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

Pick a world, any world… post a comment and tell me where you are

The Horse and His Boy or Yabba-Dabba Do!

In Rereadings Anne Fadiman describes the shock effects of reading a beloved book, Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, aloud to her eight-year-old son. Fadiman reveals that Henry quickly got “lost” in the story, falling under its spell, while she began probing the text, resisting its cultural assumptions: “I held my tongue for the first hundred pages or so, but finally blurted out: ‘Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy isn’t really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?’” Her son’s response is predictably fierce and unforgiving: “Henry shot me the sort of look he might have used had I dumped a pint of vinegar into a bowl of chocolate ice cream.”

from “Magic Christian: Laura Miller tries to recapture the wonder of reading C.S. Lewis” by Maria Tatar (Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2009)

I can’t make any claims of having been put off by the “cultural assumptions” in The Horse and His Boy. As a child, I noticed the unfairness to girls identified by both Fadiman and Miller, but I ascribed it to flaws in Aravis’s character and did not read it as having a particular meaning about all girls. Similarly, I rather think that the novel’s orientalism was part of what attracted me to the story over and over again. Age hasn’t tampered with my ability to read this book at the level of adventure either; according to my book journal, I last read The Horse and His Boy in April 2005, a month in which I also read Mrs. Dalloway, A Changed Man, Persepolis 2, and Vernon God Little.

Book journal sounds disciplined and devotional but really I just write down the titles. I like reviewing what I was reading when. So far, a few things have become clear from this practice: I don’t read enough, book time is not the same as chronological time (for instance, I would have reported that I read The Horse and His Boy maybe two years ago), and I read or reread children’s books when I’m not feeling well.

But Fadiman is describing a very specific moment—reading to one’s child. My daughter Emily was born in 1991 and was very young during the years I was both studying gender at University and deciding several important things about my own sexuality (first, I had one, and second, I probably should have thought harder about why I loved Joan Jett so much as a child). I was stolidly determined to shake up Emily’s culturally imposed notions of gender despite my mother’s gentle (early childcare professional) reminders that Emily was in part working out her identity and should perhaps be allowed some… space.

The vinegar look Fadiman receives from her son Henry must parallel the look I received from Emily when I dressed bearded Ken (remember him—with the earring?) in Barbie’s dress. Only one dress fit him—it was a hand sewn, oversized square dancing dress usually left to languish at the bottom of the bin because it lacked enough skank to be considered desirable for Barbie to wear. “Why must only Barbie wear a dress?” I would ask Emily, who could only howl: “NO!”

I forbid The Flintstones because I hate that Fred bastard but I did try to be a sport about Sailor Moon, understanding that her “WAH! I’m a moron!” screeches were funny to my daughter.  I worried that SM’s calamities would teach Emily that girls were stupid or that SM’s outfit might demostrate that girls derive their power from short skirts and slutty boots (but then again my own wardrobe might have delivered that gem). By the time The Spice Girls hit the elementary school scene I was blasé enough to take her to the movie. But I never did try to proselytize through books. 

I’m not sure what all this ‘parentish’ effort achieved except that at a recent family gathering Emily was the only person in the room not to break into a spontaneous Yabba-Dabba Do! as she had never be given the chance to hear one and had no idea what a Yabba-Dabba Do was.

I got the vinegar look again.

As a child, were you forbidden to read or watch anything?

Laura Miller & the Magician’s Book

 

At first I thought Laura Miller, author of The Magician’s Notebook: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, was another Narnia hater and that was fine—Narnia had it coming. But I wasn’t interested in reading a set of interpretations which would pester me through my next Narnia reread.  Besides, books about Narnia inevitably lead to God and I can’t imagine anything less enticing than a book about christianity and children’s lit unless it was jointly written by Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens.

I remember a graduate seminar in which we began with the following round table discussion:

name the book so special to you that you have no interest in trying to critically understand it or the author

Great question—most of us responded with books we had first read in childhood. My choice was L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. After I gave my answer, one harpy could not contain herself: “So, you mean you don’t know that she was notorious as a petty gossip?”

“Fuck you,” was obviously the only appropriate response but I was younger then and merely grinned sickly, PETTY-PETTY-PETTY reverberating through my head. Now, having toured PEI and paid my respects to Montgomery’s corporeal existence, petty or otherwise, I’m able to report that The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio sits on my shelf and promises to be an amazing read.

Miller’s book is also wonderful and will be the subject of this blog for the next few weeks.

“The honest, educated reader, when tackling the towering literary works of the past, now faces a different, though no less precarious task: how to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book. Prejudice is repellent, but if we were to purge our shelves of all the great books tainted by one vile idea or another, we’d have nothing left to read—or at least nothing but the new and blandly virtuous. For the stone-cold truth is that Virginia Woolf was an awful snob, and Milton was a male chauvinist” (Miller, 171). 

 

Do you have a book so sacred to you that you would never want to ‘analyze’ it or the author? Post your book in the comments.