Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind? Tatiana and Krista Hogan share a portion of their brains, but to what extant do they share their minds as well? The scientific implications are, of course, tremendous, but as I writer I wonder about the subjective experience of these [...]]]> Keeping my brain whirring this week around the web:

Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?
Tatiana and Krista Hogan share a portion of their brains, but to what extant do they share their minds as well? The scientific implications are, of course, tremendous, but as I writer I wonder about the subjective experience of these two little girls.

The Curse of the Appropriate Man by Lynn Freed
Restrained, streamlined short stories about the surprises of beauty and plainness, the sacrifice of passion for security, and the isolation of growing up, with themes of sexuality and privilege.

Judge John Hodgman
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember my love of TV judge shows. John Hodgman’s podcast takes this model to the realm of those annoying disagreements that people have and can argue about for years. Funniest of the episodes so far is the one about whether metafictional devices ruin entertainment. Other arguments settled by Judge Hodgman include whether the built-in soap dispenser on a kitchen sink should be filled with dish soap or hand soap and whether a machine gun is a robot. The kitchen sink was oddly engrossing for me — I read all kinds of relationship dynamics into the disagreement, sensing that the husband (who wanted it to be filled with hand soap) places his desires above all, down to insisting that something obviously meant for one purpose be used for another.

I’ve just started reading The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll, and at about 75 pages in, I knew I needed to come up with a counterpart to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the effervescent ingenue who brings magic to the life of some world-weary boring [...]]]>

Associate Professor Stefane August, Brooding Mentor Dream Boat

I’ve just started reading The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll, and at about 75 pages in, I knew I needed to come up with a counterpart to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the effervescent ingenue who brings magic to the life of some world-weary boring guy. The woman in the equation — she could be either an unlucky-in (or just bored-with)-love woman who is past her ingenue days or an ingenue who has come into full awareness of her vitality — unexpectedly gets swept up by a force of nature that I am hereafter calling the Brooding Mentor Dream Boat.

He’s handsome; he’s older; he has Things to Teach. He finds the heroine irresistible, perhaps inexplicably to the reader, and always inexplicably to the heroine. He has an appropriately dreamy name. In The Marriage of Sticks, it’s Hugh Oakley, and the woman he has ensnared with his crotch/ego is Miranda Romanac, a rare book dealer. He’s married; she feels guilty but not guilty enough to resist him. Because he’s so dreamy.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sexually, he was marvelous because he had had so much experience. He admitted for years women had drifted in and out of his life like incense. His wife knew about many of these affairs but they had come to a truce about them: so long as he was discreet and never brought home any part of these other relationships, Charlotte turned a blind eye….

If that was true, why had he allowed me to come into his apartment?

“Because I was already gone for you by then. Gone like never before. I would have done anything. I broke every one of my rules.”

“Why, Hugh? Why me after all those other women? The way you describe some of them, they were incredible.”

“There’s never a satisfying answer to that. No matter what I say, it won’t assure you or lessen your doubts. Love is like an autistic child when it comes to giving good explanations.”

Yep. But why, Hugh? You’re so amazing and dream boaty, and I’m just little old me! OK, so I am a successful business owner who is an expert on rare books and manuscripts whom you met at a dinner party to which I was invited because the hostess thinks I am smart and fascinating and all that, but WHY ME?

I have a feeling that Hugh is a Mary Sue character for Carroll — a “Gary Stu,” as some call them.

I keep reading reviews of The Marriage of Sticks the praise the poetry of Carroll’s prose, but to me, it seems very utilitarian. And the dialogue? As you can read for yourself — not the most breezy. Still, I’ll stick it out and report back to you.

Can anyone else identify some Brooding Mentor Dream Boats?

Number four on the American Library Association’s list of Banned and Challenged Classics is Beloved by Toni Morrison, a book that fearlessly plumbs a question that most Americans don’t want to think about: “What does being a slave do [...]]]>

Slave Trade Ledger, from the Special Collections at Wofford College, used under Creative Commons license

Number four on the American Library Association’s list of Banned and Challenged Classics is Beloved by Toni Morrison, a book that fearlessly plumbs a question that most Americans don’t want to think about: “What does being a slave do to a human being?” I have even said that: “I can’t imagine what that does to be a human being, to be owned and used as property.”

But it is the job of the writer to imagine — to imagine the unimaginable, the horrific. Great literature often lives on the edge of the lurid, and in the hands of a less skilled writer, the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who would rather do the unthinkable than allow her family to return to slavery, could be more than just simply offensive. It could be repellant and gratuitous. This is a story you only dare to tell if you have confidence that you can make it art, that you can make it true, that it is a story that lives in you and you can make live in others.

This week is Banned Books Week, a week to celebrate and advocate intellectual freedom. On the American Library Association’s list of Banned and/or Challenged Books are several that are some of my favorite novels.

I was surprised to see that The Great Gatsby [...]]]>

Charged Vessel by Tracey Holland, http://www.flickr.com/photos/traceyholland/, used under Creative Commons license

This week is Banned Books Week, a week to celebrate and advocate intellectual freedom. On the American Library Association’s list of Banned and/or Challenged Books are several that are some of my favorite novels.

I was surprised to see that The Great Gatsby sits on top of that list. It was required reading in my junior year of high school, and I continue to re-read it ever other year or so because I find it a heartbreaking story of American longing. I never want to read the end because I don’t want Gatsby to die, but it feels so inevitable — I know it happens even if I don’t read it.

