The First Time a Second Time?

Booking Through thursday asks:

What book would you love to be able to read again for the first time?

None. That's not how I approach books. If I really like a book I don't want to read it again as if it was new. I want to read it again knowing what I know so I can then pick up things I missed the first time. If I was still reading it like it was the first time I'd never pick up those things.

This & That

Some stuff:

Sarah Waters.  The Guardian had an interesting interview with novelist Sarah Waters this week.

In the past, the literary grandes dames of the 20th century were larger-than-life figures as complex as Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes or as frankly posh and exotic as Daphne du Maurier. Waters, who has the potential, and perhaps the appetite, to achieve a du Maurier audience, is not like that. She is at pains to stress her ordinariness. "I think I'm an unhysterical person," she says. "I do see myself as normal." Everything about her situation here advertises normality. "But," she goes on, "I think that what's behind normality is very interesting."

PD James and Elizabeth George.  At the beginning of May, Rohan Maitzen wrote a blog post that I intended to point to earlier about James and George called Who Cares who Killed ... Whoever it Was?  I had read George's last novel a few months ago but I just finished James' last novel The Private Patient recently.  I found a lot to think about in her post.

Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of 'puzzle mysteries,' such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly "whodunnit." (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character's outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives--which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.

I think that's true.  At this point I only read George to find out the next chapter in the saga of Lynley and also Barbara Havers.  The mystery is really irrelevant to me.   I read James because I like the way she writes and less to find out what happens to Dalgleish but that's only because I long ago learned that James will not reveal all about Dalgleish.   And this is why I continued reading Janet Evanavich all last summer even as I grew to almost dislike her formulaic writing.  I wanted to find out if Stephanie and Joe would get together - finally and completely.  When I figured out that Evanovich had no intention of doing anything but tease us with that relationship to sell books, I lost interest and I've never read her last novel.

Speaking of mystery detectives ...

My Summer Book Wish List.  Lindsey Davies has a new volume out in her Marcus Didius Falco series - volume #19.   It's called Alexandria and, yes, the mystery will be irrelevant.  I want to find out what's going on with Marcus, Helen and the kids.   Iain Pears, has a new novel out:  Stone's Fall.  Reviews say it's more like Dream of Scipio than An Instance of the Fingerpost, which sounds encouraging.   Dream is one of my favorite novels.  (And the fact he lists Robertson Davies' The Deptford Trilogy as one of his three favorite books pleases me very much.)  A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book won't be released in the United States until October.  Will I be able to wait?  Or will I need to get it from a commonwealth country (hello Canada!) before then?  Or maybe someone who is traveling to Europe will pick it up for me in an airport bookstore ...

Finally ... a feel good story:

The Last Olympian

I finished Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian, book #5 in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  This was billed as the last book in the series and the adventures are finished but ... there were lots of openings at the end for another series based on the same concept.

The series has been leading up to one giant war between the demi-gods and gods against the forces of evil led by Kronos.  I expected that this book would encompass the war and it did.  In fact, most of the book was the war and I didn't expect that.  It was one action sequence after another.  I enjoyed it but would have liked a little less action and a little more character development.  I guess Riordan thought he had developed all of his characters at this point.

There were some clever bits.  The monster Typhon is moving through the country like a terrible storm front (in fact that's what mortals think he is) and at one point he is in St. Louis destroying buildings downtown.  I hope one of them was the Gateway One building, I've never liked it and the Mall would be better without it.

But most of the action takes place in New York and for those of us not up on the geography of Manhattan some of the descriptions didn't mean much (although Riordan or his editors did think to include a map, which was helpful).  In fact reading this book is a little like hanging out with a Yankees fan for an extended period.   By the end I wasn't really all that upset that New York was trashed. 

There were a few twists in the story that were good and the ending was satisfying.  I'm not a kid so I don't know how it would go over with kids.  I had a good discussion about the series with my 13 year old cousin Andrew last week but he hadn't read the new book yet.   When he does ... we can compare notes.

What's the story?

