Category Archives: Book culture

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about books that changed your life. One such book for me was Slaughterhouse Five. In high school, I was something of a science geek, was one of the officers of the high school science fiction club, and I played Dungeons and Dragons. One day my friend Bill Schmitt (who was a math geek more than a science geek, and who did not play D&D), told me about these science fiction books I should read.

“There’s this guy named Kilgore Trout who keeps appearing in the books,” said Bill. “He’s a character, a science fiction author, in the books, but then there really is a science fiction book published by Kilgore Trout.”

Who could resist books with a recurring character, a fictional character who even (somehow) published a book in the real world? I went to the public library and took out a book by this author named Kurt Vonnegut, an author who was wild enough to create a character like Kilgore Trout. First I read was God Bless You, Mister Rosewater; and then Breakfast of Champions; and then Slaughterhouse Five.

Slaughterhouse Five was the one that changed my life, just a little. Vonnegut himself is a character in Slaughterhouse Five, along with Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim who is unstuck in time, and aliens called the Trafalmadorians who look like toilet plungers. The emotional center of the book is an eyewitness account of the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II. Vonnegut himself witnessed the firebombing of Dresden; so did Billy Pilgrim. Reading about the firebombing of Dresden, I began to realize that World War II wasn’t quite the “just war” that everyone said it was. Within two years of reading Slaughterhouse Five, I was involved in the peace movement.

So Slaughterhouse Five remains an integral part of my moral landscape. When I later learned that Vonnegut — fatalist, rationalist, bedrock humanist — belonged to a Unitarian Universalist congregation, I was not surprised. I had already known he was a kindred soul.

And now he’s dead. Or maybe he’s just unstuck in time. So it goes. Damn, I’m sad.

*****

Update: Sf author Cory Doctorow wrote the following about Vonnegut on BoingBoing:

“My first Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions. I’d never read anything like it. It was a novel that was so easy, everything just happening, one thing after another. The book almost read itself. That was his gift, I think: to tell you things that were hard to hear, without you even noticing it. Like a nurse who can slide a needle into your vein without making you wince.” [Link]

Also via BoingBoing, a link to Vonnegut’s appearance on the Daily Show: Link.

BBC’s obit: Link. BBC’s appreciation: Link.

Vonnegut’s own Web site, with nothing there now but this one image: Link.

Books that changed your life

My sister Abby is a children’s librarian who knows more about the field of children’s literature than anyone else I know. She’s been reading the blog of Julius Lester, a favorite children’s lit author for both of us. Recently, Lester asked his readers of his blog to send him a paragraph on “Books That Changed Your Life.” So Abby wrote to him about a book that she and I both love deeply, and today Lester published Abby’s paragraph on his blog:

There are so many books that have deeply affected me, but the book that first sprang to mind is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. My brother is eight years older than me…. The first time I felt myself to be more than a little sister to him, the first time that I felt somewhat on his intellectual plane, was after reading The Phantom Tollbooth. Dan and I had many long discussions about the book, most especially its subtle humor and twists of language, and thus began a life-long habit of sitting and talking together about literature and philosophy. There are two messages in the book that have helped to form how I approach my life: that the impossible can be achieved, and that it’s far better to appreciate the here and now than to waste time and life wishing you were somewhere else [link].

The Phantom Tollbooth is a book that changed my life, too, so here’s my own paragraph on how it changed my life (though I’m not so eloquent as Abby):

When I was in fourth grade, I got transferred to a new public elementary school. Structured on the “open classroom” ideas then current, the school was one huge open carpeted room with a library in the middle and groups of children around the periphery. I loved having the library so close at hand, and one day I discovered in that library a book called The Phantom Tollbooth. I remember the moment when my nine-year-old self understood that the whole book was an allegory about opening your mind to the wonders of the world around you. I read and re-read that book innumerable times, its characters and world became a part of me, and yes that book opened my mind. So of course I had to tell my beloved younger sister, Abby, that she should read it. She read it, and fortunately she also loved it; and over the years the book seemed to feed into shared realms of fantasy and puppetry and thinking and conversation. A few years ago, I understood that the book was also about how to cultivate a life of the mind to get you through the bleak times in life. And to do that, you need friends and companions to share that life of the mind with you — along with free and open access to a library full of good books.

So what books have changed your life? I’d especially love to hear about books that you read when you were somehwere between 8-12 years old — but talk about any book that changed your life.

Leading up to Palm Sunday

Twenty-odd years ago, I was in the Harvard Bookstore buying a philosophy book when I saw, there on a little stand next to the cash register, a bright red pamphlet with the provocative title “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy.” Even though I wasn’t in law school (and had no intention of subjecting myself to that experience), I was a young left intellectual trying to make sense of the fast rightward drift of the Reagan years. On an impulse, I bought the pamphlet. I think I paid three dollars for it.

