And now, a literary musical interlude

It could be successfully argued that only one of these songs is actually about reading, and that's this one:
We've been livin' in hovels/ Spendin' all our money on brand-new novels

Couldn't find an actual video for this one, just audio, but it sure is catchy.
You think she's an open book but you don't know which page to turn to, do you, do you.

This one is the newest to me. You know when you go to a place you've never been before, but you instantly feel like you've been there for years? Or meet a person who puts you at ease? That's how I felt when I heard this song. On a less ethereal note, what are the backup dancers wearing on their heads?

I threw up the sponge instead of throwing down the gauntlet.

It's not every day you get to see something on Broadway that you could recite from end to end. Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" was part of my brief, fleeting career in high school drama (fun fact: I understudied regular commenter Elizabeth) and it all came rushing back last weekend when I saw Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersole and Angela Lansbury perform in it on Broadway last weekend. If I was laughing at slightly different moments than the rest of the audience -- well, that's old age for you.

"Blithe Spirit" is a fun play, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorites. (Not even sure where my scrawled-over copy is at this point, although I'm sure I kept it.) The small collection of plays I own are the ones I read over and over without them losing their resonance. Some sparked my interest when I first read them, like when I was assigned Lorca's "As Five Years Pass"; others, like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," I found after seeing a particularly memorable performance. ("Cat" was my go-to book one summer to such an extent that if anyone else picked up my copy it would probably burst into flames.)

If you have a favorite play, how did you find it?

This deprofessionalization is probably the best thing that could have happened to the field. Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field--by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has--the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn't all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema. Amateurism in the best sense will lead to some very interesting work by people whose primary motivation is simply to express themselves in relation to the work they're seeing--a purer critical impulse than the one that comes with collecting a paycheck along the way.

--John Podhoretz on film criticism's declining footprint. I don't think critics are going to go the way of the dodo very soon -- Podhoretz seems to be arguing for his own extinction, which seems like an unwise choice -- but my blogging side likes the notion of purity of impulse, even while my inner professional critic takes umbrage at the idea that money automatically taints the work. (Found via @editorialiste.)

I'll see ya next time!

It's hard for me to get invested in the new "Star Trek" movie enough to see it, because my experience with "Star Trek" is limited to that one episode of "Reading Rainbow" where LeVar Burton goes to the Enterprise. Lo and behold, someone has uploaded (part of) that famous episode, and Burton? Is contemplating a "Reading Rainbow" for grownups out loud on Twitter. Hire me! I am already practicing the "Teamwork" song for my interview.

Because she didn't keep sweet

After I finished all the books I brought to Rome with me, I picked up Elissa Wall's STOLEN INNOCENCE: MY STORY OF GROWING UP IN A POLYGAMOUS SECT, BECOMING A TEENAGE BRIDE, AND BREAKING FREE OF WARREN JEFFS. I polished it off pretty quickly -- I'm fascinated by these Mormon splinter groups (UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN being my first exposure) and it's not hard to see why this survivor's memoir became a best-seller.

I recently reviewed a book about growing up in a cult in 1970s Queens and one of my main criticisms of it was that I never fully understood the pull of its guru leader over the community he created. Naturally, it can be hard to convey to someone outside those religious bounds the appeal of such a tight-knit organization, especially if the author (as this one had) grew up there and essentially didn't know any different for most of her life. Wall grew up FLDS, but spends a lot of time unpacking how FLDS leader Warren Jeffs controlled his flock without even the threat of bodily harm -- turning family members against each other, positioning himself and the faith as the only door to salvation and colluding with local law enforcement to create a culture of paranoia. The self-proclaimed prophet, who survived an internal power struggle after the death of his father Rulon, is currently serving 10 years in prison thanks in part to Wall's testimony that he forced her to get into an abusive marriage to her first cousin at age 14.

Wall repeatedly uses the phrase "keeping sweet" as an expression of the culture of silence and endurance fostered by FLDS church elders, particularly among the women of the church. "Keeping sweet" means responding to adverse circumstances with a smile, remaining compliant and good-natured even when things don't turn out as you planned. It's an incredibly loaded phrase for Wall because, from the time she was younger and saw the church forcibly dismantle her family multiple times (sending away her father, and later another one of his wives), she was forced to learn how to "keep sweet" to get along at church and her church school. In the years between when she first thought about leaving the FLDS and made her break with the church, she effectively had to unlearn these techniques of submission to propel herself out into the wider world. Wall grew up within driving distance of Las Vegas, but in a society as distant to me as Khomeini's Iran or medieval Britain.

