But still you're surprised, surprised, surprised when I eat ya

When I was little I had six neon tetra fish and named them all after characters from GONE WITH THE WIND. (Scarlett survived the longest -- coincidence?!) Still, I think naming an animal after a book character can go too far. After the fatal attack at Sea World in Orlando this week the Miami Herald ran a story on the killer whale at the Miami Seaquarium, Lolita. Lolita! I quote:

[Seaquarium curator Robert] Rose said trainers and veterinarians spend long hours developing trust and relationships with orcas and dolphins, which, like humans, have different personalities. Trainers look for signs that an animal may be ill or off.

Lolita enjoys performing, he said, as the orca lolled behind him in its tank, occasionally spitting water. "I've been with her longer than I've been with my wife,'' he said.

She was Lo, plain Lo, at the morning feeding, standing six feet one. She was Lola in the breeding tank. She was Dolly in the shows. She was Dolores at the vet's. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

(Also, the newspaper pidgin used in the print headline: Lolita not kill nobody! Lolita good whale! Lolita take English lesson from Drunk Hulk!)

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

(If you like Millay, Daniel Mark Epstein's WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED is super -- and as a selective biography it won't take you forever to read.)

You can read me anything

The ignominious return of book-related songblogging! Sorry about the poor quality, it was the best one I could find.

A pretty soundtrack for a snowy day.

On "a technical matter appreciated by specialists"

Laura Miller in Salon responds to a much circulated list of writing tips from famous authors in the Guardian with her own five rules. I know she speaks for a reader (herself), not all, but there's this:

4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much.

I don't know if this is untrue so much as that I want to believe that readers, to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, know good writing when they see it. Even if we can't all agree, there must be a baseline somewhere. Or have I lost all perspective? What do you say?

D.H. Lawrence And The Emo Daffodil Alert

A week and change ago I named a line from D.H. Lawrence's WOMEN IN LOVE regarding daffodils the passage that made me roll my eyes the most. Wouldn't you know, it happened again!? So I made this graphic with roflbot to commemorate what looks like an ongoing feature for as long as it takes me to finish this book.

In this scene Ursula has been watching Rupert Birkin throw rocks in the water to disturb its reflection, and I could really quote all that stuff because who knows, maybe it could show up in a Hoobastank song, but let's cut to the chase:

'When did you come back?' she said.
'Today.'
'Why did you never write?'
'I could find nothing to say.'
'Why was there nothing to say?'
'I don't know. Why are there no daffodils now?'
'No.'

There aren't even any daffodils in that scene! Which takes place at night! Sheesh.

Photo credit goes to rocan42, who captioned this on Flickr "This poor daffodil looked lonely. So I took a picture cos I was EMO due to drinking 5ish pints of broadside." Broadside is a British beer.

Spotted on the subway

Stubby girl in a green hat reading over people's shoulders. Oh wait, that's me!

During the morning rush, burly guy with a thick gray beard clutching to his chest a copy of the British YA bestseller ANGUS, THONGS AND FULL-FRONTAL SNOGGING. All I can remember is that the ending was disappointing, but that's not the kind of thing you tell a stranger unless you really want to ruin his day.

And for a low, low price, you can tell everybody that this is your song

According to author Bill Scheft, you are allowed to print up to four lines from a non-public-domain song in a book before having to pay for the privilege. (Yes, that means websites that post song lyrics are legally vulnerable.) That number is based on the copies in the initial print run, so if you want to publish, say, a teenager's diary, you'd better make your sales estimate really low on your initial P&L and then pick up a huge audience later.

Homer, Continued

We've got an exclusive here on the blog today! But don't get too excited, it's just a book review. I was planning to cover Zachary Mason's THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY for the A.V. Club, but I screwed up and they can't use it -- something I figured out when I was 95 percent done writing the review. Now that I've finished self-flagellating over this I decided to finish it and put it up here. House rules over there are a little different from ye olde blogue, but it's a continuum.

I haven't even edited it since that last draft, so any errors below are mine (and sorry). For funsies, I took off the customary letter grade so if you want you can guess how I graded this book -- or if you've read it, play critic yourself.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Zachary Mason
(FSG)

In purporting to add to Homeric legend, Zachary Mason’s poetic and transporting debut goes where many writers, from James Joyce to the Coen brothers, have gone before. The particular charm of “The Lost Books Of The Odyssey” is to uncannily evoke characters in nudging open the door to other visions from those pages.

