Haiti, at last

When I last went to India, in 2007, my father, sister, and I spent a week teaching lessons at a dirt-poor public school in Madras—the kind in which some children don’t even have shoes to wear, where they are sent principally so they will get a square meal at lunch. I was essentially useless, as my Tamil skills extend to the phrase “I understand, but I don’t speak” and the names of certain obscure vegetables (“winter squash,” anyone?) Regardless, the kids and we became instant friends. On the last day of class, after bidding them goodbye, we were about to leave when a little boy walked up to us, shyly, with a pen in hand. “For you,” he said. The rest of the group immediately followed suit, giving us the precious possessions of which they had so little—pictures of deities, candies, even an entire set of markers (the holy grail of school supplies). I was reminded of that scene again and again this week in Haiti; there, nominally at least, to do a weeklong service project, I ended up being its real benefactor.

The first thing I saw at the airport in Port-au-Prince, before getting on the bus to the baggage claim.

It’s beyond evident to call the deadly earthquake of January 12 a devastation, the kind of horrific unthinkable event you read about in the papers, follow for a couple of weeks, donate money to in order to assuage your own liberal guilt, and ultimately forget about. (At least, this was exactly what I had done.) It is entirely different to visit a Haitian school turned church turned post-quake orphanage and see half of a blackboard with the chalk-written words mardi 12 janvier 2010 written at the top, the beginnings of a vocabulary lesson inscribed below—a lesson that would be chillingly, eternally unfinished.

This chalkboard now serves as a partition between the pharmacy and the room used as the doctor's office.

Six months have passed since 12 janvier 2010, and the streets are still covered in debris. Sturdy buildings and undamaged houses stand alongside caved-in churches and schools that have been reduced to piles of rubble. Amidst the ruins of one house, we made out the mangled remains of a blue Toyota, a dining table, chairs: those jarring remnants of normalcy, pictures of what daily life was once like in Haiti before being so cruelly interrupted. When we were driving back from our medical camp, we passed the ruins of the once-majestic Grand Palace, perhaps the symbol of Haiti’s devastation. Opposite to it was one of Haiti’s ubiquitous encampments: neat grids of tents (from all over, UNICEF to USAID to the People’s Republic of China) that now serve as the homes for over one million Haitians. “See that?” one of our translators asked, pointing towards the encampment. “That used to be a place to walk around, read, play. It was beautiful.”

Today, walking into that space, you’d be more likely to see thousands upon thousands of people sharing a single water source, crammed into tents without the smallest semblance of privacy, looking at you, their eyes reflecting pain, weariness, a little curiosity. You’d see damp, sticky litter strewn all over the ground, from empty rum bottles to condom wrappers to torn pieces of playing cards, filth between each row of tents. You’d snap on a pair of surgical gloves—totally inadequate for the job at hand, tearing just as you were picking up a particularly wet, wormy, unidentifiable piece of trash—hold a Glad bag, and get to work cleaning as the merciless Haitian sun beat down on your back. Just as you’d cleaned an entire row, you’d look at the crevasse behind the encampment, only to see it turned into a makeshift dump of sorts, overflowing with about a thousand times the garbage you’d just spent an hour picking up. You leave the rest of your Glad bags and gloves there.

Examples of tents from the encampments; above, from USAID ("From the American People"), below, from the People's Republic of China.

It is easy to focus on the negative in Haiti; the country has been so spectacularly blighted that an old tale about how it made a pact with the devil still has traction today. Once France’s wealthiest colony, the country became the first in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery (see, e.g., Toussaint L’Ouverture, slave rebellion), after a long and tough revolutionary war ended in 1801. Those idealists who would have hoped that this would begin a wave of enlightenment across the hemisphere would be sadly mistaken: not only did slavery go on for nearly seventy more years in the United States, but our always-upstanding government refused to recognize the country for fear of inspiring a similar rebellion stateside. That is, until we occupied it in the twentieth century for three decades and left it in the hands of corrupt dictatorships that lasted well into the nineteen-eighties. Add to these corrupted political institutions deforestation, overpopulation, primary school education onward in a mandated foreign language (French) as opposed to Creole, and of course, a score of natural disasters, and you almost begin to believe those whispers of an ancient devil pact.

The airport is named for Toussaint L'Ouverture, rebel and hero.

When I first arrived in Haiti, all I could think about was the negative. Every pile of rubble, every encampment, every sighting of the ubiquitous UN peacekeeping forces (which just angered me more: where was the food? Where was the medical aid? Why were resources being wasted like this?) As I was riding in the back of the pickup truck we took to the medical camp every day, a small Haitian child jumped up onto the ledge of the truck as it was moving. “Please. I’m so hungry.” We had a cab full of medical supplies and not a bite of food to give him. “I’m sorry, please get down, it’s dangerous,” a volunteer replied. When we got home—dinner ready on the table—I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.

_______

Something happened a couple of days in. Yoga instructors talk a lot about “gaining strength from your neighbors” when you’re having difficulty, channeling their energy and making it yours, whatever: something that has always seemed a little hokey and New Age to me. But the Haitians, easily the warmest, most resilient people I have encountered, really did give me theirs. Literally every single one of them has been touched by the earthquake of January 12; they survived by sheer luck, chance decisions not to go to work or school that day, fate. Or they were trapped under rubble, sure goners, but somehow made it. There was the story of the Haitian student, who described walking to his university building, watching it crumble suddenly with eight hundred students inside: among them his friends, his teachers. There was the story of the sweet woman employed as a cook in the house we were staying in Delmas (the house having been graciously opened to us by a local Haitian man, who reminded me of an especially benevolent, Creole-speaking Dumbledore.) This woman had been visiting her niece at the hospital, when the walls suddenly collapsed all around her and the ceiling above her; she emerged, having pushed herself through a narrow tunnel, twelve hours later, a living being among the bodies strewn about the building.

