While watching the pilot of 30 Rock on Comedy Central yesterday, its first day in syndication, I found what I want on my headstone after 230 years cause my body and mind to say, "That's it. We're leaving." (I was hoping for 231 years, but I'm not going to push it.)
It comes from Jenna's (Jane Krakowski) first scene, as "Pam, The Overly-Confident, Morbidly-Obese Woman", after the musical number is taped. She finishes the number, looks down and says, "This fat suit smells like corn chips."
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Silver Sliver
After giving over the past few days to season one episodes of The Good Wife on DVD, watching King of California and Julie & Julia again, and getting excited over the new fall TV season (Starting with Up All Night, which debuted last week after the season finale of America's Got Talent, and extended to the season premiere of Two and a Half Men last night (Ashton Kutcher was pretty good), and the series premiere of 2 Broke Girls (Funny enough that I'll watch it again next week, but am still tentative about it), and there were the new seasons of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune that started last night, and 30 Rock and The Big Bang Theory went into syndication, and I'm still impatiently waiting for the season premieres of The Big Bang Theory (Thursday) and The Good Wife (Sunday)), I continued reading Skipping a Beat by Sarah Pekkanen this afternoon, leaping from page 37 to 212. I think I'll hold off on part 2 of my all-time favorite books, because Dad and Meridith aren't getting home until later than usual (Dad has an ROP (Regional Occupation Program) class to cover after work at a high school in the same area from 4 to 7), which means dinner will be later, and I want to finish reading this one because Life Itself by Roger Ebert and The GQ Candidate by Kelli Goff came in the mail today.
I'm not really invested in the story of Julia facing her new husband, Michael, new because his heart stopped while he was at a board meeting at his company, DrinkUp, and he was dead for 4 minutes, 8 seconds, and after recovering, wants to give to various charities all the money he ever earned, starting with $100 million dollars that he announces to reporters that he'll give away. They both come from West Virginia, Michael from a family that ignored him, Julia from a family that seemed happy enough, running a general store, until her father got so deep into gambling that he ruined all their lives and Julia vowed not to live with that fear of not having anything, of worrying about finances every single day, and so when Michael's flavored water company DrinkUp goes public and nets 70 million dollars right away, she has nothing to worry about, and even ignores their drifting apart as their marriage goes on, including the affair Michael had with a public relations manager he hired.
I'm more into Isabelle, Julia's best friend, who reveals to Julia at a bar that she gave up a daughter, Beth, for adoption when she was 18, and always thinks about her, wondering who she is, what she's doing, and she knew she gave her up to a loving husband and wife, but wants to know, more than the cards sent every year inform her. So she writes a letter to Beth, explaining everything, including a note to her adoptive parents to give Beth the letter when they feel it's the right time.
Then Isabelle tells Julia excitedly that Beth called her and wants her to come to Seattle, and while I understand the luxurious life Julia has established with Michael and all the clothes and jewelry and maids and private chefs that come with it, spurred on by her fear of never having anything ever again, I relate more to Isabelle. It's not that Julia is an airhead type; she has a good catering business going that she has a real knack for, but I think it's because Isabelle strikes me as more straightforward. This is what she did in her life, she regrets it, and she wants to make it better. In fact, Isabelle decides to contact Beth because of Michael, and says to Julia:
"When everything happened with Michael, the first person I thought of was Beth. What if I get really sick or die? Or what if she does? What if I miss the chance to tell her I love her because I was too afraid?"
"You could still write the letter," I said after a moment. "It isn't too late. You can tell her you were scared to write before, if you want to. Just tell her the truth. It doesn't have to be perfect."
Isabelle squeezed my hand. "I think I have to."
This is the part that endeared me to Isabelle, because she's so honest about what she needs to do, realizing that there needs to be major changes:
"Anyway, after I visit Beth . . . I don't know, but I feel like something has been missing for a while now. I don't know if I can do this anymore."
"Do what?" I asked, taking out some socks and standing up to toss them back in her drawer.
"This!" Isabelle spread out her arms, like a little kid who was pretending to fly. "My life! I'm thirty-four, and what do I have to show for it? I spend the money my grandfather made--not even the money, I just spend the interest on his money--and I dabble in charity work. I play tennis and go to parties and shop and travel. I'm busy every day of the week and it's not enough. I'm bored, Julia. I'm bored out of my fucking mind, and I have been for a while. I didn't think my life would turn out like this. I don't even know how it happened. I've just been drifting along, and suddenly almost half my life is gone.
"I don't know what I'll do when I get back. Maybe I'll get involved in a charity--really involved; not just show up at a benefit in a pretty dress and write a check--or hell, maybe I'll adopt a child and bring all of this full circle. You've got a job you love, and you've got a good man who adores you. And he does adore you now, Julia, no matter what happened before."
But that's not even why I decided to profile all of this. On page 164, I smiled at finding a rare moment in which the same letters sit side-by-side in two words, and two letters switch places, creating an entirely different word:
"At my core, I was still a girl without money, a person who worried she didn't fit in, someone who walked around with a silver sliver of fear buried deep inside her, like a bit of shrapnel even the most skilled surgeon would never be able to remove."
Silver sliver. What's even more fun is if you dart your eyes between the words really fast, you can see the "i" and the "l" switch places. I love that kind of moment in books.
I'm not really invested in the story of Julia facing her new husband, Michael, new because his heart stopped while he was at a board meeting at his company, DrinkUp, and he was dead for 4 minutes, 8 seconds, and after recovering, wants to give to various charities all the money he ever earned, starting with $100 million dollars that he announces to reporters that he'll give away. They both come from West Virginia, Michael from a family that ignored him, Julia from a family that seemed happy enough, running a general store, until her father got so deep into gambling that he ruined all their lives and Julia vowed not to live with that fear of not having anything, of worrying about finances every single day, and so when Michael's flavored water company DrinkUp goes public and nets 70 million dollars right away, she has nothing to worry about, and even ignores their drifting apart as their marriage goes on, including the affair Michael had with a public relations manager he hired.
I'm more into Isabelle, Julia's best friend, who reveals to Julia at a bar that she gave up a daughter, Beth, for adoption when she was 18, and always thinks about her, wondering who she is, what she's doing, and she knew she gave her up to a loving husband and wife, but wants to know, more than the cards sent every year inform her. So she writes a letter to Beth, explaining everything, including a note to her adoptive parents to give Beth the letter when they feel it's the right time.
Then Isabelle tells Julia excitedly that Beth called her and wants her to come to Seattle, and while I understand the luxurious life Julia has established with Michael and all the clothes and jewelry and maids and private chefs that come with it, spurred on by her fear of never having anything ever again, I relate more to Isabelle. It's not that Julia is an airhead type; she has a good catering business going that she has a real knack for, but I think it's because Isabelle strikes me as more straightforward. This is what she did in her life, she regrets it, and she wants to make it better. In fact, Isabelle decides to contact Beth because of Michael, and says to Julia:
"When everything happened with Michael, the first person I thought of was Beth. What if I get really sick or die? Or what if she does? What if I miss the chance to tell her I love her because I was too afraid?"
"You could still write the letter," I said after a moment. "It isn't too late. You can tell her you were scared to write before, if you want to. Just tell her the truth. It doesn't have to be perfect."
Isabelle squeezed my hand. "I think I have to."
This is the part that endeared me to Isabelle, because she's so honest about what she needs to do, realizing that there needs to be major changes:
"Anyway, after I visit Beth . . . I don't know, but I feel like something has been missing for a while now. I don't know if I can do this anymore."
"Do what?" I asked, taking out some socks and standing up to toss them back in her drawer.
"This!" Isabelle spread out her arms, like a little kid who was pretending to fly. "My life! I'm thirty-four, and what do I have to show for it? I spend the money my grandfather made--not even the money, I just spend the interest on his money--and I dabble in charity work. I play tennis and go to parties and shop and travel. I'm busy every day of the week and it's not enough. I'm bored, Julia. I'm bored out of my fucking mind, and I have been for a while. I didn't think my life would turn out like this. I don't even know how it happened. I've just been drifting along, and suddenly almost half my life is gone.
"I don't know what I'll do when I get back. Maybe I'll get involved in a charity--really involved; not just show up at a benefit in a pretty dress and write a check--or hell, maybe I'll adopt a child and bring all of this full circle. You've got a job you love, and you've got a good man who adores you. And he does adore you now, Julia, no matter what happened before."
But that's not even why I decided to profile all of this. On page 164, I smiled at finding a rare moment in which the same letters sit side-by-side in two words, and two letters switch places, creating an entirely different word:
"At my core, I was still a girl without money, a person who worried she didn't fit in, someone who walked around with a silver sliver of fear buried deep inside her, like a bit of shrapnel even the most skilled surgeon would never be able to remove."
Silver sliver. What's even more fun is if you dart your eyes between the words really fast, you can see the "i" and the "l" switch places. I love that kind of moment in books.
Monday, September 19, 2011
My All-Time Favorite Book? Nope! My All-Time Favorite Books! That's Better.
The lovely and wonderful Lola over at "Women: We Shall Overcome" (http://dumpedfirstwife.blogspot.com/) has posed a question I've never thought about: What is your all-time favorite book? (http://dumpedfirstwife.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-monday.html)
Impossible, you say! How can I, a voracious reader since I was two, not choose even one book to sit atop all the other books I love and crow and crow about being my favorite?
When I was 14, and began writing movie reviews for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Teentime pages (It's no longer published, but used to be in the back of their weekend Showtime section every Friday), I used to make top-10 lists at year's end to determine what I had liked best, as a good little aspiring critic does. When I was a member of the Online Film Critics Society, receiving awards screeners of films that were being pushed for Oscar consideration, the ballot I received asked for your favorite movie, actor, actress and other categories to be ranked, with the top choices getting the highest number of points, and the lesser choices getting lower numbers of points.
