VOTE on the Mental Health of George W. Bush
Check the Booker Prizes.
Best book of this quarter: The Body Artist
by
Don DeLillo.
"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." [G.K. Chesterson]
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
Inspired in part by
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VOTE on the Mental Health of George W. Bush Check the Booker Prizes. |
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Best book of this quarter: The Body Artist
by
Don DeLillo.
|
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"Peace is not the absence of conflict - it is the presence of justice."
[Martin Luther King, Jr.]
"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." [G.K. Chesterson] |
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{ September (septiembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
(09.30.2004)
This book is a blessing of amazing poems - poems that met Emily Dickinson's test, for they take off the top of my head. This book is the deserving winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Astonishingly, his work has not yet appeared in The Best American Poetry Series.
Surreal. Many of these poems are creepy. Mostly inaccessible compared with his Jackstraws.
Charles Simic [from an interview with J.M. Spalding] has expressed disdain for Paul Breslin and his review of Walking the Black Cat by saying: "I would consider myself a total failure in life if Paul Breslin or someone like William Logan admired my work. Everything I have ever done as a poet was done in contempt of what he regards as 'good' poetry. A man without a trace of imagination or original ideas, Breslin is the incarnation of smug, academic mediocrity. He is as close to understanding poetry as Lawrence Welk is to playing jazz."
Seamus Heaney has written: Many famous U.S.A. poets admire this book and it was a finalist for the National Book Award. Seamus Heaney has written about Simic's work: "Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness. The magic dance is being kept up to keep calamity at bay."
| "a state-of-the-art facility that simultaneously attains instant landmark status and reinvents the library for the electronic age." |
Other quotes include:
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"It is only on the inside that the brilliance of [architect] Koolhaas's conception is
fully apparent [... The conception is] not as an enigmatic urban sculpture
but as a light-flooded glasshouse that can trace its origins directly to the founding
monument of modernism, Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace of 1850-51.
... Koolhaas betrays no interest in fancy materials, costly details, and fine finishes. Because the budget and his thinking are focused elsewhere, the client gets a huge bang for the buck. ... To maintain the Dewey decimal system in an uninterrupted flow -- always a problem in buildings that can't be expanded sequentially -- publications are organized along a rectangular ramp system called the books spiral, which extends through five levels of the 11-story structure. 'Our logic,' says [Seattle's city librarian Deborah] Jacobs, 'is that you can never predict at what rate subjects grow. Who knew 20 years ago that the Middle East section would need to be so big?' ... The predominant feeling is one of strong color and diffused luminosity." |
This sad, emotionally difficult, and unredemptive book takes some determination to complete. It won the 1999 Booker prize.
The protagonist, a college professor named David Lurie, forces sex upon one of his female students. He deludes himself into believing that she likes him and the sex, until she files a complaint against him to the college.
David seems unable to apologize. He resigns and flees to his daughter, a lesbian who boards dogs and grows flowers and potatoes that she sells in market. Her home is robbed and vandalized by three young men who rape the daughter.
Because the material is so painful and the characters so unsympathetic, I would hope that the writing of it was a catharsis for Mr. Coetzee. However, I cannot recommend it.
Funny poems - sometimes "funny ha-ha" (like a Billy Collins poem but achieving less altitude), such as "On the Meadow", which contains:
"one or two ants May have tumbled on their backs ... Wondering if anyone's coming to their aid Bringing cake crumbs, Miniature editions of the Bible, A lost thread or two Cleverly tied end to end." |
and sometimes "funny peculiar". My favorite is his poem dedicated to, and owing much of its style to, Charles Wright. It's called "Mystic Life", and begins:
"It's like fishing in the dark, If you ask me: Our thoughts are the hooks, Our hearts the raw bait." |
[Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with The World Doesn't End.]
This book is a slightly fictionalized autobiography of Sassoon's valiant military service and then conscientious objecting in the First World War. It gives a realistic, first-hand view of life in the trenches and at the battlefront, and contrasts that life with the domestic calm back in Britain, which Sassoon experienced on medical leave.
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) joined the British Army in 1914 at the start of the First World War. Anxious for active service, he got himself moved into the first Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in November 1915, three weeks after his younger brother (Hamo Watts Sassoon) died from his wounds at Gallipoli. Twelve days after that, the first Battalion left for the Somme.
Much of what happened to Sassoon - particularly the military actions that he initiated (including his single-handed attack and conquest of a gun-defended German stronghold) - appear in the novel. Sassoon shows a more sensible self-awareness in the writing than in the doing.
