Bookshelf

New Book Looks into the Birth of Mirth

June 26, 2012  by Glenn Whipp Comments Off on New Book Looks into the Birth of Mirth

If you’re reading James Thurber and Robert Benchley and composing comedic poetry at the tender age of 7, then writing a book that examines humor from every conceivable angle doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. Indeed, when David Misch ’72 began putting together Funny: The Book three years ago, it felt like the next logical step in a four-decade career that has included stints as a comedic folk singer, stand-up comedian and writer for such shows as Mork and Mindy and Saturday Night Live.

Misch credits his days at Pomona for both the beginning of his life’s work and its latest chapter. During his senior year, Misch was goofing around, making up songs on guitar with some friends in his Clark dorm room.Their laughter prompted a concert booking at the Smudge Pot coffee house and a postgraduate career as a “professional funny folk singer,” an occupation that, Misch notes, “went out around the same time as ‘buggy whip maker.’”

Misch adapted, though, writing for sitcoms, selling a handful of screenplays and serving as a special consultant on The Muppets Take Manhattan. When it came to time reinvent himself once again, Misch thought about teaching and remembered a multidisciplinary course he took during his senior year at Pomona titled Freud, Marx and Contemporary Literature. “I remember my mind being blown by the way the class brought all these things together,” Misch says. “So I got the idea to study comedy from every conceivable angle—science, biology, history, philosophy and psychology—and not just its manifestations in movies and television, as it’s usually studied.”

As Misch dove into the research, a literary agent friend told him he should fashion a book out of the material. Funny: The Book stands as the greatly abridged version of two years of study, as well as something of a companion to the course, Funny: A Survey of American Comedy, he taught last fall at the University of Southern California. In it, the witty Misch surveys the history of humor, considers the scientific nature of laughter and, amid a fart joke or two, makes a convincing case for comedy to be taken seriously.

“You’re up against it when you have people like Woody Allen saying that comedy is frivolous and inferior to drama,” Misch says. “But in my study, I was unable to discern any difference in the properties of comedy and drama, nor any difference in their complexity. The only difference: one produces laughter, the other tears.”

Misch blames the Greeks—Aristotle and Plato—for the persistent idea that laughter is cruel and immoral and thus somehow shameful. He trots out his own heavy hitters, citing Carl Jung’s belief that frivolity makes life worth living and functions as a crucial aspect of what makes us human. Misch also loves the notion propagated by author Philip Pullman that laughter ranks as one of life’s greatest pleasures, a simple delight that people can summon at will. And, of course, there’s Norman Cousins, who believed a daily dose of the Marx Brothers, along with a lot of Vitamin C, helped him live another 36 years after doctors diagnosed him with heart disease. Scientific studies of the correlation between humor and health aren’t conclusive, Misch says, but there does appear to be evidence that laughter does help a little. “And a little is better than nothing,” Misch says.

But what’s humorously healing to Misch might be a source of irritation to someone else. And vice versa. Misch didn’t need to endure the quizzical stares of some of his USC students or the occasional wave of head-scratching he noticed while teaching a course in musical satire last spring at UCLA to know that comedy is totally subjective. For him, that’s just another aspect of humor that elevates it above drama as an art form. “That subjectivity gives comedy a mystery that drama lacks,” Misch says. “What makes something funny? After all the scientific dissection I do, it’s still a little mysterious why one sentence is funny and why another sentence, that’s almost identical save for one word or sometimes one piece of punctuation, isn’t. To me, there’s magic in that mystery.”

Professor’s Praise Launched Prolific Children’s Author

June 7, 2012  by Sneha Abraham Comments Off on Professor’s Praise Launched Prolific Children’s Author

Children’s author Barbara Brooks Wallace ’45 has racked up more than her share of awards and rave reviews in a career spanning five decades. And, at 89, she’s still at it, with the Cinderella-themed Diary of a Little Devil released in December and another book in her Miss Switch series coming in the fall.

 But she hasn’t forgotten her shaky start. Wallace, who today lives in a retirement home in McLean, Va., credits her success to an initially-nerve-wracking encounter with her freshman-year English professor at Pomona College.

