Mystery spot

This picture, taken August 1969, is presumably somewhere out West. I don't know where it is or the story behind the picture (family road trip?), but maybe I'll do a little painting or a pastel of the landscape. My obsession of the moment, the West or Wests or what have you, is manifesting itself in my reading habits: I reread Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, then devoured Marking the Sparrow's Fall (a collection of his essays), and now I'm wading into J. S. Holliday's The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experiment. So very much to read, and only finite hours in which one's eyes can stay fixed on the page!

The Deepening Stream

Some time ago, browsing the used-books shelves at the Center for Fiction, I saw a squat little Modern Library edition that, for reasons unknown (I didn’t recognize the title and had never heard of the author) I simply had to possess.

The weathered red hardcover sat on my shelf for a rather long time. It’s no secret that I went on a Maud Hart Lovelace bender, and I’ve also closely followed the saga of Downton Abbey; it’s all led to an incurable curiosity about life as it was lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s – say, from the turn of the century to the end of the Great War, when the world was full of great promise and great barbarism both. I reorganized my bookshelves in early January, and when I unearthed The Deepening Stream, I did a bit of research and learned that it charts the story of a girl growing up in just that period. It went to the top of my list.

Dorothy Canfield’s novel was first published as a serial in the Woman’s Home Companion in 1930. We meet Penelope “Matey” Gilbert as a child in the States and in France, jumping from town to town as her father pursues his career in academia, and then experience with her a number of milestones: her parents die, she falls in love and marries Adrian Fort, she bears two children, and when the war breaks out, she takes her family to France to help (Adrian drives an ambulance on the front, and Matey and the children stay in Paris to help support the Vinets, a family she had lived with for a time when she was young).

Click to read more ...

Looking back: The books I read in 2011

Last year at this time, I decided it would be cool to see if I could read 100 books in 2011. And indeed, it was cool: so cool, in fact, that I couldn't stop reading once I started, and I ended up plowing through 118 books in all. Here's a rather unscientific exploration of what I encountered.

I. Gender studies

I've never put much stock in the claims of male writers who say no woman can be their equal (apologies, Mr. Naipaul), but I did not explicitly set out to read more books written by women than by men. Nonetheless, that's how it shook out: of the 118 books I read, 67 were penned by women -- that's about 57%. Undoubtedly the best of those was Middlemarch, which I put off reading for far too long; I suppose Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner and Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss are destined to figure in my 2012 list. Also quite memorable were two books that I suppose can be classed in the sub-genre of "girls behaving badly": The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Alina Bronsky) features the comically awful grandmother Rosa, and Harriet the horrid is unforgettable in After Claude (Iris Owens).

II. Nostalgia

I've mentioned it on the site a few times now, but one of the most important events in my reading life this year was rediscovering Maud Hart Lovelace and the Betsy-Tacy books. I read the first four books, now available as a treasury from Harper Perennial, as well as two books following The Crowd in their high school years. I've urged thrift-store copies on friends and family members, I've somehow acquired a Betsy-Tacy tote bag, and the July 2012 Betsy-Tacy Convention in Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota, is starting to look mighty tempting. Although not about Lovelaceiana, I found Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life an interesting exploration of rediscovering childhood favorites; she takes on the world of Little House on the Prairie with grace and humor (and there's even a brief mention of Mankata, Maud Hart Lovelace's hometown, which has an LHOP/Laura Ingalls Wilder connection of its own). And while we're on the subject of childhood favorites, for fans of Ramona and Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary's memoir A Girl from Yamhill was sublime.

III. Double duty

I try and vary my reading diet as much as possible, but a few authors figured more prominently in my list than did others. I read a few books by Colson Whitehead, a handful by Maureen Johnson, and two by Kevin Wilson. If you haven't read Wilson's short story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, you should.

