Ripped directly from Mattheous, who’s just started hanging around here at the Nook, who found it here.
Daniel Pennac’s
The Reader’s Bill of Rights
1. The right to not read
2. The right to skip pages
3. The right to not finish
4. The right to reread
5. The right to read anything
6. The right to escapism
7. The right to read anywhere
8. The right to browse
9. The right to read out loud
10. The right to not defend your tastes
Much has been written about the late, great Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker series (yes, geeks, I am aware that it’s a trilogy in umpteen parts…) with their rather random sense of humour. The Dirk Gently books which always reminded me a bit of Thorne Smith (1892-1934) books.
But, there will always be a little place in my heart for The Meaning of Liff — here’s one of my favourite entries:
PELUTHO (n.)
A South American ball game. The balls are whacked against a brick wall with a stout wooden bat until the prisoner confesses.
And here it is online, in its entirety. Gotta love the Internet!
Back to Thorne Smith, because he was just a weird and wonderful writer, and yes, Dirk Gently reminded me of him. Here’s an except from the beginning of my favourite of his books, The Nightlife of the Gods (available in its entirety online as well, with others):
CHAPTER 1
CRITICIZING AN EXPLOSION
THE small family group gathered in the library was only conventionally alarmed by the sound of a violent explosion—a singularly self-centred sort of explosion.
‘Well, thank God, that’s over,’ said Mrs Alice Pollard Lambert, swathing her sentence in a sigh intended to convey an impression of hard-pressed fortitude.
With bleak eyes she surveyed the fragments of a shattered vase. Its disastrous dive from the piano as a result of the shock had had in it something of the mad deliberation of a suicide’s plunge. Its hideous days were over now, and Mrs Lambert was dimly aware of another little familiar something having been withdrawn from her life.
‘I hope to high heaven this last one satisfies him for this spring at least,’ was the petulant comment of Alfred, the male annexe of Alice.
‘I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting,’ came a thin disembodied voice from a dark corner. ‘Night and day I’ve been waiting and expecting—’
‘And hoping and praying, no doubt, Grandpa,’ interrupted Daphne, idly considering a run in her stocking and wondering what she was going to do about it, if anything, and when would be the least boring time to do it if she did, which she doubted.
One of the books I’m reviewing is, well, rather brilliant — mesmerizing even. Zed, authored by Elizabeth McClung (Arsenal Press).
If you can read the first paragraph and not be drawn in, then okay, you don’t have to buy it. But if you can’t wait to read more, here’s the first chapter online.
Her name? Zed. Age? Eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen – it wasn’t like she was getting three square a day and multivitamins. She was small, four-foot nothing: thin, grubby, but with a thrust to her chin which told you, as you saw her beetling down the hall towards you – best step aside. Most people were fairly certain Zed was female. Her soft features and long lashes were contrasted by grey uniform coveralls, slick and shiny from constant wear. The hair was the deciding factor, because it fell, wildly uneven, to shoulder length. Once a year, Zed assaulted it with her knife, hacking it back above her ears. She had a habit of tilting her head down and staring up at people from under her bangs. She just showed up one day – no relations, no history. No one knew much about her, and those who did never passed it on. People didn’t gossip about her, at least not more than once, because if she caught them she’d stick her knife point somewhere soft on them and ask, “Got anything more to say, Chuckles?” which, invariably, they didn’t.
Yes, she fit right in with the Tower.
C’mon, Elizabeth! Get working on another one!
As you may know, I have a weakness for cultural histories — “See the history of the world through this odd angle!”
So, the other day, when I was browsing the local 2ndhand bookstore, I happened upon a brilliant addition to my library — The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroksi. ‘Tis a delightful romp through the history of such an amazingly simple, obvious thing (at least to us today), in the hopes that the mysteries of engineering become clearer:
“If we can capture the essence of engineers and engineering through the most elementary and least abstract of examples, then we can more easily get to the heart of the matter when confronted with something so large and unfamiliar that we can barely conceive of what it really looks like, let alone hold it in our hands and think about it.”
I have only just begun Chapter 5, Of Traditions and Transitions, the start of which should give you a more fanciful sample of Petroksi approachable academic, sometimes poetic style:
“The history of the pencil, when it has been written down at all, is full of erasures and revisions.”
Accurate, and cute.
To my delight, he’s written more, including an upcoming book (due in October of this year), entitled, simply enough: The Toothpick How can one resist!?!
It’s on the wishlist.
How long has it been since you read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid? Disney ruined it by giving it a happy ending, of course.
Reading it now, I realize it must have been years and years and years since I read it…but I did, because I just came to a section that I remember vividly:
At last she reached her fifteenth year. “Well, now, you are grown up,” said the old dowager, her grandmother; “so you must let me adorn you like your other sisters;” and she placed a wreath of white lilies in her hair, and every flower leaf was half a pearl. Then the old lady ordered eight great oysters to attach themselves to the tail of the princess to show her high rank.
