WHAT I'M READING NOW
Cold, dark winter days are perfect for staying indoors and reading, not that I need much excuse to do that. Just when I think there is nothing good left , along comes the kind of book I don't want to finish. In a recent spate of good reading, lucky me, I can mention the following:
"Acts of Honor" by Richard H. Dickinson. 2008. www.booksurge.com
If I tell you this book opens in Abu Ghraib you probably won't read it,
but you should because it raises not only the Geneva Convention aspect of torture but also poses conflicts of politics, patriotism, and honor. Much of the book is set at West Point and Dickinson (Class of '73 and a Vietnam veteran) knows what he is talking about. While you are at it, get Dickinson's "The Silent Men," about a US Marine sniper in Vietnam. "Silent Men" (2002) should be a classic but despite wonderful writing and a real hero, nothing much ever came of it. It could be that people are simply not interested in reading anything about Vietnam. Both of these novels are available via Amazon, that octopus. I read "Acts of Honor" as a Kindle book and like many other electronic renditions, it is full of scanning errors, so annoying to the reader.
"The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach (Little Brown, 2011), is a
wonderful read, full of baseball stuff and a great cast of characters -- each one better than the next. The main characters: a naive
baseball genius who goes to a safety school on a full scholarship; his mentor, an upperclassman from a lower class background, a natural-born coach and all-round decent person; the college president, a handsome Harvard historian who has come home to the mid-west college to do the bare minimum and act as a distinguished figurehead; the President's seriously screwed up daughter who flees a bad California marriage and comes home to Dad; the brilliant, gay, roommate of the baseball player, the voice of reason and predictor of trouble. Plus minor characters all drawn splendidly. I love this book and didn't want it to end. It has a kind of "Unbroken" decency about it and the voices of Great Americans. Speaking of...
"Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, 2010) is the true story of glory, suffering, triumph, redemption.. Louis Zamperini was an American Olympic runner in the late 1930s, a teenage wonder bound to set all records, when WWII began and he enlisted. Louis (still living at a great old age) was shot down, survived more than 100 days at sea in a raft, was captured by the Japanese and sent to one concentration camp after the other until he wound up in Japan, endlessly tortured by a sadistic guard. Somehow Louis survives and goes on to become a coach, a motivational speaker, and the hero of this terrific book. Hillenbrand interviewed Louis many times over a period of about 10 years. As you know, she is a meticulous writer and this book is a tribute not only to Zamperini but to her.
Broken Irish by Edward J. Delaney (Turtle Point Press, 2011) another spectacular novel that deserves a wide readership and won't get it. It is
another example of a most worthy effort slipping through the cracks, sinking like a rock, going up in smoke. I don't know why, but this happens all the time. Write a stupid dracula chick novel and you'll make millions. Set in Southy, the part of Boston that didn't go to Harvard, it features Jimmy Gilbride, a 32-year old tech writer and drunk "in decent shape, if that means thin -- someone hardly prone to eating. He's especially slack where the skin gathers around the joints. He is sustained by the nutrients of many beverages, by the gum he chews incessantly to mask his breath and by some beer nuts thrown in for a suggestion of something solid." It is a story of accident and ruin and it does not have a happy ending.
The Litigators by John Grisham (Random, 2011) provided a day-long spree of reading for fun. The sly humor and great characters plus a really smart and entertaining plot make what might be thought of as junk one of the most delicious novels around. David Zink, Harvard boy and senior associate at one of those legal sweatshops that churn out mega billings, goes haywire one day, walks out, and after 12 hours in a local bar, winds up on the couch in the office of a pair of seedy ambulance chasers. They clean up his mess and he eventually cleans up theirs. As a lawyer who has never seen a courtroom, David stumbles into a trial as the lead lawyer in a huge litigation against a major drug company during which he faces a battery of $700-an-hour lawyers from his old firm. Not to spoil it for anybody, but this one does have a (very) happy ending.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
THEIR DRINKING LIVES
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review," as one in a series, "My Reading Life."
Mentioned below: "The Big Sleep," by Raymond Chandler, "Fleshmarket Alley," by Ian Rankin; "The Magdalen Martyrs," by Ken Bruen.
THEIR DRINKING LIVES
“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.”
From “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler
I like crime novels that feature people who drink. I enjoy before and after: stories of dependency and recovery. Don’t ask me why exactly, I’ll only say that I find drinkers sympathetic, and add that I went to an Ivy League university in the 1950’s where I learned to be quite the good little drinker myself. Alas, as age has advanced, I seem to have lost my chops for it. Two white wines on a lot of ice and I’m smashed.
Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh police Inspector Rebus, is addicted to alcohol and tobacco. In “Fleshmarket Alley” (Little Brown, 2005) Rebus meets up with someone whom he suspects is a mugger in a dark doorway: “Rebus had a carrier bag in his right hand. There was a bottle of 20-quid malt inside and he was loathe to take a swing unless absolutely necessary.” Any drinker can easily understand this.
A veteran cop, Rebus is honest and experienced. He’s good at his job but has been sidelined by young, humorless, ambitious and abstemious professionals. Rankin’s excellent writing, smart plots, and colorful descriptions of the changing neighborhoods in Edinburgh make all of the Rebus books well worth reading. Sometimes the cigarette fug and hangovers that hurt to read about intrude on enjoyment. I want Rebus to clean up his flat and order a salad for once. I worry about his liver and I’m certain he’ll develop diabetes. His total lack of any kind of exercise makes him an ideal candidate for a heart attack or a stroke. A reader ought not to have to worry so about a character in a novel, for heaven’s sake.
That’s real drinkers for you, even in books: everybody worries about them, but they don’t worry about anything other than how early in the day they can, in conscience, have the first drink. The main character in many books by Ken Bruen, an author I’ve mentioned before in this space, may go too far. Although he solves the nastiest crimes, ex-Garda officer, Jack Taylor of Galway, is an alcoholic. He drinks to oblivion, gets into awful fights, and doesn’t remember what happened afterward. He alienates the few friends has left, he often lives in personal squalor, he has long given up on forming any kind of relationship with a woman, and his doctor has told him DT’s are not far in his future. His life seems to have no scope: it is lived from his room to the pub, from the pub to the neighborhood, back to the room with booze in a bag. Of course, he doesn’t own a car because he is always too drunk to drive.
He tries. He goes on the wagon. He sets little goals, one day at a time. Then something will happen to tick him off, and he’ll cave in and buy a bottle and drink it down. So it goes… Why do I bother with this kind of character in a novel? I am not sure I would have the patience in real life, so maybe I should switch to something a little lighter? Here is why: Jack Taylor reads and he listens to music all the time. His reading is so sophisticated and so advanced, I make lists of books he mentions and then go and read them myself. He is always way ahead of me. Is this redeeming, or what?
Jack Taylor’s real life is narrow and tormented, so he leads another life in books. In a recent novel, “The Magdalen Martyrs” (St.Martin’s, 2005), someone he has crossed enters his room and completely destroys everything in it, including all of his books, so carefully collected (and preserved!) over years. His local bookseller, comprehending the loss and taking pity, gathers the starters of a new library and delivers the books.
“Among the poets were Rilke, Coleridge, Lowell, Yeats. The crime had the foundation of Thompson, Cain, Chandler, Derek Raymond. I didn’t pay much attention to the philosophers,” says Jack, “simply stacked them against the wall. My frame of mind could hardly register titles, let alone content. Biography had a fine mix: Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Branson.” Branson was thrown in for devilishness by the book guy. You know I will try to get Derek Raymond, a writer I’ve never heard of before. I’ve already looked him up in the local library system catalogue and find there are two holdings, elsewhere in the county.
It seems Rebus is also a reader, although Ian Rankin doesn’t give us much idea of what he reads. Mainly, Rebus listens to music from the 1960’s and ‘70’s in his car as he goes from crime to crime and I keep handy a map of Edinburgh so I can shadow him on his way.
John Rebus and Jack Taylor are not alone. James Sallis, an American, has given us sophisticated, smart novels featuring Lew Griffin, a New Orleans ex-cop recently on the wagon but whose memory of serious drinking emerges hauntingly. Ian Rankin himself has commented on the work of Sallis, saying: “Then there's James Sallis - he's right up there, one of the best of the best. His series of novels about private eye Lew Griffin is thoughtful, challenging and beautifully written. Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy.”
Rebus and Taylor and Griffin join a long list of characters from the hardboiled gumshoe genre beginning with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1939) and continuing with dissolute heroes by Mickey Spillane, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Colin Dexter and Robert Wilson. Their characters are brave, often reckless, men who can’t get their lives together and who have fruitless relationships. If they are not divorced, they are widowed (always convenient) or looking for somebody who will put up with their lushedness and their dangerous comings and goings. For such drags, they are amazingly picky.
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Elinore Standard is the co-editor of "Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading," (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
ehstandard@gmail.com
NOTHING LIKE JANE WHEN YOU ARE IN A TIGHT SPOT
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY "Record
Review" as one in the "My Reading Life" series. (2004)
Mentioned below: "The Two Bishops," by Agnes Sligh Turnbull; "The Jane Austen Book Club," by Karen Joy Fowler; "A Choice of Kipling's Prose," ed. Craig Raine; "Our Kind," by Kate Walbert; "The Lesson of Balzac," by Henry James; "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park,"Emma," "Persuasion," and "Northanger Abbey," by Jane Austen; "A Room of One's Own," by Virginia Woolf
NOTHING LIKE JANE WHEN YOU ARE IN A TIGHT SPOT
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Jane Austen’s novels, nor do I remember when I read the first one. I go to them when I am tired of reading thrillers in which people get sliced and shot and blown up. I go to Jane Austen when I can’t stand another saga of family dysfunction and abuse. I turn to Jane Austen when the nightly news says the world around me is collapsing beneath the weight of fear, violence, lying and rage. I read Jane Austen to recover.
My favorite stories, fiction and non, are about how women manage and how people change their lives. I enjoy humor when it is sly and dialogue when it is stimulating. I mind being preached to. I appreciate a loyal and self-reliant character. I like happy endings.
Lately I’ve tried other so-called “comfort” novels, while attempting to avoid the bodice-ripper Regency romances and the mystery “cozies”that are so often included in this genre. Right after the ugliness of the recent presidential election, I even went so far as to try Agnes Sligh Turnbull, an American writer of bestsellers in the 1950s through the 70s. Like Jane Austen, she often writes about clergy and pastoral politics and the genteel life. Turnbull’s settings, often in upper class, pre-World War II urban America evoke what has been called a “kinder, gentler, age.”
However, this kinder period as portrayed by Turnbull -- in addition to being completely humorless -- discriminated against all minorities, was Stone Age in its treatment of women, and it assumed an ethno-centric, white male-dominated, ruling class society. People were polite, though, and they all wore hats.
After reading this appalling opening line from Turnbull’s “The Two Bishops” (Houghton, 1980), I fled back to Jane Austen:
“The warm effulgence of the late June day fell upon
the Bishop’s garden here and there.”
Karen Joy Fowler has written the delightful “The Jane Austen Book Club” (Putnam’s, 2004), in which she says, “Each of us has a private Jane Austen.” Fowler’s novel is more about the book club characters and why they read what they read than it is about Austen, but at the back of the book there is a generous bibliography and a chronological listing of what others through the years have had to say about the great Jane Austen. Fowler quotes Rudyard Kipling as saying, “Nothing like Jane when you’re in a tight spot.” (from “A Choice of Kipling’s Prose” ed: Craig Raine.) (Faber, 1987).
A chapter in a much darker recent novel, “Our Kind” by Kate Walbert,
(Scribner, 2004) has a reading group struggling to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” about which one character says, “I frankly, was confused, I couldn’t make heads or tails.” In comparing Woolf to Jane Austen, she adds, “Austen knew how to tell a story, and her books mean something. How many years later? You can read them again and again. In fact, I think we should read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ next…”
In “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905) Henry James said, “The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility…” Such ease and simplicity may be the secret to the amazing survival and popularity of her work throughout two centuries. In her short lifetime she produced six novels which, given the fact she was a female (and an “Old Maid” as D.H.Lawrence called her) and getting published was hard enough without that. I wonder if there had been more Austen books written, would they seem as precious in the way they gently remind us today of the enduring foibles and follies of human nature.
