restingmotion

A Short Walk Around My Neighborhood

 

I am painfully aware that it has been a couple of weeks since I last wrote, and there is basically no excuse for that except that my head has been wandering elsewhere.  And yet, as much as I want to say something, anything almost, my head is not really focused.  It is turning out to be not such a good day here.  I had my last chemotherapy session on Wednesday and today I have been hit with nausea and neuropathy and my head is completely discombobulated.  The good news is that as bad as it gets, it is all going to get better from here on out and I just have to cope with my body, with my head, with the water leak in the kitchen, with whatever else life throws my way.

 

 

The photos in this post are all from my neighbor's gardens, here meaning neighbor in the broadest sense, taken on my walk Wednesday morning, just before that last chemo.  Just a walk through a suburban neighborhood, with suburban landscaping and flowers, but also in many ways a true neighborhood, where neighbors walk and stop and talk to each other, a neighborhood where one day, when I was just up to walking again after my last bout with neuropathy, I was stopping for a rest while holding on to someone's mailbox.  A neighbor stopped and asked how I was, and he later drove around the block to make sure I was still up and moving and would get home ok.  I was almost home at that point and did not need a ride, but gratitude and warm feelings filled the rest of my day, and truth be told the rest of my week.

 

 

I continue to think about this, about community and neighborliness, and where we choose to live.  It is a subject that has been on my mind a lot of late.  Partially because I used to be a bounder, a person who when I would get unhappy would just up and ditch it all, but I learned that doesn't solve anything, because unhappiness is often the one thing that you take with you everywhere, or at least the seeds of that unhappiness.  First of all one needs to figure out oneself.  Yes, outside forces can push those boundaries, and this year of COVID lockdowns and health issues and cancer and feeling miserable have not helped with those inner demons, with that battle between inner and outer, and the matter of self-determination. Adversity pushes us to question what we really want, but at the same time, we have to dig deeper, to look below the surface.  Because there is always that layer of outer frustration that we may want to slough off, only to find we have stripped away too much skin, made the wrong choice, and left ourselves either numb or raw and wounded.

 

 

I am not raw and wounded right now.  My mail person just came up and dropped off a pile of catalogs, catalogs I might normally toss right into the recycling bin.  But today I will lie settle on the sofa with a cup of tea and let my mind wander as I turn the pages.  I will watch US Open Tennis.  I will eat something healthy even though I don't feel like eating.  I will do this because I refuse to give in, even though I am so behind on everything I sometimes question whether that is really true.  But I can also admit that there are days when mindlessly browsing through catalogs is perhaps more important than chasing a few dust bunnies around the house, not more important than mopping up a wet floor, but hey, catalogs then become a reward.  Eventually I will pick up the newest Louse Penny, which I have been saving for this weekend, but my mind is not yet settled enough to read it.  

 

 

This last photo, this is from my house.  I posted it, or a similar photo, on Instagram earlier in the week. You can see these apricot drift roses against the fence from the street.  They are still in their nursery planters.  I still haven't gotten them planted, but they appear to be happy here nestled between the small azaleas I did plant in the spring.  The roses will not be against this fence when they make it to their final location, but for now they offer a bit of promise, both because they look good even when I do not feel good, and hence they make me happy, but also because they are thriving despite setbacks, a reminder that the ability to thrive is not dependent on avoiding the bad things, just learning to navigate them.  I hope that is a lesson I can continue to grow into.

 

 

 

Vacation

 

At times, over the past 23 months it seems that all I wanted was to get away, to go someplace, any place.  Why was it then, when a long-scheduled vacation finally loomed, I had decidedly mixed feelings?

Anyway, I went.  I had a great time.  It was not always smooth, but then, what in life is?  I admit that as much of my trepidation about traveling, about traveling alone, was that in the past, the world of 24 months ago, I was finding that I did not really relish solo travel all that much.  But perhaps I just needed to slough something off, something that I might not have sloughed off otherwise.  Perhaps I needed to realize that I am only as alone as I chose to be, and that solo travel does not imply loneliness.

I can admit that my initial reaction to Key West was mixed.  I arrived near dusk.  I ventured out to the seaport and along Duval Street and I was struggling with crowds and noise.  This was in sharp opposition to my reaction to airports and travel itself.  Why was it that Duval Street made me pull inward, whereas I can drift through a crowded airport as if in a bubble?

 

Something I noticed before, before I stopped traveling, is that I find the travel itself quite calming.   I am perhaps neurotically organized.  I am always packed and ready at least a day before.  I can feel at loose ends waiting.  But at the same time this helps with my feelings of calmness.  I've been stranded in airports due to cancelled planes and I tend to be calm and bemused.  There is something about going to an airport, about planning travel, that allows me to just let go of the idea that I have any say in controlling events in the world,  that allows me to make myself into an island of calm.  Home may be my kingdom, and I want control.  In the world, it is easier to slough all that off.  This seems like phenomenal growth.  Would that I could maintain it in my daily life.

When I arrive however, that bubble seems to burst; perhaps it is just the yearning that takes over, the idea of vacation, the idea of escape, of adventure, of fulfillment.  That first evening in an unfamiliar place, I was nervous in crowds but also nervous on a street that felt too quiet in contrast.  Of course this stems from years of training, compounded by now years of isolation and this crazy- making hyperbolic world we live in, a world that sometimes seems determined to feed on fear, on making us fear one another.  That first night on Duval Street was like the meeting of two opposing seas, leaving me in emotional turmoil.  I had left the safety of home, but hadn't yet found my vacation self.  I felt like Dorothy landing in Oz.  I think there is always that moment of transition, a moment when pent up expectation spills over; how we experience it may vary, but it too is part of the beauty of vacation.

I found a happy corner to settle down in.  I had soup, and shrimp, and a vantage point for people watching.  That airport calm descended once again.  I walked back to my hotel in the cooler night air.  I wasn't yet sure what I thought of this place; at first it seemed too casual, too loud, too "tourista".  But that was mostly me,  my own unsettledness. It takes me a little while to shift gears sometimes, even shifting into gears that have been getting more frequent use as I grow older.

The second morning I found a great breakfast and coffee spot, a place I stopped most mornings.  I wandered around old town.  I admired the neighborhoods, the bars, the stores, the music, the artists.  I loved the fact that chickens, and especially roosters, wandered around everywhere.  This seemed a metaphor for something, perhaps just the idea of not rushing.  I watched a gecko while I drank a cup of strong Cuban coffee. I hadn't put words to that something at that point; I am not sure I have yet.  But I too began to unwind, to enjoy this place, the ambiance, the casual vibe.  I began to let go of my own expectations.

That did not come as easily as it sounds writing the words.  It is so easy to write, "I let go". But nothing is really that simple, is it?  I found my joys and my disappointments came in waves, but overall the good quickly outnumbered the bad, and mostly came when least expected, lost in a moment, often of mundanity.

I retreated during the heat of the day to my shady porch, or perhaps to the big window with the easy chair and my knitting.  I am still not a creature of the hotter climes.  I love the angled sunshine of winter light.  I burn in the hotter sun, get sun poisoning and headaches, but that doesn't mean I don't love the easy going flow of tropical and sub-tropical climes.  And yet here I was, happy and content, enjoying shade and warm breezes, the languor of the siesta.

I was went to Key West for an event, a literary festival, but I will write about that in another post.  I attended.  I missed some things.  I walked a lot, more than I had in a long time, since before my cancer treatment, only 3 to 5 miles a day, but it was a start.  I hope to keep walking now that I am home in cooler weather.  I needed the boost, the interruption to my state of inertia.

What I found, and what I often forget, is that for me the best part of vacation is not seeing the sights, or doing the things that everyone tells me I must do, but in the wandering around, in talking to people.  In just sitting back and being in a place.   I went to the Hemingway museum.  I did not go on the water.   Yes I want to see and do but I also just want to unwind and be myself.  What is surprising, although it should not be, is that being myself in a foreign environment is subtly different than being myself at home, and that, in and of itself is quite revealing. What is always surprising is that the highlights aren't the museum, or the adventure, but the little moments one was not expecting.  The chance encounters, the birds at your feet, the crow of a rooster.

Vacation, all I ever wanted....

 

Well who knew?  Sometimes we go place for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes we go for the right reasons but with the wrong expectations.  Sometimes it all falls in place.  Sometimes it doesn't.  But if we are lucky something we needed is revealed. 

 

Key West.  I will be back.  And this from a woman who usually avoids vacations to hot places.  

 

And So The 2021 Reading List Closes

One year of reading ends and another begins.  I am not going to list all the books I read in 2021 here, but I will include links to the previous monthly installments at the end of this post for those who just can't get enough.  This is the first year in many that I actually posted a reading list every month.  In fact, there may have been months when I believe that is all I posted.

