CalPoly

I recently had an email conversation with Karen Lauritsen, our Communications and Public Programs Coordinator, about what she’s reading, and a little about her work here. I hope to make this a semi-regular feature of Sensible Shoes: Readers of REK.

JK: Let’s start with a stereotypical library icebreaker: what are you reading? and what led you to pick up this book — friend’s recommendation, familiar author, arresting cover art, or?

KL: My favorite book I’ve read so far this year is The Long Goodbye. I think I read about it somewhere, maybe The New York Times. I often enjoy memoirs and have been interested in how our culture deals (or doesn’t) with grief, which is what that book is about. I also read Your Voice in My Head — a Good Reads checkout — which was just okay. That book got a lot of press in fashion magazines for some reason. My favorite book that I’ve read recently is Just Kids by Patti Smith. I was looking for something anti-establishment, artsy, immersive. It did me right.

Just last night I finished The Hunger Games. Kristen [Thorp, who works in Circulation] loaned the three books to me and with the movie out I wanted to get in on the action. It may be the first series that I’m able to finish, we’ll see. I didn’t make it past the first Twilight or Harry Potter. I read the first two in the Stieg Larsson series, but burned out after that, too.

Oh, and I’ve got a few non-fiction books going that I pick up intermittently. One is Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, which I like but isn’t super revelatory. And Hillary Clinton’s memoir which I’ve been chipping away at for about a year.

JK: Wow, you’ve got wide-ranging tastes! from grief to Hilary to Hunger Games! (What did you think of HG, by the way? So far I’ve resisted the pop culture tide on that one, despite a visit from Kristen, her copies of the 3 books in hand…)

KL: I liked HG. The author knows how to get you to care, which is good. I didn’t feel totally swept away like perhaps a teen fan would, but it was a compelling read. I did cry.

JK: Veering off a bit from grief and hunger, I know that you’re a graduate of the Conservatory Improv program at Second City LA. How did you get interested in the program? Is humor an important element for you in reading? And delving further into your background, did Second City prepare you to be a high school English teacher, or was it the other way around?

KL: The conservatory program at Second City was something I did after teaching. I had always wanted to try sketch comedy but kept delaying it for reasons I can’t even remember anymore. I miss improv sometimes, although it was never a lifestyle for me in the way it was for some. That said, I still have to be careful not to go into improv-mode as a default. It’s not always appropriate to heighten things to absurdity in real life, you know? But that impulse can be hard to resist, because it’s so fun!

Another book I’ve read recently is This is a Book by Demetri Martin. I love it; he’s so smart and his comedy is so good at revealing our ills in a thoughtful and sometimes even compassionate way. I don’t need comedy in my reading, but appreciate it when it’s there. I think it’s very, very hard to do well without being snarky, which is too easy and gets tiresome fast.

JK: Probably there’s REALLY no such thing as a “typical” day for you, with such a variety of projects going on, and a crowd of different things to report on. Which parts of your job are the most fun for you, and which are the most challenging? or are they the same things?

Any upcoming event or program you’re particularly excited to tell us about?

KL: This week I’ve been working with Patrick and Jordan on preparing Quentin Hardy’s talk [at the opening of the Data Studio on April 26] to share with the world via our blog. I love capturing and sharing the content that comes out of our events! It’s a way to show what Cal Poly and Kennedy Library offer the world. It’s both a fun process and a meaningful product.

Something else I enjoy is observing people at an event like Science Cafe. It’s a sweet fruit of my event-planning labor. There they are, sitting at a table with people they likely don’t know, from other disciplines, learning something new and having a good time. That’s pretty cool.

Speaking of which, our Science Cafe “finale” of the academic year is May 24 — Transformed! It’s about composting with worms. They will be delivered live to my house a few days before the event so it’s up to me to keep them alive for the demonstration. I’m interested in learning too, since I have a yard for the first time in my adult life and I’ve found myself getting into gardening.

