David Seruyange: Books

Wed, 16 May 2007 04:44:21 GMT

Scott McCloud

A little over two years ago I wrote a review about Understanding Comics, a book whose theme is aligned with its title. Last week I was checking on the author's site and almost fell over when I saw that he'd be in Sioux Falls presenting on his newest title Making Comics. In what's part of a larger tour, he and his family are hitting all 50 states promoting his newest title and giving his two daughters an experience they should take with them into old age.

I have been buying more comics of late but one particular comment from a girl in the crowd confirmed the goal I've been having of late in buying books and other tokens of modern culture - she was saying that her interest in comics developed when she found a stack of her father's Elfquest comics in the basement. I'm hoping that the library that I build is something that emits more than just "possession" to either children or passers-by. I'm hoping that it will be more about treasure and the unlocking of life long passions.

posted in [home], [books]

Mon, 29 May 2006 03:52:51 GMT

Fast Thinking, Cognition

After a long time ago being confronted over posting on a book I'd just started I resolved to hold my posts until I'd finished my reading of any book. I'm going to break that rule though for a snippet from Words and Rules:

Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school gradudate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number. People recognize words switfly. The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener's brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second. People produce words almost as rapidly: It takes the brain about a quarter of a second to find a word to name an object, and about another quarter of a second to program the mouth and tongue to pronounce it.

The wonder that is cognition - research like the above leaves me spellbound. I've always been interested in language and have had this book for a while now. It makes for captivating reading and I'm sure I'll find myself resisting the urge to copy more and more of it into the blog as I make my way through.

posted in [home], [books]

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:47:15 GMT

Furniture Books

How do you organize your books? Meme courtesy of Barbara, originally from an article in The Guardian. I wrote at length but accidentally lost it all.

Interesting statements from Barbara, I'm the same way:

I also confess to something else the article comments on: I totally check out other people's bookshelves. I love seeing what books people own, because I feel like it tells a lot about a person--for good or ill.

Interesting thing: in South Dakota it isn't a cultural norm to put your books out for other people so mine are all tucked away. So seriously, how do you organize them?

posted in [home], [books]

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:23:47 GMT

"Notable" Books 2005

The NY Times has a list of 100 "notable" books for the year. A friend was over a few weeks ago and after seeing my shelves made a curt remark about my not having read¹ "half of them," so I've been guilted into caging my urge to keep stocking my shelves. That doesn't prevent me, however, from putting the following on my radar:

Never Let Me Go - by Kazuo Ishiguro, probably best known for The Remains of the Day. I like the anomaly that is Ishiguro, a Japanese man who gets the English better, or more than they care to, themselves.

On Beauty - by Zadie Smith. After trying and not really getting into White Teeth, I think this will be a bit of an easier book to connect with - set in the US, jabbing at the conservative and the liberal, establishment and hip hop. Glowing reviews and a great interview on Fresh Air.

Prep - by Curis Sittenfeld. It's a good story, and especially for people like me who have this unhealthy fascination with establishment, Ivy League, and Prep school, it's a good morality tale. For a while I'd read a chapter each time I found the time in Barnes & Nobles.

Freakanomics - Levitt and Dubner. From the abstract: "economic thinking [about] everything from sumo wrestlers who cheat to legalized abortion and the falling crime rate." But the chapter that got me was on baby names and how they relate to economic well being. The moral, of course, is not to name your child an expletive [warning on language for those likely to be offended].

posted in [home], [books]

¹By the way, I have read more than half of them, and if I include the ones I've partially read I'd say more than two-thirds. Just to save face...

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 01:30:26 GMT

The Quiet American

I finished The Quiet American, my first Graham Greene book a while ago - I had written in March (looking at those pictures makes me tear up) that I wanted to tackle it, and I foolishly thought that as a small book it would be quickly read. I haven't written about it to date because I haven't known where to start. Now that I'm up to the task I'll begin with why I was attracted to it. The book is a vew of "American" from the outside, and from a Britton. I feel myself teetering on an inside and outside experience of being American and I thought this book would let me interact with that.

The book is really about Vietnam and the ideas about being "American" are really an undergirding. It's about war and journalism - the process by which we come to understand the events around us. It's about an old British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American, Alden Pyle. It is about old men and young men's love - and the crevice between them.

Before reading the book I knew Vietnam vaguely in terms of the war and the glut of films I'd seen about it. I ended up printing out a map in order to orient myself - Greene writes with an assumption of the reader's understanding of the geography and I had none. Lately I've only bought critical editions of "classic" books and in this case it was wise - mine contained a short and engaging history and context of American involvement in Vietnam. I had no idea of the interplay before the war between the Chinese, French, Japanese, and British. My American education tells me only about American involvement and American interaction with the world, in fabricated "pivotal" moments.

I disliked the protagonist, the journalist Fowler, probably, ironically, in an American way; he was a man who pretended to be objective, to believe in "nothing." A man who treated his woman like a concubine.

The book begins with the premise of an American ideologue - a young man with books and ideals who arrives in Vietnam to inspire a "third force" - an alternative to the hapless French and "evil" communists who have been fighting each other. What do I mean by ideologue? In this context I refer to a person who becomes so enraptured by a framework of ideas that they cease to reconcile it with practical realism.

Beyond an ideologue, the American Greene paints is a man who sees the world only in his terms, no matter how absurd it may be. At one point the young American points to a cafe and says that it could "almost be a soda fountain." I almost laughed aloud at how true this was, recalling countless conversations where a person would ask me about Africa on American terms.

The young American, in a misguided sense, believes in love. His is not a love of necessity or arrangement, it is a love of choice. A large, somewhat quiet, "third person" role in the book was that of Phuong, a Vietnamese woman who is between the older British protagonist/narrator and the young American. With no regard for her past involvement with the older gentleman reporter, the American steals her away, imposing her "choice" and his overwhelming affection with regards to love.

Finally, the young American believes in a notion of "greater good." That is to say that deception and even death can be reconciled as a sacrifice for something greater - in this case it is Democracy. His clandestine activities in Vietnam render this thesis over and over, with the older, cautious, and more worldly British protagonist/narrator watching with a sickened fascination.

This is only one dimmension of a much larger story, but it was the one which I was able to follow most closely. It had a few merits but on the whole, albeit that I'm indoctrinated, I found myself disliking it more and more as each page passed.

Americans are ideologues. George Washington was an ideologue. The people who come here to find a future are also ideologues and that is where their American-ness begins. The focal point of that ideology is idealism; that good and evil exist; a notion that the world can be better, that our individual actions can find traction here to bring that "better" closer to us - for some that means closer to their children as they see thier lives as mere stepping stones for a better future.

Ideology is dangerous, and when it mixes with an idea that necessary sacrifice can be made it becomes a very potent evil. We forget to ask ourselves who sacrifices, who dies as a result of any "noble" effort. But the world needs ideas, and it most certainly needs ideals. It needs fools who believe in love. It needs the sort of simple mindedness that can say "all men are created equal."

