Casting Spells

Sugar Maple, Vermont, is a lovely town that is distanced from the evils of the world as most of us know it - a haven for ordinary people who welcome tourists to their shoppes, the inn, the playhouse, the library, and the storybook charms of quaint New England.

Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & Strings, provides tourists and townies with yarn, knitting instruction, and the kind of hand-knitted sample items that can tempt even the most stash-stuffed knitter to open her purse. Every knitter knows that Chloe's store is the place "where your yarn never tangles, your sleeves always come out the same length, and you always, always get gauge." Sounds perfectly magical, doesn't it?

Well, it is, and it isn't. Actually, the town has flourished as a haven for ordinary-looking people who only drop their mortal mufti amongst themselves, when their true natures and skills can shine -- and a diverse group it is, what with the werewolves, selkies, wizards, faeries, shape-shifters, poltergeists, vampires, and trolls.

Other businesspeople in Sugar Maple are free to use their powers to create the inviting enchantments that delight tourists. (Productions at the Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse are easy to cast, since all of the actors are shapeshifters!) But Chloe, the product of a mixed marriage between a sorceress and a mortal man seems to have inherited no magic at all. Not a whit of it.

Chloe's friends are eager to get her married, hoping that she, like her sorceress mother, will find her magic when she falls in love. The townspeople are concerned about Chloe as well. As the only female descendant of the sorceress who enchanted the town and kept the magic folk safe for centuries, it is Chloe's presence that ensures the integrity of the spell.

But the spell has been weakening for awhile. Its vulnerability has been proven by the drowning death of a lovely young woman who had just purchased a delicate shawl from Chloe. This brings another threat to the town: a handsome hunk of a policeman from Outside, sent to investigate the death.

Chloe's friends have failed to find a suitable partner for her, try as they might: there had been neither magic nor chemistry between Chloe and the troll, or the selkie whose breath smelled like smoked salmon. But - when Chloe meets the hunk and shakes his hand, sparks fly - literally - and true magic enters Chloe's life.

A subplot about a power-hungry, purple-glitter-shedding faery and her desire to own the Book of Spells that was left to Chloe causes additional tension. Chloe's house is destroyed by the faery's warring sons. ("How was I going to explain this to State Farm?" she worries. Luckily, she doesn't have to, since her house is restored by morning, as if by wizardry.) (Or, by wizardry.) A town meeting about the weakening spell brings out all of the residents, including old vampires who have to insert their false teeth before they wheelchair it out into the night, an itinerant house sprite, a punked-out faery with tats and a pink iPod "permanently set too stun," and a witch who tells Chloe that "Banshees are imaginary."

(This same witch, observing Chloe in a startled moment, says "you look like you've just seen a ghost." Chloe laughs until she cries. So did I.)

Let's just say that this book delighted me, and will delight you. Trust me.

• One cavil: Why did the town's librarian have to be a troll? Don't we librarians have enough of an image problem?? Barbara reminded me that Lilith is a glam troll with gorgeous red hair. True...It's also true that she utters the funniest line in the whole book.
  

The Sea, the Sea - Iris Murdoch

"Is the future post-emergent?" is a sub-heading of an article on religious publishing that I read this afternoon. Skimmed, really. It's hard to focus when you have to get past sentences like "What will the next stage of emergent look like?" -

I just emerged from The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Usually, I don't get too far into novels whose characters are despicable, uninteresting, and/or hollow. I felt that way about almost everyone in the book, beginning with Charles, an English actor, egocentric and anal, who has retired to an old house by the sea. To say that Charles is an unreliable narrator would be a giggle-worthy understatement.

Into his picturesque refuge comes a cast of friends, lovers, and relatives - the very people he had intended to leave behind - like so many hungry ghosts. (They are, indeed, hungry. Charles sends them out for food and ruminates on his precious culinary philosophies. Should one should serve apricots dried or hydrated? Charles knows.) They troop in and out of the house like so many stock characters in mediocre plays - all except the one he longs for, his long-lost muse.

Charles may believe that his best role as an actor was Prospero, but I came to think of him as a donkey-headed fool, whose ego and cowardice are far more dangerous (and pathetic) than the brawn of any Caliban.

How did I get past this miserable lot of characters? I realized that the voice of the main character in the book does not belong to Charles. It is the voice of the sea: eternal, self-renewing, non-judgemental - and dangerous when taken for granted.

