Uncategorized

Some years ago, when I lived in New England, my next-door neighbor decided to burn the brush he had cleared from his yard. Unfortunately, mixed in with that brush was poison ivy.

Now, I catch poison ivy if you simply tell me that your second cousin had it ten years ago, so I reacted strongly to this smoke. My face swelled to twice its size. It turned beet-red and lumpy, and my eyes were reduced to mere slits. I was lucky, I guess, that I just got a faceful of smoke and didn’t breathe it in; if I had gotten poison ivy in my throat, I would have ended up in the hospital on a ventilator.

As it was, I called my doctor and got her to call in a prescription for a strong antihistamine. Walking around the corner to the drugstore, however, was a more difficult experience altogether. People gave me a wide berth, their eyes flickering to my face and then quickly away again. Even the pharmacist, whom I’d come to know well through my children’s various ailments, looked over my shoulder rather than at my monstrous face.

“I’m still me!” I wanted to shout.

But was I? How much of who we are has to do with what we look like? I’m always intrigued by people whose appearance contradicts their personalities. Take Buster for instance, a huge, husky steelworker whose terrifying demeanor incited newcomers at the corner bar to pick fights with him in order to prove their mettle. But in fact Buster was the most gentle man imaginable and loathed fighting. Or Christine, who worked with me several years ago. A blandly beautiful young woman, with the blond hair, blue eyes, and clear complexion once commonly found in teen magazines. She looked like a ditzy blond but actually boasted a fierce intelligence that she refused to hide.

Egan’s excellent novel explores these issues around the intersection of appearance and identity. It opens with a fashion model who has been in a terrible auto accident. The resulting reconstructive surgery has left her looking beautiful but different, so unlike herself that even her friends and agent do not recognise her at first. She is also at an age where her bookings had already started falling off, even before the accident, and Egan adds to her examination of identity the dimension of celebrity and how that relects or influences our idea of ourselves.

There is much more to the book, other fascinating characters whose charisma waxes and wanes, plotlines that vary from teen-aged self-discovery to acts of terrorism. It is almost too much. In fact, it is too much for Egan to handle. She does an astonishing job of keeping all her balls in the air, making me think this one of the best books I’d read a long time. But the balls tumble down in chaos at the end of the book. I was so disappointed by the ending, which felt as though Egan simply got tired of writing and stopped, leaving many plot threads dangling. The only attempt at resolution, in an epilogue, had such a different tone that it seemed to have come from another book entirely.

Still, it is an excellent book and well worth reading. There is much to think about here. How and when we define ourselves, or allow others to define us. What consistency we can expect with our past selves. What effect our influence on others has, on them and on us. And how our appearance affects the construction of our identity. I certainly found my monstrously altered appearance prevented any interaction with others. If it had been more permanent, I wonder how my image of myself might have changed.

Molly sent me a copy of her book this week, and I’ve been reading and rereading her poems in the evenings as I sit out on my little porch. Instead of going to the dance, I linger to read and watch the light fade from the sky and the surface of the pond. The water makes no sound, its gentle undulations barely noticeable, until a fish breaks the surface with a little popping sound and sends necklaces of ripples whirling out into stillness.

These poems start out in Alaska, bringing to life encounters with the aurora borealis, brown bears, and local storytellers. I particularly like “Menenhall Glacier”, a meditation on time, anchored by specific descriptions of loons and lupines and mosquitoes and enhanced by surprising but oh-so-right metaphors, such as referring to the glacier as “nature’s giant plow”.

The poems segue into the revelations of daily life: hiding eggs in the spring, meditating on laundry, consoling a friend on his divorce. Sometimes, a quirky sense of humor surfaces, such as in “Song of Consumption” with its self-mockery and “Enumerating” with its playful recounting of the way we count each day. She finds music in the words around us, such as in “Redline” which uses the rhythms in the stops of the T, a rocking rhythm reminiscent of the swaying of the cars themselves.

The people who inhabit these poems are vividly drawn, a marvel of compression that I must continue to study. I felt as though I knew the man with the blue eyes, had seen Billie Holliday myself, walked through the woods with Alice. I found the poems about her mother and father exceptionally moving, especially “Into the Crack of Dawn” with its last waltz.

