tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60008583825165944262024-02-22T04:36:23.115-05:00Necromancy Never Pays. . . and other truths we learn from literatureJeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.comBlogger727125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-65022085308468390512011-05-17T08:46:00.003-04:002011-05-17T09:24:05.929-04:00Necromancy Never Pays has moved!After five months of playing around with it and a few days of asking readers' opinions--in the wake of the big Blogger fail of last week--I've decided to take the rest of this blog over to Wordpress. You can find it there under the same name, and certainly I hope you will. Here's the link:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/">https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/</a><br />
<br />
and here's the first post over there, that tries to say something about how strange it is to be abandoning all these words over here:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/maiden-name/">https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/maiden-name/</a>Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-29385196598612826422011-05-16T06:44:00.002-04:002011-05-17T08:30:28.299-04:00The White DevilWhen I saw <i>The White Devil,</i> by <a href="http://justinevans.com/">Justin Evans</a>, on a list of books that <a data-mce-href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/White-Devil-Justin-Evans/?isbn=9780061728273" href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/White-Devil-Justin-Evans/?isbn=9780061728273">Harper</a> was willing to send me for review, I couldn't resist--even though it's a ghost story and I usually shy away from anything scary. But it's about Byron...<br />
<br />
And it turned out to be one of those mysteries where what happens is driven by a character finding out more about Byron's life. Mmm, total catnip for an English major. If I could have, I'd have read the whole thing in one pleasant afternoon. But deadlines and kids' awards ceremonies intervened, and I ended up having to put it down twice, which was two more times than I would have otherwise.<br />
<br />
As <a data-mce-href="https://jennysbooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/review-the-white-devil-justin-evans/" href="https://jennysbooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/review-the-white-devil-justin-evans/">Jenny</a> observes, this novel has a lot of plot elements, and I think that's what kept me reading. If I got a little tired of one story line, maybe the teenage boy's puerile meanderings about his relationship with his father, there would soon be another one along to keep me going down the track toward finding out more about Byron's relationship with the ghost.<br />
<br />
He's a malevolent ghost, and it's not until a scene at the very end that you find out a little bit about why Byron could have loved him. In the meantime, though, you get some impressions of life in a British boarding school, the realism of which may be due to the author's own year at Harrow. I like the comparison of the attitude of students to their British teachers and their American ones--at Harrow,<br />
"the banter was larded with respectful <i>Sirs</i>, seasoned with eager, show-offy anecdotes from the newly risen Sixth Formers. All this was friendly, even affectionate..."<br />
while at the American school,<br />
"the baby boomer faculty who had chosen such a low-paying career as <i>teaching</i> were treated with suppressed contempt by the students, children of Wall Streeters, who knew that grades didn't matter, didn't help you make millions; that these teachers, then, must be little better than servants."<br />
<br />
When Andrew, the American, comes to Harrow, he is told that he looks like Lord Byron and should therefore act his part in the play that a poet and housemaster is writing, about which of Byron's many sexual partners could be shown to be the love of his life. The ghost wants that distinction, and he wants Andrew.<br />
<br />
So Andrew has to find out what part this ghost might have played in Byron's life, and who he might have wanted to kill, in order to keep his friends alive.<br />
<br />
I particularly enjoy the poet's reply to one of Andrew's questions:<br />
"Ah, children, who want to know what poems <i>mean</i>. They don't mean. They express. They are songs. When you sympathize, you <i>make</i> them mean something...."<br />
<br />
I have to admit that I read up until the last few chapters and then put the book aside to finish in the morning, as is my habit if I read anything that might be scary. But I could have gone ahead and read it; it wraps things up nicely without adding anything too horrific.<br />
<br />
This was a nice little piece of fiction-candy, suitable for popping all in your mouth at once; one of those attractive, light-colored candies with a dark, chewy center.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-64407135792330488072011-05-15T21:58:00.001-04:002011-05-15T22:24:56.363-04:00Blogger, do I know how to quit you?I'm thinking about it. There's a <a href="https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/">Wordpress version of this blog</a> (thanks to Lass and Amanda and most especially Anna from <a href="https://diaryofaneccentric.wordpress.com/">Diary of an Eccentric</a>), and I'm going to run both concurrently for a little while and see which one wins. If you have an opinion, let me know. If I switch to Wordpress, I'll let you know.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-398416864155438602011-05-13T14:17:00.001-04:002011-05-13T14:47:36.096-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversNote: Due to Blogger fail, the edition of Trivial Pursuit for Booklovers that I scheduled for today didn't post as scheduled. So I'm posting it again. If you see it twice, you'll know that my cry of "Blogger, I wish I knew how to quit you" is diminishing in volume.<br />
<br />
Children's: What book by Lois Lowry finds 12-year-old Jonas rebelling against a futuristic society that has decided he is to become a Receiver of Memories?<br />
<br />
Classics: What was Scarlett's original name, in the first drafts of <i>Gone With The Wind</i>--Iris, Pansy or Rose?<br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: What famed work of art, unearthed on a Greek island in 1820, had its subsequent history revealed in Gregory Curtis' <i>Disarmed</i>?<br />
<br />
Book Club: What inventive Robert Coover novella explores the bond between an errant maid and her master?<br />
<br />
Authors: What best-selling British author, convicted of perjury, penned the thriller <i>Sons of Fortune</i> and the memoir <i>A Prison Diary</i> while behind bars?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: What character was said to resemble Hoagy Carmichael, in <i>Casino Royale</i>?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-61855773585278284162011-05-12T08:37:00.000-04:002011-05-13T16:46:22.438-04:00Lucky JimWhen <a href="http://thornybookclub.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-hold.html">someone</a> in the <a href="https://freshhell.wordpress.com/ifbc/">Imaginary Friends Book Club</a> proposed reading <i>Lucky Jim</i>, by Kingsley Amis, I went downstairs to find my copy, and came back up having found only <i>Lord Jim</i>, by Joseph Conrad. The paperback I was remembering must have been from my college-professor-parents' house. So on a subsequent visit to a used book store whose shelves struck me as an oddly exact recreation of my parents', I picked up a copy of <i>Lucky Jim</i>, a spoof of British academic life in the 1950s.<br />
<br />
I read the whole thing because it was mildly funny in a low-key, David Lodge kind of way. But I have to wonder about the point of digging this one up. Didn't we get over the 1950's already? Wasn't all of Jim's sort of fumbling about with women addressed by the "summer of love"? And if he didn't want to be a history professor, then surely the lesson of the hippies was that he didn't have to be. So why reread this book?<br />
<br />
It's very British; I was continually irritated by the reiterations of Jim's feeling that "nice things are nicer than nasty things." Duh! Only the British eat seed cake when there's gateaux to be had.<br />
<br />
Jim, whose last name is Dixon, is very irritating. He rarely does anything nice for anyone; in fact, he specializes in making other peoples' lives more difficult. That can be funny, but at--what is, for me at least--a very low level, as in this passage:<br />
"when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."<br />
<br />