(Setting-as-character is not that unusual. I just read Rebecca, after all. Isn't Manderley itself a character?)

The Sea, the Sea is structured as Charles's diary and autobiography. Past and present jumble as his guests and his own misapprehensions become as entangled as eel grass. As a narrator, he is quintessentially unreliable because everything, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means nothing except as it relates to him. You can trust his descriptions of the sea and the cliffs, but what lies beneath?

After I read this novel, I learned that I am not alone in not being able to latch onto the characters. Others also have found the characters less humans than philosophical principles with shoes.

Still, post-emergent, I find myself thinking about the book from the viewpoint of Charles's cousin James, a soldier and a student of Tibetan Buddhism. James tells Charles about the Bardo, the limbo between life and death, where facing and accepting one's own monsters can free one to enter the realm of the Buddhas, symbolized by the mandala.

When Charles retired from his theatrical life - died, in the eyes of his old world - he sought clarity, but he sought it within his own ego. Does Charles have the humility - or humanity! - to create his own post-emergent future?

(Yes, by the way, I loved the book.)

Kerouac on Tea

from Dharma Bums:

Now you understand the oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, and the fifth is ecstasy."

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

When I was a teenager, my friends were mad for Keats, Shelley, "Dark Shadows," and Wuthering Heights. I shared the first three passions - in fact, I wrote a dissertation on "Dark Shadows" for one of my undergraduate English courses - but Wuthering Heights just never caught my interest. The Romantic poetry stoked my love for tragic, passionate poets who died young. I read biographies of Mary Shelley and imagined myself in that room with her husband and Polidori. But two lovers on the moors? No. I'll stick to the doomed Angelique, the doomed love between Carolyn and Jebbas, and the doomed Collinwood.

(You see, it's not that I wasn't into doom.)

I finished Wuthering Heights over the weekend, and I've been discussing it on a couple of boards. I came up with my own backstory for Heathcliff (Earnshaw's illigitimate child), I enjoyed reading about the wild landscape and wild weather, and I admired Emily's brilliance -- but I came up against one huge problem: There is not one character whom I like. Usually, if that happens, I can not and will not read the whole book. I have to like or admire someone, or someone's aspirations.

This quirk of mine has never stopped me from reading works like Crime and Punishment, or other dark, dark books. The most murderous of the characters search their souls and understand that they are not the same as others. They see their guilt, or they don't see their guilt, but they understand their actions in the context of a real world.

All of the characters are personifications of various ways of being corrupted, or of being corruptors. Even Mrs. Dean, the closest to a caring, compassionate character - actually, the closest to an actual human being - allows tragedies to happen because she allows one or the other of the Catherines to manipulate her. Allows, mind you - she knows she's acting against common sense and principle, but she allows.

Having Mrs. Dean as the primary narrator prevents the reader from knowing whether the monstrous Heathcliff knows that his behavior would not fit into a world that was less isolated. In fact, it prevents the reader from seeing any evidence of love that isn't tinged with cruelty. The Romantics may have wept and yearned for their loves, but they didn't lock their loves (or their loves' daughters) into barred rooms, force them to marry mewling invalids, or hang their dogs.

And yet, despite the lack of tolerable characters , despite the overwhelming cruelty and corruption, I loved the book. This puzzled me until I realized that I was reading the land itself - the moors, the bracken, the weather - as a character, and I loved that character. The moors were what they were, are what they are, and will endure despite the disgraceful actions of the humans who enact their nasty lives upon it.

Maybe that was Emily's genius: showing us that humans may come and go, enact decent or indecent acts, or love or hate, but the land - her beloved, beautiful moor - is eternal, and worthy of gratitude. We can look beyond the nastiness of her humans and pity them for shrinking into cruel trolls instead of expanding their hearts in the beauty of the heather.

Booking Through Thursday - Harry Potter

Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it? This Ravenclaw will be reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the moment it arrives from Amazon.uk. If I don't get it by Saturday, I'll have to hide in my closet to keep from being spoiled.

1. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties? See above. I won't attend parties, but I will talk with my stuffed Hedwigs. It will be a comfort to us both.
   
2. If you’re not going to read it, why not?
3. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to? I am in the "Snape is a good guy" queue because I trust Dumbledore completely. I think he took Harry on the quest for the Horcrux as a rite of passage, to toughen him and to ensure that he could do anything necessary to vanquish (hiss) Voldemort. It was Harry's Bardo, facing what he feared, and he got through it.

