Category: Books & Writers

Five books in five days (5)

NewMexiKen spent much of the afternoon with M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a superb novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. It’s my fourth complete book since Thursday.

In compelling language, Momaday tells the story of Abel, an American Indian veteran who returns home to his pueblo in 1945. In telling Abel’s story we learn also stories about Abel’s grandfather, the priest, women in Abel’s life, friends. All this takes place in Walatowa, a fictional pueblo whose geography resembles the actual Pueblo of Jemez, the surrounding mountains and canyons, and in Los Angeles among relocated Indians.

And, while the story is moving and meaningful, it is Momaday’s language that soars. Abel at Valle Grande in the Jemez Mountains (truly, in real life, one of the world’s great scenic wonders):

Of all the places that he knew, this valley alone could reflect the great spatial majesty of the sky. It scooped out of the dark peaks like the well of a great, gathering storm, deep umber and blue and smoke-colored. The view across the diameter was magnificent; it was an unbelievably great expanse. As many times as he had been there in the past, each new sight of it always brought him up short, and he had to catch his breath. Just there, it seemed, a strange and brilliant light lay upon the world, and all the objects in the landscape were washed clean and set away in the distance. In the morning sunlight the Valle Grande was dappled with the shadows of clouds and vibrant with rolling winter grass. The clouds were always there, huge, sharply described, and shining in the pure air. But the great feature of the valley was its size. It was almost too great for the eye to hold, strangely beautiful and full of distance. Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration. He looked at the facets of a boulder that lay balanced on the edge of the land, and the first thing beyond, the vague misty field out of which it stood, was the floor of the valley itself, pale and blue-green, miles away. He shifted the focus of his gaze, and he could just make out the clusters of dots that were cattle grazing along the river in the faraway plain.

Or this, the Navajo Ben Benally remembering a snow-filled day:

And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

Awesome book; simply awesome.

Five books in five days (4)

The End of Faith by Sam Harris was NewMexiKen’s third book in my project to read five books in five days. I began book four, M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn last night, so am almost back on target.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris argues that religious faith is the problem in the world — a problem that endangers us all. The more fundamental the belief — Judaism, Christianity and Islam most of all — the more threatening it is.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

Harris is unlikely to make many converts, nonetheless he is convincing in his analysis of the danger. He is less convincing in his later chapters when he discusses alternative forms of belief and spirtuality, once we are weaned from the religious beliefs of our ancestors. Still, it’s a remarkable and worthwhile book.

“The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself….”

“Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls [i.e., rape victims], rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. Its is a failure of ethics.”

Five books in five days (3)

Oops. NewMexiKen found other things to do Saturday and has fallen temporarily behind the pace of reading five books in five days.

Which reminds me of the time in high school when I spent most of the day reading a book during various classes so I could give an oral book report on it in last period English — Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. I can still see the smiling, smirking and disapproving faces of a whole classroom full of high school juniors who thought it was somehow hilarious (and/or a mortal sin) that I pulled this off.

“On-demand delivery” is all the rage now. I was just ahead of the times.

Five books in five days (2)

NewMexiKen completed Joan Didion’s Where I Was From last evening, the second book in two days in an effort to read five books in five days. This really superb book incorporates history, memoir, journalism, literary and art criticism to examine California, then and now, real and imagined. The result is a rare combination of insightful analysis and personal feeling. Outstanding.

I’ll include two passages in separate entries.

NewMexiKen began book three last night, The Jefferson Bible, but after 50 or so pages realized that, though interesting, the book really doesn’t fit into the scheme of five books in five days. I will substitute something else for day three.

Five books in five days

NewMexiKen decided a forced march was a good way to stimulate a little more reading (that wasn’t on a computer screen). So yesterday I stacked five recent acquisitions to my library on the coffee table and dug in, telling myself I would get through all five (and enjoy them, dammit!) in the next five days.

The first, which I began and completed last evening is Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, a brief, nonfiction survey of several western U.S. massacres. While interesting in parts, with well-crafted sentences, this book has little to recommend it. It’s as if McMurtry took some cursory notes on 3X5 cards, somewhat organized the cards, and transcribed the notes. The result is disorganized, almost stream of consciousness and really not detailed enough to merit value as a history of the horrific incidents he includes.

NewMexiKen is a big fan of McMurtry’s fiction and nonfiction. This book does not measure up. (See also here for another review.)

Later last evening I got a headstart on day two, Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. More later.

Back to the old…

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of Playing With Boys and The Dirty Girls Social Club, has a blog, La Queen Sucia. (It was she who authored the review of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, mentioned here a few weeks back.)

During the past couple of weeks, Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez has included commentary on her personal social life beginning with The Dating Game (December 21), followed by Happy Things (December 29) and yesterday, Back to the old…drawing board.” One wishes Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez more satisfying endings, but these three posts together struck NewMexiKen as a fascinating short story in real time.

