Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman - November 2009 - paperback - 528 pages - $20.99 from fishpond.com.au

The environment is a hot topic right now in more ways than one. As this post goes to air the world is trying to hammer out some sort of deal at 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the media is full of claims and counter claims about what is going on, who is to blame and what can be done about it.

Tripple Pulitzer winning NY Times journalist Thomas Friedman’s excellent and passionate “Hot Flat and Crowded” was a timely book back in the middle of 2008 when it was originally published, but has just been republished as version 2.0 – updated to take into account the efects the Global Financial Crisis has had on the recommendations he proposed in the first edition of the book.

The central theme of both editions is essentially that the way that the western capitalist society has evolved in such a way that it fails to properly account for it’s own costs – both in terms of the environment and in terms of the risks of  “innovative” financial instruments such as Credit Default Swaps and derivatives contracts.

Friedman’s book is incredibly well researched – the man must have racked up a phenominal carbon footprint flying round the world interviewing farmers, villagers, tycoons and politicians – but I think what sets it apart from much of the Doom and Gloom literature around at the moment is both the wealth of suggested alternative ways forward and in the detail with which he lays them out.

There is, he argues, no point ditching capitalism as any kind of “failed concept” because there is much in it that taps into strong motivational forces in society. But there are better ways in which those forces might be harnessed; better incentives by which true energy innovation can be encouraged.

Friedman’s solutions offer ways of working with what is best and good within the systems we have, capitalising on our strengths in such a way as to retain a competitive edge without costing the earth.

Here is the author Thomas Friedman talking to Philip Adams on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live from October 2008:

lnl_20081013_2218.mp3
(27 mins 40 secs – 12.6mb)

In the interview the author defends the postulation that no two nations who have McDonald’s franchises have ever been to war with each other, the hope offered by dawning Energy Technology revolution, on why “drill baby drill” should be “invent baby invent”, on how the US military may be leading green innovation, the inverse correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom and many other fascinating topics.

Also he looks like Cliff Clavin from Cheers – what’s not to like?

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - 2006 edition - paperback - 165 pages - $14.95 from fishpond.com.au

Despite the rather lofty title this book is genuinely readable, and not at all as impenetrable as one might imagine.

The book is divided into two parts: the first recounts the author’s altogether horrific experiences of being a Jew in several of the Second World War’s most notorious concentration camps.

The second part of the book deals with the way in which Dr Frankl’s experiences and observations of humanity at its most inhumane crystallized into some very interesting and profound insights into the human condition.

The first part is at times profoundly moving, and the second often challenging but the book is well worth the short time it would take to read.

The key observation pivots around the fact that even when we are striped of every last vestige of dignity, frozen, starving, abject and completely without hope of redemption or rescue, there will forever remain at one’s innermost core, something that cannot be taken away not interfered with.

This core, perhaps surprisingly, is the way in which we chose to respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

The author describes watching his fellow inmates and found that he could predict with a fair degree of accuracy who would make it through the night and who would not, based largely on that person’s attitude to their circumstance.

There is no immutable law that stipulates at which point we must give up hope, or for that matter that we must crumble in the face of our suffering, however great or endless it may seem to us at the time.

Frankl’s main tenet is that we can as humans essentially chose not to let any circumstance get the better of us. We each have the freedom to elect not to be miserable or insulted or dejected or jealous or indignant, if we so chose.

Of course he does not use this to suggest that if someone is down that we may blame him or her for somehow lacking mental fortitude, but rather that people can be helped to think more positively.

He goes on to extrapolate and show that many of the mental dysfunctions that have become so prevalent in modern times (depression, anxiety, boredom and so on) can be treated quite successfully by addressing not the causes of these conditions but rather the general motivations of the character in question.

In essence his theory states that the existential vacuum is caused more often than not by an absence of true purpose in one’s life.

Something to live for, or giving one’s life a sense of meaning, will see a man through seemingly interminable hells in the outside world as well as it will often keep him clear of depression or otherwise turning in upon himself in his own internal mentation.

This way of seeing things eventually culminated into a whole new branch of psychotherapy called Logotherapy, with which Viktor Frankl is credited as “inventing”.

To say that depression and anxiety can be cured by simply getting the patient to think about something else or to go volunteer at the local soup kitchen is a vast simplification but it is not a million miles from my understanding of Frankl’s process.

