writers | dual personalities

“Xmas all grown ups sa is the season for the kiddies but this do not prevent them from taking a tot or 2 from the bot and having, it may seme, a better time than us.”*

by chuckofish

Let us pause mid-week and take a deep breath.

“Lady at the tea table” by Mary Cassatt

Yes, it is less than ten days until Christmas, but all will be well.

All will be wonderful.

Maybe not perfect…but perfection, I think, is highly overrated.

(c) Northampton Museums & Art Gallery; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Juriaen van Streeck, Northampton Museums & Art Gallery

Make yourself a cup of tea (or coffee) and take a few minutes to sit by the window and think.

“Woman Sitting by the Window” by Pablo Picasso

Think about those Christmases of long ago.

“Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”**

Feel better now? This is how my brain works.

Have a great Wednesday. Daughter #2 is flying in from the east coast today. Tra la, tra la.

*From How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans

**From A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

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“The world was hers for the reading.”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Betty Smith (December 15, 1896 – January 17, 1972), who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic about a sensitive young girl who escapes the grim realities of her tenement life through reading.

I always thought the author was Irish-American, but she was born Elisabeth Wehner, the daughter of German immigrants. I guess I am thinking of the movie based on her famous book–the characters are all so Irish. It is a good movie and Peggy Ann Garner as Francie Nolan is quite affecting. James Dunn won an Academy Award for best supporting actor as Francie’s pathetic drunk of a father (whom she loves very much nevertheless.) He deserved the award, although I always had the feeling he was playing himself.

The characters are very real and the movie does not gloss over the hard realities of the book. This is probably due to the fact that the film is directed by the great Elia Kazan–in his directorial debut.

Anyway, a good book, a good movie–hat’s off and happy birthday to Betty Smith!

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

I should also mention that yesterday was the birthday of one of my most favorite writers, Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965). I will happily toast both ladies. How about you?

*A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

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November 17, 2015

Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining*

by chuckofish

Over the weekend I went to a couple of good estate sales where I picked up several good books.

I was happy to see the book by Janice Holt Giles. Chances are you have never heard of her, but she was a popular mid-range author in the 1950s-70s. She never got rich from her writing, but she was able to support herself, and that is saying something.

Janice Holt was born in Arkansas in 1905. As a child she moved to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) where her parents were both teachers. She grew up with books and music and went to college. When her first marriage ended, she and her daughter moved to Louisville, Kentucky where Janice worked for Dr. Lewis Sherrill, Dean of the Presbyterian Seminary.

On a trip to visit family in 1943, Janice happened to share a 40-hour bus ride with Henry Giles, a soldier on his way to a new assignment. In two days on the bus they became such good friends that they corresponded throughout the rest of the war while Henry was in Europe. When he returned from active duty in 1945—although they had not seen each other since the bus ride—they married immediately. Henry was 11 years her junior.

After a year in Louisville, Henry could not bear the big city any longer, and the couple moved to Adair County, KY, living on Henry’s family land. Janice, as I recall, had quite a lot to adapt to–no indoor plumbing for one thing–but love will conquer all. Janice wrote and Henry farmed.

I always thought they must have been a very interesting pair. Their unusual romance and life together is the stuff of good fiction. Indeed, some of her earliest books have a strong autobiographical flavor.

Anyway, I was interested to discover, while checking Holt out on the internet, that the Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles Society was established in 1996 to preserve the literary legacy of Janice and Henry Giles and to restore their log home.

Their home is now open to the public, June-October on Saturday and Sunday.

Every year there is an arts and crafts fair in early October, and I am thinking of adding this event to my calendar for 2016. The OM’s family is from Kentucky and I have long wanted to investigate the Bluegrass State.

In the meantime I am reading The Six-Horse Hitch and enjoying it very much. She is a thorough researcher and she always knows her subject. If you are interested, I recommend you check out some of her other books. The Piney Woods trilogy, consisting of The Enduring Hills (1950), Miss Willie (1951), and Tara’s Healing (1952), though not as famous as, say, Catherine Marshall’s Christy, is just as good. I have not read all of the Kentucky trilogy, but I have read Hannah Fowler (1956) and thought it excellent.

Reading historical fiction, especially about American pioneers, is for me a good escape from today’s Modern Problems.

(Photos are from the Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles Society website.)

*Blue Moon of Kentucky by Bill Monroe

8 Comments

November 10, 2015

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” *

by chuckofish

These are the days to take long walks and savor all that blue sky and colorful autumn flora and crisp fall temperatures. Until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes…at 5:00 p.m.!

For those of us who work from 9 to 5, it means we come home in the near-dark and our evenings seem so much shorter! No walks. It seems like we eat dinner, watch something, read, and go to bed.

