The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (Tom Wolfe)

Unbelievably, Bonfire of the Vanities is my last book on my adult fiction shelf. I have been working on "this shelf" since April 9, 2007 - when I started off with Hitchhiker's Guide. April 9, 2007! What - am I nuts? Where the hell did the time go?? And now I've gone through the alphabet and I am at the last book of this particular "genre". Which shelf will we go to next? Will it be memoir? Poetry? Biography? Literary analysis? Acting textbooks? Wouldn't you like to know.

For now: Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe

It's a rare book that is an event. I remember when Bonfire of the Vanities came out - I remember reading it with my boyfriend, neck and neck - I remember everyone - EVERYONE - talking about it. It was an event. A zeitgeist moment. A truth-telling bolt from the heavens, truths that lots of people didn't want to hear. It appeared to tell us what was happening as it was happening ... Lots of books try to do that, and some books do do that but don't hit the public in the sweet spot that turns it into an event. Bonfire of the Vanities hit the sweet (tender, angry, overly sensitive, paranoid) spot. I can't think of another book in recent years that has done such a thing. At least not a fiction book. It was one of those events that, at the time, i just felt I had to participate in. Whether or not I liked the book was irrelevant. If everyone - and I mean EVERYONE - was talking about it, then I had to get in on the action. To be honest, Bonfire of the Vanities is not really my cup of tea, in terms of fiction. But at the time of its release, personal preference also became irrelevant. I had to read it. It was about "how we live now".

New York City has always been in my life. I have always known people who lived here, and as a kid would take trips down to visit my aunt. This was the late 70s. New York in the late 70s was not the mall-ed out Disneyfied New York that you see now, set up to make tourists feel comfortable and cozy. New York was the wild west. I saw my first penis on one of those trips, because a homeless man walked right up to me and whipped it out. Yeah, I'm 10 years old, douchebag, get the fuck away from me. The subways were covered in grafitti - which gave them a strangely violent and anarchic look - God, remember that? The lunatics had taken over the asylum. People jumped the turnstiles all around you. If you were in New York in the 70s, then you know this is true, and how widespread it was. You'd go up to the turnstiles with your token and all around you people were hurdling through the air over them. There was no police presence that you could feel. If you followed the rules and DIDN'T jump the turnstiles, it was only because you were determined to maintain your OWN sense of morality, in the midst of a crime-ridden atmosphere. I could totally have jumped the turnstiles myself (or crawled under them, as a 10 year old). 8th Avenue was lined with peep shows and hookers and live go-go dancers. When I moved to New York, in 1995, 42nd Street was still in the grip of that past ... The Lion King hadn't moved in yet (although it was about to), and that theatre, the building of that theatre by Disney, was going to change everything. In 1995, the buildings were baroque, cobbled together, many of them boarded up, because the peep shows were already being zoned out of the neighborhood. But nothing had come in to replace them yet. So 42nd Street. A major tourist attraction. Looked like a deserted movie set on some dusty backlot. Imagine that. I try to imagine the throngs of tourists on 42nd Street today, going into the Applebee's that is there (gross), or the Chevy's ... I try to imagine them dealing with that urban desolation that had no interest whatsoever in making THEM feel comfortable. That's the New York I grew up with. I still loved it. In fact, I loved it BECAUSE it felt dangerous. Yeah, whatever, I'll pay lip service to cleaning up the streets, but I didn't move here to live in Disneyland. I miss the hookers, frankly. I miss the smut. (Thank God I was able to capture the last gasp of it before it was torn down - one of my favorite buildings on 8th Avenue). As a kid, I didn't understand the smut - I just knew that "ladies" were on the street barely wearing any clothes. But of course I didn't hang out on 8th Avenue. My aunt took me to Broadway shows, we went to the Metropolitan Museum, she took me to Central Park. All of THOSE areas were fine for a child to be in, but on the fringes, was an obviously criminal element - which threatened to overrun the social order. You could feel it. Like I said: the subways were COVERED in grafitti, much of it spectacularly sophisticated art. Beautiful. But that wasn't art sponsored by some corporation. That wasn't art that came out of some city-wide initiative. That was done on someone's own time, with their own materials, in the dead of night. Even as a kid, you could just sense that.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is not so much about the New York of the 70s, but the New York of the flush materialistic 80s - HOWEVER: the fringes of the 70s still existed, which is what made New York during that decade so freaky. In the 70s, everyone was broke. But in the 80s came the "yuppies", and the new money - but 8th Avenue remained the same (and the folks on 8th Avenue probably made a nice buck too, because people had MORE money to spend on hookers and peep shows). So there was this huge weird gap - and if you were in New York in the 80s, you'll know how strange it was. All bubbles burst. And that was a huge bubble - unreal, with its own rules, not meant to last. The Central Park jogger incident happened in 1989 - 2 years after Wolfe's book came out -and that was an event, too, that told the lie about how "safe" New York had become - New York "seemed" safe (although it never ever seemed safe to me, still doesn't) - but it "seemed" safe to those who didn't know better - It "seemed" safe because Wall Street was doing great, and MBAs from around the country were now flocking there, fresh-faced and full of senses of entitlement. The Central Park jogger case was the end-moment of that Zeitgeist - 1989 was the beginning of that bubble bursting ... and Wolfe was writing about the mid-80s, the true insanity of a world living by its own rules, the enormous gap between the Sherman McCoys and the folks hanging around the courtroom in the Bronx ... It was a third world kind of gap. Insane. Like I said, you could FEEL it when you were there at the time. In many cities, the segregation (not racial, but economic) is so acute that sometimes you are unable to sense where the hell all the poor people are. In New York, you always knew.

Tom Wolfe deserves a more in-depth post but for now, I'll just leave it at that. I like knowing he's around. I like knowing what he's thinking about. I also like the fearless truth-telling in the book, whether it's in the racist epithets thrown around by, uhm, mostly everybody - the casual misogyny at the higher levels of society - the observations of the beginning of the tabloid frenzy that was taking over the national consciousness - and the fact that everybody hates everybody else. BUT: somehow, even with all that, the social order is maintained. Wops, spics, Kikes, we all manage to get along, even if we hate each other, because this is America, and whatever, we can't legislate being an ASSHOLE out of existence. It is only when Sherman McCoy, Master of the Universe, meets his destiny on a dark scary night on the Cross Bronx Expressway - that the hatreds are given an opportunity to express themselves, and become irreconcilable. The fans flamed higher and brighter by opportunists like the Al Sharpton-type character ... there are those who have a vested interest in all of us NOT getting along. Because if we all decided to 'get along' (even though we fucking hate each other deep down) - then that person would be out of a goddamn job.

It's a cynical book. There is no hope or redemption (which is why the movie, with its casting of Morgan Freeman as the judge - was so cautious and fearful. Nope. The second you cast HIM as the judge, just admit that you aren't doing Tom Wolfe's book. I don't know what the hell you're doing, but it's not THAT). Nobody is exempt. Tom Wolfe is an equal-opportunity hater, like Jonathan Swift. Any time you think he's about to make some point that lets someone off the hook - any time you think you can relax and go, "Oh, okay, he's saying MY side is LESS of an asshole" he'll pull a jujitsu move, leaving you high and dry. It's a coincidence that the following entry ends with a praise of Irish courage. With Tom Wolfe, you can never relax. Besides, he's ALSO saying that the Irish are animals. So seriously, if you think that's "praise", you're nuts.

I haven't read this book since it first came out. Many of the scenes are emblazoned in my brain forever. It's just that kind of book. The characters are archetypes - in their own weird way - and stand, immobile, as the forces of the late 20th century whirl around them, knocking them this way, that.

I wanted to pick a section of the book that highlighted Tom Wolfe's ear for dialogue, New York-ese in particular. So here it is.

EXCERPT FROM The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe

Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty times a day, on the average.

Still rubbing them, Andriutti looked at Kramer as he walked in and said: "Jesus Christ, here comes the bag lady. What the hell is this fucking A&P bag, Larry? You been coming in here with this fucking bag every day this week." Then he turned to Jimmy Caughey and said, "Looks like a fucking bag lady."

Caughey was also a jock, but more the Triathlon type, with a narrow face and a long chin. He just smiled at Kramer, as much as to say, "Well, what do you say to that?"

Kramer said, "Your arm itch, Ray?" Then he looked at Caughey and said, "Ray's got this fucking allergy. It's called weight lifter's disease." Then he turned back to Andriutti. "Itches like a sonofabitch, don't it?"

Andriutti let his hand drop off his triceps. "And what are these jogging shoes?" he said to Kramer. "Looks like those girls walking to work at Merrill Lynch. All dressed up, and they got these fucking rubber gunboats on their feet."

"What the hell is in that bag?" said Caughey.

"My high heels," said Kramer. He took off his jacket and jammed it down, give-a-shit, on a coatrack hook in the accepted fashion and pulled down his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and sat down in his swivel chair and opened up the shopping bag and fished out his Johnston & Murphy brown leather shoes and started taking off his Nikes.

"Jimmy," Andriutti said to Caughey, "did you know that Jewish guys - Larry, I don't want you to take this personally - did you know that Jewish guys, even if they're real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That's a well-known fact. They can't stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don't like to go hunting or they're for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?"

"Gee," said Kramer, "I don't know why you thought I'd take it personally."

"Come on, Larry," said Andriutti, "tell the truth. Deep down, don't you wish you were Italian or Irish?"

"Yeah," said Kramer, "that way I wouldn't know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place."

Caughey started laughing. "Well, don't let Ahab see those shoes, Larry. He'll have Jeanette issue a fucking memorandum."

"No, he'll call a fucking press conference," said Andriutti.

"That's always a safe fucking bet."

And so another fucking day in the fucking Homicide Bureau of the Bronx Fucking District Attorney's Office was off to a fucking start.

An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses had started calling Abe Weiss "Captain Ahab", and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. Unlike the greaet D.A.s of yore, such as Frank Hogan, Burt Roberts, or Mario Merola, Weiss never went near a courtroom. He didn't have time. There were only so many hours in the day for him to stay in touch with Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and the New York Daily News, the Post, The City Lights, and the Times.

Jimmy Caughey said, "I was just in seeing the captain. You shoulda--"

"You were? What for?" asked Kramer with just a shade too much curiosity and incipient envy in his voice.

"Me and Bernie," said Caughey. "He wanted to know about the Moore case."

"Any good?"

"Piece a shit," said Caughey. "This fucking guy Moore, he has a big house in Riverdale, and his wife's mother lives there with 'em, and she's been giving him a hard time for about thirty-seven fucking years, right? So this guy, he loses his job. He's working for one a these reinsurance companies, and he's making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and now he's out a work for eight or nine months, and nobody'll hire him, and he don't know what the hell to do, right? So one day he's puttering around out in the garden, and the mother-in-law comes out and says, 'Well, water seeks its own level.' That's a verbatim quote. 'Water seeks its own level. You oughta get a job as a gardener.' So this guy, he's out of his fucking mind, he's so mad. He goes in and tells his wife, 'I've had it with your mother. I'm gonna get my shotgun and scare her.' So he goes up to his bedroom, where he keeps this 12-gauge shotgun, and he comes downstairs and heads for the mother-in-law, and he's gonna scare the shit out of her, and he said, 'Okay, Gladys,' and he trips on the rug, and the gun goes off and kills her, and - ba-bing! - Murder Two."

"Why was Weiss interested?"

"Well, the guy's white, he's got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he's gonna fake an accidental shooting."

"Is that possible?"

"Naw. Fucking guy's one a my boys. He's your basic Irish who made good, but he's still a Harp. He's drowning in remorse. You'd think he'd shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he'd confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the videocamera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it's a piece of shit, but it looked good at first."

Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John's Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail." Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott's apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy's grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn't help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well ... impolite! ... on the ordinary social level ... to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn't that it was morally wrong ... It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.

Not that they weren't guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn't waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.

Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John's, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn't remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very closely. To his parents, New York City - New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world! - was a drama called The Jews Confront the Goyim, and the goyim were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney's Office, the D.A.'s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn't want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The goyim were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals in the Homicide Bureau.

The Books: "Lighthousekeeping" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson.

After about a decade of reading books by Winterson that were a bit of a yawn, I tore through Lighthousekeeping like a crazy person. I read it WAY too fast ... much of it was lost to me ... But I couldn't contain myself. I was so excited. Here was a story that WASN'T the story of a love triangle (man, woman, redheaded woman) ... it was something different altogether. It did not (on the whole) get good reviews, and many of the criticisms are ones I have made myself. There is something repetitive about Winterson's work. She only has a couple of themes, and she keeps hashing them out. She is not, say, John Irving, or Annie Proulx - people who are interested in creating other human beings. Winterson doesn't do that. When she's at her best, she creates other memorable worlds and realities, set-pieces that stick in the brain and imagination. When she's at her worst, she drones on and on in overly poetic prose that can't ever be pinned down. Her books can feel like upended poems, fragments of verse - clipped together. It can be quite tiresome. Don't be mistaken: I don't look for Winterson to write a big novel like John Irving does, or Michael Chabon. That's not her thing. But sometimes I read her stuff and I wonder what it must have been like to have success come so early. To hit it as huge as Winterson did, so early on. Maybe she really does only have one story to tell. Who knows.

But I found Lighthousekeeping to be captivating. Here's the stunner of an opener, classic Winterson:

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.

I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that - even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.

Shoals of babies vied for life.

I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate - shepherd's pie, goulash, risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once - what a disaster - and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.

Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived ever since.

I don't know, I think that's pretty damn marvelous.

The orphaned girl of Lighthousekeeping is named Silver (same name as the heroine in Tanglewreck - excerpt here ... See, that's what I mean about the same-ness of Winterson's work ... she even repeats lines from story to story ... and it doesn't seem just like a personal lexicon. It sometimes feels like she has run out of invention. To me, "what you risk reveals what you value" BELONGS in The Passion (excerpt here), where it first appeared. It probably appears in 5 out of 6 of her books after that. Like: no, Jeanette! Don't do that! You're weakening it!!) Sorry, tangent: Silver is orphaned. She goes to live with a blind man named Mr. Pew who keeps a lighthouse. Mr. Pew tells the little girl stories of a man named Babel Dark, an 19th century clergyman - and the story flows back and forth from the present-day at the lighthouse (which never feels like the present-day - it is a grim and bleak existence) back to the mid 1800s when Babel Dark lived. Babel Dark's journey becomes intertwined with Silver's, and - as usual - we aren't sure what is "real" and what is imagined.

I really liked the book. I liked the worlds she presented to me. I love the house built into the cliff, where groceries fall out of the cupboards, and Silver has to be strapped into her hammock so she won't fall out and go plummeting down the house. I just love stuff like that. It truly IS inventive.

But please, Jeanette: no more "what you risk reveals what you value", okay? You said it once and it really meant something. It still does. Just let it be!!

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson.

The Pews have been lighthousekeepers at Cape Wrath since the day of the birth. The job was passed down generation to generation, though the present Mr. Pew has the look of being there forever. He is as old as a unicorn, and people are frightened of him because he isn't like them. Like and like go together. Likeness is liking, whatever they say about opposites.

But some people are different, that's all.

I look like my dog. I have a pointy nose and curly hair. My front legs - that is, my arms, are shorter than my back legs - that is, my legs, which makes a symmetry with my dog, who is just the same, but the other way round.

His name's DogJim.

I put up a photo of him next to mine on the notice board, and I hid behind a bush while they all came by and read our particulars. They were all sorry, but they all shook their heads and said, 'Well, what could we do with her?'

It seemed that nobody could think of a use for me, and when I went back to the notice board to add something encouraging, I found I couldn't think of a use for myself.

Feeling dejected, I took the dog and went walking, walking, walking along the cliff headland towards the lighthouse.

Miss Pinch was a great one for geography - even though she had never left Salts in her whole life. The way she described the world, you wouldn't want to visit it anyway. I recited to myself what she had taught us about the Atlantic Ocean ...

The Atlantic is a dangerous and unpredictable ocean. It is the second largest ocean in the world, extending in an S shape from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, bounded by North and South America in the West, and Europe and Africa in the East.

The North Atlantic is divided from the South Atlantic by the equatorial counter-current. At the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, heavy fogs form where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. In the North Western Ocean, icebergs are a threat from May to December.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. Threat.

The world according to Miss Pinch.

But, on the coasts and outcrops of this treacherous ocean, a string of lights was built over 300 years.

Look at this one. Made of granite, as hard and unchanging as the sea is fluid and volatile. The sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never. There is no sway, no rocking, none of the motion of ships and ocean.

Pew was staring out of the rain-battered glass; a silent taciturn clamp of a man.

Some days later, as we were eating breakfast in Railings Row - me, toast without butter, Miss Pinch, kippers and tea - Miss Pinch told me to wash and dress quickly and be ready with all my things.

'Am I going home?'

'Of course not - you have no home.'

'But I'm not staying here?'

'No. My house is not suitable for children.'

You had to respect Miss Pinch - she never lied.

'Then what is going to happen to me?'

'Mr Pew has put in a proposal. He will apprentice you to lighthousekeeping.'

'What will I have to do?'

'I have no idea.'

'If I don't like it, can I come back?'

'No.'

'Can I take DogJim?'

'Yes.'

She hated saying yes. She was of those people for whom yes is always an admission of guilt or failure. No was power.

A few hours later, I was standing on the windblown jetty, waiting for Pew to collect me in his patched and tarred mackerel boat. I had never been inside the lighthouse before, and I had only seen Pew when he stumped up the path to collect his supplies. The town didn't have much to do with the lighthouse anymore. Salts was no longer a seaman's port, with ships and sailors docking for fire and food and company. Salts had become a hollow town, its life scraped out. It had its rituals and its customs and its past, but nothing left in it was alive. Years ago, Charles Darwin had called it Fossil-Town, but for different reasons. Fossil it was, salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too.

Pew came near in his boat. His shapeless hat was pulled over his face. His mouth was a slot of teeth. His hands were bare and purple. Nothing else could be seen. He was the rough shape of human.

DogJim growled. Pew grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the boat, then he motioned for me to throw in my bag and follow.

The little outboard motor bounced us over the green waves. Behind me, smaller and smaller, was my tipped-up house that had flung us out, my mother and I, perhaps because we were never wanted there. I couldn't go back. There was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the lighthouse.

Pew and I climbed slowly up the spiral stairs to our quarters below the Light. Nothing about the lighthouse had been changed since the day it was built. There were candleholders in every room, and the Bibles put there by Josiah Dark. I was given a tiny room with a tiny window, and a bed the size of a drawer. As I was not much longer than my socks, this didn't matter. DogJim would have to sleep where he could.

Above me was the kitchen where Pew cooked sausages on an open cast-iron stove. Above the kitchen was the light itself, a great glass eye with a Cyclops stare.

Our business was light, but we lived in darkness. The light had to be kept going, but there was no need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with everything. It was standard. My clothes were trimmed with dark. When I put on a sou'wester, the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.

The darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it too on the shapes of the things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn't know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked sausages in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages with darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste. That's what we ate: sausages and darkness.

I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.

There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me.

The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.

The Books: "Tanglewreck" (Jeanette Winterson)

Actually, this book is a book for kids - but in the interest of keeping an "author together" - I have shelved it with Winterson's adult books. So: Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Tanglewreck, by Jeanette Winterson.

This is Jeanette Winterson's first book for kids.There is much here to praise - a fast-paced story, with time travel, and little kids on the run, and evil villains ... A lot of it feels quite derivative, however. It's obviously Winterson's voice but unlike her other books - which I barely can compare to anything else - this is full of things that reminded me of other books. Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter ... It doesn't quite work. A great children's book is also a great book for adults. I count something like Good Night Moon in that. There is such a thing as perfection - and it's the same for kids as it is for adults. Good Night Moon wouldn't hold up as an adult NOVEL, of course - but the standard of excellence is the same, as far as I'm concerned. Madeleine L'Engle said a great thing once: "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." LOVE that. That's why her books are so transportive. I never get sick of them. Tanglewreck is a wee bit too didactic ... but in this case it feels sneaky, like Winterson is trying to sneak in a message in such a subtle way that the kids won't be bored - but she's trying to get her point across. I rolled my eyes at some of these. Winterson is a big environmentalist. Nothing wrong with that. But she tried to put that into the book ... and again: nothing wrong with that, but it felt sneaky, like she was trying to get away with it, and I didn't like that. Kids don't like to be condescended to. If you have a message, then find an inventive way to weave it into the book so that it is inevitable, rather than snuck in. Compare that to Madeleine L'Engle's Ring of Endless Light (excerpt here here) - perhaps my favorite of all of her books (I fluctuate) ... and its vision of a summer working at a marine biology lab, and hanging out with dolphins - in captivity and also in the wild ... The things learned about dolphins that summer transcend marine biology concerns, and makes the book about (on some level) the necessity of ongoing scientific research - that science that has a practical GOAL is not the only kind of science ... There's way more ... but in general, it's about the importance of dolphins, and how they should be protected, studied, loved, whatever. But do you ever catch Madeleine L'Engle trying to preach ANY of that to us? Do you ever catch her trying to sneak in her message, hoping we won't notice? Or, no - it's not "hoping we won't notice" ... Winterson tries to sneak in her message hoping it will work on the kids in a subconscious way ... that the kids will be swayed to her point of view through osmosis. Something about that did not sit well with me, reading Tanglewreck. It is obvious L'Engle's love for dolphins, and her belief that preserving dolphins, and studying them, and protecting them, should be a priority. But she only does that through telling the story of Vicky and Adam working in the lab. L'Engle isn't trying to sneak anything past us! Winterson also assumes that her audience will all feel the same way about America, so her main villain is American, a representative of a huge multi-national corporation, and the most ambitious person in the galaxy. Winterson relies on a shorthand here (American = bad, not to be trusted) that feels very "right now" to me. Yeah, I know, the world has always hated us (but whatever, when you all want to escape the tyranny in your own lands, where do you go?? Yeah. I thought so.) Back to my point: I know "anti-Americanism" is nothing new. I mean, if you go back and read some of the things George III said about us, way back when, when the US was first starting out, you can see the contempt. Nothing has changed. It's been there since the beginning for us. (So to imagine we could "go back" to a time when we were universally admired ... Yeah, uhm, so when would that be? Learn your history, people.) But a children's book needs to be, on some level, universal. If you want kids to read it not just in this generation but others. I can feel the world of 2006 and 2007 in Tanglewreck, even though that's not what it's about at all. I can feel the global warming debate, I can feel the Iraq war, I can feel the anger at America's power, I can feel the "green" movement ... all in a book that has nothing to do with any of that. I guess what I'm saying is: Winterson is not at the top of her game here. Frankly, I don't think she would have tried to "get away" with any of this if it were a book for adults - and THAT is why the book sometimes feels condescending. Winterson has NEVER come across as didactic to me ... she's too much of a free spirit. But here she does.

However, on the flip side: The classic Winterson imagination is at work here, and I very much liked the weaving of truth with fantasy. Like, we're in this magical story where "Time Tornadoes" have sprouted up all over England, ripping people into the past, future, whatever ...but there are certain things that still ground us to reality. I liked that.

Silver lives in a big 500 year old house called Tanglewreck. Her parents and little sister disappeared one day. She now lives with an evil aunt, who stays with her at Tanglewreck, and doesn't take good care of Silver at all. Silver has to fend for herself. She loves her house, it feels alive to her. These Time Tornadoes start to swoop through London, and suddenly, things start to shift and change. A man named Abel Darkwater shows up at Tanglewreck, talking about a specific clock that was left in her parents hands - an essential clock called The Timekeeper ... Mr. Darkwater, a clock fanatic, and an ambitious man, knows that whoever has this Timekeeper will control Time. Something has happened to disturb Time. Huge forces begin to converge on Tanglewreck ... there is a Timekeeper hidden there ... it goes back centuries ... and Silver needs to hand it over. Silver has no memory of any Timekeeper. She is 11 years old. Just a kid. Abel Darkwater takes her to his house in London, but she escapes - and eventually joins up with a tribe of people who live in the tunnels beneath the city ... They call themselves "The Throwbacks". For whatever reason, they are immortal. Time has somehow "forgot" them ... most of them were inmates in Bedlam, the famous mental hospital of old in London, and are scarred forever by the experience. Turns out Abel Darkwater, too, is immortal ... and his connection with the Throwbacks is an unhappy one, and goes way back. But they save Silver - and they realize the urgency of keeping the Timekeeper out of Abel Darkwater's hands ... and so begins a chase - not just across England but across the galaxy ... to, first of all, find the Timekeeper, and to then hide it from people who would use it for ill.

It's a quick read. The slight annoyances didn't stop me from enjoying it. It just didn't have that "oomph" that great children's books need to have. I guess I felt a bit of distance from it. It feels like a lot of Winterson's other intellectual exercises ... ruminations on quantum physics and Schrodinger's cat and Einstein ... all fascinating stuff, and I ate it up here ... but I do wonder if a kid would be bored by it all.

Just to prove my point from yesterday about some of her more rabid fans: One of the reviews on Amazon (I think for the British version of the book) states that she feels she knows Winterson so well that "if we were to meet we would be on a first-name basis". Okay. First creepy clue. Then she goes on to list her problems with the book (and many of them were my problems as well) - but finally she is MOST disappointed in the fact that Silver, an 11 year old girl, appears to "fall in love" with Gabriel, a young Throwback BOY ... and that particular reader was SO disappointed that Winterson chose to have it be a heterosexual thing and missed an opportunity "to teach kids it's okay to be gay." Oh, great: let's add one MORE didactic message to the book! Why are you looking to Winterson, an artist, to "teach kids it's okay to be gay"?? In a book that has nothing to do with that? Winterson struggles with that kind of thing - people expect her to be a mouthpiece for them, rather than herself. Tanglewreck has no obligation to be anything other than itself. To look for it to show "kids it's okay to be gay" when ... it has nothing to do with that, you would never put such a pressure onto another writer - you only put the pressure on Winterson because she is gay - but that's the kind of narrow-minded thinking Winterson has always fought against. Do NOT label her as a gay writer. Or, whatever, go ahead and label her - but just know: that by labeling her, you limit her. It reminds me of Ted's story about directing Virginia in Chicago and being told on a radio interview that he wasn't qualified to direct a play about Virginia Woolf because he was a man. It also reminds me of the recent (and ongoing) kerfluffle between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee about Eastwood's film about Charlie Parker and how Spike Lee thinks only a black man should have directed that film. Clint Eastwood was like, "But nobody else did it! I did! Get over yourself." I like Spike Lee a lot, but that kind of nonsense is ... well, nonsense. This is a level of art that I cannot stand. Where group identity politics trumps artistic considerations and imagination. Oh, so only a deaf actor can play someone who is deaf? Personal experience trumps imagination? Well, sorry, but that goes against everything I believe in. You don't need to be a prince to be able to imagine yourself into Hamlet - and to put that kind of literal consideration onto any artist is fucking stupid. Winterson is gay - therefore she can only write about gay things? How boring! Thank God Winterson appears to be easily bored, and continues to try new things, not listening to those who need her to be some posterchild for gay rights. Winterson obviously, with Tanglewreck, wanted to write a story about the things that interest her (and always have): quantum mechanics, space, transformation, alchemy ... To read her book and be disappointed that it doesn't have a gay person in it, is to be moronic. It makes me sad. It makes me hope that Winterson just keeps on keeping on ... writing what SHE wants to write. Every book may not be successful - and that's, actually, one of the most interesting things about Winterson. Even her failures are interesting. She does not play it safe. Or - no, that's not right. I feel she DID play it safe in books like Gut Symmetries (excerpt here) and The PowerBook (excerpt here) - same ol' same ol'. I suppose the fans who only want one thing out of her were tremendously pleased by those books. Those books validate THEM. I don't look for Winterson to validate me. I want her to follow her star, and I will always be right behind. Wherever she goes. When she plays it safe, she gets boring. So when she tries something new (Art & Lies (excerpt here), Tanglewreck) - sometimes it doesn't completely work - but I find that just as fascinating, and admirable. It takes guts to fail. It takes guts to put yourself out there, to know you might be out of your element ... but to understand that being out of your element is exactly where you need to be. To quote Winterson herself: "What you risk reveals what you value." And then, sometimes, she takes a risk (like with Weight - her story of Atlas and Heracles - excerpt here) - and she triumphs. That's what's exciting. Not to mention the fact that her first three books - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (excerpt here), Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here) and The Passion (excerpt here) - are all HUGE risks ... and she knocked them out of the park. So keep taking risks, Winterson. Keep trying to please yourself - not those who have something specific they need of you ... and I'll always be a reader.

Well, I'll always be a reader, regardless. I'm no fair-weather fan! And I suppose - like the woman on Amazon - I have certain "needs" of Winterson, too. I am always curious as to what the hell she is getting up to (she has a new book out - The Stone Gods - a sci-fi book, and I haven't read it yet ... I'm not a big sci-fi fan, but I can't wait to read it ... just to see what she's doing) ... and I hope that my expectations of her are not unfair, or limiting. I know when I'm bored, and I trust that response ... but I also know that Winterson is a wild card. She's made her name on being unpredictable. I'm a fan for life, that's just the way it goes.

So although Tanglewreck is not quite a success, I do admire it because of the risk she took in writing it. She had to know people would be displeased. She wrote it anyway. Awesome! It is only by doing what she wants to do ... that she will continue to grow and flourish as an artist. She has the money. Her books are huge successes. She can please herself. That's what I like about following her career. I never know where she will go next.

Here's a section where Silver sits in the tunnels beneath London with the tribe called The Throwbacks. She is on the run from Abel Darkwater.

EXCERPT FROM Tanglewreck, by Jeanette Winterson.

Gabriel began to teach Silver how to find her way through the labyrinths, and where to come Upground. They told each other stories about their lives, and Silver promised Gabriel that whatever happened, one day she would take him to Tanglewreck.

'I should be glad to see the place that you love,' said Gabriel. 'Nothing matters but those things that matter, Micah says.'

And Silver thought she understood.

In the timeless, ageless space of the Throwbacks, Silver felt happy again, happier than she had been for years. She remembered that with her parents and Buddleia at Tanglewreck, every day had stretched into every day, and she had been free, just like this. She started to sleep on her back, instead of curled up in a ball. She had no sense of how much time was passing - perhaps all of it. Perhaps none.

One day, finding Micah on his own in the Chamber, smoking his pipe, she asked him what he had meant by the 'Experiments'. His face grew dark.

'They be alchemists - him and Maria Prophetessa.'

'That's the beautiful woman called Regalia Mason?'

'Yes.'

'Is an alchemist a sort of magician?'

'Yea, in sort.'

And Micah explained how hundreds of years ago, science and magic were nearly the same thing. Nobody studied physics or chemistry, they studied mathematics or astronomy, and they studied alchemy. Astronomers were also astrologers, who predicted what would happen by measuring the movement of the stars. Even Isaac Newton, who studied mathematics, and discovered gravity, was an astrologer.

'And Isaac Newton, he be a member of a secret society called Tempus Fugit.'

'Time Flies!' said Silver. 'Abel Darkwater's shop!'

'Yea,' said Micah. 'Many of the alchemists spent all their lives labouring to turn metal into gold, but some, like Isaac Newton, and Abel Darkwater, and Maria Prophetessa, and a very powerful magician called John Deem they laboured to make Time.'

'You can't make TIme,' said Silver, thinking, even as she said it, how grown-ups were always saying they had to make time, usually for their children.

' 'Tis why he be alive and not dead in the earth,' said Micah.

'But you are all alive too,' said Silver.

'Yea,' said Micah. 'He experimented on us in the lunatic asylum in ways that would curdle your heart, but when we escaped we discovered that we be not dying as Updwellers do. Have you not noticed something about Abel Darkwater?'

Silver thought about his marble eyes, his round body, his shadowy face ...

'He be like us who don't want the light. If our kind do go in the light, as Updwellers do, we die. Abel Darkwater is cleverer than we; he don't die in the light, but he can't be in the light for long. The dark slows death down, like hibernation. Like animals who sleep all winter.'

'What else slows it down?' asked Silver.

'Cold,' said Micah. 'You put a piece of meat in your cold safes - fridges, you call them. Yea, in the cold safe it does not decay. In the sun it decays.'

'Dark and cold,' said Silver.

'Yea,' said Micah. 'Dark and cold. Come.'

Micah hoisted Silver up on to the warm shaggy back of a bog pony and led her through a short maze of tunnels.

Silver hung on to the pony's thick mane, and felt his warmth on her fingers. Now she understood why Abel Darkwater's house was so cold. It wasn't because it was an old house like Tanglewreck; it was to keep him alive. That was why he had no electric lights, and that was why Mrs Rokabye complained a lot, even for her. Silver didn't feel the cold much. They had hardly any heat or electricity at Tanglewreck because their parents couldn't afford it. Only Mrs Rokabye had electric fires and electric blankets, and even an electric headscarf that she wore in the winter.

'Behold!' said Micah.

They had come to a round corral where half a dozen cattle were contentedly munching hay. The temperature was freezing, and a haze of cold hung over the cows.

Silver shivered and wrapped her legs round the pony. She looked up and saw that the opaque natural light and the steaming cold were coming from a perfectly round sheet of what looked like frosted glass. But it was perhaps fifty metres in diameter.

'In thine own world that be an ice-skating pond,' said Micah. 'A great marvel, for it remains frozen the whole of the year, and through your four season.'

'It's an ice-rink,' said Silver.

'We depend on it for our cattle. These cattle be bred by Abel Darkwater in 1805. We keep them in calf for milk, and we eat the calves for meat.'

'When will they die?' asked Silver.

'I know not. None of us knows when we shall die. But that is true of thine own world too.'

Silver and Micah made their way back to the Chamber.

'Why are you still afraid of Abel Darkwater?' said Silver.

'For the chains and the beatings and the blood-lettings and the faintings, and the dissections and anatomies he performed, and the great cold he kept us in, and the darkness where we dwelled before we be made different by him and her, and that he was my Master. He could destroy us still. He does not destroy us for reasons of his own, but I know them not.'

'Why does he want the Timekeeper?'

Micah stopped as he was walking. 'Abel Darkwater never must find the Timekeeper. If truly you know where it be ...'

'I don't know where it be, I mean, where it is,' said Silver.

'He must not become Lord of the Universe, for that is his wish, and his many lifetimes' work,' said Micah, his face grave.

'How can we stop him?' asked Silver.

'He cannot do it without the clock.'

'But he says I will lead him to the clock.'

Micah was silent. 'It may be that you must dwell with us for the remainder of your days.'

Silver gasped at this. 'What, and never see Tanglewreck again?'

'It may be. If you be the Keeper of the Clock, it be your duty to keep it safe.'

'But I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT IS!'

'That may be the means of keeping it safe,' said Micah.

The Books: "Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, by Jeanette Winterson.

Part of the ongoing Myths Series from Random House (which I adore) - Winterson takes on the myth of Atlas and Heracles. I mentioned in another post that I think Winterson could definitely be a kind of post-modern Edith Hamilton. I have always felt that her strength, as a writer, lay in the evocation of magic and myth and fairy tale in the middle of more straightforward narratives. It's what I most love about her. Because even with all her invention and unconventionality - she actually is one of the most traditional of writers. Meaning: she respects tradition. She ADORES it. It lives and breathes around her, and she finds new ways to put those traditions and old tales into her stories - because they mean that much to her. It's not an act or a gimmick (having read her book Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery - essays on art, from paintings to books to poems - I can say that she sees herself as PART of a tradition, not outside it. Many of her more radical fans don't like this about her because they "need" something from her. They want her to buck the system, they want her to be only one thing. Reject the tradition!! Jeanette Winterson is a lesbian. She's quite open about it. But she also is quite open about the fact that because of her sexuality - which has little to do with who she is as a writer - people project things onto her, and have expectations that are, frankly, retarded. I suppose any writer from a minority struggles with that. They need to be all things to all people.) Winterson tells a funny story about being berated by some random woman on the street because she shaved her legs and wore heels. It's that kind of nonsense I'm talking about. My friend Alex often deals with nonsense like that. Her lesbian fans want to OWN her and then get all insane and jealous when Alex expresses a thought that doesn't line up with the expected lesbian attitude. I've seen it happen on her blog - it's nuts!! Anyway, Winterson is elusive, in many ways. She resists classification. I understand why a certain group of people would latch on to her work. I really do. But she's an independent person, an ARTIST, not a person on a poster representing a cause.