I ended my association with film criticism entirely after I finished writing my first book, What If They Lived?, co-written with Phil Hall. I loved that after all the years I had been reviewing movies, it had led to this incredible opportunity, which I surely wouldn't have gotten otherwise. When Phil had offered it to me, and I was considering it, and initially didn't want to do it, my mom told me I had to do it because it would not come again like this, just being handed to me.
At that point, I wasn't enjoying writing movie reviews anymore. When I had started, I had the notion that I could do this full-time. Getting paid to watch movies and write about them? It was my goal. But before the book came along, the experience had become a hamster wheel for me. I knew how Hollywood worked: The movies Hollywood wished it hadn't made were dumped in January; the summer was for big and loud butt-scratcher movies; the fall and winter were given over to those movies that the various studios felt deserved Oscar glory and dammit if they weren't going to go all out to try to make that happen.
This wasn't for me anymore. Couple that with watching the screeners that came in through the Online Film Critics Society, determing through those what I liked the most and what I would vote for, and I was exhausted. I realized that I still loved movies, but not to that extent. I would be happy if I never wrote another movie review again, if I removed myself from that grind, and therefore ceased being a member of the Online Film Critics Society. And I am!
It's been three years since I left the Online Film Critics Society, left film criticism entirely, and all those rankings attached to it. The books you will read about are my all-time favorites. There is no rank for them, and it hews to my way of living life: No one is above me and no one is below me.
I begin with The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, a compilation of three short books of his book reviews: The Polysllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Hornby's book reviews first appeared in the McSweeney's publication, The Believer, but they're not your typical book reviews. They are pure love about books, about the frustrations inherent in bad books, about the excitement of finding books you so desperately want to read that your entire being tingles, and just living the reading life, which, for Hornby, includes his beloved football.
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree was published in 2006 by Viking, then in paperback in 2007 by Penguin Books, both in the U.K. There is no American edition of this, just the three volumes published by McSweeney's. I ordered this from a U.K. bookshop, and am happy to have all of Hornby's writings in one book, to reference, to revel in, to smile in recognition at his love of books, which is also my love. Reading is living, and Hornby embodies that.
I want to quote large passages from Hornby's introduction, which says everything true that there is to say about reading, especially in that if you don't like a book that you're reading, you don't have to finish it:
"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005's 'Books of the Year' lists. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents - they each, coincidentally, have three children - and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a major twentieth-century world figure. At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he'd put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he'd dared hope. He then realized that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.) The truth is, of course, that neither of them will ever finish it - or at least, not in this phase of their lives. In the process, though, they will have reinforced a learned association of books with struggle.
I am not trying to say that the book itself was the cause of this anguish. I can imagine other people racing through it, and I can certainly imagine these two people racing through books that others might find equally daunting. It seems clear to me, though, that the combination of that book with these readers at this stage in their lives is not a happy one. If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity - and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured - then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV programme. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking, or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. It doesn't matter. All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.
'If reading is a workout for the mind, then Britain must be buzzing with intellectual energy,' said one sarcastic columnist in the Guardian. 'Train stations have shops packed with enough words to keep even the most muscular brain engaged for weeks. Indeed, the carriages are full of people exercising their intellects the full length of their journeys. Yet somehow, the fact that millions daily devour thousands of words from Hello, the Sun, The Da Vinci Code, Nuts and so on does not inspire the hope that the average cerebellum is in excellent health. It's not just that you read, it's what you read that counts.' This sort of thing - and it's a regrettably common sneer in our broadsheet newspapers - must drive school librarians, publishers and literacy campaigners nuts. In Britain, more than twelve million adults have a reading age of thirteen or under, and yet some clever-dick journalist still insists of telling us that unless we're reading something proper, then we might as well not bother at all.
But what's proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that's for sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E.M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell - were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters. I have on my desk here a James Lee Burke novel, a thriller in the Dave Robicheaux series, which sports on its covers ringing endorsements from the Literary Review, the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, so there's a possibility that somebody who writes for a broadsheet might approve . . . Any chance of this giving my grey matter a work-out? How much of a stretch is it for a nuclear physicist to read a book on nuclear physics? How much cleverer will we be if we read Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck's beautiful, simple novella? Or Tobias Wolff's brilliant This Boy's Life, or Lucky Jim or To Kill a Mockingbird? Enormous intelligence has gone into the creation of all of these books, just as it has into the creation of the iPod, but the intelligence is not transferable. It's there to serve a purpose.
But there it is. It's set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work, otherwise they're a waste of time. And so we grind our way through serious, and sometimes seriously dull novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive. Please, please, put it down.
And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe - because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes."
And now I've got an overwhelming urge to re-read this one.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is another of my all-time favorite books. I saw the movie first, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, in our condo in Pembroke Pines, Florida back in early 2002. I think it was one of the only times I watched a movie on Turner Classic Movies while it was airing.
I was impressed with the detail of the time period, the 1930s, nearing the time of World War II, and the cloistered life of Stevens the butler in the somewhat gloomy, haunting Darlington Hall, in the employ of Lord Darlington, who strives to achieve an understanding between the French, British and Germans in order to prevent war, but is misled on many fronts and is naive in his understanding of diplomacy. Plus, Anthony Hopkins can be so many different people, and this was in 1993, two years after Hannibal Lecter.
In August 2006 (I'm only so exacting because of what followed after), my family and I went on a trip to San Francisco. Driving. Normally, every time we go on a trip, it's because Dad has something to do at the destination, a conference, a meeting, related to business education. This seemed to be the rare time when that wasn't true.
Before we left Santa Clarita for San Francisco, I had been to the library, found the hardcover edition of The Remains of the Day, and decided it was finally time to read it, after five years of just adoring the movie. It was hard to read anything on 70 miles of winding mountain road that make up part of the Pacific Coast Highway, and the worst thing was that at the start of it, when Dad was trying to find a way to turn around, and stopped somewhere to ask about it, he was told he couldn't. We were on that road and we could only follow it all the way to its end, to San Francisco.
I had a migraine by the time we got to the motel, but I had read most of The Remains of the Day and was utterly impressed by the detail put forth in such formal language, as is the way of Stevens. And not once did I think about Anthony Hopkins as Stevens or Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. Images from movies do not remain in my mind when I read the source material, and this book stood very well on its own. It's no wonder that director James Ivory found something so extraordinary in it to make a movie from it. Some changes benefited the movie, such as the new owner of Darlington Hall, Mr. Faraday, now being Congressman Lewis, retired from politics, and played by Christopher Reeve, which gave him more screen time, as the gray-haired Lewis, as well as the young man that came to Darlington Hall as part of President Roosevelt's Brain Trust.
Came October of that same year, and we went to Palm Springs, to Hotel Zoso, for a business education conference Dad had there. Otherwise, we would have never gone to Palm Springs.
I fell hard for the downtown area, which we happened to be near on a Thursday night as well, so we saw the street fair they have with various vendors, artists, food carts, and there was such a vibrancy there, like this was all that was needed in the world, this intimacy in close spaces. And even just to walk it without the street fair there, in the daytime, was pure pleasure. I felt at home walking those sidewalks, sensing a community amidst those storefronts. There was still a feeling of detachment, as would be expected with the wealthy people who live there, but it wasn't as pervasive as it is in Santa Clarita.
While Dad was at his conference, and Mom, Meridith and I walked those downtown streets, we happened upon a bookstore crammed with books. And the owner, who had few teeth, looked like he lived there and he immediately, temporarily, became a hero of mine, because I would love that, to always be among all those books.
In the back, there were stacks of paperbacks, floor-to-ceiling, sections for Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz. And I walked those floors, near those wooden bookshelves, looking at all those titles that were just waiting again to be read.
Near a glass case with a few rare books inside, I found what I had been hoping for: The Remains of the Day, in a paperback edition from Vintage International. This one was mine. And I still have the original receipt from October 9, 2006, from that bookstore. It was $5.95, with $0.46 tax, and so it came out to $6.41. It's a very simple receipt, no logo of the store, a strip of paper torn off from the role after printing. No perforation. I think the bookstore was called G.W. Books. It closed a few years ago, and I wish it hadn't happened, but perhaps the rent in the downtown area had gone up. That guy couldn't afford it. I hope he's still around, somewhere, still with his books, still reading a lot, as he was reading when we had walked in.
I read The Remains of the Day at least once a year, and with this edition, and that receipt, I always remember him, a lone literary explorer.
I found Subways are for Sleeping by Edmund G. Love, who wrote for Harper's Magazine, while searching for Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York by Randy Kennedy, inspired by a journalism 101 class at College of the Canyons in October 2004, in which one of the assignments had been to listen to a radio news program, such as NPR or another station, and write down what had been reported and the stories that had been told. I got up early one morning for "Morning Edition" on NPR, and heard a story by Robert Smith, who had spent the night in the New York City subway system, taking in all the sights and sounds at those hours, including a guitarist who preferred to play in the subway at night because all the stage is his. Only his.
That story inspired me to seek out more about the world of the New York City subway system, with no desire to visit. Just read. I couldn't find Subwayland in the County of Los Angeles library catalog, but I did find Subways are for Sleeping and it sparked in me what I like to do when I randomly come across a book: I put it on hold and look to read it. I love doing that because it could be one book that affects me greatly. And this one did.
Love writes about the homeless population in New York City, and the resourcefulness of a few figures there, such as Henry Shelby, who picks up various odd jobs along the way, and keeps a tight hold on the money he makes, only spending money for a small hotel room when he hasn't spent a great deal in two or three days, preferring to sleep on the subway. There's old radio shows available for download online, and this particular story, in 1956, was turned into an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop ("The theater of the mind," as the narrator intoned). I downloaded it and have listened to it often. But that stemmed from my association with this book, which began after I checked it out.
