The Vietnam War, or the American War as the North Vietnamese would have it, officially ended the morning of April 30, 1975, as a final helicopter lifted out the last ten marines from the American Embassy in Saigon.
In the novel “Matterhorn” historical time and historical dates don’t matter much to author Karl Marlantes. What matters is the jungle, the fog, the enemy. Bullets, bombs, staying safe or getting killed.
“Matterhorn” is a fantasy – these events didn’t happen, but similar ones certainly did. Some General decided to name high jungle peaks after Swiss Alps. This story revolves around a hillock designated Matterhorn, in the mountainous jungles, a very long way from here.
The sense of danger and dread is unrelenting. Marlantes provides very few moments for the reader to stop and wonder. The book is a nonstop tale written in mud and blood by an author who lived through it. I read this book late into the night four or five days in a row.
One reader commented online, “When they ask, fifty years from now, what was the Vietnam War like? Someone will hand them ‘Matterhorn.’ There it is.”
The way I’ve heard this novel described to those who haven’t yet read it is simple – you will feel you are in the jungle, with the Marines, from the very first page.
The book stands out crisply from other war books for that reason alone. It doesn’t get all gung-ho war movie or sadly sentimental or all Norman Mailer and the Great American Novel on you. There is a satisfying minimum of foxhole philosophy, no halfway authentic battles.
“Goodwin sauntered up to the CP group. He was eating a can of spaghetti and meatballs mixed with a package of Wyler’s lemonade powder. ‘What’s up, Jack?’ he asked Fitch.
“‘We’re going to take the hill at first light.’
“‘Matterhorn?’”
“‘No. Helicopter hill.’
Goodwin whistled. ‘Just like in the movies,’ he said.
“‘Let’s hope so, Fitch replied, spreading his map.”
And this: “Something ahead snapped, and Mellas’ heartbeat accelerated as the shadow of Vancouver sank quickly to the mud. Mellas went down on one knee, eyes straining. The wind moved softly through the jungle, bringing the smell of damp rot. It also rustled the trees, filling the air with a steady hiss. Trying to hear anything was maddening. The failure to hear could mean his death. The fear made his heart pound and his breathing shallow and more rapid, all in turn making it more difficult to hear. No one moved. Everyone was waiting for an order...”
According to the jacket flap, it took Karl Marlantes thirty-five years to write this novel. I would guess that no matter when he started it, he could not have let it go until many years after the war.
Too bad, because I found myself wishing I could have read this book back in the day, when some were fighting in the jungle and others back home, like myself, were fighting against the war. And struggling to keep ourselves out of it, to be honest.
I was one of many college students who by and large did not end up on a plane to Vietnam. We swapped stories about swallowing blood to simulate bleeding ulcers. We attended college, graduate school, whatever it took to stay out of the wartime draft.
Some patriotic suckers actually enlisted. Others went because they were poor, or black, or poor and black. All of us – fighters and protestors alike – knew little about the war. We thought we understood the politics, but we didn’t. We thought we knew the war, but we didn’t know about the mistakes that killed people, or the luck that saved them during the war and long after.
Back then we would not have wanted to read a book like this, but I wish we had it in our hands in those days.
You are not likely to come across a better told tale of this now almost mythical war, nor one more universal in its suffering and redemption. We are fortunate that Karl Marlantes survived the Marines, medals and all, and lived to write about it. This is a harrowing, important book.
NOTES:
“Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes. Atlantic Monthly Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9780802119285.
The publisher Grove Atlantic has an interview with the author, and links to reviews.
The Lemuria Books blog reprints an essay by Karl Marlantes. He starts with this: “Having read a galley of my novel, Matterhorn, about Marines in Vietnam, a somewhat embarrassed woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t even know you guys slept outside.” She was college educated and had been an active protester against the war. I felt that my novel had built a small bridge.”
Karl Marlantes was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. You can read the Navy Cross presentation here.
15 April 2010
09 April 2010
Getting All Thoughty on You
We watch TV, I admit it, and we watch the CBS news, I admit that, and we have noticed that news makers brought in to the studio for interviews are sat in front of the same fake books on fake bookshelves.
The books themselves never move or change. (Come to think of it, neither do most of my own books.) The CBS books glow softly in shades of violet, green, gold and red. They set off the sallow skin or disappearing hair of the guests quite effectively.
We may be the only viewers in the country who have noticed this. Does anyone else still watch network news every night of the week? Hey... we watch it on our Digital Video Recorder – no commercials. The half hour show is over in 20 minutes.
What backdrop will CBS use in future years? Some say books made of paper (remember paper?) now inhabit an historical realm strewn with buggy whips and ox carts, bronze swords, typewriters and telegraph keys. Soon enough, CBS will display rows of Kindles lined up in black and white, or pods of IPads showing off in full color; Nooks, Pocket Pros, a queue of Ques...
John Updike wrote in his sixth collection of essays, “Due Considerations,” “Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies...
“My mother's college texts, I remember, sat untouched in a corner of our country bookcase, radiating the glories of Renaissance poetry and Greek drama while being slowly hollowed by silverfish. The bulk of my own college books are still with me, rarely consulted but always there... Such books... form an infinite resource of potential rereading, of new angles and insights on terrain where our footprints have all but vanished.”
From my parents I inherited many cartons of books. I kept the most unusual or interesting ones, judging them mostly by their covers. I have half a shelf in cracked red leather, other books in navy blue boards with gilt letters on their spines. From my father a collection of theater magazines from the 1930s. From my mother paperback volumes from The Britannica Home University, faded yellow stapled paperbacks dating from the 1920s.
On page four there is an Underwood & Underwood photo of a lawn tennis doubles match at Wimbledon, the players in white shirts and pants, audience in straw hats. On page 54, a photo depicts “A Quiet Game of Draughts” between two elderly, bearded gentlemen with the caption, “Edgar Allen Poe used to argue that checkers was an even more intellectual game than chess.”
I did not know that.
Updike writes, “Books hold our beams down; they act as counterweight to our fickle and flighty natures. In comparison, any electronic text-delivery device lacks substance. Further, speaking of obsolescence, it would be outdated in a year and within 15 as inoperable as my formerly cutting-edge Wang word-processor from the mid-Eighties... Without books, we might melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips.”
Updike wrote before the birth of Kindle and variously named I-Things. But like the poet William Butler Yeats he had a sure sense for the Second Coming:
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed... and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...” William Butler Yeats, 1919
Holding on to my own collection of physical books feels more and more like a rear-guard action, protecting civilized old things from the onslaught of the relentlessly new.
“The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”
It reassures me to play three hundred year-old music on a wooden instrument invented in the 17th century. My particular cello was carved, shaped and fitted together in Italy during the toughest years of World War II. It’s a fine old thing, a mere baby at 70 years of age. These days there are fiberglass cellos available and purely electronic ones. Yet wood-and-glue versions have never been bettered. This gives me hope and comfort and a fair amount of joy.
My paper books and my wooden cello carry me across any chasm. I like to imagine ink-on-paper books and wooden instruments will continue forever, while at the same time, I hope and expect that books in electronic form and musical instruments made of ever more exotic materials will flourish alongside.
NOTES:
Updike’s essay is published in “Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism” by John Updike. Ballantine Books paperback $20. ISBN 034549900X.
From the publisher: “‘A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each.’ This is how (the late) John Updike, one of the world's most acclaimed novelists, modestly described his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. ‘Due Considerations’ is his sixth collection, and perhaps the most moving, stylish, and personal...”
Quotations from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It is one of the most frequently anthologized poems.
The books themselves never move or change. (Come to think of it, neither do most of my own books.) The CBS books glow softly in shades of violet, green, gold and red. They set off the sallow skin or disappearing hair of the guests quite effectively.
We may be the only viewers in the country who have noticed this. Does anyone else still watch network news every night of the week? Hey... we watch it on our Digital Video Recorder – no commercials. The half hour show is over in 20 minutes.
What backdrop will CBS use in future years? Some say books made of paper (remember paper?) now inhabit an historical realm strewn with buggy whips and ox carts, bronze swords, typewriters and telegraph keys. Soon enough, CBS will display rows of Kindles lined up in black and white, or pods of IPads showing off in full color; Nooks, Pocket Pros, a queue of Ques...
John Updike wrote in his sixth collection of essays, “Due Considerations,” “Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies...
“My mother's college texts, I remember, sat untouched in a corner of our country bookcase, radiating the glories of Renaissance poetry and Greek drama while being slowly hollowed by silverfish. The bulk of my own college books are still with me, rarely consulted but always there... Such books... form an infinite resource of potential rereading, of new angles and insights on terrain where our footprints have all but vanished.”
From my parents I inherited many cartons of books. I kept the most unusual or interesting ones, judging them mostly by their covers. I have half a shelf in cracked red leather, other books in navy blue boards with gilt letters on their spines. From my father a collection of theater magazines from the 1930s. From my mother paperback volumes from The Britannica Home University, faded yellow stapled paperbacks dating from the 1920s.
On page four there is an Underwood & Underwood photo of a lawn tennis doubles match at Wimbledon, the players in white shirts and pants, audience in straw hats. On page 54, a photo depicts “A Quiet Game of Draughts” between two elderly, bearded gentlemen with the caption, “Edgar Allen Poe used to argue that checkers was an even more intellectual game than chess.”
I did not know that.
Updike writes, “Books hold our beams down; they act as counterweight to our fickle and flighty natures. In comparison, any electronic text-delivery device lacks substance. Further, speaking of obsolescence, it would be outdated in a year and within 15 as inoperable as my formerly cutting-edge Wang word-processor from the mid-Eighties... Without books, we might melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips.”
Updike wrote before the birth of Kindle and variously named I-Things. But like the poet William Butler Yeats he had a sure sense for the Second Coming:
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed... and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...” William Butler Yeats, 1919
Holding on to my own collection of physical books feels more and more like a rear-guard action, protecting civilized old things from the onslaught of the relentlessly new.
“The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”
It reassures me to play three hundred year-old music on a wooden instrument invented in the 17th century. My particular cello was carved, shaped and fitted together in Italy during the toughest years of World War II. It’s a fine old thing, a mere baby at 70 years of age. These days there are fiberglass cellos available and purely electronic ones. Yet wood-and-glue versions have never been bettered. This gives me hope and comfort and a fair amount of joy.
My paper books and my wooden cello carry me across any chasm. I like to imagine ink-on-paper books and wooden instruments will continue forever, while at the same time, I hope and expect that books in electronic form and musical instruments made of ever more exotic materials will flourish alongside.
NOTES:
Updike’s essay is published in “Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism” by John Updike. Ballantine Books paperback $20. ISBN 034549900X.
From the publisher: “‘A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each.’ This is how (the late) John Updike, one of the world's most acclaimed novelists, modestly described his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. ‘Due Considerations’ is his sixth collection, and perhaps the most moving, stylish, and personal...”
Quotations from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It is one of the most frequently anthologized poems.
01 April 2010
A Romance on Three Legs
You fiction readers, with your emotional epiphanies and family sagas and all. I prefer mostly non-fiction, and I still get quite a lot of feeling out of my favorite books, especially the one I read this week: “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Hafner.
I shed a tear on page 222 when Gould died of a stroke at age 50. I felt for him when he couldn’t find a Steinway anywhere to suit his particular pianistic needs, and ached with him when the one piano he really did like was broken to pieces on a loading dock. I rooted for his blind piano tuner, who rose from poverty to the heights of that somewhat esoteric profession.
What I’m trying to say is “A Romance on Three Legs” is not only well researched on a topic of great interest, but it’s as well written as any book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non. It’s simply a glorious work of craft, start to finish.
“A Romance on Three Legs” was Gould’s own term for his love affair with his personal piano. The book concerns Glenn Gould’s search over many years for a piano that somehow could deliver the music he heard in his imagination.
He needed a piano with a delicate touch, not one set up for the bomb shell-like effects of composers such as Rachmaninoff or Liszt. “From an early age,” the author notes, “Gould adopted an unusual and intimately physical relationship with his instrument. Sometimes he lowered his face so close to the keyboard that it looked as if he was playing the piano with his nose. And it often seemed that he was hugging the instrument... Yet Gould’s ‘rather hunchbacked’ technique gave him ‘finger clarity, better definition and feeling’ for the composers he preferred, especially Bach.
Gould “sometimes said that he hummed while playing in order to compensate for the shortcomings of an unfamiliar or inferior piano... it represented wishful thinking, the perfect, ideal phrasing he had in his head that he could never quite achieve in real life.”
“Fans noticed,” Hafner writes. “A woman once sent a letter to Columbia Records from the Midwest to say she had just bought a recording of Bach’s French Suites. ‘Now, you’re not going to believe this, she wrote, ‘but someone is singing in the background as Mr. Gould is playing!’”
Gould also “stomped, swayed in time to the music, and conducted himself whenever he had a free hand. He sat sidesaddle much of the time, with one knee almost on the floor.” He invariably sat low to the keyboard, in an adjustable chair his father had modified for him. That same chair now sits in a museum in Gould’s native Toronto, along with his fabled Steinway CD 318, the piano he used for most of his career.
In 1946 at age 14 Glenn Gould performed with the Toronto Symphony. He quickly built a Canadian reputation, and became internationally acclaimed after New York concerts and the success of his first recording, the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach, released in 1956. This recording has been in print ever since, and it is one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time.
Gould gave up performing in public midway through his career, preferring the silence and concentration of a recording studio, where he would often edit and re-edit himself both on the piano and in the editing room. His recordings were technical masterpieces like no others.
Author Katie Hafner creates a deep and rich portrait of an unusual musical genius. She traces the full history of Steinway pianos, details the art of piano tuning and piano manufacture, and follows the stories of several people crucial to Gould’s life and career.
Along the way she tells every funny story, recounts every eccentricity, every dispute, love affair, grand achievement and petty annoyance. The author narrates the life of this most difficult artist with grace and honesty.
Truly this is a book to savor: “A Romance on Three Legs” by Bay Area writer Katie Hafner.
NOTES:
“A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Harper. Bloomsbury paperback $16. ISBN 1596915250.
Notes on the Gould’s Goldberg Variations from the book:
p. 25... “Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations became the best-selling classical recording of 1956. By 1960, it had sold forty thousand copies, which was, Joseph Roddy noted that year in the New Yorker, ‘just about as astonishing in the record business as a big run on a new edition of the Enneads of Plotinus would be in the book trade.’ Gould outsold the soundtrack for The Pajama Game... it would eventually become the best selling classical solo instrumental album of all time, with sales topping 1.8 million copies... “
P 223... Gould’s funeral (age 50, 1982).. “At the end of the service, the closing aria from the recent recording of the Goldberg Variations was piped into the cathedral (in Toronto)... His grave is marked by a simple granite stone into which the outline of a piano is etched, along with his name, years of birth and death, and the first three measures of the same aria.”
p. 20... “There were many reasons for Oppenheim’s objection (the producer for Columbia Records tried to talk him out of performing the Goldberg Variations). The Goldberg Variations was notoriously challenging; it was a work more often associated with the harpsichord than the piano; it had been recorded on piano by only two musicians, and one, Rosalyn Tureck, was the established authority. But Gould stood his ground and Columbia gave in.”
P. 22... “But in Gould’s agile hands the music became eye-opening, fresh, and brazen... When Gould played Bach, the music became sparse, abstract, and mysterious. (David) Dubal wrote, ‘It was a process that went far beyond quibbling about the correct instrument. Indeed, the timbre of the piano under Gould’s hands became new and unexpected.’”
p.22... “Gould... argued that the harpsichord purists were suffering from ‘musicological overkill’ and that Bach was comparatively indifferent on the question of which instrument a piece of music was best suited to When it came to Bach, he argued that in certain circumstances ‘the piano can get you a lot closer to Bach’s conceptual notions that the harpsichord ever can.’”
