"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. But the biographer sees the last chapter while he is still at the first, and I have only to write over with ink what Gavin has written in pencil." pp. 6-7

"We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company." p. 109

Continued...

Favorite Quotes

Mr. Forster's Pageant

"The age of enquiry was over, and the age of authority had begun, and it is worth noting that the decline of science at Alexandria exactly coincides with the rise of Christianity."
The Outermost Dream p 23 "Mr. Forster's Pageant"

"Paganism of the most tolerant kind, able to think of all gods as perhaps the same few deities worshipped under different names, is replaced by the rigid insistence that there is only one God..."
The Outermost Dream p 23 "Mr. Forster's Pageant"

Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy

"She disliked democracy not because she believed that the common people were unfit to rule but because it encouraged mediocrity, renounced all ideals that were higher than those that could be attained, and, by blurring distinctions, diminished the richness of existence.
The Outermost Dream pp 27-28 "Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy" (Karen Blixen)

(she) "...sprang from a class that valued things according to the use they could be put to and preferred the convenient to the beautiful."
The Outermost Dream p 28 "Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy" (Karen Blixen)

"...she had a frightening sense of the fragility of life, a terror of abandoning her soul to something she could lose again; that every moment of happiness she had known in Africa had been colored by a dread of its ending; that it had become a habit, and ide'e fixe, with her 'to the point of calculating how much more time was left of something, even if it was only a trip to Nairobi'."
The Outermost Dream p 32 "Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy" (Karen Blixen)

"'For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue -- you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?'"
The Outermost Dream p 34 "Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy" (Karen Blixen) Quoting from her essay "On Mottoes of My Life"

"Her housekeeper said, 'I have never thought that she was sweet and nice all the time, or that it was always pleasant to live under her roof. She was, though, a person with stronger feelings than so many others. Therefore there were things which pained her, and when something pains you, it can well make you unreasonable'."
The Outermost Dream p 39 "Ideas of Honor and Aristocracy" (Karen Blixen)

V.S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship

"What distinguishes a classic from an ordinary book is, of course, authority, and to write with this degree of authoritry you have to have a great deal to say and no hesitation about how it is to be said or about saying it."
The Outermost Dream p 50 "V. S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship

"The French boys in the shop could not pronounce his name, and he was the office joke until he managed to become the office humorist instead. A month after he started to work there, his awkward French had become fluent."
The Outermost Dream p 53 "V. S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship"

"He knew that he wanted to become a writer, but he could not see that he had anything to write about except that he was alive."
The Outermost Dream p 54 "V. S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship"

"...there is a noticeable change of pace and focus. Events take place in time rather than at any given moment of time. The descriptions of people tend to be generalized."
The Outermost Dream p 58 "V. S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship"

"'...the Spanish paradox: life intensely felt in the flesh and made whole by the contemplation of death'."
The Outermost Dream p 59 "V. S. Pritchett's Apprenticeship" Quoting V. S. Pritchett

A Life

"Almost blocking the doorway was a grand piano that Amalrik had inherited from an aunt who was a singer. It was completely out of tune and was seldom played. 'Some people -- especially foreigners -- used to laugh at us, because while we didn't even have a table to eat at, half the room was occupied by a useless grand piano. But its very uselessness and beauty, together with the paintings, the old books, the grandfather clock, and the withered, spidery plants on the sideboard, made our room look like something out of a fairy tale'."
The Outermost Dream p 67 "A Life" (Andrei Alekseyevich Amalrik)

Displaced Princes and Princesses

"Her diaries are not introspective and contain few generalizations. They record whom she saw and what she did, always with the instinct for the telling detail which is characteristic of the great diarists."
The Outermost Dream p 109 "Displaced Princes and Princesses" (Marie Vassiltchikov)

The Bohemian Girl

"Her character had many faults, but they were all of the forgivable kind, and it is too much to ask that people who spend very much time in a world of their own, as all writers do, should immediately and invariably grasp what is going on in this one."
The Outermost Dream p 153 "The Bohemian Girl" (E. Nesbit)

