Brown Study

Downton Abbey and the Great War

2012-01-10T22:15:00.005-05:00

I'm a long-time Masterpiece Theater watcher -- when you grow up with no cable and only two of the three major networks reliably penetrate the mountain gaps, PBS becomes doubly important as a source of entertainment. Since moving away from home, I probably don't tune in quite as often, which is why I was late catching up to Downton Abbey. I saw enough of last season to get the gist of the main story lines, then tuned in for the premiere last Sunday night. I was even more interested since the story had advanced into the war years, and I have read and studied so much about the literature and history of that era. So while I still enjoyed the soap opera of it, the clothes, and Maggie Smith's one-liners, I did feel a guilty twinge at seeing the Great War trotted out as mere plot device and background scenery.

While I don't expect a popular TV show to turn into a documentary all of a sudden, I do wish the war aspects were handled more subtly and given a bit more gravitas, particularly since this is a British production and not a Hollywood hack job. It probably would have been better to dispense altogether with the trench and Somme battle scenes and not to have stuffed every single Great War cliche into two hours -- while giving nothing its due. The Womens Auxiliary Corps, Land Girls, the White Feather Campaign, Doing Your Bit, Getting a Blighty, Gas Blindness, Shell Shock, the Lost Generation...it's as if every topic from Great War 101 was dutifully introduced and bum-rushed off the stage. If there isn't a soldier-poet's untimely death introduced in the next episode or two I will be astonished!

Well, there I am just being crotchety. So to appease my conscience and balance out all the fluff and nonsense, below is a photo from the Imperial War Museum of London, showing a soldier from the actual Somme battlefield, where there was absolutely nothing romantic or glamorous happening.

The poem below is from Siegfried Sassoon, one of my favorite poets, who survived the war and died the year I was born.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You snug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

- Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack, 1918

[Note: I reproduced the poem above faithfully from my 1918 edition, which may have included original typos -- "snug"/smug, "crumps"/cramps.]

2012 omen for the New Year?

2012-01-01T18:42:00.006-05:00

Every fall and winter I keep my bird feeders full and spend a lot of time on weekends spying on the little visitors -- and squirrels -- and count the birds for Cornell's Project Feeder Watch. This is one of the ways I entertain myself when everything is cold, drab, and brown. But today, sitting on the sofa in the front room of the house, my husband alerted me to an unusual sight -- a hawk settled down on the power line right by our porch at just about eye level. Any time a hawk is in the neighborhood, soaring way overhead, everything heads for cover, no birds, no squirrels, all is quiet. So this young fellow settles down right over our dogwood tree, and we wondered what kind of New Year's omen that could be? He sat for long enough that I scooted away and brought back the camera for the hubby to snap a few pictures.

I am choosing to believe that our hawk visit is something promising for the coming year -- a wild and beautiful creature, momentarily serene and wavering delicately on a wire right before our eyes. Yep, let's go with that.

Here is the Downy Woodpecker who has been hanging out with us lately. And while I'm at it, I might as well add Harry Cat, arch-enemy to birds everywhere, especially tasty nuthatches. (Oh, bad kitty!) Harry lives at my parents' house, so my birds are at least safe from that predator.

Lonesome cowboys

2011-09-05T21:53:00.005-04:00

While on my end-of-summer vacation I whipped through Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove -- a big, sprawling tale that I missed entirely in its hey-dey; I even managed to miss the mini-series, an omission I'll correct before too long. I had to make myself put it down every now and then to save my eyes. It's the kind of book that has become more and more rare as I grow older -- an honest-to-God page-turner.

I've got a soft spot for westerns and the romance that clings to the idea of the cowboy. My dad's long love-affair with the wide open spaces of Montana is also a draw. I've never been there myself, but I'm fascinated by it because of his travels that started when he was a teenager, old enough to hitchhike out west from Virginia and give my Grandma a conniption, and to cowboy enough to earn his keep on the ranch of some distant relatives for a summer. He kept going back over the years, and the picture is from one of the trips when my Mom went with him, squatting on the sunlit plains in that pretty golden light.

It's a book lovingly written. McMurtry gives his characters space to fill out and take on a life of their own. In some ways they have the stock traits you would expect -- the laconic loner Call, the good-time gambler and womanizer Spoon, and the loquacious dispenser of droll cowboy humor MacRae. There's a full cast of cowboys, Indians, whores, and outlaws, but they all manage to rise out of their stock characters and do surprising, touching, and, often, desperate things.

The basic outline of the story follows the Hat Creek outfit several years after the Civil War. Ex-Texas Rangers Call and MacRae, who have fought the Comanches and Kiowa, and protected the Texas settlers along the Mexican border, have settled down to trade horses and sell cows with a collection of hands, some of them from their Rangering days, which are now over. When their old friend and cohort Spoon arrives running from trouble he caused in Arkansas as a drifting gambler, he shakes them out of their routine of raiding for horses and cattle in Mexic0 with the idea of driving cattle to Montana and claiming the wild land there, which is still harried by the northern tribes and remains mostly unsettled.

The Hat Creek boys light out for Montana, and the perils of the long drive of three-thousand miles serves as the backdrop for the action. Deaths are varied and constant as they traverse the wide open plains, stalked by an array of dangers including bandits, Indians, wild animals and unrelenting weather. There are female characters in this world of men: the unfortunate Lorena Wood, an implacable prostitute who falls in with Spoon on the promise that he will leave the drive along the way and take her to San Francisco, only to be captured by a vicious Indian bandit called Blue Duck; another prostitute, who has married a hapless, small-town sheriff on the trail of Spoon; and independent Clara, MacRae's longtime love, who has married a horse-trader and moved north to the Nebraska plains.

The world that McMurtry creates is one that visits misfortune and terror on both the just and the unjust, but one thing that it often rewards -- at least for awhile -- is competence. Call and MacRae have already built outsize reputations for themselves as Rangers and their abilities have allowed them to reach their golden years, still able to out-fight and out-think anyone who challenges them. Call and MacRae are one of the great literary duos -- as different as two men can be, but tied to each other through mutual loyalty and shared history. It's old-fashioned stuff but I like old-fashioned. And of course, I couldn't read it without thinking of Cormac McCarthy and thinking about where they sort of dovetail and where they diverge with their visions of the west. No doubt, McMurtry stays a little closer to the myth that McCarthy both punctures and extends -- mostly by creating a slightly-altered myth, peering from America's "manifest destiny" record of murder and pillage to an apocalyptic future.

I've often pondered the lives of those first pioneers and all that they faced and endured to stake their claims. The hardships and dangers seem nearly unimaginable to a soft, lily-livered creature like me, but I suppose people have always plunged into things blithely unaware of the reality, and then just had to survive once they were in it. I guess, if I had stumbled into it like that, I'd just be stuck with the situation, which is probably how most people ended up. I may yet see the Bighorn Mountains and the Milk River one day, relying primarily on my competence in avoiding being eaten by a big Grizzly bear. I think I can do it.

Reading binge

2011-08-28T23:07:00.004-04:00

I used to read books like a house afire, especially after I emerged from graduate school and was catching up on all the non-thesis related stuff that I hadn't been able to get to while I was focused on getting my degree -- not that I didn't like what I was working on; I just couldn't decide to take a break and read Grapes of Wrath in the middle of it. It also helped that my first job out of school was as at a bookstore, which is like putting a sugar-fiend in a candy shop.

Then, when I moved on to other employment, I actually slowed down a bit, sometimes for months without even wanting to read anything but newspapers and magazines -- a bit jaded. For the last few months, I've really got back to my roots, which was always 19th century British fiction. And luckily, I've left one extremely prolific author completely untouched, unlike my beloved Austen and Eliot (I have the lone Eliot novel remaining -- Felix Holt -- which will probably fall this winter.)

Right after I began with Trollope's Can You Forgiver Her, I went on to the next door-stopper, Phineas Finn. I was just as hooked with this one. The title character is a young man on the rise. Finn is a poor Irishman, studying law, bored with it, but making fascinating friends in London by way of his good looks, charming manners, and intelligence. His new friends are not only aristocratic, they are politicians and cabinet ministers, who plant the ambition for Finn to also run for Parliament -- a lofty goal for an unknown with no money; in fact, he is still supported by his father -- a modest physician practicing in a country village in Ireland. Finn's plan to run for a seat in the House is met with little enthusiasm, since it means throwing away his law studies (and a more promising professional income in the long run) for the vagaries of serving in an unpaid political post. But so begins the unlikely success of Phineas, who finds himself in the political inner circle of England during the momentous debates around the passage of the Reform Bill of 1867, which sought to extend the ballot to a greater number of men.

Trollope fictionalizes all the real players, but other than changing names, he pretty much hews close to the historical record. And of course, it's not all politics -- there's lots of interpersonal intrigues, romances, doomed marriages, triangles, and even a duel. Also popping up are characters from the first Palliser novel, Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Glencora and, very much on the periphery of this story, is CYFH protagonist Alice Vavasor and John Grey. All in all, more good, old-fashioned entertainment, told with Trollope's customary attention to detail. layered characters, and sparkling wit.

But that's not all!

Just like the infomercials, there's more. I went back to the well on another favorite of mine -- the Brontes. I've read most of the novels except for Charlotte's The Professor and Anne's Agnes Grey, and also Juliet Barker's fabulous family biography. I thought I would try a novelistic version of the Bronte clan, but by an author who I trusted not to make a bodice-heaving botch of it -- Denise Giardina. I loved Giardina's novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Saint's and Villains, which I read back in my bookstore days; plus, she's kind of a home girl, born and raised in the coalfields of West Virginia. She takes as her thorny subject, the least penetrable Bronte in Emily's Ghost, a lovely, moody, smart take on Emily's life and early demise.

Giardina takes what little is known of Emily -- and that mostly from Charlotte's more extensive biographical resources -- and creates a believable version of the semi-mystical creature who has come down to us through the lens of her few poems and that strange, violent, completely original novel, Wuthering Heights. Giardina's Emily is fiercely independent, willful, radical in her politics, loyal to a few, but indifferent to most, and indeed, almost mystically allied with her windswept moors, the voices of the dead, and the animals with whom she feels such strong kinship. She imagines a doomed romance between Emily and the curate William Weightman and creates a very vivid world in which this, perhaps unlikely, relationship could grow. Set against the abject poverty of the people in Haworth Village, the Chartist riots, and the degrading conditions of the now-industrialized mill workers, the concerns of the novel rise above the merely romantic.

I don't want to give much away about how Giardina brings all of it together, but anyone interested in the Brontes should read this novel. The rest of the family is well-represented with Branwell coming off a little better than you might expect, and Charlotte, not very well at all. It's an intriguing portrait and genuinely heartbreaking at the end. The most tantalizing scene for me is the one in which the sister's are sharing their first novels by reading them aloud to one another. Emily's characters and story shocked and dismayed her sisters (which seems probable). Their criticism -- Anne's gentle and Charlotte's much less so -- draws Emily to declare angrily, "But I am Heathcliff -- I am!" It's enough to send me back to read Wuthering Heights again with that in mind. When I think about it from that perspective, it's an idea that makes sense and may even open up the novel to me in ways that I totally didn't appreciate the first time around.

Trollope...finally

2011-07-24T21:48:00.002-04:00

For someone of my tastes in fiction, it's surprising that I've taken so long to get around to Anthony Trollope. Somehow, through an undergraduate English program and then a Master's program that was heavy on British fiction, Trollope was never on the reading list, and I kept filing him away for future reading. Well, finally, after finishing up the delightful Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I decided to start with the first novel in one of the two major series that Trollope produced among his 47 novels. For someone so prolific, you need a plan.

Can You Forgive Her is the first of the Palliser novels, so called because one of the major characters figures significantly in all six novels -- the aristocratic and politically powerful Plantagenet Palliser. The major character, however, in CYFH is Alice Vavasor, and she requires forgiveness -- at least according to Trollope -- for her deplorable record in engaging and then jilting suitors. First, her ne'er do well cousin, George Vavasor, then the impossibly well-behaved John Grey, and then back again to George... But Alice is not a flighty, tempestuous, or shallow woman. She is just the opposite -- serious, thoughtful, and sensitive to her own shortcomings and what she owes to the man she will one day call husband.

While she is treated very sympathetically by Trollope, and is charged only with the fault of being overly"self-willed," her real problem is that she is a woman stuck in the limbo of gender roles in Victorian England. On the one hand, she is a sensitive and intelligent woman in the rare position of having a great deal of personal autonomy due to the fact that she commands her own fortune, but still facing an extremely limited array of roles that are considered to be appropriate to a gently bred young woman. She can marry or she can remain a spinster, but there is very little else open to her without an education, and anything but very basic education was certainly not the norm for most women of her time and class. (When Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) wanted to learn German or Greek, or natural sciences, she either had to engage her own tutors or teach herself.)

With these limited options, the main drama of Alice's life boils down to choosing the "right" husband -- not just someone she can love and respect, but someone through whom she can gain the vicarious satisfaction of having done something meaningful with her life. She can't stand for Parliament herself, of course, so the only political power within her grasp is supporting a husband who has those ambitions.

This is the climate, richly detailed and peopled, by Trollope's imagination. The intrigues of love and marriage are mirrored in the world of politics, and there is just as much treachery, falsehood, pride, and ambition at play in the one as in the other.

Can You Forgive Her is a sprawling, 900-page novel in the true Victorian fashion, in which numerous characters, both major and minor, are fleshed out in full. I often wanted to throttle one or more of the protagonists for their stubbornness, selfishness, coldness, or downright villainy, but they were never boring.

One added pleasure of this novel was reading Trollope's witty description of a meeting of Parliament in light of the current machinations of Congress "negotiating" the debt crisis, and on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the agonizing histrionics surrounding the Rupert Murdoch scandal. Here is a snippet without further comment:

There is something very pleasant in the close, bosom friendship, and bitter, uncompromising animosity, of these human gods,—of these human beings who would be gods were they not shorn so short of their divinity in that matter of immortality. If it were so arranged that the same persons were always friends, and the same persons were always enemies, as used to be the case among the dear old heathen gods and goddesses;—if Parliament were an Olympus in which Juno and Venus never kissed, the thing would not be nearly so interesting. But in this Olympus partners are changed, the divine bosom, now rabid with hatred against some opposing deity, suddenly becomes replete with love towards its late enemy, and exciting changes occur which give to the whole thing all the keen interest of a sensational novel. No doubt this is greatly lessened for those who come too near the scene of action. Members of Parliament, and the friends of Members of Parliament, are apt to teach themselves that it means nothing; that Lord This does not hate Mr That, or think him a traitor to his country, or wish to crucify him; and that Sir John of the Treasury is not much in earnest when he speaks of his noble friend at the "Foreign Office" as a god to whom no other god was ever comparable in honesty, discretion, patriotism, and genius.

Trollope, Anthony (2009-10-04). Can You Forgive Her? (pp. 447-448). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

Something wicked this way comes...

2011-06-21T22:38:00.007-04:00

The Pilgrims were surely an earnest, long-suffering, and hardened people to have gone through all that they did in planting Plymouth Colony. When it wasn't famine, sickness, terrible weather, or threat of an Indian war enveloping them, it was the more common type of hardships that befell them.

Much of William Bradford's excellent history Of Plymouth Plantation (I'm reading the 2001 edition edited by Samuel Eliot Morison, Borzoi Books) chronicles the business reversals that they suffered, the underhanded dealings of agents who were supposedly negotiating for them back in England with their investors (the Merchant Adventurers), but who were really out to make a buck for themselves. The Pilgrims got the shaft every time they turned around, and ironically enough, had a heck of a time finding a pastor for their flock who wasn't a complete charlatan or who didn't have some peculiar belief that they couldn't countenance. But Bradford became seriously perturbed by the "wickedness" he saw breaking out all around him, just as the colonies were becoming more populous and, at least some, more prosperous.

In his entry for year 1642, he entertains several reasons why all this incontinence, sodomy, and buggery was breaking out like an epidemic. He considers that it is because the Devil has to work extra hard and go to greater lengths to sow corruption in a people simply because they "endeavour to preserve holiness and purity ... and strictly punisheth the contrary when it arises." However, Bradford doesn't like the idea that the Devil is more potent in the New World, so he also reasons that it might be because their community didn't allow sins to "run in a common road of liberty" so when it did break through, it was twice as violent.

But here's where he really lets the Puritan freak flag fly -- it's not because they have more than the normal proportion of "evils" done among them:

But they are here more discovered and seen and made public by due search, inquisition and due punishment; for the churches look narrowly to their members, and the magistrates over all, more strictly than in other places. Besides, here the people are but few in comparison of other places which are full and populous and lie hid, as it were, in a wood or a thicket and many horrible evils by that means are never seen nor known; whereas here they are, as it were, brought into the light and set in the plain field, or rather on a hill, made conspicuous to the view of all. (Chapter XXXII, p. 317)

Ah! Here it is, the forerunner of modern "social networking" but without all the spying and legwork. Now, you can simply out yourself, disposing of the bother of relying on others to do it for you. That, my friends, is progress. And if broadcasting all your evils isn't enough, you can take a picture of yourself engaging in said evils and confirm them. Although, I have to say, if hanging were the probable outcome, modern social networkers might manage to be more prudent. Not that I think that's an appropriate antidote. But as Bradford would say, "Thus much for the present."

All joshing aside, what really strikes me about the passage above and of the whole book, really, is the most earnest, genuine, soul-shaking belief that the Devil is REAL. Not some cartoon red imp with a cloven hoof and pitchfork, but a destructive, preying, malevolent presence haunting your every thought, step, and nightmare. And if you were already of this persuasion in Europe, amongst the familiar rolling hills or grand cathedrals of the cities, how much would that feeling be intensified, in almost perfect isolation, facing an endless wilderness that contained unfathomable threats and mysteries?

It's easy to make Puritans the butt of jokes with our 21st century sensibilities. I know I've certainly done it. But for them it was a deadly serious business; they weren't being ironic; they weren't trying to sell people a bogus story in order to defraud them (well, maybe a few). The belief that they were constantly in peril and threatened by eternal damnation is what they staked their lives on and what made them quite willing to execute those members of the community who might be "infected" by evil, a belief that reached its ultimate expression in the witch hunt hysteria which was to follow.

Old World, New World

2011-06-19T21:48:00.007-04:00

For most of the spring I was distracted by getting ready for my first trip to Paris for nine days in May. Not really being a world traveler, it was a big deal to finally visit a city that has so long figured in my reading, whether history, fiction, or poetry. I've long considered to myself to be more Anglophile than Francophile, though the latter had been increasing in its power as I've probably read more French literature in the last 10-15 years than I ever had before -- Hugo, Flaubert, Colette, Zola, not to mention, all the ex-pat writers who lived in Paris, especially in the 20s.

My husband and I had a successful first trip to Paris -- I say first, because I do hope to make it back again one day. We spent all nine days and nights in the city, walking the streets and boulevards, riding the metro, and climbing stairs -- stairs up to the heights of the Notre Dame towers and the platform of the Arc de Triomphe, and down into the crypts of the Pantheon and to the narrow streets winding from the hill of Montmartre.

We saw the usual sites that tourists visit, cafes and monuments and crowded museums. I walked down the staircase of the Conciergerie where many a victim of the guillotine took their final steps, including Robespierre, whose descent was commemorated on a brass plaque. We stuck our heads into the bell tower where the fictional Quasimodo swung from perch to perch. We were gently accosted on the street by an old lady who was genuinely in a tizzy over the case of Strauss-Kahn, which was just hitting the news as we arrived. I'm afraid we weren't of much comfort to her and said our bon soirs and moved on. We saw Guy Marchand crooning in a jazz club while we ate foie gras and chicken across from a table that included a tiny and well-behaved poodle. We ventured a bit out of "museum" Paris to the 20th arrondissement and saw an indie band favorite of mine in a hole-in-the-wall club filled with hipsters.

People keep asking me what my favorite thing was and it's actually been pretty easy to answer. I love Paris at night, walking along the Seine and over the bridges, especially around the Ile de la Cite and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, lit up and looming over St. Michel. While hardly empty, at night you can tune out the bustle of tourists and street traffic a little more and just look into the river and feel the breeze ruffling your hair. This is when I felt I was really in the Paris of my imagination. I could have wandered around half the night, but we would eventually stumble back to our hotel in Montparnasse after midnight and start again in another part of the city the next day.

So that was lovely Paris, which I'm still processing like a good Romantic -- emotion recollected in tranquility. I'm not a very "in the moment" kind of person; pretty much the opposite. I do all my sorting out of experience, much, much later. And so, far from digging into more francophilia and French literature, I'm on to my next thing, which is...the New World. My world. America.

Wherein I declare John Smith to be awesome

I'm all the way back to the beginnings at Jamestown and Plymouth Colony. I've been reading Captain John Smith, who has to be one of the most fascinating characters in history. I think he lived about nine lives' worth of adventures and near-executions and shipwrecks and disappointments. I find his prose (not at all modernized in my edition, thankfully) a little difficult to follow sometimes. He assumes a lot of knowledge, and then rattles off Indian names and places and I get thoroughly lost trying to figure whose skulduggery he is describing and why his compatriots are always trying to cross him, if not hang him from the nearest branch. He spends a lot of time in his General History explaining, haranguing, and practically begging potential English investors to mount a proper colonization effort -- going in for the long-haul and not the easy money. Forget the gold mines, he says, there's money in timber, cod, and crops -- all there for the taking, which apparently, just didn't sound sexy enough for most people, particularly when the natives are known for flaying you alive and roasting your innards. But as the Captain opined, "It is not a worke for every one to plant a Colonie; but when a house is built, it is no hard matter to dwell in it." You can feel his frustration bleeding out in most of his writings at the lazy, unimaginative, lily-livered mortals he was often trying to prod into action. This is perhaps why they were always trying to hang him, why he finally got kicked out of the colonies, and why the Pilgrims passed on him in favor of the more manageable Miles Standish. This last bit I learned from Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, which I'm reading alongside William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford is wonderfully crisp and engaging, and I'll probably have more to say about him in a future post. Possibly, he is not as awesome as Smith, but as your Puritan forefathers go, he's pretty snazzy.

Savage Beauty: A Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

2011-04-18T21:02:00.007-04:00

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
(First Fig by EVM)

This biography by Nancy Milford has been on my shelf a long while. I'm sure I read reviews of it and put it on my list when it came out, and then one of my writing gods, John Crowley, wrote tantalizingly about it on his blog, so I bought a copy on one of my next bookstore trips. I spent a good part of this March and early April finally reading it, and oh, what a page turner! I love a good literary biography, and I've particularly enjoyed those about my favorite women authors.

Some of my favorite biographers are Hermione Lee who wrote about Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton -- all very smart and well done; the late Julia Briggs also wrote a life of Woolf that I liked very much; Jan Marsh's Christina Rossetti and Juliet Barker's The Brontes are standouts.

First of all, I always thought Edna St. Vincent Millay was a grand name for a poet, and I love lyric poetry of her type and her era. But really, I didn't know that much about her life. I suppose I imagined one of those faintly patrician New England families who sent their daughters to schools like Vassar in the 2os. I was quite wrong about at least one of those assumptions. She went to Vassar alright, but as a "special case" with money drummed up by an interested benefactor on the strength of the poetry she had already written as a young woman and published.

Born in rural, coastal Maine, Millay and her two sisters were daughters of a single mother -- the imposing Cora Buzzell Millay, who had sent her ne'er-do-well husband packing (he is a very pathetic figure in the biography) when the girls were very young, despite the fact that they were quite impoverished and existed very much at the margins of society, where only helpful family members and her own employment kept them with a roof over their head and food to eat. My sympathy was won when reading about how the very young Edna had to keep house and take care of her sisters when her mother was working as a nurse in remote locations -- often for weeks, if not months at a time. It was Edna who had to buy and ration the food that was bought from the money sent home by their mother; who kept the girls groomed and dressed; who made sure everyone went to school and did their homework -- not the most poetic existence in the world. But that is part of what makes her story so extraordinary.

Milford's book is really masterful. Not only does she write well and lucidly, the research is impeccable. While I'm always impressed with how the best biographers can create a vivid life of someone long gone -- except for the written records left behind (often scant and of some far more secretive subjects than others), one of the joys of this book are the little vignettes that Milford includes of her conversations (and negotiations) with Edna's only living sister, Norma Millay, the keeper of the flame, and the gatekeeper of all things to which one might want to gain access if one were writing a biography. Norma died in 1986 and the biography was published in 2001, so that gives some idea of how long Milford was at work on her subject.

Norma seems somewhat Sphinx-like, careful of her sister's reputation, devoted, but also sly, hinting at just enough to lead a scholar on, but then slamming the door shut knowingly and playfully, just when too much might be revealed. For example, she tells Milford some of the things that she destroyed, including one "indiscreet" letter and also some film, pornographic in nature, if she is to be believed (and it's certainly no stretch, considering all the rest of the evidence for Edna's adventurous sexual life) of Edna and her husband Eugen -- home movies, if you will.