IV. Out and about

It turns out I'm one of those people who likes themed reading: a creepy tale by Patricia Highsmith on Halloween, something with a good holiday scene for Christmas. And, of course, when I travel, I try to find stories about the places I'm going. While in Paris, I read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; on the way to Singapore, I made my way through a strange book of colonial travel, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (Isabella Bird); a far better read was Stella Kon's The Scholar and the Dragon, about a Chinese immigrant to Singapore in the early 20th century.

V. Ape for apes

Monkey-related similes and metaphors appeared in nearly every book I read in 2011, but only two explicitly focused on our primate friends. Benjamin Hale's The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a story of a chimp caught between the animal and human worlds, out of place, ultimately, in both. But Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape, a used-bookstore find, stands out here: it's about animal testing, sort of, but it's also a primate love story, and then there's a sidetrack into "top-secret government rocket research" that culminates in a scientist skinning an ape and donning its skin as he is blasted off into space. Truly, truly strange.

I could go on and on (other important categories include epics [Lonesome Dove, Middlemarch], books about books [The Professor and the Madman, Globish, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Mystery and Manners], and awesome literature in translation [Suicide, The Jokers, The Sleepwalker, The Clash of Images]). But instead, I'll turn back to my reading -- which for now is the second half of Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness and a bit more of Heidi Julavits' The Effect of Living Backward -- and we'll meet again in a year for another roundup.

Get 'em while they last!

I can't vouch for the quality of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman, as I sadly left this great moment in book-cover art on the shelf, but I can alert you to some awesome deals. Argosy Books, on 59th between Park and Lex, has biographies -- mostly hardcovers -- on its outdoors racks. They're $3 apiece. A small price to pay to learn about someone else's fabulous (or tragic, or complicated) life! 

I picked up Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by John Wain, and Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Lady, by Nancy Hoyt (I confess to picking this blindly based on a quick Google search that yielded the following summation of Wylie: "She was changeable, self-absorbed, and dangerously romantic ... in the end, few acquaintances had much patience or, for that matter, much good to say about her"). I've been on a biography kick lately; for my birthday, I got Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith (on the life of Patricia Highsmith) and Jane Fletcher Geniesse's The Passionate Nomad (on the wanderings of Freya Stark).

Well, what are you waiting for? Go! Read!

Books and art, what could be better?

Ah, fall: when New York bestows upon its citizens a plethora of fests, fairs, and fun! The New York Art Book Fair, which closes tomorrow, is a lovely free-for-all at MoMA PS 1 in Long Island City (so convenient!).

L Magazine highlights 10 things you shouldn't miss; I'll just present a list of book and zine titles from the fair's presenters that I found poignant, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy:

• Once Upon No Time
• Wasted Time
• Scream at the Librarian
• Reduced to Silence
  
• Dirt, Detritus & Vermin
• Surprised by French Fries
• And If You Don't Go Crazy I'll Meet You Here Tomorrow
• Teenage Kissers
• You Make Me Want to Die in the Countryside
• A Fiesta of Tough Choices
• That Would Have Been Wonderful
• Footnotes to a Manual of Shaker Furniture
• Re-Reading the Riot Act
• Things Are Conspicuous in Their Absence
• An Eruption of Anti-Time

Buy a book -- or two, or three! Or just marvel at the wonderful design, the creamy pages, the odd tchotchkes on offer (such as the clip-in inchwide streak of gray hair, the Sontag: Feminist Hair Wear, yours for the low, low price of $25!), the hipster glasses, the plethora of limited-edition totes.

An author by any other name ...

Last night, I finished Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. A cool topic, and interesting to consider in an age where some are calling for more transparency and less anonymity on the Internet.

