books

February 28, 2006

Octavia Butler, The Great SF Writer, Dies at 58

Wild Seed blew my mind in college - it was the first science fiction book that showed me how SF could not simply predict the future, but help us reimagine the boundaries of the human. In the midst of cyberpunk chic, Butler was one of the few SF writers as interested in bodies as machines. Years later, Parable of the Sower was the book I had with me the night I stayed up in the recovery room with my dad after his brain surgery.

A black woman, Butler was a pioneer in the white male world of SF. Today, when almost everything on the shelves advertises itself as "hard SF" - i.e., full of blowhard white guys with science degrees and guns - her voice will be sorely missed.

Science Fiction Writers of America Memorial Page

Posted by tedf at 02:27 AM | Comments (1)

December 11, 2005

The Bitter Disappointment of Turkish Delight for Fans of Narnia

I had a similarly disappointing experience to this Slate writer when I finally had a chance to try Turkish Delight in England a few years ago. It made wax lips seem delish by comparison.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Really Foul Candy - In pursuit of Turkish Delight. By Liesl Schillinger

Posted by tedf at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2005

Poetry Wars

Here's a great NYT piece on a nasty battle in the world of poetry. It's a prime example of that chestnut about the politics of academia: the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

The New York Times > Books > Surrender in the Battle of Poetry Web Sites

Posted by tedf at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2005

From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden by Amy Stewart

When I'm diving into a new field I know nothing about - Buddhism, photography, wine, wrestling, or gardening, to take a few recent examples - I'm always looking for a certain kind of writer: an opinionated, first-person guide to this confusing new world. My model for this kind of writing is Bill James, the great baseball analyst. I'm always on the lookout for "the Bill James of wine" or "the Bill James of wrestling."

The point isn't that I want an expert to tell me what to think. Rather, I want to hear about this new universe from a distinct, coherent point of view. From there, I can develop my own perspective. I don't want an authority so much as a critical sensibility. These new subjects always teem with boggling amounts of details - the eightfold path of Buddhism, the varieties of wrestling holds, the latin names for all those flowers. I'll never learn all this stuff by trying to memorize it, and that wouldn't be much fun, anyway. Rather, what I want is to absorb the perspective of a savvy participant, so that the field as a whole makes sense to me. Once I do that, the details can fall in place over time, if I decide to stick with it.

I appear to be in the minority in this preference - most people seem to prefer the bland-to-cutesy textbook style of the Dummies guides. Guide series do have their places - I'm a big fan of the " . . . for Beginners" series of cartoon guides. When they're done right, as in the classic Marx for Beginners by Rius, those are a great way to get your bearings on a subject. The newer "Introducing . . ." cartoon series is also great. And Oxford University Press has a nifty ongoing series of "Very Short Introduction to . . . " books. The Jung books from both of the latter series have been great entry points into a massive body of work.

All this brings me to From the Ground Up, my entry point into the daunting world of gardening. I've picked up a half a dozen gardening reference books over the last few years, but all of them succeeded only in dazing me with a boggling array of disconnected tips, warnings, and factoids. What I needed was a theory of gardening that made sense to me. So I switched over from Borders's "Gardening Reference" section to the "Gardening Writing" section. I was wary, because I find nature writing often unbearably twee and smug in that Year in Provence mode. I was wary of this book too, given its sweet but very Provencial impressionistic cover painting of a front yard garden. I browsed the book over several Borders visits, each time wavering, then finally took the plunge.

It was a good call. I devoured the book over just a couple of days, and now I feel a new sense of comprehension of all this gardening stuff. Stewart writes about her first year of building a garden from scratch, as an enthusiastic but inexperienced amateur. Her tastes, reassuringly, are for wildness over rigid structure, and a few weeds and bugs over pesticidal warface. She strongly prefers organic methods, but isn't a compost Nazi when chemicals seem to be the only way to go. I don't really like her taste in vegetables - I can't stand tomatoes or zucchini - but I think I'd really enjoy hanging out in her garden.

This isn't one of those books where the putative subject becomes a metaphor for the writer's life. Sure, we learn about her husband, her beloved great-grandmother, and her two amazing cats. But the focus is always on the garden for its own sake, and that's plenty. We learn a lot about the virtues of compost, the overratedness of roses, and, in a great chapter, the lives of earthworms. (The latter subject must have really inspired her - she followed this book up with a whole book on worms.)

Stewart did have an inspired location for her garden: a rental house in Santa Cruz, across the street from an amusement park and just a block away from the beach. Gardening so close to the ocean - and to druken tourists - has its own specific challenges. And this microclimate has its own specific charms. One thing I'm learning is that gardening is always local. You can browse all these giant coffee-table books full of fantasy gardens, but what really matters is what will grow in your soil, under your sky. (That's why my next step is to start reading books specifically about gardening in the South - Tough Plants for Southern Gardens looks particularly promising.)

I'm still not sure I'll end up planting much more than my current batch of containers. Or maybe I'll just grow a huge row of something simple and useful, like mint - I really like mint. But even if I punt on this whole gardening project, I understand the gardener's worldview a little better now, thanks to Stewart.

