Bringing in The Leaves

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “Apres Moi, le deluge.”  It means, roughly, “After I go, everything’s coming down” and if everything refers to leaves, the "deluge” is lugin’ .  It’s amazing.  I mean, if deciduous trees were water, my address would be “Alabama River". Now this front's blowing in and my river of leaves has turned into Niagra Falls. Why send me more foliage to rake away, God?  Don't I have enough to clean up already?

Luckily, I’ve been a rake warrior for most of my life.  My hometown was blessed with a ton of elm trees and every fall brought the Battle of Leaves, where each family’s goal was to get those discarded solar panels of photosynthesis off of the grass and over the curb before rain and time glued them to the earth.  There was an undeclared neighborhood competition for the cleanest autumn yard and ours usually came in dead last.  Oh, my mother, sister and I would comb leaves from the  of crabgrass, but our lawn never looked better than “lived in”.  

The best lawn on the street was next to ours, an unsullied, emerald crew-cut of grass that was perfect because our neighbor lady removed each leaf as it fell to earth, picking them up with two fingers and placing them in one of the garbage cans she washed out every other week.  Although her behavior seemed silly to me at the time, I think I understand it a bit better now and not just for health-related reasons.  In tidying her yard, our neighbor was caring for the smidge of earth she recognized as “home” and that care was an overt act of love.

As children, we learn to store away our toys before sleep.  The practice saves toys (and bare feet) from mishaps in the night and the toys can be found the next day. By removing the fallen leaves, my neighbor was preparing her yard for its annual nap.  While daylight was waning, birds were boarding their migratory flights and other mammals were settling down for their sleep, she was scooping up those last souvenirs of summer – the leaves – and preparing her lawn for the winter season so nothing could obscure the sunlight when it shone on new grass in the spring. 

Some more summer to clear away before sleep

It’s a wonderful act of symbiosis to care for the land that nurtures and shelters us in return.  So I rake my leaves and tidy the yard, like a parent straightening the toys and bed covers in a beloved child’s nursery.  Once my yard's bedtime preparations of late autumn are finished (which include multiple requests for water but no reading aloud) it will settle into its season of somnolence.  Then, I’ll go back in the house, we’ll all snuggle down and dream dreams of warmth till the Spring.

How the Other Half Lives

There's something in humanity that makes us split ourselves into groups, don't ask me why. Yesterday, people in my state split into groups for a football rivalry that sometimes resembles a blood feud. When we're not divided over sports teams, we split apart over divisions like politics, gender, or income.  And too many of us still divide into groups based on ethnic background and/or  skin color. Those divisions still run so deep populations coexist side-by-side as strangers, wondering how the other half lives but too afraid to reach out.

Then someone like Randi Pink comes along, brave enough to speak the truth.  That's what she does in her debut Young Adult novel, Into White.   It's the story of LaToya Williams who calls herself Toya; a black girl in a mostly-white high school. This kid knows a lot about alienation and fear. It's not bad enough to be treated like the Invisible Girl by a fair percentage of the students and teachers. It's not just anxiety about her parents' marriage.  When one of the few grounded black students picks on her, Toya utters the same prayer every miserable teenager has made: "Please turn me into somebody different."  The kick is, her prayer is heard.  When she wakes up, Toya is white.

Randi Pink

To everyone outside of her loving, flawed family, Toya now looks like she has Nordic ancestry and right away she sees some changes. Pants fit a bit better, some teachers are nicer and she's no longer Invisible Girl. On the other hand, visibility means becoming a target of those who never saw her before. The "popular girls" praise and then undercut her, suggesting she's fat because she wears a size 6.  (For the record, a size 6 is small, but that's another thing Ms. Pink gets right. In the world of competitive, adolescent, mean girls, it's good to be thin and popular but no one is ever good enough.) And some who knew Toya when she was black now react to her with mistrust.  In other words, it can suck to be white as well.

Any writer good enough to carry the title can develop a nuanced hero or villain, but an author's true talent shows in creating interesting minor characters. Through exposition and suggestion, Ms. Pink deftly sketches a secondary antagonist named Aunt Evilyn and then illuminates the lady in a small but key scene.  In the family, Toya's aunt may be tactless and bossy but there's a whisper of scars in her untold back story.  In defending her aunt, Toya finds the voice that will carry her into the future (which is good). I want to learn more about Evilyn and her past.

In her TED talk, Ms. Pink talks of how we limit ourselves by fear and how confronting fear helps us transcend those limits. Perhaps that same fear is why we wall ourselves into groups.  If so, a courageous voice can knock holes in those walls.

InSantaTy

In the South, we like to decorate for the holidays.  All the holidays.  This is where I first saw an Easter-Egg tree and specialized autumn decor for September, October, and November.  Of course, nothing competes with December and its holiday season.  People began opening boxes and stringing lights down here before their Thanksgiving dinners were completely digested.  So when my friend, Edna said her badly injured back might keep her from putting out her "Santa Collection" I said I'd be glad to help.  I had no idea she suffered from In-Santa-Cy.

I walked into a house that, during Decembers, shelters two people, some plants, and approximately a thousand Santas.  My poor friend lay bound the couch by her TENS unit while her niece, Tanya, had been emptying a treasure trove of Santas from stacks of storage boxes  Santas made of wood, paper, plaster, and metal. Santa's image imprinted on cloth.  Seriously, I don't remember seeing this many images of Father Christmas when I went to Santa's Workshop as a child.  

Don't get excited folks; these are just the coffee-table Santas!

Kris Kringle was on everything: Santa towels, Santa spoon rests, Santa cups and hundreds of Santa statues.  I gulped a little and said, "Where can I help?" and was sent off to the library.

The book room played host the "Historical Santas", statues of St. Nick from various countries made in different years.  There was a whole carton of international Santas and it took awhile to unpack and arrange them. I didn't begin to photograph them all.

Who needs books, when you can shelve Santa?

