reading | dual personalities

May 23, 2014

Happy Friday–like the blast of a trumpet!

by chuckofish

This Friday has been a long time coming–what a long week! But we have a three-day weekend coming up, so it’s all good.

FYI May has been a big month for birthdays already and this weekend we have two more favorites: Bob Dylan (May 24) on Saturday

and Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25) on Sunday!

Those are two great reasons to celebrate this weekend! One good way to do so would be to re-read Self Reliance, which I have been meaning to do–how about you?

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Another way would be to watch No Direction Home (2005)–a film chronicle of Bob Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966 from folk singer to rock star. Directed by Martin Scorsese, it uses archival footage and recent interviews to tell the story of the illusive Bob, who refuses “to be simplified, classified, categorized, or finalized”. And why should he be? He is, like Emerson and those other guys mentioned above, a “pure and wise spirit,” both great and misunderstood.

Dylan and Emerson are certainly on the same page. Here’s Bob:

‘Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do what’s right and not be second-guessed
Don’t trust me to show you beauty
When beauty may only turn to rust
If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself’

How Emersonian can you get?

So enjoy your weekend and trust yourself. Eat cake.

6 Comments

May 13, 2014

“Dead men tell no tales, Mary.”*

by chuckofish

“He took her face in his hands and kissed it, and she saw that he was laughing. “When you’re an old maid in mittens down at Helford, you’ll remember that,” he said, “and it will have to last you to the end of your days. ‘He stole horses,’ you’ll say to yourself, ‘and he didn’t care for women; and but for my pride I’d have been with him now.”

― Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

Happy birthday to Dame Daphne du Maurier (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989)!

According to IMDB, “Daphne Du Maurier was one of the most popular English writers of the 20th Century, when middle-brow genre fiction was accorded a higher level of respect in a more broadly literate age. For her services to literature, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, the female equivalent of a knighthood.” In other words, they don’t write them like she did anymore.

Yes, it may be time to dust off Jamaica Inn or Frenchman’s Creek. I wish they would do justice to her books on film, but I haven’t seen any that really come close to her prose power. The Birds maybe. I must say, they keep trying. Check out all the versions here.

*Jamaica Inn, of course

6 Comments

April 28, 2014

Oh me of little faith*

by chuckofish

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

John 20:19

This Sunday’s Gospel reading was the scripture where Jesus does not bother to use the door which is locked anyway. He just appears to 10 of the remaining 11 disciples. This is mentioned very casually. No one really makes a big deal of it. Because they don’t, one thinks it is probably just what happened. At least I think so.

The disciples, huddled in their locked room after everything that has happened, are both afraid and ashamed of their fear and their behavior in general. We should try to remember the disciples when we are fearful and anxious. They were not paragons of strength. Far from it. Some of them were not even very smart. (Think of Peter.) They were just like us. After this visit from Jesus, however, when he breathes on them and they receive the Holy Spirit, they seem to have gotten their collective acts together. It took a second visit for Thomas, because he missed the first and refused to believe without “touching and seeing”.

Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

We all have our doubts, and that’s okay. Doubts, Frederick Buechner says, are “the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Well, my mind wandered during the sermon on this scripture, but this is what I was thinking.

Meanwhile this weekend I enjoyed the spring weather by working in the yard. I also went on a birthday outing with my best Grace girlfriends. Our fearless leader and party planner Carla reasoned that, because we never have room for dessert when we go out to lunch, we should just go out for dessert. Brilliant! So we ventured downtown to a place famous for its ice cream concoctions and had sundaes. When was the last time you had a sundae? I cannot begin to remember when that was. It really was a treat.

Art Deco walls at the “Fountain”

We also went to the main branch of the downtown library which has been recently renovated.

Notice the 250th birthday cake in front and the spire barely visible behind of our Episcopal Cathedral

Notice the 250th birthday cake in front and the spire of our Episcopal Cathedral barely visible behind the library.

Intrepid explorers that we are, we had a super fun time.

