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Isabel Swift comments on Summer Reading

I was listening to my itunes podcast from The New Yorker…

(Side note: many free podcasts can be downloaded and enjoyed @ iTunes. I just add it to my iPod, but if you have a smartphone with MP3 player, think you can download them there. All kinds of free content–learn about music, cooking, manners, philosophy, comedy, news, whatever).

…and one of the stories was about this out-of-work kid who told everyone that he was reading great books over the summer & was delighted to find everyone was very impressed. No, he wasn’t actually reading any, but I decided this was a worthy goal and I should start filling in the chinks and read stuff I had never gotten around to reading.

I thought I’d start with one classic, one recent literary type bestseller. My first toe in the water: PORTRAIT OF A LADY/Henry James & A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS/Dave Eggers.

My rules are that you can have an opinion about a book you’ve read, but can’t have an opinion about the author unless you’ve read at least 3 of their books. It seems fair.

So I found AHWOSG a bit tedious–perhaps colored by having seen Eggers on panels at conferences. And Henry James, who I had never read (yes, watched Wings of the Dove, though my enjoyment was colored by the uncanny resemblance of Daniel Day Lewis in that role to my older brother). Portrait seemed a good start–one of his more well known novels, and the heroine’s name was Isabel. Can’t get more relevant than that!

OMG. It was a fairly hard slog. Then I realized I couldn’t complain about Henry James because I hadn’t read my requisite 3 books. Back to the Library. Wings of the Dove was just too long, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit through that story again. So I went with Washington Square–short, but as the introduction notes, not one of his more popular stories. And for good reason. I was one book away from an opinion. Luckily, there was Turn of the Screw–famous (I’d even seen the opera) and a novella! They even had to toss in a couple of short stories to fill the book out.

I was off an running. Well, if you’ve ever read James (I can now say that) “running” is not a word one would associate with his prose!

Despite some very active ghosts, TOTS (cute, eh?) was fairly tough going. But I needed to be able to have an author opinion! I even read the short stories. Also a good bit of the various scholarly preambles. Holy Toledo, if they don’t turn you off reading the book, nothing will. In fairness, I actually really like getting a sense of context, a quick cliff notes on the writer, the history, the critical thought. But obviously, there’s a similarity between the writer’s style and his or her academic fans, so prefaces were a bit of a slog too.

OK, here’s my assessment. After really not getting it for 3 novels (what is the big deal with this guy, etc.), the penny finally dropped thanks to the very last short story I read, “The Jolly Corner.” Whew! I could have an opinion that wasn’t just HUH?

So what’s the big deal? I haven’t done research beyond the above fairly pathetic efforts, but here are my insights.

First, he seems to be one of the first writers to deeply explore a sense of the character’s conscious, their emotional makeup and the psychological causes behind their actions. Freud was born 13 year after James & lived over 20 years longer, but there’s a strong connection with the birth of psychology. That seems pretty big as a new writing vision.

He also straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and offers a well rendered vision of the sense of past graciousness, limitations and social norms and proprieties that were being broken down, but still were powerful forces in an aristocratic or wealthy life. “The Jolly Corner” really presents a vivid metaphor of a man caught between two worlds, trying to find himself. Finishing it, I actually felt warmly towards James, though he definitely read as being a bit mysongenistic, which can be irritating.

So now that I’ve explained James, what’s on your summer reading list?

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Isabel Swift’s Hyperbolic Coral Reef

July 29, 2010 by Isabel Swift in category From Isabel Swift tagged as Hyperbolic Coral Reef, Projects

You may, perhaps, be wondering just what the Hyperbolic Coral Reef is?

So glad you asked!

It’s a project started in Australia by two crocheting sisters seeking to call attention to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

Interestingly, there’s a mathematical angle to all this. I will likely not get this entirely right, but basically for some time mathematicians denied there was a hyperbolic function until Mr Vincenzo Riccati and Johann Heinrich Lambert came up with it in 1760. This despite the fact that many coral grow hyperbolically, so there were examples right under their nose (or toes).
And you can crochet a hyperbolic function by simply creating a chain and doubling it for every stitch–example below:

It starts to look like brain coral, doesn’t it? And the pattern can be modified to create other coral (and mathematical) functions.

It was a powerful visual and experience to remind me you can start with something very simple–a single chain stitch. Then do something very simple–double it. And if you continue to add these simple building blocks, you can create something of amazing complexity–perhaps even beauty. Just think about the single cell dividing and dividing and what remarkable organism it can come up with!

I remember reading that Balzac (king of the door stopper novels) would start each one with a single page. Then he’d keep adding bits and expanding bits, and thousands of pages later, you’d get Lost Illusions.

So the longest journey does indeed begin with the first step. And whatever complex project you may have in mind that feels overwhelming, just make a single slip knot. Add another. You’ll be surprised how it can grow!

Isabel Swift

For those who want to learn more, I’ve grabbed a relevant paragraph from The Smithsonian Community Reef project:

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE HYPERBOLIC CROCHET CORAL REEF PROJECT AND THE SMITHSONIAN COMMUNITY REEF:

The Smithsonian Community Reef is a satellite of the worldwide Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project created by Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles. It was made possible through the support of the Quiksilver Foundation, the Embassy of Australia, and the Coral Reef Alliance. Find out more about Margaret and Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles here, and their Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project here. Find out more about the upcoming exhibition of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef and Smithsonian Community Reef at the National Museum of Natural History on the Museum’s Smithsonian Community Reef Temporary Exhibitions Page. To be included on this e-mail circulation list (or removed from it) please contact sicommunityreef@yahoo.com.

And for those of you may be wondering how this relates to hyperbole? I figure it’s whatever it is, just double it!

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Thought for the day

December 24, 2009 by Isabel Swift in category From Isabel Swift tagged as gifts, miracles

Happy Holidays!

I wanted to share a quote from Marianne Williamson’s A RETURN TO LOVE, Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. She had a lovely and profoundly simple point that gave me a new insight into what a miracle was:

“A miracle is just a shift in perception.”

The more I thought about that, the more true I realized that’s exactly what a miracle was. We can use other words: Belief. Faith. But it really is just that small; just that big. A shift in perception.

How do we shift that perception? How do we move from believing something is impossible to believing it is possible?

Sometimes it entails finding a new path. Or gaining greater strength in an area of weakness. Maybe it’s just having someone else truly believe in us. And with that realization, we need to acknowledge and remember that we have the power to perform miracles in others. It’s a tremendous gift.

Give it freely.

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