eye of the storm

hey my josiah warren book just got accepted by fordham u press.

this summer, after finishing political aestheics (now in production at cornell!) i was going to write a quasi-analytic book on truth or perhaps a whole anti-system of philosophy, though i and others are hoping i die before i can do that. instead i seem to be soaking in american transcendentalism/19th c. reform movements. i'm reading the correspondence and journals of thoreau, for example, and i'm going to perhaps someday produce a book on the politics either of thoreau or of a group that would include thoreau, emerson, alcott, garrison, ripley, fuller, etc.: the only historical segment of political philosophy with which i would unequivocally identify.

one delightful discovery: odell shepard's 1937 biography of bronson alcott: pedlar's progress. in my enthusiasm, i want to say it's more or less the best biography i have read. it rests on prodigious - indeed heroic - research, as alcott was one of the most copious letter and journal-writers of the nineteenth century, and everyone he ever met also wrote about him. and yet it is not like the contemporary scholarly biography, even the excellent examples of which (such as robert richardson on emerson, thoreau, and william james) are sahara-sand accumulations of detail. shepard ignores any detail that doesn't tell. he writes with great verve, humor, and pointedness. he does not inflate his subject into a world-bestriding collossus, but sees him clearly and assesses him fairly.

to boot, it includes (pp. 253ff. of the greenwood press edition of 1968), the very best and crispest general characterization of the historical location and central ideas of the american transcendentalists.

shepard finds a perfect subject in alcott. emerson - an extremely close friend - called alcott "very tedious and prosing and egotistical and narrow" and said, rather astonishingly, "I do not want any more such persons to exist." and then: "the most remarkable man and the highest genius of his time." only rwe can do that.

alcott was right about education, and asserted and practiced the still-(or rather morethanever-)radical notion that children are human beings and that schools should not be totalitarian environments. (one of the many things that the american left and right agree about - possibly because they are in principle opposed to independent thought - is that a school is by definition an absolutist environment, and that the only question is what we are going to force these slaves to do. they agree on that question too.) among others, he educated his daughter louisa may.

been reading an obscure volume of thoreau's correspondence: familiar letters, a gift from the inimitable joan brown. there's plenty to enjoy. one passage i thought was interesting was the following, about an advertisement for firewood, which thoreau came across while he was living on staten island in 1843. the letter is to emerson:

But I am suspicious of the Brittonner, who advertises so many cords of good oak, chestnut, and maple wood for sale. Good! ay good for what? And there shall not be left a stone upon a stone. But no matter, - let them hack away. The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins, and pigs and children reveling in the Concord dirt; and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.

obviously, thoreau is a famous nature boy and environmental hero. but what i think we're still trying to catch up with is the idea that human beings are as natural as trees. thoreau's appreciation of nature extended to irishmen. indeed the idea is profound among other things in looking at the arms of an irishmen, and their children and pigs, as transformations of trees. now no doubt thoreau would have mourned the destriction of walden woods. but he also would have seen it as a continuation of the process of walden woods. we cannot destroy nature, are not destroying it. we are it. even the destruction of ourselves would be the destruction of it, by it, a continuing transformation and preservation of its energy.

here's the final critical evaluation of ayelet waldman's book in the washpost, by annys shinn:

After reading these stories, plenty of parents will fault Waldman for something or other. Plenty more will be able to relate.

seriously, those non-sentences are the tag of a "book" "review." it is, i suppose, an assessment of the book's literary quality, its intellectual ballast, its prose style, its depth and precision etc. it's great to "relate." i'm glad you feel better. now pretend you can read.

susan cheever on ayelet waldman:

Waldman’s wit and honesty seems directed at making mothers feel better about being, well, mothers. “I feel like a bad mother,” she admits, “even when by all reasonable analysis I’m a perfectly fine mother.” As she writes with typical deadpan humor: “A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make playdates, her children’s clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex.” But Waldman’s book is actually a tragedy wrapped in a comedy.