As for a challenge, it’s a familiar one — time to do everything I want to get done!

Karen’s blog, Kennedy Library Out Loud, is a great place to learn about upcoming and past library events.

photo credits, from top:

Jordan Hooper
Alan Yeh [Karen shown with Emily Zamrzla, bookbinder, at April Science Cafe on Japanese bookbinding]

If you’ve ever appreciated a cleverly designed book jacket, it may well have been one of this guy’s. He discusses the covers below in this entertaining TED talk.

Karen Lauritsen (Kennedy Library’s Public Programs and Communications Coordinator) and I had a conversation recently about reading, book groups, Good Reads, goodreads.com, and library life. It’s posted to her blog, Kennedy Library Out Loud (a great place to read about library events, exhibits, Cal Poly authors, etc.) Read the whole interview here.

Karen has some great stories — she’s been a high school teacher, a filmmaker, a conservatory improv student at Second City in LA, and coordinator of the Design Communication Arts program at UCLA Extension. Maybe I need to interview her!

Russell Banks isn’t known for writing happy, uplifting stories: The Sweet Hereafter, for example, is about the aftermath of a school bus accident with multiple child fatalities. His characters usually are gritty, working class, and often violent. In his latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, he takes an unsympathetic character and forces us to empathize with him, or, failing that, understand how he got to be who he is.

The Kid is a convicted sex offender, or that’s what we’re told about him at first. In his early 20s, discharged from the Army, and addicted to Internet porn, he’s low on the likability scale. He buses tables and camps out under a Florida causeway with other societal rejects. Gradually we learn that this is his only option. As a sex offender, he violates parole if he’s within 2500 feet of anywhere there might be children — this includes homeless shelters and most apartments he can afford — but can’t leave the area. His disinterested mother wants nothing to do with him; he wears a GPS anklet that keeps the justice system aware of his whereabouts. To fulfill his parole, the outcast camp under the causeway is his only option.

Gradually we learn how he’s arrived at this low spot. Without giving away too much of the plot, his conviction is based as much on his complete isolation and inexperience with other people as it is on an actual crime. He’s not innocent, but he’s not as guilty as this banishment from society might indicate.

Banks doesn’t make the Kid into a saint, or a blameless victim. But he does evoke our sympathy. When he’s taken in by the Professor, a morbidly obese man of ambiguous motives, we hope he’s not being exploited. To say that both of these main characters are unique is an extreme understatement; I’ve never encountered anyone like either of them in anything I’ve read, and they stayed with me long after I finished the book. The moral issues are huge and seemingly insoluble, the setting is intensely well-drawn, and the Kid is one of the best antiheroes I’ve ever met.

author photo: Nancie Battaglia

This novel, or at least half of it, could almost be described as Balkan magical realism. The main characters are Natalia, a young doctor, and her grandfather, also a doctor, who has recently died under somewhat questionable circumstances. That makes it sound like a mystery, which it is in some ways, but it’s much more than that. Natalia and a fellow doctor are traveling in war-torn areas, vaccinating children and distributing medicine to rural clinics. She plans to collect her grandfather’s belongings on the same trip. There’s a strong undercurrent of danger in this trip: two women doctors traveling alone in a politically and militarily unstable zone, where power shifts constantly. They stay at a farmhouse, where nearby a group of peasants, all of them sick with something that sounds a lot like tuberculosis, are digging in a vineyard. At first I assumed they were migrant laborers, but it turns out they’re trying to find the bones of a relative buried there, to remove the family curse that they believe has made them all ill. This is just one thread of a complicated story. In flashbacks to Natalia’s childhood, she recalls her trips to the zoo with her grandfather, and his treasured copy of The Jungle Book, which he shares with her. The story also jumps back further, to her grandfather’s childhood, and his friendship with an abused deaf mute womanknown as the Tiger’s wife.