I read novels most of the time, and this was a good reminder of all the cool STUFF that nonfiction can teach you. I mean, did you know:

• Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson) was an early proponent of the standing desk ("He wrote most of his books, include Alice, while standing up," according to Ciuraru, and supposedly could stand at his desk for 10 hours a day). Carroll also had strange tea rituals -- he steeped it for exactly 10 minutes, and paced, swinging the teapot, for those 10 minutes -- and walked, sometimes as much as 20 miles a day, to solve problems or reflect on life (though it's anyone's guess as to why he made notes about his feet and how they held up post-walk).
• Georges Simenon, what a whacko! Ciuraru notes, "He owned a gold watch that a reporter described as 'the size and shape of a brioche.'" [yum!] "This was a man as intoxicated by himself as others are by fine wine ... On the advice of his doctor, he restricted himself to two bottles of red Bordeaux daily. (He did got through periods of renouncing alcohol for Coca-Cola.) One friend recalled a common sight: Simenon throwing up a bottle's worth of cognac in the garden, 'two fingers down his throat, after he finished a chapter.'" (Drunkenness, many a writer's friend/foe.) Also? "... he weighed himself before and after completing each new book, so as to measure how much sweat the project had cost him."
• Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Strangers on a Train, was altogether unpleasant, but had a strange affection for snails: "Her fondness for snails was such that she kept three hundred of them in her garden in Suffolk and insisted on traveling with them. When she moved to France in 1967, she smuggled snails into the country by hiding them under her breasts -- and she made several trips back and forth to smuggle them all."

Read it. The Bronte bits and the Mark Twain chapter felt somewhat familiar, but now I'm raring to read some Henry Greene (Henry Yorke) and learn more about the sad end of James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon).

The Information

I had something of a hard time hanging with the entirety of James Gleick's The Information (one-line Janet Maslin review, extracted from the Times: "The Information is to the nature, history, and significance of data what the beach is to sand.").That said, the book's final paragraph is a thing of real beauty:

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Perhaps this is indecipherable denuded of the context of the 500-odd page tome, but I found it striking. Lots of provocative ideas and little bits of history and culture; tons to unpack and meditate on.

Americanisms new and old

I'm turning, again, to H.L. Mencken's The American Language; it's so dense and packed with information that I find it hard to progress more than a few pages without starting to track down some of the source material to learn more (today's diversion: an 1841 edition of the Congressional Globe on Google Books, which offers "A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time").

My copy, a fourth edition reprinted in 1937 that I found at Argosy Books, was perhaps the best-spent $11 I've doled out in the past year. It's a great reminder that so-called corruptions of English, American or otherwise, have been fretted over for decades; for example, Mencken notes:

A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary, in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions as to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee (a sort of diminutive for coat) and citified appeared in the popular vocabulary and even got into more or less respectable usage.

Suddenly, systematize doesn't seem quite so egregious. But don't worry -- the BBC is still cataloging our linguistic sins; here's 50 irksome turns of phrase that grate across the pond. Maybe they can just make a list of things we are allowed to say?

It's true, I do (also: Astoria books!)

This post is participating in the Astoria Blog Carnival, hosted by We Heart Astoria.

I almost don't know what to say; I just want to join in the merriment. Two years and 13 days ago, we moved to Astoria (or, rather, the border of Astoria and Long Island City, but who's really counting?); about a month ago, we signed another two-year lease, and we couldn't be happier. I find nothing more satisfying than setting out, camera in hand, and snaking through the streets; here's to many more such "adventures," even if they are rather pedestrian and unremarkable, in the coming months.

Since I read a lot of books, I figured I'd highlight a few Queens-centric stories I've recently enjoyed.

The Ask, Sam Lipsyte

In the Times, Lydia Millet writes, "A witty paean to white-collar loserdom in the fund-raising racket, “The Ask” describes a crisis in the life of one Milo Burke, a deeply cynical academic development officer, earnest binger on doughnuts, avid consumer of Internet porn, and devoted father and husband. Detailing the meltdown of Milo’s career and marriage, “The Ask” takes place in an exhausted and passive institutional workplace ..." It's a commentary on modern New York, an interesting illustration of life for those of us who are making it, so to speak, but still not living off Central Park and hob-nobbing at Cipriani.

