Roy Miller's Blog, page 214

Download from our shop right now!

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 23:11

Root Canal Secret Mission | WritersDigest.com

This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 18 April 2017 | 4:00 pm.
Source link

You’ve scheduled a root canal and the dentist finishes up. You pay and head to your car. Once in your car you hear a voice (from the tooth) that informs you that the dentist inserted a government device in your mouth and you’re needed for a secret mission. What happens next?

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

A Debut Calls a Ferrante-Style Female Friendship to the Fore

This content was originally published by DEBORAH SHAPIRO on 18 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
Source link

Photo

Julie Buntin

Credit

Nina Subin

MARLENA
By Julie Buntin
274 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $26.

At the center of Julie Buntin’s debut novel is the kind of coming-of-age friendship that goes beyond camaraderie, into a deeper bond that forges identity; it’s friendship as a creative act, a collaborative work of imagination, and what happens when that collaboration — terribly, inevitably — falls apart.

The story of this particular friendship is told retrospectively by Cat, now 30-something in Brooklyn, drawn back to her youth in rural northern Michigan, where she found Marlena and her life, effectively, began. We know from the outset that within a year of their meeting, Marlena will drown. What we discover is just how haunted it will leave Cat, how full of questions.

Watchful, bookish Cat and reckless, alluring Marlena have plenty of literary and pop cultural antecedents, but Buntin, through closely observed detail, makes these two her own. Their attachment is full of lovely teenage-girl things — cherry lip gloss, cut-up T-shirts, hearts drawn on the back of a hand, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks songs, tossed-off but unforgotten intimacies: “She scrapes a set of fingernails against my kneecap, a small circle that opens outward, shivering through me.” They share sarcasm, but they also share a simmering rage at being poor and female and cornered in a world with few options for them — where escape appears mostly in the form of another trap: addiction. Alcohol for Cat, pills for Marlena. The prevalence of opioids, along with meth, is more than a timely backdrop here; it figures inextricably into the novel’s plot — the unraveling of Marlena’s life and the lasting consequences for Cat. “We were basically statistics,” Cat tells us, but one of Buntin’s achievements is in acknowledging that reality while constructing characters that are anything but.

Photo

The strength Cat and Marlena derive from their connection offers an alternative escape. “Together, we had power.… Nothing could hurt us, as long as we weren’t alone.” The effects are abiding for Cat, who later describes her friend as “the bit of steel at my center,” but it’s not enough to save Marlena. Days “so big and electric that they swallowed the future and the past” are fleeting, and the girls’ closeness is threatened by growing resentments and, more sadly, a certain human impenetrability. “Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get,” Cat concedes, and this novel wrestles with the notion that the truth — the truth of our private, inner lives — is not only subjective but contradictory and often unknowable. Still, Marlena is Cat’s invention, and Cat is Marlena’s — they invent each other.

What gives this narrative its force is the accumulation of so much potential and the absolute crushing of it. Part of that is circumstantial, the specific conditions Cat and Marlena are up against, and part is more broadly existential. Cat’s safe but lackluster adulthood can’t compare with her adolescence, which was at once not enough and too much. She’s motivated to leave for New York, but in the sections set in the present, her grief has generated a numbness so blanketing it renders even the city flat and generic. Drinking seems to be the one thing that brings her to life as it paradoxically deadens her.

There’s a risk in writing straightforward, first-person prose about muted passivity, namely that such prose can begin to exemplify it, especially next to the more beautifully descriptive sentences here. And a few moments might have been more powerful with a little less of Cat’s somewhat redundant commentary on the nature of memory, time and loss. This generous, sensitive novel of true feeling is at its most moving when it sweeps you up without too much explication, becoming both a painful exorcism and a devoted memorial to friends and selves who are gone.

The post A Debut Calls a Ferrante-Style Female Friendship to the Fore appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 15:04

Empty satire: the regrettable rise of blank-paged books in the Trump era | Books

This content was originally published by Danuta Kean on 18 April 2017 | 3:34 pm.
Source link

It’s a product worthy of Reggie Perrin’s Grot shop – the store opened to sell tat in David Nobbs’s magnificent satire of modern life: a book called Reasons to Vote Democrat by Michael J Knowles, which contains only a smattering of words – title page, contents and chapter headings – in its 265 pages. The rest is blank.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” tweeted president Donald Trump as his recommendation sent Reasons to Vote Democrat up the bestseller charts. It isn’t the only blank book produced on the back of current divisions in US politics: Oregon Democrat Cylvia Hayes got there first, with Surprising Reasons to Think That Trump Will Be a (Bigly) Great President! – 150 pages, entirely blank.

