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8/7/07
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7/16/07
SHELF LIFE: Blind Faith
Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See
By Robert Kurson
Random House, 306 pages, $25.95
By Alexander C. Kafka
Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune
How wrapped up in fear we are; how it constrains our plans, our hopes.
That's never clearer than in contrast with someone who has so many obvious things to fear but shakes off those concerns and lives more fully than the rest of us in the human herd -- someone like Mike May, whose astonishing story is memorably told in Robert Kurson's Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See.
May lost his vision at age 3, when, one spring day in 1957, he climbed into the rafters of his family's garage in Silver City, N.M., seeking a vessel for water with which to make mud pies. He walked over to a cement horse trough to wash out the hard powder in the jar. That powder was calcium carbide, and when combined with water it forms explosive gas acetylene. His mother, Ori Jean, heard the explosion, "ran to the backyard and found Mike lying on the ground, drenched in blood and sharded in glass. He was in shock and whimpering," and he almost died.
Instant tragedies offer no exemption from quieter, more gradual ones, like the alcoholism of Mike's dad, Bill, an engineer. That left Ori Jean to raise her five children, including her blind son, increasingly by herself. She was the right woman for the job, though, moving the Mays to Walnut Creek, Calif., so Mike could go to a regular school, and not just allowing but encouraging him to live the active, daring childhood for which he was wired:
"At school . . . Mike took tetherballs to the face and dodgeballs to the groin. He bloodied his nose, cracked toes, and broke fingers. While running to first base in kickball, he stepped on top of the ball, fell backward, and bashed his head on the pavement. He was unconscious for twenty minutes and rushed to the hospital." A week later, he was playing again.
May insisted on being a school crossing guard. He rode a bike three miles in traffic into town, using his extraordinary spatial memory and acutely echo-sensitive hearing. During his bike ride, his mother "stayed home and vacuumed the living room, then vacuumed it again. After three hours Mike walked in the door. 'Hi, Mom,' he said, then went to wash up for dinner. She never asked him about the trip -- she didn't want it to seem like a big deal."
In high school, Mike built an 80-foot tower in the back yard for his ham radio. "By the time he was teetering at forty feet, [his mother] could no longer stand it." She drove off and returned to find Mike "in the garage talking into a microphone, saying, 'This is WB6ABK. Is there anyone out there? Where have I reached?' "
Sometimes his courage crossed way over the line into recklessness -- for instance, the motorcycle ride to and around the high-school track, or the time he borrowed his sister's car for a mercifully short, experimental drive.
He was on wrestling teams in high school and at the University of California at Davis, where he studied electrical engineering. He went on a student exchange to Ghana with his guide dog. Because of the blindness and the dog he was unable to line up a host family and ended up living alone in a mud hut and contracting malaria. After studying international relations at Johns Hopkins University, he was the CIA's first blind employee: a political-risk analyst.
He became a high-tech entrepreneur, and -- of all things -- a ski racer, winning, with his guide, Ron Salviolo, three gold medals at the 1982 Paralympic World Winter Games, then becoming the first blind skier in the Olympics, in 1984 at Sarajevo (though he and Salviolo had to sneak onto the course to achieve that unofficial distinction). When one of May's business ventures went bust, he handled dejection in his usual fashion, taking up a riskier form of racing called speed skiing, where the snug helmets muted his hearing. He and Salviolo worked out a two-way radio system, and May set a blind-skier record of 65 m.p.h. May also fell in love and married, and he and his wife, Jennifer, had two sons.
On a chance encounter with Jennifer's optometrist, May learned of an experimental procedure to restore sight in his one eye, the right; the left had been replaced by a prosthetic in 1977 after an infection from his illness in Ghana.
The medical risks of this new procedure were harrowing. First, transplanted optical stem cells (not the embryonic kind of current heated debate) would produce daughter cells to clear and preserve the cornea. Then a new cornea would be transplanted. The combined surgeries had only 50-50 odds of success, and any improvement could reverse itself at any time. The anti-rejection drug vastly increased the chance of cancer. And May could lose the partial light sensitivity that was so vital to his activities.
For months he didn't even seriously consider the operations. And although he found time for everything, he didn't find time to read the few available case histories of the life-long blind who'd had some vision restored. They tended to become severely depressed, because their new vision confused and tired them as much as it helped and pleased them. They also felt their specialness disappear without ample emotional rewards to compensate.
May had been a charismatic role model, making a point of gently explaining to groups how full his experiences and his senses were without sight. He was an inspiration and an ambassador, and he feared the blind would feel betrayed if he sought sight. He might be betraying his own sense of self too.
Kurson -- a former Sun-Times and Chicago magazine feature writer, now a contributor to Esquire magazine and author of the deep-sea account Shadow Divers -- uses May's difficult decision, in 1999 at age 46, to frame May's story and those of his family and friends. Then Kurson weaves into that narrative a discussion of the medical research and obstacles involved not just in the experimental surgeries but in sight-related brain function. He lays all that out clearly but without condescension and in small sections a nonscientist can digest.
As the book's title suggests, the surgery went miraculously well, but May's visual cortex wasn't up to interpreting what his restored eye could deliver. Movement and color spoke to it; depth and visual cues didn't. For instance, faces were clear but meaningless, gestures weird and distracting, and moguls on beloved ski runs camouflaged. May's new world was in many ways gorgeous but also baffling and exhausting. How he has chosen to handle that is characteristically remarkable, though, and that's one of the things that makes him an equally compelling medical and literary subject.
While May's achievements are extraordinary, the most moving aspects of his story are the magical but also melancholy bits of ordinary life we don't always properly absorb: the thrill of seeing your spouse's body or your son's freckles; the pleasure of catching a ball. Then there are the small, strange revelations that came with May's new vision: the discovery that stop signs are red and that red meat isn't, necessarily; that overhead highway signs won't knock the roof off your minivan; that parking attendants wear neon reflective vests.
May, with a deferred adolescent fervor, always dreamed of seeing women, especially topless women. But when he does finally get to indulge in some belated scoping, he needs help making sense of what he sees, help that his wife sweetly provides, explaining to reporters that she wants her husband to enjoy all things beautiful.