Molly and I share a dance community, and I am thrilled by the dance imagery in these poems, sometimes in the context of dancing itself, sometimes as a way to understand and approach the rhythms of life. My daughter-in-law, new to dancing, said that she knew she would love it when she first walked in and noticed that everyone was smiling. These deceptively simple poems invite you onto the floor and gently whirl you away, inviting you to explore the complex patterns of your life, leaving you refreshed and—yes—smiling.

Starting with sixth grade, my mother enrolled me in private girls’ school. I didn’t want to leave the public school but was helpless before her determination. One of the requirements of the entrance exam was to write an essay, a term and a form that were new to me. The proctor explained that I should just write a story about the assigned subject, summer vacation, I think.

The school was as awful as I’d expected, snobby and materialistic. Worst of all, the minuscule population (smaller classes! the brochure bragged) reduced to near zero the chance of my finding like-minded friends. Rather than learning to get along with others, I withdrew into myself. It wasn’t until Adrienne Rich came as an alumna to speak at an assembly that I began to believe in my own survival. A published and honored poet, rebellious and outspoken: she took my breath away. If she could survive this school with her voice intact, then I could too.

Ever since, I’ve devoured her poetry and—yes—essays, grateful for the questions she’s asked and the trails she’s blazed. This book of essays and conversations gives us her fierce and intelligent voice discussing poetry, art, women, and her own work. When she mentions that the primary motivation for her poetry is to reveal what is hidden, I am reminded of our school and our neighborhood—she grew up a block away from me—and their suffocating atmosphere of secrecy, their respectable and elite front hiding shame and abuse and prejudice.

She relates this archeological work to the study of silence, a parallel that had not occurred to me before. I’d thought about silences in women’s lives in the sense that Tillie Olsen uses, the gaps in women’s creative lives cause by the harsh demands of women’s roles in our culture. But the thought of digging into what those silences might hide is thrilling.

Rich talks about the difficulty of making poetry out of political experiences, mentioning how she learning from Yeats that it was indeed possible to do so while protesting his idea that the addition of a political dimension would make the voices of women poets harsh.

I love when she talks about how Raya Dunayevskaya’s biography identifies Rosa Luxemburg’s central relationship as being with her work. I’ve found that too many people—biographers, editors, readers—allow women only one story: a romance.

Most of all, I loved Rich’s discussion of translation, having just taken a course where I translated Italian poetry into English. She carries the idea forward into describing the essence of poetry itself: “But poetry is an art of translation, a connective strand between unlike individuals, times, and cultures.” And here she ties translation and poetry into one of my deepest values: that of creating and nurturing communities.

Despite the stereotype of the lone artist, working away in solitude, there is no doubt that the heart of it is communication. And by communicating our different realities, we come to understand and appreciate each other. In a new book club at Ukazoo Books, a group of strangers, one person asked why it seemed that people who read lots of novels tend to be liberal politically. It seems to me that the reason is precisely this appreciation of experiences foreign to our own, undermining our self-righteous conviction that everyone could be as successful as we are if they would just try a little harder. Rich says: “Art is our human birthright, our most powerful means of access to our own and another’s experience and imaginative life. In continually rediscovering and recovering the humanity of human beings, art is crucial to the democratic vision.”

Rich is still my model and my inspiration, just as she was when I was in school. These essays help me understand why.

King’s first book about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes was The Beekeeper’s Apprentice which I finally read, despite my misgivings. I’ve come to dislike stories that use real people as characters or characters created by other authors. It doesn’t seem fair somehow, even if they are out of copyright.

Milan Kundera’s book Immortality made me think about public images and how little control one has over how one is remembered. More than just celebrities haunted by paparazzi and grotesque tabloid stories: even those who have chosen private lives may be affected. It is terrifyingly easy for a rejected lover or malicious sibling to spread false stories about a person and change the way that person is perceived by others.