When another character finally asks Jim why he wants to teach medieval history in a college, he reveals himself to be the 1950's version of a slacker, one who had some choices but didn't care enough to make them:<br />
"the reason why I'm a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It's why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I'd be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff."<br />
<br />
Amis' comic genius, if you think he has any, lies in his ability to capture the small details of conversation that can make it so awkward and wearing, like when someone says a word wrong because he's thinking of another word and you start thinking about that instead of what he's said:<br />
"'And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'<br />
The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical."<br />
<br />
Every time Jim said something awkward in a conversation, I was torn between laughing at him and identifying with him, which disturbed me because I didn't like him! And yet I often say things like he does out of nervousness when I'm at an academic gathering:<br />
"'Well, it's an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.'<br />
'You're in luck, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing around cigarettes.<br />
Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name."<br />
<br />
At one point when they're sitting at a table and Jim Dixon is observing a conversation, his thoughts are petty and mean in almost the exact same way mine would be in a similar situation, which made me grin and cringe at the same time:<br />
"Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it--Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values'--and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence."<br />
<br />
The high point of the novel is when Jim finally says to his annoying and manipulative friend Margaret what readers have been longing for him to say for pages and pages:<br />
"Don't be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do."<br />
And then she has a page and a half of hysterics, ending with having her face slapped and being given a glass of whiskey, which she takes and "with eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more." <br />
If there's any satisfaction in the ending, it's that Margaret is revealed as a fraud and Jim gets free of her.<br />
<br />
Overall, though, I'd take rereading Lodge's <i>Nice Work</i> over plowing through this old-fashioned relic, if I felt the need for British academic humor. The uncomfortable pleasure of reading the quite awkward bits of conversation is the only reason this particular novel should still be read at all. Have you ever had a conversation at an academic gathering that made you feel you had just said something monumentally stupid? And did you cringe for days afterwords?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-10711560025638502402011-05-11T09:49:00.000-04:002011-05-11T09:49:22.024-04:00The Mysterious Human Heart in New YorkWhat with awards ceremonies and other end-of-the-school year events, we've been up early and to bed late and I've been seeing all sorts of people I rarely see in between. One of them told me he's trying to "cut through the Gordian knot" of kid sports and school schedules so he can come with us to take a road trip through the inevitably predicted rain to the most crowded part of a nearby city tomorrow night. As my friends used to say about spending too much money getting to the beach, it is a highly inadvisable thing. And yet, well nigh irresistible.<br />
<br />
The inimitable poet Dorianne Laux says it best, in her poem "The Mysterious Human Heart in New York," which is from her new volume that I've already touted here once, <i>The Book of Men</i>:<br />
<br />
Streetwise but foolish, the heart<br />
knows what's good for it but goes<br />
for the dark bar, the beer before noon,<br />
the doughy pretzel hot and salty, tied up<br />
in a Gordian knot. It takes a walk<br />
through Tompkins Square where<br />
the homeless sleep it off on stone benches,<br />
one shrouded body to each gritty sarcophagus.<br />
The streets fill with taxis and trucks,<br />
pinstripes and briefcases, and the subways<br />
spark and sway underground. The sun<br />
is snagged on the Empire State, performing<br />
its one-note song, the citizens below<br />
dragging their shadows down the sidewalk<br />
like sidekicks, spitting into the gutter<br />
as if on cue, as if in a musical,<br />
as if there's no association between the trash<br />
flapping against the chain link and the girl<br />
with her skirt up in the alley. When the traffic<br />
jams on 110th--a local pain, a family affair--<br />
the Starbucks junkie leans against the glass<br />
and laughs into his hand, a cabbie<br />
sits on his hood and smokes, cops<br />
on skates weave through the exhaust,<br />
billy club blunts bumping against their<br />
dark blue thighs. Everyone's on a cell phone,<br />
the air a-buzz with yammer and electricity<br />
as the heart of the city pounds like a man<br />
caught in the crosswalk holding his shoulder,<br />
going down on one knee, then blundering<br />
into Central Park to lean over the addled bridge,<br />
the sooty swans floating under him, grown fat<br />
on cheap white bread. Oh heart, with your<br />
empty pockets and your hat on backwards,<br />
stop looking at yourself in the placid waters.<br />
Someone is sneaking up behind you<br />
in an overcoat lined with watches,<br />
and someone else is holding a cardboard sign<br />
that says: The End Is Here.<br />
<br />
Sometimes your heart feels better when you do what you know is not good for it. As the parent of a high school senior, I would desperately like to tell my heart to go ahead, spend more time "looking at yourself" instead of having to pay attention to the way the doomsday sign is "sneaking up behind."Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-69429266669090064042011-05-09T09:25:00.002-04:002011-05-09T10:10:56.527-04:00Fuzzy NationWhen I read that John Scalzi's <i>Fuzzy Nation</i> was coming out, I had to find our copy of H. Beam Piper's <i>The Fuzzy Papers</i> so I could reread the original of the story that Scalzi has enlarged and updated. Then the Piper book sat on my shelf until last week, when Cassandra Ammerman at <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/torforge.aspx">Tor</a> sent me a shiny, new hardback copy of <a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/04/07/the-super-secret-thing-that-i-cannot-tell-you-about-revealed-introducing-fuzzy-nation/"><i>Fuzzy Nation</i></a>, and I had to hurry up and read one book right after the other, which turned out to be a fine thing to do, as Scalzi's story is an agreeable addition to Piper's, much more than just a re-hashing of some of the old issues.<br />
<br />
The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story <i>The Star Beast</i> was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations). There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.<br />
<br />
Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama. There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).<br />
<br />
Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.<br />
<br />
<i>Fuzzy Nation</i> comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension. I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-63890403074476550452011-05-06T07:32:00.000-04:002011-05-06T07:32:15.287-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversChildren's: What type of bird showed Mary Lennox where the rusty key to <i>The Secret Garden</i> was buried?<br />
<br />
Classics: What novel sees ambulance driver Lt. Frederick Henry escaping execution by jumping into the Tagliamento River?<br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: What 20th-century trustbuster got the royal treatment in Edmund Morris' <i>Theodore Rex</i>?<br />
<br />
Book Club: What Texas town did Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae meet up in, before starting a cattle drive to Montana?<br />
<br />
Authors: Who had already penned Player Piano by the time he became one of Saab's first U.S. dealers?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: What comic included the classic stand-up routine "A Place for My Stuff" in his collection of cerebral scat called <i>Braindroppings</i>?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-27680099219582259152011-05-04T09:14:00.002-04:002011-05-04T09:16:42.175-04:00StarshipHave I been catching up on my reading? A little. But what I've been doing more of is catching up on my video watching. We're still on the first season of <i>Veronica Mars</i>, the second or third season of <i>Big Bang Theory</i>, we just got the new season of <i>South Park</i>, and then yesterday my kids sat me down and we watched the new Starkid video on YouTube, <a href="http://www.teamstarkid.com/starship.html"><i>Starship</i></a>.<br />
