Season's Readings 2008

Season’s Readings 2008

My Favorites

Running With Scissors: A Memoir, by Augusten Burroughs

5 cassettes. I was reading this book at the same time I was reading Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Strange experience, because both were narrated by precocious teen-aged boys. I liked this book a lot. I heard the movie was not good. The author was born in 1965. See more under ‘Reviews.’

The author’s mother, Julia, was born in County Mayo, Ireland in 1920. After leaving the convent, she met her husband-to-be, who wanted to have a large family. Since she didn't feel she could admit to being 40, she made a decision to subtract ten years from her age.

This reminds me of a Casey family story. The way I heard it, Grandpa Casey shaved ten years off his age when he applied for a new job as a meat inspector. He apparently justified this to his children by telling them, "Those ten years in Ora didn't count." (He had spent part of his childhood on his family's farm in Ora, Indiana.) This became a catch phrase in our household.

Unlike Grandpa Casey, Julia kept her deception a secret. Since her husband was posted to Hong Kong and other colonial outposts in his job with HSBC, she was able to keep him from casual family get-togethers where birth order would surely have come up (Julia had five sisters and a brother). But, you can imagine how this secret strained the family relations. She implied to her son, for example, that her family could be troublemakers. (The son—the author of this remembrance—was relieved to eventually find—after his mother’s death—evidence that led him to believe that Julia had fessed up to her husband in their later years.)

Julia had her own set of catch phrases. See ‘Book-related Quotes.’

6 cassettes. Dr. Paul Farmer established a Haitian clinic called Zanmi Lasante. That name is imprinted on my mem₤ory, after hearing it spoken aloud countless times during this BOT. It is Creole for ‘Partners in Health.’ “Kidder portrays a genuinely inspired and heroic individual, whose quest for justice will make every reader examine her or his life in a new light.” - Booklist

7 CDs. Loved this. “Shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women’s friendships and shows what it means to stand together.”

12 CDs. Loved this.

Second Tier

13 cassettes. The mathematical genius John Nash is a Bluefield, WV native, born 1928. The movie version was more enjoyable than the book, but each form does certain things well. I agree with this review on Amazon: “Ron Howard departed masterfully from the book to provide the essence of Nash's story without bogging down in some confusing issues that Nasar, in a book form, handles with appropriate detail and context.”

5 cassettes. I liked listening to this novel, but only because of the magical voice of the woman reading. This book was too poetic for me. Sample: “To that period of time called day I profess an indifference; such a thing is a vanity but known only to me; all that is impersonal I have made personal. Since I do not matter, I do not long to matter, but I matter anyway.”

14 CDs. In this novel, famous author Vida Winter wants to tell the truth about her life before she dies. She selects as her biographer a young woman whose work had impressed her, Margaret Lea. The resulting story of her childhood at Angelfield, twins Adeline and Emmeline, and a topiary garden was absorbing while it lasted.

Eleanor Roosevelt, by Blanche Wiesen Cook.

Vol I (16 cassettes), covering 1884—1933, and ending with their move to the White House, was published in 1992.

Vol II (20 cassettes), covering 1933—1938, was published in 1999. This audiobook version was read by Kate Reading.

This was very good. And I certainly recommend it to anyone who wants chapter and verse on ER.

7 cassettes. All three of Galileo’s children were illegitimate. His eldest daughter was born in 1600, went to the Poor Clare’s Convent at age 13, thrived there, and died of dysentery at age 33. 120 of Suor Maria Celeste’s letters to her father survive. “According to the Biblical interpretation at that time, the Earth was the centre of the universe and was stationary. When Galileo wished to publish a book which argued for the Copernican system, he attained the required stamp of approval from the religious authority (a requirement for all books published in Italy at the time) but circumstances led Pope Urban VIII to ban it and denounce Galileo as a heretic, even though he was a devout Catholic. Unauthorized copies of the book, however, found their way to prominent scholars outside of Italy and it was published in countries that were not under the Pope's rule, such as Germany and Denmark.” - Wikipedia

5 cassettes. Read by Penelope Dellaporta. Based on a series of lectures Woolf delivered at the two women’s colleges (Newn-ham and Girton) at Cambridge University on the topic of “Women and Fiction.”

Woolf’s thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Interesting tidbit: I read elsewhere that Woolf’s own legacy from her Aunt Caroline Emilia Stephen was ₤2500, the equivalent of about ₤115,000 today. Invested, it earned her about ₤100 a year, or the equivalent of about $7,360.

