On "The Most Girl Part of You" by Amy Hempel (3185 words) *****

Here's another story from the master, one who only puts out a couple of stories a year it seems. I'm reminded a bit of a tale about Paul Bowles versus his wife Jane Bowles. Paul wrote quickly, edited quickly, churned stuff out. He wrote some fabulous stuff; he also wrote some pretty lame stuff. Jane agonized over every word, but her one novel--Two Serious Ladies--is a masterpiece in every way, rivaling the best that Paul ever came up with.

If Hemphill is part of the latter camp, I could believe it, but I can also believe that such agony gives us lines like "May I challenge you to a dance?" Fantastic.

Here, in this story from her collection At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, a young gal with a close guy friend (one might even say she has a crush, the way she claims everything about Jack is "big") watches as her friend tries to come to terms with the death, the suicide, of his sick mother. Life for Jack seems to be going on about the same as usual, but it's not usual, and we know it and so does she, down deep. The two continue to hang out, but Jack is hurting--and hiding it. And yet, the story is one of a Phoenix, one about what rises from the ashes. Read the story here at the Collagist.

On "The Scar" by Cathy Barber, "From Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johansson" by Thomas Patrick Levy, and "Half-hearted Apology" by Nicole Koroch

I find Barber's "Scar" to be a powerful poem in part because of what it hints at. Like many a good short story, it leads us down a path of history and drops us off just before things are about to turn, or at least may turn. That we don't know--but that we suspect--the final ending is the scary part. Read the poem here at Marco Polo.

Levy's poems are musings from a lover--or a fan--and they're spectacularly poetical, full of odd turns of phrase and metaphor, unexpected dabblings in linguistic dexterity. Levy asks Johansson not to leave him, but my question is, is she listening? Because if she isn't, she needs to be. Read the prose poem here at Diagram.

Koroch's apology pulled me in just with its title, and the poem is pretty much what the title says. As you can imagine, it's kind of funny--and kind of sad. I hope to avoid building friendships like this one. Read the poem here at Ramshackle Review.

On "If Poems Were Children" by Margaret Sullivan, "Unfinished Letter to Death" by Connie Voisine, and "A Conversation about Momentum" by Cami Park

Sullivan's very short poem is a simple metaphor carried to its logical conclusion, and as such, it is gorgeous. I've sometimes wished for less of a desire to write if only to have more time for other things in life. And yet, the opposite--the inability to write, EVER--is probably a more discouraging prospect. Read the poem here at Failbetter.

Voisine's piece falls into the "unfinished" category of writing, but what makes it so ingenious, coy, original, and darkly funny is that it does not just remain unfinished in one piece. It is a collection of unfinished phrases, begging to to be filled in, just as a life cut short often is. Read the poem here at Pool Poetry.

Park's short poem discusses exactly what the title says--all the ways in which most things move toward another thing, whether we wish it to or not. The interesting part here is in what Park chooses to discuss. Read it here at Ward Six.

On "The Werewolf" by Basil Copper ***

Written in the 1970s, this basic introduction to all things werewolf--or at least, the history of the werewolf in legend, fact, and art--seems best to me in its second section, on fact. Werewolves--and vampires and elves and fairies and trolls and all things horrific and fantastic--have not held much interest for me, except in theory. And Copper's book seems to have confirmed that. The legends regarding the werewolf are moderately interesting, while the books and movies about the werewolf sound dreadful (as in dreadfully bad).

I would likely have been drawn a bit more to those other portions of the book, however, if Copper had spent more time analyzing and hypothesizing one what our fascination with the werewolf actually means. Instead, he tends mostly to focus on plot summaries of the best novels and stories and on giving his opinion with regard to how good or bad the works are. Given my lack of interest in the plots, I didn't find these sections terribly compelling.

The section on fact, however, was interesting precisely because Copper did spend some time hypothesizing, drawing parallels between legend and real life. In this section, various theories are espoused with regard to how people in the Middle Ages, for example, could have burned so many werewolves in the various witch hunts that occurred.

