Sun-up was at 7:56 this morning according to the BBC weather site, and we are having our first foggy morning of the season. The skyscraper tower of the Royal Free Hospital two blocks away — considered a blight by Hampsteaders — is not visible from the dining room window at the moment. These foggy days are a prelude to Christmas every year. A new weather front is dropping the temperature every day, and for the next few mornings we can expect freezing fog to linger. The sidewalks — I can never remember they are called pavements here — will be wet and slick; the damp air will penetrate the woolen defenses of scarves, hats, and gloves, making the temperature seem much colder than it really is.
As the atmospheric fog drops, the fog of my eternal head cold seems to be lifting. The week after my return from the States, I never left the house except to buy some head cold medication. I just slept and worked on breathing. Fortunately, there were no dates to remember on my calendar. This week has been a gradual entrance back into the swing of living in London.
I hosted a quilt group pot-luck lunch on Monday and attended one on Thursday. The Monday group always holds the pot-luck lunch here because we have more Christmas decorations than anyone else. Most of the group members are ex-pats living in rented and often furnished flats who will only be here for the months or years of their husband's overseas assignment, so naturally they haven't brought the family decorations from home. I usually welcome the party to unpack our beloved Christmas decorations, but I am afraid last weekend I made a rather half-hearted effort, so I have to finish the job this weekend. Alas, we have another year in which the storage box of Christmas themed fabrics has not been touched. The old "Christmas in July" craft magazine promotions need to be revived. Speaking of magazines, Borders bookstores in the UK are closing down, so my easy access to US magazines is now closed off. Borders US expanded to the UK shortly after we moved to London, but was sold off a few years ago to a UK private equity group and then to a management buyout, but Waterstones has the high streets sewn up having bought up all the other high street chains. Borders opened up some huge US-size bookstores around the country. Those empty spaces are going to make big holes in shopping districts.
I loved seeing Megan's Sanctimommy photos of decorating Hingham. Some are ones she grew up with and requested when she and Barnz chose to have Christmas on their own. It has been nine years since we spent Christmas with Megan. I would never ever want young children to spend Christmas away from home. I still have memories of a Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in Washington, D.C. with two little girls deeply worried the Easter Bunny would not be able to find them for basket delivery room service. (He did.) As of yesterday however, I have formed a new holiday plan. In a few years, I want Megan and the children to come for a visit the week after Christmas so, as dual citizens, they can experience an important cultural component of their English nationality: the theatre. The English live and breathe theatre, unlike Americans who have very little access to theatre productions unless they live in New York with money to spare. Outside of New York, there is the one professional repertory theatre in big cities, the non-professional drama club in small cities, and the ubiquitous high school musical. I wonder if high schools even put on plays any more. My high school had the annual musical plus a Junior Class Play and a Senior Class Play where we were introduced to classics like Blithe Spirit and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Hingham High School had a vaunted drama program, but after the annual autumn musical, all I remember being invited to see was the 15 minute entry into the all-important Massachusetts High School Drama Competition, which recognises technics and techniques, but offers no appreciation of drama as art.
Yesterday, when an English friend with a three year-old granddaughter listed the number of performances they had already attended with her and how many more were coming up, I realised the national love of drama begins with the pantomime season at Christmas. Time Out magazine lists 27 productions under the Children's Theatre heading in this week's issue. They include The Cat in the Hat at the National Theatre directed by Katie Mitchell (a very hot young director), The Enchanted Pig, an opera by Jonathan Dove at the Royal Opera House, and The Forest at the Young Vic. Then there are the annual productions based on beloved story books, Raymond Brigg's The Snowman told in dance (suitable for age 2+ to start them really young), Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, and a new production of her book Stick Man. The year-round children's theatres, the Polka, the Angel, the Unicorn, have seasonal productions too. So of course I want my grandchildren to come here to spend a week attending the theatre every day. When they outgrow the children's productions they will graduate to the adult panto productions. Fairy tales told with an edge of sexual innuendo and cross-dressing with B-list celebrities, popular stars of past decades, soap opera stars, and reality TV competition winners and losers in the special roles. We went to a few high-class pantos — Angela Carter's posthumous Cinderella — years ago, but looking through the listings, perhaps we need to book a real panto this year.
Every year in the weeks before Christmas we book so many Christmas concerts, there is no room for anything else. Looking at my calendar I see six concerts coming up over the next two weeks. Speaking of music, I am surrounded by stacks of CDs — our collection of Christmas music (minus the extensive, but outdated collections of LPs and tapes) that Bob has been using to write his review of favourite Christmas music available on Bazzfazz (11 parts) and on Scholars and Rogues, which has 14 parts. A Big Day in Hingham was the day the Atlantic Wire website picked up Part 4 from Scholars and Rogues. I can't find the actual link because my computer is not picking up links very quickly right now, but the Atlantic Wire bills itself as "tracking the most influential opinion makers," and on the night in question, everyone else on The Ticker was indeed someone notable from their 50 most important pundits list. I feel the title of Bob's post, which included the words "Medieval Babes" had something to do with its selection by an A-list political site with cultural pretensions. Megan and Barnz, who can do these things, captured a "screen shot" so we have a record of this event on Bob's laptop.
In addition to the two pot-luck lunches, I went to two book groups this week. My regular "Sevens" group read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a book I did not like in the 1980s when I first read it, and which I found I still don't like when I reread it earlier this week, although I keep reading that I should like it as it is some sort of classic. The group was split on opinion, but those who liked it kept citing the magnificent prose, which is usually the reason given to call it a classic. One thing I don't like is the writing style which I found made up of oddly patched and overblown phrasing. Our moderator found an interview in which Robinson said she began writing and saving metaphors when she was doing a graduate degree on Shakespeare, and later she realised she had the voice of Ruth in her random collection. In other words, she did patch together the prose.
The second book group was an extra meeting of the "Literary Ladies" to meet Ruth Waterman, the author of When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo. Ruth is an English violinist who studied at Julliard and lived in New York for years before returning to England. In 2002 she was invited to guest conduct the Mostar Sinfonietta in Bosnia. She returned to Bosnia to lead concerts in 2004, 2005, and 2006, when funding for the orchestra ran out. As a BBC contract presenter, the BBC gave her recording tape and suggested a radio show if she found any interesting material. She collected personal experiences of the devastating war years from her young orchestra members that were used for a Radio 4 programme, and ultimately for this book. I bought the book from her, so haven't read it yet, but she played excerpts from the voices of the musicians and discussed the sadly deteriorating situation in Bosnia at the moment. The meeting was heightened by a visiting friend of a member who told of her escape to Rio de Janiero from Bosnia with her 9 year-old daughter after, as she said, "my mother's body was found in the river and my grandmother was killed." She is also a violinist, explaining she was in Bosnia when the war began because she had returned from living in Paris when asked to represent Bosnia in an international competition, and told us of her desperation when her only chance to stay in Rio was by securing a seat in the city's symphony orchestra. The room certainly went silent as she told her story, giving us an inkling of what Ruth went through when survivors poured out their experiences.
Finally, we went to a gallery opening of a print exhibition organised by the husband of a quilting friend. David is an artist and designer, and his design has been chosen by the Royal Mail for the Olympic Sports series of stamps issued earlier this year. David's stamp is for Badminton. To celebrate he invited other stamp designers to exhibit their work as prints made by Epson photocopiers. What a great show. The link to the ROA Gallery lets you see the wonderful work on display. We chose at least a dozen. Next week we will have to hone our choice down to Christmas gift level.
At last I feel like I am back into the routine of life. Tomorrow we get our tree, and I begin to organise what needs doing between now and the New Year. We haven't even caught up on the Advent Calendars. Christmas is only two weeks away!!
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Cooks and Books
This weekend I came down with the cold that Bob and half of London have been nursing recently. Sort of a half-hearted cold in my case that didn't progress beyond a stuffy nose, but on Sunday I wasn't feeling great so I cancelled quilting for Monday since I was hosting, and everyone I know is feeling pretty risk averse to germs these days. Last spring Hampstead was one of the first nodes of swine flu for tweens and teens in Britain. Lots of Easter holidays in Mexico for the elite travelling set of North London, I guess. Not having quilting has thrown my whole week off. And this is my last week in London until December because on Saturday I fly to Massachusetts for more than three weeks of doting on my grandchildren and on their lovely parents too.
It wasn't much of a weekend here. American-style Halloween has been adopted by England — at least in Hampstead, home to so many US children and their parents — over the course of the eleven years we have lived in London. Costumed Trick-or-Treaters rove the streets including ours, but living in a mansion-block of flats, we don't have to stock up on treats. The deli up on the High Street that has a sideline in US food — junk and otherwise — was selling bags of candy corn, so I did get to gorge on that annual American iconic treat. Back in the day, our first Halloween here, teenaged Susan was appalled to discover there was no knowledge of candy corn in this country. Every year since then, we have imported some either on an autumn trip to Hingham or by having Megan mail us some. The first year Susan was at Cambridge, she shared her stash with British friends, who refused to believe it was edible — and she said some adhered to that belief after trying a piece.
Fortunately we are going to be in the States this year for Thanksgiving because there seems to be no tinned pumpkin in England this year. Europe does not know about the joy of canned pumpkin puree. Every recipe that involves pumpkin, and there are a lot of recipes since pumpkin is a favourite vegetable, begins with the instruction to clean, bake, and puree your pumpkin. Now I have done that in my past life, and generally I ended up with a weak coloured, slightly stringy, and invariably flavourless mush that made a very poor pie. Yes, I know that sugar pumpkins are the recommended variety if one wants to be all native, back-to-the land, I-never-eat-canned-food about these things. And I have had better luck with sugar pumpkins when used for puree, but nothing gives a pie the flavour of pumpkin from a can. For several years, tins of pumpkin were only available at the American-stocked deli for a price, so that became an item to bring back on visits to the States. Finally, a few years ago supermarkets began to stock tinned pumpkin, eliminating the need for suitcase importation, but last year and now this year, the tinned pumpkin has disappeared once again. So I will have to spare some suitcase room for pumpkin to make muffins and bread and soup, and maybe even a pie, next winter.
I have been in a cooking trough for the past week. Absolutely no interest in cooking, and this week will require no dinners, so I am pleased. Although I do have a mound of pears and apples that should be sauced or something. And a sugar pumpkin delivered with the organic produce last week in time for Halloween. And a backlog of onions, cabbage, and carrots that probably won't be used, at least by me. By the time I am back here in December I will be ready to cook up a storm, I'm sure. And I will try not to find any new cookbooks to buy — although I am intrigued by Thomas Keller's new cookbook that was written up in the New York Times a few days ago. I never buy restaurant chef cookbooks because I know they are never going to work for sloppy non-perfectionist me at home, but the references to apple butter in a slow cooker and already knowing he salts his broccoli water makes me curious about the blanching in a big pot method mentioned in the article. Addictions are impossible to overcome. I guess I have been lucky to avoid damaging addictions like drugs and alcohol — and I gave up cigarettes (although I plan to resume smoking regularly when I am 80) — but I can't stay away from the cookbooks. There are always new ones, flaunting their flashy covers, the well-designed pages — fonts, white spaces — that I cannot resist, and of course the appealing taste sensations promised are irresistible. Sometimes when I bring them home I cook up a recipe or two, and I am rarely disappointed. After that, I mostly admire them on the shelf — on the shelves is more accurate — and the ones in the piles on the table or some in the pile under the table. Okay, you get the point. Fortunately most of the cookbooks never came to England — part of the plan for a new life in a foreign country free of cooking and cookbooks — and then I just had to have Nigella's first cookbook published the same time we arrived in England, and making a big splash because of her family and her dying husband. Now there are so many of them, I consider them to be "A Collection" so it would be wrong to de-accession, in the museum term, by weeding them out and taking the pointless ones to Oxfam. Next time, we can discuss my addiction to buying craft project supplies.
