Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I picked up a copy of Robinson's novel Gilead after it was recommended to me by a literary agent at the Grub Street conference. The agent had read a sample of my novel and suggested Robinson's work as an author I could learn from. As I made my way through the text I noted her flawless prose and use of details. I also read to notice how Robinson makes use of a first person narrator. My own work is currently told from the first person and I find that I need more writerly tools to make the most of his point-of-view.

Gilead is a ponderous novel. It is an epistolary novel written by a 76 year-old pastor in 1956 Iowa to his seven-year-old son. The pastor is near death and wants to write to his son who will not remember him after his death.

I finished the novel a few weeks ago and only today picked up my copy to give it more thought. As I paged through and reread sections, I was impressed more deeply by the language and the ideas in the novel. So please forgive the extensive excerpts. (I actually left out sections that were noteworthy!)

Memorable Quotes

(hardcover first edition, 2004)

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them. (Opening paragraph)

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (p 7)

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. (p 23)

That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was to love another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before. (p 55)

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing. (p 95)

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. (p 114)

There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say. (p 137)

But I believe that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. (p 139)

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. (p 154)

Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense. (p 177)

My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. (p 179)

The tact was audible. (p 186)

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it. (p 188)

One interesting aspect of the whole experience was that I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn’t deceive myself, either. (p 203)

. . . that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk. (p 205)

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. (p 209)

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? (p 238)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. (p 243)

It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth, which starts me thinking again about heaven. (p 244)

A Few Good Words

susurrus: etymology: Latin, hum, whisper; a whispering or rustling sound

crepuscular: of, relating to, or resembling twilight OR active in the twilight

Model sentences

Here I am trying to be wise, the way a father should be, the way an old pastor certainly should be. (p 56)

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens it eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. (p 57)

In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road. . . . (74)

I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. (p 98)

I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes. (p 147)

Your mother looked at me, so I knew I must have sounded upset. I was upset. (p 152)

Useful Links

NPR Terry Gross Interview with Marilynne Robinson on Gilead
(I highly recommend this interview--very thoughtful)

Saturday by Ian McEwan

I recently finished Saturday, by Ian McEwan. I consider his book, Atonement, one of my favorite novels. So I was intrigued to read another piece of his work.


Saturday is set in London post 9/11 and just before the war with Iraq. The events take place on one Saturday and are told from a neurosurgeon's point-of-view. Henry Perowne is happily married with two artistic children--a poet and a blues musician. His cherished Saturday begins early when he awakens and views a burning plane make an emergency landing. We follow him as he interacts with his children and wife, plays a mean (and long) game of squash, shops for dinner, and cooks a fish stew for a family dinner. (Yes, he even cooks.) This typical Saturday is laced with conflict brought about by a random encounter with a less-fortunate street guy--a tough guy whose Huntington’s Disease the neurosurgeon readily diagnoses in the middle of road rage in the streets of London.

I admit that I was not immediately hooked by the story. The characters, however, and the choreography are finely drawn. And I did feel my pulse race as McEwan built tension and suspense into the narrative. Any book that elevates my heart rate is doing something right.

This book made the New York Times top ten books of 2005. Indeed it does capture modern life and a thoroughly recognizable attempt to "make sense" of a world on the brink of war.

Memorable Quotes
(page numbers from paperback First Anchor Books Edition, April 2006)

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. ( p 17)

She remained in silent contact with an imaginary intimate. (p 48)

Happiness seemed like a betrayal of principle, but happiness was unavoidable. (p 49)

This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. (p 66)

Work that you cannot begin to imagine achieving yourself, that displays a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection—this is his idea of genius. This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t “live” without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof.

There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule. Who could eve reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction? (p 92)

There are so many ways a brain can let you down. Like an expensive car, it’s intricate, but mass-produced nevertheless, with more than six billion in circulation. (p 99)

A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night. God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own—the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans. . . (p 122)

It isn’t rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all it entails—jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realizable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray. (p 127)

Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simple fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place. (p 159)

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. (p 176)

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion. (p 198)

Useful Link

Ian McEwan's Website: Saturday
(Includes a reading guide, reviews of the book AND a recipe for the Fish Stew)

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.