Just to remind you, the six Austen novels, in order of publication, are “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), “Persuasion” (1817 Posth.) and “Northanger Abbey” (1817 Posth.). Although the books were not published in exactly the order they were written, they all deal with common themes such as the control of passion, miscommunication, the humbling of the vain and self-satisfied, and virtue rewarded. In addition, they all seem to be to be about money and the want of it.
“Northanger Abbey” of the six, is quite strange and it is the only one I have not persistently re-read. Perhaps this is because it seems like a juvenile exercise, which it pretty much is. Austen wrote it perhaps ten years earlier than any of the others but it wasn’t published until after her death. Unlike the other five novels, I find little comfort in “Northanger Abbey." The three brother-sister pairs of characters seem farcical at times and, as I do with some other novels old and new, I find myself becoming impatient.
Mark Twain didn’t exactly love Jane Austen’s work. He said, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Among other non-appreciators are Joseph Conrad, “What is it all about?”; Rebecca West, “...you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love…”; H. G. Wells, “A certain ineluctable faded charm. Like some of the loveliest butterflies – with no guts at all.” And so on… Of course, there have always been detractors but the appreciators far outnumber them.
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching…”
For me, as a reader in the 21st Century, these brave qualities are what make Jane Austen so reassuring, over and over again.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, with Laura Furman, of
"Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading." (Carroll & Graf, 1997). ehstandard@gmail.com
SOUR GRAPES DEPARTMENT
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in 2004 as one in the "My Reading Life" series in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review."
Mentioned below: "P.S. I Love You," by Cecelia Ahern; "The Devil Wears Prada," by Plum Sykes; "The Nanny Diaries," by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus; "Maneater," by Gigi Levangie Grazer; "Winning," by Jack Welch; "To Have and To Hold," by Jane Green; DaVinci Code," by Dan Brown.
SOUR GRAPES DEPARTMENT
Don’t let anybody tell you writers aren’t seethingly competitive and envious of their colleagues’ success. Behind that thin wince of congratulation are clenched teeth. It’s tough enough to be gracious about a contemporary’s critical success, but it is a whole lot easier to be graceful about that than it is to hear about some kid’s huge advance.
The 22-year-old daughter of Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister, just got a one million dollar advance from a US publisher for her novel, “P.S., I Love You”, plus $100,000 for a US film deal. The novel, written in longhand in three months, got rotten reviews in Ireland. Oh well.
So what if “The Devil Wears Prada” gets a lousy review in the New York “Times” Book Review? “Devil” is now high on the NYT best seller list with (as of May, 2004, and climbing) 323,000 copies in paperback and 478,000 in hardcover, and Plum Sykes, the author, is crying all the way to the bank.
The young co-authors of “The Nanny Diaries," (St. Martin’s, 2003) recently got a $3 million advance from Random House for follow-up books that are yet to be produced. It didn’t hurt that “Nanny” sold two million copies since publication, but still…
Gigi Levangie Grazer’s “Maneater," (Simon&Schuster, 2003) had a movie option for more than $1 million six months before the book was ever even published.
Jack Welch, the former GE executive, just sold world rights for $4 million to Harper Collins for a business how-to book called “Winning."
Aside from being unbecomingly envious, how do these enormous stakes affect me as a reader? I ought not to be affected, directly. I can either read the book or ignore it. But when a publisher, usually one unit of a conglomerate, forks out huge advances, it means it somehow has to make the money back. This means promotion and media (which the conglomerate also owns) hype. More and more, it means the bottom line is going to decide what gets published and what doesn’t. This makes it a whole lot harder for what we think of as literature to edge into print.
Even if an insultingly tiny advance is secured for a literary work, the publisher usually won’t spend a cent on publicity or on such frills as author tours, and the book, even if it is critically well-received, lives a short little life and then sinks like a rock.
Look at this! A full-page, back-of-the-Arts section ad in a recent New York “Times”. This ad, in bright pink, announces an ‘irresistible” new novel, “To Have and To Hold” (Broadway, 2004), by Jane Green. It reminds us that Green has sold more than a million copies of her previous novels. Interested? Here is the blurb: “Five years ago Alice gave her hand in marriage to a man who can’t keep his hands to himself. And by now, the man of her dreams has turned into a full-on cheating nightmare. But true happiness is about to find her in ways she never dreamed of.”
The jacket illustration shows a man embracing a svelte woman with one of his arms extended behind her and the hand at the end of that arm squarely on the butt of another svelte woman standing nearby. Four other paperbacks by Green are shown in the ad and here is a really amazing thing: on no cover illustration is there a head. Each one shows legs –- long legs, very long female legs – and one shows a nude male torso, but nobody has a head or a face. Why is this? Could it be that faces might make the bodies less fantastic?
I don’t even want to know what this ad cost or who paid for it: Broadway Books, Green’s publisher, or maybe Book-of-the-Month-Club, or possibly The Doubleday Book Club, or perhaps Random House who issued an Audio CD version of “To Have and To Hold”. In any case, we know it cost plenty. Grrrrrrrrrr.
You’ve probably read Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code” (Doubleday, 2002), just about everybody has. Aside from the inaccurate theology and history and stupid ending, the writing is terrible. I confess to finishing the book but then I threw it at the wall. I don’t even want to think about the amount of money this book has made. Spinoffs have become a regular industry.
Sour grapes? You bet! A heaping dishful of big, fat, juicy sour grapes!
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf,1997) ehstandarad@gmail.com
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
ALL THAT HARD WORK
This piece originally appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review," as
one in the series, "My Reading Life," by Elinore Standard.
Mentioned below: "Traces of Thomas Hariot," by Muriel Rukeyser; "A Brief and True Report," by Thomas Hariot.
ALL THAT HARD WORK
“The Traces of Thomas Hariot” by Muriel Rukeyser (Random House, 1970) is an ambitious biography taken on by Rukeyser, (1913-1980) who is best remembered as a distinguished American poet.
Thomas Hariot, (1560-1621) – tutor to Ralegh (today an “i” is added), friend of Francis Drake and Christopher Marlowe -- went as a surveyor and historian to the New World. He set out from Plymouth as part of Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition to explore and record the “Virginia” wilderness. Hariot’s (spelling in the 16th Century was ad hoc: one can use “Heriot”, “Harriott”, “Herriot”, “Herriott” or any variation) only surviving book, “A Brief and True Report” was the first writing in English about America. It was published in 1588, three months before the sailing of the Spanish Armada.
Respected in his day and forgotten in ours, Hariot was a mathematician, alchemist, naturalist, and astrologer who investigated intellectual powers of change and magic – enough to get anybody in trouble with the Star Chamber – and Hariot (unlike some of his close friends including Raleigh) survived a long stay in the Tower of London.
To me, “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” is as much about the process required to produce a first-rate biography about an historical figure who left little written record as it is about the figure himself. I’ve owned “The Traces of Thomas Hariot” since 1970, and I always wondered what made Rukeyser choose so difficult a subject. I get the feeling the work took on a life of its own as it progressed -- as these things often do.
She began her inquiry into Thomas Hariot while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. There are hints and glances at Hariot in work by Raleigh, Marlowe, Spenser, Roger Bacon, Donne and other Elizabethans, and Rukeyser asked herself and her students, “Who was he? Where was he to be found?” There was little written about him, but there were clues and what Rukeyser calls, “excitements”.
In the early 1960’s, she commenced a search for Hariot papers and materials in England and examined sources in museums and private libraries; the clock began running. She waited years for Hariot’s own papers to be published so that what she was saying about him could become verifiable. As she worked in the British Museum with microfilms of the Hariot papers, a fellow scholar informed her publisher that her work should not be published because Rukeyser was not consulting original manuscripts. She found another publisher. A friend wrote, “By now, it is an obsession with you, and these obsessive things sometimes turn out well.”
She hits pay dirt in the library at Alnwick, the home of the present-day Duke of Northumberland whose forebear, The “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland, had been Hariot’s patron. She had been given permission by the Duke to visit two years earlier and she appeared unannounced, acting boldly on a rather old invitation. The day came when she finally met the Duke. “He came toward us, and I began to show him the papers of his family with which I was working. I told him some of what I was after. He put his head on one side, with its legendary red hair, and the turning point of all my endeavor came. He said, ‘It’s very much like fox-hunting.”
She goes to Raleigh country in Dorset, England, and a place called “Nag’s Head”. In the U.S. she goes, as Hariot once did, across the sandbars in Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, to Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Hattaras. Back in England, she meets and interviews descendants of Raleigh and Hariot and of the many others connected to the expedition.
In Madrid, Rukeyser gets access to the archives of the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia, to complete the account of the “other side” of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Then back she goes to London in 1968, to Syon House, a Northumberland residence where Hariot ended his days.
She discusses the possible planting of a Hariot Trail, so that the New World plants and trees described in “A Brief and True Report” might also be set out on the present-day site of Hariot’s former home and laboratory.
Years pass and one can see that as Rukeyser proceeded, she got sucked deeper and deeper into the black hole of research. You get the feeling that some of it was drudgery and a lot of it was fun. You understand that Rukeyser, a person with the time and the means, could afford the expense of foreign questing. You are aware that her own distinguished reputation as a poet and teacher gave her credibility and entrée, and you realize that she had an international network of friends and acquaintances and what they used to call “connections” in academia and publishing.
At the end of the book, there is an eleven-page partial reading list and citation of 300 sources. Her Acknowledgments list is long, including: “To Sarah Lawrence College and to my students there, whom I first set the errand of searching with me for the traces of Thomas Hariot”.
As she concludes the book, Rukeyser describes herself as “exhausted” and accepts that there are gaps in the story of Hariot she can never possibly fill. To make the challenge greater (in those pre-digital days before fax, e-mail, Google, hard-drive backup and Jet Blue), the second publisher lost her manuscript and they lost treasured illustrations. Rukeyser compares the long delays for the book with “Hariot’s long story of delay and failure.”
And you know what? I am going down deeper and deeper into my own interest in what Rukeyser went through in order to produce a responsible biography. I am much more fascinated by that process than I am by Thomas Hariot! I Google “Muriel Rukeyser” and I come up with 10,000 results! This is enough to feed the most voracious obsession! I Google “Thomas Hariot” and I find 4,700 –- amounting to many, many pages of references and endless pathways to follow. Practically all of the Rukeyser entries have to do with her poetry; few have to do with Hariot. I get tired of paging through. Unlike Rukeyser, I give up.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms: Great Writers and
Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).
ehstandard@gmail.com
BOOKS TO MAKE YOU GO ON LIVING
This piece appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review," as one in
the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard.
BOOKS TO MAKE YOU GO ON LIVING
When someone told me a book by Jim Harrison changed his life, I knew I’d better read it. And read it I did, but I couldn’t figure out what about the book meant so much to him and it was not until years afterward that I had a chance to ask. By this time, he was in Hollywood, producing movies, and he had to think for a moment. “It was the family life,” he recalled. “It showed me how I wanted to lead my own family life.”
In a recent "Believer" magazine, my muse, Nick Hornby. mentions “What Good Are The Arts?” a new book by professor, critic and London Sunday Times columnist, John Carey, (available in Britain, but not yet published in the U.S.). Hornby says he “decided that from now on I’d only read stuff that John Carey recommends.” Hornby read G.K. Chesterton’s classic thriller, “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) at Carey’s behest and says he even “bought a book by Kipling, and I didn’t think anyone would ever manage that.”
Before e-mail, my reading friends and I exchanged book tips via postcard. Every now and then, I’d receive a cryptic scrawl on the back of a photo of a Carpathian crag: “Go get ‘The Man Who Loved Children’. Run, do not walk!” Nowadays, we have Internet access not only to our friends’ recommendations but also to lists of all kinds on web sites such as Amazon. I’ve described some of the more interesting ones in this column.
Still, there is the rare note in the mailbox – I got one recently from a friend who had moved away – in which she suggests books I’d never dream of on my own. She likes the work of Rohinton Mistry and her list includes “A Fine Balance” and “Family Matters”. She also told me about “The Voices of Morebath” by Eamon Duffy, a little story about “an English village church “. She suggests “The Summer Book” by Tove Jansson . “This is a delight,” my friend says, “about an elderly grandmother and a six year old granddaughter on a private island in the Gulf of Finland.” Such is not the stuff of bestseller lists.
In his Introduction to “Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century’s Most Enjoyable Books,” (Faber, 2000), John Carey, begins by wondering if there will still be books at the end of this millennium, a time that may be as remote from printed books as clay tablets are from the present. He muses on readers and non-readers and says the difference between the two is the greatest of all cultural divides. Carey says the divisions “…cut across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other.” He wonders if in tomorrow’s densely packed world reading will become a lifeline for almost everyone.
