A disappointing introduction to Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–62 )is one of those intellectual figures I think I should know more about than his famous wager so when I saw Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason by Mary Ann Caws on sale I bought a copy.

"Pascal's Wager" is the argument that it's in your best interest to believe in the existence of God, because it's a rational assumption and does no harm, whereas disbelieving risks the possibility of eternal punishment in hell. It assumes of course both the existence of God and the existence of hell, and if you don't believe in God and his heaven, why would you still believe in hell?

Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason is a handsome book. Attractively designed and printed on heavy paper, it fits neatly in the hand and is well-illustrated with color and black-and-white plates. It includes notes, bibliography, and index.

I'll let the publisher describe the contents: Mary Ann Caws "takes us back to Pascal’s youth, when he was a child prodigy first engaging mathematics through the works of mathematicians such as Father Mersenne. She describes his early scientific experiments and his construction of mechanical calculating machines; she looks at his correspondence with important thinkers such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat; she surveys his many inventions, such as the first means of public transportation in Paris; and she considers his later religious exaltations in works such as the 'Memorial.' Along the way, Caws examines Pascal’s various modes of writing—whether he is arguing with the strict puritanical modes of church politics, assuming the personality of a naïve provincial trying to understand the Jesuitical approach, offering pithy aphorisms in the Pensées, or meditating on thinking about thinking itself."

Unfortunately, from the unreadable Preface by Harvard professor Tom Conley to the ponderous text by Caws the book is a disappointment. One small example, Pascal supported the tenets of Jansenism in their conflict with the Jesuits but it is not clear what they were or why Jansenism was an issue in 17th century Catholicism.

Caws is clearly fascinated by Pascal, his life and times, but she does not show the non-specialist reader for whom Blaise Pascal seems intended why we should care. Although one reviewer writes "I'd happily present this book to anyone getting acquainted with Pascal as a fine introduction to the man and his life that will usefully as well as pleasurably inflect reading and considering him," I'd suggest looking for something more comprehensive and accessible..

John Green reviews the era in which we live

I was familiar with John Green for his best-selling novel, The Fault in Our Stars, which if you have not read I recommend. Today, however, I will write about The Anthropocene Reviewed, his collection of essays adapted and expanded from his podcast. 

The anthropocene is defined as "the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment," that is, right now. Green reviews and rates different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale as if they were restaurants—everything from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and the penguins of Madagascar.

He talked about the book in a New York Times interview in which David Marchese. the interviewer, noted that in the book Green gave the internet three stars and at the end asked a bunch of rhetorical questions, including: “What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” 

Green's response: "The easy answer is that when the internet becomes part of you, you cede a certain amount of your overall sense of self to online experience, which can be wonderful in some ways. This is going to surprise you, David, but I was a big nerd when I was a kid. I would have loved to be able to connect with young people the way that young people can connect with each other now across time and space around shared interests. It would have been amazing for me to have a relationship with other people who were obsessed with collecting every version of the 1986 Chicago Cubs baseball cards. The internet has facilitated communication in lots of really beautiful ways. And then there is the cost." The cost he says without saying is that people in their posts can be ugly, vicious, and nasty.

Most of the 48 essays are short—four or five pages—and most include some history or background on the topic: first recognition that Halley's Comet was a comet (worth 4,5 stars), discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings (4,5), why teddy bears (2.5), air conditioning (3.0), staphylococcus aureus (1.0). 

Some readers may disagree with Green's ratings. Some may argue that you can't rate something like the internet at all. Three stars compared to what? Smoke signals? The telephone? No one can argue with the variety and discernment of Green's essays. An entertaining, interesting, and useful collection. 

Women and orgasm

It was a confluence of items: a spam offer, a book review, and a book, all concerned with women and orgasm, which my online dictionary defines as "a climax of sexual excitement, characterized by feelings of pleasure centered in the genitals and (in men) experienced as an accompaniment to ejaculation." 

The offer in my spam filter promised "She’ll Be Shaking & Begging — Tonight, Make her scream your name." It is not offering a vibrator, but a product that promises to give men an erection that will give a woman an orgasm. Here we are, fifty years after The Hite Report was published and the myth lives on that way to orgasm is via a male erection.

