Friday, July 22, 2011

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

By


“And that is why people think that computers don’t have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captains seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means little man. And they think that computers don’t have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn’t see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.

And this is why people’s brains are like computers. And it’s not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.

Also people think they’re not computers because they have feelings and computers don’t have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if is a sad picture they cry.” Pgs 118 - 119


Book 44

The imperfectionists

By Tom Rachman

Book 43 

No ordinary Joes : the extraordinary true story of four submariners in war and love and life

By Larry

Book 42

Displaced Persons

Lot’s wife: “To look back was to turn into a tall mound of nothing but grief, dry grief. Not a punishment but a natural consequence. She turned into salt because those who looked back turned into salt. Not a punishment. A fact.” Pg 72

“Lola had studied genocide at Yale University, years ago. What Chaim would not discuss at home, she discussed in class, read in books, wrote in papers. Sometimes, when she was home for vacation, he would steal a look at them.” Pg 281

No Ordinary Joes: The Extraordinary True Story of Four Submariners in War and Love and Live

Captain Fitzgerald “York leaned over to look, and read: ‘Keep your peckers up, men.’ It had been written in blood by Captain Fitzgerald.” Pg 167

On the theme of survival and just getting through the past, not ever being able to shake it, one of the guys from the story said so much. You can’t never get it over you just keep getting through it.
By Ghita Schwarz



Book 41

Monday, July 4, 2011

The Cave Man

By Xiaoda Xiao

Solitary confinement for nine months has its effects on an individual that stretch outside of the prison walls and beyond that deprived space. In this book, Xiao explores the complexity of gaining your freedom from imprisonment with the necessary illusion that you are putting that part of your life behind you. But is that possible? Can we ever free ourselves of what we have experienced in the past or do our experiences sometimes haunt us, propelling their painful reminders into the future? What of the dreams that willed one through the experience of imprisonment and isolation? Even they can be questioned or more confounding, simply dissolved in the day to day realities of existence. 

Book 40

The Madonnas of Leningrad

By Debra Dean

This book was recommended by both my parents.

"But now I know, while beauty lives
So long will live my power to grieve."
- Alexander Pushkin

This story moves between Russia during WWII and a modern elderly couple, one of whom is struggling with Alzheimer's disease. It is at once a story about that couple and how they survived the war and how they are currently struggling with how to survive this disease. 
It is a beautiful story seeped in rich descriptions of art, detailed history of a harrowing time in history and a simple story of love and age.

"The bond that had first brought them together as children existed whether they spoke of it or not, the bond of survivors. Here in America, a relentlessly foolish and optimistic country, what they knew drew them closer together. She was his country and he hers. They were inseperable.

Until now. She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves." Pg 119

"No one weeps anymore, or if they do, it is over small things, inconsequential moments that catch them unprepared. What is left that is heartbreaking? Not death: death is ordinary. What is heartbreaking is the sight of a single gull lifting effortlessly from a street lamp. Its wings unfurl like silk scarves against the mauve sky, and Marina hears the rustle of its feathers. What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world." Pg. 161

Book 39

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

I never listened to Patti Smith. Until after reading this book. I love her version of "Hey Joe" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (the extent of my post-book read you tube search for Patti Smith).

I loved this book. I loved her writing. What I really loved, was such a beautiful account of a deep and true friendship. This book is based on her long-standing friendship with Robert Maplethorpe; a friendship where each acted at once and alternately muse and artist. 


"I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in." Pg. 170


"Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with the grandeur, a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw it and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, 'His obscenity is never obscene.'" Pg. 199


"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortes. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo." Pg 279

Book 38

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

By Camilla Gibb

This was a wonderful book. Excellent story weaving together a simple tale about a family, poetry, and art with a real movement in Vietnamese history about a group of artists trying to hold on to their humanity in the complex face of communism. Its also about the life blood of a people: pho.
"Hung is the heart of this small community on the banks of a polluted pond; he is good to these poor people, keeping them fed and entertained He treats everyone with respect - from people in high places, like Miss Maggie Ly, to people without sense or legs, like his neighbor. It is humbling to have an Old Man Hung in your life It makes you want to be a better person." Pg. 79

"Having sent Tu on his way with a small packet of lotus seeds for his mother, Hung worries he has made the boy feel insecure. He understands Tus concern about the worth of one's life. . . . 
He should have told Tu that a hero is just a man, a person who makes mistakes from time to time. It is natural when speaking of the dead that we tend to remember the heroic things rather than the flawed. Hung has for so long been invested in giving Binh a portrait of his father as a hero that it seems he has forgotten Tu. The boy might actually be better equipped than someone of his father's generation to understand the imperfections and contradictions that characterize a man, however great." Pg. 170

Historical movement known as the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair after two publications, Nhan Van (Humanism) and Giai Pham (Fine Works). Came to the west through the writings of Hoang Van Chi.
Book 37

namako - sea cucumber

Linda Watanabe McFerrin
A half-Japanese family moves to Japan after some questionable fidelity on the part of the parents. Told through the eyes of the oldest daughter, this unique coming of age story is told through growing pains and across the span of two continents.

Book 36

Lit

By Mary Karr

Karr writes a stark, honest memoir about her time as an alcoholic and the process of her recovery (kicking and screaming). Her dark side so dark it threatened to extinguish her, the double meaning of the word "lit" is both her years of heavy drinking and the experience of coming out of that time period. She writes like a pulsing vein. Which makes her story that much more profound.  


"Eventually I get drunk at her again, driving to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels like my poor Daddy used to drink (no scrap of awareness of the similarity), and I drink it in the garage while flipping through my wedding pictures, where Mother looks walleyed and very pleased with herself. I could drag her behind my car, I think. Instead, I drain the poison that I hope will kill her." Pg 130


"My body's a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10 AM). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, its still possessed of a golden nimbus.
     That's the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me - that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness.

     Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner's blast across my naked chest. Foregoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife beater T-shirt (3:15!).
     In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that's rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.
     He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head's tilted with bald curiosity.
     Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I've cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper's sagging from the vaporizer's work, but fresh steam in his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower.
     But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on." Pgs. 159-160
"It's unhip to fall to your knees, sentimental, stupid, even. But somehow I've started to do it unself-consciously.
     Behind a door, my body bends, and the linoleum rises. I lay my face on my knees in a posture almost fetal. It is, skeptics may say, the move of a slave or brainless herd animal. But around me I feel gathering - let's concede I imagine it - spirit. Such vast quiet holds me, and the me I've been so lifelong worried about shoring up just dissolves like ash in water. Just isn't. It its place is this clean air.
     There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the hear muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there." Pg 296

Book 35