To this Great Stage of Fools: Born November 29th

Nov29

Three authors were born on this date. All three are listed on my Unfinished List of the 100 Best Fiction Books of All Time. All three wrote for children as well as adults. Can you identify the author for each of the following quotations?

1. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

2. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

3. “The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike…Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.”

4. “. . . it comes to me that if I am not free to accept guilt when I do wrong, then I am not free at all. If all my mistakes are excused, if there’s an alibi, a rationalization for every blunder, then I am not free at all. I have become subhuman.”

5. “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

6. “God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”

7. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

8. “Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!”

9. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere–‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

10. “Poor dull Concord. Nothing colorful has come through here since the Redcoats.”

Happy Birthday to Jack, Jo, and Maddy, three of my favorite authors and thinkers.

A Texas Tree Talks by Douglas Rose

Nov29

There’s an ancient old Texas pecan tree

If it could talk, it would boast many tales to tell;

Now it stands quiet–a new sprawling mall built

Within yards of its Texas trunk–

Passers-by still stop to rest in its ancient shade–

But no one will ever know what the pecan tree knows–

Because it will never, never ever tell!

I found this poem at the Texas State Historical Society website.

LAST CHANCE: If you’ve written anything related to pecans —a recipe, a joke, a story, even more trivia— please leave a link. Everyone who leaves a link will be entered in my contest to win a bag of pecans from our annual Pecan Odyssey, shelled by the Semicolon family, mostly me. I’ll be drawing a name tomorrow. In the meantime, check out some of the pecan-related stories and recipes other bloggers have left to tantalize and make you appreciate the lowly pecan.

Antoine, The Nearly-Anonymous Pecan Gardener

Nov28

You may be used to varieties of pecans that are large with a lot of meat inside and at the same time easy to crack because of their thin shells. When I a little girl, we had a “native” pecan tree in our yard, and I can testify that the pecans were small and hard to crack with tiny bits of nutmeat inside.

We have the many varieties of pecans that we have today partly because of a man from Louisiana named Antione, that’s all, just Antoine. He was a slave gardener, and he grafted the first official variety of improved pecan, Centennial, at Oak Alley Plantation on the west bank of the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans in 1846. It won the Best Pecan Exhibited award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.

Antoine is listed in an 1848 inventory of his owner, J.T. Roman’s, slaves as a “Creole slave, age 38.” That and the fact that he was a pioneer and expert gardener, skilled in the grafting of pecan trees, make up about the sum total of what we know about Antoine. But he did do something that I will appreciate tomorrow when I’m shelling my pecans, my paper-shell pecans.

My Mama Always Said

Nov27

. . . if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else will.

IMHO, my curriculum book, PictureBook Preschool would be a wonderful Christmas gift for any friend or relative with a preschool child. The weekly book lists are grouped by theme, and January would be a perfect time to start reading aloud daily to your preschooler if you’re not doing so already.

Click here for more information . .

More Pecan Trivia

Nov27

The Nueces River was named by the Spanish explorer La Salle in honor of the pecan trees growing along its banks.

The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas.

Georgia usually produces the most cultivated pecans for sale of any state in the U.S. Texas comes in second.

You may thresh the pecans from the tree or thrash them. Both words mean essentially the same thing.

In Cajun country, if you’re a “gone pecan” you are doomed, lost, unrecoverable. Let’s hope New Orleans isn’t a gone pecan. (Has anyone actually heard this idiom used in conversation or seen it in print? I just found it on the internet.)

The World’s Largest Pecan Tree and the story of a visit to it.

San Saba, Texas calls itself the Pecan Capital of the World.

If you’ve written anything related to pecans —a recipe, a joke, a story, even more trivia— please leave a link. Everyone who leaves a link will be entered iin my contest to win a bag of pecans from our annual Pecan Odyssey, shelled by the Semicolon family, mostly me.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Nov27

Twins. Ghosts. Insanity. Murder. Large English country houses. Odd dreams. Libraries full of books. Numerous references to Jane Eyre

This book has all the ingredients and they’re stirred together well. I recommended it to Eldest Daughter as soon as I finshed it on Thanksgiving, and she stayed up until after 1:00 AM reading it. ‘Nuff said.

However, I’m going to write some more because I can’t resist. I read a book a long time ago about a pair of British twins who were mentally disturbed; I think it was a nonfiction case study, but it may have been fiction. I still remember how very odd the twins were and how one twin controlled the other using nonverbal cues and a secret twin language. The book also told about how the twins were separated and sent to different institutions in hope of improving their mental conditions. I’m really wondering if Ms. Setterfield read that same book or another similar one. I wish I could remember the title.

