blackink_whitepages_ rt Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Current standings; 1. jane = 58 2. lostgirl = 41 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 Question 36 When I read this book I was utterly charmed by the author's voice. Her characters are lonely, uneasy, searching. They are normal people doing normal things that then slide into oddness. There is humour and sadness in them, but there is also an essential feeling of hope. It is impossible for me to review the book without using the work quirky. There it is, dammit, this book is a collection of QUIRKY short stories. In 'I kiss a door' the narrator tells us in just over 4 pages her discovery of a shocking truth about her friend. She has great skill in choosing just the right words to breezily explain something that could have been laboured and over written and made so much more complex. This is her greatest talent I think, her ability to use dialogue or to invite us in to her characters mind and tell us things with deceptive ease. Several times I thought, wow, that's so clever. There is a slight unevenness to the quality of the stories, I thought some much more effective than others, but it is good, it's thought provoking, sad, fun, and witty, which is some balancing act to pull off. And it turns out that she is talented and sparkly and thoroughly deserving of her publications and I am just jealous! For three points, name the book, the author, and give a personal response... She also has a web community project called, "Learning to love you more." What the author said of a film she wrote and directed that was an award winner at Sundance and Cannes.... "Yeah. The limitation was sort of self-inflicted. I became really interested in how much I could show these hard-to-articulate, kind of magical or somewhat ephemeral things through really worldly, grounded ways. And it just seemed like this medium was good for that. I’m interested in general in different ways to approach that thing, these sort of hard-to-talk-about things. Actually, as a result of doing something so narrative, my more abstract pieces have become even more abstract. I’ll be working on a performance and I realize, “Wow, I seem to have just totally let go of narrative.” Whereas I used to really try to have more of a story in my performance. And I guess I feel more freedom in both realms—" 100529 ... jane miranda_july no one belongs here more than you while i am a huge fan of learning_to_love_you_more, i had a hard time watching me and you and everyone we know (i think i got that title right) - she can get a little esoteric and i think i can relate better in words and pictures than in the cinematic realm. 100529 ... rt +3=61 miranda july is an aquired taste. she is an underground artist living on the first floor. Question 37... Actor. Musician. Photographer. And, last and perhaps most intriguingly, poet. The author we are looking for wears plenty of different hats as an artist. His book collects assorted poetry, paintings and photographs ranging from the late 1970s to 2002. Whenever they are from and whatever they are, his creations are vivid and very striking. In both his visual and literary art, he shows a sort of evocative simplicity. His poetry can bring to mind very powerful emotions that are left up to us to imagine ("Tried to say something/that filled my mouth/and longed to rest/in your ear/Don't dare write/it down for fear it'll/become words, just/words..."). He can also bring to mind simpler, more everyday things like arguments, frozen roads and observing the changes in nature. His photography has the delicacy of a painting, with skilful use of light and color -- and the paintings are even better. For example, one is a simple shot of a mossy tree trunk surrounded by dry grass; another is of a leafless tree reflected in a car hood, and yet another is a darkly-lit picture of some little plants on the ground. Most striking is a photograph of electrical cables "intruding" on a grassy spot. There's an intimate, capture-the-moment feel to his photographs, as if you can see these things through his eyes for a moment. The paintings are just as good, such as "Self-Portrait, April". It's a picture of his lips and chin, with all other featured obscured by a collage-like swirl of hazy artwork. The paintings are definitely absorbing, even if you don't understand the story behind them. His evocative, thoughtful artwork is shown in three different forms -- poetry, photographs and paintings -- in the beautiful work. A haunting, remarkable collection of the actor's collage of projects. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... A few words from the author... I enjoy learning. It's a part of my traveler's nature to ask questions and learning is part of me. I have moved a lot… And also, I like to imagine the lives of people that I meet in my travels. Every time I get in a taxi I have to ask the driver how his name is pronounced and where he comes from... That way, I have a story for my collection, and then there are many of them that I use for my characters. It's a positive consequence of many trips; it helps me as an actor because observing, and learning, looking at what happens in the world offers me different points of view from my own. 100530 ... lostgirl Coincidence of Memory Viggo Mortensen another provoking recommendation...poet, artist in every sense… one review of this book stated, “there is honesty and bravery in his words, and the visuals are an added bonus.” 100530 ... rt +3=44 welcome back lostgirl! new question... This book is an excellent example of a relatively new genre, one that considers food as therapy. In the author's case, it’s not just cooking that helps her deal with life’s vicissitudes but writing about food — which she has done for The New York Times since 2004 and before that for The San Francisco Chronicle. Her subtitle is manifested partly in mini-profiles of Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Marcella Hazan, Rachael Ray, Edna Lewis, Leah Chase and her own mother, but more in accounts of her dealings with these women. They are pegs on which she hangs her metaphorical garments, with the purpose of revealing a little more of herself each time one is removed. It’s a funny way to construct what is fundamentally a memoir with recipes. Maybe she didn’t have enough confidence in the intrinsic interest to be found in the tale of being one of five kids (all given names that began with the letter K) of an Italian-American mother and a Norwegian-American father (working “in the middle management battlefield of a national tire company”) who becomes managing editor of the college newspaper at Michigan State University, goes into journalism, works in Washington State, then in Alaska, lands a job in the Bay Area writing about food and finally a plum job at The Times. Along the way she discovers that she’s an alcoholic, and stops drinking; that she’s a lesbian, and marries a woman who gives birth to a daughter they bring up together. We can understand it’s a little difficult, at this stage of her life and career, to justify writing an autobiography. She is not, after all, a household name like some of her subjects. The rationale she gives for doing so is, first, to explore certain attitudes toward domestic cookery chores: “The kitchen was a prison for the wave of feminists that included Hillary Clinton and her Wellesley sisters.” Remarking on Clinton’s victory over Barbara Bush in Family Circle magazine’s war of the cookies, she notes: “The thing that bothered me most . . . wasn’t the inherent sexism. It was that Hillary acted like giving out a good cookie recipe diminished her.” “My heroes,” she adds, “are women who never abandoned the kitchen. They use cooking as a source of strength.” This only begins to sound like special pleading when she over-eggs the cake and claims that “their recipes have helped save their communities and kept families together. They have made political change through their love of food.” In any strong sense, it’s hard to see how these claims can be true; but in the weaker, more reasonable sense, it’s difficult to see why they should apply only to women. What about James Beard, whom she wittily nails by saying “he was a food pimp of the highest order” because he would endorse “almost any food product” and wrote so many cookbooks? “Through it all,” she acknowledges, “he helped a new generation dedicated to what could be grown around them articulate what they were doing in their kitchens.” Hang on. Isn’t this identical to the political achievement with which she (rightly) credits Alice Waters? And what about Michael Bauer, her editor at The Chronicle, or the prolific journalist Michael Pollan? She lauds their achievements; why aren’t they included among her foodie heroes? In fact, hero-worship might not be her thing. She does catty better — thinking she’s going to be jealous of Ruth Reichl; detailing how another former Times restaurant critic and two current writers, one after another, left the newest recruit to pick up the tab; remembering how she incurred the wrath of Marcella Hazan’s husband. So does food provide palliative care for what’s eating this author? Not really. But I’d be interested to read the sequel in 20 years, when she’s got a lot more to write about. For three points, name the book, the author, and give a personal response... When asked If she could describe the perfect meal, she said... "This is always such an impossible question. Sometimes the perfect meal is as simple a roast chicken with a really good salad or even just a bowl of cereal late at night. But I sure would want some cheese, some kind of impeccable pasta, a great piece of pork and whatever vegetables were exactly in season. And some killer dessert. I love dessert." 100531 ... lostgirl Spoon Fed By Kim Severson i love that her heroes are those who use cooking as a source of strength... 100531 ... rt +3=47 go lostgirl! Question 38... This writer is the author of six previous books, including his most recent, Zeitoun, a nonfiction account of a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina and What Is the What, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. This writer is also the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine (The Believer), and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2004, he taught at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. A native of Chicago, he graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children. He did an interview a few weeks ago, on The New Yorker website, that covered a lot of the themes of the new book, I chose questions from those sent by readers that didn't overlap too much with that interview.I also grouped them according to similar subject matter. Many of them cover the process of publishing a book like this through McSweeney's. Q: How's the family? I don't want to pry too much, but we did come to know your family with your first book, so it's natural to wonder how everyone's doing. Did you finally get a dog? Melati Kaye Bangalore, India A: People have been really good to us. I think generally as humans we understand or assume that the world is full of generous and huge-hearted people, but you don't really know it first-hand until you get letters from strangers who are truly concerned about the welfare of your family. It just knocks you over, how kind people are. A lot of people share their own family stories with me, and man, some of these letters… well, every story is sadder than the last. There were a lot of times over the last couple years when these letters, from people I might never meet, really gave us strength. A lot of people, total strangers, wrote extremely kind notes after my sister died last year, and that meant a lot to us. It was such a hard year. There are times when my brothers and I just look around and can't believe there's only three of us left. You really can't do the math, or you'd lose your mind. But we're doing well. Bill's in D.C. writing and consulting, and Toph will be a sophomore in college this fall, and we're happy to be back in California. No dog yet, though. Q: I read about this 826 Valencia tutoring thing. What's the story — what are you guys teaching, who are the kids, how old are they, do you know what you're doing, etc? I thought these kids today only wanted to play Crazy Taxi. Regan Brooks Burlington, Vermont A: The kids are all over the map, age-wise, and in terms of their needs, and that makes it really different every day. Our days are strange sometimes, where we're doing a field trip with first graders in the morning — they play in the pirate store and we tell them stories in costume (usually this guy Ian dressed up as a pirate), and then they put together a booklet relating to their curriculum — and in the afternoon we've got drop-ins working on papers, and right after that our classes start. So we start with twenty 6- and 7-year-olds trying to find out if Ian's real, asking where his treasure is, pulling on his eyepatch, all that, and we end with fifteen 12-year-olds learning advanced comic-making techniques. It's a strange place sometimes, but we knew it would have to be strange, to be a place kids would come on their own. I didn't answer the other question yet. No, I hadn't taught anyone, besides my brother, since I was a camp counselor. We're focusing on 18-and-under students because that's where the need's the greatest, basically. The college kids in San Francisco are pretty well-served, comparatively. But obviously the whole story is told better on the 826 website. Q: Do you edit as you write? How many drafts did you go through, and how many readers did you trust to give you feedback? When do you know you're done? A: I do all of those things. I write in huge bursts, and then go back and fiddle. I'm not very regular, in terms of routine. There are weeks when I write nothing, and weeks when I write 10 hours a day. I usually go through about 15-20 drafts on anything I do, printing it every time, making marks, inputting the marks, printing it again, reading it in a different place — different room, bus, beach, whatever. When the pages seem to make some sense, I give them to someone else, at which point they tell me it makes no sense. Then I go back and do ten more drafts. I always think I know when I'm done, but I'm only sure I'm done when someone else tells me I'm done. After 20 drafts, you're just not the best judge of your own work. Q: This is an easy one, but I'm always interested in what other writers are reading. Any other new books you'd recommend? John Mahoney Berkeley, California I've been a little out of it for a while, because I've been reading lots of old stuff about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. (I recommend those.) As for newer stuff: Tom Vanderbilt wrote a book called Survival City that just came out, and it's fantastic — about the physical remnants of the Cold War. That should be read by everyone, for the same reasons Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is being widely read. Have you read Javier Marias? I've just been discovering him, and he's just incredible. There's also that book I mentioned earlier, Hobo by Eddy Joe Cotton, that's one of the most electric things I've read in years. One of our tutors at 826 Valencia, Stephen Elliot, wrote a book called A Life Without Consequences that should be read, especially by anyone who loves JT LeRoy's stuff. Arthur Bradford's Dogwalker is out in paperback soon, and I'd recommend that book to anyone. Lydia Davis's Samuel Johnson Is Indignant is out soon in paperback, too. And A.M. Homes and Gabe Hudson have collections coming out in September, and those guys are doing insanely good work. Can't believe how many really huge, meaty stories Homes has in that book. And I've heard the very best things about Eugenides's new book, Middlesex, if you'll take a second-hand recommendation — I haven't read it yet. There's just a ton of great stuff out there right now and in the next few months. Rick Moody's The Black Veil is brilliant. Anyone who actually reads it will know this. People like Moody, who really reach and take great risks, should be rewarded, rather than punished (and he was, by some) for whatever shortcomings people see in their work. It's a strange time in books, you know, where skilled experimentation is not only discouraged, it's being bullied completely out of the arena. And that just can't be tolerated. Moody is obviously a guy with virtuosic talent, so why not give him a little space? Not that Moody's work is all that similar, but what would happen if Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Millhauser or even Dos Passos debuted today? They'd all be called pretentious or fussy or cold. It's scary to think of the beating they'd get. It's time, I think, that the critical community embrace the idea of pluralism in books — where very different approaches can co-exist, and where artistic diversity is honored, and where great risks are encouraged. If the risk pays off, give them credit; if it doesn't, certainly you can't come down harder than you would on someone who's not even making an effort to expand the boundaries of the form. (I'm babbling all this, by the way, while admitting that my new book isn't nearly as daring as Moody's, or Lydia Davis's last book, or Danielewski's, or anywhere near the level of anything by Ann Carson. With You Shall Know Our Velocity, I had a straightforward story to tell, and did it in a fairly straightforward way.) For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100531 ... jane it's dave eggers! so weird - i just got home from my mom's house - she had just watched "away we go" and we agreed that eggers' name sounded familiar - and looked him up online at her house ... the collective_unconscious is working in mysterious ways today. 100531 ... rt +3=64 that's trippy about the connection between the film and the game. i love it when that happens... Question 39 This author was a contributing editor for Public Radio International’s This American Life from 1996-2008, where she produced numerous commentaries and documentaries and toured the country in many of the program’s live shows. She was one of the original contributors to McSweeney’s, also participating in many of the quarterly’s readings and shows. She has been a columnist for Salon.com, Time and San Francisco Weekly and continues to write occasional essays for the opinion page of the New York Times. She has made numerous appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She is the voice of teen superhero Violet Parr in Brad Bird’s Academy Award-winning The Incredibles, a Pixar Animation Studios film. She is the president of the board of 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring and writing center for students aged 6-18 in Brooklyn. Here is an excerpt from her book published in 2005... One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. There they were — John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz — in tune and in the flesh. The men who murdered Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called "Everybody's Got the Right to Be Happy," a song I cheerfully hummed walking back to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying. Not that I came all the way from New York City just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential assassins. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires because of the man who brought one of those presidents back to life. I was there to visit Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial. A nauseating four-hour bus ride from the Port Authority terminal just to see the room where some patriotic chiseler came up with a marble statue? For some reason, none of my friends wanted to come with. Because I had to stay overnight and this being New England, the only place to stay was a bed-and-breakfast. It was a lovely old country mansion operated by amiable people. That said, I am not a bed-and-breakfast person. I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're "quaint," a polite way of saying "no TV." They are "romantic," i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're "cozy," meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control. The real reason bed-and-breakfasts make me nervous is breakfast. As if it's not queasy enough to stay in a stranger's home and sleep in a bed bedecked with nineteen pillows. In the morning, the usually cornflake-consuming, wheat-intolerant guest is served floury baked goods on plates so fancy any normal person would keep them locked in the china cabinet even if Queen Victoria herself rose from the dead and showed up for tea. The guest, normally a silent morning reader of newspapers, is expected to chat with the other strangers staying in the strangers' home. At my Berkshires bed-and-breakfast, I am seated at a table with one middle-aged Englishman and an elderly couple from Greenwich, Connecticut. The three of them make small talk about golf, the weather, and the room's chandeliers, one of which, apparently, is Venetian. I cannot think of a thing to say to these people. Seated at the head of the table, I am the black hole of breakfast, a silent void of gloom sucking the sunshine out of their neighborly New England day. But that is not the kind of girl my mother raised me to be. I consider asking the Connecticut couple if they had ever run into Jack Paar, who I heard had retired near where they live, but I look like I was born after Paar quit hosting The Tonight Show (because I was) and so I'd have to explain how much I like watching tapes of old programs at the Museum of Television and Radio and I don't want to get too personal. It seems that all three of them attended a Boston Pops concert at Tanglewood the previous evening, and they chat about the conductor. This, I think, is my in. I, too, enjoy being entertained. Relieved to have something, anything, to say, I pipe up, "I went to the Berkshire Theatre Festival last night." "Oh, did you see Peter Pan?" the woman asks. "No," I say."Assassins!" "What's that?" wonders the Englishman. To make up for the fact that I've been clammed up and moping I speak too fast, merrily chirping, "It's the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president." "Oh," remarks Mr. Connecticut. "How was it?" "Oh my god," I gush. "Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush." Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is "too personal," but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln. Now, a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota. I continue. "But the main thing that surprised me was how romantic Assassins was." "Romantic?" sneers a skeptic. "Totally," I rebut. "There's a very tender love scene between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz." Blank stares. "You know. He was the anarchist who killed McKinley. Buffalo? 1901? Anyway, the authorities initially suspected Goldman had helped him, but all it was was that he had heard her speak a couple of times about sticking it to The Man. He'd met her, but she wasn't his co-conspirator. Anyway, the play dramatizes the moment they meet. He stops her on the street to tell her that he loves her. The guy who played Czolgosz was wonderful. He had this smoldering Eastern European accent. Actually, he sounded a lot like Dracula — but in a good way, if you know what I mean." (They don't.) "He told her, 'Miss Goldman, I am in love with you.' She answered that she didn't have time to be in love with him. Which was cute. But, this was my one misgiving about the performance, I thought that the woman playing Goldman was too ladylike, too much of a wallflower. Wasn't Emma Goldman loud and brash and all gung ho? Here was a woman whose words inspired a guy to kill a president. And come to think of it, one of her old boyfriends shot the industrialist Henry Frick. Maybe I'm too swayed by the way Maureen Stapleton played Goldman in the film Reds. She was so bossy! And remember Stapleton in that Woody Allen movie, Interiors? Geraldine Page is all beige this and bland that so her husband divorces her and hooks up with noisy, klutzy Maureen Stapleton, who laughs too loud and smashes pottery and wears a blood-red dress to symbolize that she is Alive, capital A. Wait. I lost my train of thought. Where was I?" Englishman: "I believe Dracula was in love with Maureen Stapleton." "Oh, right. I haven't even mentioned the most touching part. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley sing this duet, a love song to Charles Manson and Jodie Foster. Hinckley and Squeaky sang that they would do anything for Charlie Manson and Jodie Foster. And I really believed them! Squeaky's like, 'I would crawl belly-deep through hell,' and Hinckley's all, 'Baby, I'd die for you.' It was adorable." Mr. Connecticut looks at his watch and I simultaneously realize that I've said way too much and that saying way too much means I might miss my bus back home. And I really want to go home. I yell, "Nice meeting you!" and nearly knock down the teapot collection in my rush to get away from them. Though before I can leave, I have to settle up my bill with the friendly B&B owner. His first name? Hinckley. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100601 ... lostgirl Sarah Vowell Assassination Vacation murder of presidents and funny but irreverent historical tourism written with remarkable honesty? sounds much more interesting than regular old American history! 100601 ... rt +3=50 lostgirl! the voice, the delivery, the intelligence...all combine to make her one of the most intriguing media personalities i have heard. besides, "the incredibles" would not have been the same without her quirky vocal talents. Question 40 Sam Dent, the fictional small upstate New York town that is the backdrop for the novel presented here, will remind readers of the working-class communities portrayed in his last several books, "Continental Drift," "Success Stories" and "Affliction." It's an impoverished town, where only the summer and winter people from New York, who own vacation homes, have any money or resources. The local people struggle to make ends meet, working at part-time jobs and living in trailers and old disheveled houses. The men drink too much, and the women seem worn down by housework and squabbling children. Everybody knows everybody else. What happens one cold winter day will forever change the lives of the people of Sam Dent: on the way to school one morning, the local school bus swerves off the road, tumbling down a ravine and sinking into an ice-covered sand pit. Fourteen children are killed; others are severely crippled. "For us," says a father who lost his children in the accident, "there was life, true life, real life, no matter how bad it had seemed, before the accident, and nothing that came after the accident resembled it in any important way. So, for us, it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sand pit, and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone." In relating the story of Sam Dent, the author uses the school bus accident as a catalyst for illuminating the lives of the town's citizens. It's as though he has cast a large stone into a quiet pond, then minutely charted the shape and size of the ripples sent out in successive waves. His portrait is rendered through the voices of four people whose lives have been permanently altered by the accident: Dolores Driscoll, the perky, well-meaning bus driver, who says she swerved the vehicle to avoid hitting a small dog; Billy Ansel, a Vietnam veteran and widower, who loses his two beloved children in the accident; Mitchell Stephens, a high-powered New York laywer, who is determined to sue the state for negligence in the children's deaths, and Nicole Burnell, a beautiful 14-year-old student confined to a wheelchair since the accident. Through their first-person reminiscences, he creates a mosaic like study of the ways in which a community copes with tragedy. For all the people involved, the accident creates a Maginot line in their lives, forever dividing the past from the present and the future. Many attempt to deny what happened: they move away from Sam Dent to try to begin new lives in other towns; they lose themselves in drink and drugs; they embrace the church's talk of life everlasting. Others try to assign blame. Susceptible to the arguments of Stephens and other out-of-town lawyers, they grope around for villains: the state, the town, the school district, whoever might have legislated stronger guard rails on the road, drained the fatal sand pit or hired more experienced bus drivers. In the end, of course, there is no one person or agency responsible for the accident. The accident is just that -- an accident, one of those frighteningly random events that occasionally disrupt the even flow of daily life, underscoring the innate precariousness of life, our susceptibility to grief and loss and hurt. This has been a favorite theme of his recent fiction, and in this book he does a smoothly professional job of developing it while at the same time giving the reader a finely observed portrait of small-town life. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... The novel has been adapted into an award-winning 1997 film of the same name by Canadian director Atom Egoyan. 