And yet, as much as the emotional and physical stresses of having survived such an event linger—our clinic doctors diagnosed more post-traumatic stress disorder and high blood pressure than anything else, prescribing bright pink anti-allergy tablets for the scores and scores of patients who couldn’t sleep at night—the people are still passionate about and proud of their country, eager to help rebuild it, to do their part; from them, I learned to try to do the same. Every weekday, I worked at one of two churches: “Big Church,” as we called it, where one hundred patients sat in pews, our pharmacy a small storage closet, our doctor’s office a table to the left of the pulpit; “small church” was the church-turned-school-turned orphanage, where the patients sat upstairs, and the orphaned children singing songs downstairs would simultaneously break and mend my heart.

These three little guys from the orphanage loved the camera.

After the evening’s harrowing ride from the clinic to the house in the back of the pickup truck (you’ve got to cultivate your “truck legs” much like you would your sea legs), we’d begin work with an incredible local youth group from the neighborhood. The group formed in 2009 to combat the social problems that plagued the country even before the earthquake. (They call themselves “FAST Plan”: the “FAST” stands for Framework for Attaining a Social Transformation; how cool is that?) Since January 12, they’ve focused more on clean-up projects (they set up the encampment clean-up at which I volunteered), water distribution projects, even a project aimed at constructing a primary school for one hundred children from the Delmas neighborhood. (They do this in addition to regular work at school or university.) And they’re between eighteen and twenty-four years old.

This sign, which I snapped in the car on my way from the airport, speaks to one of Haiti's bigger socioeconomic problems: the often-higher cost of local goods.

While the youth group isn’t religious, it is definitely spiritual: meetings always began with a pretty French prayer. God definitely pervades Haiti, if not in spirit, then certainly in letter: in prayer, in song, in conversation, even painted in bright blue letters (“Dieu bénévole”) on the fronts of the colorful tap-taps, the tiny covered trucks that serve as Haiti’s public transportation. Medical clinic always started with a chant; partings ended with the words “May God bless you.” Any recounting of an earthquake survival story always included mentions of God’s grace, God’s benevolence, God’s protection. Although I think the term “reverent agnostic” (heavy on the ‘reverent’, as I was raised in a religious household) fits my belief system better than anything else, I found myself chafing at the idea of God’s supposed omnipresence in a country that looked to me like God (provided s/he even existed) had completely jumped ship, fallen asleep, feigned ignorance while nature cruelly shook the country with all its might. “Are you a believer?” a translator asked me (that’s how they always ask in French: not if you’re religious, but if you’re a croyant/e.) “I’m not sure,” I responded honestly. “That’s not good!” he chided me. “It’s good to believe. I pray every day.”

In the evenings, our Haitian host would often teach us songs, one of which had a lovely, haunting melody and went, I think, along the lines of, Prions pour la paix d’Haïti (Pray for the peace of Haiti). He sang it, like he sang everything, beautifully, a little sadly, movingly, the way only someone who really believed the words could. And all of a sudden I had a feeling that my anemic, intellectual quasi-agnosticism—being as it is, the lack of a belief—wasn’t strong enough to weather Haiti. The Haitian faith in God is so ubiquitous because it inspires, unites, moves, solaces. It isn’t really about the object of the faith at all, but the faith itself; whether or not God exists, whether or not he or she or it has continually left Haiti in the lurch, faith in God and good is, paradoxically, the groundswell for the Haitians’ indomitable strength.

That song played over and over again in my head on my flight back from Port-au-Prince, a surreal undercurrent as I arrived back in Dallas, almost as though it was reminding me to remember the country I had feared and then fallen in love with, the people who’d helped me more than I could ever help them.

Prions pour la paix d’Haïti.

Love at first sight. This was after they'd sung a "Welcome" song in Creole-glish I wish I could post here!

Crime and Punishment

Let's not and say we did. Sorry, Raskolnikov, but 200 pages is punishment enough.

H(ait)iatus

Tomorrow--at the truly ungodly hour of 5:45 am--I leave for Port-au-Prince! I've optimistically stuffed the following volumes into my bag: Midnight's Children (Rushdie), The Road (McCarthy), Atonement (McEwan), The Bell Jar (Plath), and Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky, and really slow going so far, by the way), but I'm anticipating that at least seven of the eight hours I spend traveling will involve my face on the tray table.

I am beyond excited about going to Haiti (although still not entirely sure what work I'll be doing once I get there, since it varies week to week). Obviously, once I am there, the only book I'll be using is my tattered little French dictionary--and even that probably not too much, since (I believe) Creole is more commonly spoken. I'll be sure to post updates and pictures whenever I can; electricity is intermittent, as is internet access, so "whenever I can" might actually not be until a week from tomorrow.

I know whatever I do will be a miniscule drop in a truly impossible bucket--Haiti is so broken, facing an entire litany of problems from disaster relief to political corruption. But, well, "to choose doubt as a philosophy is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." (That's from Life of Pi.)

So I go, hopefully to do something, definitely to learn something. And until then, orévwa!

Nominations and names

My mom--one of two creatures genetically obligated to love everything I create--recently complained that my Book a Day blog is "too legal-y." She's probably right; my list of 45 reveals an overwhelming selection bias in favor of all things court-related.

