Half Changed World

In the Fall of 1999, Jane Juska ran the following personal ad in the New York Review of Books:

Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.  If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.

A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance is Juska’s story of what happened after she ran that ad, along with some discussion of what led her to it.  In short, she had some really creepy dates, met some interesting men, had some good sex, was introduced to some of the literary wonders of New York (the desk where Melville worked at the Customs House, Trollope’s hand-written manuscripts), fell in love, and was rejected by the one she loved.  It’s a quick and entertaining read — Juska generously shares the joys of her adventures, but turns into funny stories the moments that must have been agonizing to actually live through.  (She also throws in some interesting discussions about teaching, both in high school and in prison, although at times they seem to have wandered in from a different book, maybe True Notebooks.)

Hugo Schwyzer writes today about why he believes that the highest form of commitment — to which one should aspire to  —  is "the commitment to be a loving, reliable, and enduring presence in the lives of those with whom we have chosen to be sexually involved." 

I’m not sure that Juska would disagree.  But I’m pretty sure that she would say that it was not realistic for her to hold out for such a commitment — at 66, divorced for 30 years, the odds were against her.  (Due to both women’s longer lives and the traditional pattern of men partnering with younger women, there are many more older women looking for men than the reverse.)  And given the choice between sex outside of a committed relationship, and no sex at all, she was not willing to give up on the likelihood of sex — other than with herself — being part of her life.

Juska concludes:

"I take pleasure in the memory of lying next to a man who knew what to do with me. I recall with equal pleasure the conversations with intelligent men who were lively and curious and thoughtful and who liked to talk with me.  That was a surprise.  I never thought we would actually, as my ad offered, ‘talk first.’  But we did, first and last and sometimes, in the middle.  All my parts have been fed by these men.  They have made me a rich woman.  But rich doesn’t mean full, and rich as I am, I am not full."

The book got a lot of favorable attention when it came out.  I hope it made Juska decent money, so she’s able to travel to New York without having to be a not-fully-wanted guest.  And I’m enough of a romantic that I want to believe that maybe it brought her someone to love and be loved by.  (The note at the end of this CBS story suggests that maybe it did.)

Update: This NY Times story (via F-words) says that Juska has a second book coming out this spring, and that her story does not have the happy ending I hoped for:

"I am moved to tears with longing and love for this man," Ms. Juska writes, "with despair and regret for what cannot be."

The last time we were at Costco, D asked me to buy a box of GoGurt.  I’m not quite sure how he heard of GoGurt — whether he somehow saw an ad for it on TV in spite of our best attempts to TiVo out all the commercials, or if one of his friends brought it to school.  It’s fairly high in sugar, but not otherwise bad for him, and we’re always trying to get him to try new foods, so I said sure.

As it happens, GoGurt is having a Narnia movie tie-in promotion, so all of the tubes have pictures of different characters.  D understands that there’s a lion, and a witch (who is bad even though she’s very pretty), and informed me yesterday that the movie is "coming soon on DVD."  I’m not sure whether D could handle the movie yet — I think it might scare him — but in any case, I want his first encounter with the story to be with the book.

So when we went to the library tonight, I asked him if he wanted me to look for a Narnia book.  They did have several copies of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so we took it out.  When I finished reading the first chapter, D asked "what’s a faun?" and I told him that after he brushed his teeth, we could look on the computer and see if we could find a picture of one.  And sure enough, the Narnia website has pictures of all the main characters.

So, between the marketing tie-ins and the multi-media experience, it’s not exactly an unmediated encounter between a child and the story.  But if that’s what it takes for him to have the patience for a chapter book, I can live with that.  Because getting to read stories that I loved to my kids is up there on my top 10 list of perks of parenting.

This week’s book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.   Grandin is well known for being a high-functioning autistic person who has written and speaks extensively about autism, and who has done groundbreaking work on the treatment of animals in slaughterhouses.

When I picked up the book, I knew that Grandin had said that her autism had helped her understand animals better.  My vague impression was that her claim was, since her autism meant that it took conscious effort for her to see the world from others’ perspective, it didn’t take much more effort for her to see it from animals’ perspective.  In fact, her claim is more radical than that — she argues that in many ways, people with autism see the world in a way that has more in common with how animals see it than with how neuro-typical humans see it — more visual, but also less filtered by generalizations, expectations and assumptions.

Grandin and Johnson write a bit about this video, which shows a group of people passing basketballs.  Go ahead and download it, and then watch it and count how many times the people in white pass the basketball.  Don’t read on until you’ve counted.

