Southernbooklady's reading journal for 2014

Well, I am completely new to this group, which I confess I joined because I saw there was going to be a discussion group devoted to science/history/religion books and that The Selfish Gene might be on the list. That's a favorite of mine so I'd like to take part.

In truth, I've been looking for a good way to keep a reading journal that others could see, but without the hassles that come with maintaining a blog, so the 75 books challenge group seemed like a good fit.

I work in the book industry, in the American South, but live alone on the coast of North Carolina except for two dogs and three and a half cats, and while they are great company they aren't so good at discussing books. I do most of my reading at my library table, although I'll listen to audio books when I'm baking or gardening or trying to get through some incredibly tedious housecleaning task. Hopefully, this will be a place I can natter on about books with others.

I read pretty much everything except diet and self-help books, but I'm not an expert in anything and I don't follow reading plans or challenges very well--I suspect I won't get near the 75 mark. Instead I let books lead me to other books, so that my reading life is very much a meandering one, constantly blown off course by the interesting and unexpected. Invariably these turn out to be the best books I read in any given year.

So be forewarned, if you check in here--this is probably going to be the most unstructured thread in the group.

Hi Nicki - Welcome to the group! I just perused your favorite authors and think we may have some reading interests in common, so I've starred your thread. I was particularly thrilled to see Sylvia Townsend Warner, as I started a trip through her catalog last year - so far I've only read Mr. Fortune's Maggot and Summer Will Show.

Lolly Willowes is a favorite. But I loved Summer Will Show!

Hi - nice to see you here!

ETA--I should have read your first post more thoroughtly! I know you'll have great input on the Science, Religion and History thread.

#3 - Lolly Willowes is up next! I quite liked Summer Will Show, although it was a bit colder than I thought it would be - I think I anticipated a slightly more passionate love story. I had to sort of adjust expectations mid-way through, which was fine. It worked. I'm also very interested the Claire Harman biography. Have you read that? Ok. Sorry to talk your ear off about STW. :-)

Checking in here. I see we have 175 books in common so I'll see what you are reading.

>5 DorsVenabili: I'm also very interested the Claire Harman biography. Have you read that?

I haven't. I didn't even realize she'd written a biography of Warner. I do have her biography of RL Stephenson wishlisted. I have a weakness for biographies of writers, artists, and scientists.

Hi Nicki - welcome! As a total book voyeur (voyeuse?), I confess to watching most of the video tour of your home library. It reminds me a bit of mine!

Hope you enjoy our little group here. I've starred your thread so I can follow along on your journey this year.

Welcome! I see you have a Little Free Library. Squeakychu and several others here have 'em as well. Lookslike you're in good company. :)

Hi Nicki, I've seen your posts elsewhere on LT and I'm intrigued to see what you decide to read and your thoughts on the books! I am a meandering reader as well, no structure or plan. It works well for me too.

Welcome!

I confess to being curious about the half a cat!

>11 countrylife: All my pets are rescues of one sort or another. Iago is a nearly feral grey striped tabby who I've been luring into a sense of trust. He's almost at the point where he'll let me touch him. Once I can, I'll catch him and take him for his shots, make sure he's fixed etc. But right now he's still at the point where he won't allow being picked up. So he's not quite "mine" yet.

Well we share about 700 books, so I'll be interested in following your thread as well. I also watched your library tour, and I am so envious of all the books you have. I especially like the fact that it seemed that so many of your books have a history. It's like each and everyone of them is an old friend or family member of yours.

Welcome to the 75'ers.

I'm glad you clarified that half a cat!

Nicki, welcome to the group and Happy New Year.

Welcome to the group, Nicki!

Welcome! I lurk occasionally on Hot Topics, and I’ve admired your posts for intelligence and civility.

The Hare by Cesar Aira



So the first book to go in my reading journal is also one that is very hard to describe. The truth is, I'm a little addicted to Cesar Aira, I like to read his books at night before I go to bed because they are so vivid and give me such strange dreams (an experience I've written about elsewhere). His willingness to let his plots run away with themselves while the author veers wildly between philosophical digressions and diamond-bright imagery would be frustrating, I think, to people who like their novels to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, preferably in that order.

But I love it.

The Hare is no exception. It's longer than Aira's other works, and apparently one of Aira's earlier novels although it has just recently been translated into English. Ostensibly, it is the story of a British naturalist in the 19th century traveling through the Pampas in search of a rare animal called the Legibrereian hare, which is said to be able to fly. But like all quest stories, it turns out that his not what his journey becomes, and not what he is really seeking. As he travels, on a special horse, with a taciturn guide and an excitable young companion, the naturalist makes his way through various Indian tribes, becomes embroiled in their politics and possibly their mythology. As he is ruminating on the differences between himself and the natives, those differences become less and less distinct, harder and harder to define, until at last he is left facing off against himself--one version streaked with war paint, one calm and collected and suitably "civilized." It is a literal meeting of doppelgangers, by the way...Aira adores juxtapositions and litters them throughout all his books.

Others have expressed some reservations about Aira's apparently facile associations between the European/rational and Native/irrational, and there is something to this critique, but it didn't bug me since everything in the book is walking symbolism. Readers looking for a straight up quest story might find that annoying, especially since Aira rarely lets his characters actually finish a thought or a narrative without getting interrupted, so all the talk has a way of getting constantly diverted into unexpected directions.

But at this point I'm an old hand at Aira's brand of runaway storytelling. I've learned to just go along for the ride. Expect anything. Embrace everything. You are always rewarded, if by nothing else, then by the scenery. Nobody paints more beautiful and breath taking pictures, like this sight of a woman who has been bathing in a lake:

This was Juana Pitiley; Clarke was sure of it, even though he had never seen her before. She was naked, and was covered from head to foot in dried salt, which gleamed in the sun like diamond dust. Despite her years, which could not have been less than sixty, she was a beautiful, imposing woman, and so tall that the Indians opposite her looked like squinting dwarves. She was very still. She must have already heard the news, but said nothing. There was something tragic, or indifferent--but in either case, sublime--in the way she stood immobile. Clarke could not take his eyes off her, or continue on his way. An inexplicable fascination drew him to the sight. It seemed to him as though she raised her eyes, sparkling with salt crystals, to look in his direction. Shen they finally got going again, she had still not moved. In his confused state after seeing such a vision, Clarke was sorry he had been unable to talk to her about the famous Hare. Yet at the same time he realized it would have been useless to try to do so directly. She did not seem the kind of woman who responded to questions. In fact, she did not seem the kind who spoke at all to mere mortals.

And so it goes. Every step of Clarke's journey because a series of tumbling cascading visionary moments which reach a final crescendo in the last pages of the story, on a mountain, in the moonlight.

Once again, it gave me weird and wonderful dreams.

Nicki, you've intrigued me with Cesar Aria. Which of his shorter books would you suggest as a first read?

>19 UnrulySun: The first I read, and the least surreal, was a book called An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. It is historical fiction, of a sort, centered around a real person, a German painter who was traveling in Argentina and was struck by lightening, causing a permanent nerve damage that affected his art.

I have a fondness for stories about writers and artists. This one is a more straightforward narrative than others, but you still have to be willing to let go of expectations.

My other favorite of his is a weird little story called Ghosts, which I reviewed here:

http://www.bibliobuffet.com/a-reading-life-columns-193/archive-index-a-reading-l...

Once again, some stunning imagery. In this case, the story takes place in a half-finished high-rise condo , which is missing most of its walls and is still an exposed skeleton of beams and girders. The passage of time in the story is marked by the shadows of the steel support columns as they crawl along the unfinished cement floors. It's very beautiful.

Your thread can certainly not be any more unorganized than mine is, Nicki! Welcome to the group!

Interesting. My library only has copies of Maus: a Survivor's Tale translated by Aira into Spanish. Looks like I'll have to track something by him down on my own!

The Kingdom of the Ants



Not a book to read unless you are specifically interested not only in ants, but in the history of their scientific study. I supposed that's probably about six people, altogether, including the translator (Jose Duran) and the editor (E.O Wilson--whose enthusiasm for the subject of ants leaves very little for the rest of us).

But I liked it, of course. I like stories of people fascinated by the small things we walk by without notice. I've been drawn to them ever since my mother put a copy of Gerry Durrell's My Family and Other Animals in my hands as a child.

Then too, I like stories of naturalist-explorers--especially those of the Enlightenment era, who fanned out over the globe fired with the conviction that the world was knowable, that it could make sense.

In this case, the explorer was Jose Celestino Mutis, who traveled to New Grenada (what is now Columbia) to study plants and and animals under the haphazard guidance of Carl Linneaus...he who wished to classify every living thing. And he didn't "explore" so much as go native. Most travelers in foreign lands come and go in the space of weeks. Mutis arrived in Grenada and stayed for nearly 50 years.

And then of course there is the fact that ants--like almost every living creature on the planet--are incredibly interesting. The detailed descriptions of how the leaf-cutter ants create vast "gardens' of fungi in their cities, and of Mutis's shock on the discovery that ants are mostly female, and the males are winged and weak things whose only function is to impregnate the queen...and again his faithful description of the way farmers dealt with the threat of marauding species...and his care to remain objective regarding all he observed...all of this puts Mutis on my growing list of people I'd like to have dinner with.

23: I supposed that's probably about six people, altogether
Ooh, I'm one! Onto the wishlist.