I have succeeded in halting the buying of books that are not cook or craft books. And I have been immune to Amazon messages offering books that sound really really good — those statistical algorithms at work — after the debacle of the non-delivery of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.
Last week was Book Group Week for me, so my list of "Books I Am Reading" has been reduced by two for the group reads. Sunday's illness allowed me to curl up with Beth Gutcheon's Saying Grace which was much too depressing for me to recommend to anyone else. It was written in the mid-1990s, and Beth must have been in a right funk. Her more recent Maine novels More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen were much more enjoyable reads (although not necessarily happy novels). Since I gave up Joanna Trollope and Anita Shreve, Gutcheon has been a favourite for women's life-story novels because she is a good story-teller and a good writer with a sharp eye for social comment. I am being unfair to Saying Grace because it is a brilliant novel, set in a wealthy coastal California (think Santa Barbara) private sub-secondary school much like our Derby Academy in Hingham, with lots of sharp social commentary on education and parenting, and the fact that it depressed the hell out of me and gave me a nightmare the night I finished it, is no reason to slag it off to others. I am saving Hornets' Nest for the plane ride and donation to friends and fans who have to wait until next year for the US publication of the third volume. So I am down to the last of the Japanese mysteries from The Pile of books.
Full Moon Feast will remain on the list as I dip in and out of it over the year. At root I will always be a California coastal hippie since all the most important experiences of my adult life happened in coastal California (Northern and Southern) between 1971 and 1982 — I think of that time period as pre-Reagan America, although he had tragically been elected, his vampire friends hadn't yet thoroughly trashed America to enrich and empower themselves. Full Moon Feast is a recipe and food philosophy book on a subject that has long interested me: the seasonality of diet in a natural world. A few weeks ago, when London was having a cold spell, and we had not turned on the heat in the flat, the only thing I wanted to eat was pasta with butter and sage sauce, clearly because my bones were chilled, and I wanted carbs and fats to warm me internally. Yes, localism has become popular in the post-Michael Pollan world of sophisticated eaters, but I think of seasonality as being more world shaping than just eating what is on hand. My interest probably began with William Cronon's Changes in the Land, an ecological history of New England, which begins with a description of the American native tribes' movements through their territory over the course of a year to eat what was available in different places during different seasons for an adequate annual diet. Cronon discussed the Starving Season of late winter, early spring, when stored supplies were used up and new growth had yet to begin. (I immediately connected this starving time to the Christian season of Lent at the same time of year. The disadvantage of scarce food turned into a devotional benefit of sacrifice and grace.) Of course the European "settlers" ruined the native food year by restricting access to their "settlement" places which disrupted the annual cycle and destroyed the culture. So I will dip into the thirteen Full Moons Feasts over the year.
Rarely do I attend both Book Groups these days since they meet the same week, and rarely am I interested in reading both of the chosen books. This month was one of the rare months. Last Wednesday I headed over to Tamara's in Kensington to discuss Stoner, written in 1965 before "stoner" meant something else, with the Seven College Conference Book Group whose members are drawn from the alumnae of what was once the Seven Sisters Colleges in the US and enhanced by a fair number of Tamara's English friends who she has enticed to join. The nearly forgotten author John Williams won the National Book Award for Augustus in 1973, but the New York Review of Books re-published Stoner in its Classics series a few years ago, and it has been doing the literary fiction rounds ever since. The book chronicles the life of Professor Stoner at the University of Missouri from his boyhood on a struggling prairie farm to his death, a life in which very little ever goes right for him, but in which he never loses his integrity or his inner self. The writing is a tour de force of spare prose and deep meaning. It was an excellent book club choice: everyone liked it, but there was lots of discussion on those deep meanings. Much of Stoner's misery is caused by his emotionally, psychologically, mentally disturbed wife who is also just plain mean to him. By the time I was a third of the way through the book, from hinted incidents and behaviours in the text, I was convinced there was no question the horrid wife had been sexually abused by her father. From then on I interpreted the book with that point in mind, finding it remarkable because I didn't think sexual abuse existed in 1965, certainly not as a standard plotline like we have today in novels and films. What I thought was more remarkable was that when I casually dropped this interpretation into the discussion last Wednesday, I was met by stunned silence, broken by one woman saying she had assumed the same, the remainder split between "of course, now I see, that explains it all" and "no, no, she was just a nutcase and a meanie." Since there are at least a dozen passages supporting my side, there weren't many unbelievers by the end of the meeting. I think what surprised me the most was how little sympathy these women had for the wife while reading the novel. No character could be as cruel and deranged as this woman acted all through the novel without a reason, yet only one other person looked beneath the novel's cool surface to seek an explanation.
The easy manipulation of women readers was shown by the somewhat opposite reaction to the women characters in the book chosen for Friday's Book Group meeting. This is a much larger group which was once connected to the Hampstead Women's Club, when the members were almost entirely American expats most of whom had been in London for a short time — that would have been me eleven years ago — and when rotations for ex-pats were at most three years, so the group changed constantly, except for a small core of ex-pats who had lived in London for decades with English or Commonwealth husbands. The group is now made up almost entirely of long time expats or citizens. So I headed over to Nikki's beautiful house in Primrose Hill to discuss our book choice The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins. I was very excited to read this book because Elizabeth Jenkins who celebrated her 104th birthday on Halloween — yes, still alive in a local care home — spent most of her long life on Downshire Hill, and for her 100th birthday wrote a memoir titled The View From Downshire Hill. She wrote dozens and dozens of books, novels, histories, biographies, was a founder of the Jane Austen Society, a writer taken up and then dropped by Virginia Woolf. She is mostly out of print, but Virago republished The Tortoise and the Hare a few years ago, and the entire literary establishment of women love this book: Hilary Mantel in the Preface, Carmen Callil in the Afterword, Dovegrey Reader (perhaps not so much now that I re-read her post), Amanda Craig in her blog. It is well written, but it is such a period piece, from the early1950s, about a world I'm not sure we can even understand much less interpret.
Imogen, 39 years old, sweet and lovely, raised to be useless is gobsmacked when her 52 year old successful barrister husband Evelyn takes up with their 50 year old neighbour Blanche who is not physically attractive, but is a director of her late father's company and who shares Evelyn's interests in sports and other activities. Now all of these critics and half the book group women — yes, for once I wasn't the only contra opinion on a book — are as one in saying poor Imogen, who shouldn't be criticised for being useless because she simply can't help it, is being hard done by the ghastly Evelyn who is taken in by the wicked Blanche. None of this made any sense to me because Imogen is a pathetic, boring, and shallow creature who I soon wanted to strangle. I never felt Elizabeth wrote sympathetically about Imogen, yet somehow women readers instantly side with Imogen. Evelyn might be a bit cranky, but living with Imogen would drive any sane person up a wall. He is a caring father; he is devoted to his cases; he is even kind to Imogen despite her shortcomings as a wife and partner. Blanche is an active and competent woman. In a feminist novel of the 1960s, she would be the heroine, the independent woman who knows herself and knows what she wants, and no one would laugh at her just because she wears bad hats, has a chunky body above spindly legs, and chooses heinous carpets.
This is where I think we have trouble with interpretation. In today's view, Blanche is a character on Desperate Housewives breaking up a family for her own satisfaction, the clueless husband is easily lured into her honey trap Rolls Royce, and the innocent, blameless wife unjustly suffers. Yet in the 1953 world of the book, Imogen makes clear that she was raised to accept the fact her husband would have a mistress because that is the way her world always has worked (and she herself has retired from sex in the marriage). What she is upset about is that she assumed the putative mistress would be a younger version of her own useless self, on hand for sex, but not to be an active partner in life. To complicate the interpretation further, Carmen Callil relates in the Afterword that Elizabeth Jenkins told her in the mid-1990s, that the story is autobiographical. She was a long-time mistress to a respected doctor, and when his wife died, he did not marry Elizabeth. Instead, he married a neighbour and asked Elizabeth to pick up their former arrangement. She was furious, wrote this novel in a few weeks, sent it to him, and never spoke to him again. So this is definitely not a novel about the evils of adultery. When Callil made a remark about the ghastly Evelyn, Elizabeth remarked, oh but you didn't know him. I found this all to be very confusing, but I think I have now found an answer that satisfies me. The critics, and the book group members, all spend time discussing the clever title in terms of who is the Tortoise? Who is the Hare? I think the cleverness in the title is that Elizabeth is telling us she has swapped the real women in the fiction version. Elizabeth is Blanche — bright, active, competent, respected — and the message of the novel to the real unnamed Evelyn is that you could have chosen me as a partner in a modern marriage of equals to share an active public life — but you chose to remain within the accepted boundaries of your class, to marry another useless child-woman who will never be your equal and who will spend her life playing with other child-like friends. Amanda Craig's blog refers to Imogen beginning a new life with the one person who loves her. Amanda does not mention this person is 12 years old!
I began this post thinking I liked one book, Stoner, and disliked the other, but now I think they are both brilliant novels. They both manipulate the reader by pretending to be straight forward tales of their character's lives, but by placing the important facts of the story out of the way, buried in the subtext where they may not be noticed while the author is distracting you with the smokescreen of an important event, another story is unfolding.So it was a good week for reading.
It wasn't much of a weekend here. American-style Halloween has been adopted by England — at least in Hampstead, home to so many US children and their parents — over the course of the eleven years we have lived in London. Costumed Trick-or-Treaters rove the streets including ours, but living in a mansion-block of flats, we don't have to stock up on treats. The deli up on the High Street that has a sideline in US food — junk and otherwise — was selling bags of candy corn, so I did get to gorge on that annual American iconic treat. Back in the day, our first Halloween here, teenaged Susan was appalled to discover there was no knowledge of candy corn in this country. Every year since then, we have imported some either on an autumn trip to Hingham or by having Megan mail us some. The first year Susan was at Cambridge, she shared her stash with British friends, who refused to believe it was edible — and she said some adhered to that belief after trying a piece.
Fortunately we are going to be in the States this year for Thanksgiving because there seems to be no tinned pumpkin in England this year. Europe does not know about the joy of canned pumpkin puree. Every recipe that involves pumpkin, and there are a lot of recipes since pumpkin is a favourite vegetable, begins with the instruction to clean, bake, and puree your pumpkin. Now I have done that in my past life, and generally I ended up with a weak coloured, slightly stringy, and invariably flavourless mush that made a very poor pie. Yes, I know that sugar pumpkins are the recommended variety if one wants to be all native, back-to-the land, I-never-eat-canned-food about these things. And I have had better luck with sugar pumpkins when used for puree, but nothing gives a pie the flavour of pumpkin from a can. For several years, tins of pumpkin were only available at the American-stocked deli for a price, so that became an item to bring back on visits to the States. Finally, a few years ago supermarkets began to stock tinned pumpkin, eliminating the need for suitcase importation, but last year and now this year, the tinned pumpkin has disappeared once again. So I will have to spare some suitcase room for pumpkin to make muffins and bread and soup, and maybe even a pie, next winter.