<br />
Have you heard of the <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Team_StarKid">Starkids</a>? Originally musical theater students at the University of Michigan, they wrote a musical parody version of Harry Potter which is still on YouTube as <i>A Very Potter Musical</i>. Then they veered off into territory I found less delightful--maybe just because I'm old and stodgy--with <i>Me And My Dick</i>. But they came back with <i>A Very Potter Sequel</i>. And now, with the departure of the guy who wrote a lot of the music and starred as Harry Potter--Darren Criss--to the TV show <i>Glee</i>, the rest of the Starkids have formed a company and perform in Chicago, although they always put their entire production on YouTube and have now made a DVD, too, available on the <a href="http://www.teamstarkid.com/shows.html">Starkids website</a>.<br />
<br />
I thought the <i>Starship</i> parody was delightful, from first to last. You have to watch it in 9-10 minute segments, which actually kind of heightens the humor. I thought the high point was the love song in Act II, scene ii, "You don't know you the way I do." But there's a good villain song and lots of good jokes, not least about the way the "Galactic League of Extraterrestrial Exploration, the G.L.E.E." is "always making twisted abominations of everything" (wink). The bugs on the alien planet are represented by puppets, reminiscent of the way the actors use puppets and animal heads in <i>The Lion King</i> and <i>Avenue Q. </i><br />
<br />
This is inventive parody, good music, and it's free. What more could you ask? Watch it, and spread the word!Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-4286936681847156632011-05-03T09:07:00.000-04:002011-05-03T09:07:44.587-04:00What She SaidI learned a lot, working with high-school-age people for a month and a half, and remembered some of what it was like, being 15 or 16. That's probably why when I read the new volume of poetry by Billy Collins--<i>Horoscopes For the Dead</i>--this poem stuck out, for me:<br />
<br />
What She Said<br />
<br />
When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,<br />
I was like give me a break.<br />
<br />
I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.<br />
I was just similar to give me a break.<br />
<br />
As I said, I was like give me a break.<br />
<br />
I would love to tell you<br />
how I was able to resemble give me a break<br />
without actually being identical to give me a break,<br />
<br />
but all I can say is that I sensed<br />
a similarity between me and give me a break.<br />
<br />
And that was close enough<br />
at that point in the evening<br />
<br />
even if it meant I would fall short<br />
of standing up from the table and screaming<br />
give me a break,<br />
<br />
for God's sake will you please give me a break?!<br />
<br />
No, for that moment<br />
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows<br />
and the waiter approaching,<br />
<br />
I felt the most I could be was like<br />
<br />
to a certain degree<br />
<br />
give me a break.<br />
<br />
This poem's speaker and I are, you know, like, aging! And this is the kind of thinking that can go on inside an aging person's head when she hears a fragment from a 15-year-old girl's conversation. It's not useful. It's certainly no more pretty than the original phrase. And yet it circles around and around in there.<br />
<br />
One of the things I notice about the difference between people who age gracefully and are still interesting to talk to, and people who become curmudgeonly and boring is that the first type stay open to new experiences and ways of saying things. They sometimes listen to music they know they might not like, and they occasionally read books that aren't exactly suited to their tastes. They continue to grow intellectually. I want to, like, know what younger people are saying, if only to make fun of it, in the manner of this poem. What about you?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-31609830933034236102011-05-02T06:09:00.002-04:002011-05-02T12:10:09.685-04:00MaulOn Saturday night I got a plaque that says "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." That's exactly how it felt to pull off a high school musical in only five and a half weeks of rehearsal.<br />
<br />
It went well. Now it's over. I feel like I've been a little mauled by the experience, or maybe that's just because of the title of the YA novel I was reading in very small bits during the last week of rehearsals and performance--<i>Maul</i>, by Tricia Sullivan.<br />
<br />
As a novel, I didn't like it. It begins with a scene designed to shock its readers, progresses to a story they don't realize is parallel to the first one for a few chapters, and then starts weaving some details of the story together so readers think there's going to be a satisfying ending for both, and then just...stops. We're told "the game's over now" and that's it. Humph. Not a game I would have let myself get interested in if I'd been able to see that the ending didn't succeed in making sense of the plethora of detail given earlier. Even if you're someone who likes to read the ending first, though, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. There's some video-game-world-echoing-the-real-world stuff going on here.<br />
<br />
Despite the fact that I don't think it's well structured, there are some parts that are absolutely amazing, many of them in terms of how well they describe adolescent emotion:<br />
'Did you ever feel so much of something that you just couldn't control it? And you've tried shit like going to the basketball game and screaming your head off for hours and you had the orgasm or six or seven and you drank the SuperSize Chocolate Shake from 7-Eleven but in the end you didn't feel as empty as you hoped to feel. Did you ever feel something so strong you thought it was a physical hunger but it couldn't be satisfied that way, it was thicker than physical, it stuffed your axons, it was a pregnant idea begging to be born and it was using you for that shit, but you just didn't know what it LOOKED LIKE or WHO inseminated you or how to get it OUT.<br />
Did you ever feel that? It feels like being slapped upside the head about 20,000 times a day and you'll do anything to escape it but you CAN'T.<br />
Subversive behaviour. What a fucking world. It's like everyone's flowing along and the only ones stopping are the ones who can't hack it, they are the worldly possessions <b>it hurts</b> YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING DELUDED & HELPLESS and I'm reduced to paying $18.99 for a CD to express this for me because you won't let me do anything REAL until <b>after</b> I've been indoctrinated broken down and seduced into submitting to the same CIVILIZING WILL that's <b>sitting on your face</b>."<br />
<br />
Even the little throwaway lines, the random thoughts, are fabulously provocative:<br />
'Then I saw a live picture of myself in one of the TVs. I stuck out my tongue just to be sure. It's a well-known fact that TV is more real than real life so when people say get a life what they really mean is, get on TV. Because either you're watching TV or you're on it, and if you're doing neither it's a little like Schrodinger's cat, neither alive nor dead till observed. So when I saw myself on the video screen I was pretty happy because it meant I was alive."<br />
<br />
There's some interesting commentary on gender politics, ending with a logical absurdity about where we could end up if we go on as we have been. This passage is from along that road:<br />
"There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they'd whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides, you're not supposed to let it get to you. You're supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren't allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don't like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don't) who if you're lucky will offer to go beat them up knowng you won't take him up on it because you know perfectly well he'd probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they've been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and grime of uneducated testosterone." <br />
<br />
