monday february 25
Joseph, protagonist of Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses was a good student in high school, but due to stiff competition from returning WWII soldiers, he finds himself in the summer after his senior year with nowhere to go next. (These were the days before community colleges and proprietary schools with flexible deadlines.) Fortunately for Joseph (or maybe not), he's got his mother fighting for him.
You'll either love or hate this book. I love it, but I'm not crazy about this particular cover, because I think the mother should be more glamorous.
Continue Reading…
thursday february 14
It was kind of nice to read two books in a row that I could get through in a single sitting. The first is Julia Cameron's 2005 book of cartoons, How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy). The suggestions are funny but sobering, since I've independently discovered them all on my own. Hang out with time-consuming people. Think about your novel instead of writing it. Write emails (or blogs) instead of your novel. Tell yourself your job makes it too hard to write. Tell yourself you've missed the boat and are too old anyway.
Sort of related is Charles Webb's Home School, a sequel to his 1963 The Graduate. It's 11 years later, and Richard Nixon is president. Benjamin and Elaine are happily married, living outside New York City. Benjamin works as a library shelver (yay!), but mostly, they devote their lives to homeschooling their 2 sons. Note that homeschooling once seemed stranger than it does now. They haven't seen Elaine's mother in 7 years. That, of course, is just about to change.
Continue Reading…
wednesday february 06
First, watch and listen to this audio file. If you’re at work, depending on your office, you’ll either want to stick in the earbuds or crank it up really loud. If you’re reading this while waiting for the security guys to escort you to the bus stop, set it up as a loop. (Email me, if you have time before they find your cube, and I’ll tell you how to make the loop hard to stop.)
For all these years, I’ve thought about Gertrude Stein’s comparison between Napoleon and Picasso as having to do with a physical resemblance and with the nagging question of whether the experimental ideas of Picasso, like the Napoleonic empire, might someday come crumbling down. Then I read Anton Neumayr’s 1995 Dictators In the Mirror of Medicine, which purports to be a psychological and physical portrait of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
Continue Reading…
saturday january 19
Plum Island is usually described as "porkchop shaped," which is ironic, because Plum Island porkchops could be even more unhealthy than salmon from China. Indeed, the main thing Plum Island has in common with a sanitary modern slaughterhouse is that the animals that go in don't come out alive.
Except that sometimes they do--or might--and the consequences could be bad, since, as everyone who has watched The Silence of the Lambs knows, Plum Island is home to the United States's Animal Disease Control Center. Michael Christopher Carroll's Lab 257 tells the story of the Island, focusing on decades of inept management, which led to serious maintenance and safety problems on the island, which is just a few miles from Connecticut and Long Island.
Continue Reading…
wednesday december 19
Everything after the first chapter of The Great Starvation Experiment is anticlimactic, because it's here that Todd Tucker describes Hitler's 1941-1943 siege of Leningrad. A million Russians may have starved during the 872 days before the Red Army broke through the blockade. After the zoo animals, people killed their pets. They ate wallpaper paste and shoe leather. During the second year, they began breaking more basic taboos.
Thirty-six American conscientious objectors, chosen among other reasons for their sound mental health, volunteered for an experiment whose goal was to study starvation's physiological and psychological effects, and to discover the most effective way to conclude a period of starvation. The Americans' goal was both humanitarian and military: the government assumed that Russians who had been weakened by famine would be physically and mentally unable to resist Stalin's armies at war's end.
Continue Reading…
tuesday november 27
Alan Weisman's provocative and deeply depressing book The World Without Us does offer a few optimistic scenarios. The good news (1) Look at the New England forests. Early settlers chopped them down but later abandoned their farms, and now the trees are all grown up again. In a few more generations the forests will look pretty much like they did before the European settlers came. Already, three coyotes have made their way across bridges from New Jersey and into Manhattan.
The other good news (2) In the long run, global warming isn't that big of a deal, because in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand and suck in all the planets, anyway. Also, given the wobble of the earth and its slightly erratic orbit, unless we've really screwed things up, another ice age is inevitable no matter what we do, and it certainly would be more convenient to have one in 14,000 years rather than in 1,000 years. Think of New York City and England as tundra, for example.
Continue Reading…
monday october 29
I had a whole year of South Carolina history in eighth grade, but the fact that rice was once grown there escaped me. Well, it was, from the end of the 17th century up through the end of slavery times. The eight counties that William Dusinberre calls "the Low Country" in his book Them Dark Days were in fact major producers.
The reason, of course, that the rice business did not continue long after the Civil War was because the labor involved in growing the rice was so difficult, and the conditions (malaria, again) so unhealthy in the South Carolina swamps that it was impossible to find paid workers to do the job. The swamps are now swamps again; one major plantation has become a wildlife refuge.
Continue Reading…
tuesday october 16
New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey surprised many, including his wife, by his 2004 announcement that he was a "gay American." He left office three months later. It wasn't just that he'd had an affair with Golan Cipel, but that he had hired him to be New Jersey's homeland security advisor--not a tiny job in 2002--although Cipel had no particular credentials. After outcry forced McGreevey to fire Cipel, the governor found him four other jobs, which he didn't keep for long.
