LizaWasHere

This is a wonderful book, facinating, uncomfortable, and full of subtle humor.

The Human Stain is set around the fictional "Athena College" in western Masschusetts — a pretty thinly veiled Smith College. The main character was a Classics professor and a Dean for 40 years, until a comment he makes about 2 students who haven’t show up for class in the first 5 weeks of school, "Are they spooks?" is taken as racist. Ultimately, he resigns in fury and disgrace.

The main theme of The Human Stain is secrets. Every character has a secret that they would rather suffer extreme humiliation than reveal, even — perhaps especially — to those closest to them. And many of them DO suffer extreme humiliation, sometimes in their own minds, other times in the eyes of their community, but not necessarily in their own minds.

This book was made into a movie not long ago, which I haven’t seen. I can’t imagine the subtlety of the book successfully making the transition to the big screen. But I’ve heard that it was a good adaptation, so I may look for it. I liked being surprised by the plot twists and unfolding of the secrets in the book, so I would recommend the book first.

I had an idea this evening, that I’m extremely excited about.

I think I should write a book, or probably, a series of books, about computer safety for kids.

There are some good kids internet safety books written for parents. But parents and teachers need to teach kids about how to be safe online.

I think the audience that really needs these books is little kids, early readers, like ages 4-9.

The first draft has come out really instructional and not that fun.

I might need to re-write it like a story.

I’m not going to post any of the drafts up here, but if you want to read it, or if you know the perfect illustrator, email me or comment below and I’ll send you a draft.

I remember the first time I read a book of Molly Ivins essays.

It was Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, and I bought it in hardcover, even though I was a broke graduate student.

The first thing that made me fall in love was the introduction. She talked about reading this essay by a woman anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, who studied a species of monkey that lived in Brazil. Part of what she studied was their diet, and how she studied it was she and her graduate students tracked these monkeys, recording what they ate, and then trying to catch their shit for lab analysis.

Fortunately, mostly what these monkeys at was the leaves of cinnamon trees, so this wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it sounds.

Ivins thought this was a perfect analogy for the life of a political writer.

Not only did I love the analogy, but at the time, I was working as an office assistant 15 hours per week for the University of Wisconsin’s Anthropology department. I think I’d made 500 copies of that article, and Karen Strier had a very readable, fun writing style that I’d enjoyed as much as Ivins. And fortunately, Strier was also a nice, encouraging person. There were a few faculty members that it would have annoyed me to see Ivins praising their work.

I don’t have the same kind of personal connection to this book that I did to the earlier one, but I still loved it. It may even be better than her earlier work. Ivins is at her best describing and analyzing the peculiarities of American political personalities.

This book is apparently a "retrospective" of Ivins work, a fact that seems to unnerve her a little bit, and one that seems sad to me. But she has had serious illnesses in the last few years, and her most recent books have been cowritten with Lou Dubose of the Texas Observer. But the good thing about collections like that is that we DO get the opportunity to see what Ivins considers her career best work.

It also includes my new favorite political quotation, from Huey Long, the eccentric populist governor of Louisiana from 1928-32:

If totalitarianism comes to this country, it will surely do so in the guise of 100 percent Americanism.

I can’t add anything to that, other than my hope that this truth becomes more widely recognized, especially in the context of the "nuclear option" debate about whether or not to eliminate the tradition of the filibuster in the US Senate right now.

Huh. Google just informed me that Long, when he was a US Senator, filibustered an attempt to end Senate confirmation for senior employees of the National Recovery Administration, and perhaps other bills he thought favored the rich. Knew I liked him.