Spam Madness… No, this is not the title of a book, this is what happens every time I come to my book blog to post. I login and instead of writing about literature, I spend precious, irreplaceable moments of my life wading through hundreds of spam comments.

Why don’t I just erase them all? you ask. Because I’m haunted by the idea that someone who actually likes books might stop by and say hello… and I’ll miss it.

Unfortunately, the most interesting comment I’ve gotten so far was an offer for a laser comb that cures baldness. I should write them and see if they have laser sunglasses that perform corrective surgery for nearsightedness. I imagine you would have to put them on very, very carefully. And NEVER flip them up to rest on top of your head unless you want an impromptu lobotomy.

But I digress.

Ever since I read Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” (Penguin, Great Ideas Series) I’ve been much more aware of how I’m spending my life. I’m getting better at using it wisely, making conscious decisions, not blowing it rashly and so forth, but it’s kind of like herding fluffs — there’s always a breeze blowing…

Sloth, guilt, tiredness, perfectionism all tempt us to fritter our time away like dandelion fluffs in a hurricane. I keep having to remind myself that I only have a finite amount of it. (Time, that is, not the dandelion fluffs.) Why is this so hard to remember? Of course, it’s probably tied to the fact that not having infinite time means that I am going to die one day. This, frankly, is unacceptable. There are far too many fine books to read.

Here are a few quotations to whet your appetite:

On choosing people to hang out with: “But in the current dearth of good men, you must be less particular in your choice. Still, you must especially avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and grasp at every pretext for complaint. Though a man’s loyalty and kindness may not be in doubt, a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.”

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”

“We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.”

~ Seneca, Roman philosopher (4 BC-65 AD)

I’ve always been fascinated by doppelgangers. (I’m sure this reveals something shocking about my psyche, please feel free to mail in your ideas!) I really enjoyed “Blindness”, so I was thrilled to discover Saramago having a go at doppelgangers.

This is going to be great! I thought.

I was wrong.

I’ve never seen a theme so utterly unexplored. A veritable Dickensian waif of an idea wandering aimlessly through the void. The author set up what might have been an interesting story, brought in a few characters, and then we all sat there waiting for something to happen… discretely checking our watches now and then. You could almost hear the Musak and the rustle of Nixon-era magazines. Strangely, Saramago was in the waiting room too. He entertained us passably with his occasional narration, but he gave the very distinct impression of a man putting in time. Like community service for a series of parking violations.

Much as I liked the device of the narrator, (who frankly, was the only one in the book with any personality or sense of humor–in fact, he was the only rounded character in the whole thing…) As I was saying, much as l liked the narrator, he certainly couldn’t fill, never mind redeem the book.

I wonder if the Nobel Prize people are slapping their foreheads. It’s much easier to give prizes to the dead — fewer surprises. It’s an odd thing that no matter what rubbish a Nobel winner comes up with, for the rest of his life he’s got this massive endorsement. I wonder if the Nobel committee ever tried to take the prize back? Or perhaps threaten authors with notes attached to bricks flung through windows: “The next one better have character arcs or say goodbye to your garden gnomes!”

Verdict: A terrible disappointment. Embarrassingly bad ending!

(Sometimes, after a book, I scoot around on the web to see what other people thought. Looks like a hell of a lot of other people were unimpressed as well.)

Wherein Oliver Sacks hangs out with different people who have various neurological disorders. One essay per person, seven in all — fascinating stuff.

I’ve always had a weakness for anything brain-related. (Probably because I’m so fond of my own.) And I’ve always enjoyed Oliver Sacks. How can you not be fond of a man who raises ferns?

One of the essays that really stuck with me was the one about the painter who lost the ability to see color. And it wasn’t even that simple–not a world of black and white, but of unprocessed wavelengths which he described as nightmarish and alien.

Two other artists Sacks devotes essays to are Franco Magnani and Stephen Wiltshire (an “artistic autistic savant”) — both of whom have an astounding visual memory.

Another essay is devoted to Temple Grandin, who is a biologist and engineer famous for her work with animals; specifically, she designs more humane slaughterhouses. As a realistic vegetarian, I think this is honorable work. She has had an incredible influence on the industry and its treatment of animals.

All of these people have lives very different from the “ordinary”, whatever that might really be. Oliver Sacks pulls us in as close as he himself can get and shows us glimpses of these unusual experiences of the world. And in doing so, makes us rethink our own.

“If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”

- Diana Verm, high school student

Sigh. Where do you begin?

It’s all over the web: Alton Verm, his daughter, the irony. The short version is that during Banned Books Week in the States, a guy who didn’t read Fahrenheit 451 demanded that it be banned from his daughter’s school for a long list of reasons including: “bad language, violence and that the book spends time ‘downgrading Christians’ [they have to use Windows 3.1?] and ‘talking about our firemen.’[?!?]”

“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read ‘Fahrenheit 451.’

This begs the question in a screaming kind of way: “Is he psychic?” How does he know there’s filth in there if he hasn’t even peeked? And forgive me, but this is Ray Bradbury we’re talking about here. Perhaps I missed his racy period? My god, what would Alton make of Céline? And if he listened to thirty seconds of pretty much any rap song, he’d probably spontaneously combust.

Ridiculous, yet frightening people and trends aside, it did make me think about the book. Like a lot of people, I read it in high school. Two points in Alton’s complaint made me wonder: I didn’t remember Bradbury laying into Christians and it’s hard to imagine Bradbury cursing like an inner-city sailor — if you can forgive the mixed simile.

I pulled my copy off the shelf, blew the dust off the top edge and sat down to count the “swears” and skim a little.

Two hours later, I was deep into it. I’d forgotten how beautiful and sad a book it is. Save a couple of slightly dated passages, it reads like it was written last week.

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh?”

“The bigger your market…the less you handle controversy…”

Amazing, we’re still fighting exactly the same demons, Alton being a fine example of same. But I’d like to thank him for leading me to reread a good book, and for reminding me how precious the written word is. I don’t want to be patronizing, but I feel bad for Alton. I don’t even want to think about how much poorer my life would be without books.

I’d like to finish with two quotations. The first from Leonard Cohen. When told in a 1960’s recording session for one of his poetry books that when he came to a “dirty word” he should skip over it, Cohen responded with the simple statement: “There are no dirty words.”

And the second quotation is from a blog post that ends with a comment on the school’s proposed solution:

Diana, got to read an alternate book, “Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable”. Which is brilliant, because Alton Verm will stare at a title like that the way a chipmunk stares at an electron microscope.

I laughed until I hurt. What else can you do?