Bibliophile

Me, last weekend. Less date-due than I am today. The honeymoon has ended, that wonderful period of pre-baby motherhood in which it’s imperative to be taken out for afternoon tea and be administered lots of fragrant baths. Now instead of relaxing and taking care of myself, I’m given instructions like, “Try crawling around the carpet for half an hour–while watching TV or listening to music. It is good exercise as well as good for the baby’s position!” And it’s only a short slide from here to the point where I’ll be having trouble breastfeeding and crazy people on online forums will instruct me to refrain from eating anything but white rice, while I lock myself in a darkened room for a fortnight hovering naked over my colicky child in order to discourage it from nipple confusion. At least this time, I know what to expect. Today is my due-date, which I’m calling my date-due because I’m better at libraries than being patient. But what I’m better at than anything else is jumping straight to worst-case scenarios, which is why I decided that since baby shows absolutely no sign of imminent arrival (or even un-imminent arrival) that baby was never going to arrive at all. I’ve since been reassured by enough stories of babies failing to be engaged who managed to be born anyway that I am no longer fretting about booking a c-section at 42 weeks. I’ve had a hunch all along that our baby was going to be born on the Barbara Pym Centenary anyway, (June 2, but you already knew that) and I’m becoming convinced that this is really the case. I’m also sure that my bout of stomach flu at the weekend made the baby reluctant to make an entrance to the world, and now that I am feeling much better and energetic again, I am content to wait until baby decides that it’s time. As I crawl around the carpet on my hands and knees, of course. There cannot be enough of that.

Time to gripe about Things that Annoy Me in Periodicals! 1) Claire Messud's enthusiastic NY Times review of a Leskov collection says of the author: "he emerges as a literary missing link, a writer who brings the metafictional playfulness of Sterne into the Russian tradition..." Leskov is a wonderful writer, but he started publishing in the 1860s, seventy years after Karamzin, the "Russian Sterne," brought that playfulness into the Russian tradition starting in the 1790s (see this post). Karamzin was followed by a whole passel of writers influenced by him and Sterne, including Veltman (see this post), Narezhny, and Senkovsky, and doubtless others I haven't read. It's not fair to blame Messud for this, since she probably took it from Pevear's introduction (and of course I'm always happy to blame Pevear and ?Volokhonsky for things), and the real blame goes to the distorting lens through which we all view pre-Tolstoy Russian literature. 2) This is a simpler case, but more unexpected and therefore more aggravating. In Rebecca Mead's New Yorker piece on dementia care, "The Sense of an Ending," we find the sentence "Residents may choose when, and if, to bathe, provided that they maintain basic hygiene, and there is no compunction among staff members to get uncoöperative residents spiffed up for visitors." She obviously means something like "staff members feel no compulsion to..."; I don't know how the inappropriate "compunction" got in there, but even after years of watching the magazine's standards slip, it still somehow shocks me that their once-famed editing staff didn't root it out.

