"And I should also say . . ."

That's how the great Joseph Mitchell begins one of the sentences in "A place of the pasts" (New Yorker, February 16, 2015).*  He ends the sentence with: ". . . part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home."

The beginning and ending are separated by one thousand, one hundred and fifty words.  A pretty long sentence, no?  And Mitchell's is a real sentence -- understandable by anyone who can read at the sixth grade level -- not some Joycean gobbledegook or Faulknerian gibberish.

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*Act fast.  I think free New Yorker links work for about a week; after that you need to be a subscriber.

Reading

In preparation for our travels:

• Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (Stephen Kinzer)
• The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (Neil Hegarty)

Only three other nonfiction:

• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Adam Hochschild)
• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Adam Hochschild)
• What It Takes: The Way to the White House (Richard Ben Cramer)

The rest were novels:

• Stoner (John Williams)
• TransAtlantic: A Novel (Colum Mccann)
• The Woman Upstairs (Claire Messud)
• Ragtime: A Novel (E.L. Doctorow)
• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (Julian Barnes)
• The Shack (William P. Young)
• Juniper Berry (M.P. Kozlowsky)
• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
• The Calder Game (Blue Balliett)
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 (Christopher Paul Curtis)

I have my wonderful granddaughter to thank for suggesting the last four entries in that list.

I'd recommend all these books except Transatlantic and The Graveyard Book.  I'm undecided about The Shack; I'm glad I read it, but I doubt that most people would care for it.  The best of the lot were To End All Wars and Stoner.

Update: The Shakespeare Stealer (Gary Blackwood), another of the wonderful granddaughter's suggestions, bridged the old and new year; I began it a couple days a few days after Christmas and finished it a week later.  It's good.

Reading list

E.L. Doctorow and Julian Barnes are two of my favorite novelists.  On those long, long, long flights to and from Turkey (and for a week or two before and after those flight, while sitting on the back deck with a cigar) I read Ragtime (Doctorow) and A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (Barnes).  Both were disappointing.  Ragtime -- which I subsequently learned is #86 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century but which, in fact, probably doesn't deserve to be included in a list of the 1,000 best -- is almost boring.  Half of A history of the world is wonderful, with funny, interesting stories marvelously told; the other half is . . . meh.

My absolutely perfect granddaughter, who is suddenly 11 years old, recently read and enjoyed The Watsons go to Birmingham--1963 and The Calder game.  In an attempt to get into the head of a perfect 11-year-old girl, I read them too.  The Watsons is about a fledgling juvenile delinquent from a northern black family who, with the rest of his family, happens to be in Birmingham in the summer of 1963 when the 16th Street Baptist Church is bombed, killing four little girls.  The Calder game is about pre-adolescent friendships, told against a background of modern art, theft, English country life, and the desperate search for a lost boy. Pretty heavy topics for an 11 year old, it seems to me.  When I was 11, I think my books were either A-boy-and-his-dog or How-Billy-won-the-big-game.

Claire Messud's The woman upstairs is very good.  I wonder what it says about me (maybe "Wuss"?) that I can relate to a lot of what goes on in the mind of the protagonist -- a 30-something year old unmarried woman who teaches third-grade.  Whatever it says about me, it clearly says that Claire Messud is a  pretty darned good writer.

I'm only three or four stories into The best American short stories 2012, but from what I've read so far I'd give it at least 4 stars.

Postscript:

Three novels, two kid's books, and a couple short stories spread over two or three months, I realize, isn't a lot of reading -- but it's more than I've read in quite a while..  How to explain it?  Simple: "I love me my Kindle."

Page-turner

Yesterday I had "lunch" -- actually, one pretty good cigar -- on the back deck.  On my way out, I picked up last week's New Yorker from our recycle basket.  I had already read a long, pretty good article in it ("A loaded gun") and I hadn't seen anything else in the table of contents that really piqued my interest, but come on -- I needed something to read with my cigar so I picked it up.  And I started reading an excerpt from an unfinished memoir by the great Joseph Mitchell.  And I was hooked.  It's fabulous!  It also has some of the longest sentences I've ever seen outside a Faulner novel or a Joyce whatever-those-things-are-that-Joyce-wrote.  For example (with great thanks to the "A Natural Curiosity" blog for presenting it in a form I can just copy and paste):

At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic, it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.

Future reading

A couple wild-eyed lefties I'd like to check out some day:

• Chris Hedges (whom I'd never heard of until I saw him on Book TV for all of 5 minutes)
• Amy Goodman (who can be so intense as to be almost scary)

A kindred spirit?

I went through a C.S. Lewis phase many years ago. Looking back on it now,

• His apologetics (Mere christianity, God in the dock) strike me as falling somewhere between disingenuous and dishonest.
• Surprised by Joy left me cold.
• Ditto his poetry.
• Narnia was plodding and uninteresting and long, long, long.
• His other works are only a faint memory; clearly they didn't make much of an impression, except for the Perelandra series, which was one of the few sci-fi works that I can say I enjoyed, though I suspect that if I revisited it now I would find it terribly heavy-handed and tedious.