I shed a tear on page 222 when Gould died of a stroke at age 50. I felt for him when he couldn’t find a Steinway anywhere to suit his particular pianistic needs, and ached with him when the one piano he really did like was broken to pieces on a loading dock. I rooted for his blind piano tuner, who rose from poverty to the heights of that somewhat esoteric profession.
What I’m trying to say is “A Romance on Three Legs” is not only well researched on a topic of great interest, but it’s as well written as any book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non. It’s simply a glorious work of craft, start to finish.
“A Romance on Three Legs” was Gould’s own term for his love affair with his personal piano. The book concerns Glenn Gould’s search over many years for a piano that somehow could deliver the music he heard in his imagination.
He needed a piano with a delicate touch, not one set up for the bomb shell-like effects of composers such as Rachmaninoff or Liszt. “From an early age,” the author notes, “Gould adopted an unusual and intimately physical relationship with his instrument. Sometimes he lowered his face so close to the keyboard that it looked as if he was playing the piano with his nose. And it often seemed that he was hugging the instrument... Yet Gould’s ‘rather hunchbacked’ technique gave him ‘finger clarity, better definition and feeling’ for the composers he preferred, especially Bach.
Gould “sometimes said that he hummed while playing in order to compensate for the shortcomings of an unfamiliar or inferior piano... it represented wishful thinking, the perfect, ideal phrasing he had in his head that he could never quite achieve in real life.”
“Fans noticed,” Hafner writes. “A woman once sent a letter to Columbia Records from the Midwest to say she had just bought a recording of Bach’s French Suites. ‘Now, you’re not going to believe this, she wrote, ‘but someone is singing in the background as Mr. Gould is playing!’”
Gould also “stomped, swayed in time to the music, and conducted himself whenever he had a free hand. He sat sidesaddle much of the time, with one knee almost on the floor.” He invariably sat low to the keyboard, in an adjustable chair his father had modified for him. That same chair now sits in a museum in Gould’s native Toronto, along with his fabled Steinway CD 318, the piano he used for most of his career.
In 1946 at age 14 Glenn Gould performed with the Toronto Symphony. He quickly built a Canadian reputation, and became internationally acclaimed after New York concerts and the success of his first recording, the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach, released in 1956. This recording has been in print ever since, and it is one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time.
Gould gave up performing in public midway through his career, preferring the silence and concentration of a recording studio, where he would often edit and re-edit himself both on the piano and in the editing room. His recordings were technical masterpieces like no others.
Author Katie Hafner creates a deep and rich portrait of an unusual musical genius. She traces the full history of Steinway pianos, details the art of piano tuning and piano manufacture, and follows the stories of several people crucial to Gould’s life and career.
Along the way she tells every funny story, recounts every eccentricity, every dispute, love affair, grand achievement and petty annoyance. The author narrates the life of this most difficult artist with grace and honesty.
Truly this is a book to savor: “A Romance on Three Legs” by Bay Area writer Katie Hafner.
NOTES:
“A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Harper. Bloomsbury paperback $16. ISBN 1596915250.
Notes on the Gould’s Goldberg Variations from the book:
p. 25... “Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations became the best-selling classical recording of 1956. By 1960, it had sold forty thousand copies, which was, Joseph Roddy noted that year in the New Yorker, ‘just about as astonishing in the record business as a big run on a new edition of the Enneads of Plotinus would be in the book trade.’ Gould outsold the soundtrack for The Pajama Game... it would eventually become the best selling classical solo instrumental album of all time, with sales topping 1.8 million copies... “
P 223... Gould’s funeral (age 50, 1982).. “At the end of the service, the closing aria from the recent recording of the Goldberg Variations was piped into the cathedral (in Toronto)... His grave is marked by a simple granite stone into which the outline of a piano is etched, along with his name, years of birth and death, and the first three measures of the same aria.”
p. 20... “There were many reasons for Oppenheim’s objection (the producer for Columbia Records tried to talk him out of performing the Goldberg Variations). The Goldberg Variations was notoriously challenging; it was a work more often associated with the harpsichord than the piano; it had been recorded on piano by only two musicians, and one, Rosalyn Tureck, was the established authority. But Gould stood his ground and Columbia gave in.”
P. 22... “But in Gould’s agile hands the music became eye-opening, fresh, and brazen... When Gould played Bach, the music became sparse, abstract, and mysterious. (David) Dubal wrote, ‘It was a process that went far beyond quibbling about the correct instrument. Indeed, the timbre of the piano under Gould’s hands became new and unexpected.’”
p.22... “Gould... argued that the harpsichord purists were suffering from ‘musicological overkill’ and that Bach was comparatively indifferent on the question of which instrument a piece of music was best suited to When it came to Bach, he argued that in certain circumstances ‘the piano can get you a lot closer to Bach’s conceptual notions that the harpsichord ever can.’”
28 March 2010
COMCAST escalated me... this would be laughable if it wasn't so damn frustrating....
In the chat posted below I'm typing back and forth with "Mark" because I'm trying to resolve a payment problem, one of the most common life experiences of modern consumerist mankind. I signed up for automatic payments, but I'm getting LATE notices because Comcast isn't actually doing what they said they'd do... take my money! If you have the patience, read all the way through the dialog below, because you'll see how they eventually handled my inquiry today. Your comments are very welcome on this, by the way....I got what they call "escalated" at least twice. I feel so important!
Problem: Ask Comcast Escalation
chat id : f26ccc60-d89b-49cd-aebf-c230efa61e0b
Problem : Ask Comcast Escalation
Anthony Miksak > Ask Comcast Escalation
Mark > Hello Anthony Miksak, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Mark. Please give me one moment to review your information.
Mark > How are you doing today?
Anthony Miksak > I have signed up (some time ago) for automatic payments, and have requested paper statements. It appears that I now own for two months, and that automatic payments are not being posted. Can you please check on this?
Anthony Miksak > I meant to write "I now owe..."
Mark > I see here that you signed up for automatic payments and it is not yet activated and now the account is past due.
Mark > I understand the trouble that this has caused you and I want you to know how sorry I am for the inconvenience. As your service representative today, I want you to know that your satisfaction is of my topmost priority and I assure you that we can resolve this issue together on this chat.
Mark > May I have the account number please.
Anthony Miksak > ok
Anthony Miksak > (snip snip snip)
Mark > Thank you.
Mark > Let me check this out for you Anthony.
Mark > Please give me a moment while I am pulling up the account.
Mark > While waiting, let me share with you a great Comcast feature. Have you heard of THE top TV destination on the Web? That's Fancast, dedicated to celebrating television by giving fans instant access to an extensive video collection of television shows, movies, trailers, and clips, so you can tune-in, catch-up, and chat about your favorite programming. Fancast also offers comprehensive editorial and blog coverage with in-depth recaps and analysis on what's hot and happening everyday in the world of television and entertainment. Want to start watching now? Go to http://www.fancast.com
Mark > Thank you for waiting.
Mark > Let me review on the account information carefully. Please standby.
Anthony Miksak > no problem...thank you
Mark > Thank you for waiting.
Mark > Anthony, may I ask when did you register for automatic payment?
Mark > Activation would usually take 30-45 days Anthony.
Anthony Miksak > not certain... probably 2-3 months ago.
Anthony Miksak > I'm going to find a previous bill...
Anthony Miksak > I have three bills here. On Jan 4 I talked with a comcast rep and paid my bill by Amex. Then I noted on the next bill dated Feb 19 "we are set up for auto payments" and now on the current bill it appears we are NOT set up correctly... Does this match what you are seeing?
Anthony Miksak > I think 3-45 days have passed. What should I do now?
Mark > I apologize for the inconvenience Anthony. I would like to escalate this chat to our Internet Support.
Anthony Miksak > 30-45 days
Mark > PLease stay on the line.
Anthony Miksak > OK
Mark > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst
Tiwanna > Hi. How are you today?
Anthony Miksak > hello... a bit frustrated... can we please get this resolved?
Tiwanna > Analyst has closed chat and left the room
24 March 2010
It's Customer Appreciation Day
Since we spoke last week I’ve suddenly gotten old enough to enroll in Medicare. I now qualify for discounts on BART and Muni and half off my groceries, why not? I even managed this week finally to join the American Association of Altogether Ancient People (AAAAP).
This somewhat disconcerting plod to the grave is alleviated by the certain knowledge that some good things in life, mainly books and reading, will continue their march long after we drop away.
Two very strong essays appeared this week, both written by booksellers dedicated to their trade, their craft.
The newsletter Shelf Awareness reprinted a tribute to bookstore customers which had first appeared in the newsletter of Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge Island in Washington. It was written by Ann Combs. She is talking to you:
“As we continue to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Eagle Harbor Books, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the fact that one of the best things about working here is our customers: the small children who march into the store and know exactly where they are going even when a visiting grandparent doesn't, the people who patiently follow us around the store as we search for a book the computer assures us is available.
“We delight in customers who come to us for recommendations when they are about to go on a trip, or need a birthday present for a son-in-law and are particularly pleased when they come back later to report that our suggestion was a big success.
“We appreciate the customers who understand when a book takes longer to order and bring into the store than expected. We're grateful to those of you who tell us that you may check on the availability of a book on Amazon but ‘I come here to buy it.’ We listen when you describe your own favorite books, and we often find ourselves adding them to our own bedside stack.
“You customers amaze and intrigue us with your varied interests and opinions. We enjoy the conversations, the banter, the laughter. And we're thrilled that you customers come in to browse, to meet friends, to get a treat for your dog and simply to say hello. No wonder the 40 years seem to have sped by in a minute,” she writes.
That is true customer appreciation. Here in Mendocino, Christie Olson Day, owner of Gallery Bookshop, composed her own essay, her answer to the frequently asked question, why be an independent bookseller in this difficult era.
Christie writes, “We believe in the book. We believe in quieting the noise and listening to the stories. We believe in traveling far and wide between paper pages. We believe in touching the words, scribbling in the margins, and dogging the ears. We believe in surrounding ourselves with books long finished and books not yet read; in revisiting our younger selves each time we pull old favorites off the shelf.
“We believe in five-year-olds inking their names in big letters on the flyleaf. We believe in becoming someone else for four hundred pages. We believe in turning off the screens and unplugging the networks once in awhile. We believe in meeting the author, reading the footnotes, looking up the words and checking the references. We believe in holding our children on our laps and turning the pages together.
“We believe in standing shoulder to shoulder in comfortable silence with our fellow citizens before a good shelf of books; we believe in talking face to face with friends and strangers in the aisles of a good bookstore. We believe that together, readers, writers, books and bookstores can work magic.
“If you believe, please join us: SAVE THE WORLD. BUY A BOOK.”
I asked Christie how she came to write her manifesto, and she responded, “Well, a couple of very enthusiastic and committed staffers had been telling me for months that the bookshop needed a mission statement. I had played around with some ideas, but everything sounded sort of corporate to me. They didn't sound like (our store). I thought a mission statement should answer the ‘why’ question: Why does this business exist? Why are we working so very hard at what we do? I didn't come up with anything that I wanted to plaster all over the store, though, until one weekend when I was at home, doing chores. The Manifesto just started running through my head -- along with the word: ‘Manifesto’ -- and it really is the reason we're here.”
NOTES:
The Eagle Harbor Book Company runs one of the more interesting bookseller web sites:.
You can find my local bookstore, the inimitable Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books, here.
This somewhat disconcerting plod to the grave is alleviated by the certain knowledge that some good things in life, mainly books and reading, will continue their march long after we drop away.
Two very strong essays appeared this week, both written by booksellers dedicated to their trade, their craft.
The newsletter Shelf Awareness reprinted a tribute to bookstore customers which had first appeared in the newsletter of Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge Island in Washington. It was written by Ann Combs. She is talking to you:
“As we continue to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Eagle Harbor Books, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the fact that one of the best things about working here is our customers: the small children who march into the store and know exactly where they are going even when a visiting grandparent doesn't, the people who patiently follow us around the store as we search for a book the computer assures us is available.
“We delight in customers who come to us for recommendations when they are about to go on a trip, or need a birthday present for a son-in-law and are particularly pleased when they come back later to report that our suggestion was a big success.
“We appreciate the customers who understand when a book takes longer to order and bring into the store than expected. We're grateful to those of you who tell us that you may check on the availability of a book on Amazon but ‘I come here to buy it.’ We listen when you describe your own favorite books, and we often find ourselves adding them to our own bedside stack.
“You customers amaze and intrigue us with your varied interests and opinions. We enjoy the conversations, the banter, the laughter. And we're thrilled that you customers come in to browse, to meet friends, to get a treat for your dog and simply to say hello. No wonder the 40 years seem to have sped by in a minute,” she writes.
That is true customer appreciation. Here in Mendocino, Christie Olson Day, owner of Gallery Bookshop, composed her own essay, her answer to the frequently asked question, why be an independent bookseller in this difficult era.
Christie writes, “We believe in the book. We believe in quieting the noise and listening to the stories. We believe in traveling far and wide between paper pages. We believe in touching the words, scribbling in the margins, and dogging the ears. We believe in surrounding ourselves with books long finished and books not yet read; in revisiting our younger selves each time we pull old favorites off the shelf.
“We believe in five-year-olds inking their names in big letters on the flyleaf. We believe in becoming someone else for four hundred pages. We believe in turning off the screens and unplugging the networks once in awhile. We believe in meeting the author, reading the footnotes, looking up the words and checking the references. We believe in holding our children on our laps and turning the pages together.
“We believe in standing shoulder to shoulder in comfortable silence with our fellow citizens before a good shelf of books; we believe in talking face to face with friends and strangers in the aisles of a good bookstore. We believe that together, readers, writers, books and bookstores can work magic.
“If you believe, please join us: SAVE THE WORLD. BUY A BOOK.”
I asked Christie how she came to write her manifesto, and she responded, “Well, a couple of very enthusiastic and committed staffers had been telling me for months that the bookshop needed a mission statement. I had played around with some ideas, but everything sounded sort of corporate to me. They didn't sound like (our store). I thought a mission statement should answer the ‘why’ question: Why does this business exist? Why are we working so very hard at what we do? I didn't come up with anything that I wanted to plaster all over the store, though, until one weekend when I was at home, doing chores. The Manifesto just started running through my head -- along with the word: ‘Manifesto’ -- and it really is the reason we're here.”
NOTES:
The Eagle Harbor Book Company runs one of the more interesting bookseller web sites:.
You can find my local bookstore, the inimitable Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books, here.
18 March 2010
Bilingual and Lovin' It
I speak two languages. Many of you do that and more.
In English, I do fine. In Italian, well, let’s just say I have the language skills of a bright four year-old, but I’m working on it. In French? Don’t ask, and for certain don’t ask in French.
Still, I would be considered bilingual by scholarly definition, and therefore by Francois Grosjean, author of the newly published book “Bilingual: Life and Reality.”
Grosjean writes, “In a bicultural’s lifetime, cultures can wax and wane, become dominant for a while before taking a secondary role. In my own case, I feel that I have changed my dominant culture four times since becoming bicultural: it was English in my teenage years, French until age twenty-eight, American until I was forty, and it has been Swiss since then.”
When I was very small, living on Wood Street in San Francisco, Yiddish was the lingua franca; everyone shouted to everyone else in that friendly hybrid of a Jewish middle-European language. Then came English, Polish, Russian, you name it.
