of sibling deaths reminds me of Angela's Ashes.. 100518 ... rt correct! (although the book is also known as "the surrendered") you named the subtitle. 3 points gives you 25. slate magazine audio book club recently chose this book to discuss and i highly recommend a listen... 100519 ... rt Next question... This book is an extraordinary self-portrait in letters of the author's early years, from childhood to the publication of In the Shadow of Man, revealing this remarkable woman more vividly than anything published before, by her or about her. We see her at eleven founding the Alligator Society ("You have to be able to recognize 10 birds, 10 dogs, 10 trees and 5 butterflies OR moths."); at seventeen developing a crush on the local minister ("He has a beautiful long nose and he loves dogs"); at twenty punting at Oxford - and falling out of the boat ("And I stood in the water, - up to my chest - and roared and roared with laughter"); at twenty-two working at a film company and saving for a trip to Africa. At twenty-three, she took that trip, to "the Africa I have always longed for, always felt stirring in my blood." In Kenya's White Highlands, she rode horses, danced, and developed her observational skills on both animals and men ("He is very handsome & Clo & I sat in the car admiring his bottom & feeling sorry for him because he was getting filthy and oily"). The men returned her interest ("What the devil am I to do with all these middle aged married men. They hang in multitudinous garlands from every limb and neck I've got"). The turning point of her life came when a friend told her, "If you are interested in animals, you must meet Louis Leakey." And when she did meet the legendary anthropologist, he saw in this young secretarial school graduate the ideal candidate to undertake a revolutionary study of chimpanzees. He sent her to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on Lake Tanganyika, where she immersed herself in the lives of wild animals as no one had ever done before. The author has told this story in other books, but never so immediately and emotionally. She describes a chimp rain dance ("Every so often their wild calls rang out above the thunder. Primitive hairy men, huge and black on the skyline, flinging themselves across the ground in their primeval display of strength and power . . . Can you being to imagine how I felt? The only human ever to have witnessed such a display in all its primitive, fantastic wonder?"); a female chimp mating with five males early in the morning ("Hello - No 5 is queuing, down on the bottom branch. 'Thanks Big Boy, but don't hang around.' No 5 leaps out of the way as No 4 charges down . . . Soon over & off he goes. Now perhaps a girl can have a bite of breakfast"); a colobus monkey clasping its dead baby ("She kept trying to groom its poor little coat. Oh, it was heart rending. I'm only so glad I've never seen a chimp with a dead baby. I just couldn't bear it"). This book is a dramatic, moving, funny, and important book that tells the story of how an English girl who loved animals became one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100519 ... jane jane goodall africa in my blood S and i have always been particularly fond of apes/primates/monkeys - i got to watch a documentary on jane goodall recently that moved me to tears. 100519 ... j and i wanted to particularly mention chimpanzees - there is something so soulful about them specifically - in all primates really, as opposed to monkeys. and it still annoys me when people call a chimp a monkey. hah! 100519 ... rt go jane! +3 =28 jane goodall is a hero of mine. a dreamer living her dream. next question... How can a life so miserable be so funny? Is it because the stakes are so low (Milo Burke, the antihero of this novel, is a failure at many things, but most prominently at his job of pulling in major donors for a deadwater arts program at a middling university neither you nor he care about), or because they are so high (among them death, love, and the general squandering of the glories of creation on trivia)? The author's brilliant bile earned his previous novel, Home Land, one of the most passionate cult followings in recent years, and in this book that verbal invention is often the only thing that can rouse Milo and his peers from their ennui. They bait and badger each other and toss off complex cultural analyses to little effect, all the while haunted by the gap between wit and wisdom. The author manages to be both sour and tender to his characters, Milo in particular, whose barest shambles toward self-respect come to seem like the first baby steps of an honorable quest. Submission is the order of the day, but where Home Land had a working-class trajectory, this takes its tone of lucid lament to the devastated white-collar sector; in its merciless assault on the duel between privilege and expectation, it arrives at a rare articulation of empire in decline. Published 2010. The author is also a writing teacher at Columbia and was asked, "What can be taught? What can't?" "I’m not certain about any of this anymore. I think maybe you can’t teach touch. You can help people improve their sensitivity to language, but at a certain point it’s about the ear they’ve always had, even if they’ve never really let it do its work before. And you can’t teach people to be fearless (and sometimes shameless), though you can exhort them to be so. Most everything else, it seems to me, benefits from some sort of mentorship or collaborative effort. I do subscribe to the idea that you get what you need much faster with other people around. You’ll reach the same place by yourself, but it will take a lot longer." For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100519 ... jane sam lipsyte the ask this sounds really interesting. when i first saw the name "milo" i thought of a different book - but i can definitely relate to this description of the protagonist.. 100519 ... rt go margaux! +3 =31 heard a very positive review of this book today on slate culture gabfest. the show was taped live in nyc and the audience was playing a drinking game according to the catch phrases and verbal tics of the three podcasters. 100519 ... jane is a fan of drinking games :) 100519 ... rt "Literary critics make natural detectives," says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters, and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long-forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion. Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize--the U.K.'s highest literary award--this novel is a gripping and compulsively readable book. The author exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. In 2002, Neil LaBute directed a film based on the novel. The film tells the story of two scholars, Roland Michell (played by Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who investigate the affair of fictional Victorian era poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), described in letters between him and another fictional poet, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). For three points, name the book, the author, and give a personal response... A note from the author... "I grew up in a household full of books with parents who both read for pleasure. This was much more usual in my generation because there was no television. Reading was the only way you got at narrative. We went to the movies very rarely, as a huge treat. I read quite difficult things quite young. Nobody told me I couldn't. I worked my way through Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and Stevenson and Jane Austen when I was little. Then I read them again when I was older and was surprised how different they appeared! To me it seemed self-evident and exciting that one would live much more intensely in these complicated worlds of adventure and excitement and passion than one would in one's daily life of getting up and having one's little breakfast and being trotted off to one's school where you were frightened of the other kids in the playground. It seemed to me that that was normal, but now I think that now perhaps it isn't. There are people who had childhoods like that and people who didn't. And people who didn't become rather hostile to people who did because they feel that people who did had something rich. They try to say, "You weren't spontaneous, you weren't human, you only lived in your head and didn't have any relationships." That is sometimes true and sometimes not. And anyway, it often makes for better relationships when you're older because you actually learn a lot about life from books. You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents." 100520 ... lostgirl A.S. Byatt “Posession: A Romance” “Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue.” That quote alone from a random review makes this a work that will interest me, and likewise, i’m not surprised it made it into this game... 100520 ... rt +3=19 slow burning thriller page-turner. good cayman book. glad to see you playing the game again. jane was running away with it! New Question.. Published in 1958, this is a novel by a Beat Generation author. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of the author's previous work. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on the author, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet, essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in the author's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book largely concerns duality in his life and ideals, examining the relationship that the outdoors, bicycling, mountaineering, hiking and hitchhiking through the West had with his "city life" of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. One episode in the book features Smith, Ryder and Henry Morley (based on real-life friend John Montgomery) climbing Matterhorn Peak in California. It tells the story of the author's first introduction to this type of mountaineering and would serve as inspiration for him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on Desolation Peak in Washington. The novel also gives an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg gave a debut presentation of his poem "Howl" (changed to "Wail" in the book), and other authors such as Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen performed. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. More about the author...Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials". 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside your own house 4. Be in love with your life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..." 100520 ... jane jack kerouac the dharma bums my cousin aaron has told me many times to read this one. i tried to read "on the road" a few times and could never get into it, so i've sort of abstained from reading this one. is it worth it? and though i've not read it, i knew who the author was from the quote. :) 100520 ... rt sorry lostgirl...miscalculated your points again. your total is 22. jane now has 34 with the kerouac book. his stream of consciousness writing is a challenge and must be read through a filter of your own making. next question... How can we give animals the best life--for them? What does an animal need to be happy? In her groundbreaking, best-selling book, the author drew on her own experience with autism as well as her experience as an animal scientist to deliver extraordinary insights into how animals think, act, and feel. Now she builds on those insights to show us in this new book, how to give our animals the best and happiest life--on their terms, not ours. Knowing what causes animals physical pain is usually easy, but pinpointing emotional distress is much harder. Drawing on the latest research and her own work, she identifies the core emotional needs of animals and then explains how to fulfill the specific needs of dogs and cats, horses, farm animals, zoo animals, and even wildlife. Whether it's how to make the healthiest environment for the dog you must leave alone most of the day, how to keep pigs from being bored, or how to know if the lion pacing in the zoo is miserable or just exercising, she teaches us to challenge our assumptions about animal contentment and honor our bond with our fellow creatures. This book is the culmination of almost thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience. This is essential reading for anyone who's ever owned, cared for, or simply cared about an animal. The author became well known after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995); the title is derived from her description of how she feels around neurotypical people. She first spoke in public about autism in the mid-1980s at the request of Ruth C. Sullivan, one of the founders of the Autism Society of America. She is also the focus of a semi-biographical HBO film, titled starring Claire Danes. The film was released in 2010. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... Q&A with the author Q: In this book, you discuss a wide range of animals, from dogs to pigs to tigers. Which animals do you enjoy studying and working with the most? A: I've worked with cattle the most, so I really enjoy cattle. I always liked to sit in the pen and let the cattle come around me and lick me--they're really peaceful animals when they're not afraid. But the thing about cattle is they're a prey-species animal and they get scared really easily--and I can relate to that because as a person with autism, fear is my main emotion. So I can relate to how cattle are always hypervigilant, looking for rapid movements, looking for little signs of things that might be danger. Q: How has autism helped you in your work with animals? A: I'm a total visual thinker. And you've got to think about it: animals don't think in language. If you want to understand animals, you must get away from language. Animals are sensory-based thinkers; they think in pictures, they think in sounds, they think in touches. There's no other way that their brains can store those memories. Q: How has your work affected the treatment of animals? A: I've been working on improving the treatment of cattle for years. When I started out in the seventies, people were incredibly rough and abusive with cattle. The thing that kept me going was that there were some really nice people who handled their cattle well, and their cattle had a great life, and so I could see that it was possible to handle animals right. And today many more people are now involved in teaching low-stress stockmanship and good cattle handling. When I started in the early seventies, I was a pioneer in the U.S. on this; nobody else was working on these things. Q: How will this book be useful to people working with cats and dogs in animal shelters? A: People often don't recognize emotions in these animals. I went to a very nice animal shelter recently that had group housing for cats that had tree-like things with platforms and cubbyholes for the cats to get in, and a very astute worker there noticed that you can have a situation where a cat seems very calm in a shelter, but he's not really sleeping, he's constantly keeping an eye out for another cat. And people need to watch for that kind of situation, because even though it looks peaceful, that one particular cat that never sleeps is going to be stressed out. Also at this shelter, I was very pleased that the amount of dog barking was way less, and I think one of the reasons for this is that every day, every dog is taken out for an hour of quality time, playing and being walked and interacting with a person. That's going to help lower the stress. Dogs need to be taken out every day for quality interaction with a person, exercise, and fun play. Q: What are the things you really like about creating this book? A: I really enjoyed getting into all the neuroscience information. Another thing I talked about in the book are the problems with not having enough people working out in the field to implement things. We've got policymakers who never work out in the field, and some of the policies can backfire. We need to have more people working in the field. In the wildlife chapter, I talk about who's going to be the next Jane Goodall--we need a lot more of that kind of on-the-ground work. Q: You mention Dr. Nicholas Dodman and some other people in your field. Has anyone in particular been a great inspiration for you? A: One of my big inspirations when I was starting out was a scientist named Ron Kilgore, who studied sheep handling and sheep behavior. At the same time that I was working on cattle handling in the U.S. in the early seventies, Ron Kilgore was doing the same sorts of things in New Zealand. I discovered one of his papers early on, and that really was an inspiration. Q:What do you think of the more extreme animal activists? A: Violence I'm totally against--that's very counterproductive. All that does is make the animal industry go and get more lawyers and more security systems. Demonstrations--sometimes there may be a place for that. In some situations we might have philosophical differences. I eat meat. I get hypoglycemic if I don't eat animal protein. But I feel very strongly that we've got to give the animals a decent life. A woman