Month: March 2011

  • He’s My Brother

    I have to be careful here, because I have four big brothers. 

    And only one makes his presence known online.

    But I just switched the header to the blog using one of my brother’s photos of the mountain I can see out my window.  (I’m including the photo in this post, because the header changes with the seasons.)

    And I like to brag on my brothers. 

    They all have that je nais se quoi, umm, shall we say…focus…on whatever they do.  And a striving to master whatever they put their minds to.

    In Dan’s case it is photography. (When it’s not cooking, singing, gardening, theology, or sharpening knives.)

    My brother happens to be one of the best photographers I know.  He doesn’t settle for “whatever”.

    Lighting.  Lens.  Composition.  And Editing.  Oh, yes.  Do not forget to edit.

    So if you’d like to see some really magnificent pictures, go here!  Enjoy!

    Love you, Danny!

  • My New Favorite Book



      
    P.G. Wodehouse meets Robert Louis Stevenson. 

    Mix two parts E. Nesbit with three parts Jerome K. Jerome. 

    Here is a diamond of a book! 

    I want to wave down readers and persuade them to read this gem.

    Auntie Robbo is a rollicking tale of an orphaned boy, Hector Murdoch (11), and his great-grand-aunt and guardian, Robina Sketheway (81). They got on as well together as any two people possibly could.

    Their idyllic whimsical life at Nethermuir, twelve miles from Edinburgh, is threatened when Hector’s step-mother, Merlissa Benck, a woman he has never before met, visits with the aim of adopting Hector.  She sniffs around and is appalled at the the lifestyle of this unusual pair.

    “But what about … Hector, wait for me … What about other subjects?”

    “Oh, Auntie Robbo knows all about them. Sometimes we do sums. We keep account books, and history—lots of history; then afterwards we ride over the battlefields and go and look at the castles where the murders were done.”

    “I dare say,” said Merlissa Benck shortly. “But I should have thought British history would have been more suitable for a boy of your age, indispensable in my opinion. England’s story is a very great and noble one.”

    “Yes,” said Hector. “But then we couldn’t ride to the battlefields, could we? I mean they were mostly fighting in places that didn’t belong to them, weren’t they?”

     
    Hector is smart enough to apprehend the intent of Merlissa Benck: how easily she could “prove” dear unconventional Auntie Robbo was mad, stake her claim and clap the lad into dreaded public school.  So Hector and Auntie Robbo slip away at night.  On the train from Edinburgh they pick up three waifs: a brother, sister and cousin.  Fugitives, they live in a tinker’s cart, traveling through Scotland.   

    And when the fresh curling trout had been eaten, with a mound of scones and butter, they lay late round the fire, swilling cocoa, arguing again about stags and cows, telling stories, and looking back on yet another well-spent perfect day.

    Auntie Robbo is magnificent: a hale and hearty woman, opinionated, kind, an octogenarian who hikes hills and understands boys.  No morality tale here, no treacle, no dour Scottish frowns, just a thumping good read.

    My journey to Auntie Robbo was through Russell Kirk’s autobiography.  While studying at St. Andrews, Kirk became friends with the widower George Scott-Moncrieff.  One phrase intrigued me: his wife Ann, who wrote inimitable children’s books… 

    A search on her name introduced me to Auntie Robbo, which is printed in full at Gutenberg.  I dare you to read the first chapter.  I had to decide whether to buy the book (which involved waiting at least ten days), print the book (115 pages) or read it online.  I opened my laptop, used “Control +” to increase the font size and read all 22 chapters in one sitting.

    Here is a buffet of Scott-Moncrieff’s delectable sentences:

    He slipped out of questions like a mackerel fry through a herring net.

    There was a spluttering of laughter like geese being chased across a field.

    And the sea, deep and green as oil silk, swayed and sucked about the feet of these cliffs, growling with hunger, like an old lion who paws a gristly piece of meat and wonders if it’s worth a broken tooth and a belly-ache.