I wasn't a sociable type at College of the Canyons. I only wanted to take my courses, do what was necessary, and in between, I'd find what amused me, what interested me, and I'd go with it. I remember being acquaintances with a few of my classmates, but nothing further. I don't remember any of them. I do remember the small arcade with two pinball machines in the student center building where the cafeteria was too. And I remember the cafeteria, the booth I always chose in the back to spread out my math homework, and promptly ignored all the problems facing me. I pulled out Subways are for Sleeping and I read about Shelby, and Charlie, and Father Dutch, awed by these great feats of living, how these people survived on the streets of New York City, what their days were like.
In his decision to write about this particular New York City population, Love writes:
"A few years ago I was caught up in a whirlwind of my own. When it all ended, I found myself walking the streets. I needed more than just a job. I needed to reassess life. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong. I may have listened wrong. I may have thought wrong. Or, I could have been right and the world wrong. It seemed to me, at the time, that the reassessment was more important than the material side of things. I had to think. I had to have time to think. So I drifted. I remember a long series of days and weeks during which I slept on the sofas in the apartments of friends. I recall that during one whole winter month I went down to the Hospital for Special Surgery every afternoon at two o'clock to call on a girl who was confined there. I hardly knew her, but the hospital was warm and I was cold. This may sound hard-boiled, but by that time I'd found out that necessity takes precedence over nicety. I bought a tablet and a pencil and sat on a bench in Grand Central, trying to write and think there.
I say all this because I want it understood that I did not drop into this world of which I write simply to study it. I was there because I couldn't seem to escape it. My rehabilitation, if it can be called that, was a long drawn-out process because it involved a complete change in my thinking as well as a simple economic readjustment. In some ways, it is still going forward. I worked intermittently at a wide variety of jobs. I did not stay in New York, but I did return to the city two or three times. I met a lot of people and I learned a lot of things. More than once I had a stranger suggest to me a place to eat, or a place to sleep, or a place to keep warm. I learned a hundred ways to pick up a dollar or two. I consider this knowledge important, but I learned something even more valuable. I learned a lot about human beings."
I was seized by Love's writing. It was exactly how I wanted to write. Just tell the story. If you're involved, express how you were involved, but do it in the service of the story. And the stories of these people were absorbing, a world I never knew, and god willing will never know, but it became a world I wanted to understand, to see what might have happened that brought these people squarely to the streets of New York, and how they lived, what they were hoping for, what they were striving to do that would let them live how they wanted to live again.
I checked out this book constantly from the Valencia library, alternating between the one that came from the Norwalk branch and the one from the Hawthorne branch. The Hawthorne branch copy had a green cover, the pages likely fitted into a new cardboard cover after the old cover probably distintegrated from age. The Norwalk branch cover is an understated aqua color, with little tree and leaf branches drawn on in black. Likely the same process as the Hawthorne branch copy.
This book got me through my two years at College of the Canyons, 2004-2006. I would often ignore my math homework and other homework on campus in favor of reading it again. I have fond memories of that back table in the cafeteria because of this book, because of the peace afforded me. There were times when the cafeteria was completely empty and it was just me. And I loved it, especially on Friday afternoons when the campus was also empty, when everyone had other places to be, better places, and it felt as if I owned the campus.
There came a day in May 2008 when I decided that I could not live without this book, particularly the Norwalk branch copy. I had checked it out so many times (The Hawthorne branch copy only came to me twice) that I felt it was mine. I had developed such a kinship with this book. And on the last Sunday of that month, I walked into the Valencia library, knowing exactly what I had to do in order to keep my book: I declared it lost. I told the librarian at the desk that when my family and I were traveling back from Las Vegas and had stopped at the state line toward California at the convenience store/travel center there, the book had dropped out of the car and I didn't even notice, and when we got home, I couldn't find it at all and determined that that's where it was, and there was no chance of going back to get it, so all I could do was pay the necessary fines.
And I was prepared to do so because I had the money with me. On the library card pocket on the inside cover, the price was $3.75, but surely it had gone up since then, since the last time a person had checked out this book, with a due date of October 28, 1978. It probably was checked out many times after that, but by then, they were likely using due date cards and then there came the self-checkout system, but I don't think this book ever saw that because this wasn't a book people had sought out. All the pages were still intact when I first got it, still are. A bit of yellowing from age, but it had been well-protected by the books on either side of it.
The charge for "Lost Material," as stated on the receipt I got, was $29, plus a $5 processing fee. I paid it. It was worth it. Every time I read this book, I know what my future can be in writing. I know that I subscribe to Love's style of writing: Keep it simple, keep it straight, and just tell the story. And by that, I know that I am home.
One genre I've never read at length has been science fiction. I should get into it more for pure imagination, but it's never attracted me. I think of the playwright Sam Shepard, one of my heroes, who so easily intertwines reality and surrealism. You read his works and when you get to those surreal moments, it's no big deal. It's part of the lives of those he writes about, it's part of the landscape. Few writers can do that successfully and Shepard is one.
But give me a sci-fi tale set at Walt Disney World and I'm in. That's what Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow is, especially the Walt Disney World the guests never see after they leave the park, and in this case, it's "ad-hocs" who keep the attractions running, with little new technological touches, but nothing that does harm to Walt Disney's original vision, except for a new group that's taken over the Hall of Presidents, replacing the audio-animatronics with direct-to-brain interfaces that let guests feel that they're the presidents, and the "ad-hocs" do not like this at all.
I discovered Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on DailyLit (http://www.dailylit.com/), back when I was reading full-length books on there. There's the option of receiving a page of a book a day by e-mail, and clicking a link that sends you the next installment if you want more. The title alone got me curious, but then I kept clicking that link, wanting more and more and more, wanting to know what would happen to Jules, his girlfriend Lil, and Keep-a-Movin' Dan, and especially the fate of the Magic Kingdom. This was, to me, accessible sci-fi, for amateurs like me. But it was brilliant, so rich in what this world was, in a far different Walt Disney World than I ever knew, but one that I would have loved to visit as well.
Eventually, I bought it in paperback. I actually haven't read it again since I bought it, but I know that when I do, I'll be right back in that world, utterly fascinated with what Doctorow has created, in awe of such a complex, imaginative mind.
I have other all-time favorites, but I can see that this entry is quite long, and the evening is coming. The new seasons of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune begin tonight, and there's the season premiere of Two and a Half Men (I'm curious), as well as the series premiere of 2 Broke Girls (Looks funny from the clips I saw), and I'm also curious about the second season premiere of Hawaii Five-O, after watching the first season finale with Governor Jameson (Jean Smart) being killed off, though I had not seen an episode before that. But I did learn a bit about the leeway Jameson gave the Five-O team from what I read, and I want to see what the new governor does with the team, and how it goes with McGarrett, framed for the murder of Jameson.
Plus, I've got the penultimate and final episodes of the second season of The Good Wife Tivo'd from last night, and I really want to see those. And yes, I'm also curious about The Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen. Really weird how contrite he's become in such a relatively short amount of time, after the entertaining craziness from before.
Thanks to Lola (truly, because I've enjoyed thinking about why these particular books are my all-time favorites), I will write another installment in the coming days, and and it will include three Charles Bukowski books, a later Steinbeck, Harlan Ellison as a film critic, and truly one of the best, Alan Bennett writing about a bibliophile queen, my childhood experiences with Robinson Crusoe, and a book of letters by one of my heroes.
Impossible, you say! How can I, a voracious reader since I was two, not choose even one book to sit atop all the other books I love and crow and crow about being my favorite?
When I was 14, and began writing movie reviews for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Teentime pages (It's no longer published, but used to be in the back of their weekend Showtime section every Friday), I used to make top-10 lists at year's end to determine what I had liked best, as a good little aspiring critic does. When I was a member of the Online Film Critics Society, receiving awards screeners of films that were being pushed for Oscar consideration, the ballot I received asked for your favorite movie, actor, actress and other categories to be ranked, with the top choices getting the highest number of points, and the lesser choices getting lower numbers of points.
I ended my association with film criticism entirely after I finished writing my first book, What If They Lived?, co-written with Phil Hall. I loved that after all the years I had been reviewing movies, it had led to this incredible opportunity, which I surely wouldn't have gotten otherwise. When Phil had offered it to me, and I was considering it, and initially didn't want to do it, my mom told me I had to do it because it would not come again like this, just being handed to me.
At that point, I wasn't enjoying writing movie reviews anymore. When I had started, I had the notion that I could do this full-time. Getting paid to watch movies and write about them? It was my goal. But before the book came along, the experience had become a hamster wheel for me. I knew how Hollywood worked: The movies Hollywood wished it hadn't made were dumped in January; the summer was for big and loud butt-scratcher movies; the fall and winter were given over to those movies that the various studios felt deserved Oscar glory and dammit if they weren't going to go all out to try to make that happen.
This wasn't for me anymore. Couple that with watching the screeners that came in through the Online Film Critics Society, determing through those what I liked the most and what I would vote for, and I was exhausted. I realized that I still loved movies, but not to that extent. I would be happy if I never wrote another movie review again, if I removed myself from that grind, and therefore ceased being a member of the Online Film Critics Society. And I am!
It's been three years since I left the Online Film Critics Society, left film criticism entirely, and all those rankings attached to it. The books you will read about are my all-time favorites. There is no rank for them, and it hews to my way of living life: No one is above me and no one is below me.
I begin with The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, a compilation of three short books of his book reviews: The Polysllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Hornby's book reviews first appeared in the McSweeney's publication, The Believer, but they're not your typical book reviews. They are pure love about books, about the frustrations inherent in bad books, about the excitement of finding books you so desperately want to read that your entire being tingles, and just living the reading life, which, for Hornby, includes his beloved football.
