Pimplomat

I always include Scott Bradfield when people ask me who are some of my favorite writers. I base this solely on such works as The History of Luminous Motion, Animal Planet, and What’s Wrong With America.

But those books were long ago, and I was young and impressionable. Would a work more recent hold up to my memories? The answer is yes, with The People Who Watched Her Pass By. Bradfield remains a favorite of mine, and he’s one of America’s great satirists. I imagine he’ll be a writer whose fame and influence will arise after he’s dead. Please don’t let that happen; read him now. Talk about him now. Buy all his books now.

The People Who Watched Her Pass By is a story about Salome Jensen, a 3-year-old girl kidnapped by a boiler-repair man, who she refers to as “Daddy” throughout the story. As with his previous books, specifically Luminous Motion, Bradfield gives the child protagonist a worldly, aged, adult voice. Daddy doesn’t stick around, so Salome (Sal, for short) lives with someone else. Eventually, Sal bounces around different caregivers, either by choice or circumstance. The way she travels from one situation to another clearly lands this novel in the great America road trip genre.

Sal’s story is more than her kidnapping and wandering. It’s a satirical look at selfishness, ego, and the ache for a greater meaning in life. The people who Sal encounters offer sage advice, but in the end, they’re really looking out for only their own wants and needs. Their concerns for Sal are superficial, and she recognizes this early in her so-far short life.

One of my favorite sections in the book is Sal’s persona as a deity, or prophet, by strangers who haven’t seen her, who have only heard rumors of her life. The worship of the unknown is a strong pull for most people, and reading about them lining up just to take a picture of her room’s window is humorous and sad at the same time.

This same temptation for something greater pulls at Sal, too. The difference, though, is she’s doing it for herself. She’s like Jesus wandering in the desert, figuring out who she really is. Other people, specifically adults, in the book try to find themselves through others. Their narcissism is only fed by extraneous encounters and emotions.

This raises the question: What does Sal represent? Bradfield wrote that he didn’t have a purpose in writing the book.

“As with my previous novels, I simply discovered the voice of a character who carried me along until I found out where she was going,” he wrote in a blog post. “Then I spent several years trying to give her, and her story, shape.”

The issue of shape is where satire comes into play. Is Sal a critique of the modern American psyche, always looking for solutions from others via self-help books and reality TV instead of finding it within itself? Is it a story about being responsible for your choices, regardless of what others think? Or is it an acknowledgment that life is a gyre and that one should accept fate and use it to the best of your advantage? Maybe it’s all of those. Maybe it’s none of those. As with the best satirists, Bradfield gives his readers a beautifully written and deeply contemplative story. It’s one that when you’re finished, you’ll want to immediately begin again, like a magic trick you want to experience over and over, always thinking you’re about to discover the solution, only to find you’re still in the dark. But what a delicious darkness that is.

There was much talk about innovation and creativity in 2011. In fact, I heard or saw the word innovation so much that its mention would bring on waves of hostility in me. Everyone talked about it, making it not, well, very innovative.

Most writers were telling you what to do to be innovative or creative. Rarely did you read why it happens. It’s as most people wanted to jump to instruction without knowing reason.

That’s where Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer comes in. As with his previous book, How We Decide, Lehrer explores the basis of a brain function that everyone wants to know about. Yes, he does offer creativity advice, but he bases it in reason. You have to know the hows and whys before you can know the whats.

Lehrer leads readers through many examples of innovation and creativity, touching on everything from how Bob Dylan found his writing muse to how no-wrong-answers brainstorming doesn’t work in the long run to the benefits of living in a city. And he keeps your interest, because he’s a great storyteller who asserts authority. He doesn’t just report research; he guides with pristine narrative.

“The Power of Q” chapter is one of the more interesting sections. It’s about socialist Brian Uzzi and his study of Broadway musicals, about why some are successful and some are not. Uzzi found that successful productions needed a certain amount of people who have known each other for a long time and a certain amount who are new to the operation. In other words, a sweet spot of social intimacy is needed.

The reason I found this chapter interesting is because around the same time I was reading it, the Dallas Mavericks were restructuring their championship team, losing several players that helped them win it all last season. I’ve always been one that feels you don’t break up the house, you keep teams together for the long-term in order to ensure yearly success. After reading this chapter, though, I’m thinking differently about teams (sports or work). Perhaps it is best that the Mavericks shook things up, bringing in some new faces to play with a few of the old-timers. (However, maybe it’s not working; the Mavericks are 1-4 at the time of this review.)

