J: For our first book of the new while-you’re-away bookclub, Ben and I chose The Postman Always Rings Twice. Let me talk for a minute about the book-choosing process. As before, it was a difficult one, though we both (I think) did a better job picking a first round that both of us could enjoy. But this list is a much longer one than our previous, and so we found ourselves with my dad in the car driving to Norfolk two days before I was to leave, still trying to finalize the list. So, I went to Modern Library’s list of the best books of the previous century, and we started the debate.

B: I guess I wasn’t too interested in James M. Cain, or really any turn of the century who done it type fiction (I just don’t trust that gum shoes can be effective crime solvers, especially now that I’ve been taught that it requires intensely scientific forensic work to solve crimes), so this book was going to be at the top of the debate pile. Fortunately for us, Jaci ended the debate quickly by informing me that this book had been an inspiration to Albert Camus; since he was one of my favorite writers in high school, I was forced to allow the book in at spot numero uno.

J: And so it made the list as our first book. It’s a short one, but we split it into two parts since we would both be busy. And as you might expect, we both ended up finishing it early.

B: Truth be told- the book was exciting, and even with my bias towards the characters in the novel and their naiveté, so the book flew right by. Had it been what I expected, I could imagine that it would have taken the full two weeks.

J: While there were definitely a few aspects of the novel that I didn’t completely grasp (why are they suspected of a crime? what is at the heart of this central relationship?), I found myself completely engrossed. It reads like an extended conversation with the protagonist, and he’s so frank and forthcoming about his every thought and whim and dark wish that you keep reading to find out what twisted path he’ll lead you down next.

B: I also firmly believed that they could get away with their deeds. I felt that rural California during the depression would be the perfect place to commit the perfect crime and get away with it. For some reason though, the authority characters in the book were blessed with both good sense and amazing intuition (bordering on bigotry). I knew the postman was going to ring again (I mean, Cain laid that out right on the cover of the book), but I spent the whole story firmly believing that they would be Bonnie and Clyde. I was almost relieved at the ending (which I won’t spoil here, but let’s just say fate, not Dick Tracy intervened).

J: It actually reminded me in some ways of Blue Angel, the Francine Prose novel we read last time around. The protagonist isn’t terribly admirable or likeable, but you’re somehow on his side.

B: Yeh, both the protagonist and his accomplice are gross characters whose motive appears to be simple bloodlust– or at least, Cain does such a wimpy job of their motive that you can’t help feeling that way. They’re basically like your dumb, brutish nephew– you can’t help wondering why he does the things he does, but you feel affection for him all the same.

J: I think we’ll draw it to a close here, because I don’t want us accidentally to give away spoilers. If you’re looking for something a little dark and scandalous to read, read The Postman Always Rings Twice. Just don’t let the title fool you. It’s a literary Andalusian dog.

B: Next up is Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, a drama about ambitious, greedy white and black people who don’t seem to like each other very much set in a very classist 1980s New York.

Well, part two of the School of Love Syllabus is now posted, and though we’re already one book in, the website was down until recently and we didn’t get it put up. You can download the PDF version: SoL Syllabus Redux, or check out the HTML version below. Also new, is that Ben now has a Kindle, so the Syllabus is only in terms of Kindle locations. If you need page numbers, let me know in the comments, and I’ll try to work it out!

Note: this post is very, very late.  But, as ever, a good excuse: Jaci got home earlier than expected!  While in the long run this is not positive news (she’s leaving again soon, for longer), it was wonderful to have her home for Ben’s graduation and Christmases in North Dakota and Maryland.

Jaci: For our most recent books, the contrast could not have been more extreme. First, due to my Kindle fat-fingering, we had to skip forward to Blue Angel by Francine Prose (which, oddly enough, got us back on schedule), a two-week read that took me more like six days due to the pairing of addictive writing and a new assignment as the “Ship’s Lady” (i.e. the officer so close to transfer that she has no job to speak of).  Then, for a complete change of pace, we moved on to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, a dense philosophical defense of the ethical grounding of existentialism.  I think.  It turns out that being away from this kind of reading for over two years made it harder than ever it was for me completely to follow the intricate explanations by which she differentiates a humanistic existentialism from a dark, hopeless nihilism.