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree was published in 2006 by Viking, then in paperback in 2007 by Penguin Books, both in the U.K. There is no American edition of this, just the three volumes published by McSweeney's. I ordered this from a U.K. bookshop, and am happy to have all of Hornby's writings in one book, to reference, to revel in, to smile in recognition at his love of books, which is also my love. Reading is living, and Hornby embodies that.
I want to quote large passages from Hornby's introduction, which says everything true that there is to say about reading, especially in that if you don't like a book that you're reading, you don't have to finish it:
"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005's 'Books of the Year' lists. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents - they each, coincidentally, have three children - and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a major twentieth-century world figure. At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he'd put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he'd dared hope. He then realized that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.) The truth is, of course, that neither of them will ever finish it - or at least, not in this phase of their lives. In the process, though, they will have reinforced a learned association of books with struggle.
I am not trying to say that the book itself was the cause of this anguish. I can imagine other people racing through it, and I can certainly imagine these two people racing through books that others might find equally daunting. It seems clear to me, though, that the combination of that book with these readers at this stage in their lives is not a happy one. If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity - and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured - then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV programme. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking, or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. It doesn't matter. All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.
'If reading is a workout for the mind, then Britain must be buzzing with intellectual energy,' said one sarcastic columnist in the Guardian. 'Train stations have shops packed with enough words to keep even the most muscular brain engaged for weeks. Indeed, the carriages are full of people exercising their intellects the full length of their journeys. Yet somehow, the fact that millions daily devour thousands of words from Hello, the Sun, The Da Vinci Code, Nuts and so on does not inspire the hope that the average cerebellum is in excellent health. It's not just that you read, it's what you read that counts.' This sort of thing - and it's a regrettably common sneer in our broadsheet newspapers - must drive school librarians, publishers and literacy campaigners nuts. In Britain, more than twelve million adults have a reading age of thirteen or under, and yet some clever-dick journalist still insists of telling us that unless we're reading something proper, then we might as well not bother at all.
But what's proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that's for sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E.M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell - were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters. I have on my desk here a James Lee Burke novel, a thriller in the Dave Robicheaux series, which sports on its covers ringing endorsements from the Literary Review, the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, so there's a possibility that somebody who writes for a broadsheet might approve . . . Any chance of this giving my grey matter a work-out? How much of a stretch is it for a nuclear physicist to read a book on nuclear physics? How much cleverer will we be if we read Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck's beautiful, simple novella? Or Tobias Wolff's brilliant This Boy's Life, or Lucky Jim or To Kill a Mockingbird? Enormous intelligence has gone into the creation of all of these books, just as it has into the creation of the iPod, but the intelligence is not transferable. It's there to serve a purpose.
But there it is. It's set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work, otherwise they're a waste of time. And so we grind our way through serious, and sometimes seriously dull novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive. Please, please, put it down.
And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe - because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes."
And now I've got an overwhelming urge to re-read this one.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is another of my all-time favorite books. I saw the movie first, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, in our condo in Pembroke Pines, Florida back in early 2002. I think it was one of the only times I watched a movie on Turner Classic Movies while it was airing.
I was impressed with the detail of the time period, the 1930s, nearing the time of World War II, and the cloistered life of Stevens the butler in the somewhat gloomy, haunting Darlington Hall, in the employ of Lord Darlington, who strives to achieve an understanding between the French, British and Germans in order to prevent war, but is misled on many fronts and is naive in his understanding of diplomacy. Plus, Anthony Hopkins can be so many different people, and this was in 1993, two years after Hannibal Lecter.
In August 2006 (I'm only so exacting because of what followed after), my family and I went on a trip to San Francisco. Driving. Normally, every time we go on a trip, it's because Dad has something to do at the destination, a conference, a meeting, related to business education. This seemed to be the rare time when that wasn't true.
Before we left Santa Clarita for San Francisco, I had been to the library, found the hardcover edition of The Remains of the Day, and decided it was finally time to read it, after five years of just adoring the movie. It was hard to read anything on 70 miles of winding mountain road that make up part of the Pacific Coast Highway, and the worst thing was that at the start of it, when Dad was trying to find a way to turn around, and stopped somewhere to ask about it, he was told he couldn't. We were on that road and we could only follow it all the way to its end, to San Francisco.
I had a migraine by the time we got to the motel, but I had read most of The Remains of the Day and was utterly impressed by the detail put forth in such formal language, as is the way of Stevens. And not once did I think about Anthony Hopkins as Stevens or Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. Images from movies do not remain in my mind when I read the source material, and this book stood very well on its own. It's no wonder that director James Ivory found something so extraordinary in it to make a movie from it. Some changes benefited the movie, such as the new owner of Darlington Hall, Mr. Faraday, now being Congressman Lewis, retired from politics, and played by Christopher Reeve, which gave him more screen time, as the gray-haired Lewis, as well as the young man that came to Darlington Hall as part of President Roosevelt's Brain Trust.
Came October of that same year, and we went to Palm Springs, to Hotel Zoso, for a business education conference Dad had there. Otherwise, we would have never gone to Palm Springs.
I fell hard for the downtown area, which we happened to be near on a Thursday night as well, so we saw the street fair they have with various vendors, artists, food carts, and there was such a vibrancy there, like this was all that was needed in the world, this intimacy in close spaces. And even just to walk it without the street fair there, in the daytime, was pure pleasure. I felt at home walking those sidewalks, sensing a community amidst those storefronts. There was still a feeling of detachment, as would be expected with the wealthy people who live there, but it wasn't as pervasive as it is in Santa Clarita.
While Dad was at his conference, and Mom, Meridith and I walked those downtown streets, we happened upon a bookstore crammed with books. And the owner, who had few teeth, looked like he lived there and he immediately, temporarily, became a hero of mine, because I would love that, to always be among all those books.
In the back, there were stacks of paperbacks, floor-to-ceiling, sections for Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz. And I walked those floors, near those wooden bookshelves, looking at all those titles that were just waiting again to be read.
Near a glass case with a few rare books inside, I found what I had been hoping for: The Remains of the Day, in a paperback edition from Vintage International. This one was mine. And I still have the original receipt from October 9, 2006, from that bookstore. It was $5.95, with $0.46 tax, and so it came out to $6.41. It's a very simple receipt, no logo of the store, a strip of paper torn off from the role after printing. No perforation. I think the bookstore was called G.W. Books. It closed a few years ago, and I wish it hadn't happened, but perhaps the rent in the downtown area had gone up. That guy couldn't afford it. I hope he's still around, somewhere, still with his books, still reading a lot, as he was reading when we had walked in.
I read The Remains of the Day at least once a year, and with this edition, and that receipt, I always remember him, a lone literary explorer.
I found Subways are for Sleeping by Edmund G. Love, who wrote for Harper's Magazine, while searching for Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York by Randy Kennedy, inspired by a journalism 101 class at College of the Canyons in October 2004, in which one of the assignments had been to listen to a radio news program, such as NPR or another station, and write down what had been reported and the stories that had been told. I got up early one morning for "Morning Edition" on NPR, and heard a story by Robert Smith, who had spent the night in the New York City subway system, taking in all the sights and sounds at those hours, including a guitarist who preferred to play in the subway at night because all the stage is his. Only his.
That story inspired me to seek out more about the world of the New York City subway system, with no desire to visit. Just read. I couldn't find Subwayland in the County of Los Angeles library catalog, but I did find Subways are for Sleeping and it sparked in me what I like to do when I randomly come across a book: I put it on hold and look to read it. I love doing that because it could be one book that affects me greatly. And this one did.
Love writes about the homeless population in New York City, and the resourcefulness of a few figures there, such as Henry Shelby, who picks up various odd jobs along the way, and keeps a tight hold on the money he makes, only spending money for a small hotel room when he hasn't spent a great deal in two or three days, preferring to sleep on the subway. There's old radio shows available for download online, and this particular story, in 1956, was turned into an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop ("The theater of the mind," as the narrator intoned). I downloaded it and have listened to it often. But that stemmed from my association with this book, which began after I checked it out.
I wasn't a sociable type at College of the Canyons. I only wanted to take my courses, do what was necessary, and in between, I'd find what amused me, what interested me, and I'd go with it. I remember being acquaintances with a few of my classmates, but nothing further. I don't remember any of them. I do remember the small arcade with two pinball machines in the student center building where the cafeteria was too. And I remember the cafeteria, the booth I always chose in the back to spread out my math homework, and promptly ignored all the problems facing me. I pulled out Subways are for Sleeping and I read about Shelby, and Charlie, and Father Dutch, awed by these great feats of living, how these people survived on the streets of New York City, what their days were like.
In his decision to write about this particular New York City population, Love writes:
"A few years ago I was caught up in a whirlwind of my own. When it all ended, I found myself walking the streets. I needed more than just a job. I needed to reassess life. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong. I may have listened wrong. I may have thought wrong. Or, I could have been right and the world wrong. It seemed to me, at the time, that the reassessment was more important than the material side of things. I had to think. I had to have time to think. So I drifted. I remember a long series of days and weeks during which I slept on the sofas in the apartments of friends. I recall that during one whole winter month I went down to the Hospital for Special Surgery every afternoon at two o'clock to call on a girl who was confined there. I hardly knew her, but the hospital was warm and I was cold. This may sound hard-boiled, but by that time I'd found out that necessity takes precedence over nicety. I bought a tablet and a pencil and sat on a bench in Grand Central, trying to write and think there.