One theory is that the legend may have some roots in an obscure disease, a type of pophyria that makes people allergic to the sun. Such people break out into lesions in the light. Their teeth take on a yellowish hue, the urine is red, and for obvious reasons they prefer to come out at night, after sundown. Given their tortured appearance and their preference for the dark, such people might have been seen as witches.

Other diseases, of course, can be psychological, involving people who only think they are wolves--but who then act accordingly.

Copper also delves into stories regarding people raised by wolves. Such people--and there have been something like a hundred over the past few centuries--take on wolfish habits and are incable of learning to speak (going back to theories of language acquisition). Instead, they often walk on all fours and communicate in grunts. Discovered among the wolves, they have long matted hair, long nails, and sharpened teeth. The stories of such people really make one wonder about the extent to which we as humans are different from animals. If raised as a wolf, we are nothing but one, at base, is there any difference? I tend to think we have a spirit of sorts that allows for reason, a gift not inherent (at least not to the same extent) in animals, but what of these people raised among the animals?

But the most fascinating anecdote in the book, for me, is a long account of a man-eating wolf that held Lozere, France, in trepidation for several years beginning around 1764. Over the course of the next two years, the wolf would kill sixty people and injure many more. The wolf liked to prey most of women and children left alone, but it did a few times try to attack groups of children and even a group of men, learning quickly that such attempts were unwise. Villagers got together to hunt the wolf down without success. Louis XV got involved, sending in soldiers at various points, to no avail, and offering a bounty. The man who would eventually kill the beast, a local, would unfortunately not be able to claim the bounty, as the animal would be too greatly decomposed by the time it reached Paris to stand as evidence of his triumph. This, to me, seemed the most horrifying of the stories Copper recounted, something on the level of Jaws or a tale of a serial killer. Now this would make interesting literature or film!

On "Bedsheets and Typewriter Keys" by Karissa Morton, "New York Postcard Sonnet #85" by Philip Dacey, and "Vocation" by Sandra Beasley ****

Morton's poem is full of metaphor, the main one of which is in the title itself. To think of the body as a typewriter, quite lovely really. Type your words on me. Be nice. Read here at Writers' Bloc.

A sonnet I particularly like is one that gives short TV Guide-like synopses of Shakespeare plays. Dacey's is one that captures overheard parts of conversations, lines that are intriguing passages into possible stories all by themselves. Oh, to find sonnet material as interesting as this. Read it here at Serving House Journal.

Sandra Beasley's "Vocation" explores the subject of what people do for a living, reworking the tired phrases that we have come to associate with work to create something new and exciting and, well, funny. And if Freud is right, we laugh because somehow an uncomfortable truth is revealed. Her other poem, "Story" starts with an interesting quote and takes off from there. Read the poems here at Swink.

On "The Kiss" by Priscilla A. Kipp (531 words) ***

I've had plenty of opportunities to feel neglected. Someone new comes into a friend's life, and suddenly you don't hear from him or her for a while (it's particularly unnerving when it's a person you had some romantic interest in who didn't feel the same way--"I sure liked being friends with her but now I can't even be that"). Not being a parent, I've never had the opportunity to feel neglected by my own offspring. I imagine in a way that it's even worse. I mean, after all those sacrifices and a whole chunk of one's life spent together, and now the kid is an adult with people of his or her own that he or she loves. But there's also something joyous in it also, seeing your son or daughter become his or her own person. This is the ground that this bittersweet (mostly sort of sad) story covers. A woman, at the airport, meeting her son, along with the girlfriend, who her son seems more excited to see. Read the story here at Night Train.

On "Breaking the Maya Code" by Michael Coe **

This book would have come much earlier on the psycholinguists list if I'd been able to get a copy. It's been on constant loan from the library since I started the list. It forges a rather odd ending to the list, for the material is really about deciphering an ancient script, a language, something that would have fit in more with the history of reading sections of the list.

