Girl Detective

As I Lay Dying was a recommendation from SFP of Pages Turned. I wrote to ask which she’d recommend for a book group*. She said As I Lay Dying, as it was more accessible than others of his works, due in part to its dark humor.

I began to read it, and floundered immediately. If this is his most accessible, I thought, I’m really glad we didn’t read The Sound and the Fury. Who were these people? How did they relate to one another? Why so many names? Welcome to a stream-of-consciousness multi-narrator novel with fifteen–FIFTEEN!–points of view. Also, I wondered, funny? This isn’t funny, I thought, this is HORRIBLE!

In my initial flailing, with all good intention, I looked for help online to out the characters. It did help, yet it was a mistake, one I warned others not to make. As soon as I looked up the book, about half a dozen things got spoiled, including the jaw-dropping last line. Stupid internet. I wish I had stuck with my original impulse, which was to keeping reading till things made sense, and assume a second reading.

As I read, then re-read the book, I was able to figure out who was who, how they were related, and what was going on. More importantly, I was able to see past the horrific particulars of the story to the humor that lay not far below the surface.

Two of my book groups read it. In the first, only one other person besides me had finished the book, and I hadn’t yet studied up on the book or re-read it. The discussion was necessarily short, and focused on how challenging and slow the book was to read. (A comment I don’t disagree with.) I liked this book, but hadn’t yet succumbed to its charms.

Then I spent a couple hours reading about the book on Schmoop, did some more online reading about Faulkner**, and then re-read the book. And was so stirred by one particular scene involving a bridge (SPOILERS: don’t click through if you haven’t read the book) that I kept imagining a diorama. Once I realized I possessed one of the key ingredients of my imaginary diorama, I had to make it. With the help of 6-year-old Guppy, I did. He helped me find particular Lego body parts, like shorter legs, matching hair, and grumpy faces, then colored in the cardboard base because we didn’t have enough blue, green and brown Legos to make it as big as I’d envisioned.

Armed with my diorama, a bottle of wine, leftover Easter candy and my newly bolstered background on the book, I went to my second book group, and we had a rousing discussion. We talked about life, death, family, pity, religion, spirituality, ESP, feminism, and much more.

It took a while, but I am now a huge fan of the work, and look forward to reading more Faulkner. No fear!

(If I had to do this again, though, I would probably start with the short stories, and THEN move to As I Lay Dying.)

*For one of my book groups, Faulkner became an obvious choice of an author we had to read, since so many of the authors we read already named him as an influence: Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, to name a few. And I loved the serendipity that I finally got around to reading Faulkner at the same time as I finally go around to reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, an early influence on Faulkner.

**In my admittedly cursory research, I did not find any evidence that As I Lay Dying influenced Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but I found the “white-trash road trip” theme too strikingly similar.

My entry on As I Lay Dying is forthcoming, but one scene in the book so stirred my imagination that I felt compelled to make a diorama. Just for fun. I don’t know that I’ve ever made one in my life. 6yo Guppy helped me out.

SPOILERS! Also, this diorama is not to scale. And we didn’t have enough blue Legos to make a big enough river, so we used a cardboard base and Guppy colored it with marker.

The bridge:

Anse was setting there, looking at the bridge where it was swagged down into the river with just the two ends in sight…The boy was watching the bridge where it was mid-sunk and logs and such drifted over it. (123-4)

The wagon:

Then the wagon tilted over and then it and Jewel and the horse was all mixed up together. Cash went outen sight, still holding the coffin braced, and then I couldn’t tell anything…(154)

The mules:

They roll up out of the water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with the earth. (149)

Anse:

Since he lost his teeth his mouth collapses…The stubble gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have. (17)

Dewey Dell:

pa and Dewey Dell stand watching us (149),

Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which ar the horizons and the valleys of the earth. (164)

Vardaman:

Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash holleringto catch her and I hollering running and hollering…

“Where is ma, Darl?” I said. You never got her. You knew she is a fish but you let her get away. You never got her. Darl. Darl. Darl.” I began to run along the bank, watching the mules dive up slow again and then down again. (150-1)

Darl:

[Darl] is looking at me. He dont say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (125)

Lego interpretation: Note his self-satisfied expression and arresting eyes.

