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See you there?  ¶ 7:58 PM

  As you know, in my former life, I was a science geek.

Now I'm just an amateur, a reader of fascinating news about fascinating advances, which has mostly meant, in recent years, brain science. Most people are not aware of the extent to which the brain is not only becoming known, but the extent to which that knowledge is being used, in practical fashion, by marketers, advertisers, PR firms, advocacy groups, and politicians, the better to manipulate you, my dear.

I'm sure you know my namesake amygdala has long been associated with fear. Perhaps you caught the MoveOn hosted Al Gore speech a few years ago where he explained how quick-cuts in television programming are designed to activate a universal fear reaction -- to basically scare you into continuing to pay attention to the schlock. Did you know that the makers of the SkyMall catalog have tested their wares on subjects whose brains are continuously scanned to determine which ad invokes an involuntary pleasure/reward response?

In short, it's the best science reading going. In today's New York Times, a team of seven brainiacs scanned the brains of 20 people who said they were open to voting for a Democrat or a Republican in next year's election. Some of the results (read it all by clicking ici):

4. The gender gap may be closing. In recent presidential elections, Democrats have done better with female voters, while Republicans have appealed more to men. So far this time, male swing voters seem to be looking more closely at the Democrats. After viewing all the candidate videos, our male subjects, when viewing still photos of the Democrats, showed significantly higher activity in the medial orbital prefrontal cortex, an area that is activated by rewarding stimuli, than they did while looking at pictures of the Republicans. Women did not display such a one-party skew, but rather tended to react to individual candidates. So the traditional gender pattern of party preference may not be as prominent this year, particularly among men, and that may be good news for Democrats.

5. Mitt Romney shows potential. Of all the candidates' speech excerpts, Mr. Romney's sparked the greatest amount of brain activity, especially among the men we observed. His still photos prompted a significant amount of activity in the amygdala, indicating voter anxiety, but when the subjects saw him and heard his video, their anxiety died down. Perhaps voters will become more comfortable with Mr. Romney as they see more of him.

7. John Edwards has promise -- and a problem. When looking at pictures of Mr. Edwards, subjects who had rated him low on the thermometer scale showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other negative feelings. This suggests that swing voters' negative emotions toward Mr. Edwards can be quite powerful.

The good news for Mr. Edwards is that the swing voters who did not give him low ratings, when looking at still photos of him, showed significant activation in areas of the brain containing mirror neurons -- cells that are activated when people feel empathy. And that suggests these voters feel some connection to him. So Mr. Edwards has a strong effect on swing voters -- both those who like him and those who don't.

How's your brain today?  ¶ 11:31 AM

  Somehow I missed

Adam Gopnik's "The Corrections" in the Oct 22nd New Yorker. It's an interesting little essay, in and of itself, but it begins with what I would call a prima facia topic of interest:

Orion [a British publisher] has taken nineteenth-century classics--among them "Moby-Dick," "Anna Karenina," "Vanity Fair," and "The Mill on the Floss"--and cut them neatly in half, like Damien Hirst animals, so that they can be taken in quickly and all the more admired.

Although the tone of the blurbs and the back matter is defiantly unapologetic, the names of the abridgers are mysteriously absent, suggesting that, with the shyness of old-fashioned pornographers, they don't want to be quite so openly associated with the project as their publisher's pride would suggest they ought. Who was the mohel of "Moby-Dick"; who took the vanity out of "Vanity Fair"; who threw Anna under the train a hundred pages sooner than before? Orion isn't telling. Yet the work had to be done with considerable tact and judgment.

Googling this subject, I quickly found a story in the entertainment section of the London Times, whose writers had the tact and judgment to do a little abridging of their own:

Anna Karenina

The problem is, thought Anna -- her aristocratic brow furrowing slightly under a fabulous new hat -- men look so irresistible in uniform! Ditto boots, billowing shirts and moustaches! Hang marriage. Hang motherhood. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a train to catch.

Vanity Fair

At Vauxhall, Posh and Becky were toying with their parasols and nibbling macaroons. Becky was singing, in a voice not unlike her poor dead mother's, "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman. Giving all your love to just several men"; when she spotted young George Osborne coming towards them."Oops!" she said, as her friend fell into the boating lake.

David Copperfield

I am Born . . . I am Sent Away from Home . . . I Have a Memorable Birthday . . . I Become Neglected and Am Provided For . . . I Make Another Beginning . . . Somebody Turns Up . . . I Fall into Captivity . . . Depression . . . Enthusiasm . . . Dora's Aunts . . . Mischief . . . Mr Dick Fulfils my Aunt's Predictions . . . I am Involved in Mystery . . . Tempest . . . Absence . . . Return . . . Agnes!