Today the horses are in town, those beautiful beasts that arrive each year and send my thoughts back to childhood days. You'll find me in the stables early, stroking those long, warm noses, breathing a little easier. And over the weekend, running in the Philadelphia Inquirer, you'll find a story about my love of that show and its long and storied history. Over the course of the summer and into the fall, I'll be traveling a bit, to a number of events, beginning next Thursday when I head up to the BEA to celebrate the naming of Small Damages as the Armchair BEA young adult novel of 2012. A number of other events are brewing, but these are the events I can announce at this time. Also, in the next few weeks you'll find a brief Kephart essay in Good Housekeeping and an excerpt of Handling the Truth in O Magazine. I'm grateful for the generosity of the editors. So here I shall be. Perhaps I'll have the privilege of finding you in one of these cities, at one of these times. May 30, 2013, 10 AMArmchair BEA Awards(Yay, Small Damages!)Shindig Booth # 2135Javits CenterNew York, NYJune 4, 2013Speaker,Friends of the Wissahickon Annual Member MeetingPhiladelphia, PAJune 27, 2013, 10 AMProject FlowFairmount Water Works Interpretive CenterPhiladelphia, PAJuly 2, 2013Philadelphia Literary Legacy UnveilingPhiladelphia International Airport,Philadelphia, PADetails hereJuly 18, 2013, 9 AM to NoonCoffee Klatch LeaderPhiladelphia Business JournalThird Annual Women's ConferenceCrystal Tea RoomWanamaker BuildingPhiladelphia, PAJuly 27, 2013, 3:30 - 5:00 PMLaunching Small Damages paperback/Memoir Workshopwith Debbie LevyHooray for BooksOld Town Alexandria, VAAugust 6, 2013Launching Handling the Truthwith a memoir workshopFree Library of Philadelphia(details to come)Philadelphia, PAAugust 13, 2013Five Author EventDetails to comeSeptember 7, 2013, 10 AM - noonBookPassage Memoir Workshop51 Tamal Vista Blvd.Corte Madera, CA 94925September 7, 2013, 3 PMBooks Inc. Memoir WorkshopOpera Plaza601 Van NessSan Francisco, CASeptember 8, 2013Redwood Writers WorkshopMemoir WorkshopFlamingo Conference Resort & SpaSanta Rosa, CA 95405September 17, 2013, 7 PMDr. Radway LaunchRadnor Memorial LibraryRadnor, PASeptember 22, 2013Chestnut Hill Book FestivalChestnut Hill, PA(details to come)October 3, 2013, 6 PMUniversity of Pennsylvania BookstoreMemoir Workshop/Handling the TruthPhiladelphia, PA(details to come)October 20, 2013Talking Memoir with Linda Joy Myers @Rosemont CollegeRosemont, PA(details to come)March 12, 2014, 8 PMElizabeth Boatwright Coaker Visiting Writers SeriesConverse CollegeSpartanburg, SC

There is currently a major European research project to investigate the furthest reaches of the human brain, involving thousands of researchers and millions of Euros. But I reckon researchers could save oodles of dosh, and do a lot worse than simply seeing Fleur Hitchcock in action: This week - as part of a book week at St Swithun's School, Kennington - Fleur tried to get schoolchildren to visualise just what it was like inside her brain as she endeavoured to create stories. The author of The Trouble With Mummies, Dear Scarlett and Shrunk! hauled up lots of volunteers, and lined them up with baskets of eggs, German war helmets, genuine bronze-age axe heads, replica Saxon armour - and she even had children mummifying each other. The result was not-quite-chaos - and for the children who had already been doing lots of writing exercises, it was a remarkable insight into the writing process. Fleur has always written, but at school - with undiagnosed dyslexia - she found no-one else could really read what she had written. Inspired by books such as The Silver Sword and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase she has quickly found herself with not one but two publishers in the eight months since her first book Shrunk! was published. She plots out stories, not with a synopsis, but in storyboards drawn on the back of long rolls of wallpaper. In response to children's questions, she compared the writing process to turning on the hot tap, and waiting for plenty of cold water to come up before the hot stuff. (Trouble with mummies: pupil at left learns never to volunteer for a Fleur Hitchcock event) Fleur signed copies for pupils afterwards... ...and St Swithun's definitely win the prize for 'best coffee offered to bookseller and author' award... We managed to lure her back to the shop with the lure of more coffee... ...and the chance to find out more about Fleur's approach to writing. Five Questions with...Fleur Hitchcock's Writing Life 1. What are you working on at the moment? So many things *clutches head*. But I am currently working on a book for Hot Key which involves time travel and yoghurt pots... 2. What is the best writing tip you’ve ever been given? Mmm. Difficult. I think it has to be 'Read as much as you can'. This one really counts. You cannot be a writer if you don't read. 3. What’s the best thing and the worst thing about being a children’s writer?The best thing is meeting the children: that lack of reverence, sometimes you find yourself sitting in primary schools, eating school dinners, talking about your book with children - who wouldn't love that, being asked all kinds of random questions! The worst thing is sometimes you have to modify your stories to get them past the gatekeepers. For example in 'Dear Scarlett' the gangsters are very tame, and believe me I wanted them to be much more scary than that but wasn't allowed to get away with it. Neil Gaiman gets away with it, but not me! 4. Do you have a writer’s survival kit, eg a place, thing, thing or snack essential before you can start work? I have to have a hot drink. I have to have the phone unplugged. I have to have the Internet turned off - definitely. Honestly, if you take all the tweets I've done it probably adds up to several books... 5. What was your biggest breakthrough? Being picked as the Sunday Times 'book of the week' five days before publication of SHRUNK! I think it made the biggest difference, and it made me go prickly all over.