Her imagining of the myth of Atlas and Heracles is marvelous - and is representative of what I am talking about her. I really get the sense, with this book, that Winterson was able to retreat to a private space (in her mind, I mean) - where she is most creative, most in touch with her dreams and her thoughts, and wrote from that place. Sometimes Winterson's work is self-conscious. Nothing wrong with that. Virginia Woolf was a self-conscious writer. James Joyce was a self-conscious writer. Being aware of you, the artist, in the act of creation is part of the 20th century literary tradition. Winterson can sometimes go off the deep end with it, and the references become lost - it becomes a truly private work, not accessible to me, the reader - but here, with the myth of Atlas and Heracles, she is in true storyteller mode. She is sitting around the fire with members of her tribe, telling a tale they all know well, but never get tired of hearing about. Because there are lessons in it for all ... Winterson has truly thought about this myth, and its larger metaphors ... and so she goes for it.

I had been vaguely disenchanted with Winterson's books for a couple of years. Burnt by Art & Lies (excerpt here), Gut Symmetries (excerpt here) and The PowerBook (excerpt here) , although all of them have some quite lovely writing. But within 2 or 3 pages of Weight, I felt that prickle at the back of my neck, that goosebump-y feeling ... of being in the presence of a writer at the top of her game. It is a spare book, not too much fat on it, but I found myself totally lost in the pages. I know the myth of Atlas and Heracles, but here is a new voice telling that old familiar tale. She turns it into a first-person narrative, which I love - because we can enter into their experience in a new way.

More than anything, I just got the sense that Winterson had a BALL writing this. Like she could have kept writing forever, it was that fun and satisfying to her. It's a really fun book - I highly recommend it. If you're into Greek and Roman mythology, then the "Myths Series" is something you should definitely check out. I haven't read all of them - just Winterson's and Atwood's - but what a great idea, I think.

EXCERPT FROM Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, by Jeanette Winterson.

The war between the gods and the Titans was a war we had preferred to avoid. There are several versions of this war. One thing is certain; what began as just cause became just excuse. We fought for ten years.

Some say that my father was Uranus and that my brothers and I, especially Cronus, plotted to attack him and castrate him. It is certain that Cronus cut off the genitals of Uranus, and then took power himself. It is certain too, that Cronus bore a child, Zeus, who likewise dethroned his father and gained control of the heavens. Zeus had two brothers, Hades and Poseidon, and while Zeus became Lord of the Sky, Poseidon had his kingdom in the waves, and Hades was content with what lies beneath. The earth was left to mankind.

It was mankind who attacked quiet Atlantis, and Zeus who helped them to destroy my people. I escaped, and joined the revolt against the heavens. I was the war-leader, the one who had lost most and little to fear. What can a man fear with nothing to lose?

In the long fighting, most of us were killed, and my mother, out of her secret nature, promised victory to Zeus. What Titans were left were banished to Britain, where the cold inhospitable rocks are worse than death. I was spared for my great strength.

In a way I was allowed to be my own punishment.

Because I loved the earth. Because the seas of the earth held no fear for me. Because I had learned the positions of the planets and the track of the stars. Because I am strong, my punishment was to support the Kosmos on my shoulders. I took up the burden of the whole world, the heavens above it, and the depths below. All that there is, is mine, but none of it in my control. This is my monstrous burden. The boundary of what I am.

And my desire?

Infinite space.

It was the day of my punishment.

The gods assembled. The women were on the left and the men were on the right. There's Artemis, worked muscle and tied-back hair, fiddling with her bow so that she doesn't have to look at me. We were friends. We hunted together.

There's Hera, sardonic, aloof. She couldn't care less. As long as it's not her.

There's Hermes, fidgety and pale, he hates trouble. Next to him lounges Hephastus, ill-tempered and lame, Hera's crippled son, tolerated for his gold smithy. Opposite him is Aphrodite his wife, who loathes his body. We've all had her, though we treat her like a virgin. She smiled at me. She was the only one who dared ...

Zeus read out his decree. Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It's in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas - it means 'the long suffering one'.

I bent my back and braced my right leg, kneeling with my left. I bowed my head and held my hands, palms up, almost like surrender. I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?

The word given, teams of horses and oxen began to strain forward, dragging the Kosmos behind them, like a disc-plough. As the great ball ploughed infinity, pieces of time were dislodged. Some fell to earth, giving the gift of prophecy and second sight. Some were thrown out into the heavens, making black holes where past and future cannot be distinguished. Time spattered my calf muscles and the sinews in my thigh. I felt the world before it began and the future marked me. I would always be here.

As the Kosmos came nearer, the heat of it scorched my back. I felt the world settle against the sole of my foot.

Then, without any sound, the heavens and the earth were rolled up over my body and I supported them on my shoulders.

I could hardly breathe. I could not raise my head. I tried to shift slightly or to speak. I was dumb and still as a mountain. Mount Atlas they soon called me, not for my strength but for my silence.

There was a terrible pain in the seventh vertebra of my neck. The soft tissue of my body was already hardening. The hideous vision of my life was robbing me of life. Time was my medusa. Time was turning me to stone.

I do not know how long I crouched like this, petrified and motionless.

***

At last I began to hear something.

I found that where the world was close to my ears, I could hear everything. I could hear conversations, parrots squawking, donkeys braying. I heard the rushing of underground rivers and the crackle of fires lighted. Each sound became a meaning, and soon I began to de-code the world.

Listen, here is a village with a hundred people in it, and at dawn they take their cattle to the pastures and at evening they herd them home. A girl with a limp takes the pails over her shoulders. I know she limps by the irregular clank of the buckets. There's a boy shooting arrows - thwack! thwack! into the padded hide of the target. His father pulls the stopper out of a wine jar.

Listen, there's an elephant chased by a band of men. Over there, a nymph is becoming a tree. Her sighs turn into sap.

Someone is scrambling up a scree slope. His boots loosen the ground under him. His nails are torn. He falls exhausted on some goat-grass. He breathes heavily and goes to sleep.

I can hear the world beginning. Time plays itself back for me. I can hear the ferns uncurling from their tight rest. I can hear pools bubbling with life. I realise I am carrying not only this world, but all possible worlds. I am carrying the world in time as well as in space. I am carrying the world's mistakes and its glories. I am carrying its potential as well as what has so far been realised.

As the dinosaurs crawl through my hair and volcanic eruptions pock my face, I find I am become a part of what I must bear. There is no longer Atlas and the world, there is only the World Atlas. Travel me, and I am continents. I am the journey you must make.

Listen, there's a man telling a story about the man who holds the world on his shoulders. Everybody laughs. Only drunks and children will believe that.

The Books: "The PowerBook' (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The PowerBook, by Jeanette Winterson.

Ali is the narrator of The PowerBook. She is a storyteller. She sells her services online to tell stories for others. Any story you want. It can star you ... or you can inhabit another story (the story of Lancelot, the story of Mallory on Everest, whatever you like) - you give Ali your qualifications, your desires, and she tells the story. She does warn you that you may come out the other end of the story - altered, changed. Stories are not benign or harmless - they have the power to change you. You may not be the same person. People are willing to pay, however. Fantasy is a powerful thing. And it takes someone who is a WRITER who can make a story come alive. There's a bit of ego in this book (obviously) - and it is not clear at all that "Ali" is separate in any way from Jeanette Winterson, the writer. The voice is, as always Winterson's voice. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there is much that is lovely and fanciful in this book.

From what I remember, there is one particular woman, out there in cyberspace, who keeps coming back for Ali's stories. She re-invents herself time and time again. It is a shape-shifting universe, the universe of online romance and sex, you can be whoever you want to be. That is Ali's job; to make it become real and alive.

My favorite parts of this book are the stories. You, as the reader, enter the different stories, and there are times when it seems they will go on forever. There is no way out. That is part of Ali's warning to her customers. A story is a story. You can't ask what you will "get" out of a story because the story has its own rules and has to go where it has to go. Ali makes no promises of a specific result.

Here is an excerpt. You can certainly see Winterson's gift for romantic narrative here. She just goes for it. She is not cynical. She is not afraid of being hokey or overblown - because that is, indeed, how love feels like. At least in the beginning. I really admire that about her.

EXCERPT FROM The PowerBook, by Jeanette Winterson.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness but happiness in what is past.

This is the story of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo. You can find it in Boccaccio. You can find it in Dante. You can find it here.

My father's castle is built of stone. The stone is thick as darkness. Darkness is to the inside what stone is to the outside of this castle; impenetrable, unscalable, a stone-dark, heavy as thought.

The dark stone weighs on us. Our thoughts bear us down. We roll the dark in front of us down the icy corridors, and in the rooms the darkness accumulates, sits in our chairs, waits. We wait.

The castle is a pause between dark and dark. It fills the space between a man's thoughts and his deeds. My father made the design for the castle himself. It is as though we are living inside him.

Inside the castle, the furniture is black oak from Spain. In the one room where we keep a fire there is a long black table with candlesticks. At this table, for the first time, I saw Paolo.

Paolo il bello ...

***

My father Guido had long been at war with Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. A marriage was planned as a condition of peace, and Paolo rode in retinue to wild Ravenna to fetch me.

We lit the dark hall with candles, which forced the darkness off a little, made it crouch in strange shapes, like a thing whipped.

We dressed ourselves in black, my mother and I, for my father told us that every day is a day of mourning. I wore no adornment, but my hair is as loose and flowing as the cataract that roars under my window, and just as the cataract is tamed to the waterwheel, my hair is tamed to the braid, but both escape.

I bound myself as tightly as I could and went downstairs.

There was a curious light in the room. It was not the fire nor the candles nor the effect of the storm outside. I did not dare raise my eyes to discover the source, but walked mute and downcast towards the table, where my father presented me to Paolo.

I did not look up. I offered him my hand and he kissed it and placed a ring on my finger.

Through our meal my father talked only to the envoys and said nothing to Paolo or myself. I heard Paolo's voice talking to my mother, and the music of it was like a flute or a pipe. I wanted to see him, but I had not the power.

At the end of our meal my mother and father and all the envoys and servants left the room abruptly. None of the dishes had been cleared and the wine was left spilt on the table. I could sense Paolo looking at me.

There was a low rumbling noise, like a scaffold being wheeled out, and from the shadow on the floor, I understood that a great canopied bed had been pushed into the room.

I did not raise my eyes, but my skin was as cold as wax.

I heard Paolo get up and, coming round to my side of the table, he took my hand and bade me stand up.

'Francesca,' he said, 'let me see your breasts.'

I could not move, but his hands were sure as falcons and he soon had me pinned under him.

We lay on the bed and he kissed me - nothing more - one hand on my breast, the other gently stroking himself, until he felt my kisses meet his, and then he took my hand to where his own was active, and now freed, began to open my legs.

The pleasure was as shocking as the thought of pleasure.

The next morning, both dressed in white, we passed through the walls of my father's castle as easily as ghosts. In my whole life I had never been beyond the shadow of the castle. The shadow-tip of the flag marked the limit of my walks and my own shadow followed me wherever I went.

Today was not like that.

Today was sun and sky and birdsong and open faces, and I blessed my father's war, which had made this love.

As we rode, the light went with us. He was the light.

Paolo il bello.

My lover, my loved one, my love.

***

I need not tell how we passed our days as we rode in splendour along the coast. There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle to keep myself from bird height. I was bold as a starling. You fed me from your own plate. My eyes were always watching you. I thought you were one of the angels from the church window. We flew together, your wings in gold leaf from the sun. Time flew with us, and very soon we were in sight of your father's lands.

I noticed a change in you - a dampening and a quiet that I did not understand. I thought you were ashamed of me, but you shook your head, your beautiful head like an angel, and asked me to wait.

I did wait. I had waited before now. Waited all my life, it seemed. 'What is life,' my father had said, 'but a waiting for death?'

Then there were trumpets and running feet and crowds gathering and pennants and a team of white horses in silver harnesses and the white horses drew a carriage and in the carriage was a strange swarthy misshapen man, dressed all in leather, his fingers full of rings.

You turned to me and your voice was breaking as water breaks against a rock it cannot wear away.

'That man is to be your husband,' you said. 'That man, my brother.'

Oh, Paolo, il bello, why did you lie to me?

Say you are lying to me now.

The wedding took place that afternoon.

My husband was scarcely four feet tall and as twisted in body as Paolo was straight. These things need not have been laid to his fault, but his heart was his own making and his heart was as unformed by kindness as his body had been neglected by beauty. He cared for nothing but hunting and women, and he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap.

The horrors of my nights with him might have been bearable if I had not been taught a different way. The grave of my childhood life and the grave of my married life might have crumbled into one another without distinction, if Paolo had not kissed me and raised me from the dead for those few wide-open days.

Then, months later, when my husband was away, Paolo came into my room. He suggested we might read together to while away the time, and this was approved with a short nod from my waiting woman who was paid to be my gaoler.

Every morning Paolo came to me, and we read together the story of Lancelot du Lac, and his love for Queen Guinevere.

We read out loud, and there were many pauses, many broken sighs and swift glances, and as we bent our heads lower and lower over the page, to scribe a perfect world, our cheeks met, and then our lips, and he was honey in my mouth as I kissed him.

There was no more time for reading that day.

You contrived it - oh, I don't know how - to be together, along with our book, though we never turned another page.

Paolo, your love for me was a clear single happiness, and I would not give it up to save my soul.

He caught us. You know he did. Perhaps he trapped us. He might have done.

We were in bed together, naked, hot, Paolo inside me, when Gianciotto burst through the door with his men. I saw his face, triumphant, malign, and I saw him raise his terrible hand. He had a hand made of iron that he had fashioned into a spike. It was his hand that he ran through Paolo's smooth back, and through into my belly and my spine, and into the flock of the mattress. The force was so great that it lifted him up and pinned him above us like a weathercock.

I put my hands to Paolo's bleeding body, and he said to me, so that only I could hear -

'There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.'

He was dead then, and I dead under him, and hand in hand our souls flew down the corridors and out of his brother's palace as easily as our bodies had done when we left my father's house.

I have never let go of his hand.

We are as light now as our happiness was, lighter than birds. The wind carries us where it will, but our love is secure.

No one can separate us now. Not even God.

The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'Turn of the World' (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson - a short story collection. Excerpt from the story 'Turn of the World'.

The kind of writing and imagination on display in this story is my main attraction to Jeanette Winterson. It's the kind of bravery that allowed her to tell the story of a woman whose heart was actually taken (in The Passion - excerpt here), and the story of princesses who flew out of their window at night (in Sexing the Cherry - excerpt here). It's not that she's re-inventing the wheel. It's that she allows magic to be a part of her books in a way that is not hokey, or strictly sci-fi. She's more into myth. The element of myth playing a part in our lives. And fairy tales: the eternal truth of them. What can Hansel and Gretl or Rapunzel tell us about how we live? Winterson is truly inventive in this regard. She's not like anybody else.

"Turn of the World" describes four islands that lie "at the turn of the world". The names of the islands are Fyr, Hydor, Aeros and Erde. She describes each island - how they work, what their defining characteristics are. The story reminds me very much of Gulliver's Travels (excerpt here). Each island obviously represents one of our four elements. The worlds she creates you will not forget (the drowned island, the volcanic fiery island, etc.)

My favorite is the island of Erde. Obviously "earth" - because the entire island is based on mines, and jewels. But on this particular island the values are opposite from our own.

I don't know what it all means - that is sometimes the case with Winterson. She states her case, describes the world, and you are left with: So ... what does it all mean? What should I think about this? Sometimes that means that Winterson's writing is purposefully opaque, which can get boring - but in this case, it just means she's writing on a mythical magical level ... where meaning is never certain. It's just something to think about. You can charge in and say, "Oh - this is what this MEANS ..." but you may be missing the point. Winterson wants engagement. She wants us to meet her halfway. Otherwise, she is not interested.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson - a short story collection. Excerpt from the story 'Turn of the World'.

The island of Erde.

Here are mines and jewels. The climate of Erde is blustery and damp with frequent snow fall in the long winter. To keep warm, the inhabitants have perfected a cast-iron stove that burns diamonds. Diamonds are the cheapest fuel source on Erde. The coal seams are so ancient and undug that their carbon is no longer carbonaceous rock but crystallised carbon. Anyone who foots a spade into the earth will find a shovelful of uncut diamonds, which will burn unattended for two weeks.

It is true that certain mines on the island are still young, and these are highly prized. The richest women wear coal earrings and coal necklaces and the coal merchants of Erde are the wealthiest men in the world. Tourists are taken round the filthy, black coal-cutting studios near the mines, and marvel at the treasures on display. The King of Erde has a crown made entirely of coal, including the largest lump of coal ever brought up from the coveted mine. The cut lump is two feet by three feet and weighs as much as a Tamworth Sow. On state occasions, when the precious crown is carefully blacked and sooted, four men must walk beside the king to support thie fabulous glory. To be covered in coal-dust is thought a great honour.

For the most part though, the people are modst and content, sitting quietly by their winter fires, poking the diamonds.

Visitors to the island come for the caving and the hunting. The underground passages of Erde are hung with stalactites and furnished with stalagmites. Carving is a national hobby, and the growths of minerals, deep in the caves, have been fashioned into beds and chairs, elephants and whales, making a world within a world. Cavers drink their coffee out of fossil cups.

Beasts of every kind still roam Erde and hunting parties are organised throughout the season. The guides and beaters are strict; no one must stray from the route. If the prey reaches the interior, it is given up for lost.

There have been stories of foolhardy hunters who have rushed ahead into unmarked places of Erde, and they have never returned. The guides are silent. No search party is sent out. The guides themselves would not return.

What is the mystery of Erde? It is said that when a man or a woman of that place has done all they wish to do in the world, they set off, without warning, drawn as if by a magnet, towards the interior.

If the people of Hydor are known for clairvoyance, the people of Erde are known for prophesy. It is said that the Norns live in the interior, weaving their fateful rope.

Perhaps they do. The traveller has seen three sisters beckoning to him, as he nears the magnetic pole of the island. There is a tree there, whose top stretches up to heaven and whose roots push down to hell. The tree is eloquent. In its branches seem to be the tracings of the whole world. The traveller rubs his hands against the thick bark and his hands are sapped with time. He puts his head against the tree, glad to rest, and hears the rumble of history coursing through the trunk.

Perhaps it is the World Ash Tree. Perhaps it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps it is the alchemists' tree, under whose shade the self will grow again. The traveller does not know but he starts to climb.

The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'Orion' (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson - a short story collection.

Excerpt from the story 'Orion'.

Judging from this story and her book about Atlas, I think Jeanette Winterson should publish a whole book of Greek myths. She could be the next Edith Hamilton! She imagines herself into those old myths, puts her own spin on things, teases out metaphors and thoughts ... and it's all very Winterson-esque. What are the themes of the story of Orion? What is the theme of someone like Artemis? What can we learn from her? Depending who you are, the answers will probably be different. Winterson comes at it from her perspective, her interest in time and how it moves and curves (something that comes up in many of her books), her interest in sex and love, and also a sort of fanciful imagination that helps her flesh things out. Winterson, I think, is a very positive writer, despite some of the dark elements in her work. I don't get a misanthropic feeling from her at all. She's also not a humanist - she's far too self-centered ... she doesn't write books with a million different characters in them ... Only one or two or three show up. The same ones every time, only with different names. But there's something about writing the myth stories out that sets her free. It's like it's a starting point, something to riff off of - and she is free to go ... Perhaps because the narrative is already written and well-known, it's a myth after all ... so she can improvise. Winterson is great at improvising (when there's a POINT to her improvisation, I mean).

Here's an excerpt from her story about Orion (and, later, Artemis):

EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson - excerpt from the story 'Orion'.

Every 200,000 years or so, the individual stars within each constellation shift position. That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow. One day, if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us. It will still be home but not a place to take for granted. I wouldn't be able to tell you the story of Orion and say, 'Look, there he is, and there's his dog Sirius whose loyalty has left him bright.'

The dot-to-dot log book of who we were is not a fixed text.

For Orion, who was the result of three of the gods in a good mood pissing on an ox-hide, the only tense he recognised was the future continuous. He was a mighty hunter. His arrow was always in flight, his prey, endlessly just ahead of him. The carcasses he left behind became part of his past faster than they could decay. When he went to Crete he did no sunbathing. He rid the island of all its wild beasts. He could really swing a cudgel.

Stories abound: Orion was so tall he could walk along the sea bed without wetting his hair. So strong he could part a mountain. He wasn't the kind of man who settles down. And then he met Artemis, who wasn't the kind of woman who settles down either. They were both hunters and both gods. Their meeting is recorded in the heavens, but you can't see it every night, only on certain nights of the year. The rest of the time Orion does his best to dominate the skyline as he always did.

Our story is the old clash between history and home. Or to put it another way, the immeasurable impossible space that seems to divide the hearth from the quest.

Listen to this.

***

On a wild night, driven more by weariness than good sense, King Zeus agreed to let his daughter do it differently. She didn't want to get married and sit out some war, while her man, god or not, underwent the ritual metamorphosis from palace prince to craggy hero. She didn't want children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good.

By morning she had packed and set off for her new life in the woods. Soon her fame spread and other women joined her but Artemis didn't care for company. She wanted to be alone. In her solitude she discovered something very odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about history-makers and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms that belonged to the other side. What if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?

She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.

The alchemists have a saying: 'Tertium non datur'. The third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a mystery, not a formula. No one can predict what will form out of the tensions of opposites and effect a healing change between them. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a free and vast plain without any movement at all. Something new has entered the process. We can only guess.

The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'The 24-Hour Dog' (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson

A collection of short (sometimes very short) stories by Jeanette Winterson. I loved seeing her in the shorter form, because much of the boring-ness of her last couple of books was not there (for the most part) - and she seemed to have taken the reins off. These stories are not just about infidelity, and love triangles involving redheaded women. There are fairy tales here, fantastical worlds ... and it's not JUST about love. It's about all kinds of things. Come to think of it - the title of the collection (which is the title of one of the stories) is perfect. It is about the world and other places. Some of the stories don't work for me ... some of the writing has a blunt showoff-ish tone that makes me roll my eyes ... but other times, Winterson dives right in to her made-up worlds, and transports me. She really can be dazzling. I love her imagination. These aren't typical short stories. The narratives often are not recognizable, in terms of that particular form. There is no kitchen-sink reality here. Most of her characters do not have names. Most of the stories are first-person narration - and the "voice" is not distinct. It's Jeanette Winterson's voice. Every voice she writes in is her own (which, I think, is why some of her lesser stuff can be so boring.) BUT: her own voice is exciting enough, and interesting enough ... When she puts it in service of a story that works, it's perfect.

I won't excerpt from all of the stories ... just a sampling.

The first story in the collection is called 'The 24-Hour Dog'. The plotline is simple (almost too simple - there's not much to it. It's really about the THOUGHTS she has ... not the events that take place): a woman who lives on a farm decides to get a dog. She goes and picks him up. He is a puppy. The puppy fills her with a joy - she loves him - But there is something else going on. His love for her, unconditional, unnerves her. She feels "found out". She cannot hide from this dog. It is almost too confronting to have him around. What does it mean to be loved unconditionally? How on earth can she bear it?

I am particularly moved by this story right now ... because of my new furry companion who stares up at me, trying to figure me out, loving me even though she doesn't know me yet.

Here's an excerpt. I love how she guesses at the dog's perspective.

EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories - 'The 24-Hour Dog', by Jeanette Winterson

I had collected him that morning from his brothers and sisters, his mother, his friends on the farm. He was to be my dog, shot out of a spring litter, a coil of happiness. Bit by bit he would unfold.

He liked my sports car until it moved. Movement to him was four legs or maybe two. He had not yet invented the wheel. He lay behind my neck in stone-age despair, not rigid, but heavy, as his bladder emptied his enterprise, and the blue leather seats were puddled under puppy rain.

We were home in less than five minutes and he staggered from the car as though it were the hold of a slave ship and him left aboard for six months or more. His oversize paws were hesitant on the gravel because he half believed the ground would drive off with him.

I motioned him to the threshold; a little door in a pair of great gates. He looked at me: What should he do? I had to show him that two paws first, two paws after, would jump him across the wooden sill. He fell over but wagged his tail.

I had spent the early morning pretending to be a dog. I had crawled around my kitchen and scullery on all fours at dog height looking for toxic substances (bleach), noxious hazards (boot polish), forbidden delights (rubber boots), death traps (electric wires), swallowables, crunchables, munchables and saw-the-dog-in-half shears and tools.

I had spent the day before putting up new shelving and rearranging the cupboards. A friend from London asked me if I was doing Feng Shui. I had to explain that this was not about energy alignments but somewhere to put the dog biscuits.

I rerouted the washing machine hoses. I had read in my manual that Lurchers like to chew washing machine hoses but only when the machine is on; thus, if they fail to electrocute themselves, they at least succeed in flooding the kitchen.

The week before I had forced my partner to go into Mothercare to purchase a baby gate. The experience nearly killed her. It was not the pastel colours, piped music and cartoon screen, or the assistants, specially graded into mental ages two to four and four to six, or the special offer, one hundred bibs for the price of fifty, it was that she was run down by a fork lift truck moving a consignment of potties.

I fitted the gate. I tried to patch up my relationship. I spent a sleepless night on our new bean bag. I was pretending to be a dog.

The farmer telephoned me the following day.

'Will you come and get him now?'

Now. This now. Not later. Not sooner. Here now. Quick now.

Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.

He's only a dog. Yes but he will find me out.

Dog and I did the gardening that virgin morning of budding summer. That is, I trimmed the escallonia and he fetched the entire contents of the garage, apart from the car. It began with a pruning gauntlet which he could see I needed. There followed a hanging basket, a Diana Ross cassette, a small fire extinguisher, a hand brush that made him look like Hitler, and one by one a hoarded collection of Victorian tiles. Being a circular kind of dog he ran in one door to seek the booty and sped out of another to bring it to me. He had not learned the art of braking. When he wanted to stop he just fell over.

I looked at the hoard spread before me. Perhaps this was an exercise in Feng Shui after all. Why did I need a Diana Ross tape? Why was I storing six feet of carpet underlay? I don't have any carpets.

The questions we ask of the universe begin and end with questions like these. He was a cosmic dog.

The Books: "Gut Symmetries" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson

Yeah, so, right around here I stopped caring. It all started feeling the same. It's all about infidelity, love triangles, and bisexuality. Not that there's anything wrong with those topics - it's just that Winterson seemed to be treading water, going over the same territory. Perhaps there was crap in her personal life she needed to work out, I have no idea ... and again, that's fine - much great art comes from a writer wrestling with personal demons. But for whatever reason, Gut Symmetries feels strangely passionless, almost like an exercise. Which is so bizarre when you compare it to her vibrant pulsating earlier works like The Passion (excerpt here) or Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here). In those books, Winterson had larger contexts in which to place her stories: Bonaparte, the reign of Charles II, plague, war ... As she moved along in her writing career, larger contexts disappeared almost completely - and she went completely into the personal and subjective. Winterson sees herself as part of the Modernism tradition, as well she might - and Virginia Woolf is one of her inspirations (for this work in particular, with its Waves-esque ruminations). But I don't think it works as well. It's not that books NEED to have a larger context, or the outer world somehow captured in them. There are plenty of books that do not have that, and they are fine. The description of subjective experience is very very challenging - and only the great writers can manage it. Winterson had been brilliant in that regard early on, but with Gut Symmetries it feels re-hashed. At least with Art & Lies (excerpt here), unsuccessful though it was, she was trying something new. In Gut Symmetries - even with its newer elements of physics (Grand Unified Theory - ie: "Gut") and the Tarot cards ... feels like same ol' same ol'. Almost like Winterson is trying to imagine herself back into a narrative but can't quite get there.

Gut Symmetries tells the story of a love triangle. Alice is our narrator. She begins an affair with Jove - a man already married to a woman named Stella. When the affair with Jove goes south, Alice and Stella begin an affair.

All the voices sound the same in this book. It ends up feeling quite monotone. A voice droning on and on. Droning?? The sparkling brilliant Winterson? Well, yes! I was truly disappointed in Gut Symmetries and its lack of imagination ... I almost felt apprehensive, like: "Could it be that Winterson, despite the early promise, is really just a one-trick pony??" I was sad about that. I am invested in her, as is probably obvious. I know I was not alone in seeing the similarities in Gut Symmetries to her earlier books - yet without the passion and interest. In The Passion there is a love triangle - between Villanelle (obviously bisexual herself) and a married woman ... but there it feels treacherous, shattering, urgent. Here, in Gut Symmetries, I think: "Okay. This feels the same as The Passion, only now I don't care. What is missing??"

As I have mentioned before, Winterson recently came out with two books - one is a re-telling of the Atlas myth, and the other is about a keeper of a magical lighthouse - and I am so so happy to say she is back to form. And by "back to form" I mean: unpredictable, imaginative, unexpected, thrilling.

But for a good 10 years there, I struggled with my affection for her. I wondered if I would have to eventually let her go. How long can a fan hang on? (It is identical to my journey with Tori Amos ... and what a thrill, what a total thrill, to hear her latest album. Yay!!)

I can say, without a doubt, that I am, hands down, the best fan I know. Without tipping over into stalker behavior ... If I love you once? I love you always. I give you multiple chances. I am in it for the long haul. I can't say this about everybody. But with some people? It's a relationship. I will have a "relationship" with Jeanette Winterson forever. It will ebb and flow, and I've had to adjust ... I've had to let HER be in charge, because - after all - it is HER that is doing all the writing. And I will still count the days to her next book. I always will!

I chose an excerpt from Gut Symmetries that I actually like - not one of the long boring sections about love and regret and desire (which sound like all her other writings on the topics). I chose a story that gives a glimmer of who Winterson is as a writer, and why I love her so much.

EXCERPT FROM Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson

My mother, big with child, had strange longings; she wanted to eat diamonds. This gastronomic extravagance could hardly have been more than a fantasy for all but the very rich and Papa could not afford a Guggenheim bagel. We were not rich, nor were Papa's many friends but some of them were diamond dealers, trading silently, secretively in a huddle of patched-up buildings around Canal Street and the Bowery.

One evening, when I was six months old, pre-born, bouncing my hands and feet off Mama's womb wall, I heard the voices of Papa's business friends, talking quietly in our warm low kitchen. Mama shouldn't have been present at all, but she cared very little for the strict protocol of his Orthodox friends and banged about the kitchen, sometimes openly hostile, sometimes serving towers of blinis tall as the Empire State. She did as she pleased and no one dared to challenge her because she had saved Papa's life and risked her own. They called her Rahab.

Somewhere from deep inside their coats, their jackets, their shirts, their vests, their skin, their bones, the men unfolded felt pouches and spread the contents, glittering. It was not their value that they were discussing with Papa, it was their capacity to stimulate the soul's deeper life. To a Jew, stones have meaning beyond value. The twelve jewels of the High Priest's breastplate were energy not hoard. The stones live.

Mama turned round from her usual awning of aluminium saucepans and saw the diamonds. I saw their light and pressed myself as close as I could to the membrane of my genial prison. The light struck through Mamas belly and fed me.

She stepped forward, picked up a diamond between thumb and finger, and swallowed it.

Then she swallowed another, and another, a voluntary force-feeding into a priceless pate: Mama's oesophagus larded with light.

Papa's people are a patient people who have known adversity. They have wept by the waters of Babylon. They have crossed the Red Sea. They have sat in the desert with their camels and their concubines. They have wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They have bargained with their God. Yet not even Job in all his affliction had his inheritance eaten by a woman with child. There was some debate about what to do next.

Papa's people are a patient people. They agreed that Papa would lock the door to our only lavatory on the landing and persuade Mama to use a commode.

A twenty-four-hour watch was rota'd in the kitchen and one of the off-duty men went out to buy surgical gloves.

Mama had no objection. She wanted only to eat the diamonds not to digest them. No one thought about me.

And I did not think, turning in the weightless water, charmed by cut faces of light.

At last it was over, hats off, sleeves rolled up, sweat on their beards, and the much travelled diamonds shining again on their sterilised cloths.

'a'dank! mazel tov! bo'ruch ha'bo! Schnapps!'

'What? One missing? Oy oy oy oy oy! Oy va-avoy! Vai!'

Castor oil. Enema. Glycerine suppositories. Salt water colon irrigation. Cabbage soup. Schnell, kroit zup!

No use. No use at all. I had captured it or it had captured me. After a night of prayer this was revealed to the Elders in a dream. 'We will attend the birth,' they said, at belly level, directly to me, usurper of jewels, infant smuggler of precious stones.

At night, when Mama slept and the lights were out and the night was dark, Papa stood over her in his shawl and guiltily lifted her nightdress. He had never seen her naked, not seen the gentle demands of her, the map that she was where he might have travelled.

He put out his hand but he was afraid. Her belly shone.

The Books: "Art & Lies" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Art & Lies, by Jeanette Winterson

Okay, so this is where Winterson started losing me. It was only in the last couple of years that I felt her return to form. I do not mind experimentation but Art & Lies feels less like experimentation and more like masturbation, or some sort of overly long burlesque show featuring a not-very-good dancer. I am only guessing here but Winterson burst onto the literary world like a meteor - she was greeted with accolades the likes of which one can only dream of ... Her reviews, her press, for those first couple of books, were amazing - and well-deserved. She became a star. It feels to me, especially in Art & lies that Winterson lost her way a little bit with the whole fame thing. I think she felt she could do whatever she wanted - she could "riff" on something, and it would be applauded because isn't that what already happened? Art & Lies is an extended boring riff - and at some point, very early on, I lost interest completely and I only finished it because it was Winterson who wrote it, and I'm weird that way. If you hook me in once, I'm more likely to give you a couple of chances. If Art & Lies had been the first thing I'd read by Jeanette Winterson, I would never have gone on to read another one of her books. It's that tiresome. The thing is: there is some good writing in there; of course there is, it's by Winterson. It just becomes irrelevant in terms of the actual book. You don't know what the hell she is doing in Art & lies, but it felt like showing off, to me. It felt like a big blowhard taking up an entire conversation at a dinner party, dominating, and not letting anyone else speak. And it's just not good enough. I have no problem with sometimes baffling books written by egomaniacs. Obviously I don't. But you had better have a point - you better not JUST want to hear the sound of your own voice ... because otherwise it's just a bore. Art & Lies ends up feeling like a huge wash, a blurred-out painting, nothing distinct stands out. Perhaps Winterson felt that she was riffing - like a jazz musician - or like Jack Kerouac at a poetry reading ... sounds following sounds, meanings inverted, an extended riff ... But riffs must be somehow grounded in the original theme. You need something to riff off OF, in other words. There is the theme, the melody, whatever - and the musician veers off into a riff ... but that's my point. I felt that Winterson had nothing to veer off FROM here. It was just a riff, a writing exercise. It flat out doesn't work.

Not to mention the fact that it's confusing - and not in a good way. There are three main characters. Their names are Handel, Sappho and Picasso. Handel is a surgeon. Picasso is a painter - only it's a woman. And Sappho appears to be Sappho. There's a long train ride. They are three separate narrators - but to be honest, it's all the same voice. It ends up having a deadening effect on me, the reader. I don't know why Handel is named Handel, I don't know why Picasso is a woman, I don't know what the hell is going on!!