>24 qebo: Ooh, I'm one!

I suppose all my favorite naturalists and nature writing share this quality--the capacity to be amazed by the small dramas of life that are always occurring all around us.

There's a passage in My Family and Other Animals where Gerry Durrell, having discovered the existence of trapdoor spiders, becomes obsessed by them:

The facts he told me about the trapdoor spider haunted me: the idea of the creature crouching in its silken tunnel, holding the door closed with its hooked claws, listening to the movement of the insects on the moss above. What, I wondered, did things sound like to a trapdoor spider? I could imagine that a snail would trail over the door with a noise like sticking-plaster being slowly torn off. A centipede would sound like a knife-grinder at work. The larger beetles, I decided, would sound like steam-rollers, while the smaller ones, the lady-birds and others, would probably purr over the moss like clockwork motor cars.

"What do things sound like to a trapdoor spider?"

Somehow, without realizing it, that sentiment stuck in my head as a little girl and has colored the way I look out at the world ever since. Not "What does this look like to me?" but "What does this look like to them?"

Mutis does have that quality in his journals, although the sections covered in The Kingdom of the Ants are fragmentary and culled to just the passages he wrote about ants.

Actually all my favorite nature-writing has this quality to it: Annie Dillard, sitting on her rock by Tinker Creek watching a frog deflate to a bag of skin as it is killed by a predatory bug, Henri Fabre, watching the little insects in the fields behind his house. Janisse Ray, trolling the edges of her father's junkyard and the pine forest that surrounded it, unable to pass by a fallen log without turning it over to see what is underneath.

Spillover by David Quammen

"Infectious disease is all around us. Infectious disease is a king of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems." --David Quammen

That statement summarizes the one thing Quammen wants to get across in his book, the one point he wants drummed into our consciousnesses. We are not islands. We are not immune, or separate, or isolated, or apart from the world we live in. And Spillover, ostensibly an journalistic account of "zoonotic" diseases and the epidemics they have caused among us, is not only a warning to keep this point in mind, but also a kind of awe-struck exploration of its implications.

"Zoonotic" diseases, of course, are diseases we get from other animals--like rabies when we are bit by infected dogs or bats, Lyme diseases via ticks, H5N1--aka, the "Avian Flu" that comes from handling birds, etc. We don't often think about it, but the processes that allow an organism or a virus to inhabit one species, then jump (or "spill") over into another and successfully reproduce are complex, rather amazing, and fraught with significance when it comes to understanding our place in this giant ecosystem we call "Earth."

Quammen divides the book into sections, with each section focusing on one particular zoonotic pathogen. Hendra, Ebola, SARS..even Malaria, which turns out to have a complex history, part of which is zoonotic. There is an extensive section on HIV that is thorough, even-handed, and absolutely heart breaking. Each section traces the history of the disease, its first appearance, its most recent outbreaks, and the steps people who track such things take to identify, target, and combat it. The book has a ton of heroes, and not all of them are tramping through the bush looking for sick gorillas. Most of them are wearing white coats and working long hours in unremarkable laboratories at various Schools of Public Health.

Read a little ways in, and the odds are your stomach will go a little queasy over the unflinching description of what a horse infected with Hendra looks and sounds like as it is dying. Read a little further, and you will start to wonder if you shouldn't be stocking up on Purell, disinfectant wipes, and possibly Hazmat suits. But read further still, and something strange starts to happen. Instead of becoming increasingly overwhelmed with fear of the potential lethality of every innocuous bug bite, you become enmeshed in the author's portrayal of our seething and volatile environment. The more you read, the more you understand. The more you understand, the less you fear.

Years ago when I lived in Boston, there was a brief scare about West Nile Virus. A number of townships, responding to the panic, hired pest control companies to come spray the communities--a somewhat futile endeavor for places well-supplied in ponds, streams, rivers and lakes. The result was that many mosquitoes were killed, as we're many small fish in the ponds--the exact fish that normal fed off mosquito eggs. And the following season was the worst mosquito season on record. No West Nile Virus made an appearance, however.

The last section of Quammen's book takes us to task for our simplistic approach to things like disease outbreaks, our desire to find the "magic bullet" that will get rid of malaria, or HIV, or Flu, or even gypsy moths, once and for all. Nature, he makes abundantly clear, does not operate via magic bullets. It is a system of checks and balances, wherein every new "check" we create affects the balance of everything else. But if we can't conquer these zoonotic diseases, we can perhaps control them, minimizing the risk they pose and the damage they can do. Until the next unlooked-for pandemic hits, that's the best strategy we've got.

Which, on a micro level, means that you should go ahead and get your flu shot.

Away for several days, in Boston as it happens, have as yet unarticulated thoughts on post 25, but for the moment, are you aware that there's a group read of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? I noticed it earlier today.

I didn't know, but I've starred it now. I'd love to have a good discussion about that book. It's one of the first books I remember reading together with my mother.

A Thousand Mornings



I've been reading Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings, and I think I have finally discovered what it is about her-- I love the ideas in her poetry, but her language rarely has the same vivaciousness or beauty as her sense of vision:

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count
the leaves on a single tree. To do this I
have to climb branch by branch and
write down the numbers in a little book.
So, I suppose, from their point of view,
it's reasonable that my friends say: what
foolishness! She's got her head in the clouds
again.

But it's not. Of course I have to give up,
but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder
of it--the abundance of the leaves, the
quietness of the branches, the hopelessness
of my effort. And I am in that delicious
and important place, roaring with laughter,
full of earth-praise.

"Full of earth praise" is a good description of the poetry of Mary Oliver. She homes in on moments of it in everything from a bird chattering in a shrub to a caught fish, to a tree, defoliated by a storm leafing out again out of season. (That poem, "Hurricane" resonated with me because I have lived through many a hurricane and seen the Bradford pears drop all their wind-desiccated leaves in the aftermath, and burst into bloom in September, fully seven months out of season).

And I love her earth praise, I do. That quiet wonder that seems to overtake her at the smallest thing. I have this idea of her standing out in the open, arms spread towards the wind and the weather and the fullness of life, taking it all into herself.

But her words are not as beautiful as her vision. She sometimes calls them prayers, but prayers are often very beautiful. Mary Oliver's poetry is....accessible. But it is not...gorgeous. Where it comes close, the thought becomes a little trite:

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

it's like you can have the idea, or the vision, but not both.

My favorite poem in the collection was called "Hum, Hum"; which I won't reproduce here because the spacing it important, but it is about how the music of the bees, the music of live, works its way into her even when life has been something that must be survived, rather than lived.

It would be wrong to say I don't like the poetry of Mary Oliver--I do, oh so very much. She writes about things I see and feel when I'm walking in my own garden, or along my own bit of sea marsh. But while her poetry might give me a feeling of quiet comfort and pleasure, it doesn't make me shiver, and it doesn't make me gasp in shock. And it almost never makes me think "that is the most beautiful line I have ever read."

Street of Crocodiles and Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz

I've been re-visiting Schulz for an upcoming profile I'm writing, not having looked at him seriously since my college days. I've been reading the letters with some difficulty because they are filled with elaborate flattery to whomever they are addressed. Schulz spent a lot of time reaching out to literati, and I'm pretty sure part of the tone is the sort of semi-formalized language that goes along with such correspondence. So you have to be alert for when he slips out of it and into what he really wants to say. Then of course you are vastly rewarded because Schulz had a habit of working out in his letters what he wanted to write in his stories. What it must have been like to get one of those letters!

Street of Crocodiles is a mad, mad, beautiful book of course. Schulz is like William Blake in a way, in that he looks out at the world and sees a mythos, a universe of symbols, signs, and portents. Only Blake's mythos is forever rebelling and reaching for redemption -- it's beauty is in its vitality. Schulz's mythos is forever in the process of disintegration -- it's beauty is in the way it withers.

The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov

Yesterday the town I live in was hit with an ice storm that felt almost apocalyptic to the people of the Carolina Coast. Trees and branches bent and shattered under the weight of the ice and everything looked like it had been encased in wet glass.

Naturally, I lost power. Which means, I also lost heat. So the dogs and I spent the day curled under down blankets while I read Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer...sometimes reading parts out loud to the dogs, who thumped their tails in appreciation of my attention, if not the story. I made it through a third of the book before the light failed, and then a bit further by flashlight and candlelight.

After all, if you are going to be trapped in a house with no heat in the middle of an ice storm, reading the Russians seems apropos.

As it turned out, it was a fortunate choice. I had worried that after a couple weeks spent with Bruno Schulz anything that I picked up next would seem pallid by comparison, but The Enchanted Wanderer is a beautiful, magnificent story collection, filled with lush, vivid language and deeply compelling characters:

"Look, Seryozha, what paradise, what paradise!" Katerina Lvovna exclaimed, looking through the dense branches of the blossoming apple tree that covered her at the clear blue sky in which there hung a fine full moon.

The moonlight coming through the leaves and flowers of the apple tree scattered the most whimsical bright spots over Katerina Lvovna's face and whole recumbent body; the air was still; only a light, warm breeze faintly stirred the sleepy leaves and spread the subtle fragrance of blossoming herbs and trees. There was a breath of something languorous, conducive to laziness, sweetness, and obscure desires.

--from "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

I find myself wondering about the blue sky and the moonlight.

