James Patterson and Andrew Cross, 3^rd Degree.

Fluff. An explosion. A friend being beaten by her husband. A liaison with the deputy director of Homeland Security. Some more death, some sadness, and a solved murder with ends neatly tied up in string.

My palate was cleansed; it certainly wasn't stimulated.

Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, 2000.

I've mentioned Lynch's earlier book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. I quite liked the earlier one, and while this newer book doesn't seem nearly as startlingly original as The Undertaking, I enjoyed the time that I spent reading this book.

This book is a collection of essays that muse about what it means to live, and what part death plays in life. The same concerns of the earlier book are reproduced, perhaps with yet more careful reflection about Lynch's position. Given that, then, why read this book? My answer to that question is that Lynch spends more time thinking about and talking about language, and its role in life and death. While that concern was far from absent in The Undertaking, it's front and centre here: he conveys his deep respect for language and what it can accomplish. And that's an idea I'm always happy to read about.

From "Y2Kat":
"I am a slave to words. I am their servant. The acoustics and meanings, their sounds and sense, sometimes make me shiver--the precision, the liberties, the health and healing in their meanings. Language is the first among God's many gifts. To name and proclaim makes us feel like gods. To define and discern, to clarify and articulate, to affirm--surely this is what our maker had in mind when we were made in that image and likeness. Not the beard or lightning bolts or bluster. It was no big bang. It was a whisper. It was a word made flesh--our Creation. And the real power of Creation is the power of words to guard us like angels, to protect and defend and define us; to incite, and excite, and inspire, to separate us from the grunting, growling, noisome, wordless, meowing things. ..." ( 217-18)

I like reading Lynch's pieces not because of any concern of my own about mortality, but because his own sober reflections encourage reflection on my part--about words, about life, about death, and about what it is to think.

Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy, 2003.

Jones was one of my favourite authors when I was younger, thanks to books like Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant. She's a brilliant, imaginative & exciting author--far worthier of being read than JKR, in my humble opinion, but oh well.

This latest novel twins the stories of Arianrhod & Nichothodes as they try to save the world of Blest, and generally make sense of their own lives. Like all of Diana Wynne Jones's books, the kids are far more willing to recognise the world for what it is while working for its betterment than the adults. Roddy & Nick have to make sense of their respective magics, and work together to stop the takeover by the evil person whose name I'm not going to tell you (so as to not ruin the surprise).

It's not her best book, but it's riveting & fun, & I like coming back to her writing.

Over a library in one of her stories, she put an inscription about the books inside that I think I'd like above my books one day: "Monuments more lasting than brass..."

Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising, 1986.

It's always nice to reread some pulp.

Red Storm Rising is a gedankexperiment. Back in 1985/86, in the height of the Cold War, Clancy wondered what a modern war would like. This book details a potential cause (albeit with the USSR as the aggressor), and a war plan for the Soviet side.

He posits the need for a severe resource grab, and in this case chooses oil. Clancy (or his main character, Jack Ryan) is fond, in later novels, of arguing that all wars are just examples of "grand larceny writ large." The Soviets try to achieve surprise before attacking Germany--in an effort to capture Europe--in order to prevent NATO from interfering while the Soviets would attempt to capture the Persian Gulf and its oil.

At any rate, the novel is vintage Clancy. It's fun, it jumps all over the place, and it presents a neat bird's-eye view of tactics and strategy for war in a modern environment. Except that it's twenty years out of date now. And there are no longer any modern states for the United States to worry about...

A pleasant distraction that's mostly just light fluff, the book still disturbs you, as any book about war is likely to do.

Lisa Moore, Degrees of Nakedness, 1995.

I've forgotten why Ms. Moore's collection of short stories was recommended to me; that's one of the unfortunate disadvantages of meaning to blog about a book, and then putting it off for three-ish weeks.

So. Her book is weak. It has flashes of description and characterization that are quite good, but for the most part, she's far too concerned with sex and far too little concerned with trying to tell an interesting story well. The stories reflect an obsession on the part of the narrators, an inability to fully comprehend what sex means--if it does--and what role it should play in their lives.

There are, as I said, a couple of moments that work fairly well.

From "Sea Urchin":
This is the sad thing about loving. It's a skill, like working up a clay pot on a wheel. As though the form is slipping to life by itself, the hands slicked with juicy mud are doing all they can to contain it. Just the tiniest squeezing of muscles in the hands keeps the pot perfect. It's such a shock to throw a pot for the first time and see how unsimple it is, to have it skew, deform and collapse in seconds, against what you expect.(30).

