OF A GOLDEN AGE

Chuck Close is a hero of mine, both on a personal level and an artistic level. His massive, hyperrealistic portraits of people both famous and not are some of my favorite pieces — completed obsessively, layer by layer, on a huge scale that demands close scrutiny. After a traumatic brain incident changed his body and mind, he took up equally massive portraits done in grids of concentric circles and I marvel at them, moreso because of the contrast with his previous work. I have, in my life, gained one friend and lost one friend because of a shared love of and a passionate disagreement over Chuck Close.

Oliver Sacks’ wonderful piece on “face-blindness” in the latest New Yorker contains a worthy Chuck Close shoutout that filled my heart to the brim. (Prosopagnosia refers to the inability to commit a face to memory, resulting in forgetting people you know, especially out of the usual context of classroom or workplace.)

The artist Chuck Close, who is famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe, lifelong prosopagnosia. He believes it has played a crucial role in driving his unique artistic vision. “I don’t know who anyone is and essentially have no memory at all for people in real space,” he says. “But when I flatten them out in a photograph I can commit that image to memory.”

Maybe three dimensions are too many for Close’s brain to digest, like a set of equations with too many variables to be soluble. Contrast this with Terry Gross’s recent interview with stereo-vision newcomer Sue Barry. As a cross-eyed child, Barry went through surgery after surgery to attempt to fix the way her eyes looked, but they never achieved the ability to move in seamless sync until she was well into middle age. Before, the world looked flat to her the way a depthless Magic Eye drawing looks to normal viewers. Afterward, she could finally, you know, see the sailboat.

Nytpicker pointed out a phenomenon I could never have imagined: Gender disparity in the obituaries published by the New York Times. The nytpicks quote obituaries editor Bill McDonald’s 2006 statement that because of the equality gap of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the prominent people dying today are mostly white men. So they checked back 20 years to see if the disparity was even greater then:

Of 691 NYT obituaries published in 1990, only 92 of them were of women — almost exactly replicating the 2010 numbers.

So what’s going on? Are the world’s prominent women — the ones deserving of NYT obituaries — simply living forever? In the last two decades, has there been zero growth in the number of notable women who’ve died?

I can see both sides of this, but the numbers warrant some examination. Would it be morbid to admit I look forward to a more equal obituaries section in the future?

Last time I complained about slogging through a dud, and the best way to cleanse the ol’ book palate is with a real barn-burner. In a pile of stuff on one of my shelves I found a book my mom lent me: The Master Butchers Singing Club. My mom reads more than anyone I know and she has great taste, so I take her recommendations seriously.

Few books summarize themselves in a few lines better than this one:

No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, [Delphine] wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman [...] A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.

This is a book of one-way loves that sometimes meet and sometimes don’t. It is also a story of small-town life before, during, and after the Depression; during and after both World Wars; and for a few close families of outsiders. Erdrich writes from some of her experiences as the descendant of German immigrants to the midwest and of butchers and of vaudeville. Her writing is rich and articulate without seeming stuffy, and matches nicely with the almost Steinbecky setting of this book, the dusty, wheaty flats of North Dakota.

It also has shades of Carnivále, HBO’s groundbreaking and therefore short-lived show about a Depression-era traveling show. To watch a small town is like watching a close-knit group of travelers, because everyone is moving forward together and in inadvertent lockstep by necessity. When one store succeeds or fails it can take the town with it; a tragedy in one family can make ripples through everyone’s lives. It’s difficult to write about this closeness and the way it bears out without becoming melodramatic or even maudlin, and Erdrich really shocked me with her skill. She even brings in a VERY LAST SECOND SURPRISE and it is the most natural, moving, sensible closure I can imagine for the novel.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

It’s news because it isn’t really news!

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.

In this week’s “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, a woman gets reacquainted with her mentally disabled brother and must help from a distance when he gets lost at a faraway airport once he returns home:

And then I thought of the only person I knew in Boston with whom I had had any contact, my senior-year prom date. Bill had been more a friend rather than a boyfriend, and he had known my mother, my sisters and [my brother] John. A few times, he and his wife had unexpectedly taken John to dinner.

“Bill,” I said, “It’s Lorna. I’m so, so sorry to wake you up. I have an emergency. I don’t know what to do. I need some help.” I explained the situation and, yes, dear reader, I asked this guy I barely knew anymore if he would get out of bed, get dressed, drive 45 minutes to the airport, pick up my brother, take him to his home and host him overnight until we could solve the problem the next day. He agreed.