There's also something faintly creepy about Norma. Here's one bit Milford includes, in which Norma is showing her some relics from their girlhood:

"But look what Mother made for us," Norma said, as she lifted out of a trunk three identical porcelain-faced dolls -- identical except for their hair. One was dark, and one was blond, and one was fiery red. Norma asked me if I wanted to hold them, and I didn't. They seemed to me spooky, lying in their old muslin clothes, but their hair was real, all right, and richly colored, and dead.

When I said that I found the dolls macabre, Norma thought I meant dirty. "No, Nancy, the hair was washed. Mother washed our hair before she used it." Here was some fragment of their real bodies and Norma wanted me to touch them as she fondled their hair, as if they were relics. I recoiled from them as if they were tiny pieces of flesh.

Just a whiff of the Gothic there, yes?

Edna was a rock star in her day -- back when poets could still have that kind of impression on the popular mind -- she did extensive reading tours at the height of her fame, including my burg of Louisville, KY (of which I'm sure the local newspaper records are readily available -- I just need to dig them out), where she packed the houses and left reporters rather breathless in their wonderment at her voice, her theatrical style of reading, her flaming red hair, and romantic gowns. It must have been quite something to see. She was the New Woman -- a modern, outspoken, fully emancipated woman, and artist, who drove both sexes equally to distraction, and took advantage of every conquest.

Marriage didn't stop the love affairs, and one of the many fascinating aspects of her life, is the way her husband Eugen fitted himself to Edna's needs. At first he seems like the subservient nursemaid, always guarding her fragile health and time, providing her comforts (thought not necessarily the money for them), her opportunities for extracurricular activities, and then it all takes a turn in later years, when he is feeding her addictions (albeit with the best intentions) and isolating her almost exclusively to himself -- a source of great conflict for Norma and the younger sister, Kathleen.

Rather than re-tell the entire life here in a blog post, I wholeheartedly recommend that you acquire the biography, which to me, reads like a good novel anyway. And, in a weird little personal anecdote of my own, I'll close with how, when I was burrowing through my bookshelves, I found my first editions of some of Millay's poetry -- collected when I was still in graduate school, although Millay wasn't part of my studies at all. At the same time I also collected some other poetry of that era, including a complete Robert Graves (who was part of my research). Idly flipping open the flyleaf of Graves, I found it inscribed by none other than William Rose Benet -- brother of Stephen Vincent, husband of the poet Elinor Wylie, both of whom were close friends of Edna's. The book had been in William's possession -- it had his address on a little bookplate in the corner, in addition to his signature. I had never once took any notice of it before, but the name rang a bell this time because I had just been reading about him in Milford's book. Weird, eh?

So I'm not sure what I'm on to next. Poetry now calls my attention, but maybe something completely different, too. It's about time for a science break. I'm thinking about turning my brain to goo with some physics by Brian Greene. Has anyone read The Elegant Universe?

Hunchback

2011-03-15T21:08:00.007-04:00

I can't quite get away from Paris in my reading -- now that I have a trip actually planned and on the calendar, I've been rather obsessed with the city. I read Hugo's Les Miserables years ago, so decided next to read Notre Dame de Paris, better known stateside as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Of course, everyone is familiar with the basic strokes of the story, but finally reading it for myself, I was struck by how much Notre Dame, and all the ideas it represents for Hugo, is, in fact, the main character of the novel. And as relentlessly tragic as the story is, the one uplifting thing about it is that the magnificent cathedral still stands. Hugo might have decried its degraded state after the Revolution (and the rest of Paris's "new" architecture), but the fact that it has been preserved -- and I can go climb up into its towers this spring -- is pretty amazing.

Much like Melville's lengthy excursions from the plot of Moby Dick, Hugo indulges in long passages about the history of Notre Dame, the geography of the city, and the arcana of the hermetic knowledge ostensibly sealed up in the very stones of the city's buildings. I enjoyed these excursions much more than I did the detailed description of everything you never wanted to know about the sperm whale industry in the nineteenth century; in fact, the long chapters of Book III, divided into "Notre Dame" and "A Birds-eye View of Paris," are probably my favorite parts of the book.

Notre-Dame de Paris is a particularly curious specimen of this variety. Every face every stone, of the venerable structure is a page not only of the history of the country but also of the history of art and science....One might believe that there were six centuries between the doorway and those pillars. Alchemists themselves find in the symbols of the main entrance a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the church of St.-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyphic....This central and fertile church is a sort of chimera among the ancient churches of Paris; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the trunk of a third, and something of them all. (Modern Library ed., Catherine Liu transl.)

Hugo breathes life into the medieval city and peoples it with characters that seem straight out of Chaucer -- the beautiful and otherworldly gypsy Esmerelda, frightful Quasimodo, ridiculous poet and goat-lover Gringoire, Sack Woman, and the hideously twisted Archdeacon Claude Frollo. One doesn't really feel great affection for any of these characters -- they seem too stylized in their various modes, like figures in a mystery play, but in their pitiable fates, they seem most human. That awful image from the perspective of Quasimodo as he views the hangman sliding down the rope to fall on Esmerelda's frail shoulders is truly sickening (I think I also remember this violent scene in one of the movie versions).

Any time Hugo is describing Quasimodo in the cathedral, the novel really soars -- it is the marriage of the Hunchback to his natural habitat and to his bells that is so moving. And here is the iconic scene of him snatching Esmerelda from her executioners the first time they attempt to hang her as a witch:

Suddenly, when the executioner's assistants were preparing to obey Charmolue's order, he climbed across the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his feet, knees, and hands, glided down the facade like a drop of rain down a pane of glass, ran up to the two men with the swiftness of a cat that has fallen from a roof, knocked both of them to the ground with his enormous fists, and bore off the gypsy on one arm, as a girl would a doll. With one bound he was in the church, holding the young girl up above his head and shouting with a terrific voice, "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" This was all done with the speed of lightning.

History lessons

2011-01-30T21:58:00.009-05:00

One of my regrets from college is that I neglected to at least minor in History. Instead I mucked around in Business (thinking it would somehow be good for me). Oh, how I rue the time sucked away by Accounting and Economics -- I finally had the good sense to bail on Marketing and leave business admin behind forever. But I also took a bunch of mass comm classes, a smattering of drama, and a couple of upper level history classes, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Had I had a better focus, I could have double-majored in English and History. Of course, this has no practical implications -- I just would have enjoyed the course work more, and maybe had a better grounding for much of my later reading.

As fiction goes, although I enjoy all kinds, nothing beats really fine historical fiction for its power to completely immerse me in another world. I like having very specific moments and places to anchor the author's imaginative work. My favorite writer of the moment is Hilary Mantel. Last winter, I devoured Wolf Hall about the career and life of Thomas Cromwell in the service of Henry VIII, and just recently, I read her novel, A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution and its prime movers and shakers, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton. Of course, there's a lot of "artistic license" that must go into these works of fancy, so I often follow up with a non-fiction counterpart, as when I read Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game after Kipling's Kim.

My only complaint about Mantel is that I find myself a bit deflated when I finish her books -- they are that engrossing for me -- and I dither for a long while on what comes after. Fortunately, my husband made a great recommendation -- going in a completely different direction -- Gary Wills' Pulitzer-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. I haven't finished it quite yet, but it's excellent. It's not that long ago that I finally read Shaara's Killer Angels and, as luck would have it, even more recently, some classical Greek literature.

One of Wills' primary goals is to refute the notion that Lincoln just jotted down some casual, off-the-top-of-his-head remarks while on the train to the dedication, a notion that has stuck in popular American myth. Wills begins by illustrating how Lincoln structured the Address on the model of classic Greek funeral speeches, most notably that of Pericles of Athens. In following chapters, Wills has traced the most important influences on the speech, including the role of the Victorian "culture of death," the rural cemetery movement, Transcendentalism, and Lincoln's view of the of the primacy of the Declaration of Independence as THE founding document of the United States, rather than the actual Constitution -- the true spirit of the American experiment as compared to the law that was created (with its flaws) out of it. It's completely fascinating.

Here's the text, if you'd like to revisit:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Reading fail - The Man Without Qualities

2011-01-01T17:13:00.004-05:00

My ambitious book for the winter was going to be Robert Musil's masterpiece, and when I read the first few chapters, I thought it was going to be a success, but at 150 pages or so in, I'm throwing it overboard. I thought it would be one of those rich, expansive, epic stories similar to War and Peace, but...it's no War and Peace.

It has so far been a series of character sketches, and while finely drawn, there just isn't enough interaction, dialogue (but lots of inner monologues), or plot to keep me going -- not for three volumes (never finished!) anyway. I know that it is supposed to be a detailed portrait of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the Great War and the cultural and intellectual life of the characters, but I just don't have the patience to read about what everyone is "thinking" all the time, without its being tied to some actual feeling. Tolstoy rolls out his characters and they immediately come to life, and he manages to explore ideas and important historical moments while still engaging and entertaining the reader. I'm not really getting that from Musil. So I'm starting my new year by refusing to slog through a Proustian-length novel that isn't going to hold my interest.

Oh well, sometimes you're just not in the mood for certain books. I might be diving into Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety about the French revolutionaries, especially fitting since I hope to visit France later this year.

Backsliding, sort of

2010-11-30T22:14:00.005-05:00

I was just looking back over my reading journal, which has slowly gone from an actual physical journal I keep, to being supplemented by this blog, to being almost entirely electronic. I'm not sure I like this transition, but I find it hard enough to keep up even online, plus my reading seems to dwindle more each passing year. For one thing I am reading books that tend to be much longer and denser, and I've had a lot less free time on my hands since this spring, when I started doing music writing on the side.

I spend many evenings doing research, listening to new music, and going to shows and writing reviews. I've seen some pretty cool stuff and got a chance to talk to some musicians that I really admire. It was surreal to chat with Gordon Lightfoot, for example. I've also discovered some great singers and songwriters (for myself, I mean, not "launched their careers") like Joe Pug and Vandaveer. I also enjoyed getting to see and review all of Kentucky Opera's season this year -- I Pagliacci/Cavalleria Rusticana, The Elixir of Love, and Madame Butterfly. Speaking of surreal, I also found myself in the photo pit snapping pictures of Justin Bieber. That was weird. But.. I digress.

I've been meandering through my anthology of classical lit -- I'm only up to Aeschylus -- and although I'm moving pretty slowly, I enjoy it when I get to settle down long enough to read through a section. I definitely would enjoy reading Herodotus more thoroughly, and Pindar's verse. But, I think I'm ready for another novel, and the only question is whether it's going to be something I've had lying around for awhile or embarking on the big winter project of Musil's A Man without Qualities. It may not be time for that one quite yet. I could join my brother in tackling Anna Karenina. Tolstoy always seems right for winter...or I could make myself finish Helprin's Winter's Tale, which I sputtered out on in July. It was obviously not a good match for the season.

This week, however, I'm all about food, so it won't be decided. I'm hosting a holiday party and I spend an inordinate amount of time planning my dishes, my shopping, my prep, and getting all crafty like Martha Stewart (in my dreams).

Reading the classics

2010-11-08T21:32:00.005-05:00

On a whim, I read an early John Updike novel called The Centaur, which is partly a retelling of the myth of Chiron, the wise and gentle centaur of Greek myth, who was a a willing sacrifice to the gods to expiate the sin of Prometheus. In the novel, Chiron is high school science teacher George Caldwell, who also coaches the swim team, a lovable loser, convinced of his own inferiority, but devoted to his seventeen-year-old son, Peter. The novel covers three winter days in Pennsylvania in 1947, alternating between Peter's realistic perspective (recalled as an adult) and the third-person prose that weaves the traditional and mythic narrative of the characters and events. In this, as in all of Updike's novels, there is poetry intermixed with the gritty details of the mundane. He describes a gathering winter storm:

The town of white roofs seems a colony of deserted temples; they feather together with distance and go gray, melt. Shale Hill is invisible. A yellownes seeps upward. From the zenith a lavender luminosity hangs pulseless, as if the particular brilliance of the moon and stars had been dissolved and the solution shot through with a low electric voltage. The effect, of tenuous weight, of menace, is exhilarating....Upward countercurrents suspend snow which then with the haste of love flies downward to gravity's embrace; the alternations of density conjure an impression of striding legs stretching upward into infinity. The storm walks. The storm walks but does not move on.

Reminded of how I always loved Greek mythology, and feeling the lack of an actual classical education, in which I would have picked up at least a smattering of Greek or Latin and read some of the great philosophers, I checked out Bernard Knox's Norton Book of Classical Literature to ease my way into some of the ancient writers. I've read Homer and Virgil and some of the plays, but going back into these unfamiliar poems and essays, it's been marvelous to recognize again, how timeless the writing is -- how common the concerns are and how "modern" they sound still, these fragments and scraps from centuries before Christ and Rome's grandeur. I keep coming across little gems that I want to post here, which I'll try to do in the next few days.

Lorrie Moore

2010-10-19T21:49:00.004-04:00

My days seem to get busier and busier and that pushes reading into further little corners and short bursts of time. We recently vacationed in San Francisco and Sonoma, but about all I managed to read even then was a wine list (that's me chilling my toes on the Pacific beach, satisfyingly tiny and distant on the strand).

Flying makes me restless, so I tend to flip through magazines and look out the window -- I can't concentrate on a book. So even though I carried Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs along for the ride, I didn't actually crack it until I got home again.

Years ago, I read Birds of America, and remember liking the stories a lot, although I couldn't tell you much about it now. I just remember that they were clever, humorous, and had a unique voice. This novel is narrated by a Midwestern college girl named Tassie Keltjin, who gets a regular babysitting job for a rather mysterious yuppie couple adopting a mixed-raced child. Tassie is a cool narrator who plays her cards close to the vest, slow to react, and something of a loner, although not entirely by choice. The novel seemed to take a meandering track, often Victorian in its attention to mundane details of physical description, and although I thought it was oddly paced, the writing was good and often funny.

There were a few moments when things the characters said sounded a bit false -- and sometimes Moore went on a little too long, making satirical fun of some of the self-consciously liberal-political "support group" back-and-forth that formed several scenes. However, unlike most novels that I love for the first three-quarters only to find that they flop for me in the end, this book did the opposite. Maybe not even the last quarter, but the last 50 or so pages, I found completely mesmerizing -- forcing me to stay up way past my bedtime to finish it. When things suddenly got weird -- if not surreal -- Moore seemed to slide into another gear.

You find out why the rather eccentric couple is so mysterious, Tassie's boyfriend's true colors are revealed, and then tragedy strikes, and the way Moore handles all of this serves to make the story much more expansive, poignant, and even rather disturbing.

Now, on to other things, but I don't know what. With my schedule, I think I need to stick with some quicker reads for awhile yet.

Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game

2010-09-30T21:10:00.005-04:00

I was led to this history of the struggle for central Asia by reading Kipling's Kim. In studying a lot of Victorian literature, I had a glancing knowledge of what was involved in the Great Game shenanigans and the Afghan Wars, but I'd never read anything specifically focused on the history. Hopkirk's book is a great overview of the major actions from the late 18th century through the beginning of the 20th century.

Fascinating, thrilling, and completely maddening, never has so much been lost for so very little. This was the Cold War pre-game with Russia and Britain thrusting and feinting, waging war by proxy, and sending ridiculous official memos to one another, but never actually coming to blows directly. One would push too far (usually Russia), then the other would finally threaten to retaliate, and somebody would back down, but not of course, until they had seen many hundreds, if not thousands of people die in whatever madness they had lately been pursuing. The painting above memorializes one such enterprise.

When the Afghans drove out the British garrison in Kabul in 1841, 16,000 soldiers, some family members, and camp followers were set upon in the Gandamak gap and massacred just about literally to a man. A few of the native soldiers managed to slip away to the caves, but only one seriously wounded military doctor reached the Jalalabad Gate, where the next British outpost was located.

I amused myself this afternoon by visiting some of the spots on Google Earth, which made the whole thing that much crazier. Hopkirk tries his darndest to describe how desolate, remote, forbidding, and dangerous the landscape is, but nothing quite does it justice. Google Earth made me feel kind of nauseous as I zoomed virtually down into the Khyber Pass or into Chitral. It's rocks people. Big, jagged, up and down rocks with inordinately fierce people climbing out to slit your throat for you, then as now. I am by no means criticizing the Afghan people, who have been beset on all sides for nearly their entire history -- and people will simply NOT STOP coming in to mess with them.

To what extent did we (the general Western "we") create the Taliban? That is a question that begs asking. Of course, there is all the complicated strategic and political "reasoning" behind the Western powers clashing over Afghanistan. No one really wants it for itself (although these days, mineral resources are probably more of consideration), but it just happens to be on the way to places and things that people do want. I'm no political analyst or foreign policy expert, of course, but the whole thing does look rather insane from a certain viewpoint.

There are great illustrations throughout -- mostly of the cast of characters over the years -- soldiers, adventurers, spies, khans, shahs and various potentates. The story can pretty much be boiled down to the captions: "hacked to death by a Kabul mob," "paid for with his life," "assassinated," "beheaded," "slaughtered," "massacred"... You get the picture. And yet, there was never a shortage of men willing to pose as horse traders, wandering holy men, or snake oil salesmen and venture off to the back of beyond, just on the off-chance they wouldn't be thrown into a foul pit, pushed off a minaret tower, hacked and dismembered, or have their head paraded through town on a pike. Oh, and that's if they actually made it to their destination without starving, freezing, taking ill, or being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Seriously, these people needed some reality TV and Farmville to sap their dreams of grandeur.

Now, you shouldn't assume that I didn't entirely enjoy the telling of this history. It's just that it's so mind-boggling in its waste and utter hubris. That and the fact that I woke up this morning, after finishing the "final" chapter last night to this story: "Signaling Tensions, Pakistan Shuts NATO Route." Love the inset map. Holy crap.

The Great Game

2010-08-23T23:28:00.004-04:00

I finished Rudyard Kipling's Kim. For a long while I found Kim a bit annoying in his smugness, but I warmed to the character through the relationship with his lama, to whom he remained so loving and devoted in what seemed a very un-British way. I also enjoyed Kipling's descriptions of the landscape and the culture of pre-partition India; whatever one may think of his imperial attitude, you get the feeling that his connection to this place and time was very deep and something close to his heart and identity.

I have only a nodding acquaintance with the Great Game intrigues that move the plot and found the details hard to follow, so as one book always leads me down the rabbit hole to the next, I just got Peter Hopkirk's history, The Great Game, from the library to help me out. I always find myself wanting a map when I read novels like this. It's funny to read those place names -- Lahore, Peshawar, Kashmir -- and think how little has changed. The players have changed only nominally. The West is still trying to gain control in a place that has never in its history been tractable to outsiders, whether it was the British, or the Russians, or the Americans. Fascinating? Depressing? Will we ever manage to untangle ourselves from that formidable landscape and complicated past?

Kipling had his idealized Kim, master of all those "Asiatic" mysteries, leaving his adult future, mercifully, to the reader's imagination. And we have the sad story of Pat Tillman as our modern-day pawn in yet another iteration of the Great Game. I know that history and the current political situation are too complex to boil down into such easy parallels -- still, it is poignant to have one in mind while reading the other. It reminds you that Kipling is not just some dusty, old Victorian writer who's strictly out of mode, but in fact, someone who still has something meaningful to say to the 21st century reader.

Summer vacation?

2010-08-03T22:49:00.005-04:00

I've done some fun stuff this summer and traveled over a few long weekends, but I haven't had a chance to have one of those lay-about extended vacations, sipping cold drinks by the water and catching up on my reading. It's been very active -- squeezing in chores between dashing in and out, picking up food on the way home, and not having nearly as much of a social life with my pals.

We had two major music festivals in Louisville in July, both of which I was covering as part of my side job as a music writer/reviewer for Louisville.com. It's usually much more loose, where I can spread out the shows I'm going to see, but last month everything was packed together. The highlights have been getting to see The Flaming Lips, She & Him, Dwight Yoakam, and Loretta Lynn -- plus interviewing one of my favorites, Tift Merritt (below). I've got a little breather to gear up for a sprinkling of fall shows and the upcoming Arts season. After scrabbling around, dirty and sweaty in the outdoors, it will be paradisical to sit in cool, comfy auditoriums watching the opera and the orchestra.

Meanwhile, I had the Amen corner of family birthdays to attempt to remember -- two nieces, my husband, and both my parents. Whew!

Reading and everything else has taken a hit. I started Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, but bogged down somewhere in the Second Part. When I get distracted from a book for so long, it's hard to get back into it. Plus, I get bees in my bonnet about other things in the meantime. I've been learning about telescopes and trying to brush up on astronomy, so I was in the mood to read something related. I found Simon Singh's Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and zipped right through it. It was really fun to read, but very thorough and methodical at the same time. I have a hard time wrapping my head around a lot of the math and science -- not to mention the mind-blowing concepts -- but he actually did a fine job of boiling it down to my level. Thank god for people who know how to use analogies, graphics, and charts to explain things to people like me.

Time. Space. Space-Time. It kind of makes the stupid crap I wade through on the Internet and TV everyday seem...well, like the stupid crap it is. I think that would be notated Stupid¹².

Next on my reading list are books picked up from the library today: Farenheit 451 (which I don't think I ever read -- or I will remember on approximately page 112 that I read it in 10th grade) and some Kipling -- The Light that Failed and Kim, which takes places between the 2nd and 3rd Afghan Wars (the British version). Those Afghan wars just never seem to go out of style.

China Mieville: The City and the City

2010-05-31T21:15:00.007-04:00

One nice thing about the Memorial Day long weekend is that it allowed me to finish The City and the City that I bought last week. While I used to plough through books in two or three days on a regular basis, I don't generally have that kind of time any more. I read it rather compulsively, and it leaves me feeling irrationally guilty that I haven't discovered this author earlier.

Mieville gets stuck in the genre fiction ghetto because he writes in the sci-fi/fantasy realm; in fact, he has won the U.K.'s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction three times, which I believe is a record. But I wonder how it is that he's not being at least long-listed for Booker Prizes and the other premiere literature prizes?

I'm sure I've never read anything quite like The City and the City. That someone could conceive of such an intricate, psychologically and philosophically rich world, and then set a first-rate mystery-thriller into it leaves me rather slack-jawed. Is there such a genre as the existentialist noir crime novel of ideas?

I'm going to give you a little summary, but I'm telling you right now, it's not going to do it justice. Somewhere in contemporary Eastern Europe, two city-states border one another -- Beszel and Ul Qoma. The first person narrator is a career detective in Beszel, Tyador Borlu, of the Extreme Crime Squad. The story kicks off as he investigates the murder of a young woman, her body dumped at the edge of a skate park. Soon after he realizes that the crime involves not only Beszel, but it's foreign neighbor Ul Qoma, the stakes are raised considerably and a wider, shadier, conspiracy becomes apparent. Just why the conjunction of Beszel and Ul Qoma complicates Borlu's investigation so dramatically is something that you have to read the novel to understand.

The shadowy organization called Breach, which exists as a dark, all-seeing Big Brother agency somewhere between the two cities, finds and fixes "breachers"on both sides of the cities' borders. The powers of Breach are unknowable; but the rules it polices are rigid. It is one of the creepiest, coolest, fictional constructions that I've ever come across.

Mieville himself is an interesting dude, to say the least. Born in London, he has a degree in social anthropology from Cambridge, a Ph.D. in International Law from the London School of Economics, and also held a fellowship from Harvard. He's a Marxist who, as a member of the British Socialist Workers Party, unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the House of Commons in 2001. He's written six previous novels or novellas and he's only 38-years old -- one of those ridiculously talented upstarts that I seem to be running across more and more lately. Seriously, what's wrong with this younger generation?

As I've started to contemplate the rest of my annual summer reading list, I would definitely recommend this novel (just out in trade paper) to put at the top of yours. I'd love to hear what others think of this one. Mieville has a new novel coming out this month, but I'd like to go backwards and read some of his other books. He has stated that his goal is to write a novel in every genre. Of course!

Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends

2010-05-24T20:54:00.004-04:00

It's been almost two months since I've posted here. Spring always sneaks up on me -- all of a sudden, I have yard and garden work again, Derby festivities, and this year, I also picked up some fun side-work writing about live music for Louisville.com. Since April, I've been going to more shows, doing interviews with artists, and writing reviews, and I'm still getting used to the new schedule.

It has definitely cut down on my time with other things, although I did manage to follow up Romola with reading Ross King's history of the building of Brunelleschi's Dome, an architectural marvel which looms, literally and figuratively, over much of the history of Florence where Romola is set. I learned a little bit about architecture, and it included some great character studies of Brunelleschi and his artistic rivals. Anyone with an engineering bent of mind would probably enjoy reading about the practical challenges of building such an immense dome, the innovations it required, and the machines that had to be created just to hoist all that material up to the workers.