100601 ... lostgirl The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks this looks slightly like a 'downer' with tragedy hitting a community in such a way, especially with kids. however, for those who are comfortable with death as an integral part of life, the ripple effect of such an even across the human dynamic could be a literary treat. not sure yet about this one. 100601 ... typogirl (event) not even. ugh. 100601 ... rt +3=53 lostgirl! his book "affiction" is also highly recommended. the film version features one of nick nolte's most memorable roles...especially when he yanks out his bad tooth with a pair of pliers. Question 41 This poet was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well driller and sometime-prospector. She received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, Ryan has lived in Marin County. Her partner of 30 years is Carol Adair. For more than 30 years, she limited her professional responsibilities to the part-time teaching of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., thus leaving much of her life free for "a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle maunderings poets feed upon." She said at one point that she has never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview in The Christian Science Monitor, she noted, "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy." In her poems she enjoys re-examining the beauty of everyday phrases and mining the cracks in common human experience. Unlike many poets writing today, she seldom writes in the first person. She has said, "I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the impersonal." In her poem "Hide and Seek," for instance, she describes the feelings of the person hiding without ever saying, "I am hiding": It’s hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It’s hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It’s like some form of skin’s developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear. She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader: "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading." Her poems are characterized by the deft use of unusual kinds of slant and internal rhyming–which she has referred to as "recombinant rhyme"–in combination with strong, exact rhymes and even puns. The poems are peppered with wit and philosophical questioning and rely on short lines, often no more than two to three words each. She has said of her ascetic preferences, "An almost empty suitcase–that’s what I want my poems to be. A few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying." Because her craft is both exacting and playfully elastic, it is possible for both readers who like formal poems and readers who like free verse to find her work rewarding. John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said: "Halfway into one of her poems, one is ready for either a joke or a profundity; typically it ends in both. Before we know it the poem arrives at some unexpected, deep insight that likely will alter forever the way we see that thing." She has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are: "Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends" (1983), "Strangely Marked Metal" (Copper Beech, 1985), "Flamingo Watching" (Copper Beech, 1994), "Elephant Rocks" (Grove Press,1996), "Say Uncle" (Grove Press, 2000), "Believe It or Not!" (2002, Jungle Garden Press, edition of 125 copies), and "The Niagara River" (Grove Press, 2005). Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Her poems have been widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is current Poet Laureate. For three points, name the poet and give a personal response... Her poem, "shark's Teeth" Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from the small shark's-tooth shaped fragments of rest angled in it. An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark. Sometimes a bit of a tail or fin can still be sensed in parks. 100602 ... lostgirl its Kay Ryan... i read about ten of them...each one was better than the next. here's one that grabbed my attention: The Fabric of Life It is very stretchy. We know that, even if many details remain sketchy. It is complexly woven. That much too has pretty well been proven. We are loath to continue our lessons which consist of slaps as sharp and dispersed as bee stings from a smashed nest when any strand snaps— hurts working far past the locus of rupture, attacking threads far beyond anything we would have said connects. 100602 ... lostgirl and also this very compelling quote: “What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe.” ~Kay Ryan 100602 ... rt go lostgirl! +3=56 glad to know you are digging this poet. she is sensual and concise. Question 42 The Holocaust becomes a breathtaking personal drama, in the midst of a vast cataclysm, in this big and questing novel with autobiographical elements and a fearless determination to explore a particular human dimension of a historical nightmare. The novel speaks through the voice of the author's alter ego, a polite young Tidewater Virginian called Stingo who comes to New York in 1947 in the hopes of being a writer. With a small legacy that will enable him to devote himself to writing, Stingo lands in a boarding house in deepest Brooklyn. There he befriends an irresistible character named Nathan Landau, a compelling but deeply disturbed Jewish intellectual who has nursed back to health a beautiful Polish war victim, Sophie Zawistowska, who is now his lover. Stingo revels in his time with his new friends but gradually becomes aware of the shadows that surround them. Their relationship is tormented, even violent. Sophie begins to describe to Stingo her experiences during the war, when — as a Polish Catholic, the daughter of a law professor and the married mother of two — she was persecuted with all the viciousness the Nazis could muster. Her husband and father were murdered, and she and her children were sent to Auschwitz. Sophie lived through it, amazingly, but only in the technical sense, an act of survival that begins with an awful decision she was forced to make. With her unstable lover, she now waits for a fate that seems, to Stingo, as inevitable as it is tragic. The novel garnered the author commercial success and won prizes. It rose to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, won the 1980 American Book Award for fiction and was made into a successful movie, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and an opera by the English composer Nicholas Maw. However, the project aroused controversy. The initial reviews were mixed. Some critics seemed to find the complexity of the narrative troubling. But in time, critics focused on two particular objections. One was that the Holocaust so surpassed moral comprehension that it could not be written about at all; the only appropriate response was silence. The other was that even though non-Jews had also been victims of the death camps, for the author to write about one of them, a Polish Catholic, was to diminish the true horror of the event, whose primary purpose, these critics pointed out, was the destruction of European Jewry. He stood his ground. To the criticism that the Holocaust was beyond art, he told an interviewer that however evil the Nazis were, they were neither demons nor extraterrestrials but ordinary men who committed monumental acts of barbarism. To the comment that he was wrong to write about a non-Jew, his response, in an Op-Ed essay in The Times, was that the Holocaust had transcended anti-Semitism, that “its ultimate depravity lay in the fact that it was anti-human,” he wrote. “Anti-life.” The book is a rare event in late-20th-century American fiction — a bold, substantial novel with serious themes that also tells a riveting story. The author meditates frequently on the historical dimension of the Holocaust and how such a thing could happen, letting the matter resonate with his own knowledge of oppression that occurred in the American South. The characters are powerfully and engagingly drawn, often with wit and humor, and the novel speaks with great humanity. It belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces. For three points, name the author, the book, and give a personal response... 100602 ... jane sophie's choice william styron 100602 ... jane as fascinated as i am with the holocaust as a historical event, i find it sometimes difficult to process - had some experiences when i was younger and reading about the holocaust and having nightmares... 100602 ... rt go jane! +3 =67 Question 43 This author, Pulitizer prize winner for fiction in 2000, wrote a novel in 2003 which is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision. It is a book about two generations of the Ganguli family, and at the same time it is a novel about exile and its discontents, a novel that is as affecting in its Chekhovian exploration of fathers and sons, parents and children, as it is resonant in its exploration of what is acquired and lost by immigrants and their children in pursuit of the American Dream. It begins in Boston in 1968, with the birth of a boy named Gogol Ganguli. Gogol comes by his name through a series of random accidents and misunderstandings that will come to represent for him the unexpected trajectory of his family's life. When a letter from his great-grandmother, suggesting a formal Indian name for him, fails to arrive from India, his father, Ashoke, impulsively settles on the name of Gogol, after the famous Russian writer whose book of short stories helped save his life many years ago in India. He had been reading the book when the train he was traveling on derailed; rescuers spotted him only because they saw a page of the book flutter from his hands in the dark. It was on that same train that Ashoke met a stranger, who gave him the advice that would change his life: ''Do yourself a favor,'' the man said. ''Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.'' That is how Ashoke came to be a doctoral candidate in engineering in Boston, and that is how his new wife, Ashima -- whom he married in an arranged ceremony -- came to start a new life in a cold, gray city in New England. Ashima tries to hide her disappointment when she first sees the tiny three-room apartment that is their home: so different, she thinks, from the homes she remembers from American movies like ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''The Seven-Year Itch.'' She is terrified at the prospect of raising a child ''in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.'' And yet slowly, cautiously, the Gangulis make their way in America. Ashoke becomes a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ashima has a second child whom they name Sonali (soon to be called Sonia). And the family moves to the suburbs, buying a new house in a development. ''Their garage, like every other, contains shovels and pruning shears and a sled,'' the author writes. ''They purchase a barbecue for tandoori on the porch in summer. Each step, each acquisition, no matter how small, involves deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends. Was there a difference between a plastic rake and a metal one? Which was preferable, a live Christmas tree or an artificial one? They learn to roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne, at Thanksgiving, to nail a wreath to their door in December, to wrap woolen scarves around snow men, to color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter and hide them around the house.'' But while their house on Pemberton Road looks like all the other houses on the street, while the Ganguli children take bologna and roast beef sandwiches to school like all their friends, the family never feels quite at home in the cozy suburb. News of their relatives in India comes through the mail or noisily by phone in the middle of the night, and there is always the sense of making do and making substitutions. Newly made Bengali friends fill in as aunts and uncles at holiday celebrations; Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts and onions are mixed together to approximate a favorite Calcutta snack. Being a foreigner, Ashima thinks ''is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.'' ''It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what has once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.'' Her son, Gogol, too, feels like a perennial outsider. In his youth he tries to distance himself from his Indian roots: he does not hang out with other Indian-American students, does not think of India as home, as his parents and their friends do, but as ''India,'' like his American friends. Yet at the same time he often feels a sense of detachment, a slight sense of apartness. Gogol realizes, while living with a girlfriend named Maxine, that she and her well-to-do parents possess a confidence and sense of familial continuity that he and his parents will never possess. When he later begins dating a Bengali woman whom he has known since childhood, he embraces their shared ambivalence about their cultural heritage even as he realizes that their alliance is ''fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire'' on the part of their families. The author uses her unerring eye for detail to annotate their emotional lives: Ashoke's hatred of waste, which makes him complain ''if a kettle had been filled with too much water;'' Ashima's meticulous upkeep of three address books, which contain the names of all the Bengalis she and her husband have known over the years. In chronicling more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, the author has not only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait, she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100603 ... lostgirl The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri we take so much for granted, don't we? this looks like it would be a look into a life story that not many could imagine...always feeling~being the outsider, the one not fitting in; for most of us it lasts for a period or a phase. for them it is a lifetime. 100603 ... rt +3=59 lostgirl is now only 3 points behind jane... Question 44... In the restaurant kingdom, no job ranks lower than dishwasher. It requires virtually no skill (tons of stamina and work ethic, true, but they don't call it "unskilled labor" for nothing) or a presentable appearance. The dishwasher is typically the last guy out of the building after closing; works elbow deep in soggy leftovers; is treated like the grunt by everyone at the restaurant, including the bussers; and makes the least money. All this is just fine with the author of a zine he started; in fact, for many years, this is what helped to make washing dishes—or "pearl diving," to use the professional lingo—his ideal job. The author, now 40 and living in Amsterdam, first washed dishes at a Jack in the Box after high school. His boss made him scrub pots as punishment for his bad attitude, but it was like throwing Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch: He didn't have to talk to anybody while he washed dishes, and he could zone out and listen to the radio, away from the micromanaging eye of the boss. "This ain't so bad," he remembers thinking. "Not bad at all." One dishwashing gig led to another, and lured by the ease with which one could quit one gig and land another, he made it his mission to wash dishes in every state in the country. Often hitchhiking place to place or sleeping in his van, he spent a decade in dishpits at communes, casinos, oil rigs, retirement homes, greasy spoons, the Lawrence Welk resort in Branson, a ski resort in Vermont, and a fish cannery in Alaska. As soon as he'd tire of a gig, he'd walk away and move on to the next pile of dishes. He's just published a rollicking new memoir (Harper Perennial Press). A few years into his quest to wash dishes for pay in all 50 states, this author realized that what he was really doing was hunting for a town to call home. With his vagabond's satisfaction in working as little as possible and quitting jobs at a moment's notice, and his working-class disdain for bosses, he definitely wasn't after a career. But by the late '90s, his zine was a cult phenomenon, and he himself a folk hero and contributor to radio's This American Life. An interview from Pittsburgh's City Paper... During a 2000-01 stint in Pittsburgh, dishing at Chatham College and the East End Food Co-op, he nearly bought a house here. Instead, the San Francisco native abandoned his 12-year quest, left the road, got married and moved to Europe. What will fans of your zine find new in the book? I've become a better writer. At the time I was just writing it with a pen on a piece of paper and then photocopying it and sending it to some friends -- not giving any second thought about it. Who influences your writing? I mention in the book when I read 26 Mark Twain books in a row. Huge influence. When I discovered Bukowski, that was obviously a huge influence: a guy writing books about his everyday life, [about] his post-office job. Raymond Carver -- how simple he can keep things and yet tell a story so well. Why did you start washing dishes? I couldn't get jobs where I needed experience, or that I needed education for. Yet taking an undesirable job gave you leverage. As loathsome as the job seems to many people, among my friends it was empowering to do the crap work nobody else wants to do, and sort of remain anonymous or not take it too seriously. Just putting in your hours and leaving at the end of the day, and picking up your check. Is there a paradox in hating work but taking pride in your trade? I try to address that paradox with the epigrams: Dishwashers are "quintessential dirty workers," essentially nonpersons [writes sociologist Gary Alan Fine], and yet, [writes George Orwell,] as "low as they are, they have a kind of pride." I had my own pride. I wasn't really proud, like, "I'm working for this corporation, or I'm working for this capitalist restaurateur -- great! I'm so glad to wash this guy's dishes!" What do you think about the Wal-Mart-led trend to call employees "team members" or "associates"? It's sickening. It's double-speak: They're still the employees, and they still will be laid off. It's kind of sad that it works, apparently. It does have some effect on making people think they're part of a team. Whereas you were a complete free agent. I did have the luxury of knowing I wasn't sticking around. If I was 19 years old and had two kids and needed a steady paycheck, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did. Why did you almost settle in Pittsburgh? I assessed every place I've been in the country and decided that Pittsburgh was the place for me. Especially with the good quality of living, and I liked the people there, and I loved the hills and the geography; I liked the size. And the price of the houses was the clincher. What happened? I never did buy a house. Then I did have my bike accident. Laying there at [West] Penn Hospital, under the flood lamps, with a concussion, and whatever drugs they put in me, and the doctors picking the gravel out of my face, in that moment I really did have to wonder what I was doing with my life. I decided to finish dishwashing, which took me out of Pittsburgh again. What's Amsterdam like? We live on [a] square that's very much sort of the stuff that small [American] Southern towns used to have, with the butcher and the baker. There's maybe 20 businesses on the square, and it's the butcher, baker, green-grocer, hair salon, drug store, et cetera et cetera -- fish monger, and a bike shop. We like it a lot here. Do Europeans view work differently? When we first got here, my wife and I both trained at a bike shop in the middle of the city. You can nearly walk by it without noticing that there's even a bike shop there. An excerpt from the book... CHAPTER ONE WINE O'CLOCK A bead of sweat rolled from my forehead, down my nose and into the greasy orange sink water. I wiped my face with my apron, lifted my baseball cap to cool my head and sighed. As I picked at the food dregs that had coagulated from the sink water onto my arm hairs, I surveyed my domain—the dishpit. It was a mess. The counters were covered with the remains of what, not long before, had been meals. But the dishmachine stood empty. No dirty dishes were in sight. No one yelled: “More plates!” or “Silver! We need silverware!” For the first time in hours, a calm settled over my dishroom. Having successfully beaten back the bulk of the dinner rush, I was caught up and it felt good. Time for another go-round. On my way to the waitress station, I grabbed an empty bus tub and twirled it on my middle finger—a trick I’d perfected while working at a bagel shop in New Mexico. I lowered the spinning tub from my finger to my cap—a new trick I’d yet to perfect. The tub sputtered from my head and plummeted into the full bus tub that awaited me. A couple plates smashed to the floor. The crash rang throughout the restaurant and was followed by a shocked hush from employees and customers alike. I, too, observed the moment of silence for the departed plates. But I wasn’t sad to see them go. If dishes had to break—and they did have to—then it was best to break the dirty ones rather than the plates I’d already worked to clean. In some Illinois cemetery, Josephine Cochrane was spinning in her grave. She was the 1880s socialite who’d grown fed up by her servants breaking her precious china as they washed it by hand. Cochrane presumed that by reducing the handling, there’d be far less breakage. So she invented the motorized dishwashing machine. Her contraption became an instant hit with large restaurants and hotels in Chicago. Even the machine I was using at this place—a Hobart—was a direct descendent of Cochrane’s. But now, more than a century since the introduction of her innovation, human dishwashers—particularly this one—were just as cavalier about dish breakage as they’d been back in Cochrane’s day. As I looked down at the wreckage at my feet, the boss-guy charged around the corner wide-eyed with his hand clutched to his chest as if he’d been shot. “Plates fell,” I said. “Again?” he sighed. “Try to be more careful, Dave.” Six weeks earlier, when a fellow dish dog had tipped me off about this gig—an Austrian-themed inn at a ski area in Vermont’s Green Mountains that came complete with room and board—I was immediately intrigued. I’d pictured myself isolated in the mountains and hibernating through the winter at this job while getting caught up with my reading, saving up some money and crossing yet another American state off my list. When I called about the job from Wisconsin, the boss-guy assumed that if I wanted to come all that way to dish in a ski area, then I must’ve been a ski nut. “No,” I told him. “Actually I don’t ski.” That made him suspicious. He then asked, “Do you have long hair?” “Not anymore,” I said. “Okay,” he said. “If you can get here by next week, the job’s yours.” I rode the bus most of the way and hitchhiked the rest and when I arrived, the boss was no longer suspicious. I was willing to dish and that was enough for him. In fact, he gave so little thought to me that by the second day, he started calling me by the wrong name. “And Dave, clean it up,” he said, looking at the broken plates on the floor. I’d never bothered to correct him. “All right,” I said. When he turned and walked back to the dining room, I kicked the debris under the counter and headed back to the dishpit with the full bus tub. While unloading the dirty dishes, I mined for treasure in the Bus Tub Buffet. The first find was fool’s gold—a half-eaten schnitzel. I couldn’t blame the diner who’d left the second half uneaten. It was the place’s specialty, but it wasn’t very special. I snobbishly passed on it as well and continued excavating. I unearthed more dishes and then struck pay dirt: some garlic bread and remnants of crème brulée. I smeared the crème brulée on the garlic bread and scarfed it down. Scrumptious, said my taste buds. Queasy, countered my stomach. The gut had a point. Bus Tub Buffet? More like Bus Tub Roulette: you win some, you lose some. So far I was losing. As I was guzzling water from the tap, the call went up in the adjacent kitchen: “Wine o’clock! Wine o’clock!” I looked at the clock. Indeed, it was already wine o’clock. Dick, one of the cooks, entered the dishpit with a grin on his face and a jar in each hand. He handed me a jar and held up the other in a toast. “Wine o’clock,” he said. “Wine o’clock,” I repeated. We clinked jars and then downed their cooking sherry contents. Wine o’clock was eight o’clock—an hour before closing time and an occasion observed by the cooks with rounds of sherry. Closing time—nine o’clock—was celebrated in a similar fashion except with shouts of “Five o’clock! Five o’clock!” and the consumption of Five O’Clock brand vodka. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100603 ... jane dishwasher by pete jordan 100603 ... jane sounds like an awesome read - i'll have to pick it up. i like the idea of living out anthropological experiment. 100603 ... rt sorry about stating lostgirl was 3 points behind...brain glitch! +3=70 for jane, which gives her an 11 point lead. 70-59. Question 45 This writer was born in 1947 to a fiction writer and a book critic. In first grade she learned to read English. In second grade (in Austria) she learned to read German. Her books include a novel, The End of the Story (1995), four full-length story collections—Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002), Almost No Memory (1997), and Break It Down (1986)—and several small-press and limited-edition volumes. Her writing defies generic classification. Some of her fiction could just as easily be called essay or poetry. Many of her stories are extremely short. Her narrators are often given a drastically narrow scope but an extremely sharp focus. Their observations might be described as dispassionate—sometimes humorously so—and for this reason the considerable emotional component of her stories is often subtextual. She works as a translator of French literature and philosophy, and is well known for her translation of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, which earned her wide critical acclaim. Her other translations include books by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Michel Leiris. She has won many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. On hiatus from teaching at SUNY Albany, she lives and works in upstate New York. Most of her works are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. Her pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses. One can read a large portion of her work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. Her latest book of collected stories will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal. Her tone is dancelike, insouciant, and often very funny. Her work contains many piquant details. The smallest pieces are sometimes sweet jeux d’esprit, and are like the captions you might encounter at a contemporary art installation. What deepens the work, and moves it from game to drama, is that this brisk, almost naïve tone is often revealed to be a mask, a public fiction, behind which a person is flinching. What is omitted or suppressed becomes highly charged, and the hunger strike of the spare, lucid words on the page can take on a desperate aspect. Selfishness, in every sense of the word, is her real theme. Her work raises the interesting question of how much a fictional story about a fictional self can shed, and still remain a story about a vivid self. The answer is almost everything. The stories assemble an intellectual and emotional autobiography; a sensibility is strongly confessed. “We know we are very special,” she writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” This restless business of “trying to find out” is precisely what constitutes the specialty of this writer. Excerpts from Varieties of Disturbance Chapter One A Man from Her Past I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man "Franz"! "Franz" is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh. Dog and Me An ant can look up at you, too, and even threaten you with its arms. Of course, my dog does not know I am human, he sees me as dog, though I do not leap up at a fence. I am a strong dog. But I do not leave my mouth hanging open when I walk along. Even on a hot day, I do not leave my tongue hanging out. But I bark at him: "No! No!" Enlightened I don't know if I can remain friends with her. I've thought and thought about it-she'll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn't like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it's not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend. The Good Taste Contest The husband and wife were competing in a Good Taste Contest judged by a jury of their peers, men and women of good taste, including a fabric designer, a rare-book dealer, a pastry cook, and a librarian. The wife was judged to have better taste in furniture, especially antique furniture. The husband was judged to have overall poor taste in lighting fixtures, tableware, and glassware. The wife was judged to have indifferent taste in window treatments, but the husband and wife both were judged to have good taste in floor coverings, bed linen, bath linen, large appliances, and small appliances. The husband was felt to have good taste in carpets, but only fair taste in upholstery fabrics. The husband was felt to have very good taste in both food and alcoholic beverages, while the wife had inconsistently good to poor taste in food. The husband had better taste in clothes than the wife though inconsistent taste in perfumes and colognes. While both husband and wife were judged to have no more than fair taste in garden design, they were judged to have good taste in number and variety of evergreens. The husband was felt to have excellent taste in roses but poor taste in bulbs. The wife was felt to have better taste in bulbs and generally good taste in shade plantings with the exception of hostas. The husband's taste was felt to be good in garden furniture but only fair in ornamental planters. The wife's taste was judged consistently poor in garden statuary. After a brief discussion, the judges gave the decision to the husband for his higher overall points score. Collaboration with Fly I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe. For three points, name the author and give a personal response... 