There's so much more to this book that I can't help feeling like I'm selling it short. I have yet to finish all the critical responses in the back of my edition. But it's revealed my American-ness to me - those unscripted tendencies that I've slowly assumed while being here. It shows me how American idealism and hope can be, simultaneously, a greatest strength and weakness.

posted in [home], [books]

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:31:49 GMT

Good Pulp

I finished Rain Fall a few weeks ago, the first of a series from Barry Eisler.

An ex-military hitman who stops his victim's heart with a PDA. The CIA, Yakuza, Tokyo, jazz music, Vietnam, small town New York State, and some paranoia. Light snippets of Japanese interspersed through the novel for your pleasure...

It's pulp to make you think, to experience Tokyo, to think Japanese and American all at the same time.

I don't read very quickly by any means and it was about a weekend's worth. Try out the first chapter here [PDF link].

posted in [home], [books]

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 03:59:04 GMT

Berlin

This weekend I finished Berlin, the first in a series of graphic novels by the author and illustrator, Jason Lutes. As the title suggests, this book is focused on the city in its entirety and its tumult during the dying days of the Weimar Republic between World War I and World War II, and although the storyline does revolve around a core set of personalities the author uses a variety of clever devices to keep our perspective larger, on the city as a whole.

Lutes is a brilliant artist but what really propelled this book beyond the typically good graphic novel was its writing. Although each cell is a montage of feeling and visual empathy, I was constantly impressed with how it read aloud as well as any carefully crafted traditional novel.

I've debated with myself quite a bit on whether to post "quotes" from the book; without their visual accompaniment it seems a bit crass.

In the opening chapter the reader is introduced to Kurt Severing, a weathered journalist, and Marthe Müller, a young woman who is traveling from the country to study art in Berlin. Severing is a man who is painfully reconciling himself with the truth of his city: that it is being torn apart by the ideas of Marxism and socialism in a struggle with the combination of ignorance, poverty, and nihilism that make the German fascism of that time. As a writer this manifests itself in Severing through his writer's block, a sort of paralyzing disbelief at what is happening, with which he struggles for most of the book. Marthe, on the other hand, is at odds with herself in an introspective way; after the death of her younger brother she's only recently been able to bring herself to draw. Throughout the book she tries to discover what her art means to her and what makes her draw.

It seems that the struggles of the writer and the artist are close to Lutes' heart; in a recent interview he admits to having difficulty choosing to pursue writing and literature instead of art. The blurry line between writing and drawing is evident from the start: Marthe sketches on lined paper and journals in a sketchbook.

After finishing Understanding Comics earlier this year, I've paid close attention to "the gutter" in graphic novels - that is the space between frames where your mind creates a link in the narrative. Most American comics transition from "action to action" cells and hence allow the reader to put together a sequence of events. Lutes' approach is different; many of his transitions are "scene to scene" - the kind that allow your mind to construct a larger picture of a thematic place or feeling.

Reading Berlin is a reminder of the power of ideas and unrest; how they spread themselves through the edges of society into a potent force. After World War I the idea of socialism was in a violent struggle with the nihilism of right wing fascism and Lutes paints a picture of the discontent among those that have survived the first World War - a sea of veterans - returning to a crippled, desperate city. We see the narcotic fanaticism of leftist socialism championed by Rosa Luxemborg and Karl Liebknecht.

It's ambitious for Lutes to attempt a story in this context but I think it succeeds because each character of Berlin allows us to watch it unfold, rather haplessly - they are being carried by powerful currents and struggle only to stay afloat. And as the diseased unrest begins to take over they are either torn apart or pushed together.

Because it's only a first installment, it stops short of true closure. There are new issues of the Berlin series, published by Drawn and Quarterly, but I'll probably wait to feast on the second collection when it's published as a book.

posted in [home], [books]

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 01:45:29 GMT

O Pioneers!

Since I got to South Dakota I've been asking people about what writers give the Midwest a sense of place. The first writer people pointed me towards was Kathleen Norris, famous for her meditations on the Dakotas and spirituality. Beyond that I found myself with a lot of local history publications - the sort of misty eyed nostalgia that I found hard to read because it wasn't history, it was memory. No one pointed me to Willa Cather but a quote from a National Geographic article on the Midwest sent me in her direction; she seemed to love this place but with the sight of the good and the bad.

"Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out..."

As soon as I read those words I knew that she understood this place and the grand complication of living here in a way that I did. In the pages of O Pioneers! I found Willa's sense of place and even though she wrote about her familiar territory of Nebraska most of what she said could have easily been applied to what I've observed in the Dakotas. As apt as the quote above was what came before it:

"There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction."

And while Cather's early portrait of the open prairie is daunting, it's a special form of kinship that begins to rise out of the hardship that this place creates. Her honesty never demeans the place or belies how much love she has for it.

Most of my readings on feminism these days come from right wing fundamentalist sources and they all lament its effects on the modern woman. Such writing purports to retract the current gender "confusion" and trace our steps back to comfortable roles: male and female. I remember hearing its effects at a Bible study once whereupon being asked where she sees herself in 10 years a young college student said: "barefoot and pregnant."

O Pioneers!, however, is tinged with a balanced feminist tone and it lays a considerably healthy perspective of what our lives are today as men and women. The assumptions we make of freedom and choice are remarkable especially in considering the world of Cather, less than a century ago, women weren't allowed to vote and it wasn't ludicrous to assume that they couldn't own anything outside the auspices of a husband or male relative. In such a world this book must have challenged the going stereotypes and assumptions.

And so the central figure in the book is a woman to break these stereotypes, Alexandra Bergson. Her family homesteads in Nebraska after migrating from Sweden and although her father, a laborer from a shipyard, manages to learn a love for the land and what it takes to farm it, he runs out of time and dies prematurely. Knowing that his daughter Alexandra is a more capable decision maker than her younger brothers, he instructs them to follow her lead and allow her control of the farm until they marry or decide to part ways.

The story moves with Alexandra as she becomes a successful farmer, balancing her authority over her younger brothers with a description of the settler's climate - the various characters on the American prairie and the issues that face them. Among these characters are Ivar, a Norwegian maverick who embodies an ideal of deep seeded spirituality; one free from convention and structure; a man who is uncomfortable with the church and yet most alive spiritually in the book. There is Frank Shabata, a Bohemian hothead who by ill circumstance finds himself working the land, and hating it. Two of Alexandra's brothers are farmers - men overtaken by convention for whom departure from the norm is their most painful conception. Her youngest brother, Eli, is a would-be wayfarer and free spirit but his love for a woman keeps him coming back to "The Divide," ultimately becoming his undoing.

But aside Alexandra, the two characters who play at the forefront of the narrative are Carl Lindstrum and Marie Shabata, Carl as the man who Alexandra not only loves, but needs, and Marie, a picture of the type of beauty that destroys the things around it.

Cather is excellent with characters; her descriptions are simple and probing. For as little time as she spends developing them, they feel familiar and believable as they participate in her story. Here is her description of Alexandra's brother, Oscar:

"Oscar could not grow a moustache; his pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white eyebrows gave it an empty look. He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance; the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller as you would an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying, without slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn't bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case against Providence."

