Nonsuch Book

the happy life. the search for contentment in the modern world ;-) by david malouf

The seeming cultural imperative of happiness. The draw to it or a creation of it as strong in westernized culture as the draw to extroversion. The discussion of happiness, one would assume a preoccupation as old as man, feels even more present in recent years. It has become a popular "project." It has become frequently linked to our corporeal existence and all our accoutrement - green living and feeding your body well will bring you happiness as will cleaning your closet. The removal of physical clutter will apparently reveal much of what is required for spiritual or psychic equilibrium.

I poke fun at the self-help sector of the happiness trade, and yet I find myself peeking in these books and magazines and whatnot at the library and bookstore. Hoping for something more than I think I will find there. Because we all want to be happy, don't we? And wouldn't it all be so much easier if happiness were somehow quantifiable and not something with which to wrestle indefinitely? So when a copy of David Malouf's collected essays on the subject came through my mail slot from the publisher a little while back, I was pleased. They may have put an emoticon on the smart man's book cover, but I expected more from this than the material available to me in the Target book section breeze-through during a Sunday afternoon quest for cleaning products. And I was justified in my expectations.

These five linked essays, easily read in an afternoon, ask "what exactly are we looking for when we chase happiness?" Widespread poverty, illness, and famine do not threaten us as they have in the past. Yet so few are fulfilled. A desire for immediate gratification prompts frenetic quests for what we term happiness. Is happiness the same thing as contentment? Why do we have such outrageous stress levels? Malouf outlines our relationship with happiness through history from creation myths through Jefferson's assertion that the "pursuit of happiness" as a right and finally landing at an examination of how the increasingly impersonal nature of contemporary life leaves many a bit unhinged.

The premise of these pieces is deceptively simple, and some could say lacking the depth that the framing ideas promise. But I found this collection extremely pleasing. The beginning of thoughts, of a conversation, and lovely in its erudite simplicity. 

From The Happy Life:

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

"Jeremy Bentham's proposition in An Introduction to the Principles of Moral Legislation (1789) - "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" - has become essential to any serious political platform."

"What the classical schools offered their adherents was the removal from their lives of the uncontrolled, their vulnerability to what was "external" - external, that is, to the Self: dependency on others, fear of Fate or the Gods, fear of death. Happiness lay in self-containment, self-sufficiency. The one thing that none of the schools doubted was the importance of the Self as the purest agency of being and its need to be protected from the distractions, the temptations and the dispersive busyness of things."

"So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomenal so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grap for and make real, we musy go on inventing ourselves."

One of the most striking features of twenty-first century living, in what we think of as our part of the world, is the return of the body as our most immediate, and in some cases our only, assurance of presence, of the rich and crowded and actively happening world-we-are-in."

"Happiness is singular; each case speaks only for itself. It is also subjective. It belongs to the world of what is felt, what cannot be presented or numbered on a scale because it cannot be seen."

the nonfiction

With little time on my hands recently, I have found that the amount of nonfiction I read has been steadily increasing. No narrative arc to follow. I can read multiple books at a time easily. Chapters often stand alone successfully, allowing me to jump around in a text and select that which interests me most. Skimming often. But a few in the last month or two have held my attention entirely.

• Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett - Aggressively challenges certain linguistic assumptions and shows how waning linguistic diversity corresponds with waning cultural diversity.
• "Multiplication is for White People" by Lisa Delpit - There is no achievement gap at birth. Enough said.
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt -
"His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation."
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer - From the Author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A brilliant, fast-paced read that I loved for the fact that it employed the latest findings in neuroscience to champion my own personal and constant self-justification of the conflation of reason and emotion.
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer - Came at a time when a friend at work shared a belief that creativity is not an innate gift but something that can be developed. A belief I share and found echoed here. But especially loved the focus upon creativity and productivity - making a vision real. It takes hard work, a cultivation of one's creativity and not a muse tapping you on the shoulder beckoning you into an afternoon of daydreaming. Which I, of course, have no objection to. But wish to touch the best my head holds in many instances.

curriculum vitae: a volume of autobiography by muriel spark

Back in January, I enjoyed Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark. Immensely, as I have enjoyed all her fiction. But I ended my post on the book on an odd note about where author intrudes upon work. (Can't believe I am electing to quote myself.)

