dual personalities

Tag: reading

August 26, 2021

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I have several books going right now. I just can’t get into any of them, but I will keep plugging away.

I am almost finished with The Only Woman in the Room, which hardly does justice to the remarkable Hedy Lamarr. It is as shallow as a movie of the week. It is not enough to say, this was a beautiful woman who was also smart. You need to show it. Good grief, writing 101. The main character has no personality and moves through the book like a face in a movie stilI.

It’s not enough to say she disguised herself and escaped to London and met Louis B. Mayer there and he got her to Hollywood. You can read that on the back of the book jacket. Sigh. Clearly the author was not up to the subject.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek has potential, but it is a novel with obvious hooks and gimmicks and I have to just get over that and read. It is better written than the Hedy Lamarr book.

For Old Crime’s Sake is standard Jane and Dagobert Brown fare, which I really enjoy, but I need to read it during the day when I still have some mental energy.

The Patriot was written in 1960 and is about a teenage WWII recruit learning to be a fighter pilot. We’ll see. I think he is not a patriot. Lots of irony.

Maybe I’ll just re-read Busy, Busy Farm (see above).

Anyway, here’s a good post about reading TLOTR for the first time as a 45-year old: “If [Tolkien] had to do it all over again, I bet he would make Mark Zuckerberg into Sauron…” I bet you’re right.

In other news, daughter #1 went back to JC yesterday after a fun few days spent taking it easy and indulging ourselves. We watched a couple of movies. After discussing the End Times while drinking margaritas, we thought it only appropriate to watch Ghostbusters (1984). “Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

Somehow it resonates today.

We also watched Wonder Man (1945), a truly bizarre Danny Kaye vehicle, also starring Virginia Mayo and Vera-Ellen in her first movie.

BTW, Amazon Prime has a whole bunch of Danny Kaye movies available to watch for free if you are so inclined.

Last night the OM and I went to an event at the Eugene Field House/Museum featuring the Missouri Bicentennial Quilt. It was pretty cool. Each county in the sate had a quilt square. I must say, however, that St Louis had a mighty disappointing block.

It’s the one on the right with the braille inscription, representing the Missouri School for the Blind. All very well and good, but really, what about the Gateway to the West and the Arch and all that? St. Louis County has Grant’s Farm–appropriate. Jefferson County has Mastodon State Park–appropriate.

Jackson County (where my ancestors settled) has that cool covered wagon and the jumping off place for the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail.

C’est la vie.

Well, today I start my Bible Study at my new church. We are reading Leviticus. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, have a fine day! Try to “slander no one…be peaceable and considerate, and always gentle toward everyone. At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us…” (Titus 3:2-5)

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August 12, 2021

De choses et d’autres

by chuckofish

One of the nice side effects of having a party, is all the leftover flowers…

(We also have a lot of leftover food!) But we miss seeing our loved ones and that “and then we were all in one place” feeling. Sigh.

Well, moving along, I read Redhead by the Side of the Road, Anne Tyler’s latest novel. NPR said that it “is heartwarming balm for jangled nerves.” Well, maybe. It is an easy read, but there just isn’t much there. Tyler wrote a few masterful books back in the 1980s and some good ones followed, but she is yet another example of someone whose editor keeps goading her to write one more novel because the publisher knows it will make some money. Anne, you’re 79 years old, it’s okay to retire.

Now I am reading The Only Woman in the Room, a fictionalized telling of real life “glamour icon and scientist” Hedy Lamarr’s escape from Nazi Austria and transformation in Hollywood. She was, no doubt, quite a woman, but in the hands of this author, it’s all pretty dull, re-hashed material. The book was a gift, so I will read the whole thing and hope that it picks up.

To celebrate the 200th birthday of the state of Missouri, I watched Across the Wide Missouri (1951).

(This photo must be of lunch break on the set, because look at that cowboy in the background!)

Directed by William Wellman, the film stars Clark Gable as a fur trapper and mountain man in the 1830s. Gable is a bit old for his part (typical for Hollywood) but I enjoyed it. Beautifully shot in Technicolor in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, there is a lot of action and nary a dull moment in this movie. Gable’s stunt double Jack N. Young was particularly impressive. The final action scene where our hero’s baby son, attached as a papoose to a horse that bolts, is quite exciting. The supporting cast is excellent and includes the usually suave Adolphe Menjou playing against type as a French trapper as well as Russell Simpson and James Whittemore.