One Creature

"As husband and wife, they continued to practice certain forms of politeness with each other. He did not see her in the morning until her face was made up. Except in moments of the greatest stress, they did not ask, 'What are you thinking of?' They did not permit themselves displays of ill temper or try to impose on each other all their own ways of seeing and feeling."
The Outermost Dream p 175 "One Creature" (Colette)

"She read Proust all the way through about every two years."
The Outermost Dream p 177 "One Creature" (Colette)

"Within reach, a brown morocco-leather box, designed to hold a rare copy of Pascal's Les Provinciales but actually containing her lipstick, mirror, etc."
The Outermost Dream p 177 "One Creature" (Colette)

"The real curious person has no secrets; they would interfere with his pursuit of knowledge. More curious than Colette was it probably isn't possible to be. And who she was, what she was, at all times lies open to you like a landscape when you read her. She never descibes anything she has not observed. Every important thing about her is there. Nothing is held back from the reader who may be curious about her. And yet when all curiousity about Colette has been satisfied, she continues to exert a pull, an attraction."
The Outermost Dream p 177 "One Creature" (Colette)

The Element of Lavishness

"'And there she was and there she stayed. I had no thought of doing anything with her. A year or so later and equally out of the blue I saw Minna telling about the pogrom in a Paris drawing-room and Lamartine leaning against the doorway. And there she stayed�cI found that I wanted to write anovel about 1848. And Sophia and Minna started up and rushed into it'."
The Outermost Dream p 203 "The Element of Lavishness" (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

"'I love reading Letters myself, and I can imagine enjoying my own'."
The Outermost Dream p 205 "The Element of Lavishness" (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

"'I hope you have had the same moonlight nights there have been here: the downs like sleeping deities and a moonlit badger feeding on the lawn.' And this: 'I wish you could see the two cats, drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementally adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their suppertime. They might have ben composed by Bach for two flutes'."
The Outermost Dream p 206 "The Element of Lavishness" (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

Continued...

"Gloom we will always have with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending."

In our current quest for self-improvement, it's getting harder to enjoy life's little pleasures. Even if we are seduced by the occasional martini, cigar, or bacon and eggs breakfast, we worry about the effects afterward, or worse, feel guilty. We are behind in our duties and chores and failing at our own major makeover.

So, tear up your New Year's resolutions and sit down with Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures. Then go out and really take pleasure in something.

Travellers
"Travellers had a place in rural society and as long as they did not abuse the settled community's generosity relations between the two were peaceful. This was especially true in the Midlands where the land was rich and the farming community prosperous."
p 53

Continued...

The morning after I began thinking for a tagline for this weblog, I woke up with the words "plain and simple as the truth" in mind. The phrase had a familiar ring, but I couldn't place it. I searched on the web. I searched amazon.com. I couldn't find anything.

Then Sunday, on the third floor of the library, I remembered. It was the title of a book on writing. Well, almost. I found the book: Clear and Simple as the Truth. I'd read about it in The Common Reader catalog. I had checked it out, several years ago. I checked it out again.

This book defines one type of style, classic, and its elemental principles. The classic style is contrasted to other styles, such as, romantic, contemplative, and reflexive.

Mystery solved! But now I'm in search of a new tagline.

Continued...

The Earthquake Bird is the first book I've read by a foreigner in Japan that isn't about being a foreigner in Japan. It is set in Tokyo and the protaganist is English. The sense of place is dead-on, so all the familiar dissonance of being a foreigner in Japan is felt, but The Earthquake Bird is not about that. It is a psychological thriller; it is a murder mystery which has just won the John Creasey Memorial Dagger award as a newcomer to crime fiction.

"Early this morning, several hours before my arrest..." (excerpt)

The writing itself is mesmerizing. I read it over two days and that first night I dreamed in the voice of the narrator.

It wasn't until I reached Part 2 of As the Twig is Bent that I remembered that I'd read it before. Yes, it reminded me of that other book, and I meant to try to find it to compare the two; then, I realized this was the other book.

