No Joke, But Rather Poetry

Apr1

“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.”
–W.S. Merwin

“The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.”
–Mark Twain

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

April is National Poetry Month, and I intend to give you a gift this month: a poem a day and a suggested poetry book or poetical thought each day. If I miss a day, forgive me. If my poetical selections displease you, again forgive. If you enjoy deceptively simple poetry and light verse that’s not always so light and meaning cloaked in the language of poetry, you might have a good time celebrating National Poetry Month with me.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Mar27

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

This book is one that I might have enjoyed more had I discovered it on my own rather than hearing about it for ages before I finally tried it out for myself. Published in 2003, Reading Lolita has gotten rave reviews, has been recommended widely and repeatedly, and was a best selling memoir. Maybe it was just too inflated for me to appreciate the book for what it was.

Reading Lolita starts out well. In the fall of 1995, the author is meeting with a group of students, all female, in her apartment after she resigned from the university where she was a professor of English-speaking literature. One of her former students reminds her: “She reminded me of a warning I was fond of repeating: do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.” This rather pithy statement seems like a good truth to keep in mind, but in this book there is a fine line between reality, epiphany, and truth. And the line, to extend the metaphor, gets really blurred by the end of the story.

Next, the author introduces her girls, the group who have come to discuss literature in a place where they can do so openly and honestly and without veils and chadors that hide not only their bodies but also their ideas and dignity as persons. Eight women including the author herself. Ms. Nafisi describes them vividly: Manna the poet, Mahshid the sensitive lady, Yassi the comedian, Azin the fashionable divorcee, Mitra the artist, Sanaz the conformist, and Nassrin, the one that the author calls a Cheshire cat.

But after the introductory chapters, maybe even within the first few chapters, the book becomes scattered and sometimes incoherent. The narrative moves from the Thursday morning literary society to insights on Nabakov and The Great Gatsby to the history of Ms. Nafisi’s feud with the Islamic purity police to someone that the author calls her “magician.” The Magician is a sort of literary hermit who’s decided to withdraw from society as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to shame and persecute intellectuals, but who also wields great influence as entertains carefully selected guests in his apartment and gives them advice and counsel? He’s a shadowy figure, and I never was sure whether he was an imagined character (for some literary purpose?) or whether he was real.

The timeline of Nafisi’s narrative jumps around like a cat (yes, on a hot tin roof), and the book is structured around the books and authors that the women read and discuss together: Lolita by Nabakov, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daisy Miller by Henry James, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Although Nafisi mentions and sometimes discusses other books and other authors these four define the four sections of the book. I’m not sure why these four, but I suppose it’s because these are the books that resonated with Ms. Nafisi’s students. Of the four I’ve read Austen and Fitzgerald, and dabbled in Henry James (but not Daisy Miller). Of course, I found the allusions to and commentary on the books I have read more illuminating than those I haven’t. (Nabakov just sounds tawdry and distasteful.)

I had trouble keeping the women and their individual stories straight in my mind. I had a hard time figuring out the chronology of Ms. Nafisi’s life and story. I sort of understand why the women identified so strongly with Lolita; like women in the Islamic Republic, Lolita is a victim of misogyny and abuse and entrapment. But why Daisy in Great Gatsby or Daisy Miller? Both of these ladies are rather careless exploiters of others, rather than being helpless victims or overcoming societal expectations.

Maybe I read too fast. Maybe I wasn’t patient enough to tie the narrative together and mine the diamonds out of it. Nevertheless, it just won’t go on my personal list of all-time great memoirs.

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

Mar25

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl.

Ruth Reichl was a food and restaurant critic for the New York Times in the 1990’s. Apparently, as I learned from reading this book, this position is more powerful than one might imagine. Restaurant reviews and the number of “stars” awarded to a restaurant in NYC can make or break a restaurant. Who knew?

So, since she became a powerful force with her job at the New York Times, Ruth Reichl also became an immediate celebrity in the restaurant world. Her picture was posted in all the restaurant kitchens, and all of the waiters and managers and other workers were warned, even given a bounty, to spot her coming. Which makes it difficult to get at the truth about a restaurant and its food and its service to regular, non-food critic customers.

That’s when Reichl began to don elaborate disguises in order to visit the restaurants on her list, incognito. Not only did she disguise herself, she imagined, with the help of an ex-drama coach and old friend of her mother’s, an entire persona for herself as she visited restaurants as Molly the retired high school teacher, or Betty Jones the poor spinster, or Brenda the redheaded extrovert, or even her own mother (deceased). The disguises enabled Reichl to do her job, which was to write an unbiased and honest review of a given high dollar restaurant, but they also gave her insight into herself, the kind of person she was able to become, the kind of person she wanted to be, and the core of her own identity.

