The Volokh Conspiracy has a feature called Saturdays with Stendhal.
I've not read any Stendhal.
But I thought I might take a leaf from their book, and have Wednesdays with Wharton.
Here's a bit from The Custom of the Country.
Mrs. Spragg, once reconciled--or at least resigned--to the mysterious necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of Undine's, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful find--how could you tell it would be such a fit?"--it came to her quite easily to answer: "Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take...."
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, January 12, 2009
At some point a couple of years ago I listed some literature I remembered reading in high school. Apparently they are still torturing high schoolers with some of these things, because people stumble across my blog looking for information about these stories. The most frequently looked-for story is A.B. Guthrie's "Bargain". It's not available on the internet, probably because it's not in the public domain, but the book it was published in is out of print. Here it is: The Big It and other stories. I found it at the library.
A real quick synopsis - Mr. Baumer, a grocer on the American frontier, is fed up with having his whiskey stolen and being generally treated with disrespect by Slade, a freighter - that's the guy who drives a horsedrawn wagon to transport goods, including the supplies Baumer orders to stock in his store. The other freighters steal whiskey too but for some reason Slade - large, rough, violent, illiterate - is the focus of Baumer's anger. There are some confrontations, things escalate, and Slade assaults Baumer and breaks his hand. To the surprise of the narrator, a schoolboy employed by Baumer, Slade is subsequently engaged again to pick up supplies. He doesn't return, and is found dead on the roadway with the supplies still in the wagon. Upon unloading the supplies, the narrator finds that instead of whiskey, Baumer has ordered wood alcohol. Slade stole his drink as usual and it killed him. He couldn't read "Deadly Poison" on the barrel.
I remember the debate we had in our class as to whether Mr. Baumer committed murder. I contended that he did, because the action he took had the sole motive of bringing about Slade's death. He knew Slade would drink the "whiskey" and he knew it would kill him. Others said that Slade wasn't murdered because he knew the whiskey wasn't his and he'd been told not to steal it. No court could touch him, my classmates said. I'm not too sure about that, actually, but even if true, there's a difference between whether a person is guilty of a thing and whether that thing is demonstrably against the law. So this is one of those things where there's no one right answer (although your teacher may have strong feelings and may try to insist that there is) and it's a useful exercise in working out your moral compass.
Some elements of the story that I notice upon rereading:
The first thing we see Baumer saying to the narrator is this. "Better study, Al. Is good to know to read and write and figure." This possibly explains some of the contempt he has for Slade, a grown man who can't read, and foreshadows what happens to him. The very end of the story:
"Hurry now," Mr. Baumer said. "Is late." For a flash and no longer I saw through the mist in his eyes, saw, you might say, that hilly chin repeated there. "Then ve go home, Al. Is good to know how to read."
The description of Baumer contrasts mightily with that of Slade.
Here's Baumer:
I stood and studied him for a minute, seeing a small, stooped man with a little paunch bulging through his unbuttoned vest.... There was nothing in his looks to set itself in your mind unless maybe it was his chin, which was a small, pink hill in the gentle plain of his face. [Chin = stubbornness? Defiance?]
Slade:
Then I recognized the lean, raw shape of him and the muscles flowing down into the sloped shoulders, and in the settling darkness I filled the picture in - the dark skin and the flat cheeks and the peevish eyes and the mustache growing rank.
Also:
I had heard it said that Slade could make a horse scream with that whip.
Baumer thinks Slade hates him for being an immigrant, and indeed, Slade calls him "Dutchie" (a nickname for Germans). He despises Slade for betraying his trust in stealing from him, but as our narrator points out, the other freighters steal too. "A man makes mistakes," Baumer says twice about his poor judgment in trusting Slade. Maybe he's angry at Slade because he feels stupid about having trusted him? Baumer doesn't see his continuing provocation of Slade's wrath as a mistake, not at all, even though he points out a time or two that Slade is bigger than he is, and that physically he couldn't hope to best him.
After the confrontation:
He spent most of his time at the high desk, sending me or Ed out on the errands he used to run, like posting and getting the mail. Sometimes I wondered if that was because he was afraid of meeting Slade. He could just as well have gone himself. He wasted a lot of hours just looking at nothing, though I will have to say he worked hard at learning to write left-handed.
It's not clear what's happening here. Is Baumer afraid of Slade, as Al thinks? I'm not really feeling that. Is he nursing his grievance until he's angry enough to do something about it? Is he trying to think what to do? Does he already know what he's going to do, and is only waiting for the cold weather so that hypothermia will make Slade's death from methanol poisoning more certain? Is he wrestling with his conscience? I don't see any indication from Al's observation and reporting that Baumer's conscience bothers him at all about what he's doing.
So was he justified in taking Slade out that way? His right hand is permanently damaged, remember, and the law won't do anything about that. Should he have chalked up the whiskey loss to the cost of doing business, as he did with the other freighters, and stayed out of Slade's path? Could he have kept his self-respect if he had? Would he have done what he did if there was any real chance the law would have come down on him?
Readers, feel free to leave comments or questions, or just lurk if you want to.
A real quick synopsis - Mr. Baumer, a grocer on the American frontier, is fed up with having his whiskey stolen and being generally treated with disrespect by Slade, a freighter - that's the guy who drives a horsedrawn wagon to transport goods, including the supplies Baumer orders to stock in his store. The other freighters steal whiskey too but for some reason Slade - large, rough, violent, illiterate - is the focus of Baumer's anger. There are some confrontations, things escalate, and Slade assaults Baumer and breaks his hand. To the surprise of the narrator, a schoolboy employed by Baumer, Slade is subsequently engaged again to pick up supplies. He doesn't return, and is found dead on the roadway with the supplies still in the wagon. Upon unloading the supplies, the narrator finds that instead of whiskey, Baumer has ordered wood alcohol. Slade stole his drink as usual and it killed him. He couldn't read "Deadly Poison" on the barrel.
I remember the debate we had in our class as to whether Mr. Baumer committed murder. I contended that he did, because the action he took had the sole motive of bringing about Slade's death. He knew Slade would drink the "whiskey" and he knew it would kill him. Others said that Slade wasn't murdered because he knew the whiskey wasn't his and he'd been told not to steal it. No court could touch him, my classmates said. I'm not too sure about that, actually, but even if true, there's a difference between whether a person is guilty of a thing and whether that thing is demonstrably against the law. So this is one of those things where there's no one right answer (although your teacher may have strong feelings and may try to insist that there is) and it's a useful exercise in working out your moral compass.
Some elements of the story that I notice upon rereading:
The first thing we see Baumer saying to the narrator is this. "Better study, Al. Is good to know to read and write and figure." This possibly explains some of the contempt he has for Slade, a grown man who can't read, and foreshadows what happens to him. The very end of the story:
"Hurry now," Mr. Baumer said. "Is late." For a flash and no longer I saw through the mist in his eyes, saw, you might say, that hilly chin repeated there. "Then ve go home, Al. Is good to know how to read."
The description of Baumer contrasts mightily with that of Slade.
Here's Baumer:
I stood and studied him for a minute, seeing a small, stooped man with a little paunch bulging through his unbuttoned vest.... There was nothing in his looks to set itself in your mind unless maybe it was his chin, which was a small, pink hill in the gentle plain of his face. [Chin = stubbornness? Defiance?]
Slade:
Then I recognized the lean, raw shape of him and the muscles flowing down into the sloped shoulders, and in the settling darkness I filled the picture in - the dark skin and the flat cheeks and the peevish eyes and the mustache growing rank.
Also:
I had heard it said that Slade could make a horse scream with that whip.
Baumer thinks Slade hates him for being an immigrant, and indeed, Slade calls him "Dutchie" (a nickname for Germans). He despises Slade for betraying his trust in stealing from him, but as our narrator points out, the other freighters steal too. "A man makes mistakes," Baumer says twice about his poor judgment in trusting Slade. Maybe he's angry at Slade because he feels stupid about having trusted him? Baumer doesn't see his continuing provocation of Slade's wrath as a mistake, not at all, even though he points out a time or two that Slade is bigger than he is, and that physically he couldn't hope to best him.
After the confrontation:
He spent most of his time at the high desk, sending me or Ed out on the errands he used to run, like posting and getting the mail. Sometimes I wondered if that was because he was afraid of meeting Slade. He could just as well have gone himself. He wasted a lot of hours just looking at nothing, though I will have to say he worked hard at learning to write left-handed.