    She thought she had slipped into her dotage….Years ago, round about seventy, she had accepted such things as inevitable, much as children accept that they will one day be grown up; but by this time she was eighty-one, she had forgotten about dotage and death again, and it was very unpleasant to be confronted by one of them suddenly.

    This is a book I plan to read at least once a year until I slip into my dotage.  I laughed aloud; I disrupted my husband’s concentration, intruding with quotes. I have plans for read alouds with the grands.  I’m baffled why Auntie Robbo has remained unknown to me before now.


    Auntie Robbo would make a fantastic full-length feature film.

    Picture a madcap Maggie Smith with laughter and twinkling eyes, and you’ve got Auntie Robbo.

    If I knew an ounce about writing a screenplay, I’d do it myself.

  • The Sword of Imagination

    When I picked up Sword Of Imagination: Memoirs Half Century Literary Conflict I respected Russell Kirk.  By the time I finished the book I was quite fond of this charming articulate author. 

    Kirk’s name doesn’t have the recognition that William F. Buckley Jr.’s does but they are closely connected.  In 1953 Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, a book which had a great influence on Buckley’s thinking.  Like Buckley, Kirk was a cheerful conservative.  Like Buckley, Kirk was an excellent writer.  Unlike Buckley, Kirk came from modest means.
     
    Kirk warns the reader in the preface:

    Enthusiasts for modernity, the global village, the end of history, the gross national product, emancipation from moral inhibitions, abstract rights without concomitant duties, and what Samuel Johnson called “the lust for innovation”–why, such folk may be little pleased by my fulminations and vaticinations.

    Dr. Kirk had an antiquated vocation: man of letters, an intellectual devoted to literary activities.  (An aside: To be a woman of letters is my ideal occupation: to read and write all day, all week, all year!)  Writing his memoirs in the third person,

    Kirk believed that his political function it was to work upon the body politic by endeavoring to rouse the political and moral imagination among the shapers of public opinion — that large category including political leaders; opinion makers of serious journals, the mass media, the academy, and the church; and that unknowable crowd of individuals who, as Dicey points out, influence their neighbors by the strength of their convictions. By talent, he was a writer, a speaker, an editor. In the long run, conceivably he might demolish some molehills, if not move mountains. The only weapon with which he was skilled was the sword of imagination.

    In this highly detailed autobiography Kirk outlines how he moved from a boy living next to the railroad yards to a nationally regarded intellectual. His peregrinations took him to Michigan State College, the Salt Lake desert, Duke University, St. Andrews, throughout the United States and Europe. 

    The book reads like a popular history of the second half of the twentieth century.  Kirk writes engagingly of his encounters with many leaders: Richard Weaver, Donald Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hoover, McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II.  Never bland in his opinions, he writes generously of both of his convivial and and his adversarial relationships.

    Kirk’s writing is both erudite and highly personal.  The winning of his young wife, Annette, is the kind of romance I enjoy reading.  Together they build a family (four daughters) and a community of scholarship and fellowship.  Kirk writes of his wife, “Openhanded, glowing with life, and discerningly compassionate, Annette Courtemanche Kirk turned the shadowy old house, without altering its character, into a center of charitable and intellectual undertakings, so that it was crowded with people of all sorts and conditions.” A young visitor paid the Kirks a supreme compliment calling their place the Last Homely House, a reference to Elrond’s Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings.   

    One thing I found uncomfortable was Kirk’s love of ghost stories, haunted houses and his dabbling in things uncanny. 

    I know a book was worth reading when the reading of Book A makes me want to read Book B,C,D,E and F.  I finished Sword Of Imagination with a renewed desire to read several books already on my shelves: Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, Ideas Have Consequences, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (really, all things Flannery), T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (I need to become acquainted with Eliot), and a book on economics that Dr. Kirk wrote Economics: Work and Prosperity.    
       

