Book #13 of 2013

Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality is Gary Lachman’s latest bio in a series of books about important figures in the Western Esoteric Tradition. And like its subject the book is by turns fascinating and frustrating.

At times it seems Lachman, whose books are almost always clearly organized and engaging, has bit off more than he can chew. There’s a lot of speculating and justifying, though he’s careful to make sure the reader knows when the evidence is scanty, or open to interpretation, or simply absent. Though HPB was a major public figure and an interesting thinker, her life and work were controversial–she had enemies, she had detractors, and not all of them were honest. There are fakers (and fakirs), plots, calumnies, exposures, publicity stunts, investigations, splinter groups and factions, political intrigues, etc. Lachman tries to pilot a course through multiple accounts and contrary motivations by key players to sort out what’s true…this drags down his narrative a bit, and makes for some clunky writing now and again.

But Blavatsky herself is so damnably interesting, so vital, and so important that the book is definitely worth a read, even though it’s occasionally a slog. Lachman does the best he can to sort out the myriad complexities of this figure, and though he has some obvious sympathies for her, he is fair and reasonable in his conclusions.

Book #12 of 2013

When Gore Vidal died a few months back I had to pause and allow that fact to sink in for a while. I devoted a huge chunk of my 20s to reading him, after all, and much of my knowledge of US history comes from his historical novels. I also loved his essays and admired his bitter exasperation with American empire and its two corporate parties pushing thinly disguised versions of the same agenda to two groups of befuddled and misled voters.

I decided I should re-read something following Vidal’s demise, and it took a while for me to chose Creation: A Novel. As much as I loved the US historical novels, I really enjoyed Creation and Julian the most–and these led to intense reading in ancient history and religion during my 30s.

So I just finished re-reading Creation. What prevents it being merely Vidal showing off his detailed knowledge of history is the fact that its narrator Cyrus Spitama is actually Gore Vidal thinly disguised. We get to be inside Cyrus’s (Gore’s) head as he meets and grapples with major historical figures like Confucius, Socrates, the Buddha, Master Li, Darius the Great, Xerxes the Great, Pericles, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Democritus. Cyrus is the grandson of Zoroaster, raised in the harem of Darius, and a childhood friend of Xerxes. From these humble beginnings he ends up an ambassador for Persia to Cathay and India. As a result we get Gore Vidal’s snarky take on the workings of power in these regions, and on the beliefs and traditions of each culture. It’s great fun, and I think by the end of the year I’ll likely re-read more Vidal, perhaps Burr or Julian or Lincoln? Or maybe my fave, Live from Golgotha.

If you’ve never read Vidal’s historical novels, this is a great place to start. If you don’t like the narrator or presentation, you likely won’t enjoy any of them. Check it out.

Book #11 of 2013

Typically I prefer to know a novel well before seeing its film adaption. But occasionally it happens the other way round, and even more occasionally it’s a pleasant experience.

I’m a fan of the Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate, and finally got round to reading its precursor, The Club Dumas. I liked the book a lot, but it’s rather a different experience from the film. Polanski had a degree of fun with the text, removing the main conspiracy of the novel and concentrating almost entirely on an occult secondary plot. He also removed an important character and subsumed him into another name involved in the main conspiracy, changing his role completely. All of this makes perfect cinematic sense.

The Club Dumas is a bit complex, dabbling as it does in Umberto Eco-ish material: the occult, literary criticism, book collecting, antiquity forgeries, etc. I’ve never read Dumas in English or French, so I’m sure many Musketeer references soared over my head–but the narrator Boris Balkan is quite helpful at explicitly pointing them out as we go. The novel never feels cumbersome as some of Eco’s do; the characters are interesting and finely drawn, the action moves right along, there is humor and a bit of sex.

Tunes

David Bowie’s The Next Day is that sweater you wore a lot 2 decades ago. It was your absolute favorite, and when it became a bit threadbare you couldn’t bear to part with it, so it ended up in the least visited part of some closet, where you find it one Autumn day when it’s just getting a bit chilly. You are pleased to have found it and you smile as you put it on and it’s still your favorite. It becomes part of your around-the-house comfy clothes, and you wear it daily after work from October through February, but never out of the house because the style is perhaps somewhat less than current. Then one day you say ‘fug it’ and you wear it to work and everyone says ‘where did you find that sweater–it rocks!’ This record reminds me how much current Indy and Alternative bands owe Mr. Bowie.

