Reviews of Dan Brown’s latest … ugh

Il Miglior Fabbro in a pensive mood (perhaps thinking about books and book reviewers): portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, 16th century

Another Dan Brown novel, another pack of smug reviews.

Here’s my confession:  I’m already sick of the reviews of Brown’s “Inferno,” and the book only pubbed a day ago. Reviewers say that Brown doesn’t do anything new in his latest, but here’s the thing: neither do they.

The criticisms are predictable; the angles are all the same. “How can he write such drivel?” they say, wringing their hands. At this point, after four books, attacking Brown’s prose style or story line is unimaginative and tiresome — like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.

If they can do better than Brown, then they should give it a try. Please. That’s what’s changed for me, my friends. As I’ve worked with historical material and puzzles in a book of my own,  I’ve come to appreciate Brown even if I wouldn’t make the same narrative choices.

Every reviewer, in fact, should try to write a novel or a story before offering to review one. That doesn’t mean that you’ll become an instant cheerleader. But at least you’ll have a broader perspective … and maybe you’ll avoid carpal tunnel syndrome from all that hand-wringing. Writing  is an extraordinarily humbling, powerful journey.

FOR YOUR READING (DIS)PLEASURE:

Good:
New York Times (keeps perspective on the story, and the thriller genre): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/books/inferno-by-dan-brown.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Decent:
The Globe and Mail (it starts off like all the rest, and then changes) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/has-dan-brown-become-gasp-a-better-writer/article11940973/

New York Daily News:  http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/dante-catholicism-fill-brown-sizzling-inferno-article-1.1343823

Eye-rollers
The Standard: http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/book/review-a-chase-a-blonde-some-dimwit-culture-it-must-be-dan-browns-new-blockbuster-inferno-8615057.html

Clives James in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/14/clive-james-dan-brown/2155487/

Praise (with an extreme back of the hand)
The Telegraph:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10053517/Inferno-by-Dan-Brown-review.html

Completely lame:
The Guardian (imitating Brown’s writing)  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/14/dan-brown-inferno-first-look

Mea culpa:
I’m no innocent bystander. I was once guilty of this sort of holier-than-thou reviewing too  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-lost-symbol14-2009sep14,0,5481048.story (blech)

Carol Ann Duffy’s songs of the Earth

Credit: Jacopo Werther

It almost sounds like British laureate Carol Ann Duffy is responding to news headlines about bee populations and cellphone usage when she says:

Where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise

In pear trees, plum trees; bees

Are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.




Guard them—against what? Cell phones? Against our environmental ignorance?

Duffy might have that situation in mind, but her  poem “Virgil’s Bees” also evokes Caesar Augustus’ favorite bard and his praise of bees and their labor in the  Georgics.

It’s a poem belonging to Duffy’s yellow-and-black-themed collection, “The Bees” — one of two volumes published by Faber and Faber this spring to welcome the season (how many publishers are classy enough to have such poetic timing for publication dates?) from a poet who’s scooped up every contemporary poetry prize worth winning, from the T.S. Eliot Prize to the Costa Book Award to the Dylan Thomas Prize and on and on.

“There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping/the last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in…” she writes in “Forest,” a poem in the other volume, “Rapture,” about a memory of lovemaking in the woods that ends with a poignant, painful request:


I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.



This is elemental stuff that’s rich with mythic associations (how many dark woods are there in fairy tales and myths? Can you count them all? Impossible!). This is what I look for in poetry — language that I can think about the way someone else thinks about songs from the radio; and a sensibility whose roots are deep in ancient tradition and whose branches spread a lovely, contemporary shade.

Duffy prides herself on using plain, simple words — a poet like Seamus Heaney, who relishes strange, Latinate language, seems to annoy her (I don’t see why) — but that doesn’t mean her poetry is without shadows or mystery, beauty or grace. When morning light falls on “the softening earth,” in the poem “Grace,” Duffy experiences a moment of spiritual transcendence:

…the moon stepping slowly backwards

out of the morning sky, reward

for the dark hours we took to arrive and kneel

at the silver river’s edge near the heron priest….