I have been in a cooking trough for the past week. Absolutely no interest in cooking, and this week will require no dinners, so I am pleased. Although I do have a mound of pears and apples that should be sauced or something. And a sugar pumpkin delivered with the organic produce last week in time for Halloween. And a backlog of onions, cabbage, and carrots that probably won't be used, at least by me. By the time I am back here in December I will be ready to cook up a storm, I'm sure. And I will try not to find any new cookbooks to buy — although I am intrigued by Thomas Keller's new cookbook that was written up in the New York Times a few days ago. I never buy restaurant chef cookbooks because I know they are never going to work for sloppy non-perfectionist me at home, but the references to apple butter in a slow cooker and already knowing he salts his broccoli water makes me curious about the blanching in a big pot method mentioned in the article. Addictions are impossible to overcome. I guess I have been lucky to avoid damaging addictions like drugs and alcohol — and I gave up cigarettes (although I plan to resume smoking regularly when I am 80) — but I can't stay away from the cookbooks. There are always new ones, flaunting their flashy covers, the well-designed pages — fonts, white spaces — that I cannot resist, and of course the appealing taste sensations promised are irresistible. Sometimes when I bring them home I cook up a recipe or two, and I am rarely disappointed. After that, I mostly admire them on the shelf — on the shelves is more accurate — and the ones in the piles on the table or some in the pile under the table. Okay, you get the point. Fortunately most of the cookbooks never came to England — part of the plan for a new life in a foreign country free of cooking and cookbooks — and then I just had to have Nigella's first cookbook published the same time we arrived in England, and making a big splash because of her family and her dying husband. Now there are so many of them, I consider them to be "A Collection" so it would be wrong to de-accession, in the museum term, by weeding them out and taking the pointless ones to Oxfam. Next time, we can discuss my addiction to buying craft project supplies.
I have succeeded in halting the buying of books that are not cook or craft books. And I have been immune to Amazon messages offering books that sound really really good — those statistical algorithms at work — after the debacle of the non-delivery of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.
Last week was Book Group Week for me, so my list of "Books I Am Reading" has been reduced by two for the group reads. Sunday's illness allowed me to curl up with Beth Gutcheon's Saying Grace which was much too depressing for me to recommend to anyone else. It was written in the mid-1990s, and Beth must have been in a right funk. Her more recent Maine novels More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen were much more enjoyable reads (although not necessarily happy novels). Since I gave up Joanna Trollope and Anita Shreve, Gutcheon has been a favourite for women's life-story novels because she is a good story-teller and a good writer with a sharp eye for social comment. I am being unfair to Saying Grace because it is a brilliant novel, set in a wealthy coastal California (think Santa Barbara) private sub-secondary school much like our Derby Academy in Hingham, with lots of sharp social commentary on education and parenting, and the fact that it depressed the hell out of me and gave me a nightmare the night I finished it, is no reason to slag it off to others. I am saving Hornets' Nest for the plane ride and donation to friends and fans who have to wait until next year for the US publication of the third volume. So I am down to the last of the Japanese mysteries from The Pile of books.
Full Moon Feast will remain on the list as I dip in and out of it over the year. At root I will always be a California coastal hippie since all the most important experiences of my adult life happened in coastal California (Northern and Southern) between 1971 and 1982 — I think of that time period as pre-Reagan America, although he had tragically been elected, his vampire friends hadn't yet thoroughly trashed America to enrich and empower themselves. Full Moon Feast is a recipe and food philosophy book on a subject that has long interested me: the seasonality of diet in a natural world. A few weeks ago, when London was having a cold spell, and we had not turned on the heat in the flat, the only thing I wanted to eat was pasta with butter and sage sauce, clearly because my bones were chilled, and I wanted carbs and fats to warm me internally. Yes, localism has become popular in the post-Michael Pollan world of sophisticated eaters, but I think of seasonality as being more world shaping than just eating what is on hand. My interest probably began with William Cronon's Changes in the Land, an ecological history of New England, which begins with a description of the American native tribes' movements through their territory over the course of a year to eat what was available in different places during different seasons for an adequate annual diet. Cronon discussed the Starving Season of late winter, early spring, when stored supplies were used up and new growth had yet to begin. (I immediately connected this starving time to the Christian season of Lent at the same time of year. The disadvantage of scarce food turned into a devotional benefit of sacrifice and grace.) Of course the European "settlers" ruined the native food year by restricting access to their "settlement" places which disrupted the annual cycle and destroyed the culture. So I will dip into the thirteen Full Moons Feasts over the year.
Rarely do I attend both Book Groups these days since they meet the same week, and rarely am I interested in reading both of the chosen books. This month was one of the rare months. Last Wednesday I headed over to Tamara's in Kensington to discuss Stoner, written in 1965 before "stoner" meant something else, with the Seven College Conference Book Group whose members are drawn from the alumnae of what was once the Seven Sisters Colleges in the US and enhanced by a fair number of Tamara's English friends who she has enticed to join. The nearly forgotten author John Williams won the National Book Award for Augustus in 1973, but the New York Review of Books re-published Stoner in its Classics series a few years ago, and it has been doing the literary fiction rounds ever since. The book chronicles the life of Professor Stoner at the University of Missouri from his boyhood on a struggling prairie farm to his death, a life in which very little ever goes right for him, but in which he never loses his integrity or his inner self. The writing is a tour de force of spare prose and deep meaning. It was an excellent book club choice: everyone liked it, but there was lots of discussion on those deep meanings. Much of Stoner's misery is caused by his emotionally, psychologically, mentally disturbed wife who is also just plain mean to him. By the time I was a third of the way through the book, from hinted incidents and behaviours in the text, I was convinced there was no question the horrid wife had been sexually abused by her father. From then on I interpreted the book with that point in mind, finding it remarkable because I didn't think sexual abuse existed in 1965, certainly not as a standard plotline like we have today in novels and films. What I thought was more remarkable was that when I casually dropped this interpretation into the discussion last Wednesday, I was met by stunned silence, broken by one woman saying she had assumed the same, the remainder split between "of course, now I see, that explains it all" and "no, no, she was just a nutcase and a meanie." Since there are at least a dozen passages supporting my side, there weren't many unbelievers by the end of the meeting. I think what surprised me the most was how little sympathy these women had for the wife while reading the novel. No character could be as cruel and deranged as this woman acted all through the novel without a reason, yet only one other person looked beneath the novel's cool surface to seek an explanation.
The easy manipulation of women readers was shown by the somewhat opposite reaction to the women characters in the book chosen for Friday's Book Group meeting. This is a much larger group which was once connected to the Hampstead Women's Club, when the members were almost entirely American expats most of whom had been in London for a short time — that would have been me eleven years ago — and when rotations for ex-pats were at most three years, so the group changed constantly, except for a small core of ex-pats who had lived in London for decades with English or Commonwealth husbands. The group is now made up almost entirely of long time expats or citizens. So I headed over to Nikki's beautiful house in Primrose Hill to discuss our book choice The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins. I was very excited to read this book because Elizabeth Jenkins who celebrated her 104th birthday on Halloween — yes, still alive in a local care home — spent most of her long life on Downshire Hill, and for her 100th birthday wrote a memoir titled The View From Downshire Hill. She wrote dozens and dozens of books, novels, histories, biographies, was a founder of the Jane Austen Society, a writer taken up and then dropped by Virginia Woolf. She is mostly out of print, but Virago republished The Tortoise and the Hare a few years ago, and the entire literary establishment of women love this book: Hilary Mantel in the Preface, Carmen Callil in the Afterword, Dovegrey Reader (perhaps not so much now that I re-read her post), Amanda Craig in her blog. It is well written, but it is such a period piece, from the early1950s, about a world I'm not sure we can even understand much less interpret.
Imogen, 39 years old, sweet and lovely, raised to be useless is gobsmacked when her 52 year old successful barrister husband Evelyn takes up with their 50 year old neighbour Blanche who is not physically attractive, but is a director of her late father's company and who shares Evelyn's interests in sports and other activities. Now all of these critics and half the book group women — yes, for once I wasn't the only contra opinion on a book — are as one in saying poor Imogen, who shouldn't be criticised for being useless because she simply can't help it, is being hard done by the ghastly Evelyn who is taken in by the wicked Blanche. None of this made any sense to me because Imogen is a pathetic, boring, and shallow creature who I soon wanted to strangle. I never felt Elizabeth wrote sympathetically about Imogen, yet somehow women readers instantly side with Imogen. Evelyn might be a bit cranky, but living with Imogen would drive any sane person up a wall. He is a caring father; he is devoted to his cases; he is even kind to Imogen despite her shortcomings as a wife and partner. Blanche is an active and competent woman. In a feminist novel of the 1960s, she would be the heroine, the independent woman who knows herself and knows what she wants, and no one would laugh at her just because she wears bad hats, has a chunky body above spindly legs, and chooses heinous carpets.
This is where I think we have trouble with interpretation. In today's view, Blanche is a character on Desperate Housewives breaking up a family for her own satisfaction, the clueless husband is easily lured into her honey trap Rolls Royce, and the innocent, blameless wife unjustly suffers. Yet in the 1953 world of the book, Imogen makes clear that she was raised to accept the fact her husband would have a mistress because that is the way her world always has worked (and she herself has retired from sex in the marriage). What she is upset about is that she assumed the putative mistress would be a younger version of her own useless self, on hand for sex, but not to be an active partner in life. To complicate the interpretation further, Carmen Callil relates in the Afterword that Elizabeth Jenkins told her in the mid-1990s, that the story is autobiographical. She was a long-time mistress to a respected doctor, and when his wife died, he did not marry Elizabeth. Instead, he married a neighbour and asked Elizabeth to pick up their former arrangement. She was furious, wrote this novel in a few weeks, sent it to him, and never spoke to him again. So this is definitely not a novel about the evils of adultery. When Callil made a remark about the ghastly Evelyn, Elizabeth remarked, oh but you didn't know him. I found this all to be very confusing, but I think I have now found an answer that satisfies me. The critics, and the book group members, all spend time discussing the clever title in terms of who is the Tortoise? Who is the Hare? I think the cleverness in the title is that Elizabeth is telling us she has swapped the real women in the fiction version. Elizabeth is Blanche — bright, active, competent, respected — and the message of the novel to the real unnamed Evelyn is that you could have chosen me as a partner in a modern marriage of equals to share an active public life — but you chose to remain within the accepted boundaries of your class, to marry another useless child-woman who will never be your equal and who will spend her life playing with other child-like friends. Amanda Craig's blog refers to Imogen beginning a new life with the one person who loves her. Amanda does not mention this person is 12 years old!
I began this post thinking I liked one book, Stoner, and disliked the other, but now I think they are both brilliant novels. They both manipulate the reader by pretending to be straight forward tales of their character's lives, but by placing the important facts of the story out of the way, buried in the subtext where they may not be noticed while the author is distracting you with the smokescreen of an important event, another story is unfolding.So it was a good week for reading.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A cultural cornucopia of autumn
A generally busy week around here. Saturday evening we heard the Tallis Scholars at Cadogan Hall doing motets on death by Lassus, Gombert and Josquin, followed by Victoria's Requiem. Not a cheerful programme. We used to be fans of the Tallis Scholars, but we gave them up a few years ago when we started thinking everything they sing sounds a bit like everything else they sing. A bit boring really. And I guess we still are thinking that after Saturday night. We have tickets to their Christmas concert in December too.
