In the Headlights

Reading More, These Days

I recently discovered how easy it is to decide to do a post every few days instead of one or two each day.  Now I understand why some authors sit at their computers at the same time every day and dedicate a certain number of hours to writing.  Otherwise it all unravels so quickly.

Thanks to the folks who noticed I haven't been posting.  I'll blame some of it on my work schedule, and some on an ennui that has descended on me.  Hoping for changes soon.

Today, I'd like to share with you a trilogy I just finished.  Thanks, Bro for the birthday present.  I'd never heard of Kim Stanley Robinson, who is apparently quite prolific.  The "Science in the Capitol" trilogy consists of Forty Days of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting.

The books feature an intelligent take on science and spitirualism, with Tibetan Buddhists figuring side by side with National Science Foundation eggheads.  The character dynamics are charming and intelligent, the political commentary (though it's a novel, many real people are cited, and some of the characters pretty transparently represent real people.)

The books are intelligent without being condescending.  Love and betrayal, espionage and spiritual enlightenment are woven throughout.  There are many LOL moments, and many more thoughtful bits.

The background is the global warming crisis, and weather catastrophes figure prominently. These books, however, propose to actually DO something about the weather.  It goes through national and global political hoops to suggest some scientific suggestions (Would they work?  Who knows?  It's a novel.) to try to combat and reverse rising carbon dioxide levels. 

I marked many passages, here's one, near the end of the final novel.  The Panchen Lama (the one chosen by the Chinese, who is in exile) is speaking with Frank and Charlie, two of the books' main characters about reincarnation.  Frank has just said that the Dalai Lama claims to be just an ordinary man.

"I am even more ordinary, as you know."

"So why should you continue to believe you are the reincarnation of some previous person?"

"We are all such.  You know---one's parents."

"Yes, but you're talking about something else.  Some wandering spirit, moving from body to body."

"We all have those too."

"But identifiable, from life to life?"

Drepung (Panchen Lama) paused, then said, "I myself think that this is a heuristic device only."

Charlie laughed.  "A teaching device?  A metaphor?"

"That's what I think."...

"And what does that teach us?" Frank asked.

"Well, that you really do go through different incarnations, in effect.  That in any life, your body changes, and where you live changes--the people in your life, your work, your habits.  All that changes, so much that in effect you pass through several incarnations in any one biological span.  And what I think is, if you consider it that way, it helps you not to have too much attachment.  You go from life to life.  Each day is a new thing."

All this spiritualism and a good recipe for a marinade too, from President Phil Chase's blog:

"What I do is mix soy sauce and a dry white wine about half and half, and then add a big dash or tarragon vinegar, and some heaping spoonfuls of brown sugar, and a tablespoon of olive oil, about a teaspoon each of ginger and mustard powder, and a dash of garlic powder.  Mix that up and the longer you marinate things in it the better but just dipping in it will do too.  Best on veggies, chicken and flank steak.  Sear the meat and then cook at a lower heat."

I loved these books.  Hope you will too.

Alice, Let's Eat

I love to eat.  I love to read.  I live to read.  I live to love.  I eat to live.  I eat to ...read?

Anyway, they're pretty important aspects of my life, so no surprise that I love reading Calvin Trillin.  After reading About Alice a few months back, I picked up a few other Trillins that I had missed.  This was one. 

It's a republication of a book of articles originally published in 1978.  I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't looked at the flyleaf.  The material is as fresh and fun as if it had been penned last month.

The theme is more or less that Trillin yearns to try every good meal (particularly regional delicacies) in every good restaurant he reads about (and his agents are everywhere) as his lovely wife tries to limit him to three meals a day, and occasionally attempts to get him to diet. 

The most mentioned restaurant is Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, famed for its barbecue, but he is on no less a quest for the best fried chicken or country ham.  He also seeks out Dungeness crab and oyster loaf, pizza and barbecued mutton.  And just about every type of food to be found in Louisiana, though most of it is ingested in New Orleans.  He does eat some things I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, but it just goes to show that chacun a son gout.  Imagine the accents where they belong.

It is part travelogue, part food journal, part intimate portrait of a marriage.  Alice herself is a gourmet cook (married to a gourmet/gourmand, what's not to like there), who is addicted to good food, particularly dessert, and most particularly, chocolate. 

The real amazing thing here is that I have never seen photos of Calvin or Alice Trillin where they look the least bit overweight.  That's the real secret I'd like to discover.

[Image from Barnes & Noble, where they also have an interview with Trillin.]

Skin Tight

I was going to loan Skin Tight to a friend who was unacquainted with  Carl Hiaasen's wicked brand of black humor.

Before turning it over, though, I reread the first chapter, and was hooked.

This is one of my favorote Hiaasens.  The others are Tourist Season, and Double Whammy...his early stuff. I think his early success led him to write faster and more formulaic.  Many know him as the creator of Skink, the former Florida governor who eats roadkill.