Valdes-Rodriguez’s newest novel, Make Him Look Good, will be published in April.

Nicholas Sparks 40

It’s the birthday of the novelist Nicholas Sparks, born in Omaha, Nebraska (1965). He’s one of the few successful male romance novelists starting with his first novel The Notebook which he wrote as an homage to his wife’s grandparents. They had been married for sixty-two years when he met them and he realized while talking to them for the first time that they were still flirting with each other.

Nicholas Sparks said, “Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It’s one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.”

The Writer’s Almanac

NewMexiKen enjoyed Three Weeks with My Brother, Sparks’s non-fiction memoir.

Calamity Jane

From Salon via Powell’s Books a review of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird. The review begins:

As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane — 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser — was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and ’80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day’s G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, to Jane Alexander’s feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert’s blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series Deadwood, Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls — published in 1990 — which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.
…

For all executive producer David Milch’s claims for its veracity, HBO’s Deadwood got Jane wrong: She wasn’t an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen’s Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to “white slave” for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she’d lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. …

A couple of key quotations:

“Canary was the Courtney Love of her day”

“She was a good woman [,] only she drinked.”

Read more from Powell’s.

The Year of Magical Thinking

NewMexiKen recommends Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking without reservation. Every thinking person should read this book about the sudden death of Didion’s husband and the serious illness of their adult daughter (who died after the book was published). While, of course, sad, the book is not depressing, and it is about the best discussion of death and dying — and grief — that one can imagine.

The Gift of the Magi

by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 1906.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And
sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two
at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and
the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

Continue reading The Gift of the Magi

A Christmas Carol

… was first published on this date in 1843.

Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

A Perfect Memoir

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez really likes The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.

I mean good. Effortless reading thanks to the author’s clear mind, generous heart and gift with language. Surprising, heartbreaking, satisfying in a million tiny ways. This is one of those books I read and go, “Damn, I wish I could write like that.”

Wow. Wow wow wow. Still got goosebumps.

Everywhere NewMexiKen looks, this book gets raves. The story of Walls’ upbring by dysfunctional, rambling parents is one of The New York Times 100 notable books of the year.

920 Biography, genealogy, insignia

Melvil Dewey was born on this date in 1851. You know — Dewey, as in Dewey decimal system.

Read Dewey’s obituary in 1931 from The New York Times.

Here’s a website that seems to be the Dewey Decimal Classification headquarters.

Oh, and here’s 025.431: The Dewey blog.

NewMexiKen has been considering jettisoning the Categories for this blog and replacing them with a classification scheme. I’d probably use the Library of Congress system, though. Sorry, Melvil.

Willa Cather

It’s the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873)…. Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky.”

She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure’s magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My ??ntonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Willa Cather said, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”

Source: The Writer’s Almanac.

You may hear Garrison Keillor tell the above and more by clicking here [RealAudio].

Best line of the day, so far

Since Wallace Stegner’s death, there is perhaps no one better qualified to make sweeping statements on Western culture and history than Larry McMurtry. From his familial background (Texas homesteaders) to his own experiences in cowboying, bookselling, writing and research, McMurtry is pedigreed like nobody’s business. This is a book he should have been able to write in his sleep.

Maybe he did.

— Allen M. Jones reviewing Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter for New West Network.

Of course, Jones is disappointed because McMurtry can write at the highest level:

His best novels — Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers — are all ambushes of emotion, everyman oomphs of grief and redemption. No flourishes of purple prose, no narrative strutting. Here’s just a handful of people you can care about, and here are some of the bad (and good) things that happen to them. His life’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, is a staggering achievement of invisible research and camouflaged, authorial labor. Anyone who can read about the death of Augustus McCrae without threatening tears has a chunk of vulcanized rubber for a heart.

Oh What a Slaughter is a short, nonfiction survey of several western massacres.

Joan Didion 71 today

The Writer’s Almanac tells us about Joan Didion, winner of this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction. Or you can listen to Garrison Keillor recite this and more [RealAudio].

It’s the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, “I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it… I thought about the atomic bomb a lot… after there was one.”

She began keeping a notebook when she was five years old, and she later wrote, “Keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with a sense of loss.” At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation.

Didion became associated with the so-called New Journalism, because she often made herself a character in whatever she was covering, and she went much further than most journalists in revealing her own states of mind. The title essay of her collection The White Album (1979) includes notes from a psychiatrist’s evaluation after she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband’s recent death from a heart attack at the dinner table, came out this year.

Joan Didion said, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. . . . Writers are always selling somebody out.”

