dual personalities

Tag: writers

June 5, 2012

Small House of Uncle Thomas

by chuckofish

Today in 1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly started a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper. In honor of this I wanted to show you the famous scene from the King and I movie where Rita Moreno narrates a Siamese version of Little Eva’s escape from Simon Legree across the frozen river. Alas, this is not currently available on YouTube.

So here is the best I could do. It is still pretty great.

I remember back in 1994 when daughter #1 did a report in the 4th grade on Harriet Beecher Stowe. As part of her report she brought our VHS tape to school and showed the famous scene from the King and I.

A gratuitous photo of Yul Brynner to please my dual personality.

Amazingly most of her classmates had never seen it. I have always been an evangelist for great movies, even encouraging my children to embarrass themselves in front of their peers. Hopefully they have forgiven me.

Please note that 1851 was also the year that Moby-Dick was published. Amazing!

2 Comments
June 4, 2012

Not a gentleman born

by chuckofish

Well, I have finished Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall and book two in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. It is, no surprise, wonderful.

You remember that Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c. 1485 – 28 July 1540) was an English statesman who served King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540 in many capacities and was his right hand man. He facilitated his marriage to Anne Boleyn and then arranged the annulment of that marriage. Oftentimes throughout history (and in historical fiction) he has been portrayed as a villain and hatchetman, but we know he indeed was not.

Here is a wonderful description by Cromwell of one of his friends, which really is a perfect description of him:

“He does not talk simply to hear his own voice, or pick arguments just to win them. He is not like George Boleyn: he does not write verses to six women in the hope of bundling one of them into a dark corner where he can slip his cock into her. He writes to warn and to chastise, and not to confess his need but to conceal it. He understands honour but does not boast of his own. He is perfectly equipped as a courtier, but he knows the small value of that. He has studied the world without despising it. He understands the world without rejecting it. He has no illusions but he has hopes. He does not sleepwalk through his life. His eyes are open, and his ears for sounds others miss.”

This is the kind of book I want to start over and read again right away. I think I will read Wolf Hall again. Hilary Mantel is brilliant, and as a writer reading her, I could weep for her brilliance. Brava, Hilary–you’ve done it again.

6 Comments
May 15, 2012

Reading Moby-Dick

by chuckofish

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”

Ishmael, “The Chapel”

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March 1, 2012

Taking the shortcut

by chuckofish

“Or you can take the shortcut and paddle to one of the passages in the Huron River, which reflects this world so clearly you can see into the next one. When wild flags blossom along the river’s edge in this world, snow whitens the banks in that one. And when trout and sunfish sleep under a skin of ice here, swamps there hum with bees and cicadas, kingbirds and vireos and warblers. Walk against the current. Follow one of the streams that spill into the river till you find the spring at the bottom. You have found a doorway into the spirit world. Be careful. It is not safe to pass through that doorway without a guide.

“But maybe you don’t travel that far. You say, Ann Arbor is far enough. Stand still in the stream. Listen. Thomas Bearheart’s cousin picks up her hammer. Can you hear it ringing as she forges copper fishhooks in Drowning Bear, Wisconsin? Put your ear to the water as if it were a train track and listen for travelers rushing toward you, invisible as the dead and noisy as a pack of dogs.”

Nancy Willard, Sister Water

2 Comments
February 27, 2012

Don’t take your guns to town, son

by chuckofish

Yesterday, February 26, was the birthday of the late, great Johnny Cash (1932–2003). Johnny and I go way back. I saw him on television singing his hit Don’t Take Your Guns to Town when I was 3 or 4 and I was hooked. Uncharacteristically, my mother bought the single. I like to think it was at my prompting, but my older brother probably had something to do with it. Johnny was just so great and his talent so magnetic that even a three-year-old could sense it. He was to singing what John Wayne was to acting, except he had a jagged, dangerous edge. He was, after all, “the Man in Black”.

He wrote so many great songs: Understand Your Man, I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire, Folsom Prison Blues, and the list goes on and on. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1980), and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1992). Only thirteen performers are in both of the last two, and only Hank Williams Sr., Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, and Bill Monroe share the honor with Cash of being in all three.

He also had a television show, wrote books, was a faithful Christian, and was friends with Bob Dylan. I never saw Johnny Cash in concert–it is one of my great regrets. Here is Johnny’s last video–a heart-breaking rendition of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails.

I always thought that Johnny and my mother had the same eyes of plaintive Scottish brown. (Apologies to J.D. Salinger)

3 Comments
February 9, 2012

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

1. I just finished Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a short, beautiful first novel.

So few books like this are ever written, much less published. It is about an old man on his death-bed remembering his father, who in turn remembers his. A keeper!

2. Then Again by Diane Keaton–I am currently reading this memoir by actress Diane Keaton.

It is more about her relationship with her mother than a celebrity tell-all, and that is what attracted me to it. She is an unpretentious and intelligent person who was very close to her mother and wrote the book after her death to try to understand her better. “Comparing two women with big dreams who shared many of the same conflicts and also happened to be mother and daughter is partially a story of what’s lost in success contrasted with what’s gained in accepting an ordinary life.” Like me in my youth, Diane has frequently been classified as a “flakey chick”, but still waters run deep as they say.

3. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge–a juvenile novel I had heretofore missed. The cover of the newest edition is terrible, isn’t it?

An older one is much more appealing:

It is purportedly one of J.K. Rowling’s favorites and it is very popular in England. It was even made into a movie starring Ioan Gruffudd, but they changed a lot (playing up some vague romance angles) and angered the book’s fans. It was good and well written and I finished it, but it won’t be added to my shelf of classics.

4. Volume II of the Library of America collected writings of Raymond Chandler.

I periodically re-read his novels, which never disappoint. One can read these books every year, because the plot is forgotten as soon as the book is closed. It is old Philip Marlowe that lingers.

And the prayer book, so the Psalms are always at hand!

What are you reading?

3 Comments
February 2, 2012

Virtue and Honor

by chuckofish

“However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.”

–Robertson Davies

6 Comments
January 9, 2012

Why I love Raymond Chandler

by chuckofish

“Yes. I can imagine. Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.”

“Never the time and place and the loved one all together,” I said.

“What’s that?” She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.

“Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I feel sure you’d prefer the automatic.”

–-The Little Sister

5 Comments
November 29, 2011

Why I love Raymond Chandler

by chuckofish

Quotes like this!

“The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.”

–The Lady in the Lake

2 Comments
November 1, 2011

Happy birthday, Stephen Crane

by chuckofish

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. He wrote The Red Badge of Courage when he was 24 and died at 28.

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

3 Comments