17 April 05
Imaging A Treasure Trove
Classicists are rejoicing now because a new infrared imaging technique is enabling scholars to decipher a massive and previously illegible collection of papyri of Greek and Roman texts. This collection of 400,000 fragments was found at the end of the 19th century in an ancient rubbish site in a town in central Egypt. It is possible that deciphering these texts will lead to a 20 percent increase in the number of classical works in existence.
31 March 05
Passing the Book Torch
Maria of Alembic has passed the stick along to me for this book meme.
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Since this involves memorizing an entire book and I’d have no hope ever of doing that for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus which would be my first choice, I’ll take Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, lots. Sargeant Angua, the female werewolf on the Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, and Stephen Maturin of the O’Brian series come to mind as the most recent.
The last book you bought is?
The Zen of CSS Design and CSS Cookbook
What are you currently reading?
Faithful, an account by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan of the 2004 Boston Red Sox which I need to finish by Opening Day (Sunday); Enemies of Promise by Lindsay Waters; Behind the Curve, a sailing whodunit by Steven Chance, to whom I’m related and would otherwise not be reading it at all; The Zen of CSS Design; Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer which I started at DocRoc’s and which is an astonishingly gripping account of the fall of an empire; Jingo by Terry Pratchett; and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I may give up on the Chance pretty soon, though I’m told it contains a reference to my grandparents in a slightly salacious way. I just can’t plod my way through till I get there. Oh, there’s another one, it was at the bottom of the pile and never quite got finished: Starhawk’s Earth Path.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Since we’re all going to be on the desert island and everyone else already has the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the collected Shakespeare, I’ll bring a natural history of greater Oceania or whereever the island is, complete works of Chaucer, the Divine Comedy, Proust, and Cervantes.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
DocRoc, because she reads widely and well; Chris R., because she does too; and Chris Clarke, because I know the answers are going to be so unlike mine and will, I hope, include paleontology and things. He seems awfully busy these days, though, exposing the tears in our civic fabric.
12 March 05
Bookstore Luck
Returning from a trip into town on this glorious spring day, we stopped by the used bookstore near the food co-op. And we found three Terry Pratchetts we’ve not read yet — Lords and Ladies, Small Gods, and Jingo. She never gets them in at the bookstore, she told us, and she didn’t really expect them to last the four days on the shelf that they did. We’ve pretty much exhausted the library’s collection, so there we go.
22 December 04
The Muttering of Old Books
Dale has opened an interesting thread, taken up by Jarrett, on going to a bookstore—perhaps the finest bookstore in the world, Powells—and feeling less than excited, newly so, about the books on the shelves. He describes the “dreary hopelessness” of walking through the philosophy section, an experience that used to be so satisfying.
I suggested this might be a distribution problem—that the really good new stuff is out there, hiding, unpublished and unnoticed because of corporate decisions relating to “the market” (us) and its perceived desires. I think it might not be that simple, though, having thought about it further.
Walter Benjamin spent weeks at a time not talking to other people. Cornel West doesn’t do this. There are demands on his time that are probably getting in the way of some writing that might, in fact, get Dale really excited. If not West, then others. Very few of us know how to be alone.
What are the really important books of our time? Can we know? This is a question that has been asked in different ways by many different bloggers, some of whom appear in the list at left and many more that don’t. Is this also a function of our failure to embrace aloneness and thinking hard? I’m not sure, but I think we need to keep looking. I think we need to keep going to Powell’s. Like Icarus falling unheeded into the drink, we may not know for some time.
I was talking this afternoon with a mentor from my publishing past, who told me that Vicky Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets, puts it this way in answer to someone who was getting less than excited by the books in her high-powered reading group: forget the reading group. Go to the grimiest used bookstore you can find and head for the dustiest section. Something will leap off the shelf at you, and it won’t be what you’re expecting. It might be Icarus.
A childhood friend has recently left the rat race and opened her own used bookstore in Picton, Ontario. Olivia & Co comes with the eponymous cat draped over comfy furniture. It’s not very grimy, at least from the photos I can see on her website, but I’ll bet there are a few gems in there. And at the very least there’s a cat to balance the muttering of old books, as Jarrett puts it.
28 November 04
Whither American Fiction?
