November 5, 2010
Books wrote our life story
“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of the refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?”– Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
November 2, 2010
A transfer of substance
“Once a book falls into our possession, it is ours, the same way children lay their claim: “That’s my book.” As if it were organically a part of them. That must be why we have so much trouble returning borrowed books. It’s not exactly theft (of course not, we’re not thieves. What are you implying?); it’s simply a slippage of ownership or, better still, a transfer of substance. That which belonged to someone else becomes mine when I look at it. And if I like what I read, naturally I’ll have difficulty giving it back.” –Daniel Pennac, Better than Life (which I’ve finished reading, so you’ll be relieved to know that this is my final quote from it).
October 27, 2010
That's what I call bad novels.
“To make a long story short, let’s imagine something called “industrial literature.” It’s job is to reproduce, ad infinitum, the same types of stories, to grind out assembly-line stereotypes, to retail noble sentiments and trembling emotions, to seize every opportunity to turn current events into docu-dramas, to conduct market studies in order to manufacture, according to demographic profile, products designed to tease the imaginations of specific categories of consumers.
That’s what I call bad novels.
Why? Because they’re not creations. Because they reproduce pre-established forms. Their enterprise is one of simplification (lies, in other words), whereas the novel is the art of truth (complexity, in other words). Because by provoking knee-jerk reactions, they lull our curiosity. Because the author is absent, and so is the reality he or she claims to describe.” –Daniel Pennac, Better Than Life
October 14, 2010
Fervent Guardians
“Those of us who read and say we want to spread the love of reading, much of the time we’d rather be commentators, interpreters, analysts, critics, biographers, exegetes of works silenced by our pious respect for their greatness. Imprisoned in the fortress of our expertise, the language of books is replaced by our own language. Instead of letting the intelligence of stories speak for us, we turn to our own intelligence and talk for the stories. We have stopped being the messengers of literature, and turned into the fervent guardians of a temple whose miracles we praise with the very words that close its doors. You must read! You must read!“– Daniel Pennac, Better Than Life: Secrets of Reading
August 25, 2010
Hardly a good advertisement
“I’ve just made a cup of tea,” said Miss Caton, who was crouching near the gas-ring. “This will do you good– a strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar. I learnt that when I was doing first aid during the war– treatment for shock.”
Humphrey glanced distastefully at the tan-coloured liquid in the think white cup and waved it aside. “No, thank you, Miss Caton– I really couldn’t drink it– and where did you get that terrible cup?”
“It’s the one I have my elevenses and my tea out of every day,” she said briskly.
Humphrey took his mid-morning coffee elsewhere if he was not at a sale and was seldom on the premises in the afternoon either, so he had probably never noticed his typist drinking from the thick serviceable cup.
“Well, Miss Caton,” he said. “I can only hope that nobody has ever seen you drinking from such a monstrosity. It would hardly be a good advertisement, would it?”
“I take my tea in the back,” she said, on the defensive, “so no customer could have seen me.”
“And you, James– do you drink from such a cup?” asked his uncle sternly.
“I don’t know,” James mumbled. “I suppose I may have done on occasion.”
Humphrey exclaimed in horror.
“Perhaps a cup of China tea,” Miss Caton persisted, “though it wouldn’t have the same reviving effect, and without milk or sugar it might be too acid for you in your present condition.”
–from Barbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died
August 19, 2010
The magic of arrival
“Underneath it all, I’m sure I like the idea of travel much more than the reality. Not the being there, but the sense of motion, the magic of arrival. Destinations can be uncomfortable, bumpy, dirty, replete with bad food, hard beds and cold showers. In a hotel room, a cockroach scuttles across the floor, and I feel twinges of homesickness, a mourning for the warmth of the known. But mostly, when I land, there is often disappointment. Imagination is the lie I’ve been telling myself.” –Charlotte Gill, “Travelling Lessons” from the wondrous Room 33.2
July 8, 2010
I would like to give her more
“It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushses of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.” –Joan Didion, “On Going Home” from Slouching Towards Bethelehem
June 23, 2010
An important tradition of English writers
“But the novels also belong to an important tradition of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported it. Sharing that world’s know-how, vigilant over its precise local expertise, these writers nonetheless never quite belong with both feet inside it, or quite participate in its whole power; they survey it from a position sanely detached, defined by irony. They find that freedom perhaps because they’re Anglo-Irish, or Anglo-Indian, or penniless, or from the north (a significant marker for Gardam), perhaps simply because they’re women. They relish the framework that the codes give (‘life with the lid on’, in Bowen’s phrase), and do justice to the best that these embodied, but never forget the inequity, or the costs of forcing life into rigid forms.” –from “Thank God for Betty” by Tessa Hadley, LRB Vol. 32 No. 5 · 11 March 2010
June 6, 2010
My mind is a toy basket
“A mother’s brain is an ort pile where the cultural guano of the ages of each of her children surives. A composted yellow slice on the bottom of Big Bird feathers and Barbie hair cut with Crayola scissors and old plastic market tubes and Tweety card decks, tiny little shoes, purses, belts, shimmery underwear and skates for Barbie, and the more politically correct stuff made of wood, the popsicle stick dolls and the blocks in every shape, painted, the wooden horses and the sets of foot-piercing dangerous jacks and red rubber balls and the miniature horses and the coveted big plastic horses and the Playmobil and Lego figures and math toys and sets of mazes and puzzles from about twelve dozen sets and the stuffed things– tigersnakelephantarantulapepigiraffeturleagle– and the marvelous tea sets that come in every china pattern and the little furniture and mirrors, the detritus of Vintage Star ponies and Wild Things and Seuss figurines and every McDonalds Happy Meal toy and then, well, all of this compacted together with old Halloween candy mortise into a solid-earthen basement floor of kid knowledge.
My mind is a toy basket filled with tiny, cheap, broken stuff.” –from Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
May 17, 2010
Dispatches from another dimension
“Without question Tess was getting bigger and more complicated every day. But she was also growing her story. Growing a life that acquires its own description. Babies have only a handful of verbs. They eat, shit, cry, spit up, sleep, smile and wiggle. As a new parent, you live inside those few verbs with your child for the first year. In a sense, that’s part of the disorientation on top of sleep deprivation and all the other usual suspects. Some mornings I’d catch myself sitting with Tess and shaking the rattle, as I had the day before, and the day before that, or listening to her cry, or to her feed, and wonder where the hell all my verbs had gone. Could somebody open a window in there?
This might ultimately explain why parents are so punishing with their anecdotes. We are ecstatic, as if thawed from a long cryogenic sleep, with each rejuvenating action taken by our kids, no matter how banal. Like tourists with too many holiday slides, we prattle on to bored strangers, celebrating our return from new frontiers. ‘My god,” we say, ‘you should have seen the baby and the thing he did with the garden hose the other day! And this morning he made a brand new sound, sort of like he said, ‘multifaceted’ but, thing is, we don’t even use that word around the house, do we hon?’ Parents– all of us– send dispatches from another dimension where babies watching dogs, or futzing with garden hoses, is something blockbuster. And it is. Like, wow.
Or maybe you just had to be there.”
–from C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark by Ryan Knighton (and my review is here).
