dual personalities

At some point during our courtship, Daughter #2 and I dropped into one of Dupont Circle’s famous bookstores. We had just toured the Phillips Collection, and after strolling past Daughter #1’s former D.C. apartment—reminiscing about that great old apartment is mandatory for any trip to Dupont Circle—we decided to pop in at one of my favorites.

No, not Kramerbooks. Kramerbooks is a great independent bookstore. And they have a good café, where you can sit with your purchase in public. But are you reading? While I approve of book buying, of course, I am more a fan of book reading. At Kramerbooks, all the books are new, and they are perfect if you want to be seen reading. You get the feeling that the life of the books at Kramerbooks entails nothing more than a move from store shelf to home shelf. Indeed, there is an apocryphal story about former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s cynicism of D.C. book culture: he slipped his business card into the top dozen copies of a stack of the latest political tell-all—around page 200 or so—with his home phone number written on the back. He scrawled the following note: “Call me upon seeing this—$100.” No one did. An acquaintance of mine even recently held her wedding at Kramerbooks, and this fact couldn’t be more Kramerbooks if it tried.

Weddings #atKramers 👰🤵 Congratulations to the beautiful bookish Bride & Groom, Kelsey & Jerrod! #BookstoreWedding #DC pic.twitter.com/ITljmhnWb3

— Kramerbooks (@kramerbooks) October 19, 2018 

This looks like a lovely time, but notice those stacks of crisp hardbacks behind the groom. Will they ever be read? Daughter #2 and I are all in favor of book-themed weddings, as you know, but the books should be there to be read.

No, the bookstore that we stopped at was Second Story Books. Second Story Books is where Kramerbooks go after the grandchildren liberate them from the home shelf. It is an excellent used bookstore. Every morning Second Story Books trundles out a series of library reshelving carts that lure readers inside to their squirrely stacks.

On this occasion, I found a copy of an out-of-print paperback by one of my favorite authors, Henry Green. This Penguin edition features three of Green’s best novels: Loving, Living, and Party Going. (Yes, nearly all of Green’s titles are participles.) It’s a difficult copy to find affordably, so I snatched it up. I gave it to Daughter #2, who has not read a word of it to this day.

This lack is entirely my fault; I gave the gift incorrectly. I should have annotated that copy of Henry Green. One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a copy of Moby-Dick with Daughter #2’s personal annotations.  You might argue that Moby-Dick recommends itself, but really, even the best reader wants occasional motivation. Slipped into the text at regular intervals, the personalized notes kept me reading into the wee hours. Only a handful of pages before uncovering another treasure!

I may annotate that Green this Christmas. Party Going (1939), my favorite novel of Green’s, would be an apt choice, since the coming December weeks are often themselves a season of party going. Yet Green’s novel is more specifically appropriate for its lack of a party: the novel takes place primarily in the hotel adjacent to a London railway station as a group of wealthy Bright Young People await a train to the continent for a summer holiday. They wait; tension grows; they wait some more. For Green, this is a metaphor for the political tension of the ineffectual 1930s. If we want to stretch it, perhaps the novel could also be a little metaphor for Advent. But then you would have to ignore Green’s contempt for his peer group as he directs his sinuous sentences against them:

Amabel’s flat had been decorated by the same people Max had his flat done by, her furniture was like his, his walls like hers, their chair coverings were alike and even their ash trays were the same. There were in London at this time more than one hundred rooms identical with these. Even what few books there were bore the same titles and these were dummies. But if one said here are two rooms alike in every way so their two owners must have similar tastes like twins, one stood no greater chance of being right than if one were to argue their two minds, their hearts even must beat as one when their books, even if they were only bindings, bore identical titles. … These people avoided any sort of trouble over what might bother them, such as doing up their rooms themselves, and by so doing they proclaimed their service to the kind of way they lived or rather to the kind of way they passed their time.

