What prompts a solitary grasshopper to join a violent street gang plague of locusts? Serotonin. Link from jpmassar.

Brain scans show that reading is not passive: “when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story.” Link via email from gramina, who added, “In other news, water is wet.”

How memories form, fade, and persist over time. Link from housepet.

From technomom, I can move things with my brain: Brain-implanted prostheses.

The technology promises to give thousands of victims of stroke, spinal cord injury and paralyzing illnesses the ability to, say, talk with a friend, flip through television channels or transport themselves by driving their own wheelchair. One day implants may enable paralyzed people to move robotic arms or even bypass damaged parts of the nervous system to reanimate unresponsive limbs. In the meantime, the quest to develop implanted neural prostheses is bringing with it revelations about how the brain manages motion and how it can remodel itself so that only a few neurons are needed to direct action through an implant.

Guerrilla art in Austin. Link from caprine.

Jane Austen meets George Romero. Link from housepet. Darcy/zombie slash? I can’t even think about it. Or stop thinking about it.

Everybody is linking to Handknit Heroes, which is totally freaking cool for a number of reasons. The least of which is that this comic book (plus knitting patterns!) comes from my old and dear friend Mortaine. Who was smart enough to get out of the Bay Area while the getting was good.

Everybody should also be linking to these cool comics by oletheros. Full of metanarrative and fascinating art, and definitely worth checking out.

World’s greatest letter of complaint. Link from apocalypsos.

Redneck wedding cakes. Complete with a tasteful spray of shotgun shells.

What’s your favorite unconventional work of art?

John Updike described the world he saw in beautiful prose. Now he has died at 76, and I’m sorry that he won’t be around to chronicle baseball or psoriasis any longer.

However, I will not miss his voice as a fiction writer. With effort I can forgive the youthful pretension that embedded chunks of untransliterated Greek — including the final line — in The Centaur. (I find it impossible to forgive his editor, however.) But throughout his long career, he used his great gifts to shallow ends. Something in him was stalled at the adolescent stage of seeing females as utterly fascinating, utterly alien tabs and slots for his delectation, and sex as the only real pleasure or transcendence in life.

There are other reasons his books fail to move me. Like John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and lesser writers of the same generation, he chronicled the woes of well-off suburban white males. My response to their anomie: If your comfortable life is so wretched, you have the power to give it meaning — go forth and serve the poor, and stop drinking so much.

Moreover, he grew up in my own home state, but his awareness of *place* (and of poor people) was as blunt as his awareness of middle-class people (and their endless hunt for status) was acute. And I grew bored with the over-emphasis on sex. Given my own sexual obsessiveness, that’s saying something.

I could see his great strengths — the preternatural vividness of his observation, the unerring perfection of his metaphors. I wish him well in whatever follows.

Not necessarily my favorites, but some books I proselytize for.

1. Joanna Russ, The Female Man 2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle 3. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age 3?r. Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle 4. Terry Pratchett, Small Gods 5. Lorelei, The Mistress Manual* 6. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory 7. Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon 8. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night 8ß. John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl 9. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence 10. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred ¡. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery 11. Margaret Halsey, With Malice toward Some 12. Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady 13. David Bradley, The Cheneysville Incident 14. Kelynda, The Crystal Tree* 15. Barbara Michaels, Ammie Come Home 16. Toni Morrison, Beloved µ. Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home 17. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology ¿. Mary Duffy, The HOAX Fashion Formula 18. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa §. Richard Adams, The Girl on a Swing 19. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love 20. John McPhee, The Control of Nature

*Because I need the royalties, dammit. Not that I get (m)any.

ETA Originally supposed to be posted to thebookyouscrew. Thus the bizarre numbering system.

“Do What Lets You Go On,” Take Two.

