Monday, August 27, 2007

Books You Haven't Read (Maybe)

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle blog (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-sellers-books-that-just-keep.html) lists ten best-sellers you have probably never heard of or read. Here's the list with sales or in-print figures:

1. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (614,000 copies sold)
2. Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. (325,000 in print)
3. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (close to 600,000 in print)
4. Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (83,000 sold)
5. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (over 200,000 in print)
6. How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland (over 50,000 in print)
7. Best Friends. by Martha Moody (over 500,000 in print)
8. I Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (130,000 sold)
9. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl (782,000 paperbacks in print)
10. Interventions, by Noam Chomsky (nearly 25,000 in print)11. Honky, by Dalton Conley (90,000 in print)

A couple of the authors are familiar. But what’s fascinating about the list is what it says, or doesn’t say, about American culture. The Best Seller lists are in themselves interesting indicators, but at the same time the books that make it there are (somewhat) understandable. The authors are famous; the titles are provocative; the buzz has been generated and we salivate and buy. But the ten books in the NBCC list are just weird.

What are these books doing here? What does it mean that the biggest seller is a first book mystery story (The Dante Club) about a group of nineteenth-century Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who gather to translate the Inferno and find themselves on the trail of a serial killer? Who are these 700,000+ readers?

Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir by a Hmong immigrant—and is one of the most-often assigned books in freshman college courses. Did you know that?

Take a look at the other books. Read about them on Amazon.com. One of the fascinating aspects of this list is how intelligent most of these these books are, unlike so much of what is normally on the best-seller lists. Rigoberto Menchu? I remember when this book came out—and I also recall that it was later thought to be a fraud, not written by the presumed author at all. (I don't know if that was ever proved or not.) It’s a radical critique of colonial US culture. Best Friends is another first novel, this one about college chums.

What’s my point here? (I'm trying to find one.) Those of us who are interested in contemporary culture and what makes it go find helpful direction in the book world. What are people buying and reading? (Why was Mary Gordon's book about her mother and Roman Catholicism reveiwed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review yesterday?) Does it mean anything that people are buying these ten books and not ten others of perhaps equal value? (Maybe they are and those books are on someone else's list.) What about the fact that many of these titles were initially reviewed tepidly or even negatively. Pearl’s was recommended only for the largest library collections by Library Journal—ie, too dense for most people. In publishing we used to say that a negative review is just as helpful as a positive review.

There are no books with “religious” themes here. The list is obviously eclectic, however--not at all "scientific" or representative. It is not meant to reflect any particular reality except that of the blogger who thought this was an interesting collection of best-sellers most of us haven’t heard of. We know that The Left Behind series of books outsells everything, except maybe The Purpose Driven Life and the Harry Potter books.

We also know the Holy Bible outsells everything. The Koran anyone?

Well, I thought you might find this list as interesting as I did. If you are still looking for something to read this summer, maybe one of these books will attract your attention.

I'm not reading any of them. Right now, my leisure reading of choice is Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the Library of America series. I'm halfway through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich from that collection. Dick is one of those writers being recovered by American readers. All of a sudden. Who knows why? It's kind of like this list of books.

Professionally, I'm reading Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. It definitively takes apart the Intelligent Design argument, but it also raises some pretty serious questions about the whole idea of a created universe for those who think of themselves as Christian and evolutionists. Really? Have you thought that through? Can you explain how the Creator God who is interested in us personally also made/makes the universe and all of its suffering so that we might worship him/her/it?

Ok, I've slipped from frivolous end-of-August space filling to something serious. Sorry. Go back to reading Danielle Steele.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Instructions: A Poem

No music, please
Only silence such as I have entered
only the ambient squall of traffic
airline passengers in falling flight
the shuffling of impatient feet
a chair

and let me be hidden from the congregation
congregated for me
neither in vessel nor box
but truly somewhere else than where they are
not out of disrespect for them
and grief
but my necessity

I am gone
let that be clearly known
by darkness and the silence
by the emptiness I have gathered
let no one pray or bark a word of praise
let there be no story telling
of the time I did or did not do whatever
nor retelling of the jokes I never told so well
let no one that I’ve loved come near
the stage of my departing
you know why
you know what I have been and done
as others do not know
this is your chance
to forget

I send you these instructions having seen
the beyond not far from any
there is no point in explaining
it is not what you expect

do you remember walking on the shore
of Oregon to Haystack Rock between
the clouded heads at either end
of Cannon Beach
and families in recumbent bikes
like crabs escaping withering tide
but circling back and back
the overcast above the rock crackled
by the gulls and chilling rain
the goofy dogs erupting from the waves
without a clue
torpedoed us

where I am is nothing

for god’s sake don’t say anything
to give my life away

Monday, August 13, 2007

God Is Dead, OK?

