Come and Meet those Dancing Feet

42nd Street was really good.  If I sound surprised it's because MUNY productions for the last 15 years have mostly been mediocre.  But this was a good show with lots of good dancing.

Considering that the temperature was in the high 90's with a heat index of 108 and when the show ended after 10:30 the temperature was still in the upper 80's, that's saying a lot. And the rain held off, the drops didn't start falling until the drive home.  Which is good because this wasn't Singing in the Rain.  Which has been on my mind all night because of comments on my earlier thread.

So here's a brief scene in honor of Andi:

Tap Your Troubles Away

It has been a tough week for a variety of reasons.  But the weekend is almost here.  I'm starting the weekend by going to see 42nd Street at the MUNY.  Tap dancing always puts me in a better mood.

Here's two of the greatest tap dancers ever:  Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell.

How to Kindle a Love of Books

Last week one of my colleagues, a man more than 20 years older than me, came into my office and said "You're young.  I need someone young." 

Since I turned 49 on my last birthday I was flattered.  But when he told me that he needed advice on a graduation gift for his grandson who was leaving college and entering law school, a gift of "some useful new technology" as he put it, I told him that we needed someone younger.  So we walked down the hall to talk to someone who graduated from law school in the last five years.

What we ended up discussing was whether a Kindle would be a good gift.  He didn't know what a Kindle was, but when we explained it he was intrigued.  We all agreed that it might be a wonderful gift for a law student.  The case books for classes probably wouldn't be sold digitally but  if other types of books that a student might need were available digitally, it would be worth the price:  law dictionaries, etc.  He was going to look into it.

I've avoided getting a Kindle.  I like reading "real" books - paper and ink books.  But I can see the benefit of them.  My sister, who travels regularly for her job, has a Kindle and loves it.  She always has something to read wherever she is.  And it is much easier to carry around her Kindle than it is to bring 10 books with her.

Digitalization of most books is coming and will be here before we know it.  And in general I think that's a good thing.  In the same way that digitalization of music and television shows that I can buy online is a good thing.  I don't think it will kill publishing but it will change it. 

Last month Clive Thompson, in Wired Magazine wrote about the digital revolution in reading. His main thesis: Taking [books] digital will unlock their real hidden value: the readers. He made an interesting observation:

You're far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you're far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.

Maybe.  Or maybe they won't buy it in print but they will buy it in a digital format that is easy to read, such as the Kindle format. 

I'm considering seriously considering getting a Kindle.  But I'm not in a hurry to make a decision.

Down the Garden Path

How can you resist a memoir that begins like this:

I bought my cottage by sending a wireless to Timbuctoo from the Mauretania, at midnight, with a fierce storm lashing the decks.

I couldn't.  But, then, I already knew what I was getting when I purchased Down the Garden Path by Beverly Nichols.  Years ago I had read his memoir trilogy in which he described his efforts to rehabilitate the house and gardens at Merry Hall:  Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn.

I'm not a gardener but even I loved his accounts of gardening exploits and English country living in the years after World War II.  I was excited when I saw that my favorite little local bookstore carried the Merry Hall trilogy.  When I realized that they were carrying even more of Nichols' books I decided to treat myself to Down the Garden Path, his initial foray into garden writing. 

Published in 1932 it unexpectedly became a great hit.  Nichols was already an established writer who had a reputation throughout the 1920's as a partying playboy, friends with Noel Coward and Anita Loos. So it was somewhat of a surprise when he published a book about gardening.   He expected it would be mostly ignored, but it wasn't.  According to the new forward, written by Nichols' biographer Bryan Connon, The Gardening Club of America declared it "one of the most delectable and diverting garden books ever published."

Nichols has a wonderful way with words, although his turns of phrase are old fashioned early 20th Century phrases.  And of course he is describing another time, 1928-1931, a time when master-servant relationship existed, when people like Nichols had to deal with "the servant problem".   By the time Nichols wrote the Merry Hall books, World War II was over and upper class Britons were more or less resigned to the fact that life had changed.  (They didn't know how to move on to "post-servant"  phase, but they realized they were going to be servantless.)  But at the time this book was written the landed class was still in denial.

