This One's for Mimi, if She's Tuning In

The great salmon speaks: The secret is that nothing knows, the secret is that all life flows, the secret is that thoughts and heart are different beings, split apart, and though we change in skin and bone each being has its truth alone, while dreams and wandering take you far, accept yourself for what you are, there comes the time when close to home, your self must please itself alone, then sing beneath the lovely sky, the earth asks simply that you try


Can't get it spaced correctly, like a poem, because I don't want to learn to fiddle with the html, but if you read it aloud, you'll naturally hear the separate lines.

The poem is spoken by the salmon who is trying to leap up the water to his home in David Clement-Davies' brilliant novel Fell, the sequel to The Sight, which I haven't read. I won't spoil the plot, but if you love believable fantasy novels in which human - wild animal communication happens, you should try this gem. If you love wolves and their domesticated cousins, the German Shepherds, and know how the dog lies down with its nose on its paws in a posture of resigned patience underlaid with suppressed impatience, then try it. Girl heroine, destined for greatness, finds boy counterpart; much danger and death, many surprises, lots of wolves, and a cold Romanian landscape. Lovely writing. Clement-Davies has a nice website too, where you can see this and his other novels.

Virgin Woolite

The title's a condensed triple pun. Never mind. This is too good not to share with toto el mundo, and of course they're all tuned in here!



Pretty shiny, eh?

Eloise Wilkin, Resistance is Futile!

I think I posted a bit of this some time back, but good things, the REALLY good things, need to be brought out into the light every now and then.  Much as I love the finest of the early Little Golden Books' illustrators, there were a few that were not so admirable.  If you don't know about My Little Golden Book about Zogg, inspired by Jane Werner Watson and Eloise Wilkin, then don't wait -- take a look here, now.  Here's a sample.

Gardener Writers

When you're not digging in the garden, it's a joy to read writings by other gardeners. here are a couple of excerpts from books I've been enjoying on rainy days and dark evenings.

"How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary. Why are those wonderful weeping wisterias (or so they looked in a catalog: wonderful, inviting, even perfect) not fitting in the way I had imagined them, on opposite sides of a stone terrace made up of a patchwork of native Vermont stone? I had not yet understood and also had not yet been able to afford incorporating the element of water in my garden. I could not afford a pond. I could not understand exactly where a pond ought to go in the general arrangement of things. I do not even like a pond, really. When I was a child and living in another part of the world, the opposite of the part of the world in which I now live (and have made a garden), I knew ponds, small, really small bodies of water that had formed naturally (I knew of no human hand that had forced them to be that way), and they were not benign in their beauty: they held flowers, pond lilies, and the pond lilies bore a fruit that when roasted was very sweet, and to harvest the fruit of the lilies in the first place was very dangerous, for almost nobody who loved the taste of them (children) could swim, and so attempts to collect the fruit of pond lilies were dangerous; I believe I can remember people who died (children) trying to reach these pond lilies, but perhaps no such thing happened, perhaps I was only afraid that such a thing would happen, perhaps I only thought if I tried to reap the fruit of pond lilies I would die. I have eaten the fruit of pond lilies, they were delicious, but I can't remember what they tasted like, only that they were delicious and that they were delicious, and that no matter that I couldn't remember exactly what they tasted like, they were delicious again.
In my garden there ought to be a pond. All gardens, all gardens with serious intentions (but what could that mean) ought to have water as a feature. My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts."
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book):

"How much I long sometimes for a courtyard flagged with huge grey paving stones. I dream of it at night, and I think of it in the daytime, and I make pictures in my mind, and I know with the reasonable part of myself that never in this life shall I achieve such a thing, but I still continue to envy the fortunate people who live in a stone country, such as the Cotswolds, or in the northern counties of Yorkshire, Westmorland, and Cumberland....
"Amongst these essential and fundamental coverings I should plant small treasures. shall we say as an axiom that a very small garden should have very small things in it? The picture should fit the frame. I should have lots of little bulbs, all the spring-flowering bulbs; then for the later months I should let the pale-blue Camassias grow up, and some linarias, both pink and purple, such easy things, sowing themselves in every crevice. Every garden maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth. The tiniest garden is often the loveliest. Look at our cottage gardens, if you need to be convinced."
Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book (edited by Phillipa Nicholson)

