Bibliophile

JOURNAL: 5/20/13.Trying a couple of tricky narrative tricks. Don't know if they are going to work.I'm just trying to get the basic plot down. I'm going to need to go back later and add depth.Soon I'll be facing the cold and hunger chapters.How do you portray long periods of time where nothing happens? How do you portray not eating and not moving without being boring? That will be a challenge.Once they try to escape, and once the werewolves start striking, then everything will be easier.So I've got to figure out a trick.Wrote the second Stanton chapter. It was a struggle. I finally added a werewolf element to the chapter, and that gave me enough wordage.I've got one more set-up chapter, which will get us halfway through the book.Then the cold, starving chapters at Truckee Lake. Not sure how I'm going to do those. I feel like I need a couple of chapters of that without the werewolves. Maybe have the werewolf enter the second chapter.How do portray hunger? How do you portray nothing happening but hunger and cold? Then go to Stanton and Reed, and the beginning of the rescue.Then the action scenes to fill out the rest of the book.

From a letter (6 III 1909) of Innokenty Annensky (classicist, poet, and much-loved teacher) to Max Voloshin:But do many understand what the word is among us? [...] You know, recently, even among us, oh! how many there are who fuss over the word and are even prepared to speak about its cult. But they do not understand that the most frightening and powerful word ? the most enigmatic ? is perhaps just the everyday word.(Russian below the cut, from here.) On December 13, 1909, Annensky died from a heart attack at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station on his way home from work; Natalia Murray writes (The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde: The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin, p. 14): "It was almost certainly triggered by discovering the non-inclusion of his poems in the first issue of one of the most fashionable journals of the time, Apollon." You can care too much about the word.Continue reading "THE FRIGHTENING EVERYDAY WORD."

Managing Stress: From Morning to Night Time-Life Books 1987 Mary: I thought this title would be an excellent kickoff to our new and improved site. Hopefully, you will notice that pictures are loading faster. Both of us will continue to tweek this  as we go along. We appreciate your patience for the last few days. Special shout out to my partner-in-crime, Holly, who spent the last few days slaving over our website, while I ate and drank my way through New Orleans. (Btw, my stress is totally busted!) Submitter: We pulled this book from the shelves of a high school public library when looking for books on stress and relaxation. The pictures made us burst out laughing. My personal favorites include the man clutching a cork in his mouth (where did the cork come from? His liquid lunch?) for “jaw relaxation” and the lady slumped over at her desk who appears to be looking up her own skirt. Holly: The advice and the exercises are probably fine, but it’s sooooo 1980s! Remember these stress busters? Relax! Chicken System Neurotic Hanging Out

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Was a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin. Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes. Petrushevskaya’s previous collection published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s 2009 best books list. Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review: This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: “A Murky Fate”; “Hallelujah, Family!”; “My Little One”; and “A Happy Ending.” But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better. In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.” “The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.” For the rest of the review, go here.

The Human Figure, John Vanderpoel (F, 20s, tight curls, mustard yellow peacoat, black purse w white spots, L train) http://bit.ly/11I8CQ3

May 21, 2013 Fisherman's House on a Lake near NurembergC.1496Albrecht Dürer21 May 1471 - 6 April 1528 _______________________ Argument with Myself Mike Jay reviews Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves. Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. (....) For the long remainder of his life Henry was blandly unaware of his own story. He would readily volunteer that he had ‘a lot of trouble remembering things’; if pressed, he might speculate that ‘I have possibly had an operation or something.’ His short span of consciousness led to repetitive behaviour – making the same observation repeatedly, or mechanically eating two lunches in a row – but his conversation was characterised by a gentle wit and quizzical, punning exchanges that seemed to test every statement for possible meanings. (When Corkin commented on Henry’s love of crosswords by dubbing him ‘the puzzle king’, he responded: ‘I’m puzzling!’) He had occasional episodes of frustration, anger or panic, but was usually good-natured and accepting of the scene around him. In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time’, though Corkin also wonders whether his lack of anxiety and emotional churn might have been related to the partial loss of his amygdala....(more) _______________________ Conrad Felixmüller _______________________ The U.S. as a party-state Adam KotskoAn und für sich ... Interpreting the party-state phenomenon through liberal democratic norms, the “totalitarian” analysis decides that since something like civil society or the private sphere no longer has the desired autonomy, we can only conclude that the state, as the only other available center of power, is over-dominant. This is a profound misreading of the situation, however, as Foucault points out in Birth of Biopolitics. The problem in party-states is not that the formal state structures are too strong, but that they’re too weak to restrain the party-movement that instrumentalizes them....(more) _______________________ Corruption StudyStudy of Changing SocietiesVolume 1'6 _______________________ Men above the World (Epitaph for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht)1919Conrad Felixmüller (21 May 1897 - 24 March 1977) _______________________ Singin

Readers of this blog know that Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent is a story featuring a boy named William, a child of Bush Hill and Baldwin Locomotive Works, the brother to a young man murdered by a cop. William has lived in my imagination for many years. He was a primary character (but not the primary character) in my Centennial Philadelphia novel, Dangerous Neighbors. He rescues lost animals for a living. He matters to me. Earlier today, I discovered that my friend Ed Goldberg, a librarian in the New York system, put Dr. Radway and Dangerous Neighbors side by side in a review. I love that he did this. I learned from his study. I'm deeply appreciative. Ed's entire report can be found here, on his lovely blog, 2HeadsTogether. He ends his musings like this: What both books do so well is describe one city, Philadelphia of the 1870s, although two different worlds. Both books delve into their main characters, William and Katherine, making them come alive. And both books use language as only Beth Kephart uses language. It was a luxury reading the books one after the other, because it highlights the contrasts that otherwise would have been hidden. So, Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent and then Dangerous Neighbors. The one-two punch in books. Thank you, Mr. Ed. And thank you, Elizabeth Mosier, for the extraordinary note you wrote to me after you read the book through. No one can ever know just how much words like these matter to an author—especially in the case of this particular book.