working at Niman Ranch said that we've got to give animals "a life worth living." These cattle can have a decent life: the cows and the bulls, out on a ranch eating grass. The calves spend half their lives in a feed yard, but they're still outside. Another way I look at it is, those cattle would have never been born, would have never existed, but now that we've made them exist, we've got to give them a decent life. Q: If you could give your book to one person or one group of people so that they could learn more about animal care, who would that be? A: I think any kind of person who works with animals, whether it's a pet owner, a cat owner, people who work with horses, people who work on farms--anyone who works with animals on a daily basis is going to like this book. Q: Proposition 2 in California just passed. Its aim is to reduce the inhumane confinement of farm animals by giving them enough room to stand up, turn around, and stretch. What do you think of this, and what do you think the real effects will be? A: Veal stalls and sow stalls we need to get rid of, plain and simple. Putting a sow in a box where she can't turn around for most of her life, that's absolutely not acceptable. Two-thirds of the public have problems with it. With hens and chickens, that's a more complicated issue. It's so much more expensive to put them in systems that are cage-free, and what I'm worried about is the egg industry migrating to Mexico and being a real mess, where we have no controls at all. What people don't realize is that half of the egg industry is liquid egg, which can be easily shipped in those stainless-steel tanks. It's the eggs that go into bread, the eggs that restaurants use...And I'm concerned that that might migrate to Mexico. There needs to be a lot more thought going into how we're going to implement things. What's happening in a lot of fields now--with any issue, not just animal issues--is we're getting more and more policymakers totally separated from the reality of what's happening on the ground, where ideology takes over from practicality. Q: What are your future plans relating to animal advocacy? What is the next issue that you would like to tackle? A: I'm an implementer. Somebody has to work on implementing things. I want to continue working with people on practical guidelines that will result in improvements. I spend a great deal of time working with large meat buyers, because economic forces can often bring about great change. One of the things that should be a major criterion in judging welfare is when there are too many lame animals. And lameness is something I can measure. I want things I can measure. Too often we've got our best and brightest going into policy, and they haven't done anything practical. All I can say is, whatever field you're in, whether it is animals or something else, you need to get out in the field and find out what's going on in the trenches, so that you don't make policies that might have unintended, bad consequences. Get away from the lobbyists, get away from all that, get out and visit farms, visit ranchers, because with a lot of issues, the truth is somewhere in the middle. 100521 ... lostgirl Animals Make Us Human Creating the Best Life for Animals By Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson Dr. Grandin’s application of her personal experience with autism to the animal world is not only miraculous, but also realistic, as these communication processes can be jarringly similar. 100521 ... rt correct lostgirl! +3=25 new question... This book is an exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered - each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now. In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. The author proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together. This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments, as in the final essay, where death leads to our lives being lived backward. It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side.A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? The author wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime's worth of accumulated acts, as he suggests, spending six days clipping your nails or six weeks waiting for a green light? Is heaven a bureaucracy, where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world where God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us? Or is God actually the size of a bacterium, battling good and evil on the battlefield of surface proteins, and thus unaware of humans, who are merely the nutritional substrate? Mostly, the author underscores humans desperately want to matter, and in afterlife search out the ripples left in our wake. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100521 ... lostgirl SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman i must read this one! that's not much of a personal response i guess, but all i can say is that the few synopses i just blew through have got my existential wheels turning at warp speed. and all of this in about 100 pages? (thanks for continuing to fill the void.) 100521 ... rt +3=28 next question... One of America's most influential chefs, the author created a revolution in 1971 when she introduced local, organic fare at her Berkeley, California, restaurant, Chez Panisse. Twenty-five years later, she and a small group of teachers and volunteers turned over long-abandoned soil at an urban middle school in Berkeley and planted the Edible Schoolyard. The schoolyard has since grown into a universal idea of Edible Education that integrates academics with growing, cooking, and sharing wholesome, delicious food. With inspiring images of the garden and kitchen and their young caretakers Edible Schoolyard is at once a visionary model for sustainable farming and childhood nutrition, and a call to action for schools across the country. Bright photographs show the engaged youngsters at work and close-ups of the lush flora and garden fauna. Extensive back matter includes the principles of "edible education," food-related writings by some of the children, recipes, and notes that provide context for the photos on earlier pages. The text is essentially a long essay by the author, a combination of chronology mixed with emotional storytelling. In a way, the whole package feels like a well-produced annual report or fundraising document for the program. For three points, name the author, book, and give a personal response... Principles of Edible Education Food is an Academic Subject A school garden, kitchen, and cafeteria are integral to the core academic mission of the school, so that ecology and gastronomy help bring alive every subject, from reading and writing to science and art. School Provides Lunch for Every Child From preschool through high school, every child is served a wholesome, delicious meal, every day. Good food is a right not a privilege. Providing it every day brings children into a positive relationship with their health, their community, and the environment. Schools Support Farms School cafeterias buy seasonally fresh food from local, sustainable farms and ranches, not only for reasons of health and education, but as a way of strengthening local food economies. Children Learn by Doing Hands-on education, in which the children themselves do the work in the vegetable beds and on the cutting boards, awakens their senses and opens their minds, both to their core academic subjects and to the world around them. Beauty is a Language A beautifully prepared environment, where deliberate thought has gone into everything from the garden paths to the plates on the tables, communicates to children that we care about them. 100522 ... rt point value increases to six points. this one is so easy it doesn't need a clue. the book title is right in the question. 