Wordless Wednesday (with words)

February Twilight - Sara Teasdale

I stood beside a hill
Smooth with new-laid snow,
A single star looked out
From the cold evening glow.

There was no other creature
That saw what I could see
I stood and watched the evening star
As long as it watched me.

Your work space

Teabird provided a treat when she posted a photo and description of A.S. Byatt's workshop. So let me ask you, gentle reader: what is (or would be) your ideal workspace?

Moon Rani's turn at a meme

Below are my answers to the meme that Teabird answered earlier.

What kind of care do you take of your books? Let's review, shall we?
Are you careful with the spines? Or do you crack your books open to make them lay flat?
Do you use bookmarks? Or do you dog-ear the corners? If you do use bookmarks, do you use those fashionable metal ones? Or paper?
I am very careful with books. I don't crack spines - - "Cracking spines" upsets me, even in inanimate objects. I use plastic bookmarks, though sometimes I use the envelope from a friend's letter. I dislike bulky bookmarks that bulge the pages.
Do you write in your books? Ever? If you do, do you make small marks, or write in as much blank space as you can find? Pen or pencil? Highlighter? Your name on the front page?
I never write in books, although I highlight Bible passages with colored pencils.
Do you toss your books on the floor? Into bookbags? Or do you treat them tenderly, with respect? I care for my books as if they were actual friends.
Do you ever lay your book face-down, to save your place? Oh, no.
Um--water? Do you bathe with your books? Hold them with wet hands? Read out in the rain? Anything of that sort? Never. I once lent a book to a man I had just begun to date. He returned it to me in a wretched state; it seems he read it while in the bathtub, and dropped it in the water. He never apologized, and never offered to replace it. My intuition told me to drop him immediately, based on his treatment of my book. I didn't. I rued that decision mightily.
Are your books lined up on a bookshelf? Or crammed in any which way? Stacked on the floor? Current circumstances leave me without a bookcase. My books are in little stacks here and there until I can secure a bookcase. Then I'll line them in tidy rows.
Do you make a distinction--as regards book care--between hardcovers and paperbacks? No.
And, to recap? Naturally, you love all of your books, but how, exactly? Are your books loved in the battered way of a well-loved teddy bear, or like a cherished photo album or item of clothing that's used, appreciated, but carefully cared for? I love my books in the latter way, like a cherished friend who deserves the best of care. That's how I think of books and always have done.
Any additional comments? I attribute much of my book habits to early childhood training. I was raised by a mother who came from a hardscrabble home, and who emphasized the values of things. I was taught to take care of my belongings, and to make them last as long as possible.

One out of every twenty-five

My interest in true-crime books piqued an interest in knowing what makes murderers tick. How can someone take another's life? How can someone take more than one life? Truly, I think I would lose my mind if I committed a murder for personal gain. Even killing someone in self-defense would shatter me. Being able to commit the heinous act of killing is what I call an unknowable because there is just no way I can know how a person thinks before, during and after murder. Some of my earliest childhood teachings were to put myself in someone else's place. Over time, I began to try to think like someone else in a particular circumstance in order to figure out what makes him the way he is. It isn't quite the same as the novel, The Other, but I understood trying on someone else's mind for size. But I've never been able to try on the mind of a murderer - - I am exceedingly grateful for that.
Some years ago, FBI profilers interviewed hundreds of incarcerated killers, the infamous as well as the obscure. They took notes on simple facts such as birth-order, environment, height, weight, parental involvement and dozens of other things. Then they sorted the facts, looking for commonalities, and began the method of criminal profiling. Sociopathy (or psychopathy, as I prefer, also known as the antisocial personality) was a common disorder among those interviewed, especially among the serial killers and mass murderers. In other words, people who killed others were frequently found to be devoid of conscience.
Martha Stout, PhD., submits the figure of population distribution of sociopathy at four percent, or, one person out of twenty-five. Dr. Stout is the author of my most recent read, The Sociopath Next Door. Lest you think, dear reader, that this means that one out of every twenty-five people may just snap and kill you, please know that sociopathy takes a variety of manifestations (personality theorist Theodore Millon divides sociopathy into ten subtypes). Some sociopaths are content to commit petty unkindnesses while others prefer to sack and loot corporations, and still others kill people or rob banks. Perhaps you had a cruel schoolteacher or coach. You might just have known one of the sociopaths next door.
In The Sociopath Next Door, Dr. Stout describes, through composite examples, several sociopathic personalities in action, none of whom is the serial killer type. She situates the sociopath in our neighborhoods, and tells us what kind of behavior he exhibits in day to day living. As chilling as that sounds, it also serves to inform, to put us on our guard.
Dr. Stout states that she wrote this book as her answer to the question, Why have a conscience? She wrote that she also wanted "to warn good people about 'the sociopath next door,' and to help them cope." As I read, I became more and more sure that I know two sociopaths; I am very grateful that there is much distance between them and me! Far from advising the other ninety-six percent of us to avoid judgment and labels with sociopaths, Dr. Stout tells us how to protect ourselves from them. What a relief that position is from the trend to look for "root causes" of harmful behavior, and to keep trying to reach the good that is presumed to be in the hearts of those who would hurt us. Sometimes, there is no such good. Sometimes the best thing we can do is to keep up our defenses.
In fact, the latter part of the books lists "Thirteen Rules for Dealing With Sociopaths in Everyday Life." Some of those rules simply waste paper and print (such as the last rule, "Living well is the best revenge"), but others are useful in identifying sociopaths and dealing with them when we must.
Dr. Stout muses at length about what constitutes conscience, what causes it to develop and what prevents it from developing. She weaves her enthusiasm for Buddhist views into this book as well, though I would prefer less philosophising and more hard fact.
Although I still can't put myself into the mind of a sociopath, this book provided an enlightening view of what makes such people the way they are.