Right now, I'm reading the essays in Chabon's Maps and Legends, a witty, fun, and very illuminating collection about the act of writing, of reading, and of what fires the imagination. He pays close attention to the subject of "serious" literature as opposed to writing for mere "entertainment." By way of making his case for fiction that is both, he uses Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as an example, and argues against the rather patronizing attitude of critics, not to mention some readers and writers, toward fiction that gets labeled as genre writing for "entertainment" purposes -- mysteries, fantasy, adventure, and science-fiction.

I loved his essay on The Road by Cormac McCarthy, another example that he uses to extend his argument of serious vs. genre fiction. He posits that The Road is "allowed" into the serious literary fiction club, even though it treats a "fantasy" post-apocalyptic world, peopled by near-mythical figures, because McCarthy is already established as a literary writer and his speculative world hews close to accepted forms: "For the post-apocalyptic is also a mode into which mainstream readers may venture without risking the stain of geekdom."

The status of relative legitimacy enjoyed by the literature of global disaster may in part result from the fig leaf that a satirical or religious purpose provides, and from the congeniality to conventional realism of a world without supercomputers, starships, or eight-foot feline warriors from the planet Kzin.

Chabon obviously is not afraid of the stain of geekdom, as he spends quite a bit of time on comic books and what they have meant to him as a writer. One reason that I'm drawn to him is that he is able to put into just the right words, a lot of what I feel about the reading and writing of books. Of course, he goes the extra step of actually putting those thoughts into practice by writing brilliant, entertaining fictions.

Savonarola's end

2010-04-01T21:34:00.006-04:00

I have finished Eliot's Romola. One of its criticisms, and a reason that it is not considered one of her major novels, is that her fictional characters are overwhelmed by the political and historical character of the novel. Girolamo Savonarola dominates the last third. The heroine Romola has come under his bracing influence in the wake of her miserable marriage; her husband's numerous betrayals include plotting against the infamous prophet; and the last act of the novel concerns the events that lead to his excommunication and public execution for heresy.

Eliot examines minutely, not only Romola's crisis of faith as her moral compass fails her in a very public way, but also Savonarola's failure to live up to his fiery sermonizing. Was he a poser or was he in earnest? He had declared to the people that God would intercede on his behalf to prove his prophecies were true. The people took him at his word. And when he ran afoul of the Pope, whose corruption he excoriated, his followers were eager to witness Savonarola's miraculous rescue when subjected to a trial by fire. Unfortunately, he was not so convinced:

Not that Savonarola had uttered and written a falsity when he declared his belief in a future supernatural attestation of his work; but his mind was so constituted that while it was easy for him to believe in a miracle which, being distant and undefined, was screened behind the strong reasons he saw for its occurrence, and yet easier for him to have a belief in inward intuitions; it was at the same time insurmountably difficult to him to believe in the probability of a miracle which, like this of being carried unhurt through the fire, pressed in all its details on his imagination and involved a demand not only for belief but for exceptional action.

Eliot investigates the psychological burden of a figure such as Savonarola, neither condemning him entirely, or holding him up as a martyr. This is the dilemma Romola faces; she has invested in Savonarola's message of purity and goodness as an example for her own life, when she had nothing more to cling to, but when faced with having that last belief stripped away, where does that leave her? Here is her (and Eliot's) humane and compassionate conclusion:

Whatever falsehood there had been in him, had been a fall and not a purpose; a gradual entanglement in which he struggled, not a contrivance encouraged by success.

In Eliot's progress as a writer Romola occupies the space between her earlier triumphs (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss) and her later masterpieces (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda). I'm glad to have filled this gap. I can definitely see the more refined expressions of ideas she explored in Romola that turned up in more artful ways in the latter two novels, particularly Deronda. Romola, almost too saintly in her suffering, becomes the more deeply flawed, yet still beautiful, Gwendolyn Harleth in Deronda, with Daniel assuming Savonarola's role of moral compass for her even as he struggles with his own mysterious identity and mission as a Jew in Victorian Britain.

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which as been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness. (Daniel Deronda)

More from Romola

2010-03-24T21:26:00.006-04:00

I'll be the first to admit George Eliot is not for everyone. As a rule, she does not write short novels; she doesn't cut to the chase or read like a screenplay. She unwinds one flowing sentence after another, building by slow accretion a character's rich psychological profile. Step by step, the plot unfolds, motivations are explored, the fates of the players are intertwined, and never, never is Eliot in a rush to make things happen.

So, you have to enjoy the subtle beauties of her language, the shadings, the foreshadowings, the drift of fine detail that creates an entire imaginative world. But then. Where everything has been advancing tick-tock, tick-tock, there comes a point when it all accelerates, the tensions that have been hinted at before suddenly intensify, and for me at least, the decorously-paced story becomes the page-turner. Or, as I said to my husband in much less refined terms, the shit really hits the fan. I'm just past that point now. Not only are the fictional characters headed for reversals, but the historical ones are as well. Now the revolutionary leader Savonarola -- the crusading Domenican priest Fra Girolamo -- is coming to power in Florence after the downfall of the Medeci's in the French-Italian wars. There will be book-burnings and there will be blood!

One of the chapters just finished is called, "A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens." Tito Melema, husband of the titular beauty Romola, continues his downward spiral into lies and betrayal, just as his political star is rising in the new power structure of Florence after the Medeci have been expelled. He is dining with the most powerful men in Florence, while at the same time being confronted by the one man who knows all of his darkest secrets and who seeks to expose him. Here, we come to another of Eliot's uncanny strengths: as a Victorian woman writing about fifteenth century Florence, she possesses a peculiarly timeless understanding of what makes people tick.

See if any of this sounds familiar: a young, handsome, silver-tongued politician on the rise, seems outwardly devoted to his wife, but in fact has betrayed her and fathered a child out of wedlock, and now faces exposure and disgrace. He is willing to say or do anything to weasel out of it. Also, a cynical political party, currently out of favor, is willing to latch on to a popular conservative movement led by an evangelical to retain their grip on power. (Georgie girl, I hope you're getting a load of this.)

I could quote the entire chapter, but of course, that's not feasible, so I'll just pick out a bit of it for your amusement. The Frate is the conservative priest, Girolamo Savonarola, and this comes from the speech of one of the richest men in Florence to his cronies:

"We might have done without the fear of God and the reform of morals being passed by a majority of black beans; but that excellent proposition, that our Medicean heads should be allowed to remain comfortably on our shoulders, and that we should not be obliged to hand over our property in fines, has my warm approval.

"...And, for my part, I see clearly enough that the only safe and wise policy for us Mediceans to pursue is to throw our strength into the scale of the Frate's party. We are not strong enough to make head on our own behalf; and if the Frate and the popular party were upset, every one who hears me knows perfectly well what other party would be uppermost just now....

"A wise dissimulation," he went on, "is the only course for moderate, rational men in times of violent party feeling. I need hardly tell this company what are my real political attachments... This theory of the Frate's, that we are to have a popular government, in which every man is to strive for the general good, and know no party names, is a theory that may do for some isle of Cristoforo Colombo's finding, but will never do for our fine old quarrelsome Florence....the best thing we can all do will be to keep the Frate's flag flying, for if any other were to be hoisted just now it would be a black flag for us."

Wow.

Romola

2010-03-14T19:49:00.006-04:00

Picking a favorite author feels like picking a favorite child -- you feel a little slighting toward the others, but in your heart of hearts, there is the one. For me, that is George Eliot. While it used to be the case that Silas Marner was assigned in high school English classes, it was not in mine. (Our novels junior and senior year were instead The Scarlet Letter and Animal Farm. It was a less savage age when we had not yet completely given up on and betrayed our youth by assigning Dean Koontz and Anne Rice, as if the origins of those authors had never existed. But I digress.)

I didn't encounter Eliot until my college course on the Rise of the Novel, in which we read many books of formidable length, including Middlemarch. In fact, this is the same course in which I was supposed to have read Bleak House, and as recorded in this blog, finally finished it a mere 25 years later! As word-addled as I was between the Fielding, Eliot, Dickens, James, Sterne, et al. (confession: I never finished Tristram Shandy either; yes, it's on the repair list), I was engaged by Middlemarch. It wasn't just that I liked it, I admired it; it was so grand, so serious, and instead of being weighed down by its own substance, it was a fascinating, romantic story. I don't think anyone has ever taken such an intense look into the moral lives of her characters. And George Eliot was very concerned with moral decisions. She herself struggled with and ultimately rejected Anglicanism, and as a religious skeptic, she investigated the impulses that drove men and women to the acts that would either destroy them or settle them in an enlightened, useful, and happy life.

Since my first introduction, I've read through most of the Eliot oeuvre, including some of the short fiction, poetry, and her letters. Of the novels, only two remain for me -- Felix Holt and Romola, and I've just begun the latter, which is set in Florence, Italy in 1492. It is a departure for her; her other novels are set in her own Victorian time period, in England. This novel is an expression of her ambition and classical learning, a foray into historical fiction that most critics have numbered among her less successful attempts. Having just started, I can say only that it is awe-inspiring in its erudition. Oh, she delights in throwing around the Latin and Italian phrases, as well as her knowledge of classical literature, including Greek. This may not make for an engrossing novel on the level of Adam Bede, but it has its own charms.

Here, she describes the slow, moral descent of one of the novel's main characters in her wonderfully meticulous dissection of human frailty:

When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires -- the enlistment of our self interest on the side of falsity; as on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

Wintry Olympics

2010-02-28T13:30:00.007-05:00

I think one reason so many people have been fascinated with the 2010 Winter Olympics is that this season, more than ever, so many people on the U.S. east coast feel like they're competing in their own personal events: shoveling snow, sledding, and trying to get to work on icy roads after getting walloped by one storm after another. And what else are you going to do when there are snowdrifts up to your window eaves?

We've been luckier than most in the Ohio Valley. Winter has been mostly an aesthetic event with only a couple of messy days and no more than about six inches of snow at a time. Still, this winter has seemed longer, colder, grayer, and snowier than usual, and even though it's late February, it's hard to see that Spring is just around the corner. Today, the snow is gone, but again it's damp, cold, overcast and I've got some Nordic skiing on the t.v. to be followed by the big U.S. vs. Canada hockey final.

My own version of the Olympics has been carried out in the kitchen where I've been experimenting with my French cuisine, courtesy of Julia Child. I've never done much with fish, other than frying it or broiling it in the oven with very mixed results. It just seems like one of those things too hard to get right. So, the last two Saturdays, I've cooked fish poached in white wine. Last week it was Sole Bercy aux champignons -- sole fillets with scallions and mushrooms. Following Julia's recipe precisely, it came out perfectly, even the cream sauce. I was too harried to pause for a picture, but it was a beautiful dish. I served it with salad and buttered peas and a crisp Sauvignon Blanc.

I hadn't planned to do it again this Saturday, but they had some lovely salmon fillets on sale at Kroger, so I brought one home and tried another recipe. Again, I poached it in white wine with a dice of celery, onion, and carrot for about 12 minutes. After draining off the juices and boiling them down, I whisked in several tablespoons of butter for the sauce...et voila!

And just because I was in there trying new things, I decided to practice my souffle-ing. For a side, I made one with gruyere cheese. One good thing about souffles is that they are simple from an ingredient standpoint -- flour, butter, milk, eggs with whatever sweet or savory flavor you're adding, in this case, shredded gruyere. The trick of course, is those pesky egg whites and getting them folded into the cooked sauce without deflating the mixture, and of course, the "puff." I had pretty good luck with this one. It was certainly tasty and had a nice, golden brown crust. We (the spouse and I) ate ALL of it, along with the fish and salads, and white Bordeaux. Too much!

A negative side-effect of kitchen Olympics is that if spring doesn't get here soon with warmer temperatures and outdoor activities, I'm going to need to lose about 15 pounds! On tap for tonight: lasagna. There's a real spa entree for you!

Chicken Big Mamou

2010-02-21T17:29:00.010-05:00

I made this dish the Monday before Mardi Gras. Mamou is one of my favorites from the Paul Prudhomme Louisiana Kitchen Cookbook, along with his jalapeno-cheddar yeast rolls. Both are great for a wintry day at home; fortunately it was a holiday, so I could spend the day watching it snow and puttering around in my kitchen -- this is especially important for bread baking and all the punching, rising, and shaping that goes along with bread from scratch.

Since I had all that time, I also took pictures of the cooking process -- always a great inspiration to get into your own kitchen and cook! The full Mamou recipe is readily available online if you Google it, so I won't include it here. I highly recommend the cookbook if you like Cajun cooking, or you can probably get it from your library.

Assemble all the ingredients for the two spice mixes -- one for the rich tomato sauce and one for the chicken rub.

I assemble the spice mixes in small bowls; as you can see, there are lots of onions, both white and scallions, chopped pretty fine. Oh, and butter. Lots of butter! It already looks good deconstructed.

Heaven on earth is a bunch of onions sauteeing in butter! This is the first step to the sauce -- one cup of white onion and minced garlic.

You add in tomato sauce, Worcestershire, spice mix, chicken stock, half the chopped scallions, tabasco, etc., and simmer for 40 minutes before adding the chicken. It smells so good!

I used about 2lbs. of chicken breast, cubed up. Mix it up with the rub mix (these are heavy on the pepper, as you can see in the first photo -- black, white, and cayenne. Saute in more butter along with the rest of the scallions until it's cooked through. It then goes into the sauce after its 40-minute simmer.

Add the chicken to the sauce. You'll be doing lots of tasting at this point. You may want to lap it straight from the pot but control yourself. It's hot! Cook the pasta and get a plate.

Ooo la la! On the plate with a fresh yeast roll.

Pick your prince

2010-01-20T17:58:00.009-05:00

I'm between books right now as I've just finished Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall. Often, after I read a really marvelous book, I know that the next thing is likely to suffer by comparison, so I have to put a little time in between. I was first introduced to this novel (I believe before it was published in the States) by Levi Stahl, who wrote so wonderfully about it that he made me eager to read it too. Even so, since one man's fabulous is another man's "meh," I didn't necessarily expect to love it.

For connoisseur's of both literary fiction and history, and also for more mainstream readers, Wolf Hall is a thorough pleasure. It follows the years of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence from an apprentice, of sorts, to the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, just at the time that Henry VIII started to rid himself of Katherine of Aragon in favor of Anne Boleyn to the apex of his power in England before the king's relationship with his second queen began to sour.

Mantel sticks close to the facts, wielding her impressive scholarship in service to her imagination and creating a fully-realized portrait, not just of Cromwell, but also the other historical figures who seem to live and breathe on the page with their contradictions, murky motivations, and unpredictability. Conversations, formal in the royal court, or whispered behind closed doors, snap with wit and realism.

One of my favorite characterizations in the novel is what she does with Thomas Howard (Duke of Norfolk and uncle to Anne) -- a frequent Cromwell adversary who only grudgingly comes to acknowledge "the son of a blacksmith's" power at court:

The duke is now approaching sixty years old, but concedes nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe-head; his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics; in tiny jewled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyr's bones....He thinks the Bible a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he understands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an affectation altogether, and wishes there were less of it at court. His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight. He does not see why it's a gentleman's business to write letters; there are clerks for that.

Mantel excels at presenting these entertaining and densely-packed descriptions, conjuring the Duke before you, and every time afterward that he appears, you bear that first impression in mind. When he comes "rattling" into the room, you remember those shards of martyr's bones, the impression both faintly comic and sinister at once -- and you feel you have his measure.

Reading Wolf Hall you are immersed in the world of Tudor England, its chamber pots and jewel-crusted gowns, the barges on the Thames and the grisly public executions. But of course, the real genius in it all is the portrait of Cromwell that emerges; a man so crucial in working out the tangle of separating England from the Roman Church and Henry from his wife; the man who was simultaneously loathed at court and in politics, but loved by family and his extensive household of valued servants.

One feels a little silly, falling in love with Thomas Cromwell, long dead and described as looking "like a murderer," but as I was re-reading Levi Stahl's musings on the book, he actually hit the nail on the head as to the attraction -- for males or females; it is "hyper-competence," a subject that my husband and I have discussed in just this context.

As Mantel notes in the book, Cromwell was said to have memorized the entire New Testament in Latin; he was adept in several languages and could out-talk the Devil; he knew a quiet, sure way to kill a man, if necessary, and he knew how to convince people that his ideas were really theirs. He knew the value of things and when asked by the women at home to describe Anne for them, could "price her out" from head to foot; he knew what was in England's coffers to the last farthing; he could shoe a horse, plan a meal for a cardinal, threaten a troublemaker into submission, and make a pair of peacock wings for his little daughter. He's not writing sonnets, swashbuckling, or laying wenches left and right, he's just tackling the everyday, alongside of parleying with kings and bishops. He's rather exhausting, and that seems to have been a common opinion of him.

The title of this post, "pick your prince," is a bit of the pragamatic wisdom of Cromwell, by way of Mantel's storytelling. There may be a number of contentious princes; you don't know which one will end up triumphing, who to suck up to; but if you're a smart and capable man, you'll pick your prince and make darn sure that he's the one who comes out on top -- and if it doesn't work out, you take the consequences. Taking risks and responsibility at the same time are sorely lacking in public life these days -- maybe that's a big part of the attraction as well.

This is quite long and I've still managed to leave out a lot of what's wonderful about this book. When I got toward the end and realized that Wolf Hall is the seat of the Seymours (family of another future wife for Henry) the foreshadowing gave me an inkling that this might not be the only novel Mantel intends to write about Cromwell. Very happily, she is, at least according to the Internet (ultimate trustworthiness), already at work on the next volume.

New Year's 2010

2010-01-02T23:21:00.006-05:00

My long holiday vacation is nearly over, and while we missed all the snow that was dumped elsewhere, the cold air has settled in for awhile. Once I got over the flurry of house cleaning early in the week, I made a trip to the library. After not reading much of anything for a couple of months, I read two novels quickly back-to-back: first, Rebecca Stott's literary mystery, Ghostwalk, and then Per Petterson's To Siberia. I really loved his previous novel, Out Stealing Horses. They were both good without being great, but it was a good way to kick-start my reading life in the New Year.

Now, I would have thought that I would read even more as I got older, but compared to the voraciousness of my younger self, the number of books has steadily dropped off, year-to-year. Of course, I no longer work in a bookstore, and I'm also much more restless and unfocused, as if I were aging backwards (though not physically, unfortunately). So this is what it's like to be an adolescent!

The other thing I've come to realize -- and reading these two perfectly satisfactory novels emphasized it -- is that I no longer take much pleasure in reading merely satisfactory books. At first it was just that I couldn't and wouldn't read bad writing or sloppy writing (which automatically disqualifies most, not all, popular fiction), and now my persnicketiness has ratcheted up to the point that I don't even want to read merely "pretty good" books. This sounds ridiculously snobby, but I prefer crankily discriminating. So, rather than bounce around from one thing to another that I don't really care about, I'm going to be very picky this year. Along with the ever-present five or ten pounds one is always trying to lose, I guess that's my resolution.

Winter Birds

2009-12-09T21:28:00.014-05:00

This afternoon I was working from home so I could meet the oven repairman for my gas range. It was a gusty day with the temperatures dropping on their way to the coldest point of the season tonight. I made sure to fill my feeders with seed and the birds flocked to them all afternoon, so I took some pictures of my regular visitors. At left is a chickadee, the most vocal and the tiniest.

Some of my favorite birds are the ones whose markings are the most subtle, like the junco and white-throated sparrow at below right. The WT sparrow has the obvious white patch at the throat, but so does a house sparrow. The difference is the little yellow eye dot, if you look closely, and the striped crown. The male house sparrow has a solid gray cap (no stripes) and a black "necktie" at the throat and breast. You can look at them side by side below at left. Juncos look like they're wearing a little black or gray frock-coat, the shades vary quite a bit. They have white breasts, obvious white outer tail feathers (best seen as they spread their tails in flight), and pinkish beaks. They are small and sparrow-like and stay mostly on the ground scratching around, rather than approaching the feeder. I saw one actually at the feeder for the first time only last week. I don't know what the big draw was. They are a bit more skittish than other birds -- quick to take flight when spooked, which unfortunately, I do often, because I'm always jockeying for a view.
In this group is another favorite -- the sweetest little songbird, the song sparrow. They're small and solitary; I almost never see more than one at a time, scratching on the ground, never at the feeder. When they're out on the power line in front of the house in summer they sing up a storm, a beautiful liquid, melodius trill. They have the same soft brown sparrow coloring but they are noticeably more streaked, all the way down on the breast. They also have a striped crown.
The more colorful varieties are very familiar, like the cardinal, although I, of course, like the muted colors of the female. They are very elegant, whereas the male is brilliant. Today I also got the titmouse and curious downy woodpecker, but I was not quick enough to snap the Carolina wren or nuthatch. I usually get two or three goldfinches, with as many as six scrapping with each other at the four-perch feeder.
While I've been completely too inattentive and distracted to read for the last month, I did take out my Christina Rossetti last night to read a few poems before bed. One of my favorites is "A Birthday" with the lines:

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot...

It's a very simple poem, but one of the most beautiful lyrics in the language. It reminds me of that song sparrow singing in the hedge in summer.

All Hallows

2009-11-01T19:48:00.006-05:00

When November 1 arrives, despite all the official season-ending dates, it really feels like the beginning of winter. The clocks turn back, the trees are half-stripped, and the birds are extra-voracious at the feeders. They are the bright spot in my winters. I enjoy feeding them and spying on them out the back windows. I highly recommend Cornell Ornithology Labs' Project Feederwatch if you like to watch your feeders anyway. You can count your visitors and send the data in to have your own little part in a science project.

The juncos haven't arrived yet, but the goldfinches and chickadees have been flocking to my feeders. I live in a suburban area with very little yard, but it really doesn't take much. The only problem is...squirrels. Darn their rascally hides! I'm convinced they're studying higher mathematics in the off-season, trying to figure out the best trajectory to gain access to my feeders. Sometimes when I see them staring fixedly at the tube feeder, I imagine little thought balloons filled with equations, charts, and diagrams.

Book Report
I read Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I liked it; it made me consider what I was doing at age 24. It wasn't publishing a critically-acclaimed first novel. It came out about the time I was finishing my undergrad degree and getting seriously sidetracked. He has the amazing work ethic of great writers. Being that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History several months ago, and it, of course, was published after Mysteries, it made me wonder what, if any influence, he might have had on that novel. They both feature a quirky, charismatic rogue's gallery of highly educated twenty-somethings, some pretending to be what they're not; sexual experimentation, if not transgression; buried secrets. Chabon is definitely more playful and Tartt darker, overall. It doesn't really mean much, except that one made me think of the other.

I believe I'm going to start a veritable mountain of a book -- Roy Jenkins' monumental biography of Winston Churchill. It looks fantastic, of intimidating learning and length. Perhaps, I'll attack it in parts, and read some novels in between.

Killer Angels & Generals

2009-10-07T21:44:00.006-04:00

I read Michael Shaara's great novel of the battle of Gettysburg. When I read a book like this I always wonder how I managed to put it off for so long. Even with the historical facts so familiar, it remains gripping, almost suspenseful, as if it might somehow venture into one of those "What If?" alternate histories that have popped up in recent years. What if Lee had listened to Longstreet's advice about withdrawing and finding better ground? What if they had heeded Hood's suggestion to try an attack on the Union rear instead of a frontal assault in clear view of Union artillery?

Shaara is brilliant with the portraits of Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain. It gets to the heart of those complex dualities of war that equally attract and repel: horror and beauty, baseness and nobility, loneliness and brotherhood.

I couldn't decide on a follow-up novel from the Shelf of Obligation so I started a book about Napoleon and Wellington by historian Andrew Roberts. I'm not cheating -- I couldn't actually fit all the unread books in this house in one bookcase! Roberts' focus is mostly on what the two famous generals said, thought, and wrote about each other before their first and only meeting at the Battle of Waterloo.

It's pretty entertaining and anecdotal, and apparently Roberts will go to great lengths to toss off some groaner puns. On Wellington burning his violin as a symbolic act before seriously taking up his military career: "Did he resolve to roam while his fiddle burned?" Dude! I have a feeling I'm going to find out more than I ever wanted to know about Napoleon's bout with hemorrhoids. But I bet he has a punny witticism lined up for that topic too.

Well, the weather has turned bright and crisp after a gloomy spell. Today I filled up my bird feeders after a summer of slackness. The birds usually let me know when it's time. All that chattering in the backyard takes on a distinctly nagging tone. Two chickadees came to the mostly empty finch feeder at the window and looked in as if to say, "Hey LADY! There's a nip in the air -- get it?" So I listened and bought the freakin' bird seed. Now I suppose the squirrels will start gnawing on my pumpkins, just to send the message home.

It's been raining since Summer ended

2009-09-25T23:32:00.004-04:00

Autumn is here, but there's no crisp, blue sky or gently drifting leaves. It has literally rained nearly every day and the leaves are driven down, clinging wetly to the brick patio and sticking to the windshield. There wasn't much of a transition from summer beach vacation (just a couple weeks ago now) and this mucky, humid, gloomy seasonal shift.

