Everyone asks me how I like Connecticut. Especially people who actually live in Connecticut, who apparently have some kind of vested interest. “How do you like Connecticut?” they ask.
I reply, “It’s pretty.”
And every single time, the person who’s asked me the question will look at me with a kind of sideways, stank-face expression of abject horror, as if they suspect me of slandering their state with some kind of backhanded compliment.
Actually, it’s as if they have heard of the incident after a terrible choral concert through which I and a bunch of friends once sat with our hands over our eardrums to prevent the discord from piercing our eardrums and making them gush blood. When our mutual acquaintance who was part of the concert came out to greet us after the merciful conclusion of the double-encore, everyone else suddenly pretended that they hadn’t been rolling their eyes and whining during the musical carnage, or that they hadn’t rushed during intermission to the bar next door to slug down shots to get them through the second half. The air was full of totally insincere Oh, what a fantastic concerts! and I’ve never enjoyed myself mores!, until the acquaintance turned to me with raised eyebrows and an air of expectation.
“You know,” I told him with great enthusiasm. “That is really a nice shirt you’re wearing!”
Yes. It’s as if Connecticut looks at me askance because I’ve told it that it has a really nice shirt.
I don’t mean the compliment as anything other than what it is, however. Connecticut is pretty. Flowers stay in bloom for an obscenely long time, as if they’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be seasonal and have packed their bags to come visit and stay a good long while. I can’t walk twenty feet without stumbling over a picturesque brook that doesn’t have the common decency not to burble. The trees grow high and wide and broad, and in the late autumn they all shed their brilliant, jewel-colored leaves in one grand choreographed flourish, over the passing of a single night. Heck, it’s it’s January right now and the grass is still a vivid emerald green.
Everything in Connecticut is just so pretty. I can travel down the road through the quaint, adorable New England town center of Old Greenwich—with its town clock, old-fashioned storefronts, and an overall village charm that’s only missing a friendly Dalmatian in the doorway of the teeny-tiny fire station—and come out a mile later on the beach. Everything there is quiet and calm and serene where the soft sands lie in pillow-like ripples, or else it’s unspoiled and beautiful where the winter reeds blow between the rocky western coast. And then there’s the Emerald City of Manhattan on the horizon, a mere twenty miles away, glittering over the sound like a jewel.
I can drive in any direction and encounter majestic outcroppings of rock, or beautiful rivers dotted with pleasure crafts, or vast forests, or rolling, endless farmland. The people of Connecticut curl their lips at the mention of Bridgeport, its most disreputable and least picturesque city. But you know, I lived for twenty-five years in Detroit, and Bridgeport, you don’t scare me. I can say for certain that most citizens of the neighborhoods within the Detroit city limits would look at Bridgeport, with its intact houses and roads and the sun glittering seductively on the water, and think it an urban oasis.
There’s stuff I don’t like about Connecticut, to be certain. There’s only one major artery through the entire state, and it runs east to west and if it’s jammed from an accident or just congested, you’re doomed to sit in your car for three hours. You’re also pretty much condemned to a painfully slow trip if you want to travel anywhere from north to south, as you’re pretty much restricted to doing it along tiny little one-lane roads, usually behind a UPS truck that blocks the road as it stops every three houses to make a delivery.
I don’t like the fact that it’s tough to visit a big box store of any sort. There just aren’t that many, and they’re inconvenient and far between. In Michigan, or in Virginia, or in any of the other places I’ve visited, I could pick any of the five Targets within a five-mile radius of the house, drive there on a speedy freeway, park quickly in the lot, grab cat sand and shampoo, and get home within a half-hour. Visiting a Target here involves navigating through downtown Stamford, parking (and paying for the privilege) in a multi-story deck, taking an elevator to Target, and then wrestling my purchases back to the deck before trying to get out of the downtown area.
Either that, or I can drive to the only other Target in the area, in White Plains—a city I believe was described in The Inferno as part of the lowest circle of hell, in which all the streets are one-way and heading north.
Then there’s the Connecticut shrug, which everyone will gladly perform if you suggest that the state is missing something, like a good Thai restaurant, a place to buy cheesecake, or a karaoke bar. “Oh, you can get that in the city,” they’ll say, doing the shrug and jerking their head in the direction of Manhattan. My first few months here, I heard the phrase so often that I declared You Can Get That In The City should be officially made the state motto, Latinized, and sewn onto the Connecticut flag.
