Obama won Texas?

The major news media have been reporting for a week that Hillary Clinton has saved her campaign and built momentum by winning the primaries in Ohio and Texas. But now NPR has reported that she may not have won Texas after all. She won the popular vote but apparently lost the caucus vote, which could leave her with 95 delegates to Obama’s 98. According to NPR, it may not be sorted out until June.

Meanwhile, the constant repetition of what is, at best, a half-truth continues to shape the opinions of people who don’t dig deeper — along with half-truths (or worse) like “Hillary has more experience” (because she was First Lady?) and “Obama doesn’t have detailed proposals.”

Paul Theroux

I caught the end of a Brian Lamb interview with Paul Theroux about his book Dark Star Safari, an account of Theroux’s journey down the east coast of Africa, from Egypt to South Africa. Theroux is an uneven writer, but his best work, like The Mosquito Coast and My Secret History, is excellent. And as Lamb pointed out, he has spent more time learning about the rest of the world than nearly any other contemporary American writer. (More than any I can readily think of, aside from the half-crazed William Vollmann.)

It’s a little startling to think that Theroux, with his well tailored suits and mid-Atlantic accent (he lived in England for years), was traveling through Africa in the backs of trucks a couple of years ago, when he turned sixty. Lamb asked him how he felt about growing older, and he said “What age means to me is that it’s a fraud, that age means nothing.” So long as you’re healthy, I suppose he’s right. As someone once said, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

Negotiating with the Dead

I’ve read a number of books about writing — John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction is a favorite, though the exercises are intimidating and the subhead, “Notes on Craft for Young Writers,” always gives me the uneasy feeling that I might be too old to benefit — but until recently I hadn’t heard of Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead. I don’t think it’s particularly well known.

Part of the trouble may be the forbidding title. Another part of the trouble may be that this isn’t like other books on writing. It’s not all about craft, like Gardner’s book, or about the life of a writer, like Stephen King’s. There’s some of that, but mostly there are meditations on questions like “Who is the writer when she’s writing?” and “Who is she writing for?” and “Is it wrong to write for money, and if so, why?” Atwood is surprisingly funny in this book (based on a series of lectures), especially about her childhood as the daughter of an expert on forest insects. I was pleased, too, to see that she discovered Edgar Allan Poe and the Sherlock Holmes stories at the same early age that I did. 

Most literate cities

I ran across an article today about chasing book thieves, and I noticed that the Seattle paper where it appeared, The Stranger, has a regular feature called “Constant Reader,” about books and bookstore life.

Seattle must be a pretty bookish town, I thought. And sure enough, Seattle is ranked number two on a list (a few years old) of “most literate U.S. cities.” Minneapolis is number one, and other cities I suspected of bookishness were high on the list as well. Madison is number four, Washington, D.C. is number six, and Boston, Portland, and San Francisco come in at eight, nine, and ten. (By “Boston” I suspect the researchers meant the greater Boston area, with Cambridge providing most of the boost.) The high scores of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati did surprise me.

New York City ranks 49th, which strikes me as about right. Despite being the center of the publishing world and the home of a lot of writers, New York is not the most bookish town. As Jenn has pointed out, New Yorkers generally want to be entertained, and not by sitting in an armchair with a good novel.

About book thieves: I’ve read that shoplifters are psychologically different from other sorts of criminals. They generally don’t commit other crimes, and their motivation for stealing is often to make themselves feel better by giving themselves a gift. When Jenn and I had our bookstore cafe, we noticed that theft spiked up dramatically in the weeks after 9/11. Some people knitted, some drank herbal tea, and others made off with whole stacks of expensive coffee-table books.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Some books are imprinted forever with the places where you read them. When I think of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Kawabata, for instance, I think of the old stone quarry in Rockport, Massachusetts.

A few times in the summer, back when I was living in Cambridge, I took the train from Boston to Rockport and hiked to the rocky peninsula where the quarry was dug long ago. Now it’s filled with rainwater, and a few bushes have taken root between the blocks and slabs of rock. It was a good place to go either alone or with a friend, and when I think of it I remember leaning against a flat, sun-warmed slab of granite and reading the hardcover edition of Kawabata’s book. The cover was just ornamental type on a very pleasing shade of deep blue.

A couple of times I was there in the late afternoon, waiting for the sunset. The bay to the west of the quarry was broad enough that you could actually see the sun set into the water — rare for the East Coast. I kept hoping I would see the famous green flash at the last moment of sunset, but I never did.

I checked out Palm-of-the-Hand Stories from the library, but I haven’t recaptured the magic of reading it the first time. The paperback edition from the library has a murky photo of hands rather than the deep blue cover. The stories, too, are more disturbing than I remember, though Kawabata’s ability to convey character and emotion in two or three pages is amazing.