i might point out that cheever's standards for both wit and honesty seem a trifle...low. i'd say that, in oprah-world, even extremely obvious repetitions of what women have been saying for half a century pass for courageous self-examination, brutal honesty, and uproarious hilarity. it's all about making mothers feel better about being mothers, or any woman feel better about being whatever it is she might be: it's all part of the self-esteem industry, an atmosphere that comports poorly with rigorous self-reflection. i'd say also that it's easy to say of a memoir that it's courageously honest, but it's impossible to assess this from the text itself. 

ayelet waldman's fame seems to derive from her declaration to the nytimes that she loves her husband (the novelist michael chabon) more than her children: the reaction to this is the struggle through which waldman has had to fight, like a refugee woman in the darfur region, clawing her way through a sandstorm with her starving family as the janjaweed sets up a crossfire. both the declaration and the outrage are, if you ask me, just puzzling: like, who, really, ever felt like this was a dilemma or a choice you face? and, you know, ok if you feel that way, i guess, whatever. it's really not my business, but rather a task for your family and therapist. maybe it's really fucked up, but maybe it's ok. like: are you basically nice to your children?

at any rate, the woman's memoir of self-esteem is a rather complicated genre. first, the woman must be fucked up: fat, addicted (cf susan cheever), idiotic enough to marry john edwards, sterile, indiscriminately promiscuous, bipolar, a bad mommy, bulimic, or perhaps all at once. and she must find redemption in the form of self-esteem: she overcomes her terrible problems at the moment she comes to face and accept them or learns to love herself. one cannot dismiss this as an unimportant or completely disingenuous exercise, though it is formulaic, and the redemption seems exaggerated, as the next memoir by the same author is liable to show clearly. but the effect on other women depends first of all on very vivid degradation: the reader is meant to feel that she's not as fucked-up as the author, and so not alone or without hope. the memoir depends - like the spiritual autobiography (augustine or malcolm x) - on the vividness of the degradation, the clarity of the redemption, and the strength of the identification. the way you overcome your apparent degradation is to realize that you were never degraded at all (which is definitely not the approach of augustine or malcolm): that you can fix anything by believing of yourself that you are a good and valuable person. i think that there is something to that, but also that in many situations it is potentially just delusional and actually not an enduring solution to a real problem. on the other hand, there are some problems which might yield to positive thinking.

indeed, the contrast of the self-esteem memoir to the conversion narrative is instructive. for augustine or malcolm, the sin - though it is not portrayed as being without its attractions, of course - is real. they really did things that they really, on reflection, believe to be wrong, and that show that they were actually bad people, because they were the people who did those things. the self-loathing is conceived to be necessary. they believe of themselves that they are persons capable of actual evil, because they are persons who have actually done evil. this requires of them a radical transformation, which in turn requires the intervention of a god or a miracle. the efficacy of this miracle depends on holding fast to their sense that they were, truly, and are still always potentially depraved. it is a real moral drama within the self. the self-esteem narrative is comparatively superficial: here's my confession. but i was always a good person. and when i saw that i realized i didn't have to keep (snorting coke/fucking everyone/eating ice cream). or: i finally saw that i have a disease, and i was redeemed by medication. the bad things are unreal, unconnected to the self, and to say that the redemption is superficial is an understatement.

the courageous honesty of these memoirs - and that is the blurbological form prescribed for their assessment (cheever's review of waldman deploys it like twenty times) - is measured by the depiction of degradation. but putting it mildly, though that kind of self-portrait is difficult to write, it is not the only dimension of honesty, and the form presents various temptations to disingenuousness. indeed, because the formula prescribes redemption through self-acceptance, a real withering self-scrutiny that involves clear personal responsibility is kind of prohibited: the moral problems have to melt in the sun of mere self-acceptance. the defects in one's character have to be both extremely vivid and, finally, unreal. "i feel like a bad mother when i'm really a fine mother": that's not exactly as deep as self-reflection might go, is it? and to identify it as wit is just some kind of confusion: a good argument for not reading susan cheever's books, which are courageously honest examinations of her alcoholism, weight problems, sex addiction, and so on.

it's worth asking, as many a feminist or oprah post-feminist has asked, why girls come out of girlhood thinking so negatively about themselves. i don't want my daughters' personalities to be cesspools of self-loathing. but it's also worth asking why, for the grown girls themselves, this is almost the only model of what could ever go wrong, the key to every problem, the total environment. this sort of understanding kind of constructs the female self as an infinite trap, facing mirrors with infinite embedded reflections. there's a woman's magazine called self; why is there none called other? it could even be...about something.

