Edith Wharton, et al.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
--Edith Wharton, US Novelist (1862-1937)

***

It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would aprove; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure.
--Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

***

A self-narrative that meets the accuracy, peace-of-mind, and believeablity criteria is likely to be a quite useful one, precisely by avoiding too much instropsection.
--Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves (2002)

***

“And the truth is that the truth can never ultimately hurt.”
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (1986)

***

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey. . . . you can’t expect anyone to match the intensity of your emotions.”
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (1986)

***

“Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear.”
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (1986)

Caroline, or Change

Last night L. and I saw the brilliant musical "Caroline, or Change," book and lyrics by Pulitzer and Tony Award Winner Tony Kushner. It has been a long time since I willingly attended a musical and even longer since I might have even considered using brilliant to modify musical, but. The musical is witty, true. I suppose I mean brilliant in that quirky impressed British way of saying it. Brilliant! Sans irony, of course,which might leave me with beautiful as a better choice to describe the work.

I purchased tickets for the show because it received rave reviews from all local sources. It was so successful that it even extended its run by two weeks. Read: You have two weeks to run out and see if for yourself here in Boston. Read reveiw excerpts and buy tickets here: http://www.speakeasystage.com/

When you consider the many tasty treats you can have at local restaurants and eateries near the Boston Center for the Arts, how can you resist? L. and I dreamed of a dark chocolate calzone at the Picco, but there was a menu change during our over-long absence. So we happily went out on a dessert limb and had the ice-cream cookie. So simple, yet so decadent. We gushed over the play while we shared our chocolate drenched delight. Powerful. Witty. The music--not even the lyrics--gave me goosebumps and made my body want to cry. Here is the synopsis:

Set in a small town in Louisiana in 1963, CAROLINE, OR CHANGE tells the powerful story of Caroline, a black maid working for a Southern Jewish family while struggling to raise her own children amidst the swirling social changes sweeping the country. At the heart of this beautiful musical is Caroline's relationship with the family's young son, Noah, who bonds with Caroline after the death of his mother. Everything changes for these friends, however, when Noah's stepmother decrees that Caroline can keep any change that Noah leaves in the pockets of his laundry. This decision ultimately sparks a confrontation that rips apart both households and mirrors the conflicts outside their doors.

Caroline, or Change left me with a fresh sense of the power of good writing and the joy that lingers from experiencing performance art. L. worked out how to shape a narrative he had been trying to puzzle out.

While the performers were very good, three cheers go out to the young Jacob Brandt, who played the part of Noah. Well done!

NPR Interview with Tony Kushner

New Yorker: John Lahr Discusses Kushner's work

NPR Interview with Kushner
(discussing his co-authorship of Spielberg's movie, Munich)

Free Books! Gutenberg Project

I learned today about the Project Gutenberg, a 35-year-old nonprofit based in Illinois. They have a mission to "break down the walls of ignorance and illiteracy." To aid in this fight they are launching an effort to make thousands of classic books available for free in downloadable form.

Volunteers began typing and scanning books into a database thirty-five years ago, decades before the Internet and the ability to distribute texts electronically became a reality. Now those efforts are bearing fruit as the project plans to host the World eBook Fair. Between July 4 and August 4 over 300,000 books will be available for free download. The fair will be repeated annually.

The majority of books are no longer protected by copyright. For a small percentage of the books, copyright permission was granted for their inclusion. There will even be a limited number of classical music files as well.

Free books. This enterprise is legal. And my Dad always said there was no such thing as a free lunch. Just think: schools could download copies of The Odyssey for free!

For more information read
the Boston Globe's article by David Mehegan:
Free chapter added to saga of e-books

Download free books (to your laptop, ipod, etc.) at the World eBook Fair: http://worldebookfair.com/

Learn about Project Gutenberg AND download free books now:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
(about 20,000 titles ready for download)

Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep and The Man of My Dreams

This evening I attended a reading by Curtis Sittenfeld. Her first novel, Prep, was a runaway best seller and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the top ten novels of 2005. (See the link in the sidebar.) The narrator, Lee, in Prep is an angst riddled teen who convinces her parents to let her move out of South Bend to attend a boarding school out East. Being from South Bend (sort of), I was attracted to the story line. The novel was smart and just dark enough for my tastes to make it stand out from a crowd of novels with young female characters.

