Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Trick or Treat? A blogful of literary goodies to celebrate the season

Happy Halloween and time for one last wave of the pointy witch’s hat (between Trick-or-Treaters) to all those seasonal favorites—hauntings and spirits and witches, oh my! One of my favorite books with a splendidly mist-shrouded All Hallow’s feel is John Harwood’s wonderfully gothic exploration of the traditional ghost story in The Ghost Writer. The Ghost Writer is a gorgeous puzzle box of intertwining tales, all connected by an overarching mystery in which timid librarian Gerard seeks answers to his inscrutable pen pal's strange past and his own family's somewhat shady history through a series of odd Victorian manuscripts—ghost stories, of course. The manuscripts, each one a perfectly formulated exercise in gothic style, provide clues to the mysteries in Gerard’s life, but will they help him in time to save him from his family’s ghosts? Read it and see.

For a complete change of pace, check out my absolute favorite book about witches, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A full eighty years before Harry Potter, poet Warner penned this rather charming country novel about timid Edwardian spinster, Laura (a.k.a. Lolly) Willowes, who shakes off the conventions of her day to become a witch. Harry Potter fans beware—there really isn’t much magic practiced in this one. Published in 1926, the pace is leisurely, the writing precise and poetic, but—witchcraft aside—the real thrust of the novel is its highly unconventional celebration of freedom from social constraints that, in those days, often relegated women of Lolly’s station to unpaid household laborers. Fans of Barbara Pym's writing might also enjoy this salute—with a little spin of its own—to the excellent women of a bygone era.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Let's Get Digital, Digital

I am here to report that I need never leave my home office again. That’s right, people, I did my homework and then some. I set up an account and subscribed to a dozen or so RSS feeds. (See below.) I listened to a podcast. I downloaded an audiobook from the library catalog. (More on those in my next post.) I even did 200 or so updates and countless system restarts so that I could install the latest version of Windows Media Player, which actually allows me to watch Netflix movies right here at my desk. Am I rockin’ or what?

Incidentally, several of these feats (particularly the Windows Media Player) were achieved with no small level of frustration and with really big bucketsful—we’re talking aircraft carriers of truckloads of buckets—of patience. At one point, my husband took over the installation just to relieve me of the sheer monotony of update, reboot, install—each iteration of which was followed by a message stating “before you can install XYZ, you must first yada yada yada.” (I regret to say strong language may have been used during this exercise.) Anyway, when all was said and done, my husband strongly encouraged me to actually WATCH a movie. So I did. At my desk. Alone. (Maybe my husband wanted to see our frustration and patience pay off, or maybe he wanted to spare himself being subjected to another obscure Zombie flick like the last one I picked out. Who can say? Either way, I am ready for the day—should it come—when the library has downloadable video.)

At this point, I must take a time out to say that E. M. Forster was surprisingly prescient. I’m not talking about Howard's End or A Passage to India here, but another of Forster's lesser-known works called “The Machine Stops,” which details a future where people live in isolation connected to other people only through technology. A strong opponant of H. G. Wells' style of speculative fiction, Forster intended “The Machine Stops” to serve as an "anti-Wellsian" piece. Ironically, it stands as a rather fascinating counterpoint to Wells' own dystopian visions in The Time Machine and other works. Read Forster's story along with Wells' A Story of the Days to Come for a fascinating and quick glimpse of two ironic and terrifying futures.

Here are my comments on RSS feeds: I set up a bloglines account, and added several accounts. The process was clunky, the bloglines page cluttered and hard to read (or so I felt), and I quickly realized I was never going to want to go there. I then added an RSS feed button on my tool bar. I click on the button when I am on a site I want to subscribe to, and, voila, with one additional click it adds the site to my RSS feeds. To access my feeds, I click on favorites and the RSS icon appears with a list of my subscriptions. Neat.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Straight from the Witch's Cauldron: Victorian Ghost Soup

Mist mantled mornings. Check. Skittering leaves that flutter and carpet our rain-damp paths. Check. Bare bones of trees (check) that rattle against the silent backdrop of an eerie harvest moon. Check. Freak windstorms, hailstorms, and lightening strikes that rattle the library windows. Check, check, and check. You guessed it, it must be Halloween, and what better time than a fog-shrouded fall evening with the rain tapping a ghostly coda on the darkened pane—what better to time, I say, than to cuddle up on the sofa with a cup of cocoa, a pair of cats (black of course), and a good book.

