Well, the biology/chemistry is not really relevant. Anyway, the suggestion is that in order for a system (a human being, in the case in point) to change, the change can't happen gradually. Systems are well organized to maintain their existing patterns even in the face of new input. For a significant change to occur, there has to be a total upheaval, a moment of complete chaos, after which the system completely reorganizes itself.

The so-called scientific basis of this idea is not something we need to take seriously. But it seems to me, strictly on a personal and intuitive basis, that this principle is in fact often valid. It does seem to me that the times in my life when I have made major changes have been times when I've gone through a somewhat major upheaval in which my life got disorganized and reorganized. To some extent, this used to happen to me on a fairly regular basis, simply in the process of moving from one part of the country to another. Each move necessitated a fair amount of transformation not only in the way my life was organized, but to some extent in the sort of person I was.

The Clarion science fiction workshop I went to in 1981 was a major upheaval, even though I've never been able to explain this to other people. My first sabbatical, in Berkeley, while I was learning NLP, involved a completely reorganization of my life. Getting divorced led to another complete reorganization. The scenes I did with Petra (which many of you do not know about and will never be told about) certainly for a time produced a complete chaos in my life. On the other hand, the various NLP trainings I've been through since 1990 were temporary almost ecstatic (for want of a better word) experiences, but a month later I was able to resume my life the way it had been before.

Now this whole upheaval idea may be just bullshit, and I can see someone (myself) becoming an upheaval junky, going through life seeking out one upheaval after another, hoping that these will somehow magically produce the changes one is seeking. However...

However for the past ten years or so, I have been staying here in Honolulu at my teaching job and asking myself, "Why should I have to go to another city and give up a job that gives me such nice benefits and a lot of freedom in order to find the life I want?" And so far, the process of trying to gradually change my life just hasn't worked. I manage to do things that are worthwhile, but I still don't seem to be moving closer to the life I want.

Well.

With that preface.....

One thing I keep forgetting to mention about last summer, and which was one of the things I had planned the summer around, was the Bloomsday (June 16) Joyce readings. In 1998, I had gone to some of these for the first time, but only managed to get to a few hours worth. This time, I intended to take in as much as the all-day reading of Ulysses at Carroll's books as I could stay awake for. This is a dramatic reading (but a reading, not a dramatization) by a troupe of several actors, in costume.

Several things went wrong with this plan, though. First, it turned out that Carroll's Books has now moved from their Church Street location to a considerably smaller store in North Beach, and it was no longer feasible for them to give more than a lunch-time reading of about an hour. There was a slightly longer evening reading at a brand new Irish bar (Johnny Foley's, I think the name is) downtown that I was able to attend. This included a short performance by someone who does a really excellent Dylan Thomas impersonation.

Unfortunately, however, I missed the really main event at O'Reilly's bar on Green Street in North Beach on Bloomsday itself. This was a dramatic presentation (not a reading) in full costume. Unfortunately, however, my friend Jay was inconsiderate enough to have been born on June 16, and for his fiftieth birthday his friends had scheduled a "roast" at a Mission Street pizza restaurant. I had to agonize quite a bit to decide between the two events, but eventually I realized that one simply cannot fail to show up at a friend's fiftieth birthday party. I do trust, though, that in his next life he will arrange to be born on less inconvenient date.

In any case, as you've all been previously informed, I had already managed to listen to a superb reading of a large proportion of Ulysses via Naxos Audiobooks. This set of recordings was a labor of love, read by Jim Norton, with Marcella Riordan doing some of the women's voices (Molly Bloom's, in particular). Unfortunately, only about a fourth of the book could be covered, since Naxos was not willing to put out a version comprised of 16 CDs, which is what the book in its entirety would have required. Consequently, some quite famous parts are, with regret, omitted. Still, one gets a pretty good impression of the whole, and Ulysses is a hell of a lot easier to follow when someone competent is reading it aloud in a nice Irish accent.