I was also attracted to Sittenfeld as an author. She was teaching ninth grade English at a private high school for boys at the time the novel reached publication. After the novel hit the charts, I read one (or two?) essays by her describing her experience writing, getting published, and being marketed. She seemed smart and witty, but not in a snarky way. She was articulate and insightful.

Tonight she read from her latest novel, Man of My Dreams. The narrator is also a young woman, Hannah, but Sittenfeld insists that she is quite distinct from Lee. Lee's story was told during her high school years. Hannah's story spans fourteen years and she gets to mature into her late twenties. Lee said not-so-nice things because she was filled with bile. Hannah also gets verbally callous, but her roughness comes more from naiveté instead of nastiness. These are Sittenfeld's descriptions, as I have yet to read her new work.

Sittenfeld is tall. Tonight she wore black slacks paired with a black v-necked top. Her shoes: black. She looked cool. She looked like she writes: forthright, natural, and comfortable. Hhhhmmm...not sure those are the best adjectives. Alas. Or perhaps I should avoid any connection whatsoever between her writing style and her fashion style?

Sittenfeld shared with us her pleasure to be a guest author of Brookline Booksmith, where she used to shop when she lived nearby seven years ago. After a few opening remarks, she read several pages from the new book, and then took questions.

One person asked her about her readership: men, women, girls? Sittenfeld receives letters from readers of every ilk, but she surmised that many of her readers are women. She laughingly remarked that her audience consists of her family, her high school advisor, and a few strangers. Sure enough, she took questions from "Aunt Nancy" and "Aunt Sue."

The reading was held at the Coolridge Corner Theater, where sounds from surrounding theaters occassionly provided a soundtrack for the reading. After the Q & A we were all invited to the book store for a signing. This time I decided to pass. Not sure why. I suppose that the reality of packing all my books for the move back to South Bend is growing more present in my mind. I have accrued boxes of books already. My copy of Prep is back in South Bend and I wasn't quite ready to buy her latest. I will keep it in mind, however, as a future read.

Useful Links

Curtis Sittenfeld Official Website

May 22nd Time Article by Lev Grossman
Prepping for Love:
With The Man of My Dreams, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld
puts the literature back in chick lit.

Island of Slaves and Burdick's

This past weekend L. and I invested some time in Cambridge. Living in the Back Bay, we most often stay on our side of the Charles. Certainly there is plenty to do. The event was trip to the theater to see Island of Slaves, by Pierre Marivaux in a new translation by Gideon Lester. Here is a brief synopsis provided by the show's website:

Many years ago, a group of fugitive slaves colonized a remote island and established a society of absolute equality. They determined to do away with all class distinctions; any former masters arriving on the island would have to be retrained in the ways of democracy, or else put to death.

Now a storm at sea maroons four people - two aristocrats and their slaves - on the island. They are met by an administrator who instructs the masters and slaves to switch names, clothes, and roles, so beginning their lesson in humanity.

I am thinking this play, originally produced in 1725, did not include drag queens. Luckily, this newest interpretation did! The acting was finely done. For lots of reviews and articles about the play and this production visit this website: http://www.amrep.org/slaves/

Before the show we stopped at Burdick's café located just next to the venue. We have been hearing about this place forever. L. even visited there once eons ago, but had since erased its exact location. Friends, if ever we shall meet in Boston, you will be taken there to indulge. I know this because I do not forget such rich, dark chocolate and can hone in on it from Harvard Square. And, more importantly, it is henceforth linked to in my external memory drive (otherwise known as this blog).

Freed from Guantanamo

I know that I have been news heavy these past few blog entries, but I can't seem to help myself. Shouldn't we be concerned about this?

Freed from Guantanamo, 5 face danger in Albania

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Five Chinese Muslims recently released from the Guantanamo Bay prison are living under increasingly dangerous conditions in Albania, the only country to let them in after the United States determined they were not ''enemy combatants," according to their lawyer.

The lawyer, Sabin Willett of Boston, asked in court papers filed yesterday that the Bush administration bring the five men to the United States for their own safety.

The men, who are members of an ethnic group known as Uighurs, were arrested in Afghanistan four years ago. A military tribunal later determined that the men had never been enemies of the United States, and ordered them released.

But because the Chinese government has a history of persecuting Uighurs, who have been seeking greater independence, the men could not be sent back to China.

