This is an entertaining, quick read.  The plot is interesting, and so are the insights into the life of the 15 year old autistic/obsessive boy named Christopher, and how his mental capabilities relate to his family and the world around us.  The story is told from the boy’s perspective with little diagrams and pictures, making it fun to read.  Christopher loves math and science and wants to be an astronaut.  He decides if it will be a Good Day, Quite Good Day, Super Good Day, or a Black Day depending on how many red or yellow cars he sees.  He can’t eat food that is brown or yellow and he can’t eat food if it touches on his plate.  He won’t hug anyone and he hates being around people.  He calms himself by sitting alone in a closet and doing math problems in his head.

Christopher writes this story for his teacher.  He writes it like a mystery story, starting of with the murder of his neighbor’s dog.  As he starts to ask questions to his neighbors, we see that he has trouble relating with them and many everyday things are difficult for him.  He notices all words and signs but has trouble putting them all together to understand their meaning.  He doesn’t like jokes and expressions that are fancy ways of saying something that can be stated simply.  As he investigates the murder, he finds letters from his mother that his father has hidden from him.  These letters help Christopher understand more about the world and he starts on a journey that is big for him, but would seem ordinary to most people.

The best thing about the book is seeing how Christopher thinks.  He is such a great character.  Everything revolves around logic, numbers, signs, and words.  He loves animals – his pet rat and the dog that is murdered, but when it comes to people, he just can’t deal with them.   On his adventure he carries his pet rat in one pocket and a Swiss army knife in the other.  When a stranger approaches he opens the knife in his pocket and is ready to fight.  He gets very anxious around people.  The numbers and the logic are safe for Christopher but they imprison him.  He makes up logic games like the Super Good Day and Black Day car game to try to believe that life follows some kind of logic.  As the story unfolds, we see that his parents have created a difficult environment for him, even though they try to do the best they can.  And we see how our culture tends to make people crazy.

I wish there was more depth to the book.  Maybe there’s not because it is told from Christopher’s perspective?  We have the mystery and then another mystery that unfolds, and a manic adventure, but there could be more complexity woven into the story, or maybe more development of some of the other characters.  Christopher does seem to be very much like his father, and it would be interesting to see more details about his father’s life and their relationship.

When you have a baby your reading habits are going to change dramatically in short order. I bid farewell to my lofty, existential days of cracking Kierkegaard and dabbling in Dostoevsky. O.K. maybe I didn’t read much by them but their names work well for alliteration. Regardless… a few weeks ago Christine and I found ourselves waist deep in baby tracking field guides. While Happiest Baby on the Block and Your Baby’s First Year Week by Week are super helpful at teaching rookie parents like us things like which end to put the diaper on, they can make you a little weird in the head if used as 100% of your daily literary intake. We needed to have books on hand that were fast, fun and irreverent, so we took action, supplementing the bookshelf in Claudia’s room with books of short stories, magazines, and some books that were mostly pictures. In the end we had The Dog Lover’s Companion to California, the January and March issues of Harper’s, issue #13 of Afterall, Amphigorey Also, the April issue of Dwell, a book of short stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had left over from college, and the guidebook from the Fundacio Joan Miro. Yes… we are total yuppie, geeks from hell. This stuff was great but we needed more, so we headed over to Cody’s on 4th street (because the one by our house is closed now). Christine picked up a book by Stanislaw Lem and a couple others (that she’ll probably write about here soon), but I had a different author in mind.

When looking for advice on what a parent should read, I took a page from the ultimate resource for parental know-how, my mom. She loves Tom Robbins. I remember her and my dad blazing through his books on childhood vacations to the Outer Banks and I dug Jitterbug Perfume and some others when I was a little older. My parents were visiting Berkeley a few weeks ago and we briefly talked about Robbins’ Neo-Romantic, pseudo-psychedelic, faux-philosophical stories about wondering inanimate objects on our way to see the Fishtank Ensemble at The Freight and Salvage.

That was is it. I had to pick up one of his books at Cody’s. Thumbing around on the shelves I came across one I had never heard of before called Wild Ducks Flying Backwards. I opened it up and saw that it was a collection of short writings dating back to the 1960s. Ambrosia! This was exactly what I was looking for, perfect, bite-size, ten page chunks that fit neatly between baby feedings and unloading the dishwasher. When I opened it up and saw that it included Robbin’s tribute to Terence McKenna (who I used to be obsessed with) and that the book opened with a quote by Erik Satie (who I am currently obsessed with), I beat a quick path to the cash register.