A long time ago, I don't remember the year but it must have been at least thirty-five years ago, I went on a sightseeing trip to Hannibal MO with my family. Hannibal is famous as the place where Mark Twain grew up and there are all kinds of tacky Mark Twain sights that you can go see. I had been there before - it's the kind of place you go on field trips. My mother was always game for day trips too and we went a few times as a family.

Bill Bryson, in his book The Lost Continent, described Mark Twain's boyhood home very accurately:

It cost two dollars to get in and was a disappointment. It purported to be a faithful reproduction of the original interiors, but there were wires and water sprinklers clumsily evident in every room. I also very much doubt that young Samuel Clemens' bedroom had Armstrong vinyl on the floor (the same pattern as was in my mother's kitchen, I was interested to note) or that his sister's bedroom had a plywood partition in it. You don't actually go in the house; you look through the windows. At each window there is a recorded message telling you about that room as if you were a moron ("This is the kitchen. This is where Mrs. Clemens would prepare the family's meals ...). The whole thing is pretty shabby, which wouldn't be so awful if it were owned by some underfunded local literary society and they were doing the best they could with it. In fact, it is owned by the City of Hannibal, and it draws 135,000 visitors a year. It's a little gold mine for the town.

Since we had been to Hannibal before (I don't remember why were bothering to see it again) we were looking for something different to do and we saw an advertisement for "Rockcliffe Mansion". It had very little to do with Samuel Clemens (he had been a guest once) and we thought that was great so we drove up to it.

Rockcliffe Mansion was ... a mansion. A very beautiful mansion. Hannibal is situated along the Mississippi River. The business area is down at river-level but there are hills and bluffs behind the town and Rockcliffe Mansion sits on top of one of them. It was designed by Barnett, Haynes and Barnett, of St. Louis, who had also designed the Missouri Governor's Mansion and many of the turn-of-the-century mansions in St. Louis' West End. The original owner was a local lumber baron, John J. Cruikshank, and he moved in with his wife and four daughters in 1900.

The thirty room mansion had a formal dining room, music room, library, two parlors and a "Moorish" room on the first floor (besides the kitchen, butler's pantry and breakfast room). It had a ballroom on the third room (plus servants quarters, a sewing room and a schoolroom) and multiple bedrooms on the second floor. What I remember most about the house was that it was fitted out for both gas lighting and the "new fangled" electricity. Mr. Cruikshank wanted to be modern but didn't trust electricity was reliable so all the light fixtures had both electric and gas. This must have been fairly common at the time because after touring the mansion I was watching Meet Me in St. Louis and noticed, in the scene where Esther asks John to accompany her around the house while she turns out the lights, that all the light fixtures in that house had both electricity and gas.

I've always loved going through old houses but this one especially struck me because it had so many original furnishings and because of its story. The Cruikshanks moved into the house in 1900 and the daughters grew up in it. One of the daughters got married and moved into the house right next door. In 1924 Mr. Cruikshank died. His widow moved in with her daughter next door. The house was boarded up and never lived in again. Forty years later the city was going to condemn it and it was going to be torn down. (The daughter was still living next door.) But a group of intrepid local individuals decided to check it out. They gained access to the house and discovered a time capsule.

When Mrs. Cruikshank moved out she left everything exactly as it was. There was still furniture in it, and paintings, even some clothes were still there. It was as if she walked out one day, turned the key and never came back. And the house was so well built that it was still structurally fine.

Inside, [they] found, under the crust of years of soot and grime, gigantic rooms and halls with palladium windows and 10 carved marble and tile fireplaces. Rockcliffe, as the home became known, was built by a lumber baron, Mr. John J. Cruikshank, who had supplied as building materials only the finest quality walnut, oak and mahogany that could be found. With the double brick wall construction and the innovative designing by Barnett, Haynes, and Barnett of St. Louis, this particular home was far more solid after 75 years than most homes built today.

Once this was discovered the house, of course, had to be saved. And it was.

