How the reading is going

So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling.


But I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they do not vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. It is this, and not senility, that is the real second childhood. … As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.
(THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY, 1970, Penguin 1990, p. 233)

And Davies gets off so many great lines:

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain—in short, a man. (p. 3)

But before Paul’s birth, he had loved her because she was the blood of his heart; now he seemed to love her on principle. (p. 38)

After the marathon reading, and a great discussion during book club, I find the lure of the next two books in the series, THE MANTICORE and WORLD OF WONDERS, nearly irresistable. Especially intriguing is the idea that the next book has a different narrator, so we readers will see old scenes (and the first narrator) in different lights. What luxury!

But my new year’s resolve has not yet slaked, and I know first I must finish the second half of NORTH AND SOUTH, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story is set very close to the time I set my latest work-in-progress, and she uses the same great reportorial eye and style she did in MARY BARTON, which is set earlier. I’d gleaned great ideas and details and modes of speech from the first half of N&S, but somehow had stalled out on reading it. I blamed holiday travel and a fierce dive into first revisions (for story) on my WIP, but opening it again, I remember the real reason. She is just too good.


“You think it strange. Why?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (NORTH AND SOUTH, 1855, Norton Critical Edition 2005, p. 109)

Gaskell also shows raw emotions expressed through action, as in the so-painful scene where Margaret turns down Mr. Thornton’s offer of marriage (pp. 174-8). And, the part that makes my head spin, she’s writing contemporary, not historical, fiction.

The darkness of January descends: I can’t match this historical accuracy, this raw emotion, I shouldn’t even try. I should write about my own time; after all, the themes I’m working are resonant now. But my attempts at contemporary have been clumsy, and I’m so slow that neither of the two contemporary manuscripts I’ve finished works for plot now: In one, the woman is a reporter in a style that was true when I was a reporter, all of five years ago, but isn’t true now; in the other, written four years ago, the protagonist invents a new app on the computer that somebody real invented two years ago. But if I want to say anything “real,” and be believed, I should do it in my own time.

I know the counter-arguments, and I have good reasons for writing historical (like I do want to write about Peterloo), but in the darkest days of the year, these arguments feel ephemeral. And there’s a snowstorm, so I have to shovel. And N&S sits unread.

And then my company announces it is closing its only office in town and laying off nearly all of us. So I flee.

I land in the last Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell I haven’t read, BEFORE THE FROST. This too, is an alternate-view story: Wallander as seen and felt from his daughter Linda’s point of view. She describes his hair-trigger anger, and we see it reflected in her own expressions of anger. I especially enjoyed how she resolves her childhood impressions of him with how she sees him working as a detective, and how she tries to resolve her choice to become a police officer with what has come before. Other father-daughter relationships in the book trace other trajectories. As always, I wonder how much I miss because this is translated.

Done with that, and still skirting N&S (which continues to travel back and forth to work in the messenger-bag), I glom onto AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. He’s been in the news, and in love, and I remember he does that hyper-real detail thing even in the stories that carry a lot of fantasy, as well as solid storytelling, and the book has been on my shelf forever and is recommended by the spouse (who says read ANANSI BOYS right away after). And, like Davies, this story wonders at why people want marvels, how they create their own marvels, and how people who feed them their marvels fare. Fun read, watching the stories told and re-told, and seeing how a longer form can carry a lot of short-story structure (like history passages that don’t slow the main narrative drive), you just have to remember to wrap it up better at the end.

So I’m cruising along and bam—on p. 99—he uses the word “manticore,” which is, you’ll remember, book 2 of the Deptford trilogy. It’s a Sign, so I seek out our copy of the trilogy, but spouse is deep into it and won’t give it up and aren’t I supposed to be reading N&S? Fine. I return to AG, and enjoy the “that’s my life!” references to the northern midwest (pasties, yoopers, those sports-team signs) as well as references to the potential that “It’s a Wonderful Life” could be a depressant and – hello – references to brain science:


She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought that when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”

“I bet it’s like the space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow.
(AMERICAN GODS, Harper 2001, p. 133)

Soon enough, I’m through the book and dashed if it isn’t another snowpocalypse outside, saving me the trouble of immediately deciding which follow-up book to read (N&S is now under a pillow on the living room couch). This morning, no newspaper delivery so we’re reading books at breakfast, and the spouse shouts and chortles several times as he finishes WORLD OF WONDERS. “You must read this now,” he says, “so I can talk about it.”

But first, just one little chapter of N&S.

After I clear some more snow.

How the writing is going: Stuck in pre-revision molasses, but better to slowly look at everything now than rush like last time and discover my “fixes” messed up the plot. Ran through all the pages looking for plot points that don’t pay off, then noting characters that have too much or too little weight. This week I look at locations and setting.