We should all be so lucky to experience such a moment. And if we can’t, at least we can read Duffy’s work. That’s a good consolation.

Related articles

• Words, Wide Night, by Carol Ann Duffy (objetsdevertu.wordpress.com)
• Carol Ann Duffy unveils poems inspired by museums (guardian.co.uk)
• Poetry: Carol Anne Duffy (insideenglishteaching.wordpress.com)
• First 37 – seeing/hearing Britain’s first female poet laureate (50firsts2012and13.wordpress.com)
• Form for All ~ Terza Rima and the Terza Rima Sonnet (dversepoets.com)

Angels, Neruda, Odom’s poetry and more: a roundup

Coming soon: What begins Michael Odom’s book of poetry “Strutting Attracting Snapping” isn’t a poem… it’s a picture. A sheet of grid paper with a maze written in pencil. The maze has a “Start” and a “Finish” and a lot of twists and meaningful detours in between… and it’s much like the experience of reading Odom’s powerful chapbook. Look for a Q & A with the author to appear here, at Call of the Siren, very soon.

Young readers: How do we  improve our children’s reading ability? I think of that all the time, especially as mine grow older and I realize that I can share more of my book interests with them. There’s a great comments thread that you might unspool at Games4Learning and gain some helpful ideas to try at home.

Harper Lee: Won’t she live forever? It’s been impossible to think of the real Scout as susceptible to time and declining health, but then I learned about her  unfortunate situation with her agent and the copyright of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Rather than brood on that, though, I have a question for Ms. Lee: Why won’t you say something about your novel’s creation before it’s too late? If it’s a one-off and you never found the right material to make another, then why not say so? (Plenty of “one and done” authors would find deep consolation in what she has to say.)  On the other hand, if Truman Capote helped her to write it,  why not admit it and give credit where it’s due? It might be a sore spot, especially for so many years’ recognition as the book’s sole author, but if someone’s going to have a co-author, they could do far worse than Capote, don’t you think?

Holy angels, Batman: The Red Serpent takes a pithy, sardonic look at angels as the first comic book superheroes in a new post. What line did I especially like? This one, on something that angels and superheroes have in common: “Items of clothing that closely resemble lingerie or underwear.” Check it out. Definitely worth your time.

Deathproof: Pablo Neruda was unearthed to decide whether or not he died from a lethal injection given by Augusto Pinochet’s regime. So far, the early tests reveal that he had advanced cancer. If anyone deserves to be called a superhero besides an angel — see item above  – it’s Neruda. He was a superhero for Chile. Whatever the results of the exhumation — whether death by cancer or poison — the same’s not true of his poetry.  His poetry’s immortal. Bullet-proof. That’s what Ilan Stavans points out in a lovely item in the New York Times, and that’s what Neruda also says, about poetry’s power even in the darkest moments, in “A Song of Despair”:

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Related articles

• National Poetry Month: Pablo Neruda (diaryofaneccentric.wordpress.com)
• Drunk as Drunk, by Pablo Neruda (objetsdevertu.wordpress.com)
• Poetry Preserves – Pablo Neruda (bethmurch.wordpress.com)
• Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s body exhumed (amandapayneblog.wordpress.com)

Hmmm…just curious: new in bookstores

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!: Unfriendly figure of Curiosity, from Cesare Ripa’s popular book of emblems, Iconologia, published in 1593

Philip Ball is a writer to be envied — he’s a non-affiliated academic who ranges far and wide wherever his curiosity takes him.

In the case of his new book, curiosity holds up a mirror to itself — and to all of Western civilization. With Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (University of Chicago Press), Ball shows the long, difficult road that science has taken in order to be allowed to ask every and any question about the natural world.

The book balances on two questions which he asks  early in the book:

“[I]n the wider world mightn’t there be something ill-disciplined, even improper, about a voracious curiosity that permits nothing to be too trivial or obscure?”

