Bend Sinister

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
Skipping the preface and introduction, I read it, and then immediately read it again, aware now of Nabokov's dazzling wordplay, delicious humor, and dizzying imagination. Sure, I got the parody of Stalinism,

"You see, the general procedure is something like this: first the questionnaire must be filled, then you go to your cell. There you have a heart-to-heart talk with a fellow prisoner who is really one of our agents. Then, around two in the morning, you are roused from a fitful sleep and I start to question you again. It was thought by competent people that you would break down between six-forty and seven-fifteen. Our meteorologist predicted a particularly cheerless dawn."

followed the dream sequences,

Olga was revealed sitting before her mirror and taking off her jewels after the ball. still clad in cherry-red velvet, her strong gleaming elbows thrown back and lifted like wings, she had begun to unclasp at the back of her neck her dazzling dog collar. He knew it would come off together with her vertebrae...

caught the obvious imagery--but I had glossed over the tiny interjections, which Nabokov reveals in the introduction.

It may be asked if it is really worth an author's while to devise and distribute these delicate markers whose very nature requires that they be not too conspicuous.... Most people will not even mind having missed all this; well-wishers will bring their own little symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party; ironists will point out the fatal fatuity of my explications in this foreword and advise me to have footnotes next time (footnotes always seem comic to a certain type of mind). In the long run, it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts.

Enjoy your own tangential pleasure, then, and read--and re-read--Bend Sinister.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Kenzaburo Oe, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
It had been a while since I last read The Plague, that existential classic by Camus, so, when scanning the dust jacket of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, and seeing the words "plague," "Camus," and "existential hero" within mere paragraphs of each other, I thought why not? After all, it sat on the "classics" rack in my local library.

Kenzaburo Oe's style is described as "grotesque realism," and the description fits.

Dogs, cats, fieldmice, goats, even foals; scores of animal carcasses were piled up forming a small hill, quietly and patiently decomposing. The beasts' teeth were clenched, their pupils melting, their legs stiff. Their dead flesh and blood had turned into thick mucus making the yellow withered grass and mud around sticky, and--strangely full of life and holding out against the fierce onslaught of decay--there were countless ears.

The ears, in their way, symbolize the plight of juvenile delinquents abandoned to a plague by paranoid villagers. They attempt to create a new life within the confines of the deserted village, but their success is short-lived.

I don't know if disappointment is the right word. It is breezy, thanks to its clipped sentences; it is graphic and disturbing; it is ultimately tragic; but somehow, I missed the emotional connection, the "enormous impact" (as the Washington Post put it). I guess I'll have to read The Plague again.

Communities of Dissent

Stephen J. Stein, Communities of Dissent

The history of religion is usually told from a majoritarian perspective; small heresies receive only a passing mention, as foils for dominant creeds. Stein's brief synopsis is an attempt to take the minority view, treating fringe groups as not only worthy of study, but typical of American idealism and cranky independent-mindedness. The book could have woven twin strands of humor and pathos into a brilliantly-textured polemic, but sadly, in the name of objectivity, it becomes dull, a collection of historical bits livened only by descriptions of outlandish behavior and direct quotes from primary sources. Consider a typical example of a "New Religious Movement," the Vermont Pilgrims.

Sometimes they wore coarse sackcloth instead of bearskins. They fasted constantly. The central item in their diet was gruel, or mush.... They rarely ate meat and rejected other basic practices of Western civilization, declaring them sinful inventions. They gave up, for example, the use of knives and forks as well as conventional furniture, preferring to suck their food from a common bowl through cane stalks while standing....[T]hey neither bathed nor cut their hair.... Sometimes they rolled in the dust as an act of humility and repentance. They also chanted strange refrains, such as: "My God, my God, my God, my God, What wouldst thou have me do? Mummyjum, mummyjum, mummyjum, mummyjum" (3).

Stein's main tactic is summarize-rinse-repeat; the end of each chapter is a concise recapitulation of the main points, which is fine for a time, but becomes numbing. His deliberately unbiased reading means that there is little critical analysis of NRMs' often wacky claims. Also missing is explanation of the vituperation and persecution by "insiders." Was it a tit-for-tat response to charges of stagnation and decline by foaming prophets, or an irrational outpouring of fear? Did the government look away or participate?