Booking through Thursday

This week's question:

A couple weeks ago, we asked about how you take care of your books, with one of the questions asking whether you write in your books. Well, what about books that are meant to be written in? Like, say, a journal or diary? Do you keep one? Obviously, if you're answering this, you have a blog--do you just let your blog be your journal? Or do you also keep one for private stuff also?

Yes, yes, yes. I keep one for myself. I've kept a journal for 37 years, give or take a few periods of silence. (As always, silence roars.) The notebooks are in my closet, in two large pieces of luggage. Although I've never reread them, there are some entries I can see as clearly as if they were in front of me. I know where I wrote, what I wrote, which pen and which ink I used. Taken together, they probably would be a Cubist sort of memoir - some overlap, some clashes of color, some movement (but very little organization, alas).

Will I ever reread them? Probably. Will I ever share them? That's a hard one. I'd like to say yes, sure, but I'm not sure.

I have purposely avoided using fancy notebooks as journals, although I'll use them for story ideas, commonplace-type books, repositories for haikus, even lists. For journal writing (does anyone really like the verb form, journaling??), I want to be comfortable, even sloppy, without the psychological impediment of a formal environment. The same does not hold true with my pens, however - if the paper is fountain-pen friendly, I'll use one from my collection (especially if it was a gift).

melanie

TBR bonus post - A.S. Byatt's Workspace

I love to see how/where writers write, don't you?

Here's a link to A.S. Byatt's writing room -- a Victorian attic, glass paperweights, room to write by hand -

and magpies outside her window...

TBR Challenge - The Biographer's Tale

The Biographer's Tale - A.S. Byatt

Welcome to the Bizarro World edition of Possession. Where once the literary sleuths sought the mystery of a Victorian poet, now the sleuth seeks to escape the Laputa-like world of modern literary criticism. He wants things - facts - tangibles.

Steered by his orotund advisor (who doodles random, obscene runes during lectures) and stirred by a three-volume biography of Elmer Bowles (a Victorian polymath whose own writings may or may not have been, shall we say, reliable), Phineas Nanson decides to write a biography of the biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. Destry-Scholes becomes Phineas's guru, inspiring him to write as he wrote by retracing his subject as Destry-Scholes had followed his multifaceted and peripatetic subject all over the world, learning the same languages, and, possibly, dying in the pursuit of Biography.

Byatt is devilish. In Posession, literary factions flung themselves into the chase for Cristabel's secrets. In this book, nobody flings himself at anything - except, perhaps, a zealous Swedish bee taxonomist, whose assistance in translating some of Destry-Scholes's notes on Linneus prefigure her zest for - well, for Phineas.