Soon the Yiddish faded away, through attrition and a general move to less ghetto-ish neighborhoods. When I got around to reading Leo Rosten’s books “The Joys of Yiddish” and the hilarious “The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n” I felt somehow at home again.
There are something like 7,000 languages alive in the world today. Europe has 239 of them; there are as many as 1,310 languages spoken on various islands in the Pacific Ocean. “With so many languages in the world... a lot of contact is bound to take place between people of different language groups,” Grosjean writes.
Bilingualism can result from geographic proximity, immigration, acquisition in school, global trade, military invasions, deafness, even colonization. In fact, the person who doesn’t have some familiarity with one or more other languages is rare.
In the US after English, Spanish is the most frequently used first or second language of some 28 million speakers. After Spanish “one finds several Asian languages (Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese) as well as European languages... A number of languages that were in the top ten in the middle of the 20th century, such as Yiddish and the Scandinavian languages, had fallen off strongly by the census of 2000... Yiddish speakers had gone from 1.7 million in 1940 to fewer than 200,000 in (that census) and it was mainly being spoken by elderly individuals.”
In this book Grosjean sets out to dispel fifteen myths, among them that bilinguals have equal and perfect knowledge of their languages; that bilinguals have split personalities; that knowing two languages somehow hurts the development of children.
He starts with a story that can’t fail to draw you into this interesting book:
“In the span of a few hours this Monday morning, I bought croissants in French from the baker’s wife, who then served the next client in Swiss German; I accompanied my bilingual wife into town to meet her trilingual Italian-French-German friend; I stopped by my garage to have my car checked by a mechanic of Portuguese origin, who explained to me, in French, how the cooling system worked. While going from one place to another, I listened to the radio... and heard... Roger Federer in London, talking about the final he had played at Wimbeldon. He was tired, having... given interviews in his four different languages (Swiss German, German, French, and English).
“Now, as I am settling down at my desk, accompanied by the music of George Frideric Handel, a German-Italian-English trilingual, I can hear the children in the day-care center across the street singing songs in French and Italian. Bilingualism is indeed present in practically every country in the world, in all classes of society, in all age groups. It has been estimated that half of the world’s population, if not more, is bilingual. This book is about them.”
NOTES:
Bilingual: Life & Reality by Francois Grosjean. Harvard University Press hard cover $25.95. ISBN 978-0-674-04887-4.
Interested readers can contact the author by means of his Web site.
The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n by Leo Rosten. Mariner Books paperback $12.00. ISBN 0156278111. From the publisher: “The humorous adventures of Hyman Kaplan, the irrepressible student at the American Night Preparatory School for Adults, and his personal war with the English language. A classic work of American humor.”
The New Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten (revised in 2003 by Lawrence Bush). Three Rivers Press paperback $19.95. ISBN 0609806920.
In English, I do fine. In Italian, well, let’s just say I have the language skills of a bright four year-old, but I’m working on it. In French? Don’t ask, and for certain don’t ask in French.
Still, I would be considered bilingual by scholarly definition, and therefore by Francois Grosjean, author of the newly published book “Bilingual: Life and Reality.”
Grosjean writes, “In a bicultural’s lifetime, cultures can wax and wane, become dominant for a while before taking a secondary role. In my own case, I feel that I have changed my dominant culture four times since becoming bicultural: it was English in my teenage years, French until age twenty-eight, American until I was forty, and it has been Swiss since then.”
When I was very small, living on Wood Street in San Francisco, Yiddish was the lingua franca; everyone shouted to everyone else in that friendly hybrid of a Jewish middle-European language. Then came English, Polish, Russian, you name it.
Soon the Yiddish faded away, through attrition and a general move to less ghetto-ish neighborhoods. When I got around to reading Leo Rosten’s books “The Joys of Yiddish” and the hilarious “The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n” I felt somehow at home again.
There are something like 7,000 languages alive in the world today. Europe has 239 of them; there are as many as 1,310 languages spoken on various islands in the Pacific Ocean. “With so many languages in the world... a lot of contact is bound to take place between people of different language groups,” Grosjean writes.
Bilingualism can result from geographic proximity, immigration, acquisition in school, global trade, military invasions, deafness, even colonization. In fact, the person who doesn’t have some familiarity with one or more other languages is rare.
In the US after English, Spanish is the most frequently used first or second language of some 28 million speakers. After Spanish “one finds several Asian languages (Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese) as well as European languages... A number of languages that were in the top ten in the middle of the 20th century, such as Yiddish and the Scandinavian languages, had fallen off strongly by the census of 2000... Yiddish speakers had gone from 1.7 million in 1940 to fewer than 200,000 in (that census) and it was mainly being spoken by elderly individuals.”
In this book Grosjean sets out to dispel fifteen myths, among them that bilinguals have equal and perfect knowledge of their languages; that bilinguals have split personalities; that knowing two languages somehow hurts the development of children.
He starts with a story that can’t fail to draw you into this interesting book:
“In the span of a few hours this Monday morning, I bought croissants in French from the baker’s wife, who then served the next client in Swiss German; I accompanied my bilingual wife into town to meet her trilingual Italian-French-German friend; I stopped by my garage to have my car checked by a mechanic of Portuguese origin, who explained to me, in French, how the cooling system worked. While going from one place to another, I listened to the radio... and heard... Roger Federer in London, talking about the final he had played at Wimbeldon. He was tired, having... given interviews in his four different languages (Swiss German, German, French, and English).
“Now, as I am settling down at my desk, accompanied by the music of George Frideric Handel, a German-Italian-English trilingual, I can hear the children in the day-care center across the street singing songs in French and Italian. Bilingualism is indeed present in practically every country in the world, in all classes of society, in all age groups. It has been estimated that half of the world’s population, if not more, is bilingual. This book is about them.”
NOTES:
Bilingual: Life & Reality by Francois Grosjean. Harvard University Press hard cover $25.95. ISBN 978-0-674-04887-4.
Interested readers can contact the author by means of his Web site.
The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n by Leo Rosten. Mariner Books paperback $12.00. ISBN 0156278111. From the publisher: “The humorous adventures of Hyman Kaplan, the irrepressible student at the American Night Preparatory School for Adults, and his personal war with the English language. A classic work of American humor.”
The New Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten (revised in 2003 by Lawrence Bush). Three Rivers Press paperback $19.95. ISBN 0609806920.
11 March 2010
I don't know and I don't care...
As grammatical or syntax errors go, I’ve always been fond of this one – modifying the word “unique.” Either something is one of a kind, or it is not, I’ve always believed. However, in our present not-rational world, things can be very unique, the most unique, uniquer-than-thou.
The word “uniqueness” passes spell checkers quite well, but it’s a clumsy word. I’d rather say “uniquity” for the quality of being unique, but although Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary recognizes uniquity as a word, it hasn’t caught on, probably because “uniquity” sounds a lot like “iniquity” or injustice, which reminds me that it’s always a mistake to write run-on sentences, not because you were told not to in high school, but because the reader will run out of breath reading or saying the whole thing at one go.
Uniquity/iniquity somehow reminds me of the use of the word “disinterested” to signify “uninterested,” as in bored. These two have become through usage interchangeable, but we don’t have to like it. To be disinterested is to be unbiased, fair-minded. Uninterested is just that – a distinct lack of interest, or apathy.
This all is very interesting, at least to me. Yesterday’s misused words may become tomorrow’s new words. No one can resist the progression of meaning in English. But we can try.
Teacher: What does the word “apathy” mean?
Student: I don’t know, and I don’t care.
Apathy arrived in English about 1600, from the French/Latin/Greek “apathia” or “apátheia” meaning “insensibility to suffering.”
If you are not apathetic, you must be “pathetic,” from the Latin “patheticus” and the Greek “pathetikós.” Call someone pathetic on the school yard and you’ll start a fight, yet pathetic didn’t start out that way.
About 1600, we adopted the French “pathétique” to mean “affecting the emotions, exciting the passions.” A hundred years later “pathetic” had shifted meaning to “arousing pity, pitiful.” It wasn’t until the 1930s that scholars recorded the most current meaning: “so miserable as to be ridiculous,” and thus your Dead End Kids, your Bowery Boys, your East Side Kids brawling in movie school yards during the Depression.
Pathos derives from the same roots as pathetic, but it is no longer pathetic’s first cousin. You experience pathos as a kind of down feeling, a sense of sorrow. You may say an excellent novel has plenty of pathos, but people will mistake it if you instead describe the novel as pathetic.
My favorite book on English is Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue, English and How it Got That Way.” Bryson has nothing to say about pathos. But he’s eloquent on American dialects (yes, we have them), plosives and runes, and word origins.
He calls English “an adoptive, borrowing tongue” – shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, and so on. “As long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from more than fifty other languages – a phenomenal number for the age,” Bryson writes.
Take garbage. In fact, please take out the garbage. “It has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was brought to England by the Normans, who had adopted it from an Italian dialectical word, ‘garbuzo,’ which in turn had been taken from the Old Italian ‘garbuglio’ ‘a mess’ which ultimately had come from the Latin ‘bullire’ (to boil or bubble).”
In modern Italian, to boil or bubble is “bollire,” a change of one single letter from the Latin of two thousand years ago. That’s the Italians for you: slow food and slow language. Italians do change, but they take their time about it.
NOTES:
“The Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. Harper Perennial paperback $14.99. ISBN 0380715430.
Jimmy Buffett is credited with saying “Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care.”
“Disinterestedly Apathetic” is “disinteressatamente apatico” in Italian. Memorize this.
Not to mention lay and lie... less and fewer... “rest” rooms... it and it’s... irregardless... and so many more!.
A fascinating usage note ... “Disinterested and uninterested share a confused and confusing history. Disinterested was originally used to mean ‘not interested, indifferent;’ uninterested in its earliest use meant ‘impartial.’ By various developmental twists, disinterested is now used in both senses. Uninterested is used mainly in the sense ‘not interested, indifferent.’ It is occasionally used to mean ‘not having a personal or property interest.’ Many object to the use of disinterested to mean ‘not interested, indifferent.’ They insist that disinterested can mean only ‘impartial’: A disinterested observer is the best judge of behavior. However, both senses are well established in all varieties of English, and the sense intended is almost always clear from the context.”
If I have made any mistakes in this essay, please don’t tell me. Okay, do tell me, but be kind.
The word “uniqueness” passes spell checkers quite well, but it’s a clumsy word. I’d rather say “uniquity” for the quality of being unique, but although Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary recognizes uniquity as a word, it hasn’t caught on, probably because “uniquity” sounds a lot like “iniquity” or injustice, which reminds me that it’s always a mistake to write run-on sentences, not because you were told not to in high school, but because the reader will run out of breath reading or saying the whole thing at one go.
Uniquity/iniquity somehow reminds me of the use of the word “disinterested” to signify “uninterested,” as in bored. These two have become through usage interchangeable, but we don’t have to like it. To be disinterested is to be unbiased, fair-minded. Uninterested is just that – a distinct lack of interest, or apathy.
This all is very interesting, at least to me. Yesterday’s misused words may become tomorrow’s new words. No one can resist the progression of meaning in English. But we can try.
Teacher: What does the word “apathy” mean?
Student: I don’t know, and I don’t care.
Apathy arrived in English about 1600, from the French/Latin/Greek “apathia” or “apátheia” meaning “insensibility to suffering.”
If you are not apathetic, you must be “pathetic,” from the Latin “patheticus” and the Greek “pathetikós.” Call someone pathetic on the school yard and you’ll start a fight, yet pathetic didn’t start out that way.
About 1600, we adopted the French “pathétique” to mean “affecting the emotions, exciting the passions.” A hundred years later “pathetic” had shifted meaning to “arousing pity, pitiful.” It wasn’t until the 1930s that scholars recorded the most current meaning: “so miserable as to be ridiculous,” and thus your Dead End Kids, your Bowery Boys, your East Side Kids brawling in movie school yards during the Depression.
Pathos derives from the same roots as pathetic, but it is no longer pathetic’s first cousin. You experience pathos as a kind of down feeling, a sense of sorrow. You may say an excellent novel has plenty of pathos, but people will mistake it if you instead describe the novel as pathetic.
My favorite book on English is Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue, English and How it Got That Way.” Bryson has nothing to say about pathos. But he’s eloquent on American dialects (yes, we have them), plosives and runes, and word origins.
He calls English “an adoptive, borrowing tongue” – shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, and so on. “As long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from more than fifty other languages – a phenomenal number for the age,” Bryson writes.
Take garbage. In fact, please take out the garbage. “It has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was brought to England by the Normans, who had adopted it from an Italian dialectical word, ‘garbuzo,’ which in turn had been taken from the Old Italian ‘garbuglio’ ‘a mess’ which ultimately had come from the Latin ‘bullire’ (to boil or bubble).”
In modern Italian, to boil or bubble is “bollire,” a change of one single letter from the Latin of two thousand years ago. That’s the Italians for you: slow food and slow language. Italians do change, but they take their time about it.
NOTES:
“The Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. Harper Perennial paperback $14.99. ISBN 0380715430.
Jimmy Buffett is credited with saying “Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care.”
“Disinterestedly Apathetic” is “disinteressatamente apatico” in Italian. Memorize this.
Not to mention lay and lie... less and fewer... “rest” rooms... it and it’s... irregardless... and so many more!.
A fascinating usage note ... “Disinterested and uninterested share a confused and confusing history. Disinterested was originally used to mean ‘not interested, indifferent;’ uninterested in its earliest use meant ‘impartial.’ By various developmental twists, disinterested is now used in both senses. Uninterested is used mainly in the sense ‘not interested, indifferent.’ It is occasionally used to mean ‘not having a personal or property interest.’ Many object to the use of disinterested to mean ‘not interested, indifferent.’ They insist that disinterested can mean only ‘impartial’: A disinterested observer is the best judge of behavior. However, both senses are well established in all varieties of English, and the sense intended is almost always clear from the context.”
If I have made any mistakes in this essay, please don’t tell me. Okay, do tell me, but be kind.
04 March 2010
Looking Backward, WAY back...
Over the years this column has had many names (and been called many names). Here is my selection of Golden Nuggets from the past:
From the very first Words on Books, published on this date in 1902:
“The lumber schooner Amazon LLC hove into Mendocino harbor today carrying four seasick passengers and a crate of books destined for the new bookstore on Main Street. Idle bystanders, curious to discover what books were in the box, were told to wait until store opens Monday next.”
From 1903: “No doubt writing in haste for money, Polish writer Joseph Conrad (nee Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) undermines The Empire with a feverish tale of misbehavior. In one lovely passage, indeed the only lovely passage, set on shipboard, at sunset, on the Thames, the reader senses ‘The Heart of Darkness’ may be an edifying story well told. However, Korzeniowski soon dives into literary territory of the African variety.”
From 1908: “Well-known humorist Mark Twain, investor in the Mechanical Type-Writer, works daily on his autobiography, utilizing that machine with the assistance of a secretary, thereby risking further deterioration of an already deplorable handwriting.”
From 1912: “To celebrate ten successful years of insightful commentary, this column will now be named ‘The Discourse of Excursis Bibliomanicus.’
Forced by an editor to invent a name that would fit on one page, this column was renamed “The Back Number” in July, 1917:
‘In the room the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.’ With these words the Irish expatriate T.S. Eliot signals that writers of his generation will have nothing new to offer us. We know the women speak of Michelangelo. What else is there to speak of in Italy? Really, Mr Eliot, must we hear again from these insufferable women?”
