Girl Detective

I was so moved and engaged by Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, that I sought out books she referred to in it by Jane Kenyon, and her earlier memoir, Devotion, about her tangled quest for clarity in spiritual matters.

Shapiro skillfully weaves together pieces of her past and present. Her observant Orthodox Jewish father, her atheist and difficult mother, her own practice of yoga, her son’s infant near-death experience, and her own attempts to…I’m not sure what to put here. Figure it all out? Make meaning of it? Because really, her spiraling, back-and-forth, round-and-round memoir does not acknowledge the kind of meaning or comfort usually found in devotional memoirs. Her memoir is ambivalent, in the true meaning of the word, pulled in many directions.

We can’t see what’s coming. We can’t know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won’t always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge. (239)

I loved this book, the writing, the stories of her life, and her struggle to make meaning and acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of any meaning that does become clear. I think I’ll be going back to all Shapiro’s books, from the beginning, and working my way back up to these. If a mark of a good book is one that makes me think, and want to learn, these two short books pack a substantial emotional and intellectual wallop. (I may come back to edit this last poorly constructed sentence. It’s not elegant and mellifluous, but it says what I mean.)

I watched the movie Children of Men several years ago, and thought it was really good, and that I should read the book, The Children of Men, by P.D. James. I chose it for my reading group Gods and Monsters. Even though I’d watched the movie years ago, the plot and visual details had remained with me. As I read the book, I kept wondering, where is this, what is that, why is or isn’t something here? The book, I found, was vastly different from the movie, so I had to turn off my memory and go along for the ride, and a wild one it was.

In the book, Theo is a 50 something history professor whose cousin is the leader of 2021 England. In the future, humans are barren, and no children have been born since 1995.Theo becomes involved with a small dissident group and the books ticks along as a thriller from there, but with the disquieting vision of a barren society, of what might happen if we stopped being able to choose whether to reproduce, and of what people freedoms people give up for comfort and pleasure.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

I decided not to watch the film again before the discussion of the book, as it’s so different. The movie was loud, violent, and post-apocalyptic. I’m fascinated that the film chose to diverge so wildly from the book, and look forward to discussing the book, then re-evaluating the film on its own merits.

The book stands on its own, quietly suggestive of a skewed future. It’s a coming of age tale but for a man of 50, who reminded me somewhat of the narrator of Julian Barnes’ A Sense of an Ending, and who has a relationship with a cousin that felt very similar to the brothers in Herman Koch’s The Dinner. The ending is an interesting one, very “Lady or the Tiger,” disquieting, and with much left up to the reader to decide how things will play out. I am still ruminating on the ideas and images of the book.

In Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, the Perils and Pleasures of the Creative Life. she quoted the poet Jane Kenyon a few times, and this one hunk of writing advice made me sit up and attend:

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

These words rang so true for me I searched them to their source. A Hundred White Daffodils is a posthumous collection of Kenyon’s essays, poetry translations, and one previously unreleased poem assembled by her husband, poet Donald Hall.

I was delighted to find this advice was number 8 in a list titled “Everything I Know About Poetry (Notes for a Lecture)” and the previous 7 and a codicil are all worth reading as well. But I’m not going to write the rest of them out. Seek out the book, and some of Kenyon’s poems. I never would have but for the Shapiro book, and I now have this whole, bright glowing corner of poetry to explore.

This was for one of the book groups I attend, Books and Bars. I hadn’t heard of Max Barry’s Lexicon when it was selected for May, and when I saw the effusion of blurbs from trusted literary sources, I was surprised how I missed it.

The novel opens on a man named Wil being chased in an airport by two other men. They are in turn chased by others, and afraid of someone they call “Wolf.” Exciting, ’splodey things happen, then Wil’s story alternates with that of Emily Ruff, a street urchin from San Francisco. All this is part of a larger mystery about a group of people called poets who wield the power of persuasion using the science of language and specific words and verbals constructions. The story jumps back and forth in time, between characters, with some bits in between about privacy, spin control, and data gathering. I found it had tremendous forward momentum, and became progressively more resentful of people and things that got in the way of me finishing the book as all the pieces came together.