But when it comes to other things, Connecticut is tops. Need a hot pretzel shop, like a Wetzel’s Pretzels or a Auntie Annies? You’re in luck, because the Connecticut malls have cleared out establishments like Banana Republic and Gap and Macy’s in order that every mall can be all pretzel shops, all the time, from one end to the other!
And do you need the ability to hop out of your car and pee over the railing on I-95? Maybe you’re too shy to do so in lesser states like New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but man, Connecticut’s got you covered. Whip it out and whiz away! No one cares that you’re only three feet from the traffic, or that there are actual rest stops down the road or a McDonald’s at the next exit with an indoor facility. Not in Connecticut, baby! Just let that urine fly!
And prettiness. Connecticut is really, really pretty.
Maybe it’d just have been better if I’d stopped there.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Monday, November 14, 2011
Color Snapshots
I love taking photographs. I have absolutely no training or formal education in photography. I'm not particularly good at it. But that doesn't stop me.
Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing application ever invented. (Seriously. Add me, y'all.)
I was looking over my photos from 2011 last night and noticed something that should have been fairly obvious, if I'd been paying attention—but which really didn't seem apparent until I saw nearly a year's worth of thumbnails lined up in neat rows. All my photos from the early party of year are pretty typical shots of things that caught my fancy, or of my cats, or in the springtime, of all the floral life springing up in abundance in my old Michigan home. Nice, colorful stuff.
Then we get to June, when I moved. And suddenly I've got nothing but black-and-white studies of my new surroundings. Not just black-and-white photos. Moody black-and-white photos, with dark shadowy edges encroaching into the frame like special visual effects of doom left over from some Stephen King miniseries.
I have dozens and dozens of photographs of my local beach—pictures taken during the sunniest, greenest, warmest time of year, that look like the kind of thing Sylvia Plath would've clutched to her bosom as she stuck her head in the oven. They're the kind of photographs you might find in a newspaper with a byline reading The suicide victim, presumed deceased, was last spotted wading into the waters of this local beach during a dangerous high tide. Onlookers say his bathing suit may have been weighted with rocks. Or they simply should be wrapped in a note fashioned of cut-out letters that read, deer detectives, I burried the bodies here. hah! hah! hah! the fairfield killer.
No, really. I'm not exaggerating. I look at those photos now and I'm thinking, I took these in the summer? When it was nice? Double-tee-eff?
It's actually fairly funny how bleak this last summer looks, through my lens. I totally get it, though. On a day-to-day basis I might've been thinking, "Oh, I like these monochromatic studies. They're clean and simple." But throughout the entire summer I was really on a mindset of, "I don't want to be here. I don't like this place. It's never going to be anything to me."
If you look at my scrapbook of photos for the year, though, something happens right around the end of October. Suddenly my black-and-white photographs start to fade away—they don't vanish completely, mind you—but they're replaced by eye-popping, cornea-bleeding blasts of color. I'm not exaggerating that it could cause the unsuspecting scroller a serious case of visual whiplash. If you were to compare the photographs of the same subject, five months apart, I'd venture to say you wouldn't recognize them.
What happened recently to effect the change? It's tough to say. I think the actual realization came that this is my life now, and that I can't really pretend it isn't, when I was in the city recently. I was sitting at the Central Park Reservoir, one evening. I'd had a very long and leisurely and enjoyable day investigating a geeky board games store, and taking myself out to a solo lunch, and spending the afternoon at the museum. I had dinner and an evening with a new friend yet to come. I was standing there with a hot beverage in one hand and my phone in the other, snapping photos of the water and the sunset and admiring the colors while joggers huffed and panted and kicked up gravel with their running shoes behind me.
And suddenly it struck me: This doesn't have to be a special day. You could have a lot of future days this good.
It wasn't that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house into Technicolor. No, it wasn't that blatant or sudden. It was just at that moment I realized I'd been stumbling around for months like someone whose eyes have been badly sun-bleached, and that slowly, very slowly for weeks, I'd been seeing colors again.
So here's to the scarlets and lemon yellows, so vivid one could warm his hands over them. Here's the eye-popping greens and blues and indigos, the crimsons and oranges. Here's to the blacks and whites and thousands of shades of grays between, too. I could use them all in my life.
Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing application ever invented. (Seriously. Add me, y'all.)