Renamed “Saddle Stitched,” 1918: “Would I were to say ‘We told you so!’ would I be, thereby, gilding a lily? I think not! Hereby the remarks of Anonymous in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.’ ”
1920: “Is my column, Folio Fiddle-Faddle, worth a hoot? I wonder, then receive this letter:
“Pa and I enjoy reading Fiddle-Folio-Faddle (sic) in the Mendocino Beacon news paper, which makes its way to us at Camp 24. Harvesting of the redwoods proceeds apace, and after church of a Sunday afternoon Pa will catch and skin a raccoon – a squirrel if we’re lucky. Soon the savory smell of simmering squirrel stew, or roasting raccoon ragout, signals Sunday supper. Later, we catch up with the literary life. We cannot afford to purchase even one of the books you recommend. Regardless, Sunday would be much less interesting without our Fiddle-Faddle-Folio.” (sic)
From the newly named Excursis Bibliomanicus Romanticus, 1934: “The Devil resides in Washington and bread lines stretch around the block. Yet here in Mendocino we are stuffed with the filling news of books and literature.”
From Bibliomania Exfoliosis, 1937: “The improved bridge over Big River brings new books to us almost every couple of months. Arriving rain-soaked and torn, yet these tomes were packed in excelsior, nailed firmly into wooden boxes by unionized longshoremen sitting on the dock of the San Francisco Bay.”
From The Reading Radar, 1942: “Buy Liberty Bonds, save tin foil, conserve words, that’s the ticket. Few travel far on gasoline coupons. More Americans stay home & read. Used books bundled by Boy Scouts for shipment overseas may have covers removed to fill paper drive quotas.”
1961: “Today we are reborn as ‘Crazy for Books!’ We are ‘crazy!’ about books! We are not ‘crazy!’ and we are not smoking anything herbal or stuffing white powder up our nose! Got it? Just writing! About books!”
1979: “The Man says I’ve served my time, so I’m back with ‘A Few Words on Books.’ Banned from the Beacon and fired by the Advertiser (and because community radio station KZYX has not yet gone live) this mimeographed flyer is yours to keep.”
Hang on to it, bro. It’s collectible.
NOTES: None this week.
From the very first Words on Books, published on this date in 1902:
“The lumber schooner Amazon LLC hove into Mendocino harbor today carrying four seasick passengers and a crate of books destined for the new bookstore on Main Street. Idle bystanders, curious to discover what books were in the box, were told to wait until store opens Monday next.”
From 1903: “No doubt writing in haste for money, Polish writer Joseph Conrad (nee Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) undermines The Empire with a feverish tale of misbehavior. In one lovely passage, indeed the only lovely passage, set on shipboard, at sunset, on the Thames, the reader senses ‘The Heart of Darkness’ may be an edifying story well told. However, Korzeniowski soon dives into literary territory of the African variety.”
From 1908: “Well-known humorist Mark Twain, investor in the Mechanical Type-Writer, works daily on his autobiography, utilizing that machine with the assistance of a secretary, thereby risking further deterioration of an already deplorable handwriting.”
From 1912: “To celebrate ten successful years of insightful commentary, this column will now be named ‘The Discourse of Excursis Bibliomanicus.’
Forced by an editor to invent a name that would fit on one page, this column was renamed “The Back Number” in July, 1917:
‘In the room the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.’ With these words the Irish expatriate T.S. Eliot signals that writers of his generation will have nothing new to offer us. We know the women speak of Michelangelo. What else is there to speak of in Italy? Really, Mr Eliot, must we hear again from these insufferable women?”
Renamed “Saddle Stitched,” 1918: “Would I were to say ‘We told you so!’ would I be, thereby, gilding a lily? I think not! Hereby the remarks of Anonymous in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.’ ”
1920: “Is my column, Folio Fiddle-Faddle, worth a hoot? I wonder, then receive this letter:
“Pa and I enjoy reading Fiddle-Folio-Faddle (sic) in the Mendocino Beacon news paper, which makes its way to us at Camp 24. Harvesting of the redwoods proceeds apace, and after church of a Sunday afternoon Pa will catch and skin a raccoon – a squirrel if we’re lucky. Soon the savory smell of simmering squirrel stew, or roasting raccoon ragout, signals Sunday supper. Later, we catch up with the literary life. We cannot afford to purchase even one of the books you recommend. Regardless, Sunday would be much less interesting without our Fiddle-Faddle-Folio.” (sic)
From the newly named Excursis Bibliomanicus Romanticus, 1934: “The Devil resides in Washington and bread lines stretch around the block. Yet here in Mendocino we are stuffed with the filling news of books and literature.”
From Bibliomania Exfoliosis, 1937: “The improved bridge over Big River brings new books to us almost every couple of months. Arriving rain-soaked and torn, yet these tomes were packed in excelsior, nailed firmly into wooden boxes by unionized longshoremen sitting on the dock of the San Francisco Bay.”
From The Reading Radar, 1942: “Buy Liberty Bonds, save tin foil, conserve words, that’s the ticket. Few travel far on gasoline coupons. More Americans stay home & read. Used books bundled by Boy Scouts for shipment overseas may have covers removed to fill paper drive quotas.”
1961: “Today we are reborn as ‘Crazy for Books!’ We are ‘crazy!’ about books! We are not ‘crazy!’ and we are not smoking anything herbal or stuffing white powder up our nose! Got it? Just writing! About books!”
1979: “The Man says I’ve served my time, so I’m back with ‘A Few Words on Books.’ Banned from the Beacon and fired by the Advertiser (and because community radio station KZYX has not yet gone live) this mimeographed flyer is yours to keep.”
Hang on to it, bro. It’s collectible.
NOTES: None this week.
23 February 2010
A Room Stuffed with Books
I live in a room stuffed with books. Many of you do as well.
From where I sit I can see trees, a squirrel, the odd passing cat or flock of turkeys. That’s the window view. Everywhere else I look it’s books, books, books.
On my right: A complete 20-volume set of the “The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians” copyright 1980.
Also: Guidebooks to various computer programs; travel books that don’t fit on the other travel book shelves in this room; a 1907 set of “The Life & Works of Abraham Lincoln,” commemorative edition, partially bound in red leather; a boxed set in the original French of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust, some Boswell, a bit of Dostoyevsky, “The Fundamentals of Musical Art, Volume 10" which was a gift signed by two friends in 1990.
Those titles cover maybe 20 feet of shelves. There are 14 more eight foot-high cabinets in this small study. I admit it is lovely to be so surrounded. As if I had read even half these books. As if I ever will read most of them.
On her book blog this week Barbara Vey asks, “To Keep or Not to Keep?”
“...What benefit do I get from titles staring me down? Why daily expose my conscious brain to Kafka and Chekhov randomly placed next to Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, and Aldo Leopold? I’ll never read those books again. (Will I?) Just because they came into my possession doesn’t mean I have to keep them. ‘Possession’! I loved that book by A. S. Byatt. Where did I put my copy? Don’t tell me I got rid of it!” she writes.
I know that feeling so well that recently I purchased a hand-held scanner and the software to go along with it so I may catalog my collection, and find out how many duplicate copies I have and where my books are in the first place.
What prevents me from carrying out this plan is the certain knowledge that before entering all these books into a database I must organize them so the computer can guide me to a title it thinks I own.
How to make sense of such a crazily diverse group of books? Maybe I will label the shelves One Two Three and so on. Then the computer can report that “Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies” has a spot on shelf three, cabinet four. Or worse yet, physically move these books into categories... Do historical novels shelve with Fiction or History? Is it all Fiction? Should Dickens sit next to Dick? Cornwell near Calvino, Chaucer on the same shelf as Churchill?
As someone once asked in the bookstore, “Where is your NON-fiction section?” I had to think about that for a minute.
Right now I get along on memory and intuition. I remember holding a monograph on the ant. I was over by that chair, and the book had a blue cover. I’m pretty sure it’s still there, if I didn’t move it.
Gliding along a wall of multi-hued books I randomly pick out an advance uncorrected proof of “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, & the Fault Line Between Reason & Faith” by David L. Ulin.
Back when I was an active bookseller, I probably said to a sales person, “Could you send me a copy of that earthquake book? Even though I’m not going to buy it for the store, maybe I’ll do a Words of Books on it.” That was six years ago. I really should dust more often.
Blogger Barbara Vey asks what should we do with books we may never read, or never read again? The first problem, for me, starts with the fact these are BOOKS, not week-old newspapers or burrito wrappers.
I could give some to friends, or swap with strangers on the Internet, but I’d just be exchanging one unread book for another. I offered a look-see to a used book dealer, but he turned me down. He has too many books, too.
I could give books to a local thrift store, but I’d probably end up buying some of them back, and anyway, could they possibly use them, or would they end up one-cent-sale-ing them into a box in the rain? It’s horrible to contemplate.
In the meantime, I live in a room stuffed with books. A few are valuable first editions, some so useless they really should go out with the burrito wrappers.
Taken together, I admit, these books provoke in me a quiet joy. They are silent friends, ready to speak in their many voices, never insisting on being heard. Eyes and hands will find them again one day.
NOTES:
Barbara Vey’s blog at Publishers Weekly got me thinking about all this.
An excellent software source for cataloging books, music, your just-about-anything you have a lot of...
A national directory of thrift stores.
A recent list of “The 10 Best Websites To Swap Books, Movies, Games & CDs”
From where I sit I can see trees, a squirrel, the odd passing cat or flock of turkeys. That’s the window view. Everywhere else I look it’s books, books, books.
On my right: A complete 20-volume set of the “The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians” copyright 1980.
Also: Guidebooks to various computer programs; travel books that don’t fit on the other travel book shelves in this room; a 1907 set of “The Life & Works of Abraham Lincoln,” commemorative edition, partially bound in red leather; a boxed set in the original French of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust, some Boswell, a bit of Dostoyevsky, “The Fundamentals of Musical Art, Volume 10" which was a gift signed by two friends in 1990.
Those titles cover maybe 20 feet of shelves. There are 14 more eight foot-high cabinets in this small study. I admit it is lovely to be so surrounded. As if I had read even half these books. As if I ever will read most of them.
On her book blog this week Barbara Vey asks, “To Keep or Not to Keep?”
“...What benefit do I get from titles staring me down? Why daily expose my conscious brain to Kafka and Chekhov randomly placed next to Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, and Aldo Leopold? I’ll never read those books again. (Will I?) Just because they came into my possession doesn’t mean I have to keep them. ‘Possession’! I loved that book by A. S. Byatt. Where did I put my copy? Don’t tell me I got rid of it!” she writes.
I know that feeling so well that recently I purchased a hand-held scanner and the software to go along with it so I may catalog my collection, and find out how many duplicate copies I have and where my books are in the first place.
What prevents me from carrying out this plan is the certain knowledge that before entering all these books into a database I must organize them so the computer can guide me to a title it thinks I own.
How to make sense of such a crazily diverse group of books? Maybe I will label the shelves One Two Three and so on. Then the computer can report that “Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies” has a spot on shelf three, cabinet four. Or worse yet, physically move these books into categories... Do historical novels shelve with Fiction or History? Is it all Fiction? Should Dickens sit next to Dick? Cornwell near Calvino, Chaucer on the same shelf as Churchill?
As someone once asked in the bookstore, “Where is your NON-fiction section?” I had to think about that for a minute.
Right now I get along on memory and intuition. I remember holding a monograph on the ant. I was over by that chair, and the book had a blue cover. I’m pretty sure it’s still there, if I didn’t move it.
Gliding along a wall of multi-hued books I randomly pick out an advance uncorrected proof of “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, & the Fault Line Between Reason & Faith” by David L. Ulin.
Back when I was an active bookseller, I probably said to a sales person, “Could you send me a copy of that earthquake book? Even though I’m not going to buy it for the store, maybe I’ll do a Words of Books on it.” That was six years ago. I really should dust more often.
Blogger Barbara Vey asks what should we do with books we may never read, or never read again? The first problem, for me, starts with the fact these are BOOKS, not week-old newspapers or burrito wrappers.
I could give some to friends, or swap with strangers on the Internet, but I’d just be exchanging one unread book for another. I offered a look-see to a used book dealer, but he turned me down. He has too many books, too.
I could give books to a local thrift store, but I’d probably end up buying some of them back, and anyway, could they possibly use them, or would they end up one-cent-sale-ing them into a box in the rain? It’s horrible to contemplate.
In the meantime, I live in a room stuffed with books. A few are valuable first editions, some so useless they really should go out with the burrito wrappers.
Taken together, I admit, these books provoke in me a quiet joy. They are silent friends, ready to speak in their many voices, never insisting on being heard. Eyes and hands will find them again one day.
NOTES:
Barbara Vey’s blog at Publishers Weekly got me thinking about all this.
An excellent software source for cataloging books, music, your just-about-anything you have a lot of...
A national directory of thrift stores.
A recent list of “The 10 Best Websites To Swap Books, Movies, Games & CDs”
18 February 2010
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Who Played with Fire and Kicked the Dragon's Nest
Last week we praised the writer John Biggins. This week Steig Larsson. I am so fickle, and in fact, so uninformed.
Steig Larsson’s three thrillers have been world-wide best sellers, and his first novel, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” also is a movie soon to be released in this country. In 2008 (it is reported) the author was the second best-selling author in the world. How did we miss this?
It took a slight nudge from a friend of mine who works in a bookstore for me to pick up the first of Larsson’s books and give it a look. I now have joined those who clamor for this intriguing author.
Six years ago Steig Larsson died unexpectedly at age 50 of a heart attack. He had just delivered three manuscripts to his Swedish publisher. Like one of his lead characters, Larsson was a crusading left-wing journalist. He was “a leading expert on antidemocratic right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations,” all of which is reflected in his novels as well as the subject of his journalistic work.
When a Swedish labor-union leader was murdered in his home by neo-Nazis in 1999, the police discovered photos of Larsson in the murderer's apartment.
For reasons of personal safety Larsson and long-time girl friend Eva Gabrielsson never married despite a decades-long relationship. To do so would have required public disclosure of their home address.
There is no evidence that Larsson’s death was anything but natural. Yet he wrote thrillers about dark forces hiding in plain sight. His readers naturally have to wonder...
“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” gets off to a leisurely start that some have said is due to lax editing. No explosions, no assassinations, just a gradual build that introduces the main characters and themes of the novel. You soon discover that it’s not only residents of Mendocino who drink way too much coffee and live in an isolated village. The Swedes have their coffee pots and their secrets, too.
It’s amazing to me that such a book, that reads in many places like sitting through the slow parts of Ingmar Bergman movies, could become such a popular sensation. It’s a compliment to readers everywhere, and should give hope to more literate writers, very much including John Biggins, who was praised here last week.
Despite Larsson’s icy Nordic-ness, by the middle of the book I was enthralled, entranced, enraptured, captured, intrigued, glued. I read this book last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Even in a small mass market edition it runs well over 600 pages.
There are rumors that Larsson may have left a fourth manuscript, and at least the outlines of further books, and that he planned a series of ten novels. He has become so posthumously successful that I would not be surprised to hear another writer will be commissioned to carry on the series, as was done, for example, to Robert Ludlum after his death.
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” currently is selling well in the US; “The Girl Who Played with Fire” will be available in March, and in June “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”
To discuss plot points would risk spoiling the book for future readers. But I should note that there are very strong females in this tale. It was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women” and that is a big hint on the theme of this engaging thriller.
Writers of a more literary bent with books of a less commercial nature will ponder Larsson’s posthumous success with wonderment. Money and fame seem to be handed out by the mysterious hand of fate, not a panel of Olympian judges.
