i'm a very very complex person

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:56:17 GMT

Simply must post because yesterday I finished the first book in some time that I've been truly excited about: The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley. The only other Smiley I've read is A Thousand Acres, which I thought was interesting and ambitious but not particularly affecting, so I was surprised to find myself so gripped by the stories in this book. And by almost all of them, too! The book contains five short stories and a novella, and I'd be hard-pressed to name a favorite. I loved "The Pleasure of Her Company," about a young woman who befriends the married couple next door yet never quite understands the nature of the relationships between the three of them; I loved "Long Distance," in which a man ends a relationship with a woman in Japan and then spends a very emotionally complicated weekend with his brothers and their families; I loved the title novella, which certainly belongs on the list of most realistic portrayals of marriage in fiction. I am impressed by the sharpness of Smiley's perceptions, and by how she is able to do so much with these stories of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. And so many layers of emotion and meaning! I felt about these stories the way I feel about Alice Munro's work: they demonstrate exactly how much the short story is capable of.

Two recent reads: adultery and activism

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:00:53 GMT

We Don’t Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus: This book is composed of three novellas that were originally published in different collections, but that concern the same characters and theme. The characters are two young couples—Jack and Terry, and Hank and Edith—and the theme is adultery, or perhaps marriage (can’t have one without the other, after all). The first novella, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” is the longest and by far the best of the three. This novella is told from Jack’s perspective and focuses on his affair with Edith and the problems in his marriage with Terry. It’s a visceral and violent story, full of fighting and sex and people being terrible to each other. Jack is an asshole and doesn’t (won't?) see the way that Terry’s life hurts and degrades her, yet Dubus (writing from Jack’s perspective, no less) makes the trap that Terry is in so absolutely palpable. Really amazing.

The other two novellas are less successful. “Adultery,” set a few years after “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” tells the story of Edith’s affair with a former priest who discovers that he’s dying after he and Edith become involved. There are some very lovely and tender scenes between Edith and her lover, but the story feels like it doesn’t add up to much in the end. The last novella, “Finding a Girl in America,” was flat-out annoying. Perhaps I was sick of reading about these character by the time I got to this one, but I couldn’t muster even a little bit of sympathy for Hank in this novella, and didn’t really care that he had finally found happiness by having a relationship with one of his nineteen-year-old students. Nevertheless, they were interesting to read, if only to see someone other than Updike take on subject matter that seems so quintessentially Updikean.

Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake: I had a couple of opportunities to spend time with Ann Pancake during her recent visit to Penn State, and I took part in some very interesting conversations with her about writing and activism, and the struggle to reconcile artistic goals with activist goals. Her novel, the story of a poor family in southern West Virginia and the impact that Mountaintop Removal Mining has on their lives, has a clear activist stance that doesn’t always jibe perfectly with her literary ambition. Pancake tells her story from several different perspectives, and while she does a good job at establishing distinct voices for all of these characters, only a couple of them really come to life. The use of multiple characters also seemed to make the book a bit repetitive—every time I read a chapter about Dane, for instance, he seemed to be saying pretty much the same things. Pancake’s biggest strength is in her powerful descriptions of the devastation wrought by Mountaintop Removal, and of the fear and anger of the powerless people who live below these mines. Still, I wanted her to go further; it felt like the novel was building up to some really awful event, but Pancake shied away from giving it to us in the end. Even so, I really enjoyed digging in to this story and watching it unfold, despite its imperfections.

I feel compelled to add that Ann Pancake is an awesome person, and I was very happy to get to meet her and spend time with her while she was here. She gave a lot of her time to us MFA students, and was as sincerely interested in hearing about our writing as she was in talking about her own. Reading the second half of this book after hearing her voice really enhanced my appreciation of her prose. If you have an opportunity to hear her read, I highly suggest you take it. And, though Strange as This Weather Has Been may not meet all of Pancake's artistic goals, its activism succeeds: after I finished the book, I called Ms. E just to make sure that we’re buying our power from PECO Wind, because I wanted nothing at all to do with coal.

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:07:48 GMT

I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

This is Annie Dillard again, from a paragraph early in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, the book that is, it seems, the harvest of which she writes.

I began reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek at the end of July, and I finished it in late September. That’s a long time to spend with one book, but I could not read this book in bits and idle moments; I had to read it in entire chapters and with full concentration. Even so, I feel that I will need to read this book again, that though I have grasped individual chapters, the wholeness of the book still eludes me.

I use words like wholeness and concentration because they seem intrinsic to Dillard’s project in this book. She chronicles a year of living, walking, and observing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but the book is more than just a record of events. It is also an attempt to come to a spiritual understanding of the natural world, and an exploration of the role of humanity in the world. Dillard wrestles with grandeur, intricacy, fecundity, violence, beauty, and what it is to experience the sublime. She is a very sharp observer—her descriptive writing, while sometimes a bit heavy-handed (she admits in an afterword that while writing this book she thought that a sentence “was not quite done until it was overdone.”) is clever, surprising, and very often beautiful—and she sieves her observations through the staggering amount of natural history and theological thought that she has read.

There were a lot of passages in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek that fascinated me and resonated with me. I was intensely envious of Dillard’s deep local knowledge. She knows her valley and her creek in all seasons and all weathers, in its trees and creatures, in the shape of its geography. That is the kind of knowledge of a place that I want to cultivate. Dillard’s writing about seeing, too, seemed to mesh so perfectly with my own experience that it was like she was putting words to thoughts I hadn’t quite had yet: the slow learning that happens when you decide to try to see the natural world, the strangely half-active, half-passive nature of that process… Well, read Dillard; she describes it much better than I do.

But all through the book there was also the matter of my atheism and Dillard’s Christianity. Dillard’s faith is active and seeking, not at all the kind of religious belief that can be so alienating to me, but I still can’t share it. Nevertheless, I don’t feel the kind of unbridgeable gap between myself and Dillard that I sometimes feel with religious people. Perhaps this is the thing that makes me feel like I need to read this book again someday. I get to thinking or writing about the spiritual elements of the book, and I suddenly lose my ability to articulate; maybe if I read it again this won’t happen on my next pass.

I will end with one more quotation, one in which Dillard herself sums up the book far more gracefully than I have done:

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.

Queen Village in September

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:36:19 GMT

I was at home in Philadelphia this weekend, and on Sunday morning I took a walk around my neighborhood with the camera.

Blue windows on S. Orianna St.

Shop window on Fabric Row

I saw this fellow near the community garden. He's a twin for my Tommy.

Pepper plant on Queen St.

The Headhouse Square famer's market.

Apple crates at the farmer's market.