Bill picked up John. By now it was 1 a.m. My brother ended up sleeping on his couch. The next day, St. Joan sorted out the baggage issues and got John safely home. I think I sent Bill a fruit basket. What I had asked was well beyond the call of anyone’s duty. Sometimes people just do the right thing, and we don’t know why. They just do.

You know, this is why we all keep going.

My beloved alma mater (Beloit College), and my beloved advisor (Tom McBride), each year release the Mindset List, a hilarious and insulting rigmarole of what this year’s entering students don’t know about. With such startling revelations as “55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties,” the list reads like an annual scanning of the “Events of 1992″ page on Wikipedia.

I hate this list and it makes me mad, mostly because it doesn’t actually build the understanding it pretends to aim toward. More and more people have no guilt or shame whatsoever in their total lack of knowledge of what came before they were born, and have a borderline-adversarial relationship with the interests of their parents or other adults. We build more lateral connections, with peers and friends and even trusted strangers via blogs or TV, than we do vertical connections, with relatives, educators, and so forth.

The list’s makers insist it is only to give a frame of reference to adults who do not wish to sound irrelevant to the young people in their lives. Yet all the list does is remind everyone how old they are and subtly imply that young people are worse off for their level of knowledge. It makes both sides defensive and both take issue with the items on the list.

The New Yorker asks if the Mindset List is still relevant:

The Beloit list has always been a bit musty, often trading in cultural totems as stale as coffee in a faculty lounge. (See all the lists here.) The reader—young or old, hip or otherwise—can’t help but squirm at lines like: “70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.” But for the class of 2014, for whom “‘digital’ has always been in the cultural DNA,” the list seems particularly outmoded. If nothing else, I suspect that kids now know more, rather than less, about these types of cultural trivia and historical fragments, because as each year passes, the information becomes so much easier to obtain.

I wouldn’t go that far. But I do question the list’s relevance every year. Even if a few people my age at Beloit thought of Paul Newman as “the salad dressing guy” (an item of note on our list), that made me feel deeply embarrassed by their ignorance. The Beloit students I know are also embarrassed that the Mindset List is our college’s only entrance into the national consciousness.

This New York Times story on parents postponing kindergarten for a year is the latest example of insane, one-up-oriented 21st-century parenting technique.

“I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”

Or this:

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

The article goes on to explain that there’s added pressure to hold children back a year since if they enter at the correct age they’ll be up to 18 months younger than other children in the same class, which can have serious effects on personal development.

I didn’t go to kindergarten and started first grade instead. Because of the genetic lottery, I always was the tallest girl in my class regardless of age, so size didn’t have any effect on me after starting school early — I can’t speak to that part and do not underestimate how children may get picked on or left out because they are smaller.

But in terms of maturity or life experience, simply being older doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Someone just like me who had started kindergarten at age 6 would be 19 at her high-school graduation and 23 if she followed it directly with a bachelor’s degree.

She would enter the world of entry-level work two full years after I did and compete against both those who had gone to work right away and those who had spent a year doing community service or some other kind of transitional experience. By age 25 I’ll have four years of full-time work experience where this theoretical person will have two.

More importantly, Americans fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in every core academic subject, and to suggest that our children aren’t capable of or couldn’t find happiness and fulfillment in starting to read or count at the same time they have for decades is the same old overindulgent American helicopter-parenting crapola.

We want our children to be bigger and stronger than other children but don’t mind that they will start their learning and organized socializing a full year later? That sounds like a formula for creating bullies.

Is the title ironic? I will never know.

Writing reviews of mediocre books is the worst, because I don’t even feel moved to say anything. I’d never heard of Judy Blume’s 1983 novel Smart Women, which speaks to its (un)importance in the world — if I listed all the Judy Blume books I’ve read and truly loved, it would take forever and be annoying. But those are children’s or YA books, and Blume’s heyday as a writer for adults didn’t come until over a decade later with the impressive Summer Sisters. In fact, this book came out around the same time as Superfudge, which is also a book I loved.