100604 ... lostgirl Lydia Davis! i think i might really enjoy her short stories; as from what i have seen of her work, she writes about real-life situations (in small quirky doses) in equally unexpected ways. one review stated that any aspiring writer would do well to study and enjoy her work. another said “read, study, laugh, and learn." bring it on... 100604 ... rt lostgirl! +3=62 Question 46 It's hard to get through the first chapters of this book. The problem is, you keep laughing out loud, losing your place, starting again, then stopping because you're tempted to call your friends and read them long sections of the assured, hilarious prose. Here's how it begins... ''My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. . . . I have many many girls, believe me, and they all have a different name for me. One dubs me Baby, not because I am a baby, but because she attends to me. Another dubs me All Night. Do you want to know why? . . . I have a miniature brother who dubs me Alli. I do not dig this name very much, but I dig him very much, so O.K., I permit him to dub me Alli. As for his name, it is Little Igor, but Father dubs him Clumsy One, because he is always promenading into things. It was only four days previous that he made his eye blue from a mismanagement with a brick wall.'' Not since Anthony Burgess's novel ''A Clockwork Orange'' has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio. But if Burgess's hero was an enraged, disaffected English youth bottom-feeding off the detritus of Soviet culture, this author's narrator is an actual Russian (or more accurately, a Ukrainian) who could hardly be more affable, more engaged or more enchanted by everything American, from Michael Jackson and ''the greatest of all documentary movies, 'The Making of ''Thriller,'' ' '' to the career of the porn star John Holmes to the ''many good schools for accounting,'' one of which Alex dreams of attending. Alex speaks English like someone who has taught himself by painstakingly translating a really abysmal novel with the help of a badly outdated dictionary. In his idiosyncratic and persuasively consistent lingo, to sleep is to ''manufacture Z's,'' to have sex is ''be carnal,'' good is ''premium,'' nearby is ''proximal,'' difficult is ''rigid,'' and a certain downtown Manhattan neighborhood is, logically, ''Greenwich Shtetl.'' No matter. Alex is ''fluid'' enough to be dragooned into working as a translator for Heritage Touring, the travel agency at which his abusive father arranges trips for American Jews ''who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and the Ukraine . . . where their families once existed.'' Specifically, Alex's assignment is to accompany a tourist referred to, alternately, as ''the hero'' and the ''spoiled Jew,'' and whose real name is, as it happens, is the actual name of the author. ''The hero'' has come to Ukraine to look for a woman named Augustine, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and whose photograph he carries as a kind of magic talisman. After a first encounter that could hardly be funnier or more unpromising, Alex and ''the author'' set out across the ''totally awesome former Soviet republic,'' together with Alex's grandfather (who, despite a case of psychosomatic blindness, has been enlisted as their driver) and along with their overly amorous and malodorous dog, named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., after the grandfather's favorite singer. (After the old man learns, with horror, that the ''Negro of the Rat Pack'' was a convert to Judaism, he calls his pet Dean Martin Jr.) Any attempt to explain the complex narrative strategy of this genre-bending novel makes it sound more complicated than it is. Actually, it's not difficult to follow, since the structure reveals itself slowly, in stages, and each one of these small revelations is a source of surprise and pleasure. Indeed, one of the book's attractions is its writer's unusually high degree of faith in the reader's intelligence. Sections of the novel refer to other sections in ways that you have to think about in order to make the connections that, once you think about them, are perfectly obvious. The humor ranges from jokes that are, alas, too dirty to be quoted here to the loftiest literary allusions; the author has so much energy that he doesn't care if we get all the jokes, whether we know that he is paraphrasing Heinrich von Kleist or if we pause to follow the zany logic of a rabbi's bawdy sermon comparing the glass partition separating his male and female congregants to the division between heaven and hell. In fact, he's got his sights on higher -- much higher -- things than mere laughs, on a whole series of themes so weighty that any one of them would be enough to give considerable heft to an ordinary novel. A partial list of the book's concerns includes: the importance of myths and names, the frailty of memory, the necessity of remembrance, the nature of love, the dangers of secrecy, the legacy of the Holocaust, the value of friendship, what it means to be loyal and good and to practice what the author has taught Alex to call ''common decencies.'' And I'm not even mentioning a whole host of subthemes, including the confusions and collisions between American and post-Soviet culture. Perhaps the most beautifully orchestrated comic set piece in the book involves the Russians' appalled response to ''the hero's'' vegetarianism -- and a dropped potato. Such scenes are so virtuosic, so appealing -- and, finally, just so much fun -- that you hardly care when big chunks of the book start to crumble in the last 50 pages or so. At one point, the author tells Alex that he feels he was born to be a writer. As Alex would say, the reader will harmonize completely. This novel is endearing, accomplished -- and (to quote Alex one last time) definitely premium. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100604 ... jane Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer I heard the film was really good - I think Elijah Wood played the protagonist. My mom really liked it - I guess I should check it out! :) 100604 ... rt jane! +3=73 the film is directed by liev schrieber and along with elijah wood, stars eugene hutz from one of your fire bucket-toting bands, gogol bordello. it's hilarious and poignant. 100604 ... j ooh, i love liev schrieber. i'll really have to see it. 100604 ... rt Question 47 The first lurch comes four lines in. A woman named Irene America is writing in her diary — or, rather, in one of her diaries. She is keeping two: one real, one fake. “You gave me the first book in order to record my beginning year as a mother,” she writes. “It was very sweet of you.” Something about that sentence is off. Could it be the faintness of the praise? The flatness of the tone? Perhaps it’s that the person being addressed is meant never to see these words, because we’re glimpsing the blue notebook in which Irene records her true thoughts and feelings. She keeps it in a safe deposit box at the bank, away from the prying eyes of her husband, the “you” of those early lines. The other notebook, the red diary, is kept in a filing cabinet in her basement office at home. Irene knows her husband has been reading it in secret, and she contrives to use it as a weapon, setting down lies meant to torment him, to smoke him out and ultimately to free herself from their marriage. This book is, as its publisher declares, unlike any other novel from this author. That isn’t to say it’s devoid of the Native American themes that permeate her many previous books. Both Irene and her husband, Gil, are of Indian heritage. Raised by a white mother, Gil clings to his paternal “mishmash of Klamath and Cree and landless Montana Chippewa.” Irene also grew up with a single mother, in her case a political activist who “dragged her to everything Ojibwe.” Their shared culture closely informs both their careers. Gil, an artist, paints portraits of his wife, often in “cruel” or “humiliating” poses evocative of the history of whites’ mistreatment of Indians. (“She appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.”) Indeed, Gil envisions the series — which has become both famous and lucrative, and which he’s named after his wife: “America 1,” “America 2” and so on — as representing “the iconic suffering of a people.” Irene is a historian. Or she would be if she hadn’t stalled partway through her Ph.D. thesis on Louis Riel, “the depressed métis patriot.” When the novel begins, she’s at work on a new study, of George Catlin, “the 19th-century painter of Native Americana,” whose subjects, she reminds herself, “would sicken and die soon after” he finished their portraits. Yet Gil and Irene’s ancestral ties are overshadowed by the corrosive way their identities have become grafted together. Gil’s livelihood hinges on rendering and selling images of his wife’s naked body. Irene’s initial thesis subject was “distantly related” to Gil’s family, and her current one is an obvious analogue for her painter husband, who she feels has drained the life from her. “I wonder how you can make love to me,” she writes in her blue notebook. “I am a dead woman whose reflexes alone can be activated.” Later, during one of their verbal sparring matches, Gil re­inforces this impression. To Irene’s accusation that he is painting kitsch, he retorts: “No, Irene. I’m painting death.” This is one of their more tender exchanges. More often, they are engaged in hostilities, both stealthy and outright. Irene locks the door when she takes a bath. Gil has Irene followed. Irene photographs a bruise Gil has given their older son. Gil stabs his palms and makes bloody handprints on a portrait of Irene. Irene punches Gil in the head so hard she almost knocks him over. Gil pitches empty vodka bottles out the window at Irene. They drink and drink and drink. And both fantasize, with a numbing repetitiveness, about their own deaths — and those of others. An introductory note that accompanied early copies of the novel declared that the author wrote this book “straight on,” as “a single, gripping narrative,” and it does have a headlong quality. Although not especially short, the novel has a pace that’s mercifully fast. But what to make of the publisher’s claim, which isn’t intrinsically positive? To be sure, in places, this book seems more like notes for a novel than fully realized fiction. (“The tragic irony of it offended him.” “His outlook was sentimental while hers was tragic.” “They might hate each other, at least, Irene might hate Gil, while he had no idea how much he hated Irene because he was so focused on winning back her love.”) Elsewhere, though, her unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing (“the christbirthing pinecone air”) as well as flashes of blinding lucidity. When Irene, admiring her youngest child’s drawings of her, inquires about the “stick with a little half-moon” that always appears at the end of her hand, the first grader replies simply: “The wineglass.” When Gil is in a rage, one of their dogs urinates on his shoe, and Irene feels “a sudden jolt of pride in the dog.” But we miss something if we approach this book simply as fiction. This book is a portrait of an “iconic” marriage on its way to dissolution. And the author has been in just such a marriage. Irene, more than a decade younger than Gil, plays a vital role in his work and he in hers. The author's former husband, the writer Michael Dorris, was a decade older than she, and both referred regularly in interviews to the extraordinary intensity with which they collaborated. We see threads of child abuse and depression in Gil and Irene’s collapsing union. The couple separated amid allegations of child abuse, and a year and a half later Dorris committed suicide — a desperate act, the author later revealed, that had preoccupied him for years. It’s a fool’s errand to parse fact from fiction. Even given such glaring similarities, to acknowledge them in a review would seem prurient, loathsome — if she hadn’t seeded her narrative with what feels like an imperative to do so. Partway through the novel, she introduces a new character, a half-sister Irene has never previously known about. An artist who is an old friend of Gil’s, this woman occupies a kind of idealized neutral territory; she bears some allegiance to both spouses and enmity toward neither. The role she assumes at the end of the book, when Irene and Gil may not be able to save themselves, let alone their children, is one of redemption, almost of salvation. And in a book where “a soul could be captured through a shadow,” a portrait is a double released into the world and being someone’s namesake matters, she has called this half-sister Louise. The novel’s final chapters contain a series of shocks that resound both thematically within the context of the narrative and — for the considerable number of readers who will come to this book well versed in the publicized details of the author's own life — beyond the page. I won’t hazard a guess at how literally we are meant to interpret these twists and revelations. But the character to whom, in the end, the author assigns all agency, all authorial power, changes our understanding of everything that has come before. The choice feels wistful, possibly noble and almost unbearably sad. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... From an interview with the author... Q: Talk about your process of writing. I take little notebooks with me when I walk. I keep notebooks of odd events I hear about. My dad tells me he used to collect weird bank robbery stories. I get a lot from little bits of historical research, too. Some of it is from family history; a lot is from local history. I love local history museums, and I love driving to North Dakota. A lot of it is plain made up. But I just have to sit down and be there every day. I really do believe in being there for the work that has to come. I go to my little room and sit. To have the freedom to sit down in your chair and to not know where anything's going to come from. I suppose that is the one big adventure in my life right now, not knowing where the story is going to come from. Q: Besides fiction and poetry, have you ever engaged in other forms of writing? Not really. I don't think I'll write in any other form, such as playwriting. I'm completely nondramatic that way. I never grew up with any sense of theater, drama. I just could never do it. I have no interest in a screenplay, either. My stories are tucked far away in my thoughts. I never am actively seeing them worked out. I grew up without television. My parents were very careful about it. I think that is a lot of the reason I love language. I really liked Shakespeare in high school. King Lear is very powerful to me. It has always been my ground text. Flannery O'Connor. J. E Powers, I've always loved. I love Toni Morrison and Philip Roth 100605 ... lostgirl Shadow Tag By Louise Erdrich “A brilliant cautionary tale…Reading it is like watching a wildfire whose flames are so mesmerizingly beautiful that it’s almost easy to ignore the deadly mess left behind.” i have not read this but i have heard about this book. looks like a compelling glimpse into a collapsing family with interesting dynamics. there are always multiple facets to a story… 100605 ... rt lostgirl! +3=65 highly recommended from the girls at slate's double x. 100605 ... rt Question 48... Perhaps it could be called, "the most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings: What should I do with my life?" This novelist and business writer spent two years interviewing more than 900 people who had weighed or were weighing that question. From his research came this book. The author describes what he learned from the people he interviewed, and focuses on four: Debbie Brient, once a sales executive; Rick Olson, a onetime lawyer; Don Linn, a former investment banker; and Leela de Souza, whose resume includes stints as a ballerina, Stanford MBA and White House fellow. Each approached their desire for a life change a little differently, he says. But like most of the people he interviewed, ultimately these four were searching for "a place where they can be content, grow roots a little, and make an impact." In an interview with npr.org, the author tells more about the lessons behind people's life-changing quests — including his own. npr.org: You've said that the matter of what we should do with our lives is "the most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings." After interviewing hundreds of people, how would you say most of us address what you call The Question — do we do a pretty good job of meeting it head on, flounder hopelessly, avoid it with a vengeance? Most attempt to answer it with one eye open, one eye closed. We let our fears govern our decisions; rather than challenging the validity of those fears, we accept the boundaries set by those fears, and end up confining our search to a narrow range of possibilities, like the guy looking for his car keys under the streetlight because he’s afraid of the dark. Some broad examples: we confine ourselves to a range that is acceptable to our parents or our spouse; we confine ourselves to places inhabited only by people "like us," meaning of our class and education level; we place too much emphasis on being respected by an imaginary audience; we shy away from avocations that take a long time to mature and pay off. I was inspired by people who had overcome these fears to look beyond the obvious choices. It wasn’t easy for them, but in a way that hard journey made the result even sweeter. It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right puzzle piece to match their skills; they had to grow as a person first. Your radio report features four people who saw the need for a radical change in their lives, and have gone forth to make it. Let's talk a bit more about the stories of each of them, and the lessons you took away from them. Tell us how you learned about Debbie Brient, the sales executive turned conservationist, and what you think others could learn from her experience. A lot of people have this notion, or maybe it’s a hope, that their calling will just make itself clear one day, as an epiphany. An epiphany is a religious notion, and we invoke the word "epiphany" any time we have a good idea, because it helps conjure a sort of divine certainty – we’re implying, "Hey, this wasn’t just my little idea, I got it straight from God." But I think this is a misappropriation. In fact, true epiphanies are really rare. Of the 900 stories I learned, only three had genuine epiphanies. One heard a voice telling her to go to Maine, one heard a voice telling him to go to Guatemala, and Debbie Brient heard this voice telling her "Isn’t it clear!?" Well, epiphanies aren’t clear. These three people followed the voice, but were very unsure what they were doing. And they had to figure it out. To me, Debbie’s story is a lesson in clarity versus muddledness. We think it’s supposed to be clear. We think if it’s not clear, it must not be calling me. But in fact, even true callings are unclear, and even more so for those who don’t hear a voice. You interviewed Rick Olson, who changed his career from lawyer to trucker. In your experience, will most people who ask themselves The Question wind up facing such a dramatic life change? And if they do, what will they need to know and do to carry it off? Obviously, not everyone needs such a radical change. But Rick’s story demonstrates the significant potential for change we inherit when hard times strike. It's the hard times that force us to overcome the doubts that normally stop us from acting. For people who are considering a dramatic life change like Rick’s, all they really need is to know they’re not alone, they’re not the only ones who’ve done this. That seems to help people –- to know they’re not crazy, that other people have done this and been happy. Since you started your book research, you've followed Don Linn from a New York investment banking firm to a catfish and cotton farm, and now a book distributorship. You framed his answer to The Question in terms of him being able to live with his conscience. Do you believe many Americans stay in jobs that they feel require them to betray their morals or ethics? And what did you learn about people's decisions to get out of jobs like that? I can’t quantify the number of people who feel their work is part of some unethical system. But it’s not uncommon. However, I found that despite their frustration, very few people change their life simply for ethics. They usually stick to the grind. They change their life when it gets personal –- when the system turns on them. In Don Linn’s case, he had moral problems with being ordered to push leveraged buyouts on clients that didn’t need them and couldn’t afford them. But those moral problems didn’t cause him to change. The day his life changed, he came home from New York (he lived in Dallas) and his daughter and son, then three and one years old, respectively, asked "Who is that man?" He’d spent so much time on airplanes, they didn’t recognize him. And that’s the point when it got personal. The final person you profiled in the radio piece is Leela de Souza — a gifted dancer, a White House fellow, a Stanford MBA, and still she wound up out of work, confused and depressed. You must have collected stories of people who faced up to The Question, did their best to craft an answer, and still have yet to get their happy ending, their ultimate fulfillment. What's the advice in that case? It’s a process that takes many attempts, and you learn from the failed part of each attempt. Making mistakes is a necessary part of learning. All 55 of the stories in my book are failure stories –- where best intentions aren’t working out, and they have to figure it out from inside that hole. The answers lie more in our hearts than our minds. Leela is a very intelligent woman –- but she realized, after six months of unemployment, that finding her purpose is the one problem that’s not easier to solve if you’re smarter. You list four specific areas where people take wrong turns in figuring out their answer to The Question: money, what you call "smarts," place and attitude. Can you talk a bit about each of those areas, and how people's approaches to them can confuse the search for the best course in life? There is not room here for me to discuss these properly. I hope people will read the book. But, briefly, we make certain presumptions about how the world works, and then make decisions guided by those presumptions. Well, it all goes wrong when those basic presumptions are inaccurate. Those are presumptions more about how we want the world to work, rather than how it actually does. Here are four wrong presumptions, which we have wrongly accepted as true: (1) That money is the shortest route to freedom. (2) That we can think (or analyze) our way to an answer of where we belong. (3) That we are autonomous from the environment that surrounds us. (4) That our biggest obstacles are external, rather than internal. You observed that almost everyone you interviewed for the book struggles with this life-direction question more than once. Is there such a thing as asking yourself this question too much, too often? In the book I tell the story of a woman who had changed her career trajectory five times in 10 years. We met when she was on the cusp of yet another career change. But after some serious self-examination, she realized her hairtrigger desire to change came from her very tumultuous childhood (she moved frequently and her mother had five boyfriends growing up). In the year after this realization, she devoted her energy to defusing that craving for change. So, the answer to your question is yes. Sometimes we need to decipher where our craving for change comes from. Did you write this book because you knew so many people who were struggling with life-direction questions, or because you were facing that struggle yourself, or both? How do you think you've handled those points in your own life when you've asked and answered The Question? Three years ago, I was wondering whether to get married again and have a family, or stay single and keep working on my writing career (which requires me to travel a lot and work many odd hours). I never thought I could do both. In these three years, I have done both -– the book is nothing less than a testament to me overcoming that fear. Not only is it the most important thing I’ve ever written, but my family was actively involved. My son, who’s not yet two, went on 17 trips during the reporting of the book, as I traveled across the country and both oceans to meet people in person. I no longer feel torn between these two loves. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in how I’ve answered this question in my life — mistakes both in my career and personal life — but writing this book was one of the few right things I’ve done. Is there such a thing as the wrong answer to The Question? I think that’s playing a game of semantics, when people say "There is no wrong answer because you learn from your mistakes and it’s all part of a process." I do think there are wrong turns and we should be willing to take a stand and call them out. Such as: when people betray themselves, when people betray others, when people cheat or lie or fool themselves, when people act unethically to get ahead, when people pretend they will get rich when they won’t, when fathers abandon support for their children, etcetera. The list of wrong answers is endless. Obvious Questions Don't Have Obvious Answers We are all writing the story of our life. We want to know what it’s "about," what are its themes and which theme is on the rise. We demand of it something deeper, or richer, or more substantive. We want to know where we’re headed--not to spoil our own ending by ruining the surprise, but we want to ensure that when the ending comes, it won’t be shallow. We will have done something. We will not have squandered our time here. This book is about that urge, that need. I began this project because I hit that point in my life. The television show I’d been writing for was canceled. The magazines I wrote for had thinned their pages. My longtime book editor had quit to pursue theater and film. I was out of work, I had a baby on the way (my first), and I was worried: how to be a good father, how to make money to support my family, and how to keep growing as a writer. I probably could have hustled up an assignment (the freelancer’s equivalent of "Just go get a job"), but I wasn’t sure I should. I felt like the kinds of stories I’d been telling no longer worked. They no longer mapped the depth and drama of human life as I experienced it. Looking for guidance and courage at this crossroads, I became intrigued by people who had unearthed their true calling, or at least those who were willing to try. Those who fought with the seduction of money, intensity, and novelty, but overcame their allure. Those who broke away from the chorus to learn the sound of their own voice. Nothing seemed more brave to me than facing up to one’s own identity, and filtering out the chatter that tells us to be someone we’re not. What might I learn from those who had confronted this question? I decided on the simplest approach possible: I would express my curiosity to whoever would listen, trust this would provoke some leads, and travel the country tracking down the people whose stories spoke to me. I had no idea that sticking to this simple method would soon take me to so many places I’d never been, and far deeper into people’s lives than I’d ever gone as a writer. I hit on an incredible wellspring of honest sentiment. Complete strangers opened their lives and their homes to me, confessing feelings and events they hadn’t revealed to their closest friends. This was at a time when we were losing our respect for corporate leaders, we no longer believed new technology would make our lives better, and the attack on our freedom made life precious and weighty. People were reassessing what mattered to them and what they believed in. I heard some nine hundred stories, spent countless hours corresponding and on the phone, and came to know about seventy people closely. I spent time with them all in person, which was absolutely necessary. (About fifty are included in the book.) The word "interview" doesn’t describe the emotional exchange that usually occurred. None were friends when I started, but most were by the time I was done. These were microwave friendships, forged with fast blasts of revelation and bonding, like those formed quickly in a freshman dorm, remembered for years. I let them cry in my arms. I slept on their couches. I sat in their musty attics, looking through old photo albums. We went running together. We traded secrets. I met their parents and held their children. I went to one’s wedding. I became symbolically associated with their turning points. Many people described how much it helped them to have me listen; they talked their way into a greater understanding of what had transpired and why. The people in this book are ordinary people. By that I mean they did not have available to them resources or character traits that gave them an uncommon advantage in pursuing their dream. Some have succeeded, many have not. They’re not famous. Over half are parents. Over half participate actively in their church. They’re a diverse assortment of ages and professions. Most (but not all) are educated, but a fair number earned that education later in life, as one step upward in their chosen transformation. A handful had spent years earning a high salary before they woke up to what their life was all about, but only a couple of them saved any of that money – most spent what they earned, just like anyone else, and as a result didn’t have a safety net when they changed their life. Only two asked me not to use their real names. I’ve chosen stories that I hoped would encourage reflection and offer solace, not ones that merely entertained. Most importantly, when I say that these are ordinary people, I mean they’re real. They’re messy and complicated. You hold in your hands the antithesis to all those books which pretend their one-size-fits-all formula will result in rosy, happily-ever-after Hollywood endings. I’m a chronicler; this is (foremost) a social documentary of people’s lives; it just so happened that I learned a ton in the observation. The result might lack the comforting ease of a cure-all, but it makes up for it with integrity. (You want a step? Step one: stop pretending we’re all on the same staircase). This theme is going to reappear throughout: It’s not easy / It’s not supposed to be easy / Most people make mistakes / Most people have to learn the hardest lessons more than once. If that has been your