Communities of Dissent is a decent introduction to the history of American cults and sects, but its most valuable resource is its "Further Reading" list.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser, On Writing Well
The New York Times calls it "a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose." Indeed, it is a model of clarity and brevity, Zinsser's fundamentals of good writing. He echoes Thoreau, charging the writer to "simplify, simplify." (The smart aleck in me always wondered why Thoreau had to repeat himself.) But Zinsser goes beyond mere platitudes, giving countless examples, often from his own writing, and addressing specific modes and genres (from memoir to science writing, from art criticism to sports). Zinsser's brain is a storehouse of pithy anecdotes. My favorite:

Many years ago, when I was writing editorials for the New York Herald Tribune, the editor of the page was a huge and choleric man from Texas named L. L. Engelking. I respected him because he had no pretense and hated undue circling around a subject. Every morning we would all meet to discuss what editorials we would like to write for the next day and what position we would take. Frequently we weren't quite sure, especially the writer who was an expert on Latin America.

"What about that coup in Uruguay?" the editor would ask.

"It could represent progress in the economy," the writer would reply, "or then again it might destabilize the whole political situation. I suppose I could mention the possible benefits and then--"

"Well," the man from Texas would break in, "let's not go peeing down both legs."

Which is why I can't wait to read another Zinsser classic, Writing to Learn.

Humankind: A Brief History

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Humankind: A Brief History
A slender volume packed with big questions. What makes us human? Tool-making? Ratiocination? Language? If we cannot effectively distinguish a bright line separating humans from apes, should we expand rights to our near relatives? Although Fernandez-Armesto offers no clear answer (nor does he set out to), his work sets out the historical, cultural, and scientific paths such questions have taken. And in the end:

That humans are uniquely rational, intellectual, spiritual, creative, conscientious, moral, or godlike seems to be a myth--an article of faith to which we cling in defiance of the evidence. But we need myths to make our irresoluble dilemmas bearable.... For now, if we want to go on believing we are human, and justify the special status we accord ourselves--if, indeed, we want to stay human through the changes we face--we had better not discard the myth, but start trying to live up to it.

A great complement and challenge to the ebullience of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

The Blank Slate

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
In his apologia for evolutionary psychology, Pinker treads on many toes--right, left, social constructionist, innatist, fundamentalist, radical feminist, neo-Marxist, and more. His book has been reviewed elsewhere, so I won't attempt to say anything new or profound; what I'll do is quote passages I found either interesting, challenging to my preconceptions, or both.

First up, critics of "reductionism" (and there are many):

Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by another. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed....An isolated geographer would have to invoke magic to move the continents, and an isolated physicist could not have predicted the shape of South America (p. 70).

A useful summation of the key themes of cognitive science:

1. The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback.
2. The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.
3. An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind.
4. Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variations across cultures.
5. The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts (pp. 31-45).

I appreciate Pinker's perspective on education; it is a refreshing change from standard constructivist gobbledygook, the sort that echoes throughout the academy.

...education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.... Students cannot learn Newtonian physics until they unlearn their intuitive impetus-based physics. They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn their intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn their intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of a designer. (222-223)

[David] Geary points out a final implication. Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children... are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term (223).

Every teacher who's ever had students work in groups learns this the hard way:

When people are part of a group, they pull less hard on a rope, clap less enthusiastically, and think up fewer ideas in a brainstorming session--unless they think their contributions to the group effort are being monitored (257).

Pinker is at his best when he dresses up arguments in droll (often personal) anecdotes.

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike.... By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist) (331).

And, last, a scientist's lament:

...when it comes to genes, people suddenly lose their ability to distinguish 50 percent from 100 percent, "some" from "all," "affects" from "determines." The diagnosis for this intellectual crippling is clear: if the effects of the genes must, on theological grounds, be zero, then all nonzero values are equally heretical (378).

The book is readable and vastly researched--although one wonders if Pinker quotes his sources too uncritically (he quotes standard critiques of "Whole Language," for example, which are based on scurrilous, politically-motivated studies). He succeeds at demolishing the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage, but spends less time addressing The Ghost in the Machine (which seems to disappear, pun intended, in later chapters). But these criticisms are tempered by great admiration for the book's wit and clarity. I'll re-read it again this summer and have even more to say. (Sorry.)

The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
A concoction of reality, fantasy, folk-tale, history, memoir; above all, a prose-poem in five stanzas. Most infuriating are the accounts of harsh, unrelenting abuse heaped on Chinese girls for their main fault: not being boys.

We had three girl second cousins, no boys; their great-grandfather was the old man who lived with them, as the river-pirate great-uncle was the old man who lived with us. When my sisters and I ate at their house, there we would be--six girls eating. The old man opened his eyes wide at us and turned in a circle, surrounded. His neck tendons stretched out. "Maggots! Where are my grandsons? I want grandsons! Give me grandsons! Maggots!" He pointed at each one of us, "Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot!" Then he dived into his food, eating fast and getting seconds. "Eat, maggots," he said. "Look at the maggots chew."

