Tag Archives: little bits and pieces

March 24, 2015 · 2:38 pm

Having a Good Nattering, Chin-Wag, or Gossip with a Book–Maeve Binchy’s “Circle of Friends”

I can remember the first time I was curious enough to mention Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends to another friend who reads, one whose tastes are perhaps a little less specialized than mine.  She said, “You probably wouldn’t like her; it’s not really literary fiction.”  I persisted, and she said “Well, it’s more like popular fiction, kind of gossipy and low-key.  No big symbols or literary stuff to interpret, it’s mostly just about people’s lives in a small town in Ireland, and how they change when exposed to social currents from Dublin.”  So, I thought, well, I’ll see the movie, which got some acclaim, and in which Minnie Driver starred, I wasn’t sure in what role; that seemed like a good way to approach the thing.

But something came up, and I missed the local showings of the movie, and by the time everything was over, I had gone on to something else.  This made me all the more curious when a copy of the book fell into my hands from a free book shelf (don’t ever believe that it really happens that way–it didn’t “fall into” my hands, I regularly prune certain free book shelves with effort and abandon to get books I think I might like to read).

True enough, when I read the book blurb, it didn’t seem like my kind of book; for one thing, it was about a hometowny little friendship between two girls who go on to university together, and it sounded fairly humdrum.  No Pulitzer or Nobel there.  Then I started to read.  I found other reasons not to get too excited about the book; for one thing, it seemed to have a number of places in which the dialogue that should logically have been in the mouth of one character came from another character, or there was a typo, or one character’s name seemed to be given for another character’s.  This was a minor distraction, however, once I got involved in the story.

What I found was that the author was a penetrating judge of character, and though most of her creations were young and just starting out in life, she had a knack also for writing about the older people in the book and their conflicts and disappointments.  Though the young university students and their cohorts are spoken of as the “circle of friends” once or twice in the book and are the central focus, by the end of the book the whole cast has become one whose lives have importance to the reader.  It’s as if we are having a gossip about them all with the village maven.  Every character, no matter how minor, has a fate or an ending, or a new beginning, and though there are no major surprises in the way they turn out, yet everything develops satisfactorily and in line with one’s sense of poetic justice.  This treatment, though it is decidedly not literary in the sense of showing just how arbitrary life can actually be, and how ironies can multiply and interact, is still the source of a satisfactory read.  After all, there are also instances in real life when people do get what’s coming to them, whether for good or for ill, and those can also be written about:  not everything is some huge black catastrophic event or supplies a constantly pointed little fictional essay that baits the reader and leads him or her to expect what isn’t delivered and to be disappointed as a source of entertainment.

Which is to say, when all is said and done, that Maeve Binchy delivers no more and no less than the blurbs have contracted for:  she is a reliable and percipient author who, though perhaps a bit lingeringly romantic or sentimental, never puts the romance or the sentiment in the position of having to carry the entire load of the plot effects.  Circle of Friends, though not a book I would necessarily find it important to reread in order to get anything I didn’t get the first time, might become a soothing anodyne that I would read again because it reassures me about humanity in the main.  I seem to remember that I read of Binchy’s death some time back, and I can now see why her devoted readers created such a stir about her potential absence: she has a kindly, open, wise, and perceptive mode of writing that while not pretending to be full of literary tricks and technical achievements is nevertheless full of human warmth and good humor.  Now I suppose all that remains is sometime to watch the movie and see if the movie magnates have managed to capture the work of her great heart on film.

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March 10, 2015 · 12:36 am

The generic governess tale, or “Agnes Grey” and its limits and gifts

Never having read anything by Anne Brontë before, I decided to hold off on the excitingly named The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and go for the more quietly named Agnes Grey.  My decision was affected partially by the thought that “wildfell” sounded like more “wuthering,” or “heights,” and misery, and romantic passion, and though I’ve since been informed that the tale of the tenant is not what I’m expecting (about that more another time), I stuck with my decision and started reading.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised is saying too much, but at the same time I wasn’t appalled; I was instead nonplussed.  I found Agnes Grey slight, short, and simple.  There were no overwhelming highs and lows of emotional resonance as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.  It was actually a competent and unsurprising tale of a vicar’s-daughter-turned-governess-eventually-makes-good (by the oldest–or second oldest–“trick” in the book, the first supposedly being prostitution, which of course can’t be mentioned in the same breath with churchy mid-19th century marriage).

And yet, the book has appeal, in spite of the fact that there is little or no let-up from the trials of teaching bad-mannered and spoiled upper-class children, no break to the virtuous sermonizings on Fate (herein known as “God’s will”) in which the heroine indulges at the least opportunity.  She is too good, like many a religiously inclined governess in similar novels, but for some reason, though a little missish from time to time, she is not boring.  Maybe it’s the repetitive instances of words in narrative and especially in dialogue which are either capitalized or italicized to indicate emphasis:  when they are those of others, they are those most often of outrageous remarks made to or near the heroine; even more, when they are hers, we sense a sort of youthful eye-rolling.  “Can you believe this?” she seems to be saying.  A technique like this, which we would censure as puerile in a contemporary author, thus becomes a bit appealing in this otherwise sometimes prosy young writer.