The other Naxos books I've really liked have been Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The reader, Nigel Anthony, does a wonderful job of conveying the sensuous quality of Durrell's writing. When a few years ago I tried re-reading the first volume Justine for myself, I found myself getting very impatient with the slow pace and the fact that for most of the book not much really happens. But I found listening to the book while making and eating breakfast and dinner extremely enjoyable, almost sensuously so, and I had no urge to get on with the story faster. (Of course the fact that the CD version is considerably abridged may have also been a factor.)

Some books, most books I guess, are like driving to reach a destination. And whether one is driving from New York to San Francisco or only across town for a movie, no matter how pleasant the trip may be, one never loses sight of the ultimate destination one is striving for.

Some other books, though, are like a drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon. One is not primarily trying to get somewhere, one is just enjoying the drive, and there's almost a little disappointment in arriving at the terminus. Proust is in this category, as is Lawrence Durrell. Another book of this sort, which I read very recently (it's not available on CD) for reasons soon to be explained, is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

Anyway, listening to CDs is an expensive way to read a book, since a CD set costs about as much as a hardcover, and all the things I've been listening to are things I could have taken out of the library in book form for free. On the other hand, I can get through a book on CDs in four or five days, listening to it while making and eating meals. And if I tried to actually read it, I'd never manage to find the time at all.

Within a Budding Grove was one of the Proust volumes I'd never read. The reading, by Neville Jason, was acceptable once I adjusted to his voice, but not exceptionally good. It comes as a set of two CD sets, which means that I invested about $40 in hearing this second of Proust's novels. On the other hand, as mentioned, otherwise I would never have managed to read it at all, although I have actually read Swann's Way and Guermantes's Way in book form, and will probably eventually do the same for Sodom & Gomorrah. Neville Jason was also the reader for War and Peace, which was certainly good. I think that it was actually easier to keep the enormous cast of characters straight while listening than it was for me years and years ago when I read it in book form. In any case, the booklet that comes with the CD helpfully contains a nicely organized character list for when one gets lost.

Anna Karenina, read by Laura Paton, was easy to listen to and keep track of, but not as wonderful as some of the other Naxos productions.

Great Expectations, read by Anton Lesser, was extremely well done. But then it would take an extremely incompetent actor not to be able to read Dickens well.

Unfortunately, I have encountered a few clinkers from Naxos. One danger in having a single reader for a book is that the reader needs to change voices for the different characters, and some male readers wind up doing an extremely annoying falsetto for their female characters. This was the most annoying problem in Michael Sheen's reading of The Idiot (by Dostoievsky) and William Hope's reading of Wings of the Dove. Wings has in fact almost only one male character in the whole book, and for some reason Hope decided to also use a falsetto voice for this primary male character, which made scenes very difficult to follow. Hope's reading was also quite dreadful in other respects. He constantly emphasized the wrong words in sentences, thus conveying an incorrect meaning. I constantly found myself needing to go back and mentally revise his readings. (There was sometimes the same problem in Laura Paton's reading of Anna Karenina.) I had the feeling that Hope had put an absolutely minimal effort into his reading. For one thing, for quite a while he kept getting the name of one of the main characters wrong, which made things extremely confusing. Listening to Wings was quite unpleasant, but I forced myself to continue to the end because it has been thirty years since I read it, and I really wanted to go back and remember what it was like.

I was one of the few people in the whole world who didn't like the recent movie version of Wings of the Dove, because I had found Helena Bonham Carter's performance in the film absolutely passionless, despite the fact that I usually adore her. Now I had the same reaction listening to Hope's reading of the book. So maybe it was just his atrocious reading, but I couldn't help but suspect that maybe the passionlessness of the movie had been inherent in Henry James's book itself. I'm not curious enough to go read it in book form, though. I remember from having read it in my twenties that it's incredibly long and quite hard going.