A couple weeks ago, in a review of a new book about Shere Hite and her best selling book, The New Yorker reviewer Margaret Talbot writes, "[The book's] main takeaway was the the  startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfort of many audiences, often referred to penile' thrusting'—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris." (The New Yorker, 3926, p68)

The narrator of Miranda July's popular novel All Fours doesn't need an erect penis—or a male lover for that matter—to enjoy multiple orgasms, although she has nothing against men and their erections. The publisher says, "All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman."

One reviewer called All Fours a female Portnoy's Complaint, which is not fair, but may prepare unsuspecting readers for the reading experience. I remain saddened that there are enough misinformed men apparently that spams like the one I cite can find customers. I'm sorry for the men, sorry for their partners.

Outline your fiction or no?

Maybe it's the difference between creating genre fiction—mystery, thriller, romance, fantasy—and literary fiction.

Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jesse Q Sutanto who has a degree in creative writing from Oxford University, writes YA rom-coms, YA thrillers, and adult contemporary fiction. She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer “I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them"—i.e., she wrote them by the seat of her pants (if you can visualize that).

But it was not working "because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.” She says that by her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed.” (https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto)

Roger Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt has written 22 books, six off-Broadway plays, and has taught creative writing. In his book Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing he says he tells writing students because they ask that they should never outline. "The trouble with using an outline is that you'll follow it . . .You'll cover everything you've put down in one portion of your outline, all the while aiming for what you've put in the following portion. All you'll be doing is reading a road map. You'll never surprise yourself with a sudden turn."

A student asks if an outline will keep the story orderly so that it's clear to the reader. "Don't worry about the reader," says Rosenblatt. "Worry about the story. Your story will determine its own orderliness without your planning it out step by step." (p. 34)

Maybe this writing game is more complicated than putting words on paper.

How does she do it?

I don't know how to review—let alone critique—Elizabeth MeCracken's short story collection The Souvenir Museum. 

A dozen stories. Individual characters—individuals—in every one. Domestic and international settings: Ireland, Scotland, somewhere in the midwest (Illinois? Indiana?), London, Rotterdam, Swampscott, Galveston, Austin, Boston, Denmark, Amsterdam.

Which is not to mention an original—or interesting—situation in every one but I'll mention some anyway: A wedding in rural Ireland. An affair between a directionless young woman who drinks Jim Beam and a much older radio advice doctor. A young man and an older ventriloquist who takes him into her bed. Two fathers take their son to a waterpark. A middle-age couple enjoy a honeymoon on a moored Amsterdam canal boat.

Aside from character, setting, and situation the language of the stories is worth the price of admission. Here are some examples literally taken at random:

—It was his eyes that confused things, so joltingly blue they seemed to hold every emotion and its opposite.

—Then, helped by a dozen hands, as in a child's séance, they were lifted up and the cave was filled with applause, genuine, sarcastic, dutiful.

—New Year's Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Mickle, villainess of the children's game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious.

—She's basically a hermit, Sadie had told him, and Jack had imagined a lady lighthouse keeper, a kind of nun—not a nun nun, since Linda was Jewish, but a woman of the book, devoted to reading.

Unlike the writing I often find in literary magazines McCracken's English is not so rich wuth metaphor and fine words it is almost cloying. She'll create a word if necessary—"joltingly"—but it does not call attention to itself for interrupt the flow. The Souvenir Museum is amazing. I wish I could tell you how she does it. I can only suggest you see for yourself.

A dual portrait of Anna and Tom, digital nomads

Writing teachers tell students they should show not tell. Writers should, my search tells me, "convey emotions and actions through descriptive details and sensory experiences rather than simply stating facts. This approach helps readers engage more deeply with the story by allowing them to infer feelings and situations from the characters' actions and surroundings." This is such a commonplace that I was intrigued by Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico's short novel, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (who is not credited on the cover), because he mostly tells the story rather than shows it.

Latronico is almost thumbing his nose at readers by starting the book with six pages of a careful, detailed description of a Berlin apartment. I.e., "Sunlight floods the room from the bay windows, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face down on the seat . . . ." No dialogue, no conflict, no story, just a lovely apartment.

We learn this is the apartment/workspace of Anna and Tom, a young couple from elsewhere—where exactly is not spelled out; they do not speak German and hang out with, party with other ex-pats. They are successful in the gig economy as graphic designers, website designers, menu and brochure designers. Money does not seem to be a problem, but Berlin after the Wall came down was an inexpensive place to live. Anna and Tom are lucky to find and occupy apparently permanently a spacious, desirable apartment while the getting was good. Before Berlin was overrun by affluent Germans.