Posted by tedf at 03:33 PM | Comments (5)

March 29, 2005

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

I just finished Little Children, the latest novel by Tom Perrotta. Perrotta is one of the few contemporary novelists whose voice rings completely true to me - no postmodern fireworks, no MFA hyper-refinement, just clean, candid, slightly wry prose. The writer he most reminds me of is Nick Hornby, and if you're a fan of High Fidelity, you're sure to enjoy Perrotta's The Wishbones.

I first stumbled across Perrotta's first book, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, in an airport bookstore. I have no idea what it was doing there, but it was an instantly compelling series of snapshots of childhood life. The Wishbones, his first novel, is a wonderful story about a musician grappling with the reality that he's never going to be a rock star and may have to settle for domestic stability. The film The Wedding Singer, which came out shortly after the book, has so much in common with the book that I've always wondered if it's more than coincidence. Perrotta's next novel, Election, was filmed by Alexander Payne, and featured Reese Witherspon's breakout performance. I've always preferred the book, actually - it's just as funny, but a little more generous and less smirky than the movie. The one Perrotta book I haven't read is Joe College. All Perrotta's books hit close to home, but this one was a little too close - it's about life as a Yale student in the 1980s, drawn from Perrotta's own experiences. (I went to Yale from 1987-1991, missing Perrotta by a couple of years, I think.) I'll probably get back to it at some point, but reading it felt just too uncomfortably familiar when I first picked it up. I had the same reaction when I tried to read Nelson George's novel about working as a struggling rock critic in New York.

Perrotta's great subject is arrested adolescence (or, in the case of Bad Haircut, just adolescence) - the way the imprint of our high school identities continues to structure our lives into our thirties (and perhaps beyond). Little Children extends that theme into parenthood. The protagonists in Little Children are parents who still don't feel like adults. Todd is a stay-at-home dad who's studying to pass the bar exam, but gradually realizes he likes hanging out with his kid and doesn't really want to be a lawyer. He starts skipping out on his studying to watch the local kids skateboard and play in a midnight football league. Sara is a mom who stumbled into marriage and parenthood in a post-college daze, never able to recapture the sense of community she felt in her years at the school's women's center. They start an affair when they meet at their childrens' playground.

The rest of the plot involves a convicted child molester who moves back home to the neighborhood on his release from prison, and the community's response. That stuff drives the narrative forward, and allows Perrotta to play the parents' fears for their children off their own desires for happiness and escape. But it's a little too sensationalist, and distracts from the observation of everyday suburban detail that's the heart of the book. There are amazing little set-pieces where Perrotta captures the social dynamics of: playground moms competing over mothering skills; ex-jocks taking a "touch" football game a little too seriously; and book clubbers debating the sexual practices described in Madame Bovary (specifically, whether a vague reference to a "shameful" sexual act implies that she has anal sex).

Perrotta's also great on the weirdness of kid culture. Sara, for example, is amazed that her kid is so transfixed by the Thomas the Tank Engine movie, a debacle starring Peter Fonda, Alec Baldwin, and a bunch of animated trains. She observes that her child would gladly watch it every night, "despite its art-house pacing and insistent Freudian undertones."

Perrotta's tone usually tends toward the sunny, and the darker hues in this novel have encouraged some critics to hail it as a breakthrough. More likely, he's finally writing about more traditionally literary subjects - Updike territory - and critics are rewarding him. The relief of this book is that writing about suburbia hasn't neutered Perrotta's voice. Rather, it brings out how so many thirtysomething moms and dads still feel like teenage misfits deep inside. And I guess the politics of Perrotta's books are in how he embraces that inner teenager - it's the rebellious teenager inside us that roils against the workaday world, that chafes against the constraints of adult lives constrained by the demands of capitalism and patriarchy. Todd's and Sara's affair is their little rebellion against suburban conformity. Perrotta is also enough of a humanist to not blame the spouses, but rather observe how they chafe against the demands of adulthood, as well. (Compare this generous approach to the misogyny of American Beauty, which celebrates Kevin Spacey's character's embrace of his inner adolescent, but doesn't extend the same sympathy to Annette Benning's character, who's pegged as the enforcer of suburban ideology: capitalist work habits, consumerist conspicuous consumption, patriarchal gender roles, and bourgeois propriety.)

Perrotta, like Hornby, is one of those writers I can imagine growing old with. They're a few years older than me, and they seem to be marking out the terrain of adulthood just as I step into it. As I grow older, I can imagine more of their generational cohort taking shape. I think of it this way: when I was a teenager, the contemporary artists who spoke to me the most were musicians in their twenties, looking back on their adolescent frustrations. There weren't many novelists I could respond to as directly, because there weren't many teen or twentysomething novelists, period. In my twenties, I read a lot of autobiographical cartoonists such as Joe Matt and Chester Brown - bohemian peers who had found a forum to describe lives not very dissimilar from my own grad student life. Now, in my thirties, my generational peers are finally starting to write novels. Novels are no longer just about other people; they're about people like me.

Read too much of that stuff, and it can become solipsism; that's the rabbit hole that made Joe College too dopplegangerish to read. But reading a few writers like Perrotta and Hornby is also intensely reassuring and rewarding.

Posted by tedf at 05:50 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

This Could Be Great, But I'm Wary . . .

Yahoo! News - 'The Lord of the Rings' Coming to Stage

Posted by tedf at 03:36 PM