Within a few months, I had given the pamphlet to a friend of mine who was actually in law school. She needed it more than I did. But I remembered the pamphlet’s advice that students should form study groups. Stand up at the end of class, the pamphlet advised, and say that you will be forming a study group at such-and-such a time, at such-and-such a place. When I found myself in graduate school for creative writing, in 1990, I did exactly that. Not that I tried to form a left-leaning study group — by that time, almost no one leaned left in public any more — but I found that participating in any kind of small study group turned out to be a good way to fend off the crushing anonymity of graduate study. (Analogies to small group ministries in congregations would be well-taken.)

As the years went by, I drifted away from left politics, and drifted into religion. I felt that Jesus (and Buddha, and a few other religious geniuses) did a better job of articulating egalitarianism and the essential worth of all persons, than did the Frankfurt School or the New Left.

So there I was yesterday, back in the Harvard Bookstore, when I saw a trade paperback published by New York University Press titled Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic against the System: A Critical Edition:– a critical edition of the little bright red pamphlet I had bought twenty years earlier. I had forgotten how turgid the prose had been, how simplistic the political analysis. But that little red pamphlet still offers good advice:

Because hierarchy is constituted as much through ideology as through physical violence, it is meaningful to oppose it by talking, by joking and refusing to laugh at jokes, through the elaboration of fantasies as well as through the elaboration of concrete plans for struggle.

Let me hasten to affirm, O Reader, that not all resistance is equally heroic, or equally successful, or equally well-conceived, or equally adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. I propose in the next chapter that law students and teachers should take relatively minor professional risks. All over the world, workers and peasants and political activists have risked and lost their lives. There is a gulf between these two kinds of action, and I have no desire to minimize it.

But they are nonetheless parts of the same universe, and we possess no grand theory telling us that actions of one kind or the other are bound always and everywhere to be futile, any more than we can no that the most heroic behavior will be always successful.

Tomorrow, those of us who are spiritual followers of Jesus of Nazareth will remember his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. That’s always the occasion for me to wonder whether Jesus’s acts of resistance in Jerusalem were well-conceived and adequately adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. It’s also the occasion for me to think about how far I want to go with my own resistance to the inhumanity of hierarchy, with my own personal work to promote egalitarianism.

Not that I have a final answer to that question, but it’s something to think about.

Happy 200th, Henry

I managed to miss the two hundredth birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882). A poet who is perhaps best known for his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” it also happens that Longfellow was a Unitarian. If you go up to visit First Parish in Portland, Maine, they will show you the pew which he and his family rented.

Longfellow’s reputation has fallen on hard times. Today, the critics dismiss his poetry as too sentimental. And the historians rightly point out the gross inaccuracies in his poems;– when I was a licensed tourist guide in Concord, Massachusetts, I had to constantly explain to people that despite what Longfellow wrote in “Paul Rever’s Ride,” Revere never made it to Concord because His Majesty’s Regulars captured him in the town of Lincoln.

Nevertheless, Longfellow’s straightforward language and imagery helped create the political mythos of the United States. I still get chills as I read the last lines of “Paul Revere’s Ride”:

In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,–
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;–
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,–
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

…although, in the context of the current political and military adventures of the United States, it is worth noting that Longfellow was a pacifist.

So happy 200th, Henry. Sorry I missed the actual date. But according to the Web site of the Longfellow Bicentennial, I’ll have plenty of other opportunities to celebrate — including an “evening conversation” at 6:30 tonight, at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge.

Sunday school teachers can find activity kits here: Link (scroll down and follow the link labeled “Activity Kits,” which brings up a pop-up window).

Works by Longfellow at Project Gutenberg: Link.

Bon mots on reading and writing

On Friday and Saturday, I attended Boskone 44, the 44th annual convention of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). This was not one of those conventions filled with people dressed up like Star Trek characters — NESFA conventions tend to focus on books, and the people who attend tend to love readings and writing, and you’re more likely to hear about decoding and deconstructionism than about Klingons. Herewith my notes from some of the panel discussion I attended:

Religion in Fantasy

Authors Judith Berman, Debra Doyle, Walter H. Hunt, and Jane Yolen began by discussing the question, “Is it too simplistic to say that C. S. Lewis’s and J. R. R. Tolkein’s fantasy promotes Christianity, while Philip Pullman’s subverts it?” The panel questioned whether Tolkien’s books can even be considered Christian. Jane Yolen, who is Jewish, summed it up when she asked, “Tell me what’s Christian about them.” The overall arc of the story is perhaps more reminiscent of Norse mythology.