Although romanticized, the plot and the depiction of the Blackfeet Indians seem fair. There are plenty of “good” Indians to balance Ricardo Montalban’s “bad” Indian. According to Wikipedia, the 31-year old Montalban was seriously injured during the making of this movie and had back problems for the rest of his life. I don’t doubt it. (You can rent it on Amazon Prime.)

Well, I hope everyone is keeping cool. We are experiencing a typical August heat wave.

Things could be worse.

I was happy to see this. You go, Isaac. You were always a favorite of mine.

Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favor, and further us with thy continual help; that in all our works, begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

–BCP, 1662

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August 5, 2021

“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world”*

by chuckofish

This morning I am going to the airport to pick up daughter #2, DN and Katiebelle! They will be here for the weekend and will attend our 200th Birthday of Missouri Statehood party on Saturday. Also on Saturday is my DP’s second son’s re-scheduled wedding. How did this scheduling snafu happen you ask? Long story…but c’est la vie! This weekend is party central for both DPs.

This was an interesting article about raising children by Episcopalian Sam Bush. “God does not aim to quell our anxiety by offering us helpful tips or boosting our self-esteem.” Yes, but I do get tired of articles that go on about how hard everything is, including child-rearing. Everything is an excuse for anxiety. Of course, raising children is hard, especially in this iPhone-addicted age. But your children do not ultimately belong to you; they belong to God. Turn your worry and your cares over to Him. A lot of our modern problems are due to our trying to go it alone, with only “science” to help. Good luck with that. Be sure to watch the Parks and Recreation video–priceless Ron Swanson (who I have no doubt is a Calvinist.)

And I found this article to be quite compelling.

Happy birthday to Wendell Berry, who turns 87 today. It is also the birthday of Guy de Maupassant, the master of the short story. He wrote his own epitaph:  “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing,” which should be a warning to us all. A toast to them both!

“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.”

Robert Farrar Capon, “Between Noon and Three”

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July 27, 2021

“I keep an inventory of wonders”*

by chuckofish

We think a lot about the passing of time and this was a shocker:

Yes, the album was released on May 26, 1967–54 years ago. And WWI was only 50 years before that. Western culture had changed a lot in those 50 years, but think about how much it’s changed in the past 54 years.

As usual, I am trying to escape our crumbling culture by reading something uplifting. Currently I am re-reading Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. This novel has much to say about the passage of time and people living in community.

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 not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, 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.

Frederick Buechner calls it “the Room called Remember.”

The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.

Anyway, I highly recommend both Wendell Berry and Frederick Buechner.

And, of course, there’s always Jorge Luis Borges…

In the golden afternoon, or in
a serenity the gold of afternoon
might symbolize,
a man arranges books
on waiting shelves
and feels the parchment, the leather, the cloth,
and the pleasure bestowed
by looking forward to a habit
and establishing an order.
Here Stevenson and Andrew Lang, the other Scot,
will magically resume
their slow discussion
which seas and death cut short,
and surely Reyes will not be displeased
by the closeness of Virgil.
(In a modest, silent way,
by ranging books on shelves
we ply the critic’s art.)
The man is blind, and knows
he won’t be able to decode
the handsome volumes he is handling,
and that they will never help him write
the book that will justify his life in others’ eyes;
but in the afternoon that might be gold
he smiles at his curious fate
and feels that peculiar happiness
which comes from loved old things.

June, 1968

*Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2016

2 Comments
May 11, 2021

Look homeward, angel

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of American author Stanley Elkin, who taught at my flyover university for many years. He also lived two houses down from us growing up. I babysat for his children Bernie and Molly from time to time when I was in high school. His wife Joan was nice. I remember they had the cover of every book he wrote blown up to poster size and framed, which I thought was a little over the top, but to each his own.

Here’s a little film about Stanley which shows our street (I think) at about 1:01.

And here he is sitting in front of his house (photo by Esquire).

He rode a motorcycle until he was diagnosed with MS, and then he slowed down quite a bit.