What Lehrer suggests–and something he consistently suggests in his writings–is that you should know yourself best. Find what works for you, because for every piece of research saying one thing, there will be another saying the opposite. Maybe you work better getting away from a problem. Or maybe you work better with a group. However you work best, identify that and edge toward it. That is where you’ll find your creativity. For you see, science is primarily about paying attention, and until you pay attention to yourself first, nothing will change. Lehrer’s latest book is a great tool toward this needed self-consciousness in society.

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer in March 2012.)

Every year I post my annual list of which books I read, a list that helps me remember past events and feelings that I may have forgotten, like resting in my hammock on a nice summer day reading The Truth About Celia or the eagerness I felt flying to Italy while reading Poets in a Landscape. You could say that I remember things through the books I’ve read. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to live.  Happy reading in 2012, everyone!

Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Me, Myself & I by Edward Albee
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr.
The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute
Augustus by John Williams
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The Commedia dell’Arte by Giacomo Oreglia
The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack
The Actor’s Art and Craft by William Esper and Damon DiMarco
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
Slowness by Milan Kundera
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out by Mick Napier
Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee (editors)
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Jitney by August Wilson
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honday Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The Night Season by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Seven Guitars by August Wilson
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Jokers by Albert Cossery
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis

I’m a completist. I don’t know why. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that when I find something that I enjoy, and it appears in a series, I have to complete it.

My latest obsession is with New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics. I read one (Stoner by John Williams), loved it, and decided to see what else was in the series. I’d find one at Half Price Books (“Oh, this looks interesting, too!), buy it, and put it next to the previous one. This process repeated itself until now, where I find myself wanting (daresay, needing) to collect the whole series.

I know this is crazy. I won’t read every single book immediately or even like all the ones I read. But that’s not the point, which is to complete the collection.

I’ve done the same thing with the Best American Series (Short Stories, Travel, Science and Nature, Essays, Non-required Reading, Poetry) and the O. Henry series. Have I read any one volume of those all the way through? You can safely bet no. There was even a time I collected all the Shakespeare plays in individual volumes by a certain publisher because I liked the woodcuts used on the covers. This is ridiculous because I have many copies of his plays in anthologies scattered throughout the house. Do I really need four copies of Hamlet? Apparently, the answer is yes.

The completist in me is not something new. I collected baseball cards, coins, stamps, records, etc. when I was younger. I never saw it before as a problem, which makes worrying about it now kind of crazy.

The cliched saying is that if you know you’re crazy, then you’re not crazy. Then what am I? Perhaps being a completist is a type of crazy that’s more accepted in society, or at least it was. Hoarders has spoiled that game. Now when I bring a new NYRB book home because it’s part of “the collection,” my plus-one rolls her eyes, silently saying cuckoo cuckoo.

Or maybe I’m obsessing too much on the obsessing. I should focus on the pleasure I get from these books beautifully aligned on my shelf, knowing they are ready for me when I’m ready for them. I should obsess on the knowledge that I have a lifetime of reading ahead of me.

And I will, just as soon as I finish completing this collection.

If you’re anything like me, you bounce around various news and magazine sites daily on the Internet. It’s rare that I consume one site totally. I more often graze on information like a starving student at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

This is common for a majority of Internet users. According to new research from the University of Missouri, “Internet users often do not make the conscious decision to read news online, but they come across news when they are searching for other information or doing non-news related activities online, such as shopping or visiting social networking sites.”

“Incidental exposure to online news is becoming a major way for many people to receive information about news events,” said Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a post-doctoral fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute in the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “However, many people don’t realize how their news reading behavior is shifting to more  serendipitous discovery.”

Yadamsuren surveyed almost 150 people and found that they experience online news in three different ways. The first way is specifically on news sites. The second way they’re exposed to news is via non-news sites and activities, such as social networking sites and checking email. The third way is by just happening upon news while conducting other Web searches.

Because of the many ways people come into contact with news, Yadamsuren believes organizations should have links to their stories on various Internet sites as much as possible.

Fair enough. But just having links doesn’t necessarily mean people are going to read it. For a perspective on that, we turn to an interesting piece called “The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline.”

In it, writer Alissa Walker questions how the Internet is changing the way she writes.

“…when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.”

Meaning is what we writers and readers are constantly trying to find. What can I write that means something to someone? How do I find stories that mean something to me? There are no easy answers, because they rely on personal choices. You’re never going to write something meaningful if you’re creating quick-list articles. And you’re never going to read anything meaningful online if you’re always making the excuse that you don’t have time to read.

