Chapter books and picture books

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Last summer, my assistant Ezra said: “Are you going to the bookstore at lunch today? Because I want to go with you.”

“Why?” I said. “You want a book? I can pick it up for you.”

“No,” he said with certainty. “It’s the new Game of Thrones book. It’s the first one in six years. I want to buy it myself.”

So we went to the (now defunct) Borders Bookstore, and I turned him loose.

He was immensely happy, and I left him alone with his prize. I wandered off to the “graphic novel” section, and browsed for a few minutes, and rejoined him shortly with a big black-and-white Superman anthology. “What’s that?” he said suspiciously.

“It’s an anthology of some comic books from my childhood,” I said happily.

He looked down on me (seriously: he was at least five inches taller than me) with disdain.

He was buying a chapter book and I was buying a picture book.

Well, so what? I love my picture books. Some of them remind me of my childhood, which is reason enough. Some are artistic / beautiful, which is reason enough again. Some are profound and moving (like “Maus”). Some are just for fun, like my comic anthologies, or my volumes ofLynda Barry and George Herriman and Edward Gorey.

To quote Charles Dodgson (from – surprise! – a chapter book!):

 “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?’”

Amen, sister.

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Adorably unsafe at any speed

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I was walking to the health club the other day, and I paused at the corner of Wayland and Pitman. It’s a bad corner: Wayland Avenue drivers are timid and hesitant, and Pitman Street drivers are aggressive and nasty.

I waited for all the cars to go through before I crossed. But the last car caught my attention. It was driven by a woman with something like a fox terrier in her lap. She was actually driving while resting her chin on the dog’s head. The dog was avidly looking out the side window, while the driver was looking straight ahead.

It was adorable, and terrifying.

I’m just thankful that the driver wasn’t on her phone, or texting, at the same time. Who drives with an animal in her/his lap? An idiot, that’s who.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” all the trouble is initiated by a cat named Pitty Sing, who’s been smuggled into a car by Grandma. Disaster ensues.

Listen to Flannery O’Connor, kids. No matter how much you love your pets, don’t let them ride in your lap while you’re in the car, no matter how adorable they are, no matter how adorable you think you look while doing so.

All kinds of non-adorable things can happen.

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Maira Kalman

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Maira Kalman is a writer and artist and thinker. She has created something I can only call the “graphic essay,” and which can only be understood by looking at / reading one.

 

 

Her graphic world is full of bright colors and unusual angles. Her unique calligraphy swoops and flies among her images. She loves capturing Daily Life: hats, kitchen sinks, burger platters.

 

 

 

One of Maira’s great themes is ephemerality: the preciousness of every moment that passes, under the threat of mortality. Every moment, for her, becomes a visual poem.

 

 

Here are the first few images from one of her “And the Pursuit of Happiness” pieces:

 

 

 

Never in a million years could I have come up with “soigné diatoms.” Nor could I have rhymed “Beringia” with “herringia,” nor seen the obvious link between motorcycles and dinosaurs.

 

 

The sketches and paintings and drawings are all her own work, and the photos, and that candy / cookie / Play-Doh single-celled creature at the beginning.

 

 

But the real magic lies in the combination of all these with her words, and her thoughts.

 

 

She described herself in a recent Thinkr video as a “loopy optimist,” and I think that’s appropriate, but I think she’s too modest. Here’s the video:

 

 

 

 

She has written on history, and democracy, and travel, and music. She has shared chocolate with both Kitty Carlisle Hart and Louise Bourgeois, and shown us both encounters:

 

 

“Nature is the guarantee of sanity. Or maybe love. Or both. Or not. Anyway . . .”

 

 

I feel extraordinarily encouraged when I read her essays. They make me feel that it might actually be worthwhile to continue for a few days or months more on Planet Earth.

 

 

And for that: thank you, Maira Kalman.

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Rest in peace, Nora Ephron

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So sorry to see another witty smart person go: Nora Ephron, who died just yesterday.

 

 

I love her novel “Heartburn.” Here are a couple of (inexact) excerpts:

 

 

“I was hired by the National Caper Council to develop a bunch of recipes including capers. For a month I put capers in everything including milkshakes, and I realized that everything that tasted good with capers tasted better without.”

 

 

Also (I paraphrase broadly on this one): the narrator is in the hospital, watching over her critically ill mother. The nurse comes in and covers her mother’s face with the blanket. “Our mother’s dead,” the nurse says warmly.

 

 

Narrator flares up. “She’s not our mother! She’s my mother! And – “

 

 

And all at once Mother sits up in bed, spreads her arms in triumph, and says:”Ta da!”

 

 

(And then dies shortly afterward.)