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:59:13 GMT

I watched at the window; I watched at the creek. A new wind lifted the hair on my arms. The cold light was coming and going between oversized, careening clouds; patches of blue, like a ragged flock of protean birds, shifted and stretched, flapping and racing from one end of the sky of the other. Despite the wind, the air was moist; I smelled the rich vapor of loam around my face and wondered again why all that death--all those rotten leaves that one layer down are black sops roped in white webs of mold, all those millions of dead summer insects--didn't smell worse. When the wind quickened, a stranger, more subtle scent leaked from beyond the mountains, a disquieting fragrance of wet bark, salt marsh, and mud flat.

I lay in bed last night and read Annie Dillard on the coming of fall, and it felt profoundly appropriate. Though we still have temperatures that reach the mid-70s, the season has unmistakably changed. My mother gave me apples at Lake Ontario last weekend, and this weekend I baked an apple crisp with cinnamon and pecans. And then, because I had strawberries that were at the end of their life, I baked strawberry muffins. It was lovely to have the oven on and warm smells filling the apartment. And it was lovely to have tea and a strawberry muffin for breakfast this morning. I will have to begin feeding the birds again soon.

I read "The Dead" last week for the first time in several years. It was more wonderful than I had anticipated to return to this story which is so beautiful and familiar in all of its particulars: Freddy Malins turning up screwed at the party; Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia bustling on the stairs; Gabriel being called a West Briton by Molly Ivors; and then Gretta on the stairs, listening to the faint music that reminds her of Michael Furey... I was overcome with emotion reading the end of the story, much more than I had been the first time I read it, and I wondered if this story might actually be Joyce's greatest work. Could it be better than Ulysses? Is that possible?

This weekend I read Katherine Mansfield's novella, "At the Bay." It was a strange work, made of loosely connected sections that felt quite slight individually, but added up to...something. Not a cohesive narrative exactly, but something that felt like an Impressionist portrait of a community. She seems to look at her subjects only sidelong, yet to come away with penetrating insight. I have never read Mansfield before, so I can't say if this is typical of her work.

My goal for my last year of grad school is not to be frantic. To work steadily, every day, and to have that be enough. The previous two years have been characterized by stress and last minute scrambles to finish work, to grade papers, to throw words onto a page, to do what I needed to do to get through the next day. And I don't want to do that anymore.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:28:06 GMT

My friend Suzannah, who shares my love of a good WWI novel, loaned me Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, and I read it while I was at Stony Lake. Faulks spends most of the book following the actions of Stephen Wraysford, first when he comes to Amiens, France as a young man working for a British textile factory and has an intense affair with a married woman, and later, once war breaks out, in the trenches as a British officer. Stephen's story is occasionally broken by leaps forward into the 1970s, when Stephen's granddaughter decides to conduct research into his war experience.

Wraysford is an intriguing character--even before serving in the trenches, he is somewhat strange, a person who is slightly distant from those around him--but the book as a whole is somewhat uneven. The first section, concerning Stephen's love affair with a married Frenchwoman, is highly dramatic, almost soap-operatic. Some of this is fun and/or gripping, but once the affair ends, we are thrown forward several years and find ourselves in the midst of the war, where the affair is only a distant memory and doesn't seem to have much bearing on Stephen's emotional state. But that's okay, because the war is what Faulks is good at. He's really good at it. It's hard to know how to praise writing when the subject is so horrific; most of the adjectives seem inappropriate. Faulks is excellent at the grinding daily misery of the trenches, especially in the strange scenes that take place in Stephen's officer's dugout at night between Stephen and his friend Michael Weir. These scenes are haunting, but the most powerful piece in the book is Faulks's depiction of the first day of the Somme. It's an amazing piece of writing, powerful and lingering.

Unfortunately, my interest in the Faulks's narrative decreased every time he left the actual field of battle. I cared very little about Stephen's granddaughter and her attempts to find out about the war. I found her ignorance so complete as to be difficult to believe. How could a woman in her late 30s have so little notion of events that are so significant not just to her country but to her own family? I was unsympathetic to her, and found her story line to be little more than a distraction from the parts of the book I would rather have paid attention to.

I appreciated Faulks's book for the way in which it gave me a very full sense of the war, especially the length and scale of the war, but it is nowhere near to approaching the Regeneration trilogy at the top of my list of WWI literature.

Empire Falls

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:08:00 GMT

Empire Falls by Richard Russo: As I said in my last post, this book started out boring and remained boring. I considered putting it down after the first 100 or so pages, and I should have done so, but whatever--I persevered instead. The book is about Miles, a man who manages a diner in a small, rundown town. Not a whole lot happens (until late in the book, when a few dramatic developments appear out of left field); Russo focuses on Miles's relationships with his family members and on the town itself. But the relatively quiet plot is not what makes the book boring. It's boring because Russo's prose is absolutely styleless, and because he insists on explaining every last detail of everyone's thoughts and actions--even the thoughts and actions that he has already explained in detail in previous chapters. There's no room for ambiguity and no need for interpretation, so the reading experience becomes totally passive. And therefore boring.

Russo managed to create an interesting setting for his boring book. His depressed Maine town reminded me of some depressed western NY towns that I know, and I'm interested in the questions posed by places like that: What happened to those towns? Why did people choose those particular places to settle or to build factories? Why, now that the factories are closed, do some people stay? What will it take to make them finally leave? I was in Croghan, NY last week and saw for sale signs in front of five houses on three blocks of the main street. Where are they planning to go? That sort of stuff is worth thinking about and Russo has some insights on these topics, but, like most everything is the book, they are explained nigh unto death.

I was made uneasy by Russo's depictions of women in Empire Falls. The three main female characters are Miles's teenaged daughter, his ex-wife, and the rich widow of an industrialist who essentially controls the whole town. The teenage daughter is so undeveloped that she hardly counts--she functions more as a plot device than as an actual character. The rich widow is such a quintessential witch that it's almost funny: she's manipulative, cold, power-hungry, greedy, and even comes equipped with a vicious cat as her familiar. She's pretty awful, but so ridiculous that I could dismiss her pretty easily. Russo's portrayal of the ex-wife struck me as much more insidious. This woman is vapid, immature, stubborn, vain. She leaves Miles because he's such a sad sack, and Russo implies that her unhappiness and her desire for something better stem from selfishness, and her subplot seems designed to punish her for leaving her marriage. Russo is apparently using this character to demonstrate that mild dissatisfaction within marriage is far better than the awful choices that await women who leave their husbands.

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:43:43 GMT

I finished Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet on Monday night. Although I remained caught up in the plot, I lost much of my affection for the book as it went on. I read it because I was looking for something that would be fun and not terribly taxing, and it met both of those requirements, but I think it's significantly inferior to both Affinity and Fingersmith.