As Cather uses these and other characters to weave her story, I found that each of them is amplified by life on the prairie, a concept I had never considered while living here. I felt blotted out, muted by the space and thought that the distance and openness of this place would muffle the things I did and who I was. But, in an odd way, without the clutter of elsewhere, a character can become more of itself: more resistant to change, more lonely, more isolated, more loved, and more broken.

The irony of Alexandra as a self-made woman, a locus of her family and strength against adversity is her waking daydream:

"Sometimes, as she lay thus luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew, he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat."

She, like everyone else, longs for companionship - a need even more pronounced after she's attained her independence. As the book reaches its conclusion she's admitting this need to a man who has failed in most things except for his ability to support her emotionally. This in contrast with her daydream: the man she loves is "like no man she knew... larger and stronger and swifter..."

I like this portrait of our need going deeper than a safe home or physical protection. I like the frightening prospect of the independent woman who doesn't need material success but emotional support and companionship.

I also like Cather's portrait of life here. She alternates from the beauty and mystique of the land to grim realities, hardship, and isolation. She describes a diversity of this place that is taken for granted - before we began to consider it bland, white, or Christian, she shows it as a place of Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, and French immigrants. We see the beautiful side of hardship: people banding together and helping each other through - and we see the ugly side of human nature: jealousy, selfishness, and prejudice. In all we see people, fate, and circumstance, all amplified by a life on the prairie.

posted in [home], [books]

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 03:14:50 GMT

Heart of Darkness

Although I finished it more than a month ago¹, I've been bantering back and forth in my mind about how to write about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What I'd started as an attempt to gauge a colonizer's perspective² of Africa became a much bigger journey - a book I thought would be an afterthought in its novella size (only 132 pages of mass market paperback sized reading) ended as a though provoking journey that I kept going back to after I'd finished it³.

Sometimes a book is great simply for the questions it asks. As I found myself reconciling pieces of the book with my own life I escaped what would have been a bad reading of it and saw a glimpse of what Conrad intended: the contrast, irony, and darkness in man, civilized and primal.

Another reason the book succeeded for me was style: it is narrated in its entirety. It's rare to find books of this style - the last I read was The Last Samurai and for those that know me, my affection for that book was, well, overwhelming. There are other things that make the structure interesting: throughout the book, only two characters are formally given names. Others are given only anonymous references, including the primary narrator whose recounting is the book.

It opens with a group of sea farers on their way from the aptly named Gravesend down the river Thames, when one of the sailors, Marlow, tells the small group the story of taking a boat down the River Congo. The journey into Congo eventually becomes a journey in search for a man named Kurtz, a cryptic ivory trader who embodies that intersection between Europe and Africa.

While Heart of Darkness inspired a lot of reflection on my part, perhaps the biggest thought I kept returning to was the notion of truth.

"... No it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone..."

This is a bleak quote, admittedly, and yet in our own hearts of darkness, is it not so? Our struggle to reach across the chasm between us and others, to say who we are - reveal our inner depths, and yet that is so hard. As Conrad wrote, trying to span a world of rules, protocol, and formality - what we refer to as "civilized" - with a world that was abstruse, foreboding, and ultimately lethal - a view of "Africa" - and struggled with this principle. He is quoted as saying:

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see."

Heart of Darkness ends with the prospect of the sailor, Marlow, telling the truth to Kurtz's fiancé, a feat which he can't quite pull off:

"But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether..."

In that bridge between worlds, how do we tell the truth? How do we make other see? The Heart of Darkness is a question of art altogether for which Conrad, it seems, left a crushing answer.

posted in [home], [books]

¹And now it's been a month since I originally wrote this review. Hopefully it's not too stale.
²Just how much of a racist was Conrad? I think he was a man of his time and therefore a racist. Some of his passages made me seeth:

"to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs... He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed... "

Chinua Achebe has famously criticized the book and its attempt to contrast the darkness of Africa^2a with the civilization of Europe. While his comments aren't without merit, a short way into the book I began to read it away from this perspective and had better success in getting Conrad's ideas.
^2aAnd to say that Africa isn't dark is to deny a very depressing reality. It isn't the only "dark" place out there and there is truly a darkness in the so called "first world" and yet how hard is it to reconcile the world of kid soldiers, ethnic cleansing, AIDS, and starvation with our quiet corners of suburbia? While there is always hope, and while the blame is something for the world to share, this is an honesty I refuse to neglect.
³Part of the reason I delayed so much in posting this is because Heart Of Darkness is such a complex book. There are so many angles from which to approach it that I thought of trying to incorporate some of the other interesting pieces: how Conrad's biography works into the book, how it relates to the darkness of Africa today (and our inability to communicate it), the traveller's nature of the book. People like Paul Theroux and Richard Kaplan quote Conrad with good reason; he travelled as they did: to see. In the end I decided to leave just this impression to keep things concise.

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:08:15 GMT

The Love of Stones

"... that we should all suffer, for so small a thing."

Recently I'd been wondering what was wrong with me; I'd liked everything I read, almost, it would seem, without discernment. The Love of Stones revealed my string of good books for what it had been.

I bought my first diamond a little over a year ago. I wondered at the small (very small) stone; I fantasized about its origins: perhaps it had been mined by a Ugandan soldier deep in the heart of the Congo, perhaps it was mined in Sierra Leone and sold on the black market by a South African mercenary.

I wondered at what kind of pain made that stone, my tiny, insignificant diamond.

The Love of Stones is about Katharine Sterne, a jewish sociopath who is obsessed with a piece of jewelry called the Three Brethren. The secondary characters are Daniel and Salman Levy, Iraqi Jews who possess the Three Brethren for a short time. The larger theme is concerning the possession of people by their possessions, and the ugliness of this stark reality. Katharine's efforts lead her across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

The interesting parts of the book trace the history of the Three Brethren, their conception for the Duke of Burgundy, his assassination and their subsequent possession by his son, John the Fearless, it's owners from a "Queen Henrietta Margaret" (described as a King's consort) to various Dutch owners. It is fragmented here through a turn of events and its constituent pearls are the last trace Katharine has for the jewels.

In order to get the jewels from Europe to Iraq, where the jewels resurface as the possession of the Levy brothers, Hill uses some mysterious marsh Arabs - they give the stones to the brothers as a "gift" when they accompany one of their tribesmen back their exotic whereabouts from Baghdad.

We find Sterne in Turkey at the beginning of the story - her chase leads her to a small city in the western part of the country called Diyarbak'r. There she takes stead with a rich jewish widow named Van Glött who is obsessed with pearls. We follow her from Turkey back to London and then to Japan where the story reaches its conclusion.

Hill, who has also published some poetry, writes in uneven prose, sometimes melodic and enjoyable and at other times belabored and fanciful. I found myself annoyed with nearly all of the dialogue which seemed to follow this pattern: character A makes an assertion, character B contradicts with new assertion. The cycle may repeat itself a few times and then all dialogue ends.

Everyone of consequence in the story is Jewish (even the Japanese fisherman Hideki). Perhaps this was by intent, but it was thoroughly unbelievable (unless Hill somehow meant to communicate that only jews are obsessed with precious stones).

