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Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (“How to discuss books that one hasn’t read”), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.

Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:

“LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten).

Tahourdin next recounts that Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.

[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

I suppose we should delight in his honesty.

I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?

I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.

Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?

Where are its roots?

Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:

When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.

I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .

Technorati Tags: James Joyce, writing, books, literature

At some point in fifth grade, I noticed the blackboard in Mrs. Marshman’s math class was blurry. I mentioned it to my parents, and within a few weeks had been fitted with my first pair of glasses.

I didn’t submit to the experience wholeheartedly, by any means. Most troubling was the sense that I was now damaged in some way. Poor eyesight is a mild disability for sure, generally more a nuisance than a crippler. Still, the finality of it weighed on me. It also complicated things. My eyeglass lenses were constantly in need of cleaning, the frames would get knocked about and no longer fit, and then, of course, came puberty, and to my other insecurities came the added burden of a reputation for braini-slash-nerdiness — of which my glasses were an obvious sign.

The body is always in a state of flux, of course, and once pointed in the direction of poor vision dutifully explores that trajectory; the silver lining was that as my eyesight worsened I swapped the hornrims for gold wire rims, and later contact lenses. Not quite so homely.

But I still hated them.

Then, in the late 1980s, I learned about William Bates, an early 20th Century physician who had made the astonishing claim that poor eyesight is learned — and can be unlearned.

I read his book, tossed my contacts aside, and began muddling about the world without my visual crutch.

I was encouraged at first. With my eyes freed to function more naturally, my vision improved quite a bit right away; my right eye (the “weaker” of the two) went from 20/180 to 20/80 or so.

But 20/20 vision eluded me. I could induce it for short periods — I’ve passed vision tests, twice, for my driver’s license — but much of the time my world was still blurry. I didn’t put my glasses back on. But sometimes I wondered if the received wisdom wasn’t correct, after all. It seemed that perhaps poor eyesight is inescapable, a curse bestowed by our genes or the modern necessity of being tethered to close-up work, reading, computers.

Now I know differently.

The clues I needed were in another book, Relearning to See, by Thomas Quackenbush. I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my discovery, but the upshot is that I needed to relax and stop trying to see. By trying to see, I was distorting either the shape or the alignment of my eyeballs. When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, the world around clears.

This isn’t a purely physical change. On the contrary, Candace Pert is right on when she says the body is the subconscious mind. Granted, straining to see has a measurable effect on the physical body (this image

is one Quackenbush reprinted from Bates’ Perfect Sight Without Glasses; the woman had perfect vision at the time the leftmost photo was taken. In the middle photo she has myopia — see how her eyes look different? And on the right, she’s furrowing her brow as she tries to see) — but it is first and foremost a condition of being. Put another way: my vision began to blur when I was a child not because my eyes were failing but because as I transitioned from early childhood into social awareness — when I began valuing how others viewed me — a kind of habitual anxiety that defined my relationship to myself hardened into fact. Little wonder the world around me went dim.

When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, I feel something that affects more than my eyes. It’s like sinking back into a comfortable chair, a state of being in which I am letting go instead of struggling. The clarity of my vision is ancillary: a function of a different vantage point rather than a different way to hold the muscles of my eyes.

Quackenbush touches on this as well in his book, writing:

The individual with blurred vision is interfering with the normal, relaxed way of using the mind and body.

Plenty has been said about the way we modern folk are so stressed; how we react to non-physical stimuli with the same fight/flight response our forebears depended upon to escape saber toothed tigers. But how many of us realize that this response literally distorts our experience? It’s a perversion of our ability to think abstractly: we wrap ourselves in a kind of continual low-grade nightmare, little realizing that our anxiety defines what we can touch and know.

“Cultivate a habit of relaxation.” It’s the first New Year’s resolution on my list, because I’ve begun to understand that everything else flows from it . . .

Technorati Tags: eyesight, myopia, natural vision

“HarperCollins announced the firing, ‘effective immediately,’ in a two-sentence news release that was issued about 7 p.m. Eastern time.”

Technorati Tags: O.J. Simpson

When someone wrote an Amazon review that she’d bought Outwitting Dogs because her dog was on the cover, I assumed she meant she owned a Jack Russell terrier and bought the book because there’s a Jack Russell on the front.

Doh!!!

It really IS her dog on the cover!!!

Susan has sent me some more pics of Camilla to post here. Look at that sweetie! She doesn’t look at all like a dog who would chew a slipper now, does she!

And isn’t this cool? Turns out the book’s cover model is a hard-working industry professional with a massive portfolio — who hobnobs with some of the most famous dogs in the biz!!! Lassie!!! Beethoven! The Taco Bell chihuahua!!! Air Bud! And that’s Bullseye, the Target Bull Terrier, in the sunglasses, right?

And look at this one — you can see why this dog works a lot. Doesn’t that make your heart just melt?

Technorati Tags: Outwitting Dogs

Isn’t this nice? Outwitting Dogs cracked Amazon’s Top Ten List of dog training books!

This was last night. Since the list is updated hourly, the ranking fluctuates–the book had dropped two placed by this morning. Still, it’s cool, isn’t it? Up there with Karen Pryor! :-o And the Monks of New Skete! LOL

Technorati Tags: dogs, dog training, Outwitting Dogs

She was a brilliant naturalist — one of the first people in the world to recognize that lichens are a symbiotic organism, for instance. As a woman, however, she was excluded from assuming what would have been, today, her place in the scientific community.

Article here in Chet Raymo’s online Science Musings.

Technorati Tags: science, Beatrix Potter

Story in the Guardian.

My favorite line: “Yes, but … what about the children?”

Technorati Tags: children’s books

Via Publishers Marketplace, here’s a Election Day countdown treat with a writerly twist: a “Match the porn with the politician who wrote it” quiz.

:-)

UPDATE: Okay, I linked first, read later, and really, the quiz title should be “Match the most gawdawful prose ever written with the politician who wrote it.”

I now need a shower and it’s NOT because of the sex!

Technorati Tags: novels, politics

It’s a thrill when the dog training book I co-wrote gets a mention in the press, of course, but I also love when someone says something like this, which I just found in a dog training forum (Terry Ryan is the trainer I teamed up with to write Outwitting Dogs):

I second Sandra on the Terry Ryan book, i just bought it and im hooked.

It’s hard to assign a value to writing quality, and it happens that Terry (her website is here) is a gifted and experienced dog trainer; there’s no question that the enthusiasm shown by people who read it are in large part due to the quality of the content. The lady knows what she’s doing when it comes to dogs!

But I like to think that my contribution — in terms of the organization, clarity of the writing, and tone of the book — are playing a part in the book’s success as well ;-)

/end shameless self-promotion

Technorati Tags: dog training, Outwitting Dogs

Newly awakened, I recognized
the day — it was yesterday,
it was yesterday with another name,
it was friend I knew to be lost
who came back to surprise me.

Thursday, I said to it, wait for me,
I am going to dress. We’ll go out together
until you disappear into night.
You shall die, I shall go on
awake and accustomed
to the satisfactions of dark.

Things came about quite differently
as I shall tell in intimate detail.

I don’t really care for Neruda — much of his poetry strikes me as forced — but this one’s pretty nice, and after a day spent hunched at my computer, looking up only long enough, once in awhile, to chafe at my responsibilities, at the dullness of being responsible when it’s naughtiness I need — I can relate to the Thursday of the poem that turns finally into a tomb.

The translation is by Alistair Reid, from a 1972 bilingual edition, in paperback, Pablo Neruda Selected Poems.

Technorati Tags: poetry, Pablo Neruda