“Was there after all something in the old accusation that it is weak-willed to succumb to the wiles of curiosity?”

The answer, too, is given early: “[T]he problem of our times — and also its great good fortune — is that temptation is everywhere.”

Stop the presses

The sidewalk internet, circa 1902.

Considering the hits that the print media business has taken in recent years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that CareerCast.com has identified newspaper reporting as the worst job of 2013.

It’s never been an easy job — you’re constantly on call and on deadline — but that’s what makes it such an honorable profession. But the other aspects of the business today — less job openings, constant threat of layoffs, squeezing the life out of shrinking staffs of writers — were the deciding factors in CareerCast’s assessment.

I read the item with a feeling somewhere between relief (my own relief) and sympathy for colleagues still on the front lines. And I couldn’t help thinking of all those great mythic figures in art — from Penn Warren’s Jack Burden to the unnamed reporter questing after Rosebud’s identity in “Citizen Kane” — that partly inspire you to consider that profession in the first place.

What are some other reporter-characters in literature? Lucien Chardon in Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” — does he count, even though he’s just a hack? Peter Fallow in Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”? The character of “John Berendt” in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”? Who else? Lend me your thoughts.

I envy — and worry about — all those young college grads with journalism aspirations. They’re entering a world where headlines aren’t the brightest about their chosen vocation, and yet it’s an occupation that’s needed the most — without reporters, how else do you keep the rest of the world honest?

Weary, weary, weary

“There is an air of malaise within the painting,” notes one critic about Laus Veneris by Edward Burne-Jones. I couldn’t agree more.

You ever want to think about cool things and share them on the blog, but you can’t? A busy week’s kept away the Call of the Siren, and it’s made me feel like the unhappy-looking lady on the right side of this Burne-Jones  painting, Laus Veneris.

I think we’re both feeling the same thing, but she looks way better than I do in red.

Banking on Banks

Cancer’s a thief. It’s not a stealthy one, though. In most cases, it doesn’t sneak in and out of a window while the owners of the house snore in their beds. It’s more like a robber with an extreme taste for vandalism — it robs you of loved ones and leaves wreckage behind.

Still, many artists have put a brave face on this condition (I’m sure there’s a more substantial post here somewhere … for another time). I’m reminded of a beautiful beautiful beautiful poem (it’s clear that I think it’s beautiful, right?) by Stanley Plumly, “Cancer,” that mythologizes it:

Mine, I know, started at a distance
five hundred and twenty light-years away
and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth,
yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten
lying on my back looking up at the cluster
called the Beehive or by its other name
in the constellation Cancer,
the Crab…

The poem is found in “Orphan Hours: Poems,” published by W.W. Norton & Company. At $25.95 it’s a steal — worth every penny.

Iain Banks in 2005 (credit: Szymon Sokol)

And, at the other end of that noble spectrum, there’s Scottish novelist Iain Banks, who just announced a terminal diagnosis of gall bladder cancer on his website. The Guardian provides the full story.

Where Plumly is glorious and epic, Banks resorts to the type of black humor you find everywhere in his work, from his mysteries to his sci-fi Culture novels. What’s the sentence in his unhappy announcement that knocked me over and then out? This one:

“I’ve withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I’ve asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry — but we find ghoulish humour helps)”.

I truly admire that voice. I’m sure there’s fear and terror behind it, but it’s still extraordinary to me that anyone receiving such serious news could muster the energy to make their readers smile a little in spite of it all. (I wish I could have carried such an attitude when my own loved ones suffered from it.)

The Guardian article does much more than announce this news, however. It also gives readers a taste of what Banks’ work is all about (something else beautiful and strange? Banks’ novel “The Wasp Factory”) and an opportunity to read him while we still have the pleasure of including him in our company.

Related articles

• Iain Banks has terminal cancer (amandapayneblog.wordpress.com)
• Iain Banks (elisabethlanserrose.com)
• Iain Banks Has Gallbladder Cancer, Cancels All Upcoming Appearances (notthesingularity.com)