Austenland...

If you love Jane Austen and have ever been on the more pathetic end of the needy and desperate - cool and confident dating spectrum, this is a book you should read.  Austenland tells the story of Jane, a thrity-ish year old woman whose obsession with Mr. Darcy has actually affected her life.  Jane is bequeathed a vacation to an English resort where women embrace Regency era speech and dress and are courted by actors playing out Austen-like rolls.  A refreshing and surprising story follows where Jane finds Jane and not some more elegant and reserved version of herself.  She finds Jane with all of her ridiculousness. 

In trying to think of other good Austen material to recommend, I just realized that I own all the Austen books, The Jane Austen Book Club, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Marvel's Pride and Prejudice comic book, a Jane Austen figurine, all the Jane Austen movies and a Mr. Darcy paper doll.  I think that puts me on the wrong end of another kind of spectrum.
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The boys helped me clean house today.  It cost me about a half gallon of Windex.  The lower halves of all my windows look fantastic.

The road...

If you want to spend some time meditating on what in your life is extraneous, this is a good book.  It follows a man and his son struggling to survive in a post-apocalypse world.  This man wants food, fire and for himself and his son to not be cannibalized.  In a post-apocalypse world, how much of my life would look vain, wasteful, or just plain unnecessary? 

The father really wants more than that, though.  He's trying to protect the light in his son - his belief in goodness and his yearning to walk upright in a world devoid of hope.  The child wants to be a "good guy" and to help the few bedraggled survivors they encounter.  The father wants to guard and protect that light in his son but is also saddled with the burden of their day to day survival.

It's painful to read but  also thought provoking and beautifully written.  Here are some excerpts...

"He knew only that the child was his warrant."*

"Creedless shells of men"

"By day the sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.  The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion.  Colors.  The names of birds.  Things to eat.  Finally the names of things one believed to be true.  More fragile than he would have thought."

"Do you wish you wish you would die?

No.  But I might wish I had died.

...

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."

"There is no God and we are his prophets."

Concerning the boy

Other survivor:  "Maybe he believes in God."

Father:  "I don't know what he believes in."

Other survivor:  "He'll get over it."

Father:  "No he wont."

Father to son

"You have my whole heart.  You always did.  You're the best guy.  You always were."

*I had to look up the actual definition of warrant.  

warrant - something that serves to give reliable or formal assurance of something;guarantee, pledge, or security.

Serendipity...

We read this very cool book that combines the story of the Japanese poet Issa with his poetry and beautiful illustrations by Kazuko Stone.

In got me in a haiku mood:

The baby won't cry

While he eats.  I hate to sweep.

Serendipity.

Just in case you're wondering if this is a pattern of slovenly mothering, here is a story from a few years back.  Bryan was about 18 months.  I had just thrown away a bag of stale chips.  While trying to do something (urgent, no doubt) on the computer, I heard the unmistakable sound of chips pouring on to the floor...

Me:  (internal monologue)  They're in a bag in the top of the trash so they aren't THAT dirty, and they should keep him busy for another five minutes or so.  (Five minutes later I go sweep up the chips, dump them into the trash can and return to the computer.  Fast forward another few minutes.)

Sound from hall:  Thunk, crumble.  (pause)  Thunk, crumble.  (pause)...

Enter Bryan carrying a kitchen trash can almost as tall as himself and occasionally dropping it to eat a few chips directly from the trash.  Awesome.

War and peace and theoretical mathematics...

I'm still making my way through War and Peace.  This week I came across a character named Pfuel who brought me back to my math department days.  He is a Russian military theorist who has devoted his life to developing his own brand of military theory and has no patience for barbarians who want to taint his theory with practical applications and concerns.  The Russian army is attempting to apply his theory in their defense against Napoleon and the French.

There is often underlying tension between pure and applied math departments.  As someone from the applied side of the aisle, this cracked me up:

"Pfuel was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice.  He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn't want to know about it.  He positively rejoiced in failure, because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was."

"Pfuel seemed uniquely capable of treating even Napoleon like a barbarian, on a par with everyone else who opposed his theory."

This is what I love about Tolstoy.  Even for a minor, fringe character, in a few words he paints a vivid and true picture of human nature.

*All of the War and Peace quotes are from the Anthony Briggs translation here.