And this is the thing to remember about her:  though we learn by reading that she was exceedingly precocious, she had a youthful high spirit, and was not inexperienced in terms of what she was writing about.  She was a governess for six years herself, and her character of Agnes Grey thus owes something to her own experience.  It’s not too far to assume that there are aspects of wish fulfillment in Agnes’s eventual destiny and the book’s happy ending.  Yet this book should not lead anyone to underestimate the youngest Brontë, who was a poet and a novelist (under the pen name of “Acton Bell”) though she was dead at the age of twenty-nine of what Wikipedia calls pulmonary tuberculosis.  Her fame today, though it is derived from her entire body of work, is largely endebted to the book which shocked her contemporaries, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (and once again, more about that another time).  Still, the gentle, sweet tenor of Agnes Grey, wherein doing one’s duty and maintaining a hopeful demeanor in the face of all adversity brings eventual reward is a reward in itself as a reading experience–and the adversity is not of that ilk which tortures the reader’s sensibilities in the apparent belief that a catharsis can be forced.  As a steady diet, Agneses might be a bit tame, but then, there’s no danger of that:  there’s only one Agnes Grey.

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February 8, 2015 · 8:48 pm

Agony and a Painter’s Eye: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”

Today’s post is about one of the most frequently taught poems of the early Victorian era, one which has perplexed many an undergraduate (including me, at the time) and even more seasoned readers, I think primarily because they are waiting for it to tell a story, or give an explanation, of however attenuated a kind.  And it does both of these things in its own way, except that its own way is not that of the usual lyric poem; rather, it is an encapsulation of a lyric moment caught by the “eye” of a painter who was also a poet.  This multi-talented individual was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and writers.

The poem is “The Woodspurge,” a modest title in line with the mostly restrained and simple words used.  The overall effect, however, is anything but simple.  Here is the poem in its entirety, all four four-line stanzas, which have been quoted elsewhere on the Internet previously as well:

“The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,/Shaken out dead from tree and hill;/I had walked on at the wind’s will–/I sat now, for the wind was still./Between my knees my forehead was–/My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!/My hair was over in the grass,/My naked ears heard the day pass./My eyes, wide open, had the run/Of some ten weeds to fix upon;/Among those few, out of the sun,/The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one./From perfect grief there need not be/Wisdom or even memory;/One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three.”

Now to embark upon an interpretation, which is of course only one among many possible, but which I believe has some points to recommend it, such as its close reliance upon the items found in the poem, without adding possibly spurious additional material.

The first stanza begins by stressing that even when the speaker is in motion, as when walking, he is passively affected in the main:  when the wind pushes him along, he walks; when the wind ceases, he sits.  The wind is said to be “shaken out dead,” and indeed he is deathlike and still, or at least motionless, when the wind dies down.

Though many people think that the arcania of rhetorical figuration is mainly limited to such figures as similes, metaphors, apostrophes, and other such figures more common to poetry, it is a fact that in this poem Rossetti uses both paralipsis and litotes (in the second and third stanzas respectively), which perhaps occur less often in poetic circumstances.  Here in the second stanza, the speaker “paints a picture” of himself with head hanging low, and says that his lips did not say “alas.”  Well, why should they?  We don’t know, but by saying that he did not say something he is in fact saying, the poet is using the figure of paralipsis, which is denying that one is making a statement while in fact making it.  He speaks of his naked ears, and here the word “naked” is like the word “dead” in the first stanza, in that it is a powerful and evocative word that stands out as unusual; there is a sense that he is unprotected; there is a sense of vulnerability.

In the third stanza, this same sense of vulnerability occurs when we are told that his eyes are “wide open,” and therefore exposed.  At first we think that they are not exposed to much, it is true, as his head is hanging between his knees, but this seems to be a case of much from little.  Using the figure of litotes, or understatement, he says that he can see “ten weeds,” which is surely not all he can see even given his restricted field of vision.  Weeds and grass grow thickly, after all.  This figure of understatement produces a sense of lowness (as does his crouch), and depression.  Among these weeds, he focuses on the woodspurge because is it different and isolated, as he the speaker too is isolated, even among natural things and nature, though in poetry these are very often seen as potentially sympathetic, even sometimes to the extreme of using the “pathetic fallacy,” in which a speaker’s or character’s emotions are said to be experienced by a natural force or being.  The woodspurge is “out of the sun” literally because it is overshadowed by the speaker’s limbs and head hanging; the speaker himself is “out” of a sort of shining grace, of happiness.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker brings up “perfect grief,” and suggests that there is no wisdom which comes from it or memory which can resolve it.  Though the reader may experience a sense of shock at this sudden introduction of intense emotion as a subject, yet there is something about it which shows fittingness as well.  Even though it “ups the ante” in a sudden way, it’s appropriate because we know that all this so far has been adding up to something, some climax.  The last two lines contain a living crystallization of a moment of pain and suffering, the sense of “perfect grief” as embodied in the totally a-historical symbol of the woodspurge.  That is, before Rossetti wrote his poem, there was no necessary connection between the tiny weed/flower and sorrow; since his poem, I doubt that anyone aware of the poem, either seeing the poem and/or seeing the woodspurge knowingly, could help but think of the emotional connection.

This poem “The Woodspurge” is an excellent introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite notion that a poem (or a painting) can be about a moment of intense emotion without a history in words of the cause (though of course many of the paintings were of characters from literature or myth).  As well, to anyone themselves subject to the feelings recorded in the poem, “The Woodspurge” itself is a woodspurge-in-words which can capture their own emotions, again without an actual historical rehearsing of the cause of the emotions.  Thus the vagueness of the “backstory,” as it’s called now, makes the poem itself more universal and accessible to more people.  The statement that “One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three” betrays the lastingness of the grief and the simultaneous poverty and wealth of sorrow:  sorrow is full and overflowing, so full that the speaker cannot say more than he does, yet it leaves him empty of all but the final awareness of the association between his emotion and what he sees at the extreme moment of its intensity.

