The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I knew I wanted to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society because of Anna's enthusiastic review at Diary of An Eccentric and the other positive reviews I've noted over the past year or so (Bermuda Onion, Caribous Mom, Farm Lane Books). So when a friend who said she liked it offered to lend it to me recently, I decided to read it next. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I found it enjoyable, and certainly a fast read, but I was disappointed that the characters weren't better developed and that the book discussions were a fairly shallow and peripheral part of the novel.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel, so character development can be tricky, but it's often one of the most enjoyable aspects of the genre. Here, I was left wondering why on earth the main character, Juliet, likes a four-year-old girl she's just met well enough to take care of her almost exclusively within days of their meeting, and why the girl's other caretakers allow it. The letters suggest that the other caretakers already "love" Juliet before they meet her, from reading her letters, but I would need more than a few month's worth of letters before I handed over any four-year-old in my care.

I was also unsatisfied with the descriptions of Juliet's laconic true love, Dawsey, a man that her best friend describes as "quiet, capable, trustworthy--oh Lord, I've made him sound like a dog--and he has a sense of humor." The thing is, I thought he continued to sound like a dog right to the end of the novel, if a dog could have a sense of humor and a love for reading Charles Lamb.

One of the most quoted sentences from the novel comes from one of the best-delineated characters, Isola, who says "I don't believe that after reading such a fine writer as Emily Bronte, I will be happy to read again Miss Amanda Gillyflower's Ill-Used by Candlelight. Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That last sentence is a good one, all right, but much of its charm stems from the particularity of the detail in the preceding sentence. This novel would be much better if all its observations on reading were similarly particularized. One character says he loves reading Seneca, but if a love of Seneca is to be communicated to the novel's readers, there should be some more specific reasons than just that the character has lived through wartime.

Being not entirely immune to this novel's charms, however, I very much enjoyed the story of how Granny Pheen came to have a series of letters written by none other than Oscar Wilde. Any novel that worships Wilde as much as this one does is a friend of mine. Just not a very good friend. Not the kind that lets you get too close.

I occasionally find other novels similarly frustrating, in that I feel I'd like to know the characters better, including finding out what they value in the books they say they love--I got the same kind of feeling reading Fowler's The Jane Austen book club, and a bit of it reading Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale. Maybe it's just that I wouldn't be a good fit for most book clubs--and that's why I've never joined one. If you have, are you satisfied with the level of discussion?

The Importance of Ohio Public Libraries

Public libraries are one of the foundations of our system of democracy. I’m reminded of this every time I walk into mine, because carved over the door is this quotation from John Adams: “LIBERTY CANNOT BE PRESERVED WITHOUT A GENERAL KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE PEOPLE.” I never fail to find this reassuring, no matter how exasperated I am about local schools or politicians.

I live in a small town and work four miles away in an even smaller village, and so my children have always been lucky enough to have access to two public libraries—the village one, where we all loved to browse in the same room, and where the summer reading program was just steps away from the playground outside, and the bigger one where we go now to pick out books and audiobooks. In the last few years, the bigger library has had a terrific Young Adult librarian who has gotten my kids involved in library events and ordered some of the new books that interest them and keep them coming back in to see what’s new. But she was fired in the second round of cuts this spring.

Now under the Adams quotation on the door is a notice about the most recently proposed Ohio library budget cuts. I took a photo of it, because I found it so ironic underneath the Adams quotation.

It’s also ironic that Ohio’s governor, who proposed educational reforms earlier this spring, should now be proposing to cut back on the best system of public education we have in this country. People in small towns like mine need libraries. They need to be able to read and find out the Truth about the larger world, especially because mine is a town where one of the middle school “science” teachers who is NOT being drummed out of the school system for teaching religion told my daughter that she should make a choice between “believing in” either creationism or evolution and then two years later took my son aside and chastised him for making a statement in class supporting evolution when “it wasn’t necessarily true” and the other kids “had to make that decision for themselves.”

My neighbors need books more than they need almost anything else. Governor Strickland, I’m willing to pay more taxes to ensure that they continue to have access to those books. If the proposed cuts go through, my village library will close completely, and the bigger library will have to restrict its hours so severely that it will be hard for working people to keep track of when it’s open and when it’s not.

So raise my taxes. Give me the option of paying extra taxes directly to a library fund, so that I can support the library on behalf of my poorer neighbors. Don’t do any more damage to Ohio’s library system.

John Green, who went to college in the village and is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns, also wrote about Ohio libraries this week, so if you're interested in more of the facts, hop over there and see what he has to say. And if you live in Ohio, make sure your elected representatives know what you think about library funding.