I also re-read “The Snow Goose” a very short novella by Paul Gallico about a lonely hunchbacked artist who participates in the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 and the snow goose that watches over him. It gave me chills.

If you are looking for something to pick up and read at one sitting, I highly recommend this marvelous book.

Have a good week!

* Nickle Creek

2 Comments

April 17, 2014

Everything was blazing

by chuckofish

…Everything was blazing, everything was sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover–because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and–there she was! her! and she was talking to herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions…

–Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Okay, I have finally finished this magnum opus and I have to say I liked it. I think it is overly long and could have used some tightening up. At times I wanted to tell ol’ Boris to shut the hell up, but, you know, he was a talker. I have heard some blog-grumbling about the end of the novel. Personally–spoiler alert–I was relieved to have it work out the way it did. And I think the last twenty pages were worth waiting for.

I guess they are making a movie. I’m sure it will be awful. Sigh.

3 Comments

March 28, 2014

The weekend approacheth

by chuckofish

Well, this time last week I was going out to dinner with cute boys and hanging out with daughter #2. This week it has been back to the salt mines for me as usual. Work, work, work.

One bright spot was going to my first lacrosse game of the season.

The boy’s Varsity Hounds creamed his old high school team 15-3.

It was kind of weird sitting in the KHS football stadium cheering for the “visitors”. It was also quite cold! Once it started to get dark, I had to bail and go home even with my winter coat and a Bean’s wool blanket to sit on.

At home I am keeping my spirits up with these pretty flowers–and, yes, the Christmas Cactus is blooming again.

On the reading front, having finished Peter Carey’s wonderful Olivier and Parrot, I started reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and I am hooked. The book, which took more than 10 years to write, is narrated by Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New York boy whose world is violently disrupted during a routine visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. A terrorist bomb explodes, killing Theo’s mother and other innocents, including a man who, just before dying, implores Theo to take “The Goldfinch” out of the smoking wreckage of the museum. I have not read Tartt’s other two books, but I am impressed. We’ll see if she holds me for 700 pages. I plan to find out this weekend.

Have a great weekend!

8 Comments

March 25, 2014

People talk

by chuckofish

“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

5 Comments

March 17, 2014

Just as I am

by chuckofish

While organizing ~~a whole mess of~~ some old photos, I found this great one of my dual personality when she was on a dig in Jordan back in the 1980s. I think it was when she was getting a master’s in archaeology at Mizzou, before she went on to Yale, but if I am wrong she can set us straight. She was always much less timid than I, more like our mother. Being in the desert with a camel (and without a hairdryer) would not have fazed her much.

Anyway, I spent my weekend per usual. I went to the book sale at the Unitarian Church, braving the Prius-filled parking lot in order to search through their treasure trove of books. Their thinking may be a little to the left of whoopee, but they are good readers.

I went to three estate sales and got a few more books and then I came home and worked in the yard for awhile. It was a beautiful day–the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the daffodils were poking up.

By Sunday, the temperature had plummeted, the wind was howling and it was sleeting, but I forged on to church nevertheless. I sat with my good friend Marty. It always amuses me to remember that her son was the coolest guy in school forty years ago and wouldn’t have known me from Doris Day, but it is proof positive that all things come to those who wait, if not in a semi-skewed fashion. It is the skewed part that is the point.

God does have a sense of humor and so should we.

Write deeply upon our minds, O Lord God, the lesson of thy holy Word, that only the pure in heart can see thee. Leave us not in the bondage of any sinful inclination. May we neither deceive ourselves with the thought that we have no sin, nor acquiesce idly in aught of which our conscience accuses us. Strengthen us by thy Holy Spirit to fight the good fight of faith, and grant that no day may pass without its victory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–C. J. Vaughan

Have a good Monday!

8 Comments

January 21, 2014

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I finished The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner on MLK Day. I think I had tried to read this book several years ago, but had put it aside. Not in the mood. When I opened it up a few days ago, however, it immediately grabbed me and held my interest. Isn’t that funny how that works? I am that much older, I guess, and receptive, therefore, to this wonderful book about a retired literary agent who starts reading his journals from a trip he took with his wife to seek his roots in Denmark twenty years earlier. Although a spring chicken myself in my fifties, I have a lot of friends who are in their seventies and eighties, and what Stegner writes struck me as very true.