At the risk myself of having made much of a little thing, I have written this analysis of one of Rossetti’s most famous poems, maybe the most well-known, because it is so perfect of its kind.  I hope that you too will find it answers to your notion of a fine work of art, and will remember its beauty at any time when you feel that the world’s beauty has deserted you:  the woodspurge may be a simple flower, but it is a deceptively simple poem, and one which has much to offer to those who would notice.

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October 26, 2014 · 10:13 pm

One last hurrah! for Halloween–Oliver La Farge’s “Haunted Ground”

George Waterson, our hero, stands up on a cold, frozen beach, wet and shaky all through himself, and looks around.  Something tells him that his luck has finally turned against him, as he realizes that after his boat, the Lucy, has broken up in the waves behind him, that all he can do now is to go on up to the old Hales’ house, on what is known locally as “Haunted Ground.”  As he trudges up the long hill ahead of him, he can clearly hear his heart beating like thunder, and very slowly.  He feels tired and worn out.

As he looks up to the house above him, he sees lighted windows, and thinks to himself that the woman for whom he has an unrequited love, Sue, will be laid out in one of the rooms.  Her death is recent:  a burglar came into the old house, the first burglar in the little town in twenty years, and shot her.  Her mother Mrs. Hale is also said to be sick from the shock of the incident, according to the callous village gossip.

George as he’s climbing begins to remember the many times he, Sue, and his friend John did things together growing up:  they had snowball fights with hydrangeas, he gave Sue rides on his pony while the envious John trailed along behind.  But the thing he remembers most is the grief he felt when Sue told him that she was engaged to John.  Still, there was more to it.  He remembers his shock and shame when he felt triumph at John’s being lost in his boat off Brenton’s reef, as George pretended to comfort Sue whole-heartedly.  Sue had said then:  ‘”Anyway, living in Haunted Ground, I’ll see him again when I’m old, the way Granny used to do.”‘

He keeps climbing, but has a nagging feeling that he left something of importance on the beach behind him with the wrecked bits of his boat.  His clothes feel dry already in the cold wind.  He continues to feel grief not only because Sue is dead, but because he believe that in time he might have won her away from her memories of John, to be his own wife.

Finally, he reaches the house and knocks.  No one answers.  Possibly in fright, his heart seems to beat even more loudly.  Again he knocks, fighting off the feeling that there is something vital left on the beach behind; surely there was nothing left from the wreck that he would have had with him?  Still, no one answers.  He reaches out and opens the door, entering where the sitting-room door is open and lets welcome warmth into the hall.  He sees Sue’s coffin in the center of the sitting-room.  Mrs. Hale is waking it sitting in a rocker in the room.  He thinks it is really unusual not to see her knitting or sewing.

He apologizes to the old lady, whose mind seems to be overcome with grief as well.  She answers, ‘”That’s all right, George; if I’d known what you were I’d have let you in.  Sit down.”‘  She seems vague and exhausted.  He goes toward the coffin to view Sue, but weirdly, Mrs. Hale warns him not to “disturb” her.  The old lady continues,”‘I figured she was tired, and she’s laid out so pretty I’m just letting her rest awhile.  She’s to be buried Thursday.'”  George is now seriously worried that the old lady has become unhinged, and as he gazes searchingly at “the girl’s uncovered face, the rich gold-brown hair, long lashes making shadows on the cheeks, delicate, warm mouth,” his heart beats even more loudly, and he thinks naggingly again of something down on the beach, though he can’t understand why his mind insists on being in two places at once when he is grieving Sue so profoundly.

Mrs. Hale asks him how he got there, and he says that when he heard about Sue, he didn’t want to live anymore, and so he went out in his boat in the midst of the storm.  He was sorry that he had washed ashore on their beach, because it reminded him of his loss, but he says he’s glad he came up now.  She responds, “‘It’s hard for you, George.  She’ll be seeing John after church on Thursday.'”  This strikes him as an odd way to talk about Sue’s potential afterlife.  She keeps talking to him, but her voice fades out, as if she’s barely able to enunciate.  He figures they are both suffering from shock, and he hears the knocking of his heart even more, as if his ears have been damaged by being cast adrift in the surf.

He tells the old lady gently that they both seem to be suffering from shock, though she says she feels better now that things are over.  He tries to tell her about how her voice fades out from time to time as she’s talking, and she seems not quite to believe him.  Then he says that he can hear his heart beating overloudly in his ears, and he’s been so battered by the storm that it feels as if someone or something is pulling at his shoulder.  The old woman responds with a sort of hysterical cry and tells him to “‘Get back to the beach, get back to the beach, you still have time!'”

This makes his hair stand on end, as she tries to tell him something in her nearly inaudible voice.  Finally, in a last-ditch effort to make him understand, she jumps up and throws the bedroom door open.  “‘Look,'” she says.  There her body lies, “serene and pale,” on the counterpane.  Mrs. Hale shouts, “‘They’ve found you on the beach, that’s what you hear, what’s shaking your shoulder.  Your heart’s still beating.  You’ve got time to go back, to live, to find someone else than Sue.  Sue’s meeting John on Thursday.  Go back to the beach.”  He realizes then the thing of importance that he’s left on the shore, and he feels “panic and black horror.”  Then, as he turns to go towards the door, he runs up against Sue’s coffin.  He asks if Sue is “in there,” and Mrs. Hale affirms it, but warns him not to wake her, and tells him to hurry.  George thinks carefully.  The last paragraph of the story reads:

“‘You know, Mrs. Hale, John was my best friend.’  He sat down.  ‘Those heartbeats are very slow; they’ll be over in a minute.'”

This story is a bit dated, perhaps, but maybe the twists and turns of the tale as I have retold it aren’t too old and tattered to give you just a bit of a chill down your spine.  To all of my faithful readers and to any new friends I might have found along the way, have a Happy and Scary Halloween, and I’ll be posting again next week sometime!