"Inside of this engaging and wickedly funny novel, we find Spark's own story written with the buffer of years between her own experience and Fleur's. Where art is established as the redeeming value of a life, a choice has been made in this regard, and the end product is worth the sacrifice of conventional comforts. But the unsettling part is not that choice itself but the feeling that Spark has re-written her own pain in order to put a shine on her own legacy. Fair enough. She owns both sets of material in question. But there is always something a little sad to me behind her sharp intelligence, her simple, well-phrased bluntness. As if her directness is not intended as bare-faced honesty but an attempt to disarm to discourage a deeper look behind her constructions."

This opinion of Spark was recently intensified when I read her slim volume of autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. From the very beginning where Spark repeats more than a few times that she is writing to offer facts in order to correct the false things that have been written of her, one's guard is up. The charming but obviously edited details of her childhood are seemingly calm and direct but readers of Spark will immediately be suspicious of what lurks behind, what remains unsaid, and waiting for the moment when the lady will pounce. It is a slow wind-up but Spark eventually unleashes a little retribution upon those who have wronged her all while preserving the image of her own inaccessible self. Fascinating. Can't be sure if she underestimates the intelligence of readers by offering this or she simply offers the story she chooses without regret or excuses. And does not give a damn whether you choose to accept her version of her life or not. The latter I think.

What I concluded after finishing the book was that the closest we might get to the essence of Muriel Spark is not here or in interviews or any of the personal papers she leaves behind but in her works of fiction. In Fleur Talbot in Loitering With Intent. In the students that surrounded Jean Brodie (the section of CV where she discusses her teacher that influenced the Brodie character is a highlight of the book). And I am sure in other places where I have not ventured yet. And the other thing that I concluded is that I simply do not want to know more than she wished us to know. As much as I enjoyed the recent biography by Martin Stannard, I felt awkward reading it as if peering in someone's windows out of untoward curiosity. Where one would feel shamed if caught.

moonwalking with einstein by joshua foer

"even if you embrace your own nerdiness..." is scrawled across the upper right corner of my card full of notes from my read of Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Are they my words or the author's? It doesn't seem to matter as the thing that drew me to this book is articulated as clearly by Foer as the thought ran through my own head. To what extent would one reveal their inner geek for cognitive gain?

"The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" reads the subtitle. I think most people would admit to wanting to improve their memory. Maybe in the practical sense of remembering car keys and appointments as I fear this book is possibly (and inappropriately) to be hyped but on another level in the sense of expanding one's intelligence or accessing one's native abilities depending upon viewpoint. When Foer visits the U.S. Memory Championship to write a piece for Salon, he is both drawn and repelled by the participants, confiding that although comfortable with his inner nerd, he is clearly not on the full-blown level of awkwardness that he is witnessing. And yet by book's end, in full fledged training for this same contest, he hilariously finds himself in an odd place.

"Not long after returning from England, I found myself sitting on a folding chair in the basement of my parents' home at 6:45 a.m., wearing underpants, earmuffs, and memory goggles, with a printout of eight hundred random digits in my lap and an image in my mind's eye of a lingerie-clad garden gnome (52632) suspended over my grandmother's kitchen table. I suddenly looked up, wondering - remarkably, for the first time - what in the world I was doing with myself."

What I have described so far is just the engaging frame of an examination of what happens in a world where memory has migrated from the interior to the exterior. Where we access information not from our own minds but from the printed word, the computer screen, the phone in hand. Pre-Gutenberg humanity had the ability to preserve memory through an oral tradition slowly lost to us as print became more accessible and literacy rates rose, but Foer is quick to illustrate that those structures for memorization from the ancient Greeks and others are still accessible but only practiced by those he describes as the attendees of a Weird Al Yankovic concert.

