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I have been going to the library regularly and have read quite a few books. I’m listing them here so I can remember.

Any & Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, Liars and Saints by Malie Meloy, Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver, The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro.

All quite good and recommended.

The phrase “Thrilla in Manila.” A clue spotted last week in the NY Times crossword. (The answer was “rematch.”) Then a friend of mine used the phrase Monday evening. Then on Tuesday I read it in a novel (“John the Revelator” by Peter Murphy.)

It was a long haul, over 900 pages, but a good read. I can’t say much without doing “spoilers.” Lots of great characters. Esther Summerson, the Jellybys, Harold Skimpole, Mr. Guppy, Krook, Miss Flite, Sir and Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn, Jo, Mr. George, and so many more.

300 pages in, Dickens, as Virginia Woolf observed, keeps piling more characters on the fire. It’s a blazing bonfire by now with several shadowy characters up to something. It’s not exactly clear what their up to, but it’s clear that they are revolving, ever closer, to the protracted Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Snagsby, the street urchin, Jo, Lady Dedlock, Mr. Bucket, and on and on.

The Social Security Administration keeps a list of the most popular given name by year. From 1909 to 1946 the most popular female name was Mary. Mary was overthrown by Linda from 1947 until 1954 and then Mary regained her supremacy until 1962 when Lisa ruled until1971. Then Jennifer took over until 1984 when she was overthrown by Jessica who ruled until 1995, interrupted briefly in 1991-1992 by Ashley. Since then the Ems have ruled – Emily from 1996 through 2007, only to be superceded by Emma in 2008.

On the boy’s side, John was king from 1909 until 1924, when Robert took over until 1940, when James took the throne. He ruled until 1952 and then Robert returned for one year. A few James and David years followed and then began the long reign of Michael which ran from 1954, only interrupted once by David in 1960, until 1998. From 1999  through 2008 Jacob has reigned.

That’s a lot of Cobs and Bobs.

Getting started on another Dickens. This time starting with chapter 3, we’ve got a female narrator. There’s a protracted law suit going on, and most of the main characters are beneficiaries of one of the litagants, John Jarndyce. There’s our narrator, Esther, as well as two distant cousins, Ada and Richard. And then there’s the charming Harold Skimpole, the self-described care-free and careless person who has no understanding of money and the ways of the world. He describes Ada thus: “We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind,  an orphan. She is a child of the universe.” Mr Jarndyce replies, “The universe makes a rather indifferent parent, I am afraid.” Before the chapter ends, Richard and Esther pool what little money they have to keep Harold from being arrested for a delinquent debt. More later.

Another excellent book by Dickens filled with great characters and exciting drama.

The tale is set in Coketown, a made-up manufacturing town in the north of England. Dickens uses animal metaphors to great effect, describing machines as melancholy elephants constantly nodding their heads, and the smoke from the factory chimneys as giant snakes.

The characters include Thomas Gradgrind, a school teacher who is intent on “just the facts” – no whimsy allowed.  Josiah Bounderby is the blustery banker, who marries Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa. Louisa is later wooed by James Harthouse, which causes Gradgrind’s system of facts to come tumbling down.

Among the “hands” at the factory are Stephen Blackpool and his friend Rachel. Among the most moving scenes in the novel are the scene in which Rachel saves Stephen’s drunken wife from poisoning herself, and the “starlight” scene after Stephen is rescued from the abandoned mine-shaft.

Great stuff.

The Final Jeopardy answer today was “Who is Robert Burns?” The category was “Celebrations.” The question was “Homecoming Scotland is a year-long celebration of this man’s 250th birthday on Jan. 25, 2009.”

by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is a great novel. I should have read it when it was assigned in high school, but like youth, literature is wasted on the young.

In a nutshell, the plot describes Silas, the solitary weaver, and how he came to adopt an orphaned infant, and how that brought him out of his solitude to join in the life of the community.

Here’s a brief passage describing Silas and Eppie as they are sitting in church:

‘

The weaver’s bent shoulders and white hair give him almost the look of advanced age, though he is not more than five-and-fifty; but there is the freshest blossom of youth close by his side – a blonde dimpled girl of eighteen, who has vainly tried to chastise her curly auburn hair into smoothness under her brown bonnet: the hair ripples as obstinately as a brooklet under the March breeze, and the little ringlets burst away from the restraining comb behind and show themselves below the bonnet crown. Eppie cannot help being rather vexed about her hair, for there is no other girl in Raveloe who has hair at all like it, and she thinks hair ought to be smooth.