NOTES:
Stieg Larsson is on line here and here.
An excellent recent BBC piece on the author...
All three of Stieg Larsson’s books are available in various editions. If you’d like to read them in their least expensive format ($7.99 mass market editions) the first is available now; the next two will be published in March, and June, 2010, respectively.
(Available now)
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307473479.
(Due March, 2010)
“The Girl Who Played with Fire” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307476159.
(Due June, 2010)
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307739964.
Steig Larsson’s three thrillers have been world-wide best sellers, and his first novel, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” also is a movie soon to be released in this country. In 2008 (it is reported) the author was the second best-selling author in the world. How did we miss this?
It took a slight nudge from a friend of mine who works in a bookstore for me to pick up the first of Larsson’s books and give it a look. I now have joined those who clamor for this intriguing author.
Six years ago Steig Larsson died unexpectedly at age 50 of a heart attack. He had just delivered three manuscripts to his Swedish publisher. Like one of his lead characters, Larsson was a crusading left-wing journalist. He was “a leading expert on antidemocratic right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations,” all of which is reflected in his novels as well as the subject of his journalistic work.
When a Swedish labor-union leader was murdered in his home by neo-Nazis in 1999, the police discovered photos of Larsson in the murderer's apartment.
For reasons of personal safety Larsson and long-time girl friend Eva Gabrielsson never married despite a decades-long relationship. To do so would have required public disclosure of their home address.
There is no evidence that Larsson’s death was anything but natural. Yet he wrote thrillers about dark forces hiding in plain sight. His readers naturally have to wonder...
“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” gets off to a leisurely start that some have said is due to lax editing. No explosions, no assassinations, just a gradual build that introduces the main characters and themes of the novel. You soon discover that it’s not only residents of Mendocino who drink way too much coffee and live in an isolated village. The Swedes have their coffee pots and their secrets, too.
It’s amazing to me that such a book, that reads in many places like sitting through the slow parts of Ingmar Bergman movies, could become such a popular sensation. It’s a compliment to readers everywhere, and should give hope to more literate writers, very much including John Biggins, who was praised here last week.
Despite Larsson’s icy Nordic-ness, by the middle of the book I was enthralled, entranced, enraptured, captured, intrigued, glued. I read this book last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Even in a small mass market edition it runs well over 600 pages.
There are rumors that Larsson may have left a fourth manuscript, and at least the outlines of further books, and that he planned a series of ten novels. He has become so posthumously successful that I would not be surprised to hear another writer will be commissioned to carry on the series, as was done, for example, to Robert Ludlum after his death.
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” currently is selling well in the US; “The Girl Who Played with Fire” will be available in March, and in June “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”
To discuss plot points would risk spoiling the book for future readers. But I should note that there are very strong females in this tale. It was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women” and that is a big hint on the theme of this engaging thriller.
Writers of a more literary bent with books of a less commercial nature will ponder Larsson’s posthumous success with wonderment. Money and fame seem to be handed out by the mysterious hand of fate, not a panel of Olympian judges.
NOTES:
Stieg Larsson is on line here and here.
An excellent recent BBC piece on the author...
All three of Stieg Larsson’s books are available in various editions. If you’d like to read them in their least expensive format ($7.99 mass market editions) the first is available now; the next two will be published in March, and June, 2010, respectively.
(Available now)
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307473479.
(Due March, 2010)
“The Girl Who Played with Fire” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307476159.
(Due June, 2010)
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307739964.
11 February 2010
John Biggins is Back... and so is Frans Michielszoon van Raveyck
I read recently that more than the usual number of bookstores in the United Kingdom have closed over the past year. The Guardian counts (almost) two a week, for a total of 102 shops closed in 2009, leaving just 1,289 in business.
Yes, that small store in the Cotswolds, the one you consulted for the name of a particular insect you saw the previous week in France, that store. It’s gone now along with “...the UK's only specialist crime bookshop, Murder One... Lancashire's award-winning Kaydee Bookshop... south London independent Crockatt & Powell” and all the others.
Perhaps for related reasons and the sorry state of publishing, the redoubtable British author John Biggins is planning to self-publish his next novel, “The Surgeon’s Apprentice.”
Due to a long-lasting, long-distance acquaintance with the author, I was privileged this week to read the not-yet-published Chapter 11, no financial irony intended. Mr Biggins’ dedicated readers, who have had nothing new from him for at least a decade and a half, can now anticipate further wonderful adventures among the feeble-brained and half-witted, in other words commanders, lords, and others in authority.
You may have read Mr Biggins’ previous novels. If you are not so fortunate, do treat yourself to one of the four paperback books. You likely will join many other readers who not only cherish and recommend these novels, but also suffer from the so far unfulfilled longing for more. Fans live on a forlorn island surrounded by the sea of lesser works, waiting to be rescued by just one more book from this author.
I continue to receive fan mail addressed to the author because previous WOBs I wrote on Mr Biggins live forever as searchable Internet space nuggets. For example, the the most recent, from Greg Coultis, in Brisbane, Australia:
“I have just finished reading the entire.. ‘Otto Prohaska’ series by the author John Biggins. What an entertaining read! The author has a wonderful style and I found the ‘historical’ side very engaging. I would love to read more of his adventures if the author is willing and a publisher can be found. True gems lying in the dust! I will be recommending these to all my friends.”
Biggins’ hero in the earlier books was a lieutenant in the land-locked Austro-Hungarian Navy, a navy consisting of one submarine and perhaps a few rowboats as World War One began. In the new series (yes, more than one ms. already has been drafted) the hero’s name will be much harder to pronounce: Frans Michielszoon van Raveyck, but he is likely to be just as unlikely a hero as Otto Prohaska. Van Raveyck is a surgeon’s apprentice serving in the Dutch navy in 1625.
In Chapter 11, “Frans, thanks to his knowledge of English and his ability to write shorthand, is sent by the admiral of the Dutch flotilla to take a note of Viscount Wimbledon’s council of war aboard his flagship off the coast of southern Spain... the fleet having arrived there after a fortnight at sea without any very clear notion of what it intends doing next. In the end nothing very much is decided: so when the fleet arrives before Cadiz the following day matters drift somewhat for lack of firm direction…”
In an email Mr Biggins wrote, “I've just finished the final edit and I have to say that I like the book and have enjoyed writing it, which is always a good sign. It's another cheerful canter through the limitless badlands of human folly, wickedness and self-deception with occasional halts to admire the things that we've accidentally created in the process of robbing and oppressing one another, like science and art.
“These aren't seafaring yarns even to the extent that the Prohaska books were, though the hero does spend quite a lot of time at sea and also ends up doing things like being the first European to explore Australia, thanks to his ship having piled up on the coast as the result of the flotilla admiral miscalculating their longitude and making the turn north for Java rather too late.
“Really they're about the world of the baroque and the very beginnings of science. But I'm sure you'll enjoy them even so. They're certainly not for stupid people or those who wish to be told only what they know already.”
John Biggins’ new web site will be online soon, his book will be available for purchase later this year, and his many fans should start placing nickels, or shillings, in the cookie jar in anticipation.
Biggins is writing again. Great news for smart readers everywhere!
NOTES:
The Guardian article...
“A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending To, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781590131077
“The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Future Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Unexpectedly Interesting Time...” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131084.
“The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-Boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thankless” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131091.
“Tomorrow the World: In Which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa & Oceania.” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131107.
(A current note from Alice Whitehead-Chan apropos of nothing above, but funny nevertheless) “The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from ‘Miffed’ to ‘Peeved.’ Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to ‘Irritated’ or even ‘A Bit Cross.’ The English have not been ‘A Bit Cross’ since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from ‘Tiresome’ to a ‘Bloody Nuisance.’ The last time the British issued a ‘Bloody Nuisance’ warning level was in 1588 when threatened by the Spanish Armada.”
Yes, that small store in the Cotswolds, the one you consulted for the name of a particular insect you saw the previous week in France, that store. It’s gone now along with “...the UK's only specialist crime bookshop, Murder One... Lancashire's award-winning Kaydee Bookshop... south London independent Crockatt & Powell” and all the others.
Perhaps for related reasons and the sorry state of publishing, the redoubtable British author John Biggins is planning to self-publish his next novel, “The Surgeon’s Apprentice.”
Due to a long-lasting, long-distance acquaintance with the author, I was privileged this week to read the not-yet-published Chapter 11, no financial irony intended. Mr Biggins’ dedicated readers, who have had nothing new from him for at least a decade and a half, can now anticipate further wonderful adventures among the feeble-brained and half-witted, in other words commanders, lords, and others in authority.
You may have read Mr Biggins’ previous novels. If you are not so fortunate, do treat yourself to one of the four paperback books. You likely will join many other readers who not only cherish and recommend these novels, but also suffer from the so far unfulfilled longing for more. Fans live on a forlorn island surrounded by the sea of lesser works, waiting to be rescued by just one more book from this author.
I continue to receive fan mail addressed to the author because previous WOBs I wrote on Mr Biggins live forever as searchable Internet space nuggets. For example, the the most recent, from Greg Coultis, in Brisbane, Australia:
“I have just finished reading the entire.. ‘Otto Prohaska’ series by the author John Biggins. What an entertaining read! The author has a wonderful style and I found the ‘historical’ side very engaging. I would love to read more of his adventures if the author is willing and a publisher can be found. True gems lying in the dust! I will be recommending these to all my friends.”
Biggins’ hero in the earlier books was a lieutenant in the land-locked Austro-Hungarian Navy, a navy consisting of one submarine and perhaps a few rowboats as World War One began. In the new series (yes, more than one ms. already has been drafted) the hero’s name will be much harder to pronounce: Frans Michielszoon van Raveyck, but he is likely to be just as unlikely a hero as Otto Prohaska. Van Raveyck is a surgeon’s apprentice serving in the Dutch navy in 1625.
In Chapter 11, “Frans, thanks to his knowledge of English and his ability to write shorthand, is sent by the admiral of the Dutch flotilla to take a note of Viscount Wimbledon’s council of war aboard his flagship off the coast of southern Spain... the fleet having arrived there after a fortnight at sea without any very clear notion of what it intends doing next. In the end nothing very much is decided: so when the fleet arrives before Cadiz the following day matters drift somewhat for lack of firm direction…”
In an email Mr Biggins wrote, “I've just finished the final edit and I have to say that I like the book and have enjoyed writing it, which is always a good sign. It's another cheerful canter through the limitless badlands of human folly, wickedness and self-deception with occasional halts to admire the things that we've accidentally created in the process of robbing and oppressing one another, like science and art.
“These aren't seafaring yarns even to the extent that the Prohaska books were, though the hero does spend quite a lot of time at sea and also ends up doing things like being the first European to explore Australia, thanks to his ship having piled up on the coast as the result of the flotilla admiral miscalculating their longitude and making the turn north for Java rather too late.
“Really they're about the world of the baroque and the very beginnings of science. But I'm sure you'll enjoy them even so. They're certainly not for stupid people or those who wish to be told only what they know already.”
John Biggins’ new web site will be online soon, his book will be available for purchase later this year, and his many fans should start placing nickels, or shillings, in the cookie jar in anticipation.
Biggins is writing again. Great news for smart readers everywhere!
NOTES:
The Guardian article...
“A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending To, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781590131077
“The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Future Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Unexpectedly Interesting Time...” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131084.
“The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-Boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thankless” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131091.
“Tomorrow the World: In Which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa & Oceania.” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131107.
(A current note from Alice Whitehead-Chan apropos of nothing above, but funny nevertheless) “The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from ‘Miffed’ to ‘Peeved.’ Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to ‘Irritated’ or even ‘A Bit Cross.’ The English have not been ‘A Bit Cross’ since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from ‘Tiresome’ to a ‘Bloody Nuisance.’ The last time the British issued a ‘Bloody Nuisance’ warning level was in 1588 when threatened by the Spanish Armada.”
Who is John Biggins? Now we know!
(from the author...)
John Biggins was born in October 1949 in the town of Bromley; then in Kent but now an outer suburb of London and notable only as the birthplace of H.G.Wells and the deathplace of the Emperor Napoleon III. The son of an electrician and part-time Communist Party activist, his childhood was sickly and his schooling intermittent; though he made up for this with a great deal of precocious reading while lying ill in bed. In 1961 he moved with his family to South Wales, his father having in the meantime abandoned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to become a steelworks engineer, and decided from then on that he would no longer waste time being ill. After attending Chepstow Secondary and Lydney Grammar Schools, then reading history at the University of Wales in Swansea from 1968 to 1971, he went to then-Soviet Bloc Poland and remained there for the next four years studying for a Ph.D. This experience gave him an enduring fascination with institutional dysfunction and the pathology of decaying empires; as did his subsequent four years of unemployment in the now-abolished Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food where one of his tasks was to write a history of the 1974 Cheese Subsidy in such a way as to show his then-boss in the best possible light: a job which he undertook with such creative relish that he was soon moved to another department.
After being advised politely but firmly to leave the Civil Service in 1980 he turned to journalism to support his wife and two children, then to technical authorship in the burgeoning IT industry of the mid-1980s, then to writing fiction in 1987 largely in order to amuse himself and without much expectation that what he wrote would ever be published. So it was with some surprise two years later that he found his first novel, “A Sailor of Austria”, being taken up by the first publisher who had a sight of it. In later years his day-job, by now largely in medical engineering, took him to France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands where he occupied his evenings with reading in the local languages in an effort to try and understand what was going on around him. Later on, two years spent writing and teaching an English course for Polish doctors also allowed him to develop a long-standing interest in medical history and led indirectly to his latest series of novels.
Despite advancing years he remains as neurotically active as ever, tirelessly roaming the landscape of whichever country fate has deposited him in with a map in his hand as though other people’s word wasn’t good enough for him and he really expects to discover lost temples or hitherto unknown tribes amid the flat waterlogged fields and motorway junctions of the Rhine-Meuse delta. An inveterate cyclist, he is currently much engaged in reviving the bicycle as a mass means of transport in Great Britain.
As he looks back on a bright future his greatest satisfactions in life – apart from the novels, obviously – are to have known the love of a good woman (the same one all the time) and never to have taken part in any organised sport, for which he retains the profoundest of blind spots. Quite good at a lot of things but not outstandingly good at anything, his epitaph will probably be “he was clever but not wise”.
He has double-jointed thumbs.
John Biggins was born in October 1949 in the town of Bromley; then in Kent but now an outer suburb of London and notable only as the birthplace of H.G.Wells and the deathplace of the Emperor Napoleon III. The son of an electrician and part-time Communist Party activist, his childhood was sickly and his schooling intermittent; though he made up for this with a great deal of precocious reading while lying ill in bed. In 1961 he moved with his family to South Wales, his father having in the meantime abandoned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to become a steelworks engineer, and decided from then on that he would no longer waste time being ill. After attending Chepstow Secondary and Lydney Grammar Schools, then reading history at the University of Wales in Swansea from 1968 to 1971, he went to then-Soviet Bloc Poland and remained there for the next four years studying for a Ph.D. This experience gave him an enduring fascination with institutional dysfunction and the pathology of decaying empires; as did his subsequent four years of unemployment in the now-abolished Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food where one of his tasks was to write a history of the 1974 Cheese Subsidy in such a way as to show his then-boss in the best possible light: a job which he undertook with such creative relish that he was soon moved to another department.