I say all this because I want it understood that I did not drop into this world of which I write simply to study it. I was there because I couldn't seem to escape it. My rehabilitation, if it can be called that, was a long drawn-out process because it involved a complete change in my thinking as well as a simple economic readjustment. In some ways, it is still going forward. I worked intermittently at a wide variety of jobs. I did not stay in New York, but I did return to the city two or three times. I met a lot of people and I learned a lot of things. More than once I had a stranger suggest to me a place to eat, or a place to sleep, or a place to keep warm. I learned a hundred ways to pick up a dollar or two. I consider this knowledge important, but I learned something even more valuable. I learned a lot about human beings."
I was seized by Love's writing. It was exactly how I wanted to write. Just tell the story. If you're involved, express how you were involved, but do it in the service of the story. And the stories of these people were absorbing, a world I never knew, and god willing will never know, but it became a world I wanted to understand, to see what might have happened that brought these people squarely to the streets of New York, and how they lived, what they were hoping for, what they were striving to do that would let them live how they wanted to live again.
I checked out this book constantly from the Valencia library, alternating between the one that came from the Norwalk branch and the one from the Hawthorne branch. The Hawthorne branch copy had a green cover, the pages likely fitted into a new cardboard cover after the old cover probably distintegrated from age. The Norwalk branch cover is an understated aqua color, with little tree and leaf branches drawn on in black. Likely the same process as the Hawthorne branch copy.
This book got me through my two years at College of the Canyons, 2004-2006. I would often ignore my math homework and other homework on campus in favor of reading it again. I have fond memories of that back table in the cafeteria because of this book, because of the peace afforded me. There were times when the cafeteria was completely empty and it was just me. And I loved it, especially on Friday afternoons when the campus was also empty, when everyone had other places to be, better places, and it felt as if I owned the campus.
There came a day in May 2008 when I decided that I could not live without this book, particularly the Norwalk branch copy. I had checked it out so many times (The Hawthorne branch copy only came to me twice) that I felt it was mine. I had developed such a kinship with this book. And on the last Sunday of that month, I walked into the Valencia library, knowing exactly what I had to do in order to keep my book: I declared it lost. I told the librarian at the desk that when my family and I were traveling back from Las Vegas and had stopped at the state line toward California at the convenience store/travel center there, the book had dropped out of the car and I didn't even notice, and when we got home, I couldn't find it at all and determined that that's where it was, and there was no chance of going back to get it, so all I could do was pay the necessary fines.
And I was prepared to do so because I had the money with me. On the library card pocket on the inside cover, the price was $3.75, but surely it had gone up since then, since the last time a person had checked out this book, with a due date of October 28, 1978. It probably was checked out many times after that, but by then, they were likely using due date cards and then there came the self-checkout system, but I don't think this book ever saw that because this wasn't a book people had sought out. All the pages were still intact when I first got it, still are. A bit of yellowing from age, but it had been well-protected by the books on either side of it.
The charge for "Lost Material," as stated on the receipt I got, was $29, plus a $5 processing fee. I paid it. It was worth it. Every time I read this book, I know what my future can be in writing. I know that I subscribe to Love's style of writing: Keep it simple, keep it straight, and just tell the story. And by that, I know that I am home.
One genre I've never read at length has been science fiction. I should get into it more for pure imagination, but it's never attracted me. I think of the playwright Sam Shepard, one of my heroes, who so easily intertwines reality and surrealism. You read his works and when you get to those surreal moments, it's no big deal. It's part of the lives of those he writes about, it's part of the landscape. Few writers can do that successfully and Shepard is one.
But give me a sci-fi tale set at Walt Disney World and I'm in. That's what Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow is, especially the Walt Disney World the guests never see after they leave the park, and in this case, it's "ad-hocs" who keep the attractions running, with little new technological touches, but nothing that does harm to Walt Disney's original vision, except for a new group that's taken over the Hall of Presidents, replacing the audio-animatronics with direct-to-brain interfaces that let guests feel that they're the presidents, and the "ad-hocs" do not like this at all.
I discovered Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on DailyLit (http://www.dailylit.com/), back when I was reading full-length books on there. There's the option of receiving a page of a book a day by e-mail, and clicking a link that sends you the next installment if you want more. The title alone got me curious, but then I kept clicking that link, wanting more and more and more, wanting to know what would happen to Jules, his girlfriend Lil, and Keep-a-Movin' Dan, and especially the fate of the Magic Kingdom. This was, to me, accessible sci-fi, for amateurs like me. But it was brilliant, so rich in what this world was, in a far different Walt Disney World than I ever knew, but one that I would have loved to visit as well.
Eventually, I bought it in paperback. I actually haven't read it again since I bought it, but I know that when I do, I'll be right back in that world, utterly fascinated with what Doctorow has created, in awe of such a complex, imaginative mind.
I have other all-time favorites, but I can see that this entry is quite long, and the evening is coming. The new seasons of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune begin tonight, and there's the season premiere of Two and a Half Men (I'm curious), as well as the series premiere of 2 Broke Girls (Looks funny from the clips I saw), and I'm also curious about the second season premiere of Hawaii Five-O, after watching the first season finale with Governor Jameson (Jean Smart) being killed off, though I had not seen an episode before that. But I did learn a bit about the leeway Jameson gave the Five-O team from what I read, and I want to see what the new governor does with the team, and how it goes with McGarrett, framed for the murder of Jameson.
Plus, I've got the penultimate and final episodes of the second season of The Good Wife Tivo'd from last night, and I really want to see those. And yes, I'm also curious about The Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen. Really weird how contrite he's become in such a relatively short amount of time, after the entertaining craziness from before.
Thanks to Lola (truly, because I've enjoyed thinking about why these particular books are my all-time favorites), I will write another installment in the coming days, and and it will include three Charles Bukowski books, a later Steinbeck, Harlan Ellison as a film critic, and truly one of the best, Alan Bennett writing about a bibliophile queen, my childhood experiences with Robinson Crusoe, and a book of letters by one of my heroes.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Dickinson's Lemon Curd
I walked into Walmart Supercenter with my family, curiosity on my mind. Dickinson's Lemon Curd curiosity.
I had seen the jar the last time we were there, read the ingredients (Sugar, eggs, butter, lemon juice concentrate, pectin, citric acid...), and thought it to be interesting, especially since it's an English creation, and I'm American, and therefore have had nothing like it. But today, I wanted it. I wanted to try it, and though it was $2.78 for 10 ounces, well, why not?
Dinner was heavy, with spaghetti bake (mozzarella cheese, an Italian blend of shredded cheese, ground beef, beef sausage), cheesy Ciabatta bread, and chocolate-strawberry-banana smoothies Meridith made. But a little after 11, I determined that since I'm not going to bed until around 2, now would be the time to dull my curiosity.
I dipped a plastic spoon in the jar (clean spoon, and I used it only once), scooped out a tiny bit, and tried it.
Oh....my....god!
It tastes like lemon meringue pie in a jar!
I love the English for many things, and this is just another thing to add to the list!
So that's BBC dramas, comedies, Monty Python, Charles Dickens, politics (I sometimes get tired of ours and need a break, so C-SPAN 2 has Prime Minister's Questions every early Wednesday morning), Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, John Gielgud, Rowan Atkinson, Phil Collins, Sting, and now lemon curd.
I had seen the jar the last time we were there, read the ingredients (Sugar, eggs, butter, lemon juice concentrate, pectin, citric acid...), and thought it to be interesting, especially since it's an English creation, and I'm American, and therefore have had nothing like it. But today, I wanted it. I wanted to try it, and though it was $2.78 for 10 ounces, well, why not?
Dinner was heavy, with spaghetti bake (mozzarella cheese, an Italian blend of shredded cheese, ground beef, beef sausage), cheesy Ciabatta bread, and chocolate-strawberry-banana smoothies Meridith made. But a little after 11, I determined that since I'm not going to bed until around 2, now would be the time to dull my curiosity.
I dipped a plastic spoon in the jar (clean spoon, and I used it only once), scooped out a tiny bit, and tried it.
Oh....my....god!
It tastes like lemon meringue pie in a jar!
I love the English for many things, and this is just another thing to add to the list!
So that's BBC dramas, comedies, Monty Python, Charles Dickens, politics (I sometimes get tired of ours and need a break, so C-SPAN 2 has Prime Minister's Questions every early Wednesday morning), Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, John Gielgud, Rowan Atkinson, Phil Collins, Sting, and now lemon curd.
James Cromwell at the Supermarket
I went to bed at 2 this morning and drifted into a dream that carried me all the way through to 9:14 a.m. It's amazing how dreams that seem to only happen in an hour or two turn out to have encapsulated seven hours of sleep.
Last night, I was thinking about the supermarket, any supermarket here. I need more frozen blackberries and yogurt for the coming week. In that dream, I found myself at a supermarket, looking for yogurt. Not many Greek yogurts in one refrigerated case, and then I encountered apparently a former co-worker at The Signal, even though I didn't recognize him, and I would have. We reminisced about our days there, I asked him what he was up to, and we moved on.
And then, in an aisle full of crackers, I was behind a tall man who was picking up a box from the top shelf, and it turned out to be James Cromwell. Yes, Farmer Hoggett from the Babe movies, but for me, a West Wing fan, former president D. Wire Newman in the 5th season episode, "The Stormy Present," one of only two episodes I liked from that season, but a slight disappointment to me, because though I could get the feeling of life after the White House from Newman and his deceased successor Owen Lassiter (the funeral in the episode takes place at his presidential library in Costa Mesa), there wasn't enough discussion about the personal impact of the White House from Newman or from former acting president Glenallen Walken. Instead, the focus was on the protest situation unfolding in the Middle East, and Newman's experience with the same royal family during his term, and Walken's opinion about what should be done. I liked the scene of Newman telling Bartlet how he felt after his MS was revealed to the world, and of Walken talking to Bartlet about a trip he took to China with Lassiter. But there was that golden opportunity, squandered, also because of a "B" story of Josh trying to negotiate a settlement between North Carolina and Connecticut about a copy of the Bill of Rights stolen by a Civil War soldier.