But all things are not beautiful, and May's first sight of homeless people, cracked windows, chipped paint and an obese woman at Costco whom he at first mistakes for a forklift -- well, those are revelations too. Nor does his medical odyssey pre-empt the tribulations of his latest roller-coaster business venture (talking global-positioning-sytem units for the blind). It's one of several factors that, for years, have put serious and repeated strains on the Mays' marriage. Marriage, too, is an adventure, and adventurers both, they crash through together into the unknown.
A motif of Crashing Through is the importance of getting lost. Whether on the elementary-school playground, in Ghana, in his college town, on the ski slope, or undergoing batteries of medical tests, May crashes through physical, mental and emotional boundaries and discovers -- sometimes whimsically, often painfully -- what's out there. The book's epigraph, from Soren Kierkegaard, puts the idea succinctly:
"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
Reading about May repeatedly losing and finding his way, I was overcome with admiration, of course, but also found myself wishing him a little more tranquility now, a bit less striving, a time of taking stock -- at least for a spell, maybe, before he goes on to wow us in some new way.
While May has apparently fended off despair through constant motion and ambition, we can nonetheless feel the weight, as well as the valor, of his experiences. As you read about the man who "dared to see" in so many transcendent ways, don't be surprised if your own vision mists over now and then. As May, of all people, well knows, tears, too, are necessary.
7/6/07
SHELF LIFE: What's It All About, Terry?
By Terry Eagleton
Oxford University Press
By Alexander C. Kafka
Reprinted From Bookslut
I was reading a thick, facile, ironic novel—a several-year-old best seller about the Jewish Russian immigrant experience. Halfway through its 600 or so witty, self-satisfied, eclectically referenced, hubristically hip pages, I wasn’t connecting with it. It had been enthusiastically recommended to me, and, like someone who had waited 25 minutes for a bus, I knew that if I abandoned the project, the payoff would surely have come five minutes later, but I felt terribly impatient. I put it down.
I thought to myself, What I really want right now is a slim, profound, accessible volume that will tell me something about the meaning of life. That’s when, fortuitously, I spotted on my desk a slim, profound, accessible volume called The Meaning of Life, by the acclaimed theology-preoccupied British Marxist cultural critic Terry Eagleton.
Yes, I know. Nothing screams fun like a theology-preoccupied British Marxist cultural critic. But I’m here to tell you that—the occasional inappropriate political dig aside—this is an entertaining, enlightening, succinct book that actually delivers on its title, and all in 175 pages plus recommended reading and index.
It’s a self-help book of sorts, if you need help withdrawing from self-help books—an anti-Secret, you might say. For it’s the kind of self-help book that will make you look long and hard at the words self and help and possibly book, until you realize the futility of the notions and go back to hermeneutic Square One. Like a good drill sergeant, it breaks down your every instinct and assumption about the meaning of life, then puts you through rigorous exercises in basic philosophy until you’re fit enough to come up with some sturdier ideas about the subject.
Eagleton, a skillful writer whose no-doubt lively lecture voice speaks from the page, spends much of the journey teasing us into thinking the work will ultimately be a practical joke. That is, some tired workaday schmo like myself picks up this book thinking, OK, finally, an answer, only to be persuaded that the question is futile and superficial, if not altogether meaningless. On my side, nothing more than nagging doubts about what it’s all about; a general, banal sense of disorientation; a hunger for useful distinctions, if not clear directions. On his side, a panel of skeptical experts including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, who all question whether meaning has a meaning on various linguistic and metaphysical levels.
Even if you can get past the whole language problem inherent in meaning, there’s the moral one. Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin, for example, see various goals such as “courage, compassion, justice, and so on” as often incompatible and irreconcilable. To achieve one in most practical situations involves sacrificing another.
From there, Eagleton explores the history of the question—how premoderns generally didn’t worry about the meaning of life because they were wrapped up in religious certainties. He considers how even the moderns like Kafka and Beckett, in their explorations of meaninglessness, harked back more or less implicitly to a template of normalcy in which meaning and some accompanying civility had a place.
For postmodern thinkers, not even those implicit normalcies existed, and the dearth of them was horrifying, liberating, or both. At least if meaning is contingent and subjective, than we can all invent our own meanings, whether in touchy-feely spirituality, sports fandom, a passionate anti-religiousness, or some other expression. But no, Eagleton finds those options unsatisfyingly narcissistic, arbitrary, smug, and/or silly. So an absence of meaning is no breeding ground for meaningful meaning either.
And, oy, as if the meaning of meaning and the moral morass weren’t obstacles enough, then there’s the whole definition-of-life issue. “'The meaning of life' might well mean 'what it all adds up to,'” writes Eagleton, “in which case childbirth and clog dancing would indeed have to be viewed as aspects of a single, significant totality. And this is more than one would expect even from the most shapely, well-integrated of works of art.” Generalizations are suspect, as are generalized abnegations of them, he contends:
“Life is a gas, a bitch, a cabaret, a vale of tears, a bed of roses. This bunch of shop-soiled tags may hardly seem much on which to build a case. Yet the assumption that all metastatements about human life are vacuous is itself vacuous. It is not true that only concrete, particular truths have any force. What, for example, of the generalization that most men and women in history have lived lives of fruitless, wretched toil? This is surely more disturbing than the proposition that most people in Delaware have done so.”
Eagleton ventures a couple of possible candidates for the meaning of life, among them happiness and love. Needless to say, he systematically pummels both concepts into existential submission, with a little help from Freud, and Aristotle and the philosopher Julian Baggini take some collateral damage along the way.
But just when I’m beginning to think I’ve been led, albeit charmingly, down the garden path and that maybe I should have stuck it out with the thick hipster novel after all, The Meaning of Life takes an interesting turn. I’m not sure one could really “spoil” a book about the meaning of life—after all, either it has one, or more than one, or none at all, right? Suffice to say that he strongly suggests, suspensefully late in the game, that it has one, that happiness and love might not be altogether irrelevant, and that it has much in common with jazz.