I've been trying to think about how to describe reading The Elegant Universe. First off, I had to read it twice, and some parts three times, which explains why I am only now finishing it even though I started reading the book last year. I have no head for math, none for spacial dimensions, and spacial dimensions in String Theory take on some very weird characteristics. I will say that as an overview of physics I liked it very much. Greene does an excellent job of outlining General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a way that I've rarely found in other books or other attempts to grasp the subject at a layman's level. Even the introduction to the string theory concept was attractive, plausible, and...elegant...as a hypothesis.

But as he delved further into the theory, its implications, its possible conclusions about the nature of the universe, it all began to feel more and more like, well, magic.

Partly this is because all the work done on string theory is basically at the level of the theoretical. Mathematical modeling is the "laboratory" of the theoretical physicist, and computers are the lab equipment. So most of the theory is constructed along the lines of "If this one thing is true, then this other thing would happen" -- whereupon the theoretical physicist would get cracking on what Greene kept calling their "arduous mathematical equations" in order to see if, in fact, A, then B and then maybe even C.

By the end of the book the reader has been taken through the results of such mathematical explorations of discovery and been presented with a kaleidoscopic array of new concepts and ideas: worldsheets and Reimann surfaces; supersymmetry; Calabi-Yau dimensions curled up in the tiny interstices of the space-time universe we inhabit, one- two- and three- brane strata that apparently protect the universe from space-time disasters whenever it happens to tear (something it may do fairly frequently).

After awhile, it all starts to sound like an elaborate and heavily mathematical version of Dungeons and Dragons.

In the end, then, The Elegant Universe presents an enticing picture of a "theory of everything" that is, indeed, elegant. And to give him due credit, Greene is careful to point out where assumptions about the nature of all things are being made in order to push the theory further. He admits, for example, that the reasons we seek "symmetry " in our scientific models are at least on some level aesthetic, even if as a guiding principle symmetry has proved to be a powerful and useful tool.

But absent any clear way to test the theory experimentally (most of what happens in string theory happens on the scale of the Planck length, which is the mind-boggling number of 53.025×10−36 ft), string theory remains just that--a theory: If A, then B, and maybe even C.

But it is still an awfully big "If."

>25 southernbooklady: (Yeah, I know, it’s been awhile.) I tend toward an engineery approach, get caught up in how people figure stuff out. Loved E. O. Wilson’s Naturalist. Super duper loved Time, Love, Memory about experiments with fruit flies.

>32 southernbooklady: I began this some years ago, and didn’t finish. Yet. Still have aspirations. Somehow physics is more of an ought for me; biology is what I’m actually drawn to. FYI, there’s a tutored read of The Elegant Universe from 2012.

>33 qebo: I tend toward an engineery approach, get caught up in how people figure stuff out.

Oh, I agree, that aspect is hard to resist. It's one of the strong points of books like Krakatoa , The Ghost Map, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Not to mention the always iconic The Double Helix.

I'll check out the tutored read, thanks for pointing me to it. I did find the book an engaging story, especially a story of how physicists think, how they frame problems to find solutions. It's still pretty rarefied territory, but at least I feel like I've got a map to it now.

It's been a little while since I posted what I've been reading. Not that I haven't been reading, but I've also been in the garden, which interferes a bit with the writing life.



The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell (read in the latter half of March).

The Forest Unseen is a book I found quietly appealing, if not earth-shattering. A man decides to sit on a rock and watch the same patch of woods every day for an entire year. Sometimes he gets off his rock and knees down in the leaf litter with a magnifying glass to peer at things close up. Sometimes he steps back from his rock and cranes his neck to look up at the tree canopy overhead. Sometimes he takes off all his clothes to "be as the animals are." (The animals are indifferent)

In the process of recording what he sees, he also tells us what he knows about what he sees, and thus as the year progresses readers are treated to a widely disparate series of fun facts; learning why hickory trees leaf out so late in the spring, but maples do not. How snails have sex as hermaphrodites, why chickadees in the north are larger than those in the south, the mechanics of mosquito bites, and the nuances of the katydid's mating call.

And all of this is fascinating. If I was a little girl I'm sure I would have sat at the knees of the author for hours on end listening to him talking about the secrets of the forest floor right in front of us. (In fact, he reminds me a little of my Grandpa, a man who I thought knew everything about everything in the natural world).

But I'm not a little girl. And Haskell's book is missing something for me...some consciousness of the deep questions perhaps. He's got a fine appreciation for the interconnectedness of life and he does not shirk in talking about the implications. But he lacks the questing spirit of, say, Annie Dillard, or Janisse Ray, or Thoreau. He's watching, but he's not looking for answers. As a result there is fine detail about the life all around us, but he stays out of the picture, even when he is watching himself become food for a mosquito. He's barely part of his own story.

The Complete Poems of Li Ch'ing-Chao translated by Kenneth Rexroth

This was a book I went searching for based on comments by readers here at LT. Li Ch'ing-Chao is a new voice to me, although the poet herself wrote in the 12th century. She was by all accounts a remarkable person, something that the biographical sketch which introduces the collection makes abundantly clear. That, and the extensive annotations at the end of the book--which explained many of the political references, were a great help in reading the book.

But to be honest, I ignored both, and went right to the poetry first. Kind of like drinking wine without looking at the label.

The poems are beautiful, even if I am missing the formalism of the style she wrote in (tz'u, and shih). I have an affinity for nature poetry, of course. And poetry that marks the passage of our lives by the seasons and the flowers that bloom and then fade. But this...written from the women's quarters of a feudal Chinese low-level aristocrat, was so clear, so in the moment, and so...pure. The poems are not remote and philosophical, nor frilly or overwrought, even when some of the poems are about great longing, loneliness, or loss. There are several poems where the poet recounts drinking herself into a stupor for want of the presence of her husband--whom she loved very dearly. And a few where she resists the wine, driven by the same longing for him.

In the introduction, it's suggested that her early poetry is more vivacious and brilliant than her later work, written in exile, at the end of a hard life filled with many political ups and downs, her own reputation ascending and descending with the whims of the court politics. But I didn't find it so. I found her later work, poems written after the death of her husband, quieter, perhaps, but still intense. Here are two favorites:

Spring Ends

The gentle breeze has died down.
The perfumed dust has settled.
It is the end of the time
Of flowers. Evening falls
And all day I have been too
Lazy to comb my hair.
Our furniture is the same.
He no longer exists.
All effort would be wasted.
Before I can speak,
My tears choke me.
I hear Spring at Two Rivers
Is still beautiful.
I had hoped to take a boat there,
But I know so fragile a vessel
Won't bear such a weight of sorrow.

On Spring

I idle at the window
In the small garden.
The Spring colors are bright.
Inside, the curtains have not been raised
And the room is deep in shadow.
In my high chamber
I silently play my jade zither.
Far-off mountain caves spit clouds,
Hastening the coming of dusk.
A light breeze brings puffs of rain
And casts moving shadows on the ground.
I am afraid I cannot keep
The pear blossoms from withering.

The first she wrote about the death of her husband. The second about missing him while he was away visiting an outer province for his position as a court official.

This was also posted in one of the Reading Globally threads, but I'll include it here as well:



W. Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of a trip he took through the Far East-- Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam. It took awhile to grow on me. He begins, without irony, by stating that this is not the kind of journey where the traveler brings along his whole household and attendant conveniences with him, and thus could barely be said to be traveling at all. You have to leave your world behind, he insists, and submerge yourself in new worlds.

This, he does not do. Not in the way we would understand it. Maugham is very much a sahib and is treated as such by everyone he meets. His willingness to sleep in bamboo huts (constructed especially for him by village headmen on the news that his arrival is imminent) and eat food cooked by native cooks not withstanding, Maugham is a white man traveling through lands he endures more than he understands, and at the end of his journey he is as untouched by his experiences (and unmoved) as those lavish travelers he complained of in the beginning of his account.

There is little in the way of real descriptions of the places he passes though, although he is at his best describing ordinary scenes--river traffic, rail station crowds, street bustle and rickshaw rides. He's at his worst whenever he is dragged against his will to some temple or site of local significance. "Another giant head of Buddha" being his usual comment on such things. He makes no effort to discover the history of these places, or to understand their significance. Even the people he meets are not native. His interactions with the locals in any of the countryside he travels through tend to be limited to inquiries about food and accommodations. He saves his longest and most in-depth interest for any European he happens to meet during his journey--an Italian priest who hasn't been home in twenty years, but keeps up with the social scene via magazine subscriptions. A mid-level colonial bureaucrat who is depressed because the Burmese girl he'd taken as a mistress left him when he wouldn't marry her. An old classmate who was kicked out of school after he was arrested, and has washed up in a dingy apartment in Haiphong where he whiles away his life smoking opium and thinking about the life he could have had.

I found Maugham's sense of unquestioned entitlement wearying, in a way I might not have if I'd read the book twenty years ago when I was reading Kipling. And yet....and yet...I kept reading. And by the end of the book I was not only reading, I was engaged. Maugham gets a lot of criticism for his prosaic writing style but I like its dry understated tone and clean use of language. And when he gets going on one of his ex-patriot character sketches, he does a beautiful job. So I think that's the spirit in which The Gentleman in the Parlour needs to be read--not as a 'travel' book, per se, but a book about what it is to be adrift in a foreign land.

Also posted in the Reading Globally group:



Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams

Turn Right at Machu Picchu is a pleasant book, but it left me wanting: Wanting more information about how the Inca made these incredible large-scale constructions, how they did their math, their astronomy, their architecture. How they created a construction style that could withstand earthquakes and avalanches.