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October 4, 2014 · 6:37 pm

“Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores”–Jen Campbell’s humorous salute to the reading public

When I was young, my family owned a small-town bookstore.  It was at the center of town, and was not only a favorite spot for people to pick up their periodicals and bestsellers, but was as well the best source of literary novels and authors which students in the local schools and colleges were being asked to read for class.  We lived in a community which was fairly literate, but even so, we still had many odd encounters and requests for books that were strange and peculiar.  So is it any wonder that when I encountered Jen Campbell’s book Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores that I felt an immediate sense of kinship, and laughed my fool head off while reading from cover to cover?

Just to give you a few examples, under the chapter “Literary Pursuits,” Jen lists this gem:  “Where’s your true fiction section?”  Or this one:  “This Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter book has to be the most historically accurate fiction book I’ve read.”  Under “What Was That Title Again?” Jen quotes this:  “I’m looking for some books on my kid’s summer reading list.  Do you have Tequila Mockingbird?”  Or, “Do you have Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof?”  Under “Parents and Kids”:  “Customer:  These books are really stupid, aren’t they?  Bookseller:  Which ones?  Customer:  You know, the ones where animals, such as cats and mice, are best friends.  Bookseller:  I suppose they’re not very realistic, but then that’s fiction.  Customer:  They’re more than unrealistic; they’re really stupid.  Bookseller:  Well, writers use that kind of thing to teach kids about accepting people different to themselves, you know?  Customer:  Yeah, well, books shouldn’t pretend that different people get on like that, and that everything is “la de da” and wonderful, should they?  Kids should learn that life’s a bitch, and the sooner the better.”  Under “You Want What?”:  “Customer:  Didn’t this place used to be a camera store?  Bookseller:  Yes, it did, but we bought the place a year ago.  Customer:  And now you’re a…  Bookseller:  …a bookstore.  Customer:  Right.  Yes.  So, where do you keep the cameras?”  Under “Customers Behaving Badly”:   “Customer:  I’d like a refund on this book please.  Bookseller:  What seems to be the problem?  Customer:  I barely touched it.  It’s  ridiculous!  Bookseller:  What do you mean?  Customer:  I mean all I did was drop it in the bath by accident.  And now, I mean, just look at it:  the thing’s unreadable!”  Under “Isn’t It Obvious?”:  Customer:  Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?  Bookseller:  Er…do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?  Customer:  No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.  Bookseller: …”  Under “Books for Kindling”:  Customer:  Do you guys sell used e-books?  Bookseller (laughing):  No…  Customer (angrily):  Why not?”  Under “The Adult Section”:  “Customer:  Hi, do you have that sperm cookbook?  Bookseller:  No.  Customer:  That’s a shame.  I really wanted to try it.  Have you tried it?  Bookseller:  I have not.”  Under “Higher Powers”:  “Customer:  Do you have a book that interprets life?  Bookseller:  I’m not sure I know what you mean.  Customer:  Well, I was out hiking the other day, and I saw a wolf.  I want to know what that meant.”  Under “Out of Print:  “Customer:  What kind of bookstore is this?  Bookseller:  We’re an antiquarian bookstore.  Customer:  Oh, so you sell books about fish.”  And these I’ve blurbed about are only the beginning:  for the small price of $15.00 in the U.S. (in Canada it’s $16.00), you can read many, many more and longer exchanges, even more fraught with those sources of constant comedy and commiseration, human intellectual frailty and sometimes sheer thoughtlessness.

To give a bit about the history of this book, here’s Jen Campbell (a native of the U.K. where she currently works in a bookstore).  In the introduction about her work at the bookstore Ripping Yarns in London (the bookstore named after Monty Pythoners Terry Jones and Michael Palin), she says:  “After a particularly strange day about a year ago in which I was asked if books were edible, I started putting some choice ‘Weird Things Customers Say…’ quotes up on my blog (jen-campbell.blogspot.com).  The intent wasn’t to mock or antagonize our customers.  Far from it.  Most of the people I meet everyday are amazing, an integral part of our north London neighborhood and the lifeblood of our business in a tough time for booksellers.  But, as anyone who works in retail probably knows, there are some encounters that simply leave you speechless.”

Other bookstores and book fiends quoted Jen Campbell on Twitter, Neil Gaiman blogged about them, and Jen was finally asked to publish a book of them by a book publishing company in the U.K.  Booksellers from many different states of the union and provinces in Canada joined in the fun and contributed their favorite quotes to the book, and their stores and general locations are identified (though no individuals are named) in the coda of each quote.  For a great light read and a real hoot of an experience with how one may oneself come across to strangers on days when one isn’t at one’s best, perhaps, you could do a lot worse than to pick up this book for yourself and your friends.  One thing’s for sure:  you can’t imagine many people trying to return this one!

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September 25, 2014 · 6:50 pm

“School days, school days, dear ol’ Golden Rule days….”

There was a song current in my mother’s youth, now complete with anachronisms, the first verse of which went “School days, school days, dear ol’ Golden Rule days; Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick; I was your maid in calico, you were my bashful, barefoot beau; And you wrote on my slate, ‘I love you so!’/When we were a couple of kids.”  Of course, hickory sticks were replaced by paddles in my mother’s youth, and they were no longer using slates, but there was still some corporal punishment by teachers (now mostly and happily a thing of the past), and there is, was, and one hopes always will be youthful romances to tide us over until the long school day is through.

And though this is a song largely about those who are in school pre-university, this post is just by way of saying that I will in fact be away from posting at length for a few days, because I am going with my immediate family to visit my undergraduate alma mater.  I hope to have lots to write about when I get back; if I don’t have much of anything to write about the trip itself, I will I hope have a renewed spirit to return to my literary posting with.  Until then, have a great autumn!