Art & Lies got terrible reviews. I think a lot of the anger I sense in the reviews had to do with feeling disappointment because her first books had been so promising. Now ... any writer who has had success will have to deal with that. You cannot please everybody. You need to write to please YOU and hope that it will find readers. However: Art & Lies didn't please ANYone. I know that Winterson stands by her book. Of course she does. She wrote it. But it was a huge bore to me, almost an affront to have to keep reading it ... I was mad. I got over it, of course. But I was like: where's the STORY. What are you DOING.

Oh, and here's another thing. Maybe she was going for something Joycean here - because he is KING of the "riff".

But Art & Lies is actually not hard enough to be considered Joycean. The things revealed, the thoughts, the ruminations - are all pretty run of the mill. It is nothing new. And they are expressed in a banal way. Winterson? Banal?? How on earth did that happen? If you want to write a big difficult book - in a Joycean manner - you had better have your shit together. And you had better be so OCD that you yourself can tolerate all the graphing and codes and stuff that you have to make sense of in order to write your own book. Ulysses is hard. That's as it should be. It is appropriate for what Joyce was going for. He didn't have to write things that were so hard - look at the stories in Dubliners which are all straight-forward narrative, impossible to misunderstand. So the content dictated the form. And Joyce's thoughts on language got more complex as he got older and that needed to be reflected in his writing. Winterson is riffing on NOTHING here ... and her "riffs" on language feel amateurish when compared to other "riffers". It is not successful. She really went off the rails here.

It would be years before she wrote another book that thrilled me the way her early books did. Years. Art & LIes was the start of something, a downturn - the reviews she got were so bad, that it is my sense that she did retreat a bit. To regroup, whatever. Her next couple of books were not the big mess that Art & Lies is - but they go over completely familiar territory: gender-bending narrator falls in love with married woman. It began to feel less like creation and more like biography - or, as I said earlier, masturbation. I think getting the kind of press she got for Oranges (excerpt here) and The Passion (excerpt here) can definitely turn your head. Many writers have fallen into that trap, and come out with some gasbag horror in the wake of their earlier successes. I am not interested in Winterson for her extended riffs (and I know I am in the minority on that) - I like Winterson for her Swiftian evocation of other weird worlds, worlds that work logically, and do not come across too much as metaphors. I like the fairy tales. I like her freedom with form. But in Art & Lies all of the things that are GOOD about her writing are taken to excess, expanded, stretched out - so that it loses all substance altogether.

Obviously Art & LIes was published because it was Winterson writing it. It would never have been published if she was untried or unknown. I would love to know the conversations at the publisher's house, as they tried to make sense of her manuscript. I wonder what fights went down. I'd be very curious to know.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Art & Lies, by Jeanette Winterson

This is the nature of our sex: She takes a word, straps it on, penetrates me hard. The word inside me, I become it. The word slots my belly, my belly swells the word. New meanings expand from my thighs. Together we have sacked the dictionary for a lexigraphic fuck. We prefer to ignore those smooth, romantic words, and dig instead for a roue's pleasure. The mature word, ripe, through centuries of change, the word deep-layered with associative delights. The more the word has been handled, the better we like it. For me, the perverted challenge of re-virgining the whore. Aren't we a couple? Two successive lines of verse that rhyme with each other? Press your eye to the keyhole and you can see us, one on one, swiving at the perfect match of dactyl and spondee. The coupling-box where we must make ends meet. My well-coupled filly, me, her rider in mid-air.

See me. See me now. I'm not a r(R)omantic, I'm a true C(c)lassical. I don't believe in love at first sight. I'm not falling for you, but one step forward, and you might fall for me.

What things fall?

Once, an angel, leaping out of heaven to find new worlds, his hands snagged on a zigzag of stars. Lucifer, whose cuts bled light ...

*

The thunderbolt, Zeus-hurled, through the timid clouds, the comet's head, nuclear discus gold-thrown.

The Dead, down to Tartarus, black poplars by a black stream. The black shaft smooth-sided and the jag-toothed dog.

Icarus, the flying boy, his body sun-glazed. His sun-glazed body that shattered the glassy sea.

Autumn. Long leaves of bright undress.

Hermes. Star-spurred.

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

She fell like a choirboy on a stave of lust. Head back, throat bare, breaking body, breaking voice in an ecstasy of praise. Praise out of the mouth and out of her thighs, aesthetic and ecstatic in a garment of flame.

Pull the shirt over your head, drop it, drop it into my arms, lovers have no need of time. Aphrodite murders Cronos. Drop through the long cylinder of our hours. Ours this time not Time's. Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red.

There was no colour in the sky when she walked along the beach.

The white shells sea-glazed shone. She put one to her ear and heard the strange moaning of the sea. She looked out to where the light skimmed the water. The light that balanced on the narrow crests of the waves. The light that tumbled in the water's concaves.

The light whipped up the dull foam and threw it in petals over her feet, her feet glassed in by the shallow water.

The water, dashing the past at her feet, the water dragging her future behind, the hiss and pull of the waves.

Driftwood on the sands. She picked up a wedge, too light for its size, its substance beaten away. It was only the past, a hollow thing in her hand, only the past, but a shape and a smell that she recognised. The comfortable old form its uses dead.

Clouds in the sky. She wanted a view but the clouds were pretty. Vague, pink, well known. Weren't driftwood and clouds enough? Memories, and what she still had, enough? Why risk what was certain for what was hid? The future could be just as yesterday, she could tame the future by ignoring it, by letting it become the past.

She began to run. She ran out of the day that coiled round her with temperate good sense. She ran to where the sun was just beginning the sky. A thin rung of sun within reach. She leapt and grabbed the ladder bar with both hands and swung herself up into the warm yellow light.

The train was crowded. Is that Sappho, both hands hanging off a neon bar?

The Books: "Written On the Body" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson

In Written On the Body (perhaps Winterson's one of best-loved books - it's not at all my favorite, as a matter of fact I started losing interest right around reading this one - but I know I am in the minority!) we have an unnamed narrator - and we do not know the gender. It could be a man, could be a woman. Can't tell. The narrator is a womanizer - a ladies' man/woman ... But, surprisingly, the narrator falls in love with a married woman named Louise (naturally a redhead - all of Winterson's objects of desire are redheads). Louise is married to a cancer researcher, but it is through the eyes of the narrator that we fall head over heels for her. The narrator ends up breaking off the affair with Louise when it is found out she has cancer. This becomes Winterson's extended metaphor: the body, and its systems ... and how each system/part reflects an aspect of love, or loss. Winterson, in this book, seems interested in excavating loss - and how the memories of a loved one remain, for better or for worse ... one of the recurring questions in the book is something along the lines of "Why is the measure of love loss?" I've got to say: Winterson, in this book, in her writing on love, and what it feels like to lose someone and be haunted by that person - puts other writesr to shame. She seems paramount to me. She is a grandiose and romantic writer - but never sappy. There are lines where you actually have to put down the book and take a moment. Or at least I did. And if I know anything I know that the measure of love is LOSS. She is able to write about that particular brand of sadness in a way I find captivating, and completely real. She speaks directly TO her audience ... and in breaking down the body (we get to know Louise's body intimately), and focusing on this or that ... she keeps the whole thing from being too literal. Anyone who's read her books will know what I mean. Nicholas Sparks, for example, may THINK he's writing about love - but he's only re-stirring some lukewarm pot of sappy sentimentality and rehashing "ideas" about soulmates for an adoring stupid public who wouldn't know real romantic writing if it knocked them on the ucipital mapilary. And yet his reputation is that of a guy who writes sweeping romances. Baffling. To me, Winterson - by avoiding telling a straight-out story - by holding back on certain expected things (even the name or gender of her narrator) - she puts us into the realm of poetry and experience, rather than "and then this happened, and this happened." She's a poet. The title of Written On the Body is perfect because that is exactly what Winterson does here. The body is a canvas. When you love someone you write yourself ON them. And love, at that intense level, is not separate from desire, or lust, or whatever. It's all the same. I've had that kind of love. You know. Where fucking is the same as a deep philosophical conversation or laughing hysterically about Young Frankenstein - there is no separation, it is not "here we are naked, and here we are clothed" - because you're that connected, it's all one. That is love.

Here, in Winterson's world, love is a visceral palpable thing. But it is only in the context of LOSS that we can even really perceive love - and that's something that sucks big-time.

Like I mentioned before - my favorites of Winterson's books are the fairy-tales ... This is more of a contemplation, and to me it takes on a same-ness, after a while - whereas something like Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here) never feels "the same". But again, that's just me. In the lexicon of Jeanette Winterson - Written On the Body is probably her most beloved book, and got her her most devoted audience. I may not be in that group, but that is neither here nor there. Based only on The Passion, I'll read whatever this woman writes. And there are sections of Written On the Body that rank with the best romantic writing of the last 20 years, certainly. No contest.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson

Into the heart of my childish vanities, Louise's face, Louise's words, 'I will never let you go.' This is what I have been afraid of, what I've avoided through so many shaky liaisons. I'm addicted to the first six months. It's the midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn't do any of it again. I did suspect that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra overcoat. Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her I forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it's no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked.

I never used to think about my previous girlfriends until I took up with Jacqueline. I never had the time. With Jacqueline I settled into a parody of the sporting colonel, the tweedy cove with a line-up of trophies and a dozen reminiscences about each. I have caught myself fancying a glass of sherry and a little mental dalliance with Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Judith, Estelle ... Estelle, I haven't thought about Estelle for years. She had a scrap metal business. No, no, no! I don't want to go backwards in time like a sci-fi thriller. What is it to me that Estelle had a clapped-out Rolls-Royce with a pneumatic back seat? I can still smell the leather.

Louise's face. Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid. Am I hoping for a saviour in Louise? An almighty scouring of deed and misdeed, leaving the slab clean and white. In Japan they do a nice virgin substitute with the white of an egg. For twenty-four hours at least, you can have a new hymen. In Europe we have always preferred a half lemon. Not only does it act as a crude pessary, it also makes it very difficult for the most persistent of men to drop anchor in what may seem the most pliant of women. Tightness passes for newness; the man believes his little bride has satisfyingly sealed depths. He can look forward to plunging her inch by inch.

Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look don't smell, don't dream. The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage. Swear you'll cleave only unto him or her and magically that's what will happen. Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex. The charm didn't work. You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn't work. It's not your fault is it?

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. A friend of mine, a banker and a very rich man who had travelled the world, told me he was getting married. I was surprised because I knew that for years he had been obsessed with a dancer who for wild and proper reasons of her own wouldn't commit. Finally he had lost patience and chosen a pleasant steady girl who ran a riding school. I saw him at his flat the weekend before his wedding. He told me how serious he was about marriage, how he had read the wedding service and found it beautiful. Within its confines he sensed happiness. Just then the doorbell rang and he took receipt of a van-load of white lilies. He was arranging them enthusiastically and telling me his theories on love, when the doorbell rang again and he took receipt of a crate of Veuve Clicquot and a huge tin of caviare. He had the table set and I noticed how often he looked at his watch.

'After we're married,' he said, 'I can't imagine wanting another woman.' The doorbell rang a third time. It was the dancer. She had come for the weekend. 'I'm not married yet,' he said.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else.

The Books: "The Passion" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

The Passion is one of my favorite books of all time. It's one of those books, too, that I can read, and read again, and again, and never get sick of. It always weaves its spell. Fantastic. To me, it is Winterson at the height of her powers. When she started getting introspective (in my opinion), when her imagination started turning inward - I lost interest a bit. Not forever, mind you - but I kept waiting for, you know, a story - in her next couple of books - something that was on the extraordinary level of Sexing the Cherry and The Passion ... and it wasn't there. Now, Winterson has no obligation to me, specifically. It is just my taste speaking. She obviously had other things to say, and wanted to try other things in her writing - and kudos to her for feeling free enough to do that. Winterson is nothing if not ambitious and fearless. I guess it's tough when you count a book as your all-time favorite, one of your beloved books. I don't THINK I sat around waiting for her to write another Passion - that's not really my thing either ... Oh well. Who knows. All I can say is: The Passion is a terrific novel and a book I hold very dear to my heart. There are characters in those pages - Villanelle, Domino, Napoleon - who will stay with me forever. Winterson creates scenes that will forever be emblazoned on my memory: the frigid Russian winter, the casino in Venice, the eerie prison/mental hospital on the island at the end ... These are WORLDS she creates. A writer really is like a god in that way - she creates worlds. Winterson's world has logic and magic, walking hand in hand ... and you may not believe something happens logically - but you believe in the magic. It's just great stuff - and I can't recommend The Passion highly enough. I love love love this book.

There are two narrators: Henri, a young kid who ends up being Napoleon's personal cook - and Villanelle - a cross-dressing web-footed red-headed woman from Venice. Napoleon Bonaparte has begun his World Takeover Campaign and Henri, a farm boy with no life experience, finds himself swept up in it. He believes in Napoleon. Napoleon is his hero (although you can kind of tell, from the prose of his narration, that his idol has fallen off the pedestal ... and he is writing about this in some kind of terrible retrospect). Henri believes in what Napoleon says. It is after the winter campaign - going in to Russia - when Henri realizes that Napoleon is mad, that any ends justify the means ... and that his idol is actually a maniac. You get the sense that Henri is actually quite fragile. He has not recovered, emotionally, from losing his idol. There is something terrible in a world that crashes your idols. But anyway, that's part of Henri's side of the story.

Villanelle is one of the great literary creations. I find her, frankly, impossible to resist. So I guess I'm like all the men (and women) who fall down like ninepins at her feet, dying for love of her. She lives in Venice with her mother and stepfather - who is a simple kindly baker. The sections on Venice - and what Venice is like, and what it means to Villanelle (whose family have been Venetians for centuries) - and how the city is a shape-shifter, the watery alleys and roads never in the same place, a city to get lost in ... anyway, the Venice sections are among the most spectacular in the book. Winterson (Villanelle) seems to be writing about a fantastical place where magical things can happen ... not an actual city on the globe ... but that is how Villanelle sees it. She was born under strange circumstances - and she knows that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio (etc.) ... She, too, is a shape-shifter. At night, she dresses up as a boy and goes and works in a huge casino. She puts a beauty mark on her face, to kind of mess with gender expectations ... and she pickpockets people to get extra cash. Men fall in love with her/him. Perhaps they look at the boy working the roulette wheel, or the blackjack table ... and find something appealingly feminine about him ... who knows what ... and they find themselves rubbing up against her. Women openly fall for this small red-headed boy ... and Villanelle enjoys a rich (if insane and complicated) sexual and romantic life. But it is not until she meets one particular elegant woman at the casino that all hell starts to break loose. Villanelle has never been in love. She has plenty of experience - but no experience of the heart. She meets a woman in the casino and is immediately smitten. This woman is married - to a distracted man, a shipbuilder (if I remember correctly) - and Villanelle and she begin a passionate affair.

Okay, so there's that.

Meanwhile. Napoleon is still on his rampage. He has taken over Venice. This, to Villanelle, is sacrilege. Disgusting to her. Things begin to break down with the woman of her heart - perhaps she is not willing to risk all, who knows ... but their liaison begins to end, and Villanelle realizes that her heart has been stolen. Literally. She puts her hand on her chest and feels no heart beat anymore. She becomes convinced that it is SOMEWHERE in her ex-lover's house, and she must get in there to get it back.

Villanelle never knew her father. Her father was one of the mysterious class of people known as the "Venetian boatmen" - those who propel the gondolas through the streets and alleys, and have been doing so for centuries. The boatmen have their own rites, as secret as the dead, and stories - terrible and beautiful - are passed down through generations. The legend is that all boatmen have webbed feet. But if anyone outside the charmed boatman circle ever SEES the webbed feet - they will go mad. There are stories of such encounters. Villanelle's mother found herself pregnant - and before the baby was born - the father disappeared. When the baby was born, alas - it was a girl (women are not allowed to carry on the boatman tradition) - with red hair ... and ohmygod - webbed feet. In the entire history of the Venetian boatmen, there has never been a woman with webbed feet. So it is apparent from Day One that things will be different and difficult with this small red-headed girl. Villanelle's mother marries again - this time a baker - and they seem to accept that every night their daughter puts on men's clothes and stays out all night in casinos.

Villanelle's love affair eventually crashes and burns, and she finds herself without a heart. Nothing matters anymore, so she joins up with Napoleon's army - or, should I say, becomes one of the throngs of prostitutes who follow the men around, from country to country. Love doesn't matter anymore. And her country has been taken over by an insane Frenchman. Nothing matters. Villanelle is a gambler at heart. Her whole thing is: "You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play." That's it. THAT is the game of life.

It is in her time as a prostitute that she meets Henri.

Henri, like many men before and probably after, falls head over heels in love with her - although his true love is, of course, Bonaparte.

You just get the sense that whoever ends up being with Villanelle will have to be worldly, in some way. Henri, with his sweet farmboy innocence, has no idea what he is getting himself into. But isn't that how "passion" often is? Passion is not safe. Passion does not hedge its bets. Passion doesn't look before it leaps.

I hesitate to say anymore about this book - the way it all unfolds has a terrible inevitability ... and Winterson really has things to say about love. Her voice (like I mentioned) is distinctive. No one can write about love and come up with anything new. Impossible. But to find a way to write about passion (sexual, romantic) that feels new - well, that is quite an accomplishment.

There are scenes of Villanelle - at midnight, 1, 2 a.m., in her gondola, parked outside of her ex-lover's house - where the ex-lover is ensconced with her husband - Villanelle knows that her heart is in there somewhere and life cannot continue for her until she gets it back ...

You know. That feels new. It is logical, too. Winterson writes the fantastical as though it is the most normal thing in the world.

It is my favorite of all of her books. I'll probably do one or two excerpts.

But here is the opening of the book. It is Henri's first section. I read this even now - even after reading the book multiple times - and I want to keep reading. It's hypnotic. What on EARTH is going to happen?

EXCERPT FROM The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.

Odd to be so governed by an appetite.

It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.

No one over five foot two ever waited on the Emperor. He kept small servants and large horses. The horse he loved was seventeen hands high with a tail that could wrap round a man three times and still make a wig for his mistress. That horse had the evil eye and there's been almost as many dead groom sin the stable as chickens on the table. The ones the beast didn't kill itself with an easy kick, its master had disposed of because its coat didn't shine or the bit was green.

'A new government must dazzle and amaze,' he said. Bread and circuses I think he said. Not surprising then that when we did find a groom, he came from a circus himself and stood as high as the horse's flank. When he brushed the beast he used a ladder with a stout bottom and a triangle top, but when he rode him for exercise he took a great leap and landed square on the glossy back while the horse reared and snorted and couldn't throw him, not even with its nose in the dirt and its back legs towards God. Then they'd vanish in a curtain of dust and travel for miles, the midget clinging to the mane and whooping in his funny language that none of us could understand.

But he understood everything.

He made the Emperor laugh and the horse couldn't better him, so he stayed. And I stayed. And we became friends.

We were in the kitchen tent one night when the bell starts ringing like the Devil himself is on the other end. We all jumped up and one rushed to the spit while another spat on the silver and I had to get my boots back on ready for that tramp across the frozen ruts. The midget laughed and said he'd rather take a chance with the horse than the master, but we don't laugh.

Here it comes surrounded by parsley the cook cherishes in a dead man's helmet. Outside the flakes are so dense that I feel like the little figure in a child's snowstorm. I have to screw up my eyes to follow the yellow stain that lights up Napoleon's tent. No one else can have a light at this time of night.

Fuel's scarce. Not all of this army have tents.

When I go in, he's sitting alone with a globe in front of him. He doesn't notice me, he goes on turning the globe round and round, holding it tenderly with both hands as if it were a breast. I give a short cough and he looks up suddenly with fear in his face.

'Put it here and go.'

'Don't you want me to carve it, Sir?'

'I can manage. Goodnight.'

I know what he means. He hardly ever asks me to carve now. As soon as I'm gone he'll lift the lid and pick it up and push it into his mouth. He wishes his whole face were mouth to cram a whole bird.

In the morning I'll be lucky to find the wishbone.

There is no heat, only degrees of cold. I don't remember the feeling of a fire against my knees. Even in the kitchen, the warmest place on any camp, the heat is too thin to spread and the copper pans cloud over. I take off my socks once a week to cut my toe-nails and the others call me a dandy. We're white with red noses and blue fingers.

The tricolour.

He does it to keep his chickens fresh.

He uses winter like a larder.

But that was a long time ago. In Russia.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

It was a mess.

Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

The Books: "Sexing the Cherry" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson

A strange and wonderful book. I haven't read it in years, and just flipping thru it this morning made me want to pick it up again. It's truly bizarre ... with elements of history (it's set during the reign of Charles II in a pestilential London) mixed with straight-up fairy tale (princesses flying out of their bedroom windows at night). There are dual narrators. One is a semi-horrible yet benign woman named The Dog-Woman - a fat filthy character who has a throng of dogs living with her ... and the other is her foundling son, Jordan. Jordan (if I am remembering correctly) has wanderlust - and has a small boat, he rides around on the Thames watching the sun rise. He befriends a man who is somehow in service to the King - and this man was responsible for bringing the first pineapple to England. This sort of thing makes Jordan dream of other places, other worlds. Could he get there without actually traveling? Much of his travels appear to take place in his own mind - but again, with Winterson, you can never be sure.

Jordan has fallen in love with someone from afar - a dancer - and he has set his heart on finding her again. His search takes him far and wide, and it seems that he must be just day-dreaming, he can't actually believe that princesses fly out of their windows at night, can he? But in this world of pestilence and fire, of brand new fruits like pineapples, of time seeming like something that is fluid as opposed to fixed - anything is possible.

Like I said, much of the detail is lost to me, although I remember the structure quite well. It was mesmerizing to me the first time I read it. I know just where I was. I bought it in a beautiful bookshop across the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco. We were in a cute little town and there was an outdoor cafe. I had been living in a van for 2 months. (No, I was not trying to be like "Ooh, I was homeless once" Jewel.) I was, myself, outside of time and space. At least it felt that way. For 2 months, I had no address but that Westfalia, all my stuff was in boxes in my parents attic - and it's quite an interesting (and at times disorienting) position to be in. You are unmoored. No way back because where would you go?? We were near the end of our unmoored journey and things had gotten very bad for me. I was reaching what I call the "wordless time" - when everything slowed to a standstill, and pretty much stopped - until the damn Westfalia broke and I found myself shouting at cops in Woodland Hills, California, and showing them my empty wallet and how I couldn't pay for the tow. And within a month, I had moved to Chicago. Sight unseen. Broken up with my boyfriend of 4 years, leaving him behind in San Francisco ... wondering what the hell had happened to his girlfriend. I'm not saying that Sexing the Cherry had anything to do with my descent into wordless paralysis. I just know that I read it right before I went under. It's a vivid memory. The book is a small book, not even 200 pages, but it sucked me in. I read it in a day, probably. There are no rules in the book. I found that refreshing. I was sick of rules. Rules were killing me, strangling me. I couldn't play by the world's rules. They didn't "fit" for me. I was losing it. Sexing the Cherry swoops into 17th century England - and there are times you feel you are reading historical fiction - with the civil wars and trials and all that ... and then there are times when reality unhinges itself, and anything at all can happen. You are in a Swiftian world, like Gulliver visiting the floating island in the sky land ... these alternate realities have their own rules they must obey. Things are logical - yet they are also fantastical.

I found that such a refreshing point of view, after being so trapped in logic nothing but logic. To me, ONLY logic makes no sense at all. I need the fantastical in order to breathe. Seems that Winterson understands that. I love her sensibility.

Here's an excerpt. You'll see what I mean about not being sure what is real and what is not. It is clear, from a couple of words, that Jordan is daydreaming about visiting this place - but the description of this town is so detailed, and goes on so long, that it takes on the trappings of something that is real, and actual. If there is anything I truly love about Winterson's writing - it is THAT ability of hers.

I know many people find her to be one of the best writers about love that is out there. That is true. But for me, that's not the hook (although I recognize her skill in that area). For me, the hook is the magical-reality thing that she does, weaving in illusion with down-and-dirty fact - seamlessly ... making you question things, and also making you succumb, like a good reader should, to the logic of the fairy tale. Because, in the end, there is NOTHING more logical than a good fairy tale. It's Winterson's fairy-tale esthetic that gets me every time. Love it.

EXCERPT FROM Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson

The shining water and the size of the world.

I have seen both again and again since I left my mother on the banks of the black Thames, but in my mind it is always the same place I return to, and that one place not the most beautiful nor the most surprising.

To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.

The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.

The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of shattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defence on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Years had passed. Was it their fault if the city had failed to deal with its overheads? The judge ruled against the plaintiff but ordered the city to buy her a new mop. She was not satisfied, and was later found lining the chimneys of her accused with vitriol.

I once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon and was amazed to hear, as the sights of the city dropped away, a faint murmuring like bees. The murmuring grew louder and louder till it sounded like the clamouring of birds, then like the deafening noise of schoolchildren let out for the holidays. She pointed with her mop and I saw a vibrating mass of many colours appear before us. We could no longer speak to each other and be heard.

She aimed her mop at a particularly noisy bright red band of words who, from what I could make out, had escaped from a group of young men on their way home from a brothel. I could see from the set of my companion's mouth that she found this particular job distasteful, but she persevered, and in a few moments all that remained was the fading pink of a few ghostly swear-words.

Next we were attacked by a black cloud of wrath spewed from a parson caught fornicating his mother. The cloud wrapped around the balloon and I feared for our lives. I could not see my guide but I could hear her coughing against the noxious smell. Suddenly I was drenched in a sweet fluid and all returned to lightness.

'I have conquered them with Holy Water,' she said, showing me a stone jar marked with the Bishop's seal.

After that our task was much easier. Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.

Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. The sky under the setting sun was the colour of veined marble, and a great peace surrounded us. As we descended through the clean air we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from the people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties.

We landed outside the , where the dons, whose arguments had so thickly populated the ether that they had seen neither sun nor rain for the past five years, welcomed us like heroes and took us in to feast.

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

The Books: "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" (Jeanette Winterson)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

Oh, Jeanette Winterson, you crazy egomaniacal sometimes-brilliant sometimes-infuriating lesbian ... how I love you and how you drive me crazy! My relationship with you is akin to my relationship to Tori Amos. I was so into Tori's early albums and then she went off the deep end for a good decade - and now - hoorah - she's back - I LOVE her latest album ... but I loved her earlier albums so much that I stuck with her, through her experimental years, as boring as I found all of that. There aren't too many artists I do that for. Margaret Atwood is another one. I'll read all your books, lady, even when you bore me to tears - just based on, oh, Bodily Harm alone (excerpt here)!!

Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene like a comet shooting towards earth from another galaxy. At least that's how I remember it. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her first book and it won the Whitbread prize for "first fiction" - and her novels that followed (which I'll get to when I get to) were mind-blowing. She became a star. A huge star. She writes with absolute certainty of her own gifts. She's a writer, sure, but more than that: she's a showman. She glories in her own powers of creation. She can be like Joyce in that way. She was asked once who her favorite writer was - and she said, "Jeanette Winterson." Reminiscent of Joyce's response to the question: "Who is your favorite writer in the English language?": "Well, aside from myself I don't know." It is not popular to be so openly arrogant. It rubs people the wrong way. But that's okay. It's not the artist's job to be a nice polite person who plays by society's rules. And so sometimes (in her later books) that showmanship turns into an obnoxious quality - especially when the book in question doesn't hold up ... but those first couple of books? Holy shit. You read them and just follow her on her magical path - you can't help it. Just surrender. You really have no choice. She'll strong-arm you into loving her, either way. The New York Review of Books said about Oranges:

The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk…. As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down.

It does have a very aggressive quality to it, her writing. Self-confidence as aggression. And yes, she seems to follow her own star - which involves risk. She doesn't care about how books are supposed to go ... she does her own thing. Oranges is, for all intents and purposes, a memoir - about her childhood growing up with evangelical missionaries - knowing that she was "called" to spread the word of God ... but then discovering that she liked girls, instead of boys. Perhaps that means that she is even more called to greatness, since it goes against the grain - but her fanatic parents do not see it that way, and her discovery of her sexuality and her preferences destroys the family. She ends up running away.

Now with Jeanette Winterson, you can never be sure what is true and what is not true. And it ends up not really mattering. (Perhaps because she's a way better writer than, oh, Mr. James Frey.) The narrator of Oranges is named Jeanette. And her early author biographies in her first books are very funny snarky paragraphs - like: "Jeanette Winterson thought she would be an evangelical Christian her whole life, but then ran away and joined the circus." I'm exaggerating - but not all that much. She seems to thrive on self-creation, meaning: her persona, as a writer, is bold, funny, irreverent - and untruthful. You cannot trust her. But you do not care. (This becomes a main theme of my favorite of her books: The Passion. In that, the web-footed cross-dressing redhead keeps assuring us, the reader, "I'm telling you the truth. Trust me.")

The press that she got in the beginning, the reviews, were the things authors dream of. She was compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The greats. She did not seem to limit herself. She was not bound by the so-called laws of fiction. She would intersperse her narratives with haunting fairy tales, quite terrifying, or stories that sound like Biblical parables. She had no fear.

I LOVE her early stuff. I have friends who really dig her "middle" stuff - which I find interminable and self-indulgent ... but that just goes to show you that it is very difficult to be neutral about Jeanette Winterson. She is polarizing. And judging from some of the stories about her real life, and her dramas (posing nude for one of her author photos) - she's a trip. The first book of hers that I read was The Passion and it remains, to this day, one of my favorite books of all time. It was enough to make me a Jeanette Winterson fan forever. Through thick and thin, girl. I'll read you.

I am so so glad to read her last two books - which seem to be a reversion to what she does best (in my opinion): create magical realities, mixing fairy tale and present-day settings ... but I'll get to those.

Jeanette Winterson weathered the storms of her bad reviews - which began with her book Art and Lies - it was like people were disappointed by her, and took her experimentations personally. I wasn't sure she would be forgiven. But she just kept writing what she wanted to write. On the strength of her earlier books, her reputation remained, despite the fact that she seemed to have gone a bit nuts (there was a huge Vanity Fair piece about her, I recall, which made her sound like a walking-talking psychodrama) - and, what can I say, I'll read whatever that lady writes. And sometimes I'm bored, sometimes I'm pissed ... but anyone who can write a book like The Passion will have my attention forever. Seriously.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-of-age story. Jeanette's mother is completely wacko. Jeanette grows up in a hothouse Jesus Camp atmosphere in the Midlands of England ... homeschooled, and sent out every weekend to stand on street corners passing out tracts. Eventually, she is forced to go to school ... and it is then that she begins to realize her attraction to her own sex. All hell begins to break loose. But it's not the story that is the stand-out here. It's the writing. It's not poetic writing, or flowery, or nostalgic ... it's not beautiful. It's one of those rare rare moments in life when you read a writer and you think: Wow. This is truly a distinctive voice.

Jeanette Winterson has her own voice, and I feel like I would recognize it anywhere. She lulls you into a sense of complacency, making you feel like, "Oh, okay, I know where I am, I know what kind of book this is ..." and then, with a quick jujitsu move, she rips out the carpet, and tells you a fairy tale. That ends horribly. Or she suddenly adds a magical element - and you are not sure what is real anymore.

I can't believe I haven't written more about Jeanette Winterson - and I'd be VERY interested to hear thoughts from other people like myself who have been reading her for years. She has PASSIONATE fans (of which I am one, despite my reservations about those damn middle books) ... and people really give a shit about her, and what she's working on. She's one of the few writers where I hear she has a new book coming out, and I pre-Order it, to make sure I get it on the damn day it comes out. There can be no waiting for Jeanette Winterson. I cannot WAIT around for the right time to buy her book. I must have it first. And I will drop everything else to read it.

She's not like anybody else.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

It was in this way that I began my education: she taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy, and she told me all about the lives of the saints, how they were really wicked, and given to nameless desires. Not fit for worship; this was yet another heresy of the Catholic Church and I was not to be misled by the smooth tongues of priests.

'But I never see any priests.'

'A girl's motto is BE PREPARED.'

I learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. The more godly your town, the more high buildings you'd have, and the more rain you'd get.

'That's why all these Heathen places are so dry,' explained my mother, then she looked into space, and her pencil quivered. 'Poor Pastor Spratt.'

I discovered that everything in the natural world was a symbol of the Great Struggle between good and evil. 'Consider the mamba,' said my mother. 'Over short distances the mamba can outrun a horse.' And she drew the race on a sheet of paper. She meant that in the short term, evil can triumph, but never for very long. We were very glad, and we sang our favourite hymn, Yield Not To Temptation.

I asked my mother to teach my French, but her face clouded over, and she said she couldn't.

'Why not?'

'It was nearly my downfall.'

'What do you mean?' I persisted, whenever I could. But she only shook her head and muttered something about me being too young, that I'd find out all too soon, that it was nasty.

'One day,' she said finally, 'I'll tell you about Pierre,' then she switched on the radio and ignored me for so long that I went back to bed.

Quite often, she'd start to tell me a story and then go on to something else in the middle, so I never found out what happened to the Earthly Paradise when it stopped being off the coast of India, and I was stuck at 'six sevens are forty-two' for almost a week.

'Why don't I go to school?' I asked her. I was curious about school because my mother always called it a Breeding Ground. I didn't know what she meant, but I knew it was a bad thing, like Unnatural Passions. 'They'll lead you astray,' was the only answer I got.

I thought about all this in the toilet. It was outside, and I hated having to go at night because of the spiders that came over from the coal-shed. My dad and me always seemed to be in the toilet, me sitting on my hands and humming, and him standing up, I supposed. My mother got very angry.

'You come on in, it doesn't take that long.'

But it was the only place to go. We all shared the same bedroom, because my mother was building us a bathroom in the back, and eventually, if she got the partition fitted, a little half-room for me. She worked very slowly though, because she said she had a lot on her mind. Sometimes Mrs White came round to help mix the grout, but then they'd both end up listening to Johnny Cash, or writing a new hand-out on Baptism by Total Immersion. She did finish eventually, but not for three years.

Meanwhile, my lessons continued. I learnt about Horticulture and Garden Pests via the slugs and my mother's seed catalogues, and I developed an understanding of Historical Process through the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, and a magazine called The Plain Truth, which my mother received each week.

'It's Elijah in our midst again,' she declared.

And so I learned to interpret the signs and wonders that the unbeliever might never understand.

'You'll need to when you're out there on the mission field,' she reminded me.

Then, one morning, when we had got up early to listen to Ivan Popov from behind the Iron Curtain, a fat brown envelope plopped through the letter box. My mother thought it was letters of thanks from those who had attended our Healing of the Sick crusade in the town hall. She ripped it open, then her face fell.

'What is it?' I asked her.

'It's about you.'

'What about me?'

'I have to send you to school.'

I whizzed into the toilet and sat on my hands; the Breeding Ground at last.

The Books: "Breaking and Entering" (Joy Williams)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams

Wonderful book! It's amazing to me how many voices Joy Williams can assume. In this book, people talk and talk and talk. It's a book about drifters, and the people they encounter along the way. These people have stories to tell, and sometimes they talk for 2 or 3 pages. The voices are all completely distinct - you would never mistake one for another. Joy Williams is channeling, basically. The chorus of different voices is one of the best things about this book.

