Yesterday, a friend of mine who’s a law clerk happened to mention how much she enjoys reading Justice Roberts’ legal decisions. This enjoyment, she said, is irrespective of any agreement or disagreement with him on points of law — but rather has to do with his writing style, which she described as crisp, readable and frequently entertaining.
One favorite is his dissent in Pennsylvania v. Nathan Dunlap, which opens in a Sam Spade style:

North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.
Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.

On the same topic of Legal Dissents that Make Enjoyable Reading, my friend also cited this one, given by Judge Bybee in the 9th Circuit case US v. Nevils:

It is said that the wife of English lexicographer Samuel Johnson returned home unexpectedly in the middle of the day, to find Dr. Johnson in the kitchen with the chambermaid. She exclaimed, “My dear Dr. Johnson, I am surprised.” To which he reputedly replied, “No my dear, you are amazed. We are surprised.”
Earl Nevils was surprised when two LA police officers with guns drawn ordered him not to move. But Nevils was not amazed in the least by the circumstances in which he found himself: he had a loaded, chambered semiautomatic Tec 9 on his lap and a loaded, chambered .40 caliber pistol by his leg. Nor was he astonished by the marijuana, ecstasy, cash and a cellphone on a table a foot away. Although the unoccupied apartment was not his, Nevils wasn’t the least bewildered at finding himself in Apartment #6–officers had found drugs and guns in the apartment just three weeks earlier and had arrested Nevils there for parole violation. According to one of the officers, Nevils first impulse was to “grab towards his lap” where the Tec 9 lay and “then he stopped and put his hands up.” He later exclaimed to an officer, “I don’t believe this s—. Those m———— left me sleeping and didn’t wake me.” The jury found him guilty of being a felon in possession.
The majority overturns his conviction because it finds the evidence insufficient to show that Nevils knowingly possessed the guns. It surmises that it is equally plausible that someone–anyone, actually, since the defense couldn’t finger any person in particular–set Nevils up by placing the guns on him while he was in a drunken stupor. Thus, the majority concludes, no reasonable juror–certainly not the twelve who did–could have found that Nevils knowingly possessed the guns. Like Mrs. Johnson, I am both amazed and disappointed. I respectfully dissent.

• “Samba Triste,” performed by a young Baden Powell.
• Karen Russell’s “Vampires In The Lemon Grove“: Originally appeared in Zoetrope and is included in Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. Worth searching out.
• Two nonfiction books: Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust, and Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, the latter recommended by Steph. Neither are about topics I’d have thought I’d find interesting — and yet they’re both fascinating. Both definitely of the fox, not hedgehog school.
• Summer Will Show, of course.
• Werner Herzog: My new thing is to watch a Herzog double feature on the weekends, Werner Herzog Sundays!, a ritual I plan to keep up for at least a few more weeks. The first weekend was My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski and Grizzly Man, which worked well back to back as character studies. Next were the Les Blank-directed documentaries about Herzog: Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. I’ll be away this weekend, but the one after will be Fitzcarraldo and I don’t know what. Maybe filling out an application for Herzog’s Rogue Film School.

I’m reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show right now. It’s about an Englishwoman who runs away to Paris and falls in love with her husband’s mistress. I’d been wanting to read it ever since Sarah Waters named it as one of her favorite novels. At the time, it was out of print. But NYRB Classics reissued the novel this August, and I really think you couldn’t do better than to get yourself a copy.
Warner was a poet as well as a novelist, and as I read I find myself admiring how this shows in how she works her sentences. It sounds like a deadly dull thing to praise, a writer’s sentences, maybe because its praise that often gets awarded to books that are stultifying (meditations on a woodpile and changing cloud patterns and something-something about mortality and oh my god what page am I on it is only page 23). But the fact is Warner’s sentences are unusually beautiful, and I keep wondering what it is about them that makes them so.
One particular thing I’ve noticed is the ratio of Latinate to Anglo-Saxon in the paragraphs. Warner’s a very elegant stylist, and one danger of “elegant prose” is how easily it can become overly smooth and glassy. And then the reader slips right off the face of it. One of Warner’s tricks is to pop in an Anglo-Saxon-rooted word here and there that’s not only a good, just-right word, it also works like a prick to keep the paragraph from growing too smooth.
Example of elegance that would become glassy if the entire novel were like this:

Together they would look out of the window at the unfinished Ste. Clotilde, and an artistic conversation would take place, Père Hyacinthe with roulades of language expatiating on the beauties of the Gothic Frederick supplying cadences of agreement, till the two voices joined, as it were, in a duet, aspiring in thirds and sixths …

Example of a prick in the elegance:

The pleasures of avarice were emphasized by the surroundings. It was difficult to believe that this was Paris, so nipped and dingy did it look, so down-hearted and down-at-heel. A shrewish wind was blowing.