Wallace had always pleased her high school teachers. But at Pomona she came to realize she was prone to “flossy” overwriting and for the first time in her life, she was making C’s on papers. Then English Professor Charles C. Holmes called her into a meeting.

“He pushed my two essays across his desk and said, ‘There really isn’t much I can say to you.’  My heart nearly stopped because my immediate thought was that my writing was so bad, there was no hope for me,” Wallace says.

His next words stunned her: “If these were done by a professional writer,” Holmes said. “They’d be good enough for The New Yorker.”

Holmes went on to tell Wallace to continue taking English and writing classes—advice she heeded some years later. But first she transferred to UCLA, majored in international relations, got married and had a son. It was her sister Constance Brooks Schindehette ’43 who reminded Wallace of Professor Holmes’ advice.

Wallace enrolled in a creative writing course at Santa Monica City College, and eventually tried using her childhood in China as a setting for a fantasy children’s story—resulting in a book that Wallace says was terrible. “But that story hooked me on writing for children, so that’s what I’ve done ever since.”

Claudia, the tale of an 11-year-old girl overcoming the ups and downs of that age, was Wallace’s first published book.

She has earned acclaim ever since. Praised by the American Library Association, The New York Times and Kirkus Reviews, Wallace has been honored with two Edgar Allen Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America for The Twin in the Tavern and Sparrows in the Scullery. She also earned the NLAPW Children’s Book Award and International Youth Library “Best of the Best” for Claudia.

Her many works include Victorian-era mysteries, fantasy novels, a biography of her mother, her autobiography, picture books, teleplays and musicals. The Trouble with Miss Switch and Miss Switch to the Rescue were made into Saturday morning animated specials for ABC, both of which were the highest-rated films in the TV series.

Wallace’s latest book is Diary of a Little Devil, a Cinderella-themed story (“No handsome prince, but a happy ending nonetheless!”) of a young girl, Andy, whose widowed father remarries someone with twin daughters who—once they all return to their home in China—make life miserable for Andy.

Between shooting a YouTube video of her reading a chapter from Diary and preparing for the fall release of Miss Switch and the Vile Villains, this octogenarian is keeping at her keyboard. “What’s next for me is to go on writing one way or another,” she says. —Sneha Abraham

The love lives of American Muslim women

February 29, 2012  by Sneha Abraham Comments Off on The love lives of American Muslim women

Nura Maznavi ’00 was tired of hearing everyone talk about Muslim women, without ever stopping to listen to Muslim women themselves.

“Nowhere in the public discourse did we see a reflection of the funny, independent and opinionated Muslim women we knew,” says Maznavi, who, with co-editor Ayesha Mattu, thought an anthology could help fill the void. “We decided to compile our faith community’s love stories as a celebration of our identity and heritage, and a way of amplifying our diverse voices, practice and perspectives.”

In Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, 25 women chronicle their experiences of romance, dating, love and sex in the context of their varied relationships to their Muslim faith. (“InshAllah” means “God-willing.”) For the anthology’s co-editors, this was an opportunity to subvert popular perceptions and stereotypes of Muslim women and also remind readers of the universality and complexity of the search for love.

The project began nearly five years ago. Maznavi and Mattu, who met through mutual friends, circulated a nationwide call for submissions and received more than 200. The criteria for the final selections? The writers had to be both American and Muslim and collectively represent the spectrum of both identities. The contributors to Love, InshAllah are blonde or black; South Asian or Southern; divorced, single or polygynous; straight or lesbian. “It was very important to us that the final contributors reflect the ethnic, racial and religious—orthodox to cultural to secular—diversity of the American Muslim community,” says Maznavi, a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles.

For Maznavi and Mattu, building trust was key so that the writers felt comfortable exploring the parts of themselves that were sometimes difficult to write about. Contributors were assured that none of their stories would be sent to print without their final approval. “For many of our writers, it was the first time they were sharing the personal and intimate details of their love lives—not only with the public, but sometimes with their family and friends,” she says.

Each of the editors contributed a chapter as well. Maznavi wrote about her crush on a Sri Lankan Catholic model and the dilemma of whether to kiss him or not. Mattu told the story of finding her soul mate in an Albanian agnostic—after 9/11 and before his conversion to Islam.

