Saturday, Ian McEwan

I just read and very much liked Saturday by Ian McEwan. The protagonist is a neurosurgeon and the book is full of brain biology which I loved and have just barely enough familiarity with to have a sense, although far from true understanding, of. [THAT is a terrible sentence!! Sorry] Henry is a good man, a truly good man of somewhat limited imagination but firm grasp of his work and, in general, of his life. A brief run-in with a thug with a incipient Huntington's disease leads eventually to serious drama.

Two odd things happened in my mind as I read this. The book is set on a specific Saturday in February 2003, a day of anti-Iraq-war demonstrations in London, where the story is set, and also in New York. Although I did not take part in the NYC march to the UN I remember the day not in much detail but that I talked to someone in the evening who had been to the demonstration and that one reason I didn't go was that I was working several hours that day. I've never before had the sense of memory about a specific day that is the setting for a totally fictional story.

The odder things is that when I was reading the first scene with Baxter, the thug, I had a very, very strong deja vu. That happens when I've read something before. I do not forget strong scenes I've read. I was 99% sure I had not read this book, but I went to my log of books read to check and I had not. I do not believe the scene was excerpted anywhere and I would have been unlikely to have read it as I rarely read short fiction. All I could finally assume is that perhaps I read a long review that described this scene in some detail. Certainly I found one detail after another very, very familiar. But then other parts of the book were new to me.

Well, the scene was good enough to read twice if that happened, unlikely as it seems. Upon finishing I found it very satisfying to have read a novel about a family of sincerely good people with the "bad guy" shown in a much more complex and interesting way than usual.

An auxiliary remembrance sparked by the book was another instance of neurosurgery being a dangerous occupation -- far more dangerous than in this story. A very fine neurosurgeon I knew -- a gentlemanly man with a lovely wife I knew also -- had operated on a patient. The operation, as brain interventions can do, disarranged the man's emotional responses, not because the surgeon made any mistakes but because the brain is a delicate instrument that we don't understand very well and things happen. The patient became paranoid after he was "well", so paranoid he worked out a disguise and plan and actually went to the surgeon's house one morning and murdered him, wounding the wife as well. It was a real tragedy and some 20 years or so later it still makes me sad.

Beethoven's Birthday

Today is Beethoven's birthday, or so it's believed since he was baptized on December 17 and the tradition at that time was to wait a day [or so] to see if a child was going to survive. I'm glad this one survived.

The joy and wonder that I've had because this man wrote the music as he did has made me happy that he was who he was. I understand from Malcolm Gladwell's new book, OUTLIERS, that what he possessed [like Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Brahms, on and on] was not a gift but an innate talent and he had the good luck to be in the right place and time to hone that talent to an enormous degree. Also the circumstances of his personality and the life he lived made it inevitable that this particular music would pour out and be rewritten until it reached the perfection which we know.

I've been thinking about the idea of "gift" since this is the season of gift giving of a much more mundane sort. Gift suggests a giver. Once we are old enough to give up the Santa Claus story, we know whence our Christmas gifts. We also know whence our "gifts" of personality, both nature and nurture. We look at in our mirrors and think, Good God, my mouth has become exactly like my mother's or I have high blood pressure just like everyone in my father's family. We watch our children grow up and think, yes, I know where that trait comes from.

But in the case of heart stopping genius like Beethoven's do we look at something supernatural to explain the "gift"? I don't think Leopold Mozart would have said that about his little Wolfie. To go a little afield, where and how did Shakespeare's genius spring forth? I understand literature a little better than music though I cannot say I love it more. Beethoven awes me in my ignorance of just "how" it all works. Shakespeare awes me with the structure and invention of his work but more so with the understanding of human psychology and the actions and turns of phrase that reveal the complexity to us. I want to agree with Galdwell, I don't want to attribute it to any divine "Gift" except with that small "d" so that it is an adjective not a noun. And the same for Beethoven.

It is not a gift, but a hard earned self-education that make me able to appreciate these wonders of creation. I have a sense of richness in my life that has nothing to do with money because I appreciate Beethoven's music and so much else. I think the richness is in what we can enjoy, the complexity we can appreciate for what it is.

Lanegella's Nixon

Thinking about actors and the art they possess in making difficult personalities likable and why they do it. I've known many actors, some well and many less well but I think, one and all, they are sensitive people who want to be liked. In their desire to be liked the brilliant ones know that they can play unlikable characters, say Shylock or Iago, Hitler, Dracula, Nixon, the Queen of England [well, she's not unlikeable, just unknowable for most of us]. A part of the fine actor's art is to find the humanity he or she shares with the character he or she will become on stage or screen. They find the moments when the depths of the human need to be liked, to gain approval either makes the character painfully vulnerable or moments when a realization that honesty and soul baring will lift them beyond the ordinary coward who always covers his vulnerability with bluster.