Tipping the Velvet tells the life story of Nancy Astley, who begins as an oyster girl in Kent but soon ends up in London, where she undergoes several dramatic reversals of fortune and experiences much of the seaminess that London had to offer in the 1890s. In my opinion, the strongest part of the book is the section dealing with Nancy's love affair with Kitty Butler, when the two of them work the music halls as a pair of male impersonators. Waters does a wonderful job of depicting the theatrical lifestyle that Nancy and Kitty lived, and of giving life to the community of actors and theatre people among whom they found themselves. Nancy and Kitty achieve a certain degree of fame, and there's a great moment when Nancy describes their fans: young girls, most of whom simply like the act and are amused by the sight of two women in trousers, but, Nancy observes, "for every ten or twenty of such girls, there would be one or two more desperate and more pushing, or more shy and awkward, than the rest; and in them I recognised a certain--something." There was something quite compelling for me in the idea of the secret communication between these women, happening underneath and around and through the broader discourse. Also compelling for me was the way Waters conveyed the strength of Nancy's unconventional gender expression--so significant to her that she must act on it, despite the fact that she has no vocabulary to define it or to consider why it matters to her.

The biggest problem with the book came from the development of Nancy as a character. Or perhaps I should say the non-development. Nancy seems to lack any sense of perception, and to be unwilling to engage at all critically with any of the situations she finds herself in. She relates to the world quite passively, and doesn't seem bothered by this in the slightest. Perhaps it's just because this is quite different from my own outlook, but I found that her attitude--"Things happen to me! Oh my!"--got old quickly. It seems that each new phase of her life erases the previous ones, and within days or weeks of making any particular change, she is molded into an entirely new form and her previous existence is nothing more to her than a passing pleasant or unpleasant memory. In the first part of the book, I wanted to take Nancy under my wing and tell her that it was okay to fall in love with a woman, and okay to prefer wearing men's clothes; as the book went on, I just wanted to shake her.

There are other little inconsistencies too--why, for instance, is it so easy for Nancy to adapt herself to the social expectations of Diana Lethaby's world, but so difficult for her to do the same thing once she moves in with the Banners?--but I chalk most of the book's problems up to the fact that this was Waters's first novel. They seem quite forgivable in that light. Nevertheless, I would suggest that anyone interested in Waters start with Fingersmith instead.

And now I have started reading The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín. I've read The Master twice, but have read nothing else of Tóibín's at all. It is strange to read something else by him, especially something with a contemporary setting and an entirely fictional cast of characters.

Light and dark

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:37:48 GMT

Two photos of little details that have caught my eye recently:

House sparrow on a headstone, Old Pine Church, Philadelphia

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:05:21 GMT

Year-end reading wrap-up

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:22:49 GMT

I found it a bit more difficult than usual to compile my year-end reading list this year. I'm usually very orderly about my reading--one book at a time, from start to finish--but that reading style isn't really compatible with having lots and lots of required reading for school. There were many books that I just skimmed or read in bits and pieces, and my careful record keeping sort of went out the window. So here, as best as I can reconstruct it, is a list of the books that I read in something close to their entirety in 2008:

1. Writing in the Asylum by Jennifer McCormick
2. The Circuit Writer by Margot Fortunato Galt
3. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
4. On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
5. June Jordan's Poetry for the People, Laura Muller and the Blueprint Collective, eds.
6. The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
7. I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope
8. Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry
9. Affinity by Sarah Waters
10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
11. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
12. Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
13. Life Class by Pat Barker
14. The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
15. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
16. The Liar's Club by Mary Karr
17. Newspaper Days by H.L. Mencken
18. Ecological Literacy by David Orr
19. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
20. Developing Ecological Consciousness by Christopher Uhl
21. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
22. The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow
24. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
25. Meeting the Tree of Life: a Teacher's Path by John Tallmadge
26: Jumping Over Fire by Nahid Rachlin
27. Ovenman by Jeff Parker
28. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice, Charles M. Anderson and Marion M. MacCurdy, eds.
29. Darkness Visible by William Styron
30. Cruddy by Lynda Barry

I'm disappointed in how few books I read "for pleasure" this year (some of the assigned reading was pleasurable, of course, but it's somehow not quite the same.) Only nos. 8-14 were my own choices. But it's always been very hard for me to do outside reading when I'm in school, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I am surprised at how little fiction I read--only about one third of the titles on the list are novels, a shocking development when you consider the fact that my reading lists are usually at least 97% fiction. I did read a lot of short fiction that isn't represented here (mostly in The New Yorker, but from a few other places too), but it's still a much smaller amount of fiction than usual. I know that this is because I took two classes that required a lot of reading about pedagogy and one where the reading list was entirely autobiographies, but I'd really like to make sure I get back to reading more novels in 2009.

The lack of variety in my list makes it difficult to do my usual awards show format, with different categories and all the rest, so instead I'll just name a few of the best books of the year.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: This book is beautiful and quiet, perfectly suited to the dark and the cold. I suppose it's no wonder that I liked it, since it hits on a couple of my big themes: aging and memory and family history.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I had never read a full-length work by Gertrude Stein before this one, and I was intimidated going into it, but I ended up really liking the book. Stein creates a vivid depiction of her and Alice's life in Paris. I was surprised by how funny the book was, and also by the way it forms a sort of slyly moving portrait of their long life together.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy: I loved McCarthy's voice in her autobiography: erudite, clever, curious, matter-of-fact, and thoughtful. This book also served as my inspiration for an essay on family history and place that I've been working on for a while now.

Cruddy by Lynda Barry: It's difficult to hold a book that I only finished two days ago up against books that have had months to settle in my mind, so perhaps I'll change my mind on this at some point, but I was really into this book. It is a glimpse into a dark, violent, sexualized childhood and its aftermath that was totally engrossing. I kept finding myself in bed at night saying "One more chapter. Okay, now just one more chapter..." I haven't written a proper post about this book, but I'm planning to do it very soon.

The two worst books of the year were The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The Perrotta was absolutely flaccid and boring, and The Mistress of Spices was nothing but cheap exoticism and non-credible romance. To be avoided!

Recent reading

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:51:12 GMT

It's been a very long time since I've written about my reading, and the backlog of books is beginning to pile up. These will, of necessity, be very short reviews but there are some books on this list that I really wish I could give more time to. Ah well.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I will confess that I was intimidated by this book, having read only isolated bits of Stein and having heard much about her difficulty. So I was surprised to find this book so readable, and so downright funny in places. It's an odd sort of memoir, skating along across the surface of Stein's and Toklas's life together and almost never delving into any sort of interiority or emotional depth, but it's full of clever lines and sharp little portraits of all the writers and artists that they knew in Paris before and after WWI, and if you read between the lines even a little, there's this great, subtle sense of the long intimacy between Stein and Toklas. What a project, to adopt someone else's voice like that! While reading it, I sometimes got the sense that it was all just a big shared joke between the two of them, and Gertrude and Alice were still off somewhere chuckling over it all.