I was looking over my photos from 2011 last night and noticed something that should have been fairly obvious, if I'd been paying attention—but which really didn't seem apparent until I saw nearly a year's worth of thumbnails lined up in neat rows. All my photos from the early party of year are pretty typical shots of things that caught my fancy, or of my cats, or in the springtime, of all the floral life springing up in abundance in my old Michigan home. Nice, colorful stuff.
Then we get to June, when I moved. And suddenly I've got nothing but black-and-white studies of my new surroundings. Not just black-and-white photos. Moody black-and-white photos, with dark shadowy edges encroaching into the frame like special visual effects of doom left over from some Stephen King miniseries.
I have dozens and dozens of photographs of my local beach—pictures taken during the sunniest, greenest, warmest time of year, that look like the kind of thing Sylvia Plath would've clutched to her bosom as she stuck her head in the oven. They're the kind of photographs you might find in a newspaper with a byline reading The suicide victim, presumed deceased, was last spotted wading into the waters of this local beach during a dangerous high tide. Onlookers say his bathing suit may have been weighted with rocks. Or they simply should be wrapped in a note fashioned of cut-out letters that read, deer detectives, I burried the bodies here. hah! hah! hah! the fairfield killer.
No, really. I'm not exaggerating. I look at those photos now and I'm thinking, I took these in the summer? When it was nice? Double-tee-eff?
It's actually fairly funny how bleak this last summer looks, through my lens. I totally get it, though. On a day-to-day basis I might've been thinking, "Oh, I like these monochromatic studies. They're clean and simple." But throughout the entire summer I was really on a mindset of, "I don't want to be here. I don't like this place. It's never going to be anything to me."
If you look at my scrapbook of photos for the year, though, something happens right around the end of October. Suddenly my black-and-white photographs start to fade away—they don't vanish completely, mind you—but they're replaced by eye-popping, cornea-bleeding blasts of color. I'm not exaggerating that it could cause the unsuspecting scroller a serious case of visual whiplash. If you were to compare the photographs of the same subject, five months apart, I'd venture to say you wouldn't recognize them.
What happened recently to effect the change? It's tough to say. I think the actual realization came that this is my life now, and that I can't really pretend it isn't, when I was in the city recently. I was sitting at the Central Park Reservoir, one evening. I'd had a very long and leisurely and enjoyable day investigating a geeky board games store, and taking myself out to a solo lunch, and spending the afternoon at the museum. I had dinner and an evening with a new friend yet to come. I was standing there with a hot beverage in one hand and my phone in the other, snapping photos of the water and the sunset and admiring the colors while joggers huffed and panted and kicked up gravel with their running shoes behind me.
And suddenly it struck me: This doesn't have to be a special day. You could have a lot of future days this good.
It wasn't that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house into Technicolor. No, it wasn't that blatant or sudden. It was just at that moment I realized I'd been stumbling around for months like someone whose eyes have been badly sun-bleached, and that slowly, very slowly for weeks, I'd been seeing colors again.
So here's to the scarlets and lemon yellows, so vivid one could warm his hands over them. Here's the eye-popping greens and blues and indigos, the crimsons and oranges. Here's to the blacks and whites and thousands of shades of grays between, too. I could use them all in my life.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Sarah
Our older cat, Sarah, was nearly twenty-two when she passed away last week. That's ancient, for a cat. She'd been deaf for a couple of years, and somewhat frail, but almost up until the end, she had a vast enthusiasm for her three primary interests in life—food, peeing, and finding a warm body to cuddle next to.
We'd resigned ourselves to losing Sarah last year when all three of our cats were struck by a mystery virus, after we put our house on the market. Despite the fact that she was a crazy mess who couldn't breathe and stopped eating and drinking for two days, Sarah managed to bounce back even before the virus abruptly took our middle cat, Chloe. After that tragedy, any extra time we got with Sarah was more or less a blessing.
Sarah loved the smaller apartment in which we've been living in Connecticut. She had no stairs to climb in order to reach her litter box. The paths from her favorite sleeping places to the water dish and food pan were short and swift. In her last months she took a lot of pleasure in finding unique places to nap. She investigated and made nests in any open cupboard. She would hop on the bed and take a circuitous route across pillows and bookcase shelves and laundry baskets to the tops of the bureaus, where she would nap in the sun, next to the windows.