i guess what i wonder is whether all these writers and readers' experience really does comport with the formula, or whether it's usually forced into it. i wonder whether there could be less formulaic arcs that would be truer to people's real experience. i wonder if there is a way of reading or a dimension of being moved - especially for female readers - that is more than just "I relate!" and "i feel better about myself!" or in other words i might just say that it is a problematic but legitimate form, but that there's too much of it, and that even women could possibly think as well as feel, or assess literary quality or honesty on bases other than effect on their own self-image. i wonder whether even an american girl, growing up in the suburbs, might actually more or less freely decide to do something wrong. not because she was suffering from an illness or because she had low self-esteem, but because her real, actual personality was one that was capable of making such a decision. then i wonder whether she might use her responsibility for such a thing as an occasion for real self-scrutiny and the basis for a self-tranformation that wasn't just some kind of chanting of affirmations.

i wonder, in other words, whether there could be a woman who grew up in connecticut, whose dad was a lawyer, who turned out to be a pillpopping anorexic ho or whatever, and who actually worked to engage in self-criticism and to work toward self-esteem by working to deserve the self-esteem she lacked, rather than by seeing that she never actually did anything wrong, that it wasn't her really, because her real self is good and beautiful whatever she might actually do.

one might point out, on the other side of the coin, that though this sort of memoir fetches up in self-esteem, it markets degradation: there is an exhibitionist streak: i'm *so* bad, which is ok, because i'll stop at the end. you want to read about how carolyn knapp overcame her terrible drinking problem. but you also want to read about the crazy shit she did when she was drunk. susan cheever's desire: where sex meets addiction might be about how she came to realize that she is a precious person, but it's going to get you there through wallowing in random, wild sex, which is going to be the heart of the "i relate!" response or: geez, if she's a valuable person and did all that, i must not be as bad as i thought i was. plus i just got to read some pretty cool porn; that is, the degradation is overcome, but it is romanticized. sin is fun or at least...stimulating, but then it might suck, but then redemption is a matter merely of affirming your own goodness.

the theme of exhibitionism is sticky, because one thing you might notice about, say cosmo or whatever, is that self-esteem and exhibitionism are related, so that if you can get yourself looking really good by dieting or whatever it may be, then you can feel "sexy," which is a central element of woman's self-esteem under this sort of representation of women's subjectivity, and that in turn will allow you to flaunt what you've got etc. and of course the mere fact that you are retelling your sexual badness can be a treatment for your self-esteem problem in a variety of ways, even though it is also supposed to be...a symptom of your self-esteem problem etc. oy. sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

self or oprah mag is caught in a similar deal: it's telling you that you are good enough just the way you are, and it's marketing products to you that will make you more attractive and happy. we might point out that the american economy (including the publishing industry) rests on both wallowing in or manufacturing self-loathing or moral degradation and marketing self-esteem redemption.

the solution has to be superficial or temporary, because the next product has to be sold, the next memoir written, the next show put on the air, the next plastic surgery performed, etc. in a worst-case scenario, susan cheever's continued success might depend on a relapse, or a whole new addiction. for such reasons, and even though you're going to feel better for ten minutes, i don't think that you're going to find a long-term cure for your self-esteem issue in oprah or susan cheever.

watcha readin, crispy?
been tackling william james. but also for recreation neal stephenson's baroque cycle. just finished the first massive volume: quicksilver. it is remarkable on many levels. it is, among other things, the adventure of the invention of modern science, and people such as hooke, huygens, newton, and leibniz are actually plausible characters, the last being particularly delightful and thoroughly explored. the treatment of intellectual themes is amazing in its depth and accuracy, while still being actually part of a novel, with narrative momentum. indeed the evocation of the era - in politics, religion, economics, etc - is astonishingly vivid, the product of more than research: stephenson must have just soaked in this atmosphere (1660-1710, say) until he was a sort of native. the characters are recognizably of their time and recognizably of ours, so you are drawn into intimate historical connection. and the writing just sparkles: by turn hilarious and profound.

