Just Kids
Yesterday, sitting on a stool in my sunny kitchen, I began the final section of Patti Smith’s Just Kids. This is the part of the book in which she describes Robert’s illness and death.
Reading, I felt sadness trickle in and then fill me with the loss of him. My sorrow was for all of us with our world crushing grief for this or that Robert. One of the dogs came over to commiserate and lick my toes.
In honor of Patti and Robert, I took a photo so I would always remember how I felt reading their story at that moment in the kitchen.
It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or a tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power (page 136).
Heathens & Believers
What kind of postal worker heathen processes a magazine by ham-fisting a numerical code onto it with a ball point pen?
Is the mailing label somehow not sufficient to direct The Believer to my home? Or perhaps it is assumed that periodical recipients won’t much care that their edition has been personalized for them by the post office?
I am no stranger to magazines limping in with the sad appearance of having been run over by a dull lawn mower but surely these crude pen marks aiding delivery are, at the very least, redundant?
Dear Laura Miller
Thumbing through The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia has inspired me to finish my letter to Laura Miller (see About the Project). Check out her review of The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Miller writes:
“The Magicians” is a grown-up’s book, one that reflects on the sort of questions you never think to ask about fantasy narratives as a kid, such as: Is it such a good idea to meddle in the politics of a strange country you barely understand? Wouldn’t magical powers drain much of the challenge — and therefore the purpose — out of life? If animals and trees could really talk, would they have anything especially interesting to say?
The only thing preventing me from rushing out and buying this book today is that I would have to find real clothes (in washing machine) and change out of the bizarre outfit I cobble together for days I don’t expect to leave the house.
Monster Medley
Coraline scared the shit out of everyone I gave it to (adults or near adults). Neil Gaiman has this to say about that:
As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.
Perhaps the terror adults feel reading this novel turns in part on the twisted fulfillment of our childhood wishes:
“We’re here,” said her other mother, in a voice so close to her real mother’s that Coraline could scarcely tell them apart. “We’re here. We’re ready to love you and play with you and feed you and make your life interesting.”
Our fear grows in proportion to the intensity of our need for parents “ready to love you and play with you and feed you and make your life interesting.”
Check out Gaiman’s blog.
Geek Love is one of those books that should be Oprah book club famous but isn’t. Still, it is a favorite of many readers. Read it for cluttery sentences that always surprise like this line:
Their bodies lifted up, clean and simple to her in the clear, unconscious awareness of each of their cell’s sensing that she would grunt out strong young.
Never the Bride is Miss Marple meets Frankenstein with the emphasis on the Miss Marple end of the equation. Cozy in a creepy kind of way and enormously funny throughout. 
Sometimes I’m not in the mood for books like this (who wants to be so uptight they sit stone-faced through a Terry Pratchett novel, for example) so I always read them when I’m in a more relaxed state. Huge fun.
The Year of the Flood
I’ve just started The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. 
I pre-ordered it from Chapters and it came last week. I was surprised though that I could remember so little of Oryx and Crake. I loved the book but six years later I just had a vision of a man in a tree. Doesn’t say much for my powers of recall. I should’ve re-read it because it will bug me that I didn’t; I settled for a plot summary from Wikipedia.
If an interest in the paranormal was a prominent feature of the 1990′s zeitgeist, the apocalypse (never far from our guilty minds) equally fascinates us now. The October issue of Chatelaine magazine reports:
A third book set during this period is planned, but Atwood confesses she doesn’t yet know what’s in store for the last of humanity. “Kill them, spare them: We’ll wait and see. I’m open to suggestions.”
I think this portrait is wonderful. I read M is for Moose: A Charles Pachter Alphabet to my nephew this weekend and loved it.
I often make bookmarks from scrapbooking paper to match the mood of the book I’m reading.
This is the one I made for The Year of the Flood.
We Monsters… of Templeton
Stephen King ‘blurbed’ The Monsters of Templeton thus “there are monsters, murders, bastards and ne’er-do-wells almost without number. I was sorry to see this rich and wonderful novel come to an end”—and that is reason enough for me to read this book. But add to that the fabulous book cover, maps, letters, family photos, and genealogy charts contained within and it was impossible for me not to love it.
