Reading
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
- Photo by Tamara Beckwith
- Adam Johnson
by Adam Johnson
Random House, 464 pp.
Most of The Orphan Master’s Son focuses on a North Korean man named after a government-appointed martyr whose name, Pak Jun Do, resembles “John Doe” for a reason. The book is at once a grand adventure, a hallucinatory ordeal, a deft spy story and a treatise on how the dogmas forced on people by ruthless institutions peel away truth and eventually even identity.
The book’s first section describes Pak Jun Do’s unlikely ascent to hero status. The rest of the book veers into something like magical realism gone wrong, where all the fantastical plot shifts and dreamlike moments are caused by the fear engendered by North Korea’s brutal regime.
Pak Jun Do and the others who live under Kim Jong Il are always prepared to hew to a reality in which all things glorify their Dear Leader. The stories they tell investigators and interrogators, the statements they make at work and in mandatory “criticism sessions,” and even private conversations among family members, are correspondingly nonsensical, and author Adam Johnson uses this absurdity to fuel Pak Jun Do’s bizarre journey from orphan to hero, from prisoner to politician.
Pak Jun Do’s identity is built on one such fiction, namely that, despite living in an orphanage, he is not an orphan. The boy decides he is actually the orphan master’s son mainly because the man treats him so badly: “Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel.”
The privilege of deciding which orphans do the merely menial jobs and which take the tasks more likely to be fatal also falls to Pak Jun Do—another sign, in his mind, of his true-born status—and the author implies that this may be at the root of his unwillingness to adhere completely to the rules of his society.
His ability to unmoor himself from the dogma is stymied somewhat by the simple fact that he has never known, or even glimpsed any other way of life, until he is recruited by the regime for various incursions into Japan, a mission monitoring radio transmissions from the hold of a fishing boat and, eventually, a surreal trip to Texas.
The moments when Pak Jun Do’s received knowledge collides with the reality of the wider world are stunningly effective on their own, and also as a backdrop for the catalog of humiliation that grows with Pak Jun Do’s every return home. Johnson’s presentation of the young man on the cold, cramped fishing boat, listening to radio transmissions from around the world night after night, zeroing in on the reflections of a particularly pensive American athlete who is trying to row around the globe, would stand alone as a gorgeous short story.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
- Photo by Meredith Heuer
- Daniel Handler
INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: I'm going to be blunt. A copy of your book arrived just this morning, and I finished it, and it’s a very gray and rainy day in Raleigh and this book did not help things.
DANIEL HANDLER: I’m sorry to hear that. I can only think of your suffering.
Well, I mean it as a compliment—the book captured for me the verisimilitude of a first romance and break-up. I’m curious about the roots of the story, and what inspired you to try to capture such heartache.
Well, it was Maira’s idea, I guess. We had worked together on a picture book (13 Words, written as Lemony Snicket), and she wanted to do another book, and she said yes. And I asked her what she wanted to paint, and she wanted to paint small objects, and I tried to think of a way that small, ordinary objects might seem magical. And it seemed to me that it would take a romantic imagination to transform such objects, and I began to imagine small objects returned to an ex-boyfriend by a sentimental-yet-enraged young woman like so many women I know.
Did Maira think of the objects, or did you?
- Photo by Rick Meyerowitz
- Maira Kalman
Something you’ve done with this book is get other writers to talk about their own worst break-up stories. When you were going back and putting yourself in the mindset of Min, what was the hardest part—or even the easiest part—of capturing the outsize emotions of a teenager?
I didn’t find it particularly hard to capture the voice. I take public transportation every day, and I’m surrounded by young people conversing, and I listen in to as much as I can without being called out as a creep. I guess maybe one of the more strenuous parts is I wrote the entire thing longhand—seeing as the entire book is one long letter, I thought it was only fair that I write a letter of my own. I wrote it all in cafés, basically, on legal pads, and by the end of writing my hand was roughly some sort of subhuman claw. The easiest part was having Maira doing all these paintings and have people talk about the spell the book casts, when so much of it comes from her drawings.