In the dream, my intention was to ask Cromwell if there had been anything changed in the script, any sections of exactly what I had hoped for that were excised. I began talking to Cromwell, telling him that I know others would ask about Babe, but I really wanted to know more about his role as former president Newman, to learn about the filming, to see if anything had been left out.
Also at the supermarket was a contingent of his family, on hand because his mother or father was dying, which is strange to me now because his mother, actress Kay Johnson, died in 1975, and his father, director John Cromwell, died in 1979. Or maybe it had been an aunt or an uncle, but either way, they were there for support and to get him back to the hospital in due time. I remember also nieces and grandchildren there too, and at the end of the dream, a 14-year-old granddaughter who had actually seen the episode I was wondering about, but all I could muster was telling her that her grandfather did was excellent in it. Some things are too important to let questions about other things creep in.
There seemed to be his family in nearly every aisle. There were instances in which he dashed off, and I encountered them, and they answered some of my questions, but not what was truly important to me. It was remarkable how tight-knit this family was, a rare quality.
That's all I got out of the dream. I think if I'm to get any hypothetical answer about the missed opportunity, my next dreams are going to have to involve John Sacret Young, who wrote the episode. Or maybe even executive producer John Wells, since he was at the head of that atrocious fifth season after creator Aaron Sorkin and chief director/co-executive producer Thomas Schlamme were fired at the end of the fourth season.
Last night, I was thinking about the supermarket, any supermarket here. I need more frozen blackberries and yogurt for the coming week. In that dream, I found myself at a supermarket, looking for yogurt. Not many Greek yogurts in one refrigerated case, and then I encountered apparently a former co-worker at The Signal, even though I didn't recognize him, and I would have. We reminisced about our days there, I asked him what he was up to, and we moved on.
And then, in an aisle full of crackers, I was behind a tall man who was picking up a box from the top shelf, and it turned out to be James Cromwell. Yes, Farmer Hoggett from the Babe movies, but for me, a West Wing fan, former president D. Wire Newman in the 5th season episode, "The Stormy Present," one of only two episodes I liked from that season, but a slight disappointment to me, because though I could get the feeling of life after the White House from Newman and his deceased successor Owen Lassiter (the funeral in the episode takes place at his presidential library in Costa Mesa), there wasn't enough discussion about the personal impact of the White House from Newman or from former acting president Glenallen Walken. Instead, the focus was on the protest situation unfolding in the Middle East, and Newman's experience with the same royal family during his term, and Walken's opinion about what should be done. I liked the scene of Newman telling Bartlet how he felt after his MS was revealed to the world, and of Walken talking to Bartlet about a trip he took to China with Lassiter. But there was that golden opportunity, squandered, also because of a "B" story of Josh trying to negotiate a settlement between North Carolina and Connecticut about a copy of the Bill of Rights stolen by a Civil War soldier.
In the dream, my intention was to ask Cromwell if there had been anything changed in the script, any sections of exactly what I had hoped for that were excised. I began talking to Cromwell, telling him that I know others would ask about Babe, but I really wanted to know more about his role as former president Newman, to learn about the filming, to see if anything had been left out.
Also at the supermarket was a contingent of his family, on hand because his mother or father was dying, which is strange to me now because his mother, actress Kay Johnson, died in 1975, and his father, director John Cromwell, died in 1979. Or maybe it had been an aunt or an uncle, but either way, they were there for support and to get him back to the hospital in due time. I remember also nieces and grandchildren there too, and at the end of the dream, a 14-year-old granddaughter who had actually seen the episode I was wondering about, but all I could muster was telling her that her grandfather did was excellent in it. Some things are too important to let questions about other things creep in.
There seemed to be his family in nearly every aisle. There were instances in which he dashed off, and I encountered them, and they answered some of my questions, but not what was truly important to me. It was remarkable how tight-knit this family was, a rare quality.
That's all I got out of the dream. I think if I'm to get any hypothetical answer about the missed opportunity, my next dreams are going to have to involve John Sacret Young, who wrote the episode. Or maybe even executive producer John Wells, since he was at the head of that atrocious fifth season after creator Aaron Sorkin and chief director/co-executive producer Thomas Schlamme were fired at the end of the fourth season.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Trying It Again
I abandoned My Hollywood by Mona Simpson because despite the good idea of writing about the immigrant women who supply stability for the lives of Hollywood types by raising their children, doing their laundry, etc., Simpson only wrote the idea, not a novel. And I don't think I will go back to it in the years to come, to try it again. I've lived here in the Santa Clarita Valley for 8 years, I've seen parts of Hollywood many times, and I don't think even total detachment from it, as there would be once I'm a resident of Henderson, Nevada, would compel me to go for it again.
But there are some exceptions with other books I've left without finishing, such as Dog On It by Spencer Quinn, a mystery novel that takes place from the viewpoint of Chet, a dog, and family to Bernie, a private investigator. I mentioned it briefly in an entry I wrote on May 6, 2009 (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2009/05/i-should-go-to-laundromat-more-often.html), and it didn't do anything for me then. So why would I go back to it now? What does it have that My Hollywood doesn't and likely never will?
It has novelty. Last month, I got a book catalog from Daedalus Books, detailing the new titles they had on sale. One of them was Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann. It involves sheep that have been well-taken care of by their shepherd. He has read them a wide range of books every evening, thereby giving them much understanding about human nature, which helps after he is murdered and they set out to find out who did it. Yes, the sheep.
It stems from novelty in mystery novels for me. I tried Baltimore Blues, the first novel in the Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman, and not only did I really like Tess, I liked Lippman's descriptions of Baltimore, the way of the world there, as only she, a former reporter there, could possibly know. Every time she described some quirk of Baltimore, you could tell that she loves her city. After I read it back in March, I checked out of the library Charm City, the second book in the series, but never read it, because other books were crowding in, demanding their time with me. And I acquiesced to those other books.
Maybe that was the mistake. I liked that first book, and I should have gotten right into that second book, keeping up the momentum. It wasn't until August that I remembered how much I had enjoyed Baltimore Blues, and decided to order Charm City. And then, I started it at the beginning of this month. I still liked the city descriptions, but I didn't feel the same interest in Tess this time, nor of Lippman's Baltimore. This didn't feel like my territory, a world I could happily live in for a time.
In the same Daedalus Books catalog, I found The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom. A mystery series revolving around a bookmobile? I love books, and I love libraries. I didn't want that book yet, though, because it's the third one in the Mobile Library Mystery series. So I ordered the first one from abebooks.com. And then I remembered that I have State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy, the first novel in the White House Chef Mystery series. I love the history of the White House and of its occupants. It sounds like it would be a series for me.
But I haven't read any of these books yet. Other books, such as The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez currently, have beckoned. It's not a delay of any kind, just that I go with what I spark to at the moment. I still have sparks for these books, and I will read them soon enough, because I'd like to have a mystery series I can get into, but one that suits me and my interests, including books, the library, the White House. Three Bags Full probably won't lead to a series, but sheep working to solve the murder of their shepherd? I can't let that pass me by!
And I've thought again about the Haunted Bookshop Mystery series by Alice Kimberly, about Rhode Island bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure, and the shop's ghost, a private investigator murdered 50 years prior on the same spot that Timothy Brennan, the author of the Detective Jack Shield series (A series inspired by the exploits of that very PI), drops dead on during a talk he's giving about his books.
I like bookstores too, but I think I never continued with that series because of the haughty family of Penelope's deceased husband. I like the ghost aspect, and have always wanted to write something involving a ghost, but that never suited me. They were a jarring interruption in a wonderful world of books.
Also, for a while now, I've loved watching Antiques Roadshow, and remember fondly the antiques store we went to in San Juan Capistrano that had envelopes with "Burt Lancaster" mimeographed in blue (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2009/04/love-for-san-juan-capistrano-that-will.html). They were the real things, made for his production company. Now I regret not buying them, but I was utterly fascinated at the apparent history of the items in that store, the glass cases with antique dishes inside them, the old pop culture figurines, the lunch boxes, one of which I think had Howdy Doody on it, and the wisps of people you could find still attached to those items. You could imagine who might have owned it, for what reasons it's here, and who it might be for now. Maybe an antiques mystery series? I've found one called the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries by Jane K. Cleland, and I think I'll try the first book, Consigned to Death. It's not so much the mysteries I'm looking for (I usually half-heartedly guess at who the culprit is), but just these worlds with the same characters. I get that also with the Kingdom Keepers series by Ridley Pearson, which takes place at Walt Disney World after dark, or at least the first one did, and I ordered the second, third and fourth books in the series because of my undying love for Walt Disney World and the Disney name and all that it entails, and am anticipating the fifth book, which will be published next year.
My reason for trying Dog On It again is because I'm a dog lover. I grew up with a black toy poodle named Beaumont. He was a baby when I was three years old. Now we have Tigger, our part miniature pinscher, part Italian greyhound, and Kitty, our part miniature pinscher, part terrier. Kitty came from someone in Alaska who took in rescue dogs, and this household was also populated by cats, so Kitty adopted some of their traits, including walking fearlessly across the back of the couch and sitting right on the arm of the couch. A few days after she arrived in June 2006, she took over the rocking chair that we've had since I was a baby. She made it her own, and it's where she lays for part of the afternoon, and in the late night when I'm still up and everyone has gone to bed.
A dog helping to solve mysteries? I'll try it again. I would like to feel a connection to some series of books, one that hopefully goes ever on. All of these are possible starts.