But although you can find this story many places (on the house's Website and on a wikipedia page, as well as information you can get at the house) it never answers the question that I have always had. Why did it happen? Why did Mrs. Cruikshank just turn the key in the lock and leave everything as it was? Why did they not sell the house? It might have been different in the depression, but in 1924 surely there would have been a buyer. Or even after the war. And even if they kept the house why was it never emptied? I've never seen an answer to these questions.

I've been thinking about this because Rockcliffe Mansion is now for sale. For a mere $1,500,000 you could own it and all of its furnishings. Here's a link to some exterior shots of the house and here's a link to interior views so you can see for yourself what a beautiful house this is. There's loads of beautiful woodwork (since Mr. Cruikshank was a lumber baron).

So, thinking about this, I did a little googling. I found an 1880 St. Louis Newspaper reference, dateline Hannibal, Missouri, referring to a case by the State of Missouri against John T. K. Hayward, James Hayward, & John J. Cruikshank for printing and circulating a lewd pamphlet. That may have been Mr. Cruikshank's father. I found a NY Times article about a divorce in the late 1800's between a John J. Cruikshank and his wife Mary (with a daughter and son mentioned). I found a photo of John J. Cuikshank's home in about 1890 on Lyon street which may be the home his wife Mary received in the divorce. I found a History of Cruikshank Lumber in google books which states that JJ Cruikshank retired from the business in the late 1890's and it was taken over by his son (must have been the son by his first wife). In retirement he built "Rock Cliff" the most beautiful mansion in northeastern Missouri. I found a story of ghosts in the house.

Finally I found the Missouri Department of Natural Resources site where I found the report (pdf) made when it was placed on the national registry of historic places:

When J. J. Cruikshank, Senior (d. 1890) moved his lumber business to Hannibal from Alton, Illinois in 1856 he was joining an already burgeoning trend. Although Missouri did not itself have large lumber resources, Hannibal turned its geographical position to advantage, using the Mississippi River to float logs down from Wisconsin and Minnesota and the railroads to transport processed lumber to points west and south. In that first year Cruikshank handled one million board feet of lumber. By the late 1880's this figure had risen to forty million annually and the Cruikshank firm was just one of a number of local lumber companies, twelve in 1870, ten in 1883. J. J. Cruikshank, Junior, succeeded his father as head of the firm in 186^, and by 1883, before the real peak of the business, he was estimated to be worth up to half a million dollars. After the Civil War, like others in his position, he expressed his affluence in a large Italianate house. Its location on the southeast corner of Fifth and Lyon Streets was just across the street from the father of his wife, the former Mary E. Bacon, and in the part of town known as Millionaire's Row.

In 1884 this marriage ended in divorce, and two years later he married Annie Louise Hart (born 1860), twenty-seven years his junior. In the next eight years, four daughters were born to them, and it is likely that the desire to please and to show off this new young family encouraged him to consider building a new and more fashionable house.

It goes on to say:

Socially, the house worked as hoped. At the opening reception in June, 1901, the Empire Orchestra played for 700 guests. Daughter Gladys was married on the stair landing-in 1912, Louise and Helen on the veranda in 1915 and 1925, respectively. The social high point came on June 2, 1902, when Mark Twain addressed some 300 guests from the stairway. By that time the lumbering-industry had declined considerably, and by 1905 rafting was "almost past." J. J. Cruikshank Junior's death in 1924 led to the house's closing. It remained unoccupied for forty-three years.

All very interesting, but still doesn't answer my questions.

On a Fodor's site I found someone's report on a trip to Hannibal:

Finally we went to the Rockcliff Mansion. WOW!!!

After J.J. Cruikshank, Jr.died in 1924, his window took a few items, fired the servents and went next door to live with her daughter. The family then ignored the house until the city told them in the 1960s to fix it up or tear it down. So the daughter arranged to have it bulldozed into the cellars!!!!
Some people in town were able to buy it from her just a few days before it was to be demolished. What they found was: books still in the book cases, hand carved furniture from Italy, Tiffany lamps, lighting fixtures and windows, linens, and clothing. There was some water damage, but the woodwork and wallpaper were still in good condition. All this, the daughter was going to wantonly destroy! It's definately worth the trip to see.