Right after I finished The Bluest Eye, at last report, I entered a restless, non-reading period, which I blamed on the unremitting bleakness of three novels in a row. It seemed my brain would only take glossy magazines and DVDs of The Wire for awhile. At the beach I began Orhan Pamuk's memoir/history of Istanbul to get me out of my funk. It was charmingly told -- an eccentric mix of autobiography, Istanbul minutiae, old photographs, and of course, Pamuk's chronicle of his family life and his relationship with the city itself -- a city he has never abandoned, its old glory faded, ruined in fact, pulled between East and West, the Bosphorous serving as gateway and mythic companion.

He explores the sense of failure and melancholy that hangs over Istanbul and its inhabitants -- something he calls huzun -- and reflects on how he has come to understand that deep sadness and accepted it as part of what he loves about it and what has nurtured him as a writer. He is playful, often funny, with terrific anecdotes of his family and his grandmother's museum-like rooms, his father's philandering, his "second life" and the imagined twin Orhan -- a happier, sunnier Orhan, who lives a charmed life elsewhere in the city.

I'm now reading a book that it seems I should have read long ago -- Shaara's Killer Angels. It really is inspired. Since I'm still in only the first third, I'll reserve further comment. And yes, I'm still working on that bookshelf by the bed.

Read 'em if you got 'em

2009-07-29T21:51:00.005-04:00

Like most book people, I have books all over the house that I've bought, borrowed, been given, hoarded and carried around from one house to another in boxes...but I still haven't read them. And, of course, I go on acquiring, reading some, but my acquisition outstrips my consumption. So, while mulling over what to read and changing my mind, or my mood, I decided to gather all those foundling children up from their corners and bookshelves all over the house, and I put them all in one bookcase by the bed. To read. What a notion!

So, now I have my cache of unread books, mostly fiction, but maybe a couple of non-fiction titles mixed in, and by god, I'm going to read those books before I get any more (okay, I won't return gifts!). I also decided to read rather randomly, so I've been kneeling in front of those two shelves, closing my eyes, and picking off whatever my hand landed on first.

I started with Continental Drift by Russell Banks, a book I had him sign for me when I worked at the local book store. I first read Rule of the Bone and later The Darling, and I really admire him, but he tangles with some intense material. I have to spread him out because of that. A couple of his novels were adapted into equally weighty movies, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction. CD was good and god-awful depressing. I was so relieved to finish it that I thought that might do me for Banks, but actually, I always meant to read Cloudsplitter about John Brown, so maybe just one more!

Next, Larry Brown's Dirty Work, which I just finished tonight. This was his first novel, and the only one I've read by him. It was really engaging -- a tragic story about two Vietnam veterans who meet up and trade stories in a VA hospital, one black and the other white, both from Mississippi. I loved the voices of the characters -- they seemed pitched just right -- earthy, funny, heartbreaking. Larry Brown died young, unfortunately, of a heart attack at age 54 in 2004. What I didn't know about him was that he was friends with one of my favorite musicians, Alejandro Escovedo, and even played with the band a few times. He also was friends and played music with fellow southern writer (and a very funny man), Clyde Egerton, who I also met at the bookstore where I hosted the authors who were doing the requisite PR reading/signing.

I immediately picked my next book, which will be Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I don't think I've read anything by her since Beloved. My new system is amusing me for the moment, anyway.

Summer time and the living is easy

2009-06-22T22:12:00.006-04:00

When I posted last in May, it still felt like spring -- some days were still quite cool and often highs were only in the 70s. Well, we spent no time at all hanging out in the 80s and now, post-Solstice, it is sticky, clingingly hot with big thunderheads looming every day. I've been watching movies in the AC (Star Trek and Up at the theater, recently Slumdog, Tell No One, Chinatown, and In Bruges at home), taking in baseball games, and reading a bit.

I read John Crowley's newest novel, Four Freedoms, which hearkens back to the style of The Translator, rather than that of the more mystical, speculative fictions of the Aegypt cycle or Little, Big. The latest is set during WWII on the domestic front and centers on a fictional wartime airplane factory, which Crowley places near the real Ponca City, Oklahoma.

It treats many themes that I spent so much time exploring in my Master's thesis on literature of the earlier world conflict -- the war's left-behinders -- the old, the crippled, and the female non-combatants. How did this world, suddenly drained of most of its able-bodied young men, look and feel to them? An entire country bent toward one purpose -- making war successfully -- is suddenly dependent on those marooned at home, those who, heretofore, mattered the least in a culture that more or less rigidly defined roles based on gender and physical ability. What a rich, topsy-turvy, and liminal world for a writer of Crowley's genius to look into.

What next? I have a copy of The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, which Levi Stahl is making sound so fun right now, and also The Lost City of Z. I've started neither, rather dipping into Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure and the Fitzgerald translation of The Illiad.

I've been listening to Phoenix's latest, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which I like a little more each time I play it, and Morrissey's The Quarry. And I'm completely enthralled with Okkervil River -- everything. They're at the top of my list for the band I most want to see next. They aren't exactly coming around to my neck of the woods anytime soon, but I'll keep an eye out.

Thinking about summer reading, part one

2009-05-07T22:52:00.011-04:00

I don't know that I read completely different books in the summer, but I always look forward to the annual "summer reading" specials in newspapers and on radio shows and hearing what everyone is recommending. I also just enjoy the idea of people slowing down to focus on books and the pleasure of reading for a change. It's easy to forget that not everyone has abandoned this simple and affordable leisure activity for movies, video games, and the Internet, not to mention, sexting. I hear that's big right now.

I worked in a bookstore for a long time, and one of the best things about it was turning customers on to new authors or forgotten titles. I've been thinking about some of my favorites and deciding which ones I would suggest as great summer reads. Personally, I tend to read more nonfiction and longer novels in the fall and winter -- my "project" reading. But in the warmer months, when I hope to hit the beach at least once, I load up on fiction, especially mid-length and shorter books that are easy to carry and that you can finish in an afternoon or two. So here's my list, in no particular order. I was going to do a sort of top 10 in one post, but I think I'll spread them out over the next couple of weeks. And I hope other readers out there (is there anyone out there?) will drop in and tell me about some of yours. I'm always in the market for recommendations -- non-fiction included.

Creepy

For some reason, I like a good creepy book when the sun is blazing; ghosts and murders and otherwise murky dealings are nice counterpoints to waves splashing and greasy sunblock prints on the pages. A big staff favorite from my days at Hawley-Cooke was Peter Cameron's Andorra. It's one of those quiet, subtly building stories in which you know there's something really sinister going on but you can't quite put your finger on it. Then, wham! it hits you between the eyes with a two-by-four. A very twisty tale, cleverly written.

Something similar: Dennis McFarland's A Face at the Window or Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods; and just about anything by Stewart O'Nan.
In a classic vein, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; Dracula; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Western (sort of)

I'm always trying to get people to read Willa Cather. One of my favorites is A Lost Lady, the story of the beautiful Marian Forrester told by a young admirer, Niel Herbert, who -- as he grows from a boy to a young man -- loses his romantic illusions about her. Niel's disenchantment mirrors the transition of the romantic, pioneering West (embodied by Marian's older husband, Captain Forrester) to the anti-heroic, grasping, and exploitative modern age. (Although, of course, I'm not suggesting that the latter three qualities only came in with the Modern era.) Two of my favorite writers of the West are Cather and Cormac McCarthy. I actually think they have a lot in common. This hit me after reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, which rather bizarrely kept bringing to mind Blood Meridian.

Longer and worth it: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Last Crossing; Wallace Stegner, The Angle of Repose

Romantic and exotic

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez may be my all-time favorite summer book. Just a few years ago both me and my husband read this one while at the beach. It's magical storytelling about a young girl whose strange upbringing and difference end up getting her into trouble with the local priests who think she is possessed by demons. The young exorcist, of course, falls madly in love with her. This is a short novel bursting with beauty, mystery, and otherworldliness.

Not anywhere near as wonderful, but still very good: It's been awhile since I've read any Isabel Allende, but I really enjoyed The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, and Of Love and Shadows.
Not Latin-American: The Map of Love by Ahdaf Souief -- a big multi-generational family saga and love story set in turn-of-the-century Cairo. Juicy.

That's it for now. And by the way, I provide Amazon links for easy reference, but I highly recommend your local, independent bookstores for new and used books.

Bleak House

2009-04-30T22:33:00.007-04:00

Maybe it's just that the Dickens I've read has been so spread out -- beginning at some point with A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities -- but I seem to forget from novel to novel how richly the characters are drawn and how funny he is. It's been quite a long time since I've read any Dickens, so Bleak House again surprised me.

One thing that struck me was how contemporary the social satire feels. I suppose people have hated lawyers ever since there have been lawyers, making this plot, which turns on a famous suit in the Chancery Court, immediately accessible to any reader awash in a sea of courtroom dramas and high-profile cases, where justice -- if it comes at all -- is too little and too late.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

The other primary target in Bleak House is the hypocritical do-gooders who are very interested in helping the miserable in far-flung places while ignoring the suffering close to home (Mrs. Jellyby); those whose chief interest is in lecturing the poor about their morals instead of offering material help (Mrs. Pardiggle); and those in power who argue about the problem but never do anything (Parliament). Meanwhile the destitute live evilly in slums like Tom-all-alone's:

In the midst of which dust and noise, there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom [personification of the poor] only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.

Some sections of the story are told in the first-person narration of the protagonist, Esther Summerson, a rather saintly character with mysterious origins and a lonely childhood, who becomes one of the wards of John Jarndyce -- a wealthy, older gentleman who is a party to the most famous and long-running estate battle in the Chancery Court: Jarndyce and Jarndyce. It is the sort of case that has become a joke in the creaking machinery of the judicial system -- one that has ruined and wasted lives already and will also swallow up the youth of Richard Carstone, a Jarndyce cousin also in the care of the benign John, along with a young female cousin, the beautiful Ada, to whom Esther is devoted.

The central mystery of the novel is Esther's parentage and tied to that mystery is a murder. Solving these and tying up the loose ends of Jarndyce and Jarndyce speeds the last third of the novel along and brings to the forefront one of the best characters, Inspector Bucket. While Dickens isn't credited with being the father of the detective novel, he ushers the genre in by creating one of the first fictional detectives. Polite to a fault, garrulous, and with eyes everywhere, Bucket reminded me of no one more than the t.v. detective Columbo. He even has the wife who is much talked of, but who never really appears in the foreground. I couldn't get Peter Falk out of my head as I read!

Dickens is known for being a little over-the-top in pulling the heart strings, but I have to admit, it worked on me at least a couple of times. One instance in particular was touching because it came so unexpectedly: from a character, so rigid and pompous revealing an amazing capacity for compassion and forgiveness. Dickens created some great stock characters -- all of one virtue or vice -- but he was most successful when characters were allowed to show those contradictory impulses and traits that make them more fully human.

Bleak House is simply a treat if you don't let its length put you off. It has inspired me to work my way through the Dickens' oeuvre eventually.

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company

2009-04-02T22:32:00.005-04:00

This is the rather clunky title of Brian Hall's novel of Lewis and Clark, which for simplicity's sake, I'll refer to here as Company. First of all, let me admit that I'm more ignorant of Lewis and Clark history than I knew, rather embarrassing since I live in Louisville, home of the Clarks, as well as the Filson Historical Society, which is one of Hall's resources. I had to get some non-fiction guides to clue me in to many of the facts and to help separate history from fiction (although sometimes the "history" is fuzzy enough to admit fiction).

As I wrote recently, one of my favorite contemporary novels is Hall's The Saskiad, as different from Company as it can be. I loved it so well that it pains me to say that I nearly gave up on this one near the beginning. I stuck with it, and I'm glad I did, although I do think it's flawed. But I will say that even the flaws are indicative of Hall's talent, which takes some explaining.

In The Saskiad, Hall found the perfect voice for the young girl -- so note-perfect that you fell right into the story. As they say in theater, he never broke character. In Company, this talent of Hall's becomes the novel's flaw for me. He has quite an illustrious cast of characters, based, of course, on historical persons, which is quite a thing to pull off, particularly if you're trying to establish that authentic voice for each one of them and tell the story through multiple perspectives. Unfortunately, he does it so doggedly that I sincerely wanted to strangle Thomas Jefferson with his own cravat and hold Sacajawea's head under the Missouri just so I wouldn't have to hear her tell the story. This is surely not a good sign with characters that I am inclined to admire!

This is what I mean: To illustrate Lewis' impatience for Jefferson's longwinded, fanciful, and learned monologues on nearly everything under the sun (while the hopeful explorer just wants to study the maps prior to the expedition), Hall unreels pages and pages of our forefather's verbal meandering. Oh, it produces the effect perfectly that he must have imagined it to have had on Lewis, but perhaps at the expense of the reader as well, who just wants to get on with the story a bit. This is a mere quibble of the impatient, thought I...until it came to be Sacajawea's turn.

Hall (as he says in his notes at the end) tried to approximate the native voice as much as possible, choosing vocabulary picked up from Shoshone language guides and supplying a sing-song, dreaming quality to her narration. And if his goal was to show that a non-English-speaking native woman of the plains inhabited a world entirely alien from us, then he certainly succeeded. The problem for me is that much of it is nearly incomprehensible. With great difficulty, I pieced together the story she was telling and even lazier readers than I would be tempted to skip ahead. This, combined with the "earthy" vocabulary used, repetitively, to describe her world and her experience just had an unpleasant effect -- it's a veritable storm of cunts, shit, fuck, dirt, vomit, etc. Now, this might be mere prudery on my part, except it had the same effect on me as the passage with Jefferson, which was all noble subjects and high-flown language. It just became exasperating -- a little too much of a good thing. I wanted brush strokes and got ax blows instead.

Now, I will say that her sections became less irritating as I went along; either I got used to the style, or it became less dense, mirroring her growing familiarity with the White Men and her new milieu. And of course, the bulk of the narrative is from the perspectives of Lewis and Clark, and both of these "voices" are very well done. Hall subtly communicates the genuine admiration these two had for one another, but also the streaks of impatience, pettiness, and jealousy that must have colored their relationship. And, most importantly, he avoids two yawning pitfalls the narrative could have sunk into. First, he did not romanticize Sacajawea into some Disney princess or overdo her as Feminist Icon (or God forbid, cook up some romance between her and one of the principles). He simply gave her her due; her story is extraordinary without embroidering it, even in fiction.

The other thing Hall didn't try to do was overwork the theory that Lewis may have had feelings for Clark that were not entirely platonic. There are some reasons to think this could have been the case, but it's speculation, and Hall wisely leaves the idea to float out there on its own as an intriguing possibility.

I ended up liking it better as I neared the end, but Company isn't as easy a recommendation as The Saskiad. Hall sticks close to the historical record, but creatively fills in the gaps and shows admirable restraint with some of the more complicated material.

Angels of Destruction

2009-03-26T22:13:00.006-04:00

Author Keith Donohue's story gets off to a quick start -- a knock at a lonely old lady's door in the dead of a winter night, a small, threadbare child standing in the cold. The woman is Margaret Quinn, a widow who has never fully recovered from the loss of her own daughter who ran away to join a revolutionary cult -- the Angels of Destruction -- as a teenager a decade before. The strangely knowing nine-year-old is either a runaway herself, or perhaps an angel, born of the woman's prayer to have her own daughter returned. There is a bit of ambiguity introduced as to the role of the girl, who stays with Margaret to be passed off as her grandchild in an elaborate ruse. But the novel definitely favors the supernatural identity of Norah, the waif, who can perform miracles that amaze her fellow third-graders and her best friend, Sean. Another darker, more sinister presence hovers in the background, always watching, insinuating himself among Mrs. Quinn's acquaintances, asking pointed questions about the mysterious Norah Quinn.

There is one brief mention of the name Noriel, which the dark, watching presence inscribes on a snowy windshield early in the novel, suggesting a link with Norah. I did not read up on my angel lore while reading this, but according to esotericaarchives.com, Noriel is the angel of the fourth month, which doesn't really shed any light on the plot, but maybe someone else knows more about this than I do.

Whether you think Donohue pulls off the supernatural part of the story or not, the novel is really about the unambiguously human characters -- awkward, fatherless Sean, lonely Margaret, and her wayward daughter Erica. The themes are familiar ones -- forgiveness, redemption, hope, faith. A novel like this, with one foot in the invisible and supernatural, invites comparison with someone like John Crowley, and it's sure to pale in that comparison. That's not really fair, of course -- it's like comparing every novel about a dysfunctional Southern family with Faulkner or every fishing tale with Moby Dick. My excuse is that I've actually been reading Crowley concurrently. That being said, I think Donohue has written a very engaging story with some minor flaws. I enjoyed it. I wanted to see how he wound it all up in the end, and how the characters fared. Here's a short quote to give you a little flavor of the story:

She was used to moving numbly through the desolation of her life. Like the survivors of momentous devastation, she patched her sorrow and moved on to some semblance of normalcy. And now the girl had come, and Margaret sensed the cracks in her will to abide nothing but the memory of her daughter. Everything, bad as it was, had been fine, bearable. But this morning, Norah had shattered the world.

Choosing one book among the thousands

2009-03-23T22:42:00.004-04:00

Oh, what exciting blog posts I come up with. This one is just me thinking out loud about what I'm going to read next, as I just picked up a couple of requests from ye olde library. In addition to the books I have in my home stash just waiting for the right moment, I've also been thinking of going on a tear through the Victorians (again).

From the library, I just picked up a brand new title that I saw reviewed in last week's NYTimes, Angels of Destruction, by Keith Donohue, whom I haven't read before; and also, Brian Hall's novel about Lewis and Clark, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, mostly on the strength of how much I loved Hall's The Saskiad. I connected with that book in a way that I've done with very few novels. While I wasn't reared in a hippie commune like the protagonist Saskia, I did have the same freedom of movement growing up in the country with lots of time to myself and indulgent parents who just let me lay about reading and fiddling with words. Like her, I was totally immersed in mythology and lived in my imagination, feeling like an outsider most of the time. I thought Hall completely nailed the funny inner life of an awkwardish, teen girl with a balance of humor, seriousness, and poignancy. It's been several years ago that I read it, and I would have to resort to my old-timey, handwritten book journals to fill in more details.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about Dickens and the Victorians, in general, after reading Eminent Victorians last fall. It's one of my favorite literary periods, home to one in my triumvirate of writer-goddesses, George Eliot (the other two being Austen and Woolf). I've read quite a lot of that company, yet with some rather enormous gaps -- not much Dickens (only A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations) and no Trollope at all. So, first on my list is Bleak House, which I was assigned to read way back in a "rise of the English novel" class in college, but skipped out on -- I was just too overwhelmed at the time to plow past that first twenty odd pages about the fog in London. But when I finish it, I can say it took me twenty-five years to read Bleak House!

I really cleared the decks to read War and Peace over the winter and didn't get distracted, but like most serious readers, I always have so many candidates crowding their way to the front! I'm usually interested in about fourteen things at the same time, but I've learned that I don't really enjoy trying to read more than one book at a time. (I might make a teensy exception, since I'm currently re-reading Little, Big.) So, I think I'll try the Donohue, which will go fast if I like it, and might fall off the list if it doesn't grab me; then Hall and finally, Dickens.

And dear God, if you have any other recommendations, don't tell me about them!

(Just kidding.)

Dream houses

2009-03-19T22:21:00.002-04:00

Last night before bed I was reading Crowley's Little, Big. One of the central images in the novel is the mysterious house at Edgewood, which depending on one's approach, has many different front's -- in effect, many different houses in one. They all connect on the inside, a rabbit warren of hallways, doors, stairs, and curious rooms that meet at odd angles. And last night I dreamed first of going down a long, tree-lined avenue and on both sides were all sizes and styles of houses, lining a very green and quintessentially American street. There were painted ladies and shotguns and Cape Cods, but as I was telling my companion in the dream, how strange to find such a street in the middle of desert in Saudi Arabia -- like a mirage!

And then the dream changed slightly and I was on another street with impossible-looking houses, Gothic looking structures and cathedrals, only these buildings were partially buried in the ground, up to their gabled roofs and domes -- one very like the dome of St. Paul's. They were not destroyed or harmed, just built into and underneath the ground, with trees and vegetation all around them, and one knew that they were massive and intact under the earth when you entered inside. I did go in one, and the floors were leaded glass, and you could see the shadowy floors plunging below.

Houses have always been a central image in my dreams ever since I can remember. Houses familiar and completely foreign -- I remember dreaming vividly of a house in Africa, hexagonal or octagonal, with windows from floor to ceiling, set down in a jungle so that I could see the wild outside, the birds and animals and exotic flora curling around the decks. And familiar houses, sometimes even my own, always have secret rooms or entire floors that I've forgotten; they are filled with things I've forgotten, treasures. Doors, attics, secret compartments, winding hallways, and staircases are everywhere in my dreams and whatever I think I'm about to find or could find remains just out of reach and often I can't find my way back in once I've left.

Of course the other thing I read before sleeping was Matthew Arnold's poem, "The Buried Life"; hence, the buried houses, I suppose.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Ryan Adams and the Cards

2009-03-17T22:40:00.002-04:00

It's kind of funny how you have to approach a Ryan Adams show: Expectation (if he's "on," it has to be great), exasperation (I hope he's not freaking out this time), speculation (will this be the last show before he breaks up the band?). So I actually felt sort of relieved when I got to see a full set, he didn't do anything too weird, and his voice sounded fantastic. Success! I thought the best moment was when he broke loose with "Come Pick Me Up," not just because it's one of my favorites, but because it came pretty early and I thought it signaled a wide-ranging affair from his huge catalog. The only disappointment was that there weren't more rockin' songs like Magick thrown in. I totally agree with Jeffrey Lee Puckett's review that all of the songs were the same tempo -- very mellow. I would have liked more energy. But that feels a little nitpicky considering he really did perform well in that purple light. It wasn't as dark as the last time when he hid under the infamous hoodie, but I only saw the silhouette of Ryan. Man of Mystery.

I did have an insight into the mystery, however. When he finally engaged the audience in a little midset chit-chat and the lights came up just a bit, he said something like, okay, you've scared me enough, you can take the lights back down. And I thought, it's not just an act, he really is uncomfortable performing! Performance anxiety -- possibly debilitating? It kind of fits in with the drugs and alcohol, which might have been his way of controlling it, and now all clean and sober, he has do it differently -- practically in the dark, at a safe distance from the audience. See, speculation. Well, it's one theory. I know that he blames inner ear and hearing problems "on the record" as his reason for the rumored abandonment of music for his literary career. Who knows, but it would be a shame if stops recording, hard as that is to imagine.

Levi Stahl

When John Crowley links to anything on his livejournal page I feel compelled to check it out. That's how I found The Whole Five Feet and now, I'vebeenreadinglately, Levi Stahl's blog. Sometimes when I think I read a LOT, I run across someone who puts me to shame. Or maybe it's not so much that I don't read as much, I just don't read as well, as critically, and as deeply as others do. And I certainly don't write as well about reading. Reading the entries in Levi's blog makes me want to hang up my sad little tappety-tap keys and find a Harlequin romance.

His recent post about Penelope Fitzgerald will motivate me to finally read one or more of her novels. She's been on the radar for a long time, but somehow, I've just never got around to her. I just requested several books from the public library, and I will now have a few more to put on the list. Of course, I just started re-reading Crowley's Little, Big.

A Sport and a Pastime

2009-03-11T23:02:00.003-04:00

I finished James Salter's novel, title above, having previously read The Light Years. I've heard many people gush about him, particularly other writers, but I have to say, I don't really get it. The writing is good, of course, frequently lovely and I enjoyed his wonderful evocation of the French countryside, describing the seasons, the light, the empty sidewalks and cafes. But the people -- the characters -- I don't connect to at all. He reminds me of Fitzgerald and of Hemingway in the kinds of people he writes about, the floaters on the waves of other people's money, angst-ridden adventurers, the sad, jaded rich, and beautiful virgins/whores that figure as enchantresses and victims and the left-behind. They never seem real to me, and in fact, they just get on my nerves. Is it a class thing? Those vaguely patrician, Ivy-league educated ne'er-do-wells and American women who go abroad to get a title and a villa? It's all just a little too precious for me.

I won't say I hated it, but I read it without much joy. In a better way it reminded me of William Maxwell's The Chateau, but mainly because both stories concern Americans (always cast as innocents -- a well-worn theme) abroad in post-war France, adrift in an alien, if alluring culture. Well, anyway, I think that does me for the Salter experience.

I've been thinking I might re-read (which I don't often do) Little, Big by Crowley. It definitely merits another reading, and I'm sure I'll soak up more the second time. It's so magical and mysterious and suggestive. A review on its 25th anniversary just appeared in the Guardian. He has a new novel in the works -- WWII era, I believe.