All that to say, this book is about mentally disturbed twins. It’s also about Story, the stories we live out and the narratives we create to make sense of our lives. The book is about lies and truth, too, and the boundaries that separate the two.

“I will tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky glances at the last page.”

The narrator doesn’t exactly cheat on this commitment, but Ms. Setterfield, the author behind the narrator, does. The story doesn’t go directly from beginning to end; it comes to a seeming end and then backtracks to tell the same story from a different perspective which changes everything.

“In a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same —yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other.”

I said that The Thirteenth Tale contains numerous references to Jane Eyre, and others have compared the book itself to Charlotte Bronte’s works. However, I think it’s much too wild and borderline insane to fit into the essentially staid and conservative Victorian world of the Brontes. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman spends most of her time locked in the attic, only escaping to bring the story to its denouement. In The Thirteenth Tale the insane run free, and the sane are required to hide in attics and closets. Futhermore, in The Thirteenth Tale and in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, the Victorian author I would compare Setterfield to, as madness runs amuck, spreading chaos and mayhem throughout the countryside, it becomes difficult to judge who is sane and who is mad and and who is telling the truth and who is lying and who is simply evil.

For sheer gothic fun and mystery, pick up The Thirteenth Tale. Oh, I almost forgot, if you love words, you’ll enjoy the language and style of this book, too. Note the quotations above, especially the second one. I had to look up “vertiginous”. It means “causing or having to do with vertigo.” What a great word!

Mixing Metaphors: Mudslinging Authors and Literary Daggers

Nov26

Ariel at BittersweetLife is collecting quotations of great authors writing about one another. He seems to think these knd of quotations would be edifying and enlightening. However, I’m not sure what it says about my own personality that I immediately thought of the first quotation in the list below, Mark Twain on Jane Austen. I think the lesson here is that great authors are often NOT authorities on the work of other authors.

Mark Twain: “Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.”

William Faulkner on Mark Twain: “A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a man to a dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway, in reply: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think emotions come from big words?”

Thomas Macaulay: “From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.”

Anthony Trollope: “Of Dicken’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of rules … No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.”

Oscar Wilde on Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

Oscar Wilde again: “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”

Oscar WIlde, once again: “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

Edward Gibbon on St. Augustine: “His learning is too often borrowed, his arguments too often his own.”

Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold: “Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.”

Samuel Johnson on Lord Chesterfield: “This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!”

Samuel Johnson on Thomas Gray: “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made people think him great.”

D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman: “This awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.”

G.K.Chesterton: “Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written poetry.”

T.S. Eliot on My Fair Lady: “I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.”

Ezra Pound: “Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.”

W.H. Auden on Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “There was little about melancholy that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”

W.H. Auden on Edgar Allan Poe: “An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”

Saki on Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing; That’s typing.”

Let me note that I agree with only a handful of these insulting remarks, and I will not tell you which ones those are. So, “[d]o you have a favorite quote, from a respected author/thinker, in which he/she comments on another author?” Inquiring minds want to know.

Shug by Jenny Han and Rules by Cynthia Lord

Nov25



These two books have a lot in common:
1. Both are fiction, written for middle school age children, specifically twelve year old girls.
2. Both books feature a twelve year old girl as the protagonist.
3. Both are first novels for their respective authors.
4. Both stories are told in first person, present tense, which I found a bit odd. Especially in Shug, there were switches from present tense to past tense which were awkwardly handled. Is telling the story in present tense a new trend in YA fiction? I suppose it gives a sense of immediacy to the story, as if the reader is experiencing the action of the story along withe narrator instead of hearing about what happened in the past from an older and wiser teenager.
4. The themes are similar: first love, a family with secrets that are embarrassing, popularity and the struggle to fit in and be liked.
5. The plots are even similar: Girl meets boy, Girl makes friends with boy by helping him, Girl also befriends cool new girl in town, family problems embarrass Girl, Girl hurts boy’s feelings, they make up. A dance is the setting for the climactic action of both novels.
6. Both books have been nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction, which is why I ordered them from the Harris County Library and read them.

So why did I like Rules so much and find Shug to be depressing and discouraging? I read Shug first and all I could think about throughout the entire 248 pages was how sad and difficult and hopeless Shug’s life was. I analyzed this feeling of gloom and realized that it wasn’t, as I would expect, because of Shug’s alcoholic mother that her life was so grim; it was because of the grim, cutthroat realities of middle school life. The Pecking Popularity Order is alive and well in Shug’s town and in her school especially. All the children in the book, who should still be playing games and squabbling over ice cream and dress up clothes, are instead worried about popularity, their first date, their first kiss, and who’s the prettiest. The children are cruel to each other, and although I’m under no illusions about how mean twelve year olds can be, I found the verbal cruelty in Shug to be particularly sad and if it’s true to life in the twenty-first century middle school, I’ve found another reason to homeschool.

