“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?

Everyone has something that school managed to ruin for them. For me it was football (okay, this one’s a joke), calculus (can’t say I’m too upset) and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Now, the latter is a bit of a mystery. I know I read The Great Gatsby in school and was almost certainly forced to deconstruct it down to the molecular level and then document the carnage.

Strange thing is that I remember none of this, but I’ve had an absolute aversion (think Clockwork Orange) to Mr. Fitzgerald for ages. This puzzles me. Usually, I can explain in great ranting detail why I don’t like something.

For hours if left unchecked.

But I cannot tell you why this aversion to FSF. So last night I pulled an (unread) copy of the Viking Portable collection (edited by Dorthy Parker) and read a short story called Absolution. It was magnificent. (Doubly recommended if you had a Catholic upbringing.)

I absolutely refuse to give a summary, because I can’t stand that kind of review and also because nothing that I can say will give you any idea about it. You just have to read it. But I will give you one sentence:

“There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.”

Go find a copy and read it.

I have half a dozen other books that I’ve read before this one. The trouble is, they were fabulous and I’m still trying to think of something intelligent to say about them.

This book, on the other hand, will be easy to deal with quickly. Think “high concept”: Da Vinci Code meets Victorian potboiler meets Jim Thompson. This gives you an idea what the author was reading. I’m guessing he is also the product of many a writer’s workshop and thinks of himself as an Artiste. Translation: poseur. Basically, this is pretentious, high school level rubbish. And the author would receive a C+.

A few quotations to get us started:

“I am satirizing people in the art world.” [from an interview]

Ooow. Guess that makes you smarter, eh.

From the book, part of a message left on someone’s answering machine:

“…a memory I won’t ever surrender. The ensuing weeks were filled with more of the same, long walks, endless conversation, and romance.”

Read that out loud. When’s the last time you heard someone say “the ensuing weeks”? Ugh. It’s vague, clichéd and frankly, straight out of a Harlequin Romance. (And someone get the man (and his editor) a book on punctuation!)

Here we have another example of the sloppy ransacking of the past in a desperate attempt to elevate a thrown-together bit of rubbish. He didn’t even bother to think it through. Now, I don’t like or read mysteries, but I do know that the most important element of a mystery story is the mystery bit. It’s glaringly obvious who the killer is right at the beginning. If I had been his editor, I might have pointed this out to him.

And why does he trot out the three historical figures? (Other than to give his book a little borrowed glory.) His research is non-existent. (Oh, I’m sorry, he does cite “Time Life Library of Art”, copyright 1967. Guess he visited his parents and found that propping up the sofa.)

He’s name dropping. He seems to think that sprinkling the magical name of Da Vinci about like pixie dust will just blow our doors off to the point that we’ll leap out of our chairs and shout: This guy’s a genius!!! And when we exclaim that, we ourselves shall not know to whom we refer: the artist/inventor or the author. Oy. (Sounds a little like Charlton Heston there… except for the “oy”.)

The little uninspired stories he fabricates loosely around the names he drops are just embarrassing, e.g.: Vermeer apparently had no talent and used the camera to cheat his way to fame. Wow. That is so preposterous it’s stunning. Is that actually in “Time Life Library of Art”?

It’s that ignorant way of thinking that supposes great artists have a “secret”. And if we could only find out what it is, we too could be just like them. Forget talent and years of hard work. No, no… no craft, that’s boring. There must be a magic device that will make me rich and famous.

Disappointing. Oh well, I still love camera obscuras — why I picked up this book at the second hand shop without even skimming it. That’ll teach me!

So here are some good camera obscura links:

Vermeer and the Camera Obscura

An Appreciation of the Camera Obscura

Flash demo of how a small box one works

And there’s even a movie that uses the camera obscura as a central device: “Addicted to Love”.

Beware the distractions of the internet! I sat down two hours ago to write this review and promptly discovered Pandora which is an impressive tool from the Music Genome Project. It’s downright eerie how well it guesses what I’ll like. Sadly, they don’t have any classical or “world” music and I was just about to give up when started finding some great old jazz. Hurray! Adding Leonard Cohen and Josh Ritter has produced some interesting results and I’ve actually discovered some great new music. This thing really works!

Then, I happened upon this entertaining article in the Globe called “No books? The terrorists have won” ( Need a password ? )

Then, I started rooting around in one of my favorite sources for fabulous articles: mirabilis. There went another hour spent in wonderfully interesting reads.

Okay, I’m back and I will write this.

I seem to have a bit of a thing for Norwegian writers and now I can add Hamsun to the list. I read this on vacation, which I heartily recommend. It’s not a book I could read dashing between jobs on public transit. And that, to me, is only right: the book draws you into a world so utterly different from ours. There are a lot of differences, but the biggest is how people move through time. This is a slow, thoughtful, eerily beautiful book that you can’t stop reading.

Details of Knut Hamsun’s life are variously reported. The Encyclopædia Britannica claims he began writing “at the age of 19, when he was a shoemaker’s apprentice”. Other sources (i.e.: the Nobel Prize people!) say he was “an apprentice to a ropemaker” which I admit I prefer — talk about a lost art! And of course, the internet has its share of gossip, claiming that “Following a meeting with Joseph Goebbels in 1943, he [Hamsun] sent Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift.” Britannica is ominously silent on this one and I don’t have access to a library, so I can’t tell you if there’s anything to it. But it’s the old argument of the artist vs. the man. So, on to the artist.

Here’s an excerpt from an article of his:

“Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness. A word can be transformed into a colour, light, a smell. It is the writer’s task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored. The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words. He must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.”

I wish I could read him in the original, but his writing comes through as utterly unique even in translation. If you want to read more about him, here’s an excellent article from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I’m certainly looking forward to reading more by him.