Sunday was cold and gloomy so instead of doing a planned walk, we went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and the Masters exhibit that opened a few weeks ago. Turner is not one of my favourites, and I know very little about him, except for the tons of information that permeates English culture because he is after all "England's greatest artist" who painted England's favourite painting. A Cockney prodigy, he enjoyed besting his contemporaries and the old masters who came before. He famously added a speck of red to his seascape in the 1832 Royal Academy Show when he saw that it was hanging next to Constable's red splattered Waterloo Bridge. This exhibit hangs the two works side-by-side for the first time since 1832. The entire show is made up of Turner paintings side-by-side with the work of artists he wished to emulate or more to the point to outshine in skill. He competed with all of the greats: Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Canaletto and dozens of other very good artists. The Tate holds a huge collection of Turners because of the Bequest to the nation that settled his estate's death duties — and the idea for the show comes from Turner in his will leaving a few of his works to the nation with the condition that Dido Building Carthage be displayed next to Claude's ...Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in the National Gallery. The interesting thing about the show is that curator David Solkin chose to exhibit as many misses as hits for Turner's scorecard. There were some where Turner's version of another artist's subject was a clear winner, especially when atmosphere was a defining element. There were some perfectly dreadful pastiches of master works. Sadly, for me and for Bob who is a bit more of a Turner fan than I, there were some perfectly lovely paintings by Turner that paled when sitting next to a master, so we have another show where opinion of the artist declines as the show progresses. In our family that is known as the Bonnard effect, after a huge show at the Tate in 1998. We took time out from our moving-to-a-new-country chores to see the show, and Susan, Bob, and I agreed that the only Bonnard we really liked was the famous Dining Room Overlooking the Garden at the Met in New York.
On the plus side, some of the old masters borrowed for the show were well worth the price of admission (which we didn't pay because we are members), especially Rembrandt's The Mill from Washington D.C.'s National Gallery. That was one of Bob's favourites when he was in the army in Maryland and spent his spare time in Washington museums. He hardly recognised it because it has been cleaned in the intervening 35 years, which I read on-line was rather controversial since it completely changed interpretations of the work.
While at the Tate Britain, we stopped in to see the Turner Prize nominees work which has just gone on display. Why it is the Turner Prize I have no idea except he is Britain's best/favourite artist. He would have no problem whatsoever competing with these artists and winning hands down. This is the Prize that has featured unmade beds and light bulbs flashing on and off in past years. I couldn't possibly comment on any of these nominees so I will let a link do that.
And I found a new artist to admire in a room display on women artists who had a hard time because they were women. Stanislawa de Karlowska was married to the Camden Town painter Robert Bevan. The Tate owns three of her works and these two were on display.
Last night we did something we rarely do anymore. We went to see a dance performance. This is the centenary of Diaghilev's Paris company Les Ballet Russes, and Sadler's Wells' contribution to the celebration is this programme where they asked four choreographers to create pieces In the Spirit of Diaghilev. We went primarily because one of four, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, choreographed a fabulous programme we saw last year titled Myth. His contribution was Faun, based on the music Afternoon of the Faun with additions from Nitin Sawhney, and featured two remarkable dancers. Afterlight, danced to wonderful Satie piano music, was an homage to Nijinsky, danced by a solo male with a light show playing over his body movements. Quite fantastic. Those were the two successful parts of the evening.
The first piece featured many dancers, several large TV screens with bright red machines turning and black and white stripes rippling, plus a bright strobe light that unfortunately was directed right at Bob's retina, so he had to hold his hand over his eyes for most of the piece. The TV screens were very distracting, as any neuroscientist knows, the brain is wired to watch moving impulses of light, and as any parent buying an infant mobile knows, red, black and white are the colours that can be discriminated first and best. I have no idea what the dancers did, I watched the TVs. When we were riding home on the Tube, and I finally had a chance to read my programme notes, I discovered this piece was made by "an ongoing collaborative enquiry into the distributed nature of choreographic thinking with the Interactive Cognition Lab, UCSanDiego" — the very place Bob did his cognitive science post-doc 30 years ago!!!!!! So it was neuroscience after all.
We had gotten an e-mail from Sadler's Wells last week noting this production included "adult content" material, and that would have been directed at the final piece which included rape, sodomy, a Pope, a garotting, blood, and an electrocution. This was very much "in the spirit of Diaghilev" measured by the people walking out! But no fist fights as far as I could see. A powerful blast of incense permeating the theatre did nothing to improve my reaction. The music was a lovely waltz — my programme says Ravel's Mother Goose — so ho hum, violence and nursery rhymes, must be a commentary on our times or something.
I also finished another book this week, Gardens of Water, a first novel by Alan Drew, written when a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book has one of those Readers' Guides for book groups in which we learn that Drew and his wife took teaching jobs in Turkey, arrived in Istanbul four days before the huge earthquake hit in 1999, and lived there for three years. The latter means they were there pre- and post-9/11, never mentioned in the interview, but clearly what helped shape the text. A Kurdish family of four has been uprooted from their Southern Turkey homeland because of the PKK rebellion. The Turkish forces are of course funded and supplied with weapons by the US — it's just what we do — and the father hates Americans — it's just what they do. They have settled in a city near Istanbul, but when the earthquake hits, they lose their home, shop, and extended family. The Turkish government is unable to respond to the crisis so they rely on American aid workers to feed and house the population. These aid workers are Christians who offer succour, but at the price of intense proselytising. The novel sets up clashes in world view: evangelical Christianity in a Muslim community; traditional parents trying to maintain their values — values that are mostly abhorrent to those with Western values such as the readers of this book — but whose children are swayed by the toys and treats of the modern world; the deep distrust of anything associated with the US by the millions of people whose lives have been tragically altered by one US policy or another. I won't be giving anything away if I say this is not a happy book.
Cold weather has arrived in London this week along with quite a bit of rain. We haven't yet turned on the heat, but we will this weekend. After spending a day shivering wearing three sweaters and my bathrobe, I finally pulled out my winter clothes and sweaters. My closet and drawers are stuffed full so that means no shopping trips for me. I find myself drawn to the window displays this season because so much of it looks familiar — 1965 familiar. The last time these cute tunics and miniskirts were around, I was the target market! There are articles in the paper about Twiggy because she is turning 60. How could she have been younger than I was? And suddenly through Facebook I am in contact with high school classmates who haven't crossed my mind in 40+ years. I seem to be simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time.
Sunday was cold and gloomy so instead of doing a planned walk, we went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and the Masters exhibit that opened a few weeks ago. Turner is not one of my favourites, and I know very little about him, except for the tons of information that permeates English culture because he is after all "England's greatest artist" who painted England's favourite painting. A Cockney prodigy, he enjoyed besting his contemporaries and the old masters who came before. He famously added a speck of red to his seascape in the 1832 Royal Academy Show when he saw that it was hanging next to Constable's red splattered Waterloo Bridge. This exhibit hangs the two works side-by-side for the first time since 1832. The entire show is made up of Turner paintings side-by-side with the work of artists he wished to emulate or more to the point to outshine in skill. He competed with all of the greats: Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Canaletto and dozens of other very good artists. The Tate holds a huge collection of Turners because of the Bequest to the nation that settled his estate's death duties — and the idea for the show comes from Turner in his will leaving a few of his works to the nation with the condition that Dido Building Carthage be displayed next to Claude's ...Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in the National Gallery. The interesting thing about the show is that curator David Solkin chose to exhibit as many misses as hits for Turner's scorecard. There were some where Turner's version of another artist's subject was a clear winner, especially when atmosphere was a defining element. There were some perfectly dreadful pastiches of master works. Sadly, for me and for Bob who is a bit more of a Turner fan than I, there were some perfectly lovely paintings by Turner that paled when sitting next to a master, so we have another show where opinion of the artist declines as the show progresses. In our family that is known as the Bonnard effect, after a huge show at the Tate in 1998. We took time out from our moving-to-a-new-country chores to see the show, and Susan, Bob, and I agreed that the only Bonnard we really liked was the famous Dining Room Overlooking the Garden at the Met in New York.
While at the Tate Britain, we stopped in to see the Turner Prize nominees work which has just gone on display. Why it is the Turner Prize I have no idea except he is Britain's best/favourite artist. He would have no problem whatsoever competing with these artists and winning hands down. This is the Prize that has featured unmade beds and light bulbs flashing on and off in past years. I couldn't possibly comment on any of these nominees so I will let a link do that.
And I found a new artist to admire in a room display on women artists who had a hard time because they were women. Stanislawa de Karlowska was married to the Camden Town painter Robert Bevan. The Tate owns three of her works and these two were on display.
Last night we did something we rarely do anymore. We went to see a dance performance. This is the centenary of Diaghilev's Paris company Les Ballet Russes, and Sadler's Wells' contribution to the celebration is this programme where they asked four choreographers to create pieces In the Spirit of Diaghilev. We went primarily because one of four, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, choreographed a fabulous programme we saw last year titled Myth. His contribution was Faun, based on the music Afternoon of the Faun with additions from Nitin Sawhney, and featured two remarkable dancers. Afterlight, danced to wonderful Satie piano music, was an homage to Nijinsky, danced by a solo male with a light show playing over his body movements. Quite fantastic. Those were the two successful parts of the evening.
The first piece featured many dancers, several large TV screens with bright red machines turning and black and white stripes rippling, plus a bright strobe light that unfortunately was directed right at Bob's retina, so he had to hold his hand over his eyes for most of the piece. The TV screens were very distracting, as any neuroscientist knows, the brain is wired to watch moving impulses of light, and as any parent buying an infant mobile knows, red, black and white are the colours that can be discriminated first and best. I have no idea what the dancers did, I watched the TVs. When we were riding home on the Tube, and I finally had a chance to read my programme notes, I discovered this piece was made by "an ongoing collaborative enquiry into the distributed nature of choreographic thinking with the Interactive Cognition Lab, UCSanDiego" — the very place Bob did his cognitive science post-doc 30 years ago!!!!!! So it was neuroscience after all.
We had gotten an e-mail from Sadler's Wells last week noting this production included "adult content" material, and that would have been directed at the final piece which included rape, sodomy, a Pope, a garotting, blood, and an electrocution. This was very much "in the spirit of Diaghilev" measured by the people walking out! But no fist fights as far as I could see. A powerful blast of incense permeating the theatre did nothing to improve my reaction. The music was a lovely waltz — my programme says Ravel's Mother Goose — so ho hum, violence and nursery rhymes, must be a commentary on our times or something.
I also finished another book this week, Gardens of Water, a first novel by Alan Drew, written when a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book has one of those Readers' Guides for book groups in which we learn that Drew and his wife took teaching jobs in Turkey, arrived in Istanbul four days before the huge earthquake hit in 1999, and lived there for three years. The latter means they were there pre- and post-9/11, never mentioned in the interview, but clearly what helped shape the text. A Kurdish family of four has been uprooted from their Southern Turkey homeland because of the PKK rebellion. The Turkish forces are of course funded and supplied with weapons by the US — it's just what we do — and the father hates Americans — it's just what they do. They have settled in a city near Istanbul, but when the earthquake hits, they lose their home, shop, and extended family. The Turkish government is unable to respond to the crisis so they rely on American aid workers to feed and house the population. These aid workers are Christians who offer succour, but at the price of intense proselytising. The novel sets up clashes in world view: evangelical Christianity in a Muslim community; traditional parents trying to maintain their values — values that are mostly abhorrent to those with Western values such as the readers of this book — but whose children are swayed by the toys and treats of the modern world; the deep distrust of anything associated with the US by the millions of people whose lives have been tragically altered by one US policy or another. I won't be giving anything away if I say this is not a happy book.