This is what Langella did with Nixon and he did it with great subtlty, I think in the same way Helen Mirren showed us Elizabeth II as a woman dedicated to her inherited role but a woman dealing with pain and needing to make a change in her usual way of acting. So did Nixon during the last interview. In both cases it was not spelled out in CAPS for the dull witted but done by the actor with his or her most important possession [as actors] their emotional instrument. They were acting, yes, playing roles, but at the same time they sincerely felt with their whole beings the emotions of the characters they portrayed.

The first time I heard the phrase "emotional instrument" I felt a the truth of that phrase, "blew my brain." I realized what fine actors really do -- they have found a way to use their own emotions as musicians use their pianos or violins or flutes. Great actors' talent is that the emotional instrument is accessible and usable in a way it is not for lesser actors. Those great actors do not take their talent for granted but truly work at using those emotions and honing their expression.

A fine actor was telling me about this before I truly understood that it is possible to reach into one's emotional instrument at will and hit a note as a violinist can play a certain note. The actor said, "I can go from just talking to you to being furious at you" -- and as he said "furious at you," he was to the extent the look on his face changed in that instant. I felt I'd seen a sleeping lion suddenly roar, his jaws open and great teeth bared, right in my face, ready to chew me to bits.

Wonderful actors amaze me in the same way wonderful pianists, or painters or dancers do -- they display areas of art most of us cannot fathom accomplishing, but which we are richer for having experienced. This is part of why I choose the movies and art I go to see carefully now. When you understand the wonderful of fine art other art is a disappointment.

Frost/Nixon

I had a free afternoon so I went to see Frost/Nixon. Afternoon movies are largely the retired crowd and this was no exception. Senior citizen rate ends at 5:00 p.m. I don't go to movies very often -- it always seems I'd rather do something else. But I did want to see this since, of course I remember Nixon's resignation and all that surrounded it. But I never saw the famous interview.

The two main actors were excellent, Frank Langella most of all -- so much so that, although Nixon's face is etched in my memory, I accepted Langella's face completely, even in the painfully probing close ups. There were moments of speaking about misusing the power of the presidency when I really wanted to should out, "And George Bush too!" Needless to say, I stiffled the impulse. I wasn't sure the screen play was the best it could be but I was totally willing to relive that part of history. Langella has been at the top of his power both on stage and screen for the last several years. I imagine it's an Oscar nomination performance. When one is very picky about what one sees, one is rarely disappointed. It was a movie worth seeing.

Quotes

So chilly today that even as I sit in my perpetually overheated NYC apartment, with a quilt over my lap and legs, my toes are cold -- I think it's some kind of intellectual sympathy because, truly, my apartment is not chilly. But it is cool enough to inspire an evening of reading. I'm into a strange, somewhat fantastic novel called The Jade Cabinet by Riki Ducornet, a book in which Charles Dodson is an off scenes character. I think I bought it because it has a wonderful cover with two apparently dead birds as from a curiosity cabinet. [Yes, they ARE wonderful even if seemingly dead!] This is not my usual kind of reading but I'm hooked and will finish it before I fall asleep tonight.

Meanwhile here are two photos from a walk on Long Beach on Cape Cod over Thanksgiving. And a couple of quotes I like very much that I have just discovered while surfing blogs:

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance. Will Durant

and

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? Abraham Lincoln



The shells are from the wonderful Shell Tree on the beach. The oak leaf has a border of ice, or maybe I should say morning frost. Photography is the only way to make this wonder "permanent."

And now to put on some warm socks so I can read in cozy comfort -- what a better way to spend a chilly winter evening?

About the Big Apple

I've just read an article in the Dec. 1 issue of New York Mag, "The Loneliness Myth." In New York [it was not entirely clear whether Manhattan or all of the five boroughs], slightly under 50% of the residences are inhabited by only one person. Many things have been written about the "lonely crowd" and the loneliness of a big city. Not so says writer Jennifer Senior. And I agree.

The author cites all kinds of sociological studies which bolster her premise about connectivity within the single-ness, I have an immediate reaction. I know that in this country and in the world, a woman alone [of any age] tends to be conspicuous -- FEELS and IS conspicuous. Not so in Manhattan. Neither a man nor a woman of any age alone is actually at all conspicuous. When society makes one feel one's aloneness, then that person tends to dwell on it and think he or she is lonely rather than just alone. But here that aloneness is so general that nothing about it feels strange nor is on treated as if one is less important than a couple or part of a group. Walking into a restaurant and saying "One" does not feel like an oddity -- because it isn't.