Developing Ecological Consciousness by Christopher Uhl: This book walks a very fine line between appropriately earnest and being straight-up cheesy. It's a mix of scientific information, personal anecdotes, and "practices" that are meant to instill a sense of wonder and connectedness to the earth. It's a little unclear what audience Uhl intended for this book--teachers who want to help develop their students' ecological consciousnesses? The students themselves? People outside the educational context who are just interested in the subject?--and this issue becomes a weakness. It's an engaging book overall, even if it does inspire occasional eye-rolling.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: This is Hemingway's take on some of the same Parisian expatriate material covered by Gertrude Stein. Even though Hemingway and Stein are unflattering to each other in these books, I ended up enjoying both of them. My favorite part of this memoir was the first half, with its focus on austerity and hard work, the routines of writing that Hemingway established for himself, the cafes and the cheap good meals... Like the Stein, there was a lot more humor here than I expected to find.

The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald: This is a strange book, a posthumously collected group of autobiographical essays, jottings from Fitzgerald's notebooks, and selections of his correspondence. The essays are the most readable part of the book; there are gems among the notebook writings, but you have to go through a lot of not particularly interesting stuff to find them. The essays were notable to me mainly for their long, elaborately lyrical sentences--quite a change from Stein and Hemingway--and their sense of melancholy nostalgia. Essays like "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and "My Lost City" function as memorials to an age that has passed, but the funny thing about them is that the age that Fitzgerald is memorializing has only been over for three or four years at the time the essay was written. My favorite piece in this book was "Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ----", an account of a few years in the lives of the Fitzgerald's told entirely in the form of memories of various hotels in which they stayed.

Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow: Unfortunately, I have almost nothing to say about this book. Coming as it did on the heels of David Orr's Ecological Literacy and Uhl's Developing Ecological Consciousness, this poor book had very little chance of standing out in my mind. All three of these books have started to run together for me. Perhaps I'll come back to the Thomashow at some point when I can read it for its own sake.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: This is Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband and the ways she was made crazy by grief during that year. Parts of the book are harrowing--on the night that I read the first two chapters, I got in bed and just cried--but other parts are quite beautiful. There are certain words and phrases that ripple through the whole book, coming to the surface again and again, and there are lovely memories of Didion's 40-year partnership with her husband. I was amazed by the clarity of Didion's writing and complex way she structured her narrative.

And that is all for now! It's gotten quite chilly here in the past few days, and I'm really enjoying it.

Journal Update

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:38:17 GMT

When I started this journal, I had a rule against making friends-only posts. My thinking was that if there was something I wasn't comfortable with sharing with the entire world, that thing did not belong on the internet in any form in the first place. I still think there may be some merit to that. But the way I use this journal has changed a lot since then, as I've connected with people here and discovered that I like posting the occasional personal update. Recently, I've been friended by a number of people whom I don't know, who don't comment to tell me who they are, and whose journals are not English so I can't get a sense of them or their journal. I don't know where they're coming from, and the journals often end up disappearing again not long after they add me. Very mysterious.

The result of all this is that it has made me think once again about the degree of personal information I reveal here, and who I reveal it to. I'm not interested in going to back to my strict ban on friends-only posts; in fact, I'm going to go the other way. Posts that are strictly about books will still be public, but everything else will be locked. I've been locking more and more posts lately anyway--I just figured that maybe it was time to make it official. I'll also begin gradually combing through old posts and locking the ones that need it. Does anybody know of a way to do this more efficiently than clicking through seven years worth of livejournal history, post by individual post?

This announcement mainly exists for the sake of people who are reading this journal and are not on my friends list. If you'd like to continue reading, please say hello. It's likely that I will be more than happy to add you. I will probably be happy to add you even if your journal is not in English--I don't really care about that and I have several friends whose journal are not in English (or not entirely in English). It's really not a language issue; it's much more a question of whether or not I can interact with you and get to know a little bit about you before we become "friends," even in the sometimes limited and misleading way that livejournal uses that word.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:34:00 GMT

I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go recently, but I can't quite figure out my feelings about it. It was a quick read (or would have been, if I hadn't gotten interrupted halfway through by Ms. E's getting burned and my suddenly having to become her nursemaid), but I kept feeling like there was some key element missing from the book yet was never able to put my finger on what. Perhaps it was just because my expectations were very high based on my love of The Remains of the Day, and there are few books indeed that can stand up to that one, but I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed in this book.

It's funny, but many of the characteristics that made The Remains of the Day so brilliant are also present in Never Let Me Go--I can't figure out why the same things that came together so perfectly in one book would fall so flat in another. Both books are told through reminiscence, both feature pinpoint control of tone and voice, both are narrated by characters who are careful observers of other people...the list could probably go on. Perhaps the thing that Remains of the Day has that this book lacks is intensity. That's an odd thing to think because Never Let Me Go has much more drama in its plot than a butler going for a drive, but the drama didn't seem to penetrate--it's like the two books are mirror images of each other: Remains of the Day still and quiet on the surface but smoldering below, and Never Let Me Go full of much more intensity on the surface and empty underneath.

But I shouldn't just compare this book to Remains of the Day; I should think about it as its own thing. My favorite character was Tommy--I liked the teenaged Tommy so much that I was disappointed that the adult version of Tommy wasn't developed more fully. I must confess, though, that it was a little strange to read the book because the character Tommy reminded me so strongly of my cat Tommy. And not just because of their names! Like my cat, the character seems developmentally behind his peers, slow to catch on to things, easy to laugh at... The book opens with a storyline about Tommy being mildly bullied at school, and I found it very hard to read because I kept thinking that those mean children were teasing my poor helpless kitty.

Kathy, the narrator, is a strange character. There's something about her that doesn't click, something artificial about her. Several times I found myself responding to her recollections by thinking that people just don't act like that. It reminded me of a friend I had in high school who, I learned, had a very different perspective from mine. Whenever he and I would talk about something that had occurred among our group of friends, our perceptions were so far removed from each other that I would find myself wondering if we were talking about the same people and the same event. Ishiguro does acknowledge this sort of subjectivity in his narrative--Kathy is forever mentioning that one of her friends had a different interpretation of a particular instance, or that someone else remembered a story in a different way than she did--but this acknowledgment doesn't seem to amount to much.

I think the thing that disappointed me most was the ending of the book. The conclusion is a bit foregone--we know the characters can't get the thing they want--but even so it seems to happen rather abruptly, with a great deal of mystery and suspense all dispelled at a stroke. I guess in the end my problem is that I can't seem to figure out why Ishiguro wrote this particular book. The book has some science fiction-ish elements, and some coming of age elements, and a great deal of interpersonal drama elements, but all of these various elements don't seem to gel with each other, and I'm left wondering what exactly he was trying to accomplish.

Sigh. I feel like I might be being a bit too harsh here. It's an engaging enough book, and there were a few moments of nicely managed tension. I don't know. Has anyone else read this one? I would very much like to hear others' thoughts.

In totally unrelated news, I harvested my first zucchini today! And when I say first, I mean that these are the first zucchini I've grown EVER, as in my whole life. Very exciting! Now I've just got to figure out how I'm going to use them.