100523 ... thorn the edible schoolyard by alice waters. i haven't read it, but teaching children about growing food and food systems seems like a great idea, and i'd like to read the book. 100523 ... rt welcome to the game thorn! correct...6 points for you puts you in third place behind lostgirl and jane. 100523 ... rt Published in 2010, this book details working alongside undocumented workers in this stirring look at the bottom rung of America’s economic ladder. The author's project feels initially like a gimmick; that this middle-class white American can go undercover in the lettuce fields of Arizona or the poultry plants of Alabama seems more stunt (or rehash of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed) than sound journalism. But the warmth with which he describes his co-workers and the heartbreaking descriptions of the demanding, degrading, and low-paying jobs quickly pull the reader in. Gimmick or no, the author pushes his body and his patience to the limits, all the while deferring attention to the true heroes: his co-workers, whose dignity, perseverance, physical endurance, and manual skill are no less admirable for being born of sheer necessity. What emerges are not tales of downtrodden migrants but of clever hands and clever minds forced into repetitive and dangerous labor without legal protections. He excels at putting a human face on individuals and situations alternately ignored and vilified. In the shadows of the U.S. economy—places where underpaid, often undocumented workers toil in hellish conditions—he does more than just observe and document. Showing deep solidarity as well as a commitment to exposing the injustices endured by low-paid laborers in America, he spent a year working alongside this largely immigrant and rural workforce—cutting lettuce, dumping tubs of chicken parts, and huffing through the streets of Manhattan to deliver food. In writing this remarkable book, he brings attention to the resilience of the workers who are the backbone of this country’s economy, appreciates the great contributions of undocumented workers to making our lives better by holding up the economy and the backlash they so often face. For anyone who has fought for dignity in the workplace, this book is a triumph—and a call to arms. This is a big-hearted American book, audacious and bold. The author goes the distance, and should help silence the nativist nabobs and peddlers of racial propaganda who clog the immigration discourse today. In the spirit of Upton Sinclair, it’s an ode to the working human—whether that worker comes from Iowa or Michoacan. "There's so much yelling and anger about immigrants, but it comes from people with callous-free hands, like politicians," said the author, 32, who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. "I thought it would a good idea to get as close to the story as possible." His first job was at a lettuce farm in Yuma, Ariz., where he cut 3,000 heads of lettuce a day in scorching heat for nearly three months. "All you're doing is bending down to the left and the right for hours at a time," he said. He made $8.27 an hour at the rigorous job. "I don't think my back ever realigned itself, even months after I left." He next worked the graveyard shift at a processing plant in Russellville, Ala., separating chicken breasts by hand for $8.05 an hour. A vegetarian since grade school, he was more repulsed by the monotony of tearing 8,000 breasts a night than the fact he was drenched in chicken fat. "Imagine having a job and, within five minutes, you know how to do everything involved and you're already bored," he said. He then headed back to New York to work in Manhattan's flower district, which he said was no bed of roses, either. Low wages, unwarranted verbal abuse and 11-hour shifts without breaks were commonplace at the tiny store where he cut flowers. His last stop was an upscale Manhattan restaurant, where he risked life and limb navigating through bustling traffic as a bike deliveryman for little more than $2 an hour - far below the $4.60 required by law. "During my whole time working as a deliveryman and speaking with deliverymen from other restaurants in the city, I never met anyone that was making that much," he said. He saw the poor working conditions, job-related injuries and unfair wages he expected while writing the book but was ultimately impressed by the grit of the immigrants who make up the backbone of the American workforce. "No one really complained," he said. "There was a definite pride in what they were doing and a recognition that a lot of people couldn't do the job." For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response. 100524 ... lostgirl Working in the Shadows Gabriel Thompson this would give anyone who says, “i hate my job” a run for their money. it sounds sort of depressing , honestly, but probably worth a look to put real life into some sort of better perspective. 100524 ... rt +3=31...3 points behind first place. Next Question... The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life this author's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal. Now this book follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness--and to her astonishing resurrection. Her longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. This book is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with her relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up--as only she can tell it. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... An excerpt from the book... Lost in the Golden State Here lies one whose name was writ in water — gravestone of John Keats Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest — a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils. No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around. Wasn't that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted Robert Frost: The shattered water made a misty din. Great waves looked over others coming in And thought of doing something to the shore Water had never done to land before ... Pretty, Doonie said. Quinn spat in the sand and said, She's always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she's fine. He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger. My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison. That's me, I said. Miss California. Quinn himself was no Adonis. We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he'd just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer. From the time we'd hit the state line, he'd been going into phone booths to skim directories for the guy's name. Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, y'all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I'm gonna carve those waves up like your mama's Christmas turkey. Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards — Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe. But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude. They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water. They'd suffered no car wrecks in which an ancient axle had snapped. Nobody was missing any obvious teeth, either. In the ocean, long waves came with open-fanged mouths, drooling where the spray blew back only to bite down on my pals, who'd thrown themselves onto their homemade boards and were digging in. From the beach, it was a bitch to witness — not just the asswhipping the sea was delivering but the massive cheer of my friends taking it, the small and concentrated energy of repeatedly hurling themselves at impenetrable force. Mocking their inadequacy against those waves, one guy walking past said to his small-boned girlfriend, This is why they send the white trash to Vietnam. At some point, a guy as wasp-waisted as a Ken doll, with stomach muscles you could have bounced a quarter off, strolled over to where I sat. The sun shone through his long dark hair, making a halo around him. Maybe he'd seen our license plates, for he said to me, you Texan? I allowed as how I was. You interested in some acid? Ken said. When I told him I didn't have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas? Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping. I shrugged. What do y'all do here? He unfolded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD. I knew right off I didn't want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose. He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he'd scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug. At dusk, we parked in an apartment lot where a hometown dope dealer had left his pink Lincoln Continental with its busted steering column. Easy knew somebody who lived there, and in the way of poor hippies, they cooked us noodles and let us use their bathroom in exchange for the free pot Doonie could lay on them. Secreted inside the freakishly fat surfboard — in a scooped-out hollow in its foam core — he'd ratholed a few fragrant bricks of pot and a baggie of questionably acquired pills. These investments — tucked away from the law under sheets of fiberglass and squeegeed over with resin — would free him from the factory jobs we'll all eventually take. For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in — not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke. 100524 ... lostgirl Lit by Mary Karr a close friend's soon to be ex-wife is fighting a similar battle...looks interesting. 100524 ... jane crap. i've been sick this whole weekend. bugger. 