The Tent

by Margaret Atwood

This book of essays and poems is by one of my favorite authors. Until now, I'd only read her fiction (novels, novellas and short stories), but this book is different than the others. They're only about 2 pages long each... And yet, they still made me think differently, which I guess, is a goal for any book I read. Still made me laugh. It's got a nice, dark sense of humor. And now I don't want to return it to the library, but I guess that it just means that I'll have to go out and buy it. I suppose there could be worse fates :)

What I really want is to post the whole book here. But that violates a number of copyright laws, and you'd miss the fun of the illustrations that are sprinkled in here and there. Just pieces of one story, because it's so much fun, and they're all so full of wonderful things that it's hard to pick several small pieces... Instead, I just chose most of one of the essays, in L's honor.

"Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He'd never liked heights so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.

When he got to heaven, it was a large field. There were a lot of little pink things running around that he thought at first were mice. Then he saw God sitting in a tree. Angels were flying here and there with their fluttering white wings; they were making sounds like doves. Every once in a while God would reach out with its large furry paw and snatch one of them out of the air and crunch it up. The ground under the tree was littered with bitten off angel wings.

Our cat went politely over to the tree. Meow, said our cat. Meow, said God. Actually, it was more like a roar.

I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn't sure...

They aren't mice, said God. But catch as many of them as you like. Don't kill them right away. Make them suffer.

You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that.

It's a question of semantics, said God. You won't get in trouble for that here.

Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what "semantics" was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren't mice, what are they? he said. Already he'd pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks.

They're the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don't mind, it's time for my nap.

What are they doing in heaven? said our cat.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe."

Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

Another library book, but I picked this one because Amazon and iTunes (the audio book section) were pushing this book. And at first, I wasn't interested in a novel about research ethics and academic integrity issues in a lab. Didn't seem like it would make a compelling plot.

And yet it did. I was up till 3:30 this morning reading this book, and then I finished it this evening (which may have also been possible because the television wasn't working, but anyway...). Turns out, having just finished my degree, and working in a lab environment, and to a lesser degree, having dated a co-worker, it was incredibly interesting. A girl is hurt, and lashes out at what turns out to be an easy target. What's interesting is all the fallout in the supporting cast. And the academic politics. And ultimately, the intersection of science and politics (which is, after all, what I just finished studying, in a broad sense). Though my situation was far, far different than hers, having been in an academic environment, and knowing people in these sorts of positions made me sympathetic. And apparently, unable to put this book down. I'm going to recommend it to C., if and when we talk about books again, because I think he could (should?) find it interesting, as a person who will be pursuing research and perhaps a post-doc someday. The book is a little preachy at points, unfortunately tipping it's hand in judging what the characters are about to do, but I really liked it. And would recommend it (more generally) as an interesting commentary about the roles of science, ethics and personality in academia and research. It's more of a page-turner than a book that has literary elegance, but it does get points for turning a dry subject into a quick read.

"Deliciously self-deprecating, he dismissed his own results as minor, or even accidental. "It's random luck," he's day whenever he published an article or research note, and this along with myriad other sayings of Feng's, had become a catch-phrase in the lab. "Fungi," the other postdocs called them. To Marion's secret amusement, the researches collected Fungi in their lab books. For the past six months or so the postdocs had been compiling a lexicon that included such classic definitions as:

Sucessful grant proposal (idiom): 'major disaster, long-term'
Analyze (verb): 'to flounder'
Hypothesis (noun): 'highly flawed thinking'
Conference (noun): 'cancer junket'
Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): 'sick tax'
Breakthrough (noun): 'artifact'"

"Jacob thought carefully before he spoke. He looked at Robin as she sat before him in her short-sleeved summer shirt; he considered her bare arms, her fine open face, the humility and baffled sdness in her confession. He thought abou the place the time, and Robin's state of mind. Quite deliberately, Jacob considered what his words might mean to her - hesitated a moment - then shot his arrow anyway. He said, 'The results seem almost too good to be true'."

Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

This is the first Salman Rushdie book I've read. My friend T. had recommended him years ago, but I got bogged down. But now it's summer again, and I'm back to hitting up the Georgia Tech Library (probably for the last few times!). And I'd read a great review of the book, and decided it was time.

The first 40 or so pages of the book are slow. The story is told in pieces by characters, and the first seems self-indulgent, but unfortunately, not in an interesting way. However, the book moves on and picks up after that. It's a beautiful story, about how tiny pieces of peoples emotions create a perfect storm of events. It's about Kashmir, WWII France, India, and Hollywood. There's this idea in there that people are a function of their place, which I find particularly interesting as I try to decide on a place to live. It's a wonderful story about how people's flaws knit together into disaster, but in a way it also points out that their strengths could have knit together (had the stage been set as a comedy instead of a tragedy) to become their salvation. The book has a lot to say about the roots of terrorism, and the author does have a lovely turn of phrase. But I think that what will stay with me is how everyone thinks that they're doing the best that they can under the circumstance, and the reader can feel and understand how limited they think their options are. Lesser writers leave you unconvinced about a characters actions, you feel they should have known better, or surely they could have seen how this could go badly. But these poor people were doing what we all do, muddling through imperfect situations.

"The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty, like small mountain ranges made up of malfuctioning truck exhausts, jammed weaponry and broken tank treads. Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It cme to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out intino the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an antirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would here a hollow metallic ring. Because they were made of armor they could not be shot but they were too heavy to swim nd so if they fell into the water they would drown. Their breath was hot and smoky, like burning rubber tires, or the exhalations of dragons. They were to be honored, feared, and obeyed."

"As a result of Max's unexpected romantic infatuation - and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised - he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don't ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and thworing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.

So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerinin the withhoding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, s content to possessit as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as collector who can't resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir."

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

by Albert O. Hirschman

I read this book for my professional paper, the day before the paper was due, on the recommendation of my advisor. I wish I'd read it before I wrote the paper. In fact, I wish I'd read it before I went to Ethiopia. Ah well. But it's a great book. It's not often that you read a book for school or work that's supposed to be on a technical matter and it ends up articulating a framework for thoughts that had always been disconnected. What remains to be seen is if it will find its way into the paper at this late date.

The book is about how when people are dissatisfied with a situation, they can leave the situation (switch to another group, product, etc.) or they can work to change the situation to become more to their liking. Economic thought talks a lot more about leaving the situation (exiting the market, pursuing a substitute, etc.). Political thought is based on how to change the situtation (as leaving it could be considered, in the most extreme form, secession or treason), and activating stakeholders voices. According to the author, loyalty is one of the key factors that makes someone decide to stay within a system and try to change it (like people have to churches, families that they view as disfunctional). Made me think about the "America, love it or leave it" arguement in a new light. It's also a very readable (and short) book. I'd recommend it to anyone trying to think about the "should I stay or should I go" idea in a new light, though the book itself primarily uses the public/private school debate and public sector failure examples.

"Two principal determinants of the readiness to resort to voice when exit is possible were shown to be:
(1) the extent to which the customer-members are willing to trade off the certainty of exit against the uncertainties of an improvement in the deteriorated product; and
(2) the estimate customer-members have of their ability to influence the organization."

"The short-run interest of management in organizations is to increase its own freedome of movement; management will therefore strain to strip the member-customers of the weapons which they can wield, be they exit or voice, and convert, as it were, what should be a feedback into a safety valve. Thus voice can become mere "blowing off steam" as it is being emasculated by the instituionalization and domestication of dissent... and exit can similarly be blunted."

"Once members have a slight preference for, say, voice over exit, a cumulative movement sets in which makes exit look ever less attractive and more inconceivable. As a result, voice will be increasingly relied on by members at a time when management is working hard to make itself less vulnerable to it."