Anyway, the English Department at WashU must have been quite the place back then–what with Stanley and William Gass and Howard Nemerov. The Gasses lived in our neighborhood too and Nemerov famously walked down our street on his way to work. But some of my friends didn’t like driving to my neighborhood–too sketchy.

Different perspectives.

7 Comments
April 13, 2021

“Some days are diamonds/ Some days are rocks”*

by chuckofish

Mood

Hope you are having a diamond of a day, able to enjoy the weather and read a little poetry.

The Real Prayers are not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode
the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green
glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed, obviously,
was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle
it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring
of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long,
sharp-edged wings, and the fall into the grass where it
tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and
then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color
clenched in order to hold a small, still body, and it flew
off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink
of sky, where does it go to, and why?        

–Mary Oliver

Today is the birthday of writer Eudora Welty (1909–2001) whom I have admired for many years. It is always a good day to take down one of her books from a shelf and open and read.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

I will also note that tomorrow is daughter #2’s birthday.

We will celebrate her birthday in 10 days when she and baby Katie visit for a long weekend. Of course, we can’t wait to hold that baby, but I can’t wait to hold my baby…

…who was a precious bundle of joy not so long ago and is now a beautiful and talented young woman.

Sunrise, sunset. Time is the continuous thread of revelation.

The watercolor is by Louis Michel Eilshemius, painted between 1888 and 1910. (Detroit Institute of Arts)

*Tom Petty, Walls

6 Comments
March 12, 2021

“Must be getting early, clocks are running late”*

by chuckofish

Daylight Savings time starts on Sunday. The days will start to be longer and that’s okay with me.

I finished reading The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder last week and I really enjoyed it. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any fiction of substance where interesting characters express interesting thoughts.

“I have long noticed that people who talk to those closest to them only about what they eat, what they wear, the money they make, the trip they will or will not take next week—such people are of two sorts. They either have no inner life, or their inner life is painful to them, is beset with regret or fear.”

I started to re-read The Bridge of San Luis Rey and I’m also reading a biography of R.C. Sproul.

This article about The Pilgrim’s Progress was interesting. I remember it was a favorite of the boy when he was a child. I think it is true that while “the Christian allegory is inescapable and unmissable for adults, for younger readers Bunyan’s book can read like an exciting fantastical adventure featuring more than its fair share of peril, drama, and creative invention.”

“When Theodore Roosevelt died, the Secretary of his class at Harvard, in sending classmates a notice of his passing, added this quotation from ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’: ‘My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.'” (FDR)

It may be time to re-read this classic as well.

I didn’t watch any movies on my lenten list this week, but I will this weekend. I did watch Go For Broke! (1951), which I had never seen. It is the real-life story of the 442nd, which was composed of Americans born of Japanese parents, many of whom were in internment camps back in the U.S. Fighting in the European theater during WWII, this unit became the most heavily decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the U.S. Army, as well as one of the units with the highest casualty rates.

It starred Van Johnson who was nearly a foot taller than most of his co-stars, which seemed kind of racist, but was probably just illustrative of the truth. It wasn’t the best war movie ever, but I enjoyed it and I learned something. The screenplay by Robert Pirosh was nominated for an Academy Award in 1951. Back then they knew how to make different characters knowable and distinctive in a very short time and this film was very effective in doing that.

In other news, yesterday afternoon I finally got my PowerPort removed and that is a great relief. It’ll leave a scar, but Yay.

It has been raining and it is supposed to rain off and on all weekend. We will endeavor to have a good weekend anyway!

*Grateful Dead, Touch of Grey

5 Comments
August 18, 2020

A barrel full of bears

by chuckofish

Tomorrow is the birthday of Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971), an American poet known for his light verse. This poem, which I haven’t thought about for years and years, was a great favorite of mine as a child. Remember “The Tale of Custard the Dragon”?

  • Belinda lived in a little white house,
    With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse,
    And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon,
    And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.
  • Now the name of the little black kitten was Ink,
    And the little gray mouse, she called him Blink,
    And the little yellow dog was sharp as Mustard,
    But the dragon was a coward, and she called him Custard.
  • Belinda was as brave as a barrel full of bears,
    And Ink and Blink chased lions down the stairs,
    Mustard was as brave as a tiger in a rage,
    But Custard cried for a nice safe cage.