It's not clear what's happening here. Is Baumer afraid of Slade, as Al thinks? I'm not really feeling that. Is he nursing his grievance until he's angry enough to do something about it? Is he trying to think what to do? Does he already know what he's going to do, and is only waiting for the cold weather so that hypothermia will make Slade's death from methanol poisoning more certain? Is he wrestling with his conscience? I don't see any indication from Al's observation and reporting that Baumer's conscience bothers him at all about what he's doing.
So was he justified in taking Slade out that way? His right hand is permanently damaged, remember, and the law won't do anything about that. Should he have chalked up the whiskey loss to the cost of doing business, as he did with the other freighters, and stayed out of Slade's path? Could he have kept his self-respect if he had? Would he have done what he did if there was any real chance the law would have come down on him?
Readers, feel free to leave comments or questions, or just lurk if you want to.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Follow-up to the last post; I hope nobody thinks what's going on now is anything new.
Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort's situation. They were not definite, but they were hopeful. It was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening, when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of relief.
New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle. But to be obliged to offer them up would be not only painful but inconvenient. The disappearance of the Beauforts would leave a considerable void in their compact little circle; and those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball-room in New York.
...
On the Wednesday morning, when [Archer] reached his office, Mr. Letterblair met him with a troubled face. Beaufort, after all, had not managed to "tide over"; but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to predominate. In consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors were likely to close before the day was over. The ugliest things were being said of Beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre, and his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.
The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated. "I've seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this. Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another. And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort? What CAN be done about her? I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age, there's no knowing what effect this affair may have on her. She always believed in Beaufort--she made a friend of him! And there's the whole Dallas connection: poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you. Her only chance would be to leave her husband--yet how can any one tell her so? Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses."
...
The butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting-room door, announcing: "Mrs. Julius Beaufort"--and had then closed it again on the two ladies. They must have been together, he thought, about an hour. When Mrs. Mingott's bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped away unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room. She seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete control of her body and brain. The mulatto maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid everything straight in the room, and went away; but at three in the morning the bell rang again, and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons (for old Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their mistress sitting up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm.
The stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles. But the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases that Regina Beaufort had come to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up her husband, see them through--not to "desert" them, as she called it--in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their monstrous dishonour.
"I said to her: "Honour's always been honour, and honesty honesty, in Manson Mingott's house, and will be till I'm carried out of it feet first,'" the old woman had stammered into her daughter's ear, in the thick voice of the partly paralysed. "And when she said: `But my name, Auntie--my name's Regina Dallas,' I said: `It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.'"
From The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920. Read it here.
Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort's situation. They were not definite, but they were hopeful. It was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening, when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of relief.
New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle. But to be obliged to offer them up would be not only painful but inconvenient. The disappearance of the Beauforts would leave a considerable void in their compact little circle; and those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball-room in New York.
...
On the Wednesday morning, when [Archer] reached his office, Mr. Letterblair met him with a troubled face. Beaufort, after all, had not managed to "tide over"; but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to predominate. In consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors were likely to close before the day was over. The ugliest things were being said of Beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre, and his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.
The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated. "I've seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this. Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another. And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort? What CAN be done about her? I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age, there's no knowing what effect this affair may have on her. She always believed in Beaufort--she made a friend of him! And there's the whole Dallas connection: poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you. Her only chance would be to leave her husband--yet how can any one tell her so? Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses."
...
The butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting-room door, announcing: "Mrs. Julius Beaufort"--and had then closed it again on the two ladies. They must have been together, he thought, about an hour. When Mrs. Mingott's bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped away unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room. She seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete control of her body and brain. The mulatto maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid everything straight in the room, and went away; but at three in the morning the bell rang again, and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons (for old Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their mistress sitting up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm.
The stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles. But the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases that Regina Beaufort had come to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up her husband, see them through--not to "desert" them, as she called it--in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their monstrous dishonour.
"I said to her: "Honour's always been honour, and honesty honesty, in Manson Mingott's house, and will be till I'm carried out of it feet first,'" the old woman had stammered into her daughter's ear, in the thick voice of the partly paralysed. "And when she said: `But my name, Auntie--my name's Regina Dallas,' I said: `It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.'"
From The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920. Read it here.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897
Hedge fund founder Thierry de la Villehuchet kills self after losing $1B in Madoff scandal
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897
Hedge fund founder Thierry de la Villehuchet kills self after losing $1B in Madoff scandal
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Star Spangled mess: Mavs' Howard insults anthem
DALLAS (AP) — The battered reputation of Josh Howard took another hit this week when an online video surfaced showing the Dallas Mavericks forward disrespecting the national anthem.
In a video posted on YouTube, Howard is shown on a football field at a charity flag football game. As the national anthem plays in the background, Howard approaches a camera and says: "'The Star Spangled Banner' is going on right now. I don't even celebrate that (expletive). I'm black."
Why am I reminded of The Man Without a Country?
“WASHINGTON (with a date which must have been late in 1807).
“SIR—You will receive from Lieutenant Neale the person of Philip Nolan, late a lieutenant in the United States Army.
“This person on his trial by court-martial expressed, with an oath, the wish that he might ‘never hear of the United States again.’
“The Court sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled.
“For the present, the execution of the order is intrusted by the President to this Department.
“You will take the prisoner on board your ship, and keep him there with such precautions as shall prevent his escape.
“You will provide him with such quarters, rations, and clothing as would be proper for an officer of his late rank, if he were a passenger on your vessel on the business of his Government.
“The gentlemen on board will make any arrangements agreeable to themselves regarding his society. He is to be exposed to no indignity of any kind, nor is he ever unnecessarily to be reminded that he is a prisoner.
“But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country or to see any information regarding it; and you will especially caution all the officers under your command to take care, that, in the various indulgences which may be granted, this rule, in which his punishment is involved, shall not be broken.
“It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this intention.
“Respectfully yours,
“W. SOUTHARD, for the
“Secretary of the Navy.”
You couldn't really do what was done to Philip Nolan in the story. It was cruel and it certainly was unusual. I wonder if they even teach that story anymore.
DALLAS (AP) — The battered reputation of Josh Howard took another hit this week when an online video surfaced showing the Dallas Mavericks forward disrespecting the national anthem.
In a video posted on YouTube, Howard is shown on a football field at a charity flag football game. As the national anthem plays in the background, Howard approaches a camera and says: "'The Star Spangled Banner' is going on right now. I don't even celebrate that (expletive). I'm black."
Why am I reminded of The Man Without a Country?
“WASHINGTON (with a date which must have been late in 1807).
“SIR—You will receive from Lieutenant Neale the person of Philip Nolan, late a lieutenant in the United States Army.
“This person on his trial by court-martial expressed, with an oath, the wish that he might ‘never hear of the United States again.’
“The Court sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled.
“For the present, the execution of the order is intrusted by the President to this Department.
“You will take the prisoner on board your ship, and keep him there with such precautions as shall prevent his escape.
“You will provide him with such quarters, rations, and clothing as would be proper for an officer of his late rank, if he were a passenger on your vessel on the business of his Government.
“The gentlemen on board will make any arrangements agreeable to themselves regarding his society. He is to be exposed to no indignity of any kind, nor is he ever unnecessarily to be reminded that he is a prisoner.
“But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country or to see any information regarding it; and you will especially caution all the officers under your command to take care, that, in the various indulgences which may be granted, this rule, in which his punishment is involved, shall not be broken.
“It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this intention.
“Respectfully yours,
“W. SOUTHARD, for the
“Secretary of the Navy.”
You couldn't really do what was done to Philip Nolan in the story. It was cruel and it certainly was unusual. I wonder if they even teach that story anymore.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
I want to talk about raising a literate child. I can do that because, since the definition of "expert" is "parent of one child", I am an expert. Disclaimer: You can't make your kid be literate any more than you can make him or her anything else. People are who they are from the get-go. But you can influence a kid to go the way you want. You might as well try, since you'll pretty definitely influence him or her to go the way you don't want. I've read that "the footsteps your kids follow in are the ones you thought you'd covered up".
Anyway, back to the literate child. Before I became pregnant with F, I was listening to the radio one day - and I can tell you exactly where in Memphis I was driving at the time - and I heard someone authoritative talk about the importance of reading Mother Goose rhymes to babies. The cadences and the rhymes point out the way the language is put together. That made a lot of sense to me. When F came along, we acquired a big green Mother Goose book. Maybe my mom gave it to us? It has lots of big colorful pictures and lots and lots of nursery rhymes. I held F on my lap and read them to her. When she was big enough to turn the pages, I'd read all of the poems on one page and she'd study the picture for a while, then she'd turn the page and I'd read the poems on that page.