And of course, the internet increases the range of the problem. Consider the dog poop girl, a young woman on the subway in South Korea who refused to clean up the mess her dog made and was rude to people around her who asked her to do so. A bystander snapped her picture and posted it on the internet. Others quickly tracked down her personal information and shared it on the network, shaming her family, forcing her to drop out of school, and causing her to be known for the rest of her life as the dog poop girl—surely a disproportionate punishment for her rude behavior. Daniel J. Solove’s The Future of Reputation explores this story and others like it, raising ethical issues about privacy in an age of internet vigilantism.

Well, I’ve wandered from Mary Russell, but these concerns have kept me away from such books. However, rave reviews from people whose opinions I trust finally sent me to the first book in the series. While I found it absorbing and well-written, I winced every time Holmes’s name was mentioned, which somewhat interrupted the flow of the story, and I decided not to read any more in the series.

But I have. Mog asked me to return this book to the library for her, and there it sat, saying Read me . . . Read me . . . until I finally gave in. Again, absorbing and well-written. Again, the wincing, though perhaps a little less because Russell and Holmes operate independently during long stretches of the book. Here, on their way back to England from India, they decide to stop in San Francisco to enable Russell to deal with her inheritance. Her intention is to sell the properties that have languished since the tragic death of her parents ten years previously.

As they near port, however, Russell experiences three different recurring dreams, disturbing dreams of flying objects and faceless men, causing Holmes to wonder if they could be related to the death of Russell’s parents and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, although Russell maintains that she and her family were living in England at that time. Holmes and Russell's separate and mutual investigations probe issues of memory and identity, of the role that places and possessions play in anchoring our sense of self and providing the continuity we expect to find in our personalities.

Several recent books have looked at the effect of learning you were mistaken about some critical event in your past: Atonement by MacEwan, The Sea by John Banville. Understanding and correctly interpreting your past seems to be a task of middle age: looking backward in order to determine the best way forward. I keep getting distracted, but I meant to say that King is an excellent writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Except for the wincing.

This is one of those books that follows an object through time, in this case a painting by Gwen John. The first section of the book is about Gwen herself and her attempts to establish herself as a painter, struggling not just with the poverty and dearth of recognition that most artists experience, but also with the shadow of her more-famous brother Augustus and, of course, with the role restrictions for women in the late 19th and early 20th century. She early recognises the conflict between the demands of her art and those imposed by marriage and children. Her response is to shutter her passionate nature and keep to herself, hence the book’s title which is from a quote from John’s own writings.

These conflicts—between home and work/art, between solitude and society—have dominated my life, as well. I am constantly trying out new ways to balance my time and energy. In order to write, more so than for other kinds of work that I do, I need fairly large blocks of time alone. By “alone” in this context, I mean not interacting with others. I actually write best in a public space, such as a pub or coffeehouse, where there are people around me, but no one distracting my attention from the work. In order to have sufficient alone-time, I have, after much experimentation, developed a routine that consists of substantial periods of solitude interspersed with short, but intense social times.

Of course, when I had small children at home, such a routine was impossible. In those days, I dreamt constantly of a white room. An empty, white room with a plain wooden table and chair under a window hung with sheer white curtains that lifted and belled in the breeze. Perhaps a cot, but nothing else. Plain as a nun’s cell. I longed for that room.

So I was captivated by the particular painting in this book: a still life of a corner of John’s attic room in Paris, a chair with a parasol, a table under a window, a glass of yellow primroses. We follow the painting as it changes hands, going from one woman to another. It means different things to different women, but also changes its meaning for each woman over time.

I was a little disappointed every time the story moved away from a particular woman, as I wanted to know more about her and how the insights she gained from the painting changed her life. Also, I found the idea that all the women who owned the painting wanted to live solitary lives a bit surprising, as I know few people of either gender who would choose to “keep the world away” to that extent. I suppose it could be said that the painting’s owners were self-selected, by their attraction to the painting.

