Author: Kat

by

Critics We Like & Mrs. Caliban

We are all Mrs. Caliban.

We are all Mrs. Caliban.

There are critics we like, and critics we don’t like.

I am astonished that most of the critics I admire are men.  I would never have believed such a gender division possible fifty years after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

First, the past.

We all miss John Updike.

We all miss John Updike.

John Updike was a life-changing critic whose essays in The New Yorker introduced me to many brilliant writers.  He wrote fascinatingly about Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, one of my favorite books, a sad, witty, moving novel about a desolate housewife who falls in love with a monster. Surely all women understand this inclination to love exotic monsters, because monsters in literature are more human than the human monsters we fall in love with.  (Not you, honey!)

Ingalls’s Larry is one of manifold literary monsters who attract women.  Think of Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape, in which the heroine falls in love with Erasmus, an escaped 300-pound ape.  Think of Melissa in  Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Distant Planets; she falls in love with a dolphin.  Think of Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Think of the many strange couplings–like Leda and the swan–in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  (I should get offline and finish this essay.)

Ingalls’s heroine, Dorothy, is the neglected wife of a philanderer and the grieving mother of a dead child.  One day when she is listening to the radio, she hears, or thinks she hears, a strange announcement.

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this programme to make the following announcement in this area.  Early this morning, keepers at the Jefferson Institute for Oceanic Research were attacked by a creature captured six months ago by Professor William Dexter on his South American expedition.  The creature, known to the popular press by its nickname “Aquarius the Monsterman,” appears from intensive scientific analysis to be a giant lizard-like animal capable of living both underwater and on land for extended periods….

When the monster, Larry, shows up in her kitchen, she is not afraid.  She hides him.  He is kinder than her husband.

And oddly, though few of us entertain lizard-like monsters in our kitchen, we empathize with Mrs. Caliban.

We are all Mrs. Caliban sometimes.

And would we have found this book without Updike?

But what about contemporary criticism?  These days we read so many reviews online that criticism can metamorphose into a chimera if we’re not careful.  We read The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Review of Books, TLS, The Guardian, and other publications, not to mention blogs, tweets, and GoodReads.

And then I give up on a book.  “This is a piece of crap.”  “Where did you find out about it?”  “Either The New Yorker or a blog, I’m not sure.”  “Get offline!  It’s too unreliable.” “My blog is not unreliable. I found out about this at X blog.”  “Is that the one with the dog pictures?”  “WEll, they all have dog or cat pictures.”  ” The New Yorker doesn’t have a dog or cat.” Oh, dear.  I should never have shown him that dog video.   And why didn’t I take better notes?  If I had been taught by Jesuits, I would have believed the tenet, “Do it right the first time.” I would have  written bibliographical information…

Do it right.

Marry a monster.

Criticism is chimerical.

It’s so confusing.

Good reviews, bad reviews, books that sound good, books that are good, books that turn out to be terrible.

But there are good critics, and sometimes we find them.

truths_ragged_edge_cover_hrMy favorite critic is Michael Dirda of The Washington Post Book World.  Isn’t he everybody’s favorite?  His style is relaxed and conversational, but he has a Ph.D. in comp lit, and is obviously one of the most over-qualified newspaper reviewers. He writes about poetry, science fiction, biographies, novels, reference books, you name it.  He is prolific, and I’ve read his reviews in The New York Review of Books, TLS, and The Barnes and Noble Review; he used to have a blog at The American Scholar. I can’t tell you how many dazzling books I have read because of his reviews.  He recently reviewed Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, and I would have loved to read it had I not spent all my money at the Planned Parenthood book sale and banned book-buying for the next few months.

Book-How-to-win-an-election ciceroPeter Stothard, editor of TLS and a classicist, is a brilliant critic:  after I read his stunning book, Spartacus Road:  A Journey through Ancient Italy, I looked for his criticsm online (a little gentle cyber-stalking), and I must say he keeps a low profile.  I found some of his reviews in The Wall Street Journal: He praised Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History  and Philip Freeman’s translation of Quintus Tullius Cicero’s How to Win an Election, which particularly interests me because I’m fascinated by Cicero’s relationships with his family (Quintus is the famous Marcus Tullius Cicero’s brother).  I’ll be looking for more by Stothard on the classics.

I very much like the reviews of novelist Adam Langer, who, astonishingly, was called “the worst reviewer in America” by The New York Daily News. I  read one of Langer’s reviews in The Washington Post to ascertain whether he was as eloquent as I remembered, and he was.  His review in The Washington Post of Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints, a novel of “wayward youth” in the “Reagan ’80s,” not only describes the book so vividly that I have added it to my TBR, but admits its flaws, which many reviewers seem too intimidated to do these days.  He mentions that two other recent novels have similar themes , but are presented in a more solid historical and political context.