Eventually Cipel threatened to sue McGreevey for $50 million on sexual-harassment charges. Dina Matos McGreevey published her memoir of the experience, Silent Partner, a few months after Jim McGreevey published his, The Confession.
Continue Reading…
saturday september 29
An acquaintance* was facing legal difficulties. She didn't know what to do. Finally a solution came to her: she would write to John Grisham and ask for advice and money. I felt sorry for my acquaintance's desperation and ineptitude. But apparently writing to a public figure when in bad straits, or just for the heck of it, is not uncommon.
I was surprised to learn just how much time Eleanor Roosevelt spent corresponding with non-famous Americans. The book I have before me, If You Ask Me (1946), is a collection of letters from regular people along with Mrs. Roosevelt's responses. Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, and other editors have compiled collections of her letters since then, including Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (1998) and Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt Through Depression and War (2004).
Continue Reading…
monday september 17
Just when I'd become okay with the idea, gathered from my college history text, The Middle Ages, 395-1500, that the western part of the Roman Empire fell because the upper-class Romans who ruled it all moved out to the country and lost interest in even having an empire, let alone paying taxes to support it, a new book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians comes out and says no, it really was the barbarians after all. My own ancestors were among the worst barbarians, but you can't blame them because at the time they were too barbaric even to think about attacking anyone. Later, when they did, The Middle Ages, 395-1500 scornfully says they mistook some small Italian hamlet for Rome. The Middle Ages, 395-1500 authors hated my ancestors.
Still, I'm sorry about the Dark Ages, what with being the beneficiary of many centuries of Western culture, as well as other cultures.
Continue Reading…
friday september 14
I learned just a few years ago that you can't drive your car all the way from Alaska to the bottom of South America, and I found this unsettling in the same way I found it unsettling as a child to learn that Baja, California, is actually a part of Mexico.
The problem is the Darien Gap, an area of about 30,000 square acres of swampy, mountainous, and otherwise difficult geological features between Colombia and Panama, that has been breaking hearts and ruining lives for centuries, even before Colombian paramilitary groups got into the act. The Gap now refers to the uncompleted stretch of the Pan-American Highway. Centuries earlier, the Gap referred to a possible break in the mountains, sort of like the Cumberland Gap, that would allow the building of a canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. An Englishman named Dr. Edward Cullen claimed to have found just such a gap.
Well, we all know what happened with that idea.
Continue Reading…
monday august 27
Paul Pennyfeather, an industrious third-year student at the College of Scone, Oxford, and the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, innocently crosses paths with members of the posh Bollinger Club. Naturally, the next thing that happens is that Oxford administrators unfairly "send him down" for "indecent behavior," and Paul is forced to take work as an instructor at a Welsh preparatory school. Since the novel is a dark comedy, Paul quiets his first class by offering a prize to the student who can write the longest essay, regardless of merit.
Interestingly, although Waugh certainly does not mean for us to respect Paul's teaching ability, this writing-instruction technique is quite popular among contemporary English composition instructors, including me.
Continue Reading…
tuesday august 07
I would prefer a place without snakes, even though I imagine Mia Farrow bravely took snakes into consideration when she offered to exchange herself for "Suleiman Jamous, the humanitarian coordinator of the Sudan Liberation Movement."
This is the first of two entries about the Darien Gap, the 30,000-acre area between Colombia and Panama. The Gap is what makes it impossible to drive from Alaska to the bottom of Chile. You can't go from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the Darien Gap either, because of mountains, swamps, rivers, and dense jungle. Another problem: paramilitary guerrillas, who will kidnap you if they find you, which they will. The native peoples aren't especially friendly either.
The paramilitary groups include two left-wing groups, the ELN and the FARC; and one right-wing group, the AUC. You may ask yourself, If I have to be kidnapped by a paramilitary group in or near the Darien Gap, which should I choose? Two books that could help you decide are Leszli Kalli's Kidnapped: A Diary of My 373 Days in Captivity and The Cloud Garden, by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder.
Continue Reading…
friday july 27
I need to be vague so a Major Corporation won't slap me with a SLAPP suit, but I used to be a contractor in the library there. The library was right across from the large auditorium, and one day I noticed everyone from the [censored] wing of the building going in, which was not unusual. But this time, it turned out that 300 [censored] were being told they would no longer have jobs with the Corporation in [censored] months, and that a certain kind of research would no longer take place there.
Everyone took the news pretty well except for one guy who must have found out beforehand what was going on and refused to enter the auditorium. He sat in one of the nice chairs by the library yelling things like, "It's a lot cheaper to hire a PR person than to invent a product that will keep someone's [censored] in their [censored] for their whole life!"
That's the man I want to marry, unless he already is married.
One of my points here is that it's a good thing the companies involved with researching sulfa drugs and the even better antibiotics didn't drop out because the research involved was expensive.