Lipsyte explains Astoria thusly:

I'd take long walks in the neighborhood. We lived in Astoria, Queens, as close to our jobs in Manhattan as we could afford. One afternoon I made a mission for myself: stamps for the latest bills (I'd ask for American flags, stick them on upside down in protest against our nation's foreign and domestic policies), paper towels, and -- as a special treat to celebrate the acceleration of my fatal spiral -- a small sack of overpriced cashews from the Greek market.

I'd cure my solipsistic hysteria with a noonday jaunt. Sights and smells. Schoolkids in parochial plaids. Grizzled men grilling meat. The deaf woman handing out flyers for the nail salon, or the other deaf woman with swollen hands and a headscarf who hawked medical thrillers in front of the drugstore.

This was a kind and bountiful neighborhood: the Korean grocery, the Mexican taqueria, the Italian butcher shop, the Albanian cafe, the Arab newsstand, the Czech beer garden, everybody living in provisional harmony, keeping their hateful thoughts to themselves, except maybe a few of the Czechs.

Witty, wry, and a great read; The Ask was one of my favorite books in 2010.

I also indulged in a bit of noir, including the following from the successful Akashic Noir franchise.

Queens Noir, Robert Knightly, editor

The Kim Sykes piece, "Arrivederci, Aldo," is set in Long Island City, on the Silvercup lot. In "Only The Strong Survive," by Mary Byrne, she describes Astoria:

"In no time at all I reached Broadway, with its crowds and traffic and fruit displays. I liked it better here. This was home. Men on the sidewalk spoke Chinese and Slav and Arabic into cell phones. Visit Queens and see the world."

In the final Astoria-based piece, "Last Stop, Ditmars," by Tori Carrington, the author describes the Greek population in the area:

I sat back in the booth, considering her where she had taken the seat across from me. I'd also known what she was going to say because I knew her. And had known her husband. Mihalis Abramopoulos had owned and operated the Acropolis Diner on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, for the past thirty years. Ever since he'd come over from Greece in the early '70s. Not unlike many of Astoria's Greek population that had been trying to escape military coups and martial law and were looking for a safe environment in which to raise their kids. Hey, my parents had done it in the '60s, before the colonels had stages a military junta in Greece and taken over control of a country that was still trying to get its shit together after the civil war. I'd been seventeen at the time, but I'm told I still speak like I'd just arrived on the last plane over the Atlantic.

Interesting! Our landlord is Greek; there are lush, old grapevines in our backyard, which I've long admired, but I'm always reluctant to ask about his origins, and his family's origins. Perhaps for someday soon.

I should also plug Marcy Dermansky's Bad Marie, which is not set in Astoria, but is an un-put-down-able tale about a lady, named Marie, who is BAD. Dermansky lives in the neighborhood, and she is a fun follow on Twitter. She taught me that Harissa, on 30th Ave., has great food (Balthazar pastries!), and it's been a staple ever since. Cheers!

If you're in Astoria and you're looking for a good bookstore, I'm a big fan of Seaburn, on Broadway and 34th St. The thrift stores, particularly the Salvation Army and Goodwill, can also be great (low-cost!) sources for your summer reads.

(By the by, I aspire to one day write half as well as these folks. Perhaps a yarn set in the Salvation Army on Steinway, an absolute must if you like people watching.)

The words, the words

I'm only about 50 pages into Blake Butler's There Is No Year, and progress is impeded again and again as I flip back to reread sentences and passages I can't stop thinking about. The rhythm, the weight, is entrancing:

They purred secret sentences in silent rising spiral until the sky at last had drunk so much it sunk to night---the night not out of cycle but in insistence, demanded in the skin, the unseen smoke of body after body sewn surrounding until the mother, at least could not see---could not feel the air even around her, or her other---could not feel anything at all---and in the dark the mother stuttered---and in the dark again the mother walked.

It reads almost like poetry (dark, haunted stanzas):

He pressed his flesh against the grate's face's metal tines---a mazemap pressed around his eyes. Through the gaps a lukewarm air blew, moist like raindamp, stunk like rice.