Filaments so fine and strange that science has no name for them...

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:59:33 GMT

I finished Sarah Waters's Affinity last night. I ended up liking it quite a bit, but it wasn't at all the book that I expected. I expected it to be more along the lines of Fingersmith, a "lesbo-Victorian romp" as Waters herself once described her work. While Affinity is certainly both lesbo and Victorian, the romp part of the equation seems to be missing. Fingersmith is all fast-paced complexity, shocking plot twists, and suspense, whereas Affinity develops much more slowly and manifests its complexity not in the plot but in the layers of unreliability that cloud the narrative. There is tension in Affinity, certainly, but it takes much longer to develop than the tension in Fingersmith; I dawdled for two weeks through the first 300 pages of the book, and then read the last 60 in a gulp.

Affinity is a very dark book--Waters is not a writer who is afraid of the Gothic! The story is set mainly inside Millbank, a huge and grim prison on the banks of the Thames, and is woven throughout with themes of class, sex, desire, and betrayal. Spiritualism plays a major role in this book, and we are given glimpses into strange, sexualized séances in which the medium is bound to her chair with velvet restraints and spirits appear for the sole purpose of breathing on the necks of pretty girls. The darkness of the book is not all fun and sexy, however. Suicide, isolation, mental illness, and desperate loneliness all come into play as well.

I was most interested and impressed by the uncertain elements of the narration, and the way Waters allows that uncertainty to build slowly throughout the novel. First we wonder how much to trust Selina Dawes--does she truly believe what she says about spirits? How much of her work as a medium was a hoax? Margaret Prior, on the other hand, seems trustworthy: she seems sad and intelligent, sympathetic, terribly misunderstood by a world that can't comprehend that a woman might rather be a scholar than mistress of a house. And she is sad and intelligent and all the rest of these things, but as the novel goes on and we read more and more of her journal, we begin to wonder whether her perceptions match up with reality, or whether her mind has been so influenced by laudanum and her own desperation that she no longer sees things as they are. This is brought home by a lovely subtle moment when Margaret and Helen both look at the same painting and see very different things...

The biggest flaw of Affinity is the fact that Waters sometimes seems to let her research show a bit too much. She devotes long passages to the workings of the prison, describing in detail everything from the laundry room to the infirmary to the kitchens. This stuff is interesting, but bears no real relation to the story and I couldn't help but think that Waters just included it because she had read all about it herself and didn't want that to go to waste. On the plus side, there is some really beautiful writing in the book. I'm thinking particularly of an evocative passage describing the prison in winter--surprisingly lovely for such a bleak subject.

I don't know quite what to make of the ending of Affinity. I don't mind the fact that it's not a happy ending, but there's something about it that's unsatisfying entirely separate from the question of whether it's happy or not. I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps too much mystery is dispelled by the ending, and things that had seemed powerful and strange are shown to be ordinary. Or perhaps it's that I was able to piece things together just the tiniest bit ahead of reading them--not far enough ahead to call the ending predictable, but enough so that none of it truly shocked me.

So, Affinity was different than the rollicking good time I thought it might be, and the ending was just a little bit off, but it was still a very good book. Atmospheric, sensual, subtle, and then wonderfully tense near the end. I definitely intend to read more Waters. I have Night Watch sitting on the shelf upstairs, but Ms. E read that last summer and said it wasn't very good... Perhaps I will have to seek out Tipping the Velvet instead.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to make a dent in my to-read shelf. I think I'm going to read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go next.

Thu, 29 May 2008 00:37:46 GMT

I. A picture of flowers

I went out to the deck to water my garden yesterday, and found that the red and white verbena had burst into bloom. I cut a few blossoms for the kitchen, and they were so cute that I had to take a picture. Perhaps tomorrow, once these have faded, I'll cut some of the purplish-white petunias that are also blooming right now.

II. A book about spirits

I'm currently reading Affinity by Sarah Waters. Waters's Fingersmith was one of the most fun books I read last summer, so I thought I would attempt to recapture that with another of her novels. Affinity is less suspenseful (thus far, at least) than Fingersmith but more nuanced--there are fascinating layers of unreliability at work here, and some very lovely writing. It took me 50 pages or so to really get into it, but now that I have I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:34:22 GMT

It feels like it's been a very long time since I've posted a proper book review. Perhaps that's because it has been a long time. A quick look back at my journal reveals that it's been over two months since I've even posted one of those little improper book reviews that I was writing during the semester!

I had my top two wisdom teeth out on Friday, which meant that I spent a large portion of the weekend lying on the couch, which in turn meant that I had plenty of time to finish reading Moab is my Washpot, the autobiography of Stephen Fry. The same qualities--wit, charm, candor, and a highly engaging voice--that made Moab is my Washpot ideal post-semester reading also made it ideal reading while recovering from oral surgery, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The book tells only the story of Fry's first twenty years, but there is more than enough drama in those years to fill up 350 pages. I found it easy to identify with Fry's portrait of his younger self: a child with high verbal intelligence, but one who is also withdrawn and sometimes painfully ill at ease in the world. Fry is quite open about the unpleasant aspects of his youthful persona, and he freely admits his penchant for stealing and his ugly willingness to manipulate friends for his own ends. Fry seems to have ready access to the emotions of his early life, and he's able to bring to life the strange mixture of pride and shame that his behavior inspired in him, as well as the inexplicable compulsion that drove him to repeat these behaviors again and again. It sounds rather dark, summarized in this way, but Fry tells it with such humor and sparkling language that it doesn't seem heavy. There's some very nice material mixed in as well--for example, an instance when a teacher intervenes at just the right time and in just the right way to save Fry from cruelty and ostracism at the hands of his schoolmates. This event is rendered so lovingly, with such carefully recalled detail and obvious gratitude--it's a glowing moment, and I couldn't help grinning when I read it.

The central event of the book (and of Fry's emotional life, it seems) is his experience of falling in love at the age of fourteen with a boy at his school. This event gets rather a lot of buildup in the book, but then doesn't deliver quite the emotional punch I was expecting. There's emotion there, make no mistake--Fry is lovely when he describes his devotion to and idealization of Matthew--but the whole thing lacks the tension I need to really feel it. This lack of feeling cropped up at a few other points in the book as well. Fry seems very willing to share his emotions with his readers, but less willing to probe or interrogate them. The book favors narration entirely over introspection; Fry covers some unpleasant territory in the book (particularly a self-destructive downward spiral in his late teens) and I can't blame him for not wanting to delve deeply into those parts of his history, but it does leave the reader with odd gaps in understanding...

Stylistically, Fry seems to be trying to keep his prose as close as possible to the tone of his speaking voice, and the result is usually quite readable. There are sentences that seem to get away from him, instances when he injects so many modifiers and qualifiers that the whole thing crashes into the guardrail and becomes a massive adjectival pileup. But those sentences are outnumbered by the ones that are witty or trenchant or self-deprecating or otherwise spot-on. The book is conversational not merely at the sentence level, but also in structure. It's a VERY digressive read. For the most part the digressions were fun, and gave insight into other sides of Fry, but every so often they got in the way of the narrative or interrupted a story that would have been better left uninterrupted.