Mark Adams is suitably self-deprecating throughout the book, but he doesn't seem to have much of a purpose beyond "follow in the footsteps of the discoverer of Machu Picchu." It's a bit of a man's midlife crisis story, rather than a personal discovery story. As much as I've always enjoyed travel literature, lately I've been chafing against the whole white-man-discovers-the-native thing that riddles the genre. Ever since reading An African in Greenland, I've been wanting to find books like it--travel accounts by non-Europeans, by people who, no matter what their culture, were just bit by that kind of restlessness that makes them always want to move towards new shores and horizons. It would be a neat travel list, if I could find enough accounts to put on it.

Mostly, I was wanting to talk to the guide in the story, John Leivers, more than the author. After the Inca builders, he is the most fascinating thing in the book.

>38 southernbooklady: I read that book in 2012 and was also disappointed in it.

>39 thornton37814: On the whole when I read I try to avoid imposing my own expectations on a book, and instead read it for what I think the author is trying to say. But that requires that the author be trying to say something. Turn Right at Machu Picchu would have been a good National Geographic article, and a great story told over dinner or at a pub. But Adams didn't seem to have any agenda beyond "retrace the route of Bingham." He even seemed to lack the kind of irrepressible curiosity that makes the explorer go hacking their way into the jungle in the first place. The guide had that in spades. Adams, not so much. So I felt its lack when reading, although the book did make me look around for more books about Peru and the cloud forest and the peoples who live there.

Forest of a Thousand Daemons by D.O. Fagunwa

Reading books in translation sometimes feels a little like looking at pictographs from an ancient culture. The entire carved wall thrums with meaning, the sensitive, curious reader can feel it. But for the visitor from another culture and another time, so much remains inaccessible, opaque. What doesn't, what bleeds through, remains shimmery and translucent, so that one can never really be confident that the story heard is the one that was intended.

Wole Soyinka talks a little about this problem in his translator's note at the beginning of the book:

"...this phrase 'mo nmi ho bi agiliti' which became "my breath came in rapid bloats like the hawing of a toad" aroused some protest from a critic. Indeed agiliti is far from being a toad, it is more a member of the lizard species. But then neither toad nor lizard is the object of action or interest to the hero Akaraogun or his creator Fagunwa at this point in the narration Fagunwa's concern is to convey the vivid sense of event, and a translator must select equivalents for mere auxiliaries where these serve the essential purpose better than the precise original.

...So not only are we reading a tale written for another culture, but written in another language and retold to us in words that sometimes mean things quite different from what the storyteller really said. Soyinka's explains why he felt it was so important to translate the word Irunmale in the title (Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale) as "daemons" instead of the usual "devils," or "gods" or "demons," even though any of these three would be more "literal" and accurate. He offers a lamentation for the way English words can't convey the right "sounds," the way Fagunwa's carefully-chosen Yoruba words do, and how therefore the music of the story utterly lost.

But perhaps not as lost as all that. This is a modern novel, after all. The first novel to be written in the Yoruba language, and thus of immense influence for later Nigerian writers, but Fagunwa is no ancient shaman relating old and sacred myths. He is an English-educated Nigerian, an alumni of St. Andrew's College in Oyo--the premier educational institution in Nigeria-- giving a voice to his own culture as it becomes infiltrated and transformed by modern influences. It might not be so out of bounds to see in the novel the shades of other stories from more familiar traditions.

The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, then, is an odyssey story, told in a storyteller's cadence, with a storyteller's toolbox of traditional folk themes and fairy tales to build upon.

The book begins with a plea from the storyteller:

"My friends all, like the sonorous proverb do we drum the agidigbo*; it is the wise who dance to it, and the learned who understand its language. The story which follows is a veritable agidigbo; it is I who will drum it, and you the wise heads who will interpret it."

It is a call to the listener and the reader -- asking us to not just passively listen or read, but to take part in the tale, to be Akara-ogun, perhaps. To hear the story as if it were happening to us.

If folk tales are the primary colors in the writer's paint box, Fagunwa is an acknowledged master at color, hue and shade. The hunter-hero, Akara-ogun, goes into the forest of Irunmale, has adventures, outwits enemies, kills monsters, escapes capture, meets spirit creatures who sometimes become benefactors (One is a beautiful woman named "Help-meet") and returns home, sometimes wiser, sometimes richer, sometimes in sorrow. The stories are vivid, and sometimes frightening. Like Odysseus, or Hercules, each new adventure seems to tease the reader with a whispered meaning, and one gets the growing sense after every strange event that the trials of Akara-ogun aren't adventure stories, but morality tales.

In fact, there is an undercurrent to all of Akara-ogun's adventures...a tension between old ways and new beliefs...between traditional superstitions and modern religious doctrines. Between "the forest" and "heaven." One full of wily daemons, one full of wise angels. A hunter like Akara-ogun must learn to navigate both. He uses both spells and prayers, magic and faith. And while it is clear Fagunwa thinks that faith in God is the most powerful of weapon in a hunter's bag of tricks, the magic of the daemons that infest the forest can't be dismissed.

*agidigbo: Yoruba leisurely music played mostly at social gatherings

The Cloud Forest by Peter Matthiessen

The Cloud Forest is an account of an extended trip the author took to South America, spending most of his time in Peru although he also wandered through Argentina and Brazil, and did get as far as Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at one point. Given the amount of territory he covered, it is perhaps not surprising that Matthiessen spends less time talking about cultures or ecosystems, and more time describing the succession of truly precarious conveyances he was forced to use--rickety buses driven by men with little concern for the safety of their passengers, standing room-only rail cars for trips that would take fourteen hours, flimsy boats manned by inexperienced crews, tiny airplanes piloted with the kind of fatalism that comes from flying over innumerable crash sites. Each time the author climbs into one of these things, one gets the sense he is putting himself in the hands of fate. Presumably, such an attitude was a requirement when traveling in the bush, or one would never get anywhere.

A writer of naturalist inclinations, Matthiessen faithfully records all the birds he sees with the diligence of a birder adding species to his life list, and he is suitably interested, and wary, of fauna with teeth. There is an extended section where he tries to determine the "most dangerous" animal in the jungle, and everyone he asks agrees that it is the Bushmaster-- a pit viper -- but that it is a thing rarely encountered. He does confirm, by personal experience, that it is safe to swim in a river with piranhas as long as one isn't bleeding or sporting any open wounds. But he doesn't go into the natural histories of the species he encounters, so they remain mere snapshots as he floats, or drives, or walks, or flies by.

But landscape he does beautifully, especially when he is describing scenes from the windows of whatever doubtful aircraft he has consigned himself to.

The last part of the book is devoted to a poorly-planned, poorly-executed, and almost absurd "expedition" to search out a giant fossilized mandibula that was rumored to have been discovered on the banks of the Pongo river deep in the Peruvian jungle. It's the kind of trip that would make John Reveirs, the savvy guide from Turn Right at Machu Picchu, shake his head in disgust. Matthiessen seems to have got through on a wing and a prayer and a whole lot of dumb luck.

But he does devote considerable time to describing the indigenous peoples he comes across--most of them in a state of cultural disintegration owing to the effects of industrial forays into the jungle, "modernization" and civilization beating back the forest, and the indefatigable efforts of various Christian missionaries to save their souls. This last group comes in for some very harsh criticism by the author, who finds that those who have been "saved" are almost always left in a worse condition than they had been as heathens. Despite the occasional missionary who seems to have the well being of the natives truly at heart, the general practice seems to have been to strip the natives of their culture, hand them Bibles, force them into clothes, and then take off for the next wild tribe in need of salvation, leaving the newly saved peoples to fend for themselves in a culture they neither understood nor had any place in. Sort of an evangelical version of the slash and burn agriculture that was decimating the rain forest.

This was in 1960, so steps have been taken to slow down the decimation of indigenous peoples -- indeed, Matthiessen makes a point of talking about steps that were being taken even at that point: including one law that made it illegal to murder a native even in self defense. Of course, laws are only as good as your ability to enforce them, and the country Matthiessen is traveling through is utterly lawless. He learned to go armed. But the only thing he shot was a capybara, which he promptly lost in the river, thus losing his chance for something besides yuca for dinner.

As is probably clear at this point, The Cloud Forest is ultimately more of an adventure story than a "travel" narrative. But as adventure stories go, it is pretty impressive.

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

I've been putting off writing about this book even though it will certainly make my "best of the year" list, mostly because I had such an intensely personal reaction to it. Margaret Fuller was a woman I was only peripherally aware of-- like so many remarkable women, whose achievements remain overlooked by those who continue to see men first, and women...a far second, a curiosity--her accomplishments were always "background" material in other books, other reading. I knew she was in Emerson's circle of Transcendentalists, I knew she was a social reformer and early advocate for women's rights, an influence on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

But that is all I knew until Megan Marshall's perceptive biography, which among other things will make one ask just why it was considered "Emerson's" circle, and not Fuller's.

I wasn't expecting to identify so strongly with Marshall's subject, though. But the portrait of the woman that emerges felt achingly familiar. A precocious child, whose father believed in a strong classical education even for his daughters, Margaret Fuller was fluent in Latin before she was ten years old, and spent hours in debate with her father, who was of a progressive bent, honing her ability to think critically and construct a logical argument. Like her father, she idolized Roman Republican values. Cicero was a personal hero.

