You are what you you eat, or, this is my brain on books

I recently became alarmed when Ginny started becoming obsessed with Wordgirl, her favorite program on TV. I knew she would drop everything when the program came on, and I’ve seen her doing the Captain Huggyface dance, but my first serious indication that she was truly crazy about this show was when Wordgirl became a part of her prayer life.

Mommy: Ginny, do you have anything you’re thankful for tonight, anything you’re worried about?
Ginny: I wish Jesus would make me fly like Wordgirl. And that Wordgirl was real. And I want Jesus to stop Professor Two Brains.

And then there is the documentary evidence (coming soon). You will note that in Picture A, not only has Ginny drawn a picture of Wordgirl, she has also faithfully rendered the \television stand, the TV itself, as well as the pile of junk on top of it. This has led to some serious reconsideration about what I’ve been feeding my child’s developing brain. (Oh, don’t worry—I’m not going to make her give up Wordgirl. That’s crazy talk.)

I’ve also been thinking about what I’ve been feeding my own brain, of late. I’ve always been a voracious reader, partly because I started early and loved it, but also because my parents, though they had little extra money, also loved books and there were always plenty lying around for me to check out. I would take a volume of Will Durant to bed with me when I was a kid, read volume C of the encyclopedia on the toilet (not all at once, of course), and pore over my Little House books in the bathtub. When I was in grad school, my reading reached a frenzied pace. Then, for almost a year after I finished my degree, I read practically nothing serious—nothing philosophical, nothing too challenging. I had to keep reading the professional literature related to my field, but I kept to abstracts if possible, unless absolutely forced to look at the whole thing because I was trying to include it in a lit review for a paper of my own.

I wish I could say that I jumped wholeheartedly back into the fray after that time, but I really can’t. I still read every chance I get, but most of it has been fiction, and much of that has been fairly fluffy stuff, especially historical fiction. (See last year’s summer reading list: (http://livingdeliberately-amyo.blogspot.com/2008/07/ok-were-back-from-beach-once-again.html) But then a friend asked me recently “what are you reading?” Since he’s one of the best-read people I know, the question gave me pause. What have I been reading? What have I been filling my mind with? What have I been consuming?

So I was inspired to order some new books, finish some old ones, AND have devised a way to rate the books’ value as food for the brain. Here’s my view (and this is strictly my personal view, my personal aesthetic): it’s easy for a book to have something profound/”nourishing” to say. However, life is short, and for me to persist in reading a book, it has to be something fairly palatable—something about it has to be pleasing. The very best books, for me, are a meal unto themselves—for example, my beloved O’Brian novels would each garner a Chicken Pot Pie rating. Shogun, another favorite, would at least rate a Stouffer’s Turkey Tetrazzini. However, World as Will and Representation would receive a Metamucil rating, being perhaps a necessary evil for some academic reading lists, but not something that goes down easy. And, hopefully, it's something you won’t have to revisit very often. So here goes...

1) Before the Dawn (Nicholas Wade). This book explores what recent findings about the human genome have to tell us about humankind’s prehistoric origins and cultural achievements. There are a number of fascinating insights about everything from what the evolution of the body louse can tell us about human migration patterns to how and when people began to use spoken language. I have to say that I felt vaguely uneasy reading this, not because of any of the book’s conclusions, but because the human genome was only fully mapped in 2003—all this information is stuff I couldn’t possibly have learned in a science class, which makes me feel kind of sad and anachronistic. (I felt the same way when my daughter’s Solar System placemat informed me that Pluto was no longer a planet.) Anyway, one of the juicier things about this book is that it shed light on a number of arguments and personal conflicts among scholars in the field of anthropology—it achieves what few quasi-academic texts can: it is gossipy. Rating: broccoli casserole.


2) The Irony of American History (Reinhold Neibur). This 1952 book almost makes the reading of #3 unnecessary. It was very eerie, in fact, to see Neibur making almost exactly the same claims and raising the same issues about America’s usurpation of power in the 20th century as Chomsky, more than 50 years later. (I’m not surprised—it just kind of gave me the willies.) Writing as he was at the height of McCarthyism, one of the things that I was most interested in was the way Neibur critiques the “city on a hill” concept, that is, the divine mandate that so many Americans seems to feel applies to the U.S., justifying so much of what we do in the name of the “Lord’s work.” He does make a giant pile of generalizations about the people of the “Orient” and how capable they are of democracy. On the whole, however, it stands the test of time, I think. There are many gems in this short work, but here’s one that I like: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.” The point is—America’s history is ironic, rather than tragic. There’s always hope for a happy ending. Rating: spinach salad.

3) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Chomsky). I read Chomsky’s 9/11 in 2002 when I was working on my dissertation (it was on the syllabus for students in my study). My own reaction to this brief work was pretty subdued—a sort of…yeah, of course—so? The students in my study, however, really struggled with its critique of American foreign policy, not surprisingly. Fast forward to now…I now am the one sticking my fingers in my ears, saying “lalalalalalalaaaaa.” (With chapter titles such as “A Cauldron of Animosities,” you can see what I mean.) It’s not because I disagree with anything that he’s saying about how we’ve screwed up, where, and why. It’s that I can
barely stand to think about this stuff anymore. Partly this has to do with the election and everything that was said about the last eight years. Look, can Obama just sign an executive order making everybody in Congress read this book? There are at least three hopeful pages at the end, so hopefully everyone will make it through. The only funny sentence, in fact, is at the end of the book, on page 235, when he says “It would be a very great error to conclude that the prospects [for democratic success] are uniformly bleak.” Oh, OK! There’s only 234 pages worth of bleakness here. This is the kind of book that should be dutifully consumed, but you aren’t going to go back to the well very much. Rating: Christmas fruitcake.

There's more to come (just not right now! I'm tired!)

Lost and Found

Since I’m on a roll with the blog-as-confessional theme, I’ll tell you another story, one that was brought to mind by a conversation I had recently with an old friend:

Picture a 1930s era brick school building, kids milling about on the blacktop outside, waiting for their rides to appear. Paint (probably lead paint) is flaking from the windowpanes, and there is a large Africa-shaped slab of concrete missing from the foundation on the south side of the building. It’s an early fall afternoon and the summer heat hasn’t broken yet. The school building doesn’t have AC, so everyone is wearing shorts; those who didn’t in deference to fashion are regretting the choice. The blacktop is lined off for 4-square games, and there are a few takers, but mostly people disdain this activity because a) it’s hot as hell and b) the schoolyard has a significant slope, which means that the losers have to chase down stray balls at top speed, and this sucks.

The cool kids—those who haven’t left already—are standing with their backs to the wall of the school, or in the shade of the trees at one end of the blacktop. Everyone else is trying to either get the attention of the cool kids or simply look inconspicuous. There are no adults in sight. Kids get in cars or walk home, without anybody taking much note. On another day, I will get into the car of an older boy I have a crush on (one of the more thrilling events of the year, for me). The day after, a teacher will ask me about this, apparently out of curiosity, for I am not reprimanded and nobody notifies my parents. The police state found in contemporary schools does not yet exist. We are left to our own devices, expected to police ourselves.

On this day, I am 13 years old. I am waiting for the bus to take me to my grandmother’s house, where I will consume chocolate pudding and cable TV, two things not available at home. My mom does not believe in junk food and my dad does not believe in cable TV. We have 3 channels, one being PBS. My friends watch MTV on Friday evenings. I watch Lawrence Welk. This does not bode well for my social life, as anybody (but my parents) could tell.

Suddenly, I hear laughter and shouting, and see a group of kids huddling up in a circle, packed tight around some spectacle. Usually this means a fight. Obeying some deep-seated pack instinct, everyone on the blacktop makes a beeline for the huddle. I am standing on the outside of the circle, but I can see what is happening. I can see who is inside (a kid I’ll call Alex), but it’s not a fight. Alex is in the grade below mine, but he is older than me, having failed several grades. He has some sort of speech impediment, and is fat. He is what we would nowadays call “special needs,” but that is not a term we know. We call him retarded, not necessarily because he is stupid, but because he is crazy, and this word is an excellent catch-all for his freakish qualities. Alex is often goaded into fights because everyone loves to see what he will do. He does not throw punches like other boys—he sort of slaps at his opponent, working himself into a maniacal rage, lurching and leaping and foaming at the mouth until he gets completely tired out, or his opponent walks away, laughing.

On this day, however, Alex is not fighting anyone. Instead, he is dancing. The kids around the circle are clapping and chanting “go Alex, go Alex” and he is obligingly doing something that is a cross between the running man and churning the butter. The other kids toss pennies at him to encourage him to keep it up. I am looking, laughing too. Then I catch Alex’s eye and am ashamed to my very core. Alex knows me, a little. Once, after he failed at least one grade, but before he failed the next, he was in my class, and I gave him part of a fruit roll-up I brought one day for snack. He was nauseatingly grateful and wanted to sit next to me for a long time, which was intolerable. But I had never been actively mean to him. Now I can see that he does not want to be dancing, just as he did not really ever want to fight. I want to say something to the other kids to make them stop. I don’t. I know that the pack can turn, instantly, on another victim. I will experience this myself later that winter, when a classmate will yank my skirt down as I walk into the gym, in front of the entire student body. I have my own problems, but I know already, as Alex does not, that the only way to survive is to keep your head down. This is what I do now. A bus comes and I get on it. I am grateful, later, that I didn’t have any pennies in my pockets, because I might have thrown them.