The first time I was shown this video (sometime last year, long before I read the book), I totally didn’t see the gorilla.  It’s apparently a well-known phenomenon.  Grandin argues that no animal — and no person with autism — would ever make that mistake.

The book was interesting, although a bit meandering.  I don’t find cows an inherently fascinating topic, but Grandin and Johnson do a good job of tying Grandin’s work on cows to discussions of more popular animals such as dogs, as well as to comparisons with human brains.  (The hard cover I took out from the library has a cover photo of Grandin with a horse; the paperback shows a dog in profile.)

Grandin both believes that animals are intelligent, possibly self-conscious, and is strangely unsentimental about them.  She writes:

"People always wonder how I can work in the meatpacking industry when I love animals so much.  I’ve thought about this a lot.

"After I developed my center-track restraining system, I remember looking out over the cattle yard at the hundreds and hundreds of animals milling around in their corrals.  I was upset that I had just designed a really efficient slaughter plant. Cows are the animals I love best."

"Looking at those animals I realized that none of them would even exist if humans hadn’t bred them into being.  And ever since that moment I’ve believed that we brought these animals here, so we’re responsible for them.  We owe them a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible.  That’s my job."

The story of the miners killed in the West Virginia mine accident this week would have been sad in any case, but it’s made macabre by the terrible miscommunication that led the families to believe for several hours that 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive, rather than just the lone surviver.  Every time I walked through the lobby of my office building today, the USA Today headline "Alive" jumped out at me.

As it happens, for several weeks I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Melissa Fay Greene’s Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster while I exercise.  I picked it up a while back at a library sale, knowing nothing of the disaster, but willing to give anything Greene wrote a try having read Praying for Sheetrock.  She describes the terrible collapse of an entire mine that happened in Nova Scotia in 1958 and the experiences of two small groups of miners that miraculously survived the "bump."  They were trapped underground without light, food, or water for a week before the miners on the surface were able to dig down to them.

Listening to a book on tape slows it down for me, and makes the images linger.  I know that mines have changed a great deal over the last half century (although maybe not enough), but I can’t help imagining the scene in Tallmansville as much like that described by Greene in Spring Hill.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families.

Last week, I was reading and I must have made a noise, because T said "what?"  I said, "Nothing, I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the book I’m reading."  "Is it as bad as Bastard Out of Carolina?" he asked, that having set the standard years ago by leaving me staring into space and whimpering as I finished it.  "Almost."

The book I was reading was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls and it is both heartbreaking and challenging.  It’s the story of her childhood with parents who simultaneously opened up worlds for their children — worlds of literature and art, of geology, natural history, and astromony — and who failed at the most basic tasks of parenting — keeping their kids fed and safe.  She writes of her first memory — catching on fire at age 3, as she cooked hot dogs for herself — and of her father giving her Venus for Christmas one year.  She writes of living in a leaking house, without heat, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and of stealing discarded lunches from the trashcans at school.  She writes of riding in back of a U-Haul truck, and of her father yelling at her and her siblings when they finally caught his attention and pointed out the that the doors had opened.  And she writes of her father bringing her to see the cheetah at the zoo, and bringing her up to the cage to let it lick the salt from popcorn off her hands:

"I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?  None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah."

Imagine Angela’s Ashes if, instead of doing her best to feed her family in spite of her husband’s drunkeness, Angela had been an artist who thought it was a waste of time to cook, thought it was unfair to expect her to hold a steady job, and hoarded food from the children.

But what makes the book so wrenching isn’t the depths of the poverty to which the Walls family sank, or even the domestic violence, alcoholism, and mental illness that shadowed their lives, but the moments of beauty and wonder that are interspersed with all of the above.  I don’t doubt that the Walls kids should have been in foster care, but Jeanette Walls makes clear that something important would have been lost as well as much gained.  (The one time that a social worker does try to investigate the family, the children cover up for the parents, fearing — probably with cause — that they’d be separated from each other.)

The other book that I was reminded of was The Mosquito Coast.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you won’t understand why, because in the movie, Harrison Ford’s character just seems like a egomaniacal lunatic.  But in the book, the story is filtered through the perspective of his son, who believes in him.  Like Allie Fox, Rex Walls is a man of a million plans.  (The "Glass Castle" of the title is the house that he was constantly designing blueprints for, even as their real house slid down the side of the mountain.)

