books | dual personalities

December 31, 2012

With lots of love and happy wishes

by chuckofish

Over the holidays I re-read Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, which I discovered over twenty years ago. It is really marvelous. Here she sums up what I believe to be the very true essence of a woman’s happiness:

“When you think of me you must think of me as one who is truly happy. It is true, I want a great many things I haven’t got, but I don’t want them enough to be discontented and not enjoy the many blessings that are mine. I have my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself. There are lots of chickens, turkeys and pigs which are my own special care. I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time. I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends. Do you wonder I am so happy? When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.”

Times have not changed that much if you substitute a station wagon/mini van for the horse and wagon. And don’t kid yourself that she didn’t have a “job”. She worked harder than I ever have at my cushy flyover university. At the center of her happiness is love and the freedom to do what she wants.

I highly recommend this book as a good way to start the new year off on a positive note. It is available here.

3 Comments

December 19, 2012

Build your own world

by chuckofish

Today’s Emerson quote is brought to you by daughter #2 with whom I had a serious intellectual conversation the other day.

Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.

(from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

It is truly an amazing thing when your children reach an age where they are more knowledgeable than you on certain subjects. It is doubly amazing when that subject is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

5 Comments

October 23, 2012

Who would you choose?

by chuckofish

If you read a variety of blogs, you have certainly come across more than one of those posts where the writer asks the question: Who would you choose if you could have lunch with anyone? Usually they go on to tell you how they would love to get together with Audrey Hepburn, Princess Diana, Thomas Jefferson, Mother Theresa, Steven Spielberg and so on. Blah, blah, blah, boring celebrities. And, yes, I include Thomas Jefferson in that company. He would probably choose to have lunch with Marilyn Monroe.

Not that I’m judging anyone for their choices. Everyone is free to choose whom they want to choose. This is America after all! Come on.

Anyway, I’m sure you can guess who I would choose. Just in the last few days I’ve talked about Bob Dylan and Hilary Mantel and Marty Stuart–all would be charming companions at a meal. And you know how I feel about Frederick Buechner and Raymond Chandler. A conversation with them–to die for! As for movie stars, we’d need a big table to accommodate all my favorites.

But if we’re really talking about conversation, let’s invite:

Thomas Cranmer. He wrote the book.

General Sherman. He had Grant’s back.

U.S. Grant. He epitomized humility and courage. He had Lincoln’s back. And he was a really good writer.

Dorothy Rabinowitz. She tells it like it is in the WSJ.

T.E. Lawrence. He would be awesome, but we’d need someone to come along with us who could make him feel comfortable and draw him out of his shell–like Mrs. George Bernard Shaw.

Mary Prowers Hough, my great-great grandmother and the classiest lady to ever set foot in Colorado. I’d have a million questions for her.

J.D. Salinger. We could talk about Jesus over a glass of ginger ale in the kitchen.

Eudora Welty. We’d talk about stories and the art of writing them. I think I would like to invite

Shirley Jackson to come along too. The three of us would get along famously.

Saint Timothy. He received letters from Saint Paul containing personal advice which I take very personally: God did not give you a spirit of timidity!

Well, I’m sure I’ve left out some obvious choices. Who would you want to share a meal with? Alexander? Sargon the Great? Thomas Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell? Johnny Depp?

12 Comments

October 22, 2012

Hip hip hooray!

by chuckofish

How wonderful to be able to give a big shout out to Hilary Mantel for winning her second Man Booker Prize! She previously won the award in 2009 for Wolf Hall. Now she has won the 2012 award for the sequel Bring Up the Bodies. She is the first woman to win twice. I couldn’t be more excited for her, and if you have not yet read either of these two wonderful books–run (don’t walk) to your nearest book store/library to acquire the books and do so!

Meanwhile the wonderful fall weather continues here in our flyover state.

The leaves on the ancient mulberry tree in our yard are bright yellow.

…and at the same time the rhododendron bush continues to bloom

along with several spring annuals!

And I have been trying to find something to read. I have started several books that were recommended by friends and abandoned them all. Bleh. Now I have gone back to an old favorite and am reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One. Not surprisingly, Bob has a wonderful way of expressing things and amazing powers of recall.

Having moved to New York City after one semester of college, he drifts around playing music, staying with people he meets, reading their books, and listening to music. His brain is like the proverbial sponge as he sets about educating himself:

I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Kan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.

Don’t you just love that?

I wonder if Bob has read Hilary Mantel’s books. I think he would really like them and old Thomas Cromwell especially.

7 Comments

October 15, 2012

Back to the salt mine

by chuckofish

Another weekend gone with the wind. I finished the Alexander McCall Smith book I have been reading–the 13th installment of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series, The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection.

It was another slow, easy read about Precious Ramotswe and her ~~sometimes~~ often irritating friends.

In the end, however, McCall Smith teaches us the same lesson we have been waiting for: “The human heart, you see…is pretty much the same wherever one goes.” It is a lesson worth repeating.

I also finally watched Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Daughter #2 had liked it very much when she saw it last summer, so I thought I would check it out. I am also an old Joss Whedon fan from the old Buffy days and also like all things Serenity. But I have to say, I wasn’t all that impressed. They are, after all, super heroes, so you don’t get a lot of character development and/or good dialogue. Yes, there was lots of CG pyrotechnics etc. Yes, the final fight in NYC was pretty darn swell. But not really my thing, you know?

The best line in the movie was from Captain America

who was responding to Scarlett Johansson’s character who had referred to Iron Man, Thor and Loki as gods:

There’s only one God, Ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.

