Ed: Ž is for Žantovský

I’m mostly interested in Vaclav Havel as a playwright and a theatrical figure. I love his stuff; I love the sort of thing he does. I’d love to play in a production of The Memorandum; I’m too old to play the lead in The Garden Party, but I could certainly play one or another of the bureaucrats (or several of them, I suppose). I’d like a chance at Largo Desolato, sure. His stuff is sort of absurdist moral comedy, as it might be Pythonesque and Beckettish, a bit Stoppardy à la N.F. Simpson in Caryl Churchill mode, in a sense, with a touch of Ionesco. But nothing like any of those. He’s really masterly at repetition, and really masterly at repetition as well. Extraordinary works. Extraordinary.

And of course an extraordinary life. Michael Zantovsky (the author of Havel: A Life) was Mr. Havel’s press secretary in his first term as President of Czechoslovakia, or possibly his first term as Czech President, or perhaps both. The details weren’t clear. For a politician and diplomat, though, he does an excellent job of situating the theater stuff, both interpreting the works themselves and situating them within Prague culture of the time. He’s better at describing the reactions to The Garden Party than the production, but that itself is fascinating. Really, though, Mr. Zantovsky (or Žantovský), is much better at the political maneuvering and chaos that immediately followed the Velvet Revolution. The stuff he was there for. The image of President Havel and President Walesa trying to find somewhere in the White House to have a cigarette was lovely.

My favorite bit could have come out of a Havel play: after Mr. Havel took office, he prioritized a sort of de-communization of the Castle, the immense thousand-year seat of government. I had no real idea about the Castle; you could fit ten White Houses in it with room to walk around between them. Good King Wenceslas ruled there; so did Hitler. Anyway, the thing about the Velvet Revolution is that the government never really stopped in between; the whole point of the velvet-ness was a combination of amnesty and continuity that meant that (among other things) people who had jobs in the Castle under the Communists in November 1989 would show up to work in December 1989 under democratic rule. And the Communist bureaucracy was of course famous for not letting the right hand know what the left was doing (while simultaneously encouraging either hand to inform on the other) so it took a while to, f’r’ex, figure out that the catering staff reported to the security staff.

Anyway, Now-President Havel prioritizes de-Communizing the Castle. He’s a believer, of course, in symbols and whatnot, and art and architecture and so forth, and he wants to make the Castle feel less communist. So evidently he would go on these excursions, room to room, trailing his inner circle of staff, trying to find out what was going on in this part of the Castle, and what was going on here, where people were being made to stand in line under huge statues, or whatever. He got into details of design, which drove everyone crazy. Anyway, in this insanely large complex, he’s trying to poke his nose everywhere, but not systematically, just charging around. And Mr. Zantovsky doesn’t say how long he’s been at it, alas, when he comes across a room full of women wearing headphones and typing. They were listening in on all the telephone conversations in the Castle. That had been their job under the Communists, and they were still showing up to work and doing it, even though nobody was coming and picking up the reports any more.

Such a great scene. And profoundly Havel-ian, too, although I suppose if he had written it, there would have had to be another scene later, where the President comes back in and the women are still there, still typing their reports for nobody to ever receive, only now of course in the newly liberated capital, with democracy and freedom, they have no headphones and no longer eavesdrop on people’s calls. They just skip that step, too, and keep filling out the reports just as they always did.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: Q is for Quindlen

Yeah, well, there aren't that many Qs.  And I'd at least heard of Anna Quindlen.  I'm pretty sure I've read an essay or two here and there.  So I picked up a book, complete with Oprah's Book Club sticker, on the theory that I might be ok.

Black and Blue is not a book I would normally read.  The black and blue of the title are the bruises of Frannie Benedetto, given to her by her abusive policeman husband.  She leaves him, through a network of helpers, and takes their son.  In the year that follows, we see her go from her immediate traumas to more groundedness; what makes this alive is the way Quindlen writes the character.  We see her triggered with love, loathing, fear, reconciliation--in the complicated ways that people interact, that make an abusive relationship stand not just as a weak-woman with an aggressive man.  We see the ways in which this relationship was a dance, back and forth; we see this even when she's away from Bobby Benedetto.  The book hinges on the custody issues that often arise in these cases--where the battered spouse may take the child but doesn't necessarily have legal rights to the child, where the abusive spouse may steal the child back.  Black and Blue are clearly also emotions--anger and sadness color the whole book.

