Dogeared

From Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping:

We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, though somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. 

*
 I ate lunch wherever I could find enough space to seat myself without appearing to wish to insinuate myself into a group, or a conversation, and I read while I ate. Lunches were terrible. I could scarcely swallow. It seemed as if I were trying to eat a peanut-butter sandwich while hanging by the neck. It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned.
*
Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly-- My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me.

Dogeared

From Jane Austen's Mansfield Park:

"I am a very matter-of-fact, plain spoken being, and may blunder on the borders of a repartee for half an hour together without striking it out."

From Lionel Trilling's essay, Mansfield Park:

The city bears the brunt of our modern uneasiness about our life. We think of it as being the scene and the cause of the loss of the simple integrity of the spirit--in our dreams of our right true selves we live in the country. This common mode of criticism of our culture is likely to express not merely our dissatisfaction with our particular cultural situation but our dislike of culture itself, or of any culture that is not a folk culture, that is marked by the conflict of interests and the proliferation and conflict of ideas.

Dogeared

From Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride:

She's happy he's still alive: women live longer than men and men have weak hearts, sometimes they just keel over, and although she and West aren't old--they're hardly old at all--still, women her age have awakened in the morning to find dead men beside them. Tony does not consider this a morbid thought.
*
Zenia's ashes were in a sealed metal canister, like a small land-mine. Tony was familiar with such canisters, and they depressed her. They did not have the grandeur of coffins. She thought of the people inside them as having been condensed, like condensed milk.
*
Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He's easy to please, but difficult to protect.
*
But that's what happens when you love someone, thinks Tony. You cheat a little. 

 15 pages in and I've already dog-eared 4 pages. I love this woman. On the other hand, I am beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that I've already read this book, and forgot about it. Granted, my memory in general has more holes than a Chicago street, but still. The ability of a book to stay with me long after I read it is one of my measures of greatness.

Book Review

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read this book very quickly, and talked about it to anyone who would listen. I was quite wild-eyed in my fascination with it. But my ardor waned as the book went on; ultimately, I'm not sure what I would say if someone asked me what it was all about. It really wandered. And while I enjoyed the journey, by the end I was left feeling kind of empty about it. I'd still recommend it, but I haven't thought about it much since I finished the last page.



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Book Review

This Life Is in Your Hands: One Family, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone by Melissa Coleman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was telling my father-in-law's girlfriend about my current fascination with growing/gathering/raising one's own food (an idle fascination, since I am lazy and have no real desire to labor in a garden or chicken coop), and she told me I should read this book she'd just finished. So she sent it to me. But when I read the flap and realized that the book was also about the accidental death of a three-year-old, well--this mother of a three-year-old wasn't too enthusiastic about reading it. But eventually I did, and I'm glad. I was quickly engrossed, and read it in just a few days. I enjoyed the little tastes of information about organic farming--just enough to learn a little without getting bored, for a non-gardener--and was touched and drawn in by the emotional life of the author's family, which is observed and probed in such insightful detail that it's surprising that the author can write with such objective distance about her parents; and yet there is just enough of the author's own feelings--both sympathy and resentment--to keep it warm. I think Ms. Coleman must have spent a lot of well-used time in therapy to get to the place she's at in this book. I love to read stories that have this sort of spiritually balanced, clear-eyed perspective on the world--not preachy or chirpy or delusional but still positive.



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O! let my books be

The original Borders, in Ann Arbor, Michigan: closed for good.

It is truly terrifying to see this once-loathed behemoth close its doors. I cannot deny that I buy many if not most of my books online -- these days, usually used, from Alibris or Amazon. When I don't just borrow from the library. But there are few things I love more than browsing a bookstore. And while I love the quirky charm and hand-selected editing of an independent bookstore, the behemoths offered many things the independents could not. Like in-store espresso bars, and a generous sprinkling of armchairs and tables where one could sit and read for hours without raising any eyebrows. They replaced libraries in many ways -- and were even better, because you can't drink coffee at the library. This particular Borders, above, was home to many long study sessions during law school. They even let me bring my dog! I have never encountered another business that equaled that hospitality.