Then there’s Robert McCrum, an associate editor at The Observer. What I enjoy most at The Guardian/Observer website are McCrum’s mini-essays. Today he wrote about conspiracy theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.  Last week he wrote a fascinating essay about the speech as a genre, both in the political arena and in literature.

Where are the women, you might ask?  I’d like to know, too.

Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella

I love Joan Acocella, the dance critic at The New Yorker who also writes fascinating articles about books.  Her style is both engaging and sophisticated:  she has a gift for making you want to read books you wouldn’t normally read, such  as André Vauchez’s Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, and Augustine Thompson’s Francis of Assisi: A New Biography. She has also written brilliantly about Willa Cather and Zadie Smith.  I only wish she wrote more often about books.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times is shrewd and sharp, a demanding, even-handed critic known by writers for hitting hard.   I read her reviews more frequently than I do the other Times reviewers, because I trust her, even though our tastes are very different.  For instance, I didn’t think the Oprah book, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was particularly graceful or significant, and it made Kakutani’s Top 10.  But I always want to know what Kakutani says, because she can be trusted.

My goal in middle age has been to be beyond gender, in the sense that I no longer want to consider gender issues.  As I have indicated, I happily read male critics, and I don’t  care if a review is written by a man or a woman. But I feel disgruntled when I realize that fewer women get criticism gigs than men:  you can read the VIDA statistics here.  

I’ve been a very good sport about this.

And so, if you’re out there, what is your plan for making writing gigs more equitable?

And, fellow bloggers and readers, who are your favorite critics?

by

Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood & A Little Bit About Ken Kesey

Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a  chronicle of his travels with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their famous bus trip across the country in the 1960s, when they all took a lot of acid (except for Wolfe).  He is an exceptional writer of New Journalism and a good novelist.

KESEY

Did I get Ken’s autograph, or was it his brother’s?

I am a fan of Ken Kesey, so of course I like Wolfe’s Kool-Aid.  I am such a fan that in 1997 I got Kesey’s autograph, or at least I THINK it’s his autograph, during Kesey’s fiftieth anniversary bus tour with the Merry Pranksters.  The bus was roped off, and we could file by and look at it, and occasionally somebody like Mountain Woman would get out and walk around.  Then I saw Ken Kesey, and I did a groupie thing that I can promise you I’ve never done before or since:  I slipped under the rope to get my copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest autographed.  He said, “Oh, no, I’m his brother; Ken is on the bus.” But I asked him to autograph my book anyway, because I have a sense of humor, and who knows if it was Kesey or not, because the brothers looked identical?    And then I got a reporter friend to get my book autographed by the REAL Ken Kesey.  But the whole thing looks like a scribble, so did I get his autograph or not?

Anyway, on to Tom Wolfe.

Some years back I read The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I did not enjoy it as much as my fellow book group members did.

Back to Blood by Tom WolfeBut I read his new novel, Back to Blood, and it is extremely entertaining, the kind of book you can inhale, though it is 703 pages (but the print is big).  His verbal pyrotechnics in the first half of the book dazzle, and though plot takes precedence later, the novel probably should have won some kind of award, though I haven’t the faintest idea what, since it seems to be a mix of fiction and (not quite) journalism.  Wolfe has won many awards, including the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Set in Miami, Wolfe’s book interweaves the stories of many colorful characters, including Nestor, a Cuban-American policeman who dramatically rescues a Cuban refugee from the 70-foot mast of a yacht; Magdalena, a beautiful Cuban-American psychiatric nurse who wears very little clothing; John Smith, a Yalie who works for the Miami Herald and breaks a story about art forgery that upsets his editor, Edward T. Topping IV;  Norman, a sex addiction psychiatrist who has sex addictions himself; a rich Russian who donated millions of dollars worth of paintings to the art museum; and Igor, an art forger.

Wolfe has a very good time with this book.  He seems to have interviewed everyone in Miami to write it.

The character I found most moving was Nestor, the cop.  You know cops:  they can be heroic and touchingly chivalrous, but also very weird.  I was once coerced into a cop car at midnight because I was JOGGING.  They insisted on driving me home, because the neighborhood was too “dangerous.”