The book wanders as effortlessly as great dinner conversation through Foer's training and the subculture of mental athletes right alongside often astute observations about the state of education as it skirts the value of memory and loses a core knowledge base in favor of amorphously defined higher level thinking objectives, savants, linguistics, the occasional superficiality of our reading, a random access indexing system and more. It is fascinating. Quite the page turner. But so over-archingly broad that one feels he could have written for years and not arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. Both because there is not one and because the subject is unwieldy in its scope.

Thankfully, the structure imposed by the actual championship competitions rein in the ever-expanding but fun conversation Foer brings to the table. This book is quietly witty and engaging and will have you secretly indulging your own geek fantasies whether those be memorizing countless digits of pi or all of Shakespeare's sonnets. And musing about how both remembering and forgetting define our uniqueness, our humanity. 

Read for a TLC Book Tour. Find links to more opinions here.

clandestine in chile by gabriel garcia marquez

In 1985, filmmaker Miguel Littin disguised himself as an Uruguayan businessman, and snuck back into Chile after twelve years of exile. Accompanied by three international film crews, each supposedly there making films promoting Chilean tourism, Littin sought to assemble a documentary film that would show the world the dark truths of Pinochet's dominion. After Littin's safe exit from Chile after weeks of filming, he sat down with Gabriel Garcia Marquez to recount the experience, yielding approximately 18 hours of recorded conversation which became condensed into this 116 page book. Of oddness. And slightly annoying vanity.

So the story is told as if in Littin's own voice but is clearly stylistically the voice of Garcia Marquez. The tone is serious, asking the reader to believe in a danger facing Littin and his very large, very well-financed entourage that hardly exists. Littin's cab changes, hotel changes, fake passport and wife and other cloak and dagger type details take on the form of drama queen gone wild, and assume comedic qualities in which I found only small amusement. There is an emotional attachment here to home and hearth for which one can have some sympathy, but these details of the face of Chile become muted by the larger assertions of self concern. My family. My friends. My childhood. My film career. Et cetera. There is no terror, no horror, no real indication of Pinochet's crimes. 

Now perhaps, as suggested by Francisco Goldman in the introduction to the NYRB edition, Garcia Marquez did not find it necessary to recount Pinochet's atrocities when they were already well-known. Or perhaps this was Garcia Marquez just using the weight of his fame as a writer of fiction to publish a threat, a slap in the face to Pinochet. A threat whose very existence prompted Pinochet and his cohorts to seize and burn 15,000 copies of the book upon publication. But let's be clear. This is no "classic of modern reportage" where Garcia Marquez returns to his journalism roots. This is personal, and as Goldman astutely concludes, more about the ways that an older generation of political dissidents align themselves with power especially as when compared to the more strident voice of someone like Roberto Bolano. I'll stop here before revealing anymore of my leftist leanings. This was not a bad book. This was a weird book. A curiosity you can run through in a short amount of time if interested. 

angie lewin: plants and places

Beautiful, luxurious books. Books that we call coffee table books. Books that are as much or more eye candy as they are word-laden. Irresistible frequently but to many only justifiable in their decadence and expense as gifts. Especially during the holiday season. I have purchased a few for gifts this Christmas but the one I would most likely keep for myself is from Merrell. Angie Lewin: Plants and Places with text by Leslie Geddes-Brown.

Botanical images are a particular favorite of mine, but there is something enchanting about Lewin's work that is often missing elsewhere. It is neither faithful reproduction nor whimsical reinterpretation, but homage to the intricate details of nature, once removed from realistic images. Paintings, sketches, woodcuts, collages are all contained in this new book that is divided into locations of inspiration - Coast, Woodland and Hedgerow, River and Loch, Meadow and Garden and finally a return to Studio for the end.

Her work has been compared to Albrecht Durer's watercolour and gouache painting The Large Turf, the work of wood engravers Thomas Bewick and Samuel Palmer, and other 20th century masters of the tiniest of details. Lewin's intense observations of the smallest objects in nature, and the repetition of those features in textiles and prints, have the effect of bringing one's face right to the edge of the reproduced object.

