Organizing Your Bookcase?

If you're planning on re-organizing your bookcase after the TBR Dare ends Friday, like I am, watch this little video.

Even if you're not.




Hat tip to the Slog.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

One of the fruits of Emancipation in

the West Indian islands is the number

of ruins, either attached to the houses

that remain or within a stone's throw

of them; ruined slaves' quarters, ruined

sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling

houses, often ruined mansions that were

too expensive to maintain.

Opening to

A High Wind in Jamaica 

by Richard Hughes

Children are evil.  Not evil, but so amoral in their innocence that their actions are sometimes difficult to distinguish from evil.

Richard Hughes examines this supposition in his comic novel A High Wind in Jamaica.  Set at the end of the 19th century, when steam ships were beginning to replace schooners, something that worries the novel's pirates, A High Wind in Jamaica is the story of a group of children kidnapped by pirates while on their way to homes in England.  Which group will turn out to be closer to the barbaric nature of uncivilized humanity: pirates, or children freed from proper adult supervision?

The Bas-Thornton's have raised their children on a ruined sugar plantation in Jamaica where Mr. Bas-Thornton has a 'business of some kind.'  Mrs. Bas-Thornton has not tried to maintain any sense of proper decorum.  Instead her children, three boys and two girls, have been left to themselves, much to their delight.

It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home.  Here one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it.  The difference between boys and girls , for instance, had to be left to look after itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short and were allowed to do everything the boys did--to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.

After an earthquake followed by a hurricane which destroys much of their home, the Bas-Thornton's decide to send the children back to England for their safety.  Two months later, the Bas-Thornton's receive a letter from the ship's captain--their children have all been killed, murdered by pirates who raided the ship shortly after they set sail.

But the truth is that the children willingly went with the pirates who afterwards found no one would take them off their hands.  Over time, the pirates become attached to the children and, for a while, keep them on-board ship enjoying their company.  The children quickly adopt the pirates as surrogate parents, big brothers really.  They are enthralled by the ship's monkey.  They become attached to both of the pigs kept on board for future use, treating them as foot cushions, thrones, and horses.  The youngest girl, Laura turns everything she finds into a baby doll she can stash in it's own 'home' somewhere on board.  (In the end she'll try to take them all with her, fighting the cook over a soup ladle baby she can't bear to be parted from.)   Her brother Edward is overjoyed at his good fortune; he gets to be on a pirate ship without even having to run away from home.

It all appears very innocent, but Mr. Hughes is interested in darker aspects of childhood.  Early in the novel one child, John falls to his death while everyone is on shore.  That night the children look at his empty bed wondering what to make of it.  Afterwards, no one mentions John at all.  He is forgotten by the children until their mother asks where he is once they are rescued.  Emily, the captain's favorite, is devoted to him until  one night when he has too much to drink he looks at her in a way she does not like.  After that, she turns against him, which is understandable, but through her innocence she later exacts a terrible revenge which the captain does not deserve.

A High Wind in Jamaica is a book about children, but it is not a book for children.  Mr. Hughes enjoys the games and frolics of his child characters, but his sympathies lie more with the pirates.  They  are taken in by the children, the pirates find they are unable to properly civilize the children who find the absence of civilizing parental guidance a 'kind of paradise.' When it becomes clear that the children cannot stay on board any longer, the pirates must decide what to do with them.  A true pirate would toss them in the sea, which is suggested, but the captain has become too fond of them to do this. Instead, he will see them safely placed which will lead to his downfall.

I entered into reading A High Wind in Jamaica expected an adventure novel, which I got.  There is plenty of adventure to be found in Mr. Hughes's book.  There is also a very adult look at the nature of innocence and the amorality inherit in it.  A High Wind in Jamaica was much more than I expected, and I expect it will be in contention for my list of favorite reads in 2011.

TSS: Skateboard Parade Floats

I don't often brag about my history class here, but this project turned out so well I'm giving in and going for it.   I do a massive (for 7th grade) research project each year that includes a 4-5 page term paper with bibliography and a speech with slides which we presented to the parents this past Wednesday.  This year I decided to have each group prepare a skateboard parade float about their topic.  It sounded like fun to me.  I had no idea how it would turn out; I just thought we'd go for it and see what happens.  

