The Nation’s editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed have rounded up an army of writers who have contributed essays on the mavericky ex-governor’s brush with greatness. The collection is called Going Rouge: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare and will conveniently also launch on November 17th.  The book is already making waves with its obviously similar book cover. In both covers, the plucky moose-mama sports the color red and gazes toward a brighter tomorrow. But there are also a few key differences.

First, the use of the word “Rouge” which alludes to Palin’s sex-appeal and sideshow antics during the 2008 election. In what may be a reminder of the how close Palin came to power, the ex-governor is shown with hair tied back and wearing more formal attire, unlike going Rogue’s more innocuous, homey look .

There is also the font size of Palin’s name on Going Rouge which at first glance makes it seem as though she is the author and not the subject. Then of course, the dark clouds and the word “Nightmare” which are pretty self explanatory.

Now many books quietly or inadvertently  use similar cover photgraphs. Take, for instance, the following well known examples. (Thanks to the awesome totallylookslike.com

Going Rogue’s #1 status on Amazon.com has been attributed by some to mass advance buys by right-wing organizations who plan on distributing the volume to their loyal sheep.

But what will the cover’s effect be on launch day? Is it just a playful dig, or a disingenuous and even unethical marketing tactic?

Would the casual buyer unwittingly pickup the wrong copy?

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Famous personalities, from d-list losers all the way up to the president himself take advantage of this medium to gab, jaw and shoot the shit about anything and everything…in 140 characters or less of course.

Inevitably, Twitter has also become a haven for narcissistic nobodies who tweet the joys of their last bowel movement or facebrag in quantities that their facebook status message just could not handle.

Could anything of value come from these one-liners, the chum of cyberspace?

Yes! And believe it or not, it’s poetry!

And Rimbaud wept.

The Longest Poem in the World is a site which assembles random tweets in couplets to form an endless rhyming monstrosity. It is constantly updated with fresh tweets and is one of the greatest contributions that tweetology has gifted the world. It is also a cool snapshot created by authors unknowingly collaborating on a momentary work…

http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com

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Featuring such jewels as panchymagogue: “medicine purging body fluids from the body” and tetanothurm: “a cosmetic for removing wrinkles”, the site may seem geeky at first, but is pulling for a worthy cause.

Languages have been going extinct faster than ever and the global nature of the world today has ensured the steady debasement of even our own beloved English. How often do you hear the words “jussulent” or “primifluous” in daily life?  Today’s youth are more likely to shriek out: “pwned” or “l33t” before they go back to playing WoW and sniffing glue…

Aside from netspeak and archaic words, regular everday spoken English has taken a beating. Upon seeing an attractive girl, I’d probably turn to my friend and say: “Dude you should’ve seen this bitch. She was fuckin’ hawt man, I mean fuk bro..but she was like, cool too, you know? I mean, fukkkkkkk….”

And Byron wept.

Perhaps its natural evolution of language, but at the same time there’s a nagging feeling that we’re just being too intellectually lazy– that all these common words are really simplified stand-ins for a myriad of more nuanced thoughts. George Orwell explained this connection between thoughts and language well in Politics and the English Language, a wonderful essay that ultimately traces the misuse, generalization and oversimplification of language to its extreme end: authoritarian political control…

Anyways, geeks of the world unite! Pull an Angelina and adopt these most reviled and forgotten of outcasts at savethewords.org. Users can sign up and “adopt” a word, sealing their duty with the following oath:

“I hereby promise to use this word in conversation and correspondence as frequently as possible to the very best of my ability.”

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The main thing is the size. (The edition I read was 1359 pages). If this book was, say, 300-400 pages with similar style and themes, it would likely have been read, tossed aside, and forgotten long ago. But any book 1000+ pages in length is automatically considered as having more significance than it deserves in this quick-read-paperback-thriller age.