It seems to me that while this passage doesn't share a new analogy, it spells out the analogy well. It's a simile that really does work, and invites repetition: it shares the messy delicateness that is trying to love, trying to maintain a relationship, and it does so simply and without over-elaborating upon the idea.

A real problem with these stories is evident just after the point that this passage comes from: the slipshod nature of the jumps from one idea to the next, intended to create juxtapositions that ask the reader to make sense of some oddly related ideas, instead are jarring and startling to the reader. I wonder if perhaps the speaker hasn't fully made sense of the relations herself, and so the disconnects remain disconnected, rather than linking smoothly.

In "Haloes," Moore uses a line that I find intriguing: "the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It's important that it's not a bejewlled or perfect finger. It only points to something" (136). While it seems to me that this is the idea behind each of Moore's stories, I'm inclined to argue that the person pointing needs to have some sense of the "why" behind the pointing, and I'm not convinced that that "why" is present in these stories--or, in fact, that the finger is pointing at something worthy of consideration.

Glenn Yeffeth, ed., Seven Season of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show.

This collection of twenty-two essays begins with some degree of promise, examining certain aspects of Buffy. In particular, Nancy Holder's "Slayers of the Last Arc," is a piece that argues that the final conclusion of the show works well both artistically and in the context of the show as a whole. While I'm more tempted by its seductive appeal to Joseph Campbell's outline of the quest myth (from Hero with a Thousand Faces) as an explanation, it is one of the few pieces that doesn't fall into the trap that most of the rest do. That is to say, it has a clear argument and it doesn't just follow a story--it uses quotations from the show to argue a point. It's a real essay!

The other extreme--and I won't pick on a particular author or essay, here, are the pieces that say, wasn't Buffy great? Don't you miss it when X happened? Who really was Buffy's best boyfriend?

So. Some decent essays, some crap. Much like those essays that you'll find online--and in short, spend your time looking for interesting pieces there; unless you can get this Yeffeth book from the library, it's not worth the price of purchase.

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale.

When I was a kid, I loved the idea of James Bond. I'd heard of him--and even seen a couple of the movies--and still wasn't allowed to take the books out of the library. Not their restriction: my mom's. She thought it wasn't yet age-appropriate material. Or so she always said: she never mentioned that they're poorly written, unexciting books, too.

Casino Royale is where Bond made his first appearance in print. It's a slow, plodding book--the first half deals with Bond trying to beat a Russian spy at Baccarat, and the second half is him recovering from being tortured--and setting up SMERSH as his future antagonistic agency. The entire book is a plodding exploration of the philosophy and psychology that Fleming creates to explain Bond. That is to say, the whole book sets up the rest. Whether they're better, substantially, is hard to say: the extensive descriptions that are so much a part of Fleming's style do not provide a background of excitement necessary to a spy/thriller novel, in my opinion.

Stick to the movies.

Laura Kipnis, Against Love: a Polemic, 2003.

This book, by Dr. Kipnis, is far from as exciting as its reviews and its cover suggest it might be. The book jacket says that the book "examines the meaning and cultural significance of adultery, arguing that perhaps the question concerns not only the private dilemma of whether or not to be faithful, but also the purpose of this much vaunted fidelity." Fair enough, as things go, but let's make it simpler: she says that while love is fun, it's for the short term--and, in most cases, can't be sustained over the long-term. She's quite forceful in her presentation--one might even say that she's polemical...

Her analysis follows in a Foucauldian mould, investigating structures that exist to exert control on a number of levels--the personal, societal, and so forth.

She begins by pointing out that since love, in its first and initial moments is so very fun, it's not something that should stoop to becoming "work," as marital therapists are so fond of arguing is necessary (there are some quite enjoyable moments of railing against just such therapists, too).

The second chapter suggests that binding monogamy is a type of prison: that it exists based on strictures that prevent, on injunctions, rather than being based on love itself.

In the last of the compelling sections--chapter three--Kipnis offers what feels like a fervid paean to adultery. The excitement, the perils, the fact that adultery is ultimately about stealing time for the new lover lead to new perils. What she's asking is why this excitement fades, and why this experience should be denigrated in the public eye when monogamy is a thing of the past (a point that she most carefully explores in this section).

