Cancer and the "Right" Words

I spoke with a friend earlier this week and inquired what she had planned for the day, she said she was visiting a friend in the hospital.  I asked what had happened and found that her friend had cancer and was about to endure a very painful procedure to remove this tumor.  Even sadder, the patient’s fiancée, who I’ve met but don’t know well, has also been in for cancer twice and so far as I know, is in remission.

What a sad beginning for a couple that are clearly dear to each other.  What was sadder to me, though, is how common this story is.  Just thinking over the past few years, I’ve had family and friends who’ve had their battles with cancer.  Some of them came out victorious and others didn’t.

Given my family’s medical history, I already know that if I live long enough, cancer is not unlikely to strike (assuming the heart disease or diabetes don’t get me first.)  It was a sobering discussion but not one I regret.  The worst part of the conversation with my friend was that the right words for how I felt about this ever-present battle, or any words of comfort or love that could help carry anyone through such a crisis.

What follows still aren’t the right words.  But they are closer to what I wish I could say:

A bed is a place where you sleep at night
When the dark blankets the sky and in sight
Are the stars, millions and billions, burning,
Shining, while the moon is always turning
From new to full, and all that’s in between,
Colored white, blue, orange, but never green. 

A bed is where a baby ought to sleep,
A place for it to laugh and where to weep.
The bed is high and surrounded by bars
So they won’t fall and collect any scars
While mommy and daddy leave a minute
To let them dream for more than that minute. 

A bed should be where a child sleeps soundless
But they jump, shouting, energy boundless,
Until they’re forced under the sheets, covered
Over.  They’d sleep but the monster slobbered
And muttered, bragged that the best thing to munch
Is a plump juicy kid for his fine lunch. 

A bed is where the teenager will sleep
So long it makes the parents want to weep
For the state of the rising generation.
They wish that they would change their location
And be outside, providing a service
In lieu of their sloth, utterly useless. 

A bed is large enough for newlyweds
To love, to talk, to rest, to pray, to shed
The everyday façade and manners,
Drawing nearer th’other ’neath the banner
Of their burgeoning, growing family.
The quilt can’t warm as their own felicity. 

Parents don’t get much rest in their own beds
As the bratlings crawl and bawl, need their meds,
Snacks, a hug, a talk, another demand
To visit a friend, they’re joining a band,
They forgot to call, they drew on the wall;
Once in bed, they wail, “I can’t take it all!” 

The bed is for the sick and decrepit,
Weak and lonely, for whom no light is lit.
Family and friends stand about and support
But little they say or do can purport
They will be healed, so they embrace and weep
And understand a bed is where they’ll sleep. 

A bed was made to comfort us through the night
That hides the stars, symbolizing the blight
From which no one has, will, or could escape.
But wait! Lo, what is that bright burning shape
On the horizon?  Dawn makes evening shake
And I know a bed is where we awake.

#47 House of Leaves

When I worked at Barnes & Noble, two books were recommended to me more than any other.  From the customers and employees, the first was A Game of Thrones.  From just the employees, I was constantly told to read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  So I was already planning on reading this when I found that ridiculous list that threatens to consume my life.  In fact, I checked both books out at the same time, not knowing that it was already on the list.

I had some trepidation in starting this one.  This is not the first of Danielewski’s books I’ve read.  A few weeks before, I came across The Fifty-Year Sword, which turned out to be a pretty cool little horror tale but had an annoying narrative style I almost didn’t make it past the first thirty pages.  The Fifty-Year Sword has five narrator’s and they all speak on the same page; the only way you can distinguish them is that their fonts are in different colors, but because they are interrupting…

            …correcting…

                        …telling the facts as they are…

            …which, didn’t you realize how that afternoon when she sat down to take her morning pills that Mr. Chardanay…

…you’re getting it all wrong…

                        …as they actually took place.  And it isn’t very nice of you to…

            …coolly sipped his cocoa with that twinge of disgust…

…and it goes on and on and on like that the whole stinking book.  I was concerned about what post-modern tricks he was going to pull on me with House of Leaves.  He does pull a lot of literary stunts and what I’ve taken to call “cinematic tricks” through his story, as well as having two narrators, but this is handled better in this book than it was in the second.