One of the things my mother does when we meet up, here or in Bodega Bay, is that she (messily) unloads a pile of things she wants me to see that she’s been saving up since last time. One of these latest unpackings was some excerpts from the current issue of the Antioch Review, a piece called “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing” by Daniel Harris. In this he wrings his hands about the state of American letters, where creative writing programs mass-produce out-of-work MFAs, all of whom are first in line to nab spots at prestigious art colonies and write stuff that is read only by others like them. Whom they envy and take delight when some small failure or other befalls them. It’s a shrinking pool, he says, one that despises the mass-market authors but secretly envies them more than anyone else.
I’m not sure I follow the entire drift, not having the article to hand, but this section (as quoted by my mother) caught my eye: “The five best books I’ve read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch’s Siegried, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time... Not a single American author alive today … is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (because they’re presented without chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt…”
Is this because American writers are too geared toward publication, or getting on Oprah, or receiving kind notice by the New York Review of Books? (Or that they are too weighed down by Hemingway or even Faulkner?) What would happen if someone quietly writing away in the backwaters, away from writing groups and even bookstores, produced something like G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage, the most quirky novel I’ve read in over a decade? Is it just not now culturally possible for this to happen in the United States? Or to write a highbrow novel that doesn’t, somewhere deep within, have an unpunctuated stream of consciousness that mimics the Hot Thing passage in Toni Morisson’s Beloved?
To all of you who’ve been working hard on your fifty thousand words for the month of November (and even those who haven’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I’d settle for an American version of Terry Pratchett. We’re ripe for some serious satire.
27 November 04
La Casita del Cielo
We went on a downtown bookstore outing today, and wandered for the first time into La Casita del Cielo, which is a new Spanish children’s bookstore hidden between D and E streets. Pica was looking for a grammar to send her sister, who is helping teach Spanish in her primary school back in Maine. She found a perfect book, and talked a lot to the owner about bilingual education here. One of the reasons the owner, who is from Peru, started the store is because of concern over Spanish literacy here. Most bilingual teachers in the schools have very little command of Spanish, and Spanish-speaking students do not end up learning much in the way of Spanish grammar or writing skills. On top of all that, American culture as a whole is not one where most people read much. Anyway, he was happy to hear about Pica’s sister’s efforts, and gladly gave Pica several free books to send along to her school. As for myself, Spanish children’s books make for good reading practice at my level, and I settled in this evening to a copy of Helico y el pjaro, by Andr Dahan. Fun little story about a bird being taught to fly.
29 October 04
Paths Not Taken
Long ago and far, far away, I was an assistant editor at a major university press. (Hint: it’s in the same town as the team that just won the World Series.) Not a line or copy editor, the kind of editor that makes decisions about what gets published or not.
Times are hard in scholarly publishing right now; print runs have shrunk, nobody’s buying criticism, and the machine—the deeply flawed machine that goes by the name of publish or perish—is grinding to a halt. There are plenty of very smart people out there, some of whom can even write very well; but whether their books will sell or not is a very hard question to answer. Actually, it isn’t: they mostly won’t.
I used to move in these exalted circles, have intricate discussions about subjects I knew a lot less about than I appeared to (but so, always, did my interlocutors); travel to conferences, try and find the diamond in the rough—the hot new commodity everyone else was also on the lookout for. It was cut-throat and it made your heart beat fast. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and ultimately, too much for me.
Yesterday I got a call from someone who was visiting Davis—an editor I knew well from my conference circuit days. He was giving a talk to graduate students about how to get their work published. His hosts invited me along to dinner—the inevitable expense account dinner—and for an evening, before I went off to the shabby offices of the Yolo Beat Bush/Democratic Party HQ, waiting to get our Nevada assignment for tomorrow, I was transported back to the world of publishing. It was fun. I got to talk to people about their interesting work (and it IS interesting, it turns out, if unpublishable), enthuse, trade jokes, remember Edward Said making one of his grand entrances at MLA with a long black cape (fifteen thousand people would part like the Red Sea).
I’m not sorry I chose a different path. There’s too much posturing in that world, too much bullshitting. But the dinner was a reminder that my life could have been very different—and a great deal more stressful.
17 October 04
Writing for Oprah
When I lived in the 13th (Vietnamese) arrondissement in Paris in the early 80s, my then husband and I were befriended in the supermarket by a sephardic couple (he was learning English, overheard us, wondered about English conversation). They had a television, we did not. They invited us over regularly on Friday nights (their Shabbat evening featured an oil lamp and exquisite stewed clementines) to watch Apostrophes, a show on which the host, Bernard Pivot, interviewed about five or six authors whose books he had read (another gluttonous passion of his was wine, so when he did the wine week with Hugh Johnson and other oenophile writers, it was a double treat: watching this guy ENTHUSE was a spectacle).
