Grown Folk Wisdom

Finally, I come upon something useful stuck in the Web...

L'CHAIM!!!!!!!!

My nephew! Welcome to the Party, little man!

Read-Whatcha-Got Challenge: An Update and a Confession

First the update:

12. Thomas Wolfe "Look Homeward Angel"

While I did write this name on my list and strike a line through it, I didn't finish it. I started it eagerly and after about forty pages, I just couldn't go on. Wolfe's prose is full of energy and crammed with ideas, but is just one shade off of purple, which is far too close for me. Let's call his prose violet. Next!

19. Deborah Harkness "A Discovery of Witches"

Easily the smartest vampire/witch/etc book I've ever read. Detailed world-building and humanly-drawn inhuman characters make the book very easy to get lost in, which is the way a book about monsters should be. What I didn't like about the story was the pacing. Far too long and lingering in the wrong places. The heroine, a witch who doesn't know how powerful she really is, spends too much of the story not knowing how powerful she really is. The damsel-in-distress act gets repetitive. While it is crucial for an author to love her characters, she must be ready at a moment's notice to drag their asses through Hell. Harkness mollycoddles her lead characters for three hundred pages and just when things get interesting, the book ends and we are told to wait for the sequel. Which of course I'll read, but I won't be happy about it.

34. Janna Levin "How the Universe Got Its Spots"

This is a wonderful diary by an astrophysicist/cosmologist as she pursues the shape of the Universe and explains how she came to the field. It's a treat to be inside a mind like this. We see her work and her life and along the way learn the ins and out of cosmic topology, relativity both special and general, and why the Universe might be a finite place. I'll admit that a couple of times the math shot right over my head, but for the most part Levin takes care to avoid that.

23. Mary Doria Russell "Doc"

A well-told story - no, yarn, in the best sense - about Doc Holliday and his life before the OK Corral. In Russell's hands, Doc is a living, breathing (painfully, due to the tuberculosis) human being. He is a deep soul, who spends each day with Death and in true Southern form, greets him with a drink and witty joke. The story shifts skillfully from one character to another, getting in their heads without having to rely on first-person narrative. It's a highly crafted narrative technique that Russell makes look effortless. This is NOT an easy thing to do and when it's done well, the reader doesn't even notice. I also loved the fact that Doc's Georgian accent comes through crystal clear without reading like dialect. It brought me back to Savannah every time he said something.

And now the confession: I bought a new book. Yes, I know, but the thing is, I'm going to read it before April 1st. My only saving grace is that I have to read it for work. No, that is not cheating. Why? Shut up! that's why.

Rant For The Week: Booze Is To Drugs Like Milk Is To Cookies

It comes down to this: no one was smoking crack in Akron, Ohio in 1935. If they were, the first Twelve Step program would not have been called Alcoholics Anonymous and seventy-seven years later you would not see "sober" people smoking weed between meetings.

Alcohol is a drug. Put it in your system and it alters your consciousness, impairs your body, and makes you think you're extremely interesting, a great dancer, an unbeatable fighter, and able to drive home even though your right eyelid won't open for some reason. Maybe you can't stop drinking it even though you desperately want to. But when you say you're an alcoholic, you can still think of marijuana as something outside of your alcoholism instead of inside of your addiction.

Alcoholics - drug addicts - are already people prone to self delusion and hypocrisy. When you tell them that alcohol is different from drugs, you are giving them an easy out. When you label their condition "alcoholism", you are giving them an external focus instead of forcing them to confront themselves. The problem is not the liquid in the bottle, it is the shit in their brains.

I don't believe that addiction is a disease. Bill Wilson and the other founders of AA called it a disease because that was the best explanation they could come up with at the time. They did not have access to brain scans and the other tools of modern neuroscience. When the people of ancient Sumeria saw a comet, they figured it was a message from the gods. When the people of 1935 saw a man take a shot of whiskey minutes after his doctor told him one more drink would kill him, they figured he had a disease. It was a logical assumption at the time. Today, it's no longer an accurate conclusion based on the given evidence.

In my opinion, addiction is self-programming run amok. We are self-programming beings. If we learn to deal with overwhelming emotions by shutting down our central nervous systems with a six pack (or two), then that will become our default behavior. Eventually, we will literally not be able to do otherwise. Until we learn a new program.

I believe this idea of being able to re-program the brain keeps the responsibility of recovery on the addicts, while also giving them active hope. Addiction as an incurable disease is a depressing premise. Addiction as a reversible set of programming is an open invitation to a new way of living. And it doesn't make me roll my eyes when I hear it the way I do when someone tells me "alcoholism is a disease just like cancer is a disease." Is that so? Then how come I don't see cancer patients driving their cars into telephone poles after they take their medicine?

To The Book Depository!

January First: goals have been spoken aloud, auto-da-fe have been handed down, and gauntlets have been thrown. The Annual Read-Whatcha-Got Challenge has begun (yes, I re-named it!).

As the ancient Mayan prophecies foretold, it is now 2012 - the End of the To Be Read Pile!!!!!!

It can be looked at as a literary housecleaning, a feng shui re-orientation of your narrative spirit. The rules are simple: from 1 January until 1 April, you will read no new books. Read my blog: No. New. Books. You can only read books you have already purchased and which, quite frankly, are beginning to lean precariously over the edge of your nightstand, threatening to topple over onto your head while you sleep (most likely dreaming of all the books you're going to buy, you insatiable bastard).

You must read only those books, and read only those books you shall. It is a challenge, it is a goal, and it is an endurance test. It will be long. It will be grueling. You will curse the day you ever agreed to do something so publicly stupid. You will go mad watching all the shiny, new books rolling by. The endless "Best Books of 2011" lists and the upcoming Tournament of Books will be especially torturous. The way is dark and lit only by the flaming bodies of those who have fallen before you, but...