This kind of early intensive education made her intellectually confident when she finally entered school, but also socially awkward and emotionally naive--two traits that would dog her for most of her early adolescence and into her early maturity. She was, as we might say now, a brainy girl. A bit of a geek. It was a painfully familiar picture.

In consequence, Marshall portrays a woman whose passions and emotional attachments were idealistic, her heart often in service to her ideals, rather than the other way around. And thus, although she was adept at forming serious friendships and deep attachments, they had a way of disappointing her when the object of her regard failed to live up to her ideals. She all too often failed to take into account the emotional realities of her friends, even her close ones, and they seem to have often felt the need to draw back from Fuller's demanding brand of intense intellectual intimacy.

The moment when the book really coalesced, however, was after the death of Fuller's father, leaving Margaret, as the oldest and most independent of his children, responsible for supporting the family (something her mother was not equipped to do and none of her younger brothers old enough to contemplate). At this period the family is forced to retire to a family "farm" (the word deserves the quotes--it was another of her late father's educational experiments) and eke out their living on the little money they could inveigle from a wealthy but parsimonious uncle and what Fuller herself could earn writing reviews for magazines and taking in students for instruction in the classics. (She also taught her own younger brothers, since the family could not afford to send them to a school).

It was a severely constrained life for Fuller, who until then had participated in or organized any number of salons and discussion groups and had been making a name for herself in intellectual circles. And it was in the midst of this isolation that she, doing the usual round of "good works" expected of women in her social class, went to attend the bedside of a woman dying of what she was told was consumption, but which turned out to be complications from a botched abortion. A short while later, she paid a charitable visit to an ancient widow and her elderly daughter -- each abandoned to their own devices in their poverty, without kith of kin to care for them, left to an endless series of days huddled by a fireplace eating whatever bread charity society workers left for them. These two incidents, which Fuller wrote about in vivid detail in her journal, seem to have been brackets or bookends to the question of a woman's fate if she did not exist under the protection of a man. Marshall identifies this period as the time when Fuller's feminism and radicalism began to sharpen and achieve its focus, setting Fuller on a path that would eventually lead to her declaration of the institution of marriage as a form of slavery, and commitment to working with women prisoners -- most of whom, she decided, owed their incarceration to the way men forced women to live their lives.

I originally picked up Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as part of a binge of reading about the transcendentalists, thanks to Robert Richardson's enormously impressive biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire. Richardson calls his book "an intellectual biography." If that is so, then Marshall's might be called an "emotional biography" -- if we can divest the word from its current pop-psychological tones and find in it instead an account of how one woman grew into her passion and life's calling.

It was a calling that consumed her from within and without (like most driven people she was a workaholic). And to the end of her all-to-short life she would write about her struggle to realize her fullest potential in a society where "an independent woman" was something of an absurdity. An idea for which there was no place. And despite all Fuller's accomplishments -- she became the first foreign correspondent for an American newspaper, covered Europe during the revolutionary fervor know as the "European Spring," was a friend to George Sand, knew Garibaldi, was close with many Italian and Polish Republicans-- despite all this, she still to the end of her days struggled to be both a woman and "a human" in the same body, so to speak. And right up to her death society denied her this one wish. Did not, it seems, even understand what she was asking for, was demanding.

I found much to identify with in Fuller's lifelong struggle to live as she would often write "to her fullest potential." It's hard not to think, watching (as an example) the irrational hostility engendered by Hillary Clinton's political career, that any woman with aspirations wouldn't find Fuller's frustrations familiar. "Potential" always seems to be measured against the expense of the other well-defined roles women are required to fill: Daughter. Mother. Wife. Mistress. That Fuller persisted so steadfastly in pursuing her own idea of what it was to be a complete person, in defiance of everybody's expectations -- even her most intellectual friends and most radical compatriots -- is a testament to her will and conviction. Perhaps, in the end, it is only in the struggle to be ourselves in the face of all that is expected of us that we can be said to realize that "full potential" Margaret Fuller was forever chasing.

>42 southernbooklady:, >43 southernbooklady: If I could write at a pace beyond excruciatingly slowly, I’d be a more active participant in your thread. BBs abound here... Margaret Fuller especially is well worth attention. Not on the review page?

I'll put a version of it on the review page, but I want to make it a little less personal for that venue.

Great review! I am looking forward to reading Margaret Fuller.

Anyone who loves Cicero is a friend of mine - wishlisted! Thanks for the lovely review!

Banned in Boston by Neil Miller

Banned in Boston is a faithful and comprehensive history of the operations of the Watch and Ward Society, an organization dedicated to guarding the moral character of that city for about a century. But the book's focus is to document, not to speculate on the nature and implications of censorship. So if you are looking for an account of how our ideas of censorship and freedom of speech have evolved, then Banned in Boston is more of a "case history" than a deep exploration into the question.

I did find the extended section on Burlesque theater really interesting (indeed, how could anyone not?). And, a former Boston bookseller myself, I was surprised at how widely accepted the idea of censorship was in the city, and for how long--apparently, the position of "Official Censor" -- a city government position, was only abolished in 1982, two years before I first came to Boston for college.

And it did renew my interest in HL Mencken.

The high point of the book from my perspective was not the well-drawn portraits of the succession of leaders of the Watch and Ward, or their differing approaches--some pugnacious men on a moral crusade, some preferring to work behind the scenes, flexing their power and privilege (and sense of moral rightness) quietly. Those were interesting enough, but the book really came into focus for me when the understanding that existed between the Watch and Ward, law enforcement, and Boston's booksellers--something called "The Gentlemen's Agreement" -- began to break down.

The Gentlemen's Agreement was an unwritten directive, whereby the Watch & Ward would quietly notify booksellers that a book had been determined to be obscene and "actionable" (that is, in violation of the state's obscenity laws), and booksellers would just as quietly remove all copies from their shelves. If they failed to do so, they risked being brought up on criminal charges for being purveyors of obscene material if they happened to sell a copy. Both Watch and Ward and police were in the habit of trying to purchase books deemed actionable in undercover operations, and then arresting (or demanding the arrest of) the unfortunate clerk who unknowingly ran afoul of the law. Prior to the Gentlemen's Agreement, the arrest and trial was the only way to receive an official ruling on the obscene nature of a book--basically, bookstores wouldn't know a book was actionable until action was taken. The Agreement sidestepped the problem by letting booksellers know which titles would land them in court cases if they were sold. No muss, no fuss, and the people of Boston never even knew that there were gaps on the shelves.

It was illuminating to learn how meekly the city's booksellers acquiesced to this state of affairs, where some extra-official entity would, without transparency or oversight or method of appeal, have the final say over what could be sold in a bookstore. But "Free Speech" didn't have the meaning it does now, and censorship was only one of a number of areas in which the Watch and Ward was concerned. It also raided gambling dens, exposed hotels that were acting as brothels, went after speakeasies and dope dens, and in general guarded the moral character of the city. At a certain period their influence was absolute and no one seemed to question that their role was a necessary and good one.

Except the writers. H.L. Mencken was the first to get himself deliberately arrested in order to expose the capriciousness of Boston's obscenity laws and the way they were enforced. But other authors (and their publishers) eventually followed suit, recognizing the potential for publicity....to the point where being "banned in Boston" was a sure way to get one's book national attention and sales. Upton Sinclair parlayed his novel "Oil" into a national bestseller by making the most of its trial for obscenity in Boston. Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser.....writer after writer who produced what we now deem as American classics had their day in court in Boston---mostly with excellent results in terms of sales in the rest of the country.

And judge after judge found themselves increasingly frustrated at the hopeless attempt to determine a legal definition of good literary taste -- until eventually even the prosecutors in these cases told the Watch and Ward representatives that despite their duty to uphold the letter of the law, they were not in sympathy with the goals (not to mention the secretive and underhanded methods) of the Society to ensnare booksellers in their pursuit of morally questionable literature.

It was the ridiculousness of having to determine the immoral nature of books like "Oil" or "The Sun Also Rises" that eventually led to the booksellers of Boston to reject the role of the Watch and Ward, and to the Massachusetts State legislature to completely rewrite the obscenity laws. So that by the time I stepped off the bus in the Boston terminal in the early 1980s, suitcase in hand and a suggested reading list from my college adviser I was to complete before the semester started, there was not a single book on the list that could not be found in any of the numerous bookstores in the city. And the idea that any of them might be banned for obscenity was as absurd a notion as the idea of the Watch and Ward members handing out free copies of "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

American Nations by Colin Woodard

The first thing you need to know about this book is that although the author's bio says that he is a native of Maine, he's really a native of Yankeedom. That is one of the eleven "nations" he has identified that have a quantifiable impact in the United States, and that continue to guide (or bedevil) its course. A "nation" in Woodard's lexicon is a group defined by a cultural cohesion rather than by a geographical proximity or political boundary. The underlying idea...that our country is better understood in terms of cultural affiliations instead of political ones...is not new. It is the principle behind works like David Hackett Fischer's excellent Albion's Seed, which the author cites, and documented by statistical analysis...something every political campaign strategist worth his salt knows.