Finally, with Tristram Shandy, the problem was not so much with the reader, John Moffat, as with the book itself. I have always been embarrassed about never having read Tristram Shandy, but now I found that this was the one volume I was actually impatient with. I kept wanting the author to get on with the story and was quite glad that I was listening to an abridged version.

I also picked up a few novels in cassette form which had been reamindered. Maybe there was a good reason why they'd been remaindered. Anyway, they really made me appreciate by contrast how well most of the Naxos collection are done. Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a book which I've thought for a long time I ought to read but knew I'd never get around to. Unfortunately, the reader, William Hootkins (on Penguin Audiobooks) made the decision that the right tone of voice for the book would be one of cheerful enthusiasm, and it seemed to me that this was exactly the opposite of the tone in which the book had been written.

Geraldine McEwan, reading Jane Austin's Persuasion (also on Penguin), also had a completely wrong voice, namely the voice of an old woman which might have been right for one of Austin's comic older characters, but was totally wrong to convey Jane Austin's own lightly mocking irony. I have never read Persuasion in book form, so I don't whether it was the book or the reading that prevented me from having much feeling for the characters, but I just couldn't care much what happened to Ann Eliot and Captain Wentworth. I kept on noticing, which I never did in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, how petty and ultimately silly the concerns of all these characters were. I could maintain my interest only by remembering the movie version, which I liked a whole lot.

I will say, though, that Carol Shields reading her own novel The Stone Diaries (another Penguin Audiobook) was quite good. I regretted that I had only heard an abridged version.

This fall I'm taking a literature course from one of the creative writing professors in the English Department, Ian Macmillan. I know him through having taken the graduate fiction workshop from him a few years ago, and I talked to him about the course last spring and was quite interested in his plans. He told me that he wanted to present a thematic/interpretative approach that is now out of fashion, especially among writers. (He started off the course by giving us the contrary point of view in the form of the famous Susan Sonntag essay, "Against Interpretation.") For my part, I've always more or less agreed with Ms. Sonntag and disliked the approach of deep interpretation. But I thought that Macmillan's course would be a chance for me to see the interpretative approach presented at its best.

In the course, we're covering five novels plus a short story anthology (The O. Henry Awards 1998) and a number of other short story classics. The novels are two classics full of deep meaning: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. The Faulkner is actually fairly short, but The Magic Mountain is 700 pages of closely spaced type. It's actually not hard reading, once you accept the fact that it goes on forever and very little actually happens. It's one of those books that's a drive in the country rather than a drive to a destination. Like Proust, you can take your time and read maybe fifty pages an evening, just enjoying it (or not) one page at a time.

The other three books were recent highly regarded novels, chosen almost at random. White Noise by Don DeLillo, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Macmillan wants to investigate the question of how recent literature stacks up against Faulkner and Mann.

I read all the books at the end of last summer, after I got back from San Francisco, because I knew that I would never manage it during the semester. I regard the very fact that I was able to finish The Magic Mountain as in itself a major achievement.

So far, we've discussed a number of short stories and the Faulkner and are almost finished with The Magic Mountain. I'm finding the course very rewarding. I do think that Macmillan's interpretations, at least in the case of the Faulkner, go a little beyond what the text actually supports, but the main thing is that I'm noticing a lot more about the books than when I just read them for myself. In the case of the Thomas Mann, I know from watching a video in the library here which shows Mann lecturing that his intent was for the novel to be highly symbolic. And in fact, I'd even say that so far Macmillan has even been possibly under-interpreting The Magic Mountain in comparison to the conventional approach to it and Mann's own statements about his work.

Every time I leave Macmillan's class (once a week, Friday afternoons), I feel a very strong need to do some more writing myself. But the week goes by and there are too many other things on my schedule and too many books stacked up in my bedroom that I want to read immediately.

And next week Lady Atria arrives again, to stay with me for six months this time.

So I guess I'm counting on her to provide a major upheaval in my life. She should be capable of it.

-- Lee