What I liked best about this book were the descriptions of how the painting affected different people, how it echoed their lives and emotions, how it shifted its meaning for each viewer. I once read a mystery by Jane Langton, one of my favorite authors, where one of the characters was an eccentric old woman who wrote letters to God, crushed them into a ball, and threw them up into the air. That illustrates how I feel as a writer, laboring over a story or a poem, tossing it out into the air, never knowing what it will mean to a reader, often surprised by the comments that do come back to me. Here, the section written from the point of view of the artist, Gwen John, is fascinating, but the sections from the point of view of the recipients, those who look at the painting, are brilliant.

I like westerns and Kelton’s books in particular. I’ve written before in this blog about his books. His stories are often coming-of-age stories where a young man is finding his place in the world and coming to grips with the complexity of the people around him, learning to appreciate their qualities and accept their faults. Kelton’s books also have a strong sense of place: Texas during and after the Civil War.

This story is set a bit later, around the turn of the century, when a wealthy rancher named Frank Claymore is on trial for murder. Crippled with rheumatism and bursting with cantankerous crotchets, he is helped into the courtroom by his lifelong friend, Homer Whitcomb.

Almost immediately, we flash back to his youth, when he and Homer and another friend, George Valentine, ride out to search for cattle on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and run into a Comanche hunting party. With the Civil War going on back east, the Confederacy cannot send troops to Texas to fight the Indians, so families from Clear Fork, including Frank’s sweetheart Rachal, have taken refuge in Fort Davis.

Each succeeding chapter starts with Frank’s trial and then takes up the story of the past again, until finally we understand the twists and turns of the path that led Frank to this moment in the courthouse, where the town seems to be against him, all but Homer and the two Native Americans under the Chinaberry tree outside.

Kelton handles the time changes deftly never leaving me in any doubt as to where and when we are. And I found the descriptions of the land stunning, particularly those of the early years, before the buffalo had been slaughtered and the prairie grasses plowed under. The valley that Frank stumbles upon and swears to return to is vividly drawn, not just the look of the hills and stream, but the feel of the place, the awe that it inspires.

Frank is well aware that his actions have brought about, or at least contributed to the changes he so deplores, not that he would admit that out loud to anyone. I, too, have been ruefully surprised when I look back at the unintended consequences of so many of my decisions and actions. My poor record at predicting outcomes, both good and bad, leaves me humble and repentant.

Initially, Frank seems like the worst kind of bad-tempered, controlling old man, certain that he is always right, never hesitating to criticise those around him. But as his past unfurls, marked by grief and loss and unlooked-for responsibilities, he begins to make sense and inspire more sympathy. How could he be otherwise—this taciturn man who understands cattle but not people—given the trail he has followed? Through him, I came to understand and appreciate several of my acquaintances.

Frank’s story moved me, at first to rage and frustration, sometimes to nostalgia, occasionally to amazement and respect. It left me thinking about friendship, the bonds of the past, and—finally—forgiveness.

Yes, I have ants in my cabin. At 5:30 the sun—already fierce—slams against the side of the cabin and pours through the window, scattering rainbows from Kate’s prisms across the walls. Within seconds, the ants begin to trickle from the corner of the roofline over my desk. Carpenter ants, as I know by the pile of debris and the swarm of flying ants on that really hot day, their lacy wings such a contrast to their hard black bodies. No matter how interesting, though, they are destructive and will have to go.

Mostly they don’t interfere with me as they scatter across the roof ledge and down the wall, though watching them take over the space is a little disturbing, and of course I have to brush them off the desk before they get to the laptop with its warm, inviting hum. I try to adopt Thoreau’s let’s-live-together philosophy towards them till the exterminator comes. It helps that they disappear at night, withdrawing with the sun’s warmth, bustling back to their nest. Some things that don’t bother me during the day really creep me out at night.

I figure that being in a cabin means welcoming the wildlife. I’ve gotten used to my 3 a.m. caller: some large animal that comes crashing down the hill, rustling leaves and breaking branches, to drink noisily from the pond. Not sure what my nocturnal visitor is, a raccoon perhaps or a fisher cat. I encourage spiders because they help to keep the ant population down.