By the way, on that studying the picture thing: I and my sibs were read to quite a bit, and I can run across the Little Golden Books, which are still in print, and know what the pictures inside will look like even though I haven't cracked those things in decades.
F had short books when she was a toddler. We belonged to a book club, maybe associated with "Parents" magazine, and we got lots of little short books from them. R or I read one or two of them to her every night before bed.
At age 4 I thought it was time to start reading chapter books to her, a chapter a night. I took inspiration from Dick Estelle, the Radio Reader - anyone remember him? I thought if he could do it I could. We started with The Hobbit. I paraphrased just a bit as needed for clarity and when the story might bog down from a 4-yr-old's perspective (in Mirkwood, and after they found the dragon) but other than that we read that sucker straight through. After that it was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That one really motivated F to learn to read. She wouldn't let me stop after one chapter. I had to keep reading every evening as long as I could. I remember once croaking, "I have to stop now," and she said, "Oh, no, Mommy, I have to find out what's happening to Edmund and the White Witch!" and she took the book from me and tried to force meaning from it.
After that we skipped over to The Magician's Nephew, and then we left Narnia and read some other things. We did Ramona the Pest right before she started kindergarten, and The Door in the Wall (terrific story) and then we started the Little House books. We read ALL of those, and there are quite a few. If you start with the first one, Little House in the Big Woods, and proceed chronologically, the reading difficulty progresses as Laura gets older. Sometimes when I was reading F her chapter, R would come in and sit and listen to the story. He enjoyed taking a turn doing the reading too, if I was busy or tired or just if he wanted to.
And let me interject - when you're doing this you don't just read every word on the page, one after the other, like a robot. You stop and ask questions: What do you think is going to happen next? Do you think it was a good idea for her to do that? What should she have done? Or if a scene has an incomplete description, ask the kid to fill in from her imagination. This encourages the child to pause and reflect while reading, and it's an excellent opportunity to get those little character-shaping lectures in that parents need to do. "See, all of this happened because she didn't tell her mommy the truth" - that kind of thing.
We read to F every night until she could read faster to herself. When she reached first grade, they sent her back to read to the kindergartners because they wanted those children to see that a small child like themselves really could read. She chose The Monster at the End of This Book and she read with great expression, because that's another thing: when you read to a kid, you have to do different voices for different people, and slow down dramatically, or sigh as you read, or whatever it takes to make the story real.
(Never stopped reading to her altogether, by the way - I remember reading a Katherine Anne Porter short story to her, for instance, probably close to the end of high school. And I took my inspiration there from The Princess Bride, the book, in which it's the father reading to the kid, and he tells the kid's mom that his father continued reading to his children into their teens.)
After that my boosting of F's literacy mostly consisted of suggesting books for her to read and talking with her about her reading material. I read virtually all of the books she had to read, from elementary school through high school. Some of the selections made me wonder: I was not the only parent horrified at The Giver for kids going into 5th grade; the boy watching his father kill the low-birth-weight twin even as he talked baby-talk to it was a bit much, we thought. And then in high school, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I had not read it before, and loved it. F hated it. But I read it identifying with the adult narrator, looking back at all of the sad, funny, scary, horrifying, infuriating events of her girlhood that made her into the person she became. F read it identifying with the little girl in the story, and if you read it that way it's pretty much unbearable.
I wrote here about forcing her to read Rider at the Gate, a book she didn't initially want to read and subsequently loved, and here about using Jane Eyre and The Good Earth to make a point about what makes a person a moral person. We talked about poetry, too.
This summer I inflicted A Yellow Raft in Blue Water on her. She read it all pretty much in one sitting, complained bitterly about how depressing it was (although she liked the parts about Rayona), and I'll bet anything she'll be taking it off the shelf again at some point even as she is asking herself why.
Anyway, back to the literate child. Before I became pregnant with F, I was listening to the radio one day - and I can tell you exactly where in Memphis I was driving at the time - and I heard someone authoritative talk about the importance of reading Mother Goose rhymes to babies. The cadences and the rhymes point out the way the language is put together. That made a lot of sense to me. When F came along, we acquired a big green Mother Goose book. Maybe my mom gave it to us? It has lots of big colorful pictures and lots and lots of nursery rhymes. I held F on my lap and read them to her. When she was big enough to turn the pages, I'd read all of the poems on one page and she'd study the picture for a while, then she'd turn the page and I'd read the poems on that page.
By the way, on that studying the picture thing: I and my sibs were read to quite a bit, and I can run across the Little Golden Books, which are still in print, and know what the pictures inside will look like even though I haven't cracked those things in decades.
F had short books when she was a toddler. We belonged to a book club, maybe associated with "Parents" magazine, and we got lots of little short books from them. R or I read one or two of them to her every night before bed.
At age 4 I thought it was time to start reading chapter books to her, a chapter a night. I took inspiration from Dick Estelle, the Radio Reader - anyone remember him? I thought if he could do it I could. We started with The Hobbit. I paraphrased just a bit as needed for clarity and when the story might bog down from a 4-yr-old's perspective (in Mirkwood, and after they found the dragon) but other than that we read that sucker straight through. After that it was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That one really motivated F to learn to read. She wouldn't let me stop after one chapter. I had to keep reading every evening as long as I could. I remember once croaking, "I have to stop now," and she said, "Oh, no, Mommy, I have to find out what's happening to Edmund and the White Witch!" and she took the book from me and tried to force meaning from it.
After that we skipped over to The Magician's Nephew, and then we left Narnia and read some other things. We did Ramona the Pest right before she started kindergarten, and The Door in the Wall (terrific story) and then we started the Little House books. We read ALL of those, and there are quite a few. If you start with the first one, Little House in the Big Woods, and proceed chronologically, the reading difficulty progresses as Laura gets older. Sometimes when I was reading F her chapter, R would come in and sit and listen to the story. He enjoyed taking a turn doing the reading too, if I was busy or tired or just if he wanted to.
And let me interject - when you're doing this you don't just read every word on the page, one after the other, like a robot. You stop and ask questions: What do you think is going to happen next? Do you think it was a good idea for her to do that? What should she have done? Or if a scene has an incomplete description, ask the kid to fill in from her imagination. This encourages the child to pause and reflect while reading, and it's an excellent opportunity to get those little character-shaping lectures in that parents need to do. "See, all of this happened because she didn't tell her mommy the truth" - that kind of thing.
We read to F every night until she could read faster to herself. When she reached first grade, they sent her back to read to the kindergartners because they wanted those children to see that a small child like themselves really could read. She chose The Monster at the End of This Book and she read with great expression, because that's another thing: when you read to a kid, you have to do different voices for different people, and slow down dramatically, or sigh as you read, or whatever it takes to make the story real.
(Never stopped reading to her altogether, by the way - I remember reading a Katherine Anne Porter short story to her, for instance, probably close to the end of high school. And I took my inspiration there from The Princess Bride, the book, in which it's the father reading to the kid, and he tells the kid's mom that his father continued reading to his children into their teens.)
After that my boosting of F's literacy mostly consisted of suggesting books for her to read and talking with her about her reading material. I read virtually all of the books she had to read, from elementary school through high school. Some of the selections made me wonder: I was not the only parent horrified at The Giver for kids going into 5th grade; the boy watching his father kill the low-birth-weight twin even as he talked baby-talk to it was a bit much, we thought. And then in high school, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I had not read it before, and loved it. F hated it. But I read it identifying with the adult narrator, looking back at all of the sad, funny, scary, horrifying, infuriating events of her girlhood that made her into the person she became. F read it identifying with the little girl in the story, and if you read it that way it's pretty much unbearable.
I wrote here about forcing her to read Rider at the Gate, a book she didn't initially want to read and subsequently loved, and here about using Jane Eyre and The Good Earth to make a point about what makes a person a moral person. We talked about poetry, too.
This summer I inflicted A Yellow Raft in Blue Water on her. She read it all pretty much in one sitting, complained bitterly about how depressing it was (although she liked the parts about Rayona), and I'll bet anything she'll be taking it off the shelf again at some point even as she is asking herself why.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
So I'm rereading Edith Wharton's fluffy little novel The Glimpses of the Moon and I ran across this:
He sent a pneumatic telegram to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing to say that he would call on her that afternoon at four.
This is Paris, 1922 or so. What in the heck, I asked the longsuffering R who was trying to read his own book, could a pneumatic telegram be? Is it referring to the inflated tires of the bicycle messengers? For once R couldn't answer my question so I looked it up.