There are also wonderful moments in the Maul (Mall), like when the heroine finds a clothing store with items that help her feel what she needs to feel right then in order to survive, and a bookstore where the books become exactly what she needs to read.<br />
<br />
Lots of flashes of brilliance, but no final explosion, no settling of the dust so readers can glimpse the new world that has been created. It's the end of the game just when you've figured out a few of the rules.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-65406313187494654662011-05-01T20:11:00.009-04:002011-05-02T08:14:15.490-04:00Code of the LifemakerPhoenix Pick’s free ebook for May is James P. Hogan’s “Code of the<br />
Lifemaker.”<br />
The Coupon Code for May for the free ebook is 9992144. The coupon will be<br />
effective from May 2 through May 31.<br />
Instructions and download/purchase links at <a href="http://www.ppickings.com/" target="_blank">www.PPickings.com</a> (Phoenix<br />
Pick’s catalogue page).Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-52351053854630906322011-04-29T07:47:00.000-04:002011-04-29T07:47:59.099-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversChildren's: Who are known as the Trenchcoat Twins, in a top-selling book series?<br />
<br />
Classics: What Mart Crowley drama finds Harold getting a hustler named "Cowboy" as a birthday gift?<br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: What <i>All Things Considered</i> co-host flits around Orville and Wilbur Wright's old haunts, in <i>The Flyers</i>?<br />
<br />
Book Club: What Peter Shaffer play sees Antonio Salieri sadly sigh: "I was born with a pair of ears and nothing else"?<br />
<br />
Authors: Who left instructions that his poem "Crossing the Bar" be included at the end of all editions of his poetry?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: Who observes, in <i>The Call of Cthulhu</i>: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents"?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-52225805079662156552011-04-27T06:56:00.000-04:002011-04-27T06:56:01.003-04:00Tigana, the conclusion<i>Tigana</i> is an interestingly-told story, especially since so much of it has happened before this novel begins. Once I got to the halfway point, I had to go ahead and finish reading it, which is something that happens to me with fantasy less and less as I get older.<br />
<br />
The characters all put their hope in the prince of Tigana, Alessan, who is a symbol of his country in exile, since no one in "Lower Corte" except those who were alive when Alessan's father killed Brandin's son in the war can now remember even the name of their former country, Tigana. When Devin looks at Alessan, "he found his avenue to passion again, to the burning inward response to what had happened here--and was still happening. Every hour of every day in the ransacked, broken-down province named Lower Corte."<br />
<br />
One bad guy, Alberico, gets badder, killing the messenger who brings him bad news. And the bad news is that the other bad guy, Brandin, who has destroyed Tigana so thoroughly that one day no one will remember its name, has gotten better (through the love of a good woman, Dianora), and has abdicated as ruler of his native land in favor of ruling over his adopted land, the land he has so thoroughly conquered. Brandin is complicated and interesting and you want to like him, but Alberico is just a bully. Alessan's stated goal is to defeat both at the same time, so neither will get the upper hand, but by the end of the novel, it seems a terrible shame and a waste that Brandin can't get past his hatred for his son's killers enough to do something more positive with his power: "He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored him in life, he was here among an alien people he had conquered, asking for their aid, needing their belief in him."<br />
<br />
But Alessan's goals are always the ones that seem most important, to the other characters, and to the reader. He is the one who says (he's still in his early twenties, mind) "I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone."<br />
<br />
So when Alessan triumphs and both Alberico and Brandin fall, I rejoice, except for the very long shadow that the secret about Alessan's father, the King of Tigana, casts over the ending. I hate the character of Scelto, Dianora's loyal servant. I hate him with a fiery and enduring passion, because he is the one who decides not to tell the King's story. I'd like to believe it is to make sure that all feuds are ended, but I think it is simply despair, and therefore unworthy of its place in the ending of such a long and powerful saga.<br />
<br />
<i>Tigana</i> is a well-told tale. I found it reliably absorbing every time I picked it up, until I couldn't put it down anymore.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-86138078504642059922011-04-25T08:42:00.000-04:002011-04-25T08:42:06.856-04:00The AirUsually if I have a bit of time on the weekend, I write up a review of whatever book I've finished the week before and set it to post on Monday morning. But this is tech week for the high school musical--opening night is this Thursday--and I haven't quite finished the book I was reading last week. Mostly I've been reading poems, because I found some new volumes at the college library.<br />
<br />
One of those volumes is Rae Armantrout's <i>Money Shot</i>. A lot of the poems seem a little spare to me, like there should be more to them. But this one--this one seems to me to be about precisely the situation I'm in this Monday morning. I see it as a poem about not having much to say, but looking for a way to say something anyway:<br />
<br />
The Air<br />
<br />
1<br />
Our first gods<br />
were cartoon characters--<br />
<br />
quirks and quarks--<br />
each dead<br />
wrong,<br />
and immortal.<br />
<br />
2<br />
Silence is death<br />
and<br />
silence is dead-air.<br />
<br />
Give a meme<br />
a hair-do.<br />
<br />
Give it a split-screen.<br />
<br />
Make it ask itself<br />
the wrong question.<br />
<br />
Make it eat questions<br />
and grow long.<br />
<br />
Especially after reading a lot of blogger responses to the "four things meme" lately, I like the lines "make it ask itself/the wrong question." What exactly is the wrong question when you're just looking for something to say? The pointed question? The important question? Or maybe just a question that's mildly amusing and makes people want to know more?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-56702843181822662382011-04-22T07:26:00.001-04:002011-04-22T07:26:00.483-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversChildren's: What author's <i>Just So Stories</i> explain how the leopard got his spots and how the elephant got his trunk?<br />
<br />
Classics: Whose famed diaries were originally published as <i>Het Achterhuis</i>, or <i>The House Behind?</i><br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: What book by John F. Kennedy probed moments of integrity by senators like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster?<br />
<br />
Book Club: What Robert Olen Butler tale stars a hairless, 16-toed alien who mates with an Alabama beautician?<br />
<br />
Authors: Who promised <i>Book</i> magazine that <i>Blood Canticle</i> would be her last novel about "people who were damned or who were condemned"?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: What brooding albino swordman is emperor of Melnibone in Michael Moorcock's epic saga?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-60797398561546165072011-04-21T08:44:00.005-04:002011-04-21T11:21:26.462-04:00My New American LifeI loved <i>After</i> and was less enthusiastic about <a href="http://necromancyneverpays.blogspot.com/2008/12/empathy.html"><i>Goldengrove</i></a>, so when Harper offered to send me an advance copy of the new novel by Francine Prose, I said yes, send me <i><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/My-New-American-Life-Francine-Prose/?isbn=9780061713767">My New American Life</a>.</i> And the verdict? While I'm never sorry to have read anything by Francine Prose, because she's a good writer and a smart person, this one doesn't address national issues as well as I hoped it would, and as well as I thought <i>After</i> did.<br />
<br />
The novel tells the story of Lula, an Albanian girl who came to New York City on a tourist visa and has been spinning tales about her native land as part of her effort to find a way into the American Dream. For the suburban New Jersey dad she calls Mr. Stanley who hires her to watch over his son Zach, a high school senior, she tells folk tales and goes along with the assumption that she is a war refugee. For Zach she tells stories about rebellious teenagers. For the Albanians she sees in New Jersey, Lula tries to tell a tale of her American success, but since none of them believe that success comes without some kind of sinister price tag, they see no real opportunity to capture that elusive American Dream, no house in the suburbs that isn't haunted by the failures of its former occupants.<br />