Dear America, We Need To Talk About Dan Brown

I finally got around to reading ANGELS AND DEMONS -- or if you prefer, I used the excuse of going to Rome, where the book is mostly set, to see what the rest of you have been reading all this time. (I previously used a rainy Sunday afternoon as an excuse to plow through and quickly forget THE DA VINCI CODE.) There will be massive spoilers for both of these books coming up, so if you care about that now, disengage.

I think it's so cute that we've all been going around pretending these books are about Religion and Deep Thinking. Really! Because they are really about sex -- those who fight for it and those who fear it. Guess which ones are the good guys? Oh, you naughty reading politic, you.

Think about it: In THE DA VINCI CODE, Robert Langdon, champion of secular life, fights the mysterious elite Opus Dei to keep word from getting out that Jesus had sex, and likely not just once in order to save a kitten from falling off a cliff. In ANGELS & DEMONS, Langdon believes he is fighting a murderous re-incarnation of the Illuminati, who are magically able to Do What Computers Can't(1), but actually in protecting a sexy nuclear scientist he is defending her questionably defined project against the legendarily sex-panicked(2) Vatican, particularly the late Pope's right-hand man whose life is totally wrecked when he finds out he is the late Pope's biological son and thus tainted by original sin despite the cold embrace of the church.

Oh yeah, and about that sexy nuclear scientist, alias Vittoria Vetra. This was a character of Denise-Richards-in-Bond-movie levels of disbelief, who is described as "smouldering" not five pages after finding out her father has been brutally murdered. Really? She can't have a few minutes of tear-stained messedness? And unfortunately her magnetic appeal is filtered through Robert Langdon, which makes him seem like a guy who would use personality tests on women in bars. "You're standing in a room... what color is that room? It's okay, I'm a symbologist." Oh, but it's okay, say his defenders, because he's sexy too. But saying a guy has a "swimmer's body" isn't the same level of objectifying as mentioning over and over how great at yoga someone is where it makes no sense to do so, only you know what that means. That means she's hot! Any community yoga class will disavow you of this notion quickly.

After an interlude of pseudoscience I dearly wish I could pick apart, Langdon and Vetra find themselves racing through Rome trying to stop the supposed Illuminati killer from slaying people in symbolically appropriate ways throughout Rome. One of their stops is the church which holds Bernini's "St. Theresa in Ecstasy," which in the book has been shoved aside by the super-prudish church despite being specially commissioned for them because it is Just Too Hot. Having visited the Vatican Museums I can confirm that the church probably just didn't have room for it among their collections of copied Greek stuff, stolen Egyptian stuff and paintings everyone else forgot about. But Brown lovingly describes how the statue looks like she's in a less than spiritual ecstasy, and her testimony sounds more like a one-night stand than a prayerful vigil. Well, maybe to modern eyes it does, but surely if the Vatican had doubts about her purity it wouldn't have canonized her in the first place. And forcing the figure of St. Theresa to act as a piller for Brown's sex-is-good thesis seems kind of insulting to the religion from which she has sprung. I'm not Catholic, I'm just sayin'.

Thanks to chapters from his point of view, we know the killer is not only a super-mean dude, but he also gets his kicks from tying up and violating women (particularly in brothels, but he doesn't seem that picky). This is Brown going "Oh no, I don't mean all sex is okay, which only strengthens my argument!" If only he had really gone all-out on this line of thinking and made Vetra a sexy lesbian won over by the redeeming love of Ben Affleck. But we're supposed to believe that the Pope's chamberlain, a celibate man among celibate men, would enlist this clearly predatory guy in order to further his own ends even though he would likely be horrified by the outcomes. This is where the science of the book makes its regrettable bow, and the concept of Vetra and her late father being able to create matter is supposed to be such a threat that it forces Pope Jr. to protect his celibate reserve by employing someone whose mores are almost opposite to his. Naturally, the killer later goes after Vetra, who would be his next victim (because she's sooooo hot), only Langdon saves her, for which his reward is sex from her. Heaven (ha?) forbid she just shake his hand and invite him to a press conference.

All this is to say that I didn't exactly enjoy ANGELS AND DEMONS, although being unable to sleep on the plane I whizzed through it. Knowing that Ewan McGregor has been cast as the extremely sex-negative former assistant to the Pope makes me almost want to see it, if only to balance out the times I have inadvertently seen him in the altogether onscreen. (3) But I think it's funny how the controversy has focused on the Vatican's refusal to allow on-location shoots because they're "still mad" about THE DA VINCI CODE and the whole Jesus-having-sex thing -- a narrative which only confirms what Brown is trying to do in his books, which is pit his sex champions (Ron Howard, in this case?) against the censoring powers that be. If the Church is not compliant, he must be onto something! Or, you know, they just decided it would be too much of a hassle to have Tom Hanks, McGregor and Ayelet Zurer (Vittoria Vetra) running around in their much visited sites for weeks with large amounts of photographic equipment.