But Wooard takes the concept to an entirely new level. "American Nations" is an interpretive history of the country from the perspective not of individual men, or states, or events, but of competing cultures. And while there is merit to the idea that "Yankee" (New England) culture is different from "Borderlander" (Appalachia) or "Tidewater" or "El Norte" (Northern Mexico, South West), or "New Netherlander" (New York City), or "New France" (New Orleans), Woodard's approach presumes a kind of inevitability of character. Just as people say we are what we eat, Woodard thinks we are where we grew up. Nurture trumps nature.

I found the premise both compelling and troubling. Compelling, because the cultural values he associates with "Yankeedom" -- my own nation of birth -- are unquestionably my own, and I have held them as foundational principles for all my life without ever feeling the need to challenge them or put them seriously to the test. Values like the importance of education, of personal responsibility and self-determination, of the idea that governments are an instrument to implement the common good. Of the importance of public service. These are all straight out of the Puritan play book, so to speak, and it was a little sobering to realize just how ingrained they are, even at this far remove from the days when people wanted to live in their "city on a hill," that a lefty radical feminist atheist like myself can still be so directed by them. "American Nations" has made me consider more deeply how my values differ in profound ways from those of my neighbors here in the nation of "Deep South" where I happen to live at the moment. How the importance of education in my value system weighs against the importance of family ties in theirs, as an example.

If nothing else Woodard gives the reader an appreciate for the depth and strength of the cultural prejudices we all carry. And it was not comfortable reading his account of how ruthless we are in defense of our own cultural values and priorities. His birds-eye-view of the history of American colonization is a description of unapologetic invasion, exploitation, and even rationalized genocide of nations that were not in accord with our own-- most obviously, the one nation that gets short shrift in Woodard's account--the "First Nation" -- meaning entirety of the native peoples on the continent.

That last statement provides a clue into one of the more serious flaws in the book -- he glosses over a couple nations. Native American tribes are mentioned only in so far as they are conquered, and the entire population of Africans slaves and their descendants is nowhere to be found on Woodard's map of American nations -- presumably because they have mostly been assimilated into the culture that brought them over in the the first place. (One of the characteristics of the "Deep South" nation is not just family loyalty, but the importance of social conformity, of caste). This has the odd effect of implying that the "First Nation" and the African-Americans are somehow culturally irrelevant.

Of course, Woodard does not want to imply any such thing, so it would be better to think of his book not as a history of how eleven different cultures shaped and continue to shape this country, but how eleven different cultures--ten of them European--did and continue to do so. And while the book is classified as "E98" by the Library of Congress (History -- United States), it might be better approached as sociology or political science by the reader, because one of the clear priorities of the author is to explain how and why Americans become polarized on current issues, and how we have a hope of coming to some kind of compromise if we cease thinking in terms of left/right, conservative/liberal, red/blue, win/lose...and choose to think instead in terms of alliances between cultures, between "nations," with similar values around whatever subject is in contention. Woodard, who does not strike me as especially afflicted with a rosy outlook, sees some hope of making headway against the epidemic of gun violence if we tackle this problem like UN trying to get every country represented at the table to sign an arms treaty.

Unfortunately there are two "super powers" among the American nations -- the Yankeedom and Deep South nations -- and it is pretty clear from Woodard's tone which one he thinks is on the side of the angels. And this brings up the other major flaw I saw in the book-- Woodard's own unacknowledged loyalty to his own nation. Like me, he's a member of Yankeedom. Like me, his natural affinity is for the cultural values he grew up with and absorbed as "ideal." This is not much of a hindrance when he is describing the founding of his various American nations in the distant pass, but his personal prejudices become more evident the closer he comes to contemporary times, until by the end of the book he is reduced to reciting a litany of political figures and initiatives, labeling them according to their "nation" like a baseball fan checking off a score card. Naturally the figures from the Deep South are pinned with every resistance to progress and progressivism, and figures from his own nation and the tiny but culturally vibrant nation of New Netherlands get the credit for every social advance. Woodard's list of politicians begins to sound less like evidence and more like an indictment.

The lack of objectivity that permeates the latter half of the book made me re-assess the author's over all premise, and I came to the conclusion that his approach to viewing history as a story of competing cultures was useful -- in the way any historical filter can be useful-- but ultimately not as radical as it first appeared. The book's great strength is in the way it will make the thoughtful reader assess his own cultural assumptions, and possibly even allow him to understand and empathize with the cultural values of other "nations." It may be a tool for change for some current social issues. But it is a little too in love with its own ideas, and there is a tendency to make the facts fit the theory, rather than the other way around. Whenever Woodard comes across a political figure who acts at odds with his (or her) "nation" he calls them "an anomaly." American Nations was published in 2011, so it would be interesting to see what the author had to say about the momentum of the movement towards same-sex marriage equality that has occurred since the book came out -- since that is an issue that received wide-spread popular support and was not among any of the founding values of the eleven American Nations.

Perhaps there is yet another "nation" out there, steadily pursuing change while the superpowers of Yankeedom and Deep South bicker at each other and bang their metaphorical shoes on their metaphorical desks. "Youth land" maybe?

Back after a couple months when work takes over my life! I do a lot of reading in July-August-September, but it is almost all work-related as we prepare for the annual trade show of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. So the emphasis is on books that might not even be released yet, or that are being pushed for the holiday season and I rarely have time to write anything about them except the usual stuff I would send to bookstores to get them excited about the event. Nevertheless, it is a fun show to do, if you can ignore all the stress that comes with any kind of event planning. Over a hundred authors were in attendance, along with several hundred booksellers and publishers. Here's an account, written the day after it was all over:

http://bookballoon.com/index.php/home/post/515-blog

Over the next couple days I'll start posting about the books.

So one of the books I brought back from the trade show last weekend was Heritage by Sean Brock (sorry, can't find the touchstone for the title):



...which wins my vote for best cookbook cover, ever. (Those are his tattoos).

And it is a great, great cookbook in terms of traditional recipes that highlight seasonal and local flavors. The first random page I opened to had this:

Beet and Strawberry Salad with Sorrel and Rhubarb Vinaigrette

So I can tell I'm going to have fun with it over the next couple months, and I'm already planning on inflicting some of the recipes on my family when they all descend on me for Christmas.

But....and it is a big, big "but." (heh.) The guy is a purist. And not inclined to offer possible workarounds for those of us who are not, or can't afford to be. So his recipe for Hoppin' John calls for Carolina Gold Rice (which, as far as I know, would have to be ordered special from a granary in South Carolina) and Sea Island Red Peas (ditto.)

The aforementioned Beet and Strawberry salad calls for something called "rhubarb bitters." The butter-braised asparagus with nasturtium capers uses "cane vinegar." And so on, and so on. Almost every recipe used something not to be found in my pantry, which is saying something because I have a pretty well-stocked pantry.

And I get it, I do. I wouldn't make myself beet and strawberry salad right now because not only are beets and strawberries out of season, but the nasturtiums are not yet seeding, so I wouldn't be able to make the capers. I'm on board with his ultra-seasonal approach and his intensive use of garden produce--which goes far, far beyond the zucchini and tomato harvest. I also understand his desire to pay homage to the traditional flavors of the sometimes very specific micro cuisines to be found throughout the south. So I see why he wants me to buy Carolina gold rice from the one place on the South Carolina coast that still grows it.

But the upshot is, this is a "do something special in the kitchen" cookbook, not an everyday use cookbook, although it will give you lots of ideas for your own, probably less finicky approach to making a meal. Still, if you do want to go all out, he gives you the resources to do it--including where to find "cane vinegar" and how to make "Husk Hot Sauce" (a requirement in his personal fried chicken recipe). I have a feeling though, that I'll be substituting often, since I don't think I should have to buy his favorite kind of flour for dredging when making said fried chicken.

He's got a "manifesto" at the beginning of the book that I mostly can get behind. It includes statements like:

"Cook with soul--but first, get to know your soul."

and

"Eat with your hands as much as possible."

I have been reading this book with a kind of bemused tolerance, continually diverted by the way Roxane Gay seems to have come to the same conclusions I have about life, women and everything by way of an entirely different set of cultural references.

Gay is an avowed pop-culture addict. I am not. Or, not any more. So I was prepared, I thought, for an onslaught of commentary about television shows I never watched. And indeed, early on in the book is a pretty pithy description of the BET channel, which I don't think I've ever even turned on, followed by one about reality television, of which I haven't seen an episode of any show since Kelly Clarkson won American Idol.

I was not, however, prepared to hear that one of her foundational stepping stones to feminism was Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High. Team Jessica!

So okay, Gay is maybe half a generation or so behind me. Those SVH books she was gobbling up as a girl I was selling in my first ever job as a bookstore clerk. And I hated them. I loathed them. I wanted to spill something gross over Jessica's outfit and slap Elizabeth off her moral high ground. (At the time I was in a torrid love affair with a radical lesbian feminist, so I needed an outlet.)

But really, once I got past my incredulity, I had to admit I had nothing on her. I cut my fictional teeth on the classic science fiction stories of th sixties and seventies. And let me tell you, the original Star Trek doesn't win any prizes for feminist role models. As a girl I was reduced to pretending that Uhura was my best friend.

So I got over the enthusiastic story line recaps of SVH, and the Hunger Games, and the other crap culture that Gay unabashedly admits to loving. Partly, because Gay is not blind to their faults, and indeed outlines them in painful detail. She acknowledges and confronts the problem of liking the stuff that is bad for you....which as her entire book seems to underscore, is where women find themselves all the time.

