Just Connect

(with apologies and credit to E.M. Forster)

I am teaching a fourth-semester German course this semester, as well as an introduction to twentieth-century literature course. Unconsciously, due to the nature of the textbooks assisting me in each of these courses, they are running parallel. We began with the Weimar Republic, went on to the Nazi era and WWII and will soon be moving into the Cold War era and the rebuilding of West Germany.

What have I just finished reading? The Spy who Came in From the Cold. The Cold War provided such good material!

My next book is The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. Likely in preparation for teaching contemporary German-Jewish literature in the fall.

I figure these are good signs I like my job!

Just Breathe

alternately: how one small breathing exercise can send me on a jaunt through my life in sound bites.

In corpse pose in yoga today, we were told to relax our ujjayi breathing and just breathe “normally” in through our noses and out through our mouths. This requires, for me anyway, conscious thought. That got me to thinking: have I made the yoga breath more automatic? Is that slight constriction at the back of the throat easier and more natural for me now?

Which then got me to thinking: huh–if the constriction at the back of my throat is coming more naturally, does that, then, account for the “grunt-sigh” noise Dale insists I keep making when I’m stressed out or responding negatively to something?

The “grunt-sigh” got me to thinking about the “woof-shrug” that Daniel Coyle wrote about in Lance Armstrong’s War. “Woof-shrug” is the sound and body language combo emitted by Belgian cycling gurus who don’t want to humor you with an answer.

Coyle’s book inspired me to think about the book I am currently reading and loving, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which, aside from being specatcularly well-written and enjoyable to read, is full of fun yiddish words, rendered in the American.

Yiddish, and how I pronounce it in my head while I read, led me to ponder German (since, duh, they’re related), whereby I wound up back at my job.

Do we all see why I sometimes have a hard time falling asleep at night?

Books Read and Unread

I found this meme making the rounds and it appears right up my alley.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote
Moby Dick (I spent my jr. year of h.s. in Germany and missed out on this one)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula

A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses (totally on my to-do list)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit

In Cold Blood: a true account . . .
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Not bad, I’d say. There are a few on there I’d like to read. Maybe this summer’s reading list awaits.

Fairy Tales

I saved the best for last in my fairy tale seminar this semester and during the last week of classes, we are discussing Allerleirauh, Koenig Drosselbart, Fitchers Vogel, and Der Raeuberbraeutigam.  Allerleirauh is called “Thousandfurs” in English sometimes, if it is translated or discussed at all. Since it has to do with incest, you can imagine how often that is. Fitchers Vogel (Fitchers Bird) and Der Raeuberbraeutigam (The Robber Bride-groom) both tell tales of girls tricked or betrayed into marrying men who are not what they appear to be. Angela Carter wrote a collection of fairy-tale-inspired short stories titled The Bloody Chamber in which the title tale pulls heavily from The Robber Bride-Groom. Margaret Atwood has used the material, too, both in Bluebeard’s Egg and in The Robber Bride. It is good stuff–all about the secrets that lie behind closed doors and what young girls are supposed to not know or be curious about (or get caught doing) before their time.

An astute student pointed out, in our comparison of these tales to the better-known Cinderella, Briar Rose, and Snow White, that these less-familiar (to American readers, anyway) tales begin, rather than end, with a betrothal or marriage, and portray a pretty rare glimpse of the life of a girl after she has found her mate. Fitchers Vogel and Der Raeuberbraeutigam can serve as warnings against marrying the first best thing to cross your path, warnings not to take men at their face value, and warnings to not get caught doing that which you oh-so-dearly want to do.

Although it has not been the focus of the seminar, Carter and Atwood’s modern fairy tales based on the Grimms’ classics are a real treat. I love them all and they helped convince me that a sophisticated seminar could be created out of the same volume of texts that brought us Haensel und Gretel–(not to imply that HuG isn’t very sophisticated, or anything.) Later this week, we’ll be watching a movie based upon Angela Carter’s re-working of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, called In the Company of Wolves. I fear the film won’t live up to my mental image of Alice, the girl in Carter’s tale, and how she is the animalistic figure, the one whose desires control the show. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Death of a critic

There are two kinds of readers out there. Well, maybe 57 kinds of readers, but for this study, we’ll stick to two. There are those who read detective and crime stories and those who do not. I read them. It’s my dirty little secret. A P.D. James mystery novel is a truly delicious escape from the real world.

