6 posts tagged “books”

In less than a week, Team Snarkfox will be in glorious London, England, with all that entails (acute childhood nostalgia, oddly flavored crisps, gawking at things in Liberty, visits to cousins, buckets of tea, the Tate Modern, hemorrhaging money). We haven't been in almost six years, and I can hardly wait. I am filling the time until then with:

• desultory filling-out of forms that must be completed before my job status shifts over to something else, which it will do while we are out of town;
• largely failing to read the things I ought to be reading in preparation for next semester;
• sending occasional work-related emails so that people will be under the mistaken impression that I am getting something done;
• formulating schemes to run away and read novels on the lawn.

I have been feeling somewhat ancient and unaccomplished lately--or rather, naggingly aware of the fact that I should have gotten a good deal more sorted out by now, given the age that I am, and that I'm not going to suddenly get a few years back to get it righter. On the other hand, this state of affairs is hardly a surprising outcome of the habits outlined above, now is it? Also I note that my face appears to have mutated into that of a well-creased yet puffy monkey, which is not heartening. I had hoped to age gracefully, but it seems that unless it turns out that "comic and rubbery" is the height of grace, I am out of luck. Too bad.

But London! London will be extremely heartening, and indeed probably even replete with actual reading of novels on lawns. There are a lot of grassy squares that are eminently suitable for just that very thing. It will be restorative.

Speaking of novels, I keep reading The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West, over and over again. I read lots of books more than once, of course, but this is a different, more total and consuming, kind of rereading. There are a number of books that I read and have read this way, often coming to the end and flipping back to the beginning to start over again without standing up in between. Most of the books that fall into this category I read for the first time quite some time ago. The majority date from childhood, when it seems my whole life was consumed by an unbroken stream of reading, and whenever I happened by some circumstance to be forced to do something other than read, my mind was still awash in whatever books I had been reading just before.

The Fountain Overflows I read for the first time only six months ago and I believe I have read it at least six times since then. I wish I felt I had the skill to explain what makes it so entirely compelling to me.

It was written in 1956 but is set about fifty years earlier. The narrator, Rose Aubrey, is one of four children in a family that appears to be almost entirely unfit for the world in which it lives. Their father is brilliant, handsome, mercurial, a political genius, and constitutionally incapable of passing up an opportunity to lose money in the stock market or to bite a hand that feeds him. Their mother, once an accomplished concert pianist, is thin, anxious, nerve-jangled, shabby. To outsiders she seems hopelessly odd, but in fact she is clever and generous, capable of holding the family together and looking after a number of other characters in distress that cross their path.

Rose, her twin sister Mary, and their brother Richard Quin never doubt that where the Aubreys and the outside world diverge, it is infinitely better to be an Aubrey. The oldest child, Cordelia, is built differently. Their oddness and poverty agonize her. She is pretty; she plays the violin in a way that stupider adults think is impressive, though the musical Aubreys know better and are agonized in their turn:

...we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.

This gives you some idea of the quality of the writing. The discrepancies between the judgments of the non-Cordelia Aubreys and the judgments of most of the people they come into contact with (in all of which the book sides definitively with Rose) produce the emotional tensions and central drama of the book, though page to page it is filled with small events. Mainly it brilliantly captures what it is to be a child, (thus) relatively powerless, and possessed of very high standards. I love it.

Oh dear, what a ridiculously long post this turned out to be, and with so little holding it together. On the other hand, writing it cheered me up enormously. Since I'm pretty sure that only about three people are going to read it in any case, so be it. Maybe one of you will even read the book and tell me how much you loved it.

Yesterday I spent at least two hours drawing an otter. Today (and a number of other days that preceded it) I spent a good deal more time looking for sources of research funding, with much less to show for it. Productivity hooray.

On the other hand, the weather turned magically delicious while I was locked up indoors all day, and when I emerged at 8:15pm (I'd been substitute-teaching an evening class for a colleague) it was so shockingly lovely that it made me happy in spite of myself.