I got the feeling that Hill doesn't get people; his characters are one dimensional and even when he tries to give them emotion and context, it's an empty waste that doesn't provide insight or depth to the real "who" in the character. Contrast this with other writers, like David Mitchell, who can make a character so human - so knowable - without even using a biological narrative¹.

And sometimes mediocre books, massively flawed, can be rescued by good ideas. If there was a good idea for The Love of Stones, it was the history of a set of jewels. The sad part was that, for me, this didn't make it worth the effort.

posted in [home], [books]

¹Try this excerpt from Ghostwritten for an example of what I mean.

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:37:14 GMT

Understanding Comics

There is so much that we do not see. Experiencing art¹ is the act of seeing and yet most of us look at it casually, ignoring undertones, overtones, and details. For this reason I always like to read about an artistic medium deconstructed and explained, distilled for me to go back to what I have and look again, closer. Understanding Comics is about "comics" as an art form, with all the nuances stitched together in simple, concise explanation.

The starting point for the author, Scott McCloud², is a definition, one which excludes common misapplications like cartoons and film. It takes a full chapter for him to reach his full conclusion of how to define comics: "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer."

He continues from the definition to a basic explanation of the vocabulary of comics and how it straddles the ideas of realism, symbolism, and iconography. McCloud is an excellent teacher; he takes his time in introducing, layer by layer, the concepts behind what make comics work and how. His tell is evocative: the pages span topics like Mayan pictographs (which he argues are comics), René Magritte's The Betrayal of Images, communication theory, and Japanese culture, all woven together in simple transitions.

I liked his section on closure, the process where the reader completes a work of art in their mind. In comics the reader sees a series of frames and in their mind they put it all together; a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time, and motion.

Perhaps the best of the book was towards the end when McCloud shows that all art is layered beyond its surface. He shows art as the following onion:

(Idea | Purpose) > Form > Idiom > Structure > Craft > Surface

We are too often limited by surface, working our way from right to left instead of seeing beyond the obvious to the core. This is perhaps what plagues comics as simplistic, boyish, and shallow. Beyond comics we can see these layers present in what we put our hands to: film, literature, writing, photography, even play.

McCloud's final frames conclude with wisdom that could be applied to any art, that ultimately any form must be precluded with our will to learn accompanied with our ability to see.

posted in [home], [books]

¹This post is rife with generalizations about art. It is true that art is an undefinable (next time you're at a boring party have the "how do you define art" conversation) but generalizations are a starting point for any discussion.
²If you want a taste of McCloud, he's got some free online comics. I especially liked the one about chess.

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 17:15:11 GMT

The Kingdom by the Sea

"To be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication... "

A few years ago, while I was working in Rochester, NY, I crutched my way across the street to a small bookstore to get away from students for a few moments. The older couple who apparently owned the shop sat at the front of the store doing inventory on a pile of books. I could tell they were book lovers; they turned each over thoughtfully as they noted author, edition, and publisher. To legitimize my presence in the small shop as a reader, I wandered to travel and looked at books about the U.K. I saw The Kingdom by the Sea and as soon as I read the summary, I was hooked:

From the white cliffs of Dover to Cornwall and Wales, on to Ulster and Scotland, Paul Theroux sets out on a three-month journey around Britain's coast.

The way the British Isles worked for me at the time was as a gray utopia: a place with enough rain to match my gloomy moods, an abundance of rocky coastal views, a refined culture, and a bucolic Merchant & Ivory aesthetic. I loved the names of all things British: Gravesend, Bristol, Cape Wrath, Tenby, Cardiff by the Sea...

But it's mythology that suffers because Theroux is not a newspaper travel writer: he deliberately avoids castles, monuments, and tourists. He is preoccupied by really seeing a place, encountering its inhabitants, and learning its subtleties. Some people read this as Theroux being a grouchy, pessimistic, and even callous traveler but this is simplistic and wrong. I love his honesty. You learn what being on the dole is, he offers opinions of why the English stare out to sea, and he comes up with names for the people he encounters: Mr. Mould, Mrs. Mumby, Alf and Rose Doggett, Harry Gummer, and a dozen others that keep you chuckling as you read.

Travel writing is difficult: it is arrogant to assume even slight understanding of a place based on a brief encounter. Beyond this, giving a place a context, both historic and modern involves a lot of research and study. Theroux manages to avoid sounding glib in his arrogances, and in fact his work to really give places their context saves him from sounding too pompous, self assured, or myopic.

Theroux travels in 1982, the year that Britain and Argentina fought over the Falkland Islands¹. Instead of trying to write something "timeless," he studies the British through their attitudes and responses to the brief conflict. His descriptions are dated; Ireland is a much happier place now than the early 1980s. What was once a place of hopelessness and turmoil is a shining example of possibilities in today's European Union. What makes the book remain worthwhile is that it is an unapologetic snapshot; as much a recent history as it is a travelogue.

This book has been a great companion over the last month in South Dakota. Interestingly, I found myself not really reading it when I was away from here. The moment I got back is when I started fumbling for Theroux and tales that brought real clarity to the fantasies I'd made of "elsewhere."

Occasionally I act as a "grown up" and turn down my instincts on impulse purchases. It's painful responsibility, acceleration from a life consisting of possibility to a life defined by constraint. For all those moments, I wonder if I'm missing a friend like Theroux.

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¹Described rather cynically as "two bald men fighting over a comb."

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 12:10:11 GMT

The Next Christendom

I first read a taste of Philip Jenkins in The Atlantic Monthly a few years ago. Christianity is undergoing a massive geopolitical shift and Jenkins has been writing extensively about it. Christianity is dynamic and lately I've been thinking: just whose Christianity do I practice? My friend Donny sent me a full review¹ of Jenkin's book which seems to promise some big changes in how Christians consider "missions²" and doctrine. Donny is a PhD Philosophy student at Claremont.

In his The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins offers a fascinating look at the rapid expansion of contemporary Christianity. In describing what he styles Southern Christianity, Jenkins dispels stereotypes and methodically details Christianity's growth in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A common misunderstanding among Northern Americans and Western Europeans is that Christianity belongs solely to middle-class whites. Christianity is anything but; it is the religion of the poor and non-white, a fact made poignant by the inroads the faith has made among India's class of Untouchables. Jenkins also rejects that Christianity among the poor is more akin to liberation theology, the view entailing God's preference for the poor and oppressed and his preference for them in class struggle. This too is false. While Christianity claims the allegiance of countless poor Latin-Americans and Africans, these people are less likely to see Christianity as an ideology to support social revolution (liberation theology), than simply as a religion specifically addressing spiritual needs and offering hope for the future. And, although these ideas can be found, particularly in Latin American, southern Christianity is strikingly more conservative than its northern counterpart. This more conservative streak can be seen in the stance many southern Christians take on contemporary social issues. Homosexuality is openly disdained by, and the emphasis on gender equality in the U.S. and Europe is viewed as a northern export. Interestingly, the conservative leanings of southern Christians do not exclude women from leadership roles, since many renowned prophetesses in Africa and Latin America are at the center of several successful Christian movements.