 

I read more books in 2021 than I did in 2020, and in both years I read far more than my yearly average over previous years.  I hadn't really thought about this very much until I sat on the fringes of a conversation regarding reading, where the others involved noted that they had in fact read less than usual since the Covid-19 pandemic began.  I noted, to myself, that I had read substantially more, but didn't jump in because the conversation was actually far more interesting without my input, which would have served no purpose other than bragging rights.  

 

As for my own increased reading there were several factors involved.  To begin with, I had decided to read more in 2020, even before the pandemic shut-down began, and then, like many others, I went through a period of ennui where I was unable to read.  I overcame that however.  To some degree I simply. read more because I went out less; there were fewer social obligations to distract me.  I also have to admit that health issues may have contributed; it would be naive to deny this.  My television viewing also increased exponentially, and that I do blame on health struggles and lack of energy.  My heaviest television use occurred at those times of greatest listlessness.  

 

I also cut back on social media in many ways.  One would think that in a time of greater social isolation, greater social media would enhance one's sense of connectivity.  But that was not what I found.  Yes, zoom was a godsend and I have friends I zoom with, and friends I talk with regularly.  But otherwise it seemed to me that I found social media sites polarizing.  Pandemic shut-downs were hard enough for everyone, but there were times that I felt that the combination of the news and social media, especially combined with a lack of one-on-one human interaction, were more isolating, and made conversations and interactions, if anything, more high-strung and volatile, as if none of us could completely get out of our heads.  Books helped me with this.

 

At any rate, I have been happy to be a reader, and I still wish to see myself as a reader.  I have no regrets over any book I have read, no matter if it was difficult or mindlessly simple, no matter if I found myself agreeing with the author, or disagreeing vehemently.  Each and every book showed me some perspective on the world outside of my own, and often I was most surprised by the books I least expected to be surprised by. 

 

Still my plan is to read less in 2022.  My goal is 60 books, and I would be very happy if that is all I read.  I will also be happy if I read more, or even less.  I have other things I want to do with my time, and although those things do involve social engagement, I also find I have no desire to be out in the world as much as I was prior to 2020.  In short it is all an adjustment.  Who knows where it will all lead.

 

Note that already my reading was tapering off in December:  6 books, 5 of them fiction.  The one non-fiction book, Avrum Bluming's Estrogen Matters, was a reread.  I had read it the first time in April, so technically, although there are 140 books listed, that one was listed twice, for a total of 139 books.

 

135. Edwige Danticat: Claire of the Sea Light.

136. Alice Hoffman: The Marriage of Opposites.

137. Joy Jordan-Lake:  Under a Gilded Moon.

138. Avrum  Bluming: Estrogen Matters.

139. Louise Penny: Still Life.

140. Jean Stafford: Boston Adventure.

 

Edwige Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light takes place in Haiti in the seaside village of Ville Rose.  The center of the novel is the occasion of Claire Limye Lanme's 7th birthday and in many ways the action of the book weaves its way around this center, much like a circular maze, using Claire's story to tell the story of the village, its history, its residents, as well as the story of Claire herself.  In the first part of the book we get a fairly straight-forward explication of Claire's story up until the time of this birthday, and Claire closes out the novel, making a decision about her own place in this intricately woven web.  In between these two points, the story moves forward, backward, and often sideways, showing us the interconnected lives that make up this place, and which make up the underlying foundation on which Claire's life is built.  It is a fascinating, and often poetically told story.  Despite the name of the novel, Claire is not the main character, she is simply a point of light around which all these other stories come into focus and are told.  It is a beautiful and compelling novel, although the story line is often convoluted and will frustrate the less than focused reader.    It is as much the story of a place as of a person, and in fact the story of each person is as much the story of the place and the people that shaped them.  Claire initially seems as much an idea, a creature of mist and yearning as she seems a child, just because of the way the story focuses around her but not on her.   As the stories weave together, the reader also begins to see how Claire will, herself, become interwoven into the story of this place, and this place will be interwoven into her own story.

 

Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites also takes place in the Caribbean but it is an entirely different kind of novel, much more in the vein of classic historical fiction.  It is the story of Rachel Pomie Petit Pizarro, the mother of the painter Camille Pissarro, beginning with her childhood in the prosperous Jewish community in Saint Thomas and ending in France.  Hoffman paints a fascinating and occasionally maddening portrait of Rachel and through this rather good historical novel she also allows the reader to explore the precarious situation of women in early 19th century colonial life.  Rachel's stories, and her descriptions of Saint Thomas seem to flow from some of Pissarro's work.  I am certain this is intentional as Hoffman tries to weave together the little we know of Pissarro's family with what we do know of his work as an artist.  I found the story also fascinating because it explores the Jewish culture of St. Thomas, where there had been a strong sephardic Jewish community since 1700. Hoffman's description of the synagogue itself is particularly beautiful, blending a bit of magic with historical reality in the understanding and eyes of a child, the young Rachel. The telling drove me back down memory lane, allowing me to relive my own experience of visiting the synagogue of Congregation Beracha Veshalom Vegmiluth Hasadim in St Thomas, which is one of the oldest standing synagogue I have personally been to.  This one is the second oldest building built as a synagogue in the Untied states, having been built in 1832, and it is still in use. 

 

From there, and continuing in the historical fiction vein, I read Joy Jordan Lake's Under a Gilded Moon, which concerns the Vanderbilts and the building of  the Biltmore Estate in nearby Asheville, North Carolina.  This was a book club choice, I believe partially chosen because it is about local, or at least regional history.  The novel shows the sharp dichotomy between the Vanderbilts, including their friends and kin, and their attitudes toward the poorer residents of the region. I felt it was particularly good at describing the beauty of the scenery. It suffered from attempting to add in too many "real people" and "real places", as if somehow it had to be a survey of all that was once here, at the expense of the story line.  It was clear a great deal of research went into the novel but the detail overwhelmed the story, resulting in inconsistently tenuous connections and gaps in the plot.  Still the novel did open a discussion into the roots of the divisions and attitudes, between rich and poor, attitudes that we still struggle with to this day.

 

For my other book group, i reread Still Life, the first of Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novels.  I enjoyed reading it the second time as much as I had the first, which makes me think I will enjoy it again and again, and it was good, from this perspective to see how many of the characters who might take center stage in later novels are introduced here.  

 

Lastly I read Jean Stafford's early novel Boston Adventure, which proved to be a difficult choice.  The novel itself was good although at times tedious.  It is a carefully painted and studied portrait of Boston Society in the mid 20th century told from the perspective of an outsider, a poor girl, who is brought into the circle but who is never really a part of it.  In many ways it is a fascinating study of social isolation, perhaps not the best thing to read when our entire culture has been experimenting with a different vein of social isolation.  It is also a fascinating study of the cruelty that is often contained in social "kindnesses", in the way that persons of one class or milieu often, in the name of "helping", create effective prisons without explicitly meaning to do so. It was a worthwhile novel, but not perhaps the best airplane reading, where I would have done better with one (or four) short frivolous novels.

 

Previous months:
January, February, March, April, May, June, July1 and July2, August, September, October, November.

 

 

 

Joy. A Reflection.

A few weeks ago, attending a small birthday celebration among friends, the birthday girl asked the members of the party to reflect on the year that was coming to a close.  When it was my turn to speak, another friend interrupted and deflected the conversation into another topic.  I was a little put off, and a few minutes later was talking to a third friend, telling her what a positive experience the past year had been, when she asked that I wait and share my comments with the group.  And yet, when the topic came up again, I was once again interrupted, and the birthday girl was distracted with another unrelated conversation. I never did get a chance to speak.

 

In some ways this conversation, with all its attendant frustrations, is a mirror for my year, and, in fact, much of what I was hoping to say that evening.   I can state upfront that at that moment I felt unheard, and uncared-for, as if my year and my thoughts were somehow less valid than anyone else's.  But that was also a fleeting feeling, and like so many disappointments in life, one can either hang onto a momentary flash of negative emotion, letting it shape and color your being, or one can simply release it into the air and let it go.  I chose the latter, just as I chose, despite a year that many would consider challenging, to see it as a good year, chose to count my blessings rather than my losses.  

 

In fact, what I was going to say that evening was not about cancer or struggle or how hard the year had been; everyone in that room knew what I had been through, knew my struggles and that was not the time to reiterate them.  What I had actually been about to say was that through my experience I had been offered an opportunity, and in a way a blessing,  because I was forced out of the comfort zone of habit.  Habits are not always to our benefit. It was only through the process of falling apart that I was able to realize the possibility of rebuilding, of rebirth if you will.   I am in fact happier today than I was at this time last year; I am happier today than I was two years ago.  That does not mean the road was easy; in fact it was damn difficult at times.  But no one ever promised any of us an easy road, and the more mature I become the more I see that ease and comfort often hamper growth and creativity.  I would not wish cancer on anyone.  But at the same time, increasingly, neither would I wish anyone bland comfort and ease.  There is something in our essence as Homo Sapiens that needs to be challenged, that needs to create, and the process of creation is a process born of destruction.  We cannot live up to our full potential without constantly dislodging ourselves from the dead-ends life has imposed on us, no, that we have imposed upon ourselves.