Moreover, Eagleton’s answer to the question—if a question is really what you’d call it after his boisterous dissection—strikes me, for one, as surprisingly satisfying. He cautions against elitist navel-gazing on such matters as the one he’s addressing. But whatever the meaning of life may include, considerations of it in such clever company can surely play a worthy part.
6/11/07
SHELF LIFE: Icy Reception
By Roger McCoy
Oxford University Press
178 pages
By Colleen Mondor
Chasing Ray
Reprinted From Bookslut
Alfred Wegener's name is far from instantly recognizable, but his idea of "Pangaea" -- first theorized in 1912 asserting that the continents were once joined into a single land mass that later split apart and drifted into their current positions -- is. Geologists of the day decried his conclusions and refused to believe them. Ultimately the “continental drift” theory would become accepted and Wegener would receive high praise, but it would be long after his death in Greenland, where he died while leading an ice core sampling mission in 1930. Unlike so many polar explorers who merely wanted to be first or furthest, Wegener actually sought scientific truth in the North. He was tireless in his dedication to geology and meteorology and remained determined even in the face of derision and disrespect. Roger McCoy was clearly captivated with Wegener and recounts his life in Ending in Ice: The Revolutionary Idea and Tragic Expedition of Alfred Wegener in great detail while largely allowing the man to speak for himself.
Interestingly, the novelist Clare Dudman also wrote a book about Wegener, One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead. In her lyrical portrait of the scientist’s life, she reaches into his heart and head and imagines feelings and compulsions that might have driven him on his scientific path. The weight of McCoy’s book is upon Wegener’s discoveries while Dudman dwells heavily on relationships. The Alfred Wegener in One Day is the scientist as perceived by the novelist (the New Yorker commented in its review that, “Dudman artfully channels Wegener’s voice so convincingly that her book reads like an artifact of Old World Exploration”), but in reading her book the voice I heard was more of Dudman than Wegener. This probably can not be helped, it is a novel after all. Is it because it is easier to read the passages such as this from one of the Greenland journeys:
I stand up and look around. Our only hope is food, but all I have is a gun and a lifeless hillside. Already I can feel the anger dying away and losing power. We have to live. We have to eat. Gloe whimpers and collapses on my feet. He doesn’t see me lower the gun.
No one asks where the meat comes from.
Rather than the more direct truth: “They were nearly exhausted and had no more provisions. With regret they shot the last dog and cooked it.”
The end result is the same; the sled dog was killed and eaten and moments later a clergyman from a nearby trading post (attracted by the shot) arrives to save them. But in Dudman’s passage, Wegener is conflicted and even heroic -- he alone knows that it is the friendly dog that is eaten. In McCoy’s passage, the dog dies so the men can live, simple and brutal but also familiar to anyone who has read polar tales. And really, the dog is not the point in McCoy’s book -- it is why Wegener was in the Arctic and what he learned there that really matters. And that is where the two books diverge.
McCoy pays a great deal of attention to the time Wegener spent in Greenland on each of his succeeding missions -- both as an expedition member and later as a leader. He is intrigued by what the explorer sought to learn and how he hoped his accomplishments would bolster existing research. In easily readable text and accompanying maps and photos, McCoy lays out the manner in which Wegener sought to prove his continental drift theory and also measure ice ages and climate variations. The epic story of his death in the snow is told through the lives of those who saw him last and survived. McCoy had a wealth of material to draw on, but the loss of the final diary (the author imagines it was taken by the man who was with Wegener in the end but was lost along with him some unknown distance from the body) makes his final days a mystery. He likely died of heart failure, as his wife believed decades later. After his fellow scientists found his grave, they reburied the body, leaving him in the place that had captivated him for so long.
Ending in Ice continues for several chapters after Wegener’s death, however. McCoy covers the scientific success of the last expedition and what happened to its other members. He also reports on the accomplishments of Wegener’s wife in the years after her death (she died in 1992 at the age of 100). She continued to write about her husband’s work, including a book of his “diaries, letters and her own memories” in 1960. All of this information was drawn on by McCoy, allowing him to have as complete a picture possible of this fascinating man.
Finally though, it was not Wegener’s words but his continental drift theory that has endured. It was not until the 1960s that geologists began to consider it again, and using oceanographic data learned during WWII, a case was built in support of Wegener’s ideas. This later research, and the men who drove it, makes up the book’s final chapters, providing an excellent overview of geologic advances in the latter part of the 20th century, and showing just how a theory like Wegener’s had to be re-proved. McCoy rightly shows that opposition to it in the beginning was largely due to its revolutionary nature, quoting one participant of the 1926 American Association of Petroleum Geologists conference convened for the sole purpose of discussing Wegener’s theory: “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start all over again.” The thought of starting over -- even it was in the right direction -- was too much for Wegener’s contemporaries, and it would take new scientists to finally embrace his conclusions.
Alfred Wegener is the sort of historical figure who belongs in the classroom -- his life and death would brighten any earth science class, and the simple way in which he found a solution for one of the planet’s enduring mysteries is heartening to all armchair scientists everywhere. Ending in Ice might not have the same poetic nature that Dudman’s book possesses, but it most certainly is a compelling historic account. Both books are a testament to Wegener’s enduring legacy but it is McCoy’s that has stayed with me. He did not have to imagine what lay in Alfred Wegener’s heart; it was obvious to the biographer from the way the man lived and died just who he was, and that is the story he tells so beautifully.
SHELF LIFE: Exiled From a Country That Doesn't Exist
By Farouq Wadi
Translated by Dina Bosio and Christopher Tingley
Interlink
109 pages
By Colleen Mondor
Chasing Ray
Reprinted from Bookslut
Invaders don't read history. What point would there be, after all, in reading anything that ran counter to their desire to invade, to expand and settle?
Farouq Wadi, a novelist and short story writer, was born in Palestine in 1949. He returned to Ramallah, the twin city of his hometown, al-Bireh, in early 1995 and late 1996 after having left while still a teenager. To some degree, Homes of the Heart: A Ramallah Chronicle is an account of any adult returning to the place of their youth, filled with recollections of how things were and mild shock at its current appearance. As we all know, however, Ramallah has changed more dramatically then most cities in the world during the past decades and continues to find itself at the center of multiple violent conflicts.