Liberty and Willie are a couple. They have been together since high school, and they are now married. They live in the Florida Keys. For "fun" (although it doesn't seem really fun - it seems more like a compulsion), they break into people's houses when those people are assumed to be away (mail piled up, cars gone, etc.) - and live there for a week or so. They never stay in one house for long. Willie is in charge of the timing. He's the one who looks around and decides, time to be moving on now. Liberty seems rather passive. Somewhat sad. We don't know why yet. She is connected to Willie - not just because of a marriage license but because of their shared history - much of which is quite dark (it unfolds slowly throughout the book). At times, it is not clear why Liberty stays with Willie. But Willie is not a loser. He has a glitter about him. He's handsome. People are attracted to him. When they break into people's houses - he likes to take even more risks: living in a house that is not theirs, picking up an invite out of the piled-up mail to some dinner party - and he and Liberty will go, saying they know so-and-so, cousins from out of town, whatever ... They do not worry about covering their tracks. Willie wants the people to KNOW that "they" were there when they return. He makes sure to leave their head dents in the pillow. He takes photographs of Liberty with their camera, and leaves the film inside, undeveloped. It's a risk-filled life. It seems to fill some abyss of emptiness. Liberty is a follower. She doesn't try to put the brakes on Willie, because what would be the point of that. Liberty has a dog - a big huge white dog with creepy eyes the color of ice cubes. The dog's name is Clem. Clem is a conversation-starter. People see him and stop in their tracks. Nobody wants to pet him. People are almost afraid of him. What he represents is dependent upon the person looking at him. It's like he's a blank screen onto which people project their longings, fears.

Willie and Liberty do this breaking and entering thing almost as a vacation. It's not that they are homeless. They have a home. It's a small home, nothing fancy - but a home nonetheless. It's that there's something between them - an abyss - something - that makes it difficult to just sit on the couch at night and be together. There is no ease between them. Over the course of the book you realize what it is that has gone down ... Liberty is a depressive, that much is obvious ... and Willie appears to look upon his role as caretaker. He leads her around. Perhaps because he feels he owes her that much, who knows.

I love this book. I love every word. I love all the crazy people they meet - the nightguards, the neighbors ... I love the mystery in the prose, how it doesn't reveal all ... I love the deep sadness that is apparent in the book, only Williams never comes out and states it openly. It's just a mood. A sense. There's a lot of talk in the book - like I said, most of the book is long conversation ... There's something about Liberty and Willie that makes people open up, and want to divulge all. Especially Willie. People look at Willie and somehow feel that he might save them. But from what? Willie senses this trend as well and figures he should go with it, and inhabit whatever it is that people want to see ... If people look at him and see a savior (not in a religious sense - but a moral sense, perhaps even a physical sense) ... then who is he to deny them that? Liberty stands back, watching how people are drawn to Willie, and she loves him, too ... but from her perspective, perhaps she sees more of a con artist at work. Who knows. The irony is that Willie, even though he knows her best, cannot save her. He failed her. This is his greatest tragedy, and I'm not sure he can forgive himself.

This is a wonderful book - hauntingly written, at times quite funny - and also nervewracking. They hang out in these houses, taking baths, having sex, walking around, trying on the people's clothes ... and you want to tell them to knock this shit OFF - you could get caught!!

I suppose that is the point, for them.

Highly recommended book, my favorite (so far) of all of Williams' stuff.

EXCERPT FROM Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams

The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torcheres, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.

On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.

"This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack," Willie said, staring in at the treasure of white two-ply.

The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.

The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the roofs was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons' life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.

The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.

"How about cutting my hair?" Willie asked Liberty. "Just a trim."

She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.

"You can't read my mind," Willie said. "I just wanted my hair cut."

"It doesn't need it," Liberty said. "It's fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it."

"I could write your diary," Willie said.

"That's a terrible thing to say," Liberty said. Then she said, "That's not true." Finally she said, "I wouldn't keep a diary."

Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.

Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker's dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peace. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton's tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover. He plunged his head between her spread thighs, Liberty read. Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft ...

Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.

"What are we looking for here," Liberty asked, "just in general?"

"You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn't want to use it," Willie said. "They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble."

"Anesthesia," Liberty said. "You can't rob God."

"I keep having this dream," Willie said. "It's a typical prison dream. I'm wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I'm locked up."

Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road's shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty's mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.

***

During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons' screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.

The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Trust was not a guarantee made to the paper's readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror - the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.

A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn't want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.

Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children's voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.

Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way - West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing - time for the thing, they'd say, let's do the thing - became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.

The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children's voices.

The Books: "State of Grace" (Joy Williams)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

State of Grace, by Joy Williams

A fantastic writer - very hard to pin down (especially when you look at the style and content of Breaking and Entering - my favorite of her books). Williams seems (to me) to channel completely different energies and voices, depending on the structure of what she is writing, and I'm mesmerized by it. She hasn't written all that much, and there were YEARS in between books. She just came out with another book - maybe 2 or 3 years ago, but for many years I only had State of Grace and Breaking and Entering on my shelves. State of Grace was published in 1973, but when the whole Vintage Contemporary "movement" started happening in the late 80s, early 90s, it was re-released in a snappy new paperback, and that's how I came across it. I'm not sure why it appealed to me. I write the date of purchase on the title page of every book I buy and State of Grace was bought in January of 91. That tells me quite a bit. A bleak time for me. Awful. Living in Philadelphia, feeling completely lost - and worse than that: voiceless. I had lost my power of self-expression. I was frozen. There are no journals for about a year of that time in my life, I had nothing to say - even to myself. Something in State of Grace - with its poetic description of a paralyzed (emotionally) young woman, on the run from her past, trying to re-invent herself desperately: sorority girl, wife ... but the past is stronger than any present-day affiliations and it comes to claim her. She has not the stamina to resist.

Kate grew up in a rigid Bible-thumping family - whose mother hated her and her father ... I can't remember if her father is a preacher, or just a fanatic - but he has a hold on his daughter's mind, his standards for her behavior are impossible ... and there's something too-much about the whole relationship. It is like Kate is expected to be her father's sweetheart. They are connected. Two peas in a pod. Kate goes off to the South, to Florida - for college ... and it's unclear (you'll see what I mean in the excerpt below - Williams doesn't give anything away too literally, it's a true "mood" book) whether or not her father is aware of where she is. What is she running from? Kate tries to slip into the hot Southern world of college and sororities - she has sex (as Kate writes about her sorority: "all the sisters fuck like bunnies") - she doesn't follow the teachings of her childhood, but goes off the deep end. None of this is spelled out in a chronological way in the book - we start smack-dab in the middle - with Kate pregnant, sitting in a trailer with her husband Grady - and we have to back-track to figure out how she got there.

State of Grace is almost like a stream - or a river - with many different estuaries - branching off, coming back, surging together, branching off again. Kate, our narrator, is NOT a reliable narrator. She sits in the trailer, she wonders where she is, she is haunted by her father, she loves her husband, but she seems to have no center. Nothing grounds her. And her writing reflects that. Eventually, Kate - the first-person narrator of the first half of the book - goes away - and we get a cold quiet third-person narrator later on in the book, who looks down on Kate, and her father, and their meanderings. It is as though whatever Kate is wanting to describe, whatever Kate is really thinking and feeling - is too awful and too intense for her to even attempt to tell it herself. She needs an omniscent narrator.

It's been years since I've read this haunting book - but the poetry and dreamlike quality of Williams' prose here has stayed with me. I remember some of the lines by heart; they have become quite important to me. ("Don't become impatient. Here is the time.") Kate looks around at the landscape and sees that it is alive. She speaks to us, in a voice which is at times strangely disconnected, hallucinatory - but then she'll switch, with no warning, and take on an almost commanding voice - telling us what to do, what to think, what to look at. It's like a montage, the first half of the book. We don't know where Kate wants us to go, we have to piece together her story ... and somehow Williams manages to suggest that Kate is aware of her father, at all times - whatever she does, is somehow in reaction to her father. And so even her marriage to sweet Southern boy Grady lacks substance, lacks reality ... because all along it is her FATHER who will win the battle. She will never be able to escape him.

I need to read this book again. Breaking and Entering, her next book, is a book I love - and have read a couple of times - but there's something so raw about State of Grace, and it reminds me of that raw wordless time in my life ... I have stayed away from re-reading the book again. Ghosts, you know?

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter.

Williams is something else.

EXCERPT FROM State of Grace, by Joy Williams

I wake early, as a rule. I try to remember what I've told him. There's no way of being sure how much he knows. Sometimes, when we are walking through the woods together, I am quite at peace and even believe that any terror I previously felt is merely an aspect of my parturient condition. I know that he is thinking. I know that he is trying to decide what to do. I wait for his decision as nothing can proceed without it. It is the choice between life or death, between renewal or resumption. I have no fear of him. We are in love. Of course I could only hope that he would kill us, that is, Daddy and me, because I have a feeling, though I know it's mad, that we are going to go on forever. But it's too late for that now. I must be realistic. Even if he traveled there, he would not find Daddy. Even if he did, even if Daddy made himself available, he would not be able to deal with him. God and the Devil are the whole religion and Daddy has both on his side.

I have not offered to leave but he does not think of this. Several times he has suggested traveling together far away. I would agree to anything but he dismisses his suggestions instantly, almost before they are uttered, as though he was not the one who made them. No possibilities are open to me. As I say, I wait. What is going to happen waits with me. We have always been reluctant companions.

And in the meanwhile, time, as always, passes or fails to. To the eye, we have proceeded with it. We have our little willfulnesses and quirks. For example, I have terrible eating habits. He eats almost nothing now. He used to saw away at a huge side of pork that he brought down himself and prepare that in a variety of ways. But the hog is gone now, as is the reason for his killing it. Or at least we have always liked to believe that the hog was the same that butchered our hound, though the woods are full of hogs, shaking the land with their mean rooting and rutting. But the hog is gone now and the dog and our hopes for living simply, on the land and on our love. Once he liked grits with syrup and pecans that we'd shake down from the trees but now he cannot even be comforted by memories. I, on the other hand, have a terrible hunger. I love awful foods. Children's cereals, cupcakes and store pies, that wonderful gluey bread Dixie Darling, yes, two long loaves for only 21 cents. Once, before I moved out here, I ate nothing for three weeks but Froot Loops. It became hallucinogenic after a few days. Anything will. If you breathe in too much basil, a scorpion will be born inside your head. If you eat too much roe, you'll probably die. Why not? I had to stop the Froot Loops. Everything was so enormous and I was becoming so small. My gums bled. The girls became lecherous and outraged even though I was curious about them as well. Everything smelled rancid in that big house even though the girls washed themselves constantly and all the food was kept in jars. They were so boring about their hygiene, their hair and fingernails. They were healthy enough I suppose. The lint-free pussy plombs employed! The cases of disposable M'Lady Tru-Touch HandSavers ...

Once, for an infraction of the rules, I was forced to clean the shower drains. I also had to change all the beds ...

I do little here in the woods. I assimilate the soundlessness. We pursue the meager life with a few garish exceptions. I have my Dixie Darling products, which, I might add, have never disappointed me, and he has his Jaguar. An old faithless and irrational roadster, black, and in perfect running condition. It is so fast and inside it is a warm cave and smells delicious. It is parked beside the trailer and often, in the afternoon, I go out and sit in it and have a drink there. It calms me. The leather is a soft dusky yellow from all the saddle soap he works into it. It smells like lemons and good tack.

After that singular Fourth of July, Daddy never had a car, although there once were two. Daddy and I walked everywhere. On Sundays, we would skate across the pond to church - two sweethearts, my hand in his, in the other glove, ten pennies for the offering plate. Slivers of ice flew up beneath my skirt, my eyes wept. We skated quickly, seriously, lightly on Sunday mornings, barely leaving a mark behind us ...

He loves the Jaguar - the skill and appreciation it takes to enjoy it. He is Grady. I shall make myself clear. Grady, my husband, a country boy with brown face and hands and blond matted hair low on his brow. The rest of him is long, white and skinny. He knows a great deal about hunting, fishing and engines. He loves the Jaguar and he also takes an abashed pleasure in this dank trailer which is his. It cost $10. He bought it from Sweet Tit Sue who now lives farther upriver. She wrote out a bill of sale which we keep in Rimbaud's Illuminations. At the moment, it happens to mark the spot you know, Andthenwhenyouarehungryandthirstythereissomeonewhodrivesyouaway. It is not always there. We move it about for amusement, to tell our fortune. He used to enjoy that. All those words with their imminence and no significance. He always saw luck in these woods.

He gets angry at me often now. I'm afraid it's the way I keep house. I don't keep house. His face becomes rigid and he speaks so softly I can barely hear him. The place is so soiled that nothing can be found. It smells. It doesn't bother me. What is the purpose of order?

Each morning I am ravenous. I eat with a lamp on and my feet in a pair of his socks. The mice have left their turds all over everything, in the sink and in our shoes and in the dog's dish. It doesn't bother me.

I am chewing on this bread ... I must admit I eat this garbage because I want to insult myself. We think as we eat. Our brains take on flavor and scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.

The Books: "The Writing Class" (Jincy Willett)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett

Second novel by the absolutely delicious Jincy Willett (she has a collection of short stories out too) ... I can't get enough of this writer!! I love her sense of humor, her intelligence, and the sense that she really is writing exactly the way she wants to write. It's a voice. There's a confidence there, a surety - an unselfconsciousness ... I don't get the sense that any of it is a "put on", or an act. I sensed it in Winner of the National Book Award (excerpt here) - and it's in full form here. Her prose is an absolute joy to read. Laugh out loud funny at times, but then with lines of piercing insight and pain and recognition where you (or, I should say, I) feel recognized and named. She's an intense writer. All heart. In all its mess and humor and pain. I'm with Carrie - who wrote in June - that Writing Class "finally, finally out and available". It's that repetition of "finally" that really captures my own excitement about Jincy Willett - that her new book is "finally, finally out". Yes!!

The Writing Class tells the story of Amy, a one-time author - now a teacher of writing classes in extension courses at a college. Many of her students are serious writers - others not so much ... The book gets into each of her students, their writing styles (Jincy Willett's evocation of all of their different styles is nothing short of brilliant!) - their insecurities (one of her students continuously complains about the portrayal of women in whatever story they read each week), their pomposity, and their humanness. Amy is a sad loner, but she has come to terms with her sad loner status. She's prickly and anti-social, but she's also obviously a wonderful teacher. It is through that engagement with her students that she stays connected - to creativity, to herself. She was married twice - once to her gay best friend, who died of AIDS, and then to another guy, who was basically a rebound from her friend/husband dying - and she can't really remember anything about her second husband, except that it was because of him that she moved from Maine to San Diego. She thought a change of scenery would be good for her. Now, though, she is fat, lives alone with her dog, drinks by herself - and yet she's not a bleak character, somehow. Willett manages to suggest a truly eccentric character in Amy ... that her life, in a weird way, suits her - as long as nobody gives her a hard time about it. She has trouble sleeping. She is very lonely, but she is more comfortable being lonely than being artificially attached to another person. Hmmm. Guess I relate to her. I love how Willett portrays Amy. You love her. You love her in the role of teacher - and you love her as the loner woman, haunted by her past. She had a novel published when she was 23 and it hit huge - she had a couple of follow-up books ... but then everything slid to a standstill. All of her books are out of print now. So here she is, teaching adult students what she knows about writing ... trying to run away from her own potential. Oh! And, at the suggestion of a friend, Amy sets up a blog. To at least get out some of her ideas. The description of blogging is so spot ON - the random douchebags who show up to critique you, out of nowhere ... the random folks who fall in love with you without knowing you ... the weirdos, the awesome people, the Google searches .... it's all a new world to Amy, and it baffles her ... she tries not to take it seriously, after all it's not REAL writing ... but it does somehow fascinate her. Who ARE these people?? She loves it.

The book is structured around the classes themselves - First Class, Second Class - and what Amy focuses on in each class. And very quickly, by the Third Class, Amy realizes that there is a malevolent force in her class, someone who is trying to sabotage the rest of the group. Evil-sounding parodies of people's pieces are sent to them (really mean stuff) - and Amy begins to feel she is losing control of her class. Someone is wreaking havoc. The book becomes a sort of murder mystery as Amy (and a sympathetic - or so we hope - regular student) try to figure out which one of the students is pulling these pranks (which get more and more dangerous). Eventually, the class is canceled - due to the shenanigans of the prankster - and the students decided - Screw THIS, we want to continue - so they convince Amy to continue holding classes, this time rotating locations. Things get distinctly bizarre. Amy tries to rein in the class - one of whom is STILL being a douchebag - only we don't know who!! Amy tries to keep the class focused on the WRITING ... Meanwhile, she goes home at night and obsesses on who would do such a thing ... She tries to piece together the identity of the "prankster" from the person's writing style ... she comes up with some conclusions, all of which end up being false.

People end up getting killed. What the hell is going on?? Which would-be writer wants the others dead? What issues of envy and rage are at work here? Will Amy ever discover the identity of the malevolent student? Or will she be caught in a trap of her own making??

A wonderful book about creativity, loneliness, and the writing impulse. Great stuff. I loved every word.

All of the "types" in the writing class are just awesome: the overly sensitive obese woman who only writes when taking a class, the guy taking the class to pick up women, the feminist, the really talented no-nonsense older woman who really understands literature, the sci-fi fan (who can't write a word worth reading if he tried), the mysterious macho guy whose name is actually Charlton Heston (ha!!) - who is kind of a wild card and who ends up being tremendously good at writing - without any fanfare or pretentiousness - there's the Book Club afficianado who ONLY has good things to say about EVERYTHING - she balks at criticism of any kind, and seems to look at every moment in life as a potential Oprah moment ... makes it difficult to have a class discussion of what DOESN'T work ... all of these people just come to life. I love it. Also, Amy - despite the fact that she is a "failure" as a writer - does not come off as bitter towards other writers. You really get that. She ends up LOVING this class - they're a "good group", she keeps saying - because they really want to dig in and critique and get to the bottom of things. This is not the story of a bitter has-been who has lost the joy of her craft. No. That's one of the reasons I was so moved by The Writing Class: the flame of love can be kept alive, even without any validation from the outer world. It really can.

Oh - and another great thing about the book: You think you have some of these people pegged. The annoying PC-obsessed reader, the pompous doctor, whatever ... but by the end, you realize that you have been wrong wrong wrong. It's the best kind of character development and makes me realize how much we judge others - and "pigeonhole" someone as "that type" - when there is no such thing, not really. That's part of Willett's point - in this book of writing about writing. Be very very careful when you judge. First of all, you cut yourself off from being surprised - either pleasantly or unpleasantly - and when you are incapable of surprise you truly embody the term "Douchebag". And second of all, you really may just be coming from your OWN bias and be totally misreading something because you are predisposed to see it a certain way ... That happens in the book as well. It's all great fun!

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett

Dot Hieronymus led off discussion of Code Black with breathless compliments. Spurred by the doctor's muscular prose ("Black struggled to maintain an impassive countenance, but not even he could quieten the vein that throbbed visibly in his left temple."), she had already torn through half the novel and couldn't wait for the rest of class to catch up. Dot belonged to three book clubs and had read "every medical thriller that ever came down the pike," and Code Black ranked with the best of them. For all Amy knew this was true.

"Before we begin," Amy said, "I want us to notice that this piece of fiction, as opposed to Marvy's, is part of a larger whole. So it's a fragment, and therefore more difficult to talk about than a short story. We can't complain about loose ends, for instance. We can't demand to understand everything that's going on. At this stage, it would be disastrous if we did get the whole picture, wouldn't it? It's the writer's job, in his opening chapters, to draw his readers in. If, by the end of an opening chapter or two, we don't understand why a character is behaving the way he is, or what somebody meant when he said what he did, that's probably good. We'll keep reading to find out."

"So what can we complain about?" asked Frank. His copy of Surtee's manuscript had taken a beating and was covered with pen scribbles. Frank looked eager to complain about lots of things.

"Oh," said Amy, "you can always complain about cliches. And not just language, either. A character can be trite, or a setting."

"Well, here's this black-belt babe-magnet neurosurgeon --"

"Hey," said Ricky Buzza, "that's not a cliche. I mean, I never read about a black-belt neurosurgeon --"

"Come on, he's a type, a superhero type, and you just know there's going to be a vast conspiracy --"

"Don't spoil it!" said Dot.

"And a big shoot-out, or lobotomy tournament --"

"Don't forget the Illuminati," added Chuck.

Edna Wentworth and Ginger Nicklow smiled and stayed out of it. Tiffany jumped in with Frank and Chuck. Harold Blasbalg, who Amy recalled was supposed to be working on a horror novel, weighed in on Dot's side, as did Syl Reyes, and the rest sat still and watched the show.

Because he was a big shot and because his storytelling, however absurd, was essentially competent and had a surface gloss, Amy had expected Surtees to get a free ride. So she was pleasantly surprised by the raucous upbraiding, but after fifteen minutes, during which the doctor took a real pummeling, she figured it was time to even the field. Extension instructors were paid, execrably, to avoid alienating their customers. "As I was saying," she said, "before I was so rudely interrupted --"

"It's not supposed to be Shakespeare," Dot said. Her color was high, and she had managed to smudge printer ink on her ivory jacket. Sometimes people couldn't take debate, rough-and-tumble or no; they either weren't used to being disagreed with or never stuck their necks out in the first place. But Dot seemed invested in Surtees himself. While she lauded and then hotly defended his silly book, she glanced reflexively at the back of his head (Surtees remained composed throughout) as though hoping for a glance back. Sometimes people, usually women, took extension courses to meet singles. "You're not being fair," she said.

"As I was saying," said Amy. The class reluctantly attended to her. "You can reasonably complain about cliche characters, settings, even cliche scenes. Tying somebody to the railroad tracks and all. But you can't fairly complain about cliche plots."

"Why not?" asked Ricky Buzza. Ricky was Amy's enabler this quarter.

"Because all plots are cliche. There are no new plots."

Ginger Nicklow spoke up. "I read somewhere, I'm sure it was in college, that there are two basic plots: Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk."

"Sex and death," said Chuck Heston.

Syl Reyes wondered what the heck that was supposed to mean.

"Search me," said Amy. "I've heard of this one myself, and I've always wondered. I guess it means you have the quest story and the erotic unveiling story. Most adventure stories, including this one, are quest stories. Although you could obviously have an interior quest, a search for spiritual enlightenment, or a search for the identity of your father's killer, or whatever."

"So Jaws is what?" asked Pete Purvis.

"An aquatic unveiling," said Frank, and even Tiffany P.C. Zuniga laughed.

"Getting back to my point," said Amy, "I love it that you guys have gotten so passionate about this piece, but I need to make it clear that it is, as Dot says, not fair to slam Code Black for having a trite plot. Whether or not it's unfair to compare it to Shakespeare I leave for another time."

"Okay," said Frank, "but can't we call Black Jack a cliche character?"

"Not yet," Amy said. "For all we know he may have quirks and depths we just haven't learned about in the first two chapters." Sure he does.

"What about an erotic quest?" asked Chuck.

"There you go," said Frank.

"For this reason," Amy continued, "critiques of fragments - novel chapters, unfinished stories - often center more on language than on structure. Language is the one thing we can safely criticize. A bad sentence can't be redeemed in the last chapter."

Amy led the class through Surtee's manuscript page by page. She landed pretty hard on the dialogue, though without calling it "wooden," and spent a great deal of time trying to convince them that fictional characters should almost always say or ask their lines, rather than hiss, shout, breathe, huff, or spit them. "There's way too much snarling going on here," she said, and when Pete and Dot defended the snarling as vivid she slapped them down smartly. "Even if you were right about this it wouldn't help you," she told them. "The dogs at the gates of publishing houses, called 'readers', have all been trained to toss unsolicited manuscripts at the earliest opportunity, and they all use the same checklist, fair or not fair. One of the surest ways to turn them off is to have your character purr 'Good morning,' snarl 'Get lost', or opine anything whatsoever."

Surtees's cheerleaders reacted sullenly to this speech, but Surtees did not. He was taking notes.

Amy disliked being generous to students like Surtees, who had so little need of her generosity. She had hoped, even expected, that the class would go easy on him, so she could be the one to jump up and down on Code Black, but instead she was forced to be the good cop, and actually heard herself praising, however faintly, his attention to physical detail, and the way his characters traveled sure-footed through time and space, and the fact that every scene ended pretty much when it should, and was bound to the scenes before and after it by a neat causal chain. Code Black had what creative writing teachers called narrative pull. That the tale itself wasn't worth putting down on paper wasn't something Amy was allowed to mention.

In the end all she could do was allow Tiffany Zuniga five full minutes to excoriate the doctor's obligatory sex scene, in chapter two. Tiffany hated that the untamed woman had "voluptuous curves", yowled like a jaguar "at her moment of ultimate release", and "slipped smilingly out the door" when it was all over. "I mean," said Tiffany, "how convenient is that."

Dr. Surtees, seated in the front row directly ahead of Tiffany, actually smirked.

"Worst of all," said Tiffany, "he uses bed as a verb. I hate hate hate hate that."

"Good for you," said Amy, and meant it.

The Books: "Winner Of The National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather" (Jincy Willett)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather, by Jincy Willett

I am so glad I discovered this book. And Jincy Willett has just come out with another book - and I'm so excited to read it. I was hooked by her prose within page One of Winner of the National Book Award - it is distinctive, it really is: funny, assured, specific - kind of hilarious, there's a madcap feel to it ... but it's also rather dark. I love it. Winner of the National Book Award takes place mainly during a hurricane in Rhode Island - it's a big Rhode Island book - and I am not sure of Willett's assocations with Rhode Island or what her deal is, but she gets my home state so right. It's difficult to explain Rhode Island sometimes - AND much of what you say is a surprise to someone who doesn't know the state well ... so you're dealing with people's preconceived notions, rather than an open mind. If you're a Rhode Islander, you'll know what I mean. What IS Rhode Island? How can we be defined? I love my home state, I am really proud of it, and love coming from there.

Winne of the National Book Award tells the story of two sisters: a slut (Abigail) and a spinster (Dorcas). I mean, look at those names. They come from upstanding Yankee stock - and there is an absolutely hilarious anecdote about their troublemaking ancestor - the only person who came over on the Mayflower, took one look around, and said, "Take me back home!" One is a librarian (guess which one), and the other is a ravaging whore who ruins lives. She eventually is imprisoned for murder - and a feminist writer interviews her and turns her story into a book - some kind of feminist manifesto - which eventually wins the National Book Award. The librarian, who grew up with her sister, knew her amorality and selfishness, is highly skeptical of the book - Her sister? A feminist? Are you kidding me??

While Abigail is a total nightmare, she is also absolutely entertaining. The whole book is entertaining. I LOVE Willett's writing style.

There's a slight tang of bitterness to the book - after all, it is narrated byDorcas, the one who never ever could get any attention for herself as long as her sister was in a 3 mile radius ... but Dorcas also doesn't really WANT a relationship. She has seen what relationships can do - and what wreckers they can be - in the life of her awful sister, and she doesn't want any of THAT, thankyouverymuch.

Brilliant character descriptions. Conrad Lowe: one of Abigail's many lovers - a creepy psychopath of a man, outwardly charming, smiling, and many women find him disarming - but Dorcas sees right through him, and he can't stand that. He MUST conquer Dorcas. Willett's breakdown of his character traits is brilliant. I've known a couple smiling psychopaths like Conrad Lowe, and she gets it perfectly right.

Dorcas sits down one hurricane-y day, and breaks open the book about her sister - meaning to read it, finally. But she knows it's going to make her angry, since it will all be self-serving lies. She waits out the hurricane, drinking scotch, reading the book (we get to read some excerpts from it - and it's hilarious: florid obvious made-for-Oprah prose - spinning this horrible story of a woman with no conscience into some kind of uplifting morality tale) - and living out the memories of her life in the shadow of her sister.

This all may sound very prosaic - BUT: it's the WRITING that is the standout in this book. It's got a voice, a distinctive voice - and Willett is a joy to listen to. I love the voice of this book. Here's another book that made me laugh out loud. Kudos.

Not to mention the whole takes-place-in-Rhode-Island thing. She just gets it sooo right.

EXCERPT FROM Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather, by Jincy Willett

Mark Twain was right: New England weather is a literary specialty, not a science. He gave a more reliable forecast in 1876 than those boobs on channel ten.

Probable nor'-east to sou'-west winds, varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points betewen; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes and thunder and lightning.

I woke up this morning with a hurricane headache and turned on the stupid TV and there they were, one of each sex, babbling in front of a huge weather map. "We're going to get it," the man said, and the woman added that "the only question is how it's going to hit. Pandora is on the way." Last night these same people were promising she'd miss us by a hundred miles

A hurricane headache is no guarantee. The big one is out there somewhere, that's all, eyeing your neighborhood. You're on her list, and the atmospheric pressure plummets, skyrockets, some damn thing, and the air is humid, smelly, ominous, and your head feels caught in a padded vise. You want to crawl right out of your skin.

We had a bad one here, in Rhode Island, in 1938, the year of our birth, and another bad one in '54, which I remember, and that's it. Rhode Island is not Key West.

Many have noticed this.

Hurricane headaches make you feel antsy and doomed, but they can be gotten around, like the premenstrual whim-whams. You just remind yourself that your emotions are physical in origin, and ignore them. I'm good at that.

"How bad it's going to be is anybody's guess." The man in the red blazer, Ernie, was unable to act convincingly as though this were bad news. "We're going to get it for sure."

"The main thing right now," his partner added, "is not to panic."

"And remain calm. I repeat. Hurricane Pandora is on the way. I repeat. Pandora is coming."

"And not just her tail."

"Nope. Head to toe!"

"Full body slam!"

"She's got us in her sights!"

"We're staring right up her gun barrel!"

"She's made a shambles out of Cape Hatteras!"

"Heading straight for us at thirty-seven per!"

"But don't panic!"

From my bay window in the living room I could see at least two people dutifully panicking already. Old Mrs. McArch had just about covered all her windows with masking tape, and John and Marie Bucci were squeezing children and beagles into the station wagon.

The Buccis always headed out. They headed out in '68, when we were supposed to get the race riots. I asked John then where he was going, and John stopped and thought and said, "Burlington?" I pointed out (I was only thirty, I had more energy then) that (a) we weren't going to get any riots, and (b) if we did they'd be in Providence, where Negroes actually live, and not way out here in Frome. John shrugged. "Yeah, I know," he said, reddening, staring down at two bulging suitcases, "but hey." John's a nice guy. I always wish him luck. John is my bellwether, and John was heading out.

Today was supposed to be my day off. I had scheduled my Saturday crew, T.R. and Gloria, to man the library without me, and particularly to catalogue that three-foot pile of new books standing on the floor beside my desk. Usually I do these myself, the new books. Usually I want to. Of all my duties, opening brand-new books is the most pleasurable. When it comes to books, I am a sensuous woman. Usually. But not today, and so, naturally, today is Panic Day, and the Saturday people have flown away home, and I have had to come in myself and face it. The new book pile.

I knocked on Anna's door and told her about the forecast, and asked, did she want to come with me. She was already awake, listening to her clock radio, and said she'd stay here by herself. "I've always wanted," she said, "to batten down the hatches." How a twenty-year-old could have "always wanted" to do anything was a puzzler, but her decision was just as well. Today I didn't need the company. I poured some scotch in our father's old silver flask, put on jeans and a white shirt, filled three grocery bags with towels, and drove out to the Star for cold cuts and bread.

I'm not a drunk, by the way. It's going to be a long day, that's all.

I waved to John and Marie as I backed out the driveway. John shouted that they were heading up to Portland. "But the storm is moving north," I said. "I know," Marie said, and John said, "We know. But hey." We all had a nice laugh, and I wished them luck.

It was six thirty a.m. and twenty people stood outside the locked glass doors of the Star, watching the manager and a couple of checkers shuffle around inside. When I joined them they greeted me like a family member. I had forgotten about this. Rhode Island gets so few near misses, so little natural drama, that I forget from one time to the next about this phenomenon: what Conrad Lowe called "the disaster factor".

Rhode Island natives, including those born overseas, are under ordinary circumstances so shy and mistrustful around people they don't know as to seem almost deranged. They never look a stranger in the eye, or if they do, they unfocus their own eyes. I don't mean a stranger you pass in the street, I mean a stranger who's lived next door to you for twenty-five years, or a stranger you ask directions from or hand his dropped wallet to or knock down with your car.

This probably has something to do with the tradition of overcrowding, of living cheek by jowl for two hundred years. Whatever the cause, we have no stage presence at all, no Southern theatrics, Midwestern irony, Western hyperbole, New York cynicism. We don't even have the famous and overrated Maine understatement. We have instead an Unfortunate Manner.

We literally don't know how to act. We have no roles to play. We are the nakedest of Americans, and when native strangers, themselves naked and ashamed, make even innocuous demands of us - How much is this? Would you please get off my foot? - we panic and writhe, we shamble and fumble with our buttons, we mutter even as we back away. We make inappropriate noises. I've seen man-on-Weybosset-Street interviews on TV, and they're really too painful to watch. A stout woman with anxious haunted eyes, asked for her New Year's predictions, blurts, "I think we're going to have World War III!" and giggles like a toddler. She stands for all of us, an awkward cipher, silly or rude, or silly and rude, and inside, clearly glimpsed in the frightened eyes, some poor trapped soul screaming for help.

Our body language, of course, is wonderfully complex. We know a thousand different shrugs.

We are so lonely here, with only our loved ones for company. We kill, maim, insult our loved ones, or dream of doing so, to keep from going mad. And then disaster strikes. God, how we love disaster.

Let the storm come and flatten us, please, let the poor riot, let our houses burn (we have a terrific arson rate), let our president fall, our spaceships explode. What we wouldn't give for an LNG holocaust or a freeway sniper. Anything. I used to think we were just a big bunch of cowards, but that isn't it. We panic early, and we panic hard and long; but we love every minute of it. Rhode Island: The Panic State.

Panic frees us, to look around openly at one another. Disaster makes us friendly, in a demented opportunistic fashion all our own. We stumble toward one another, hilarious with terror, crazy with all the possibilities, like hibernating grizzlies injected with speed and shoved out into the light. We go berserk with candor. We lose it, big time, and oh, what a sweet relief that is.

***

Except for us Yankees, true and false (us Yankees do have stage presence), everybody waiting outside the Star was burdening the stranger on his right with the intimate details of his private life. The running theme of the conversation was "We're really going to get it now," and around us the wind picked up, and green maple leaves, plucked before their time, eddied in the parking lot, batted around in the smelly air as though by a bored child who, though already strong enough to rip down tree branches, had only leaves to play with for the moment.

The stranger to my right, a squat wide-rumped blonde in turquoise bermudas, asked me if I had filled my tub this morning, and I said yes, to take a bath. "You're not saving water?" I shook my head. "You tape your windows?" No. "You here for candles? Batteries?" "I'm here for my lunch."

Her face fell, and I felt bad about ruining her good time. She looked back up at me in a bold, speculative way. "I seen you someplace," she said. This is what passes for polite inquiry around here.

"I'm the head librarian at Squanto," I said.

"Nah," she said, shaking her head. "That's not it."

She was distracted then when the manager opened the glass doors. We wished each other luck, my new friend and I, and then we all squeezed through the single door in discrete lumps of ten. It took great effort not to panic along with everyone else. Men and women grabbed carts and began cruising down the aisles, like contestants on that old game show where you had five minutes to load up and the one with the biggest total won.

I concentrated so hard on strolling that I got to the deli counter second, behind a ruddy, big-chested yachting type, probably from Little Compton and somehow stuck inland, who had obviously decided that cold cuts were the way to go in the coming apocalypse. Soon there was a small crowd around him, and he gave them a big show, ordering corned beef, proscuittini, smoked turkey, even olive loaf, in thinly sliced two-pound units. No one but me resented the way he was hogging the counter and showing off his money. I ended up buying a jar each of dried beef and mayonnaise, a package of stale burger buns, and an old head of iceberg lettuce.