I think they're great.  The parents loved them. We paraded them up and down the isle before we began the presentations as one student announced each float topic.  The one above is Inventions and Discoveries from China.  You can see porcelain, paper money, gunpowder and rockets, (they had one student walking along the float flying a large rocket) printing and vaccines.  Several floats featured little disco balls that lit up.  This one had Christmas lights around it, too.  

The group doing Heian Period Japan, the time of Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonogan, made the large doll, the paper dolls, the trees and altered two decorative boxes to make the house for their float.  

The Exploration in China group made clay figures of Zheng He, Chinese explorer, on the left and Marco Polo, Italian explorer,  on the right.  They also made a compass, a Chinese junk and a small copy of The Travels of Marco Polo for their float.

The kids loved this project from the get-go.  I had them at 'skateboards.'  I think knowing they were going to make a float made working on both the paper and the speech easier to take.  (The speeches and the papers were all excellent, too, by the way.)

And when we  finished the presentations, we had refreshments provided by the parents.  Lovin' my job this week.

Dakota's Favorites: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

 



The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a non-fiction novel based on the murder of the Clutter family, husband and wife, son and daughter, all four killed in their own home by Perry Smith and his accomplice Dick Hickock in 1959. Mr. Capote's accomplishment is not that he tells a compelling story of murder and the subsequent search for justice, which he does, but that he also creates a complete and sympathetic portrait of just about everyone involved in the story without making excuses for anyone's behavior.

Mr. Capote leaves no stone unturned. There are no truly minor characters in In Cold Blood. Everyone presented is captured in detail, not just sketched in, but portrayed fully enough to become memorable. Everyone from the victims and the killers, to the waitress in the local diner and Nancy Clutter's teenage boyfriend who can't believe what has happened or that he is the main suspect. The result is not just a portrait of a Midwestern town, but of a large slice of the American pie. I doubt a more complete portrait of America circa `1960, its people and the social conditions that made them what they were, exists in any form. In Cold Blood's strongest asset is that it shows us what America was like in general by showing us the lives of so many specific people. By the end of the book, I had the sense that I knew as much about Holcomb, Kansas as the people who lived there did.

I suspect that many potential readers are turned away from the book by the possibility of blood. The story is not a pleasant one, true, but I found the book to be much less bloody, much less violent than the movie versions of this story are. Mr. Capote gives the reader the details of the crime, but he does not exploit them for effect. It is well known that he became at least friends with the two killers, but he does not make excuses for them, not really. He does tell their stories, just he tells everyone's story, but while I came to sympathize with them, I did not at any point begin to see them as "victims."

If you've seen either of the recent movies about Truman Capote and the writing of In Cold Blood, the book itself may surprise you. It does not seem like something a man like Truman Capote would write. There is nothing arch about the story telling, no reliance on wit at all. The details are presented in a straightforward writing that almost seems to lack style. Details are allowed to accumulate until they build their own story, make their own case. The result is a very dense read that only becomes compelling well into the book. There is no sensationalism grabbing your attention and moving you quickly from chapter to chapter. Mr. Capote trusts his material to do the job without writerly gimmicks.

At least that is what I thought at first. It turns out that there are a few gimmicks in the novel, though not many and not enough to damage its reputation or diminish its accomplishment. In Kim Powers novel, Capote in Kansas, Harper Lee is angered to find that Truman Capote made up a scene at the end of In Cold Blood. Nancy Clutter's good friend meets one of the chief investigating police officers at Nancy's grave site shortly after the two killers have finally been executed. How important is it that this meeting never really took place? It does give the book a novelistic feel that the preceding pages didn't have, but it also gives the book a conclusion it would otherwise be missing. I'm inclined to let Mr. Capote off the hook here. He has done such a wonderful job up to this point, that I'm willing to forgive him this ending. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I like it. When real life won't satisfy, it's good to have fiction to rely on.



Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archive. This review first ran in 2008.

The Beauty of Men by Andrew Holleran

The boat ramp looks quite different

depending on the time you go there--

night or day--but because it's just a 

sandy clearing in the woods, it's always

clean and beautiful; and because the

lake it serves is in a remote part of 

Florida, far from both coasts, the place

is seldom very crowded.