Another source of unexpected good feelings was this: Snark had to get up for a few hours smack in the middle of the night last night in order to do some computer thing for a client while the rest of the nation slept. Since he would have to set an alarm and get in and out of bed exactly when I am most likely to stare appalled at the ceiling for hours with insomnia in the event that I wake up on my own, neither of us was expecting to feel spectacularly well-rested or pleasant today. But since we were anticipating it, and I knew I'd have to stay at school extra late today anyhow, we granted ourselves an extra lazy morning, and it all wound up having a rather festive schedule-turned-upside-down effect. Not so bad after all.

In other high-achieving news, we watched two whole films in the past week. I cannot recommend I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, despite my fond feelings for Mike Hodges (or at least for Get Carter) and my well documented extremely favorable opinion of Clive Owen and his handsome, handsome handsomeness. Alas. If you are in the market for a charming trifle, however, I think you will find that Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day does not disappoint. I also finally finished my bathtub reading of The Little Drummer Girl, bringing me right up to date for 1983.

This rather awesome passage is from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, published in 1921:

Satan was like a man of sixty, or it might be sixty-two, in all things save that he was covered with grey fur, and had horns like those of a stag. He wore a breech-clout of very dark grey, and he sat in a chair of black marble, on a dais: his bushy tail, which was like that of a squirrel, waved restlessly over his head as he looked at Jurgen, without speaking, and without turning his mind from an ancient thought.

I think that "by Satan's squirrelly tail!" would make a good oath. I only wish there were more opportunity to utter that sort of thing in everyday life. (Obviously, the answer to this is that I must make the opportunity.) The tail comes up again at the end of the chapter: "So Jurgen left the Black House of Barathum: and Jurgen also left Grandfather
Satan, erect and bleak in his tall marble chair, and with his eyes gleaming in the dim light, as he sat there restively swishing his soft bushy tail."

Nice, isn't it?

I was expecting Jurgen to be both weird and ribald, which indeed it is, but I didn't anticipate quite how positively, snickeringly porny it would be. Oh, the lances, their tips red with blood. Oh, the magestically large swords and sticks and scepters. Oh, the shaking of the scepters and the poking with the lances and the hiding of the swords where the nubile young thing could not possibly see them. Oh, indeed.

Actually, your corners are a little too poky for that to work so well.

This thread on Unfogged did not wind up being very well directed towards answering Ogged's original request, but it made me very happy by sending me on a trip through Books I Love Land. Oh, hello, A Change of Climate! Wonderful to see you, A Maggot and Woman in White and Mating and An Instance of the Fingerpost! I don't really have anything more to say about any of it, but I had just been feeling super cranky as I tend to do when I am working to many deadlines at once and thought it would be pleasant to revisit the way that thread pepped me up. C'mere books, let me give you some snorgles.

Then she said, "ahh. smell that lovely decomposing vegetation."

While I'm reminding myself that, in fact, this week has not been devoid of cheer, I should also remember that I got to spend a lot of time reading around in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. This is always a great treat for me, because it is chock full of delights. It's a nice big corpus of some 190 hours of recorded and transcribed speech from lectures, seminars, lab meetings, advising sessions, campus tours, dissertation defenses, and various other academic adventures. I think my favorite are the off-campus labs where people are doing field research on fish and birds. Like this!

SU-f: you're not dictatorial you just want your own way.

SU-m: he's a despot (face it.)

S1: <LAUGH> yeah, pleased to meet you too. <SS: LAUGH> can you think what it would be like if you ever had me as a patient?

SU-f: (xx) is this mine? over there?

SU-f: um, yeah they were over there.
<PAUSE:30>

S1: dee di dee you know it's a really tough job but, someone has to do it.

SU-f: <LAUGH> me
<PAUSE:11>

SU-m: uh oh

SU-m: uh oh

SU-m: uh oh

SU-f: <GETS THROWN IN WATER> oh

About damn time.

Annnnd, we had a really good speaker at the department colloquium this week, smart and charming and practical and organized. So what exactly I have to be grumpy about, I really do not know. My hug meter is so low LOOOOOVE MEEEEEE 

I must register my disappointment that Black Swan Green is not a zillion pages long.

...of two rather different milieux: (a) the Stephen Potter *manship books, and (b) Fast Times at Ridgemont High.