Ben: I’m more to blame for the delay of this post rather than delay of reading books. I finished all of these books (well, most of Ethics) by the deadline, including Game of Thrones, but was hard pressed to find the time to write this post. And to be honest, these two books inspired such a wide array of emotions and criticism that I may have been subconsciously avoiding the post in my “angst of the now”.

Jaci: I had read one book by Francine Prose earlier–a nonfiction piece about how to read like a writer.  By the end I knew I wanted to read one of her many fictional works, and I always like a good campus novel, so I chose Blue Angel for the bookclub.

Ben: So I heavily resisted adding Blue Angel to the reading list. I imagined that this was a book Jaci was putting on the list to punish me- some sort of pseudo-feminist, anti-man, coming of age story about girl students and their evil male professors. It turned out I was right, but what was unexpected was how much I enjoyed the book- and I flew through it. It’s a credit to Prose that her writing is so fluid and engaging, that even while you’re being beaten by a seriously uncomfortable plot, you just keep hoping that things will end well. (Spoiler: they did not.) And yes, for those of you critiquing my critique, it was a coming of age story — just because the male professor, who was the protagonist (pseudo-feminist), was upper middle aged doesn’t mean it wasn’t coming of age for him.

Jaci: Reading Blue Angel was a strange experience: I wasn’t certain I wanted to know how it would end (the ending is clear from the beginning, and I think she planned it that way).  But despite not really liking or respecting the main character, a has-been novelist working as a writer-in-residence at a small liberal arts college, I found myself in some way on his side.

Ben: I dreaded every paragraph that I devoured- it was like watching a train wreck, fascinating in that you can’t look away, but you desperately hope that superman will show up and pick one of the trains up! I was actually kind of empty at the end, just from shear hope exhaustion. Most of this was because Francine Prose (a woman) managed to tap into a deep-seated male fear and insecurity in such a spectacular way (sorry to reveal secrets) that it became less about the surrounding characters in the book, and really just the reader (of any gender) identifying completely with the protagonist.

Jaci: In short: the tone of the book was fresh despite the well-used subject matter; the writing is addictive; the reader’s emotional response is marvelous.  Read it!

Ben: And then it was time for Mademoiselle de Beauvoir.

Jaci: Ben claims I snuck this book onto the list without his knowledge during the bargaining phase; I claim I added it after he added Heaven so that we would have a nice pair of nonfiction books on the list, and if he didn’t know I had added it, well, then, he needs to pay attention when I’m babbling along!  In the end, though, I think he ended up enjoying it more than I did.

Ben: Luckily I do have some philosophical education, as well as a background in existentialism (like most teenagers), so I was ok with the ideas in the book. It’s just unfortunate that the prose was so dense. As I was reading (on a flight from Seattle to North Dakota), it kept putting me to sleep! I wondered out loud (on the plane) if this was due to the heavy material, or if perhaps there was a better way to communicate these particular ideas (they are mind-bendy), but authors choose to present it a certain way (Descartian drama paragraphs) just to give weight to their ideas.

Jaci: While it was a challenge to hold my greatly-shortened attention span in check, I found that I did learn things from this book.  Reading actual philosophy (as opposed to second-hand descriptions of the positions of a philosophical camp) is always illuminating, and there were some amazing things written.  Most of my notes from this book are simply direct quotes.  And I was glad to find that despite difficulties I could still draw something from a challenging (and long) argument.

Ben: And she definitely reinforced my postion as a Kierkegaardian existentialist. I had never considered her definition of ambiguity before — (although exactly what was ambiguous led to a rather ambiguous debate between Jaci and I!) — and I was interested to contemplate my current philosophical outlook from this new perspective. I highly recommend this book along with some sort of stimulant!

Jaci: So there it is: morals and ethics, all in the space of three weeks’ reading.  Skipping forward in our own story, I was able to restore Game of Thrones to my Kindle in Rome.  And now, for once, we’re waiting on me to finish a book.  It turns out that a fantasy of this type goes easier for me when I’m someplace I’d really rather not be–reading it during my extended vacation has been difficult.  Once I finish it, we’ll be temporarily closing shop and updating the inventory in preparation for my next long time away.  Until then…

Jaci: Book number two, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is complete!  And early, RIGHT BEN??