Continue Reading…
tuesday july 24
About 25 years ago, my mates and I were drinking 9-cents-a-bottle wine (probably now about 78-cents-a-bottle wine) in the Avignon train station, waiting for the 3 a.m. billet bige train to Italy. A man with a bleeding hand approached us. He spoke no French nor any other recognizable language; just "Tch, tch, tch," as he pointed first to our individual bottles of wine and then to his dripping hand. My classmates scattered, but I caught on and poured a few cups of the cheap wine on his hand. He said, "Tch, tch, tch," and went to a different part of the station.
The paragraph above provides one piece of useful advice, which is that alcohol is a good thing to pour on a wound, or on a potential wound. Rubbing alcohol is best, but you can't count on everyone you meet in a train station at 1 a.m. having rubbing alcohol.
It's hard to write a whole book about poison ivy, because there are basically just two rules about how to treat it in its initial stages, but Outwitting Poison Ivy, by Susan Carol Hauser, who also wrote Outwitting Ticks, makes the subject as lively as possible.
Continue Reading…
thursday july 12
My alternate title for this entry was "It's A Wonder Anyone's Alive at All."
The total casualty rate during World War I was far higher than the American Civil War's. However, huge medical advances occurred between the 1860s and 1914. You may ask yourself which would be worse--to be wounded in the Civil War or in World War I.
I have to say that being wounded in the Civil War in most situations, especially early on, would be much worse. Ira M. Rutkow's Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine is a sobering reminder of how awful medicine was before the development of asepsis and antiseptics. It's also the story of how personality conflicts and inter-agency political battles can get in the way of what everyone agrees is a good thing--in this case, proper care for the war's wounded soldiers.
Continue Reading…
tuesday june 26
Joyce Maynard is only five years older than I, but unlike me she's published a whole lot of good books, starting with the memoir she wrote when she was 18, Looking Back; A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties. Later she wrote a memoir of her affair with J. D. Salinger; the darkly funny Baby Love, about three teenaged mothers, a deranged escaped killer, and an equally deranged though less violent grandmother. Before they divorced, she wrote children's books with her ex-husband, and a syndicated column about the joys of family life. She probably portrayed family life as more joyful than it was in her case, and it's clear in Internal Combustion that she has still not completely moved on from that divorce.
Later she wrote the engrossing To Die For, a novelization of the Pamela Smart case. Finally, she's crossed the line into serious True Crime, with Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City.
Continue Reading…
monday june 11
1958 was an interesting time to be born, because World War II, though long past, was still a part of everyone's collective memory, and the Cold War was really gearing up. Most of my friends and teachers believed Hitler had been a communist, and our games of Russian Interrogation and Nazi Interrogation were identical:
"Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Facial slap) "You lie. Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Slap) "You lie."
Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.
Continue Reading…
wednesday may 30
I don't mean to brag, but one of my uncles might have invented chocolate syrup. I think I heard a family member mention this once. Amino acids are involved. Uncle Jim is in his 80s, so when I see him this summer, I'll have to discuss this with him. I don't know though if I can spin a whole book out of my memories of Uncle Jim, especially if it turns out he actually didn't invent chocolate syrup.
In the stacks I found My Uncle Joseph Stalin, by Budu Svanidze. Here was someone who didn't have to read up on amino acids, the "building blocks of protein," to make an interesting famous-relative-exploitation book! Budu was a loyal communist, but he fell in love with a Hungarian woman who refused to live behind the Iron Curtain, so they snuck out to Paris and perhaps also South America under assumed names. The idea is that Budu wrote this and several other memoirs because he needed the money--and he was successful, as his several volumes of memoirs were translated into English and other languages. He even sold an article on Joseph Stalin's three wives to McCalls.
Continue Reading…
friday may 25
I spent the morning wondering if I should bail an acquaintance out of jail. I haven't seen her in a few years, and if jails do provide rehabilitation of any kind, she would certainly benefit. Still, I was dressed neatly in time to drive to her arraignment. Then I checked the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts site again: her case had been put on hold, and she'd been released on her own recognizance.
Why the obsession with somone I barely know? Partly because of my obsession with the British TV series Bad Girls, a jail drama that ran for 8 years that I just found out about. You can watch YouTube clips and see if it's for you. Only the first season is available on DVDs playable by regular U.S. DVD players. There are Alternate Ways of getting hold of the other 100+ episodes, but they could land you in prison.
The Education and Religion Department is the place to go for serious information on incarcerated women. The first book I chose was 13 Women: Parables From Prison, edited by Karlene Faith, a prisoners' rights advocate for 40 years.
Continue Reading…
friday may 04
I visited my parents in South Carolina with the agenda that they might like to fund some of my son's college tuition. Instead, my mother let me ransack the abandoned WalMart that was being used to store books for her library's book sale. She said I could take whatever I wanted. These were reject books that had already been picked through during two used-book sales this year. Many, I noticed with annoyance, were my own books, which I'd left at my parents' house in the '70s. I ended up with about 6 boxes, including books and other interesting stuff I stole took from the pharmacy, which has also been abandoned since 1989.
When I got back to Cincinnati, I realized that no eBay person would ever buy about a third of the books I'd taken; another third, I kind of wanted to keep for myself. East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick, published in 1992, falls into this category.