Nestor is a hero, in a cop kind of way, but things keep going wrong for him.  A Cuban refugee scrambles onto a yacht and climbs up a 70-foot-mast.  If he is arrested on dry land he gets asylum, but on a boat he is still technically in the water and, if caught, will be sent back to Cuba.  Nestor is ordered to rescue him from the mast, so he hauls himself up hand over hand, as he has learned to do on a rope at the gym.

Nestor before the climb is thinking:

Now he was in for it, whether he could pull off this stunt or not.  He sized up the mast.  He tilted his head up and looked straight up.  Way…way…way up there–Jesus!  The sun was burning up his eyeballs, darkest extremos or no darkest extremos!  He had begun to sweat…wind or no wind!  Chirst, it was hot out here, grilling out on the deck of a schooner in the middle of Biscayne Bay.  The man on top of the mast looked just about he size and color and shapelessness of one of those turd-brown vinyl garbage bags.  He was still twisting and lurching about…way up there.”

Traffic stops on the bridge near the mast, and all the Cubans get out of their cars and boo Nestor.  Nestor is shunned by his family and the Cuban-American community because the refugee was turned over to the Coast Guard (not Nestor’s doing) and will be deported, though he is a hero in the Miami Herald.

The same nightmarish kind of misunderstanding occurs again and again regarding intrepid, competent, if not too brainy, Nestor.  When he and another officer bust a crack house, someone with a cell phone tapes the scene and uploads an edited version on YouTube that makes them look like racists beating up a black man at random.  The drug dealer has actually given them a lot of trouble.

I was very sympathetic to Nestor, a muscular cop who does his job a little TOO well.  Wolfe makes Nestor the most sympathetic character in the book.

Other characters fare less well with me.  Magdalena doesn’t seem real–was there ever such a mindless woman?  Well, of course.   She dresses in bustiers and very short skirts, suggested by her roommate, a “sophisticated” Peruvian, and other outfits I suppose women do wear in Miami.  Magdalena, despite her penchant for slutty fashions, is very prim, and though she will do anything in bed with rich men, she is shocked by the sexual obsessions of her boss and boyfriend, Norman, the sex addiction psychiatrist, and later by the insensitivity of a wealthy Russian art collector.

There are few intelligent women characters.

But Wolfe very sharply illustrates the similarities between reporters and police.  John Smith, the aggressive reporter who looks like a blond wimp, shows his strengths when he and Nestor work together on an art forgery case ( informally, because Nestor’s  badge has  temporarily been taken away after the YouTube video).  The two thrive on being undercover.  At a strip club where Igor, the forger, hangs out, Nestor knows exactly how to act, and later at Igor’s studio in an assisted living facility where Igor has a studio, John takes charge and Nestor learns about true double-dealing.

Wolfe’s style is exuberant but sometimes glib;  there are lots of ellipses…lots of exclamation points….lots of noises like “Smack,”  “Beep,” and  ” Click!”

This book is sharply observed, humorous, and addictive.  The vividness is sometimes exhausting, though.

But I love his references to Balzac and Gogol–they’re the names of clubs and restaurants–and I think he is trying to write “Balzac-ian) realism, mixed with the bizarre.

It is vintage Tom Wolfe, a terrific read, and I do recommend it.  It is really a lot of fun.

by

Giveaway: Angela Thirkell’s The Duke’s Daughter

IMG_2342I found an embarrassment of riches at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, and I accidentally acquired a book I already have, Angela Thirkell’s The Duke’s Daughter.  If anyone would like my old copy, a 1951 ex-library book that has obviously been much read, leave a comment. The book is in what I’d call “acceptable” condition, but if you want a reading copy of this hard-to-find book it’s okay.

I’ll draw names tomorrow, and there is an excellent chance you’ll win, because I’m not sure how many Thirkell fans there are out there.

If you would like some background on Thirkell, here is a link to my “review” of Thirkell’s High Rising.

by

The Greatest Book Sale

Planned Parenthood Book Sale.

Planned Parenthood Book Sale.

Tonight we attended the Planned Parenthood Book Sale in Des Moines.

It is one of the five best things about living in the Midwest.  The other four are Murphy-Brookfield Books in Iowa City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Wabash Trace Trail in the Loess Hills of Western Iowa, and Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

My taste is impeccable.

You may not agree at first.

“Where IS Des Moines?”

“WHAT is Des Moines?”

“Are we there yet?’

When you find yourself among 600,000 books in the 4H Building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds, you will think you’ve gone to book heaven.  And then you’ll remember:  oh, yeah, she’s the one with impeccable taste.  We, of course, went tonight, the first night.  There was some sleet.  There was some flooding in our basement.  But I was not about to stay home on Opening Night.  All the glitterati would be there.   What would we have done at home?  Watched “Community?”