it's a moment when the modern scientific consciousness is emerging from religious and alchemical models, and newton himself regards his physics as a religious text, and is as or more interested in wild alchemical speculations/experiments than in his own astonishing achievements in straight geometry or what we would consider to be empirical science. that is right, and has the effect of complicating our sense of what science currently is as well as of what it once was. in some ways a or even the central character is the royal society: a rich wild world in which things we would think of as insane or perverse are juxtaposed with fundamental scientific advancements, and in which nobody can be perfectly clear on the difference.

one amazing idea: parts of quicksilver are written in the literary forms of the era: picaresque novel , epistolary novel, restoration comedy , and scientific treatise, for example. that is a brilliant conceit, and becomes quite the hall of mirrors, as characters seem to be perfectly aware, for example, that they are living in a picaresque, or as characters in stephenson's picaresque novel become the subjects of picaresque novels being devoured by other characters. perhaps people have done this before, but it adds tremendously to the sensation that you're entering into a whole world of culture and knowledge.

been reading the courtier and the heretic: leibniz, spinoza, and the fate of god in the modern world, by matthew stewart. now actually i think popularized or kind of novelistic presentations of intellectual history are in order: i might try my hand at such a thing, if i haven't already. also leibniz and spinoza are extremely interesting as characters as well as thinkers, and it's a good yarn. stewart has his moments as a writer, as in the very first sentence: "It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair."

on the other hand, the conventions of this genre and stewart's application of them are quite ridiculous and irritating. to jack up the significance or motivate people to read, he just gushes. "It is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought." wait. really? let's start with bacon, descartes, hobbes, locke, newton. leibniz and spinoza are important, also extremely idiosyncratic or in certain respects downright bizarre, and i think any of the thinkers i just mentioned has a much better claim on the titles stewart gives l and s. the latter were influential, also in important senses dead ends. they don't, in order to be worth writing about, have to turn out to be the two greatest thinkers ever. and what can it mean to say that they remain unsurpassed? that leibniz is more important or influential than hume or kant, or that he wasn't drilled a new one by voltaire? or that frege wasn't the better logician?

or how about this: "Not since the days when Socrates stalked the agora in order to alert his fellows that the unexamined life is not worth living...had the world seen a philosopher so dedicated to his quest as Spinoza." bitch please.

i'm teaching the debate over the ratification of the constitution right now. a few observations. the federalist papers, by madison and hamilton, are probably the greatest bits of advocacy journalism ever printed: it's unimaginable that these were, like, newspaper op-ed pieces. the writing is beautifully clear but also subtle, the arguments extremely convincing. it is to be regretted that the anti-federalists had no one comparable. reading the speeches of patrick henry, or luther martin etc is reading disorganized blowhards, though there were important points. regrettable too is that the objections were not more fundamental, and that they were above all concerned with preservation of state sovereignty, partly for various nefarious purposes such as preservation of the slave trade and dominance of westward expansion/speculation. henry gets up in front of the virginia legislature and declares that the thing should begin "we the states" instead of "we the people." this was an amazing opportunity to make a world, as it were, and had there been intellects and pens of the caliber of madison and hamilton on the other side, it might have had a better, a freer, outcome (though the antis must be credited with the bill of rights, and deserve much gratitude for that).

probably the best anti-federalist material is from "centinel" (samuel bryan of pennsylvania) and, especially, "brutus" (robert yates? of new york). the library of america two-volume set the debate on the constitution is quite something.

the volume i'm actually teaching has an extremely solid intro, excellent selection from the federalist. i feel the anti-fed selection could be sharper. much more doable than the sprawling volumes above.

this is rather unseemly, but if any of y'all liked against the state, you might stick up a review on amazon. it's a rather depressing little pair right now.

as i'm a 50-year-old man in the process of moving thousands of books and large bookcases from my former place of residence into a house that will hardly - or rather, just won't - hold them all, i can't help thinking that there's something to be said for replacing them with a little device. course i would mourn various aspects of the book, having spent my whole life in an environment built out of them. but, you know, what the hell.