I'm not much of a gardener (ok I'm not at all a gardener) but even I could have a beautiful garden if I could employ ... a gardener.   Nichols has a gardener to do the heavy lifting and that leaves him time to putter in the garden.  And write books about it.  Which is marvelous for we readers.

I've already lent it to my best friend H who is the possessor of the complete set of Merry Hall books.  It probably will make the rounds of the book club too.

Cold Comfort Farm/Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

One of the problems with having a love of reading but no formal education in literature is not knowing how to classify novels within genres.  To the extent that we covered genre in my high school literature courses or my college freshman English courses (which I actually mostly took in high school), it was only in a cursory way.  So I tend to classify literature in a cursory way.

What I've found is that "real" English majors are always correcting me when I try to classify novels.  Cursory isn't good enough for them.  I understand that; it's how I feel about generalized discussions of the law.  But since, most of the time, the genre really isn't necessary for what I want to talk about when I talk about novels (and since the "correction" often takes the form of an extended lecture that forms a huge digression from the topic at hand) I tend to avoid mentioning genre.

But that's hard to do when talking about novels that fall into genres like, for instance, satire. 

I'm just going to admit right off the bat that I know next to nothing about satire as a genre.  I recognize that there are all kinds of genre classifications that may fall within satire or may well be slightly (or majorly) different from satire.   I've never figured out how those classifications work and, inevitably, whatever I decide to call something, I'm told it is WRONG! 

Maybe that's why I think I don't like satire.  I do think that I don't like satire.  I don't think I hate it.  But I do think I don't like it.

So with all those caveats ...

As I said the other day, I was not fond of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.  I remember that, mostly, I was bored by it but I kept reading because "everyone" said it was so great.   It took me a while to figure out that it was supposed to be satire and that was partly because it didn't seem all that over-the-top to me, a girl from the midwest.  As far as I was concerned, people from New York really were like that and the things that happened to them really happen to people in New York.  Where was the satire?  Eventually I got it.  But I didn't like it.

My formal introduction to satire (wasn't everyone's?) was Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal.  But I had read Huckleberry Finn before that.  I liked Huck Finn. No one told me it was satire but I understood that Twain was playing with me.  On the other hand, I've never wanted to re-read Huck Finn.  I've never wanted to re-read A Modest Proposal.  I've never wanted to re-read anything satirical that I can think of.   The way I look at it, once you "get it" there isn't any point in reading it again.  And that's how I've always looked at satire - as something that is meant to convey a message (usually with blunt force) and once I get the message I can discard the medium.

I sometimes think that the reason I avoid satire is because I'd rather just "get it" by reading a book of non-fiction and really learning about the subject.  The kinds of satire that I like are the short humorous kind that make me laugh.  A Modest Proposal, for all it's cleverness, isn't going to make anyone guffaw.  The Onion, on the other hand, makes me laugh quite often.  But I wouldn't want to read a novel-length version of an Onion story. And is The Onion satire?  I think it is.  But it is also a parody. 

I like parody. And here we get into deep waters because I have no idea if parody is a sub-genre of satire or is it it's own genre or is a technique that is sometimes used in satire?  I'm sure someone will enlighten me.  

I think I like parody because the key to understanding and "getting" parody isn't knowing any fact about society in general (political or religious etc.) but knowing something about the works that are being parodied and what their strengths and weaknesses are.  The Onion is a parody of a newspaper.  It may satirize the news, but it only works because people are familiar with newspapers. The Daily Show  is wonderful because it is a parody of a news broadcast.  It uses that parody to satirize the political news of the day but it only works because people understand news broadcasts and their strengths and weaknesses.

Most parodies that I like have nothing to do with politics but are strictly parodying a particular type of work of literature or film or television.  For instance, I thought the film Galaxy Quest, a parody of the Star Trek franchise, was fabulously funny.   There are certain elements of parody in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make the entire concept work.  As far as I'm concerned, a good parody is written by someone who loves the underlying work being parodied and is enjoyed most by people who love that underlying work too.  I think that's why I liked the film Australia but other people didn't.

