It's an intellectural banquet

I am confident that Namwali Serpell's study of Toni Morrison's fiction, On Morrison, will not be the last written about the Nobel Prize winner's work. I am also confident that it will not be surpassed.

Serpell comes to it with an interesting history. She was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a B.A. from Yale and a PhD from Harvard, both for English literature. He debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her next two books, Stranger Faces (2020), critical essays, and The Furrows (2022), a novel, were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

She is a tenured literature professor at Harvard and teaches a course on Morrison. With her racial, academic, and literary background Serpell can—and does—write about Morrison with unique authority.

She discusses in detail Morrison's first six novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved,  and Jazz—and her single published short story—"Recitatif." The widely anthologized story is remarkable because Morrison removed all racial markers from the two female characters and readers have argued over which Black and which is white since. 

Because I recently read Sula, I was interested to read what Serpell said about it. She said a lot more than I did (or could) say. I think it would be useful and helpful to read each novel immediately after reading the chapter of Serpell's commentary. I can't imagine that many of us have read as widely or can read as deeply as Serpell. I believe such a program would be enormously rewarding intellectually.

Yet for all that,  On Morrison is not written in "academic" prose. It is clear and accessible. Serpell adds a touch of personality when talks about herself and her own writing when appropriate and always to indicate Morrison's influence on her. She's a fan although she never met her.  

On Morrison is not a biography; however Serpell sketches enough of her life to give context to the work. She discusses Morrison's last four novels and how they relate to the earlier books. She talks about Morrison's poetry (it's not very good, surprising in how lyric her prose often is) and her playwriting. It's an artistic life in full.

On Morrison is a book to keep and to reread. I've never read Tar Baby or Jazz, and before I do I will reread Serpell's discussion of them. An intellectual banquet.

Unexpected plrasures of learning Japanese

One time in my 60s I stopped in a Japanese coffee shop to have coffee and read my book or The Japan Times. When the proprietor served my coffee I told him, "Haizara ga iranai."—I don't need the ashtray—and he took it away.

Where had "ashtray"—haizara—been hiding in my subconscious? I have never smoked. I have never needed an ashtray. I have no recollection of learning the word. Why would I? I could not have seen it or used the word in 40 years. Because the incident was exceptional, I remembered it.

Recently I was reviewing color words—akairo, red; kiiro, yellow; aoiro, blue; etc.—and learned a new one, haiiro, gray.  Iro by itself means "color," so haiiro literally means "gray color." And, by extension, it can also mean "ash colored." 

When I read that, the penny dropped. I already knew that sara  or zara means "plete "or "dish." If the first half of haizara means "ash," the second half must mean "dish"—or, a dish for ashes. Or ashtray. Which is how the dictionary translates it.

Aside from the sharp pang of pleasure this insight gave me (no small thing), I now have a way to remember "gray." Who'da thought?

Why the body with the buried bikes?

Val McDermid is a writing phenomenon. She was born in Fife, Scotland, a mining community, in 1955. She was eight when the East Wemyss coal mine near her home caught fire. The disaster, which killed nine men, gave her an early understanding of fear and loss. Also, her childhood habit of telling scary stories to her friends in the seaside caves near her home started her on the path of making up frightening tales.

After becoming the first student from a Scottish state school to enter St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she became a journalist, working for the Scottish tabloid the Daily Record, and later, the Daily Mirror Group, on the northern desk of the Sunday People. Her career as a reporter included being beaten up by 80s wrestling legend Big Daddy, as well as an unsettling encounter with Jimmy Savile who was eventually revealed as a predatory sex offender with 400 to 500 victims—ranging in age from 5 to 75—over fifty hears. Saville inspired one of her most notorious villains.

Her experiences covering tragedies like Lockerbie (the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing) and Hillsborough (a stadium crush that killed 97 fans) finally pushed her to leave tabloid journalism in 1991 and write fiction full-time, although she had been writing fiction.  Her first mystery Report for Murder was published in 1987.

When she started, British crime fiction often seemed to her to be excessively middle-class and polite. She was determined to do something different, writing punchy and contemporary stories that would draw on her journalistic background. She believes that crime fiction can hold a mirror up to society: “I want to write a novel that people will enjoy but will also give them pause.”

