Death of a Genius

Carlos Fuentes died today. I read his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz last year when I needed a Mexico book for my 6 books, 6 countries,  6 regions Challenge. It was amazing. Below you will find my brief (sadly) review and the Goodreads summary. If you have not read Fuentes yet, use this moment as an excuse to give yourself the gift of his work. Apparently he has a novella due out this year. I will definitely be buying are reading it. Thank you, Carlos, for making the world a more magical place with your craft.

My review:
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This may be the best book I have ever read. It is lyrical, crude, laser-sharp but also epic. It was literally breath-taking. It is about life and death, love, loss, corruption, pride, compassion, connection to history and to the land. It is about Mexico and about what it is to be human, and about being.

View all my reviews

Goodreads Summary: “Hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1962, “The Death of Artemio Cruz” is Carlos Fuentes’s haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico. Its acknowledged place in Latin American fiction and its appeal to a fresh generation of readers have warranted this new translation by Alfred Mac Adam, translator (with the author) of Fuentes’s “Christopher Unborn.”
As in all his fiction, but perhaps most powerfully in this book, Fuentes is a passionate guide to the ironies of Mexican history, the burden of its past, and the anguish of its present.”

CHS Slammers

Cheltenham High Poetry Slam

I had a wonderful experience tonight. I spent the evening at the local high school because a couple of teens I know were showcasing their poetry at the Cheltenham High School Poetry Slam. Many of these kids compete regionally (in the greater Philadelphia area) as part of a school team. While there was a little bit of what you would expect from high school student poetry (broken hearts, teen angst, etc.), there was also some pretty profound stuff going on. One poem was about an absent father, and it moved skillfully between rage, humor, regret, and wisdom. Another student reached out to a friend lost to the pursuit of an easy high, and tried to call her back with reflections on the joys of a middle school life full of simple pleasures and youthful confidence. A third student poignantly reflected on the Daily Routine of being stopped and harassed by white cops for simply being out and about and a young black man in our town. The poets celebrated the preciousness of family and of the moment (in their delight in the weather, in the moments of connection, or not, at a party, in the music of a band in the train station), and they mourned the loss of parents, of cousins shot dead in their prime, of siblings falsely imprisoned. There were lines and phrases that will stay with me–”Don’t you know I’m some species of unlovable”–delivered with poise and precision by kids just 15 to 18 years old, kids who have mined their moments and inner experiences for the gems strung artfully into creations delivered tonight to a large, but sadly pretty segregated, crowd. White Cheltenham, PA, you are missing out on beautiful, powerful stuff by overlooking this event. Even the emcees were wonderful. They had great chemistry, did nice interviews with the poets while the judges were scoring the poems, and kept the evening moving. This event lasted almost 4 hours, and it flew by. I pray these kids keep writing, keep performing, keep receiving the encouragement they got from the warm and expressive crowd tonight, and keep supporting one another with the incredible camaraderie they showed amid the competition for tonight’s prize. These kids make me grateful and proud to be part of their community.

Poets and Emcees

Keep your eyes peeled for the future work of:
Ray Patterson (winner)
Jeremy Goldsmith (2nd place)
Dana Kluchinski (3rd place)
Mcintosh Bazile (finalist)
and the other wonderful competitors:
Maya Alston
Amber Bell
Naiyanna Brown
Justina Davidson
Aryeh Harris-Shapiro
Najja Lawson
Koby Leff
Amber Martin
Jaliah Matthews
Chase Roberts
and Mecca Smith

with emcees: Rachel Bain, Michael Fuller, Judah Klein, and Francine Marquis.