Notes rescued from the bottom of a file drawer seem to show that Destry-Scholes was in the process of a work - or works - on three men who seem to have little in common: Linnaeus, the taxonomist whose travel-writings betrayed a singular desire to catalog the sexual organs of everything he sees, whether human or plant; Galton, the inventor of fingerprinting and a zealot for eugenics; and the great playwright.

As Phineas tries to follow the biographer's notes, his confusion begins to resemble one of Galton's passions: creating composite portraits of people by selecting features of each and blending them, creating, in Phineas's eyes, "something that had been taken away by being added." The same process begins to afflict Phineas, who loses focus as accumulated facts begin to blend into an unsatisfactory whole.

Vera, a niece of Destry-Scholes, allows him access to shoe-boxes filled with note cards and a collection of her uncle's marbles, which she tries to match up to lists of unrelated words in one of her uncle's notebooks: maidenhair, bum, lamplight, tendril, gloop, gentian, spitfire, goosefeather... His employment at Puck's Girdle, a fey, blue-green travel agency, introduces him to a sinister gentleman who offers snuff Phileas as a sly requestfor a rather perverse tour -- but is this desire any less perverse than the celebrated taxonomists's prurient focus?

Phineas describes himself as "a very small man.. but perfectly formed." This book is a perfectly delightful stew of things, facts, and intangibles that might not satisfy the cravings of the would-be biographer, but satisfied me completely.

melanie

I don't drink.... wine...

I've been reading Brideshead Revisited for Knit the Classics. How I love Anthony Blanche. ..

Ah, Anthony. Anthony is my favorite character (outside of Aloysius, but let's no go there) in the book, and in the mini-series. Maybe I just have a Thing for flamboyant magi, but one must find truth where it is. Is anyone else as fascinated by this character's perfect observations as I am?

I just reread the section where Anthony and Charles are having dinner, and Anthony is telling Charles about Sebastian's "gruesome" family. In retrospect, wasn't he perfectly correct? Did he not have (especially) Lady Marchmain down in every respect? Were not (are not) the aristocracy far more decadent than the most florid commoner?

I'm also a sucker for anything that mentions the Bloomsbury crowd, and even their tangents, so I love the comment he throws off about having to read Antic Hay before he goes to Garsington. He would have fit in perfectly at Garsington! Lady Ottoline would have loved him, and how he would have loved her home, the colors, the Orientalism, the pugs -

... and gracious - can you imagine a conversation between Anthony Blanche and Lytton Strachey? It would have been so d-d-delicious.

melanie

Booking Through Thursday

Via Book-a-Rama :

Booking Through Thursday

What kind of care do you take of your books? Let's review, shall we?

1. Are you careful with the spines? Or do you crack your books open to make them lay flat? I'm both careful AND I crack the books - depends on the book (and, needless to say, whether it's mine!)


2. Do you use bookmarks? Or do you dog-ear the corners? If you do use bookmarks, do you use those fashionable metal ones? Or paper? I use bookmarks. Many of them were gifts, and some are hand-made (embroidered, knitted). The only metal one I use is William, the hippo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on a blue ribbon.


3. Do you write in your books? Ever? If you do, do you make small marks, or write in as much blank space as you can find? Pen or pencil? Highlighter? Your name on the front page? Sometimes I use an address label on the inside front cover, and sometimes I write in the book. If the paper is fountain-pen friendly, I use a fine-nibbed pen. Otherwise, a ball point. If I write, it's usually on one of the blank pages at the end - I take notes, and indicate the page number.


4. Do you toss your books on the floor? Into book bags? Or do you treat them tenderly, with respect? On the floor!?!?!?!? I carry books with me in my knitting bag, or in a tote with my notebooks and journal. My books, c'est moi. If anything, I treat them more tenderly, and with more respect, than I treat myself!
   


5. Um--water? Do you bathe with your books? Hold them with wet hands? Read out in the rain? Anything of that sort? No. No. No.


6. Are your books lined up on a bookshelf? Or crammed in any which way? Stacked on the floor? On bookshelves or piled on furniture. Never ever ever on the floor (see #5).


7. Do you make a distinction--as regards book care--between hardcovers and paperbacks? Not really.


8. And, to recap? Naturally, you love all of your books, but how, exactly? Are your books loved in the battered way of a well-loved teddy bear, or like a cherished photo album or item of clothing that's used, appreciated, but carefully cared for? Both. Some are well-loved stuffed rabbits, and some are cherished like a pair of velvet gloves. (Wine-colored velvet, or forest green. I know this is more information than you want. I have a thing for gloves.