Atlantic Sunrise

At night, the sound of the ocean is lonely. The sound of it, heard from the campsite, makes me think of vastness and infinite spaces and loneliness. At sunrise, the human scale returns. I shared the beach with this strange creature, which the ranger told me was a tunicate and is actually a whole colony of small creatures living together. It's called sea pork. When the waves roll over it, it shrink to the size and shape of a small avocado. Such a sight!

Noro madness

If you don't know it, there's a color-changing yarn around that has lots of people under its spell. A clever fellow in Brooklyn designed a 1X1 ribbed striped scarf that is so addictive that people all over the country are making them. I even know a woman who is working on TWO. You can find hundred of pictures of these on Flickr. Here's my first one in progress, made with Noro Silk Garden, a blend of silk, wool, and mohair. It's going to Caleb, who will be instructed to keep it on the outside of his coat, not next to his skin -- or he can hang it in his bedroom as a banner. The colors are really richer than shown here. The wonderful thing about working with this yarn, is that you never know which colors are going to turn up and what the juxtapositions will look like. I started with two colors, one quite bright and one quite dark, but in places they become almost the same. Time to buy some more. (Warning: it's not cheap. But it's worth it.)

Winter is edging over for spring, if you just look around

I finally raked up all the oak leaves in the yard, because the warm spell made us all think it was nearly spring, and the daffodil shoots were getting blanched. Spring bulbs are hardy, so I thought exposure would be good for everyone. here are some treasures discovered lately. The one at the top is the beginning of the lovely pale yellow grape hyacinth that sursprised my last spring.

Laura Miller, Part 2

Reading Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: a Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia was a pleasure on many fronts. We usually enjoy reading about books and writers we like and more often read these after the event, just as we read a movie review after seeing the movie, partly to see what another person thought of it and partly to relive the pleasure of watching it. So all through Miller's book we have a great romp through Narnia. But at the same time, Miller writes about the act of reading and how reading develops in children, and about her own life as well. Here's a passage that speaks to me:

"Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine -- the same time as which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me -- he too was 'living almost entirely in [the] imagination....' Like Lewis's, my material life often seemed to me nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm.... I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited....did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in the garden?."

I too sometimes wonder where my predominant traits come from. My parents liked to read but not to garden, and I can see now that they were in some ways people who enjoyed quiet and solitude. For the gardening gene I have to reach back to my maternal great-grandfather, who kept pencilled notes and page references on the endpapers of books and who grew nasturtiums and a vegetable garden in Middletown, Rhode Island.

Continuing the garden theme, Miller writes, "Gardens speak to people of this solitary temperament. Even those of us who don't tend the real ones find the idea of gardens, especially walled ones, evocative.... Garden are man-made concentrations of the natural world, places where nature is trained to seem more itself than it is when left to its own devices. In a way, the artificiality of gardens is like the artificiality of stories, which take the components of life and arrange them into forms that intensify and order them, saturating them with meaning."

Luckily, where I live you can practically garden all year round. Winter is the dormant season, but it's also mild and the ground is rarely frozen. And the long winter nights make lots of time for reading.

