Month: September 2015

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Why Is It So Hot? Books vs. Lawn Ornaments in Omaha

Old Market District, Omaha, in summer.

                                             Old Market District, Omaha

Omaha is a  hip Midwestern city (by our standards), with a splendid art museum and trendy shopping in the Old Market District.

It was, however, 91 today.

“It feels like 100,” I said.  It really did in the sun.

My husband says he doesn’t feel the heat till it’s 95. “It might be 92.”

The warehouses in the Old Market District in Omaha are now shops, restaurants, and lofts. You can browse at antique stores, glass stores, art galleries, and junk shops.  We drink coffee or iced tea on “dog-friendly” terraces:  a small bulldog had stepped out of Colette; surely it was Fossette from The Vagabond!.

But the question was whether to shop at a bookstore or an iron lawn ornament store.

We love to pop in at Jackson Street Booksellers, one of the best used bookstores in the U.S.

My husband says I buy too many books.  And the shelves at home do seem to be full.  Time to donate to the Planned Parenthood Book Sale again.

Iron Decor and More, Omaha

Iron Decor and More, Omaha

“You want to go to the lawn ornament store?” I have a hankering for a tacky ornament for the backyard.  They have an iron cow on a bicycle and colorful cats with springy necks.  I must admit the chicken in the picture at right is too much.

‘NO!!!!”

So we went to Jackson Street Booksellers.

Jackson Street Booksellers interior

Jackson Street Booksellers

You know the kind of bookstore. It’s huge, and they recently expanded, and they need to expand again.  The shelves are so tall you can’t possibly see what’s on top. The store is deep and dark, with occasional spotlights.  There are also piles of books on the floor.  You can’t find the Wyndham Lewis books unless you move a tall stack of books.  (Too much trouble.)  The owner and employees sit up front and read the paper.  They don’t chat to us.  My husband thinks it’s because we’re from out of town.  I explain that the staff at used bookstores never talk to customers.

J.C. at the TLS has confirmed this.  He said of Skoob in Bloomsbury:

Here are the overflowing shelves, the arcane subject headings, the musty smell, the foreign languages on the floor, the grumpy staff…

Very like Jackson Street Booksellers..

It is crammed with literature, genre books, Americana, biographies, memoirs, art books, history, theater books, women’s books, foreign language, politics, travel, vintage books, and several shelves devoted to the coveted Folio Society editions and Heritage Press editions (books that come in a box!).

And then we went to The Bookworm, an indie bookstore in the suburbs.

Did I buy books?

IMG_3288Yes!

At The Bookworm:  Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford).  This beautifully designed book is one of a very clever “A Short Introduction” series of tiny paperbacks.  I almost bought one on Nothing.  (“Cheeky Brits,” said my husband.  Sorry, Brits!!)

Modern Latin American Literature- A Very Short Introduction 51sKoOlFsVL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_At Jackson Street Booksellers:  Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (a Brazilian classic).

Jorge Amado gabriela 51D10CF6CSLKay Boyle’s Three Short Novels:  The Crazy Hunter, The Bridegroom’s Body, and Decision.  (Boyle is an excellent American writer, and I was introduced to her books  by Virago.)

Kay Boyle Three_Short_NovelsPhyllis McGinley’s A Pocketful of Wry.  This remarkable poet won the Pulitzer for her light verse.  I posted her “Ode to the End of Summer” here.

Phyllis McGinley A Pocketful of Wry 152d32243f93b68a33c74f2e4b49c4543 More Novels by Ronald Firbank:  Caprice, Vainglory, and Illuminations  (I may have read these long ago, but my Firbank is missing!.)

3 More Novels Firbank 51xUbgGKjzL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_Robert Grave’s Good-Bye to All That (I love his historical fiction, but not his autobiography)

IMG_3278(My cat is considering what to read next.)

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After Burnout: Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur

All That You've Seen Here Is God Bryan Doerries 9780307949738On Sunday night I wrote about Bryan Doerries’s All That You’ve Seen Here Is God:  New Versions of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Readership of that post was sparse. Disappointing, because my background is in classics.

And so I had “book blog” burnout. Fortunately, I am inspired again by Lawrence Durrell, that underrated writer of gorgeous modernist fiction.

Durrell MonsieurLawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, the first volume in the Avignon Quintet, is a stunning metafictional novel.  Like Durrell’s masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, it plays with linked narratives from multiple points of view.  Durrell’s labyrinthine prose reflects the tortuous relationships between the eccentric, fiercely individualistic characters.  What is real?  What is invented by the novelist?

We do not care what is real, because the writing is luminous.

The relationships are complicated, as always in Durrell.  Durrell knows that the novelist is a trickster:  there are twists and surprises.  Who is the narrator?  It seems to be Bruce Drexel,  a doctor who has traveled on a train from Paris to Provence where his best friend committed suicide.  Bruce remembers his arrival at  dawn, and discovers “the Bruce that I was, and the Bruce I become as I jot down these words…”

Bruce explains:

The telegram which had summoned me southward from Prague was suitably laconic.  It told me of the suicide of my oldest and best friend, Piers de Nogaret; more than friend indeed, for his sister Sylvie was my wife, though the telegram was signed not by her but by the family notary.