Booking Through Thursday - fan letters

Have you ever written an author a fan letter?
Did you get an answer?
Did it spark a conversation? A meeting?


I've written to a few authors, but only received three responses. Joseph Epstein, whose collection of essays, The Middle of My Tether, delighted me, sent a typed postcard thanking me for my comments. Laurie Colwin wrote a short note. And Joan Didion, to whom I sent a letter of condolence on the death of her husband, sent a personal note on her lovely blue stationery.

I've met authors, but not through letters, only at book signings: Joyce Carol Oates, Alexandra Stoddard, Dominick Dunne, Alan Dershowitz, Marvin Kitman...

(Have you read Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life? One of the suggestions she makes is to write letters to authors. I really should write one to her.)

Booking Through Thursday - monogamy

One book at a time? Or more than one? If more, are they different types/genres? Or similar?

(We’re talking recreational reading, here—books for work or school don’t really count since they’re not optional.)

Monogamy? HAH! No way. I have no discipline, no plan, almost no discernment. Whatever comes along, if it looks delectable, I will taste it.

As for what I read - No rhyme, no reason - No, that's not true, because I am apt to be reading poetry and non-fiction together, along with fiction, which can be anything from classics to children's books.

(In fact, I have just joined a read-and-knit-along for Anne of Green Gables, and I'm looking forward to it as I would look forward to curling up with ice water and peppermints... no, that's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I also want to reread...)

Booking Through Thursday - do your friends read as much as you?

There was a widely bruited-about statistic reported last week, stating that 1 in 4 Americans did not read a single book last year. Clearly, we don’t fall into that category, but . . . how many of our friends do? Do you have friends/family who read as much as you do? Or are you the only person you know who has a serious reading habit?

I was not surprised by the statistic. As a librarian for almost thirty years, I have seen how reading habits have changed. Where once, patrons would stagger to the circulation desk with a dozen books to check out, now they have three or four. Where once, we would have to buy a dozen copies of the latest bestseller, now we buy three or four. Perhaps, some of this trend can be attributed to the online booksellers, whose deeply-discounted prices make it more attractive to buy a best-seller than to wait for 3-4 weeks to get it from the library. More likely, people who once were casual readers have become less likely to read for any of a million reasons - I won't bore you with my cynical list of possibilities.

One of the details in the MSN article caught my attention - the notion that women are less likely than men to read biographies . I won't generalize from myself, since I'm a fiend for biographies, especially if they're about literary or intrepid women. (I'm itching to read the new biography of Gertrude Bell, for example.) I will generalize from my women friends, though - they (we) all read history, biographies, science, all manner of nonfiction, and we discuss amongst ourselves.

Another detail - or omission - from the article made me wonder whether the survey included audio books. I've seen discussions and debates on whether audio books count as "reading" - for example, check out this excellent post by Moonfrog and the comments below - and I've been rather surprised by some of the conclusions. For the record, I think that any medium that lets you absorb the author's words qualifies as reading - and I wonder who amongst the scoffers would tell, say, blind people that they aren't reading their "Books on Tape."

So, do my friends and family read as much as I do? Friends, yes, but wouldn't you expect that we'd choose friends whose passions complement our own? In fact, some friends astound me with the number of books they read, especially since they also knit amazing things, create and sustain splendid gardens, raise excellent children, work time-intensive jobs....Would that I had the energy and time-management skills to keep up with them!

(Family - not as much. Alas.)

Katie Roiphe - Uncommon Arrangements

Meh.

Have you ever seen those mind-map-like charts that begin with one celebrity and radiate / branch out to show who has had (ahem) relationships with whom? That's this book.

In no particular order, these are some of the linked literati: H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, D.H. Lawrence, Vanessa Bell, Radclyff Hall, E. M Forster, Rebecca West - (no, wait, I already listed her - she finds her way into an amazing number of these stories!) -

Some had children with each other. Some were jealous of others. Some were not jealous of others.

Some are old literary friends of mine. I already knew all of the tidbits herein. I did not learn anything new. Had I not known anything about these people, all I would now know is that writers have libidos.

Not recommended. Not.

Meh.

Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love

I confess: the only reason I read his book was its presence on best-seller racks in Borders and Barnes & Noble. I suppose I got what I deserved. At least I had the sense to stop reading it when - well - I'm getting ahead of myself. Be patient.