It is a testament to the strength of Quindlen's writing that I finished this book.  I almost put it down after the first chapter, especially as the character and I share first names...creepy.  Quindlen is a compelling writer of character.  Can I recommend it? not really.  I do think it is a long ramble for a book--that it could have been paired down some.  I think too that its point is clear in a shorter format; I don't think we would have loved Fran less if we'd seen her beaten less, or understood her and her child's adjustment needs and coping less.  I'm not sure that I don't also understand the issues of domestic abuse better now than I would have in 1998 when the book was written; I think we've done a lot in almost 20 years to bring the issue out of the shadows.  But perhaps, in 1998, we needed this book.

(I still may try one of the other Qs I picked up)

Ed: E is for Easton

Obviously, I picked up Boys Don’t Knit, by T.S. Easton, because I am a boy who knits. Done.

It turns out that it’s quite a good book. Funny, silly, rude, sweet, outrageous. I’ll keep an eye out for the second one in the series.

I’m a little curious about the editing for the American edition—this is a very very English book, and it’s jarring when he talks about his father offering to take him to a soccer game. Does Macmillan US really think that American teens would be confused by references to football? Are they right? There were a couple of other places where there were what felt like Americanisms stuck in between the Tesco and the tea cozy, if you know what I mean. On the other hand, I’m told that British English now has Americanisms stuck in like that particularly amongst teens (such as this book’s first-person narrator) so perhaps a British reader of the American edition would find it totally smooth. Dunno, it seemed off to me. Although the choice not to change lollipop lady to the American crossing guard also confused me, so what do I know.

This also connected to a mini-gripe about the knitting talk—mostly it was marvelous, with our main character a kind of savant who has to visualize the whole pattern in his head before he begins, and then knits with machine-like precision. Not my way, but I loved reading it; the knitting was an extension of his character. I’m not convinced by the pattern for the easy-knit huge-stitch hoodie, I must admit, but hey, there’s a lot of stuff on ravelry I’m not convinced by, with pictures and everything, and that’s presumably real. As an idea for a pattern by a teenaged asbo who discovers a gift for the knitting needles, it works. No, my gripe is that in discussing a completed (or nearly-completed) knitted item, he several times says that there were no dropped stitches at all, and I think once says that an item knitted quickly was good, even though there were a few dropped stitches. I don’t know if a dropped stitch is something different in American Knitting than in British, but in my experience, a dropped stitch is a significant calamity which is likely to leave a large unsightly hole in the finished product. A twisted stitch is more the sort of thing I think a good knitter in a hurry might do, uneven cabling, or there’s probably a name for it when your stranded colorwork has the wrong tension and puckers the fabric, right? Anyway, dropped stitch clanged on my American ears quite badly.

But those are minor gripes in what was otherwise a fun YA sort of read.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: I is for Ivey

I freely confess to trolling the library shelves for a book that strikes my fancy by an author whose last name begins with a letter I don't yet have.  That's why I left the library this week with an I and a couple of Qs (yet to begin).  I also admit that I picked up this book because of the author's first name.

Eowyn Ivey's book, The Snow Child, (with excerpt link!) is perhaps best described as magical realism.  Using the core of a Russian fairy tale about a childless couple's snow sculpture comes to life, the book is set in Alaska of the early 20th century with childless homesteaders, Jack and Mabel.  Faina, a blond waif, appears out of the woods just after Jack and Mabel break their sadness and the stress of Alaskan life by making a snow maiden.  We are left wondering whether Faina is a snow child out of a fairy tale or an orphaned girl making her own way in the wilderness; really, this is a book about how we need to believe stories, how they bring a magic and a vibrancy to our lives, and how we rely on them to tell ourselves things about ourselves.

Ivey's book is very rich--the relationships between characters (Jack and Mabel, Mabel and Esther--another, more established homesteader, Jack and Garrett--Esther's son) are nuanced and deep.  The setting is interesting, in a way that appealed to the Little House on the Prairie reader in me.  I was sometimes disappointed by the way Faina interacts with figures and I blame this on Ivey wanting to have her Snow Maiden and her real girl simultaneously; Ivey doesn't want to settle one way or the other which leaves the magic sometimes flatter than it might be.  The end has a complicated twist I wasn't expecting, which pushed the book back towards magical realism.  A good read--sad, still, sweet, strong.

