Gleanings from My Readings

“Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty.”
---Jane Austen, in Lady Susan

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“History is most responsibly understood as a mosaic of probabilities or as something like a babble of voices from which emerges a fallible consensus of opinion. Narratives give us focused, if varied, points of view, and storytellers elide, forget and filter whatever facts they believe they possess. About the best you can hope for in a movie’s presentation of history is that it is not an overt lie.”
---Philip Martin, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, in his article “Defiance Is Riveting Drama; Is It History, or Its Shadow?” 1/20/09

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“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the sad feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
---Andrew Wyeth, American artist

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“There is, of course, a cognitive disconnect to reading poetry to an audience numbering in the millions, as Alexander did. Most poets never reach that many people in a lifetime, which may have something to do with the choice to keep her focus simple, her imagery direct. Even so, the crowd began dispersing well before she was finished, as if her words were little more than an afterthought. Partly, that has to do with her placement on the program—after the president; she had the misfortune of following the main event. But even more, it suggests the tangential role of poetry in our national conversation, which is unlikely to change no matter how seriously this president, or any other, takes the written word.”
---David L. Ulin, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in his article “The Poem That Failed”

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Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem:
“Praise Song for the Day”

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

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Happy Reading!

Renaming

I love the way families have special words, usually coined by the children. We call a billfold a bofield thanks to our oldest son. He also gave us smell-good for cologne, as in “Dad, can I wear some of your smell-good?” Our daughter renamed the elbow the bowain. And, yes, we do still use these words, but we try not to do it in public.

Right now, I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and she shares a couple of her family’s special words:

In a few months we’d be drunk on the scent of Lizzie Webb’s mock oranges and lilacs, but the show begins modestly in April with her tiny Lenten roses, white–petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffodils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these were up, poking their snub, yellow-tipped noses through a fringe of leaves.

“Oh, Mama,” Lily cried, “look what’s about to bloom—the tranquils.”

There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our family, those pink birds with the long necks are called flingmos because of how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother’s youngest child—and that was, yikes, twenty years ago.

Ah, the joy of children and language.

Going Global

Here are the top 20 global bestselling authors:

1. Khaled Hosseini

2. Stieg Larsson

3. Ken Follett

4. Stephenie Meyer

5. Muriel Barbery

6. Carlos Ruiz Zafón

7. Anna Gavalda

8. John Grisham

9. J K Rowling

10. Henning Mankell

11. Alan Bennett

12. Jodi Picoult

13. Christopher Paolini

14. David Baldacci

15. Nicholas Sparks

16. Elizabeth George

17. Lauren Weisberger

18. Michael Connelly

19. Patricia D. Cornwell

20. Paulo Coelho

A couple of these authors—Hosseini and Cornwell-- are favorites of mine. I’ve read works by Grisham, Baldacci, Sparks, and George, there’s a Jodi Picoult novel on my nightstand, and as I mentioned on an earlier post, I plan on reading a series this summer. Perhaps it will be Meyers’ or Rowling’s. Ken Follett’s on my “must-read” list, but I have no plans for the rest of those guys. Maybe later?

Hearts and Flowers

I’m one of a group of women who were asked to teach a fifth-and-sixth grade girls class on Wednesday nights. We each were to take a turn, and last week was mine. My topic? “Being Cool and Popular.”

After recovering from the emotional trauma of recalling now not cool and popular I was, I began to plan my lesson. I decided to begin by getting them to define “popular” for me, to give me some characteristics of popular people.

Good looking. Lots of friends. Good at sports. Likes to be the center of attention. Great clothes. Has all the up-to-date gadgets. Mean sometimes. Has a cool car.

So far so good. I write these on the board.

Then one girl shyly says, “They have good handwriting.”

What? I pause for a minute, wondering what to do with this seemingly random contribution.

Then I remember. Way back before cool cars or football or iphones even mattered. I remembered girls who crossed their t’s at a jaunty angle, who looped the end of letters just so, who dotted i’s with hearts and flowers while the rest of us valiantly attempted to do a passable imitation of their artistic embellishments on the standard cursive script that marched around the room on top of the blackboard.

Boy, those were the days.

Dissertation Decor

Since our children are all out of the house, I've taken over the second story as a work area for writing my dissertation.

Everything may look nice and neat downstairs, but believe me, upstairs it looks as if a book and notecard factory has exploded. Piles of books. Books in the chair, books on the bed, books on the floor, books on the table. Open books, closed books, books with papers sticking out of them. Blue notecards, yellow notecards, green notecards, orange notecards. Paper-clipped notecards, rubber-banded notecards, stacks of notecards turned in alternate directions. Notebooks, legal pads, three-ring binders full of photocopied journal articles. You get the picture.

If you come for a visit before I'm finished, I'm warning you: Upstairs is off limits. Don't even ask. Of course, it's not a bad as it looks. Order might not be discernable to the untrained eye, but I promise, there's method in my madness.

Booking It--Generosity

Do you give books as gifts?

Yes.

To everyone? Or only to select people?

I love to give books to children. But as far as adults go, I only give books to ones I know appreciate and want them. And I do try to match the book to their interests—genre, favorite authors, hobbies, interests, etc.

How do you feel about receiving books as gifts?

Oh, give me a break! Is that a rhetorical question?

Inexpensive Travel

Gleanings from My Readings

"We do not look in our great cities for our best morality."
---Jane Austen

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“Nearly all of us . . . are offended by violations of some kinds of linguistic taboos. Political conservatives tend to be more offended by profanities and obscenities, whereas liberals tend to be more offended by racial and ethnic slurs as well as by slurs against homosexuals. Pinker says that words are arbitrary labels and that linguistic taboos embody a kind of magical misconception about language. In fact, though, speakers within a linguistic community typically show widespread agreement about the relative offensiveness of words. Linguistic taboos are real, then, not magical.”
---Gilbert Youmans, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Missouri, in a letter to the editor of The Atlantic (Jan/Feb 2009)

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“[Both my mother and the librarian] taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. . . . I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
---William Hazlitt, in his essay “On Wit and Humour”

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“Language is to some extent tendentious. This is what we have to work with. Think of words in terms of foodstuffs: whatever we cook up won’t be composed of pure nutrients: it will derive from odd life-forms that breathe underwater of grow in the ground. But we can use fresh, organic ingredients, we can wash contaminants off them, and we can avoid globbing them up with heavy batter and frying them in oils that clog our arteries. Actually, it’s a lot harder to do that with words than with trout or carrots, but it’s the goal for an honest writer to aspire to.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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Happy Reading!

It's the Adverb's Fault!

Steven Pinker of the New York Times explains HERE why Roberts flubbed while administering of the presidential Oath of Office. It's a grammar thing, folks.

Presidential Reading

So, what does our new president read? If you’re interested, here’s an article from the New York Times about his reading habits.