<br />
The darkness and emptiness that are so integral to this story make the story itself feel underpopulated and flat. Here's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKNT9fTv0Ms">Prose reading a one-minute segment</a> from her novel. You can see that she believes in its satiric potential, but I don't see that the satiric moments ever coalesce into a meaningful whole.<br />
<br />
The moments are interesting and amusing enough to sustain a reader, however. Especially early on in the novel, Lula's "teaching moments" with Zach are wonderful, like this one:<br />
<br />
Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening news, educational for them both. The president had come on the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird flu. The word <i>avian</i> was hard for him. His forehead stitched each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he'd been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.<br />
'At home,' Lula marveled, 'that man is a god.'<br />
'You say that every night,' Zeke said.<br />
'I'm reminding myself,' she'd said. Her country's love affair with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescuing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's death squads. Even at home she'd had her doubts about the streets paved with gold, but when she finally got to New York and started working at La Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feelings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula's opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.<br />
Yesterday night, as always, she'd felt sorry for the president, so like a dim little boy who'd told a lie that had set off a war, and then he'd let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice president, who scared Lula too, with his cold little eyes not blinking when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.<br />
'There is no bird flu,' Lula had told Zeke. 'A war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a sore throat and a fever.'<br />
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York subway system.<br />
Lula said 'There is no threat.'<br />
'How do you know everything?' Zeke asked. 'Not that I don't agree it's all bullshit.'<br />
She'd been about to tell Zeke--again!--about having grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha, who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he'd had built in a country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a chance to repeat herself, she'd been distracted by an advertisement for the new season of <i>ER</i>.<br />
'Look, Zeke,' she'd said, 'see that gurney rushing in and doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at you till you figure out who to pay off.'<br />
<br />
It seems to me that the delights of the satire in that passage are offset by the childishness of the caricature of the president, and so like all partisan political rants, the novel is going to end up preaching--to the extent that it succeeds in preaching at all--to the choir. Lula becomes less of an interesting character, and more of a liberal mouthpiece.<br />
<br />
She's a canny operator at all times:<br />
"She wanted to give him a consoling pat on the shoulder, but she never touched Mister Stanley, and she didn't want to start now, both of them weakened in body and spirit, both perhaps seeking relief from the damage that alcohol had inflicted on their bodies. Mister Stanley wasn't the type of guy to hit on the nanny, but every guy was a hangover away from being that type of guy. Even a friendly shoulder squeeze was a door best left unopened."<br />
After enough passages like that, it gets harder for me to work up much sympathy for what Lula wants, and cheer for her to get it--she's looking out for herself, and she doesn't need anybody else.<br />
<br />
As she gets more sarcastic, she gets funnier, but seems more two-dimensional, so that passages like this one--which should hit me right where I live (and work)--bounce off without much effect except a wry smile:<br />
"It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world."<br />
<br />
By the time Lula and Mister Stanley take Zeke to visit a fictional college called Alice Ames, the satire has stopped working. Lula's musings, at this point, are the ravings of someone who is becoming unhinged by months of boredom and disappointment:<br />
"It had tickled her to see Americans taken in by the sort of scam people thought happened only in Eastern Europe. If she had a dollar for every La Changita customer who told her about not being allowed to drive his rental car to Prague because it might get stolen, she wouldn't have had to work there. But now that she'd come to care about Zeke and Mister Stanley, she'd lost the ironic remove from which she watched Americans get conned, and she hoped that Alice Adams was not a dirty trick cynically named after some grifter's favorite hooker."<br />
<br />
Satire requires a delicate hand, and Francine Prose is almost good enough to do it well. So even though this isn't the satire about what has happened to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96c4B2C7e6Q&NR=1">The American Dream</a> that I might have been hoping for, it's as close as anyone else has come since <i>Miss Saigon</i>, another "see ourselves as others see us" kind of satire, and it makes an interesting companion volume to Jonathan Franzen's novel <i>Freedom</i>. <i>My New American Life</i> will be available--in bookstores--on Tuesday, April 26.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-37424413555097511982011-04-19T08:37:00.001-04:002011-04-19T08:44:56.564-04:00AntilamentationSometimes how you've come to be reading a poem is part of the pleasure. Last week I was carrying around a volume of poetry while I ushered some very important guests around campus, and when I had a few minutes, I would perch somewhere and read one or two of the poems. On the second day of this, I perched on the side of some cold, concrete steps in front of the Admissions building, where people come and go so quickly, and read this poem by Dorianne Laux, out of her volume entitled <i>The Book of Men</i>:<br />
<br />
Antilamentation<br />
<br />
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read<br />
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not<br />
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,<br />
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not<br />
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,<br />
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one<br />
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones<br />
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.<br />
Not the nights you called god names and cursed<br />
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,<br />
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.<br />
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights<br />
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings<br />
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed<br />
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.<br />
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still<br />
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one<br />
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,<br />
when the lights from the carnival rides<br />
were the only stars you believed in, loving them<br />
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.<br />
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,<br />
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house<br />
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.<br />
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.<br />
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,<br />
under the lit signs on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.<br />
<br />
And there I was, twenty years later, sitting in a highly visible spot on a campus where I have not achieved fame and fortune, reading this poem and laughing because I'd picked up an onion ring someone dropped on the floor of the dining hall the night before and crying because it was a bright, sunny morning and the rest of my life was all spread before me as soon as my campus visitors opened the door onto those concrete steps.<br />