Middle-aged divorcees Margo and BB become friends and then lose each other when one dates the other’s ex-husband: Really? It doesn’t play out much more interestingly than that in the long form, and I was bored by all the main characters, who were either stockish or actively obnoxious. Margo’s teenage daughter Michelle had enough attitude to fuel several nu metal albums and was way, way beyond the behavior of anyone I’ve ever met, even AS a teenage girl. Margo did gross things and BB was a total headcase, neither of them acting these parts out in a relatable way.

I don’t know, it was a fast read and wrapped up pretty nicely, but it all felt stupid and pat. During the ongoing conversation about the equally pat and indulgent qualities of Eat, Pray, Love, I wished this tale of middle-age crisis had more substance. Instead, it had all the me-first priorities without the beautiful locales.

On the other hand, reading Smart Women made me want to run back into the arms of my favorite female writer — ANNE LAMOTT. She has a new one out and I need to get my hands on it. It is also about a mother and troubled teenage daughter, but I know Lamott can handle that relationship expertly.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

I’m typing and deleting and retyping ideas here as I reach for an analogy to suit this book. It is one part I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier’s shocking novel of a boy’s series of psychological . . . revelations? But the other part, I’m not sure of — I think Ishiguro is going for the measured feeling of a detective novel, the kind of detached logician embodied by Sherlock Holmes but also represented by wave after wave of Poirots and Lynleys and Morses and alikes over the years.

Ishiguro does not succeed with this book. It is a little too baffling to be fully realized or sucked into, the tone too antiseptic, the narrator too unreliable. Christopher Banks, a British expat raised in Shanghai until the disappearance of both of his parents, becomes a successful and somewhat famous detective in London before deciding he needs to return to Shanghai and find his parents after many years have passed. He doggedly insists they are still alive after twenty years and even more bafflingly is convinced he is going to play a huge role in preventing the involvement of China and Japan in both the Sino-Japanese War and the impending Second World War.

In the meantime, he has somewhat adopted a young orphan girl, and has a skittering ongoing friendship with an orphaned adult woman in London. These two characters are supposed to bear significance but are only outlined and hinted at, and they end up acting as tools for Christopher’s various instincts and strange beliefs about his life and his mission as a detective. I will not say more because the events are confusing enough to read for yourself, let alone to have spoiled in advance by a review.

I don’t know, as usual, Ishiguro writes beautifully and I found the book compelling if not that rewarding. Will it stay with me the way the other three books I’ve read have? No. And in fact, it feels like a rehash of the tone of Remains of the Day mixed with the political subtexts of both Remains and Artist of the Floating World. The raw materials of Ishiguro’s story are exciting and fresh — he purports to write “international novels,” and does so, repeatedly, more successfully than any author I can think of — but something about When We Were Orphans made me feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And Christopher Banks absolutely made my skin crawl.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

This is a fun, fast little book about English and some of its requisite quirks. I liked the title when I spotted it at some thrift store or book sale, and Richard Lederer is a pretty famous wordplayer with a fair passel of cachet on these matters.

I was expecting more of a simple list-like book of examples of usage or something like that, but Lederer writes in essay form about some positive and negative attributes of the English language. He offers up many examples of the phenomena he describes and draws conclusions about, for instance, the way English accepts words from all other languages and absorbs them into common usage.

He makes some recommendations for writing, too, promoting both poetry and effective, simple language:

Here is a sound rule: Use small, old words where you can. If a long word says just what you want to say, do not fear to use it. But know that our tongue is rich in crisp, brisk, swift, short words. Make them the spine and the heart of what you speak and write. Short words are like fast friends. They will not let you down.

The part I liked best was when Lederer commented on which words derive from which languages — Anglo-Saxon terms are typically brief, French terms more gestural or figurative, and Latin or Greek terms more precise. Think about fear, terror, and trepidation, or ask, question, and interrogate.

Lederer devotes the last dozen or so pages of the book to a series of notable quotations about language and words, some from writers I’ve never heard of. My favorite of these is from Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle:

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

Words are subject to trendiness and overuse the same as any fashion or food or occupation. To look at language both as a fresh, living organism and one of humankind’s most deeply rooted histories takes a big-picture view that we sometimes lose in an era when new (absurd) words crop up every day and more and more people fall out of love with high-quality writing and communication.

What we construct with words can feel new forever — Carlyle’s line still zings even from the 1800s, and even if Shakespeare’s language trips you up sometimes, his turns of phrase are often timeless.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.