  • Word of the Week: Susurration

    Last week I read PD James’ autobiography, A Time To Be In Earnest.  I came across a word I have no memory of previously meeting: susurration.

    In my response to this book I wrote:

    This quote is representative of her prose. I love the sibilance and onomatopoeia of susurration, a word spell-check is unfamiliar with.

     

    I stood for a moment in complete silence broken
    only by the note of a song bird and the susurration
    [a soft, whispering or rustling sound] of the breeze
    in the wayside grasses. It was one of those moments
    of happiness and contentment which give reality to death,
    since however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

    I carried this delicious word around in the pockets of my mind, taking it out, turning it over and examining it while I drove to the post office or made my bed.

    I am finishing up Russell Kirk’s autobiography, The Sword of Imagination, and lo! I found the down-pillow-of-a-word again!  He writes of Clinton Wallace, a hobo whom they took into their home and lives for the last six years of Clinton’s life.

    Walking the roads most of his life, Clinton Wallace had picked up in public libraries or in the lonely rooms of old hotels a tremendous fund of miscellaneous knowledge. Once he startled Kirk, in connection with some mention of change of regimes, by remarking “Arnold Toynbee writes of the susurrus of silken slippers descending the stairs, and the tramp of hobnailed boots coming up.”

  • How2Coupon

    My daughter-in-law, Taryn,
    started a coupon blog this year.

    It’s taking off!

    Why does Taryn coupon?

    Two in diapers, a mortgage and one income.
    Your formula may look a little different (add a car payment, subtract the diapers), but the common denominators of debt and life’s little necessities remain. By spending less on the toilet paper, toothpaste and tomato soup, you can allocate more toward your debts, whatever they may be. As many couponers before me would agree, financial freedom is the goal.  

    I have witnessed a pass through the grocery store with Taryn.

    You know how a twenty foot fall-away jump shot 
    is poetry in motion?

    Taryn’s twenty minute grocery run which yielded $60 savings
    was poetry in marketing.
    I could only increase my stride, hang on to coupons and
    gasp in admiration.

    If you want to save money, take a look.

    Check out How2Coupon on Facebook.

  • Ten Books I HAD to Have…Still Sitting on My Shelf

    I saw this meme at Carrie’s blog Reading to Know.  She referenced Ronnica’s list. As I read I wanted to pull my hat down and my collar up and slink away.  Yep.  It wouldn’t be too much of a strain to come up with my own list.

    I’m devoted to Paperbackswap.  Since books on my Too Be Read list are scrunched tightly on a shelf or stacked precariously by my bed or double-shelved in the guest room, I’m usually not in a hurry to get a book that I think I’d like to read.  I put it on my wish list and wait–from a month to more than a year–until a copy becomes available. 

    If I had to lay blame for this problem, while striving to keep my reputation unbesmirched, it would be on you readers who write such compelling reviews.  No mea culpa here; you are to blame!  Yeah! 

    What amazes me is how the searing heat of have to read it so quickly cools once the book is on my shelf.  Why does the acquisition thrill me more than ingestion?  But enough of philosophizing.  Here is my list of books I just HAD to have…still sitting (unread) on my shelf.

    • Liberal Fascism This undoubtedly made someone’s list of must-read books from 2008.  Tom Wolfe recommends it.  It’s been called the greatest book ever; it’s been called total bunk.  Which one is it?

    •  The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude I came up with the idea to read this book all by myself.  Margaret Visser is a classicist who writes charming social histories.  I sort of went gaga over Much Depends Upon Dinner.  When she wrote about gratitude, I had to have it.

    • Only One Year is a book by Stalin’s daughter, who, for good reason, abandoned the surname Stalin and adopted her mother’s maiden Alliluyeva.  Russia interests me, as does World War II. There is great value in reading primary source documents.  One can read Hitler’s tripe (I did) and Churchill’s six volume set on WWII (I got through the first volume); but Stalin was too busy murdering millions to pen his memoirs.  So the daughter’s book is about as close as one can get to discovering the personal side of Stalin. She defected to the United States and lives today in Wisconsin.

