Pages bookstore is closing

I hadn’t heard about this: after 20 years, Pages on Queen Street is closing.

Terry Pratchett on books

I  stole this quotation from the BookCrossing site:

“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. “

Terry Pratchett

Dr. Seuss meets Charles Darwin

Or vice versa. It’s Robert Fulford’s column: Dr. Seuss meets Charles Darwin.

In a notable contribution to Darwin Year, Brian Boyd has … written On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press), a searching, free-wheeling book that sets forth a Darwinian view of narrative’s place in human history. And Dr. Seuss’s Horton fills all of 60 pages, getting equal billing with Homer’s Odyssey, the other title chosen to demonstrate Boyd’s theories. One section of the book is titled, “From Zeus to Seuss.”

Boyd considers storytelling a human adaptation, in the Darwinian sense. It derives from play, which itself is an adaptation observed among intelligent animals, from gorillas to dolphins. More important, storytelling carries with it crucial advantages for human survival. It sharpens our skills in human interaction (“social cognition” is the term Boyd uses). It encourages cooperation. It fosters creativity. Had humanity been consciously looking for an intellectual device to encourage it on the way to evolutionary success, we couldn’t have done better than invent that endlessly prolific form we call narrative….

Frye was willing to go deep into history to uncover the governing myths that dominate world literature. Boyd, in what feels like an extended response to Frye, takes us further, back into the murkiest eras of prehistory. Literature’s equivalent of evolution, Boyd has decided, is evolution itself. He calls what he does “evolutionary criticism,” or evocriticism.

In recent decades Darwinism has influenced a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, religious studies and archaeology. Last year Denis Dutton, in The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, identified the ways that evolution shaped taste and preferences in art.

Boyd and Dutton come down on the same side. Both reject the widespread academic view that different cultures are naturally isolated from each other. They believe in universally shared themes and inclinations, the result of humanity’s common roots.

Boyd draws parallels between the theory of evolution and the work of artists – Homer, Dr. Seuss, whoever. Natural selection, motiveless and unconscious as it is, nevertheless follows certain patterns. Again and again it randomly sets in motion possible solutions to problems of survival, fails, then starts again, re-using whatever elements have proven valuable. “In time, it can create richer solutions to richer problems.” Put that way, evolution sounds exactly like the work of a writer.

Dr. Seuss’s genius, as Boyd sees it, was the product of a brilliant artist who was also a tireless worker. Boyd contends that literary genius arises, in a perfectly naturalistic manner, through familiar Darwinian processes. A genius tests ideas, discards many, concentrates on a few. Like evolution, literary genius “does not know quite where it is going until it arrives there, usually after a long cycle of generate-test-regenerate.” It builds on partial discoveries and then arrives at lasting solutions to problems no one could have formulated in advance.

In his youth Theodor Geisel found it easy to make people laugh. “He turned these into his speciality: he worked and worked and worked at play.” He was a superb problem-solver, like evolution. He spoke to the world’s desire for meaningful forms of play and provided (as Boyd eloquently puts it) “the pleasures of amused surprise.”

Boyd describes the slow stages by which Dr. Seuss invented the micro-town of Who-ville, where the inhabitants play tennis, football and hockey, push babies around in baby carriages, and otherwise act like humans – all on territory smaller than a square centimetre. Having invented this society, he imagined Horton, a conscientious elephant, who sees that Who-ville needs to be saved from accidental destruction.

Before readers finish the book’s 60 pages we’ve absorbed a cluster of lessons on the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak, the necessity to speak up in defence of an endangered community and even the duty to vote.

Dr. Seuss, while re-enacting the story of evolution through his career, made literary art that contributed to progress through imagination, co-operation and creativity.

…

Far from draining life’s sense of purpose, he argues, Darwinism demonstrates the richness inherent in the human enterprise. Studying our origins makes our possibilities even grander than we could otherwise imagine and – as this remarkable year demonstrates – never ceases to open fresh intellectual territory.

The books of MacDonald Harris

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Philip Pullman writes about the books of MacDonald Harris.

MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney (1921-1993), a naval veteran and distinguished professor of literature.