Holy the Firm

2009-03-03T23:26:00.004-05:00

I re-read Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. An excerpt:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. (Harper and Row, 1977)

She is like Donne to me -- difficult, brilliant, stark, unafraid to plumb the depths and attempt a measure of the heights. She delights and scares the bejesus out of you at the same time. She makes you pick up the dictionary. Pay no attention to anything I write, but read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Reading big, important books

2009-03-01T22:20:00.005-05:00

I just finished War and Peace today; it took a couple of months, reading at a pretty leisurely pace. As I've already written, I fell in love with it from the beginning, and I didn't change my mind about it. What is amazing is that Tolstoy wrote such a beautiful, sprawling novel seemingly to illustrate his view of history and his critique of the great man theory. The Epilogue dealt mainly with his argument against the traditional view that watershed events -- particularly wars, revolutions, mass migrations -- are driven by heroes like Napoleon and Alexander -- that their will, genius, power-wielding carries the masses to do their bidding. His story, with its many characters, high and low, bad and virtuous, weak and strong, shows that this view is false; that causes and effects are impossibly complicated; that our perspectives are too limited; and it can only be the interacting masses of wills and relationships, along with a mysterious equation of constraints that he calls necessity and freedom, which actually makes "history." There is no way I can quickly boil down what he took about 1200 pages to get at and no guarantee either that I understood it perfectly as he meant it, so I'll leave it at that.

But here's one takeaway that I have from reading another of the Big Important books: it is nearly always the case that they are hyped to be much more dense, unapproachable, and difficult than they really are. Your reading pleasure will be maximized reading W&P if you are a student of history, particularly military history, but you can just as easily chuck all the theories of history and just read it as adventure and romance on a huge scale -- an epic family drama. The only difficulty is keeping the Russian names straight in the beginning, and of course the time commitment if you are a slow reader, but otherwise, it's great fun. I've had exactly the same experience with Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, and Ulysses, all of which I approached with a sense of intimidation, but which I found to be genuinely entertaining. (Okay, there was a long bit about the sperm whale industry in MD that made me want to poke Melville with a stick, but you can skip that; no one is going to call the lit police.) I was very nearly finished with Ulysses when I finally started to get the "big picture," but there are many charms along the way, even if you suspect you're missing a lot.

You can argue all you want about the dead, white guys dominating literature for so long, but it's not just a conspiracy -- the great books are really pretty great, and you can still enjoy the wonderful diversity of contemporary fiction -- men and women, white and black, the dead and the undead (vampires have had their voices silenced for far too long).

Perhaps, I'll test my theory further one day if I ever read Finnegan's Wake, which has always looked fairly incomprehensible to me. If you've read it, let me know.

Marah and Brandi Carlile

2009-02-22T14:04:00.005-05:00

Dave Bielanko and Marah

I make it a rule to see Marah at every reasonable opportunity, and I'm never disappointed. We were all psyched to see them in their latest formulation (temporarily without Serge, the other Bielanko brother, and with a new drummer and bass player plus Christine, the keyboardist) and arrived at the appointed place...only to find it completely deserted! Refusing to believe it, we got out and saw the sign pinned to the door -- the show was moved to another bar. Every time I've seen them, they've been relegated to a smaller, crummier venue. They really ought to be packing out the Palace or the Waterfront on a summer night. I think it bothers me more than, say, Dave Bielanko, who seems to take it in stride. I think he's genuinely more interested in the music and the experience than achieving wealth and fame, and they never shortchange an audience, no matter how small.

On this night, I was in the middle of an allergy attack, which made me feel miserable, but between a medicinal, near gag-inducing swig of my hubby's bourbon and Marah finally coming on, it magically dissipated. It was a somewhat surreal evening of kick-ass music, a dirty backroom dive, and these crazy-dancing ladies who kept drinking white russians and buying them for the band, prompting Dave to claim, "It tastes just like Christmas morning!" And through all of this, from the time we got there until we left around 2 a.m., some poor dude was sitting on a stool, as completely passed out on the bar as I've ever seen anyone. I never saw him stir, apparently not even when the gals playing foosball adjusted his chair to give themselves more space, or -- needless to say -- while the band ten feet away ripped through, "Coughing up Blood." Someone else needs an intervention.

Well, one good thing about such intimate gatherings is that you actually get to talk with the band if you want to. I had to stick around to buy a new tee, since my only other one from Marah is too small to wear in public. I told Dave how much we always enjoyed the shows and asked him about the new album. He said they were close to finishing it up in Nashville (the next stop) and that he thought Serge would be ready to rejoin them when they toured in April. He and Christine were both very nice, tired, and grateful for kind words. I'm so glad I stayed up past my bedtime.

Brandi Carlile and Sondre Lerche

In the Pops series, the Louisville Orchestra teamed up with Lerche to open and Brandi for the headliner. Lerche is really impressive. Such a youngster, but with lots of poise and a fabulous crooner voice. I think the crowd in Whitney Hall was well-pleased with his performance, since of course, everyone was really there for Brandi. And even though he didn't play guitar with those huge, Norwegian mittens from the PR headshot, I still enjoyed it!

My expectations were high for Brandi, since she's one of my very favorite artists; I actually think she was even better than I thought she'd be. Her voice is phenomenal -- really, really big and strong -- the recording process does not add a thing that's not already there. And if you possibly can, you aspiring leaders-of-the-band, manage to frame yourself with identical twin musicians! I love the harmonies Phil and Tim Hanseroth bring, and of course, the guitar skills. Oh, and I should not forget the barefoot cellist, Matt. She sang new songs from the forthcoming album, which were strong -- "Dreams" and "Oh Dear" -- some from her other records including "The Story" and "Follow", and great covers of "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Hallelujah." She does the best Johnny Cash since Johnny Cash! She's so inspiring. She's the reason I bought a guitar (even though it's currently gathering dust in the corner), and now that I've seen how skinny she is in her second-skin blue jeans, I'm also inspired to get a little more running in. Dang you, Brandi Carlile!

Good stuff

2009-02-16T23:10:00.002-05:00

We saw Gary Louris and Mark Olsen last night. My husband and I were both impressed by G.L.'s guitar skills, and I was astounded at how great they sound together live. Like Simon and Garfunkel, theirs are just two voices that blend together beautifully. I was happy to see the bar packed for them (SRO), even though that sort of thing is harder and harder on my back and knees. Orthopedic shoes? I'll just suffer for other people's art, I guess. Lots of Jayhawks' fans there -- all, as they say, "of a certain age."

I just rediscovered Okkervil River after hearing some of "The Stand Ins" -- a sequel of sorts to "The Stage Names," which when I first heard it, didn't grab me at all. I like the other so well, I'm going back now to give it another listen. Also, I'm still fascinated by Antony and the Johnsons (they have a new CD out); I first heard Antony on the Leonard Cohen tribute, "I'm Your Man," and I've been checking him out since then. I still haven't bought anything, but I'm still trolling through some of the songs, trying to figure out what I'd like best. He definitely has a different sound going on, but I like it -- there's something a bit otherworldly in his music, but you wouldn't want to dance to it, unless you're dancing over someone's grave maybe.

I've embarked on the fourth and final volume of War and Peace, which has vaulted into my favorite novels of all time very easily. As lengthy as it is, or maybe because of it, I'll be sad to finish it. If I'm stranded on a desert island some day, and the smoke monster isn't coming for me (Lost -- I'm in too deep to stop now), I'd like to have a copy of W&P with me.

On crap

2009-02-09T18:10:00.014-05:00

I generally stay away from commenting on things that I don't like. Rants can be very tiresome and there's no end of things to deprecate, whereas there's so little that approaches sublimity. One should be more selective. However, having subjected myself to a weekend of UTTER crap, I feel compelled to flush it out of my system. I wanted to call this post On Bullshit, but it's been taken, of course.

I'll start with the movie Beowulf, starring a high-profile cast of actors who might have thought they would be less embarrassed as CGI "enhanced" versions of themselves in this stinker. My husband called it, jokingly, clay-mation. Other than stealing some of the same names and general setting, this Beowulf bears more resemblance to the Grand Theft Auto video franchise than the epic, Old English poem. Why not just make your movie without attempting to reference the original, if nothing about it suits you? It's as if the screenwriters were still so ticked about having to read it for their British Lit survey, they decided to give it a good, old-fashioned Hollywood fucking-over just for spite. Please! Blame the teachers, not the poetry.

The movie was both gross and inappropriately funny as when nude, faux-Beowulf's manly bits kept getting the Austin Powers sight-gag treatment. Helmets, chandeliers, roof beams all kept getting in the way of the "camera." Naked Beowulf slithering all over Grendel's mucousy backside was just inspired...but by what I don't know and don't wish to know. And instead of a shaggy, swamp beast, insert Angelina Jolie with weird, barefoot stilletto-heels. Now that's some monster! Oh, it was just so very awful and juvenile in it's presentation that it seemed downright mean-spirited. My husband had the good sense to fall asleep -- at least until I poked him and made him sit up.

Sadly, a moody, artistic, elegiac movie version of Beowulf could be made with the right spirit and creative people involved. I thought of something like Julie Taymor's Titus, which also starred Anthony Hopkins (the unfortunate Hrothgar here). A throbbing score, beautiful Scandinavian vistas, and dialogue studded with that wonderful Old English cadence would be something to see. But instead, crap. Utter crap, even.

The Grammy's

Thankfully, I was reading War and Peace while this was going on, which is kind of like viewing an eclipse through a pinhole -- you won't risk permanent blindness. It was one trainwreck performance after another, with only a few exceptions. Strangely, everyone seemed better dressed than usual. You should at least be able to count on the Grammy's for some really tacky getups.

The benighted idea of pairing classic acts with newcomers served neither well. The greats seemed desperate and sad, while the newbies were just plain bad in comparison. Stevie Wonder with the Jonas Brothers? Ouch. And what about trotting out the only surviving member of the Four Tops? More pain. Which brings me to a few points about Katy Perry, bless her. Some of it really wasn't her fault, because I assume she wasn't responsible for the "production" components.

First, if one is going to be vamping while surrounded by giant fruit, at least go with the sexy kind -- pomegranates, figs, juicy mangoes. At any moment I expected to see the Fruit of the Loom guys popping out from behind an apple. And they might have busted better moves than Perry, which leads me to the second point. Sign that girl up for Madonna's dance camp! Of course, she probably felt justifiably ridiculous having just descended from a giant banana. And from all the hoopla about this song, you would think she invented lesbians, or lipstick lesbians, or even lipstick. I'm bemused since Jill Sobule was the first woman to sing a song titled -- gasp!-- "I kissed a girl" way back in the pre-Twitter era of 1995, while Perry was still going to Vacation Bible School. All of which is not really a knock on Katy Perry herself, who seems clever and is trying to make the most out of what may only turn out to be 15 minutes of fame.

So, there's really no moral here, other than that I find crap disturbing. I just needed to get that out of my system.

In the grip of winter, distractions must be found

2009-02-03T22:04:00.004-05:00

The snow and ice did not quite melt away before the chill set in anew -- today, a brisk wind blew clouds of snow off the rooftops of the office buildings producing, for a few moments, a faux blizzard. Real snow fell this morning, but didn't last, and it's rather bitterly cold, refreezing the old snow and ice. I wrestled the wheeled trashcan to the curb this morning, up and over the ridges of snow and found a cove between shoveled mounds to perch it near the curb. Everything becomes difficult -- routine chores, walking, driving, concentrating on work.

Companionably, London was hit by a snowstorm that brought the city to a halt, and the citizenry is none too happy about it. School closings! One quote in the Guardian was someone bemoaning the officials' unpreparedness and remarking that a bad example was being set for children, who were being taught that when things get difficult, just stay home and have fun. If that person were transported to the U.S. and could observe our love and acceptance of snow days, he might wonder afresh how it is that we became the most powerful nation on earth.

And in yet another example of American sloth compared to the British -- we who choose a mere 25 or 50 or at most 100 "best novel" lists from time to time -- the Guardian newspaper has compiled a list of 1000 novels "everyone must read." Now seriously, Americans don't even want to read a list that long, much less the actual novels! I feel certain that I can die without regret, if die I must, not having read John Grisham's A Time to Kill, or even anything of Martin Amis. Of course, those Guardian folk are probably indulging in some good-natured hyperbole with the "must read" directive, particularly when one of their own, the lamentable Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice), infamously claimed never to have read a single book. I thought every English person was born clutching a copy of Bleak House.

And finally, my browsing uncovered another tribute to John Updike by one of my very favorite writers, Ian McEwan, summing up thusly:

The Updike opus is so vast, so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more.

Music

Under the banner of welcome distractions, it seems as if the music world is conspiring to send all my favorites to town in the next two months. I already was planning to see Gary Louris and Marc Olsen, Brandi Carlile, and Ryan Adams. Today, I see that Marah is also stopping over this month, and the Cowboy Junkies are playing a gig with the Louisville Orchestra in March. I need to win some radio tickets or I'll go broke. I did find one freebie last night -- the Von Bondies' (also touring, but not nearby) new song, "Pale Bride." He may be Jack White's sworn enemy, but I like Jason Stollsteimer's voice a lot; the VBs certainly have a lot of attitude live. It's still one of my favorite rock shows. I'm sure the small venue had something to do with it. I thought they'd disbanded, it's been so long since I heard anything out of them.

Ice Storm

2009-01-31T16:37:00.011-05:00

Suffering through a snow and ice storm is inconvenient at best and often very dangerous, as we Kentuckians are finding out. However, aesthetically speaking, it is a wondrous thing to behold, particularly if you don't have a tree knifing through your roof and you're not freezing to death. For a day before the snow turned to ice, the birds in my backyard were obviously fueling up. All day, cardinals, house finches, juncos, and sparrows clustered around the feeders. My goldfinch feeder, full of nyjer thistle seed, usually lasts weeks. It was drained within a day and a half. Everytime I looked outside three or four would be fighting over the two perches on the tube. In the picture, two of them sit on the fence, waiting their turn, flanked by house sparrows.

A dead, brown landscape transformed overnight into a glittering, crystalline world, and the birds disappeared. Individual magnolia leaves, coppery-brown, suspend in their own glass boxes like bees caught in amber, but perfectly clear, every vein visible. A heavily beaded dogwood stands against a Wedgewood blue sky, bare barberry hedges drip with diamonds, the holly leaf's sharp points grow into claws of ice. Every surface is brilliant with refracted light and icicles lengthen into daggers and spears, dripping off every roof and gable. The first night of the storm, at 2:30 in the morning, I awakened to the first crash of limbs falling in the neighbor's yard. All night and into the next day you could stand on the porch and listen to cracking, groaning branches giving way and exploding into the surface of ice-crusted snow as if a giant beast was lumbering though a forest.

Today, it is sunny and clear, and the melting has begun. There is a continual drip, slide, crash, and sizzle. Maybe the birds will venture back out from their hiding places.

John Updike, RIP

2009-01-28T17:10:00.006-05:00

In that category of public figures that you don't really know, but care about, I always find it particularly sad to say goodbye to writers. Their work, which has been such a pleasure and an education, is at an end. We can only re-read and savor what's left behind -- which is invaluable -- but never will there be anything new.

Even though Updike has never been one of my most-loved authors, he has always been a writer that I have admired for his lovingly crafted and poetic sentences and for an old-school, writerly work ethic. He's always seemed a throwback to writers like Dickens and Trollope in sheer volume, and like those other giants of Victorian letters -- the combined novelist, essayist, and critic who seemed to know everything and be capable of illuminating any subject.

I've read Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and a smattering of essays and short stories, but personally, I like him best for Gertrude and Claudius. It takes a certain renegade quality and degree of confidence to take on something as canonical as Shakespeare's Hamlet and transform that story, without doing damage to the original, to something uniquely your own. And, of course, he will always remain memorable to me for the book that I started and couldn't finish. It was probably not a good choice, since I was bound to compare it with Garcia Marquez, but Brazil was a book that I could put down. However, his vivid comparison of yams to a certain part of the male anatomy has stuck in my mind. And the fact that I have never walked through the produce section quite the same person says something about the power of the image and the writer who created it.

Austerlitz and after

2009-01-15T23:28:00.006-05:00

I just finished Volume 1 and am well launched into Volume 2 of War and Peace. The last bit of V1 was Tolstoy's version of the Battle of Austerlitz. And apparently, it's not just we southern Americans who can't stop fighting wars long gone and lost. Courtesy of the BBC, the picture accompanying this post is a somewhat recent re-enactment of said battle.

I'm very taken with W&P. The characters are marvelous and, although I knew it was set during the Napoleonic wars, I don't think I realized how much of it would be based on the history of those actions. It's always interesting to figure out how writers decide where history and fiction part ways. For example, one of the "characters" is General Kutuzov -- a real person, but I'm assuming the young adjutant Prince Andrei is Tolstoy's creation. I love it. I've always been interested in the Napoleonic wars, but mainly Napoleon's dueling with Wellington, so this earlier part is educational.

I read with nerdly relish the battle scenes and try to imagine how it must have looked. I learned to love battle maps for that reason. I'm not very good with maps, but even I, after staring at them long enough, and reading the descriptions can finally begin to see how the geography shaped the action. I first had this breakthrough when reading WWII accounts of the ground war in the Philippines. Suddenly, some of what I read started to make more sense.

And speaking of maps, I like the way Tolstoy treats the drawing rooms and dining rooms of Russian society in the same way he sets the stage for the war scenes. He's always careful to say exactly where everyone is sitting or standing in relation to one another, and he tracks their movements and conversations with the same careful attention to detail. There are as many schemers, glory-seekers, and adversaries in these settings as on the fields in Austria. There's Anna Mikhailovna with the heavy artillery, Prince Vassily with the feint, and there's poor, blundering Bezukhov in full retreat. I should try to sketch one of those out! One of my favorite scenes has been the deathbed struggle over securing old Count Bezukhov's will before he finally croaks. It's deliciously funny. Well, maybe it isn't supposed to be...but it is. Thankfully, I've managed not to find out too much about this novel -- I suppose people don't find it easy to sum up such a plot and cavalcade of characters, and I've never seen the movie versions. I know Henry Fonda played Pierre Bezukhov but I'm seeing someone who looks a lot more like Oliver Platt or even P. Seymour Hoffman. He needs to be more rumpled and portly (at least, thus far).

On another track entirely, a much shorter and amusing read is John Crowley's latest blog post about his recent run-in with the law.

War and Peace 2009

2009-01-05T16:33:00.006-05:00

I've finally decided to tackle Leo Tolstoy's classic. I read The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyich a while back and liked them both. So, for the foreseeable future, if anyone ventures to ask me what I'm reading, then the answer is going to remain the same.

I've also just started listening to the new album (I still call it an album, even though I downloaded the MP3s from iTunes) by Kasey Chambers and her husband, Shane Nicholson, Rattlin Bones. It's one of those rare ones that you love from the first listen and every song is a keeper. Their voices are really beautiful together -- I'm a sucker for a good duet. But it's more than just duets -- it's two people really singing songs together. You don't think of Jack White and Brendan Benson doing duets, for example, or Steven Page and Ed Robertson. The collaboration is a little more involved than that -- from the songwriting to the instrumentation. Anyway, it just made my "best" list of 2008 (I think it was released in September). In no particular order, here are my other favorites from last year:

Cardinology, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals
Acid Tongue, Jenny Lewis and peeps
Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket
Consolers of the Lonely, The Raconteurs
Angels of Destruction, Marah
Vagabonds, Gary Louris

Coming up, I hope to see Brandi Carlile, Louris, and Adams in the next few months, and I'll keep my fingers crossed that the latest incarnation of Marah, comes around sometime this year. I just read at Kelly Willis' site that after a few April shows, she is on extended hiatus from the road, having found that four small children and a tour bus don't really mix. I can't imagine how it could, since her husband is also a musician.

Lameness

2008-12-16T22:56:00.003-05:00

It's as good a theme as any at this holiday season. Everything seems to have come up short -- shopping, decorating, cooking...and books. I was reading Cloud Atlas, which I never did grow to love. I read half way and decided life was too short, and in my humble opinion (no, I'm not using the fucking shorthand), it did not deserve the Booker Prize. Overly clever, if not pretentious, no heart, which isn't the same as having no talent. I skipped-read through the latter half and decided I did myself a favor. The profound thesis at the end -- something about the human race being rotten at bottom, or maybe it was inherently good, whichever way he ended up, was -- you guessed it -- lame. It seemed so unimportant, I've forgotten. I'm being harsh. Much better-read people than me thought it was marvelous, I guess. As noted, Chabon said he loved it (or cleverly disguised that he did not) on the book jacket blurb.

So, I haven't started anything else. I have Reservation Road, which someone described as "the bleakest" American novel ever written. Probably not, but I'll save it for the beach anyway. Meanwhile, I read some of Davis McComb's second book of poems, Dismal Rock, and still love him. Ultima Thule was beautiful and I still go back and read those poems. For such a wonderful poet, he seemed strangely well-adjusted and nice when I met him at a book signing. He signed my favorite poem in Ultima, "The River Under the River."

...Tonight the river is at work dissolving, solving
over and over the riddle of its loosening.
I want to know how to hear it, and what it might teach me:
how to inhabit this thing of bone, gut, and blood,
this part of me that would not vanish if I vanished.

Winter days

2008-12-03T23:04:00.005-05:00

I went for a walk today during lunchtime -- my usual laps around the old manse property, marooned in the midst of an office "park." On the way back I cross the divided four-lane to the pond and see what's going on over there. It wasn't that cold, 40s, a little gusty. The longer I stay out, the better it feels, and I don't really want to go back to the office. The leaves have flown and all of the color has faded, but winter has its own melancholy charms.

Today, I noticed the muted shades of December without snow. The clouds were thick and layered like blankets, the color of slate, iron, and new bruises, pushed down over watery blue patches of sky. The ground is marbled green and brown and covered with the little wooly heads left over from fall aster blossoms. Doves settle down in the willow branches and a little flock of dark juncos flit in the undergrowth by the pond -- winter birds themselves with little frock coats of dark black and soft gray. Geese sit on the pond and a ring of ducks circle in the middle, dabbling, and seemingly chasing each other's tailfeathers. The water is lapped in the wind, blue-black to the white rocks on shore. Windblown branches are everywhere and among them, the bare, scarlet stems of a brambly shrub. I think I looked it up once and have forgotten again what it is. They are beautiful in winter -- as bright as male cardinals.

I spent November in Donne territory, appropriately enough. I finished the Stubbs biography, which took me most of the month. It was very good and I think it definitely gives me a better context for the poetry. I'm reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I'm only into the fourth section (story?), and it strikes me as a bit of showing off. "Now I shall write in the style of a nineteenth-century English adventurer and now in the style of a rather louche 1930's man-on-the-make," etc., etc. It would be more fun if it were Michael Chabon (who plugs it on the back cover); still, it's well done, and I may grow to love it.

I made peanut-butter fudge -- one of my white whales of cookery. Okay texture, but not peanut-buttery enough. I have another recipe to try still. I'm going to bake cookies, as usual. And I unearthed my mother-in-law's old cookie cutters -- some of which I'm sure my mom also has somewhere. Not an old one, but I found a camel-shaped cutter in the stash. I love camels! I'm going to do a little Christmas decorating by the end of the week. I'm auditioning tree alternatives.

I should blog more often

2008-10-27T21:13:00.004-04:00

I seem to be on the once-a-month schedule, which for "bloggers" should be more like once a day. Glad I'm not one of those!

After reading Stevenson, I couldn't really settle on anything. I tried a novel that I had heard about recently, concerning Darwin, called Mr. Darwin's Shooter. It actually seemed promising, but there was something about it that I just wasn't in the mood for in between the time that I requested it and when I actually picked it up at the library, so back it went.

I decided to go with one of Crowley's early novellas called The Deep, which was published back in 1975. It was really interesting to see the development of his style and themes from early work to the most recent. It was a very dense, challenging story to follow -- I think it's the disorientation of not quite knowing what world you're in. There are very familiar elements of historical fiction, except the medieval, magic-steeped world it depicts is so decidedly not this one. And there is the refusal not to give in to readers' expectations. Nothing exists outside of the imagined landscape of the story, which, as you give in to it, is very powerful.

Then, I seized on John Donne the other night, the way some people reach for the Bible when things are just feeling too overwhelming. I read at random, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, being the shortest day." Some people claim their iPods sense their moods and play just the right music at times -- I've even had that silly feeling myself (I'm the one that chose all that music in the first place, duh) -- but here was the perfect poem for my state. So beautiful, mournful, but oddly peaceful:

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;

I've always loved Donne on a purely visceral level, but I've never really learned that much about him, or spent enough time understanding the poetry, which is cunningly crafted, witty and incredibly learned, much the way I feel about Wallace Stevens. So, now I'm reading the recent biography of Donne by John Stubbs -- one of those young, smarty-pants scholars that so astound me. (What was I doing at age 29? Geez...) I was going to start with T.S. Eliot's essays on Donne, but I'll have to dig them up elsewhere, since they seem to have gone missing at the library. Some poor student, no doubt, who never even finished the paper, lost the book, got kicked out of school, and went on to some misbegotten life in politics.

