California magazine blog

There Was Light

Ran across these quotes and thought they were worth sharing. Both come from "There Was Light" a collection of essays by Cal alumni. This one is from the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith Ph.D. '34, who wrote:

Not everyone is as restrained as I am about Berkeley. A few weeks ago I shared a seat on an airplane with a young colleague newly recruited, like so many before him, from the University of California. I asked him if he missed it. He replied: "Christ, yes! At Berkeley you worked all morning in the library and then at noon you went out into the sun and there was always a demonstration going on or something. Man, that was living!"

And here is Robert McNamara '37, former Secretary of Defense who was quoted by Irving Stone, editor of "There Was Light." Stone had been telling McNamara, who died this year, about the campus protests of his day. McNamara responded:

The University must learn to roll with the punches, and not take them all on the chin. That is the only way I could have survived in Washington. The University was here a hundred years ago; it will still be here a hundred years from now.

Live Lit

This evening from 5-6 at the Morrison Library, author Daniel Alarcón (War by Candlelight, Lost City Radio) will be reading from an essay he wrote for the journal Granta about book piracy in Peru. (Disclosure: Alarcón is related to this blogger by marriage.) The event is just the latest installment in the excellent series called "Story Hour at the Library," a monthly prose reading hosted by the Berkeley English department's Vikram Chandra and Melanie Abrams. Coming up in December, a reading by Mary Roach, author most recently of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. She will be followed in February by bestselling author and publishing phenom, Dave Eggers. The whole schedule can be found here, plus webcasting of earlier programs, including readings by Michael Chabon, ZZ Packer, and the late great Oakley Hall, whom we remembered in our pages here. 

Adaptation

Airing tonight on most PBS stations is the documentary version of Botany of Desire, Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan's "plant's eye view" of evolution. The story ranges far and wide, from the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan to the underground pot-growing operations of suburban America, all the while explaining how (metaphorically speaking) plants have used us for their own ends. It promises to be an interesting show, but we're still sorry we missed the musical. 

Advice for Budding Boswells

In the Fall issue we ran 5 questions past "serial biographer" Jeffrey Meyers (p. 90), who took his doctorate in English at Cal in 1967. Since that time, he has written 43 books, including more than 20 biographies -- most recently, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle. In addition to providing answers to our questions, Meyers sent his "12 principles of biography." They are:

1.      Read everything in print and follow up every lead.
2.      Be persistent and see everyone who will talk to you.
3.      Weigh all the evidence like a lawyer. A biographer is an artist on oath.
4.      Get the subject born in the first five pages.  Nothing is duller than genealogy.
5.      Describe the subject's personal habits and tastes.
6.      Portray the minor characters as fully as possible.
7.      Illuminate the recurrent patterns of the life. Look at the big picture, not the small details.
8.      Keep up the dramatic narrative, employing the same techniques as the novelist, and concentrate on your readers' interests rather than your own obsessions.
9.      Don't focus on the events of the life, but on what they mean.
10.     Be selective rather than exhaustive, analytical rather than descriptive.  Aim for 400 pages and remember that a shorter book, though much harder to write, is easier to read than a long one.
11.     Complete the book in a few years, at most, or you'll begin to hate the subject for eating up your life.
12.     Always remember that the responsibility of the biographer is to do justice to the subject.
--As a lagniappe I should add: marry a woman who shares your passionate interest in biography, and is an excellent linguist, indexer, researcher, critic and editor.

And there you have it all you aspiring Boswells: A baker's dozen.

Bugger All Down Here

The universe in which we whirl began as a single point 13.7 billion years ago; it has been expanding ever since, with its temperature steadily decreasing. Our universe has at least four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Just now the size of our observable universe is roughly 13.7 billion light-years on each of three dimensions by 13.7 billion years on the dimension of time, increasing as I write and you read.

That passage comes form the article, "The (Really) Big Picture." It, in turn, comes from a wonderfully cogent book entitled Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present by Cynthia Stokes Brown, a historian who lives in Berkeley and teaches at Dominican University. And when it comes to big history, well, that's about the size of it. The story goes on to say that reading big history is often like this -- like listening to Eric Idle's "The Galaxy Song" from Monty Python's "Meaning of Life." For those who aren't familiar with Idle's chef d' oeuvre, or for those who just want to revisit it in all its glory, here goes, thanks to the magic of the web.

Best American This and That

 The annual Best American series is out for 2009. California made it into Best American Science and Nature Writing with Keay Davidson's article, "Blown Apart," which ran in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue. Congratulations to him on that honor.

But that's not all. We also made it into Best American Nonreguired Reading, the quirky Dave Eggers joint that features a high/low blend of cultural miscellany. This year the mix, which was selected by kids from the 826 Valencia writing center, included Best American Alumni Notes (we kid you not) including two from our very own pages. You'll have to buy the book or borrow a copy if you want to see it.

Enjoy.

The Bomb Throwers

In today's New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Peter Richardson's A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. While the review is generally favorable, Garner laments a lack of context: Where, he wonders, is Tom Paine and the history of dissident pamphleteering in America? Where is the general cultural freak-out of the Sixties? And, where oh where is the Berkeley Barb? (To be fair, the Barb is probably a book in itself.) In the end, Garner deems the book "appealing if choppy."