Moby-Dick

Ishmael: Whaling's cool.

Queequeg: Tattoos are cool.

Starbuck: Coffee's cool.

Ahab: Fools! Stop yer philosophizin' and help me fight this fish.

Moby-Dick (rising from waves): Screw you, Pegleg!

All: At last! Some action!

Moby-Dick: [Crash! Chomp! Blow!]

All: Aaargh!

Ishmael (later, alone, clinging to wreckage): Whaling's cool . . .

Back to Gopnik:

...the Orion "Moby-Dick" is not defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be: the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel. This is not what a contemptuous philistine would do with the book. It is what a good editor, of the Maxwell Perkins variety, would do: cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters-the "taut, spare, driving" narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.

And...

...the compact "Vanity Fair" relieves Thackeray of his "preciousness"-the discursive, interfering commentary on the action that charmed his Victorian readers. In a middle chapter called "In Which Amelia Invades the Low Countries," for instance, Thackeray's chatty, confidential tone is altered by his subtractors into the sparer narrative voice of good writing.
...
Even as sympathetic a reader as Edmund Wilson hated Thackeray's rambling remarks and continual intrusions of mild ironies. But Thackeray without his little jokes and warm asides becomes another, duller writer-too constantly on message. Meaning resides in the margins; Thackeray wants to insinuate, not force, his way into the reader's confidence. Becky Sharp lives for us not just because her creator made her but because her creator couldn't leave her alone; he is always there, fussing over her shoulder, commenting on her behavior, the way we do with real people who obsess us. Transparent, objective lucidity is the last emotion we have about the actual; we fret, comment, editorialize, intrude, despair, laugh, and gossip.

The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldn't be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses and selfindulgent excesses. They have to, since originality is, necessarily, something still strange to us, rather than something that we already know about and approve. What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental. Books can be snipped at, and made less melodically muddled, but they lose their overtones, their bass notes, their chesty resonance-the same thing that happens, come to think of it, to human castrati.

Now comes the part when I state my opinons and drive the last of the other Incertians away and onto their own new blogs*. I don't find these abridgments particularly upsetting. There is, today, one very specific idea of what good writing looks like, and Gopnik describes it well. These "compact editions" will no doubt find a grateful readership. What I do find upsetting, however, is the absence of the editors' identities.

Whoever these editors are, they are people who know these novels, and good modern writing, well enough to accomplish a truly amazing creative act. I see these books as something akin to "Bittersweet Symphony" or "Steal My Sunshine" or "Ice, Ice, Baby" or "Gold-digger": the original utterly defines the new artifact, but the artifact is valuable of its own accord, belonging (no matter what British judges who suck Rolling Stone cock think) to their new makers and to the time periods in which they were produced.

So it's sad to me that they won't (don't want to?) get credit.

Now, as for our modern idea of what makes a good novel, and what that ends up excluding, I'll keep those opinions to myself, lest I be the last Incertian standing*, babbling alone to myself in the dark.

*I don't actually believe I'm chasing anyone away. At least I hope I'm not. I do use shit metaphors a lot. Sorry. :-)  ¶ 11:32 AM

  In Defense of the Baby Bump

Now that we have swimmers, I find myself contemplating more seriously the prospect of sporting a baby bump. Yet I have noticed that most of my friends (and Brian too) dislike this phrase. So tonight I write a short defense of the baby bump.

Usually the phrase is applied to celebrities with a gerund like "sporting" or "showing" or even "showing off" -- now before I explain why I think this is a moral good, I'd like you to consider the alternatives:

she is pregnant (like a pause)
she is carrying (like a mule)
she is "with child" (what was she "with" before? Or was she merely "without"?)
she is "expecting" (aren't we all "expecting" something? We do have busy lives, after all...)

Snark aside, the problem with each of these options is the verb to be which serves to define what the woman is.

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Sylvia Plath

One of the many things I like about this poem is the fact that its metaphors evolve from oddities like "a melon strolling on two tendrils" to "a means, a stage, a cow in calf" (barely a metaphor at all, just a change in species -- to a domestic beast) -- "a means, a stage," especially make her not a person, but a method, a vessel, a system for the delivery of the desired product. The last metaphor, "I've eaten a bag of green apples, / Boarded the train there's no getting off," is not about what she is, but about something she's done and its consequences and her desires... in other words, in this last moment, she resumes being human again.

From my point of view, the scariest part of making a baby isn't the stretching or the hormones or the 18+ years of work, anguish, disappointment (and I'm sure some good stuff too) that follow; the scary part is that people are likely to forget you're a person.

