Short epistolary format at its best

This weekend I read Marjorie Williams' The Woman at the Washington Zoo, a collection of her profiles, essays, and other writing. Williams' husband, Timothy Noah, edited the book after Williams died of liver cancer in January 2005. The book is really, really good. My favorite political essays were "Thank You, Clarence Thomas" and "Bill Clinton, Feminist," but I was moved most by the personal essays about her son's fear of bugs and her cancer diagnosis.

My favorite part is the section of reprints from Williams' "Breakfast Table" feature at Slate. The pieces were printed as short letters between two authors about reading the daily newspapers over the course of a week. The short epistolary format works so well here: there's none of the high-minded, content-lite language of media criticism, just friendly, thoughtful conversation. Here's a selection from Williams (reprinted in the book) from March 1999:

Today's stinker is the New York Times' Page One story "One Precinct, 2 Very Different Murder Cases," which ponders the public treatment of two recent murders in Brooklyn's 77th Precinct. One, the unsolved stabbing of white graduate student Amy Watkins, got big play in the Times and all the other New York media; the other, the stabbing of Jamaican immigrant Marvin Watson, got no notice at all. Here at my actual breakfast table in majority-black D.C., when we see the Post showing the same egregious double standard the Watkins/Watson story addresses, we sing out, "When Bad Things Happen to White People!" But the Post is at least free of the Times' disingenuous self-consciousness. The Times story, by Jim Yardley and Garry Pierre-Pierre, does note that Watson's death "went unreported by the tabloids and the New York Times." But it presents this as just one of those unfortunate realities, folks--like the alignment of the planets; not as a failure the Times should perhaps be re-examining. Did this silence from the paper of record have anything to do with the fact that the city's finest assigned two dozen detectives to the first case, while handling the second as a routine homicide? The Times doesn't speculate. And the story re-commits the moral error it is supposedly exposing, noting, for example, that the white Kansan had an ex-boyfriend who now attends Harvard Law School (who cares?). Worst of all, it closes with a quote from the girlfriend of the dead man, in which the Times somehow gets her to ratify its original, brutal news judgment: "There are a lot of killings in New York, and I don't think all of them could be covered," she says. That's a relief. Whatever twinge of doubt caused some editor at the Times to assign this story is now assuaged.

Although Slate doesn't run the "Breakfast Table" feature anymore, they occasionally use the epistolary format in for the Book Club, Movie Club (scroll down to Scott Foundas's entry for 12-29 to read a smart critique of Crash), and other discussions (I linked to Katha Pollitt's and William Saletan's discussion of abortion).

The day of the love for many

Better late than never, here's the hilarious Georgian take on Valentine's Day:

Valentine’s Day is known to be a special day, an extraordinary one honoring love and lovers and is celebrated worldwide on February 14th. People believe it is the day of “Love” which encourages individuals to show their care and affection towards their dearest ones. Across the globe people celebrate this day by giving out gifts, flowers (mostly roses), special valentine’s cards, candies, chocolates, sharing intimate time with loved ones, hanging out in restaurants or clubs and a lot more interesting activities to express affection.
...
With special days like this, individuals (mostly boys) are opportuned to propose or express boldly what they feel towards opposite gender, they usually use the Valentine’s Day as a scapegoat to reveal their long time secret desires towards someone, Some girls surprisingly received roses from strangers and unexpected companions.

“He flipped out a rose and insisted it’s for me, I was shocked as it was unexpected and he’s my close friend” Ana, a student of Black Sea University, exclaimed.

Natia: my boyfriend invited me for lunch in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day; I never knew it will change my life as there and then he proposed to marry me which I willingly accepted.
...
Not only cards exchange is common on the Valentine’s Day. Other romantic stuff serve intimate Valentine’s day moments as well; Walking in parks, strolling in the moonlight, offering loved one’s pizza with shape of a heart, a letter or a gift inside the pizza’s box, Scattering rose petals on the floor to lead you to the person you love, Bunch of roses with a ring inside one of the flowers (suggested for those intending on proposing to their loved one), dining in deem lights and a lit colored candle, champagne toasts with soft romantic music (Jazz preferably).