100524 ... rt we have a first place tie: lostgirl and jane=34 points next question: Published in 1997, this book is a collection of essays. In the title essay, originally published as "Shipping Out" in Harper's, the author describes what he sees as the middlebrow excesses exhibited during his one week trip aboard a cruise ship (MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir) in the Caribbean. His ironic displeasure with the professional hospitality industry and the fun he should be having unveils how the indulgences of the cruise turn him into a spoiled brat, leading to overwhelming internal despair. He uses footnotes extensively throughout the piece for various asides. Like much of his work, the essay is written in post-modern style. Another essay in the same volume takes on the vulgarities and excesses of the Illinois State Fair. This collection also includes his influential essay "E Unibus Pluram" regarding television's impact on contemporary literature and the use of irony within American culture. The author committed suicide in 2008. For three points, name the book, the author, and give a personal response... The following is a transcript of a commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being well adjusted, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term. Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about. By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register. Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people. Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth... Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall. Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship... Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. 100524 ... jane A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace 100525 ... jane there is another great book that has an extensive use of footnotes; it's called "stiff" by mary roach 100525 ... rt +3 =37 ...and jane is back in first place. it's funny because mary roach was next on the list! next question (dedicated to ever_dumbening for first introducing me to this poet) This writer's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Maxine Kumin calls her "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." She has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Although she has been criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship of women with nature, she finds the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature. As her creativity is stirred by nature, she is an avid walker, pursuing inspiration on foot. For her, walking is part of the poetic process. She is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes. Some of her poems... The Journey One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save. "Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on…. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things." –- " Wild Geese" Her poems are life's witness, the sunflower, even a stringbean; slowing down to observe, and to experience sheer gratitude and wonderment. "It doesn't have to be The blue iris, it could be Weeds, in a vacant lot, or a few Small stones: just Pay attention, then patch A few words together and don't try To make them elaborate, this isn't A contest but a doorway Into thanks, and a silence in which Another voice may speak." —"Praying" Her poems are a salve, a remedy to cure a culture which can move too fast to perceive a relationship between an inner or outer existence. When asked by an 8th grader, Elizabeth Lopez, from Provincetown Mass., her long time home, during an interview for the school paper, if she could be anything, what would it be? She replied, "I would like to be a healer." Perhaps to a world bereft of reflection, inner solace, and quiet, she may not be so far off. For three points, name the poet and give a personal response. 100525 ... lostgirl Mary Oliver i have not read her yet, however, one review stated that her imagery especially of nature is perhaps "too rich." i will probably lover her because of that and more. 100525 ... typogirl says oops love her....you get the idea 100525 ... jane which mary roach book was the question about? 100525 ... rt +3=37 and we have a tie again for first place. hey jane, the book was "stiff." kathy read it and i remember how she would yell out to me, face behind the pages, whenever she would come across something equal parts gross and fascinating. next question... This author, at 25, has already been a Rhodes scholar, worked in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and been a line chef in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He writes a blog on science issues affiliated with Seed magazine, where he is an editor, and now has written a precocious and engaging book that tries to mend the century-old tear between the literary and scientific cultures. In college, he did a double major in neuroscience and English. One day, during a break in molecular experiments on the nature of memory, which involved “performing the strange verbs of bench science: amplifying, vortexing, pipetting,” he picked up “Swann’s Way.” “All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences,” he writes. What he got instead was the surprise Virgil gave Dante: Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew 1) that smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) that memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual remembering. These were facts scientists didn’t establish until a few years ago. And here was Proust making the same point in 1913. Quick as an ion opens a potassium gate, the author began re-examining his favorite artists to see what they could teach us about the mind. He found that writers and musicians consistently lead the way to new theories with inspiration, while scientists mop up with hard data. Gertrude Stein’s experimental writing presaged Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar, while Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” anticipated discoveries by neurologists that what the mind at first rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful, once the underlying patterns have been recognized. Here’s his take on how the process works in the case of Proust and memory. Proust’s goal in “Remembrance of Things Past” is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists,” he writes, “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone ... bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection.” Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory. This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which the author calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.” In 1959, C. P. Snow asserted that there were now two cultures in the educated world, the scientific and the artistic, separated by “mutual incomprehension.” Artists did not understand — or care about — science; physicists and biologists paid no attention to art. Today, scientists are making border raids. There is a literary-scientific movement called biopoetics, led by the Harvard professor E. O. Wilson, that wants the humanities, as he wrote in his 1999 book “Consilience,” “rationalized.” Biopoetics wants to know why literature is necessary. What is its evolutionary function? And what does it mean to say one book is “better” than another? They’d like to wire a reader with “Madame Bovary” on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide. Now here comes this author, pushing back. You don’t need Newton’s Third Law of Motion to tell you that turnabout is fair play. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 100525 ... rt whoops...accidently wrote the author's name in the text...see if you can find it! 100525 ... jane it's proust was a neuroscientist by jonah lehrer 100525 ... jane i love the idea that everything is interconnected - all fields of study - specifically the arts and sciences. it's part of why i love da vinci so much. 100525 ... j and by the way - i love "stiff." did you ever end up reading it? 100525 ... rt +3 =40 jane is back in first place...it's on my list of books to read staring at me from kathy's nightstand. 