Since the season demands, I find myself wondering why it is that the words Victorian and ghost story seem to belong together like macaroni belongs with cheese. Maybe we just have Henry James and The Turn of the Screw to thank for this, or maybe repression and catharsis are another natural pairing that naturally manifests as a spectral blue emanation in the back parlor amongst the roll top desks and hand-painted fans. Whatever the case, we can thank Egyptologist author Arthur Phillips for another shall-we-say interesting and worthy entry in the Victorian Ghost genre with his recent novel Angelica.

Set in 1880s London, Angelica details a family’s downward spiral as a mysterious nocturnal spirit begins to haunt their lives, shattering their peace, disrupting their marriage, and possibly even threatening their child’s life. But is the specter real or is it imagined? Told from the point of view of four disparate family members, the story unfolds as a strange tale of denials, half-truths, buried secrets, and hidden motives, strongly in the vein of a Victorian-style Rashomon. In that respect, readers of the author’s other novels (Prague, The Egyptologist) will recognize Phillips’ trademark ambivalence toward his characters, whose self-deceptions form a unique pathos that is hard to resist. Psychologically complex and rich in atmospheric detail, Angelica is a delectible potage of themes and motifs, part psychoanalysis, part Victorian ghost story, part childhood memory—and entirely impossible to put down. So bring on the fuzzy slippers and the mini-marshmallows, Angelica is a perfect Fall read.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Mmmmm deee-licious

Titillate your tastebuds with reading... and social bookmarking?

Good food and good books shared with good friends—those things form a big part of my life. This week, besides sharing a few good books, I want to share a delicious new way to learn, grow, and share one's interests, whatever they may be. You guessed it, I'm talking about del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a Web-based social bookmarking site that makes it easy for users to move from site to site while always returning with one click to his or her list of favorites. Not only that, del.icio.us provides new opportunities for readers (or Web surfers) to network with other readers (and surfers) with similar interests.

For example, fans of C. S. Lewis might wish to tag Lewis’s unofficial Web site Into the Wardrobe. Once you’ve tagged the site, you will not only find that 172 other people have tagged the site, you will be able to view other sites those 172 people have tagged that may also be of interest to you. [Disclaimer: naturally, you don’t know those people or how reputable or appropriate for your purposes their favorites may be. You should still always be diligent in checking the reliability of any source, especially any internet source, before singing its praises.]

Now, speaking of C.S. Lewis and all things delicious... Lewis once said that if you wanted to interest children in reading, you should write about things that interest children—things like, for example, food. Perhaps that's why we find so much eating in the world of Narnia—from sumptuous afternoon teas with fauns to fresh fish feasts with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver to turkish delight with, well, let's just say someone who proves in one gesture why children should never accept candy from strangers.

Lewis also offered some pretty delectable fare for the grown-up palate with his classic Garden of Eden allegory, Perelandra, set on the watery world of Venus. Written in the 1940s, the science may be dated, but the story is timeless—and you'll never forget Lewis' description of the Perelandran gourds, that are neither sharp nor sweet, neither savory nor voluptuous.

In any case, if you want to create a world to delight your readers, one where they may immerse themselves as one of the natives, there is no better way than though the cuisine. Here are just a few of my favorite visual and literary feasts that touch on the power of sharing a meal, a recipe, or a culinary custom:

Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
Neveryona, by Samuel R. Delany
Babette’s Feast (movie)

Please share your literary feasts with me, and if you find good sources for more, don’t forget to tag them and then share your tags with me!