By the time I got to the checkout the two lines were twenty deep and festivity was at its height. Shoppers sighting bare acquaintances across the way abandoned their lines to embrace one another; and when they returned, their places remained open to receive them. Most people were giddy and riotous but here and there stood someone badly frightened by all the excitement. A tiny old woman cried and was comforted by a family of Portugese; a pregnant teenager with a Cro-Magnon forehead and hair bleached to the color of driftwood bellowed like a steer every time someone bumped into her cart, "Quit hittin' me, you retard!" Joe Hiltebrand, retired Frome Junior High School principal, turned around in line in front of me and addressed us. "This lady," he said, pointing to an old woman whose elbow he held, "just has two boxes of candles. Surely we can let her in ahead of us." We all nodded except for the cave-preggo, who said, "Fuck huh." The line turned toward her as one. "Fuck all a youse."

The woman in back of me, who had been talking in my ear, an academic type Not From Around Here, probably a Brown University wife, spoke soothingly to the girl, as though she were a zoo animal. "We're all scared, dear," she said, and so forth, carefully using monosyllables, but she didn't get far. "Fuck you," said the girl, and the woman Not From Around Here turned away without losing poise and whispered in my ear. "Two eloquent arguments for abortion rights, right there." Academics always spot me for an educated woman. What is it? How can I avoid it? "I'm a nun," I told her. She laughed unconvincingly, and turned to the woman in back of her. "Isn't it fascinating," she said, "to see what other peopel buy in times of crisis? I see you're loading up on packaged mixes. An interesting choice." "Yeah, I guess so," said the humiliated housewife From Around Here, who obviously wanted to shield the contents of her cart with her body. Even during Panic Time it is inexcusable to comment on someone's groceries. We all stared rudely into the academic woman's cart, which brimmed with wheels of cheese and bags of whole wheat flour. Miraculously, the woman sensed hostility. "Brie is the perfect hurricane food!" she said, in her too loud Midwestern voice. "It can't spoil! It can only get runny and smelly and yummy!" "Fuck huh," said the preggo. Indiania, Illinois, Ohio. Somewhere out there. Well, we all have to come from someplace.

I come from Rhode Island.

The Books: "Scoop" (Evelyn Waugh)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

I read this book because of Christopher Hitchens' review of it, I think in The Atlantic. Hitchens' review made me laugh out loud, so I immediately went out and bought a copy and read the book last year. To say this is a funny book is to completely under-state the situation. It is so funny that I found myself on the bus one night, reading it, and my face was literally frozen in a comedy mask of laughter for the entire ride, tears streaming down my face. It was unbearably funny. It's hard to describe why something is funny - and humor, of course, is a subjective thing. What's funny to me may be just "silly" to someone else. To me, Scoop is in the top 5 funniest books I have ever read in my life. Some books are amusing, they have a light and hilarious tone, that puts you into an easygoing comedic mood. But Scoop is beyond that. I GUFFAWED reading this book. I had to put it down occasionally, because I just needed a break from the laughter. I couldn't breathe. I probably scared my neighbors. "Why is she whooping and guffawing all by herself over there?" It's not always comfortable to have your face literally FROZEN into a Greek comedy mask!! It makes you look like a lunatic!

Scoop is the best lampoon of journalism (especially foreign correspondents) I have ever read. It is 100% absurd, from beginning to end, but at the same time (and this is Waugh's genius), all you can do is see how right ON his observations are ... how true the whole thing is, and that he seems to be only exaggerating a little bit. It is not a book for idealists. It is a book for those of us who look around, see craziness, and wonder if we are all alone. Does anyone else see how INSANE this all is?? There's a sort of Wag the Dog thing going on here - Scoop reminded me quite a bit of that film, only it took as its target journalism. But you get into the realm in Scoop where "truth" is the LAST thing anyone cares about. If it's in print, it's true. And so the foreign correspondents race around trying to beat each other to the punch - but it's all bogus anyway, and what on earth is the point?

The best part about this book is its protagonist. Scoop flat out would not work if the lead character was fully ensconced in that kind of journalism, and knew the rules, and accepted them. No. We need the outsider. We need the baffled "nature writer" who has never been outside of England to suddenly find himself in a foreign country in the middle of a civil war, surrounded by INSANE foreign correspondents ... in order for the book to work. He's sort of like Paul Pennyfeather, in Waugh's Decline and Fall, a guy who doesn't have a lot of ego, he's not running around trying to prove himself, or defend himself ... He just quietly negotiates the insane world he is in, and tries to behave like everyone else does. But because he doesn't understand the WHYS of all of the rules, he just mindlessly imitates what he sees ... and so the misunderstandings that come about because of that are hilarious.

William Boot lives with his family on a rambling old estate called Boot Magna. He rarely leaves. He is not married. He writes occasional pieces about otters and flowers and such for London papers. And through a grave misunderstanding - there's another Boot afoot in London journalism, a young glittering up-and-coming star ... William Boot is assigned to go cover the civil war in Ishmaelia, a fictional country in Africa. So just imagine the mix-up (which is never ever discovered): William Boot sits at his moldy desk in the country, painstakingly writing about how the flowers are coming out in the country, and how the birds are flying south. And suddenly, with no explanation, it is demanded of him by his newspaper that he drop everything and go to get the "scoop" on what is happening in Ishmaelia, a place he has never even heard of. It would be like someone who writes about fashion suddenly having to go to Chechnya and figure out what's happening. William Boot never questions the assignment. He doesn't say, 'Are you sure it's me you want? Could there be another Boot running around that you are thinking of??" He just starts to prepare for his trip.

Hijinx ensue at every stage of the way. He packs enough stuff that he needs to have servants trailing behind him. He doesn't know how to file a dispatch. You have to pay by the word - but he doesn't know that, and sends NOVELS of words back to the main office ... none of which have anythign to do with NEWS. Scoop is a deeply cynical book.

William Boot has NO IDEA what he is doing. He is tossed into the thick of the world of foreign journalists, hanging around aimlessly in this godforsaken African country, waiting for something to happen. Boot meets a couple of people who realize very quickly, wow, this guy has no idea what he is doing - and show him the ropes. But of course it's a very competitive atmosphere - everyone waiting for THE scoop that will put THEIR paper on top, make their paper be the first to report such and such. William Boot has no ambition. He doesn't care about any of that. He misses his home. He misses the creek in his yard and his flower garden. And yet, through various coincidences and misunderstandings, William Boot ends up getting the scoop to end all scoops. But he doesn't even realize it.

Scenes upon scenes of correspondents racing about Ishmaelia, in a long lunatic caravan, trying to beat each other to the story. But the best thing is: the entire thing, you can tell, is pretty much being invented by the journalists. It's wag the dog. What is really happening in Ishmaelia? Well, by the end of reading Scoop, you know that that is the most irrelevant question of all.

The characters are awesome. There's one renegade journalist, a star, who doesn't run with the pack. He gets amazing scoops and no one quite knows how he does it. William Boot does not understand the rules - and he NEVER understands the rules. He continues to send back novel-length dispatches - which all basically say, "Nothing happening here!" which, of course, is not what his paper wants to hear. If nothing is happening in Ishmaelia, then why are we paying for you to be there? Something BETTER happen in Ishmaelia. But William Boot is a true innocent. Full of guile. He has no scheming or wheeling or dealing in him. He just follows events. He reports on things he does not understand. He interviews people and writes what they say - but you can tell - by both his questions and the answers - that William Boot has no idea what is going on. He has ZERO context.

To imagine his hardened Fleet Street editors reading those ridiculous reports back in London ... to picture all of them looking at each other like, "Huh?" is one of the funniest images in the book. ESPECIALLY because they all still think that William Boot is the OTHER Boot, the genius journalist Boot - so they are predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to think to themselves, "Well, maybe this is just how he works ... maybe we need to just hang back and let him do his thing ... everyone says he is the best in the business ..." So everyone is basically in a torment of confusion and misunderstanding.

Even just writing about the book makes it sound less funny. All I can say is; for one of the most insightful cynical relevant angry hilarious books about journalism ever. I laughed from beginning to end.

There's one chapter which describes a Communist Revolution that occurs in Ishmaelia - but it only lasts for one night. That chapter was like a Benny Hill episode.

Here's an excerpt from the first part of the book - William Boot finds himself in a whirlwind. He is a simple country farmer, and suddenly he has to go report on a war. He has to go request Visas from two separate embassies (one of the recognized government of Ishmaelia, and one of the revolutionary government). William Boot has never even heard of Ishmaelia. He doesn't even care, frankly. He's not openly bitter or skeptical - but he honestly has no curiousity about African wars or any other wars. He doesnt' understand why he has been chosen, a man who writes about his own flower garden, to sail off to Africa and report on a war, but he moves ahead with the plans. This is smart smart humor. Waugh has a slam-dunk ending to each of these chapters. It's the "ba-dum-ching" of all great comedy. There is no escape from his absurdist worldview. So don't even try.

Please notice the blunt incomprehension of all of William Boot's replies.

EXCERPT FROM Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

2.

At the Passport Office next morning they told William that he would want a visa for Ishmaelia. "In fact you may want two. Someone's just opened a rival legation. We haven't recognized it officially of course but you may find it convenient to visit them. Which part are you going to?"

"The patriotic part."

"Ah, then you'd better get two visas," said the official.

William drove to the address they gave him. It was in Maida Vale. He rang the bell and presently a tousled woman opened the door.

"Is this the Ishmaelite Legation?" he said.

"No, it's Doctor Cohen's and he's out."

"Oh ... I wanted an Ishmaelite visa."

"Well, you'd better call again. I daresay Doctor Cohen will have one only he doesn't come here not often except sometimes to sleep."

The lower half of another woman appeared on the landing overhead. William could see her bedroom slippers and a length of flannel dressing-gown.

"What is it, Effie?"

"Man at the door."

"Tell him whatever it is we don't want it."

"He says will the Doctor give him something or other."

"Not without an appointment."

The legs disappeared and a door slammed.

"That's Mrs. Cohen," said Effie. "You see how it is. They're Yids."

"Oh dear," said William, "I was told to come here by the Passport Office."

"Sure it isn't the nigger downstairs you want?"

"Perhaps it is."

"Well, why didn't you say so? He's downstairs."

William then noticed, for the first time, that a little flag was flying from the area railings. It bore a red hammer and sickle on a black ground. He descended to the basement where, over a door between two dustbins, a notice proclaimed: --

William knocked and the door was opened by the Negro whom he had seen the evening before in Hyde Park. The features, to William's undiscriminating eye, were not much different from those of any other Negro, but the clothes were unfrogettable.

'Can I see the Ishmaelite Consul-General, please?"

"Are you from the Press?"

"Yes, I suppose in a way I am."

"Come in. I'm him. As you see, we are a little understaffed at the moment."

The Consul_general led him into what had once been the servants' hall. Photographs of Negroes in uniform and ceremonial European dress hung on the walls. Samples of tropical produce were disposed on the table and along the bookshelves. There was a map of Ishmaelia, an eight-piece office suite and a radio. William sat down. The Consul-General turned off the music and began to talk.

"The patriotic cause of Ishmaelia," he said, "is the cause of the coloured man and of the proletariat throughout the world. The Ishmaelite worker is threatened by corrupt and foreign coalition of capitalistic exploiters, priests and imperialists. As the great negro Karl Marx has so nobly written ..." He talked for about twenty minutes. The black-backed, pink-palmed, finlike hands beneath the violet cuffs flapped and slapped. "Who built the Pyramids?" he asked. "Who invented the circulation of the blood? ... Africa for the African worker, Europe for the African worker, Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic and Antarctic for the African worker."

At length he paused and wiped the line of froth from his lips.

"I came about a visa," said William diffidently.

"Oh," said the Consul-General, turning on the radio once more. "There's fifty pounds deposit and a form to fill in."

William declared that he had not been imprisoned, that he was not suffering from any contagious or outrageous disease, that he was not seeking employment in Ishmaelia or the overthrow of its political institutions, paid his deposit and was rewarded with a rubber stamp on the first page of his new passport.

"I hope you have a pleasant trip," said the Consul-General. "I'm told it's a very interesting country."

"But aren't you an Ishmaelite?"

"Me? Certainly not. I'm a graduate of the Baptist College of Antigua. But the cause of the Ishmaelite worker is the cause of the Negro worker of the world."

"Yes," said William. "Yes. I suppose it is. Thank you very much."

"Who discovered America?" demanded the Consul-General to his retreating back, in tones that rang high above the sound of the wireless concert. "Who won the Great War?"

3.

The rival legation had more spacious quarters, in a hotel in South Kensington. A gold swastika on a white ground hung proudly from the window. The door of the suite was opened by a Negro clad in a white silk shirt, buckskin breeches and hunting boots, who clicked his spurs and gave William a Roman salute.

"I've come for a visa."

The pseudo-consul led him to the office. "I shall have to delay you for a few minutes. You see the Legation is only just open and we have not yet got our full equipment. We are expecting the rubber stamp any minute now. In the meantime let me explain the Ishmaelite situation to you. There are many misconceptions. For instance, the Jews of Geneva, subsidized by Russian gold, have spread the story that we are a black race. Such is the ignorance, credulity and prejudice of the tainted European states that the absurd story has been repeated in the press. I must ask you to deny it. As you will see for yourself, we are pure Aryans. In fact we were the first white colonizers of Central Africa. What Stanley and Livingstone did in the last century, our Ishmaelite ancestors did in the stone age. In the course of the years the tropical sun has given to some of us a healthy, in some cases almost a swarthy, tan. But all responsible anthropologists ..."

William fingered his passport and became anxious about luncheon. It was already past one.

" ... The present so-called Government bent on the destruction of our great heritage ..." There was an interruption. The pseudo-consul went to the door. "From the stationer's," said a cockney voice. "Four and eight to pay."

"Thank you, that is all."

"Four and eight to pay or else I takes it away again."

There was a pause. The pseudo-consul returned.

"There is a fee of five shillings for the visa," he said.

William paid. The pseudo-consul returned with the rubber stamp, jingling four pennies in his breeches pocket.

"You will see the monuments of our glorious past in Ishmaelia," he said, taking the passport. "I envy you very much."

"But are you not an Ishmaelite?"

"Of course; by descent. My parents migrated some generations ago. I was brought up in Sierra Leone."

Then he opened the passport.

The Books: "Decline and Fall" (Evelyn Waugh)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh

I just read this book a month or so ago (thoughts about it here). It made me laugh out loud. From page one. It was Evelyn Waugh's first novel and it's unbelievable to think that - because it's so assured, so unbelievably ridiculous - openly absurd ... He has such confidence in his own tone. It just GOES. Everything in the book depends on a terrible misunderstanding that happens in the first chapter - and it is NEVER "righted". Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for running across the quad wearing no pants. The incident occurs during a notorious night where everyone plays pranks - but Waugh makes it clear that Paul Pennyfeather sits alone in his room, he's serious, he's studying to be a minister, and he's not one of the rampaging idiots wreaking havoc on the campus. But somehow, one of the pranksters steals Paul Pennyfeather's pants (from off his body) and, mortified, he runs across the quad, under the eyes of the Dons. So it seems as though HE is the instigator of the madness - and he is expelled. Paul Pennyfeather doesn't even explain himself or try to defend himself. He is quite passive. Perhaps he senses that the series of coincidences that led to him running pants-less in a public place would be too bizarre or difficult to explain, so all righty then, no hard feelings, I'll pack my bags and go!

The ministry is now out of the question for someone expelled for indecent exposure. So Paul Pennyfeather gets a job at a ridiculous boarding school for boys in the Welsh countryside. Every teacher who works there is legitimately insane. The headmaster is a lunatic. The boys are terrors. Paul Pennyfeather was hired to teach German and music - even though he doesn't speak German and he can't play an instrument. But the school assures him that that doesn't matter. And the amazing thing is: IT DOESN'T.

Waugh skewers education in this book. Academia is his target. Paul Pennyfeather is really the only sane one in the book - but nobody congratualtes him for it because, after all, if everyone is insane then the only sane one is going to seem the MOST insane.

Paul Pennyfeather ends up getting fired - due to another series of coincidences - and then he ends up having a romance with this woman who basically convinces him to become a slave trafficker - but he doesn't even know that that is what he is doing. She runs a theatre in Buenos Aires or something like that and all of her showgirls are stranded throughout Europe with Visa problems so she begs Paul to go get all the girls. Paul does. He flies through Europe, talking to embassies, getting girls out of hock, all the while having no idea that he is behaving like a criminal mastermind. He eventually is arrested for slave trafficking. How on earth do you traffic in slaves and not know it? Perhaps Paul understands that the world is a tremendously complex place and there is no way he could understand his part in it ... so he accepts all of these disasters with passive aplomb. He is thrown in jail, and he finds that he really enjoys jail. And what do you know ... many of his old teacher friends are also in jail by now, for this or that crime ... so he knows a lot of people. It's like he keeps running into the same band of lunatics.

The entire book is hilarious. It never stops. The comedy is relentless. But at the end, there's a monologue by one of the characters that cuts through the bullshit, the lunacy, and makes the points Evelyn Waugh has been making all along. Only now he goes from covert to overt. It's brilliant. Evelyn Waugh had SUCH a good eye for ridiculous-ness, pomposity, pretentiousness ... Paul Pennyfeather is not congratulated by the world for having integrity. He is the one who takes the fall. His entire life is ruined. Yet he seems to not mind all that much. Isn't that how life sometimes is? You start out wanting to be a minister and before you know it you are trafficking slaves across Europe, and you aren't sure how you got from A to B.

The excerpt below is during the games day at the boarding school. The parents of the boys (lunatics, all of them) show up to watch their kids run relay races, etc. But the whole thing is mayhem, because nobody really cares about sports - none of the teachers do - they don't even understand why anyone would WANT to leap over hurdles and run around a track ... Paul Pennyfeather is in charge of much of this, and again, he has no qualifications. But that doesn't seem to matter.

Very funny book. Amazing (again) that it's only a first novel.

EXCERPT FROM Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh

"So you're the Doctor's hired assassin, eh? Well, I hope you keep a firm hand on my toad of a son. How's he doin'?"

"Quite well," said Paul.

"Nonsense!" said Lady Circumference. "The boy's a dunderhead. If he wasn't he wouldnt' be here. He wants beatin' and hittin' and knockin' about generally, and then he'll be no good. That grass is shockin' bad on the terrace, Doctor; you ought to sand it down and resow it, but you'll have to take that cedar down if you ever want it to grow properly at the side. I hate cuttin' down a tree - like losin' a tooth - but you have to choose, tree or grass; you can't keep 'em both. What d'you pay your head man?"

As she was talking Lord Circumference emerged from the shadows and shook Paul's hand. He had a long fair moustache and large watery eyes which reminded Paul a little of Mr. Prendergast.

"How do you do?" he said.

"How do you do?" said Paul.

"Fond of sport, eh?" he said. "I mean these sort of sports?"

"Oh, yes," said Paul. "I think they're so good for the boys."

"Do you? Do you think that?" said Lord Circumference very earnestly; "do you think they're good for the boys?"

"Yes," said Paul; "don't you?"

"Me? Yes, oh, yes. I think so, too. Very good for the boys."

"So useful in case of a war or anything," said Paul.

"D'you think so? D'you really and truly think so? That there is going to be another war, I mean?"

"Yes, I'm sure of it; aren't you?"

"Yes, of course, I'm sure of it too. And that awful bread, and people coming on to one's own land and telling one what one's to do with one's own butter and milk, and commandeering one's horses! Oh, yes, all over again! My wife shot her hunters rather than let them go to the army. And girl's in breeches on all the farms! All over again! Who do you think it will be this time?"

"The Americans," said Paul stoutly.

"No, indeed, I hope not. We had German prisoners on two of the farms. That wasn't so bad, but if they start putting Americans on my land, I'll just refuse to stand it. My daughter brought an American down to luncheon the other day, and, do you know ...?"

"Dig it and dung it," said Lady Circumference. "Only it's got to be dug deep, mind. Now how did your calceolarias do last year?"

"I really have no idea," said the Doctor. "Flossie, how did our calceolarias do?"

"Lovely," said Flossie.

"I don't believe a word of it," said Lady Circumference. "Nobody's calceolarias did well last year."

"Shall we adjourn to the playing fields?" said the Doctor. "I expect they are all waiting for us."

Talking cheerfully, the party crossed the hall and went down the steps.

"Your drive's awful wet," said Lady Circumference. "I expect there's a blocked pipe somewhere. Sure it ain't sewage?"

"I was never any use at short distances," Lord Circumference was saying. "I was always a slow starter, but I was once eighteenth in the Crick at Rugby. We didn't take sports so seriously at the 'Varsity when I was up; everybody rode. What college were you at?"

"Scone."

"Scone, were you? Ever come across a young nephew of my wife's called Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington?"

"I just met him," said Paul.

"That's very interesting. Greta, Mr. Pennyfeather knows Alastair."

"Does he? Well, that boy's doing no good for himself. Got fined twenty pounds the other day, his mother told me. Seemed proud of it. If my brother had been alive he'd have licked all that out of the young cub. It takes a man to bring up a man."

"Yes," said Lord Circumference meekly.

"Who else do you know at Oxford? Do you know Freddy French-Wise?"

"No."

"Or Tom Obblethwaite or that youngest Castleton boy?"

"No, I'm afraid not. I had a great friend called Potts."

"Potts!" said Lady Circumference, and left it at that.

All the school and several local visitors were assembled in the field. Grimes stood by himself, looking depressed. Mr. Prendergast, flushed and unusually vivacious, was talking to the Vicar. As the headmaster's party came into sight the Llanabba Silver Band struck up Men of Harlech.

"Shockin' noise," commented Lady Circumference graciously.

The head prefect came forward and presented her with a programme, beribboned and embossed in gold. Another prefect set a chair for her. She sat down with the Doctor next to her and Lord Circumference on the other side of him.

"Pennyfeather," cried the Doctor above the band, "start them racing."

Philbrick gave Paul a megaphone. "I found this in the pavilion," he said. "I thought it might be useful."

"Who's that extraordinary man?" asked Lady Circumference.

"He is the boxing coach and swimming professional," said the Doctor. "A finely developed figure, don't you think?"

"First race," said Paul through the megaphone, "under sixteen. Quarter mile!" He read out Grimes's list of starters.

"What's Tangent doin' in this race?" said Lady Circumference. "The boy can't run an inch."

The silver band stopped playing.

"The course," said Paul, "starts from the pavilion, goes round that clump of elms ..."

"Beeches," corrected Lady Circumference loudly.

" ... and ends in front of the band stand. Starter, Mr. Prendergast; timekeeper, Captain Grimes."

"I shall say, 'Are you ready? one, two three!' and then fire," said Mr. Prendergast. "Are you ready? One" -- there was a terrific report. "Oh, dear! I'm sorry" -- but the race had begun. Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Prendergast's bullet. Philbrick carried him, wailing dismally, into the refreshment tent, where Dingy helped him off with his shoe. His heel was slightly grazed. Dingy gave him a large slice of cake, and he hobbled out surrounded by a sympathetic crowd.

"That won't hurt him," said Lady Circumference, "but I think some one ought to remove the pistol from that old man before he does anything serious."

"I knew that was going to happen," said Lord Circumference.

"A most unfortunate beginning," said the Doctor.

"Am I going to die?" said Tangent, his mouth full of cake.

"For God's sake, look after Prendy," said Grimes in Paul's ear. "The man's as tight as a lord, and one one whisky, too."

"First blood to me!" said Mr. Prendergast gleefully.

"The last race will be run again," said Paul down the megaphone. 'Starter, Mr. Philbrick; timekeeper, Mr. Prendergast."

"On your marks! Get set." Bang went the pistol, this time without disaster. The six little boys scampered off through the mud, disappeared behind the beeches and returned rather more slowly. Captain Grimes and Mr. Prendergast held up a piece of tape.

"Well, run, sir!" shouted Colonel Sidebotham. "Jolly good race."

"Capital," said Mr. Prendergast, and dropping his end of the tape, he sauntered over to the Colonel. "I can see you are a fine judge of a race, sir. So was I once. So's Grimes. A capital fellow, Grimes; a bounder, you know, but a capital fellow. Bounders can be capital fellows; don't you agree, Colonel Slidebottom? In fact, I'd go farther and say that capital fellows are bounders. What d'you say to that? I wish you'd stop pulling at my arm, Pennyfeather. Colonel Slybotham and I are just having a most interesting conversation about bounders."

The silver band struck up again, and Mr. Prendergast began a little jig, saying: "Capital fellow! capital fellow!" and snapping his fingers. Paul led him to the refreshment tent.

"Dingy wants you to help her in there," he said firmly, "and, for God's sake, don't come out until you feel better."

"I never felt better in my life," said Mr. Prendergast indignantly. "Capital, fellow! capital fellow!"

"It is not my affair, of course," said Colonel Sidebotham, "but if you ask me I should say that man had been drinking."

"He was talking very excitedly to me," said the Vicar, "about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity."

"Drink, pure and simple," said the Colonel. "I wonder where he got it? I could do with a spot of whisky."

"Quarter Mile Open!" said Paul through his megaphone.

The Books: "Possessing the Secret of Joy" (Alice Walker)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker

I read this wrenching book in a couple of days in a cold winter when I was living in Chicago. I remember particularly sitting on the Clark Street bus, travelling uptown, reading the excerpt below and feeling a burning sensation in my heart and chest, like I thought I might have to get up and get off the bus. I will never read this book again. I don't have to. And sometimes I feel like I want to throw it out, or give it away ... why keep it around? But, like a couple of books on my shelves, it is completely representative to me of a certain time in my life, a difficult time, and sometimes I like to have those books around, just as a reminder. Not just of a bad time in my life, but of how far I have come. I was in agony when I read the book. I cannot remember how it came to me, or who recommended it. I'm not a big Alice Walker fan. I had read The Color Purple in high school, and yes, I remember it moving me - but it didn't propel me on to read all of her stuff. She wasn't that good. She wasn't, say, Max Shulman (excerpt here)!! No, just kidding. A friend of mine in high school was a huge Alice Walker fan. I remember sitting in the library with her, during our first period, and the announcements and Pledge of Allegiance were coming over the loudspeaker from the principal, and my friend sat at our table, with tears streaming down her face because she had been reading The Color Purple. It just didn't hit me, in the way it did her. But somehow Possessing the Secret of Joy came into my life during that grim winter, and I'll never forget my experience reading it. I felt named by the book. That has not happened often. It's not that I "related" to the book. It is, after all, about an immigrant woman from Algeria. It has nothing to do with my life. But its message named me. It called out to me. Specifically. That's why I almost had to get up and get off the bus. It was unbearable.

It tells the story of Tashi, an African woman who has emigrated to the United States. Many of the details are lost to me. She has married an American man - Adam. She had fled the oppression and war in Algeria, and is now living a comfortable American life. But she is on the run from her memories. The book is told in different voices - her voice, Adam's voice, her friend Olivia - there are a couple of more characters who chime in as well. Alice Walker's strength is not in realistic writing, obviously - she's more of a political writer, more interested in the points she wants to make, rather than creating a realistic framework. That's one of the main reasons why I can't get into her work. I like more realistic stuff. But in Possessing the Secret of Joy it works, because all of the different voices (and they actually AREN'T different voices - they may be different characters but they all have the same voice) pour every side of the argument into a big pot in the middle - nothing is left out ... So it's a deeply complex book, in a way (and I don't think complexity is Walker's strong suit) - and I think is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about female circumcision (the topic of the book). Of course there's plenty of non-fiction stuff available too, but Walker's book - with its solemn Greek chorus of differing views and opinions - is a huge part of the literature. Tashi's sister bled to death during her circumcision "ceremony". Tashi herself somehow did not have the procedure done - but instead of feeling relief that she had escaped such a fate - it starts to bother her. It becomes a political and cultural symbol to her, especially living in the West. Africa is in upheaval and so Tashi, in an act of solidarity that is insane (if you look at it rationally), goes back to her village and has the procedure done. Things go downhill pretty quickly and Tashi goes mad. The thing about the book that can be grating but is also its greatest strength is the multitude of voices weighing in on Tashi's choice - her husband, her friend, her husband's lover - all of these people are invested in what has happened and, of course, have different views - not just about Tashi's choice but about the tradition, in general. My memories of the book are vague, in terms of specifics - I mainly just remember that burning sensation on the bus, with the fogged-up windows and the snowy sidewalks going by outside ... but I do know that Tashi returns, again, to Africa and murders M'Lissa - the village woman in charge of clitoridectomies. She's an illiterate ancient woman, but puffed up with her position of upholding the tradition. She is the one who allowed Tashi's sister to bleed to death. The book goes back and forth between the trial of Tashi for murder - and all the events leading up to the murder.

Much of the book has to do with the inherent danger in even talking about any of this. Now, with people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others, writing openly about their experiences - it doesn't seem to be as taboo. Or, of course it still is taboo - it is a hot hot topic - but it can be talked about. Alice Walker was writing about a character who felt guilty about "revealing" the fucked-up nature of her native culture. Who was she to live in America and JUDGE Africa? No. This is her tradition. It has always been done. There are reasons. It is part of her culture. Having not had it done, she feels somehow outside of her own traditions. This is craziness talking, of course - but that's the whole thing ... The book makes you ponder your genitals. I mean, that sounds ridiculous - but it's true. Not in a sexual way - just in the FACT of them ... and in doing so, we come to the heart of who we are. I'm not talking about being defined by them - but they are hugely important and the book is so relentless it made me openly BAFFLED at the hostility towards the genitals and what they represent ... The book certainly makes you cherish them, and thank God you have them (in the same way that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's books do - you just read some of that crap and think, 'Thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me live HERE and not in Somalia or the Sudan") And to contemplate being robbed of them ... for what? for why? why is female sexuality so feared? so LOATHED? Whether or not clits are cut off, that feeling is "out there" ... I had internalized it. It was mine as well. The pleasure one can get during sex - the way everything works ... seems to me to be a gift from God. It is to be cherished. But I was tormented back then, and that was one of the reasons I felt named by the book. It went down into the very core of identity. Who we are, who I am. ... But I won't go into that further. Tashi knows that by even opening up the conversation - by talking about what a bogus "tradition" this really is - perpetrated mainly by old ignorant women - she will be seen as betraying her culture. Telling the secrets to a world that will not understand. She takes that risk. The book becomes about "taboo" - and what it means to break taboos. You are rarely congratulated for it. And Tashi loses her mind after breaking that cultural taboo. She is not sorry she murdered M'Lissa. It was long overdue, as far as Tashi is concerned. But that, in its way, is madness as well.

It's one of those books I can't ever stand back from and evaluate, saying, "This worked" or "That didn't work". It's a tough book to take, and I suppose the Greek chorus aspect of it would be tremendously boring to some - but for me, it just pierced through the pain I was in, speaking directly to it - in a profound way that truly changed me. So I can't really evaluate a book like that. I put it down, when I finished it, feeling like I had been crying for a week straight, even though my eyes were dry. I was drained, depleted. "Good" book? Seems like an irrelevant question when my experience had been the kind that it was. There aren't too many books I can say that about.

Here's an excerpt. This is what almost made me get up and exit the bus. I was dreading coming to this book on the shelf. I had no idea what to say. So I will press Post now without over-thinking it or reading it again.

EXCERPT FROM Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker

Tashi-Evelyn

At night The Old Man played music for us. Music from Africa, India, Bali. He had an amazing record collection that occupied one wall of his house. He showed us grainy black-and-white films, made on his trips. It was during the showing of one of these films that something peculiar happened to me. He was explaining a scene in which there were several small children lying in a row on the ground. He thought, first of all, that they were boys, which I could see straight off they were not, though their heads were shaved and they each wore a scanty loincloth. He assumed, he said, he had inadvertently interrupted a kind of ritual ceremony having to do with the preparation of these children for adulthood. Everything, in any case, had stopped, the moment he and his entourage entered the ritual space. And what was also odd, he said, was how no one spoke a word, or even moved, as long as he and his people were there. They literally froze as the camera panned the area. The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs, the adults simply stopped in midactivity, unmoving, even, it appeared, unseeing. Only - he laughed, relighting his pipe, which had gone out, as it frequently did, while he talked - there was a large fighting cock (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about quite freely, crowing mightily (it was a silent film but we could certainly perceive its exertions), and that was the only sound or movement while we were there.

The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.

When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting cock, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude.

The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks.

And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant cock waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.

There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what I felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted - by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the cock as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me - I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.

The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the cock.

When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man's foot or a woman's foot?

The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the classic pose of the deeply insane.

A man's foot? A woman's foot?

How could one know?

But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called "crazy road", a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman's, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M'Lissa's tattered wraps.

As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant grass, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura's age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.

Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M'Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn't realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken - a hen, not a cock - was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M'Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M'Lissa's upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.

The Books: "The Accidental Tourist" (Anne Tyler)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler

I have so many personal associations with this book that I'm not even sure how to write about it - as a book, I mean. It's really what brought my first boyfriend and me together ... 5 million years ago. I still have the copy he gave to me in that long-ago summer with a note from him in the front. He was older than I was - not by much - 6 or 7 years - but I was 20 years old, so that's a HUGE age difference. Now it wouldn't be anything. Hell, 20 years is no longer a big age difference - but back then it was. I was in college, he was in law school, totally different times in our lives. We had known each other for years - I had met him when I was 16. See? I have to talk about all of this before I talk about the book itself. To me, he was a glamorous older guy - my good friend - but not someone I would have thought of romantically. Mainly I felt he was out of my league. You know, I was 20 years old. A late bloomer. A virgin. I had had a boyfriend in college, sort of - but nothing serious or lasting. The guy who would be my first serious boyfriend seemed way more grown-up than me, and always was dating some hot intimidating WOMAN, so I never "crushed" on him because - what would the point of THAT be? But we were good friends, and one summer we started hanging out a lot. Having a blast. (He was such a fun person.) He happened to be reading The Accidental Tourist at the time. I was working 2 or 3 jobs, and he would show up at my place of work, just to say Hi. He would bring me ice coffee. We spent entire days at the beach. We had adventures in a small outboard motor, tooling around Newport, pulling up to docks alongside gigantic YACHTS - and going into whatever bar was there and having a Bloody Mary. I had a cocktail dress in my bag, so we would stroll up the dock, in our flip-flops and shorts, towards some glamorous restaurant, slip into the bathrooms, change into our dress-up duds, and meet at the bar. Then we would go back to the restrooms, change back into our flip-flops and shorts and go back into our outboard motor, and put-put over to the NEXT bar to do it again. Bar-hopping via outboard motor. I was so naive that I had no idea I was being courted. Antonio (that was his name) told me later that it was reading The Accidental Tourist, with its two misfit lead characters, that made him take another look at me, and start to fall in love with me. Much later, I would see that as an insult. Oh, so, I'm a MISFIT, THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE SAYING?? But at the time, it was that book that brought us together. He begged me to read it. He gave me a copy with a blunt note in the front ... something that made me think (FINALLY): "Huh...... is something going on here???" Well, there was, and I read the book, and loved it, and Antonio eventually made his move, and whatever, we were together for four years. Ancient freakin' history. The interesting thing is: Antonio was very much like an Anne Tyler character. He had his "way" of doing things and anything that deviated was a deviation - not just a different way of doing things. He considered his way the default. I am, to put it mildly, not that way at ALL. Who cares if you cut the bell pepper longwise or crosswise? I honestly would need a bone marrow transplant in order to give a shit about stuff like that. I think Antonio saw himself in that book - and saw that maybe it would be okay if he let himself fall in love with the freckled crazy girl in glasses who had messy handwriting and was kind of clumsy. I mean, I think that's how he saw me! He loved me, don't get me wrong - and we actually still love each other - he's one of my favorite people ever, always will be ... but he had to convince himself that a "deviation" from his norm would be okay, that I would be safe, he would be okay with me. He had never dated anyone like me. His girlfriends were either breezy sophisticated types wearing colored heels and sundresses or hard-bodied tomboy types who liked to ski and windsurf and bungee jump. Uhm, yeah, so, I was neither. I liked to read Anne of Green Gables and I liked to write in my diary, and I enjoyed going skinny dipping in the ocean after my shift at the pizza joint. I was loyal to my family on an almost tribal level. Still am. I was an actress. I had a depressive streak. I had great friends. This whole thing was a "deviation" for Antonio and it stressed him out. I am still convinced that we were not meant to be together - and I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did - my not giving a crap about which way to cut the peppers became a metaphor for our differences. NOW I would have no problem handling the situation and telling someone to chill out, don't tell me how to cut a pepper, I'm a grown woman, there's not only one way to do things. But then I couldn't defend myself. It was a mess. BUT. In that first summer, it was all tremendously exciting!! Still one of the best summers I've ever had.