As for Philip Pullman, the panel could not agree on what religious viewpoint he might have, if any. Only half joking, Judith Berman said, “Maybe he’s a crypto-Swendenborgian.” All four authors agreed that C. S. Lewis used more non-Christian elements (fauns, talking animals, etc.), than explicitly Christian elements. Berman, who first read Lewis’s “Narnia” books at age 13, talked about the “anger” she felt when she first realized that the books were supposed to be Christian apology in disguise. Debra Doyle, however, said that her 4th-grade self was fascinated to realize that an author could use such allegory in a book — it was the first time she had gotten an allegory in a book.

The best remark of the hour came from Jane Yolen. Yolen brought up the fact that as a Jew, she has written Christmas books. She said that when she was on a book tour, a child once said to her, “I thought you were Jewish. How could you write Christmas books?” To which Yolen replied: “Well, I’ve written murder mysteries, too.”

What Can’t You Read?

The question behind this panel discussion was simple: what classic books do you feel you should read, but every time you sit down to read them, you’re gravely disappointed? Fred Lerner, a librarian and bibliographer, admitted that for years he was unable to get through Joyce’s Ulysses. Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, who’s an editor at Tor Books and who said that he cultivates a short attention span to get through slush piles, remarked of the best-selling book Dune, “I can’t get more than three chapters into it before my brain turns to concrete.” (Personally, that’s the way I feel about Ulysses.)

Nielsen-Hayden also asserted that “reading is like a trance state, neurologically, physically, mentally,” and that anything that an author does to break that trance state can make a book unreadable for a particular reader. Then Lerner took the discussion off into a fascinating tangent on decoding — a reader has to be sufficiently adept at decoding in order to get into a trance state. Lerner quoted critic and author Samuel Delaney, who has said that reading science fiction requires a very specific subset of decoding skills. The panelists speculated that those who enjoy reading science fiction have to be introduced to the genre by their early teens to become adept at that subset of decoding skills. (This prompts me to speculate that this phenomenon might apply to other genres of writing.)

The Religious Life of Techies

…where “techies” are those who work in some high technology field, e.g., computer science. A couple of bon mots during this panel discussion from Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit who is also an astronomer employed by the Vatican:

A techie working in Silicon Valley supposedly said to Consolmagno, “You know, with religion, you’re not selling truth, you’re selling tech support.”

When asked by a member of the audience how he could reconcile his work in astronomy with having to accept the creation story in Genesis, Consolmagno replied that taking Genesis literally was a “Protestant heresy.” To which another member of the audience added, “These people say that God is omnipotent and all-powerful — except when it comes to knowing how to use allegory and metaphor.”

An independent bookstore

I love Central Square in Cambridge: the co-op supermarket, the street life, the Cantab Lounge, and especially the independent bookstores: Seven Stars with its excellent selection of scriptures of the world’s religions (used and new), Rodney’s with its remainders and its used poetry books, and Pandemonium with the most comprehensive selection of science fiction and fantasy in the Boston area….

…and as it happens, Pandemonium is in financial trouble. They moved from Harvard Square to Central Square — 4 Pleasant Street, to be exact, around the corner from the Cantab — but the move took much longer than expected, and they have cash-flow problems. But you can help….

…Tyler, who owns the store, is selling t-shirts. You can pre-order a very cool t-shirt here: link. And so what if you don’t live in the Boston area! — here’s your chance to buy a cool t-shirt and save an independent bookstore. I already ordered mine. Buy a t-shirt, save an independent bookstore!

Tyler is posting updates on the store situation on his LiveJournal page: link. If you want to place your t-shirt order in person, visit the store or you can see Tyler at Boskone this weekend. Even though his predicament has been posted on BoingBoing, he’s still facing an uphill battle — help out if you can.

A day in the life

There I was this afternoon, typing away on my laptop, when suddenly everything froze. I tried all the usual things — nothing worked. So I drove up to the Apple Store in Cambridge where, to make a long story short, the techs determined that my laptop had to be sent off the be repaired. Fortunately, I have back-ups of my most important data here on my office computer, as well as hidden away on my unlimited stoage space on AOL’s server.

The Apple store is in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall, not someplace I’d ordinarily go. So as long as I was there, I firgured I’d look around and see what it was like. I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the stores or restaurants, but the people were fascinating: families with children, a few pre-adolescents on their own, teenagers in small groups, young adults, and even a few middle-aged people like me. I seemed to notice that everyone was surprisingly well dressed. Then I figured out that many of the young people were playing the mating game when I heard some young men behind me talking about pretty girls they had an eye on — the crowds were so thick I couldn’t tell which pack of young women they were looking at, but that helped me realize why so many of the young people looked like they took such care in dressing. I did not fit in — not that I was badly dressed, but I was sensibly dressed for the cold weather and slushy sidewalks, as opposed to being fashionably dressed.