I was a reading child.  I got books from our village library, our town library, and the city library.  Books from Providence would come home with my father, who would go there and get three at a time for me, recommended by the children's librarian.  (No -- I never visited a school library, though I'm now a school librarian.) I lived in these books.  Besides playing outdoors, in the small woods and on the shore, and riding my bike all over the neighborhood, reading is where I lived. When my father would come home with three new books, I'd wait till after supper or bedtime, get into my pajamas, then get into bed and examine each one in the stack -- smell it, look at it, savor its promise, then decide which one to read first.  One day when I was about nine, he brought home what would become one of my favorite, most magical books.  It was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Once I went into that wardrobe, my life changed forever.  My bedroom had a large closet under the eaves, and I'd lie in bed at night, KNOWING that if I just believed hard enough I could go into my closet and reach back and enter Narnia. I never got out of bed and actually tried -- so maybe some part of me also knew that it wouldn't happen.  Such is the duality of childhood thinking and desire.  You KNOW that it's true, that the only thing lacking is your lack of faith.  And you're not willing to risk being wrong.  So you go on thinking about your closet and what might happen if you really try.  (Just as, a few years later in junior high school, when I went on a science fiction reading jag, thanks to the tastes of a boy I had a crush on, I KNEW that if I believed and tried hard enough, then ESP would work, and I could silently transmit my thoughts to David Sanderson across the room.)

Narnia was where I wanted to go, and I read the magical book more than once and lived inside it.  But -- and this baffles me -- I never found out till much later that there were other books in the series. I guess I always had enough to read, and I didn't talk about my reading with anyone, and the wonderful and anonymous librarian who sent these treasures home didn't think to send me more Narnia books, so I never knew that there were more.

Then some years later, in college, my friend Jennifer and I discovered Tolkien and also made friends with a graduate student at the Episcopal Theological School and his wife, who was a children's librarian.  And this wonderful woman, Carol Hole, fed Jennifer and me with wonderful new children's books that we'd missed and ones that were new, and we discovered the remaining six Narnia books.  And were not too old or sophisticated to enjoy them with the same intensity as our child selves.  And we also discovered that Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford,England, would send us books on faith that we'd pay.  So we acquired lovely hardcover versions of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings, and Charles Williams, and other writers.  I still have these books, but I doubt that Blackwells is now so free about sending to unknown Americans. 

And now, today, because my job kept me imprisoned for several hours of low-key supervision of teenage boys, I read all of Laura Miller's book about Narnia ("the Chronicles," as she calls them).  Since I'm a huge fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books, I've read his virulent opposition to Lewis's fiction and been ambivalent about my own love of the Narnia books.  But the brilliant and articulate Laura Miller has redeemed them for me, putting such criticisms in their place.  I'm not writing here a review of Miller's very fluent and personal book but a suggestion that anyone who has been enchanted by Narnia might like to read what Miller has to say in The Magician's Book.

Out of Print, No Doubt, But Still Great

There are some books that go out of print and stay that way because of changing sensibilities and changing ideas (usually for the better, but we need to think hard before condemning something) about what's good for readers, especially young ones. I have one such at home, and I try not to share it with the children, but I look at it a lot -- in fact, daily, because it's my lap desk, being just the right size. The illustrations are by the wonderful Fyodor Rojankovsky, one of the European immigrant illustrators who came to the U.S. around the time of WWII and found work with the Disney studios and the Golden Book company. His colors are gorgeous, his animals very lively, and his people a bit strange but very engaging. He illustrated lots of Little Golden books and some of the big ones, like this collection, which I remember from my childhood and found a year or so ago in a second-hand store. You can find copies easily on abebooks and other sites, an they're not expensive. There are stories composed mainly of pictures, poems, and regular stories. But the reason it's not currently sold is that some of its images wouldn't be considered appropriate for children nowadays.

While hunting is popular in the part of the country where I live, many modern parents just would not offer to their children a picture like this, with the rifle hanging on the wall behind the contented couple. (Not to mention the crucifix.) There are other pictures, too, which wouldn't be acceptable, like those of the tank and warplane. It's too bad, because it's such a fine book otherwise. Great stories and great illustrations. But it just won't fly.

So, if you're an adult, and you appreciate fine picture book illustration, find a copy of this gem. But you probably shouldn't share it with your youngest friends.