More of a dinner-and-a-movie type? Don't forget to check out 000h How I Loved That Movie for plenty of film, food, and fun.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Blog Ate My Homework

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.... That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."—C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

The blog ate my homework. As a teacher of online classes, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation on these very words to account for missing or incomplete assignments. It seems that the mysterious world of cyberspace has replaced Fido as the number one repository for misplaced papers and failures of accountability. So before I move on to the more up-beat portion of my post (not to mention somehow tying it neatly back to C.S. Lewis and/or the application of Web-based tools in the library), let me take a moment to vent. With my students, it (it being the application of cyber-based excuses) usually starts with "I posted it yesterday, I don't know where it went," usually moving through various and creative mumblings about "lost in cyberspace," and generally ending somewhere around the ever-alarming "I forgot to save," or the only-slightly-less-startling, "No, it's not in my Sent folder or my Outbox. But I know I sent it." Okay, I know in technological terms, I was born last week, but do my students think I was born yesterday? (Er, I guess that's a rhetorical question.)

Anyway, lately, I've been charged with my own homework assignment, which is basically to comment on library applications for various Web-based networking tools from Flickr to Facebook and beyond. My initial reaction, at least to the available krl2pt0 articles, was not too distant from that of Underground Dweller, who wrote, among other deeply pithy things, "I can see where the blog stuff could be useful for committee communications, but it also seems like every separate blog and email account just adds to side work and pulls us away from our primary work duties." On the other hand, like Underground Dweller, I am not unwilling to learn these things and see great opportunity for growth and communication with, say, departmental blogs, leadership blogs, or even procedural wikis. (Is an ILL Wiki of interest to anyone? You tell me.) As far as further comment at this time, I will have to say, the blog ate my homework. This is especially apropos as, in a moment of the deepest irony, my entire blog entry disappeared and wouldn't come back even with repeatedly desperate pounding of the Control + Z keys and even though it's been autosaving every 5 minutes since I started. Just so you know, I had to write it over. And the first one was better.

Because of that, I will have to talk about C.S. Lewis next time. For now, I leave you with the epigraph above and Lewis' wonderful words-to-live-by from The Silver Chair. These words have comforted me in some of the darkest places in my life, and—while I don't exactly consider blogging a dark moment—still, I find food for thought in Lewis' rather allegorical musings from the Underland Kingdom in The Silver Chair as we muddle along in our various virtual worlds.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Comfort Books


I'm a big believer in pet therapy, comfort food, and of course comfort books. But before we go there, take a moment to slide your eyes to the right and feast them on the love-bunny known as Rho. Rho is Megzilla's brother, and a little less precociously brainy than his sister. He is, however, quite a sweetheart, loves to give hugs and kisses. So take a deep breath, gaze long into those melting blue eyes, and feel yourself to be deeply loved. Aahhhh, feels good, doesn't it?

Now that the pet-lovers have all forsaken their computers to go hug their own feline and canine family members, let's get back to the subject of comfort books. You know the ones I mean: the ones that you always come back to, the books that never fail to give solace on the coldest, wettest, worst-ever days, the days when you lock your keys in the car, argue with your spouse, slip in a mud puddle, and have to eat leftover tuna cassarole for lunch when you absolutely loathe tuna cassarole. On days like that, my husband likes to immerse himself in the world of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy. I haven't read it yet, but if you have you might want to log in here and let me know what kind of oddball I'm married to, since the reviews all use words like dark, disburbing, and violent, strangely counterpointed with other words like romantic, witty, teasing, and--strangest of all if you knew my husband--matriarchal. Having said that, I'm thinking my husband may be a little like Meggy and there's some freakin' serious stuff going on behind that innocent blue-eyed gaze.

Back to comfort books. One of my favorite comfort reads is Little Women, a choice which no doubt many of you will understand instantly and wholeheartedly. I honestly have never met the person who grew up American, female, and reading who did not love this book. It's a classic for a reason.

Another favorite comfort book is the aforementioned The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What can I say? It's not enough to know that Vogon poetry is the third worst in the galaxy, Douglas Adams does not scruple to tell you what out there may be worse. If you read this and don't laugh, I am very, very sorry.

Book About Books, Part Deux

My last entry promised you another book about the power of books, and so I offer you Brock Clarke's darkly humorous, deftly poignant novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. When habitual bumbler Sam Pulsifer returns from serving a 10-year prison sentence for torching the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, other famous writers' homes start going up in flames and Sam is the only suspect. Sam's efforts to unravel the mystery lead to a series of comic misadventures that examine the power of literature on our lives. Word of note: If you've ever been in a book group (and even if you haven't), and you don't find Clarke's ruminations on book groups, memoirists, and stoically cynical New England writers funny, well, if you don't find that funny let's just say I'm a little concerned about you. You need to cheer up. Go read the section on Vogon poetry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Laugh. Please.