Well, Mom, I hate to do this to you, but my weekend read was Supreme Courtship, a Christopher Buckley satire about the nomination process to the highest court in the land. I've loved Buckley ever since reading Thank You for Smoking, and I resolved to read his other stuff after a very amusing talk he gave at my university ("Did you know," he quipped at one point, "that the title Grapes of Wrath was originally translated into Japanese as Angry Raisins?")

The plot of Supreme Courtship is typical Buckley: a milquetoast president with low approval ratings has been struggling to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. His arch-nemesis is the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a pompous, veneered windbag (written to have more than a passing resemblance to Joe Biden) who has systematically rejected every nominee put forth by the president--including one for "insufficiently appreciating To Kill a Mockingbird." Fed up, the president tries another tack, nominating America's most popular TV judge, a cowboy boots-wearing Texan named Pepper, who is a self-described "plain old girl from Plano" (my hometown! Holla.) Hijinks ensue.

The book definitely had me giggling and was a timely read, given the usual charade of this week's confirmation hearings. ("Kagan promises a 'modest' jurisprudence," bellows the New York Times headline. Let me guess--analogies to umpires and worship at the altar of judicial restraintism are next on the hearings agenda.) In one chapter, Pepper is given a huge book of possible questions to prepare for her hearings, along with answers, which seem to her to represent nothing so much as "smoke grenades of obfuscation." I couldn't put it better.

Ultimately, though, although it starts strong, the book loses steam towards the end, like a bottle of soda that's been left open too long on the countertop. I still enjoyed it (I also really enjoyed flat Sprite as a kid, believe it or not), and would recommend it for anyone who likes their beach reads a little "legal-y."

My other weekend read, Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, did the opposite--beginning slowly before reaching a climactic, dramatic end. The book was interesting enough as a depiction of Old New York, a decadent, privileged society in which nothing matters more than family name (the protagonist bears the absurdly upper-crust moniker Newland Archer), during a time when "scandal was dreaded more than disease." Cue the scandal--Archer, betrothed to the boringly beautiful May, falls in love with her exotic, rules-flouting, recently-separated, Polish countess cousin. This all sounds more interesting than it is, as the plot rolls by at a snail's pace with a cast of side-characters whose family connections are a tangled web (apparently incest was big in Old New York). Not to mention that it's hard to identify all that much with characters who spend their days worrying about the state of their cigar humidors and summer homes. (Or maybe it's just my hard-heartedness: Visiting room after gilt-covered room in the palace of Versailles inspired in me nothing so much as a deep sympathy for those nameless, revolting peasants.) A better title might have been Privileged People with Nothing to Do.

The ending, though, was redeeming. Consider it flat Sprite in the reverse.

The halfway point

I looked at my reading list today and realized I'm a little less than halfway through my Book a Day Project! It's been alternately exhilarating and dreary (depending, of course, on the book). I'm behind (no surprise there). I've managed to update this thing semi-regularly, but hardly as often as I was supposed to (they say creative types can't stick to a schedule, and I'm sticking with that).

A friend asked me if I wake up, pick up a book, start reading, and don't finish until 11pm the same day, or, alternatively, if I "knock out that one Russian mofo's War and Peace in an hour." Ha. The truth, as someone once said, lies in between. Depending on how Zen I feel and how interesting the book is, hundreds of pages can pass by in the span of a couple of hours; on other days, everything becomes a distraction and a single chapter is the literary equivalent of Mount Everest.

Last week, my lovely sister, who as of late has been enslaved to the medical profession (even disembarking from the plane in a particularly smelly pair of scrubs--JUST KIDDING, Jan, they didn't smell AT ALL), came into town, meaning that the whole family was together again for the first time since Christmas! So obviously much time usually devoted to the greats of fiction and non-fiction was, instead, spent eating and gossiping and eating again (we are Indian, after all) and figuring out how to use the auto-timer on the new camera for a family portrait ("HURRY DAD! You've only got ten seconds, and Mom, if you blink this time...!") Despite the 24/8 family time (and I do mean 24/8) I did manage to squeeze in a couple of good reads you should absolutely add to your lists if you haven't already devoured them.

The first was Salinger's Nine Stories. I have a love-hate thing with short stories. On one hand, done well, they are great works of art in miniature. On the other, they are almost always deliberately unfinished--leaving you, the reader, unsatisfied, wanting more (especially true regarding Salinger's entire opus, since the famously reclusive author published so little of what he wrote). Salinger's short stories are funny and wise, dark and mordant; my favorite was Teddy, the final story in the collection, which is Vedantic philosophy as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old boy genius. All are crisply written, economical, provocative: there's no doubt that the recently-deceased author was a master of the form.

I also squeezed in the ubiquitous Life of Pi, whose book jacket simply says "This book will make you believe in God." (A tall order.) The book traces the journey of Pi, moored at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger (I'd explain, but you really should read it.) It is a classic survivor story with deliciously fantastical elements--in some ways reminiscent of Homer's Odyssey. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and leave you with this observation of Pi's:

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life."

A good thing to remember at the halfway point of anything.

Attachment and detachment

I'll admit it, as much as it may destroy my credibility.

I judge books by their covers. Not only by their covers, but by their titles. Even by the author bios (too detailed is usually a bad sign.) Especially by the typeface the author used. (I have a visceral, physical reaction to Times New Roman, that personality-devoid gray suit of fonts--and don't even get me started on the hideous cutesy crayon purée that is Comic Sans.)