House of Leaves is about an American family who buys a house in Virginia; at first, the house is perfect for them, a place where the parents especially can work on their relationship.  He has constantly been gone for his work as a photographer and she has had her share of indiscretions in the past.  Navidson, the father, has set up video cameras in every room of his house to make a documentary of the simply life when the house itself goes crazy.  The interior dimensions start to become larger than the exterior, and then a hallway appears that just seems to grow and grow, eventually leading to many rooms and a staircase that never seems to end.  And Navidson (because everybody in a haunted house story is intelligent) decides to document the whole thing.

Indeed, the novel is written as an essay studying the movie that Navidson made.  The first narrator goes over the family dynamics, the other people brought into the story, comments on the five explorations down the hallway, as well as his opinions about the camera shots that were used.  There are also copious footnotes, which is never a bad thing for me.  In cases like Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or any of Terry Pratchett’s novels, the footnotes are even more interesting that the main story itself.

There are times when House of Leaves feels like reading Moby Dick.  Half of Moby Dick is reading story and the other half is a dissertation on the whaling life.  There are times when half of House of Leaves is about the family and then the other half is all on the psychology and science of the house itself.

There are some literary stunts he uses; there is a chapter where he talks about Navidson and his brother, comparing their relationship to the biblical Jacob and Esau, and the pages are set up in columns resembling scripture passages.  But more obvious are the cinematic tricks.

Cinematic tricks are when the author doesn’t just write the words but uses them in such a way to convey a picture on the page.  Some obvious cinematic tricks I’ve seen before were in The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket, where instead of describing how dark the elevator column was, Snicket gave us two pages of ink squares; and the ending of The Host by Stephanie Meyers has an intermission designed to make you think that this is the end, and could have been the end.  It certainly gave a distinct feeling of death and nobility of sacrifice, as well as need for meditation.

Unlike these books, though, Danielewski tries much more subtle cinematography with his words.  Several footnotes extend over many pages and one of them is laid out in such a fashion that reading it feels like you’re looking through a window or crawling through a tunnel.  And in the last two explorations, the pages are set up in a way that there is only one sentence per page, but each sentence is deliberately places with at the top, bottom, center, diagonally, upside-down, or vertical, all to give you a sense through the words of where the explorers are physically, when they’re lost, the sense of vastness of their supernatural home, as well as the claustrophobia or solitude they feel, as well as the danger they’re in.  I can see how others may get annoyed with this (I usually do) but this was so well done.  I didn’t get the sense that Danielewski was showing off at all but was deliberately trying to bring a specific emotional response from the reader he may not have gotten in any other way.

The Navidson portion of the book was great and well worth reading if you want to see what new things are being tried and done in our century for literature.

I’m not recommending the book to any of my friends. It has to do entirely with the second narrator, Johnny Truant.  Johnny is a stoner who discovers the Navidson Record.  He writes the introduction to tell of how he came across the Navidson story, and many of the footnotes are his thoughts and stories from his life, and how reading the Navidson Record is ruining his life.  He is a very unreliable narrator; over half the time, you cannot trust that he is “telling the truth.”  He constantly contradicts his own statements and you’re left not sure which statement was correct, the first or second.  He turns out to be a pretty rotten human being, too.  The alcoholism and drug use is merely the tip of the iceberg; the guy gets around more than James Bond, screwing every girl except the one he has a crush on (assuming, again, that he’s “telling the truth”), and as the story progresses, as he starts to go insane and murderous, he is less and less pleasant.  Instead of the fear I was getting from the house portion (which is what a scary story is supposed to do) I was getting angrier and angrier with this guy and wished that he would just die.  No satisfactory answer to that; I’m still not sure whether he committed some form of supernatural suicide or if he took the final step into insanity and went comatose.  I spoke with my manager about that; she said that she liked how it left you guessing.  I just thought the whole portion was stupid and made me a little sick.

Such a pity, because that core story is so amazing.  The Johnny Truant portion covers it like so much coal that I can’t appreciate the diamond underneath.

Barnes & Noble

I quit my job yesterday.  I gave them a notice so I still have three shifts left before it’s officially over, but for all intents and purposes, by next Saturday, I will be just a full-time student doing what I can to get out of there at a better pace than I currently am.  It was not an easy decision.  It’s something I’ve been meditating on for two months and given some prayer and conversation with others about.  Once in a while, you have to take the plunge.