The article is far more sociological than psychological, but, in fact, loneliness is an individual state. Does one need feedback from others? Do you need to discuss a book or movie or event with someone? Will emailing a friend or family member in another city/contry/place resolve that need? Apparently, the answer to the last question is often yes. I can understand that and often feel that way. In fact Senior emphasizes that having internet communications is often a satisfying substitute for actual interaction.

Just how much one depends on another body being present really depends on the individual; I grew up without playmates except for a brother who was not a satisfactory playmate. I don't think I was lonely; that was the fact of a rural life. Probably I learned a degree of self-sufficiency that way; many other people do not have that experience and so depend more on immediate reaction from family or friends.

Demographically speaking certainly I see the truth of those statistics in the building I live in. On my floor more at least half the 20+ apartments has single occupant. We are not really a community but many of us know one another's names, those who have been here longest have our conversational forumulas [largely to do with weather] but there is a satisfaction in the tenuous neighborliness. I like living alone, having to answer to no one if things are strewn about as they are ust now while I am rearranging closets. Tomorrow it will be put to order again, for my own satisfaction. And so it always is, no excuses, no apologies, living life as makes sense to me.

Reading About Books I'm Not Likely to Read

So here are a couple of bright looking young guys who are very, very clever writers and thinkers who are being much discussed and read and talked about. The clean cut one is Daniel Pink and the one with the hair is Malcolm Gladwell. I've been reading about them and their books and realize I'm not likely to read them. A dirty little secret of people who seem to know all about what's going on in the literary world is that they do almost as much reading about books as they do reading books. It's not as sneaky as it sounds; there are far too many books to read and not nearly enough time so one has to pick and choose. To stay abreast of what's going on it's important to read about books. I've been doing this since I left college.

Daniel Pink came to my attention thanks to Oprah -- rather her magazine which printed an interview between O. and Pink. She's very impressed. His book is A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the World. Now there's a title! And it's about all I want to know about the book. I know the right/left brain ideas, which have been highly simplified going at least back to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain quite a few years ago. Much as I'd like to be able to draw deftly I couldn't get more than two chapters in, I simply resisted the manipulation idea. I think I'm mainly a right-brainer [creative! who doesn't want to be?] but my left brain is skeptical and critical and resists all that flattery. So I immediately resist Pink's book.

The critical side sets in when he emphasizes that US companies are outsourcing all the dreary routine stuff like computer programming, data entry, customer service, even some newspaper writing, legal research, all the "dull" stuff to places like Bangladesh, India and China. While we good old Americans do the creative stuff -- like hedge funds and subprime mortgage lending, creating Super Bowl advertising and making movies to appeal to the mentality of 12 year olds. "Rule the world?" God help us! Look at the economic mess those creative types have got us in, think about the arrogance of "ruling the world" via action movies and potty mouthed stand up comics and weepy Oprahs empathizing with victims of domestic violence. This is enough to know about Mr. Pink's book.

On the other hand Mr. Gladwell, after two best sellers that were so clever, he's now asked to speak to those [possibly] right brained executives garnering fees up to $80,000 for inspiring them, thanks to his books, The Tipping Point and Bling, has now written Outliers which he says is a departure, "very definitely not a self-help book" [suggesting the others really were]. He told a NNY Times interviewer "It's very much a book about collective and social organized change. I am turning my bank on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can't be. The appropriate place to provide opportunities is at the world level, not the individual level."

The earlier books and their success make me skeptical of his thinking but apparently the new book is taking a much larger view of the forces that mold society, the things that come together to produce the remarkable successes like Mozart, Darwin, Bill Gates. He has stopped giving easy recipes and says we are all living in a great web of circumstance which includes everything from genes to economic well being to religion to nutrition [I'm extrapolating]. I tune in when I discover someone is taking a wide view and not giving me that old adage I've argued against for a long time about the "cream always rises." No, it can't if it's homogenized. I'm not sure that takes a whole book to explain. I'm not sure I need to know his arguments since I already agree with him. The whole world needs to change-- and I think that includes those who would assume that somehow Asians are to be our "left brainers" as if they do not have creative abilities, as if they ancient civilizations were the produce of bean counters and not great thinkers in every area of culture making.

So I think I'll settle in now and finish the clever and somewhat too light Julian Barnes book I'm reading. Something about British cleverness doesn't irk me as much as American cleverness -- at least in fiction.