Which is why I like the phrase baby bump, especially coupled with "sporting" -- the "bump" is not redefining the person; it's merely something she "sports" (more vigorous and less vain than "wears") for several months. She's "being a sport" (possessing an attitude) by lugging around this weight; she is not becoming a beast of burden. She is strong and proud and unashamed.

Which is why I think the introduction of the phrase and concept baby bump is good for all mankind. Why not?  ¶ 8:40 PM

  High Praise for a Novel

In the form of an unusual experience: I enjoyed reading Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square so much that I actually forced myself to read it slowly, rationing it out to just a little each night and the ending this afternoon, so that the enjoyment of reading would go on and on.


Otherwise I might have overindulged in a night and might have woken up regretting it the next morning (thus requiring I take a stroll 'round hangover square). I can't remember that last time I liked a book that much.

The novel is neat and clean, and successfully and suspensefully weaves together a few narratives each of which would not add up to as much on its own: it is the story of a bunch of freeloading drunks living in London just before the start of WWII; very subtly, it is an allegory of the politics leading into WWII; it is a story (and this is established first) of a man who has two personalities, one of which is in love with Netta Longdon, and the other which only knows that he cannot find peace until he kills her. That suspense, established at square one, brings edginess to the whole novel, makes it emotionally irresistible for the reader -- and makes more palpable the threat of impending war.

But as the heart pounds, the brain delights: I'm not sure I've ever read an author with such a brilliant knack for dialogue, especially the dialogue of drunks. His descriptions also show an astonishing talent for making the familiar unfamiliar so that we better know it, perhaps for the first time. I'm going to give a small example, one that really delighted me:

In the mornings, nowadays, George Harvey Bone was awakened by a fluffy white cat belonging to the hotel. At about seven o' clock he would hear a little cry--petulant rather than appealing--outside his door, and he would blunder out of bed in the darkness and open the door. He would blunder back into bed and hear no more.
Then there would be a sudden springy soft weight on his body, and the cat would begin to manoeuvre near his head. Sleepy as he was, he could put out his hand and stroke its fur.
After a while this motion seemed to generate an electrical disturbance within the animal--an aeroplan-like throbbing, slowly growing in volume and drawing nearer--the purring of the cat in his ear. The purring, this surrender of its being to a rhythmic and externally audible throbbing, in its turn seemed to induce in the cat a sort of frenzy, a frenzy manifesting itself mainly in the front paws, which, in the agony of restless pleasure, stretched and relaxed, the right paw stretching while the left relaxed, and the other way about, in eager alternation. George called this "playing the piano." He did not know the name of the cat so he called it "Pussy." "Don't make such a noise, Pussy," the big drinking man would gently murmur in the darkness. "And stop playing the piano." But the cat would not stop until a place had been found under the bedclothes near George's head; then it would go to sleep, and George would attempt to do the same.
But usually it would be too late, and in a few moments he would be wide awake, grinding out the problems of his life, delving into the night before to see where he had got to exactly, where he had left off. This morning he knew, because of the sickness in his heart, and the giddiness in his head, that he had got drunk, but he couldn't at first remember how or where...

Of course I've had this experience a million times, the cat waking, the drunk waking, the cat drunk waking, but this passage made me feel it new. I really admire that kind of skill. If you want to love reading a book, I recommend this one.


  ¶ 3:18 PM

  Carver Carved Out

I have read pretty much the entire body of Ray Carver's work. (I'm not sure that's bragging: it took half an hour.) And my feelings on his stories have always been pretty clear: while his later stories are enjoyable, his early stories make me want to scratch my eyes out. Yes, they're all shorter, but they all feel longer to me. In that way that 5 minutes in a dentist's chair feels longer than 20 minutes of fun. His early stories are dull and soulless. They can't keep my attention. They are, in my opinion, stories for people who do not actually enjoy reading, and torture for people who do. In other words, minimalism.

Let me ask you something: if you love something, do you really want less of it? Hmmm? Is your favorite food better at 10 micrograms? Is your beloved more enjoyable if seen once a month? Spring days? Stormy beach walks? Whatever it is you love, do you want less of it? No, I didn't think so. Neither would you want to stuff yourself to surfeit so that you become sick of it, but you do not want as little as possible.

So Carver ain't my cup o' tea.

