dual personalities

Tag: reading

March 8, 2013

The good reader*

by chuckofish

Winslow Homer, "Girl Reading"

Winslow Homer, “Girl Reading”

“The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play that Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.”

–Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1925)

*”Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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February 8, 2013

This and that

by chuckofish

February is a month for catching up on dormant needlepoint projects,

Progress!

Progress!

organizing drawers,

drawer

and reading

febbooks

I am almost finished with Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter and I highly recommend it.

“As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or is it Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love…do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.”

What have you been doing?

5 Comments
January 14, 2013

This and that

by chuckofish

When daughter #2 was home over the Christmas holiday she made a concerted effort to read some contemporary fiction. (You can read about it here.) I told her I would read The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach so we could talk about it, and, always the good mother, I did just that.

Well, I tried to read The Art of Fielding. I really did. I read at least 60 pages before I threw it across the room (metaphorically) and gave up. It is just pretentious showing off in the worst sophomoric way. For instance he gives his characters stupid names: Skrimshander and Starblind and Affenlight. Okay, we get it; you read Moby Dick. And I just couldn’t take the way he always writes “freshperson” instead of “freshman”, as in “freshperson year”. Please. The characters and story were not enough to overlook these minor irritations I’m afraid. Life is too short for this drivel. And, hey, baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life has been done many times before, and by far better writers.

Sorry, daughter #2. I tried (but not very hard).

booksgretel

Luckily, I took the advice of my niece Ellen and sent away for The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. What a find! This is beautiful prose at its best…and about Wyoming! It is a deep and true and pitch-perfect observation of Life. How could I not love a book by someone who writes, “I met my husband at a John Wayne film festival in Cody, Wyoming”?

Gretel Ehrlich is a writer from California, who went to Bennington, UCLA film school and the School for Social Research in NYC. But she left all that baggage behind when she went to Wyoming looking for solace and discovered that “true solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.” She is no sophomore.

Meanwhile, my Saturday estate-sale-ing turned up no Big Finds, but some good books.

booksJan

Have a great week and happy reading!

3 Comments
January 9, 2013

Note to self

by chuckofish

sky

I felt my spirits rise when I had got off the road into the open fields, and the sky had a new appearance. I stepped along more buoyantly. There was a warm sunset over the wooded valleys, a yellowish tinge on the pines. Reddish dun-colored clouds like dusky flames stood over it. And then streaks of blue sky were seen here and there. The life, the joy, that is in blue sky after a storm! There is no account of the blue sky in history. Before I walked in the ruts of travel; now I adventured.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Jan. 7, 1851

Oh so many books to read (and re-read) in 2013! Do you have a pile of new books to read in January?

Books

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December 31, 2012

With lots of love and happy wishes

by chuckofish

xmasdinner

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
November 26, 2012

Happy birthday, Marilynne Robinson

by chuckofish

“…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. ‘The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.’ There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That’s a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it’s also the Lord’s truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience.”

from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Have you read any Marilynne Robinson? She is so great! She has written three highly-acclaimed novels plus several books of essays. She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities and currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. If you are not acquainted with Marilynne, you are in for a treat. She is wonderful.

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with lots of good food:

family:

maybe a little Christmas decorating:

The boy puts up the Christmas lights

and even a little estate saling:

Estate-rescued angel choir

And, of course, some Marilynne Robinson!

7 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
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