You can’t do it all at once. You can’t undo it all at once. One small bit at a time. Rebuild carefully. Rebuild strong. Escapism doesn’t work. The problems will still be there when you come back. On the other hand, maybe you’ll have more strength to tackle them if you get away (emotionally or physically) for a little while. Be gentle with yourself. Be even gentler with others. It’s not all your fault. Some of it is, though, and it helps to figure out where you went wrong. “Going wrong” is not a death-penalty offense. Go back to your sources, the roots of your strength. Don’t be afraid to accept help and advice. Failure doesn’t have to be forever. Even the end of the world isn’t always the end of everything. Hold on to what really matters. There are reasons people love you. Have faith in your friends’ good judgment even when you have no faith in yourself. You’ve been through bad times before. Remember all the good times you’ve had since then. Have you had enough water? enough sunlight? enough sleep? enough hugs? something decent to eat? You need those every day. You’ll make it. That’s what you’re good at.

Advice to the USA, to President Obama, to those caught in layoffs and industry crashes, and to me.

No more torture.

Our new President chose to be sworn in on the Bible Abraham Lincoln used, and that is deeply satisfying. However, Obama is too sane to be that much like him. Lincoln, the Great Liberator, was both a genius and a deeply melancholic man suffering from lifelong depression.

I see a stronger parallel between the father of our country and this new president. Obama drew some criticism during the campaign for being cool, distant, intellectual. But those qualities are what we need right now.

Washington was very bright, but not a genius. He was, above all, a self-disciplined, hard-working, emotionally balanced man of the rational eighteenth century. In the words of Fisher Ames, a Federalist,

His habits of inquiry were so far remarkable, that he was never satisfied with investigating, nor desisted from it, so long as he had less than all the light that he could obtain upon a subject, and then he made his decision without bias.

Thomas Jefferson, a Democrat-Republican, said,

Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it.

In order to undo the damage of the corruption, paranoia, and irrationality of the Bush II regime, we need a president of old-fashioned virtues. Duty, responsibility, self-control, hard work. We’re all going to need to put in a lot of effort to reconstruct our country, our moral position, and our economy.

Bush’s character was compounded of privilege, laziness, greed, favoritism, and rage. He stumbled around drunk for forty years and then decided he wanted to be president. Nothing could be more different from Obama’s hard work, compassion, steadiness, and intelligence. Bush thought he was appointed by God and that anything he wanted was God’s plan for the world. Obama takes a more nuanced view, and he is well aware that God helps those who help themselves. Bush thought it’s right because he does it. Obama does it because it’s right.

No, he’s not perfect, and he won’t come riding in on his unicorn to save us all. My sister, a longtime Obama supporter, asked me if I expected him to do miracles, and I said, “Well, he already put on his Superman cape and brought that plane down safely in the Hudson.”

A few days ago, I referred to the safe emergency landing in the Hudson as a miracle. xiphias called me out on it, and he was right. It was a miracle only in the sense that any human cooperation is a miracle. It was a miracle created by discipline, steady work, careful thought, and years of experience. A human miracle.

If Obama can work miracles, they will be miracles of that sort. I’ve always believed that work is a kind of prayer. It’s certainly the kind of prayer we need now. Not “Thank you, God, that our country is superior,” but the steady, thoughtful application of time, resources, and energy to our goals, a meditative and patient focus that brings together many kinds of people in a common purpose — even, as our new president reminded us, even unbelievers.

Political evolution illustrated. Link from apocalypsos

In 2001, The Onion predicted the Dubya years with uncanny accuracy:

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

Link from ross_teneyck.

Eight years in eight minutes

January 19 is the birthday of a number of brilliant and fascinating people, including Janis Joplin and Robert E. Lee (who was two years older than Poe, but graduated before the latter entered West Point). None, however, were as enigmatic and difficult as Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, editor, horror writer, and inventor of the detective story.

The mystery was to some extent deliberate; Poe published misleading brief accounts of his life, but nobody knows why. It may have been sheer mischief; he told his fellow students at West Point that he was descended from Benedict Arnold.