My Geocaching World

Wissahickon Creek

So today I read for about 30 minutes and stumbled around in parks and the woods for several hours. I thought I would give you a little sense of what my geocaching world is about so you will know what I’m doing when I could be reading. First a little definition. Geocaching is the “sport” (sometimes an apt term, other times, clearly not, see my discussion further along) in which one uses a gps device to find hidden containers of various sizes–geocaches or just “caches”–which contain at least a logbook and also sometimes little fun trinkets or even “travelbugs” (items with tracking numbers which are meant to be moved from one cache to another and logged so that people can follow the journey–I bought a pirate keychain in St. Thomas, brought it home, added a tracking tag, and put it in a cache in NJ. It went straight to New Zealand, where it bopped around for a year or so, then went to Australia, and is now touring the UK. Needless-to-say, I live vicariously through my travel bugs). Anyhow, you get the coordinates of the cache either by looking online at a listing that describes the location and characteristics of a cache or by using an app on your phone or GPS to get listings in an area. One of the things that is cool about caching is that it turns seemingly innocuous places, like your local stop sign, into little hidden treasure chests, and you muggles (yes, we call you that. Thanks, JK Rowling!) have no idea! Another cool thing is that it provides a great excuse to explore places you would otherwise never find (for instance the retired missile silo about a mile from my daughter’s preschool which is now right next to a set of batting cages in a town park–who knew?!). When it is sport-like, it involves hiking, or kayaking, or rock-climbing to get to a challenging spot. When it is less-so, it can involve looking for a magnetic hide-a-key in a parking lot lightpost base. The hides can be really easy to spot (tupperware in a fallen log somewhere out in the woods, with not much camo), or really tricky to find because of a hard puzzle to solve or something visually tricky to find, like a unique container well camouflaged to blend with its surroundings.

So here is what a typical day-off caching might look like. This morning, while checking email as I got my daughter’s breakfast, I found a message saying that a new cache had been published about 20 minutes away from my house.  I decided to leave the house early to try to be the first one to find this cache in the beautiful Wissahickon Creek area of Philly. The park there is full of trails, both paved and unpaved, and is one of the places I train when I do endurance races with Team in Training. Anyhow, a geocaching friend had just placed a cache, a tiny bison tube

Bison tubes

containing only a log to sign, in a tree just off the trail by the site of the first Baptist baptism in America, in 1723 on Christmas Day (BRRRRR!). The cache is wittily named Polar Bear Club (actually PBC Redux, as there have been prior Polar Bear Club caches in the area, washed away when the river got a bit out of control in severe storms). The members of the Brethren Church–German Baptist–were known as “dunkards” for their immersion baptisms, and I, for one, would not be up for baptism in the Wissahickon on Christmas Day, even with global warming. Geocachers often like to bring each other to historic or geologically interesting spots to fill each other in on local history like this. (Coincidentally, later in the day one of my own caches was published–even smaller, a “magnetic micro,”–which is located near the former site of “Roadside,” the home of Lucretia Mott, who was an amazing Quaker minister, abolitionist, and campaigner for women’s rights. She was also a founder of Swarthmore College. But I digress.) Some geocaches are puzzle caches, which involve solving some sort of riddle or puzzle to get the coordinates, and this was of that type. I needed to look up the numbers of a couple of asteroids to get the final digits in the coordinates.

So anyhow, it is kind of a thing with geocachers to be the first to find a newly published cache. You can set up email alerts to learn when new caches are available in your area, and if you are so motivated, run out and see if you can get there first. I don’t get a lot of FTFs, as they are known, (this is just my 7th in almost 3 years) because I have a day job, a toddler, etc., but it can be fun if it works with my schedule and one is close by. This wasn’t actually all that close, but I had already arranged to meet another cacher friend to find a cache that we had both looked for unsuccessfully recently (where unsuccessfully = didn’t find it and came home with scars from lots of pricker bushes). So I figured I would just head out early and try to grab Polar Bear Club on the way (where on the way = completely out of the way across town). I actually wondered if I would run into said friends there doing the same thing, but I didn’t. Instead, after a lovely conversation with a random poodle-owning stranger in the parking lot at the trailhead about the 26.2 sticker on my car, my status as a rebitizen (I also have a bumper sticker that says “Run, Rebitzen, RUN”), the politics of the Reconstructionist movement, and the joys of dog ownership, I headed down the trail and spent some time blundering around where the GPS on my phone was pointing me. Not seeing the bison tube (which is quite tiny and tends to be hanging sneakily in a tree), I decided to check out some other trees a bit closer to the creek, in case either my GPS or the cache owner’s wasn’t being very precise about the location. A few moments later I saw two people approaching, electronics in hand. I had competition, or in this case, a generous collaborator, in my search.

