The ceremony was held in the treehouse of the Marigot Bay Hotel, with inquisitive geckos looking on as we exchanged rings and cut a delicious carrot cake. Looking forward to many happy years together.
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On Tuesday Jenn and I will be married in a treehouse overlooking the bay. I can’t think of a better place for it.
Photo by Emily Forrest.
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Having spent some time in Zimbabwe, I can attest that Southern Africans are devoted meat eaters. Novelist Zakes Mda is an exception. Late in his rambling memoir Sometimes There Is a Void, he explains how this came to be.
I have always been inclined towards vegetarianism even as I devoured huge chunks of pork. I have always felt bad for the animals I was eating but did not have the courage to do anything about it....
It is only on a subsequent visit to South Africa that something that happens that forces us to think twice about eating meat. Gugu has moved to Twin Oaks, a townhouse complex in Randpark Ridge. I buy a plump duck that I first steam for her. I then bake it after basting it in a mixture of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, white pepper, soy sauce and honey. After I have done the job it looks really good and we are looking forward to eating it. Just as we are preparing to serve the meal we hear some quacking sounds outside. When we open the door there is a mother duck and her ducklings standing on the doorstep looking at us admonishingly. We quickly close the door.
“There’s no way I can eat this meat now,” I say.
“Nor me,” says Gugu.
We dump that whole duck into the dustbin. From that day we stop eating meat altogether.
Jenn and I have been semi-vegetarians for several years—though unlike Mda, we do eat fish and crustaceans. Our habit was confirmed one chilly day when we visited the farmer’s market in Union Square and noticed a couple of lambs in a small pen. They were dressed in little sweaters and were nuzzling each other companionably.
“What do you do with them?” a customer asked.
“Well, you could keep them as pets,” the farmer replied. “Or you could eat them!” he said brightly.
(I see from Jenn’s blog that the lambs weren’t wearing sweaters. They were actually wrapped in a blanket. Just one example of the many tricks your memory can play.)
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I am delighted to announce that my next book, African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies, will be published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in the spring of 2013.
African Lives is a pan-African collection of autobiographical writings by Africans of various ethnic groups, from Ibn Battuta and St. Augustine (born to a Roman father and Berber father in North Africa) to Zakes Mda and Binyavanga Wainaina. The book is organized by geographical region.
The table of contents has not yet been finalized, but these are just a few of the books I plan to draw from:
African Lives should be a useful resource for classes in African history, culture, and literature, but I’m hoping the dramatic true-life stories I’ve collected will also find a wider audience.
If you know of someone who should know about this book, or if you have some last-minute suggestions for work I should include, please let me know!
“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime adviser to Mr. Romney, said in response to a question about pivoting to a matchup with Mr. Obama and appealing to moderate swing voters. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
In a book called Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath offer an acronym that describes memorable messages: SUCCES (yes, it’s one S short). It stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story-Containing.
Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, Mr. Fehrnstrom’s remark covered the bases nicely.
Simple? Yes.
Unexpected? No question.
Concrete? What could be more concrete than the image of a toy that almost anyone can picture, and that many of us played with as children?
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If you’ve been reading something disturbing, I can recommend Ricky Jay’s new collection Celebrations of Curious Characters as an antidote.
For years I’ve enjoyed Ricky Jay’s hooded gaze and gravelly voice on FlashForward, Deadwood, The X-Files, House of Games, and elsewhere, but he is also an entertaining author, with a predilection for the sort of twenty-dollar words you might hear from a 19th century pitchman. (This way to the egress!)
Based on a series of four-minute public radio features, these are tales of magicians, con men, astonishing calculators and linguists, and people who can dress rats in riding silks and jodhpurs and train them to ride on catback (and train the cats to put up with it). The stories are accompanied by vintage prints, engravings, and handbills from Ricky Jay’s own collection.
There are also some good jokes.
]]>Some years ago I portrayed an Israeli Mossad agent in the film Homicide, and the director, David Mamet, asked me to speak a few lines in Hebrew. I studied assiduously and proudly played my part. The movie later screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and I asked David about the audience reaction to my part of the dialogue. “Oh they loved it,” he said. “They all wanted to know what language you were speaking.”
Despite its clean writing and constant revelations, The Red Market has pages I could hardly look at (for instance, those describing how organs are harvested from Falun Gong members in China). It’s a fairly short book, which is just as well for most readers, but the author’s list of what he didn’t cover makes it clear that it could have been much longer.
]]>As I began to contemplate putting all of my research into one book, I realized that there were more criminal red markets than I could ever hope to cover. I’ve left out landmark cases of morgue thefts across the United States, where funeral parlors sold the bodies they were entrusted to take care of to tissue-supply companies. The desecrated corpses were carved into surgical grafs and replacement tendons. I’ve ignored scandals around traveling museum exhibitions, where plastinated bodies of executed prisoners have been put on display. Likewise I’ve only briefly mentioned a report than more than one hundred thousand pituitary glands were stolen in England to produce human growth hormone. I make no mention of a recent report of Bolivian serial murderers who sold the fat of their victims to European beauty-supply companies that produce up-market facial creams. And every day the list grows. From the mid-1990s to 2000 the Israeli military harvested the corneas of Palestinian militants killed in combat. And deeper in history, at the turn of the nineteenth century a booming market for shrunken heads in Europe sparked tribal wars in South America. Providing an exhaustive account of every red market is beyond my abilities.