Which is why I picked up Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera: I've always loved the title. And the book did not disappoint: it's the kind of lush, epic story which you fall into, which wraps you up in meandering plot and gorgeous imagery. The book traces the lives of three people in a Colombian town in the Caribbean (the location is never really clear): a hopeless romantic, a levelheaded scientific, and the beautiful woman whom both pursue. It's absolutely lovely, although in a sense, it's almost too easy to become absorbed in the story and forget that none of the three self-absorbed characters is really very likeable. All are, however, very real, incredibly funny, and at times appallingly unromantic: their worst flaws coexist with the beautiful, decades-long love story like, well, cholera and love.

On the other hand, Herman Hesse's spare, short Siddhartha was a chore to get through. The novella is the iconic story of a man named Siddhartha, who encounters the Buddha and eventually attains nirvana after a winding journey through the stages of life. (I was so clueless when I started reading it that I initially thought the Siddhartha of the title was the Buddha. Confusing.) I had heard corroborated, rave reviews of this book as a life-changing masterpiece of literature.

Maybe it's my unenlightened frame of mind (I do yoga, but generally, and unfortunately, with thoughts and to-do lists swirling in my head) or my general lack of patience for allegorical tales with meanings buried beneath layers of stories about forests and animals and boat-men and rivers. Perhaps I'll pick it up again ten years from now and glean all the meaning that was supposed to burst forth like wisdom from the realized soul. But Wednesday's mindset just couldn't handle hokey phrases like "Her mouth fell open like a freshly cut fig" or the protagonist's need to refer to himself in the third person ('"Siddhartha is going to eat now,' said Siddhartha.")

Argh.

The cover, though, was beautiful.

Gastronomers abroad

Along with a lovely, culinary-minded friend (and with the aid of this wonderful book) I spent my four months in Paris in search of what we called (only half-jokingly) "gastronomical adventures." These led us to creamy, fragrant, Italian gelatos; to crisp warm goat cheese served on tangles of green salad in iconic French bistros; to those heavenly, pillowy, marvelous, multicolored confections known as macarons; to the tartest, tangiest, Provençal tomates sechées (sundried tomatoes) and the crusty, fresh, French grandmother-made baguettes that accompanied them; and even to little hidden gems in our own residential neighborhood, from a tucked-away "soup boutique" to an Algerian pâtisserie famous for its honey-drenched, pistachio-studded baklava.

And people wonder why I miss it so much.

If said friend and I had had a patron saint on our quests, then M.F.K. Fisher, the early 20th-century food writer and poet-in-prose, would undoubtedly have been it. Although her writing is chiefly about food, equally as important are the people and memories associated with it, whether they are in Whittier, California (her hometown) or the south of France, where she lived and worked. In As They Were (one of many collections of her prose), she weaves these into little sensory vignettes ranging from cottage life in Provence to a hotel in Dijon that pipes wine directly into the rooms (chilled white before breakfast, bold red before bed--only in France!) to the "third or fourth best apple tart of [her] life." Her beautifully-constructed prose has a spiky edge, allowing her to avoid the kind of goopy sentimentalism that often plagues these sorts of memoirs. And it is carefree, worrying very little about tomorrow or yesterday, but always living very decidedly in the present, and living well indeed: the biggest concern is where the next gastronomical adventure will take place.

Skip this one, read this one

The thermostat has been registering a toasty 100˚F lately, which is too bad, because nothing calls for a black turtleneck and a beret like some French existentialism. (Perhaps I can wear the summer equivalent.) I remember the immense amount of Gallic street cred I felt when I read Sartre's Huis Clos ("No Exit"). I understood very little of it the first time around and could be seen at various Starbucks in the city trying to like plain espresso and muttering "L'Enfer, c'est les autres" ("Hell is other people") to myself in a menacing voice.

Joining the cheery Sartre in the pantheon of existentialists is Albert Camus, a French playwright and author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I'd never read Camus's The Stranger (apparently, neither had George W. Bush, until 2006), although it is a French literary classic, and I majored in French in college (not that this is a subtle commentary on the department or anything). It is not a happy book - the main character, Meursault, is drawn into an absurd series of events, culminating with the killing of an Arab man on a beach near Algiers. The book is divided into two parts, detailing events before and after the homicide. Throughout, Meursault displays a stoicism that the townspeople find freaky: in Part One, having just found out that his mother died, he attends the funeral, expresses no desire to look at her, smokes a cig, and drinks coffee ("with milk"). His beautiful girlfriend Marie--whom he begins seeing the day of his Maman's funeral--asks if he wants to marry her; he responds that "it didn't make any difference to him, but they could if she wanted." (Romantic!)

Mersault's lack of emotion is used as damning character evidence in the second part of the book, where he is placed on trial for murder. At one point, he's asked if he feels remorse, and he feels the need to explain that he had never been able to feel remorse for anything because "[his] mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow." The book resolves with his observation on the meaninglessness of life, the absurd disconnect between the uncertainty of fact and the certainty of the verdict and of the punishment: death by guillotine.

Maybe it's just because it's hard to feel angsty with such abundant sunshine, or maybe it's just that I haven't ever really identified with existentialism, but I did not enjoy this book; it ultimately felt empty, which perhaps was the point. I'll give it another read during a New Haven winter and get back to you.

My Tuesday read was similarly angst-producing and anxiety-ridden, but for completely different reasons. Zeitoun, recommended to me by a lovely friend of peerless taste, is written by Dave Eggers, whose work I have always enjoyed. (What is the What is probably my favorite--if you haven't read it, you must--it's the rare, life-changing book.) Zeitoun did not disappoint; it is the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian contractor living in New Orleans with his American wife and young children in 2005--the year of Hurricane Katrina. I'm ashamed to admit I don't know very much about Katrina, and this book--which is non-fiction but novelistic--is illuminating (not to mention heart-breaking). Absolutely read this book--a paperback version's out on the 15th, and the proceeds go to Katrina relief efforts.