All this notwithstanding, I just ordered A grief observed. (I probably read it before, but I have no clear recollection of it.)

Why bother going back to so disappointing an author? I suspect there might be more to him than I ever appreciated. That suspicion is raised by something Keillor said about the book this morning:

In the book, [Lewis] writes that he doesn't believe people are reunited with their loved ones in the next life. "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

The Writer's Almanac

Fish story

"Stanley Fish" sounds like somebody I should know about, but in fact he's a mystery to me. Wikipedia informs me he is "an American literary theorist and legal scholar" (so maybe there's no reason I should have known about him after all). Whatever, here's a link to a lovely little essay he wrote in The New York Times -- http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/my-life-report/?src=me&ref=general.

It sounds very honest and sincere (until you get to the last three paragraphs, that is, which sound phony, phony, phony).  I should hope to be able to write something like that myself some day, even if I wind up never showing it to anyone.

Let the great world spin

My goodness!

I just wrote about "Dean Spanley," which, -- at best -- is 3 stars out of 5, and I never even mentioned anything about the best novel I've read in a couple years -- the best since Gilead! Shame on me.

Clarence's speech

I thought this guy's impressions, some of them, anyway, were very good.

But what really -- ahem -- "impressed" me was the material. I remember reading the tragedies and histories one summer when I was a kid -- between junior and senior year in high school? Between high school and college, maybe? But I sure don't remember this great -- I say great!-- monologue.

Hans Castorp

At the library this afternoon, I spied a copy of The Magic Mountain. I stared at it for a minute or two trying to remember the protagonist's name -- and came up empty. Very disappointing, considering how much time and energy I put into reading that book (many, many years ago). The nearest I got was "Adrian Leverkühn" -- which is not near at all, since he's a character in an entirely different novel.

On the other hand, since The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus are both all-but-unintelligible gibberish, Adrian could easily have taken Hans's place in that sanitorium and Hans could have replaced Adrian as the champion of 12-tone music and I don't think anybody would have noticed.

A Dog's Death

SEAMUS
R.I.P 1997-2011

Seamus, usually called Shay or sometimes Seamus the Wonder Dog, died today, March 5. He was 13 and a half years old, and for most of that time was virtually a fixture of the neighborhood. Nicknamed long ago “the Mayor of Woodside Park,” he would lie in our front yard, surveying the passing scene, occasionally offering a bark or two of hello. Other dogs might be alpha-males, but Seamus was an omega, as docile and easygoing as any dog can ever be. In his younger days, he would sometimes wander off and many in the neighborhood have called our house to say “Do you know where your dog is?” Then we’d go fetch him on Pinecrest Circle or in the park near Spring Street, and he’d be thrilled to see us. His favorite activity—even more than eating—was taking walks in the woods, preferably near creeks in which he could splash and fetch sticks. Even in his last months, when suffering from a series of ailments, he remained a wonderful animal friend. In our memory, Shay will always be bounding across the front lawn, full of life and love. We miss him terribly.

Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Seamus sounds nothing at all like Bones.
And he sounds everything like Bones.
R.I.P., Seamus.
R.I.P., Bones.

Dirda goes on to mention a John Updike poem -- two actually -- that are worth reading:

• Dog's Death, and
• Another Dog's Death.

I've never been much of an Updike fan, but after reading these poems, I may have to reconsider.

Wigan Pier

I came across a wonderful quotation today from Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
Quoted by Harold Pollack, RBC

And this prompted me to search out my own very favorite paragraph from the book:

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are performing. Normally each man has to clear a space four or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Quote of the day

On the 30th of September I reported for duty at Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, with the 4th United States infantry. . . . Colonel Steven Kearney, one of the ablest officers of the day, commanded the post, and under him discipline was kept at a high standard, but without vexatious rules or regulations. Every drill and roll-call had to be attended, but in the intervals officers were permitted to enjoy themselves, leaving the garrison, and going where they pleased, without making written application to state where they were going for how long, etc., so that they were back for their next duty. It did seem to me, in my early army days, that too many of the older officers, when they came to command posts, made it a study to think what orders they could publish to annoy their subordinates and render them uncomfortable. I noticed, however, a few years later, when the Mexican war broke out, that most of this class of officers discovered they were possessed of disabilities which entirely incapacitated them for active field service. They had the moral courage to proclaim it, too. They were right; but they did not always give their disease the right name.

Personal memoirs of U.S. Grant, p 15.

Vacation reading, 2010

• Independence Day, Richard Ford
• Lush Life, Dallas Murphy
• The March, E.L. Doctorow
• The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry

Independence Day is very uneven: Some parts engrossing, others a struggle to get through. I'd give it a C+. People who know about literature and such were much more impressed -- in 1996 it won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award.