Cash:

Cash lies on his back on the earth, his head raised on a rolled garment. His…face is gray, his hair plastered in a smooth smear across his forehead as though done with a paint brush. His face appears sunken a little, sagging from the bony ridges of eye sockets, nose, gums, as thought the wetting had slacked the firmness which had held the skin full….He lies pole-thin in his wet clothes, a little pool of vomit at his head. (156)

Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. (163)

Lego interpretation: the grey spot to the right of his head is vomit and Dewey Dell attends to him. His tools are in the water and at his side. His injured leg is elevated, he’s pale from almost drowning, and he’s in a lot of pain.

Jewel:

Lego interpretation: he is taller than the others, has a different skin tone, black hair instead of brown, and has a cranky, man-of-action expression on his face. Note the circular bumps on the narrow end of the coffin, where Addie’s head would be, and where Vardaman drilled air holes, then Cash carefully filled them. Also note one of Cash’s tools in river and the dead mule in the background.

It took a great deal of time to sort through our Legos to find appropriate expressions and hair for the characters. I was quite surprised how easy it was to find coffin-shaped pieces. Discerning Lego enthusiasts may recognize many Star Wars elements.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson was recommended to me originally in the mid ’90s by one of my first writing teachers, Diana Cavallo. I took a copy from my in-laws’ basement on my trip west from Philadelphia to Minneapolis in 1998. It sat on my shelves until this year, when the same friend’s author mentor recommended it to her and she recommended it to me as happened with Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.

Anderson’s name is barely recognized today, and his most famous book relatively obscure compared to those of some of the writers who came after and credited him as an influence, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck.

The book is a novel in linked stories. Even though each story was about different people in the town, they all orbited one young man, George Willard, a reporter at the small town’s paper. His story is the anchor at the end.

The town is full of complex people leading quiet lives. They have painful pasts and often long for a lost love, or present sexual shenanigans. For a book from 1919, it’s quite sexually frank, I thought. I found it tough to get into but once the stories began to accumulate, I became involved in the town and its people, even when they thought and behaved badly, just as real people do.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor is one of the classics that I’m kicking myself I only got around to now. She’s emotionally brutal, her titles are brilliant, and the stories make me think and feel. This is the end to my self-education on O’Connor that started with Wise Blood, then Brad Gooch’s Flannery and now this. Not all the works from her tragically short life, but plenty to see her themes of pain, alienation, fear of change, and religious struggle.

In the weeks after I read this, I found connections again and again in real life, in what I was reading, and in what I was watching on TV.

These stories will stick with me. Even if I forget which title goes with which story, I bet I’ll be able to recall these as long as I’m able to recall things: the surprise ending of The Barber, the car trip in A Good Man is Hard to Find, the general in A Late Encounter with the Enemy, the tractor scene in The Displaced Person, the Bible salesman in Good Country People, Mary Fortune and her grandfather in A View of the Woods, the invalid Asbury in The Enduring Chill, the bus trip in Everything that Rises Must Converge, the asylum visit of The Partidge Festival, the well-meaning father who tries to take in a troubled boy in The Lame Shall Enter First, the doctor’s office in Revelation, the tattoo of Parker’s Back, and the reworking of The Geranium in Judgment Day, her last complete story.

While the book works terrifically as a whole, from its first story, The Geranium, to its last, Judgment Day, I don’t recommend reading it all at once. I started this way, and had to stop. The stories have a lot of similarity, so run together if read together, but stand apart when read over a period of time, as I did, a story at a time between other books.

Stuff White People like is Christian Lander’s collection of 150 of the blog entries from his popular blog of the same name. It’s been sitting around for years, and finally graduated to bathroom book, for which it’s ideal. Short, funny. But the funny is also a little painful for me. As my dad often jokes, I resemble those remarks in my earnest white well-meaning but often less-than-world-changing actions. Funny, disposable. Will make you think self-deprecating things (#103), rather than just saying them or writing them. Also, hasn’t aged appreciably. All these things seem still to be true of aspiring regular folks masquerading as hipsters and vice versa. Plus many more. Which is why there is a sequel.

Here’s a sampling of those I’m guilty of:

1. Coffee
5. Farmer’s Markets
6. Organic Food
7. Diversity
8. Barack Obama
9. Making You Feel Bad for Not Going Outside (a Minnesota pastime)
13. Tea
15. Yoga
21. Writers Workshops
41. Indie Music
42. Sushi
44. Public Radio
48. Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops (I bet I get extra white-people points for disliking the former along with Trader Joe’s and loving the latter.)
54. Kitchen Gadgets
61. Bicycles
63. Expensive Sandwiches
70. Difficult Breakups
81. Graduate School
82. Hating Corporations
83. Bad Memories of High School.
85. The Wire
96. Having Children in Their Late 30’s

and on through 150. I come in at about 75%. Sigh. The unique taste of millions, indeed.

Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was an indirect recommendation. A friend of mine is in a mentor program with a local author, who recommended it to her. She in turn recommended it to me.

It’s a collection of short stories, linked by the common theme of the title–the pushes and pulls of life, and the compromises we make as we go along. They exemplify the meaning of ambivalence–not the commonly mistaken conception of not caring, but being pulled to multiple opposing options. The stories are tight as drums. They pulled me through, with economic yet devastating characterizations, each taking me to an ending that was surprising, yet satisfying.

I often don’t enjoy short stories because they tend to go for an icky-wow factor that lingers unpleasantly. Meloy’s stories contain some people behaving badly, yet they made me think and feel, not recoil. I both enjoyed and was impressed by this collection. Highly recommended.

Greetings and Salutations, Friends and Readers! It’s been a while, no? Life’s been life-y lately, volunteering for an event at my kids’ school, applying to a writing contest/program, reading and struggling to understand Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a case of double pink eye, plus the usual merry-go-round of family stuff like sports and piano and reading and writing and such.

I’m out of practice with blogging, but eager to get back in the saddle. I’ve got book reviews, a few anecdotes, maybe even some food posts, all banging like Athena in my head, trying to get out. I hope you’ll see some of that in the next few days, now that things have settled down a little bit. (Fingers crossed.)

One of the first contenders in last month’s Morning News Tournament of Books, Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother was also one of the shortest waits at the library. It went down in the first match to Murakami’s IQ84. My reading schedule got so crowded I didn’t get to it before the match, but since both Amy of New Century Reading and Pat of O Canada, Y’all, liked it, I figured I’d give it a try.

I wasn’t surprised it lost to Murakami, as it’s a short work by a younger author versus a sprawling-idea-filled work by one of the greats. It tells the story in flashback of Raj, a boy during WWII on the island of Mauritius, which housed a secret prison camp for an exiled ship. The history is fascinating, Raj’s bond with his mother, his friendship with a prisoner, and his story of poverty and abuse are all touching, yet something about the book distanced me, in spite of its first-person narration. Perhaps my heart is two sizes too small, but this didn’t impress me as it did many others.

I grew up in a family that made deviled eggs for special occasions. There was never a recipe. What I remember is a series of steps: boil eggs, peel eggs, halve eggs, put whites on fancy deviled-egg dish, put yolks in bowl, add mayonnaise, mustard, salt, pepper and horseradish as a matter of course, then possibly experiment with things like vinegar, hot sauce, and, one unfortunate time, wasabi. Make sure everyone in the house tastes it to offer input, then put into plastic bag, pipe into egg-white halves, and put leftover yolk mix on crackers, usually Triscuits.

As an adult on my own, I don’t make deviled eggs as often as my family does. My kids don’t (yet) like them. But yesterday on Easter, I felt the pull of tradition. I unearthed the Harvest Gold Tupperware egg transporter (I have three other egg serving dishes) and got down to the serious business of making eggs.

I was motivated by three recent articles–one from the Genius Recipes series at Food 52, and two from my husband G. Grod, one on baking eggs rather than boiling them, and another on using Sriracha sauce in the filling.

Baking versus boiling? A success. I put a cookie sheet below the baking eggs in case they ’sploded, but no eggs were harmed in the process. Were they easy to peel, you ask? More than half of them were, but easy-to-peel is more a function of egg age than of cooking method. I’ve tried poking a hole with a push pin, storing eggs on their sides, and pretty much all the methods, but the best thing is old eggs, where the inside membrane is drying out. Peeling under a thin stream of running water at the sink helps a bit by making a little space between the shell’s membrane and the egg.

Next up was making the filling. I only had a few eggs to work with, as I’d made the Hell’s Kitchen 9-egg lemon-ricotta hotcakes for breakfast, so I had to do some fiddly math to get proportions right, but they tasted good, with a nice slow burn at the finish. And they looked pretty and orange-y. Until they fell off G Grod’s cargo bike on the way to a friend’s house. We were able to rescue most of them, and I cleaned them up a bit for the below photo. In spite of their looks, they went fast. I’m going to make a lot more, next time. And not drop them.

Sriracha deviled eggs

Sriracha Deviled Eggs

1 dozen eggs, preferably about a week old

To cook the eggs: Put oven racks in middle of oven. In cold oven, place eggs directly on rack. (You can put a cookie sheet on the oven floor if you’re worried they’ll explode; mine didn’t.) Set oven to 325F. Set timer for 30 minutes. Prepare ice bath. When 30 minutes have passed, remove eggs with oven mitts or tongs and put them in ice bath for 5 minutes. When pouring out cold water, jostle eggs to crack the shells. Peel. Halve. Place egg whites on plate or tray.