But there are some exceptions with other books I've left without finishing, such as Dog On It by Spencer Quinn, a mystery novel that takes place from the viewpoint of Chet, a dog, and family to Bernie, a private investigator. I mentioned it briefly in an entry I wrote on May 6, 2009 (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2009/05/i-should-go-to-laundromat-more-often.html), and it didn't do anything for me then. So why would I go back to it now? What does it have that My Hollywood doesn't and likely never will?
It has novelty. Last month, I got a book catalog from Daedalus Books, detailing the new titles they had on sale. One of them was Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann. It involves sheep that have been well-taken care of by their shepherd. He has read them a wide range of books every evening, thereby giving them much understanding about human nature, which helps after he is murdered and they set out to find out who did it. Yes, the sheep.
It stems from novelty in mystery novels for me. I tried Baltimore Blues, the first novel in the Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman, and not only did I really like Tess, I liked Lippman's descriptions of Baltimore, the way of the world there, as only she, a former reporter there, could possibly know. Every time she described some quirk of Baltimore, you could tell that she loves her city. After I read it back in March, I checked out of the library Charm City, the second book in the series, but never read it, because other books were crowding in, demanding their time with me. And I acquiesced to those other books.
Maybe that was the mistake. I liked that first book, and I should have gotten right into that second book, keeping up the momentum. It wasn't until August that I remembered how much I had enjoyed Baltimore Blues, and decided to order Charm City. And then, I started it at the beginning of this month. I still liked the city descriptions, but I didn't feel the same interest in Tess this time, nor of Lippman's Baltimore. This didn't feel like my territory, a world I could happily live in for a time.
In the same Daedalus Books catalog, I found The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom. A mystery series revolving around a bookmobile? I love books, and I love libraries. I didn't want that book yet, though, because it's the third one in the Mobile Library Mystery series. So I ordered the first one from abebooks.com. And then I remembered that I have State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy, the first novel in the White House Chef Mystery series. I love the history of the White House and of its occupants. It sounds like it would be a series for me.
But I haven't read any of these books yet. Other books, such as The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez currently, have beckoned. It's not a delay of any kind, just that I go with what I spark to at the moment. I still have sparks for these books, and I will read them soon enough, because I'd like to have a mystery series I can get into, but one that suits me and my interests, including books, the library, the White House. Three Bags Full probably won't lead to a series, but sheep working to solve the murder of their shepherd? I can't let that pass me by!
And I've thought again about the Haunted Bookshop Mystery series by Alice Kimberly, about Rhode Island bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure, and the shop's ghost, a private investigator murdered 50 years prior on the same spot that Timothy Brennan, the author of the Detective Jack Shield series (A series inspired by the exploits of that very PI), drops dead on during a talk he's giving about his books.
I like bookstores too, but I think I never continued with that series because of the haughty family of Penelope's deceased husband. I like the ghost aspect, and have always wanted to write something involving a ghost, but that never suited me. They were a jarring interruption in a wonderful world of books.
Also, for a while now, I've loved watching Antiques Roadshow, and remember fondly the antiques store we went to in San Juan Capistrano that had envelopes with "Burt Lancaster" mimeographed in blue (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2009/04/love-for-san-juan-capistrano-that-will.html). They were the real things, made for his production company. Now I regret not buying them, but I was utterly fascinated at the apparent history of the items in that store, the glass cases with antique dishes inside them, the old pop culture figurines, the lunch boxes, one of which I think had Howdy Doody on it, and the wisps of people you could find still attached to those items. You could imagine who might have owned it, for what reasons it's here, and who it might be for now. Maybe an antiques mystery series? I've found one called the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries by Jane K. Cleland, and I think I'll try the first book, Consigned to Death. It's not so much the mysteries I'm looking for (I usually half-heartedly guess at who the culprit is), but just these worlds with the same characters. I get that also with the Kingdom Keepers series by Ridley Pearson, which takes place at Walt Disney World after dark, or at least the first one did, and I ordered the second, third and fourth books in the series because of my undying love for Walt Disney World and the Disney name and all that it entails, and am anticipating the fifth book, which will be published next year.
My reason for trying Dog On It again is because I'm a dog lover. I grew up with a black toy poodle named Beaumont. He was a baby when I was three years old. Now we have Tigger, our part miniature pinscher, part Italian greyhound, and Kitty, our part miniature pinscher, part terrier. Kitty came from someone in Alaska who took in rescue dogs, and this household was also populated by cats, so Kitty adopted some of their traits, including walking fearlessly across the back of the couch and sitting right on the arm of the couch. A few days after she arrived in June 2006, she took over the rocking chair that we've had since I was a baby. She made it her own, and it's where she lays for part of the afternoon, and in the late night when I'm still up and everyone has gone to bed.
A dog helping to solve mysteries? I'll try it again. I would like to feel a connection to some series of books, one that hopefully goes ever on. All of these are possible starts.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Keeping Magazines Close to Myself
This morning, while I was sleeping, stacks of books next to my bed fell. Call it a quirk of gravity and shoddy stacksmanship.
After breakfast, emptying the dishwasher, and a shave, I got right to it, reorganizing the books according to what I really want to read in the next few weeks. The books next to my bed are crucial. The ones across from my bed, on the other side of my room, I can pull them out whenever I feel like it, whenever some image or some line from another book compels me to seek out more about, say, Walt Disney World, but they remain where they are, the order of those stacks never changing.
As I stacked The Bookseller of Kabul atop The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez (Two I got from Big Lots last week when my dad decided to go there to seek out a new cell phone case), the ones I want to read next after I finish The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal, I spotted a fold-out ad I had received in the mail from The American Poetry Review, offering up the prices for a subscription, and including covers of past issues, and a poem, "The Mysterious Human Heart" by Matthew Dickman, from the November/December 2008 issue. Dickman writes about going to a market in New York, looking for plantains, ginger root, and cilantro. I read the poem, and the desire for a new subscription stirred in me.
I had recently cancelled my subscriptions to Bookmarks and The London Review of Books because I don't enjoy reading book reviews, and by extension, I began to tire of these magazines. Bookmarks was good to see the covers of various upcoming books, and for plot summaries, but what more could I get from that that I haven't already gotten from Amazon and abebooks.com when I need it? I first considered Bookmarks to be a menu of possibilities, but then I determined in the following months that I like to explore on my own. I like to bump into books, to see one that captures my eye on Amazon when I'm looking up another one on the site. I loved my visit to Big Lots because I went to the book section without any idea of what I wanted. I would just know when I found it, and I did in the two aforementioned books, as well as Dog Days by Jon Katz, Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, and a few others. I didn't need a magazine to tell me what was coming up when I'd probably find out on my own anyway. I like the e-mails from Amazon, the "Best of the Month" ones because they gives me a small taste of what's available and to see what suits me. But it never pushes. I am my own literary explorer.
The only book critic I've ever liked has been Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, and that's because I had discovered his book, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainment, while browsing Amazon and I loved learning about what sparked him to reading and why he's loved it for decades. I prefer an introduction like that. Show me a critic who started out as an avid reader, who devoured every single book they found, and I will read them, because their words will be suffused with that love, no matter how shoddy the book might be. Dirda's the only one I've found of that stripe so far, though I don't actively search for them.
I never found such personalities in London Review of Books. I learned of it by way of the personal ads it's apparently well-known for, selections that had been published in two books compiled by David Rose. I wanted to see what else this magazine offered and I had been impressed with the broadsheet size of it, that the writers within could concentrate so carefully on books. But what I found was concentration, never a sense of passion, which I suppose wouldn't fly with London Review of Books, unless there was an article by Alan Bennett, in which case it was the quiet passion I appreciated, of a man walking as I do through the vast universe of books, bending down to pick up whatever he finds in front of him, and reading in appreciation. But I never got that impression with the other articles in that magazine. It was as if those writers were sitting on a stately perch, looking down at all the books gathered below them, harumphing and sniffing haughtily about books they happened to read with two fingers perched at the spine, one in the spine and one behind it. It's intellectualism I cannot embrace. When I was reading How to Bake a Perfect Life while walking through the Walmart Supercenter with Mom and Meridith, and I got to the reunion of Ramona and Jonah, my heart swelled up big and I felt like I was going to be pulled up into the air, free to float and fly around in pure happiness. Right then, I wanted the entire world to know about this book. And that's the feeling I want to sense if I happen to read a book review. Dirda has that. Others don't.
So The London Review of Books was out too. But I wasn't searching for a new magazine to subscribe to in the way I was looking for a new hour-long show that I could be as passionate about as The West Wing. My go-to magazines are The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and Saveur, which is about food of all cultures and types, about cooking, about living life tasting everything you can and holding in your mouth that which you love so dearly. And it's not just the writing that expresses that, but also the photography. I've never seen food look like this, and only have there been a few times that I have seen it outside of a photograph, such as the Swedish meatballs at IKEA. There is a great comfort to such a dish, including the meatball gravy that goes on top of the mashed potatoes too, as well as the lingonberry sauce. It is like a security blanket. Saveur does that often, exploring what we are passionate about in food. The Oxford American does that with its Southern writing, with culture in much the same way, but publishes its own food issue never often enough.
I latched on to The New Yorker through John Boston, who had worked at The Signal for 30 years as its foremost columnist, humor and otherwise, to the extent that when we moved here and Mom saw his byline often in the paper, she thought he owned it. He was truly the heart and soul in this valley and it was an unforgivable crime when he left the paper after so much shoddy treatment. Boston had issues of The New Yorker on the bookshelves next to his desk, and let me take many of them home for my own perusal. I was fiercely attracted to the cartoons and a few writers, such as Patricia Marx, who is a terrific humorist, and whose second novel, Starting from Happy, I have but I still haven't read it yet. Other books have gotten in the way, also literally, because I'm not sure which stack it's in.