Continue Reading…
saturday april 21
If you go to library school, you'll sooner or later have the conversation about "What if someone comes into the library and asks for a book on how to build a bomb?" As far as I can tell, the library has no how-to books on this subject, but if it did, the answer is that we would help the customer find it and not question his or her motivation.
In library school, this discussion will quickly deteriorate to questions like "What if a customer comes in and wants a book about how to make crystal meth?" The library has chosen not to buy books on this subject either, although there are certainly books about the problems associated with meth labs and addiction. The library's electronic collection, which you can access from home, however, has a government document called Clandestine Methamphetamine Labs. This 78-page PDF file includes photos, so you can recognize a meth lab if you see one, and compelling reasons why you shouldn't build your own.
Continue Reading…
tuesday april 10
Like betting on horses and selling worthless junk on eBay, computer hacking and its precurser, phone phreaking, are a lot harder to do now than they used to be. The coolness of knowing that you can make free phone calls by calling an 800 number, blowing your Captain Crunch whistle into the receiver before anyone picks up, and then "dialing" the person you really wanted to call, has become much less cool now that
- Long-distance phone calls are now pretty much free if you have a cell phone (even free-er if you borrow someone else's phone); and
- Now that everything's digital, the Captain Crunch trick doesn't work anymore.
Continue Reading…
I'm trying to find a connection between two books I've read lately, Running Away With Frannie, by Renée Manfredi, and Un seul crime, l'amour, by Mary Fualaau (formerly Mary Kay LeTourneau) and Vili Fualaau, with a couple guest chapters by Vili's mother, Soona Fualaau.
I can't talk too much about Manfredi's strange and memorable novel without giving away the plot, which takes an unexpected turn about halfway through, and then another one at the end. The protagonist is Sam, a 25 year old from a household without a lot of money, one of ten siblings with an alcoholic father and a mother who works in an Elvis-Presley commemorative-plate-making factory. The mother expresses her opinion of dinner guests through her table settings. If the visitor gets a young-and-healthy Elvis plate, the mother likes the guest. Old washed-up Elvis means Sam's mother is not amused.
Continue Reading…
saturday march 24
In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," a mother and her two daughters view the cultural importance of some beautiful inherited quilts in different ways. The plan is for the uneducated daughter to get the quilts when she marries, and when the quilts wear out, the uneducated daughter knows how to quilt and will make some more.
The educated but mean daughter, who doesn't know how to quilt, is appalled that a piece of history will be lost when the quilts wear out. She wants to preserve the quilts and hang them on her wall. Our sympathies are meant to be with the uneducated mother and daughter--but the mean daughter does have a point. The quilts will wear out, and a piece of the characters' family and ethnic heritage will be gone.
It's sort of the same with books.
Continue Reading…
tuesday march 13
A friend of mine confessed--it seemed like a confession--that he was relieved when Theodore Kaczynski turned out to be the Unabomber, because a friend of his pretty much fit the profile.
I understood perfectly, having spent some time in high school trying to track down Patricia Hearst (really impossible from rural South Carolina before the Internet). I just finished reading Robert Graysmith's 2003 Amerithrax: the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, and the most interesting part isn't about anthrax at all: it's the report of an interview between Mohammad Atta and Johnelle Bryant, manager of the Homestead, Florida, office of the U.S. Departure of Agriculture.
Continue Reading…
saturday february 24
Yesterday, my son was rejected by CCM as a piano performance major. Fortunately, he got over it in a few minutes because he liked Bowling Green (where he was accepted) better anyway.
I mention this because if you're planning to push your child into something, piano is better than figure skating, especially pairs figure skating. Pianos are expensive, but they're cheaper than ice time, skating coaches, skates (you'll have to have more than one pair, because your feet will keep growing as you get older, although maybe less than most people's if you're a girl and aren't allowed to weigh more than 100 pounds). Plus even if you're playing a piano duet, there's practically no chance that your partner's skate blade will pierce your skull. Jon Jackson's 2005 On Edge: Backroom Dealing, Cocktail Scheming, Triple Axels, and How Top Skaters Get Screwed; and Joy Goodwin's 2004 The Second Mark: Courage, Corrpution, and the Battle for Olympic Gold make this pretty clear.
Continue Reading…
saturday february 17
I've yet to find the perfect home-decor book (good-looking house without money or time investment) in the budget-decor department, so I decided to go the other way. In Dictator Style, English writer Peter York has compiled photographs of the interiors and exteriors of homes owned by notorious dictators, including Hitler, Tito, Ceaucescu, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein.
While admitting that some (though not all) of Slobodan Milosevic's rooms have that certain je ne sais quoi, York condemns most of the despots on grounds of bad taste--everything is too big, and they tend to put up photos and paintings of themselves all over the place. Idi Amin had tacky shag carpeting, and no one knows what the scary devices in the Ceaucescus' bathroom (p. 57) are.