I am excited.  On top of being able to devote all my energies on my school, it also opens more time for other things that kept getting pushed to the side.  I actually have time to go to the Sacramento temple twice a month (something I have sorely missed.)  It also gives me time to volunteer at my local library—considering how much I have used that service over the years, I feel it’s only right to be giving back to the community, even if it’s just a small part.

I have things to be excited about, and I am, but… it is tough to say good-bye.  I can’t say enough how wonderful the Barnes & Noble bookstore has been this past year.  It has been my favorite store since my college days; I used to hang out there in between college classes and some semesters, I spent more hours there than I had in Institute.

Barnes & Noble was my dream job.  Not a dream profession; I didn’t then and still don’t have any desire to be in a retail career.  But I loved that store, I love books, and the employees I saw always looked happy to be where they were at.  There are not many jobs out there with that sort of benefit.

I cannot believe my good fortune still that I was hired so quickly after moving to Sacramento.  The hours were terrible and the pay even worse—which is about par for my working life.  But the experience has been without price.  I have never had such a string of good managers and friendly co-workers, and let me tell you, that alone put this as one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

Some Things I’ve Learned

1)      I am good at customer service.  Not something I ever expected, but considering my patience and organization skills (contrary to the current state of my bedroom, I can be tidy) the service desk was a great fit for me.  And that was great because I despise being at the cash registers.

2)      The Nook is a really cool device.  Check it out sometime; they have demos and classes for Nook at the store, all free of charge.  It beats the heck out of the Kindle, tell you what.

3)      I will never get over the Love & Sex bay sitting right next to the Teen section.  I mean, what are they saying?

4)      You need gloves to work with magazines.  Every time I was given the duty of shelving magazines, I always finished my shift with three paper cuts.  I swear you could kill someone with a copy of Elle.

5)      Much as I hated working at the registers, I’m not a terrible salesman, but I have too much respect for the customer’s wallet to ever be great at it—this was a real pain in selling the membership discounts.

But the constant wake-up call for me is how the times have changed.  I’ve always loved published books.  I’ve changed my opinions over the years about the styles; I used to prefer paperbacks because I could carry them everywhere, but nowadays, I’m willing to splurge a bit for a hardcover, because you not only get a good story, but they look so much better on a bookshelf.  But the paper publishing industry is suffering. 

Borders went out of business because of this.  Barnes & Noble would have if they didn’t jump on the eReader bandwagon, which is one-third of their business, last I checked.  They’re not competing with other bookstores anymore as there aren’t any left.  You can still find used bookstores but they’re not doing so hot.  Publishers are aggressively pushing books on electronic format because that’s what’s selling.  Barnes & Noble is competing with Apple, Amazon, and Google, and they’ll be the first to admit that they’re the underdog in this race. 

Here’s the kicker: I overheard my co-worker speaking with a customer about this very subject and he told, “It wouldn’t take much for publishers to take real books seriously again.  If only a few more people would buy the real books instead of the devices, publishers would back down a bit and go back to pushing the regular format.”  Which makes total sense to me.  Much like the movies, you vote with your dollar. 

If you’re among the folks that want to keep their paper books lasting for a while longer, let me make a final recommendation.  Barnes & Noble has a leather-bound series that look gorgeous, gold on the edge and ribbon bookmark attached, for classics.  I have Shakespeare’s complete works, Edgar Allen Poe’s poems and stories, the complete Sherlock Holmes, and a collection of American poetry from this collection.  They do not stop there.  The classics are numerous, from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, Gray’s Anatomy to Jules Verne.  They’ve gone modern as well.  You can get works from Anne Rice, Neal Gaiman, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Harper Lee, H. P. Lovecraft, and there’s even a leather-bound for the original Star Wars trilogy. 

Most recently, they’ve come out with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in one volume and Dune by Frank Herbert.  All of these are only $20 each for multiple stories, if not complete works, and they look beautiful on your shelves. 

They’ve started doing a children’s series as well.  They colors are much brighter but they still look great, and they have some of the greats: Little Women, Peter Pan, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Secret Garden, and several others.  Bound to be more if people keep purchasing them, and these are only $10.

I’m not getting paid extra to write this (that'd be awesome if I were.)  I just love books, it is still my favorite store, and I want it to go on for a long, long time producing the same wonderful products I’ve enjoyed.