8 CDs. This book takes place during WWI, in a TB sanatorium in the Adirondacks. A lot of patients did recover, using the rest cure, and breathing in that clean mountain air. It got me curious whether it was ever proven or disproven if those things effected the cure. So, see end of this document for some things I have learned about TB.

Not Recommended

5 cassettes. I read this to sample what John Lanchester’s novels might be like, having very much enjoyed his memoir. I had heard a listener on NPR call in to a book show to recommend this book particularly. But, it did not appeal to me at all. Detailed description of Mr. Phillips, and how he spent his first day after being made redundant (leaving the house as if to go to work, and then killing time until he could go home, since he hadn’t told his wife he had been let go). It went nowhere, in my opinion.

5 CDs. Disappointing. A romp thru Financial Planning. Touches on some of the big names: Money and the Meaning of Life, by Jacob Needleman. “That everything is priced has to do with the breakdown of values in our culture.”

The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, by George Kinder

1. Innocence

2. Pain

3. Knowledge

4. Understanding

5. Vigor (The energy and commitment it takes to follow thru)

6. Vision (Give Back to one’s Community)

7. Aloha (Give back to another living person)

(Aloha is used in the sense that the ancient Hawaiins used it: The passing of a blessing from one person to another, an act of kindness, generosity, or compassion.)

3 CDs. Myla Goldberg (author of Bee Season) lived in Prague in 1993. From the CD carton: "In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe the integral ways in which Prague's character had endured." The book was very short. She described a walk through Vysehrad Cemetery (“Prague’s Père Lachaise”), and an encounter with some Czech policemen. But I didn’t get much out of it.

10 CDs. I wanted to know what was in the safe deposit box and how Oskar came to the understanding that “the renter” was his grandfather. And I didn’t want the grandfather’s letters to be buried. And what were the empty envelopes in his grand-mother’s dresser drawer? In short, I am not recommending this although I did think that nine-year-old Oskar Schell was an interesting narrator. I read the author’s own statement of what he was trying to achieve in the book (see end, under ‘Why They Write’). But it doesn’t erase my gripes. The author is young (born 1977) so I’m sure I will have the opportunity to give him another chance!

17 CDs. I got this (long) after reading in Books Briefly Noted (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006) “Much of his memoir is about frustration and dead ends” and “Less polished construction…but there is something distinctly moving about his decision to think through the work—and the years—that did not quite cohere.” Moving? I disagree. I wish I had read the New York Times review, which would have dissuaded me. It sums up my take on the book, and I quote from it in ‘Reviews’ below.

Books Sampled

Bob’s cousin Nell Kiddy Walker said she had “had her DNA done.” When I told Eva that, and said I didn’t really know what it meant, she recommended this book. I skimmed it, skipping over the more technical parts. I liked the author’s fragments of memoir about his childhood. For instance, his description of a bank errand he went on with his parents, which left a “permanent impression about money, the substance that could make one’s parents, godlike adults, grip the armrests of a chair in anxiety.” Or his family’s excursions to Little Havana in 1965 where “in the reflective glass of the storefronts, we could see ourselves edging past, and we saw what we weren’t, as well as what we were.”

6 cassettes. Only 11 stories (out of 43 that were included in the book) were included. Philippe Petit’s profile was the primary one I was looking for when I got this (“The Man Who Walks on Air” by Calvin Tomkins). It was a good follow-up to the documentary Man on Wire which we had seen earlier in the year. Some of the other profiles included were a 1950 profile of Ernest Hemingway (by Lillian Ross), 1957 Marlon Brando (by Truman Capote), 1959 Floyd Patterson (by A.J. Liebling), 1999 Richard Pryor (by Hilton Als) and 1996 Katharine White (by Nancy Franklin).

Listened to the first 2 of 13 CDs. I doubt I will go back to it. But, maybe I should. A review of the CD says, “Listening to [Tristan] Layton is like sitting at a Left Bank cafe with a British friend who knows both the history and gossip of the 1860s' Paris art scene and can put it all in political context. Layton has a friendly, low-pitched voice, good tempo and pace. He's never overly dramatic, but does lift an amusing vocal eyebrow quoting some of the more pompous figures of the period.” The book covers the years 1863–74 in the history of art.

Interesting.

The Best of NPR: A Life in the Arts.

1 cassette.