9. Any additional comments? Not now - I'm reading.

melanie

2nd annual St. Brigid Bloggers (Silent Poetry)

(From Carrie's post)

What: A blogger's silent poetry reading
When: anytime February 2
Where: your blog
Why: to celebrate the Feast of Saint Brigid, a/k/a Groundhog Day.
How: select a poem you like- by a favorite poet or one of your own - to post February 2.

If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on this post. Last year, Reya put out the call and there was more poetry in cyberspace than she could keep track of. So, link to whomever you hear about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.


My contribution:

To Japanese Incense - Sara Teasdale

The wind that rings the temple bell
Is far away,
And far the brazen incense urns
Of ashes grey.
And far the carven temple gates
Of red and gold --
The dreamy temples where the gods
Have long been old.
The dragonflies and irises
Beside the stream,
Are far away in lands of dawn
And lands of dream.

melanie

TBR Challenge - The Nazi Officer's Wife

The Nazi Officer's Wife - Edith Hahn Beer, with Susan Dworkin.

I read this book because a good friend said she'd been inspired by it. People will do anything to survive. Yes, and it often is astonishing to know about them. Astonishing, inspiring - and terrifying.

This book terrified me. Anything about the Holocaust terrifies me. The very word, Kristallnacht, terrifies me. I am a Jewish woman; I would be foolish if it didn't terrify me, or if I were complacent enough to think it never could happen again.

Kristallnacht, Night of Broken Glass. When I read about the Holocaust (which I rarely do), my brain experiences Kristallnacht. Thoughts break away and shatter. I lose my ability to speak coherently. To think coherently.

***********************

Edith Hahn's memoir is coherent and focused. I read it in one sitting because it was impossible to look away. Her story has been dramatized, and it is remarkable.

The world for Viennese Jews came apart very quickly. One day, she was finishing law school, and the next, she was enslaved and forced to work on a farm and in a carton factory. Rather than submit to being taken to Poland, she went underground in Vienna, where kind Viennese women helped her to get false identification papers and saved her life. She moved to a town outside of Dresden, met a Nazi officer, lived with him, married him, had his child, a daughter. He spent time in Siberia, captured in battle, and returned. They divorced. She and her daughter went to England. Both survived. We know this story because her Pepi, the beloved who could not escape his grotesque and hysterical mother, saved all of her letters and papers, and because her daughter read them.

What a person will do to survive -

I can not put my thoughts together for this. Instead, I offer some of my reading notes, in no particular order. Please read the book.

the Nazi officer who demanded a dust-free home
millions turned to dust. millions.
to be able to hold two beliefs
to be considered subhuman and powerful enough to threaten civilization
those who would scapegoat
1984 - do it to her
to know the lie - the citizens knew full well - THEY MAY NOT ESCAPE INTO DENIAL BECAUSE THEY KNEW-
she refused anesthesia - she endured the pain of childbirth to protect her Jewish child- to protect the daughter of a Nazi
Thomas Mann on the radio - the first time she heard the full truth, piles of children's shoes
"I had often heard Werner's views about the power of Jewish blood"
"She turned her back on me. I could feel her sense of triumph, her genuine satisfaction in destroying my life. It had a smell, I tell you - like sweat, like lust."


melanie

To be read challenge, 2007

I must be crazy. Why do I join all of these challenges? Well, because. Because they force me to focus on things I've meant to read.
This one is the "To Be Read Challenge" - 12 books that you have been meaning to read, in 12 months.



(drumroll, please......)

Jan Marsh - Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood
Lucinda Hawksley - Lizzie Siddal, face of the Pre-Raphaelites
Ann Beattie - Follies
Claire Tomalin - Katherine Mansfield: a secret life
Kara Dalkey - The nightingale
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never let me go
A.S. Byatt - Biographer's tale
Margaret Drabble - Seven Sisters
Francine Prose - Changed man
Virginia Woolf - On being ill
Maureen Corrigan - Leave me alone, I'm reading
Edith Hahn Beer - The Nazi officer's wife

melanie

From the Stacks Winter Challenge: "Marriage à la mode" by Katherine Mansfield

Technically, this is not a "rereading." It's an offshoot of the last book I read for Rereading. That's what I do, as a voracious reader: I follow pathways from one book to something else.