Anne Tyler is the storyteller of people with Asperger's, basically. All of her characters are fussy, a bit antisocial, and have OCD-level organizational skills. I've read some of her other books, but never really got into them because The Accidental Tourist was such an important book to me - my experience with Anne Tyler kind of began and ended there. I know she's a big deal, one of the most successful American writers writing today ... and she's marvelous, she really is - The Accidental Tourist is a terrific book. Heartbreaking. The film made of the book was not too bad, either! I feel like the film really got what it was about those two people that made them fit so perfectly together, eventually. It's an odd pairing and on the face of it makes NO sense.

Macon Leary is a lonely man, who has split from his wife in the wake of their son's murder. All of the underlying problems in their marriage (he is a systematic OCD kind of guy - she is impulsive) come screaming to the forefront once their son is gone (he was murdered in a Burger Bonanaza during a field trip at summer camp). Macon Leary lives alone, and we get scenes of him washing dishes - in his own particular way (he has a "way" for everything) - and he keeps imagining that his ex-wife is watching him at all times, kind of smirking at his fussiness, and shaking her head in contempt. Macon kind of fell into travel writing - the details are lost to me - but he got some assignment to write a travel piece, and the way he wrote it was so funny that the editor asked him to do a series. Basically, he writes about travel for reluctant fearful travelers. Macon Leary does not enjoy travel. He finds it unbearable. For such a rigid guy, all of that change - and having to figure things out in a foreign land - are unbearably stressful - and he writes his travel pieces in that tone. It's all about comfort. Where is the McDonalds in Amsterdam? You can get Sweet 'n Low in Beijing, you just have to ask. Make sure you stay here at this hotel, because it looks most like a Holiday Inn in Iowa. You know: looking for signs of home even in another country. His travel pieces hit a nerve, and so he has written a series of books for "The Accidental Tourist". He writes for people who want to pretend they have never left home.

Macon can't stand the travel, but he loves the writing part of it. Not a happy man. Full of regrets and fear. He comes from a family of fussbudgets - his sister alphabetizes her spice rack, it is desperately important - and marriage doesn't seem to really be "for" these people. Macon's marriage was an anomaly. So now that he is back to single status, he goes over to his siblings' house and they play cards, and it's like they're back in childhood now - only they are all middle-aged.

It's kind of disturbing.

In the middle of all of this, Macon brings his dog to an obedience school - where he meets Muriel, a dog expert. She's got frizzy hair. She's rather kooky. And she doesn't have many boundaries. Like, she calls Macon at home. Macon is so rigid that anything deviating from his small path of normal feels like a threat, or unbearably painful. After all, he couldn't protect his son from going on a simple outing to a burger joint. The world is a tremendously dangerous and unpredictable place. Better to just hunker down, walk in a straight line, and don't disturb anyone. Muriel doesn't play by those rules. She wants to talk about his dog.

And you know, the details are lost to me ... but slowly, inevitably, Macon starts to fall in love with Muriel. But because he's Macon - because he's an Anne Tyler character - love actually feels like stress, rather than love. That was not something I personally related to as a 20 year old girl ... but boy is it something I relate to now. Love feels like stress ... I know it's not ... but this is not a rational thing we're talking about here. We're talking about matters of the heart. If you're a rigid person, stuck in your ways (and I am) - then anything that comes along and pushes you, or messes up your schedule ... feels wrong. It takes Macon forever to realize that Muriel is not wrong, and that stress is actually love.

Tyler is a wonderful writer (as you'll see in the excerpt below) - and quite funny. She has great compassion for her Asperger's-syndrome characters - she's probably got a lot of those qualities herself, she writes about it so well.

I've only read the book once, way back then, during that sunny endless summer when I fell in love for the first time. It seems caught in that moment in time, for me. I have no desire to re-read it - and actually considered skipping it for my Daily Book Excerpt - because it's so potent and such a carrier of memories. But I've got my own OCD going on, and what I call adult-onset Asperger's, and I felt I couldn't skip the book, even with all the associations, so here it is.

Here's an excerpt. Macon is having dinner with his siblings.

EXCERPT FROM The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler

When his brothers came home from work, the house took on a relaxed, relieved atmosphere. Rose drew the living room curtains and lit a few soft lamps. Charles and Porter changed into sweaters. Macon started mixing his special salad dressing. He believed that if you pulverized the spices first with a marble mortar and pestle, it made all the difference. The others agreed that no one else's dressing tasted as good as Macon's. "Since you've been gone," Charles told him, "we've had to buy that bottled stuff from the grocery store." He made it sound as if Macon had been gone a few weeks or so - as if his entire marriage had been just a brief trip elsewhere.

For supper they had Rose's pot roast, a salad with Macon's dressing, and baked potatoes. Baked potatoes had always been their favorite food. They had learned to fix them as children, and even after they were big enough to cook a balanced meal they used to exist solely on baked potatoes whenever Alicia left them to their own devices. There was something about the smell of a roasting Idaho that was so cozy, and also, well, conservative, was the way Macon put it to himself. He thought back on years and years of winter evenings, the kitchen windows black outside, the corners furry with gathering darkness, the four of them seated at the chipped enamel table meticulously filling scooped-out potato skins with butter. You let the butter melt in the skins while you mashed and seasoned the floury insides; the skins were saved till last. It was almost a ritual. He recalled that once, during one of their mother's longer absences, her friend Eliza had served them what she called potato boats - restuffed, not a bit like the genuine article. The children, with pinched, fastidious expressions, had emptied the stuffing and proceeded as usual with the skins, pretending to overlook her mistake. The skins should be crisp. They should not be salted. The pepper should be freshly ground. Paprika was acceptable, but only if it was American. Hungarian paprika had too distinctive a taste. Personally, Macon could do without paprika altogether.

While they ate, Porter discussed what to do with his children. Tomorrow was his weekly visitation night, when he would drive over to Washington, where his children lived with their mother. "The thing of it is," he said, "eating out in restaurants is so artificial. It doesn't seem like real food. And anyway, they all three have different tastes. They always argue over where to go. Someone's on a diet, someone's turned vegetarian, someone can't stand food that crunches. And I end up shouting, 'Oh, for God's sake, we're going to Such-and-Such and that's that!' So we go and everybody sulks throughout the meal."

"Maybe you should just not visit," Charles said reasonably. (He had never had children of his own.)

"Well, of course I want to visit, Charles. I just wish we had some different program. You know what would be ideal? If we could all do something with tools together. I mean like the old days before the divorce, when Danny helped me drain the hot water heater or Susan sat on a board I was sawing. If I could just drop by their house, say, and June and her husband could go to a movie or something, then the kids and I would clean the gutters, weatherstrip the windows, wrap the hot water pipes ... Well, that husband of hers is no use at all, you can bet he lets his hot water pipes sit around naked. I'd bring my own tools, even. We'd have a fine time! Susan could fix us cocoa. Then at the end of the evening I'd pack up my tools and off I'd go, leaving the house in perfect repair. Why, June ought to jump at the chance."

"Then why not suggest it," Macon said.

"Nah. She'd never go for it. She's so impractical. I said to her last week, I said, 'You know that front porch step is loose? Springing up from its nails every time you walk on it wrong.' She said, 'Oh, Lord, yes, it's been that way,' as if Providence had decreed it. As if nothing could be done about it. They've got leaves in the gutter from way last winter but leaves are natural after all; why go against nature. She's so impractical."

Porter himself was the most practical man Macon had ever known. He was the only Leary who understood money. His talent with money was what kept the family firm solvent - if just barely. It wasn't a very wealthy business. Grandfather Leary had founded it in the early part of the century as a tinware factory, and turned to bottle caps in 1915. The Bottle Cap King, he called himself, and was called in his obituary, but in fact most bottle caps were manufactured by Crown Cork and always had been; Grandfather Leary ran a distant second or third. His only son, the Bottle Cap Prince, had barely assumed his place in the firm before quitting to volunteer for World War II - a far more damaging enthusiasm, it turned out, than any of Alicia's. After he was killed the business limped along, never quite succeeding and never quite failing, till Porter bounced in straight from college and took over the money end. Money to Porter was something almost chemical - a volatile substance that reacted in various interesting ways when combined with other substances. He wasn't what you'd call mercenary; he didn't want the money for its own sake but for its intriguing possibilities, and in fact when his wife divorced him he handed over most of his property without a word of complaint.

It was Porter who ran the company, pumping in money and ideas. Charles, more mechanical, dealt with the production end. Macon had done a little of everything when he worked there, and had wasted away with boredom doing it, for there wasn't really enough to keep a third man busy. It was only for symmetry's sake that Porter kept urging him to return. "Tell you what, Macon," he said now, "why not hitch a ride down with us tomorrow and look over your old stomping ground?"

"No, thanks," Macon told him.

"Plenty of room for your crutches in back."

"Maybe some other time."

They followed Rose around while she washed the dishes. She didn't like them to help because she had her own method, she said. She moved soundlessly through the old-fashioned kitchen, replacing dishes in the high wooden cabinets. Charles took the dog out; Macon couldn't manage his crutches in the spongy backyard. And Porter pulled the kitchen shades, meanwhile lecturing Rose on how the white surfaces reflected the warmth back into the room now that the nights were cooler. Rose said, "Yes, Porter, I know all that," and lifted the salad bowl to the light and examined it a moment before she put it away.

They watched the news, dutifully, and then they went out to the sun porch and sat at their grandparents' card table. They played something called Vaccination - a card game they'd invented as children, which had grown so convoluted over the years that no one else had the patience to learn it. In fact, more than one outsider had accused them of altering the rules to suit the circumstances. "Now, just a minute," Sarah had said, back when she'd still had hopes of figuring it out. "I thought you said aces were high."

"They are."

"So that means --"

"But not when they're drawn from the deck."

"Aha! Then why was the one that Rose drew counted high?"

"Well, she did draw it after a deuce, Sarah."

"Aces drawn after a deuce are high?"

"No, aces drawn after a number that's been drawn two times in a row just before that."

Sarah had folded her fan of cards and laid them face down - the last of the wives to give up.

Macon was in quarantine and had to donate all his cards to Rose. Rose moved her chair over next to his and played off his points while he sat back, scratching the cat behind her ears. Opposite him, in the tiny dark windowpane, he saw their reflections - hollow-eyed and severely cheek-boned, more interesting versions of themselves.

The telephone in the living room gave a nipped squeak and then a full ring. Nobody seemed to notice. Rose laid a king on Porter's queen and Porter said, "Stinker." The telephone rang again and then again. In the middle of the fourth ring, it fell silent. "Hypodermic," Rose told Porter, and she topped the king with an ace.

"You're a real stinker, Rose."

In the portrait on the end wall, the Leary children gazed out with their veiled eyes. It occurred to Macon that they were sitting in much the same positions here this evening: Charles and Porter on either side of him, Rose perched in the foreground. Was there any real change? He felt a jolt of something very close to panic. Here he still was! The same as ever! What have I gone and done? he wondered, and he swallowed thickly and looked at his own empty hands.

The Books: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn takes place (as the author states beneath the title of the book:) in the "early nineteenth century". More so than Tom Sawyer (excerpt here), Twain addresses the larger cultural and social issues of that time - the free states, slave states, trying to get to the free states, the Mississippi slicing up through the nation like some kind of divining rod, the issues of Jim's wife and kids and how he wanted to get some abolitionists to kidnap them out of slavery ... all of those everyday things that a slave would experience at that time - and Twain does so in a way that is not didactic, or preachy - which is one of the reasons the book is controversial. You can't point to it and say, "HERE is what Mark Twain was SAYING" definitively because you can always find that the opposite sentiment is also true in the book. It's not a pamphlet or a sermon, much to the dismay of the literalists in our midst. It's a BOOK, with flawed human beings as the lead characters - as opposed to neat symbols they can line up behind and approve of. (Damn these people and their fucking "approval".). The book is controversial now because, obviously, it's not politically correct enough (even though if it were as politically correct as the times dictate now - it wouldn't be historically accurate - it also would be a big fat bore). But it was controversial from the moment it appeared. Huck Finn has always been a troublemaker of a book, and I love him dearly for that. I love books that piss people off. I love books that certain types of people think that none of us should be allowed to read. I love them on principle. I love books that make people tremble about "the children" and what will happen if "the children (tm)" read it? You want to make me read a book? Have some self-righteous nitwad pontificate about why I "shouldn't" read it. Book sold. "This book is not for children(tm)!!" (Or, not to mention the morons who disapprove of Madeleine L'Engle because her books aren't Christian enough. Or ... they can tell it's Christian ... but they don't underestand all of it and people like that HATE not understanding something!!! Therefore, Madeleine L'Engle must be up to no good!) Now I know we should pity these people, it must be pretty awful to BE them, but I don't pity them because they have a vested interest in controlling what is available to be read, and no, I don't take that lightly. I remember I went off on "challenged books" once and some self-proclaimed member of the "religious right" said, "I am troubled by your intemperate response." Now. This guy had been reading me for a couple of years. Okay? And he's just figuring out NOW that I'm intemperate? Looks like you need to work on your reading comprehension, bub. Don't look for "temperance" here when we're talking about literature and unimaginative fearful morons who want to decide what the rest of us get to read. Damn straight I'm "intemperate". Strangely enough, he doesn't comment anymore. Huh. Wonder why.

Well, I was a kid, and I read Huckleberry Finn on my own (I later had to read it in high school, and believe me - I felt like the biggest expert in the world because I had already read it so many times) - and I loved it. I was not corrupted. I didn't suddenly start running around thinking it was okay to say "nigger" and dreaming of a return of the antebellum south, or whatever the hell it is that people are so worried about. I loved Jim. I wanted him to be free. It was obvious to me even as a child (tm) that everyone in the book - EVERYONE - speaks in their own dialect. It's kind of like Dickens' books - where you really can hear the conversation, because Dickens almost spells it out phonetically. This is just how those people talked back then. I don't know, I was a kid and I knew it was a story! Will wonders never cease! I was caught up completely in its plot (although, as Twain says in a note before the book begins that anyone attempting to find a plot in the book "will be shot" - ha!) - I was on that raft with Jim and Huck, I lived their adventures with them, I wanted Jim to be free, I knew he couldn't go back - he just couldn't! - and I loved all of the adventures they had along the way. It's a great book! You can read it as an adult and see a lot more in it - but it's great fun for a kid as well. It's a fantasy: Huck and Jim on their raft, free man and slave ... sailing on the Mississippi - and while they are on their raft, all is possible. They WILL make it. They are equals. To even say that is condescending. It is what it is. They are friends. It is when they are forced to pull the raft over to one side of the river or the other, and step out onto the land, that they get into trouble. That is when the larger forces at work in the society start to catch up with them. As long as they are in motion, out on the water, they have a chance. And to those who say, in an apologetic tone, that Huckleberry Finn reflects some of the racist attitudes of his day, I reply: OF COURSE HE DOES. Because he lived THEN and not NOW, you morons. Bah.

I read it because I had read Tom Sawyer as a kid and was totally intrigued by the glimpses I got of Huckleberry's character and so I needed to read on. From the first sentence of Huckleberry Finn I was hooked:

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter.

Looking back, I would say that what hooked me in was the voice. The "voice" of Huckleberry Finn represents (in my view) a huge leap forward in American literature. It still feels contemporary now. Holden Caulfield sounds like Huckleberry Finn. The first-person narration means there is no distance between us, the reader, and Huckleberry, our guide. Where he goes, we go. Where he makes a mistake, we stroll right into the thick of it with him. We don't have anyone else to take us on the way - it's him. And I don't know: I just loved hanging out with him. I love him still. I love that character. One of the greatest characters in our pantheon.

I know I've mentioned before my fantasy as a kid of being an orphan, thrown upon the world with no support, and I would have to make my way on my own. Huckleberry Finn (although he does have a father - loser loser loser) is one of the best examples of how my fantasies operated as a kid. Adrift with no "adults"? Having to deal with conmen, dangerous barking dogs, being chased? Sleeping under the stars? Sign me up!

Huck Finn's famous statement at the end of the book ("All right then, I'll go to hell") speaks to his essential decency, his innate inability to NOT see his fellow man as ... human beings. It was that that captivated me, and really made me kind of swoon for Huck a little bit.

And that's what made his ridiculously funny stopover at the Grangerford house one of my favorite parts of the book. Unlike Tom Sawyer, who is kind of a grade school lothario, Huckleberry Finn doesn't really have any interest in girls. Girls do not factor into his life at all. Becky Thatcher is a big character in Tom Sawyer but there really are no "girls" in Huckleberry Finn, just grim humorless female authority figures - and who's going to feel romantically about them?? But here at the Grangerford house, on the run, flying by the seat of his pants, using another name (which causes a humorous moment) - he meets Emmeline Grangerford - or, he doesn't really, because she's dead - but the house is full of her unfinished paintings and bad poetry and Huck kind of becomes a bit obsessed with Emmeline. He wonders about her. He thinks about her. He even prays for her soul. It's kind of an extraordinary little section and really shows Huckleberry's compassion - and not just that - but his ability to SEE.

Now there are some things he can't see - like how bad Emmeline's poetry actually is, and how her paintings sound ATROCIOUS (that's one of the funny things in the scene - Twain just blatantly telling us what Emmeline painted, letting the awfulness speak for itself - only Huckleberry, who has no taste in art or literature, thinks everything he encounters is AMAZING) ... so no, he doesn't look at the paintings and poetry and think: "Man. This work sucks." NO. He looks at it and wonders about a person who would do such paintings, who was she, did anyone love her like she obviously loved people? Was she okay where she was now?

He really cares for her.

This quality will come up again and again in Huckleberry Finn - his intuitive ability to see people - and yes, sometimes it comes too late ... but it's quite a gift, and it was a gift to me as a kid reading it. Because ... it taught me how to see. I mean, I was always going to be a sensitive little thing - I am convinced I was born that way ... but Huckleberry's ability to see really struck me, and made me want to be more like him. He reads her AWFUL poem ("stomach troubles laid him low" ... In a poem?? hahaha) and feels sad that she obviously cared so much that she would write a poem, and he wondered who cared about her, and who would write a poem for her. So he tries. Poor illiterate Huck Finn tries to write her - a girl he had never met - a poem. I don't know, it really touched me as a kid - and it still does.

So while the Grangerford section and the paintings of Emmeline may not be the most famous part of the book, that's the excerpt I knew I wanted to post today - because they had such power for me as a youngun. And even though I first encountered Emmeline's horrible unfinished painting when I was 10 years old, years and years and years ago - yikes - I still, to this day, remember exactly what the painting was - and what parts were unfinished - and the multiple pairs of arms, etc. To me, the book has great staying power (obviously).

One of my all-time faves.

EXCERPT FROM Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Cold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and buttermilk -- that is what they had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've come across yet. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women. They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs. They all asked me questions, and I told them how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm down at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann run off and got married and never was heard of no more, and Bill went to hunt them and he warn't heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there warn't nobody but just me and pap left, and he was just trimmed down to nothing, on account of his troubles; so when he died I took what there was left, because the farm didn't belong to us, and started up the river, deck passage, and fell overboard; and that was how I come to be here. So they said I could have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was. So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:

"Can you spell, Buck?"

"Yes," he says.

"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.

"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.

"All right," says I, "go ahead."

"G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n -- there now," he says.

"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could. It ain't no slouch of a name to spell -- right off without studying."

I set it down, private, because somebody might want ME to spell it next, and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to it.

It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I hadn't seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style. It didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in town. There warn't no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps of parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town. They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a sawlog. There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out. They wouldn't took any money for her.

Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn't open their mouths nor look different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things. On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that bad apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn't real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.

This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a big family Bible full of pictures. One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. Another was Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too -- not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.

They had pictures hung on the walls -- mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before -- blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon -- and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the name of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker -- the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there. The old lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty of niggers, and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there mostly.

Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken" and play "The Battle of Prague" on it. The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.

It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn't be better. And warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it too!

The Books: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" - (Mark Twain)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , by Mark Twain

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with this book and wanted to slip into its pages. Not as much as Huckleberry Finn which propelled me into a mania ... I kind of had a crush on Huck Finn ... It was Huck and Lance Kerwin who took up my 10 year old fantasy life. But Tom Sawyer wasn't too bad either. I preferred Huck because he had less going for him, in terms of advantages and social graces and I always liked the underdog. Tom Sawyer was a slippery one, a popular boy, with a certain amount of ease and social standing (you know, basically putting all the neighborhood boys to work whitewashing so HE didn't have to do it!) ... but the feeling in Tom Sawyer, of kids free (mostly) to live entirely outside, getting up to no good, creating entire melodramas where they can act out make-believe games (or, not so make believe) ... was heaven to me. To be honest, except for the whole electricity thing, and the whole horse and buggy thing ... I had no real concept that Tom Sawyer did NOT live in my era. His childhood was very much like mine. I didn't sit inside watching television because, you know, there were only 3 stations ... so I watched cartoons on Saturday, and ABC Afterschool Specials (Hello, Lance Kerwin!), and Sunday night Disney, and Masterpiece Theatre. But there really wasn't all that much on ... at least not all the damn day ... so the kids in our neighborhood spent the majority of our time outside, in the woods, having mud wars, building forts, stealing raspberries from someone's garden, basically up to NO GOOD. Oh, and pushing it as long as we could - hearing our mother's voices calling us in to dinner ... one more minutes, please, one more minute!! To me, the crap that Tom Sawyer got up to was familiar. Of course things get much more serious at the end of the book, but that was part of the fun of it: the fantasy that you, as a child, would get caught up in grown-up forces beyond your control, that you would have to figure out a way to survive - be wily, sneaky, resourceful ... I mean, this was my main fantasy. All of my favorite books as a kid had that as an element. Mixed-Up Files (excerpt here), Harriet the Spy (excerpt here), Diamond in the Window (excerpt here), and a ton of L'Engle's books - Arm of the Starfish comes immediately to mind (excerpt here), with its story of a young boy stranded in Portugal, caught up in forces (international criminal forces) way beyond his understanding. In Tom Sawyer, what starts out as a kid's game (a blood oath, pretending to be pirates in search of hidden gold) turns deadly. The kids have to find their own way out of the dangerous situation. Heaven!!

Tom Sawyer is probably Mark Twain's best-known book - although it was not his best-seller (not until after his death). Innocents Abroad (excerpt here) sold better than any of his books - which is so interesting, and just goes to show you that you cannot predict, via SALES, what will "last", and what will not. Like I mentioned, Huck Finn was a favorite of mine as a kid, and, in my opinion, it feels more important than Tom Sawyer ... more like a precursor to Gatsby (excerpt here) or Catcher in the Rye (excerpt here), with its distinctive narrator, and point of view.

Tom Sawyer is the kind of book, like Anne of Green Gables (excerpt here), that depends on the power of each funny/touching/scary episode adding up to a great whole. Tom Sawyer was published originally in serial fashion - I have great fondness for the episodic form, and wish more books now were written that way - as opposed to just a straight-line one-plot narrative. I love episodes! (doesn't surprise me at all that Mark Twain would have written to Lucy Maud Montgomery on the publication of Anne, praising her to the skies and referring to Anne Shirley as "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice" - a huge compliment. Montgomery's stuff is in the Twain vein, especially the Anne books).

I have my favorite episodes in Tom Sawyer - I like him and Huck hiding in the cemetery best - but I had to pick the excerpt below, because it makes me laugh out loud. Just the language!! So funny! How the priest "turns himself into a bulletin board" - and his comments on the badly behaved church choir: "There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country." hahahahahahaha And Twain's lampooning of the prayer:

A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen.

It hit my funny bone when I was 10, and it is STILL funny to me! Any time anything chaotic happened in church, it was always hysterical because you were supposed to be so good and quiet.

EXCERPT FROM The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , by Mark Twain

About half-past ten the cracked bell of the small church began to ring, and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon. The Sunday-school children distributed themselves about the house and occupied pews with their parents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her -- Tom being placed next the aisle, in order that he might be as far away from the open window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd filed up the aisles: the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days; the mayor and his wife -- for they had a mayor there, among other unnecessaries; the justice of the peace; the widow Douglass, fair, smart, and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could boast; the bent and venerable Major and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson, the new notable from a distance; next the belle of the village, followed by a troop of lawn-clad and ribbon-decked young heart-breakers; then all the young clerks in town in a body -- for they had stood in the vestibule sucking their cane-heads, a circling wall of oiled and simpering admirers, till the last girl had run their gantlet; and last of all came the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass. He always brought his mother to church, and was the pride of all the matrons. The boys all hated him, he was so good. And besides, he had been "thrown up to them" so much. His white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as usual on Sundays -- accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys who had as snobs.

The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more, to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country.

The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through with a relish, in a peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country. His voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached a certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost word and then plunged down as if from a spring-board:

Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow'ry beds
of ease,
Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' bloody seas?

He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and "wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, "Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth."
After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin-board, and read off "notices" of meetings and societies and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom -- a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities, away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen.

There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down. The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured it -- if he even did that much. He was restive all through it; he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously -- for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman's regular route over it -- and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded, his ear detected it and his whole nature resented it; he considered additions unfair, and scoundrelly. In the midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coat-tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom's hands itched to grab for it they did not dare -- he believed his soul would be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on. But with the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal forward; and the instant the "Amen" was out the fly was a prisoner of war. His aunt detected the act and made him let it go.

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod -- and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse. However, this time he was really interested for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the principal character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was a tame lion.

Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed. Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black beetle with formidable jaws -- a "pinchbug," he called it. It was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went into the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs, unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws, and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.

By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill. The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced.

Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it. He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in him to carry it off.

The Books: "The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrims' Progress" - (Mark Twain)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress, by Mark Twain

Okay, so I know this isn't strictly fiction - it's more reportage/memoir - but it bothers me when I have to separate books by the same author just because they are in different genres. It haunts me at night. I thrash in bed worrying about it.

Interestingly enough, this book was Mark Twain's best-seller of all of his books. It remained so throughout his lifetime. I LOVE it. I read it a couple of years ago, and ate up every word. It made me laugh out loud (of course), but his insights, too - his sometimes jaundiced American eye about travel ... his observations about his fellow "pilgrims" (so funny!!) - but then, too, it's fascinating: The book was published in 1869 - it began as a series of articles Twain was writing for a newspaper, which were published separately and then put together as a book ... so when you read it now, you are getting an intimate look at the world of what is now Israel (and the surrounding lands) at that time in history. It could not be more fascinating. It's great, too, because there was no such thing as political correctness then - and so some of Twain's observations are scathing! He skewers entire countries based on a couple of people he met, he is vicious towards the Portugese, for example (vicious, and yet hilarious) . The book doesn't lack in seriousness - Twain doesn't make fun of everything. It's just that he can't help himself: human beings are funny to him, whether they are galloping Turks or pious Christians. Everyone is vaguely ridiculous. Especially because, in a trip such as this one, it's all about the group. And there is nothing funnier than a group dynamic. They cohere during the boat ride across the ocean. They are stuck on the ship together ... we get to know some of the characters, we hear about their activities, and the different quirks of his fellow pilgrims. It's a delight, this book. It's Twain at his very best.

The excerpt below is when, after a stormy crossing, they finally sight land - as they approach the Strait of Gibraltar. Much excitement. Much misinformation is flung around the ship - people who read guide books and think they are experts, people who repeat the same old legends time and time again until Mark Twain wants to pull his hair out ("don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!") I love how the entire ship has given one of these boobs a nickname: The Oracle. He is SUCH a recognizable type. Tell me you haven't met someone like him before! He means well, he is not malevolent ... just ignorant and defensive when his ignorance is pointed out to him. He sets himself up as an expert, spouting out facts (incorrectly) from the guidebooks ... and then when Twain tries to tell him that no, it actually isn't like that ... The Oracle gets uppity. As though there is no way to REALLY know what is true. Actually, Oracle, yes, there is. It's called reading and understanding what you read and backing it up with your own experience and what you can see with your own eyes. Just admit you made a mistake!! Don't dig the hole further!! But folks like The Oracle always have to dig the hole further. They cannot help themselves.

I love the book. Highly recommended.

EXCERPT FROM The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress, by Mark Twain

Within the hour we were fairly within the Straits of Gibraltar, the tall yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, with their bases veiled in a blue haze and their summits swathed in clouds -- the same being according to Scripture, which says that "clouds and darkness are over the land." The words were spoken of this particular portion of Africa, I believe. On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain. The strait is only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part.

At short intervals along the Spanish shore were quaint-looking old stone towers -- Moorish, we thought -- but learned better afterwards. In former times the Morocco rascals used to coast along the Spanish Main in their boats till a safe opportunity seemed to present itself, and then dart in and capture a Spanish village and carry off all the pretty women they could find. It was a pleasant business, and was very popular. The Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them to keep a sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators.

The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes weary of the changeless sea, and by and by the ship's company grew wonderfully cheerful. But while we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the lowlands robed in misty gloom a finer picture burst upon us and chained every eye like a magnet -- a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till she was one towering mass of bellying sail! She came speeding over the sea like a great bird. Africa and Spain were forgotten. All homage was for the beautiful stranger. While everybody gazed she swept superbly by and flung the Stars and Stripes to the breeze! Quicker than thought, hats and handkerchiefs flashed in the air, and a cheer went up! She was beautiful before -- she was radiant now. Many a one on our decks knew then for the first time how tame a sight his country's flag is at home compared to what it is in a foreign land. To see it is to see a vision of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a very river of sluggish blood!

We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain with summit streaked with granite ledges, was in sight. The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar, was yet to come. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous. Even the prophets wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there, I should think.

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom.

The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I should say, by 1,400 to 1,500 feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide at its base. One side and one end of it come about as straight up out of the sea as the side of a house, the other end is irregular and the other side is a steep slant which an army would find very difficult to climb. At the foot of this slant is the walled town of Gibraltar -- or rather the town occupies part of the slant. Everywhere -- on hillside, in the precipice, by the sea, on the heights -- everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad with masonry and bristling with guns. It makes a striking and lively picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it. It is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of a "gob" of mud on the end of a shingle. A few hundred yards of this flat ground at its base belongs to the English, and then, extending across the strip from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of a mile, comes the "Neutral Ground," a space two or three hundred yards wide, which is free to both parties.

"Are you going through Spain to Paris?" That question was bandied about the ship day and night from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I never could get so tired of hearing any one combination of words again or more tired of answering, "I don't know." At the last moment six or seven had sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did go, and I felt a sense of relief at once -- it was forever too late now and I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

But behold how annoyances repeat themselves. We had no sooner gotten rid of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another -- a tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about it, even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up there."

We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock. These galleries are like spacious railway tunnels, and at short intervals in them great guns frown out upon sea and town through portholes five or six hundred feet above the ocean. There is a mile or so of this subterranean work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor. The gallery guns command the peninsula and the harbors of both oceans, but they might as well not be there, I should think, for an army could hardly climb the perpendicular wall of the rock anyhow. Those lofty portholes afford superb views of the sea, though. At one place, where a jutting crag was hollowed out into a great chamber whose furniture was huge cannon and whose windows were portholes, a glimpse was caught of a hill not far away, and a soldier said:

"That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen of Spain placed her chair there once when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up there."

On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good while, and no doubt the mules were tired. They had a right to be. The military road was good, but rather steep, and there was a good deal of it. The view from the narrow ledge was magnificent; from it vessels seeming like the tiniest little toy boats were turned into noble ships by the telescopes, and other vessels that were fifty miles away and even sixty, they said, and invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distinguished through those same telescopes. Below, on one side, we looked down upon an endless mass of batteries and on the other straight down to the sea.

While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to another party came up and said:

"Señor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair -- "

"Sir, I am a helpless orphan in a foreign land. Have pity on me. Don't -- now don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!"

There -- I had used strong language after promising I would never do so again; but the provocation was more than human nature could bear. If you had been bored so, when you had the noble panorama of Spain and Africa and the blue Mediterranean spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze and enjoy and surfeit yourself in its beauty in silence, you might have even burst into stronger language than I did.

Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them of nearly four years' duration (it failed), and the English only captured it by stratagem. The wonder is that anybody should ever dream of trying so impossible a project as the taking it by assault -- and yet it has been tried more than once.

The Moors held the place twelve hundred years ago, and a staunch old castle of theirs of that date still frowns from the middle of the town, with moss-grown battlements and sides well scarred by shots fired in battles and sieges that are forgotten now. A secret chamber in the rock behind it was discovered some time ago, which contained a sword of exquisite workmanship, and some quaint old armor of a fashion that antiquaries are not acquainted with, though it is supposed to be Roman. Roman armor and Roman relics of various kinds have been found in a cave in the sea extremity of Gibraltar; history says Rome held this part of the country about the Christian era, and these things seem to confirm the statement.

In that cave also are found human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony coating, and wise men have ventured to say that those men not only lived before the flood, but as much as ten thousand years before it. It may be true -- it looks reasonable enough -- but as long as those parties can't vote anymore, the matter can be of no great public interest. In this cave likewise are found skeletons and fossils of animals that exist in every part of Africa, yet within memory and tradition have never existed in any portion of Spain save this lone peak of Gibraltar! So the theory is that the channel between Gibraltar and Africa was once dry land, and that the low, neutral neck between Gibraltar and the Spanish hills behind it was once ocean, and of course that these African animals, being over at Gibraltar (after rock, perhaps -- there is plenty there), got closed out when the great change occurred. The hills in Africa, across the channel, are full of apes, and there are now and always have been apes on the rock of Gibraltar -- but not elsewhere in Spain! The subject is an interesting one.

There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 men, and so uniforms of flaming red are plenty; and red and blue, and undress costumes of snowy white, and also the queer uniform of the bare-kneed Highlander; and one sees soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, and veiled Moorish beauties (I suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and turbaned, sashed, and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez, and long-robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuán and Tangier, some brown, some yellow and some as black as virgin ink -- and Jews from all around, in gabardine, skullcap, and slippers, just as they are in pictures and theaters, and just as they were three thousand years ago, no doubt. You can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims suggest that expression, because they march in a straggling procession through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of complacency and independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen or sixteen states of the Union, found enough to stare at in this shifting panorama of fashion today.

Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance. However, I do not count the Oracle in that list. I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your very teeth as original with himself. He reads a chapter in the guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from erudite authors who are dead now and out of print. This morning at breakfast he pointed out of the window and said:

"Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast? It's one of them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say -- and there's the ultimate one alongside of it."

"The ultimate one -- that is a good word -- but the pillars are not both on the same side of the strait." (I saw he had been deceived by a carelessly written sentence in the guidebook.)

"Well, it ain't for you to say, nor for me. Some authors states it that way, and some states it different. Old Gibbons don't say nothing about it -- just shirks it complete -- Gibbons always done that when he got stuck -- but there is Rolampton, what does he say? Why, be says that they was both on the same side, and Trinculian, and Sobaster, and Syraccus, and Langomarganbl -- -- "

"Oh, that will do -- that's enough. If you have got your hand in for inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing more to say -- let them be on the same side."