The language that is being deciphered is ancient Maya. Coe's book is an account of how it happened and why it took so long. As an entertaining read, it was a bit on the slow and name-dropping side for me; as history, it focuses mostly on the academicians involved and not so much on the history that is gleaned after the code is cracked. I was thinking the book might be like Richard Rhodes's "Making of the Atom Bomb," but I didn't find myself as invested in the discoveries that were awaiting the archaeologists, linguists, and art historians who finally put the pieces together as I was in the physicists who somehow managed to break apart an atom for the first time.

Coe starts off well enough with his first chapter, which explains some of the basics about different writing systems and about language systems, much of which was covered in other books on my list. Still, this was the most interesting part of the book to me. Maya, it was assumed, was ideographic. That is, each symbol stood for a word--much as some think of Chinese or of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But Coe points out that, while such languages may have started as ideographic on some level, they are really logographic. Logographic languages, if I understand correctly, work with symbols for combining ideas, along with some phonetic and syllabic symbols. Purely syllabic languages have a symbol for each morpheme, and phonetic languages have symbols for each phoneme.

At one point, ancient Egyptian was thought to be ideographic as well, but in fact a scholar named Champollion was able to prove in the nineteenth century that the symbols in the writing actually had a function similar to those in Chinese. Hence, for example, an "eye" symbol wasn't necessarily an eye, but perhaps the sound "eye" or the syllable "ide" or the concept of "high" (I'm making these up--if only to note the point). Mayan, it turns out, works on a similar principle. But whereas Champollion took two years to crack the code, Mayan scholars would take over one hundred. Why?

Champollion had better resources: he had the Rosetta stone and some careful preserved artifacts to review. Mayan scholars didn't.

But in fact, they did. One writer from the early Spanish conquest had written out the Mayan syllabary. Scholars, however, assumed he couldn't possibly have been telling things as they actually were. And here, I suppose, is the interesting part of Coe's story--the crux of the tragedy. Mayan wasn't decoded, it turns out, not because materials weren't present but, first, because of preconceptual prejudices and, second, because of academic egos.

An ancient non-Western "barbarian" culture couldn't possibly have had real writing, some great thinkers assumed. Others thought Native Americans prone to mystical thought--not likely to actually bother writing down events around them. Further, the signs themselves--folks assumed--must be ideographic. And so it goes, working with such assumptions, those trying to decipher were blinded by their own preconceptions.

But even worse, they were blinded by each other. One scholar in particular comes off quite badly. So important was it to be right about his own interpretations that when the true answers--that the script in fact had phonetic and syllabic components mixed into it--were exposed he mocked them. And by reputation, his use of mockery transferred to virtually all others in the field. And such competition, Coe points out, continues up to the writing of his book, wherein archaeologists, angry at dollars being given to linguists, downplay the need to "read" what the inscriptions actually say. Each academic is so concerned with his or her own field and reputation that the work of others is run down, and progress on the subject of the Maya is stunted.

Coe's, then, is a book about closed-minded thinking and academic ego, something that unfortunately is all too familiar many in university settings, as well as to many in the political arena. Truth doesn't matter as much as being "right"--even if one is wrong.

On "They Rolled On" by Pete Pazmino (356 words) ***

Here's a piece that's like a poem. Great prose is often made of repeated phrases or words, and that's the technique Pete Pazmino uses here to describe an evening among young people, students, in a car. I was never a cruiser, and yet a story like this reminds me of youth--perhaps because in the act of driving and watching we feel like there's a world out there waiting for us, full of all kinds of opportunity. Certainly, that's how I felt when younger. Then you get to be twenty-one and get comfortable with bars and all the opportunity seems to be a myth. But it's nice while it lasts. Read the story here at Monkey Bicycle.

