Was there on Sunday, The Green Apple bookstore’s used book division seemed to have gone through some re-shelving. Each alphabet section seemed to have expanded a bit. For the first time, i realized that I only linger in front of a selected few shelves.

I often start with N, which is always a good one. It helps that M (Maugham) is not far away. Afterwards, I moved deeper into the isle and would find I (Irving). A couple of shelves further up the chain, actually used to be horizontally shifting two shelves from I along the backwall of the store before they did the reshelving. Now I had to turn a corner to reach G (Greene). The last shelf i visit would be at the head of the alphabet, now back toward the front of the store where the cash register and the entrance to CD/DVD section are close by., A (Auster).

Under section N, I had been interested in Naipaul. But this time, Nabokov caught my eyes. The store seemed to have recently expanded both author’s selections. In addition to Nabokov’s fictions, there were a few non-fictions as well. I randomly picked up one thin volume “Strong Opinions” which seemed to have been mentioned in J. M. Coetzee’s recent work “Diary of a Bad Year.” Although I can’t be sure whether it was referring to Nabokov’s work or merely a description of Coetzee’s character’s work. But the connection seemed interesting enough. Turned out to be a collection of interviews given by Nabokov.

Would you agree to show us a sample of your rough drafts?
I’m afraid I must refuse. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.

Haha. So Nabokov prefers a flair of exaggeration. “hearty mediocrities”, interesting phrase.

And there is more:

Could you describe this work? [ referring to Eugene Onegin, Nabokov’s current translation work]
During my years of teaching literature at Cornell and elsewhere I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience of poetry. As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.

“the passion of science and the patience of poetry”? I always thought it was the other way around…

In a couple of passages he mentioned 100 lectures he gave on Russian literature, and I could see that volume right on the shelf “Lectures on Russian Literature”. I opened the book at Leo Tolstoy-Anna Karenin:

…we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.

Fantastic, isn’t it? I’m intrigued by his witty language. Despite his cockiness.

These two books have to go with me. As i continued browsing my usual sections, I picked up Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies as well.

Satisfied, I walked back to the N section where there was a chair and started reading. In that very moment, I wish i could just sit there and do nothing until i finish reading all three books. I was surrounded by books, sitting on a comfortable chair, even with a sky light right above my head. Not one, not two, but three books waiting for my consumption. Nirvana.

Sadly, I couldn’t sit in the store and read forever. As I was checking out. The cash register suddenly fell into character, for the first time, what was described by other author, a typical used bookstore clerk appeared in front of me. He looked at my selection and locked his gaze on Nabokov’s Strong Opinions. “Is this the one that has his letters?”
“Uhm, I think this is a collection of his interviews.”
“Oh, there is one with all of his letters and it is fantastic. We are not allowed to buy books here, otherwise i would have gotten that one.”
“…” [agonizing whether to rush back to the Nabokov shelf, locate the collection of letters (i thought i did see something under that kind of title, “letters by Nabokov”? “Nabokov letter collections”?) and bring it back and pay for it.
“You’ve read Pale Fire?”
“Excuse me, Pale what?”
“Pale Fire.” incredulous look as if i’m some kind of alien.
“Oh, no, don’t think so.”
“You like Nabokov but you’ve never read Pale Fire?!” [implying…SHAME ON YOU! You don’t deserve to own any Nabokov. Give back that book, put it back on the shelf!]
“…” smiled and shrug.

I guess people weren’t making it up that used bookstore clerk are judgmental. Oh well, what do i care? The only Nabokov I find interesting enough was Lolita. Until today. Maybe i will try pale fire someday. But no rush, really. My hands are full, for the moment.

Accidentally, both articles i enjoyed in this issue of The New Yorker are grayed out, i.e. no on-line version.

Romeo, Romeo
The ballet gets a happy ending.
by Joan Acocella
and
The Back of the World
The genius of G. K. Chesterton.
by Adam Gopnik

I’ve never even heard of Chesterton before. Based on the quotes sprinkled throughout this review, I liked him already.