The Glass Castle has at least somewhat of a happy ending, as the Walls children move away from their parents and at least three of the four grow into basically happy and functional adults.  (The youngest stabs their mother after an argument, is institutionalized for a year, and then moves away and loses contact with the family.)  The parents continue to live by their "ideals" (or their madness) choosing to live as squatters in New York rather than accept assistance from their children or anyone else.  And ultimately, Jeanette is more forgiving of her parents than I could imagine, accepting them for who they are.

The Julie/Julia Project was the first blog I ever read, back when I didn’t really know what a blog was.  I think someone posted a link to it on one of my email lists, several months into the project, and I read a few posts and was hooked.  In it, Julie Powell documented her attempt to cook every single recipe in Volume 1 of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year.  She wrote about the dishes that turned out great and the dishes that she tortured her friends with, the days when she was interviewed on television and the days when she didn’t get home from work until 8 pm and had to start cooking a dish that takes at least 3 hours to cook.

So, I really wanted to like Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.  But I didn’t.  It wasn’t as funny as the blog, didn’t have the detailed information about the food and, of course, didn’t have the element of uncertainty that was in the blog.  By the very fact that I was holding the book in my hand, I knew that Julie finished the project, got a nice book contract, and was even able to quit her crappy government job.

Maybe the book would be more compelling to someone who hadn’t read the blog and so hadn’t heard many of the most interesting stories already.  But I’m not sure.  One of the recurring themes in both the blog and the book is the crappy little kitchen that Julie had to work in.  In the blog, she mentioned several times that it’s so small that she had to perch her food processor on top of the trash can.  That’s a wonderful image, bringing the scene to life.  She never uses it in the book.  What happened?

Last week, Julie was quoted in the NY Times as saying that she no longer searches for herself on blogs.  I hope that’s true, because I feel mean for saying negative things about the book when I got so much pleasure from the blog.

A few months ago, when I wrote about how much (or how little) effect parents have on how their children turn out, Jen recommended a book called The Stardust Lounge: Stories from A Boy’s Adolescence, by Deborah Digges.  It’s Digges’ memoir of how her younger son got into trouble — car theft, running with gangs — how helpless she felt — there’s a great passage where she describes following him through the night streets as he heads out to do graffiti with his friends — and how they eventually made their way through the rough waters of his teenage years.

Digges recounts the conversation with Steve’s therapist that seems to have been a turning point.  Ed, the therapist, says:

"Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens.  Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because — Steve’s an example — they’ve been allowed to.  Or because — like his street friends — they’ve had to."

"After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions — after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk — now you’re telling him no.  That’s all over.  Now he’s got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked."

"But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns.  And he’s still just a kid.  He’s failing school…"

Ultimately, Digges decides to back off and let go, to let Stephen make his own decisions — and to let him deal with the consequences imposed by schools and legal systems when he makes bad ones.  Part of the charm of the book is that Digges never suggests that this is the only right approach.  In fact, she never is sure that it’s the right approach, even for her and Stephen.  Even at the end, when he’s going to college for a fine arts degree, she doesn’t suggest that this means the story has a happy ending, only that he’s on an easier path for now.  But she accepts that she’s not cut out out to be a controlling parent, and that Steven can tell she’s faking it when she tries.

Social services programs for youth talk a lot these days about building on adolescents’ strengths, not just seeing them as a bundle of trouble waiting to happen.  Although Digges doesn’t use this language, this is precisely what she does — encouraging his music and his photography even when he’s at his most rebellious, expecting him to act responsibly in caring for their chronically ill dog. 

Perhaps the bravest — or craziest — thing that Digges does is take in one of Stephen’s friends, Trevor, when his own family turns him away.  It would have been easy for her to say, sorry, I have enough on my plate dealing with my own kid and my job and my falling apart house and the tax authorities.  No one would have faulted her for saying, no, Stephen’s peace is fragile enough, I can’t take in a ghetto kid with a whole set of his own problems.  But she didn’t. Perhaps because of Stephen’s difficulties, Digges didn’t have the expectation of being able to control how everything would turn out, and so was open to letting even more chaos — several high-needs pets, a troubled teen — into her life.

I hope I don’t experience the challenges that Digges did, but if I do, I hope I can face them with as much grace as she did.

Today’s book is Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female In The US Army, by Kayla Williams.  This insta-memoir is Williams’ account of her year serving in Iraq as an Arabic-speaking military intelligence soldier. 