I figure when I kick off I’ll likely be consigned to hell. They’ll say, however, that while I was certainly no saint, that I wasn’t quite worthy of total damnation. Consequently I’ll spend a millennium in some upper echelon of hell, where you can get mojitos during happy hour, and where Leningrad is the house band. Vtoroi Magadanskiy would make hell much more tolerable, and in a thousand years I could probably learn Russian and understand what the heck he’s singing.

Books #9 and #10 of 2013

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews is everything you want in a non-fiction collection: it’s provocative, annoying, stimulating, dull, frustrating, interesting, and amusing by turn. I particularly like Dyer’s writing about photography and jazz–he’s no technician or expert in either field, but he’s more than just a fan, and he turned me on to some photographers I enjoyed browsing on Google Images (What would Walter Benjamin think about THAT?).

Less interesting were Dyer’s little memoirish pieces; he’s no Tony Judt. Meaning primarily that I never thought “Tony Judt is a dickhead” while I read his memoir essays–rather the contrary. I often, however, thought “Geoff Dyer is a dickhead” while reading his. But part of Dyer’s charm is being a dickhead–he’s managed to wrangle a pretty successful life out of abusing the dole and writing about stuff he doesn’t know shit about in a certain sense, but to which he’s paid attention and about which he’s thought carefully . On the strength of the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Vintage) and this current volume, I will be reading more Geoff Dyer.

The Cement Garden
is another light-hearted and charming romp by Ian McEwan. Dad kicks off, followed shortly by Mom. Their four kids are left to fend for themselves in a castle-shaped house in some weird suburb being dismantled to make way for a highway. It’s kind of like a cross between John Hawkes’ The Blood Oranges and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle because it’s by equal measure disturbing, funny, and sexy. McEwan’s concerns here are the vague barriers between adulthood and childhood, and how very fragile we can be during that transition, especially without kindly predisposed elders to guide us.

Day #110 (or so) of the current school year…

It’s been an exhausting but rewarding couple weeks at school. The Adventure Race, Literacy Night, and the preparation and execution of our Expeditionary Learning National Conference Site Visit have taken their toll. Next week the hits keep coming with the annual delight of standardized testing and its stresses.

My 7th and 8th grade Humanities students are writing memoirs. All members of the Humanities Team wrote drafts to use for modeling with the kids. Here’s my first draft, which I will revise parts of in front of the students as they work on revision and editing:

I knew something was up as soon as Doc Hartig walked into the exam room. I’d been sitting there on the end of the cushioned exam table in my street clothes, that waxy paper slipping and squeaking beneath me if I shifted my weight to grab an old Time or Baltimore Magazine off the radiator by the window. The magazines were yesterday’s bad news and I’d given up on them quickly as a means of distraction, preferring the cheap framed reproductions of Norman Rockwell prints so familiar from childhood visits to this office: a country doc bent over to apply his stethoscope to a teddy bear at the behest of a small girl child; a befuddled pharmacist with prominent Adam’s apple mixing a potion; a suburban practitioner with Saint Nick’s demeanor attending a young boy’s young boy abrasions. This exam room was all hard metal glint, plastic veneer, and glaring fluorescence. In Rockwell’s day a visit to the doc meant stepping into some old codger’s living room. Rockwell would never had painted this interior. Rockwell would have found little to paint in the 1990s that wasn’t devoid of character or comfort.

                There was no jovial teasing when he came in. There was no chummy hello. He cast his eyes away from me, this man I’d known more than ten years, and seemed unable to land them anywhere satisfactory. He scanned the sink, the biohazard waste bin, the glass jars of swabs and cotton balls and bandages with their chrome tops. I took this time to get a good look at him, this awkward pause, this situation which had moved from a formerly comfortable routine to something new and disquieting. His skin was looser now then the last time I’d seen him. Flesh pulled more heavily around the undersides of his eyes. There was a hint of paunch pushing the button of his dress shirt just above his belt. Gray hairs were accumulating at his ears and above his temples. “Uh,” he said, and though I’d often read in novels of people who wrung their hands in distress, I’d never witnessed this behavior until this moment. “Hmmm.” Behind his glasses I noticed Doc Hartig’s eyes were glassy and red. The hands wrung each other and then he clapped and those glassy red eyes landed on my face and darted away again.