Coming soon: the Babar Question

Reading

I was trying to read some book from somewhere, and it just wasn't grabbing me.  Can't even remember what it was, but it was tedious.  So I put it down and picked up another second-hand Penelope Lively find, Judgement Day.  The change was like leaving the listless warm South Carolina ocean of late August and jumping into a bracing New England pond in June.  Precise, economical writing, well-defined and sympathetic characters, and immediate psychological suspense.  It's just a story of a sophisticated London woman finding engagement in her new home in the seemingly narrow-minded suburbs, trying to help out the local church with its historical pageant.  There's an ineffectual parish minister, who is captured at once by Lively's description:

      He spent several years as a curate in North London, where he found himself out of his depth, made to feel a lackluster figure both by his more racy colleagues and the parishioners.  He was no good at Youth Clubs and disturbed black teenagers.  They made rings around him, as did the jaunty young vicar and his jeaned, chain-smoking wife and her brisk, emphatic community-worker friends.  When the Laddenham living came up he fled with relief.

The village' folk are drawn sympathetically but with a cool eye.  Most of the suspense built up is of a quiet kind: will Clare find a meaningful place in the community? Will the rector break out and do something amazing? What of the quiet, widowed Sydney Porter?  Is Clare's marriage truly happy?  Nothing is predictable.  And neither, says Lively, is modern life, in a village any more than in the city.  While the novel lacks the darkness of McEwen's fiction, villate life is not all tea and flowers.  Accident intrudes cruelly, and wanton human behavior. In a McEwen novel, Clare's child would not have been spared the accident that happens to another.  But it still strikes near her, and she and we are aware that none of us is safe, but that we have to go on and try to live by our lights.

How to Spend a Pleasant Evening

The early part of it, anyway, prime time maybe around 7 p.m.....http://cdn1.ustream.tv/swf/4/viewer.45.swf?cid=317016

A thousand thanks to the wonderful people who put this up.  The puppies are no longer blond balls of fur, and there are just three left, but oh, joy abounding! And a thousand thanks to Roger Sutton, from whom I first heard of this.

Arcane Knowledge Department: Those Nifty Stamp Books!

Did you know that some postage stamp sets are meant to be made into little booklets? I learned this once from a friendly postmistress. Here is a tutorial:

Tater on the High Range

Tater often walks up and down the keys, quite deliberately, I'm sure. It's hard to catch him with the camera, but in this clip, he finally did a descending scale, with a nice resolution -- and then one more note.

He is accompanied this evening by the radio.
Of course, I can't prove to you that he is doing this deliberately. But why else would he walk down the 88 keys, thunderously, then up again, during certain wakeful periods. Of course, you say, he wants to go out! Just open the door!
But because he's a cat he can be perverse and apparently "indecisive." I doubt that a cat is indecisive at all. He's just weighing the odds that, given the cheddar cheese aroma lingering on your fingers from your snack, you will lead him to the kitchen for his own portion. rather than not.
Tater seems to walk deliberately down and up the keyboard. Sweet Pea, on the other hand, steps nimbly and soundlessly along the narrow edge of wood.

Yellow Cat Democrat

For I will consider my cat Tater...

My old yellow cat Tater loves to sit on my lap and read the newspaper, but he also enjoys reading the bits and bytes of news at Truthdig.com.  This evening we discovered that the "A-V Booth" at Truthdig gives us non-cable-TV households access to some very excellent content, such as this "60 Minutes" program interview with Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.  Tater and I, though we don't go about shouting our our excitements, are thrilled about the election and are very happy that Senator Obama will be the 44th President of the United States. I can't speak for Tater's early enthusiasm, because he missed the momentous speech the senator gave at the Democratic convention four years ago, but I was lucky to be in Rhode Island that week, in a household with cable access, and when Obama made his amazing appearance on the national scene, I thought to myself, this man could be president some day.  I truly didn't think it could happen so soon, but now that it has I am deeply thrilled and joyous and optimistic about the future of this country.  The First-Lady-To-Be is an equally impressive a person, and the idea of those wonderful children in the White House is delightful.  I know there are no instant miracles, and his road will be difficult and potentially dangerous for him, but I hope that the majority of citizens are responding with hope and confidence to the fresh air that is invigorating our country.  And I truly believe that this is not a triumph of "liberals" over "conservatives," because it was clear to me from his first appearance that he is deeply conservative in the values that matter and wise and intelligent enough to govern well and to create an energetic consensus. Please visit the link to see this "60 Minutes" program.http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20081117_barack_and_michelle_obama_on_the_next_four_years/

November in the Mountains

It's not mild Portland, Oregon, nor is it the colder southern New England, and there are thousands of microclimates here in the southern Appalachians, depending on elevation and aspect.  In my little yard in town I have differing zones..  Here's some of what's going on in the sunnier areas these days. In this region we plant fall pansies. They are colorful in the fall and hunker down for the winter then come into their own in the spring.

