A very light Orwell essay, where he reminisces about his time working in a bookshop, which, being the serious writer he was, clearly had its frustratiA very light Orwell essay, where he reminisces about his time working in a bookshop, which, being the serious writer he was, clearly had its frustrations. “I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.”
He discovered things about both patrons and books that he probably wished he hadn’t. But those of us who have served the public will likely relate to the sometimes mocking thoughts that exist behind our tolerant smiles, and he makes some brilliant politically incorrect barbs about, for example, “vague-minded women” and a “decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts.”
Great fun if, like me, you’re a lover of both books and sarcasm. ...more
“The profound wisdom of Black life and literature” is the subtitle, and exactly what I found inside this wonderful book. Griffin combines a warm and p“The profound wisdom of Black life and literature” is the subtitle, and exactly what I found inside this wonderful book. Griffin combines a warm and personal memoir with what fed that warmth: books and beauty and culture.
Very generally, I felt she focused the first half on her father and the second half on her mother. Her father taught her a love of reading and jazz music. He sadly died when she was only nine, so the meaning behind the memories is heightened.
“Yet and still, I don’t believe my father is dead. He visits me every night. I don’t see him. But I feel the side of my bed go down as he sits on it, like he has done hundreds of times before. I smell him. I feel him. And, often, after falling asleep, I meet him in my dreams.”
His advice provides the title: read until you understand. She took it seriously, and dove into the library of books he left her. Using examples from these books, she makes many points about how to survive and thrive under oppression. I knew of writers like Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass of course, but she shares about some lesser-known writers too.
I particularly liked the story of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born free in 1825, but orphaned at three, she was raised by an uncle who was a prominent Baltimore abolitionist and founder of the Watkins Academy school for Black children. She studied there, excelled at writing, but was put out to service at age 13. The Quaker bookseller in whose home she worked opened his library to her though, and she read and wrote and eventually published poetry.
Griffin continued to read and encountered writers from her own lifetime, like Toni Cade Bambara, and particularly Toni Morrison. She provides illuminating analysis of one of my favorite Morrison novels, Sula.
But she doesn’t stop at literature. She moves on to art, and beauty in a broader sense--particularly the healing nature of beauty. I found her memories of the Black women in her life and how they made beauty from what they had incredibly moving and useful.
At one point, she includes a fascinating painting: Romare Beardon’s The Dressmaker, which sparks meaning for her from contemplating the fact she comes from a long line of seamstresses who took comfort in creating something beautiful for their families.
I just have to share this lengthy passage. It brought tears to my eyes, remembering my own mother and grandmother at their own sewing machines late at night, carefully creating clothes for us, draperies, and even upholstering chairs and sofas.
“The quiet buzz of her sewing machine is barely audible over the sound of Miles, Marvin, or Earth, Wind & Fire. My mother prefers to sew after midnight: after the dishes have been washed and the kitchen straightened up, after I have bathed and gone to bed, after the noise of the day has quieted. By morning’s light, she will have solved a puzzle, pushed past a momentary challenge, and she will have created something beautiful. She is meticulous: a finished seam, pressed flat with the iron, a collar stiffened just right, a yoke, a dart. She attends every detail, even if it means ripping it all out and starting over. If I awaken, I come down the narrow, dark staircase to find her sitting at the shiny black Singer sewing machine with gold lettering. Our cat, a jet-black, green-eyed beauty named Velvet, is reclining at her feet. My mother is humming, and she seems--happy.”
So we read and learn and create beauty that will bolster us through hardship. What an important message in these difficult times.
“Even in the midst of crisis, the flowers bloom. Especially in moments of crisis, their blooming is a reminder of something that transcends the moment, a reminder of a deep, deep sense of time, reaching back and stretching forward.” ...more
“In the end, she valued kindness above everything.”
This is an excellent story. It comes across as light at first, full of allusions to time (1959) and“In the end, she valued kindness above everything.”
This is an excellent story. It comes across as light at first, full of allusions to time (1959) and place (the eastern coast of England), and sprinkled with dark humor. I happily read along, very much enjoying the character of Florence Green setting out on her challenging venture.
“It’s a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don’t intend to retreat.”
Florence is determined to make a go of a book shop, against the wishes of the powers-that-be in her isolated little town. I have had my own disagreeable experiences with small towns, and Fitzgerald deftly describes what can happen when everyone knows everyone and you’re hounded by prying eyes and unwittingly caught up in selfish schemes.
The writing is deceptively simple. While it starts with a light feel, about half way you realize you’ve skipped your way into a tragedy. When you’re done reading, you feel like you’ve read something Russian, like Chekhov maybe, which has left you contemplating personal values and the cruelty of human nature.
I’m looking forward to checking out more Penelope Fitzgerald!...more
Adrienne Rich was a fierce poet, but also an academic, and this is an academic collection. It includes lectures to students, speeches to administratorAdrienne Rich was a fierce poet, but also an academic, and this is an academic collection. It includes lectures to students, speeches to administrators, presentations to commissions, articles, essays, reviews and columns. At times it was a bit too academic for a general reader like me, but what brilliance.
She spoke from experience, of patriarchy and feminism, motherhood and teaching. But the parts I enjoyed most were when she applied her knowledge and experience to literary analysis.
On Wuthering Heights: “The bond between Catherine and Heathcliff is the archetypal bond between the split fragments of the psyche, the masculine and feminine elements ripped apart and longing for reunion.”