Opening to

The Beauty of Men

by Andrew Holleran

Once every so often, a blogger somewhere asks if it's possible to recognize how good a book is without liking it.   I think we'd all agree that a book can be good even though it does not fit our own personal taste.  At least in theory.  But when the rubber hits the road, or the fingers turn the pages, could you praise what is praiseworthy and write a good review about a book you didn't like?

The Beauty of Men by Andrew Holleran contains some of the best writing I've read in a while.  He takes the reader into the lives and psyches of his characters with an empathetic touch bringing them  to life with honesty and with understanding.  He neither judges nor asks us to feel sorry for the people he portrays.  His words are straightforward enough to cut to the quick, but writerly enough to be lyrical when lyrical is called for.

The Beauty of Men is about Lark, a 47-year-old single gay man, who has moved to Florida to help care for his mother who became paralyzed after a fall.

At times he has to remind himself, She fell, I didn't. But it doesn't matter. She fell on him.  All accidents on a certain scale, he noticed early on, sitting in the waiting rooms of intensive care units, affect not only the person who had the accident, they affect the person's family as well.  "She'd be better off dead!" his cousin said the evening she visited his mother for the first time after the fall; he wanted to slap her, for saying precisely what they could not allow themselves to think.  "Would you rather have died the night you fell?" he recently asked his mother.  "Oh God, yes!" she said in a loud croak.  So much for the twelve years. They were victims, all of them, of Technology--she'd been on her way out of Life, in a revolving door, and been caught when the door stopped--she'd been stepping into Charon's boat to cross the river Styx when she was pulled back, one foot in the boat, one foot on the bank.  Death had been devouring her and dropped her to the floor, like a dog distracted by other prey, mangled and crippled and sore.

Ironically, his mother's injury allowed Lark to escape a world full of death.  The novel is set in the mid-1980's when AIDS was ravishing a generation of gay men in New York City where Lark was living.  Now, Lark lives alone, has few friends, but he can blame this on his move to rural Florida.  Had he stayed in New York he would be just as alone for a different reason.  Now, instead of going to clubs and bath houses, he goes to the boat ramp and the one local gay bar two towns over in Gainesville.

There are no happy campers in The Beauty of Men.  Maybe one.  Lark's friend Eddie who frequents the boat ramp almost daily without any illusions of romance.  Eddie is older than Lark but he has none of  Lark's maudlin attitude about age.  He knows what he is, has accepted it, and goes through life with neither illusion nor self-pity.  Lark on the other hand is obsessed with age.  He has survived the AIDS epidemic only to find himself too old to be the gay man he wants to be anymore.  The old become invisible, which is true in the straight world, too, but invisibility for older gays in the 1980's was compounded by a community that valued both youth and beauty as signs of good health.  Lark is still interested; he just can't find anyone who reciprocates.

We are the same age, Lark and me. Knowing something of what he feels did not make me like The Beauty of Men more.  Maybe the 1980's is not long enough ago.  If the novel were set in the 1940's, I could have felt more for Lark.  But so close to our own time, I lost patience with him early on and never really came around to his side.    I can't say if the issues the book raises have been resolved or if we've just moved on to other things, but it all felt a bit old-hat to me.

So am I recommending the book?  I can say this: It is so well written that I will be reading more of Andrew Holleran's novels.  I've never read his classic Dancer from the Dance which is considered a seminal work in the LGBT Cannon.  When I next see it on the shelf in a used bookstore somewhere, I'll buy it.  In the end, The Beauty of Men is an excellent work.

"Reaching Rose" by James Purdy

An old man who has  long since outlived family and friends goes to the same local bar every night.  His only connection, Richard, the bartender doesn't know that the calls the old man makes inside the bar's one phone booth are not real calls.  The old man has no one to call, no one to talk to, so he pretends to dial the phone then spends several minutes talking to imagined people, filling them in on all the things he longs to say to someone.  A monologue that looks like a dialogue.