The "Sketches of a Bittersweet Life" in the first half of this book describe Poll's childhood in the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire) from 1914 to 1928. The daughter of a miner, Poll and her many siblings never have enough to eat, and rarely have enough to wear. Although the poverty is ever-present, the stories focus on the people: her Aunt Lizzy, who went to America and ran a boarding house in California during the gold rush; her Dad, the coalminer, who spends every free moment with his nose in a book or discussing Einstein, Darwin, Shaw and Lenin with his "butties"; her Mam who is chased out of an orchard and threatened with the law for gleaning the fallen apples after the harvest; and her Granny who is credited with breaking the drought when she sends a few choice words God's way.

Each sketch in the second half of the book describes one of the jobs during her years in service from the age of 14 until she is married at 23. She rarely stays with one employee more than a year, for she is always homesick for her kin and her woods. In the 1970s (when this book was published) one of these stories was dramatized by the BBC as "Abide with Me".

Continued...

My Cousin Rachel satisfied my desires for a good summer read. It took a few pages for me to fall under it spell, but once I did I was as lost in it as Philip Ashley is in his cousin, Rachel. Did she murder his beloved uncle, Ambrose, or not? Everything is either as it seems or nothing is as it seems. Philip, the narrator, is either delusional or the only one who sees clearly through the plots and counter plots. The cleverness of the book is that you can't be sure.

The story begins and ends "They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though." Before the plot comes full circle, though, it twists and turns like a corpse hanging in the wind.

Highly recommended.

Continued...

Thanks to a week of rain, I have time to pay attention to some neglected projects, including this site. The new colors are the result of my leafing through The Designer's Guide to Global Color Combinations. This book has page after page of color combinations sampled from arts and crafts all over the world. The samples include the CYMK and RGB numbers, so that you can find a combination you like and easily replicate it. The author, Leslie Cabarga, throws off the yoke of browser-safe colors, and has convinced me to be likewise wild and crazy.

The color combinations from this book are available on CD-rom from Flashfonts.com. The home page of this site is a bit flashy, but worth a visit, if for no other reason than to order the "New American Bumper Sticker". Dig around the site for some really stunning designs.

Leslie Carbarga is working on a new site As soon as I saw those colors, I was ready to redesign this site all over again.

Whenever we get a rare day cold enough for a fire, I curl up with a glass of sherry and one of my favorite "girl" books. Tonight it was Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, since I just retrieved it from Dana. I purchased this copy in Japan where it is published as a foreign classic for students of English. However, it is now in the public domain, so you could download it from Project Gutenberg. I don't think that reading it online would give you the same pleasure as reading a real book in front of a fire. And the drawings are integral to the narrative. It is written as a series of letters from the orphan, Judy, to an unknown benefactor (Daddy-Long-Legs) who has sent her to college.

Originally published in 1912, this book is, in a word, charming. I have nothing more to say about it, except that if you're a girl, or have any girlishness left in you, you should cuddle up all toasty and read it, especially if you like reading chatty letters.

Continued...

Right after seeing Master and Commander for the third time, I started reading the Patrick O'Brian's twenty-book series. I began checking them out from the library as they became available, but this forced me to begin toward the ending of the series (The Nutmeg of Consolation). The reading was a little tough, not for all nautical terms, but because the narrative lurches in fits and starts. A great deal of attention is given to a small detail of conversation and then a huge plot point is wrapped up in an off-hand sentence. Only coming from the movie to the books, made it possible to enough on the characters at this stage of the series to get through the plot.

One of the great things O'Brian has done is to create two strong main characters. Jack Aubrey is the man of action, a sensing type who lives in the moment, feeling both joy and pain deeply, but not dwelling in it. Stephen Maturin is the intuitive, intellectual observer, sometimes brooding, other times almost coldly unfeeling. Opposites attract; but because they are both very good at what they do, respect holds their relationship together. Seeing the same events through both their eyes brings history into three-dimensional reality. The movie did not do justice to their relationship. The movie focused on Jack and Stephen comes off as a self-interested malcontent. In the books, however, the reader spends more time in Stephen's head, since as the non-naval person he is the one constantly questioning naval jargon and customs.

I dreaded finishing up the series, because long before I read the last six books I'd come to love hanging out with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. It doesn't matter much what they're doing, it's just fun to tag along. As it turned out, though, knowing the ending made starting at the beginning that much more enjoyable, because the context lent poignancy to meetings and conversations that you know will figure later, even though the characters themselves are unaware.

