The Grinchy Brain

This note from Kelly First was on one of a handful of packages that arrived for me yesterday and that Kelly put at my front door this morning. The note says: Dear Brenda, Can I draw legs on the fish? Please?

The Brain, The Morning Brain, The 8 A.M. Brain that has usually had only a cup and a half of coffee, looked at that note and came up with, "Huh?" I showed the note to Dave and he read it and said, "Oh, look at the little legs on the fish." And I was still, like, "HUH?" And then I saw that Kelly had drawn little legs on the Jesus Fish to turn it to a Darwin Fish. Evolution, baby.

Who says biologists have no sense of humor?

The packages held a handful of books that I ordered from Amazon. I'll tell you about the books because it might be interesting for you to see how The Brain deals with the joy and cheer of the holiday season.

The first book is Magadan by Michael Solomon. It was published in 1971 but has since gone out of print. Magadan was about his false arrest and imprisonment in a gulag (the Soviet prisons that have been compared to German concentration camps) in Magadan, in Siberia. He spent seventeen years in prison, eight years in Siberia working as a slave laborer and then nine years in a Romanian prison until his release in the 1950's. (I'm almost finished with this amazing book.)

The second book is Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shamalov. Kolyma is near Magadan in Siberia, the site of yet more gulags. Like Solomon, Shamalov spent seventeen years in prison, most of that time in forced-labor camps. When he was released, he wrote these books that were later translated into English and published in America in the late 1960's.

The third book is The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Jane Wickensham. After Wickensham's father shot himself, she wrote this book in an attempt to understand why.

The final book is Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan J. Brison. Brison, a professor of philosophy, was vacationing in France when she went off for a walk in the countryside and was attacked, raped, strangled, and left for dead in the bushes on the side of the road. She wrote the book when she realized that the trauma of the attack had changed her perception of reality to the extent that she initially thought that perhaps she had suffered some form of brain damage.

So there it is. That's what The Brain has chosen--two more books about Soviet gulags, one book about suicide, one book about the effects of a violent assault---to read this Christmas season.

Ho-ho-horrible, no?