The story is full of mythic characters: a deathless man, shot twice in the back of the head, who turns up at crucial times in the story; a hunter called Darisa the Bear who goes after the tiger; an apothecary who tends to the villagers but has a past unknown to any of them.

Here’s a video from Politics & Prose bookstore, with staff discussing and recommending the book:

author photo: Beowulf Sheehan

On the surface, a supernatural psychological mystery set above the Arctic Circle, and a rock and roll comedy that bounces between San Francisco and upstate New York don’t seem to have much in common. But as different as these two novels are, there is some common ground: the specter of fathers, one absent, the other abusive and now senile, hovers over both stories. The tone, though, couldn’t be more different.

John Burnside, a Scottish poet and novelist, has written a seriously spooky psychological novel with a claustrophobic setting: a small island off the coast of Sweden, in a house occupied by Angelika, a driven, reclusive artist and her teenage daughter. Angelika was together with Liv’s father very briefly, and won’t tell her daughter much of anything about him. Liv, on the other hand, is so suppressed by her mother’s neglect, that she takes the lack of information at face value, and seems to have little curiosity about him.

Very few people are allowed into their world, and Liv only has limited access to her mother, who leaves her completely on her own to work on paintings. Their only contacts with the outside world are a handful of lonesome bachelors, most of whom seem to have long-buried crushes on Angelika. One of the men, Kyrre Opdahl, spins scary folktales for Liv about the huldra, female temptresses who lure lovesick men and boys to their death. Liv only halfway believes the stories — until a pair of brothers, and later an adult visitor to the island disappear without a trace.

Most of the tension in the book is between Angelika and Liv, and Liv and her sanity. We’re unable to tell at many points whether we’re inside her head, or whether the events being described are actually happening. Burnside does such an effective job of portraying her fear and self-doubt, that we’re often taken along with her. When Liv is summoned to London by a stranger to meet her father, who is gravely ill, her shaky sanity nearly leaves her permanently. The book was involving enough that relief was one of the feelings I had when I finished it. Still, if you enjoy a good haunting, I’d recommend it.

Suzzy Roche’s Wayward Saints, on the other hand, has a lot of comic elements: Mary Saint, a has-been punk rocker, now working in a SF cafe called the Crumb Bunny, her transsexual best friend Thaddeus, and a dead ex-bandmate named Garbagio. But Mary has ghosts of her own: an abusive father, now institutionalized with dementia, her past fame, and the shriveled, reduced life she’s now sleepwalking through. When a fan from the past offers to set up a concert for her at her old high school, her past has a head-on collision with her present.

Author Roche is a member of the folk trio The Roches, so she knows what she’s writing about when she portrays the lower-rent end of the music business. While I think I’d still rather hear Suzzy sing, I did enjoy this book for its quirky characters and satisfying story.

Seeing the movie preview prompted me to seek out this book and quickly read it before it leaves the Palm. The novel, based on a short story, is Hemmings’ first, and its characters grabbed me from the first page. A distracted, work-obsessed father, Matt King, is forced to take a much more hands-on role with his two daughters when his daredevil wife Elizabeth falls into a coma after a boating accident. I know, it sounds like an after-school special or a soap opera Friday afternoon cliffhanger, but in Hemmings’ hands the comatose wife is not just a dramatic plot device, especially since we know from the beginning of the book that she’s dying. Matt is slower to accept this fact, and is then faced with telling his daughters, as well as their many friends.

But his grief gets even more complicated when his oldest daughter tells him that Elizabeth has been cheating on him: now anger and betrayal are added to the mix. He vacillates between wanting to give his wife’s lover the opportunity to say goodbye, and his more visceral urge to tell the guy off. Further complications ensue when he discovers the lover’s involvement in a family land sale decision that he is solely responsible for.