    • The Christian Imagination is a book of essays on culture, art and faith.  People who own this book don’t swap it.  They must like it.  I got weary of waiting for it to become available by swap, broke down and bought it.  I have huge expectations from this book.  And because it is a collection of essays I could read small bits at a time.

    •  The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong When our friend told me that birds sing in dialects, that a song will have variations between regions, even valleys! it shanghaied my imagination.  A robin’s song in the south can be recorded and compared to a robin’s song in the west and the variations noted.  The concept thrills me, but I haven’t made time to read the specifics.

    • The Godly Home Richard Baxter is a Puritan pastor, a proven author in our home.  When I saw this updated and edited version (the Puritans do go on) it seemed needful to get it.

    • Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands The diaries of Queen Victoria written both before and after the death of Prince Albert.  Primary document, a chance to get to know the Queen better, and best of all, Scotland!

    • The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor I am not (yet) a Flannery fan.  I have read nothing of hers.  I’ve heard boatloads of stuff about her, quotes from her, raves and non-raves of her fiction.  A friend recommended I start my O’Connor exploration with her letters.  There they are.  Waiting.

    • The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court When I put this on my wish list at Paperbackswap, I think I was 982 in line.  I’m curious what I will find out about nine of the most powerful people in America. 

    • Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain I started this book by a neurologist and found it very engaging.  I’m not sure why the engagement was broken, but I do want to find out more about the connections between the music and the brain.  The story of the surgeon who was struck by lightning and consequently developed an insatiable thirst for classical music was simply amazing.

    One obvious reason why the books are still waiting is that except for Baxter and the Queen, they are all close to 500 pages.  Writing this blog entry has peaked my curiosity…again.  But I have a book to finish before I can get involved in one of these.

    If you had this stack by your bed, which one would you pick up first?

    And, of course, if you have a list of boughten but languishing books, I’d love to read it. 

  • A Time To Be In Earnest

    A perfect day should be recorded.
    It can’t be relived except in memory
    but it can be celebrated and
    remembered with gratitude.

    P.D. James fascinates me.  She writes mysteries containing biblical allusions, phrases from the Book of Common Prayer and broad cultural references. Reading one of her novels, I am bound to learn ten new words, several new authors, poets, works of art, music or architecture.  However, life in jolly England is not all tea and scones.  Murder, infidelity and sex are part of her crime stories: disturbing but never salacious.

    She calls her memoir a fragment of autobiography.  I was eager to learn more about a lady who, in a catalog of people I admire, reminds me of David McCullough. Decent. Dignified. Distinguished.

    Time to Be in Earnest is written in the format of a diary of Baroness James’ seventy-seventh year. The title comes from a description of a minister in Samuel Johnson’s The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland: A man who has settled his opinions, does not love to have the tranquility of his convictions disturbed; and at seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.  Notes of her daily life show her to be full of humor, humility, generosity and humanity. And busy! Her speaking schedule fatigued me. She includes time with her family and friends, memories of her childhood, and a potpourri of opinions.  P.D. James is interested in life; hence a journal of her daily life is interesting. 

    I was asked for Dalgliesh’s
    [Adam Dalgliesh is the chief detective in her series]
    views on structuralism–    or was it post-structuralism. 
    I replied that he had     given it careful thought for
    a number of evenings and     had come to the conclusion
    that it was nonsense.
    The young chaplain sitting next to me murmured,
    “In vain they lay snares at her feet.”

    Because of her use of Cranmer’s magnificent cadences (Book of Common Prayer), I was curious if she wrote about her faith. She was born and bred in the distinctive odour of Anglicanism; her mother gave comforting and lively little homilies on which she could hang her gentle moralizing; when asked point blank if she was a Christian, her reply is affirmative with caveats, which she acknowledges is confusing. 