Eventually he tempered his recklessness a little, and turned his passion for bravery into more constructive actions, such as getting as many as possible of the dead and wounded men back into the British trenches, for which he was awarded a Military Cross.
Among his criticisms of the War were:
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"this camouflage War, which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations
of people who had never seen the real thing ...
You have ceased to believe what you are told about the objects for which you supposed yourself to be fighting... Hatred makes one vital, and without it one loses energy... I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." |
Sassoon was liable to be court-martialed for his public "wilful defiance". However his fellow officer, the writer Robert Graves (1895-1985) saved Sassoon from trial and likely imprisonment, by persuading decision makers to diagnose Sassoon as " suffering from shell-shock" and to send Sassoon (in July 1917) Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh.
It is interesting to compare this with Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938). Both men write clearly. Sassoon puts himself deeper into danger than Orwell, and has a stronger sense of ironic humor to ward off his fears. Orwell is much more of a political analyst, as befits a journalist. But both men are trying to understand why they are fighting and what is "the right thing to do" in complex circumstances.
Earlier he wrote Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), which won the Hawthornden Prize. He later wrote The Memoirs of George Sherston. These three books are the trilogy The Memoirs of George Sherston.
Dr. Kate Carr documents her life in a type of middle-aged Bridget Jones Diary, which initially seemed a bit slow and self-absorbed, but turns into a slightly surreal, slightly sarcastic exploration of what it means to be "Good". Her husband, David, is converted to being "Good" by a faith healer ("DJ Goodnews"), who then moves into their home, to the annoyance of Kate and mystification of their two small children. It is somewhat of a relief when we finally discover that "Goodnews" has problems of his own, although it comes as a disappointment to David.
Avoid this book.
I have just finished slogging my way (intermittently for a month) through
Underworld (1997)
by Don DeLillo.
A decade ago, I read War and Peace one Summer, taking my time with the story, the characters, and the words, carrying the book to coffee shops, Laundromats, and on a summer backpacking trip into high Sierra country. What a feast of a novel - a moveable feast, too.
Underworld is, of course, totally feeble by comparison, except in its gravitational pull, as the book's mass is that of a small moon of Jupiter. But the tome is merely a collage of information (journalism and opinion), which the flour-and-water paste of diverse and intermittent narrative fails to hold together.
I tried to enter Underworld a few years ago, and dropped it. However, following my delight in his The Body Artist, and after reading enormous praise for Underworld, I tried it again. I did finish it so that I can pontificate that the whole is as bad as the portion I remembered.
Don DeLillo writes (about a third of the way through the book):
| "Pain is just another form of information." |
The frequent hooks to get the reader to continue reading were a little heavy-handed, as if the author had taken classes in writing soap operas or telenovelas. But pleasant enough to skim on a sultry Labor Day afternoon.
"Fable, parable, and family legend" says the jacket.
"Boldly playful, gymnastic and surreal" it quotes the Kenyon Review.
"Charming" it quotes Booklist.
I could have done with a little less charm and a little more guts, like the amazing "Refugio's Hair", a poem of terror buried among these gentle narrative poems.
[Her What was she Thinking [Notes on a Scandal] was (under its UK title Notes on a Scandal) on the short-list for the 2003 Booker Prize.]
Everything you Know, Zoe Heller's first novel, tells the story of suspected wife murderer Willy Muller, who made lots of money from his memoir and his notoriety, and from churning out "sleb" biographies. Willy is permanently though wittily angry with everyone around him, including himself. He alienated his two daughters after his wife's (Oona's) death, and he is now trying to understand the suicide of Sadie, his younger daughter and the suddenly received diary of Sadie's sad life.
In between the crash and bang of bodies and talk and booze, Willy momentary ponders his morality:
| "And I am bad. A bad, bad man. I have to be - because there's only that or being good, right? ... it seems like there should be more options on the moral menu. If doing the thing is so bloody extraordinary, then not doing it should be considered regular. If those Poles who hid Jews in their haystacks were really such saints, why are the Poles who said to the Jews, fuck no, get out of here before you get me killed - why are they such scoundrels?" |
And he reminisces about his wife and what was probably a meeting of equals:
| "In the roar and crash of battle, she would say literally anything: that your breath revolted her, that your appearances on television were 'embarassing', that she fancied one of your colleagues. The point of an argument, as she saw it, was to inflict pain. And if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing with unimaginable spleen. ... Never, in the fifteen years I lived with her, was there a single moment when I got her to step back with the gratifyingly flummoxed, watery expression of someone truly hurt." |
Willy's life - dark and hilarious and one I am delighted I am not in - appears to be such a no-holds-barred fight, until finally he tries to start paying his moral debts.