experience, the people herein will comfort you. They did me. That alone was worth the trip. I was no expert. I had no credentials as a counselor or academic. I approached these people as merely "one of them." The events of my life had shredded any theories I used to have about how to address the question "What should I do with my life?" I had been humbled into admitting I knew nothing, and as I hit the road I was continuously humbled again by what some of these people had endured and the wisdom they seemed to radiate. I learned from them through inspiration and imitation. I also learned from the multiplicity of stories--by comparing how people talked and what language they invoked, certain patterns emerged, and I could place a story in the context of the larger picture. I learned that it was in hard times that people usually changed the course of their life; in good times, they frequently only talked about change. Hard times forced them to overcome the doubts that normally gave them pause. It surprised me how often we hold ourselves back until we have no choice. So the people herein suffered layoffs, bankruptcies, divorces, evictions, illness, and the death of loved ones, and as a result they were as likely to stumble into a better life as they were to arrive there by reasoned planning. They made mistakes before summoning the courage to get it right. Their path called into question the notion that a calling is something you inherently know when you’re young. Far from it. These people discovered in themselves gifts they rarely realized they had. They spoke of fulfillment, not happiness. Very often they found fulfillment in living up to their moral responsibility to society – in finding some way to feel they were helping others, or at least connect genuinely with others. In this sense, even though they were pursuing what they personally needed, they were learning selflessness. And while they had to fight hard to get what they loved, they also had to learn to love what they then got; while they scrapped for what was within their reach, they learned acceptance of events beyond their control. They learned that their responsibilities didn’t keep them from their purpose – they were part of their purpose. (And sometimes the most important part). They did not find some Single Perfect Answer to the question; at some point it felt right enough that they made their choice, and the energy formerly spent casting about was now devoted into making their choice fruitful for as long as it might last. In every case, they found a place that was good for them. What I mean by that is, it was something that shaped their character in a positive way. Even if they didn’t succeed wildly, doing it brought to the surface a trait that had been neglected. They might not have discovered their calling, but they did discover a lot about themselves. By no means have I written about only the success stories. Many of the people I included were midtransition, searching and hoping. This presented its own challenge, because they routinely asked for my counseling. This was always an uneasy role to be put into; usually, I handled this by telling other people’s stories--"Here’s what this person found, in a similar situation...." In a few instances, I was not so passive when I sensed that my passivity--my listening mode--was being taken inappropriately as endorsement. I didn’t want to be an accomplice to a wrong turn. So I tried to guide them by reminding them of their own stated resolutions. Anyone’s who’s counseled a friend struggling with this question knows this tension – you want to be encouraging, but you also want to be realistic. I didn’t handle all these situations perfectly; I reveal these moments in the text to show my own fallibility. People asked a great many questions that helped steer my research. Many of these questions were of the smart-aleck variety, merely intellectual/devil’s advocate babble, but it was much more difficult and challenging to address those asked from the heart, by people stuck in the middle of it and honestly confused. Questions such as: Should I put my faith in mystical signs of destiny, or should my sense of "a right fit" be based on logical, practical reasons? Should I accept my lot, make peace with my ambition, and stop stressing out? Why do I feel guilty for thinking about this? Should I make money first, to fund my dream? How do I tell the difference between a curiosity and a passion? How do I weigh making myself a better person against external achievements? When do I need to change my situation, and when is it me that needs to change? What should I tell my parents, who worry about me? If I have a child, will my frustration over my work go away? What will it feel like when I get there? (How will I know I’m there?) These were screamingly obvious questions, but it seemed they were almost so obvious that we hadn’t publicly collected how we’ve learned to answer them--as if the answers should be obvious too, which they’re not. Too often we’re reticent about these issues. Talking about them can seem so fruitless, meanwhile inflaming anxiety and diverting us from the other things we have more control over, and can do. Yes, but it can also strengthen our resolve and shield us from distractions. I found that the biggest obstacle to answering the question this book poses is that people don’t give themselves permission to take it seriously. At the risk of being fruitless, let this book be a safe place for a discussion. This book does not research the history of its question. I don’t quote experts, though I interviewed some, and I don’t quote literature unless it was quoted to me by someone I wrote about. I didn’t spend time in the library to write this book. Those sources of wisdom felt too abstract compared to the hard-earned record of those who actually took action, changed their life, and enjoyed or suffered the consequences. Spending time with them affected me subtly. Afterward, I was always spent, and needed to recharge on the familiar patterns of my family, the writers’ Grotto, and my soccer teams. I became hyperaware of what mattered to me and what was merely that week’s noise intruding on my life. It stripped away some of the ways I had colored my past, and often I was visited by old friends in my dreams. I became more honest in person, less contrived in my writing. They helped me find my own story. They wanted to know how I’d come to be a writer, and how I’d recently become a husband (for the second time) and a father (for the first time). I’d never written about my own journey, never thought it was a story worth telling, but hearing their stories helped me tell my own in a way that it finally did have some oomph. To some it was inspiration, and to others it was kinship. Okay, he gets it. My biggest surprise was how being a new dad folded into the book, and how I face this question now that I have a family. Writing hadn’t come easily to me, and I’ve had to be very protective of my love for it. I was once so afraid that being a parent was incompatible with being a writer. The travel, the intense concentration. For years this fear had stopped me from mixing the two. Somehow, in a year in which our son, Luke, was born, and my wife, Michele, a molecular immunologist, was putting a drug through the FDA’s approval process, I found the time and the room in my heart for this enormous project. I took my family with me whenever I could, which was most of the time. In his first year Luke went on seventeen trips of up to ten days in length, including weeks in London and Hong Kong, which he loved because it was hot. Now it seems like a miracle. It’s a far different book from what I originally envisioned. It reflects what I found, not what I predicted. I didn’t write a single person’s story until I had gotten to know two-thirds of them, and even then their meaning was just beginning to show itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the unconventional way I’ve arranged these stories. It’s not organized by industry or personality type, and it’s not a travelogue. Since my method conveys how I’m implicitly suggesting we think about this question--and since figuring out how to do this didn’t come easily--an explanation is probably necessary. There are many very real stumbling blocks that block us from pursuing this question: never enough money, never enough time. We’re aware of those constraints – they’re right in front of us, every day. But we also have many psychological stumbling blocks that keep us from finding ourselves. Some of these are badly tangled misconceptions, some are deeply rooted fears. The two are related--like any prejudice, misconceptions get fabricated and sustained by fears. These psychological stumbling blocks are often less real than we imagine. By confronting them, we begin to see around all our obstacles, even the seemingly insurmountable ones. What I found is that, if you take care of these obstacles, you create an environment where the truth is invited into your life. So this book is meant to unearth the psychological demons that haunt us. It uses people’s stories to demonstrate these misconceptions and fears, and shows how people are confronting them or have gotten past them. Their stories are organized into eight sections. In the first section, they’re struggling with the essential paradox of trying to make a "right" decision in the absence of experience. In the second section, they’re overcoming traditional class notions of where they belong. In the third, they’re learning to resist the temptations that have distracted them from their true aspirations. The modern economy tends to toss us around like a hot potato, while we’d usually prefer to settle down and stay put. The people in section four have found ways to resolve that inherent conflict. In the fifth section, they’re getting to know themselves as people first, then struggling with what that means for their career mission. The people in the sixth section found their right place or environment, which led in turn to greater insight. The seventh section is the longest in the book. It recognizes that we make our choices with our family in mind. The people in the final section demonstrate the virtues of patience and persistence. I include them not to admonish the young and urgent, but to respect the big picture. Most of us take the slow road, no shortcuts. In addition to that macro-structure, you’ll find subthemes and side-conversations running story to story. They’re not meant to be read out of order, though there’s no harm in that. They’re meant to build on each other. Ideas and terminology brought up in earlier stories are invoked in subsequent ones, and the result is meant to resemble a rolling conversation, but one in which the ideas are continually reined in by dogged reality. Like any conversation, there are times I interject and times I mostly listen. When people heard this book’s title, the most common question I’d get asked was, "So is your book about life, or about careers?" And I’d laugh, and warn them not to get trapped by semantics, and answer, "It’s about people who’ve dared to be honest with themselves." For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100605 ... lostgirl wow, two in one day! Po Bronson What Should I Do With My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question this is the ultimate question, isn't it? and the answer is indeed obscure. many people were perplexed that i chose my career at 12 years old and stuck with it...but it was the right choice for me (and it lasted for nearly 20 years) until i burned out and took a breather to just be a mom and to write. and now i'm ready to go back again...so, my opinion is that there really is no wrong answer to the question; as long as the choices made in the maze are provoking, challenging, and fun, and "right" for the person at the "right" time. it's really not so much about the money or the status, its about the enrichment that is given and gained. in my case, it came from giving the gift of health, and i miss it! i'll definitely read this one by the way. 100605 ... rt whoa! look at you lostgirl! +3=68 po bronson is one serious dude. 100605 ... rt Writing about motherhood is a little bit like writing about sex — in both cases, the author confronts the challenge of finding something new to say about a subject so powerful that all but the most inspired language sounds either trite or overblown. In an essay she wrote for The New York Times back in 2005, the author found something new to say about both sex and motherhood, or at least something rarely heard spoken aloud: that she loved her husband even more than she did her four young children. Some readers probably cringed at the way she wrote about her own sex life (“vital, even torrid”), but they weren’t the ones who tore into her on “Oprah,” or criticized her on the rabid parenting Web site UrbanBaby. Mostly, her attackers were indignant mothers, and they forced her into what she calls, her book of essays about maternal guilt, the " perp walk,” a public and painful drubbing for declarations that — among other things — her children might not appreciate. Bold though it was, the actual message of her essay probably wasn’t quite as controversial as her presentation. She didn’t do much to soften the stance, taking her point of view to a rhetorical extreme — she could survive the loss of a child, she felt compelled to spell out, and life would go on, so long as she had her husband. The reverse would not be true. It wasn’t the writing that riveted or repelled people in that essay, it was an immoderate honesty, which is precisely what makes the book occasionally absorbing reading. At its worst, that unedited quality translates, in her prose, into lazy cliché: She writes of her “briefcase traded in for a diaper bag” and makes jokes about her sagging breasts. (I’m begging here: can we please have a moratorium on that particular image in maternal memoirs?) In an essay in which she congratulates herself and her husband for sharing housework (a task made that much easier by the maid they employ), she reminds readers that “there is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer,” an insight Redbook has probably been espousing, in one form or another, for, oh, about 30 years. She even makes tired jokes stereotyping her own identity (on ordering in dinner: “I’m a Jewish girl from the New York area, after all”). The author shares her thoughts below. 1. Why did you write this book? Do you want the snarky answer or the real one? The real one… Because so many women I know are in real pain. They are so crippled by their guilt, by their unreasonable expectations, that they can't even allow themselves to celebrate the true joys of being a mom. When your little girl curls up in bed with you and says, "Your hair always smells so good, Mama," you should be able to melt with emotion without worrying about whether she's reading at grade level. 2. Do you think you're a bad mother? Well, yes. Of course. I mean, that's the whole problem. I feel like a bad mother, even when by all reasonable analysis I'm a perfectly fine mother. Hell, I went camping last month with the second grade. Camping. Me. A Jewish American Princess from New Jersey. Camping for me is staying in a Marriott, but I slept on the ground and ate toast burned over an open fire. And had fun. 3. What is your definition of a good mother? As one of my interview subjects said, "A Good Mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make playdates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex." 4. Okay, so what do you consider a responsible, attainable ideal of a modern mother? One who loves her kids and does her level best not to damage them in any permanent way. A good mother doesn't let herself be overcome by guilt when she screws up. 5.How did your upbringing shape you as a mother? My mother drilled into me the importance of being a feminist, a woman with her own identity. But perhaps more important, she and my dad modeled a relationship that was entirely unequal… and didn't work. I knew I wanted something different from what they had. So while I've made choices that made her feminist blood boil, I've also expected that my husband pull his share of the home and child labor. And that's made all the difference. 6. What advice would you give to mothers today? Most important, learn to forgive yourself and the other mothers you know. Try to lay off the judgment. Just do your best and consider the rest a small donation on your part to therapists the world over. If we never messed, up what would they charge our children for? 7. So what's the snarky answer to why you wrote the book? As a kind of f&%k you to the insane Urban-Baby type moms who, after my New York Times piece on loving my husband more than my kids, sent me letters saying my children should be taken away from me and/or my husband would leave me for another woman. And especially to the woman on Oprah who leapt across the stage shouting, "Let me at her!" when I walked on that set. Yes, that really happened. (adapted from a review by Susan Dominus) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100606 ... lostgirl Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman oooooh ooh yeah~ this topic is near and dear to my heart. women (including me)are constantly accused of being bad mothers, no matter how they choose to parent their children. i've been criticized for staying home as well as for being a working mom. i am a willingly prominent NON-MEMBER of the "mommies club" and choose to parent they way i see fit. so far, it's working out just fine, and that's another reason for the rest of the snakes to gossip! i think i'll like this one. 100606 ... rt +3 =71 puts you right behind jane! there is a fascinating interview with the author on fresh air in which she delves much deeper into her writing of the book, her marriage to micheal chabon, and their reasons why they chose to have an abortion. 100606 ... rt Question 50 This book is a truly one of a kind novel, not to mention a major pop culture phenomenon. It mirrors the changes that occurred to American society after World War II. The novel gives a glimpse to the reader what it was like for woman and how their roles in society changed. It's a great tale of human nature as well as overcoming adversity. One becomes enthralled and entranced by the infamous character, Holly Golightly. She, without a doubt, is defining of a cultured woman of the American 1950's, a contemporary debutant, carefree and aloof. This former starlit actress moves into the narrator's (or "Fred" as Holly refers to him as) apartment building, just a floor down from his apartment. After Holly climbs through his fire escape to avoid a man who is biting her, they become instant friends. Holly is not a perfect person, but because her flaws are bared for all to see, she is a much more identifiable and loveable character. Her wild like qualities make her irresistible to every man she comes in contact with, which doesn't omit "Fred", either. Over the course of the story, he falls madly in love with the fiercely independent Holly. Definitely a quintessential case of misguided love. For three points, name the author, his novella, and give a personal response... An excerpt from an interview with the author in Paris Review No. 17... Did you have much encouragement of your writing in your early days, and if so, by whom? Good Lord! I’m afraid you’ve let yourself in for quite a saga. . . . I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented. . . . Well, finally, I guess I was around twelve, the principal at the school I was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal.” He thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to some special school equipped to handle backward brats. Whatever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal, pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in the East where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly and—guess what—came home a genius, so proclaimed by science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want to believe it—they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal boy. 100606 ... lostgirl Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capote misguided love? mmmmmmmm……been there, read this a few times. 100606 ... rt +3=74 and this puts lostgirl into first place! Question 51 Plenty of novelists are adept at injecting a little extra funk into dysfunctional families, but few do so with more zest than this author. Her slyly observed books are often written with cool, satirical detachment and feature characters and situations that seem ripped from the headlines. Her spectacular second novel, “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal,” echoed the Mary Kay Letourneau tabloid teacher-pupil sex case. Her new book traces the traumas of the Litvinoffs, a radically chic family living in post-9/11 Greenwich Village. The paterfamilias, Joel, is a crusading lawyer of the William Kunstler type who, if the novel is optioned by Hollywood, seems predestined to be played by Ron Silver. In 1962, when Joel, on a visit to London, had first wooed his English wife, Audrey, he tried to impress her by bragging about legal work he was doing for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and about having been kicked by a racist police captain in the bus station in Jackson, Miss. It was all a bit lost on Audrey, who at this stage of her life “had never met a Negro.” Forty years later, when the couple are established in New York, Litvinoff, 72, suffers a stroke in the Brooklyn federal courthouse, where he is about to defend Mohammed Hassani, one of the Schenectady Six, a fictional group of Arab-Americans arrested for visiting a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998. Joel lies unconscious in a hospital for almost the whole of the book, but nonetheless remains a large influence on the lives of his family, as each member—the potty-mouthed, pot-smoking Audrey; their two daughters, one unhappy in love and work and haunted by her growing obesity, the other by her inability to choose between two faiths, left-wing politics and Orthodox Judaism; and an adopted, drug-addicted son — seeks to uncover the true meaning of the family (and, of course, life). As a meditation on radicalism and its impact on families, this is no “American Pastoral,” and the Litvinoffs are no tribe of Levov. But their struggles to find their beliefs — in themselves, in their ill father, in politics and religion ­— are absorbing. And the effort of the family to hold to­gether as Joel, its centripetal force, ebbs away, keeps the novel moving along briskly. It’s funny and sad at the same time. There are familiar overtones in the novel. Its depiction of a family galaxy that spins around an accomplished, famous and amorous father is reminiscent of Claire Messud’s satirical novel “The Emperor’s Children.” And as a stylist, the author resembles Lionel Shriver, whose novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin” was also tied to the news (in that case, the Columbine school massacre). All three of these writers, it seems fair to say, belong to a school of novelists whose talents include a flair for journalistic observation. The author is herself an interesting hybrid. She grew up in England but now lives in New York City. Her journalist’s training — she wrote feature articles at one time for The Independent, the London daily — strongly inflects her novelist’s voice. After several chapters, I wanted more gossip about the latest contretemps in the Litvinoff household, the gorier the better. The novel brims with clever dialogue. After an unhappy visit to meet their father’s former mistress, with whom he had secretly fathered a child, the two sisters, Rosa and Karla, dish: “She’s one of the most self-satisfied, narcissistic people I’ve ever met. Did you take a look at her idiotic books?” “No,” Karla lied. “Oh, God! It was all ‘How to Read Palms’ and diet books.” “Well, you don’t love someone because of the books they read ” “Don’t you?” And anyone who has sunk into low spirits will relate to this description: “Depression, in Karla’s experience, was a dull, inert thing — a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off.” Heller’s journalistic distance enhances her powers of observation, but it also erects emotional barriers, and some readers may find it difficult to care deeply about these characters. The most interesting seekers are the sisters, Karla and Rosa. Unhappy in her marriage to a union organizer, continually dissed by her mother, Karla at first seems the family doormat. But she gathers strength as the novel rolls along and finds unlikely love with a food-loving Egyptian immigrant who runs the newsstand at the hospital where Karla works. She has nothing in common with him politically, but he loves her with more vitality than anyone ever has. Rosa mystifies her family with her plans to become religiously observant, and even she recoils from some Orthodox customs that strike her as demeaning to women. There are laugh-out-loud moments when she travels upstate to visit the rabbi who will become her mentor and gets almost everything wrong, including the laws forbidding touching light switches on the Sabbath. “Rosa had some cause to regard herself as a worldly woman,” she writes. “As a child, she had broken bread with Daniel Ortega and sung freedom songs with A.N.C. activists in Soweto and played softball with Abbie Hoffman. By the age of 18, she had seen both her parents arrested for acts of civil disobedience and had twice been arrested herself. Yet, in truth, her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world, and there were large areas of ordinary American life about which her impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing had left her astonishingly ignorant.” The most maddening character is rude, profane Audrey, whose grating demands that Joel be kept alive at any cost drive his doctors and also her family nuts. The author seems to have little patience or empathy for her, either. “Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back — that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant — it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.” The other members of the extended family don’t really rise above caricature, especially Lenny, the adopted son, and Joel’s former lover Berenice, an African-­American artist whose apartment, adorned with examples of her work, exhibits a graphic picture of her private parts. And the grand finale, after Joel’s death, with one big, happy family reunion, feels like the end of a glib movie. Still, the quests of the various Litvinoffs make a compelling tale of familial self-discovery. (Adapted from a review by Jill Abramson) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... The idea for the novel came from a news article about scientists who thought they had found a gene that might be responsible for people’s beliefs, the author explained. Regardless of whether it exists, she saw “the belief gene as a metaphor” for those who unquestioningly accept authority, whether in religious, political or personal affairs. “All of us invest our identities in what we believe,” she said. “It’s hard to concede anything to the other side.” As Audrey’s friend Jean describes it: “There were some people with a gift for conviction — a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, ‘I’m in: this is my position.’ ... All of the Litvinoffs had it, to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps.” Each family member is ultimately forced to confront the flaws or fallacies of a deeply held belief, but it is the struggle of Audrey’s daughter Rosa that is at the novel’s center. After faithfully drinking the left-wing Kool-Aid and spending four years in Cuba, the disillusioned Rosa finds herself inextricably drawn to Orthodox Judaism, a turn that horrifies her vehemently atheistic parents. To the author people who manage to break away from an entrenched belief are “heroic.” Imagine how the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s felt when they learned the truth about Stalin, she said, “how agonizing it was for those people to find that Uncle Joe was not the person they thought.” “I imagine Alan Greenspan was feeling a similar sense of loss when he admitted the market is not infallible,” she added. The author has experience with left-wing ideologues, conflicted Jews and larger-than-life personalities. She describes her own mother as a rather glamorous Labor Party activist with “Stalinist inclinations.” She was the type who would think it “perfectly sensible for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan,” she said. (Her parents died when she was in her 20s.) Her father was a screenwriter (“The Dirty Dozen” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”); he was apolitical, an “equal opportunity cynic,” she said. Although her father was Jewish by birth (her mother was a Quaker), she was raised as an atheist in North London. She remembers her grandmother, a German Jew who spent time in Spain during the Civil War, telling her, “There’s only one way you could disappoint me — by becoming a Tory or a nun.” For her, the most difficult part of the novel was depicting Rosa’s slow religious conversion, particularly since the character is so intellectually fastidious. As an atheist, she said, she bent over backward to avoid coming off as condescending or snooty, and her portrait of Orthodox believers is both sensitive and sympathetic. If anything, she said, “I erred on the side of giving them an easy ride.” When she was in her 20s, she lived in New York and wrote a Bridget Jones-type newspaper column about her single-girl exploits for a British newspaper. For more than a decade she has been with the screenwriter Larry Konner. Three years ago they invited all their friends to her 40th birthday party promising a special surprise entertainment. It turned out to be their wedding ceremony. The couple own an apartment in TriBeCa, but they and their two daughters have been living in the Bahamas for the past 18 months or so. They were briefly in New York, crammed into a snug hotel room, to take care of getting their younger daughter into kindergarten. At one point her family tramped into a restaurant after a short shopping excursion. The girls presented their mother with a big white mug — because she likes a big cup of tea. Now that she’s a parent, she said, “I’m slightly more sympathetic to parenting mistakes,” adding that she is certain her parents never obsessed over how they were raising their children the way her generation does. This novel is told through the eyes of both parents and daughters. “Trying to write in the third person and juggle several characters was challenging,” she said, explaining that it may be a Puritan streak that compels her to struggle with something new. Readers have interpreted in different ways how the characters end up, and not always in line with the author's intention. But she acknowledges that once you write something, you no longer control it. “It goes out in the world,” she said, “you have to let it go.” 100607 ... lostgirl 'The Believers' by Zoe Heller judging from the reviews i've read regarding this work, it looks like one worth picking up. this story appears to have complicated, interesting, but perhaps confusing characters combined with complex, twisting plot patterns...all this makes for much more thought-provoking reading than the usual run of the mill characters and situations we can all easily 'relate' to...it could possibly be a difficult read, but that doesn't scare me. 100607 ... rt +3=77 lostgirl! Question 52 This poet, first of all, is a man of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. Widely read and much honored, he has brought the kind of energy in his poetry to his work as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment. Most notably, in his tenure as United States Poet Laureate, he has spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, "imagination makes communities." He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as "Watershed," which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. For him, everything is connected. When he works to heighten literacy, he is also working to promote awareness about the environment. He believes that natural beauty must be tended to and that caring for a place means knowing it intimately. Poets, especially, need to pay constant attention to the interaction of mind and environment. And when he is talking about poetry itself, whether Matsuo Basho's or Elizabeth Bishop's, he is both spontaneous and original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook. He has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. He has translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life. He was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry. His essay collection Now & Then, which includes his Washington Post articles, was published in April 2007. As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW) , an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. He is chairman of ROW’s board of directors, and judges their annual international environmental poetry and art contest for youth; he also wrote the introduction to the poetry collection River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. He is also a board member of International Rivers Network. He was chosen as Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education and, in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the introduction to a new edition of selected Walt Whitman poems in Song of Myself: And Other Poems. In spring 2010, Ecco published The Apple Trees at Olema: Selected Poems & Essays, 1985-2009, and a collection of selected essays. Awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics' Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, He is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. (adapted from a bio by Steven Barclay Agency) Poems The Yellow Bicycle The woman I love is greedy, but she refuses greed. She walks so straightly. When I ask her what she wants, she says, “A yellow bicycle.” Sun, sunflower, coltsfoot on the roadside, a goldfinch, the sign that says Yield, her hair, cat’s eyes, his hunger and a yellow bicycle. Once, when they had made love in the middle of the night and it was very sweet, they decided they were hungry, so they got up, got dressed, and drove downtown to an all-night donut shop. Chicano kids lounged outside, a few drunks, and one black man selling dope. Just at the entrance there was an old woman in a thin floral print dress. She was barefoot. Her face was covered with sores and dry peeling skin. The sores looked like raisins and her skin was the dry yellow of a parchment lampshade ravaged by light and tossed away. They thought she must have been hungry and, coming out again with a white paper bag full of hot rolls, they stopped to offer her one. She looked at them out of her small eyes, bewildered, and shook her head for a little while, and said, very kindly, “No.” Her song to the yellow bicycle: The boats on the bay have nothing on you, my swan, my sleek one! Misery and Splendor Summoned by conscious recollection, she would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking, before or after dinner. But they are in this other room, the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch embracing. He holds her as tightly as he can, she buries herself in his body. Morning, maybe it is evening, light is flowing through the room. Outside, the day is slowly succeeded by night, succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room does not change, so it is plain what is happening. They are trying to become one creature, and something will not have it. They are tender with each other, afraid their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment when they fall away again. So they rub against each other, their mouths dry, then wet, then dry. They feel themselves at the center of a powerful and baffled will. They feel they are an almost animal, washed up on the shore of a world— or huddled against the gate of a garden— to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted. Privilege of Being Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy– it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed– and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater? Anyway, they do, they look at each other; two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious, startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other, and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel. All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it, it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that they close their eyes again and hold each other, each feeling the mortal singularity of the body they have enchanted out of death for an hour so, and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man, I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness, wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth. And the man is not hurt exactly, he understands that life has limits, that people die young, fail at love, fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of coming, clutching each other with old invented forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely companionable like the couples on the summer beach reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes to themselves, and to each other, and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels. (HarperCollins Publishers) For three points, name the poet and give a personal response... 100607 ... lostgirl Robert Hass Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away, but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual. Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs. Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire, and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls. Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world. If you're lucky, you're hungry. (Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer) wow....leaves a reader breathless doesn't he? 100607 ... rt +3 =80 lostgirl! quite relevant poem you chose...right on. Question 53 It's 2:17am in a Paris hotel room and my sweat is bleeding into the sheets. I've been staring for hours at the popcorn ceiling, little balls of stucco poised to drop like concrete rain. The walls boxing me in are as thick as a bomb shelter, built to keep out the noise of landing planes and overzealous couples in neighboring rooms. The chapter ends: We're supposed to get married and I've never hated anyone so much in my life. And the second chapter begins: I didn't always want to push my fiance off a balcony. I knew that I was in for a wild ride; this wasn't your typical science book. It's not a book about science, per se, it's a book about living science. It's a story about the starts and stops and random things that get in the way of scientific research, both mundane and crazy. It's a love story and an adventure story with science and war-torn Congo as a backdrop. It's the ultimate story of one couple's attempts at finding work-life balance (as if there is such a thing). The chapters seamlessly integrate the story of the author's evolving relationship with her husband Brian, their joint attempts at asking really important questions about science, and the politics and war stories of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And of course the chimpanzees and bonobos are, in some sense, the stars of the show. Especially the bonobos. I was one of apparently only a handful of people who already know about bonobos, our other closest cousins besides chimpanzees, so I was surprised to read about how neglected bonobos have been by the larger scientific community. On her blog, the author wrote: As a lemur scientists once said to me, 'So what? No one knows about sifakas' (the dancing lemurs, even though they do, because of the cartoon Madagascar) 'why should bonobos be any different?' Because bonobos hold the key to a world without war. Their physiology, biochemistry, and psychology is set up to avoid violence. The fact that sex is their mechanism to reduce tension is irrelevant. We need to study the hell out of bonobos and use our big fat brains to find our own mechanism so we can live peacefully. We've had 26 days without war since WWII. Right now, there are 7 conflicts throughout the world killing over 1,000 people a year. In Congo alone, 1,500 people die every day. Despite cognitively knowing that we need to cooperate and get along (and in some instances we excel at this - but not health care reform), our emotions get in the way. We have to find a way to be more like bonobos. They share 98.7% of our DNA. What's in that 1.3% that makes them the way they are? And if we can use hummingbird flight to make helicopters and cat's eyes to make reflector lights, why can't we use bonobos to make peace on earth? And while you're reading the book, you start to understand the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees as she carefully explains the different studies that they conducted. You learn that chimpanzees are happy to cooperate in a food gathering task but only with certain others and only at certain times in certain situations; bonobos, on the other hand, are more than happy to share their food with just about anyone (study). You learn that upon being confronted with with a picture or recording of an unknown conspecific, chimpanzees have physiological responses that suggest a strong emotional fight-or-flight response. Their hands get colder and their right ears become warmer. Not so in the bonobo. You learn that even the baby bonobos who live in the nursery, and have no significant experience with adult bonobos engage in way more sexual behaviors than their baby chimpanzee counterparts. And since the babies couldn't have learned this from the adults, it probably reflects some innate set of behaviors. And then there's the study that Tory Wobber conducted, measuring the amount of testosterone present at baseline in bonobos and chimps (bonobos have WAY more, which is probably related to their increased sex) Bonobos are marked by cooperation; chimpanzees by conflict. How can two species so genetically similar be so different? It seems to relate to the availability of food. If you're a chimpanzee, you never know when or from where your next meal might come. Your position in the social hierarchy influences when and how much food you get from a given hunt or foraging trip. If you're a bonobo, you have plenty of food. The environmental pressure to adopt a more conflictual way of engaging with others is relatively non-existent. The way to reduce social tension is with sex. Sounds good to me. So you're learning about all these fascinating differences between bonobos and chimpanzees, and you start thinking about which aspects of human nature seem to be shared with either species, and then you realize that you see aspects of chimp and bonobo behavior playing out in the intergroup conflicts of the wars in Congo. And you start to notice echoes of chimp and bonobo behavior playing out in the interpersonal conflicts (and their subsequent resolution) between her and Brian. And the brilliant part is that she doesn't explicitly spell out the parallels between the apes and humans, but it's painfully clear. When are we more like bonobos, and when are we more like chimpanzees? When you read about the conflicts in Africa over diamonds, gold, and so on - when you read about the terrible atrocities committed by people against other people - you can't help but think about chimpanzees. When you read about the way Brian totally calmed her down after a particularly stressful day of testing, you can't help but think about the bonobos. And the other thing that becomes painfully clear is how important it is that we learn as much as we can from the bonobos, and that we work as hard as we can to protect the few remaining bonobos left in the world. Because somewhere in the 1.3% genetic difference between us and them are some pretty important clues as to how they maintain such a violence-free society. And that's really why she felt compelled to write this book, I think. And it was such an important book to write; the only other English-language book about bonobos was written by Frans de Waal more than ten years ago. By the end of the book, you feel like you really know her and Brian, you feel like you really get the issues surrounding the war in Congo...though, I probably don't get it as well as I think I do...and I have to remind myself which Congo is "chimpanzee Congo" (Republic of Congo) and which Congo is "bonobo Congo" (Democratic Republic of Congo). Thanks, Vanessa, for a great way to remember which is which! You feel like you really know the individual bonobos who feature so prominently: Mikeno, Lomela and Kata, Semendwa, Isiro, Malou, and all the others. And not only do you feel like you know them, but you care for them. (adapted from The Thoughful Animal, science blog) When I wake up this morning, someone might try to kill me. I live 10 minutes from a small town called Durham, NC, where according to the last statistics, 22 people were killed, 76 women were raped, and there were 682 cases of aggravated assault. When a chimpanzee wakes up in the morning, they probably have the same thought. In fact, if you're a male chimpanzee, you're more likely to be killed by another chimpanzee than anything else. If you're a female chimpanzee, expect to be beaten by every adolescent male who is making his way up through the ranks. People often ask me why humans are so intelligent, as in, what is it other apes lack that makes us so unique. Related Articles * What's a bonobo? * Attention North Carolina! Come meet a bonobo warrior! * Humans Have a Lot to Learn From Bonobos, Scientist Says * Are you a gambling chimp or a sure-thing bonobo? * Why bonobos? Find a Therapist Search for a mental health professional near you. Find Local: * Acupuncturists * Chiropractors * Massage Therapists * Dentists * and more! I'll tell you this: I would swap every gadget I own - my car, my laptop, the potential to fly to the moon - if I could wake up as a bonobo. No bonobo has ever been seen to kill another bonobo. There is very little violence towards females. The infants get an idyllic childhood where they do nothing but hang out with their moms and get anything they want. There is plenty of food. Lots of sex. And yet, according to one of our studies, 75% of people have no idea what a bonobo is. This isn't really our fault. It's been 13 years since Frans de Waal published Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, and since then, there has not been one popular book published on bonobos until I wrote Bonobo Handshake which is out today. Compare this to over 300 books published on polar bears, 240 books on chimpanzees, and 380 books on mosquitoes. This is partly because bonobos are so rare. There are as few as 10,000 left in the wild. And they only live in one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has suffered the bloodiest war since World War II. But it's also because politicians, scientists, and the media have been trying very hard to pretend they don't exist. Why? Bonobos have gay sex. For bonobos, sex is a mechanism to reduce tension. And you can't talk about two females rubbing clitorises together until they orgasm in documentaries, intelligent design classes, or to right wing demographics who believe homosexuality is unnatural. Bonobos are not considered to be family friendly, despite the fact that children can see people cut up, blown up and shot before 8pm on television. When it comes to scientists, even scientists who I like and admire, only ever refer to 'our closest living relative, the chimpanzee'. There is never any mention that we have TWO closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. If scientists do speak about them, they are constantly trying to neuter them. Bonobo researchers get annoyed by bonobos' reputation of being the over sexed ape, and are constantly downplaying the differences between bonobos and chimps. Even in cognition studies, despite Kanzi, bonobos are rarely tested for cognition because 'we've already done this in chimps, why should we do it in bonobos?' As for politicians, bonobos never had a chance. Acknowledging the existence of an ape who shares 98.7% of our DNA (suggesting descent with modification i.e. evolution), has homosexual interactions, and is female dominated, is completely out of the question. Microsoft spell check doesn't even register 'bonobo' as a word. And so bonobos have remained, locked in the cupboard like an embarrassing relative. As a lemur scientists once said to me, 'So what? No one knows about sifakas' (the dancing lemurs, even though they do, because of the cartoon Madagascar) 'why should bonobos be any different?' Because bonobos hold the key to a world without war. Their physiology, biochemistry, and psychology is set up to avoid violence. The fact that sex is their mechanism to reduce tension is irrelevant. We need to study the hell out of bonobos and use our big fat brains to find our own mechanism so we can live peacefully. We've had 26 days without war since WWII. Right now, there are 7 conflicts throughout the world killing over 1,000 people a year. In Congo alone, 1,500 people die every day. Despite cognitively knowing that we need to cooperate and get along (and in some instances we excel at this - but not health care reform), our emotions get in the way. We have to find a way to be more like bonobos. They share 98.7% of our DNA. What's in that 1.3% that makes them the way they are? And if we can use hummingbird flight to make helicopters and cat's eyes to make reflector lights, why can't we use bonobos to make peace on earth? 2010 is going to be the year of bonobos. With my book coming out, Sara Gruen releasing the first fiction about bonobos, and the bonobo genome due any day, expect bonobos to move to the front of public consciousness. (from the author's blog) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100608 ... lostgirl Bonobo Handshake ~a memoir of love and adventure in the Congo by Vanessa Woods violence, history, nature, sex and the dynamics of humanity compared to our peaceful primate cousins, the nearly extinct bonobos. can’t honestly say i have ever even heard of this amazing animal that shares so much common DNA with us, however it looks like a worthwhile adventure to find out more. 100608 ... rt +3+80 lostgirl is drifting away into first place waters............. this book is a must read! bonobos are the answer to sving the world! they never kill each other. they only use violence to maintain peace. sex is as common as a handshake. i heard vanessa woods do an interview with leonard lopate on the wnyc podcast. she is an australian who is now living in north carolina, but spends much time in the congo studying the bonobo the closest animal to the human. Question 54 It is not unheard of for a novelist of exceptional talent to write a deliberately difficult book. This urge does not necessarily result in novels with nameless characters, mutating typography or unpunctuated attempts to explore the aphotic realm of human consciousness. It is also not an urge unique to modernism or experimentalism. Some novelists just seem to say, What the hell. John Updike's odd (and wonderful) early novel ''The Centaur'' seems to have been written from this impulse, as do Philip Roth's equally bizarre novel ''The Breast,'' Norman Mailer's ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Unconsoled.'' Among this crowd, the young British novelist portrayed here stands out. Deliberately difficult novels are the only novels he seems to be interested in writing. This is to the good; the tree of literature drops its best fruit after being shaken with conviction and intelligence. Our author is neither abstrusely arch nor a wizard of scenic dislocation. One does not sense that -- unlike, say, William Gaddis, Carole Maso or Walter Abish -- Mitchell is trying to chop down the tree of literature in order to replace it with something treelike. On the contrary, his prose is straightforward and, quite often, magnificent. He is as good at aphorism (''Faith, the least exclusive club on earth, has the craftiest doorman'') as he is at description (''Now and then goldfish splish and gleam like new pennies dropped in water''). The difficulty comes in how he chooses to construct his novels -- or rather, how he does not choose to construct his novels. ''Ghostwritten,'' his first, involves nine characters (a musician, a terrorist, a host-seeking poltergeist and so on) and nine different locales that have no formal connection to one another. The book's meaning is the readerly equivalent of an inkblot test. ''Number9Dream,'' his second, largely follows a single character through Tokyo and beyond, but the story fractures along so many stress lines of the possible and impossible -- confusion the book does almost nothing to repair -- that the novel becomes little more than a beautifully expressed fantasia. With '' this novel,'' he has returned to the rather nutty method of ''Ghostwritten'': the novel gives us six separate stories, spanning the planet, that cover roughly 1,000 years of time. On one hand, Mitchell's strategy is boldly antithetical to what most narrative-driven novels have been up to since Cervantes. On the other hand, what Mitchell is doing is basically James Michener's ''Alaska'' with an I.Q. transplant. This novel has already been published in England. The reviews have been messiah-worthy. (One critic wrote that the novel makes ''almost everything in contemporary fiction look like a squalid straggle of Nissen huts.'') In The Observer of London, Robert McCrum called the novel ''a remarkable new novel by a significant talent,'' and made its Booker Prize nomination (''Number9Dream'' was a finalist) sound inevitable -- although The Sunday Telegraph caused a brief stir when it disclosed it would not review 'this book because its critic found the novel ''unreadable.'' The book imposes a dizzying series of milieus, characters and conflicts upon us: a ship sailing amid some islands around New Zealand during the mid-19th century, wherein an American notary named Adam Ewing befriends, at risk to himself, a stowaway Moriori named Autua; a Belgian estate called Zedelghem in the 1930's, wherein a sexually indecisive aspiring composer named Robert Frobisher serves as amanuensis to an older, more accomplished composer; California during the 1970's, wherein a plucky journalist named Luisa Rey attempts to disclose an ''Erin Brockovich''-style industrial conspiracy; London during the here and now, wherein a 60-ish book editor named Tim Cavendish finds himself accidentally imprisoned in a home for the elderly; Korea in the (just) foreseeable future, wherein a genetically engineered ''fabricant'' named Sonmi-451 is interrogated for her crime of wanting to be fully human; and Hawaii in some distant and thoroughly annihilated future, wherein a young goatherd named Zachry bears unknowing witness to the final fall of humanity into superstition and violence and war. With the exception of Zachry's tale, the book's thematic centerpiece, we visit each of these stories twice, in the following order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Each story is written quite differently -- so much so that this passionate book feels like a doggedly expert gloss on various writers and modes. The archaic Ewing section, rendered in journal form, becomes Defoe, possibly Melville. The epistolary Frobisher story is, perhaps, Isherwood or some other sturdy English master. The Luisa Rey section, written in breathlessly lousy prose, is some species of sub-Grisham. The urban comedy of Tim Cavendish's antics is well within Martin Amis's city limits. The plight of Sonmi-451 is Huxley (or ''Blade Runner''). And the daymare of Zachry's postapocalyptic world is something out of William S. Burroughs in a ''Cities of the Red Night'' mood. Taken as a whole, this consumate effort seeks to give the novel a steely new rigging of the possible. It is an impressive achievement. Unfortunately, impressive is usually all that it is. It is a devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine. So let it be said that this author is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page. But the novel is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect. It is frustrating not because it is too smart but because it is not nearly as smart as its author. Running across its muscularly told tales are two obvious connectors. The first is that every story is in some way ''read'' by a character in another (Ewing's journal is found by Frobisher, Frobisher's letters are read by Rey, Rey's story is submitted to the editor Cavendish, Cavendish's story becomes an old film watched by Sonmi-451, one of the gods worshiped in Zachry's world is Sonmi-451 herself). The second is the strongly implied notion that every central character is a reincarnation of a previous character, a philosophical conceit that in its basic elegance could have flapped from the pages of ''Jonathan Livingston Seagull.'' Cavendish himself addresses this as he mulls over the novel about Luisa Rey that was submitted to him: ''One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippy-druggy -- new age.'' Self-mockery as self-protection is a very old gambit, certainly, but it is beneath a writer as brilliant as he, truly is. To write a novel that resembles no other is a task that few writers ever feel prepared to essay. this writer has written such a novel -- or almost has. It its need to render every kind of human experience, the novel finds itself staring into the reflective waters of Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' Just as Joyce, in the scene that takes place in the cabman's shelter, found the hidden beauty of cliché-filled prose, so our author does with his Luisa Rey story. Just as Joyce, in the late scene in which Bloom and Dedalus finally sit down together, explored the possibilities of a narrative driven by interrogation, so he does with his ruthlessly grilled ''fabricant,'' Sonmi-451. This book is friendlier than ''Ulysses'' but far less fallibly human. If his virtuosity too often seems android, one suspects this says less about his achievement and more about the literature of formal innovation. This is a book that might very well move things forward. It is also a book that makes one wonder to what end things are being moved. (Adapted from a review by Tom Bissell) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response. 100608 ... lostgirl Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell this was described by one reviewer as being a "novel as a puzzle." touted as a highly complicated read, looks like i'd love it. by the way....where is everyone? 