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.