On this date

  • Illinois was admitted to the Union as the 21st state on this date in 1818.
  • George B. McClellan was born on this date in 1826. McClellan was the commander of Union forces in the east during much of the first two years of the War of the Rebellion. He loved to organize and feared to fight. McClellan was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1864, receiving 21 to Lincoln’s 212 electoral votes.
  • Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on this date in 1857. Born in the Ukraine of Polish descent, Joseph Conrad learned English in the British merchant marine in his twenties. He began writing in the 1890s and published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902) are his most famous works.
  • The first human heart transplant took place in Cape Town, South Africa, on this date 38 years ago (1967). The patient, Lewis Washkansky, survived 18 days before he died from double pneumonia, a result of anti-rejection drugs suppressing his immune system.

Daryl Hannah is 45 today.

Brendan Fraser is 37.

Rattlesnake Lawyer

NewMexiKen became intrigued at a book-signing Friday evening in Albuquerque’s newest Borders (on the westside at Coors Bypass and Ellison). The author, Jonathan Miller, looking a little forlorn in the mostly empty bookstore, told me proudly that The Albuquerque Journal had written that he “may just be the next John Grisham.” So I bought one of the two novels displayed on the little table — Rattlesnake Lawyer — and Miller signed it for me.

The story centers around Dan Shepard, a recent and somewhat unambitious lawyer who ends up in New Mexico as the junior public defender in an fictional eastern county. As the “baby lawyer,” he is assigned the case of a minor, Jesus Villalobos — Hay-Zeus, not Jee-zus, Shepard learns. The kid, a known troublemaker is accused of battery. The charge turns into murder when the victim dies and Miller tells the story all the way through the boy’s trial as an adult.

NewMexiKen read the book in one day, finding the characterizations and the story intriguing. A good hook, in other words. I cannot be certain that Miller gets all the details right — I doubt you can find any rattlesnakes to kill in early January, for example — but most of what he describes — the people, the community, the one-mall town, the everyone-knows-everyone sense of it, the police and prosecutors — all ring true. A reader will not confuse the setting or the characters with any place other than New Mexico, that much is for sure.

Miller has a second novel — Crater County — also published last year. Rattlesnake Lawyer was good enough I’ll look for this second one, too, even if Miller isn’t around to sign it.

Miller, who’s business card says “Attorney/Author,” attended the Albuquerque Academy. Locals will appreciate the name of one incidental character — Juan Tabo.

Update: Miller emails to say he’d been at Borders eight hours and “sold 62 books, one of the most for a one day signing by an independent author in NM.”

170 years ago today

It’s the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835), who wrote Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his own favorite, The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1891). He was cynical and irreverent, but he had a tender spot for cats. There were always kittens in the house, and he gave them names like “Sin” and “Sour Mash.” “Mamma has morals,” said his daughter Suzy, “and Papa has cats.” He swore constantly and without shame. His streams of profanity broke his wife’s heart on a daily basis. One day he cut himself shaving, and she heard a string of oaths from the bathroom. She resolved to move him to repentance, and she repeated back to him all the bad words he had just said. He smiled at her and shook his head. “You have the words, Livy,” he said, “but you’ll never learn the tune.” After he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he found himself awash in cash, which he invested in a typesetting machine that was very complicated and very ingenious and demanded more and more investment and in the end would not work. He had to declare bankruptcy, and he decided to go on a worldwide lecture tour, the proceeds of which he would use to pay back all of his creditors. His visits to Africa and Asia convinced him that a God who allowed Christians to believe that they were better than savages was a God he wanted no part of. He was a funny man and is remembered for his humorous sayings. He said, “It is better to keep you mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” He also said, “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Listen to Garrison Keillor recite the above and more.

Killing the written word by snippets

American University linguistics professor Naomi S. Brown wonders in the Los Angeles Times if we’re “Killing the written word by snippets.” This excerpt:

But today’s college crowd has a tool we did not: the search engine. Want to learn tap dancing in Austin? Lessons are just a few clicks away. So are the words spoken by the White Rabbit in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” or every reference to dogs in “The Canterbury Tales.” Between Microsoft Word’s “find” function, Project Gutenberg, Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature and Google Print, seeking out precise fragments of information has become child’s play.

Search engines are a blessing. Unquestionably, they save all of us vast amounts of time and shoe leather, not to mention their democratizing effect for users without access to substantial book collections. But there is a hitch.

Much as automobiles discourage walking, with undeniable consequences for our health and girth, textual snippets-on-demand threaten our need for the larger works from which they are extracted. Why read “Bowling Alone” — or even the shorter article upon which it builds — when you can lift a page that contains some key words? In an attempt to coax students to search inside real books rather than relying exclusively on the Web for sources, many professors require references to printed works alongside URLs. Now that those “real” full-length publications are increasingly available and searchable online, the distinction between tangible and virtual is evaporating.

Professor Brown concludes: “If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society.” Is she right?