Trip Down Memory Lane

Memory is a funny thing.  There are 365 ¼ days in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes to an hour, and 60 seconds to minute, and all we’ve experienced is stored in our brains of which we only utilize two percent.  Memories are cluttered all through our heads and, at least in my experience, are drawn out by odd connections and patterns.

Last week, I reviewed the Pease’s book, The Definitive Guide to Body Language, which I still haven’t finished but am loving every page.  It was the section on laughter that brought up my memory topic.  Body Language spends several pages discussing the social reasons behind laughter in the play of dominance and submission, how it produces endorphins and generally improves health, and how it affects romantic relations.

The last really got me thinking.  When I was a teenager, in discussions with my peers at school, church, extracurricular activities, or just hanging out, if we were talking about girls, we’d ask what was important for them to have.  Looks almost always came first (come on; from teenagers, what else were you expecting?) but almost always equal to that was that she had to have a sense of humor.

What’s interesting is how a sense of humor is often so high on the women’s list of desirable traits.  What I hadn’t considered is that each sex interprets “sense of humor” differently.  Without going into too much detail why this is (read the book), generally speaking, women tend to like men who can make them laugh, while men are looking for someone who will find them funny.

Beyond noting the differences between the sexes, what struck me was how humor is a binding force socially and how laughter builds relations.  Which took me to my own successes in the dating realm (they have been few.)

Best date I ever had was back when I lived in Utah.  There’s a summer event called the Orem Storytelling Festival.  It was three days and evenings where storytellers from across the country would come and tell all their tales.  There were different themes and groups; I know there were romantic tales and spook stories, and times for reading to the kids.  But the one that I took my date to was “Big Laughin’ Nite,” which was two hours of non-stop hilarity.

The ticket situation was frustrating.  I ordered the tickets a week ahead and waited every day for them to come.  Days after the event, they still never showed.  So I had to buy the tickets again an hour before.  I wanted to argue with somebody about it but life’s short and we were already going to have a bad seat on the grass anyways.

Oh, yes, this was an outdoor event.  Big hill that sloped downward into a natural amphitheater, stage below and huge speakers everywhere.  I hadn’t brought blankets and I’m pretty sure the sprinklers had been on that morning at least, because it was a little damp sitting down.  After an hour of talking and sunset bringing in a chill, the show started.  The first two storytellers were okay.  Not that funny.  I only remember the second on because the lady required audience participation.

But from number three on down through the rest of the dozen or so storytellers, they just kept getting funnier and funnier.  Halfway through, I looked over at my date and said, “I hope the next guy sucks.  My ribs can’t take this anymore.”  Nobody sucked.  My sides and stomach were sore for two days.

And, of course, we had some slight problems finding my truck again (that crowd was incredible).  But you know what?  I got a second date out of that—after a year of constant disappointment, this was incredible.  (I have no illusions about my skill with women.)  In fact, just from one good evening of humor, there followed six months of dating that one woman and a couple years of good friendship with her.

I’m not sure why I’m going on about this, except to say that I really think that Peases are on the right track with their book.  If I can put in my own experiences into something, it lends much credence to the work than I would otherwise give it.

A New Reading List

I did a quick browse through the library when I came across the title 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  I looked at that and thought, That’s a dare.

I skimmed through all the titles, expecting to be unimpressed, but the truth is, the books I have already read were generally really good ones.  A more accurate title would have been 1001 Novels You Must Read… but whatever.  I decided to take them up on that challenge and read every title they have in there, see if all these books are worth reading before I die.

This project will take at least five years, but I will be back to report on each one I actually finish, perhaps on a Thursday or Saturday.  I don’t know which yet; I’ll be playing this by ear.  It won’t be every week because I do have other obligations and there are other books I’d like to read in the meantime.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of the books I’ve already read on this list and what I think of them.  I’ve already read 46 of them over the years.

The Thousand and One Nights—No argument.  The only making it a novel is the Scheherazade frame to unify these short stories (much like Ray Bradbury does in The Illustrated Man) but it’s a rare case that the frame is as interesting as the stories themselves, all of which are adventurous, beautiful, sexy, and deeply human.

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan—Read it in my Children’s Literature college class.  This is one I will reread to remind myself of what’s in it; I remember the allegory being very heavy-handed but certainly is important for historical purposes and the fact that it’s never been out-of-print says a lot after 400 years.

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift—Hilarious, and certainly condemning to the aristocracy of the times.

Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen—Her first novel is gorgeous, and it incidentally has my favorite movie adaptation of her works, with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet in one of their best films ever.  I have gotten sick of Pride and Prejudice, and it’s not the book’s fault.  The writing witty and has a bite to it, and the story has brilliant characters and fascinating twists and turns.  But I have seen too many adaptations—most of them really good adaptations, but I’ve been so inundated with this story that I’ve ceased to care.  Not on the edge of my seat to see whether Elizabeth and Darcy get together.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens—Here is where I make no sense.  I’ve also seen a lot of adaptations for this book and many of them range from the mediocre to downright awful, but I still love this book.  Maybe it’s the chord it rings with me; truth is, the story is not about Christmas but rather uses Christmas as the setting.  The real story is about a poor man who became rich, and in doing so forget where he came from, thereby neglecting the people he ought to have been the most charitable towards.  (And something that almost all the movies have neglected are the two children beneath the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present.  That was more heartbreaking to me than Tiny Tim and the true symbol not only of Scrooge’s neglect, but the society in which he lived.)

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas—Yes.  Excellent book.  One of my favorite sequences is when D’Artagnan makes his return trip from his current mission and goes to collect his three friends… only to find that he has to twist all of their arms to get them back into the service.  I laughed throughout the whole thing.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë—An unexpectedly creepy romance.  Although, maybe romance is the wrong genre to put this book in.  There is a love story between Jane and Mr. Rochester, but truth is, it never dominates the plot.  It’s really a drama about the life of a meek, unattractive woman and the tragedies she faced from childhood through her adult life until she finally makes peace who she is.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville—It is worth reading but nobody could fault you for skipping every other chapter.  It seriously alternates between an epic story of vengeance, madness, and the eternal struggle of man versus nature, and then the minutiae of whaling, whales, whalers, whale ships, and the economy of whale oil.  That will wear you down.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo—Overwritten, for sure.  There is not a character who isn’t compelling, though, and Valjean is in contention for greatest hero in all literature.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll—There really aren’t any books like them.  They’re not my favorite by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re bizarre enough and the dialogue is clever enough that I wouldn’t mind repeat readings.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky—I’m blown away that this was only supposed to be Part 1 of a larger epic called The Life of a Great Sinner.  That’s almost as audacious as Chaucer’s plans for The Canterbury Tales.  Great story that stands on its own legs, though.

Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson—The epitome of adventure stories.  A terrific, bloody tale of the ultimate treasure hunt.  I hate what recent film adaptations have done to Long John Silver in making him a pseudo-father figure to Jim Hawkins; this is one of the most heinous and traitorous villains written, and Jim standing up to him increases my respect for the kid.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—My favorite novel they made us read in high school, period.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson—I’m not a fan.  It’s honestly kind of boring, but it is essentially a type of the werewolf story and deserves recognition for that if nothing else.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde—I like it.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—Except for “A Scarlet in Bohemia,” this is a rather forgettable collection.  Most of the mysteries weren’t that compelling for me.  Doyle improved his craft much by the time his second collection came out.

The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells—Meh.  He gets props for being one of the originators of the sci-fi genre and bringing out these cool ideas of time travel and genetic manipulation but… meh.  Later authors told better stories with these ideas.  However, The Invisible Man is also on this list and that was enjoyable.  Griffin is such an enjoyable criminal psychopath.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James—I like to believe she was seeing ghosts, but I’m down with the madness theory, too.

Ulysses by James Joyce—I will not finish this book.  It’s not that I lack for courage; I got through 400 pages before I gave up.  However overwritten Moby Dick and Les Misérables are, Ulysses is 20 times worse, and given that I don’t really like Homer’s Odyssey to begin with (The Iliad is much cooler) and Joyce turns it into an even more boring allegory of some Joe Shmoe whose wife is cheating on him, I just can’t do it.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—It does bring into light how shallow the lifestyles of the rich and popular will be, but I didn’t actually need this book to tell me that.  I got the message in junior high.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque—One of the few novels of the time that was truly about the infantrymen and not the commanders over them.  It’s worth reading just for that, but boy is it sad.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien—Hobbit’s all right, but I’ve read Lord of the Rings twice and want to reread it a couple times more before I die.  I never reread books, so this is one of the highest compliments I can give to a story.

Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck—Like the first, hate the second, love the last one.  Cannery Row is the best thing Steinbeck wrote.  A group of guys trying to do a nice thing for someone only to have it bite them in the butt because of their own failings is the story of my life.  I appreciate that this one has a happy ending.

Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell—They’re easy books to hate but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in them.  My problem is that I have too much optimism to believe in the dystopia.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger—Caulfield needs to grow up.  I can’t argue against the existence of his type, though.  I’ve seen people like him way too often and I have no idea how to bring about a change in these individuals.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov—Brilliant book.  It’s a great tale of how civilization develops.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway—I rather like the old man.  Really is a shame he lost his fish to the sharks.  Really a shame there were no chapters, either.  It was such a pain finding a good place to stop.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding—I didn’t like it when I read it in high school, but I think I would enjoy it much more now that I have a few extra years under my belt.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White—I love King Arthur and this is the ultimate novel of his life, from his tutelage from Merlin to the breaking of Camelot.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee—I understand the hype.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller—I don’t understand the hype.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein—Boo!  Best science-fiction novel, my ---.  It had such a great start and descended into the promotion of a free-love society.  I don’t want to know how many STD’s the major characters contracted by the end of the book.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien—Really weird and an ending that’s too familiar to Roland Deschain’s reaching the highest room of the Dark Tower.  Still, it wasn’t a terrible ride to the end.

Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—this one actually is in contention not only best alien abduction story, but best take on time travel ever.

The Shining by Stephen King—It is a joke that this is the only one of his novels on the list.  He’s had more influence on 20^th Century literature than anybody else until Rowling brought us Harry Potter (none of those books are on the list either, which I also can’t take seriously.)  The Shining is good, but what about The Stand or The Dead Zone or It?  Heck, if they don’t want any horror on the list, throw in “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” or “The Body” from his Different Seasons collection.  Hearts in Atlantis would be a respectable choice.  Whatever.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams—It’s fun the first time, but ever since I discovered Terry Pratchett, Adams has never been as funny to me.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons—I was a little surprised to see a graphic novel on the list, but I wasn’t surprised that this one would make it.  It’s the only comic book to win the Hugo, and I did enjoy this sad drama of flawed superheroes.  It begins as a simple murder mystery and turns into a war tale in which they fail to save the world without great sacrifice, and the sacrifice is their honor.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro—I’ve written about this one elsewhere.

Two Book Reviews

I should be finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray that I borrowed from my coworker.  It’s a special annotated, unedited and uncensored version she ordered straight from Britain, and she was very kind in letting me have it these past few weeks.  I already put off reading it so I could finish the other library books that were due before I cracked these pages open.  The annotations are as much fun to read as the novel itself.  But it’s what’s been added that makes this book really interesting.

Or rather I should say what’s been put back in.  Oscar Wilde’s publishers took several looks at his manuscript and said, “Yeah, we’re taking this crap out before we invest our money in this.”  So out went all the material Victorian England would not stand for.  It was still an edgy book.  When I read it in college, I was intrigued at the homoeroticism that was bubbling beneath the surface; it certainly added a level of the danger and deviance of Dorian Gray and how he was ruining the lives of the young men that came within his sphere of influence.  From chapter one of this uncensored version, it’s obvious that homosexuality is the force behind all of Dorian’s motivations and one of the tools Lord Henry will use to deceive and corrupt Dorian.

(I’ll also add that while these additions and annotations make this story more fascinating, I’ve grown to despise Oscar Wilde himself.  Why is it that some of the greatest artists tend to be such despicable human beings?  Wilde turned out to be a terrible husband and quite the philanderer.)

As I said, I should be finishing this book to give it back to my coworker, but I get distracted easy and the other day, it came from browsing in the bargain section where I found a couple of stacks of body language books.

I am fascinated by body language.  I have been fascinated by it since I lived in Dallas.  During my mission, we had a mission president who was in charge of making sure we were taken care of and also to make sure that we weren’t being idiots.  Our mission president’s wife was a great support in that.  While he was teaching us how to be good teachers and dedicated workers, she got down to the nitty-gritty: how to clean our apartments, sew our clothes, and proper table etiquette.  These lessons were intense; I learned I had been buttering bread wrong my entire life (you’re supposed to break off a bite-sized piece, then butter it, then eat it.  Did anybody else know that?  I had no idea.)