Lines written for my family and friends (real and imaginary) on the event of my birthday in which I went to Barnes and Noble and a concert...

Chris took me to Baltimore for my birthday last weekend.  We had fancy Italian food, browsed at Barnes and Noble and went to a Willie Nelson concert.  A couple of things...

We came across this building.  The words "Sewage Pumping Station" are displayed above the windows.  It's such a beautiful building for such a purpose.  I'm not sure if I admire it or am disturbed by it.  "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean."* or  "Yes, I am a sewage pumping station.  Laugh if you must, but at least I'm not pretending to be something I'm not."

Someone actually did a lot of work to publish these two gems.  No, it wasn't just a funny joke over cocktails.  Someone actually spent days and weeks of their life on these.  Very Bad Poetry is amusing, though.  One of the poems is entitled "Lines Written for a Friend on the Death of His Brother, Caused by a Railway Train Running over Him Whilst He Was in a State of Inebriation."  That's enough.  You really don't need to read the poem.

 I love the summer teen reading tables and either 1) find something intriguing I've missed or 2) feel smug that I've read everything interesting there (I know, it doesn't take much).  I found this monstrosity among the summer reading tables.  Really - this is what we want our teenagers to read?

Once we endured the opening act, the concert was great.  To the performers of the world:  1) Just because you can play your guitar with your face does not mean that you should.  2) If the crowd is, generally speaking, significantly older than you, they will clap for you in the way they clap for small children who do spastic cartwheels - more because they don't want to disappoint you and it is somewhat amusing than because it's a wise move, musically.

This is what we should have been watching instead of the opening act.

Willie Nelson was awesome - Whiskey River, Good-Hearted Woman, Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys, I'll Fly Away, ...

*Matthew 23:27

War and peace...

I'm about halfway through War and Peace, and I love it.  It will definitely make my top ten all time favorite books.  (Before you read on, please take a moment to be very impressed that I am reading this book.)  I love the way Tolstoy paints characters.  He sees human nature with a penetrating eye.  One of the characters, Pierre Bezukhov, is painfully familiar.  He is compassionate, open-hearted and has the best intentions and principles.  But when it is time to make a difficult decision or act on those principles, he never chooses the hard, right thing.  He always takes the easy path.  He has difficulty detecting when someone around him is flattering him.  He assumes that they are sincere.  At first glance it seems that he makes this assumption because he is a kind-hearted man with a generous spirit.  That is not the real reason, though.  The real reason is arrogance.  It just doesn't appear to be arrogance because he truly is kind.  Here are a couple of quotes about him that were uncomfortable to read:

Volume I, Part III, Chapter I

"It seemed so natural to Pierre that he should be liked by one and all, and it would have seemed so unnatural if anyone had not liked him, that he couldn't help believing in the sincerity of everyone around him."

Volume II, Part V, Chapter I

Pierre has slipped back into the indulgent lifestyle of an idol rich man.

"It took him a very long time to become reconciled to the idea that he was the very model of a retired Moscow gentleman-in-waiting, a type he had found so profoundly repellend seven years ago. 

Sometimes he consoled himself with the idea that it didn't matter - this was only a passing phase - only to be struck by the horrifying thought that plenty of others had gone through the same 'passing phase', embarking on this kind of life and joining this club with all their teeth and hair and leaving when they were toothless and bald."

This reminds me of visiting a church a few years ago.  There was a 60-ish year old woman in the row in front of me.  She looked angry and dissatisfied - not in the moment but in life.  It just hit me that I will be that age, and probably sooner rather than later.  At the time there were things I knew the Lord wanted me to do - simple but hard things for me.  It didn't feel like I was deciding to disobey.  it felt like I was waiting until later.  I have this underlying assumption that I will eventually live in obedience to God.  Looking at this older woman - who may well have been a wonderful, gracious, Godly woman but for some reason represented bitter wasted time to me - revealed the foolishness of that assumption.  The thing is, I always could have stated with absolute sincerity that in things of God, "not yet" equals "no".  It is in my religion but often not in my economics.*  I think C.S. Lewis describes that phenomenon in The Screwtape Letters.  It is very dangerous to genuinely believe a truth and be unable to see the way you habitually live in defiance of it.

*There is a quote in the introduction to Freakonomics (I think) that says something like "If you want to understand a culture's ideals, study their religion.  If you want to understand what they actually do, study their economics."