“But they hurt me so,” said the little mermaid.
“Pride must suffer pain,” replied the old lady. Oh, how gladly she would have shaken off all this grandeur, and laid aside the heavy wreath! The red flowers in her own garden would have suited her much better, but she could not help herself: so she said, “Farewell,” and rose as lightly as a bubble to the surface of the water.
The eight oysters attached to her tail — Oh, how I felt for her when I was 7! Now, as an adult, I wonder just how aware of the trials and tribulations of women Mr. Andersen was…
I was just reading one of Archie’s latest posts, on the book Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton.
I’ve never heard of it…and Archie’s review makes the book sound interesting, but what was most interesting to me was his personal identification with it. It’s about his childhood home, and essentially about his life.
I heard about “Cloudstreet” when it was first released. I chose not to read it because what interest could there be in the streets I knew, in the people I knew? I finally decided to read it. It was a task done slowly as I relived so much of my own life.
I too, would hesitate to read something that potentially reflected so much of my life. What if it brought up bad memories? What if the writer hadn’t seen what I saw? What if…?
The closest to this I have ever come is reading Tom Robbins’ book Skinny Legs and All on a beach on the Sunshine Coast of BC. I was spinning with the carnival that summer, and when I got to the description of Randolf “Boomer” Petway, I almost threw the book in the drink…it was Willie the Welder, the man I was currently involved with:
Randolf “Boomer” Petway was a welder by trade. He was seven years older than Ellen Cherry Charles. He was husky, dark, and, in a broad-faced, silly-grinned, thuggish sort of way, handsome. He drank a lot, guffawed a lot, and walked with a moderate limp, a piece of equipment having crushed his anklebone in the welding shop. In spite of the lameness, he boogied to country-rock more flamboyantly than any man in east-central Virginia. Some dance critic, who worked behind the bar in a honky-tonk, said that when Boomer danced he looked like a monkey on roller skates juggling razor bladse in a hurricane.
“He’s a complete idiot,” reported Ellen Cherry to Patsy, “but I have to admit he’s a hill of fun.”
The sex was similar too. :p
Anyone else out there find their lives in a book?
“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”
So begins The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, one of my Christmas books, well-chosen, I think, by my husband.
Opened it this morning, and before I’d finished my first cup of coffee in bed, I was 77 pages in. Stopped there so I could savour, not devour, it.
And blog on it.
I’ll update you all when I finish it.
If there’s one genre that we all feel we have a claim to, it’s travel writing. C’mon! Don’t you feel that you too could be a travel writer? It’s not that hard, is it?
Anyone can throw a 50-word review on an online travel community — I do it myself quite regularly at my new obsession, Gusto!. (If you’re so inclined, check out my profile.) But seriously — name a travel writer, who’s not one of these two big guns:
Bill Bryson
Today I want to introduce you to the man everyone should read (and aspire to write as well as), Pico Iyer. Prolific, insightful, man-of-the-world — you get 200,000+ Google hits on the man. (Go ahead, explore. He’s been interviewed a lot, he’s written a lot, and he’s had lots written about him. And, he speaks well — went to a reading and Q&A with him once.)
I will give you a sample, and you can decide for yourself.
Years ago, my mom and I traveled to Vietnam, and stayed for a week in Hanoi, in the old part of the city. Gorgeous place, but I can’t describe it anywhere near as well as Iyer in this excerpt:
“And nighttime was the best of all in the old, and stately capital, as something ancient began to come forth from the shadows. I loved to bump along the lamplit alleyways after dark in a cyclo, a perfect pace at which to see and smell the spicy nights. In the gloom, the town was more mysterious than ever, the streets too dark even to read by, the little stalls half lit, the faces eerie in blackness. Lovers were eating ice cream by the waterside, and children traded cards of movie stars. Whole families sat at tables on the sidewalk, eating elaborate meals by the flicker of oil lamps. Couples sat cradled by their bicycles, or in the hollows of large trees. The air smelled of mint and a festival spirit. And it was easy to feel the lamps were burning inside the people too.”
[from the essay "Yesterday Once More" in the collection Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (1993)]
Go check him out. You won’t regret it.
Just this morning, lying abed, cozy under my covers, two cats in attendance, a cup of coffee brought to me by my love, I finished reading Truly Wilde by Joan Schenkar. The scene was apt, as luxuriating in bed was one of Dolly Wilde’s greatest pleasures, as Schenkar illustrates by quoting Wilde’s letters.