On Jane Eyre: “Coming to her husband in economic independence and by her free-choice, Jane can become a wife without sacrificing a grain of her Jane Eyre-ity.”
On Poetry: “But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”
My favorite was her essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” from a 1975 Brandeis University lecture. Understanding Dickinson from Rich’s intellectual-feminist-poet point of view is a treat no Dickinson fan should miss. A revelation.
For those who think this collection may be dated, I offer this: “One of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and the sharing of words. This hearing and saying of women has been able to break many a silence and taboo; literally to transform forever the way we see.”
The “past decade” referenced was 50 years ago, but it sounds remarkably like a certain movement going on right now. As we know, silences continue, and there are many more secrets we must go on sharing in order to move the transformation forward. We still have much to learn from Adrienne Rich....more
“I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The R“I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning …”
Let me just say, not all writing ideas are good.
I can just picture my mother (who was an avid reader and extremely charitable) holding this book in her hand, scrunching up her face as she reads, then putting the book down into her lap, shrugging her shoulders and saying “I guess some people like this sort of thing.”
I know they do because I read this with a lovely group and many there did like it and discovered interesting and amusing ideas. I enjoyed hearing their thoughts.
But I did not enjoy this book. The beginning was good--a reader beginning a book, with lots of little details we readers can relate to, and then the beginning of a story in a train station that had potential. After that it went downhill fast for me. I wouldn’t have minded the structure: a second person commentary followed by the beginning of a story, repeated and repeated and repeated. What got me was that each round got more and more boring, to the point where I had to force myself to turn the pages.
Calvino writes “…all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost.” Perhaps. But in this book I not only lost the echo, I lost the story. I was shocked at how quickly I forgot each chapter after finishing it. I mean it was wiped completely out of my mind, which was very frustrating because of the work I had to put into paying attention to it enough to keep reading.
This is a post-modernist experiment, not a story. The author is clearly capable of writing a good story, and teases his readers, particularly the bookish kind, with thoughts about the experience of reading and the constraints of writing. But Calvino straddles two approaches--commentary and story--and never commits to either. I come away from reading this neither as from a fictional dream (thanks, Ken) nor stimulated by ideas. I just come away feeling teased--bullied almost.
I don’t dislike all post-modernist fiction. I don’t believe every story must have a beginning and an end, as Calvino asks at the end of this book. But stories must make you want to keep reading, and on that count, for me, this failed epically.
Perhaps Calvino wrote something I’d like better, but although my mom would have forgiven him quickly, I don’t like being bullied and I may hold a grudge against him for a long time....more
“The silences I speak of here are unnatural, the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being … when the seed strikes stone; the soil will“The silences I speak of here are unnatural, the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being … when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.”
Creativity requires time. Time requires money. A significant percentage of potentially creative people are held back because of these facts, which Tillie Olsen explores in this groundbreaking study, first published in 1978.
The necessities of earning a living, and/or of caring for children or family, have prevented working people and women specifically from a creative life. Olsen shares her own story, and then provides a truckload of examples to convince the reader of what we have missed due to this forced silencing of creative people who are too busy to create.
“As for myself, who did not publish a book until I was fifty, who raised children without household help … who worked outside the house on everyday jobs as well … The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks … The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you.”
The writers journals and letters she draws from are fascinating—Virginia Woolf, but also Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Katherine Mansfield, and many more. She also mines the territory for lesser-known writers, and brings back some that should be more widely read. An extensive excerpt from Rebecca Harding Davis is included, and leaves me anxious to read more.
Finally, a quote from Emily Brontё that not surprisingly sums it all up with blistering poetry: “O! dreadful is the check—intense the agony— When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.”...more
“It was Henry James she was reading one tea-time when she said out loud, ‘Oh, do get on.’
The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said, ‘S“It was Henry James she was reading one tea-time when she said out loud, ‘Oh, do get on.’
The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said, ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.
‘Not you, Alice’ the Queen called after her, even going to the door. ‘Not you.’
Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and coming back to the chair she wondered why. That this access of consideration might have something to do with books and even with the perpetually irritating Henry James did not at the moment occur to her.”
Oh, such fun! Royal snooping and a demonstration of the power of reading--who can resist? As well as being funny, this included surprising turns and was ultimately very satisfying....more
This is a unique, behind-the-scenes look at creative people in an intensely creative time and place.
It was the period between the wars.
“The news of This is a unique, behind-the-scenes look at creative people in an intensely creative time and place.
It was the period between the wars.
“The news of my bookshop, to my surprise, soon spread all over the United States, and it was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris. They were all customers at the Shakespeare and Company, which many of them looked upon as their club.”
I didn’t realize that, more than anything else, this book is about James Joyce. Beach not only published Ulysses, but she was Joyce's chief supporter and champion. This is a must read for Joyce fans—full of juicy details about his struggles and quirks, like: he liked to spend more money than he had, he was a big tipper, he always remembered birthdays, he gave big parties that ended with him playing the piano and singing a sweet song, and (my personal favorite) he sighed a lot.
There was a bookshop cat named Lucky who ate people’s hats and gloves. Sylvia also had a dog foisted on her, despite her remark that she “couldn’t keep a dog and a James Joyce and a bookshop.”
Shakespeare and Company was a magnet for talented writers of the time. In addition to Joyce, there was F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Maddox Ford, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, TS Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Anais Nin and many, many others.
I found A Moveable Feast more readable, much more of a story (Hemingway, after all). But Sylvia Beach was equally amazing at what she did best—she created a haven of support for so many important writers of her time. Where would we be without her?...more
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