You can read the whole poem here.

Our copy was in “The Golden Treasury of Poetry” illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund.

I wonder if people still read Nash’s poems to their children as our parents did. Studies show, of course, that reading to one’s children is one of the most effective ways to build the “language” neural connections in their growing brains as well as a strong base for cognitive development. Indeed, babies who are read to have their “receptive” vocabularies (number of words they understand) increased 40 per cent, while those not read to increase by only 16 per cent. (Studies show!)

Well, a toast to old Ogden Nash and a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.

While on the subject of reading, John Piper gives 10 reasons for reading the Bible every day. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32)

(Painting by Mary Cassatt: “Mrs Cassatt Reading to her Grandchildren” -1888)

6 Comments
July 14, 2020

“Sweet July, warm July!”*

by chuckofish

I have been reading a little bit of this, a little bit of that…

The Walter Mirisch book is fascinating if you are at all interested in movies. Written by an extremely successful film producer (several Academy Awards for Best Picture), one learns how someone who can make brilliant decisions can also make dumbfoundingly bad ones and never understand why. The David McCullough book contains “portraits in history” ranging from Louis Agassiz to Frederick Remington to Miriam Rothschild. As I have said before, McCullough understands context better than almost anyone writing today. He does not judge his subjects, but he likes them (you can tell).

Did I mention that we watched The Brothers Karamazov (1958) Sunday night? I’m not sure I had ever really watched the whole movie. Of course, it is not the masterpiece that the book is–it is just the plot with some character development that we see. The spiritual aspects are mostly left out, although (spoiler alert!) Richard Basehart as Ivan does admit that there is a God at the conclusion of the story.

Nevertheless, it is very good. Yul Brynner is excellent and so handsome–really at the top of his game–his performance shows a lot of depth. Also, William Shatner is very good as the youngest, most spiritual brother. (And he is also very handsome.) There are also some casting mistakes (why did Albert Salmi have a career?), but on the whole, I was impressed by this adaption by Richard Brooks–well done.

[Also I will note that there is a line in the movie said by Grushenka–“All the truth adds up to one big lie.”–which is also a line in a Bob Dylan song. Of course, Bob.]

I am having some follow-up surgery this Thursday, but my DP, along with daughters #1 and 2, will pick up the slack, and I’ll be back soon.

“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”

–Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

*George Meredith, “July”

4 Comments
February 26, 2019

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

Screen Shot 2019-02-25 at 1.33.54 PM.png

I finished re-reading The Trees by Conrad Richter over the weekend.  It is such a great book. So underrated.  He reminds me of Willa Cather, who also worked hard at her craft, getting it right. Richter also put so much into his books, so much research, and they are spare and perfect–no extraneous showing off.

RichterFullSizeRender.jpg

“There is great tenderness in his stories,” wrote David McCullough about Richter, “Much that is raw and earthy, much that is funny, and not a little cold-blooded violence. The land is never merely the setting; it is elemental to the story, vast and full of power and mystery. His characters do not merely move across the landscape; it is part of them and they are part of it…In the trilogy [The Trees, The Fields, The Town] it is the ancient trees, ‘a race of giants,’ that shut out the light.”

There they stood [Sayward Luckett reflects] with their feet deep in the guts of the earth and their heads in the sky, never even looking at you or letting on you were there. This was their country. Here they had lived and died since back in heathen times. Even the Lord, it seemed, couldn’t do much with them. For every one He blew down, a hundred tried to grow up in its place.

“The underlying values expressed in the trilogy,” McCullough continues, “in all the novels, are the old-fashioned primary values–courage, respect for one’s fellow man, self-reliance, courtesy, devotion to the truth, a loathing of hypocrisy, the power in simple goodness. He called them “the old verities” and he was sure they were vanishing from  American life. He had no patience with such expressions as “the Puritan ethic.” He thought most of those who used that expression never bothered to understand what the Puritans were all about.”

So, if you are looking for something to read, try Conrad Richter! I am going on with the trilogy.

On another note, I must say, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing the wee babes “reading” books.

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“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.”
― Tim Gunn, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work 

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