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September 19, 2014 · 9:31 pm

Halloween, wolves, lights out!–and whimsy

Today, I am going to tell you the very brief, horrific (and admittedly whimsical) tale of a naughty little girl of my acquaintance and how she (for some time at least) lost the friendship of a near relative through a lie about wolves, radiators, and lights out! time.  If you suspect that I know that little girl a bit better than I am letting on, so be it (heaven forbid you should think it is actually myself I am talking about, though they do say that confession is good for the soul).

Cast your mind back to the early 1960’s, when little girls still wore puffy petticoats with short skirts over them, and either had to have pigtails and ponytails or Shirley Temple curls (made arduously, if not “natural,” by painstaking mothers using bobby pins, at least on school nights, when everyone the next day had to believe the curls were genuine).  Picture to yourself a weedy young imp who preferred to lie curled up with a good book all day, and hated being told to go outside and play (hey! that rhymes!).  This young person of the female persuasion only liked going out to play or even playing inside with dolls, for that matter, when one or the other of her female cousins were around to make the game interesting.

Of course, Halloween comes in the fall of the year, and at that time, vampires, spooks, and werewolves are in the juvenile mind in abundance, not only for trick-or-treat, but even after, to spice up daily conversation and slumber parties.  And, of course, to supply material for ghastly nightmares, which, once they’re over continue to supply a pleasurable frisson of fright, a harking back to horror.

Well, it so happened that this little girl had never acquired a fear of the dark.  She was afraid of many things, but unlike her female cousins, had never become afraid of the dark, or required a night-light to sleep.  But she was afraid of wolves.  Not just werewolves, but the real animal, which she’d never seen except in books, nor was likely to.  But her cousins slept with a night-light, because it was decreed that parents had different verdicts about what was the best way to deal with nightmares, and theirs had been known to give way more easily to the specific of waking only to find the light shining, and nothing wrong.

Now, our little girl, we’ll call her Beth (for nothing would induce me to reveal her true identity), abhorred a night-light.  She was proud of not needing one, and when she had an occasional fright in the night, she simply stumbled out of bed and went to her parents’ room for comfort and reassurance, or better yet, and more often, called out for the long-suffering (and perhaps overindulgent) parent(s) to come to her.  But one other thing that she was perhaps less rational about than even wolves was floor registers to radiator systems, the kind that have a few little slots in the floor that can be made to shut firmly by pushing the knob.  Doing so of course shut off the warm air flow to the room, but it at least produced a firm surface which didn’t show a long, mysterious floor passageway below it, leading off into who knew where.  Nevertheless, Beth had been warned to leave the floor vents open, and by and large she was a good child and not too terribly mischievous.  She did tell the occasional untruth when it was advisable in her view, but as she usually got found out and punished, it didn’t often strike her as a viable option.

There was one notable occasion, however, when Beth found it to be the sine qua non, the absolutely necessary element, to add comfort to her existence.  And this was when her cousin Bella came to stay the night.  Now Bella was about a year or two younger, and wasn’t used to being lied to by Beth, so she was unprepared for what happened when the two girls were left alone for the night.  Just as Bella had requested, there was a night-light burning to one side of the bedroom, and while Bella found this a fine method of reassurance in a strange place, Beth found it irksome and just knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink with it on.  She had been warned by her mother to leave the light burning if Bella wanted it on, as a mark of courtesy to her guest, yet since it was her bedroom they were sleeping in, in her nice warm bed, and everything was beckoning for an evening of confidences and strange stories in the dark, she just knew there must be some other way to arrange things to her satisfaction.

Suddenly, it came to her in a flash of inspiration!  She’d share with Bella one of her own nightmares that had happened once or twice to trouble her own sleep; only, she’d pretend that it had really happened, and surely Bella couldn’t refuse to allow her to turn off the light then!  So, slowly and carefully, trying to suit her story to what Bella was likely to believe, Beth explained, with many a gesture and fearsome expression:

“Well, see, Bella, it’s not that I don’t want the light on; but at night, there’s a big, fat, mean ol’ wolf that comes up in the floor register, and if he can see us, he might eat us.  Or tear us up to pieces, and then eat us.  But if we have the lights all out, then he can’t even see where we are, and all we have to do is go to sleep, and he’ll leave us alone and go away.”

Bella’s eyes grew large.  “But won’t he hear us talking?” she asked, her voice shaking with the faithful tremors of the new convert, gullible but still with questions.  “Naw,” said Beth airily, “He never hears me when I sing to myself in the dark.”  “Well, then, won’t he smell us?” Bella persisted, not liking this strange mutated creature of frightful fairy tales at all.  “NO!  He doesn’t smell; something is wrong with his nose.”  “Well, can’t we just close the register and keep him out?”  This example of independent thinking, which moreover had all the marks of her own previous thoughts on the subject, riled Beth.  “NO!  Not unless you want to be a baby and freeze all night, without any heat.  I’m telling you, the only thing to do is to turn out the light.  And we’d better hurry, because I think I hear him coming now!”

Had Beth had time to think the matter through at leisure, before her parents had sprung the surprise on her that she was expected to endure a night-light all night, she might probably have thought of a better solution.  Because this one clearly had serious drawbacks, one of which was that Bella now wailed in a loud voice, “I want my mama!  I want my mama, and I want to go home!”  Why this lie?  Especially since no wolf or even any self-respecting werewolf was likely to come up through a floor register in a modern house at night?  Suffice it to say that this took place back in the 1960’s, when naughty children were still likely to be punished with at least a mild spanking, as well as having privileges taken away, and such methods were enough to reassure the erring Beth that whatever wolves lurked below the floorboards were best left unmentioned when company came.  Bella went home still frightened, though in a huff as well for a few weeks when she was assured that Beth had only been “telling a story,” as such matters were euphemistically called by the children’s doting grandmother.

