Archive | July 2006

Works For ME Wednesday: You Can’t Beat the Heat in Mexico

Jul26

The Headmistress at the Common Room offers some tips on keeping cool without air-conditioning.

She has some good ideas, but after my trip to Matamoros, Mexico a couple of weeks ago, I can safely say that most of her ideas just wouldn’t be enough for this wimp in that kind of heat. We were promised electricity and air-conditioning, but when we arrived, they said the electricity would be working mañana, and we all know what that word means in Mexico. So for the first few nights we didn’t sleep without air-conditioning. That’s right, we tried to sleep in box-like dorm rooms that trapped the heat and had little or no ventilation because the windows were blocked by—air conditioning units! There was a generator that produced enough electricity to run a few ceiling fans, but all the fans had to move around was hot air. The only thing that we found that would help was to sleep outside. First the guys moved their cots and beds outside; then the girls bought tents and moved outside, too. It still wasn’t cool, but we could sleep although the mosquitoes and gnats almost drove us crazy. (I’m still planning to post on what I learned in Mexico, other than the fact that I’m a spoiled American brat who has to have a cool house to sleep properly.)

I was reminded of a story my father-in-law told of growing up in West Texas. He said the whole family moved outside to sleep in the summertime under a big shade tree. Then, if it rained, they all scrambled to carry beds and mattresses back inside where it was hot, but dry. Luckily for them, it doesn’t rain much in West Texas.

I’m going to make this post my Works For Me Wednesday entry; at least you know one thing that works, and Headmistress can share a lot more useful tips.
More beat-the-heat ideas from Kathryn at Suitable for Mixed Company.

Go to Shannon at Rocks in my Dryer for more Works for ME Wednesday tips.

Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons

Jul25

Lots of people wouldn’t enjoy reading a book about a bipolar mother who neglects her children and almost worries her long-suffering husband into his grave. Call me warped, but I really like reading about people who live on the edges (and off the pages completely) of sanity and normality. I think it teaches me something about the boundaries of what we call sane and makes me trust that God is somehow out there beyond those boundaries, too.

So Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons is that sort of book. It’s also a Southern book, and I like that, too. The mother in her illness is described compassionately, but realistically, even though it is obvious that her illness infllicts emotional damage on every member of her family and that sometimes, often, the young narrator of the novel, Hattie, the daughter, is not sure what to think of her mother or how to deal with her manic depressive episodes.

The novel begins at the end so that the reader knows that the mother eventually gets treatment and is able to to get relief from her symptoms and relate to her daughter and to the rest of her family in a healthy way. Then, the narrator tells how her mother died at the age of sixty-two after many years of bipolar illness and only fifteen years of health. The rest of the novel moves back and forth in time as Hattie recalls her childhood memories of living with her mother’s mental illness. The memories are scattered through time, disorganized, just as Hattie’s mother’s mind is scattered and disorganized under the influence of alternating bouts of mania and depression. This sort of presentation makes more work for the reader than a strictly chronological account would entail; however, it also gives a feeling of
verisimilitude to the story of the memories of a child growing up in a chaotic household.

There is a character who brings some stability to Hattie’s childhood years, Pearl, the black housekeeper, cook, and caretaker for Hattie and her older brother and their mother. The father in the story is much too busy trying to work and take care of his wife; he has very little time or energy for his two children. Amazingly enough, however, this dysfunctional family is also shown to be a loving and strengthening place of nurture for Hattie and her brother who manage to grow up to love themselves, each other and their parents.

The ending of the novel was a bit disconcerting. Ms. Gibbons tells us all about what it is like to live with a mentally ill parent, but very little about what it is like to reconnect with that parent once she is able to function and care for her children somewhat normally. Maybe “normal” doesn’t make much of a story; life in the Land of Mental Illness does include lots of adventure, although it’s the kind of adventure that you’d want to read about rather than live. I would have liked to read more about how the teen-aged Hattie and her mother managed to establish a new relationship based on health rather than sickness.