“I just read them for fun.”
“Dictionaries?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds awful.”
“Awful used to mean ‘full of awe.’ The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary.”
He blinked.
“See?” She said. “Fun.”

I found it a smart fast read. Some others at the discussion thought it was full of plot holes, or predictable, or silly, or a screenplay for an action movie not a work of literature. My husband G. Grod said he can’t believe no one mentioned how similar it is to Snow Crash, so I guess I’ll be reading that again soon.

One description of art is something that changes one, as opposed to entertainment, which does not. I don’t think they’re opposites and I don’t think this as an empty thriller, either. I think Emily was a good main character with an interesting development, there were parts that made me laugh aloud. I am changed in that I am not going to be taking any internet quizzes or answering any marketing research again. Am I a dog person or a cat person?

None of your beeswax.

The Golden Compass is another book my 10yo is reading in school that I decided to read along. Unfortunately, he is restrained to 2 chapters every 2 days and asked not to read ahead, and I found that it is very hard not to devour this book. It has a very high want-to-know-what-happens-next quotient.

Lyra Belacqua is a pre-teen girl raised mostly by male scholars in an alternative world’s Oxford University. Her uncle Lord Asriel is her benefactor, but sneaky Lyra is soon off on adventure, involving missing children, a beautiful temptress named Mrs. Coulter, and figuring out who Lord Asriel is. Oh, and there are animal familiars called daemons, warlike polar bears, witches, mysterious Dust with a capital D, and more.

Pullman has crafted a rich and fascinating alterna-world. An avowed atheist, the author is trying to tell a mythic adventure story without relying on religion, other than to send a few barbed arrows at Catholicism.

“Witches have never worried about Dust. All I can tell you is that where there are priests, there is fear of Dust.”

But the resulting portrayal, that it’s all fate, doesn’t quite jive with the conflict of the plot.

“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,” said the witch, “or die of despair.”

Lyra is smart and strong, but as portrayed in this book, she’s just following THE path fate has laid out for her, not one of many possible paths, and this bugs me because how much adventure can there be, if things are all mapped out, even in just the author’s head? Lyra’s alethiometer, the golden compass of the title, is a device that tells truth of the past present and future. I find it too pat and convenient to have something so absolute.

As a parent, and as a reader, I know I’m supposed to read the same books my kids do, and talk to them about it. But because I let them choose what they want to read, they read a lot of stuff I simple can’t summon up the gumption to read along with: Garfield, Geronimo Stilton, Big Nate, Pokemon, and on and on.

Hmm. Maybe that can be there someday band name: Pokemon and On?

Also, when I have tried to discuss books with them, they clam up. Or, in one memorable sad case, I kept asking one of the boys about the bomber in The Westing Game. And finally, he said, “Oh, it was X” and then refused to talk about it more. And X was the wrong character! My head nearly exploded.

But that was a while when the 10yo said he was reading Holes, which has been recommended to me by umpteen gazillion people, I thought it was time to act like a responsible reading parent and read it too.

Holes is about a kid named Stanley Yelnats who is wrongly sentenced to a juvenile detention camp where they are required to dig holes. Interspersed with Stanley’s present misery is his backstory, as well as a backstory about a woman named Kate. The book is simply written, and proceeds at a good clip as all the stories meet and mesh, then end on a hopeful note. My 10yo, who is sitting here reading over my shoulder as I write this, said that what he found interesting about Holes was how the reader knows so much more than Stanley does, and as the stories crossover, it makes sense to the reader but poor Stanley is clueless about the significance of the things he’s done.

I can see why Holes is popular, and recommended. But I found it lacked a complexity that makes a book good for both kids and adults. It’s good, but I didn’t find it great, so if any readers out there did, I’d love to hear your perspectives.

I am trying to catch up on my book blogging, so I may do a couple of combo-pack posts like this one. I’m doing my comic-book and graphic-novel reading in between bigger books, so they’re kind of like mortar in a brick wall.

I’m really enjoying the current run of Wonder Woman, and the latest graphic novel collection is volume 3, Iron. Wonder Woman is trying to figure out what shenanigans the Greek gods are up to, and where the heck Zeus has gone. I’m really enjoying the art, and the portrayal of the gods.