Continued...

Every few years I pull a favorite book off the shelf, one of those books I dip into over and over, and read it again from start to finish. Part of the reason is to soothe myself with the familiar. But I'm also interested in finding something new. Really good books have all sort of treasures hidden in their nooks and crannies, treasures that are revealed only to eyes of experience.

I first read 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' when I was 30. Now, almost twenty years later, I still love most of the bits I made notes on then. But now other things stand out that my 30-year-old self didn't understand.

In Your Eyes

"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public...The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes...Then there is the third category, the category of who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love...And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present." pp. 269-270

Continued...

"The Accomplished and Lucky Teakettle" From the painting by Warwick Goble."

After our Saturday morning trip to CM and taping the ceiling so I could continue painting, we were restless. So off to the bookstores! First we stopped by Book People because I wanted a small diary I could tuck into my pack for our trip. Then to Half Price Books. I figured Half Price would have a great selection since all the UT students moved out this week. The bonus is that they were having their tent sale--every book in the tent, one buck.

I made off with a 1912 version of Collier's Junior Classics Vol I: Fairy and Wonder Tales. I absconded with my parents' 1956 version thirty years ago. Today I'm still enchanted by Molly Whuppie, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Goose Girl, and Wassilisa the Beautiful. I have been inside St. Alkmund's Parish Church, Whitcross that Randolph Caldecott illustrates in "The Great Panjandrum Himself". And I have never read a translation that matched Yei Theodora Ozaki's poetry in "The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Flower".

Many Americans these days spout off a lot about their rights, but few talk about the responsibilities, duties, and obligations of citizenship. The Good Citizen's Handbook is a timely collection of advice gleaned from government pamplets, civics textbooks, and scouting handbooks of the 1920s-1960s on being courteous, helpful, cheerful, and kind. Having grown up in the 1960s, I'm tempted to roll a cynical eye. Isn't this naive innocence just "Leave It To Beaver" wistfulness? a facade hiding the corrupt and ugly truth. Yes. But what my generation did not seem to understand is that this facade of civility, holding out the ideal and striving toward it, is what allows us to progress. If we focus on the best in ourselves and others, we emphasize and strengthen that good. This is quite different than the flag-waving pseudo-patriotism that masks today's selfish consumerism. This is true community spirit, a responsibility for all members in the community, a desire to make the world a better place for everyone, starting with making yourself a better person. Cheerfulness. I'll have to work on that.

In How Proust Can Save Your Life Alain de Botton turns literary biography into self-help manual full of useful advice gleaned from Proust's life and works. What does Botton think we can learn from Proust? Chapters include: How to Take Your Time. (Useful advice for anyone thinking about reading Proust.) How to Suffer Successfully. How to Open Your Eyes. How to Put Books Down.

Quotes
"...we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire." -- Marcel Proust. p. 6

"In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never experienced himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity." -- Marcel Proust. p. 25

"When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches." -- Marcel Proust. p. 28

"An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that once we've put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm." -- Alain de Botton. p. 29

"...one must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself." -- Marcel Proust p. 40.

"My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved," he declared, and defined his principal character trait as: "The need to be loved; more precisely, a need to be petted and spoilt more than a need to be admired." p. 54.

"Those who love and those who are happy are not the same." -- Marcel Proust p. 55

"...feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge." -- Alain de Botton. p. 65.

"Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy. The stubborn recurrence of misery means that the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness. Proust, a veteran of grief, knew as much." -- Alain de Botton. p. 71.

"And a personal imprint is not only more beautiful, it is also a good deal more authentic. [Trying to sound fashionable, speaking in cliches] involves flattening your identity to fit a constrained social envelope. If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to creat our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from cliches, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timber of our thought." -- Alain de Botton. p. 95.

"However, the First World War radically altered his plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realized that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter." -- Alain de Botton. p. 114.

"For instance, it is often assumed, usually by people who don't have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others' interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his." -- Alain de Botton. p. 120.