The story follows Zeitoun (known to everyone by his last name), who decides to stay behind in New Orleans while his wife and children evacuate; having seen dozens of storm warnings before, he's sure this one will blow over in a couple of days at most. Instead, the levees break, the streets flood, and the city devolves into chaos. In the aftermath, Zeitoun uses an old canoe to literally row across streets, rescuing families who are trapped in their houses. One day, as he goes back to his house, he is mistaken for a looter and arrested by the National Guard, forced to spend the next several weeks in a Guantánamo-style cage. From the moment the storm hits onward, the complete incompetence of the rescue effort is abundantly clear; the villain in the book is insurmountable government bureaucracy.

Looking at the Gulf Coast five years later, that is angst I can believe in.

If the Supreme Court justices were on Captain Planet...

...Scalia, caustic, merciless, pen-as-sword, would be Fire; O'Connor, trailblazing, no-nonsense, suffers-no-fools, would be Earth; Kennedy, occasionally weepy, often dramatic, nearly always self-important, would be Wind; Stevens, polite, unruffled, placid, would be Water; and Blackmun, kind, questioning, constantly agonizing over the human consequences of his decisions, would undoubtedly be Heart. (My analogy, of course, breaks down there, as there are four justices I haven't accounted for...oops.)

At least that's the picture given in Edward Lazarus's controversial 1998 book, Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court. Lazarus served as a Supreme Court clerk in the 1988-9 term for Justice Blackmun, who famously authored Roe v. Wade in 1973. Clerking for the Supreme Court is tremendous, prestigious, competitive--during the year, a clerk works closely with his or her justice, recommending which cases should be reviewed (since the Supreme Court doesn't review all cases appealed to it), advising the justice on the legal reasoning to be used in a specific case, and oftentimes even writing parts of Supreme Court opinions (both majorities and dissents). The clerk plays a host of different roles: adviser, student, defender, helper, even friend.

As the Court is famously veiled in secrecy--cases, even those potentially altering the course of our constitutional rights, are deliberated behind closed doors--the clerk is, for his or her year, similarly bound to the code. So Lazarus's 540-page tome, which weaves memoir (of his term at the court) with historical analysis (of watershed cases in the controversial areas of affirmative action, abortion, the death penalty) was seen initially as a rude betrayal. Frankly, nothing in it seemed particularly stunning or salacious (I mean, certainly not compared to the gossipy, schadenfreude-laced Game Change, which I am embarrassed to admit I bought on my Kindle.) I learned that clerks have a scarily powerful role at times (and depending on the justice): their representation--fair or unfair--of a case to their justice can often literally determine the difference between life and death. As the court of last resort, the Supreme Court has the final word on death sentences issued nationwide: Lazarus describes the chilling process of waiting for the justices' votes on death penalty cases, votes which clerks would relay to the jails, where men--sometimes innocent, sometimes guilty--would be waiting, hoping, for a last-minute reprieve from the highest court in the land as they were strapped into the chair.

For an abolitionist (which I am), reading Lazarus's detailed account of the death penalty's rollercoaster history on the Court--including an eight-year period in the 1970s in which it was outlawed altogether before being reinstated--is heart-wrenching. In one case, Warren McCleskey, accused of murder, challenged his sentence on racial grounds: a study had found that suspects in crimes in which the victim was white were four times as likely to get the death penalty as suspects in crimes in which the victim was black. Nevertheless, a majority found that even in light of this huge disparity, the statistical evidence wasn't quite convincing enough to warrant a retrial. In another case Lazarus mentions, the defense attorney was late by two days filing a petition to stay his client's death sentence; he petitioned the Supreme Court at any rate, figuring they would overlook the comparatively minor clerical error in light of the gravity of the situation. They didn't; writing for the majority, O'Connor began her opinion pompously, "This is a case about federalism..."

The bizarreness and caprice with which death penalty cases are treated in the courts is really best summed up by this observation of Norman Mailer's, quoted by Lazarus: "Capital punishment is to the rest of all law as surrealism is to realism. It destroys the logic of the profession." Yet there are many surreal moments in other areas of Court history. There's the shuffle-dance the Court does around the abortion issue before three Republican nominees ultimately voted to uphold its central holding in 1993. There's the unsuccessful nomination fight of Robert Bork, a brilliant radical conservative with zero people skills and a very long paper trail that eventually proved his undoing. (Or maybe it could have been Bork's innate creepiness. Two friends of mine who were roommates used to play a game called "Hide the Bork," in which they would tuck Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, the cover of which features Bork's exceedingly creepy, goateed visage, in various corners of the room to scare the other roommate.) There's the successful, but scandal-plagued, nomination fight of Clarence Thomas. And, of course, there's the absolute circus of Bush v. Gore.

These are all covered in Lazarus's occasionally long-winded--but still engaging--primer on the modern court. (If you are looking for a quicker modern Supreme Court read, I'd suggest Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine--Closed Chambers is much more academic, more detailed, and less recent.) Ultimately, the hero of Lazarus's book is thoughtful, rational, consensus-building jurisprudence; the antagonist is the hyperpolitical, results-driven process that has overtaken the modern court. Lazarus ultimately presents a fiercely-divided, two-wing court whose members do not resemble Captain Planet's elements so much as they do a pair of substances that can never seem to get along: oil and water.

Veritas vos liberabit?