The lack of a chain bookstore was one of the few things I reproached of my new, small hometown. I would much rather while away a rainy afternoon with Nugget in the generous children's section of a Borders or Barnes & Noble than at McDonald's Playland. The coffee would be infinitely better, for one thing.

So I mark the passing of Borders with grief, sincerely and deeply. With a tinge of rueful irony; I find myself thinking often of that movie, You've Got Mail. That was just 13 years ago! What will happen in another 13 years?

I'm no Luddite. I understand the appeal of e-books, and I welcome them as an invigorating new medium for literature. I love that the internet has made it possible to find virtually any book you could want, rendering moot the argument that chain bookstores were bad because they homogenized and shrank the range of books available. But I grieve, and I worry. Capitalism rewards the majority, and often, I'm in the minority. A minority that no longer has the luxury to vote with her wallet.

Book Review

Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic by Peter Korn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Fascinating and compelling. I don't read nonfiction unless it's got enough of a narrative to keep me turning the pages, and this one more than fits the bill. More importantly, it's an unblinkingly honest look at what abortion really means, to the women who face that most difficult of choices, and the medical providers who make that choice possible. Including a detailed description of a second-semester abortion that was very, very hard to read--the sort of thing I could imagine encountering in pro-life literature. And yet I think it would be impossible to read this book and walk away thinking women should be denied that choice.



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Book Review

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


That rare gem: a page-turning plot that makes you think deeply about universal issues, peopled with compellingly flawed characters and rendered in lip-smackingly delicious prose. Highly recommended for anyone. And it would be a great movie. Imdb says it's in development--I hope it gets made.



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Dogeared

From Virginia Woolf's Night and Day:

... the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

*

... for whatever people say, I'm sure I shall come back to this wonderful world where one's been so happy and so miserable, where, even now, I seem to see myself stretching out my hands for another present from the great Fairy Tree whose boughs are still hung with enchanting toys, though they are rarer now, perhaps, and between the branches one sees no longer the blue sky, but the stars and the tops of the mountains.

One doesn't know any more, does one? One hasn't any advice to give one's children. One can only hope that they will have the same vision and the same power to believe, without which life would be so meaningless.

Book Review

Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Hard to get past the anti-semitism. Scott is incapable of mentioning Isaac "the Jew" without also commenting on his avarice. Literally. Every time. And Isaac is not a minor character--he's in virtually every chapter. On the other hand, Isaac's daughter Rebecca is a great female character. Her Saxon counterpart, Rowena, is quite flat in contrast. Ivanhoe is also pretty flat. There is very little insight into his or Rowena's emotional experience of the events of the book, particularly when you compare them to Isaac and Rebecca. So why am I giving it four stars? Because there are scenes in here that are unparalleled, any of which could alone justify Scott's reputation. E.g., Friar Tuck and Richard Plantagenet stepping carefully--and belligerently--into an acquaintance that quickly leads to a drunken sing-a-long before the altar of St. Dunstan.



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Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat

I recently read Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, which is set on an island in the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s. It contains a lot of descriptions of people gathering or growing their own food; fishing, digging clams, growing strawberries, raising chickens, etc.--which, I imagine, was so mmuch more common back then than it is now. For some reason I was really captivated by this, and I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of producing or gathering my own food ever since. And then today I read this article by a woman who was forced by the "Great Recession" to start living a more sustainable life--she went from buying goji berries and espresso at Whole Foods and Starbucks to buying seeds for a vegetable garden with food stamps, and dumpster diving to find fresh produce for her family. I was alternately horrified and shamed in reading it.

Shame or no, I don't think I'll be diving into any dumpsters anytime soon. But I do have half a mind to plant a vegetable garden. Only thing is, I'm really lazy. Producing or gathering one's own food require commitment and work. Also readiness to learn about and understand plant and animal life. And then there's my picky eating habits--hard to live off the earth when you refuse to eat zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, shellfish, and many other gifts of Mother Nature.