I feel like I've just pointed out a lot of flaws about the book, but I really did enjoy it. I think a large part of my enjoyment of the book stemmed from my enjoyment of Stephen Fry as the narrator of his own life story. I was absolutely charmed by him. I reacted to this book in a way that was quite common for me when I was younger, but has become quite rare as I've gotten older: I wanted to be friends with him. Seriously, if would be so cool if we could hang out. There would be so much we could talk about! From the frustrations of being a music lover who lacks all musical ability to the experience of searching, as teenaged queers, for the deeply coded hints of homosexuality in Forster and John Knowles... At several points in the book, I found myself thinking that Stephen Fry is exactly who I would be if only I had been born male, British, and 25 years earlier than I was.

Thu, 01 May 2008 21:24:44 GMT

Why on earth would I want to grade my students' papers when there's a book meme that I could be doing instead? You guys have seen this one, I'm sure. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Now everyone will see some of the gaping holes in my reading, and you all can tell which of these books I ought to go and read right now, and which ones I can allow to pass me by without a second thought.

Bold the ones you've read,
underline the ones you read for school,
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend.

The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay***
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners* [Okay, it's true that I haven't read the whole thing. But I've read several of the stories, and I certainly plan to read the rest. It deserves the asterisk for "The Dead" alone.]
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things******
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences****
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner [Bah]
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita*********************
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King******
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [On the list for this summer]
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses [How can I call myself a Rushdie fan? I know, I know...]
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury**************
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses******************************
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*********
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights [This one makes me wish there was some way to indicate books you've ready but absolutely despised...]
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:44:49 GMT

I. Recent reading

June Jordan's Poetry for the People edited by Laura Muller and the Blueprint Collective: I don't really know what to make of this book, or even how to describe it. The book grew out of the famous poetry class that June Jordan taught at Berkeley for many years, and it's something of a hodge podge. The book is essentially a compilation of materials for and by the class: student writings (both poetry and personal reflections), a sample syllabus, lists of classroom ground rules, tips for staging readings, etc. The book came out in the early nineties, and often feels a bit dated in some of its earnest political correctness and focus on identity politics. But June Jordan was an incredibly impressive poet and activist, and the book is definitely imbued with her sense of poetry as a real tool for change. It's an interesting book, I'm just not sure how useful it is unless you happen to be trying to initiate your own version of the Poetry for the People course.

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta: Oh my god, this book is so bad. Everything about it is bad. Perrotta's prose has no style whatsoever, I didn't care about the characters, there are preposterous holes in the plot...I could go on. Perhaps the worst thing about this book is the fact that every time something is done or said, Perrotta is right there, explaining it to us--there's no room for interpretation, imagination, or even involvement on the part of the reader. The other worst thing about it (too many bad things to pick just one!) is the way it gestures towards big topical issues (the power given to right-wing Christian fundamentalists, abstinence-only education, gay marriage) but refuses to take any kind of stance on those issues. They just sit in the book taking up space while Perrotta tiptoes around them trying not to offend anybody. Bah. My workshop professor perhaps described the book best: "It's like oatmeal. Or milquetoast... Oatmeal with milquetoast on top."

I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope: Every teacher and every writer who's reading this should go out and get this book. It's great. It occasionally veers a little into the sentimental, but it's still great. The book tells the story of how Sam Swope, a children's book author, spent three years teaching fiction and poetry to a class of elementary school kids in Queens. He followed the same class through third, fourth, and fifth grade, so he got to develop relationships with the kids over a long period of time and watch the changes in them as they grew up, worked with different teachers, etc. There is quite a bit of the students' writing reproduced in the book, and I was amazed not only by how good it is but also by how easily these kids are able to access their imaginations. This is also a super-quick read--I got through the whole thing in a day, and I'm no speed reader.

II. Birds!

I love my bird feeder. It's so much fun, and it allows me to indulge my interest in wild birds even when I don't have time to go hiking and look for them. I'm amazed at the variety of birds that I get, too! I regularly see juncos, chickadees, titmice, a mated pair of cardinals, nuthatches, and white-throated sparrows, but I've also seen house finches, blue jays, and today I even thought I saw a fox sparrow! (Fox sparrows are rather uncommon, and I wasn't able to be quite certain of my id before he flew away.)

A few weeks ago Ms. E came to visit and brought her camera, which allowed me to take some bird feeder photos. They're slightly dark because of being taken through the window, but a few of them came out pretty well.

Nuthatch on the tree

Cardinal

Junco

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal

Nuthatch at the feeder

Recent reading

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:48:45 GMT

I checked, and the last time I posted about my reading was well over a month ago. Sheesh! Last semester I read tons and tons of novels, but this semester my reading has been more diverse: essays, articles, single chapters in larger works... That makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of it all. Nevertheless, I will attempt to catch up.

Writing in the Asylum by Jennifer McCormick: The asylum in the title is not the foreboding madhouse that the word evokes, but is rather McCormick's word for the troubled urban high school where she spent some time tutoring and teaching poetry. The book describes her experiences and advocates for poetry as a means of addressing some of the social issues, psychological challenges, and disempowerment facing the students who are educated in these kinds of schools. It was originally written as McCormick's dissertation, and it's a strange mix of personal stories and highly academic writing. McCormick also makes no attempt to hide the fact that she has an agenda. It's an interesting enough book, but Sapphire's Push deals with the same issues in a much more visceral way.

The Circuit Writer by Margot Fortunato Galt: Another take on teaching poetry in schools, this time in rural Minnesota. This book could not be culturally farther away from Writing in the Asylum, but there's an underlying similarity in their messages. I appreciated the fact that Galt stayed closer to the concrete than McCormick, but I had some disagreements with some of her pedagogy. I have been reading a lot this semester about the teaching of writing outside of academia, and it's very interesting to be able to take these different readings and consider them in light of each other.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: I really liked this novel. This book is a double narrative, concerning events that happened to the narrator, Trond, the summer of 1948 and in the present. I wished that Petterson had spent more time in the present--I liked Trond as an old man, living in an isolated house by a Norwegian lake and trying to decide how to spend the end of his life--but the flashback story had its compelling moments as well. It's very beautifully written (and translated), with a wonderful sense of narrative voice.

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt: This book made a bit of splash when it came out a few years ago, mostly because a Harvard professor had written a book with a bad word in the title. Having now read it, I can say that the most noteworthy thing about this book is that a Harvard professor wrote a book with a bad word in the title. It's an inoffensive bit of fluff-philosophy that doesn't actually seem to have much to say. Parts of it are mildly amusing, and it only takes about an hour to read, so at least I can't blame it for wasting much of my life.