This post was lifted in its entirty from this accidently discovered bog

During March 1878, Forsyth gave a lecture on the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, a lecture he repeated the following year to a well-attended audience in the Town Hall, Cottingley. Both were recorded in the Shipley and Saltaire Times. In the course of his lecture, Forsyth offered the following remarks:

Scotland is not a land of artists. Perhaps it has only produced one really great artist in the true sense of the word. I mean Scott. If the artist is one who sets himself with all his power to please in a noble and lofty way – one whose chief thought is not self-revelation, but the revelation of something above and beyond self; if he is the interpreter of the vast and varied physical and moral and spiritual world, I say Scott is probably the only Scotchman in the highest sense worthy of that name. But, perhaps our dearest poets are not our highest artists. Burns was much that was bad. He was always true – true to humanity, true to his own class, true with himself. You have him as he really was, painted with his own brush with rare skill, much fineness of line, great firmness of touch, great range and depth of colour. You do not find him so much of an artist as to paint for you the thing he would wish to be considered, and offer you that as a portrait of himself. The first influence that woke Burns’s poetic fire was Scotland, the second was woman, the third was nature, the fourth was religion, the fifth was man. Of course, I do not mean that these followed one another in exactly that order. The soul of genius does not grow up in that orderly way. It has a perplexing way of mixing the courses in its spiritual diet … His attitude to women was at once his glory and his shame. Here he rises to his best and here he sinks to his worst. His worst was very bad … It was not humanity that touched him. It was the men and women around him; especially the women. Do not forget that Burns belonged to a country where, I am ashamed to say, a high idea of purity is not the rule in his class of society … Burns, in his fine and fresh fidelity to nature … taught us that nothing can be really beautiful which is not also fundamentally true. And truthful is the one word we can most fully apply to Burns, whether in poetry or in his life. He did many things he ought not to have done. One thing he did not do: he never lied. And he never distorted the voice of nature … [On religion], except in the hour of passion, or in the time of revolt from the horrible religion around him, Burns himself was a pious man, almost a godly man. He strove to pierce to the heart of the matter when everybody round him was feeding on the husks …[Burns] is one of the very foremost of the apostles and apologists of human nature. It was because he could not stand the wholesale denunciation of it, preached by men holding the Calvinistic and unscriptural dogma of total depravity, that he revolted so fiercely from the ecclesiastical conception of man. He saw a dignity, a tenderness, a goodness, a manliness in the men and women round him which did not seem to spring from their having been converted. He saw loving and faithful hearts among those whom the Church called reprobate and non-elect. He felt in himself, along with sins he never blinked, something more and better which the religious world of his day would give him no credit for… And write what you will against him, hang, draw, and quarter him on the moral rack, yet you must say this, that the most compassionate of human hearts was his, that his pity covered all the world except a liar; that it ranged tearfully from daisies and field mice, dogs and old mares, through little children and fond foolish women to heroic souls in their dire adversity, and their conflict with death’.

Click the image for larger version.

The garden on June 8. The zuccini is doing well. A couple other squash types not so much but they are all right. The beans are burning up. All 8 pepper plants have been eaten by bugs. The okra are still small and struggled with bugs as well, but a couple of them now have true leaves and the bugs seem to have stopped. Perhaps they will thrive. Thank goodness for the tomatoes. The 3 at the far end are over 4 feet tall – I think the compost bin used to be there – and look very vigorous. If they were a carnivorous plant I would be very afraid of them. On the right is the compost bin surrounded by peppermint. Next to that is the Italian parsley, which has gone to seed. I was going to cut it back but I saw some ladybugs in there and figured that was a good thing.

Notes to self:

• Next year plant more green beans. They are pretty small and don’t like the heat. From the 6 this year, I got about a dozen beans.
• Move the peppermint somewhere else in the yard. It spreads.
• Try planting larger peppers and okra. The small ones don’t seem to be able to survive the bugs.

Here is the garden on May 1. I started planting on April 5th, but then had to cover them all when there was a frost the next week. Note to self: next year plant after tax day.

Click the image for larger version.

Item: Tuesday, June 3. During the drive home from work, I was listening to “True Oldies 106.7.” After playing the song “Loves Me Like A Rock” by Paul Simon the DJ said, “Paul Simon graduated from Queens College where he majored in English, but he decided that he would rather play music instead of translating the poems of James Joyce and Robert Burns.”

Item: Wednesday, June 4. The $400 Double Jeopardy question in the category “Poets” – Who was Robert Burns?

on the name “Robert Burns” at harpers.org turns up several things one of which is this from the February 1947 issue in an article entitled “Western Half-Acre” by Thomas Hornsby Ferril:

The contradictions wash out. I return to the Nature-loving traits in all of us, if we want to use them to our advantage, so magnificently developed in a man like Robert Burns who could write “The Twa’ Dogs,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Daisy,” and who could be ostracized for his revolutionary devotion to the common man and die as a miserable outcast, yet still set multitudes of us rocking to “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve – bums, barflies, bankers, doctors, economists, arm in arm, everybody loves everybody and where have you been all my life? Sentimentality? Indeed it is! So is war, so is Ku Kluxing; everything wicked about us is sentimental. Robert Burns, who loved all Nature, has done more to make us love each other, in a world where a little goes a long way, than twenty carloads of well meaning international savants. The only thing he hated was the wickedness that hindered loving. Such a mind would forgive, but not approve, tirades like mine against people who rule out love of Nature from their blueprints for a better world. But if we must fight for a better world, let’s love as much of it as we can as we go along, each and every facet of it. The crusader who says there will be time enough to enjoy Nature when we have made the world itself fit to live in is not only an apologist for his own hatreds, but makes the patent error of conceiving of history as a series of static destinations. He reminds me of some single-minded young couple saving up for a glorious honeymoon trip around the world when they are seventy: Unless we love Nature in sickness and in health, in war and peace, in depression and prosperity, we do not love Nature at all-and once we lose interest in her manifestations we block off a vast avenue to our own comradeship.