100609 ... rt +3=83 lostgirl! Question 55 Ten years after retiring from long-line offshore fishing for a life of lobster-trapping and writing on Isle au Haut off the coast of Maine, this author succumbed to "a deep yearning to go out of [her] comfort zone one more time" and find out whether, at 47, she was still seaworthy. The woman hailed by Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm as "one of the best swordboat captains, period, on the East Coast," signed on to pilot the 63-foot Seahawk on two swordfishing expeditions that would span 60 days and take her some 1,000 miles from home, to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. What she hadn't signed on for was landing (briefly) in a Canadian jail, or losing money on her venture. Like The Hungry Ocean, her best-selling 1999 account of captaining the Hannah Boden, this book charts the trip from hiring crew to selling their catch, with a lively narrative mix of adventure, colorful character portraits and calamity. But the story she tells of perseverance over hardship this time around is quite different. Instead of a triumphant, safe return with a record catch, this excursion, while not ending tragically, does not end entirely happily, either. She notes repeatedly that she has changed, both physically and mentally, in the 10 years since she last fished blue water: "I had always hired from the neck down. But at the age of 47, I realized that I had changed and that perhaps my criteria for crew needed to change." Her four-man crew is more mature and stable than in the past, and she, too, is less volatile. She writes, "I had definitely developed a more thorough thought process in the last ten years, I realized. I was actually being considerate." Another difference is that whereas the Hannah Boden was a sleek 100-foot vessel outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, the Seahawk is a 63-foot hunk of rust and outdated, malfunctioning electronics. In her eagerness to fish again, she overlooks some minimum standards — and pays for her oversights: After just 48 hours at sea, she suffers the humiliation of requiring a tow back to Nova Scotia for engine repair. In the end, the boat seems held together by bungee cords and epoxy. She knows how to spin a good yarn out of nightmarish setbacks, including her arrest by the Canadian coast guard after the Seahawk drifts into Canadian waters. She comments, "My detractors accuse me of intentionally crossing the line for publicity or for a book opportunity, to which I say bullshit — not my style. It happened. I have now written about it. So call me a pragmatist. But don’t call me an opportunist." While The Hungry Ocean offers a clearer picture of the nuts, bolts and economics of commercial fishing (and is less riddled with cliches), this tale is a more reflective book, pondering not just the vagaries of nature but the nature of success and self-definition. Her voyage of discovery culminates in several instructive moments, including her realization that "the standard by which I measured my own worthiness" had indeed grown beyond mere "seaworthiness." (adapted from a review by Heller Mcalpin) Here is an excerpt... Ripe and one sliver shy of full, the cantaloupe moon shone a flashlight beam along our path as we steamed east through the Gulf of Maine. It was glassy calm, and running lights glowed dimly on the stabilizing birds at the ends of the booms, rounding their edges to appear like jet engines under wings, red on port and green on starboard. This breathless night allowed us to haul the birds out of the water and gain a full knot in speed, as they normally ride below the surface to retard the roll of the boat and they slow us down in the process. The steady drone of the diesel two decks below added a soothing hum to the slow, gentle rocking of mysterious origin. The last of the lime green landmass had crept from the edge of the radar screen as the faded umbrella of city lights closed over our wake. At sea—it's more a feeling than it is a place. It was this feeling, the state of being at sea, that I hadn't experienced in ten years. This sensation is the result of living the total contradiction of burden and freedom. I am the captain, I thought. The freedom to make all decisions, unquestioned and without input, was something that I had missed during my sabbatical. To be held ultimately, although not solely, responsible for the lives and livelihoods of a loyal and capable crew was strangely exhilarating and empowering. But high hopes and expectations were weighty loads. It's the willingness, and not the ability, to bear that burden that separates captains from their crew. Right here and right now, as the Seahawk plodded along, I was fondly embracing the burden of that responsibility. Just being on the boat made me feel good. I was confident. And confidence is a key to success. I tweaked a knob on the autopilot to correct our course two degrees and remain on a perfect heading according to the numbers displayed on both GPS's. As I eased myself back into the captain's chair, Arch pulled himself up the narrow stairway and into the dark-paneled wheelhouse beside me. "Everything is secure below. Timmy is in the engine room doing a few things, Dave is reading a magazine at the galley table, and Machado is sleeping," he reported. "I really like Machado. He's so funny! I think he'll more than make up for not being around to help at the dock. You got a great crew!" "Thanks, Arch. I know I do." I meant it. Confidence in my crew fed my personal confidence. I believed that this was the best crew I had ever sailed with. Certainly the most mature; we probably wouldn't be plagued by the usual crew problems that stem from basic personality differences and lack of sleep. I wouldn't have to break up any fistfights or garnish any wages as punishment for poor behavior. Small squabbles could be annoying, I knew. And nothing was more exasperating than trying to reason with real, solid, mutual hatred when both parties are virtually connected at the hip for an extended voyage. Liking one another was huge. As far as work ethics go, nothing beats the older, more experienced guys. It's very much like the "young bull/old bull" thing. Four of the five of us owned and operated our own boats, so we already knew the basic moves that otherwise needed to be taught. Mike Machado was the only non-captain aboard, but he was also the only one other than me with any Grand Banks fishing experience. And between the two of us, I suspected that we had racked up more miles along the salty way than any pair I could think of. "Yes," I said, "I think we have a winning team aboard. Just the right combination of talents and strengths." "Speaking of talents and strengths, here I am," Tim said laughingly as he popped his head through the back door of the wheelhouse behind Archie. "The engine room is looking good. The water maker is cranking out, and the ice machine is making great ice—lots of it. I just shoveled. How's the list?" he asked, referring to whether or not the boat was leaning. I looked directly at the bow to determine that we were indeed not listing to either side and gave a silent nod. I was happy to forgo the usual lecture on the importance of keeping the boat on an even keel and the dangers inherent in not doing so, which is why I'd asked Tim to compensate by moving ice or fuel. "Why didn't you tell me? I would have helped you shovel," said Archie. "You take care of the galley, and the rest of us will handle the shoveling. Thanks for dinner, by the way. It was great," Tim said. I was relieved that Timmy had understood without having to be told that Archie was valuable in many ways and that none of his assets were in evidence on the end of a shovel. At his age and with the range of experience and breadth of knowledge that Archie had concerning just about anything, I didn't want to waste him in the fish hold. Again, I was appreciating the maturity level of my shipmates. I knew that Archie and Tim had a mutual liking and respect for each other, reminding me of father and son. "I'm gonna call Marge tomorrow and get a recipe for chicken," Arch said. "Do you mind if I hook up the satellite phone in this corner? It's the only place the antenna wire reaches. Everyone can use it to make calls." He was twisting the small coupling at the end of the rubber-coated wire that came through a hole in the aft bulkhead and terminated in the corner he'd mentioned. The five of us had a lot in common, I realized. Our similarities went beyond the fishing gene. Food was of utmost importance, as was family. So a call home for a chicken recipe was a no-brainer. "I'm gonna fix that computer on my watch tonight. Did you find the manual for the weather fax? I know I can get that going. I bungeed the hell out of our stateroom. These things are coming in really handy so far," he said as he pulled a short loop of bungee cord out of a hip pocket. "These and the two-part epoxy . . . I can keep us going with this stuff." I had always known Archie as a guy with a short attention span. I guess you'd call it adult ADD. (Excerpted by permission of Viking Adult.) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100609 ... jane linda greenlaw seaworthy 100609 ... jane i think it was a really interesting idea for her to challenge herself one last time before retirement, and it makes me want to go out and be in the ocean again. 100609 ... rt jane is back +3 =73 Question 56 Is Google making us stupid? When the author posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic essay, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now he expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind” — from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer — he interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, he makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption — and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, this book sparkles with memorable vignettes — Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive — even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds. (adapted from a review by The Atlantic) An interview with the author... You write that the Internet encourages a mental ethic of speed and, in effect, distraction. Tell us a little about how you arrived at this idea. It was originally spurred by my own personal experience. Like a lot of people, I had been using the Net heavily for more than a decade. In fact, every time the Web gained some new capability, I used it more. What I started noticing around 2007 was that I seemed to be losing my ability to concentrate. Not just when I was sitting at a computer. Even when the computer was off and I tried to read a book, to sustain a single train of thought, I found it difficult. What's the scale of the technological and cognitive transformation here? When was the last comparable shift? I think the last one was probably the introduction of the printed book with Gutenberg's press in 1450. It changed the prevailing mode of thinking in society. For the first time—speaking for society—you had a technology that encouraged people to be attentive, and shielded them from distraction. A mode of thought that was previously restricted to scholars and monks suddenly was encouraged among society at large. The printing press had a very large role in fostering the modes of thought we saw reshaping society in the centuries afterwards. That was the last time we saw something as dramatic as the introduction of the Internet. What sets the Internet apart from radio and television—earlier mass media—is that the Net doesn't just process sound and video. It processes text. I think it's fair to say that the written word is extremely important to our intellectual lives and our culture. Until recently text was distributed through the printed page, which encouraged immersion in a single narrative or argument. With the Net, text becomes something that can be broadcast electronically the way sound and pictures can be. So you begin to see the same habits of thought: distracted, hurried, and (I would argue) superficial. What we're seeing is a revolution in textual media. What domains do you think will suffer the most in this transformation? Which will be the biggest beneficiaries? The biggest beneficiary is online media itself, whether it's services like the Google search engine, Facebook and Twitter, or traditional media served up online. These are both shaping our mental habits and benefiting from it, supplying information in a kind of blur. And it's no surprise that printed media is a very big victim. We become less and less able to read a printed book or a long essay in a magazine. In addition to the economic upheaval, traditional print media is going to suffer from cognitive changes. As a caveat--this is something that is going to play out for many years. Has your perspective changed? My point of view about computers has changed over the last 5 or 10 years. By nature, I'm much more of a technophile than a technophobe. I was even pretty geeky about wanting to have the latest thing. Now, because of my suspicion that my reliance on these things is stealing a literary mode of thinking, I've become increasingly suspicious of my love for gadgets and technology. I had Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I stopped those. I don't have an iPad or an iPhone. What can we do to counteract these cognitive changes? I struggle with that question. I think it depends on whether you see this as a social and cultural phenomenon, or from the standpoint of an individual. On the social level, I confess I'm a fatalist. The Internet is being woven so deeply into our daily lives—the way we socialize, work, and get educated. In some ways, I see this change in our thinking toward an ever more distracted and fast-paced mode as perhaps inevitable. I'm not sure we're going to be able turn the clock back as a society. On the individual level I'm more optimistic. Those of us concerned about what we might be losing can make the choice to reduce—perhaps dramatically—the time we spend on the Net, and the time we spend staring into screens. Instead, we can focus on reading deeply, and exercising our concentration. People who are worried should give thought to how they might be able to back away from the online life. How do you see these cognitive changes affecting the bigger picture--our politics, our economy, our society? I don't want to make the Internet too much of a bogeyman. You can certainly make the argument that the political sphere has been influenced very heavily by media—particularly by the compression of thought into soundbites, and from there into more extreme soundbites. That is something that predates the Net and computers and goes back to TV news. But I think the Net amplifies and accelerates that process as well. That's not to say it's all negative. It makes a lot more information and points of view available to people. But I fear its effect will be to further encourage superficial thinking. Do you see this cognitive shift resulting in tension between generations? I'm wary of painting this as a generational divide. One thing we've learned about the brain is that it's malleable throughout our lives. I'm 51 years old. Half of my life was spent in the pre-computer era. Nevertheless I'm suffering these same cognitive effects. The mental effects of staring into a screen are the same no matter what your age. It annoys me a bit to see middle-aged people pretending this is just something that influences the young. It influences everyone. There's no doubt, however, that the consequences would be more severe if you were brought up from a very young age getting your information through computers and smartphones. The danger for the young is never developing the mental facility for contemplative thought, whether deep reading or being able to follow a single argument over a long stretch. I worry that we're training children to be distracted, to confuse getting access to information with intelligence.There seems to be a redefinition of our idea of intelligence itself that is emerging. The emphasis is on how quickly you can find information, rather than what you do with it, how deeply you think about it, and how you weave it into the knowledge you already have. How do you think individual development—of minds, of personalities—is affected by the digital age? It seems pretty clear to me that the richness of our knowledge and our memory hinges on our ability to pay attention. If we're perpetually distracted from a young age—the average American teen already sends or receives about 3,000 text messages a month—we will likely sacrifice some of the depth and distinctiveness of our intellects and our personalities. That's not to say there won't be compensations, and it's not to say that we'll be stupid, but it is to say that we'll be less interesting. Your vision is noticeably darker than some of the sunnier optimists. How do you respond to the idea that fears of a negative change are exaggerated? I think it puts me outside of the mainstream. On the other hand, even among the people who continue to be infatuated with technology, I do think that there is a substantial minority that is also beginning to worry about the effects on their intellectual and social lives. We've had about 20 years of general excitement and enthusiasm about the Net. Now, that won't go away, but I think more and more doubts are going to be raised. It's seemed for a time like a divide between technophile and technophobe. But when people like me have serious doubts as well, that's when the conversation begins to change. It can't be characterized as an anti-technology, pro-technology divide. Is (or was) your less Webby life happier? Distinctly so. In addition to feeling calmer and more attentive, I felt less anxious. Some psychologists believe that the faster we take in information, the more stress we feel. I found that to be true in my own experience. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100609 ... jane nicholas carr the shallows this looks SUPER interesting. i, too, have noticed my concentration at an all-time low. i have wanted to get back into reading but found it extensively more difficult than it was in my childhood. of course, here's another one to add to my reading list ;) 100609 ... rt +3 =76 go jane! 100609 ... rt Question 57... This author's poignant debut novel has been called "reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." The book follows the path of young Kimberly Chang who has just immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn with her mother and Kimberly's double life, trying to learn English and succeed in school while helping her mother in a sweatshop and living in poverty. The main character's struggle mirrors her own experience: she moved to New York when she was five years old and would go to a Chinatown sweatshop with her family and return back home to a rat- and roach-infested apartment. Through her hard work, she attended Hunter College High School, later attending Harvard on scholarship and eventually earning her MFA in fiction at Columbia. An interview with the author from "the Gothamist..." What inspired you to write this novel? I suppose I started by wanting to write this book for my mother. When I was a child and we were working in the clothing factory, she stayed in the kitchen, tying sashes on skirts and tagging pants until late into the night. And no matter how wise she was in Chinese, my mother could only manage a few words of broken English. We all take the subway, and there are those foreigners on the train with the weird clothes, and they’re holding plastic bags that smell funny, and they can hardly speak English. Well, I’ve been that foreign person and my mother’s English is still non-existent. I wanted to tell the other side of the story, to put English-speaking readers into the mind and heart of a Chinese immigrant, so that readers could experience what it was like to be on the other side of the language barrier. I wanted them to feel how it was to have to struggle to comprehend English, and yet to understand Chinese as easily as a native speaker does. I hoped that maybe the next time someone saw a foreign person on the train, they might realize that that person could be wise, articulate and funny in their own language. Can you describe some of your experience in New York after you immigrated? For instance, did you really live in a roach- and rat-infested apartment and work in a Chinatown sweatshop? Yes, we did. We’d been fairly well-off in Hong Kong but when we came to New York, we had to start all over again. My family started working in a clothing factory in Chinatown and my father brought me there after school each day. I started when I was five years old. My story wasn’t unusual - there were many children in the sweatshop. I remember the constant layer of fabric dust that settled on my hair and arms, and the incredible heat of the factory due to the steamers. We also lived in an apartment without central heating, where we kept the oven door open as our only source of warmth. I really don’t want to talk about the roaches and rats because I’m still terrified of them! The unusual part of my story is that we were lucky enough to get out of that life. Do you think New York opened its arms to you? New York taught me how hard you have to work to be the best that you can be. It showed me an incredible world of art, music and culture. It introduced me to friends from many cultures and backgrounds. It gave me a tremendous amount of freedom, to succeed and to fail. A friend of mine once told me, “Living in New York City is like living on Krypton. Once you learn how to walk in NY, you can fly everywhere else.” Your book acknowledges Kimberly's challenges with understanding English by distorting some words to convey how she hears the language. How difficult was it for you to learn English? I remember wishing more than anything that I could speak English. In my first elementary school in Queens, I was completely lost and no attempt was made to help me whatsoever. Every exercise I did was simply marked with a zero, even though it was impossible for me to do them correctly since I didn’t understand a word of English. After we moved to Brooklyn, my second elementary school was much kinder and the teachers made a real effort to help me integrate. I could learn fairly quickly at that point since I was still so young. However, I’m the youngest of seven children and I saw how much harder it was for my parents and older siblings to learn English. Tell us about attending Hunter College High School. I’d gone to a public elementary school and like Kimberly Chang in my novel, I was tested by several exclusive private schools in sixth grade. I won scholarships to all of them, but I think that it would have been very hard for me to fit in socially at that point in my life. That’s where Kimberly’s story takes place - I imagined what it would have been like if I’d accepted one of those scholarships. I was thrilled when I got into Hunter, which is a public school for gifted kids. I still felt quite out of place in many ways, because some of my clothes were homemade and there were a number of American customs I didn’t understand then. However, I was in a community of teachers and students who were vitally interested in learning. It was challenging and fun, although I was sometimes very afraid, because I knew that if I slipped and couldn’t keep up with the rest of the class, there would be no one at home who could help me. From the moment I entered Hunter, I also had the intention of going to Harvard when I left. I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to achieve my goal, but I understood I had no other choice. If I didn’t get into Harvard or a comparable school with a need-blind admissions policy, it would have been impossible for us to pay any part of the tuition and I wouldn’t have gone to college at all. Even though you loved English and literature, you devoted your high school studies to science, because you didn't think English was practical and you needed to get a full financial aid package, which Harvard gave you. Then you changed your major from Physics to English. What did your parents think? How did you manage? You have to understand that although I did quite well in school, I was a disaster as a Chinese daughter at home. I burned and spilled everything in the kitchen, took apart appliances I wasn’t supposed to, and was (and still am) the worst housekeeper anyone had ever seen. My family didn’t think I was smart, because I was dreamy and impractical. My parents were absolutely stunned when I got into Harvard, especially since it was by early admissions. They were so relieved by the Harvard thing that they were quite calm about the switch from physics to English. I was already putting myself though Harvard then, working up to four jobs at a time. I started by banging dishes in the freshman cafeteria, then cleaned rooms (which I was also very bad at), read to the blind, and worked in the library. I also wanted to give something back to the Chinese community and taught English as a Second Language to adult immigrants, worked as a Big Sister, and became the director of a summer program for Chinatown kids. I loved that program because we tutored the kids and took them to beaches and museums. It was an alternative to going to the workplace, whether that was a sweatshop or a restaurant, with their parents. It was only at Harvard that I realized I never would have to go back to the factory. I felt safe enough to do what I really wanted to do, which was to become a writer. You worked as a professional ballroom dancer in NY after college. How did you get started at that? Do you watch Dancing with the Stars? I’ve always loved to dance and I think that if I’d been trained when I was younger, I might have become a professional dancer. I took a lot of dance lessons as soon as I was able to, and after I left Harvard, I started looking for a job that would give me enough space to write at the same time. There was an audition for a major ballroom dance studio on midtown New York. I was terrified, but I went. We started in a large room and were taught several combinations. About twenty of us were picked out to be “trained.” That was, of course, another part of the selection process. In the three-week long training, we learned the entire Bronze syllabus, all ten dances, man’s and woman’s part. Every day, some people from my training class disappeared. I never saw anyone talking to any of us. They were just gone. Our group got smaller and smaller until one day, I was the only one left. I thought, “OK, either I disappear now too, or I have the job.” I had the job. I spent about three years doing competitions and shows, and teaching, and most of all, being trained to dance well. I have seen “Dancing with the Stars” and it’s a lot of fun, but the truth is, I have no time so I almost never get to watch television. My dream is to have a new TV show called, “Dancing with the Writers.” And then you went to Columbia for your MFA. How was that experience? I realized when I was in ballroom that I was spending about ten hours a day dancing and one hour writing, when it needed to be the other way around. I’d been accepted to a few programs but when I visited Columbia, it was so New York: diverse, edgy, smart, and challenging. I knew it was where I wanted to go. The Columbia Graduate Writing Division taught me to be a professional. It was wonderful to have those years mainly to write, although I held other jobs as well to support myself. I learned so much there about craft, language, and passion. I don’t think I could have become a professional writer if I hadn’t gotten my MFA, although many writers do very well without one. Someone compared Girl in Translation to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. What do you think? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of my favorite books when I was growing up, so of course, I’m honored by the comparison. I really can’t judge my own book at all. I can only say that it was sincerely my best attempt to write something meaningful. I wanted to create a work of fiction that would show people some of the different worlds I had seen myself. Your life is like the embodiment of the American Dream. Do you think your life and its success would be possible in another country? I think that success is obviously possible in many different places, but America was the Golden Mountain to my parents’ generation. It was the place to follow your dreams and something that I do think is very American is that ability to believe. The idea that someone can be a child working in a factory one day and a successful novelist a number of years down the road is a powerful one, and in America, we’re not afraid to believe in it. You now live in Holland. What do you miss about New York City? I really love Holland, but there are a lot of things I miss about New York. Most of all, I miss my New York friends and family. I miss the feeling of complete freedom you have on the street, where you could dance along in a huge yellow chicken outfit and no one would really notice you. I miss the musicians that perform in the subways and on the street. I miss the cab drivers who all have their own stories. And of course, I miss the bagels. For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100610 ... lostgirl Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok one reviewer who is actually an immigrant and not usually drawn to stories like this gave a rave review… she states, “There's a Chinese saying that the fates are winds that blow through our lives from every angle, urging us along the paths of time. Those who are strong-willed may fight the storm and possibly chose their own road, while the weak must go where they are blown.” girl in translation looks to me like a study in perseverance and poise, right up there with hard work and trying to navigate the most challenging of mazes…that of life. 100610 ... rt +3=86 lostgirl! Question 58 To shape the everyday happenings of the world into a good story — isn’t that what novelists are supposed to do best? Yet readers must often choose between “literary fiction,” understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the “real world” of human relationships, and “commercial fiction,” fast-paced novels in which plot is everything. The literary is assumed to be cerebral and artistic, the commercial mindless and entertaining. One suspects that nobody is completely happy with this divide. So it is a joy to discover, every once in a while, a writer whose prose and plotting take something from both camps. As this author proves in his nuanced literary thriller, it is perfectly possible to find a novel that has it all. His tale begins when Odile, a Parisian clothing designer happily married to an art-film auteur, agrees to acquire Soviet-­era May Day banners with a partner and courier them out of Russia for a significant fee. Instructed to “pay whatever was asked” for the flags, Odile buys 30 of them for $50,000. After completing the mission and boarding their train back to Paris, Odile’s partner, an assistant professor at the Sorbonne, disappears. Odile returns to Paris alone, takes the flags to the American dealer who has orchestrated the entire affair and hurries home, only to find her 13th Arrondissement apartment ransacked. Her husband, Max, meanwhile, is having a mid-career crisis that inspires him to ditch his current project — a bankable film with the starlet Isabelle H. attached — to experiment with his own version of cinéma vérité. In the next days, Odile and Max become entangled in a web of intrigues that endanger their marriage and their lives. Enter a cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amounts of cash — and voilà, you’re caught up in the momentum of a great story. “The money is in the truck with my driver,” Odile says with gun moll aplomb as she buys the May Day flags from a band of black-market merchants. “If I like them, he will pay you. He has a gun.” Odile is “a cool customer,” but she is also the kind of woman who is subject to recurrent dreams, intuitions, episodes of déjà vu and “esoteric synaptic events.” Although religion holds no interest for her and she doesn’t consider self-denial a virtue, there is something of the mystic in Odile. She holds a private conviction that “she would renounce the world and its ten thousand excruciations” to “retreat into solitude and live her life as an ascetic,” even as she doubts her “own freedom to make such decisions.” Yet Odile is enraptured by the physical beauty of her surroundings. Standing before the Opéra Bastille, she perceives that “a veil had been lifted to reveal a scene completely new to her, one in which every particular was strange and without precedent. She knew where she was, but each thing she saw was the first of its kind: the first bicyclist, the first wine carafe, the first woman to tie a sweater around her waist by the arms.” The conventional thriller dame of the first Odile meets the sensitive introvert of the second, creating a wonderful frisson. The contrast makes Odile a magnificent character. The author's passion for detail lies behind this, of course. He has an artist’s eye for color and texture. A figure in a Giacometti drawing is “shimmering into being of its own accord” in a way that is “bewitching and troubling in equal measure.” The May Day flags are “piled against a wall in smoldering array.” Such descriptive richness might be expected from a writer who was senior editor at Art in America magazine for more than 30 years. In fact, Mooney’s art-world descriptions are so enchanting that one fully believes that a savvy American art dealer would hire an inexperienced, non-Russian-speaking Parisian clothing designer to travel thousands of kilometers by train to hunt down Soviet-era artifacts from street markets in Moscow and smuggle them back to Paris. Perhaps that is why, when the details feel off, the effect is disorienting. Odile goes to Moscow sometime in the late 1990s, yet the Russia Mooney describes has a distinctly cold war ambience. A fellow passenger on the train from Moscow to Paris, an American student traveling from Beijing, had changed his renminbi into rubles on entry, only to discover that the rubles “couldn’t be taken out of the country” upon departure. Rather than have it confiscated, he spends all of his money on Caspian caviar and Georgian champagne. It’s a small detail, but in 1998 it was legal to bring rubles out of Russia. Whether the ruble was worth much in 1998 — it crashed that year — is another question. A more glaring distortion involves the repercussions of taking the May Day flags through border control. Just before he disappears, Odile’s partner offers to bring the flags through customs at Brest alone, warning Odile that if “something goes wrong, they have only one of us to execute.” Execution of French citizens for bringing flags out of Russia? Fifty years earlier, one might have ended up in Siberia, but in the 1990s the punishment would have been considerably less harsh than the firing squad. Most likely, he played up cold-war-era menace in the service of creating dramatic tension, and in this respect, Russia functions as it was meant to. One is too wrapped up in the drama to bother with Google. Indeed, when a truly frightening nemesis arrives in the person of Kolya ­Kukushkin, a Russian banker who will torture and kill to get what he wants, all thought of life-­threatening customs agents disappears. Kukush­kin is a classic villain, both charming and terrifying, whose influence is more pervasive than Odile and Max realize. At one point, feeling adrift, Odile buys a ticket to John Huston’s “Maltese Falcon,” the classic film-noir adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel. She takes a “third-row center seat in the darkened theater, and delivers herself gratefully” into the brilliant distraction of the story. “A hundred minutes later she emerged refreshed. The world depicted in the film, for all its duplicity, innuendo and fruitless striving, resembled the real world only in part. Why she should draw strength from this utterly ordinary observation, available to virtually anyone on earth for the price of a movie ticket, was beyond her, but as she started east on Boulevard St.-Germain she felt its power in every step she took.” Whether Odile’s experience is one of artistic communion or pure escapism, a cerebral appreciation of film noir or her own private guilty pleasure, it is impossible to tell. In the end, if one is mesmerized by a storyteller’s gifts, what does it matter? (adapted from a review by Danielle Trussoni) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100610 ... rt a clue you need? this author said, "sight is a rapacious sense and that there are two ways that we experience everything." question is now worth six points... 100611 ... lostgirl The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney A thriller stock full of Paris, Russian mob, art, design, a movie with dual unexplained endings, love, hate...the intelligence quotient on this one makes it another to add to the required reading list. 100611 ... rt +6=92 lostgirl! Question 59 “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” Something that began as “[a]n appreciation, an affinity” became something “more serious” and then “it became somehow personal.” In this case the color is blue and what follows is a philosophical investigation into loss, pain, and suffering. In the 240 prose entries the book consists of, this author deals with the personal loss of a relationship and witnesses the physical suffering of a friend who became a quadriplegic following an accident (something she also wrote about in her 2007 poetry collection, Something Bright, Then Holes), all while returning again and again to the color blue. Throughout the book, she consults numerous writers, artists and thinkers, and she places herself firmly in conversation with them. In entry 23, she notes the tendency to turn to color at “a particularly fraught moment” as demonstrated by Goethe’s Theory of Colours, Derek Jarman’s Chroma, and Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour. She writes, “[Wittgenstein] knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically boring. ‘That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit,’ he wrote.” So we learn she is in a particularly fraught moment and has turned to the color blue. At a job interview at a university she is asked, “Why blue?”: “We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.” This clearly refers to more than just the color blue. It also refers to “the prince of blue,” a former lover who has since left, and it refers to anyone or anything anyone has ever loved. Unlike her assessment of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, her own writing about color is certainly not boring. The collection of quotes and facts are reminiscent of David Markson’s Reader’s Block series, but she makes herself more present in the collage, creating an engaging and powerful read. (Of course, Markson’s books were published as fiction, whereas Nelson’s is a memoir or essay.) While readers can certainly delight in the wonderful and strange facts she assembles, the readers also experience a wider range of emotions. Without falling into old standbys and clichés, she articulates loss in a way that readers can relate to. However, the ability to trace and define loss may prove fruitless to some, since she is not able to produce a cure. Early on she asks, “But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?” By the end of this book, there does seem to be some greater understanding or perhaps transcendence or redefinition of the problem, so the book itself serves as evidence that there is something to be said for diagnoses. With the publication of Jane: A Murder in 2005, she established herself as a serious thinker in search of truth. The lyric essay serves as the perfect form for her investigations. This book is brilliant and sad, and it adds to the excellent body of work this prolific, young writer has created. (adapted from a review by Gina Myers) A Bombblog interview with the author... What gave you the idea to write a collection based on the color blue? Was it the works of Goethe and Wittgenstein on color or did you discover those after you began? I’ve always loved blue, and I’ve always been a writer, so the prospect of a book about blue has been hovering with me, around me, for some time. But in another sense, the book was a localized, reactionary choice: I had just written two books about a sexual murder in my family (Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts) and I actively wanted to spend time writing and thinking about something I loved rather than something I found despicable and frightening. So it began as a pillow book of sorts, a book devoted to pleasure. Because I am who I am, or because pleasure is what it is, the book slid pretty quickly into dealing with pain too. I have been a longtime lover of Wittgenstein, so that love predated this project. Goethe I think I read along the way, as I devoured many classics of color writing. What is your first memory of the color blue? I grew up near the beach in northern California—Muir Beach in particular—and spent many hours as a child and later, as a teenager, driving those crazy curvy roads with that unbelievable expanse of blue ocean spread out down below. That geographical setting—which is really more of a phosphene for me than a place—appears early on in the book, in #6, where I say, “The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene.” It’s a spot where I learned something about being alone, and something about the sublime, and likely something about the pain and the pleasure of each. Did blue factoids like those of the Cyanometer and Bower birds come to you naturally because it was your favorite color, and then you decided to write a book about blue? Or was there a conscious blue fact hunt as a result of deciding to write the book? I collected blue factoids, as you say, for years, just naturally—one exerts a magnetic effect (hopefully!) on what one loves. But once I started the project, I definitely hunted. Michel Pastoreau, William Gass, John Gage, David Batchelor, Victoria Finlay, and other writers provided leads, which I followed according to whim and intuition. As far as hunting in the wild goes, I did my fair share. Blue is, as the book notes, both utterly abundant and also quite rare in nature, so the hunting was paradoxical. It’s related, perhaps, to looking for love, or anything else that can feel puzzlingly ubiquitous and zero-sum. On your credits page you have sections for “The Principal Correspondents and Suppliers,” and in the text you mention “blue correspondents.” Did your blue information come mostly from your own research or via others once you mentioned you were writing a book about blue? What was the format for others’ submissions to your blue fact collection? The information came from everywhere. Perhaps mostly from books, as mentioned above, but I also informally invited and attracted blue facts and stories from all sides. I guess to qualify as a correspondent, someone had to supply me on more than one occasion; certain friends were treasure troves of blue facts. A lot of blue bits would come my way—and still come my way, though I don’t know what to do with them anymore—after giving of a public reading from the book. So audience members, friends, lovers, and colleagues all got into the act, which was great. It felt like a beautiful detective story, but with no denouement, no arc, no solution, no crime. While working on the book I started a blue altar in my house to collect all the weird goods that came my way, and believe me, they were weird—a light blue cement road bump/disc thing with a smiley face painted on it by a desert-dweller, shreds of a navy blue shirt passed back-and-forth between me and the so-called princess of blue, pictures and postcards of Jesus, in his blue mandorla, which I sewed together and hung up like a mobile, and so on. And there are so many leads I never followed—for example, my friend, a great poet named Christian Hawkey, told me a hair too late in the game about the blues of Georg Trakl, which I would have liked to pursue. Another lifetime! In your writing you’ve worked in several different forms from poetic lyric to memoir to non-fiction. The form of this book is a sort of series of numbered journal-like prose entries. How did you decide to go with this form for this book? I was writing a lot of blue poems for some time, some of which ended up appearing (in prose), but I wasn’t happy with them as poems at all. I felt they just scattered thoughts, facts, and strong feelings around, without any of the focus or logic or sequential accretion that I had in mind. I was so taken with the form, tone, and locutions of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that it took me awhile to realize that the form was right there, staring me in the face. I basically took half of the book’s locutions from Wittgenstein, and the other half from Goethe: the anecdotal locutions about perception come from Theory of Colours, and the relentless form of self-questioning, of pulling the rug out from under the speaker each time she has come to perch, comes from Philosophical Investigations. The combination and form all came to me at once one day while I was browsing in the philosophy section of a dusty, cowboy bookstore in Joshua Tree. I drove back to LA and applied it to what I’d gathered, and it seemed to take. How do you decide the form of any project you work on? Does your subject matter dictate the form or do you have to tinker with different forms to see which one works best? It’s both—the content dictates the form, but I have to try out different forms to see what form the content wants to take. This can be quite frustrating, even if it ends up the most inventive thing I do as a writer. I remember, back in college, reading the line, “I look for the form/ things want to come as” (by Archie Ammons, I think—not a poet I’ve spent a lot of time with, but this one line obviously stuck), and thinking to myself, yes, that’s exactly how it is for me. The irony is that philosophically, or metaphysically, or spiritually even, I don’t think I really agree with this approach at all. I mean, things are what they are. But if an invented thing doesn’t properly exist prior to one’s inventing it—well, maybe then you do have to look for the forms things want to come as. Most of your books of poetry seem to have a central theme as opposed to just being a collection of poems on various topics. What do you attribute this to? Writing the book Jane: A Murder changed a lot, maybe everything, for me. After years of writing short, individual lyric poems, I suddenly felt my mind hunger out past the one-page mark, and into the problems posed by more capacious structures. And, I guess, those posed by working with a “topic,” as you say. “Topic” may be a more accurate word than “story,” though narrative often shimmers in as a by-product of working with length and sequence. But mostly it’s a formal interest that pushes me out, an abiding interest in—and bewilderment about—how thoughts hold together, how they push against each other. How they congeal, contrast, accrue, or change via juxtaposition or order. For the moment I seemingly can’t go back to short poems—I’m working on another longish nonfiction project right now, called The Art of Cruelty, which has a form (straight-away prose) but is still wandering around in the lands of tone and genre. In this book you mention wanting to travel to blue sites such as ancient indigo and woad production sites in Afghanistan and Morocco amongst others. You go on to say you didn’t have any money to go and were denied a grant. Do you have any blue travel tales? Have you been able to take any trips to any blue specific sites or do you have any plans to in the future? Oh no, I have no blue travel tales to tell at all. Some of the blue correspondents sent me news from Morocco, or from Africa, or from other far-off lands, but I mean it when I say that my blues stayed local. I think that’s alright. I have a quotation pinned on my wall, from a Chinese poet named Mo Fei, that says: “Poetry has to do with a satisfaction with limited things, a paring down. It is the acceptance of a certain form of poverty. It is not endless construction.” I like this asceticism, this surrender to the condensery, as Lorine Niedecker once called it. This book is about that distillation, as performed in the face of something as all-encompassing and endlessly beautiful as the color blue. Somehow it all reminds me of John Cage’s formative experience in a soundproof booth: he was amazed to discover that instead of silence, he could still hear two sounds: that of his nervous system, and that of his blood beating. He said this event gave his life direction, insofar as it sent him down the path of nonintention. I suppose I feel something of the same about blue, though I’d be hard pressed to explain more. It relieves and enlivens me. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100611 ... lostgirl Bluets by Maggie Nelson an odyssey into the color blue seems like an odd thing until one reads a bit about this author...her insight and perspective are very different than most, should make for a compelling read. 100612 ... rt +3=95 go lost girl! Question 60... A HINDU, a Muslim and a Christian are trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It sounds suspiciously like the setup of a joke, something you might hear at a tavern from the guy who's been downing gimlets all night. But this novel based on this very premise, is hardly your average barroom gag. Granted, it may not qualify as ''a story that will make you believe in God,'' as one character describes it. But it could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life -- although sticklers for literal realism, poor souls, will find much to carp at. For one thing, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian are all the same person -- Pi Patel, an amiable Indian teenager who sees no reason why he can't practice three religions at once. He's also something of an expert on animal behavior. As the son of a zoo owner in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, he grew up on familiar terms with howler monkeys, one-wattled cassowaries and American bison. As a result, he's attuned to the intricacies of interspecies cohabitation. ''A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence,'' he explains. ''Exactly where an animal says to us, 'Stay out!' with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, 'Stay in!' with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.'' This zoological savvy proves indispensable to Pi when he and his family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move -- lock, stock and menagerie -- to Canada. Like latter-day Noahs, they load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail for the New World. But ''midway to Midway,'' something inexplicable happens. For reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker. They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone on the 26-foot craft. But thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general bewilderment of two traumatized and seasick creatures, the obvious does not immediately occur. Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach an important insight about his boatmate: ''I had to tame him,'' he realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.'' As paradoxical as it may seem, Pi understands that his own survival depends on keeping his ferocious opponent alive and well -- ''because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker.'' Although the book works remarkably well on the pure adrenaline-and-testosterone level of a high-seas adventure tale, it's apparent that the author is not interested in simply retelling the classic lifeboat-survival story (with a Bengal tiger playing the prickly Tallulah Bankhead role). Pi, after all, is a practitioner of three major religions who also happens to have a strong background in science; with such a broad résumé, his story inevitably takes on the quality of a parable. In fact, although the book reverberates with echoes from sources as disparate as ''Robinson Crusoe'' and Aesop's fables, the work it most strongly recalls is Ernest Hemingway's own foray into existentialist parable, ''The Old Man and the Sea.'' But while Hemingway depicted the defining struggle of his archetypal man as one of sheer endurance and determination, Pi's battle is more subtle. The boy must finesse his demon, not overcome it, and do so by means of a kind of psychological jujitsu. He comes to realize that survival involves knowing when to assert himself and when to hold back, when to take the upper hand and when to yield to a power greater than himself. He discovers, in other words, that living with a tiger ultimately requires acts of both will and faith. There are times when he pushes the didactic agenda of his story too hard. One episode involving a bizarre ''Gandhian'' island of passively carnivorous seaweed -- populated by an enormous herd of South African meerkats -- struck me as a little too baldly allegorical, however magical its imagery. But he is usually able to keep his feet on the ground by focusing on the physical and logistical details of his hero's predicament. He writes with a playful and discursive casualness, but that doesn't prevent him from delivering some arresting descriptions. In one of the more cinematic moments in the novel, Pi catches a bioluminescent dorado and must pummel it to death with the dull side of a hatchet: ''The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colors in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neonlike on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.'' Moreover, in the book's final chapters, just when many novels are winding down to their foregone conclusions, he gives the novel an intriguing twist. After the lifeboat comes safely to shore in Mexico (and Richard Parker disappears without ceremony into the jungle), Pi finds that his wild narrative is not believed by the officials sent to debrief him. And he knows exactly why: ''You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently.'' Urged to provide a more credible explanation for his survival, Pi placates the officials with a story that contains just the kind of ''dry, yeastless factuality'' they're looking for. But is this more straightforward (and tigerless) version of events actually closer to the deeper truth of his adventure? It's a testimony to the author's achievement that few readers will be tempted to think so.(adapted from a review in the Los Angeles Times) A Question from the A.V. Club... So you don't find on that individual level you mentioned, people of any one faith are more accepting or open to the book than people of another faith? No. But if I project, Christians—part of this is based on my personal experience, and part of it is based on my intuition—don't read fiction. The Bible is enough for them. Jesus is enough for them. That otherworldliness of the Bible stimulates their imagination enough. Ardent Christians are not novel readers. Now, having said that, I did receive letters from Americans who were very Christian. I remember one man liked the novel, liked the story, but didn't find the fact that Pi practiced more than one religion all that amusing. He said "I've been put on this earth to spread the word of Jesus, and Jesus is the only truth, and to claim to be Christian and do something else is to be muddled and lose your way." I haven't received any equivalent letter from a Hindu or a Muslim. I would very much doubt that Hindus who were novel-readers would react in that way, if only because Christianity has tended to be exclusive. Christianity has tended to believe that it has the truth, and if you're anything else, you're going to be in limbo or in Hell. The Hindus have a different approach—everything is an incarnation of the divine, whether it has a Hindu name on it, or whether it's called Jesus, Buddha, or Allah. To them, everything is a manifestation of Rama. So they tend to be inclusive. In other words, everything is a metaphorical expression of Hinduism. You'll often see in India, Hindus who will step into churches and make an offering to a statue of Mary or Joseph, figuring that this might be another avatar of Vishnu. It's not necessarily thought-out, but their instinct is not to disclude, but rather to include. Which isn't necessarily theologically any better than what Christianity does. Whereas Christianity discludes in a way that's quite narrow, Hinduism includes in a way that denatures the original religion. But nonetheless, the reaction of the Hindu would not be to feel threatened. I suppose a Muslim would probably react in the same way as the Christian. Islam is more tolerant, not many people know that, in theory—in the word, in the Koran. It is actually quite tolerant of other ways of getting to God. There's an entity called the dhimmi. It means "the people of the book." Muhammad had met Christians and had met Jews, and he respected them. So the dhimmi are people who get to God through other ways. According to Islam—"Allah" just means "The God," by the way, it's not a proper name, like Joe or Frank—Muslims pray to the same God as Jews and Christians. So to them, Jews and Christians are praying to the same God in a different way, so they are to be respected. Not that that has been put into practice, due to other considerations. But I do imagine a Muslim reader might be slightly more open than a Christian, but not as open as a Hindu. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100612 ... lostgirl Life of Pi By Yann Martel taming the tiger...(this will be ordered and on its way soon.) i love the whole far-out premise of the story, and also the 'necessity' to create a believable explanation for the otherwise unexplained. also, since i see no problem pulling what is needed from any and all religions, i look forward to learning more. 100612 ... rt +3=98 lostgirl! Question 61 Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio hit Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching over a million people monthly. Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a philosophical approach to big ideas in science and beyond, and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award in Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. Here is his exclusive guest review of the next book in the game... Honestly, I can't imagine a better tale. A detective story that's at once mythically large and painfully intimate. Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her--taken without her knowledge or consent--live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become a foundation of modern science--leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and fertility and helping to discover how viruses work and how cancer develops (among a million other things). All of which is to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one's mind right out of one's face. But what's truly remarkable about the author's book is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them. The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist. As Deborah Lacks and the author search for answers, we're bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth that Henrietta's family can't afford the health insurance to care for diseases their mother's cells have helped to cure. She tells the story with great sensitivity, urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this book. Excerpt Deborah grabbed her bag off the floor, and dumped its contents onto the bed. “This is what I got about my mother,” she said. There were videotapes, a tattered English dictionary, a diary, a genetics textbook, many scientific journal articles, patent records, and unsent greeting cards, including several birthday and Mother’s Day cards she’d bought for Henrietta. While she sorted through the pile, as though she was saying something as everyday as It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, Deborah said, “Scientists do all kinds of experiments and you never know what they doin. I still wonder how many people they got in London walkin around look just like my mother.” “What?” I said. “Why would there be women in London who look like your mother?” “They did that cloning on my mother over there,” she said, surprised I hadn’t come across that fact in my research. “A reporter came here from England talking about they cloned a sheep. Now you go on the Internet, they got stuff about cloning my mother all over.” She held up an article from the Independent in London and pointed at a circled paragraph: “Henrietta Lacks’s cells thrived. In weight, they now far surpassed the person of their origin and there would probably be more than sufficient to populate a village of Henriettas.” The writer joked that Henrietta should have put ten dollars in the bank in 1951, because if she had, her clones would be rich now. Deborah raised her eyebrows at me like, See? I told you! I started saying it was just Henrietta’s cells scientists had cloned, not Henrietta herself. But Deborah waved her hand in my face, shushing me like I was talking nonsense, then grabbed a videocassette and held it up for me to see. It said Jurassic Park on the spine. “I saw this movie a bunch of times,” she said. “They talking about the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and I’m like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother’s cells too! “I don’t know what I’d do if I saw one of my mother clones walkin around somewhere.” Deborah realized Jurassic Park was science fiction, but for her the line between sci-fi and reality had blurred years earlier, when her father got that first call saying Henrietta’s cells were still alive twenty-five years after her death. Deborah knew her mother’s cells had grown like the Blob until there were so many of them they could wrap around the Earth several times. It sounded crazy, but it was true. “You just never know,” Deborah said, fishing two more articles from the pile. One was called Human, Plant Cells Fused: Walking Carrots Next? The other was Man-Animal Cells Bred in Lab. Both were about her mother’s cells, and neither was science fiction. “I don’t know what they did,” Deborah said, “but it all sound like Jurassic Park to me.” (from the author's site) Name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100613 ... lostgirl The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot With severe internet limitations on a travel day, I took a chance and asked my mom and brother if they had any idea what this book is based on the clue and with lack of google...and jeff looked at me really strangely, then pulled it out of his briefcase. He finished it this morning. 