Cold weather has arrived in London this week along with quite a bit of rain. We haven't yet turned on the heat, but we will this weekend. After spending a day shivering wearing three sweaters and my bathrobe, I finally pulled out my winter clothes and sweaters. My closet and drawers are stuffed full so that means no shopping trips for me. I find myself drawn to the window displays this season because so much of it looks familiar — 1965 familiar. The last time these cute tunics and miniskirts were around, I was the target market! There are articles in the paper about Twiggy because she is turning 60. How could she have been younger than I was? And suddenly through Facebook I am in contact with high school classmates who haven't crossed my mind in 40+ years. I seem to be simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Reading RoundUp
Yes, it really is October already. I ask rhetorically, why did September go past so quickly? Maybe because I spent half the month in this chair, in front of this screen, blowing away fifteen years of writers block. Perhaps there is a Dan Brown effect. I understand he published a new book last month after years of writer's block. I'm afraid I have only ever gotten around to reading one of Dan's oeuvre. In 2004 when it came out in paperback here, which was years before it did in the States, I was in the airport on my way to meeting Bob, who was at a conference for work, in Cannes. There it was piled up in the airport book store, with previous recommendations by friends in the States as a great read, I succumbed to The DaVinci Code.
Cannes, in March, is really quite a boring place. The LaCroisette promenade is blocked with heavy equipment as the beach clubs are being made ready for the upcoming season and Festival; after you have climbed up to the museum in the castle on the hill above the scenic port, frankly there is little else to do. The bank conference organiser was Bob's friend, and we had been allocated a beautiful room overlooking the sea, so for much of the week I holed up in this luxury room watching French TV. I learned that Charmed seems like a much more interesting show when Piper, Phoebe and Prue are speaking French. I re-learned the craft of crochet after a 30-year hiatus, and remembered that US and UK crochet stitch instructions are different by a factor of one — a US single crochet is a UK double crochet and so on up the number scale — but the bag came out great. And I read the worst book ever written. It was so bad that I forced Bob to read it in his conference breaks. He too was enthralled by the pure awfulness of the writing. The bonus for us was that after the conference, we spent a week or more driving around Provençe and Languedoc and came upon the very places Mary Magdalene and her companions roamed after setting off from the Holy Land in 40 A.D. Their boat landed in the Camargue village of Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer where the church commemorates Mary, the Virgin's sister, and Mary, mother of the apostles James and John — hence the plural "Saintes" — who settled in the village and were buried in a small oratory built to establish Christianity in continental Europe. Mary Magdalene and her siblings wandered farther — her brother Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead previously, went to Marseilles and eventually died again in Cyprus. Her sister Martha went to Tarascon
where she tamed the local monster, the Tarasque, a cross between a dragon, a scorpion, and a turtle, apparently, in this photo from Wikipedia. When the townspeople killed the monster, unaware he had been tamed, Martha made them feel so guilty, they all converted to Christianity and named their town after the monster. Mary Magdalene went first to Marseilles, then retired to a cave in the Saint-Baume mountains and was buried in the church at St-Maximin-a-la-Sainte-Baume. When we stopped at the church, a funeral mass had just begun, so we were unable to see what sort of shrine is in the church. There is no mention in any of the legends that the family was traveling with a child however. Undoubtedly a mere oversight in the legends, now set straight for all of us by Dan Brown.
I have notched up two more books since the last reading roundup. I devoured the second Jackson Brodie novel, One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson while we were in Bruges. I am a fan of the convoluted plotting that introduces at least a half dozen characters and events, all of whom are eventually twined together as the novel progresses. Hallelujah, the library had volume three, When Will There Be Good News, on the shelf when I returned volume two.
C.P. Snow's The Masters, chosen by one of my book groups, was quite a wonderful read. An old-fashioned novel with chapters, chapters with titles, chapters whose titles appeared as a phrase somewhere in the chapter. No magical dream sequences tilting reality; no mystical butterflies flitting in and out. The Masters is a slice of life at a Cambridge college in 1937 where the current Master is dying of cancer and a new Master must be elected by the Fellows. The novel is part of an eleven volume series, called the Strangers and Brothers Sequence, narrated by one of the Fellows, Lewis Eliot, who teaches law at Cambridge and maintains a practice in London, one foot in academia, one foot in the real world. The Sequence chronicles Eliot's life and career from start to retirement, but this volume remains, claustrophobic, within the walls of the college as they choose one of their own to be Master. The moments of political power play are subtly told, mostly through dialogue, but the reader is always forced to keep up with the mind games being played by the major characters.
Snow is best known for his lecture/article/book The Two Cultures, delivered in 1959, and now being commemorated in its 50th Anniversary year. Snow believed the two cultures — of science and of the humanities — had grown so far apart both among scholars and the public, they could hardly communicate with each other. I'm not going to pretend I know what his arguments were, nor what his critics said, because I haven't read the lecture or the commentary. Back in the day, the Enlightenment day that is, science was called "natural philosophy" in academic parlance when it was taken for granted that arts and science were not separate. In 1770s England, Joseph Priestley as a scientist could discover the element oxygen, but have his house firebombed – and eventually flee to Pennsylvania – because of his Unitarian religious beliefs. The same theme was explored in the Darwin show we saw at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge a few weeks ago focusing on how visual artists adopted the findings of "natural history" when painting landscapes or anthropomorphising cute puppies .
I will admit that although I am an "educated, enlightenened" person, I shy away from science when I am confronted with a concept that might require some effort to understand. Bob has a subscription to the wonderful magazine New Scientist, which presents recent research findings in language a layperson can understand. Every week I look at the cover, think "oh that's interesting," and rarely inquire any farther. Megan lists Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything right after Dorothy Dunnett in her list of favourite books, and she has been after me to read it for years.
I think in the States, our education system does a better job on instilling some science into "non-scientists" than the UK, where students who go on to university begin to study specialised subjects after they finish their school-leaving exams (the GCSE tests) when they are sixteen. During the last two years of secondary education, in preparation for university entrance, students choose three to five subjects to be tested on at the end of the two years (the A-level exams), but the subjects they choose are related to the course they wish to study at university, and when they reach university, they will study only the subject of the course they have been admitted to and some ancillary subjects related to their core area. In the States, of course we normally continue studying science all four years of high school, and most universities have curriculum distribution requirements. While most everyone grumbles about these "outside the comfort zone" classes, I fell in love with botany and then ecology back in my day at Mount Holyoke, and Susan loved her opportunity to study ornithology at Bowdoin.
So while we Americans have the chance to study science longer, we are the ones who now seem to have a serious problem with accepting scientific information. While I might shy away from science, I still believe what scientists have to say. I certainly believe that science may be the only thing that will save the planet from the mess humans have made. Yet if I believe polls, most citizens of the States have some doubts about various findings in this realm of knowledge, and many citizens outright reject some of the most basic principles of the universe. Was there ever a more embarrassing moment for the States, when the Republican presidential hopefuls for 2008, stood on a TV stage and argued that they believed less science than anyone else on that stage. Yes indeed, we're all with Archbishop Ussher now, and we'll be celebrating the earth's 6,013th birthday on 22-23 October this year. Isn't it time to propose this date as a national holiday? Now I read that fewer people believe in global warming these days than the numbers who believed a few years ago. What's to believe? This isn't a faith-based argument over a supernatural deity. Even the conventional argument that climate change is a natural event, yada yada yada, so we don't need to panic, doesn't change the outcome. Of course there have been climate changes not caused by human activity — in some cases because there were no humans at the time – but those changes still wiped out large numbers of species, according to the geologic record. There is no reason that you can't adhere to Bishop Ussher's time-scale and also believe that droughts are longer and drier than in the past, temperatures are rising, seas are rising, currents are changing . Whether you believe the past is thousands or billions of years old, the evidence is still the same; the cause of change can be attributed to God or to humans, the outcome is still the same.
The Christian right abetted by the Republican party of know-nothings have perpetrated evil in the United States, but perhaps the worst has been the politicisation of science. In the 1970s, the PBS science programme Nova had an episode about the tremendous advances made in the study of genetics during the 1920s by Russian scientists who were already positing the idea of some sort of genetic replication mechanism. When Stalin came to power, true scientific work was suppressed in favour of crack-pot theories promoted to further goals of the state. I remember thinking how glad I was to live in a modern country where science was respected and would never be politicised. How did things move in the wrong direction so quickly? C. P. Snow worried that representatives of the two cultures could no longer communicate with each other. Humanities scholars who expected scientists to be familiar with Shakespeare's poetry, did not accept they should equally understand Newtonian laws of physics, thus demeaning the quality of scientific principles. Today, the rift has deepened to where one side of the divide will now deny the validity of the other side's work. Tinkering with communication will no longer save us from plunging into a dark age.
Cannes, in March, is really quite a boring place. The LaCroisette promenade is blocked with heavy equipment as the beach clubs are being made ready for the upcoming season and Festival; after you have climbed up to the museum in the castle on the hill above the scenic port, frankly there is little else to do. The bank conference organiser was Bob's friend, and we had been allocated a beautiful room overlooking the sea, so for much of the week I holed up in this luxury room watching French TV. I learned that Charmed seems like a much more interesting show when Piper, Phoebe and Prue are speaking French. I re-learned the craft of crochet after a 30-year hiatus, and remembered that US and UK crochet stitch instructions are different by a factor of one — a US single crochet is a UK double crochet and so on up the number scale — but the bag came out great. And I read the worst book ever written. It was so bad that I forced Bob to read it in his conference breaks. He too was enthralled by the pure awfulness of the writing. The bonus for us was that after the conference, we spent a week or more driving around Provençe and Languedoc and came upon the very places Mary Magdalene and her companions roamed after setting off from the Holy Land in 40 A.D. Their boat landed in the Camargue village of Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer where the church commemorates Mary, the Virgin's sister, and Mary, mother of the apostles James and John — hence the plural "Saintes" — who settled in the village and were buried in a small oratory built to establish Christianity in continental Europe. Mary Magdalene and her siblings wandered farther — her brother Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead previously, went to Marseilles and eventually died again in Cyprus. Her sister Martha went to Tarascon
where she tamed the local monster, the Tarasque, a cross between a dragon, a scorpion, and a turtle, apparently, in this photo from Wikipedia. When the townspeople killed the monster, unaware he had been tamed, Martha made them feel so guilty, they all converted to Christianity and named their town after the monster. Mary Magdalene went first to Marseilles, then retired to a cave in the Saint-Baume mountains and was buried in the church at St-Maximin-a-la-Sainte-Baume. When we stopped at the church, a funeral mass had just begun, so we were unable to see what sort of shrine is in the church. There is no mention in any of the legends that the family was traveling with a child however. Undoubtedly a mere oversight in the legends, now set straight for all of us by Dan Brown.I have notched up two more books since the last reading roundup. I devoured the second Jackson Brodie novel, One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson while we were in Bruges. I am a fan of the convoluted plotting that introduces at least a half dozen characters and events, all of whom are eventually twined together as the novel progresses. Hallelujah, the library had volume three, When Will There Be Good News, on the shelf when I returned volume two.
C.P. Snow's The Masters, chosen by one of my book groups, was quite a wonderful read. An old-fashioned novel with chapters, chapters with titles, chapters whose titles appeared as a phrase somewhere in the chapter. No magical dream sequences tilting reality; no mystical butterflies flitting in and out. The Masters is a slice of life at a Cambridge college in 1937 where the current Master is dying of cancer and a new Master must be elected by the Fellows. The novel is part of an eleven volume series, called the Strangers and Brothers Sequence, narrated by one of the Fellows, Lewis Eliot, who teaches law at Cambridge and maintains a practice in London, one foot in academia, one foot in the real world. The Sequence chronicles Eliot's life and career from start to retirement, but this volume remains, claustrophobic, within the walls of the college as they choose one of their own to be Master. The moments of political power play are subtly told, mostly through dialogue, but the reader is always forced to keep up with the mind games being played by the major characters.