The 44 chapters that form Mason’s collection are by turns straightforward and discursive, playful and tragic, respectful of or discarding their source; most describe an episode along Odysseus’ classic route, a few with him even narrating, but others examine its events from the vantage point of earlier legends and some from the afterlife. (Fear not, there are footnotes.) Routes not taken spring forth in the lost books, and Odysseuses who may have lived: “Sanatorium” finds him a madman in a temple, unable to remember where he came from after being evacuated from the front; in “Bacchae” and “Islands On The Way,” he succumbs to temptresses en route and forgets his legendarily patient queen. A few of Homer’s minor characters speak out, from the lyrical puzzle of “Phoenician” in the voice of the swineherd Eumaios, who helped slaughter Penelope’s suitors, to “Stone Garden”’s striking image of a lonely Medusa tending her flowers alone. Two pieces envision a particularly gruesome alternate fate for Helen than that written into other authors’ accounts of the fall of Troy.

And other authors are constantly on Mason’s mind: While some of its images are as striking as those in Homer’s work, “The Lost Books Of The Odyssey” is in conception naturally derivative of its inspiration, even if it didn’t also invoke Shakespeare, Dickinson and a host of others. “The Book Of Winter” owes the biggest debt to Borges, whose playfulness and erudition are honored here, in its evocation of a stranger who is gifted a mysterious book, while “Record Of A Game” shuttles the epic poem around using a metaphor Nabokov would have loved.

Mason builds this multiplicity of voices into the book’s preface, citing (fictionally) the lost books as original pieces of Greek legend discarded as a legion of bards repeated and added to the old songs. In “The Iliad of Odysseus,” the Ithacan king even becomes one of those bards, leaving the Trojan battlefield in disguise and writing a song of his heroics to disguise the fact that his flight forced the Greeks into a war of attrition from which Agamemnon barely escaped. Even a few less distinguished chapters in Mason’s arsenal articulate themselves through the voices used -- of the Furies being eavesdropped on, or the implacable third-person view of ruined Troy. As “The Lost Books Of The Odyssey” coils back into itself through the superb chapter “Last Islands,” it leaves in its wake the impression of a homage, but also a continuation of Homer’s work.

You did it, America!

As hoped, "Shutter Island" beat "Dances With Na'vi" and "Pagan Holiday, Actually" at the box office this weekend. And you did it without my help because I haven't gone yet (to be hopefully rectified this week).

SHUTTER ISLAND author Dennis Lehane was credited as an executive producer on the movie. He is currently adapting his short story called "Animal Rescue" about a lost pit bull into a full-length screenplay and his novel THE GIVEN DAY, set in Boston in 1918 (shiver), has been optioned by Sam Raimi.

Madeline Dare is moving here

Back in '07 I got a review copy of a book called THE CRAZY SCHOOL by Cornelia Read. I noticed it was the sequel to Read's first book A FIELD OF DARKNESS, so I picked that book up and basically lived in it until I finished. It was the kind of book that makes real life going on around you seem shimmery and somehow less real when you set it down. For much of the book, which involves a 20-year-old murder in upstate New York, Madeline is knocking around on her own in this small town full of eccentrics and I was right there with her. I can even remember the way the wood floor in her apartment was described. THE CRAZY SCHOOL is good, but not as good as the first book.

Catching up on Publishers Weekly I just found out that Read's third book INVISIBLE BOY is coming out in March -- and it's set in early '90s New York City -- this is so promising. The review (which can be found on this page) mentions a Prospect Cemetery in Queens that really exists, and is one of the city's oldest.

Sidebar: I try not to read any reviews of books I know I'll be reviewing in the future, but PW is the exception -- it's a great resource for finding titles I wouldn't have otherwise heard about, early enough that I can write about them. (And I'm not just saying that because I also write for PW, although its editors have been swell to me.)

Pau Gasol is going to finish 2666 before I do

Many of the NBA's 83 foreign-born players say reading was always the main form of entertainment in their home countries. Cleveland's Mr. Ilgauskas says he grew up with no videogames and a TV that had only two channels. Nenad Krstic of the Oklahoma City Thunder says his basketball coaches in Serbia probably gave him as many books to read as his schoolteachers did when he was a child. "People are just brought up with more technology here," says Milwaukee Bucks center Andrew Bogut, who grew up in Australia. (Mr. Bogut says he's such a bookworm he can't bring himself to use a Kindle. "I get more of a thrill out of going through the actual book like you're supposed to," he says.)

It's out of date now but this Wall Street Journal article about NBA players who like to read is pretty neat.

Opening this weekend: "Shutter Island," finally

Had I not known about it already, I would have guessed from the trailer that this was the kind of horror movie I always avoid a la "The Crazies" (worst title ever?) but I'm giving Scorsese the benefit of the doubt. And while I recognize the metric is meaningless, I would also like to see it beat "Space Smurf Pocahontas" and "He's Just Not That Into Your Holiday" at the box office.