Well, c’est comme ça. Lately I have been watching Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014)–the show about a motorcycle club that operates both illegal and legal businesses in the small town of Charming, CA. It has a good cast headed up by the very appealing Charlie Hunnam

(an English actor), Katey Sagal and Ron Perlman.

So far in season one, they are developing interesting and three-dimensional characters–the guys in the MC are pretty great–so we’ll see if I can hang in there despite a good amount of (you can imagine) violence.

I do love watching shows on Netflix without commercials. (I had to laugh when Castiel, the angel on Supernatural, in response to someone asking what he was doing while recovering from nearly dying, said, “I’ve been binge-watching the first season of The Wire.”)

On the book front, I am reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Set in occupied France during WWII, the novel moves back and forth in time, centering on a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths eventually cross. It is excellent. Sometimes “highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning” authors actually deserve the accolades.

Carpe diem!

*Anthony Doerr

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October 21, 2015

Way back Wednesday

by chuckofish

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us–our class–would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I’d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.

–Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

This time of year always makes me take a wistful look backward at my schooldays. I have always been an observer, watching other people do things. Sometimes I was taking pictures, sometimes writing about it. Sometimes I was just listening. Whatever.

I was never as cool as Annie Dillard, that’s for sure, never as connected. But we both felt the same desire to get the heck out of Dodge and move on.

Speaking of moving on, I re-read Dillard’s short memoir looking for a quote and I didn’t think it was as great as the first time I read it. Time and age again. Sigh.

5 Comments

October 19, 2015

“The outermost suburbs of the Truth”*

by chuckofish

I didn’t do a whole lot this weekend. I went to a few estate sales and I puttered around the house. I walked around my neighborhood. It is the perfect weather for that.

I watched Furious 7 (2015) with Vin Diesel et al.

It was ridiculous but highly entertaining. Indeed, the movie deserves an Oscar for special effects, because I certainly could not tell you where the real Paul Walker began and ended. Those Weta Digital people are pretty amazing.

I didn’t go to church but stayed home and re-read Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner, the third in his trilogy of memoir. It was the first book I ever read by Buechner and I was sold for life. But I guess he is not for everyone. When I first discovered him over twenty years ago, I recommended him to everyone I knew. One friend read The Sacred Journey (the first book of memoir) and thought he was a whiner. That is the last way I would describe him, but to each his own.

“The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we came from farther away than space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never really be at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars.”

Buechner is the Man as far as I’m concerned.

And now it’s Monday again. Tra la la.

*Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner

3 Comments

October 7, 2015

An’ The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes, An’ tells ’em, ef I be good, sometimes

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of James Whitcomb Riley (October 7, 1849 – July 22, 1916) who was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author, frequently referred to as the “Hoosier Poet.”

Statue in Greenfield, Indiana

I suppose no one reads his poems anymore. (Although–surprise!– his books are still in print.)

I remember my mother reading them aloud to us with great gusto. There was Little Orphant Annie

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’
sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-
an-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun,
A-listenin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

and The Raggedy Man

O The Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa;
An’ he’s the goodest man ever you saw!
He comes to our house every day,
An’ waters the horses, an’ feeds ’em hay…

Indeed, they were fun to read and fun to listen to. That is no doubt why Riley was among the most popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

So join me in a toast to the forgotten Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley. (Perhaps with one of these.)

I leave you with this picture of another famous Hoosier reading some JWR poetry for fun and personal enrichment.

Enjoy your Wednesday–and don’t let the Gobble-uns git you!

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September 23, 2015

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I have been re-reading some old favorites.

First I read One Fine Day by Mollie Painter-Downes, which I highly recommend. You will recall that between 1939 and 1945 Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war from England for the New Yorker. The action of this novel takes place all on one day in the summer of 1946 in a small village in England. It is a quiet meditation on how things change and how we adapt and how we still have so much to be grateful for.

“The country was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady’s workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of brown stuff, a thread of crimson, a stab of silver, a round, polished gleam of mother of pearl. It was all bathed in magic light, the wonderful transforming light in which known things look suddenly new.”

Now I am re-reading the wonderful Gilead by the great Marilynne Robinson. Basically it is a meditation by a dying minister, writing to his young son about his life and what it has meant to him.

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”

It is all about the beauty of the world and our lives here on earth. Wow.

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.”

The new Jan Karon book, Come Rain or Come Shine, is out and I have ordered it. In this installment Dooley has graduated from vet school and opened his own animal clinic and is getting married. Sounds good to me.

What are you reading?

6 Comments

September 15, 2015

Postcards from New York: I whistle a happy tune edition

by chuckofish

I had a lovely, fun-filled time visiting with daughter #1 in her tiny UWS third-floor studio apartment. Basically we were only there to sleep and grab an occasional Diet Coke. Oh, yes, we did shower and change, but in typical fashion I had done a miserable job packing, so my clothing options were limited. Daughter #1 always looked impeccable.