Ben: Stieg is an exciting writer–I couldn’t put it down because I kept wanting to see what happened next, so I kind of tore through it in way less than the allotted 3 weeks. Really, three weeks was a lot for this book, but I did pace myself somewhat, because I managed to stretch it to two weeks.

Jaci: I learned from my Kindle complaints during the last book–remembering that it was hard to flip back, the first thing I did was draw out the family tree from the early pages.  The notebook really came in handy.  And I found that I appreciate the anonymity the Kindle provides–when reading a book both wildly popular and gruesomely violent, I was happier not to converse about it with random strangers at the airport during my many hours waiting to board a red-eye to Maryland.

Ben: Jaci had a surprise visit home! But she discovered that my notebook was unused. My excuse is that I’m a reader, not an English major! Speaking of gruesomely violent (like when Jaci discovered the unused notebook…), towards the end of the book, I became less thrilled with the violence. Jaci mentioned that the original title was “Men who Hate Women”, and this is probably an apt description of the book, and while I’m desensitized to a lot of different kinds of violence thanks to TV, Stieg manages to properly shock you, and gives you an apprehension and disgust that takes talent to describe. The book attempts to take the edge off with humor and romance, but some sections were still tough on me.

Jaci: I didn’t make nearly as many notes for this book as I did for the last.  But I did use it as a meditation on translation.  The book isn’t exactly what most people would call “literary,” but I am a professed reading snob (and read like one–can’t help it), and it’s hard to know who to blame for, say, more than one cruise missile metaphor in a single chapter.  (Because someone must be blamed, sayeth the word nerd!)  And I also tended to wonder about cultural references.  The translator seems to have done a good job keeping the book as firmly grounded in Sweden as possible, and yet, at times I ask–when a reference to the Addams Family appears, is it because the Addams Family is culturally significant in Sweden or because the translator translated a cultural reference?  Considering my entire knowledge of Sweden is based on this book (which made Swedish prison sound like a writers’ colony retreat), a photograph of a farmstead at the local Noodles & Company (looks a lot like North Dakota), and some gifts Ben brought me after his Adobe Air Tour trip (tasty jam!  tiny painted horses!) I can honestly say I may be not just a bad but the worst person to judge.

Ben: I have actually been to Sweden! So I was amused at many references; in fact, I would argue that the translation was better than normal, simply because of the things that remained untranslated. For instance, holiday names were all untranslated, and the translator felt no burden with assisting English speakers with place names and Swedish proper names. It almost assumed a familiarity with Sweden that was very enjoyable, and also gave non-Swedish readers an education about Sweden without being overly pretentious about it. Jaci’s right, though, it is no literary masterpiece, but it is a good, quick, entertaining read. Jaci prefers to come out of a book being a better person for having read the book–which I suppose is a good thing. However, I like to be entertained by books more than anything else.

Jaci: I would classify this book as amusing, and I can understand why it was popular.  The real question: will we be reading the entire Millennium series?

Ben: Well, I’m interested and not interested in the rest of the Millennium series; interested because I want to find out more about the main character who is a hacker. She didn’t seem to be developed as well as she could have been in the first book, even though she was the girl with the dragon tattoo. Uninterested, because I don’t really want to put myself through the discomfort of reading descriptions of sexual violence.

Jaci: Next up: Ben’s most dreaded book on the list, Dead Souls by Gogol.  Lucky for him it is short (and we’ll actually be together when we’re reading it due to some scheduling vagaries that worked out in our favor).  It will be interesting to read another translated work, especially since the translation I chose wasn’t really a choice at all–only the Hogarth translation was available for Kindle at the time I put the list together.  Russian absurdist literature?  Given Ben’s affinity for French existential literature, I think he may enjoy it more than he expects.

The Lazarus Project (Cover)

Jaci: As the first of the thirteen books on the bookclub list gathers up its threads and ties them in tidy bows, I find myself very satisfied with both the novel and the bookclub’s success so far. The best part about it is that Ben and I have things to talk about that aren’t his thesis or my work, each of which take up such a large portion of the hours of our many days spent apart.