Now of course I'd heard that he had a pretty tough editor, but I didn't realize, until I read this NYTimes story, that the editor had really rewritten the stories:

In 1998 an article published in The New York Times Magazine by D. T. Max, then a contributing editor at The Paris Review, investigated Mr. Lish’s longstanding claims that he had played a large role in creating Raymond Carver. Mr. Max reviewed Mr. Lish’s papers at the Lilly Library and discovered that he had made dramatic cuts, changed titles and rewritten endings of the stories in “What We Talk About.”

“For better or worse,” Mr. Max concluded, “Lish was in there.”

Also in the Lilly Library is a seven-page letter, dated July 8, 1980, which Carver wrote to Mr. Lish as he readied “What We Talk About” for the printing presses. In it Carver pleaded with Mr. Lish, “Please do the necessary things to stop production of the book.”

Carver acknowledged in the letter that Mr. Lish had “made so many of the stories in this collection better, far better than they were before.” But because several people — including Ms. Gallagher and the writers Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff and Donald Hall — had already seen some of the stories in their earlier versions, Carver wondered, “How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened to the story in the meantime, after its book publication?”

Carver, who had recently met Ms. Gallagher (he later divorced his first wife, Maryann Burk) and stopped drinking, wrote: “If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.” He then detailed what he wanted restored.

Mr. Lish disregarded Carver’s plea and published the edited stories. Writing in The Washington Post, Doris Betts praised Carver’s “verbal skill, the distilled pungency, the laser focus of his implacable vision.” Michael Wood, writing in The Times Book Review, said “his writing is full of edges and silences, haunted by things not said, not even to be guessed at.”

I bolded the sections that I found particularly chilling. I mean, as an author, this is just terrifying, that someone could change and publish your stories against your vehement protest, and then, to add insult to the injury, the critics marvel at the scars and label your writing for them, so that your very name becomes synonymous with the scars.

I for one would like to see the restored versions of the stories. I suspect I'd like them a lot better than those butchered abortions that currently pass for his early work.

Labels: early stories, ray carver, raymond carver

  ¶ 12:32 AM

  Taking a Lathe to "Literary" Genre

Last night Brian and I watched the film version of Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, which, despite being a made-for-TV effort by PBS from 1979 that was filmed in 3 weeks, is really good. It immediately inspired both of us to dig up Brian's yellowed-to-almost-orange paperback of the novel and start reading it (for him again, for me, first time). And of course it is really well-written, and excellent, doing that thing that words can do that movies can't: bringing the conceptual threads together into poetry, so that the images are more vivid than if we saw them with eyes.

It made me compare the book to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which I'm reading right now. (Let me preface the rest of this by pointing out that I am a huge fan of Atwood, and I do not criticize her as an author, just this book, and the mistake it makes.) Oryx and Crake is SciFi, "just like" The Lathe of Heaven, but Oryx and Crake is SciFi that's trying desperately to be considered "literary": as a result, I'm stuck at 1/4 way through and bored to tears. The novel starts off excitingly enough: Snowman lives in a strange post-apocolyptic future and reminisces about his past (our future) while trying to survive, something he's not too terrific at. I know there's more to it, because most of the book still lies before me, and because she's dropping hints that I'm not missing. So what's boring?

The part that I guess gives it its "literary" cred: the verisimilitude, the banalities of middle-class life, the unspoken family conflicts and the thick-as-treacle domestic tensions. ZZZZzzzzzz. If we have to live in his memories, can they please be memories of plots and pigoons, and not of microwave dinners and dad's new girlfriend?

I'm starting to think the book should be about a quarter as long as it is. Especially after picking up The Lathe of Heaven and getting so much of depth and interest and humanity and story and image and nature and love and the desire to make the world better, and the failure of trying, and stillness of natural beings, and the goodness inherent in stillness, etc., and nothing at all that is dull.

I devoured Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in a single night. I simply could not go to sleep without knowing what happened next, and next, and next. But The Handmaid's Tale was unapologetically itself: only the cutesy epilogue comparing it to Chaucer tried to be "literary," and that was done with such a heaping helping of humor that it didn't at all deflate the story. So why couldn't Atwood create the same kind of success with Oryx and Crake? My guess is that the feminism angle gave her an "out" in The Handmaid's Tale, that she didn't feel the pressure to somehow force the story into a literary mold, because it already had a social purpose. But Oryx and Crake is about a theme as least as old as Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark": the mad scientist who improves on nature, and destroys it. Well that's just good ol' fashioned SciFi grist for the mill. How to make it "respectable"? Ah, make it dull!

I hope I'm wrong about that, because I'm reading Oryx and Crake to the end, and I want it to get better. But I just keep thinking about the last Atwood book I read, how undeniably good it was, how absolutely gripping, and I just keep thinking, "what happened"?  ¶ 8:05 PM