Heller is said to have based Willy Muller on her own father Lukas Heller, a screenwriter. I hope that life did not include the murder of a wife and the suicide of a daughter.
Given Heller's skill with cutting remarks and dismissive opinions, she has received an education in the funny-yet-revolting aspects of disgust. And I certainly admit that at times the book made me laugh out loud. However, that single tone can grow tiring. So it is pleasing to see it expressed more subtly in What was she Thinking [Notes on a Scandal].
{ August (agosto (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
The book is a scholar's readable examination of how the New Testament associate Satan with Jews resistant to the teachings of Christianity.
See a separate article for the chapters and notes on The Origin of Satan (1996) notes.
Little of interest except for some of his throw-away definitions, such as:
A disappointment if you are looking for poetry: it's all prose. To see good examples of his poetry, read his Velocities (1994).
The long and illustrious tradition of collaborative verse has flourished across centuries, from the sung sagas of the Norse and the Greeks to the linked verse in the Japanese traditions. Braided Creek is another extension of this tradition. The authors do not identify which poem was written by which man. They blend their voices so skillfully that this reader did not experience a conversation between two poets so much as a conversation with the reader of the rich work of a new meta poet 'Harrison-Kooser'.
The poems are haiku-like in length (between 1 and 5 short lines) and in juxtaposition of images. While the poems are original and unique, within the body of the conversation are flashes of poems that echo aspects of the poetic tradition and that could have been offered to us by Rumi, by Issa, by an unusually cheerful and concise Robert Bly, or (as in the following from p.37) by W.S. Merwin:
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"What is it the wind has lost
that she keeps looking for under each leaf?" |
This insightful and meditative book is closest to the Japanese tradition: it observes details of the animals and plants in the lives of the authors, and assesses loss and death, such as (p.71):
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"An uncommon number of us die
on our birthdays. You turn a bend an abruptly you're back home." |
Being very much in the world, they are not afraid to touch on current (early 21st century) politics (p.43):
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"First deer fly emerged solstice morning
bent on hell, creature torture. But like Bush among his fly friends he's a nice guy." |
Several of my many favorites are on time, as this (p.2):
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"Each clock tick falls
like a raindrop, right through the floor as if it were nothing." |
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"I hope there's time
for this and that and not just this." |
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"A welcome mat of moonlight
on the floor. Wipe your feet before getting into bed." |
I strongly recommend this book.
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press.
This story of at least four obsessions raises thoughts of our responsibilities to ourselves, families, and friends, and on the reliability of whoever tells their story.
The creepily funny Barbara Covett becomes obsessed with a new, weak fellow teacher, Sheba Hart, who starts an affair with an under-age and learning-disabled male student. Meanwhile, at least one of the male teachers is infatuated by Sheba; presumably out of his frustrated jealousy, he informed the school head of Sheba's affair.
Sheba herself is married to a much older man, who was once her teacher. I believe that not only was there an obsession on at least one side of that relationship, but also that Sheba used her unequal-age marriage as one her rationalizations to justify her current affair.
Barbara on Sheba:
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"Sheba talks this way - as if she were a passive victim of fate
rather than the principal architect of her own suffering. It's rather late in the day for her to start acting the stricken mother. She ought to have been thinking of Ben's [her Down's syndrome son's] welfare back when she was first batting her eyelids at Connolly [the under-age student]." |
Sheba to Barbara after reading a draft of this manuscript:
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"'You're mad! You really believe this stuff is the truth.'
... 'What an idiot I've been to trust you. All that filth and lies you've been writing ...' ... 'You have such delusions of grandeur, don't you?'" |
| "In the tyranny of the army, a man becomes a brute, a piece of machinery." |
Dos Passos is a much more interesting novelist than his friend and contemporary, Ernest Hemingway (who is better in a short-story sprint than a novel's marathon). Dos Passos interweaves a complexity of characters, including believable women. He treats his characters, especially his central three soldiers, with a lot of respect for their hopes, their needs, and their losses.
A PBS program on Dos Passos quotes him as saying some things that resonate today as much as almost a century ago:
| "Of all the things in this world, a government is the least worth fighting for." |
and that in his work he tries to express:
| "man's struggle for life against the strangling institutions that he himself creates." |
I have added his USA trilogy to my must read list: in that same PBS program, Normal Mailer declares that if there is a great American novel, it is USA.