 

In retrospect I saw that my friend, fearing I my comments would be something of a "downer" was deflecting, as she had been reared to do, steering the conversation away from unpleasantness and toward idle chatter.  Of course this did mean that my thoughts went unheard; it also meant that on some level she expected something less of me than I was going to offer.  But it also presented an opportunity for forgiveness.  I realized that my thoughts were no less valid for not being heard. Yes, we all want to feel heard, and that is an important part of feeling loved. The crime was not really against me, but against herself and the others.  In choosing to deflect, she was choosing not to engage on a personal level, to live on a surface level, which is both her choice, and her loss. Yes, she was protecting herself from despair, but she was also closing herself off from the possibility of joy.  The simple truth is that all of our words deserve to be heard. And by shutting down each others words we close ourselves off to the possibility of connection, and ultimately to joy and through joy, hope.

 

For that, it seems is one of the things I have learned this year, perhaps one of the many things I have known in my head for a long time, but which I have not always practiced in my heart, is that life is short, that I am very lucky, and that it behooves us all to treasure and hold onto joy.    Joy has nothing to do with the trials of life; and although it often does us good to rail against pain and affliction, holding onto our grief, our anger and our sadness does us no good.  When we cannot manage hope, we can still find joy.  Through joy we can often find happiness and love. Holding onto joy teaches us that there are things we can let slip away, that forgiveness is not difficult once we let go of pain. Taking even hesitant steps toward joy starts us on a path that can lead us to finding  hope in a world that occasionally seems devoid of just that.

 

In the past two years the median life expectancy in the US has dropped by 1.5 years. Regardless of the numbers, no single one of us is guaranteed anything, to live to the median, or beyond it.  And yet this reminds me of something.  The median life expectancy of an American is roughly slightly over 4100 weeks, perhaps less by these new calculations.  I have already lived over 3200 of those weeks.  No matter how I look at it, I am on the downward slope.  It is easy when we are young to think we always have time, but it is not true.  Most of my time is already in the past.  When we look at years it all seems so far away; when I look at weeks, it all seems so short.  I want my weeks to be about joy, whatever joy I am finding in the moment of that particular week.  Last week it may have been about family. This week joy revolves around friends and fabric and creative endeavors.  If I am lucky I have 900 more weeks, perhaps more, perhaps less.  But the luck isn't in the number of weeks; it is in how I chose to live those weeks. The gift is that I can chose who I want to be.  I can chose joy.  It is not about what happens, or even time itself, but what I chose to make of my time in my life.

 

I choose joy.

Wallowing....or November Reading

Sometimes life just gets the better of us, despite all of our good intentions, despite all our efforts to bear up and soldier on, and sometimes there is no recourse, or perhaps no healthy recourse, other than to allow oneself to be caught in the tide, washing up wherever one will.

 

November was, in many ways, a difficult month.  During that last 10 days or so of radiation therapy I was just done, mentally exhausted perhaps more even than physically exhausted.   Although I had allowed myself to be sick, allowed myself to stay in bed as needed, allowed myself to shirk responsibility, I hadn't really allowed myself the option of wallowing, of hosting my own private pity party, of tossing myself headlong into escapism and grief.  And then November hit.

 

As you may recall, I ended October with a novel in Fern Michaels' Sisterhood series.  I went on to open November with a binge-read, finishing the first nine novels in the series over the course of twelve or so days. When I wasn't reading I wasn't doing much else either, other than flouncing about or hiding in bed.  I have no real regrets about that; I needed to allow ennui full access, allowing it to simply run its course and die from exhaustion.

 

In fact, were I not so generally listless and in need of escape, I might not have enjoyed these books as much as I did.  Michaels is a story-teller, not a writer, and the novels very much follow a simple formula.  This is the crime; this is the punishment; how does one then make the story work.  As I mentioned before, this is pure simple escapist and revenge fantasy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  They read like a literary equivalent of a Lifetime movie.  I would want to say Hallmark, but they get perhaps a little too gritty on the revenge side for that, at least in some of the volumes.  There is no nuance, no sophistication, no real character development, and yet they were exactly the escapist distraction I needed.

119. Fern Michaels: Weekend Warriors

120. Fern Michaels:  Payback.

121. Fern Michaels:  Vendetta

122.  Fern Michaels:  The Jury.

124. Fern Michaels: Sweet Revenge

125.  Fern Michaels:  Lethal Justice

126. Fern Michaels:  Free Fall.

127. Fern Michaels: Hide and Seek.

128. Fern Michaels:  Hokus Pokus.

 

If you were observant, you may have noticed a gap.  

 

Somewhere in the middle of that list, about the time of my last treatment, of ringing the bell, of celebrating the joy of finally being done, I threw myself into a literary novel, and a very good one at that.  It didn't hold, that focus, and I was back to fantasy fiction before I knew it, but enough of that.

 

123. Richard Powers:  Bewilderment.  I found this slim novel entrancing, moving, powerful, provocative, and bewildering.  I intend all of that in the very best way, but it also may have been slightly more than I was ready to deal with at the time.   It is the story of Thomas, an astrobiologist, who is raising his nine-year old son, Robin, following the death of his wife some years previously; but the novel is both more and less than one particular story line.  Thomas is thinly drawn, often rather one-dimensional, and also far too clueless, even for a trope. Sometimes too much weight is placed on Robin, not that children can't be wise beyond their years, or fragile in ways that we, as adults have long forgotten.  But the story is deeply affecting and even the sometime glib characterizations play an important role in this.  It is the story of a family struggling; it is a story of a struggling earth and the damage mankind is inflicting on it; it is a story of scientific ethics; it is an overtly political novel; it is an overtly humanistic novel.  In short it is a short novel that can be read on many levels in many ways, and that will both entrance some, myself included, and annoy others.   

 

I found  the tile of Bewilderment entirely apt.  Mostly it is exactly that, the story of our own bewilderment.  Thomas is a bewildered single father, struggling to deal with the needs of his son in the face of the expectations of society, neither of which he fully grasps; he is a man most comfortable with his science. Robin is a child probably somewhere on the spectrum, but his father wishes to avoid labels and drugs. Robin is preternaturally bright, a trait inherited from both of his parents, and emotionally unstable.  He is bewildered by humanity, by the learned behavior humanity embraces, especially as this behavior appears contradictory to the natural world Robin so keenly observes. Bewilderment is also portrayed in the glimpses we are given of the life of the mother, Alyssa, (A - Lyssa, or not-fractious) who fights against the destruction of the natural world and yet struggles to contain her own emotions and anger at said destruction.  Robin is very much the blossoming of the union of Thomas and Alyssa, neither of whom fit into the world completely, into something new -- a new beginning, which alas does not survive the bewilderment of the world into which it is born.  I do believe there is a lesson in this, as well as the most telling lesson in this book, which is not the bewilderment of the primary characters, or the bewilderment of the natural world, which is ongoing, but the bewilderment of humanity at its own destructive tendencies.  In this novel the complacency, ignorance, and willful blindness are their own kind of bewilderment, a bewilderment of unseen consequences.  What choice does one make when the alternatives are bewilderment or retreat into a comforting complacency? Do we chose bewilderment? Or would we rather be comfortably numb? Can we learn? Or is it already too late?  Will we change, or will we retreat into our own solace, our own grief, our own bubbles?  There are no real answers here, but despite all the big questions, there is quite a bit of humanity.

 

129. Heather Busch's  Why Cats Paint. This slim art book proved to be a humorous romp.  Yes, it is a book for cat lovers.  Yes it is about cats making messes with paint, as well as making messes with other things.  It is a brilliant satire of both the culture of cat lovers and the elitism of the art wold. A good reminder not to take oneself too seriously.

 

Having gotten all that out of my system, my reading settled down. Here is the remainder of the list.

 

130. Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery.

131.  Maggie O'Farrell:  Hamnet.

132. Hillary Rodham Clinton: State of Terror.

133. Tommy Orange:  There, There

134.  W.E.B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk.

 

Although they are not sequential on the list, I am going to discuss Up From Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk together primarily because they have formed their own conversation in my thoughts.  I had heard of both authors of course but do not believe I had read either.  They should both be part of some essential syllabus that is required reading for what it means to be educated in America, along with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  In fact, I wish I had read them as a teenager, when I was reading both of the latter.  But I also realize that both men, Washington, and DuBois, write in ways that are not really accessible to teenagers today, and that we do not really teach historical context, historicity, or train young people in how ideas change and evolve, and how our own thoughts are changed by shifting tides of ideas and events that often really have little to do with the original context facing the writer of the words themselves.  I suppose I continue to hold onto the hope that such a world is possible. 