That's all I have time for right now, but I really do hope to begin posting more regularly again!

graphic novels!

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:36:38 GMT

So long ago that I don't even remember when it was, I asked for recommendations of graphic novels to check out. I have now finally followed up on some of those recommendations. In the days between Christmas and my birthday, I read both Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry (I have a vague recollection that these two books were recommended by slowlyawake and glazed_glitter, but I could be wrong...) This now brings the total of graphic novels that I've read up to three, and while I'm nowhere near an expert on the form, it's obviously an area where some really cool work is happening. Oddly, all three of the graphic "novels" I've read have actually been graphic memoir--it's sort of funny that there's no distinction in terminology to distinguish between the fictional and non in this form.

Anyhow, the first of the two books that I read was One Hundred Demons. Lynda Barry calls her book "a work of autobifictionalography," thereby perhaps resolving the terminology question mentioned above. The book is a series of short stories, each relating to a demons like "My First Job," "Girlness," and "Dancing," demons that haunted Barry in her childhood and into her adulthood. There's a lot of text to these stories, the art often squeezed into just the bottom third of the panels. But Barry manages to pack a lot into that bottom third--the paintings are colorful and vivid, with an energetic, outsider-ish quality that I find really appealing. Also appealing is Barry's conviction that anyone can make this art. The book has an intro and an outro, both of which encourage readers to pick up a brush and start painting their own demons--I love that.

As much as I enjoyed One Hundred Demons, I think I did the book a disservice by reading it all in one day. The stories are somewhat similar in tone, and reading them all back to back allowed a sameness to creep in. I was also a little disappointed by the way the stories sometimes seemed to wrap up a bit too neatly and easily. I don't think I would have even noticed this as a flaw if it weren't for the fact that at other times Barry digs so fearlessly into the real and painful stuff of her childhood. Next to that, the occasional dollops of wisdom and perspective from Barry's adult self are bound to pale in comparison. Still, there's a lot of really great stuff in this book. My favorite story was dancing, which seems to strike a perfect balance between the personal and the universal, between poignancy and humor--great.

Persepolis could not be more different from One Hundred Demons in terms of art. Where Barry's illustrations nearly pop off the page with energy and life, Satrapi's are restrained, stylized, and black and white. Reading the two books in a row made Persepolis seem very stark at first, but the style grew on me as I read. There are certain images from this book that have lingered with me in the weeks since I read it, like the drawing of the rows of veiled schoolgirls in Tehran forced to line up in their classroom and beat their breasts in mourning for the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war, the girls' round white faces staring out from the black of the background and the black of their veils. Like the art, the story also grew on me as I read. At first I wished for a bit more structure to the narrative, but by the end I was fully immersed in Satrapi's story. And the end of the story is absolutely heartbreaking. I wish that everybody who was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran for a glimpse of life in Iran during the troubled '70s and '80s would read this instead. It's such a compelling portrait of the ways people find to survive their circumstances.

So thank you to Nora and Cynthia, or to whomever else it was that suggested these titles to me--both were excellent and very worth reading.

What Time Is It On the Sun?

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:21:15 GMT

What Time Is It On the Sun?, the exhibition of work by Spencer Finch currently at MASS MoCA, was the best art experience that I've had in a very long time. I knew nothing about Spencer Finch before seeing the exhibit; I went just because MASS MoCA is perhaps my favorite museum, and a visit there has become something of a post-Christmas tradition in my family. As soon as I walked in I was enchanted by a cloud of light bulbs that stretched and spread above me. The bulbs were of varying sizes and they hung from the ceiling in constellations. The work was surprising and beautiful, and my immediate reaction was one of involuntary delight. I learned from the exhibition guide that this work (called Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) came about after Finch observed the sky and mixed a number of paints to match the exact color he saw. He then calculated the molecular ration of each color in the combination, and constructed the installation such that each light bulb represents a single atom in the molecular structure of the pigment he created.

All of the works in the show are like this: attempts to use scientific methods and scientific precision to capture and represent the ephemeral. Finch specializes in all that is fleeting about our sensory perceptions. His work present a certain quality of light, a particular breeze, the remembered colors of his dreams. I was fascinated by the explanations in the exhibition guide and by the notion that all of these seemingly abstract pieces were actually representational. To look at a piece like Abecedary, Finch's gigantic canvas covered with a random, even spattering of colored dots, and to know that it is based on both Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Nabokov's synesthetic perception of the alphabet is to have a ready answer to the questions of meaning that come with abstract art. But the funny thing was that having these answers made me wonder how necessary they really are.

This is a piece called CIE 529/418 (Candlelight), in which the stained glass panes on the windows filter the light in the gallery to produce light the exact color of candlelight. It was beautiful. The photograph doesn't half do it justice. There was a wonderful moment in this gallery when, somewhere in the invisible sky, the sun came out from behind a cloud and the already-warm light in the room brightened and warmed noticeably. There were seven or eight people the room when it happened, and every one of us exhaled in surprise and enjoyment. In a moment of pure pleasure like that, pure visual delight, does it matter that the light in the room has been measured by a colorimeter and determined to be exactly the same color as the light eight inches away from a candle's flame, or does it simply matter that the light is lovely? I don't know the answer to that. To transform something as huge and powerful as the sun into something as intimate as candlelight is an amazing undertaking.

What about Eos (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02)? This is a frieze-like installation of neon tubes, striped with shades of blue, indigo, and yellow, and arranged with a sense of motion that almost rivals Broadway Boogie Woogie. Does it matter that it also, as the title suggests, creates light that precisely matches the color and intensity of dawn light in Troy? Does the work say more to us if we know that? Something about memory, perhaps, or perception, or attempts to pin down the ineffable? Obviously this layer of scientific precision is a necessary part of the process for Finch, and I'll never know why he needs instruments and measurements and calibration in order to produce beautiful things. I'll also never be able to separate my aesthetic response to his work from my knowledge of what the work represents, so I can't determine how much that knowledge contributed to my engagement with the exhibit.

Avalanche (K2, 1978)

Some of the work is beautiful; all of it is fascinating and surprising and provocative. If you will be anywhere near western Massachusetts this spring, go see it.

Best of 2007

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:24:29 GMT

I'm joining the list-posting crowds and offering my fourth annual compendium of the best stuff I read during the past year. As usual, re-reads are ineligible, as are things that I failed to read in their entirety.

Books marked with an "R" are re-reads.

1. To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe
2. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
3. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
4. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin
6. Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
7. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
8. April Fool’s Day by Josip Novakovich
9. Stillness by Courtney Brkic
10. Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila
11. Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
12. The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
13. Gifts by Charlotte Holmes
14. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
15. The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
16. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
17. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
18. The Light Possessed by Alan Cheuse
19. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
20. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
21. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
22. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
23. The Guide by R.K. Narayan
24. Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
25. If on a winter’s night a traveler… by Italo Calvino
26. Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai
27. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
28. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (R)
29. The Dress Lodger by Sherri Holman
30. Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
31. After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
32. The Master by Colm Toibin (R)
33. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (R)
34. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
35. The Colour by Rose Tremain
36. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
37. One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry
38. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Best short story collection: This is not a particularly strong category this year. I guess the award will go to Stillness by Courtney Brkic, which was uneven, but had a couple of real gems.