Guidebooks for vacations

I like to read the available guidebooks when we're going on vacation, especially when it's to a big, famous tourist place like Paris. They tell me which are the most essential sights and how to see as many of them as possible in the time I have. So when we were planning a trip to Paris and Nice, I bought several different guidebooks and ended up using them all.

The most ubiquitous guidebook right now seems to me to be Fodor's, and they're decent. I tend to like the quirky ones, the kind that promise some kind of insider information or have a slant on the place you're planning to go (like the "Hawaii Revealed" series). For our trip to France, I bypassed the Baedeker's, because after reading Forster's A Room With a View it cracks me up. I got a Fodor's on Paris, one on France as a whole, and another on Provence and the French Riviera. They had good basic information. The guidebook I ended up liking best, though, was a Frommer's on Paris. In addition to the basics, like what days and times a museum is open, Frommer's told me about what train to take and which ticket entrance might be less crowded than the main one. It gave me details on what the difference is between a brasserie, a bistro, a cafe, and a restaurant. It had maps of the metro and the RER, so we could see what the station at the end of the line was (which is how you follow the signs for the direction you want to go).

The quirky book I read in preparation for our trip is entitled "Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, and it explores some of the cultural differences between the French and the rest of the world. Some of the most interesting were that the French consider stores extensions of their private space, and so you need to say "Bonjour" when you enter, rather than just begin silently browsing, and that eating a meal is a public activity, rather than just something you do on your own when you get hungry. The ceremony of mealtime is important. I saw a number of children eating multiple-course meals politely with family groups. The most impressive was a child who couldn't have been more than two who sat at a restaurant table for an hour, eating neatly with a fork and making conversation with the adults seated around her. We learned that you have to ask for the check (so you need to know the word, which is "l'addition") because the waiters, who are consummate professionals, won't think of trying to rush you by bringing it before you ask. One time when I watched a waiter filet an entire fish at our tableside and marveled out loud at how quick and efficient he was, he said to me, with a degree of reproach, "it is my job."

In addition to the kind of guidebooks you use for planning, I also find that books you buy along the way can be good substitutes for tours in your language, even the audiotours that have become so popular in museums and art galleries. We found a book in the gift shop at Chartres that helped us "read" some of the iconography of the windows, and I bought a pamphlet from a vending machine at Notre Dame that showed us some of what we were looking at as we walked through. Since we're all fast readers, this worked for us. Most of my guidebook reading takes place as I'm traveling to my destination. We didn't know what we were going to do in Nice until I had five hours on the TGV to figure it out. Sometimes my kids say that I schedule too much "charging about," especially in a big city, but usually I propose a schedule of what we're going to see on which day and everyone else finds it useful because then we don't miss anything out of indolence or inattention to detail.

Do you use guidebooks for vacations? Are there better ones than the ones I've been using?

Sunbird from M is for Magic

I come from a family of people who like to eat, and who remember vacations by what we had to eat when we were there. The smell of fresh pineapple and Coca-cola brings memories of our last trip to Hawaii, and one of the things we remember about going to England was the completely fried breakfast we were served at a B&B in the Cotswolds--fried egg, fried bacon, fried tomato and...fried toast. Our most memorable meal in France was in the shadow of Chartres, at a sidewalk cafe where we ordered meals in French and so weren't sure what we were actually asking for (I got four tiny little birds, which were delicious).

So the story about The Sunbird is one I was primed to like as we return from our summer vacation. It's about an Epicurean Club whose members were always looking for something new to eat. At the outset, they think they "have eaten everything that can be eaten," including "several long-extinct species." So one of them says "I fear we must hang it up for there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten." Then one of them suggests the "Sunbird."

The reaction to his suggestion is that he's making it up. One member says it's imaginary, but another responds that "unicorns are imaginary...but gosh, that unicorn flank tartare was tasty." So they decide to travel to Egypt to capture and cook a Sunbird. They find one, admire it, bow to it before it dies, and then they cook it. "It tastes like heaven," one of them says. Another says "It tastes like love and fine music. It tastes like truth." As they continue eating they say "It tastes like my youth. It tastes like forever." And then they all burst into flames. They have achieved their end.

It's a small idea for a story, but the idea stays with me. You go on a quest for your heart's desire, and then what you do when you find it--you eat it! I guess that's why we sometimes stand in front of the refrigerator when we don't know what we really want. As Stephen Dobyns says in "How to Like It," we stand there looking "as if into the place where the answers are kept." Do you ever find your heart's desire when you look in the refrigerator?

Chivalry from M is for Magic

This story is one of my favorites from Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic, mostly because of its elaborately mundane tone. From the very first line--"Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat"--everything that happens seems entirely plausible. The fur coat is in an Oxfam shop, the British version of Goodwill, and an old lady buys it: "Mrs. Whitaker gave fifty pence to Marie, who gave her ten pence change and a brown paper bag to put the books and the Holy Grail in. Then she went next door to the butcher's and bought herself a nice piece of liver. Then she went home." She polishes the Grail and puts it on her mantel.