Midway through the book, one realizes that Christianity is larger than one could have imagined. The sheer number of Christians in countries outside the U.S. and Europe is staggering. By the year 2050, only one Christian out of five will be non-Latino and white. Jenkins goes on to examine the rise and popularity of Christianity in heavily populated and quickly-growing countries as China, Nigeria, and India. As their populations swell, so will their number of Christian adherents. The rapid expansion of Christianity becomes apparent when looking at the rate of population growth in third-world countries. It should be noted that Jenkins employs the loosest definition of 'Christian', one which encompasses Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and what some would consider fringe groups such as Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and Christian groups with more than a little sprinkling of indigenous influence. Nevertheless, the number of even a subgroup of Jenkins 'Christians' is considerable; besides, Evangelicals may be the only group that sees Jenkins' use of Christianity as a set back.

Jenkins does more in his book than lucidly reveal Christianity's burgeoning development; he shows that its rise in the Southern Hemisphere will very likely provoke religious wars, similar in intensity to those of medieval Europe. As Christianity and Islam expand, often side by side, and as they compete for converts, confrontation appears inevitable. Countries have already and will continue to erect specifically Christian or Muslim states. Several countries in Africa and Asia have already blurred the boundaries separating politics and religion, imposing specifically Christian or Muslim laws on their citizens, the consequences of which has sparked intense fighting in places such as Sudan and Indonesia.

The ascendancy of southern Christianity generates several amusing ironies. The first is a role reversal in who evangelizes whom. Southern Christians have and will continue to make significant missionary inroads into the increasingly secular United States and thoroughly secular Western Europe. The Brazilian based Igreja Universal do Reino (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, or, IURD) and the Nigerian based Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) are only two of the growing number of southern movements that have firmly entrenched mission enterprises in a number of U.S. and European cities.

Another irony is what Jenkins cleverly styles "White soldiers following Black and Brown generals," that is, northern clergy seeking ordination and authority from southern Christians. Why? This is seen particularly in the Anglican and Episcopalian Churches, where the tide of liberalism has significantly eroded traditional gender roles and views on homosexuality. By now, several U.S. bishops have been granted ordination from African and Southeast Asian archbishops. Since an archbishop in either denomination is free to ordain whomever he pleases in his province, the U.S. bishops are bishops of provinces outside of the U.S. and missionaries to America. Jenkins says this trend stems from the mounting sense of isolation felt by conservatives within American and European denominations, an isolation assuaged by powerful overseas friends. Of course, these denominations draw "White soldiers" because of the vast number of their constituents, and because those constituents tend to be theologically conservative.

All in all, Jenkin's work is part statistical research, part apocalyptic vision. One finds objectively derived numbers and the solid methodology expected of a religious studies professional; one also encounters an interesting projection of what all that data means for the future of Christianity. This book is a must-read for missionaries and students of religion seeking to better understand the complexity and the ever-increasing diversity of Christianity.

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¹Send me your book reviews and I will post them.
²You'd be surprised how for some this is still jungles and underbrush.

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 21:59:57 GMT

Best of N lists: Books

The lists are trickling in for the past year's best books. The Economist, New York Times, and LA Times have all produced their lists. For taste overseas, check the list from The Guardian and BBC. I'm hoping to write soon about the book I enjoyed most this year but in the meantime, I'm planning some of the impulse purchases for next year from Amazon.

David Mitchell, whose Ghostwritten I just finished, has a new book, Cloud Atlas. David Foster Wallace has two new books, Oblivion, which is a collection of stories and probably doable, and Everything and More, which is about the mathematical concept of infinity, probably too abstruse for the likes of me. For something completely different I'd like to try Alice Munro. She writes a lot about rural life and her book Runaway makes a few "best" lists. I'll be more aggressive next year about trying to understand rural psychology. Another best in the fiction section, Florence of Arabia, was my brother's gift to me for Christmas. I'm looking forward to reading and laughing aloud.

In politics, I'm hoping to get a used copy of Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward. Many have called this book an excellent recount of what led up to "Operation Iraqi ~~Screwup~~ Freedom." Another book making the list is Against All Enemies, the Richard Clarke book that created quite a fuss. Many people have shrugged at me saying that they "don't have the information that 'W' had" and yet here we have two detailed accounts, one from an insider and the other from a respected journalist.

Too many books, too little time.

posted in [home], [books]

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:16:44 GMT

Ghostwritten

Last week I finished Ghostwritten¹, David Mitchell's first novel. The book holds a unique structure as each of the nine chapters is narrated by a different person, each in a different part of the world. The jump off point is Okinawa, but Mitchell takes the reader west through Tokyo, Hong Kong, China's mainland, Mongolia, London, Russia, Ireland, and (of course) New York.

The theme most easily seen in the book is global connectedness. Sometimes it's paper thin like a phone call from Okinawa to a wrong number in Tokyo, other times it's deep and meaningful like the death of an old friend on a different continent. Mitchell weaves the reader in and out of places through telephone lines, history, chance, and design. There are other themes that Ghostwritten touches: the love of youth and that of age, the idea of writing ("ghostwriting") as reflection, and the future to which our deep connections could bind us. The book is very ambitious.

I like debut novels that are raw and this is probably what made me most attracted to Ghostwritten. In addition to its structure, Mitchell lets go and allows the stories room to maneuver. But this same raw, unrefined nature works against the book, almost destroying its virtues. Each chapter can be read as a short story and although this makes for an interesting approach, it also makes the book very uneven. I agree with many reviews that it made for shaky storytelling: one moment it's a "thriller", the next it's "sci fi." The voices of the characters were another device that may have been too ambitious - occasionally they were either too similar, unrealistic, or implausible.

In the end, however, the appeal of the book outweighed its weaknesses. Mitchell throws around a lot of clever references throughout the book. I've always enjoyed it when something I'm reading contains what I call "easter eggs," and Ghostwritten does not disappoint with subtle nods to jazz music, biblical passages, quantum mechanics, and history. Mitchell is a great story teller, and some chapters shine on their own. My favorite of the nine interlocking parts was the story of Satoru, a young man in Tokyo who works in a record store². The part that I believe was best written was the story of a Chinese woman who maintained a tea shack on the pathway to a Buddhist shrine.

It's a good book with important themes. I look forward to picking it up again sometime in the future and getting even more out of it.

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¹You will find other reviews here and here.
²The whole chapter is excerpted here.

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 14:45:12 GMT

David Foster Wallace

I mentioned last week that I was going to his reading at the Hammer Museum. It was more than I expected. Even though I had only read from Wallace¹, he seemed to be at his best. The moderator said only one thing I agreed with: that his writing is almost instantly recognizable, even in the smallest of chunks. His reading of two short pieces demonstrated her intuitive comment to be true.

There was quite a crowd gathered to see him. Some were students but quite a few, especially those who were brave enough to ask questions afterwards, were enthusiasts like me for whom Wallace had opened a new world in our understanding of what a book could be.

His first piece was cheeky and although there were larger, more subtle themes, he had most of us laughing with pleasure at each turn. I really like hearing writers read their work because they provide a natural voice for how their story flows. If you've ever read his work, you know that he not only footnotes his work obsessively, but he is capable of incredibly long sentences and the most excruciating detail. He also will sometimes revisit something (an thing, a place, a person), over and over again, adding layer upon layer of detail, telling you the story in a new light as each component is revealed.