I was not disappointed in the least. With around seventy individual writings organized into sections for “Travel Articles”, “Tributes”, “Stories, Poems, & Lyrics”, “Musings & Critiques”, and “Responses”, it was perfect for non-linear, late-night, parental reading. Even the introduction is awesome as it slowly slips into a smart-assed jab at a stereo-typical Tom Robbins reader. The travel stories were probably my favorites. He uses all of the vivid and gently demented descriptive firepower from his fiction to tell tales of his encounters with surly hippos in Africa and a giant, pink, art-deco hotel in Florida. His tributes hipped me to wonders of people I had never heard of like Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh and people who I had never cared about like Debra Winger. The back-handed tribute to Ray Kroc (the founder expander of Mc Donalds) was rad. The part about naming the sandwich the “Big Mac” instead of naming after the other Mc Donald brother had me snickering. His film script treatment called “The Tower of St. Ignatz” err.. towered in the book’s fiction section with a charming “Boy meets girl. Boy impregnates girl. Boy happens to be girl’s high school science teacher. Boy and girl get caught up in a strange, voodoo-powered, love octagon with a washed up rock star, giant antenna-building, salty, old sailor and his extended family, while tracking down a tabloid executive in the Caribbean to sell him photos of an impossible, scientific phenomina”-type of story. In the musings section Robbins gives the best definition of art that I’ve ever read and he ends the collection with his response to the question “What is the Meaning of Life?”. I won’t spoil it, but it does of course involve beer.

In summary, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards totally kicks ass. Go buy it now. I have to get off the computer because it’s 3:00AM, Claudia’s stirring, and the Phillip K. Dick Reader beckons.

Once I start reading this book, I can’t put it down.  That was the case when I first read it in high school, and that was the case when I re-read it recently.  I can certainly see why I liked the book so much as a teenager.  The first-person narrative of a smart, perceptive boy coming of age in a “phony” society describes his thoughts, memories, and desires, as a few manic days play out after he is kicked out of boarding school.  The writing is so great that you really do feel like you’re experiencing Holden’s life.  Everything is magnified and crisp.

Reading the book now, though, I do feel a sense of distance from the book and from my own teenage years.  “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”  Teenage self-destruction is usually not without a point.  I remember hating materialism and money and oil and fighting for oil.  Funny how things seem so similar today.  These problems still exist, but my approach to them is very different now.  I have learned to “live humbly” and try to actually make a difference through my own actions.

The larger theme of The Catcher in the Rye is that most people feel like they have to act like jerks to be “grown up.”  Growing up is losing innocence and the losing the ability to genuinely be yourself and live in the moment.  This is a story of Holden choosing to act like a child, and ending up in a mental hospital, but the irony is, that in growing up, we loose ourselves jumping through hoops and acting like we know what we’re talking about.  The novel is a sarcastic stab at the way the world works.  The mental hospital is society’s way of saying they know what they’re talking about, and you’re crazy.  They have it all figured out because they watched the news yesterday.

Holden hates how fake everything is in the world.  The movies annoy him.  The everyday actions people go through annoy him.  Even people’s trite dreams annoy him.  I enjoy the way this phony-ness is described, and I enjoy the way Holden deals with it through his creative, dark, sarcastic sense of humor.  He gets into a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, because he thinks he has put the moves on a girl he likes.  Holden has a more genuine relationship with the girl, based on spending time together playing checkers and being silly, rather than on a date trying to impress her.  The thought of Stradlater using her to get what he wants drives him crazy, yet Holden realizes that he has this instinct within himself also.

Holden describes magazine stories:  “You know.  One of those stories with a lot of phony, lean-jawed guys named David in it, and a lot of phony girls named Linda or Marcia that are always lighting all the goddam Davids’ pipes for them.”  He has a similar tone describing married life:  “And I’d be working in some office making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels.  Newsreels.  Christ almighty.  There’s always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship, and some chimpanzee riding a goddam bicycle with pants on…”

Later in the book Holden formulates a possible solution to living in the fake world:  “I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.  That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody.  If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me.  They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.  Everybody’d think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they’d leave me alone.  They’d let me put gas and oil in their stupid cars, and they’d pay me a salary and all for it, and I’d build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life… I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also deaf-mute and we’d get married.”

When Holden is manic going around to night clubs, he goes to a club his older brother frequents where there’s a hip piano player he knows, Ernie.  The piano player is good, but he has lost his art by pleasing the audience.  He adds “show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.”  The crowd really admired Ernie.  “They went mad.  They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny.”  Ernie is not humble, he is not genuine, he is not an artist, and he’s not happy.