"Marriage à la mode" -- Katherine Mansfield

Imagine Isabel, if you will: a young, married woman who once lived in a pretty London house with her loving husband William and two little children. Picture the house, with lush petunias in a window box: a harmonic convergence of peace and bliss after the First World War.

Now think of the changes perfuming the ancient English air: women's suffrage, feminism, artistic and literary modernism. Each change drew advocates and acolytes, many of them famous (the Bloomsbury group) and colorful (Lady Ottoline's many-hued estate, harboring artists, pacifists, and pugs). These were the glitterati of the new London.

Pretty Isabel goes to Paris with her friend Moira, and returns discontented, a new Isabel who laughs "in the new way." William, baffled by her desire for a new house, new music, and new friends, nonetheless buys her a house in the country. He stays in London and visits on weekends while Isabel lives her new life with new friends. Bohemians and artists surround her, sharing a sunlit idyll with their pretty muse. She thrives, the children thrive, and William continues to work and support the merry band of early flower children that has replaced the traditional family.

Satisfactory, no? It's feminist fairy tale, if the prince and the princess don't mind a long-distance happily-ever-after.

Not so fast.

We meet William as he prepares for a weekend visit. His children expect presents, as children do. Toys, perhaps? No: Isabel has thrown out their old toys because they were "appallingly bad for the babies' sense of form." What else would please the children? William buys a pineapple and a melon, boards the train, and thinks of his lovely, "petal-soft" Isabel and the featherbed they one shared. Worries surface. Will the merry ones be there this weekend? Will they try to steal the fruits (of his labors?) from the children?

They are, and they do.

Mansfield's pen loathes artifice, and it wastes no time peeling each acolyte. (This, one senses, is personal.) Dennis, the wannabe ironist, frames every scene into a precious verbal tableau ("A lady in love with a pineapple"). Bobby, the fey freeloader, wants to don a Nijinsky dress and dance. Moira, Isabel's friend, discovers that "sleep is so wonderful. One simply shuts one's eyes, that's all. It's so delicious." (This, one senses, is very personal.)

They tolerate William because Isabel chides them (and William overhears): "Be nice to him, my children! He's only staying until tomorrow evening." Left alone, he wanders into a sitting room that is littered with the leavings of Isabel's new children -- piles of cigarette ashes, a grotesque mural on a yellow wall, strips of paint-daubed cloth strewn over the furniture ...

What makes a house a home? Mansfield offers a gesture. William, sitting in an armchair, feels the space next to the cushion. In London, in the old house, he would have retrieved his children's toys: a three-legged toy sheep, perhaps, or a little horn. Here, he finds "yet another little paper-covered book of smudged-looking poems." Not even the detritus of Isabel's new life belongs to him. Isabel's new life has both alienated and trivialized him. The reader hears a window slam shut before a clearly-relieved Isabel shoves him into a taxi.

Mansfield's pen loathes artifice. It also loathes sentimentality. Another writer may have pounced on William and reveled in the long love-letter he begins to compose on the train. William's lachrymose letter might have been lampooned with as much savagery as Dennnis' faux irony. But it isn't; she doesn't.

Instead, she follows the letter as it is delivered to Isabel the next day, a sultry Monday that finds the sulky group moping. Only Isabel receives a letter that day, "and mine's only from William." The envelope is thick, and the letter is long. It begins: "My darling, precious Isabel," and it continues, page after heartfelt page.

Isabel, astonished, feels an unexpected, unwanted emotion. A sentimentalist may have led Isabel up to the cool privacy of her bedroom, there to have an epiphany, and to resolve to reunite with her loving husband.

Instead, Mansfield leads Isabel to her bedroom, but not before she shares the letter with her new, feral children. They whoop and jeer when they read the clumsy prose. "God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness." They roll on the ground, weak with hilarity.

Something about the raucous scene catches Isabel's attention. Perhaps, Mansfield seems to suggest, the letter has touched Isabel's disregarded heart. Perhaps the letter shifts Isabel's attention. Indeed, Isabel begins to berate herself, calling herself "shallow, tinkling, vain..."