I pulled this book from the library hoping it would also help. It’s very short, less than 150 pages even including multiple appendices, and the acknowledgement to Orkin right up front made me a bit wary. But the prose is just what I want from this kind of book: simple and straightforward. One of the things I learned is that ants are predators of other insects such as bedbugs and the chiggers that made my childhood a misery. I wondered why they seemed to have disappeared. Now if only the ants would eat all the deer ticks . . .

Some of the introductory material about different types of ants and their habits was interesting, but unfortunately was repeated several times throughout the book, as was other information and advice. I assume the repetition was included because readers are expected to dip into the book here and there, not read it straight through as I did.

I enjoyed reading more about the way they organise their colonies. I knew about ants being a superorganism, but there were details here about the ways different kinds of ants choose their queens and how some actually enslave other ants. Thoreau used ants in a fable about war, but there are certainly other comparisons to be drawn or pondered.

In the end, I didn’t learn any new tricks to discourage ants—the advice boiled down to keep the place clean and call an exterminator—but I was left thinking about different forms of social organisation.

Cornwell seems to be a popular mystery author with a long-running series featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist who also has a law degree. I like a good mystery, so I thought I’d check her out. I first tried Isle of Dogs which is not one of her Kay Scarpetta books. I guess it was supposed to be humorous, but I found it boring and abandoned it after a couple of chapters.

Then I tried this book. Here, Dr. Scarpetta (she’s not the kind of character you call Kay) goes to Black Mountain, North Carolina, to investigate the sexual assault and murder of Emily Steiner, an 11-year-old girl. Black Mountain is said to be near Asheville, touted by Eric Weiner in The Geography of Bliss and ABC’s 20/20 as the happiest place in the U.S. Cornwell does not do much with this contrast other than occasionally mentioning that people in a small town believe the crimes they see on tv happen elsewhere and will never affect their town.

Complicating Scarpetta’s investigation are her relations with two co-workers: Pete Marino, a detective from Richmond, VA, and FBI Unit Chief Benton Wesley. Emotional undercurrents that had apparently been explored more fully in earlier books made the opening chapters of this book somewhat baffling for me. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy also complicates the story. Taking her aunt as a role model, Lucy has been working on a classified project at Quantico but lands in emotional and professional problems which may or may not be related to the case in North Carolina.

The investigation initially focuses on Temple Gault, a serial murderer whom Scarpetta has encountered in the past. Apparently assuming that readers would be familiar with the earlier books, Cornwell provides only the briefest outline of their earlier interaction. Similarly, Marino and Wesley are barely sketched in and did not come alive for me. Lucy is characterized a little better, as are Lucy’s mother and grandmother. I would have said that Scarpetta’s sister and mother are drawn too broadly to be realistic had I not had similar conversations with my own mother and one of my sisters. Still, there is little subtlety or shading in any of these characters.

The hardest part of writing a series must be deciding how much to explain what has happened in past books and when to present it. Here, not enough information was given at the right time, for me anyway. Yet, such explanations can be overdone. I had to give up reading Martha Grimes’s books because I got tired of the arm sticking out of the rubble memory. The best examples of weaving in earlier information that I’ve read are the Harry Potter books. One could also choose to make the books of a series stand alone a bit more, keeping the amount of necessary earlier information to a minimum, as P. D. James does. Another difficult factor in writing a series is the progression of the characters’ lives. I have sometimes found that reading books out of order has meant that I already know important plot points in the earlier books when I get to them.

Back to Cornwell’s book, if the setting and characterization are not detailed enough, the plot is almost too complex, with many different subplots and much traveling back and forth between more than half a dozen East Coast towns and cities. Some promising plot threads are dropped with perhaps only a sentence to tie them off at the end. The identity and motivation of the murderer seemed obvious to me early on but I was willing to play along with the red herrings. The forensic detail is interesting, as are the descriptions of the FBI research projects. As always, these are only my opinions, and while I probably will not seek out any more of Cornwell’s books, I’m sure many others will.

James has said that ideas for her books begin with a setting. Here the setting is a small (fictional) island off the coast of Cornwall that has been turned into a resort for people of distinction—politicians, writers, diplomats—who need a break from the stresses of their lives. Combe Island offers a secure environment—visitors do not bring their bodyguards—and options for solitude or society.