Continue Reading…
saturday january 27
Selling junk from around the house on eBay is fun, but driving to the post office is kind of a drag. When I saw Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, I thought I might be onto something I'd enjoy. For one thing, when my daughter got sick of Neopets, I took over her account, and I'm glad to report that our oldest pet, Jenifrlopez, is now 1,298 days old. (My daughter's gotten into Runescape: she's the girl with a chef's cap who goes around butchering virtual zoo animals.) Right now on eBay, someone is trying to sell a Runescape virtual Santa Hat for $100. Some virtual items have sold for hundreds of real dollars, presumably to game players who don't want to spend the hours it can take to earn rare items.
There is no market for virtual Neopets stuff on eBay, and my daughter refuses to sell her Runescape items. Neopets is not exactly a MMORPG ("massively multiplayer online role-playing game), and Runescape is not one of the more popular ones. Check the MMORPG Web site or similar ones for an update.
Continue Reading…
sunday january 21
The worst part of getting divorced is that you become poorer. Fortunately, the Government & Business Department has many good books with advice for debtors, and after you've taken their advice and are not coming home to turned-off electricity anymore, you can move an aisle over to the investment-tips section.
I particularly liked Deal With Your Debt, by Lee Pulliam Weston (2006). The tone was nonjudgmental, and there was plenty of retrenching advice I could use. I could ask for a temporary forbearance on my student loan. I could get my house designated a historical monument, get a low-interest loan to have it fixed up, and then move to a smaller place.
The bad part is that all of the books insist that you constantly make lists of your expenditures, which could bring facts to light that you'd just as soon not realize. Also, Weston urges you to find out your credit rating, which you might not want to know.
Continue Reading…
tuesday january 16
Clearly, I'm not the first to have discovered what a good novelist John Gregory Dunne was. He's one more writer whose books I hadn't thought of reading, though, because I'd categorized him as a thriller writer, and I don't think of myself as a thriller reader.
Then I picked up Nothing Lost, which was published in 2004, a year after Dunne's sudden death. The book is certainly a page-turner. An African-American man has been tortured and murdered in an imaginary U.S. state that seems to hover between South Dakota and Nebraska. While various politicians, including the president of the United States and a right-wing congresswoman (who prefers to be called "congressman") use the apparently racially motivated murder to advance their careers, two unpleasant drifters are arrested. The evidence is scanty, and the witness not very credible.
You'll probably spot the clue as a clue when it first appears but not realize how it's a clue. This will be to your credit, because it's really disgusting.
Continue Reading…
friday january 05
In the first part of the 20th century, as many as a quarter of all patients at mental institutions suffered from late-stage syphilis, which inevitably led to dementia and death. There were no effective treatments until the Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg noticed that syphilitic patients who also suffered from malaria sometimes recovered their faculties. Wagner-Juaregg had the idea of purposely infecting syphilitic patients with malaria. His hope was that the high fever produced by malaria would kill the spirochetes responsible for what was then called "general paresis."
It wasn't a perfect solution, obviously, but many times--apparently somewhere in the 30 percent range--it actually worked. Wagner-Juaregg won a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1927. After WWII, thank goodness, we got to have antibiotics.
Wagner-Juaregg seems to have influenced psychiatrist Dr. Henry Cotton in his quest for a cure for mental illness. The results, of course, were horrible.
Continue Reading…
friday december 29
My goal was to make $50 a week selling useless junk on eBay, and for about a month I did just that. Then, unfortunately, I began running out of useless junk that anyone else would want, and I'm at $52 for the entire last 30 days.
Kenneth Walton, author of Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, did much better. In about 1998 he was able to quit his job as a lawyer and sell the art he bought at garage sales and thrift shops for thousands of dollars a week. He spent $200 on Davenport's Art Reference & Price Guide and began to recognize the work of minor but collectible American artists. At one point he and his Army-buddy partner found a painting by Oscar Berninghaus at Goodwill, which they sold for $18,700.
Continue Reading…
monday december 18
(1) Those who would marry Leonard Cohen in a heartbeat and those (2) like my daughter, who says, "Everybody in the sixth grade hates Leonard Cohen," and when she's really mad, "Leonard Cohen doesn't love you."
The gateway song to Leonard Cohen is usually "Suzanne." Albums I'd recommend are Tower of Song (1995); The Future (1992); The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002). Cohen's least popular album (aside perhaps from his most recent one) is Death of a Ladies Man," which was produced by Phil Spector and definitely has that Wall of Sound thing going on. I like it a lot. Also, for cool cover versions, I'm Your Fan, a tribute album (Version #1) is a lot of fun.
There are biographies of Leonard Cohen, none completely up to date. The most recent is Leonard Cohen, by David Sheppard, published in 2000. While satisfying as far as Cohen's early days are concerned, Sheppard's record stops before Cohen's departure from Mount Baldy, near Los Angeles, where he was a Buddhist monk for five years.
Continue Reading…
monday december 11
The two kinds of people, those who say when they hear about The Klingon Hamlet: (1) "Yeah! Great idea!; (2) "Well, I guess anything that encourages people to read Hamlet can't be that bad of a bad idea."
The premise is that for the first time Hamlet or (Khamlet) , by William Shakespeare (Wil'yam Shex'pir) has been published in its original Klingon, after many years of being available mostly in English (aka "Terran"). The English Hamlet--not one of the dumbed-down versions--is included across from its corresponding Klingon page, so if you're a student reading Hamlet and want to annoy your teacher, you should buy or check out this book.