But the best training she ever gave was on how to read people.  It was the one time she ever focused on our teaching skills and it wasn’t something we could learn anywhere else.  She was adamant that we know exactly how the people we were teaching felt about us and what we were saying.  While you can’t read a person’s mind by the way they fold their hands, they are speaking with their movements every bit as much as what they’re saying with their mouths; and because our body movements are so often unconscious, you’re less likely to be lied to if you’re reading the body.

This training changed the way I thought and acted more than anything else in those two years I was in Texas.  Something I paid attention to was the “double-cross.”  A “cross” is where somebody folds their arms or crosses their legs.  If it’s just a single cross, it could mean that their closed to what you’re saying or it could just be how they relax.  There’s other visual clues you’ll have to read to determine what it means.  But a “double-cross,” where both legs and arms are folded, or legs are crossed and a hand grabs the ankle, or something of the like, is a clear sign that they are closed off from what you’re saying.  Paying attention to this alone was a huge help in any discussions that I had with the people I met.

As soon as my mission was over, I went looking for books just on this subject.  They’re a lot harder to find than I expected but I’ve come to understand now that this is a fairly new study, starting from the 1960s.  Fifty years is such a short time for scientific research on kinesics, but we have made great strides already, and I have snapped up anything I could on the subject.

What intrigued me was where I found the resources, because studying body language has different focuses and motivations.  Criminologists study body language to spot the liars.  Salesman and other professionals use it to see whether they can seal the deal.  There’s some dating advice to see judge by the body language whether you have a shot or should move onto someone else.

The criminology perspective is a favorite of mine.  There was a lot of focus on the eyes, especially blinking.  People blink if you have something in your eyes, of course, but you can gauge somebody’s attitude by how fast they blink.  A person who is lying tends to blink much faster than he would if he were telling the truth.  Also, somebody looking for a fight will blink more often as well.

All this is leading up to the most impulse purchase I’ve had since Christmas: The Definitive Guide to Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.  Four hundred pages of sheer pleasure and addiction.

What was cool (and not surprising) was in the introductory chapter, where it mentions flat out that women tend to be more naturally inclined to reading body language than men.  Part of it is how their brains are wired and another part of it is related to mothering experience.  After all, for roughly the first five years of raising a child, mothers can’t communicate with words.  They have to judge what their baby wants by its nonverbal communication, whether it’s hungry or upset or tired.  It’s all nonverbal.

This also explains what we call “women’s intuition.”  Even when it’s subconscious, women tend to pay attention to the body language first and what’s spoken second.  If there’s a conflict between the two, the body language is what they will focus in on.  Men, as a rule, don’t.  It’s a big reason why a couple can walk into a room, the woman will read how the people in the room are feeling, who they’re with, if somebody’s getting along, etc., and the guy is wondering where she’s getting all this.

Funny enough, this also why so many fortune tellers tend to be women.  They are very, very good at reading a body, and the crystal ball and Tarot cards tend to be the glitter and glam that adds to their show and distraction from the real talent.

In short, I’m loving this book.  It’s awesome.  I just started, so I’m only at the part where they talk about hands, which is one of the three most expressive features in our body; it says so much about whether we’re open or closed, authoritative or submissive, friendly or aggressive.  But not only do the authors talk about what signals mean, they will go into the history about why we do the things we do (such as handshakes) and even tips of how we can respond with our hands when somebody is trying to dominate you.  Blown away.

(I’m also kind of blown away by how many subjects I was able to put in this post without any unifying theme whatsoever.)

Gordon Ramsay

My first encounter with Chef Ramsay was his show Hell’s Kitchen, and frankly, I wasn’t impressed.  Part of it is that I was sick of game shows, and really, reality television is just a game show with drama and injected with steroids.  The rest is that Ramsay came off as just a foul-mouthed creep and despite his being a world-renowned chef, I didn’t get why any of the contestants were trying so hard to work for him.  The only person I would want as my boss even less was Donald Trump.

A few years later, Masterchef comes out and my mom and sisters talked me into watching it.  I liked it.  Ramsay was not the only judge and he really didn’t yell all that much.  In fact, he was quite pleasant.  That, and when they got into the final twelve, I started seeing that these judges were doing more than seeing who could reach the top.  Two of the home cooks who didn’t make it were offered jobs at two of the judges’ restaurants, Ramsay being one of them.  And he even gave his phone number to another of the home cooks to keep in touch and for mentoring purposes.  These small gifts put this above most other game shows; it wasn’t just about the money or prestige, but the contestants, even the failed ones could still be given opportunities to make more out of their lives than the currently had.