One night, Richard mentions how he admires the way the old man stays so young, how he always has business to attend to, calls to make.  The old man suspects Richard has realized that his calls are fake.  Suddenly, he's too self-conscious to continue pretending to make phone calls.  He summons up the courage to go into the phone booth one last time to dial a real number, Rose, a woman he remembers from long ago.  Is the woman he reaches real?  Or is she part of his imagination? A memory?

That's all.  But that's all you need with a good short story.  If a short story leaves you wanting more, that's means it's a good short story.

TSS: It Never Rains in Sunny California, Hah!

Image found at La Petite Gigi.

I've spent much of the week lying on the sofa watching bad movies on Netflix.  It's been raining.  I've been sick.  Nothing serious, just the sort of low level  cold common among teachers.  You can't spend your workday surrounded by children  and not get sick once in a while.  I used to get sick like this regularly, but it's been a couple of years since my last bout.  I'm felling better and will be going back to work tomorrow.

My seventh graders are presenting their China/Japan projects  Wednesday  night, so I'll just have to be well.  There's no other choice.  They need to practice.  Their slide presentations are in decent shape; I'll hear their speeches tomorrow morning, but the most anticipated part of the evening is the skateboard parade floats.  This year I asked each group to create a parade float about their topic that will fit on top of a skateboard.  We started work on them last week, and they actually look good.  I had no idea what to expect; the idea just struck me as fun so I went with it.  I haven't decided if we're going to actually parade them around yet, they are a little wobbly, but they'll make a fun display.  Yes, the samurai group did ask, and I told them no, they could not make a diorama showing seppuku.

Two book follow-ups.  I was not alone in disliking The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet when my book club met last week.  The book had no defenders.  However, I've loaned Ella Minnow Pea to several of my 7th graders and they all like it more than enough to recommend I get a set for our class book clubs. My test reader think it will be an advanced level book, but one students will enjoy.

Meantime, it's been raining.  Our dogs still insist on their walks, but they're happy to cut them short.  Dakota will walk around the yard in the rain, but when you stand in the door holding out a towel calling her name, she comes running.  She loves being towel dried.  You dry one side of her and she turns right around for the other side.  Afterwards, she turns round again hoping for more.  Gabby just stands in the doorway looking out at the bad weather.

In between bouts of bad movies I'm reading A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes.  It's sort of like a  cross between Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies.  Pirates kidnap a group of children who turn out to be far more menacing than they are.  I'm enjoying it so far, hoping to finish it today.  It's a good rainy day read.

Friday Picture Reading - Mark Twain

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by James Ford

Old Henry Lee stood transfixed

 by all the commotion at the

 Panama Hotel.

Opening to

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter

 and Sweet

by James Ford

One must have a  heart of stone to read  the death of Little Nell without laughing.

Oscar Wilde

To see if Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a book you'll enjoy read the following passage:

     He'd be thirteen in  a few months; maybe this was what it meant to stop being a boy and start being something else, Henry thought as he put his coat back on and headed for the door. He couldn't leave the photos outside.

     He turned to his father. "I'm leaving to get her photos. I told her I'd keep them for her--just until she gets back. And I'm going to keep my promise." 

     His father pointed at the door. "If you walk out that door--if you walk out that door now, you are no longer part of this family. You are no longer Chinese. You are not part of us anymore. Not a part of me." 

     Henry didn't even hesitate. He touched the doorknob, feeling the brass cold and hard in his hand. He looked back, speaking his best Cantonese. "I am what you made me, Father." He opened the heavey door.  "I  . . . am an American."

If you found this passage dramatic and moving, then Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a book you'll probably enjoy.

If you laughed out loud a little, like I did, then Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is not a book you'll enjoy, but you probably knew that just from reading the title.

To each his own.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind

February 9, 1971, 6:01 in the 

morning.

Opening to the introduction of

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

auteur: n, a director whose influence on a film is so great he is considered its author.

Before Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made Easy Rider, Hollywood was controlled by the studio system.  Directors were considered employees who worked for producers.  While many of them became known for a signature style, they did not have full creative control over their work.  The producers and the studios had final say.

Dennis Hopper and his contemporaries meant to change that.  In France, Jean-Luc Goddard and Francios Truffaut among others where changing the game.  They were auteur directors who controlled every aspect of their movies, from concept, to script, to cinematography, to editing.