 

I found both books fascinating and equally valid but quite different.  DuBois does not agree with Washington's stance.  I am not certain Washington would have agreed with DuBois, but that is not the point.  I am also not convinced that Washington was an "Uncle Tom" and although I know what the term means, I also struggle with the idea that the Uncle Tom most of us know is the one portrayed in movies and on television, and that Uncle Tom is but a shadow of the original Uncle Tom as he was written.  Dismissing Washington as an Uncle Tom, the idea of the Uncle Tom itself, is a fiction, a trope for a two dimensional world that refuses to acknowledge nuance, or reality.  It is simpler, but not true.

 

But I have wandered into the weeds.  Both works are shocking at times; both are moving, often most moving when talking, almost off-handedly, of deeply personal things.  Both writers are most revealing when they are also the most oblique, when they hint at the vastness of things not said.  DuBois' essays are meticulously argued, but it is the poetry of the personal stories that resonate.  One cannot understand where we were without reading both, just as you cannot understand where we are now without also reading MLK and Malcolm X.  

 

And then back to fiction, my comfort zone.

 

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet has resided on my shelves since its initial publication and I am only now getting to it.   Once I started I wondered why I had put it off so long.  This is fine historical fiction.  Set in Stratford in the late 16th Century it is the story of the young William Shakespeare, although he is actually never named here, his wife, Anne Hathaway, and the loss of their son, Hamnet.    Hamnet was apparently another spelling of the name Hamlet, which I knew; my early English literature training coming to the fore here.  In so many ways our obsession with proper spelling of names is such a modern thing.   O'Farrell imagines Hathaway as a strong, resourceful, fierce and creative young woman, the kind of young woman to which an observant and poetic young man might be drawn.  The setting is convincing, the story as well, and the author ties in the few known facts about Shakespeare's personal life into the story in convincing, if not always historically accurate,  ways.   Anne and Will never really overcome the rift created between them over Hamnet's death, although the drift was already present.  It was always evident that young Will's imaginings that he would take his wife to London were at odds with everything we were shown about her character; as well as many of the realities of life in 16th century England.  This did not surprise me, knowing that it was not unusual for families to stay behind, and I was grateful that O'Farrell did not fall into the modern assumption that Hathaway was a shrew simply because she stayed in Stratford.  But more than just a beautiful and heart-warming story, Hamnet is also an exploration of loss and the transformative origins and consolations of art. 

 

Next I read the new Louise Penny/Hillary Clinton political thriller, State of Terror, and I actually enjoyed it more than I anticipated.   It is a well-crafted political thriller and it read like a good mix of the two authors voices.  I am not certain I am happy about some of the connections made with Penny's Three Pines characters, I suppose these had to be added in to satisfy Penny's fans.  There is also a lot of sarcasm and political pay-back, which I did expect, and although some of it bordered on off-putting, generally the story got moving quickly enough that one just let it slip.  It always seems to me that a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is required in these novels anyway.  It was a gripping read that I didn't really want to put down. Although I suspect that the political machinations and insights are not as off-base as my heart would prefer, I did find it lacking in the empathetic insights of Penny's Three Pines voice.  This was no cozy mystery.   The ending left open the possibility of another novel, but I am not certain I would follow through, even if the authors do.

 

Lastly, I read There, There by Tommy Orange.  This was a novel that completely surprised me.  I don't remember why I put it on my library hold list, a recommendation from a friend probably, but I absolutely loved it.   The opening chapter is explosively passionate and I was completely captured by the voice, by the changing voices, by the palpable anger and confusion and even poetry of emotion and loss. This novel is told from the point of view of several characters, telling stories that initially seem disconnected but eventually come together to form a complexly woven whole.  Sometimes the transition between the stories seemed choppy; sometimes the stories seemed incomplete, and I cannot say it was the easiest read,  but I gradually came to recognize that this was intentional, a part of the story itself.  There is some confusion around the timeline just as there is confusion in the characters understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their own history -- the very state of existence known as Native American.  

 

The title of the novel is taken from a famous quote by Gertrude Stein, about Oakland, where the novel mostly takes place, when she stated that there was no "there, there" meaning the Oakland of her childhood was no longer evident in the 'there' of contemporary Oakland.  Of course this is always the case for all of us, but in this novel that meaning is even more profound as the characters are trying to reconcile the "there" of their modern lives in Oakland with an almost mythological "there" of their heritage, something to which many of the characters have no knowledge or palpable connection, other than the fact that they are judged for being Native American and they yearn for some defining story to make sense of their lives.  This is an incredibly powerful novel, filled with raw emotion.  Orange captures the feelings of these characters so that something of each of them and their struggles sneak under the skin of the reader.  Never have I read anything so powerfully soul-wrenching about the experience of alcoholism, or being a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Never have I felt such raw yearning.  I can't say it was a favorite book because it was too shocking to be so classified; but I will certainly look for future work from this author, and my view of the world will never be the same. 

 

Books I Read in October

'Tis the last day of November,

And what do I do?

I struggle to publish

A book list for you......

 

Bad attempts at poetry not withstanding, I will get my October reading out of the way, if only so that I can start on the November list, hopefully before my December gets out of hand.  

 

It may already be too late for that, of course.  November seems to be simultaneously a time when I have mustered energy and strength enough to begin putting the routines of daily life back to rights while at the same time, shoving my shoulders to the door and bracing my feet to keep it from bursting wide open with the calls and demands of worldly too muchness.

 

But.......Books

 

My October reading was, for the most part, light and inconsequential, not that there is anything to complain of in that.  I was in undergoing radiation therapy.  I had days of increasing strength and energy, and days where I would have happily stayed in bed.  I was frustrated that, although I was feeling increasingly better as chemo therapy drugs were dissipating from my systems and my body was beginning the long process of healing from the onslaught, neuropathy continued to be a problem.  I wanted it all to be done.  Very human that, as also is the impetus to escape into something silly and or distracting.

 

114. October started off with The Guest Book by Sarah Blake.  Oh my, was this a frustrating read!  In fact, had it not been for a book group, I would have abandoned this book fairly early on.  

 

Surprisingly, although I struggled through the five-hundred some-odd pages of dissatisfied whining by wooden characters in a novel with no core, no heart, nothing to grab onto, there were parts of this novel, certain themes, that persistently stayed glued in my thoughts. Yes, I thought. Yes, I wondered.  Yes, I wished that the author had been less scattered in her focus on big themes, and had more adept at tying them together in deeper development of at least one character.  There is a lot that could have been explored here:  A multi-generational family saga, an island in Maine, family secrets, so much to explore.  But it wasn't really explored, just listed, and almost analyzed through the overlapping stories of three generations of women, except that this interleaving of experiences never quite worked, and this reader never really connected with any of the three women.  

 

Blake was taking on big questions and alas, the questions overwhelmed the novel.  Rather than deft emotional exploration we were given minutia, pat answers and cliché. This book left me yearning for a different book; it could have been so much more relevant, revealing, even rewarding had there been less attention paid to throwing in circumstances and greater focus on the personal repercussions caused by the ripple of those circumstances. I found the novel to be less than satisfying, even if thought provoking.  No regrets however: it was worth reading the book if only for the group discussion, which was far more interesting than the novel itself.  In that sense, I would have to say it was a good book club novel; depending on the temperament of the club itself.

 

Book 115:  Charming Falls Apart by Angela Terry.  This sweet, charming, bit of fluff, chick lit at its best, just made me happy.  It didn't take long to read, and the story was predictable, but those were not problems here.  The story, about a young woman who loses her job and her fiancé on one fateful day, and has to find her way back from this upset of her "perfect" life, is just fun to read.  There is humor and growth, and yes a bit of sappiness as well, but it was the perfect book for me at the time.  The gentle exploration of vulnerability and self-mockery exploited by self-help books was particularly adept. Sometimes one needs something that just brightens the spirits, and does it with a light hand. 

 

116. I went into Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken with high hopes.  I was disappointed although it is not necessarily a bad book.  Perhaps it is just that the passage of time has not played well with Hawken's thesis.  It is actually a very good survey of millions of small NGOs from around the world, of the desire of people to effect change, and a cataloging of the, mostly local, desire of humans to change direction  and return to some kind of biological, environmental, and humane sanity.    But he is trying to define this movement as a coherent movement, despite its incoherence.  Hawken acknowledges the localness of the human condition, and even makes efforts to point out that the global human community and its impact does not depend on agreement on specifics, but acknowledgement of the common humanity that includes our differences.  He fails in that he focuses too greatly on labeling a movement, even as he acknowledges that a defining focus cannot exist.  I found the book naively optimistic.  

 

A quote from the introduction stuck with me though, and it defines much of the tenor of this book, and hits home with me in my own views of life:

 

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data.  If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.   (4.1.4)

 

117. Next, I picked up James Baldwin's slim but profound volume, The Fire Next Time.. Baldwin's passionate voice, the intelligence of his observations and his prose are still highly relevant even over half a century after this book was written.  Baldwin writes about being black in America, about how black Americans see white Americans, and chillingly so, how whites do not see themselves.  It is a book that is easily read in one sitting, and yet I kept coming back to it over the course of several days.  Absorption took weeks. I saw Baldwin's insights in other books, other events in my life, changing my thoughts, still.  I think this is a book everyone should read, a book that I wish I had read when I was 15, when I was reading the writings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.  I didn't know about James Baldwin at that time. In my own, admittedly naive in some ways, worldview, this and quite a few primary sources would be taught and read by all teenagers when they study American History. But that would require a world that took a different view of itself.  Whereas the more pessimistic side of myself believes the only lesson history teaches us is that we don't learn the lessons of history.