The final chapter deals with fidelity and adultery as reflective of society. It looks at the changes from the unexamined infidelities of Kennedy to the over-examination now current in modern US political culture. Kipnis argues that the development of fidelity in love-based partnerships as a metaphor for trustworthiness in leadership and governance is a very recent development, and that it's not, ultimately, sustainable simply because of the lack of permanence in modern relationships. Her implied criticism--that would be much stronger if it were made explicit--is that a trope that is doomed to failure should be recognised as such by canny participants, who should essay a move beyond it instead of living within the status quo. Obviously, this chapter moves away from an investigation of the personal aspects of love and adultery, and paradoxically, this movement both succeeds and fails. While the final chapter of the book is intriguing, and while it is perhaps the best argued portion of Kipnis' thesis, it doesn't fit nearly as well with what has gone before. This discontinuity, combined with a negligible conclusion that makes no real effort to sum up her work left me disconcerted and unimpressed.

The book jacket asks "What is the trade-off between personal gratification and the renunciations society demands of us?"; the answer that Kipnis provides is that what we give up is not worth the price. Unfortunately, the book wasn't worth the surprisingly long time it took to read: the pacing forces the reader to slow down, and really, it's just not worth doing. Certainly finishing the book wasn't worth the 75 ¢ fine that I've incurred for returning the book three days late.

Denise Levertov, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems [with a Note on the text by Paul A. Lacey.

Levertov's poems are spare. Each carefully chosen word seems to be distanced from each other word, and yet would not work without it. At her best, she describes specific images--the feet of a homeless man, in "Feet"; the branch, in "Drawn in Air"--and lets the description offer what other atttendant ideas that would be reflected upon.

I borrowed the book from Wayne to read "Feet," as I was looking for poems for the Maundy Thursday service at church. It's a gorgeous poem, perhaps the best in this odd collection, that I didn't end up using: image piles on top of other images, and demand time to be considered, require time for the reader to construct a sense of what's being talked about. It was so beautiful a poem that I thought it wouldn't quite work, aloud as background: it, like the best of her poems in this book deserves the full attention of anyone who encounters it.

I referred to it as an odd collection because it is not ordered by anything other than date of composition, far from Levertov's normal method. It's a book that I'm going to have to find a copy of for my own library.

I'll end with an excerpt from the beginnng of another of my favourite poems in the book, "Mass of the Moon Eclipse":

Not more slowly than frayed
human attention can bear, but slow
enough to be stately, deliberate, a ritual
we can't be sure will indeed move
from death into resurrection
As the bright silver inch by inch
is diminished, options vanish,
life's allurements. The last sliver
lies face down, back hunched, a husk.

The pauses and caesuras in the lines slow down the words in a reading even as the poem talks about slowing down. The line breaks leave ideas not hanging but suspended, like the moon as it slowly vanishes behind Earth's shadow. The rest of the poem is just as good. Go look for it.

Thomas Merton, Geography of Holiness: The Photography of Thomas Merton, (ed. Dema Prasad Patnaik).

Wayne Allen very kindly leant me this collection of Merton's photography.

Merton--whom I'm very fond of--sometimes frustrates me by making me incredibly jealous of him. This book is yet one more example of that. Merton's shots exhibit a clear understanding of lighting: he captures shadows that both obscure and reveal, drawing attention to intriguing negative spaces, while washing important subjects almost out of the picture. Plate 28 [Darjeeling (the Kanchenjunga)], for example, almost makes the mountains that dominate the landscape disappear into the clouds, calling the viewer's attention and focus to the tiny trees that dot the mountain in the middle-ground.

Always the photographs ask you to consider details; the shots draw you in with the sense of line. In plate 29 [Darjeeling (Terraced Plantation)], the winding road contrasts sharply with the ridge-contours of the planting, pulling the eye to the very small cluster of flowers in the foreground.

Plates 59 & 60 (both of the monastery of Christ in the Desert, NM, a place I'd very much like to visit), are of shadows from pegs emerging from an adobe wall: the mottled colours of the wall soften the jutting pegs & sharp, spear-like shadows that that they cast. Both photograps are of an enclosing feature, but both reveal a tremendous lightness and openness that invite reflection.

While some of the photos are of exotic locales, Merton also reveals an eye for the beauty that is around him: chairs on the porch of his hermitage, fields, roots, rocks, a wagon wheel, doors... He frames each shot in such a way as to present life and action in the stillness of the photograph, and his eye for composition makes me jealous indeed.

These are a gorgeous series of photos, and I'm grateful indeed to Wayne for sharing them with me.