This one, though, is a gem.  Filled with creeps and bizarre bad guys, it is the story of a very inept plastic surgeon, and the tangled mess he weaves trying to extricate himself from lawsuits and a homocide investigation.

He hires Chemo, a 6'9" 180 lb. geek with a cottage cheese complexion to take care of his woes.

The setting is Miami, where Hiaasen was, for years, a columnist and reporter for the Miami Herald before turning his hand to fiction.  He still writes columns for his old paper.  He's pretty cynical about his old stomping grounds and its inhabitants.

The hero is Mick Stranahan, a former investigator who just wants to exist in peace in his house in Stiltsville.  In his life, Mick has killed five men and married five women.  Enough to make anyone want to avoid him.  Yet he remains curiously unspoiled.  He is supported by some colleagues who go way back, and hunted by...some colleagues who go way back.

In typical Hiaasen fashion, things turn hilariously bizarre, bad guys are eradicated in very creative ways, and the urbanization and "development" of paradise is almost another character.

If you like Hiaasen, I'd suggest you go back and read his early stuff.  You're in for a treat.

[Sorry this is late.  Could not get the image link to work.]

Naked

...is pretty much the last way I'd picture author David Sedaris.

Naked was published in 1997, and is typical David Sedaris.  Stories about his family and his life, warts and all, I read them, my mind saying the words in his voice.

The title story is about time he spent in a nudist camp.  I'd always pictured Sedaris a a pretty buttoned-up guy, which he was when he arrived there.  In his time there, he slowly became comfortable with public nudity, rendering it pretty much as boring as any vacation spent in a trailer park with a cross-section of humanity.  The nudity seems to add no fillip of excitement.  And so, I think my speculations about what a nude beach or nude club vacation have been quashed for eternity.

The stories about his mother, father, sisters and brother are my favorites.  I particularly like his mother, a dry wit (with drink and cigarette), who had her kids' number and managed them with humor and aplomb.

He talks about the jobs he held growing up, including as a paint stripper and a migrant worker;  he appears to have been quite adventurous, surprising again in view of the buttoned-up image I'd had of him.    Some of his tales have an O. Henriesque irony to them.  He talks about his homosexuality, and growing up with the dawning realization of his sexuality.  No mention of Hugh, who must have come later.  He also grew up with a number of obsessive-compulsive traits, which, while poignant, are so hilariously described that it maked me laugh until tears came.

Reading Naked was like taking a vacation, a much-needed break from my own reality.

[You can get it at BooksaMillion .  Or do what I do and support your neighborhood used book store.]

Bent Objects

Deb sent us the link to this great site, Bent Objects.

Terry Border is the still-life artist who created these mini-masterpieces.

Check out his site.  And in 2009, buy his book:  Bent Objects:  The Secret Live of Everyday Things.  It can't help being wonderful.

It can't help being wonderful.

 

Literary Mystery?

   I had dinner with my folks this weekend, and my Dad asked me what the connection was between Snoopy and D.H. Lawrence, author of many novels including Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I couldn't figure it out.  He said Lawrence had been married to Frieda von Richthofen, who was a sister of the Red Baron. 

He added a wonderful story that he'd read.  It seems that after Lawrence's death, his wife travelled to the United States, bringing his ashes with her.  She brought them along when she went to a cocktail party where she lost the ashes, and they were never seen again.

I don't know why anyone would bring ashes to a cocktail party, but there you go.  It's a good story.  It may be apocryphal, but I hope it's true.

The links I found say that Frieda Lawrence was a distant relative of Baron Manfred Von Richthofen, Snoopy's nemesis, the Red Baron.

[Image of a grumpy looking David Herbert Lawrence from cswnet.com]

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole. 

I just read it for the third time.  Those of you who know me understand that that's saying a lot.  I rarely read a book or see a movie more than once, even if I enjoyed it...there are so many more out there.  The only other book I can think of that I've read multiple times is Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

But when I ran into A Confederacy of Dunces in the stacks of my favorite used book store, Black Sheep Books, I felt an endorphin surge and a rush of happy memories.  Red and I had both read it a couple of times and enjoyed it very much.

Irreverent, funny as hell, gross, full of stereotypes, the book develops momentum as it rolls you from one rollicking adventure to another.  The common thread is Ignatius C. Reilly, morbidly obese, overeducated, damp, smelly, with a pyloric valve that shuts on him in times of stress.  He's misanthropic, and lives with his mother in a tiny flat in New Orleans.  He spends his time in bed, writing in his journal (yellow Big Chief pads, in pencil, strewn all over his room), and writing inflammatory letters to that minx, Myrna Minkoff, a radical hippie, and his erstwhile partner and nemesis from their days in college.

His mother finally throws him out and tells him to get a job.  He has no skills, and his attempts becoming gainfully employed are hilarious.  He continually thwarts himself with his constant subterfuge, his appetite, his plain inability to get along with people.  On the way, he becomes a rabble-rouser, espousing one cause after another in a Quixotic attempt to right wrongs (at least as he sees them).