There is  a certain protocol. Our maids and valets dress us for the evening.  “Where’s my fan?”  I say in a panic.

“It was here a minute ago, Ma’am.  Land sakes.”

“Please look for it, Tildy.”

Oh, wait,  this isn’t Downton Abbey. We have no maids or valets. We all dress down in old jeans and old sweaters, so we can get our hands dusty and dirty handling old books.

IMG_2312

A smiling shopper!

Although the first Planned Parenthood Book  Sale was held in 1961,  I  didn’t learn about it till  the ’70s when I visited my grandmother in Des Moines.  She lived in an apartment in the charming Beaverdale neighborhood, above what is now Backcountry Outfitters, I’m pretty sure.  I loved all her old things, begged for her antique trunk, and when I saw her 19th-century copy of Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, I said, “Where did you get that?”

“The Planned Parenthood Book Sale.”

And of course she let me take it home.  She was a grandmother.

Although Planned Parenthood continues to be strong, they’ve had some setbacks.  A few years ago, an ani-abortion group  started something called “a Pro Life book sale,” always scheduled the same weekend as the Planned Parenthood Book Sale.  The anti-abortionists hope is to undercut the profits of the 52-year-old Planned Parenthood sale:  the profits of the Planned Parenthood Sale, by the way, go to community education and outreach programs.

The anti-abortionists are playing dirty.  They’re petty.

The Planned Parenthood people never mention it.  They’re classy.

Someone should write a news feature about it, but the newspaper doesn’t  take it on.

So enough history.

And now for my stash!

IMG_2335

We all love to read, and this little cat has her eye on Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall.

The best thing to do at a sale is not to look for any specific author.  If you want to find Balzac, you won’t.  I found many other splendid things, though.

IMG_2321_1

Penguins, Oxfords, and Nortons. Pretty good, huh?

Some of these were almost new.  They cost $2-$3 each.  They’re mostly replacements for old disintegrating copies.

The book scouts were there clicking on their scanners, and they had wiped out the foreign language books by the time we got there. Thank God for the classics, older books, and paperbacks.  They had left quite a few behind.

IMG_2331

On the way home with your boxes of books you have to stop for a snack. Do not go to the Homeplate Diner. They can’t even make an omelet.  Drive down Unviersity to the Dairy Zone for chocolate soft serve ice cream.  .  When you taste that chocolate ice cream, you’ll know you’re in the zone.

IMG_2339This kitty can’t wait to read the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Crime and Punishment ($3).

I found several Angela Thirkell and Peter DeVries books.  I LOVE humor books.  Will try to add a picture or two tomorrow.  I’m tired!

by

Mirabile Does Middlebrow: Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys

Photo on 2013-04-15 at 20.07

We read The Little Ottleys.

Sometimes a comedy is stripped to the bone.  The plumage is colorful but the skeleton pokes through.

Ada Leverson’s novels are a bit like this. Her style is minimalist.  The plots are contrived.  The characters are sticks.  They walk around the stage and chat.

Yet Leverson is charming.

If you like an epigrammatic style, witty dialogue, chic characters, and drama that unfurls in drawing rooms, you will probably enjoy Leverson’s novels.

Leverson is like a second Oscar Wilde, albeit female and heterosexual.  And she was indeed a close friend of Wilde, and even published parodies of his poems in Punch.

The Little Ottleys by Ada LeversonI am not a fan of Wilde, but Leverson’s trilogy, The Little Ottleys, is important not only for its Wildean entertainment:  Leverson obviously  influenced the comic voices of Angela Thirkell and Violet Trefusis.

In Love’s Shadow, the first novel in Leverson’s witty trilogy, the beautiful but practical heroine, Edith, works constantly to manage her profligate husband Bruce, a hypochondriac who skips work,  fritters away hours at amateur theatricals, and cannot be bothered to sit down and look at their finances.

We love Edith, but are frustrated and puzzled by her choice of husband.  How did this happen?

Much of Love’s Shadow revolves around another bad match, that between Edith’s beautiful, rich friend, Hyacinth Verney, and Cecil, a charming man in his thirties who is madly, miserably in unrequited love with an older woman who urges him to marry Hyacinth.

The story of Hyacinth and Cecil, though outwardly romantic, is chilling.  So this is what love comes to.  One can’t get the one one wants, and so….   Hyacinth loves Cecil, but he simply obeys Eugenia in attempting to love and then marrying Hyathinth.  Maybe Eugenia fixes everything by rejecting Cecil, but we doubt it.  Love has shadows and doubles wherever we look.