Getting the book to print was a hurdle, though eventually an independent publishing house, Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint, was won over. “Many of the first publishers we approached loved it, but were reluctant to publish a book by unknown writers meant for an untested market,” Maznavi says.

The hope of the book, says Maznavi, is that “we will discover that one of the things we all have in common is the desire to love and be loved for who we are.”

 

 

Richard Preston ’76, Michael Crichton and the making of “Micro”

February 19, 2012  by John B. Saul Comments Off on Richard Preston ’76, Michael Crichton and the making of “Micro”

Richard Preston’s friendship with Michael Crichton is a strange one—mostly because the two writers never met.

It developed as Preston ’76 finished writing Crichton’s 17th novel, a thriller that finds seven grad students lured to Hawaii for a research project that turns out to be run by a sociopath scientist. The students are plunged into the insect world of Oahu and must struggle to survive.

“At first I thought I would be intimidated,” says Preston, “but I became entranced by Michael’s materials. It became an act of friendship, and I developed a feeling of affection for Michael even though I had never met him.”

Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 66. He left behind an unfinished manuscript and the Michael Crichton Trust, which went looking for someone to complete the novel. Lynn Nesbit, Crichton’s literary agent, called Preston in 2009 to let him know about the search. Preston, author of several best sellers himself, was at work on a novel, but the Crichton project sounded “extremely tempting,”and he let Nesbit know he was interested.

He was given the manuscript of the third of the book that Crichton had completed. “There was a poignancy in it. Crichton was working at high speed as if he didn’t know if he had time left to finish it,” Preston says.

Preston (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event) wrote a proposal of what he thought Crichton’s plan was for the book and supplied an ending (Crichton had not) and a working title: Micro World, a technical term from biology basically referring to organisms the size of insects.

He got word that Sherri, Crichton’s widow, wanted to meet him, and he traveled to Santa Monica, Calif., where he met with her and Bonnie Jordan, Crichton’s longtime personal assistant, in Crichton’s writing space, a nondescript home where Crichton worked in a spare, upstairs bedroom.

“Sherri was so taken that I had come so close to predicting the secret title of the book—Micro—that she thought I should see these notes, and she brought out notebooks and jottings on hotel notepads and told me no one had seen these, not even Nesbit.”

Preston started an outline for the book, which became a 25,000 word “story bible.” The three of them—Preston, Sherri and Jordan—all worked on the book with the two women making suggestions based on their knowledge of Crichton and his discussions with them about the book.

“Michael was obsessed with the literary trope of shrunken humans and watched movies like Fantastic Voyage with Sherri to get it right.”

Preston began the actual writing in the spring of 2010. August of that year found him in Hawaii, down on his hands and knees with a magnifying glass examining the floor of an Oahu rain forest for detail to use in the book.

According to Preston, Crichton “was concerned that young people today don’t have the chance to experience the wonder of nature. So I tried to take readers on an odyssey through the micro world.”
Preston thought part of the task was to recover the lost voice of the author Michael Crichton. He studied videotapes of Crichton for speech patterns, read all of Crichton’s books and did a technical study of Crichton’s writing—how he went about his narratives, how he developed characters, etc.

“It was definitely a project where you had to check your ego at the door,” says Preston, whose book The Hot Zone has sold more than 2.5 million copies. “At one point, Bonnie handed back some of my work and she had crossed out the word ‘meanwhile.’ She told me that Michael never used the word in any of his books, that his narrative scenes were slam-bam and there was no meanwhile in them.”

Sherri insisted that Preston keep the part that Crichton had written, which meant Preston had to adopt Crichton’s style and tone. (Preston won’t say where the transition is in the book).

In going through Crichton’s notes, Preston came upon the words “to JR” jotted in them. Crichton mostly did not dedicate his books to anyone, but those words looked like a dedication to Preston, and he asked Bonnie who J.R. might be. A friend? Family? And then it came to them: Junior. When Michael died, Sherri had been pregnant with their child.

Preston put a photo of John Michael Crichton, Jr., then 3 years old, above his writing space, a way of remembering “the person I was writing for.”