<br />
Every poem in the volume is just about as glorious as that one, and it's one of my recommendations for this year's poetry award over at the <a href="https://indielitawards.wordpress.com/poetry/">Indie Lit Awards</a>, where you should go and nominate it if it made you laugh and cry, too.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-47816254511003248422011-04-18T06:24:00.001-04:002011-04-18T07:32:07.981-04:00One Thousand White WomenOne day when I was looking for birthday gift ideas in the YA section of a bookstore owned by a local children's writer, <a href="http://bonniepryor.com/">Bonnie Pryor</a>, she recommended a novel to me, <i>One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd</i>, by Jim Fergus. I added it to my pile of books, brought it home, and let it get buried underneath books from the library and others with more urgent deadlines. Then a few weeks ago, looking for something different to read, I unearthed it and read it in a couple of sittings.<br />
<br />
The premise of the novel is taken from an actual historical event; in the preface, we are told that<br />
"in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world--a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes' request was not well received by the white authorities--the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do."<br />
<br />
At the beginning, I thought the novel was going to consist of <a href="http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/wslibrry.htm">Chief Seattle-type propaganda</a> about the noble Native American. The Cheyenne Chief who asks President Ulysses S. Grant for the women explains that "we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People" and proposes the idea of intermarriage so that the white women can "teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone." But the novel becomes more a portrait of a vanished way of life, with the character of May Dodd as interpreter, rather than apologist.<br />
<br />
Although I grew up near a state park called Trail of Tears in memory of the Cherokee who died crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1838 (including the "<a href="http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8646">Princess Otahki</a>"), I've never had any experience of prejudice against Native Americans, and have always regarded it as something that existed only in the past. This novel explains some of the prejudice on both sides by showing how May, who grows to love the Cheyenne, experiences hatred from both "civilized folks" and "savages."<br />
<br />
Although May does continually praise things like "how cunningly and perfectly these native people had folded themselves into the earth" and criticizes "the white man" for "his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up," she doesn't venerate the Cheyenne blindly, but frequently challenges their "male only" rules and laments their "pitifully low tolerance" for alcohol.<br />
<br />
Both the love affair May has with a white man, Captain Bourke, and the love she feels for her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, help her see the deep gulf that lies between their different views of the world:<br />
"According to Captain Bourke...the only true hope for the advancement of the savage is to teach him that he must give up this allegiance to the tribe and look towards his own individual welfare. This is necessary, Bourke claims, in order that he may function effectively in the 'individualized civilization' of the Caucasian world. To the Cheyenne such a concept remains completely foreign--the needs of the People, the tribe, and above all the family within the tribe are placed always before those of the individual. In this regard they live somewhat like the ancient clans of Scotland. The selflessness of my husband, Little Wolf, for instance, strikes me as most noble and something that hardly requires 'correction' by civilized society. In support of his own thesis, the Captain uses the unfortunate example of the Indians who have been pressed into service as scouts for the U.S. Army. These men are rewarded for their efforts as good law-abiding citizens--paid wages, fed, clothed, and generally cared for. The only requirement of their employment, their allegiance to the white father, is that they betray their own people and their own families...I fail to see the nobility or the advantage of such individualized private initiative..."<br />
<br />
The way the story is told--with an introduction by a fictional male descendent of May Dodd's, a prologue based on the historical meeting of President Grant with a Cheyenne Chief, and an afterward about the journals kept by May-- gives the story a feeling of authenticity and preserves some of the flavor of the antiquated diction that Fergus uses so well for "Dodd's" writing. I was surprised to be reminded, at the end, that this novel was written by a male author, so deeply had I been immersed in the female point of view.<br />
<br />
The greatest strength of this novel is characterization; these well-realized characters will live in your memory for a long time after you've been drawn into their stories.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-19408962191674895742011-04-15T08:18:00.000-04:002011-04-15T08:18:15.884-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversChildren's: What classic book, credited to the mythical "Wally Piper," was later discovered to be adapted from an earlier story titled <i>The Pony Engine</i>?<br />
<br />
Classics: What Shakespearean comedy includes the chilling stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear"?<br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: Who charts her transformation from church choir singer to disco queen sex goddess, in her memoir <i>Ordinary Girl</i>?<br />
<br />
Book Club: How many people does Eddie meet in heaven, according to Mitch Albom's 2003 novel?<br />
<br />
Authors: Who came out of hiding to record a clip for <i>The Simpsons</i>, where he appeared with a bag over his head?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: What novelist introduced the FBI-agent couple Dillon Savich and Lacy Sherlock in <i>The Cove</i>?<br />
<br />
(I'll bet the guy who writes <a href="http://tommyspoon.blogspot.com/">Exit, Pursued by a Bear</a> knows one today!)Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-19169233348535208142011-04-13T19:12:00.001-04:002011-04-13T19:13:37.617-04:00ToadsI've been thinking about Philip Larkin's poem "Toads" this week, because the toad called work is squatting on my life.<br />
<br />
I am engaged in an endeavor that will either make my work life a lot better, or get me out of this line of work entirely (so I'm also thinking of Iago saying "this is the night that either makes me, or fordoes me quite").<br />
<br />
Here is Larkin's poem:<br />
<br />
Why should I let the toad <i>work </i><br />
Squat on my life?<br />
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork<br />
And drive the brute off?<br />
<br />
Six days of the week it soils<br />
With its sickening poison--<br />
Just for paying a few bills!<br />
That's out of proportion.<br />
<br />
Lots of folks live on their wits:<br />
Lecturers, lispers,<br />
Losels, loblolly-men, louts--<br />
they don't end as paupers;<br />
<br />
Lots of folks live up lanes<br />
With fires in a bucket,<br />
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines--<br />
They seem to like it.<br />
<br />
Their nippers have got bare feet,<br />
Their unspeakable wives<br />
Are skinny as whippets--and yet<br />
No one actually <i>starves</i>.<br />
<br />
Ah, were I courageous enough<br />
To shout, <i>Stuff your pension</i>!<br />
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff<br />
That dreams are made on:<br />
<br />
For something sufficiently toad-like<br />
Squats in me, too;<br />
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,<br />
And cold as snow,<br />
<br />
And will never allow me to blarney<br />
My way to getting<br />
The fame and the girl and the money<br />
All at one sitting.<br />
<br />
I don't say, one bodies the other<br />
One's spiritual truth;<br />
But I do say it's hard to lose either,<br />
When you have both.<br />
<br />
Even a 1/6-time job can be hard to lose. So I'm hunkering down.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-32021875217396519032011-04-12T09:38:00.001-04:002011-04-12T09:43:25.183-04:00The MaypoleWe had a warm day here on Sunday, and now the lilacs in back and the apple tree in front are all leafed out, and the grass is turning green. I was leafing through a new volume of poetry by Linda Pastan and found this one that's just right for the time of year, a reply to one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems, <a href="http://necromancyneverpays.blogspot.com/2009/01/mind-of-winter.html">The Snow Man</a>:<br />