"Whatever the efforts of certain great artists to open our eyes to our world, they cannot prevent us from being surrounded by numerous less helpful images that, with no sinister intentions and often with great artistry, nevertheless have the effect of suggesting to us that there is a depressing gap between our own life and the realm of beauty." -- Alain de Botton. p 145.

"Because of the speed of technological and architectual change, the world is liable to be full of scenes and objects that have not yet been trasformed into appropriate images and may therefore make us nostalgic for another, now lost world, which is not inherently more beautiful but might seem so because it has already been widely depicted by those who open our eyes. There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life, which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them." -- Alain de Botton. p 148.

"...having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it..." -- Alain de Botton. p. 164.

"(The rich) therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less priveleged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, dressing gowns, and someone who isn't free this evening." -- Alain de Botton. p. 166.

"We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves." -- Alain de Botton. pp. 178-179.

"We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires...That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it." -- Marcel Proust. p. 180.

"...a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes." -- Alain de Botton. p. 196.

Following Proust's suggestion, I've started reading novels about the kinds of things I want to write about. Before this, I've stayed away from them, afraid that I would just end up just rehashing someone else's ideas. I was delighted with the very first book I chose, Camille Lauren's In His Arms.

Years ago I read a book on writing fiction which instructed the potential novelist to avoid the pitfall of making her novel a thinly-veiled autobiography by first writing an autobiography. Get it all out first. Dutifully I began, but I soon was got caught up in defining what makes an autobiography. What makes a life? How do I define myself? Am I the sum of my experiences? A series of events? The things I did or the things that happened to me? My various jobs? My relationships with others: daughter, mother, wife, and mistress?

In "In His Arms" Camille Laurens has taken the last course. She explains, It would be a book about men, about the love of men: as loved objects and loving subjects...It would be a book about a woman's men, all of them, from the first to the last...in the order, or lack of it, in which they first appear in her life, in the mysterious shifts of proximity and distance that would make them change in her eyes, as they left, returned, stayed, altered. The form of the book would thus be discontinous, so that the turning of its pages would mimic this to-ing and fro-ing, the progressions and ruptures that splice and split her connections with them: the men would have their entrances and exits, as in the theater, some would have just one scene, others several, they'd have a greater or lesser importance, as in real life, and more or less space, as in our memories.

This plan touches on two themes I'm interested in: how each person potentially holds a piece of our puzzle; and, how different our sense of self is depending on whose eyes are reflecting us. To define ourselves, we find our boundaries, that line where you no longer exist and the other begins.

I enjoyed "In His Arms" as much as a chat over coffee with a good woman friend who was also a lover of words and men. It provided thoughts to disagree with, disagreement being the sure way to jump-start my own ideas. I enjoyed the riffs on words. I thought the cadence and pacing was close to how I write, or want to write. So I was dismayed to read the negative reviews on Amazon. Tedious. Self-conscious. Dull. Mechanical. Wooden. Well, that doesn't give me much encouragement for my writing.

Continued...

Visiting Santa Fe made me curious to read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop about its first archbishop, Jean Baptiste Lamy (apparently an ESTJ and nothing like Cather's character Jean Marie Latour). I don't remember reading any Willa Cather in American Literature class, even though she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for 'One of Ours'. But I'm glad to have discovered her now. I like her writing style a lot. I whizzed through this book in two days and would like to know more about it. What made her decide to write it? What kind of research did she do for it? She writes precisely in answer to the questions I had on the 14 hour drive to Santa Fe...what would it be like to travel this country by foot or on horseback? How does the landscape fashion the lives here. If you lived here, could you ever live anywhere else? The whole time I was in Santa Fe, some unconscious memory of my ancestors kept welcoming me home. [More info on the staircase at The Loretto Chapel]

The title is a bit misleading, because it is not so much concerned with Father Latour's death as his life in New Mexico. Unlike "The Death of Artemio Cruz" it is not a deathbed flashback of a life.

Continued...