Other blank books include Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration; Reasons to Vote for Republicans: An Incomprehensible Guide, and Reasons to Vote for Democrats. On this side of the Atlantic, the Ukip jester’s name provided the hilarious blank: in 2014, Ebury published The Wit and Wisdom of Nigel Farage (which Amazon warns, helpfully, is a “blank book”).

The biggest joke is that readers are prepared to pay for what is essentially a sketchpad with a funny jacket. That the noble art of political parody seems to have descended into a one-joke turn that avoids words – is rather unfunny. These blank books make the Ladybird parodies, and the Blyton-spoof Five on Brexit Island, look like Jonathan Swift.

Where is Henry Root when we need him? Satirist and roué William Donaldson posed as Root in the late 1970s in a delightful series of letters that hooked the nation’s biggest egos with a pound note as bait. To Margaret Thatcher, he suggested Mary Whitehouse as new home secretary; to the First Sea Lord he volunteered his services: “I’m on red alert here and can leave for my ship at the drop of a bollard.” And, to the senior Treasury counsel at the Old Bailey, after “the irresponsible behaviour of the Guardian” revealed jury fixing, he nominated himself as a juryman in certain trials. “In cases involving pornographers, blasphemers and those prone to civil agitation and disorder, you’d have at least one vote under your belt.” His proffered pound was returned.

Imagine the fun Donaldson would have had with Farage and Trump? If not Root, perhaps his precursor Humphry Berkeley, who after the second world war posed as H Rochester Sneath, headmaster of the fictitious Selhurst School, who snapped at self-important rivals in more prestigious institutions.

To the head of Marlborough College – the future alma mater of the Duchess of Cambridge – he wrote asking how he had “engineered” a visit from the royal family only to be slapped down. Of the head of Stowe, Sneath inquired if he should provide sex education to school maids, (Berkeley, an undergraduate at Cambridge, was eventually exposed after a letter in the Daily Worker led a reporter to his door.)

Constructing such complicated satirical personae took work, which paid dividends in mirth. But the only laughter I hear around blank books is that of the publishers, as they pocket the profits from books as subtle and revealing as a blow to the head. Perhaps the funniest thing to emerge from all of this is that Trump has yet to recommend a book (apart from his own) with words in it.

The post Empty satire: the regrettable rise of blank-paged books in the Trump era | Books appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 14:01

Mom Seeks Novel for Family Book Club, No Kafka or Y.A. Allowed

This content was originally published by NICOLE LAMY on 18 April 2017 | 9:50 am.
Source link

Photo

Credit

Joon Mo Kang

Dear Match Book,

A little over a year ago I started a book club with my 20-something son and daughter. My son will be a graduate student this fall working toward a Ph.D. in English. He reads Kafka for fun. My daughter has a graduate degree in education and teaches seven th-grade English. She reads Y.A. for fun. I’m not a fan of either.

We average a book a month and over the past year have explored a variety of genres including essays, biography, literary fiction and young adult. The most successful selections have been fiction. “Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel; “People of the Book,” by Geraldine Brooks; and “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr, were universally liked and produced healthy debates.

My turn is up in May. After two nonfiction books, I think we’re due for a first-rate novel. Do you have any suggestions of a page turner that will also generate a good discussion among such a disparate group of avid readers?

BROOKE LENKEI
CANTON, MASS.

Dear Brooke,

At first I thought I should steer you away from fictional family dramas. Wouldn’t that be asking for trouble? Then I reconsidered. You sound very well adjusted.

Your book group can handle an intense, domestic saga — “A Thousand Acres,” by Jane Smiley, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. Set in Iowa, Smiley’s novel is based on Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” It would make a good follow-up to “Station Eleven,” which opens with a death onstage during a production of the same play.

Since your book group enjoyed “Station Eleven,” consider reading another dystopian novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” uniquely speculative among Chang-rae Lee’s books. It’s an adult book, but it features a 16-year-old protagonist and is artfully narrated in the first person plural. Don’t fear it: The “we” works subtly to build Lee’s dystopian vision.

Although you say that the members of your (family) book group have very different tastes, there are intersections among the novels. All the books you mention have intricate plots and characters whose lives are shaped by art — visual, musical or literary.

An artist, a real one from the Italian Renaissance, Francesco del Cossa hovers in one half of Ali Smith’s sly novel in two parts, “How to Be Both.” In the other half — it could come first or second depending on which edition of the book you pick up — there is an English teenage girl named George grieving the loss of her art-obsessed mother. The book offers mysteries — both in plot and in the novel’s construction as readers puzzle the two halves into a whole.