Snow is best known for his lecture/article/book The Two Cultures, delivered in 1959, and now being commemorated in its 50th Anniversary year. Snow believed the two cultures — of science and of the humanities — had grown so far apart both among scholars and the public, they could hardly communicate with each other. I'm not going to pretend I know what his arguments were, nor what his critics said, because I haven't read the lecture or the commentary. Back in the day, the Enlightenment day that is, science was called "natural philosophy" in academic parlance when it was taken for granted that arts and science were not separate. In 1770s England, Joseph Priestley as a scientist could discover the element oxygen, but have his house firebombed – and eventually flee to Pennsylvania – because of his Unitarian religious beliefs. The same theme was explored in the Darwin show we saw at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge a few weeks ago focusing on how visual artists adopted the findings of "natural history" when painting landscapes or anthropomorphising cute puppies .
I will admit that although I am an "educated, enlightenened" person, I shy away from science when I am confronted with a concept that might require some effort to understand. Bob has a subscription to the wonderful magazine New Scientist, which presents recent research findings in language a layperson can understand. Every week I look at the cover, think "oh that's interesting," and rarely inquire any farther. Megan lists Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything right after Dorothy Dunnett in her list of favourite books, and she has been after me to read it for years.
I think in the States, our education system does a better job on instilling some science into "non-scientists" than the UK, where students who go on to university begin to study specialised subjects after they finish their school-leaving exams (the GCSE tests) when they are sixteen. During the last two years of secondary education, in preparation for university entrance, students choose three to five subjects to be tested on at the end of the two years (the A-level exams), but the subjects they choose are related to the course they wish to study at university, and when they reach university, they will study only the subject of the course they have been admitted to and some ancillary subjects related to their core area. In the States, of course we normally continue studying science all four years of high school, and most universities have curriculum distribution requirements. While most everyone grumbles about these "outside the comfort zone" classes, I fell in love with botany and then ecology back in my day at Mount Holyoke, and Susan loved her opportunity to study ornithology at Bowdoin.
So while we Americans have the chance to study science longer, we are the ones who now seem to have a serious problem with accepting scientific information. While I might shy away from science, I still believe what scientists have to say. I certainly believe that science may be the only thing that will save the planet from the mess humans have made. Yet if I believe polls, most citizens of the States have some doubts about various findings in this realm of knowledge, and many citizens outright reject some of the most basic principles of the universe. Was there ever a more embarrassing moment for the States, when the Republican presidential hopefuls for 2008, stood on a TV stage and argued that they believed less science than anyone else on that stage. Yes indeed, we're all with Archbishop Ussher now, and we'll be celebrating the earth's 6,013th birthday on 22-23 October this year. Isn't it time to propose this date as a national holiday? Now I read that fewer people believe in global warming these days than the numbers who believed a few years ago. What's to believe? This isn't a faith-based argument over a supernatural deity. Even the conventional argument that climate change is a natural event, yada yada yada, so we don't need to panic, doesn't change the outcome. Of course there have been climate changes not caused by human activity — in some cases because there were no humans at the time – but those changes still wiped out large numbers of species, according to the geologic record. There is no reason that you can't adhere to Bishop Ussher's time-scale and also believe that droughts are longer and drier than in the past, temperatures are rising, seas are rising, currents are changing . Whether you believe the past is thousands or billions of years old, the evidence is still the same; the cause of change can be attributed to God or to humans, the outcome is still the same.
The Christian right abetted by the Republican party of know-nothings have perpetrated evil in the United States, but perhaps the worst has been the politicisation of science. In the 1970s, the PBS science programme Nova had an episode about the tremendous advances made in the study of genetics during the 1920s by Russian scientists who were already positing the idea of some sort of genetic replication mechanism. When Stalin came to power, true scientific work was suppressed in favour of crack-pot theories promoted to further goals of the state. I remember thinking how glad I was to live in a modern country where science was respected and would never be politicised. How did things move in the wrong direction so quickly? C. P. Snow worried that representatives of the two cultures could no longer communicate with each other. Humanities scholars who expected scientists to be familiar with Shakespeare's poetry, did not accept they should equally understand Newtonian laws of physics, thus demeaning the quality of scientific principles. Today, the rift has deepened to where one side of the divide will now deny the validity of the other side's work. Tinkering with communication will no longer save us from plunging into a dark age.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Friday, not the thirteenth
A second good joke in the same week as the green bananas quip -- by the way, what sort of bananas did Ocado deliver on Thursday? -- the greenest green bananas I have ever seen from Waitrose's new Fairtrade Home Ripening line of bananas. They are mostly yellow now, so we have nearly survived this bunch. And now another banana line to keep straight when I am placing my on-line order for groceries.
The second joke: Friday is considered an unlucky day in the maritime trade. One merchant decided to prove this superstition wrong. He ordered a new wooden sailing ship to be built, on a Friday; construction of all the important parts of the vessel were begun on Fridays; the boat was christened on a Friday; and sailed off on its first voyage on a Friday.......and it and its cargo of woodpeckers was never seen again.
All right, it sounded much better when told by the magnificent June Tabor in her dramatic deep voice at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night. Another spellbinding evening of music from June with last night's programme all connected to the sea in one way or another including a wonderful description of the Aberdeen Fish Market from one of H.V. Morton's 1920s travel books on Britain. I was once a huge fan of Morton. Our first trip to Rome, way back when we lived in Hingham, was planned around a Morton book I found in the Hingham Library. Despite being decades old, the essence of Rome had not changed, and we explored sites that a modern day Fodor's or Frommer's or Rough Guide would not have sent us to. When I moved to London and found that Morton had produced a huge list of British travel books, I was excited -- until I started noting the anti-semitic, racist comments laced through their texts. I imagine the Rome of 1957 had few undesirables for him to comment on in that book. I'm not a big Wagner fan, so I have never had to deal with that moral question. Bob is uncomfortable with being a fan of T.S. Eliot since Anthony Julius's book was published in the mid-1990s. We were in Hingham, and much of the book dealt with Eliot's time at nearby Milton Academy (where we might have sent Susan for high school) and Harvard, so the book made a big splash in Boston. I've noticed when Bob says something complimentary about Eliot he likes to add a tag line, "but of course he was an anti-semite..." I have deliberately had nothing to do with Morton in years. I had bought only one Morton book (he's more of a library kind of guy) on Wales, which I left shrink-wrapped for several years, while I evaded dealing with my conscience, and then binned after a biography of the man was published and learned from the reviews that anti-semitism was only the start of this appalling man's sins: he supported Hitler and took South African citizenship as a fan of apartheid. But he was a brilliant travel writer. Last night, sitting in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, we were all transported to Aberdeen's fish market, where the slap of dead fish -- dead being the normal state of fish for people, if not for fish -- sounds like the slap of a million babies bottoms all at once, to paraphrase a bit. Morton's warped mind has not seemed to be an issue for others. The BBC has done a recent TV series following his travels, his books have been reissued (I don't know if the new editions have been redacted.), and through Google, I can join a Morton appreciation society to share views with other Morton fans -- I certainly hope this is referring to his views on travel. So I exude a deep sigh of sadness and wonder how someone with a gift for describing places so well, could do so with a mind steeped in malice.
Back to the subject of Friday, here, yesterday -- It was certainly not an unlucky day in this family. Susan was appointed Curator of the Hampstead Museum at Burgh House. A day we have awaited with no certainty since last March when our former curator announced her resignation and recommended Susan be considered for the job. Five years out of Bowdoin, two years out of Cambridge, Susan has achieved a goal -- a real job in a museum. That may not seem like such a difficult goal to reach, but in the three to four years since Susan decided that a career in museum work was what she wanted to pursue, we have all learned museum work is one of the hardest, most competitive, limited job areas to break into despite the huge number of museums in the UK. She has volunteered at museums -- no longer a route to being hired for jobs as it once was -- worked on grant-funded projects at Hampstead Museum, and financed her independent life by working in a shop. For much of the past two years working -- for pay or as a volunteer -- seven days a week. Of course museum work is still under-paid and under-funded. The curator job is half time with half-pay to match, but she is finally on her way upwards. And we all say hurrah!
The second joke: Friday is considered an unlucky day in the maritime trade. One merchant decided to prove this superstition wrong. He ordered a new wooden sailing ship to be built, on a Friday; construction of all the important parts of the vessel were begun on Fridays; the boat was christened on a Friday; and sailed off on its first voyage on a Friday.......and it and its cargo of woodpeckers was never seen again.
All right, it sounded much better when told by the magnificent June Tabor in her dramatic deep voice at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night. Another spellbinding evening of music from June with last night's programme all connected to the sea in one way or another including a wonderful description of the Aberdeen Fish Market from one of H.V. Morton's 1920s travel books on Britain. I was once a huge fan of Morton. Our first trip to Rome, way back when we lived in Hingham, was planned around a Morton book I found in the Hingham Library. Despite being decades old, the essence of Rome had not changed, and we explored sites that a modern day Fodor's or Frommer's or Rough Guide would not have sent us to. When I moved to London and found that Morton had produced a huge list of British travel books, I was excited -- until I started noting the anti-semitic, racist comments laced through their texts. I imagine the Rome of 1957 had few undesirables for him to comment on in that book. I'm not a big Wagner fan, so I have never had to deal with that moral question. Bob is uncomfortable with being a fan of T.S. Eliot since Anthony Julius's book was published in the mid-1990s. We were in Hingham, and much of the book dealt with Eliot's time at nearby Milton Academy (where we might have sent Susan for high school) and Harvard, so the book made a big splash in Boston. I've noticed when Bob says something complimentary about Eliot he likes to add a tag line, "but of course he was an anti-semite..." I have deliberately had nothing to do with Morton in years. I had bought only one Morton book (he's more of a library kind of guy) on Wales, which I left shrink-wrapped for several years, while I evaded dealing with my conscience, and then binned after a biography of the man was published and learned from the reviews that anti-semitism was only the start of this appalling man's sins: he supported Hitler and took South African citizenship as a fan of apartheid. But he was a brilliant travel writer. Last night, sitting in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, we were all transported to Aberdeen's fish market, where the slap of dead fish -- dead being the normal state of fish for people, if not for fish -- sounds like the slap of a million babies bottoms all at once, to paraphrase a bit. Morton's warped mind has not seemed to be an issue for others. The BBC has done a recent TV series following his travels, his books have been reissued (I don't know if the new editions have been redacted.), and through Google, I can join a Morton appreciation society to share views with other Morton fans -- I certainly hope this is referring to his views on travel. So I exude a deep sigh of sadness and wonder how someone with a gift for describing places so well, could do so with a mind steeped in malice.
Back to the subject of Friday, here, yesterday -- It was certainly not an unlucky day in this family. Susan was appointed Curator of the Hampstead Museum at Burgh House. A day we have awaited with no certainty since last March when our former curator announced her resignation and recommended Susan be considered for the job. Five years out of Bowdoin, two years out of Cambridge, Susan has achieved a goal -- a real job in a museum. That may not seem like such a difficult goal to reach, but in the three to four years since Susan decided that a career in museum work was what she wanted to pursue, we have all learned museum work is one of the hardest, most competitive, limited job areas to break into despite the huge number of museums in the UK. She has volunteered at museums -- no longer a route to being hired for jobs as it once was -- worked on grant-funded projects at Hampstead Museum, and financed her independent life by working in a shop. For much of the past two years working -- for pay or as a volunteer -- seven days a week. Of course museum work is still under-paid and under-funded. The curator job is half time with half-pay to match, but she is finally on her way upwards. And we all say hurrah!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Book blogging
This is Book Blogger Appreciation Week!