It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to express our affection to each other only on Valentine’s Day; we can and should anytime possible, for the world needs care are affection of others to make it a better place. The world needs solidarity among individuals, peaceful living, interdependence among people, and excessive love for one another. Just like any other good day, the Valentine’s Day came and is gone with the wind, I wish you many happy returns, a wonderful time full of hope and love.

Octavia Butler died

Octavia Butler died Friday. My girlfriend Kate was very inspired by a talk she gave at Columbia in 1998, and I used her excellent young adults' novel Kindred in teaching a summer program for high school kids.

From her AP obit:

Butler began writing at age 10, and told Howle she embraced science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called "Devil Girl from Mars" and thought, "I can write a better story than that." In 1970, she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich.

Her first novel, "Kindred," in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, "Fledgling," an examination of the "Dracula" legend, was published last fall.

Here's a link to Pam Noles' essay "Shame" about race in sci-fi, which Jenny Davidson pointed us to.

And here's an Amazon list/guide, So you'd like to... Read a Dozen of the Best Women Writing SF.

Summers + Tina = Larry Brown?

James Traub on Larry Summers:

But Summers never came to grips with, or perhaps recognized, the special problem of the supremely self-regarding culture. As it happens, I have written about just such situations before, and have even, when Tina Brown was editor of The New Yorker, worked at one. (Full disclosure: I was not one of Tina's favorite writers.) One thing I've learned is that the wise steward of such majestic institutions says, or at least is understood to say, "I love this place so much that I will not accept anything less than the best."
...
Summers had a gift for arming, rather than disarming, his audience. One of his own aides described for me a famously contentious meeting with Law School faculty at which, he said, "Larry told them he wasn't going to pay any attention to their views, when in fact he was going to be listening to their views." Summers so offended his own preferred candidate to head the Graduate School of Education, whom he subjected to a withering cross-examination, that she changed her mind about taking the position until members of the school interceded.

You do, of course, have to wonder about professional intellectuals who get so wobbly under cross-examination. Harvard professors appear to be accustomed to a level of deference that few of us on the other side of those Ivy walls could ever expect. Clearly this had much to do with the fabled Cornel West affair, when the president grievously offended this overhyped superstar by tendering what Summers apparently regarded as delicate hints on matters such as grade inflation and the production of serious academic work. Summers was right, as he generally was. But he never intended to insult West. In fact, he had no idea that he had insulted West. Summers himself wouldn't have been offended, and it never crossed his mind that Cornel West might be made of different material than Larry Summers, or that West might need to hear some malarkey along the lines of, "I love your work so much that I don't want to accept anything less than the best."

Speaking of disappointing "fresh blood"-type recruited leaders, whoever expected that the only good thing to come of Larry Brown's first year as Knicks coach would be that short little Nate Robinson would win the slam dunk contest? ("Iguodala was robbed" is the new "Scorcese was robbed"--his finale dunk was just as bland as Leo's Howard Hughes!) The Knicks are currently two losses out of dead last in the league, on track to finish the season with 46 fewer wins than Brown's old Pistons (sorry for the math, ladies)--a failure on par with Talk Magazine!

Wow, that came together rather nicely.

Teaching in Georgia: the blank gaze

Blogger and fellow Tbilisi denizen SueAndNotU seems to be teaching at the same "university" where I taught 'The English Novel' (singular form especially appropriate, as the university posessed exactly one English novel in sufficient numbers to teach a small class) last semester.

Her account of teaching sounds just like mine. A tip, Sue: ask them to talk about sex and drugs. It's like magic!

She writes:

Essentially, I'm teaching English through the medium of history, using a primer published in the U.S. and intended for ESL students. I'm there, see, not so much to spread my revisionist politically correct propaganda, as to let them practice their English with a native speaker. I have high hopes that, by the end of the semester, they'll all be saying "like," like, waaaay more often.

This is a fine thing in itself, and I'm happy to serve the cause of greater English proficiency in my small way. But as long as the class is ostensibly about history, I still feel obligated to put up a fight. Look, I probably shouldn't use this forum to mock my students but a) I'm not exactly up for tenure here; b) believe it or not, I mock gently with affection, because they're pretty dear kids; and c) they don't use the internet; I checked.

With my least-advanced class, we read a chapter on the beginnings of World War I. It goes like this, for your information: the Archduke of Austria-Hungary goes to Serbia. He is shot. Austria-Hungary is angry! They declare war on Serbia. Other countries have agreements with Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and soon all of Europe is fighting.