That’s oddly reminiscent of Jack Kerouac writing things out on a continuous scroll of paper, though on the one hand you’re talking about a fictional teenage girl and the other a drugged-out beatnik. But there’s a spontaneous feel to both.
I guess so. I’m kind of a careful writer, so a lot of what looks spontaneous in the book is actually several drafts old. It’s like what Dolly Parton used to say: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” So I haven’t experienced much of the Jack Kerouac method, which to my knowledge involves lots of cocaine and beating women. That hasn’t been my preferred strategy in writing fiction.
You can only abuse women if they’re fictional.
I don’t think that’s a line Jack Kerouac drew. Though I spent a weekend at Jack Keuorac’s cabin once, and it was very beautiful. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and you can understand he might be prone to fits of despair, as it’s very isolated, but also in an unbelievably beautiful location.
The book’s a first-person narrative, but there’s a certain unreliable quality to Min in that she’s not completely aware of herself and how the romance is really playing out. And what I thought was relevant about the story was that Ed’s not an evil character—his great crime is that he’s a teenage boy who doesn’t see the big moments or hurtful moments the same way Min does. Do you find that’s a common flaw in first relationships, or relationships in general?
I think romance itself is constructing a beautiful story from the very ordinary things that you are surrounded by, be they objects or people. So I think Min had a long narrative in her head informed by movies that she liked that didn’t in fact always fit the narrative that was going on. So sure, I think she’s unreliable, in the way that everyone is a little unreliable in their memory.
And it gets into the idea of how you can define yourself by a relationship, even without realizing it, and how that’s fundamentally unhealthy, which is something that got to me as a reader.
That’s the idea. I think that the entire point of a romance is to get as memorable as possible for as long as possible, and you have to allow someone to get a certain kind of significance in your head. And when it’s over, you’re angry at yourself for allowing them to get to you.
Love is strange, as Mickey & Sylvia said.
And tainted, as Soft Cell said.
I thought that was a remake of an older one.
It is, but I don’t remember the original, and I think that two-note synthesizer riff feels like the pierce of heartbreak.
What, in your mind, are the great romances, be they film, literature or real life?
Well, I guess it depends on the kind of romance you like. My favorite novel is Lolita, which is a great romance, though if it were happening in real life it would be less of a romance and more of a monstrosity.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is that Min has these fictional touchstones she refers to throughout the book—films and music that don’t exist in the real world. I read elsewhere that you did this in part to not tie the book to any specific time period. How’d you come up with these—do you think of titles in your spare time or things like that?
I think the problem with these things when they’re referred to in a novel is that they don’t mean the same things to the same people. So if you say something like, “Going out with this person makes me feel like I’m starring in When Harry Met Sally,” some people are going to say, “Oh, he means the most romantic movie of all time!” and others are going to say, “Oh, he means two hours of nails on a chalkboard, having an unbelievably grating time.” And if you have negative views about some movie, and the reader doesn’t like it, it’s a strange and alienating thing. So when Min describes movies that didn’t happen, it’s easier to imagine them as something beautiful in your head than if she’d described an actual film.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
More of a psychiatric casebook than a life: The Journals of Spalding Gray
Edited by Nell Casey
Knopf; 368 pages
$28.95
The world primarily remembers actor and playwright Spalding Gray for a body of some 20 theatrical works he wrote and staged over three decades between 1975 and 2004. Improbably, he performed almost all of them, alone, while seated on a stage whose set design rarely included much more than a wooden table and chair, a microphone, a glass of water—and a notebook containing a skeletal outline of the evening’s subject, handwritten, in all caps.