 

 

(Rest in peace, Nora. We will miss you, and your wit, and your warmth.)

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For the first day of summer: a young-adult reading list

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Summer is all about recreational reading, but everyone’s idea of light reading is different.  Some like John Grisham, or Patricia Cornwell, or Stephen King.  I like young-adult stuff.

 

 

For me, “young adult” is any chapter book not directed to an adult readership.  Some are perfectly appropriate for bright eight-year-olds, and some aren’t. 

 

 

Young-adult literature is unassuming, and it gets right to the point without dithering.  There’s very little padding in most young-adult books.  Sometimes the authors pander – they lay it on too thick, or they get the atmosphere wrong – but there’s some pretty good stuff out there, both old and new.

 

 

Let’s acknowledge J. K. Rowling right at the top of the list.  I hope she figures out a way to continue her story.  What about Harry and Ginny’s kids? 

 

 

Still have your set of Narnia books?   I’ve purchased them and gotten rid of them twice over.  I like the characters and the storytelling, but C. S. Lewis’s drippy Christian moralizing makes me feel sticky after a while.  I can’t even touch “The Last Battle” anymore, although Neil Gaiman has written a wonderful short story about the flip side of that story.

 

 

(Lewis, for all his faults, was a pretty good writer.  If you haven’t read the space novels – “Out of the Silent Planet,” “Perelandra,” and (especially, and weirdest of all) “That Hideous Strength” – do it.  Great stuff.  Nasty stuff here and there, too.  If you don’t wince a couple of times while reading these, you’re not reading very carefully.)

 

 

If you like surreal whimsy – and who doesn’t? – try Tove Jansson’s Moomin books.  My favorite is “Moominland Midwinter”: the Moomin family is hibernating, but the little Moomin boy wakes up and discovers that, during the winter months, their house is completely taken over by all kinds of peculiar creatures.  It has the creepy stillness of a deep Scandinavian winter, and it’s lots of fun: perfect ice-cold reading for a hot New England day.

 

 

P. L.Travers wrote “Mary Poppins,” and “Mary Poppins Opens the Door,” and “Mary Poppins in the Park.” Her original Mary Poppins is not Julie Andrews: she’s ferocious, and truly scary sometimes – the cobra in the London zoo calls her “cousin”! – and Jane and Michael worship her.

 

 

Thornton Wilder wasn’t really a young-adult writer, but some of his novels – especially “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” – fit perfectly in this category. I read it in high school, and was moved to tears, and I still quote it endlessly. If you haven’t read it, read it immediately.

 

 

And finally, here’s a writer who’s still among the living: Rick Riordan.  The Percy Jackson books were a Greek-mythology knockoff of Harry Potter, but Riordan can really tell a story too.  He left the Percy Jackson story to tell a sort of parallel story involving Egyptian mythology instead, but it doesn’t quite have the energy of the Percy Jackson books. He seems to have realized this, however, and has gone back to Percy, with a side twist through the Roman version of the Greek myths; he’s written two of these, and they’re both wonderful, and I’m looking forward to number three.

 

 

There’s your summer reading assignment, kids.

 

 

And it’s fun.

 

 

So get reading!

 

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Bloomsday 2012

 

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Today, June 16, is Bloomsday. As all lovers of James Joyce know, it is on June 16, 1904 that all of the momentous and mundane activity in the novel “Ulysses” takes place: the hero, Leopold Bloom, wanders aimlessly/purposefully around Dublin; his wife Molly does God knows what with Blazes Boylan; the young Stephen Dedalus teaches school, and does his own bit of wandering, and ends up in Nighttown with Bloom, and the two of them go home together.

 

 

 

It’s a whopping good novel, if you haven’t read it. It’s a little threatening at first – really big, a little menacing – but it’s hysterically funny. My high-school librarian, Catherine Schwarz, gave me an old hardback copy back in the early 1970s, which I still have. I poked and pecked at it for some time, until I came to the Nighttown episode, which is written as a kind of surreal drama. When I encountered Mananann Mac Lir, the Gaelic sea god, intoning: “Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter” – well, I decided I liked it very much.

 

 

When Partner and I were in Ireland some years ago, one of the few things I bought for myself was a nice paperback copy of the original text of “Ulysses,” including all of the original typographical errors. It makes a nice companion piece to my old hardback copy. And it’s from Ireland.

 

 

Joyceans celebrate Bloomsday in all kinds of ways. The NY Times has a blog about it: readings, articles. My friend Bill, who has published an excellent book of texts derived from Joyce (go see it on Keyhole Press: it’s called “Unknown Arts”), just put up a text on Fictionaut which collects all Andy Warhol’s diary entries dated June 16. It’s creepily appropriate for the day.