Speaking of bad-a$$ female protagonists, the latest novel in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen features Janni, the original Captain Nemo’s daughter, who goes after the men who kidnapped her daughter. Much of this is in German, though it’s not impossible to follow, since as we all know, Nazis are bad.

Every so often my reading dance card gets so filled up I swear off borrowing library books other than ones for my three book groups. But then I read a review of a book that sounds so good I just can’t help myself, and I’m off to the races with my library queue again. As soon as I finished reading a buttload of books about Hamlet, Rebecca Mead’s memoir/literary appreciation My Life in Middlemarch was next up. Mead uses her lifelong love of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a frame to weave in a biography of Eliot and a memoir of her own.

On [my] first encounter, I identified completely with Miss Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young gentlewoman who years for a more significant existence. This identification was in spite of the difference between our social stations. Dorothea lives at Tipton Grange, a large estate equipped with household staff. My family lived in a modest house with a small garden, built in the 1950s, and I only had to go back a few generations to find ancestors who had belonged to the household staff on properties like the Brookes’.

It’s been a few years since I read Middlemarch, but the details came back, and I was reminded why I loved Middlemarch when I read it, and affirmed that I want to re-read it, as well as all of Eliot’s works.

Mead is a good guide to the novel and its author’s life, though her own life is drawn more sketchily in the book than is Eliot’s. Also, Mead’s portrait of George Eliot’s relationship with George Lewes is unequivocally loving, which didn’t square with my memory, and sent me back to Marghanita Laski’s book, George Eliot and Her World, which Mead refers to in her book. There is a reference that Eliot may have discovered indiscretions of Lewes after he died, which in turn might have been one factor in her perhaps o’er hasty second marriage. Mead, in spite of an impressive array of research on the author and her works, doesn’t mention the possibility of Lewes’ indiscretion. Whether because she didn’t find the evidence persuasive, or because she has such affection for her subject that she didn’t want to cast aspersions, I don’t know.

Did you know Northeast Minneapolis’ Art-a-Whirl is the biggest artist open-studio event in the US? And it’s this upcoming weekend, from Friday May 16 to Sunday May 18. Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about Whirling with little ones, which I wrote about for Minnesota Monthly’s TC Taste blog here. But it’s a good set of links even if you don’t have little ones. And even if you don’t live in the Twin Cities, you can check out the art online.

And, please do. Because in writing that post, I put all the links in my draft, and they didn’t copy over to the final, so I had to enter them all again. Which was a giant pain. So go, read, and click the links, to justify all that hard, hard work, if you would, kind readers!

I am a novel gal. I will occasionally dabble in short stories and non-fiction, but I rarely venture into poetry. Last month, I read Dani Shapiro’s book Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life. In it she quotes poet Jane Kenyon, and writes a little about Kenyon’s sadly short life. So, going by the transitive property of liking stuff, I liked Dani Shapiro’s book, and Dani Shapiro likes Jane Kenyon’s poetry, then there’s a good chance I will like Kenyon’s poetry. So I picked up a copy of Kenyon’s first collection, From Room to Room. And, voila, I liked it!

Kenyon’s collection sketches out a story of leaving one home and moving to another in New England. The poems are short, and deceptively easy to read. They invited me in for what felt like a short stay, but I lingered on each one rolling the words around in my head. Some are sad, some sweet, some funny. One of my favorites was this:

The Shirt

The shirt touches his neck
and smoothes over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt–down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.

I chose Hamlet for one of my books groups last month, and I believe it was the least attended session to date, only possibly rivaled by Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Draw your own inferences. But I will probably not choose another play as a book selection. I enjoyed it, but it’s obviously not a crowd pleaser, which is curious for one of the most lasting works of literature in the world, no?

One of the big reasons I picked Hamlet for April was that the big local theater, The Guthrie, along with The Acting Company, was putting on both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern these past few weeks. Reading a play as a book seems silly without seeing it performed. It’s rather like reading musical notes on a page but not hearing them played. Over about three weeks, I watched 7 Hamlet adaptations on DVD, a few related DVDs, read the play and a comprehensive introduction and set of long notes, a graphic adaptation of the novel, an excerpt of a big book on Shakespeare, and a little book on Hamlet. All this before seeing a live production. Like that old Palmolive commercial, I was SOAKING in it. In fact, so saturated am I that I don’t even know where to begin in writing about all these. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit. And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

Heh.

