Kismet Arts Tangent

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (1987)

Summary: Dillard describes her childhood. She is an explorer, a collector, a drawer. Her feelings of living involve tales of snowball fights, sisterhood and the strange antics of her parents. She confides in the reader her most desperate moments of rage and the strange claustrophobia of being a live wire in a small town with Sunday church-goers and school uniforms.

Review: This book took some time to read because every few pages I would be stalled with a childhood revelry of my own. Her exuberance is familiar. We’ve all had those moments where we marveled at something. Was there an interesting pattern in the Cliffside? What do teenage boys sound like? How does an adult look to a child? We let our minds wander over everything as kids, taking it all in and connecting things that seem mundane to an adult, but quite right to the young new traveler of the world. Dillard is very conscious of that feeling we all have about wanting to remember the best parts in life. We all fear that on our deathbeds, we blink a hard blink and think, What was that?

Rating: 9 pencil studies of a baseball glove

Favorite part: “Later she touches one palm to another and tries for a gane to distinguish each hand’s sensation of feeling and being felt.” P.44

Wine-pairing: I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. He mourns is wife while reminding himself that the soul, the essence of a person is their hopes and dreams, their thought processes and by being involved in her hopes, her dreams, a part of her becomes a part of him. A slightly more psychological understanding of the self that puts a great deal into perspective, emphasizing the point of an enriched interior life.

The Panda’s Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould (1980)

Summary: In this series of essays, Gould talks about evolution. He covers theories about dinosaurs, encephalic quotients and Larmarckian notions of taking your evolution by the horns so to speak. Gould emphasizes that science is quintessentially a human endeavor and there will always be biases towards on theory or another depending on the cultural climate.

Review: At first, I couldn’t stand this book. His essays would initially present something that made a good fair of sense and then towards the middle, Gould would say “However, that is totally wrong.” Or something like that. I was scared to finish reading this book because I felt like I was getting a lot of incorrect theory in my head, but the point of his essays are that there is merit in being reasoned in wrongness. The connections made by the method are sometimes incorrect, but the method has merit.

Rating: 7 radial sesamoids

Favorite part: “Species are the units of nature’s morphology.” P.213 This was the end sentence of a great chapter describing that species are subjective to the time they are in because species are changing and evolving all the time. I connected this to culture. And how there is no “authentic” culture, but what we can observe in the moment, and from our worldview.

Wine-pairing: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is an interesting book about a particular slant of evolution. One can see how our culture’s point of view can mesh well with this individualistic theory.

Ken’s Guide to the Bible by Ken Smith

Summary: Smith parses down the bible, The Old Testament, The New Testament and some Gospels and other such ancillary texts, showing the bible’s pastiche nature. It is a book that points out (as it says on its cover) the violence, sex, absurdity and weirdness that Christians so heavily rely on and refer to when wanting to answer moral questions… wait, what?

Review: Perfect for the beginner Atheist. This is a book that you can use against your Christian friends in the schoolyard when they quote Corinthians, you can quote right back at them and laugh! I haven’t read the bible, so I was surprised at all the juicy details that they just had to have in there.

Rating: 8 first born sons dead for their father’s sins

Random Sample: “God has a wrestling match with Jacob and loses. To honor the occasion, God changes Jacob’s name to ‘Israel.’ –Genesis 32:24-30”

Wine-pairing: After analyzing a text that is fiction posing as fact, how about a switch? The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown pairs up amazing art artifacts and scientific stories to weave together a very realistic Church conspiracy… yes, the Holy Grail. Is it a chalice?

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Summary: Vowell’s series of essays relating to patriotism, history and colonialism is fascinating and makes me feel like I am not alone in the slight unease of being proud to be a United-Statesian. The prose is personal and contemporary. It feels like you’re speaking to a friend who just happens to be a nerdy history author.

Review: Please read this book. Especially, if you’re not into politics. It is smart without being stuffy and intellectual. It is funny, sweet, ironic and easy to read through. Take it apart, read it in its components, out of order, upside down. Books like this are fun to read at lunch when you want fifteen minutes of insight.

Rating: 9 sentences of the Gettysburg Address that you recited in the second grade

Random Sample: “From the Spanish exploration of Aztec cocoa and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, and down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA and the lifestyle marketing of  Seattle’s Starbucks’s, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention , and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.”

Wine-pairing: The Quiet American.  Graham Greene’s allegory to United States/British influence on Vietnam.