Also I appreciated Anthony Lane's movie review of The Village in the recent New Yorker, for including observations that echo the spirit of the above quotes by Dos Passos:
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"From the start, the civilization that is depicts is seldom less than creepy;
you find yourself asking what savagery has been left behind in order to arrive at such an idyll, even whether it could - just could - be in the interests of the idyllic that the claws of intimidation be kept sharp. You may scoff at the idea that a community would not just prep itself but define itself by declaring an ever higher level of threat, in which case I would draw your attention to any newspaper of the past month." |
For more, see our Exercise Resources (books and recordings)
One hopes that Ms. Rhys' life was better than this:
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"If I thought you'd kill me, I'd come away with you right now and no questions asked.
And what's more, you could have any money I've got with my blessing." Jean Rhys |
See also Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
(08.15.2004)
A founding belief of the Mormon Church (created in the USA early in the 19th-century) is that true believers can speak directly with God.
"I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." says someone with a similar belief system: George W. Bush (reported in the Lancaster (Pa.) New Era from a private meeting with Amish families on July 9. The White House has said Bush was misquoted. Or perhaps he misspoke.)
Krakauer's book concerns murders committed by Mormons, who claimed they were fulfilling the doctrine of 'blood atonement' preached by their founders Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.
The book's motivating story is of Ron and Dan Lafferty, two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, who claimed they received orders from their God to kill the wife and child of their youngest brother. (Note that the Mormon Church now excommunicates Mormon Fundamentalists.) Their rationalization was that the wife (whom they knifed to death in 1984 together with her baby daughter) had helped the wife of one of the killers to leave her marriage after the husband declared he was about to become polygamous.
Other reported murders include the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when Mormons dressed as Paiutes massacred people in a wagon train heading to California.
Krakauer gives a history of founder Joseph Smith, a crystal gazer, who had been found guilty of being 'a disorderly person and an impostor' only a few years before he 'discovered' gold plates and magic spectacles that allowed him to translate them.
Krakauer also reports the Mormons' practice of 'Lying for the Lord': Brigham Young himself once bragged, "We have the greatest and smoothest liars in the world."
It is noted that the Mormon families are well behaved compared with those of the rest of the USA, and seem happier. But as DeLoy Bateman (a survivor of Mormonism) is quoted at the end:
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"But some things in life are more important than being happy.
Like being free to think for yourself." |
(08.13.2004)
For more, see our Exercise Resources (books and recordings)
(08.08.2004)
One of today's words is:
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de vuelta. back.
Estaré de vuelta. I'll be back. |
(08.06.2004)
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The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo (2001),
in the unabridged audio CD, read by performance artist Laurie Anderson. The body artist is Lauren Hartke, a performer who manipulates her own body and the perceptions of her audience. Reviewers calling this a ghost story are mistaken. Reviewers writing that the story contains an eavesdropper are correct, though the eavesdropper is Lauren Hartke, not (as they claim) the fictitious idiot savant that appears in a spare room. For the novel is a story about how one artist creates her work from her passions and her losses, from the aggregation of her experiences and her memories. And it shows how she integrates and communicates them through her medium, which is, for Lauren Hartke, her body. |
{ July (julio (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
(07.27.2004)
This is another Crace book in iambics, which make the story a bit ponderous and I find distracting. His protagonist is a feeble and irresponsible actor, who gets every woman pregnant, especially the last time he has sex with her. Passive-aggressive, one might say. I have little sympathy for this character. (Crace numbers his chapters by the sequence of conceptions, and indulges himself in opening with Chapter 6.)
For a more enthralling book by Crace, see his The Gift of Stones (the 6th best book I read in 2002), which addressed life in an ancient and pivotal time when a tribe moved from the Stone culture to the Bronze culture.
However, one thing I like about Genesis is its refusal to locate the country (a Crace trope) where this story is set, with familiar-yet-unfamiliar names of plants and customs: not England, France, Poland. It's European, nonexistent or maybe Hungary in a parallel universe.
Best review (i.e., the one whose opinions I share, except for the 'stirrings of sympathy') is that by Anthony Quinn, film critic for The Independent in London. Quinn writes
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"Ever since his first book, Continent, which was set on an invented
landmass, the topography in Jim Crace's fiction has contrived to be both
piercingly strange and naggingly familiar, an amalgam of the imaginary and the
realistic in which the local flora might be a fessandra bush
and the swag-fly is an irritant."
"As the book proceeds, one feels stirrings of sympathy for Lix that never quite break into curiosity. ... his plight remains oddly remote from us, since Crace is less interested in Lix as a forlorn individual than as a representative of mankind's baser instincts and motivations." "Technically, Crace can be depended upon for an elegance of language, though one notices in this novel how often the aphoristic style rings false: 'Successful people are too busy, as the saying goes, to take care of the chickens.' Are they? What exactly have chickens to do with successful people? ... the sentences have a lyrical shimmer, but the closer one looks the less meaningful they appear. ... Genesis is a clenched and ponderous effort." Published: 11 - 23 - 2003 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 2 , Page 8
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"I sit at my window and words fly past me like birds -- with God's help I catch some."