Ed: N is for Novik

I like Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels a bunch. Not that they’re perfect, but they are enjoyable—they play to her strengths, and her strengths happen to coincide nicely with my Sources of Reader Pleasure. On the other hand, I have been feeling that the Temeraire story is getting played-out; I don’t look forward to the new books the way I might. I was somewhat ambivalent about the new non-Temeraire novel, then, mostly eager, but a little concerned that Ms. Novik would abandon the plot-driven incident-packed style that I like so much.

Well, Uprooted is certainly packed with incident.

It is also powerfully evocative, and the world of Fantasy Early Modern Poland is a magnificent creation. The magic, as well, is lovely, and the core of the book is in Our Hero, a young woman with a talent for magic, as apprentice to an older (but dead sexy) man whose talent for magic appears at first to be utterly incompatible with hers… yes, you can certainly tell where this is going. But while it does have some of the tropes of Romance that get up my nose, it manages to avoid other ones that get even further up my nose, so that’s all right, d’y’see? And while I don’t know that I think the characters, as such, are brilliant inventions, the relationships between the characters are compellingly drawn, and drawn in such a way as to propel the plot, and that’s most certainly all right.

I’m wondering, though, whether the inclusion of a scene earlyish in the book where a Bad Guy attempts to rape Our Hero is the sort of thing that the article I can’t seem to find now was on about—I mean an article I can’t seem to find now, that says more or less if you are including a rape scene just to show that the villain is a Bad Guy, please don’t. But there have been lots of notes recently about the inclusion (or not) of rape scenes in movies, books, TV and comics; the question really ought to be in people’s minds. And while this scene is handled quite well, it really isn’t necessary from a plot point of view, and is of questionable value from a character point of view—that is to say, nothing of the decisions she later makes seems informed specifically by her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. Of course, there are lots of things in books that aren’t necessary, and perhaps sexual violence does not, in fact, constitute a special category such that an author must justify its presence by necessity. I am inclined to think it does, by virtue of the history of the trope, but your mileage is likely to vary. I’m not angry at Ms. Novik for including the scene, I’m just a trifle uncomfortable with it in the otherwise terrific book.

Digression: I am, however, really angry with Google right now. In an attempt to discover whether other people had been musing on this question, I typed [novik uprooted rape scene] as my initial search, without quotes, and Google seems to feel that rape and sex are synonymous. In addition to making YHB angry, they boost to the top of the search discussions of an entirely different scene, consensual in nature, effectively obscuring any articles that I’m actually looking for. But mostly, that’s just bad and wrong, Google. Boo. End Digression.

Anyway… Uprooted is a terrific book, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. One of those when-can-I-get-back-to-my-book reads. On several occasions I responded aloud to an event in the book; a couple of times with an ewwww but at least once with a yesss!

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: J is for Jacobs

If we judge books by their covers, I might never have picked up Kate Jacobs' Comfort Food.  (Although TSOR reveals that it is just the cover on my library's edition and not the cover on her site which more accurately reveals the tone of the book).  My edition is black with some artfully scattered peaches, some split and open, others closed.  But the peaches aren't photographs with dripping juice but artfully painted in a Chardin sort of way--pretty but not gooey.  And the book is more of a gooey-peach sort of thing: sweet, soft, sticky, bruised.

Set in the cooking show world with our heroine Gus, her daughters, cohost, neighbor, various beaux, tv figures, etc., this is a book in the "chick lit" genre.  Women discover their feelings, have vibrant lives (or change their lives to be more vibrant), cook, fall in love.  It is amusing as it riffs off of what can go wrong in the kitchen (especially as folks try to make things go perfectly).

But this book is closer to Jennifer Crusie in style (though less explicit in the sex which Crusie writes with anticipation and tension and steam and here is dealt with behind suggestion and closed doors, MYOB) than some artfully displayed peaches suggested.  I may go back and look for some of the books in her other series, The Friday Night Knitting Club, though I vastly prefer cooking to knitting.

Ed: R is for Rubin

Fran and I and a friend of ours recently went to see Edward Petherbridge in My Perfect Mind, and in the build-up and excitement, the friend lent me The Nicholas Nickleby Story: The Making Of The Historic Royal Shakespeare Company Production by Leon Rubin. It’s a terrific book, and does a great job of illustrating just how crazy the RSC was to do the thing in 1980, and how unlikely it was to succeed, and how really really unlikely it was to solve their funding problems for years. Mr. Rubin was the assistant director, assistant to the two co-directors (not exactly co-equal, tho’, as one of the co-s was Trevor Nunn who was at the time Artistic Director of the RSC, so there’s certainly a sense in which Mr. Rubin was assistant to the assistant) and had insight into the process from both an artistic and an administrative angle. I’d recommend it as a balance to a really good production diary written by one of the actors, only there isn’t one. Alas.