Yes, it's time to drag out the 1976 funny-hat-blue-belt photo again (fourth year of training, finals taken, results awaited) and tag another post under The Sufferings of Student Nurse collection, and If I'd known then what I know now I think I would have been rightly terrified at the mere thought of my student nurse ward allocation to Cohen CD, Infectious and Skin Diseases at Great Ormond Street, on March 10th 1974. My last ward before heading off to secondment at the London Hospital for the SRN part of the training that combined RSCN (Registered Sick Children's Nurse) with it. I know the exact dates because (this being me) I still have my Pink Book with all my ward experience logged and signed. It was on Cohen CD that I worked under the tutelage and eagle eye of Sister Macqueen, (the author of The Children's Nurse - The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse) for the next twelve weeks. Tucked in my Pink Book I have even discovered a scrap of paper with some of the Cohen patient names and diagnoses, obviously an attempt to drill it into my head in readiness for a ward round, and reading it now I am even more retrospectively terrified at how my twenty-year old self gaily dealt with such things as tubercular, e coli and meningococcal meningitis and herpes encephalitis amongst other things, and with never a thought that somehow I might catch something. And then the young teenager with epidermolysis bullosa, a debilitating conditon where the skin blisters and falls off at the merest touch... her distress was not surprisingly manifest in tantrums and teenage angst, and the daily bath sheer, unmitigating torture for all concerned. But imagine my delight when I heard news that Sister Macqueen, known to us then as Sue ( though never to her face of course, heavens the earth would have opened up and swallowed us) had written a book (with the help of a ghost writer) about life as a nurse at Great Ormond Street. Being a completist with regard to my shelf of books about G.O.S I ordered a copy there and then, but this being me and wanting it yesterday, I downloaded the Kindle version too. Sue Susan Sister Macqueen (old habits etc) had actually completed her initial nurse training at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge where she first encountered the GOS nurses out on adult secondment as part of their combined adult and children's nursing course... '... their GOSH uniforms marking them apart from everyone else...the pink nurses were renowned for their attention to detail, not only in the way they looked, but in the way they cared for their patients..' It was all enough to convince Susan (OK, I'm over it now, I'm sixty this year after all) that she wanted to do her post-registration paediatric training at GOS and that is where she headed at the earliest opportunity. With her nerves in shreds (no...I can't imagine this, she was a formidable ward sister) Susan walked onto 1A, the ward that would put the fear of god up most of us bright young things, Cardiac.  It is an indication of the terror that Susan, though already a qualified nurse, felt out of her depth amid the noisy hubbub that was an old GOS ward. The wards in our day, now almost obsolete, were a rare mix of medical and nursing care of the highest standard to the backdrop of the laughter and shrieks of children playing and riding tricycles up and down the corridor, and with the radio singing along in the background. Do you remember that song Lullaby of Broadway, a hit again in 1976. Wiz and I were both staff nurses on the same ward, 2DE (metabolic diseases and burns) and as soon as we heard that song on the ward radio we'd all head for the corridor for the tap dancing bit...no matter what you were holding...baby... potty... syringe.  Sister Macqueen might have had a bit of a conniption and of course that would not have been possible on Cohen where she became sister in 1972, the year that I arrived at

Dirty Money, Ashley and JaQuavis (F, 30s, short red sweater dress, fishnet-ish stockings, black hair, L train) http://bit.ly/11Ia7O4