Check this out: The Internet of Tubes
How extremely cool.
He sent a pneumatic telegram to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing to say that he would call on her that afternoon at four.
This is Paris, 1922 or so. What in the heck, I asked the longsuffering R who was trying to read his own book, could a pneumatic telegram be? Is it referring to the inflated tires of the bicycle messengers? For once R couldn't answer my question so I looked it up.
Check this out: The Internet of Tubes
How extremely cool.
Monday, February 18, 2008
I've gotten a few hits from people looking for explanations of "The Lady's Maid's Bell". So it wasn't just us, Tsiporah.
: )
Here.
: )
Here.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Tsiporah says she's having trouble commenting. I'm going to turn off the word verification. I'll have to turn it back on if I get comment spam but maybe the bots will take a while to find me.
Anyway, so Tsiporah thought "The Lady's Maid's Bell" had an abrupt ending and she wasn't sure what happened. I emailed this to her:
Yes, "The Lady's Maid's Bell" did have an abrupt ending. I didn't get it right away. I made R and F read it, and my sister, sister-in-law and mother, so we could all discuss what happened.
I asked R why Mrs. Brympton didn't want to ring the bell to call Hartley and he had to explain that to me - whenever she rang that bell, Emma Saxon answered. Much as she liked Emma, she really didn't want to see her ghost. That's why all the other maids had left, of course.
Emma wanted Hartley to warn Mr. Ranford not to come to the house, but she couldn't explain to Hartley what she wanted.
My sister had to explain this part to me:
At the end, Mr. Ranford had come through the garden to visit Mrs. Brympton secretly at night. Were they having a physical affair? Don't know - Hartley was surprised to see that Mrs. Brympton was still clothed b/c she thought she'd gone to bed. Looks like if it was an actual affair she'd have had some of her clothes off! Brympton had smelled a rat and only pretended to leave, and had doubled back to the house to catch his wife with Ranford. Emma stopped him at the door of the dressing room to give Ranford time to split. She must have cared about Ranford b/c he cared about Mrs. Brympton. Unfortunately, it was all too much for poor Mrs. Brympton's heart.
Ranford limped at the funeral b/c he hurt his foot or ankle jumping out the window. Brympton knew but he couldn't prove it.
So it's kind of a thriller in a dark, subdued way.
One thing that "The Lady's Maid's Bell" and "To Build a Fire" have in common is a driving plot that pulls you along. You know something is going to happen. They both set up an atmosphere - in TLMB it's the gloomy house and the dripping woods, in "Fire" it's the extreme cold.
Here's another Wharton story but it's very different.
Xingu
It's about some women who are trying to be cultured; they're trying too hard and they don't have a clue, and the free spirit among them tries to rescue them but they're too dull to see it. It's pretty funny, and it's one of my favorites.
Anyway, so Tsiporah thought "The Lady's Maid's Bell" had an abrupt ending and she wasn't sure what happened. I emailed this to her:
Yes, "The Lady's Maid's Bell" did have an abrupt ending. I didn't get it right away. I made R and F read it, and my sister, sister-in-law and mother, so we could all discuss what happened.
I asked R why Mrs. Brympton didn't want to ring the bell to call Hartley and he had to explain that to me - whenever she rang that bell, Emma Saxon answered. Much as she liked Emma, she really didn't want to see her ghost. That's why all the other maids had left, of course.
Emma wanted Hartley to warn Mr. Ranford not to come to the house, but she couldn't explain to Hartley what she wanted.
My sister had to explain this part to me:
At the end, Mr. Ranford had come through the garden to visit Mrs. Brympton secretly at night. Were they having a physical affair? Don't know - Hartley was surprised to see that Mrs. Brympton was still clothed b/c she thought she'd gone to bed. Looks like if it was an actual affair she'd have had some of her clothes off! Brympton had smelled a rat and only pretended to leave, and had doubled back to the house to catch his wife with Ranford. Emma stopped him at the door of the dressing room to give Ranford time to split. She must have cared about Ranford b/c he cared about Mrs. Brympton. Unfortunately, it was all too much for poor Mrs. Brympton's heart.
Ranford limped at the funeral b/c he hurt his foot or ankle jumping out the window. Brympton knew but he couldn't prove it.
So it's kind of a thriller in a dark, subdued way.
One thing that "The Lady's Maid's Bell" and "To Build a Fire" have in common is a driving plot that pulls you along. You know something is going to happen. They both set up an atmosphere - in TLMB it's the gloomy house and the dripping woods, in "Fire" it's the extreme cold.
Here's another Wharton story but it's very different.
Xingu
It's about some women who are trying to be cultured; they're trying too hard and they don't have a clue, and the free spirit among them tries to rescue them but they're too dull to see it. It's pretty funny, and it's one of my favorites.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
I think sometimes about how people change, individually, and how society changes. Human nature doesn't change, does it? But things that are socially acceptable become less so, or more so, over time. Are we getting better? Is it better that we don't (usually) openly make fun of mentally retarded people, or hide them away in shame? Oh yes. On the other hand, parents of children with Down syndrome report being asked by complete strangers why they didn't abort them, as though they had a duty to do so. That's not better.
And one has to ask what society is, anyway. I tend to think we each have our own society: people we hang with, in real life or on the net, people whose opinions we read in the newspaper or whose shows we watch on TV. So whether violent video games, for instance, affect society probably depends on whose society we're talking about. Unless I am the victim of a violent criminal who took his inspiration from those games, they don't affect my society at all. Except insofar as I care about people I don't have dealings with, as I am supposed to do, and fret about their societies.
Anyway, one of the things I think about is the changing acceptability of words. The n-word comes to mind, of course. There is a book I really like: Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton, one of my favorite writers. One of the reasons I like her work is that she draws her characters so finely, and includes such detail in her stories, that you can pick up all kind of social nuances that have disappeared since her day. (An example is in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", which is one of the stories I linked to in my previous post. The exchange between Hartley, the lady's maid who narrates the story, and Mrs. Railton, neatly illustrates how each of these women know their "place", yet they appear to like each other. They are totally comfortable with social distinctions we don't have now.)
So in Twilight Sleep there is a fairly tragic character in Nona, Pauline's daughter. Nona at 19 is the conscience of the book. She's never had any real spiritual guidance from her mother, although her mother would argue that. She's left Nona to develop her own spiritual/ethical compass as best she can, and Nona has done pretty well; better perhaps than her mother would like. For instance, Nona doesn't see the social distinctions the way Pauline does. Pauline's secretary, Maisie, has a mother who develops cancer. Pauline sees this as an inconvenience for herself, although she tries to push this down, and generously offers to pay for all of Maisie's mother's care. But it's Nona who goes to the hospital and actually sits with Maisie, and holds her hand, while her mother has surgery. Pauline worries that Nona is just a little too good, really. Here:
Pauline turned a tender smile on her daughter. "It's so like you, Nona, to want to be with Maisie for the operation - so fine, dear."
Voice and smile were full of praise; yet behind the praise (Nona also knew) lurked the unformulated apprehension: "All this running after sick people and unhappy people - is it going to turn into a vocation?" Nothing could have been more distasteful to Mrs. Manford than the idea that her only daughter should be not only good, but merely good: like poor Agnes Heuston, say ... Nona could hear her mother murmuring, "I can't imagine where on earth she got it from," as if alluding to some physical defect unaccountable in the offspring of two superbly sound progenitors.
You see here that besides being empathetic with Maisie, Nona has more insight into Pauline's "unformulated apprehension" than even Pauline does.
Yet here is Nona out on a date: "Isn't there a rather good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward there's that n--- dancing at the Housetop."
How jarring that is. One thinks that when this book was brought back into print they could have changed that line: "afterward there's jazz at the Housetop" for instance. Because if Nona were a girl of today she would bite her tongue off before she'd say that word. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how the corporate view of what is or is not acceptable changes.
Let me pause and say that of course one realizes this is fiction. At the same time, Nona is a very important character in the book, and her depiction has internal consistency throughout. If it had ever been brought to her attention that the n-word is rude and hurtful she would not have said it. Either it would not have been brought to her attention (very possible) or it simply was not the derogatory term then that it is now.
So the minor issue here is that one reads these books and is jarred by this kind of thing - Twilight Sleep also includes a much more problematic outburst of anti-Semitism by a less sympathetic character - and wonders whether the text should really be left as it is, which causes one to hesitate before recommending it to people it might upset.