Full of blogging, signifying nothing

2008-09-19T20:23:00.010-04:00

My favorite writer, John Crowley, whose blog is a lovely and rare thing, has been bouncing between the worldly and sublime lately, and his last post considers Moments in Eternity, having previously pondered the seeming "evanescence of the universe." These are good things to contemplate. They are a welcome distraction from...well, pretty much everything. So, here I sit, wondering what it is I'm really writing about.

Crowley's creepy/creeping feeling of the universe somehow unveiling a weird truth to him in these surreal times is intriguing. He mentions Wall Street shenanigans, a certain new political meteorite, and the initial operation of the Large Hadron Collider as points on his radar that either he is experiencing something mystical or that he is "filling up with immaterial bullshit." For both of us, unfortunately, it is probably the latter. But here's one thing that I've found just a little curious. Through no planning of my own, it seems like everything I read and everything that's happening around me keeps circling around the same concerns.

I've been reading Robert Louis Stevenson, just on a whim, because I feel like I missed out on him a bit. So I read Kidnapped, and then stumbling across it, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. The latter is a charming travel narrative that RLS wrote about his journey on foot (and with donkey) through the rough territory of the wild southwest of France. Two completely different things, but both touch on the stark differences of politics and religion that influence history and, of course, our individual lives. In the novel, it is the dividing line between the Jacobites (who wanted to restore the line of King James) and the house of Hanover; in the travel story, he finds himself captivated by the centuries-old conflict between Catholics and the Protestant holdouts in France -- the guerilla Camisards of the Cevennes.

At the same time, I had also checked out Marilynne Robinson's essays called The Death of Adam. She is the author of the contemporary classic novel, Housekeeping, and the beautiful -- and as far as I'm concerned -- also classic, Gilead. Her latest novel, and successor to Gilead is Home, which I haven't read yet.

So, the first essay in Death of Adam is on Darwinism. In particular she takes on Daniel Dennett's book on evolution, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which I happen also to have read not too long ago. With the bursting on the political scene of someone who brings to the fore again the whole tiresome argument of creationism vs. evolution, in addition to a host of other retrograde ideas, it just seemed apropos to be reading a response to the controversy via Robinson. Oh, and Robinson, just appeared at a reading recently with...you guessed it...John Crowley.

To try to digest Robinson's response is probably to do her a disservice (read it!), but in short, she offers a corrective to the inferior, and intellectually, worst arguments from both sides. She reminds us that there is a rewarding, non-fundamental, and spiritually rich way to understand the Bible (and the creation story as rendered in Genesis) as opposed to the science-denying Creationist view; and at the same time, that Darwinists hardly have all the answers to our Existence -- and overdo their contemptuous refutations of Christian thought on the matter.

I suppose it sounds kind of boring, but there is an exhilaration, which Crowley notes, in feeling that everything is, perhaps, an illusion, a fragment of truth, a vanishing universe that owes no obligation to our bootless attempts at meaning.

Eminent Victorians

2008-08-14T17:01:00.014-04:00

Considering the years I've spent studying British lit, particularly nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, and my interest in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, I'm not sure how I neglected reading Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians for so long. The book was such a sensation when it first appeared because it transformed the writing of biographies -- dispensing with the reverent practice of beatifying the subject and leaving out anything that might be considered improper, critical, or scandalous.

As his subjects, Strachey takes on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold (father of poet Matthew and director of the Rugby School), and General George Gordon. The four profiles are loosely connected through some other "minor characters" -- the poet Arthur Clough, Arthur Gladstone, Cardinal Newman, and of course, Queen Victoria.

The crystalline quality of the prose makes you want to read it aloud -- and even more -- it makes you wish you could hear Lytton Strachey himself reading it aloud, as he probably did to Leonard and Virginia. He brings these dusty old Victorian icons (dusty even by the time that he was writing it) to vivid life. In fleshing out their failings and triumphs, conceits and absurdities, he created a style of biography that makes these historical figures completely relevant to their modern successors -- the celebrated clergyman, the do-gooder, the academic, the military hero. He brilliantly cuts out characters with the swift, sure strokes of a master swordsman -- and he's just as deadly. Here he dispatches the unfortunate Arthur Clough:

Perhaps it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such an atmosphere should have fallen a prey, at Oxford, to the frenzies of religious controversy; that he should have been driven almost out of his wits by the ratiocinations of W.G. Ward; that he should have lost his faith; that he should have spent the rest of his existence lamenting that loss, both in prose and verse; and that he should have eventually succumbed, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale.

Strachey reminds me of how little removed we are from what we may deem the hoary past. The English were bogged down in Egypt, stuck in an occupation that was going nowhere between corrupt ruling pashas with their hands in the till and Islamic fundamentalist rebels who wanted to get rid of them all:

Their government had intervened unwillingly; the occupation of the country was a merely temporary measure; their army was to be withdrawn so soon as a tolerable administration had been set up. But a tolerable administration seemed a long time in coming, and the...army remained.

That's a quote from EV, not the latest book by Ron Suskind, in case you were wondering. And so the English had to call on General George "Chinese" Gordon, who has a lot in common with another George (no, not that one or even that one), another general, in fact -- George S. Patton. Both won fame in early exploits, cut dashing figures, suffered ignominy, and then were brought back by pure desperation to save the day -- Patton in France and Germany, Gordon in Egypt and the Sudan. Both were arguably a little off their rockers and they both met bad ends; although dying in an automobile crash is a good deal less bad than having one's head cut off and placed in the fork of a tree to be abused by stone-throwers and circling hawks.

Well, they were too late, but at least the English did finally send a relief mission to Khartoum, in a vain attempt to extract the encircled and defiant General Gordon. Prime Minister Gladstone reluctantly gave way before the powerful politician, Lord Hartington, whose popularity Strachey attempts to explain. See if this reminds you of anyone (although I'm thinking of an entire body of someones):

...They loved him for being dull. It was the greatest comfort -- with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain that he would never in any circmstances, be either brilliant or subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat, listening to his speeches in which considerations of stolid plainness succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally assured.

City of Thieves

2008-08-05T21:24:00.004-04:00

Several weeks ago, I read the NY Times review of David Benioff's book and put it on reserve at the public library. It just so happened to come in right after I read Chabon's book, leading to a rare confluence in my reading life. First, the two authors have a lot in common -- both are precocious literary talents, have Jewish backgrounds, and have had their works translated to film. They both seem annoyingly blessed with genius, good looks, lovely partners, and California tans, but I'll forgive them both, just as Michael Dirda can bring himself to forgive Tom Brady for his Superbowls, chiseled features, and Gisele Bundchen.

Benioff's novel features a teasing opener, leading one to believe it is based on the adventures of his real Russian immigrant grandfather, but then he wisely dashes off into the story proper and never returns to the "frame," which, more often than not drags down an otherwise perfectly good novel. Lev Beniov is a teenage boy, alone in Leningrad during the famous siege in WW2, dreaming of being a heroic Russian fighter defending his city against the Germans. Things go awry when he is taken prisoner by the NKVD (Russian secret police) for looting a dead German paratrooper. He becomes paired up with an alleged army deserter in an unlikely mission to save both their lives -- procuring a dozen eggs for a Russian colonel, whose daughter is marrying and wants a proper wedding cake as the rest of Leningrad teeters on the edge of starvation. Madcap adventures of cannibalism, whoring, and picaresque wandering behind German lines ensue. And like Chabon's TYPU, the story ends up hinging on a game of chess.

I loved the novel -- I zipped right through it, and then read a recommendation from my mother that I'd also carried to the beach with me, an Anita Shreve novel called Resistance, about, what else, the Belgian Resistance in WW2! I think I shall try to take a break from the plight of Jews, WW2, chess, and Nazis.

The Frozen Chosen

2008-07-28T21:13:00.005-04:00

Among the many things I've too long neglected is reading anything by Michael Chabon. While I was at the beach, I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union -- Chabon's latest -- and I thought it was fantastic. Briefly, the novel's premise is an alternate history, based on an idea actually floated at some point in the 40s to make Alaska a Jewish homeland. It's a contemporary, noir-ish detective story based on an imagined history of the Jews in Alaska.

While I was checking out Chabon's Wikipedia entry this afternoon, I saw that the Coen brothers are adapting it for the screen. Being that I also love the Coens, this seems like a perfect coupling (or would that be tripling?). It's still pre-production, so there's no cast as of now. I can't help but wonder who they might get for the principles. I can see Frances McDormand as Bina, but I wonder if they'll make the characters a bit younger than in the book, which might work against that choice (plus, she's already played the police woman of the frozen tundra). I thought of Adrien Brody as the strung-out Messiah, but Landsman and his partner are tougher. Rob Morrow seems like a natural choice (he's already played a Jew in Alaska...and a cop!), but he lacks the sense of dissipation and desperation. Still...who knows...maybe he's already lobbying for the part.

While on the topic of things too long neglected, I finally watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" over the weekend. Nicholson was certainly compelling, and I had no idea that the very young Danny DeVito was in it. And Louise Fletcher was scary. I think she deserved that one-hit-wonder Oscar. Whatever happened to her? But on to other classics -- shockingly, my hubby has never seen "Flashdance." Strange, the gaps we have in our cultural upbringing. The legwarmers! The Shower Dance! Oh, the Humanity!

As I'm just prattling on from one thing to another, I'll take the opportunity to champion Washington Post book critic and raconteur Michael Dirda and his weekly book chat (Wednesdays at 2:00, usually, on the WP site). They are delightful -- neither too highbrow or lowbrow -- with lots of great suggestions and insight into all sorts of literature (including "genre"). Some of the regular chatters are almost as fun to read and wide-ranging in their book knowledge (but not quite).

I read another thing that was actually fairly uplifting, as not much is in the world of conservation. Scott Weidensaul reports in his wonderful blog, Of a Feather, that the province of Ontario is making a truly meaningful and inspiring (I hope) contribution to the welfare of our migratory birds. Read all about it here.

Out Stealing Horses

2008-06-29T22:47:00.003-04:00

I loved this novel by Norwegian writer Per Petterson (Petterson is a former librarian and bookseller). It won the 2007 Dublin Impac award, which has honored several of my favorite recent books, including My Name is Red (Pamuk), The Master (Toibin), and No Great Mischief (MacLeod). This award is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries (how cool is that!) and is open to books in any language.

The novel is written as a memoir by Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has isolated himself in the country after his wife's death to settle in to his last days, with only his dog Lyra for company. His story is primarily focused on the summer of 1948 when he and his father spent their last summer together. Remarkably, one of his few neighbors turns out to be a link to that time and place. Trond recounts the events of that year, the people that he remembers, and the secrets that he finally learned about his father.

I was surprised at how much it reminded me of some aspects of Cormac McCarthy -- the spare language, the meticulous descriptions of physical activities -- felling timber, riding horses, rowing boats in the river -- and the beautifully rendered prose about the natural world and animals. This is an especially good book for dog lovers; it makes you want a dog like Lyra. It has flashes of violence, but certainly not McCarthian in scale. It's much gentler and more reflective. The timeline of the things Trond tells you is just out of sync enough that revelations come at intervals, and the novel keeps opening up further and further from what seems to be, at first, a simple tale of a boy's coming of age into something much denser and more satisfying. Lovely.

Books that changed your life?

2008-06-26T21:42:00.008-04:00

I've seen widgets on social networking sites that let you list the "books that changed your life," and as much as I love books, it always irritates me a bit -- usually, because what it really means is "what are your favorite books?" Perhaps, if you were so distracted by a book that you walked out in front of a Bunny Bread truck -- that would constitute a book that changed your life. Maybe some people read John Grisham and decide to become lawyers? Could be. So...I put aside my skepticism and started to decide which books I would put in the BTCYL category.

First, a little tangent: We were a reading family growing up. My mom would read aloud to us, and not just when we were tots, but when we were older kids. We had some kind of Golden Treasury of stories that I remember her reading from; but also To Kill a Mockingbird and The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. Even if she didn't finish them aloud, it would be enough to get me started on them, and I would finish on my own. I distinctly remember an elderly lady who sometimes substituted in elementary school, and that was her thing -- she was a great storyteller -- she may have told stories extemporaneously; it's hard to remember. Her name was Mrs. Paris? Parrish? She was marvelous! I don't think I was the only one listening rapt; it was a great treat when she came to watch your class. She was a retired schoolteacher; she must have been in her eighties -- a little, neat, grandmotherly southern lady in a dark dress and a bun, straight out of Eudora Welty.

We were also not terribly picky readers; we read the Encyclopedias, we read pure crap, we read Shakespeare and the Hardy Boys, Harlequin romances and Outdoor Life magazine, and just whatever happened to be lying around. We had the whole set of Junior Classics and fairy tales -- really creepy ones with bizarre illustrations that still seem perverse. (Ah -- perhaps the first book that changed my life, or at least gave me some terrific nightmares.) The Iliad in who-knows-what translation first acquainted me with the stomach-churning nature of violence in sixth grade. I remember literally feeling queasy over some of it. The cruelty of the Gods freaked me out! And this, from someone who has now read nearly the entire Cormac McCarthy oeuvre (so far, thank God).

Gone with the Wind and Little Women might be the first two books on my list, because I reread them, and they were probably the ones that made me want to write stories myself. Every female character I've ever concocted is a version of Jo March or Scarlett O'Hara. It's sort of the Virgin/Whore dichotomy, although neither fits quite perfectly into those categories. Now, skipping many, many books later, there are a few more that stand out above the rest.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, the second time I read it, was a strangely consoling companion when I felt truly in need of a Deronda to guide me through. The poor judgment and regrets of Gwendolyn Harleth! Aye, me!

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, which I found purely by happenstance when browsing the shelves of the public library, led me to my Master's thesis topic and opened up a whole new world of literature, which led me, in turn, to at least one job, and indirectly to all the ones I've had since. I hadn't really thought of it that way before, but I think it's true. I never would have read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien without Fussell, which is reason enough.

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek made me stop taking the natural world for granted, and I started paying attention -- learning the names of things and how they came to be.

And books that shaped my thinking about the Big Issues? Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation and Jim Crace's Quarantine on religion; A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon on women, writing, race, and politics. McCarthy's Blood Meridian on American myth-making.

I've left out Shakespeare; I know it seems trite, but it's very hard to imagine coming to love poetry, drama, and books without him there in the background, the measure of it all.

Suite Francaise

2008-06-23T16:55:00.003-04:00

I just finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, a Russian-born Jewish woman whose family fled the Bolshevik Revolution to settle in France. She already had established a reputation as an important French writer by the time World War II broke out. Both she and her husband were arrested in 1942 and were killed at Auschwitz. Their two young daughters were hidden from the French police throughout the war and managed to survive. The eldest daughter, Denise, had saved her mother's notebook, in which she had begun her last work, about the fall of France.

Obviously, the dramatic background of Nemirovsky's life added to the power of the novel, but the novel itself is beautifully, searingly written. She had such a wonderful, clear-eyed view of the extraordinary events going on around her as she began this work, which was practically a real-time setting for the action. The "suite" has two completed parts, "The Storm" and "Dolce," of a planned five parts.

Nemirovsky's focus was on the reaction of various classes of French people to the country's defeat -- not fully recovered from the previous war -- and then to the occupation. Although collaboration with the Germans is a subject, she never mentions the plight of Jews anywhere in the book -- never mentions the existence of the concentration camps. Mostly for practical reasons, she and her family had converted to Catholicism in the years before the war, and she claimed no interest in the Jewish "cause." Some of the correspondence of her husband and friends is included in the Appendix as they tried to find out her whereabouts after her arrest. The horror of what happened is compounded by the fact that nothing they had done allowed them to escape the Nazi racial program, and even though they were aware of the camps, no one seemed to actually realize that being sent to them was almost certain death. The correspondence continued unknowingly even after she had died, and right up until the time her husband Michel was also arrested and sent to the gas chambers. The fact that the French police in Vichy France continued actively to pursue the little girls is a mind-boggling bit of inhumanity. I suppose it's only by examining the individual stories, that it's possible to start understanding the utter depravity of the Holocaust.

One of the striking things about the novel is Nemirovsky's observation of the basest of human instincts coming to the fore during the turmoil she witnessed. From every class of French life -- it became "every man for himself." In a particularly disturbing episode during the first panicked exodus from Paris, she describes some of the refugee women tossing their children aside and running from the German strafing attacks. By contrast, there are some, but not many instances of sacrifice and kindness, but very few characters who manage to retain any sort of moral integrity.

Summer reading

2008-06-08T21:18:00.003-04:00

Having gone through a pretty long spell of reading rather lugubriously, I've been on a good run of books. I finished Out of Africa and liked it, but the longer I read the more uncomfortable it became for me. Although Dinesen seemed to have glimmerings that what had happened to the natives was unfair, regrettable even, there is still that annoying sense of Western entitlement to African land -- their right to "make something of it," to school and convert the natives, push them aside to reservations, and pronounce their cultural rituals as barbaric and unhealthy. It was also unsettling to read her blithe accounts of killing lions, iguanas, and whatever other animals came to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sort of combining both of my discomfort zones, the local Masai were required to come and ask her (memsahib) to kill the lions raiding their cattle. I guess it would be necessary to place oneself back in the mindset of that time to understand how such incredible sensitivity could exist alongside the arrogance and imperiousness of the Colonial settler.

Next in my stack from the library (I'm so old-fashioned; I get BOOKS -- from the LIBRARY!) was Richard Fortey's Life: the first four billion years. I loved Earth, which was a history of our understanding of geology and plate tectonics. If you want a quick spin through the basics of evolutionary biology via the fossil record and other scientific developments, this is a pretty entertaining way of doing it.

Some of the Amazon reviewers (FWIW) pooh-poohed his style, his lingering over personal anecdotes, and his frequent quotations from poetry, but those are of course, the main points in his favor as far as I'm concerned. If I were a graduate student in paleontology, I wouldn't be using it for a textbook. Why do all these people who obviously already know it all, think he's writing for them? There are times when I think that many people use the Internet only to demonstrate their vast superiority over the rest of us underdeveloped plankton. Well, this multicelled organism quite liked it, especially his explanation and analysis of the "boloid collision" or K-T event, that wiped out the dinosaurs, and all of the controversy over the several theories offered for their extinction.

The book that I just finished was The Night Country by Stewart O'Nan, one of my favorite writers. Wow -- it's the first actual page-turner that I've read in awhile. It's wonderfully creepy and sad and moving. Three teenage "ghosts" of a Halloween car crash have been called back a year later to follow the variously guilt-ridden, obsessed, and devastated survivors of that night. The ghosts are invisible and powerless, mostly grim bystanders to the inevitable drama that is playing out on the anniversary of their deaths. It was very powerful and not without its moments of black humor. It also perfectly captures teenagers' stubborn belief in their invincibility.

I was going to go straight into Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, but after reading just the beginning of it, I think I'll pick something else. It wasn't that it was bad in any way, but I could just tell that it wasn't my cup of tea -- style, concerns, characters -- none of it seemed promising. I have the new translation of War and Peace now, but I think I'll save it for the fall. On the other hand, a frozen Russian landscape might be a great escape as the temperatures look to remain completely unbearable for the rest of the summer!

Out of Africa

2008-05-14T22:45:00.002-04:00

It's been really busy around here, my allergies have been getting me down, and it seems like I'm always too pooped to read for very long. But I did start Out of Africa and I'm finding it delightful. It is as if she dreamed of Africa and is trying to capture it all before it dissolves in the daylight. What an amazing life that must have been. The stories (at least in the part I've read so far) are all about the Natives (her word) and the peculiar nature of her relationship to them. She recounts these stories as the solitary authority figure on the farm; and at least so far never mentions her husband, but already several times, Denys Finch-Hatton. Having seen the movie, I don't want to leap to the conclusion that her tale matches up too neatly with how her life was depicted in the film, though the essential facts are that Finch-Hatton was her lover and her wandering husband infected her with syphilis. In the book, so far, the husband is a blank. Ah -- the power of the Creator! It is hard to keep Meryl Streep's voice (as Karen Blixen) out of my head as I read.

I love her descriptions of the landscape, the African night, the animals, and the flora of Kenya. Of course, her observations of the different tribes and peoples, their culture and traditions, are very interesting, but also awaken in me my post-colonial critical perspective of the white, Western voice pronouncing on the Dark Continent. She seems to see herself as the translator of these peoples to Westerners, and I do think that it was a sincere effort of hers -- meant to acknowledge her affection and admiration for them, even as they are dismissed in many ways as inscrutable and Other.

Still, I hope it makes me dream of grassy plains, gazelles and lions, and starry, African nights with the hyena's eyes shining in the dark.

Out of Montreal

2008-04-29T22:33:00.002-04:00

We got back from our trip to Montreal over an extended weekend. Luckily, we had lovely weather -- low 70s and sunny every day. Because the weather cooperated, we walked a lot of the city, including old Montreal and the waterfront, but I still didn't get to all of the neighborhoods I wanted to check out -- the Jewish delis in Mile End or the Marche Jean Talon, for example. No time for shopping either -- there were some music stores and book stores that I had read about, but I didn't find them. Maybe, we'll be able to take another trip. I think our next destination will be somewhere warm, though.

I've been listening to new Gary Louris, Patty Larkin, and The Raconteurs. Louris was a long-time member and lead singer of the Jayhawks, a band that will be sorely missed. I guess they are all on to their own projects though.

While on the plane, I started a Larry Watson novel called Montana 1948 that I just finished. It was good -- although it didn't have the same impact as the first novel that I read by him several years ago, White Crosses. I always highly recommend that one. Both of these novels are set in the lonesome border land of Montana with Canada. Both also involve small-town sheriffs, scandal, and death. Their similarity is striking -- variations on a theme, but not really redundant.

I have two books from the library -- Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Richard Fortey's Life: The first four billion years on earth. I will assume the latter does not go into a great deal of detail.

I'm not sure what's next, if either. I also find myself wanting to read some Thomas Carlyle; I'm thinking of those Victorians, having re-read some Tennyson and Rossetti lately.

On the nest

2008-04-07T21:31:00.002-04:00

Finally, spring seems to have taken hold. Today was sunny, warm, and breezy. On my afternoon walk, I saw a hawk circle overhead and a pair of house finches perched in a cedar bower. The red bud trees are just starting to show their fire-pink nubs, and my favorite spring wildflowers are peeping out of the grass -- tiny dog violets, spring beauties -- and carpets of heal-all and dandelion, spreading around a single row of bright yellow daffodils.

I took one turn around the pond, populated by Canada Geese in aggressive, nest-defending attitudes. I try to keep a wide berth, since I don't want to pick a fight with a surly goose or alarm the mothers quietly sitting their nests by the shoreline. One breeding pair was loudly intent on kicking another pair off their turf, necks extended serpent-like as they advanced hissing (yes, a hissy-fit) and squawking. I don't know if it's correct to say squawking, but it sounds a lot more belligerent than "honking." What made the scene really amusing were the grazing "onlooker" geese turned in attitudes expressing a Jerry Springer-like fascination with the domestic fight scene. Smaller, but no less fierce, I also saw mockingbirds chasing each other around as they vied for territory. Whew, it's dangerous out there!

I didn't see any ducklings, but only a couple of mallard pairs on the pond and one American Coot. Even though I had looked it up before, I had managed to completely forget what this "duck" is. Sooty black all over with a whitish bill, they're not actually ducks, but belong to the rail family, which is why I had such a hard time tracking it down in the first place. I don't think they're uncommon, but the office park pond is the only place I've ever seen one. I learned that their bills are not flat like a duck's but triangular like a chicken's. So maybe now that I've reinforced it in my memory, I'll be able to identify them correctly from now on.

Opening Day

2008-03-31T21:52:00.002-04:00

I refer to baseball of course. I usually feel very springy and hopeful on Opening Day, but like everything else, they've messed with it a bit. It used to be the first Saturday in April and was nearly always the Reds, but now they have these "special" openers like last night -- a single game between the Nationals in their new park and the Braves, which I didn't get to see because it was an ESPN game. A night game in March that wasn't even part of a series. What's that all about? It's all gone commercial! So I was just going to catch some baseball at lunch time today on the "official" opening day. It poured rain here, rained out the Yankees, rain delayed the Cubs and the Reds...maybe baseball will be better in April!

I just bought the new Raconteurs album but haven't really had a chance to give it a good listen yet. I thought it sounded less like the first Raconteurs and more like the last White Stripes. Interesting. We've also been listening to Rodrigo y Gabriele, which I bought my brother for Christmas, but it wasn't until he sat us down to watch the DVD that came with it, that I got motivated to buy it for myself. They are really amazing on the guitar, especially Gabriele. I love that Latin-influenced, heavy percussive sound. And being that I can barely get from G to C, watching those fingers fly, and make all that sound, just blows me away!