His second piece was distrubing. Although he warned us ahead of time, it didn't detract from how discomforting the story became. It was strange, I kept finding myself thinking, that the same group of folks (myself included) who had been laughing at each paragraph of his previous piece would now give distressed sighing noises in unison. The truth of good art is that it is gripping.

There was a discussion afterwards which was almost useless as UCLA professor Mona Simpson bumbled through her rabid assumptions of Wallace, often taking time to talk about herself. Most of the questions from the audience were either too abstract or generalizations that Wallace mercilessly dealt with. A few times, however, there was this true flicker of the honesty of a guy who writes fiction and has so many critics and students reading too much into it. And I few times I thought the questioners were onto something that he casually brushed off, but which pressed on some of the finer points of his writing. For example, someone asked about his research methods and how excited he got about learning what he was writing about. Even though he shrugged his way through it, there is something to a guy who just read a story that covers, in exquisite detail, the inner workings of the IRS bureaucracy. He may play it off but make no mistake, he must really dive into his subject matter.

One thing he said, in particular, resonates with me. He was talking about endings in response to a good question about why he had a tendency to "drop off" the reader when his stories were seeming to climax. Most endings have been done, he responded, there are set number of ways for a story to end and after watching a lot of tv one knows all of them. The real story, he seemed to be saying, was in the tell. The detail. How you get there. And it seems that is the substance of his style. I think his writing works for people who perk up at descriptions, grammer, and prose, and fails for those who want television endings.

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¹If you want something managable by Wallace, I recommend Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:55:51 GMT

Persepolis

At the bookstore, I couldn't find it in the "graphic novel" section and the clerk at the information desk informed me that it was shelved as a biography. In other bookstores, Persepolis has been classified under "Middle East History" and no wonder - like most good things it can't be simply classified.

It is the story of Marjane Satrapi's youth in Iran during the Islamic revolution that deposed the Shah. Her style is deceptively simple but as you move through the book you forget about its format and become touched by the stories inside: being forced to wear a veil, political oppression and imprisonment, love between social classes, and how children understand and come to grips with the folly of adult worlds.

Good books find themselves perpetually relevant and one cannot read Persepolis without thinking of the world today: Islamic violence, George Bush's "Axis of Evil," and how real people are affected by the decisions of the political hegemons.

I remember being in Nairobi, reading casualty reports of the Iran-Iraq war on Sundays in the paper. I've talked to Iranians who escaped in the early 1980s. But this was different. Enhanced. It put me on the ground, giving me a more personal, open account of what happened.

Satrapi goes into detail about why she wrote the book, the format, and its meaning here. There are quite a few people who have a hard time with the graphic novel format. I feel sorry for them.

The story ends sadly but take heart; there is a second installment that follows it up.

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Tue, 03 Aug 2004 15:56:10 GMT

It's No Longer Possible To Look Away

I've just recieved the best birthday present of my short lifespan: a personal email from Greg Egan.

I wrote:

A quick question that I'm sure many people ask you: why do you choose
to write fiction as a vehicle for your ideas?
Someone saw me struggling over Diaspora and commented that it
was "a waste of intelligence" for a person like you to write fiction
and though I had many answers as to why I *thought* it was important
that you did, I thought later that it would be interesting to hear the
answer that you give people of that ilk.

Thank you for reading this -

David Seruyange

Egan responds:

Hi David

Why fiction? Because sometimes the best way to examine important
questions about the nature of the real world is by pushing things to
extremes, and to do thought experiments that are impossible either in
reality, or in a context constrained by having to know every detail about
the real world.

There's plenty to be gained by studying real physics (or neurobiology, or
whatever) and contemplating what those facts alone reveal. But to
extract the most morally/philosophically/aesthetically interesting
consequences of science, I think it's necessary to do it in a context
where you can make up the fine details that have yet to be pinned down by
real research, while remaining true to the general principles that the
scientific worldview has revealed.

Maybe we should all fully grasp, already, what science has taught us in
the most general sense: that human beings are made of matter like
everything else, and that the Earth is one small planet in a very big
universe. But to confront those simple truths more fully, we need to
imagine more extreme situations ... and although things are changing so
fast that we probably *can* all be shocked and unsettled by a factual
report of current science, I really like to push things to the point
where it's no longer possible to look away from what science has
revealed. For that, everything needs to be magnified, and made larger
than (contemporary) life. I can only do that in fiction.

Best wishes

Greg Egan

About once a year I pick up one of Egan's novels and try to read it. They usually get the better of me but upon each successive attempt I get a little further and understand just a little bit more of his ideas. This year I've made my attempt on Diaspora (synopsis here). You can get a taste of it by reading the first chapter as an excerpt.

Fortunately, Egan expands on some of his ideas online. It's useful for people like me, lay, who are trying to understand what he is writing about.

Egan also publishes non-fiction (ie scientific and mathematical papers) from time to time. Although many are online, they are well beyond my understanding. (Another reason I'm happy he writes - for people like me who lack a sufficient background for the intimate details of modern science).

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Mon, 26 Jul 2004 03:37:54 GMT

Life, Love, and Death in Africa

Concrete structures rose around me, nosing up through the slum smog: ministries, multinationals, agencies of the United Nations. From a street corner, I watched the teeming scene: office workers in their frayed shirt collars and cheap suits stepping over beggars, shoeshine boys, vendors selling spreads of newspapers. Drum magazine splashing the headline "Luo Girls are Best in Bed." the white plutocrats in their short sleeves, the youngish European females we called leatherettes because the tropical sun had aged their white skin, the hippies, the Kenya cowboys, the Somali cafe crowd, Asians in their banks and trading houses, the young black middleclass kids in their baggy trousers and wet-look coifs, the Big Shiny Men in their air-conditioned BMWs, or the processions of tourists in khaki safari has, window-shopping for taka taka souvenirs from Eden. Rising above the chaos of downtown's Uhuru Highway was a string of giant advertisement billboards. "Tusker," they read. "My Country, My Beer." - The Zanzibar Chest, Aiden Hartley

No matter how far I get from my youth in Nairobi, I will always remember the streets. As Hartley describes, cultures zig-zag in front of you there, you are at once surrounded by poverty, wealth, beauty, hopelessness, dirt, and paradox. Life is everywhere.

I began The Zanzibar Chest on the way to Philadelphia. It is a memoir of the years that Aiden Hartley spent as a foreign correspondent covering Africa. Beyond his own story, he begins by giving an account of his family history which gives the reader a sense of who he is at his roots. He comes from a family of the colonial British order, a family of adventure and passion for people spanning not only south and eastern Africa, but also the Middle East.

Reading about Africa is always hard. I can’t turn my back on my origins but it’s hard to embrace the stories Africa will tell.

At any one time we had six wars, a couple of famines, a coup d’état, and a natural disaster like a flood or an epidemic or a volcanic eruption, all within a radius of three hours’ flight from Nairobi. You could take off at sunrise, commute to witness a battle, or hear a starving man breathe his last and be back home by nightfall, in time to file a story, take a shower, then hit the Tamarind restaurant downtown for mangrove crab and Stellanbosch…
I’d climb aboard the Cessna at first light, in my mind kissing the tarmac good-bye like the pope in reverse. The pilot throttled up, mumbled into his microphone, neck muscles bunching like a bullfrog. On take-off I used to recite the Lord’s Prayer over and over until I got stuck on a line like a mantra—“deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil” – as the earth feel away.