With caching, you tend to get to know the nicknames of other people in the area through the caches they have placed and the logs they write when they find (or don’t find) caches. I am known as the owner of the Seuss Series–a set of caches I have placed related to titles of Dr. Seuss books. Sometimes there are geocaching events–pot lucks, pizza parties, or just flash mob type things that bring people together, usually in conjunction with a mass publication of a bunch of caches in an area. So sometimes you actually meet the people whose nicknames you recognize, and there is often an exchange of cell numbers or email addresses in case of the need to PAF (phone a friend) on a tough cache. In this case, the guy who converged on the geozone (GZ) with me was someone I’d seen the name of many times, but never met. He spotted the bison quicker than I did but let me share the FTF with him anyhow. I had a great chat with him and with his muggle wife, “I’m along for the bird watching,” and then headed back to my side of the world to tackle the cache I had come to see as my nemesis.

This cache hasn’t been found very much, is in a very pricker-infested section of a wildlife preserve, and had actually been the site of a rogue false cache, which had made the logs misleading for awhile. A week or so ago, not knowing about the false cache issue, I had finally tackled this one, knowing it was  a challenge, spent 30 min to an hour searching in and around an old abandoned shell of a pumping station or something getting grossed out by the refuse from partying teens and not finding what was reputed to be in the building itself. I later learned I had failed because the recent logs were about the false cache, which the cache owner had gone and removed when he learned of it. So that had been totally wasted time. Once I had found all that out, I had tried going back to find the real thing, only to find the GPS bouncing all over but mostly directing me into a serious thicket of prickers. I had, again, given up and moved on to more rewarding searches. Nonetheless, there had been logs that had identified this one as a favorite, and there were suggestions that the cache owner had fashioned something cool and unique to hold the log for this one. Hence I was headed back to meet up with a couple who had also had no luck with this one in the past, to try to “get the smiley”–the little emoticon reward which is placed beside the listing once you find a cache. When I arrived, they sheepishly said, “don’t be mad…” They’d arrived early and gone to start looking without me. I was actually fine with that, since they had found it, NOT in the pricker thicket, and so they spared me the additional pain that one of them had endured hunting where the GPS pointed, while the other had found the cache, in a very cool natural object modified to hold the little scroll of paper that served as the log, which was located slightly off from where the GPS was pointing. Turns out their daughter had actually had the thing in her hand the first time they were there, and hadn’t looked carefully at it, only under it. She’s now in the navy in Michigan and will be pretty frustrated when she hears about this. So anyhow, they kept me out of the thicket, I found the cache, admired the container and left feeling friendly toward my former nemesis. My friends and I parted ways when they headed off to try to be first to find my new cache and I moved on to finish up the caches in a beautiful cemetery nearby that I’d had to abandon a week earlier when I became afraid that if I didn’t leave, I’d be locked in for the night with my car.

The rest of the day was a series of short walks in the woods, some clever containers (like a converted soda bottle that looked like it still contained liquid, a log  with a little hollowed out spot for a small container for the log, a half contact lens case with a magnet attached hidden in a stop sign, and a tupperware neatly tucked under a fairy house in the owner’s yard) and one DNF (Did Not Find). This one was located in a local park that featured an amazing set of birdhouses designed by an artist and a pretty little garden. That cache was probably in a bush in the garden, or under some wildflowers there, but I just didn’t want to damage the landscaping hunting for it too vigorously. I’ll come back to that one when the plants die back or when someone’s log gives me a better idea of where to look. At one of the caches I did find, I traded a little key chain I got one year at a Phillie’s Mothers Day game for a kid’s telescope for my daughter, and I spent a half hour or so in the cemetery looking for someone’s lost dog (she found it). For all of you saying, “this all sounds pretty pointless,” I have to agree, but it’s also a great excuse to be outside exploring new corners of the world on a nice sunny day, and I definitely enjoy every minute (ok, maybe not the pricker minutes).