The “shrewish” is good, but the “nipped” is perfect.
Another prick:

The smell of the sea, melancholy like a whine, rose from the filthy clucking water.

The inverse, of course, is also true. Sometimes the elegance extends and makes beautiful what would otherwise be ordinary. Here is a sentence that could have been “and they breakfasted on coffee, bread and sausage”:

Some tin coffeepots, long wands of golden bread, a sausage in a paper chemise, gave a domesticated appearance to the barricade.

With the recent glut of self-help books based on the works of great authors, I’ve been amusing myself with mock proposals, my favorite so far being Six-Pack Abs With Charles Bukowski. Another idea is a more generalized “exercise with the authors!”-type encyclopedia. Charles Dickens would have the first entry. From Jane Smiley’s Penguin Lives biography:

It was in this period [1838ish] that he took up the habit of long, vigorous daily walks that seem almost unimaginable today for an otherwise very busy man with many obligations. At a pace of twelve to fifteen minutes per mile, he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles. Returning, as his brother-in-law said, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir…”

I think of this often as last year I received a fancy GPS-style watch with which to track my walking/jogging (or “wogging”). It was a very generous present, but it’s taken a lot of illusion out of my life. For example, pictured above is an overlook I walk to quite a bit that, if you asked me before, I would have told you was roughly a four-mile walk but which turns out to be more like two.
(If you have any similar “authors who exercise” tidbits, please feel free to share by email.)

Books I bought simply because the title amused me, no. 43: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Alchemy.
Related: If you have any lead pencils or jars of old pennies lying around, I’d be ever so grateful if you could send them along.

People sure wish George R.R. Martin would finish his new book! This new one is to be called A Dance With Dragons, and it’s the fifth in his Song of Ice and Fire series, which despite its embarrassing, “a cologne by Oksana Baiul” name is, in fact, an excellent and very addictive fantasy series. I had reservations about the fourth book in the series (short version: too many family histories, too many nipples) but I’m still a fan — and the fourth book ended with several cliffhangers that I’m eager to see get sorted out. This latest installment was originally due out a few years back. 2006? 2007? I don’t remember the specific date; only that I counted down to it, then presented myself in a froth at the bookstore that week to pick up my copy. It was nowhere to be found. Later I checked Amazon and saw a new pub date, this one about six months or so in the future, had been fixed. Disappointing — but what are you going to do? Then, a few months later, the revised publication date was replaced by this, more ominous message: “Currently unavailable. We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.” I checked Martin’s website. An update there said something like, “Yep, I’m still writing.”
Now, if you’ve ever been engaged in a writing project that’s lasted a period of years you’ll be familiar with how, after a while, no one seems to ask how the book is anymore. Instead they ask you when it will be done. And while people often mean it well, at some point you realize that the real question they’re asking isn’t “Are you done yet?” so much as “Why aren’t you done?” It’s an awkward question to field from family and friends. Worse, I imagine, would be to hear it from an agent or editor. But now I’ve discovered the most terrible thing of all: To have it be the subject of an open debate in the reviews section of Amazon.
Yesterday I happened to think about Martin’s series and decided to check Dance With Dragons‘ Amazon page to see if it had a release date. No, but somehow the book had accrued 49 reviews and a two-and-a-half star rating. Had I missed the book’s coming out? Was there some foreign edition that people had gotten a hold of? No. The majority of the “reviews” are fans expressing their disappointment with the delay in publication and asking variations of the question: “Why isn’t it done yet?”
One reviewer writes:

I am thrilled to see that others share my growing concern. I, too, followed Robert Jordan through 11 main Novels and a prequel waiting for him to finish his series.
Then he died, leaving his series unfinished.
A lesson George RR Martin should learn from! [Ed. note: !!]
I’m a regular at GRRM’s website and “Not a Blog” and have to say that I just can’t put into words the disappointment I feel. Mr. Martin has caught the bug. He’s decided that he is going to stretch out his “A Song of Fire and Ice” series as far and for as long as possible.
He has time to blog about football.
He has time to blog about politics.
He has time to blog about toy miniatures.
He has time to travel around the world.
But…
He has no time to work on his LONG overdue 5th book.”