The story takes place in India, shortly after independence, and deals with the lives and interactions of the members of 4 families. It includes both their everyday problems as well as their direct involvement with the politics and issues of the day. However, the central theme is the forbidden love between the Hindu Lata and Muslim Kabir, and the story follows Lata’s mother’s attempt to find a more “suitable boy” before things end in disaster. Meanwhile, other members of the families deal with their own problems – from winning elections to finding the meaning of life to dealing with health problems, etc. The scope is huge, weaving these intersecting lives into a picture of the entire nation at the time.

Anyone who has read War and Peace will find themselves attempting to compare the Russian masterwork to this Indian version, not because A Suitable Boy deserves to be placed in the same category, but because the size, structure, and family issues can be seen as somewhat in parallel. Here the ‘War’ is the class struggle and litigation following land reforms imposed on authoritarian Zamindars, as well as Hindu/Muslim tensions in the time period around Partition. The Rostovs are the Mehras, and a capricious Natasha is here an insipid Lata. The novel maintains a wide enough scope perhaps, but not the depth of emotion, depth of language and depth of philosophical insight necessary for a classic.

Now War and Peace is in a category apart, (I sometimes jokingly say the best novel in English is the English translation of a Russian novel), and obviously it isn’t completely fair to compare a modern novel to an immortal masterwork. However, novels of this type are rarely written and an author who wants to take on the entire human experience within a culture must accept a higher burden than the average novelist. These writers attempt to go all out, maintain hundreds of characters, dozens of storylines, as well as philosophical observations on the minutiae of human actions and the broad nature of man. Booklovers, after investing a great deal of time in reading, will feel cheated unless the entire structure is maintained and they come away with a feeling of emotional grandeur. A writer who attempts to do everything in one volume must do everything well.

Clearly, one of the author’s main jobs is to make the reader interested in the characters presented. But the affection between star-crossed lovers Lata and Kabir seems forced and insincere, though this is supposedly the central thread in the narrative. Others are presented in a better light. The degenerate Maan and the brooding Rasheed are likely the best of the lot and Mrs. Rupa Mehra is dead on as the vexed Indian mother. Still other, minor, characters pop up as gems throughout. The shifty Varun, Anglophile Arun are not bad. The character of Amit, daydreaming poet, is clearly Seth himself, and through him and by other means unnecessary poetry is snuck in wherever possible. Stereotypes abound, but India is the indeed a land where living stereotypes can be found.

Images follow one after another: a Nawab contemplating a crumbling way of life, frenzied devotees crushed in a tragic pilgrimage, plus the standard mix of marriages, deaths, religious ceremony, betrayals and a stabbing for good measure. One especially well done episode portrays a rustic Muslim village as seen through the eyes of the character Maan. The pace of the story is reasonable, although chapters devoted to the courtroom, while important, can stretch tediously and a certain blandness pervades all.

The last line of Seth’s poetic contents describing the players taking their bow is apt, as the general lifelessness of the characters makes the reader feel he’s witnessed a well costumed cast, poorly performing a lengthy play. Props to Seth for picking a realistic over a romantic ending, but to be harsh, by that point the reader has lost interest in the robot-like Lata.

There are nevertheless, a number of good points. Few if any books will give you such an extensive buffet of Indian history and law, humorous and tragic vignettes, religious commentary, and glimpses into the lives of musicians, politicians, courtesans, and working families. Also, this is a period novel, taking place a few years after independence, and the ‘feel’ is maintained believably throughout. This is especially important in context of the transition period after 1947 when the Brits were out but still in, landowners were in the middle of an identity crisis and Hindu-Muslim tensions were continually boiling. Incidents sometimes rich, sometimes affecting, and too numerous to mention here dot the narrative, but nothing can change the final impression: that this is the magnum opus of an average writer.

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The popularity of Phillip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials has increased lately because of the release of a movie based on Book I, and as a result of the explosion in mainstream atheist literature (Dawkins, Hitches, Harris, etc.)

The plot of Book III: The Amber Spyglass, rolls along, though slow and dark at times, but Pullman’s greatest triumph is the world he has created, not the storyline. The daemon system, (whereby a human is paired to an animal which acts as an external soul) by this third book has become entirely natural and poignant. The connection between Dust/Original Sin/Dark Matter is stirring, but might not be sufficiently tied together for the casual reader.

