Ever hear of a guy by the name of Henry David Thoreau? Author of Walden, and Civil Disobedience and many other philosophically laced writings on natural history and environmentalism, etc? Advocate of the simple life -- as in, living in a cabin in the woods? Of course you have. But did you also know that on April 30, 1844 [a year before he hermeticized himself in the woods of Massachusetts to focus on his career as a writer] he made the mistake of striking a single match and burning down 300 acres of trees? Yep. He is the "woodsburner" of John Pipkin's [2009] novel. Let me begin by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which has all the potential of being as boring as watching branches turn to sticks, for a great majority of readers out there. For me it had the opposite effect -- but that's because I love well-done character sketches, and digressions in novels do not bother me much. In a strictly linear sense, the entire 366 pages of this book take place really over that one-day period, April 30th, 1844. So, if you need a lot of plot to get you through the night, this may not be the book for you. Thoreau and his friend Edward simply want to make a chowder of some freshly caught fish. It's a windy day, and once the fateful match is struck -- the flames take over. And so does Pipkin. The author digresses, but in an ingenious way [in my opinion]. He introduces us to a handful of diverse characters that will be profoundly affected by this out-of-control wildfire. We learn of their own personal histories and present situations -- and one by one they are all drawn to the inferno, either in a fight to lessen the damage [to put the damn thing out] or to re-adjust their lives [move on once it is extinguished]. For me, this book was what I call a "sleeper". And by that I mean it was better than I thought it would be, early on. But then again, almost any book that ends with an admirable character running off with the girl of his dreams is good enough for me! [Ooops. Spoiler.] Based on an actual incident in the life of Thoreau, Pipkin has really created something worthwhile and rewarding for the serious reader out there. I would rate it at four entirely burnt trees out of five. *****
Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls -- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? -- Donna Tartt, The Secret History --
Every so often you hear of a new book by a favourite author and you have to say "Oh my God!" or whatever other phrase might apply to your own personal exclamation of impending joy. I think I said something profound like "Holy Moly" last night when I found out that Donna Tartt will have a new novel released somewhere around September or October of this year. I've read her other two novels and loved them so much, especially her first one, The Secret History. So I'm really looking forward to nabbing The Goldfinch off the bookstore shelf as soon as it's available. One blurb describes it as "a haunted odyssey through present-day America. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art." She's an exquisite, quality-over-quantity author I feel I can trust. Three books in what… a quarter of a century? Donna Tartt takes her time to produce literature that is definitely worth the wait. I love how she put it in an interview: "William Styron said, when he was about my age, that he realized he had about five books in him, and that was OK. I think I have about the same number. Five." All I know is, however many she writes, I will be buying them! *****
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby --
If you are like me you sort of have this idea of Umberto Eco as though, Wow -- you are really going to have to do some thinkin' if you read him! It's true. But now I realize this is a good thing. I finally picked The Name of the Rose off my shelf and opened it up. What a trip! The bulk of the story takes place over a seven day period in November of the year 1327. William of Baskerville [an English monk/detective] along with his novice assistant Adso, set off on a diplomatic mission to a Franciscan abbey in the hills of Italy. From day one, the mission shifts gears quite a bit -- because a string of mysterious murders begin to take place. And the abbot wants William to figure out what the hell is going on. Naturally, in such a cloistered environment, everyone becomes a suspect. And soon William discovers that the real issue involves the secrecy of the abbey's library. At night, this section of the place is off limits to everyone except the librarian himself. There are connections that are too suspicious to ignore. William, a rationalist by nature, finds himself following leads that are religious and superstitious -- and this throws him off course. The bodies start piling up, and his time there is running out. The book is ingenious in its depiction of the mayhem that can result in religion's [insane?] desire to suppress knowledge and free-thinking inquiry. Ultimately, someone is trying to keep one single book from being read -- and is willing to murder others in this quest to quench philosophical introspection. If Dan Brown is your man -- leave this book alone. You will only throw it at the wall at some point. In things I have read since, Eco deliberately designed it with a certain sort of reader in mind. The first 100 pages are constructed in such a way as to deter the average thriller-reader. If you can get beyond page 100, Eco will have you in his thrall. It's a design every bit as surreptitious and sneaky as what is going on in the abbey itself. I loved this book. Written in first-person narration [by Adso] it will be a rewarding whodunit caper for anyone who loves true, timeless literature. Is it a beach read? I don't know. I don't think so. I can't quite imagine pina colada rings anywhere on these pages as you try to hold them open in the sun while a stray beachball is bouncing off your head. But if you want to immerse yourself in a truly engrossing tale… one where yes, you have to think a bit -- this novel is a beauty, for sure. It's my first journey into this brilliant author's crawl space -- it makes me look forward to sealing myself away into yet another Eco-chamber one day! *****
Has your cat, [or dog, for that matter] ever done something that just made you say, "ARRRRRRGH! You little bugger!" [??] Tonight I returned to my apartment to shards of glass on the floor. Apparently my cat Kennedy thought it would be highly reasonable to break my favourite beer glass. My beloved Duvel glass! The last of its kind [sort of]. You can only buy these things on places like eBay, at exorbitant shipping rates! For well over a decade I have been getting drunk out of this very glass… and really enjoying it! But no. It's not good enough for Kennedy that I pay the rent here, and feed him, and ensure that his bathroom is clean every morning before I leave for work! No. He has to push my all-time favourite and one-of-a-kind beer glass from the edge of my desk and shatter the thing. Mind you, I did have him neutered EXACTLY a week ago, last Thursday. Maybe this is his way of saying, "Hey, thanks a lot, Dad! You know, I did have plans to actually put those things to use one day! So... every seven days I'm going to do something like this! Or worse!" *****
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life. -- Stephen King --
The topic was human relationships. Not sunsets. Or rabbits. Or cuteness. Or the full moon at night. One said That surety of each other. Trust. Faith. The campfire gave a little burst -- as if agreeing.