There is some good theoretical work out there on detective fiction–on the etymology of crime, on knowing “truth,” and solving cases–that explains the seduction of detective fiction. In the crime novel, there is a truth, it can be known, it is not ambiguous, etc. Beats the pants off reality, in other words.

I’m reading a German novel that is roman-a-clef and detective novel all in one. Martin Walser’s Der Tod eines Kritikers was published to much hoo-haw in Germany in 2002 (me, I’m the timely reader of important contemporary fiction) because Walser so very obviously has an author kill off Germany’s premier (Jewish) literary critic. Antisemitism, anyone? Walser has had run-ins with other literary figures before, like the time when Ruth Klueger (author of Still Alive, which you should read if you are at all interested in personal histories of the Holocaust) totally outed him for being a xenophobic Antisemite, though he had also been her friend–her closest friend–in the years immediately following the war.

I haven’t gotten very far yet. At this point we have a dead critic, whose name is Ehrl-Koenig, which is truly witty, since it parodies Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s hyphenated last name AND Goethe all in one, an author imprisioned under suspicion of having done the dirty deed, an author who is determined to prove the other’s innocence, and a city covered in a blanket of snow that covers all tracks. The suspect-author is not talking. Evidently Ehrl-Koenig thought his last couple books sucked.

This is no escapist fiction, alas, for Walser wants to reflect on the knowable world, and on the narratives we weave out of crime. It’s a bit obtuse, in the way fiction that takes itself very seriously sometimes is. I read on, comfortable in not knowing who the good guy is or what the outcome will be.

Christopher Moore is not a Fluke

My local trade book pusher dropped a copy of Christopher Moore’s Fluke. Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings into my bag before we left town for family Christmas in Omaha and professional obligations in Chicago. Moore’s Lamb received lots of good press on this blog and, although Fluke doesn’t touch Lamb in the “hilariously profane” category, it is also a captivating story with enough oddball stuff, as well as sex and drugs and whale songs, to make me sad when it was over. A central love–or lust–story between a marine biologist who studies humpback whales and his summer assistant appears to structure the “tale” but the human story of desires denied and fulfilled takes a back seat to the grand narrative underlying the whole thing.

I can attest that I didn’t see Gooville coming. I didn’t envision that Fluke, like Lamb, would turn out to be a witty, sexy, irreverent book about something big–whales, Jesus, whathaveyou–that turns out to be about something much larger than us all. Of course, Lamb telegraphs to the reader that it is a gospel and perhaps the reader then expects that s/he will read things that make them think, or laugh, or reflect on the Bible, or on what Jesus represents for us as a culture or for us as individuals. Fluke, in its own way, does much the same thing. Whereas Lamb invents a relationship between Jesus and his parents and his friends that explains how early Christianity is born and differentiated from the traditions of ancient Judaism, Fluke introduces the reader to a manifestation of the divine that is less anthropomorphic and yet still personal and intense.

The marine biologist finds himself, after an adventure I don’t want to give away, in a deep underwater cavern called Gooville. It is the locale of the primordial soup–the stuff whence all life on earth came–first from the sea, then evolving on land. When the soup, the Goo, realizes that some of its favorite creatures, the whales, are being killed, it tries to learn more about the enemy (humans, duh) and invents a whole host of creature things to do its explorations for it and “report” back. In addition to narrating a pretty powerful commentary on the effects of man attempting to be/come God (a wayward scientist wants to destroy the Goo before it destroys humanity–things do not end well for said wayward scientist), Fluke creates the most clever creatures I’ve encountered in a while: the whaley boys. Whaley boys (who are both male and female) steer the ship, talk in a mashed-elf voice, look like a killer whale, or a blue whale, or a humpback whale, or a minke whale (depending on the “breed” of whaley boy) and are sexually promiscuous and polymorphously perverse. The male whaley boys like to wave their prehensile penises around–how can you not love a large marine mammal with a sense of humor?