“All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window.”

The joy of the book[The Napoleon of Notting Hill] lies in the marriage of Chesterton’s love of feudal romance with his love of the density and mystery of the modern city. … “A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wal that is not actually a deliberate symbol — a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card.”

In addition to “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” the review also talked about this other book “The Man Who Was Thursday.” There are some quite fascinating dialogs from the latter book.

[a scene between the main character and an anarchist poet]
The book is also stippled with small epigrammatic moments, as when Syme comes upon an anarchist poet, Gregory, standing by a street amp (“whos gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence behind him”) on a silent, starlit street:

“I was waiting for you, ” said Gregory. “Might I have a moment’s conversation?”
“Certainly. About what?” asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree.
“About this and this,” he cried; “about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself — there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.”
“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you woud ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

Another intriguing observation by the reviewer on anarchy in early 1900’s. Not sure how much exaggeration it is in the reviewer words below since i don’t know the history that well, but it is on the alarming side. Was anarchist that successful once? or is the reviewer lumped a bunch of different things into anarchist for the sake of “shock and awe”?

It’s easy to forget just how scary anarchists could seem at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the previous quarter century, they had killed a French President, and American President, and the Russian Tsar, and had bmbed the Royal Greenwich Observatory, near London. (The same score now — Sarkozy, Bush, Putin, and the London Eye — and we’d all be under martial law.)

Lastly, about the title of the review “The Back of the World”, it is a reference taken from the ending paragraph of “The Man Who Was Thursday”, and it is meant to indicates the two-sidedness of reality.

This double vision, where the appetite for romantic violence is imagined as the flip side of the desire for absolute order, gives the book its permanence. It ends with a powerful and strage image of reality itself as two-sided:

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front–”

Reminds me of the days back in college, feeling totally lost after a lecture and only able to find clarity in a discussion session with the TA. Here the reviewer is the TA, and Chesterton, the professor. I liked the review because it makes something strange sounds interesting. Not sure i actually want to read Chesterton if i couldn’t have a page by page review by Adam Gopnik to go with it.

I’m not a J. M. Coetzee fan. For precisely the reason iterated in the introduction paragraph of the new book review in the New Yorker.

There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. “If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry,” he writes of himself in his memoir “Youth”: “But warmth is not in his nature.” …that his father surely thought him a selfish child “who has turned into a cold man.” His art, he laments, is “not great-souled.” It lacks “generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love.”

The only thing i managed to finish reading by Coetzee and actually liked is “Youth”. But this new book of his, The Diary of a Bad Year, sounds extremely interesting. Not only because it contains some “strong opinions” on current events: Bush Administration and Guantanamo, but also because it seems to be using an unique format in print:

“Diary of a Bad Year” takes a daring form: Señor C’s essays occupy the bulk of each page, more or less, but running beneath them, like the news crawl on a TV screen, are what read like short diary entries by Señor C and by Anya, which offer a running commentary on the developing relationship of employer and employee, and which convey the plot of the novel, such as it is. So a typical page is segmented like the back of a scarab beetle, and the reader must choose to read either one narrative strand at a time or one page at a time and thus two or three strands simultaneously. In practice, one does a bit of both—a gulp of essay, a snatch of diary—and the broken form usefully, but relatively painlessly, corrupts any easy relation to innocent continuity.

Last but not the least, the protagonist of the novel is a J. S. Bach fan!! This is new. Knowing this little fact alone seems to make me like Coetzee a little more. How cold can a person be if he loves Bach?

The second part of “Diary of a Bad Year” records the private ideas and responses of Señor C—what he calls his “gentler set of opinions.” These are more passionate, more fragmentary, and more irrational than his public utterances. One of them, “On J. S. Bach,” begins:

The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.

Squall Lines – J. M. Coetzee’s “Diary of a Bad Year.”, by James Wood. The New Yorker, Issue of December 24th, 2007.

I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us. And in that desert she dragged her university days into our midst to describe the stars – the way Adam tenderly taught a woman with gracious metaphors.