Trying to explain the point of reading to non-readers is tough and it makes one ask what it is that makes reading so unique. Carey addresses this by pointing out that movies and television look like what they represent and words on the printed page do not. But they can, he says, “represent anything, and they have to be deciphered by a skilled practitioner.” He reminds us this is an “amazingly complex operation.”
When you think about it, reading involves an extraordinary creative process. Carey says, “no book or page is quite the same for any two readers.”
In “Pure Pleasure” Carey lists fifty 20th century books he would like to re-read, allowing one book per author and trying to choose the same number of books for each decade (which he failed to do) – fiction, non-fiction and poetry were all admissible, and books in translation were permitted.
He went, he says, “for less trumpeted and less familiar favorites by the same authors.” He included only books he likes: no Proust, no Faulkner.
This is so interesting: Carey says he left some books out because they were too well-known. He dropped Nabokov’s “Lolita””, for example, Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” and Stella Gibbons’s “Cold Comfort Farm.” The chosen titles had to be really absorbing, they needed, he says, “to make him want to go on living.”
“Above all, they need to be appealing enough to enthrall some of the semi-literate barbarians outside the door who may start to reintroduce reading to a bookless world.” And so, like Nick Hornby, (and thanks, Nick, for this) I am listing some of John Carey’s books to live for, beginning with A. Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1902) a thriller Carey says is, “one of the formative myths of the twentieth century,” because according to Carey, “it has permeated the culture at all levels, as myths do.”
Carey continues with Gide: “The Immoralist” (1902), Kipling: “Traffics and Discoveries” (1904), Conrad, “The Secret Agent” (1907), Forster, “A Room With a View” (1908), Chesterton: “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) described by Carey as “the last gasp of the Edwardian summer before Armageddon.” And he concludes this innocent decade with Arnold Bennett’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” (1908) and Wells’s “The History of Mr. Polly” (1910).
The list is delicious as it continues with Hardy, Gorky, Joyce and Eliot, among others, in the next decade. The 1920’s include Mansfield, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Waugh and Graves’s “Goodbye To All That,” which Carey says is, “an anti-war book that displays just those qualities – courage, pride, patriotism – that make war happen.”
In the decade before WWII, we have Yeats, Bowen, Steinbeck, Greene and Orwell, among others.
For the 1940’s, only one: Keith Douglas’s “Alamein to Zem Zem” (1946), a graphic chronicle of tank warfare in the North African desert. Carey says, “Few battle narratives are so exuberant or so sensitive.” Douglas survived the desert campaign but was killed in Normandy at the age of 24. I tried to find the Douglas book in the loal library system, but couldn’t. Perhaps a deeper search into local university libraries may yield results.
The 1950s brings us Thomas Mann, William Golding, V.S. Naipaul.
The 1960’s: Auden and Muriel Spark.
The ‘70’s: Ted Hughes and Ian McEwan.
Only two represent the 1980’s: Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” (1980) and work of the poet, Philip Larkin.
The concluding decade, the 1990’s, features John Updike’s “A Rabbit Omnibus” (1991). Hear Carey’s comments on this sage of middle-America in the second half of the twentieth century: “Modern America, as illustrated by Rabbit’s friends and relations, is coarse, ignorant, philistine, foul-mouthed, arrogant, cultureless, infantile, and sex-obsessed. Worse, it rules the world.”
Why choose a work so filled with decline and fall?, Carey asks himself. “Because of Updike’s writing is why.” Carey says, “Updike is a poet moonlighting as a novelist.”
If “Pure Pleasure” piques your interest, you may want to go on to Carey’s “The Intellectuals and the Masses” (St. Martin’s, 1992), a book (title courtesy of Arnold Bennett) about the response of the English literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939, to the new phenomenon of mass culture.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of
"Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading." (Carroll & Graf, 1997). ehstandard@gmail.com
the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard.
BOOKS TO MAKE YOU GO ON LIVING
When someone told me a book by Jim Harrison changed his life, I knew I’d better read it. And read it I did, but I couldn’t figure out what about the book meant so much to him and it was not until years afterward that I had a chance to ask. By this time, he was in Hollywood, producing movies, and he had to think for a moment. “It was the family life,” he recalled. “It showed me how I wanted to lead my own family life.”
In a recent "Believer" magazine, my muse, Nick Hornby. mentions “What Good Are The Arts?” a new book by professor, critic and London Sunday Times columnist, John Carey, (available in Britain, but not yet published in the U.S.). Hornby says he “decided that from now on I’d only read stuff that John Carey recommends.” Hornby read G.K. Chesterton’s classic thriller, “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) at Carey’s behest and says he even “bought a book by Kipling, and I didn’t think anyone would ever manage that.”
Before e-mail, my reading friends and I exchanged book tips via postcard. Every now and then, I’d receive a cryptic scrawl on the back of a photo of a Carpathian crag: “Go get ‘The Man Who Loved Children’. Run, do not walk!” Nowadays, we have Internet access not only to our friends’ recommendations but also to lists of all kinds on web sites such as Amazon. I’ve described some of the more interesting ones in this column.
Still, there is the rare note in the mailbox – I got one recently from a friend who had moved away – in which she suggests books I’d never dream of on my own. She likes the work of Rohinton Mistry and her list includes “A Fine Balance” and “Family Matters”. She also told me about “The Voices of Morebath” by Eamon Duffy, a little story about “an English village church “. She suggests “The Summer Book” by Tove Jansson . “This is a delight,” my friend says, “about an elderly grandmother and a six year old granddaughter on a private island in the Gulf of Finland.” Such is not the stuff of bestseller lists.
In his Introduction to “Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century’s Most Enjoyable Books,” (Faber, 2000), John Carey, begins by wondering if there will still be books at the end of this millennium, a time that may be as remote from printed books as clay tablets are from the present. He muses on readers and non-readers and says the difference between the two is the greatest of all cultural divides. Carey says the divisions “…cut across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other.” He wonders if in tomorrow’s densely packed world reading will become a lifeline for almost everyone.
Trying to explain the point of reading to non-readers is tough and it makes one ask what it is that makes reading so unique. Carey addresses this by pointing out that movies and television look like what they represent and words on the printed page do not. But they can, he says, “represent anything, and they have to be deciphered by a skilled practitioner.” He reminds us this is an “amazingly complex operation.”
When you think about it, reading involves an extraordinary creative process. Carey says, “no book or page is quite the same for any two readers.”
In “Pure Pleasure” Carey lists fifty 20th century books he would like to re-read, allowing one book per author and trying to choose the same number of books for each decade (which he failed to do) – fiction, non-fiction and poetry were all admissible, and books in translation were permitted.
He went, he says, “for less trumpeted and less familiar favorites by the same authors.” He included only books he likes: no Proust, no Faulkner.
This is so interesting: Carey says he left some books out because they were too well-known. He dropped Nabokov’s “Lolita””, for example, Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” and Stella Gibbons’s “Cold Comfort Farm.” The chosen titles had to be really absorbing, they needed, he says, “to make him want to go on living.”
“Above all, they need to be appealing enough to enthrall some of the semi-literate barbarians outside the door who may start to reintroduce reading to a bookless world.” And so, like Nick Hornby, (and thanks, Nick, for this) I am listing some of John Carey’s books to live for, beginning with A. Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1902) a thriller Carey says is, “one of the formative myths of the twentieth century,” because according to Carey, “it has permeated the culture at all levels, as myths do.”
Carey continues with Gide: “The Immoralist” (1902), Kipling: “Traffics and Discoveries” (1904), Conrad, “The Secret Agent” (1907), Forster, “A Room With a View” (1908), Chesterton: “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) described by Carey as “the last gasp of the Edwardian summer before Armageddon.” And he concludes this innocent decade with Arnold Bennett’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” (1908) and Wells’s “The History of Mr. Polly” (1910).
The list is delicious as it continues with Hardy, Gorky, Joyce and Eliot, among others, in the next decade. The 1920’s include Mansfield, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Waugh and Graves’s “Goodbye To All That,” which Carey says is, “an anti-war book that displays just those qualities – courage, pride, patriotism – that make war happen.”
In the decade before WWII, we have Yeats, Bowen, Steinbeck, Greene and Orwell, among others.
For the 1940’s, only one: Keith Douglas’s “Alamein to Zem Zem” (1946), a graphic chronicle of tank warfare in the North African desert. Carey says, “Few battle narratives are so exuberant or so sensitive.” Douglas survived the desert campaign but was killed in Normandy at the age of 24. I tried to find the Douglas book in the loal library system, but couldn’t. Perhaps a deeper search into local university libraries may yield results.
The 1950s brings us Thomas Mann, William Golding, V.S. Naipaul.
The 1960’s: Auden and Muriel Spark.
The ‘70’s: Ted Hughes and Ian McEwan.
Only two represent the 1980’s: Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” (1980) and work of the poet, Philip Larkin.
The concluding decade, the 1990’s, features John Updike’s “A Rabbit Omnibus” (1991). Hear Carey’s comments on this sage of middle-America in the second half of the twentieth century: “Modern America, as illustrated by Rabbit’s friends and relations, is coarse, ignorant, philistine, foul-mouthed, arrogant, cultureless, infantile, and sex-obsessed. Worse, it rules the world.”
Why choose a work so filled with decline and fall?, Carey asks himself. “Because of Updike’s writing is why.” Carey says, “Updike is a poet moonlighting as a novelist.”
If “Pure Pleasure” piques your interest, you may want to go on to Carey’s “The Intellectuals and the Masses” (St. Martin’s, 1992), a book (title courtesy of Arnold Bennett) about the response of the English literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939, to the new phenomenon of mass culture.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of
"Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading." (Carroll & Graf, 1997). ehstandard@gmail.com
THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US
This piece by Elinore Standard is one in a series, "My Reading Life," in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review."
Mentioned below: "The Lost Garden," by Josephine Humphreys; "The Amateur Marriage," by Anne Tyler; "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon; "Brick Lane," by Monica Ali; "The Sleeping Father," by Matthew Sharp; "The Guards," by Ken Bruen; "The Great Fire," and "The Transit of Venus," by Shirley Hazzard; "How Reading Changed My Life," by Anna Quindlan; "Aurora Leigh," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US
If the book we are reading does not wake us,
as with a fist hammering on our skull, why
then do we read it? Good God, we would
also be happy if we had no books, and such
books as make us happy we could, if need
be, write ourselves. But what we must have
are those books which come upon us like
ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the
death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break
the frozen sea inside us.
Franz Kafka
Josephine Humphreys, author of “The Lost Garden”, (Norton, 2002) says “…the author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.” Humphreys also says, “Every story is a story about death. But perhaps if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”
Anne Tyler was interviewed by Mel Gussow of the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of “The Amateur Marriage” (Knopf, 2004), in which she talks about the way she approaches her subjects and settings, and about her cultural interests:
“I read contemporary fiction nonstop—particularly the newer writers, who seem to me to be starting out at a higher and higher level.” She lists Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane”, and one she describes as a “fresh, funny, quirky book”: “The Sleeping Father” by Matthew Sharp.
She cites as an influence the literary and personal interest of Reynolds Price, her first teacher, and adds, “I’m sure that my years of faithfully rereading ‘Anna Karenina’ must have been for some purpose. Really,” she concludes, “we’re all standing on other writers’ shoulders.”
Ken Bruen is the author of noir thrillers usually set in the west of Ireland or in the rawest sections of South London. His characters have been described as hard and bitter and their actions are often borderline psychotic and usually shocking. “The Guards” (St. Martin’s, 2001) features a falling-down drunk ex-cop who reads and solves mysteries when he is not wiped.
He is explaining to a mocking friend what he sees in books:
As I’ve said, my father worked on the railways. He loved cowboy books. There was always a battered Zane Grey in his jacket. He began to pass them on to me. My mother would say,
“You’ll make a sissy out of him.”
When she wasn’t within earshot, he’d whisper,“Don’t mind your mother. She means well. But you keep reading.”
“Why, Dad?” Not that I was going to stop, I was already hooked.
“They’ll give you options.”
“What’s options?”
A faraway look would come into his eyes and then,
“Freedom, son.”
In Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable novel, “The Great Fire” (Farrar, 2003), the main character describes two young people who have managed to be different from their awful parents: “They are wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature and make free with it. They are right to cling to it: it has delivered them.”