Viktor Frankl’s arguments are well made and the book is highly readable – as the 10 million sales since the book was first published shortly after WWII will attest.  Quite where Logotherapy would now sit in the light of more modern developments such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming I’m not entirely sure – not least because I can claim no expertise in either, but I know enough to recognise similarities between both.

Has the book had a profound effect on my own self-awareness? Perhaps a bit, yes. I will admit that I will often now second-guess some of my more negative inclinations, such as they are, and that is not without utility.

The book is short – stretching to barely 160 pages with the foreword and lengthy editorial summation at the end – fascinating, and again, well worth a read.

Here follows a rather sweetly dated interview with the venerable Viktor Frankl (who sadly died at the ripe old age of 92 in 1997) which appears to have been conducted by a local news anchor who to all intents and purposes looks a little out of her depth – bless her :-)

Possible Talking Point Arising from “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl:

1. Is it actually possible to choose to be happy or unaffected or positive about things in your life that severely test your patience or mood?
2. Would you have given Frankl’s theory as much credit had he not endured the horrors he did?
3. Could you recommend a course of Logotherapy to someone you knew to be a little dark of mood?

Jeff In Venice, Death In Veranase by Geoff Dyer - 2009 - paperback - 272 pages - $28.69 at fishpond.com.au

By his own admission, Geoff Dyer likes to play in the skinny inch between literature and reality, fiction and verity, to twist surprise and manipulate the expectations both of his audience and his genres, and one suspects his own self.

This much might be obvious from an author called Geoff who’s a writer writing a lead character called Jeff who’s also an author – it’s a bit obvious, but in very intriguing ways also not.

I guess this makes it clever.

“Jeff in Venice – Death in Varanasi” is the latest book from the author of “Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered” (2004), and “Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H.Lawrence” (2003), both of which generally deal with misadventure and frustration with projects that sort of fail on an epic existential scale.

The book is comprised of two very strongly contrasting but very closely interwoven novellas; the first dealing with the wild drug fuelled excesses of the Venice Bianale Arts Festival, the other with the deep privations and destitution of the Indian city of the Dead.

The echoes between the stories may at fist seem feint but, as the author himself points out in the Radio National interview below, they will become much clearer if you read the book one and a half times: read the 1st book, then the 2nd book and then re-read the first again.

The effect is both discombobulating and satisfying at the same time. It’s as if by plucking at two such discordant notes in just the right way the effect is a harmonious counter-point. Or something.

If you don’t believe me, here is the NYtimes review.

In this interview, the author reads sections from each of the books and talks with ABC Radio National’s The Book Show about “Jeff in Venice – Death in Varanasi”.

bsw_20090701_1005.mp3
(36 mins 12 secs – 16.7mb)

And for a further taste of the man in spoken form, here is an interview from 2003 on the Identity Theory website in which Geoff talks about being less conventionally categorisable, the trends of literary criticism and the way writers tend to write about other writers. He shares personal views on how he writes himself, his process and how he still struggles to identify what sort of a writer he actually is.

He’s an interesting thinker and is plainly a man at home with his words – he uses them well. He’s lazy and at best claims he is striving for the status of respectable drop out.

And here is our man addressing the enticingly titled “Shoreditch House Salon”, reading to what sounds like a room full of fairly young people who are desperate to laugh at anything [warning: this reading contains some fruity references]

geoff dyer at shoreditch house salon from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.

A debate is raging and raging hard in the Australian publishing industry. Yeah woteva you may scoff but as readers of books, or as people with pretensions of reading books, this does effect you.

Some time ago, the Australian Government asked the Australian Productivity Commission (APC) to have a look at whether or not the parallel import restrictions (PIRs hereafter) which were introduced in 1991 are still a good idea.

It has been argued quite elloquently by Henry Rosenbloom that these PIRs have allowed a comparative renaissance in the Australian literary scene at a time when global trends were at best stagnant.

My understanding of the PIRs is that basically it has meant that Australian publishers got a level of trade protection to print what they wanted rather than having overseas interests decide which of their books we wanted and when we were going to get them.

The two sides in this argument seem to be the book industry itself, comprised of authors (Tim Winton in his acceptance of this years’ Miles Franklin prize for Breath put the boot into the proposal), editors, publishers, printers, independent book shops etc. in the one corner and the APC, former NSW Premier and noted literary mind Bob Carr and the Dymocks book store chain on whose board he sits.