Equally chilling is Leverson’s portrayal of Edith, the amused, strangely unruffled wife and mother who expects very little and who mothers her husband almost as much as she does their hilarious son, Archie.  (And by the way, Mrs. Moreland’s loquacious son Tony in Angela Thirkell’s High Rising MUST be modeled on Archie.) Bruce doesn’t bother to hide his extreme admiration for Hyacinth from Edith, and even admits he can’t go see his mother because he has asked a woman from the amateur theatricals to lunch (but she turns him down).  None of this bothers Edith.  She is serene and gently humorous.

The novel ends with an odd little scene:  the Ottleys are cruising in a taxi looking for the house of the Mitchells who have invited them to dinner.  Bruce has forgotten the address.

Tenterhooks by ada leversonAnd so that odd scene is their marriage.

In the second novel, Tenterhooks, Edith prefers the company of Aylmer Ross, a widower she meets at a dinner party.  We still don’t know why she married Bruce, though they’re still together.

In the case of Aylmer, a successful, hard-working barrister with a large income and extravagant tastes, we know  exactly how he got married, and how unimportant it was.

People had said how extraordinarily Aylmer must have been in love to have married that uninteresting girl, no-one in particular, not pretty and a little second-rate.  As a matter of fact the marriage had happened entirely by accident.  It had occurred through a misunderstanding during a game of consequences in a country house.”

This is perhaps a bit too-too, but it’s charming.  Marriage proposals are not always about champagne and rings in cupcakes.

Aylmer’s chivalry is unrealistic, but that’s Leverson’s deadpan comedy.  Such romantic gestures are taken in stride.

What will happen?  Edith and Aylmer see each other every day.  She buys a new dress to get his attention.  Or rather, her good friend buys it:  Edith doesn’t like to shop, and her friend doesn’t mind doing it for her.

Finally Aylmer and Edith kiss, but don’t have sex.  Then Aylmer takes off and rambles around Europe because he is so unhappy.  Edith misses him very much.

And even Bruce has a moment of jealousy.  When Edith won’t show him a letter, he physically takes it away from her.  It is not one of Aylmer’s, though:  it turns out to be an advertisement.

Will Edith and Aylmer get together?  I’m guessing not in this book.

But I still have the last book to read.

These books are a feather-light, charming entertainment for a rainy afternoon.

by

Mirabile Does Middlebrow: Ann Hood’s The Obituary Writer & Colette’s The Blue Lantern

Last year I read innumerable middlebrow novels, and especially enjoyed Nancy Hale’s Dear Beast, Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group.

Nancy Hale

Nancy Hale

This year it may seem that I’ve read mainly classics, or perhaps just Balzac, Balzac, and Balzac.  (Does my repetition of his name make it sound like a law firm?)

Yes, this has been the year of the classics.

But I continue to enjoy new middlebrow literary novels that may or may not last, and older books, sometimes out-of-print, other times reissued as rediscovered classics by optimistic publishers.  Often such books are written by women for women, because women after all, according to studies in the U.S. and Canada, make up 80% of the fiction readers.

Don’t we want to know what women are writing?  I mean, we’re reading it.  Aren’t we?

I have a recurring dream in which I own a writers’ retreat.  Actually it is an apartment house that resembles a motel, and it happens to be located behind my house. I am very anxious.   It is a lot of work.   Whom will I allow to stay?   It’s always a shock to walk in and find the apartment to the right of the biggest bathroom inhabited by a man I don’t know and don’t approve of.  (Is he even a writer?)   Yet if Jonathan Lethem or Ann Hood shows up in my dream, they’re serious writers so they get nice rooms; but if Tom Wolfe or Tina Brown come, they have to be sent elsewhere, because they’re  off doing journalism and socializing and won’t be around the rooms much anyway, see?   In my dream I’m the all-knowing landlady with rules like, “Lights out at 1 a.m.”  How’s that for sternness? That’s like saying, “Lights out, never.”  But the worst thing is trying to gather all the animals in every night.  You wouldn’t believe how many dogs, cats, and hamsters come to live at a writers’ retreat.

Ann Hood

Ann Hood

“Ballbody!”  “Muffy!”  Don Juan!”  “Cheri!”  If you can convince them you have food, they’ll come in.

It’s good to get out of the dream and talk about books again.