The Grand Rapids Citadel Band 1884

The Grand Rapids Citadel Band was the first commissioned Salvation Army band in the United States. Mr. David Jolly Hay was the first commissioned bandmaster in the country.

I’m not saying Harry Potter dies – I’m not saying either way – no spoilers here! – I’m just saying that we’ve finished book 7. I read it aloud to my youngest daughter just like all the book before it. (There were several points when it was difficult to speak for getting all choked up near the end of this one.) It feels like the end of an incredible 10 year long journey. J.K. Rowling has wrapped up her tale with a tour de force, a triumph of imagination. Amazing!

Harpers.org is a pretty interesting web site, but not much of the actual magazine in available (free), which is too bad because there is a great story by Alice Munro called “Fiction” in the August issue.

Also in that issue is this funny little piece:

[Discography]
MEMORY ALMOST FULL

From a February 26 sentencing memorandum by
Judge Gregory R. Todd, in the case of Montana v.
Andrew McCormack. In 2006, McCormack was
arrested for stealing beer. After entering a guilty
plea, he received a sentence of probation, community
service, and a fine.

Mr.McCormack, to the question of "Give
your recommendation as to what you think the
Court should do in this case," you said, "Like the
Beatles say, 'Let it be.''' If I were to overlook your
actions and let it be, I would have to ignore that
day in the life on April 21, 2006. Evidently, you
said to yourself, "I feel fine," while drinking beer.
Later, whether you wanted money or were just
trying to act naturally, you became the fool on
the hill. As Mr. Moonlight at 1:30 A.M., you did
not think for yourself, but just focused on I, me,
mine. Because you didn't ask for help, wait for
something else, or listen to your conscience saying,
"Honey, don't," the victim later that day was
fixing a hole in the glass door you broke. After you
stole the eighteen-pack of Old Milwaukee, you
decided it was time to run for your life and carry
that weight. But when the witness said, "Baby,
it's you," the police responded, "I'll get you," and
you had to admit, "You really got a hold on me."
You were not able to get back home because of the
chains they put on you. Although you hoped the
police would say, "I don't want to spoil the party"
and "We can work it out," you were in misery
when they said you were a bad boy. When the
police took you to jail, they said, "Hello, goodbye,"
and you became a nowhere man. Later, when you
thought about what you did, you may have said,
"I'll cry instead." Now you're saying, "Let it be,"
instead of, "I'm a loser." As a result of your hard
day's night, you are looking at a ticket to ride that
long and winding road. Hopefully, you can say
when I'm sixty-four, "I should have known better."

Soku. Hillary said it was “cute like a bunny holding a gun,” and true dat. The song is “I’ll Kill Her” sung by Soku, a young lady from Paris, France. The contrast of a violent threat being made in a fun way is part of the charm, but I think what really makes this song is the guitar playing by Toma – as well as the fact that it’s a good, well-structured song. The minimalism helps, too.

After that check out this “live” version.

It reminds me of Clair de Lune – an Athens band that played only one gig ever – in April of 1980 at the Last Resort.

I just finished “Break of Day” by French author Colette. I mentioned before that her birthday and mine are both January 28, right? In fact I seem to be specialising in women authors born in late January… Edith Wharton’s is January 24. Virginia Woolf’s is January 25. Anyway…

Here’s a quote. The character Helen Clement is speaking to Colette. (The ellipses are hers.)

‘

In short, Madame Colette, it’s true that I live in a very independent way and that I work. But after all, you know life well enough to understand that there are times when things aren’t easy, that I’m a woman like any other… that one can’t avoid certain affections… certain hopes, and it’s just in that particular hope that I’ve been disappointed.

 

It’s been a couple weeks since I finished “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton, written in 1911. The delay in making my comment is like a speechlessness wrought by its devasting emotional impact.

In the first part of the book, I kept wondering why the narrator was so concerned about Ethan’s “story.” He seems too nosy about him. The introduction informs the reader that Ethan was injured in a “smash-up” and it is this foreboding that make the story so poignant.

Once the story starts, with the chapters, it is a flashback to Ethan’s younger days. In this part, I kept wondering how Mrs. Wharton, who was born Edith Jones to one of the richest families in New York – supposedly the Joneses one tried to keep up with – could have such empathy and knowledge of poverty. I also was in wonder at her ability to describe in few words the terrain of the human heart.

This book is a masterpiece. The way such a complete picture is painted with such an economy of words is some kind of magic.