Jean Rhys |
See also Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.
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What is the most obvious mental health problem of
G. W. Bush?
|
(07.17.2004)
Finished: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance [or should that be 'Zero-Tolerance' with a hyphen] Approach to Punctuation (2003) by Lynne Truss.
A hilarious and readable (5 sunny hours) book on punctuation by newspaper writer and radio commentator Lynne Truss.
(07.11.2004)
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What is the most obvious mental health problem of
G. W. Bush?
|
Rather than read the book, with its complete lack of punctuation, I listened to it on tape (by Gianfranco Negroponte), which had the additional bonus of a recorded interview with its author. Carey says that the style of his book matches that of the Jerilderie letter written by Ned Kelly, thus giving the book a voice never heard before in a novel. In an interview published in the UK's The Observer, Kelly credits Faulkner as an influence, through such books as As I Lay Dying.
The novel interleaves documented history with Carey's inventions of people and characters. The historical Australian Ned (Edward) Kelly was born June 1855 and executed in 1880.
The book is presented as if written by Ned Kelly for the education of his fictional daughter about her father, a daughter born of his fictional love affair with Mary Hearn. One aspect of the book that especially delighted me was Kelly's sensitivity to his fictional daughter's womanhood, by: (1) being coy about sexual behavior and (2) omitting obscenities, which would otherwise occur on every page. Example of the latter are: "Im [no punctuation except for full stops!] very adjectival tired of lying cheating men" and "It was ess this and eff that."
The U.S.A. has its slave heritage and Australia has its criminal heritage, for it was to Australia that the Victorians deported many of their convicts. Ned Kelly's father was John 'Red' Kelly, born in 1820 in Tipperary, Ireland (d. 1866). John was transported from Ireland in 1841 for stealing pigs. Ned was John's eldest child. In 1865, John Kelly was arrested for stealing a heifer.
Carey keeps returning to the Australian criminals (see also Jack Maggs), whom he presents as good-hearted, misunderstood, and abused people. In the above mentioned interview in The Observer, he says that Ned Kelly is "not like Jesse James [... but] like Thomas Jefferson. That is the sort of space Kelly occupies in the national imagination."
I, however, am skeptical about Ned Kelly. Remove the fictional daughter and fictional lover and the coy treatment of sexual and profane material, and the resulting story is a savage tale of a robber who robbed and threatened men and women and children, stole herds of horses, robbed banks, killed three cops, and planned to derail (presumably causing death) a train full of policemen. In 2004 in the U.S.A., such a man could be called a terrorist, or at least someone with an Antisocial Personality Disorder (DSM 301.7).
Was Ned Kelly a psychopath or was he or a folk hero? My guess is that he was both. Kelly claims that he only killed someone if it were necessary. But he certainly seems to have threatened to kill a lot of people, and a lot of people seemed to have believed that he would do so.
In his interview on the tape, Carey is asked for advice to would-be writers. He suggests three things:
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(07.08.2004)
(07.06.2004)
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press. Among my favorites are his 6-line poems such as The Executions on Piíncipe Pío Hill (p.90), which contains:
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"... I keep stepping back --
across an ocean, across time, backing away, hoping it will focus into something I can bear." |
and the second part of On What Planet (p.43), which ends:
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"... explorer's gentian
(Gentiana calycosa), summer's last flowers Go on, kneel down, get up close, peer into one ... It's like looking into a chalice flecked with stars Then the mind will give a little nudge, and you are there, inside the singing, in a luminous alien night." |
|
What is the most obvious mental health problem of
G. W. Bush?
|
This documentary is sadder and wiser than his previous films. It is full of information and the recognition of human suffering. It also documents the gradual disillusioning of some of our soldiers in C-in-C George W. Bush.
It centers on his "Life Laws", whose emphasis on responsibility does sit well with me. They can help lead you, he says, to a good and happy life by taking responsibility for all its aspects (including your attitude to the "wrongs" done to you):
Yes, we know all this. Sort of. But hearing it from a recorded workshop, from a man who talks like he's mud wrestling with a pig and working with real-life situations, seems like a wake-up gust of air. This expresses much of the material in Life Strategies but in a more lively and interesting way. McGraw is much better (like the Sundance Kid - or was it Butch?) if he moves.
(07.02.2004)
(07.01.2004)
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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