After finishing Weidensaul's book, I tried a novel by someone new. John Crowley has recommended Elizabeth Hand, so I checked out Mortal Love from the library. It seemed promising -- it was about the White Goddess myth, the Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Swinburne, and that general time period, with several other entangled narratives. On the surface, it was in the same vein as Possession by Byatt, which I loved. But, it really didn't live up to Byatt--or for that matter, Crowley; so after meandering half way through without being in the least interested in the story or any of the characters, I gave it up. There was something about it that just got on my nerves. It wasn't terribly subtle. Maybe it was the pathetic male characters falling prey to the succubus/white goddess/Undine that just seemed strained and silly. What a bunch of dopes. I think I've lost my ability to suspend disbelief to that extent. Thus, I'm going to read Hermione Lee's bio of Willa Cather next. She's one of my favorite writers and I've already read her Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Other than that, I've still got my Final Four, since like many people I just went with number one seeds. Terribly boring, but obviously, quite correct.

March madness

2008-03-05T16:52:00.006-05:00

I'm actually talking about a "madness" not licensed by the NCAA and CBS (although I'll be filling out my brackets soon enough). I'm just mad that spring hasn't quite sprung; that in addition to feeding the little bastards all winter (the birds get the crumbs), I now have a squirrel condo in the soffit of my house; that I can't switch fast enough between G and C; and that I have to wear winter shoes and socks when I want to wear sandals. Well, at least March isn't February, which totally sucked.

So, here are the silver linings. First, I can now see all of my tulips and daffodils peeking above ground, and assorted other spring bulbs, which will be nice little surprises because I can't quite remember what I planted -- or where the squirrels moved them to (are you sensing a theme?).

Second, I've been reading a book by the wonderful Scott Weidensaul -- Return to Wild America -- which is beautiful and educational and makes my chest hurt because so much of it documents the terrible destruction we've visited upon the land and its inhabitants. When I read about the wholesale slaughters of wild creatures and landscapes that have been carried out over our history of "improving" this country, the surly, dark spirit lurking in me just wants to declare that we are going to get exactly what we deserve. (As many times as I think of Thomas Hobbes, I should really go ahead and read Leviathan. But would that improve my mood? I expect the sound bite is out of context--life is nasty, brutish, short--and that he actually believed in human advancement and a brighter future.) That was a long and tenuously connected parenthesis. I think there's an even longer Cormac McCarthy parenthesis out there, but I 'm not going to try it; I could sprain something. Also, all my silver linings seem to have black linings. But never mind.

Third, I am the happy owner of tickets to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova -- AND -- Elvis Costello and the Imposters both in May! That is in addition to Derby festivities. And there will also be baseball games, and all the players will look like normal, lanky fellows, except for the tubby pitchers, because Roger Clemens is testifying before Congress, and so they've had the bejesus (and androstenediol) scared out of them.

Fourth silver lining is that even though I stink now, I'm better at playing the guitar than I was in October.

Number five: I'm going to go buy some strappy sandals, goddammit. Just watch me.

Number six: I have an awesome husband who puts up with my finicky salad-eating ways.

Jaded

2008-01-22T14:39:00.000-05:00

Apparently, I just don't want to read anymore. I finished Stendhal and started combing my shelves at home for something "lighter." I threw out all the books that were tomes, which wipes out half of my existing library, and then disqualified everything that seemed dark or weighty, which effectively wiped out the other half. I then went to Borders, just to get inspiration, and didn't bring home a single book! While dithering around, I had picked up my Edgar Allan Poe collection and started to read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I finished it, but it was not a supernatural tale so much as a seafaring adventure, and not at all what I was looking for. It was actually just annoying. Cannibalism. Whoopee.

Is there such a thing as a book slump? Even the last Jane Austen that I read -- the one that I had lovingly saved -- Northanger Abbey was, dare I say, disappointing. It's definitely the least appealing of her novels. A clever parody of Gothic romances, no doubt, but no real meat or charm. Bother! John Crowley has been reading and writing about Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay on his blog. He is clearly delighted by it, and since I like literary bios, I might have to read it myself. I want to be delighted by my next book! Is that such a tall order?

So, I turned to my rock in times of reading disenchantment--poetry. Dylan Thomas. Not delighted either.

Also, to fill in my grump, I read last week that Marah has cancelled their U.S. tour with their new CD and the band has broken up...again. Fiddlesticks.

New Marah

2008-01-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

Marah's new CD came out Tuesday. I just haven't been to buy it yet, but I've already listened to most of it since it's being streamed online. Looks like the reviews are strong; the link takes you to the player and their tour dates so far. I'm hoping they'll continue to add dates a little closer to me. We just saw a Marah-lite version over the summer, but I'm looking forward to seeing the full band back together. I hope they have great success. They definitely seem to have put some renewed efforts into publicity for this one.

Meanwhile, I'm still bogged down with The Red and the Black. When I do pick it up, I enjoy what I'm reading, and yet I'm just not compelled to return to it, so it going very slowly, and I'm over half way through it. Sometimes you're just not in the mood for a certain book, and I think that's where I am with this one. Still, I'm committed to finishing it at this point.

I had a little mini-breakthrough playing the guitar last night. Even though I'm not really much better or faster, for the first time I could kind of see how a song on the guitar comes together with the chords and the strumming -- it seemed like it might actually become a little less foreign. And the night before I had picked it up and just playing a G chord sounded horrendous! I mean, it sounded terrible, so I just put it away without even trying anything else. Go figure.

Reading light?

2008-01-03T16:14:00.000-05:00

I looked back through my book journal (offline) to see what I had read throughout 2007, some of which I talked about here. I read a surprising amount of non-fiction early in the year -- a study of Virginia Woolf, a history of 20th century warfare -- and then lots of rather heavy novels and the new biography of Edith Wharton. My reading definitely tended toward the "serious" and several of them were real doorstoppers! And I never even made it to War and Peace, as intended. So now I'm thinking I might need to lighten up a little this year and put W&P off a little longer. Of course, I'm in the middle of Stendhal's The Red and the Black right now, which isn't exactly The Notebook. But after that, maybe I'll try something in the fantasy genre for a change of pace. I haven't seen any of the movie versions, but I'm thinking about the novel I am Legend, since no one ever thinks the movies do it justice.

I've mostly been thinking about music and getting my collection moved to my new iPod (thanks, hubby!). It's very cool to have all my favorite songs so handy, but there's so much stuff to collect, it's overwhelming. Also, I've been making noise on my guitar. I know it would be smarter to learn to play Kumbaya first, but who really wants to play that? I 'd rather make my ears bleed trying to play an actual cool song (with easy chords!) -- at least it's not boring. Maybe I'll finally learn to play *something* this year. My fingers still get sore and I don't think I'm much closer to learning how to strum. That whole music-math connection is intimidating to me, because I never got the hang of that either. It's like there is this whole compartment of my brain for those kinds of smarts that I can't unlock. It looks like it should be easy and straightforward, but it's so NOT for me.

Kelly Willis...at last

2007-11-28T13:49:00.000-05:00

Finally on tour in my area, Kelly Willis kept circling closer as she added dates, so I got to see her in my hometown. It was a really good show. She had her full band with her, which included two other guitarists, a mandolin/fiddler, keyboardist, and drummer. She sang a lot of songs off the new CD and mixed in a few oldies, but only one song from Easy. Kelly sounded terrific and somehow is still as skinny as a bean pole. Instead of boots, she was wearing white patent leather wedges. I always notice the shoes!

That's probably the only show I'll see before the New Year, unless we catch some last-minute thing before the holidays. I haven't really seen much else on the calendar. I guess it's all Frosty and Rudolph from now on. I don't mind a little Christmas music, but the incessant cheesy holiday music that they play in stores grates on my nerves. I heard, fleetingly, a crap country song on the radio as we were driving back home on Thanksgiving--something about "you are the angel at the top of my Christmas tree..." There's just about nothing worse than "modern" country Christmas songs.

Tis the November of my discontent...

2007-11-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

I've been searching all day for the particular word to describe my feeling of general disagreeableness -- something more than mere ennui -- but less glum than weltschmerz. I'm sure it's largely my seasonal funk starting to edge its way in. There's something about the coming of winter, dark days, the negative aspects of the holidays with their crassness and fakery that bums me out every year.

In any case, I'm looking for a perfect French word for it; I know it's out there, but I can't quite put my finger on it. My husband suggests the humble "grumpy," but of course, it lacks a certain sophisticated, continental flair. The Eskimo have a hundred words for snow, but the French probably have about that many for feelings of discontent. Merde!

I just finished James Salter's novel Light Years, a beautifully written book about all sorts of discontents. It is a wonderful example of reading and life convergence. Salter is considered to be one of the last of the "Hemingway school" in his style, but I think he is a terrific improvement on Hemingway. I can see the influence in the short sentences and the precise word choice, and even in the way dialogue is delivered, but Salter's language is so much richer and more lyrical and his characters seem far more like real people. For one thing, Salter goes on my rather short list of male authors who write well about women (Flaubert, Hardy, Michael Ondaatje, Brian Hall to name the ones off the top of my head). Rather than the alien stick figures Hemingway conjures up, Salter's women are like -- gasp! -- human beings. The character Nedra's struggles with aging are uncomfortably familiar: "People only come this close..." looking at herself in the mirror, from a certain distance, in a certain light. How we deny! It is a book filled with many lovely, astute, disquieting things. (Another departure from the ersatz macho-man Ernest is that Salter was a real-life fighter-pilot in the Korean War, not some wanna-be adventurer.)

On a far different note, the Project Feeder bird counting starts this weekend. Funny, how I look forward to it. Selena vs. Squirrels, Round Two. There is no question, of course, who will emerge victorious.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

2007-10-19T15:18:00.000-04:00

Willa Cather is one of my favorite writers. I forget how beautiful her writing is in between books, and it always delights me when I rediscover it. This one has definitely spurred my interest in the history of New Mexico and the clashing of Spanish, native, and American cultures. I find myself thinking of Cormac McCarthy and his perspective on these "clashes" in Blood Meridian. Obviously, he renders the violence in much more gut-wrenching terms than Cather does, and she actually finds humane and genuinely good men -- Father Latour, Father Vaillant, the young Indian Jacinto, and Kit Carson -- among the killers, rascals, and cheats. One thing these writers do have in common is their ability to evoke the natural beauty, mystery, and majesty of the southwestern landscape. I'm just a bit over half way through, but it's such a wonderful book to enter into autumn with.

I think next may be James Salter, and I'm also planning to read The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, considered to be one of the greatest Italian novels.

Music outlook and Rilo Kiley

2007-09-27T11:19:00.000-04:00

My hubby didn't change his mind about Wilco when we saw them live. He's not a fan and neither does he care for Jeff Tweedy's hat. I did enjoy the show, though. Maybe it was the happy location of our seats in the outdoor venue, but the sound was really excellent. Kudos to the sound dude. We were going to go see Kelly Willis this weekend, but she's added a date even closer to us in November, so we're going to wait until then.

My musical obsession of the week is the new Rilo Kiley, Under the Blacklight. I've heard some of the earlier stuff and cuts from Jenny Lewis' solo album, but nothing really hooked me until I listened to the new one on Rhapsody, then had to go out and buy it. It's one of those rare CDs that every track is really appealing. Of course, the fans of previous RK are apparently all het up that it's a "sellout" because it doesn't sound just like the first one, which was nice but more mellow and sounded similar to every other emo group providing a soundtrack to Grey's Anatomy. If this one provided a soundtrack to a show, it would have to be something on HBO, considering the subject matter and racy lyrics. That being said, I'll probably go back to the first one for more attentive listening now.

Lewis has a great voice and it's very versatile. I get everything from Cher to Liz Phair to Madonna from her songs. There is also something to be said for a really good beat, which most of these songs have. I read a Guardian review of this CD, which was mostly positive, but the reviewer thought they went terribly wrong on a song called "Breaking Up;" he thought the closing refrain sounded frightfully like a jingle for a tampon advert! That's why I like the Guardian. While I might not agree, I can see what he means, and it's pretty funny.

Joe Henry, Wilco, Alejandro Escovedo

2007-09-14T16:32:00.000-04:00

I won tickets to go see Wilco next Friday, which is cool since I probably wouldn't have gone to the show otherwise. I like some of their stuff, but their more "experimental" mode leaves me a little cold. I was not a big fan, unlike the rest of the musical universe, of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Sky Blue Sky seems more my style though. I hope it's a good show.

I also just bought Joe Henry's new CD Civilians. On only a few listens, I really like it a lot. He writes really intricate, beautiful lyrics. I love the rumination that he puts in the mouth of Willie Mays (standing in a Home Depot -- a bit of reality?) in "Our Song." He's a true original, much like Tom Waits. I think he' d be really great to see live too.

I saw another fantastic Alejandro show that was all electric -- no cellos or violins. It was rocking! His cover of "Beast of Burden" was a lot of fun, too.

Next up, I hope, is Kelly Willis in Lexington. No tickets yet, but it's on my calendar. And thank goodness I saw the White Stripes in July -- looks like Meg is having some major troubles and the remaining tour is canceled, both in the States and the UK. Bummer for those folks.

On Chesil Beach

2007-09-12T16:56:00.000-04:00

I just read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, which is on the Booker short list. I'm a big fan, and though I liked this one, I wouldn't count it among my favorites. It really is more of a novella -- I read it in a sitting. It had the feeling of an exercise -- a working out of a writing challenge. Certainly, in lesser hands, such delicate and intimate subject matter could turn out all wrong and end up a candidate for the infamous Bad Sex Award. McEwan is deft where his sadly matched protagonists are clumsy, however. He takes us back to the days when men and women could still be hopelessly uninformed and reticent about sex (early 60s in Britain, just on the cusp of the sexual revolution) and explores the repercussions on an idealistic young couple who have a very bad wedding night.

But it seems to me that he tips the scales a bit. It's not just that they're "virginal" and nervous. and that it's a "different time." He suggests that there is something much darker going on. Unless I misread, the woman Florence has a (repressed) history of being sexually abused by her father. That fact, to me, turns it then into rather old territory of McEwan's, where such themes of incest and sexual transgression recur. Maybe I just had other expectations for it from what I had already read and heard about this book. I guess I'm just left wondering what his point was -- and if I missed it entirely.

Literary news: Glad and sad

2007-08-30T16:49:00.000-04:00

Cormac McCarthy won the U.K."s James Tait Black memorial prize for The Road. The Guardian article indicates, too, that he is being mentioned as a Nobel contender. I'd like to see that -- it would be very well-deserved for his entire body of work, which is impressive, to say the least.

I also read the obituary for literary scholar Julia Briggs, who was only in her 60s and died of a brain tumor. I read her study of Virginia Woolf and loved it. She was married to the historian Robin Briggs, which I did not know. It's very tragic. When one of your favorite writers dies, it is a loss -- even though you don't know them personally, you feel you know them just a little through their work; and of course, you do lose the gift of the writing that they would have done.

What else I did this summer...besides read

2007-08-29T17:03:00.000-04:00

I followed up The Keep with On Beauty by Zadie Smith (thumbs up) and read an old Rose Macaulay novel called Crewe Train on the beach. That is one from the vaults (1926). Macaulay is an underappreciated writer. She's wickedly funny, elegant, interesting -- a fine satirist. The Towers of Trebizond ought to be at least a minor classic. She was more well-known than Virginia Woolf at the time, but I think she kind of got swamped by the Modernists -- Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, and all those post-war writers. She wrote a wrenching, melancholy novel called Non-Combatants and Others in the midst of WWI.

I visited the beach for several days and had a lovely time despite the influx of jellyfish. They were small and pale, but numerous. I think they were the common Moon variety, but I'm not an expert. I did see one or two that were much larger, and I assume they were different from the masses. The water was beautiful and clear on the Gulf Coast, so you could see all the other fish nipping around your ankles as well.

I saw a great, scaled-down Marah show at the Bottletree in Birmingham, a very cool little venue with some pretty good bar food. I had only seen them one other time, and the guitars were so loud, I really couldn't hear the voices, so this was a treat. I could actually hear Dave and Serge sing. I liked the set, which included many old favorites from Kids in Philly. It was awesome to hear "City of Dreams" from If You Didn't Laugh.

And, last but not least, we caught the White Stripes at Sloss Furnace, also in Birmingham. Whew! Outdoors in July in a big, tin shed. It was a furnace, alright! Despite the sweltering, airless shed and the concrete floor (no seats!), it was a great show. Even the Megster came out from behind the drums and sang "Cold, Cold Night." (However, I am way too old and spoiled for such things, so I'll probably try to see Jack in AC venues from now on.) One of my sidenotes from this show is spotting a true "southern belle." I had always heard that they do not sweat but "glisten." Lest you think this is a myth, I noticed a very chic young lady--bangs swept over her forehead, perfect makeup, crisp clothes--who arrived in the infernal confines of Sloss and looked just as fresh after the concert. Obviously, she must have made a pact with the Devil, and so was unaffected by the heat and smoke that turned the rest of us into sweaty, disheveled rock-and-roll degenerates.

I'm now in the middle of the new Edith Wharton biography by Hermione Lee. I'm always amazed at the ability of great biographers to ferret out all those far-flung bits and pieces, assemble them, and then make some kind of sense out of them. Not to mention, they have the challenge of filling in the gaps. In EW's case, she made sure to self-edit her archives by destroying a great many letters (though she did leave her "secret diary"). Henry James, one of her primary correspondents and friends, burned most of her letters to him on request.

Divisadero

2007-07-03T09:47:00.000-04:00

Ondaatje is the master of the loosely connected narrative. Seemingly unconnected people and events in his novels wind around to brush up against one another. Where the characters end up overlapping is often the way their stories are illuminated, even as they spin away again into their separate worlds. Divisadero traces the paths of two sisters, Anna and Claire, and the boy, Coop, who they grow up with on a California farm. Their lives are suddenly altered in the aftermath of a disastrous love affair, and they move out into the world apart, but still living intimately with the memories of their former existence. Anna's voice moves in and out of the narration, as she researches the life of a French writer, Lucien Segura, in a remote village in France. There, she takes a lover, Rafael -- the son of gypsies whose caravan lies at the periphery of Segura's farmhouse where she works.

The story then becomes as much about Segura as Anna, Claire, and Coop. The sections set in France, both in the near present and in the early-1900s of Segura's life are very beautiful. There are many parallels between these lives, decades apart. Segura's war was the devastating conflict of the Great War; in the present, the Gulf Wars hovers in the background of Coop's life as an accomplished gambler in the casinos and dives of Las Vegas and Tahoe.

This is one of those novels that bears a second reading, just for the pleasures of its prose, but also to discover all the tenuous filaments that tie its characters together. I've admired all of Ondaatje's novels that I've read: The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, and Anil's Ghost -- but I think this and Anil are the ones that I found to be the most moving.

O Lord, what fools these mortals be!

2007-06-14T15:46:00.000-04:00

I kicked off my summer (a bit early) appropriately by re-reading A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the things that I like about Shakespeare is that he remains so darn funny. I was chuckling all the way through the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, which is so silly and touching at the same time. All the while Bottom and his fellows are murdering the play with their literalness and malapropisms (Ninny's tomb!) and the royal onlookers are making their snarky comments, you are acutely aware of their earnestness and their sense of duty. They are the best of good 'ole boys paying their respect to king and queen on their wedding day having spent their zero leisure time preparing their lines and being set upon by mischievous fairies!

I was reading something the other day about the play that reminded me of all the spells lifted to put things to rights at the end, Demetrius was left under a spell. He didn't love Helena until the potion was put into his eyes, but the fairies didn't mend their magic, so essentially, it's only magic that ties him to Helena. For Shakespeare, of course, it paired off all the lovers neatly at the end. If he had indulged in sequels as much as we do today, he could have written a further tragedy (or maybe one of those dark romances) in which Demetrius awakens from the spell and is married to a woman that he doesn't even like! Possibilities!

I think I'm going to read The Tempest again too; then Faust -- both Marlowe's and Goethe's. It's all John Crowley's fault!

Endless Things -- last of Crowley's Aegypt series

2007-06-12T16:57:00.000-04:00

I just finished Endless Things, after reading the four novels of Aegypt in succession. I've been a big Crowley fan for a while now, but I never read this cycle, which began twenty years ago (Aegypt came out in 1987)! I think you could think of the four volumes as one very, very long novel. I usually do that terrible thing where I try to compare a writer to a similar writer, but I don't think I can do that with Crowley.

To the uninitiated, this series focuses on the scholar/historian Pierce Moffett, who finds himself out of a job, then "buswrecked" in a small town where he decides to remain, or doesn't "decide" -- Moffett tends to let things happen to him , and is, in fact, almost incapable of making decisions about anything pertaining to his future plans. So, the peripatetic Moffett drifts, or is pulled, on a journey through four novels that echoes the thinking, yearning, searching quests of Renaissance philosophers John Dee and Giordano Bruno. It would take entirely too long to explain the intricacies of this story or the cast of characters, but if you are interested in such things as ancient religions and mythologies, alchemy, magic, the occult, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, werewolves, Appalachian lore, witches, angels and demons, literature, the nature of time, astrology, possession, and of course, love... well then, this might be for you. You get the picture. It's complicated, but in a delightful way.

Crowley is, by far, one of the more erudite novelists around, and you do have to pay attention. The reading is demanding in equal measure to the pleasure you will get out of it.

If my rambling is too vague, then you might want to check out the laudatory review in the Washington Post. Also look out for a piece by Michael Dirda in the Post; he mentioned it in one of his weekly online chats, which I highly recommend for book nerds everywhere. Not many mainstream reviews out there. But they're just scared of him, no doubt. Awed to silence!

Summer reading bonanza

2007-06-05T23:11:00.000-04:00

It's challenging when all of your favorite authors have new books at roughly the same time! My summer reading is usually decidedly not new. I believe last summer I was reading Colette and Robbe-Grillet, for instance. I like to catch up on quirky old novels or the forgotten classics that I never got around to. But this summer, already waiting for me, are new novels by Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) and Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero); I'm currently in the middle of Crowley's Endless Things, following up the third volume, Daemonomania. I keep changing my favorite, of course, but I really loved D. It was dark, sad, and of course, beautiful and mysterious. The Solstice Masque scene near the end was amazing. I don't know how he does it. But I digress....

I'm pretty darn sure Suite Francaise was on last year's list, but it's on my nightstand still. And scattered 'round the bed, the sacred and profane: King James Bible, The Way of Hermes, May issue of Vogue, an encyclopedia of occult philosophies, Bullfinch's Mythology. Most of these point their way back to Crowley, except just possibly, the Vogue.

I was also planning to finally read something by Michael Chabon -- the new one seems pretty interesting (Jews in Alaska! A minyan for Fleishman...); Haruki Murakami, Don Delillo; I've never read anything by Martin Amis -- is it skipping ahead to read the son before the father? Oh, and The Keep by Jennifer Egan, also on my list for about a year. And it's not like I don't have anything else to do. I suppose I feel compelled to make up for that 60 appalling-percent of my country people who confess to reading nothing at all! This explains much, eh?

Jim James and James Brown ...sort of

2007-06-04T22:30:00.000-04:00

I had another really cool weekend of music -- just by happenstance I attended two benefit concerts. The first was a benefit for Kush Griffith, trumpeter and arranger (I think) for the Godfather of Soul James Brown. Kush was in a wheel chair but still very capable of delivering the funk. Playing along with him were two other members of the band, drummer Melvin Parker and his brother Maceo on saxophone. We went on the spur of the moment; it was a show also featuring Brigid Kaelin on keys and vocals. I've seen her a couple of times, as a guest artist at other shows and she's always impressive. We do have a wealth of local talent in Louisville. It was a lot of fun--and the music was great.

We were lucky enough to get tickets for Jim James (featuring Sarah Elizabeth and Ron Whitehead) along with local artist and musician Andy Cook, and Jim's My Morning Jacket bandmate, Carl Broemel. The concert benefited the owners of the venerable Rudyard Kipling -- a performance spot for artists of all types for a couple of decades in Louisville. The first set was Ron W.'s poems interspersed with Sarah's songs (including several duets with Jim). Sarah has a beautiful voice that blended very nicely with Jim on House of the Rising Sun, Sound of Silence, and (way cool) White Rabbit.

It's hard to overstate what an immensely entertaining, warm, lively, and sometimes dreamy set that Jim and friends put on in the second half of the evening. I've never seen MMJ live and I've only seen Jim on Austin City Limits, so it was quite a revelation. First of all, we're in a room that probably holds about 100 people, sitting and standing, and although there were a few feedback issues, the sound was really beautiful and rich. I know I'm lucky to have been in on this show in such an intimate setting. Jim is an unflagging powerhouse of a performer. He played for at least two hours just in his set, so I now understand why those marathon Bonnaroo shows are so legendary! I think his voice can't be appreciated as much if you only hear the recordings -- it ventures somewhere between the poles of ethereal and wailing, swathed in the dreamy reverb.

Inasmuch as you can get a vibe about someone just by observing them on a stage, Jim exudes a very gentle warmth, part down-home Kentucky boy, part Buddhist monk. There is something incantatory about his songs; they have a quality of snatching after something elusive. I suppose sitting in such an intimate setting, musically beguiled for such a length of time, tempts one to deconstruct the experience, but I'll heed the warning of Wordsworth -- to murder is to dissect -- and leave the rest to the imagination.

