The Buried Life link added

I've also added a link to The Buried Life, four young guys whose attitude toward life has blown me away. I guess, having four daughters, two of whom are on the cusp of womanhood - yes, I'm bracing myself - has made me susceptible to the message inherent in The Buried Life. Effectively, what these four young men have done is respond to the immortal question they asked themselves: Why are you doing this? (Reminded me of the Talking Heads song that asks the immortal question, How do I work this? How many times have I asked myself that question?) They gave themselves the name The Buried Life, taken from a Matthew Arnold (1852) poem:

"But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;"

Ostensibly, they decided they were on a mission to accomplish their Bucket List (100 things to do before you die.) But it turned out to be much more complicated than that (and at the same time much simpler). Here's what they say on their website:

Life moves fast and we wanted to slow down and enjoy it. To do that we had to ask ourselves some important questions, most importantly: What do I need to achieve or experience before I die? When we turned the question on strangers, we were fascinated with the answers we received. Given the ultimate deadline, people are forced to ignore the day-to-day trivialities that sometimes bury their lives and evaluate their most personal dreams and ambitions. Ultimately, we want to get people excited about doing whatever it is they dream about doing. Why wait? We are also curious to know about the state of our generation, our values and the role we are play in today’s society. Really though, we want to have fun and help people.

Check them out.

New links

I draw your attention to a few new links I've added that I think are worth your time. They are John Degen's blogspot - author of the novel The Uninvited Guest which I quite liked (see my review below), and a guy who seems to be working hard on behalf of beleaguered, poverty-stricken writers in Canada.

Also, David Drummond's blog. He's the award-winning book cover designer who created the covers for The Rent Collector and Nick Maes' novel Dead Man's Float, both international prize-winners. Check out David's visually-clever style on his blog. I know you'll agree that he's one of the best in the business today.

Also added is 101 Squadron, blog of freelance editor, writer, journalism teacher and researcher Lawrence Nyveen. I actually know Lawrence through his wife Elvi - yeesh that sounds bad - when I coached their eldest daughter in soccer a few years back and who subsequently went on to an illustrious soccer coaching career herself. Lawrence and I share share a high-school alma mater, Bialik, though I think he's a couple of years younger than me. He writes with a wry sense of humour. Coaching apparently runs in the Nyveen family. On his blog you can follow the exploits of the kids hockey team Lawrence coaches (there's a future book in there too.). By the way, 101 Squadron refers to a famous Israeli airforce squadron and Lawrence is an afficionado who co-wrote what looks like a fascinating book about it.

In praise of the glorious toothpick

This link is just for fun.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/the-glorious-toothpick

And on a personal note in praise of my eldest daughter, who is as skinny as a toothpick, and from whom (G-d willing) I will shep much naches this weekend when she reads from the Torah on Shabbat Parashat Yitro. Her aliyah is the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments). Yasher koach Sivan!

Making sense of Steinerese

And here's another author I haven't read. George Steiner. Though I can't say I suffer any embarrassment from the admission. This article and the following sample from it may explain why:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3130055.ece

Making sense of Steinerese may look difficult, but it’s quite simple once you get the hang of it. Just ignore three-quarters of the words, and translate the rest into plain English.

Steinerese: “The rhetoric of desire is a category of discourse in which the neurophysiological generation of speech-acts and that of love-making engage reciprocally.”
English translation: “Talking and making love are closely related.”

Steinerese: “Though it may take on ‘surrealist’ modes, the grammatology of our dreams is linguistically organised and diversified far beyond the historically, socially circumscribed provincialities of the psychoanalytic.”
English translation: “Dreams involve language, and elude psychoanalysis.”

Steinerese: “Saturation by commentary, by textualities parasitic on preceding expositions, may, arguably, inhibit autonomous creativity.”
English translation: “Too much criticism stifles literature.”

I heard that at that big technology show (in Las Vegas?) recently one company introduced a device which translates simultaneously. You speak into one side of the handheld unit and an automated voice blurts your sentences out the other side in any one of several languages of your choice. I don't think I'm making this up. But if I am, it's a brilliant idea. Now if only they could invent something that does the same with the double-speak of politicians. Say, something that comes as a feature on your tv.

Epstein on The Jewish Americans

The adolescent son of a dear friend of mine, trying to get out of going to High Holiday services, said to his father, “Why do I have to go to synagogue? Uncle Joe [that would be me] doesn't go to synagogue, and no one is more Jewish than Uncle Joe.”

