Robust, But Light On The Tongue

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

-James Joyce

I don't need fine wines, aged single malt whiskeys, rare cheeses, or any other obscure delectable delights for my tongue when I have the finely crafted words of brilliant writers.

Take a sentence like the one above and roll it around in your mouth.  Speak it slowly, savoring the rhythm and the flow.  

This is what is means to devour books.  You can read to fill up your time just as easily as you can eat to fill your stomach.  Or you can read to taste the flavors of human thought, human expression, and human experience.   

A good sentence will satisfy me for days.

If you run across a particularly tasty one, drop me a line.

Do I Have Mentalism?

Please answer as honestly as possible:

1. Do you lose time from work due to thinking?

Yes. Sometimes I even hide in the bathroom and think.

2. Is thinking making your home life unhappy?

Yes. Sometimes I think that my thinking is the cause of all our unhappiness.

3. Is thinking affecting your reputation?

Yes. People have stopped inviting me to parties because of the way I think.

4. Have you ever felt remorse after thinking?

Yes. My God, after a night of binge thinking...sometimes I can't even look at myself in the mirror.

5. Do you crave a think at a definite time every day?

Yes. Usually I wake up and have to have that first thought just to get out of bed.

6. Do you want to think even after thinking has made you sick?

Yes. I know how thinking will make me feel, but I don't care - I have to think or I'll feel worse!

7. Do you ever think alone?

Yes. Sometimes I don't want anyone to see me thinking because I know they're judging how much I think.

8. Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of thinking?

Yes. Once I thought for three days straight and when I stopped thinking, I was in Fresno with no memory of how I got there.

9. Is thinking jeopardizing your job or business?

Yes. My thinking is taking this company down in flames.

10. Have you ever been to a hospital or institution because of your thinking?

Yes. I was arrested on a 5150 because I was running through the streets naked and thinking out loud.

Results:

You have a thinking problem!

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.