 

I ended the month with more frivolity.  I talked to my mom on October 31, and she mentioned a book she had found in the library at her assisted living facility, Safe and Sound by Fern Michaels.  I was tired and overwhelmed, I needed an easy read, and I was able to download it from the local library system to my kindle right then and there.  So I read it.

 

118. This is volume 29 in Michaels' Sisterhood series, but I didn't know that when I picked it up.  It was still an entertaining read, quickly finished in just a couple of hours.  I will say up front that I do not like most of Michaels' romance novels, but I enjoyed this, and I went on to a bit of a mini-binge into the beginning of November.  The novel is meant to pull at the heart-strings:  a lonely, abused, child in trouble, women who want to protect him, and inflict punishment on those who cause this charming boy harm. The Sisterhood is a series about female vigilantes.  It is pure over-the-top female revenge fantasy where bright ambitious women take on the ills of the world.  No one is killed, but that does not mean that punishment and retribution are not occasionally quite violent.  Yes, I loved it.  I can say that even as the punishment in this particular case made me squirm, although I also understood it.  

 

We are complex  and inconsistent, we humans, aren't we?  No point in pretending otherwise.

 

 

 

Brave New World

So much has happened in the last month I cannot even begin to catch up.  At the same time it is as if nothing has happened at all.  I am still here, in Knoxville, life still goes on, all is well.  It is a life of little excitement, and that is often all to the good.  But even that is ambiguous.  I am excited.  I am excited at small things, and increasing energy, at the ability to vacuum the cobwebs out of the corners of the ceilings and the light fixtures.  I am excited that the various piles of life, the things neglected, are less neglected now, and that energy grows steadily, in small increments.  The truth is that even joy takes energy.

 

 

Two weeks ago, well almost two weeks ago, I cleaned out the garage.  This took most of an afternoon and it was dark by the time I finished.  The box in the middle (green stripe) is now gone.  The pile of black things in the driveway also.  That was a floor-standing bike rack that worked in my apartment, but not in the garage because it is meant to lean against a wall and the floors of the garage slope slightly toward the center in order to drain any errant water that might find its way inside.  Sold.

 

I abandoned the garage in the early summer.  Oh I walked through it to get to my car.  But it was filled with dirty shovels and bags of dirt, spills on the floor, cobwebs I hadn't the energy to tackle.  Mess and nature were taking over and this fed my own bitter inner voices.  How could I live here two years (almost 2 1/2 years now) and not yet have put up shelves, of organized the garage, have kept up with the mess?   My inner voices moved beyond gentle admonitions to chiding to shrieks of outrage and disappointment.  

 

But wait.  I was in the middle of planting when suddenly I simply could not.  it was not a question of what I would rather do, but one of what I actually could do. The question was "do I lift this shovel from the floor?" "Do I sweep up this dirt?" Or do I use what small remaining bit of energy remains to drag myself up the steps and back into the house.  "Do I even have enough energy for that?"

 

Wait!  I have lived here 2 1/2 years, but over 1 1/2 years of that time I have been dealing with other issues, health issues, energy issues, the push-pull of dreams versus the reality of limited energy.  It is time to cut myself some slack.   I can be happy with neat but not organized.  Yes, there is more that could be done.  The possibility of more always exists.  I have always been subject to the whims of "more is more", to gluttony, not just in having, but in doing.  I was trained from early childhood for a life of gluttony:  the gluttony of doing; of being;  the need to be "smarter than"; the push to be "more accomplished";  the drive to achieve. The call of "more" is yet another trap.

 

 

There have been other progresses.  The espresso machine started leaking.  It started leaking at the worst possible time, when my energy was low, when my brain was also trapped in a pit of molasses.  It could flood the kitchen cabinet between my first and second expresso if I grew roots in my chair, if I allowed too much time to elapse.  And then....... The flood and its aftermath would overwhelm my energy levels and send me back to bed, exhausted and coffee-less.  But this was but a small crisis, a crisis of luck and even privilege in a world of greater crises.

 

 

A month later the coffee corner is back in business.  The biggest source of the leak has been addressed, although there are still a few small adjustments to be made, as there are also a few small tweaks to be made adjusting the grind back to my normal house espresso grind after a month of grinding coffee much more coarsely.  I can live with tweaks.  To live is to master the need for constant tweaking of one's hold on reality.

 

Some piles have simply been shifted to other piles, it is true.  

 

I cleaned out my closet.  I dreaded going in there.  I didn't know what would fit, what would not.  I wore the same few garments over and over again, and I was happy with the cohort of limited choice.  But the closet still loomed.  In the last month it has all been addressed.  Everything, from undergarments to coats and everything in between has been tried on and divided up.  The standard divisions were strictly maintained: keep, donate,  mend or remake.  Surprisingly, it all came out pretty evenly. About 1/3 of the contents of my closet remains, although that is more heavily weighted toward shoes and accessories.  

 

 

Above is the pile of potentialities: things that need mending, things that can be altered or remade, things that show promise of transformation because the fabric or the yarn can be reused, reconfigured, reimagined.  Of course, in the immediate future this just means one more pile in the studio.

 

I haven't sorted the studio out yet.  It remains more a house of dreams than a fully functioning work space, although I am beginning, just beginning, to work there again.  My hands itch at the prospect while simultaneously protesting as they struggle with fine motor skills.  Every day my hands and my head come a little closer together. Every day dreams and reality butt heads.  Every day the walls shift, even minutely. 

September: Fiction Month

September seemed to have been an "all fiction, all the time" month, although considering that many of the novels were light, it seems odd to me that I read only 11 books.  Nevermind. First the List:

 

103.    Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North.

104.    Ann Cleeves, Red Bones.

105.    Lee Child, The Sentinel.

106.     Ash Davidson,  Damnation Spring.

107.     Annette Valentine, Sufficient Sacrifice.

108.     Phillip Roth,  The Dying Animal.

109.     Sally Rooney, Normal People.

110.     Louise Penney, The Madness of Crowds.

111.    D.E. Stevenson, Still Glides the Stream.

112.    Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers.

113.    Lawrence Block, A Time to Murder and Create.

 

Once again, I am going to attack the list in the order read. Surprisingly, all of the novels remain clear in my mind despite the fact that I often feel so tired that I feel like my brain has short-circuited, and I did not take extensive notes in my reading journal as I read. This was because for most of September my hands were not working well and I could not hold a pen. A keypad was also uncomfortable (and still can be) but I prefer my journaling with pen and paper, a setback that seems to have radically upset my life in ways I did not expect.

 

But onto the books:

I started the month planning to continue working my way through the Booker nominees.   But that plan fell by the wayside with the first book I selected, although beautiful, was too intensely philosophical and meditative for my mind to wrap itself around at that time, sick as I was following my final chemotherapy session.  It quickly became apparent that I needed lighter reading, something focused more on movement than introspection, and so began a month of wild swings in reading material.

 

That first novel was Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North.   This is an intensely literary novel; there is very little action, there is no dialogue,  A young man in Columbo, Sri Lanka receives a phone call informing him of a death; he takes a long walk; he takes a long train ride; he observes the world around him and meditates on previous train rides, personal history, public history, the toll taken by war on those touched directly and those seemingly untouched in any obvious way.  It was all too intensively introspective at a time when I needed an escape from the inward gaze. 

 

I would not recommend this book if you are looking for a clear-cut story line and easy answers. If you can tolerate beautiful, elegantly meditative prose that makes time and place feel very real, it may be book for you.  I stated that there is no real action in this novel, and yet, action and inaction are referenced constantly.  One begins to see a world through this young man's eye; one begins to feel like one is interacting with people otherwise unknown and, to most of us, unseen.  It is the story of culture, of trauma, of family, of yearning, of love, and of death.  With no direct story at all, Arudpragasam manages to reference a rather large story, a story that touches all of us in one way or another, celebrating those moments lost in fleeting thought, and somehow coalescing them into a rather poetic whole.  He accomplishes this in a very slow meditative way, without bashing the reader on the head, through seductively quiet prose.  It is not a novel this reader could pick up and read straight through.  In fact I am convinced that this is a novel savored slowly, in increments, allowing its qualities to slowly percolate into our thoughts.  I will probably write about it again at the end of the second reading, and this book is worth reading twice, as is the case for all truly good books.