In a Constitutional Law of Civil Rights class, I presented a Supreme Court case called Powell v. Alabama, about the "Scottsboro boys" - nine black men, aged 13 to 19, accused of raping two white women on a train traveling through the Jim Crow South. The boys were captured by civilians in Alabama and immediately sent to prison, where they weren't allowed to talk to each other or any sort of counsel - until the day of their trial. Because of public anathema toward the Scottsboro boys, no attorney was willing to take on the case, and the judge vaguely appointed "all of the Alabama bar" to represent the defendants. On the day of trial, a real estate lawyer--who was neither a member of the Alabama bar nor a defense attorney, and who was wholly unfamiliar with the case--stepped up. The boys were tried in turn, on the same day, for a crime bearing a capital penalty. Lacking adequate defense, on the basis of circumstantial evidence and of testimony riddled with hearsay and falsehood and inconsistency (one of the victims eventually retracted her accusation altogether), each of the boys was sentenced to death, by a tainted jury that had taken mere moments to deliberate.

While the case eventually got up to the Supreme Court--which in a watershed moment called the convictions unconstitutional because of the inadequacy of the counsel provided--the Scottsboro boys languished for years in prison, waiting out an endless appeals process. Some died in prison, while others spent years clearing their names.

The parallels between this case and the one that wrenches apart the tiny Alabama town in To Kill a Mockingbird (which, I should mention, I absolutely loved--by far my favorite of the books I have read so far for this project) are uncanny. The stark difference, of course, is that mythic paragon of decency and justice: Atticus Finch. He is the attorney for Tom Robinson, a black man similarly falsely accused of assaulting a white woman. The town torments Atticus's family for his collusion with this no-good criminal--for his betrayal of the white race. Atticus's tomboyish, precocious daughter, Scout Finch--who is even more winning of a protagonist than Oscar Wao--narrates the racial prejudices of the 1930s South with the innocent, matter-of-fact voice of an eight-year-old: in one classroom scene, she is asked to define a democracy, which she does, as "equal rights for all, special privileges for none." Her teacher nods in approval and writes "WE ARE A DEMOCRACY" on the board; Scout is disturbed after observing this same sanctimonious teacher out on the steps later in the day, criticizing Atticus for having the gall to defend a Negro as he did.

At trial, in a closing plea to the jury, Atticus near-whispers, "Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal...this is not an ideal, but a living, working reality."

Perhaps, in the sense that everyone has the theoretical right to a fair trial, et cetera. But in reality? Well into the 21st century, we still treat as questions what should be settled facts: that everyone is free from unconstitutional search and seizure (looking at you, Arizona), that everyone has the right of due process, and that these are rights that cannot be derogated in any case--national security pressures notwithstanding. The law itself, as Obama observed, can be applied to reward the powerful and punish the powerless, the disenfranchised, the poor.

What Atticus speaks to, I think, is still an ideal--what should be, rather than what is. Kind of like Atticus himself.

Dreams and Darkness, Identity and Community

I hadn't planned this at all, but I read Dreams from My Father and Heart of Darkness back-to-back and noticed certain parallels--both, of course, are personal narratives of protagonists who (at some point) journey to unfamiliar African lands (in Obama's case, Kenya; in Conrad's case, what is now Congo-Kinshasa). Obama describes a boyhood attempt to understand his identity by checking out books about Africa from the library and his crushing embarrassment upon seeing, under the "Kenya" section, pictures of men in loincloths, bones stuck through their noses--the stereotypical "African savage" caricatured in books like, well, Heart of Darkness. In fact, Conrad's narrator describes his first encounter with such "savages": "They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces: but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar."

Hmmm.

Of course, the similarities largely end there: race, and racism, are ugly, unconscious undercurrents in Heart of Darkness, while they are central themes of Dreams from My Father. It is hard to believe that the books were written less than a hundred years apart - in Heart of Darkness, the infamous Kurtz uses the color of his skin to fashion himself a "demigod" of sorts, exploiting the native people, their land, and their treasure. Although the novel is critical of his actions, the superiority of the white man over the black man is portrayed as a given, almost an afterthought. Dreams from My Father, and the person who wrote it--not to mention his future career path--were so completely inconceivable in this world.

While we're on the subject of differences, Heart of Darkness, while only about 100 pages, felt endless--maybe because I already knew the story, maybe because Conrad is not a fan of paragraphs. Dreams from My Father, on the other hand, was about five times that--but its length is hardly noticeable. In fact, it was completely unlike any other political memoir I've read (I guess because it is not really a political memoir at all...) It's honest, not canned, and seriously reads like a novel; it is inspirational without being twee or trite. More than that, though, I think any child of immigrants, any "third culture kid," really anyone who has ever struggled with questions of identity or belonging, can absolutely glean lessons from this book. I love this observation of Obama's (from his days as a community organizer):

"There was always a community if you dug deep enough. There was poetry as well - a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask."

This is the kind of thing I want to remember as I begin law school/a career--before I succumb to the corruptive clutches of "Big Law," to the competition, to the dry task of what Obama himself describes in Dreams as "a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power." It is so easy to forget the law's impact on real people, real communities, real lives. It is so easy to jump on a career treadmill and even forget oneself--the goals and aspirations tucked away in journals, mentioned fleetingly in personal statements and cover letters. Looking at the administration's struggles to enact policy--particularly in the wake of uncontrollable, heart-wrenching disasters like the gallons of oil currently spilling into the Gulf--it is even easy to forget the nationwide aspirations, the promises, that once seemed so golden, so attainable. It's through community work, I think, through a focus on that elusive "greater good," that individual identity is forged--a sum of the parts, a part of the whole.

Decadence and Dorian Gray

When I studied abroad in Paris, I learned the danger of false cognates--for example, the word excitée, which you think would mean "excited," an expression I use about once a conversation. As in "Dear Madame, I am so excited to stay with you this semester!"