I thought Ms. Reichl’s food memoir was interesting and insightful, especially in the chapter where Reichl becomes Emily Stone, a “dried-up prune” of a woman with an entitled attitude and a chip on her shoulder. When her dinner companion tells her, “These disguises have gone too far. I hate the person you’ve become,” Reichl realizes that “if Brenda was my best self, Emily was my worst.” All of the people she pretends to be are really at least partly herself. It made me wonder again about actors and actresses and the stress of pretending to be people who may be drawn from the worst aspects of one’s own secret self.

I did enjoy reading about Ms. Reichl’s adventures in New York City restaurants that are all so expensive and exotic that I will certainly never visit them myself. Eventually I’d like to read some of her other books, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, or Save Me the Plums. This book, Garlic and Sapphires, does include recipes (which I will probably never try since I’ve grown a deep aversion to cooking in my old age) and a few of the articles that Ms. Reichl wrote for the Times when she was their food critic. Ruth Reichl went on to become editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.

At the Sign of the Golden Compass by Eric P. Kelly

Mar24

Eric P. Kelly‘s historical novel, The Trumpeter of Krakow, won the Newbery Medal in 1929. At the Sign of the Golden Compass was published ten years later in 1938, and it has a lot in common with Mr. Kelly’s earlier award-winning novel. Although Golden Compass begins in London in 1576 with the nineteen year old printer’s apprentice Godfrey Ingram being accused of crime he didn’t commit, the main setting is the European continent, specifically the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Spain and Holland are at war, and rebellious and undisciplined Spanish troops are quartered in the Flemish city of Antwerp, threatening violence and pillage to the citizens of the city at any time. Or perhaps the Dutch troop will fight the Spanish in the very heart of the city itself.

Godfrey Ingram, after fleeing to Antwerp, finds himself in the middle of not only a war between the Spanish and the Dutch, but also an intellectual battle between medieval astrologers, sorcerers, and assorted fakirs who fear the spread of knowledge and of literacy and the progressive printers, authors and translators who are working to educate and illuminate by the power of the written word and the printing press. Godfrey finds sanctuary and begins work at the printshop of Christopher Plantin, who is memorialized at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp to this day. Other actual historical characters who make an appearance in the novel are philosopher Justus Lipsius, Governor of Antwerp Champagney, Phillip II of Spain, and the painter Peter Paul Rubens.

The central antagonist in the novel is a famous astrologer and sorcerer (as in The Trumpeter of Krakow), and the book shows the controversy between the new ideas brought to the public by means of the printing press and the old superstitions that held men in bondage before the advent of mass printing. In fact the two main characters, Godfrey Ingram and Christopher Plantin, discuss the allure and power of printing toward the end of the book:

“I would far rather be a master craftsman in this trade than posses a doctor’s gown. Yea, I would rather print fine books than own a hundred ships that bore treasures from the Americas or the East.”
The Master’s eyes brightened. “You have it, too,” he said. “The fatal fascination of the press. I sometimes think that ink is a curse, that it lures men on when nothing else in this life interests them. I, indeed, am one such, caught in this folly. Yet, I would not have it otherwise. Write, I cannot. The gift of words has not been given me. But I have the desire, the madness–call it what you will–to print the words of others. To keep alive in the world the thought of thinking men, to spread abroad ideas that enliven and elevate.”
p.189-190

Eric P. Kelly’s style of writing is somewhat florid and overly dramatic; however, he is dealing with dramatic events: the rise of the printing press, the evil of deviltry and superstition, and the sack of Antwerp in 1576, also called the Spanish Fury and known as the greatest massacre in Belgian history. If you’ve read The Trumpeter of Krakow, the style of writing in this book is much the same as in that earlier book. It was off-putting at first, but as I persisted, I became quite engaged in the narrative. It’s not a time or series of events in history that I knew anything about, and I’m glad to have read about it in Mr. Kelly’s book.