I have long been a fan of Ann Hood, and am two-thirds of the way through her new novel, The Obituary Writer.

the obituary writer by ann hoodIn alternating chapters Hood relates the stories of two women of different generations: Claire, a ’60s housewife, who dislikes her husband deeply and is pregnant with her lover’s child, regards John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as a symbol of hope; Evelyn, a teacher whose lover disappears in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, becomes a traumatized, almost psychic writer of literary obituaries.  This thoughtful, nuanced book focuses on women’s emotions and sensibilities, and I can tell you right now, our husbands are never going to read this delicate novel about loss.  But Hood’s  crystal-clear prose has depth, and though this is unlikely to make the New York Times Notable Books list, it is perhaps her best book, and it is worth reading.

cha_colette

Colette

How I love Colette!  Her lush prose reads like poetry, and her laudations of nature are both subtle and sensual. But I admit I had put off reading The Blue Lantern, her journal and memoir about old age, because the subject naturally is one to be avoided.

Colette’s meditations in her seventies are just as sharp and astonishing as ever, even when she humorously admits to some faltering of her vision and hearing.  If she has to travel by car instead of on foot in her seventies, she makes the best of a different vantage point.

She writes of the frailty of aging:

More than once of late, turning my eyes from my book or my blue-tinted writing paper towards the superb quadrangle that I am privileged to view from my window, I have thought ‘The children in the Garden are not nearly so noisy this year,’ and a moment later found myself finding fault with the doorbell, the telephone, and the whole orchestral gamut of the radio for becoming progressively fainter.”

The Blue Lantern Colette She still visits vineyards and markets, still eats good food and drinks wine. She tells funny anecdotes about her famous friends, Jean Cocteau and Gide.  One day she is determined to copy a lovely rug in Cocteau’s country house at Milly.  She must have it!  But her friend Cocteau is abroad, Jean Marais is on a film location, and Paul of the Bookshop says he’ll go to Milly and charter an airplane.  Colette tells him to forget it.  The next thing she know,

…out of the blue Jean Marais sprang to life before my very eyes, tall enough to brush the ceiling with his orange–no, moonlight blue hair–no, auburn mop of hair!  And what in the world was he trailing behind him, slung from his shoulder?

The rug!  Colette’s friends will do anything for her.  They’re all so brilliant and funny.  Don’t you feel sad that you weren’t a brilliant actor/filmmaker/bookshop owner/writer who hung out with Colette?

She also quotes letters from fans, which amuse her, even when they ask outrageously that she write a preface to their “life work.”

Oh, Colette, we love your voice!

by

The Plague, Love’s Shadow, & Love Has No Pride

The 1971 version of Cousin Bette is great when you're sick.

The 1971 miniseries of Cousin Bette with Margaret Tyzack.

I’ve been shivering under blankets and comforters, wonder if I’ll be able to wash my hair tomorrow, can’t even drink tea, which I usually live on, and didn’t make weekend oatmeal muffins.

We  have one of those viruses that go around offices and then go around the family and then go away and then come back.   First stomach flu, then a cold, headaches, you name it.  We call it the plague.

I had intended to do some work today, even if it meant shivering in the living room, but I just didn’t feel well enough.

Nap.  Diet 7-Up.  Nap.  Diet 7-Up.

I watched the last episode of Cousin Bette, the brilliant 1971 miniseries with Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren.  It is slower, more detailed, and better-cast than the ’90s movie with beautiful Jessica Lange tarted-down slightly, but still breathtaking as unattractive Bette.  (It was a little like casting Winona Ryder as Jo in Little Women:  the audience laughs when Jo sells her hair and one of her sisters (Amy?)  says Jo’s hair was her one beauty.)

Diet 7-Up.  Suddenly I felt like reading a romantic novel.

Green Hat by Michael ArlenIt’s not that I was in the mood for romance.  I just wanted to reread Michael Arlen’s romantic middlebrow novel, The Green Hat, a kind of 1920s mood piece where flappers and free love abound and a stylish woman can’t get it right.  The narrator, a writer, relates the tragic  story of Iris Storm, a beautiful, languorous woman who wears a green hat and drives “a long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot,” who lives unconventionally and takes love lightly, and with whom, of course, everyone is in love.

Then love turns heart-rending.

It’s a sad novel, but I was already crying because I couldn’t drink my tea, so what’s a little more sadness?

But I couldn’t find it.

What to read when you're sick.

What to read when you’re sick.

Finally I settled for Love’s Shadow, the first book in Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys, a trilogy so witty Leverson seems like a female Oscar Wilde.

And, in fact, Leverson was Wilde’s friend, and during his trial, he lived at her house in her son’s nursery.  She was also the first one to visit Wilde when he got out of prison.