I do eat eggs (and willingly pay three times as much for eggs from vegetarian-fed, "free-range" chickens), and I like the idea of harvesting my own eggs from a backyard flock. The main deterrent there is filth. I imagine that chickens relieve themselves, and that it smells, and that someone has to do something about it. I'd rather that someone not be me. So I'll put that one off at least until my son is old enough to shovel chicken poop.

The lady who waxes my eyebrows (see? I can't even wax my own eyebrows) told me yesterday that she and her husband just got some goats. Her husband wants to use them for packing on hikes, she explained. Confused, I imagined a goat strapped to her husband's back. For the fresh milk? I asked, still obsessed with home food production. No, she explained: to carry his stuff. Oh. Goats are good at walking on mountains. Really hope she didn't realize I was picturing her husband carrying the goat up the mountain. Her goats are male. But I could get a female goat if/when we move outside the city limits, I thought. That would be cool. Also has to wait for Nugget to grow into his poop-shoveling duties though.

For now, I think I'll start with an herb garden on my windowsill. If the plants live, maybe I can move up to an outdoor vegetable garden.

Speaking of keeping plants alive, it just occurred to me that I was twice chastised by strangers today with regard to my dog. First for not having her on a leash and then for leaving her in the car while I went in the library (although technically I was not actually chastised for the library thing because I did not respond when the librarian asked "the person who owns the blue station wagon with the dog inside to please come to the front"). I don't believe I was endangering her (or anyone else), but my position also was not all that defensible in either case (thus my decision to slink away rather than argue about it with the librarian while everyone in the library craned their necks to see the abusive dog-owner). In general, unleashed dogs and dogs unattended in cars are a bad idea, I get it. But the encounters left me irritated at the way having responsibility for other beings--kids and pets--makes one particularly vulnerable to criticism for your choices. So maybe I should skip the goats and chickens.

Anyway. I'm off to the grocery store.

Dogeared

From Jill McCorkle's PS, in The Best American Short Stories 2011:

If I had your job [as a couples therapist] I might ask a person: If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life--This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe--who would you want hearing your whispers?

From Kevin Moffett's Further Interpretations of Real Life Events, ibid.:

A story needs to sing like a wound.

From Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: 

That honest tradesman's manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr. Lorry's eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.

Dogeared

From Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities:

A WONDERFUL FACT to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

*

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose, beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a handsome face, and a remarkable one.

in thy orisons/ Be all my sins rememb’red

Hamlet has resonated with me more and more as I grow older because I think of him as paralyzed by thinking too much. It seems to me that is something that becomes more of an obstacle as one grows older and acquires more knowledge. Harold Bloom argued that it's not that Hamlet thinks too much, it's that he thinks too well. He may be right--I haven't done any careful reading to assess his viewpoint, and I certainly have not thought about the play as much as Bloom--but I don't find his interpretation nearly as compelling. Which is counterintuitive; surely it be more comforting to think that I don't act because I'm such a profound and incisive thinker. But it is much more satisfying to identify with a tragic figure than with a hero. I can't tell you why, but there is plenty of evidence. The best-loved characters in literature always have flaws. Maybe it's what makes them seem human. You can't identify with a god. That's what Jesus is for. He's human; he doubts. It's funny though, that most of us tend to spend a lot of time trying to convince other people that we don't have any flaws, as if no one will love us if they know we're not perfect. (That's not just me, right?)

I will forget my nature.