As I've mentioned in a few posts here and there, I've been slowly reading an ARC of Andrea Barrett's upcoming story collection Archangel. Her fans are going to adore this; it's everything you expect from Barrett and more - a truly fabulous set of stories. I love it. The final story is "Archangel" and includes the main character from the earlier story "The Experiment", now all grown up and fighting in WWI. It's 1919 in "Archangel" and although the war is over, for these men it continues in Russia, where they are assigned to The Polar Bear Expedition and bizarrely, stuck in the Russian Civil War. I have never heard about this force which is pretty stunning as I heavily studied US military history in college (it was the main focus of my history degree) and I've read a ton on WWI. (It seems like I'm always finding out more of history that I've missed. So frustrating!) Barrett does amazing stuff with the setting and characters and brings alive all the confusion and fear of this war-after-a-war where nobody has any idea what is going on. Because this is Barrett there is also a second character, a woman, who is an x-ray technician. The science history of x-rays blends into military history as if they were always meant to be, and readers fall in love with these two people so far from home and so uncertain as to why they are there and what will become of them in that miserable place. You will read "Archangel" and hate war all over again. It's sublime - brittle and sharp and slices your heart. I ripped me apart a bit, this story, and the final paragraphs were worthy of a Wilfred Owen poem. I can't wait until you all read this book - I just can't wait. [Post pic: En route to Archangel, a group of 339th Infantry Regiment doughboys pose with their newly issued M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifles. From the Army Sustainment Bulletin.]

Every Tuesday Diane at  Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book she’s reading or thinking about reading soon. This is a book I’ve had for some time and haven’t read yet. It’s The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. I bought this book because I’d read and loved Mary Lawson’s book, Crow Lake (link to my post on the book). The Other Side of the Bridge begins:  Prologue There was a summer back when they were kids, when Arthur Dunn was thirteen or fourteen and his brother Jake was eight or nine, when for weeks on end Jake pestered Arthur to play the game he called knives. Jake had a great collection of knives at the time, everything from fancy little Swiss Army jack-knives with dozens of attachments to a big sleek hunting knife with a runnel down one side for blood. It was the hunting knife that was to be used in the game because according to Jake it was the best for throwing. The only reason I haven’t read it yet is pressure of time  - and lots of other books that I’m dying to read. But should I read this one soon? This is the blurb on the back cover: Arthur and Jake are brothers, yet worlds apart. Arthur is older, shy, dutiful, and set to inherit his father’s farm. Jake is younger and reckless, a dangerous man to know. When Laura arrives in their 1939s rural community, an already uneasy relationship is driven to breaking point … And this is what Penelope Lively wrote about it in the Guardian: This is a fine book – an enthralling read, both straightforward and wonderfully intricate. I think I’ll move it up the list of books-to-be-read.

The Water Witch by Juliet Dark Ballantine Books, 2013 Fantasy; 352 pgs I wish I had sat down to write this review earlier. It has been a few weeks since I read the book. I finished it just before all of my attention was taken by Riley's last days, and so reviewing this book, much less any other book, went down a few notches on my list of priorities. As a result, my memory is a bit fuzzy. What I do remember . . . From the Publisher: [. . .] Callie McFay, a professor of gothic literature, has at last restored a semblance of calm to her rambling Victorian house. But in the nearby thicket of the honeysuckle forest, and in the currents of the rushing Undine stream, more trouble is stirring. . . . The enchanted town of Fairwick’s dazzling mix of mythical creatures has come under siege from the Grove: a sinister group of witches determined to banish the fey back to their ancestral land. With factions turning on one another, all are cruelly forced to take sides. Callie’s grandmother, a prominent Grove member, demands her granddaughter’s compliance, but half-witch/half-fey Callie can hardly betray her friends and colleagues at the college. To stave off disaster, Callie enlists Duncan Laird, an alluring seductive academic who cultivates her vast magical potential, but to what end? Deeply conflicted, Callie struggles to save her beloved Fairwick, dangerously pushing her extraordinary powers to the limit—risking all, even the needs of her own passionate heart. I fell in love with Juliet Dark's writing, characters and their world in The Demon Lover. The Water Witch is the second book of the Fairwick Chronicles and it is just as good as the first. I was quickly swept back into Callie's life in Fairwick, enchanted by the world and people Dark has created. Carol Goodman writing as Juliet Dark yet again shows her great writing chops. She has a way with words in spinning a tale and in creating a world that is so full and rich in my mind's eye. This particular book had less of the Gothic feel that the first book had, but it was no less atmospheric. Fairwick is full of charm and mystery, darkness and light. Oh, how I would love to explore the college town and the woods behind Callie's house! The author weaves mythology and folklore into her story, which only adds to the allure. There is much more action and less romance in The Water Witch than was in The Demon Lover. As a result, this book seemed to move a bit faster pace wise. The characters were more fleshed out, and I enjoyed getting to know them better. Especially Callie. She's more fully coming into her own, learning where she came from, what powers she has and just how to use them. I was not happy to see this book come to an end if only because the next book in the series isn't waiting in the wings for me to read it. Rating: (Very Good +) To learn more about Carol Goodman/Juliet Dark and her books, please visit the author's website. Source: I received an e-copy of this book for review from the publisher via NetGalley. © 2013, Wendy Runyon of Musings of a Bookish Kitty. All Rights Reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Musings of a Bookish Kitty or Wendy's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.