And there ends this whimsical (and true) tale of the fall season, my second early contribution to the Halloween holiday which will come next month.  But you should know that if it’s ever a choice between being in the dark all night and managing to sleep, or sleeping with a light on in a room with a floor register, old memories have convinced me that the dark room is the best (and for good measure, I might even pile up extra blankets on the bed and shut the floor register as Bella suggested–after all, even a cousin who’s a ‘fraidy-cat can’t be all wrong!).

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June 30, 2014 · 4:40 pm

Fame Versus a Moment in Time–Joyce Carol Oates’s “Three Girls”

Have you ever read a story and been so enthralled by what it reveals about a famous person that you feel a strong impulse to research it and find out whether or not it’s a true story?  But then, you decide that it tells you something more essential about what we all are, and think that of course it’s true, whether or not it actually took place as described in exact detail?  That’s how I feel about Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Three Girls.”

This story is addressed to a “you,” which means of course that it is written in the hard-to-master second person singular, and retells an event which happened to the narrator and the person addressed, two of the “three girls.”  It’s all about the romance of books and book lovers, and what it is like to be young and lost in the infinite (or nearly so) world of words and word enthusiasts.  The story is set in “Strand Used Books on Broadway and Twelfth one snowy March early evening in 1956,” and the book descriptions are as important as the descriptions of physical space:  “No bookstore of merely ‘new’ books with elegant show window displays drew us like the drafty Strand, bins of books untidy and thumbed through as merchants’ sidewalk bins on Fourteenth Street, NEW THIS WEEK, BEST BARGAINS, WORLD CLASSICS, ART BOOKS./50% OFF, REVIEWERS’ COPIES, HIGHEST PRICE $1.98, REMAINDERS./ 25¢–$1.00.  Hard-cover/paperback.  Spotless/battered.  Beautiful books/cheaply printed pulp paper.  And at the rear and sides in that vast echoing space massive shelves of books books book rising to a ceiling of hammered tin fifteen feet above!  Stacked shelves so high they required ladders to negotiate and a monkey nimbleness (like yours) to climb.”

It is significant that the story takes place where it does, because it doesn’t take place where the narrator and her friend would expect it to, in surroundings such as “Tiffany’s,” or “the Plaza,” or the “Waldorf-Astoria,” or on “the Upper East Side.”  Instead, it takes place on their own home turf, where they have often been and browsed through the books before, at a stage in their relationship with each other which causes them all too eagerly to incorporate their enthusiasms with a certain event that takes place there, quite unexpectedly.  The event?  They sight a third girl poring through the sections of books, a girl older than they by about 9 years, but dressed like a girl still, in contrast to her usual famed appearance:  they see Marilyn Monroe, intently perusing books in the modern poetry section, first of all, then picking up Darwin’s Origin of Species, then going through shelves marked “Judaica.”  Unseen by her for most of the story, they watch her read, astonished to conclude that she apparently wants to be like them, as they see themselves, two girls with a love for poetry and writing and reading.

They have previously considered Monroe’s world to be beneath them, to be frivolous and airheaded and needful of men–whom they pride themselves on doing without–to make it meaningful.  But now they see that Marilyn Monroe has a more serious side, wants to share the world they two share with each other especially, and when she hesitates near the checkout, fearful apparently of being recognized, they take her money and buy her books for her, rather than doing the more pedestrian thing of asking for her autograph.  She lends her magic aura to their friendship, however, more, perhaps, to their love relationship.  She gives them as a thank-you one of the books she bought, and they treasure it as a talisman both of their adventure in the bookstore and of their connection with each other.  The last paragraph of the story reads:  “That snowy early evening in March at Strand Used Books.  That magical evening of Marilyn Monroe, when I kissed you for the first time.”  Thus, Marilyn, far from being a force which causes them to scorn their enthusiasm and surroundings, instead consecrates these things for them because she turns out to have a side which is equal to the more serious topics (than movie fame) which engage them.

Though I hesitate to expose my own dubiousness about whether or not Marilyn Monroe was “bookish,” I should at least reveal that I was curious as to whether or not Joyce Carol Oates meant for her two main characters to have been correct or deluded in their notion that the woman they saw was Monroe.  For one thing, she commented on the “blue eyes” of Marilyn:  in all the photos I’d seen of her, I’d thought Monroe had chocolate brown eyes, and the movies of hers I’d seen were too long ago for me to be sure.  Though the experience of the two girls was still significant regardless of whether or not it was actually Monroe (just as the story was significant whether or not it was autobiographical), I was intrigued by what Oates’s intentions were in this respect.  So, I actually looked up a gallery of photos of Marilyn Monroe.  A lot of the shots were in black and white, and those which weren’t seemed to suggest that her eyes were dark.  In two of the photos taken close up and in color with Monroe’s eyes very wide open, however, the eyes were clearly a deep and pellucid blue!  It was just the excessive dark eye makeup of the time which had deceived me.  Thus, apparently Oates meant for the experience of the two girls to be a genuine one, in literary terms at least.  And also in literary terms (with particular reference now to postmodernism), Monroe’s cameo appearance is meant to signify an interpenetration of the “realism” of films and the eerie hyperreality of seeing a film star in actual life, which is rather like seeing where the “toys” are put away after we are finished “playing” with them.