These then, though unbeheld in deep of night.
Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none,
That Heav’n would want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep;
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night: how often from the steep
Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other’s note
Singing their great Creator…

That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I wanted to hear nothing more. I got up and walked away.

….

A few months later, she waltzed with me, as we danced as a group in Cairo. Though slightly drunk she wore an unconquerable face. Even now the face I believe that most revealed her was that one she had that time when we were both half drunk, not lovers.

….

In the street of imported parrots in Cairo one is hectored by almost articulate birds. The birds bark and whistle in rows, like a plumed avenue. I knew which tribe had traveled which silk or camel road carrying them in their petite palanquins across the deserts. Forty-day journeys, after the birds were caught by slaves or picked like flowers in equatorial gardens and then placed in bamboo cages to enter the river that is trade. They appeared like brides in a medieval courtship.

We stood among them. I was showing her a city that was new to her.

Her hand touched me at the wrist.
“If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.

-The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje has a new novel out! Just read the review from current issue of The New YorkerThe Aesthete, by Louis Menand. The name is “Divisadero” and it seems that a large portion of the stories are set in Northern California! 🙂 I have to go and find a copy.

“We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth. – Nietzsche”

to be cont’d…

I stumbled onto this particular show on podcast: Neural Theory of Language, it is part of the KQED Forums program, a talk with Jerome Feldman, EECS professor at UCBerkeley, and an author of “From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language.” . I kept on rewinding it as i listened, learned something new every time. An amazing field.

How our brains work? How do we learn knowledge? What exactly happened biologically when you learned a new fact?

1. Our brain is completely different from a computer. Computer processes information in a linear fashion, while our brain is vastly parallel.

2. neurons are slow, but our brain is fast. The reason being most of our “knowledge” is hardwired between neurons. There are two forms of knowledge of our brain, one that relies on chemistry in the brain that is similar to a kind of “computation” to go from one neuron to the next. But when it comes to something we learned really well, there is minimum computation, but mostly direct “wiring” between one neuron to the next. The learning process is a process of subtraction, to reduce the multiple paths existed, and as a result to reduce “computation” required. I’m fascinated by this aspect of the talk. So when we were given a piece of knowledge, such as, Mr. Feldman was born in Pittsburgh. The moment this information was given, there certainly wasn’t a hardwired connection instantly created. Instead, there was a chemical reaction that “added weight” to certain path and resulted in a connection.

3. Children learn language by map an abstract concept, i.e. a word, with their real life experiences. When a child started learning to speak, he/she already accumulated roughly one year worth of experiences. The learning to speak process is a process of “subtraction,” a process of “hardwired.” So if there is to emerge a human-like robot, a simulation of real life experience is mandatory.

4. People who were bilingual since childhood are better equipped to acquire more languages because their neuron structures were adapted in certain way that become optimal to learn new languages. Neurons are most active at growth during childhood.

This professor’s favorite phrases are “That’s not my area of expertise, so i can’t comment on it.” “This is not my theory but … ” It is obvious that this area of research has been divided into very thin slices that each expert only takes on one and dives deep. But for us non-academic people, this sounds funny, because we could hardly grasp the basic knowledge of the landscape, how could we tell which leaf on a particular tree that belongs to Professor Feldman?

It was hot. We all sorta huddled behind the Muni shelter, in the small piece of shade surrounded by blazing sunlight.

I was reading an article from a back issue of The New Yorker, a story about a dessert lab in New york city. It sounded more like a “dessert bar.” I was vaguely aware of some random conversation going on around me. Suddenly the guy who was talking to the group, pointed at the article from behind me and exclaimed,” I LOVE that article!” I was completely startled. Before I was able to conjure up a response, he continued, excitedly, “OMG! I love that article so much that I blogged about it. And I tried to find an on-line copy…” I asked him whether he loved it because what it talked about, the dessert sounds amazing, or because of the writer. He said that he loved the way the author writes. “I can’t explain. But i just think his writing is fantastic. I loved it so much that I bought the author’s book called ‘Heat!'”