Okay, class. Let's review what we read. What started WWI?

Blank stares. Eternal, uncomfortable silence. They stare at me with the empty eyes of those who know they will win this face-off.

Alright, let's back up. Where is the Archduke Ferdinand from? Feel free to look back at the text.

Serbia?

No. What happened to the Archduke?

He got killed in Serbia in the war?

No, the war happened after he was killed. Okay, how about this. What did Austria-Hungary do when he was killed?

Blank stares.

Remember, a Serbian has just killed a member of Austria-Hungary's royal family. What do they do?

Blank stares.

What happens next? What starts?

Blank stares.

Okay. True or false, everyone: as a result, Austria-Hungary... invites Serbia to a party?

Swelling heteronormative discourse

Two sentences from two articles from two different publications about sex at Barnard. Guess which one is from the Columbia Daily Spectator and which one is from the barnard bulletin:

"Nobody is quite certain where Barnard's swelling heteronormative discourse
comes from..."

"Barnard girls are easy, and they give good head, the stereotype goes."

The two articles are about a recent "fireside chat" between students and the dean and president of Barnard College about issues of sexuality on campus. The Spectator article focuses on a worry voiced at the event that Barnard students are stereotyped by Columbia students as either sluts or lesbians (in either case, they're inferior intellectually). The bulletin article is about whether the activities at Barnard's Sexhibition week contribute to a sex-positive environment or if they embarrass some students. Both articles made me think, something about being 18-22 years old and subject to a lot of emotional conflicts about sex makes for some truly terrible writing. Personal ambivalence gets turned into generalizations (sometimes hurtful, sometimes false), derogatory comments, misguided attempts at theory, pseudo-psychology, personal attacks, and a lot of [navel]-gazing disguised as transgressive philosophy.

I give lots of credit to the people at Take Back the Night and related organizations, who get flak for anything they do--either they yell too much or they're too open about different types of sexuality--but keep working creatively anyway.

I have to guess there's some amount of humor in this feature from this week's edition of the bulletin, a horoscope organized by icons of "'sexy' things":

Aries: leather jacket over bra
Taurus: condom, leather jacket, bra
Gemini: lacy underwear
Cancer: lilies
Leo: bra
Virgo: puckered mouth
Libra: woman's back
Scorpio: more underwear
Sagitarius: hands unhooking someone's bra
Capricorn: smiling mouth
Aquarius: underwear
Pisces: the word CONSENT

Oh, women's college! But why are there extra quotation marks around 'sexy'? And why are there so few "'sexy' things" that icons have to be repeated? Oh well, I'll take this feature over this apparently unedited column any day.

Analysis of Alice nothing but a house of cards

I've been reading the Penguin Classics collection of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, which is edited by a British scholar named Hugh Haughton. It's heavily annotated, but Haughton is no Martin Gardner. Here's Haughton on Alice's mushroom-induced growth spurt (the one that gives her a really long neck, making a pigeon worry she is a serpent):

'The next thing is to get back to that beautiful garden,' Alice decides at the close of the chapter and behind this scene may stand the first 'beautiful garden' and its 'serpent', as described in the book of Genesis: Alice finds herself treated as a serpent in the trees by a version of the sacre pigeon, who understandably sees her as a predator... William Empson remarks that the whole episode gives Alice a strangely phallic role and appearance. The pigeon is concerned with her eggs, and the following chapter takes up the idea of babies.

Haughton's notes are filled with pointless analysis like this, just the type of bullshit I like to think Dodgson would loathe.

I once read a similar analysis of Hitchcock's Psycho, the kind of book love to cite to prove that the ivy league teaches nonsense (it was assigned in a friend's film course). The author employed any and all possible evidence in her quest to prove that the movie is structured around anal fixation, including that the heroine is seen "sitting down, as though defecating", and that the film's title ends in the letter 'o', which should evoke for the reader the image of an asshole. (I'll say!)