Ben: Jaci mentioned to me that there is actual science behind the book club–psychology says that couples that share mental space like this can span long distance relationships and become closer. It was a bit of a surprise, how important this was to me; instead of feeling helpless or separated, I can go grab the book of the week and keep my sanity. It’s more than just something extra to talk about, it’s a replacement for all the little things a person has to do on a daily basis to maintain a relationship.

Jaci: In order to fully occupy the psychic space we’ve set aside for each other, I find myself reading more deeply than I have since I left behind the fortress of academia for my floating fortress. The Lazarus Project was a good choice for book one–both literary and very readable (it’s one of the few on the list we chose without much debate or any sort of trade-off, which was why I placed it where I did).

Ben: It’s also helped my personal discipline! I’m not exactly a morning person, and with my busy days, I find it hard to get up before 6:15, which is the latest I can get up to do my morning routine and get to work by 8. Reading every morning gives me a reason to get up at 5, have some coffee, and get my day off on the right foot. The Lazarus Project was a good start because it’s not putting me to sleep when I’m reading so early and half awake! (Thank goodness we didn’t start with Gogol…)

Jaci: In some ways, it’s as though we are together, in 1908 Chicago or in eastern Europe circa today, or at least in Aleksandar Hemon’s versions of these places. This means, of course, that over the next several months we’ll be traveling to some very strange lands together, including (if memory serves) a few brief trips to Mars towards the end of the journey.

Ben: I’m really feeling connected to Brik (the main character). He has me in stitches, and he constantly says out loud what I’m thinking. His perspective on his marriage with an American, white, Catholic neurosurgeon really reminds me of the things I’m thinking in my own marriage. I wonder if the married life commentary has the same resonance with Jaci. Knowing that we’re reading the same things and at least getting the same input makes me read the book in a whole new way. I’m even embarrassed about the time in brothels because it’s weird to be there with your wife!

Jaci: I also like looking at the notebook I decorated for a few minutes before and after I start reading. The first few pages are already filled with notes, questions, observations. To be frank, however, I live in a paranoic haze, worried that my Kindle will somehow be broken in my semi-rough living conditions.

Ben: Ah, Jaci is going to get a little English teacher resistance from me here. Jaci isn’t in a place where she is reading and taking notes every day… but I am. I’ve been reading for enjoyment rather than taking notes or making observations. I feel like Jaci is going to make me pay eventually when she starts bringing up specifics, but I have a hard copy, so I can always flip through the book, whereas Jaci can’t with the Kindle!

Jaci: Ah, the Kindle. I love the dictionary feature, but I miss being able to flip back and review previously read pages with ease! Especially in a book like this, a book which is constructed as an echo chamber with two stories interlacing in subtle but significant ways, it would be nice to flip back to the third page of the second chapter where I remember seeing something (instead of finding location ####, which I will not remember when I get to it’s twin in a later passage). But it’s compact, it’s simple, and it’s working. Like the bookclub.

Ben: It’s kind of sad that Jaci has better electronics kit than I do, especially in a place without too much network connections. Meanwhile I’m back in the seventeenth century with mine! Someone get me an iPad!

It’s what you have all (all two or three of you) been waiting for…it’s the syllabus!  Click the hyperlink to download a PDF version, or see below for Ben’s shiny HTML rendition.

Driving home with the six books we had to purchase in actual (as opposed to virtual) copy, Ben called me a kid in a candy store.

Hers-and-His notebooks.

The notebook backs

When one is forced to face down the possibility–the inbound reality–of months apart from a loved one, one seeks ways to stay connected.  Letters long ruled as the king of connection; email is today’s parchment and plume, but we lose something in the transition from penmanship to pixels.  (Stay with me, I can alliterate all day.)  Care packages, while welcome, are a one-way communique.  (Rhyme!)  At pre-deployment briefs, would-be helpers offer discounted “flat daddies” that can be placed at the meal table to take the place of the missing three-dimensional version.

Mail at sea can be greatly delayed, along with care packages of hopefully well-preserved goodies; email can be shut down or lost for a variety of reasons; and I somehow think Ben would find a “flat daddy” more discomfiting than not.