If you'd prefer your books about books to be a little less out there, you might enjoy memoirist Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. When out-of-work actress and secretarial temp Julie Powell finds her life stuck in a rut, she decides to spice things up by cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking--over the course of 365 wild and flavorful days. Her culinary adventures lead to a blog, the blog leads to a book contract, and the book contract leads to a hilarious and heartfelt homage to good food and the inspiration that can come from one well-loved and much-thumbed-through tome. So, buck up, bloggers, we may have a purpose after all.

Thanks to all of you who shared with me your favorite books about books. I encourage everyone reading to check out Sara F.'s excellent review of House of Leaves on The Birdhouse, and if you know Martha Bayley, be sure and ask her about The Shadow of the Wind. Until next time...

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

What to read while you're surviving Web 2.0

Yeah, I know I said it, but I have no intention of telling you that. Geez, I could feel my ego swelling like an overfull water balloon even as I wrote that. What I can do is comment on a few things I've read and enjoyed while pushing my Sisyphus' stone of blogging up the internet hill. (Just kidding. It's not that bad.) For now, I'd just like to mention a couple fascinating fiction reads, both books about the power of good old-fashioned books--and not just the words on the page (although those are important), but the book-in-the-hand, the sometimes-musty, jacket-bound artifact that may have belonged to someone before you and that may (or may not) have meant the world to that person.

The first is King Dork, by Frank Portman, in which high schooler Tom Henderson finds a copy of the classic Catcher in the Rye in a box of his deceased father's books. As Tom sets out to learn about his father from his father's books, he finds himself enmeshed in a series of mysteries that may help him understand more about his relationship with his father—or maybe they'll just provide the key to attracting hot girls. A wonderfully funny homage to high school, rock and roll, and—somewhat ironically—The Catcher in the Rye, King Dork is heartfelt and sometimes cynical—but always honest.

For the second... well, you'll have to wait for my next post, because I'm bushed and it's dinner time. Better yet, reply to this post with your favorite books about books.

Why Blogzilla? For that matter, why blog?

If you don't want to know the answer to those questions, stop reading, um... now.

My mom has a cat, a really cute cat. Her name is Meg, but we call her Megzilla. You can see her picture right over there to the left. She's the one making angel eyes at the camera.

Meg is one of those winsome, alluring little cats with big eyes like a hypnotist's spinning plate that draw you in and make you want more. She could be a poster child for Hello Kitty, she's that cute.

But--and here's where the Megzilla part comes in--Meg is a thinker and--dare I say it?--she's precocious. (Right, did I mention, she's a cat?) She is also deeply entrenched in the belief, as any stray fly or other winged insect can attest, that she is a large and ferocious killer jaguar. Furthermore, unlike Hello Kitty, when you look into Meg's pie-like stare, you know she is not just thinking about her upcoming dinner or her most recent nap, she is thinking really Deep Thoughts, such as, "How can I, a six pound cat, move that 10-pound pillow off the couch, up a flight of stairs, through a narrow door, and into the bathtub? Hm, time to apply those principles of physics I picked up on Wikipedia while Mom was sleeping." (You may scoff, but I've seen her do the thing with the pillow. And maybe I'm wrong about the Wikipedia, but I've seen her sit and look at the pillow and plan, then shift her angle, adjust her momentum, give a little leap, and BAM an object four times her size is on the floor and heading up the stairs in her tigerlike grip. Believe me, this is no innocent kittenish accident. By golly, she planned it.)

So where am I going with this? Well, there is a whole world of information out there in that place we fondly call cyberspace, and I am attracted to it, much as I am attracted to figuring out what's going on behind Megzilla's hyptotist's gaze. Granted, sometimes I feel that I am to that world of information what the fly is to Megzilla, but what of it? Like the rest of us, I get to keep peddling my literary allusions, because I love them, and if cyberspace chews them up and spits them out like one of Meggy's flies or, worse, digests them and they come back as big fragrant steaming piles of blogese, then so be it. At least I have entered the 21st century, allusions loosely intact (no bowel pun intended).