Ron Currie, Jr., is not a writer I have encountered before. A couple of weeks ago in Powell’s bookstore here in Portland I spotted the title of his book, God Is Dead, and thought, “Well, that’s old news.” Flash back to the fifties and the “God is dead” theology that famously made the cover of Time. I picked up the book and was hooked by the first sentence: “Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.” I bought the book.

The Dinka woman, aka God, is killed by the Janjaweed, and word of his/her death spreads quickly. The end of the Supreme Being is catastrophic….or is it? This is the implicit question in Currie’s clever and horrifying fiction.

The world of the first chapter is all too familiar and includes a hilarious and outrageous appearance by Colin Powell who tries to rescue the Dinka woman, in spite of official consternation that he is taking an interest in this lowlife woman. She changes Powell, who suddenly begins to tell the truth. In a riveting telephone call with President Bush, he calls the President a “silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker.” All right.

God apologizes to a young man she has asked Powell to find for her—not actually the one she asked for but an imposter:

“Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as [anyone] of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer.”

As God lies awaiting death, he closes his eyes and wishes “for someone he could pray to.”

That’s the first chapter. What’s an author to do next? Currie describes a world sunk in chaos and war, horror and cruelty. It seems like a cliché—God is dead and now everything, as the philosophers used to say, is possible. Morality flies out the window. As one character says, talking about violence in the world, “there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.” Martial law is declared; the National Guard moves into every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy rises to an epidemic scale. Looting of Little Debbie snack cakes escalates. Serious shit.

But then the cliché begins to turn on itself. Feral dogs that fed on God’s corpse begin to speaking a “mishmash of Greek and Hebrew and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.” It's a story straight out of supermarket tabloids. Temples are built to them. But among people braced for the end of everything, a gradual realization dawns: nothing has changed. “God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.”

Needing something to revere in place of God, the people of the US begin to worship children: “God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.” Since, as the author observes, Americans virtually worship children already, the step to actual worship is easy. Evolutionary Psychologists try to break Americans of this idolatry, but it is not easy.
When war erupts between the Postmodern Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychological forces, the Evo Psychs threaten invasion of the United States. All hell really is about to break loose in the name of absurd ideologies.

What we realize as we read the evocative and unnerving stories Currie has written is that the world after God is the world we already live in. Time was right. God Is Dead is a fable of our own times and our own culture, our idolatry and indifference, our cruel warrior mentality, our false religions. Despite our high rates of religious observance and our national assertion of belief in God, we Americans in fact behave exactly as we would if we knew for a fact that God does not exist. We simply worship what makes us feel good and secure. For all we know or care, a Dinka woman eaten by dogs in the Sudan might well be God.

What’s the Sudan thing again? I mean, like, whatever.

Currie has written fiction but it is, like all good stories, simply the backside of our daily lives.

Monday, August 6, 2007

A Redwood on the Streetcar

Connie and I discovered a nursery in Northwest Portland last week at the end of NW 18th Street by the railroad tracks, about as far north as you can go in Portland before you fall into the Willamette River. Peter, who runs the nursery, is a copper-haired Belgian who works alone among hundreds of plants. He likes to talk to visitors and seems mostly unconcerned about actually selling much of anything. On our first visit, we bought three potted Begonias and two Dogwoods (small) for our 5 by 8 foot terrace. There was already a small Butterfly Japanese Maple there.

A lot of foliage for a small space, admittedly; and we also have a breakfast table and two chairs. But it’s cozy not crowded. A place of joy. We added along the front of the balcony some Mums and a couple of other flowers whose names I lost. Then we returned to see Peter: we wanted an evergreen of some sort in front of the living room window that overlooks the terrace. He showed us around on a 90-degree sunny afternoon. A freight train pulled up alongside the nursery, its engine throbbing rhythmically.

Most of the conifers we looked at were too large, the pots half the size of our terrace. Or they were too small, ornamentals we would not be able to see from the living room. Then he showed us a Redwood. Sequoia. It was about four feet in height with a dogleg left or right depending on your vantage point. It was exquisite.

“It grows to be the tallest tree in the world,” Peter said. “It’ll reach 500 feet.”

“We could angle it over the street,” I suggested.

“Cut a hole in the terraces above us,” Connie offered.

Peter said, “It will stay small if you leave it in a small pot.”

We could put a Redwood on our terrace?

We paid Peter the $29 he insisted was the price and we squeezed our Redwood into our blue shopping cart and walked it back to the streetcar and rolled it on. We got a seat. The Redwood stood.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said one man, “a tree on the streetcar.”

The tree made everyone smile, especially when we told them it was a Redwood. Then an infirm woman boarded, young but crack-addict skinny, and I offered her my seat. She smiled with teeth that went in all directions and bowed a gracious thanks. I angled the Redwood over her head, “to give you some shade.”

She smiled up at me. “Well, thank you, sir.”

The streetcar hummed along 11th Avenue past the library, the Redwood branches swaying over her head, and she looked cool in the shade of the tallest tree in the world, which now sits on our terrace in front of the living room window.