A Few Short Truths

Mar21

I have some things to say, here on my own little piece of internet turf:

Teaching that sex outside of marriage between one woman and one man is immoral is traditional Christian teaching. It is Biblical, longstanding, and faithful Jesus’ teaching and to the Christian understanding of human flourishing. (Not to mention to the teaching of most other religions for the past six thousand years.)
Teaching that sexual expression outside of marriage is sin is not equivalent to denying one’s sexuality. The fact that we are sexual beings does not mean that we are compelled or allowed to express that sexuality in any and every way we want. In fact, sexuality is a gift with boundaries. And Christians believe that God asks us, for our own good, to have sex only within those boundaries.
If I say that those boundaries include no rape, no pornography, no homosexuality, no bestiality, no adultery, no prostitution, no fornication (sex before marriage), and no pedophilia, that does not mean that I am saying that fornication is the same as bestiality.
Nor does it mean that I am equating the people that engage in any of these sins or the people who are victims of those who engage in these sins with animals.
Nor am I “sin-leveling”: I recognize that some of these sins are more damaging to humans than others. Nevertheless, all are sin.
This teaching of “sexual purity” (if you want to call it that) does not lead directly or indirectly to murder.
Giving men and women strategies to use to redirect their thoughts away from sexual temptation does not lead directly or indirectly to murder either.
Jesus said, “I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” He is telling men not to look at a woman with lust: the desire and intent to dehumanize and use that woman to satisfy his own sexual desires. Telling men not to look at pornography and not to look at actual human beings with lust, to look away when temptation comes, is not disrespectful to women, it is not blaming those women for his temptation, and it is not bad advice.
If a man or a woman does blame other people for his or her own temptations and sin, that person is engaging in an age-old attempt to justify his or her own sin. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. But God holds each of us responsible for our own actions.
There is hope for any person who believes he has a “sexual addiction”, and that hope is found in the forgiveness and redemption provided by Jesus Christ. Fall on His grace and then choose to follow Him daily, hourly, in obedience and love for other people who are all His creation, made in His image, not to be used or regarded as sexual objects.
There is also hope for those who are the victims of sexual abuse and objectification. Jesus has compassion for the suffering that any of us endure at the hands of others, and He offers rest for the weary and victimized and forgiveness for any sin which separates us from the perfection that God demands.

Phantastes by George MacDonald

Mar15

I am reading MacDonald’s quite strange and wonder filled book, Phantastes. In chapter eight, Anodos, a young man travelling in Fairyland, takes on a shadow-self that follows and eventually surrounds him, killing any light and any beauty that comes near. And after some travel in the company of the shadow, Anodos writes:

“But the most dreadful thing of all was that I now began to feel something like satisfaction in the presence of the shadow. I began to be rather vain of my attendant, saying to myself, ‘In a land like this, with so many illusions everywhere, I need his aid to disenchant the things around me. He does away with all appearances, and shows me things in their true color and form. And I am not one to be fooled with the vanities of the common crowd. I will not see beauty where there is none. I will dare to behold things as they are. And if I live in a waste instead of a paradise, I will live knowing where I live.'”
Phantastes by George MacDonald, p.78

Just like C.S. Lewis’s dwarfs in The Last Battle, Anodos is no longer to be fooled by the illusions of beauty and magic and fairy dust. Anodos believes that the darkness of the shadow is showing him reality, but darkness can’t “show” anything. One can only truly see when one is in the light, not the shadow.

Unfortunately, I know at least one young man whose name could be Anodos, a name that means “lost” or “pathless.” I am praying that he comes to see the enchanted and beautiful paradise where he actually could be living instead of trusting the disenchantments of the Shadow.

Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser

Feb27

I just finished reading Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, and although I think the biographer has some underlying assumptions and biases about politics and history that I would not agree with, I still recommend the book. I thought it quite insightful, and it provided background and details that I did not know before about Ms. Wilder’s life.

The book spends as much time on the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s only surviving child, Rose Lane Wilder, as it does on Laura’s life. Perhaps because their lives were so intertwined, the daughter and the mother come across as enmeshed in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship that nevertheless produced several wonderful and classic books. In spite of Rose’s mostly negative influence, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s philosophy of life shines through the books. Garth Williams, the second and most famous illustrator of the Little House books, wrote this about Ms. Wilder after meeting her on her farm in Missouri:

She understood the meaning of hardship and struggle, of joy and work, of shyness and bravery. She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.
Prairie Fires, p. 263-264

The same could not be said for her daughter.

In fact, even though I read A Wilder Rose: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and their Little Houses by Susan Wittig Albert, a fictionalized account of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose and their somewhat stormy collaboration in writing the Little House books, and I knew that Rose was a difficult person, I didn’t really realize how very unstable she was. Fraser blames Rose’s outbursts and tantrums and trail of broken relationships on childhood trauma and possible mental illness. However, the childhood trauma rationale seems like an excuse rather than a reason. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the mother, endured much more and much worse than Rose ever did, and Laura, while not a perfect person, was certainly more mentally stable and plain likable than Rose ever was.