Philip Pullman says

I’m astonished, really, that such a clever and interesting writer should have vanished so completely: I’ve spoken of him to several well-read people, and none of them has heard of him. Perhaps he lacked some vital ingredient, that mysterious mana that brings commercial and critical success to many writers nowhere near as good. Perhaps it was just that he was too interested in too many kinds of life, and didn’t stick to one sort of book. Perhaps he never quite managed a single undeniable masterpiece, whose gravitational field would have pulled his other work into prominence. Besides, none of his novels has been filmed.Buy him while you can, is my advice. Here is a full list of his novels:

Private Demons (1961); Mortal Leap (1964); Trepleff (1968); Bull Fire (1973); The Balloonist (1976); Yukiko (1977); Pandora’s Galley (1979); The Treasure of Sainte Foy (1980); Herma (1981); Screenplay (1982); Tenth (1984); The Little People (1986); Glowstone (1987); Hemingway’s Suitcase (1990); Glad Rags (1991); A Portrait of My Desire (1993).

If you Google his name, you’ll find a short and interesting website about his life and work.

Book review: Wuthering Heights

Norman Geras of Normblog regularly asks others to review a book or play that was important to them. In this article, Elizabeth Baines reviews Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It’s a book that she read as a teen and then as an adult.

Norm writes:

Elizabeth Baines is a prize-winning radio playwright and the author of numerous short stories as well as two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. More recently she has become an occasional actor, and has written for the theatre, producing her own stage plays, ‘Drinks with Natalie’ and the award-winning ‘O’Leary’s Daughters’.

Elizabeth Baines on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Which book has been most important to me? Well, how would I choose? Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, both of which, aged eleven, I bought from Woolworth’s with my saved-up pocket money and which most certainly coloured my emotional landscape and increased my (already formed) determination to write? Or George Orwell’s essays, which, when I was at university, hit me right in the eyes with a clean fresh blast of political air and ensured that in future I would be aware of the politics of whatever I wrote? But wait – wasn’t I once asked this question before, and didn’t I answer unhesitatingly, ‘Wuthering Heights‘, because this novel, with its striking structure – a narrative within a narrative, yet containing other narratives, a layering of voices and perspectives – has probably had the greatest impact on my own writing

Read on

Books!

I keep finding more books in the impromptu bookstore. I bought two books by The Amazing Randi and got them signed.

Bethesda, Maryland

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I’m in Bethesda at a conference of the Centre for Inquiry. So far I’ve met authors Barbara Forrest and Susan Jacoby. I did not bring a cat.

Stencil graffiti in Truro.

Stencil graffiti in Truro., originally uploaded by john durrant.

This graffito done by stencil and spray paint has the look of a virus or a space station.

Lynne Murray’s book blog

I stumbled upon this book blog while looking for something else: Lynne Murray’s “30 Years Ago Today: I had an orange notebook.” Here’s part of her article about “Motherhood: humor, sadness, artistry, magic & grace“:

Shirley Jackson is arguably a better writer than my favorite domestic goddess essayist, Betty MacDonald who wrote: The Egg and I, The Plague and I, Onions in the Stew, Anybody Can Do Anything, and um, a bunch of children’s books…

MacDonald was more of a comic genius. (She created the unforgettable Ma and Pa Kettle, based on farming neighbors in Washington state.)

Jackson and MacDonald both address what someone has called “the visceral shock of motherhood” and the disillusionment of the drudgery of family life from a woman’s point of view. I lent out my copy of The Egg and I, so I can’t quote you the passage where McDonald describes the shock of her swift descent from bride to wife. She made it funny, but you could see why her first marriage ended in divorce as she detailed her transition between being a sought-after bride to living with a husband who considered her a “bad sport” or inept because she didn’t share his knack for and joy in the drudgery of farm life. I remember reading it at 12 or so, and thinking, hmmm . . . men, marriage, maybe there’s something there that the romantic stories don’t mention.

Bookcrossing’s top 100 books for 2008

The 100 most popular books on Bookcrossing are listed on member stinalyn’s blog, “Strixaluco: The 2008 Bookcrossing Top 100.”

Actually, stinalyn points out, it’s really the top 120 books, thanks to a 25-way tie for 96th place.

This being Bookcrossing, it’s also a release challenge.

It’s also Robert Burns Day so Bookcrossers are releasing books of his poetry or his novels in appropriate places.