That seemed to be the same story the guide had told us when we visited the house so long ago. So maybe its true. But why? Why wouldn't the interior furnishings have been sold? It makes no sense to me.

It seems like a good mystery or at least a good mysterious background for a novel.

By the way, google is amazing. Once I knew the name of his first wife I discovered that she re-married in 1902 in England.

This & That: TV, Rooftop Bars, etc.

Some stuff:

Dollhouse News. Via Jen and Manuel I heard that Fox is going to renew Dollhouse for another 13 episode season.  So I headed over to Whedonesque where Joss himself posted a comment:

Any thread that contains both "Shpadoinkle" and "Yub Yub" is truly exciting. And anything that reunites me with my stunning cast and my crazy staff (or "room fulla Tophers", as I call them) is nothing short of a gift. Heady times, indeed. We're two weeks away from finishing "Cabin" and now it looks like no summer vacation after all. But oh, the terrible things my brain is brewing... Just wait. We'll make it worth it.
Thanks for hanging in.

Apparently all of us watching on Hulu counted!  Not to mention those who use DVRs.  ABC also renewed Castle which I've been watching on Monday nights.  I love Nathan Fillion so that's good news.  It's exactly the kind of mindless show that's perfect for a Monday night.  Now, if we could only have a sequel to Dr. Horrible ...

Some local news.  Last night I checked out the new Moonrise Hotel over on Delmar for the first time, starting with drinks on the Rooftop Terrace lounge and continuing into the inside bar at Eclipse (the restaurant there).  The hotel was packed, probably with folks in for the graduation at nearby Washington University.  The decor was pretty funky with stairs in the lobby that have each step lit up with a primary color light (I can't explain it better, check out the website).

It was not an easy location to get to, coming from Clayton on a Friday night with Highway 40 still closed.  But once I was there and over my commute-stress I enjoyed being on the rooftop.  And my mojito was excellent (although they don't have waiters and the bartender was slow as molasses).

It was an odd night to be at a rooftop bar because there was bad weather to the north and a tornado watch for the area.  But we figured there was no better place to watch for a tornado than on top of a building.  No, we never saw one.  Here's a photo:

When the weather did start turning rainy and windy we headed downstairs where we split some Salt & Pepper Fried Calamari with jalapeno garlic butter that was truly scrumptious.   It was so good we decided to stay for dinner (although we stayed in the bar and didn't move into the restaurant).  

I had Lobster Pot Pie, billed as brandied lobster cream, golden potatoes and english peas in a pastry.  Sounds yummy doesn't it?  But I thought it was a little disappointing - the pastry was a puff-type pastry shaped in the form of half-moons but the "stuff" wasn't inside the pastry, they just sat alongside.  That isn't pot pie, at least not my definition.  For dessert I wanted the Berry Shortcake Trifle (mixed berries layered with shortcake biscuits and creme chantilly) but they were out of it so, instead, I tried the Cointreau Cornmeal Pound Cake which looked like a wedge of my grandmother's corn bread (and tasted like it) with cointreau flavored cream on top and some cointreua soaked oranges.  I like cornbread ... but not for dessert. 

So, the food was a mixed experience.  But the late night menu looks good so maybe it would be a place to go after seeing a movie at the Tivoli or after an event at The Pageant next door (if I ever get to an event at The Pageant).  One big complaint from the folks who rode their bikes - there is no bike rack.  Unacceptable in an urban environment.  But the manager assured us that they were getting one and it would be some hip design.

Home Improvements.  I'm in the midst of home improvements and boy are those things expensive.  I just had the back steps leading up to my back door replaced.  They were old wooden steps that were painted white and were starting to rot away.  I had them replaced with steps made out of the composite material that you can just hose off and I think they look really nice.  I also had the area around my front door worked on.  I'm sure my neighbors are relieved to have a clean white sunburst over my door rather than the peeling one that was there for the last year.  Next we move on to the patio and finishing the backyard fence.  Then (finally) I can start doing something to the inside.  Then it will be time to move.  Kidding.  But isn't that what always happens?