It the exception of Brazil, we're looking at a NATO of Santas

Good luck reaching a book before New Years!

Not my fault, this trio of Santas all moved
the moment I took the picture!

Hours later the house was bursting with Santas, there were still more boxes to unpack and I was seeing Edna in a different light.   What had turned this sweet, sane little woman into a full-fledged Santa groupie?

Another group of Kris Kringles, complete with holiday mouse.

She laughed saying her son called it her "InSantaty".   Some of these images are souvenirs, some are gifts and others come from crafts she made with her children.  In other words, Santa is more than her ambassador of Christmas, he's a talisman of memory.  Given Edna's generous, sweet nature, I suspect he's her role model too.  As far as role models go, she could go far and do worse.

So I went home to my husband and thought about our collection of 10,000 books, a few toys and some Wind-In-The-Willows figurines (4 moles, 2 water rats, 1 badger, 0 toads).  Yes, one person's collectibles are another's waste of time and money and, like most things, extreme collecting can be bad for the health.  But what someone collects says something about who they are and I can think of few characters more benevolent than Santa Claus.  So, in the interest of kindness and Peace on Earth, perhaps we could all use a touch of InSantaty.

The Real Kings of Broadway

Thanksgiving is celebrated all over the US but most Americans start out their day in New York City. Virtually, that is.  Long before the turkey comes out of the oven, Americans are in front of their TVs, staring at Macy's famous parade.  Some watch it for the tradition, some tune in for the bands, and lots of kids can't wait for the balloons but I watch the parade to see Broadway.  Before the main event kicks off, actors perform excerpts from currently running shows.  The stars seem like the kings of Broadway.

But are they?  Actors are the most visible part of theatre but how much power do they really wield in Times Square?  Very few, it seems.  Behind them are the financial and creative engineers behind every show: the writers, directors and composers but even they can be hired and fired.  Behind them are those that can make a show work and invest the money needed for the show to open: the legendary Broadway Producers.  Do you think Producers are the ultimate in show-biz power?  According to Michael Riedel, there's still one group that's higher.

No matter how good it is, no show can open on Broadway, unless it's booked into a theater and the cadre of people who own and run the theaters on Broadway should really be considered the ultimate power-players in their field.  Riedel's book, Razzle Dazzle is an amazing account of these show-business moguls and the impact they've had on our culture.

Enter, the Schubert Brothers, Sam, Lee, and Jacob, who ran theaters in upstate New York before 1900. With the change of the century, they moved to NYC and bought or built theaters across the country and filled them with shows people wanted to see. More than 100 years later, if you look at the current list of Broadway theaters, the Schubert organization owns 17 of the 41 buildings. Book good shows into those theaters and watch the money flow into the box-office; even if the biggest profits are "ice".

Ice are the profits that come from reselling tickets.  The box-office employee sells blocks of these for a bribe.  Then employees of the theatre or the production company sell the tickets they get as an employment perk and pocket the difference.  The ticket scalpers resell what they got for hugely inflated prices and keep the unearned, untaxed income.  The people who invest funds and talent into the show don't make a dime from this revenue based on their work and the audience dwindles because of the high cost of tickets.  A 1960's investigation began to curtail some of the Ice, but it's still a huge problem: this year the creator of the hit musical, Hamilton, begged the legislature to pass a law stopping computer software "bots" from continuing the practice.

Riedel

The Schubert and the Niederlander (who own 7 theaters) organizations helped create decades of show-biz legends as they saw their business rise, fall and rise again.  There are the good stories, like how Chorus Line brought people back to the theater when NYC itself was bankrupt and there are bad tales, like Dorothy Loudon threatening a kid. (" If you make one move on any of my laugh lines, you will not live to see the curtain call.")

Gossipy, gregarious, and suckers for razzle-dazzle, we're all suckers for Broadway and why not?  It's the New York out-of-towners all want to know and as American as Pumpkin Pie and Thanksgiving.

A Date That's Hard to Forget

Our cultural memory is built around a series of events that resound in our collective memory.  Some of these are good like the date man first walked on the moon, but many are terrible to recall.  Yet we recall them when each anniversary comes around and remember where we were when "it" happened. For my Dad, his first "It" date was December 7, 1941.  His childhood memories were divided by the day he went fishing and came home to a country at war.   For me and a lot of other Baby Boomers, our first "It" day is today.  November 22, 1963.  President Kennedy's assassination threw such a big rock in our river of memory that the ripples hit our personal lives.  

Those ripples are one of the big themes in the King novel titled with that date.  In a way, it's a normal time-travel tale: a man goes back in time to prevent something bad and finds out success can breed a bigger failure.  In another way, it's much more than that; it's a tour of history and a trip through a human heart.

King's research in story tale showed me I don't know very much about the event I'll probably remember for the rest of my life.  Yes, I remember my mother crying uncontrollably when the president was shot and how so many grown-ups around me hated, just hated he'd been killed in our state, Texas.  But I didn't know the assassination probably wasn't Oswald's first attempt; seven months earlier, a retired army general had been shot at in his home and evidence indicates Oswald pulled the trigger. That information suggests something in Oswald's motive to me: he was killed people for fame, not politics.  The segregationist/arch-conservative views of the general were the opposite of Kennedy's liberal ideals.  Oswald wouldn't have targeted both men because of their deeds; they were political opposites.  What the victims had in common was their celebrity status which makes Oswald like Mark David Chapman: someone so determined to be remembered, they'll kill to get into history.

11/22/63 also looks at how America has changed in fifty plus years and how we've stayed the same. Our wage rates and prices may change but our attitudes towards these don't.  There are still good people and bad ones and a lot of souls caught in between.  We all know we live in a global economy but we tend to look at the world through home-town glasses.  We still root for the hero and cry when he loses.  We still get up again after we fall. And, like every generation before or since, there are dates we will never forget.