Is this a liminal moment? Mansfield certainly has given Isabel a chance, but she chooses, with minimal consciousness of error, to rejoin her friends, "laughing in the new way."

Virginia Woolf once characterized Katherine Mansfield as "hard and cheap" (although she recognized Mansfield's potential to equal her own art). Hard and cheap. How else to tell this story? Isabel squanders the opportunities of liberation, congress with serious artists, and a loving husband. She chooses cheap thrills.

This fairytale does not end with Cinderella and her prince, beautiful to the end. Sleeping Beauty does not awaken to the true value of true love. The story holds up a mirror to every frivolous, self-reverential society that is so enthralled with itself that it stagnates. As it was, Mansfield implies, so shall it be.

- - - - -
- - - - -

Mansfield died of tuberculosis, at the estate of a charismatic, esoteric teacher, Gurdjieff. The wizard could not heal her - another fairy tale gone awry. Perhaps Katherine Mansfield knew that the mage would fail, but she chose to reach for the fantasy after hard reality had failed her.


----
posted by melanie

Rereadings - "From the Stacks Winter Challenge"

Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman.

"One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish," says Fadiman in the introduction to this collection of essays. "It helps you remember what you used to be like." This may not always be pleasant: "Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarassing former self."

Patricia Hampl, in "Relics of Saint Katherine," was introduced first to Katherine Mansfield's personal writings, the journal and letters, instead of the crisp and illuminating short stories. Hampl's guide was Doris, her boyfriend's mother, who plucked these volumes from her ceiling-high bookshelves and said, "You must have these."

Doris was as unfulfilled in the dull St. Paul neighborhood as Mansfield had been in Wellington, New Zealand. Doris was rumored to have written, and had been a teenager when Mansfield died. Since then, she had maintained a personal attachment to the life and work of the dead "tantalizing bohemian big sister," a connection she passed on to the young Patricia.

She was astonished to learn that diaries and journals could be published and admired as literature. (After all, she wrote diaries as well!) These books "opened the door to memoir and the essay, forms I came to prize and practice."

Doris loved the short stories and knew the arc of Mansfield's life, including her sexual freedom, relationships with such literati as D. H. Lawrence, and her desperate, final grab at life through the mysticism of Gurdjieff. She also believed and rejoiced in the last words of Mansfield's published journal: "All was well."

"She was so happy," said Doris. "She forgot to be careful."

"It was as if she were there," writes Hampl. But Doris died before she could reread the journal after modern scholars discovered that Mansfield's odious husband had edited it to blunt the agony, loneliness, and despair with a triumphant narrative arc. (Says one of Hampl's friends: he was "boiling Katherine's bones to make soup.")

(One is grateful that Doris was able to enjoy and cherish her Katherine to the end of her life.)

When Hampl visits Bandol, where Mansfield wrote "Prelude" and "Bliss," she ascends to Mansfield's room in the "great peachy Belle Epoque" hotel, delapitated now, "left to pickle in its unhealthy browns and beiges, its sickets greens." (One thinks of Mansfield's lungs, disintegrating in the bacillus brine of tuberculosis.) Hampl looks out to the same brilliant, blue sea that Mansfield would see after three hours of "happiness in the writing" - the only happiness that remained to the doomed writer.

As Hampl compares Mansfield to Sylvia Plath - two talented women doomed to be more famous for their lives than for their art - one realizes that the same is true of Doris, whose life we see through Hampl's brief narrative, but whose writing we never will know.

"Relics of Saint Katherine," in Hampl's first infatuation, were "the moist devotion of a cultist, not the frank pleasure of a reader." The cultist tracked down Mansfield's favorite brand of soap (Cuticura), wore the soft, velvet clothing Mansfield loved, and pinned up pictures of Mansfield as a personal shrine.

Fadiman's warning that rereading may mean encountering an "embarrassing former self" may describe this early devotion, but we also see that a writer's growth can transform that shallow, self-oriented, early experience into a deep and compassionate understanding.

*********

Hampl's essay is but one of seventeen that examine works from Colette's fiction to the Sue Barton books. Consider yourself warned: come to these essays without pen and paper, else you will want to read almost everything that these writers - those who are read and those who have written - have ever published.

melanie

The perfect month for us!