    This quote is representative of her prose. I love the sibilance and onomatopoeia of susurration, a word spell-check is unfamiliar with.
     

    I stood for a moment in complete silence broken
    only by the note of a song bird and the susurration
    [a soft, whispering or rustling sound] of the breeze
    in the wayside grasses. It was one of those moments
    of happiness and contentment which give reality to death,
    since however long we have to live,
    there are never enough springs.
     

    The appendix contains the full talk P.D. James gave to the Jane Austen society on 18 July, 1998. You can read all but a few pages of Emma Considered As a Detective Story here. Austen fans will love it!
            

  • A History of Illicit Laughter

    Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
    ~ Victor Borge

    I woke up giggling this morning.  We had decided to sleep in and my laughter broke covenant.  Oh great, muttered my husband. Josh, where are you?  Curt’s words launched me on a new round of mirth. 

    Josh, who is like a son to me, and I have a history of horse laughs.  When he was Jr. high age, something would set us off and all our pent up laughter would come bursting out in loud guffaws: gasping, tear-squeezing, body-wracking sobs of laughter.  Slowly we decelerated and calmed down until one glance set off more horse laughs.  By the time we settled down we couldn’t even remember what was so funny.

    What is weird about those episodes is that they happened around our table. Suppression was never an option. No one else understood us but they got a good entertainment package from our shtick. 

    The most wicked laughter is the illicit kind.  Laughter that is wildly inappropriate is the funniest. And it’s even wilder if the source of amusement is mutually understood by less than three people. 

    Let me assert a long-neglected truth
    that nothing binds two people together
     like a history of illicit laughter.

    My friend Ilene and I bobbled our way through my dad’s sermon at Bible camp when we were nine. When he spoke about a conjunction saying thank God for that but, we heard thank God for that butt. I still remember my pathetic attempts to disguise the laughter into sneezing, coughing, tears of repentance, anything but laughter. 

    My  most humiliating episode took place with my sister-in-law at our niece’s wedding.  Our nephew thrust a camera into her hand moments before the ceremony began with a request to take pictures.  The camera had a mystifying delay on the trigger and as attendants processed, Karyl Lynn missed each beautiful bridesmaid, ending up with photos of an empty aisle.  Horrified at muffing every single shot, she planned to get the entire wedding party while they stood at the front. 

    She clicked. 

    “Let us pray,” intoned the preacher. A twinkle of silence sat suspended in the air.

    Then the bewitched camera began a loud rewinding. Aghast, my sister-in-law shoved the camera under her thigh. That only seemed to amplify the clicking and clacking. 

    And off we went.  Two middle-aged woman shaking, shivering, shambling with laughter. 

    After the prayer, my brother, her husband, stood up for Scripture reading.  He put on his pastor’s voice and began the reading when he noticed our ridiculous posture: hands over our mouths, over our eyes, vibrating, pulsing, out-of-control.  It was all he could do not to check his fly.  We came close to landing this massive laughter, when he sat back down and muttered What is going on?, effectively relaunching that airship. 

    I am truly ashamed to admit that we laughed through the entire ceremony.  Amidst the throes I knew I needed to rein it in, find composure.  But we played off each other; every time we grabbed three quick sighs and a slow cleansing breath, the other would release a tiny snicker which was jet engine fuel.     

    After the ceremony the bride and groom acted as ushers greeting friends as they left their pews.  The bride looked at me quizzically and asked, Aunt Carol were you laughing or crying?  I’ll explain it one day, I promised.

  • She Married a Scottish Laird

     


    I knew when I married the man that I married the mansion.

    This is on my short list of great first sentences.  (N.D. Wilson’s (Leepike Ridge) is hard to beat: In the history of the world there have been lots of onces and lots of times, and every time has had a once upon it.)

