Lisa Lieberman > Recent Status Updates

Yep, the tone is irritating me. Putting this one aside. Something better just came in from the library.

Lovely writing but I'm not sure about the arch tone.

My 64th birthday present to myself.

Del Giudice, a great amateur of local gastronomy, wanted me to taste the eels, which at this time of the year are a specialty of the town . . .The eels were being skinned alive in full view of the customers, chopped up and thrown into a frying-pan where they continued to squirm, and on one occasion a cook pulled a live octopus out of a tank, sliced off a tentacle to add to some soup, and threw it back again.

Walter Mosley was the Guest of Honor at last weekend's Crime Bake mystery conference put on by the New England chapters of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. I heard him read from his new book and rushed to the book tables to buy it and have it signed.

Really nice interview with Anne Tyler in the NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/bo...

From an interview with Ursula Le Guin in Virginia Quarterly Review:

As Ursula once said in an essay accompanying the 500-year-anniversary edition of Thomas More’s Utopia: “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

To all of my friends who reviewed this book, even the ones who didn't particularly like it, thank you for putting it on my radar. I seem to be going through a difficult time, reading-wise. Can't tell you how many good books I've started and put down, one or two chapters in. This one's a keeper -- just what I need right now.

We've moved into the realm of the classic anthropologists: Tylor, Lévy-Bruhl, Malinowski. Jane Harrison gets a mention. All tending toward understanding the thinking of primitive peoples by unearthing the primitive aspects of "Homer's" texts. Add Gilbert Murray's notion of the Inherited Conglomerate (he was Dodds's mentor), the commonly accepted beliefs and assumptions that comprise a society's cultural parameters.

For normal men [dreaming] is the sole experience in which they escape the offensive and incomprehensible bondage of time and space. Hence it is not surprising that man was slow to confine the attribute of reality to one of his two worlds, and dismiss the other as pure illusion. This stage was reached in antiquity by only a small number of intellectuals . . . primitive peoples still [give dream experience] validity.

The psychologists have taught us how potent a source of guilt-feelings is the pressure of unacknowledged desires, desires which are excluded from consciousness save in dreams or daydreams. . .

. . . the Homeric Zeus is modelled on that of the Homeric paterfamilias. It was natural to project on the heavenly father those curiously mixed feelings about the human one that the child dared not acknowledge even to itself.

I had forgotten what a Freudian Dodds was, but a quick look at the index, after finishing the first chapter, confirms it. Ten references to Freud himself (plus others in the notes), separate entries for The Interpretation of Dreams, Oedipus Dream (as distinct from Oedipus himself). But, of course, the lectures from which this book is derived were delivered in 1949, when psychoanalysis was in vogue.

This book feels more like a thought experiment than it did the first time I read it. Granted, that was close to forty years ago! I'm retrieving my younger self as I proceed through the story, am glad to find that her idealism and her rage at injustice is the same.

This is a very disturbing book and I must find out why Margitte was so keen on it.

So glad that Millar is available. I discovered her in high school in some dark corner of the public library. Her books were already out of print and I felt kept her to myself, a secret. Now I'm appreciating her all over again. Noir stories but her characters have greater psychological depth than those created by male authors of the era. Millar writes with understanding about losers, drinkers, trapped, unhappy people.

I needed a Margaret Atwood fix.

A really smart blog post by Sarah Hoyt about why big publishers and megabookstores are failing. I don't think any of this will come as a surprise to my reading friends here, but it's nice to have it spelled out:

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2017/03/3...

Apparently, Literary Hub has worked out how many books I will manage to read before I die:

60 and female: 86 (26 years left)
Average reader: 312
Voracious reader: 1300
Super reader: 2080

I'm probably a super reader (80 books per year) according to their calculations. Average reader=12 books/year; voracious reader=50. Still, it's sobering to have it all laid out so coldly.

[Psychologist Caplan arranged for veterans to talk to civilian listeners without interference]

The listeners were coached to begin by saying, "As an American whose government sent you to war, I take some responsibility for listening to your story, so if you want to talk about your experiences at war and since coming home, I will listen for as long as you want to talk, and I will not judge you."

Over the course of time, what happened to me is that pretty much all the moral walls I had, in regards to anything and everything, were pretty much obliterated . . . I was gonna die tomorrow so I didn't give a fuck . . . then that last little wall [against killing] was taken away. And now I am having to deal with . . . what I did to others. At the very basic level, was all of that worth it?

"The value of just war lies in its being not only a salve to the conscience of the king or president who orders troops into battle, but as a reassurance to the troops themselves that the killing they do is orally righteous. Otherwise it is murder."

"This is the dark truth of war, a secret we are all complicit in keeping. We know, though we rarely acknowledge it, that war imposes terrible costs on human beings and that, while some are strengthened by the experience, others buckle. We understand at some level why combat veterans shrink from sharing their stories: we don't want to know them." (11)

Why did't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why. In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. . . "Aunt Olga, why did you do it?" "Show me an honest person who survived Stalin's time." Then there was Uncle Pavel who served in the NKVD in Siberia. When it comes down to it, there is no such thing as chemically pure evil.

To my author friends on this site, there's a new FREE contest for writers of Historical Fiction being sponsored by Chuck Sambuchino's Guide to Literary Agents blog: http://tinyurl.com/zodcsgo

"If we think of a library as a city and a book as an individual house in that city, each sentence becomes one tiny component of that house. Some are mostly functional – the load-bearing wall, the grout between the bathroom tiles – while others are the details we remember and take away . . ."

https://aeon.co/ideas/simplicity-or-s...

Fabulous piece by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel. I loved the book, and now I love her, too. http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/sp...