Isak

Choose Books: Good for the Jews

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

Good for the Jews
By Debra Spark

In his review on NPR, Alan Cheuse has this to say about Debra Spark's new novel:

Here's a smart, sprightly, sex-drenched and neatly plotted novel about Midwestern life set in Madison. Its got a beautiful 25-year-old inexperienced Jewish woman as its main character, some steamy sexual situations and broad swath of serious political concerns about mid-sized city bigotry and the dangers of know-nothing bureaucracies.

From its provocative title onward, the novel moves steadily along, with credible and often compelling characters, never averting its eyes from the betrayals and hypocrisy that make life in any town, a laboratory for the study of contemporary American mores. ...

... Anonymous letters, missing files, vague threats, a synagogue fire, and a death, followed by a suicide: all this contributes to a superb, sometimes satirical, always cutting, investigation of the way we all live now, East Coast, West Coast, or Third Coast.

Good for the Jews draws from the Book of Esther in this contemporary tale set in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Bush administration. The novel--tinged with mystery, humor, and the politics of both high school and the broader world--won this year's Literary Fiction award from the University of Michigan Press. 

In full disclosure, Debra Spark has been my writing teacher--formerly in an official way and informally in an ongoing way. She is one of the smartest and most insightful people I know. She's also the author of the excellent book, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and two other novels.

Consider this book as a gift for people who are one or more of the following:

• People who are interested in the cultural and political legacy of religion in the twenty-first century.
• Readers who have overdosed on fiction set on the coasts.
• People who have a sharp sense of humor about high school.

Recommended Edition:

The University of Michigan Press
$24.00

This hardcover is the one available edition this novel. Beautifully presentable and gift-ready.

Where To Buy:

Your local independent bookseller. Find the shop nearest to you here. You might also want to prowl the used bookshops for treasures. If the book you want is not in stock, the bookseller will be happy to order it for you (almost always sans shipping); just ask! If there are really, truly no indie booksellers near you, consider ordering online from an independent bookseller, such as Brookline Booksmith or Powell's, and having it delivered to your doorstep. Another option: order online directly from the publisher.

Image Credit: Creative Commons, by moriza.

Of Daemons and Elves:Creativity and Artistic Genius

This is something of a Sunday morning prayer: Elizabeth Gilbert has a fascinating talk about creativity and how artistic genius has been conceived over time, from the suffering and self-destructive writer to the visiting daemon of inspiration. She brings humor and insight to the challenge of the working artist; this is a testament to showing up to each day for your work with an openness to divinity that might pass through you and sense enough to not depend upon it. Gilbert persuasively suggests that we begin the process of disentangling the association of the creative process with suffering, and that we break apart the notion of "being" a genius. Another jewel from TED.

Speaking: Gabriel García Márquez

Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? ... we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

Gabriel García Márquez, from his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture, "The Solitude of Latin America"

Beyond Reaction Time: On Reading

David Ulin, the book editor of the Los Angeles Times, offers a fascinating reflection on "the lost art of reading" that goes beyond the usual paraphrase. Ulin wrestles with a question that strikes close to me: he is trying to reconcile his lifelong passion for reading with his current struggle to concentrate on the pages before him. Ulin believes that reading enlarges us through contemplation, time, and the opportunity to "merge with the consciousness of another human being." This, Ullin contends, is the exact opposite of mentality espoused by our contemporary culture.

Such a (noiseless mentality of reading) is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

While Ulin might've turned this article  into a technophobic morality tale, he instead becomes both personal and nuanced, revealing how lives are grounded in narratives rather than a series of reactions, and to live otherwise is disorienting--to him and, frankly, to me too.

I am too susceptible, it turns out, to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing. For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," primarily at night -- a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

Yet there is time, if we want it. Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload. In her recent essay collection "The Winter Sun" (Graywolf: 196 pp., $15 paper), Fanny Howe quotes Simone Weil: "One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming." That's the point precisely, for without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in -- because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way. There is the present-tense experience of reading, but also the chronology of the narrative, as well as of the characters and author, all of whom bear their own relationships to time. There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago. St. Augustine composed his "Confessions" in AD 397, but when he details his spiritual upheaval, his attempts to find meaning in the face of transient existence, the immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide. ...

As I write this, I have about seven Firefox windows open to different websites. Now, I am certainly grateful for the gifts of technology, and I believe in its profound potential to keep improving our world. I love being in the constant process of creating this website; I've learned a great deal and made both friends and allies through social networking tools. But I've noticed, too, that flattening sense of distraction that Ulin describes. And it is particularly apparent when I sit down to read, or meditate. It's an unsettling itch. I read with my fingers ready to get on with it, to turn the next page. I don't like it. I'm neither mindful nor content.

A bit of affirmative action is in order. That is, a concerted effort to choose where I put my time and attention more carefully. Do I really need to refresh my email as frequently as I do? Mightn't I try out opening one internet window at a time and doing one task at a time, instead of creating this false sense of simultaneity where articles remain unread on some open tab, as if by being accessible it is being addressed? I've heard of folks who go on "media fasts" and "technology fasts." For me, I think a balanced diet is in order.

At stake is my mentality and my spirit. At stake is my ability to continue finding great joy in reading; to better seek and understand.

What He Thought

I love this poem by the syntactical trickster and impish genius that is Heather McHugh (who is pictured above). There is nothing to do but to gesture at this poem, to sweep my arm in its direction while looking at you imploringly, and to say, "Here, here!" Or, if you prefer, "Hear, hear!"

What He Thought
By Heather McHugh

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious
“cheap date” (no explanation lessened
this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic —
and least poetic — so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

“What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think — “The truth
is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. “If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry —

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly) — poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

Image Credit: The Stranger

So Saturated with Laughter

I Have Learned So Much
By Hafiz

I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.
The truth has shared so much of itself with me that I can no longer
think of myself as a man, a woman, an angel, or even pure soul.
Existence has become so saturated with laughter it has freed me of every
concept and image a mind could ever war with.

Translated by David Ladinsky.
Collected in I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy.

Friday Must-See

On this rainy October morning, take heart in this moving video:

This is from Mr. Philip Spooner's testimony last April for Maine's Equality bill, which was intended to protect the right to marry for gay people in the state. On November 3, Maine will vote on Prop. 1 about whether to make that right permanent. The No on 1: Protect Maine Equality campaign has been fighting hard to ensure that that the right to marry in their state doesn't disappear as it did in California one year ago.

It's not too late to donate or volunteer for the cause; in fact, the next couple weeks are crucial.

Think Little

There's a little piece of brilliance, right here in our midst.

Speaking: Dorothy Day

Isn't there something awfully smug about such piety--building up your own sanctification at the expense of the increased guilt of someone else? The turning of the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential murderer, or thief, in order that we might grow in grace--how obnoxious! In that case I'd rather be the striker than the meek one struck. One would all but rather be a sinner than a saint at the expense of the sinner. In other words, we must be saved together.

~ Dorothy Day, March 1952
From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings

Quick Hit: Cornel West Tells All

Dr. Cornel West has just published the hotly anticipated memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He is, as TIME Magazine has called him, "one complex dude: brilliant scholar, political activist, committed Christian and soul brother to the bone.” He is also, of course, a Princeton professor of religion and African-American stories and an established author of many books, including the classic Race Matters.

On Democracy Now!, West discusses his upbringing, public healthcare, post-election disappointment, the role of music in his life, his spat with former Harvard president and current White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, and more.