If I wanted to be particularly harsh with myself, I could question my judgment and say that I liked Rules better than Shug because I find autistic children more sympathetic than alcoholic adults. However, there’s more to my preference for one book over the other than a preference for one problem over another. The children in Rules were sometimes unkind to one another; they made mistakes and needed forgiveness. But there was so much more grace in Rules; Catherine, the heroine of Rules, apologizes to the person she hurts because she is sorry, not because, like Shug, she’s calculating how unpopular she will be if she doesn’t apologize. Catherine loves her autistic brother, David, and shows it, even if she does become exasperated with the difficulties and embarrassments he brings into her life. Shug, on the other hand, has pretty much given up on her parents, not without reason. Shug’s reality should be more hopeful than Catherine’s; alcoholics do recover and become sober while autistic children don’t usually become un-autistic. Nevertheless, Shug’s only hope is to avoid her parents long enough to grow up and move out, but Catherine comes to a kind of peace about her brother and learns not to make his problems hers while still loving and communicating with him on his own terms.

If you want to read or recommend a middle school problem novel, I’d suggest Cynthia Lord’s Rules. Of course, it didn’t hurt a bit that one of the symptoms of David’s autism is that he uses the words of Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad) to express his thoughts and feelings. Frog and Toad are much more fun than middle school back-stabbing.
And I like Catherine’s self-made rules: Pantless brothers are not my problem.

“I am laughing at you, Toad,” said Frog, “because you do look funny in your bathing suit.”

“Of course I do,” said Toad. Then he picked up his clothes and went home.

Another take on Shug from Jen Robinson at JKR Books.

Thanksgiving Center of the Blogosphere

Nov24

Random thoughts of gratitude from the Queen of the Beehive. “I’m thankful for . . . the miracle of water that can boil, freeze, fill human cells, ripple, trickle and crash, steam, make creation bloom, obey God’s voice, make things clean, form vapor, steam and snowflakes, make earth inhabitable, and wave for the moon.”

Barbara Curtis (Mommy Life) is giving thanks for all she never had. “I’m grateful for the stability I never had. Divorce, foster homes, frequent moves and family separations were hard on me as a little girl, but blessed me with resiliency and endurance. They also make me appreciate the family Tripp and I have built and the roots we’ve put down now.”

Ariel at Bittersweet Life says that gratitude requires an Object, a Person to whom we give thanks. “Gratitude requires a personal object—and if thankfulness is to be deep and enduring, it must be pinned to Someone better than a changeful, error-prone human friend, good intentions aside.”

Taking Thanksgiving for Granted

Nov22

For the past several months during our morning family devotional time, we’ve been going around the circle and each naming one thing that we’re thankful for that morning. The answers tend to be predictable and not terribly thoughtful or creative; we’re not all awake in the morning, and believe it or not, my children can be flippant at times. So they say: “sleep” or “my family” or “my house” or “my bed” or “Z-baby.” (I told you we were still sleepy.)

One of the urchins has lodged a protest; he thinks that the morning exercise in gratitude is forced and not really conducive to true thankfulness. He further says that we should save the naming of things that we appreciate for once a year, Thanksgiving Day. Somehow, naming the things we are thankful for daily devalues the sense of gratitude, according to Mr. Thankful-But-Not-Wanting-To-Say-So-Daily.

I disagree. Even if the things we name are trivial, and even if the gratitude we feel each morning is not always profound, just thinking about thankfulness each morning is an exercise that can, with time and persistence, produce a heart of gratitude. Like many, many other things in parenting and discipling my children, I can only compel the outward display of Christian virtue. The Holy Spirit must supply the inward change. So, I can require the children, or myself, to memorize Bible verses; I cannot change their hearts, or even my own, to make us want to obey the precepts in those verses. Does this mean the memorization is useless? No, it means that it is only a beginning, a turning toward that which is right and good; God can use the words of Scripture to change my attitudes and my behaviour.

Other examples:
I can require them to do math; I can’t make them love math or see its beauty as a reflection of the order that God has built into the universe.

I can compel outward obedience; I can’t compel an attitude of unselfish service.

I can make myself exercise; I can’t make myself enjoy the process.

I can make myself read the Bible; I can’t force myself to receive any benefit or blessing from doing so.

Disciplines, of gratitude or physical exercise or obedience or math, may lead to dull, spiritless habit, a glazing over of the spirit as the eyes lose their spark when we are bored or the same disciplines may lead to joy —joy in math or joy in physical activity or joy in thankfulness. Much depends on our attitudes and expectations about discipline itself, and much more depends upon the work of the Holy Spirit within the believer.

For all the blessings we have received and for all that we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.
In the meantime, we’ll keep on practicing.