On "The Big Hoo-Ha" by Maren Michel (6519 words) ****

Maren Michel's story carried me through to its wallop of an ending. Here is a tale of people aged together so much so that they understand one another's odd grievances and don't much care--or at least Bill doesn't seem to care. Certainly, one gets the feeling that his wife is a bit bossy and a whole lot neurotic, but there's a charm here that Bill sees as few others probably do. Given his chance for freedom, he looks back like Lot's wife. Read the story here at Adirondack Review.

On "Bounce" by Jeanie Chung (2127 words) ***

The same folks who make basketballs make baseballs: Spalding. That's just something that hit me as I read this story. Imagine, making balls for a living. Some company out there specializes in balls.

A ball is important, however, as Chung points out in this story. It's what boys--and girls--think about. For me, it was never the basketball--too big, too meaty--but the baseball, which fit so perfectly into one's hand; or the tennis ball, only slightly smaller and with so much bounce; or the golf ball, a miniature one could admire for its form. But it's easy to see where the love of the basketball would arise. On television, players perform tricks. You can do these yourself. You can practice yourself. You can practice almost anywhere.

I played basketball in a church league for a couple of years. It was nothing I had wanted to do, but it was the difference between the kids having only one team on which the bench never played and two teams on which most people got to be starters. I did it for the team, you might say. I wasn't good, and I didn't dream of being a star. I was never good at any sport, and basketball, with its emphasis on speed and height, made me even less interested.

But Chung's story is about a kid with natural form. And in that, the story is embued with a kind of energy and enthusiasm for what playing the game can be like, especially in the way that Chung forges her sentences--short and choppy phrases--the pick, the pass--punctuated by the occasional smooth and long clause that breaks away like a player on the court. Read the story here at Stymie.

On "Cyclicismus" by Kevin O'Cuinn (403 words) ***

There's something kind of chilling about this funny little story. That's a pun, sort of. We're talking folks without a home here, migrants, probably runaways. We're also talking a story with some beautiful language--and a beautiful man (or at least a man beautifully written about, who can't cross his legs). So much description here is working. That's why you need to go here, to Spork, and read it.

On "How to Speak Dog" by Stanley Coren ****

So do animals speak languages? When you ask people who are animal lovers, the answer seems to be yes. Coren makes the case that dogs have a language in this book. Now, it's not like a human language. He calls it a simple language (akin to a very small child's), as much dependent on gesture and body language as on sound. He makes this case because animals manage to communicate meaningful things to each other, because they can talk about things not in the current setting (e.g., calling the pack together), because they have a rudimentary grammar (a growl followed by a bark may have a different meaning than a bark followed by a growl, and certain gestures never accompany certain kinds of sounds). Granted, you're not going to get a dog to talk about philosophy, but then, Coren says, you won't get most people to talk about that either: more than two-thirds of what we say has to do with social interaction, which is what a dog's speech is confined to.

But these are the conclusions of Coren's book. Most of the book is not devoted to arguing these points but rather to delineating for us humans just what dogs are saying when they put a hand on our knee or bark at a cat. And in this Coren has some absolutely fascinating subject matter. Individual chapters go into the meaning of different sounds, scents, and of various sets of gestures--with the tail, the ears, the eyes, the face, and the body. Much of dog speech has to do with establishing who's boss and who is going to follow, and as Coren points out, is primarily about heading off a fight rather than getting involved in one. Hence, if a dog looks away, it is taking a subordinate role as opposed to one who continues to stare.

This has implications for how we as humans deal with dogs as well. Coren has some cool anecdotes, the most memorable to me being one in which a dog would continually come and sit on the couch next to a woman when her husband was gone. The dog would put his heavy head on the woman's lap along with a paw. He seemed to want constant affection, but he was heavy and hot and tiresome. She'd move over to make room for him, but he'd move again to be on her. Coren pointed out that in fact the dog was not looking for affection. It was claiming that it was the boss, demonstrating that it ruled the house when the woman's husband was gone. In another case of misunderstanding, a dog would continually wet the floor when a man came home, though it didn't wet the floor otherwise. Obviously, the dog was being disrespectful and hateful--or so it might seem. In fact, in dog language, it was trying to show its submissiveness to the man, as in I'm so like a little puppy around you that I can't even control my bowels, so don't beat me up.