Wadi is a hopeful traveler though, the sort of memoirist who knows things are going to be different and is not constantly surprised by how much smaller things seem, or how buildings have aged in his absence. He has much more serious business to get down to, seeing the places of his youth while also commenting on the forbidding presence of the Israeli military in unfamiliar locations. He is surprised to find the old Health Department where, "my eyes had stung from drops and my cuts from iodine" is now the location of an Israeli military post. Standing there, wondering what had become of the Friends' School which was once nearby, he finds himself forced to retreat, "in the face of a machine gun ready to target anything that moved, amid a darkness of which I already formed part."
Interestingly, even though he has left it all behind, it is Ramallah and al-Bireh that Wadi has written about and dreamed about in his decades of exile. Thus his awkward return; his discovery of just how transformed the post-war, internecine conflicted region has become, troubles Wadi to no end. He had foolishly hoped for a happy reunion, perhaps even for revelations about who he is and how his long absence from home transformed him in unknown ways. Instead there are only quiet discoveries such as this:
Amid my mixed feelings of losing Jerusalem and longing for Ramallah, I tried to chat with the taxi driver. Perhaps he might share some of my sorrows and joys.
Since when," I asked, "have we got to Qalandia without passing through Jerusalem?"
"Since they opened this road," he said sarcastically, without giving any date. "We follow the roads they map out for us," he added sadly. "It's been that way for a long time now."
With them. For them. We travel our cities on roads they've built for us.
And yet Wadi still sees himself as Palestinian. The answer to this strange relationship with place is found only a couple of pages later however, after he arrives at the Lighthouse Square, center of Ramallah since the landlocked lighthouse was built in 1923. "God! How had the town grown so old? How had it lost its memory, withholding from its son all warmth of welcome? Why had we fled from our exiles? Was it just to return to a homeland so like the exile itself?"
A "homeland so like the exile itself." What is it like when you are in exile from a country that does not exist? How can it be to recall a place that is daily transformed from what it was, claimed and reclaimed by succeeding groups and armies? How can you go home when your home has a name only known to those who lived there -- when it lives on only because of collective will and not official sanction? I wonder perhaps if this is what it felt like to be a Native American in the 19th century -- looking for a place that is disappearing from maps and encyclopedias; looking for a country that it is only known by name.
In the midst of his visit, Wadi delves into the history of Ramallah and al-Bireh, providing readers with fascinating glimpses of the people and nations who have been involved in the area's formation. He writes of people from thousands of years ago as if they were old friends or dear family and gives the book a measure of warmth which balances his disappointment over modern times. He is never harshly partisan when writing about Israel, although he does exhibit a strong frustration when referring to Israeli settlements. This argument will be familiar to anyone well versed in Israeli-Palestinian relations and Wadi handles it adeptly.
The book does not make any political conclusions at all, but it's not meant to. It is simply a story about one man and his connection to the place of his birth. In that regard it is both timeless and borderless -- it is a story anyone with a love of country would both enjoy and understand.
6/3/07
EXCERPT: 'Smooth Operators'
We don’t see his type so often now, but back then he was the ultimate male icon. He was charming, dashing, debonair. He was a lady’s man. He was the sort of man who was very much at home on a bar stool and who seldom lit his own cigarette. And if he wasn’t decanting himself a whisky into a crystal tumbler, he was practicing his golf swing in a pair of beige slacks.
He was hot. He was hairy. He was probably wearing Dacron.
But women were wise to be wary of his sort: this male of the species bit back. He was a ladykiller. He was the male version of a praying mantis or black widow spider. He was a gorgon in Cuban heels with a ramrod mustache. He was the quintessential alpha male. In the '70s, he wore a satin-effect smoking jacket and left chocolates on your bedside table. In the '80s, his bachelor pad was black and chrome, and he threw a red bedspread on his futon.
Remember his type? As Sade would no doubt chime in: “No need to ask. He’s a smooth operator.” The smooth operator was the archetypal male. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, he was the image of masculinity for men (and women) to buy into, whether it was his aftershave, his chunky jewelry, or his bikini briefs. For the first time in a long time, the male body was up for grabs.
My father appropriated an off-the-shelf version of the smooth operator, albeit with a few twists of his own. He was more what you would term “lathe operator” than “smooth operator,” but I remember one afternoon in 1978, when he drove into town in his tangerine-colored hatchback and returned with a fuzzy perm and man-clogs. For the next few months, I watched him carefully tweak and tease his curls with an Afro comb, displaying the sort of dedication I would later see him give to pruning ornamental roses. And while his man-clogs gave him much needed height, they caused him to clatter around precariously, his exaggerated leg movements giving him the look of a wading duck, the curly perm on top completing the picture of Big Bird.
Dad also began spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, coming out stinking of strange synthetic colognes—smells that would have put many an effluent oulet pipe to shame. And he began unbuttoning his shirt low to reveal a sovereign medallion amongst sparse, but carefully cultivated, wisps of chest hair. I think it was about that time in his life that he started playing squash doubles and invested in a chest expander. Dressed in a short dressing gown which he wore about the house and which showed more thigh than was perhaps appropriate, Dad would perform faux martial-arts displays to himself in the full-length mirror. Out went the nylon briefs and in came the leopard-print G-string briefs, so when Dad did a high kung-fu kick, we were all truly “thonged.” Not since Narcissus fell in love with the image of himself in the pool of Mount Helicon had a man seemed so enamored with his own image.
I was only nine years old at the time and too young to realize what was happening to him, but I knew that he wasn’t normally a vain man: the baggy trunks and cut-off denim shorts that he wore almost non-stop during vacation were testament to that. He wasn’t, as we would say today, “in touch with his feminine side”—he was very much a man’s man and enjoyed doing manly things such as cleaning the rain gutters and racing ferrets. Nor could it be said that he was much of a fop either; it was his brother Derek—and not my dad—who came back from West Germany carrying a handbag, a fashion stumper that’s still spoken of to this day. Truth is, I merely assumed Dad was in the midst of a midlife crisis and said nothing, preferring to leave him to have his mental breakdown in peace.