Peter Biskind, in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, traces the early days of American independent movie-making.  He follows a cast of well respected directors: Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Robert Altman and several others.  Looking at their collective body of work it's impressive to see what a great decade the 1970's were for American film:  Nashville, The Last Detail, M*A*S*H, The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Star Wars, Badlands, Taxi Driver, Jaws, Raging Bull.  All  made against the odds while their creators struggled to maintain complete control over them by working outside of the Hollywood studio system.

Mr. Biskind has done his research. The story of each filmmaker is extensively detailed.  Their character; their peccadilloes; their struggle with the studio, their peers and themselves is thoroughly examined.  For instance, who knew that Peter Bogdanovich kept a piece of celery in his pillow because the smell helped him sleep.  While I was reading the New Yorker reviews Pauline Kael wrote in the early 1980's when I became a serious film goer, I was unaware of how important she was to film makers throughout the 1970's. Her backing was the factor that made several of the above mentioned films possible.  Film critics had the power to make or break a movie in the 1970's when films were released slowly to build word-of-mouth as they entered theatres across America.

This makes Easy Riders, Raging Bulls interesting reading for film buffs like me, and I suspect even for those with only a passing interest in the topic.  However, I did have three problems with Mr. Biskind's book.  First, he makes a habit of repeating salacious stories that cannot be confirmed.  He relates a particularly unflattering anecdote about a film maker as though it is true, only to insert "the film maker denies this" afterwards.  I suppose that it's difficult to write a book when so many incidentscome down to "he said" "she said," but I found Mr. Biskind too often went with whatever version was more sensational.  The second problem I had with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is also one of content.  For my taste, there was too much about the film maker's personal lives, their sex lives in particular.  I would have liked more analysis of their films than details about their sex lives.  Though their sex lives were epic.  Epic.  Really.  You've no idea. Finally, why is there no examination of Woody Allen?  Mr. Allen spent the 1970's as a true auteur, making some of his best work: Annie Hall, Manhattan.  Nor does Mr. Biskind look at John Sayles or John Cassavettes who never hit the big time the way Spielberg or Coppola did, but always remained in creative control of their work.

In then end, almost all of the directors Mr. Biskind covers fell victim to the cliche of Hollywood.  Fame became too much for them.  Their self-absorption and their self-aggrandizement grew to such heights that they over-reached, drove away those who had helped them early in their careers only to wind up producing a disaster that ruined their careers:  Popeye, At Long Last Love, One from the Heart, The Last Movie, 1941, Personal Best.  Some, like Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg recovered from their flops and continued to produce good work, while others faded into Hollywood's sidelines.  By the end of the decade, the studios and the producers were back in power, and American movies were generally worse than they were in the mid-1960's.  Can anyone imagine a line around the block in 2011 for a movie that didn't have an alien or a cartoon superhero in it?

Pauline Kael saw this coming.  Towards the end of her career she became known for her argument that Star Wars and E.T. had become the norm, infantilizing American movies.  This did not make George Lucas happy.  In fact he named one of the villains in his movie Willow after her, General Kael.  Mr. Lucas would most likely deny this, of course.  But  Easy Riders, Raging Bulls remains your best source for a look at the last great decade of American movies.

TSS: Stolen Book Returned Read!

Image found at Courant.com

I added two new titles to my classroom book clubs this week: Al Capone Shines my Shoes and The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  While I've not read the sequel to Al Capone Does My Shirts, I am a fan of The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  (See review here.)  Through an unexplainable ordering error I ended up with 10 copies of each, enough for two book clubs with two copies left over.  I guess my book talk for The Forest of Hands and Teeth was a good one, because there was almost a fight over the two book club sets and the next day I caught one boy returning a copy he had 'borrowed.'  He loved it. Read it all in one night.  I didn't have the heart to write up a referral or assign detention even though I told him he had to wait for the next round of book club choices.

I decided to extend book clubs, sort of, to my sixth grade class.  My plan is to let the students select from a list of books, read at their own pace, and then do a brief activity with the other students who've read and finished the same book.  We'll devote just under one period each Monday to reading, discussing, and writing about the books.  I posted a chart on the wall with each student's name and the title of the book they chose.  By Friday 2/3 of the class was ready for a new book.  I think having them wait until Monday to choose a new one is actually making them want to read more.