Even more improbably, their subject matter was clearly, overtly autobiographical. Early monologues like Sex and Death to the Age 14 and Booze, Cars and College Girls openly disclosed their contents in their titles. His mid-career masterpiece, Swimming to Cambodia (which director Jonathan Demme captured on film in 1988) detailed Gray’s idiosyncratic discoveries—about the world, U.S. and global politics, relationships and himself—during his experiences as a supporting actor in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. The film, which detailed the horrific aftermath of the Vietnamese war on the mainland of Southeast Asia, won three Oscars.
During the ‘80s and ‘90s, a number of critics claimed that Gray actually created the genre of autobiographical performance. If that’s an overstatement—and it is—Gray’s work still had an undeniable influence on a generation of writers (and performers) of autobiography, creative nonfiction and postmodern storytelling, as well as those who have followed.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine the work of Ira Glass, David Sedaris, Mike Daisey or Tim Miller without him. The poetic journalism of Anna Deavere Smith clearly owes Gray a direct debt as well. Along with every writer who has ever appeared on This American Life, The Monti and its inspiration, The Moth in New York City, all suddenly become a lot more speculative absent the groundwork Gray did a quarter-century before.
- Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
- The first page of Gray's notebook for SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA
Still, having edited previous books on writers and depression (2002’s Unholy Ghosts) and writers providing extended care for sick family members (An Uncertain Inheritance, in 2008), it’s telling that Casey ultimately emerges as well here with a Gray who remains—over nearly 40 years—perpetually hyperaware of a series of self- and other-diagnosed personal psychological dysfunctions and dilemmas, requiring the ongoing care of family members and significant others, frequently to the exclusion of all other individuals and concerns.
In short, those expecting a juicy, ribald ride behind the scenes of Gray's most engaging narratives are in for a shock. THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY ultimately seems the joyless casebook of a forbidding psychiatric enigma more than a famous monologist and humorist's back pages.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
- Public domain
"I'm hopeful, but wary… because I've seen defeat," Dorfman said of the Occupy protest movement.
Dorfman, the renowned novelist, playwright, poet and journalist, read from his latest book, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of An Unrepentant Exile, Tuesday night at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham. Dorfman, also a professor at Duke University and a prominent human rights activist, shared his thoughts on Chile, the challenges of creating true political change and the Occupy movement.
Dorfman was a staunch and public supporter of Salvador Allende, who became the first democratically-elected president of Chile in 1970. After the election, Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to Allende's chief-of-staff. Although he was recounting events four decades past, his presentation carried whiffs of the present.
"There is nothing quite like it, the thrill of being present at the birth of a new social order when the tired conventions of the past are swept away," Dorfman read from his book.
But in 1973 the democratic movement in Chile was brought to an abrupt and violent end. The Chilean military staged a coup to depose Allende, and the country was ruled by Gen. Augusto Pinochet until 1990. Dorfman went into exile, and devoted much of his subsequent career to advocating for human rights causes and the return of democracy to Chile.
Feeding on Dreams details Dorfman's life in exile—his evasion from death squads, his life in America, his yearning for Chile, and what happened when he and his family moved back after the country's return to democracy in 1990. Chile's transition to democracy, Dorfman found, was fraught with challenges and fear—the consequences of being ruled by a dictatorship for 17 years.
There is no such thing as pure change, Dorfman explained to the crowd of about 30 people who gathered to listen to him speak last night. He was referring, not to the Chilean revolution, but to the Occupy movement—"a movement of exiles in their own country."
Dorfman described purity as the Occupy movement's greatest asset, but as its greatest potential problem as well. Change must happen through the institutions, he explained, which inevitably leads to negotiations, and betrayal.
But "it's very encouraging," he said. The Occupy movement, like other protest movements before it, has demonstrated that you can evict a person from land, he said, but not an idea from the mind.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Interview: The areas of John Hodgman's expertise; tonight at Durham Armory
- Photo by Bradley Gutierrez
Now, Hodgman has completed his continuously paginated saga of false knowledge with That is All (Dutton, $25), a massive compilation of made-up facts and stories centered around the coming global superpocalypse, Ragnarok, in 2012.