To the two girls, however, the experience joins them even more strongly to each other, as does the one book Monroe gives them to share (a book of poems by Marianne Moore, another M. M.).  The glamor of the film world is therefore bestowed like a halo upon a world which for the main characters already had its crown of light; to find an unexpected “ally” of sorts involved in their dreams and fantasies of literary excellence, however, gives the experience a validity from an unexpected quarter, and somehow these situations always impress us humans the most.  I still remember once back in the mid-70’s, when I was briefly in Cannes, and came back with a photo of a startling redhead whose picture had been accidentally taken while I was filming a town square:  my family and I argued amongst ourselves for days as to whether or not it was Ann-Margret (the stage name of Ann-Margret Olsson).  The square was still beautiful and historic regardless of who the intruding redhead was, but somehow to others looking at the photos with us, the photo became not “And this is the such-and-such Place in Cannes” but “Here’s the square in Cannes where we think Ann-Margret walked in front of the camera.”

Such is fame, and such is the significance of a moment in time in Oates’s story:  the fame is there for everyone to see, and gets as near to immortality as humans can perhaps conceive of, but the moment in time in which ordinary people think they brush up against fame in non-typical or unexpected surroundings often becomes the touchstone for a private moment of their own when they felt they were in communication with infinity because of something they were sharing with others who, like them, “just happened to be there.”

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June 21, 2014 · 4:31 pm

How much does God weigh?–Emily Dickinson and her quizzical answer

Today is a hot, sunny, beautiful day of summer, when the sky and the ocean are both full of blue ecstasy, and that makes it just right for a little ditty of a post on the natural world, so that I can return to it as soon as possible and leave the air conditioning and the computer to their own devices (yes, I’m getting lazy in the summer heat, you guessed it).  So, I chose a short three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, who is the perfect poet when images from nature come into question, as so many in her huge corpus of short poems have images and a figurative lexicon drawn from nature and its seasonal languages, even when the subject is death, or the departure from the world of nature.  This poem (#632 of her poems), however, includes some of her homey domestic images as well, the images of a woman used to keeping house and dealing with household implements.  But the real “kicker” about this poem is the way it goes along so very, very simply only to hit us with a real conundrum of an image at the very end.  Here is how it goes:

“The Brain–is wider than the Sky–/For–put them side by side–/The one the other will contain/With ease–and You–beside–/

The Brain is deeper than the sea–/For–hold them–Blue to Blue–/The one the other will absorb–/As Sponges–Buckets–do–/

The Brain is just the weight of God–/For–heft them–Pound for Pound–/And they will differ–if they do–As Syllable from Sound–”

There is something a bit sly and even coy about the way she leads us into her   transcendent world, which while using simple everyday images, sensations, and experiences makes such astounding transitions to experiences beyond this world.  She starts easily enough, by observing that the brain can contain both the image of the sky and the experience of seeing it, as well as the self.  “Well, okay, Emily D.,” one is bound to say, “I think we can accept that for starters.”  Then, she passes on to another apparently limitless thing the senses encounter, which curiously enough is less big than the sky, when it seems that it might otherwise be more poetically ordinary to start with the smaller of the two items (the sea) and build up in the next stanza to the larger (the sky).  But then, we find that her quirkiness or perhaps odd sense of humor has assigned a color to the brain (she says of the brain and the sea “hold them–Blue to Blue–” which means to compare the two “blue” items).  This makes us forget for the moment our previous quibble about relative sizes of infinite or quite large things, and leaves us, bemused, to go on to the last stanza.

Here, in the last stanza, Dickinson is asking us to perform another and even more daunting task, really quite impossible even for the believer in God, and certainly more than impossible for the questioner or doubter.  Not that it’s been easy up until now:  so far, we’ve put the brain and the sky side by side, we’ve held the brain and the sea up to each other for comparison, at least mentally, and been asked to imagine the brain soaking up the sea as a sponge would a bucket of liquid.  Now, we are being asked to “heft” the brain and God, to judge whether or not she is just when she suggests that they are of a similar “weight” and “differ–if they do–” and here the problem comes in.  Now, we are no longer being asked to judge of something which can at least be visualized with a great deal of imagination:  now we have to guess what the difference might be, if there is any, between “syllable” and “sound.”  The one is presumably the visual or physical or mental notation of the second, which proposes a more sophisticated relationship than between the items in the other two stanzas.  If one reads the items in order and assumes that the brain is the “syllable” and God the “sound” (and there is really no assurance that this is the correct “formula,” except that “sound” seems slightly more mysterious, as God would probably be thought to be), then the first, the brain, records or notates the second, God, and the second is the fulfillment of the first.  But it’s a stretch.

Perhaps the useful thing to end this post with is the observation that Dickinson, in many if not all of her poems (and yes, I do want to assure you that my curiosity was once pronounced enough to take me through the whole volume), likes to play “riddle me this” with images and concepts.  She finds in so many instances that the natural world speaks to her of what is beyond it, yet retains its own quiddity and essence, partaking of the “great beyond” without being any less literal and precious as what it is on earth.  Even the experiences of imagining death use homey and everyday images and pictures drawn from the natural world, because death is the great riddle of our existence, yet is a part of the natural world as well, and Dickinson was well acquainted with its appearance in nature.  And now that I have paid my tribute both to one of the greatest American poets of all time and to the lovely and perplexing world of nature that inspired her, I’ll quit writing, and go off to be inspired by the summer day myself (for so at least one always hopes to be).  Goodday to all my readers, and here’s hoping that even if you aren’t in the middle of summer where you are, that you find something in the natural world to make you happy today.