"He does this at every meal," the girls told us in English.

"Yeah," we said. "Our old man hates us too."

[originally posted July 16, 2004]

Inside Mrs. B's Classroom

Leslie Baldacci, Inside Mrs. B's Classroom
Give up a cushy job to teach in Chicago's South Side? You'd have to be crazy. Or, you'd have to be Leslie Baldacci. It's not a self-congratulatory memoir; it is, rather, a frank, brutal record of what's wrong with urban (translation: inner-city) education, what's misguided about political reform, and what's wrong with standardized testing. Hint: it's not the kids.

I touched on the insensitivity of assumptions when I faced the bean-counters who defend standardized test scores like they are the holy grail. They, same as most policy-makers, like things to fit in neat little boxes. Wrapping themselves in comfortable assumptions makes it easier to defend their hard and fast policies.

I told them the story of one kid, a fair student, who had tanked the Iowa test the year before. On test day, he took the garbage out before school and found a dead body in the alley. His mother sent him to school after he finished talking to the police.... Try as we might to consider the conditions that children come from before they pass through our doors, we cannot anticipate everything and therefore should not assume anything.

Oh, and if you figured eventually Baldacci would go back to her old job, refreshed and reinvigorated from her field trip into the South Side, you're wrong. She's still teaching.

[originally posted July 15, 2004]

Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness
A "dictionnarrative!" I can't say I was swept up in the sort of fervor that made Constance Hale "shiver with glee," but I was pleasantly surprised by the erudition and poetry in Gordon's slender volume. (I suppose I should have read the many prequels.) Tongue-tripping and intellectual--what's the difference between complacent and complaisant?--and altogether good fun. A sample quotation:

The horizon greeted us with a baleful rumble of louring coruscations as we dreaded our way along the precipitous switchbacks of Upper Trajikistan.

Say it out loud; try, though, to avoid spitting on your keyboard.

[originally posted July 14, 2004]

The Meaning of Everything

Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything
And now, to the real deal, a true dictionnarrative--the story of the fabled Oxford English Dictionary (which, as the author notes, might have been published at Cambridge if history had taken a different turn). Winchester's deft prose conveys his utter enthusiasm for all things nerdy. (When I was young, I was accused of "reading the dictionary;" if we'd had an OED in the house, I'm sure I would have.)

An example of Winchester's over-the-top ardor:

These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

I suppose the Greeks thought the same thing about Greek, and heaven knows the Romans were quite fond of Latin. For the future, my money's on Asia; the global balance of power will shift toward China and India in the next two decades. You heard it here first.

[originally posted July 14, 2004]

A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
Praise be to Dover for their cheap reprints (paperback, of course) of classics old and modern. Bridging the divide is Ibsen's once-scandalous A Doll's House, the 19th century women's lib shocker. Nora supports hubby Torvald through a difficult financial scrape by taking a loan from Krogstad, the unscrupulous former lover of forgotten widow Christine. Her scheme backfires, but Christine gets back with Krogstad and convinces him to cancel Nora's debt. When hubby finds out, his righteous indignation leads Nora to realize she's just his doll; in a final scene exactly opposite Gone With the Wind, Torvald's left mumbling, "The most wonderful thing of all?--" as Nora flounces out the door.

[originally posted July 13, 2004]

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Collected Novellas [more specifically, Chronicle of a Death Foretold]

It takes a master craftsman to create suspense out of inevitability. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez does just that. Thanks to the Citizen Kane-like reportage, you know all the while that the protagonist, Santiago Nasar, is going to die; you even know who will kill him--or, more accurately, who has killed him. And yet you are still breathless when he is murdered gruesomely, shockingly, humorously. It's like being punched in the gut while laughing.

...and yet they thought that Santiago Nasar would never fall.... Trying to finish it once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it almost in the armpit, where pigs have it. Actually, Santiago Nasar wasn't falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door.

Up next: A Doll's House.

[originally posted July 13, 2004]

The Stranger

Albert Camus, The Stranger
Who's more American--Johnny Cash or Albert Camus?

Read The Stranger not to be moved, or to be unmoved, but because you can. Be gripped by its sparing, simple prose (see below). Or, let the waves of anticlimax wash over you; merely bob on the surface, floating in "gentle indifference." The choice is yours.

I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?

Matthew Ward, in the prefatory note, justifies the Hemingwayesque, crime-novel style of the translation:

Camus acknowledged employing an "American method" in writing The Stranger, in the first half of the book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the depcition of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the "tough guy" tone.... In addition to giving the text a more "American" quality, I have also attempted to venture farther into the letter of Camus's novel, to capture what he said and how he said it, not what he meant. In theory, the latter should take care of itself.