Reading has delivered many young people who later go on to write about it as lifesaving and, as it was for the Bruen character, liberating.
Another of Hazzard’s characters, a woman who is emerging from an uneventful life at the age of 40, talks about reading in “The Transit of Venus” a novel from 1980 (Viking): “It occurred to her, in her isolation, that books might have helped. It was the first time she had reckoned with the fact she did not read, that neither she nor Christian (her husband) read – and here was the true discovery, for she had relied on him to maintain a literary household.” Although they had books in the house, these are people who are always meaning to read but never quite get around to it.
The American novelist and essayist, Anna Quindlen, has written a short tribute to reading, “How Reading Changed My Life” (Ballantine, 1998), in which she describes her own Reading Life. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.” At the end of her book, Quindlen includes several pages of reading lists, about which she says, “Reading lists are arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I.” And you, as a reader of this column, know that I do, too!
For an epigram to this gem, Quindlen uses an excerpt from “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high, packed large, -- where, creeping in
And out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between
The ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997). ehstandard@gmail.com
MOVING THE BOOKS
This piece, by Elinore Standard, appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record
Review" as one in an ongoing series, "My Reading Life."
MOVING THE BOOKS
When I realized we were going to move out of the house in Pound Ridge, NY, where we lived for 35 years, I began worrying about the books. We had a fine core library, heavy on English history, big on Latin America with an impressive Cuba section. We had a lot of biography and some decent poetry including a City Lights edition of Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl”. We had a good Black History and 1960’s collection and a nice assortment of what is called “literature” – that is, Austen and Trollope and Thackeray. We also had contemporary writers – first editions of Roth and Updike and Bellow, for example. I had a shelf of memoirs, old and new, and many books about God. We measured American and English history in feet. We inherited a large maritime collection: the law of the sea, seagoing union history, and knot tying.
I found a 1924 presentation volume about Lenin that my in-laws must have got when they traveled to Russia on their honeymoon in the early 1930s. There was a juicy one devoted to Kim Il Sung published in Pyongyang. We had special editions of the Lillians: Hellman and Smith.
I did not want to transport all of this stuff 300 miles north to an apartment in the heart of Burlington, Vermont. I knew every pound would cost. I was all for finding a dealer and selling everything. I took most of my own books to the local library for their book sale and kept just few, including some of the memoirs, the Austen and Trollope and Thackeray. I preserved a few anthologies, left over from when I taught writing.
Obsessively, I began cataloguing the rest: I handled each volume and listed each book I thought might be collectable and worth something to most hard-hearted dealer. Into my computer I entered title, author, publisher, date, condition, plus any outstanding feature such as illustration, dedication, and so on. Slowly the list grew.
There were inscriptions by famous persons, including Jessica Mitford, and a Nobel Laureate who, early in his career as an economist, wanted to court my mother-in-law but she spurned him, according to family legend, because her mother objected to his foreign accent.
We had wonderful children’s books and I listed many of those including two inscribed first editions of Norton Juster’s “Phantom Tollbooth.”
I forged ahead with my list and you cannot imagine how huge and time-consuming a project it was. I was absorbed and determined. I sensed we were sitting on a gold mine. I would sell the entire lot and off we would go, up north, unlumbered by the ton of books and all set to inhabit a much smaller place where there would be plenty of wall space for art, mirrors, and plain, unadorned wall. We would read books on line. We would get library cards.
My dear partner, husband of 40-some years, and owner of many of the best books, said no. He was taking them all. He thought my list was crazy. He felt it was the work of a compulsive and didn’t mind saying so. No dealer would con him out of his library. It was all going to Vermont. Shelves for books must be built and we commissioned them. An entire room would have zero wall space. There would be the doorway and the windows, the rest -- shelves. The largest room in the apartment would become the new library.
Every day, I packed a few boxes of books, labeling each one and sealing it with tape. I had help and the process intensified. Our son came down from Vermont and spent a weekend packing the Cuba books and the books from his grandfather. Boxes lined hallways and were stacked four deep to the ceiling in the library. By the time we were done, we had more than 100 boxes of books. The original system ultimately crashed. Books were chucked into boxes in a last-minute frenzy. Everything would go, except the few I managed to jettison.
I felt like Tallulah Bankhead in “Lifeboat”. I knew that one more ounce would tip us over and in a way I was right. A closing date was finally announced. The moving truck came and it was loaded with the boxes. A few pieces of furniture made it, plus some clothing and dishes and linen, but mainly it was books. As darkness fell, it turned out truck was marginally too small and a second van was frantically arranged. The logistics of this screw-up were costly and infuriating. I was ready to snap.
Once everything was unloaded in Vermont, the apartment – one-third smaller than our house – reeled beneath the sheer volume of books. Young helpers came to shelve what they could, ignoring labels and categories; it became a push to get at least some of the books off the floor so we could move around. There remain about fifteen unopened boxes and nowhere to put the contents. More shelves must be built.
As it stands, the person who caused all these books to make the journey now says he made a mistake. He realizes he doesn’t even want to see some of what we brought. We acknowledged that it was a process, that before we moved he was not ready to part with anything, that it all had to happen the way it happened, hang the labor and the expense.
The Cuba collection will get its own shelves and will remain boxed up for weeks. Some of the other stuff will be given to the public library down the street. All must be re-sorted and re-shelved in some rational order. This, too, is a process. It is impossible to duplicate what existed before and it is a big mistake to attempt doing that in a much smaller space.
Out of stubbornness, before we moved I sent my precious list to a book dealer who had expressed interest -- and what do you know? He offered $350. for the absolute cream of the entire collection including a first edition of Robert Frost’s “West Running Brook” (Holt, 1928).
Secretly, I think what he most wanted was “Ant and Bee and Kind Dog” by Angela Banner, (Ward, 1968), a little green book I bought for our son when he was about two years old.
* * *
ehstandard@gmail.com
Review" as one in an ongoing series, "My Reading Life."
MOVING THE BOOKS
When I realized we were going to move out of the house in Pound Ridge, NY, where we lived for 35 years, I began worrying about the books. We had a fine core library, heavy on English history, big on Latin America with an impressive Cuba section. We had a lot of biography and some decent poetry including a City Lights edition of Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl”. We had a good Black History and 1960’s collection and a nice assortment of what is called “literature” – that is, Austen and Trollope and Thackeray. We also had contemporary writers – first editions of Roth and Updike and Bellow, for example. I had a shelf of memoirs, old and new, and many books about God. We measured American and English history in feet. We inherited a large maritime collection: the law of the sea, seagoing union history, and knot tying.
I found a 1924 presentation volume about Lenin that my in-laws must have got when they traveled to Russia on their honeymoon in the early 1930s. There was a juicy one devoted to Kim Il Sung published in Pyongyang. We had special editions of the Lillians: Hellman and Smith.
I did not want to transport all of this stuff 300 miles north to an apartment in the heart of Burlington, Vermont. I knew every pound would cost. I was all for finding a dealer and selling everything. I took most of my own books to the local library for their book sale and kept just few, including some of the memoirs, the Austen and Trollope and Thackeray. I preserved a few anthologies, left over from when I taught writing.
Obsessively, I began cataloguing the rest: I handled each volume and listed each book I thought might be collectable and worth something to most hard-hearted dealer. Into my computer I entered title, author, publisher, date, condition, plus any outstanding feature such as illustration, dedication, and so on. Slowly the list grew.
There were inscriptions by famous persons, including Jessica Mitford, and a Nobel Laureate who, early in his career as an economist, wanted to court my mother-in-law but she spurned him, according to family legend, because her mother objected to his foreign accent.
We had wonderful children’s books and I listed many of those including two inscribed first editions of Norton Juster’s “Phantom Tollbooth.”
I forged ahead with my list and you cannot imagine how huge and time-consuming a project it was. I was absorbed and determined. I sensed we were sitting on a gold mine. I would sell the entire lot and off we would go, up north, unlumbered by the ton of books and all set to inhabit a much smaller place where there would be plenty of wall space for art, mirrors, and plain, unadorned wall. We would read books on line. We would get library cards.
My dear partner, husband of 40-some years, and owner of many of the best books, said no. He was taking them all. He thought my list was crazy. He felt it was the work of a compulsive and didn’t mind saying so. No dealer would con him out of his library. It was all going to Vermont. Shelves for books must be built and we commissioned them. An entire room would have zero wall space. There would be the doorway and the windows, the rest -- shelves. The largest room in the apartment would become the new library.
Every day, I packed a few boxes of books, labeling each one and sealing it with tape. I had help and the process intensified. Our son came down from Vermont and spent a weekend packing the Cuba books and the books from his grandfather. Boxes lined hallways and were stacked four deep to the ceiling in the library. By the time we were done, we had more than 100 boxes of books. The original system ultimately crashed. Books were chucked into boxes in a last-minute frenzy. Everything would go, except the few I managed to jettison.
I felt like Tallulah Bankhead in “Lifeboat”. I knew that one more ounce would tip us over and in a way I was right. A closing date was finally announced. The moving truck came and it was loaded with the boxes. A few pieces of furniture made it, plus some clothing and dishes and linen, but mainly it was books. As darkness fell, it turned out truck was marginally too small and a second van was frantically arranged. The logistics of this screw-up were costly and infuriating. I was ready to snap.
Once everything was unloaded in Vermont, the apartment – one-third smaller than our house – reeled beneath the sheer volume of books. Young helpers came to shelve what they could, ignoring labels and categories; it became a push to get at least some of the books off the floor so we could move around. There remain about fifteen unopened boxes and nowhere to put the contents. More shelves must be built.
As it stands, the person who caused all these books to make the journey now says he made a mistake. He realizes he doesn’t even want to see some of what we brought. We acknowledged that it was a process, that before we moved he was not ready to part with anything, that it all had to happen the way it happened, hang the labor and the expense.
The Cuba collection will get its own shelves and will remain boxed up for weeks. Some of the other stuff will be given to the public library down the street. All must be re-sorted and re-shelved in some rational order. This, too, is a process. It is impossible to duplicate what existed before and it is a big mistake to attempt doing that in a much smaller space.
Out of stubbornness, before we moved I sent my precious list to a book dealer who had expressed interest -- and what do you know? He offered $350. for the absolute cream of the entire collection including a first edition of Robert Frost’s “West Running Brook” (Holt, 1928).
Secretly, I think what he most wanted was “Ant and Bee and Kind Dog” by Angela Banner, (Ward, 1968), a little green book I bought for our son when he was about two years old.
* * *
ehstandard@gmail.com
Sunday, January 8, 2012
ARMCHAIR DETECTION, INSPECTION
This piece by Elinore Standard, appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review" as one in the "My Reading Life" series.
Mentioned below: Novels in the McGarr series by Bartholomew Gill;
Novels in the Grijpstra/deGier series by Janwillem Van De Wetering; Novels in the Van Der Valk and the Castaing series by Nicolas Freeling; Novels the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; Novels by Henning Mankell; Novels by Karen Fossum; Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon; Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte novels by Arthur W. Upfield; Allen Choice novels by Leonard Chang; Inspector Maigret novels by George Simenon; Mma Ramotswe novels by Alexander McCall Smith.
ARMCHAIR DETECTION, INSPECTION
Come with me on a trip around the world to meet a few of my favorite detectives along the way.
We’ll travel eastward, stopping first in Ireland. Bartholomew Gill is, alas, no longer with us (he died in 2002) but we’ll look around the Dublin of his novels, the locale for more than 15 novels featuring brainy Dublin police Inspector of Detectives, Peter McGarr. In such mysteries as “Death in Dublin”, “Death of an Irish Lover”, “Death of a Joyce Scholar”, and “Death of an Irish Tinker”, McGarr and Gill’s other characters evolve as the series progresses. His people change: they get older and wiser, they rise in rank, some leave the force, they marry, they split, they die. Gill’s writing is comfortable to read and I’m sorry he’s gone. I miss him already.
Hop across the Channel, now, to the Netherlands and the work of Janwillem Van de Wetering whose Commisaris of the Amsterdam police, and his subordinates, policemen Grijpstra and deGier have partnered in an enjoyable series that includes such titles as “Outsider in Amsterdam,” “The Corpse in the Dike,” “The Blond Baboon,” and others, now reprinted in paperback (many by Soho) and available on Amazon.
Although the murders in these books are brutal, there is a thoughtfulness and humanity on the part of the characters that sometimes borders on the quirky. DeGier is a tall, skinny, Zen-practicing cat owner and flutist and Grijpstra is an ageing and somewhat dissolute drummer. They worship their elderly boss and make inside jokes about everything.