It’s only now, nearly thirty years later, that I realize my father was performing the most ancient of rites. He was paying homage to the masculine image. Put simply, he was preparing himself for the dating scene. No longer with my mother, Dad was creating his own version of the beautiful male. With his new mane of hair, traditionally the symbol of male strength and virility, as well as the extra two or three inches afforded by his man-clogs, my father was hot to trot. It was a case of “Lock up your daughters.”
However, the world into which my dad furtively stepped with his man-clogs wasn’t the same as it had been when he and my mother had first gone a-courting in the late '50s. It had changed dramatically. In the '50s, the extent of male preening involved nothing more than combing grease through your hair and blowing the mothballs off your father’s demob suit. But by the late '70s, the female form was no longer the sole focus of sexual desire. John Travolta was strutting his stuff in Saturday Night Fever, and before you could say “polyester lounge suit,” men the disco-dancing world over were squeezing themselves into twelve-inch bell bottoms and stuffing socks into their pants.
The sexes had been in turmoil since the psychedelic '60s melted the static gender roles of the '50s. Women were being liberated through birth control and in the workplace. By contrast, there were the first mumblings that men would soon become surplus to requirements, that masculinity was heading for crisis. The androgyny of the '70s led us nowhere fast and only assisted in confusing things, as men and women looked for their lost identities in the approaching '80s. Something was happening all over town. Ready-to-wear emporiums and mail-order catalogs hit, and suddenly fashion became affordable and mass market—not the greatest omen in terms of quality it has to be said. However, I think we can blame the arrival of new man-made fibers and dyeing agents for the more experimental fashion crimes during this period.
It is through this period of flux that our hero the smooth operator, boldly sowed his oats. Unabashed, he flew the flag for the male as sex symbol during a time of sexual uncertainty, and maybe that explains what’s fascinating about him today. Dressed in the fashion shrapnel of the time, the smooth operator stood for the age-old image of the sexually desirable male.
Men have preened and paraded themselves since they fell out of trees. In our culture, the male image can be traced back to the kouros of Greek antiquity, later immortalized by Michelangelo’s David. This Apollonian ideal—the broad shoulders, the expanded chest, the tight buttocks and the stiff pelvis—struts like a peacock aware of its admirers. All that’s new in the pictures in this book is that they’re either doing this in the underpants section of a catalog or they’re modeling Gore-Tex.
There are, however, aspects of the smooth operator’s character that both repel and intrigue us. If you set yourself up on a pedestal, you’re asking to be knocked off—especially so if you’re a man. If women aren’t hanging off the smooth operator's neck, they’re fingering his sunglasses or cooing at this crotch. And while he may have been considered “groovy” in his day, from our present day perspective, he seems seriously out of date.
He’s vain too, and if there’s one thing a woman admires less than a man who doesn’t care about the way he looks, it’s one who does to a fault. We don’t like men to care (or be seen to care) about such surface-deep nonsense. Men are supposed to hunt, gather nuts, and change carburetors in secondhand cars. Even today’s so-called metrosexual man, with his skin care products and plucked eyebrows, is essentially a figure of fun.
But I think there’s something else deep beneath our stone-throwing. If a man loves his own reflection, we suspect it wouldn’t take much for him to transfer that desire to another man’s reflection. So that if the smooth operator is guilty of Narcissism, he might well enjoy another practice of the ancient Greeks, namely sleeping with other men. That, traditionally, has been a great way of bringing the macho heterosexual man down a peg or two. Such is the lot of the smooth operator. He walks a precarious tightrope between impressing the ladies and convincing them he really wouldn’t be interested.
But I think the smooth operator has the last laugh on us. We think these hairy beasts of the sex war jungle are antique relics, Neanderthals that have been selected out of existence by modern sensitive man. Maybe that’s their comedy value, but I urge caution. It is merely his fashion—the man-drag—that has changed to fit in with modern norms. The ancient rules of sexual attraction haven’t changed one iota. Like the kouros, my dad in his man-clogs or today’s modern sensitive man, the smooth operator is merely a chapter in the history of men masquerading as men.
The smooth operator’s dead. Long live the smooth operator.
Text from the introduction to Smooth Operators: The Secrets Behind Their Success, by Richard Jarman and the Advertising Archives. Copyright by Universe Books. Used with permission. Photo is from the book cover.
4/21/07
CHASING RAY: History's Fine Lines
By Mireille Marokvia
Unbridled Books
Farthing
By Jo Walton
Toor Books
By Colleen Mondor
from Chasing Ray
Mireille Marokvia’s memoir Sins of the Innocent provides a perspective of World War II that I don’t think has been presented before. Marokvia is French and met her future husband, a German artist, in Paris in the 1930s. They were part of the Hemingwayesque group that the city was infamous for in the years before the war -- all witty repartee and glamorous creativity. Bit by bit, however, Mireille and Abel found themselves unable to ignore the news coming out of Germany and the rest of Europe. Friends abandoned the Continent; at one point a friend sends Abel a ticket to Argentina, pleading with him to leave, but the two lovers did not think it would get so bad, or that the badness would get close to them. News of the Munich Agreement in 1938 galvanized them. “No war,” she writes, “There would be no war. That was all we saw. And Czechoslovakia? Sacrificed / yes, yes, but peace, we had ‘won’ peace!” They had a victory banquet with friends in celebration. “We had several victory banquets,” she writes.They were ready to celebrate what they were desperate to have, and in reading about her excitement, her relief, one begins to care very deeply for naïve Mireille and her husband. They don’t know what’s coming, but we do, and we wonder just how a French woman and German man will possibly navigate those events together. That struggle for survival is what makes up the bulk of the story, and what gives it a narrative dynamic that is unlike any other memoir about the war years on the market today.
In other words, Suite Française my ass. Mireille Marokvia might not have a suitably sad story complete with lost manuscript, hidden suitcase and death to accompany it, but she did more than most: she survived. The fact that she accomplished this at all is impressive, but when you consider that she did it as a French woman in Germany who was opposed to the fighting, it makes her life seem almost like a miracle.