**All of the War and Peace quotes are from the Anthony Briggs translation here.

***I'm trying to do book posts on Saturdays.  Check out Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books.

The Histories...

I feel like I need some kind of degree for having finished this book.  It took me about four months.  Here are a few thoughts and favorite excerpts...

It sucked to be a woman in ancient times.

1.196  Herodotus describes an auction of all the marriageable Babylonian girls.  The girls are sorted by attractiveness.  Each of the pretty girls goes to the highest bidder, and the money is pooled and used to bribe men to marry the ugly girls.  There is a reverse auction for the ugly girls.  The ugliest stands up first and is married off to the man who will marry her for the least amount of money.  This continues for the rest of the ugly girls.

1.199  "The most disgraceful Babylonian custom is that at some point in her life every woman of the land is required to sit in a sanctuary of Aphrodite and have sex with a strange man...A woman sitting in the sanctuary is not allowed to return home until one of the strangers has thrown money into her lap and had sex with her...It can be any amount of money:  by religious law she is not allowed to refuse it...Women who are attractive and tall get to go home quickly, while the ugly ones wait for a long time without being able to do their duty.  In fact, some of them wait three or four years."

People do horrible things to one another (also see excerpts above).

Old Testament law was revolutionary.  It seems so obvious because our law is based on Judeo-Christian law, but for the ancient world, it was revolutionary.

Pagan religion is just another version of working out your own salvation.

7.114 (Speaking of Xerxes' entourage)  "When they learnt that the name of the place was Nine Ways, they buried alive nine local boys and girls in the ground there."

Xerxes was a psycho.  Reading the book Esther, I never understood why Esther was so scared to speak with Xerxes without being summoned.  It seemed melodramatic and suspect.  Now, I ABSOLUTELY believe in the reasonableness of Esther's misgivings.  Xerxes was a freaking PSYCHO!!!

7.35  The newly completed bridge across the Hellespont was destroyed in a violent storm.  "This news made Xerxes furious.  he ordered his men to give the Hellespont three hundred lashes and to sink a pair of shackles into the sea...So the sea was punished at his orders, and he had the supervisors of the bridging of the Hellespont beheaded."

7.38  When Xerxes' friend, Pythia, asked that the eldest of his five sons be allowed to stay back from war, Xerxes had the young man cut in two.  The Persian army marched in between the two halves of his body.

What it means to be free...

5.78  "Now the advantages of everyone having a voice in the political procedure are not restricted just to single instances, but are plain to see wherever one looks.  For instance, while the Athenians were ruled by tyrants, they were no better at warfare than any of their neighbours, but once they had got rid of the tyrants, they became vastly superior.  This goes to show that while they were under an oppressive regime they fought below their best because they were working for a master, whereas  as free men each individual wanted to achieve something for himself."

The problem with tyranny...

3.80  "How can monarchy be an orderly affair, when a monarch has the licence to do whatever he wants, without being accountable to anyone?  Make a man a monarch, and even if he is the most moral person in the world, he well leave his customary ways of thinking."

5.92  [Periander, tyrant of Corinth]  "He sent an agent to Thrasybulus to ask what was the safest kind of government for him to establish, which would allow him to manage the state best...Every time he [Thrasybulus] saw an ear of grain standing higher than the rest, he broke it off and threw it away, and he went on doing this until he had destroyed the choicest, tallest stems in the crop...[Periander] He realized that he [Thrasybulus] had been advising him to kill outstanding citizens, and from then on he treated his people with unremitting brutality."

Crucifixion was a big deal.

3.125  "Once he had killed him - in a way which does not bear mentioning - Oroertes crucified the corpse."

Many fantasy writers get inspiration from the ancients.  

I see shades of the Lacedaemonians (Spartans, but since I finished this gargantuan book, I want to use the hoity-toity name) in Robert Jordan's Aiel and the Seanchan remind me of the Persians.

And a big hit in my house...

2.162  "When Apries found out what was going on, he sent as a herald to Amasis an eminent Egyptian who was loyal to him, whose name was Patarbemis, with instructions to escort Amasis back to him alive.  Patarbemis approached Amasis and issued the king's command, but Amasis, who happened to be on horseback at the time, lifted himself up in the saddle, farted, and told him to take that back to Apries."

* Here's a link to the translation I used.  All of the above quotes are from this version.