I haven’t read much of this yet, but it is utterly charming.  The three novels in the trilogy are Love’s Shadow, Tenterhooks, and Love at Second Sight, all of which are available free at manybooks.net.  The paperback version of Love’s Shadow is available from Bloomsbury.

And then…

“It sounds like Delilah in here,” my husband said later.  (N.B.  Delilah is the host of a syndicated call-in and pop music radio show.)

Linda Ronstadt

Linda Ronstadt

I was listening to Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt and watching their videos on YouTube, and, indeed, they  probably are favorites of Delilah.

Do you know how many versions of “Love Has No Pride” there are on YouTube?  Linda Ronstadt’s and Bonnie Raitt’s are the best.

And the lyrics, by the way, have more depth than I realized.  When I was young, I used to spend hours listening to such music, but I don’t think I caught the fact that the narrator’s friends have walked out on her, too.  For me it was all about love.

But look at this first verse:

“I’ve had bad dreams too many times
To think that they don’t mean much anymore
Fine times have gone and left my sad home
Friends who once cared just walk out my door.”

Really startlingly sad, and the fourth line is a shock.  Because it’s not what we’re expecting:  her lover scorns her, but so do her friends.  And that loss also hurts, when friends give you up because you’ve made a bad choice, or they think you have.  (Has anyone ever refused to go to your wedding?  Probably.)  And”…just walk out my door” is brilliant.  You need the “just.”  It makes it sound pop and colloquial.  (That would be edited out in a writing class.)

Then there’s the repeated:

“And I’d give anything to see you again.”

Like many of us, I have regrets and would “give anything” to go back in time “and see you again,” and take that Aeschylus class…

There have been many emotional scenes in my life, as I’m sure there have been in yours, and this song captured my intense feelings in a way that The Green Hat and Love’s Shadow could not.

So below are two brilliant versions of “Love Has No Pride,” the first by Bonnie Raitt, the second by Linda Ronstadt.

And here’s the Ronstadt:

by

Comments & Nuns: Where Did I Go Wrong?

It is easier to comment at The Guardian than at blogs hosted by Blogger.

I tried to comment on a blog about this book, but the commend didn't go through...

I tried to comment on a blog about this book, but the commend didn’t go through…

It takes about a minute to sign up at The Guardian and call yourself Ishmaella or something–and then you can write any foolish thing that comes into your mind.  Fortunately I only did that twice, and I can’t remember what I said.

Many of The Guardian’s articles are based on comments these days, so it’s a good thing they’ve made it easy.

Good though these comments may be, I prefer comments at blogs.

Comments on blogs seem friendlier and more supportive than comments at newspapers. Blogging is more homey, more like publishing a small-press book than like publishing a newspaper.  A small-press editor once told me that if a writer had a lot of friends, the book sold, and if he or she did not, the books just sat in a box.

If I apply this to bloggers, it makes sense.  There are some wonderful popular blogs with dozens of commenters, and then there are other wonderful unknown  blogs with few comments.  Bloggers tend to have more comments if they are active in Yahoo book groups or network with fellow bloggers  and “do” challenges. (But aren’t those challenges for very young readers?)

These days I limit my online social activities  to commenting occasionally at blogs.  Although one family member reads my blog, he doesn’t comment online.   He just likes to see what I’m reading, because I’m not supposed to be buying books.

Sometimes I want to comment at blogs, but find it impossible to type in the indecipherable code of letters and numbers that proves I’m not a bot.

I recently tried twice to comment at Vintage Reads, because I loved a post on Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus.  I’ve never read Black Narcissus, but when I first read Godden’s other nun book, In This House of Brede, as a teenager, I thought about becoming a nun.

You might actually have to go to church to do this, however.

I wandered around a beautiful Episcopalian church.  There was a courtyard.

I didn’t get around to going to any of the services.

I have known some very nice nuns and some very mean ones.  Overall, I wouldn’t like that line of work.

Back to commenting at blogs, whether they are about nuns or not:  If you want a spam-free environment, you often screen your comments.

Most of the commenters here are bloggers, and they are civil.  After I approve the first comment by a visitor,  he or she can comment regularly.

It is a little more difficult at Blogger, which I think is the most popular blog platform.  First you must sign in under a

Google Account
OpenID
Name/URL
Anonymous

And this is sometimes more difficult than it looks.

hieroglyphicsThen you need to type in a bunch of indecipherable hieroglyphics that I have to take off my glasses and squint at to see.

Do I get the letters and numbers right?    Sometimes it takes two or three tries.