I give the book a B+, and if you like the subject, you’ll probably enjoy the story of Hattie and her family in Sights Unseen. Oh, by the way, this book has a child/teen narrator, but it’s not a children’s or YA title; some of the subject matter, although not lurid or gratuitous, is for adults.

Book-Spotting #15

Jul25

This memoir about using poetry to cope with grief and suffering sounds interesting.

However, this book, Three Bags Full, just sounds odd, almost odd enough for me to try to scare up a copy and read it. From a review in The Guardian:

The crime-fighting sheep in Three Bags Full derive their particular genius from George the shepherd having read to them every evening – mostly romantic fiction featuring red-haired women called Pamela, a genre which the sheep naturally refer to as “Pamelas”, a phrase clearly worth stealing for one’s own.

Yes, you read that correctly, it’s a German sheep detective novel, translated into English, in which a flock of sheep solve a murder mystery. I guess they’ve exhausted all the possible human detectives. What next? The Frog Detective?

In the news in India, Shakespeare goes to Bollywood? I’m not finding it too difficult to imagine Ophelia or Desdemona in a sari, but near the bottom of the article it says that one Indian director is planning a Bollywood adaptation of Little Women. I am finding that hard to envision.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born July 24th

Jul24

Alexandre Dumas, pere, b.1802. I’m planning to read The Three Musketeers to my urchins this next school year. It’s such a great story.

I’ll let you know how the urchins like it. I expect to have a lot more swordplay going on around here as soon as I do read it–as if Karate Kid didn’t practice his sword and light saber techniques often enough as it is.

Robert Graves, b.1895. I, Claudius is a good novel, but I read that Graves thought of himself more as a poet than a novelist. We read some of his poetry in British literature class last year, but I don’t think my un-war-experienced high schoolers (nor I) appreciated his images and poems of the horrors of WW I too well. I do rather like this image:

Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
“Symptoms of Love,” lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961)

Athos would agree with the idea of love as a migraine. Maybe Aramis would, too.

Amelia Earhart, b.1897. Have you ever seen the picture book Amelia and Eleanor Go For a Ride by Pam Munoz Ryan about how Amelia Earhart gave First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt a ride in her airplane?

Chapbook Answers

Jul23

Blog-friend Melissa Mental Multivitamin asks some question today in this chapbook entry that I can’t answer in her comments because she doesn’t have them. So I’ll answer here:

1.

Many people have had this experience, I think, especially where music is concerned. We become steeped in the notion that if we can’t excel, there’s little point in pursuit.

Quoting from Bachelors Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast by Bill Richardson, MM-V asks “What do you think? Is there little point in pursuing an interest if there’s no chance you will excel?”

I answer with these words from Edith Schaeffer’s wonderful book, The Hidden Art of Homemaking:

Man, because he is limited, has a very limited choice. He is limited by time, as well as talent. He is limited by the resources at his disposal as well as in the skill to use what he has. We do not all have the talent to produce all the ideas that come into our minds. . . A man might think of some great painting in his mind, but not be able to execute it on canvas at all, because he does not have the talent to paint.

We are limited by time and by areas of talent and ability. So our creativity is not on God’s level at all. His creativity is unlimited and infinite. Nevertheless, we have been created in His image, so we can be, and are made to be, creative.

One more:

You are not a great musician, but you do play an instrument –or you did. . . All the music you make is in your daydreams of some remote future success, when you burst upon audiences as an established talent, or surprise your friends by letting them know you have been “discovered.” Your musical talent and your creative possibilities are in a cast, and the rest of your body and personality are suffering from the lack of freedom. . . Even if musical talent is “just” used within a family, someone is appreciating what is being produced, or is sharing in the enjoyment of producing something together.

Read the book if you’re still of the opinion that art is only for the notably gifted and the highly talented. Read the book anyway to be inspired to pursue your own art.