Brandi Carlile

2007-05-30T16:02:00.000-04:00

I've only been listening to Brandi Carlile for a couple of weeks but she's already in my Pantheon of favorite artists. I kept hearing her name and decided to check out the free tracks on Rhapsody. They were off her first recording, and I was immediately blown away. I rushed right out and bought that one -- and who was I kidding -- also bought the new, T-bone Burnett-produced CD (The Story) a few days later. I've been listening to both and spreading Brandi-fever to my friends and family. I don't usually link to MySpace, but her space has the streaming music, of course, as well as a lot of cool links to video (check out the ATT Room, featured prominently).

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a new find since Marah's Kids in Philly. Brandi has a beautiful voice reminiscent at times of KD Lang, Janis Joplin, and Patsy Cline, but of course, just shades of those great singers -- she's really unique. She has even inspired in me, the ham-fisted, a desire to learn to play guitar. I mean, everyone wants to play the guitar, but actually having the discipline to learn and practice, which is another thing altogether.

She and her band members (The Twins!) write all the songs (although there is an excellent live Elton John cover on the first one). I also like the fact that in the picture on the back cover of The Story, she looks a bit like Jack White. That's a good sign!

The pleasures and pain of live music

2007-05-21T16:15:00.000-04:00

A lot of people -- including myself, when younger -- don't like live music, because they want to hear the performers sounding *exactly* like they do on the record. It's taken me awhile to appreciate hearing performers live, warts and all, but I think that's become one of the most entertaining aspects of trekking to concerts: the unexpected. It's fascinating to see how performers relate (or don't) to a live audience and how they respond when things beyond their control, perhaps, go haywire.

I like getting a little glimpse of how they relate to band mates, how their nerves manifest themselves, or how they conform (or don't) to the mood of the audience on a particular night. You can certainly tell from reading concert reviews (non-pros more than pros) that performances vary wildly from one night to another, one city to the next. The artists themselves recognize that certain intangibles make one show electric and another one completely flat. What makes a performance "transcendent" and what merely good?

I had an excellent opportunity to explore all of these things during a public radio sponsored concert over the weekend that included this wonderfully diverse line-up (in order of performance): Paula Cole (back from "Where have all the cowboys gone?" post-Lilith Fair obscurity); Charlie Louvin (introducing songs he first recorded in 1955!); Suzanne Vega; the trippy rock band Vietnam; and finally, our hero, Ryan Adams.

The anxious fanboys and fangirls had crowded in early for Ryan, and yeah, I was mostly there for him as well, although I was really looking forward to Vega and checking out Vietnam, who I didn't know much about at all. So first Paula Cole: great voice, sexy little black dress, cool heels, and some really bizarre dance moves. As we say in the south, bless her heart. She was a bit hard to watch. She either needs to wear the dress and be a softly swaying songstress or check into some blue jeans more conducive to rocking out, if that's her version of it.

Charlie Louvin broke out the old school country and gospel tunes that your grandaddy might have been singing along to after returning from Korea (the War, that is). He was a treat and such an old hand. He wasn't the least bit confounded by the kids in their baby doll t-shirts and dyed mohawks. Introducing one old love'em and leave'em crying song, he observed wryly to the front rows, "You're too young to have lost anything yet." He served up the stage banter he's been rolling out for a good fifty years, and it still mostly works.

Suzanne Vega is just Cool. She's got a sexy, smarter-than-you, big-city elegance that I wasn't really expecting. She sounds amazing, which I was expecting. Her new CD "Beauty and Crime" is coming out this summer and sounds like it will be strong. One of our household, all-time favorites is "Nine Objects of Desire," which I guess was her last full release, not counting retrospectives.

I liked Vietnam, after my initial fright (two of those boys look like Charles Manson, without the crazy eyes -- although I may not have been close enough). Seriously, there might have been more total hair on display than My Morning Jacket. In fact, they make MMJ look Esquire-groomed by comparison. Plus, MMJ doesn't scare me. Whoa--I don't know what the songs actually said, but their sound is very authentically post-911, the world is fucked, and we're-here-to-witness (they're based in Brooklyn). I also called them "attack of the Allman Bros." because the drummer's blonde hirsuteness was more hippy-smooth than the others. They're sort of Bob Dylan crossed with hairy southern rock with some goth undertones. What the hell? I thought they were creepily compelling and sure to be condemned by the likes of Karl Rove, W., and company, which makes them aces in my book.

Ryan, Ryan. In his defense, he apparently tore a ligament while skateboarding and can't play the guitar. Okay, accidents happen. The show still goes on and the brat boy had such a wonderful opportunity to ingratiate himself by showing up, being charming and self-deprecating (I know, I know). But, no. First of all, I wasn't aware that he'd had any sort of accident, so he and the band gather in near total darkness toward the back of the stage, sitting on stools, making it hard to decipher just which one was Ryan Adams. Finally, his disembodied voice (like an angel, of course) emerges from the crouched and hooded figure near the piano.

So the lights never came up, no one ever said diddly to the audience, and though the songs (new ones) sounded pretty good, we were all too bemused/disappointed/miffed to notice. What the heck is he doing? Is that a splint on his hand? Did he tear an eye-ligament (big-ass, ridiculous sunglasses, despite the gloom)? Is that a shower cap he's wearing under the hoodie? Is he reading the music off a stand (I definitely saw him turning pages)? Is that actually Ryan Adams or a changeling? So many questions. His first and only words were good night and thanks as he and the band left the stage after playing about 30 minutes. If only we'd had pitchforks and torches on us. Who knew?

Jazz Fest Weekend One

2007-05-09T16:54:00.000-04:00

Whoops -- I saved this as a draft and never got around to posting, so...better late than never:

I made my first trip to New Orleans for Jazz Fest this year. We went all three days and saw Dr. John, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Norah Jones, Gillian Welch, and Arturo Sandoval. The weather was hot, but not nearly as humid as I expected, and we had bright, sunny skies all three days. Unfortunately, we had to choose between Van and Lucinda Williams, but parked ourselves for The Man, since it's less likely we'll see him again. It was good, even though we were pretty far away in our little patch of chairs. People run their flags up for a good reason in that crowd. Once you leave your campsite and try to find it again, you can end up flailing around for awhile in the mass of humanity!

It's a great festival--colorful, friendly, and eclectic. There's much more music than what I listed above, which were the headliners. Next time, I would spend a little more time in some of the smaller tents, not only to get out of the sun, but also to sample some of the variety of acts and local music. We caught some of the Creole Indians and Pete Fountain, but as the crowds increase, it's harder to move around.

Since I'm not that much of a crowd person anyway, I have to say my favorite moment of the festival was being up close for Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. It's the first time I've seen them live, and both were fantastic. That, followed by Sandoval on the final day was certainly a highlight.

Love and Sleep in preparation for Endless Things

2007-04-03T16:50:00.000-04:00

I finished Aegypt and I'm currently in the middle of the next installment, Love and Sleep. I really enjoyed the early chapters of L&S, which covered the young Pierce Moffett's childhood in eastern Kentucky. I think that since I'm reading these back to back and they were written almost 10 years apart, I'm finding the redundancy in the latter parts of L&S a little offputting. I'm sure the exposition would be more needful for someone reading it as a standalone or for the poor person who had been waiting seven years to get to volume two! But that's a fairly minor point. I should probably reserve further judgment until I've finished it.

Meanwhile, I've been amused and delighted by John Crowley's blog. I had no idea he had one, but came across the link on Wikipedia. Lots of good things there for word nerds and people who like witty, literate commentary--from both blogger and commenters.

In music, I've been listening to James Hunter for a little retro vibe -- I saw him live recently, and he was really fun. Also, I've been listening to Cold War Kids. I had heard them on an MTV podcast (I think that's what it was). Very compelling, story-like lyrics about people whose lives have gone tragically awry for the most part. It's not groovy lounge music by any means. I really like the piano parts.

On to fiction!

2007-03-08T15:47:00.000-05:00

I finally finished Niall Ferguson's War of the World, and after spending a month with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their minions, I am more than ready to spend time in fictional la-la land. I just had time to start John Crowley's Aegypt, which should put me as far from reality as I can get, as it promises to deal with Angels, alchemy, and alternate worlds. Weirdly, when I picked it up last night, the first date mentioned in the book was March 8, which is today and the setting was a coal mining town in Appalachian Kentucky, which is close to where I hail from. Weird, huh?

Aegypt was originally published in 1987 as the first novel in a tetralogy, and the fourth one, Endless Things, is due this very April. In other words, I need to get busy.

The War of the World

2007-02-27T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's history of twentieth century conflict. I'm a bit more than half way through, but the going is getting tough. It is an excellent effort, thorough, and offers interesting insights, but I've been on hiatus because it became so disturbing. I've read a lot of military history, so I'm no stranger to violence recounted, but the litany of horrors from World War II has just about done me in. And I haven't even got to the section on the Rape of Nanking. I think the stark, documentary accounts of neighbors killing neighbors (and sometimes family members)--the more "intimate" nature of the mass murdering that went on ahead of the Nazi industrialization of death--is the thing that got to me. It is difficult to understand, although Ferguson attempts to enumerate some of the contributing factors, how seemingly ordinary people can turn into killing machines. The line is too fine between "humanity" and bestiality, and it is a phenomenon that can not be safely relegated to the past. All you have to do is look at Africa, not to mention the Middle East. So, as I am not one to abandon a book--especially when I'm 400 pages in--I'll have to tackle it again.

Random play

2007-01-30T16:52:00.000-05:00

One of the best things about MP3 players is the random shuffle feature. Some people claim that their devices are in sync with them to a preternatural degree (don't these people choose the songs, themselves-duh!), but I'm not here to debate that. They do however, sometimes cook up a particularly heavenly run of songs that have nothing to do with each other, but somehow seem just right. While walking on the treadmill, I heard, in succession:

Looking for someone like you - Kelly Willis
Ordinary Joe - Terry Callier
Off the record - My Morning Jacket
Strawberry Road - Sam Phillips
My heart is the bums on the street - Marah
When I was cruel - Elvis Costello

Anyway, it was pretty awesome. That's all.

McEwan's life is as strange as his fiction

2007-01-19T16:30:00.000-05:00

I loved the story in the Times this week about Ian McEwan discovering an older brother he never knew about. The details sound like the premise of a really great novel! Clandestine affair, a baby given up to strangers during wartime, the death of a husband in Normandy...

In other news, poet Seamus Heaney won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize for his latest collection (which I haven't read yet). Also a writer from Kentucky won a British prize for short stories: Willie Davis for "Kid in a Well." You can read it on The Guardian's site.

Woolf and the creative process

2007-01-19T16:03:00.000-05:00

I just finished Julia Briggs' Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. What distinguishes this "biography" is that the focus is squarely on Woolf as an artist. Woolf was an exemplary diary keeper, and Briggs' uses great resources to show how she created her books from conception to publication. Even if you are not a particular Woolf fan, any one interested in how artists work, in the mystery of the creative process, would enjoy reading this book. Also, for anyone doing research on specific works by Woolf, this is an excellent reading guide. I found myself--a devoted Woolf fan--newly impressed by her serious work ethic, complicated as it was by her fragile mental health and fragmented by two major wars. (The Woolfs split their time between the country and the city, but Woolf was passionate about London. One of her former homes was destroyed, and her last home in London was damaged by WWII bombing.) She was deeply devoted to her craft. She could have reeled off traditional narratives by the score, but she was passionately attached to the idea of finding new forms to get at the truth of being. She wanted to write books about the inner workings of our minds, about all the invisible things that shape what we are and what we do.

I also highly recommend Hermione Lee's full-length biography of Woolf, which is more of a traditional "life" bio. It came out several years ago, and this spring Lee is publishing a new biography of Edith Wharton, which I will probably pick up. In addition, Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys) has a new bio of Thomas Hardy out now that sounds very good. They're all dropping at the same time!

My next "big read" is history, however. I just started Niall Ferguson's War of the Worlds: The Descent of the West. I think it's going to be really interesting, if sobering. He's looking at the extraordinary violence of the last century and attempting to analyze it in new ways--apparently he's turning a few standard arguments on their heads; for example, instead of the rise of Western power and influence, he sees a "reorienting toward the East." Anyway, I've plowed through the 70-page introduction and just begun the first chapter.

Red in tooth and claw

2006-12-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

While taking my walk at lunch the other day, I saw something I hadn't seen before up close: a red-tailed hawk was on the ground of an open park-like lawn, energetically disposing of its unfortunate prey, which appeared to be at least squirrel-sized. There was no one else around, so I was able to sidle up pretty close--maybe 50 feet away--and watch the hawk at work. Grisly, but fascinating. I admired the way he flipped it around with his strong talons and sturdy, white legs. I could hear the snap, snap of his beak, picking the bones clean and see the tufts of white fur flying up on the breeze. Every now and then, he would pause and seemingly look straight at me, but I guess I didn't pose much of a threat as I was standing beside a lone tree, quite still. Finally, I decided to back away and walk the loop around the old house. By the time I got back around, I could see the hawk sort of hop-dragging the carcass beneath a big holly tree. It was on my second loop around that the impressive shadow of a vulture swooped overhead. All of this food-chain observation reminded me too, of the baby turtle I had found the day before--on the same loop--flattened into a perfect medallion on the asphalt. I suppose one of the Great Blue Herons I sometimes see at the neighboring pond had dropped it mid-flight.

It's heartening to see nature carrying on in the heart of an otherwise soulless office "park;" although, further construction in the area will shortly wipe out most of what's left there too. For the moment, a few ground hogs, rabbits, and chipmunks still have the run of the place, and hawks can enjoy a midday picnic. There's a pile of brush at the end of the circle that is providing cover for the winter birds: doves, mockingbirds, juncos, and what I think are some migrating warblers. They are very secretive, whatever the little birds are, and I couldn't get close enough to identify them. I'm sure someone will eventually clean off the brush pile, and that will be the end of that.

Project Feeder Watch

2006-11-28T15:41:00.000-05:00

To help combat the winter blahs, I decided to sign up for Project Feeder Watch, which is sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. I've put up a feeder for the last couple of years in my little, postage-stamp yard and enjoy watching the birds who come to visit. This year I'm going to count my birds and send in the data. I love watching the chickadees, finches, titmice, etc., duke it out around my feeder, or queue up on the back fence, if they're feeling courteous. Then there are the squirrels...arrrgghhh! They're diabolical--but at least I have something to distract me from the cold, gray days and the bare trees. The thing that sent me to Cornell's site was a book called Songbird Journeys by Miyoko Chu. If you're interested in songbirds, particularly their migratory behavior, this is a great book. It is always so humbling to be reminded of how much our lives are connected and intertwined with the rest of the natural world. Chu makes you think about the small things that you do (or don't do) that can affect our songbird populations, migration patterns, and ultimately their survival.

Ozomatli and Los Lonely Boys

2006-11-08T15:53:00.000-05:00

I like Los Lonely Boys, but I have to admit I showed up mostly for Ozomatli--a gem of a band that I stumbled onto with Street Signs. I 'm no hip-hop expert, but I like the way these guys do it with lots of Latin music influences and all kinds of other stuff thrown in like Middle Eastern and African beats, symphony strings (on the recording, not live), brass and a plethora of percussion. They had to work hard to win over a crowd waiting for LLB at the show, but I think they did it in the end with great energy, dance moves, and playing bravely to a Kentucky audience that didn't come out for any hip-hop dudes from LA. At the end of their set, they jumped off center stage, over the pit barrier, and led a Samba-style march up the center aisle. It was pretty awesome. I spoke to a couple of the guys out in the lobby after, telling them how I actually got scolded for standing up during their first song. Dudes! That lady was lame. Thankfully, they got the house standing for the last two songs at least. Vindication. It's not music you should sit through!

LLB were pretty entertaining. I like their sound, but I don't get that much into the long, jamming guitar solos. I admire the dexterity, but I'd rather hear the songs. I think they've got great harmonies when they're not overwhelmed by the instruments. That's just my preference. I'm sure guitar-heads would beg to differ.

Anyway, for heaven's sake check out Ozomatli! They have a new CD coming out soon.

Barenaked Ladies are Me!

2006-11-05T21:02:00.000-05:00

We saw Barenaked Ladies in Columbus on their BLAM tour. Being a true fan girl, I had already bought third row tickets as soon as they were available, but unbeknownst to me, my surfer hubby (Web surfer, that is) had entered a Microsoft Live Spaces contest and outdid me by winning front row tickets and backstage passes. Darn him. We met the band before the show, which was equal parts kind of cool and painful. I was dreading it a bit because I knew it would be contrived and weird. So it was contrived and weird, but they were all very nice about it and took the time to sign autographs and say hello. I think it's usually NOT the big fans that end up in an official meet-and-greet, which probably accounts for the subdued, slightly apprehensive atmosphere. They probably approach everyone with the thought, okay, is this person going to be a complete headcase? I think it's mostly people who happen to work in the venue, were caller number nine, or are there for some other purely random reason that may not have anything to do with being a BNL fan. My primary goal was to be as polite as possible and go get in my seat.

I enjoyed every minute of the show. They sound great live and look like they're having a good time. Everyone seemed to be in fine voice, and I'm a sucker for a tight harmony. And I always admire Steve's super-high leg kicks. When you get to the 35-and-over checkbox, you find that you are not as springy as you used to be, so it's that much more inspiring. Sometimes I'll get a wild hair and want to turn a cartwheel or roll down a grassy hillside, and invariably I think--I could really hurt myself. Still, I'm totally enchanted by their willingness to frolic on stage. I like a little frolic every now and then myself.

They played a very fan-friendly mix of older songs and new stuff. I was secretly hoping for something a little more obscure from Maroon like "Conventioneers" or "Off the Hook," but they did a couple of different ones. One of our favorite songs from the last album is the bluegrassy "For Me," which we did get to hear. It's the second time I've got "Alcohol" live, and I thought it was a real treat to hear Ed sing "When I Fall." That, with "Hello City," "Jane," and "Brian Wilson" were fine classics. Of the new stuff, I love, love, love "Home;" and "Running Out of Ink" is fantastic. I like songs, as Ed put it, with lots of words! They don't really do the yeah, baby, yeah too much. They are the literate person's band.

When We Were Orphans

2006-11-03T16:46:00.000-05:00

This is the only novel I've read by Kazuo Ishiguro, and granted, it may not be representative of his work. It left me kind of cold, even though it had moments that were really nice. It's one of those novels where the sum of the parts didn't really add up to a satisfying novel for me. I think I was disappointed because I thought I was being tuned up by an unreliable narrator for a really BIG denouement, but it sort of pooped out in the end. As it turns out, the narrator-detective Christopher Banks was only moderately delusional and the effect was sort of--well--boring. Oh, well, they can't all be gems.

I'm not sure what I want to read next. Perhaps Richard Ford. He's just published the last novel in a trilogy that I've not started, so start at the beginning with The Sportswriter. It's that time of year when curling up with a good book is especially cozy. The holidays are almost here, and it seems like it's been such whirlwind of activity lately. I've been really fortunate to see so many great musicians this year: Marah, Jackie Greene, Joe Ely, Tom Waits, Bruce Cockburn, Eric Clapton, Barenaked Ladies, and next week--Ozomatli and Los Lonely Boys. My goal is to catch the elusive Kelly Willis somewhere next year. I keep hearing whispers that she's been working in the studio. I didn't get to see the Raconteurs, but it was getting really hard to squeeze in yet another out-of-town concert trip. I can start plotting for next year.

The Road

2006-10-25T12:27:00.000-04:00

I read the The Road by Cormac McCarthy just recently and I was stunned by how beautiful it was, despite the fact that it's about a blasted America in the midst of nuclear winter. His writing has always had the apocalyptic element and he has finally served up the Apocalypse directly. I wonder what else he has in mind, because I can't help feeling that this is the novel toward which all of his previous fiction has been headed. It even ends with a sliver of hope. It seems like a farewell, a very stark benediction, though I hope that's not the case. It's a novel you keep thinking about. I loaned it to friends and look forward to talking to them about it too.

And speaking of the road, we've been traveling recently. In Birmingham, we saw Eric Clapton last weekend. He was great, but he seemed more the elder statesman generously pushing forward two youngsters in his band, both very fine guitarists. Why does everyone seem to be performing their farewells these days? Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Having been bombarded with the combined idiocy of election ads for weeks now, it does sometimes seem like the End of the World is upon us. It's as if all the stupidest and lamest people in the country were suddenly interested in governing. Oh, dear, I just broke my own rule in only writing about "what makes the world a better place," which would explain the long gaps between posts.

Moving right along...I'm currently reading my first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans. I'm about half way in and realizing my narrator is very unreliable, which is always fun. It also has an old-fashioned Wilkie Collins thing going on.

Last, but not least, hubby and I have front row seats for Barenaked Ladies in Columbus. We're very excited, and I'm also looking forward to checking out the wine/food scene there since we're going up for the weekend. The new BNL has a nice, easy vibe to it. It doesn't seem as thematic as some of the other albums, particularly Maroon, in which all the songs seem to hang together like a collection of short stories. But because of the way it's been released, I don't think it is intended to be otherwise. I particularly like "Home" and "Peterborough and the Kawarthas," which is lovely. "Wind It Up" is the best song no one is playing on the radio. Oh, well. Radio is so ten-minutes-ago.

Late summer novels, music, and distractions

2006-09-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

I've mostly worked through my obsession with the fall fashion magazines--particularly Vogue. I always feel like I'm indulging a particularly guilty pleasure. Why do I pore over shoe styles and skirt lengths and goofy trends? I think it must be the fun of observing a world that I SO do not inhabit (the same reason I'm attracted to military history and battlefield accounts? That's a weird parallel). I wish all I had to worry about was the chagrin of being caught out in last year's Prada. Horrors!

I have managed to read through a spate of novels while pondering the bubble skirt and patterned tights. I went back and read Cormac McCarthy's first novel as I await the new one coming later in the month. The Orchard Keeper belongs to his early set of novels, all set in the hills and towns of East Tennessee. He has been remarkably consistent in his style and themes from the very beginning. He has a great gift for dialect and manages to capture the subtle features of language that convey both the humor and the menace hovering under the surface of everyday speech. I think he is unparalleled in writing about the natural world and the life of animals. His descriptions are detailed and transcendent at the same time. There's always the lurid streak and the unthinking violence--man's destructive and greedy spirit aimed at both nature and other men. He is, therefore, always relevant, always instructive, and can't help being prophetic.

A good, old-fashioned novel is Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire set in occupation-era Japan. Hazzard worked for British Intelligence (she's an Australian by birth) in China during WWII, so she knows whereof she speaks in this story of a couple of war-scarred veterans, both involved in post-war duties and still dealing with the trauma of their service. One of them finds healing in the relationship he develops with a much younger woman (girl, really), but he's so gosh-darned honorable the situation is robbed of creepiness. I guess that's the old-fashioned part--the love story, the idealized young woman and her terminally ill brother. Also a little creepy is the fact that the protagonist and his famous-author father shared the same mistress (though not at the same time). Well, all of this sounds a bit pot-boilerish, but Hazzard's writing is so elegant and restrained, and her concerns so solemn, that the effect is more Laurence Durrell than Harold Robbins.

I just finished Monica Ali's Brick Lane. I thought it was well-written and an interesting look at immigrant London. Of course, as a novel about Muslims and identity in Britain in the post 9/11 world, it is intriguing apart from literary merit. They are already filming it and it's creating another round of hoopla from the residents of the real Brick Lane, some of whom find it racist and derogatory. My favorite quote from the protest faction spokesman is "It's not fiction--it's lies." Right. Hmmmm... That bit would be right at home in Ali's book!

Last, but not least, I saw Bruce Cockburn recently in concert. He was wonderfully soothing somehow--soothing in the way of people who are at least mad about the same things that you are and can articulate it in a finely crafted song--another of those voices crying out in the wilderness. Effortless-seeming guitar playing and good musicians playing with him.

Dwight Yoakum

2006-08-25T10:07:00.000-04:00

I saw Dwight Yoakum at the State Fair--following the mules, pigs, and sheep--which were a fine opener. (By the way, sheep do not say "Baa." That's just pro-sheep propaganda. They actually stick out their tongues at you and say, "Bleeeeehhhhhhh!") It was general admission in a stadium, but our seats were pretty good and the sound was also nice and clear. He put on a great show. My favorite part was probably his trio of Buck Owens tributes plus "Bakersfield." He was playing new stuff from Blame the Vain and greatest hits: Little Sister, Turn it on... Guitars & Cadillacs, Muehlenberg County, etc. He's a great showman as well as interpreter of the songs. He mentioned that Guitars, Cadillacs came out in 1984. Yikes, we're old! That seems fairly impossible. It doesn't seem that long ago that he was new on the scene with the skin-tight blue jeans and flop of blonde hair. He's traded that look in, I guess, for the traditonal Western suit--Porter Wagoner without the sequins. I'm not sure who he traded Sharon Stone in for, however.