The simplicity, though, masks a complex moral anti-drama; for Meursault, the protagonist, events merge seamlessly into each other. He is an observer, objective, detached from his own existence--even killing a complete stranger without reason or remorse--but only when condemned does he realize his beliefs about death and life are illusions.

... everything was very simple: the guillotine is on the same level as the man approaching it. He walks up to it the way you walk up to another person. That bothered me too. Mounting the scaffold, going right up into the sky, was something the imagination could hold on to. Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything: you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with great precision....

Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me... For everything to be comsummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

The allusion is obvious, violently and ironically inverting the crucifixion. So much for the promise of future glory, so much for the hope of suffering through a world that is not "home."

I find it instructive to read the one-star reviews on Amazon. They give you the true sense of the book--its capacity to shock, to infuriate, to baffle, even years after The Stranger has become a near-cliche.

Don't Even Waste Your Time, January 12, 2004
Reviewer: A reader from Cincinnati, OH USA
If you are looking for a book to put you to sleep, look no further. Here it is. This is the most pathetic book I have ever read. And not only was the book boring, the main character, Meursault, was an emotionless, hopless, and disgusting human being. His views on women and relationships are no less than vile. He does not even remorse over the death of his mother. He then says that he no emotional attachment to Marie, the lady that he is sexually active with. Thankfully, he commits a cold blooded murder and is put to death. And at his execution, he says that he wishes there be "howls of execration." It is amazing to me that an individual can want there to be people cursing him on the day of his death. Bottom line, this is not woth the time for you to sit down and read it. [this refers to the original British translation]

Disappointing, June 24, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Boston, MA United States
I'll keep this short. The book was an awful read save the last ten pages. Everything before that is terribly uninteresting. It is only once he has been sentenced and awaits his end that it becomes something worth flipping through. I have the utmost respect for Albert Camus, but this is dribble.

A horrible translation, March 29, 2002
Reviewer: Meg from Boston, MA
I have read a previous translation of The Stranger, and was deeply moved. My entire life was changed. The previous translator did Camus justice. Matthew Ward, with this translation of The Stranger, ruined the novel. Ward includes awful cliche and unintelligent description. Unfortunately this is the only translation currently in print in the US. If you are able to, please order from a forgein printer (sometimes printed under the title The Outsider) or consider searching for an out of print copy not translated by Matthew Ward.

So much for being faithful to the original, in all its paradoxical simplicity. Non-flowery prose just isn't as moving.

[originally posted on July 12, 2004]

The Dimwit's Dictionary

Robert Harwell Fiske, The Dimwit's Dictionary
A useful reference, if you have trouble with cliches, stock phrases, or "moribund metaphors." Most helpful are the thesaurus-like recommendations. I hate, loathe, despise the phrase "in terms of," which, in the world of education, gets batted around like a beach ball in a graduation speech. "With some slight thought," Fiske writes, "in terms of can be pared from a sentence." For some, slight thought is tough work.

[originally posted July 12, 2004]

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz
Time-shifting narrative structure that anticipates Quentin Tarantino's filmic stylings; shifts in person that blur the roles of reader and protagonist. Fuentes manages to use first, third, and second person, without overly confusing or aggravating the reader. The shifts in time at first seem random, but as the novel rears to the finish--as expected, Artemio Cruz dies--the death scene is juxtaposed with Cruz's birth, and the narrative comes full circle. Satire, pathos, and lyric description collide in this magnificent work. I'd say much more, but I'll save it for my IB class this coming fall.

[originally posted July 12, 2004]

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003 (novel).
A realistic post-apocalyptic future with an infuriating conclusion. I'll have to read more Atwood, now; it's like Vonnegut or Palahniuk--darkly humorous and easily digestible, but unsettling, even stomach-churning in its plausibility. Only quibble: why do companies, years hence, have such cheesily-spelled names? "RejoovenEsense." "HelthWyzer." "AnooYoo." Annoying.

[originally posted June 30, 2004]

No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools

Anyone with any level of concern for the American public school system--in particular, its political machinations--should read Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools. When school boards turn teachers into political pawns, when principals run roughshod over the First Amendment, when at-risk students are kicked out of school and their transcript notes "lack of interest"--these are a few of the bile-raising stories, from the trenches, of some of America's finest. Best about the volume: it's written by the teachers themselves.

Read it. Now.

[originally posted June 25, 2004]

a word of explanation

I'm using this blog as a place to store book reviews from decorabilia, my "regular" blog, for practical purposes; I want them all in one place, accessible even when non-digital memory fails me. Nothing more.