Month: October 2007

  • A Different Perspective on Ivanhoe

     

     

    Whenever I think about Ivanhoe, I think of my nephew Will.  Will has many credentials: he knows every country and capital in the world; he’s read every issue of National Geographic, he’s a great rugby player, he’s been to 85% of theart museums in the world; he speaks Farsi, and he’s taken a solo trip to Iran.  Some day Will will give me a guided tour through the best museums in NYC.  That Art History degree needs to be used occasionally. But I digress.

    Will voluntarily picked up Ivanhoe and read it when he was in the fifth grade.  And he understood it!! Move over, Will.  Whenever I think of IvanhoeI now think of this review, written by my friend JT (Btolly‘s daughter) for a collegeclass.  I begged her to let me post it.  She graciously agreed, sweet girl!

    While I don’t share her scorn for this book, her ferocity is entertaining.

    Here is a book with a weak hero, a dead boring plot line and enough smarm to cover all other literary works of the 19th century. What was Sir Walter Scott thinking? Listen to the eloquence: “Alas, fair Rowena,”returned De Bracey “you are in the presence of your captive, not your jailer.” One might just as well read a Harlequin Romance and get the same story. It is sickening to the stomach.

    The whole book is a grease slick for the characters to ooze through with continual dialogs of unimaginative, unoriginal, doe-eyed, pansy-pantsed love speeches. Scott’s desperate attempts to save this “classic” is to throw in the ever controversial anti-semitism twist. But, alas, it works too well. Rebecca far outshines Rowena as a woman of substance, not fluff. If Ivanhoe was at all a real man’s man, he would go for tying the knot around Rebecca and not his lance.

    Ivanhoe, whose real name is Wilfred, spends most of his time brooding in the forest with a fat friar, ordering his good friend “the fool” around. Gird your loins and defend your country, man! Go save your King! Scott should be shouting this from the highest parapet, but instead he locks his love-tortured heroine there. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any worse, the villain gets slain. This of course is to ensure the happy ending; the return of the king andthe blessed marriage of two ridiculous dunces.      ~ JT

     

  • Scotland in the Spring


    Delight yourself in the Lord;
    And He will give you the desires of your heart.
    ~ from Psalm 37

    On St. Patrick’s day just ten months ago I wrote

    It is a dream of mine to see Iona some day,
    to stand on these grounds
    and to thank God for his faithful servants.

    I don’t know how to write the next words….
    My husband and I are going to Scotland next spring.


    Edinburgh Castle

    We’ve been given a gift of a trip to the
    destination of our choosing.
    Reservations have been made.

    Why Scotland?

    Scotland sings to me.

    I can only blame the books.
    They – I couldn’t say which ones specifically -
    breathed into my soul a love
    for all things Scottish,
    a yearning to see the rugged Highlands,
    a kinship with a people.


    St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh

    So I’m starting the journey of planning.
    Experienced travelers tell me
    this can be as fun as the trip itself.

    Of course, I’m planning where to go.
    But right now I’m planning what to read before we leave.

    My pile of books includes the Life of St. Columba,
    Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs
    Scottish Heroes, Tales of Covenanters
    RLS
    Burns’ poems
    George MacDonald
    John Muir
    John Buchan and O. Douglas.

    Any suggestions out there?

    Rise, Caledonia, let your voices ring

    In this Highland Cathedral of our God and King.

    Whom, joy and liberty, to all, will bring.

    Come; let your heart, with love and courage, sing

  • Child Prodigies
    When I read Poiema’s review in March, this book went on my list of books to be read.  In the distant country of my childhood, I played the cello; a lingering fondness for that instrument permeates my soul.  The fact that the author was also a cello player made me eager to read his work.

    About a third of the way through the book I had convinced myself that I really didn’t need to keep this book.  I’m still undecided; I loved parts about music intersecting with life, the grown up child prodigy teaching a young child prodigy.  The back story of the trial for the murder of a Buddhist monk didn’t interest me. There are, however, some passages too wonderful to escape my journal. 

    [Maestro's instructions] That is the way to approach your music.  Every piece, every time you play it, is unique and irreplaceable.  Your should open your ears and heart to every phrase, every note and squeeze every drop of beauty you can from it. Take nothing for granted!

    [Reminiscent of Robert Greenberg's Frame of Silence]  This immediately made me think of the kind of silence I used to love, the instant before I would start a piece and the audience would quiet down to absolute stillness.  I always held the bow over the strings for a few seconds too long, just to relish that incredible vacuum, when a hall filled with hundreds of people could become so quiet.  No one ever, ever sneezed, coughed or budged until I offered release with the first note.

    Bach, there can be no doubt, brought classical music to perfection. He expressed his musical ideas with devastating precision and understatement.  Each piece is like a finely cut diamond: clear, simple and almost mathematical in appearance, but underneath the surface what complexity and structural integrity! The possibilities for interpretation are limitless; just as there are countless ways to project light through a diamond, no two performances of Bach can be the same because each musician’s unique personality has its own spectrum of feelings that can be conveyed freely through Bach’s inventions. 
    When I was very young one of the reasons I was able to hear a piece of music and then play it right back without having to look at a score was that for me each musical phrase had not so much a color or flavor as a texture…

    The whole subject of child prodigies fascinates me.  So many prodigies seem very close to prodigals, not in the sense of extravagant waste, but in the sense of being  far away, socially and metaphorically.  During the time that I read The Soloist, I previewed the movie Hilary and Jackie (too dicey to recommend, although the music was gorgeous), about the life of the du Pré sisters, particularly the tormented and fragmented life of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré.  This book and that movie both left me feeling sad: sad for the weight of great giftedness and sad for the lack of appropriate parenting of the children with such gifts.

