Fan-Action

My action on this one is to write a thank you letter to Maile Meloy. 

Her short fiction collection broke my "meh." streak with a breath of clarity.  For that I feel quite grateful, and quite sated with literary nourishment for at least a day or two. 

I've long held the short story as perhaps my favorite form.  When well-wrought, each tale's impact offers a moment of quick, quiet transcendence.  Meloy makes that happen every time. 

Her stories are "small" and contemporary, focusing on one or two nuanced characters who face conflicting yet simultaneous emotions.  Nary a misstep here, yet few of these stories offer neatly tidied outcomes:  like life, only well-honed and compacted to offer high entertainment as well.

A telling contrast, my last book and this.  Both writers strive to offer everyday living distilled to create a heightened experience of quotidian passions.  But only Meloy succeeds for me.

Action reflection:  It's tough to tease just one action from a collection of distinct tales.  Luckily, however, offering gratitude to a stranger counts.

So I'll write to her, and put another of her books in my 2011 queue.

MFB,
L

p.s.  For the official blurb on the book, click it, or go to Maile Meloy's web page.

Tragic?

D'ya ever wonder why, in the name of all that is psychologically stable, you kept on reading a book when it dragged you ploddingly into realms of (sometimes not-so) quiet desperation? 

I don't usually wonder that.

A Thousand Acres?  Not perfect, but enjoyable.  The House of Sand and Fog?  Fabulous. (Devoured in one sitting, breathless, crying, katharsis.  "Mmmmm... Please sir, may I have some more?")  The Inheritance of Loss?  Shalimar the Clown?  Antigone?  Bring it. 

In fact, for Xmas I asked Santa for an "I Heart Hamlet" T-shirt.  He managed a soot-stained program from the Joe Papp production of Othello in Central Park.  I wept happy tears.

And this love of tragedy isn't an artifact of age either.  Back in high school and college, I dug the stuff.  First course, first year at Brown? Ancient Greek Drama: Best. Course. Ever.  And nary an Aristophanes in sight.  All tragedy, all the time. 

So why was the meandering bleakness of The God of Animals so difficult to endure, I ask myself?  Perhaps because what we often label tragic events aren't actually the stuff of tragedy.  

There's a difference between what's tragic and what's merely depressing or downright sad.  The former has something to do with emotional engagement with a single character who commands a certain degree of gravitas, and an intensity of pacing - that snowballing toward the final horror that feels inevitable yet preventable at once - leading to katharsis. And this novel simply didn't have a classically tragic structure to support it.  For me, that lack of solid structure made the difference between a satisfying read and a rather taxing one.
 
So what is this novel, at least for this reader?  It's one slowly grating downward spiral with a cast of characters who are either clueless or twisted or just plain mean.  Or naively confused or oversexed or abused or adulterous.  Or most of the above. 

Or horses. 

Did I mention that The God of Animals is a horse book?  About a little girl whose mom self-meds one serioiusly clinical case of depression by staying in bed 24/7 and whose entirely obtuse yet hunky dad, upon losing his elder daughter to a rodeo star, displaces his abandonment rage onto female horses and his younger daughter, our protagonist/narrator?  Well, it is.  And things go from that to worse, in a quiet, quotidian sort of way, until there's a blip of possibility, and then - oops!  nope! - it's back to random accidents and uncomfortable adult-child relationships.

Other readers who found this novel more engaging than I almost unanimously note that protagonist Alice's interior monologue rings true for them, offering the ambivalence and confusion and passion of early adolescence with unsparing accuracy.  On this, I concur.  But I suppose I've read so many books (both novels and memoirs) with similar truthiness that this quality alone didn't win me over.

A brief ray of tepid sunshine:  Aryn Kyle's a youngish writer whose prose moves along confidently.  A stronger novel may well lurk in her future.  And she's certainly not hurting now reputation-wise, as this novel garnered plenty of attention when it was released.  I wish her, as I wish you all and I wish myself on this fine evening in the Pacific Northwest,

More fail better.
L

Actions:
* Only. Great. Books.  That's my mantra now, and for 2011.  I will be asking expert readers - English teachers and bibliophiles, not book-sellers and publishers out to create a phenom, and certainly not random readers on virtual bookshelves - for their top 10's and I'll curate their lists for us all.  Because even with Amazon and goodreads and literary awards and such, there's no even-close-to-reliable way to find great - or at least very good - books, and there aughta be.  I'm on it!  (And this could be quite a project!)

* May research the psycho-social roots of this re-emerging (Coinage du jour: remerging. Like it?) 'girlie, gritty horse fiction' genre.  Many parallels here to the Jane Smiley's The Georges & the Jewels that I just read last month... Why so few/no realistic boy-based horse fictions lately?  (OK, so maybe Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses - and the rest of his Border Trilogy - pretty much slew all late 20th/early 21st century contenders?)

* In fact, must redeem horse fiction in own mind by rereading the first section of McCarthy's The Crossing (now there's a tragic novella that will haunt you, in a good way).

* And must reread Joy Harjo's stunning poem "She Had Some Horses" to reset the power of horse-as-symbol in my literary mindset.  If you haven't read it, you must.  Go do so now...