Two weeks ago, on the eve of a court hearing into their fate, the military announced that it had dropped the men off in Albania, a mostly Muslim country in southeast Europe. Willett, who has been waging a court battle to get the Uighurs brought to the United States as refugees, flew to Albania.

In an affidavit filed yesterday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Willett described a harrowing trip to a slum where the five men are living in a refugee processing center. He said he was able to take his clients to a restaurant and get glasses made for one of them, but since he left, they have been afraid to leave the compound.

The men's arrival has caused a sensation in Albania, he said. The Chinese government has called on Albania to extradite the men, whom it calls terrorists. Members of the Albanian parliament have vowed to send them to China. And even if the men are allowed to stay in Albania, Willett said, they would face a bleak future.

''The impoverished country where they were dumped without community, common language, family, or prospects is ill-suited to withstand the strident demands of the most powerful communist dictatorship on earth," Willett wrote. ''These men never wronged the United States in any way. What has happened is shameful."

The Bush administration has asked the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that it is now moot. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not return a call yesterday

Also yesterday, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister announced that 16 captives held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp would be transferred to Saudi jails in coming days -- the first large-scale transfer from this isolated island prison camp in more than a year.

Bush Taps Jesus

WASHINGTON DC--USA Today reported last week that President Bush wiretapped American phone lines to investigate terrorist activity. Capitol Hill sources revealed today that Bush has also tapped his direct phone line from Jesus the Christ.

Bush has maintained a direct line to Jesus throughout his presidency, despite drastic hikes in long distance, to better serve the American people. Initially Bush was able to accept collect calls from the Christ. After 9/11, however, the Lord gave 24/6 (Sundays excluded) access to Bush in an effort to aid Bush fight the good fight against terrorism.

Bush apparently tapped the phone line due to increased suspicion regarding the Lord’s calls into the United States. Increased chatter indicated an imminent in-breaking of divine intervention in American politics. Bush upholds the legality of his actions to monitor Jesus’ phone activity. He did not seek a warrant due to the high probability that Jesus would observe the court proceedings and take preemptive action. The Lord is known to protect his existence at all costs--giving out revelation as he sees fit despite human suffering and global warming. His followers operate in separate enclaves and often do not communicate as they work to transform the word according to their leader's specifications.

Bush is committed to protecting the American people. Jesus is being held in a top-secret facility pending official charges.

GOP senator says judges were told of phone spying

Trying to be a thoughtful citizen, I emailed Larry Tribe, the Harvard professor whose article appeared in yesterday's Globe and asked his advice about how to proceed in light of the information revealed about the NSA and phone data. He replied (which impressed me) and suggested contacting legislators to make my views clear to them. Based on my limited experience on Capitol Hill, he is correct. Representatives and Senators do take into account the letters and phone calls they receive from constituents. So, call now and vote early and often.

Here is the next installment regarding the NSA and phone "spying." Things are still murky. . .

GOP senator says judges were told of phone spying
Verizon, BellSouth deny playing a role

By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press | May 17, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised controversy, a Republican senator said yesterday, for the first time connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records.

President Bush, meanwhile, insisted the government does not listen in on domestic telephone conversations among ordinary Americans. But he declined to specifically discuss the compiling of phone records or whether that would amount to an invasion of privacy.

USA Today reported last week that three of the four major telephone companies had provided information about millions of Americans' calls to the National Security Agency. Verizon Communications Inc., however, denied yesterday that it had been asked by the agency for customer information, one day after BellSouth said the same thing.

Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

''None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work.

Hatch made the comment when asked during an interview about recent reports that the government was compiling lists of Americans' phone calls. He later suggested he was also speaking broadly of the administration's terror-related monitoring.

When asked whether the judges somehow approved the operations, Hatch said, ''That is not their position, but they were informed."

The surveillance court, whose 11 members are chosen by the chief justice of the United States, was set up after Congress rewrote key laws in 1978 that govern intelligence collection inside the United States.

The court secretly considers individual warrants for physical searches, wiretaps, and traces on phone records when someone is suspected of being an agent of a foreign power and when making the request to a regular court might reveal highly classified information.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been led by US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, and then by US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.

Bush was asked yesterday about the reported lists of calls.

''We do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," Bush said.

He appeared to acknowledge the NSA sweep of phone records indirectly, saying that the program referred to by a questioner ''is one that has been fully briefed to members of the United States Congress in both political parties."