I was saved the summer of my 9th year, at church camp in Swannanoa. Of the kids from my church, I was the last person to go down to the altar. Even then I was reticent about public displays of any sort, and mostly went down because I didn’t want to make the preacher feel bad. What I remember most about the whole experience is that while praying fervently that God would find the lost sheep, that Heaven would come down and Glory fill my Soul, I ended up breaking my friend Newana’s headband, a blue plastic affair that I had borrowed for the evening. So there I was kneeling with two halves of the headband in my hands, trying to figure out what to do with them. Leave them there? Put them in my pockets? I had just Washed my Robes in the Cleansing Fountain, but I was already feeling that Sin hath left a Crimson Stain on me, all over again.

What I didn’t know then, is that we need saving from ourselves not just once, but over and over again. We need that amazing grace, not just once, but many times. I was lost, but now I’m found. Then I got lost again, and got found again. And again. And again. It’s the process of losing our faith in everything, perhaps, that makes finding it again more powerful, more beautiful, more redemptive.

I was in Wal-Mart the other day, picking up a few odds and ends, and was just about to walk out the door, when suddenly somebody tapped me on the shoulder. It was Alex. “Hey,” he said, handing me a bottle of Children’s Motrin that I’d accidentally left in my cart, “they forgot to scan this one.” I took it from him, and the cashier rang it up. As I paid, Alex smiled at me. He actually looked pretty ok, aside from the fact that two of his front teeth were missing. I could tell he didn’t remember me. “I just wanted to save you from that alarm. I hate that damn thing.” And then he walked out the door. There’s no ending to the story, really. But it looked like maybe he was found, too. I hope so, I really do. For his sake, and for mine.

Hey, Jealousy...

I think that blogs are so popular because they provide us with something that is sorely lacking in our society nowadays: the opportunity to confess. Blogs are perfect for this. They have the confessional quality of a journal or diary, but are only obliquely public, giving the refreshing sense that somebody is listening to you, but not judging you too much. Plus, you can always cancel any comments that you don’t like, an option not available, unfortunately for most, in the non-virtual version.

In this spirit, I have to talk about something that has been on my mind. It’s my own personal Achilles’ heel, the deadliest (for me) of the seven deadlies: the sin of envy. And where did the serpent strike me most recently? You guessed it—in Sunday School, the scene of most of my other recent bad behavior. Here’s what happened: one of the women in my class (my neighbor, incidentally) told everyone that she had started work on a novel. She was making excellent progress, she told everyone, already she’s on Chapter 4—AND, to top it off, HER DAD IS A PUBLISHER.

You know the scene in Throw Momma From the Train when Danny Devito’s character (the horrible horrible beyond horrible writer) is telling Billy Crystal (the creative writing teacher and aspiring novelist) about the novel he was writing, based on their time together? And Crystal starts throttling Devito out of pure rage? Well, I didn’t actually throttle anyone, but I was nanoseconds away from it. I should note that I have no idea if my neighbor is a good writer—she probably is. The point is, as I’ve mentioned in the blog before, I’ve been working on a novel for two years, and lately it hasn’t been going well. The prospect of someone, anyone, I know being successful at novel-writing suddenly made me go berserk, or want to.

Naturally, I’ve been in a repentant (sort of) state ever since. I mean, who do I think I am? Oh yeah, the hyper-competitive lunatic. And if I wanted to start a massively overcomplicated epistolary novel spanning two centuries, a novel that involves murder/suicide, a psychic, and miscegenation, a novel that is probably beyond my own ability to finish--it’s my own damn fault. Who am I to object if my neighbor wants to write an allegorical fantasy novel about a unicorn? A novel that will probably get published. GAAAHHHH!!!!! Ok, I need to get hold of myself.

The fact is, I’ve always had a problem with jealousy. I’m sure that my therapist (if I had one—boy I really do need one) would tell me that it stems from a deep-seated lack of proper self-esteem. Maybe that’s true—it’s an awfully convenient explanation. I remember being very young, maybe six, and delving into a little pack of paper medals in my mom’s desk drawer, the kind of thing that people receive when they win something at field day. I remember writing my own name on all of the medals: the blue medals I’d award myself for something that I was actually good at, like reading or singing. The red medals were for things that I was pretty good at, like monkey bars and the long jump. The white medals were for things that I wished I was good at, like math and swimming. When my mom found out what I’d done she was both confused and appalled. I think she thought that I was suffering from an overweening pride when, in fact, the opposite was the case. I’d like to be able to blame my parents (who wouldn’t?), but I long ago decided that they did the best they could with what they had to work with. The fault, as we have heard from another source, lies not in our stars (or parents), but in ourselves.

Over the years, I’ve done and said a great many stupid things because I wanted to be the best. Now that I’m older, I don’t do them (or say them aloud), but I still think them, and often let them get the best of me. A belated resolution for 2009 (the year is still young, right?) is going to have to involve besting this trait, once and for all. Or, if we can look to Daniel’s example, I need to redirect the behavior, turn the impulse to envy into something else, something productive. Sigh. I guess this means I need to get to work on the novel project again. The novel without end, amen, amen.



PS--here's my most favorite scene from the movie...love it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbmRmtW5q00&NR=1