 

My reading of Arudpragasam was interrupted by Ann Cleeves' third Shetland Mystery, Red Bones, which serendipitously showed up just when I needed it from my library wait list.  This story takes place on the island of Whalsay, where Sandy Wilson has returned home for a visit.  While he is home his grandmother is shot and an investigation begins.  As usual the landscape is its own character in this story.  I have never been to the Shetland Islands, but the story had me yearning for cold foggy mornings, wind, and the contrast between bitter chill and warm fires.  No, it is never as nice as imagined. The story was also interesting because Jimmy Perez is somewhat at loose ends in this novel.  Fran Hunter is down in London and he can't stop missing her and thinking about her, and he finds himself oddly out of his depth on Whalsey, despite being Shetland-born.  Perez is an astute observer of people, but he doesn't know this place or its history, Sandy grew up here, but like many a youth, he drifted through much of the family drama, letting it slip past his own self-absorbed haze.   Sandy begins to grow up and come into his own in this novel, begins to take more responsibility rather than just seemingly drifting through life, and Jimmy also seems to mature, to begin to reach past his insecurities, to see and accept the need for assistance and working relationships that initially seemed elusive.  I am looking forward to the next installment.

 

Next up was The Sentinel, a Lee Child/Andrew Child collaboration and the next in the Reacher series.  I found it thoroughly entertaining.  I love the way the fight scenes are described, the physics of it, even though I personally abhor the urge to fight or harm others.  I was happy to avoid the rather predictable sex scenes.  This Reacher was slightly different.  He spoke more.  He spent more time in active, at least as described to the reader, thought.  As a chronic over-thinker, one of the things that appeals to me about the Reacher character is that he does not spend loads of time mulling over the options; I appreciate the essential contradiction of his nature, -- either seemingly completely at rest and quiet (easily under appreciated) or explosively taking action.  Still, the character was familiar and the book enjoyable.  Reacher is still Reacher; the man and his code appear intact and I will continue to read.

 

The next book, Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson, had a bit more meat.  And yet I struggled.  This is a very ambitious debut novel centering around a family in a Northern California logging community in the late 1970s and the story takes place over the course of about a year.  This is where it also bogs down on occasion.  There is so much here, technical information about the physical act of logging and great detail about the lives of the logging community.  This is a community that is being torn apart, trapped between the conservationists who want to preserve the redwoods, and the entire corporate industrial side of the logging structure which is basically unseen but is represented by the spray which the companies use to cut down on the undergrowth and make the logging possible.  We see the complexity of the issue, of loggers whose families have been in this community, doing this work, for generations, men who both love the forest and also take pride in the work they do, in the pressures of a world that demands more and more lumber and places ever increasing pressure on both the environment and the loggers themselves, men who are trapped in a system completely outside their control.  When the community  learns they are being poisoned by the very spray they are told is safe and which makes their work possible, they are almost torn apart.  The incomprehensibility of it, that a company and a government would intentionally spray chemicals that harmed the workers, is palpable, as is the anger,  the fear, and the push-back, because this is a community with nowhere to go.  This goes on and on, as if the author is slowly, meticulously, building a bed on which the fallen tree can land once she lands it.  I appreciated the information and yet 400 pages are spent in this complexly interlayered preparation.  When the giant redwood that is this story falls, it falls quickly, almost too quickly. I found the novel to be mostly compelling, the primary characters Rich and Colleen to be well drawn, realistic and memorable.  I drew them into my heart.  And yet there were sections where the book was painfully slow, where the words and the stories seemed like more vines and low growing brush that needed to be cut away; I felt the ending, although beautiful and powerful, was slapped on and not well integrated into the story.  I understand the idea of the structure, or at least my interpretation of the structure, but I felt the story bogged down simply in having too much to say. But these are minor quibbles, Damnation Spring is a powerful novel with characters who ring true, characters who might find their way into your heart and make you reconsider what you thought you knew.

 

Sufficient Sacrifice is the third of a series of novels by Annette Valentine about her father.  I read all three books for a book club, and I have struggled with all three to one extent or another.  Oddly, this is the volume I struggled with the least. I read the first volume, Eastbound From Flagstaff in February, and as I mentioned I found the writing a bit sanctimonious, lacking in flow with too much detail about small points, little character development and obvious and awkward transitions, but I did find the story interesting enough that I wanted to see how everything turned out.   Our group next read the second book in the series, Down to the Potter's House, and I wrote about it in March.  It was one of two books that earned a flight rating, meaning I did not finish it and wanted nothing more than to throw it against a wall.   Despite all this I read the third book, although I will admit that I skimmed sections.  I struggled with the same issues concerning the prose, but I found the story a bit more compelling here.  This book seemed to come from a core emotional place that I found in the first book of the series, and talking to the author later, this was indeed the case.    The author was obviously trying to write about and express something deeply personal, there was a deep vulnerability that surfaced, despite the prose, and I am glad that I read the book, even though I would not read it again and am really not sure I would even recommend it. 

 

Then the next two books were read for my other book club, and I am going to write about them together, even though in many ways they would seem to be at odds.  First of all, I can say that I had read Sally Rooney's Normal People previously, and although this was the first time I had read The Dying Animal, I had read other novels by Roth, including previous David Kepesh novels.  The books were chosen following a discussion revolving around an opinion essay which ran in The NY Times on September 3, "What's Wrong with Sex Between Professors and Students" (link here).   The Roth novel was referenced in the article as one example of the dynamic and its problems, and the group had also been discussing reading Rooney's novel, which seemed a bit of a stretch, although it does include university students and sex.  

 

In the end I felt the novels played off each other nicely and both had deep and powerful statements to make about humans as sexual beings, gender equality and politics, human relationships and how we develop or fail to develop, even what is "normal".  And yes, Roth addresses this as well.  I was less convinced that the Roth novel related to the article in question on anything more than a superficial level.

 

We didn't all read the Roth; several found it offensive.  Well it is, isn't it?  But that is one of the things I find fascinating, and brilliant, about Roth, the way he can write something so deliberately offensive, misogynistic, shallow, selfish, frivolous even, and yet, if you can let yourself get beyond your rising bile, you find that it is a novel of powerful depth.  This slim, apparently self indulgent novel is filled with literary and cultural allusions. In fact one could argue that it is not misogynistic at all except for that fact that humans are animals and sexual ones at that, men and women alike. I was also impressed by the parallels between Roth and Rooney in that they are both deeply examining human psyche as it relates to human development, becoming mature, sex, and heterosexual relationships.  If anything I think we tended to dismiss Roth as shallow and crude.  Neither am I convinced that we really explored the depth of Rooney.  Yes we have two lonely teenagers; yes one of them gets drawn into self destructive relationships, but she also grows beyond that, and most of the women in this novel do not grow between adapting/wanting/changing to please a man.  Rooney uses stereotypes as a tool, much the way Roth is using sex. Like the Roth novel, it can be easy to dismiss the Rooney as a relationship novel about young adults, to distance oneself from the main characters, when it is really so much more than that. I was constantly amazed at the parallels between the relationships in the two novels.  I definitely have to read the Roth again.  And I would still like a long conversation about all these issues over wine or whiskey. Takers?

 

And then I finished out the month with lighter fare.  First up was Louise Penney's 17th Inspector Ganache novel, The Madness of Crowds, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Penney's choice to make this post-pandemic, was optimistic as most readers are probably still mired in it, at least initially, but I don't begrudge this.  It had to be dealt with.  And she brings up many of the questions that have been on people's mind, the uncertainties, the fears, and even how easy it is to take information and draw incorrect and/or inhumane conclusions, to sway a population that lives in fear.  This novel was on the darker end of the Ganache novels, but still not horribly dark, and all ends peacefully again in Three Pines. 

 

I downloaded D.E. Stevenson's Still Glides the Stream when it turned up for free on my kindle simply because I have a friend who loves Stevenson's novels.  I was not thrilled with the first one I read, but felt that the author deserved another chance.  The novel was sweet and completely predictable.  I pretty much knew the story line, the plot, and how everything would turn out  by the end of the first chapter or two. The characters did not develop in anything but predictable ways.  I can see how this could be comforting for some, like watching an old favorite movie again and again, but I did not find there was enough wit or meat to hold my attention and I am not inclined to pursue the author further.  Still it was a cozy way to curl up for an hour or two and escape the world.

 

The last two novels were by Lawrence Block who wrote the Bernie Rhodenbarr series which I love.  I have never read any of his other novels but know people who love Matthew Scudder, so I thought I would give them a try.  I rather enjoyed The Sins of the Fathers. It was well written, entertaining enough, and Scudder looked promising even though he was obviously going through a rough time.  I was less thrilled with the second novel, A Time to Murder and Create.  Scudder's alcoholism is obviously getting the better of him in this novel and he makes stupid decisions; in fact I was simply grateful he didn't get himself knocked off.  I do know that he will eventually clean up, and the character looks somewhat promising, but I remain on the fence about whether I will take this any further.

 

There you have it, September from the land of books.  October has been relatively light, reading wise.  I have finished two books; I have four books currently in process and a week left in the month.  I do not know how far I will get, at the moment I feel pulled in too many directions. What about you?