I love my job.

My own book club meets today, though I probably won't go since I'm a bit sick, to discuss The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet which was not on my TBR shelf when 2011 started making it my first 'violation' of The TBR Dare.  Book club exceptions are allowed, so it's not really a violation, but it still feels like one.   The TBR Dare has been an eye-opening experience.  Some days I look at the nearly 100 books on my TBR shelf and can't see anything I'm remotely interested in reading.  I force myself to pick up something, go with a short book usually, and end up liking it, sometimes loving it.  But having looked at the same set of books for over two months now, I can see that there are many I'm going to jettison once The TBR Dare ends on April 1.  Whatever impulse it was that moved me to purchase them has  fled; there's no point keeping them around.

Going to bookstores has become a little bit painful, as well.  Even the library annoys me.  Why bother buying or reserving a book if you can't read it until next month?  It's a strange thing book buying.  Book collecting, too.  At least collecting books you intend to someday read.  Collecting first editions, particular authors, quality cover art all make sense to me.  But I'll be thinking twice about what goes on my TBR shelf hereafter.

It's March and I still don't know for certain which school I'll be teaching at next year.  The School Board has yet to determine which school the children will go to let alone where the staff will be.  I'll end up in a classroom teaching middle school and one room is as good as another, but it would be nice to start planning for the transition.  I had hoped we could actually do some serious program development before school started, but it's not looking that way.  Everyone is ready to get started, but the School Board has to act first. Whatever they do, some people are going to be mad at them.  Doing nothing is just setting everyone off. Mark Twain once said that God created the idiot for practice, then he made the school board.

Smart man, Mark Twain.

Are you still doing The TBR Dare?  Just 18 days to go!

Dakota's Favorites: Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers

Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archives here at Ready When You Are, C.B.  That's a fancy way of saying they are a re-run.  But try using the search feature here at Blogger and you'll find that it only searches entries less than a year old.  If you've got an archive full of reviews older than one year that you'd like people to find, re-post them.


"She's back. She's after me."


Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers takes a lot of chances. Recreating the lives of not one but two well known and well respected American writers and dealing with subject matter that has not only been covered by others, but covered very well. It is to Mr. Powers great credit that he pulls it off, giving readers an entertaining and haunting experience by telling us a story we already think we know.

Capote in Kansas is the story of Truman Capote and Harper Lee, their difficult lifelong relationship, their time together in Kansas researching In Cold Blood and how the subject of their research continued to haunt them long after the book was published.

Towards the end of his life, Truman Capote, who spends most of the novel at his home in Palm Springs with only his maid,- Myrtle and a plumber he is infatuated with, has begun to fell the presence of Nancy Clutter's ghost. (Nancy Clutter was one of four family members whose vicious murder became the subject for Capote's non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.) Capote never wrote anything of substance again and ended up isolated from most of his friends and acquaintances. In Mr. Powers' novel, he seems to regret this situation which is probably what causes him to think Nancy Clutter's ghost is haunting him. Capote calls Harper Lee in the middle of the night, frantic with fear convinced that Nancy Clutter has come back from the dead to seek revenge on him for exploiting her life and her murder.

Harper Lee, Capote's childhood friend, currently lives with her sister in their family home in Mississippi. She also never published anything after the success of her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which come out shortly after In Cold Blood, and has only recently begun to appear at public functions. In Mr. Powers' novel she is also haunted, by the Clutters, by memories of her deceased brother whom she writes letters to, by the real man Boo Radley was based on, and by her now failed friendship with Truman.

Both people emerge as fully formed, believable characters in Mr. Powers' novel. I was initially skeptical about this, I usually avoid fictionalized stories like this one, but after a few chapters I was hooked. Truman Capote was nothing if not interesting, and Harper Lee continues to fascinate if only by her absence, so Capote in Kansas can easily give the reader a sense of gaining insider knowledge. Some of this is a bit prurient at first, but by the end of the novel, I felt that I had come to understand the situation and the characters. The attempt to reconcile a long lost friendship, to apologize for things said and left unsaid, gives the book a human touch that would have otherwise been lost in the somewhat sordid details of Truman Capote's end as interesting as those details are. Mr. Powers' book serves as an attempt to bring both Capote and Lee back into the fold, so to speak. I think he succeeds.