To get you up to speed on this issue we turn to Radio National.

Late Night Live on June 29th 2009 aired this heated discussion between a redoubtable Bob Carr (who published his pro-free-market opinions in The Australian) and Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Publishing :

lnl_20090629_2218.mp3
(mp3 – 11mb – 24 minutes)

Then last week on 15th July as the announcement from the final report from the Australian Productivity Commission came down in favour of scrapping the PIRs, Fran Kelly talks to Mike Woods deputy chairman of the APC, who explained again about how Australians were not buying books because they were too expensive, and how the PIRs have resulted in an industry that is prone to inefficiency.

bst_20090715_0649.mp3
(mp3 – 4.1mb – 8 minutes 53 secs)

Interestingly, Mr Woods does admit that Australian authors do tend to get significantly reduced royalties from books sold here printed by international publishers, some 6% rather than the 10% offered by local publishing houses. Hardly an incentive. Woods also advocates subsidy or grant schemes as a way of supporting local authors in a more accountable way.

At around the same time, Henry Rosenbloom published an angry but empassioned blog post in which he argued that nothing less than Australia’s cultural integrity was at stake and that:

…referring this subject to the Productivity Commission is like asking duck-hunters what they’d like to shoot.

and that even in the very best case scenario:

…some of the time, in some circumstances, some booksellers might be able to import cheaper books.

Later that day, Mr Woods got another chance to air his views on the Book Show. Here he responds to the suggestion that it would be easier to do away with GST on books which may level the field significantly.

bsw_20090715_1005.mp3
(mp3 – 4.6mb – 10 minutes 8 seconds)

The next morning, the 16th July, Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast also spoke to Louise Adler, still desperate to get her point out in the absence of Mr Carr.

bst_20090716_0748.mp3
(mp3 – 3mb – 6 minutes 22 seconds)

So the decision now rests in the hands of the Australian federal government, and while they ruminate on the pro’s and cons of arguably destroying the local literary industry, I thought I’d canvas your opinions on the subject.

If at the bottom of this ugly heap is getting more Australians to read books, is a price reduction of a few bucks really going to make a big difference?

Would any of you read more books if they were cheaper?

Would you really read more if books were a couple of bucks cheaper? Would it be pertinent to observe the the cheaper makets in the US and UK may be cheaper because they have larger populations of book buyers to work with?

The Second Book Of The Tao by Stephen Mitchell - 2009 - hardcover - 207 pages - $34.98 from fishpond.com.au

In a nutshell, Stephen Mitchell’s “Second Book Of The Tao” is a book about reading his first book  Tao Te Ching (literally: “The Book Of The Way”) to his wife & fellow author Byron Katie.

The outcome is what Stephen himself describes as “the most profound book on spirituality that exists” and “not only a commentary on the Tao Te Ching, but a portrait of the mind completely at ease with itself and the world.”

The mild-mannered Mr Mitchell is entitled to big-note himself: he is a poet, scholar, author and translator who has brought into English writings from as many as 12 diverse languages including Akkadian and ancient Babylonian – which of course I’ve been meaning to get round to myself, but, you know… :-)

To borrow if I may from the official blurb:

Mitchell has composed this innovative new book drawn from the work of Lao-tzu’s disciple Chuang-tzu and Confucius’s grandson Tzu-ssu.

He has selected the freshest, clearest teachings from these two great students of the Tao and adapted them into versions that reveal the poetry, depth, and humor of the original texts with a thrilling new power.

And on top of all that he’s also quite funny, in a subtle understated.

Each of the 64 short chapters offers an enlightened translation followed by an elucidation, a deeper examination or even in some cases, an explanation.

This is the talk he gave to The Tattered Cover book shop via the Authors On Tour Live podcast:

MitchellPodcast.mp3
(35mins 55secs – 16.4MB)

And here is a little video from Stephen Mitchell’s YouTube channel in which he discusses how he actually came to write “The Second Book Of The Tao” (4mins 15secs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lastly, for those who may be a little confused, here is an helpful online (and therefore not to be fully trusted) chat about the differences and correlations between Zen, Tao and Buddhism.