The Truth About Celia

Kevin Brockmeier's new book A Brief History of the Dead has a cool cover. But what really catches my eye is that he's also written a book called The Truth about Celia that sounds even better. From the Publishers Weekly review:

In 1997, Christopher lives happily with his wife, Janet, and seven-year-old daughter, Celia, in a beautifully preserved 19th-century house in a peaceful small town. One morning, while Celia and her father are home alone, Celia vanishes from the backyard. There are no clues, no suspects. In successive stand-alone chapters, Brockmeier wanders ever further from a straight recounting of events. He describes the aftermath of Celia's disappearance from the perspective of the community at large, then turns Celia's story into a fantasy about an otherworldly green-skinned child, and finally imagines Celia in a new incarnation as a single mother called Stephanie. Christopher's and Janet's numbness--they show little rage, frustration or grief--is skillfully rendered, if sometimes oppressively subtle. Christopher lives in a hazy world of guilt, while Janet commits a few quiet acts of rebellion, disrupting the showing of a movie and finally drifting away from her husband. Brockmeier's prose is measured and lovely, and he sketches a number of eerie and compelling scenes, including those in which Christopher believes he receives telephone calls from the missing Celia on a toy phone that she treasured.

I'm an absolute sucker for this kind of Paul Auster formula stuff, but it does seem like the genre is running out of steam.

Anyway, the point of all this is: as anyone familiar with Alice should know, the real truth about 'Celia' is that Celia, the main character in Columbia University's 2004 Varsity Show (an annual student-produced musical comedy), is just a thinly-veiled Alice Boone, complete with an anagrammed first name. Celia was a badass editor in chief. Celia would never write the kind of drivel that passes for campus editorial leadership today!

Reasons to live, but no reasons to steal

My friend presented the following ethical dilemma to me: She was sort of considering stealing a copy of Amy Hempel's At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom from the public library. The used book prices on Amazon.com should give some indication of how rare this book is. I must be the luckiest girl in the entire world, for I found a copy of the book a few years ago at a used bookstore in Albuquerque. Aware of its scarcity in the used book world, I was excited to find it on the top of a stack of books someone had just sold, so I tried to play it cool when I asked about the price: one dollar. It is the best thing I've ever found at a used bookstore. Even though I'm well known to be the least responsible library patron of all time, I couldn't take her plan into consideration. "Think of how many people want to read that book! Think of how many people need to read that book!" We decided she could photo-copy it.

I'd recommend reading Hempel's Reasons to Live before At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom because it contains my favorite contemporary short story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." I do a little homage to "The Most Girl Part of You" (from At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom) every time I drink hot tea and ice water at a meal.

Joystick Jabberwocky

How do you translate a poem like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"?

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach offers a French translation he calls "Jaseroque", which includes stanzas like

Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l'oiseau Jube, évite
Le frumieux Band-à-prend!

...That would be the Jubjub bird and the frumious Bandersnatch, shown at right.

So how does this translation do? The Babelfish translation of "Jaseroque" doesn't quite return us to the original. The stanza

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

becomes

One two, one two, by the medium,
The sword vorpal makes stalemate-with-side!
The demolished animal, with its head,
It returns gallomphant.

Not bad, but "stalemate-with-side" is disappointingly literal.

I imagine that no other poem has been rewritten for satire as many times as "Jabberwocky". (There's a whole page of such poems, though the page incorrectly calls them "parodies".) I first learned of the poem when I was in grade school because of a brilliant satire in MAD magazine, written by veteran Frank Jacobs. Here it is, annotated with inspiration from Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice:

You've just wound down nineteen straight hours of Nintendo. Your brain is totally waxed, and as you crash you find yourself mumbling incoherently verse after verse of MAD's...

"Joystick Jabberwocky"
by Frank Jacobs

'Twas Billy, and the Shyguy Clones [hero of Double Dragon; common enemies in Super Mario Bros. 2]
Did Grax and Grumple in the Kraid; [evil emperor in 3D Worldrunner; Bubble Bobble final boss; Metroid boss]
All Lizzie were the Hanger Zones, [Godzilla lookalike in Rampage; penultimate level of Contra]
And Phanto Renegade. [mysterious face that chases you in Super Mario Bros. 2; awful early Nintendo brawler]

"Beware the Shadow Boss, my son! [final enemy in Double Dragon, who turns out to be your brother, a poor excuse for making game only single-player]
The Killer Clams, the Mummy Men! [Karnov; Castlevania]
Don't Goombah with a Neul, and shun [mushroom enemies in Super Mario Bros.; Solomon's Key enemy]
The Death Breath known as Ken!" [boss in Kid Niki: Radical Ninja,; hero of Street Fighter: 2010]