It certainly must be said that the story of In Cold Blood and its creation is simply a fascinating one. Two effete southerners from New York City head off to the Kansas prairie and try to meet and interview just about everyone in town. I still find it difficult to believe that they pulled it off. Through both character's flashbacks we see several scenes of their time in Kansas including the night Truman took several locals out to dinner and then dancing at what must have been the only drag bar in Kansas much to Harper's chagrin. The fact that it's so hard to believe only makes it more believable.

The Vagabond by Colette

Ten thirty....Once again I'm

 ready too soon.

Opening to The Vagabond

by Colette

Collete's The Vagabond tells a story of backstage life in the music halls of turn of the century Paris.  The narrator/heroine has left a failed marriage and career as a novelist to earn a living performing two shows a night as an actress in French pantomime.

The Vagabond works as a backstage novel and as a source of insight into the its author, Colette.  Because the narrator's biography shares so much with Colette's it's nearly impossible not to succumb to the temptation of committing the biographical fallacy.  Since their back stories match, it's easy to conclude that the novel must be the story of Colette.

With this in mind, I found The Vagabond ultimately disappointing.  Collete is known for dealing with issues of love and sexuality, especially female sexuality, with a frankness that Americans see as French.  It's a cliche in the U.S. to see the French, especially French artists like Colette, as more in-tune with an adult sensibility around sex than we are.  I found Colette's novel Cheri  to be a good example of this adult sexuality even though the title character is a teenager.  So I was surprised to find much of The Vagabond  adolescent:


Love, if you can; no doubt this will be granted you, so that at the summit of your poor happiness you may again remember that nothing counts, in love, except the first love, and endure at every moment the punishment of remembering, and the horror of comparing.

I was 22 when my first love came to an end. At that time I would have agreed with Colette whole-heartedly.  25 years later, it's tempting to roll my eyes a little in exasperation.  Colette was 37 when she wrote The Vagabond.  While the passage above is well written, I don't buy it.  The love that lasts is the love that counts.   Spend a decade or more with the one you love and you'll look back on that first love, remembering and comparing with no horror or punishment at all.  Except maybe a moment or two spent wondering, "What was I thinking?"

While I had more problems with The Vagabond than the one outlined here, there is enough that's good in the novel to make it a worthwhile read.  The peek at theatrical life, Colette's beautiful writing, the hints at autobiography all succeed in entertaining the reader.  Those lucky enough to read it while in the throes of first love or in recovery from it will find a kindred spirit in Colette's The Vagabond.

Colette lived until 1954, so I figured there must be film footage of her.  I could only find a little snippet from a 1951 documentary  featuring an interview with Colette over breakfast in bed.  Because the embed feature was disabled, you'll have to follow the link over to YouTube if you'd like to see it.

The Man Who Went up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

The room was small and shabby.

Opening to The Man

 Who Went up in Smoke

by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Translated from the Swedish

 by Joan Tate

Crime was much more tawdry 1969.  Today a crime novel is likely to begin with an incident of domestic violence or a drunken brawl and end with the exposure of an international drug ring that's used as a front to raise money for former Nazi officers now secretly carrying out experiments on the children of illegal immigrants.  

Since the detective novel became respectable literature, the crimes contained there-in have grown more despicable.  One senses that each generation of novelists feels that have to go to greater lengths to find readership and respectability.  Since detective novels follow a largely pre-determined format, one of the few variables available is the intensity and extent of the crime under investigation.  This is probably a much more significant issue for police procedurals than other detective novels.  There are all sorts of oddball characters one can turn into detectives in a pinch, but for a modern police procedural, the detective, by definition must be a police officer.  

This leads to the invention of crimes so creative that they strain credulity.  Joseph Mengele hiding out in the Brazilian rain forest raising an army of Hitler clones.  Honestly.  It's just gotten worse since Boys from Brazil.