My subscription to The New Yorker lasts until September 2014, since I renewed it last year, and I don't intend to cancel it early, especially because of Amelia Lester, the 27-year-old managing editor, and her restaurant reviews. She lets the details of the restaurants speak for themselves, with slightly bouncy prose that I always enjoy. But what's always bothered me about The New Yorker, even though I know it's because of its prestige, are some writers of articles who get so overexcited about where they are. They're at The New Yorker! Their articles must sound like it with many exclamation points peppered throughout even though there's merely a comma or period there! They have to call their parents and let them know right away that they're in The New Yorker again!
Just write the article. Aim for the prestige that you want so much, but come on, an article about the AIDS epidemic probably should not have that kind of exclamation-point feeling in it. I enjoy that every week is a crapshoot, that I won't know what I'll be getting until I get that e-mail from The New Yorker detailing what's in the next issue. And when I open that e-mail, I cross my fingers and hope for a TV review from Nancy Franklin (my favorite TV critic) and a movie review from Anthony Lane (My favorite film critic, although there are weeks when Josh Bell, the film critic for Las Vegas Weekly supplants him). But I don't enjoy those articles that have that feeling of "OH MY GOD! I'M IN THE NEW YORKER!!!!!" I prefer subtlety in words. The power of an article will emanate from what you write about. John McPhee had no problem doing that. It works.
I get the same feeling from The American Poetry Review as I do with Poets & Writers, a devotion to the attempt at making the written word work in new ways, to reflect different minds, different cultures, different approaches to the world. Like Saveur, I feel like I can hold it close to me. It's mine. I will always find something in the pages to interest me. Just like there will always be food that's new to me to learn about in Saveur, and just like there's always a new method of writing to learn about in Poets & Writers, and just like there's parts of Southern culture new to me to learn about in The Oxford American, I think there will always be a new poem or a few in The American Poetry Review that will wrap its tendrils around my brain and heart, compelling me to reread those words, taking in each one, watching as it connects to the others, seeing what it creates that fires my imagination and makes my heart bloom. I get the same feeling while watching Jeopardy!, except for the emotional parts. I like studying how the questions were written, why they're written in those particular ways. It feels like The American Poetry Review will do that for me too, and why I subscribed for 3 years at $34.50. It's published 6 times a year, and that's a pretty good span of time to absorb the power of any poems that affect me so before the next issue comes out. And the balance of Saveur, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and The American Poetry Review feels right. I can get what I want from all of them and feel satisfied every time.
After breakfast, emptying the dishwasher, and a shave, I got right to it, reorganizing the books according to what I really want to read in the next few weeks. The books next to my bed are crucial. The ones across from my bed, on the other side of my room, I can pull them out whenever I feel like it, whenever some image or some line from another book compels me to seek out more about, say, Walt Disney World, but they remain where they are, the order of those stacks never changing.
As I stacked The Bookseller of Kabul atop The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez (Two I got from Big Lots last week when my dad decided to go there to seek out a new cell phone case), the ones I want to read next after I finish The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal, I spotted a fold-out ad I had received in the mail from The American Poetry Review, offering up the prices for a subscription, and including covers of past issues, and a poem, "The Mysterious Human Heart" by Matthew Dickman, from the November/December 2008 issue. Dickman writes about going to a market in New York, looking for plantains, ginger root, and cilantro. I read the poem, and the desire for a new subscription stirred in me.
I had recently cancelled my subscriptions to Bookmarks and The London Review of Books because I don't enjoy reading book reviews, and by extension, I began to tire of these magazines. Bookmarks was good to see the covers of various upcoming books, and for plot summaries, but what more could I get from that that I haven't already gotten from Amazon and abebooks.com when I need it? I first considered Bookmarks to be a menu of possibilities, but then I determined in the following months that I like to explore on my own. I like to bump into books, to see one that captures my eye on Amazon when I'm looking up another one on the site. I loved my visit to Big Lots because I went to the book section without any idea of what I wanted. I would just know when I found it, and I did in the two aforementioned books, as well as Dog Days by Jon Katz, Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, and a few others. I didn't need a magazine to tell me what was coming up when I'd probably find out on my own anyway. I like the e-mails from Amazon, the "Best of the Month" ones because they gives me a small taste of what's available and to see what suits me. But it never pushes. I am my own literary explorer.
The only book critic I've ever liked has been Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, and that's because I had discovered his book, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainment, while browsing Amazon and I loved learning about what sparked him to reading and why he's loved it for decades. I prefer an introduction like that. Show me a critic who started out as an avid reader, who devoured every single book they found, and I will read them, because their words will be suffused with that love, no matter how shoddy the book might be. Dirda's the only one I've found of that stripe so far, though I don't actively search for them.
I never found such personalities in London Review of Books. I learned of it by way of the personal ads it's apparently well-known for, selections that had been published in two books compiled by David Rose. I wanted to see what else this magazine offered and I had been impressed with the broadsheet size of it, that the writers within could concentrate so carefully on books. But what I found was concentration, never a sense of passion, which I suppose wouldn't fly with London Review of Books, unless there was an article by Alan Bennett, in which case it was the quiet passion I appreciated, of a man walking as I do through the vast universe of books, bending down to pick up whatever he finds in front of him, and reading in appreciation. But I never got that impression with the other articles in that magazine. It was as if those writers were sitting on a stately perch, looking down at all the books gathered below them, harumphing and sniffing haughtily about books they happened to read with two fingers perched at the spine, one in the spine and one behind it. It's intellectualism I cannot embrace. When I was reading How to Bake a Perfect Life while walking through the Walmart Supercenter with Mom and Meridith, and I got to the reunion of Ramona and Jonah, my heart swelled up big and I felt like I was going to be pulled up into the air, free to float and fly around in pure happiness. Right then, I wanted the entire world to know about this book. And that's the feeling I want to sense if I happen to read a book review. Dirda has that. Others don't.
So The London Review of Books was out too. But I wasn't searching for a new magazine to subscribe to in the way I was looking for a new hour-long show that I could be as passionate about as The West Wing. My go-to magazines are The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and Saveur, which is about food of all cultures and types, about cooking, about living life tasting everything you can and holding in your mouth that which you love so dearly. And it's not just the writing that expresses that, but also the photography. I've never seen food look like this, and only have there been a few times that I have seen it outside of a photograph, such as the Swedish meatballs at IKEA. There is a great comfort to such a dish, including the meatball gravy that goes on top of the mashed potatoes too, as well as the lingonberry sauce. It is like a security blanket. Saveur does that often, exploring what we are passionate about in food. The Oxford American does that with its Southern writing, with culture in much the same way, but publishes its own food issue never often enough.
I latched on to The New Yorker through John Boston, who had worked at The Signal for 30 years as its foremost columnist, humor and otherwise, to the extent that when we moved here and Mom saw his byline often in the paper, she thought he owned it. He was truly the heart and soul in this valley and it was an unforgivable crime when he left the paper after so much shoddy treatment. Boston had issues of The New Yorker on the bookshelves next to his desk, and let me take many of them home for my own perusal. I was fiercely attracted to the cartoons and a few writers, such as Patricia Marx, who is a terrific humorist, and whose second novel, Starting from Happy, I have but I still haven't read it yet. Other books have gotten in the way, also literally, because I'm not sure which stack it's in.
My subscription to The New Yorker lasts until September 2014, since I renewed it last year, and I don't intend to cancel it early, especially because of Amelia Lester, the 27-year-old managing editor, and her restaurant reviews. She lets the details of the restaurants speak for themselves, with slightly bouncy prose that I always enjoy. But what's always bothered me about The New Yorker, even though I know it's because of its prestige, are some writers of articles who get so overexcited about where they are. They're at The New Yorker! Their articles must sound like it with many exclamation points peppered throughout even though there's merely a comma or period there! They have to call their parents and let them know right away that they're in The New Yorker again!
Just write the article. Aim for the prestige that you want so much, but come on, an article about the AIDS epidemic probably should not have that kind of exclamation-point feeling in it. I enjoy that every week is a crapshoot, that I won't know what I'll be getting until I get that e-mail from The New Yorker detailing what's in the next issue. And when I open that e-mail, I cross my fingers and hope for a TV review from Nancy Franklin (my favorite TV critic) and a movie review from Anthony Lane (My favorite film critic, although there are weeks when Josh Bell, the film critic for Las Vegas Weekly supplants him). But I don't enjoy those articles that have that feeling of "OH MY GOD! I'M IN THE NEW YORKER!!!!!" I prefer subtlety in words. The power of an article will emanate from what you write about. John McPhee had no problem doing that. It works.
I get the same feeling from The American Poetry Review as I do with Poets & Writers, a devotion to the attempt at making the written word work in new ways, to reflect different minds, different cultures, different approaches to the world. Like Saveur, I feel like I can hold it close to me. It's mine. I will always find something in the pages to interest me. Just like there will always be food that's new to me to learn about in Saveur, and just like there's always a new method of writing to learn about in Poets & Writers, and just like there's parts of Southern culture new to me to learn about in The Oxford American, I think there will always be a new poem or a few in The American Poetry Review that will wrap its tendrils around my brain and heart, compelling me to reread those words, taking in each one, watching as it connects to the others, seeing what it creates that fires my imagination and makes my heart bloom. I get the same feeling while watching Jeopardy!, except for the emotional parts. I like studying how the questions were written, why they're written in those particular ways. It feels like The American Poetry Review will do that for me too, and why I subscribed for 3 years at $34.50. It's published 6 times a year, and that's a pretty good span of time to absorb the power of any poems that affect me so before the next issue comes out. And the balance of Saveur, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and The American Poetry Review feels right. I can get what I want from all of them and feel satisfied every time.
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