The island calmed and enchanted me as well, with its crashing tides and cliff walks, its rustic chapel and stone cottages. And of course its lighthouse, no longer in service but maintained as an historical site. James deftly brushes in allusions and connotations, not only of lighthouses but of small islands: treasure islands, self-contained paradises, embattled outposts threatened by the sea.

Commander Dalgleish, in his role as leader of the Special Investigation Squad, is asked to look into a suspicious death on Combe Island. Abandoning his plans for a weekend with Emma Laverham, Dalgleish rounds up his team—DI Kate Miskin and Sergeant Benton-Smith—and heads out.

James is one of my favorite authors. She understands how government works and Scotland Yard. Her stories are well-plotted, with the right amounts of suspense and baffling turns. Her writing is simply amazing: intelligent, forthright, engaging, and at times profoundly moving. Best of all, she has created characters with subtle shadings who grow even more complex in each installment of her long-running series. She gives us just enough of their personal lives to make them interesting, but never so much that it interferes with the story. Here, the denizens of the island are fully drawn as well, their fears and routines, their needs and desires, their histories and dreams.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of The Book of Ebenezer LePage with its Guernsey setting and memorable depiction of daily life on the island. As he described, World War II brought the end of Guernsey’s centuries-long isolation and the loss of their unique culture, overwhelmed by tourism and television. Isolation, though, is not always a good thing. I wondered if the isolation of Combe Island in James’s book made it easier for the people there to slip the bonds of society’s rules and expectations, if perhaps something taboo like murder could there come to seem a natural solution.

It is hard to believe James is 88. She has lost none of her power as a writer, her confident prose contrasting sharply with Elizabeth Smart’s struggles (described in the last entry). I was first attracted to her books by their intelligence, but have come to treasure every aspect of them. This is a worthy addition to the series.

I liked this later book much better than By Grand Central Station if only because its view of the world is much closer to mine. The prose is still poetic and cut up into short sections, but together they make up a mosaic that—for me, at least—was much more intelligible and satisfying than the earlier book.

I read it in conjunction with On the Side of the Angels the second volume of her journals and, as before, found much that is lifted from her journals and woven into the book. In one entry, too, she talks about organizing Rogues and why she put the pieces in the order she did; I confess that this helped me better appreciate the book’s structure.

Rogues starts out in post-Blitz London, a bleak environment where people must count over their losses. And, indeed, this book is about loss: about growing old, trying to write in the face of waning powers. Smart’s journals are full of the difficulty of trying to start writing again in middle age, having spent the decades since By Grand Central Station working as a copyeditor and sometime journalist to support her four children.

In Rogues Smart writes, “The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain.” Her poems too—I was also reading her Collected Poems at the same time—talk of the difficulty of writing. One is even titled “Trying to Write”. But they are also full of the difficult joys of parenting and the small lessons learned from snails and bulbs in her garden.

These are struggles I know all too well, however much I berate myself for insufficient self-discipline, for spending too much of myself on the day-to-day pleasure: that first cup of tea in the morning, watching the birds at the feeder, or taking a walk through this astonishing world where lilacs and dogwoods are blooming again, surprised all over again by their extravagant ebullience.

I thought about Tillie Olson’s Silences which discusses the silences in women’s lives, the long stretches when they do not write or paint or whatever because they are busy with children and home-making. I swore that wouldn’t happen to me but it did. How could it not? Now, like Smart, I struggle to find the words that once filled my head and hands. But I have the great joy of my children’s company and all the lessons they have taught me. I’m also delighted to see many of my friends, their children grown, taking up (or retaking) some form of art: painting or writing, viola or piano.

I hate it that we have to learn these lessons all over again, every generation. And saddened that, for all our work in the 1970s and since, for all our progress, this is one riddle we have not solved: how to do the best for our beloved children, as we so desperately desire, and not lose the vocations and avocations that seem intrinsic to our very selves. Although perhaps they are only postponed, and that is not so bad. At least these days most of us live long enough to embark on a second life once the children are grown. For Smart, having to care for two of her grandchildren, that second life seemed far too short.