For the filling:

12 egg yolks
6 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 teaspoons Sriracha hot sauce
2 teaspoons fresh-squeezed lime juice
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Put yolks in mesh sieve over large bowl. With rubber spatula, press through mesh. Add mayonnaise, butter, mustard, Sriracha, lime juice and salt. Taste, and adjust as needed.

2. Transfer mixture to plastic bag. Snip off corner. Squeeze filling into egg whites on tray.

3. Eat the ugliest egg to make sure they’re good. Repeat as needed to reassure yourself. Share with friends. If you want to.

At the Telegraph, an article that has many commenters’ undies in a twist, “Bettany Hughes: who knows whether God is a girl?”

Bettany Hughes, an expert in ancient history, claimed that Christianity “was originally a faith where the female of the species held sway”.

To oppose the ordination of women bishops in the Church of England is to deny the central role women played in the foundations of the faith, said Hughes.

“By suppressing the true story of the connection between women and religion, we etiolate both history and the possibilities of our own world,” she wrote in Radio Times.

The Telegraph piece shoots itself in the foot by including an inflammatory bit at the end about another scholar’s thesis that Jesus was a hermaphrodite.

And while “God as girl” makes a good sound bite, I’d prefer female or woman or feminine or something less childish.

Seriously, though, the tradition of world religions had male war deities paired with female fertility and wisdom deities. Then that changed. Haven’t you ever wondered why?

(Link from The Morning News)

The teacher has been reading Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie aloud to 8yo Drake’s class. When she was close to the end one night, the next morning before school Drake “needed” to know the ending, so he asked to see our copy. I told him it was on the shelf with the other books by Kate.

“We have a whole section for her?” he asked wonderingly.

I told him to look in the D’s. Given that the first author he saw was Dickens, it took him rather longer than I expected to find Kate’s books.

When he pulled it off the shelf, he asked about the stuff inside: an article on Kate in the local paper after it came out, and some other Kate-related things. I showed him the inscription, which had an illustration of a dog.

Downstairs, Drake would not leave the house for the bus until he’d finished the chapter. I asked, I sternly asked, I raised my voice, then I realized I should just be quiet and let him finish his chapter.

As we walk/jogged to the bus, he said, “Our family is really lucky. Other families don’t have books signed by Kate.”

I responded, “Yes, we are a lucky family.”

Hype plus a slot in this year’s Tournament of Books put Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder on my TBR list. Years ago, a writer friend recommended Patchett’s Magician’s Assistant, which I loved. After I read Bel Canto, which everyone I knew loved (but I found a bit remote and chilly) I talked with my friend about it. She and I agreed that we admired Bel Canto, but didn’t love it in the way we did Magician’s Assistant.

In the meantime, Patchett lost some credibility with me with her piece on travel writing “Did I Kill Gourmet Magazine?”, which came off to me as snobby rather than tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, when the good reviews poured out on State of Wonder, I hoped for another Magician’s Assistant. Alas, no.

Marina Singh is a 42yo scientist employed by a big pharmaceutical company. In the first sentence, we learn her co-worker, Anders Eckman, has died, and soon learn that he was in the remote jungle trying to persuade a crotchety researcher to come in from the field. Marina is asked by both Eckman’s wife and the head of the company to go down and find out what happened. Things are complicated because Marina is having an affair with the much older head of the company, and she was a student of the missing researcher.

One of my pet peeves is characters who don’t grow and learn. While people like that exist in real life, I don’t care to spend time with them fictionally, either. To me, Marina was a dud of a main character, flat and uninteresting. Ditto for the plot, which seemed like it would be full of thrilling plot development. Instead, to me, it plodded, and by the time I got to this or that reveal, I was so exhausted from getting there that I didn’t care much. Or, in a few cases, the reveal had been expected by me so long that I no longer felt any satisfaction from having called it. Marina does some strange things at the end, and some other plot points are left unresolved. But again, I didn’t care that much. I neither liked nor admired this book. I experienced schadenfreude when Wil Wheaton slammed it during the Tournament of Books as:

a story that demands so much suspension of disbelief it may as well have asked us to accept sailing down a river flowing with unicorn tears.

For a character-driven medical thriller, I’d recommend Intuition by Allegra Goodman instead.