An interesting discussion regards the gesture of pointing, which dogs do differently than humans. Dogs tend to look at the pointer when we use our hands rather than at the thing that is being pointed at. In dog speak, the way to point is with one's body, by turning one's head, just as a dog would point with other dogs. Coren believes this has, in part, to do with dogs less satisfactory eyesight.

Later chapters explore some tidbits on dogs and scent (they have something like four to five times the number of scent receptors that humans do, which explains why they can distinguish scents so much better than we can, making up for shortages in sight), on differing dialects among dogs, of dogs and cats, and of attempts to teach dogs human language. The dogs and cats section shows how cats in fact have their own gestural language that, in many ways, differs from dogs. Hence, this can lead to conflict, especially when the dog or cat has not grown up in a mixed home. Take, for example, rolling over to expose the belly. In a dog, this is a move showing submission; in a cat, this is an attack pose.

The chapter on dogs learning human language focuses mostly on apes, since that's where most research has actually been done. Primates, as the author points out, hold a lot more promise in this regard because of their greater dexterity with regard to hands. However, in the 1960s, Elisabeth Mann Borgese did try to train her dog Arli to use a keyboard to type out requests and demands, starting first with words and then moving to individual letters. Eventually, he learned to count to four and to type the words dog, cat, arlie, bird, ball, and bone. But was it really language? There is a humorous passage regarding submission of his poetry to a literary journal, which compared his work to e e cummings and encouraged Arli to continue in his pursuits.

On "Love of Life" by Jack London (8219 words) ****

In a story that rivals "To Build a Fire" in subject matter but which stretches on much longer, London recounts the possible last days of a man injured in a fall in the snow. A burden now that he has a swollen ankle, his companion deserts him, and we get the benefits of the adventure story to follow--where to find food, how to make shoes from blankets and clothing, how to fend off hungry wolves waiting for you to die. The story is exquisite in detail, and one can't help but cheer the man on to the very end and hope, somehow, that he makes it back. Stories of extreme conditions would seem like easy pickings for great reading, but it's easy to overdo the hysteria. What I think makes this London story work is that he focuses so much on the external, and that external then begins to stand for the internal state of the man. It's a great read, reminiscent of films like Touching the Void, another great winter survivalist tale. Read the story here.

On "The Game" by Michael Boylan (2729 words) ***

It's a friendly game of football between friends. Enter the stranger. The stranger has this strange effect on all of them, this commanding presence. He doesn't play the way the friends usually play, and he won't let them play that way either. Soon, he's changed the rules, and the friends are doing whatever Henry says, and they're all terrified of one another. Boylan's story seems like something a little unrealistic and impossible, but he makes you believe that perhaps it could happen. And of course, it does. There's the obvious metaphor here to societies at large, the way that dictators control whole nations, getting people to hate one another and to fear the man at the top. Just one charismatic leader and . . . Read the story here at 580 Split.

On "The Side Bar" by Jean Ryan (4242 words) ***

Stopping in Dodge City on my way across the country when I was twenty, a lifetime resident of Southern California, I was struck by the fact that out here, out in the middle of the country, there weren't a thousand people trying to break into film. I was eating at Dairy Queen (for lack of any restaurants in that time and place that weren't fast food), being served by people who weren't aspiring actors. It's one of the reasons that living outside Hollywood is more relaxing. You don't have to try to be something else. You're not in a constant struggle to try to be something bigger than life--and you don't feel like you're settling for something less if you don't take part in that struggle. Ryan recounts a woman who likes her small town of White Horse, Nevada, for similar reasons. Not so many choices. You have one restaurant, one grocery, one hardware store. And if you walk into any of these places, the chances are good you know who you'll see.