My solution?

Ben and I are creating a bookclub for two.

I filled out this idea yesterday, while reading about “common reading” programs on college campuses, though some version of it has been percolating in my egghead for months.  The idea at university is that inbound freshman have at least one book in common–something to unite them and serve as a source of conversation.  My idea is that Ben and I, by reading the same books at the same time, will be carrying on a sort of psychic conversation through the nexus of the words we’re experiencing together.  Even if email goes down and it’s a month or more between mail deliveries, even if I can’t make an outgoing phone call or tweet a single word, in some way, we’ll be joined.

Of course, our very different tastes in reading makes picking books a fraught operation.  We want anywhere from eight to fifteen books; right now, we’ve agreed on four (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Daniel Saurez’s Daemon, and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land).  One of our “rules”–that anything we pick must be available on the Kindle due to my space limitations–has only compounded the problem.  We dropped the rule that all books must be new reads for both of us (which allowed two of our choices).  Most likely, it will take a few trips to the bookstore in the end, since we’ve pretty effectively shopped our own shelves at this point.

What else remains to make the bookclub a success?

-More books (obviously).

-A syllabus…I’ll take care of that!

-Notebooks.  We’ll each jot down a few thoughts on the books we read together, especially when our communication lines fail, so that we don’t forget the things we each want to discuss.

-A reining in of my book snobbishness, and a slowing down to savoring speed in Ben’s reading habits.  We’ll meet in the middle.

I plan to post the full list of books and syllabus as a guide for others who want to try this gambit to close the miles during long times apart.  Take that, sword.

The Changing Identity of South Asian Guyanese

During our many Christmastime conversations, the question of my graduate thesis came up.  Ben, in an urge to experiment with self-publishing and happening to know I had a fairly polished hundred pages, put this together back in 2008 and made it available via Lulu.  He designed the cover art and wrote the blurbage as well (basically, everything required to make it accessible).

Mom Bengfort, in particular, advocated for making sure that this paper was available to those interested in the topic.  If I do say so myself (and definitionally, I do), while it isn’t groundbreaking anthropology or breathtaking Shakespeare, the extensive bibliography would be very useful to any student of Guyanese anthropology, sociology, history, or literature.

In any case, if you’re here at Bengfort.com, statistically you are here for the cookbook.  So this is, in essence, a classic “But wait!  There’s more!”  Consider this your invitation to sit down with a nice spread of dahl, roti, pumpkin, and armchair anthropology.

http://www.lulu.com/content/2742903

Yesterday, per Devi’s suggestion, I started reading Fair Play by James Olson, a book on the moral and ethical issues surrounding intelligence gathering.

While I will offer a comprehensive review of the entire book when I am finished, I think that the book asks some interesting questions that deserve individual attention and analysis. The book is set up as a series of scenarios where the reader has to decide whether the act is morally justified, and then contains responses from people in various fields analyzing the situation. As the book suggests that the reader “reach his or her own conclusion- yea or nay- after each scenario, before reading the opinions of the commentators,” and “try to respond instinctively as you would if you were a senior policy maker or intelligence officer and had to approve or disprove the operation,” I’ve decided to blog my initial reactions before continuing reading, then see if my mind changes when I listen to the arguments. I would also like to hear your thoughts!

**Disclaimer** The few (of many) scenarios I choose to blog about are the property of the author, James Olson, and are entirely fictional. The analysis I present, however, is entirely my own, and does not represent the author’s point of view. For more background information and analysis, please read the book!

Scenario 1:

“Rolando Montemayor is a Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) officer under cover as a second secretary at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York. He previously served in the Cuban embassy in Madrid, Spain, where the CIA successfully ran a double agent operation against him. The double agent, a young Spanish Communist journalist, reported to his CIA case officer that he strongly suspected that Montemayor was homosexual.

When Montemayor moves to New York, the CIA passes its information on him to the FBI. The FBI and CIA agree to conduct a joint operation against Montemayor in New York in an effort to recruit him as a penetration of the DGI. The FBI surveillance of Montemayor indicates that he frequents gay bars in New York and engages in promiscuous homosexual sex. Using telephone taps and infrared photography, the FBI acquires incontrovertible evidence of Montemayor’s homosexual activities. Homosexuality is grounds for dismissal from the DGI, and Montemayor has carefully concealed his sexual orientation from his family, friends, and colleagues.