They went to Germany because of a visit from an old friend of Abel’s. “How I disliked him!” writes Mireille. “I still do!” He brought news that Abel’s widowed mother was quite ill and needed him at home right away. It was two months since Chamberlain’s agreement; they thought war was averted. They would only go for six months, Abel promised, and then they would return to France. Mireille believed him and really she had no choice. His mother was sick and needed her son, and so of course, his new wife went with him. They stayed in Germany for the next eight years.
In the chapters that follow Mireille explains how two people who were against the war managed to survive while not being arrested as traitors. The story rarely dwells on the Holocaust, as it was not something the couple was largely aware of. The author remembers an anti-Semitic film and, later, a young Jewish co-worker with a child whose identities she helps to hide. But mostly Sins is about day-to-day living, about people who found ways to shop for little food and make meager dinner parties so they could still spend time together and pretend everything had not changed forever. It’s about having a job during the war, and being an artist in a place where art barely exists. Sins of the Innocent is the story of the German home front that has been rarely told to Western readers.
For every recollection of an evening out with friends or move to a new apartment, the author throws a deeply insightful comment that goes a long way towards expressing what Germans were thinking during the war. After Abel is questioned by the Gestapo (with a French wife his loyalty came into question), the two of then struggle to put the episode behind them. “As time passed and nothing else happened, we became carefree again -- as animals do, I suppose, when scents left by the hunter have blown away.”
On a more practical note, she reveals the blind devotion to all things good about Germany exhibited by most of the people around them. After Hitler invades the Soviet Union, cries of “Christmas in Moscow” are heard everywhere. And while it is clear that the Germans know their history enough to recall Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia over 100 years before, they are eager to explain to the French woman how different things are now. “Hitler was another kind of conqueror, a modern conqueror who possessed modern means. And anyway, what had been disastrous for Napoleon’s army was the retreat. The Germans do not retreat.”
It was early in the war still and they had a lot to learn. But Mireille, whose own great country had surrendered in a shockingly quick manner, has her suspicions. She keeps them to herself of course, because to do otherwise would be suicidal, and she is a woman determined to survive.
It was purely by coincidence that while I read Sins of the Innocent I was also deeply immersed in Jo Walton’s alternate history novel, Farthing. In that world, England negotiates a peace treaty with Germany in 1941 and thus abandons Western Europe to Hitler’s Germany. Jews are forced to wear the yellow star on the Continent and there are rumors of forced labor camps. An underground railroad of sorts is established across the Channel and Lucy Kahn, whose parents are some of the most powerful people in England, has married a Jewish man who unobtrusively does what he can to help Jews, both refugees and British natives like himself. Lucy and David think they are fine, that in spite of the occasional social insult the Kahns, just like the rest of England, will be just fine. Then there is a murder over a long party weekend at the parental estate, Farthing. Walton takes the cozy British murder mystery and turns it on its ear.Farthing is in many ways the flip side of Sins of the Innocent. Mireille Marokvia’s life was similar to Lucy’s at first -- safe on the surface but never more than one wrong move away from going to hell in a hand basket. She came from a country that gave in to Hitler; and if there had been no Winston Churchill, no steadfast steely-eyed determination on the part of the British people, then maybe she would have lived the rest of her life in a world that lived and died at his whim. It makes one wonder just how long the German people would have been able to deny the truth of what Hitler’s world demanded if that had happened. In Lucy’s case, the denial seems to be eternal and ultimately even those whose eyes become awakened to the dark political machinations at work in the British government find themselves paralyzed by the thought of the personal sacrifices necessary to change their world.
Can we blame Mireille’s husband then for finding a way to work for the German government through the war or her for finding a way to peacefully survive it in the country? There was no joining the resistance or hiding Anne Frank’s contemporaries in the attic for Mireille and Abel; they chose to live as if there was no war, to fight social battles, to provide aid and comfort in a few small ways, but largely just to get through it. The truth is that usually that is how it works. They live through it and maybe later they write very enlightening memoirs about how it was, how terrifying and horrifying and deeply, intensely, personally tragic the war was. And that’s fair enough, right? Farthing is fiction, it’s what did not happen and so, really, must we take it to heart? “All the demons are on the loose right now,” Mireille was told by an acquaintance during the war. “Don’t listen to them. Lie low and wait. Demons do not last.”
But they do in Farthing and truth be told they were mighty damn close to winning it all in World War II. It’s just an English murder mystery at its heart though, right? A politician dead in a guest bed, an overly histrionic wife, a rumored affair; it’s really no different from Agatha Christie’s best. Except this isn’t Dame Agatha’s England. This is the one where Mireille never got to go home, where Abel probably was shot for not being a patriot, and where that Jewish girl she worked with didn’t find a safe house in the country.
The fine line between truth and fiction is glaringly obvious in reading these two books together, and what one author knows from experience and another fears for the future makes for utterly compelling reading. Mireille Marokvia lived through a war as a smart and gentle woman who wanted only peace. But Jo Walton knows the biggest truth of all: that Marokvia’s survival was due largely to the sacrifices that so many others made to guarantee that peace would come. Farthing is for them, as much as any historic book on the war can ever be. It is the warning of what might have been just as Sins of the Innocent is a gripping memory of what should never again be.
4/9/07
SHELF LIFE: Emotional Intelligence
Body of Lies
$24.95
Suspicion is the most powerful enemy. When more-conventional methods fail, rising CIA operative Roger Ferris, inspired by a British World War II ruse against the Germans, decides that only suspicion is potent enough to expose and bring down the elusive terrorist Suleiman, believed responsible for a series of deadly car bombings in Europe.
In David Ignatius’s sixth novel, the gripping thriller Body of Lies, Ferris, after recovering from injuries sustained in Iraq, is posted by his gruff boss, Ed Hoffman, to Jordan as chief of station. Shuttling between the Middle East, Washington, and Europe, Ferris concocts a plan to throw into the terrorists’ midst the corpse of an imaginary CIA agent, the literal body of lies, with a figurative body of lies around it that will entangle the jihadists in mutual distrust and violence.