100613 ... rt +3=101 that is totally crazy! another classic crowl_and_crowlie moment. Question 62 Like the carefully engineered dies which created his company's first products--steel pitons and carabiners which climbing enthusiasts would recognize as primitive forerunners of today's sleeker gear--the author is if nothing else an original. How many other shy French-Canadian boys become surf-and-climbing bums, then blacksmiths forging their own play tools, and eventually founders of world-renowned sports equipment and apparel companies like Patagonia? How many other heads of multi-million dollar enterprises open their memoirs by stating bluntly, "The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values. I wanted to be a fur trapper when I grew up." The proverbial mold from which the author was cast got broken. In this book, readers get a fascinating look inside the history and philosophy of both Patagonia and its irascible, opinionated founder. From its beginning, the book shares a sense of his strong-willed personality and his love of the outdoors. He recounts a mostly happy childhood spent in a still-unspoiled southern California, climbing, diving, fishing, and surfing. The narrative soon moves into his early entrepreneurial efforts, which were less focused on market-share domination than on earning a basic living to finance his own sporting habits. As his company's first catalog noted, delivery could be slow in the summer months, when he typically left the "office"--a dilapidated shack converted into an ironworks--for climbing adventures across the American West. Eventually, though, the story settles into a pattern familiar to business audiences: Patagonia grows rapidly, takes on more employees and product lines to sustain hungry demand from customers, but overreaches with over-ambitious expansion plans and suffers a hiccup in its adolescence. This make-or-break juncture of a business's development often contains the most interesting material, and here the author and his beloved company are no exception. He describes a series of wrenching decisions through which he and Patagonia management team navigated in 1991, as sales growth stalled while capital and operational expenses sprinted ahead. From this crisis emerged Patagonia's first-ever layoffs, affecting a hefty 20% of the workforce, and a serious re-examination of the business's core principles and methods. The historical part of his book largely ends at this point, and gives way to an exposition of philosophies which emerged at Patagonia during its dark moments in the early 1990s. The rest of the book serves as a kind of primer to business, the Patagonia way: one chapter each on product design philosophy, production philosophy, distribution philosophy, image philosophy, financial philosophy, human resource philosophy, and so on. Fans of Patagonia can revel in the company's working details, as can those who support or want to build businesses with self-consciously cultivated soulfulness. Readers who enjoyed Gary Erickson's story about Clif Bar, for example, should definitely find this a welcome addition to their bookshelves. (adapted from a review by Peter Han) An excerpt from the book. (Penguin Press) “You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.” I had always avoided thinking of myself as a businessman. I was a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier and a blacksmith. We simply enjoyed making good tools and functional clothes that we, and our friends, wanted. My wife, Malinda, and I owned only a beat-up Ford van and a heavily mortgaged, soon-to-be-condemned cabin on the beach. And now, in 1975, we had a heavily leveraged company with employees with families of their own, all depending on us. After pondering our responsibilities and financial liabilities, it dawned on me one day that I was a businessman, and would probably continue to be one for a long time. It was clear that in order to survive at this game we had to get serious. But I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business. If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my terms. Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet, going up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even barefoot. We needed to have flex time to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family. From the mid-1980s to 1990, sales at Patagonia grew from $20 million to $100 million. Malinda and I were not personally any wealthier, as we kept the profits in the company. In many ways the growth was exciting. We were never bored. New employees, including those in the lowest-paid positions in retail stores or the warehouse, could rise rapidly to better-paying jobs. For a few positions we conducted searches – and we could claim our pick of the litter within both the apparel and outdoor industries. But most of the new employees we hired came through a well-rooted and fast-growing grapevine. Despite our own growth at Patagonia, we were able, in many ways, to keep alive our cultural values. We still came to work on the balls of our feet. People ran or surfed at lunch, or played volleyball in the sandpit at the back of the building. In growing the business, however, we had nearly outgrown our natural niche, the specialty outdoor market. By the late 1980s the company was expanding at a rate that, if sustained, would have made us a billion-dollar company in a decade. Can you have it all? The question haunted me as Patagonia evolved. Another problem would come to haunt me more – the deterioration of the natural world. I saw that deterioration first with my own eyes, when I returned to climb or surf or fish in places I knew, like Nepal, Africa or Polynesia, and saw what had happened in the few years since I’d last been there. In Africa, forests and grassland were disappearing as the population grew. Global warming was melting glaciers that had been part of the continent’s climbing history. The emergence of AIDS and Ebola coincided with the clear-cutting of forests and the wholesale pursuit of bush meat, such as infected chimpanzees. On a kayaking trip to the Russian Far East, before the collapse of the old Soviet Union, I found that the Russians had destroyed much of their country trying to keep up with the U.S. in their arms race. Closer to home, I saw the relentless paving over of Southern California’s remaining coastline and hillsides. In Wyoming, where I spent summers for 30 years, I saw fewer wild animals each year, caught smaller fish, and suffered through weeks of debilitating, record-setting 90-degree heat. But most environmental devastation the eye doesn’t see. I learned more by reading about the rapid loss of topsoil and groundwater, about the clear-cutting of tropical forests and the growing list of endangered plant and animal and bird species, and of people in the once pristine Arctic who are now being warned not to eat the local mammals and fish because of toxins from industrial nations. At the same time, at Patagonia, we slowly became aware that uphill battles fought by small, dedicated groups of people to save patches of habitat could yield significant results. We began to make regular donations to smaller groups working to save or restore habitat, rather than giving the money to large NGOs with big staffs, overheads and corporate connections. In 1986, we committed to donate 10 percent of profits each year to these groups. We later upped the ante to 1 percent of sales, or 10 percent of pre-tax profits, whichever was greater. We have kept to that commitment every year, boom or bust. We also realized that in addition to addressing these external crises, we had to look within the company and reduce our own role as a corporate polluter. We began recycling paper waste in 1984 and conducted an intensive search for a source of paper with a higher percentage of recycled content for our catalog. In 1990, we were the first catalog in the U.S. to use recycled paper. In that first year, switching to recycled paper saved 3,500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, 6,000,000 gallons of water, kept 52,000 pounds of pollutants out of the air and 1,560 cubic yards of solid waste out of landfills, and it prevented 14,500 trees from being felled. We also researched and pioneered the use of recycled, reused and less toxic materials in our construction and remodeling projects. We worked with Wellman and Malden Mills to develop recycled polyester for use in our PCR® Synchilla fleece. All the while we continued to grow. We experienced so much success on so many fronts during the late 1980s that we began to believe the expansion would never end. And we planned to just keep going. Then, in 1991, after all those years of 30 percent to 50 percent compound annual growth and trying to have it all, Patagonia hit the wall. The United States had entered a recession, and the growth we had always planned on, and bought inventory for, stopped. The crisis soon deepened. Our primary lender was itself in financial trouble, and it sharply reduced our credit line. To bring our borrowing within the new limits we had to drastically reduce spending. Our own company had exceeded its resources and limitations; we had become dependent, like the world economy, on growth we could not sustain. But as a small company, we couldn’t ignore the problem and wish it away. We were forced to rethink our priorities and institute new practices. We had to start breaking the rules. I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn’t be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company. We knew that uncontrolled growth put at risk the values that had made the company succeed so far. Those values couldn’t be expressed in a how-to operations manual offering pat answers. We needed philosophical and inspirational guides to make sure we always asked the right questions and found the right answers. While our managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead week-long employee seminars in what we called Philosophies. We’d take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values. I realize now that what I was trying to do was to instill in my company, at a critical time, lessons that I had already learned as an individual – and as a climber, surfer, kayaker and fly fisherman. I had always tried to live my life fairly simply and by 1991, knowing what I knew about the state of the environment, I had begun to eat lower on the food chain and reduce my consumption of material goods. Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all,” the sooner it will die. Name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100613 ... lostgirl Let My People Go Surfing ~the education of a reluctant businessman By Yvon Chouinard i love reading stories like this...there are many businesses that take off for reasons seemingly unreal, unbelievable even, but success can be really unusual yet interesting and informative (and real) at the same time. this one might need to go on moe's reading list! plus, i've heard from a reliable source that Patagonia makes magic bags.... 100613 ... rt +3=104 a magic bag indeed. over the years it has contained quite a variety of gifts and treasures in this world and others. Question 63 For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place-“sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don't know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, the daughter of a Bedouin chief, later finds herself living in a Riyadh high-rise where, she says, there are “worlds wound together with years.” The characters in the linked stories in this book are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole. Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. She reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions, and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places. Winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this book is a loosely connected collection of short stories portraying the monotonous, isolated lives of American expats and Saudis living in small, isolated Saudi Arabian communities. The author, an American who moved to Saudi Arabi in her late teens, reflects on her experiences through the circumstances and emotions of many of her characters. In "Pioneer," a lonely little boy spends hours watching each creature that passes, attempting to amuse himself without toys or playmates; meanwhile, his frustrated mother slowly grows weary of their monotonous, lonely life and begins to crack. Ghusun and Thurayya, the two young Saudi girls in "Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time," must remain confined to their home, as per their eldest brother's command; secretly peering into the outside world, they witness as much as they can, but they know the life of inequity that awaits them, shaped by ritual and tradition as much as their desert surroundings. The remaining five stories detail the same sense of isolation through a range of intriguing characters. From an interview with Three Rivers Review... Not only is the setting of this book in a foreign culture, but it also happens to be a very controversial foreign culture for the Western reader. There are all these preconceived notions about what to expect from a Middle Eastern setting. How do you go about changing that? Well I kept a lot of what would be the obvious controversy offstage. You don’t go to a beheading in any of these stories, but somebody does talk about it. We do see some violence: the scene where the young woman glimpsed across a field and her male relatives shove her back inside the house and start hitting her. Yes you could say the women are oppressed in some way, but it’s like when you scream too loud or use too many caps, people start ignoring you. I just decided that the more the characters were nuanced, the more you saw them going about real things they would do and reacting on a very emotional level, the reader would see that on some level they’re like people anywhere. Life is normal; you don’t think about having a split identity of an immigrant or an expatriate in this case, your identity contains those things together and what you experience everyday somehow is normalized. By normalized I didn’t want to smooth off the edges of controversy, but I wanted people to come at them maybe from underneath instead of having it thrown in their face. For me, nuance is truth, that is truth, and I think a writer no matter what you’re writing about, owes the truth to the reader. All of your characters have to be true to themselves and have to be in situations that seem like you’re creating some kind of life. I think particularly when you are dealing with a controversial culture, the reader has to learn in a way that is subtle, and that will hopefully accumulate into something meaningful and I didn’t want to pander to any set of expectations in that way. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100614 ... jane Triple Time by Anne Sanow i dig short stories - i think there is an art to compiling a book of short stories. lots of autobiographical stuff in this game, K! 100614 ... rt jane returns! +3=79 Question 64 This novel is as serious as a snakebite, with a plot that seems tight enough to fit on the label of a package of chew. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly lives deep in the Ozarks, where she looks after her two younger brothers and her crazy mother, a woman who mostly sits on a chair in a kind of feline catatonia. Ree’s father is a methamphetamine cook who jumped bail after putting the family’s house up as collateral. Ree has a week to find Dad before the county repossesses the place. The author's seven previous novels, featuring a population scraped from the underbelly of Arkansas citizenry — even the children are often grotesqueries — arrive from a genre you might want to call “hillbilly noir.” In this book he has hit upon the character of a lifetime. Young Ree Dolly allows the author to glide this novel seamlessly from violence to innocence. She is hard-boiled. She is harsh. She can be sweet. She knows her way around firearms. She has a clinical compassion for her crazy mother. Ree nurtures her two preadolescent brothers by teaching them how to shoot and skin squirrels. She herself can withstand a brutal beating as well as any doe-eyed heroine of a Japanese underground comic book. Here’s a bit of one of the author's fight scenes: “Ree swung a fist at those blunt teeth in a red mouth but missed. The other women closed in with boots to the shins while more heavy whacks landed and Ree felt her joints unglue, become loose, and she was draining somehow, draining to the dirt, while black wings flying angles crossed her mind, and there were the mutters of beasts uncaged from women and she was sunk to a moaning place, kicked into silence.” Ree’s home is more than just the house, it is her clan, the Dollys — her uncles with names like Thump Milton and Uncle Teardrop, outlaws who cook crank as their daddies brewed moonshine before them. All the Dollys are intimate with violence: “One night when Ree was still a bantling Dad had gotten crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and been shot in the chest. ... He was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor he drove 30 miles to ... the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling.” The novel is structured like a Philip Marlowe story in which, for each clue the dick digs up, he returns to his office to mull things over with a shot of scotch. Ree walks or drives or is driven into the snowy rural landscape on mostly red-herring dead ends. She then returns to her house and remaining family to unwind from various sorts of traumatic violence and ponder her next move while listening to tinny New Age tapes with titles like “Alpine Dusk” and “The Sounds of Tranquil Streams.” The author's Ozarks are rendered in a kind of ramshackle, beautific realism. This novel begins, for example, with a striking image of meat hanging from trees: “Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.” There are also Inuit-like descriptions of snow. “Frosty wet began to fall, not as flakes nor rain but as tiny white wads that burst as drops landing and froze a sudden glaze atop the snow.” Ree herself is described as “brunette and 16, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes. ... She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs.” The whole Ozark milieu is rendered so completely and expertly that the author should consider changing the settings of his future novels, just as Cormac McCarthy gave up Tennessee for Mexico. He has brilliantly played out the hillbilly landscape — its weather, its wilderness, its lack of culture and its primitive tongue: grated Parmesan is “sprinkle cheese,” given names are “front names” and sanity is described as a condition in which one’s “parts are gathered.” His Old Testament prose and blunt vision have a chilly timelessness that suggests this novel will speak to readers as long as there are readers, and as long as violence is practiced more often than hope or language. (Adapted from a review by David Bowman) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100614 ... jane Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell i love the idea of reformatting language to reflect culture - the way some poets change nouns into verbs. it strikes me as creative and definitely catches my eye. 100614 ... rt +3=82 here comes jane! 100615 ... rt Question 65 As a novelist, this author has made a minor speciality of luridness. In all of her writing there is a latent sense that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Her memoir is no exception: it has the same foreboding, the same ambience of barely controlled menace. It opens with the sentence: “I remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts.” And as she moves through her account of her origins, the prevailing mood is that of film noir. She was 31 when she was contacted by her biological mother, Ellen Ballman. It emerges that her real father, Norman Hecht, was Ellen’s boss — older, married, an ex-football player, with children of his own. She tells us that she was adopted by a couple whose own son had died six months earlier. Before they brought her home, “the trusted pediatrician” was “dispatched to the hospital to make an evaluation of the merchandise — think of movies where the drug dealer samples the stuff before turning over the cash.” Such details will be familiar to readers of her fiction: a lawyer from “In a Country of Mothers” calls the adoptive parents and says, “your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.” Like Bret Easton Ellis, she writes sleek, violent cartoons of contemporary existence, and it’s fascinating to watch this novelist of extremes handle the delicate material of her own life. Her imagination inhabits the wildest shores of satire, where a bored husband and wife not only have affairs but smoke crack and set fire to their suburban house with a grill; where a wife who is a little angry with her husband after a party cuts his neck with a kitchen knife; where a fat man is envisioned “chewing on the small bones of a roasted baby something — chicken, lamb, child.” There is rage behind this stylish nihilism, and it finds its purest expression in this memoir: the figures in her life often behave as if she had invented them. Her biological mother calls when she neglects to send a valentine: “You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off.” And after she gets in touch with her biological father, he takes her to hotels where they sit in fern bars like an illicit couple. She herself lurks in a parked car outside his house and sees a girl pulling back a curtain. (“Is she my sister?”) There is a lot of stalking in this book. Other, more potentially ordinary moments turn sinister. The needle piercing her skin during a DNA test is “beyond sexual.” Describing a book reading, she writes: “From the moment I arrive, I have the sense they are there — exactly who, I am not sure — but I can tell I am being watched, sized up. There is the strange sensation that something else is going on — there are people here who have come for a reason other than to hear me read.” The relentless flatness and darkness of her imagination is both explained and exploited in the pages of her memoir. In one of the book’s more powerful scenes, she imagines driving a car into the wall of her adoptive parents’ house. She is enraged, but she stops herself when she remembers how much her adoptive mother loves her china. Next, she imagines going inside, taking the dishes off the shelves and then driving the car into the wall, “though it wouldn’t be quite the same.” It is in these rogue moments of tenderness that one feels her psychological quandary: how caught she is between wanting to live in the house and wanting to smash it to pieces. Of course, a situation where extra parents suddenly turn up after one is fully grown lends itself to strangeness, almost to kitsch. Her new mother sends her a child’s birthday card shaped like a teddy bear and signed “Love, Mommy Ellen.” Her new father gives her a heart-shaped locket appropriate for a little girl. She agrees to meet Ellen at the Oyster Bar of the Plaza, with all of its evocations of Eloise. The woman arrives in a ratty white fur jacket, and orders Harveys Bristol Cream. That is the last time she sees her before she dies of kidney disease. In many ways, this book is really about a wild goose chase. There is no epiphany here. In all the moments when some shimmering self might rise intact from the detritus, it does not. In the cardboard boxes with her mother’s possessions (which she labels with a characteristic lack of euphemism, “Dead Ellen 1-4”) she finds nothing to provide some unaccustomed comfort in the world, nothing that will save her — only containers filled with sheet music, unopened bills, phone messages and receipts, some of which she puts in ministorage. She says, “I do not want this to be the most depressing story ever told” — though one imagines if there is anyone on earth who could write such a story it could well be her. But this book veers toward the sentimental, concluding with an unusually straightforward tribute to her inspiring adoptive grandmother. Here the reader cannot help thinking of the ferocity of her fiction: the suburban house going up in flames, the gunshots in the mall. Normally, she is not one to reach for consoling niceties, for flourishes of redemption and images of human endurance. How can the ruthless author of “Music for Torching” and “The Safety of Objects” allow herself this easy way out of a story that can have no easy way out? It feels false. What does not feel false is a sentence on the last page: “I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too.” (Adapted from a review by Katie Roiphe) An interview from New York Magazine It took you almost fifteen years to publish this. Why so long? As it was happening, I was making all these notes, and then I wrote 100 pages and gave it to somebody to read—a very close ally involved in my publishing life—who hated it. It just froze me. And then Granta came to me as I was finishing my last novel. They were doing this adoption anthology. And I said to myself, Come on, you've got to be able to pull something out of this. So I went back to [the notes] and I thought, They're really not that bad. Does this book help explain why you've written such dark stuff in the past? I think I'm compelled toward truth always. One of the things I've always done with my characters is make them have to face the truth of who they were even if it was excruciatingly painful to them, whether it's the couple in Music for Torching or the reality of who my family is. Except in this case you're making yourself suffer instead of your characters. I suffer for my characters, too. Do you feel better now? I spent a long time feeling like at any moment I just would be not part of the planet anymore. I do feel better now. But people keep saying, "It must have been so cathartic for you." And I think, Is vomiting cathartic? I think it usually is. I don't. I have a fear of vomiting. I equate it with death. Are you dreading the reviews, especially after your last novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, got such a mixed reception? I think getting slammed in the New York Times two weeks before the publication date, which actually gave critics around the country a chance to crib from that review, had a lot to do with the "mixed" reception. It wasn't entirely mixed, it's just the mixed part was very loud. I think about reviews of the memoir: What's a negative review of a memoir? "Not only is she a lousy writer, her life sucks." I assume you haven't heard from your birth father about the book. I haven't, no. I didn't write it to get a response from him, that's for sure. But my [adoptive] mother has read this twice, and she keeps saying to me, "It's the best thing you've written." Which to me as a novelist, who just works so hard on these books, is ironic. How do you feel about memoirs in general? I'm completely opposed to them. People say, "Aren't you young to have written a memoir?" And I say, "Well, I only remembered one thing." As much as you're talking about an experience in your life, I don't think it means you're going to talk about every experience of your life. And in a way it's a memoir, and yet it's about two people I never knew, and it's about a life I never had, which I think is really interesting. It kind of becomes a Beckett thing. You write that you have a family now, but don't actually reveal very much about your current life, and people will no doubt wonder about it. When I would write fiction, I would make up things, and people wondered. No matter what I do, it makes people wonder. I think that's just my job. How much did you wonder what it would have been like to grow up with your birth parents? I don't know that I would have survived growing up with my biological mother. She claimed my father wanted to adopt me, but I think it would have been like Cinderella, in that they'd never let me out of the kitchen. Are you making an argument for nurture being more important than nature? No, I feel like in many ways I really am an amalgam. I grew up in this very intellectual and artistic household that certainly allowed me to develop that side of myself, but I also think part of my drive, or how I move through the world, is definitely biological. For three points, name the author, her memoir, and give a personal response... 100615 ... lostgirl The Mistress's Daughter A Memoir By A.M. Homes i cannot even imagine, knowing myself and my perpetual desire for knowledge, being in this situation. adopted and then later embarking on a wild chase for the real story of her origins, then bravely letting the world read all about it, wholly inclusive of the good, the bad and the ugly...makes me consider that she realized that real life can be just as interesting and possibly stranger than the fiction she writes. 100615 what's it to you? who go blather from