And then Durrell switches to the third person, and we see Bruce from a novelist’s point of view.  In the next sentence he switches back to the first person.

He must be trying to objectify his thoughts and emotions by treating them as one would in a novel, but it didn’t really work.  As a matter of fact, in Rob Sutcliffe’s famous novel about us all, things began in exactly this way.

Who is the narrator?

Bruce reveals that their lives have been disturbingly described in their friend Rob Sutcliffe’s bitter novel about their strange relationships.  And, yes, Durrell includes many excerpts from Sutcliffe’s diaries and his novel. Who is the narrator? we ask again.

durrell avignon quintet 51GoOSphbOL._AC_UL320_SR204,320_The five main characters are wildly unconventional.  Piers was Bruce’s lover; Bruce’s mad wife, Sylvie, was Piers’s sister, and is now in an asylum.  Poor Sylvie was the last one to see Piers alive.  And Rob, the eerily far-seeing novelist, has been married unhappily to Bruce’s lesbian sister.  Then there’s Toby, a historian obsessed with the Templar Knights.

Durrell meanders, but his style is elegant and poetic.  We read him for style.  This novel is fascinating.  The five characters, especially Piers, are involved with a cult of Gnostcism. There are beautiful descriptions of their trip to the desert in Egypt, where they are introduced to the rituals by Akkad, a trickster who compels them to question everything.

The historian Toby’s research into the medieval Knight Templars circles back to Gnosticism, a subject Durrell also treated in Balthazar, the second novel in The Alexandria Quartet.

And in the final section we spend time with another novelist, Blanford, and everything we know is thrown into question.

Loved it, loved it, loved it!  I am all about The Avignon Quintet now.  Monsieur is possibly even better than Justine, the first novel in The Alexandria Quartet.

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You Couldn’t Pay Me to… and Milk Duds at the Opera

Ellen has to prep for her dates with the brilliant British guy she meets at a Kandinsky

Ellen meets a very cultured professor  at the art museum.  He knows EVERYTHING.

Okay, I admit I like culture.  But I couldn’t get tickets to see Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet.

Am I in London?

No, so it hardly matters.

So what do we do in the Midwest for fun?

I pretend to shop at the mall like other women, but usually just stop at the bookstore.

And during the long, long, long harrowing winter nights when the wolves are howling at the door, etc,  I read Sophocles in Greek and Plautus in Latin. That’s theater, isn’t it?   If you study classics for seven years and then teach it for seven more (or more), it’s a snap.

But there are so many subjects I know little about.

And so I was laughing my head off over an episode of Ellen, the ’90s  sitcom starring Ellen DeGeneres.  In “Ellen’s Improvement” (Season 2, Episode 13), she decides to improve herself after she and her friends miss all the questions on Jeopardy.  Perturbed that she didn’t know who Kandinsky was,  she reads a book about him.

.Then she drags Adam and Paige to a museum.

Paige:   “I don’t get art.”

Ellen:  “You’ve gotta give it time.”

Paige:  “No, my mom said if it doesn’t go with the drapes it’s not worth having”

Ellen:  “Yes, this $300 million dollar Kandinsky would clash with her ceramic clown collection.”

Okay, that’s funny.  But it’s even funnier when she meets a UCLA professor from England and they have an arty chat.  Then she has to prep for her dates with him, until she introduces him to her world of watching TV on “Melrose Place” night.   Heather Locklear reminds him of Lady Macbeth.

That is my nightmare.  I love art museums but pray I don’t have to talk about art.  I have had many a trite conversation with friends who know the phrase, “Ah, the colors.”  Perhaps I’ll read a few chapters in my Sister Wendy art history book and learn a new phrase before I rush off to that Sargent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I am so bored by opera that I laughed hysterically when Ellen falls asleep and her friend Adam throws a milk dud at the woman singing Madame Butterfly.

I’m sorry, but it’s just so funny!

And so I must, like Ellen, take a crash course in culture.

MY READING LIST

 Hamlet, because Benedict Cumberbatch is stunned that I’m missing his performance.  (My last Hamlet was  Paul Gross at Stratford, Ontario, 2000.)

Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open:  Essays on Art. Actually, I do want to read this.

The Amazon sample of Evan Baker’s From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging.  (Just the sample!)

Crafting with Cat Hair by Kaori Tsutaya. (But it is art?  No, I’m kidding.)

Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?   (She’s funny.)

Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life As a Pretender  (She is a stunning rocker; rock is art; ergo, rock, scissors, paper.)

The Penguin Book of Witches, ed. by Katherine Howe.  Halloween is coming!  And I might have to talk about witchery!  And I’ve been to Salem!  Diane Purkiss, author of The Witch in History: Early modern and twentieth century representations, said in the TLS  that Howe’s anthology of witchcraft was  too American.  Good, I’m Howe’s audience!  (Howe is also a very good novelist.)

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America).  If you read Kael’s brilliant movie reviews in the ’70s and ’80s in The New Yorker, you know how outrageous she was.