Legendary ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn
Texas yodeler Don Walser
Lynn Redgrave
Don Feiler
Rock musician Ry Cooder
Jeremy Brett, PBS’s Sherlock Holmes
Ethel Merman
Mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker
Classical pianist Leon Fleisher, who lost use of his right arm due to repetitive stress

Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, by Walter de la Mare, “with embellishments by C. Lovat Fraser.” First published 1916.

Be sure to get the edition illustrated by C. Lovat Fraser. I don’t know why this has gone thru so many editions, with so many different illustrators, as I didn’t see the appeal of the poems at all. But the illustrations in this particular edition were charming. I sought this out after reading that Maurice Sendak said: “I discovered Peacock Pie when I jostled a shelf at the Argosy Book Shop in 1958. The book fell on my head. No one had prepared me for Lovat Fraser, and I’m grateful for that.”

David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall.

1 CD. Recorded live in Oct, 2002. David Sedaris can make me laugh out loud. He came to Rochester in September of this year on his new tour, and I went to that performance with my friend, Julie Daniels.

The author, born in 1944, took a year off in 1974 from his job teaching tennis in California, and one of the things he did was a 53-day, 2000-mile trip through Scotland in the Spring. “Filled with false confidence gained from his only previous long-distance bike trip—23 miles around Point Reyes, California—Cantin quickly was educated about the realities.” – from the blurb. See an excerpt from this book at the end of this document.

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Book-related quotes, and quotes from books

"I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone facades. … Authorship was considered something between a black art and a form of manual labor."

- Edith Wharton, talking about the lack of encouragement she got from her parents, for a career in writing

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"Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."

- Edith Wharton, in turn, could not be supportive of something she did not comprehend, namely why stream-of-consciousness writing came into fashion. [In particular, she was railing against James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).]

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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

—both the above from Barbara Kingsolver

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What I am is a loner kind of thinker. I just put myself in a discovery position, and hope. And I don’t know how it works. What I really like to do is read and think and write. I never thought of anything interesting in a lab. In a lab you learn what the problems are. You need to be acquainted with that. But I don’t think when I’m around other people and telephones. The business of a university or private lab, there’s a lot of distraction that’s really worthless. But just keep immersing yourself in something, and you might get lucky.

- Kary Mullis, in an interview with Edward Ball in The Genetic Strand. Mullis won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993 for his ‘invention’ of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction that finds and multiplies tiny fragments of DNA.

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Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

- Edward Gibbon, as quoted in A Beautiful Mind

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Her gift and her circumstances match each other completely.

- Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen in

A Room of One’s Own _________________________

Why They Write

I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times--once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

- Bernard Malamud

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I think it's a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and meaning in your life, to find that it has a narrative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle. Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what you've done before and what you're doing now.

- Bobbie Ann Mason, commenting on the impulse that led her to write memoir, Clear Springs, published in 1999.

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If you don’t write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

- Jose Saramago

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Being realistic wasn’t my intention. My intention was to create … something that you could really empathize with, someone whose journey you wanted to be along for.

- Jonathan Safran Foer

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Why They Read

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

- Kafka

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At a university, you study books that can be deconstructed, not books that can change your life. [Nelson] Algren's books can change your life, and this kind of book you always have to discover on your own.

- Russell Banks, as quoted in The Writer’s Almanac, March 28, 2008

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Autobiography ("an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing," said Quentin Crisp) has also had its critics. "The reminiscences of Mrs Humphrey Ward," said Harold Laski, "convinced me that autobiography is a sin." Marshal Pétain thought that "To write one's memoirs is to speak ill of everybody except oneself." But perhaps one of the most common (if least admitted) reactions to the form was detailed by the drama critic James Agate, "Every time somebody's Autobiography comes out I turn to the Index to see if my name occurs.” … Discretion in autobiographies can clearly also be overrated.

- Elizabeth Knowles, 05/09/2003, from the website www.askoxford.com

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British universities are not very happy places for their staff currently, and I gave up the academic life for the same reasons as many others do and would like to do. In particular, the erosion of my private reading time made me unhappy. If I cannot escape for an hour or two every day by reading for pleasure, then small problems seem to grow large, and I begin to feel enormously burdened.

- from an interview with Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale

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When we were reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces we found ourselves taking a detour into a conversation about whether reading could be considered an addiction. It is, after all mind altering. … If I have to get a train and I don’t have enough reading with me, I can feel quite panicky. So, am I addicted? And is it dangerous?