Here, Matt and the girls scatter Elizabeth’s ashes from an outrigger canoe off Waikiki:

The girls paddle slowly, and Scottie stops and rests her paddle across the hull. Her back is hunched and she looks at her lap and I wonder if she’s crying. She turns, holding up her hand. “Mom’s under my nails,” she says.

I look, and yes, there she is.

Alex turns and Scottie shows Alex her fingers. Alex shakes her head and gives Scottie this look that seems to say, Get used to it. She’ll be there for the rest of your life. Shell be there on birthdays, at Christmastime, when you get your period, when you graduate, have sex, when you marry, have children, when you die. She’ll be there and she won’t be there.

For a novel about the premature death of a mother of two, there are as many funny moments as sad ones. And I was happy to discover that the movie nailed the “dramedy” vibe perfectly; it was very true to the book. George Clooney has impeccable comic timing, and covers the tragic side of Matt’s character just as well. The whole cast is excellent, and the author even has a brief cameo as Matt’s secretary.

author photo: Monte Costa

Okay, I’ll admit I didn’t read ALL of these books during my long session on the couch last week; some of them are from weeks ago. But I’m not up to full speed, so will do short reviews of this run of excellent books I’ve lucked into recently.

First was Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which I’d been eagerly anticipating since I first heard it was in the works. This was no disappointment: great characters, varied settings (Mother Teresa’s hospital in India, Brown University, the inside of a mental hospital, an elite biology lab on Cap Cod). The characters are college students: Madeleine, an English major who loves Jane Austen but runs head-on into postmodernism, which threatens to dismantle her love for reading and possibly even her ideals of love; Leonard, a brilliant biologist who struggles to overcome his abusive childhood and keep his mental equilibrium; and Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major who goes halfway around the world seeking answers to big questions, but ultimately becomes obsessed with a very personal one.

These three characters graduate from an Ivy League school in the 80s, and I finished at a state university on the West Coast in the mid-70s. But Eugenides has nailed the excitement, uncertainty, and misery of being in your 20s, and the blessing/curse of having your whole life ahead of you, with way too many momentous choices to make, in a way that is universal. The canvas is smaller than Eugenides’ Middlesex, but I think the book will stay with me almost as long.

Next was a title from 2010 that I’d heard nothing about, pressed into my hand by a friend. It’s from a writer, Cristina Garcia, who I’d read and enjoyed before (Dreaming in Cuban). The Lady Matador’s Hotel is a slim novel made of interconnected chapters. The characters are all guests at a posh hotel in a Central American country where the politics are unsettled. A Japanese-Mexican-American lady matador, a hotel employee or two with a revolutionary past, some gringos hoping to adopt a baby with the help of an adoption lawyer, a brutal general, a Korean factory owner with a pregnant, underage girlfriend, a Cuban poet… all of these characters cross each others’ paths in a way that keeps the suspense and plot moving along. I’m repulsed by bullfighting (and had trouble getting through The Paris Wife because of it) but Garcia kept me reading right through the gore. This book was good enough that I may go back and read another novel by Garcia, Monkey Hunting.

Book #3 is a brand new novel by Hector Tobar, Pulitzer-winning journalist and columnist for the LA Times. In a set-up reminiscent of Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood, The Barbarian Nurseries is a story about race and class, this time a little farther south: in coastal Orange County. The Thomas-Torreses are a well-off couple with two sons and a baby daughter. The father, Scott, is a half-Mexican software designer; his white wife, Maureen, grew up in Missouri with an abusive father. They’ve risen economically to the point that they now employ a full-time nanny, a maid, and a gardener to keep their ocean-view home in a gated community immaculate. But a financial reversal or two and some over-the-top spending force them to let the maid and the gardener go. The extravagant tropical garden begins to wilt; much of the work of caring for the children is shunted off on Araceli, the maid, without discussion or an increase in pay. An argument between Scott and Maureen that begins over — what else? — money initiates a chain of errors, abdications of responsibility, and miscommunications which set this compulsively readable novel’s plot in motion. Tobar juggles multiple voices (Mexican-American, illegal immigrant, Orange County surfing prosecutor, Filipina public defender) and multiple big issues (immigration law, foster care, what constitutes a family, who do we trust and why) with ease. This is an excellent novel of this particular moment in California history.