The plot so far has carried heroine Lyra and her daemon to a cave where she is being held by her apparently evil mother. Lyra’s friend Will, aided by a knife which can cut through dimensions, comes to her rescue and they set off to find answers to the chaos around them. Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel, is making war upon heaven and the fate of the future world, and all worlds apparently, hangs on the choices made by Lyra, a neo-Eve. Aided by witches and gypsies, Lyra and Will adventure to different worlds including the world of the dead in search for answers.

As for the characters: Mrs. Coulter is so robotically evil and erratic readers are unsure of what to think throughout. Similar inconsistencies with Lord Asriel cause us to shout “Dammit! are these people good or bad!?” But that is probably the question Pullman wants us to wrestle with. Lyra jumps back and forth between being a goofy, bratty kid and a mature serious woman, but again this may be intentional as Pullman has to keep her hovering on the edge of sexual discovery. Will is rocklike and unlikable (though with good cause) but for this reason his expected love for Lyra in the final chapters is somewhat awkward.

Readers of the first two books might remember points here and there where Pullman drives the strangeness of his world home. For example, in Book I where Lyra eats a raw kidney or in Book II when Iorek eats his friend Lee’s corpse. These act as exclamation points that Pullman nonchalantly throws in so the reader might catch his breath and say: ‘Yes indeed, this is a strange world, so different from our own.’ Dr. Mary Malone’s time among mulefa (somewhat of a rip off of Gulliver’s last journey, complete with bird yahoos?) seems to continue this, as a kind of originality/weirdness for originality’s/weirdness’s sake. This compounded weirdness, (having no archetypal root in the reader’s mind), tends to ‘thin’ a story as it goes on, and though you will applaud the originality, I think most will find this story fading faster in memory than comparable fantasies, unless reread at least once.

What lingers however is pure poetry. The final image of Lyra sitting alone in the Botanic Garden knowing Will is doing the same in the overlapping world is absolutely haunting, and it is a cynical son of a gun who can’t shed a tear at such a time. The weird factor plus childlike discovery factor plus the backdrop of abstract philosophy add up to many other beautiful dreamlike images which I feel are the final residual treasures in the series.

Social philosophy:

Readers may note concepts in the book including homosexual angels, few examples of married couples as compared to lovers, a nun who throws her crucifix into the ocean and later moves in with a man, anima/animus ideas etc, and accuse Pullman of having a not so subtle social agenda. Those who rage against the machine often have a tough sell, but Pullman is no more “right” or “wrong” than his critics in this area as these critics will attack his social philosophy with their own religious philosophy. Few will dare to think “beyond good and evil” (“God” bless quotation marks!)

Religious Philosophy:

Numerous fantasy authors attack churches indirectly (e.g. Robert Jordan’s Children of the Light) or do not touch God at all. Others, like C.S. Lewis, supported Christianity by being masterful but ‘original in an unoriginal way’. That is to say, Lewis took something ready made and confirmed it in the hearts of his accepting readers with allegory. Pullman, the anti-C.S. Lewis, throws subtlety and allegory out the window with an all powerful church centered in the money capital Geneva, an assassin priest who performs preemptive penance and, even the suggestion that the church cuts out the sexual organs of children.

Pullman’s slip is identifying the God he is using specifically as Yaweh/Adonnai. This gives the Christian church reason to attack his religious ideas when the core of the book is its philosophical ideas. You could attack Jesus(Da Vinci Code style), the Church(historically or with certain controversies today), Mohammad, Buddha, anyone you want, and make some progress one way or another, bunk and debunk endlessly, though believers and skeptics would multiply. This is why Pullman’s enemies are foaming at the mouth, because they feel they can refute him with substantial argument……..

Abstract Philosophy:

But ‘God’ is simply too abstract to ever be created or destroyed by man’s philosophy or argument. What Pullman has done here is take an entity considered infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, etc and presented him as merely a powerful though mortal imposter. The true question of God is not touched, and even some characters in the book express doubt over the nature and existence of a possible “true Creator” beyond and above the presented imposter. Pullman, wanting to destroy God, has taken the abstract concept of God, humanized and personified it, and destroyed it instead.