The whaley boys are the Goo’s first line of defense against total destruction by humankind, but they are an artificial beast, and provide comic relief. The real whopper of the story is when we, and the marine biologist, learn why the actual whales sing. The Goo gives life and food to all the creatures of the sea. The whales, we learn, sing to say thank you to the Goo–a kind of prayer of thanksgiving and a prayer of hunger–and the Goo provides for them, creating krill out of the primordial soup for their taking.

The whales pray. It’s actually a small line in the novel. Much more is written about how the Goo interacts with humans, its power to heal and rejuvenate. Even then, a pot-smoking, poser surfer boy from New Jersey who is masquerading as a Hawaiian gets more lines than the Goo. But the Goo, Moore implies, is supposed to be a secret anyway. We–and the pot-smoking, poser surfer boy–don’t need to see the Goo or go to the Goo. We just need to know that the Goo loves the whales and that we shouldn’t kill them. We need to know that the ocean is not their for our amusement–whether recreational, scientific, or military–but that it is the true cradle of civilization. Moore has again written a funny, funny novel that is a novel of faith. Faith in a God, a Creator of sorts (maybe not the Sistine Chapel “Creator” but nonetheless. . . ) who demands that we be caretakers, not destroyers, of the bounty the Creator has given us.

Maybe we should send a copy to Bush, hmmm?

Horton hears a . . . Gore?

One of the beauties of having kids is that you get to read and watch your favorite stories, books, and movies from childhood all over again. Now that it is December, The Grinch is high on our viewing list. I luvs me some Grinch, really I do. Boris Karloff rocks. Our DVD of his grinchiness also includes Horton Hears a Who. I don’t think this was one of my childhood Seuss favorites and I can’t recall if I’ve ever read our copy of it to the girls.

But, watching this sweet, misunderstood elephant rescue an entire miniscule civilization of Whos in the face of a community of jungle dwellers who did not believe him or support his quest made me once again marvel at Seuss’ keen understanding of the interconnected web of humanity and ecology. (The Lorax, he who speaks for the trees, comes to mind, as well)

Then I had another thought: Does Al Gore know that he’s modeled his post-vice-presidential, Inconvenient Truth-y life on a . . . sensitive elephant?  Nobody listens to Al about climate change and impending ecological disaster, much like the kangaroos, apes, and toucans thought Horton was going off his rocker when he told them that a speck of dust held an entire community of Whos (a person’s a person, no matter how small). But, in the end, the Whos themselves holler and shout and make their voices heard and their presence acknowledged. Too bad the polar bears and seals, gorillas and tigers affected by the rise in temperature, the shift of breeding grounds, and the rising ocean levels can’t holler at us, too.

Not illiterate. Yeah!

So, while my wife’s stunning reading speed and stamina may actually make me appear to be, at best, semi-literate, I, too, can read books cover to cover on occasion. I typically read three books at a time or so, which is a very bad idea, but I can’t shake the habit.

The book I just finished, after about six months and more fines than the book is worth, is World Light by Halldor Laxness. I got turned on to Laxness when I worked at Yale, where I just fell in love with hearing George Schoolfield pronounce Laxness’s name in that lovely acquired Scandinavian accent of his. Problem is, Laxness writes wickedly dense prose, and I say this having read thousands upon thousands of pages of Thomas Mann. Mann is practically Danielle Steel compared to Laxness. Fluff. There’s a reason Laxness won the Nobel in the 1950s.

So why the fines? Well, apparently because I’m an idiot. I had previously checked out and read Iceland’s Bell at the Manhattan PL, and while returning that, I grabbed World Light in a fit of optimism. Oh, I’ll just knock this out,  I thought. Ha! Turns out, I just checked the catalog of the library in which I work and, yes, we do have the book, sitting about forty paces from my desk. I’m rather peeved at myself. At least this little search revealed to me that we also have Independent People and Paradise Reclaimed, the next two Laxness titles I want to read.