Other Books by Stephen Mitchell:

Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell - 2006

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mentel - 2009 - paperback - 672 pages - $28.58 from fishpond.com.au

Set amidst the turmoil of Henry VIII’s struggle against The Vatican, and Thomas More’s equally epic struggle against Thomas Cromwell  Hilary Mantel’s lastest work of historical fiction Wolf Hall sets out to make us rethink our assumptions about the story’s key figures.

So many of our thoughts of this turbulent time in British history is tied up with the 1966 Oscar winning film “A Man For All Seasons“, it is hard not to see Cromwell in our minds as nasty, mean and universally cruel. But in “Wolf Hall” we encounter a Cromwell who is complex, compelling and surprisingly likable.

Hilary Mantel argues that while Robert Bolt’s play and the film that preceded it were both beautiful drama, they were not great history, and in Wolf Hall she sets about redressing some of the balance by conjuring believable dialogue and circumstance out of plausible historical likelihood and fact.

A Man For All Seasons

The result is a book that  has gripped the attention of all who have read it, and earned great praise for the subtle authenticity with which the author goes about depicting a world quite removed from our own.

It was a time when The King of England was turning his back on the Catholic Church, and in turn on many of it’s european allies, seemingly driven to do so out of a desire to remarry for both an heir and (perhaps) for love of a comparatively low-born Anne Boleyn. Into such a world was born the Church of England and this book sheds timely light on Cromwell’s role as Midwife to this process.

To borrow a lofty phrase from amazon.co.uk, it was

“a time when the very idea of social progress, and of a better world, was fresh, alien and threatening. It was a time of men who weren’t like us, but who were creating us”

There are as many interesting factoids about the time and the characters as there interesting additional facets to great figures in history, who elsewhere often suffer from fairy tale bi-dimensionality.

You can listen to the full interview with author Hilary Mentel, here speaking with Peter Mares for ABC Radio National’s The Book Show:

bsw_20090618_1005.mp3
(mp3, 38mins 12secs,  17.5MB)

In this interview Hilary Mantel discusses the difficulties inherent with writing historical fiction, especially set against the common cliche of the Tudor period as one of frilly romance and noble gentility. The world of Wolf Hall is bloody, cruel and violent – far closer, the author argues, to what it would actually have been like.

She also explains her use of language in the book, not wishing to contemporize  it beyond authenticity and yet not rendering it so archaic as to alienate the reader. Part of her solution is to keep the rhythms of the way people of the time spoke and wrote, within an accessible lexicon.

The reviews I’ve read seem to imply that it works.

I appreciate that the length of this book will daunt many of our number, but I do think it will reward those interested in the Tudor era, or in the private personal motivations behind political processes with enormous global consequences.

Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman - Hardcover - 2009 - 107 pages - $29.98 from fishpond.com.au

Returning to the themes of Mary Roach’s Stiff for a moment, I thought it might be prudent to examine the possible options for your less physical remains.

Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman takes forty possible scenarios of what might happen to you or your soul, your intellect, your essence or whatever and turns each into a vignette of delicate exploration.

On their own one suspects they may resemble slightly half-baked or underdeveloped ideas, but the strength of this little book is in the actual exercise of exploring the variety of postulations.

The book is more of an invitation to stop for a moment and think about your assumptions, or your own feelings about what might or might not await any part of you that may continue experience sentience after your body ceases to function.

If you don’t have assumptions or guesses or a faith to inform or direct your feelings about the afterlife, this may be the perfect book for as through its forty little lenses you are sure to glimpse at least one idea that tickles your fancy.

You may well not agree with any of the possibilities explored in David Eagleman’s book, but that doesn’t really matter. In this kind of metaphysical realm it can be just as advantageous to figure out what you don’t believe as what you do – to define where some of your boundaries are, even if you are not fully sure what it is you are building that boundary around.

David Eagleman is a very bright guy. He is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law – which I’m sure makes him a pretty sharp tack.

David Eagleman - a bright guy

One ancilliary point of interest about the title story SUM which essentially lists how long the average person will spend doing essentially mundane tasks over the course of the average life-time.

7 hours vomiting? Now I may have been an especially gastric infant but I’ve hardly ever hurled bile as an adult and am now left wondering if I’ve some serious ground to make up – and am not looking forward to it.

