Unabashedly Bookish

Last night I saw a powerful play out about the health care debate, Anna Deveare Smith's Let Me Down Easy. Smith writes in a unique way: She writes one-woman plays by recording interviews with real people, cutting them to size, and committing them to memory. She becomes each of her interviewees on stage, to present the sort of powerful discussion that would never happen, by chance, around a dinner table. Read more...

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story. Read more...

I get on the bus home from work at the psychiatric hospital around 4:30, when most of my coworkers also get on. I usually hold a text, which feels almost religious, or barbarous, like a shield in my palms. I'll read The New Yorker, nonfiction (recently: Philip Roth's account of his dying dad), or fiction (recently, short stories). Last week, the head psychiatrist, sitting beside me, caught my eye as I looked up. She said I often hide in my books on the bus ride home. "Why?" she asked. I felt put on the spot. Read more...

One of the most annoying pieces of advice I've gotten in my effort to write fiction was to make everything more explicit. I was in a writers' group a few years ago, and I was often told to clarify all the physical details in my short stories (What clothes are the characters wearing? Where exactly are we standing in the kitchen?). Read more...

Last week I wrote about storytelling and romance: how when we're young, the stories we tell about ideal love are different from the ones we tell when we're older. I'm still thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. Here at the hospital, I'm giving therapy to a 19-year-old boy who suffered a brain injury that largely took away his use of language. He lives without access to most words. Read more...

This is another story--related to love and literature--from the hospital for the insane where I'm currently working. A friend recently gave me good language for describing a lot of the mental illness at this hospital: Most of the patients here never developed the "ego functioning" of grown people. Read more...

The poet John Dryden once said that a poem had the two purposes of “delight[ing] and instruct[ing] mankind.” We make literature--or any story we build about life--to entertain and to teach us. The second part of his line, about “instructing” us, refers in some sense to a biological truth. Our ability to tell stories is an evolutionary prize. Our brains developed the ability to make stories because that’s a useful way of learning lessons from the past. We remember things, play imaginative games about cause and effect, and so learn what behaviors might shape a good life. Narrative is our testing ground for learning about the cause and effect of human behavior. Read more...

It is amazing to me how disconnected or distorting our ideals can be in relation to real life. Marx had an ideal about freedom; then Stalin followed that ideal into perversion, killing millions of people. Tolstoy focused his fiction on Christian ideals of fairness, but he was violent with his wife. D.H. Lawrence wrote about ideal masculine sexuality, but he didn't like actually having sex. Read more...

I wonder if you've ever enjoyed one book so much that you resist picking up a new one for a while. Others authors look pale in comparison to that old voice; you want to make sure you've gotten the most out of one author's mind, putting off your turn to another. Read more...

I'm reading a wry, dirty book, Edmund White's autobiography, My Lives White is a gay novelist and biographer who's written a frank, sexy description of his life in Paris and New York City, from the 1950's to today, in S&M scenes, departmental meetings at NYU and Princeton, drunken binges, and intellectual discussions with sexually obsessed philosophers like Foucault. Read more...