The Very First Fine-Dining Cookbook

Every Thanksgiving a fair proportion of the American populace tries to transform themselves into chefs.  Although we spend more money eating out than on groceries these days and not cooking 40 percent of the suppers we serve, Thanksgiving is the day when we take to our kitchens and attempt to cook "traditional" dinners.  Add that to this decade's obsession with fine dining and there'll be a lot of untrained cooks in the kitchen this week trying to pretend they're Escoffier.  If you're looking for a cookbook rich in tradition that will make your Thanksgiving feast the talk of the town, have I got one for you!

How to Cook a Peacock a/k/a Le Viandier is so much more than an eye-catching cookbook, it's a journey into medieval France.  These are the recipes of Gillioume Tirel, chef to Philip IV, Charles V, and Charles VI of France.  So when you serve dishes that come from this book, your guests can claim they feasted like kings. But I should say this is no ordinary cookbook.

See, the 14th century wasn't as obsessed as we are with precision.  There's not a word about cooking temps or time in the book.  Nor are there any of those lovely measuring amounts, like cups and teaspoons, that we hold so dear.  Instead, you'll use your imagination and tastebuds and learn a few new cooking terms as well.

For example the first direction in the recipe Lark Grané says:

 "Take larks, restore them, then brown, and put veal in the pot with them, for a better broth."

Restore them? Is he kidding?  Bring them back to life? Luckily the glossary says restoring meat means blanching or brining it.  I remember blanching from Home Ec.  Unfortunately, the recipe also calls for verjuice, something I don't think they sell at my local Piggly Wiggly.  Too bad since it comes from under-ripe grapes

For the truly ambitious, there is a way to prepare "Pheasant and Peacocks In Full Display" that calls for a marinade of (amoung otherthings) long pepper, true cinnamon and rose water. and preservation in sugar and household spices. Not a word about what to do with the feathers. You know, cooking for royalty is all very well but I think I'll stick to turkey this year. The peacocks can stay in the zoo.

What Booklovers really need: A sign

When I became an office manager, my sister sent me a terrific sign that became my Prime Directive (sorry, Star Trek).

If I ever forgot, this sign reminded me of the purpose of  my job.  I was the designated gatekeeper, tasked with running interference on every distraction that phoned or walked in the door.  I dealt with them so my bosses could focus on the work that kept us in business each month.  Most sales reps. were willing to work with me but if one of them complained, I showed them the sign. That message gave me that last word.

These days, I'm beginning to think that stories, like people, also need signs.  I was in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop the other day and found a few I really liked.

Now that's great advice, no matter who you are.  Every life is a story and yours is only as good as you make it.  So live the life that will become the story you want to tell.

If I ran the universe this sign would be on the desk of each teacher and librarian in every primary school. Maybe the secondary schools as well.  I'm just sayin', okay?

And now the sign that all readers need:

What do I want for Christmas this year?  This slogan printed on everything I own, from T-shirts to toilet tissue, and cars to my coffee cup.  A sign to run interference for me like I ran it for my bosses.  I figure folks will have to respect it.

After all, it's a sign.

A Story for the Broken-Hearted

Most of the time, I try to be happy.  I think everybody does.  Either we find that's a good way to deal with the world or we think that's what the world wants from us.  But sometimes, happiness isn't an appropriate choice for what's going on in our lives.  Now a motivational speaker might say the thing to do when you're sad is paste a smile on your face anyway.  Fake being happy until you cheer up again.  While there's something in the "fake it till you make it" idea, I don't believe in divorcing yourself from your real feelings.  Sometimes, the only way to deal with grief is to feel the grief.  When that happens, I reach for Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons.  It's a guidebook for the broken heart.

At first glance Caro Venable wouldn't seem like the right kind of guide to learn about grief.  For one thing, she's got a life most of us would kill for.  She's got some talent, a loving spouse, a son that's doing well and two houses, one on her very own island.  Sounds perfect right?  But Caro's still tortured by the memory of her daughter's death five years ago and there's another problem: Caro drinks.   Not snot-slinging, commode-hugging, drunk but too much and too often. Booze also keeps Caro from seeing her comfortable life have cut her off from a much that she loves; that art and the nature have been replaced by her husband's business and ambition.  

Into this half-life of booze and melancholy come a pair of catalysts to shatter the inertia.  First a Cuban landscape artist with insight into drunks and the tongue of an adder.  Then the news that her husband's real-estate development company is at risk and Caro has the ability to save it...if she is willing to let him destroy the Gullah settlement and nature preserve already on the island. Caro has to choose between the life she left but holds dear and the man she's loved since she was a kid.  It's only in the face of this "lose-lose" situation that Caro finally reaches back out to life.

So what's great about this book?  Maybe, not a lot beyond the descriptions of the Ace Basin and a kind of life peculiar to the Coastal South.  But what the book has is an honesty about loss and how sometimes it can't be avoided.  If we live long enough, we all endure loss and the longer we live, the more grief we endure.  What we do with that grief and how we honor the lost dictates how we'll cope with whatever comes after.  Caro shows how to comes to terms with despair and still fight for a better tomorrow.  That's something worth knowing when you're broken-hearted and you need to start living again.

Finally, getting it right

There's a wonderful line in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that says, "Everything will be all right in the end...if it's not all right, then it's not yet the end."  There's more than mindless optimism in that phrase, that's an expression of faith. It encourages you to keep going, and not be dismayed, even in the face of disaster.  It's a faith Jane Austen endorsed when she wrote Persuasion, her last story with a sensible heroine.

Austen wrote about two types of women, those who think before they speak and the rest of us. The impulsive, strong-willed ones like Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and Catharine Moreland are easy to identify with because they say what they feel and they cause most of their own problems.  The responsible heroines are a little bit deeper.  Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are always aware that odds and circumstances are against them so they're careful about what they say and when they speak. Most of the time, this is a good trait but in Persuasion, Austen shows the downside of being too careful.