Geocachers can also get a little silly with the the stats about their finds. There are various sites that will crunch your account statistics in different ways to give you a little sense of your progress. Here’s what one such site does with my history:

Profile created using MyGeocachingProfile.com

So that is what I’m doing when I’m not reading. Of course I did have The Golden Notebook on in the car when I was driving around, and I did read The Angle of Repose when I stopped for lunch, so I did actually get some good reading done, too.

And now I’m blogging and watching the Phils on the West Coast while my much saner husband sleeps. But I’m happy, and Katie really liked the birdhouses when I took her over there after I got her from school. She also wanted to grab a cache on the way home, so we stopped by a great one with the cache camouflaged in one of those outdoor garden lights. She got a bouncy ball from that one (in exchange for a draydel).

Where’d She Go?

Distraction 1

Ok, so you might have noticed I’ve been a little MIA lately. Yes, I have been working a lot and Katie, my 4 year old daughter, was home from school last week. But I also haven’t really settled on a next read. I’m listening to The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing on audio, and I love it, but it is something like 28 hours long, and I have a 5 minute commute to work. So no matter how much I love it, it will be awhile. It might motivate me to get back to running actually. I started The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz and was enjoying it, although Mahfouz reads tend to feel kind of leisurely to me–his books please but don’t grip me–but then I found out the group I was planning to read it with have put it off til August. So now I think I’m going to wait to finish it with the group. I was starting The Trial by Kafka on the Kindle, but I haven’t even gotten out of the preface, and I keep getting waylaid by the stupidly addictive Angry Birds app I put on there. I’m supposed to read Wise Children by Angela Carter for another group read, but haven’t gotten a copy yet, and I haven’t gotten beyond page 2 of Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer, another current group read, because I keep trying to read it while Katie is awake. Tonight, though, I started Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (for my Pulitzer Group) instead of going and getting dinner between patients. I’m hooked. This is going to be a good one. So expect a review of this one soon.

But really, it hasn’t been the books. It got nice out all of a sudden, and baseball started, and I remembered how much I like geocaching. So books have been competing with sunlight and flowering trees, with Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, Hunter Pence and our great Phillies broadcast team (they are remarkably funny to listen to), and with the masochistic pleasure of battling ticks, vines, prickers, hills and creeks in order to discover some camo’ed tupperware container with a logbook and some funny toys that Katie loves. Oh, and I did have to do taxes. And my husband did just go out to get my daughter a bike and got one for me at the same time.

But I promise not to neglect you, my faithful subscribers! I will keep you posted on my reading (even if it slows down just a teensy bit), and maybe I’ll encourage you to get out with a GPS and find silly little containers in the woods near you! Oh, and GO PHILLIES (who are, as I type, in an insane pitching battle with SF, shutout on both sides in the bottom of the 10th)!

So what are YOUR biggest reading distractions?

Distraction 2

In Venice Amid Intrigue

Italy was not originally on my itinerary for the year, but I wanted to get one of my backlog of Anne Perry mysteries read when we went on vacation last week, before digging into something more serious. The action in the book I started turned out to move back and forth between Britain, a small German state, and Venice, where the exiled former Crown Prince of said German state had been living until his murder on a trip to England. Since the book made me desperately want to visit Venice based on the descriptions of the city in the 1850s, and since it also made me really want to revisit the European history of the period, I decided to count it for the Around the World Challenge after all. Since I’m counting what could be an Italy read for Cuba (one of Italo Calvino’s novels; he was born in Cuba), it seemed ok to count this one for Italy. Here is my review.