Hodgman will appear at the Durham Armory at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to read from and sign copies of That is All. We were able to get up with him on the road to ask him questions about the reading, his thoughts on Occupy Raleigh and the extremely unsettling mustache he's been sporting for That is All.
Independent: So, the description for the Durham event is a "reading and riffing." That scares the hell out of me. What will this be? Improvising? Do you have a talk or anything?
John Hodgman: Well, usually with book tours, I start by reading passages from the book I think the live audience will enjoy. Gradually, as the experience gets tattooed onto my brain, the book tends to fall aside, and I think by the time I'm in Durham, I will be speaking more or less extemporaneously from the book.
I might talk about sports, and the difference between American football and European football, including the fact that one actually uses a ball, while the other uses something that could only be called a ball by a mentally ill person. I'll also probably touch on how magic tricks are performed, and a reality television show I think is going to be very successful that I have devised, and certainly the coming global superpocalypse, which I refer to as Ragnarok.
Of all the things to latch onto from what you just said, I have to say your reality show is going to have a hard time topping Hillbilly Handfishin', which is sort of a sign of Ragnarok in and of itself.
Are you referring to the ancient art of noodling, or catching a catfish with one's bare hands? That's the ancient battle of man against disgusting mud creature. It taps into that.
Just last night, you did "Money Talks" on The Daily Show, riffing on the Occupy Wall Street movement. You might be interested to know that just 20 miles or so from Durham, there's an Occupy Raleigh movement going on near the State Capitol. Any plans to drop by?
Is this specific to North Carolinian (pronounced "North Caro-LEAN-ian") issues?
There's some overlap with local issues and the broader movement.
I don't know that I'll have time to visit the Occupy movement there in Raleigh. I don't want to make fun of people when I don't know what they look like. That's the thing with the whole Occupy movement—it truly is leaderless and grassroots in every possible way, so even I hesitate to call those people "dirty hippies" as a joke, because there are a lot of people down there who are extremely eccentric, and many who are extremely thoughtful.
There would be a lot of people down there I would agree with tremendously—in or out of character as the "Deranged Millionaire." There's a lot of people I feel are not going to be productive trying to solve our problems with a drum circle.
Speaking generally, I think when it is not violent, which I do not think is productive even as an expression of frustration, it is a perfectly reasonable thing to be happening, and it tests our ability to tolerate ambiguity that we cannot put a particular ideology on it. It's a good challenge for our media and our country to appreciate, that we are not living in a world where politics are right vs. left, like two opposing sports teams.
But I do hope that they are able to take showers before I come to town, because that's just something that I'm not willing to tolerate.
Speaking of the "Deranged Millionaire," of all the things you discuss in your book, the thing that has burned itself most into my brain is the mustache.
Right. I think you put it well. More than anything else, it is an issue. It is troubling to people; it is a subject of debate; it is controversial.
Will you be bringing this mustache to your reading, and what does it say about the mindset of myself and others that the mustache is the first thing that leaps out at people?
Well, I will be bringing the mustache, because it has attached itself to my face. So I have no choice about that. I can reassure the people of Durham that it will not be jumping out at people. It seems to have established a very stable parasitic relationship with my upper lip, and it seems to not be wanting to change hosts. So people should not fear my mustache, or worry that it's going to take over their own upper lips.
So it's a mustache détente, where it's peacefully occupying your face?
In many ways, you're right. The mustache has a lot of similarities to what's going on on Wall Street; it's almost like an outgrowth of the Occupy movement. It is clearly a disruptive presence. It has something to say, and yet precisely what statement it is making is multitudinous and unfathomable.
And I don't quite know what to do about it. I grew it on a whim earlier this year, where it was something that I liked, and yet it is something that causes a lot of discussion. I think that people are unnerved by an otherwise pale and baby-faced human baby walking around with a mustache, and because of its unnatural lustrous dark color. It is jet black with streaks of gray, compared to my otherwise mousy brown, limp hair, and people presume it is fake.