Think you not of dull and drear days of winter. Instead, brew a cup of your favorite camellia sinensis and drink a toast to January, National Hot-Tea Month! It matters not whether you sip Lipton's, Earl Grey lavender, or a rare and precious cup of liquid gold so long as it leaves you with a catlike, satisfied smile of contentment.
Cheers!
(Moon Rani)

Spam poetry? Really?

I get a fair amount of spam, and some of the subject lines are funny. Sometimes I send them to amuse TeaBird. She had a brilliant suggestion: collect spam subject lines and arrange them into poetry! I decided to make them into spamkus, that is, spam haikus. Here, Dear Reader, is my first effort, a poem which is fitting for New Year's Day.

"Look at this. Throw down

your doubts and fast join us. Pray

thee, scale greater heights."

Watch this space for more spamkus.

May you be blessed with all you need and lots of what you want this New Year.

(Moon Rani)

teacuppa

Thanks to blog reader, Jenny, who told me about www.teacuppa.com. It looks like another good site for us tea-lovers. I haven't ordered anything from there, but I recommend you visit the site now while its snowflakes still flutter and while a darling gift set is still featured.

(Moon Rani)

The gifts the "Gift-Tea" gi'e us!

A friend of a friend enjoys tea. Last year my friend gave his friend a box of English Breakfast tea, brand unknown. His friend was delighted enough to hint about this year's Christmas gift. My friend asked my advice. Naturally I was flattered, and sought to deliver my best recommendation.
I learned that the recipient did not know much about tea. I took this as a good sign, as was his pleasure with last year's gift. I had a vague idea of his taste, and I could assume he was open to new ideas. Only see what I suggested because you, too, may have a lovely gift tea to try or to give.
Since the gift recipient liked English Breakfast tea, I suggested blends of black teas known to be sturdy standbys. The first is loved tea-dom, PG Tips. It is hearty, bold and unassuming, takes well to milk or cream should you desire, and also has enough heart to accept honey or sugar. The second tea is Yorkshire Gold, which was, several years ago, named the best-tasting tea in Great Britain. It has similar properties to PG Tips while standing on its own for taste. It has a pretty box, too. I know that last sounds silly, but I think eye-appeal is part of a gift.
I took the liberty of ordering the tea, and I used www.englishteastore.com. The ordering was easy, the shipping was a lightning-stroke of rapidity, and the prices were so reasonable that I won't go anywhere else from here on. Ah, and there was a bonus: my friend told me to pick something for myself in payment for my help!
Here is another recommendation, and this one is for a honey that is copacetic with tea. Here I am with a few work holidays, so of course I also have another nasty cold. Today I am drinking a cuppa PG Tips (my "payment" tea mentioned above) sweetened with blueberry blossom honey. This honey is produced by Laney Family Honey, Inc., and was at my grocer. I find it congenial in my comfort tea. It was absolutely perfect during one of my spasms of health-seeking, when I bought Celestial Seasonings' Blueberry Breeze green tea. In fact, it was just what was needed to give the tea a blueberry taste.
(Moon Rani)

Super-Size, please

This is not a book review. It's not a tea review. It's a recommendation for a font size. I am so pleased with an early Christmas gift that I wanted to let others know about it in case they are in need of the same thing.
A friend and I agreed to exchange one Christmas gift apiece. We kept it inexpensive, and each specified the gift desired. My request was for a giant-print Bible. Illness and presbyopia combined to make my ordinary Bible harder and harder to read. In fact, I avoided reading it at all, of late. I buy large-print Reader's Digests and devotional books, and it occurred to me that there must surely be a large-print Bible, too.
What I found was that the "large-print" Bibles could be printed in fonts as small as ten-point. That's not very large. But a "giant-print" had thirteen- or fourteen-point fonts. It makes all the difference in the world! My thoughtful friend decided to give my Christmas present early because he said that no one should have to wait to read a Bible, so I can offer you this modest review.
Perhaps you or someone you know has trouble with ordinary size fonts. Now you know to look for GIANT-PRINT wherever the option is available. If it is a Bible you want, be sure to look at it before you purchase; this is one time when an online purchase might not be the best idea. The thin pages do not bother me, but I can see where they would make reading hard for people who are bothered by the print's showing through from the pages' other sides.
I keep learning how to make reading more accessible to people. Learning to read was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I have tried, in small ways, to help others enjoy reading, too. I used to read aloud on radio stations to blind and visually-impaired and physically disabled people. I used to tutor small children in reading-readiness. Now I am learning about giant-print and thin pages. I offer this information to others in case they don't know such things exist. These innovations might allow others to continue to enjoy reading.
This is an appropriate day to publish this post, as I look at the date. It was my late mother's birthday. Illness and age affected her reading pleasure, too, and I remember how thrilled she was when she discovered large-print books at the library. It was like watching someone learn to read, just seeing her excitement and pleasure when books were, once again, accessible to her.
Remember: if reading is hard for you, make an effort to find a way to work around your difficulties. Don't quit reading. Never quit reading!
(Moon Rani)