<br />
The Maypole<br />
after Wallace Stevens<br />
<br />
One must have a mind of spring<br />
to regard the cherry tree burdened<br />
with blossom;<br />
<br />
and have been warm for days<br />
to behold the boughs of the redbud<br />
prickly with color in the glint<br />
<br />
of the April sun; and not to think<br />
of any cruelty in the difficult birthing<br />
of so many leaves, to feel only pure<br />
<br />
elation at the sound of the undulant breeze<br />
which is the sound of every garden<br />
with a breeze blowing among its flowers,<br />
<br />
the sound the listener hears, watching the buds<br />
which were not quite here a week ago<br />
pushing up from oblivion now.<br />
<br />
Since we're still in the middle of "<a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18993">the cruelest month</a>," it rained yesterday and got cold again last night. Our elderly gentleman rabbit who spent most of the winter in our dining room is still coming in at night, because the breeze is still more of a cold wind. But there are a lot of buds. It looks like there are good things to come.Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-84535369414257204672011-04-11T06:18:00.000-04:002011-04-11T06:18:00.238-04:00ChessOne of the four books I brought along to Walker's chess tournament this weekend, the Ohio high school championship, was Stefan Zweig's novella entitled, simply, <i>Chess</i>. I had read about it at <a href="http://www.farmlanebooks.co.uk/2011/chess-stefan-zweig/">Farm Lane Books</a> and probably some other blogs, too, but as usual I can't remember which ones. Anyway, it sounded like a good addition to my chess tournament book pile, a kind of psychological thriller that had to do with a game of chess.<br />
<br />
I pulled it out at the end of the first evening, when I was looking for something new to distract me from the nail-biting end of a long game that eventually turned out to be a draw. It took me twenty or thirty minutes to read the entire novella, and afterwards I had time to sit there amid the empty tables set with chessboards, still waiting for the outcome of one of the last three games in the room.<br />
<br />
One of the things I've said about chess recently that earned me the stern, nodding agreement of my resident chess expert is that it's a little bit like law, in that if you know the precedent, you can use that to win. The resident chess expert (I'm using the term "expert" in a technical sense, as he's now rated 2065 by the U.S. Chess Federation and therefore falls into that category; only "master" is higher) reads a lot of books about chess, so he has an advantage over other young players who may have had more experience playing games. He can look at algebraic and other kinds of chess notations and picture a chess game, and he's learned to see the results of many possible moves all the way to the end game. This is fairly routine for chess players at his level.<br />
<br />
So when I read Zweig's story about a man who, in solitary confinement by the Gestapo, finds a chess book and teaches himself to picture the board and all the possible moves by players on each side, it did not strike me as terribly odd. That it drives him to a state he calls "chess poisoning" did strike me as a little odd, but perhaps not under the circumstances. The interest of the book, for me, ended up being in its historical significance, not in terms of what it had to say about chess.<br />
<br />
There were a couple of interesting and, I thought, accurate observations for laypeople:<br />
"I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet's verses from only a few lines."<br />
<br />
This is certainly true, even at the high school level; each player knows his opponents and has studied their moves in previous games. Sitting in a room with high school chess players yesterday, I overheard a conversation that included the information that "so-and-so usually opens with King's Indian," which is a series of moves that has its own name and methods of counter-attack.<br />
<br />
The other interesting bit, for me, was one that echoed my situation as I read the passage:<br />
"But to be perfectly honest, the gradual development of the situation was something of a disappointment to us laymen, as it is in every real tournament game. For the more the chessmen became interlocked in a strange, intricate formation, the more impenetrable did the real state of affairs seem to us. We couldn't tell what either of the opponents intended, or which of the two really held the advantage. We just noticed individual pieces being advanced like levers to break through the enemy front, but we were unable--since with these first-class players every movement was always combined several moves in advance--to see the strategic intention in all this toing and froing."<br />
<br />
I was told (by other players) that the draw at the end of the day was slightly disappointing for Walker, since he had a "superior position" for most of the game and was "ahead on time." His opponent, however, did not make any mistakes.<br />
<br />
The only thing I can ever tell about Walker's game when I walk into the tournament room is that if he's walking up and down and smiling, he has a--sometimes momentary--advantage. If he's sitting down holding his head in his hands and looking stern, it's business as usual. As in poker, good players put on a "chess face." And parents try to strike the right balance between supporting the tournament play and letting the players alone.<br />
<br />
Walker played good chess all weekend. <span data-jsid="text"> He drew with the highest-rated player (a 12th-grader who speaks Russian to his chess teacher) and they were both in a 5-way tie for first, which was decided according to an arcane and precise method of "tie-breaker" points, according to which the 12th-grader<span class="text_exposed_show"> came in first, and Walker came in second. His friend who went into this tournament with the exact same rating and who shares the Ohio 10th-grade championship with him, came in third. Walker has an embarrassingly big trophy and is happy because he played well, winning four games and drawing two. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span data-jsid="text"><span class="text_exposed_show">After the awarding of the trophy, we went out to dinner with the family of Walker's chess student, Joe, and Walker replayed one of his games at the restaurant table to show Joe what happened and why. Then we drove home, and Eleanor played a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnqj31VPNoE">song from the musical "Chess</a>" in Walker's honor so we could all sing along: "one town's very like another when your head's down over your pieces, brother."</span></span>Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-17798933438637877092011-04-08T08:20:00.000-04:002011-04-08T08:20:59.040-04:00Trivial Pursuit for Book-LoversChildren's: What John Reynolds Gardiner tale tells of a lad's science project that turns him green and leafy, and the Feds who want him kept in the dark?<br />
<br />
Classics: What J.D. Salinger novel drew its title from a misquoted Robert Burns line?<br />
<br />
Non-Fiction: What U.S. government agency saw its dirty laundry aired by former employees in the tell-alls <i>In Search of Enemies</i> and <i>Inside the Company</i>?<br />
<br />
Book Club: What biblical patriarch stars in Joseph Heller's <i>God Knows</i>?<br />
<br />
Authors: What best-selling self-help author is, according to fellow psychologist Robert Butterworth, "like your mama, without hair"?<br />
<br />
Book Bag: Which of John Grisham's first 10 novels did not have a title beginning with the word "The"?Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000858382516594426.post-72869533477089986352011-04-07T08:49:00.000-04:002011-04-07T08:49:50.476-04:00American Fear<a href="https://spynotes.wordpress.com/">Harriet</a> mailed me some volumes of poetry that arrived last week, and one of the volumes is so suited to my current temperament that I suspect her of picking it out especially. It's about gratitude and wonder, but also fear. It's funny on the way to being even more serious. By Robert Wrigley, it's entitled <i>Beautiful Country</i>, and the epigraph accurately forecasts the tone of the entire volume: "This is a beautiful country."--John Brown, seated on his coffin, as he rode to the gallows, December 2, 1859.<br />
<br />