Next book-club book: HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson

Guest post

Gifts from the spouse:

buds beneath
heavy snow on bough
spring will come

Join the fun

Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are from events all over the world. This year, Brain Awareness Week is March 15-21. [see my earlier post, "I touched a brain," for more]

Stay tuned

We are in final edits on a cute little video showing some of the fun stuff people do to celebrate Brain Awareness Week, which this year will be March 15–21. It’s my first foray into video-making since the early 1980s, and I am quite a bit rusty, so this will be an “unauthorized” version, but short and spunky and a stepping-stone to the next, better one.

The Dana Foundation supports this annual world-wide campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research by hosting an international calendar of events, sponsoring some events and offering a clearinghouse of ideas for people to put on their own events. See more at dana.org/brainweek.

Midnight’s Children

I found Salman Rushdie’s breakout novel all it was cracked up to be, though it did take me about 50 pages to fully commit. It is dense and circular, eschews some common internal punctuation, and has a fantastic story bedded in sharp detail and joy in the wordsmithing. For a dense book, I read it rather quickly, in the 12 days between the end of NaNoWriMo and the date of bookclub (gulping the last dozen pages while riding in the car on the way to the club-meeting).

It gave me so much to chew on (the story of modern India, travel, what it means to be family, what superpower I would want, whether if I dropped to part-time to concentrate on fiction writing I could produce something even remotely like this about my country), that I haven’t read any fiction in more than a week. I keep picking up novels and reading the first few paragraphs at most, then setting them down, not quite ready to start. (OK, that’s published fiction. I did read my NaNo novel through twice already, as part of revising it, but that’s editing, not travel and adventure and escape.)

I didn’t like but did enjoy the narrator, telling his own story as if it were the center of the Indian universe, which, in perhaps less-extreme form, we all think of our own stories.

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If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of that nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?
(from MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, (1981) 2006 Random House trade paperback edition, p. 319)

(I like how when I typed that in, Word said, “run-on sentence. Change?” Actually, no.)

My favorite story-parts included the grandfather’s courting his bride (and the various iterations of a sheet throughout the story), the sister’s childhood strength and her mutation to Jamila Singer, and the crazy-ghost Sundarbans jungle scenes. I didn’t enjoy the “present day” parts, where Saleem is writing and annoying his girlfriend Padma, but even that thread brings a fun part right at the end, as she giddily recognizes herself in the narrative.

Saleem’s final wrap-up metaphor sees his years, and India’s, as a series of flavors of pickles, “special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans . . . believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.” (p. 530) (Rushdie’s ellipses, my bolding–I’m adopting this as my new retort!)

As a victim of too many writing seminars, I also loved this line: “From ayah to Widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victime, persists in seeing himself as the protagonist.” (p. 272, italics Rushdie’s). Saleem could not be the hero of a series romance; they are required to act, and usually act heroically. He reacts, and often even his reaction is passive, yet he believes he and his fellow children, born in the first hour of India’s political rebirth, are “the gods you never had” (p. 504).

While the book doesn’t end on a happy note, and one of its themes is that optimism is a disease, still there is the promise of the new generation of gods, including the baby Sinai, who should be grown to young adults by now. Do you see them?

Next up for bookclub: FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies

Snowpocalypse

Street12202009
This is down our street 12 hours after the 24+ hours of snow stopped (4 pm, Sunday, 12.20.2009). No driving today! The car at the corner turned back and didn’t come down the street.

N12202009
Taking advantage of the camera’s POV.

Cleo12202009
Cleo is tired from a day of running from window to window.

Old new media

OK, so it’s an ad, but it’s only 1 min long. I like the “amazing pen-tip interface.”

H.M. Brain Dissection Live Online

The brain of Henry Molaison, the most famous amnesic and perhaps the most-studied neurological patient in history, will go under the knife starting Wednesday morning. Mr. Molaison, who died in December 2008, donated his brain to science; as part of the Brain Observatory Project, his contribution will help thousands of researchers worldwide.

Brain Project scientists plan to Webcast the slicing and preservation of brain matter on thousands of slides; extra-high-resolution digital images of the slides will eventually be posted on the open-access site. The operation is scheduled to start Wednesday mid-morning and will at least through Thursday, during roughly office hours, Pacific time. Part of this project is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation.

On Monday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a nice explanatory story on Mr. Molaison and the work of the Brain Project, which is based at the University of California, San Diego. I also wrote a short piece (with an audio link) about him for Dana’s 2008 annual report.

[A version of this post also is on the Dana Foundation blog. See more cool brain news there!]

Black Friday

Here’s an animation that offers another perspective on Picasso’s wrenching painting Guernica.

Future of Computing?

I’m all about the video, for one more week. (24,000 words to go! 5 more days! Ack!) This is fun-zooming animation; next will be a very different zooming animation.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.