The image that the title of the book refers to gives a big clue to the meaning of the book.  Holden is talking with Phoebe, his little sister, and he says that he wishes he could be the catcher in the rye.  He wishes he could be the person who stands in the field of rye and catches the children if they start to fall over the cliff.  The children falling over the cliff is a metaphor for growing up.  Holden wants to catch them so that they don’t loose themselves as they become adults.  That’s the one thing he wants to do.  He wants people to keep their humble, childlike innocence.  The hard crash at the bottom of the cliff usually triggers a big ego that prevents people from seeing reality and living genuinely.

Cody’s Books on Telegraph is hands down my favorite bookstore. It is family owned and just a couple of blocks from our house. We go up there all the time to shop and attend lectures by authors like Brian Greene, Chuck Klosterman, David Mitchell, and even Gary Hart. They will be closing on July 10th after 43 years in Berkeley. The 4th Street and San Francisco locations will remain open. The owners are blaming competition from mega-stores and internet retailers. Some people are also claiming that safety conditions and a lack of parking on Telegraph scare away older shoppers. I think that people just don’t read books these days. It is pretty sad, regardless of the causes.

Read the full story on SFGate.

David Mitchell proves that there is a reason for creating art, and it’s not the Da Vinci Code. Mitchell read passages from his new book Black Swan Green and answered questions for a lively audience at Cody’s on Telegraph tonight. His previous book, Cloud Atlas is my favorite contemporary fiction book, and, especially after hearing Mitchell speak tonight, he is my favorite contemporary author.

Mitchell took a while to get warmed up, drinking tea, reading from his new book, and then soliciting questions. He began to freely speak about art and his process for writing. He spoke of a universal reason for making art with so much sincerity  that I almost wanted to cry. He talked about those fleeting moments of happiness - fleeting moments when everything is just right - and you notice and then they’re gone. Art is a way to make those moments tangible. And he is right.

This almost seems like an impressionist view of art, but it’s not, at least I don’t think so. It’s not so much about capturing a particular physical moment, like the sea bathed in light, but more of communicating a feeling, presence, or state. It’s about putting elements together to create a happiness that is life. Cloud Atlas is that. Cloud Atlas helped me see the world in a different way. One person tonight interpreted the “present” in Cloud Atlas as a car chase that leads to an insane asylum. Mitchell said, yes, and then the insane asylum blows up!

Mitchell said that he’s always learning from his work, and that he cringes when he goes back to older works and sees mistakes he has made, but then he is that much better. When asked about what he thinks about genre writing versus literature, he gave a nod to Dan Brown for encouraging people to read, but went on to say that one strategy is to take a cliché, say from a genre, and manipulate it slightly to create something original and interesting. I immediately thought of ways to apply this to the visual arts. What a perfect cure for postmodernism: the cliché with a hook. Cloud Atlas is completely postmodern, but it’s held together with an undeniable artistic strength that comes from thoughtful sensitivity of expression.

I haven’t read Black Swan Green yet, but it’s on my list. It is a more traditional novel, loosely based on Mitchell’s teenage years. He’s now working on a historical novel.

This book is a collection of character sketches called “grotesques.”  I wanted to read this book because it had a creative organization, with the character sketches loosely related; because it was about Ohio, where I’m from; and because it was about a time period that interests me, post civil war to early 1900s.  I think I would have really liked to have read this book in high school, but now I can only give it mediocre marks.

Each character sketch is 2-10 pages long, and each sketch is mostly depressing.  Of course, that is part of the theme of the book.  Each person seems to have some desire to do something, and struggles to do it.  Most of the desires relate to being loved and accepted.  There are a lot of examples of people being inhumane and mean spirited, which I found difficult to read.  It read like a demented soap opera.  Psychology is a primary focus, and plots are thin.

That being said, there were some interesting passages.  For example, the creepy doctor who later has an affair with the main character’s mother is one of the few who knows “the sweetness of the twisted apples.”  These are apples that are not picked, but left on the tree and free for the taking.  They are undesirable because they are twisted, but they are delicious because the sweetness gathers in the grotesque folds.

One of my favorite sections was “Loneliness.”  It tells the story of an artist, Enoch Robinson.  He left Winesburg and went to New York and hung out with other artists.  He wanted to speak volumes but could never get the words to come out of his mouth right.  “He did not want friends for the quite simple reason that no child wants friends.”  He preferred to speak to the people in his mind, whom he could control and with whom he could be confident.  He got married and got a job as a commercial artist to play the role of “citizen,” but he could not deal with that life and went back to New York to talk to his imaginary friends, and then ended up back in Winesburg.  I enjoyed reading about this crazy artistic personality.

At the end of the book, after generations of disappointment, the main character leaves Winesburg.  He is a hero who has finally found the courage to go after what he wants.  Winesburg ends up representing repression and resulting inappropriate expression under the guise of normalcy.