 

 

Branching Out

The concert season has begun again.  I missed the first symphony concert; it was too close to my last chemo and I was still feeling too vulnerable to sit in a concert hall filled with people, even masked vaccinated people.  My immune system was still too fragile.  It still is fragile, but growing stronger and I have been venturing out more.  It is necessary.  Isolation is a deadly as disease.  Even for a basically introverted person like myself, there can come a point when life becomes too small, too isolated, when one becomes disconnected.  I've been wanting to sell everything and flee, become nomadic, and I realize this is not about anything really but my own need to begin regaining a life outside the small confines of health issues and pandemics and various whatnots that have making me feel constrained, and that running never solves anything because the frustrations we are trying to escape are always the ones that are glued most deeply to our psyches.

There were two chamber music concerts within a few days of each other actually.  The first, my first concert of this season, was the Knoxville Chamber Classics and it featured two works that had been transcribed for a chamber orchestra.  The first was Jessie Montgomery's Strum, a work I heard performed by the Providence String Quartet in its original, cello quintet, version.  I have also heard it in quartet form but failed to record the specifics of when, where, or by whom.  But that was many years ago, and I understood from the program that not only has the quartet been revised, but that Montgomery had also arranged a string-orchestra version, which is what we heard on October 3rd.  The piece was still charmingly familiar and delightfully performed, the pizzicato strumming providing texture to musical themes reminiscent of sparkling flashes of light washing through the room.    Quite a joyous way to return to concert listening.

The second familiar piece made new was Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, which had been arranged by Christopher Theofanidis for chamber orchestra.   The quartet itself is a beloved piece that I know quite well, and although I may have been a tad cautious, there was no need.  The transcription itself was beautifully done, and Theofandis deft use of the woodwind section to add texture and melodic richness to the strings was brilliant.  The second movement, which is particularly poignant when well performed was particularly well written, and brilliantly performed, leaving me on the verge of tears.

Three nights later a smaller ensemble performed in the concertmaster series at the Knoxville Museum of Art.  The first half of the program was brilliant, with William Shaub on violin and Kevin Class on piano.  Although I loved every piece and sat on the edge of my seat, lost in the music, I was particularly taken by the two works by Fritz Kreisler, and yes, not that long ago I would have thought I would never write such words.  Kreisler is not my favorite composer.  Heretofore I would said he leans too heavily toward schmaltz, but now I also wonder how much of that is expectation in interpretation.   Shaub revealed crisp melodies warmth and an emotional depth I did not anticipate, without any of the dreaded schmaltz.    The second half of the evening was filled with the Mendelssohn String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat.  I felt the third movement, where the first violin takes a strong melodic lead and the ensemble played with a responsiveness that felt like it was leaning more toward a symphonic temperament than traditional chamber form, was particularly effective and beautifully played. 

What a relief and joy these concerts were to my soul, and they have at least temporarily stalled my dreams of flight behavior, but as I said that is not a statement of anything definite or permanent, just a reactionary phase to the intense changes of the last year.  

Also, slowly but surely, because I needed to get beyond just functioning, I have started playing in the kitchen again.  Oh I needed to eat, and I cooked in a functional sense, in that I put food on my plate.  But starting in September I also felt the urge to start trying new things again.    I rejoined a cookbook club on Facebook, one I had participated in a couple of years back, and started trying a few new recipes from their September book, which I got from the local library Cook With Me by Alex Guarnaschelli, and trying a few things that had been languishing in my own files, or in other cookbooks that have been collecting dust on the shelves.  Scattered throughout this post are photos from my experiments.  Most were not a full dinner -- I did not often have that much energy.  But the energy spent in cooking filled a creative vacuum, one that was particularly sharp as there was a period where my hands were not up to knitting or needlework. 

Shown are the following:

• Daikon Curry; recipe from Saveur Magazine.
• Chilled Carrot Soup from Cook with Me.
• Chili-Mint Sautéed Cucumbers from The Broad Fork by Hugh Acheson.
• Grilled Zucchini and Charred Pepper Salad from Cook with Me.
• Spice Ruby Red Cabbage Steak from Cook With Me.
• Chicken Parmesan from Cook with Me.
• Halibut Braised in Ginger Lemongrass Broth from In the Hands of a Chef by Jody Adams.

 

My most recent musical outing was to attend the Met Live broadcast of Boris Godunov last Saturday.  On a screen, not a stage in front of me, but fabulously well done.  It is one of my favorite operas, and at least a part of that is the way that the opera is both intimate and epic, the way it takes on grand themes of Russian history in a really rather complex, and complexly moving narrative with great music too boot. Seeing that performance had me dreaming of opera again, although I realize I am not an opera lover per se.  I love opera, but don't love opera for its own sake, and the music has to be as good as the performance.  I am fortunate to live in a town with three opera companies, although I only attend the performances of two of those organizations: the smaller one and the university based one. I do not attend the performances of the third because I find their performances bore me to tears.  In short, I am still, perhaps always, coming to terms with my own bias and expectations; I am spoiled, and my inner critic tends to get the last word. I actually don't seek perfection, it is not all its cracked up to be, better a spectacular failure in a daring attempt than boring blandness any day.  But this is true not just of music, or art, or anything really, including my own successes and failures, or perceived successes and failures, and finding some balance between head and heart is a complex and never ending struggle.  Sometimes I think the reality is exactly the opposite of whatever we perceive it to be, blinded as we are by our own history.

I haven't yet started cooking from this month's book, Dishoom by Shamil and Kavi Thakrar and Navid Nasir, although I have been happily reading the extensive text and dreaming.  Primarily I have been too tired to take on the recipes, although I hope to make something before the month ends.   I am slow-roasting the spices for their version of Garam Masala, which is different than the version I have made for years, as I write this, so there is hope for Indian food exploration soon.  I still need to make a trip to the Indian grocery. Why have these simple tasks taken on such weight?  No, no, please don't tell me.

 

More cooking? Or is some other stone waiting to be unturned?

August Books

I have been fighting with this blog post for over two weeks. That is not all I have been fighting, but a strict accounting is irrelevant to anything. Suffice it to say the best I can do simply is not enough right at the moment.  We all fall into these periods on occasion.   Today, I am determined to get at least this one thing done, this one thing outside of my two naps and my radiation session and pulling together adequate nutrition.  All of that makes for a rather busy day.

In August I read 13 books.  Here is the list:

 

90. Paul Fussell:  Class, A Guide through the American Status System.

91. Victor Krachenko:  I Chose Freedom.

92. Sue Monk Kidd:  The Book of Longings.

93. David Brooks:  Bobos in Paradise.

94. Elizabeth Curid- Halkett:  The Sum of Small Things

95. Naomi Hirahara:  Summer of the Big Bachi.

96. Ann Cleeves:  White Nights.

97. Matt Haig:  The Midnight Library.

98. Zora Neale Hurston:  Hitting a Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick.

99. David A. Price:  Geniuses at War.

100. Nadifa Mohamed:  The Fortune Men.

101. James Baldwin:  Going to Meet The Man

102. Lucy Foley: The Hunting Party.

 

The first three books,  Class,  Bobo in Paradise and The Sum of Small Things were all rereads prompted by a discussion with a friend who was be bemoaning the loss of the class system of her youth.  I thought her understandings were somewhat off base, not necessarily completely in regards to the class structure of mid-twentieth century America but to shifts in play since that time. This is irrelevant to our friendship of course, and I was mostly rereading not to continue an argument, but in order to reconsider and refine my own thoughts.  I was in the midst of my reading when David Brooks' reconsideration of his own thesis, How the Bobos Broke America came out in the August Atlantic Magazine.  The article was promptly shared between one circle of friends and further discussion ensued.   I might have been thinking of a blog post, but decided I had little more to contribute on that subject, and I agree with many of Brooks' points.  In some ways I think he is kinder to the Bobos, and I say this seeing myself as very much a part of this tribe, than I myself would be.  Still, I am glad to have reread and reconsidered.  

 

I read two other non-fiction books.  Victor Krachenko was a Soviet Official who defected to the United States in 1944 and later wrote a book, I Chose Freedom about his life in the Soviet Union.  I read it because Kravchenko lived through some of the famines and issues discussed in the novel I read in July, Child 44. I believe the book was a best-seller at the time and I can see how the information that Kravchenko revealed about the Soviet Union was new and shocking.  Even though we know much more today, I still found the book interesting, and at times surprising, although I was perhaps equally surprised by young Victor's naïveté as by some of the more brutal and calculated abuses.  The book was indeed interesting, but not necessarily one of my favorite books.  Worth checking out for anyone interested in that particular period/subject.