The other issue, and the reason why these books should probably be left as they are, is that in many cases you kind of have to judge people and events by the standards of the day. Not every case, of course. Major things like murder and rape have always been wrong. And individuals or (hopefully) small groups always have and always will find ways to rationalize doing what they want to do, even when they know they're wrong. Use of words, though, don't you have to take that in context? There was a school somewhere that I read about a few weeks ago, that wasn't allowed to put on a play based on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" because originally in England (never here) it was published as "Ten Little N---s". That was in 1932, as I recall. The story has nothing about black people in it. Isn't that a bit much?
Anyway, so acceptable use of words changes. Acceptable attitudes change - in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", Mrs. Railton notes that because Hartley can read aloud, she is educated above her station. I don't believe anyone would let that pass their lips today, but Hartley thinks nothing of it.
And we are reminded that well-meaning people have done things in the past that we reject now. The fact that they are now rejected doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad. The rejection itself may be a passing fad. Going back to mentally retarded people - look at the controversy over mainstreaming. Those children used to be excluded from regular classrooms. Then there was a push to mainstream absolutely all of them, because segregating them is BAD. But every now and then you run across the parent of a child with a severe mental handicap, or a teacher who has mainstreamed kids in her classroom, who question the wisdom of mainstreaming every single kid, or assert outright that some of them should not be mainstreamed. Segregating schools by race used to be wrong and bad, but we find Afro-centric schools springing up in places where the grownups are desperate to find some way of reaching the next generation of black kids. So I think it's useful to look at these things and separate out the things we have let go of, or need to let go of, because they're wrong; and things that we let go of that we need to bring back, like the idea that folks should get married before they start having kids, like they used to do.
When F was a little girl I gave her Little House books and Louisa May Alcott books to read along with her contemporary fiction. I wasn't trying to prepare her for life in the 19th century. I simply wanted her to have some perspective, to see that pop culture of today isn't all there is or has ever been, and to see that ideas like temperance and sexual morality didn't just spring up overnight among the people on the fringes of society. One of the ways I tried to be a bit proactive about helping her develop her own spiritual/ethical compass. Mine's still developing.
And one has to ask what society is, anyway. I tend to think we each have our own society: people we hang with, in real life or on the net, people whose opinions we read in the newspaper or whose shows we watch on TV. So whether violent video games, for instance, affect society probably depends on whose society we're talking about. Unless I am the victim of a violent criminal who took his inspiration from those games, they don't affect my society at all. Except insofar as I care about people I don't have dealings with, as I am supposed to do, and fret about their societies.
Anyway, one of the things I think about is the changing acceptability of words. The n-word comes to mind, of course. There is a book I really like: Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton, one of my favorite writers. One of the reasons I like her work is that she draws her characters so finely, and includes such detail in her stories, that you can pick up all kind of social nuances that have disappeared since her day. (An example is in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", which is one of the stories I linked to in my previous post. The exchange between Hartley, the lady's maid who narrates the story, and Mrs. Railton, neatly illustrates how each of these women know their "place", yet they appear to like each other. They are totally comfortable with social distinctions we don't have now.)
So in Twilight Sleep there is a fairly tragic character in Nona, Pauline's daughter. Nona at 19 is the conscience of the book. She's never had any real spiritual guidance from her mother, although her mother would argue that. She's left Nona to develop her own spiritual/ethical compass as best she can, and Nona has done pretty well; better perhaps than her mother would like. For instance, Nona doesn't see the social distinctions the way Pauline does. Pauline's secretary, Maisie, has a mother who develops cancer. Pauline sees this as an inconvenience for herself, although she tries to push this down, and generously offers to pay for all of Maisie's mother's care. But it's Nona who goes to the hospital and actually sits with Maisie, and holds her hand, while her mother has surgery. Pauline worries that Nona is just a little too good, really. Here:
Pauline turned a tender smile on her daughter. "It's so like you, Nona, to want to be with Maisie for the operation - so fine, dear."
Voice and smile were full of praise; yet behind the praise (Nona also knew) lurked the unformulated apprehension: "All this running after sick people and unhappy people - is it going to turn into a vocation?" Nothing could have been more distasteful to Mrs. Manford than the idea that her only daughter should be not only good, but merely good: like poor Agnes Heuston, say ... Nona could hear her mother murmuring, "I can't imagine where on earth she got it from," as if alluding to some physical defect unaccountable in the offspring of two superbly sound progenitors.
You see here that besides being empathetic with Maisie, Nona has more insight into Pauline's "unformulated apprehension" than even Pauline does.
Yet here is Nona out on a date: "Isn't there a rather good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward there's that n--- dancing at the Housetop."
How jarring that is. One thinks that when this book was brought back into print they could have changed that line: "afterward there's jazz at the Housetop" for instance. Because if Nona were a girl of today she would bite her tongue off before she'd say that word. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how the corporate view of what is or is not acceptable changes.
Let me pause and say that of course one realizes this is fiction. At the same time, Nona is a very important character in the book, and her depiction has internal consistency throughout. If it had ever been brought to her attention that the n-word is rude and hurtful she would not have said it. Either it would not have been brought to her attention (very possible) or it simply was not the derogatory term then that it is now.
So the minor issue here is that one reads these books and is jarred by this kind of thing - Twilight Sleep also includes a much more problematic outburst of anti-Semitism by a less sympathetic character - and wonders whether the text should really be left as it is, which causes one to hesitate before recommending it to people it might upset.
The other issue, and the reason why these books should probably be left as they are, is that in many cases you kind of have to judge people and events by the standards of the day. Not every case, of course. Major things like murder and rape have always been wrong. And individuals or (hopefully) small groups always have and always will find ways to rationalize doing what they want to do, even when they know they're wrong. Use of words, though, don't you have to take that in context? There was a school somewhere that I read about a few weeks ago, that wasn't allowed to put on a play based on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" because originally in England (never here) it was published as "Ten Little N---s". That was in 1932, as I recall. The story has nothing about black people in it. Isn't that a bit much?
Anyway, so acceptable use of words changes. Acceptable attitudes change - in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", Mrs. Railton notes that because Hartley can read aloud, she is educated above her station. I don't believe anyone would let that pass their lips today, but Hartley thinks nothing of it.
And we are reminded that well-meaning people have done things in the past that we reject now. The fact that they are now rejected doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad. The rejection itself may be a passing fad. Going back to mentally retarded people - look at the controversy over mainstreaming. Those children used to be excluded from regular classrooms. Then there was a push to mainstream absolutely all of them, because segregating them is BAD. But every now and then you run across the parent of a child with a severe mental handicap, or a teacher who has mainstreamed kids in her classroom, who question the wisdom of mainstreaming every single kid, or assert outright that some of them should not be mainstreamed. Segregating schools by race used to be wrong and bad, but we find Afro-centric schools springing up in places where the grownups are desperate to find some way of reaching the next generation of black kids. So I think it's useful to look at these things and separate out the things we have let go of, or need to let go of, because they're wrong; and things that we let go of that we need to bring back, like the idea that folks should get married before they start having kids, like they used to do.
When F was a little girl I gave her Little House books and Louisa May Alcott books to read along with her contemporary fiction. I wasn't trying to prepare her for life in the 19th century. I simply wanted her to have some perspective, to see that pop culture of today isn't all there is or has ever been, and to see that ideas like temperance and sexual morality didn't just spring up overnight among the people on the fringes of society. One of the ways I tried to be a bit proactive about helping her develop her own spiritual/ethical compass. Mine's still developing.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Been worthless today. Well, I made soup for a few future meals. I told R about 10:30 this morning, in some dismay, that I wasn't dressed yet; how trifling. But as he pointed out, it's Saturday and I've had a long week.
F went back to school Friday, so we're back to the empty nest.
I've been thinking about the relevance of literature to life in general, partly because of a conversation on Erin O'Connor's blog. At some point before my boss left town to do his cancer treatment, he and I and one of the other managers were talking and I made reference to Jack London's "To Build a Fire". They both gave me blank looks. No idea what I was talking about. "I am illiterate", my boss said. At home that evening I found the story online and emailed the link to them. My boss read it and passed the link along to his true-love so she could read it too. The other manager said, "I read that story you sent - that was awesome!" Y'all, there's an entire world of literature out there.