This lack is particularly keen because few of the actors come across as vibrant characters in this story—to be honest, Mr. Rubin doesn’t really write vibrant characters and is better at describing problems and solutions. Still, you get a sense of David Edgar, the playwright, and the co-directors, Mr. Nunn and John Caird, and the composer Stephen Oliver, and the set designer, more than you do the actors. Roger Rees does become a character, and you get a sense of him as the lead actor in more than one sense, pushing the production toward his view as well as acting out the others’. Mr Petherbridge has a couple of good scenes in the book, as does Bob Peck, but John Woodvine barely appears at all, and while he is effusive about Ben Kingsley’s Squeers, there’s no depiction of Mr. Kingsley’s process of creating the character.
Digression: I know that the broadcast version is not the original cast, nor yet the second cast, but I find I cannot keep in my head the idea that Alun Armstrong was not the first Squeers. I certainly cannot imagine Ben Kingsley in the role. I would be fascinated to know how Mr. Armstrong approached the role, joining the cast after the long development was over. Someone should really be doing some sort of oral history of the show now, before anyone else dies. Anyway, this book doesn’t present a Ben Kingsley to usurp Mr. Armstrong in my mind, so I’m sure I will continue to forget that he played the part. End description.

The bulk of the book, of course, depicts the months-long period of research and improvisation that forty-odd actors went through with three directors and a playwright and the novel. I would have hated that process. Oh, Lord, would I have hated it. As did some of the cast, evidently, although most of them stuck it out. For which I am grateful, if not really understanding.

Now, during much of that period, the actors were also performing Shakespeare in repertory. That is, depending on the show and the part, they were putting in full days preparing NickNick and then playing George Page in Merry Wives of Windsor in the evening, and then coming back the next day to work on NickNick all day and play Iago at night. These are roles Bob Peck actually played in Newcastle in the last weeks before NickNick premiered, while he was learning Sir Mulberry Hawk and Big John Yorkshireman—more accurately he was rehearsing the NickNick roles whilst David Edgar was simultaneously writing them. John McEnery whilst preparing to play Mr. Mantalini, among others, was playing Pistol and Roderigo. Mr. Rubin doesn’t give a sense of what that was like at all, but then, he was spending those nights in meetings with Mr. Caird and Mr. Nunn and Mr. Edgar, amongst others. Probably just as exhausting.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Ed: P is for Perry

I’m interested in Grayson Perry as a sort of public figure—I can’t say I much like the art that I’ve seen pictures of, I’m afraid, although of course with pots and tapestries it’s unlikely the pictures on the internet do the artworks justice. But the person, or at least the public persona, I find fascinating. He’s wildly transgressive in a comforting, middle-brow way; he’s a straight man who likes wearing dresses, particularly outrageous ones; he pontificates about art while mocking the way art seems to draw people into pontificating. He’s an unpopular pop artist. He combines being an avant-garde artist with being a television personality. It’s as if Robert Mapplethorpe combined with Graham Norton, or as if Salvador Dali.

The cartoon on the cover of Playing to the Gallery, Helping Contemporary Art in Its Struggle to Be Understood, has the title scrawled in spray paint over a Rothko. I like contemporary art, but I have never really enjoyed Rothko’s stuff, so that was an added spark of interest—tho’ I don’t think, in that specific case, that Rothko’s paintings need help to be understood, but maybe they do. And while I like contemporary art, not everybody does; perhaps, I thought, this book will help me in my struggle to be understood as genuinely liking Clyfford Still’s stuff or Sol Lewitt’s. At any rate, I grabbed it off the library shelf and gave it a try.

It’s entertaining, often cleverly written, largely unhelpful, inconsistent, somewhat incoherent and a lot of fun. I don’t think it will help contemporary art in its struggle to be understood—if you don’t like the stuff, at best you will feel better about not liking it. Or at least feel less like the stuff is an insult directed at you personally, which seems to be a common reaction… it’s much more likely to be an insult directed at previous generations of artists. And recent ones, too, which means that the insulted stuff is also contemporary art, within the meaning of the act, and you won’t have liked that, either.