To clear my palate before tackling my next novel about the serving class, ThrityUmrigar’s The Space Between us, set in present-day India, I read something completely different, urged on me by a friend who reads very little fiction, at least in English. Nick Hayes’ The Rime of the Modern Mariner retells Coleridge’s classic poem, re-setting it in modern times, with an environmental theme. The hardest part for me was to slow down enough to take in the drawings, which manage to be heartbreaking, whimsical, and atmospheric, all at once. With the best of intentions, I bookmarked the original poem online, planning to look at them side by side, but the experience of the book was too compelling for me to want to interrupt my enjoyment to do that. I think this is only my third graphic novel (the other two are Persepolis I and IIby Marjane Satrapi, both excellent) and it made me realize that I want to read more in this genre.

author photos, from top:

Ricardo Barros
Norma I. Quintana
LA Times
The Guardian

Have complaints about the way you were parented? Did Mom and Dad favor a sibling, buy you downmarket toys, crack corny jokes in public? Read this memoir and you may be shamed into shutting your pie hole. Texas singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell gives us a (literally) blow by blow description of his hellish childhood. With no sibling to share the abuse, Crowell absorbed it all — except when his parents attacked each other, which happened regularly. Here he describes an outing with his dead drunk parents to a drive-in restaurant:

Biting her fingernails was a habit my mother indulged to the hilt. “It’s my nerves,” she claimed, and she took nervousness to new heights — “down to the quick,” as she put it — until her fingertips were a throbbing bloodred pulp. Considering this, it’s hard to imagine how she could produce claw marks on the side of my father’s face. But I saw it happen as Jimmy wailed on.

The time bomb suddenly exploded. My father punched her in the face, hard. Unfazed, she kept scratching away at his face and screaming “Go on and hit me. Show everybody what a big man you are. Go on, knock my teeth out. I know you hate the ground I walk on.”

These were eight-year-olds in drunken thirty-something bodies powered by pent-up rage. If experience had taught me anything, it was how to defend myself from their periodic need to hurl themselves into the inferno. But in the cramped quarters of the Studebaker, the flames were dangerously close to torching my self-preservation. Survival, from my vantage point in the backseat, was fast becoming an issue.

In my parents’ world of downward spirals, outside influences — like the carload of customers parked next to us, or concerned carhops asking if everything was all right — were less effectual than a kite in a hurricane. Quelling these prizefights called for more drastic measures.

Clarity came from a familiar source inside my head. If you want this to stop, get their attention. It occurred to me the Dr. Pepper bottle in my hand could end this brawl once and for all.
“Look what you made me do!” I yelled above the din of their vitriol, and was surprised when the fighting stopped instantly and both my parents granted me a haggard glance. Then, with the stage set, I busted myself over the head with the bottle, opening a three-inch gash just above my hairline.

Add his mother’s epilepsy and her periodic forays into Bible thumping to the mix, and is it any wonder Crowell wound up writing country songs? But the big surprise to me is that he was able to forgive them, make peace with his nightmarish upbringing, and even ease their way into whatever afterlife they earned for themselves. His account of both of their deaths is every bit as riveting as the story of their lives.

author photo: Alan Messer

It was announced at the New Yorker Festival a couple of days ago that HBO will do an adaptation of Franzen’s The Corrections. Franzen will adapt his novel into a series, and Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) and Scott Rudin (The Social Network, Revolutionary Road) are both to be involved. There are unconfirmed rumors that Anthony Hopkins will play the lead.

Here’s a video of Franzen discussing the project with New Yorker editor David Remnick:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2011/10/jonathan-franzen-and-david-remnick.html