Are we hung up more on sex as a country, or more on religion? I think we would like to believe ourselves to be the latter because it reflects better on us than the former -- after all, we're just being philosophical! Of course, the correct answer to this question is, "yes," but this will not appear in Brown's new novel THE LOST SYMBOL, due out this fall. In fact, I'm willing to call it right now: The lost symbol is some kind of cosmic booty-call Bat-signal (4) whose existence is supported by some sweet Gaia-worshipers and all but destroyed by a nefarious league of nuns. (5) Quick review without reading: The nuns were better than the albino and the possessed Vaticanite.

(1) Langdon knows the Illuminati killed a dude because they used their special perfectly symmetrical seal to brand him, a seal that cannot be reproduced via computer. Really? That's your whole proof?
(2) In college I once tried to get into a seminar called "Sex Panic." I'm still a little bitter I didn't get in, if only for the excuse to shout "Sex!! Panic!!!" on main campus.
(3) Only one worth watching is "Velvet Goldmine."
(4) Dear Google searchers, you're welcome.
(5) But if this were actually true, I would read this book, because who doesn't want to read about a league of nuns?

Also, Things That Make Me Want To Clean My Apartment

File under Wish I'd Thought Of This First: A blog devoted to bookshelf porn (SFW), or photos of other people's bookshelves . This one alone inspired many off-color thoughts about real estate in me. Oh, my.

Perhaps you'll find me feeling better in a day or two

Inspired perhaps by her recent in-the-flesh encounter with one Colin A. Firth, Nikki of A Small Song made a list of her fictional crushes. Hint: they trend 19th century! I went over and divulged one of mine, so it's safe to go over and spill yours. (It does say fictional men, but no need to limit yourself.)

Your Assistance Please: Books about modern Rome

I'm back from my first trip to the Eternal City and the landing has been a bit bumpy, not least because today is my first ever jury duty summons.

I don't know how long this participatory venture in American justice will last*, but I sure would like to take some books about Rome with me -- but contemporary Rome, not phalanx-and-toga stuff. The only Wormbook book I found that mentions Rome is EAT, PRAY, LOVE (the "Eat" section takes place there) but, of course, I've read that. I've read DAISY MILLER which I believe takes place partly in Rome, and I knocked out ANGELS & DEMONS on the flight over (about which, more later).

Got a suggestion that will help ease the pain of re-entry? I would love to hear it, and not just if you believe you will soon be appearing on the docket in New York County and facing my wary jet-lagged eye. And while we're at it, if anyone knows why I have had "Buddy Holly" stuck in my head since I got back, have at it.

*Books I'm bringing with me to the courthouse: four. Overkill: complete.

Is it time to panic yet?

In my non-professional capacity as Rhetorical Question Answerer to the world, I'm going to say no. It is not time to panic about the swine flu yet, even if there have been cases confirmed in your state, even if someone coughed on you recently and oh how gross seriously. However, if you're tempted to panic anyway, it's probably not a good idea to read any of these books about flu, epidemics or pandemics. You've been warned:

Richard Preston, THE HOT ZONE. '90s bestseller about Ebola coming to kill us (via a researcher at the CDC who risked infection to research it). Honestly I'd be surprised if most of you haven't read this one already; it's a definite page-turner though.
Peter Moore, THE LITTLE BOOK OF PANDEMICS. Aww, how cute, a collection of information on lots of different terrible things that could happen to the world! Aren't you adorable.
Mike Davis, THE MONSTER AT OUR DOOR: THE GLOBAL THREAT OF AVIAN FLU. I respect Mike Davis' work, but the man might as well call all his books BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID. This is the most terrifying between the factory farms and the very detailed symptoms of the SARS that tried to kill us. He just wrote an essay for the Guardian about the very real dangers of swine flu -- sleep well!
Steven Johnson, THE GHOST MAP: THE STORY OF LONDON'S MOST TERRIFYING PANDEMIC AND HOW IT CHANGED SCIENCE, CITIES AND THE MODERN WORLD. Actually, I'm looking forward to picking this one up because I'm fascinated by what little I know about the cholera epidemic -- the well and the popular concept of infection and so on. Call me crazy if you must.
Stephen King, THE STAND. I haven't even read a little of this one but I hear it's about a superflu that wipes out most of the human race, so there you go. Of course, when it's King, you expect to be scared a little.
Norman F. Cantor, IN THE WAKE OF THE PLAGUE: THE BLACK DEATH AND THE WORLD IT MADE. Hey, if worst comes to worst, whoever survives can have a kick-ass Renaissance. Now there's something to look forward to... kind of.