In 1972, the late English writer Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) actually had the nerve to kill off his own Amsterdam police Commisaris, Piet Van der Valk, after several successful novels. A “Guardian” obit of Freeling said, “He was tired of the tyranny of having to write the same story over and over again.” I always missed Van der Valk (“Love in Amsterdam” 1962, “King of the Rainy Country, 1967) but I did enjoy Freeling’s sop to his disappointed fans: two novels featuring Arlette Van der Valk, the widow. Freeling also wrote 16 novels set in and around the Alsace region of France with Henri Castang as the detective-hero in those. Good, but not as good, as the Dutch series.
Get on a coastwise freighter and make your way up the North Sea to the Stockholm of the early 1970s, and to climate and atmosphere as cold as the long, dim days of Nordic Winter. Swedish husband-and-wife writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo created 15 novels in a police procedural series featuring Martin Beck of the Stockholm homicide squad. Written before 1975, when Wahloo died, titles include “Roseanna (1965) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1971) which was later made into a movie featuring Walter Matthau.
Martin Beck is solid and methodical and usually fed up with the general incompetence of the police force and the dehumanizing aspects of his job. His colleague, Lennart Kollberg, hates violence and refuses to carry a gun.
Should you wish to remain in Arctic emotional deepfreeze, check current detective titles by Swedish novelist Henning Mankill and Norwegian, Karin Fossum.
Thaw out, and head South, now, to watery Venice and the Inspector Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon. This is a fairly recent series, the novels beginning in 1992, and Leon seems to write a new one almost yearly, so that’s good. I love it that Brunetti often comes home for lunch and as the reader, I get to share what he’s having. A favorite in this series is “Aqua Alta” (1996), set during the winter floods when many of the streets and sidewalks are under water and Venetians make their way about town on boardwalks hurriedly placed for that purpose.
Quick! Hop on QANTAS or hurry to the stacks at your local library, or go on line, and order any of the many Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte books by Arthur W. Upfield (1888-1964) generally not in print but still available for sale through Amazon. These stories, set in flyblown small towns of Western Australia during the 1930’s to ‘50’s, are gems of description and in each one, Detective Inspector Bonaparte or “Bony” as he is called, uses his Aboriginal tradecraft and cunning to deal in interesting depth with a timely Australian problem: flood, rabbits, drought, wildfire, and to solve whatever crime that happens his way.
Upfield reprint titles include: “Murder Down Under” (Touchstone, 1998), “Bony and the Mouse” (Harper, 1991), “The Sands of Windee”, (Macmillan, 1985). Thinking in his own Dreamtime, the patient Detective Inspector Bony says, “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”
At last, we make our way back home to San Francisco where we meet Allen Choice the young private eye in three novels by American writer, Leonard Chang.
Chang studied philosophy at Dartmouth and Harvard and his work is pleasingly literary. A most absorbing novel is “Fade to Clear” (St. Martin’s, 2004) in which the Korean-American PI works to find an abducted child and faces his own issues of resistance to personal commitment. The writing is a little “noir” in the tradition of the old-fashioned sleuths of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett .
This Choice novel is set in San Francisco and moves around Silicon Valley. It includes generous lashings of Kierkegaard which may sound off-putting but is really not. “Fade to Clear” has a third person point of view and is written in the present tense, something not easy for a writer to manage without annoying the reader. I am impressed by Chang’s insight into his complex characters and his willingness to try a little literary razzle-dazzle.
Chang has also written “Over the Shoulder” (Harper 2001) and “Underkill” (St. Martin’s 2003). In his website http://www.leonardchang.com Chang says he is going to write more Allen Choice novels, how many more, “I’m not sure, but it feels like I’ve only started to delve into his character and family.” Chang’s first three Allen Choice novels have the makings of a durable series and he has written other stuff -- short stories, etc.
Of course, we could keep circling the globe, going around and around like the Flying Dutchman. We could return to Europe for George Simenon’s, Le Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, probably (next to Sherlock Holmes) the most famous fictional detective that ever was. Maigret figures in 78 novels and 28 short stories, and at least 50 films. On sheer output, Simenon stands first.
If we felt like it, we could head down to southern Africa, to Botswana and Alexander McCall Smith’s adorable and best selling Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally-sized” proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The frequent flyer miles are racking up. Oh, what pleasures such armchair travel can provide!
* ** *
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (1997, Carroll & Graf).
ehstandard@gmail.com
Mentioned below: Novels in the McGarr series by Bartholomew Gill;
Novels in the Grijpstra/deGier series by Janwillem Van De Wetering; Novels in the Van Der Valk and the Castaing series by Nicolas Freeling; Novels the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; Novels by Henning Mankell; Novels by Karen Fossum; Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon; Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte novels by Arthur W. Upfield; Allen Choice novels by Leonard Chang; Inspector Maigret novels by George Simenon; Mma Ramotswe novels by Alexander McCall Smith.
ARMCHAIR DETECTION, INSPECTION
Come with me on a trip around the world to meet a few of my favorite detectives along the way.
We’ll travel eastward, stopping first in Ireland. Bartholomew Gill is, alas, no longer with us (he died in 2002) but we’ll look around the Dublin of his novels, the locale for more than 15 novels featuring brainy Dublin police Inspector of Detectives, Peter McGarr. In such mysteries as “Death in Dublin”, “Death of an Irish Lover”, “Death of a Joyce Scholar”, and “Death of an Irish Tinker”, McGarr and Gill’s other characters evolve as the series progresses. His people change: they get older and wiser, they rise in rank, some leave the force, they marry, they split, they die. Gill’s writing is comfortable to read and I’m sorry he’s gone. I miss him already.
Hop across the Channel, now, to the Netherlands and the work of Janwillem Van de Wetering whose Commisaris of the Amsterdam police, and his subordinates, policemen Grijpstra and deGier have partnered in an enjoyable series that includes such titles as “Outsider in Amsterdam,” “The Corpse in the Dike,” “The Blond Baboon,” and others, now reprinted in paperback (many by Soho) and available on Amazon.
Although the murders in these books are brutal, there is a thoughtfulness and humanity on the part of the characters that sometimes borders on the quirky. DeGier is a tall, skinny, Zen-practicing cat owner and flutist and Grijpstra is an ageing and somewhat dissolute drummer. They worship their elderly boss and make inside jokes about everything.
In 1972, the late English writer Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) actually had the nerve to kill off his own Amsterdam police Commisaris, Piet Van der Valk, after several successful novels. A “Guardian” obit of Freeling said, “He was tired of the tyranny of having to write the same story over and over again.” I always missed Van der Valk (“Love in Amsterdam” 1962, “King of the Rainy Country, 1967) but I did enjoy Freeling’s sop to his disappointed fans: two novels featuring Arlette Van der Valk, the widow. Freeling also wrote 16 novels set in and around the Alsace region of France with Henri Castang as the detective-hero in those. Good, but not as good, as the Dutch series.
Get on a coastwise freighter and make your way up the North Sea to the Stockholm of the early 1970s, and to climate and atmosphere as cold as the long, dim days of Nordic Winter. Swedish husband-and-wife writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo created 15 novels in a police procedural series featuring Martin Beck of the Stockholm homicide squad. Written before 1975, when Wahloo died, titles include “Roseanna (1965) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1971) which was later made into a movie featuring Walter Matthau.
Martin Beck is solid and methodical and usually fed up with the general incompetence of the police force and the dehumanizing aspects of his job. His colleague, Lennart Kollberg, hates violence and refuses to carry a gun.
Should you wish to remain in Arctic emotional deepfreeze, check current detective titles by Swedish novelist Henning Mankill and Norwegian, Karin Fossum.
Thaw out, and head South, now, to watery Venice and the Inspector Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon. This is a fairly recent series, the novels beginning in 1992, and Leon seems to write a new one almost yearly, so that’s good. I love it that Brunetti often comes home for lunch and as the reader, I get to share what he’s having. A favorite in this series is “Aqua Alta” (1996), set during the winter floods when many of the streets and sidewalks are under water and Venetians make their way about town on boardwalks hurriedly placed for that purpose.
Quick! Hop on QANTAS or hurry to the stacks at your local library, or go on line, and order any of the many Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte books by Arthur W. Upfield (1888-1964) generally not in print but still available for sale through Amazon. These stories, set in flyblown small towns of Western Australia during the 1930’s to ‘50’s, are gems of description and in each one, Detective Inspector Bonaparte or “Bony” as he is called, uses his Aboriginal tradecraft and cunning to deal in interesting depth with a timely Australian problem: flood, rabbits, drought, wildfire, and to solve whatever crime that happens his way.
Upfield reprint titles include: “Murder Down Under” (Touchstone, 1998), “Bony and the Mouse” (Harper, 1991), “The Sands of Windee”, (Macmillan, 1985). Thinking in his own Dreamtime, the patient Detective Inspector Bony says, “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”
At last, we make our way back home to San Francisco where we meet Allen Choice the young private eye in three novels by American writer, Leonard Chang.
Chang studied philosophy at Dartmouth and Harvard and his work is pleasingly literary. A most absorbing novel is “Fade to Clear” (St. Martin’s, 2004) in which the Korean-American PI works to find an abducted child and faces his own issues of resistance to personal commitment. The writing is a little “noir” in the tradition of the old-fashioned sleuths of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett .
This Choice novel is set in San Francisco and moves around Silicon Valley. It includes generous lashings of Kierkegaard which may sound off-putting but is really not. “Fade to Clear” has a third person point of view and is written in the present tense, something not easy for a writer to manage without annoying the reader. I am impressed by Chang’s insight into his complex characters and his willingness to try a little literary razzle-dazzle.
Chang has also written “Over the Shoulder” (Harper 2001) and “Underkill” (St. Martin’s 2003). In his website http://www.leonardchang.com Chang says he is going to write more Allen Choice novels, how many more, “I’m not sure, but it feels like I’ve only started to delve into his character and family.” Chang’s first three Allen Choice novels have the makings of a durable series and he has written other stuff -- short stories, etc.
Of course, we could keep circling the globe, going around and around like the Flying Dutchman. We could return to Europe for George Simenon’s, Le Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, probably (next to Sherlock Holmes) the most famous fictional detective that ever was. Maigret figures in 78 novels and 28 short stories, and at least 50 films. On sheer output, Simenon stands first.
If we felt like it, we could head down to southern Africa, to Botswana and Alexander McCall Smith’s adorable and best selling Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally-sized” proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The frequent flyer miles are racking up. Oh, what pleasures such armchair travel can provide!
* ** *
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman, of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (1997, Carroll & Graf).
ehstandard@gmail.com
THE JOY OF COOKING
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY,
"Record Review" as one in an ongoing series -- "My Reading Life."
Works Mentioned: "The American Woman's Cookbook;" "Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking," by Meta Given; "Main Line Classics," "Il Talismano," by Ada Boni; "Alice B. Toklas Cookbook;" "The New York Times Cookbook," by Craig Claiborne; "Moosewood Cookbook," by Molly Katzen; "The Silver Palate Cookbook," by Julee Russo and Sheila Lukins: "The Book of Jewish Food," by Claudia Rhoden.
THE JOY OF COOKING
I have a friend who came to the US from Germany in the late 1930s. The family left everything they owned behind in Munich, along with the cook and the maid. Their first stop was a bed-sit on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. The children – my friend and her brother – were sent to school and their father went off to find work. The children found a copy of “The American Woman’s Cookbook” and gave it to their mother, a smart and organized woman who had never cooked anything in her life. She paged through the book to find recipes within her limited scope and before the children came home for lunch, cooked up the plat du jour. If things went well and if it was received without too much fuss by the children, she served it up again to the whole family that evening.
Later the family settled in LA and she became an inventive and competent cook. Her daughter, my friend, is one of the best cooks I have ever known. So when I think of cookbooks, I think of that family.
I’ve kept my first cookbook, “Meta Given’s "Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking” (Ferguson, 1947), a big, fat thing with recipes for squirrel and possum. I saved the menu of the first meal (ham and scalloped potatoes, endive and radish salad, apple Betty) I served in my own kitchen. I have affection for this tattered book that I consider a poor person’s “Joy of Cooking”.
Those were the days of the sunshine salad, the dump cake and the church ham supper. I have a lineup of cookbooks from churches and local organizations such as the “Main Line Classics” (Saturday Club, 1982) with recipes that make me wince. The Main Line one is heavy on the canapés like sweet and sour canned cocktail sausages.