After I left the mall, I walked over to the MIT Press Bookstore. I fit in better there. Some geeky-looking young women browsed the cognitive science books; had I been twenty years younger, I would have been fascinated by them (I mean, cognitive science, wow). One man was sitting in the corner with the computer science books and I don’t think he moved the entire half hour I was in the store. I browsed their selection of books on ecology and the environment, but wound up buying a book called On Physics and Philosophy. I’ve lost my interest in malls, but bookstores still do it for me.

Odds and ends on books and blogs

I’m usually not a big fan of Internet quizzes, but I couldn’t resist “Which science fiction writer are you?” I knew I was going to be Ursula K. LeGuin, and that’s who the quiz said I was. Except of course that I’m not, because I don’t have her talent and skill.

*****

New blog by a religious professional called Open the Doors: The Ministry of Welcome, written by the thoughtful and insightful Chance Hunter. Chance has just become the Welcome Ministry Coordinator at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia. I’m looking forward to hearing about his thoughts and experiences in congregational hospitality and growth in a program/corporate size congregation.

*****

I miss going to the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago, which remains for my money the best academic bookstore in the United States — at least for the topics I’m interested in: religion, ecology, philosophy, cultural criticism. Today I discovered to my delight that their Web site now allows you to browse The Front Table, the books they currently stock on the famous front table of their 59th St. store — there’s always one or two books on that front table that I decide to buy.

****

Will Shetterly, the Unitarian Universalist and science fiction writer who writes the blog “It’s All One Thing,” has recently stopped eating meat as part of his Three Steps To Save the World. Since that first post, he’s done a number of other posts on vegetarianism and veganism (link, link, and most recently link). He’s convinced me — this week I went back to being a vegetarian. I still eat eggs and butter, and I’m willing to eat small amounts of locally-raised organic meat, but today’s meat and fishing industries are way too polluting and non-sustainable.

Grolier Book Shop

Yesterday, I had to go up to Cambridge for a meeting. While I was up there, I stopped in at a couple of bookstores in Harvard Square, and on a whim I walked over to see if Grolier Poetry Book Shop was still open.

Grolier Poetry Book Shop is one of the last holdovers from a different era. Twenty years ago, there were more than fifty small independent bookstores in and around Harvard Square. Many of those were specialty bookstores, like Mandrake Books that sold only philosophy and fine arts books, or the store on Arrow Street that sold only Asian books, or Grolier that sold only poetry books.

Grolier was special even in those days — it was perhaps the only bookstores in the whole country that sold nothing but poetry. The only other poetry bookstore I knew of was City Lights in San Francisco, but City Lights sold non-poetry books, and most of its poetry had some relation to the Beats. Grolier carried all kinds of poetry. Everyone who cared about poetry went there: people would travel great distances to go to Grolier; walk in there on any given day, and you would be likely to run into a published poet, or at least a young struggling poet.

The last time I was in Grolier was a year ago. Louisa, the former owner, had not been well for quite some time. Store hours had grown irregular, so when I walked by last spring and saw she was open, I went in. Louisa looked ill, the shelves were half-empty, and for the first time ever I walked out of the store without finding at least one book of poetry to buy.

So yesterday, I walked by on a whim; more out of habit than anything else. Miracle of miracles, Grolier was open. Not only that, but the shelves were full again. I climbed up the familiar steep stone steps and walked in.

“Where should I leave my pack?” I asked out of reflex (Louisa vigorously enforced the rule that all bags and packs should be left behind the counter).

“Over there, if you want to,” said the pleasant, relaxed man at the counter, someone whom I had never seen before.

We wound up talking at some length. Daniel is the new general manager of the store; he’s managing it for the owner; sales have been pretty good so far; he’s a professional musician, a trumpeter, who’s taking a break from performing. We both agreed on several things: the level of music education in the general population is declining; we wish Barney Frank was one of our senators rather than in the House of Representatives; Philadelphia is a wonderful city; the war in Iraq is absolutely insane.

Daniel apologized that he did not have the bilingual edition of Portuguese poetry that I was looking for, tacitly acknowledged that in the old days Grolier probably would have had it, and said that it was taking time to build up the stock to the old levels. I managed to find the other books I was looking for, and a few others I wasn’t looking for: Countee Cullen’s collection of African American poetry, a collection of poems by contemporary Chinese poets, the collected poems of Maya Angelou, Given by Wendell Berry, and Audre Lourde’s The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.

What a relief: Once again, I’ll be able to make regular trips to Grolier to get my poetry fix. Once again, a cultural landmark is open for business.

Grolier Poetry Book Shop: Daniel Wuenschel, General Manager. 6 Plympton Street, near Harvard Square, Cambridge (off Mass. Ave. behind the Harvard Book Store). Phone: 617-547-4648, email: grolierpoetry AT verizon DOT net.

Grolier’s hours:
Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 am to 7 pm;
Thursday – Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm,
closed Sunday and Monday.