Haiku Review: The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien

Bought book for book club
but quit. I’d rather read an
owner’s manual.

but I don’t care much for the idea of all the fish swimming eagerly toward the boy, just aching to be fished out and slaughtered. I know it’s the boy’s fantasy, but not one I want to ingrain in my vegetarian child.

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that there’s dirt on the stones that probably never gets washed off?

When I was a kid, we didn’t have many books in the house. I had to feed my reading habit with frequent trips to the library, but it was inevitable that I would run out of books to read sometimes, and when I did, I turned to the only books in the house: the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Junior Encyclopedia Britannica volumes were tame and not very interesting, but around sixth or seventh grade, I discovered that the not-so-junior volumes contained some very racy material, namely, lots of information from the Kinsey Report. Being a naive Southern kid raised in a sheltered environment, I was stunned to read that 20% of men had had sexual experiences with animals, and that 50% of men had at least one homosexual experience by old age. I read and reread that part of the Encyclopedia Britannica until I had the information more or less memorized. In fact, because sex wasn’t exactly dinner conversation in my own family, many of Kinsey’s groundbreaking theories and controversial attitudes became so ingrained in me that I forgot where they came from. For example, I described the idea of sexual orientation as a continuum to many people over the years without realizing that I drew that idea from Kinsey. Those afternoons with the encyclopedia had virtually faded from my memory.

Then I saw “Kinsey,” the 2004 biopic, and I rediscovered my first source of sexual knowledge. I’m endlessly fascinated by the way this zoologist was able to charm such huge numbers of people into divulging their sexual histories to him. He exerted a profound influence on our attitudes toward sex. Believe me, I’m grateful.

So I had to read T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle, a fictional account of Kinsey’s life as a sex researcher from the perspective of one of his assistants. While the book is fictional, it is thoroughly researched and well-grounded in the facts of Kinsey’s life. The main character, John Milk, struggles to reconcile his intellectual agreement with Kinsey’s attitudes about sex with his feelings about his sexual relationship with his wife Iris. Milk’s hero worship of Kinsey complicates matters, as does his tendency to think with his penis at times. Milk’s conflicts with Iris are surprisingly compelling, and I found myself aching for both characters.

Sex: is there any better subject for a novel?

I love the ending of this movie, where Jack Lemmon finally tells the millionaire that he’s a man, and the millionaire, without batting an eye, says “Nobody’s perfect.” It implies either that the millionaire knew the whole time that he was wooing a man, or that he was sufficiently bisexual not to care.

In the same vein, I like the fact that men throughout the movie are swooning over the obviously male Lemmon and Curtis. Maybe all these suitors are motivated by their sublimated homoerotic desires, making these men in drag appear to be their dream girls. Or else the men see through the flimsy disguises, suggesting that they are wildly attracted to cross-dressing men, while Lemmon and Curtis innocently believe that they are passing as women.

This movie is ripe for a remake.

My favorite part of this is the part with Snow White and “The Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. Might be one of my favorite movie scenes ever.

My biggest challenge as a fiction writer is plot and conflict. I’m capable of writing dozens of pages where nothing really happens, or where everything worth mentioning is internal. Some people do this well. When I do it, though, it’s boring.

This book was like having a great teacher and mentor hold my hand while I planned my novel. I haven’t yet written the novel I planned using this book, but I feel sure that it will be immensely better than it would’ve been without it. Later on, I want to revise my first novel using his methods.

I will never again try to write without this book close at hand!

Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, describes the Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education with wit, wisdom, and surprising objectivity. His account of the legal proceedings is nicely counterbalanced by his interviews of the individuals involved, most of whom he admits to liking personally even when he disagrees with their intellectual positions.

In spite of Chapman’s affable nature, the predominant theme of this book is the disturbing portrait of the Intelligent Design proponents, who stand prepared to cloak and distort evidence of evolution and accepted scientific methods and principles in order to sneak creationism into the classroom.

I like Jack Black. I thought he was great in School of Rock and Orange County. I like Tenacious D. I thought Nacho Libre would be a fun movie.

But I can’t figure out what anyone involved with this film could have been thinking. I’m an easy laugher, and I didn’t even crack a smile. Jack Black’s talents are wasted in this movie, and there are no other decent cast members capable of rescuing the film from the depths. The plot was stupid (being based on a true story is no excuse), and the writing is terrible. How did this film get made?

I actually quit watching an hour into it and picked up a book instead. I recommend not spending even an hour of your life on this dog—just go straight for a book.

This is a book that cogently presents the case for atheism, but without the more aggressive tone of Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Dawkins takes a scientific approach to the subject of religion, and his discussion is engaging and convincing.