Brave New World is one of the best books I have read. The large moral and ethical social questions raised in the book are very interesting and thought-provoking. These issues are made personal, and tied into a great story, when applied to “the Savage” and his relationships. The issues are still so relevant that it is difficult to believe that the book was first published in 1932.

The brave new world is a place where humanity is a science carefully controlled. Poetry, art, and strong personal relationships are traded for leisure, immediate gratification, and “everyone belonging to everyone else”. The idea is that the perfect balance can be reached in society by controlling and efficiently producing the right amount of lower classes and upper classes. People have been customized to enjoy their places in life. Even the least desirable jobs are now enjoyed by people that have been conditioned to enjoy the particular kind of work they do.

Soma is a drug that is taken daily to escape from any pain. Soma can provide a holiday without leaving. Soma and consumerism keep the populous numbed and content. The economics of the brave new world are entirely relevant to today’s world. God has been replaced by “Ford” suggesting the importance of products and the lack of importance of an individual’s personal beliefs. People are encouraged to throw things away if they are torn and to buy new things for the good of society. People seem to live as if in day-dreams, as if cogs in a machine, without much thought or depth of feeling.

A Native American settlement near Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the few places left in the world where people still have babies the old fashioned way and live in families. Bernard, a worker for the State, takes one of his girlfriends, Lenina, for a holiday to visit this savage settlement. Bernard is on official business to study these people, as if studying animals in a zoo. Bernard discovers a woman from the brave new world who had been stranded in New Mexico years ago when visiting with Bernard’s superior, the Director. The Director and the woman (Linda) had acted as savages in Santa Fe and the woman now had a grown child (the Savage) who had been raised in the Native American settlement.

The Savage and his mother never quite fit in with the others in the settlement. The Native American wives did not welcome the woman’s loose sexual practices, those of the brave new world, and the woman had a very difficult time living in the savage environment without soma and all the other amenities of the brave new world. The woman and the Savage travel to the new world with Bernard. We see the reaction of the brave new world to an old woman, who was once one of them and now is in a condition no one ever sees – missing teeth, wrinkled with age, and spent; and to the savage who has not been conditioned to “belong to everyone else”. The Savage reaches celebrity status while he tries to live the life that will make him happy.

While this is not the most interesting book in the world, it was worthwhile to read. I was attracted to the book by the subject of “status anxiety” and the comprehensive cultural perspectives covered – visual arts, economics, religion, psychology.

The thesis of this book is:

“— That status anxiety possesses an exceptional capacity to inspire sorrow.”
“— That the hunger for the status, like all appetites, can have its uses: spurring us to do justice to our talents, encouraging excellence, restraining us from harmful eccentricities and cementing member of society around a common value system. But, like all appetites, its excesses can also kill.”
“— That the most profitable way of addressing the condition may be to attempt to understand and speak of it.”

I found the “Material Progress” section to be quite fascinating. This sections details the goods and amenities that became available to western capitalist societies beginning with the industrial revolution and accelerating in the 1950s. Geared toward “ordinary people,” department stores became popular around the turn of the 20th century. Fashion changes constantly so that consumers will desire the newest styles. America is synonymous with consumerism. “When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what one book he would give the Soviet people to teach them about the advantages of American society, he singled out the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.”

I found the main part of the book rather boring, though this is good supportive material for the thesis. There is discussion of status obtained through lineage, status obtained through achievement, and views that celebrate the ordinary. De Botton does a good job of capturing the many different perspectives and historical causes of “status anxiety.” I do feel like I have a better understanding of “the condition” but I’m not quite sure how to “address” it. Some thoughts are:

• Consumer power vs. others making money. Corporations make money by convincing you that you need to buy their products. How much do you really need to buy? Have confidence to make choices based on what you need, considering the impacts of the creation, use, and disposal of the product. Research before you buy:

http://www.buyblue.org

• Find genuine acceptance from others. Seek love from the world through who you are and not what you have or what you’ve accomplished. Enjoy times with good friends who know you.

• Respect the choices of others. Everyone can follow their own dreams of happiness as long as they respect others and are willing to accept the consequences of their own decisions. A greater good should be considered in the search for individual happiness.

• The public realm should be a desirable place. Often, the public realm is bleak – a highway cluttered with signs for fast food restaurants – and residents drive up to their homes in need of a psychological escape. Why not create public spaces where people want to be, where all people feel proud to live in the community, and are not forced to the private realm where they must buy countless consumer goods? The results of thoughtful city planning – appealing architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and good public transportation – can create experientially rich environments for everyone.