As I said once before, I came late to the Michael Lewis party, so it’s only now that I’m reading Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. (I haven’t seen the movie yet.)
I’m not especially interested in baseball, but the book is still a great story. It’s not as packed with marketing ideas as, say, Thinking, Fast and Slow, but it has a few good ones:
Paul DePodesta was just the sort of person who might have made an easy fortune in finance, but the market for baseball players, in Paul’s view, was far more interesting than anything Wall Street offered. There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t. There was also a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next. Thirdly—but not lastly—there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to the reality.
Later in the book, we learn why a general manager with a limited budget should look closely at players who are undervalued because they are fat or even have club feet.
The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing, because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.
Baseball is a game of statistics, but one of the key insights of Paul DePodesta was that some statistics mattered a lot more than others.
Not long after he’d graduated from Harvard, in the mid-nineties, he’d plugged the statistics of every baseball team from the twentieth century into an equation and tested which of them correlated most closely with winning percentage. He’d found only two, both offensive statistics, inextricably linked to baseball success: on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Everything else was far less important.
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Around 1993, I think, Jenn and I went to see Spalding Gray perform Gray’s Anatomy at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club. It was one of our first real dates. The audience enjoyed it, but there were parts of the monologue, especially when he spoke of his suicidal mother, that struck too close to home for some. I noticed a handful of people getting up abruptly and stalking out.
While in Thailand filming The Killing Fields, he writes in his recently published journals, “We saw water Buffalo and I walked with the herd boys. I ran from group to group. I cried in front of Penny when she asked me about Liz. Penny told me that I said things that people thought but didn’t say.”
I was already a fan, and over the years I continued to be fascinated by his strange, funny, honest stories. Spalding Gray dressed just the way I did myself—khakis and plaid flannel shirts—and it occurred to me that if I had had any gift for acting, it would probably express itself in just the way it did with him: sitting at a wooden table with a notebook and a glass of water, talking to an audience.
After he disappeared in 2004, I kept hoping for day after day that he would turn up alive. When his body turned up on the banks of the East River, I was surprised at how painful it was for me. He had been a part of my life for a long time.
One of the quirky treats of Spalding Gray’s journals is the many dreams he recorded, of which this is one example.
]]>June 12, 1983
DREAM: I was diagnosed as having an incurable disease (referred to as a cancer) that was killing me slowly. I was taking care of some pet fish and put them in the oven with some “wild” fish. Went in a panic to open the oven and all the fish looked at me with intelligent eyes—like dog eyes. I managed to get one out of the oven and it turned into John Malkovich who seemed indifferent to being saved.
On the recommendation of Glenn Danzig, I checked out The Werewolf by Montague Summers from the library (reprinted by Dover as The Werewolf in Lore and Legend).
The first thing that struck me about the book was its antique language and its erudition. “It would have been only too simple a matter, “writes Summers on the first page of his introduction, “ if I had desired, to farse and bombast my notes with scores upon scores of further references...” His book is plentifully footnoted, chockablock with Latin, Greek, and old French, and peppered with obscure or antiquated words including (in the first few pages alone) mournival, prolusion, zetetic, catena, somatist, and expiscate.
The second thing, remarkable for a book first published in 1933, is the author’s firm belief in the reality of werewolves and witches, and his brusque dismissal of those who question their existence.
From whatever cause this shape-shifting may arise, it is very certain by the common consent of all antiquity and all history, by the testimony of learned men, by experience and first-hand witness, that werewolfism which involves some change of form from man to animal is a very real and a very terrible thing.
And again…
No thinking person can deny that these witches in the form of cats suck the blood of children and overlook them, and indeed not unseldom kill them by diabolical agency.
But although Summers is quite solemn about the enduring threat of werewolves and witchcraft, what really seems to upset him is the internal combustion engine.
]]>To-day the risks are no less than in ancient times, the British and Anglo-Saxon periods, although truly the perils are of a different kind. From one end of our island to another the roads are packed and ploughed by mechanical conveyances of the ugliest and most vicious pattern, swift engines of death and destruction, goaded to a maniac speed amid stench unutterable and the din of devils.
When we see London, despoiled of all her beauty, her nakedness uncovered, throwing out hideous suburban tentacles for miles after mile on all sides, it is impossible to realize that between the tenth and twelfth centuries there came up wellnigh to her gates, but a few fair meadows and open pasture lands intervening, vast forests in whose depths dwelt the stag, and the wild-boar and the bull.
Back in 2008 I reviewed Blood River by Tim Butcher, an account of a journey through the Congo. His new book Chasing the Devil tells how he followed the path of Graham Greene through Liberia and Sierra Leone.
I wonder whether someone in the marketing department at Atlas & Co. has a sense of humor. This is how the book is described in the flyer: “Butcher discovers countries left fractured and destitute by ethnic conflict, where street hawkers peddle knock-off DVDs and thugs cruise in luxury SUVs along poverty-ridden streets.”
If you live in New York City, that’s just an average day.
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