After being advised politely but firmly to leave the Civil Service in 1980 he turned to journalism to support his wife and two children, then to technical authorship in the burgeoning IT industry of the mid-1980s, then to writing fiction in 1987 largely in order to amuse himself and without much expectation that what he wrote would ever be published. So it was with some surprise two years later that he found his first novel, “A Sailor of Austria”, being taken up by the first publisher who had a sight of it. In later years his day-job, by now largely in medical engineering, took him to France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands where he occupied his evenings with reading in the local languages in an effort to try and understand what was going on around him. Later on, two years spent writing and teaching an English course for Polish doctors also allowed him to develop a long-standing interest in medical history and led indirectly to his latest series of novels.
Despite advancing years he remains as neurotically active as ever, tirelessly roaming the landscape of whichever country fate has deposited him in with a map in his hand as though other people’s word wasn’t good enough for him and he really expects to discover lost temples or hitherto unknown tribes amid the flat waterlogged fields and motorway junctions of the Rhine-Meuse delta. An inveterate cyclist, he is currently much engaged in reviving the bicycle as a mass means of transport in Great Britain.
As he looks back on a bright future his greatest satisfactions in life – apart from the novels, obviously – are to have known the love of a good woman (the same one all the time) and never to have taken part in any organised sport, for which he retains the profoundest of blind spots. Quite good at a lot of things but not outstandingly good at anything, his epitaph will probably be “he was clever but not wise”.
He has double-jointed thumbs.
04 February 2010
Words on Books readers and listeners have sent in their answers to a group of interesting questions about books. Last week, I had time to report what books you have on your nightstand, and mention a few favorite first lines.
This week, I’ve mixed and matched the remaining most interesting replies to questions usually posed to “Book Brahmins” by the Shelf Awareness newsletter.
Here are some of your responses.
Your top five authors... At least a hundred authors were named. Surprisingly, very few were mentioned more than once. You have very wide-ranging taste, you WOBers, you. Four persons rated Charles Dickens an all-time favorite. Barbara Kingsolver received three mentions. There were two votes each for Ursula LeGuin, Jane Austen, and Michael Chabon.
If I were Michael Chabon I’d faint from the company I’m keeping.
Book you've faked reading... Many people refused to answer this one. One person said, “How odd to imagine...” another “Oh golly, how embarrassing!” Another said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Paul Takushi said, “As a bookseller, there are WAY too many to mention.” Elizabeth Morrison: “I know I have done this...”
A note from Michael Grady: “I had to write a report in 9th grade about an epic. I chose the heroic Celtic tale about Cuchulain, but just couldn't get it up to read it. We had to produce a written report and answer a set of prescribed questions. I eventually went to the “Encyclopedia Americana,” read the synopsis, and fashioned a report based on what I found there. The old English schoolmarm read my paper out loud as an example of what she wanted. My friends were later outraged when I told them I hadn't actually read the book. Perhaps it was my handwriting that was so exemplary...”
Book you're an evangelist for... John Fremont named “‘God Is Not Great,’ by Christopher Hitchens and asked, ‘Can one be an evangelical for atheism?’” Other readers recommended: “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” by Elizabeth Smart, “The Book of Ebenezer le Page” by G.B. Edwards; “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone; “Shadow Country” by Peter Matthiessen; “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin was named twice; There were many others.
Book you've bought for the cover... Joel Crockett purchased a hardcover copy of “Workin' Man Blues” by Gerald Haslam because “My dad, uncles, an aunt and grandparents are on the cover.”
Final question: A book that changed your life... "Marjorie Morningstar" by Herman Wouk and “The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith were two surprising answers. Charles Grady wrote, “For me, Hugo's ‘Les Miserables’ was a life-changer; it made me a liberal in a conservative family and ultra-conservative town.”
Paul McHugh named “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. Russ Harvey named “Catch-22" and added, “My 7th grade biology teacher busted me reading it behind my text book. I just couldn't put it down. I knew then that life would never be fair but would frequently be funny.” Katy Tahja named “The Secret Garden” and said, “I was a handicapped child of the 1950's... there were NO other books about a handicapped kid.”
Other books that have changed lives: “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins. “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” by Richard Farina. “The Greeks” by H.D.F, Kitto. “The Critical Path” by Buckminster Fuller.
Thanks to everyone who responded, and to those who gave it some thought but never sent in answers, thanks to you as well. It was an interesting experiment, and you may have noticed by quoting everyone else I never had to answer these questions myself.
I would say, if you asked, that “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not change my life, exactly, but definitely alerted me to the amazing Army Surplus Store on Market Street.
My best friend and I rigged up a telegraph line, complete with clicking keypads, between our bedroom windows. The fact we never did get a signal to pass down the tiny copper wires may have had something to do with resistance of materials, but I’ll never know, because “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not turn me into an engineer.
It was a total failure on that score, but it was fun to build electric things. I do remember that.
NOTES:
The newsletter that started all this...
The complete list of favorite authors: Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Phillip Roth, TC Boyle, Tom Wolfe, Alexander McCall Smith, Agatha Christie, Wendell Berry, Stephanie Cowell, Michael Chabon Ursula Hegi, Colin Cotterill, Rudolfo Anaya, Barbara Kingsolver, William S. Burroughs (“He and John LeCarre and C.S. Forester are not ‘Great’" but their soothing celebrations of the eternal alienated loner and outsider send me back to their words over and over,” said Michael Grady). Richard Feynmann, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Anthony Trollope, Peter Matthiessen, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, John C. Gardner, John Irving, Eric Larson, Simon Winchester, Brian Greene, John Updike, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, Chris Moore. “Today. I have always felt that this is not a fair question.” Bertolt Brecht, Charles Dickens, Ursula Le Guin, MFK Fisher, Emily Dickinson... “this pantheon is mutable, save for Brecht,” Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Malcolm Lowry, Yeats, George R. Stewart, Ivan Doig, Sarah Andrews, Peter Bowen, Gretel Ehrlich, Robert Heinlein, Robert Pirsig, Ursula LeGuin, Alan Watts, Jim Dodge, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Dave Barry, Raymond Chandler, Michael Chabon, James Salter, John Irving, John LeCarre, William Langewische, Malcolm Gladwell, Gene Yang, Bill Bryson, Cormac McCarthy, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Rachel Ingalls, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alghieri, Barbara Kingsolver, James Thurber, E.B. White, Geraldine Brooks, Marcel Proust, Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann. Whew.
Questions I should have asked:
Your favorite book when you were 60.
Book you couldn’t finish (in fact, you threw it across the room).
Book you stole.
Book you stopped someone from stealing.
Book you had no idea what the author was trying to say.
Book in a language you don’t read.
Book with unexpected blank pages, pages printed upside down, backwards, missing, on fire.
Book you dreamed about last night.
Book you totally forgot once you put it down.
Book you recommended to someone knowing they’d hate it but you recommended it anyway.
Book you faked reading, but actually you did read it.
Book (or author) you’d never, ever, read, especially if anyone could see you doing it.
This week, I’ve mixed and matched the remaining most interesting replies to questions usually posed to “Book Brahmins” by the Shelf Awareness newsletter.
Here are some of your responses.
Your top five authors... At least a hundred authors were named. Surprisingly, very few were mentioned more than once. You have very wide-ranging taste, you WOBers, you. Four persons rated Charles Dickens an all-time favorite. Barbara Kingsolver received three mentions. There were two votes each for Ursula LeGuin, Jane Austen, and Michael Chabon.
If I were Michael Chabon I’d faint from the company I’m keeping.
Book you've faked reading... Many people refused to answer this one. One person said, “How odd to imagine...” another “Oh golly, how embarrassing!” Another said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Paul Takushi said, “As a bookseller, there are WAY too many to mention.” Elizabeth Morrison: “I know I have done this...”
A note from Michael Grady: “I had to write a report in 9th grade about an epic. I chose the heroic Celtic tale about Cuchulain, but just couldn't get it up to read it. We had to produce a written report and answer a set of prescribed questions. I eventually went to the “Encyclopedia Americana,” read the synopsis, and fashioned a report based on what I found there. The old English schoolmarm read my paper out loud as an example of what she wanted. My friends were later outraged when I told them I hadn't actually read the book. Perhaps it was my handwriting that was so exemplary...”
Book you're an evangelist for... John Fremont named “‘God Is Not Great,’ by Christopher Hitchens and asked, ‘Can one be an evangelical for atheism?’” Other readers recommended: “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” by Elizabeth Smart, “The Book of Ebenezer le Page” by G.B. Edwards; “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone; “Shadow Country” by Peter Matthiessen; “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin was named twice; There were many others.
Book you've bought for the cover... Joel Crockett purchased a hardcover copy of “Workin' Man Blues” by Gerald Haslam because “My dad, uncles, an aunt and grandparents are on the cover.”
Final question: A book that changed your life... "Marjorie Morningstar" by Herman Wouk and “The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith were two surprising answers. Charles Grady wrote, “For me, Hugo's ‘Les Miserables’ was a life-changer; it made me a liberal in a conservative family and ultra-conservative town.”
Paul McHugh named “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. Russ Harvey named “Catch-22" and added, “My 7th grade biology teacher busted me reading it behind my text book. I just couldn't put it down. I knew then that life would never be fair but would frequently be funny.” Katy Tahja named “The Secret Garden” and said, “I was a handicapped child of the 1950's... there were NO other books about a handicapped kid.”
Other books that have changed lives: “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins. “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” by Richard Farina. “The Greeks” by H.D.F, Kitto. “The Critical Path” by Buckminster Fuller.
Thanks to everyone who responded, and to those who gave it some thought but never sent in answers, thanks to you as well. It was an interesting experiment, and you may have noticed by quoting everyone else I never had to answer these questions myself.
I would say, if you asked, that “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not change my life, exactly, but definitely alerted me to the amazing Army Surplus Store on Market Street.
My best friend and I rigged up a telegraph line, complete with clicking keypads, between our bedroom windows. The fact we never did get a signal to pass down the tiny copper wires may have had something to do with resistance of materials, but I’ll never know, because “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not turn me into an engineer.
It was a total failure on that score, but it was fun to build electric things. I do remember that.
NOTES:
The newsletter that started all this...
The complete list of favorite authors: Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Phillip Roth, TC Boyle, Tom Wolfe, Alexander McCall Smith, Agatha Christie, Wendell Berry, Stephanie Cowell, Michael Chabon Ursula Hegi, Colin Cotterill, Rudolfo Anaya, Barbara Kingsolver, William S. Burroughs (“He and John LeCarre and C.S. Forester are not ‘Great’" but their soothing celebrations of the eternal alienated loner and outsider send me back to their words over and over,” said Michael Grady). Richard Feynmann, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Anthony Trollope, Peter Matthiessen, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, John C. Gardner, John Irving, Eric Larson, Simon Winchester, Brian Greene, John Updike, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, Chris Moore. “Today. I have always felt that this is not a fair question.” Bertolt Brecht, Charles Dickens, Ursula Le Guin, MFK Fisher, Emily Dickinson... “this pantheon is mutable, save for Brecht,” Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Malcolm Lowry, Yeats, George R. Stewart, Ivan Doig, Sarah Andrews, Peter Bowen, Gretel Ehrlich, Robert Heinlein, Robert Pirsig, Ursula LeGuin, Alan Watts, Jim Dodge, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Dave Barry, Raymond Chandler, Michael Chabon, James Salter, John Irving, John LeCarre, William Langewische, Malcolm Gladwell, Gene Yang, Bill Bryson, Cormac McCarthy, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Rachel Ingalls, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alghieri, Barbara Kingsolver, James Thurber, E.B. White, Geraldine Brooks, Marcel Proust, Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann. Whew.
Questions I should have asked:
Your favorite book when you were 60.
Book you couldn’t finish (in fact, you threw it across the room).
Book you stole.
Book you stopped someone from stealing.
Book you had no idea what the author was trying to say.
Book in a language you don’t read.
Book with unexpected blank pages, pages printed upside down, backwards, missing, on fire.
Book you dreamed about last night.
Book you totally forgot once you put it down.
Book you recommended to someone knowing they’d hate it but you recommended it anyway.
Book you faked reading, but actually you did read it.
Book (or author) you’d never, ever, read, especially if anyone could see you doing it.
28 January 2010
The Book Brahmins Speak Wisely
The free daily newsletter Shelf Awareness is fun to read and stuffed with news and gossip about the book biz. One of their most popular – they call it “wildly popular” – features is the occasional interview with a “Book Brahmin,” who answers nine itchy questions concerning their personal taste in books.
In the dictionary a Brahmin might be “a person who is intellectually or socially aloof” among other definitions.
When I sent out the same questions to Words on Books subscribers, I quickly heard back from no fewer than 15 readers, all Book Brahmins in their way, none of whom could be described as intellectually aloof. Quite the opposite.
So far I have responses from Todd Walton, Hank Lewis, Betty Barber, Elizabeth Morrison, Paul Takushi, Matty Goldberg, Raven Deerwater, Johanna Wildoak, Mark Hannon, Katy Tahja, John Fremont, Jill Hannum, Russ Harvey, Joel Crockett, and Paul McHugh, whose new book “Deadlines” was favorably reviewed here last week.
The first question is “On your nightstand now?” and the best way to share the response, I think, is to list everything that everyone said, along with a few comments.
So, deep breath, here’s what your neighbors have stacked up to read:
“The Dream of Scipio” by Iain Pears, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Deadlines” by Paul McHugh, “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder & “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver; Graham Greene, “The End of the Affair,” John Varley, “Red Thunder;” Richard Preston, “The Wild Trees;” Guy Kuttner, “Tales of the Dolly Llama;” Alexandra Horowitz, “Inside of a Dog,” “Lose Your Mother, by Saidiya; “Blind Descent,” about people who climb the deepest caves on earth... like a MILE deep... and live to talk about it; “1491" by Charles C. Mann (excellent), “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver (first book by her that disappointed me); “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, “The Bill Simmons Book of Basketball,” “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” by Eduardo Galeano, Michael Chabon's “Maps & Legends” and “I.O.U.” by John Lanchester; “What The Dog Saw,” “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” “Al Capone Shines My Shoes,” “Prince of Persia,” “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much,” “Benjamin Franklin” by Edmund Morgan and about 50 others; “Endless Forms Most Beautiful,” Sean Carroll; Dr. Don Hahn's “Change and A Good Laugh;” George Lakoff's “Political Mind,” the New Yorker; “Die Blechtrommel” (The Tin Drum); and “Brazil,” a fabulous anthology of Brazilian short stories from Whereabouts Press.
Russ Harvey mentioned “‘The Frozen Rabbi,’ plus ‘A Truth Universally Acknowledged,’ because I want to know why everyone else reads Jane Austen, and an as yet un-started mass market thriller from the $.50 pile at work. I'm not even sure which one. I just need some popcorn.”
The remaining eight questions are:
Favorite book when you were a child?
Your top five authors?
Book you've faked reading?
Book you're an evangelist for?
Book you've bought for the cover?
Book that changed your life?
Favorite line from a book?
What is the book you most want to read again for the first time?
Finally, some of your favorite first lines:
“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.” (Conan Doyle, from “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”).
“As the egg from the fish, as the fish from the water, as the water from the cloud, as the cloud from the thick air, so put forth, so leaped out, so drew away, so fumed up the Soul of Teshoo Lama from the Great Soul.” (Kipling, “Kim”).
“Whether I will be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will fall on someone else, these pages will tell.” from Dickens’ “David Copperfield” AND John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules.”
I have to end with Jill Hannum’s favorite line, because it’s mine, too: “Once upon a time there was a ...”
NOTES:
The trade newsletter Shelf Awareness has been publishing a daily email for five years.