She has now written over 40 books in five series and isn’t ready to stop: “As long as the ideas are still there, as long as the passion and enthusiasm is still there, I'll be writing. And what else would I do?” Broken Ground (2018) is the fifth of eight in the Karen Pirie series. 

An American couple have come to a remote Highland peat bog  to hunt for a treasure her grandfather said he buried at the end of WWII. They have managed to find two brand new Indian motorcycles, but buried with them is a body. Who is it? Why was he shot? Moreover, the body has not been buried for 70 years, he was added sometime after the motorcycles. Cold case detective Karen Pirie has a challenge.

Broken Ground is smoothly written with plasuible characters, none of whom are TSTL—too stupid to live. McDermid's ability to change points of view smoothly keeps the story hurtling right along. A professional job by a professional.

 

How to get a better grasp of real reality

Because President Trump in his Truth Social posts often describes a reality I don't recognize and because as a philosophy major I spent considerable time considering reality and tests for it, my attention was caught by a book titled The Perils of Perception: Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy.

Duffy is the Managing Director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute,  a London-based market research firm. To help clients understand changing markets, Ipsos regularly surveys consumers and this book compares and contrasts opinions about important issues in as many as 14 different countries. 

For example they asked "What proportion of the population of your country is aged sixty-rive or over?" On average Americans guessed 36%; the reality is 14%—a 22 poins difference. At one extreme of the difference between guess and reality, Italians guessed 46%; the reality is 21%. At the other,  the Swedes guessed 33%; the reality is 19%.

The book is filled with such nuggets. Is violence in the world increasing or decreasing? What proportion of your country is Muslim? What does it cost to raise a child? How much do you need to save for retirement? How much tax do the rich pay? "Out of every 100 people aged 20 years or over in your country, how many do you think are either overweight or obese? The average American guess: 50 people. The reality: 66 people.

"What percentage of women and girls aged 15-18 in your country do you think give birth each year?" The average U.S, guess: 24%. The reality is 2.1%. 

One more. "What is the proportion of immigrants among your country's population?" The average U.S, guess is 33%. The reality is 14%.

Some caveats: the book was published in 2018 so the research is ten or more years old. Also apparently the studies were done online, which means respondents had to have access. Nevertheless, I suspect that for all the domestic turmoil Trump has caused, American perceptions and reality have not changed significantly comforting though it might be to believe we have better information.

What is timeless is Duffy's observation that our perceptions are affected by external reality—news, family, friends, entertainment, books, etc., etc.) and our mental equipment that has evolved over millennia. For example, we tend to recall bad news more than good. We tend to believe things that reinforce what we already believe and to ignore or discount things that contradict what we already know.

Read with an open mind, hard as that may be, The Perils of Perception may help readers understand reality better and be less surprised when real reality turns out to be different than they expected.

What do you do if you're stuck in a time loop?

I'm sure Solvej Balle's novel On the Calculation of Volume 1 (smoothly translated from Danish by Barbara J. Holland) is not the first and will not be the last to play with Groundhog Day's premise—that a character is stuck in time and endlessly repeats the same day over and over and over. Because I've heard it before, I almost did not start the book even though it was a Booker prize-winner. That would have been my loss.

Tara Selter and her husband Thomas run an antique book business out of their two-story stone cottage on the outskirts of the fictional Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France. On the 17th of November she goes to a Bordeaux auction on a buying trip, returning that evening to Paris to check into her regular hotel.

She plans to spend the 18th and 19th in Paris, browsing book dealers, consulting with a specialist librarian, having dinner with a coin dealer friend and his girlfriend who Tara's never met.  They have a convivial dinner in the shop, although Tara accidentally burns her hand on the stove. She spends an uncomfortable night in the hotel, the night of the 18th, with a towel and ice cubes wrapped around her hand.

The next morning her hand is still in pain, but she comes to realize it is still—again?—the 18th of November. Thomas is surprised to see her return from Paris a day early. He has no memory of his yesterday. Indeed, for the rest of the year, for the rest of the book, every morning he and the rest of the world wakes up to the 18th of November while Tara's hand heals, her hair grows, and she tracks the number of repetitions.