As times changed and everyday meals became more sophisticated, I began to collect more cookbooks. I remember when my own mother, a woman to whom garlic was unknown, began to slip in a little sherry into the odd casserole, never telling my father who would have gagged.
After college, I got a TV job in Washington and my boss, just back in the States after a post in Europe, considered himself a cosmopolite among the yokels. He wore bespoke suits and shoes and yelled in Italian during his nightly calls to his mama in New York. Along with a bull whip which he sometimes cracked on the vinyl floor of his office, he kept on his desk a copy of Ada Boni’s “Il Talismano” a classic of Italian cookery. From him, I learned about such sublimities as a proper risotto and how to add anchovy paste to practically everything.
Alice B.Toklas was Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion and, as far as I can make out, personal slave. Toklas ran the household and often cooked. She organized their travels and received the guests who came to enjoy the excellent table chez Stein; she cooked for famous people including Picasso and Picabia and, in a fine little cookbook, describes what she gave them. The recipe for “Haschich” Fudge is described as something that “might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.” Two pieces are quite sufficient, she cautions. Oh, swell, Alice. Call the DEA.
The paradox is that Alice may be longer-remembered than Gertrude because the little “Alice B. Toklas Cookbook” (Harper, 1954) remains a gem. Although it is a memoir more than a cookbook, its mission seems to be to acquaint Americans with French family cooking. Toklas and Stein remained in France during WWII and Toklas describes living (and dining) throughout the Occupation. This is a great book to re-read because it evokes a civilized time long gone. You may even decide to try Madame Louvet’s Asparagus Tips.
“The New York Times Cook Book,” edited by Craig Claiborne, was indispensable to the young New Yorker that I was when it appeared in 1961. We actually served Beef Wellington and Crème Brulée at large dinner parties and thought nothing of the trouble. Cooking back then was a new extreme sport and the Times cookbook was our guide.
“A wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.” Molly Katzen uses this William Blake quote as the epigram to her “Moosewood Cookbook” (Ten Speed Press, 1977). It is brought to us by Katzen and others who created the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. This delightful vegetarian cookbook includes delicious recipes that include such previously unheard-of ingredients as tofu, alfalfa and mung sprouts, brown rice, tahini and tamari. I often made Cossack Pie (many kinds of vegetables topped by an egg and cheese soufflé, baked and covered with sour cream).
“The Silver Palate Cookbook,” by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, came out in the early 1980’s (Workman) and takes it title from the name of their small Manhattan shop -- one of the earliest foodie establishments catering to the crowd that brought expensive take-out to unheard-of heights -- to the “passionate seekers of the good, the better, the best.” I like the recipes in the cookbook and I like the authors’ you-can-do-it tone. Among standbys are Chicken Marbella and their lovely butternut squash soup.
My current favorite, “The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey From Samarkand to New York”, is edited by Claudia Rhoden (Knopf, 1998). The collection is divided into the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds, that is, the European and Eastern spheres of Jewish tradition. Occasionally, a recipe will call for preserved lemon, an item not available out here in the sticks, so my friend and collaborator, Laura Furman, recently sent me a jar as a present.
Like book recommendations, friends send recipes by email, or -- less often these days -- through the mail. I file these shared recipes in folders and keep them on a kitchen shelf along with the black and white marbleized school composition book that contains my mother’s recipes, handwritten on the wide-lined pages with index tabs she cut out and pasted on to create divisions. Her collection, with its hefty pastries and one-dish meals, is definitely pre-Whole Foods. One of the few vegetable recipes is for “Spinach Strata” that requires two cups of cheddar cheese, some canned cream soup, tons of mayo, four eggs, a lot of buttered bread cubes plus a pack of frozen chopped spinach.
My cookbooks and family recipes are treasures, but more for browsing than for actual use. I am a scratch cook and for everyday fare I make do with whatever happens to be around.
* * *
Tell me about your own favorite cookbook: ehstandard@gmail.com
LONGITUDE, COD, and FRIED CHICKEN
This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY "Record Review" as one in an ongoing series "My Reading Life."
LONGITUDE, COD and FRIED CHICKEN
Mentioned below: "Longitude," by Dava Sobel; "Cod" and "Salt" by
Mark Kurlansky; "Hiroshima" and "Blues" by John Hersey; "A Cow's Life," by M.R. Montgomery; "The Secret Life of Dust," by Hannah Holmes; "Coal," by Barbara Freese; "Sweetness and Power," by Sidney Mintz; "Sex," by Madonna; "Fried Chicken" and "Apple Pie," by John T. Edge; "Spam," by Carolyn Wyman.
Dava Sobel surprised everybody, including herself, when her popular account of the 18th Century measuring of Longitude (Walker, 1995) became a bestseller. I remember taking the little paperback version on a cross-country flight and by the time I landed in California, I had gained appreciation of the marine chronometer or clock that would keep precise time at sea.
Not far behind “Longitude” came “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” (Walker, 1997) ” and “Salt: A World History” (Walker, 2002), both by Mark Kurlansky. (Notice that Walker appears to have got the early lock on publishing these successful one-subject books).
Although “Cod” got better reviews, to me “Salt” is more interesting. Think about salt as a source of wealth, state monopoly and means of exchange. See it as a preservative: salted fish, cheese, meat, and vegetables (think: pickles) were main staples in practically every culture. Know that salt is as essential to the everyday cook as it is to the chef at Nobu. A first century A.D. recipe from Apicius begins: “Pluck the flamingo, wash it, truss it, put it in a pot; add water, salt, dill and a bit of vinegar…”
In this genre of one-subject titles John Hersey got there early on with “Hiroshima” (1946) and then with “Blues” (Knopf, 1987) a loving tribute to fishing and to the less-than loveable bluefish (around our house known as “the rat of the sea”). Hersey includes poems about fish and fishing by Homer, and by modern poets including James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Marianne Moore. Since knowing what to do with a bluefish once you’ve caught it is important, he provides several recipes (heavy on the garlic, rosemary and mayo—anything to subdue the nasty taste) that offer hope for making your bluefish palatable. The real trick to cooking a bluefish is to cause it happen within minutes of it being caught and gutted.
Maybe try “A Cow’s Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How The Black Angus Come To Be Home On The Range” by M. R. Montgomery (Walker, 2004). This little book traces the evolution of domesticated cattle and, among other things, walks us through a day in the life of a Montana cow.
Perhaps you’d be interested in “The Secret Life of Dust: From The Cosmos To The Kitchen Counter, The Big Consequences of Little Things”, by Hannah Holmes (Wiley, 2001) and dedicated to “My big, fat muse, P. Earth." Holmes, who says she grew up in a household with a microscope on the kitchen table, concludes the universe is growing dustier with every passing million years. She says that ultimately dust will insulate the stars and the night sky will darken. “And then, like an old newspaper in the attic, the worn-out universe will gradually disappear under the thickening dust.”
“Coal: A Human History” by Barbara Freese (Perseus, 2003), takes us into another dimension, into the seams of coal beneath the earth. This is not so much a history of coal mining as it is a social, political and environmental history and explication of the world-changing essence of coal. Freese quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote about coal in the mid-19th Century: “Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta; and with its comfort brings its industrial power.” Freese thinks we may go back, someday, to using coal that, “for all its faults, brought us through a sort of prolonged industrial childhood and ultimately gave us the power to build a world that no longer needed coal.”
Digging deeper, there are the classic academic works on commodities such as Sidney Mintz’s ambitious work, “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History” (Penguin, 1985). Most of these one-topic books can be found in the 500 section at your library, a repository of the esoteric, the exquisite, the obsessional. Go in there and you’ll emerge with an armful of books on subjects you never thought for a minute about and then spend happy hours reading about cows or coal, or maybe even dust.
One book you probably won’t find in the 500 section is “Sex” by Madonna, a coffee table-sized book (Ediciones B, 1992) whose first printing sold out in a week. A photo album about Madonna’s sex rather than, well, just sex, the book is long out of print and now collectible with prices at Amazon starting at $125 and going to more than $350. The only copy in the Westchester Library System had been at Mt. Vernon and, no big surprise, it is listed in the catalogue as “missing.”
You might want to try, “Fried Chicken: An American Story” by John T. Edge (Putnam, 2004) which lists 34 “favorite chicken houses” in 14 states with commentary on their specialties. You can read about Cape May Onion-Fried Shore Chicken, for example, and even try out a recipe for it. KFC, eat your heart out! For something to go with your chicken, Edge has also written “Apple Pie”.
Perhaps you’d care to dig into “Spam: A Biography” by Carolyn Wyman (Harvest, 1999). This is spam the ham product in a can, not the junk e-mail. Try to think of something nobody else has done, which is about as tough as finding a subject for a biography or a dissertation. I can think of a couple of topics I wouldn’t mind spending time writing about – amber, for example. Amber is so Baltic, so organic, so ancient.
It might be interesting to write about boxcars. Yes, boxcars might be good. Think of all the logos on those long lines of boxcars, hundreds of them, that took forever to trundle through the railroad crossing as you watched from the back seat of your father’s DeSoto. I Googled “boxcars” and found 99,000 entries, so figure it has, alas, as editors are so fond of saying, “ been done.” For the fun of it, go to HYPERLINK http://www.nonotuck.us./kens/boxcars / and you’ll see pictures of all sorts of railroad freight cars, a handy reference for all your trainspotting needs.
Then, I Googled “amber” and found myself on Page One of 6,420,000
entries. Pretty daunting for the would-be writer of a small book on a single interesting topic.
* * *
Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman, of
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (1997. Carroll & Graf).
Friday, January 6, 2012
CUTTINGS
CUTTINGS
The comfrey from Martha Dana
Thrives below the back stone wall.
Bees love the modest flowers
And the lavish greenery has
Many healing abilities.
Cousin Tom gave me creeping violet
From his rock garden and now it is
Among the stones, above the comfrey.
Lady's mantle swapped with Charlotte
for Hosta Elegans fights for space
With silvery artemesia
From Stella, a constant gardener,
And the mother of my husband.
Years ago, walking with Virginia,
Before she lost her mind,
I pulled up some nice ivy
From a vacant lot
And trained it to climb.
Yellow iris from Susie's place in Fly Summit
Has survived, unhappy where it is.
Bishop's Weed from Loomis Street
Has taken over by the shed.
I've carried a shovel in the trunk of my car
And dug daylilies and asters from ditches.
Betty Ann and Helen poached
My white jonquils by moonlight
From somebody's front yard.
Rhubarb from Julia French is going crazy
Out on the compost
And Julia herself, well over 90,
Is in a nursing home over near Corning.
I treasure all these cuttings.
And watch for them each Spring,
Knowing exactly where each originated
And when it was planted.
When I'm gone, there'll be no remembering.
The next people
Will never understand rhubarb.
And the comfrey will be
Just another weed.
Elinore Standard
From Uptown Dogtown
DESPERATE
DESPERATE
"I want to go home," my
mother shouted
As we drove north, away from the
place
Where she used to live.
Angrier, she became, and panicked.
Huddled in my old winter coat,
Against the door
As far from me as possible.
The New Jersey turnpike was choked
Over the horizon and beyond.
I clunked the automatic locks.
This is terrible, I thought --
Explaining why, for the hundredth
time,
The journey was taking so long.
I felt like the biggest rat in the
world
And a liar, too, telling her we'd
be home soon,
Meaning my home, not hers.
As we traveled through the rain,
she read
Road signs that made her giggle:
"Whippany!"
"Parsippany!"
She said Mahwah was really funny,
And Ho Ho Kus a total scream.
Elinore Standard
From Uptown Dogtown
DUMPSTER
DUMPSTER
For a long time, I was obsessed with fixing my sister’s life. In addition to
enbattled family relationships and nasty fallings-out, she lived in a mess.
There were piles of old fashion magazines and closets full of clothing with original sales tags, never worn. The one useable bathroom cupboard had so many beauty products stacked in it, the nails were pulling out of the shelves. Nobody was allowed to use the darkened living room except the dogs, who peed on the rug. The kitchen cabinets were like booby traps: open the door and canned goods would shoot out at your head like missiles. The ovens were used for storage. The cellar flooded. and everything down there was moldy. The roof leaked and the windows
were painted shut. The toilets couldn’t be flushed and the washing machine drain emptied out over the front lawn.