What's relevant about it? Well, for one thing, there's this:
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
Well, this is a very philosophical paragraph building you up to appreciate the main theme (HUBRIS, what a surprise), but it's true that being without imagination can cause people to do stupid things. I caught one of the operators in the plant without his eye protection and told him some very grim and dire things that I have unfortunately witnessed. And that he is very young, and should actually take pains above and beyond following the rules to protect himself b/c if something happened he would have the rest of his life to be disabled and to regret his casual attitude toward his PPE. What would happen, I asked, if he were on the catwalk over the tanks, and something splashed into his eyes? Suddenly blind, in a lot of pain, probably no one close enough to hear him cry out - how will he find the stairs and get himself down, and get to the eyewash station? These were new thoughts. He's had his hardhat and his eye protection on every time I've seen him since then. (Well, besides that, I told his boss and he was written up. Hey, if I didn't and he left off his PPE and got hurt, I could be liable.)
Some time back I emailed my mother, sister, and sister-in-law about this short story. We had a little discussion about it. I told my SIL that we probably ought to share stories and talk about them every now and then, just for culture's sake. "Oh, culture me!" she said. I thought we could call it the "Culture Me Reading Club". But we never did.
F went back to school Friday, so we're back to the empty nest.
I've been thinking about the relevance of literature to life in general, partly because of a conversation on Erin O'Connor's blog. At some point before my boss left town to do his cancer treatment, he and I and one of the other managers were talking and I made reference to Jack London's "To Build a Fire". They both gave me blank looks. No idea what I was talking about. "I am illiterate", my boss said. At home that evening I found the story online and emailed the link to them. My boss read it and passed the link along to his true-love so she could read it too. The other manager said, "I read that story you sent - that was awesome!" Y'all, there's an entire world of literature out there.
What's relevant about it? Well, for one thing, there's this:
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
Well, this is a very philosophical paragraph building you up to appreciate the main theme (HUBRIS, what a surprise), but it's true that being without imagination can cause people to do stupid things. I caught one of the operators in the plant without his eye protection and told him some very grim and dire things that I have unfortunately witnessed. And that he is very young, and should actually take pains above and beyond following the rules to protect himself b/c if something happened he would have the rest of his life to be disabled and to regret his casual attitude toward his PPE. What would happen, I asked, if he were on the catwalk over the tanks, and something splashed into his eyes? Suddenly blind, in a lot of pain, probably no one close enough to hear him cry out - how will he find the stairs and get himself down, and get to the eyewash station? These were new thoughts. He's had his hardhat and his eye protection on every time I've seen him since then. (Well, besides that, I told his boss and he was written up. Hey, if I didn't and he left off his PPE and got hurt, I could be liable.)
Some time back I emailed my mother, sister, and sister-in-law about this short story. We had a little discussion about it. I told my SIL that we probably ought to share stories and talk about them every now and then, just for culture's sake. "Oh, culture me!" she said. I thought we could call it the "Culture Me Reading Club". But we never did.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
F thought of a couple more poems: The Highwayman and Lochinvar. And I bet Paul Revere's Ride is on that list.
A poem that I bet is not on that list is WWI poet Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. It would make an interesting contrast to "Charge of the Light Brigade" though.
A poem that I bet is not on that list is WWI poet Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. It would make an interesting contrast to "Charge of the Light Brigade" though.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
We retrieved F from school today. Because of having to drag all her stuff home from the dorm, we took both my car and R's pickup, so I have driven for 6 hours and I'm tired.
I think that's my mantra lately: I'm-tired. The new medication the neurologist has me on has a possible side effect of fatigue. I don't think my fatigue is a side effect of the medication, though, I think it's a side effect of being tired. (I like the new stuff. The tremor is definitely knocked back down. Not sure about helping the migraines, although a few times I've found myself thinking "I'm tired and mad, where's my headache?" so perhaps it is.)
It's raining, which complicates the business of getting her things in. We thought we'd wait it out, but it looks like it will never stop.
So I'm going to write a few thoughts about poetry. I read recently about a book for boys that apparently lists 5 poems every boy should know. I don't know what those 5 poems are, but I tried to come up with some myself, although I'm not big on sexism. I thought of Kipling's If, of course, and Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. The latter, by the way, would be a good jumping-off point for a conversation about when to follow the rules and when to break them. There is an absolutely terrific book, The Reason Why, which tells the background story of that famous charge, and also explains how the Crimean War marked a turning point in British military history.
F thought Casey at the Bat, and of course she's right. It's a fun poem and it makes a good point about hubris. And another, serious poem about hubris is The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy's poem about the Titanic. To F's surprise, I had never run across this poem before. It's really quite something. I wonder if Hardy got hate mail about it.
And then we thought about Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky too.
There was another poem I thought about, and I'll put it in here after I tell this story.
When F was a senior in high school, I worked with the mother of one of her classmates. This coworker told me one day that her daughter had called her, crying, because a boy had died the day before. When I got home I found F on her bed with a look on her face.
"Are you OK?"
Nod.
"Did you know that boy?"
And F started crying. Yes, she knew that boy. His name was Okechi Womeodu and he was in her math class and her study hall. Okechi was in the very tough and challenging magnet school program that F was in, and in addition he missed a good bit of school to play tennis. One day Okechi had been playing tennis in the morning, and in the afternoon he had a soccer game. He didn't feel well, so the coach had him on the bench. During the game, Okechi suddenly tumbled over. His mother, a physician, ran to him; the paramedics were called, CPR was started, but he couldn't be saved. Apparently he had a heart defect; if he hadn't been an athlete, or if it had been caught and corrected, it might not have been a problem. As it was, it was a very tragic one-of-those-things.
The kids didn't know till after Okechi died that he was a nationally ranked tennis player. What they did know was that he had a smile that would light up a room. It made you feel good, F said, just to be around him. F said he was kind of a klass klown, except that he never carried it too far. If his teachers told him to be quiet, they were laughing too. In the days after his death, F told me that the kids and the teachers all were crying. The math teacher rearranged the seats, because even though Okechi's desk was empty when he was playing tennis, it was too painful to look at it and know he was never coming back. The study hall teacher, who had previously spoken to the kids only to tell them to be quiet and get their books out, talked to them at length about Okechi, and then talked to them about themselves, asked questions about their plans, and so forth; and he kept this up the rest of the semester.
At some point later on F and I were talking about the poetry of A.E. Housman, and she remarked that for her, "To an Athlete Dying Young" would be forever linked to Okechi. She said that again today. That's the thing about poetry: like all art, it's a repository for ideas and feelings to be expressed and shared and understood. It connects us to each other and to the universality of the human experience.
To An Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
I think that's my mantra lately: I'm-tired. The new medication the neurologist has me on has a possible side effect of fatigue. I don't think my fatigue is a side effect of the medication, though, I think it's a side effect of being tired. (I like the new stuff. The tremor is definitely knocked back down. Not sure about helping the migraines, although a few times I've found myself thinking "I'm tired and mad, where's my headache?" so perhaps it is.)
It's raining, which complicates the business of getting her things in. We thought we'd wait it out, but it looks like it will never stop.
So I'm going to write a few thoughts about poetry. I read recently about a book for boys that apparently lists 5 poems every boy should know. I don't know what those 5 poems are, but I tried to come up with some myself, although I'm not big on sexism. I thought of Kipling's If, of course, and Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. The latter, by the way, would be a good jumping-off point for a conversation about when to follow the rules and when to break them. There is an absolutely terrific book, The Reason Why, which tells the background story of that famous charge, and also explains how the Crimean War marked a turning point in British military history.
F thought Casey at the Bat, and of course she's right. It's a fun poem and it makes a good point about hubris. And another, serious poem about hubris is The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy's poem about the Titanic. To F's surprise, I had never run across this poem before. It's really quite something. I wonder if Hardy got hate mail about it.
And then we thought about Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky too.
There was another poem I thought about, and I'll put it in here after I tell this story.
When F was a senior in high school, I worked with the mother of one of her classmates. This coworker told me one day that her daughter had called her, crying, because a boy had died the day before. When I got home I found F on her bed with a look on her face.
"Are you OK?"
Nod.
"Did you know that boy?"
And F started crying. Yes, she knew that boy. His name was Okechi Womeodu and he was in her math class and her study hall. Okechi was in the very tough and challenging magnet school program that F was in, and in addition he missed a good bit of school to play tennis. One day Okechi had been playing tennis in the morning, and in the afternoon he had a soccer game. He didn't feel well, so the coach had him on the bench. During the game, Okechi suddenly tumbled over. His mother, a physician, ran to him; the paramedics were called, CPR was started, but he couldn't be saved. Apparently he had a heart defect; if he hadn't been an athlete, or if it had been caught and corrected, it might not have been a problem. As it was, it was a very tragic one-of-those-things.