Slammerkin - "From the Stacks Winter Challenge"

Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue

I never leave the house without a red ribbon.

Mary Saunders, the focus of Slammerkin, is thrown out
of her house after being raped for her desire for a red ribbon.

Does the red ribbon establish a kinship between Mary and
me? Perhaps. Lacking a common desire or situation, the
reader may have difficulty opening herself to a character
– in my case, the relationship between a middle-aged
librarian and a doomed teenaged prostitute.

Slammerkin places a very young woman in a desperately
poor household, where she is neither loved nor consulted
about how her life will unfold.

All evidence points to a miserable and colorless
continuation of her mother’s life of poverty, drudgery,
and subjugation that was sealed when her father
was killed in a misguided protest by men who believed that
they were going to lose, literally lose, eleven days of their
lives when the government changed to the Gregorian
calendar in 1752 -that they would lose time.

I was fascinated by the subjective inconstancy of Mary’s
perception of time. In her mother’s house, time is nearly a
solid mass, changing only by suffering and the family’s
heartless response to Mary’s pregnancy. This response, a
product of the times, is doled out without mercy.

How could the family understand the depth of Mary’s need
to escape the faded beige of their lives, or the magical hope
symbolized by that red ribbon? And yet, how could a mother
cast out her raped, pregnant daughter?

(As I write, I realize that Mary’s mother is the only truly
unforgivable character in the book. Perhaps my modern-time
sensibility intrudes. All of the subsequent damage and
tragedy that defined Mary’s brief time, and all of the bitter
focus on the actual material that she craved in this world,
began with this primal betrayal. If she was not loved for
what was within, she could, at least, adorn herself with the transitory beauty of clothes.)

Time, and the times, were different when Mary fled
to London. London was fast-paced, and the woman who
accepted her into the sisterhood of prostitutes were fast.
Doll’s love and practical guidance showed Mary that society
can tolerate – even require – actions and beliefs far larger
than she had ever imagined. Through prostitution, Mary
acquired financial independence and freedom to see some of
thewonders of her modern world. Likethe fireworks over
London, she and her sisters of the night were brief flashes
of beauty, dressed in their colorful slammerkins (loose
dresses) and masked behind their paint.

Mary’s sudden need to escape a street thug impelled her
to Magdalene Hospital, a residence founded to purge the
evil from the street-wise women. Time was suspended there,
with silence, blandness, and time to think without fearing
starvation or death in the freezing streets. With Doll’s death,
Mary realizes that she has to leave London, and her
retreat ends in a desperate flight from the sanctuary
to the town where her mother had grown up. Glimpses
of the possibilities there almost melt her cynicism, but
her nature has been formed, and she can not escape.

This novel is based, loosely, on the actual life of a Mary
Saunders who was executed for murder in 1764. From the
beginning of the novel, when Mary is 13, to her death by
hanging at age 16, Mary passes through more lifetimes
than many experience in ten times the years.

How many such lifetimes can a child endure? For Mary is a
child, and my working-class perception of childhood
makes me ache for this young girl, whose only
transgression was the love of a piece of red ribbon.

How does the red ribbon bind me to Mary’s life? For both the
18th -century child and the 21st century woman, the red
ribbon symbolizes hope. Mary’s hope for a better life is
destroyed, but the hopes of my Eastern European Jewish
ancestors for the children who would be born in the new
world, and would escape the Evil Eye of the old. have
been realized. After reading Slammerkin, I realize anew
that I am, indeed, blessed.

melanie

Thank you, Stephanie, for giving me this book!