So what’s on your list?

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Wednesday on Pop-up Calendar: Finishing Titus Groan!

It remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paraoniac denseness of detail.”–Anthony Burgess,  Introduction to Overlook edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

Wednesday on Pop-up To-Do List:  Finish Titus Groan! 

Titus Groan Mervyn Peake ballantine 39-11. Brew pot of Darjeeling so you can concentrate on finishing Titus Groan before book club tonight!

2. Take notes in cute new notebook.  You chose the book, and must be prepared to drone on in awkward silences.

You doodle:

   a. A great modernist masterpiece, but is it fantasy???
b.  Portrait of decadent inert civilization, but not an allegory.

3. Cat chews cover of your vintage ’60s paperback while you fetch your pink post-its. (You feel more important when you mark pages with post-its.) Reward cat’s bad behavior with snack so she will let you read Titus Groan.

4. Find your other used copy of Titus Groan, which is as yet unchewed by cat.

titus groan mervyn peake overlook 200px-Tglg5.  Your cousin calls to say she on her way over with two venti Starbucks coffees so you can zip through Titus Groan.

6. In the back yard you distractedly read 10 pages while your cousin chortles over Twitter, Reddit (or is it Rabbit?), and Instagram.

7.  She announces that Titus Groan is not available on Kindle Unlimited.  (Alas!)  But there is a great Clinique sale at Younkers!

8.  You tell her you have to read Titus Groan, and doesn’t she have a lot of Clinique? (“You can never have too much Clinique.”)  You tell her about the time you were hypnotized by ads in Cosmopolitan, bought $50 of Clinique, and discovered you were allergic to makeup.

9. You  say  you must stay home and finish Titus Groan , but she points out you have already read it.

10. You explain you haven’t read it since that vacation years ago in a fishing lodge in Wisconsin.  (I didn’t fish!  The lights went out!  Scary guys with cross-bows!  The fish museum!  I mostly stayed inside and read.)  Anyway, I’m an A- personality and must finish it.

11.  She asks if B+ isn’t good enough for “a bunch of SF losers?”

12. You  point out that B+ is a very good grade, and they’re not losers. The Game of Thrones fan with the braided beard is the only definitely odd one.

13.  She asks  if all the male members of my SF group are gay.

14.  You tell her who knows, we don’t talk about it, but it’s probably 50/50.

15.  She wonders if Mervyn Peake was gay.

16.  She looks him up online and discovers he was married and decides he was “moderately cute” in a “terrifying English way.” (He looks like one of his caricatures.)   But we are impressed when we learn he won the Heinemann Prize for Literature for Gormenghast and The Glassblowers.

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake

17.  Finally we go to Younkers and come home with two sweaters for the upcoming trip to Europe.  We have another Venti Starbucks coffee.

18. You had 10 pages left to read, but nobody noticed because they spent most of the time deciding what to read next.  Another night at Book Group!

P.S..  I just finished Titus Groan a few minutes ago, and it is the best fantasy/non-fantasy novel of the twentieth century.  It is arguably one of the best modernist novels of the 20th century.  And, joy oh joy,  it is the first of a trilogy!

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Recycle-a-Birthday: Forever 39 and What I’m Reading Soon

IMG_3275I had my first recyclable birthday.

It happens to everyone.

You didn’t blink an eye when you turned Bilbo Baggins’ age.  But then there’s another age you don’t like the sound of.

You are now “forever 39,” as Jack Benny said.

We enjoyed the revelry and the feast.  The pop-up birthday card (above), which turns into a music box and plays “Happy Birthday,”  was the highlight of the celebration. Yeah!  The cats loved the twirling dog on top of the cardboard cake.  And I made a real German chocolate cake in a new cake pan, and my husband surprised me with “birthday cake” ice cream.

Since I am recycling my age  (I am forever somewhat older than 39), we also recycled the birthday gifts.  I selected books I want to read off my husband’s shelves.  Some I gave him as birthday presents long ago.

IMG_3271Gifts, gifts, gifts!

This recycle-a-birthday collection includes:

Huysman’s Against Nature, a  fin de siècle novel whose decadent hero retires to a villa to pursue “luxury and excess.”

Most of the Most of S. J. Perelman, edited by Steve Martin, a collection of Perelman’s humor pieces, essays, and playlets.

IMG_3264Lawrence Thornton’s Sailors on the Inward Sea,  a meta-fictional novel about a disaster at sea in which Joseph Conrad is a character.

Carmen Laforet’s Nada, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, an autobiographical novel about a young woman in Barcelona in the 1940s.

IMG_3263Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories, edited by Craig Lesley

The Life of Mary Jemison, “Who was taken by the Indians in the year 1755, when only about twelve years old, and has continued to reside among them to the present time.”

IMG_3266

And Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others, a novel translated by Roger Senhouse and Yvonee Moyse.

IMG_3267A great birthday, yes?  I cannot guarantee that I will read all these books, but they look wonderful.

And here is pic of an alert cat helping me decide whether I should read or watch the Poldark (the DVD set of the “70s TV show was another gift!).  She seems to favor Poldark.

IMG_3268