In the case of Ryan's narrator, who you'll see as a bartender are the town's troubled, sad, lonely, and aging. I'm sure that bartenders everywhere see plenty of these sort of people. Living where I do, in a college town, where drinking establishments are more numerous than hot dog buns in a football stadium, I'm a regular at the bars. Here, the bars seem like happy places, and I guess, on a superficial level the bar where Ryan works is also. People come to socialize. But what type of people? As here, many of them are there only because there is nowhere better for them to go. They are troubled. They are sad. They are lonely. They are getting old. But for a few hours, at the bar, they have friends, comrades, people to drink with, and they're happy, and all does not seem so wrong with the world.

Landscape is big in this story, though, and the surrounding desert plays its very important part, swallowing up everyone and everything that sits inside it--including the occasional bar patron. Read all about it here at Summerset Review.

On "Animal Talk" by Tim Friend ****

Tim Friend asks us to think about language as the animals speak it rather than as we speak it. When we do that, the possibility that the animals actually talk to one another seems like a given, and language no longer seems simply like the domain of human beings. Of course, this language takes different forms: dances, smells, songs, barks, howls, clicks, beeps, and a whole lot of other things I've forgotten to list here. In essence, though, animal language, Friend says, comes down to four things, which are shared with us humans: sex, real estate, who's boss, and what's for dinner. Whether one is convinced of Friend's point or not, Animal Talk is a fascinating book on biology and communication in other species.

Each chapter is arranged around a theme that Friend delves into in greater depth using a range of particular creatures to demonstrate the particular kind of communication that he wishes to demonstrate. One chapter focuses on the metal abilities of animals, one on their emotions; others focus on the aforementioned sex, real estate, and leadership. Still others focus on song and dance. Still, the book, while easy to follow, is pings between so many interesting facts that it's hard to summarize.

Cool anecdotes that come to mind include the following: In one experiment with birds in which they were given hooks and sticks to obtain food, the birds found the hooks easiest to work with and so ditched the sticks. However, a dominant bird stole the hook from a less powerful bird, leaving this other bird to have to use sticks. The surprising part? This other bird not only used the stick--it fashioned the stick into a hook by twisting it against a cage of some sort. Friend's point? That animals are capable of some creative thinking.

A newspaper reported that a raven called for a long while in the sky before a woman noticed the raven in her backyard. She also noted then that the raven was looking into the bush, and when she saw what was in the bush, she knew why--it was a wildcat. Luckily, her husband was in close range so that she could call for help. The raven had tried to warn her, she realized. Well, not quite, Friend notes. More likely, the raven had actually brought the wildcat to feast on the woman. The calls had likely been to get the cats attention and to draw it near. Friend's point? Animals can communicate across species and can work together to achieve ends. (In this case, the bird would have been the lucky diner on what was left after the wildcat's meal.)

Other interesting facts revolve around sound and song. The best time for singing, as it turns out, if one is a bird wanting one's mating call to carry far is at dusk and dawn. That's when the sound waves in the air travel farthest due to something to do with the way the atmosphere works--and that's why you hear birds chittering so much at those times, all of them on their own frequency so that they can tune out the frequency of other species and hear only the calls that are to them. But birds aren't the only one's who sing. Whales and other sea creatures do too, but while some terrestrial songs might travel sixty miles, whale songs, buried in sound-conducive water, can travel a thousand or more.

Songs aren't the only way that creatures attract or call for mates, however. Some birds jump in place to attract mates. And some, like the bower bird, build elaborate nests (akin to baskets) and wait for the mate to inspect it. If the nest passes the mate's discerning eye, the bird will get laid.