Now, within the confines of a story this is no problem, and if the author wants “blaspheme”, more power to him. He can and does score legitimate points off the church, and the concept of a “Republic of Heaven” is too stirring to ignore. But the concept of God taken outside the book, when the story ends and the philosophy continues, is just too weak to stand up. Christians can lose or gain faith in the church or angels or humanity, but would be foolish to lose faith in God over this book. Atheists and giant-killers should look for more potent ammunition.

Note: Book I, The Golden Compass a.k.a. Northern Lights and Book II, The Subtle Knife must be read before reading this final Book in the trilogy.

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Never fear, for Seventh Sanctum has a number of random generators which can be used to combat this dastardly disease. Much like a game of mad libs, the site creates unexpected elements: from characters and setting to plot ideas.

For example, I gave the Romance story generator a click and here’s what it came up with:

This story takes place in a town in Cuba. In it, a cruel physicist attends a social event and meets a gas station attendant who inherited a family curse. What starts as contempt quickly becomes a passionate affair – all thanks to a failure. What role will a chest being opened play in their relationship?

Ooo la la…What’s that I smell? Could it be the next bestseller? Though the generators are likely for humor purposes, you never know….the kernels of some of the greatest works of literature are made up of some fairly stock components, and nearly all can be succinctly and irreverently reduced:

Romeo and Juliet: Boy Meets girl. They die.

Moby Dick: Dude chases whale. Everybody dies.

The Bible: Guy dies. Comes back to life. Sequel held up by publisher.

Well you get the idea.

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/

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In his first book, the New York Times bestseller This is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explored the fascinating intersection of neuroscience and music. This book was a primer on the ways in which music and the human brain interact, bringing together a large amount of cutting edge research, much of which Levitin was himself involved in.

The World in Six Songs sings a similar tune, drawing upon anthropology, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience to show both how music evolved over centuries of human civilization and how it evolved us.

Levitin led an extraordinary life before reaching the hallowed halls of academia. He brings much of his past as both a musician and producer into his book giving it a unique perspective that straddles two very different fields. A cognitive psychologist by training, Levitin runs the laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at Montreal’s McGill University. He had previously dropped out of college to pursue life as a musician, and once he achieved a measure of success came back to academic life, earning his Ph. D.

The World in Six Songs is the latest in a series of books that chronicle and correlate neuroscientific discoveries, bringing a somewhat obscure field to a wider public audience. These books, the most recent of which include Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia aim to explore a subset of this genre: the convergence of science and art on the playing field of the mind. Levitin’s place in the scientific community is similarly built on a foundation of art: “I’ve come to see art and science as occupying two ends of a continuum that wraps around on itself like a circle, so that the two meet at a common point.” Unfortunately, the lofty goal of relating the two that Levitin sets himself in writing this book proves to be a bit out of reach.

Though engaging for the most part, The World in Six Songs runs into major difficulties in almost every section. Levitin’s approach to writing introduces the topic anecdotally to gain the readers interest before exploring neuroscientific research findings and examples from life that corroborate his central argument. However, Levitin often meanders a bit too far in his anecdotes which, though unquestionably drawn from an interesting life, are only incidental to the main thrust of the book.

In the chapter on “Friendship” songs, Levitin describes his personal journey through sixties and seventies antiwar protests. He spends nearly twenty pages depicting his feelings as they related to the larger antiwar zeitgeist that took over many Americans at the time. This account is emotionally charged as Levitin finds long-sought closure (while standing in a hotel room where John Lennon himself had staged a protest) for the unnecessary deaths of important figures like Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Kent State massacre victims, as well as his own grandfather. While fascinating, this section of the book is only thinly related to Levitin’s six song thesis. He makes his point that protest songs brought people together in the friendship of a common goal, but uses an excessive amount of autobiography in lieu of science.