    I’ve always admired and respected Yo-Yo Ma, who has a short appearance in the second chapter of The Soloist.  In contrast to most prodigies, Mr. Ma’s life seems very balanced.   He is passionate about music, but his life evidences an integrity and wholeness that many performers lack.

  • Study as Indulgence

    Boy Studying
    Peter Vilhelm Ilsted


    Study is the bane of childhood,
    the oil of youth,
    the indulgence of adulthood,
    and a restorative in old age.

    ~ Walter Savage Landor

    What say you?
    Is this quote true?

  • Baskets of Books


    This is an incomplete gathering of books I’ve received for free!! (sorta)
    since I joined PaperBackSwap in July.
    Color me tickled pink.

    If this was your blog, I’d want to see close ups.
    So here they are!

     
    Some of these are for school, but a lot are for pleasure edification (cough, cough).
    After Kristin Lavransdatter, I want to read more Sigrid Unset.
    (See The Axe above?)
    My son compels me to read Dorothy Sayer’s mysteries.
    He won’t let up until I’ve read them all.

    Here’s the deal.
    You need to list 9 books that you are willing to mail when
    a member requests one of them. You have five days to mail a book
    after it has been requested.
    After you’ve listed 9 books, you get 3 “gift” credits.
     [Soon it will be list 10 books, get 2 credits.]

    A credit = a free book.
    You find a book you’d like, request it, and the member
    who posted that book sends it to you for free. Yippee!!

    Essentially, you are getting a book for the price of postage
    to mail the book that got you the credit. (~ $2.13).
    You are clearing off your shelves of books you don’t need to keep
    and getting books you want to read.

    “Organization is the key to life,”
    says my dear SIL Valeri. 
    I have a cupboard in the garage dedicated to books
    I’m selling or swapping so they don’t get
    co-mingled with my collection.

    Kristin, who referred me to PBS, gave good advice:
    the key to PBS is the Wish List.
    There are 180 books on my Wish List right now.
    When a title enters the system and I’m first in line,
    I get first dibs at ordering it.

    So now, when I read delicious blogs and delectable
    book lists, I scoot over to PBS and enter those
    titles on my wish list.

    When our pastor told us about a Dostoevsky
    short story (White Nights) which is required reading
    for his daughters, I put it on my Wish List.
    Now it’s in the mail to me.  Ha!

    I laughed out loud after I’d ordered a book (unknowingly)
    from Cindy at Dominion Family.  She sent me a message
    asking, “Are you Magistra?”
    and threw in another book from Grant’s list. Ha, Ha!

    And sneaky Carmon found my PBS Wish List
    and sent me a book for my birthday from that list! Ha, Ha, Ha!!

    This basket of books is my firewood for the winter;
    fuel for my mind, stacked up, pressed down
    and overflowing.

  • I Wonder As It Wanders

    Now that I’m 50, I had my first “senior moment”…

    I walked out of the box store with my cart full of groceries.  After starting down the wrong section of the parking lot, I corrected my course.  While pushing the cart, I remembered when my sister Margo was still driving but dealing with effects of a brain tumor.  She lost her short term memory and had several episodes of walking around parking lots looking for her car.  I imagined how frustrating that would be.

    A tall vehicle was blocking the view of my parking space, but I was startled to see a car pull into that space.  Huh?  My little old Subaru was parked in the slanted space directly in front of my original parking spot, the car now oriented opposite of all the cars around it. 

    Immediately a grin came to my face and I started scanning the parking lot for one of my young friends who I assumed moved my car as a prank.  Certain names even came to mind!  On the third swivel of my head a hand went out of a window across the way and a woman yelled a greeting.  She bounded out of her truck and came over with a knowing look. 

    “Your car wasn’t in gear and tried to run me over!  I was walking past it and it just bumped into me.  I thought jerk! — but when I looked for the jerk driver, the car was empty.  I started pushing my cart against the car to keep it from going farther but I was losing.  I yelled to a guy and he helped me push the car back.  He finally got in the car and engaged the emergency brake.  That’s why your car is in a different space.”

    She wasn’t the least bit belligerent; I apologized up one side and thanked her down the other.   Yikes!  I have never done that before in my life.  That I’m aware of…. 

    Trying to balance my reaction between a casual laugh and shrug and morbid “what ifs” – there was only one direction to go.  Thankfulness.  I’m thankful that a little toddler didn’t wander in front of the car; thankful that I didn’t need to leave notes on the late model car(s) in the next row; thankful that I was disabused of my notion that a practical joke had been played on me; thankful for the reminder that there are, ahem, gaps in my routine.

    Thy mercies are new every afternoon.
    Great is Thy faithfulness.

  • Recipe for Friendship

    We read two questions and answers from The Larger Catechism (a Presbyterian church document) every morning.   It struck me that  these speak clearly about the duties and sins of friendships.  See what you think.

    Q. 131.  What are the duties of equals?

    A.  The duties of equals are:
              to regard the dignity and worth of each other,
              in giving honor to go one before another,
              and to rejoice in each other’s gifts and advancement as their own.

    Q. 132.  What are the sins of equals?

    A.  The sins of equals are, besides the neglect of the duties required,
              the undervaluing of worth,
              envying the gifts,
              grieving at the advancement or prosperity one of another,
              and usurping pre-eminence one over another.

    I need constant reminders to remove the sweater of selfishness when I am with friends.  I need to learn these phrases until they become instinctive.

    “You go first.”
    “Tell me more.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I admire that about you.”