Continue Reading…
monday december 04
When did Jack the Ripper commit his crimes? 1608? 1749? 1888? 1922? Why do we all sort of know who he was? Until I started looking him (or them) up, I hadn't a clue. In fact, the killer (or killers) commited the crimes in 1888-1981, almost sort of within living memory of those people in the 118-year-old age range who remember their babyhoods well.
After reading Patricia Cornwell's Case Closed, I had no doubt in my mind that artist Walter Sickert was the guilty one. And then I read that Sickert is not in fact even one of the more seriously considered suspects by Ripperites. Wikipedia says Sickert was in France during the time of a lot of the murders.
A Wikipedia writer ominously comments that it is actually hard to tell which murder victims are Jack the Ripper's work, since there were many brutal and horrific murders of women during this period of time.
Continue Reading…
saturday december 02
I bought
Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, two long novellas generally published together, in Italy on a drizzly day, and stayed in bed reading them even after the sun came out. Nancy Mitford was a genius, and these books are her best fiction. They're based on her own family, which has spawned several exuberant biographies:
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family and
The House of Mitford.
Unsuitable Attachments and Love in a Cold Climate tell the stories of sensible Fanny Logan's eccentric cousins and of the wealthy and ancient Montdore family. Fanny's quiet life could hardly be more different than her beloved cousin Linda Radlett's, and also than that of her friend Polly Montdore. The Radletts' terrifying father Matthew hunts his chldren when foxhounds are not available (and also when they are) and writes down the names of the many people he dislikes on pieces of paper and puts the papers in a drawer, believing this will cause something bad to happen to these enemies.
Continue Reading…
friday november 17
A hilarious epistolary novel showed up in the second-floor display area last week, Bonnie Thomas Abbott's Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost. If you've ever had mean thoughts while listening to a gardening person provide predictable opinions about square tomatoes, this is the novel for you. The letters seek advice from Mertensia Corydalis, a gardening expert with a syndicated column and strong positive opinions about labor-intensive gardening. The advice is similar to what you'll see in Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden.
Reading between the lines in the answers that appear in her column, readers come to know quite a bit about Mertensia--that she's recently divorced from a fellow gardener who's now married to a floozie. Mertensia herself seems kind of interested (if you get my drift) in the young man who helps out with the garden (or why would she insist at least twice that he remove his shirt)?
Continue Reading…
wednesday november 01
The Ohioana Library's Hamilton County Writers Celebration will be in the Tower Room on the third floor of the main library on Sunday, November 12, at 1:30. The event is open to the public, and you might want to arrive early to get a good seat. We've invited more than 130 writers who were either born in Hamilton County, or who have lived here for many years, or who write about Cincinnati--either real Cincinnati or a fictionalized version (with vampires, and excuse me if I'm wrong about vampires being fictional)--and who published books, music compositions, or new magazines or newspapers within the last year.
Not all 130 writers will come, of course, but already a selection of around 40 interesting and diverse writers have agreed to come. Mercantile Library Board Member Buck Niehoff will give a keynote talk; the writers will receive certificates, and we have created a slide show honoring their books and describing their work and lives. And yes--refreshments at the end and plenty of time to meet the writers and look at their books.
Continue Reading…
tuesday october 24
One of my high-school teachers got off topic and repeated her personal anecdotes a lot. I've forgotten Latin, but I remember the anecdotes. One was about a big, strong husky boy who nevertheless didn't try out for the football team because he was "yellow." Some other boys beat him up, and the Latin teacher was glad. Then again, she thought, he probably had dementia praecox (or else he would have been on the team), so his "yellowness" wasn't exactly his own fault.
Dementia praecox, I knew, had not been a diagnosis since the 1950s, when we became enlightened and started using good drugs (Thorazine) instead of bad surgeries (lobotomy), and the word "schizophrenia" replaced "dementia praecox." Then things got even better in the '90s, when atypical antipsychotic medicines with fewer side effects were created.
According to Robert Whitaker's 2002 Mad In America, though, I've been completely wrong.
Continue Reading…
monday october 16
For his first three years in high school, my son took what we used to call "business math" and made C's. Now, through a scheduling snafu, he is taking AP calculus. He is still making C's, but they are a much higher level of C's, presumably.
I'm not sure about the connection between this little anecdote (which admittedly would be more inspirational if he were now making A's) and Joe Miller's wonderful Cross-X, a book about a high school debating team at an inner-city school in Kansas City, Missouri, where almost everyone, including the debators, has academic deficiencies. Nevertheless, the debating team is consistently ranked one of the top high-school teams in the country. I think the connection is that if expectations are high, people will rise to them.
Continue Reading…
monday october 02
Okay, LonelyGirl15 turned out to be a scam. Apparently this has proven a near tragedy to young male "geeks" who were attracted to a beautiful actress who also seemed to share their interest in science.