But where I became a fan of Gordon Ramsay was his documentary show, Kitchen Nightmares.  With a title like that, I expected this to be another train wreck like Hell’s Kitchen, as the commercials I saw included him yelling, cussing, and getting in peoples’ faces and seeing disgusting nightmares happen in restaurants that should be shut down.

The commercials were deceptive, because this is the best show on television since Extreme Makeover: Home Edition went off the air.  Extreme Makeover was the best thing television did in the last decade; certainly, it was the most inspiring.  The team would find a family whose home was trash either because of time, economic misfortune, or natural disaster, send that family on a paid vacation, tear down the house and build them a new one in one week.  Isn’t that astounding?  The Home Makeover team would build entire homes, gorgeous homes, in one week, and they did it two hundred times, and on their final episode, they built seven houses in one week’s time.

That is an incredible mission these people volunteered for.  I mean, roughly 200 weeks is little less than four years of their life invested in just that labor.  Considering that this show ran nine years, that was nearly half of their lives dedicated to that, time spent away from their families so that they could give such a wonderful gift to other families in need.  I was really sad that it had to end.

Gordon Ramsay has picked up that baton in a sense.  Instead of fixing homes, he is fixing businesses, but this is nearly as important as the place you live.  Many restaurants are family owned and run and in so many cases, if the restaurants fail, that’s their livelihood.  If they lose, they’re on the streets.

And Kitchen Nightmares focuses on the hopeless cases.  Each episode, Ramsay devotes three days to see what’s happening at the restaurants, identify the problems, give the restaurant a makeover and new menu, provide training as needed, and puts the ball back in their court so that when the restaurant’s succeed, it’s not Ramsay’s success, it’s their victory.

He does get in peoples’ face a lot, but in every case, they have deserved it.  Many are in denial about how bad things really are and part of Ramsay’s function is to wake the owners up and take responsibility.  Occasionally, there are marital, parental, and family problems, and he will take time to tackle those issues before even trying to get the restaurant moving forward.  In fact, these always get top priority since no success in their business will accommodate for failure in their homes.

Some of my favorite episodes are when he goes back to revisit restaurants he’d helped prior and see how they’re doing.  And I’m pleased to see that most of them are still on track since his coming in to give them a hand.

Which brings me to his latest television project, Hotel Hell.  It’s the same premise as Kitchen Nightmares, only he spends an entire week staying in a hotel, and he goes over every aspect of the hotels, from reception to the cleaning standards, the restaurant and bars, and community outreach.

What astounds me is how much he has to push the owners to wake up to their problems.  And some of them are maddening.  The first episode, the owners were constantly not writing the checks to their staff on time.  One of their staff waited five weeks once for a check and she made less money than I make in a week as a part-time bookseller.  That blew me away because I know I don’t work a tenth as hard or put in nearly as many hours as they do.  That was infuriating.

That’s where I gained a whole lot of respect for Ramsay.  He understands so much the value of the people who work for you and he will go down to their level and treat them like people of worth.

He’s also incredibly tenacious.  He stays on when most others would quit, because he came to help and giving nothing less than everything he’s got will satisfy.  In the above episode I talked about, he made sure above all else that the employees got paid.

My favorite so far, though, is in the third episode, where one cook in the kitchen is a college kid with horrible health issues (two heart surgeries and two back surgeries) has dreams of becoming a chef and opening up his own bakery.  At the end of the show, Ramsay gives the kid his e-mail address and tells him that he will pay for the young man’s entire college education.  No expectation of being paid back.  “All I want from you is a loaf of bread.  And God help you if you fail your classes.”  That is one of the most generous things I’ve ever seen; it nearly brought me to tears (I have a heart of stone; the fact that my eyes watered is huge.)

I can tell you that these shows proves to me that Ramsay knows what life is all about.  Success in life is not about what you achieve.  It’s about taking the talents, the qualities, the resources, and the time that you have, and use those to better the lives of others and help them succeed.  It’s about paying it forward.  It’s about charity.  I believe he’s among those rare individuals that lives it.  And I’d like to thank his family for being patient with the time he’s sacrificed from them to help others.  It means a lot to the world to let him try and make this a better place to live in.