In case you don't know it, Persuasion's set-up is simple.  At nineteen, Anne Elliot broke her engagement to Lt. Frederick Wentworth.  She didn't want to but her best friend persuaded  her that the couple was too broke and too young to create a happy life together. (Anne's father thought a naval lieutenant wasn't good enough for his daughter at the time.)  Now, nine years later, Anne's still unmarried, still missing Wentworth, and living in a house her father can't afford to maintain. Her ex-fiance reappears, complete with a promotion, and his fortunes have climbed as much as her father's have fallen.  Anne can't tell her ex-boyfriend she's still nuts about him. If she does, she'll just look like another gold-digging tramp and lose what little respect he may still have for her.  So Anne has to be quiet and watch other unmarried girls chase after the man that she loves, knowing she made a mistake.

Amanda Root in the 2007
adaptations of Persuasion

What happens next is the rest of the book but this story's already broken the Austen pattern.  In the other books, when Austen's girls get the right guy, the tale is told. Persuasion is about people making mistakes by relying on the judgment of others and whether anyone hurt so deeply can find the courage to try again. It's also the story of a middle-class that fights to keep up all the wrong appearances.  Anne's father is so wrapped up in being a minor aristocrat (he's a Baronet) that the benefits of the navy's meritocracy completely escape him. When setbacks befall him, all he's left with is his title. In contrast, Anne is the only one with the vision to see what really matters and where her true future lies.

If Austen ever sought another title for this book, Patience would have been as good an idea since it takes patience to correct a mistake.  But in the meantime, if you are under stress, keep Anne Elliot's faith to make the best of each bad situation and do the next right thing.  If that doesn't work, remember that everything will be all right in the end...so trouble now means the story's not finished.

See the Movie or Read the Book First?

The holiday season is coming up fast with its compliment of "prestige" films, those high-budget, critic-favored movies all aimed to become Oscar bait.  That's fine, but since a lot of prestige pictures are based on written works, some readers face an unusual quandary.  When a book-based picture comes out, which should you do first: read the book or see the movie?  Or, if you love one of these, should you even look at the other?

I found out how hard that question was long before I grew up.  Somewhere around age 9, I discovered Dodie Smith's book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians.  To say I fell in love with the tale is a gross understatement: I re-read it so often, I could recite whole pages of it from memory.  So I should have loved the Disney adaptation, right?  Wrong!  I couldn't stand the picture because it altered key parts of the original story and removed the comfortably British narrative voice.  I went home swearing at the film industry in general and Disney in particular for trashing a classic.  I believed no movie would ever respect a book.

Flash forward 25 years or so.  I'm still a fan of British lit. but, there some books I won't touch, like Howards End.  I heard the book was difficult and dull so I avoided it on principle. It took the beautiful 1992 film adaptation to open my eyes. Even after falling in love with the picture, I was a bit unsure about the book.  Given the usual film-adaptations, would I like the original story?  Little did I know that Merchant-Ivory, that film's production company, was known for their sensitive treatment of original material.  Howard's End remains one of my all-time faves on the screen and the page.

The truth is, some movie adaptations of stories work while others don't .  Film is a visual medium that makes some story-telling easier but it requires light and movement to keep the audience interested. Watching somebody think is dull.  And while words only require a reader's imagination, every reader's vision can't be incorporated into a film adaptation.  So it's your choice to read the book or see the movie first/  Just be prepared to accept the two versions may have nothing in common beyond the title.

Please, I need a Favor from You

Two years ago I started writing "The Stories that Follow You Home" also known as "The Istoriaphile's Corner."  It's been fun to write about stories so full of thought and meaning that they 've found a home in my soul.  Still, I have to admit that's not the reason I started this blog.  I began this because (deep breath) I wrote a book.

A bit more than two years ago, I decided to write a story about a pair of constantly squabbling sisters. This was something I knew about because my sis and I fought all the way through childhood and I wanted to see what it takes for a pair of warring siblings to cooperate and appreciate each other. I called my book The Plucky Orflings and it's taken me almost as long to finish as it took me and my sis to stop fighting but now it's ready for an agent to look at it. The problem is, I learned, that having a manuscript isn't enough for an aspiring writer now.  To get published, you need a built-in audience.

Publishers and agents don't take many chances on the books that they send to market these days. Between e-books and e-booksellers, many of their traditional customers have disappeared and business is very tight. So, most of them aren't interested in publishing a book until a prospective author can show them there's already a bunch of interested customers, or followers.  And if I self-publish, I still need to know who might want to buy it.  All of which brings me to today's request.

If you look to the right-hand side of this post, you'll see something that says, "Subscribe if you want a spot in the Istoriaphile's Corner."  If you fill this out and submit it, you'll become a follower and I'll be a step closer to getting my book published.  Being a follower doesn't obligate you to buy anything (including my book) and no one will see your name there except me.  And I promise I will only write to you when I have information or news relating to my work. But wait, as the commercial says, there is more.

If you've read my blog, you know I think about nature almost as much as I think about books.  To me, some books even go with the seasons.  So I've created a pretty register of the books I love that match or adapt to each season and I've illustrated it with some of my best photos.  If you become a follower of mine, you'll get a copy of my register in return.  

So, what do you say?  Help an aspiring author out and get something in return?  I sure would appreciate it.  And it might help The Plucky Orflings get into print.

When a Play Turns the World Upside Down

For most people believe plays are just another form of entertainment. An audience goes to a theatre and pays for the actors to entertain them. If the performance is acceptable, the company is praised with applause.  That's a fairly simple transaction but it's also a limiting one.  Theatre, great theatre does more than make people happy, it makes them think.  This would upset the audiences who only want to be entertained, if many of them hadn't learned to watch a play while ignoring what it has to say.  Then, a play like Ibsen's "A Doll's House" appears with meaning that can't be ignored and the world turns upside down.