We don't mind the Oracle. We rather like him. We can tolerate the Oracle very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot on board, and they do distress the company. The one gives copies of his verses to consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch -- to anybody, in fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly meant. His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwithstanding when he wrote an "Ode to the Ocean in a Storm" in one half hour, and an "Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers.

The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, and not bright, not learned, and not wise. He will be, though, someday if he recollects the answers to all his questions. He is known about the ship as the "Interrogation Point," and this by constant use has become shortened to "Interrogation." He has distinguished himself twice already. In Fayal they pointed out a hill and told him it was 800 feet high and 1,100 feet long. And they told him there was a tunnel 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet high running through the hill, from end to end. He believed it. He repeated it to everybody, discussed it, and read it from his notes. Finally, he took a useful hint from this remark, which a thoughtful old pilgrim made:

"Well, yes, it is a little remarkable -- singular tunnel altogether -- stands up out of the top of the hill about two hundred feet, and one end of it sticks out of the hill about nine hundred!"

Here in Gibraltar he comers these educated British officers and badgers them with braggadocio about America and the wonders she can perform! He told one of them a couple of our gunboats could come here and knock Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea!

The Books: "Anna Karenina" (Leo Tolstoy)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

There was a time in Chicago when my entire group of friends read this book. It spread like a virus. One person started it, and began raving about it, so then another one picked it up, then another ... none of us were in the same parts of the novel as we read it, so secrets of the plot had to be preserved - "DON'T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED!" we would shout at one another ... I think Maria was the first one to finish. She preserved her silence, but it was tragic for her ... because she knew the ending, she knew where we all were headed ... It was also tragic because she couldn't talk about it with anyone!! I had never read Anna Karenina before - and, to this day, it is the only Tolstoy I have read (although War and Peace WILL be read by me this year ... my cousin Liam is spurring me on!). I absolutely loved the book, and if you haven't read it, all I can say is: do yourself a favor ...

There is something for everyone in this book. It is a giant accomplishment. It's a snapshot (hugely detailed) of society in Russia at that time (at a certain class level, of course) - it's a social melodrama - a romance - It stands as a bridge between 19th century realism and 20th century modernism. You can feel George Eliot in the book, the masters of the 19th century - with their ability to look at an entire society and say, while they are in that society themselves: "Here. This is what I see. This is what is going on." It's completely three-dimensional, no matter which way you look at it. There are even 5 or 6 chapters (which felt ENDLESS to me at the time) where you hang out with Levin on his farm in the country, and you learn about his harvest, and his threshing, and how he farms, and WHATEVS with Levin and his wheatfields - let's get back to the city, please!!! But it's all a part of the book - and it wouldn't work without it. Levin is a hugely important character - I have great sympathy for that poor guy, and seeing him at work - to contrast the glitter of the city with all its corruption and intrigue - with the simplicity of life out in the country - hugely important to the success of the book.

Many of these people are, frankly, nasty. You don't want to hang out with them. It's a cutthroat world - the world of the court - and people's ideals are compromised. People's virtue cannot remain intact. It's just impossible. Anna Karenina, in many ways, is a woman beyond the pale. She is one of the greatest of characters ever created. She cannot "fit in", it just is not in her nature. So Kitty (as seen in the excerpt below) - who is a much more conventional type of woman, with regular old dreams that society approves of ... is baffled by and drawn to Anna. But Anna stands apart. Kitty could never be BFFs with someone like Anna, and I get the sense that Anna could never be friends with another female anyway. Not just because she would entrap any male in a 5 mile radius - but because her interests lie outside the typical female realm. But I guess that's part of the tragedy. Anna, in another time, another life, would make a great lawyer, CEO, or - perhaps - a fulfilled wife and mother. But not in her time. No way. She is beyond the pale. She is not a victim of circumstance - or, not totally - her own unconventional character and the choices she is willing to make put her into the realm of free will. And, I suppose, destiny. There is no other way that Anna Karenina could behave. She is being true to herself.

I won't go into the ins and outs of the terrifically complex plot - because watching it all unfold is part of the fun (yes, fun!) of this book. Every person you meet, even bit characters, are fully drawn. Watch how Tolstoy (in the excerpt below) makes the ball come alive. He's got that kind of eye. His descriptions of the gowns are almost feminine, in their eye for detail. And - of course - as women (and as observant men) we all know what fashion means, and the signals that women give out when they choose one outfit over another. That is all going on here.

I'm nervous to start War and Peace because I know it will take up months of my life (like Bleak House did last year) - but I'm excited as well.

The ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant, steady noise, like that of a hive aswarm; and as they were giving the final little touches to hair and dresses before a mirror on the landing between potted trees, they heard, coming from the ballroom, the gently distinct notes of the fiddles of the orchestra, beginning the first waltz. A little ancient in civilian dress, arranging his gray curls before another mirror, and diffusing an odor of scent, stumbled against them on the stairs, and stood aside, evidently admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince Shcherbatsky called whelps, in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them and after running by, came back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this youth the second. An officer, buttoning his glove, stood aside in the doorway, and, stroking his mustache, admired the rosy Kitty.

Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty much trouble and planning, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in the elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as unconcernedly and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in this tulle and lace, with this towering coiffure, surmounted by a rose and two small leaves.

When, just before entering the ballroom, the old Princess tried to adjust a sash ribbon that had become twisted, Kitty had drawn back a little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and graceful, and that nothing could need setting straight.

Kitty had one of her good days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace bertha did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were neither crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, curving heels did not pinch, but gladdened her tiny feet; and the thick bandeaux of fair hair kept up on her head. All the three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet ribbon of her locket nestled with special tenderness round her neck. This velvet ribbon was a darling; at home, regarding her neck in the looking glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a doubt, but the velvet ribbon was a darling. Kitty smiled here too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sensation of chill marble - a sensation she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not help but smile from the consciousness of their own attractiveness. She had scarcely entered the ballroom and reached the tulle-ribbon-lace-colored throng of ladies, waiting to be asked to dance - Kitty was never one of that throng - when she was asked for a waltz, and asked by the best partner, the first star in the hierarchy of the ballroom, a renowned conductor of the dances and master of ceremonies, married man, handsome and well built, Iegorushka Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Banina, with whom he had danced the first turn of the waltz, and, scanning his demesne - that is to say, a few couples who had started dancing - he caught sight of Kitty entering, and flew up to her with that peculiar, easy amble which is confined to conductors of the dances. Bowing and without even asking her if she cared to dance, he put out his arm to encircle her slender waist. She looked round for someone to give her fan to, and their hostess, smiling to her, took it.

"How good of you to come in good time," he said to her, embracing her waist; "such a bad habit to be late."

Bending her left arm, she laid it on his shoulder, and her little feet in their pink slippers began swiftly, lightly, and rhythmically moving over the slippery floor in time to the music.

"It's a rest to waltz with you," he said to her, as they fell into the first slow steps of the waltz. "It's charming - such lightness, precision." He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his partners whom he knew well.

She smiled at his praise, and continued to look about the room over his shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner of the ballroom she saw the very flower of society grouped together. There - impossibly naked - was the beauty Liddy, Korsunsky's wife; there was the lady of the house; there shone the bald pate of Krivin, always to be found wherever the best people were; in that direction gazed the young men, not venturing to approach; there, too, she descried Stiva, and there she saw the charming figure and head of Anna in a black velvet gown. And he was there. Kitty had not seen him since the evening she refused Levin. With her farsighted eyes, knew him at once, and was even aware that he was looking at her.

"Another turn, eh? You're not tired?" said Korsunsky, a little out of breath.

"No, thank you!"

"Where shall I take you?"

"Madame Karenina's here, I think.... Take me to her."

"Wherever you command."

And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight toward the group in the left corner, continually saying, "Pardon, mesdames, pardon, pardon, mesdames," and steering his course through the sea of lace, tulle and ribbon, and not disarranging a feather, he turned his partner sharply round, so that her slim ankles, in light, transparent stockings, were exposed to view, and her train floated out in fan shape and covered Krivin's knees. Korsunsky bowed, set straight his open shirt front, and gave her his arm to conduct her to Anna Arkadyevna. Kitty, flushed, took her train from Krivin's knees, and, a little giddy, looked round, seeking Anna. Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had so urgently wished, but in a black, low- cut, velvet gown, showing her full shoulders and bosom, that looked as though carved in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender hands. The whole gown was trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her black hair - her own, with no false additions - was a little wreath of pansies, and a similar one on the black ribbon of her sash, among white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little willful tendrils of her curly hair that persisted in escaping on the nape of her neck, and on her temples. Encircling her sculptured, strong neck was a thread of pearls.

Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured her invariably in lilac. But now, seeing her in black, she felt that she had not fully perceived her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was precisely in that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame and all that was seen was she - simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and animated.

She was standing, as always, very erect, and when Kitty drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her head slightly turned toward him.

"No, I won't cast a stone"' she was saying, in answer to something, "though I can't understand it," she went on, shrugging her shoulders, and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection toward Kitty. With a cursory feminine glance she scanned her attire, and made a movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by Kitty, signifying approval of her dress and her looks. "You came into the room dancing," she added.

"This is one of my most faithful supporters," said Korsunsky, bowing to Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. "The Princess helps to make any ball festive and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?" he said, bending down to her.

"Why, have you met?" inquired their host.

"Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white wolves - everyone knows us," answered Korsunsky. "A waltz, Anna Arkadyevna?"

"I don't dance whenever it's possible not to," she said.

"But tonight it's impossible," answered Korsunsky.

During the conversation Vronsky was approaching them.

"Well, since it's impossible tonight, let us start," she said, not noticing Vronsky's bow, and hastily put her hand on Korsunsky's shoulder.

"What is she vexed with him about?" thought Kitty, discerning that Anna had intentionally not responded to Vronsky's bow. Vronsky went up to Kitty, reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his regret at not having seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at Anna waltzing, as she listened to him. She expected him to ask her for a waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had barely put his arm round her slender waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterward - for several years - this look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.

"Pardon! Pardon! Waltz! Waltz!" shouted Korsunsky from the other side of the room, and, seizing the first young lady he came across he began dancing.

The Books: "The Hobbit" (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

As a child, I was never a Tolkien fanatic. I was a fanatic about other books - all of Madeleine L'Engle's "time" books, and I loved Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - and loved it so much that I didn't even get into the other books in that series (a situation that I do want to rectify some day). I read The Hobbit in 4th grade, and adored it - but it didn't propel me on to the level of fandom that some of my friends experienced - and I didn't read The Ring Trilogy until much later, high school maybe? I re-read all of them when Peter Jackson's movies came out, just to refresh - and I liked them better as an adult, but I feel like I missed that window - that tiny window that opens sometimes and creates a fanatic ... as opposed to just a fan. Not sure if that makes sense. I explain all of this mainly because I know how passionately people feel about these books, and I totally respect that. I respect passion about anything, pretty much (unless you say to me, "I am totally passionate about killing puppies with no remorse!" or "I am totally passionate about engineering some sort of genocide!" I am not supportive of THAT kind of passion!) So even though I don't share the passion for Tolkien's books, I totally get it, if that makes sense. I just somehow missed that moment. And, for me, I think The Hobbit is my favorite. There was something about it that captivated me as a small child (especially that kick-ass first chapter. You would be hard pressed to find a better opening to a book!) and I still feel it now as I flip through the pages.

There is something about how Tolkien sets up Bilbo Baggins in that first chapter which is just perfect. In not too many words, he paints a picture of the ultimate homebody. A cozy small creature who liked his fireplace and his meals and being cozy and warm inside. So to then picture him running and fleeing from monsters and such with huge scary wizards pushing him on is inconceivable. It's a classic tale - of someone called to a task who is not quite ready or prepared. But it was the picture of domestic warmth and comfort in that first chapter that sucked me in. I wasn't one of those little girls who really enjoyed "playing house" - but I DID like little small things ... I liked things in miniature. The people who lived behind the bookcase at Captain Kangaroo's house, for example. Or the entire "Borrowers" series - HEAVEN!! I loved Fisher Price ... because I loved the fact that they were so teeny ... I don't know why that caught my imagination so much, but it did. I wondered at the perspective of someone who was so small that he could use a human-sized thimble as a laundry basket. What would the world look like? I had a series of fairy books, where beautiful drawings of little fairies were shown lying around in buttercups or violets - flowers I knew well, I knew how small they were! So there was something about Bilbo's house, its perfect snugness, how he had everything he needed right there ... AND that he was small - not Fisher Price small - but small enough! I just loved that. I was sad when he had to leave his cozy house, and kept yearning and hoping for him to get back there again, where all was cozy and perfect. Which, of course, is Tolkien's point - not just in The Hobbit but in the Ring trilogy: the yearning for home ... Yearning for home makes up much of the world's great myths - it's probably the most human of all yearnings. Some hairy cave dude in 10,000 B.C. on a glacier killing a woolly mammoth is hoping that he will make it back to his hole in the rock by nightfall, where he will be safe for a time. You know ... we all have that. Tolkien was smart to make his heroes Hobbits, the most homebound of creatures - small, domestic, in love with comfort, not up for change ... and the simplest of pleasures are the best. To throw these creatures into the war between good and evil in their entire land ... Just perfect. Who else could save everything but a Hobbit??

And that's why the first chapter of The Hobbit is so perfect. Out of nowhere - seriously, out of a clear blue sky - dwarves show up at Bilbo Baggins' door, and breeze in, hanging up their many colored hats (I looooved as a kid that each dwarf had his own color hat ... It really appealed to my OCD side, and I memorized each dwarf's color, because it pleased me to do so. It gave order to the chaotic universe) and they all assume he is expecting them, but he not only has no idea what is going on, it takes Bilbo a while to really understand what is going to happen, and that he will not be able to say "no" to Gandalf.

I guess what I'm saying is I related to Bilbo. The picture Tolkien paints of the coziness of his house was so captivating to me that I never wanted to leave it myself. It was like the Beaver's house in Lion Witch Wardrobe (excerpt here) - a vision of coziness which is just made more poignant by the cold dangerous world just outside the warm yellow windows. Bilbo's house is like that. He has a moment in the first chapter when he gets sucked into the wizards' singing - and suddenly finds himself imagining unheard of things - dragons, jewels, being far far away from his home, caves, adventures - and it's terrifying to him.

Little does he know!

Here's an excerpt. I chose it because it has my favorite passage in the book, and maybe my second favorite thing Tolkien ever wrote (this has to be my first).

EXCERPT FROM The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

So they laughed and sang in the trees; and pretty fair nonsense I daresay you think it. Not that they would care; they would only laugh all the more if you told them so. They were elves of course. Soon Bilbo caught glimpses of them as the darkness deepened. He loved elves, though he seldom met them; but he was a little frightened of them too. Dwarves don't get on well with them. Even decent enough dwarves like Thorin and his friends think them foolish (which is a very foolish thing to think), or get annoyed with them. For some elves tease them and laugh at them, and most of all at their beards.

"Well, well!" said a voice. "Just look! Bilbo the hobbit on a pony, my dear! Isn't it delicious!"

Then off they went into another song as ridiculous as the one I have written down in full. At last one, a tall young fellow, came out from the trees and bowed to Gandalf and to Thorin.

"Welcome to the valley!" he said.

"Thank you!: said Thorin a bit gruffly; but Gandalf was already off his horse and among the elves, talking merrily with them.

"You are a little out of your way," said the elf: "that is, if you are making for the only path across the water and to the house beyond. We will set you right, but you had best get on foot, until you are over the bridge. Are you going to stay a bit and sing with us, or will you go straight on? Supper is preparing over there," he said. "I can smell the wood-fires for the cooking."

Tired as he was, Bilbo would have liked to stay a while. Elvish singing is not a thing to miss, in June under the stars, not if you care for such things. Also he would have liked to have a few private words with these people that seemed to know his names and all about him, although he had never seen them before. He thought their opinion of his adventure might be interesting. Elves know a lot and are wondrous folks for news, and know what is going on among the peoples of the land, as quick as water flows, or quicker.

But the dwarves were all for supper as soon as possible just then, and would not stay. On they all went, leading their ponies, till they were brought to a good path and so at last to the very brink of the river. It was flowing fast and noisily, as mountain-streams do of a summer evening, when sun has been all day on the snow far up above. There was only a narrow bridge of stone without a parapet, as narrow as a pony could well walk on; and over that they had to go, slow and careful, one by one, each leading his pony by the bridle. The elves had brought bright lanterns to the shore, and they sang a merry song as the party went across.

"Don't dip your beard in the foam, father!" they cried to Thorin, who was bent almost on to his hands and knees. "It is long enough without watering it."

"Mind Bilbo doesn't eat all the cakes!" they called. "He is too fat to get through key-holes yet!"

"Hush, hush! Good People! and good night!" said Gandalf, who came last. "Valleys have ears, and some elves have over merry tongues. Good night!"

And so at last they all came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide.

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least, and they found it hard to leave. Bilbo would gladly have stopped there for ever and ever - even supposing a wish would have taken him right back to his hobbit-hole without trouble. Yet there is little to tell about their stay.

The master of the house was an elf-friend - one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginning of History, the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North. In those days of our tale there were still some people who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was their chief.

He was as noble and as fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer. He comes into many tales, but his part in the story of Bilbo's great adventure is only a small one, though important, as you will see, if we ever get to the end of it. His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley.

I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales or one or two of the songs that they heard in that house. All of them, the ponies as well, grey refreshed and strong in a few days there. Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. Their bags were filled with food and provisions light to carry but strong to bring them over the mountain passes. Their plans were improved with the best advice. So the time came to midsummer eve, and they were to go on again with the early sun on midsummer morning.

Elrond knew all about runes of every kind. That day he looked at the swords they had brought from the trolls' lair, and he said: "These are not troll-make. They are old swords, very old swords of the High Elves of the West, my kin. They were made in Gondolin for the Goblin-wars. They must have come from a dragon's hoard or goblin plunder, for dragons and goblins destroyed that city many years ago. This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade. This, Gandalf, was Glamdring, Foehammer that the king of Gondolin once wore. Keep them well!"

"Whence did the trolls get them, I wonder?" said Thorin looking at his sword with new interest.

"I could not say," said Elrond, "but one may guess that your trolls had plundered other plunderers, or come on the remnants of old robberies in some hold in the mountains. I have heard that there are still forgotten treasures of old to be found in the deserted caverns of the mines of Moria, since the dwarf and goblin war."

Thorin pondered these words. "I will keep this sword in honour," he said. "May it soon cleave goblins once again!"

"A wish that is likely to be granted soon enough in the mountains!" said Elrond. "But show me now your map!"

He took it and gazed long at it, and he shook his head; for if he did not altogether approve of dwarves and their love of gold, he hated dragons and their cruel wickedness, and he grieved to remember the ruin of the town of Dale and its merry bells, and the burned banks of the bright River Running. The moon was shining in a broad silver crescent. He held up the map and the white light shone through it. "What is this?" he said. "There are moon-letters here, beside the plain runes which say 'five feet high the door and three may walk abreast.'"

"What are moon-letters?" asked the hobbit full of excitement. He loved maps, as I have told you before; and he also liked runes and letters and cunning handwriting, though when he wrote himself it was a bit thin and spidery.

"Moon-letters are rune-letters, but you cannot see them," said Elrond, "not when you look straight at them. They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them, and what is more, with the more cunning sort it must be a moon of the same shape and season as the day when they were written. The dwarves invented them and wrote them with silver pens, as your friends could tell you. These must have been written on a midsummer's eve in a crescent moon, a long while ago."

"What do they say?" asked Gandalf and Thorin together, a bit vexed perhaps that even Elrond should have found this out first, though really there had not been a chance before, and there would not have been another until goodness knows when.

"Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks," read Elrond, "and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the key-hole."

"Durin, Durin!" said Thorin. "He was the father or the fathers of the eldest race of Dwarves, the Longbeards, and my first ancestor: I am his heir."

"Then what is Durin's Day?" asked Elrond.

"The first day of the dwarves' New Year," said Thorin, "is as all should know the first day of the last moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin's Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again."

"That remains to be seen," said Gandalf. "Is there any more writing?"

"None to be seen by this moon," said Elrond, and he gave the map back to Thorin; and then they went down to the water to see the elves dance and sing upon the midsummer's eve.

The Books: "Gulliver's Travels" (Jonathan Swift)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Gulliver's Travels , by Jonathan Swift

Edgell Rickword said, of Jonathan Swift:

"[He is] the most vigorous hater we've ever had in our literature."

He said those words in the 20th century and I would imagine that the judgment will still stand, long into the future. Haters are easy to come by. But vigorous articulate haters with a skewering pen - leaving his enemies no escape? Rare indeed. I've read self-important political bloggers (is there any other kind?) describe what they are trying to do as Swiftian, and sorry, boys, gotta tell you: Don't flatter yourself. Meanie tantrum insults thrown like poo at a wall is not Swiftian, mkay, boys? And satire is more difficult to write properly than a well-wrought 5 act tragedy. Satire is out of style these days - the audience is much more literal now, that's just the way it is - so people (in general) don't have an ear for it. People are confronted with satire and the response more often than not is, "But he's exaggerating!!" Uhm, yeah. It's called satire. There's a reason why, to this day, "A Modest Proposal" is taught as the primary example of satire in Western literature. Nothing else comes close. It was published in 1729. That's how powerful it is. Everyone else is still trying to match it. I get so annoyed by people comparing themselves to Swift, I'm sorry. SPOOF is not satire. PARODY is not satire. That just goes to show you how definitions have been so degraded that nobody even knows what satire is. Anyway, whatever, I sound like the snot that I am, and I am totally fine with that, more and more every day. It's a delight when you come across an honest-to-God satirical piece of work nowadays - that really has the courage of its convictions, and doesn't crap out at the end. The first thing that comes to mind is the movie Election which so could have been terrible, or just a "spoof" of the election process. But it's not. It's deeper than that and it has deeper things to say. It's angrier. Satire is always angry. And the film just works as satire - with all its humor and rage and specificity.

Back to Swift. And his hating.

In 1725, Jonathan Swift wrote in a letter to his great friend Alexander Pope:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians - I will not speak of my own trade - soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of no dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.

You know, I really love that. Swift hated the "group". We see that so clearly in Gullivers Travels - a book broken up into 4 parts, with 4 different journeys of Lemuel Gulliver, to fantastical lands ruled by teeny people or giants or horse-like creatures, or whatever. These people are not individuals. They are groups. Gulliver is kind of a pompous ass, truth be told, he's always like, "As someone who has studied Sanskrit I understood what they were saying ..." "As a person with a deep background in calculus and fire-eating, I understood my role here ..." Like, the man has done everything, seen everything, and there's nothing you could tell him that he didn't know. He's a big fat bore. His wife and kids are probably psyched he goes away on such long journeys, just so they won't have to suffer through his pompous lectures anymore. But of course Gulliver would never see that about himself. He is an insufferable companion. That's one of the reasons why he is so funny.

My only complaint about my copy of the book is that the footnotes suck. I want more detail. Satire is necessarily very local, and so much of what Swift is satirizing is lost in the mists of time. I'm no history ignoramus, especially not when it comes to Ireland, and the British policies in Ireland - but still - the footnotes just aren't good enough. I would have liked more detail.

The book ends with Gulliver hanging out with the Houyhnhnms (benign horse-like creatures) and becoming so enraptured and used to their peaceful ways that he finds Yahoos (humans) absolutely disgusting. He returns home, and his wife and children run towards him, thrilled to see him, and he is so revolted by them he slams the door in their faces. This goes back to Swift's generalized hatred of the human race. He liked Tom, Dick and Harry - but mankind could suck it, as far as Swift was concerned. Not to mention the fact that he doesn't really see women as part of mankind - they are completely "other" and he is revolted by them. We see that in Gulliver when Gulliver is standing on the breast of the giant woman, and he sees her pores and the blackheads and the dirt on her bosom and it is totally disgusting. So fine. Women aren't included in "mankind". Tell me something I didn't already know!

There are many fantastical worlds here (I love the floating island) - and Swift describes the different ways and customs with great verve, so that you can really see the worlds - but my favorite parts of the books are when you can feel Swift's anger. Has there been a more angry writer? I'm hard-pressed to think of one. There's the scene where the Lilliputian palace catches on fire, and Gulliver, full of wine from the night before, realizes he has the perfect solution to put out the inferno - he urinates onto the palace, putting out the fire. I don't need a guide book to understand that. But there's a great plausible deniability about the whole enterprise, which makes Swift seem quite devilish. He's just telling a story, don't you know ... a fairy tale, with tiny people, and giants. Don't read too much into it! Come on now! You're being too serious!! It's brilliant.

I love anger. I love subversive literature. I love those who despise the status quo, those who are uppity trouble-makers. There's a lot of trouble to be made. There are a lot of things which are assumed to be true by the majority of people ... and anyone who comes out and says, "I HATE this" is held in suspicion. Swift was one of those people (even though in many ways he was part of the establishment). But he couldn't help but see, with his laser eye, how horrible politics were, how stupid everybody was (for the most part), and really how awful people were, especially those with any authority - just look at how we treat each other. It is indefensible. Swift does not defend that which is indefensible and I love that about him.

One of the centerpieces of the book is when Gulliver sits down with the King of the giants - and tries to answer all of the King's questions about law/politics/society of the rest of the world (excerpt below). Swift is brilliant here. His pen is a sword. Sometimes you can't even tell that he IS cutting something. His enemy might never have known he has mortally wounded until his arm fell off - the slicing is that smooth and perfect. Swift often uses terms of praise and approbation - but in a way where you can tell he means the exact opposite. It's brutal. Swift shows the absurdity of all of this by putting it all into the questions from the King. One can imagine contemporaries of Swift howling with laughter at the thought of trying to answer those questions in the affirmative ("Were those holy lords I spoke of were always promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters?" "HELL NO!" etc.) ... and through that now-you-see-it now-you-don't literary maneuver, Swift stabs his opponent in the heart. The thing is: you could hear some pompous blowhard (who had been pricked, naturally, by the implications of the satire) try to defend himself - and say, 'Well, but yes, it is always more complicated than you would think ..." and it is THAT kind of person that Swift finds most disgusting. The ones with pride. The ones who have something to lose, the ones who choose to defend the indefensible. The rot goes to the deepest levels of society. If you try to deny it or defend it, you are Swift's enemy.

Yeats wrote a poem in honor of Swift:

Swift's Epitaph
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

That "imitate him if you dare" challenge still stands. Incredible.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Gulliver's Travels , by Jonathan Swift

The King, who, as I before observed, was a Prince of excellent Understanding, would frequently order that I should be brought in my Box, and set upon the Table in his Closet: He would then command me to bring one of my Chairs out of the Box, and sit down within three Yards Distance upon the Top of the Cabinet, which brought me almost to a level with his Face. In this Manner I had several Conversations with him. I one Day took the Freedom to tell his Majesty, that the Contempt he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the World, did not seem answerable to those excellent Qualities of the Mind he was Master of. That Reason did not extend it self with the Bulk of the Body: On the contrary, we observed in our Country, that the tallest Persons were usually least provided with it. That among other Animals, Bees and Ants had the Reputation of more Industry, Art and Sagacity, than many of the larger Kinds; and that, as inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live to do his Majesty some signal Service. The King heard me with Attention, and began to conceive a much better Opinion of me than he had ever before. He desired I would give him as exact an Account of the Government of England, as I possibly could; because, as fond as Princes commonly are of their own Customs (for so he conjectured of other Monarchs, by my former Discourses), he should be glad to hear of any Thing that might deserve Imitation.

Imagine with thy self, courteous Reader, how often I then wished for the Tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero, that might have enabled me to celebrate the Praise of my own dear native Country in a Stile equal to its Merits and Felicity.

I began my Discourse by informing his Majesty that our Dominions consisted of two Islands, which composed three mighty Kingdoms under one Sovereign, beside our Plantations in America. I dwelt long upon the Fertility of our Soil, and the Temperature of our Climate. I then spoke at large upon the Constitution of an English Parliament, partly made up of an illustrious Body called the House of Peers, Persons of the noblest Blood, and of the most ancient and ample Patrimonies. I described that extraordinary Care always taken of their Education in Arts and Arms, to qualify them for being Counsellors born to the King and Kingdom; to have a share in the Legislature; to be Members of the highest Court of Judicature, from whence there could be no Appeal; and to be Champions always ready for the Defence of their Prince and Country, by their Valour, Conduct, and Fidelity. That these were the Ornament and Bulwark of the Kingdom, worthy Followers of their most renowned Ancestors, whose Honour had been the Reward of their Virtue, from which their Posterity were never once known to degenerate. To these we joined several holy Persons, as part of that Assembly, under the Title of Bishops, whose peculiar Business it is to take care of Religion, and of those who instruct the People therein. These were searched, and sought out, through the whole Nation, by the Prince and his wisest Counsellors, among such of the Priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished by the Sanctity of their Lives, and the depth of their Erudition; who were indeed the spiritual Fathers of the Clergy and the People.

That, the other Part of the Parliament consisted of an Assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal Gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the People themselves, for their great Abilities and Love of their Country, to represent the Wisdom of the whole Nation. And these two Bodies make up the most august Assembly in Europe, to whom, in Conjunction with the Prince, the whole Legislature is Committed.

I then descended to the Courts of Justice, over which the Judges, those venerable Sages and Interpreters of the Law presided, for determining the disputed Rights and Properties of Men, as well as for the Punishment of Vice, and Protection of Innocence. I mentioned the prudent Management of our Treasury; the Valour and Atchievements of our Forces by Sea and Land. I computed the Number of our People, by reckoning how many Millions there might be of each religious Sect, or political Party among us. I did not omit even our Sports and Pastimes, or any other Particular which I thought might redound to the Honour of my Country. And I finished all with a brief historical Account of Affairs and Events in England for about an hundred Years past.

This Conversation was not ended under five Audiences, each of several Hours, and the King heard the whole with great Attention, frequently taking Notes of what I spoke, as well as Memorandums of all Questions he intended to ask me.

When I had put an End to these long Discourses, his Majesty in a sixth Audience consulting his Notes, proposed many Doubts, Queries, and Objections, upon every Article. He asked what Methods were used to cultivate the Minds and Bodies of our young Nobility, and in what kind of Business they commonly spent the first and teachable Part of their Lives. What Course was taken to supply that Assembly when any Noble Family became extinct. What Qualifications were necessary in those who were to be created new Lords: Whether the Humour of the Prince, a Sum of Money to a Court Lady or a Prime Minister, or a Design of strengthening a Party opposite to the publick Interest, ever happened to be Motives in those Advancements. What Share of Knowledge these Lords had in the Laws of their Country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide the Properties of their Fellow-Subjects in the last Resort. Whether they were always so free from Avarice, Partialities, or Want, that a Bribe, or some other sinister View, could have no Place among them. Whether those holy Lords I spoke of were always promoted to that Rank upon account of their Knowledge in religious Matters, and the Sanctity of their Lives, had never been Compliers with the Times while they were common Priests, or slavish prostitute Chaplains to some Nobleman, whose Opinions they continued servilely to follow after they were admitted into that Assembly.

He then desired to know what Arts were practiced in electing those whom I called Commoners: Whether a Stranger with a strong Purse might not influence the vulgar Voters to choose him before their own Landlord, or the most considerable Gentleman in the Neighbourhood. How it came to pass, that People were so violently bent upon getting into this Assembly, which I allowed to be a great Trouble and Expense, often to the Ruin of their Families, without any Salary or Pension: Because this appeared such an exalted Strain of Virtue and publick Spirit, that his Majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always sincere: and he desired to know whether such zealous Gentlemen could have any Views of refunding themselves for the Charges and Trouble they were at, by sacrificing the publick Good to the Designs of a weak and vicious Prince in Conjunction with a corrupted Ministry. He multiplied his Questions, and sifted me thoroughly upon every Part of this Head, proposing numberless Enquiries and Objections, which I think it not prudent or convenient to repeat.

Upon what I said in relation to our Courts of Justice, his Majesty desired to be satisfied in several Points: And this I was the better able to do, having been formerly almost ruined by a long Suit in Chancery, which was decreed for me with Costs. He asked, what Time was usually spent in determining between Right and Wrong, and what Degree of Expence. Whether Advocates and Orators had Liberty to plead in Causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or oppressive. Whether Party in Religion or Politicks were observed to be of any Weight in the Scale of Justice. Whether those pleading Orators were Persons educated in the general Knowledge of Equity, or only in provincial, national, and other local Customs. Whether they or their Judges had any Part in penning those Laws which they assumed the Liberty of interpreting and glossing upon at their Pleasure. Whether they had ever at different Times pleaded for and against the same Cause, and cited Precedents to prove contrary Opinions. Whether they were a rich or a poor Corporation. Whether they received any pecuniary Reward for pleading or delivering their Opinions. And particularly whether they were ever admitted as Members in the lower Senate.

He fell next upon the Management of our Treasury; and said, he thought my Memory had failed me, because I computed our Taxes at about five or six Millions a Year, and when I came to mention the Issues, he found they sometimes amounted to more than double; for the Notes he had taken were very particular in this Point, because he hoped, as he told me, that the Knowledge of our Conduct might be useful to him, and he could not be deceived in his Calculations. But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a Loss how a Kingdom could run out of its Estate like a private Person. He asked me, who were our Creditors; and where we should find Money to pay them. He wonder'd to hear me talk of such chargeable and extensive Wars; that certainly we must be a quarrelsome People, or live among very bad Neighbours, and that our Generals must needs be richer than our Kings. He asked what Business we had out of our own Islands, unless upon the Score of Trade or Treaty, or to defend the Coasts with our Fleet. Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing Army in the midst of Peace, and among a free People. He said, if we were governed by our own Consent in the Persons of our Representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my Opinion, whether a private Man's House might not better be defended by himself, his Children, and Family, than by half a dozen rascals picked up at a venture in the Streets, for small Wages, who might get a hundred times more by cutting their Throats.

He laughed at my odd Kind of Arithmetick (as he was pleased to call it) in reckoning the Numbers of our People by a Computation drawn from the several Sects among us in Religion and Politicks. He said, he knew no Reason, why those who entertain Opinions prejudicial to the Publick, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was Tyranny in any Government to require the first, so it was Weakness not to enforce the second: For a Man may be allowed to keep poisons in his Closet, but not to vend them about for Cordials.

He observed, that among the Diversions of our Nobility and Gentry, I had mentioned Gaming. He desired to know at what Age this Entertainment was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their Time it employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their Fortunes: Whether mean vicious People, by their Dexterity in that Art, might not arrive at great Riches, and sometimes keep our very Nobles in Dependance, as well as habituate them to vile Companions, wholly take them from the Improvement of their Minds, and force them, by the Losses they have received, to learn and practice that infamous Dexterity upon others.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce.

His Majesty in another Audience was at the Pains to recapitulate the Sum of all I had spoken, compared the Questions he made with the Answers I had given; then taking me into his Hands, and stroaking me gently, delivered himself in these Words, which I shall never forget nor the Manner he spoke them in: My little Friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country: You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice may be sometimes the only Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator: That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some Lines of an Institution, which in its Original might have been tolerable, but these half erazed, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by Corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one Virtue is required towards the Procurement of any one Station among you, much less that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue, that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning, Soldiers for their Conduct or Valour, Judges for their Integrity, Senators for the Love of their Country, or Counsellors for their Wisdom. As for yourself, (continued the King,) who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

The Books: "East of Eden" (John Steinbeck)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

I just love this book so much. There's one sentence in it about springtime coming to Salinas Valley in California (I looked for the sentence, and can't find it) - and the image is that the flowers become so gold that you could almost believe the color is molten, that you could dip a spoon into the flower and scoop out some liquid gold. To me, that's what the entire book feels like. Pure molten gold. So good you want to savor it, you want every word to last, you don't want it to end. It's just words on a page - in the same way that the flowers are just yellow .... but all together, it takes on a palpably fluid and tangible essence.