 

The other non-fiction book Geniuses at War by David A. Price was indeed fascinating.   Price tells the story of the codebreaking efforts that went on at Bletchley Park and the impact these efforts had on the Allies ultimate success in World War II.  It is a fascinating book, although at times the reading may be a bit technical for some.  Price puts the work of Turing and others into context and tells the story of how Turing's work was leveraged into the world's first digital computer, Collosus, yes, at Bletchley Park.  I found it to be a compelling story of brilliant but also flawed people working under incredible pressure, people whose story is not often enough told.

 

Everything else I read was fiction.  I am not going to separate out literary versus commercial fiction as I always struggle with these distinctions.  I am interested in what I think is good and what I enjoy, and the categories we create don't often correlate with what survives and what doesn't (most doesn't anyway).  Many of what we consider "great" novels today were definitely looked down upon as commercial in their own day.  But that is only a small part of why I chafe at these distinctions.  But I am too tired to explore this in greater detail, just as I may also be too tired to discuss the books themselves well.  Therefore a simple linear accounting will have to suffice.

 

I loved Sue Monk Kidd's The Book of Longings, which tells the story of Ana, the wife of Jesus. Yes, it is that same Jesus, although Kidd mostly focuses her story peripherally to the one told in the gospels, the story of two people before his ministry began, of Ana's life, lived separately, during the period of ministry.   I thought the story was well told, I liked the character development, and that it remained mostly on the fringes of the more famous story.  I like that Kidd uses an actual document from the time, one earthed in the Nag Hamadi Library and tells the story of an educated woman who could read and write in a time when we know there were women who were both literate and literary, even if they may not have been common.  I thoroughly enjoyed the story.

 

The Summer of the Big Bachi is a mystery and the first in a series revolving around accidental sleuth Mas Arai.  But what I really liked about the novel was the dialogue and dialect, the exploration of a sense of culture and place that is foreign to me.  I am not sure the plot is the main draw here; the appeal was of being immersed in another culture and growing to to appreciate someone life might appear to fit expectations in once sense, and yet was completely foreign and more complex than imagined.  I grew fond of the old gardener.

 

White Nights is the second of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island mysteries, a series I am thoroughly enjoying.  Jimmy Perez is really beginning to come into his own, and has much more confidence in himself and control over this investigation than in the first volume. Once again Inspector Taylor from the mainland arrives to lead the investigation, but he quickly becomes rather peripheral to the case. Perez is an astute observer and the story well told.  I will be happy to continue this series.

 

I thought Matt Haig's The Midnight Library was shallow, predictable, done so much better elsewhere.  Haig does an adequate job with parallel lives and with exploring the idea that changing one's life, with wishing one had made different decisions only to learn that those decisions had repercussions that were not necessarily what one might have anticipated. Despite this, I felt it lacked depth and characterization, as if it was capitalizing on a particular moment in time, a particular trend, but adding little to the conversation.  I found it terribly trite.

 

Two sets of short stories were both fabulous:  Zora Neale Hurston's Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick and James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man.  I never was a reader of short stories; that may be changing.  Both collections are a mixed bag; some stories are stronger than others but most of them are also beautifully written and brilliantly astute about human nature.  Both writers can shock the reader with the profundity of their insight.

 

Nadifa Mohamed's novel The Fortune Men is based on the true story of a murder that took place in Cardiff in 1952, a murder in which the wrong man was imprisoned and the true murderer was never found.  It is a compelling tale filled with richly drawn and even compassionate characters, with a fabulous sense of place. and the complex relationships of a multiglot society filled with a mingling of races, religions, cultures, and attitudes both old and new.  The author captures a sense of community, a sense of hope.  The jarring disconnect between the abiding faith many of the African and Caribbean immigrants have in the British system, in its presumed justice, and the endemic fear and racism which still lie beneath the surface still haunts.  It is a powerful and moving book, a book that has since made the Booker Prize shortlist.  Well recommended.

 

Lastly, I read Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party. I read this because I had enjoyed Foley's more recent closed-room mystery, The Guest List,  and liking the genre, thought I would give this one a try.  This one is not quite as tightly developed, but it is still very enjoyable with beautiful writing and astute psychological development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday Six

It appears that this life continues to be a small quiet kind of life, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, there are times when it feels like all my previous busy-ness was a bit overdone.  I am sure that perspective will evolve in time, as life tends to evolve at its own pace.  In the meantime I thought I would share a few small things that made me happy this past week.

1. It has been a tough summer in many ways, too hot and too dry, and part of the yard are not doing particularly well.  Some plants are thriving, others are showing obvious signs of neglect, if not outright abandonment.  And yet there is not much I can do at this point but just wait and see.  What will die will die.  Nature may or may not fill in the void, and next spring I will see what ventures forth and then reassess.  Many of the older hydrangeas are showing obvious signs of stress, especially the lace cap hydrangeas, or hydrangea serrata, as they are not well adapted to Southern heat and drought (much like their adopted mother). It appears they will pull through, and I will round them out with the more resilient mop heads over the next few years.. The newer hydrangeas, the varieties of hydrangea paniculate, are thriving, as they are prone to do given their love of clay soils, and sun. Their constant bloom brings me great joy.  The glowing border of coreopsis and hydrangeas makes even the hardest of summers somehow tolerable.

 

2. Which reminds me of the surprising resilience of these little apricot drift roses which keep blooming and blooming despite the fact that they are still in their nursery pots and have never been planted.  So much for plans and good intentions.  But they also serve as a reminder of tenacity and perseverance.  I have given up fretting over whether or not they survive, but at the moment, nestled between some azaleas, they continue to appear surprisingly content with what meager resources life has give them.

 

 

3.  Oreos!  I have known that Nabisco came out with a gluten-free version of Oreos only for a month or two, but this was the first time I actually wandered into the cookie aisle of my local grocery store and tried a package.  I don't buy many packaged foods, but Oreos have always had a special place in my heart.   I think I have tried every brand of imitation gluten-free Oreo-like cookie on the market and had primarily given up.  Even the best of them, Kinni-Toos by Kinnikinick, proved to be too sweet, leaving a metallic coating in my throat and not satisfying that particular craving. I would eat more than I wanted, seeking out some elusive sense of comforting satisfaction, and still feel unfulfilled.  Sad that.  I am happy to say that these Oreos taste much like the Oreos or memory.  I could only eat two of them, and felt then that I had maxed out my sugar and carb intake for the day.  This is partly due to the fact that I discovered early on in my chemotherapy treatment that the best way to minimize nausea was to avoid sugars, starches, most carbs, and alcohol.  After a few months my tastes have probably changed, although I suspect my life-long love of sweets will always be with me.  Anyway, two cookies one day, a third a couple of days later, and my craving has been satisfied.  The package is gone; it was well worth the investment.  

 

 

4.   I sliced vegetable to make one of my favorite salads.  One of the downsides of paclitaxel treatment (or Taxol) is the neuropathy that is frequently experienced by patients.  I have had a great deal of neuropathy in my hands, and this has made it difficult to do many things, including anything much beyond minimum basics in the kitchen.  However, my oncologist reduced my dose this past week, and although I still have neuropathy, I am actually able to type more easily and to hold a pen and a knife.   Much to my joy, my garden and CSA this week supplied me with the components of one of my favorite salads and I was able to slice away without risk.  

 

 

5.  Magnolias.  Not in my yard.  Photo taken on my walk this morning, and yes my neuropathy had calmed down enough that I was actually able to take a walk.  I adore magnolias in all their iterations.

 

 

6.  I also went to the farmer's market, and gathered a small harvest from my deeply overgrown vegetable garden.  The tomatoes and parsley are mine,  The cantaloupe and eggplant are from the market.  My own fairy tale eggplants got overwhelmed by the weeds, which is sad, because as much as they bordered on overproductive last year, I ended up loving having a constant supply of these tiny eggplant, more so than I would ever have anticipated.

 

 

So when I found a small box of tiny little fairy tale eggplant I had to make one of my favorite treats.  I ate this every week last summer, sometimes making multiple batches in a week.    This is the marinated aubergine recipe from the original Ottolenghi cookbook (page 27 in my edition).  I don't think I used fairy tale eggplant the first time I ever made it; I didn't even know about the variety at that time, and Ottolenghi simply specifies small eggplant.  I also originally used the tahini-herb dipping sauce he recommends as well, but now I don't bother.  These tiny eggplants, simply quartered or halved, brushed with olive oil and salt and roasted are too divine.  The trick is to make up the herb vinaigrette while the eggplant cooks, then drizzle it over the hot eggplant and allow them to sit for at least 2 hours at room temperature.  When I have them, I keep a platter out on the counter to nibble on whenever I pass through the kitchen.  Lemon Juice is important.  The recipe specifies oregano and cilantro, but I find that whatever herbs I bring in from the garden work. More than once I have even subbed Nuoc Cham and Thai basil for the more traditional vinaigrette and been equally delighted.  

 

There you have it, a wealth of bright spots to lighten my life.  And it is still Saturday, although barely.  I am tired, but it is a good kind of tired, the kind of tired that comes from getting outside and talking with friends and playing in the kitchen.  All in all, a good week.