In fact at several other points in the book, it is as though Levitin takes his idea too far by drawing vast, evolutionary scale conclusions from more straightforward songs about heartbreak. While discussing Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” Levitin describes how the subject of the song whose girlfriend is cheating on him is actually encoding a useful adaptive message to the species: “it is maladaptive in the long run for a male…[to be] tricked into sharing his resources with a child that is not his.”

Though Levitin bandies about ideas of how music affected evolutionary thinking, this is not always revolutionary thinking. The sum of his arguments doesn’t lead the reader to a new way of looking at human nature and music, but rather provides a few interesting conversation pieces. Though fascinating, his personal stories seem more like padding than support. His correlations between evolution and music come off as more speculation than reason. In fact, much of the book seems like mere homage to a lifelong iPod playlist with only infrequent attention-grabbing science.

Though his aim may wander, Levitin’s writing style is always clear and concise. His anecdotes are interesting on a personal level and the scientific discoveries he explores are easy to swallow even if his thesis isn’t. His enthusiasm and admiration for his subject are so palpable that the reader will certainly feel an intense liking for Levitin the musician-scholar, and will eagerly wish him success – the next time around.

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And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted that:

“H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue.” (p. 181)

But Machen’s work The Great God Pan reads the way you wish Lovecraft’s would. The novella begins with a girl’s disastrous brain operation which is performed in the hopes of her coming into contact with the pagan god Pan. The rest of the story deals with a strange woman’s involvement in the mysterious death’s of several London gentlemen.

Upon its release, the work was considered controversial for its grotesque and decadent themes, as well as its implied sexual content.

So if you’re a fan of turn-of-the-century Gothic horror, (and who among us isn’t…), check out this minor masterpiece of the genre. The text is available on Gutenburg, but I also made a pdf version for easy readability:

PS: Quick tip for reading pdfs: hit ctrl+k and change the document text to white and the page background to dark and then hit ctrl+shift+h, then up and down to scroll….

PPS: The pics are from the movie Pan’s Labyrinth – They aren’t related to Machen’s story, but seem strangely appropriate.

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Most people hear of the author via the modern cult movie Fight Club, which was adapted from his novel of the same name. In the film, a disillusioned Edward Norton attempts to overcome the emasculation and hollowness caused by modern American life by starting a club devoted to violence.

The story spoke volumes to a generation of young adult men who felt empty in the absence of a great cause or struggle. After the success of Fight Club, Palahniuk went on to write other novels and short stories, often making use of disturbing incidents to bypass the reader’s walls and go straight for his innards. The author was often accused of gratuitousness, but as he said in a Guardian interview:

“Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write,….but, no, I always surprise myself…..I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point…but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.”

Should a visceral reaction be considered less valid than an emotional or cerebral reaction? I’m still not sure…Every time I read something shocking and feel the resulting emotion I wonder if I should classify it as artistically valuable or the result of cheap manipulation.

Shock value can also cause some extremely dramatic physiological reactions. During a Palahniuk’s reading of his piece “Guts“, several overcome audience members passed out. These fits continued at other readings and the short story is currently said to be responsible for 73 total faintings!

In any case, Guts is not something you read everyday and is worth checking out should you have the ‘intestinal fortitude‘….

All black humor aside, this story is very disturbing and not for everybody, so consider yourself warned:
Guts by Chuck Palahniuk

http://chuckpalahniuk.net

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But Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut would be a little more stunning if you didn’t feel it had been done before by Arundhati Roy. Love it or hate it, The God of Small Things’s (TGOST) Booker win brought more attention to the genre and you get a feeling of deja vu. (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is on a level of genius so far removed from Roy or Shanghvi, I’m not including it.)

Here’s the story of The Last Song of Dusk: beautiful main character Anuradha Patwardhan gets married to Vardhmaan, a doctor, in what seems to be the perfect marriage. But tragedy strikes when their first child, a prodigy, dies in an accident and plunges their lives into a prolonged poetic depression. Later a wild girl named Nandini stirs up their lives with her antics, and the arrival of another child leads to more poetic feelings and thoughts on love and loss.