I’d lie in my bed 500 miles away and obsess about how I’d sort her out. Over and over, I’d dream of pulling up a dumpster under her bedroom window and throwing all the junk down into it. I was resentful that my sister, the squeaky wheel, got not only attention from our mother but handouts of thousands and thousands of dollars. The fact is I also gave her money every month for years. I paid her dentist. I paid off her credit card. My silent little mantra went: “How come nobody ever helped me?” I knew she shopped for stupid stuff and I knew she was getting botoxed. All the while, I was getting burned up.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I wrote a short piece I called “Dumpster,” in which I described in detail the purge I’d conduct. Though I never showed it to anyone, somehow producing it got me off the hook. I quit thinking about the mess and I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about it anyway.
I decided to stop trying to fix her life.
I also changed the script. Any story I ever told about her used to begin, “My poor sister…” I being, of course, the one who wasn’t ”poor”. It took years for me to realize how patronizing and condescending this actually was. It dawned on me I was doing the old routine: “Make them look bad so by comparison I’ll look good.”
I began describing my sister as a hero. Instead of talking about her loono boyfriend and joyless life, I described how she took care of our mother. Instead of saying what a manipulative scammer I thought she was, I’d talk about her devotion to our demented parent and her loyalty to someone from whom she got less than zero in return.
The more often I told the story in this new way, the easier I felt in my actual conversations with my sister. I told people about her hilarious ability to mimic anyone (including me, no doubt) and her great sense of humor. Instead of commenting on her lack of friends, I described how close she was to her three children and their families.
During a prolonged and frightening sickness, my sister lived alone. She took care of her animals and she visited our mother often. She constantly battled with the health care establishment and she recovered enough to put in a glamorous appearance at her son’s wedding. She drove around in a fancy car. She shopped.
As she was dying, she kicked out a social worker she couldn’t stand. She admitted the hospice people about two days before she died and she summoned the strength to say goodbye to her children and to tell them who (and who not) was to attend the funeral. She died in her home, a place she loved, and she did not die alone.
My sister, the hero.
For a long time, I was obsessed with fixing my sister’s life. In addition to
enbattled family relationships and nasty fallings-out, she lived in a mess.
There were piles of old fashion magazines and closets full of clothing with original sales tags, never worn. The one useable bathroom cupboard had so many beauty products stacked in it, the nails were pulling out of the shelves. Nobody was allowed to use the darkened living room except the dogs, who peed on the rug. The kitchen cabinets were like booby traps: open the door and canned goods would shoot out at your head like missiles. The ovens were used for storage. The cellar flooded. and everything down there was moldy. The roof leaked and the windows
were painted shut. The toilets couldn’t be flushed and the washing machine drain emptied out over the front lawn.
I’d lie in my bed 500 miles away and obsess about how I’d sort her out. Over and over, I’d dream of pulling up a dumpster under her bedroom window and throwing all the junk down into it. I was resentful that my sister, the squeaky wheel, got not only attention from our mother but handouts of thousands and thousands of dollars. The fact is I also gave her money every month for years. I paid her dentist. I paid off her credit card. My silent little mantra went: “How come nobody ever helped me?” I knew she shopped for stupid stuff and I knew she was getting botoxed. All the while, I was getting burned up.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I wrote a short piece I called “Dumpster,” in which I described in detail the purge I’d conduct. Though I never showed it to anyone, somehow producing it got me off the hook. I quit thinking about the mess and I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about it anyway.
I decided to stop trying to fix her life.
I also changed the script. Any story I ever told about her used to begin, “My poor sister…” I being, of course, the one who wasn’t ”poor”. It took years for me to realize how patronizing and condescending this actually was. It dawned on me I was doing the old routine: “Make them look bad so by comparison I’ll look good.”
I began describing my sister as a hero. Instead of talking about her loono boyfriend and joyless life, I described how she took care of our mother. Instead of saying what a manipulative scammer I thought she was, I’d talk about her devotion to our demented parent and her loyalty to someone from whom she got less than zero in return.
The more often I told the story in this new way, the easier I felt in my actual conversations with my sister. I told people about her hilarious ability to mimic anyone (including me, no doubt) and her great sense of humor. Instead of commenting on her lack of friends, I described how close she was to her three children and their families.
During a prolonged and frightening sickness, my sister lived alone. She took care of her animals and she visited our mother often. She constantly battled with the health care establishment and she recovered enough to put in a glamorous appearance at her son’s wedding. She drove around in a fancy car. She shopped.
As she was dying, she kicked out a social worker she couldn’t stand. She admitted the hospice people about two days before she died and she summoned the strength to say goodbye to her children and to tell them who (and who not) was to attend the funeral. She died in her home, a place she loved, and she did not die alone.
My sister, the hero.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
DOGS! DOGS! DOGS!
This column originally appeared in the Bedford, NY "Record Review" as one of Elinore Standard's "My Reading Life" pieces.
Works Mentioned: "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," by Alexandra Fuller; "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime," by Mark Haddon; "The Dog Fighter," by Marc Bojanowski; "The Dogs of Babel," by Caroline Parkhurst; "The Incredible Journey," by Sheila Burnford.
DOGS! DOGS! DOGS!
I am spacing out the chapters, dragging my feet, not wanting it to finish Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight” (Random House, 2001). It is the story of her girlhood on various remote farms in post-Colonial, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Nyasaland/Malawi and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. and Fuller has taken me right there with her, as part of her unruly, unprotected life.
During the 1970s and 80’s, the parts of these countries Fuller’s parents inhabited were geographically and physically inhospitable, and to hard-luck white farmers, scratching an existence out of tick-bitten cattle and low-grade tobacco in remote places, it was also dangerous. Land mines and trigger-happy juvenile soldiers were among the outside hazards sometimes too fantastic to take seriously when everyday life was so full of its own pressing danger.
While it instructs the reader about the contemporary geopolitical realities of region, Fuller’s book is as much the story of her alcoholic, bi-polar mother, a gorgeous, overburdened farmwife, horsewoman, barefoot doctor and veterinarian, big reader and major dog-lover. Somehow, Fuller writes about this amazing character with affection and candor. Both parents were racists as were most whites during that time and in that place. They were the “bosses”, yet they were dependent on local people for practically everything, including security, during long years of civil war and general upheaval. Of herself, Fuller says, “I am African by accident, not by birth. So while soul and heart, and the bent of my mind are African, my skin blaringly begs to differ and is resolutely white.”
As you go through Fuller’s chaotic childhood with her, you wonder how anybody in that family ever survived in the thick, swampy lands where they settled. And the fact is, three didn’t. Three of the Fuller children died early: one a baby, of meningitis, the next a toddler, by drowning, the third at birth. Nicola Fuller blamed the deaths of her children on “bloody Africa” and this rage and sorrow helped drive her mad. “All of us are mad, but I’m the only one with a certificate to prove it,” she observes.
Alexandra, “Bobo”, and her older sister, Vanessa, “Van”, accepted Nicola’s emotional peaks and troughs and despite Nicola;s haphazard parenting and the gruffness of their quixotic father, the sisters seemed to have managed the resilience needed to withstand the general craziness and ever-present danger surrounding them.
The book takes its title from lines by A.P. Herbert:
“Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight,
For mother will be there.”
“The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time” is about a whole lot more than a curious incident. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s first novel (Doubleday paper (2003) is Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old autistic savant who calms himself by doing advanced mathematics in his head. Christopher’s compulsive everyday behavior is usually so impossible it would drive a saint crazy. People who come in contact with him lose patience and their own loss of control triggers Christopher’s fear-driven violence.
Haddon understands exactly how Christopher’s mind works and the unique point of view he produces is so realistic and elaborately interior, it makes you marvel at Haddon’s capacity for empathy. In addition to his clever line drawings, Haddon includes simple and complicated math problems (with solutions) and, best of all, he lays out on a simple grid an clear way to determine prime numbers. After you read “Curious Incident” prime numbers need never again be a mystery!
Were it not for the occasional strong language, “Curious Incident” could easily replace the overtired “Catcher in the Rye” as required reading in the high school curriculum. Some schools will be brave enough to adopt it and the book’s real concerns about loyalty, honesty, tolerance, and equality will provide a platform for interesting classroom and reading group discussion.
You know the saying, “I wouldn’t wear it to a dog fight”? Two dogs fighting each other is troubling enough to watch but think about a dog fighting a man when the fight is to the death. Vicious. And people watch and make bets and cheer. This is outlawed cockfighting carried to extreme -- and what, exactly, do you wear? The young women at the fights in Marc Bojanowski’s “The Dog Fighter” (Harper, 2004) wear dresses and pearls and they smell good, and they attend as ornaments, hanging on the arms of powerful men.
Set in Baja Mexico during the 1940s, this disturbing and brutal first novel introduces characters who could be described as “evil” if that word weren’t recently so degraded. The narrator, a dog fighter, writes about his life looking back over many years, and uses choppy sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspellings, and he makes all the mistakes in grammar and usage made by a badly-educated, inexperienced, but talented and articulate writer. Reading this book requires effort. The reader gets stalled, has to re-read, and often has to stop and interpret the meaning. Occasionally, it requires paging back to sort out characters and events. Some readers will have no patience with this kind of annoyance but after finishing sixty pages or so, I found I was into it and had gotten used to the narrator’s voice.
The unsatisfying ending confounds the reader and leaves her wondering what, exactly, happened. I stuck with this book, often compelled by its brutality. I won’t go back to figure out the ending. Enough is enough.
I admire the confidence and daring of this first-time novelist and it will be interesting to see what critics say about Bojanowski when the book is formally published in August, 2004.
Enough is also enough with “The Dogs of Babel” a first novel by Carolyn Parkhurst (Time Warner, 2003). A beloved wife climbs to the top of a backyard tree and falls/jumps. She leaves behind signs and symbols that will help her grieving husband unravel the mystery of her death. He decides to teach the family dog, Lorelei, the only witness to the accident, to talk. There is a lot in here about real experiments with talking dogs, some involving appalling cruelty (see “Dog Fighter” for more animal cruelty) to the animals. The husband toils along with flash cards, and so on. Dear me. Poor Lorelei. Call the Humane Society.
So much for a spate of reading on a single topic: such an artificial and hokey effort is bound to produce disappointment. It did bring me to “Let’s Go to The Dogs Tonight,” an experience well worth plugging away for. If you want a real dog story, go read “The Incredible Journey.”
Elinore Standard is the co-author with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (NY: Carroll&Graf, 1997.)
E-Mail her about your favorite Dog Books: ehstandard@gmail.com
Works Mentioned: "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," by Alexandra Fuller; "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime," by Mark Haddon; "The Dog Fighter," by Marc Bojanowski; "The Dogs of Babel," by Caroline Parkhurst; "The Incredible Journey," by Sheila Burnford.
DOGS! DOGS! DOGS!
I am spacing out the chapters, dragging my feet, not wanting it to finish Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight” (Random House, 2001). It is the story of her girlhood on various remote farms in post-Colonial, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Nyasaland/Malawi and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. and Fuller has taken me right there with her, as part of her unruly, unprotected life.
During the 1970s and 80’s, the parts of these countries Fuller’s parents inhabited were geographically and physically inhospitable, and to hard-luck white farmers, scratching an existence out of tick-bitten cattle and low-grade tobacco in remote places, it was also dangerous. Land mines and trigger-happy juvenile soldiers were among the outside hazards sometimes too fantastic to take seriously when everyday life was so full of its own pressing danger.
While it instructs the reader about the contemporary geopolitical realities of region, Fuller’s book is as much the story of her alcoholic, bi-polar mother, a gorgeous, overburdened farmwife, horsewoman, barefoot doctor and veterinarian, big reader and major dog-lover. Somehow, Fuller writes about this amazing character with affection and candor. Both parents were racists as were most whites during that time and in that place. They were the “bosses”, yet they were dependent on local people for practically everything, including security, during long years of civil war and general upheaval. Of herself, Fuller says, “I am African by accident, not by birth. So while soul and heart, and the bent of my mind are African, my skin blaringly begs to differ and is resolutely white.”
As you go through Fuller’s chaotic childhood with her, you wonder how anybody in that family ever survived in the thick, swampy lands where they settled. And the fact is, three didn’t. Three of the Fuller children died early: one a baby, of meningitis, the next a toddler, by drowning, the third at birth. Nicola Fuller blamed the deaths of her children on “bloody Africa” and this rage and sorrow helped drive her mad. “All of us are mad, but I’m the only one with a certificate to prove it,” she observes.