Enjoy not only the large collection of images in this book but also the process for the artist and the peeks into her studio. If Lewin's work appeals to you, check out her website here, including a place to order her limited edition prints. Her fabrics may be viewed and ordered here. And her notebook designs here. Or just enjoy this lovely book.

 

5 things you didn't know about louisa may alcott + giveaway

 

As a kid, I always thought that Little Women was a great book for spunky little girls like me. Maybe my aunt told me that, maybe I came up with the idea on my own. Then as an older reader, I somewhere picked up that Little Women was no longer cool to claim as a favorite. And I did not think much about it after that.

Then, in the last few years, Louisa May Alcott has emerged as not what we thought she was. An author my rule-breaking, irreverent side can embrace. Who wouldn't like her more picturing her writing pulp fiction about transvestites while humming on opium, distracted from the writing task at hand only by naughty daydreams about Thoreau and Emerson? Perhaps I am getting a bit carried away, but I have been curious about the biography by Harriet Reisen that came out last year. Since I read about it at the Wall Street Journal.

So today I hear from the lovely folks at Picador who ask if I want to give away a copy of the just released in paperback book. Hmmm. Yes, I think so. As a matter of fact, the only thing that gave me pause was the cover. I get what they are selling but less precious would have suited me better.

If you would like a chance to win, please leave a comment here by end of day Wednesday. My son will pick a winner and announce on Thursday. Good luck!

Update: AliBird from Flirting with Fiction wins!

the boy who harnessed the wind by william kamkwamba and bryan mealer

There is so much of William Kamkwamba's story that I love. The strength and courage it required to face the consequences of famine in his native Malawi. The hope he had to muster in order to embark on a project of such ambition in a time of such hopelessness. The way in which he harnessed not just the wind with his windmill but both the magic of his culture married to the power of his own intellect. This video from 2007 captures how unique an individual he is.

However, and I really hate to have to say this, there was not as much to love about the book as I had hoped. Don't get me wrong. I am not sorry to have read it, but just like my experience with Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, I felt a disconnect from the person as his story is told by another that fails to capture the real spirit of the subject. We read sitting a level away, and even though the book delivers the expected emotional impact, there seems to sometimes be something missing, and even more bothersome, something manufactured about the content. The other unsatisfying parts (that prompted me to skim a little) were the technical explanations of the process which were of little interest to me. Love this story but only just liked the book. In parts.

Don't let this keep you from the book though. It is a wonderful story and you may find that it suits you well. Please check out these links to see and read more about William Kamkwamba's ongoing quest to improve the quality of life in Malawi.

• TEDGlobal Conference 2009 video
• William Kamkwamba's website
• The short film Moving Windmills that was turned into a feature length documentary

For synopsis and links to other reviews on this TLC Book Tours event, please click here.

lit by mary karr

 

It is easy to hate the contemporary memoir. Many an over-share of information with little relevance (or interest) to most or a maudlin stain on the page that attempts to elevate the commonplace to the unique or a crime scene for unreliable narration. These are the charges, but I find myself enjoying more and more memoirs in recent years because to me they are indistinguishable from fiction for the most part. Just a story. A condensed peek into a life, the same narrative arc as fiction, similar emotional content to fiction. So much fiction is thinly veiled autobiography anyway. Unless a memoir has skewered objective facts, the subjective realities of the genre fail to register as fault with me. So I especially appreciate the sentence with which Mary Karr begins her third memoir, Lit - "Any way I tell this story is a lie..."

Because I enjoy Karr's poetry, because this book garnered such glowing reviews, I decided to read it, but without those two factors, I would never have sought out a book pitched as the story of a recovering alcoholic who discovers God and her craft ("learning to write by learning to live.") Ouch. Her previous two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry were never on my radar. So you can imagine my surprise (and embarrassment) when I shed a few bookishly infrequent tears for the rawness of her share, especially for her relationship with her father whom she has to painfully separate from his home about a third of the way through the book to move him to a nursing home.