Plus, Gay is a Scrabble geek, and I can totally get that. It would be fun to play her, because she is an avowed "bingo player" -- always looking for the big seven-letter word score, whereas I am one of those people who likes the two-letter words, and likes to play long strings of words alongside each other, thereby reaping the benefits of not only the word I played, but the words that were created as a by product.

And, Gay is a savvy and perceptive cultural critic, who is also emotionally honest--a rare combination I find irresistible. She's upfront about the exhaustion and burnout she feels fighting the good fight for students who don't seem to want it or care. About the tiredness she feels when confronted with what passes for critically acclaimed black feature films. Her devastating evisceration of "The Help" -- both movie and book -- is so thorough that I almost felt sorry for the dead horse that was Stockett's story after Gay had finished beating it to a pulp. Almost. Her assessment of the films of Tyler Perry, Quentin Tarrantino, of the blockbuster 12 Years a Slave, of Orange is the New Black, are just as relentless. I was reminded--I'm sure she'd be pleased by this-- of James Baldwin's reaction to watching The Defiant Ones, first in a theater with a white audience, who cheered, and then in a theater with a black audience, where the general consensus was for Sidney Poitier to leave that white boy's ass behind. Ultimately, in the eyes of Baldwin, and of Gay, Hollywood makes entertainment where black people forgive white people pretty much anything. Roxane Gay is dissatisfied with this. She wants more. She wants us to want more.

In fact, I'd say "we should want more" is the call that rings through most of her writing. More realistic depictions of the full range of the black experience. The female experience. The black female experience. More demand that we recognize the dignity in all people, rather than just paying lip service to the idea. More justice for victims of rape. More outrage over "rape culture" -- her discussion on this subject are the most searing and inescapable in the book, ranging from the dreadful coverage of the gang rape of an eleven year old girl in Texas by the New York Times (if the reporter, James C McKinley, Jr., hasn't already crawled under a rock out of shame, Gay's pointed response should have sent him scurrying), to the books of E. L. James, to the failure television to portray rape to realistically on their dramas and edgy "ground-breaking" shows (from Luke and Laura to Law and Order SVU), to her own experience being gang raped as a young girl. She wants to know why we still live in a culture where rape jokes are considered funny, where a football team's standing is more important than the charges of sexual assault accumulated by its players and coaches. She wants to know why we live in a society where "rape culture" is an actual thing. She wants more defiance. More outrage. More.

Ultimately, there was nothing in the book I hadn't already learned from and entirely different set of books and movies and tv shows. From reading Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Andrea Dworkin. But Roxane Gay does feel like part of my tribe -- the kind that kicks at labels but calls bullshit when she hears it. In fact, she's probably more a part of that tribe than I am. After reading Bad Feminist, I'm starting to think I'm too nice.

And I do find it encouraging that a woman can come of age in the era when 50 Shades of Gray is touted as the epitome of female sexuality, and still be sane. And still be willing to demand that we all do better, and do more.

>49 southernbooklady: I read reviews of that one when it came out and never quite decided that I wanted to read it badly enough to pursue it. I couldn't decide if I would like it or not. Your review kind of makes me glad that I did not pursue it.

>53 thornton37814: I did not think it a waste of time to read, Thornton, despite its flaws. Any book that challenges my own preconceived ideas and assumptions with good arguments and valid evidence I find worth the time. I appreciate it when people make me see things from a different perspective, and American Nations certainly does that.

Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper and published by Walker and Company.

This is an engaging book that focuses on a specific period in the life of Walt Whitman -- the period of the Civil War when he was both most prolific and most most artistically and emotionally mature. And it iss a beautiful portrait of the man's larger-than-life personality. His charisma and attraction. The way he channeled his emotions and desires into a full-on embrace of life. If there was ever a person who lived as he wrote, it was Whitman at this period.

It is also sensitive and touching depiction of his work in the hospitals caring for, being a companion, to the wounded soldiers of the Union Army. And between the author's accounts of Whitman "on the homefront" and his brother George on the front lines a really good account of the emotional life of the soldier -- not as a military tool, but simply as a young man with a gun desperate for letters from home. Not to mention a wonderful account of the emotional life of that family left at home, waiting for news of him. The book made me think of the first section of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, devoted to Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the way it talked about what the Civil War meant, how it was felt, rather than how it was conducted or how it was won and lost.

I will say that if you are a person who knows little about Whitman, the man, (as I was and am) then Now the Drum of War is perhaps not the best place to start. The scope of the book is too narrow, too tightly focused on a few specific, albeit paramountly important, years in the life of a man whose very nature tends to explode the confines of whatever boundaries and definitions we put around him. So I was conscious, while reading, of a lack of context that was wholly due to my own ignorance as a reader. I didn't feel able to read objectively or critically--I was forced to accept, for example, the author's own perspective on Whitman's mother, (about whom there are many theories) and his own interpretations of Whitman's poetry in the light of particular events like the assassination of Lincoln. But I felt the need to accept them with reservations, always uncomfortably aware of my own inadequate knowledge, and how much I was taking on faith, as it were.

For this reason the next books I picked up were Whitman's own poetry and essays, and Justin Kaplan's acclaimed biography. And let me tell you, that has been a couple months of real delight and struggle. But I had the feeling I should have read them first.

Fall is the time I really get into cooking, so I've been experimenting with Rose Levy Beranbaum's new version of The Baking Bible -- mostly with good results. She has a scientist's approach to method that makes her instructions precise and her rationale for each step clear. It can be a little intimidating, especially when she says things like "only use Gold Medal bread flour and spoon the flour gently into the measure before leveling" but on the other hand, her recipes rarely go wrong for me. And when they do, it is usually my fault for taking a short cut.

My favorite thing so far is an apricot-walnut made with regular flour, but a rye-based starter. I left the starter to sit for several days before I used it, and it got very tangy. The bread itself has no sugar, the only sweetness comes from the dried fruit. (It called for golden raisins as well as apricots, but I used dried currents). It's great with a side of sharp cheddar, or some marmalade.

But the thing I really like about the book is that because she explains the "why" of each step, you can use any recipe as a guide to creating your own version. I'm already wondering if I couldn't create a variation that uses a slightly different starter, pecans and sour cherries. Or hazelnuts and cranberries.

I love to bake, and Beranbaum's cookbooks have been standards for me for years: I've tried every recipe in her "Rose's Christmas Cookies" with the exception of the Notre Dame Cathedral gingerbread house, and more than a few of them have become Christmas standards. (I'm on my third copy of the book, because it gets so much use. And I've attempted pretty much every recipe in her Cake Bible and Pies & Pastries book. So I have no doubt The Baking Bible will get the same treatment, with the same generally good outcome.

(also posted as a review)

I finished Infinitesimal: How a dangerous mathematical theory shaped the modern world by Amir Alexander, with mixed, if mostly positive feelings. Despite the title, the preponderance of diagrams, and the extended trips into the nature of number theory, this is not a math book. It's a history book, with math as one of the main characters in the drama that spans nearly three hundred years. Not being a math person myself, I still had no trouble following along Alexander's explanations and summations of the various heated, do-or-die "proofs" that were flung back and forth by the various proponents of this or that theory. But this is not a history of the discovery of a new kind of math (the theory of the infinitely small having laid the groundwork for the development of calculus). This is a history of why the discovery of a new kind of math was such a big deal, and so...well, "dangerous."

Basically it is the story of the struggle between those who ascribed to a Euclidean description of reality, and those who did not. Or rather, those who began with theory and applied it to reality, and those who began with the real world, and tried to deduce the theory that would describe it. The former is based in the creation of abstract proofs. The latter on deductions based on observation and experimentation. The former appealed to the authoritarian and conservative elements of the Catholic Church, which in the 15th century was running a rear guard action in the struggle for souls in the face of the rise of Lutheranism. Euclidean geometry might be called "the official math" of the church -- it was the only math taught, and more to the point, the only math allowed, in all those Jesuit-run schools that spread throughout Europe and ended up the church's best defense against Protestantism.

The problem, of course, with demanding that the real world be interpreted in terms of an officially sanctioned theory is that you run into trouble when something happens that doesn't fit that theory. In the case of Euclidean Geometry, that included any number of uncomfortable paradoxes (Zeno's arrow, etc) and the inability to accurately calculate things that would be really useful -- say, the volume of a spiral.

The theory of infinitesimals, of "the infinitely small" was developed in part to overcome these challenges -- which it does, beautifully, but only at the expense of Euclid's entire notion of perfect abstract form. The argument over infinitesimals...indeed, over the primacy of observation over abstract truth...is much of what fueled the dispute between the Church and Galileo and his circle. Galileo was no mathematician, but he was able to use the theory of the infinitely small to make sense of Copernicus's heliocentric model and his own astronomical observations. Kepler, too, used the method to help calculate the elliptical orbits that improved on the Copernican model of the motion of the planets. And in the end, the church's objections to Galileo and those in his circle were as much about those methods as they were about any given theory Galileo put forth.

Alexander makes a complex subject entertaining and interesting -- certainly it will appeal to people who like Dava Sobel, or Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder. The book is especially strong in the second half, which is dominated by an account of the creation of the Royal Society, and the rivalry between the polymath Thomas Hobbes and his bete noir, John Wallis -- which reached a fever pitch that would have delighted the tabloids, if any had existed at the time. Apparently, the ability (or not) to back one's claim to be able to square the circle -- or double the cube -- was serious stuff, with wide-ranging political repercussions.