If you just get a plot summary of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! you'll want to slap him around. As a child Feynmann fixed adults' radios. He distinguished himself at MIT, was one of the first arivees at Los Alamos. He caught the notice of the higher-level scientists and solved important nuclear-related problems. He learned to pick locks. He distinguished himself at Princeton and got teaching jobs at Cornell and CalTech.
Continue Reading…
thursday september 14
I'm still weirded out by finding an apparently homeless guy sleeping on my futon. Not so much that, but my reaction, which was, when he asked me for a drink, to say I had milk and grape juice and feel guilty that I didn't have more juice varieties. (His response was, "No, man, I mean something to drink.") Am I just a compassionate person, or foolish and insane?
Two of the books I read suggest the term "houselessness" rather than "homelessness" because of the connotations of "home." Under the Overpass, by college student Michael Yankoski, tells the story of the five months he and his friend Sam spent on the streets of five large cities, as a religiously inspired experiment. In format, the book is a lot like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Michael and Sam sleep in shelters, eat in soup kitchens, and make small amounts of money playing "worship songs" on their guitars.
Continue Reading…
saturday september 09
I've never really bothered about locking my door, because if anyone wanted to get in, it wouldn't be that difficult to break a window, and then I'd just have to have it fixed. Before you look up my address, though, note that I've kind of rearranged my position on the lock issue since this morning, when I went downstairs and found an apparently homeless guy sleeping on the futon in my living room. He'd eaten some soup and drunk a full bottle of vermouth. He stole $40 from my purse and made me drive him to Price Hill, so that's why I was late.
I think a lot of people would have been more upset than I about this--actually, I felt ashamed about how long my grass was and was glad I'd stayed up late steamvaccing the rug. Probably I would have been more upset if I hadn't already started my Travels With Lizbeth blog.
Continue Reading…
thursday august 31
Ruth Rendell lost the job in Essex, England, after writing an article about a tennis club event that she was supposed to attend but didn't, thus missing the mid-speech death of the keynote speaker. Whoops! Fortunately for us, she took up mystery writing.
In a superficial way, she resembles Agatha Christie--British, terrifically prolific, lots of murders. Rendell's books are more character- than plot-driven, though. She breaks all the rules of mystery writing, but her books are wonderful. I don't want to give any plots away, so I'm not going to name titles here. In one serial-killer novel, the murderer only appears as a walk-on for about a page; so much for rules about planting clues. In another, we learn halfway through the book who the serial killer is, and the question in his mind, as in ours, as how he chooses his victims? Why do certain women just have to go, while others arouse no murderous interest? And why didn't he pick up on the serial-killing game until his 40's?
Continue Reading…
saturday august 26
It's called We Need to Talk about Kevin. It's written in the voice of the mother of a fifteen year old who's murdered nine people. It's even more upsetting than the blurb indicates. Don't read the last chapter and skip all parts about the character Celia.
I put it in the Friends Collection box today along with a bunch of Disney cassettes.
So I turned to Miss Read, whose real name is Dora Jessie Saint. I was surprised to learn she was still alive; her books give the impression of having been written long, long ago. "Quaint" is a word one might use. Her books definitely fall into the "good reads" category; there is little major conflict--mostly character development and interaction. There are a lot of characters, and they reappear from book to book, so you may have to read several books (there are about 30) to get them straight in your mind.
Continue Reading…
tuesday august 22
I didn't set out to write about plane disasters involving athletes, but I just sort of happened upon two new books on the subject this week.
The first is Nando Parrado's Miracle in the Andes. Nando Parrado, of course, is the hero of Piers Paul Read's 1974 Alive! which you've certainly read or heard about unless you are too young. Parrado was one of two Uruguayan rugby players who crossed some of the highest peaks of the Andes, 62 days after the team's small plane crashed. They hoped to reach rescuers in Chile, which they believed to be much closer to the crash site than it was. Of the 45 passengers and crew members, 15 survived.
Continue Reading…
thursday august 10
A lot of people are good at something, and they like to write how-to books about it. Sometimes the writer sees things differently than you do, and you don't exactly get what you were expecting. A how-to-redecorate-cheaply book advises me to buy a $1,400 chandelier, for example. I had been looking for tips on wrapping old phone books with duct tape to make cute ottomans (or whole sofas, if you have access, say from work, to a lot of phone books and duct tape).
Maybe it's time to take a break from all the earnestness and read some parodies.
Elinor Goulding Smith's 1956 The Complete Book of Absolutely Perfect Housekeeping; an Uproarious Guide for Disorganized Housewives really is uproarious. Her decorating tips, for example, involve stealing art from your friends' houses under the guise of "cleaning it," and she's appropriately sarcastic about the phrase "window treatments" used in place of "curtains."
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 02
The Lobotomist, by journalist Jack El-Hai, is a biography of Walter Freeman, the doctor who popularized a treatment that many people find very repellent today. The idea was that severing the nerves between the brain's frontal lobes would decrease anxiety and depression in patients with severe mental illness. Sometimes it worked.
Very often it didn't, of course, especially for patients with schizophrenia. Often, although not always, lobotomy made patients more docile and quiet. These patients were then able, if not always to live productive lives, at least to leave warehouse-like mental institutions and return home. Too many times, though, lobotomies were given to patients simply to make them less troublesome. Fifty-thousand people received lobotomies, mostly, according to an NPR feature, between 1949 and 1952.