That leads me to Cold Comfort Farm, which is a parody. (Is it also satire?  Google it and you will see it associated with satire.)  I read Cold Comfort Farm because a number of people recommended it.  It took me a while to realize it was a parody and not just some other form of 1930's comic novel (although I was fully on board with the fact of parody by the time that the protagonist got to the farm). 

Cold Comfort Farm is the story of Flora Poste ("Robert Poste's daughter") who is left an orphan after finishing an expensive education that prepared her for nothing.  She has not enough money to support herself so she decides to do what all orphans do in novels, go live with relatives.  She chooses some mysterious relatives who live at a place called Cold Comfort Farm and who owe her father some mysterious debt.  When she arrives she finds that she has stepped into a situation much like a 19th century novel not only in the living conditions but in the mindset of the inhabitants (or, apparently, much like early 20th century popular British fiction).  This pleases her because she can work to change the lives of the people for the better.  And she does.

I never read the popular British novels of the day that Gibbons was parodying, but I have read the Brontes and DH Lawrence and that was enough to "get it".   One of the interesting things to me was that Gibbons wrote the novel in the 1930's (obviously before World War II) and yet the story is set at a later date (the early 1950's?) while the life of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm is right out of Lawrence or Bronte.  This gives the novel an unpredictable feel that is, I think, essential to keeping the reader turning the pages.  I kept being pulled into the 19th century aspects of Cold Comfort Farm only to be jerked away by the appearance of telephones and aeroplanes and chevy vans and "talkies". 

I think this is important because one of the reasons I don't go out of my way to read parodies is because I fear being bored.  If you are familiar with the underlying work that is being parodied then you essentially know what is going to happen.  Humor can only go so far in keeping my interest.  What I need is a "new" problem for the author to solve.  And in Cold Comfort Farm the problem that Gibbons set for herself was how to integrate this "modern" woman into a 19th century setting without destroying the subject that was being parodied and while still keeping the woman "modern". 

I think she succeeded in part by making Flora Poste (the heroine) not really very likeable.  I didn't become invested in Flora for a very long time.  In fact, at the beginning, I wondered how I was going to tolerate her long enough to follow her through a novel.  But Gibbons uses some of the characteristics of Flora that could be annoying (her self-assuredness, her insistence on having things her way, her refusal to listen to naysaying) as a counterpoint to the people at Cold Comfort Farm who are stuck in their 19th century life simply because they can't bring themselves to act to change their lives.

In 19th century and early 20th century novels the heroine who brings change to the people "set in their ways" doesn't do it through force of character.  Jane Eyre is constantly described as quiet and unassertive.  Mary in The Secret Garden gets nowhere when she is assertive in her temper tantrums, it is only when she becomes a "good child" that she is able to work change.

Flora has no interest in being like those kinds of heroines.  She is a "modern" woman. And that is what makes this an interesting parody.  She is, in some ways, a parody within a parody.

I admit that it took me about half of the novel to really begin enjoying it.  It was only when I saw that Flora really was going to follow through on her intention to force changes that I became interested in what was going to happen and how she was going to make it happen.  I feel that it is a novel that I will read again some day because I know that I missed a lot on first reading.  But when I put it down I didn't think much about it and I did not intend to even write about it.  (Partly because of the whole parody/satire connection /dichotomy.)

Then I picked up Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.  As Fforde says, fiction is "strange, unpredictable and fun!" 

In this novel, there is an agency known as Jurisfiction that patrols BookWorld and keeps plots in order and stops rogue fictional characters from leaping from novel to novel or worse, leaping out into the real world (or Outland, as it is referred to).  As an Outlander, Thursday Next works with fictional characters (mostly from books that are seldom read anymore, because those characters have more free time to do other things).  They meet in locations that are "back story", for instance the ballroom of the Dashwood estate in Sense and Sensibility.   It is a difficult concept to explain but by this, his fourth book in the series, it is understood by his readers.