 

 

Speaking for myself, as a very amateur Joycean, I will probably have a drink tomorrow (which I would probably have anyway, but of which I’m sure James Joyce would approve), and maybe take a quick glance at “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce’s later novel, which I will never really finish, but maybe someday, when I’m in my nineties.

 

 

And then I will thank Our Lord and Savior, on behalf of scholars and writers and critics, that most of Joyce’s work is no longer under copyright.

 

 

Then (maybe) another drink.

 

 

Oh yes I said yes I will Yes.

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The Library of America

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The Library of America has been around for a couple of decades now.  They print little blue-covered books with black paper covers, and they use onion-skin paper. 

 

 

They are assembling the definitive collection of the Essential American Writers.

 

 

They started with the obvious: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, the letters and speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers.

 

 

Then they started to think about what made someone an “American writer.”

 

 

I own their edition of George Washington, and two volumes of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, and Wallace Stevens (everything he wrote fits in one book!), and Flannery O’Connor (ditto!), and Philip K. Dick, and one of their Thoreau volumes, and probably a couple of others I’m forgetting. We have a huge literary history in this country, and LOA is memorializing and perpetuating it in this series.  Their books ain’t cheap, but they’re nice editions, and they’re worth owning.

 

 

They are not perfect.  In the Lincoln volumes, I would love to know what Lincoln was responding to when he wrote his letters. Even a summary of the other person’s letter would be good. But, no, they just give you Lincoln.  (I have a collection of Groucho Marx’s letters – no, not from the Library of America, but they should think about reissuing it – and you get everything: not just the letters he wrote, but the letters he received.  Most of the time they are just as clever as his, and you get the context too.  So huh, Library of America.  Get a clue.)

 

 

LOA has covered the nineteenth century pretty completely now, I think.  They are doing the same with twentieth-century lit too (as you can probably tell, with Philip K. Dick included above). 

 

 

They are doing a pretty damned good job of preserving our country’s literature.

 

 

They do a neat little thing online: A Story A Week.  They send an email once a week, with a link to their website, and you can go read a story from one of their publications.  It is invariably something I’ve never read before.  Recently I read a bit of Mark Twain, and a short personal reminiscence by Dreiser, and a very odd thing by Edith Wharton, and a couple of things by people I’d never heard of.

 

 

It’s nice to be reminded that we have such a rich literary heritage.

 

 

And it only took us three hundred years to get there!

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Book report: “Trout Fishing in America,” by Richard Brautigan

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I was feeling a little down lately, and old, and depressed. 

 

 

Prescription?  Run to the bookshelf, and find my 1970s copy of “Trout Fishing in America.”

 

 

This (if you don’t know) is a little shapeless novel by Richard Brautigan, published in 1967.  The chapters are anywhere from one to four pages long.  It really doesn’t matter what order you read them in (although you should read the final two chapters in their place, last of all).  It’s kind of about trout fishing in America, although it’s kind of not.  The narrator roams all over the western United States, fishing in trout streams, describing small towns, rural locations.  There’s a character named “Trout Fishing in America,” who seems to be a person, but he’s also (literally) Trout Fishing in America.  There’s also a character named “Trout Fishing in America Shorty,” who’s a foul-mouthed guy in a wheelchair (sometimes).

 

 

My friend Ardy gave me my first Brautigan novel when we were both in high school: “In Watermelon Sugar.”  It’s a slightly more traditional novel, strange and spacey, but haunting.  (I think you had to be there in the 1960s/1970s to really get these novels.)

 

 

I went on to read all of Brautigan’s hippie output: his other novel, “A Confederate General at Big Sur” (which is very good), and his early poetry (collected as something like “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster”).  There’s a wonderful early poem sequence – “The Galilee Hitch-Hiker” – that’s really excellent.

 

 

But now you have to explain what it was like in the 1960s / 1970s. 

 

 

I tried to explain this twice over the past few months.  I failed both times.  Both people thought that “Trout Fishing in America” sounded like a stupid concept for a book. One of them was very young, in her early twenties. She invoked the Tet Offensive at me, for god’s sake! (Does she think the Tet Offensive was begun by American troops?)  Anyway, I said to her: “We thought, in the Sixties and Seventies, that the world was actually getting better.”

 

 

“Sure,” she said scornfully.

 

 

“I’m serious,” I said, feeling suddenly very hippyish.  “We thought we were changing the world.  Eighteen-year-olds could vote.  The Vietnam war was grinding to an end, and we were doing something about it.  There was something called the Equal Rights Amendment (which came to a bad end, but that’s a different story). Roe versus Wade happened.”