“What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll?”

Anyway, I liked it a lot and highly recommend it. Some of the things his hero gripes about back in 1973 seem like nothing to what we put up with now. They are the same things, of course. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1977. It always surprises me when a book I like actually receives an award.

Wallace Stegner, you will recall, was an American novelist, short story writer and environmentalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose in 1972. He was an Eagle Scout.

I also recently read Cider With Rosie by the English poet Laurie Lee published in 1959. I read about it in The Outermost Dream, a collection of essays by William Maxwell, the wonderful New Yorker editor who also wrote some good fiction and had impeccable taste. Laurie Lee was unknown to me, but my dual personality tells me that he is quite well known in Britain and that his aforementioned memoir is dearly loved there.

Well, who knew? Thanks to William Maxwell, I found out. Laurence Edward Alan “Laurie” Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. And, by the way, his memoir of a bygone way of life really is wonderful.

What are you reading?

P.S. The paperwhite bulbs my brother sent for Christmas are growing–not blooming yet–but soon!

5 Comments

January 13, 2014

Weekend update: Another chance to disapprove, Another brilliant zinger, Another reason not to move, Another vodka stinger*

by chuckofish

Mostly this weekend was a time for catching up. I had no social plans beyond a birthday lunch with my girlfriends and church on Sunday. We had a baptism and it was good to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness with my brethren. At the end of the service we sang the interminably long but deeply wonderful “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”. Verse 6 always brings tears to my eyes:

Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

On the literary front, I finished In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, which daughter #2 had encouraged me to read. I enjoyed it, but it was the kind of book where you are always aware that you are reading “literary” fiction. Not really my cup of tea. Great literature does not hit you over the head with its worthiness. Furthermore, I have to say that while some of the characters are engaging, they are also anarchists/terrorists. So again, how can you really care what happens to them? In point of fact, I didn’t.

I watched two movies–one was a really good one: Oscar and Lucinda (1997), an Australian movie directed by Gillian Armstrong and based on the Booker Award-winning novel by Peter Carey. Boy, I really liked it.

Ralph Fiennes plays an Anglican priest in the mid-18th century who is an obsessive gambler. His reasons for gambling are pure and his Pascalian argument for his legitimate use of it as a Christian, completely righteous. He meets Cate Blanchett, who is a compulsive gambler, on the ship going to Melbourne and they become friends. Lucinda bets Oscar her entire inheritance that he cannot transport a glass church to the Outback safely. Oscar accepts her wager, and this leads “to the events that will change both their lives forever.”

I was so impressed with Ralph Fiennes who plays the innocent and devout minister without the least bit of irony or judgement. He is totally believable and likable. Cate Blanchett is as always intelligent and precise and believable. Both are so good as kindred spirits. Plus there are lots of fine actors in smaller roles. The production is beautiful. The music is by Thomas Newman.

Just a great movie! I will have to read the book now.

I also watched Company (2011)–a filmed version of the Broadway show which won the Tony for Best Musical back in 1971.

I was talking to someone at work awhile back and I said I hadn’t ever seen Company and the next thing I knew he had brought it in for me. He said I’d like it. Well, I finally got around to watching it and I did not like it. Stephen Sondheim’s negative take on marriage and relationships (and women in general) is very cynical and “sophisticated”.

Puff puff. But there is not one likable/relatable character in the bunch. The main character, played by one of my least favorite actors–Neil Patrick Harris–is a jerk. Poor Mr. Sondheim. I feel that he was writing from experience.

On the home front, I took down our outside Christmas lights. It was 60-degrees yesterday so it seemed like the smart thing to do. I was impressed with what a good job the boy did putting them up. I guess he isn’t an Eagle Scout for nothin’!

Golden Globe update: FYI June Squibb is from Vandalia, Illinois. You go, Flyover Girl!