I continued reading the article on the shuttle. Another passenger of the shuttle asked him more about the article. He explained that the author used to be the editor at the New Yorker but fell in love with cooking after interviewing/visiting this dessert lab he described in this particular article. The editor eventually quit his job and went to Italy to study cooking.

Later on, I looked for that article on google, just typed in the article’s title and the author’s name, up came on the 4th slot was a blog. I opened it up, it was by this guy at the shuttle stop! I spent the rest of the evening reading his blog’s archives. Turned out to be excellent reading. I collected his RSS.

His name is Omar, and he loves podcasting. This is the nth time i’m hearing this term, “podcast.” I asked around and finally understood how it worked–“Which planet are you from?” co-worker commented when i revealed my ignorance. Following Omar’s advice, i spent the evening downloading podcasting and listening to them: BBC Documentary Archive, NPR Books, best of KFOG, Bill Moyers on Faith and Religion, etc. etc.

I’m hooked! Downloading as much as i can find onto my ipod and will start listening on my shuttle ride. 🙂

Things are definitely more interesting when you no longer drive solo 2 hours a day commuting.

– The Dessert Lab, article by Bill Buford in The New Yorker, June 26th, 2006.
– Omar’s blog on this New Yorker article
– Google Video (FREE): Charlie Rose: an hour with author Bill Buford, An hour all about food, cooking, and restaurants with author Bill Buford. His new book is “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany”

A MIND IN CONNEMARA
The savage world of Martin McDonagh
　　BY FINTAN O’TOOLE
　　
　　In the March 6th issue of ‘The New Yorker”, there is an interesting profile on Martin McDonagh(newyorker.com didn’t put this one on-line), the acclaimed Irish playwright. He wrote total of 7 plays during a few months of time in 1994(he was 24 then). Six of them were produced and staged in London, New York, etc.. All were well received. Huge success.
　　
　　What fascinated me was how he became a writer/playwright living on welfare. He left school at 16, and decided not to seek an education because he doesn’t want to condition himself for a job, or to find himself a boss. He wrote stories, watched TV, did manuel labor when the welfare stopped and quit the job once he is allowed to receive welfare again.
　　
　　That reminded me of the story on how Harry Potter’s author also wrote her story when she was living on welfare.
　　
　　All writers, or writers-wanna-bes should go to England. 🙂 At least English writers.
　　
A few quotes from the actual article.

McDonagh…At thirty-five, he is perhaps the most successful young playwright of the past decade — in 1997, he was widely described as the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season — and his plays, black comedies in which acts of extreme cruelty and violence are routine, are merciless rebukes to literary sentimentality.
…

McDonagh’s brother left school at seventeen, intending to be a writer, and started to live on welfare. (He is now a screenwriter–his script “Ned Kelly” was made into a film, which was released in 2003, with Heath Ledger in the title role.) As soon as McDonagh turned sixteen, he did the same. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. “I didn’t want to educate myself toward some kind of job. I didn’t even want a job. I didn’t want a boss.”

….
He insists that he has no intention of writing another play.

“I think I’ve said enough as a young dramatist,” he said. “Until I’ve lived a little more, and experienced a lot more things, and I have more to say that I haven’t said already, it will just feel like repeating the old tricks.” For a moment, McDonagh looked disconsolate. But he sounded hopeful. “I want to just write for the love of it,’ he said.’ And also grow up, because all the plays have the sensibility of a young man.”

I’m amazed at the lucidity of his mind. How he just knew what he wanted (or at least what he didn’t want) at the age of 16, or at the age of 35. I’m amazed that so many novelist didn’t know it is time to stop when they have nothing new to say. But this guy does.

I have no desire whatsoever to see any of his plays.

For those who might, currently his play “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is showing off Broadway in New York City.

In one of recent “The New Yorker”, I read a short fiction by Paul Theroux, it was called: The Best Year of My Life.

I started reading Paul Theroux when Gui introduced me to his “Riding the Iron Rooster.” Later “The Old Patagonian Express : By Train Through the Americas .” The chapter where he described his meeting with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires was one of my favorite travel story by him.