The French in general have a much higher level of popular discourse than we do here or in Britain —philosophy is taught as a compulsory subject in high school, so even kids whose destiny is to become mechanics or plumbers have a vague understanding of Descartes and Hegel. Pivot’s show was watched by hundreds of thousands; book design is almost nonexistent as a profession except for children’s books, because the French buy BOOKS to read, not because they’re pretty or enticing on the cover (this would render them suspect, in fact). However, Gallimard, Grasset, and Garnier Flammarion rubbed their corporate hands and stocked up local bookstores in preparation for Friday nights when one of their own was to be featured on Apostrophes, because sales would skyrocket the next day. (Pivot saved them millions of francs in marketing.)
Oprah Winfrey triggers the same hand-rubbing mechanism in publishers here. The books she plugs are in general quite different; though I don’t watch her show (still don’t have a TV), I know enough from spending time in bookstores where the Oprah Book Club sticker pops out at you from all over the place (salivate, salivate go the publishers) that she leans heavily toward fiction about women in history whose stories were inadequately told (if at all). (The genre has become a self-perpetuating one—Maria of Alembic and I were giggling about this during a recent visit: imagine a woman in history about whom almost nothing is known, and make up her life story; get it published; get on Oprah. Pass it on.)
That Oprah is getting millions of Americans to read when they otherwise wouldn’t is a) astonishing b) mahvelous c) slightly sad. But I’m reminded by Siona who is going to lead a discussion about The Red Tent soon that I balk heavily at reading a book that is either recommended by Oprah or that is making the book club circuit. I confess this is probably just on principle. My sister has two small kids and felt her mind turning to jelly—a book club is perfect for her, because she doesn’t have the time or other resources to choose reading material for the couple of hours a week she can spare. (I did read The Red Tent on my sister’s recommendation and did enjoy it, but it adheres to the above formula perfectly.)
I hope my powers of discernment never deteriorate to the point where I can’t figure out what to read by myself, from reviews, or through the recommendations of intelligent, literate friends, many of whom I’ve never met but whose words I read daily in blogland.
The irony is I participate in a pre-digesting activity myself by sitting on the committee to choose next year’s Campus Community Book Project. The irony is that this committee has tremendous power and weight (hey, we do a lot of work for it outside our regular jobs; there has to be SOME payback). I sometimes wonder whether the book project shouldn’t be, instead, the whole campus being the committee: everyone reads all these books and then we vote…
11 September 04
Bloggers Do The Berkeley Bookstore Beat
Today we travelled by train to Berkeley to meet up with bloggers Chris from Creek Running North, Siona from Nomen est Numen, and Maria from Alembic. Our aim was to visit Berkeley bookstores, of which there are a plethora, too many to do in a day, but no matter. We first walked up to Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, the largest and most famous of Berkeley bookstores, where we browsed for an hour, several of us emerging with more books than intended. Siona brought her own lunch so we wanted to eat outside, so we picked up take-out Indian from a restaurant on Telegraph (walk 500 yards in Berkeley, you’ll find an eatery that meets the needs of the moment) and had our lunch by Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. The Indian food made for a messy picnic, but was very good. Meanwhile the Cal marching band was warming for the football game later on in the afternoon. (A bit of Aggie Pride here—I think the UC Davis Marching Band-Uh is better).
Chris had to leave early, but the rest of walked down Shattuck to the used bookstore Pegasus, where I found a book on line-and-wash (our third art book purchase of the day). Our return trek netted us an office supply store (complete with Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks, as well as Lamy and Stypen fountain pens—Maria bought a Lamy pen), as well a decent espresso place by the BART station.
Too many things to do in Berkeley as usual. No chance to visit art stores, alas. We even found a very intriguing new restaurant half-a-block from BART—Ristorante Raphael, kosher Italian vegetarian food. But we were full from our Indian meal, so it will wait for next time.
These blogger bookstore outings are quite fun. Perhaps we should all next go on a field trip to Powell’s!
9 September 04
El Diccionario del Besbol
This resource came in handy this evening, before attending my Spanish class.
From the National Baseball Hall of Fame