The kids didn't know till after Okechi died that he was a nationally ranked tennis player. What they did know was that he had a smile that would light up a room. It made you feel good, F said, just to be around him. F said he was kind of a klass klown, except that he never carried it too far. If his teachers told him to be quiet, they were laughing too. In the days after his death, F told me that the kids and the teachers all were crying. The math teacher rearranged the seats, because even though Okechi's desk was empty when he was playing tennis, it was too painful to look at it and know he was never coming back. The study hall teacher, who had previously spoken to the kids only to tell them to be quiet and get their books out, talked to them at length about Okechi, and then talked to them about themselves, asked questions about their plans, and so forth; and he kept this up the rest of the semester.
At some point later on F and I were talking about the poetry of A.E. Housman, and she remarked that for her, "To an Athlete Dying Young" would be forever linked to Okechi. She said that again today. That's the thing about poetry: like all art, it's a repository for ideas and feelings to be expressed and shared and understood. It connects us to each other and to the universality of the human experience.
To An Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Interesting article here about how our minds wander.
I am very apt to be distracted. I always used to hate having the radio on in the lab and now that I AM THE QUEEN it isn't. Because I can't concentrate and think. I suspect other people don't concentrate and think as well as they think they do with all that yackety-yack, either. Even so, when I'm reading something boring and tedious it is very hard to keep my mind on it so that it makes sense. I usually have to read it aloud. At one time it would have bothered me for people to hear me reading aloud when I am alone in my office, but I don't care anymore.
"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
Pray what is the reason for that?"
"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling a box--
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.
- Lewis Carroll, of course. I find that his little verses have meaning for me somehow. When F and I were at the zoo looking at the Chinese alligator I inflicted How doth the little crocodile on her, which inexplicably I seem to have memorized.
I am very apt to be distracted. I always used to hate having the radio on in the lab and now that I AM THE QUEEN it isn't. Because I can't concentrate and think. I suspect other people don't concentrate and think as well as they think they do with all that yackety-yack, either. Even so, when I'm reading something boring and tedious it is very hard to keep my mind on it so that it makes sense. I usually have to read it aloud. At one time it would have bothered me for people to hear me reading aloud when I am alone in my office, but I don't care anymore.
"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
Pray what is the reason for that?"
"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling a box--
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.
- Lewis Carroll, of course. I find that his little verses have meaning for me somehow. When F and I were at the zoo looking at the Chinese alligator I inflicted How doth the little crocodile on her, which inexplicably I seem to have memorized.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
From Right Wing Nation:
Look at the list of books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
Strike out the ones that you aren’t interested in (or have never heard of).
If you are reading this, tag, you’re it!
*The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
* Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
* To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
* Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
* The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
* The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
* The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
* Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
* Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) - haven't read, will look into
* A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) - ditto
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling) - haven't read any Potter books (I know, shocking) but probably will eventually
*Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling) - see above
* A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) people keep telling me this is good
* Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) - don't know, have seen mixed reviews
* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) - see above
* Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald) ?
* The Stand (Stephen King)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling) - see above
* Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
* The Hobbit (Tolkien)
* The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
* Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
* The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
* Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) - might like; enjoyed the movie
* Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) - bleah
* The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
* East of Eden (John Steinbeck) - does the Reader's Digest Condensed Version count?
* Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
* Dune (Frank Herbert)
* The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
* Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
* 1984 (Orwell)
* The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
* The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
* The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
* I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
* The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
* The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
* The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
* The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
* Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
* The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) - I have this but haven't read it
* Bible
* Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) (reading it now)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) - one of F's faves
* Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
*The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - I saw a play based on the life of Woody Guthrie once and have done all the OK dust bowl I need to do
* She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
* The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
* A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
* Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
* Great Expectations (Dickens)
* The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
* The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
* Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling) - see above
* The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
* The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
* The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger) - lent to me by my SIL
* Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) yuck
* The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
* War and Peace (Tolsoy)
* Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
* Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
* One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
* The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
* Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
* Les Miserables (Hugo)
* The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
* Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
* Shogun (James Clavell)
* The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
* The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
* The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
* A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
* The World According To Garp (John Irving) (wish I hadn't)
* The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
* Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
* Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
* Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
* Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
* Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
* Emma (Jane Austen)
* Watership Down (Richard Adams)
* Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
* The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
* Blindness (Jose Saramago)
* Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
* In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
* Lord of the Flies (Golding) (ugh)
* The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
* The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
* The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - I don't like Ludlum and don't know why I read his stuff - Forsyth is much better
* The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - F tells me it is very good.
* White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
* A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
* The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
*Ulysses (James Joyce) Not my bag. I just know it.
* The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
* Absolom! Absolom! (William Faulkner)
* Light in August (William Faulkner)
* The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
* The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
* Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
* Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
* The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) - tried but couldn't do it.
* House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
* Moby Dick (Herman Melville) - R has read this but I haven't.
* Animal Farm (George Orwell)
What would I add to the list? How about some Edith Wharton: Custom of the Country maybe. Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. George Eliot's Middlemarch.
And dang, where's the science fiction? Jules Verne? H.G. Wells? Heinlein? Asimov? Bradbury? Dune and Ender's Game to represent the whole genre? I don't think so. At the VERY LEAST I'd add The Martian Chronicles. Can't think how it didn't make the list. And all those different Harry Potters but only one Stephen King????
Look at the list of books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
Strike out the ones that you aren’t interested in (or have never heard of).
If you are reading this, tag, you’re it!
*
* Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
* To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
* Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
* The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
* The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
* The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
* Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
* Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) - haven't read, will look into
* A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) - ditto
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling) - haven't read any Potter books (I know, shocking) but probably will eventually
*
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling) - see above
* A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) people keep telling me this is good
* Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) - don't know, have seen mixed reviews
* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) - see above
* Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald) ?
* The Stand (Stephen King)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling) - see above
* Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
* The Hobbit (Tolkien)
* The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
* Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
* The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
* Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) - might like; enjoyed the movie
* Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) - bleah
* The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
* East of Eden (John Steinbeck) - does the Reader's Digest Condensed Version count?
* Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
* Dune (Frank Herbert)
* The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
* Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
* 1984 (Orwell)
* The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
* The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
* The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
* I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
* The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
* The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
* The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
* The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
* Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
* The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) - I have this but haven't read it
* Bible
* Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) (reading it now)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) - one of F's faves
* Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
*
* She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
* The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
* A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
* Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
* Great Expectations (Dickens)
* The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
* The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
* Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling) - see above
* The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
* The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
* The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger) - lent to me by my SIL
* Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) yuck
* The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
* War and Peace (Tolsoy)
* Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
* Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
* One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
* The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
* Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
* Les Miserables (Hugo)
* The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
* Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
* Shogun (James Clavell)
* The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
* The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
* The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
* A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
* The World According To Garp (John Irving) (wish I hadn't)
* The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
* Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
* Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
* Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
* Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
* Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
* Emma (Jane Austen)
* Watership Down (Richard Adams)
* Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
* The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
* Blindness (Jose Saramago)
* Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
* In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
* Lord of the Flies (Golding) (ugh)
* The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
* The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
* The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - I don't like Ludlum and don't know why I read his stuff - Forsyth is much better
* The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - F tells me it is very good.
* White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
* A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
* The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
*
* The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
* Absolom! Absolom! (William Faulkner)
* Light in August (William Faulkner)
* The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
* The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
* Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
* Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
* The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) - tried but couldn't do it.
* House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
* Moby Dick (Herman Melville) - R has read this but I haven't.
* Animal Farm (George Orwell)
What would I add to the list? How about some Edith Wharton: Custom of the Country maybe. Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. George Eliot's Middlemarch.
And dang, where's the science fiction? Jules Verne? H.G. Wells? Heinlein? Asimov? Bradbury? Dune and Ender's Game to represent the whole genre? I don't think so. At the VERY LEAST I'd add The Martian Chronicles. Can't think how it didn't make the list. And all those different Harry Potters but only one Stephen King????
Sunday, September 03, 2006
I looked up Sara Teasdale the other day, because it crossed my mind to wonder about her poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", and the Ray Bradbury story it inspired; and to wonder whether she was thinking about nuclear holocaust when she wrote it. It turns out she died in 1933, so most likely not. But I ran across this little thing she wrote:
The Look
Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.
- Sara Teasdale
And it reminded me of this, by A. E. Housman, included in his collection entitled A Shropshire Lad:
When I Was One-and-Twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
- A. E. Housman
Teasdale was American, and Housman, English. But their lives spanned the same time period: 1884 - 1933 for her, 1859 - 1936 for him. I think the poems' similarity has to do with the simplicity of the language and the wry, gentle humor each has, as well as the fact that there's obviously a story not being told here.