This book, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, play a part in my novel Sliver of Light. I’ve been reading young adult novels lately, and I’ve found that most of the characters are terribly interested in literature or classical music or art, or any of the nerdy stuff my friends and I liked in high school. When I was about twelve I read a book called My Beautiful Fat Friend several times, mostly because the main character liked opera and could sing Pamina’s part in The Magic Flute.

A Portrait of the Artist is used in the novel as a symbol of a particular type of man — or person, really — who wants to be an artist, who even thinks that they are an artist deep down inside, but never do anything about it. They feel like Stephen Dedalus in the early part of the book but never reach the stage of self-transformation that Stephen does. And they always have excuses and self-pity.

Another book in my novel is one that I am surprised is not on the list, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. If you are a sensitive reader, there is something wrenching in the empathy you feel for Esther Greenwood. It would be unwise to hand this book over to a teenage girl if you don’t know her well — and it’s precisely what the A Portrait of the Artist-toting manchild does in Sliver of Light.

I think that’s what behind the impetus to ban books — the recognition that reading them can be a powerful experience, even an uncomfortable experience. When I was a kid, there was a song they taught us Sunday school that haunts me. It taught: “Be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear, be careful little mouth what you say.” It’s only a short jump to “Be careful little heart what you feel” and “Be careful little brain what you think.”

Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in [...]]]>

"Not quite Sophie Beer" by Dan Foy, www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/, used under Creative Commons License

Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in literature for young adults, and claims that these “problem books”  ”appeal to the worst in every teenager.” He prefers classics, such as Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, which deal with problems of adolescence at a “prophylactic distance.”

I could easily make fun the phrase “prophylactic distance” and respond to Mills’s argument, but I realized, as I read the essay, that it would be pointless. Mills and I have a difference at the foundation of our views about what the purpose of young adult fiction is. I’ve come to think of it as reformative versus formative.

In reformative young adult fiction, readers are presented with an idealized vision of adolescence. The main characters in these books experience some difficulties without getting too sullied by them. They do not despair. They do not rebel in any significant or dangerous way but learn from their troubles and come out better for having had a life lesson. They are adolescents as adults wish them to be: curious and seeking their individuality but not hurting themselves or their parents in the process. These books depict adolescence in a muted way — the troubles of growing up are there, but they are easily met and resolved. The overriding virtue of these books, as Mills sees it, is their virtue: they are “morally serious.” I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with books like these; some of the books Mills cites are favorites of mine, like Anne of Green Gables and His Dark Materials.

However, I don’t think books like these offer a full complement of experience to contemporary young readers. As a young adult, I adored classic books about teenagers, but I also read Judy Bloom and V.C. Andrews– and classics that would probably fail in Mills’s scrutiny, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar. As the reformative point of view has it, books like the latter indulge the teenager’s propensity to be self-centered, self-pitying, values-questioning, and, ultimately self-sufficient. Reformers like Mills do not want adolescent problems to be too “tawdry,” and he does not want those problems to be solved without God and family. But as I see it, self-pity, misery, desperate longing, foolish experimentation, and real problems, are natural parts of adolescence, and to deny the (sometimes uncomfortably graphic) depiction of adolescence from the adolescent point of view (as much as adult writers like me can recapture it) is to deny teenagers the reality of their experience.

And this is key: So much of how teenagers are regarded is as a sort of liminal species whose concerns are both temporary and not as important as they think they are. Recently, my therapist asked me what characterized therapy that I had responded well to in the past — I thought back to being sixteen and sullen, of being twenty and scared, in a psychologists’ office, and the common factor worked its way through the memories of talking and crying into the foreground: My problems had been taken seriously. I was not treated as if I was in a stage, as if my mind’s workings (and non-workings, as it were) weren’t important as long as that mind was still forming. I wasn’t temporary, a rebellious teenager or a fickle young woman (as I had been characterized), to the therapists, or at least they didn’t treat me that way.

And that’s what, from a formative point of view, I think the best contemporary young adult fiction does. It doesn’t treat teenagers as if their minds are too fragile to contemplate themselves, as if their angst is unfounded or exaggerated. It says, “You are not alone or abnormal.” (Or in the case of V.C. Andrews, “See, you’re not abnormal. This is abnormal!”) And it sometimes even says, “Yes, things could be worse.”

“… We should not grieve, should we, baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make — you didn’t know what: — in short, he was [...]]]>

“… We should not grieve, should we, baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make — you didn’t know what: — in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.”
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and was amused to find a completely accurate portrayal of new motherhood in it. The heroine’s sister, Celia, is the mother of what she regards as the most remarkable being in the world, and is content to sit and stare at him, to talk of almost nothing but him, and can’t think that anything is truly wrong in the world as long as her baby is safe and happy. She is harmlessly insipid in her new motherhood, and I understand every inch of her silliness.

I laughed when I read this because I’d been calling Mateo “my little Buddha” because of the serenity of his expressions. Honestly, it is quite hard to work on anything when I could happily watch him sleep and talk of nothing but him — how he has begun to smile and outgrow newborn clothes, how he watches me intently and studies his father’s face.

It is a kind of devotion that is difficult to write about — both because it is so consumingly intense and because I know it can be tiresome to people whose existences aren’t anchored to my own little “center and poise of the world.”