                “We got the results, and it’s a melanoma. I know you’d said this spot was there for a few years so I’m concerned about its margins. I’ve got a plastic surgeon who’s a good excision guy up in Towson. You need to get with him as quickly as you can for a consult so we can get it all cut out.” Doc Harting cleared his throat because his voice was squeaky and cracking like a pubescent’s.

                There’s no way for me to capture that moment. I thought the word cancer, I processed it, I knew what it entailed. Every melodramatic movie or television show or novel with a character slowly rotting away in agony flashed through me. I felt a keen revulsion akin to the sensation of walking through a thick spider web in the dark. My interior became warm gelatin, and I put my hands down to either side of my hips. My fingers felt detached, insensate. My body had become an enemy. I imagined myself sliding off the exam table and that slippery paper unspooling as I went. The Norman Rockwell prints now suggested tombstones and decay, and I wondered if Rockwell ever painted the Grim Reaper swinging a rusty scythe.

                “The big C,” I replied to Doc Hartig, with what I imagined to be bravado. “Ok.” I spent an hour and a half at the gym this morning, I thought. I ran 6 miles yesterday. “We just bought a house,” I said, and smiled, or tried to smile. I just finished graduate school.

And the hardest thought: How can I tell Patricia?

The week before I’d gone to the doctor for the first time in 5 years. I’d not had health insurance since I’d moved out of my folks’ house and had never been substantially sick. But a persistent cough and sinus infection sent me back to the doctor who’d done my annual checkups through middle and high school, the doctor who’d seen me change from boy to man, the guy who’d filled out my sports permission slips. He’d seen the mole on my shoulder immediately during our exame and said “That should come out.” I’d asked if I could hold a mirror and watch him cut it, and though the nurse had immediately exclaimed no, Doc Hartig instructed her to hold a mirror so I could watch as he made incisions down either side of the small brown patch. Because of the numbing shots I had no sensation in my shoulder as I watched his gloved fingers pull the mole out, a thick white root coming behind the surface flesh, blood moving slow and sure, and a final scissor cut to sever it from me. There was an antiseptic wipe before the quick and easy stitching and bandaging. That mole had gone to the lab in a small plastic vial and someone in a lab looked it over and typed up a report and that report had just kicked me in the gut.

Though it was 17 years ago I still remember the drive home from the doctor’s. How pointless, ugly, and forgettable things glowed. The Jiffy Lube at Warren and York Roads—I’d seen it a thousand times, but now I really saw it, and its employees going about their business looked to me like the most important things. Litter and dry leaves swirled in the wind along the ramp to I-83 and as I pulled onto the highway. I headed toward our new home where I still had painting and unpacking to do, and wondered how long I would live there?

                I had to go to work in two hours. 

 

 

 

Books #7 and #8 of 2013

Monster is a lot of fun. We read it in Humanities class with the guiding question “Do you wear a mask?” The students sympathize with Steve Harmon, and they cheer at the end of the book, but then I asked them “What is the difference between innocent and not guilty?” We had a very rich discussion before looking back in the text and finding sections which cast doubt on the protagonist’s claims on the stand. Myers created an engaging book which can be used to teach point of view, screenplay format, memoir, or as an enrichment for a zillion social studies topics.

The Comfort of Strangers gave me a sinking feeling and this feeling got more and more intense as the novel progressed. Creepy, claustrophobic, and deeply disturbing–The Comfort of Strangers showcases Mckewan’s taut, clinically precise prose. Brought to mind other creepy and beautifully crafted books like John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, or The Talented Mr. Ripley. The inevitable climax so disturbed me I could barely keep reading, but was at the same time compelled to finish–a deliciously intense literary experience.