Continue Reading…
thursday july 27
Not only is North Korea lobbing missiles in its direction, but also what's going to happen when the billions of American anime and manga fans complete their East Asian Studies degrees and move there. Can the small rather racially homogenous island nation assimilate these new potential citizens?
I am an expert because I spent ten hours with my daughter last week at Ikasucon and also because I read Wrong About Japan, by novelist Peter Carey. Like my daughter, Peter Carey's 12-year-old son Charley is Otaku and plans eventually to move to Japan, but Carey has Japanese connections that help him meet and interview publishers of manga and other involved people on their Tokyo trip. Carey never really gets it.
Continue Reading…
saturday july 22
Having taught English comp for 18 years, I've seen plenty of plagiarism, and more so since the Internet. In the old days, you'd have to go to the library and find the journal or book the student used--often tedious work (see The Mark Twain Murders, by Edith Skom). Catching plagiarists is pretty easy now.
It's easy to see why comp students steal their papers (although it's still not considered best practice). Other cases are less understandable, and the library has two good books that discuss plagiarism's mysteries. In Words for the Taking: the Hunt for a Plagiarist, Neal Bowers, Iowa State poet and English professor, discovered during the '90s that someone was stealing his poems, changing the titles and first few lines, and then submitting them to literary journals. Bowers hired a not-terribly-useful lawyer and very good private investigator to track down the perpetrator. Eventually Bowers discovered that plagiarism was the least of David Jones's crimes.
Continue Reading…
monday july 17
If you're on John Grisham therapy, you might want to alternate that with Patricia Cornwell therapy; for one thing, it's very convenient just to turn around from the Grisham books, walk a few feet, and hit the Cornwells.
Cornwell has written other books--notably Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed, a controversial nonfiction book claiming to discover Jack the Ripper's identity--but she's best known for her Kay Scarpetta mystery series. So far, there are fourteen of them, and apparently a fifteenth will appear in 2006. It's important to read them in order, beginning with the 1990 Postmortem, because the characters in the books refer to events in previous books and age in something vaguely like real time. (Scarpetta's niece Lucy starts out at 10 and is by now probably about 26.)
Continue Reading…
friday july 14
Happy Bastille Day, I guess.
Louis the Sixteenth was the King of France in 1789.
He was worse than Louis the Fifteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Fourteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Thirteenth.
He was the worst since Louis the First.
-- Alan Sherman
If You've seen La Nuit de Varennes, one of my three favorite movies (the other two being Nashville and Best in Show), or if you have an interest in the French Revolution, you're going to want to read Les Nuits de Paris; or, the Nocturnal Spectator, in which Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne recounts--and probably sometimes invents--the events of his hundreds of nights spent meandering the streets of Paris betwen 1789 and 1793, and his general disapproval of the greed and crime in Paris during the days leading up to and following the Revolution.
Continue Reading…
saturday july 08
There is no butler character in this hilarious play by Joe Orton. What the Butler Saw begins with a psychiatrist's interview with a candidate for a secretarial position. When the candidate admits she cannot type, the lecherous psychiatrist asks her to remove her clothes so he can conduct a psychological evaluation. When the psychiatrist's wife arrives suddenly, the secretary must hide behind a screen. An inspector of psychiatrists threatens to commit the secretary to a mental institution because of her inappropriate nudity. A missing body part of a statue of Winston Churchill is key to the plot.
If you liked The Importance of Being Earnest, you'll like What the Butler Saw. The play's opening is certainly reminiscent of Wilde's work. (I've omitted the stage directions to save space.)
Prentice: I'm going to ask you a few questions. Write them down. In English, please. What was your father? Put that at the head of the page. And now the reply immediately underneath for quick reference.
Geraldine: I've no idea who my father was.
Prentice: I'd better be frank, Miss Barclay. I can't employ you if you're in any way miraculous. It would be contrary to established practice.
Continue Reading…
saturday june 24
You don't have to care about Agatha Christie to love The 8:55 to Baghdad: from London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, which I read about three times in three days before returning to the shelves. Andrew Eames's goal is to follow the path of Agatha Christie as she traveled from an upscale suburb of London to Iraq, following a depressing divorce. She had been planning a Caribbean cruise but changed her mind after hearing recent returnees enthuse about the country. She took the Orient Express (later of course celebrated in Murder on the Orient Express), which now ends in Venice.
Vacationing in Iraq in 1928 wasn't as weird an idea for Agatha Christie as it is for Andrew Eames. After leaving Venice, his path continues--on increasingly neglected rolling stock--through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, and finally into Iraq. He meets a lot of people (the drunken British beach bums in Bulgaria are particularly amusing) and reports some fascinating dialogue.
Continue Reading…
friday june 23
The title of this entry may seem like an oxymoron, and it is. The good news is that if you haven't had to write a research paper since 1985, you may not know that you can permanently delete "ibid." from your vocabulary.
The library and the Net have a lot of good resources. We've got the brand new Concise Rules of APA Style<