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“

But we have only begun

To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
— we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

                - Denise Levertov

(Candles in Babylon)

Life As We Knew It

What do you do once you've lived through the end of the world? 

You write a book review. 

This one will be short and sweet.  In Susan Beth Pfeffer's belletristic YA novel, sixteen year old diarist Miranda Evans and her family survive volcanoes, blizzards, a deadly flu epidemic, and near-starvation, outliving nearly all their neighbors and presumably their extended family as well.  Premise:  An asteroid hits the moon, knocking it closer to the earth and setting off a series of natural disasters that pretty well wipe out most of the humans on the planet, and presumably most other terrestrial species as well.  It's a survival story, pure and simple, and the interest for readers - especially young ones - will lie in how Miranda and her family deal with an increasingly less "convenient" lifestyle and how they slowly become more resourceful, determined, and cohesive in the face of catastrophe after catastrophe.

Pfeffer's prose moves along smoothly, with evenhanded pacing and short chapters keeping the action at the fore, although one must consciously suspend disbelief that a 16 year old is describing these calamitous events with such seamless clarity, on a series of makeshift diary pages, and on the very day they're happening.  And of course, character development takes a back seat to such a stimulating plot, although events do eventually conspire to force both Miranda and her younger brother, Jonny, to mature while the crisis brings out the best in the relatively static characters of Miranda's mom and her older brother, Matt. 

I think that's almost enough said about the book.  Except to say that I chose it because it was noted over and over again by local teens as a favorite novel and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  AND that as I web-surfed to provide you with links for this post, I discovered that Pfeffer's produced two additional "Moon Crash" books since 2006, one set concurrently but in NYC rather than Pennsylvania, and the other a sequel uniting the protagonists of both novels, to be published in paperback this spring.  Now why'd she have to go and write a series?  Guess I've got two of my January reads lined up, as apparently I have grown fond of this plucky family after all...

Action:  Hoo, dogies.  It's just gotta be about canned goods. 
See, the family here survives mainly due to mom's quick decision to go shopping the day after the moon-shift and buy all the non-perishables she and her kids can get their hands on.  Her insistence on preparedness and frugality keeps them alive for much of the book.

So:  1.  I'll take a load of canned goods/non-perishables to the food bank.  (Baby, it's cold outside, snowing even.)  2.  I'll check our emergency preparedness kits and update them. (And maybe even our fire extinguishers too...)  A little for the world, a little for us.  And practical.

MFB,
L

(MFB was definitely the Evans family's motto too, and it served them well.)  What's MFB?  It's More 'Fail Better'.  See my 'pinecone turkeys' blogpost from 11/24/10.  (With a tip of the ill-fitting hat to Samuel Beckett.)

Good Omens: Not bad.

But what's all the fuss?

Even the writers wonder the same thing in their commentary for the anniversary edition.  They seem dumb-founded by this sci-fi-ish novel's cult following, as - in truth - am I. 

Oh, I get fans' enjoyment of Pratchett & Gaiman's sense(s?) of humor, and I too found their musings on human nature thought-provoking, but I much prefer Gaiman's more recent works like Anansi Boys and Stardust, and this novel's plot- and character-development left me wondering... 

In particular, during the lengthy penultimate "Saturday" chapter, when I should have been flipping the pages relentlessly with breath held and eyes wide open as we careened toward the book's climax, instead I wound up skimming and flipping pages just hoping for some decisive forward plot movement as we bopped around among various plot threads in a stop-start-stall  motion.  And then there's the issue of character development, even for what you might call the dual protagonists, angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley.  To me, that issue loomed large:  Many of the characters seemed merely allegorical devices and vehicles for one-liners for most of the book, so, for me, keeping engaged on a psychological/emotional level grew challenging.

On the other hand, I did laugh out loud many times and smile often, so if diversion's what you're looking for at the moment, then most of this book will serve you well.

What's it about?  Too much to tell, really... Good and Evil and Armageddon and the stupid, cruel, violent, generous, decent things humans do.  Human nature and the nature of the world.

And when this book falls into the hands of its perfectly right reader, a rabid dogged fan is born.  It's happened to over one million people, and it could happen to you.

In the end, Good Omens is another solid read for anyone who likes to think, holds an open mind - esp. about religion - and enjoys a good laugh.

MFB,
L

What's my action?  Magic.  See "Gnomens" post, and stay tuned for "December Story" (dropping about Jan. 1 or 2) to see what happened...

FYI for Listening Learners:  For a leg up on the first 100 pages or so, which can seem dauntingly peppered with characters, settings, and - for us Americans, sometimes obscure - references to many things British, get the CD on tape or downloadi the audiofile.  The reader, Martin Jarvis, thoroughly 'gets' every word, inflection, and innuendo, so he's well worth listening to to get your footing.  And if you listen in the car and then read at home, you'll speed through Good Omens at the same pace as it proceeds... One week's adventure to save or slay the world as we know it.