In the dictionary a Brahmin might be “a person who is intellectually or socially aloof” among other definitions.
When I sent out the same questions to Words on Books subscribers, I quickly heard back from no fewer than 15 readers, all Book Brahmins in their way, none of whom could be described as intellectually aloof. Quite the opposite.
So far I have responses from Todd Walton, Hank Lewis, Betty Barber, Elizabeth Morrison, Paul Takushi, Matty Goldberg, Raven Deerwater, Johanna Wildoak, Mark Hannon, Katy Tahja, John Fremont, Jill Hannum, Russ Harvey, Joel Crockett, and Paul McHugh, whose new book “Deadlines” was favorably reviewed here last week.
The first question is “On your nightstand now?” and the best way to share the response, I think, is to list everything that everyone said, along with a few comments.
So, deep breath, here’s what your neighbors have stacked up to read:
“The Dream of Scipio” by Iain Pears, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Deadlines” by Paul McHugh, “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder & “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver; Graham Greene, “The End of the Affair,” John Varley, “Red Thunder;” Richard Preston, “The Wild Trees;” Guy Kuttner, “Tales of the Dolly Llama;” Alexandra Horowitz, “Inside of a Dog,” “Lose Your Mother, by Saidiya; “Blind Descent,” about people who climb the deepest caves on earth... like a MILE deep... and live to talk about it; “1491" by Charles C. Mann (excellent), “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver (first book by her that disappointed me); “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, “The Bill Simmons Book of Basketball,” “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” by Eduardo Galeano, Michael Chabon's “Maps & Legends” and “I.O.U.” by John Lanchester; “What The Dog Saw,” “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” “Al Capone Shines My Shoes,” “Prince of Persia,” “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much,” “Benjamin Franklin” by Edmund Morgan and about 50 others; “Endless Forms Most Beautiful,” Sean Carroll; Dr. Don Hahn's “Change and A Good Laugh;” George Lakoff's “Political Mind,” the New Yorker; “Die Blechtrommel” (The Tin Drum); and “Brazil,” a fabulous anthology of Brazilian short stories from Whereabouts Press.
Russ Harvey mentioned “‘The Frozen Rabbi,’ plus ‘A Truth Universally Acknowledged,’ because I want to know why everyone else reads Jane Austen, and an as yet un-started mass market thriller from the $.50 pile at work. I'm not even sure which one. I just need some popcorn.”
The remaining eight questions are:
Favorite book when you were a child?
Your top five authors?
Book you've faked reading?
Book you're an evangelist for?
Book you've bought for the cover?
Book that changed your life?
Favorite line from a book?
What is the book you most want to read again for the first time?
Finally, some of your favorite first lines:
“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.” (Conan Doyle, from “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”).
“As the egg from the fish, as the fish from the water, as the water from the cloud, as the cloud from the thick air, so put forth, so leaped out, so drew away, so fumed up the Soul of Teshoo Lama from the Great Soul.” (Kipling, “Kim”).
“Whether I will be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will fall on someone else, these pages will tell.” from Dickens’ “David Copperfield” AND John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules.”
I have to end with Jill Hannum’s favorite line, because it’s mine, too: “Once upon a time there was a ...”
NOTES:
The trade newsletter Shelf Awareness has been publishing a daily email for five years.
21 January 2010
Horse Kicks Lady, Dog Bites Man, Three Star Edition at 11
Paul McHugh’s new mystery/ thriller/ outdoor adventure/ travelogue/ dialog/ diatribe/ ecological morality play/ whatever, is titled “Deadlines.” It kicks off fast with a whinny and a gallop. A big white horse tramples to death a little old lady, and the hunt for justice begins.
A greenhorn journalist newly arrived in San Francisco gets involved with the story. He suspects foul play, but can’t yet prove it.
An older reporter with a drinking problem and a tragically dead girl friend gets on the case. The greenhorn reporter gets beat up, bad, and only the drunken lout can help. First he has to rally up, drop the sauce, dust off his reporting skills, save his job, fight his editor, and figure out the Who What When Where and Why of the whole thing.
The bad guys are horrible, the good guys heroic. On the embattled California coast justice may triumph, but it’s never a sure thing.
“Deadlines” is a cheerful romp through quite serious territory. The title is meant to invoke the heady atmosphere of a major daily newspaper, with its feuds and infighting, dedicated writers and corporate maneuvers.
I’ve long followed Paul McHugh’s career because once, much time ago, he lived in Mendocino. Paul seemed just another happy, hapless hippie, with a special appreciation for this gorgeous place.
He turned up later as a successful beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He covered outdoor sports and environmental issues, and worked on a number of investigative series.
McHugh is only too well aware that newspapers are having a hard time of it. Readers who don’t already appreciate what they stand to lose if newspapers shut down will be reminded in “Deadlines.”
In answer to some questions I posed about how he came to write this book at this particular moment, Paul wrote:
“When I took the buy-out from the SF Chronicle in the summer of 2007, I also took it as a chance to change my life. As Yogi Berra says, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it!’
“... I had spent 30 years assiduously applying the rubric and values of non-fiction in my prose. I felt I achieved a fair amount that way, but it made the far more imaginative dimension and creativity of fiction seem like the Promised Land. I'd written some short fiction and one novel before: "The Search For Goodbye-To-Rains." That was a young man's first-person narrative, basically an intellectual and spiritual memoir of a cross-country motorcycle trip. The primary way fiction entered that picture was through exaggeration of my personal story.
“In truth, I did not pursue fiction further at that time of my life (30 years ago) because I did not feel that I understood other people, or life itself, well enough to create believable characters who were not me, or fictional situations that were not my own. However, after 30 years of research and writing, 22 of them in a big city newsroom, I had begun to feel that these deficits were cured, and that I could now apply creativity to my working capital of understanding.
“So, I took a deep breath, and plunged in! My first goal -- as it should be for any fiction writer, I think -- was to focus on creating a rattling good yarn. The story itself must be strong enough to carry any other purposes a writer may have. A secondary goal was to portray a newsroom in full uproar as it charges toward putting out an important, investigative article. I wanted to clearly present and celebrate journalism, with all its warts and flaws, certainly, but also with that tattered, inkstained nobility of purpose which also -- in its best moments -- it can display.
“... I wanted people - especially any young people who happen to read my book -- to understand that it is a valuable trade, and one worth pursuing, despite all or any difficulties. And a craft crucial to preservation of democracy.”
“Deadlines” is newly published in paperback by the esteemed Fort Bragg house Lost Coast Press. Later this year you yourself can meet and greet Paul McHugh when he returns to Mendocino for a book signing and celebration.
NOTES:
“Deadlines, A Novel of Murder, Conspiracy, and the Media” by Paul McHugh. Lost Coast Press paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781935448044.
Author Biography
Other source material on various pages here... and background on the book.
Lost Coast Press is an imprint of Cypress House. Cindy Frank and staff have helped any number of worthy authors find their way into print.More information.
A greenhorn journalist newly arrived in San Francisco gets involved with the story. He suspects foul play, but can’t yet prove it.
An older reporter with a drinking problem and a tragically dead girl friend gets on the case. The greenhorn reporter gets beat up, bad, and only the drunken lout can help. First he has to rally up, drop the sauce, dust off his reporting skills, save his job, fight his editor, and figure out the Who What When Where and Why of the whole thing.
The bad guys are horrible, the good guys heroic. On the embattled California coast justice may triumph, but it’s never a sure thing.
“Deadlines” is a cheerful romp through quite serious territory. The title is meant to invoke the heady atmosphere of a major daily newspaper, with its feuds and infighting, dedicated writers and corporate maneuvers.
I’ve long followed Paul McHugh’s career because once, much time ago, he lived in Mendocino. Paul seemed just another happy, hapless hippie, with a special appreciation for this gorgeous place.
He turned up later as a successful beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He covered outdoor sports and environmental issues, and worked on a number of investigative series.
McHugh is only too well aware that newspapers are having a hard time of it. Readers who don’t already appreciate what they stand to lose if newspapers shut down will be reminded in “Deadlines.”
In answer to some questions I posed about how he came to write this book at this particular moment, Paul wrote:
“When I took the buy-out from the SF Chronicle in the summer of 2007, I also took it as a chance to change my life. As Yogi Berra says, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it!’
“... I had spent 30 years assiduously applying the rubric and values of non-fiction in my prose. I felt I achieved a fair amount that way, but it made the far more imaginative dimension and creativity of fiction seem like the Promised Land. I'd written some short fiction and one novel before: "The Search For Goodbye-To-Rains." That was a young man's first-person narrative, basically an intellectual and spiritual memoir of a cross-country motorcycle trip. The primary way fiction entered that picture was through exaggeration of my personal story.
“In truth, I did not pursue fiction further at that time of my life (30 years ago) because I did not feel that I understood other people, or life itself, well enough to create believable characters who were not me, or fictional situations that were not my own. However, after 30 years of research and writing, 22 of them in a big city newsroom, I had begun to feel that these deficits were cured, and that I could now apply creativity to my working capital of understanding.
“So, I took a deep breath, and plunged in! My first goal -- as it should be for any fiction writer, I think -- was to focus on creating a rattling good yarn. The story itself must be strong enough to carry any other purposes a writer may have. A secondary goal was to portray a newsroom in full uproar as it charges toward putting out an important, investigative article. I wanted to clearly present and celebrate journalism, with all its warts and flaws, certainly, but also with that tattered, inkstained nobility of purpose which also -- in its best moments -- it can display.
“... I wanted people - especially any young people who happen to read my book -- to understand that it is a valuable trade, and one worth pursuing, despite all or any difficulties. And a craft crucial to preservation of democracy.”
“Deadlines” is newly published in paperback by the esteemed Fort Bragg house Lost Coast Press. Later this year you yourself can meet and greet Paul McHugh when he returns to Mendocino for a book signing and celebration.
NOTES:
“Deadlines, A Novel of Murder, Conspiracy, and the Media” by Paul McHugh. Lost Coast Press paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781935448044.
Author Biography
Other source material on various pages here... and background on the book.
Lost Coast Press is an imprint of Cypress House. Cindy Frank and staff have helped any number of worthy authors find their way into print.More information.
14 January 2010
We're recalling that wiring manual you recycled in about 1981
It’s been a very long new year already, have you noticed?
For me, the long new year in books began on January 8 with an announced recall of titles that contain dangerous do-it-yourself advice: 951,000 home improvement books recalled by the Feds for instructions that could lead to dangerously bad wiring and fire hazard.
Luckily, the new Bernard Cornwell paperback novel I was reading as the new year dawned had absolutely no wiring diagrams in it.
Oxmoor House and the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission announced the recall of six Do It Yourself books. Just six books. But there are almost a million copies of these in print, and one was published as far back as 1975.
In the Cornwell novel there are several maps of the French countryside, but these have not been recalled by anyone, yet. Longbow instructions, check. How to don your armor (don’t forget to grease your jerkin), sure. The book is “Agincourt” or in the British edition “Azincourt” and it’s one of Cornwell’s best, and he’s already published a great pile of historical novels.
Why did it take American bureaucrats and publishers 35 years to figure out there were errors in published technical diagrams and wiring instructions? Couldn’t anyone figure that out in, say, 1976? 1977?
If you have a copy of one of the suspect books, for example “Sunset Basic Home Repairs” or maybe a copy of "Lowe's Complete Home Improvement and Repair" or similar titles, you can call 866-696-7602 for further instructions and a possible refund of the purchase price. It’s a free call.
According to one report Dawn Bridges, senior vice president of corporate communications for Time, which now is Sunset's parent company, said there may have been slight changes in wording or diagrams over the years from book to book. And the advice could crop up on different pages in different books.
There remain some mysteries around this entire event. Who first alerted the Consumer Product Safety Commission that there was a problem? Why hasn’t the Commission or the publisher told us exactly which diagrams on which pages contain misleading or harmful information? Would not that be useful information to share if you are trying to prevent harm to readers?
Since only an expert with the time and motivation to look closely could be certain which pages contain bad information, readers are going to have to be extra cautious and extra careful when using information in these books, or in similar books that may be flagged later.
This is the same federal commission that this month voted to postpone for another full year requiring third-party testing of toys for lead content. Lead has been discovered in some brightly colored children’s books.
This is the same commission that could not stop lead and cadmium from being imported in the first place. That allowed dangerous solvents to remain on store shelves months after another recall, allowed import of laptops that can burn their users, and only two years ago testified to Congress that no additional money or staffing would be required, thank you.
It was all so much simpler back in Henry II’s day. You believed you had a claim to France, you borrowed some money from the Jews and the Italians, you gathered 1500 ships and landed near Harfleur, which you proceeded to lay siege to.
Then, your horde hungry and exhausted and suffering from dysentery, you marched toward Calais, thumbing a metaphorical nose at the much more powerful French and their much more powerful army.
At the Somme River the French blocked the crossings, and King Henry found himself trapped in a forested area near the little-known castle of Agincourt.
Next day it was 60,000 arrows versus knights in shining armor, and let’s just say it did not turn out well for the knights. King Henry did not live long enough to become King of France, but he did make a powerful show of it, inspire Shakespeare, and add to Britain’s military glory.
“Agincourt” by Bernard Cornwell is quite a story, and an excellent way to forget about wiring diagrams, earthquakes, and how fast the new year has become just another heartbreak.
NOTES:
The recalled books: "AmeriSpec Home Repair Handbook," "Lowe's Complete Home Improvement and Repair," "Lowe's Complete Home Wiring," "Sunset Basic Home Repairs," "Sunset Complete Home Wiring," "Sunset Complete Patio Book," "Sunset Home Repair Handbook," "Sunset Water Gardens" and "Sunset You Can Build - Wiring."
One of many articles reporting the DIY books recall, this from the NY Times
The botched Stand ‘n Seal recall as reported in the NY Times:
A study shows many toys contain phthalates...
Consumer Product Safety Commission votes to delay requiring third-part testing for lead:
“Agincourt” by Bernard Cornwell. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 9780061578908.
For me, the long new year in books began on January 8 with an announced recall of titles that contain dangerous do-it-yourself advice: 951,000 home improvement books recalled by the Feds for instructions that could lead to dangerously bad wiring and fire hazard.
Luckily, the new Bernard Cornwell paperback novel I was reading as the new year dawned had absolutely no wiring diagrams in it.
Oxmoor House and the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission announced the recall of six Do It Yourself books. Just six books. But there are almost a million copies of these in print, and one was published as far back as 1975.
In the Cornwell novel there are several maps of the French countryside, but these have not been recalled by anyone, yet. Longbow instructions, check. How to don your armor (don’t forget to grease your jerkin), sure. The book is “Agincourt” or in the British edition “Azincourt” and it’s one of Cornwell’s best, and he’s already published a great pile of historical novels.
Why did it take American bureaucrats and publishers 35 years to figure out there were errors in published technical diagrams and wiring instructions? Couldn’t anyone figure that out in, say, 1976? 1977?
If you have a copy of one of the suspect books, for example “Sunset Basic Home Repairs” or maybe a copy of "Lowe's Complete Home Improvement and Repair" or similar titles, you can call 866-696-7602 for further instructions and a possible refund of the purchase price. It’s a free call.
According to one report Dawn Bridges, senior vice president of corporate communications for Time, which now is Sunset's parent company, said there may have been slight changes in wording or diagrams over the years from book to book. And the advice could crop up on different pages in different books.
There remain some mysteries around this entire event. Who first alerted the Consumer Product Safety Commission that there was a problem? Why hasn’t the Commission or the publisher told us exactly which diagrams on which pages contain misleading or harmful information? Would not that be useful information to share if you are trying to prevent harm to readers?