    On Rick Steve’s recommendation (in a UK guide book) I read Belinda Rathbone’s memoir The Guynd (rhymes with the wind). It is a poignant account of an American woman who marries a modern Scottish Laird.  Does this sound romantic? The stuff of Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, or the Brontë sisters?  Their quirky courtship is more dalliance than alliance.

    When she married the laird, he offered her the land.  But the Guynd is not Pemberley; no servants dusted and hoovered the carpets.  “I had left Mansfield Park and entered Bleak House.”  Overwhelming effort is required to restore the run-down Georgian house and 400-acre estate.  But “the Lady” has determination and energy and good taste.  When they roll up the brown linoleum that was put down during WWII her spirits pick up the promise of more dramatic change. Anyone interested in interior decorating will join in the excitement.  Photos here.

    I had no experience with rooms of these proportions or with architecture of this gravity. Small gestures were lost in the spaces, but large gestures were all the more daunting.

    Different sensibilities and priorities create tension between John and Belinda.  The story begins with a crumbling mansion and ends, sadly, with a decaying marriage.  Belinda writes exceedingly well of modern Scotland: landowner-tenant relationships, tea rituals, famous frugality, education, sense of time, and the bitter cold.

    So one learns to appreciate the native frugality within the context of generations upon generations of people born to poverty, and understand why the Scots might be inordinately grateful for small things and careful with what they have. When times are hard the Scots are better prepared for them than most of us, for a life of hardship is never buried too deep in the Scottish memory.

    It was an easy/hard read.  For the portrait of Scotland, and the well-crafted prose, it was engaging, winsome, even charming.  For the heart-ache and depleted spirit, the seeming futility and failure of restoration and of relationship, it was depressing.

    Marriage is like a house, I thought, staring up at a crack in the bedroom ceiling. It’s a shelter, first of all. And it needs to be kept in good repair. Signs of water seeping through the wall need to be investigated before the paint begins to flake off, a bare patch is exposed, the fabric begins to crack, and the job of fixing it is too discouraging, too expensive, simply the last thing you can be bothered to do.            

     

  • No Dark Valley

    I am unenthusiastic about contemporary Christian fiction.

    I’m not sure how this title ended up on my shelf, but I  gave it a go.  No Dark Valley is a phrase from a hymn (There’ll be no dark valley when Jesus comes to gather his loved ones home).  As a resolute lover of robust hymns, I found the best part of No Dark Valley to be Turner’s employing hymn phrases into chapter titles and into her prose, e.g. Ten Thousand Charms; Where Bright Angel Feet Have Trod;  Some Melodious Sonnet; Frail Children of Dust; And Grace Will Lead Me Home.  I’m often snipping little phrases from hymns for a bouquet of words.  This, alone, made the book worth reading.

    There was a laugh out loud moment: … Grandmother’s pastor, who seemed to be trying to depict the concept of eternality by the length of his prayer. 

    The protagonist, Celia, is a director of an art gallery.  The last five books I’ve read have referenced pieces of art, a delightful rabbit trail. No Dark Valley paired paintings and poems inspired by the paintings, a worthy exploration.  Here is Delmore Schwartz’s poem Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine; Cathy Song’s poem Girl Powdering Her Neck based on a Kitagawa Utamaro print; a Charles DeMuth, William Carlos William pairing.

    I liked the hymn phrases and fine art references.  When she isn’t highlighting fine art, Turner pokes some fun at kitsch: Their idea of good art was sticking a calendar picture or an old greeting card inside a frame from Kmart.  And later: Her idea of good art was the newest Precious Moments figurine.

    But the writing did not win me.  The reader is told in almost every chapter about Celia’s angst and remorse; the subtlety of showing Celia’s feelings by her facial expressions, position of her hands, physical responses would have been better. That, along with a predictable storyline and wooden characterization, haven’t changed my opinion of contemporary Christian fiction.