It's classic Joseph Epstein. Epstein is one of the very best American essayists. His last book of short fiction "Fabulous Small Jews" was a favourite from a couple of years back. And who better to comment on The Jewish Americans, this wonderful PBS documentary series I've been enjoying for the past couple of weeks. If you haven't been watching there are still a few episodes remaining. Someone should do the same for Jewish Canadians. It would be very different viewing to be sure. More restrained responses to similar social, political and economic trends. It wouldn't document the energy, the explosive creativity, the frenzied entrepreneurialism. On the other hand, neither would we see the same kind of mad rush to assimilate. And I'm not sure I agree with Epstein when he says that calling themselves Jewish Americans places the emphasis on being American. I guess grammatically he's correct, Jewish is the qualifier of American. But I've always thought of myself as a Jewish Canadian to give "Jewish" a sort of native primacy, a statement of roots. To paraphrase Letty Cottin Pogrebin “This [Canada] is our country, that [Israel] is our home.”

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2008-01/Jews_in_America.html

The story of 'Night' by Elie Wiesel

In the late 1950s, long before the advent of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust studies, Wiesel’s account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald was turned down by more than 15 publishers before the small firm Hill & Wang finally accepted it. How “Night” became an evergreen is more than a publishing phenomenon. It is also a case study in how a book helped created a genre, how a writer became an icon and how the Holocaust was absorbed into the American experience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Do I dare admit publicly that I've never read it? Oops, I think I just did. Further embarrassing admissions of unread classics are welcome in the comments section of this post. If you dare.

The Uninvited Guest by John Degen

The writing is crisp and controlled. This is an enjoyable, if not completely successful, first novel by a writer most definitely worth watching.

Hapless, aptly-named Stanley Cooper has been laid to rest and has passed the torch as guardian of Lord Stanley's Cup to Tony Chiello. Tony's first task as keeper of Canada's illustrious symbol of hockey supremacy, is to escort it to Romania. The prized hardware is to be the special guest at Dragos Petrescu's wedding in his hometown. It's an intriguing premise, and the reader can't help wondering who came up with this strange tradition of allowing each player of the winning team to spend some personal time with hockey's Holy Grail? The possibilities for plot curves and detours seem endlesss. Instead, Degen chooses to play it straight, no fancy deking or headfakes, just the literary equivalent of a slapshot between the legs.

The story has two main parts. The first is about "Two-Second" Stanley Cooper, so-named when he costs the Toronto Maple Leafs a game in the 1951 championship because of a timekeeping flub. This section is really a set-up for the second part about Tony's sojourn to Romania in the company of Drago's family, particularly his father Nicholae and cousin Diana, whom Tony fancies.

Tony plays second fiddle to the Cup, or as Tony himself puts it, the Cup takes him along on its travels not the other way around. Tony's a former hockey player who didn't quite make it to the pros. He's on the defensive, along for the ride in love and life, and we know that part of Degen's play is ultimately to bring Tony out of the shadows and into his own. Still, I had a problem caring about Tony, and I think it's because we simply don't get to know him intimately enough. When we learn about Tony's brief and intense relationship with hotblooded, insatiable Ewa Loest, it feels plunked down in the middle of the text.

The same goes with other episodes meant to add texture, like that of Valentin Propescu, the pervert music teacher from hell who's not shy about throwing his substantial girth around to get what he wants in return for his clients' social advancement. And again in the end, when the recently immigrated Petrescus recall being visited by a former member of the secret police in Montreal (another uninvited guest) who makes unexpected amends to Nicholae in a very satisfying way. It feels without precedent, a structural hitch which might have been remedied by introducing Ionescu earlier in the story. Transitions could have been handled more smoothly with a little more editing.

Still, when the narrative lands on Romanian tarmac Degen shows what he's capable of as a writer. The prose shifts from an anecdotal tone to one possessing a more layered and rewarding literary quality. Degen appears to have an insider's sense of what it felt like to live under totalitarian rule in Ceaucescu's Romania, and conveys well, the daily travails of life in a police state, coping with paranoia and secrecy. He uses backgammon as a powerful motif expressing the Romanian pride, humour, courage and determination of citizens living within a political system in which gamesmanship was the currency of existence, and everyone had to be a player of one sort or another to survive.

When I closed the novel, the lasting questions were not about Tony and where he would go from here, but about the real Stanley Cup. I wondered about the trophy's venerable history. Is it true what I'd heard that one time a hockey player (from the Montreal Canadiens?) had taken the Cup home and on the way suffered a flat tire? After changing it, the story goes, he forgot the trophy on the side of the highway. There must be dozens more bizarre tales of the Cup's travels. I'm grateful to Degen for opening that door and look forward to his next outing.