Weighed in the Balance by Anne Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As always, I really enjoy reading Anne Perry’s mysteries. I enjoy the characters: surly amnesiac detective William Monk, Crimean War nurse Hester Latterly, distinguished barrister Oliver Rathbone, whose relationships, while often testy, are also intelligent, passionate and loyal. I also enjoy the plot twists, which always have a foundation laid, but which are nonetheless not given away earlier in the novel, making things interesting to the end. I also like the vision of 19th century European society that comes through in each case as it unfolds, whether it is a commentary on medical conditions in London hospitals, as in one book, or the political intrigues surrounding the possible unification of the various German states, as in this one. One measure of historical fiction is whether it makes you want to go read history, and this one definitely did. It also made me want to visit Venice, where a portion of the action takes place.

The basic plot is this: Countess Zorah Rostova seeks the assistance of Rathbone in her defense against a slander accusation by the widow of the exiled former Crown Prince Frederich of Felzburg, a small German state. Zorah has accused Princess Gisela of murdering Frederich, in what was initially simply dismissed as death from internal injuries after a fall from his horse. She has no proof of her accusation, simply an instinctual knowledge that it must be so. As Rathbone investigates, with help from Monk and Hester (who is nursing an paraplegic son of a family from the same German state), it seems that murder has in fact taken place, but that Gisela may be the one person who has an ironclad alibi. Possible suspects and motives are many, related both to personal jealousies and potential political plots related to Frederich’s possible return to Felzburg to lead an independence movement on the eve of potential German unification. During the investigation, Monk travels to Venice, home of the exiled royal family, and to Felzburg, while carrying on a flirtation with a married Baroness from Felzburg, whose husband is a viable suspect. As I said, the solution is not clear until the very end, when critical questions are answered and the investigative team succeeds in bringing about a satisfying resolution to the case.

Committed in New Zealand in the Mid 20th Century

My first real experience with severe mental illness came on my psychology internship at Beth Israel Hospital in NYC in 1993-94. In the inpatient world of New York in the 1990s, most treatment for severe mental illnesses such as major depression, bipoloar disorder, and schizophrenia was delivered via short (a few days to a few weeks) inpatient stays featuring medication, group therapy and brief individual or family sessions followed by regular outpatient care in the form of ongoing medication and weekly psychotherapy and group sessions. Most of the patients lived on their own, with family, or in group homes. Newer antipsychotic medications were replacing the older more disabling sedative treatments for schizophrenia, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was used mainly in the elderly, with appropriate anesthesia, as it tended to be more effective and less risky than medication. When patients received ECT, it was willingly, and without fear. Thus it was somewhat heartwrenching to delve into the world of Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, which describes the experiences of a young woman hospitalized for most of 8 years in the psychiatric hospitals of New Zealand in the 1950s. Treatment seemed to have been largely a matter of ECT (or EST as it was called in the book) with apparently little anesthetic, or lobotomy. Patients lived in their own mini-society with its own rituals and routines, with little human contact other than that of burned-out ward nurses and brief exchanges with a few fairly helpless doctors. Frame can speak realistically of this world, as she herself was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized for years.