Would it be morally acceptable for the CIA and FBI to attempt to recruit Montemayor by blackmailing him on the basis of his homosexuality?” (46)

I have to say that in my initial reaction about a million thoughts ran through my head at once. The first was that in the United States both blackmail and discrimination based on sexual orientation are illegal, for good reason, and that because Montemayor did not pose an immediate threat or we had reason to believe he held vital information there really was no justification (if there ever is) for breaking the law. My second thought was that, as a spy, he knew exactly what he was getting into and how compromising (in his CHOSEN occupation) homosexual behavior was, and yet he chose to recklessly (and very conspicuously at that) engage in it anyway. I’m not saying that Cuban sexual discrimination is right, I’m just saying that if you are Cuban, and homosexual, why would you get involved in as dangerous, politically charged and secretive an occupation as espionage? I mean seriously. You had it comin’. Don’t hate the player, player, hate the game.

My third reaction, however, and the one I’m sticking with, was that the whole operation seemed pointless. You are effectively blackmailing a spy into becoming a double agent, which to me does not seem to make good intelligence, given the particular nature of double agents and the sensitivity and skill they require. Threatening to out someone does not a good agent make; they lack the loyalty or any sort of positive incentive to cooperate. Instead, use the information to your advantage- find your man a boyfriend in New York (or even a gay undercover agent; after all, they aren’t illegal in the United States, and Cuba wouldn’t see it coming!) and use HIS sexy wiles to elicit the needed incentives for double agency. Voila! A much more legal, and solid, operation.

Thoughts?

Tonight, we have a mission.

Tonight, I must write a blog post…and thereby earn a bottle of Champagne.

The quote at the top comes from the excellent novel The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry, of which I have at this juncture read precisely 51%, according to the reading machine that Champagne-wielding husband of mine purchased me for the Christmas holiday.

I also highly recommend The Widow Clicquot, a biography of Veuve Clicquot, by Tilar J. Mazzeo.  A bit thin on evidence, but what she lacks in details of the woman herself, she makes up for in reams of delightful Champagne facts.  I read this one thanks to my local library.

Other recently enjoyed reads via reading machine:

The Year of the Flood, a novel by Margaret Atwood.  A companion to Oryx and Crake, a novel my copy of which I ironically lost in what I have dubbed the “Ben’s-truck-trunk-book-flooding-incident,” this is a fantastic post-apocalyptic tale by (in my opinion) one of the most astounding authors writing in English today.  I recommend not only these but the many others by her I have read–The Blind Assassin, The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride, The Handmaid’s Tale (don’t bother with the film), and her short story collection Good Bones are all excellent, and utterly engaging.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver.  Orwellian in theme, but in ways both more subtle and more direct, she looks to the past to spin a novel of fiction from facts.  I must give props to KPLU 88.5, my local NPR affiliate, for alerting me to this novel.  (In fact, I owe that radio station for one book, one pre-ordered book, two cds and a single that I have purchased in the last month, all with great success and all, incidentally, via download.)

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters.  This one, a sort of neo-Gothic horror story set in postwar Britain, had me scared to stop reading–on more than one occasion, I simply read until I fell asleep, because I could only achieve calm through complete brain shutdown.  At one point, reading in bed with husband and dog, a sort of normal and banal rattling sound came from the general vicinity of the garage.  Winston, predictably, woofed–and I, unexpectedly, shrieked.  Just a little, but still, Ben has made fun of me for a week.

And finally, I will admit that the reading machine in question, Amazon’s Kindle, was probably the best gift I’ve ever received that I didn’t want.  My reading rate has gone from the odd book, here and there, to nearly grade-school levels again (when reading was my primary activity, I stayed up late under the covers every night, and leaving a book in progress felt like breaking an enchantment or waking from a deep sleep).  So, Ben, you win.

But now I’ve written a blog post, so I win too!  “The Devil’s in the details…”