Although their apartment is perfect, their relationship (and their sex) is rewarding, their friends are fun, their work satisfying (relative, say, to bartending or waiting tables), Anna and Tom and are dissatisfied for reasons they cannot identify. For one thing, "There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them." Images they cannot resist. Images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, news feeds, social media. They appear to live in a constant state of distraction, helpless to do more than to skate on the surface of reality. Not even their intimate relations, pleasant as the sex is, leads to anything deeper.

I found Perfection ultimately engaging and remarkable, a dual portrait of Anna and Tom as they live as ex-pat, digital nomads in Berlin, Portugal, Sicily over about twenty years as Europe and society changes. Friends return to native countries, parties begin to pall, people grow older. Apartments endure. 

A fascinating biography of an interesting writer

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is a fascinating author. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E Butler by Susana M. Morris is a fascinating biography and introduction to her work.

Butler was singular because she was the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. Why science fiction? Butler sounds like any writer on certain days when she writes: "Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time [the 1970s] nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

After her father died, she was raised by a single mother in Pasadena, California. When she was 12 years old she watched a B-movie science fiction film that lit an unquenchable fire in the girl. She began writing her own science fiction stories on the typewriter her mother had given her. She was encouraged by a sympathetic school teacher and later won a writing competition at Pasadena City College, and a year later won fifth prize in a Writer's Digest short story contest.

In 1969 she met Harlan Ellison at a Screenwriters Guild workshop and he became a mentor and champion of her work. In 1970 she spent six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania (it's now at UC San Diego) where she met Samuel R. Delany. Despite the encouragement and support her mentors gave her, she was not able to publish. She worked at menial, backbreaking day jobs to pay her rent and buy food and Morris reports that "She stuck to a grueling writing schedule, often writing from 2 to 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job. She finally sold Patternmaster to Doubleday in 1975."

In 1979 she sold Kindred, a time-travel novel about a contemporary Black woman who travels back to the antebellum South. Gradually her life became somewhat easier. (Hard to imagine how it might have become harder.) She completed the five-book Patternist series. She was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. She won a Hugo Award. She traveled internationally for research and as a representative American writer. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," acknowledging her talent and vision.

Butler recognized her calling. She wrote, "I am a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects one day to to be an eighty-year-old writer." She never made it, but she was still writing when she died.

These comments do not do Positive Obsession justice. Morris, an associate professor of literature, media, and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has, in fewer than 250 pages, conveyed the texture of Butler's life and its events and introduced the reader unfamiliar with Butler to her works. One can hope that the biography sends new readers, even those who say they do not read science fiction, to Butler's novels. 

A young interpreter adrift in The Hague

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is her second novel narrated by an unnamed woman.  The first was A Separation and that narrator was a married translator. Intimacies' narrator is single and an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (She has native fluency in English and Japanese "from my parents" and French "from a childhood in Paris," plus professional proficiency in Spanish and German. A polyglot.) Both novels have interesting things to say about language and the difficulties in moving from one to another. 

The narrator in Intimacies has come to the Netherlands to escape New York and work at the Court. Her father is dead, her mother lives in Singapore, she has no siblings, no friends, no lover. She is looking for a place to finally call home.

She meets and becomes the lover of Adriaan who is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. She makes friends with Jana who witnesses a seemingly random act of violence virtually on her doorstep. The interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with with the crime as by chance she befriends the victim's sister (The Hague is not a big city.). And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s required to interpret in a trial in which the former president of an African country is accused of war crimes.

The publisher says, "A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life."

I had a sense of a woman adrift. She is good at what she does, indeed the Court offers her a permanent position. Interpreting the words of an accused mass murderer, however, is too much for her. Adriaan goes to Lisbon to meet with his estranged wife, leaving the narrator with the keys to his apartment and a promise to call. He doesn't, and I found it difficult to understand why she does not do something to resolve the situation until a resolution is forced on her.

Kitamura's descriptions of the former president's arrival in The Hague, the preparations for trial, and the trial itself are brilliant. I had a clear sense of the narrator's involvement with and attitude toward the former president and the man's feelings about his arrest and trial. For me, however, this was not enough to endear Intimacies to me.

A writer more interesting than her writing

Vera Wong goes down to her San Francisco tea shop one morning to find the door broken open and a body on the floor holding a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? 

Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. So begins Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

As the book evolves the reader meets four characters any one of whom could have been the murderer, assuming a certain suspension of disbelief, but all of whom have good reasons not to have been responsible. I am afraid that by the process of elimination, I identified the murderer—although not the means or motivation—two thirds of the way through the book.

In fact I found Sutanto more interesting than feisty Vera Wong. Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford and considers all three places her home. She has a Masters from Oxford University, but it took her nine years after graduating from her creative writing course to get her first publishing deal. She now writes YA rom-coms, YA suspenseful thrillers, adult contemporary fiction, and adult suspense novels.

She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer in 2024 that she usually creates the plot first because “I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them. I remember my husband being like, ‘I was just reading an interview with this author, and he says that he outlines his books before he writes them.’ And I was immediately like, ‘How dare you. I’m an artiste. Every author has their own process. Don’t tell me to outline.’ And then I realized, this isn’t working because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.”

By her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “I like to say I’m a Chinese mother: My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed.”

By October 2024 Sutanto had published 11 books in four years. How had she managed? “Because it took me so long to get my first ever publishing deal—during those 10 years I was writing and then I would get really sad when the books ended up getting rejected by everybody—I learned the healthiest thing for me to do was, once I finished a book, once it was ready to query or go on submission, the best thing for me to do was to immediately move on to a new project. To fall in love with a new project so I could let go of the last book. So, I got into that habit where as soon as I finish a draft and I edit it, I send it off to my agent.

“Now I actually do take a break, but I emotionally detach myself from it. Then I’m actively thinking of my next project. I’m actively asking myself, What do I want to work on next? So that’s number one, the mental health part of the answer.

“And then the logistics part. I’ve trained myself to write super-fast because it’s the only way I can outrun this really mean little voice in my head. I call it my ‘editor,’ and as I write, this inner editor is saying things like, ‘Oh wow, that sentence is awful. That’s so awkward. Does that even make sense? The character is so boring. This plot makes no sense.’” To silence the voice, she writes in 15-minute sprints and stops after 2,000 words. “I don’t do anything with that manuscript for the rest of the day. It gives me a break, and I’ve written 2,000 words.” Do it every day and you soon have a book.

You can find the interview at https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto

Sutanto has also posted instructions on how to outline, write, and preserve your mental health while doing it at https://jesseqsutantoauthor.com/for-writers  Good stuff.

Not much happens but the book is very funny

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) is one of those authors—their names are legion—one thinks one ought to have read but never have, or that's what I think. In a moment of hopeful self-improvement recently, I checked out A Glass of Blessings. I chose it because it was convenient and Philip Larkin, a poet I admire, blurbed: "“The most underrated novelist of the century . . . The subtlest of her books—the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art.”

Wilmet Forsyth is a 33-year-old, childless, middle-class woman married to a boring, if devoted, British civil servant. She fills her days with shopping, lunching, good works (the Anglo-Catholic Church and three priests play key roles), and tea. Her most exciting experience was serving as a Wren in Italy during WWII where she made friends with Mary and met her husband.

Although not a lot "happens" in A Glass of Blessings, the book is filled with incident and is more than redeemed by Pym's writing. "Harry [a friend's husband] was one of those non-intellectual men who are often more comforting to women that the exciting but tortured intellectuals. He might not have any very interesting conversation for his wife at the end of the day, might indeed quite easily drop off to sleep after dinner, but he was strong and reliable, assuming that he would be the breadwinner and that his wife would of course vote the same way as he did." Of course. 

In other words, Pym can be very funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but knowing-smile funny. 

Another example: "He was one of those preachers who, in coming to the end of what they have to say, find it impossible to stop. Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still he went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness like a great suffocating eiderdown."

'There is one complication in Wilmet's cosseted life: she has never had a lover and she becomes infatuated with the exceptionally handsome brother of her friend Mary. Unfortunately for Wilmet, the young man is gay at a time when homosexuality was a sin that "dare not speak its name" and was illegal. It is possible that Wilmet never realizes why her feelings for the guy are not returned, and Pym's writing is subtle enough that, I suspect many readers at the time—1958—did not realize either.

I have a sense that the society and life Pym evokes no longer exists, even making allowances for the fact that the book is fiction. Which makes reading A Glass of Blessings even more rewarding than many novels.