100525 ... rt next question... When her parents are killed by an earthquake, 5-year-old Ayla wanders through the forest completely alone. Cold, hungry, and badly injured by a cave lion, the little girl is as good as gone until she is discovered by a group who call themselves (insert title of the book here). This clan, left homeless by the same disaster, have little interest in the helpless girl who comes from the tribe they refer to as the "Others." Only their medicine woman sees in Ayla a fellow human, worthy of care. She painstakingly nurses her back to health--a decision that will forever alter the physical and emotional structure of the clan. Although this story takes place roughly 35,000 years ago, its cast of characters could easily slide into any modern tale. The members of the Neanderthal clan, ruled by traditions and taboos, find themselves challenged by this outsider, who represents the physically modern Cro-Magnons. And as Ayla begins to grow and mature, her natural tendencies emerge, putting her in the middle of a brutal and dangerous power struggle. Although the author obviously takes certain liberties with the actions and motivations of all our ancestors, her extensive research into the Ice Age does shine through--especially in the detailed knowledge of plants and natural remedies used by the medicine woman and passed down to Ayla. Mostly, though, this first in the series of four is a wonderful story of survival. Ayla's personal evolution is a compelling and relevant tale. The novel references the "coming" advance of "the polar ice" sheets, setting the story before 18,000 years Before Present, when the farthest southern encroachment of the last glacial period of the current Ice Age occurred. The author's timeframe, somewhere between 28,000 and 25,000 years B.P., corresponds with archeological estimates of the Neanderthal branch of mankind dying out some time between 30,000 and 22,000 years B.P.. No definitive evidence yet exists that the Aurignacian tool making culture that existed until about 26,000 years was Cro-magnon, making it possible that the civilization was in fact the "the last hurrah" of the Neanderthals' civilization and racial existence. The culture and loci of the finds better matches the author's portrayed homelands for the Cro-magnon cultures of her works from the plains of the Ukraine and Danube valley across the Alps to western France, which is consistent with mainstream archeological thinking. Her intermingling of Neanderthal peoples in a timeframe after their extinction is suggested but muddled by the uncertainty of archaeological dating and can be accepted as an appropriate use of poetic license. Surviving Cro-magnon artifacts include huts, cave paintings, carvings and antler-tipped spears. The remains of tools suggest that they knew how to make woven clothing. They had huts, constructed of rocks, clay, bones, branches, and animal hide/fur. These early humans used manganese and iron oxides to paint pictures and may have created the first calendar around 15,000 years ago. The flint tools found in association with the remains at the first Cro-magnon site have associations with the Aurignacian culture that Lartet had identified a few years before he found the skeletons. The Cro-Magnons must have come into contact with the Neanderthals, and are often credited with causing the latter's extinction, although modern humans seem to have coexisted with Neanderthals for up to 60,000 years in the Levant and for more than 15,000 years in France. The author's research led to the incorporation of such data into her story arch and narrative. Her books have been commended for their anthropological authenticity and their ethnobotanical accuracy. It is the first book in the Earth's Children book series. A film, based on the novel, was made in 1986 starring Daryl Hannah. Dialogue is conducted mostly through a form of sign language which is translated for the audience with subtitles. For three points, name the book, author, and give a personal response... 100526 ... lostgirl The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel my mom is an avid reader, and i remember her reading this when i was much (much) younger. i had no idea there was a whole series of them! i'll ask her opinion as to whether i'd like it... 100526 ... rt +3 =40 and we are tied again for first place... 100526 ... rt A note from the author... This is a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. This book is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us. Because epidemics behave in a very unusual and counterintuitive way. Think, for a moment, about an epidemic of measles in a kindergarten class. One child brings in the virus. It spreads to every other child in the class in a matter of days. And then, within a week or so, it completely dies out and none of the children will ever get measles again. That's typical behavior for epidemics: they can blow up and then die out really quickly, and even the smallest change -- like one child with a virus -- can get them started. My argument is that it is also the way that change often happens in the rest of the world. Things can happen all at once, and little changes can make a huge difference. That's a little bit counterintuitive. As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect. And when there isn't -- when crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars -- we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work. I like to think of it as an intellectual adventure story. It draws from psychology and sociology and epidemiology, and uses examples from the worlds of business and education and fashion and media. If I had to draw an analogy to another book, I'd say it was like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, in the sense that it takes theories and ideas from the social sciences and shows how they can have real relevance to our lives. There's a whole section of the book devoted to explaining the phenomenon of word of mouth, for example. I think that word of mouth is something created by three very rare and special psychological types, whom I call Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I profile three people who I think embody those types, and then I use the example of Paul Revere and his midnight ride to point out the subtle characteristics of this kind of social epidemic. So just in that chapter there is a little bit of sociology, a little of psychology and a little bit of history, all in aid of explaining a very common but mysterious phenomenon that we deal with every day. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure that this book fits into any one category. That's why I call it an adventure story. I think it will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the world around them in a different way. I think it can give the reader an advantage--a new set of tools. Of course, I also think they'll be in for a very fun ride. One of the things I'd like to do is to show people how to start "positive" epidemics of their own. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly. That makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their product, or for that matter to anyone who's trying to create a change with limited resources. The book has a number of case studies of people who have successfully started epidemics--an advertising agency, for example, and a breast cancer activist. I think they are really fascinating. I also take a pressing social issue, teenage smoking, and break it down and analyze what an epidemic approach to solving that problem would look like. The point is that by the end of the book I think the reader will have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes. This is not an abstract, academic book. It's very practical. And it's very hopeful. It's brain software. Beyond that, I think that this book is a way of making sense of the world, because I'm not sure that the world always makes as much sense to us as we would hope. I spent a great deal of time in the book talking about the way our minds work--and the peculiar and sometimes problematic ways in which our brains process information. Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing. People who understand this book, I think, have a way of decoding the world around them. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 100526 ... jane the tipping point malcom gladwell 100526 ... jane i like the idea of an intellectual adventure story. it seems like this would be inspiring for anyone who hopes for change on an international level. 100526 ... rt +3=43 and jane is back in first place! 100526 ... lostgirl Darn....too late! Blink is also a good choice. 