In general, Hamlet the play is one of the most lasting works of literature in the world, and the character of Hamlet rivals only perhaps Jesus as the most known literary character ever. So if you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it recently, or haven’t seen a DVD, then you’re missing out. This is one of the few times when it’s as good to watch the movie as it is to read the play, because it’s a PLAY! It was written to be seen! If you are interested in finding out more, here’s what I found to be helpful (or not).

My preferred edition of Hamlet is the Arden with the introduction by Harold Jenkins, a cranky old white man who is hilariously dismissive of the work of other people he doesn’t agree with. And he’s not deadeningly repetitive, like another cranky old white man I’ll mention later. This edition of this play is going in my apocalypse backpack (which is the name of one of my imaginary bands).

Hoping to get my two sons, who are 8 and 10, in on the fun (my husband and I were reading and nerdishly obsessing over this together. Me: Jane Eyre::G. Grod: Hamlet.) My first attempt was a success, the 30 minute adaptation that’s included in Shakespeare: The Animated Series. They liked it!

Less popular with both the 10yo and me was Classics Illustrated’s Hamlet. Bad art that did nothing to illuminate the text.

Next, it’s foolish to study Shakespeare without reading Harold Bloom, one of the pre-eminent Shakespeare scholars. Alas, he is the cranky old white man who repeats himself ad nauseum. He makes interesting arguments and insights. AND THEN MAKES THEM AGAIN AND AGAIN. I read Bloom’s introduction to his

Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, the chapter on Hamlet, and the last chapter. I might be able to save you some trouble: Bloom thinks Shakespeare wrote the ur-Hamlet, the earlier missing version of the play that most scholars think was written by Thomas Kyd. Shakespeare through characters like Falstaff and Hamlet, showed a psychological interior life that had not been shown before, and helped to establish it as part of what we consider human. Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character are two different things that are often equated (or conflated, as they say in adadem-ese). He repeats these points and makes some more in his shorter book,

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, spending less time on the ur-Hamlet bee in his bonnet. Overall, he says some good stuff, some outrageous and ridiculous stuff, and some outright offensive stuff (he is shockingly dismissive of the work of women, especially non-white women). As you might have divined, I have a respect/hate relationship with Bloom. I find him necessary, but unpleasant.

But this is just me, a cranky middle-aged white woman, so your mileage may vary. My good friend and Shakespeare fan M, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, has more respect and less vitriol for Bloom than I do, so check out her opinions for another take.

And, as this is so long, I’ll do a separate entry on the movies and the play.

Holy cats, y’all, I am farther behind on my book blogging than I thought. Better get crackin’.

Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize winning The Luminaries went down in a contentious first match of The Morning News 2014 Tournament of Books to a short indie book, Hill William, by a guy who, on Facebook, seemed to dismiss ToB readers as soccer moms. As a soccer mom, I took offense to this. Soccer moms can be intelligent readers. And in one of those weird things that happens as part of the ToB, I read the match, and the comments, interested in reading The Luminaries and utterly uninterested in reading Hill William.

How to describe an 834-page book in brief? Well, not with the adjective Dickensian, though many reviewers did? It’s sprawling, fascinating, and weird, rotating among a huge cast of characters, each of whom represents one of the twelve zodiac signs or one the planets known at the time of the story, circa 1866. Set during New Zealand’s gold rush, there is a dead man, a mysterious collapsed woman, and a missing man. Who these three are, and how they related and interact with the others, is told in chapters of decreasing length, as in a waning moon. Some of the particulars of the astrology escaped me, but many of the others, as in which character represented which sign or planet, was helpful in cementing the characters in my mind. This is a long, complicated book to get lost in. It reminded me of Bleak House, The Woman in White, Jonathan Strong and Mr. Norrell, and many more. Catton has said in interviews that she was also influenced by the long-form storytelling of current DVD sets. Was the conceit about the astrology helpful, hurtful, or neutral? Readers disagree, though I appreciated this elaboration by one of the Booker judges who picked it.