In A Home at the End of the World Michael Cunningham attempts to tell the story of a modern romance (two gay men one gay man, one asexual man who will go either way, and a bisexual woman) by interweaving threads of the narrative from each character's point of view. In theory, it's interesting; by triangulating the shifting perspectives, the reader can map out the truth. The problem is that, although the characters have wildly different personalities, their voices are not distinct. They all possess the same grimly mocking tone. They all keep the same scornful running commentary on every event, overanalyzing every slight. And they're all prone to fleshing out their descriptions with a flashy similes. By the end of the book, I'm convinced that this is Michael Cunningham's voice. I wish he'd just gone ahead and written it in third person.

Another problem with the first person treatment is time. Each speaker tells his or her part of the story as if it took place in some distant past, almost as if giving evidence to the police. Conversely, the narrators act as if they don't know what's going to happen next; they are reporting the story as it happens. Sometimes they switch into present tense. Other times they say, "I would discover later..." and often what is revealed is so trivial, I wondered why Cunningham bothered to break tense. He calls attention to details that lead nowhere. So when are the characters telling the story?

Some of the writing is fine. I'd read a sentence and think, "That's clever." or "I've felt that way." or "That's a nice image." On the whole, I don't think it works; it tries too hard. Cunningham follows all the advice of novel-writing seminars. The main characters suffer horrible experiences in their childhoods that color their personalites. Every minor character comes with a telling quirk, usually two or three or four. Every player in a scene is given an interesting bit of action. But more often than not, it's meaningless and distracting. I want him to pare it down. (Is this because I was reading Hemingway last month?)

The thing that exhausted me in the end is that the writing is heavy with simile and metaphor. No one can act and nothing can exist without being compared to something else. She conducted her daily affairs with ironic good cheer, like the second banana in a thirties comedy. Like a survivor of a war, who still wears heels and lipstick to walk among the wreckage. (p 110) Which is it? One clear image is good, but a second cancels the first one out. I'd prefer an actual example. Cunningham writes as if someone told him he needs at least one image a paragraph and sometimes he seems a bit desperate to come up with it. [Bobby] had big square hands and a face blank and earnest as a shovel. (p 143) I've never known a shovel that showed sincere conviction, nor known one to be devious. Maybe he meant, "...a face blank as a shovel and earnest." She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. (p 265) By the end of the book I was screaming, "Just tell me what it is, not what it's like."

Cunningham is a successful, critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer author. Two chapters of this book appeared originally in the New Yorker. Both this book and his "The Hours" have done well enough to be made into movies. As of today 68 readers have given this novel an average 4.5 rating on amazon.com. My complaints must sound peevish.

I read the book through quickly because I was curious how it would turn out, but ultimately, I didn't care. Everyone was a carefully crafted character, a mass of twitches and jerks, but none of them came alive for me. I was interested in the characters' interactions, but I didn't empathize with any of them. Well, I did feel for a bit for Bobby, but not enough to invite him home.

The book comes with a distinctive soundtrack. If someone hasn't already put together an iMix for it, they should. The movie soundtrack does not match the book's.

Continued...

Anticipating my return to Knutsford, I've begun rereading Cranford which Margaret sent me last Christmas.

Cross Keys Hotel on King's Street, Knutsford. The original Cross Keys Inn was demolished on 1909.

Cranford is in possession of the Amazons, all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. So begins the little book (really a series of short stories) that is at once nostalgic, for certain kind of genteel English parish life, and radical. I don't mean that there's an overt feminist message; I'm remembering only that Virginia Woolf considered a book entirely about women's friendships radical 70 years after Cranford was published. But I digress. The best reason to read Cranford is because it's funny. You do think a cow dressed in gray flannel waistcoat and drawers funny, don't you?

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In November 7th's "The New Yorker", David Remnick shines a light on the Russian translation wars. What a coincidence, I think, as I'm in the middle of reading Anna Karenina. Not a coincidence, I discover reading the article, as one new translation of Anna Karenina was picked up by Oprah's Book Club. Apparently, last year Anna Karenina was all the rage. I am just late to the party.

So what compelled me to pick up Anna Karenina during our Sunday trip to the library when I haven't read a Russian author since I dragged myself through The Brothers Karamozov when I was twenty? I haven't even seen the movie. And, to my knowledge, no one else I know has ever read it either. Well, my interest was piqued by an article in the Guardian which asks How many times have you read War and Peace?. Howard Jacobson replied that he prefers Anna Karenina. I didn't think I was ready to face War and Peace even if some do consider it the best novel ever. So I opted for Anna Karenina.