Thomas, who has no memory of yesterday's November 18, is willing to believe Tara's story and together they attempt to understand what has happened or break the cycle or both. They can't, but part of the book's suspense is watching and pulling for their attempts. Because nothing changes in Tara's external reality—every morning it is November 18—she and we really, really get to the minutia of that day.

On the Calculation of Volume has no chapters. Tara numbers the repetitions and Balle separates the short paragraphs with a line of space. And because I feel what I've said is inadequate, let me quote the American publisher with whom I agree:

"The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating." Go get drunk on it.

Why Anne Hillerman picked up the Chee/Leaphorn series

Anne Hillerman was almost 64 years old when she decided to attempt to continue her father Tony's Chee/Leaphorn mystery series. After her father's death in 2008, "I was talking about his stories, his places, and then asking if people had questions. Inevitably, the second or third question would be if there was another book at the publisher, is there another book in the works, is there going to be another Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn novel. Dad did not have any unpublished or unfinished books, and I’d have to say that. 

"People told me they felt like these characters were part of their families and I could really read their disappointment. After a while, it dawned on me that I was just like those people, that besides missing my dad, I really was missing those stories, too. That was part of it, thinking that if I were to write a story, there might be an audience for it besides me and my mom. 

“The second part was, as I said, thinking about Bernie Manuelito and thinking it’s a shame for series to end with her forever pigeon-holed as the one who brings the coffee, the sweet young thing who has to be rescued by her boyfriend, the gal who drives Jim Chee around when he has a broken foot, all those things. This isn’t true for women in law enforcement, and it particularly isn’t true for Navajo women. It isn’t in the whole spirit of Navajo culture, which celebrates strong women. So, it was a combination of those things, sensing Dad’s readers’ desire for the series to continue and my own itch to have the series not end with Bernie as the young woman who has to be rescued.”

She began to draft a Chee/Leaphorn novel, eventually sent it to Tony's publisher, and in 2013 Spider Woman's Daughter was published. She has now published eleven more mysteries in the series.

In addition to giving Bernie—and other Navaho women—agency, Hillerman says she begins with a setting and a topic—anything from medical marijuana to paleontology to Navajo astronomy. “After I choose the setting, which really is like a character in my stories, then I think, what crime would be appropriate in this setting?” Once she has the crime and the setting, Hillerman skips the common practice of outlining her plot and chapters. “Usually I write a letter to myself, and I say, what is the point of this book? Why are you going to spend a year doing this? What do you want to accomplish?” she says. “And usually in that letter, I deal with what happened in the last book that I was not exactly satisfied with, that I could do better in this book. And then I just kind of start writing.” 

Shadow of the Solstice (2025) is the tenth in the series. It incorporates two true events on the Navaho Nation in Arizona and New Mexico: A major Medicare fraud in which criminals signed up needy Navaho and kept the government's therapy payments and the damage extractive industries—coal, oil, uranium—have done to the Nation's land. Hillerman does not editorialize. She demonstrates ways the unscrupulous exploit the poor and desperate. An interesting evocation of contemporary Navaho life with sympathetic characters.. 

 

Sula, Toni Morrison's second novel

Sula, published in 1973, was Toni Morrison's second novel following The Bluest Eye. One inadequate way to describe it is to say it is the account of the short life of a black woman in a small Ohio city in the 1920s and 1930s.

Of course to read it that way is akin to looking at Michelangelo's Last Supper as a bunch if guys having dinner. You miss everything that makes Sula an exceptional work of literary art.

The novel is set in Meridian, a small, fictional a Ohio town. As far as I know it is not a stand-in for Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up. Meridian has a river and a small black community that lives on one of the hills that surround town. In one of the book's many ironies, the neighborhood it called the Bottom.

Morrison convincingly evokes black life in the 20s and 30s. We read about Sula's grandmother, her mother, and her best friend Nel. One of the many pleasures of the novel is reading about the girls' friendship although they are very different people. Sula's home life is chotic; Nel's is relatively stable. Nel marries; Sula does not (apparently).

I do not want to say much more about Sula; the web has scores—hundreds?—of comments and guides.  I will say only that the incidents Morrison describes can be both convincing and unthinkable. It's clear that the residents of Meridian's Bottom (like all of us) are chips floating on the river of time. We both act and are acted upon. Sula and Nel and everyone else in the novel do what they have to do, be who they are. The lives Morrison captures are ordinary yet by means of her art extraordinary. 