 

 

“And then what?” she challenged me.

 

 

Oh, kids, she was right.  We didn’t follow through.  Reagan happened.  George H. W. Bush happened. 

 

 

We thought the revolution would be self-perpetuating.

 

 

We were wrong.

 

 

(Go read “Trout Fishing in America.”  Maybe it’ll inspire you.  Or at least make you feel that there’s hope for the future after all.)

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Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond”

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While I was living in Morocco in the 1980s, I fell in with a bunch of British people.  They were a very close-knit group, funny and intelligent and shockingly well-read.  I, who thought myself all of the above, was very outclassed.  But they were all very kind to me, and housed me from time to time as needed, and lent me books, and were generally good to me.

 

 

One (whose name was the same as a great seventeenth-century British biographer and antiquarian – something I was too stupid to realize at the time, as it certainly meant that he was descended from the man, or at least related to him) was an elderly man who’d served in the British Foreign Service for decades.  His first name was John.  He was living in mellow retirement in North Africa with his much younger (and very handsome) Senegalese lover / companion.  John was very serene, and very happy.

 

 

(I’m sure John and his British friends were all quietly amused by the fact that I didn’t recognize his family name. Well, ha ha, I figured it out eventually, thirty years later, didn’t I?)

 

 

One evening at dinner, I accidentally quoted Jane Austen (“I do not cough for my own amusement”).  It was enough to catch John’s attention, and we began to talk.  He talked about Olivia Manning, whom he had worked with, and whom he had not liked (“We knew she was always noting things down, writing about us”).  A few years ago, finally, I bought the NYRB edition of Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy,” and I still have John’s quiet words ringing in my ears, and I still have not read it completely, because I keep thinking: “John said she was a bitch.”

 

 

On another occasion, he said: “Have you read Rose Macauley?  Peculiar woman. You must read ‘Towers of Trebizond.’”

 

 

I made a mental note of it.

 

 

Years – decades! – later (I’m sure John has passed away by now, god bless him), I finally read Rose Macauley’s “Towers of Trebizond.”

 

 

Oh my dears.  Read it.  It is lovely.

 

 

It is about a youngish middle-aged woman who goes with her Aunt Dot and a priggish Anglican clergyman for a tour of the Black Sea coast of Turkey in the 1950s.  Aunt Dot has a camel, which becomes a very important character in the novel. (“Take my camel, dear,” is the first line of the novel.)  Within not too many pages, Aunt Dot and the clergyman have bolted over the Turkey/Russia border to convert the Communist heathen.  Our narrator is left behind in Turkey to ruminate, and travel, and consider what might happen next. 

 

 

This novel is funny, and sad, and has the most astoundingly shocking ending of any novel I’ve ever read.

 

 

John was right.  This is an essential novel.

 

 

Don’t make my mistake. Don’t wait to read it.  It is too funny, and too lovely, and too sad.

 

 

John and I and Rose will love you for it.

 

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Muriel Spark teaches us how to escape from elephants and pythons

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We learn things from novels.  From Jane Austen, I learned how an educated Englishwoman of the early 19^th Century lived.  From Melville, I learned all about whaling (really, more than I needed to know).  From Thomas Pynchon, in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” I learned a really astonishing amount about the German V2 rocket project.

 

 

And, from Muriel Spark, I have learned many other things.

 

 

I have been reading Muriel Spark since the early 1970s.  Her novels are terse – often under 200 pages – and very funny, and dry,  and odd. 

 

 

Muriel passed away in 2006, and I have been trying to catch up on the novels I haven’t read.  Each is a revelation, but her later novels often reuse themes and situations that occur in the earlier novels.  “The Finishing School,” her last novel, involves a private school (as does “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”), homosexuality (as does “The Bachelors”), novelists who aren’t sure if they’re in control of their characters (as in “The Comforters”).

 

 

“The Finishing School” does not have a very distinctive plot, and is not considered one of Muriel’s greatest novels.  But it contained the following very interesting information (this is my paraphrase):

 

If you are being chased by an elephant, wave your handkerchief in the air as you run.  It will confuse the elephant.

If you are being chased by a python, run in a zigzag fashion. The snake’s head and tail aren’t in sync, and he will fall behind.

If you don’t have time to run, drop to the ground, sit facing the python, and spread your legs.  The python will pause, not knowing which leg to consume first.  During this pause, pull out your knife and cut his head off.

 

 

(I related this to my friend Cathleen.  She objected: “So I’m supposed to have a knife?”  I responded:  “Are you an idiot to be in a python-infested jungle without a knife?”

 

 

This is why novels are important.

 

 

Keep reading, kids. You never know what you might learn.

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