So, partly because of what I read in this biography, I am considering removing the two books (of three that he wrote) that I have in my library by Roger Lea MacBride, fictionalized sequels to the Little House books about Rose Wilder Lane’s childhood in Missouri. MacBride was Rose Wilder Lane’s protege and heir, and he seems to have been something of a sycophant and a leech. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with his books, but I also don’t know that they are worth keeping. Perhaps I should pass them on to someone else. I haven’t read the books by MacBride, and since people occasionally ask for them and I got them donated, I added them to the library. But now, I’m wondering. Has anyone here read the MacBride books? Are they well written? Worth keeping?

At the Seven Stars by John and Patricia Beatty

Feb10

If a reader wants to be immersed in the world of mid-eighteenth century London, with lexicographer Samuel Johnson, actor David Garrick, painter William Hogarth, Jacobites and Hanoverians, orphans, beggars, spies and even murder, At the Seven Stars would be just as immersive if not quite as wide-ranging as A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. ( The main character of At the Seven Stars does make a brief, compelled visit to France.) The story begins in 1752 as fifteen year old impoverished and orphaned Richard Larkin, sent to London from the Pennsylvania Colony to live with his uncle who pre-deceases Richard’s arrival, discovers a three year old abandoned child, Abby, who is worse off than he is. And who should come along as unlikely savior but an ugly and monstrous old man, Mr. Johnson, who gives the young child a penny and also deigns to give young Richard some advice: go and apply for work at the Seven Stars, a nearby tavern. The Seven Stars seems to be a good place to work and a good place for little Abby to cosseted and cared for—until Richard inadvertently witnesses a political plot and even worse, a murder. Now where can Richard and Abigail find refuge from the spies and counter-spies and political intrigue that threaten their lives?

Central to the plot of this novel, which I would classify as Young Adult because of the age of the protagonist and because of the aforementioned murder (and subsequent violence and murder, which is described starkly but not gratuitously), is the Elibank Plot of 1752. You can look it up if you want, or just find out about it as you read the novel. The plot is engaging while not as fast-moving as a novel published in the twenty-first century might be. (At the Seven Stars was published in 1963, before the designation of YA became popular, and before attention spans were quite so much attenuated by various factors of modern life.) But the plot was not the most salient feature of the novel. The setting is so well realized that I found myself turning pages not to see what would happen so much as to read new revelations about what life and politics were like in 1752 London.

Recreated in full costume, are the lords and ladies, the street urchins, the men of arts and letters, who peopled the flowering of the Age of Reason. With cloak-and-dagger overtones, a history adventure that is vivid, authentic, and hard to put down.
We have tried to make our historical personages as real as it is possible to make them in every way–in speech, personality, views, action, and in their physical appearance in 1752.
The speech of the characters in this book has been re-created from eighteenth century literature and documents. Samuel Johnson, Hogarth, Garrick and the others, including the London cockney characters, actually would have spoken in the manner and used the words we have given them.
from the book jacket blurb, Foreword, and the Author’s Note at the end of the book

Patricia Beatty was a high school English teacher and author of tow previous books of historical fiction for children at the time of this novel’s publication, and her husband John was a college history and humanities professor, specializing in 17th and 18th century history. The couple combined their knowledge and talents, and their experience of living in London for a couple of years (1959-1960), to produce the verisimilitude and excitement of this spy novel which ends with neither the Jacobites nor the Hanoverians smelling too sweet. According to the depiction in this novel, the Jacobites were a nest of vipers, and the Hanoverians were even worse. A plague on both their houses!

Apparently, Samuel Johnson had Jacobite sympathies. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the hope of the Jacobites, died in Italy in 1788, deserted by his friends and allies and never having gained a throne. And the painter William Hogarth, who died in 1764 before the American Revolution was much more than a dim spark, was a friend and correspondent of none other than Benjamin Franklin. Actor David Garrick was a friend of Johnson’s and of Hogarth’s. Who knew? What side would you have taken in the politics of 1752? Jacobite or Hanoverian? Or well out of that frying pan and into the soon-to-be conflagration of the rebellious colonies?