Friend closes with discussions of talk among sea creatures. It seems that dolphins have unique names (in the form of whistles), just as you and I do, whether that be John or Jacob and Suzie. Dolphins, Friend says, are the only known creatures outside of humans who do this in nature. (That animals know one another uniquely--or are capable of giving names--I think is well established among creatures in captivity, as the bonobos and apes and chimpanzees who learn English show in various experiments, and even, to an extent, as our own pets show when they choose out favorite people or favorite other animal buddies.) What other things dolphins are saying to one another we don't know, since we can only get the broad strokes of what certain things mean. This type of whistle is aggressive, this type is submissive, etc. It could be, Friend implies, that such creatures are saying much more to one another than we realize and likely ever will, since we can't vocalize in their tongue (I wouldn't go so far as to say that Friend is saying they're having talks about the meaning of life, but he does seem to imply these talks might be more than "gimme gimme").

There is also the interesting tale of Hoover, the talking seal. Hoover's mother died when it was a baby, so it was raised in a human household--and as a result, rather than learning seal songs, it learned English. Granted, the English it learned was rudimentary--three sentences to the effect of things like "hiya there" and "what's going on?"--but certainly on a par with parrots. In fact, harbor seals have vocal tracts similar to our own and thus should be able to mimic our speech with a fair amount of ease. Hoover eventually was placed in a marine park, where he tried to mate with other seals. Not knowing how to sing, however, he tried to pick up women with lines like, you got it, "Hiya there!" (He eventually succeeded, and at least one of his descendents speaks "English" also.)

Ultimately, anecdotes like this last one tie in to what seems to be Friend's ultimate point, which is that Chomsky and others who believe language is unique to human beings and represents an evolutionary jump are wrong. Friend sees human language as on a continuum that could have easily developed out of the kinds of languages that other animals speak. It is only our anthropomorphism that causes us to think we are so utterly unique that we must have developed special brains to go along with speech somewhere along the way. For me, however, the book mostly a joy of discovery into the ways that each creature was uniquely created with its own way of communicating.

On "The Etiquette of Adultery" by Tara Laskowski (1140 words) ****

Written like portions of a how-to manual, the creatively wrought piece tells a story of longing. It's about a woman with a lover she can't bring to social functions and whose celebrations she can't share.

The other day I was on the phone with an acquaintance of mine, and she was bemoaning the fact that I didn't celebrate the major holidays. That makes it hard to date, she noted. I had to agree. Times past, I've known many a nice woman, but our core customs and values were not the same, and so a relationship beyond friendship wasn't really in the offing, even if we spent lots of time together, even if we claimed to love each other on some level.

Reading this story, I see that the situation of the adulteress is in some ways similar. Hooked to this man, she feels a desire for family, for shared times, for things she cannot have, and yet she spends hours with him, days, parts of her life. He's there for her, and he's not. Read the story here at Necessary Fiction.

On "The Genius Meetings" by Elizabeth Crane (3255 words) ***

This story is about exactly what it's title proclaims, a series of meetings among geniuses. These geniuses discuss "great" things, as geniuses are wont to do, but when it comes to personal lives the lot of them are a mess. The geniuses are all men. There's a degree of chutzpah that goes along with genius or that goes along with claiming genius that requires that one strike out in one's own direction whether brilliant or scathingly stupid (and if one is a genius, one is lucky enough to have happened upon the brilliant). But this in turn leads to an inability to interact with others--after all, why listen to council when you are the smartest of the group? Why indeed? Perhaps because respect for others--and others' views--is the only thing that leads to happy relations with others. These geniuses, able to share with one another, remain unable to share with those of the lower strain, and thus unable to share with humanity.

Crane's story reminds me a little of people I've worked with in the past who were quick to point out their IQ scores (I've never even taken a legitimate IQ test--where does one do such and why?) or their Menda Society membership. I've always been a bit skeptical of said people. After all, if they're so smart, why are they working with me? And why a need to report their score? Anyway, geniuses can be a bit annoying, but they make for an interesting story, which you can read here at Guernica.

On "Thinking in Pictures" by Temple Grandin ****

Temple Grandin doesn't think in words--she thinks in pictures. She's what is called a high-functioning autistic person. This "disability" is also a great gift. While Grandin grapples with a way of thinking that differs from most of our own, she also is the beneficiary of a way of thinking that allows her to achieve things that few of us can. And that's what this book is about: how Temple thinks, and by extension, how autistic people in general think--and feel and live.