I think people are concerned I'm turning into some kind of creature. You remember the 1980s movie The Fly, when Jeff Goldblum was transforming into the giant fly? His transformation manifested itself in many ways, including large dense coarse hairs growing out of his body. And that is effectively what has happened to me, though what I am becoming remains to be seen.
"Perhaps I was a mustache that dreamed it was a man, and now the dream is over and the mustache is awake."
Exactly.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Have you ever been to a poetry reading? You know that awkward time afterward when you're not sure what to do?
The Hinge Poem, a new online feature from the Hinge Literary Center, gives a new model for how to connect with an author's work, perhaps even more deeply than one might at an auditorium or bookstore reading.
Alan Shapiro's lyric poem "Wherever My Dead Go When I’m Not Remembering Them" kicks off the program, which will feature a new poet and poem each month. As with a blogpost, readers can start and participate in conversations about the poem by making comments. And Shapiro will hang out in the comments boxes live from 3-5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 16 for a highly interactive conversation. The poem is up and ready for comments already, in advance of Shapiro's online time.
"I've never done anything like this before so I don't know what to expect or anticipate," Shapiro, an English and creative writing professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, says. He's just as curious as anyone as to how the dialogues might go. "I hope the poem will spark a conversation about the process of writing, how one finds one's way through a poem from the first inklings to the final choices, how one knows when to start writing and when to stop. Something like that, I guess."
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
- Photo by Jim Wallace
As it happens, Rosenberg proposes “scientism” as a positive term to describe a worldview that does not contain a supernatural being. It’s a relatively minor point but it’s indicative of the focus of his book, which aims to provide a positive set of beliefs for today’s atheist. For Rosenberg, who has extensive training in the natural sciences—indeed, he began his education intending to go into physics before switching to philosophy—the issue of God’s existence is a question that’s long been settled by science. Instead, what interests him is what science has to tell us about the reality of our existence.
Rosenberg appears at the Regulator tonight at 7 p.m. and Quail Ridge Books on Thursday, Oct. 6. He spoke with us about his book by telephone. Following is a condensed version of our conversation.
Independent: Is this your first book on atheism?
Rosenberg: It’s my 14th book but it’s my first book on atheism. But it’s not really a book on atheism. It’s a book about what we atheists should believe, about all the other big issues that, as I say in the book, keep us up at night wondering.
The book begins by saying “there is no God, and we believe there is no God because science rules God’s existence out.” And then goes on to answer all the other questions on the basis of science. So in that sense, it’s not another book proving atheism.
I was going to ask you about popular titles like those by Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion). Those books were very popular, but you’re saying that you don’t think the project of persuading people there is no God is one worth pursuing?
My book differs from all of them in that it is not another indictment of religion, not another brief on the irrationality of a belief in God, not another analysis of how religion seduces us into belief—those are the aims of three of the most popular books. My book is about what else we should believe now that we believe in atheism.
What would you tell people are the basic things atheists should believe?
The quick and dirty version is on page 3 of my book, where there is list of questions and short answers: “Is there a God?” “No.” “What is the nature of reality?” “What physics says it is”—
—“What is the purpose of the universe?”—
—“there is none.” “What’s the meaning of life?” “Ditto.” “Why am I here?” “Just dumb luck.”
We could go through that list, that’s the short-answer list, and the rest of the book substantiates each of those answers and explains why science dictates each of those answers. But the tour goes like this: I try to explain why the nature of reality is what physics tells us it is and nothing more than what physics says, and then to show that biological phenomena are the result of Darwinian natural selection and that is mandated by physics alone. All you need to believe Darwin is to believe physics because Darwin's theory is a consequence of the operation of purely physical processes. All the adaptation and all the appearance of design in the universe could only happen that way. There’s no room for intelligent design.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
- Photo by Leigh Ann Couch
The strange, tragic and very funny tale of two siblings coming to terms with being part of their parents' performance art experiments as children (from the boy infliltrating a beauty pageant in a dress to the parents staging a mock failed proposal on an airplane), Fang is a personal story for Wilson, though not in the way you'd think. On the phone from his home in Sewanee, Tenn., the soft-spoken Wilson, who appears at Quail Ridge Books & Music tonight at 7:30, answered our questions about the book's roots—and why his own childhood wasn't like the Fangs'.
INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: So the book's been getting strong reviews—what's your reaction to that, and what do you feel is the source of the story's appeal?
Kevin Wilson: Oh, it’s beyond what I had expected. I’m overwhelmed.
I’m thinking that it’s the age-old story of dysfunctional families, which I think strikes a chord with people, and that this dysfunctional family is particularly strange because of the art they create. It taps into that disconnect that children feel from their parents—something that’s been done hundreds of times, and tries to find some new spin on it.
From what you’ve said elsewhere, it sounds the Fangs’ childhood resembles your own—at least superficially.
I grew up in a household where my parents were, I think, very much interested in creating a world separate from the real world for myself and my sister. They were not fond of the outside world, so they created this great place in our house. Not a lot of people came in—they didn’t have many friends—so we were their best friends in a lot of ways, and allowed to do whatever we wanted.
If we wanted to be superheroes, they got us capes. If we wanted to make movies, they showed us how to make stop-motion-animated movies with our Star Wars figures. They allowed us to have this childhood where the outside world existed, and we knew it was there, but it just wasn’t as interesting as what went on between the four of us inside our house.
I drew upon the idea of how we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world growing up, because all you need is your family, and the way that becomes complicated as you get older, and you need to leave it and become your own person.
But your parents weren’t like the Fangs’…
Oh, my parents were awesome! With this book, I tried to create terrible parents, who took things to such an extreme they were ruining their children. While I relate to them in some ways, they’re probably the least fit people to have children.
Are your parents still alive, and if so, what’d they think of the book?
Both my parents are still alive—in fact, Dad is on the book tour with me. He rides with me whenever I do a book tour. They’re savvy enough to separate themselves from the characters in the story, and to recognize that this is a family that is similar to us in some ways and in other ways completely different. They really liked it—I think this is the first thing I’ve written where they really, totally gave their whole heart over to the story.
Dad and I drive in the car together and stay in the same motel rooms. He gets a kick out of going on these things more than I do—after every signing he pulls the bookstore manager aside and thanks them in such a sincere way that I feel like a Make-A-Wish kid and my dad has arranged all this without my knowledge.
Speaking from personal experience, I can say if you and your dad can take a trip together with that level of closeness and still be speaking at the end, you’re not only better off than the Fangs, but most parents and children, period.
I think it works because I am pretty much anxious 100 percent of the time, while my dad is one of the most calm, upbeat, optimistic people I’ve ever met. So in many ways, he’s like medication for me.
It’s very calming to be around him. Three people will show up for a reading and I feel like the biggest loser in the world, and my dad is wanting to take pictures of me with the three people. He’s happy all the time, and in a lot of ways, that keeps me from going crazy.
What type of research did you do for the book?
I think E.L. Doctorow said, “You do the least amount of research possible—enough to get away with it.” That’s what I try to do. Research is a black hole for me—I’ll keep going and going down the rabbit hole and never write.
I remembered things like Chris Burden, the performance artist, and the Fluxus movement, and I went back and did some cursory research to remind me of it. I did some research into music that I thought the Fangs would listen to that I would listen to, but I mostly stayed away from research because the Fangs are so absurd that I don’t think that doing too much research would be beneficial for creating that family. They need to be separate from the real world in some ways.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Why you need to eat your worms: Rob Dunn's Wild Life of Our Bodies, reading tonight at Quail Ridge Books
by Rob Dunn
Harper, 304 pages
Cows. E. coli bacteria. Intestinal worms. Corn, rice and wheat. Man-eating tigers. Lice, crabs, fleas, ticks, and (shiver) bed bugs.