The world of Europe in the 1800's could safely be described as belonging to men.  Males held most of the money and power and almost all of the "good" jobs. (Even a monarch like Queen Victoria had substantially limited power.) Women were expected to be decorative, passive guests in mens' lives. Enter Nora Helmer, a little woman with a big, serious secret.  Years ago when her father was ill and her husband close to death, she took matters in her own hands. She illegally borrowed the money needed to heal her husband and she's been scrimping and scrounging to pay off the balance ever since. Unfortunately, a man who knows about her crime was just fired by her husband and he's blackmailing Nora to get him his job back.

If this story happened these days, how would it play out?  Nora might get a slap on the wrist from a judge but since she's kept up the payments, the penalty probably would be light.  Her husband might be grateful to wife who found a way to save his life. He might even admire how she repaid much of loan without while caring for him and the children.  Well, that might be the situation today but it wasn't in the 1870's.  Ibsen based his play on a friend of his who fell into the same situation.  When that lady's husband found out what happened, he filed for divorce and had her committed to the insane asylum.

Claire Bloom as Nora in
this 1973 Production

A Doll's House turns out both better and worse than real life. Nora's husband, Torvald, finds out about the deception and declares their marriage is over. When the blackmailer has a change of heart, Torvald changes his mind, still insisting Nora's actions weren't desperate or heroic but just one of those things dumb women do.  Nora realizes their life has been based on assumptions: Torvald's belief that his wife is a child and her hope that if he saw her as the adult that she is, he'd love what he saw. Reality kills both the assumptions and the marriage and she leaves him at the end of the play, slamming, as one critic said, "a door that reverberated across Europe."

To say A Dolls House became a pop culture phenomenon is like saying Noah got a bit wet.  It was the scandal of the age with actresses refusing to play the part as written and people fighting about the play over dinner. Nora was praised or condemned in the papers and from the pulpit and, for all the fuss she caused, you would think she had killed a real man instead of leaving a fictional one.  In a way, her character killed something worse; she murdered people's assumptions about their own lives.

So "A Doll's House" became a classic and part of feminist literature but that understanding of the play is too narrow. Ibsen's play resounds in any time and place where one part of humanity fails to recognize the human dignity of another. In the end, it doesn't matter if we are male or female, gay or straight, and any shade of the rainbow; we are all human with the same capacities to love, need and strive. To discount those capacities or assume they don't exist because of what makes us different, creates a wall of dangerous assumptions between each of us.  Until, of course, another play comes around that shoots down those assumptions. Then the world turns upside down.

Do You Write in Your Books?

I still remember the first time I saw it.  I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three.  

Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book.  A book full of someone else's words.  I wasn't aware people did that.

Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can't safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear.  A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully.  We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages.

I bought the used book, partly because I love the story  and partly because I was curious about the previous owner's additions.  The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else's coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story.  I wanted to decipher the code.

I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they tell you to do this in school.  In high school, teachers encouraged us to highlight or underline key points and by college, the rumor was used text books were better because the previous owner had already done the highlighting.  By the way, this only works if the original owner marks the correct passages.  

And that's the issue of annotated text: if the extra comment makes a reasonable point. I hated seeing a beautiful descriptive passage marked with a vertical line and then dismissed with the written comment "B.S."  That has no place in Madame Bovary.  

But text annotation continues, even into electronic texts.  Kindle has an option of seeing where other readers annotated their copies of your book and lets you read their commentary.  Sometimes the comments are thoughtful and succinct; sometimes they're verbal graffiti.  Like reading the comments on an internet article, at best it's a mixed bag

So no, I don't usually write in my books, and I don't like most of what other folks add. But I make one big exception to that rule.  It's not hard to  guess what that is.

Unpredictable Mary Chase

Once upon a time a woman named Mary decided to write a play.  A war was going on at that time and many people were sad so Mary wanted to make them laugh.  Now Mary knew something about writing and she'd written plays before but she had a hard time writing this comedy. Not only is it hard to make people laugh when they're sad, it's hard to find time to write when you're raising three boys and freelancing to bring in a paycheck. (Mary's other plays had not been successful.) So in the evenings, when her boys were asleep, Mary scribbled away at her story.  It was an unusual tale about a gentle man named Elwood who turns his conventional town upside down when he insists his best friend is a Celtic spirit, or pooka.  A pooka that looks like a rabbit.  A six-foot-three, tie-wearing rabbit. 

Mary spent the next two years perfecting her play.  She read it aloud to anyone who would listen and rewrote it at least 50 times.  (Plays are as tricky as chemistry experiments; one mistake can make the whole thing explode.)  Eventually, a producer read her play, and liked it enough to have it performed on Broadway.  Then, fate intervened: people loved Mary's play and turned it into a hit.  It ran for years, became a movie and got Mary the Pulitzer Prize. Now she had people who believed in her and enough money to write full-time. The only problem was everyone wanted more funny stories about gentle people, must like her hit play, Harvey.  Mary wanted to write something else.

Ten years later, (though still decades ago) Mary began to write a children's book.  This tale also had a Celtic spirit but the gentle, kind hero was gone.  In his place stood Maureen Swanson, a grade-school bully that nobody likes.  Maureen is a disrespectful liar and thief but she's not really brave. Nevertheless, Maureen  usually gets her way until she crosses the Messerman sisters, women who are cold-hearted, powerful and evil. Our bully is completely outclassed.

Fifteen years passed before Mary published the story of Maureen and the wicked Messerman sisters and when it came out it was not a hit.  It was not surprising since this story had no laughs and  people want to cheer the hero and boo the villain, where they're not laughing.  No one could believe this scary storywas written by the woman who created Harvey.

But Mary's two stories have one other thing in common; they look at what makes people change. Elwood's conventional family finally become more tolerant when they realize Elwood's eccentricities are part of what make him so kind.  Decent treatment won't persuade the rotten Maureen so she has to learn the hard way that there is always someone stronger and meaner.  Is there a bigger meaning? I'm not sure except never to try to predict or control what a good writer will come up with next.  Just hang on and enjoy the ride.