This is a good book for winter, a good book for a long trip. Probably not a beach read. But if you like to get lost in long, mysterious, Victorian novels, then this one is worth 834 pages of your time.

I didn’t finish James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, the book that won the 2014 Morning News Tournament of Books till after it won the ToB and then some other big award, I forget which one (The National Book Award). I’d borrowed the book from the library and it was due before I was to leave on Spring Break when I was about 80 pages from the end. I conscientiously returned it to the library for the next patron–you’re welcome, whoever you are–and figured I would either buy it on the trip, or hang out at a bookstore for a while and finish it. I ended up feeling like a deadbeat because I went to the bookstore TWICE to finish it, and should have just bought it, but was feeling mulish about it for whatever reason, and did not.

McBride’s book is outlandish historical fiction about a young black boy slave mistaken for a girl who is adopted into the company of John Brown, the Kansas abolitionist. The character of John Brown leapt off the page, sometimes horrifying, sometimes delightful, always fascinating.

He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.

McBride goes on a fanciful, but also dead serious, tour of a point in history I knew little about. The level of satire at times was astonishing. McBride’s portrayal of Frederick Douglass raised a lot of critical eyebrows. And yet it was this daring, and the truths the fictional portrayals pointed at, that kept me wrapped up in the story till the end. And now that I’ve written this, I feel even worse about not buying the book, as this one is certainly worth owning, and re-reading.

Postscript: I just remembered one of the big reasons I didn’t want to buy the book was because I’d brought Eleanor Catton’s doorstop, The Luminaries, along with me to read next, and couldn’t justify adding a book I was nearly finished with to my cross-country luggage. And, I am not a fan of e-readers, even if they do seem idea for this situation.

My husband read something on the inter webs about Jolie Kerr’s My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag and Other Questions You Can’t Ask Martha. Whatever it was, it spurred him to borrow it from the library. He quickly abandoned it, though, because it made him feel bad about the level of filth we live in these days.

I used to be a clean person, like Jolie Kerr. I’d pretreat my laundry and clean the bathroom once week. While my house might get messy, it would not be actually dirty. Then, I had a child. And another child. And a nasty bout of depression. I learned that being a clean person wasn’t as important to me as things like reading, writing, and sleeping. Thus, cleaning fell on the priority list. And it’s been falling ever since.

After G. abandoned the book, I picked it up. It also made me feel bad about our dirt. But rather than overwhelming me, it made me want to be a cleaner person. It also made me laugh.

If you find that you have sticky spills to contend with–honey is a common offender–grab a rag and soak it in hot water, as hot as you can stand. Wring it out and press it on the honey; the hot water will liquefy it, rendering it easier to wipe up. If there are greasy spills, such as oil, ammonia is the ticket. Just be sure that you’re not using another product that contains bleach, as bleach + ammonia = sudden death. Okay, not really sudden death, but the two in concert produce a lethal gas, and that is no joke. You’ll hear me bang on about this again because it’s a super important cleaning lesson to learn: NEVER MIX BLEACH WITH AMMONIA. It will kill you. And then you’ll be dead, and your house won’t be clean, and people will judge you, THE END. (12)

Note, I did not say, it galvanized me into cleaning my whole house!

Note, I also did not say, it made me want to be a clean person again. CleanER. Little steps.

Kerr’s book is probably targeted at 20 somethings living on their own for the first time. But,with kids and a busy life, I’ve regressed, and can definitely use a refresher. Kerr is funny yet thorough as she guides the reader through the proper way to clean the kitchen, bathroom, and house. She offers detailed analysis of stains, and what to use on them. I tore through this useful little book in a plane flight, often laughing aloud. Then I returned it to the library early and bought my own copy.

In conclusion my house is somewhat cleaner, except for a couple windows which are WAY cleaner. I spilled some navy nail polish on my favorite tablecloth and mostly got it out. I am going to try and be a cleaner person. After I read my book, take a nap, play with my kids, and do some writing.

Heh.

Well, crud. I was going to show before and after pictures of the windows and tablecloth, and now I can’t find them on my computer. Gah. Will have to update later and should also put in funny quote from book to further entice you to get it.