While the world she portrays is a bleak one, Frame’s novel is a beautiful work of fiction.  Here is her opening sentence: “They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with the ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.” In the prose we see both the madness that led to protagonist Estina Mavet’s hospitalization, but also the intelligence and insight that indicate how much is lost by her being trapped there. From her first hospitalization, Estina is eventually released into her sister’s care, but soon finds herself a patient at another hospital in another part of the country. In her description of a cheery demonstration unit for the least troubled patients which provides a bright facade hiding a darker warren of disturbing wards for the more symptomatic and chronic patients, I felt a horrible echo of the descriptions I have recently been reading of the public and secret sides of Nazi internment camps. When Estina finds herself reassigned to one of the less public units, she finds that she is left with little to call her own, dressed in hospital garb that may or may not even fit, and denied most personal possessions. She was a teacher before her hospitalization, and one item she does manage to keep is a volume of Shakespeare. “I seldom read my book yet it became more and more dilapidated physically, with pictures falling out and pages unleaving as if an unknown person were devoting time to studying it. The evidence of secret reading gave me a feeling of gratitude. It seemed as if the book understood how things were and agreed to be company for me and to breathe, even without my opening it, an overwhelming dignity of riches; but because, after all, the first passion of books is to be read, it had decided to read itself; which explained the gradual falling out of the pages.” She then goes on to describe moments when Shakespeare’s words come to her mind as she watches the situation of the patients around her. Estina travels back and forth between two hospitals and the cultures of the different wards within each hospital, terrified of the only treatments she can be offered, and often hopeless about the possibility of returning to the outside world.

I will leave you to discover where the journey ultimately takes her, but I will say that bleak as the vision of mid 20th century mental health care is in this tale, the vision of human courage and emotional depth conveyed in this novel is equally inspiring.

From Syria, in a more peaceful and lyrical time.

Today I am posting from the world of the Arabian Nights. Small confession: I’m not actually finished with these stories. I’ve decided, having read quickly halfway through, to slow down and savor the rest until I run out of renewal time at the library. These stories are best in little doses, rather than 100 pages at a time, and I decided to take them more in the way they were intended. However, I’m sure enough that I have a feel for the book, that I decided to review it now, so that you can dig in and enjoy!

Here is my Goodreads review: Arabian Nights: The Thousand and One Nights by Husain Haddaway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Reading the Arabian Nights in not a simple proposition. Not only, depending on the version you read, is it long to incredibly long, but first you have to actually choose a version. I started with the very good Wikipedia summary of the history of the collection and translation of the stories. You see, the various collectors and translators over the centuries have had different agendas in approaching the tales: make them less baudy, make them more baudy, make them fit another culture’s picture of the Islamic culture they portray, make a literal translation of the language (thus losing some meaning along the way), make the story total reach 1001… It’s complicated. After reading Wikipedia, I settled on the Husain Haddawy (spelling of the name on Goodreads is wrong, by the way) translation which is linked here. Haddawy actually has a great introduction that talks about the history of the stories and makes a good case for the choices he and the author from whom he translated the work made in compiling their version. One of the things that he argues, and I agree with him, is that to do this work justice, the translator has to be at home in both the cultures involved, the culture of the tales and the western culture into which they are translated. That way the translation can be true to the original while rendering the tales in imagery and language that create the effect of the original in the new tongue. I have been very happy with my choice of this translation.

The basic premise of Arabian Nights is that a king, betrayed by his wife and hearing of a similar experience from his brother, decides that the only way to have a faithful wife is to marry a woman, sleep with her, and kill her the next day. He is pretty much wiping out the female population of the kingdom when his vizier’s daughter steps in with a plan. She begs her father, who is charged with rounding up wives for the boss, to marry her to the king. The first few stories actually make up part of the argument between the daughter, Shahrazad, and her father, about whether he should accede to her request. Eventually he does, and she marries the king, but brings her sister along, to set up the plan. The sister asks Shahrazad to tell them a story before the night ends, and Shahrazad does, but leaving them with a cliffhanger so that she can live to tell the rest the next night. The process continues this way, with stories within stories and cliffhangers most nights. Shahrazad definitely believes in the power of suggestion, since there are many examples of people being pardoned if they tell good stories or are worthy people. Eventually the king gets the hint and decides that he won’t kill her, and the kingdom is saved.

The stories are wonderful little nuggets, many involving enchantment and demons, most also involving beautiful royals and romance. At times they can seem a little repetitive, but they are still wonderful. Haddawy has preserved the pieces of poetry interspersed in the tales which adds to the pleasure of the reading. I recommend taking your time with this collection, as the tales were intended, rather than reading the stories in large gulps quickly over a couple days. It will be much more fun that way.