Where, then, is that middle ground? How do you find meaningful stories for yourself? What attracts you to online stories and news?

(Photo via Flickr: Mike Licht / Creative Commons)

Ah, the family drama. What’s more fun than to learn about others, and what’s more disappointing than finding out that they’re just like you? I guess that’s the beauty of universal truths. Not handled well, though, these truths can drive you mad with boredom.

This is the case with The Night Season, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, a play meandering for truth and completion. And what it does find is no different that what is found in hundreds of other stories. Some will welcome the familiarity. For others, knowing how it concludes before arriving at the end is an exercise in patience and concentration.

In the play, we witness a family drama set in Sligo, Ireland, which was once home for poet W.B. Yeats. Lenkiewicz–inspired by Yeats’ work–doesn’t handle language or image quite as well as her muse. However, like Yeats, she’s earnest with her ideas.

The family consists of three sisters (Judith, Rose, and Maud), a single father (Patrick), and a grandmother (Lily). The mother is never seen and living off in London, having left the family 15 years ago. This is the family’s underlying angst. Their need for love manifests itself in several ways. Rose sleeping with a visiting actor (playing Yeats…yes, Yeats, in a movie), Judith’s on again off again affair with Gary, and Maud’s care for her absent husband are the three most blatant examples. Patrick’s interest in a bartender with big breasts and Lily’s childlike adoration for the actor add levity to a play carrying a lot of woe-is-me weight.

Though filled with stock characters (e.g., the flighty grandmother, the drunken dad) and clichéd scenes (I won’t give away the ending), the writing’s structure is interesting enough to keep you reading. In fact, it feels like a screenplay, with quick, short scenes and various locations throughout its pages.

That’s actually what this play needs, to be made into a movie. If so, it will do well on Lifetime, where its tale of unrequited love would fit right in with that network’s programming.

With The Night Season, we have a so-so play by a promising writer whose ideas are still finding a foundation. Let’s just hope in the future, it’s one we haven’t seen before.

Duality is a common theme in literature. In fact, it’s one of my favorite themes, especially when it’s an internal struggle. Questions such as who we are, what’s our place in the world, how we perceive ourselves as opposed to how others perceive us are questions that have fascinated and baffled humans for thousands of years. I suspect we’ll still be trying to answer them millions of years from now as the growing Sun swallows our planet.

Whatever (Original French title: Extension du domaine de la lutte) by Michel Houellbecq is another book posing these types of questions without definitive answers. With so much literature published on this topic, the most important question rises as to how well a writer attempts an answer.

The novel’s protagonist is a 30-year-old computer programmer who writes strange stories about talking animals in his spare time. He’s content (or resigned) to how is his life is playing out, until he’s sent on a trip with a co-worker to train provincial workers on how to use a new computer system.

His traveling partner, Raphael Tisserand, is younger and a virgin. Together, they train by day and go out at night in various French cities. The protagonist (he’s never given a name) observes Tisserand’s repeated failures in trying to have sexual relations with women and comes to the conclusion that capitalism is to blame. Because of a free-market economy, the rich (the good-looking) get richer and the poor (the ugly) get poorer.

In one of the more suspenseful scenes in the book, the protagonist urges Tisserand to exact revenge on a woman and her lover that has thwarted Tisserand’s advances. The outcome, though, succumbs to the protagonist’s capitalist theory about love.

After this scene, the book becomes a lot more philosophical, shooting toward the universal like a slim rocket.

“For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world,” the protagonist says toward the end of the book. “I’ve long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That’s done with.”

This is a common feeling among many in the world, that what you once thought would happen–or once thought you’d be–will no longer be a part of reality. It’s a difficult realization. Some never accept it, for better or for worse.

It’s this realization that Houellbecq asks his readers to consider in Whatever. His hero’s response may not be your choice. Nevertheless, it’s the only choice that will keep us alive.

Neil LaBute is my favorite contemporary playwright. His style, his subjects, his view of the world all appeal to me for reasons I’ve yet to figure out for myself. While I wouldn’t give all his plays five stars, most of them deserve that much praise.

In a Forest, Dark and Deep, however, is not one of those. It’s the worst LaBute play I’ve ever read, with its lack of nuance and its overt narrative cliches reminding me of rookie scripts in a playwriting 101 course. Seriously, LaBute, you’re going to put in thunder and lightning to mirror the storm between the characters? That’s bush league.