"We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We're like totem animals in each foreign cosmologies - like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I've turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved."

Out of context it seems a simple enough passage but within the memoir has impact from what has led to this point. Karr finds herself a part of a foreign cosmology no matter what space she occupies. She is distant from her Texas white trash, alcohol-infused upbringing. She attends graduate school where she is only required to show up a few times a year avoiding that sense of community she often views from the outside. She marries a man of aristocratic ilk whose world she fails to permeate, whose distance she mourns at the same time she intentionally distances him from the razor sharp observations to which others in the book are subject. Even the intense feelings brought on by motherhood are at times observed from a place outside herself.

For a while, the only place she fully aspires to join is the world of literature so that one sees that the title of the memoir refers to not just her frequent state of being pre-rehab but to a potential source of resolution. Seen through drunken dazes, the "nervous hospital," the trials of motherhood and troubled marriage, where the reader finally arrives with Karr seems less improbable than originally conceived as even her faith sings smartass songs of doubt. Karr's intelligence and literary occupations and eloquence make for excellent storytelling whether truth or lie.

For synopsis and links to other reviews on this TLC Book Tours event, please click here.

the sweet life in paris by david lebovitz

   

Love the photo above. Borrowed (pilfered) it from David Lebovitz's blog Living the Sweet Life in Paris because I enjoyed the idealized attachment I immediately had to the image and then laughed out loud when reading the caption, "Like most good people of Provence, she consulted the best book on authentic French cuisine available, The Sweet Life in Paris, and used my recipe." This sums up his book The Sweet Life in Paris perfectly, neither a saccharine, romanticized view of the French or a bitter indulgence of misplaced loathing. And I did mention laugh out loud funny?

It all begins as for so many with a visit and a memory:

"I had fallen in love with Paris when I had attended some advanced pastry classes at the prestigious Ecole Lenotre a few years earlier. One night after a lively dinner with friends, I was walking alone across one of the graceful bridges that cross the Seine. If you've ever walked through Paris at night, you can't help noticing that its beauty is magnified in the darkness; lights glow softly everywhere and frame the centuries-old buildings and monuments in spectacular ways. I remember that evening breathing in the damp air rising off the Seine, watching the Bateaux Parisians gliding on the river, loaded with awestruck tourists, and illuminating the monuments in their wake, the dramatic light hitting a building for just a few moments before moving on to the next."

So this statement would be like getting to know someone, the early days of dating. Well then Lebovitz actually decides to move to the city of lights after the sudden death of his partner, departing his northern California world for a fresh start in Paris. What follows is the very amusing story of how Lebovitz navigates the perplexities of his new home peppered along the way with a variety of recipes prompted from each chapter's theme. By book's end, the author's relationship with Paris has progressed from infatuation to committed relationship, successful despite the revelation of all the beloved's faults.

And the faults? Well, I particularly enjoyed reading of the author shedding his sweats and shaving and dressing quite neatly in order to take the trash out. So as not to be seen by his neighbors wearing his Sunday worst. Then there are the stories of French painters and housekeepers who seem to never want to leave your home once employed. The lack of shower curtains and the wet disgusting rags popular in French households for the required mopping up. Optional refrigeration of some foods like uh, mayonaisse and milk. Navigating the unspoken rules of obtaining less hostile customer service. Peeing in public or why the French consume tiny bits of water, don't care to use bathrooms in a host's home and have few available public toilets. And why one should not have to wait in that atrociously long line if one does not feel like it.

A perfect quick read for anyone with a sense of humor who has ever idealized what living in Paris might be like. Or foodies who would like a window into Parisian life with asides about the cuisine. If you wonder if the book could be right for you, check out Lebovitz's blog (it will make you hungry and/or inclined to cook) for the tone and type of content are the same. The smartass quality was good for me but maybe not all.

Read for the Paris in July event being hosted by Book Bath and Thyme for Tea.