I first heard of the book through a fairly negative review from Debra Dickerson on Salon.  Their site pass system is broken tonight, so I can’t look it up to quote it, but Dickerson basically says that Williams is whiny and compares the book unfavorably with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead.  Yes, Jarhead is a better written book, brutal, elegant and hallucinatory by turns.  Swofford has serious literary ambitions — he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and has the advantage of writing 10 years after his military service.  Twenty years from now, I’ll guess that people will still be reading Jarhead, while they’ll have long forgotten Love My Rifle.

But that doesn’t mean that Love My Rifle More Than You isn’t worth reading.  Williams’ prose isn’t memorable, but it’s servicable, and she shares experiences that are worth hearing about.  She writes about the constant sexual harrassment and a near-rape by one of her fellow soldiers, about the ambiguity of the Army’s relationship with the Iraqi people, about her quest for vegetarian MREs, and about how some female soldiers use their gender to get out of unpleasant tasks.  She writes about her brief involvement with interrogation of prisoners.   There’s material in the book to discomfit both supporters and opponents of using women in combat roles, and both should read the book.

Yes, the book is whiny at times.  Williams sounds surprised that her armpits and groin chafe in the desert heat, that her commanding officers sometimes give her stupid orders that risk her life.  She doesn’t seem to have read Catch-22, let alone Jarhead.  (By contrast, Swofford never is surprised by any degree of official stupidity.)  But ultimately the book reads like Williams is sitting down and telling you what it was like.  And I was happy to spend a few hours in her company.

Yes, I caught the boys’ bug.  Ugh.  I’m about 80% better, at the stage where I’m starting to be hungry, but still nervous about eating real food.

Today’s book is Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis.  Imagine the women from Reading L.lita In Tehran, drinking tea and discussing sex — the advantages of being a mistress over being a wife, nose jobs, arranged v. love marriages, faking virginity.  It’s a short book, maybe 150 pages, with only a few sentences on each page, so it’s a quick read.  It mostly succeeds because Western readers don’t think of Iranian women as having conversations that sound like something out of Sex and the City. And then it catches you again because just when you’ve accepted that their lives aren’t that different from ours, Satrapi changes gears and throws in a casual references to "embroideries" or re-virginization surgery.

Satrapi’s books are generally classified as graphic novels, but I think they’re really closer to picture books — the images illustrate the story, but don’t advance it.  And I think she’s cheating a bit by dressing all the characters in black, even though the story appears to be set before the Revolution in Iran.  (One of the most memorable images of Persepolis is when all of Marji’s classmates are suddenly dressed identically.)  For a book about women, ironically, the picture from this book that resonates the most for me is the look of perplexity on Marji’s grandfather’s face when he comes out from his room and her grandmother shoos him away.

I read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty last week (yes, the boys were good enough that I was able to read on the airplane), and enjoyed it, but don’t have a whole lot to say about it.  As with her debut novel, White Teeth, I think Smith is better at creating characters than building a plot, but the characters are interesting enough that I’m willing to go along for the ride.   I’ve never read Howard’s End, which it riffs off of, so I probably missed some of her cleverness.  (I’m sure I saw the movie, but can’t remember any of the plot.)  In general, I think it’s hard to write a really good novel about academics.  Wonder Boys was disappointing and Moo was clever but nothing more.

The NY Times published its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, so I thought I’d report on the ones I’ve read:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling  A great improvement over the last one in the series.  I’m glad I just read it though, rather than making the huge time investment in reading it out loud with T.
• The March, EL Doctorow.  I’m in the middle of this, and liking it very much.  Not to be confused with March, by Geraldine Brooks, which is also set in the Civil War.
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I really didn’t get why this one got such good reviews.  I just didn’t care about any of the characters, or what happened to them.  I actually didn’t finish the book, just skimmed the last chapter to see what the big surprise was.  If any of you read it and liked it, I’d love to hear why.
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith.  See above.
• Saturday, by Ian McEwan.  This one pulled me in neither by force of plot nor by likable characters, but by sheer brilliance of language.  McEwan captures individual moments absolutely perfectly, and also tips his hat to Mrs. Dalloway.
• Shalimar the Clown, by Salmon Rushdie.  I don’t know if this one should make my list, since I only read about 10 pages of it before realizing that there was absolutely zero chance of my finishing it before it was due back to the library, so I stopped.  Midnight’s Children is the only Rushdie book that I’ve really liked, but I liked it so much that I keep giving him more chances.
• COLLAPSE, by Jared Diamond.  Another one that I started but didn’t get very far into.
• Freakonomics, by Leavitt and Dubner.  Some interesting ideas, but if you’ve read an article about it, you’ve heard most of them.