Here's the trailer:



P.S. "The Crazies" is actually a remake. Perhaps the title was less funny in 1973.

Spotted on the subway

A 20-something woman with brown hair reading I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, on the R train. At the end of a chapter she used her book as a plate to feed her pet unicorn! Just kidding, it was a pig with wings.

This would be nothing compared to a GOING ROGUE sighting but that hasn't happened yet. Either the NYC members of its intended audience don't take the subways I do, or they read it months ago in one sitting as if it were the third Hunger Games book.

Seen anyone reading something unusual lately?

Give Elizabeth Gilbert a second chance

Hey, I heard you're getting married -- congratulations! I mean, statistically speaking, anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of you will be married at some point in your lives if you aren't already, so in fact you are getting married. Shall I put you down for a fondue set or a wok?

You may doubt the figures I just quoted, for good reason because I can't remember where I'd read either of them, but you've probably heard the one about how half of all modern marriages end in divorce. There's actually a sensible curve-wrecking reason for why that oft-quoted statistic is so high (hint: kids these days), one of the many pieces of trivia I picked up from Elizabeth Gilbert's new book COMMITTED, in which a divorcée convinces herself to get hitched again. Its trivia-packing isn't the only reason this book is more smart and serious than I expected, but it doesn't hurt.

To rehash one more time, Gilbert's previous memoir EAT, PRAY, LOVE was the product of a book deal she inked after her first marriage fell apart, in which she traveled to Italy, India and Bali looking for inner healing and okaydom and whatnot. In Bali she meets "Felipe," a divorced older Brazilian-born Australian national, and falls madly in love. (She doesn't reveal his real name in the book, but it amuses me to set it off in quotes as if to remind myself of the taste of artifice.) They promise they will live happily ever after criss-crossing the globe without getting married.

Enter stage left, the Department of Homeland Security, currently being blamed for everything except the recent economic downturn.* "Felipe" is flagged and detained for hours on one return trip because he has been going back and forth into the U.S. too many times for his unwedded bliss. Now he can't come back at all unless, you guessed it, they get married. It sounds like a romantic-comedy set-up, but given what DHS is capable of, I believe her. So Gilbert and "Felipe" move back to Southeast Asia for a while so they can live cheaply while doing all the paperwork for "Felipe"'s fiancé visa, which will allow him to enter the country in order to marry her within 30 days. And while they're out there, she might as well do a little reading on marriage in history and different cultures and how the creator of "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" was a eugenicist and every man is, in terms of evolution, either a Truman or a JFK.

Considering that the "Love" section of her last book was the weakest, COMMITTED is remarkably strong. I credit Gilbert for trading honesty in her doubts when it would have been much easier to quietly get hitched and not open herself up to scrutiny. She goes out of her way not to be flippant, sometimes too out of her way; in one chapter I could've sworn she was about to break into a verse of "Just Around The Riverbend" instead of making her point. But her wry humor snuck up on me; in a discussion of the Great Depression, she shows why divorce rates from the period are not a good representation of social trends, and then exclaims, "Where do you think all those hobos came from?" Where indeed.

The experience of reading this book reminded me a lot of A VINDICATION OF LOVE, in that even when I didn't agree I was still very much engaged in Gilbert's arguments. One of COMMITTED's chapters even seems to refute Nehring's book in suggesting that the "love-based unions" currently in vogue "make for strangely fragile tethers," although I wouldn't follow Gilbert so far as to say that marriages These Days are based solely on romantic feelings. Another chapter I even went back and re-read after I finished, something I was never tempted to do on EAT, PRAY's behalf.

The ending of COMMITTED is a foregone conclusion as Gilbert had earlier jokingly referred to the moment "I found out I would be marrying again." Her fans won't take to this book in droves, but that doesn't make it less thought-provoking; besides, like they say in all the jewelry commercials, the effects of one Oprah-championed mega-bestseller are forever.

---
*Wait, I will try! Tightened security standards mean highly skilled employees can't get their H-1B visas in order to work for American companies, which then fall behind in innovation compared to other developed countries with less restrictive entry procedures, leading to less demand for American technologies, lower profits, stock slump and layoffs, plus in the financial sector a removal of an important layer of checks and balances against subprime investing. Tom Friedman, surrender your mustache.

Who is Catherine Cookson?

Via 52 Books: The Guardian got hold of a list of the top 250 titles borrowed from UK libraries in the previous fiscal year and asked its readers to analyze the data. But what jumps out at me is how many authors I didn't recognize on the list: Apparently we're not only two countries separated by a common language, but also by our most popular literature. The British takeaway on this list, on the other hand, is how many American pop thrillers have sneaked into their libraries under cover of night.