I’m torn here — I’m a fan too, and I confess, I’ve sometimes seen pictures of Martin at sci-fi and fantasy conventions, smiling and looking like a lovely gent, and thought, “Get back to work, George!” But reading these comments I feel sympathy for him too. Because that above comment is how I’ve always imagined the ticker tape in people’s heads runs when they ask me about the book: “She has time to take walks. She has time to watch Buffy reruns. She has time to drink wine. She has time to know a startling amount of celebrity gossip and random stories from the Internet.”
Here’s a snippet from another review:

Too much time has passed; I can’t remember all the characters and the subtle nuances of the story have escaped me. It’s been something like nine years since we read about some of our favorite characters in A Storm Of Swords. I just don’t have the heart to drag myself through the series again to rekindle the affair, only to be left hanging yet another time at the conclusion.
I’ve moved on – and maybe you should too.

Poor George. Well, at least there’s no section on Wikipedia specifically devoted to cataloging how long it’s taking him to write the thing. Oh no, wait.
UPDATE: Thanks to Levi Stahl for directing me to Neil Gaiman sounding off on the same subject: “George R.R. Martin is not working for you.” (Third item.)

Maud directs the way to this essay by Anne Carson about the “metaphysical silences” of translations — places where the text falls silent, not because it’s incomplete, but because in some larger sense there are no words. As illustration, Carson uses a passage from The Odyssey and, even more interestingly, the transcripts from Joan of Arc’s trial. It’s good stuff.
The essay sent me back to If Not, Winter, Carson’s translations of the fragments of Sappho, although there, as Carson notes, the silences are physical, not metaphysical. She writes: “Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways–with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture–and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent.”
I wish we had the poems; but I love the fragments too. And the silences around them, as rendered by Carson, take on their own kind of beauty. Here are a few examples:

25
]
] quit
]
] luxurious woman
]
]
]
36
I long and seek after
42
their heart grew cold
they let their wings down
103
]yes tell
]the bride with beautiful feet
]child of Kronos with violets in her lap
]setting aside anger the one with violets in her lap
]pure Graces and Pierian Muses
]whenever songs, the mind
]listening to a clear song
]bridegroom
]her hair playing the lyre
]Dawn with gold sandals

* See the essay. I like to think this was Carson’s working title.

My 20th high-school reunion is this weekend, and I’m rushing around this morning packing my bags for the trip back to Wisconsin. I think you’re supposed to dread class reunions but other than wishing my bangs were a half-inch longer, that I wasn’t mid-breakout, and that I had, um, exercised more diligently for the past 20 or so years, I’m looking forward to it in a pretty uncomplicated way: Friends! Home! Bars! Cheese! I hardly get back to my hometown, Appleton, these days — my parents moved from there when I was 19 — but it’s still a main place with me: Not home exactly (that’s the bungalow with Lowell), but an epicenter.
The novel I’m writing is set in a sort-of Appleton; a city both like and unlike the place where I grew up. It’s strange because I inhabit that town imaginatively almost every day, but in other fundamental ways I no longer know the other city, the living city, as well as I wish I did — both because of what I’ve forgotten and because the city itself has grown, changed, moved on. And the faux Appleton that’s built up in my head is pervasive (persuasive?). This morning I was thinking about where I’d get coffee on this trip; I’ll be staying at a hotel downtown, and I thought, “Oh, you’ll just walk down to that little bakery down the street.” Then I remembered that the bakery doesn’t exist; I made it up.
In honor of the trip, and of homelands that both are and aren’t, here are two parts from James Tate’s “I Am a Finn,” taken from his book Distance from Loved Ones, which you should have along with his selected poems (which is to say, this is a longish excerpt; please don’t be angry with me, Mr. Tate!):

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).
Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger
no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
On the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid
to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910–why
is everyone leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
…
But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
Assuming I pass. Finnish literature
really came alive in the 1860s
Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.
They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
Winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

Photo from Wiener Fest 2009 in Whitelaw, WI. Taken by Sarah Filzen.