There is so much in it. It has minutia, conversation, details, and it has grandiosity to a Biblical level. It goes into family drama, the personalities of multiple people - fully drawn, complex ... and it also rhapsodizes about the development of the West, and all that that means. So much. There is the history of California, first of all. There is also the history of two families - the Hamiltons and the Trasks ... side by side ... and man, you couldn't get two families with more divergent energies than those two! The book goes through three generations. You get to know Samuel Hamilton as well as you know anyone in your own life. Same with Adam Trask. And Charles Trask (shivers). Not to mention Cathy - a demonic force who comes into their lives from the east (east of Eden?) - leaving a trail of destruction behind her, nothing that can be pinned on her, but she's a wrecker. You also get a parable of good vs. evil. I think Steinbeck truly believed that good prevails. Even if it takes many lifetimes. Even if it seems, at times, that evil wins out ... I think he felt that there was a morality at the heart of man, an essential goodness ... that could not be killed. His books can be quite dark, but there is an optimism there that cannot be destroyed, and that is never as clear as it is in East of Eden, which - with all its tragedy - has one of the most hopeful endings of all of Steinbeck's books (perhaps of any book!). People like Cathy are not malevolent because they're just born bad, and they like to stir up shit (although that is true with Cathy as well - but that's a symptom, not a cause). Someone like Cathy is malevolent because goodness actually disturbs her, she doesn't understand it, and so it cannot be allowed to stand. She is an alien from another planet. She would make a great dictator. She would understand Pol Pot, and Stalin. She is tone-deaf, when it comes to conventional morality and any kind of softness. She has learned to lie, and make the correct cooing noises that sound relatively human so that no one will pick up the scent ... but she looks around the world, sees everyone behaving in a way she finds incomprehensible (she only understands selfish motives), and will do whatever it takes to get whatever she wants. Steinbeck obviously sees that most of us are mixed bags - we all have good and evil, and if we are moderately healthy (meaning spiritually) - we can allow the two things to battle it out within us. If you are too good (like Adam Trask), you risk being naive, stupid, and forgiving towards those who do not deserve it. Look out. Don't be TOO good. Because then you'll have demons like Cathy and Charles walk all over you.

By the end of the book, we have another set of brothers - Cal and Aron ... again, with the good and evil, but by this time, perhaps it's been watered down - not so intensely stark as it was in earlier generations. Cal FEELS he is all bad, but that is only in comparison to his brother, Aron - the golden boy, who has his father's unconditional love. But Cal is obviously not all bad. It is his own psyche he must struggle with, his motherlessness state - his curiosity about who his mother is (it is Cathy, of course) - and how he feels that he must have some of Cathy in him. There's got to be a reason he has these bad thoughts, and wants to steal Aron's girlfriend, and all the other stuff.

Even to lay out the book like this does it a disservice, because reading it calls to mind the "feast of reason and flow of soul" from Alexander Pope. It is intellectually rigorous, yet it has a LAZY pace - and I mean that in the best way. We are not in a race to the finish. Life is long. There is time. There is time for long philosophical conversations - where the characters hash out things - not things that have anything to do with plot, or story - but with ideas. There is great passion in the book, and terror as well.

The character of Cathy scared the shit out of me from the first moment I met her, and she scares me still. She comes up often in my brain, as a marker, a reminder. I have many questions and thoughts about people who seem blatantly amoral - people who seem as though they are missing something. Where does that come from? Their environment? They weren't taught well? Or is it (as Steinbeck suggests) that monsters are possible? Psychological monsters. Cathy is "off" from the moment she is born. She looks at her parents and feels no attachment or familial feeling. Even as a tiny child, she looked at them and knew they would be obstacles. She is terrifying.

I suppose some people would find the themes of the book too black and white, too starkly oppositional - but I don't find it that way at all. Perhaps because it is NOT a condensed story, it has no urgency - so I never feel like Steinbeck is hammering me over the head. Yes, we have three generations of brothers - with the "good" brother having a name starting with A, and the "bad" brother having a name starting with C - Cain, Abel, yeah, we got it Steinbeck ... but again, because of the length and the unrushed pace of the book, I always felt more like I was just meeting people, not symbols or allegories.

I think a lot of what helps is that there is another family we also get to know - the Hamilton family, a huge sprawling Irish family who lives on the nearby farm. Steinbeck's actual mother's name was Olive Hamilton - and there's an Olive Hamilton in the book who marries a Steinbeck. So. Obviously, Steinbeck is blending fiction and autobiography here. The Hamiltons are just - God, I love those people. Many of their stories will stay in my brain forever. Olive Hamilton getting a ride from a barnstormer. The dressmaker daughter, fun-loving, awesome, and the heartbreak which changed her whole life. Liza, the matriarch - a tough humorless woman who does her best to keep her dreamy husband in line, with all his pipe dreams. She's an amazing character. The family: hard-working, faithful, loyal, tempestuous, impractical - the immigrant experience (the Irish immigrant experience) writ large.

And then, of course, there is Lee, the servant at the Trask house - a Chinese man - who befriends Samuel Hamilton. I can barely speak about Lee without getting a lump in my throat. He is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. He speaks pidgin English, and then one night - on a long buggy ride home with Samuel Hamilton - he finally breaks out of it, and speaks like normal, in perfect English. Yet he maintains the broken English for most people, because he finds it easier to get along with them ... He says that if he spoke properly other people wouldn't understand him. An amazing commentary on racism and how it colors how we see others. We can't even hear them. But Lee ... I don't even know where to start. He's in most of the book, since he comes to the Trask house early on and is there to the end - through generations. He is a philosopher, he's no dummy, but he's not a wise sage with all the answers - just a man who thinks deeply, and has ideas about the best way to live. I freakin' LOVE Lee. And I love Steinbeck for creating him, because sometimes I just pull down my copy of the book and read over some of the long conversational passages between Lee and Samuel - where they sit and discuss the Bible, and good and evil, and the words you should choose to live by if you want to live a good life.

Like I said, if you are anxious for plot or things to happen then East of Eden is not your book. But man, it has enriched my life immeasurably to read this book time and time again. It makes me think. It makes me proud of America, but in a really humble and sometimes complicated way. Because, like anything, it is a mixed bag. You must take the evil with the good. If you put your hands over your ears and shout LALALALA at the thought of evil ... then you are even more vulnerable to it. It is those who are slightly cynical, slightly distant (like Lee, like Abra, another great character who doesn't enter until the last third of the book) - who have the best fighting chance. They have not been totally corrupted, yet they are nobody's fools.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that I just love all of these people. Not Cathy. No way. That bitch is on her own, she scares me ... but everyone else? It's just a pleasure to hang out with them. It's not always fun - they go through hell ... but don't we all.

It's a deeply human book, one of my all-time favorites.

Here's an excerpt. You can see here how Adam, with all his good intentions, is blind to reality and cannot sense that ... well. I suppose we are all blinded by love to some extent, so I do not judge him too harshly. But you can see Samuel Hamilton looking at Cathy, first time meeting her, and knowing that something is not quite right. It's a chilling scene, the most chilling part being Adam's utter oblivion - which seems almost willful. Like - he is CHOOSING to not see what is going on. He chose to be blind from the start. That is Steinbeck's complexity. Adam is not just an idiot, a moony-eyed moron who can't conceive of evil. No. He DECIDES to not believe in it, even when faced with it headon. It's a choice. Free will. His brother Charles, bad to the bone, looked at Cathy and knew exactly what kind of monster he was dealing with. But Adam? Adam fell in love. Nightmare.

EXCERPT FROM East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

Because the day had been hot, Lee set a table outside under an oak tree, and as the sun neared the western mountains he padded back and forth from the kitchen, carrying the cold meats, pickles, potato salad, coconut cake, and peach pie which were supper. In the center of the table he placed a gigantic stoneware pitcher full of milk.

Adam and Samuel came from the wash house, their hair and faces shining with water, and Samuel's beard was fluffy after its soaping. They stood at the trestle table and waited until Cathy came out.

She walked slowly, picking her way as though she were afraid she would fall. Her full skirt and apron concealed to a certain extent her swelling abdomen. Her face was untroubled and childlike, and she clasped her hands in front of her. She had reached the table before she looked up and glanced from Samuel to Adam.

Adam held her chair for her. "You haven't met Mr. Hamilton, dear," he said.

She held out her hand. "How do you do," she said.

Samuel had been inspecting her. "It's a beautiful face," he said. "I'm glad to meet you. You are well, I hope?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, I'm well."

The men sat down. "She makes it formal whether she wants to or not. Every meal is a kind of occasion," Adam said.

"Don't talk like that," she said. "It isn't true."

"Doesn't it feel like a party to you, Samuel?" he asked.

"It does so, and I can tell you there's never been such a candidate for a party as I am. And my children - they're worse. My boy Tom wanted to come today. He's spoiling to get off the ranch."

Samuel suddenly realized that he was making his speech last to prevent silence from falling on the table. He paused, and the silence dropped. Cathy looked down at her plate while she ate a sliver of roast lamb. She looked up as she put it between her small sharp teeth. Her wide-set eyes communicated nothing. Samuel shivered.

"It isn't cold, is it?" Adam asked.

"Cold? No. A goose walked over my grave, I guess."

"Oh, yes, I know that feeling."

The silence fell again. Samuel waited for some speech to start up, knowing in advance that it would not.

"Do you like our valley, Mrs. Trask?"

"What? Oh, yes."

"If it isn't impertinent to ask, when is your baby due?"

"In about six weeks," Adam said. "My wife is one of those paragons - a woman who does not talk very much."

"Sometimes a silence tells the most," said Samuel, and he saw Cathy's eyes leap up and down again, and it seemed to him that the scar on her forehead grew darker. Something had flicked her the way you'd flick a horse with the braided string popper on a buggy whip. Samuel couldn't recall what he had said that had made her give a small inward start. He felt a tenseness coming over him that was somewhat like the feeling he had just before the water wand pulled down, an awareness of something strange and strained. He glanced at Adam and saw that he was looking raptly at his wife. Whatever was strange was not strange to Adam. His face had happiness on it.

Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel's mind repeated, "Something - something - can't find what it is. Something's wrong," and the silence hung on the table.

There was a shuffle behind him. He turned. Lee set a teapot on the table and shuffled away.

Samuel began to talk to push the silence away. He told how he had first come to the valley fresh from Ireland, but within a few words neither Cathy nor Adam was listening to him. To prove it, he used a trick he had devised to discover whether his children were listening when they begged him to read to them and would not let him stop. He threw in two sentences of nonsense. There was no response from either Adam or Cathy. He gave up.

He bolted his supper, drank his tea scalding hot, and folded his napkin. "Ma'am, if you'll excuse me, I'll ride off home. And I thank you for your hospitality."

"Good night," she said.

Adam jumped to his feet. He seemed torn out of a reverie. "Don't go now. I hoped to persuade you to stay the night."

"No, thank you, but that I can't. And it's not a long ride. I think - of course, I know - there'll be a moon."

"When will you start the wells?"

"I'll have to get my rig together, do a piece of sharpening, and put my house in order. In a few days I'll send the equipment with Tom."

The life was flowing back into Adam. "Make it soon," he said. "I want it soon. Cathy, we're going to make the most beautiful place in the world. There'll be nothing like it anywhere."

Samuel switched his gaze to Cathy's face. It did not change. The eyes were flat and the mouth with its small up-curve at the corners was carven.

"That will be nice," she said.

For just a moment Samuel had an impulse to do or say something to shock her out of her distance. He shivered again.

"Another goose?" Adam asked.

"Another goose." The dusk was falling and already the tree forms were dark against the sky. "Good night, then."

"I'll walk down with you."

"No, stay with your wife. You haven't finished your supper."

"But I --"

"Sit down, man. I can find my own horse, and if I can't I'll steal one of yours." Samuel pushed Adam gently down in his chair. "Good night. Good night. Good night, ma'am." He walked quickly toward the shed.

Old platter-foot Doxology was daintily nibbling hay from the manger with lips like two flounders. The halter chain clinked against wood. Samuel lifted down his saddle from the big nail where it hung by one wooden stirrup and swung it over the broad back. He was lacing the latigo through the cinch rings when there was a small stir behind him. He turned and saw the silhouette of Lee against the last light from the open shadows.

"When you come back?" the Chinese asked softly.

"I don't know. In a few days or a week. Lee, what is it?"

"What is what?"

"By God, I got creepy! Is there something wrong here?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well what I mean."

"Chinee boy ju' workee - not hear, not talkee."

"Yes, I guess you're right. Sure, you're right. Sorry I asked you. It wasn't very good manners." He turned back, slipped the bit in Dox's mouth, and laced the big flop ears into the headstall. He slipped the halter and dropped it in the manger. "Good night, Lee," he said.

"Mr. Hamilton --"

"Yes?"

"Do you need a cook?"

"On my place I can't afford a cook."

"I'd work cheap."

"Liza would kill you. Why - you want to quit?"

"Just thought I'd ask," said Lee. "Good night."

The Books: "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Steinbeck)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

I was always an East of Eden fan myself - and while some people find fault in East of Eden, find the allegory too obvious, the structure too sprawling and nonlinear - I LOVE it, every word, every page. However, Steinbeck will probably be most remembered for Grapes of Wrath - which was published in 1939, the memories of the decade of the 30s, its grim earlier years - still fresh to the people of America. The book was a smash hit (and not without controversy). Steinbeck takes a reportorial role. Yes, the book is the story of the Joad family on the road to California looking for work, escaping the Dust Bowl, but it's more about the conditions at the time, and the larger issues of the day. It's a book of social and political critique. East of Eden feels like a more personal book, to me, even with all the Biblical allegory stuff. Not that personal = better ... just different. Grapes of Wrath has a preachy aspect to some of it - much in tune with the times, perhaps, but the book is dated because of it. Like reading Odets' Waiting For Lefty (excerpt here) and Paradise Lost (excerpt here) - you could not "update" those, they belong in the 1930s. Nothing wrong with that, again ... but that's where the preachiness comes from. East of Eden, with its generational sweep of characters, and its ruminations on good and evil as embodied by Cal and Abra and Cathy and all the other characters with names beginning with C and A, somehow feels less dated to me, and more human.

Steinbeck was a really interesting guy - and I love it that his books are among the most "challenged" books to this day, by prudish school boards and ninnies who find his work dangerous. Well, sure his books are dangerous. That's called literature. I don't know - you might not be a fan, but you can't really ignore him. That would be stupid. He was a man of his time - a 20th century observational writer, a critic, a man who wanted to expose certain things, bring them out into the light, with his eye on the "forgotten man". The underclass, the ignored.

He lived a wide life, with many different phases - a kind of Mark Twain of his time. He didn't limit himself to one genre. His output was incredible. He wrote screenplays, he was a journalist - although his concerns were American and what was going on in America as a whole, he was also one of the most local of writers - which really comes to play in East of Eden, and its amazing evocation of the Salinas Valley in California. That was his home, his peeps, and he wrote of that area deeply and sensitively. If you've read East of Eden, doesn't it just come alive? There are certain writers who not only remember their roots, but need their roots - it is the wellspring of their talent, their vision. Steinbeck was definitely one of those writers.

Grapes of Wrath has, in my humble opinion, the one of the greatest openings of a book, AND one of the greatest closings. That last scene is shattering, just shattering ... and the opening, with his haunting eerie chapter about the dust rising into the air ... is just magnificent. Steinbeck starts big in Grapes of Wrath - with undifferentiated characters - just "people" - it's the landscape and the dust storms that are the "stars" - and he ends small - with Rose of Sharon nursing the old man in the barn.

Here's an excerpt. There's something cinematic in the writing here. You can see the sweep of the landscape, from far above ... lines on a map, highways, the endless caravan of people. And again it goes from the grand, the huge, to the very small and minute and then back out again to the telescopic view. Reminds me of James Agee's writing quite a bit.

EXCERPT FROM The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66 - the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield - over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there's an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City, and Texola; and there's an end to Oklahoma. 66 across the Panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there's an end of Texas. Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexican mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe. Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Las Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there's the border of New Mexico.

And now the high mountains. Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona. Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell. Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold. Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains o Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that's the end of Arizona. There's California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it. Needles, on the river. But the river is a stranger in this place. Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there's the desert. And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance. At last there's Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it's over.

The people in flight streamed out on 66, sometimes a single car, sometimes a little caravan. All day they rolled slowly along the road, and at night they stopped near water. In the day ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting rods hammered and pounded. And the men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened apprehensively. How far between towns? It is a terror between towns. If something breaks - well, if something breaks we camp right here while Jim walks to town and gets a part and walks back and - how much food we go?

Listen to the motor. Listen to the wheels. Listen with your ears and with your hands on the steering wheel; listen with the palm of your hand on the gearshift lever; listen with your feet on the floor boards. Listen to the pounding old jalopy with all your senses, for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm may mean - a week here? That rattle - that's tappets. Don't hurt a bit. Tappets can rattle till Jesus comes again without no harm. But that thudding as the car moves along - can't hear that - just kind of feel it. Maybe oil isn't gettin' someplace. Maybe a bearin's startin' to go. Jesus, if it's a bearing, what'll we do? Money's goin' fast.

And why's the son-of-a-bitch heat up so hot today? This ain't no climb. Le's look. God Almighty, the fan belt's gone! Here, make a belt outa this little piece a rope. Le's see how long - there. I'll splice the ends. Now take her slow - slow, till we can get to a town. That rope belt won't last long.

'F we can on'y get to California where the oranges grow before this here ol' jug blows up. 'F we on'y can.

And the tires - two layers of fabric worn through. On'y a four-ply tire. Might get a hundred miles more outa her if we don't hit a rock an' blow her. Which'll we take - a hunderd, maybe, miles, or maybe spoil the tubes? Which? A hunderd miles. Well, that's somepin you got to think about. We got tube patches. Maybe when she goes she'll only spring a leak. How about makin' a boot? Might get five hunderd more miles. Le's go on till she blows.

We got to get a tire, but, Jesus, they want a lot for a ol' tire. They look a fella over. They know he got to go on. They know he can't wait. And the price goes up.

Take it or leave it. I ain't in business for my health. I'm here a-sellin' tires. I ain't givin' 'em away. I can't help what happens to you. I got to think what happens to me.

How far's the nex' town?

I seen forty-two cars a you fellas go by yesterday. Where you all come from? Where all of you goin'?

Well, California's a big State.

It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn't you go back where you come from?

This is a free country. Fella can go where he wants.

That's what you think! Ever hear of the border patrol on the California line? Police from Los Angeles - stopped you bastards, turned you back. Says, if you can't buy no real estate we don't want you. Says, got a driver's license? Le's see it. Tore it up. Says you can't come in without no driver's license.

It's a free country.

Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it.

In California they got high wages. I got a han'bill here tells about it.

Baloney! I seen folks comin' back. Somebody's kiddin' you. You want that tire or don't ya?

Got to take it, but, Jesus, mister, it cuts into our money! We ain't got much left.

Well, I ain't no charity. Take her along.

Got to, I guess. Let's look her over. Open her up, look a' the casing - you son-of-a-bitch, you said the casing was good. She's broke damn near through.

The hell she is. Well - by George! How come I didn' see that?

You did see it, you son-of-a-bitch. You wanta charge us four bucks for a busted casing. I'd like to take a sock at you.

Now keep your shirt on! I didn' see it, I tell you. Here - tell ya what I'll do. I'll give ya this one for three-fifty.

You'll take a flying jump at the moon! We'll try to make the nex' town.

Think we can make it on that tire?

Got to. I'll go on the rim before I give that son-of-a-bitch a dime.

What do ya think a guy in business is? Like he says, he ain't in it for his health. That's what business is. What'd you think it was? Fella's got - See that sign 'longside the road there? Service Club. Luncheon Tuesday, Colmado Hotel? Welcome, brother. That's a Service Club. Fella had a story. Went to one of them meetings an' told the story to all them business men. Says, when I was a kid my ol' man give me a haltered heifer an' says take her down an' git her serviced. An' the fella says, I done it, an' ever' time since then when I hear a business man talkin' about service, I wonder who's gettin' screwed. Fella in business got to lie an' cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That's what's important. You go steal that tire an' you're a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.

Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water.

Have to wait. Got no water here.

Listen - that the rear end?

Can't tell.

Sound telegraphs through the frame.

There goes a gasket. Got to go on. Listen to her whistle. Find a nice place to camp an' I'll jerk the head off. But, God Almighty, the food's gettin' low, the money's gettin' low. When we can't buy no more gas - what then?

Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water. Little fella's thirsty.

Listen to that gasket whistle.

Chee-rist! There she went. Blowed tube an' casing all to hell. Have to fix her. Save that casing to make boots; cut 'em out an' stick 'em inside a weak place.

Cars pulled up beside the road, engine heads off, tires mended. Cars limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot, loose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies.

Danny wants a cup of water.

People in flight along 66. And the concrete road shone like a mirror under the sun, and in the distance the heat made it seem that there were pools of water in the road.

Danny wants a cup of water.

He'll have to wait, poor little fella. He's hot. Nex' service station. Service station, like the fella says.

Two hundred and fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars - wounded, steaming. Wrecks along the road, abandoned. Well, what happened to them? What happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from?

And here's a story you can hardly believe, but it's true, and it's funny and it's beautiful. There was a family of twelve and they were forced off the land. They had no car. They built a trailer out of junk and loaded it with their possessions. They pulled it to the side of 66 and waited. And pretty soon a sedan picked them up. Five of them rode in the sedan and seven on the trailer, and a dog on the trailer. They got to California in two jumps. The man who pulled them fed them. And that's true. But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species? Very few things would teach such faith.

The people in flight from the terror behind - strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

The Books: "Prep" (Curtis Sittenfeld)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

My sister Jean was the one who made me read this book. I had heard about it - I mean, you'd have to have been actively not paying attention to NOT have heard about it ... It was one of those first novels that gets a tremendous amount of buzz (causing much envy in people like ... oh ... MYSELF), sits on the NY TImes bestseller list for a while, and has much press devoted to it. Sometimes that kind of buzz is a turnoff for me, especially with a first novel. But Bookslut also loved it - which usually means I will love it - and then my sister's opinion clinched the deal. Apparently she was on vacation with her boyfriend (now fiance), and she stood in the shallow end of the pool, in her bathing suit, standing there reading the book. She couldn't put it down. I love that image. They're in some Caribbean island paradise, and she's standing in the pool reading. Uhm, is your last name O'Malley? I thought so. But Jean has great taste in books - so I finally picked it up.

Like Jean said to me when we talked about it - the best thing about this book is the "voice". It should be taught to young writers who are trying to learn "voice". It's as distinctive a voice as Holden Caulfield, as potentially exasperating. But you HAVE to keep reading. I was amazed by how well Sittenfeld calls up the anxiety-ridden perceptive paranoid world of the teenage girl - Sometimes I found myself just cringing reading the book, but also thinking to myself, "Bravo, Sittenfeld. You just NAILED that moment." There are sections in the book which are as perceptive about teenage life as anything I have ever read - and it makes the book a pretty uncomfortable read, I have to say - because teenagers are awkward, and "playing" at being adults ... and you want to save Lee from all the trouble you know she's going to go through, but you can't. Sittenfeld also has a gift - a GIFT, I tell you - for honing in on a small moment, and exposing it, dissecting it. Most of these moments are things that are totally familiar to me, I have had such moments ... but I never thought to put them into words. The book has so many scenes like that. This is not a "Young Adult" book, although it's about high school.

Lee, our narrator, as a kid, was obsessed with prep schools. She is from the mid-west, her family is not a privileged wealthy family, but she somehow gets a scholarship to a prestigious New England prep school called Ault. And so she goes. The book is broken down into the four years of high school, and so we go through the entire time of her education with Lee. The book is episodic - there is not one thruline - some characters come and go, others stay ... It feels the way high school feels. Prep school is a whole different thing, though - and Sittenfeld, who went to prep school, just nails it. The huge class differences between the elite kids - born to go to prep school - and, say, the minority kids - most of whom have huge scholarships. Lee is not in either group. She's a middle-class kid, not brilliant academically, not a genius athlete - just determined to be there. Lee is not a pleasant companion (I suppose very few high school girls are). She is riddled with self-consciousness. It is horrible to read. But God, I recognize myself in it. She is concerned over who to be friends with, because of what it will look like. She has crushes on gorgeous junior boys. She struggles. But there comes a time when you realize: you know what, Lee? You need to fucking grow up. Sittenfeld does not sugarcoat Lee's social problems. Lee is not an ingratiating person - and I guess that was one of the main complaints Sittenfeld got with early drafts of the novel. Couldn't Lee be a bit more likable? But Sittenfeld stuck to her guns, and I think the book is MUCH stronger for it. It's not, perhaps, a fun read - as a matter of fact, the entire book made me wretchedly uncomfortable - but that's why it's literature, and not just fluff. Like my sister said: It's the voice. What a VOICE this book has. Completely successful in creating this character.

Another interesting thing about the voice is that you can tell that Lee is writing it from the perspective of being an adult and looking back on her prep school years. It is not the actual voice of a high school girl ... it is an adult woman looking back on and trying to put together her adolescence. There is a questioning tone to the voice at times, a psychological contemplation ... "I think what was going on with me in that moment was ..." etc. It's very effective. It's rather exhausting, too - because, you know, it's high school. High school is exhausting. And to look back on it, and look back on how you behaved, your moments of cruelty, your moments of indifference or stupidity ... It's not fun!

Lee has friendships, but they are suffused with self-consciousness. She has a lot of anxiety about school because she is not a brilliant student. She also is kind of embarrassed by her parents when they come to visit (and her father, man - he is just so well portrayed!!) - it's like she imbibes a certain snobbery that exists mostly in her own mind. Most of the kids around her are NOT snobs - but Lee, like most high school girls, wants to fit in, not be different, not stick out ... so she keeps herself distant from almost everyone, because nobody is "good enough" for her in her own mind. And the "voice" I keep talking about - the adult Lee - has a sense of sadness in it - a longing to go back, to have a "do over" ... because my God, what a waste. And don't we all have feelings like that??

But mostly it is Sittenfeld's acutely accurate observations about what goes on in social moments - the shifts, and silent signals - that is so superb. She really nails it, and I was in awe of much of what she was able to see. Those moments of clarity that even high school kids have - where they come out of themselves a bit - and realize who they are, or what really matters. Or also: that sensation of actually being seen. Having someone look at you, when you're 15, and seeing you. It is the road to being an adult. Of coming outside your own self-consciousness and self-absorption, and joining the world. You get the sense (and this is another reason why this is a very good book) that Lee is not going to have an easy time of it as an adult, either. Her high school awkwardness is not just a phase - it is going to inform her life forever ... and her regrets will be intense. Because it is hard for Lee to be her best self. It is hard for Lee to see beyond her own small circle. It's hard for most teenagers - but Lee is worse than most. And she mis-reads people terribly, despite her good eye for behavior. She misses HUGE clues and makes giant errors - which have big consequences. You know those moments in life when you accidentally, through your own awkwardness, hurt someone else's feelings? And you don't even know how to apologize but there's a frantic-ness in the need to make things right? But you don't think you can? Prep is so full of such moments that it is near agony to read at times.

Here's an example:

I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. Say it was Wednesday and there was an after-dinner lecture and you and your roommate struck up some unexpectedly fun conversation with the boys sitting next to you. Say the lecture turned out to be boring and so throughout it you whispered and made faces at one another, and then it ended and you all left the schoolhouse. And then forty minutes later, you, alone now, without the buffer of a roommate, were by the card catalog in the library and passed one of these boys, also without his friend - then what were you to do? To simply acknowledge each other by n odding would be, probably, unfriendly, it would be confirmation of the anomaly of your having shared something during the lecture, and already you'd be receding into your usual roles. But it would probably be worse to stop and talk. You'd be compelled to try prolonging the earlier jollity, yet now there would be no lecturer to make fun of, it would just be the two of you, overly smiley, both wanting to provide the quip onw hich the conversation could satisfactorily conclude. And what if, in the stacks, you ran into each other again? It would be awful!

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that's what you thought you'd been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture-to-library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction - I'd just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

And then this, about her friendship with Martha - this really struck a chord in me as well - I have great friends still from high school ... and something about this really resonates:

And as for Martha - I never understood when I was at Ault why she liked me as much as I liked her. Even now, I'm still not sure. I couldn't give back half of what she gave me, and that fact should have knocked off the balance between us, but it didn't, and I don't know why not. Later, after Ault, I reinvented myself - not overnight but little by little. Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-deprecation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I'd ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy. If Martha and I had met when we were, say, twenty-two, it wouldn't have been hard for me to believe she'd like me. But she had liked me before I became likable; that was the confusing part.

"she had liked me before I became likable". Very astute.

And this might be my favorite passage in the book. I felt a chill reading it. I had a moment identical to this one. Identical.

"Where are you gonna go?" he said. "Harvard?"

"Yeah, right."

"I bet you're smart. Get all As."

"I'll probably go somewhere like --" I stopped. When Martha or I thought we'd done badly on a test, we'd say I might as well just apply right now to UMass, but invoking UMass as a last resort would, clearly, be a bad idea. "--to dog school," I said brightly.

"What?" Dave looked across the seat at me.

"Like obedience school," I said.

"You have a dog?"

"No, no, I'm the dog."

He looked at me again, and it was a look I always remembered, long after that night and after I'd left Ault. He was confused and was registering a new piece of information and this was what it was: that I was a girl who would, even in jest, utter the sentence, I'm the dog. It was a good lesson for me. It was a while before I stopped insulting myself so promiscuously, and I never stopped completely, but still -- it was a good lesson.

This is a first novel. It's extraordinary. Sittenfeld writes with a confidence and authority that many more established authors would be jealous of. I haven't read her second book, but I will. She's definitely someone to watch.

Here's an excerpt from Lee's freshman year. I just think it's so so accurate. I have LIVED these moments!! The impossible coolness of some kids in high school - the upperclassmen especially - who are dating, and probably having sex (we always speculated) ... the ones who seem to have zero self-consciousness - and how on earth is that possible (I would think as an awkward freshman) ... How could someone NOT care what other people thought? And it was always those people who were THE coolest (at least in my school). The ones who strolled around with some level of self-confidence - at least in appearance.

EXCERPT FROM Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

All of this was still in the beginning of the year, the beginning of my time at Ault, when I was exhausted all the time by both my vigilance and my wish to be inconspicuous. At soccer practice, I worried that I would miss the ball, when we boarded the bus for games at other schools, I worried that I would take a seat by someone who didn't want to sit next to me, in class I worried I would say a wrong or foolish thing. I worried that I took too much food at meals, or that I did not disdain the food you were supposed to disdain - Tater Tots, key lime pie - and at night, I worried that Dede or Sin-Jun would hear me snore. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

Ault had been my idea. I'd researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself. Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard. I had traded away my family for this glossiness. I'd pretended it was about academics, but it never had been. Marvin Thompson High School the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy-haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker. But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome. And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school. I imagined that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy, athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did and on overcast Sundays we would take walks together wearing wool sweaters.

During the application process, my parents were mystified. The only person my family knew who had gone to boarding school was the son of one of the insurance agents in the office where my mother was a bookkeeper, and this kid's boarding school had been a fenced-in mountaintop in Colorado, a place for screwups. My parents suspected, in a way that was only honest, not unsupportive, that I would never be accepted to the places I'd applied; besides, they saw my interest in boarding school as comparable to other short-lived hobbies, like knitting (in sixth grade, I'd completed one third of a hat). When I got in, they explained how proud they were, and how sorry that they wouldn't be able to pay for it. The day a letter arrived from Ault offering me the Eloise Fielding Foster scholarship, which would cover more than three quarters of my tuition, I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea - I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I'd actually go.

In mid-September, weeks after school had started in South Bend for my brothers and my former classmates, my father drove me from Indiana to Massachusetts. When we turned in the wrought-iron gates of the campus, I recognized the buildings from photographs - eight brick structures plus a Gothic chapel surrounding a circle of grass which I already knew was fifty yards in diameter and which I also knew you were not supposed to walk on. Everywhere there were cars with the trunks open, kids greeting each other, fathers carrying boxes. I was wearing a long dress with peach and lavender flowers and a lace collar, and I noticed immediately that most of the students had on faded T-shirts and loose khaki shorts and flip-flops. I realized then how much work Ault would be for me.

After we found my dorm, my father started talking to Dede's father, who said, "South Bend, eh? I take it you teach at Notre Dam?" and my father cheerfully said, "No, sir, I'm in the mattress business." I was embarrassed that my father called Dede's father sir, embarrassed by his job, embarrassed by our rusty white Datsun. I wanted my father gone from campus as soon as possible, so I could try to miss him.

In the mornings, when I stood under the shower, I would think, I have been at Ault for twenty-four hours. I have been at Ault for three days. I have been at Ault for a month. I talked to myself as I imagined my mother would talk to me if she actually thought boarding school was a good idea. You're doing great. I'm proud of you, LeeLee. Sometimes I would cry while I washed my hair, but this was the thing - this was always the thing about Ault - in some ways, my fantasies about it had not been wrong. The campus really was beautiful: the low, distant, fuzzy mountains that turned blue in the evenings, the perfectly rectangular fields, the Gothic cathedral (it was only Yankee modesty that made them call it a chapel) with its stained glass windows. This beauty gave a tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness.

Several times, I recognized a student from a photograph in the catalog. It was disorienting, the way I imagined it might be to see a celebrity on the streets of New York or Los Angeles. These people moved and breathed, they ate bagels in the dining hall, carried books through the hallways, wore clothes other than the ones I'd memorized. They belonged to the real, physical world; previously, it had seemed as if they belonged to me.

In big letters across the top, the signs said, Drag yourself out of the dorm!!! In smaller letters, they said, Where? The dining hall! When? This Saturday! Why? To dance! The paper was red and featured a copied photograph of Mr. Byden, the headmaster, wearing a dress.

"It's a drag dance," I heard Dede explain to Sin-Jun one night. "You go in drag."

"In drag," Sin-Jun said.

"Girls dress as boys, and boys dress as girls," I said.

"Ohhh," Sin-Jun said. "Very good!"

"I'm borrowing a tie from Devin," Dede said. "And a baseball cap."

Good for you, I thought.

"Dev is so funny," she said. Sometimes, just because I was there and because, unlike Sin-Jun, I was fluent in English, Dede told me things about her life. "Who are you borrowing clothes from?" she asked.

"I haven't decided." I wasn't borrowing clothes from anyone because I wasn't going. I could hardly talk to my classmates, and I definitely couldn't dance. I had tried it once at a cousin's wedding and I had not been able to stop thinking, Is this the part where I throw my arms in the air?

The day of the dance - roll call and classes occurred even on Saturday mornings, which was, I soon learned, a good detail to break out for people from home, to affirm their suspicion that boarding school was only slightly different from prison - neither Gates nor Henry Thorpe was at the desk when the bell went off announcing the start of roll call. Someone else, a senior girl whose name I didn't know, rang the bell, then stepped down from the platform. Music became audible and students stopped murmuring. It was disco. I didn't recongize the song, but a lot of other people seemed to, and there was a rise of collective laughter. Turning in my seat, I realized the source of the music was two stereo speakers, each being held in the air by a different senior guy - there weren't enough desks for everyone in roll call, so juniors and seniors stood in the back of the room. The seniors seemed to be looking out the rear doorway. A few seconds passed before Henry Thorpe made his entrance. He wore a short black satin nightgown, fishnet stockings, and black high heels, and he was dancing as he approached the desk where he and Gates usually stood. Many students, especially