Born on This Day: Ferdinand Magellan, 1480-1521

Feb3

“You must realize, Fernao, that the ambitions of our expedition are not for one nation alone, but for the benefit of all mankind. The all-important factor, therefore, is not whether any individual nation, such as Portugal, will underwrite it, but which one will have the foresight to do it. Let’s make haste for Spain and see King Carlos.” ~Cartographer Ruy Faleiro, as imagined in the Landmark history book, Ferdinand Magellan: Master Mariner, after the King of Portugal turned down the opportunity to fund the two men in their attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

I wonder if Magellan was truly so patriotic as to wish to give the glory of circumnavigating the globe to his birth nation of Portugal and whether Mr. Faleiro was truly such an internationalist. Whether or no, it turns out that Faleiro did not accompany Magellan on his famous voyage, either because Faleiro’s horoscope warned him of danger and violence or because Mr. F went mad just before the expedition was to set sail. Either way he missed out on the voyage for “the benefit of all mankind”, and Magellan (and Spain) got the glory–and the danger.

Scots and All Things Scottish on Robbie Burns Day

Jan25

I thought I’d link to some old posts about books set in Scotland and plan to read a few new ones in honor of Robert Burns Day, b. January 25, 1759.

I’d like to read some of the books from this list:
Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter.
The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson. Set in Scotland during the Jacobite Revolution of 1745 and its aftermath.
Mrs. Tim Gets a Job by D.E. Stevenson.
The Fields of Bannockburn by Donna Fletcher Crow.
Martin Farrell by Janni Howker.
Waverley by Sir Walter Scott. A young English dreamer and soldier, Edward Waverley, is sent to Scotland in 1745, into the heart of the Jacobite uprising.
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott. I read about half of this one, but found it hard going.
Valiant Minstrel: The Story of Harry Lauder by Gladys Malvern. Sir Harry Lauder was a vaudeville singer and comedian from Scotland.
Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald.
Highland Rebel by Sally Watson.
The King’s Swift Rider by Mollie Hunter.
Scottish Seas by Douglas M. Jones III.
The Flowers of the Field by Elizabeth Byrd.
In Freedom’s Cause: A Story of Wallace and Bruce by GA Henty.
Meggy MacIntosh: A Highland Girl in the Carolina Colony by Elizabeth Gray Vining.
Mary Queen of Scots and The Murder of Lord Darnley by Alison Weir.

Then, here are some Scottish flavored books I’ve read but not reviewed here at Semicolon. I remember all of these as books I would recommend:
Immortal Queen by Elizabeth Byrd. Historical romance about Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Iron Lance by Stephen Lawhead.
The 39 Steps by John Buchan.
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush by Ian MacLaren.. A collection of stories of church life in a glen called Drumtochty in Scotland in the 1800’s. Recommended.
The Little Minister by J.M. Barrie. I get this one mixed up in my head with The Bonnie Brier Bush because both are set in rural Scotland among church people, and both are good. Also recommended.
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald.
The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald.
The Queen’s Own Fool by Jane Yolen. Mary, Queen of Scots again.

Recommended by other friends and bloggers:
The Tartan Pimpernel by Donald Caskie. Reviewed by Barbara at Stray Thoughts.
Robert Burns’ poetry, highlighted at Stray Thoughts.
Thistle and Thyme by Sorche Nic Leodhas. I actually have this collection of Scottish folktales in my library.
Heather and Broom by Sorche Nic Leodhas.
Claymore and Kilt : Tales of Scottish Kings and Castles by Sorche Nic Leodhas.
The Scotswoman by Inglis Fletcher.
Guns in the Heather by Lockhart Amerman.
The Gardener’s Grandchildren by Barbara Willard.
Duncan’s War (Crown and Covenant #1) by Douglas Bond.
Outlaws of Ravenhurst by M. Imelda Wallace.
Quest for a Maid by Frances May Hendry.
Little House in the Highlands by Melissa Wiley.
Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff. “The beginnings of the Jacobite rebellion when King James fled to Holland.”
The Stronghold by Mollie Hunter.
The Lothian Run by Mollie Hunter.
The Three Hostages by John Buchan. Recommended by Carol at Journey and Destination.
Scotland’s Story by H.E. Marshall.

Movies set in Scotland:
Brigadooon. I like this one partly because of Gene Kelly, partly because it takes place in Scotland, and partly because Eldest Daughter was in a local production of Brigadoon several years ago.
Stone of Destiny. Recommended by HG at The Common Room. I enjoyed this movie based on a true incident in 1950 when four Scots student stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey and returned it to Scotland from whence it came back in the thirteenth century.
Braveheart. William Wallace and all that jazz.

Scots poetry:
Young Lochinvar by Sir Walter Scott.
From Marmion by Sir Walter Scott.
My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns.
In the Prospect of Death by Robert Burns.
Lament for Culloden by Robert Burns.
Beneath the Cross of Jesus by Elizabeth Clephane.
O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go by George Matheson.