reading a bunch of hannah arendt: between past and future and life of the mind. one of those things i've always meant to do, i suppose. she's admirable, and i guess if a fifty-year-old dude can still be gathering models, she's one. her depth of scholarship is immense, and she shares a number of orientations with her mentor/lover heidegger, including a good soaking in greek philosophy and german idealism. but unlike heidegger, she was not a mystic, not an obscurantist, and not a fascist. (i do not, i should say, dismiss or merely deride heidegger: there's no doubt about the depth and innovation, at many moments in many ways). her politics is admirable or at least sensible in a liberal/republican vein. her prose, considering the seriousness of the thought and scholarship, is marvelously lucid: i would say it pointedly rejects the hermeticism not only of heidegger but of much of the german tradition from which she emerged). and her standpoint is synoptic: she's got an angle on the whole thing. hard, in a way, to think of any comparable figure. i'd particularly recommend between past and future: basically a collection of interlocked essays on the idea of history and the development of political ideas such as freedom and authority.

i want to say a word about the epidemic of hoax memoirs, or at least the epidemic of their detection. one factor, it seems to me, is the pervasiveness of the idea that stories are central to human lives: all human lives everywhere. or even that human lives just are stories, a bizarre, patently false truism of everything from high-end pomo philosophy to nike ads ("we are the stories we tell": well i guess by definition that makes the false narrative memoir impossible; you told it; hence, you are it). stories are artifacts we shape, by extrusion, exaggeration, invention: a way we shape the world and ourselves in order to present them to others at a moment that demands stories. it is a shape, among others. every story is partly false: false to the chaotic incomprehensibility of experience and identity. this is not to say that there are not stories more or less connected to facts. it's to say that when oprah demands the story of redemption, over and over and over, it has to be manufactured to be effective. stories are artifacts: carved out of reality.

some dude shilling my book:

I've been reading a bunch of Theodor Adorno lately: Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory. Early on in my education, I repudiated Adorno utterly: as soon as I read him condemning jazz music (for Christ's sake) as mere debased commodity and symptom of the emptiness of the era etc, I didn't figure there could be anything right after that. Well, I had a point, and the dude is unbelievably problematic. No one has ever made more elaborate use of the Marxist notion of false consciousness: anything any of us have thought in our whole lives is more or less a mechanical recapitulation of commodity capitalism. This leaves Adorno's own point of view as an achievement that is impossible on its own terms: only I, the great Adorno, am exempt from the conditions under which we all think. On the other hand, I've come to see why people read him. The extreme alienation and cynicism, the unbelievable negativity, yield a place from which you can see a lot; of course, I maybe have my own version, though it ain't "post-Marxist" etc. If Ambrose Bierce was a commie... And actually, there has never been a more interesting application of the dialectical method: the insights are constantly imploding; he's constantly reversing even his own ideology to produce incomparable insights. He's particularly excellent on art and the arts in modernity: their separation from the culture as a whole, their debt to it, the devotion of their makers to subjectivity and the perfection of the object, and their simultaneous implication in the circulation of commodities, media, mechanical reproduction. I'm so never going to be a follower of Adorno, but I'm also getting a lot out of the texts.

If you're at all into fantasy lit, you've got to check out Steven Erikson's unbelievable "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series. I make it eight volumes at about 800 pages each. A whole world: dozens of major characters, continents, empires, tribes, cities, each with an incredibly rich history; species, forms of government, religions. And more than a world: dimensions, warrens, pantheons of gods (and people in the process of becoming gods), realms of the dead. It's a very dark vision: there are a lot lot of corpses and splattering bodily fluids, routine pain and degradation. But also true moments of nobility and small redemptions. The sheer scope takes some getting used to and a lot of paying attention to, but the writing is consistently outstanding, the thought deep. He must never do anything but write. I have yet to pick out a single inconsistency. And I can't think that there has ever been a comparable achievement. Because it's hard - on amazon, say - to keep them numbered, I'll do you a list of the eight volumes in order. There almost has to be more coming, though *Toll the Hounds* brings the thing around (almost) full circle, and could be interpreted as a place to end. Of course he could go back, to any moment over tens of thousands of years and any place in his own universe, for the next piece. I'd suggest more on the ascension of Shadowthrone and the Rope, or the Jaghut/T'lan Imass wars. But whatever it is, I'll read it.I should say I think the Malazan Book of the Fallen is at its most engaging when it's dealing with normal human beings - especially, the Bridgeburners, and the Darujistan crowd (including the world's best talker Kruppe! (of course there's the amazing, disgusting Iskaral Pust, who's incredibly self-serving interior monologue is always unconsciously spoken aloud), Cutter, Murillio, etc). It's a little bit harder to care about all the interactions of gods and ascendants.