Gilbert is a seeker. I'm a seeker. (Wouldn't you like to be a seeker too? ) In a memoir, as in life, I seek clear-headedness. In a travelogue, I seek - well, clear-headedness and a sense of Being There. In a spiritual memoir, I seek - well - how about perspective? Some evidence of growth?

Here's a quote that says it all:

The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"

Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this book. (In fact, I just gave a copy to a friend who will like it very much.) What the world needs now isn't love as much as reason and clarity. Without those, love is just an impulse. I need more than the evidence of impulse to want to read a book.

Gilbert's travels took her to Italy, India, and Bali. Italy was mostly about food. Even if I, personally, would starve before I ate octopus salad, I can appreciate someone else's appetite. (After all, M.F.K. Fisher wrote about, shall we say, non-standard foods, and her work is stunning.) I can't tell you about Bali, because I bailed out in the middle of India. That's not like me.

I love reading about India. I love Indian music, Indian food, Indian art, Indian thought and spirit. I've read Autobiography of a Yogi, books by Krishnamurti, the Bhagavad-Gita, Rabindranath Tagore, countless books about the Raj. It's difficult to put me off if you're writing about India. Gilbert managed. It wasn't that she arrived at an ashram wanting to pick and choose amongst the necessary disciplines - one expects resistance in a spiritual memoir. It wasn't even the presence of a wry Texan whose comments reminded me of a cross between the late, great Molly Ivins and The Stranger in "The Big Lebowski." It was the moment of enlightenment that involved being bitten half to death by mosquitoes.

Sometimes I can get past mosquitoes. Sometimes I can't. Oh well.

By the way, "The Big Lebowski" is one great film. The Dude abides, you know.

Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield, a Secret Life

Katherine Mansfield: a secret life - by Claire Tomalin

That I love the work of Katherine Mansfield probably is apparent from the way I've rattled on in this blog.How I wish for a new biography of this doomed and brilliant miniaturist! In the meantime, I recommend this 1987 work by Claire Tomalin.

Tomalin can always be counted on for clarity and an unbiased rendition of a life. In the case of Katherine Mansfield, both must have been difficult. Not only did Mansfield try on various personae and artistic identities, not only did she hide and lie about some of her past - she even changed her name several times, finally alighting on the name we know today.

She was, for her times, more sexually adventurous than many. Her early lovers may have included women. Some of the physical suffering she endured before her death from tuberculosis may have been the result of an STD she contracted, relatively early in her life.

Even as her strength ebbed, she flung herself into her art and the artistic life, socializing with such luminaries as Lady Ottoline, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. She and her odious husband lived with the volatile D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence for a tumultuous period. (Lawrence later based two characters in Women in Love on Mansfield and Lady Ottoline.) Her stories, crystalline and (sometimes) bitter, caught the attention of Virginia Woolf, who considered Mansfield her only true literary threat.

Mansfield's death in the enclave of the mystical Gurdjieff was part of a desperate search for a cure when conventional medicine failed her. Tomalin takes the reader through the last days and last hopes with the dispassionate details that make Mansfield's decisions tragically clear.

Tomalin's biography brought me closest to feeling that I was in the presence of this complicated woman. I recommend it to all who love Mansfield, and all who admire a good biography.

Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express

I've never before read anything by Christie, and I was expecting to be bemused by a period piece.

Instead, I was enthralled, unable to put down the book until I had finished. Not only that : since I'd never seen the movie, I was depending on the book alone , and I was utterly amazed by the ending. I never saw it coming. Great fun!

(One cavil: anyone who reads this should be prepared for some musty, unpleasant cultural stereotypes. This book is not politically correct... but one must take it as a period piece, after all.)

Booking Through Thursday - generosity

1. Do you lend your books to other people? If so, any restrictions? Not often. Everyone I know has so many books that they don't need mine! It's a good thing, because I'm almost as neurotic about my books as I am about my fountain pens. I once lent a copy of The Bhagavad Gita to my cousin. When she gave it back, I saw that she'd inked a large OM symbol on the fanned-out pages. This happened at least 35 years ago, and I still remember the punch of dismay I felt.
   


2. Do you borrow books from other people? (Friends or family—I'm not talking about the public library) Not often. See above. However, that does not stop me from BUYING books from other people. Heaven help me, I've discovered BookMooch.
   


3. And, most importantly—do the books you lend/borrow get returned to their rightful owners?? Yes. Absolutely.

A. S. Byatt - The Biographer's Tale

Welcome to the Bizarro World edition of Possession. Where once the literary sleuths sought the mystery of a Victorian poet, now the sleuth seeks to escape the Laputa-like world of modern literary criticism. He wants things - facts - tangibles.