These are some of the living things whose fates have been bound up most closely with our own in an ages-long dance of survival. They dwell in our cities and countrysides, in our houses, in and on our very bodies, and sometimes vestigially in our minds. Now consider the list above: If you were playing Noah (and to a great extent, as a species, we are, albeit clumsily), which species would you toss off the ark?
As N.C. State professor of biology Rob Dunn explains in his new book, The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today, in a world of interconnected organisms, it’s not always easy to distinguish friend from enemy (or, in some cases, “frenemy”).
Take, for instance, intestinal worms. They’ve been largely eliminated in wealthy countries, which seems like a clear-cut victory for modern medicine and hygiene. But one increasingly tenable theory holds that the disproportionate prevalence of a spectrum of disorders in affluent nations—from allergies and asthma to diabetes and Crohn’s disease—may be because we miss our worms.
As Dunn relates, our immune system evolved in concert with the life-forms that took up residence in us; without them, the system sometimes goes haywire and attacks itself. To be sure, not every mud-borne parasite is a benign symbiont. But the past decade has seen remarkable results from a new treatment for bad cases of bowel disease: a tall glass of Gatorade filled with worm eggs.
Of course, patients who enroll in these studies have to overcome the “ick” factor to down their vermicious libations. A revulsion for parasites doubtless conferred survival advantages on our ancestors (and, to be sure, Dunn doesn’t suggest we roll out a welcome mat for lice, bed bugs and other blood-suckers, but he does interestingly connect them with the development of hairlessness, nomadism and xenophobia). But a morbid, out-of-control “ick” response can do more harm than good—witness the indiscriminate, and dangerous, larding of consumer products with antibiotics.
Perhaps the ultimate example of biophobia was the work of one James Reyniers, a researcher whose story Dunn tells in a fascinating early chapter. As a 19-year-old machinist and undergraduate biology student at Notre Dame, he undertook to create the first entirely germ-free lab animal. In 1935, after seven years of painstaking progress, he succeeded, and so, apparently did his guinea pigs—“They seemed hungrier and more active than those on the outside with microbes... The animals in the chambers seemed to live longer, too, and they never developed tooth decay.”
These animals were invaluable to research, and they captured the imagination of a scientific establishment, and a public, entranced by the idea of a germ-free future. It turned out, however, that they needed special diets to survive. The microbes that normally flourish in their (and our) guts are essential to survival in the real world, providing them with valuable vitamins, enzymes and defense against harmful invaders.
“We imagine ourselves besieged by germs, but this is a mistake,” Dunn writes. “Our bodies are integrated with the microbes. ... While this new view of our lives is foreign to the medical community, to ecologists it is familiar.”
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Writers, quit your garrets! Readers, rise from your couches! The Hinge Literary Center launches tonight.
There’s a tendency these days to know writers across the continent or the world while the novelist or poet next door remains anonymous. The Hinge Literary Center hopes to remedy this. A new literary endeavor aimed at connecting local literary communities through classes and events, the Hinge launches itself with a night of readings and music at the Pinhook Bar in downtown Durham tonight at 7 p.m.
- Photo by Button Boggs
- Belle Boggs will co-teach a fiction workshop, one of the debut offerings through the Hinge Literary Center, which launches itself with a night of readings at Durham's Pinhook Bar on June 2.
Class offerings kick off in mid-June as Boggs and Raeff team-teach a fiction workshop and Farmer runs a poetry workshop. Outsiders Art and Collectibles in Durham will host this first round of classes, but the Hinge will look to hold classes and events all around the Triangle in the future. Classes will combine group feedback with some pointed instruction in craft.
Awesome work, ladies! I love getting know a bit more about the micro communities around the Triangle. And I can't …
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@michael pollan
"Occupy Chapel Hill has been on the whole very supportive of both the building takeovers. "
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