From Lauren Groff’s website:
One dark summer dawn, at the very moment that an enormous monster dies in Lake Glimmerglass, twenty-eight-year-old Willie Upton returns pregnant and miserable to her hometown of Templeton, N.Y. Willie is a descendant of the creator of the town, Marmaduke Temple, and she expects to be able to hide in the place that has been home to her family for centuries. But the monster changes the fabric of the village, and Willie’s mother, Vivienne, has a surprise for the girl that will send Willie careening through her family’s history to dig up clues about her heritage. Spanning two centuries and based on Lauren’s hometown of Cooperstown, New York., the story is told through two centuries of voices, from Templeton ghosts to residents, masters to servants, natives to interlopers, and historical figures to literary characters.
Read the first chapter.
We Monsters
Who doesn’t love the way one book leads to another?
While I work through my inability to book bind, I thought I would put up some books grouped by theme. Some of my book shelves are organized by theme and I like thinking about books this way.
We Monsters
There are six books in this theme and I’ll do a collage page for each one. I’ll post them as quickly as I can crank them out.
As my first choice should make obvious, I’m using monster in an Edward Scissorhands kind of way. Pickle Chiffon Pie is one of my favorite children’s books and is resplendent with monsters.
The King told the three princes this: “You will each go into the huge forest at the edge of the kingdom for three days. As you know, it is full of Gazoos, fairies, Dimdoozles–all sorts of unusual things.
“The one who brings back the most unusual, the most marvelous, the MOST WONDERFUL THING–may marry the Princess.”
the elegance of the bone folder
I confess that I have been too daunted by the challenges of binding to achieve much towards my mini book in the past few weeks. I did read a lot about the bone folder and have practiced my technique. I’ve used this tool to fold paper for years but discovered that I should be scoring the paper first. My achievement is shown in the photograph. I think I will abandon any attempts to start with the end in mind and just create a letter. I can figure out how to bind it once it’s made. Right?
I did read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I enjoyed it enormously and found many lines I thought relevant to this blog.
On intellectuals:
But in my profound thoughts, I am playing at who I am–hey, no way around it, I am an intellectual (who makes fun of other intellectuals).
page 37
On education:
All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they’d secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence.
page 23
fan letter
might there not be, especially in a society in which writers feel misunderstood and neglected, an obligation to write the occasional carefully wrought fan letter?
Wayne C. Booth
Over the next two weeks I’ll be doing two things for the first time: writing a fan letter (to Laura Miller, of course) and trying to make a book.
I’m going to write the letter in the form of a book. I’ll be doing this under the guidance of How to Make Books by Esther K. Smith.
Feel free to send advice. I’ll post my progress. Emily has promised to help me.
Not another f***ing elf!*
This one is for you, Jon.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were great friends, for a time. Although I have read both authors repeatedly as a child and since, I have never read a biography of either and didn’t realize they were friends or that they influenced each other’s work until I read The Magician’s Book.
Tolkien had a term for the practice of inventing worlds: “sub-creation.” It was, he believed, in the construction of consistent, believable alternate realities that human beings paid the highest tribute to their creator—by imitating him (Miller 212).
… Lewis disregarded Tolkien’s exacting formula for making a “secondary world.” Narnia was not self-enclosed and consistent. It lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos (Miller 244).
This would be a better post, I guess, if I argued for one world over the other but the truth is simply that I like both Narnia and Middle-earth. We might marvel that the creation of these worlds played a part in destroying Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship but secondary worlds are well worth fighting about.
All authors ‘sub-create’—what is a book but an ‘alternate reality’ whether it is set on earth, or in the past, or merely in a different geographical location than our own. The power of creation is in the world or consciousness that we could never have got to on our own.
Arguing for Narnia over Middle-earth (or vice versa), is like wearing Vulcan ears instead of a Hogwart’s tie. It is a declaration that I am not only here, in this place; part of me belongs to another world which I have chosen for myself.
*“ ‘Not another fucking elf!’ Hugo Dyson famously moaned at the start of one of Tolkien’s readings.” Laura Miller