For the many fans of Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See” I suggest another book about World War II with beautiful sentences and separate stories that interweave. “Fugitive Pieces,” by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, tells the story of a poet and Holocaust survivor named Jakob Beer who, through his own writing, seeks to reconstruct memories of his early life, which has been shattered by tragedy.

Set further back in history — the late 18th century — British writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s final, slim novel, “The Blue Flower,” is based upon the beginning of the artistic life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, who later became known as the Romantic poet Novalis. Despite the esoteric premise there is nothing creaky or fusty about the novel. It is alive with earthy humor — the book opens with the image of linen and underwear flapping in the breeze; it’s washing day for a large family — and the ineffable mystery of love.

Finally, for such a literary family I recommend A. S. Byatt’s layered and grand “Babel Tower.” There’s a novel about a failed utopia — another dystopia! — within Byatt’s epic novel, adding to the smart fun. If you like “Babel Tower” there is more good news. It’s the third in a quartet of novels, all of which feature Frederica Potter, a lover of books.

Yours Truly,
Match Book

Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.

The post Mom Seeks Novel for Family Book Club, No Kafka or Y.A. Allowed appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 12:59

Bookstore News: April 18, 2017

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
Source link

Palabras Bookstore moves and rebrands; Charleston's indie gets some press love; China gets a new crowdfunded bookstore; and more.

The post Bookstore News: April 18, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 11:58

People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows

This content was originally published by YUVAL HARARI on 18 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
Source link

As Sloman and Fernbach demonstrate in some of the most interesting and unsettling parts of the book, individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to produce her own clothes, how to start a fire from scratch, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We today think we know far more, but as individuals we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood how a zipper works. Most people confidently replied that they understood it very well — after all, they use zippers all the time. They were then asked to explain how a zipper works, describing in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zipper’s operation. Most had no idea. This is the knowledge illusion. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

Photo

This is not necessarily bad, though. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for humans.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless conduct fierce debates about climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate them on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.

According to Sloman (a professor at Brown and editor of the journal Cognition) and Fernbach (a professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business), providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel antiscience prejudices by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues like Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we cling to these views because of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. If you think that you can convince Donald Trump of the truth of global warming by presenting him with the relevant facts — think again.

Indeed, scientists who believe that facts can change public opinion may themselves be the victims of scientific groupthink. The scientific community believes in the efficacy of facts, hence those loyal to that community continue to believe they can win public debates by marshaling the right facts, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary. Similarly, the traditional belief in individual rationality may itself be the product of groupthink rather than of empirical evidence. In one of the climactic moments of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” a huge crowd of starry-eyed followers mistakes Brian for the Messiah. Caught in a corner, Brian tells his disciples: “You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” The enthusiastic crowd then chants in unison: “Yes! We’re all individuals!” Monty Python was parodying the counterculture orthodoxy of the 1960s, but the point may be true of the belief in rational individualism in other ages too.

In the coming decades, the world will probably become far more complex than it is today. Individual humans will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents and the political dynamics that shape the world. How could we then vest authority in voters and customers who are so ignorant and susceptible to manipulation? If Sloman and Fernbach are correct, providing future voters and customers with more and better facts would hardly solve the problem. So what’s the alternative? Sloman and Fernbach don’t have a solution. They suggest a few remedies like offering people simple rules of thumb (“Save 15 percent of your income,” say), educating people on a just-in-time basis (teaching them how to handle unemployment immediately when they are laid off) and encouraging people to be more realistic about their ignorance. This will hardly be enough, of course. True to their own advice, Sloman and Fernbach are well aware of the limits of their own understanding, and they know they don’t know the answer. In all likelihood, nobody knows.

The post People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 10:56

Two Booksellers Set Date for Inaugural Texas Bookstore Day

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
Source link

Managers at Austin's BookPeople bookstore and Brazos Bookstore in Houston are preparing to launch Texas Independent Bookstore Day. Slated for August 5, the event is being modeled on the nationwide Independent Bookstore Day, the annual day celebrating independent bookstores community engagement programs (which is April 29 this year).

Though in its preliminary stages, TIBD is intended as a statewide event. “Participating stores come from all over the state—not only from Austin and Houston, but also from Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, New Braunfels, Alpine, Weslaco, Brenham, South Padre Island, and more,” said Benjamin Rybeck, manager of Brazos Bookstore and press liaison for the event.

Rybeck added: “The Lone Star State is full of dedicated readers and home to a vibrant literary scene, and so this celebration is designed to create a platform where Texas booklovers can coalesce statewide.”