When your Book Pusher Blocks Your Review

Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line.  My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue.  So, I never thought I'd be blocked as a troll for telling the truth.  But then I reckoned without the World's Largest Book Pusher.

WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force.  First I was a regular patron, then a "1-click" shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy.  I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money.  Then Sandra Worth's Love & War had to appear.

Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses.  Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise.  This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players.  Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife.

"Tomorrow we give battle.  Lest I be unable to write you again, I send you this missive so you may know my thoughts when I am no more."

Wait a minute.  I knew those lines.  I had heard those rhythmic sentiments  before.  I glanced back at the text.  It was a moving testament of love; a soldier's realization of all that he would lose if he died in an upcoming battle.  Then Neville wished that he and his wife would both live to see their son grown "to honorable knighthood" and I recognized the real source of those words.

That moving passage actually was written by a soldier, but not one in the War of the Roses.  It was written by Major Sullivan Ballou of Rhode Island a week before he died at Bull Run. Ken Burns featured the letter in his Civil War series and I wept the first time I heard it. Now, here were his phrases, word for word, in some misbegotten, romance set in the Middle Ages!

I spent the next hour creating a reader's review on the book saying what I thought of Ms. Worth's plagiarism.  I cited sources and dates and prepared a comparison of the two letters with highlighted copied phrases. I admitted Ms. Worth hadn't broken the law; Major Ballou's letter was in the public domain and she could copy it whenever she liked. Still, it's lazy writing and dishonest to claim another's work as your own and it's despicable to steal the eloquent last words of a soldier. I thought potential customers should be aware of these flaws before they bought the book.  The computer servers in World's Largest Book Pusher disagreed.

I submitted my review but it failed to appear, the only time that has happened. After five minutes of waiting, I assumed the computer hit a glitch and started rewriting my essay, furious but sure I was right.  I submitted again, after saving the text of my essay. Again, my commentary disappeared. I rebooted, and checked everything worked before submitting the essay a third time. My other reviews were uploaded immediately but my Love and War review was apparently blocked. I started to get the message.

Now, if I submit a review to the World's Largest Book Pusher, I remember to be direct and bland. I don't want to be voted off the island.  If that happens, I'll have to move to the underside of some bridge and hang out with the other trolls. 

Finding A Room with a View

The idea of travel always seems attractive, doesn't it?  To leave behind our humdrum, everyday world and enjoy life as a tourist.  To picture ourselves in an exotic environment and perhaps, be transformed by our time in that place?  Fortunes have been made over the years in books on this subject: A Year in Provence; Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun are just three examples. But the fact is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us and most travelers come back home.  Lucy Honeychurch would be the first person to tell you that.

Lucy is one of those Edwardian, English girls who will tell you real travel isn't the flight of fancy you'd imagine.  She's supposedly on this trip to Italy, to pick up some of the culture and sophistication of the continent but she hardly allowed within speaking distance of anyone truly Italian.  Her irritating, old-maid cousin is always at her side, the hotel's land-lady has a cockney accent and all the other guests there are English as well.  To make things worse, the reservations got mixed up and she didn't get A Room With a View.

That's the opening situation in E. M Forster's story of what travel can and can't do.  Lucy is a young woman at the edge of adulthood, about to make life-changing choices.  Her cousin and other guests sense it, potential reveals itself when she plays the piano.  And all of these good people want her to make the right choices so they try and limit her exposure to the bits of Italy they approve of.  But, fate and travel sometimes circumvent the very best-intentioned limits.

Despite her guided tours and chaperone, Lucy witnesses chaos and romance while she's in Florence and she retreats to England, ready to marry the deeply pretentious Cecil Vyse.  (Great name for a silly man, right?) Fate and nature still have a few tricks up their sleeve and Lucy eventually will choose whether she wants the kind of life she's seen others live or a future that feels right for her.

This sweet tale has been adapted to film a few times, most memorably in 1986 (Have 30 years gone by that fast?) by the Merchant-Ivory company.  While I never recommend a film adaptation over a book, this is a beautiful accessory if you want a video version of the story.

Maybe we don't always have an opportunity to travel.  And travel may not always change our lives. But a good travel story can still open our eyes and give us a break from everyday life.  And in fiction, we always get A Room With A View.

An Intimidating English Teacher

He was in my very first high school class, a wiry, little guy behind a lectern, with gravity-defying hair and feverish-looking eyes. He wasn't much taller than the lectern and it probably weighed more than he did.  The stranger stared at us briefly before introducing himself as Mr. S___, taking the roll and passing out Literature text books.  "Another first-year teacher," I thought with dismay,"this class will eat him alive."  Then the little man barked out an order and half the class jumped. For a small man, this guy's voice was loud. "Mr. So-and-So" he boomed at one of the better-behaved boys in class, "What have you got there?  Bring it to me."  The poor kid named slunk his way toward the front of the class while I cowered in my seat and revised my opinion of the instructor. This guy would control the class but I didn't like him and doubted if I'd learn much from him either. Little did I know I was facing the greatest teacher I've ever meet.

Mr. S. taught my favorite subject, English, but I never would have told him something that personal. The man was far too intimidating.  We were in an era when teachers were supposed to relax a little and relate to the kids but Mr. S. didn't get the memo.  Instead he barked out remarks and questions in class and when he grinned at us from behind his lectern, he looked like a wolf eyeing his prey.  He admitted to having daily debates with the "fun" English instructor in school about which was the better teaching tool, trust or fear. Mr. S. held out for fear and it worked; he scared the spit out of me.

Sophomore collection of short stories.
Does my high school still want it back?

Funny thing was, this strange little guy taught an interesting class.  For one thing, he got us to think about what we read. Instead of focusing on terms like "protagonist" and "plot", Mr. S. forced us to identify the ideas in stories and then debate those with him in class. Some of those ideas had obvious answers, like, "What would you rather have, security or freedom?" Mr. S. always took the contrary side of an issue like this and, as I recall, he always won the debates. When we insisted Americans preferred freedom, he'd point out the ways our society had opted for security instead. Keeping up in his class meant using your wits and even the most disinterested students started getting involved.  Then, he taught us how to listen.