I'm reading Breaking Ground, an account of events in Port Angeles (our new hometown) in 2003, when a Washington Dept. of Transportation project on the PA waterfront unearthed a cemetery of the Lower Elwah Klallam tribe (my husband's new employer). WSDOT hired a consultant before starting the project to determine whether they would be running into any such issues, but the consultant neglected to speak to a single tribal member, many of whom could have told them that the cemetery was there. Somewhat laudably, as soon as the first remains were unearthed, WSDOT began working with the tribe to try to respectfully move remains out of the path of the project, and when that proved impossible they canceled the project--a really astonishing move, in light of US history, and one that probably still rankles local non-Indians (the project would have created a lot of  much-needed jobs and other economic stimuli), although it was also the only humane alternative, to the extent that matters to anyone.

Although my sympathies were with the Indians from the start, I did find it a little hard to empathize initially, I think because I am the recent descendant of recent immigrants, and have never been in a position to view long-dead ancestors as close kin. So I could kind of understand the local whites' POV, at least until I started reading the detailed accounts of tribal members who were working with WSDOT to move the graves having to, for example, pull apart skeletons locked in an embrace, in order to take them from their grave and put the bones in boxes. That's a far cry from some abstraction about the spirits of your ancestors.

But even aside from the desecration of human remains (note that this was not the first time--previous construction on the site, including quite recent utility trenches, had gone on despite the human bones being churned up and used as backfill), I'm finding it really hard to read at times.

I've literally felt nauseous reading a background chapter about the 1855 treaty that the US government obtained to justify taking this land from the tribes, moving them to a reservation, and burning their villages. I wanted to put the book down and try to go back to what I imagine to be the American status quo--a sort of collective willful amnesia about that horror show. It strikes me that we've come a long way in acknowledging American slavery and black apartheid, when you compare it to the denial that is still so rampant regarding Indians. I don't recall learning any of these difficult truths in school. My uber-liberal high school offered an African-American History class as an alternative to the standard US history taught junior year, but in neither curriculum did we take a close look at the "treaties" that still govern US-Indian relations today. At least not that I recall. In fairness, I didn't exactly pay a lot of attention to the curriculum in high school. *cough*

Maybe it's that I grew up in the Midwest, where it was easier to pretend that Indians are mythical creatures and any skeletons being swept under the rug are not actual skeletons being physically swept. But that's still no excuse. I actually find the willful amnesia more understandable here, where the truth is unmistakably real. It's easier to think about torturing a unicorn than a horse.

And anyway it's not just in the Midwest. Just think of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. It's like a Holocaust denial, but animated and broadcast on network TV. It's crazy. I heard the Wampanoag perspective on Thanksgiving in 2005 (I have spent way too long searching for an online version of the talk I went to by Tobias Vanderhoop without success, very frustrating) and I remember feeling shocked that I'd been lied to repeatedly in school long after we all should have known better. And here I am shocked again by the truth that we would all rather forget.

One thing that strikes me about this is how it must affect Indians, who do not have the luxury of choosing to forget. What is it like to live with those ugly truths, to have them be a part of who you are? I can barely imagine how potentially crippling it would be. In fact I've attempted to write the rest of this paragraph several times and keep rejecting my attempts to imagine and voice what it would be like. I can't. The fact is I've led a blindingly privileged life. It's amazing how easy it is to overlook that.

The book has changed how I view the landscape around me, for the moment. I can't take Nugget down to watch his beloved heavy machinery haul logs around the docks without thinking of the ancient village on its wide beach, buried somewhere under our feet.

Beware the foul fiend

From Nick Reding's Methland:

Visible in the semidarkness were fine bones and bright, shining blue eyes around which Jarvis's skin had liquefied and reset in swirls. He rubbed at where his nose had been and coughed violently. Jarvis had just smoked a hit of meth by holding the glass pipe with his rotted teeth. Using what was left of his right hand, he jostled the lighter until it wedged between the featureless nub of his thumb and the tiny protrusion of what was once his pinkie, managing somehow to roll teh striker of the red Bic against the flint. Suddenly, his eyes were as wildly dilated as a patient waiting in the low light of an opthalmologist's office. ... He was always cold, he said, and hadn't slept more than three hours at a time in years. His skin was still covered in open, pussing sores. He had no job and no hope of getting one. The last time he "went uptpwn," as he calls going to a Main Street bar, was eighteen months earlier. That night he was in his old hangout, teh Do Drop Inn, when another customer hit Jarvis in the face because he wanted to know what it was like to slug a man with no nose.