My favorite poem in this volume, the one that made me laugh out loud several times, is "American Fear." It's about the things we fear, and how they're connected to the things we love... written from the point of view of someone who loves words and poems. I thought that even those of you who suffer from a mild case of metrophobia (fear of poetry) would enjoy it.<br />
<br />
American Fear<br />
"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright."--Robert Frost<br />
<br />
What it is is a company selling "clothing<br />
for the disaffected youth culture."<br />
T-shirts and sweatshirts, mostly black,<br />
someone's marketing vision for a new world,<br />
a twenty-first-century Henry ("You can have<br />
any color you want so long as it's black") Ford,<br />
that old-time anti-Semite, his once nearly bankrupt<br />
namesake corporation supplanted by this other.<br />
<br />
A button on the Web site reads "Ready to Order Fear,"<br />
but everywhere you look it's free: fear of wolves,<br />
bulls, and bears: fear of the sun, fear of that one<br />
or this one, fear that all it takes is one. Storm fear,<br />
house fear, fear of frost. Fear of gravity is barophobia.<br />
But there's also Cape Fear, Camp Fear,<br />
and Fear Mountain: you can visit those. There's fear<br />
of God, fear of the odd; fear of night, fear of air.<br />
<br />
Fear of hair is chaetophobia. Eleutherophobia's fear of freedom.<br />
There's <i>First Encounter Assault Recon</i>,<br />
"a survival horror first-person shooter developed<br />
by Monolith Productions and published by Vivendi,"<br />
a video game, a generation's modus vivendi, a way of living<br />
in which we agree to disagree violently.<br />
Ephebiphobia is the fear of teenagers; melanophobia,<br />
fear of the color black; caligynephobia,<br />
<br />
fear of beautiful women; and anthrophobia, fear<br />
of flowers. You can spend hours on a list like this.<br />
Pantophobia is the fear of everything. After<br />
230-odd years the republic crawls<br />
through its slow-motion youth, democracy requiring not<br />
only equality but a vast sameness many fear,<br />
as some fear guns and others fear their guns<br />
will be taken away, their beautiful guns,<br />
<br />
poetry in them, shining assemblages of articulate parts<br />
in which ammo is the main idea. Consider the idea<br />
that a thing can be beyond perfection, as in a more perfect<br />
union, as in the sky and its endlessness<br />
--astrophobia, that's called: the fear of stars<br />
and celestial space. As for fear of oblivion,<br />
there is no word for it. Come home late, Robert Frost<br />
rattled the key in the lock and left the door open<br />
<br />
until a light was on, a way of allowing what was inside out.<br />
Later, on his farmhouse porch, Frost trembling,<br />
frightened of the dark, a shotgun in his hands. He thought<br />
he could talk Khrushchev into nuclear disarmament<br />
(nucleomituphobia, bomb fear) and sulked because<br />
JFK didn't call him back. The fear of poetry<br />
is metrophobia, and melophobes fear music, cringing<br />
at the ballgame through "God Bless America."<br />
<br />
Regarding the disaffected, the OED suggest they lack<br />
first of all affection. Put that with logophobia,<br />
the fear of words, and philophobia, the fear of love.<br />
Parthenophobia is the fear of virgin girls. WTF<br />
is internet slang and the initials of the World Taekwondo<br />
Federation, member of the International Olympic Committee.<br />
Why is there no word for the fear of committees,<br />
which are so much to be feared? Fear of Germany<br />
<br />
is teutophobia. Vestiphobia is the fear of clothing.<br />
The fear of flags is vexiphobia. On American Fear's<br />
logo, you can find the flag's stripes resembling a bar code.<br />
Gringophobia is the fear of Americans, the ones<br />
who fear America ends far north of Tierra del Fuego.<br />
Fear of a white god is leukotheophobia. A snowclone<br />
is a "cliche or phrasal template, multiuse, customizable,<br />
instantly recognizable, timeworn, and open<br />
<br />
to an array of variants"--as in, <i>What Would Henry Ford Do</i>?<br />
American Fear's best-selling design:<br />
a mandible-less skull enwreathed by bullets, bunting,<br />
and feathers, on a base of fifties-befinned bombs.<br />
There is no word for the fear of growing up,<br />
though gerascophobia is the fear<br />
of growing old, and old men fear not<br />
how others might read them by their clothes.<br />
<br />
Kings wear robes and senators wear suits. The word <i>senator</i><br />
comes from the Latin <i>senex</i>, meaning "old man,"<br />
and gerontophobia is the fear of old people.<br />
Chronophobia is the fear of time.<br />
Some old men do not wear T-shirts,<br />
because putting one on can be exhausting<br />
and taking it off worse. Imagine fearing a shirt.<br />
Why is there a word like bathysiderodromophobia?<br />
<br />
Subways are beautiful in their tunnels and troughs,<br />
their soiled, palatial stations. "Go in fear of abstractions,"<br />
Pound said. He suffered not from metrophobia,<br />
but from madness. "To fear" in Italian is temere.<br />
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross,"<br />
wrote Pound. "Better to go down dignified<br />
with boughten friendship at your side than none at all,"<br />
wrote Frost. He had a lover's quarrel with the world.<br />
<br />
Among American Fear's other shirt designs, one called<br />
"Your Pretty Death Bed," a young woman,<br />
her wrists slashed, looking asleep and covered<br />
by the Stars and Stripes. There is no word<br />
for the fear our daughters will commit suicide<br />
beneath a patriotic blanket. Robert Frost's son, Carol,<br />
shot himself with a deer rifle on October 9, 1940.<br />
"I took the wrong way with him" wrote Frost,<br />
<br />
who would outlive all but two of his six children.<br />
A citizen opposes the reintroduction of gray wolves<br />
to the American wilderness, because they are Canadian,<br />
as though they might harbor within their genes<br />
a disinclination for revolution and a soft spot<br />
for the queen. Freddie Mercury was a gay British genius,<br />
and homophobic sports teams all across the nation sing his<br />
"We Are the Champions." He's number 50<br />
<br />
among the 100 Greatest Britons, four slots ahead<br />
of George Harrison, twelve ahead of Jane Austen,<br />
and a whopping twenty-three in front of Geoffrey Chaucer.<br />
Ronald Reagan is number one on the American list.<br />
The only poet in the top twenty-five is Muhammad Ali,<br />
who comes in just above Rosa Parks but well behind<br />
Elvis, whose pelvis was censored from the television screen.<br />
No word for the fear of free speech,<br />
<br />
but a man was not allowed to board a flight at JFK<br />
because his T-shirt, in Arabic and English, read,<br />
"We will not be silent." American Fear's shirts<br />
will not alarm the Transportation Security Administration,<br />
also called the TSA. The fear of silence is sedatephobia.<br />
The TSA is also the Tourette Syndrome Association,<br />
and based on Boswell's descriptions it is theorized<br />
that Samuel Johnson suffered from the malady,<br />
<br />
making frequent odd grunts and muttering<br />
under his breath "too, too, too" meaning also<br />
and yes and more, meaning many,<br />
meaning he meant to know all the words,<br />
and the problem with all is everything. All men, all words,<br />
all fears. This beautiful, fearful,<br />
and fearsome country, such as it is,<br />
such as it might yet, someday, become.<br />
<br />
Bathysiderodromophobia, by the way, is fear of the subway, which the poet reveals in the next line.<br />
<br />
I was laughing out loud about the "fear that our daughters will commit suicide" and the bit about Freddie Mercury. Also, I love the word "ephebiphobia" and think I will be using it frequently over the next month.<br />
<br />
After I read "American Fear" I went on to the next poem according to the way I was reading through the volume, which was backwards. "A Rumor of Bears" left me with tears in my eyes. And then I got to the title poem, "Beautiful Country," and "thought about what was wrong and more wrong" but ended up being "promised another day when everything would be better," courtesy of what has become of the American military since Vietnam. And I kept reading and becoming more like Wrigley's picture of Johnson, thinking "also/and yes and more, meaning many,/meaning he meant to know all the words."Jeannehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01374498643286099244noreply@blogger.com10