We were on the go from the time I dropped my bags there (after getting up at 3:30 a.m. to catch the 5:55 to LaGuardia) until I hopped in an Uber to head back to the airport.

It was rainy when I arrived, so we headed over to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit.

It was a terrific show with lots of great portraits. I liked the Edwin Booth portrait, but, of course, they didn’t have a postcard. They always pick the weirdest things for postcards, have you noticed? C’est la vie.

We also checked some of our favorites in the American Wing.

We went to Lincoln Center to see The King and I which was fabulous,

although the King was not Yul Brynner. His ghost is always there, arms akimbo.

We walked ALL OVER Central Park, but I did not have my phone with me (!) so I didn’t take any pictures of my favorite schist. We took the uptown bus to see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which I have always wanted to do.

It was a divine space but rather godless. Not that I was really surprised, but oh well. I liked the poets’ corner with all my favorites.

We also took the subway all the way up to 190th to go to the Cloisters, another place on my bucket list.

It was very cool. (I bought a book about how it all came to be and read it on the plane ride home. Thank you, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) Afterwards we rode the subway back down and conked out. Then we got up and made ready for our evening out with some of daughter #1’s college (and one highschool) friends.

Oh my–super fun!

By the time Sunday rolled around I was incapable of leaving the UWS and we opted to stay put and meander around, ending up on a park bench in Riverside Park, watching the world rollerblade or bicycle (training wheels optional) or jog by.

While I was visiting we ate at a wide variety of wonderful restaurants and made one notable and tipsy stop at Zabar’s.

Now I am home and back at the salt mine. Last night I planted myself in front of Dancing With the Stars in full recovery mode.

8 Comments

September 3, 2015

In the old days

by chuckofish

2.The Lookout Ð "All's Well" Winslow Homer (American, 1836Ð1910) 1896 Oil on canvas *Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Warren CollectionÑWilliam Wilkins Warren Fund *Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“All’s Well”, Winslow Homer 1896

“It was a dog’s life,” said the poor old gentleman, quite reassured, “but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor as ’tis, who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of ’em. There is no occupation so fit for just that class o’ men who never get beyond the fo’cas’le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper. In the old days, a good part o’ the best men here knew a hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw the world for themselves, and like’s not their wives and children saw it with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with ’em sight-seein’, but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an’ their laws, an’ could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet; they got some sense o’ proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and their houses were better within an’ without. Shipping’s a terrible loss to this part o’ New England from a social point o’ view, ma’am.”

–Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Today is the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909)–American novelist, short story writer and Episcopalian.

The Sarah Orne Jewett House is a historic house museum at 5 Portland Street in South Berwick, Maine, which is just over the border from New Hampshire. Built in 1774, it is an excellent example of late Georgian architecture.

I guess I’ll have to add it to my list of literary/historic places to visit. In the meantime, let’s toast old Sarah and maybe re-read The Country of the Pointed Firs, which I have somewhere. You can download it here.

While we’re toasting Sarah, we may want to raise a glass to Sally Benson (September 3, 1897 – July 19, 1972) whose birthday is also today. She was a screenwriter and prolific short story writer for The New Yorker back in its heyday. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Junior Miss and Meet Me in St. Louis. Yes, that “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Her other screen credits include Shadow of a Doubt (1943) for Alfred Hitchcock, Summer Magic (1963) for Walt Disney, Viva Las Vegas (1964) for Elvis, and The Singing Nun (1966)–quite a disparate group! Her screenplay for Anna and the King of Siam (1946) was nominated for an Academy Award.

Here is a sketch of the St. Louis house in which Sally grew up:

This North St. Louis neighborhood “declined” and the house was torn down in 1994. Here’s a picture of the Hollywood version:

(The pictures of the “Meet Me in St. Louis” houses were found here on a fun blog about houses.)

The Hollywood version was eventually torn down too when MGM sold off its lots in the 1970s.

C’est la vie. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (See above quote.)

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dual personalities

Tag: writers

December 16, 2015

“Xmas all grown ups sa is the season for the kiddies but this do not prevent them from taking a tot or 2 from the bot and having, it may seme, a better time than us.”*

by chuckofish

December 15, 2015

“The world was hers for the reading.”*

by chuckofish

November 17, 2015

Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining*

by chuckofish

November 10, 2015

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” *

by chuckofish

October 21, 2015

Way back Wednesday

by chuckofish

October 19, 2015

“The outermost suburbs of the Truth”*

by chuckofish

October 7, 2015

An’ The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes, An’ tells ’em, ef I be good, sometimes

by chuckofish

September 23, 2015

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

September 15, 2015

Postcards from New York: I whistle a happy tune edition

by chuckofish

September 3, 2015

In the old days

by chuckofish