Ouch. Tell us what you really think, Henry. I guess the only thing worse than a book as status symbol is a binding symbolic of one’s vacuous inattention to even the trappings of culture. The thirties really were, in the words of W. H. Auden, a low dishonest decade.

All of this is to say: when you give a book, give also of yourself—consider annotating it, even if only a little. Your recipient is far more likely to read it.

DP #2 here for a Wednesday rant. Last night, having finished season 12 of NYPD Blue, I decided to search Netflix for something to watch. Although my sons had warned me that I would hate the film Hostiles, I decided to give it a try. I did not make it through the first scene, and now I’ll tell you why. I promise to be brief.

The film opens in a bucolic setting, the farmstead where Wesley Quaid, his wife (Rosamund Pike), and children live. We see Rosamund teaching her daughters about adverbs while her husband is outside cutting wood.  Indians appear on horseback and the husband grabs his gun, warning his wife and kids to flee to the hills. Okay, it’s not original — I sigh and think of The Searchers — but thirty seconds into the movie I’m still on board. Then I give up in disgust, because, in what is perhaps the most unrealistic attack-reaction I’ve ever seen in a movie, the husband walks slowly toward the mounted Indians ineffectually shooting his rifle as they ride him down. Tragedy ensues.

Who wrote that script, a thirteen year old? Did someone think that a brave but inexperienced settler would do something so suicidally stupid?  Or did they just think it would look good? Well, life is too short to waste time on such historical perversions. I just thought I’d warn you. And the moral of the story? When your children warn you that you won’t like something, believe them!

I promise to be cheerier next time I post. It’s just that the gutted kitchen is threatening to overwhelm my otherwise sunny disposition. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Have a great mid-week, and make good Netflix choices!

Daughter #2 reporting from College Park, today!

Like Daughter #1, I spent some time getting in the Christmas spirit this weekend. I have been waiting dutifully for a couple of weeks now to get out my Christmas decorations and deck the halls, but I do believe in waiting until after Thanksgiving. With turkey day falling so early this year, we get a full month of cheer before Christmas day! I can’t complain.

Over many years of shopping for ornaments and decor on the day after Christmas, I’ve about reached capacity in my “cozy” one-bedroom apartment. Every year I think, “maybe next year we will have space for a full-size tree,” but here we are. Our little guy is pretty hilarious, tucked in a corner and dripping with ornaments!

Perhaps more comical is our TV-cum-mantle, which currently houses what DN is calling a “rodent choir.” I’m sorry, they aren’t ALL rodents, and the rodents themselves are adorable.

Hanging up twinkle lights, tucking red berries here and there, filling shelves with wintery figures and angels and the like — it’s all so lovely. All of my decorations remind me of my mother and sister, great gifters and shoppers and care package senders who have helped me grow my collection over the years. What could be better?

Perhaps a Christmas cocktail!

*Danny Kaye in “White Christmas”

Hello, readers. Daughter #1 here.

Last night I watched Miracle on 34th Street. I think it is the perfect holiday transition movie because it starts with Thanksgiving and ends at Christmas. I love this movie for many reasons–but especially because it opens with the parade–my favorite part about living in on the Upper West Side in New York City.

The Upper West Side is not the coolest neighborhood in Manhattan. No, the Lower East Side or SoHo or Greenwich Village claim that. And the Upper East Side had Gossip Girl to bring it into the modern lexicon.

But for one day a year, the UWS is it. The day before Thanksgiving, on 79th and 81st Streets, they inflate the balloons ahead of the parade. In 2012, when my sister (Daughter #2) came to visit me for Thanksgiving, we left ABC at midnight (when I got off work) and got a front row preview of the next day’s festivities.

I lived two blocks from the start of the parade. The next morning, we ventured out to see if we could get a spot on the parade route–and we managed to squeeze in right at 79th and Central Park West, where the parade begins. We could hear the announcer calling for each entry to ‘Go’ when it was their turn to march. When we returned home, we drank mimosas and watched the back half of the parade on TV as it made its way to Herald Square at 34th Street.