As a working artist, concerned for his income with gallery shows and critics, museums and crowds, Mr. Perry has some interesting insights into the industry. He also is aware that, for instance, a hundred years have passed since Marcel Duchamp put his Fountain on show. His art-school teachers’ art-school teachers would have been too young for art school when that happened. I’ve read far too much pontification about contemporary art that fails to understand that there has been time for reactions to reactions to reactions to that provocation. It’s still a marvelous joke, but it’s a marvelous old joke, and has been for a good long while now.

Anyway, the book is unsatisfying and provoking, and good, too. If you would rather, you can listen to the Reith Lectures from which the book was adapted. The Q&A part is pretty good, I have to say.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Post Script: Oops, already had a P. Ah, well.

Max: M is for Mass

I already have an M but you should know about Wendy Mass's book, Pi in the Sky.

In this book, the seventh son of the supreme overlord of the universe (Joseph),delivers pies. that`s right. he. delivers. pies. But when the solar system is taken out of the space/time continuum, he is the only one who can save it. But he`s still grieving over the removal of his best friend. With the help of a grandmother (who gives pies to deliver to him) , a (slightly weird) girl named Annika Klutzman, and the voice of Kal, his best friend.



I like this book because it has a very cool problem in it. I don`t like this book because... well, I don`t really have a complaint about the book.


I would like to recommend fans of science fiction.

Fran: An Additional W, for Woodman

I forgot I HAD a W so I read Betsy Woodman's Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes, book 1 in a series.

Not really blogging it but to say that it was a fine read of a Scottish woman in India in the years after WWII and Indian Independence, her fortune telling parrot--Mr. Ganguly, and the town's various Muslim/Sikh/Christian/Hindu characters.

I'll probably look at the next in the series...

Fran: A is for Arnett

Mindee Arnett, The Nightmare Affair.

It came from the Teen Room.

Magic and mystery, there's a creative set up where (rare) dream pairs can see into the minds to see the past, present, and sometimes the future.  These skills are used to try to stop murders associated with someone trying to improperly use magic to control more of the world.

More pent-up tension and angst than a late Harry Potter book. 
You have been warned.

Fran: Y is for Yezierska

I recently searched the library shelves for new alphabet authors, especially for some of the more obscure letters.  My "Y" is Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers.

This is a novel written in 1925, which made me interested to see what was happening there; I confess that I had never heard of her, though the forward by Alice Kessler-Harris assured me that the book had been well received at the time. TSOR reveals that it is a popular book club or high school read.

Set in the shtetl of Hester Street in New York, following an immigrant family who'd come to America, it is a little slice of traditions and expectations set against the shock of modernism and desires.  The Smolinsky family is 4 girls--Sara (our main character), Fania, Bessie, and Mashah--their mother and father.  Bread Givers are the men in the lives of the daughters, beginning with their father who demands utmost respect from his daughters ("No girl can live without a father or a husband to look out for her...It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence") and from the neighborhood ("What? I work like a common thickneck? My learning comes before my living.  I'm a man of brains.  In a necessity I could turn to business." Turns out he has no head for business and is cheated in a deal when he buys a grocery).  The girls work, giving their father part of their wages to keep him from having to work.  As they fall in love, he ridicules and drives away their partners but the necessity of marrying off daughters leads him to make poor choices that the girls must live with.  The beaux are all men of the New World--Berel is a shop clerk with aspirations of his own business but Reb Smolinsky drives him away and marries Bessie off to the widower fishmonger who needs a new wife to care for his 5 children; Jacob is a concert pianist son of a wealthy merchant but both fathers part them and she marries a man who sells jewelry but pretends to be a diamond dealer and a con artist.  Fania falls in love with a writer but is married off to a rich man who doesn't love her and uses her as a walking status symbol.

Against this Sara desires to make something of herself.  She is our feminist.  She studies at night school, even though learning is not for girls.  She works in the garment trades as an ironer and scrimps and saves (against a system that values men's work more than women's) to go to college and become a teacher.  She works through college and fights against class prejudice and the difficulties of her upbringing.  She begins teaching and finds love for herself.  And as her mother passes away and her father remarries to a woman who only wants his insurance payout, Sara reaches a detente with her father and takes him in with her.  The idea being that she sees his weakness and takes him back out of her own mercy not out of his demands (or even his merit).  It's hard not to see this as turning her from a free woman into a proper woman but it's also easy to forgive that for it's time (and perhaps the desire to hope that when we are old and foolish, our children will forgive us).

It's a really compelling read--full of Socialism and feminism and American immigrant history.  Glad I found a good "Y".