Since I am not a book blogger, I have not signed up to participate, but I am a great supporter of book bloggers. Linking from book blogger to book blogger is one of my favourite ways of wasting an afternoon or an evening when the mind is tired and the body is weak. I have been a regular visitor to Dove Grey Reader's blog (dovegreyreader.typepad.com) for years and years. When blogging was just emerging as an indoor sport in Britain, lagging a few years behind the States, I read a newspaper article condemning these new upstarts who thought they could be arts critics. The article was written by a book critic, so Dove Grey was singled out, and when she was described as a quilter and a knitter, I knew I had to check her out. All those snooty journalists have had to pull in their horns and hope to keep their jobs these days. Dove Grey is now a celebrity -- courted by authors, publishers, festivals -- and we all love her because her head has never been turned around by the recognition. She has retired from her day job as a visiting nurse for the NHS in rural Devon (really, how did she have time for everything?), and now has more time for knitting and quilting, and for the hundreds of books she reads every year. (Does she sleep?) Starting with Dove Grey, I can link to dozens of other book blogs, and from those to dozens of others, and on and on.
Except for Dove Grey, I don't follow any other book bloggers regularly. I am not a steady reader of newspaper "professional" reviews either. The literary mafias here and in the States get it wrong so often, that I almost shy away from the the hot new literary books and the prize winners too. I have yet to find anyone who felt Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss was worth the inordinate amount of time it took to read, much less the Booker Prize it won. I read it for a book group, and we all wanted to like it because her mother, the writer Anita Desai, had been a book group guest a few year's before, and she was such a lovely woman and so proud of her daughter's writing career. Once one member of the book group (probably me because I am usually the contrarian) admitted to hating the book, everyone admitted to skimming, stopping at page 50, or unhappily slogging through. I seem to have more of a problem with highly championed books than most people. For example, I hated Brick Lane -- and Monica Ali has not had much success post-Brick Lane; Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture has such a stupid premise and ending, it shouldn't have been in the running for prizes, much less won the Costa; The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was just plain boring once you got through the history of detection and realised there was no story; and the Orange Prize winner last year was the ridiculous The Road Home whose author Rose Tremain is way overrated if you ask me, talk about a writer with no ear for dialogue. Saturday by Ian McEwan is without any shadow of a doubt, the worst book ever written (and "you don't have to take my word for it," as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, but you can take John Banville's [whose Booker winning The Sea, I did very much like] word for it in the NYRB) by an established author who has written good books (Enduring Love) and great books (Atonement). In my defense, I thought The Road, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The White Tiger were all great reads and had important points to make, so I am not a complete philistine when it comes to award winning, best sellers.
What I do find fascinating when I page through book blogs is the inconsistency of opinions that match my own critical opinions. This came as a shock to me because up until I moved to London, I almost never discussed books and opinions on books with anyone else. I was not in a book group, as the only book group I had ever heard of in Hingham never asked me to join them (although with typical Hingham inhospitality, I was occasionally asked for suggestions!); the internet hadn't discovered organised social networking; friendly discussions never included opinions on books. When I read a book, the opinion I formed was mine and rarely, if ever, shared. It is hard to imagine that life now. The book group was the first activity I joined when I was settled in London. Authors speak all over London all the time, including at the Waterstones here in Hampstead, just up the street. There isn't a living author I can't see and hear -- and question if I were brave (but I am not) -- with only the least effort of keeping track of perhaps a dozen events calendars, and paying a few pounds, which at bookstores is usually refunded if you buy the book at the reading. Some of the world's most popular writers have been guests at my book groups: Tracy Chevalier, the sorely missed Carol Shields, Esther Freud, among others. When I moved to London, reading turned from being private and personal to public and social. I discuss books at book groups of course, but I also discuss books while quilting and knitting with friends, comparing what our various book groups are liking and disliking. And if a live person is not available for an opinion, the book bloggers always are. I really cannot ever imagine going back to a world where reading is a private matter. When my opinions became a shared event, I was struck by the fact someone could agree with me wholly on one book, and disagree just as wholly on the next book. At first, I couldn't understand how that could be, but of course, everyone enters a book with their own life experiences and biases shaping what the author is serving up on the page. What may be tosh to me, will resonate with my opposite. The joy of book groups and book blogs is the multitude of individual personal insights that can make a book come alive. Too often professional critics want to pronounce on how we should feel about a particular work based on some arcane literary standard, hence the overhyped disappointments we may read and the overlooked gems that are invisible. Of course some of the biggest successes these days are the "word-of-mouth" bestsellers that emerge from the vast sea of readers who pass recommendations through the web of book groups and book bloggers.
Those with a discerning eye will notice that March has moved from reading to read on the lists to the right. Another book off The Book Pile, bought at the Library book sale two years ago, and ready to be returned for resale this year. March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. The narrative is related in the voice of Mr March, the father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, as he recounts his early life and his terrible experiences as a chaplain in the American Civil War. The voice shifts to Marmee March, when she hurries to Washington to care for her gravely ill husband. The story is well done enveloping the Marches -- using Bronson Alcott as a model for Mr March -- in the intellectual and abolitionist life of the Concord, Massachusetts inhabited by Thoreau, Emerson, and a cameo of Hawthorne. Mr March's Civil War includes a long section on the Union's attempt to employ "contraband" -- which would be the homeless slaves about to be emancipated -- in model agriculture schemes. An element of the war that I certainly knew nothing about. March was a good read.
Geraldine Brooks's first novel, Year of Wonder, was set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, famous for quarantining itself to prevent the plague from spreading through the shire during the late 17th century. That was also a very good read. I had read a long time ago Jill Paton Walsh's YA novel A Parcel of Patterns on the same subject. The plague is thought to have arrived in Eyam with a postal delivery from London where the final round of plague was petering out. A disturbing cautionary tale as we wait to see what will happen with our Swine Flu pandemic in the months to come. Brooks's most recent novel, People of the Book, was interesting, but ultimately not satisfying. The book of the title is the Sarajevo Haggadah, saved again during the most recent bombardment of Sarajevo by a librarian. The novel traces the real, when known, and invented history of the book back to the medieval clerk who lettered the manuscript. The story is told through a series of historical vignettes, interspersed with a present day story of the young woman who has been hired to restore the book for display in a new museum. I read the book for a book group and was surprised at how many people disliked the book. I disliked the book restorer, a young woman, but chosen for this important job because of her professional skills and training under the finest craftsmen, yet she acted like an immature teenager throughout, and I thought that did not ring true as a character. I did, however, like the historical vignettes, and that was the part with which others found fault. So once again, you just never know what to expect.
Now I am on to C.P. Snow's The Masters for next week's book group.
Since I am not a book blogger, I have not signed up to participate, but I am a great supporter of book bloggers. Linking from book blogger to book blogger is one of my favourite ways of wasting an afternoon or an evening when the mind is tired and the body is weak. I have been a regular visitor to Dove Grey Reader's blog (dovegreyreader.typepad.com) for years and years. When blogging was just emerging as an indoor sport in Britain, lagging a few years behind the States, I read a newspaper article condemning these new upstarts who thought they could be arts critics. The article was written by a book critic, so Dove Grey was singled out, and when she was described as a quilter and a knitter, I knew I had to check her out. All those snooty journalists have had to pull in their horns and hope to keep their jobs these days. Dove Grey is now a celebrity -- courted by authors, publishers, festivals -- and we all love her because her head has never been turned around by the recognition. She has retired from her day job as a visiting nurse for the NHS in rural Devon (really, how did she have time for everything?), and now has more time for knitting and quilting, and for the hundreds of books she reads every year. (Does she sleep?) Starting with Dove Grey, I can link to dozens of other book blogs, and from those to dozens of others, and on and on.
Except for Dove Grey, I don't follow any other book bloggers regularly. I am not a steady reader of newspaper "professional" reviews either. The literary mafias here and in the States get it wrong so often, that I almost shy away from the the hot new literary books and the prize winners too. I have yet to find anyone who felt Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss was worth the inordinate amount of time it took to read, much less the Booker Prize it won. I read it for a book group, and we all wanted to like it because her mother, the writer Anita Desai, had been a book group guest a few year's before, and she was such a lovely woman and so proud of her daughter's writing career. Once one member of the book group (probably me because I am usually the contrarian) admitted to hating the book, everyone admitted to skimming, stopping at page 50, or unhappily slogging through. I seem to have more of a problem with highly championed books than most people. For example, I hated Brick Lane -- and Monica Ali has not had much success post-Brick Lane; Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture has such a stupid premise and ending, it shouldn't have been in the running for prizes, much less won the Costa; The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was just plain boring once you got through the history of detection and realised there was no story; and the Orange Prize winner last year was the ridiculous The Road Home whose author Rose Tremain is way overrated if you ask me, talk about a writer with no ear for dialogue. Saturday by Ian McEwan is without any shadow of a doubt, the worst book ever written (and "you don't have to take my word for it," as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, but you can take John Banville's [whose Booker winning The Sea, I did very much like] word for it in the NYRB) by an established author who has written good books (Enduring Love) and great books (Atonement). In my defense, I thought The Road, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The White Tiger were all great reads and had important points to make, so I am not a complete philistine when it comes to award winning, best sellers.
What I do find fascinating when I page through book blogs is the inconsistency of opinions that match my own critical opinions. This came as a shock to me because up until I moved to London, I almost never discussed books and opinions on books with anyone else. I was not in a book group, as the only book group I had ever heard of in Hingham never asked me to join them (although with typical Hingham inhospitality, I was occasionally asked for suggestions!); the internet hadn't discovered organised social networking; friendly discussions never included opinions on books. When I read a book, the opinion I formed was mine and rarely, if ever, shared. It is hard to imagine that life now. The book group was the first activity I joined when I was settled in London. Authors speak all over London all the time, including at the Waterstones here in Hampstead, just up the street. There isn't a living author I can't see and hear -- and question if I were brave (but I am not) -- with only the least effort of keeping track of perhaps a dozen events calendars, and paying a few pounds, which at bookstores is usually refunded if you buy the book at the reading. Some of the world's most popular writers have been guests at my book groups: Tracy Chevalier, the sorely missed Carol Shields, Esther Freud, among others. When I moved to London, reading turned from being private and personal to public and social. I discuss books at book groups of course, but I also discuss books while quilting and knitting with friends, comparing what our various book groups are liking and disliking. And if a live person is not available for an opinion, the book bloggers always are. I really cannot ever imagine going back to a world where reading is a private matter. When my opinions became a shared event, I was struck by the fact someone could agree with me wholly on one book, and disagree just as wholly on the next book. At first, I couldn't understand how that could be, but of course, everyone enters a book with their own life experiences and biases shaping what the author is serving up on the page. What may be tosh to me, will resonate with my opposite. The joy of book groups and book blogs is the multitude of individual personal insights that can make a book come alive. Too often professional critics want to pronounce on how we should feel about a particular work based on some arcane literary standard, hence the overhyped disappointments we may read and the overlooked gems that are invisible. Of course some of the biggest successes these days are the "word-of-mouth" bestsellers that emerge from the vast sea of readers who pass recommendations through the web of book groups and book bloggers.