Well, it means "excited," all right--just not the kind of "excited" you might initially imagine. Something I found out a good month into my stay. Only the French.

My favorite false cognate--one much less likely to get you into trouble--is the word décadence, used not in the sense of a dear, metabolically-blessed friend's dessert specialty (a Nutella-berry-ricotta pie) but rather to signify moral decay and social decline (pies = immorality?!) I picture decadence as a combination of the English and French senses of the word: a luxuriant, silk-swathed, chocolate-covered, hedonistic degeneration of civic virtue.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is really a portrait of decadence in turn-of-the-century England. As you probably know, it's the story of a beautiful young Adonis who, Faust-like, compromises his soul for eternal beauty and youth after realizing that "the life that was to make his soul would mar his body." His consequent descent into corruption and cruelty leaves him unscarred, while his portrait becomes increasingly wizened and gruesome--a meter of his actions. He's egged on by Lord Henry, the symbol of corrosive hedonism, who gets all the best lines in the book: "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." "I wonder who it was who defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given." And my favorite, "To define is to limit," which could be the manifesto for my generation's "hookup culture."

The book goes from zero to Poe--twisted and gothic--in the course of a few chapters, which I probably should have expected but didn't, and by the surreal, horrifying end, I was shivering under the covers (and had to sleep with the lights on). Dorian Gray was fascinating and brilliantly-written...but don't read it in the dark.

I've been remiss...

From the age of seven onward, I kept a never-ending series of journals--in composition books (I liked their retro appeal), on a Word document on the family Gateway marked "PRIVATE!!!--KEEP OUT!", on parchment paper with a calligraphy pen (how I wasn't stuffed in a locker at some point in my public school career is still a mystery), and yes, even on an early blog, in ninth grade, where I went by the unfortunate online handle "Chacha." These life-documentation endeavors would always begin earnestly enough: "Dear Journal, Hey! What's up? Let me introduce myself, since I think we are going to get pretty well acquainted, and since I will write in you every day. I'm in the fifth grade, I like blue and playing the piano and Twizzlers. What about you?" This poor, silent, unobtrusive new friend would promptly be forgotten a couple of days later. Skip to Mom-enforced spring cleaning time two years later, when I would discover its sad black-and-white-speckled self underneath a family-size pack of the aforementioned candy. "Dear Journal, Oops. LONG time no talk. So much to update you on. Wow. Middle school is sooooo different...check out this Gelly Roll pen."

My love of starting journals, and my difficulty keeping them up, is just to illustrate that I am not the world's greatest daily updater by any means. Doing almost any non-hygienic daily task, really, is challenging. Which is why I am late writing this post. My original idea for this blog involved reading a book and then writing about it early over coffee the next day, preferably after having gotten up at 5:30am, eaten fruit for breakfast, and done an hour of yogalates.

Alas, after a day of work, a midnight snack of Nutella and TV, and having just squeaked by my ridiculous self-imposed midnight deadline for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I have three books I have yet to write about, all of which were interesting and rare and complex. So here goes:

Monday was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This book had been so hyped to me that I was prepared to hate it. I loved it. Oscar de Leon is the winningest protagonist, a "ghetto nerd at the end of the world." He is an irrevocably dorky, literary, overweight Dominican gamer growing up in New Jersey who compliments girls in the 'hood on their "pulchritude" and "insouciance." The story traces a Kennedyesque curse on Oscar's family, called the fuku, which has ravaged and ripped apart the de Leon family; the fuku's counterforce, in a sense, is love, both romantic and familial. Books painted as tragicomic are so rarely equal parts both, but this one actually is--it is heartrending and alternately hilarious. The narration reminded me a lot of another book I like quite a bit, The White Tiger, which also has the kind of distinctive, unselfconscious, first-person narrative voice that allows you, the reader, to forget the author's presence altogether. Oscar Wao was also filled with tidbits of Dominican history--which I know literally nothing about--in amusingly sarcastic footnotes that Michiko Kakutani informs me are "David Foster Wallace-esque." Another author to add to the ever-growing list...

Tuesday was Men Without Women, an early collection of short stories by Hemingway. When I was in high school, we had a "Hemingway unit" in which we all had to read The Old Man and the Sea (likely my least favorite Hemingway book) and then pick another novel or work of his to read on our own. (I picked A Farewell to Arms--the romance! the war! the Italian setting! the tragic end!) Anyway, a vast majority of students ended up reading Men Without Women because it was by far the shortest. I happened across a copy the other day and picked it up, having never read a Hemingway short story.

Aside from a mutual love of Paris, Hemingway and I have very little in common--he is, after all, the whiskey-drinking, bullfighting, womanizing, mustachioed, comma-eschewing epitome of Man (three of his books made it on the "The Essential Man's Library" list that I somehow stumbled upon while picking books to read for this project.) But I have always been strangely attracted to his work. The short story form fits especially well with his style--the unfinishedness, the economy of prose. I loved a few stories and could definitely have done without others (the bullfighting ones in particular...)

Wednesday was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, who writes (I believe) in Czech and in French. I could not imagine translating this work, complex as it is, into English. Loosely, it's a story of two couples living in Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968 and of dichotomies: lightness/weight, love/lust, cyclicality/linearity. The idea of "unbearable lightness" comes from the book's rejection of history's cyclical nature--if everything were to happen once, and once alone, then humans are unburdened: "what happened once might as well not have happened at all...history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow." I found the story completely frustrating and dreary, the writing beautiful and pithy. For example, on coincidences, which play a huge role in the novel: "It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in daily life, for he therefore deprives his life of a dimension of beauty." Or on kitsch: "Kitsch excludes anything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence..." Kundera has a brilliant way of putting things.