But, if you haven’t seen me commenting lately, know that I REALLY LOVE YOUR BLOG.  Your blog  won’t let me comment.

by

Peter Stothard’s Spartacus Road

One of the best nonfiction books I read last year was Robert Dessaix’s Twilight of Love:  Travels with Turgenev, part biography of Turgenev, part memoir/travel book, and part literary criticisms.

Spartacus Road Peter StothardPeter Stothard’s Spartacus Road:  A Personal Journey through Ancient Italy is another unclassifiable volume of what I’ll call belles-lettres: part Roman history, part memoir/travel, part  analysis of literature pertaining to the history of the escaped slave Spartacus, part translations of Roman poetry and letters.

When Stothard, a classicist, the editor of the TLS, and former editor of The London Times, suffered from pain from an undiagnosed cancer, he often experienced what he called “pain pictures,” vivid memories of his own past and also of scenes he knew from his classical education.   He hallucinated, or saw pain pictures, of Spartacus’s battles with the Romans, when “Nero,” as he referred to his cancer, tortured him.

Scenes from a classical education came unwilled.  During some of Nero’s visits I had vivid views of this first fight in the Spartacus war, not those of a general watching high up on a nearby hill but those of a soldier seeing what was close before his eyes.  It was as though I had been at the centre of this and other slaughters, hour after hour after hour.”

After he recovered from his illness, Stothard remained psychologically traumatized.  He had survived a rare cancer but could not put the experience behind him.  And so he decided to travel the Spartacus Road, the route Spartacus and his slave army traveled when they escaped from the gladiator school near Capua.  This strange but brilliant book fuses his journalism with his knowledge of the classics.

The book is a history of Spartacus, but it is also an often humorous 21st-century travel diary in which he discusses the tourist industry and the people he meets.  He pores over maps with a Korean teacher and her doctor husband, meets a priest who insists that he talk about his father, and encounters a peripatetic gladiator-actor who cannot play his part due to odd union rules, and who thus has become the  manager of  a woman who poses as a statue-like Virgin Mary.

Stothard is equally fascinated by the lives and views of Roman poets and historians. He begins by writing about Symmachus, a little-known politician of the late Roman Empire who wrote letters, edited texts of Livy, and understood the disasters of slave wars.  Stothard also delves into the famous poetry of Statius, Horace, and Lucretius, the histories of Sallust and Plutarch, the letters of Pliny, Cicero’s scorn of  Spartacus, and the Epicurean philosophy recorded mainly in Lucretius’s beautiful hexameters..

Peter Stothard

Peter Stothard

As Stothard speculates about Spartacus, about whom little is known, he wonders what kind of man this leader of the gladiators was.  He might have been calm, he might have been vicious.

Stothard writes:

He may have found the thinking hard.  He may be one of those who had survived his fights with fellow men and animals in the Arena but not the feelings that followed afterwards.  Psychological trauma is not a discovery of modern analysis alone.  The Romans knew about it too.  Anyone selling a slave who had fought a lion or bear had to declare that contest in a contract.  Attempted suicides had to be declared, even escapes.”

And I cannot help but think that  journalists may  also be gladiators, with widely different codes, some being resisters and heroes, others merely ambitious or vengeful.

Stothard interweaves personal memories with his travels, some of them serious, some of them funny.  He remembers seeing the Stanley Kubrick movie, Spartacus, on the walls of the chemistry lab at school in the ’60s, and is pleased when he manages to buy it from a Polish DVD seller on the street.   (He especially likes Jean Simmons as Varina.)  And I found this very comical because, during one of my rare intervals of teaching Latin in the ’80s, I showed Spartacus  on the VCR before Christmas break.  Some things never change.

I was drawn to Spartacus Road because I, too, have a classical background, and it seems natural to turn to the classics in a crisis.  I am not a historian, but I am fascinated by the poets, by Cicero and Pliny, and during one horrifying illness, infected by a deadly bug bite which the doctors could  treat only by trial and error of different medications administered through IVs, I recited all the lines of Roman poetry I could remember, thinking they would control the pain.  Since I had memorized only lines I made my students memorize, there were fewer than I needed.

Stothard’s voice is brilliant, creative, and very strong–there is no hint of uncertainty or weakness in his voice.  But  as the book goes on, it becomes a better, more original, less journalistic, book, and he occasionally shows his vulnerability, though never for longer than a paragraph.

This stunning book deftly balances the historical significance of Spartacus’s rebellion with Stothard’s very private war against cancer and struggle to be well.

What a great book.  A great pleasure to read, and astonishing that I found it.