FYI:  In my experience, this book's legion of fans is primarily adolescents, so I'm attaching two quotes that may justify their passion.  It's Adam Young, the unwitting eleven-year-old Anti-Christ from bucolic Tadfield, England, expressing his disdain for the world the grown-ups have left him:

"You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's all full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for,  if you ask my opinion." (204)

And Crowley musing that demons get a bad rap:

"There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm.  It wasn't just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell.  They'd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully functioning human brain could conceive, then shout "The Devil Made Me Do It" and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything.  He didn't have to.  That was what some humans found hard to understand.  Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game.  Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind." (76-77)

Never mind that the entire last third of the novel negates this last assertion, it's this sort of pronouncement that teenagers - and students of the human condition of all ages - applaud.

i live in the present and apparently i already know how it works...

If you know little about the internet, e-readers, social networking, cell phones & their apps, and video games, you will likely find this book's content new and interesting.  If you also know little about the science of learning and recent developments in our understanding of how the brain adapts, then the info. here will seem even more intriguing (if you keep in mind that the author's actually making an argument here so he's quite selective in the research he's chosen to include and how he interprets its import).  If you believe, as tech writer Nick Bilton seems to, that technology is inherently neutral at worst and in fact "good" in most cases, and that people who express concerns about some of the potentially negative impacts of technology are - in many cases - just "hand-wringing" (one of his favorite condescensions) Luddites, then you will likely find an ally.

If, however, you rather expected a New York Times reporter to present thoroughly compelling, logical cases to support his personal views or to acknowledge that both recent research and personal experience may tend to support some social commentators' concern about how technologies may be impairing concentration and problem solving while increasing impulsivity in the "digital native" generations, you might be disappointed in i live in the future & here's how it works.  And ditto if you aren't a technophobe and have kept abreast of the developments in technology over the past decade or so, as much - though by no means all - of the content will already be familiar.

Upsides: 
* Easy to read/skim.  Fluid writing, no doubt. 
* Bilton is, after all, a prominent tech reporter/blogger, and he's amassed enough interesting detail that you're bound to find at least a few sections - or even whole chapters - thought-provoking.  For instance, I found chapters 3 ("your cognitive road map: anchoring communities") and 4 ("suggestions and swarms: trusting computers and humans") personally relevant to some projects of my own and I enjoyed some of his corporate case studies.
* A particularly potent point for me:  Bilton predicts that the future success of many content-based high tech businesses may not be as dependent upon the quality of the information offered as upon the consumer's perception that the content is ultra-new/timely and tailored directly to his/her immediate needs.  While this narrowing toward a world of "me economics" that Bilton hypothesizes rather terrifies me in its implications (a world where we're all connected, but nobody cares unless there's something in it for them), when I bop around the interwebs I find it hard to deny, and well worth remembering as I create web content.

Bottom line for me: 
Bilton's patronizing attitude toward anyone who has concerns about the merits of some technologies is palpable throughout this book, and his "arguments" sometimes veer from addressing the actual concerns of detractors into tangential cases for technological benefits not at issue.  However, I found his writing style engaging and some of his insider info. both interesting and useful. 

MFB,
L

** My actions for this book:  I've adjusted some of my projects for this year to be more timely, interactive, and web-video-based in order to balance my penchant for creating texts.  AND I'm only going to focus on content that connects people to the world in ways that will inspire empathy rather than solipsism.

FYI: The review on the Amazon link (click the cover image) provides an alternate, and perhaps welcome, perspective to mine.

Lorax in a little red hat

Gnomes by Rien Poorvliet and Will Nuyen: This modern classic offers beautifully conceived and executed illustrations matched with straightforward, pseudo-scientific descriptions of gnomes' every aspect.  It's more than a tad dated at this point, but pleasant to look at (especially when one immerses one's entire head in double-page panoramic illustrations) for an hour or so. (faint praise, aye.)

One suspects that many elements here mirror or support the social values of Dutch illustrator Poorvliet and writer Huygen, and that's just fine, but for a modern audience, the glorification of gender stereotypes detracts from the whole magical vibe considerably.

It's also a little risque and violent at points for a book whose cover screams, "I'M HARMLESSLY CUTE!".

A snotgurgle about to grind up a gnome.  Scary!

Not that I'm entirely against these elements if the reader's age-appropriate; I'm just sayin'. 

And with that: 'Nuff critical stuff said. 

Here's a brief snippet from the somewhat heavy-handedly moralistic closing, so you get a sense of the prose style (or lack thereof). Tomte Haroldson, the writers' "informant", speaks directly to them/us in order to share a parting reflection on Gnome society's view of human folly:

"Man runs wildly about in the world of today and lives almost always at nature's expense...We have our instinct and intellect in proper balance; you have subordinated your instinct to your intellect...And that's why we (together) must proceed in three ways: the restoration of instinct, the restoration of balance in nature, and less striving for power...all the other evils on earth stem from the craving for power."

Tomte's criticisms seem reasonable enough. 

Now if only I had the magical powers of imaginary beings, perhaps I'd be able to persuade other humans to follow his advice.  And if only I had the resource requirements of somebody 15 centimeters high, I'd be able to live as lightly on the land as he...

Note to self: Must redouble efforts to reform worldview in light of "magic"; how else can self hope to follow ole gnomey's advice? 

In the meanwhile, MFB.
L