Maybe this will help me address the recent problem of my incredibly long-winded posts: I will race against the rapidly depleting battery power of my laptop. The impetus for tonight's brain blast is a brief conversation I had after school today with my good pal Bob Darken, a writer who spends his days teaching, as opposed to one such as I, a teacher who spends his evenings writing (sometimes). He recently read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We talked about the qualities of the narration that make the book so good, and it was nice to have a discussion with someone who attends to some of the same qualities I attend to when I read.

So I came up with a mental list of the qualities of pleasing narration. Foremost among them is a sense that the narrator really cares about his characters. He may still expose them to danger, he may show you sides of them they'd prefer he kept hidden, he may even have them act in ways contrary to their self-interest, but you always feel like he's concerned about their well-being. Foer is excellent about this with Oskar and with his protagonists in Everything is Illuminated.

I'm also drawn to writers who move the narration around. It's easier to hear the voices of the narrators when you're not trying to figure out the voice of the author. And I respond to writers who write energetically, particularly in the force of their prose. On the cover of The Lazarus Project, Gary Shteyngart is quoted as writing that Aleksandar Hemon "can't write a boring sentence."

So these are the three authors you should read if you like really kick-ass authors:

Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan; The Russian Debutante's Handbook
Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Everything is Illuminated
Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project; Nowhere Man; I haven't gotten to The Question of Bruno yet

To this point I've beaten the battery, which makes me think of another thing. Did you ever notice that th

Just when you thought Dostoevsky had taken over this blog, Miley Cyrus comes busting in.

You may have heard me railing about Miley Cyrus’s lyrics, about problems with their sense-making, especially in songs such as “Good and Broken,” which my daughters have made me listen to at least 200 times. Here are some of the words:

There’s a risk worth taking, a pain worth aching
on this hollow ground.

Ok, “a pain worth aching?” I was willing to give a little poetic license there, but then I realized just how ridiculous are the lyrics in the entire song. It took me about 150 listens to figure out that she really is singing ‘on this hollow ground.’ Um, “hollow” ground? We’ve all heard of hallowed ground, but hollow ground isn’t exactly what she’s looking for there. Then, of course, we get to the controlling image of the song – we “are good and broken chains.” We’re not broken links in a chain, but just broken chains. We’re just strewn about a room, I suppose, the room of broken chains.

I should point out that my peevishness here predates my becoming an English teacher – I had a girlfriend in college (believe it or not) who told me that she didn’t write letters to me over breaks because she was afraid I’d send them back to her with red ink on them. I guess that’s why I’m Mr. Popularity.

Here’s my current problem: Miley’s songwriting partners are creating a tale to two Mileys. I understand that Miley is breaking out, that she’s not supposed to be the good little girl singing you-can-do-it songs. Unfortunately, the writing team isn’t in sync with the message. Some of them are still seeking my generation’s approval, others shunning it.

For the song, “Breakout,” the first writing credit is Gina Schock, the 50 year old former drummer for the Go-Go’s. Who better to compose America’s latest anti-authority anthem?

Hangin' out's Just somethin' we like to do My friends and the mess we get into These are the lessons that we choose Not a book full of things we'll never use
”Wake Up, America” is written by Antonina Armato, who has written a bunch of Miley Cyrus songs. Here’s what Miley’s official website, mileycyrus.com, says about her latest record: “Miley sings about global climate change on “Wake Up, America,” but does so in an upbeat way young fans can take in. And dance to.” And isn’t that exactly what we need, the ability to shake it to rising sea levels. But this isn’t the rant, so maybe I need to move on. First, some lyrics to “Wake Up, America.”

I wanna learn what it's all about.But, everything I read is about global warming going green. I don't know what all this means,but it seems to be saying!(Chorus)Wake Up America!Were all in this together!It's our home so let's take care of it!You know that you want to, you know that you got to!Wake Up America! And everything you do matters! Yeah everything you do matters! In some way!
Here is a girl with an identity crisis – is school full of things she’ll never use, or does she have genuine learning curiosity as far as environmental science is concerned? Now you’ll probably say that this shouldn’t bother me – after all, it’s just pop entertainment, music for the pre-tween crowd, only the most impressionable group as far as the influence of teenagers is concerned. But here’s why I have the right to be bothered about this – on Hannah Montana on Saturday night, Miley’s character was up for the “Role Model of the Year” award. Now how blunt is that positioning for this product, I mean person? So here’s a singer sold as a role model, singing songs that are intended to turn elementary school girls into cynics, and then on the same CD, telling America to wake up. Maybe if she’d googled global warming or going green, or asked someone a question and taken five minutes to listen, she wouldn’t have had to write the “I don’t know what all this means” line. She could find out, and then when she wakes us up, she could give us the direction we’re all so desperately needing.