Hartley is harrowed, especially from his experiences covering the genocide of Rwanda and the failure that was Somalia. He is full of the types of stories that will make your heart sink and deflate your sense of reason and yet he somehow holds a sense of optimism and love for Africa that soften what would usually sound like contempt into sorrow.

His stories are dense and some of the detail is overwhelming. The stories of family history, while essential in understanding who he is as a person, can slow down the pace of the book and disorient the reader. His chapters are extremely long which gives the affect of making his story huge, dissoluble chunks. It’s a matter of style and it seems that Aiden is the type for whom a story is composed of details rather than short, quaint little summaries. But if you want something short and easy, this will put you off.

It’s strange to think that although Aiden is British, he is more African than I am. This isn’t just the case in his formative years there but also his coming of age professionally which really takes place on his first major assignment as a journalist, covering a coup in Sudan. Being African is, of course, something one can’t quantify, but it is a subject I can’t approach without apologies and parentheses.

I’ve finished about half and think it’s a great book. I’d recommend it to those with the virtues of patience and depth.

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Wed, 30 Jun 2004 03:51:15 GMT

Punctilious Pop

Occasionally there are things that are so popular and faddish I’m tempted to just walk away from them despite their potential virtues. I never saw Titanic. I will probably never read The Davinci Code. When I saw a book on punctuation on the bestseller list, my interest was stimulated but mild. I’d seen an unflattering review in the book review section of The New York Times and thought to myself: witty title, interesting idea, but I’ve got better books for my slow reading habits.

Then I saw Lynn Truss on television. She was speaking to readers at Powell’s in Portland and in no longer than a few minutes had me giggling about punctuation. I previewed the book at Barnes & Noble and snuck it to the cash register when K wasn’t looking¹.

I read about apostrophes on my way back to the Dakotas. I read about commas and quotes on my trip to western South Dakota. I read about the dash and hyphen on lunch break. I laughed aloud, in public and alone, so much as to sound loony.

The voice that cryeth in the wilderness: prepare ye a way for the Lord.
The voice that cryeth: in the wilderness, prepare ye a way for the Lord.
(Paraphrases as the book is not with me.)

Indeed, some of the funniest moments came from examples of how sacred books can be morphed humorously by a few well placed commas, semicolons, and dashes. Purgatory hangs on a comma, no less.

The book is infinitely quotable too. I’d have put large segments into this post but, like most good books, it was out of my hands as soon as I finished it. I’m going to add it to my “read once a year” list. It may not improve my punctuation (I certainly hope it does) but it will be fun to notice more and more of how Truss uses the subjects she discusses as she writes each chapter.

Ultimately punctuation comes down to style and expressiveness. Grade school teachers bash “rules” into the heads of young pupils but if any person reaches a point of writing anything of merit, their identity will come out in their preferences and use of dashes, semicolons, commas, ellipses and all of the other tools of punctuation. They may become addicted to the semicolon like Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens, use the dash like Emily Dickinson, or write a single sentence that span three pages like David Foster Wallace. Even if they are journalists (ie. writers with editors and the constraints of style guides), their punctuation will emanate their personality, their intellectual physique, as they pen their stories or articles.

Fad or no, punctilious pop ala Truss has the sort of verve and charisma that will appeal to most².

The book has an official site here. You can even find a short excerpt.

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¹It's embarassing when a person knows your purchase to complete ratio when it's as large as mine. (4-1? 6-1?)
²Excluding Bethoven biographers writing reviews at The New York Times and a teacher or two who never actually reads literature.

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 03:28:33 GMT

A Tattered One, Please

A few weeks ago, I was dragged to a rummage sale by a coworker. I usually find garage, rummage, yard, and all other sales of the type tedious; I don’t collect junk that way. This is not to say I don’t collect junk, only that my junk comes in a different form than second hand pots, child-sized tables, and broken (but it wouldn’t be much to fix it... ) appliances.

I didn’t see the seller until after I saw a box filled with books and literary magazines. I crouched and noted Milan Kundera’s Immortality¹ along with a bunch of journals with the title “A Room of One’s Own.” I asked if she was a writer and she seemed pleasantly surprised that I’d ask. When she returned the question I waffled; I heard an Irish lilt to her voice and my intuition warned me against sounding pretentious. I told her I read a lot and she asked what – the dreaded question, the measuring question.

I should have finished Middlemarch. Then I could have answered with George Elliot, she would have thought better of me, I’d ask her about Joyce and whether The Hours really got Woolf right, and if A.S. Byatt is only good at writing like a Victorian for people like me.

I’m on the lookout for a copy of the book. I’d almost buy it used on Amazon but I’d like a tattered one. Here is my shallow confession of the day: I hate new publications of classics, especially ones with new cover art. The following sounds perfect -

Spine creased, cover edges worn, cover corners creased, cover yellowed, pages yellowed. 1985 Bantam Books Mass Market Paperback. Collectible - Acceptable.

Point. Click. Buy.

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¹Another unfinished book, but this one without regrets.

Mon, 24 May 2004 10:42:01 GMT

A Conversation From Last Summer

Chris: Do you believe in ghosts?

Phadreus: No. They contain no matter and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.

Phadreus pauses and reflects...

Phadreus: Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds...

I was reminded by my latest read, Fire in the Mind¹. This conversation is a paraphrase from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

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¹You will find an excellent synopsis on the author's website.

Thu, 20 May 2004 03:10:25 GMT

My Misspent Youth

I just had a lot of fun with My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum. It’s a collection of essays collected over a few years by Daum, many of which were published in periodicals. I always love the voice of a youthful writer; as Daum spins her assured, beautiful prose the words feel as though they could just as easily be about me. The first story, “On the Fringes of the Physical World,” held that magic as Daum described an online relationship nurtured by curiosity and killed by reality.

The essay from which the book is titled is a coming of age story but the coming of age that makes sense today: graduating from college, real work, graduate school, debt and finally Nebraska. That's right, Nebraska. A cheap, unpretentious, boring, and safe place to lick wounds and pay off debts.

Daum’s strength is her honesty. This often elicits some contradictions from piece to piece; in “My Misspent Youth” she owns up to an unhealthy fascination in an untenable New York lifestyle but a while later in “Carpet is Mungers” she displays an elitist tone towards home carpeting:

“Carpet is the road you congratulate yourself for never having taken. Carpet is the woman in the supermarket whom you are glad not to be. Carpet is the house who bought the oddly named and aggressively bland-tasting Savannahs when you sold Girl Scout cookies. Carpet is the job you held immediately after graduation, before you realized that a career in marketing posed a severe threat to your emotional health ... It's the efficiency apartment you'll be forced to move into if the business fails, the marriage collapses, the checks stop coming in.”