This One's for Members of the Club

Huzzah! Hurray! Long live Honda!
I got in my car this afternoon and noticed this (the picture is after I got home, so subtract a few).  It's hard to read, but Club Members will Get It.

When the wonderful Impala reached 100,000, we were on the way to folk dancing on the Kingsport to Johnson City highway and stopped, as I remember, to celebrate the event.  That was a good old car for its day, but it didn't make it to 200K. My friend Barbara in Massachusetts says she had a Honda that went 300K.  That would be just fine with me.

The mark in the lower left is the ubiquitous pine sap, though how it got INSIDE I don't know.

Reading Catchup

Blame the absence on work, or laziness, or the fact that the cats always try to sit on the keyboard.  It's hard to type when you have to balance the laptop on the edge of your knee.  It's much easier to just READ.  And once in a while I read to the cats. (They love it.) So here are a few booknotes, first on children's books I've read recently.  Now that it's a new school year it's time to read this year's Battle of the Books choices. The most recent is Christopher Paul Curtis's Elijah of Buxton. Curtis has been winning awards for his fine historical fiction, and it's not clear why this one was only a Newbery Honor Book, not THE winner.  It's also a Coretta Scott King winner. 

Elijah is the first freeborn child in the Canadian settlement of Buxton, a real place started by a white Presbyterian minister for free blacks, just over the border from Michigan.  The time is the 1850s, and each family in the settlement has a house and a plot of land. There's an excellent school for the children, who learn Latin and Greek and everything an educated white child would be learning at the time.  When a newly freed or rescued ex-slave arrives in the community, the Liberty Bell (cast in Philadelphia) is tolled ten times in welcome.  Many residents bear marks of slavery, but 11-year old Elijah doesn't really know much about what slavery really was like.  The first half of the novel consists of episodes of everyday life.  Told in the first person in a dialect that's easy to get used to and believe in, the tales of school l and daily life and very funny escapades of Elijah and his friend Cooter constitute a typical children's story, and for a while it seems as though there will be no plot.  But in the second half, the book darkens and becomes a breathtaking coming-of-age story as Elijah travels over the border into to Michigan to right a wrong.  Slave catchers and ruthless people are everywhere, and Elijah becomes involved in a dangerous situation.  Since this is a children's book, the outcome is eventually joyous, but not before Elijah witnesses misery and death first-hand and learns some of the reality of slavery.  His final act before returning home is stunning, and I finished the book in tears.

Trail of Crumbs

Kim Sunee's memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, appeared by chance on my lap.  Kate found it at the Mars Hill Library and passed it on to me.  It's the true story of a young (30-something) woman, born in Korea and abandoned at age three in a market, who is eventually adopted by a New Orleans couple and who, at the time of writing, has ended a domestic relationship with a wealthy Frenchman and is still searching for her true identity and her home.  The book is as captivating as a novel because the author writes so well and has a tale to tell.  Because Kim  or "Keem" --(I call her that because she is so referred to by the people in her life  AND because I can't manage the diacritical marks for her family name) loves to cook, the memoir is also suffused with recipes French, Asian, and New Orleanian.  

    Because there are people in my family who were adopted from other countries at an early age, Kim's story has extra meaning.  We all seek our identity, our place in the world, and for the adopted person there is the extra question of who and why.

  Kim Sunee writes beautifully, for the most part: I could have skipped a few of the more intimate amorous scenes.  But her story is important and engaging, and I recommend this book to everyone.