And only 14 minutes experiencing pure joy? Does this still apply to the e-generation? Similarly if I feel I’ve lead a particularly joyful live thus far, does this mean either that nothing but stoic grimness to look forward to, or am I instead eating into the allocation of some other poor unknown malcontent?

So is this book more than literary collection of Twilight Zone plot lines? Not in the least.

The real point of Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, however, is more about science and the tyranny of western empiricism. Science has not explained the world, only little bits of it. The book is in some way a celebration of the unknown and of the boundlessness of possibility itself. Eagleman’s skill is in his extrapolation – each story fits neatly inside its own unique and interesting internal logic.

Indeed David Eagleman himself has proposed that rather than “agnostic”, he prefers the idea of “Possibilians” to try to encompass and acknowledge the vastness of what is still “out there”. I could be persuaded.

Here are a couple of interviews with the bloke on the subject of “Sum: Tales from the Afterlives”. In the first he discusses the book and its ideas with Philip Adams and Brian Eno on the event of the latter’s Luminous events in Sydney (26 mins):

tales-from-the-afterlives-lnl.mp3

The second is from a talk he gave for the Authors On Tour Live podcast at the venerable Tattered Cover book store in Denver Colorado in which David Eagleman reads from many of stories in the book and takes a couple of questions from the floor (42 mins):

David-Eagleman-Sum-aot.mp3

If you’d rather read someone else’s opinion, here is the New York Times book review of Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlives by David Eagleman.

Manhood by Steve Biddulph - 2004 - paperback - 293 pages - $26.31 from fishpond.com.au

It has never really been socially acceptable for men to talk about what it’s like to be a man, much less to discuss what might make a good one.

Steve Biddulph is a UK born Tasmanian resident and a family psychologist, perhaps better known for his books,  talks and seminars on parenting and the education of boys, but in Manhood – An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives he takes a close look at what is wrong with the way men relate to themselves, each other, their families and the broader world today.

Biddulph takes as his starting point the assertion that something has been going slowly wrong with manhood since the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years back, and we are only now really starting to hit braking point.

He says every man he has ever met knows another man who has taken his own life, or is in jail, or who hates his marriage, or is hated by his kids.

He uses the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement as proof that people are capable of looking at its lot, saying “this isn’t good enough” and then actually doing something about it.

Men’s Liberation – From Themselves

While women were seeking to liberate themselves from oppressive stereotyping and inequality, Biddulph argues that men too now need to liberate themselves from similarly dangerous and restrictive stereotypes which they often apply to themselves.

The main problem is that no one shows you how to be a man these days. The rise of Industry took dads out of our homes and put kids in schools,  away from uncles & granddads – the result is that many male kids grow up with little or no contact with, or access to, friendly caring older men. You are given no instruction on how to become a man beyond that which is shown on TV – little boys grow up to be bigger little boys, rather than men.

Left alone, a seedling will grow into a tree and a tadpole will turn into a frog. But a human child does not turn into a functioning adult without lots of help. To learn the gender you are, you probably need thousands of hours of interaction with older, more mentally equipped members of your own gender.

Biddulph proposes this goes some way to explaining the fact that:

• men have shorter life expectancy than women – on average 6 years
• men routinely fail at close relationships
• 90% of violent crime will be carried out by men, who will also comprise 70% of its victims
• 90% of kids with behaviour problems in school are boys, as are 80% of kids with learning difficulties
• 1-in-7 boys will experience sexual assault by the age of 18
• In 2000, suicide accounted for 1 in every 36 male deaths.

It’s certainly an interesting idea and one that I found compelling.

There are of course solutions. Most of them involve talking to other blokes, learning what they’ve learned, talking about what you’ve been through, your mistakes, your triumphs, your fears & failures and so on.

There are apparently 7 steps to becoming a man and they are:

1. Fixing it with your dad
   “you cannot get on with your own life successfully until you have understood your dad, forgiven him, and come in some way, to respect him.”
2. Getting ok with sex
   Sex can be either sleazy and obsessive, which is bad, or sacred and powerful, which is good. Make sure the sex you have is the latter.
3. Meeting your partner on equal terms
   “Anyone can get a partner – the trick is keeping them”. How to tread that delicate line between Softy and Bully with the woman you love.
4. Engaging actively with your kids
   Learn what you are really teaching your kids, what your sons need to know and what you mean to your daughters
5. Learning to have real male friends
   Learning to accept help from other blokes in all areas of your life, both to pick you up and to keep you level.
6. Finding your heart in your work
   It isn’t enough just to make a living – what you do should mean something to you. If it doesn’t, change.
7. Freeing your wild spirit
   The importance of nature, the wilderness, bobbing about in the sea and all that good stuff.