Some who read TGOST because of the hype felt the first half was basically a long list of pointlessly creative metaphors, though with a redeeming end. And like TGOST, the Last Song of Dusk’s style is in your face.

In the battle of style vs. substance and the author has to find his own balance, but there is definitely a point when the style can overshadow the substance to the point that it feels the writer wants to show off his writing more than let his characters live. At that point “original writing” becomes just a distraction. Shanghvi walks this line but slips less often than Roy. Most of his metaphors are apt and only a tad distracting. Other facets of his style are evident. He is prone to melodrama (though with a purpose), he is very fond of words like “sartorial” and “nape” (“nape of the neck” is redundant and you realize that Shanghvi, we get it already.) Also, the author wears his gay agenda on his sleeve, and nearly everyone dude in the novel has a set of nice buns.

In addition, mentioning “mercurochrome” and “suitable boys” on the same page is a little mischievous for an author who most certainly has read Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Another time he speaks of a character’s “infinitely beautiful collarbones” which remind a reader of the Roy’s description of “absurdly beautiful collarbones” in TGOST. I’m being anal here, but to readers of the small magic-realism/Indian-West subgenre these things stick out.

Readers of this book, especially Indians, will notice something about it that it has in common with Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things.
The characters always have ties to England or America, mix with whites freely, quote and listen to English authors and Western composers, have more than a bit of American savvy and slang etc. I suspect because the authors themselves have such an East-West hybrid nature they try and insert all the details of their own personal identity crises into their novels.

Would the average small city doctor in 1940’s India waltz and listen to Handel? I’m not sure, but remember these authors are shooting for emotional punch over reality and any distortions in The Last Song of Dusk just add to the hybrid insider/outsider feel that you might have felt if you read Midnight’s Children and TGOST. The Anglicized view of these novelists represents just a few percent of the Indian Experience. There have been only a handful of Indian novels in English (not translations) that capture the other 95%, which India actually is.

Anyways, other stuff happens: a girl walks on water and mates with a panther, artsy parties are held, portraits are unveiled, characters sigh endlessly and ask themselves ‘why’? The cameo by Gandhi is a little goofy, and with the parade of odd characters that stream in nonstop, sometimes you feel the author is trying too hard to cast a freakshow worthy enough for ‘originality’. But there are positives, and they all deal with hallucinatory images and poignant insights. In the end the novel is really about images rather than events, and the love, loss, and sex aplenty is always presented as part of the search for ultimate meaning.

One of the reasons this has to be a dreamlike novel is that if it used straight realism somebody at some point would say “snap out of it” and life would move on. But in Shanghvi’s construction, characters are free to artistically pose at the window, watch the dying sun and whisper ‘it can never be’. When we as readers ask why not, they answer ‘because it can never be…’

Reading The Last Song of Dusk is like eavesdropping on a dream.

You know what I mean: when you wake up from a dream, deeply moved babbling something about bright lights and a purple elephant that loved you, while an observer laughs his head off at your absurdities…Then you come to your senses and eventually laugh off the dream which progressively becomes more and more absurd to you yourself…..

“Capturing the dream’s emotion” is what Shanghvi is best at, but because I’m rating this novel on all factors: plot, sincerity, philosophical content, the final feel or ‘vibe’ etc, etc, I have to average the good and the bad, hence a rating of 3 out of 5. But if I had to rate this on Shanghvi’s emotional sincerity alone, or his attempt to capture the beauty and mystery of love and loss, I would give it 5 out of 5. He clearly feels these things very deeply, and these ideas are just so damn abstract and hard to explain to others that his haunting conveyance of them is remarkable. He is a poet through and through.

Here’s an excerpt from the book: “But even after her words were folded and put to one side, they would continue staring at each other in the knowledge that the endurers of a common fate have an association that outlives calamity and joy, strengthens over time, and deepens into a clarity that allows them to accept that love was nothing but the fragile excuse that enjoined them in the first place, and that after its cessation, after the haunting emptiness of its passing, this silence they were now sharing was, in fact, nothing short of divine eloquence.”

Preach it brother.

Shanghvi is a poet trapped in a novelist’s body. ‘Nuff said.

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