What is known for sure of Poe’s life is depressing in the extreme. His parents were actors; before Poe was two his father abandoned the family and promptly died. Poe’s mother died of consumption when her youngest son was not yet three. He was unofficially adopted by a merchant’s family, grew up in an atmosphere of comfort seasoned with contempt, and was ultimately disinherited after quarrels over debts, gambling, and irresponsibility.

Throughout his life, his finances were uncertain, and he had a skill for turning successes into disasters. He edited several magazines, increasing circulation and income, but lost these jobs because of drinking, drugs, or conflict with the magazine owner. He seems to have quarrelled with virtually every man he knew, particularly any man who had authority over him.

Nevertheless, women loved him, and he had a number of close friendships with women. He held “Aunt Muddy,” his aunt and mother-in-law, especially dear, and his marriage was in many ways a menage-a-trois of Poe, his wife, and his mother-in-law. This may seem more natural, or less, when one understands that he married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, who became an invalid before she was 18. She suffered a long, dragging death from tuberculosis, while her husband continued to write ghastly tales of beautiful dying women.

Meanwhile, Poe flirted with a number of other women, sometimes to the point of scandal, possibly to the point of fathering an illegitimate child. After his wife’s death, Poe was lost, and went searching for another love. One engagement ended when he couldn’t keep a promise not to drink. In September 1849, he proposed to a childhood sweetheart and was accepted. He left on a business trip, and within days, Poe was found in the streets of Baltimore, delirious and dying. He was forty.

This final illness was as mysterious as much of Poe’s life; experts have suggested that it may have been brain fever, acute alcoholism, withdrawal from opiates, the effects of a mugging, even rabies.

The failures, miseries, and horrors of his life are too easily conflated with those of his fiction and poetry. Since his death, his fiction has influenced authors from Baudelaire to Borges to Disch. The detective form he invented has become one of the richest and most varied of all fictional genres. He also had a hand in shaping modern horror fiction and a powerful influence on horror in films. He even wrote science fiction, and the rules he laid down for the short story are still taught.

Not a bad legacy, all in all.

“Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen As others saw; I could not bring My passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, I loved alone. Then – in my childhood, in the dawn Of a most stormy life – was drawn From every depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still: From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain, From the sun that round me rolled In its autumn tint of gold, From the lightning in the sky As it passed me flying by, From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.

W.H. Auden, a Biography by Humphrey Carpenter

A solid, weighty biography of the acclaimed poet, offering due consideration to his background, achievements, and preferred sexual positions.

No, really. Auden himself said that was an important thing to know about any homosexual. So we get the details, as well as a number of other anecdotes, analyses, quotations, and lists of friendships and rent boys. Plus explanations of the many in-jokes to be found in his plays. I’d had no idea he started out as an enfant terrible, since I first encountered his work in the last year or so of his life. But in the 1930s he was. He was also didactic, mortally untidy, and constantly seeking something to believe in. He smoked heavily, popped benzedrine at breakfast as regularly as vitamins, and drank amounts of liquor that would have killed someone with a normal metabolism. Perhaps that’s why he aged so early and so devastatingly.

Tall, pale, and clumsy, Auden was physically ungainly, but his mind was nimble and his heart essentially kind (beneath a veneer of intellectual arrogance). His homosexuality did not seem to blight his life; after his mid-life conversion to Christianity, he believed it was a sin but accepted that he was a sinner and apparently never attempted to stop himself.

It’s a good biography. Really. Carpenter apparently didn’t bother to read Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, which Auden read in ms. and described as a masterpiece.

Perhaps the issue is in me, but I found the first half riveting (so much so that I had the new Terry Pratchett actually in my hands and didn’t even open it), whereas the last bit seemed almost perfunctory. Or perhaps I just can’t bear the dwindling of this vital man into a lonely, drunken caricature of himself bellowing the same old opinions and anecdotes at the dons of Christ Church.

In the end, the poems last. The essays last. Individuals remember his great kindnesses. That keen, categorical mind survives on paper. Let the man fade into his work.

Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton

Any book assembled from snatches of interviews, transcribed and arranged by the editor, had better be accurate in its transcriptions. I was therefore spooked as well as appalled to see the caption for the first photograph of Truman Capote, the frontispiece to Chapter 1. The caption quotes To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically Harper Lee’s description of Dill, the character modeled on the young Truman: “His hair was snow white and stuck to his head like….”

Like what? To Kill a Mockingbird says duck-fluff. But here in cold print, George Plimpton’s book says dandruff.

Like Auden, Truman Capote was an enfant terrible who became in many ways more terrible as he grew older. He had several handicaps, in addition to being a literary prodigy: he was very short (5’3″), he had a high-pitched voice, and he was gay. Furthermore, his mother and her new husband spent their time gadding about New York, leaving Truman with relatives. Some were loving. Some were less tolerant of the fey child.

The observations of various family members about him, presented with no editorial comment, make the wretchedness of his youth sufficiently clear. God help any artist, let alone a gay one, born into such a family. It’s no wonder he dreamed of somewhere different, a glamorous world like the one where his mother spent her time. (And where she ultimately committed suicide.)

He had several important same-gender relationships, which get some coverage here. One was with a married man who had four children — a liaison many people disapproved of, on account of wrecking the marriage. Yet Capote helped raise the daughter of his lover, and her account of the incident is loving, honest, and in many ways positive. Her parents had been wretched together — no surprise, if dad’s a closeted gay man. And Capote treated her with unstinting kindness.

He published some short stories, a few novellas, some reportage for the New Yorker, and the monumental In Cold Blood. He was a disciplined writer — at least early in his career. He became a favorite of high society, although he never seemed able or willing to make the distinctions between old money, new money, and the merely famous. He pursued them all. He became something like a pet to a number of rich women.

And then he published an excerpt from his mysterious magnum opus, Answered Prayers, a roman à clef, in which he repeated half a dozen items of gossip about high-society people he knew.

The freezeout was instant and almost unanimous. Capote spent the rest of his life in emotional exile, and he went downhill fast. Drugs, alcohol, all the usual self-destructive substances. The account of his death given by his friend Joanne Carson (ex-wife of Johnny) is utterly lovely, but I am more inclined to believe what she told the police — that he died alone. He left a key to an unidentified safe-deposit box, where the full manuscript of Answered Prayers is supposed to be stored. All that has been found is a few chapters. The safe-deposit box has never been located.

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman

Raymond Chandler was a man of mixed loyalties. Although he was born in Chicago, he was raised and educated in Britain after the age of 7. He worked as a civil servant and a reporter in England, then returned to the US where he ultimately made quite a success as an accountant, until he was fired for alcoholism in his early 40s. Only then did he devote himself to writing. He began an affair with the magnetic Cissy, a beautiful married woman 18 years his senior, and supported her for three years before he married her. But he continued to live with his domineering Irish mother until her death when he was 34. Only then did he marry Cissy.

This book documents not only their relationship, but also the author’s search for clues to their relationship. The technique can work well in good hands, and there is plenty to search for in tracing their many addresses. (They moved almost annually.) But Freeman is repetitive and not especially reflective. However, she builds a convincing case for Chandler as a kind of knight in shining armor, with a strong psychological need to rescue damsels in distress. Frankly, reading about their sometimes obsessive relationship, I got the sense that he needed to be held in a kind of abjection to a woman.

Cissy’s long illness and death took its toll, and so did Chandler’s alcoholism. He was lost without her. He left his estate in a dreadful muddle because of it. And of course his health was wrecked by alcohol.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

This fascinating history traces the 1853 cholera epidemic in London. The author provides plenty of social and medical context, includes analyses of how the best intentions (coupled with ignorance) resulted in thousands of deaths, and profiles the men who worked to discover how the disease was transmitted and where the source was. The book is full of gastrointestinal horrors, people living in filth and poverty, and entire families dying within days. It is considerably less depressing to read than the three biographies of writers.

So, what books are you reading? Anything you recommend?