Those with a discerning eye will notice that March has moved from reading to read on the lists to the right. Another book off The Book Pile, bought at the Library book sale two years ago, and ready to be returned for resale this year. March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. The narrative is related in the voice of Mr March, the father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, as he recounts his early life and his terrible experiences as a chaplain in the American Civil War. The voice shifts to Marmee March, when she hurries to Washington to care for her gravely ill husband. The story is well done enveloping the Marches -- using Bronson Alcott as a model for Mr March -- in the intellectual and abolitionist life of the Concord, Massachusetts inhabited by Thoreau, Emerson, and a cameo of Hawthorne. Mr March's Civil War includes a long section on the Union's attempt to employ "contraband" -- which would be the homeless slaves about to be emancipated -- in model agriculture schemes. An element of the war that I certainly knew nothing about. March was a good read.
Geraldine Brooks's first novel, Year of Wonder, was set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, famous for quarantining itself to prevent the plague from spreading through the shire during the late 17th century. That was also a very good read. I had read a long time ago Jill Paton Walsh's YA novel A Parcel of Patterns on the same subject. The plague is thought to have arrived in Eyam with a postal delivery from London where the final round of plague was petering out. A disturbing cautionary tale as we wait to see what will happen with our Swine Flu pandemic in the months to come. Brooks's most recent novel, People of the Book, was interesting, but ultimately not satisfying. The book of the title is the Sarajevo Haggadah, saved again during the most recent bombardment of Sarajevo by a librarian. The novel traces the real, when known, and invented history of the book back to the medieval clerk who lettered the manuscript. The story is told through a series of historical vignettes, interspersed with a present day story of the young woman who has been hired to restore the book for display in a new museum. I read the book for a book group and was surprised at how many people disliked the book. I disliked the book restorer, a young woman, but chosen for this important job because of her professional skills and training under the finest craftsmen, yet she acted like an immature teenager throughout, and I thought that did not ring true as a character. I did, however, like the historical vignettes, and that was the part with which others found fault. So once again, you just never know what to expect.
Now I am on to C.P. Snow's The Masters for next week's book group.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
09.09.09
Midweek is a good time for a catch-up on events. The weekly gathering of the Flying Geese Quilters met here on Monday. Over the past few years, knitting has been talked about and worked on as much as quilting among the members. The group changes constantly as ex-pats come and go. We have lost most of our serious quilters, and not added anyone with advanced skills and an eye on the greater quilting world. In two weeks, we are having a special reunion meeting, with the three former members -- well lets say three members who no longer live in London, because membership is surely for life -- who best fit that description.
Bob is looking for a new group to sing with. He lost patience with the basses in his last group who never learned the music and were difficult to sing among when they were so unprepared. Last evening he raked through websites of the dozens and dozens and dozens of amateur singing groups in London looking for one that fits his criteria.
Susan is madly busy putting the finishing touches on her first exhibit at the Hampstead Museum commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the formation of the Burgh House Trust taking on the management of Burgh House and opening it to the public as a community centre. The celebration is on Sunday. And I have to get busy on putting together the spiel for my part: a 20 minute tour of Burgh House mid-afternoon, perhaps to become a semi-regular event for visiting groups. She wants me to take on the role of leader of the Friends, but that cannot be considered until -- or perhaps if -- she is offered the job as curator. September offers lots of other voluntary activities. I have already expressed interest in the Hampstead Churchyard Project, and yesterday I saw a sign at Keats House for an open day for volunteers later in the month.
Megan's blog Sanctimommy goes from strength to strength. Her recent post on the Cushing Academy Library shedding its books, and her post on the frightening new cycle-of-life (no longer related to Shakespeare's Seven Ages) we are offering our children are just brilliant reads. Bob's Bazzfazz blog has been picked up by Scholars and Rogues, and he has been linking to her non-mommy posts to widen her readership a bit. Bibs begins pre-school this week -- not a moment too soon for Megan -- the terrible twos have been taking hold, I gather. Bobs is such an adorable baby boy in his pictures. Megan says people melt when he flashes his big smile.
I am building the blog page here with some "gadgets" as Blogger calls them. I have added the Family Blog list. The "Books I am Reading" has gained a companion of "Books I have Read" since I have finally finished the books on the initial list. One lesson of the past week is that if you spend enough time on the computer, there is no time to do anything to write about. September begins a new year for the two book groups to which I belong. Both are run by the same wonderful woman who moved to London from Minnesota as a newlywed with her Australian husband 40 years ago, with the intention of staying for a year or two as an adventure. I have never read so much as I have since moving to London. Bookstores have always been a destination for our family. Bob is a huge reader and book buyer. I have always bought way too many cookbooks and craft books and history books, but when I moved to London I started buying fiction too. I was confused by the authors on offer being so different from those in the States, and after the huge bazaar of the Hingham Public Library, our tiny neighbourhood library seemed much too limited. After a year or so, I did become a huge fan of our library, tiny as it is. It is a lovely building with a coloured glass domed ceiling attached to the Keats House. The library's ginger cat, Domino, died earlier this year, and that was a great loss. It was very soothing to see him curled up sleeping on the sofa.
I don't imagine I am the only person who buys books with the good intention of reading them all, however somehow the books pile up faster than the time expands. By this time two years ago, my pile was enormously tall. The Book Pile Project was a New Year's Resolution of 2008 -- I sorted through the pile, admitted there were some bad purchases that I would never read, and they went to Oxfam -- and resolved to work my way from top to bottom over the year. I actually did stick to my resolution and read a good half of the original stack, but it's impossible to get through a year limiting reading to older purchases -- the monthly book club choices, the new bestsellers, the book sale bargains, and the hot recommendations all must be figured into the calculus. So 2009 began with a pile too -- a much smaller pile and not all the same books -- and The Book Pile Project continues into another year. I am very pleased with my progress this year. The Summer Book and March, which I have just started, are both from The Pile. Tove Jansson is a Finnish writer best known for the beloved Moomin books and cartoons. The Summer Book is an evocative series of vignettes about a motherless girl and her ailing grandmother who spend summer holidays on an island in the Gulf of Finland. A cult classic no doubt, but I found it a bit twee. The descriptions of nature were elegant, but the people of the story never rose above the level of stock characters mouthing banalities to each other. Kate Atkinson's Case Histories has turned into a much admired mystery series because of her appealing hero Jackson Brodie, the last good man standing. I just borrowed the second Brodie book from the library when I returned Janet Evanovich's Finger Lickin' Fifteen. I have read and laughed my way through all fifteen of the Stephanie Plum numbered novels -- what's not to like in a book that spoofs New Jersey -- and one of the books even has a car chase over the Raritan Avenue Bridge into Highland Park and up River Road, a route that took seven years of my life -- and takes about three hours to finish. This is the first one I felt perhaps that Stephanie and her posse of friends and family have been there and done that maybe once too often for the schtick to still be as funny as it was the first fourteen times.
I have my next few books laid out from The Pile, the library, for book club, and I'm very excited about a new food book that arrived from Amazon today. I saw it referenced on the 101 Cookbooks blog yesterday, and I can't believe I already have it in hand. I will report on the reading I get through next week.
Bob is looking for a new group to sing with. He lost patience with the basses in his last group who never learned the music and were difficult to sing among when they were so unprepared. Last evening he raked through websites of the dozens and dozens and dozens of amateur singing groups in London looking for one that fits his criteria.
Susan is madly busy putting the finishing touches on her first exhibit at the Hampstead Museum commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the formation of the Burgh House Trust taking on the management of Burgh House and opening it to the public as a community centre. The celebration is on Sunday. And I have to get busy on putting together the spiel for my part: a 20 minute tour of Burgh House mid-afternoon, perhaps to become a semi-regular event for visiting groups. She wants me to take on the role of leader of the Friends, but that cannot be considered until -- or perhaps if -- she is offered the job as curator. September offers lots of other voluntary activities. I have already expressed interest in the Hampstead Churchyard Project, and yesterday I saw a sign at Keats House for an open day for volunteers later in the month.
Megan's blog Sanctimommy goes from strength to strength. Her recent post on the Cushing Academy Library shedding its books, and her post on the frightening new cycle-of-life (no longer related to Shakespeare's Seven Ages) we are offering our children are just brilliant reads. Bob's Bazzfazz blog has been picked up by Scholars and Rogues, and he has been linking to her non-mommy posts to widen her readership a bit. Bibs begins pre-school this week -- not a moment too soon for Megan -- the terrible twos have been taking hold, I gather. Bobs is such an adorable baby boy in his pictures. Megan says people melt when he flashes his big smile.
I am building the blog page here with some "gadgets" as Blogger calls them. I have added the Family Blog list. The "Books I am Reading" has gained a companion of "Books I have Read" since I have finally finished the books on the initial list. One lesson of the past week is that if you spend enough time on the computer, there is no time to do anything to write about. September begins a new year for the two book groups to which I belong. Both are run by the same wonderful woman who moved to London from Minnesota as a newlywed with her Australian husband 40 years ago, with the intention of staying for a year or two as an adventure. I have never read so much as I have since moving to London. Bookstores have always been a destination for our family. Bob is a huge reader and book buyer. I have always bought way too many cookbooks and craft books and history books, but when I moved to London I started buying fiction too. I was confused by the authors on offer being so different from those in the States, and after the huge bazaar of the Hingham Public Library, our tiny neighbourhood library seemed much too limited. After a year or so, I did become a huge fan of our library, tiny as it is. It is a lovely building with a coloured glass domed ceiling attached to the Keats House. The library's ginger cat, Domino, died earlier this year, and that was a great loss. It was very soothing to see him curled up sleeping on the sofa.
I don't imagine I am the only person who buys books with the good intention of reading them all, however somehow the books pile up faster than the time expands. By this time two years ago, my pile was enormously tall. The Book Pile Project was a New Year's Resolution of 2008 -- I sorted through the pile, admitted there were some bad purchases that I would never read, and they went to Oxfam -- and resolved to work my way from top to bottom over the year. I actually did stick to my resolution and read a good half of the original stack, but it's impossible to get through a year limiting reading to older purchases -- the monthly book club choices, the new bestsellers, the book sale bargains, and the hot recommendations all must be figured into the calculus. So 2009 began with a pile too -- a much smaller pile and not all the same books -- and The Book Pile Project continues into another year. I am very pleased with my progress this year. The Summer Book and March, which I have just started, are both from The Pile. Tove Jansson is a Finnish writer best known for the beloved Moomin books and cartoons. The Summer Book is an evocative series of vignettes about a motherless girl and her ailing grandmother who spend summer holidays on an island in the Gulf of Finland. A cult classic no doubt, but I found it a bit twee. The descriptions of nature were elegant, but the people of the story never rose above the level of stock characters mouthing banalities to each other. Kate Atkinson's Case Histories has turned into a much admired mystery series because of her appealing hero Jackson Brodie, the last good man standing. I just borrowed the second Brodie book from the library when I returned Janet Evanovich's Finger Lickin' Fifteen. I have read and laughed my way through all fifteen of the Stephanie Plum numbered novels -- what's not to like in a book that spoofs New Jersey -- and one of the books even has a car chase over the Raritan Avenue Bridge into Highland Park and up River Road, a route that took seven years of my life -- and takes about three hours to finish. This is the first one I felt perhaps that Stephanie and her posse of friends and family have been there and done that maybe once too often for the schtick to still be as funny as it was the first fourteen times.
I have my next few books laid out from The Pile, the library, for book club, and I'm very excited about a new food book that arrived from Amazon today. I saw it referenced on the 101 Cookbooks blog yesterday, and I can't believe I already have it in hand. I will report on the reading I get through next week.
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