People of the Book

One of my reading groups chose Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book to discuss this month.   I forgot what we had chosen and only remembered to ask someone about a week before I was supposed to have read it.  I raced through it but  I finished it in time.

The novel is the story of people and of a book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.  Brooks tells the story of the people who created it and who saved it from destruction throughout the centuries sometimes at great cost to themselves.  The novel is divided between two stories.  One is the modern story of Hanna, a rare book specialist who is called to Sarajevo in the 1990's to conserve the book, which has been in a bank deposit box during the war and is now to be displayed.  This story takes place over the length of the novel but it is interrupted for brief stories about other persons who were important in the history of the book.   And each of these individual stories ties into something that Hanna found when conserving the book:  a fragment of a butterfly wing, a cat hair, a wine stain, etc.

There seemed to be a bit of disagreement in our group (I was in the kitchen making coffee so I missed most of it) between those who liked the modern story and those who liked the historical stories, but it didn't seem to be a big disagreement.   I thought that one of the saddest parts of the book was that we the reader completely "discovered" the history of the book but Hanna never did.  As in real life, she could only take the clues that she found in the physical book and try to learn from them the barest of detail about where the book had been. 

Each of us had our favorite parts of the historical sections.  Mine was the last section in which a slave in Moorish Spain creates the beautiful pictures to which text is later (in another story) added.  But many in my group thought that the story of the rabbi in Venice was the most poignant.   Interestingly we didn't spend much time talking about the political situation of Sarajevo, although that is a big part of the novel.

Because I read the novel so fast I missed a couple of connections.  The historical sections are told in reverse chronological order and often you discover in another section something that happens to a character you are reading about.   It was good to have a discussion and have people point out those instances.

The one thing we all agreed was that the author had Hanna jump too fast into her relationship with Karaman.  Maybe we're all too pragmatic to believe that people can meet each other and immediately feel that connection - other than, of course, lust.  I also thought that a few of the plot points made things just a little too easy.  For instance, the part in which Hanna just happens to join her mother in the city where her (unknown) father's family lives and then her mother gets into a car accident with Hanna's (unknown) grandmother.  I like the people in my novels to have to work toward discoveries, not have them thrown in their laps. 

I think that bothered me more than anyone else (I'm always more interested in structure than character).  We discussed whether the author just needed to keep the plot moving so that we could move on to the next historical section and everyone in the group seemed satisfied with that explanation.  Everyone except me.  Truthfully, I thought this novel would have been better if the author had decided on one story or the other.  Either a novel about Hanna that was fully developed or a huge historical novel that spans generations.   Again, I'm left to wonder why an author chose to tell such a big story in such a small book.  I would have liked a little more development.

Sister Francis Xavier

I just started reading the fifth (and last) book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  It's called The Last Olympian and Riordan dedicated it as follows:

To Mrs. Pabst, my eighth grade English teacher, who started me on my journey as a writer

A couple of things struck me about that dedication.  First, that no matter how old you are the taboo against using a teacher's first name is hard to ignore.  I was at a meeting the other night and my 11th grade English teacher was part of the committee.  I usually end up calling her nothing because I can't bring myself to use her first name.  But, second, I thought this was a wonderful dedication and I hoped that Mrs. Pabst was still alive to appreciate it.

It made me think about my eighth grade English teacher, Sr. Francis Xavier, who is no longer alive.  She was a nun, a School Sister of Notre Dame, and she took no prisoners.  She wore a full habit even when the other nuns were moving to the short habits with the half veil.  During mass (which we went to every day) she would stalk up and down the aisles monitoring everyone (not just her class) and if she didn't feel we were singing the hymns loud enough she would hiss "ssssssing!" at us. 

She was also one of the best teachers I've had in my life. 