But there is something cold/angry in him that i don’t like. A friend called it his “negativity.”

Do you know who was Theroux’s mentor? V.S. Naipaul, the nastiest old man you can find in any profession.
　　
　　I read Naipaul’s “An Area of Darkness” a long time ago—before he got the Nobel and boasted of his prowess and exclusive sexual relationship with prostitutes—and the bitter aftertaste stayed with me for weeks. Indians deserve Naipaul even less than Chinese deserve 高行健.
　　
　　Although the master and the pupil have since bitterly broken up, it seems that Theroux’s takeaway from Naipaul was a shared negativity. His tinted glasses register all and only ugliness of his life and ours, and he tirelessly harass us with the 2-D cinema verite of his pen. Have you read his travel writings on his railway rides in China and India? Well, Theroux did teach thousands of young expats of the “Lonely Planet” crowd or the Peace Corps missionaries how to see, how to think, and how to feel superior.
　　
　　But what a great pen……
-by 旧精魂

Last year i finished reading Dark Star Safari while traveling inTurkey. That was by far the best travel writing i’ve seen from Theroux. He mellowed up too. Age does help, doesn’t it?

I was never into his fiction, though. Just travel writings. This short story in the New Yorker explained many things for me about him. Knowing this made me want to forgive all his coldness i’ve seen through out the pages.

Poor Paul.

I’m a borderline geek. But i don’t usually go for books that a true geek loves.

At work, we have fliers posted in the hallway when some famous authors are on campus to give a talk, and sign books. Usually the company would buy the books ahead of the time and give them out for free to employees who go to the talk. So the audience would have a book in hand for the author to sign. It is a nice way to get free books.

I haven’t been very interested in any of these talks. Mainly because i have never heard any of the authors and based on the fliers they seemed to be all in the fantasy writer categories.

What is this love affair between a geek and fantasy?

Last Friday we had Neil Gaiman. Another unknown to me. But one of my office mates brought back a whole stack of books by Neil Gaiman, left them on the table next to me, and went on her little getaway weekend trip.

I couldn’t resist books. Especially spanking new ones with attracting cover design. So i picked up the top one on the pile, “Smoke and Mirrors”.

The writing flows well. I got interested. Left a sticky on the book pile and took it home to read for the weekend.

Started reading last night and just finished it.

The first half of the book was truly a pleasant surprise. Creative, original, good writing, and interesting stories. The best part was how Gaiman mixed realistic modern life with magic and fantasy. I loved that. His prose had good rhythm, they ran smoothly like a beautiful river.

My favorites are the one about the black cat (“The Price”). “He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.” and the one about Hollywood “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”. Or rather, i liked the courtyard in “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories.” The main character’s friendship with the old black man. Their talks of past stars in that quiet courtyard. I always imagined there were leaves on the ground, damp and colorful, and the wind of the Fall blow through the desolate scene. All that used to be glorious are no longer, except the three gold fish running around and around in circles…

I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.

Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of wall in the courtyard.

…

The rain had stopped. The sunshine was warm and bright., proper Hollywood light. I walked up to the main building, walking on a carpet of crushed eucalyptus leaves – the cough medicine smell from the night before.

The other ones that I would recommend are “The Wedding Present”, which is hiding in his introduction; “Chivalry,” “Troll Bridge,” “Murder Mysteries,” and “Snow, Glass, Apples.”

These are cleverly written. Rich in originality and beautiful or tender imagination.

The rest fell back into the category of fantasy that i don’t care for, werewolf, vampire, and unnamed creatures took over something, someone, or someplace. The Stephen King stuff that would sure make you fear and sick to your stomach.

I also like what he wrote in his introduction, about writing.

Writing is flying in dreams.
When you remember. When you can. When it works。
It’s that easy.
–Author’s notebook, February 1992

Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes a magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.

Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.

This is one of my favorite poems. Better record here in case i can’t find it on Google again. 🙂 Took me quite a while this time.

Forgetfulness
Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.