Texas is increasingly becoming more relevant to the national bookselling scene, and several independent bookstores are slated to open in the state this summer. Among the notable openings will be Interabang Books in Dallas, which is under the leadership of former Brazos Bookstore manager Jeremy Elli. A second branch of Deep Vellum Books is also expected to open in Grapevine, Tex.

For Rybeck, if TIBD is a hit, the hope is that the rest of the county will see that “there’s more to Texas than you might expect.”

The post Two Booksellers Set Date for Inaugural Texas Bookstore Day appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 18, 2017 09:55

April 17, 2017

‘Shattered’ Charts Hillary Clinton’s Course Into the Iceberg

This content was originally published by MICHIKO KAKUTANI on 17 April 2017 | 7:54 pm.
Source link

“Our failure to reach out to white voters, like literally from the New Hampshire primary on, it never changed,” one campaign official is quoted as saying.

Photo

Hillary Clinton, right, with her aide Huma Abedin talking on her campaign plane in October 2016. “Shattered” describes a presidential campaign that turned a winnable election into a devastating loss.

Credit

Doug Mills/The New York Times

There was a perfect storm of other factors, of course, that contributed to Clinton’s loss, including Russian meddling in the election to help elect Trump; the controversial decision by the F.B.I. director, James Comey, to send a letter to Congress about Clinton’s emails less than two weeks before Election Day; and the global wave of populist discontent with the status quo (signaled earlier in the year by the British “Brexit” vote) that helped fuel the rise of both Trump and Bernie Sanders. In a recent interview, Clinton added that she believed “misogyny played a role” in her loss.

The authors of “Shattered,” however, write that even some of her close friends and advisers think that Clinton “bears the blame for her defeat,” arguing that her actions before the campaign (setting up a private email server, becoming entangled in the Clinton Foundation, giving speeches to Wall Street banks) “hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover,” ensuring that she could not “cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions.”

Allen and Parnes are the authors of a 2014 book, “H R C,” a largely sympathetic portrait of Clinton’s years as secretary of state, and this book reflects their access to longtime residents of Clinton’s circle. They interviewed more than a hundred sources on background — with the promise that none of the material they gathered would appear before the election — and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.

“Shattered” underscores Clinton’s difficulty in articulating a rationale for her campaign (other than that she was not Donald Trump). And it suggests that a tendency to value loyalty over competence resulted in a lumbering, bureaucratic operation in which staff members were reluctant to speak truth to power, and competing tribes sowed “confusion, angst and infighting.”

Despite years of post-mortems, the authors observe, Clinton’s management style hadn’t really changed since her 2008 loss of the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama: Her team’s convoluted power structure “encouraged the denizens of Hillaryland to care more about their standing with her, or their future job opportunities, than getting her elected.”

The campaign frequently spun its wheels in response to crises and urgent appeals from Democrats on both the state and national levels, the authors report. Big speeches were written by committee. “Evolving the core message” remained a continuing struggle. And the Brooklyn campaign headquarters — which would end up outspending Trump’s campaign by nearly 2 to 1 — frustrated coordinators in battleground states like Colorado by penny-pinching and cutting back on television, direct mail and digital advertising.

As described in “Shattered,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook — who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds — made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.

“Mook had made the near-fatal mistakes of underestimating Sanders and investing almost nothing early in the back end of the primary calendar,” Parnes and Allen write, and the campaign seemed to learn little from Clinton’s early struggles. For instance, her loss in the Michigan primary in March highlighted the problems that would pursue her in the general election — populism was on the rise in the Rust Belt, and she was not connecting with working-class white voters — and yet it resulted in few palpable adjustments. Michigan, the authors add, also pointed up Mook’s failure to put enough organizers on the ground, and revealed that his data was a little too rosy, “meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead.”

These problems were not corrected in the race against Trump. Allen and Parnes report that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was worried in early October about the lack of ground forces in major swing states, and that Mook had “declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign,” despite pleas from advisers in crucial states.

After a planned appearance in Green Bay with President Obama was postponed, the authors write, Clinton never set foot in Wisconsin, a key state. In fact, they suggest, the campaign tended to take battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan (the very states that would help hand the presidency to Trump) for granted until it was too late, and instead looked at expanding the electoral map beyond Democratic-held turf and traditional swing states to places like Arizona.

In chronicling these missteps, “Shattered” creates a picture of a shockingly inept campaign hobbled by hubris and unforced errors, and haunted by a sense of self-pity and doom, summed up in one Clinton aide’s mantra throughout the campaign: “We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

The post ‘Shattered’ Charts Hillary Clinton’s Course Into the Iceberg appeared first on Art of Conversation.