How not to buy a calligraphy brush in Japan

I suspect that everyone who has studied a foreign language can tell stories of misusing it when in the country. This is one of mine.

Source: https://allaboutplanners.com

When I was stationed in the Army in Japan my sister, who is an artist, wrote to ask me to buy her a couple Japanese brushes, the kind that are used for calligraphy. No problem.

I looked up the word for "writing brush" in my English-Japanese dictionary before my next weekend pass into Tokyo. I had already learned the pattern for "I want , , , " or "I would like . . ." Put a noun in front of "hoshii desi" and you have a request.

I found a likely looking stationery store, entered, and confidently told the proprietor "Furo o hoshii desu." I want [to buy[ a writing brush.

He looked confused, led me to the front, and pointed up the street.

"Iie, iie furo. Furo!"  Saying "brush" even louder didn't help. He kept trying to ease me out the door until I spotted a display of brushes and pointed. "Sono," I said. That, there.

His face changed. "Ah so ka," he said, "Fude." And we completed the transaction.

When I returned to the barracks, I looked up "furo" in my Japanese-English dictionary. It means "bath."

An extraordinary life at an extraordinary time

Because Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood has been well-reviewed since it was published in 2016 (it has over 66,000 reviews and comments on Goodreads) it doesn't need another. Rather, these are a few personal reactions and thoughts about the book. Consider yourself warned.

Noah's birth was a crime because at the time (1984), sex between a white and a black was illegal, let alone marriage. His father was a Swiss expat; his mother was black, a Xhosa woman. Their time together was always fraught, although much more for Patricia Noah than his father.

Noah is, in South Africa, "colored"—neither black nor white, which meant he could move between groups. It also meant he was a lonely kid because the blacks thought he was too white; the white kids thought he was too black. Because even during apartheid there were other coloreds in the country, the laws outlawing fraternization we sometimes (often?) ignored.

Patricia did not spare the rod. Noah was a rambunctious child and his mother often felt—with good reason—she had to give him a hiding (spanking). No matter how she punished him however, Noah always felt loved. Interestingly, he felt that when the black man she married gave him a hiding, he didn't love him; it was out of pure viscousness.

Because I know virtually nothing about South Africa's history or society, I welcomed Noah's short notes to provide context and background for his stories. The Dutch settled on the coast, were pushed north by the British and became Afrikaans. To control the majority black population, the whites set up "homelands" for the ethnic groups and encouraged rivalry. Today South Africa has a dozen official languages; Noah speaks six or more and the book contains stories of how this fluency helped him more than once.

Born a Crime is a superior memoir because Trevor Noah grew up in an extraordinary society at an extraordinary time and he writes so engagingly about it. It's a book that makes you (me) want to sit down with him and request for more. 

A way to capture those fleeting thoughts

For a long time, I've made notes as I read (which probably says something about my ability to focus on my reading). 

It has always meant getting up from my recliner, going to the desk in another room—or on another floor—and writing down my thought. That's enough of a challenge that (a) I skip it rather than make the effort or (b) bringing a pad and pen to the recliner to anticipate inspiration. Because inspiration strikes so unexpectedly, (b) has seldom happened, and I've lost numerous possibly useful thoughts to (a).

Although I've owned an iPhone for several years, I only recently realized it contains a "Notes" app. That means I can recline in my recliner and whenever I have a thought I can type or dictate the note right into the phone, which I keep handy. The next morning I can import the note, or notes, into my iMac where I can incorporate it into the work in progress. It is, to coin a phrase, easy peasy.

My subconscious apparently responds to different books differently. Sometimes I read the book and simply enjoy it for what it is. Other times I have to stop virtually every page or so because the prose has triggered an idea about something I'm writing. This blog post was inspired by such a book, Catherine Newman's Wreck. It provoked a wealth of ideas that you can see from the attached picture. These are both general and specific ideas about my current manuscript.

As many authors will tell you, writing is hard. I am delighted I have discovered a way to make it slightly easier. A way to read, be inspired, and painlessly capture the inspiration for another day.