I've read it piecemeal rather than sequentially. I read the first 144 pages. Anna isn't the focus of her book the way Jane Eyre is of hers and I began to wonder why the book is named for her. Anna does not appear until page 77. Scenes from a Marriage, or Husbands and Wives might be more appropriate given that the narrative interweaves the stories of three couples. I read the introduction and learned the Tolstoy's working titles were "Two Marriages" or "Two Couples".

If I don't know my destination, I can't enjoy my journey. And at 1002 pages, Anna Karenina is such a long journey that I needed to feel comfortable with where it was going. I skimmed through the middle portion of the book and took up reading again on page 821 at the beginning of Part 7. Then I finished the book and read Parts 2 through 6.

Although the book is very long, the individual chapters are very short. Anna Karenina would make good blog reading, consuming it a bit each day like The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

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I'm biased towards novels that evoke a concrete sense of place. Bram Stoker described Whitby so accurately that I felt giddy with recognition when I saw it. Fiction makes familiar the streets of San Francisco, the burroughs of New York, and the glitter of LA. However, portrayals of Smalltown, USA, tend more toward the metaphorical than the actual. Curious about how other writers set their works in a mid-sized city whose landmarks are not national icons, I turned to the darling of the Austin literary scene, Sarah Bird.

Reading Bird's first novel, Alamo House, left me wondering how it reflected her experience of Austin. So, I dug into her biography and discovered some freakish parallels with my own life. Although she is a few years older than I am, we both are products of Catholic families with 8 kids. Our fathers were both Air Force pilots who received the Distinguished Flying Cross. We both lived on Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa. We both studied flamenco, lived in Albuquerque, moved to Austin in 1974, and worked in Japan as adults.

There the similarities end. I became a technical writer and Sarah Bird went on to work as a freelance journalist and write romance novels before getting Alamo House published in 1986. Since then she's written five more novels, most recently The Flamenco Academy. She is currently working on Weightless based on "knowing so many women—highly-educated, ambitious, bright—who had either just lost their jobs or had jobs with health insurance that was so bad, they couldn't afford to get a Pap smear." The protaganist is "a character who'd been brought low by divorce, (from a husband who bears an uncanny resemblance to W.), by the pop of the Internet bubble, and by losing her moral compass." Ah. We share the same friends, too.

So I attacked Alamo House hungrily and came away about as satisfied as I do after scarfing down a burger at Sandy's. I always feel noble supporting Austin's homegrown enterprises but the bottom line is that this is fast food. Alamo House is a light comedy set in a women's coop in West Campus where the wacky tenants suffer constant abuse from the frat house across the street.

Each of the woman is described by a quirk. For example, Esme "a menopausal woman" "well into her forties" has "ghastly yards of varicosed leg" and is wearing a torn Butthole Surfer's sweatshirt which slides off "her wrinkled shoulder". I know plenty of women well into their fifties who are neither menopausal or have wrinkled shoulders. As none of these characteristics has bearing on the character or the plot the description comes off as an exercise in Novel Writing 101.

For me the real character of interest in the book is Austin. So I skimmed over the fluff seeking answers to my original question: what changes does one make when fictionalizing a town that's large enough to be anonymous but too small for the local hangouts to be nationally known.

According to Sarah Bird's endnotes Alamo House is based on Seneca Falls Co-op (2309 Nueces) where she lived when going to graduate school in 1974 and 1975 and then again in 1983. She changes the name of Nueces to Pecan St. (to make a pun about the nuts who inhabit Alamo House). This resulted in my first bout of disorientation. Any Austinite know Pecan St. is the old name for Sixth St., our main venue for bars and restaurants. My sense of geography became more confused as the protagonist, Mary Jo Steadman, pedals from Travis Heights to the LBJ Library via West Campus where she first notices the Alamo House. That's a pretty circuitous route on a hot August day. Especially as she walks back later when her bike is smashed by frat boys. Why not just have Mary Jo live in Clarksville?