Sometime in my sophomore year, I began to get irritated over the "less-than-excellent" grades I earned in his class.  I wasn't interested in keeping a high GPA but it irked me to get "Bs" in one of the few subjects I usually aced. So, when written tests were given, I tried to write great essays, scouring meaning out of the text and paragraphs out of my soul.  Then I'd get another B and someone else's answer would be read out in class. I sweated blood over the next essay test... and my friend Mindy's answer was read aloud instead.  On the way home, I showed her my paper and asked her why he picked her essay answer over mine. "Mine answered his question." she said.

In my junior year but I started paying attention to Mr. S.'s lectures and I realized something; we might debate profound ideas in the text but the subject we studied was literature and he tested us on specific literary techniques and criteria we discussed during class. I started paying attention to what the man said he wanted in an answer. I  wrote responses to his questions.  I started getting As.

One of the last books in the lit. syllabus
I never forgot it or the teacher.

By my senior year, I had relaxed enough to appreciate Mr. S.'s teaching methods and he seemed to unbend just a bit. His grins weren't just a demanding instructor's delight in catching students unprepared, he loved seeing us use our brains. Although some of his formality remained, we began to glimpse his sense of humor and we learned he loved when we'd "forget" to return our text books at the end of term.  He said he measured a book's popularity by how few copies came back to the school.  (Mr. S., if you see this, I still have two of my short-story collections as well as my copy of Candide.  I still love them and read them; I just have to be careful because the pages are brittle and some of the covers are gone.)  Then, Mr. S. left our school system the same spring that our class graduated. I never found the chance or nerve to thank him for the impact he had on me.  But I've felt his influence ever since.

Over the years, I've attended more than a dozen schools and probably studied under a hundred different teachers.  Most were bright, some were kind and I even made friends with a few.  But the greatest teacher I ever met taught me to fall in love with a subject.  He changed me from someone who enjoyed reading as entertainment to one who reveres prose as an art.

Who is your Greatest Teacher Ever???

Families are such funny things

Families are such funny things.  Find a man in his late thirties or early forties surrounded by his kids. Around them, he is the paterfamilias.  The Father.  The Ultimate Authority (besides Mom).  Now transfer him to his family of origin and watch him interact with them.  There he's not recognized as a dad but as a brother or child and the definition has an effect on his personality.  His air of authority is gone.  Maybe an old squabble is raked up with a sibling.  If his children are watching, they have a rare glimpse of their Dad as a boy, momentarily spinning like an electron from their immediate family into the family of their grandparents. Around the molecules of generations, Dad becomes a covelant bond.

As a writer, Anne Tyler knows this better than most and the idea stands out in her novel, A Spool of Blue Thread.  This is the story of the Whitshanks, another eccentric Baltimore family (Anne is the literary patron saint of both the city and eccentric families) with an recurring, dynamic.  Each generation has one member with the drive to attain a goal above their expectations even though success will not make them happy.  Every generation also has at least one "sympathizer" member who negotiates their way through family frictions and the rest have their own coping skills.  Whenever holidays or family emergencies pull the grown siblings back together we see how much or little they've learned about being adults while they were apart.

This story also throws in something extra.  After chapters of seeing Red and Abby function as the heads of the Whitshank clan, coping with their children and grandchildren, a flashback takes us to their adolescence and we see the young people they once were dominated by their patriarch, Junior.  We even see the events that influence Junior.

In many ways, A Spool of Blue Thread is also the story of the family home, a house in an affluent neighborhood that Junior Whitshank built and coveted.  The house goes from Junior's talisman of success to the legacy Red and Abby will care for and the symbol of favoritism their sons will crave. As the house witnesses each successive generation's secrets, resentments and hopes, we learn what drives this family and what they need to let go of in the end.

Since the prospect of Thanksgiving is looming, with the chance we'll spend time with extended family, take a second for the Whitshanks clan.  Remember we are all covelant bonds in the family of Mankind and we all have a role to play.  May your next family gathering be like the beautiful spool of blue thread, that appears just when it's needed.

Making Sense of the Universe: the Writer-Reader contract

The relationship between writers and readers is an odd one. The writer sits in a garret (or on the top of Mount Parnassus, depending on your point of view) and labors to create a work of lasting value.  If it's good enough and all the stars align, the readers let the work of an author's imagination into their own and reward the author with praise, treasure and enough allegiance to read writer's next story, as long as the author keeps the the writer-reader contract.

What, you thought what I just described was the writer-reader contract?  Au contrair, mes amis! That is merely the description.  The writer-reader contract is an old and long one that is modified only as literature evolves.  One of the basic tenets of this implied agreement is that, however complex the plot or intricate the fictional universe in the story is, the author knows everything that is going on in the story and can explain how this imaginary world makes sense.  For example:

Like most of the reading planet, I adored J. K. Rowling's fantastic Harry Potter series.  It's a mammoth accomplishment and a brilliantly planned series. Elements of the entire saga start appearing immediately although their importance is played down. (Spoilers abound here so if you spent the last quarter century living under a rock to avoiding the Potter phenomenon, read a different one of my posts). In the first chapter, we get the primary premise that magic-is-real set out and we learn a baby Harry somehow defeated an evil, magically powerful being named Voldemort. The soul souvenir of Voldemort's attack, a scar on Harry's forehead, is mentioned in passing on the first chapter but Potter fans don't learn the full significance of scar until the end of the series, seven years and a million words later. Still, virtually every bit of information JKR drops in the early part of the series forms part of the bigger picture later on, from Hagrid's motorbike to Dumbledore's evasive answers to personal questions. ("What do you see in the mirror, Professor?")  JKR doesn't tell the audience everything immediately, she can't, but she tells us what we need to know when we need to know it.  She honors the contract.