One year, I learned that a co-worker grew up in an apartment on Central Park West and that his parents host a parade-viewing party every year. You can bet that I befriended him in the hopes of an invite.

But, in all honestly, I prefer the parade down on the ground. I didn’t like fighting young children for window seats at the party (I kid, but not really). In later years, I had a friend whose father was an FBI agent and was able to flash his badge and get us in without having to be there hours in advance. We’d roll up at 8:30 and then amuse those around with our witty banter (or at least imagine that we did).

I’ve always loved parades. Now that I live in Missouri, I enjoy watching the local St. Louis parade (the Giant Schnucks cart is a must see). But the Macy’s Parade (even with all of the bad Broadway musical numbers and amazing array of C-List stars on the floats) will always have a place in my heart.

*Miracle on 34th Street.

My beloved DP heads out to the Holy Land today, and while I understand that she is traveling with a church group and thus unlikely to do anything too wild, I can’t help thinking of her in terms of early English adventurers like Lady Hester Stanhope, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark.

Born in 1776, Lady Hester was the daughter of an Earl and the niece of Prime Minister William Pitt (the younger), so she had the standing to flout convention. And she did. Bored by English society, she took herself off to the Mediterranean, found a lover, and started exploring. When women’s clothes became inconvenient, she simply started dressing as a man. The locals loved it.

Reputedly one of the first westerners to undertake archaeological exploration, Lady Hester excavated at Ashkelon, an important biblical site on the coast of southern Israel.  Apparently, she didn’t find the treasure she expected and smashed the one statue uncovered for fear that she be accused of stealing. So much for archaeology. Having become something of a legend, she spent the rest of her life living in the mountains of Lebanon, where she died a recluse in 1839. As I recall, she is the inspiration for the Mary Stewart classic, The Gabriel Hounds.

Much less eccentric than Stanhope, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was the daughter of a progressive industrialist, who served as Labor MP under Benjamin Disraeli.  She was well educated, well informed, and highly intelligent. Although her career path was unconventional for a woman, Bell never courted scandal. Rather, her obvious competence and propriety won her the respect of her male contemporaries.

She hob-nobbled with kings and heads of state. Here she is picnicking with King Faisal, and here she is with T.E. Lawrence.

They had met before WWI, and shared interests in archaeology and near eastern politics. After the war, they were both involved in sorting out the boundaries of the Near East at the Paris peace talks, and both suffered deep disappointment as result. Bell died in Baghdad in 1926 as the result of an overdose of sleeping pills. Whether it was an accident or suicide is much debated. I’m inclined to believe that she died as she lived — according to her own wishes.

By contrast, Freya Stark lived to the ripe old age of 100 — which is pretty remarkable considering what she got up to during her life. Born in England in 1893, Stark’s near eastern travels began in 1927 when she arrived in Beirut. From there she moved east to Baghdad and then into the wilds of Iran, where she was the first western woman to visit the famed Valley of the Assassins.

Rugged hiking for a lady in the 1920s

Stark wrote numerous books chronicling her adventures, the last of which involved a visit to Afghanistan in the 1970s! Now that’s what I call intrepid. Not only did she have a great name (sounds like the heroine in a Victorian novel), but she didn’t let anything hold her back. She lived as she pleased, even if it resulted in solitude.

Well, obviously I don’t expect my DP to rush headlong into the wilderness, but I do hope she learns a thing or two from the intrepid ladies mentioned here: (1) Write about your experiences. Inquiring minds want to know; (2) Fear nothing, prepare for everything, and (3) There’s no place like home! These women never found home, but yours is ready and waiting for your return. As Gertrude Bell once wrote,

All the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down – traveling, as they say, for their pleasure. What is it, I wonder, that they go out to see?

*All photos recovered from Google Image.