I found myself wincing the further I went, realizing that in many ways Daum would be difficult to like as a person. Her high brow attitude (I hate carpet, I like Jewish intellectuals, I’m an effortlessly good musician) is trying the further you get into the book. But I found in myself a strange response to her confessions; her honesty opened me up. For example, I have my own peculiar aversions in home arrangement. Seeing a John Grisham¹ novel on a bookshelf or John Tesh CD causes the same sort of reaction in me that a carpeted dwelling would produce for Daum. We all have these particulars, don’t we?

"But I'm capable of being extremely shallow, far more superficial than I'm often given credit for."

Sometimes a person can be too consistent. When this is the case the air is full of pretense and lack of authenticity. Getting to know a person well is seeing contradictions. It’s the person being unafraid to show you who they are completely: depths and shallows. This is where Daum succeeds. Even though I suspect it was padded, what I liked most was getting to know her.

You can read a professional review on Salon.

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¹K called me on this; I actually have not read a Grisham book. But the Salon Reader's Guide confirmed every suspicion I had.

Mon, 03 May 2004 03:47:38 GMT

The Lost Continent

That it was an exhausting journey shouldn’t surprise you; all but 10 of the lower 48 states in a single trip is enough to daunt even the hardiest of travelers. Of course I didn’t actually do it; I simply followed Bill Bryson on my latest read, The Lost Continent.

His opening tone of mixed humor and sarcasm is held consistently through book. Perhaps too consistently; there are moments you hope he will reach into an experience and find more than a cruel jape to share. Alas, he doesn’t. But it’s not the promise he implicitly makes as you read the first page; that promise is that you will be constantly laugh audibly, wiping your eyes and clutching your side as you progress through the book.

Contains an expletive, read on your own conscience:
I was headed for Cairo, which is pronounced “Kay-ro.” I don’t know why. They do this a lot in the South and Midwest. In Kentucky, Athens is pronounced “AY-thens” and Versailles is pronounced “Vur-SAYLES.” Bolivar, Missouri, is “BAW-liv-er.” Madrid, Iowa, is “MAD-rid.” I don’t know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated sh--kickers who don’t know any better or whether they know better but don’t care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated sh--kickers. It’s not really the sort of question you can ask them, is it? At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact I did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did.
“Because that’s its name,” he explained as if I were kind of stupid.
“But the one in Egypt is pronounced ‘Ki-ro.’”
“So I’ve heard,” agreed the man.
“And most people, when they see the name, think ‘Ki-ro,’ don’t they?”
“Not in Kay-ro they don’t,” he said, a little hotly.
There didn’t seem to be much to be gained by pursuing the point, so I let it rest there, and I still don’t know why the people call it “Kay-ro.” Nor do I know why any citizen of a free country would choose to live in such a dump, however you pronounce it.

He is irreverent in every way – his grandmother, stupid people, the South – all fall prey to his easy sarcasm. He never troubles himself with the art of subtlety although he occasionally seasons his put-downs with a sentimental thought. Such thoughts usually last about a sentence or two and then, like a boy in middle school, he realizes he can’t get too deep so he makes a joke of it to distance the sentimentality. Even with his grandfather’s death he follows the pattern.

Occasionally my feelings towards a writer are mixed. Bryson evoked that sort of uncertainty about my own emotions. It was not only his irreverence and passion for Burger King or McDonalds, it was a feeling that he took a deep experience and made it into a series of funny but meaningless jests. It was a sense that as a travel writer he actually didn’t really know how to travel.

But he made me laugh: aloud in airports, early in the morning, at lunch on a rough day of work and in so many other places when it was nice to have a light moment.

Perhaps that’s why it took so long to finish the book. Robin Williams is funny as long as you carefully measure your doses and the same attitude must be taken with Bryson in order for his writing to maintain its value.

And there were a precious few places that charmed Bryson – places within reach for people like me: wistful for travel but locked to the US by circumstance. He dribbles over Mackinac Island in Michigan, Savannah, Georgia, and the coast of South Carolina. Of course here is a man who delights in looking at junk in the Henry Ford Museum but never makes it into any of the museums of New York or Philadelphia, a man who skipped Los Angeles, but he has moments of credibility.

All in all the book works, if simply for the reason that Bryson keeps his promise to keep you chuckling to yourself as you proceed through it. His lack of depth will tire the reader and his brutish honesty lacks its desired surprise effect if you try to read the book too quickly. I can see myself picking up another Bryson book for airplanes and tough days at work but it will be a long while for sure.

posted in [home], [books]

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 11:31:59 GMT

Lots of People, Reading

Barbara started it but since then I've been circulating it like crazy. What are your answers? I'll try to organize them into a format where we can see everyone's answers at once.

"David Seruyange" sophtwarez((A))hotmail.com writes:
I'll take the first bite:

Current Read:
The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson. DO NOT read this book in public if
you mind funny looks as you bend over in helpless laughter. Bryson gets
irreverent as he travels through small town America.

Next I'll read:
Probably Instances of the Number 3 by Sally Vickers. But Barbara's put
So Many Books... on my radar so we'll see.

Best book of last year:
Technically it was this year but I'm still feeling warm from In the Image
by Dara Horn. Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was last year
and was a massive influence on me though...

Book I'm looking most forward to:
A Feast For Crows, no doubt, by George RR Martin.

Favorite author:
This question for me has no answer and as I'm sequestered in South Dakota
I've no shelves upon which to look for old friends. Douglas Coupland has
good ideas, Helen Dewitt is so bright, Neal Stephenson is maddeningly
intelligent, William Gibson is so prescient... we'll stop there.

Favorite book from childhood:
Another tough one. An English author named Enid Blyton endeared me to
Cornwall and the North Sea. Thank God Tolkien introduced me to fantasy.
But I read a book called Cannibal Adventure more times (something like
7 or 8) than any other book on my shelves as a kid - it was written by
Willard Price. I did like Ramona (Beverly Clearly) and The BFG (Roald Dahl).

Favorite book from teen age:
Magician by Raymond Feist. I lucked upon this book (remember, I grew up
in Africa).

First Western:
Lots of Louis L'Amour. They all have the same plot so take your pick. I
certainly don't remember.

First Romance:
I have no idea how I got it but it was a Jackie Collins. Something about
Brazil. As trashy as they come...

First 'Coming of Age' book:
Spiderman comics

First "ethnic" writer:
Every writer is ethnic...

First fantasy / sci fi:
Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

I wish I spent more time reading:
Rereading. Rereading good books again instead of striking out with trash.

Biggest waste of time:
The Archivist¹ or Emotionally Wierd². Remembering how bad they were
still stresses me out.

Embarrased to admit I liked:
That Jackie Collins book.

People could be encouraged to read through:
I never knew how much imagination it took to read until I got to SD.
Imagination!

Favorite genre:
New authors. First books are always a bit more raw, more human. Not as
deliberately orchestrated in many cases...

Book I'd recommend to anyone:
It's obscure but the Norwegian book Naive.Super by Erlend Loe. Thanks Norbert.

posted in [home], [books]

¹Obtained solely for the cover: a stack of old books.
²Obtained solely for the prologue - a mother and daughter telling each other stories on a Scottish island. This book is rightly out of print. As much as I hate a book I usually force myself to finish it. This one was beyond any will power I could exhibit.