100526 ... rt When slavery has torn apart one's heritage, when the past is more real than the present, when the rage of a dead baby can literally rock a house, then the traditional novel is no longer an adequate instrument. And so this Pulitzer Prize-winner is written in bits and images, smashed like a mirror on the floor and left for the reader to put together. In a novel that is hypnotic, beautiful, and elusive, the author portrays the lives of Sethe, an escaped slave and mother, and those around her. There is Sixo, who "stopped speaking English because there was no future in it," and .... Baby Suggs, who makes her living with her heart because slavery "had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue;" and Paul D, a man with a rusted metal box for a heart and a presence that allows women to cry. At the center is Sethe, whose story makes us think and think again about what we mean when we say we love our children or freedom. The stories circle, swim dreamily to the surface, and are suddenly clear and horrifying. Because of the extraordinary, experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter, what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding. The maternal bonds that connect Sethe to her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in the murder of one daughter, her own best self, and the estrangement of the surviving daughter from the black community, both in an attempt to salvage her fantasy of the future, her children, from a life in slavery. However, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver’s need for interaction with this community in order to enter into womanhood. Denver finally succeeds at the end of the novel in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation. Contrary to Denver, Sethe only reaches individuation after the exorcism, at which point Sethe can fully accept the first relationship that is completely for her, her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves Sethe from the ensuing destruction of her self that resulted from the maternal bonds controlling her life. Slavery creates a situation where a mother is separated from her child, which has devastating consequences for both parties. Often, mothers do not know themselves to be anything except a mother, so when they are unable to provide maternal care for their children, or their children are taken away from them, they feel a lost sense of self. Similarly, when a child is separated from his or her mother, he or she loses the familial identity associated with mother-child relationships. Sethe was never able to see her mother’s true face (because her smile was distorted from having spent too much time with the bit) so she wasn’t able to connect with her own mother, and therefore does not know how to connect to her own children, even though she longs to. Furthermore, the earliest need a child has is related to the mother: the baby needs milk from the mother. Sethe is traumatized by the experience of having her milk stolen because it means she cannot form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter. Because of the painful nature of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed these memories in an attempt to leave behind a horrific past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D. and Denver all experience this loss of self, which could only be remedied by the acceptance of the past and the memory of their original identities. In a way this book serves to open these characters up to their repressed memories, eventually causing the reintegration of their selves. Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure. The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a 'self that is no self.' To heal and humanise, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the 'self', subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs who all fall short of such realization, are unable to remake their selves by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The self is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word - once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters face the challenge of an unmade self, composed of their rememories and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from remaking of the self is the desire for an uncomplicated past and the fear that remembering will lead them to a place they couldn't get back from. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 100527 ... rt +1 =41 for lostgirl's "blink" suggestion. 100527 ... jane toni morrisson beloved 100527 ... jane i never even saw the film, but i heard it was very good. i'm not sure how much faith i have in Oprah's acting, but i'd be willing to give it a try. 100527 ... rt jane! +3=46 next question... This novel begins violently and then veers into weirder terrain. Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student at Cornell, discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident. Aimless and distraught, he climbs aboard a train that happens to be carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, and inveigles a job as an animal doctor. His responsibilities draw him into the unpredictable orbit of August Rosenbluth, the circus's mercurial menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena, whose equestrian act attracts enthusiastic crowds. Jacob immerses himself in the bizarre subculture of acrobats, aerialists, sword swallowers and lion tamers, mastering a vernacular that reflects a rigid caste system. Ringling Brothers is nicknamed "Big Bertha," performers are "kinkers" and members of the audience are always "rubes." When an aged Jacob observes a contemporary circus, he sees children carrying blinking toys: "Bet their parents paid an arm and a leg for them, too. Some things never change. Rubes are still rubes, and you can still tell the performers from the workers." The troupe crisscrosses the country cannibalizing acts that have gone bankrupt in the Depression-era economy. After Uncle Al, the autocratic ringmaster, purchases Rosie, an elephant with an unquenchable thirst for lemonade and the inability to follow the simplest command, Benzini Brothers looks doomed. How Jacob coaxes Rosie to perform — thereby saving the circus — lies at the heart of the novel. The author, whose first novel was "Riding Lessons," turns horses and other creatures into sympathetic characters. According to an author's note, she studied elephant body language and behavior with a former handler at the Kansas City Zoo. The research pays off. August's mistreatment of Marlena pales beside the visceral wallop of his nonchalant cruelty toward Rosie: "I look up just as he flicks the cigarette. It arcs through the air and lands in Rosie's open mouth, sizzling as it hits her tongue. She roars, panicked, throwing her head and fishing inside her mouth with her trunk. August marches off. I turn back to Rosie. She stares at me, a look of unspeakable sadness on her face. Her amber eyes are filled with tears." Second-rate and seedy, Benzini Brothers suffers a collective inferiority complex (no one is permitted to utter the word "Ringling" in Uncle Al's presence). When Lovely Lucinda, the 400-pound fat lady, dies suddenly, Uncle Al orchestrates a funeral procession led by 24 black Percherons and an army of mourners competing for the three dollars and bottle of Canadian whiskey promised to whoever puts on the best show. "You've never seen such grief — even the dogs are howling." The author's circus, with its frankly mercantile morality, symbolizes the warped vigor of capitalism. No matter how miserable or oppressed, the performers love the manufacturing of illusion, sewing a new sequined headdress for Rosie or feeding the llamas as men die of starvation in a devastated America. August's paranoid schizophrenia feels emblematic — an indictment of a lifetime spent feigning emotions to make a buck. At its finest, this novel resembles stealth hits like "The Giant's House," by Elizabeth McCracken, or "The Lovely Bones," by Alice Sebold, books that combine outrageously whimsical premises with crowd-pleasing romanticism. Black-and-white photographs of real American circus scenes from the first half of the century are interspersed throughout the novel, and they brilliantly evoke the dignified power contained in the quieter moments of this unusual brotherhood. The grainy photos capture the unexpected daintiness of an elephant disembarking from a train, the symmetry of a marching band, a gaggle of plumed showgirls stepping gingerly across a patchy lawn and the haunting solitude of an impeccably dressed cook. Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions and metaphorical potential (Marianne Moore leaps to mind). Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, the author has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale. A film is currently in production based on the book. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 100527 ... jane sarah gruen water for elephants 100527 ... jane it sounds amazing, i've definitely put it on my reading list. if for nothing else than the title alone (i've a thing for elephants)... 