The highlight of the weekend, even for this self-admittedly fair-weather fan, was definitely the Cardinals beating the Washington Nationals to advance to the National League Championship Series against the Giants. Go, Cards!

And we won game #1 against the Giants. That’s the way I like it. Uh Huh.

4 Comments

September 24, 2012

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? I kept remembering where I was last weekend and what I was doing. (Last Saturday I was in Brooklyn having a bagel and coffee–you know how it goes.) Sigh. My response was to get busy.

I got my hair cut, went to an estate sale, checked out one of my favorite antique malls, caught up with my far-flung family members on the phone, scrubbed a shower, opened windows to let in the wonderful fresh air, went to Target, washed the kick plate on the refrigerator, changed sheets and did laundry, trimmed the ivy in front of the house, took a couple of walks, and finished the Anne Tyler book I was re-reading.

You get the idea. I find that the best thing for when you are sad or depressed is to clean and/or organize. Even if you don’t feel better afterward, you have a clean(er) house!

The Anne Tyler book, by the way, was Earthly Possessions, an early novel written in 1977, which is not (in my opinion) one of her best. But you know, any Anne Tyler book is much better than most, so I still enjoyed it. She always supplies a few golden nuggets. Here is one of them:

“Sometimes,” he said, “I believe we’re given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us.”

Maybe so. Food for thought anyway.

6 Comments

September 20, 2012

This and that

by chuckofish

Last night for the first time in a long time it was cool enough to take a walk after dinner. I walked past my favorite magnolia tree.

And I checked out the flora that had weathered our hot, dry summer.

I’m telling you, there were times this summer when we thought it would never cool off and that the rain would never come. But…It’s getting dark earlier. Sunrise comes later. Autumn approaches. Sweaters are necessary–not just a fashion accessory! Can pumpkins be far behind? This is my favorite time of year.

Best of all, I have a whole pile of new (and used) books to read.

A couple of these are replacements that I bought at The Strand because members of my family had borrowed them permanently (Dylan, Banks), but the rest are new reads! How good is that?

5 Comments

September 6, 2012

Why study literature?

by chuckofish

Why study literature?

College books from the 1970s

M. H. Abrams, founding editor emeritus of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, answered this way: “Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. There’s no end to the response you can make to that question Why study literature…”

Here’s the whole interview.

Henry Beetle Hough, the celebrated editor of the Vineyard Gazette, put it this way: “Any one person’s life is inexperienced and narrow, straight through to the end–poorly informed, too. Books are the only hope.”

And then, as we’ve mentioned before, there’s C.S. Lewis, who said, “We read in order to know we are not alone.” We are always looking for spiritual kin. And the amazing thing is, we find them, don’t you?

7 Comments

September 3, 2012

The fairy coach awaits

by chuckofish

Since daughter #2 left and took with her a large bookcase, leaving a large empty space in her room and a large amount of unwanted books, I have been busy packing up her books. I decided to bring up a bookcase from the basement and fill it with my own books. This meant going through more books and separating them into give-away and keep piles. In this complicated process I have re-discovered some good books that were down in the basement. One of them is the Parables of Kierkegaard, which my sister (and dual personality) gave me back in 1980 for my birthday.

Stuck inside this book was a card with the above picture on it. Inside she wrote:

Happy Birthday Darling Adorable Sister!

Here is a little something just pour vous that I know you will really relate to. I confess that I stole a few peaks at it and I could become quite interested. You must tell me all about it.

I apologize for the recycled Easter paper but you know about deprived school children.

Doesn’t this card remind you of mommy? I think it looks just like her.

Have a happy B-day–don’t get too drunk but just think–next year at this time you’ll be a married woman and I’ll have to send you cookbooks and kitchen utensils!

Well, I must away–the fairy coach is awaiting and fizzy fuzz, Pompey, Pete and Robert Preston are getting restless.

I can’t wait to see your face and sparkling ring-finger again!

Love and Theologians,
YS

How perfect is that? The Kierkegaard is pretty good too. (But I don’t recall getting any cookbooks and/or kitchen utensils.)

7 Comments

August 30, 2012

Comfort food for the soul

by chuckofish

It’s been a stressful summer. One way I have dealt with it is by re-reading some of my old favorites. Right now I am reading Out to Canaan, 4th in Jan Karon’s Mitford series, having just read These High Green Hills (#3).

These books are not for everyone (although they have been perennial bestsellers), but for me, these simple stories of the adventures of an Episcopal priest in a small town in North Carolina peopled by wonderful and endearing characters, are the only kind of fantasy I enjoy.

They had a good life in Mitford, no doubt about it. Visitors were often amazed at its seeming charm and simplicity, wanting it for themselves, seeing in it, perhaps the life they’d once had, or had missed entirely.

Yet there were Mitfords everywhere. He’d lived in them, preached in them, they were still out there, away from the fray, still containing something of innocence and dreaming, something of the past that other towns had freely let go, or allowed to be taken from them.

The books are also very funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. And they are filled with the Holy Spirit. Yes, and Karon quotes the likes of Bonhoeffer and Pascal and Wordsworth (freely)–all right up my alley.

I also enjoy the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith about a wonderful lady detective in Botswana. These books, like the Mitford books, seemingly simple and straightforward, are full of truth.

The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them–wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one’s time in tears–and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own little life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their solution?

And, as you know, when in doubt, it’s always a good time to re-read Raymond Chandler. But, look, someone seems to have “borrowed” my Chandler volume 1. (Ahem.)