I'll miss you, reading in bed

In short, I love doing it but recognize that it's bad for me. Just like eating steak, say!

A lot of sleep hygiene experts recommend reading in bed as conducive to getting a good rest, against watching TV which is supposedly a more active or involving medium. With all deference to those experts, for me I think it's the opposite; I can't read in bed because I get sucked into books and end up staying up much later turning pages. I can make this work for me while waiting for a subway train home, but can't turn it off when I get there.

I have started using phrases like "sleep hygiene" to correct the latest in a long line of sleep interruptions. As a longtime sleepwalker, any night in which I do not wake up standing in a place I don't recognize is by definition a good night of sleep, but I would like to fall asleep faster -- and that doesn't happen when I know there is a book hey, right over there just begging to be read. As for the concept of moving all non-sleep-related items out of my bedroom, well, that's a tip for people with houses.

This makes me sad because I have done some of my best reading in bed. And it's not like I have a lot of other seating options in my apartment to replace it. Maybe I could only read in bed on weekends? I'm not quite ready to give up such childish things.

How To Accessorize Your Reading

Sure, your book cover speaks pretty loudly about the kind of person you are (unless you have a Kindle). But does it speak loudly enough? Make sure to add these extras to your reading and no one will be able to mistake you for the kind of reader you are.

If your book is... The latest by a modern literary giant (your Lethem, your DeLillo, your Pynchon).
Then you need... The requisite book festival and/or indie bookstore and/or publisher tote bag. Otherwise no one will believe you are actually reading it -- the souvenir says yes, you are that awesome.

If your book is... Anything with a pink cover, but chick lit in particular.
Then you need... A matching scarf and/or sweater, because the media adores a chick-lit cliche, and don't you dare let them down or you'll never find out why that mysterious man next door keeps stopping by when you're in your pajamas with a face mask on.

If your book is... Primarily concerning zombies, especially the potential of zombies in the "real world" (i.e. ZOMBIE INVASION SURVIVAL GUIDE).
Then you need... A baseball cap. No one needs to know you've lined it with tinfoil. Oops, the tinfoil's showing.

If your book is... A self-help guide
Then you need... A hammer. To beat off the negative thoughts, that is! And also to brandish at anyone who is laughing at your choice of books, and believe me, we all are.

In my defense, I own all those items -- though rare is the day when I can be found to be carrying all of them.

Update: Goodbye Harry W., Hello Boswell and Next Chapter

A few months ago I elegized my former hometown independent bookshop, Harry W. Schwartz, closing its doors. But like the heads of the hydra, two new stores have sprung up in its place (or rather, two of Harry's former locations). I'm looking forward to checking out Next Chapter in Mequon and Boswell Books (see the proprietor's blog) on the East Side the next time I'm in Milwaukee.

Switched on!

This is Ellen's blogging robot. Ellen entrusted me to post for her for the next five days while she is in 41°54′N 12°30′E. Topics to be disseminated through the weblog platform include:

Optimal speed of page-turning
Whether tomes quickly digested for repairs are weighted the same as the latest robot-lit
Artificial intelligence: Can it be improved?
The perils of the paper-based medium in electrically charged situations
YOU, ROBOT: Self-help for machines

Photo of books and robot: photocapy

April Unbookening

Mooched 2 books (well, technically they were mooched in March and I got them now)
Got 16 from the library
Got 19 books to review
Borrowed 1 book
Was given 2 as a present (thanks, Pearl!)
Bought 1 book
41 books in

Donated 23 books to Small Thrift Store
Returned 5 to the library
Gave away 9 books
Lent 1 book
Left 1 book on a train (oops)
39 books out

I tried to go all of April without buying a book and people, I got really close. But I had to pick up a guidebook for a trip I'm going on, erm, today (more of which, next week) and while I could have waited to buy it today and had it count towards May, that would be kind of a cop-out.

Otherwise, review books made up the majority of what I read (or at least finished) this month. And I had to get a bunch of library books for a project, and didn't have time to read them yet, but that can't be helped.

Books I read in April
Brian Eule, MATCH DAY
Carleen Brice, CHILDREN OF THE WATERS
Zoe Heller, THE BELIEVERS
Jayanti Tamm, CARTWHEELS IN A SARI
Jane Hamilton, LAURA RIDER'S MASTERPIECE
Julia Angwin, STEALING MYSPACE
Eve Brown-Waite, FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES MALARIA
Hadley Freeman, THE MEANING OF SUNGLASSES
Glen David Gold, SUNNYSIDE
Rakesh Satyal, BLUE BOY
Lee Konstantinou, POP APOCALYPSE: A POSSIBLE SATIRE