(1) Gardens of the Moon
(2) Deadhouse Gates
(3) Memories of Ice
(4) House of Chains
(5) Midnight Tides
(6) The Bonehunters
(7) Reapers Gale
(8) Toll the Hounds

one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of american publishing is surely provided by malcolm gladwell, when he adduces the life and family of his *agent* as the apotheosis of success. if that doesn't make you cringe, you have transcended this earthly plane. it's at once self-congratulatory (the bill gates/einstein-level success of malcolm gladwell's agent no doubt has something to do with the fact that he's *malcolm gladwell's agent*) and self-serving (gladwell's fawn will, one expects, redouble gladwell's advance for his next book: *jive*).

here's my review of malcolm gladwell's new book, "outliers," in today's philly inquirer. i'm not alone in my misgivings; michiko kakutani in the nytimes took a pretty similar approach. and speaking of "no science without philosophy" it is astonishing to me that in a wide-ranging, sort-of-intellectual book about success, there is no attempt at all to grapple with the meaning of 'success,' a notoriously difficult term. there are pop songs that are more reflective than 'outliers' on the basic concepts involved. doctors, lawyers, and accountants are successful, also rich entrepreneurs and sports stars: gladwell just accepts the common wisdom without a moment of reflection.

continuing to blog the utterly delightful peter pan, one of the great achievements in english style i've ever encountered. here, we introduce captain jas. hook. it's worth pointing out that if barrie was trying to write a children's book today, the only way he could establish hook as the acme of evil would be in terms off his indifference to global warming.

In the midst of them, the blackest and largest jewel in that dark setting, reclined James Hook, or as he wrote himself, Jas. Hook. . . . He lay at his ease in a rough chariot drawn and propelled by his men, and instead of a right hand he had an iron hook with which ever and anon he encouraged them to increase their pace. As dogs this terrible man treated and addressed them, and as dogs they obeyed him. In person he was cadaverous and blackavized, and his hair was dressed in long curls. . . . His eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly. In manner, something of the grand seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air, and I have been told that he was a raconteur of repute. He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different caste from his men. A man of indomitable courage, it was said of him that the only thing he shied at was the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour. In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts; and in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw.
Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook's method. Skylights will do. Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has not even taken the cigars from his mouth.

been reading jane *peter pan* [having bizarre problems with typepad; itals don't work, e.g.], by j.m. barrie (with wonderful illustrations in this edition by greg hildebrandt). it is some of the most stylish and hilarious writing one could ever imagine.

Will they reach the nursery in time? If so, how delightful for them, and we shall all breathe a sigh of relief, but there will be no story. On the other hand, if they are not there in time, I solemnly promise that it will will all come right in the end.

She gave him a look of the most intense admiration, and he thought it was because he had run away, but it was really because he knew fairies. Wendy had lived such a home life that to know fairies struck her as quite delightful. She poured out questions about them, to his surprise, for they were rather a nuisance to him, getting in his way and so on, and indeed he sometimes had to give them a hiding. Still he liked them on the whole, and he told her about the beginning of fairies.
"You see Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
Tedious talk this, but being a stay-at-home she liked it.

Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, thought there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

i think i can safely say that no one knows the writing of marion winik quite like i do. and i'm telling you this is it: her voice is here perfectly realized. the form of this book is entirely original, no matter what anyone, even she, says. her writing is in perfect correspondence to its content, and it is beautiful. this book narrates in crystalline form the lives and deaths of a number of people i loved (including my three brothers), in a way i never could have. they'll end up only being remembered by marion's portrayal of them in this book, and i think people might be reading this book a hundred years hence. the grbod faces death with complete clarity and affirms life with quiet ferocity.