''They're very aware of what is taking place. The American people expect their government to protect them within the laws of this country, and I'm going to continue to do just that," Bush said.

Spokesman Tony Snow later said Bush's comments did not amount to a confirmation of published reports that the NSA's surveillance included secretly collecting millions of phone call records.

Verizon, meanwhile, called into question key points of a USA Today story that has led to wide coverage by other news media in the past week.

''Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records," the New York-based phone company said in an e-mail statement.

A day earlier, BellSouth Corp. had said NSA had never requested customer call data, nor had the company provided any.

A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc., and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the attacks.

USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson said yesterday, ''We're confident in our coverage of the phone database story, but we won't summarily dismiss BellSouth's and Verizon's denials without taking a closer look."

The Senate Intelligence Committee is to hold a confirmation hearing tomorrow on Bush's nomination of Air Force General Michael V. Hayden to head the CIA. Hayden is sure to face vigorous questioning; as the NSA director from 1999 until last year, Hayden oversaw the creation of some of the government's most controversial intelligence surveillance.

The Senate and House intelligence chairmen -- Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan -- announced yesterday that their full committees would be briefed for the first time on Bush's warrantless surveillance program. The operations have allowed the government to eavesdrop on domestic calls when one party is overseas and suspected of terrorism.

Democrats have demanded such information for months, saying the administration was violating the law by withholding it from committee members.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and an Intelligence Committee member on the select NSA panel, said the administration had given the public only part of the story.

Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

In an effort to be more than a happily ignorant member of the "complacent majority of citizens" described by Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, I read the following brief article in Today's Boston Globe. Read it. Then someone tell me what to do about it. . .

Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment

By Laurence H. Tribe | May 16, 2006

THE ESCALATING controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."

The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.

Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection at his whim is a ''search." And doing it to all Americans, not just those chatting with Al Qaeda, and with no publicly reviewable safeguards to prevent abuse, is an ''unreasonable search" if those Fourth Amendment words have any meaning at all.

The legal landscape, too, has changed decisively since the court's majority opined that Americans have no expectation of privacy in the numbers they call. Rejecting the accuracy of that description even decades ago, Congress, which was more vigorous then in its protection of privacy, enacted statutes reassuring us that our phone records would not be shared willy-nilly with government inquisitors without court orders. So it can no longer be said, if it ever could have been, that our ''expectations of privacy" about whom we call are groundless or that we ''consent" to reconstruction of our telephone profiles by using one of the phone companies that, unbeknownst to us, have agreed to share such information (although, we're told, not the content of every call) with NSA on demand.

Privacy apart, this president's defiance of statutes by the dozens is constitutionally alarming. But the matter goes deeper still. Even if Congress were to repeal the laws securing telephone privacy, or if phone companies found loopholes to slip through when pressured by government, the Constitution's Fourth Amendment shield for ''the right of the people to be secure" from ''unreasonable searches" is a shield for all seasons, one that a lawless president, a spineless Congress, and a complacent majority of citizens -- who are conditioned to a government operating under a shroud of secrecy while individuals live out their lives in fishbowls -- cannot be permitted to destroy, for the rest of us and our children.

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.

A Kiss from Maddalena

I recently attended a weekend conference for writers sponsored by Grub Street. It was the fifth annual “Muse and the Marketplace” event at which roughly half of the sessions were muse related, i.e. craft related, while the other sessions were concerned with publishing.

After hearing an agent rave about a book fallen in love with and signed the author, I picked it up on the book table. A Kiss from Maddalenais the first book of Christopher Castellani, who is the artistic director at Grub. I even snagged his signature for my book between sessions.

I finished the book after two readathons (due in part to rainy weather in Boston). It has been a while since I had such a yummy read. By the end, my heart was a-flutter, I swear. It is a classic love story set in World War II Italy. Village girl in love with local boy. Village girl gets “flower picked” by a rich Italian back from America looking for a bride. She is forced to consider the fast talking rich guy. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. It is not a new story, but it is all in the telling. And I was swept away.

Of course I heart all cosi italiani. Having lived a year in the shadow of the Pantheon, who can blame me?

A girl needs a good Italian love story now and again.

Check out Christopher Castellani’s website,
where you can take a
virtual tour of the village of Santa Cecelia
where the story unfolds
www.christophercastellani.com

Penguin Reading Guide