But what a biography! Dolly Wilde was, by all (surviving) accounts, a very vivid woman who lived in the shadow of a truly (in)famous uncle, and died in a swirl of her own infamy. Could this woman’s life have been treated to the traditional biographical form? Being a playwright, Schenkar draws on her narrative proclivities to describe the virtually indescribable…a character who left only clues to her history, whose conversational style people remember, but not her bon mots…
Schenkar describes her version of the biographic genre:
“In finding ways to tell her story, I allowed Dolly’s own passionate interests to guide me: her feel for inventive imagery turned me to the vivid enlargements that metaphor permits; her contempt for time gave me the intense concentration that thematic — rather than chronologic — treatment enables; her unalloyed romanticism lead me to the ‘recreations’ that make up the next chapter of this book, etc., etc. From time to time, I have used different styles of writing in different settings to suggest Dolly’s own changing — and very elusive — states of being.”
And it is effective. Dolly is now haunting my thoughts. Her social circle, I see now, has reached its tendrils out to me many times, in my reading about salons, in my interest in authors of her time. Virtually everyone involved in Dolly’s life is someone who was someone, or was connected to someone. For a quick overview, look at this loving tribute site to Natalie Clifford Barney & her women-centered literary and social salon of the early 1900s.
I will leave you with Joan Schenkar’s final words of her acknowledgements:
“And I thank everyone who has ever saved a scrap of handwriting, an old love letter, or a fragment of photograph from the half-forgotten life of an unusual woman in the hope that it might be important; in the hope that she might be important.”
With that in mind, the future of biography is both more overwhelming, and bleaker, in light of the changes in technology. Passwords to blog & email accounts lost, forgotten, or not able to be found in the event of death. Hard drives erased, backups corrupted.
Or worse, having to sift through all of the random tripe we spew every day, because it is so easy, electronically.
This bit of Anglo-Saxon pleasure from Earle Birney needs to be read aloud. Some background on Old English Poetry:
Old English poetry was very formulaic, with the same patterns being re-used with variations time and again. Additionally, alliteration and stress were used in the place of rhyme, which can sound strange but powerful to the modern ear. Another striking feature of Old English poetry was the use of many metaphors or kennings for common subjects: The sea could be referred to as the ‘whale’s way’, ‘gannet’s bath’, ’swan’s riding’ and so on.
Or, as the great Seamus Heaney points out when he writes about his task of translating Beowulf:
I had noticed, for example, that without any conscious intent on my part certain lines in the first poem in my first book conformed to the requirements of Anglo-Saxon metrics. These lines were made up of two balancing halves, each half containing two stressed syllables – ‘The spade sinks into gravelly ground: / My father digging. I look down…’ – and in the case of the second line there was alliteration linking ‘digging’ and ‘down’ across the caesura. Part of me, in other words, had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.
Wow…a lot of ‘ado’ before I get to the poem for today.
Canadian poet, Earle Birney (1904-1995), probably best known for his long poem, David (I wish there was a link!) — read in many a classroom! One of my favourites is Anglosaxon Street…
A memorable poem, with the rhythms of Old English, some brilliant images, and, yes, some rather strong (ooo, controversy!) language. Here it is:
Anglosaxon Street
by Earle BirneyDawndrizzle ended dampness steams from
blotching brick and blank plasterwaste
Faded housepatterns hoary and finicky
unfold stuttering stick like a phonographHere is a ghetto gotten for goyim
O with care denuded of nigger and kike
No coonsmell rankles reeks only cellarrot
attar of carexhaust catcorpse and cookinggrease
Imperial hearts heave in this haven
Cracks across windows are welded with slogans
There’ll Always Be An England enhances geraniums
and V’s for Victory vanquish the houseflyHo! with climbing sun march the bleached beldames
festooned with shopping bags farded flatarched
bigthewed Saxonwives stepping over buttrivers
waddling back wienerladen to suckle smallfryHoy! with sunslope shrieking over hydrants
flood from learninghall the lean fingerlings
Nordic nobblecheeked not all clean of nose
leaping Commandowise into leprous lanesWhat! after whistleblow spewed from wheelboat
after daylong doughtiness dire handplay
in sewertrench or sandpit come Saxonthegns
Junebrown Jutekings jawslack for meatSit after supper on smeared doorsteps
not humbly swearing hatedeeds on Huns
profiteers politicians pacifists JewsThen by twobit magic to muse in movie
unlock picturehoard or lope to alehall
soaking bleakly in beer skittlelessHome again to hotbox and humid husbandhood
in slumbertrough adding sleepily to Anglekin
Alongside in lanenooks carling and leman
caterwaul and clip careless of Saxonry
with moonglow and haste and a higher heartbeatSlumbers now slumtrack unstinks cooling
waiting brief for milkmaid mornstar and worldrise
Toronto 1942
At any given moment, I could have 10 books on the go — science fiction, poetry, a cultural history, a childhood favourite…I love the unknown of a new book, the comfort of an old friend. Who knows what’s next?