When one of her friends comes over and asks what it is, Mrs. Whitaker explains "It's the Holy Grail....It's the cup that Jesus drank out of at the Last Supper. Later, at the Crucifixion, it caught His precious blood when the centurion's spear pierced His side" and her friend, who "didn't hold with unsanitary things" says it's nice.

After the friend has gone home and Mrs. Whitaker has had her lunch and her pills, the doorbell rings, and it's a knight on a quest. He identifies himself by handing her a scroll which says he is "Galaad, Knight of the Table Round" before she'll let him in. Once he sees the Grail on her mantle, he drops to one knee and lowers "his head as if in silent prayer." He offers her gold for the grail, but she refuses, saying she likes it on her mantel, as "it's just right, between the dog and the photograph of my Henry."

Undiscouraged, Galaad returns a few days later and offers her a sword that will make the wearer "unconquerable in war, and invincible in battle." Mrs. Whitaker doesn't want it, of course, but she "made him some cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches for the journey back and wrapped them in greaseproof paper."

The next time Galaad shows up, Mrs. Whitaker makes him move things around in her attic while she cleans and tells him about her family and how she met her husband. In return, Galaad tells her about "his mother, Elaine, who was flighty and no better than she should have been and something of a witch to boot" and the rest of his family. They have tea, and then Galaad produces the Philosopher's Stone, the Egg of the Phoenix, and the Apple of Life and offers them in exchange for the grail. Mrs. Whitaker is tempted by the apple, which Galaad tells her "is one of the apples of the Hesperides....One bite from it will heal any illness or wound, no matter how deep; a second bite restores youth and beauty; and a third bite is said to grant eternal life." Although Mrs. Whitaker thinks about "how it was to be young: to have a firm, slim body that would do whatever she wanted it to do," she is no fool. She knows that necromancy never pays.

So at length Mrs. Whitaker tells Galaad to "put that apple away....You shouldn't offer things like that to old ladies. It isn't proper....But I'll take the other two....They'll look nice on the mantelpiece. And two for one's fair, or I don't know what is." Galaad goes down on his knee and kisses her hand. Then they finish their tea and Mrs. Whitaker wraps up "a large slice of fruitcake" for him, "along with a banana and a slice of processed cheese in silver foil" and tells him to use the toilet before he goes.

It's a charming story. Mrs. Whitaker is the exact opposite of a character like Blanche Dubois. Blanche desperately wants magic in her life, but Mrs. Whitaker reacts to magic in the same no-nonsense way she responds to slugs in her garden or her guitar-playing vicar. (Do you know a guitar-playing clergyman?)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties from M is for Magic

I've mentioned this collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman before, when reviewing The Graveyard Book, because the story that book grew from is included in this collection. It's a favorite collection for my daughter and me, so I'm going to tell you about some of the best stories from it individually. Our very favorite story is entitled "How to Talk to Girls at Parties."

The narrator of this story is a teenage boy, the kind who, when he goes to parties, usually ends up "in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on about politics." His friend is the kind of boy who ends up "snogging the prettiest girl at the party." So while the friend, Vic, is taking the narrator, Enn, to a party a friend has told him about, he's giving Enn advice on how to talk to the girls he'll meet there: "They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet."

So when they get to the party, Vic goes off with the prettiest girl, and Enn tries to talk to a girl he meets, asking "are you from around here?" When she shakes her head no, he asks her name and she says "'Wain's Wain'...or something that sounded like it. 'I'm a second.'" Attempting to keep the conversation going, Enn says "That's, uh. That's a different name." She tells him "it indicates that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am obliged to report back to her. I may not breed." Enn, in an unexpected burst of suavity, says "Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn't it?"

When a girl tells Enn that she must report on her impressions of "this place of yours," he thinks she means the section of London they're in and then "wondered if she was American." Things keep getting weirder, but Enn reacts as if it's merely getting later at night and the party guests are getting drunk. A girl whose name is "Triolet" makes Enn think "my generation had not been given hippie names," and when she says she is "a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea," his response is merely "isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?" To this she points out that "you are Enn...and you are a male. And you are a biped."

Just as Enn is at the point of kissing Triolet, Vic grabs him and runs out of the party. Vic is terrified and crying, but Enn continues to think about the poem and reveals that "this all happened thirty years ago."

The fun of the story is the detail in which Enn remembers the events of the night, and the way conversations and observations come together to show clearly that these girls really are from another planet. Just as teenage boys always suspected. Didn't you?