So far, I've accomplished something rare at the store for this time of year. I've managed not to fall into debt during the first half of the year.Because of Bend's touristy nature, I make money four months out of the year, I lose money six months out of the year, and I break-even a couple months out of the year. (Actually, this is new adjustment from the old formula of 4/4/4.)I make good money on the good months, I usually only lose small amounts on the bad months, so they cancel each other out.What I'm attempting to do this year is not lose money during any of the slow and/or break-even months. It's hard to keep up the level of inventory when I do this. Things don't sell evenly, so spot shortages tend to develop, and I don't want that situation to continue for too long. I don't want to disappoint customers too much.So far, I've avoided most major shortages. The cash flow seems to be covering the essentials.Most of this is accomplished by not buying the "extra." Another big part is not buying the "sale" product. There is always sale product, some of it is very attractive, and it has nice profit margins. But they aren't necessary.It turns out so far that if I just order replacement copies on the good stuff, buy the new stuff as it comes out, and try the 'occasional' extra, that the store remains well-stocked and I don't lose money.It's not as satisfying, but I'm figuring the extra profits should make up for that. (It's fun to buy, you know. Seeing new stuff all the time.)But the extra profits will only happen if I can manage the other side the equation. Not spending "extra" during the good months. The temptation is nearly irresistable -- the money is flowing during the summer and Christmas, and I see product that is attractive, if unproven, and what the hell -- why not?So -- I need to keep to the same formula as the slow months. Reorder the good stuff, buy the new stuff as it comes out, and try the 'occasional' extra just to spice things up.I've never managed to do this for a full year. I almost always blow a fuse at some point. I think this is the farthest I've gone in the year without breaking down. The farther I go, the more encouraged I am to keep going.

After nearly three years in Ohio, I was able to take my academic books out of storage yesterday and move them into my new fourth-floor green-apple-green office on campus. The office is as narrow as an elephant’s coffin, but there is room in it for eight bookcases. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who was jerked into reflection before his books were even on his shelves, I started in immediately to release my books from their boxed confinement and arrange them in a rough semblance of an alphabet—the A’s just inside the office door, the middle of the alphabet having to wait until I’d removed enough boxes to reach the shelves over by the window. Before leaving Texas, I had packed the books in “the mild boredom of order” and carefully noted the contents in Sharpie on all four sides of each cardboard box. I asked the movers to leave the boxes marked Aar–Aris and Aris–Barz in the hallway outside, and I attacked those boxes with a utility knife right away.Before long, though, I was reduced to guessing where Henry James and Dr. Johnson would end up when, days from now, I would finally be done. I had gone without these books for almost three years, and though I had missed very few of them, I was warmed by their familiarity. My library is like an intellectual autobiography. As I lifted books out of their boxes, blowing the dust off the top edge, I was able to retrace my steps. There were the books from my undergraduate years, when I was an American studies major (just like Tom Wolfe!). There was John Kouwenhoven’s Made in America, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Seymour Martin Lipset’s First New Nation. There were the poets I read to keep up with my friends at Santa Cruz, all of whom seemed to be would-be poets—John Haines, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin. There were the books from graduate school—D. W. Robertson’s Preface to Chaucer, L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, William Empson’s Milton’s God. There were the philosophers on whom I broke my teeth when I first arrived to teach at Texas A&M, because the younger colleagues whose company I preferred were in philosophy—Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice. None of these would I buy again, or even reread, but I have no inclination to dispose of them (even if I knew how), and to own them—to stand them in the light on my office shelves—makes me happy.The reason did not strike me until I had unpacked several volumes of essays by now-forgotten critics who were not prominent even in their own day—William Troy, Theodore Spencer, D. G. James, Benjamin DeMott (his Supergrow was badly damaged by mildew), W. C. Brownell, Maxwell Geismar, Mark Krupnick, John Fraser, Arnold Isenberg, F. W. Dupee, Eliseo Vivas. I who dislike story collections am a sucker for Selected and Collected Essays, and have been since long before I began to identify with their authors. Theirs are the books that give personal character to my library like drapes and wall colors in a room. What they suggest is that my library is also a geniza, where I keep and store (in Hillel Halkin’s words) “books of which no one had known; known books of which no copies had survived; the lost works of . . . poets and philosophers.” My library is a monument (or tomb) for a way of literary life that is quickly passing (and perhaps has already passed away).Its motto is something I tweeted earlier this morning: If you are committed to good writing, then everything you write is in its defense. Substitute good scholarship or good thought for “good writing,” first here and then there, and you can account for the commitment that produced every book in my library. Can the same principle account for every book in the public libraries, which are furious to buy up multiple copies of current bestsellers for readers unwilling to invest their own money in things that cannot last? I may be the last man alive who recognizes some of the authors in my library, but there is something strangely consoling in that. My library is organized upon the p