2. MM-V: “What poems have you ‘learned by heart’?”

I’m nobody. Who are you? by Emily Dickinson
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
The Raggedy man by James Whitcomb Riley
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow from Macbeth by Shakespeare
600 lines from Shakespeare, some of which I still remember.
Always Sprinkle Pepper in Your Hair by Shel Silverstein

A rather eclectic collection, don’t you think?

3. MM-V again: “What Thurber have you read? And which books bridged your childhood and adulthood reading?”
In answer to the first question,Many Moons, the story of a princess who wants the moon and a few cartoons. I think I read Walter Mitty a long time ago, but I may have only seen Danny Kaye enacting it. In answer to the second question, I have no gap between my childhood and adult reading. As a child, my parents allowed me to read anything I wanted to read, and now I do the same. I float between picture books and young adult fiction and so-called adult books, and I sometimes find more maturity and depth in the children’s books than in the books written ostensibly for adults. I suppose I do remember the first book I read in which two of the characters engaged in premarital sex. It was Exodus by Leon Uris, and I was shocked. I still disapprove and think those particular characters made a poor decision, although I like the book very much. Call me a prude.

4. Final question: “Do you subscribe to Reader’s Digest?”

From the quotation above the question, I gather that it’s unfashionable and unsophisticaated to read Reader’s Digest. If so, I plead guilty although we no longer subscribe. I ran out of money about three or four years for magazine subscriptions, and I haven’t found any extra lying around. I do have an entire long shelf of old Reader’s Digests that I have considered mining for blog posts because I think the magazine could be a blog nowadays. If I start posting entries with titles such as “I am Joe’s Colon” and “Ten Things I Learned While Delivering Pizzas”, you’ll know what I’ve been plagiarizing. No, on second, thought, I’d give credit where credit was due. I’m not ashamed of my shelf of digests.

Spooner’s Day

Jul22

Spooner’s Day, is named for Rev. William Archibald Spooner, b. 1844, Dean and later Warden of New College in Oxford. This article from Reader’s Digest describes Spooner :

Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly, hospitable man. He seems also to have been something of an absent-minded professor. He once invited a faculty member to tea “to welcome our new archaeology Fellow.”
“But, sir,” the man replied, “I am our new archaeology Fellow.”
“Never mind,” Spooner said, “Come all the same.”

He was most famous, however, for getting his tang tungled. Spoonerisms are words or phrases in which sounds or syllables get swapped. Some of Spooner’s spoonerisms:
fighting a liar–lighting a fire
you hissed my mystery lecture–you missed my history lecture
cattle ships and bruisers–battle ships and cruisers
nosey little cook–cosy little nook
a blushing crow–a crushing blow
tons of soil–sons of toil
our queer old Dean–our dear old Queen
we’ll have the hags flung out–we’ll have the flags hung out

GWB’s most famous spoonerism:
“If the terriers and bariffs (barriers and tariffs) are torn down, this economy will grow.” (January 7, 2001 in Rochester, New York)

Also born on this date:
Emma Lazarus, b. 1849.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Margery Williams Bianco, b. 1881. Author of the classic children’s story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Read it here.

Stephen Vincent Benet, b. 1898 Winner of two Pulitzer prizes for poetry, one for the Civil War poem John Brown’s Body, he also wrote the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. You can read this humorous story here. I read the story to a few of my urchins today, but they said they didn’t believe it!
Young Adventure, A Book of Poems by Stephen Vincent Benet.

Kay Bailey Hutchison, b. 1943. One of my two senators. I was looking at her website, and I found a list of books for children and adults about Texas and its history. Not a bad list, but they need to add the recent book I read about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.

Edited and reposted from July, 2005

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born July 21st

Jul21

Matthew Prior, poet and satirist, b. 1664. Borrowing ideas and outright plagiarism is nothing new. Dr. Samuel Johnson on Prior: “He never made any effort of invention: his greater pieces are only tissues of common thoughts; and his smaller, which consist of light images or single conceits, are not always his own. I have traced him among the French epigrammatists, and have been informed that he poached for prey among obscure authors.” From Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson.