There's a terrific discussion of Bradbury's story here. I like the part about how the story parallels the poem.
The Look
Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.
- Sara Teasdale
And it reminded me of this, by A. E. Housman, included in his collection entitled A Shropshire Lad:
When I Was One-and-Twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
- A. E. Housman
Teasdale was American, and Housman, English. But their lives spanned the same time period: 1884 - 1933 for her, 1859 - 1936 for him. I think the poems' similarity has to do with the simplicity of the language and the wry, gentle humor each has, as well as the fact that there's obviously a story not being told here.
There's a terrific discussion of Bradbury's story here. I like the part about how the story parallels the poem.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
So I ran across this poem yesterday:
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
-- William Carlos Williams
F says it has been in every literature book she has ever had, which possibly is hyperbole. But the poem is sort of expressive of her experiences in the last week or two: twice I bought cottage cheese and blueberries and ate them up before she got any. Not all at once, you understand, but over 2 or 3 days. I didn't mean to, honestly. You cannot look at a partial container of cottage cheese and tell if someone else has gotten any after the last time you did. It kind of settles and rearranges itself. Besides, cottage cheese and blueberries just taste so good to me and I'm not going to leave them languishing in the refrigerator. If this sounds self-justifying and defensive, that's because it is. The third time I bought them I told her that I WOULD be eating them and that if she expected to get any she'd better dive in. And she has.
But I also ran across this poem:
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
-- Kenneth Koch
Isn't that a hoot?
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
-- William Carlos Williams
F says it has been in every literature book she has ever had, which possibly is hyperbole. But the poem is sort of expressive of her experiences in the last week or two: twice I bought cottage cheese and blueberries and ate them up before she got any. Not all at once, you understand, but over 2 or 3 days. I didn't mean to, honestly. You cannot look at a partial container of cottage cheese and tell if someone else has gotten any after the last time you did. It kind of settles and rearranges itself. Besides, cottage cheese and blueberries just taste so good to me and I'm not going to leave them languishing in the refrigerator. If this sounds self-justifying and defensive, that's because it is. The third time I bought them I told her that I WOULD be eating them and that if she expected to get any she'd better dive in. And she has.
But I also ran across this poem:
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
-- Kenneth Koch
Isn't that a hoot?
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Poor F has had to submit to Lectures from me all her life. If I had had a blog while she was growing up I would have posted them too, because they are always about things I feel strongly about. The meaning of success, which I posted about earlier, was the subject of one of those lectures.
F said something the other day that reminded me of a screed that I subjected her to when she was in the 9th grade. She had to read several books for English, among them Jane Eyre and The Good Earth. Her English teacher, who I think had no sense at all (ask me sometime about the research paper assignment) asked this question about The Good Earth: Was Wang Lung a moral person? She asked this on a test, and the only acceptable answer was "Yes". I blew my stack when F told me this, and I told her that Wang Lung was not a moral person!
F thought that it was because he kept concubines in his later life. It turned out that she thought morals always have to do with sex, a notion I was glad to find out that she had so I could disabuse her of it. Morals have to do with judging that a particular behavior is right or wrong, independently of how we feel about it, whether we want to engage in it or not, what other people will think of it, or whether or not we will benefit from it. A moral person will not always do the right thing. He may try to find ways to rationalize what he does and convince himself that he's not in the wrong. But mostly he'll feel remorse when he leaves the path, and he'll try to straighten up, make restitution if possible, and resolve never to repeat the error.
Wang Lung, if you recall, had a daughter who was profoundly retarded. This was possibly due to the wretched famine that his family had to endure while she was in the womb and in the months following her birth. Wang Lung loved his daughter and felt compassion for her, so he made sure that she was taken care of. No one else cared whether she lived or died, not even her mother or her brothers, and certainly not the servants whose job it was to look after her physical needs. It's clear throughout the book that Wang Lung is a nice person who cares about others' feelings. He's obviously a warm-hearted, loving man. But if he had not loved his daughter, he would not have thought twice about letting her die from neglect. He regretted his family's lack of concern for her, but he didn't think they were bad people because they would have let this helpless innocent suffer. Right and wrong just didn't enter into it.
In contrast, Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre hated his wife. He felt that he had been tricked into marrying her and that she had ruined his life. He began hating her even before her descent into madness. But he continued to see that she was cared for because it was the right thing to do. He made sure little Adele was taken care of for the same reason - he didn't spend a lot of time with her, so it was clear that he took little pleasure from her company, but he saw to it that she was well-clothed and fed and educated by people who were kind to her because he felt a sense of responsibility toward her. It was wrong of him to try to marry Jane without her knowing that it couldn't have been a legal marriage, and he knew that. But the thing is, no one would have known if he had walked away from his responsibilities. No one knew about his wife (except his brother-in-law) or would have known about Adele, who IIRC wasn't even his child. He didn't come across as a particularly religious person, so he didn't do what he did from fear of hellfire. So there wasn't a single reason for him to do these responsible things, up to and including risking his life in an attempt to save his wife when his house burned up, except that he felt that he should. And that makes Mr. Rochester a moral person.
F said something the other day that reminded me of a screed that I subjected her to when she was in the 9th grade. She had to read several books for English, among them Jane Eyre and The Good Earth. Her English teacher, who I think had no sense at all (ask me sometime about the research paper assignment) asked this question about The Good Earth: Was Wang Lung a moral person? She asked this on a test, and the only acceptable answer was "Yes". I blew my stack when F told me this, and I told her that Wang Lung was not a moral person!
F thought that it was because he kept concubines in his later life. It turned out that she thought morals always have to do with sex, a notion I was glad to find out that she had so I could disabuse her of it. Morals have to do with judging that a particular behavior is right or wrong, independently of how we feel about it, whether we want to engage in it or not, what other people will think of it, or whether or not we will benefit from it. A moral person will not always do the right thing. He may try to find ways to rationalize what he does and convince himself that he's not in the wrong. But mostly he'll feel remorse when he leaves the path, and he'll try to straighten up, make restitution if possible, and resolve never to repeat the error.
Wang Lung, if you recall, had a daughter who was profoundly retarded. This was possibly due to the wretched famine that his family had to endure while she was in the womb and in the months following her birth. Wang Lung loved his daughter and felt compassion for her, so he made sure that she was taken care of. No one else cared whether she lived or died, not even her mother or her brothers, and certainly not the servants whose job it was to look after her physical needs. It's clear throughout the book that Wang Lung is a nice person who cares about others' feelings. He's obviously a warm-hearted, loving man. But if he had not loved his daughter, he would not have thought twice about letting her die from neglect. He regretted his family's lack of concern for her, but he didn't think they were bad people because they would have let this helpless innocent suffer. Right and wrong just didn't enter into it.
In contrast, Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre hated his wife. He felt that he had been tricked into marrying her and that she had ruined his life. He began hating her even before her descent into madness. But he continued to see that she was cared for because it was the right thing to do. He made sure little Adele was taken care of for the same reason - he didn't spend a lot of time with her, so it was clear that he took little pleasure from her company, but he saw to it that she was well-clothed and fed and educated by people who were kind to her because he felt a sense of responsibility toward her. It was wrong of him to try to marry Jane without her knowing that it couldn't have been a legal marriage, and he knew that. But the thing is, no one would have known if he had walked away from his responsibilities. No one knew about his wife (except his brother-in-law) or would have known about Adele, who IIRC wasn't even his child. He didn't come across as a particularly religious person, so he didn't do what he did from fear of hellfire. So there wasn't a single reason for him to do these responsible things, up to and including risking his life in an attempt to save his wife when his house burned up, except that he felt that he should. And that makes Mr. Rochester a moral person.
Monday, May 29, 2006
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- Lt. Col. John McCrae
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- Lt. Col. John McCrae
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages)
I'm always reminded of Chaucer this time of year when the mockingbirds that nest in the maple tree in the front yard start hollering all night. They're entertaining to listen to during the day, because they sound like a voice-activated tape recorder that records one birdsong after another. But at night, when you're about to drop off to sleep and one of those birds lets go, you could cheerfully shoot it. F has felt quite murderous on occasion because they're right outside her window.
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages)
I'm always reminded of Chaucer this time of year when the mockingbirds that nest in the maple tree in the front yard start hollering all night. They're entertaining to listen to during the day, because they sound like a voice-activated tape recorder that records one birdsong after another. But at night, when you're about to drop off to sleep and one of those birds lets go, you could cheerfully shoot it. F has felt quite murderous on occasion because they're right outside her window.
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
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