Since only an expert with the time and motivation to look closely could be certain which pages contain bad information, readers are going to have to be extra cautious and extra careful when using information in these books, or in similar books that may be flagged later.
This is the same federal commission that this month voted to postpone for another full year requiring third-party testing of toys for lead content. Lead has been discovered in some brightly colored children’s books.
This is the same commission that could not stop lead and cadmium from being imported in the first place. That allowed dangerous solvents to remain on store shelves months after another recall, allowed import of laptops that can burn their users, and only two years ago testified to Congress that no additional money or staffing would be required, thank you.
It was all so much simpler back in Henry II’s day. You believed you had a claim to France, you borrowed some money from the Jews and the Italians, you gathered 1500 ships and landed near Harfleur, which you proceeded to lay siege to.
Then, your horde hungry and exhausted and suffering from dysentery, you marched toward Calais, thumbing a metaphorical nose at the much more powerful French and their much more powerful army.
At the Somme River the French blocked the crossings, and King Henry found himself trapped in a forested area near the little-known castle of Agincourt.
Next day it was 60,000 arrows versus knights in shining armor, and let’s just say it did not turn out well for the knights. King Henry did not live long enough to become King of France, but he did make a powerful show of it, inspire Shakespeare, and add to Britain’s military glory.
“Agincourt” by Bernard Cornwell is quite a story, and an excellent way to forget about wiring diagrams, earthquakes, and how fast the new year has become just another heartbreak.
NOTES:
The recalled books: "AmeriSpec Home Repair Handbook," "Lowe's Complete Home Improvement and Repair," "Lowe's Complete Home Wiring," "Sunset Basic Home Repairs," "Sunset Complete Home Wiring," "Sunset Complete Patio Book," "Sunset Home Repair Handbook," "Sunset Water Gardens" and "Sunset You Can Build - Wiring."
One of many articles reporting the DIY books recall, this from the NY Times
The botched Stand ‘n Seal recall as reported in the NY Times:
A study shows many toys contain phthalates...
Consumer Product Safety Commission votes to delay requiring third-part testing for lead:
“Agincourt” by Bernard Cornwell. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 9780061578908.
random thoughts on two earthquakes...
We had a small temblor up Eureka way. Then Haiti exploded in what Pat Roberts called retribution for sin and sane people called a horrible, prolonged, intense shaking of the earth. All the cement buildings came down immediately. Uncountable lives lost or disrupted.
The northern California quake registered magnitude 6.5. The quake that rocked Port-au-Prince registered one half-step more: 7.0. Humboldt County, with its strict building codes and primarily wooden houses, reported 30 persons injured, 18 made homeless. In Haiti, at least 50,000 dead and badly injured, many thousands more made homeless, no effective building codes of any kind.
We are the lucky ones, indeed.
We had a small temblor up Eureka way. Then Haiti exploded in what Pat Roberts called retribution for sin and sane people called a horrible, prolonged, intense shaking of the earth. All the cement buildings came down immediately. Uncountable lives lost or disrupted.
The northern California quake registered magnitude 6.5. The quake that rocked Port-au-Prince registered one half-step more: 7.0. Humboldt County, with its strict building codes and primarily wooden houses, reported 30 persons injured, 18 made homeless. In Haiti, at least 50,000 dead and badly injured, many thousands more made homeless, no effective building codes of any kind.
We are the lucky ones, indeed.
07 January 2010
Just in time for the new year, two books about gods and the afterlife. Both fiction. One short, one long. And I got them for free!
The publishers sent me reading copies, thank you very much. The short one is titled “Sum,” the long one “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.” Both are charming, even witty, but “Sum” is the one I actually read all the way through, because, well, it’s short. Perfect for my attenuated attention span.
“Sum” author David Eagleman is a neuroscientist who researches time perception, synesthesia and other exotica. “At night he writes fiction,” the publisher notes. He’s way brighter than you or me, probably owns second and third homes in Venice AND Aspen. He’s intimidating, is what David Eagleman is.
His book is fun to read: “In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data” begins one story.
The title story claims “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order; all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.”
There is serious purpose behind the light-hearted speculation. Eagleman is a science-based skeptic and he likes to push you off-center a bit.
Some of his imaginings contain a certain poignancy. “When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed... they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.”
In a publisher-supplied interview the author says his stories “are not serious proposals; they’re satirical and thought provoking lenses through which to see our lives at new angles... The aim of this book is to swing a flashlight around the possibility space.”
Those intrigued by “Sum” might enjoy the deeper dive into Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new novel “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.”
The “36 Arguments” refers to a book within the book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” which in Goldstein’s tale has become a surprise best-seller.
Goldstein has her own set of impressive credentials, including a doctorate in philosophy and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. In trying to marry fiction to philosophy she runs the risk of coming off like a pontificator, a la the wooden Ayn Rand. So far it does appear the author manages to keep it light.
Still, the underlying mood in “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” is quite serious. Goldstein acknowledges that fundamentalists of all kinds are in the ascendant. “The world shifted, catching lots of smart people off guard,” she writes, “churning up issues you thought had settled forever beneath the earth’s crust. The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you’re likely to feel, seeing what the world’s lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.”
“It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch,” she says.
In an appendix after the novel each of those 36 arguments for the existence of god is spelled out and rationally critiqued. That section alone could keep you entertained while brooding by the fire during long winter nights.
NOTES:
“Sum, Forty Tales from the Afterlives” by David Eagleman. Vintage Books paperback $13. ISBN 9780307389930.
About the title, Eagleman notes in the interview: “First, it’s Latin for ‘I am,’ as in Cogito ergo sum. Second, it’s related to the Greek term for the highest, as in summa cum laude, or the English word summit. Third, the point of this book is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As you read the stories, it becomes clear that they are mutually exclusive and that there’s something bigger emerging from adding them all together.”
“36 Arguments for the Existence of God, A Work of Fiction” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Pantheon Books hard cover $27.95. ISBN 9780307378187.
For Rebecca Goldstein take a look at this site, and for David Eagleman this one.
The publishers sent me reading copies, thank you very much. The short one is titled “Sum,” the long one “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.” Both are charming, even witty, but “Sum” is the one I actually read all the way through, because, well, it’s short. Perfect for my attenuated attention span.
“Sum” author David Eagleman is a neuroscientist who researches time perception, synesthesia and other exotica. “At night he writes fiction,” the publisher notes. He’s way brighter than you or me, probably owns second and third homes in Venice AND Aspen. He’s intimidating, is what David Eagleman is.
His book is fun to read: “In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data” begins one story.
The title story claims “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order; all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.”
There is serious purpose behind the light-hearted speculation. Eagleman is a science-based skeptic and he likes to push you off-center a bit.
Some of his imaginings contain a certain poignancy. “When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed... they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.”
In a publisher-supplied interview the author says his stories “are not serious proposals; they’re satirical and thought provoking lenses through which to see our lives at new angles... The aim of this book is to swing a flashlight around the possibility space.”
Those intrigued by “Sum” might enjoy the deeper dive into Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new novel “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.”
The “36 Arguments” refers to a book within the book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” which in Goldstein’s tale has become a surprise best-seller.
Goldstein has her own set of impressive credentials, including a doctorate in philosophy and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. In trying to marry fiction to philosophy she runs the risk of coming off like a pontificator, a la the wooden Ayn Rand. So far it does appear the author manages to keep it light.
Still, the underlying mood in “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” is quite serious. Goldstein acknowledges that fundamentalists of all kinds are in the ascendant. “The world shifted, catching lots of smart people off guard,” she writes, “churning up issues you thought had settled forever beneath the earth’s crust. The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you’re likely to feel, seeing what the world’s lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.”
“It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch,” she says.
In an appendix after the novel each of those 36 arguments for the existence of god is spelled out and rationally critiqued. That section alone could keep you entertained while brooding by the fire during long winter nights.
NOTES:
“Sum, Forty Tales from the Afterlives” by David Eagleman. Vintage Books paperback $13. ISBN 9780307389930.
About the title, Eagleman notes in the interview: “First, it’s Latin for ‘I am,’ as in Cogito ergo sum. Second, it’s related to the Greek term for the highest, as in summa cum laude, or the English word summit. Third, the point of this book is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As you read the stories, it becomes clear that they are mutually exclusive and that there’s something bigger emerging from adding them all together.”
“36 Arguments for the Existence of God, A Work of Fiction” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Pantheon Books hard cover $27.95. ISBN 9780307378187.
For Rebecca Goldstein take a look at this site, and for David Eagleman this one.
24 December 2009
Riding along in my automobile...
It appears that both the year and the decade are coming to a close. This comes as something of a surprise to those of us who just assumed our calendars would never run out of pages.
The short days and longish nights bring on a kind of Scandinavian melancholy, even here in optimistic California.
You get to a certain age and you start losing things. Parents depart, then some of your friends begin to go, and damn it, where are those keys and why don’t they make floppy disk drives any more and will the sun return to the sky if we burn these sacred logs in our sacred air-tight fireplace?
This afternoon, speeding along in our automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel, we watched two different individuals walking the Coast highway on the day before Christmas, carrying their worldly possessions in a sack.
If that makes you slow down and think, you might also ponder the local distance between the well-fed and barely fed. In Mendocino County, approximately 22 per cent of children live in families whose income is below the federal poverty threshold. At the time of the most recent survey the poverty line for a five-person family with three children under 18 was $19,992 a year. Could you raise three children on $1,666 a month, plus buy shoes, toys and trips to the dentist?
The percentage of children living in poverty in Lake and Humboldt counties is a bit higher, 23 per cent; the state average is a bit lower, 19.5 per cent. In other words, one child in five in California lives in a state of statistical poverty, and it’s not getting better soon.
These numbers change depending on which survey you study, but they don’t change much.
A friend in England writes, “This is just to wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Here in much of the UK it looks as if we might actually get the (in)famous `white Christmas'. We have about five inches of the stuff, frozen hard owing to the sub-zero temperatures. It looks nice enough, but isn't that nice when you have to go outside. Can't say I like the cold. Not my sort of weather at all, in fact.
On the subject of the Kindle and other electronic readers, discussed here the past two weeks he says, “...I don't have the Sony version, and I don't have the other version, either. Not out of conservatism, so much as from mortal fear of the face my wife would pull if I were to buy one! Anyway, would I be able to get the books on it that I want to read, should read? And can I grouse and snort in the margins? If not, pah! No good.”
The night before Christmas it was fairly silent in our house, except for the pounding diesel of a late-arriving UPS truck.
Among the packages was a copy of David Ledbetter’s definitive and highly readable “Unaccompanied Bach; Performing the Solo Works.” This book will be of interest to at least a dozen people, thus its publication by Yale University Press rather than some larger publisher. I am exaggerating, but only a smidge. No doubt thousands of performing artists and their counterparts in conservatories and universities will avidly study this wonderful work of research and synthesis.
Take the famous Six Suites for Solo Cello written by Johann Sebastian Bach in the mid 18th century. These compelling works have been a lifelong study for me, as they have been for generations of cellists. Ledbetter puts them into context, historically, and as part of a fast-changing musical tradition that encompassed the Italian, French and German baroque styles.
He writes, “Nowadays, Bach’s cello Suites are regarded as the foundation repertory of the instrument. Then, they were at the cutting edge of developments, forward-looking and innovative in technique, style, and scope.”
Ledbetter’s holiday gift to musicians is to consider together all of Bach’s compositions for unaccompanied instruments. “Bach was a connoisseur among connoisseurs of every nuance of style and genre... a performer emoting at large over the music in disregard of the composer’s mind can only seem false to those who at least have an inkling of it... instrumentalists generally are too narrowly fixed on the repertory of their own instrument and need to broaden their horizons.”
We watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV Christmas eve, and it made us cry, as it always does. Maybe there is hope, as there was in 1946.
All the best to you and yours, and may the world be a better place because you are in it.
NOTES:
“Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works” by David Ledbetter. Yale University Press hard cover $45. ISBN 9780300141511. Thanks to Yale sales representative Patricia Nelson for providing my copy.
A Mendocino county profile
And another
The short days and longish nights bring on a kind of Scandinavian melancholy, even here in optimistic California.
You get to a certain age and you start losing things. Parents depart, then some of your friends begin to go, and damn it, where are those keys and why don’t they make floppy disk drives any more and will the sun return to the sky if we burn these sacred logs in our sacred air-tight fireplace?
This afternoon, speeding along in our automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel, we watched two different individuals walking the Coast highway on the day before Christmas, carrying their worldly possessions in a sack.
If that makes you slow down and think, you might also ponder the local distance between the well-fed and barely fed. In Mendocino County, approximately 22 per cent of children live in families whose income is below the federal poverty threshold. At the time of the most recent survey the poverty line for a five-person family with three children under 18 was $19,992 a year. Could you raise three children on $1,666 a month, plus buy shoes, toys and trips to the dentist?
The percentage of children living in poverty in Lake and Humboldt counties is a bit higher, 23 per cent; the state average is a bit lower, 19.5 per cent. In other words, one child in five in California lives in a state of statistical poverty, and it’s not getting better soon.
These numbers change depending on which survey you study, but they don’t change much.
A friend in England writes, “This is just to wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Here in much of the UK it looks as if we might actually get the (in)famous `white Christmas'. We have about five inches of the stuff, frozen hard owing to the sub-zero temperatures. It looks nice enough, but isn't that nice when you have to go outside. Can't say I like the cold. Not my sort of weather at all, in fact.
On the subject of the Kindle and other electronic readers, discussed here the past two weeks he says, “...I don't have the Sony version, and I don't have the other version, either. Not out of conservatism, so much as from mortal fear of the face my wife would pull if I were to buy one! Anyway, would I be able to get the books on it that I want to read, should read? And can I grouse and snort in the margins? If not, pah! No good.”
The night before Christmas it was fairly silent in our house, except for the pounding diesel of a late-arriving UPS truck.
Among the packages was a copy of David Ledbetter’s definitive and highly readable “Unaccompanied Bach; Performing the Solo Works.” This book will be of interest to at least a dozen people, thus its publication by Yale University Press rather than some larger publisher. I am exaggerating, but only a smidge. No doubt thousands of performing artists and their counterparts in conservatories and universities will avidly study this wonderful work of research and synthesis.
Take the famous Six Suites for Solo Cello written by Johann Sebastian Bach in the mid 18th century. These compelling works have been a lifelong study for me, as they have been for generations of cellists. Ledbetter puts them into context, historically, and as part of a fast-changing musical tradition that encompassed the Italian, French and German baroque styles.
He writes, “Nowadays, Bach’s cello Suites are regarded as the foundation repertory of the instrument. Then, they were at the cutting edge of developments, forward-looking and innovative in technique, style, and scope.”
Ledbetter’s holiday gift to musicians is to consider together all of Bach’s compositions for unaccompanied instruments. “Bach was a connoisseur among connoisseurs of every nuance of style and genre... a performer emoting at large over the music in disregard of the composer’s mind can only seem false to those who at least have an inkling of it... instrumentalists generally are too narrowly fixed on the repertory of their own instrument and need to broaden their horizons.”
We watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV Christmas eve, and it made us cry, as it always does. Maybe there is hope, as there was in 1946.
All the best to you and yours, and may the world be a better place because you are in it.
NOTES:
“Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works” by David Ledbetter. Yale University Press hard cover $45. ISBN 9780300141511. Thanks to Yale sales representative Patricia Nelson for providing my copy.
A Mendocino county profile
And another
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