Elizabeth Hamilton, b. 1758. Scots author of several books including Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, a treatise on the desirability of advanced education for women who are entrusted with the early education of the next generation. Published in 1818, you can read it here.

Ernest Hemingway, b. 1899. I asked this question last year, and I ask again: Hemingway fans, why? What is it about Mr. Hemingway’s spare prose that inspires, resonates, causes you to say, “Wow, that’s a good book!”? Which of Hemingway’s novels do you like the most? Why? I’ve read four of Hemingway’s novels, a long time ago, and I must say that I mostly remember a lot of very drunk characters and something rather poignant about The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway website
If you’re really a glutton, you can go here for my further thoughts on Hemingway.

Robin Williams, b. 1952. Great comedian. The movie Dead Poets Society makes my list of 105 Best Movies Ever.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born July 20th

Jul20

Petrarch, Italian essayist and poet, b. 1304.

Dame Cecily Veronica Wedgewood (b.1910, d. 1997) She was a famous historian of the Renaissance era. Quotation: “History is an art–like all the other sciences.”

Sir Clements Robert Markham(b. 1813, d. 1916) He was an English geographer and historian. Most interesting facts: “It was almost entirely due to his exertions that funds were obtained for the National Antarctic Expedition under Captain Robert Scott, which left England in the summer of 1901,” and he wrote several books including “a Life of Richard III. (1906), in which he maintained that the king was not guilty of the murder of the two princes in the Tower.” We’re all defenders of Richard III around here ever since we read Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.

Sir Richard Owen (b. 1804, d. 1894) Richard Owen was a famous taxonomist, biologist, and scientist in Victorian England. He actually taught anatomy to Queen Victoria’s children. Interesting story:
Owen also described the anatomy of a newly discovered species of ape, which had only been discovered in 1847 — the gorilla. However, Owen’s anti-materialist and anti-Darwinian views led him to state that gorillas and other apes lack certain parts of the brain that humans have, specifically a structure known as the hippocampus minor. The uniqueness of human brains, Owen thought, showed that humans could not possibly have evolved from apes. Owen persisted in this view even when Thomas Henry Huxley conclusively showed that Owen was mistaken — apes do have a hippocampus. This tarnished Owen’s scientific standing towards the end of his life. Victorian author Charles Kingsley satirized the dispute in his childrens’ classic, The Water-Babies:

You may think that there are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- greater- greatest- grandmother from having been an ape too.

The biography I read on the web seemed to conclude that Owen was a fairly good scientist, but nothing could absolve him of the sin of having disagreed with St. Darwin, and therefore Owen was “vain, arrogant, envious, and vindictive.”

Sir George Trevelyan (b. 1905, d. 1996) Wow! You’d have to see this one to believe it. I’d never heard of Sir George, but he apparently has some major influence in the”New Age Movement” in England. This short quotation should give you an idea of what he taught:

“Who and What is the Christos? Clearly an exalted Being of Light must overlight all mankind. He must illumine every race, creed and nation. There can be nothing sectarian about Him. Truth and Love must play down on to every man, whether atheist or believer. The great world religions need not merge and indeed should not merge, for each of them carries a tremendous facet of the Truth. But over all a real and all-embracing world religion could begin to appear in recognition of the Lord of Light, overlighting all mankind

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read more of Sir George’s ramblings, but if you’re trying to talk to someone who has fried his brain on this stuff, the link is above on his name.

Martin Provenson, b. 1916, d.. 1987. Author and illustrator, with his wife Alice, of several delightful children’s picture books, including Caldecott Award winner, The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot, also A Peaceable Kingdom: The Shaker Abecedarius and The Year at Maple Hill Farm.

Edited from material posted July 2004 and July 2005.