- Diane Setterfield, about her book group

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Excerpts

In the Orkney Islands:

After four miles I turned off the main road, to walk the cycle down the dirt drive of a farm, looking for the Rennibister earth house that a sign said was there. A man cleaning out a farm building directed me rather abruptly into the center of the farm buildings, where I found a hatch leading down into the ground. … Investigators are puzzled as to the use intended for structures of this sort, which date from the Bronze Age. Were they homes, granaries, or what? Their use, of course, is obvious to the truly acute observer: They are holes dug to allow the diggers some protection from the endless winds overhead.

I clambered back out, impressed with the nonchalance of the site, lying as it does nearly ignored in the middle of a functioning farmyard.

Later that day, he visits Skara Brae, the remains of a Neolithic community from 1500 BC:

In one description, mention is also made that the villagers of Skara Brae ‘made pottery of exceptionally poor quality.’ I like that, these poor people, lucky to be able to live at all in such a site, being put down for their poor-quality pottery production 3400 years after the fact.

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The 1996 Katherine White profile (by Nancy Franklin) in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

After Katharine White retired, at the end of 1960, her office—a prime piece of real estate—was left vacant for several years. This is an extreme case of a practice that was not uncommon by the time I got here: letting the “meaning” drain out of an office, so its future inhabitants wouldn’t get any big ideas about who they were. But when Roger [Angell] moved into her office, in the mid-seventies, after another editor retired, the meaning drained right back in. He says that a psychiatrist once told him that his being an editor and occupying his mother’s office was “the greatest piece of active sublimation in my experience.”

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From Family Romance: A Love Story, by John Lanchester

Never let them know you have a spare room

—Julia Gunnigan’s policy about her family, in advice delivered to her son, when he and his family moved to a larger house in 1998.

God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations.

—Julia Gunnigan would say this whenever anyone gave any indication of snobbery or class prejudice

God bless us & save us, said poor Mrs. Davis, I never knew herrings [pronounced “herons”] was fish.

—Julia Gunnigan would say this whenever something came up that she should have known, but didn’t. Her son says it was the punch line of an old, old joke.

Et in Arcadia Ego.

—Julia Gunnigan was fond of saying this when past her prime, never failing to add her own translation: “I, too, have lived in Arcadia."

Thousands, millions of people divide themselves between a monotonously conformist work life and a private world of intense, consoling pleasures and interests. In fact, this division of private and public is almost the norm.

- John Lanchester says it was like that for his father

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Reviews

The Air We Breathe

Barrett’s latest proves that more easily diagnosed germs might be easier to treat than narcissism, xenophobia and fear—toxins that are more insidious, but that poison the air we breathe, just the same.

- A reviewer on Amazon

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Kurt Anderson, Apr 30, 2006, Sunday Book Review, The New York Times reviews A Writer’s Life, by Gay Talese.

It's hard to overstate Gay Talese's gold-standard reputation. A few years ago, David Halberstam called him "the most important nonfiction writer of his generation, the person whose work most influenced at least two generations of other reporters."

The bedrock of that reputation consists of several exceptional magazine profiles from the 1960's, in particular "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," published in Esquire in 1966. Helped along by one of the great modern magazine headlines, the piece became a canonical archetype of the so-called New Journalism—non-fiction conceived and written in the manner of fiction, with fully rendered scenes, extended conversations and plainly subjective depictions of mood. In 1969, Talese published The Kingdom and the Power, an institutional portrait of The New York Times, where he had been a reporter for nine years. That book became a best seller, certifying him as a literary pop star as well as a reporter's reporter. Just two years after the Times book, he published another first-rate best seller, his story of a Mafia family called Honor Thy Father. ...

He's now 74, and one's instinct is to let him take his victory lap and applaud respectfully for the good work he has done. A Writer's Life, I figured, would be a traditional memoir that picked up where Unto the Sons left off, in the 1940's, when he was 12. But this book is something else. It's mostly an account of Talese's inability these last 14 years to find a story that he and his editors were excited about.

His dead ends and dry holes might have been usefully deconstructed and illuminated with careful, tough-minded, craftsmanlike introspection. ... But instead he has simply recapitulated and redoubled his botches by aggregating old notes and manuscript pages and interlarding them with bits of autobiography and self-abasement. The whole is less than the sum of its mostly arbitrary parts. It's a saga of serial professional failures that is itself a failure.

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Robert P. Lockwood, Catholic League Director of Research, March, 2000, reviewing Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel.

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa on February 18, 1564, the same day that Michelangelo died. If Michelangelo represented the last of the Renaissance, Galileo was born to the world of the Reformation. The Council of Trent, which confirmed the Church’s formal response to Martin Luther’s revolt of 1517, had ended the year prior to his birth.