Yeah, I have issues. But I really needed to get this off my chest.

One of the really wonderful things about being moved by a book is that you can start to see its existence everywhere, and this recognition suggests that the book somehow connects you to other people and their passions.

One day, when the forecast of foul weather portended that I should take the little girlies to school to set up my classroom, I grabbed Into the Wild out of our bookroom. But the computer models predicting rain must have hiccupped, so there we were, stuck in an empty school building on a hot August day, when I suggested to the girls that we head to the pool. This was one of those days when their friends were abundant, and I was thus irrelevant. Dispirited, I searched through our pool bag only to find that The Brothers Karamazov were resting at home and that all I had was Into the Wild and The Life of Pi, a book I still can’t bring myself to read.

I was planning to hate Into the Wild, preparing to figure out ways blunt and not so blunt to tell all future students who saw something admirable in Christopher McCandless that they were missing the problems with his ostensibly romantic isolationist journey. But John Krakauer’s introduction gave me a way of reading the book much the way Richard Brookhiser’s intro to Founding Father predisposed me to love George Washington as much as he did, or the way that Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare is written to advance what he wants to believe to be true.. Krakauer promises the reader that he is subjective, that as much as he perhaps shouldn’t, he sets out to correct misperceptions about his subject, for reasons both professional and personal. So I started reading the book even though I was in the middle of TBK, and I finished it in about a day and a half.

Well, I’m not going to make this entirely about Into the Wild, so let me say that all the rejecting I had perceived in the story before I read the book – rejection of family, of social bonds, of societal bonds, of government – is tempered by the love of nature, the love I’ve talked about in the Elder Zosima’s sermons. I think that the combination of Krakauer’s declaration of intent and the generous spirit I had felt through Dostoevsky made me a more open reader of Into the wild, more willing to embrace the adventure than to judge it, more willing to find something to connect with than something to reject. It’s a feeling I wish I felt more often.

So after I finished TBK, I went out in search of Aleksandar Hemon, an author whose newest book, The Lazarus Project, was praised to the heavens in The New Yorker. It’s not that I run out and buy every book praised there, but the fact that the very day after I read the review in The New Yorker, Hemon had a piece in The New York Times following up on the capture of Radovan Karadzic. I have learned in the last few years to recognize when the universe is trying to tell me something, so I scurried off to the White Plains Public Library and borrowed Nowhere Man, Hemon’s follow-up to his acclaimed The Question of Bruno.

And here too was Dostoevsky, manifest mostly through The Idiot, which will be on my list for one of these summers to come. Nowhere Man is a really, really enjoyable book, filled with great surprises of language, varying points of view and energetic narration (after the first chapter). If you were to ask me what it is about, though, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I mean, I would – it’s about the feeling of displacement that Maya Angelou makes her explicit theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – but I would have no way of explaining how the ending of the story relates to the journey of our protagonist, Josef Pronek. Nonetheless, there’s a very funny scene (which quickly turns to tragedy) when Josef is trying to kill a mouse he’s cornered in Rachel’s apartment. He’s all wound up, screaming at Rachel to give him something to kill it with, she’s in a frenzy, she hands him a book… Actually, Hemon does it better:

The mouse was in the corner shivering, huddled, a light-tentacle reaching its tail.
“Give me something,” Pronek said. The mouse was fat, a short evolutional step from a rat, its cheeks bulging as if it had been caught eating and was still chewing the food.
“What do you want?”
“Something.”
Rachel grabbed a book off the shelf: “Here.”
Pronek took the book, looked at the title page, and flipped through it – it was The Idiot.
“Not this one.”
“You gotta be kidding me! What difference does it make?”
“Not this.”
She put the book back on the shelf and stood, with her hands pressing against her back, choosing another one:
“Do you want history or biography?” she asked, irked.
The mouse dared to move, its back against the wall, but Pronek stomped his foot.
“Here is Death in Venice,” she said.

Nope, you can’t kill vermin with Dostoevsky. Only Thomas Mann will do. The Idiot has more of a role in the story than the scant mention in this scene, but still, the connection is there.

So now that my Dostoevskyan antennae have been activated, I get to the inexplicable ending, in which a character who may or may not use the name Josef Pronek, has in his soul a love of theater that is frequently subjugated to the planning and execution of various criminal enterprises. When he opens his theater in Shanghai, his first performance is Gogol’s Dead Souls, and his favorite part is that of Chichikoff singing of the mad Russian troika, rushing, rushing into the future. Yes, that’s right, this is the very same troika, the very same passage that Ippolit Kirillovich quotes in his closing argument in the trial of Dmitri Karamazov in TBK. You just can’t make these connections up, folks. They happen.

Well, that’s about all the time for me today. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience. Now get you hence and read Aleksandar Hemon and Gary Shteyngart.