Lush Life is an easy read, perfect for the beach, I suppose, but I found it a silly story told in an annoyingly glib way. Another C+. The professionals? Publisher's Weekly calls it a "a fast-paced, if not always credible, tale." (Source)

(This doesn't make any sense at all. Both books got a C+, but Independence Day was far and away the better book. Go figure.)

The March is wonderful. Wonderful! Give it an A. I've tried to read several Doctorow books in the past, but this is the first one I've been able to get past page 30. This one, in fact, was hard to put down. Read this book! Oh, yeah-- the professionals like it too: It won the PEN/Faulker and the National Book Critics Circle awards.

I only got about a third of the way into The Secret Scripture -- and now that I'm home, I don't know when I'll get around to finishing it (I hardly do any reading here) but finish it I will. It's a wonderful book -- at least an A.

Letting go

That's the title of a wonderful essay by Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker. Articles like this are the reason I subscribe. It's available on-line (but who knows for how long?) at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

A few quotes:

The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.

Recently, while seeing a patient in an intensive-care unit at my hospital, I stopped to talk with the critical-care physician on duty, someone I’d known since college. “I’m running a warehouse for the dying,” she said bleakly. Out of the ten patients in her unit, she said, only two were likely to leave the hospital for any length of time. More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life, with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and out of consciousness.

And, at the risk of violating the author's copyright, one more:

I confessed that I was confused by what Creed [, who is a hospice nurse,] was doing. A lot of it seemed to be about extending [her patient]’s life. Wasn’t the goal of hospice to let nature take its course?

“That’s not the goal,” Creed said. The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months.

Read the whole thing!

Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington?

She was Lytton Strachey's wife or mistress or something. Also a pretty good artist, I say. Here's Strachey:


And here's E.M. Forster:
The Grove Dictionary of Art says:

She is aligned more with her Slade contemporaries than with Bloomsbury. The example of French art did not loosen her touch, and her obsession with her subject denied a more abstract perception of form. Often she is more Pre-Raphaelite than Post-Impressionist. The ‘preternatural acuteness’ that Julia Strachey observed in her view of others sharpens the fun in her letters and can give a startling intensity to her portraits and landscapes.

I'm not sure whether that means she is good or bad. Regardless, I like these portraits. I'll have to ask Abby what she thinks of them.

Great prose

I'm reading Eminent Victorians a couple sentences at a time on my iPhone and loving every bit of it. Early on, we're told that if Cardinal Manning (don't worry; I don't know who he is either) had "lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent." And then comes this gem, which I couldn't have composed if my soul depended on it"

As it was, born in the England of the Nineteenth Century, growing up in the very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end with Cardinal Wolsey.

And no, I don't remember who Wolsey is, either. But what a sentence! Forty-one words before we get to the subject! Forty-nine before the verb!

I would pay money -- American dollars -- to see that sentence diagrammed.

Pretty good writing, I say

"I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn't want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor's office, or coming back from someplace you didn't enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus-all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. No­body seemed surprised at all when I told them I'd learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story." While she talked, Sophie's quick fingers were dealing with a hem, and Daily Alice couldn't always hear her because she talked with pins in her mouth. The dream was hard to follow anyway; Daily Alice forgot each incident as soon as Sophie told it, just as though she were dreaming them herself. She picked up and put down a pair of satin shoes, and wandered out onto the tiny balcony of her oriel window. "I got frightened then," So­phie was saying. "I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn't know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I'd made a mistake starting this. Anyhow ... " Daily Alice looked down the front way, a brown drive with a tender spine of weed, all trembling in leaf shadow. Down at the end of the drive, gateposts grew up with a sudden curve from a wall, each topped with a pitted ball like a gray stone orange. As she looked, a Traveler turned hesitantly in at the gate.

"Sophie's Dream" in John Crowley, Little, Big, page 24.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Courtesy of The Writer's Almanac

And a couple days ago The Writer's Almanac reminded us of Keats's famous letter to Fanny Brawne, which I won't quote but which you can -- make that should -- read here.

Wolf Hall

I quit after 65 pages.

The subject is interesting, but the author has affected a really annoying device by which she refers to her protagonist, almost exclusively as "he." So she say something like "He was worried about how the king would react." I had to read each of these sentences a couple times to make sure it was, in fact, Cromwell who was being referred to, and not, Cardinal Wolsey or the cardinal's valet or the Duke of Norfolk.

A cheap and easy way of being artsy. Who needs it?

Case closed!

A radio program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts pronounces the second word in "San Luis Rey" as LOO-is. The case, which I opened here, is now officially closed. Henceforth, only the American pronunciation will be countenanced. Anyone affecting the French ("LOO-ee") or the Spanish ("loo-EES") will be mocked mercilessly.

All of which settles one question, but raises another. Why is the ARTS Endowment encouraging people to read the book in the first place? Seems to me, the Endowment for the HUMANITIES should sue the NEA for trespassing.