The book is split up into various thematic chapters, including sections on the language, the senses, emotion, romance, medication, animals, genius, and spirituality. On language, Grandin describes her brain as being like a video recorder. She puts things together through a prodigious stockpile of images. Rather than thinking in generalities and moving to specifics, she thinks in specifics and moves to generalities. Say "dog," for example, and she'll think of the first dog she met when she was three years old, and then the dog that lived next door that used to bark at her, and so on. This can create issues, as the stockpile of memories grow, because one has to parse through a lot of images. (Then again, some of us who think in words are at a loss for them at times ourselves.)

She also discusses a common feature that autistic people share, which is hypersensitivity. Sounds, tastes, smells can all make autistic people feel as if they are under attack, because that humming that our electric shaver makes can sound like standing under a jet airplane to one who is autistic. Or the shaving that we do might feel like a gentle tickle to us, while it's as if the skin is being torn off to one who is autistic. These kind of hypersenses mean that effort must be taken to dull the features of our world, either through medication or through such things as softer clothing.

On the emotional level, Grandin seems to point to fear as being the one that overwhelms many like her the most. This is in part what makes it difficult for autistic people to leave structured regimens. Given a rigid way of thinking, they often work best with a plan. By rigid, I mean that many lack the ability to generalize about events to be able to make clear decisions. An autistic person might be taught to look both ways before crossing the street in front of his or her house, but the person won't necessarily equate that lesson to looking before crossing any street.

This hypersensitivity and devotion to structure, however, can also mean that autistic people can concentrate in a much deeper fashion than others, can, one might say, obsess over something. This in turns allows them to do things that most can't, such as, in Grandin's case, to see things as the cattle that she works with see things. Throughout the book, in fact, Grandin compares some things she feels autistic people have in common with animals, and this in turns leads to an interesting discussion on thought, for if what is termed nonthinking in animals is all autistic people are capable of (and some not even capable of that), then how do we claim such humans think at all? What exactly is thought in such a case?

Other things autistic people might be able to do include memorizing phone books (taking a picture in the brain of each page) or visualizing riding on a beam of light (such as Einstein did to craft his theory of relativity). In this sense, an educational system that insists that people be well rounded is a disservice to autistic people, who might be immensely talented in a narrow field of study and incapable of much in other fields. Einstein, who Grandin says may have had a mild form of autism, for example, would never have been allowed to become the genius he is considered to be if he had had to deal with today's educational system. Unable to get through certain classes at college, he worked as a patent office and then dispensed his theory to a science journal in his spare time. Such journals wouldn't be open to "amateurs" today.

The more Grandin discusses autism in the book, however, the more it seems like certain tendencies of autistic people are tendencies in each of us. And in that there is a danger. Early in the text, Grandin shows how difficult it is to diagnose the problem early on, but that, in turn, I think, can also lend to overdiagnosis, a fad of sorts, just as hyperactive disorder has become a diagnosis that a lot of fairly normal kids--that is, energetic kids--have been subjected to. Still, as a study in the phenomenon by one who lives in it each day, Grandin's book is a great read.

On "Finis" by Jack London (6835 words) ****

I wouldn't have expected something this brutal to have been written so early in the twentieth century, and not from the likes of Jack London. Most of the time, London's characters cling to life desperately if that's what's called for. Most of the time, if a London character is a rogue, there's something redeeming about him, something rather fun. He may be a crook, but he's good hearted, and the other people in the story know it. Not so here. In "Finis" a man sets out, like some twisted Cormac McCarthy character, to kill a party of travelers, any travelers, that happen down the road in front of him. It's them or him, he figures, and if it's death we're talking about, it might as well be them. This is a story of survival, not just against the brute forces of nature but against the brute forces of man's earnest desire to save the self at any cost. Read the story here.