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June 14, 2014 · 7:27 pm

A Conflict of Worlds–Two traditions in Amrita Pritam’s story “The Weed”

Though there are narrated sections in Amrita Pritam’s short story “The Weed,” the real interior story is about a dialogue between traditions which takes place in the actual dialogue and in the happenings of the story.  As the educated narrator says at the very beginning–a sophisticated and more worldly woman known simply as “bibi,” a term of affection–“Angoori [the younger character] was the new bride of the old servant of my neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor.”  “Bibi” takes care in her relation of events to establish that Angoori is a joyous and cheerful and attractive young woman recently married to a much older husband, and is very traditional in her beliefs and values.

For example, Angoori has been taught and apparently believes that it is sinful for a village woman like herself (but not a “city” woman, like the narrator) to know how to read.  She also believes that it is a great sin for a woman to fall in love with her husband except through the intervention of her father.  The acceptable tradition is that a girl child, when five or six, “adore[s] someone’s feet.”  In this, she is directed by her father’s wishes, because he has placed money and flowers at the man’s or boy’s feet.  In this way, it is decided whom the girl shall later marry.  The exceptions, those girls who have love affairs, are thought to have eaten of a mysterious “wild weed” that an intending man has placed in a sweet or paan and given them to eat.  Angoori has seen a girl in her village in such a situation, and she says that the girl sang sad songs a lot, and never combed her hair and acted otherwise oddly.  Angoori regards this as a very unfortunate situation, and is glad, apparently, that she is married to Prabhati, the old man who does not always live at her home because he is a servant and eats at his employers’ household.

Nevertheless, a few days later, the narrator finds Angoori in “a profoundly abstract mood,” and the younger woman asks to be taught to read, and to write her name.  Mark what happens next:  the narrator, Bibi, makes a guess that seems to be correct, that it is because Angoori wants to be able to write letters to someone, and to read letters back.  Instead of immediately agreeing as a friend of equal status would probably do if she knew how, Bibi asks her if she won’t be committing a sin in learning to read and write.  The girl refuses to answer, but when Bibi sees her later, she is singing a sad song, and nearly crying, as she had told Bibi the other girl in her village had done.  Bibi further intrudes and asks her if this was the song the girl in her village had sung, and she admits it.  She tries to force Angoori to sing the song to her, but on this point Angoori stands firm:  she will only recite the words.  The narrator further investigates in a logical, forceful manner, and finds that because Angoori’s husband does not eat at home, and the night watchman, Ram Tara, who has been taking tea with milk as a regular guest at Angoori’s and Prabhati’s house, as is the tradition, has been away on a visit, the girl has had not only not much food, but also not even any tea with milk.

Then the narrator Bibi remembers something else about Ram Tara:  [he was] “good-looking, quick-limbed, full of jokes.  He had a way of talking with smiles trembling faintly at the corner of his lips.”  Instead of just asking, as a person who thought of themselves as equal might do, whether or not Angoori was sad to be alone so much, or missed her friend Ram Tara, Bibi makes a particular kind of mischief by almost making a joke to herself of the girl’s village beliefs and traditions:  she asks her, in what seems a kindly but nevertheless mocking fashion, “Is it the weed?”  If the innocent and superstitious girl did not think so before, to have someone she regards as her intellectual superior ask her this sways her conviction on this point.  Far from being able to persuade herself away from her own unhappiness, she responds, “‘Curse on me!….I never took sweets from him…not a betel even…but tea….'”  We are told by the narrator, who seems to relish this point:  “She could not finish.  Her words were drowned in a fast stream of tears.”

In many ways, because this work shares certain tendencies with other 20th century modernist texts in which traditional, aboriginal, or village peoples are viewed supposedly objectively by a better educated person or persons (Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, with its frame story narrator, comes to mind), it has the tendency that makes of the village traditions and mannerisms something quaint or odd, something the character of higher status muses on with varying degrees of wonder, amusement, or curiosity.  Though these texts are not without a certain amount of compassion by and large, by this point in the 21st century even the compassion seems like a form of condescension, and as we can see in this story, even a writer like Pritam, who was clearly and solidly in the camp of those attempting to better conditions for poorer or less advantaged peoples in her native Punjab region, leaves the question of village autonomies unvisited.  While I really enjoyed the story, and felt sympathy was directed at Angoori, it’s a different matter to engineer empathy with Angoori.  This latter is more what late 20th century and early 21st century aims at, in contradistinction to and in rebellion against 20th century models of social reform and conscience.

So, to view this story from a later perspective than that in which it was written is to see highlighted not only the young girl Angoori, which I feel was the original intention of the piece, but to see also the somewhat downward-looking Bibi as a character as well, not simply as an empty tabula rasa or a quiet sounding board to receive the picture of Angoori.  This is why I call this story “a conflict of worlds, two traditions”:  whereas it is Angoori’s tradition to live simply within the bounds of her own village, and to obey its rules, it is also her tradition to respect the opinions and values of those who look down upon her from a superior social height, and to attempt to scale the heights of reading and writing, which have been posited to her as values she could espouse.  By contrast, the narrator Bibi is in her own way sophisticatedly naive, because she has too her own form of blindness in automatically assuming that it’s not simple loneliness but the love affair attributed by Angoori’s village traditions to “the wild weed” that the girl will claim as her dilemma.  The true kindliness is practiced by the author in showing these two characters face-to-face, two faces of what was once a part of India and what is now a part of Pakistan.  Amrita Pritam is clearly not the narrator, but is even one remove farther away, sharing with us a type of encounter which in all likelihood happens relatively frequently, whatever part of the world one is in.  Two forms of naiveté, two forms of sophistication, first contradicting each other then complementing each other, then cooperating with each other.  At the end of the story, it is clear that something else will happen, but what concerns us most has already been seen:  the women, working through the problem together, despite their other differences.  One will take care of the other if it is necessary, and one will make the other feel significant; and this, perhaps, is one of the fairer exchanges life offers.

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