Unfortunately, doubt and suspicion on a lesser scale plague Ferris’s life through and through. Hoffman is a mentor and a friend, to a point, but also clearly ruthless—an agency survivor who values loyalty just slightly less than he does a win. Then there’s the urbane Jordanian intelligence chief, Hani Salaam, who wears his authority quietly but absolutely. Ferris likes and relies on both men, and tries to act as a buffer between them without getting ground up in the vicious gears of their endless schemes.
Ferris’s personal life is no tidier. He’s grown distant from his wife, Gretchen, a high Justice Department official with the body of Angelina Jolie and the mind of John Yoo. The marriage has been a charade for some time, and he decides to divorce her. To dissuade him, she makes moves to destroy him, career and all. So, while trying to sniff out his lethal quarry abroad, Ferris now must also contend with the furious lioness Gretchen at home.
Fueling his hurry to divorce is Alice, a beautiful, earnest, liberal American living in Amman and working in Palestinian refugee camps. She knows Ferris as a State Department official, but is savvy enough to suspect what he says and doesn’t on that score. The intimacy they crave is impossible in the fog of lies and half truths that defines Ferris’s life, or rather lives. His operational and personal plans are in fundamental tension with each other, and both look like long shots.
Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist and associate editor who has covered the CIA, the Justice Department, and the Mideast, as well as editing the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He depicts the CIA as a viper’s nest of careerist malcontents with a few noble but reckless cowboys breaking out now and then, aided by some gung-ho defense personnel. He writes with a worldly assurance dipped in fatalistic melancholy. That compelling combination is reminiscient of Charles McCarry and John Le Carre, peppered with a special post-9/11 urgency.
Wins and losses, in Ignatius's world, are never complete, rarely what they seem, and hardly ever owing to those who are credited or scapegoated for them. Attesting to the book’s strength is the fact that the reader feels both implicated and invested in Ferris’s quintessentially American hopes and desperation and impatience. We fear that the real-life agents playing such high-stakes games with our lives and national reputation are really as rash, foolhardy, instinctual, and impulsive as Ignatius suggests. But we fear, equally, that they may not be, when our foes are clearly all that and more.
-A.C.K.
3/26/07
SHELF LIFE: 'Sky Time in Gray's River,' by Robert Michael Pyle, and 'Chrysalis,' by Kim Todd
By Colleen Mondor
I first discovered Robert Michael Pyle through Milkweed’s fascinating Credo series which focuses on the works of authors and the natural world. Pyle is a lepidopterist and has written an enormous amount on that subject. His latest book, Sky Time in Gray’s River covers a much broader subject matter, however. In this title he looks at life in his small town of Gray’s River, Washington, and the comings and goings in both the natural world and human one. He blends both small town memoir and intense observation of area birds and wildlife in a delightfully quirky manner that gives equal time to town meetings and neighborly visits and the seasonal arrivals of various flora and fauna. Although he is candid about the region’s difficult climate (42 inches of rain in 25 days) he clearly understands the risk he is taking by publicizing its more pleasurable aspects. “Please don’t move here because of this book!” he writes in his final notes. “Believe me on this -- you won’t like the rain! Instead of luring you to some idealized bucolic hideout that would almost certainly disappoint in the end or rot your heels, may this little book assist you in finding the heart of your own home, which lies in the lives and skies of every place.”
It is easy to understand why readers might feel compelled to move all and everything to Gray’s River, when Pyle can not contain his own deep felt enthusiasm for the place and its people. But the appeal of Sky Time is not just the Walton’s Mountain nature of the town’s populace (odd, amusing, and partial to potluck gatherings), but also Pyle’s knowledge of literary natural history which allows him to call upon references and reflections that perfectly complement his observations. On writing about trails near his home, he segues into thoughts of friends in rural Connecticut, Charles Darwin’s Sand Walk, (“I have walked there and imagined 
Darwin ambulating his way out of his current conundrum or ailment, trying out his thoughts, as he rounded the walk again and again while noting the slow shift of the Worm Stone, by which he measured the earthworms’ reconfiguration of the landscape with their castings.”) and Henry Thoreau. Every part of living provokes the same careful consideration; the same thoughtful reflection upon those who came before and have known nature elsewhere.
One of the things I most enjoy about Pyle’s writing is that while he observes and records the arrival of Swainson’s thrushes, “…we begin to hear the song itself -- two, three, five introductory notes followed by an ascending series of silver hoops: Dee dee dee deeoo deeoo DEEOO!”, he also wonders just who Swainson was that the bird was named for. When other writers might leave the thought there -- idly passing off the question to the reader for possible future study, Pyle tells us that William Swainson was a biological illustrator in early 19th century England. He became friends with Audubon and traveled with him for a time but was apparently a less than friendly individual. “By all accounts he was full of himself to an irritating degree,” writes Pyle, but he does not let this diminish his appreciation for the bird that utters such a “glorious voluntary.” And so now the reader knows about a bird and a man, and can wonder just how one has been immortalized by another.
In the midst of birds and cats and the wonder of rivers, Pyle does not stray far though from his first love, butterflies. In fact, while discussing early field guides and phenology -- “the progression of the seasons as told by its animal and plant appearances,” he mentions author Moses Harris who in 1775 wrote The English Lepidoptera: Or, the Aurelian’s Pocket Companion: Containing a Catalogue of Upward of Four Hundred Moths and Butterflies, the Food of Their Respective Caterpillars, The Time of Changing into Chrysalis, and Appearance in the Winged State: Also, the Places Where They Frequent and Are Usually Found with a Concise Description of Each, and Their Dimensions. Harris, whose book Pyle’s credits as providing a “sense of the Georgian English seasons passing in a parade of colorful flying insects” is also mentioned in Chrysalis, Kim Todd’s new biography of late 17th century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. Living centuries apart and worlds away from each other (Merian lived in Germany and the Netherlands), Merian and Pyle have little personally in common. But their love and respect for butterflies and other aspects of the natural world see them as distant kin, and reading the two books in tandem is an excellent way to see just how much the field of natural history has changed, while also remaining remarkably the same.