Another splendid example of an author knowing everything is Louis Sachar's Holes.  This is a case of non-linear storytelling at its best since most of the narrative is about perpetually unlucky Stanley Yelnats IV, a good kid in a bad situation.  Stanley can't know that his fate was tied to Camp Green Lake and a kid named Hector Zeroni generations before he was born but that's because there are "holes" in his family history.  The reader's fun comes from finding the information filling those holes at different parts of the story.  It's a masterful fulfillment of the Writer-Reader Contract.

Now compare these to Lemony Snicket's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events.  As usual we have an unfortunate child (well, 3 of them: Violet, Klaus and Sunny); a wicked, overarching villain who pursues them through the series (Count Olaf) and a bunch of mysterious clues and circumstances the kids encounter along the way. But, contrary to the implied contract, many of the mysteries in the story are never solved!  Readers never find out what was in that blasted sugar bowl or details about the schism that split the V. F. D. into fire-starters and fire-fighters! (Speaking of which, there are so many entities in the series with the initials V. F. D. it's hard to keep them straight.) Instead of resolving key mysteries that have been building through the series, the author states in the last book that not every question can or will be answered.  That is true of real life, but it's a weak excuse to readers who waded through 170 chapters of alliterative names and silly puns to find out what really happened to all of the Baudelaire family. It is a break in the writer-reader contract.

So, if you know someone struggling to write a novel this month, be kind to them.  Bring them encouragement and hot drinks as needed and assure them that they can always get through one more revision.  But remind them of the writer-reader contract and how they need to know everything in their fictional universe.  It's a part of the contract.

The Executioner's Daughter

There's a moment in Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys when an exasperated (female) teacher declares:

"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men.  What is history?  History is women following behind...with a bucket."

The Cover 

I can't help but wonder if Jane Hardstaff had this quote in mind when she wrote her excellent children's novel, The Executioner's Daughter. It may be fiction, but our heroine is forced to trudge through the disasters of history and scoop up the mess left behind with her basket.

Meet Moss, an eleven-year-old girl and permanent resident of The Tower of London. On good days, her father is the blacksmith in the tower, creating and repairing any piece of metal needed for Henry VIII's court and government and Moss stays in the forge.  On bad days, execution days, her father wields the ax.  If judicial murder and the blood lust of the crowd aren't bad enough, Moss has be present at each death.  Her job is to stand below the executioner's block and catch the prisoner's head in her basket once her father cuts it off. One execution would be enough to traumatize a child but because of the King's battle with the Catholic Church (aka The English Reformation) Moss has to witness this horror again and again  and each execution makes her want to rebel.

The Author

The Executioner's Daughter works on many levels, not the least of which is how it points out that the Tower of London functioned a separate, often self-sufficient, entity.  Yes, the castle was a prison but it was also a strong-hold, a Royal Residence and the large, full-time staff that maintained it also lived within those walls.  The Tower had few exits and Moss's father limits her freedom to its outer walls, making his daughter, in effect, another prisoner.  Preteen readers can identify with Moss's feelings of resentment and her need to expand her horizons beyond her father's world.  Parents will appreciate her loving father, a man forced to make terrible choices in order to keep his daughter safe. And everyone will like Salter, the Artful Dodger like trickster that shows Moss there are harder destinies than being the executioner's daughter and how to outwit fate.

Fascinating, adventurous and full of historical insight, The Executioner's Daughter is a delight for junior-high readers and up and it can make someone glad they're just a cleaning-woman in the annals of history.

The Politicization of Leslie

We're coming to the end of another election season and, like almost everyone on the planet, I'm glad this miserable contest is almost over.  The mud-slinging, innuendo, and overall nastiness of political rhetoric have made this a loathsome campaign year and the parade of contradictory polls is exhausting me.  But I will vote on Tuesday, as I have in every election.  I can't help it.  I was politicized long before I could read and my parents deserve the credit/blame.  That's what happens when you're kissed at a young age by presidents.

My mom had a button like this in her
jewelry box for decades

See, my mom was a big fan of John F. Kennedy in 1960.  YUGE fan, another candidate might say.  Well, what wasn't there to like?  He was young, attractive, and charismatic, enough to charm any woman in her early twenties.  And my mother was never tepid about politics.  She paid fierce attention to the news and loved or hated most people in public service.  So when she heard JFK and his running mate were arriving at the Wichita Falls, Texas airport, she had to be there to greet him, along with me and Dad.

Now my Dad was always interested in current events, although he never got drawn into fandom, like my mom.  I think he would have preferred to stay away from candidates and the crowds that followed them.  But Mom insisted, saying it would be a memorable experience for all three of us.   

That's me, a Presidential Pin-Up Girl!

Sorry to say, it wasn't memorable to me; I was less than 18 months old at the time and nothing of that day hangs in my recollection.  But Dad said he held me on his shoulders at that windy airport and Mom said that no one could tell from Mr. Kennedy's speech that he and Lyndon were ever political rivals.  After the speech, the candidates worked their way through the crowd and Mom said both JKF and LBJ kissed my cheek, the way they probably kissed a million kids along the campaign trail. Knowing how she felt about JFK, I'm surprised she washed my face afterward.

After that, national politics was always personal in my family. Mom wept uncontrollably when President Kennedy was assassinated but I went on to Kindergarten, secure in the belief that Lyndon's tenure in the White House meant the eyes of Texas really were upon me. (Hey, what does a 5-year-old know!) Mom preached civil rights from her kitchen and, during Watergate, called President Nixon and his staff everything but a Child of God for their actions. Dad didn't say as much but always knew the background on every issue and was willing to discuss them rationally.  Rational political discussions, there's something I miss almost as much as I miss my parents.

So I will go to the polls on Tuesday, same as I have for every election for more than 30 years. It's part of my role as a citizen, like my jury and military service were.  Even if I don't like who is running, I can't help participating in the process.  Like Girl Scouts and Sand Hill Plum Jelly, democracy is in my DNA.