It's only here that I felt a twinge of skepticism about Alexander's central premise. That mathematical theories could become stand-ins and justifications for political philosophies and theological truths is easily understood. But that the fall of Italy from it's intellectual primacy during the Renaissance, and England's subsequent rise as an industrial power can be put down to Rome's refusal to embrace the theory of the infinitely small seems...well...rather infinitely stretched. Political powers rise and fall for a myriad of reasons, usually acting in concert. And in the end it isn't really clear whether the efforts to suppress a troublesome mathematical method was part of the cause, or simply a symptom of Italy's faltering vitality and its descent from center of the intellectual universe to a hidebound backwater left behind by the rest of Europe.

Sounds like s good one. Onto the Wishlist it goes... :)

Yep, I'm wishlisting that one, too. Thanks for the review!

>58 drneutron:, >59 scaifea:: It was an accessible and readable account of a fairly rarefied topic -- I seem to be drawn to that kind of book. Not as riveting as The Lunar Men, but very much in the same vein.

Well, as a geek and physicist, I'm attracted to fairly rarefied topics, especially math. :)

My interaction with LibraryThing consists rather disproportionately of clicking around in idle moments so your thread has dropped off the radar. I wonder whether you might find a happier home in Club Read, where the chitchat level is lower and the book reviews tend toward multiple thoughtful paragraphs, and the members are fewer so threads don’t get lost.

>1 southernbooklady: Selfish Gene
Well, that kinda fizzled, didn’t it? I did actually read it, a month late, but haven’t yet composed a review. I bought into his argument more than I’d expected to.

>49 southernbooklady: I read this early in the year, and appreciated the historical foundation, thought it got too sketchy afterward, with after-the-fact analysis. I have, but have not read, Albion’s Seed.
>57 southernbooklady: Onto the wishlist for what it does well, even though it stretches too far.
>60 southernbooklady: The Lunar Men Ooh, I wasn’t aware of this one!

>62 qebo: Oh, I'm a slow reader compared to most LT people, and a slower writer. Plus, I don't feel driven to write about every book, only the ones that make me think. I've got about five or six more on tap I'll probably post in a flurry over the next couple weeks. Right now I'm still collecting my thoughts about True Grit, Jerry Lee Lewis, On Immunity, and the really remarkable Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, which has been a revelation.

Albion's Seed is a fine, fine book.

And The Selfish Gene -- as a theory -- is a fascinating insight into the process of genetic inheritance and species development. I think it is basically accepted as a plausible, even accurate description of the mechanics, but I did find myself wondering about some things. Like the reason he gave for the preferability of sexual reproduction over other reproductive methods. That seems very...pat.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Christmas!

Two final reviews from 2014 before I start my 2015 thread:

Jerry Lee Lewis by Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg's book on Jerry Lee Lewis is frankly adoring. That's the best word I can think of. Not that Bragg doesn't see the faults and the flaws--not that Jerry Lee Lewis (it's "in his own words" after all) doesn't know what those are in graphic detail--but it's still written in the spirit of someone who has met kith and kin in his subject. When Bragg says "there was a beauty about Elvis that southern men found hard to understand, but we get Jerry Lee" -- he is being absolutely sincere.

And that sincerity makes the book. If it is possible to adore a person even if you can't exactly admire them, then Bragg has achieved it here. And that sincerity lifts up the book even when it is inclined to go a bit over the top in the sing-song southern storyteller lingo that is Bragg's lingua franca. Bragg's writing sometimes reminds me of the way people will attempt to mimic Chandler and Hammett's "hardboiled" style and end up with something so imitative that it almost looks like satire:

"Even in the most barren times, when cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in mean little honky-tonks and he might have missed a step on his way to the stage, he gave them something they were looking for. "

Or how about:

"It usually started without fanfare; he just walked out there, often when the band was in the middle of a song, and took a seat. “Gimme my money and show me the piano,” he often said of how the experience would begin. But it ended like an M80 in a mailbox, with such a holy mother of a crack and bang that, fifty years later, an old man in a Kiwanis haircut and an American flag lapel pin will turn red to his ears and say only: “Jerry Lee Lewis? I saw him in Jackson. Whooooooooo, boy!”"

Only Bragg really talks, and really writes, and really does tell stories like this. Has done in every book I've ever read by him. If anyone else had written "but it ended like an M80 in a mailbox" I would have been rolling my eyes. But Bragg is just being honest. So you have to kind of surrender to it, and I think also you have to surrender to the story.

The upside to the book is that you get a really beautiful look at not just the Depression-era and post-War South, but also a stellar account of the grit and crackling energy of the early days of rock and roll -- when it lived in honky-tonks and speakeasies, not stadiums. Odds are, you'll be combing the net for tracks by the names that drift on and off the stages of the juke joints and roadhouses to add to your iTunes list. The coverage of Lewis's early days at Sun Records is especially good, including a detailed account of the so-called Million-dollar Quartet sessions that is probably worth the price of the book.

And the account of Lewis's rivalry-cum-friendship with Elvis is....interesting. It brings depth to the mythology of "the Killer" and "the King" which began in that impromptu meeting at Sun Records and ended when Lewis supposedly tried to kill Elvis twenty years later. It was a misunderstanding, an incident blown out of proportion -- but then, "blown out of proportion" is the way Lewis lived his life. Indeed, it's in the telling of his relationship with Elvis that the wary reader starts to get the sense of the story Lewis isn't telling. It's the down side to a book that lives up to its title: Jerry Lee Lewis, "in his own words." That includes a fair amount of mythologizing on his own account: "I knew looking at Elvis that day that I might have to come through him." he said in remembering the Million Dollar Quartet session.

It also means anything he doesn't want to talk about, doesn't get talked about. And for someone who likes to tell a story as much as Lewis, the places where he shuts his mouth are notable by contrast: the deaths of his wife and his son, for example. His silence on the subject of grief is stands out in an otherwise noisy life.

In the end Lewis apologizes for almost nothing. Not the drugs. Not the misery he caused the women in his life. Not the trouble he gets into and not the destruction he causes. Jerry Lee Lewis was a lot of things, but he was not a nice man. Bragg doesn't whitewash it, and he doesn't make excuses for him, but he does a marvelous job of making you see the full character of the man that all those Southern men just "get him." And when Bragg says "Jerry Lee Lewis was the bunched up fist. He was the swinging tire iron," the reader knows exactly what he means.

Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli

Dreams and Stones is a “not non-fiction” story of a city—indeed, of all cities—which exist as fruit born upon the tree of the world. Like all fruit the city ripens to a perfect moment, whereupon it continues to ripen until it becomes soft and decaying, and eventually drops to the ground to ferment and disintegrate, releasing the seed inside that will become a tree which will bear more fruit. It is also the story of a city as a machine that continually breaks and repairs and breaks and repairs again, as though life is something that is pulled and pushed along by the turning of cogs. These two metaphors, the tree and the machine, are so entangled with each other in Tulli’s work they are hardly distinguishable. Far from being competing conceptions of the world, they are more a question of perspective: sometimes we look at a thing and think of how it is like a tree. Sometimes we look at it and see the machine. Sometimes the tree seems like a machine; sometimes the machine grows like a tree.Dreams and Stones might be called an extended exploration into how trees are machines, and machines are trees. Or of how we are both.

We tend to think of creation stories as tales of beginnings, how we came to be what we are. They exist in the distant and untouchable past, a memory that has lost its distinction and details over the ages. But myths do not really operate this way. Nor, for that matter, do stories. They are not “past” but exist in a kind of eternal present—they are always being told because we are always telling them, always reading them. Thus, when Eve bites into the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we are not hearing a story of how we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, we are hearing a story of why we don’t live in it now.

The genius in Magdalena Tulli’s work is her conscious awareness that we are doomed to live in this eternal present that is the province of fiction. Our sense of the future is dreamy. Our sense of the past is, as Faulkner so famously pointed out, not past. Even though Dreams and Stones describes the life cycle of a city from its idealized inception on drafting paper to its eventual death among a tangle of ruins, refuse, and flood, the idea that things have a beginning and an end is something of a pretense. It is all beginning and ending simultaneously, all the time. Tulli is exquisitely aware of the malleability of our sense of time:

Every night, to the rhythm of tomorrow’s newspapers revolving on the drums of the rotary presses, the cities of yesterday are rolled up and then vanish. In the morning no trace of them remains. When the new day is over the city will be thoroughly and utterly used up; nothing will be left of it besides the nouns, verbs, adjectives, affirmative and negative sentences drifting everywhere. Yesterday’s chair, hat and teapot are already beyond the reach of today’s hand, immaterial and unusable. And those who went to bed yesterday evening exist today in the same immaterial way as yesterday’s teapots.

Eventually, life seems to move faster and faster for the inhabitants of the city, until it seems to have little to do with the ticking of clocks or the motion of the hands on their watches, and the people seem to be perpetually rising to go to work, or sitting down to pour tea, with little to distinguish one day’s tea from the next.
This idea, that the past is as present as the present, and the present is as insubstantial as the past, would almost be Zen, except that the goal of the Zen practitioner is surely to free oneself of this world of illusion, whereas the inhabitants of the city are forever trapped in an ephemeral existence. Or, as Tulli puts it elsewhere, “Every glance is accompanied by an awareness of loss.”

...

Excerpted from a profile written about the author for the website Bloom