Iron John by Robert Bly

Quite a lot of this book is made up of quotes from Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly, and at times I wondered how much of what I was reading was Steve Biddulph and how much spun Bly. It often seemed that barely a page went by without some quote or other from the multi-award winning poet but I take his point, I’m a grown up and I got over it.

Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly switched-on, tuned-in kind of a bloke – I can talk to women, I am starting to get on with my dad after a fairly staggering hiatus, I know my footy, and I’m as much an outdoorsman as the next member of Sydney’s second oldest bushwalking club – so what did the book do for me? Am I now a whole new New Man?

The simple answer is: not yet.

It may be part of my existing “mask” but I think I’m actually doing OK. Sure there are areas I could improve, I’m not so conceited as to think I’m perfect. The book has certainly made me more aware of my responsibilities towards other guys both older and younger, of the importance of honest communication in all directions. I will try to remember to pick the book out again once I have kids, or perhaps the next time I go see my dad. But neither can I honestly say that I found myself saying things like “OMFG I never realised that before”.

That is not to say the points and ideas are not well put or important, because they are. He manages for the most part to write with honest integrity without veering too far into whacky-hippy-dippy territory. His main audience is still blokes after all.

The biggest issue I see with this kind of book is getting the target audience to pick it up and read it. Sure a lot of guys are profoundly unhappy, and very much aware of the gaping holes deep inside them, but actually doing anything about it is still a big step for many guys. Getting blokes to read self-help books is not an easy task, and relying on women, partners or kids to gift the book is still no guarantee that the old fella will actually read it.

Not that that is any kind of reason not to try.

Reading this book will be an important moment in the lives of many men, and of course the lives of those around them. The ideas in “Manhood” are certainly worth a read, even if like Stefan in his review from DIYfather.com you don’t get all of them.

It is also worth noting that the book isn’t intended only to be read by men – it is by no means secret men’s business. Women, girlfriends, wives, mothers, aunties, nieces and daughters will also learn a great deal about those often silent grumpy man-lumps that slump around the house.

To get some idea about the man and his ideas, here is a short demonstration video from gentle-voiced Steve Biddulph himself, taken we presume at a recent Raising Boys seminar.

In the first part he describes his unease at how easily old guys seem to converse with young kids, and the positive co-dependence between men and boys (4min 51sec):

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the second part he imagines how life can force a man apart from his kids (2min 08sec):

Click here to view the embedded video.

And in the 3rd part he shares an extract from “Manhood” about how little boys can learn to control themselves and their bodies from the simple act of wrestling with dad (4min 09sec):

Click here to view the embedded video.

So why would I recommend it for reading in a men’s book club? Well for a start it is under 300 pages long, it is a quick read. Nice.

Secondly, everyone should at least have a personally informed opinion on the book, whether it re-awakens the primal man-spirit laying dormant at your very core, or you just discard it as a load of old sloblock.

Thirdly it may have a radically positive or profound effect on everyone and we’ll ditch the book entirely and form a men’s group instead.

Or not.

Home by Marilynne Robinson - hardcover - 325 pages - $32.97 at fishpond.com.au

Marilynne Robinson’s Home has just been awarded the Orange Prize for Literature.

It is however well worth having a squiz at the announcement over at the Guardian Books website as the response to the news raises some interesting questions about whether the awarding of special prizes for women writers adds much needed focus and attention or instead just patronizes and marginalizes their efforts.

Semi-Literati suspects the intention behind the bestowal of such trophies has much more to do with marketing and selling of books than with political or social engineering per-se, and you cannot argue that £30,000 would hinder the writerly urge, either in the auther herself or the many aspirant young female wordsmiths struggling for inspiration or the will to persevere.

Of course the debate itself adds profile to the sponsor and to the award itself, but also to the book in question, the author, literature and literacy itself, so it may in that light be seen as curmudgeonly to criticise. Need we consider the world without the Orange Prize for literature? Does it just mean there’s less money going round to support female writers?