Richardson gave us an appealingly adapted (and not at all choppy) excerpt from his book for our current issue, tracking the deep Berkeley roots of Ramparts' editorial staff.  See "Radical Slick," which opens our new Arts and Letters Section. 

We also caught up with former Ramparts staffer/Berkeley alum Jerelle Kraus, who was in charge of the art in the Times's Op-Ed section. Her book is called All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't). Like Richardson's work, it ties into the Gonzo spirit of the alternative press -- albeit, in this case, from within the halls of the vaunted and oh-so-mainstream Times.

Talking Twain

Our latest edition -- the Humor Issue -- is now on the web and in mailboxes. We didn't make nearly as big a deal about it is we probably should have, but thanks to the folks at the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, the magazine includes two previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain. That's right, Mark Twain! Both are excerpts from Twain's autobiography, which has appeared in edited forms over the years, but never in its entirety. A definitive edition of that work is scheduled to appear next year, on the centennial of the author's death.

In the meantime, Twain lovers who are hungry for even more new material should be on the lookout for Who Is Mark Twain?, which is due to hit bookstores in April. The collection, which was compiled and edited by the folks at the Mark Twain Project and carries an introduction by the Project's Bob Hirst, features material never before published.

While I'm on the subject, the next few weeks will be your last chance to see Mark Twain at Play, the excellent exhibit in the lobby of the newly refurbished Bancroft. The exhibit was supposed to end on March 31 but has been extended till April 18. If you miss it, don't worry. All the Twain materials you could ever hope to lay your hands on are safely stored in the Mark Twain Papers on the top floor of the library: notebooks, letters, manuscripts, canceled checks, you name it -- it's all available to generations of curious scholars who want to know who exactly Mark Twain was. 

Aww....

Sometimes I sit in front of my computer and just bawl, but in a good way. Usually kittens and bunnies, like those at www.cuteoverload.com, get the faucets running, or stories about Siamese twins always really get me. This isn't anything new. For years, I've been known to weep over Hallmark, Pepsi, and Mr. Clean commercials. And I have a really, really weak spot for inmates. I cry when I pass a busload of inmates on the freeway, no joke. If I want a good old-fashioned tear-jerker night, I just commit to a night of Shawshank Redemption and Chardonnay.

But today, I got all teary about the loveliest story I think I've read in the Times in awhile which gorgeously combined inmates from a halfway house and books. My new heroine, Alison Link, initiated the routine of taking the guys out for a spin at the local Barnes and Noble.

Hratch Zadoyan grabbed a sports almanac to settle an argument about who played quarterback for Dallas in Super Bowl V. Eric Duncan settled into a chair with an encyclopedia of hip-hop. Anthony Martinelli, who has spent 27 of his 46 years in prison, was mistaken for a salesman. And that bit of grace rattled the heck out of him.

“I’m used to people being scared of me,” he said. “Coming from Newark, being wild. I’ve been told I look mean all the time. I was kind of lost today, so maybe I didn’t look so mean. I never been in no bookstore before.”

At first I took some issue with the Barnes and Noble part of it -- I mean, c'mon, this story is a dream come true for the book behemoth -- and I kept thinking, couldn't Ms. Link have taken them to an independent bookstore? But then I got over it.

Read this story and your day will be better, I promise. It's like having a warm furry bundle of hope delivered straight to your heart.

--Meghan

The best books since 1981

The NY Times just posted a list of American literati's choices for single best work of American fiction from the past 25 years. Toni Morrison's Beloved was the winner, and we approve, and we are very glad that The Devil Wears Prada did not make the list. Ditto for The Bridges of Madison County (remember that? Wasn't it circa Melrose Place?). Here are a few others (listed sometimes by book, sometimes by author) that made it that we're cheering for:

• Don DeLillo (three of his books made the cut), John Updike, Mark Helprin, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford.
• Old favorites that we're delighted are still in the collective unconscious: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien; Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver; Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson.

Only two women made the list: Toni Morrison, at the top, of course, and Marilynne Robinson, for Housekeeping.

And in keeping with Bear Bites' mission of occasional snark, I'd like to point out who did NOT make the list, namely Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon. I don't know why I resent those two so much, but somehow my reaction to both smells uncannily like my extreme distaste for Gwyneth Paltrow, which in turn smells uncannily like jealousy (as I'll only admit after two glasses of wine).

A quick poll of California magazine staff reveals the following works which were not on the NYT list:

Kerry's nominee: Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. I concur that it was fabulous, although all I can really remember from it now is someone talking to a dead girl in a pickup truck.

Pat's nominee: "Anything by Cormac McCarthy. Can't you see I'm on deadline?" he growled (Pat is a Bear's bear).

Carrie is in the throes of reading Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and I just finished it myself, and frankly after reading that book one needs some time to recuperate -- to climb out of the well -- to even able to remember that American fiction exists.

But I'm glad to be reminded: "Oh yes, I have got to read more Don DeLillo."

--ML