And now it's on to Dorian Gray, and hopefully a timely entry tomorrow!

The List!

Well, a week has passed, and in the interim, I've cleaned/feng shui'd/archived everything in my room, vestiges of my college life--threadbare green bathrobe, array of French dictionaries, plastic dishware, fifteen-year-old plaid couch, "Quote of the Day" board (wishful thinking, of course...it was closer to "Quote of the Month")--relegated to storage, Proustian madeleines of the past. (Maybe this is a little melodramatic. After all, my budget and life over the next three years could easily be titled The Ramen Years: A Sequel.)

And also this week, after much deliberation, soliciting of personal recommendations, and perusing of lists along the lines of "1000 books you MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE," "The Literary Bucket List," "You Don't Understand Literature, America, or Life Unless You've Read ____", I compiled my reading list! (Read about the project's inception here!) At this point, it numbers 45, equal parts fiction and non-fiction. (It was 35, then 40, and is uncannily growing longer every time I glance at a newspaper or a bookshelf and think of a new book I need to add.)

I wonder if I should've made this an entire list of classics--the Shakespeare plays I never read, the Russians I missed out on, the dreary stuff (looking at you, Bleak House) I'd purposely avoided--instead of what it actually is, an inchoate hodgepodge of bestsellers and recent Pulitzer winners and items on mandatory summer reading lists and interesting-looking things I've always wanted to read. But what constitutes a "classic," really? Style? Subject? Timeliness? Timelessness? Popular consensus? Some convergence thereof? Maybe it's a title bestowed, like sainthood, years after the book's modernity. Maybe it's a designation requiring the Potter Stewart approach--"I'll know it when I see it." At any rate, the very incomplete, terribly random, and surely oversight-filled list below contains anywhere from one to forty-five "classics."

Week One

(1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

(2) Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway

(3) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

(4) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

(5) Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama

Week Two

(6) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

(7) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

(8) Closed Chambers, Edward Lazarus

(9) Zeitoun, Dave Eggers

(10) The Stranger, Albert Camus

Week Three

(11) As They Were, M.F.K. Fisher

(12) Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

(13) Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

(14) Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

(15) Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Week Four

(16) The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

(17) Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(18) Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, George R. Stewart

(19) Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

(20) Supreme Courtship, Christopher Buckley

Week Five

(21) Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

(22) Dreaming in Hindi, Katherine Russell Rich

(23) The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

(24) Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer

(25) The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

Week Six

(26) Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky

(27) The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

(28) Atonement, Ian McEwan

(29) A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

(30) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Week Seven

(31) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

(32) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

(33) Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

(34) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

(35) A Passage to India, E.M. Forester

Week Eight

(36) A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle

(37) Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

(38) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

(39) America's Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar

(40) When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, Robert H. Bates

Week Nine

(41) Catch-22, Joseph Heller

(42) The Road, Cormac McCarthy

(43) The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

(44) Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(45) A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

What is the "Book a Day" Project?

I was a tremendously avid reader as a kid. We're talking stacks of novels ranging from the Boxcar Children to the Brontës; the skills to make a PB&J (without crusts) with one hand as the other was thumbing through beloved dog-eared copies of the Anne of Green Gables books; an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the March family; a pair of enormous, round, purple glasses that predated Tina Fey geek-chic; and a continued inability to conduct a normal conversation without working in a Harry Potter reference of some sort. That's not to mention that it is virtually impossible for me to leave a Half Price Books without buying something, and that my currently terrible vision is certainly the result of the hundreds of pages I read (clichédly) under the covers, in the semidarkness, way past a strict 9pm bedtime.

Unfortunately, one of the sad truths of growing up is that being assigned things to read makes them less fun, and the more assigned things one has to read, the less one actually tends to read. A very recently graduated college student, I'd found myself reading less and less of anything outside of my thesis topic (most recently the Bush torture memos, which were both gory and questionable in both style and substance) and the required stuff on the syllabus (generally completed the night before a test, which made it decidedly less enjoyable). Having gone to a math and science high school, I missed out on a lot of the classics and made a heroic effort to catch up--which ended the moment I read the first two sentences of Moby-Dick.

Seeing as I am entering law school this fall--the place where assigned reading reaches its hyper-apotheosis, in those capital-S Serious books whose sole function is to intimidate those who think you, the bearer, understand its contents--now seems like the perfect time to start my Book a Day Project. The "book a day" idea was inspired by a beloved political science professor's PBS series on the Supreme Court, which included a feature on Justice Hugo Black, who--according to the series--read a book literally every single day until he died. I intend to do the same--except just for the summer, and with breaks for weekends (and for catch-up, if need be). If a book is excessively long I'll spend a couple of days on it, but I'll try to stick to the promise and title of this blog as best I can. As the above-mentioned prof often says, once Hugo Black, you don't go back.

"Why?" you ask. "Aren't you going to be doing Herculean amounts of reading for the next three years and likely the rest of your life?" To which I respond, "Probably. Actually, definitely." But this is my last, glorious, extended stretch of summertime freedom, and I intend to milk it, sprawled out on a hammock (until the weather gets fried-egg-on-the-street-like, likely in July) with a new or old classic. I'll catch up on things I never read, things I've always meant to read, things I didn't know I wanted to read until someone mentioned them. I'll try to cover fiction and nonfiction, novels and shorts, biographies, autobiographies, even prosopographies! Religious and heretical, prosaic and poetic. Memoir and fantasy. I'll try to sample little bits of everything without taking the fun out of anything. And ultimately, as everyone probably does, I hope to rekindle my first, best love.

Stay tuned for a reading list!