He Holtzed at Zigmos from afar, [Metroid flying enemy; Hudson's Adventure Island enemy]
Dodged Zombie Slime with lightning scroll, [combination of two Dragon Warrior enemies; not sure, but such a scroll appears in Domino's Pizza-licensed game Yo! Noid]
While Zelda in her Mamda Jar [Solomon's Key]
Made Yuki with a Troll. [evil samurai in Legend of Kage; various, including Joust, Shadowgate]

And as he Beaked for Pyradoks, [Alfred Chicken, others; pyramid enemy in Arkanoid]
The Shadow Boss Twinbellowed through, [Kid Icarus enemy]
Backed up by Pengs, Chicago Ox, [Mega Man ice enemies; ridiculously named Double Dribble basketball team, often beaten by the Boston Frogs]
Twelve Ninjas and McGoo. [various; Kid Icarus enemy]

Dagoom! Dagoom! Zabs met their doom! [two kinds of Gradius enemy]
And when the final Folfu fell, [Alpha Mission enemy]
Lay Bloopered ranks of Battletanks [squid enemy in Super Mario Bros.; Battle Tank]
And Mario as well.

"And hast thou zapped the Shadow Boss?
Well, spike my Foss! No Sniffit thee! [unknown; actually 'Snifit', a shyguy with gun mask in Super Mario Bros. 2]
Kello! Kello! O Porcupo!" [frog in Hudson's Adventure Island; porcupine in Super Mario Bros. 2]
He Dakkered in his Skree. [cannon in Gradius; spinning enemy in Metroid]

'Twas Billy, and the Shyguy Clones
Did Grax and Grumple in the Kraid;
All Lizzie were the Hanger Zones,
And Phanto Renegade.

Edisto

I just started reading Padgett Powell's Edisto, a 1983 coming-of-age novel set in South Carolina in what seems to be the '50s. It's great so far.

I call them rat palms because we were pulling them off, the dead butts of branches, one night for a fire, and because you must pull very hard to rip them loose, I learned the hard way that whatever is betwen the husk and the coconut-hair bark of the tree comes down on your arm, and that night in the dark my whatever-in-between was no drowsy rumpled sparrow or polite silken tree frog but a rat about the size of possum and texture of armadillo, and it landed all over my arm from hand to shoulder in one shuddering rush, and I nearly shook my arm out of socket and got a chronic case of girls' fear of rats from that and still have it, and you would too.

It's only logical

With my math students in Brooklyn, I would often use the following logical proof to drive them crazy and motivate them to pay attention.

Start with a simple "or" statement, where the first clause is clearly true, and the second clause is clearly false:

Either the sky is blue, or Mr. Wheeler can shoot lasers with his eyes.

Now take any false statement--a student's casual lie, perhaps, or a presidential quote that was patently dishonest, or the spurious proof that 1=2--and use its logical opposite, which is true, as in "1 is not equal to 2". Substitute this for the true part of the earlier "or" statement:

Either 1 is not equal to 2, or Mr. Wheeler can shoot lasers with his eyes.

Using disjunction (if memory serves), you next show that if the first clause was false, then the second clause would have to be true:

If 1 is equal to 2, then Mr. Wheeler can shoot lasers with his eyes.

Now you bring in the earlier false statement:

But according to my earlier proof, 1 is equal to 2!

And conclude the supposedly false clause must be true:

Therefore, Mr. Wheeler can shoot lasers with his eyes.

Other favorite conclusions have been:

• (Since Iraq has WMDs,) Bush listens to Kanye West
• (Since Sean "did" his homework but "just forgot it",) Sean is a visitor from another dimension
• (Since Cherie "never" said Kamrin was gay,) Cherie eats slugs for dinner

etc.

Green with envy?

Another great cover for Soft Skull Press, which is on a roll.

Kirkus Reviews says Manstealing for Fat Girls is "Sure to be shoplifted by teen delinquents".

Oh, the places you'll go

Paul Graham, whose summer venture capital program I applied for, is a popular essayist for the tech geek crowd. I especially like the speech he wrote to give at a high-school (the invitation was vetoed):

People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
...
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.

Porportional paradoxes