I had Sister for English from sixth through eighth grade.  Twice a week she would write the beginning of a sentence on the board and our homework assignment was to go home and write "a paragraph" using that as the opening.  For instance, she might write "Today, while I was brushing my teeth ..." and we would have to write something beginning with that phrase.

It wasn't really a paragraph, it was both sides of a sheet of paper (the special "control" paper that was assigned to sixth through eighth graders).  But she always referred to it as "a paragraph".  I think she was trying to make it seem as if it was not that big of a deal to write something.  You didn't have to write a whole story, just a paragraph.

The next day, before we turned in our work, she would look at her class roll and call out a name.  The lucky student would trudge to the front of the classroom, stand behind the podium and read his or her paragraph to the class.  Sister would say thank you and check his or her name off the list.  We would spend the entire class period listening to the work of our peers.  If you weren't called on during that class period you would be called on the next time.  Or the next.  We had forty-two kids in our classroom so you could never tell when you might be up again.   (Yes, forty-two).  And sometimes she'd cheat and call someone early, just to keep us on our toes.

We never earned anything other than a checkmark for our work, but the mere fact that we knew we could be called on to read our work out loud made everyone work hard to be somewhat entertaining.  You could tell if your classmates were impressed.  They nodded or laughed or occasionally gasped.   Usually Sister would just say thank you, but occasionally she would ask a question if the student had written about something factual or, if the student had written about something personal, she might express some appropriate emotion.  But mostly she just listened along with the rest of us.  If, however, the student used improper grammar (which of course happened often) she would stop him or her in mid-sentence and what followed was the equal of the Inquisition.  She didn't rest until everyone understood what was wrong with the sentence and how it was to be corrected.  But she did it all through questions and answers - law professors using the Socratic method could have learned a thing or two from Sister's technique. 

Reading paragraphs was two days out of our week.  Two other days were spent diagramming sentences.  She would write a sentence on the board, we would diagram it ourselves on our papers and then she would look at her class roll and call someone to the board to diagram it on the board.  if the student got lost she would look at the class and we would raise our hands to help out. 

Today, over at So Many Books, Stephanie comments upon an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that a professor at Trinity College is teaching a class on diagramming sentences because the students asked for it. 

They start off with easy sentences and build up to complex ones, their final assignment for the class asks them to diagram 120 lines of their favorite poem. The class also thrives on a little competition. At the end the 30 students are broken up into two teams. Each team has a week or two to write a sentence for the other team. Then on competition day the sentences are exchanged, the stop watch starts ticking and they have something like 40 minutes to diagram the sentence. The teams work at the same time each on their own blackboard. Each team starts off with 100 points and get deductions for errors. The team with the most points after deductions wins.

That sounds like something Sr. Francis Xavier would have liked.  She was a hard taskmaster and the class lived in fear of her but we learned from her.  Oh, did we learn.  The character that Meryl Streep played in the movie Doubt reminded me of her.  But, unlike that character, she was never the principal and I don't think she actually wanted to be the principal.  And it truly would have been a shame to remove her from the classroom.

I don't remember what we did on our fifth day in class.  I don't think there was a set regime, I think she mixed things up a little on those days.  I remember sometimes she would have us read things written by professionals and pull them apart.  Not for meaning but for grammar and structure.  (We had a different teacher, Mrs. Kearns, who taught "Reading" which was really the English literature class.)

Sr. Francis Xavier is long dead.  She taught me at the end of the baby boom when class sizes were enormous and when nuns were expected to "serve" without pay, just a convent to live in and food to eat.  Unlike the priests in the rectory, they cleaned their own homes and did their own grocery shopping and laundry.  And they did that after a long day teaching in classrooms crammed full of elementary school children .  Some of them were not very good teachers.  Some of them were not happy people.  Some of them were, frankly, downright mean.  But others, like Sr. Francis Xavier, were great teachers who were not appreciated nearly enough.  

I don't know if any of her students ever became a professional writer and dedicated anything to her.  But she certainly deserves such a dedication.