The two-character play focuses on a brother-sister relationship. The brother, Bobby, comes to a cabin in the woods to help his sister, Betty, clear it out for some new tenets. Throughout the play, we learn more about Betty and the cabin and her real purpose for being there. But the story is so predictable, because in our crime drama-driven world, you’re able to pick up the clues if you have half a brain and give it a 10th of your attention.

And how does LaBute lead you to the conclusion? Through pages and pages of arguing and yelling. Now maybe this is the improv side of me coming out, but I’m tired of arguing in scenes. I’m tired of seeing it, hearing it and participating in it. It’s more fun to engage in conflict subtly. LaBute is great at that, or has been in the past. I don’t why or how he lost his cool in this play.

LaBute writes in the intro

We miss the missing. It’s a simple enough concept, I suppose–when someone has made an impact on our lives and then they’re gone, we long for them and what it was that made them special.

What makes LaBute special is his subtly, his finely tuned dialogue full of understated tension, the way he keeps you cringing but eager to continue watching disaster unfold. Let us hope soon it is that talented LaBute who returns from the missing.

I work in the meeting and event industry. And one of the things that attracts me most to this field is group dynamics and learning. I love figuring out why people get together to exchange ideas, what ways best foster interaction, and how all of this can make us better humans.

Misha Glouberman loves it, too.

Glouberman, a Toronto-based event planner and facilitator, is also a thinker, a ponderer. His book, The Chairs are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City, is an exploration of his opinions on a variety of topics. Primarily, though, they focus on interactions and how best to nurture them.

The book is co-written with his friend, Sheila Heti, who originally set out to write a fiction book based on Glouberman. She didn’t get too far into it, because she realized that a fictionalized Misha is no match for the real deal. She decided she would ask him his thoughts about several topics and transcribe verbatim (some of you grammarians may squirm a bit).

Examples of these mini-essays include: “Conferences Should be an Exhilarating Experience,” “Don’t Pretend There’s No Leader,” and “Sitting Down and Listening as a Role.” Each topic analysis is strictly Glouberman’s opinion. This isn’t balanced, journalistic reporting. And that’s what makes this book enjoyable and interesting.

For, you see, Misha Glouberman is a modern-day Montaigne. His thoughts are never settled. He leaves himself room to let alternatives enter into view. And that’s the book’s main theme: Think of others. Learn from them. Entertain other viewpoints.

“It’s easy to underestimate the fact that other people have had similar problems to yours and that you can learn from their experiences–and learn from people who’ve spent lots of time thinking about certain problems,” he tells Heti in the chapter titled, “A Decision is a Thing You Make.”

Glouberman’s thinking about certain problems will cause you to think, as well. And for me, that’s the sign of a great book.

I love to read books. For the longest time, I would read five books at a time, switching among each one depending on my mood. Over time, though, I felt like I wasn’t reading as much (not true) or concentrating on each book as much (somewhat true). So, I decided to force myself to read one book at a time and give it my full attention.

I’ve been satisfied with this strategy for the most part. However, when I decide to read a book and I end up not liking it after 20 or so pages, I feel terrible about wanting to give up on it. I fall into the old trap that I should finish what I started, that winners never quit.

You should embrace quitting, though. Learning when to quit can make you more successful in the long run. Here’s Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, on the upside of quitting.

So I hang out with a lot of economists. (I know, you’re envious.) But there are two things they love to talk about that will help us understand quitting. One is called “sunk cost” and the other is “opportunity cost.” “Sunk cost” is about the past — it’s the time, or money, or sweat equity that you’ve put into something, which makes it hard to abandon. “Opportunity cost” is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else — something that might make your life better. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost. If only you could quit.

The “sunk cost” is what hurts us most of the time. It’s living in the past instead of the now or the future. It’s a cause of most of our worries.

These past couple of weeks, I started three different books that looked great. Upon reading, they were real stinkers. I started to worry that maybe I was quitting too soon, that I wasn’t giving the book its due. That’s absurd on one level, because a book is an inanimate object. But it’s more absurd that I worried about quitting something that wasn’t making me happy. I found myself in a worry spiral, and the only way to get out of it was to quit.

Dubner goes on to say:

Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

Exactly. Why continue when you know you’re going to fail? Quit and move on to something that you know will be more successful. Myself, I started to read another book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club. It’s fun to read, interesting, and, more important, it makes me happy.

How easy is it for you to happily cut your loses and move on as quick as possible? Or do you have difficulty quitting things?

(Photo credit via Flickr: Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig / Creative Commons)