I chalk this up to poetic license and one more reminder why Sarah Bird ended up writing novels and I ended up writing courses for software developers. The Daily Texan, Club Foot, the UT Swim Center, Ellie Rucker, and the Student Union all make cameo appearances. Bird drops just enough names to spark my curiousity without satisfying it. Only the Alamo House and the LBJ Library lend Austin's ambience to the story. Austin isn't as integral to the story as I hoped it would be.

I also came away confused about the time period. Clothes, cars, music, slang, and even a brief appearance by a couple of computer geeks don't help pin down the year. The reference to Club Foot suggests early to mid-1980s. When did it close? When did Ellie Rucker stop writing for the Statesman? Is a little vagueness purposeful? Does it illustrate the sense the university experience exists in a vale outside time because it is a period of transition in one's life? Or do writers think it's better to smudge the details a bit to give the fiction a more universal appeal?

As someone who spent 7 years of my life as a "vacuous office clerk" I warmed immediately to the tale of a lowly 50-year-old clerk in a city's Central Registry, the bureacracy where all births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are registered. Yes, the Central Registry is the repository of All the Names, both of the living and of the dead. Name and vital statistics. What more is there to know about a person?

When Senhor Jose accidently pulls the card of a young woman, her card is caught behind another card, he begins to wonder just that. He must discover more about this anonymous woman who is only a name on a card. This becomes his obsession and his obsession leads him to act as he has never done in his life. He plays detective. He plays the thief. He forges documents.

All the Names is translated from the Portuguese. The writing is very dense, but also elegant and lyrical. The writer in me appreciated it more than the reader in me. Conversations are compressed into long sentences with never a "he said, she said" inserted for clarification. The full stop is abhored and the whimsical approach to punctuation must have driven the proofreaders crazy. Kudos to the translator, Margaret Jull Costa. What an undertaking! What an achievement!

After a slow start with a chapter describing the layout and workings of the Central Registry, the tale unfolds like a mystery story. I stayed up all one night reading it. I might enjoy it even more if I followed Saramago's advice and embarked on a "second, more attentive reading". I did find myself enjoying it more typing out the quotes. Maybe this is a book best read out loud, best read slowly. It's a book to savor, but I don't think I'll sip it twice.

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I never read Anne of Green Gables as a child. A friend in junior high school tried to interest me in the series and failed. Then in the 1980s PBS introduced the TV series with Megan Follows as Anne and I was hooked on the irrepressible red-headed orphan.

I moved to Japan shortly afterward and it was the first movie I saw in the theater there under the (literally translated) title: Red-haired Anne. The Japanese are smitten with Anne making Prince Edward Island a prime Japanese tourist attraction. The small town culture (with it's gossips and busy-bodies) recalls the flavor of small town Japan. The setting is at once nostalgic of pre-war Japan and an idealized version of western life (evoking the same feelings as Main Street in Tokyo Disneyland). Anne of Green Gables required reading in the Japanese curriculum since 1952. So we were able to find a copy at the English language book shop in the basement of Parco Department store in Oita. After a month in Japan we were hungry for anything in English.

I usually read Anne of Green Gables when I'm sick. Anne cheers me up with her ability to find the good and beauty in everything. She goes through life with "some secret delight".

I don't identify with Anne. I'm not like her. Except that we both spent much of our youth living in our imaginations and eschewing the "real" world. And we both set our hopes high and consequently are dashed "to the depths of despair" when things don't turn out as we imagine them. We make our own melodrama.

Anne is too exuberant, too talkative, and too energetic to be my alter ego. In some passages, she does reveal herself as an I-type, needing to be alone with her thoughts to sort them out and never lonely. I'm rather more like her guardian, Matthew. "Like most quiet folks he liked talkative people when they were willing to do the talking themselves and did not expect him to keep up his end of it." Nor did I ever have her knack for bringing trouble on herself. She acts before she thinks whereas I tend to think myself out of acting.

What I am attracted to is Anne's curiousity and sense of wonder about the world. "Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination, then."

I visit with Anne whenever I feel the need to see the world with new eyes again. Or puncture the illusions of the pompously certain.

Update: Sunday February 4, 2007

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