100527 ... rt jane! +3 =49 New Question... Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1990, this poet and writer was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, he came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata. He began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, he was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, he has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982. He is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written concerning him, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. His poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, he has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture. He died in 1998. Poetry from the writer... Motion If you are the amber mare I am the road of blood If you are the first snow I am he who lights the hearth of dawn If you are the tower of night I am the spike burning in your mind If you are the morning tide I am the first bird's cry If you are the basket of oranges I am the knife of the sun If you are the stone altar I am the sacrilegious hand If you are the sleeping land I am the green cane If you are the wind's leap I am the buried fire If you are the water's mouth I am the mouth of moss If you are the forest of the clouds I am the axe that parts it If you are the profaned city I am the rain of consecration If you are the yellow mountain I am the red arms of lichen If you are the rising sun I am the road of blood Between going and staying the day wavers Between going and staying the day wavers, in love with its own transparency. The circular afternoon is now a bay where the world in stillness rocks. All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can't be touched. Paper, book, pencil, glass, rest in the shade of their names. Time throbbing in my temples repeats the same unchanging syllable of blood. The light turns the indifferent wall into a ghostly theater of reflections. I find myself in the middle of an eye, watching myself in its blank stare. The moment scatters. Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause. For three points, name the poet and give a personal response... 100528 ... jane octavio pas 100528 ... jane it is perhaps presumptuous of me to compare his poetry to neruda, but as i am fond of neruda, this is certainly complimentary. the line "the moment scatters. motionless" reminds me so much of neruda. the quiet endings to powerful stanzas. i dig it. 100528 ... rt i'm so glad you like it. i thought you would. they are very closely related. my daughter shot a film for her friend, marissa's senior thesis @ sva in mexico. marissa loved octavio paz's poetry and his funeral footage is in her film along with a tribute. +3=52 smmoooth sailing along first place waters. 100528 ... rt new question... On March 17, 2009, the co-author of this book and her colleague Euna Lee were working on a documentary about North Korean defectors who were fleeing the desperate conditions in their homeland. While filming on the Chinese–North Korean border, they were chased down by North Korean soldiers who violently apprehended them. Laura and Euna were charged with trespassing and "hostile acts," and imprisoned by Kim Jong Il's notoriously secretive Communist state. Kept totally apart, they endured months of interrogations and eventually a trial before North Korea's highest court. They were the first Americans ever to be sentenced to twelve years of hard labor in a prison camp in North Korea. When news of the arrest reached Laura's sister, a journalist and co-author, she immediately began a campaign to get her sister released, one that led her from the State Department to the higher echelons of the media world and eventually to the White House. Somewhere Inside reveals for the first time Laura's gripping account of what really happened on the river, her treatment at the hands of North Korean guards, and the deprivations and rounds of harrowing interrogations she endured. She speaks movingly about the emotional toll inflicted on her by her incarceration, including the measures she took to protect her sources and her fears that she might never see her family again. Lisa writes about her unrelenting efforts to secure Laura and Euna's release. Offering insights into the vast media campaign spearheaded on the women's behalf, Lisa also takes us deep into the drama involving people at the highest levels of government, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, Senator John Kerry, and Governor Bill Richardson—intense discussions that entailed strategically balancing the agendas and good intentions of the various players. She also describes her role in the back-and-forth between North Korea's demands and the dramatic rescue by former President Bill Clinton. Though they were thousands of miles apart while Laura was in captivity, the sisters' relationship became a way for the reclusive North Korean government to send messages to the United States government, which helped lead to Laura and Euna's eventual release. Told in the sisters' alternating voices, Somewhere Inside is a timely, inspiring, and page-turning tale of survival set against the canvas of international politics that goes beyond the headlines to reveal the impact on lives engulfed by forces beyond their control. But it is also a window into the unique bond these two sisters have always shared, a bond that sustained them throughout the most horrifying ordeal of their lives. For three points, name the sisters' last name, the book, and give a personal response... 100528 ... jane it's laura and lisa ling "somewhere inside" 100528 ... jane did you read it, K? i can't say the description of it captivates me, but i am not usually one for non-fiction. i will say that i like the idea of the alternating voices - i can see that as a powerful literary device. 100528 ... rt +3=55 i heard their story on npr. it's a harrowing tale, but also a bit funny, especially when chelsea clinton had to teach her father how to appear stoic before the north koreans. new question... Enid and Rebecca's story is the tale of the waning months of their adolescence. Womanhood is just around the corner and the two best friends swear a lot (and brilliantly: get swearing right in dialogue is really difficult and the author's ear is excellent here), talk about boys, their first sexual experiences, what they hate about (many) other people and try not to think too hard about what life holds in store for them. They have developed and very personal and refined code that means that most everyone else who isn't either Enid or Rebecca is dorky, or stupid, or a Satanist, or a pervert, or an idiot. Somehow, as characters, that only ever seems to make them more real and more endearing. The dialogue is cracking throughout -- funny, ironic, authentic. And there is an authenticity about their friendship, borne out of their rounded characterisations, and predicated on the creeping sense that, whilst the two girls have been best friends, like, for ever, the sisterly -- indeed, almost married -- closeness they now feel is inevitably going to end. This is brilliantly invoked in a scene where Rebecca says to Enid, "You tell me every stupid detail of your life but you don't even mention that you're studying for this test [to get into college.]" They both know that they can't remain such extreme intimates -- especially not with Enid's possible (probable) departure -- and the all-too-likely appearance of more permanent boyfriends coming between them. The comic has both an often quite different plotline (and many more subtleties) and a more languorous and ironic tone than its celluloid realisation. Its also a lot sadder: the dusk of the girl's teenage years is beautifully rendered by the author and this book is a highly affecting piece. For three points, name the book, the author/illustrator, and give a personal response... 100529 ... cocoon I have no idea (and Im too lazy to google it) - but it sounds really interesting! Will try and borrow it once someone gives the right answer :D 100529 ... jane i'm going to guess without googling it! and say ghost world by daniel clowes i loved the movie with thora birch & scarlett johannssen (i think i spelled her name wrong) - though quirky and fun as people think it is, it has an extremely bittersweet and dark side to it. 100529 ... rt great guess+3=58 it's one of my favorite films. i love when she's dancing in the beginning. poor scarlet. she should have stayed an indie actress. 100529 what's it to you? who go blather from