One looked away. The ability to laugh together. Far off an owl hooted -- several heads nodding. Quiet. A ubiquitous goofball mumbled Good sex. I bent forward to kill flames from a marshmallow.
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better. -- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke --
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. -- George Orwell, Why I Write --
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. -- Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners --
Well, I haven't been around much here lately -- I know. Just thought I'd drop by to talk about my second-favorite thing, besides books. Music. I'm real excited because I just got my tickets to an upcoming Joe Satriani concert which will be taking place just blocks away from where I live. Mmmm… I can't wait. It's not until October though, but you can never get tickets too soon, right? These ones are in the seventh row, middle. I will probably lose my hearing. Oh well! For those of you unfamiliar with Joe Satriani's stuff -- umm -- how can I describe it? You have to love guitar. Because really, that's what it's all about. And. I. Love. It. Here's a little taste of The Satch, in action:
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird --
I read a truly great novel, recently. Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, my fifth of this author's books, and he has rarely disappointed me. I think Oscar and Lucinda was my favourite, and this last one, the second in line. He has won the Booker Prize twice, quite an accomplishment, and you need to read this one. Jack Maggs. Jack is an ex-con from the brutal penal colonies of Australia, returned to London in 1837 to re-connect with, and explain himself to, his adopted pseudo-son Henry. And in the process he becomes the [honest to God, my cat is sitting on my back as I write this and I am painfully contemplating the necessity of getting him de-clawed]…. he becomes the footman to the neighbour next door to his son's residence. As it says on page 14, "Jack was not a footman." "Not", is an understatement. He is to footmen, what kings are to kings, in the movie starring John Goodman, called King Ralph. Basically, he has no clue what he is supposed to do. All his actions are pretence, at best. His real mission is to re-connect with his son while remaining incognito, and in the process, he is thoroughly psychoanalyzed by a Charles Dickens-like author named Tobias Oates, who performs "magnetism" [hypnotism] on unsuspecting Jack, and finds out all his subconsciously held secrets -- for the sole purpose of writing a novel about the criminal mindset. The maid, Mercy Larkin, informs Jack of what is going on while he is all looped out. Do they fall in love with each other or anything? Like as if I am going to tell you! But I will tell you this -- the 91 chapters of this book -- almost deliberately short, will have you flipping the pages to see what happens next. I loved it, and I highly recommend Jack Maggs to all my own readers. Especially if you like all that foggy old London-stuff [which I do]… people always walking around in a fog, and more things happening than any one person can see at any one time -- unless you have a really good narrator, like Peter Carey, guiding you through the mist. *****
....life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions -- we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come. -- Amor Towles, Rules of Civility -- Have a great Friday! *****
Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means. -- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose --
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath." -- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar -- Have a great Wednesday! *****
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. -- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose --
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. -- Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose --
Everyone knows I am in love with John Mayer, right? I mean, hell -- I even wrote a poem about him a few weeks ago. I just love his music so much -- somehow he is just always able to speak to my situation, both in his lyrics and his music. Lately, I've been experiencing recurring bouts of really being down. If I was a person of just a few percentage points less of a strong constitution, I would be in a state of clinical depression, really. But once again -- just listening to my iTunes on a damp, dreary [lonely] Saturday night, Mayer is yet able to speak to me through a song -- and give me some hope. Make me stay on this side of yonder balcony, if you know what I mean. After all, shadows mean there is light somewhere, right? So -- thank you, John Mayer. The significance of his first line is not lost on me tonight -- Did you know that you could be wrong, and swear you're right?