Best short story: It's always so hard to choose just one story (partially because I don't do a good job of keeping track of the short fiction I read in magazines, etc). Anyway, I won't choose one, but will give you three stories to run out and read right now: "Thailand" by Haruki Murakami, "The First Sense" by Nadine Gordimer, and "Stillness" by Courtney Brkic.

Best nonfiction: Oh man, I only read one nonfiction book this year. I read a lot of fragments of interesting nonfiction this year (most notably A.C. Haddon's Head-hunters Black, White, and Brown) but only one book in it's entirety. That's a new low, even for me! I guess that means that Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever is the winner.

Best young adult novel: This is another category where I have only one entry. And it's not even a very good entry. I grudgingly give the award to the disappointing Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Best graphic novel: I read two graphic novels in a row right at the end of the year, and haven't even had a chance to properly post about them yet. Both were excellent, but Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis wins by a very narrow margin--if you want to know why, you simply must wait until my next post! Ah, the suspense!

Best novella: "Morpho Eugenia" by A.S. Byatt. Wow, really good!

Best novel: I have two nominees this year, and they couldn't be more different: The Road, and The Remains of the Day. Shall it be Cormac McCarthy's desperately grim post-apocalyptic vision that enthralled and terrified me, or the beautifully restrained novel of British repression that broke my heart? Impossible to choose. They both win. (And honourable mentions go to Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Sarah Waters's Fingersmith--both were just a hair away from making it a four-way tie.)

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:48:41 GMT

Oh, my poor neglected livejournal. First it was the end of the semester, then it was Christmas and all the attendant madness, and somehow I ended up not posting a thing... Oh well. The good thing about being busy is that it means I also haven't been reading much, so there's not much catching up to do.

In fact, the only thing I have read lately is Arthur and George by Julian Barnes. This was actually the last book that was assigned to me for first semester, but I didn't actually finish it until yesterday. It's something like the fourth book of Julian Barnes's that I've read, and I have to say that I think he's a wildly inconsistent writer. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters had moments of real brilliance, Talking It Over felt like a piece of fluff, and The Porcupine seems to have passed through my brain without leaving any discernible impression (but check out that early lj post--how things have changed!) Anyway, Arthur and George struck me a very middle-of-the-road sort of book--the sort of thing that's interesting enough while I'm reading it, but won't be remembered a year or two from now. There was just something about the book that had a sandpaperish effect, smoothing the characters, the prose, the imagery down into absolute mildness.

The book is based on the true story of George Edalji, the half-Parsi son of an Anglican vicar who was wrongly convicted of a series of livestock killings in Staffordshire in the 1890s. After his release from prison, George contacted Arthur Conan Doyle asking for help in clearing his name. Arthur took up the case, and their joint efforts to overturn George's conviction led to the formation of a court of appeals in England. Aside from my surprise at learning that there had been no room for appeals in the British justice system until just 100 years ago, I found very little of interest in the historical basis for the book. Arthur Conan Doyle made an amusing character--well-meaning and truly generous, but also helplessly self-aggrandizing--but I wished that Barnes had made more judicious use of his source material about Conan Doyle's life. As it is, the entire biography is crammed into the book, and I'm not sure it's all necessary. I think I have have felt more warmly toward the book if it had been about 100 pages shorter. Oh well.

I'm excited to finally be finished with Arthur and George because it means that for the next week or two, my reading will be entirely my own! I probably should do a bit of getting ahead for next semester, but I'll have time to squeeze in a bit of other stuff too. Yay!

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:31:24 GMT

I had a somewhat lighter reading load last week due to the fact that my Indian fiction class spent the whole week on class presentations (apparently presentations are quite the done thing around here—I’ve done one on Italo Calvino, one on R.K. Narayan and the history of India, one on Henry Spencer Ashbee, the great cataloguer of Victorian pornography, and one on Henry James’s ambiguous relationships with men. I don’t know whether this is a Penn State thing or whether presentations are some sort of academic fad that has caught on since I was last in school, but to the best of my recollection, I have now done as many presentations in one semester as I did in my entire undergraduate career.)

One of the things that I did read last week was The Master, Colm Tóibín’s novel about the life of Henry James. This was a re-read for me, and some of you may remember how much I loved it the first time around. Sadly, it suffered in the rereading, not because it no longer seems to be as good a book as it did at first, but because I was forced to read it quickly. The first time I read The Master, I spread it out over two or three weeks; that is the kind of treatment that this book needs. One of the things I like most about the book is the way Tóibín’s story is unpinned from chronology, the way you can float back and forth through the events of Henry’s life as if being gently rocked by a warm sea. Hasty reading and pressure to finish prevented this lovely effect from developing. Sad. But even when read hurriedly, it’s evident that this book is a masterpiece. The beauty of Tóibín’s sentences, the utter complexity of his characterization of Henry James—these are the kind of accomplishments that shine through any set of circumstances. I haven’t read anything else of Tóibín’s, although I keep meaning to. I think perhaps I’m putting it off because I’m afraid that none of his other work will live up to this book. The Master seems like the kind of novel that only comes once in a career.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that prior to reading The Master, I read some of Henry James’s own work: “Daisy Miller,” “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Real Thing.” My only previous exposure to James was The Ambassadors, which I found ponderous, needlessly convoluted, and aggravating. These shorter works from earlier in his career were a revelation. The prose was so light, the plots so sprightly! I liked “The Aspern Papers” best (not least because of the way it resonated with The Master and the issues of privacy, legacy, the destruction of correspondence, etc), and was impressed by the way James built the story from the simplest of all narrative principles: someone wanting something that he doesn’t have. I doubt that James will ever become my favorite writer, but I’m interested in reading more of his work now, something I decidedly did not want to do after The Ambassadors.

Not all of my recent reading has revolved around Henry James, however. I also read After the Quake, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. The book contains six stories, all loosely connected to the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. My only prior experiences with Murakami were with isolated stories in the New Yorker which never managed to add up to a meaningful impression of Murakami as a writer. After reading this collection, I’m still not sure that I’ve got any sense of him as a writer. The collection is very uneven as a whole, with two real knockout stories, a few middling stories that I suspect I’ll forget in a matter of days, and couple of absolute clunkers. The worse of the stories was “All God’s Children Can Dance”: boring, misogynistic, and essentially empty. The best was “Thailand,” a quietly unsettling story that displays a careful control of tone and wonderfully strategic use of image. I feel like I should read more of Murakami, but I don’t know where to go next. Anybody have any suggestions?