Think of books as you think of them when you read them - as a small universe that you enter and that really exists.  Or at least exists in the sense that a television set with actors playing the characters exists.  In Fforde's fiction a few chosen people really can enter into books and walk among the characters, as long as they stay in the back story so that the reader doesn't "see" them.

But a book in Bookworld doesn't have all the detail that readers imagine when they read a book.  As Thursday ponders:

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so.  When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the author might have died a long time ago.

In Bookworld, each book floats in the great Nothing in which text cannot exist.  But the books also exist in clumps (maybe like galaxies) that are composed of genres. (Groan.  Genre again) Characters have learned how to communicate and jump from novel to novel (except no one can get into Sherlock Holmes yet) and they have, collectively, formed their own type of government complete with a legislature and an enforcement branch.  Thursday and the fictional characters on her team do the monitoring as well as keeping the peace between genres.

For instance, in this novel one of the subplots involves a border dispute between the Racy Novel genre and its neighbors, Feminist and Ecclesiastical.  The senator for Racy Novel reveals they have developed a "dirty bomb", a "tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature" and threatens to detonate it.  This is of great concern to the Feminist and Ecclesiastical genres. As Thursday  explains:

A well placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitive nature right into the middle of Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't really classify Fforde's novels.  They are fantasy.  They are comic.  They are mysteries.  Are they parodies?  Maybe Fforde tries to answer that in this novel.   

At one point Thursday is cast out of her own Thursday Next novel into the great Nothing.  Because she is not text she can survive where a fictional character cannot (that part of the novel is a graphic novel - no text, get it?) and she eventually manages to make her way to the next book ... Cold Comfort Farm.   (Where she incidentally discovers there really is something nasty in the woodshed.)

So Cold Comfort Farm and Thursday Next. Neighbors.  Linked by genre. At least in the mind of Jasper Fforde.   Is it because they are both in the parody genre?  Or is it because they parody multiple genres?  As I said, I avoid those discussions. :)

By the way Thursday Next was one of the books I was going to read this year in What's in a Name Challenge.  Two down.

Olive Kitteridge

I decided to read Elizabeth Strout's book, Olive Kitteridge, because it won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and despite its description as a novel of stories. I'm not a big fan of short story and I suspected that this would be more short story than novel.

I think it was. And I think that anyone who enjoys short stories might really enjoy this book. It is composed of thirteen chapters that each could stand alone as a separate story. Olive, the main character, is not necessarily the subject of each story and in one of them she makes only a perfunctory appearance walking into and out of a restaurant with her husband, noticed by the woman who plays the piano in the cocktail lounge.

Maybe approaching Olive this way is the best way because Olive is a difficult character. She's not very likeable but I did end up having deep empathy for her. Her husband Henry, a Jimmy Stewart character complete with the "aw shucks" language, is a very nice man and it is never completely clear how he ended up married to Olive. Her son Christopher, who suffers from depression, is overwhelmed by her so much that he doesn't seem real through much of the book. The other people in the town who know Olive do not, in general, seem to like her although they often notice moments of deep (and unexpected) kindnesses that she performs.

Strout is at her best in describing the lives of the other town people and yet, for me, that was a problem. Her story, for instance, of the life of the cocktail pianist is deeply moving and yet ... I wanted more. And at the same time I wondered why I was supposed to care about this character who has almost no interaction with the Kitteridges and who doesn't really appear at any other point in the story.

One reason I don't like short stories is that I dislike getting attached to a character only to see them disappear while there are still hundreds of pages in the book for me to read. When the story of a character is over I want to put down the book and pick up a new book. Maybe that's why I do better reading short stories that appear in magazines rather than in bound collections.

But, since this wasn't really a book of short stories, I kept reading. And I eventually got to the chapters written from the point of view of Olive herself. And that was worth the wait.

What all the stories in this book have in common is not really Olive. Strout has written a book that is, above all, a meditation on aging and end of life. Death and the thought of death pervades the stories but they are balanced by births and marriages and joy. With thirteen stories to work with, there is much to think about after this book is finished.