Yes all writers should be celebrated on their own merits, regardless of gender, class or ethnicity, and being an art form it’s hard to do otherwise, but does it really do so much harm to be labelled as a female writer? Should one rail against The System upon receipt of an award for Science Fiction writing if one regards one’s work as better suited to another genre: Futurism perhaps?

If some parts of the world want to celebrate you for One Aspect of who you are, does it mean that all your other aspects are substandard? We’d like to think not:

Wow, I just love your shoes!

You bastard – that means you hate my hat, doesn’t it?

Commercial intent and public perception are frequently at odds, but where there is genuine advantage and encouragement to be taken from leaving one’s cynicism behind, we say bring it on.

Congratulations to Marilynne Robinson – we haven’t read the book yet but we’re very much looking forward to doing so :-)

Check out the debate for yourselves and let us know what you think.

If you’d like to know more about Home and about Marilynne Robinson as an author you can listen here to an interview with the velvet-voiced Valerie Jackson on WABE Public Radio conducted on March 19th 2009 (29 mins).

home-marilynne-robinson-WABE.mp3

The discussion covers Marilynne’s use of the notion of the Prodigal Son, her understanding of forgiveness and grace and some interesting insights into the characters in the book. Given that the book is not a suspense thriller there’s not too much danger of spoilers in the interview.

Update: Monday 15th June 2009

Another pertinent interview has recently come to our attention from The Guardian Books Podcast in which Claire Armistead selects Home as her book of the week and interviews Marilynne Robinson.

The discussion is a little shorter and sharper than the WABE one above but keeps very much to the point. They discuss why the book has been described as:

the saddest book I have ever read

The interview again covers the relationship between Home and it’s companion book Gilead, touches on the centrality of religious scriptural debate in the book as manifested in questions of causality and the unfolding of time and the seeming conflict and unities between religion and scientific thought. It’s an engaging interview and we strongly recommend it (16mins)

Marilynne-Robinson-on-Home-on-Guardian-Books.mp3

On Sight And Insight by John M Hull - 1997 - paperback - 252 pages

I’m sure you’ve wondered what it must be like to be blind – you may even have even spent a few minutes trying to get around with your eyes closed, or you may have team-built with a blindfold on. It is not the same.

John M Hull was born fully sighted but started to loose sight in his left eye as a young teenager and gradually slunk into complete Deep Blindness in 1983 at the age of 48 due to  cataracts.

In his second book on the subject of his blindness “On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness” author John Hull revisits a series of his own audio tape diaries kept between 1983 and 1991. The book examines not only his own experiences, but also examines the blind person in history as a character of wonder and pity, as a Seer, and one who is quite able to compensate with other senses.

In this intriguing interview with Philip Adams on Late Night Live from 1997, John Hull talks about what he means by Deep Blindness, how it’s different from being a sighted person who can’t see. By way of example he suggests that we try to think of a known or loved person in our lives without summoning their faces in our minds. Such reference points gradually faded from John Hull’s mind and even eventually from his dreams.

So what happens when you can’t remember what your own face looks like? How do would you cope? How do you face the fact that what memories you do have of the faces of your children, perhaps from photographs, are now completely out of date? How do you handle the claustrophobia of so much less detectable world than you used to have?

John Hall has been widely applauded for the remarkable candour of the self-analysis within “On Site and Insight”. He discloses for example how, robbed of standard visual stimulus which grants so much access to the intermediate world, his appetites for both food and sex dwindled significantly.

The interview describes the condition of blindness as “an awful boring nuisance” and given John Hall’s current occupation as Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham, it is no surprise that biblical and other mythological references to blindness are also touched upon.

Interestingly, although most descriptions of the book will talk of it as a book about blindness, those who have been blind from birth have insisted that it is in fact a book about sight.

By his own account, John M Hull’s book is an heroic story of overcoming great adversity to achieve great things, but rather a detailed emotional account of what it’s like to go blind. Two of the more touching quotes from the interview:

in the dark when you’re lying in bed holding the person you love, it doesn’t matter that you’re blind.

And from John’s wife:

The problem my darling is not that you are blind, but that I have become invisible.

You can listen to the full interview here (54 mins):

lnl_20090424.mp3

Or download the full interview with John M Hull to enjoy at your leisure (25mb).