Micro was published in November, and Preston has resumed his own project, which he describes as a departure from his previous books, which were rooted in contemporary scientific discoveries. The coming book creates an imaginary world with non-human characters but “not aliens; it’s not science fiction.”

He hopes to have a first draft done by April and publication before 2014. About Micro, he says he is happy how it turned out and “I like to think Michael would be, too.”

NPR’s Joe Palca writes about what bugs us

October 18, 2011  by David Roth '00 Comments Off on NPR’s Joe Palca writes about what bugs us

“A constant struggle against being annoyed all the time may be a phenomenon limited to New Yorkers,” says Joe Palca ’74. The relocated Upper West Sider knows of what he speaks when it comes to irritable straphangers, but he has also established himself as one of the world’s experts on annoyance with Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, a book that’s about just what you think it’s about, and which the NPR science correspondent co-wrote with NPR multimedia editor Flora Lichtman.

Palca earned his Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz after graduating from Pomona, where he got his start on radio at KSPC. “We just brought our record collections to the station and played what we would have listened to anyway,” he says of his radio days in Claremont.

These days, Palca spends his time in Washington, D.C., although he also recently logged six months back in Southern California as the science writer-in-residence at the Huntington Library. The catalytic annoyance that inspired this study of all things annoying arrived—and it’s tempting to write “of course”—on the New York City subway. Palca spoke to PCM about how he came to study annoyingness, the reasons why you—and everyone else, everywhere—hate the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, and his as-yet-unfulfilled quest for the definitive annoying experience.

As a sentient human living in a major American city, you are more or less guaranteed multiple annoyance triggers in a given day. Can you put your finger on a moment when that workaday annoyance started to seem like something worth writing a book about?

The finger-putting moment for the book actually came from my co-author, Flora Lichtman. She was riding on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the guy sitting next to her on the train was clipping his nails. She found herself becoming increasingly annoyed as the clipping seemed to continue way longer than necessary for someone with only 10 digits. She asked me if I thought exploring why this experience annoyed her so could make a book, and I said, “Sure.” I pitched her idea to an editor at Wiley, he loved it, and though we ultimately had interest from several publishers, Wiley won a bidding war.

In Annoying, you identify an experience’s unpleasantness as a fundamental aspect of its annoyingness, which seems hard to argue with. There’s no accounting for taste on the question of pleasantness-versus-unpleasantness, but did you find anything that annoyed more or less everyone, everywhere?

I suppose the quintessential universal annoyance is fingernails on a blackboard, although with the disappearance of blackboards that may change. Rubbing Styrofoam boxes together captures some of the same awfulness. Skunk smell also seems to be a nearly universal annoyance. Why? Hard to say for sure. Fingernails on a blackboard has an acoustic signature similar to a human scream or a primate’s warning call. Skunk spray’s smell comes from sulfur, and high sulfur environments tend to be low oxygen environments. Perhaps these things evoke a primal avoidance reaction, which we have modified over evolutionary time to be merely annoying.

No one really likes overhearing half of someone else’s phone conversation, but I was surprised to learn that our brains are actually wired to listen to and attempt to interpret that sort of “halfalogue.” To what extent is being annoyed attributable to unhelpful reflexes like that? And can we do anything to change that?

Annoyances can seem reflexive, but in nearly all cases they are learned. Does that mean we can train ourselves not to be annoyed? Not really. We can try to become calmer people, of course, but once something’s annoying it usually stays annoying. But you can, with practice, learn not to respond. You can’t prevent your leg from twitching when a doctor taps your patellar tendon with a hammer. If you can, you have problems that go way beyond annoyance.
You pin down three main factors that go into making experiences annoying—they’re unpleasant, unpredictable and of an uncertain duration. Excluding three-for-three flukes like getting stuck in traffic with a screaming baby and a car radio inexplicably stuck on a Black Eyed Peas marathon, what would be your ultimate annoying experience?

For me, being stuck in a noisy, hot waiting room for a flight or train that is delayed with no explanation is close to my ultimate annoyance. The absence of information is what pushes me from everyday annoyance into the top echelon. I have to fudge on whether it’s the ultimate annoyance, though. I feel life is full of discoveries, and I hope I have yet to discover my ultimate annoyance.

—Interview by David Roth ’00