I've been reading Osip Senkovsky's "The fantastic journeys of Baron Brambeus" all month (see here and here), and I have to admit that since that last enthusiastic report it's been something of a slog. The problem is that in the second section he goes to Siberia, joins a scientific expedition to the mouth of the Lena, and winds up exploring the nearby Медвежий остров [Medvezhii ostrov], 'Bear Island,' which is presumably invented—it certainly has nothing to do with the Norwegian Bear Island, and probably nothing to do with the Medvezhyi Islands, which are much further east. There he and his companion find a cave with what appears to be a long hieroglyphic inscription covering all four walls; fired with enthusiasm, they spend a week laboriously translating it using the "Champollion method": "every hieroglyph is either a letter, or a metaphorical figure, or neither a letter nor a figure but a simple flourish of the handwriting" [всякий иероглиф есть или буква, или метафорическая фигура, или ни фигура, ни буква, а простое украшение почерка]. So far, so funny, but the problem is that Senkovsky then provides the complete "translation," a very long novella about the last days before the meteor strike that caused the Flood and ended the antediluvian civilization from which hieroglyphics were passed down to the Egyptians, featuring a tiresome account of a jealous husband and his flirtatious, society-loving wife whose arguments and reconciliations are occasionally interrupted by catastrophic events and the comic relief of the astronomer Shimshik, who keeps running in to bore everyone with disquisitions on how this comet proves that he is right and his archrival is wrong. (The account is purportedly written by the husband with his last energy as he starves to death after eating his wife; the line Я съел кокетку! "I ate the coquette!" didn't redeem the story, but it did make me laugh.) But now that section is over, the baron has gone to Sicily to view Etna, and the book is back on track, a souffl? again rather than a fruitcake, and I'd like to share a passage in which the baron is trying to convince the lovely Giulietta, whose current boyfriend is a Swede from Finland, that she shouldn't be so impressed with him (Russian below the cut):"But surely at least you'll agree," she went on, "that the Swedish language is very nice and pleasant to listen to?" "And do you, signora, believe," I answered heatedly, "that there is such a thing as the Swedish language? The Swedes are exceedingly proud, and they're afraid that Europeans will call them Finns, so they employ every means to convince other peoples that they are of a completely different origin and even have their own special language. But I, having lived a long time in Petersburg, have satisfied myself that the so-called Swedish language is nothing but a hoax. When foreigners are around, Swedes deliberately pronounce random sounds in a sing-song fashion, accompanying them with gestures, to make people think that they are conversing among themselves in their native tongue, and that their language is sweet and melodious; but after babbling a while in that way, they are forced to leave you, go over by the window, and explain in Finnish whatever they wanted to tell each other.Giulietta is convin

The latest piece in our Reviews Section comes to us from Jeremy Osner, and is on Hernán Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrección (The Art of Resurrection) from Alfaguara. Jeremy Osner blogs about reading and translation at READIN. He is currently working on a translation of El arte de la resurrecctión (and the translated excerpts in his review are his), a novel that is looking for an English-language publisher. Here’s a bit from his review: “The small stone plaza was floating in the midday heat. The Christ of Elqui, kneeling on the ground, his gaze thrown back on high, the part in his hair dark under the Atacaman sun—he felt himself falling into an ecstasy. It was no less than this: he had brought it to pass. Had restored to life a dead man.” We meet Domingo Zárate Vega, “better known to all as the Christ of Elqui,” in the opening lines of Hernán Rivera Letelier’s The Art of Resurrection (Alfaguara, 2010), at the moment of realization of his greatest dream—of having mastered “the sublime art of resurrection.” The novel follows Zárate Vega in his travels through a key week in the midpoint of his 20-year mission of penance. It is the last week of December, 1942; the randy Christ of Elqui journeys to the mining camp of Providencia in search of the woman he believes will play the role of Mary Magdalene to his messiah. His story of finding her and losing her again is an exuberantly comic, darkly sarcastic, heartfelt, and sentimental meditation on faith and loss, played out against labor unrest among the striking workers of Providencia. Life in the mining camp is threaded together with currents in Chile’s history in a way that is characteristic of (and perhaps unique to) Rivera Letelier’s narrative voice. He has spent the past 20 years telling the stories of people who worked in the nitrate industry, an industry that formed a vital part of the story of Chile and, by extension, that of the industrialized world. (No nitrate, no industrialized agriculture!) The degree of precision and fluency in his descriptions of scene and character bring that past alive. For the rest of the review, go here.