Don't be discouraged! We'll get through this together and be better readers for it.

To get you started, here is my personal Ball & Chain List:

1. Joy Williams "Honored Guest"
2. Grace Paley "Enormous Changes At The Last Minute"
3. Warren Ellis "Crooked Little Vein"
4. Marcel Proust "Swann's Way" (Lydia Davis translation)
5. Tom Rachman "The Imperfectionists"
6. Diane Ackerman "A Natural History of the Senses"
7. Lisa Lutz "Curse of the Spellmans"
8. S. J. Perelman "The Most of S.J. Perelman"
9. Haruki Murakami "1Q84"
10. Kevin Brockmeier "The Brief History of the Dead"
11. Rick Bass "The Ninemile Wolves"
12. Thomas Wolfe "Look Homeward Angel"
13. Katherine Porter "The Collected Stories"
14. Lewis Thomas "The Lives of a Cell"
15. The Dalai Lama "Healing Anger"
16. John McPhee "Coming Into the Country"
17. John Steinbeck "Journal of a Novel"
18. Thomas Browne "Religio Medici" (don't ask)
19. Deborah Harkness "A Discovery of Witches"
20. Brandon Sanderson "Mistborn"
21. Rainer Maria Rilke "The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge"
22. William K. Krueger "Iron Lake"
23. Mary Doria Russell "Doc"
24. Don Winslow "The Power of the Dog"
25. Josh Ritter "Bright's Passage"
26. Ellen Datlow (ed.) "Teeth"
27. Teddy Wayne "Kapitoil"
28. Virginia Woolf "The Waves"
29. Karl Marlantes "Matterhorn"
30. David W. Page "Body Trauma"
31. Stanley Fish "How To Read A Sentence"
32. F. Scott Fitzgeral "Tender Is The Night"
33. Terry Pratchett "The Color of Magic"
34. Janna Levin "How the Universe Got Its Spots"

Three months and thirty-four books? I don't know if I'll read all of these (in fact, I know I won't because the previous sentence equals a little over two books a day), but I intend to stick to this list for any and all reading pleasure. No matter what.

May God have mercy on our souls. Now go, and buy no more.

Dear Wynton Marsalis: Shut the Fuck Up

I just watched a great documentary on the new face(s) of (jazz) called "Icons Among Us" and it made me fall in love with this music all over again. It also made me feel: curious, inspired, angry, frustrated, happy, and full of bilious rage at critics, professors, so-called jazz purists, and Wynton Stickindabutt Marsalis.

This is not a retread of the usual debate of Traditional Jazz versus New Jazz. This is an examination of jazz losing it's way in order to find its way. Jazz transcending jazz to be...I don't even know - cosmic improvisation? tathagata-jam? The definition of jazz is not expanding, it is evaporating. The musicians in this documentary play improvisational music built on a number of influences beside the tradition of Jazz. They're soaking in the world and living a philosophy of improvisation within community, treating the music as a living organism. The music is incredible! Hip hop jazz orchestras, metal blues bop, and freestyle rhythmic vitality. The music is alive and well and going in new directions.

But then the purists step in and embarrass themselves with the same old stock "This isn't Jazz!" bullshit. A writer says, "Jazz today has no clear message, no clear identity." Marsalis says, "We're not producing the same caliber of musician." Harrison says, "If you haven't shared the stage with a Blakey or Gillespie, you don't have the foundation to move this tradition forward."

The new musicians respond in kind. Robert Glasper says, "If Charlie Parker came back from the dead, he'd say, 'You're still playing the same shit I was - what the fuck are you doing?" Robert Shipp says, "I don't have to view music through the prism of 'Bud Powell played it like this' or 'Bill Evans played it like this'. Fuck those guys. I do it my way."

That to me is the spirit of this music: that which does not grow is dead. I love the way Bill Frisell defines music. He says it's "a place where no one gets hurt and you can do whatever you want." I think that's all the context/message/identity you need. Now pick up that goddamn horn and say something honest.

Head Full of Pages

During a break at a recent writing event, a favorite Reader question was asked in a playful, get-to-know-you way: "If you could live in any book, what would it be?" Normally I would skip this line of inquiry in favor of inscrutable silence, but the NaNo folks are a kindly lot and I decided to join in. Without giving it too much thought, I said the Hobbit. This was immediately seconded by a dozen other people and gave way to one of those intense nerdalogues wherein the pros and cons of a completely fictional concept are scrutinized in detail. Where would you live? What species would you be? When would you live - before or after the first or second defeat of Sauron? What would you do for a living? It was all going swimmingly until I broached a practical question to the would-be Hobbit contingent, namely, what kind of sewer system is employed in a Hobbit hole? Bilbo Baggins lived under a hill in a multi-roomed, one story house with one-sided ventilation. Where do you put the toilet in that layout? Next to the windows? IN the center? Where does the waste drain out? Middle Earth is basically a Medieval era world which means, er, garderobes at best, privies at worst. Bag End, as we all know, was the epitome of Hobbit comfort and coziness, but let's face it, it's still a hole in the ground. Once you hit that bathroom, that place is going to smell like Hobbit crap. And those little dudes are way too fond of rich food.

The Hobbit contingent countered that their favorite species is a very industrious and resourceful one and surely they would have invented some sort of Roman aqueduct style of sewage. Perhaps. But if anyone in Middle Earth is going to do that, it would be those stinky but clever Dwarves living under that damn mountain.

We were all in agreement on this.