Todd’s curiosity for Merian was initially stirred by a box of notecards of all things, which portrayed moth images from Merian’s book on Surinam insect metamorphosis. Born in 1647 and died in 1717, Todd could not reckon Merian’s work with the societal constraints of her time. “When she was born,” writes Todd, “Shakespeare had been dead only thirty years. Galileo stood trial a mere thirteen years before for suggesting the earth moved around the sun. My image of an eighteenth or nineteenth naturalist/explorer was a wealthy, university-educated young man seeking adventure or a ship’s surgeon picking shells off the beach in between treating cases of scurvy. If I had a picture of a naturalist/explorer earlier than that, which I didn’t, it surely wasn’t a fifty-two year old German woman with little formal education. What was Merian doing drawing insects in South America three hundred years ago, I wondered. How did she get there? What did she hope to find?”
Remarkably, Merian’s life started out with the same innate curiosity as Pyle’s. She spent her childhood exploring the natural world, harboring an intense interest in knowing and understanding more about insects that while no one in her family could understand, they did not actively discourage. Like a far more proper Gerald Durrell, Merian was permitted to pursue her endless fascination with silkworms and caterpillars as she sought to find the secret of metamorphosis. Her artistic talent was certainly due in no small part to coming from a family of engravers which also permitted her to be exposed from an early age to many printed works on natural history. In spite of her times, though Merian found herself caught up in a lifelong pursuit of eternal questions about growth, development and reproduction that other naturalists of her time were also actively pursuing. All of them were largely self taught, just as she was, and heavily dependent upon personal observation and recordkeeping. It was a solitary pursuit and one that did not offer larger prospects for fortune or fame, but regardless Merian had a compulsion to understand, to know. With her obvious gift as an artist she became one of the preeminent naturalists of her time, culminating with her daring trip from Europe to South America in 1699. The resultant book from her time there, and the color pictures that accompanied it (several of which are reproduced in Todd’s book), proved Merian as a woman far beyond her times. It was also the peak of her naturalist career and over time, sadly, the source for a centuries’ long derision of her work.
Impeccably researched and footnoted, Todd used Merian’s own letters and study books to infuse Chrysalis with the measured voice of her subject. As close to an autobiography as Merian will ever have, the book does not seek to understand why Merian was drawn to her subjects but rather, how she accommodated her overwhelming desire to study them in a time that did not welcome such unseemly curiosity. Through marriage and babies, in and out of religious conversion, even while navigating her way through divorce, Merian’s compulsion to investigate, draw and record the lives of insects never wavered. Ultimately her trip to Surinam, then part of Dutch territory, is less of a surprise then readers first might think. Of course she would travel with her daughter halfway across the world and enter the jungles to learn more about insects; of course she would find a way to fund such a trip. This was not an idle curiosity for Maria Merian, it was her very life. And that is what makes her such a fascinating subject for her biographer. “Although I want her contributions to science to be recognized,” writes Todd, “sometimes I think her biggest gift was the way that she lived. Any life, of course, is messy, filled with rationalizations, contradictions, episodes best tucked away out of sight. But there is a boldness at the heart that won’t be chipped away.” That boldness is what sent Merian on her great adventure and then kept her alive in the years that followed as she set about recording what she learned in Surinam and also making the necessary professional connections to see to it that her discoveries would be respected and remembered forever.
Todd could have ended her biography with Merian’s Surinam book, or even her death a few years later. But she herself was curious as to why Merian seemed to be relatively unknown even within the smaller academic circles that should keep her name and work refreshingly alive. What she found was that as the study of nature and the natural world gained in respect and popularity, the very people who had nurtured it and kept it in the public eye lost the respect of those who followed. In the nineteenth century biology, zoology and chemistry came into their own as college academic departments. Governments began to sponsor the establishment of fishery and entomology bureaus. The sciences embraced the natural world and made it their own, thus effectively pushing out the many amateurs who had dedicated themselves to it without any interest in academic acknowledgement. “Merian didn’t have a formal education,” writes Todd, “she talked to and trusted the reports of those who lived with the insects for thousands of years; she was a woman.” Over time, very easily and quite insidiously, Merian’s work was disparaged, attacked and ignored. And even though fairly recent discoveries of her original work have reappeared in Russia, where they were bought and sheltered by Peter the Great in the years after her death (and where her daughter and son-in-law settled), academics still are slow to acknowledge her contribution to the field. It is too hard for students and professors to believe perhaps that a middle-aged woman hundreds of years ago could study so deeply the worlds that they must take classes and labs in order to understand. How could she know in her kitchen what they must rigorously pursue in hallowed halls of learning? How could she dare to know?
And yet I think Robert Michael Pyle, Yale trained ecologist that he is, would understand Maria Merian in a moment. He would invite her to peek out his kitchen window and see the wandering rustic bunting that had miraculously decided to visit his yard one winter (only the fourth recorded sighting of such a bird in Washington State). Pyle would know that Merian could appreciate such a surprise for what it is -- another mystery of the natural world that reveals itself only to those who watch and wait. In a classroom you can make anything happen, anything, like magic, can appear on the computer monitor or video screen at will. But for those who relish the spontaneity of nature you must be willing to go outside and see what is there; you must be willing to let it all unfold before you. Three hundred years apart, the works of Robert Michael Pyle and Maria Sibylla Merian echo with the same wonderful discoveries. How fortunate we are that Pyle is willing to share his home in Gray’s River with the world, and that biographers like Kim Todd are dedicated enough to rescue the life of someone like Merian. They give hope to the amateur naturalist within all of us; they give us reason to look twice out our windows.
***
Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place by Robert Michael Pyle
Houghton Mifflin
ISBN 039582821X
256 pages
Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd
Harcourt
ISBN 0151011087
284 pages
12/20/06
Quick takes on some books ...
‘Heat.’ New Yorker writer/editor Bill Buford’s fabulously fun, charming, harrowing description of working in Mario Batali’s restaurant kitchen and for various pasta and butcher maestros and divas in
‘Redemption.’ I loved Frederick Turner’s first novel, ‘1929,’ a historical narrative about boozy jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke and the