Steered by his orotund advisor (who doodles random, obscene runes during lectures) and stirred by a three-volume biography of Elmer Bowles (a Victorian polymath whose own writings may or may not have been, shall we say, reliable), Phineas Nanson decides to write a biography of the biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. Destry-Scholes becomes Phineas's guru, inspiring him to write as he wrote by retracing his subject as Destry-Scholes had followed his multifaceted and peripatetic subject all over the world, learning the same languages, and, possibly, dying in the pursuit of Biography.

Byatt is devilish. In Posession, literary factions flung themselves into the chase for Cristabel's secrets. In this book, nobody flings himself at anything - except, perhaps, a zealous Swedish bee taxonomist, whose assistance in translating some of Destry-Scholes's notes on Linneus prefigure her zest for - well, for Phineas.

Notes rescued from the bottom of a file drawer seem to show that Destry-Scholes was in the process of a work - or works - on three men who seem to have little in common: Linnaeus, the taxonomist whose travel-writings betrayed a singular desire to catalog the sexual organs of everything he sees, whether human or plant; Galton, the inventor of fingerprinting and a zealot for eugenics; and the great playwright.

As Phineas tries to follow the biographer's notes, his confusion begins to resemble one of Galton's passions: creating composite portraits of people by selecting features of each and blending them, creating, in Phineas's eyes, "something that had been taken away by being added." The same process begins to afflict Phineas, who loses focus as accumulated facts begin to blend into an unsatisfactory whole.

Vera, a niece of Destry-Scholes, allows him access to shoe-boxes filled with note cards and a collection of her uncle's marbles, which she tries to match up to lists of unrelated words in one of her uncle's notebooks: maidenhair, bum, lamplight, tendril, gloop, gentian, spitfire, goosefeather... His employment at Puck's Girdle, a fey, blue-green travel agency, introduces him to a sinister gentleman who offers snuff Phileas as a sly requestfor a rather perverse tour -- but is this desire any less perverse than the celebrated taxonomists's prurient focus?

Phineas describes himself as "a very small man.. but perfectly formed." This book is a perfectly delightful stew of things, facts, and intangibles that might not satisfy the cravings of the would-be biographer, but satisfied me completely.

Booking Through Thursday - caring for your books

What kind of care do you take of your books? Let's review, shall we?

1. Are you careful with the spines? Or do you crack your books open to make them lay flat? I'm both careful AND I crack the books - depends on the book (and, needless to say, whether it's mine!)


2. Do you use bookmarks? Or do you dog-ear the corners? If you do use bookmarks, do you use those fashionable metal ones? Or paper? I use bookmarks. Many of them were gifts, and some are hand-made (embroidered, knitted). The only metal one I use is William, the hippo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on a blue ribbon.


3. Do you write in your books? Ever? If you do, do you make small marks, or write in as much blank space as you can find? Pen or pencil? Highlighter? Your name on the front page? Sometimes I use an address label on the inside front cover, and sometimes I write in the book. If the paper is fountain-pen friendly, I use a fine-nibbed pen. Otherwise, a ball point. If I write, it's usually on one of the blank pages at the end - I take notes, and indicate the page number.


4. Do you toss your books on the floor? Into book bags? Or do you treat them tenderly, with respect? On the floor!?!?!?!? I carry books with me in my knitting bag, or in a tote with my notebooks and journal. My books, c'est moi. If anything, I treat them more tenderly, and with more respect, than I treat myself!
   


5. Um--water? Do you bathe with your books? Hold them with wet hands? Read out in the rain? Anything of that sort? No. No. No.


6. Are your books lined up on a bookshelf? Or crammed in any which way? Stacked on the floor? On bookshelves or piled on furniture. Never ever ever on the floor (see #5).


7. Do you make a distinction--as regards book care--between hardcovers and paperbacks? Not really.


8. And, to recap? Naturally, you love all of your books, but how, exactly? Are your books loved in the battered way of a well-loved teddy bear, or like a cherished photo album or item of clothing that's used, appreciated, but carefully cared for? Both. Some are well-loved stuffed rabbits, and some are cherished like a pair of velvet gloves. (Wine-colored velvet, or forest green. I know this is more information than you want. I have a thing for gloves.


9. Any additional comments? Not now - I'm reading.