Galileo attempted to explain to a student of his … how the Copernican theory would not contradict the evidence of Scripture.

Essentially, Galileo was slipping into trouble on three accounts.

First, despite feeble objections to the contrary, he was teaching Copernican theory as fact rather than hypothesis. Second, the popularity of his writings brought an essentially "philosophical discussion" into the public arena, requiring some sort of Church response. Third, by elevating scientific conjecture to a theological level, he was raising the stakes enormously. Instead of merely philosophical disputation that many in the Church viewed more as an intellectual game, Galileo–an untrained layman–was now lecturing on Scriptural interpretation.

Galileo and the tribunal judges shared a common view that science and the Bible could not stand in contradiction. If there appeared to be a contradiction, such a contradiction resulted from either weak science, or poor interpretation of Scripture. This was clearly understood by Cardinal Bellarmine. The mistakes that were made came from Galileo’s own personality and acerbic style, the personal umbrage of the Holy Father, jealous competitive scientists, and tribunal judges who erroneously believed that the universe revolved around a motionless earth and that the Bible confirmed such a belief.

Running With Scissors

Some of the (minor, in my opinion) facts in this memoir have been disputed by the Turcotte family ("the Finches" in the book). More to the point is that the Turcotte sisters were hurt that the book was published before they knew about it, and they had no input, and felt that the troubled teenaged boy that their family had taken in had betrayed their trust. Augusten did not “out” them. They outed themselves by filing a law suit.

The author is quoted in a Vanity Fair article that discussed the issues: "‘I hoped that they would recognize themselves and love it. I hoped [Theresa] most of all would love it.’ Then, once again came the low and wistful tone, the aggrieved memoirist: ‘But that's not what happened.’" I can understand the author feeling that way, because I thought he painted a fairly sympathetic portrait of Theresa [Natalie].

Here's one comment posted on NPR after a 2006 interview with Augusten Burroughs’ mother (Margaret Robison):

"Is it so strange to imagine that a mother and son [or the troubled teen-aged boy and the Turcotte family, for that matter] would have two entirely different versions of the same history? There are events I remember with pristine clarity that my mother denies entirely. There are moments she recalls that I remember very differently. The truth is difficult to access because in matters of personal history there is no single truth. I don’t understand this running from Ms. Robison to Mr. Burroughs with a torch of blame, trying to discover who did what. Enjoy the literature, enjoy the interview and worry about your own history."

Or, as Homer Hickam put it, in Rocket Boys: “The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but these were mine.”

Margaret had a much better attitude than the Turcotte family: "I've had to forgive myself for many things. To forgive my son. I have worked a long time with forgiveness. … That book of Chris's offered me the opportunity to grow spiritually in a way that nothing had offered me before," she says. "I'm grateful for that book. I'm grateful for the opportunity that it gave me to grow spiritually."

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Miscellany

Things I learned about TB, not from The Air We Breathe, but because of it

By 1954, TB had dropped from the nation's second-ranking killer to seventh, taking only 6% as many lives as it did in 1900. For hundreds of years, TB killed more people worldwide than any other single disease. In fact, it wiped out one-seventh of the human race at any given time. Since the lung appeared to consume itself, the disease became known as consumption.

With improvements in hygiene, nutrition and hospital care in the 20th century, tuberculosis rates declined steadily. But it was the development of antibiotics in the 1950s that wiped out the disease in North America.

Or it seemed to. In recent years, an alarming number of drug-resistant strains of TB have emerged around the world. People with weakened immune systems are particularly at risk. Today an estimated one-third of the world’s population carries the tubercle bacterium, although most will never develop tuberculosis.

from Health and Healing in North Carolina: An Interactive Timeline, and other googled resources

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I was not familiar with the phrase "Et in Arcadia ego," used by Julia Gunnigan. But I have since learned that it most famously appears as the title of a painting by Poussin.

The phrase is a memento mori, usually interpreted as "Even in Arcadia I exist," as if spoken by personified Death. However, Poussin's biographer, André Félibien, interpreted it to mean that "the person buried in this tomb has lived in Arcadia"; in other words, that this person too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. This reading was common in the 18th and 19th century. … The former interpretation is now generally considered more likely; the ambiguity of the phrase is the subject of a famous essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky. Either way, the sentiment was meant to set up an ironic contrast between the shadow of death and the usual idle merriment that the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia were thought to embody.

- Wikipedia

I also now know, too, that it is the title of the first chapter of Brideshead Revisited.

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