The title, it says, is from Jonathan Swift, from "Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting":  "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  I guess Ignatius is that unrecognized genius.  He certainly thinks he is.

The book was copyrighted in 1080 by Thelma D. Toole, John Kennedy Toole's mother,  eleven years after Toole's death by suicide.  He connected a hose from the tailpipe of his car trough the window and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.  He had been unable to find a publisher for his book, which posthumously won the Pulitzer prize.  Certainly a factor in his suicide was his depression, and his inability to have his novel published.  I find that unbearably sad.

The events take place in the early 1960's in New Orleans, a city in which Toole lived with his mother and held various jobs, working as a street vendor, and another time in a garment factory, jobs Ignatius holds in the book. Art imitates life.

Despite its age and familiarity to me, I found nothing dated or stale in reading it this third time.  Ignatius is no less outrageous than before, and, on rare occasions, almost, just almost, borders on the sympathetic.

I wonder if it would be a good movie.  Probably not.  Particularly not to those who've read the book.  I felt that way about the movie made from Catch-22...one of the best books ever, one of the worst movies.  It's tough to take a funny book, particularly if a lot of the humor is in the writing, and turn it into a funny movie.

[I found this Flickr photo from the web site of Zelda Go Wild.  It is a photo of a statue of Ignatius Reilly on Canal Streen in New Orleans.  I wonder if it's still there.]

The Kite Runner

I recently finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and Afghan-American writer.  It came highly recommended by my dance instructor, Tom, who said it's much better than Hosseini's second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The Kite Runner has gotten a lot of publicity recently, both as a book and as a movie.  The movie was very controvertial, at least in Afghanistan, for portraying the rape of a young boy, a (maybe the) pivotal scene in the story.  The young actor and his father say they didn't know about that scene (they had to flee the country because of death threats).  All that means to me is that they can't have read the script.

In short, it is the story of the deep friendship (they were like brothers) between an upper-class Afghani boy named Amir, and a servant's son, Hassan, a Hazzara.  They grow up in idyllic childhood (except that Amir learns to read, and Hassan doesn't--Amir reads to him).  Throughout, class and religious distinctions ("why would you do this for a mere Shia?") abound.  But in the beginning, it's all about climbing trees, reading stories, flying kites.  Every year, dozens of locals buy and fly kites in competition.  The strings are impregnated with ground glass, and the kites fight to cut one-another's strings.  Then, the kite runners (spectators or inactive competitors) run down the rudderless kites as trophies.  Amir is a great flyer, Hassan a great runner.

Jealousy exists between the boys because of favoritism shown by Amir's father, Baba, who seems to have more in common with Hassan (bravery, spirit), than with the bookish Amir.

After the rape of Hassan by a local bully gang, Amir can't tolerate having him around, and shamefully sets up a series of circumstances that part the former friends.

The rest of the book is about Hassan's journey to atone for his perceived sins.

It was beautifully written, and the sense of place and way of thinking is so human, yet frighteningly alien to the Western mind.  To mine, anyway.

A thoughtful, engrossing book.  I recommend it highly.

Dear Diary

I write this blog on the premise that every day, I can find something that amuses me and that I find worth sharing.  Without a doubt, some days that something is better than others. 

I just ran across something I clipped from our newspaper a ocuple of months ago.  It's about someone who wrote a lot, about nothing interesting.  At least I think so.  His name was Robert Shields, and when he died recently, he left behind a diary of 37.5 million words, found in 91 cardboard boxes.  To produce this volume, he sat in his office in his underwear, and wrote about his life every five minutes for twenty-five years. 

It seems to me that the temporal burden of writing every five minutes would leave no time to experience anything to write about.  The former minister from Dayton Washington wrote every time h took a crap or ate a meal.  He also spent quite a bit of time being interviewed by the media. 

Here's a link to an interview by Michael Feldman  from a 2000 show.(Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know,  incidentally, be coming to Jacksonville in a week).  Shields says he writes about four hours a day.

There are days when writing one post a day seems like a burden.  I wonder if he ever thought of throwing in the towel.

[Image via boingbboing]

O.E.D.

My dance instructor, Tom, is reading The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.  So it's no surprise that our conversation during yesterday's dance lesson was about the Oxford English Dictionary.  We both thought it would be a cool thing to own, and just to browse through. 

Amazon has the twenty-volume set for just $542.23.  Unfortunately, it's not eligible for Amazon Prime, so you'd have to pay for shipping.  But you can choose one-day shipping.

Tha's better than The Library Shop's twenty-volume set for $1560.  But that includes shipping.

Also interesting is that you can get many different versions, from a compact edition with the full text reproduced micrographically (reading glass included) to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the Little Oxford English Dictionary, the Single User Oxford English Dictionary, The Oxford Picture Dictionary (English-Spanish, English-Hebrew, English-Arabic, etc.)  Lots of options.

But the one that makes my pulse quicken is the granddaddy of 'em all.  The twenty volumes (plus the three supplements). 

I'll have to build an addition on the house!

[Image from Hooked on OED]