Alexandra, “Bobo”, and her older sister, Vanessa, “Van”, accepted Nicola’s emotional peaks and troughs and despite Nicola;s haphazard parenting and the gruffness of their quixotic father, the sisters seemed to have managed the resilience needed to withstand the general craziness and ever-present danger surrounding them.
The book takes its title from lines by A.P. Herbert:
“Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight,
For mother will be there.”
“The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time” is about a whole lot more than a curious incident. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s first novel (Doubleday paper (2003) is Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old autistic savant who calms himself by doing advanced mathematics in his head. Christopher’s compulsive everyday behavior is usually so impossible it would drive a saint crazy. People who come in contact with him lose patience and their own loss of control triggers Christopher’s fear-driven violence.
Haddon understands exactly how Christopher’s mind works and the unique point of view he produces is so realistic and elaborately interior, it makes you marvel at Haddon’s capacity for empathy. In addition to his clever line drawings, Haddon includes simple and complicated math problems (with solutions) and, best of all, he lays out on a simple grid an clear way to determine prime numbers. After you read “Curious Incident” prime numbers need never again be a mystery!
Were it not for the occasional strong language, “Curious Incident” could easily replace the overtired “Catcher in the Rye” as required reading in the high school curriculum. Some schools will be brave enough to adopt it and the book’s real concerns about loyalty, honesty, tolerance, and equality will provide a platform for interesting classroom and reading group discussion.
You know the saying, “I wouldn’t wear it to a dog fight”? Two dogs fighting each other is troubling enough to watch but think about a dog fighting a man when the fight is to the death. Vicious. And people watch and make bets and cheer. This is outlawed cockfighting carried to extreme -- and what, exactly, do you wear? The young women at the fights in Marc Bojanowski’s “The Dog Fighter” (Harper, 2004) wear dresses and pearls and they smell good, and they attend as ornaments, hanging on the arms of powerful men.
Set in Baja Mexico during the 1940s, this disturbing and brutal first novel introduces characters who could be described as “evil” if that word weren’t recently so degraded. The narrator, a dog fighter, writes about his life looking back over many years, and uses choppy sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspellings, and he makes all the mistakes in grammar and usage made by a badly-educated, inexperienced, but talented and articulate writer. Reading this book requires effort. The reader gets stalled, has to re-read, and often has to stop and interpret the meaning. Occasionally, it requires paging back to sort out characters and events. Some readers will have no patience with this kind of annoyance but after finishing sixty pages or so, I found I was into it and had gotten used to the narrator’s voice.
The unsatisfying ending confounds the reader and leaves her wondering what, exactly, happened. I stuck with this book, often compelled by its brutality. I won’t go back to figure out the ending. Enough is enough.
I admire the confidence and daring of this first-time novelist and it will be interesting to see what critics say about Bojanowski when the book is formally published in August, 2004.
Enough is also enough with “The Dogs of Babel” a first novel by Carolyn Parkhurst (Time Warner, 2003). A beloved wife climbs to the top of a backyard tree and falls/jumps. She leaves behind signs and symbols that will help her grieving husband unravel the mystery of her death. He decides to teach the family dog, Lorelei, the only witness to the accident, to talk. There is a lot in here about real experiments with talking dogs, some involving appalling cruelty (see “Dog Fighter” for more animal cruelty) to the animals. The husband toils along with flash cards, and so on. Dear me. Poor Lorelei. Call the Humane Society.
So much for a spate of reading on a single topic: such an artificial and hokey effort is bound to produce disappointment. It did bring me to “Let’s Go to The Dogs Tonight,” an experience well worth plugging away for. If you want a real dog story, go read “The Incredible Journey.”
Elinore Standard is the co-author with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (NY: Carroll&Graf, 1997.)
E-Mail her about your favorite Dog Books: ehstandard@gmail.com
...TO MY LOVELY WIFE, HELEN
This piece is one in a series "My Reading Life" first appearing in
The Record Review of Bedford, New York.
Works mentioned in this piece: "Middlemarch," by George Eliot "
"Beggars" and "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth; a poem by Lynn
Peters; an essay by Jenny Diski; "The Honorable Schoolboy" by John LeCarre; "Cold Granite" by Stuart MacBride;
TO MY LOVELY WIFE, HELEN
“…and to my lovely wife, Helen, without whose patience in typing countless manuscripts, this book would not have been possible.”
Are these some of the most pathetic words in literature? The wife (or female secretary) has long been an Acknowledgement cliché but happy to say, you don’t see it (much) any more. What you get now are those interminable blurbs where the author takes up a couple of pages at the beginning or at the end of the work, thanking anyone who has ever even answered the phone, plus the dog and the cat and everybody in the fifth lunch, for their unstinting support -- and, in the course of this yak, you learn everything there is to know about the person who wrote the book.
In fiction as well as in real life, the genius and amanuensis have been around for a long time. Think about Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (1871) who helps her dithering ass husband to organize his futile “Key To All Mythologies.” Here is an interesting story that goes beyond organizing papers and taking dictation. Dorothea Brooke’s nutty desire to serve the awful Mr. Casaubon, “selflessly” produces a situation where the man allows the woman to step aside while he takes the credit.
A real-life Dorothy, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), the sister of William, has been the subject of speculation about the extent to which she influenced her brother as intellectual companion. Eventually, he married her best friend but she didn’t attend the wedding because she knew she would be too upset; the post-marital ménage included Dorothy. She was a constant keeper of journals, most of which have been preserved, and in them one can find concordances with poems written by William. Her brother’s poems, such as “Beggars” and “Daffodils” use her precise descriptions
As often is the case when two lives are so intertwined, “Oh, William, William! You drive me to the very edge of distraction!” (Journal, Easter Sunday, 1802) it is difficult to tell where one mind takes up and where the other one leaves off. There are thousands and thousands of Google references to Dorothy and to William Wordsworth and by accident, I found this one in a site called “Purple Elephant” which I can’t locate again because there are more than two million purple elephants.
Why Dorothy Wordsworth is Not as Famous as her Brother
by Lynn Peters
(For Poetry Week -- April, 2005)
"I wondered lonely as a ...
They're in the top drawer, William,
Under your socks –
I wondered lonely as a -
No not that drawer, the top one.
I wondered by myself -
Well wear the ones you can find.
No, don't get overwought my dear,
I'm coming
"One day I was out for a walk
When I saw this flock -
It can't be too hard, it had three minutes.
Well put some butter in it.
- This host of golden daffodils
As I was out for a stroll one -
"Oh you fancy a stroll, do you?
Yes all right, William, I'm coming.
It's on the peg. Under your hat.
I'll bring my pad, shall I, just in case
You want to jot something down?"
As a favorite writer, Jenny Diski, points out in “My Word, Miss Perkins” (London Review, August, 2005) a review of a book about literary secretaries, “…these days the author and writer are one and the same. Obviously we have to make an exception for industrial novelists like the late Robert Ludlum, who has a team who writes the books as well as others who type them before they add their authorial name, so that there are three layers to the finished manuscript – or possibly four if you include the ‘ideas’ officer…”
In 1977, John Le Carré, concluding the Foreword to “The Honorable Schoolboy” (Knopf), said: “And for Miss Nellie Adams, for her stupendous bouts of typing, no praise is enough.”
And here is a beaut from 2005: “Most of all, thanks to my naughty wife, Fiona; cups of tea, grammatical pointers, spelling, refusing to read the book in case she didn’t like it, and putting up with me all these years.” Stuart MacBride “Cold Granite” (St Martin’s). Naughty?
Nowadays, most writers key their own manuscripts on the computer, the re-casting and re-drafting made easy by word programs, so there isn’t all that much for Miss Adams to do. When the work is finished, it can simply be fired off to the publisher by pressing “Send.” No more need to put the manuscript in the refrigerator for safekeeping.
Diski says, “Learning shorthand and typing was once a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow, David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter.” During the First World War, an army of clerks went to war and an army of women took over their office jobs, at lower wages than the men had been getting, of course. As Tillie the Toiler, the working girl either married the boss or, if she was Katharine Hepburn, or Melanie Griffith, wound up in an office with a window and a secretary of her own.
Elinore Standard
ehstandard@gmail.com
The Record Review of Bedford, New York.
Works mentioned in this piece: "Middlemarch," by George Eliot "
"Beggars" and "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth; a poem by Lynn
Peters; an essay by Jenny Diski; "The Honorable Schoolboy" by John LeCarre; "Cold Granite" by Stuart MacBride;
TO MY LOVELY WIFE, HELEN
“…and to my lovely wife, Helen, without whose patience in typing countless manuscripts, this book would not have been possible.”
Are these some of the most pathetic words in literature? The wife (or female secretary) has long been an Acknowledgement cliché but happy to say, you don’t see it (much) any more. What you get now are those interminable blurbs where the author takes up a couple of pages at the beginning or at the end of the work, thanking anyone who has ever even answered the phone, plus the dog and the cat and everybody in the fifth lunch, for their unstinting support -- and, in the course of this yak, you learn everything there is to know about the person who wrote the book.
In fiction as well as in real life, the genius and amanuensis have been around for a long time. Think about Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (1871) who helps her dithering ass husband to organize his futile “Key To All Mythologies.” Here is an interesting story that goes beyond organizing papers and taking dictation. Dorothea Brooke’s nutty desire to serve the awful Mr. Casaubon, “selflessly” produces a situation where the man allows the woman to step aside while he takes the credit.
A real-life Dorothy, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), the sister of William, has been the subject of speculation about the extent to which she influenced her brother as intellectual companion. Eventually, he married her best friend but she didn’t attend the wedding because she knew she would be too upset; the post-marital ménage included Dorothy. She was a constant keeper of journals, most of which have been preserved, and in them one can find concordances with poems written by William. Her brother’s poems, such as “Beggars” and “Daffodils” use her precise descriptions
As often is the case when two lives are so intertwined, “Oh, William, William! You drive me to the very edge of distraction!” (Journal, Easter Sunday, 1802) it is difficult to tell where one mind takes up and where the other one leaves off. There are thousands and thousands of Google references to Dorothy and to William Wordsworth and by accident, I found this one in a site called “Purple Elephant” which I can’t locate again because there are more than two million purple elephants.
Why Dorothy Wordsworth is Not as Famous as her Brother
by Lynn Peters
(For Poetry Week -- April, 2005)
"I wondered lonely as a ...
They're in the top drawer, William,
Under your socks –
I wondered lonely as a -
No not that drawer, the top one.
I wondered by myself -
Well wear the ones you can find.
No, don't get overwought my dear,
I'm coming
"One day I was out for a walk
When I saw this flock -
It can't be too hard, it had three minutes.
Well put some butter in it.
- This host of golden daffodils
As I was out for a stroll one -
"Oh you fancy a stroll, do you?
Yes all right, William, I'm coming.
It's on the peg. Under your hat.
I'll bring my pad, shall I, just in case
You want to jot something down?"
As a favorite writer, Jenny Diski, points out in “My Word, Miss Perkins” (London Review, August, 2005) a review of a book about literary secretaries, “…these days the author and writer are one and the same. Obviously we have to make an exception for industrial novelists like the late Robert Ludlum, who has a team who writes the books as well as others who type them before they add their authorial name, so that there are three layers to the finished manuscript – or possibly four if you include the ‘ideas’ officer…”
In 1977, John Le Carré, concluding the Foreword to “The Honorable Schoolboy” (Knopf), said: “And for Miss Nellie Adams, for her stupendous bouts of typing, no praise is enough.”
And here is a beaut from 2005: “Most of all, thanks to my naughty wife, Fiona; cups of tea, grammatical pointers, spelling, refusing to read the book in case she didn’t like it, and putting up with me all these years.” Stuart MacBride “Cold Granite” (St Martin’s). Naughty?
Nowadays, most writers key their own manuscripts on the computer, the re-casting and re-drafting made easy by word programs, so there isn’t all that much for Miss Adams to do. When the work is finished, it can simply be fired off to the publisher by pressing “Send.” No more need to put the manuscript in the refrigerator for safekeeping.
Diski says, “Learning shorthand and typing was once a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow, David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter.” During the First World War, an army of clerks went to war and an army of women took over their office jobs, at lower wages than the men had been getting, of course. As Tillie the Toiler, the working girl either married the boss or, if she was Katharine Hepburn, or Melanie Griffith, wound up in an office with a window and a secretary of her own.
Elinore Standard
ehstandard@gmail.com
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