This is a long way of working around to the main reason why The Man Who Went up in Smoke was such a refreshing novel, though it was first published in 1969.    Instead of a small crime leading to the exposure of an international ring of evildoers, it takes the opposite arc. Police Detective Martin Beck is called in to investigate the disappearence of a newspaper journalist who left for a trip to Hungary and never returned.  Evidence points towards his involvement in an international drug ring among other possiblities, but in the end Detective Beck discovers the journalist fell victim to baser passions.  These baser passions turn out to be nothing out of the ordinary.  In reality, most murders are tawdry affairs.  Fights that could have been avoided.  Simple revenge over petty greiviences. Domestic arguments that went much too far.  If money is involved at all, it's usually not very much.  An attempt to rob a convenience store gone horribly wrong.

In a way, that fact is much more shocking than an interantional ring of drug trading fascists.  Murder at its most fowl is also at its most ordinary.  

I'm working my way through all ten of the Martin Beck detective novels.  The Man Who Went up in Smoke is the second.  I'd say it holds up nicely against the first volume.  I worried about a sophomore slump, and there was a very slight one, but not any where near enough to put me off reading the remaining eight books.  Unfortunatley, I'll have to wait until April 1 to start the next one because it was not on my TBR shelf as of Jan. 1, and I am sticking to The TBR Dare.

TSS: Take One Old Book - Apply Surgical Tools

Yesterday, I took three teams of students to Santa Rosa High School for our first Odyssey of the Mind competition.  We had a great time presenting skits the students wrote and produced along with our first mousetrap car competition.  But it's left me far too exhausted to write up a decent Sunday Salon today.

Image from My Modern Net

So I'm offering a picture of some wonderful book art I found.

This was created by Brian Dettmer who works with old books and surgical tools. Nothing is ever added to his work. Instead, he removes parts of the page, working one page at a time to create his sculptural pieces.

You can find a gallery of his work at My Modern Met.  The gallery is well worth a visit.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Friday Picture Reading

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Dear Cousin Tassie,

   Thank you for the lovely 

postcards.

Opening to Ella Minnow Pea

 by Mark Dunn

I liked Ella Minnow Pea.  I say that now because by the end of this review you may come the conclusion that I didn't.  In spite of the flaws that will be outlined below, I found Mr. Dunn's novel to be an entertaining, charming, read.  If it's sitting on your TBR shelf, you should read it.  If you're willing to play along with the book's central conceit, you'll have an enjoyable evening's read.

Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel that tells the tale of an isolated island community off the southeastern coast of America.  The residents cling to their old ways, inspired by their  founder who came up with the shortest English sentence to use all 26 letters of the alphabet:  "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."  When the 'z' tile falls off of the building commemorating the founder, the ruling elders conclude that his spirit is telling them they should no longer use any words containing the fallen letter.  As more tiles fall and the penalty for using the banned letters grows, residents begin fleeing the island or forming clandestine groups to overthrow the community elders.  The letters between the main characters that make up the book adopt the alphabetical changes as they happen which eventually renders them close to incomprehensible.

I couldn't help but think of Natalie Babbit's classic children's novel The Search for Delicious.  In Ms. Babbit's book a peaceful kingdom is split over the question of how to define a word in the king's new dictionary.  The baker's believe delicious should be defined as freshly baked bread while the dairymen think it should be defined as a glass of fresh milk.  Eventually the argument becomes a cause for war as each side sees their own livelihood at stake.

In the end, both books solve their problem lexicographically.  The solution lies not in the realization that our thinking is incorrect or that we should change our behavior, but in finding the right words.  This message works in a children's fairy tale like The Search for Delicious, and if Ella Minnow Pea were marketed as a young adult novel, which I think it really is, I'd have no problem with this message.  It's an ideal level of satire for younger readers.  But as a book marketed to adults, I expected more.  Not all satire has to be as biting as Voltaire, but it should have some teeth.

If the underlying point of Ella Minnow Pea is a comment on censorship or on authoritarian governments, then solving the novels problem by solving a word game renders the book's critique frivolous. If the solution is so simple as to be silly, isn't the problem's importance reduced to inconsequential as well?

I intend to pass Ella Minnow Pea along to some of my 7th graders.  I think they'll enjoy it.  Maybe someday, someone will write a similar novel for an adult audience.   There's still a lot of us out here.