(What is dogeared?)

A merrier hour was never wasted there

Best Books for a two-year-old (aka the books my son is making me read over and over ad infinitum right now):
1. Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton

We've read this so many times Nugget can "read" it to me. He screams with laughter when we get to the "oops." "Silly turkey!" I say, and explain why it's silly: "His pants are on his head! His shirt is upside-down! You can't go swimming in your clothes!" "Kurkey!" Nugget yells and falls over laughing. Every. single. time.

2. Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell (with lift-the-flaps)

The flaps on our copy are battered and torn, but it still holds its charm for Nugget. This was a favorite even a year ago, when I sought out and bought ever lift-the-flap book I could find because it was one of the few ways a book could hold his attention. Now as we read it I ask him to name all the animals and we talk about the sounds they make.

3. Biggest Word Book Ever by Richard Scarry

This book is bigger than Nugget, and he loves to sit on top of it on the floor while we use it to teach him new words. Also to walk and jump on it and turn it into a tent.

4. My First ABC by MOMA


I have been dissatisfied with a lot of alphabet books because they don't use enough easily recognizable pictures, but this one is pretty good (with some exceptions, like "ex" for X which is really dumb and "zigzag" for Zwhich is a little absract and "ox" for O because even I don't know the difference between a cow and an ox and how hard is it to find a better picture for O?). The uppercase and lowercase letters are at the bottom of each page so I can point to them and say the letter and then ask Nugget to identify the picture. Plus I get to look at some art, which is never a bad thing, especially when you are reading the same book every night for months.

5. Machines at Work by Byron Barton


We have every board book about trucks that exists, and this is Nugget's favorite right now. It shows several different kinds of trucks and how they are used, and takes you through the workers' day from starting work in the morning to lunchtime to going home for the night. We like to add sound effects and bang on the book to act out the wrecking ball and jackhammers.

Dogeared

From Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle:

For a while I wanted to be an opera singer. Even though they were fat they could wear extravagant costumes, nobody laughed at them, they were loved and praised. Unfortunately I couldn't sing. But it always appealed to me: to be able to stand up there in front of everyone and shriek as loud as you could, about hatred and love and rage and despair, scream at the top of your lungs and have it come out music. That would be something.

(What is dogeared?)

Dogeared

From Jonathan Franzen's Freedom:

She was a grave and silent little person with the disconcerting habit of holding your gaze unblinkingly, as if you had nothing in common.

As she talked on and on, he found himself admiring her determination to survive without success of the sort still plausibly available to him.

He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. . . . This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual and definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

(What is dogeared?)

***Please combat the recidivism of youth offenders in Illinois by voting at http://www.refresheverything.com/TabulaRasa for my nonprofit to win $250K from Pepsi to build a transitional living center for teens leaving jail!***

Dogeared

From Bill Buford's Heat:

"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"
Filippo glanced casually in Dario's direction. "What in the dick are you talking about?" (Che cazzo dici?) he asked lightly, continuing the line of genitalia metaphors that so robustly characterize male Tuscan exchnges.
"You fat head of a penis," Dario said loudly. "Why is this on your menu?"

You don't tell a romantic that it can all be explained by economics--especially when the romantic is your host. What's more, the romantic might be right: maybe it wasn't all economics. Maybe economics itself was a metaphor, a pseudo-scientific way of acounting for something much more mysterious, this profound, dark thing Giovanni referred to as the Tuscan soul.

(What is dogeared?)

***Please combat the recidivism of youth offenders in Illinois by voting at http://www.refresheverything.com/TabulaRasa for my nonprofit to win $250K from Pepsi to build a transitional living center for teens leaving jail!***