She also loved to go outdoors, here. Whenever someone would head for the door, she'd perk up and scamper to follow. I'd proscribed Sarah from any of the usual supervised outdoor trips I take with Fred, because she has had a lifelong tendency of vomiting, liberally and copiously, that was only intensified when she ate grass. (Once, notoriously, she stuck her head under the lid of our grand piano and yakked up on the strings.) The courtyard between our house and the church is paved with slate, however, with very little grass. She enjoyed sunning herself on the warm stones, over the summer.
The screen door of our apartment doesn't shut immediately when it's closed; it hangs open at the quarter point, lingers for a while, and then gently closes ten seconds later. In August, Craig left the house for a rehearsal one afternoon and didn't notice Sarah escaping through the screen door behind him. He came back an hour and a half or two hours later to find her sweetly and complacently occupying the stoop outside the door. I'd no idea she'd gotten outdoors and was in the middle of making dinner when the pair of them returned. Craig was both frantic and remorseful, but Sarah glowed with the satisfaction of one who'd enjoyed a secret adventure.
It cheers me up to think she had that one last hurrah.
Sarah started to slow down the weekend before last. She stopped nagging us for food in the mornings; she ceased running for the door when I'd walk out to get the mail. She suddenly wasn't able to hop up onto the bed any longer, and even the much lower sofa was too much of a strain. By that Monday, she'd stopped eating. We kept her close, putting her next to us on the bed at night and keeping her by us during the daytime. She simply seemed to be winding down, like a top spinning in decreasing circles. By Wednesday we had to face a rough decision—was it kinder to have her put down, or simply to keep her by us until the end. We decided on the former. I couldn't bear the thought of her having some kind of terrible, painful medical emergency in the middle of the night or at some time when the vet's office wasn't open. We made an appointment for the afternoon.
We wrapped Sarah gently in a towel and drove to the vet's that afternoon. She passed away in my arms on the way over. And you know, rather than meeting the end on a cold exam table, I'm glad she went that way—quietly, of old age after a very long and happy life, warm, in my arms and surrounded by the two people who loved her most.
Isn't that all any of us could really hope for?
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Words from a WoWcaholic
My name is Vance, and I'm a WoWcaholic. I've been WoW-free for about six months, now.
I gave up World of Warcraft, the online multiplayer game that millions play, after a long love affair with the game that lasted over half a decade. My favorite thing to do in the evenings, after the work of the day was over and I had the leisure for it, was to log in, toodle around on one of my characters there, and relax. I played the original game—vanilla WoW, they call it, from close to the original release. I suffered through the indignities of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, as my characters were clad in armor of increasing multi-colored clownishness (for the men) or increasing skimpiness (for the chicks). I plowed through the snows of the Wrath of the Lich King. Then, when the third expansion, Cataclysm, came out . . . well, after a little of it, I was done.
Sometimes when people leave the game and write about it, they have a long laundry list of ills they want to communicate. I really don't. Sure, I was a little underwhelmed by the high-level content in the third expansion, and by the short length of time it took my first character to reach the top level of 85, from the previous cap of 80. I mean, basically all he did was explore the new profession of archaeology with some leisurely digs for artifacts and boom, he was 85 within a week, without having even visited any of the new zones.
And yeah, I had some dissatisfaction with the changes in raiding—the end-game activity that involves large groups of players attacking the same content (over and over, usually for weeks and months) for the game's best treasures. Never mind that for three or four years I'd always been game to be part of other people's groups, often anchoring them as one of the so-called 'tanks' who lead the way and absorb most of the damage from monsters—which I hated, by the way, but agreed to do because someone needed to do it, and the enjoyment of being in a large group outweighed my own reluctance to perform the task. Despite hours and hours over the years doing that, when the changes came out, I was part of no one's group, and there didn't seem to be room for me anywhere, any longer.
No, I had some minor gripes along those lines, but one day I was playing and sending a priest of mine through the desert lands of Uldum, and I thought about all the quests he had yet to do, and the dungeons he'd yet to suffer through the game's random matching system, and then all the crap he'd have to craft, and all the daily quests he'd have to do to get money in order to buy some starting end-game armor for the raids to which I wasn't being invited anyway, and I thought to myself, You know, this is too much like work. The fun had drained out of the game for me.
So I put it away for a week, to see if I felt the same a few days down the road. Then I quietly canceled my account, and deleted the game from my desktop.
That was last April, and I've been WoW-free ever since.
Now, usually people who've quit the game like to pontificate about how much better they are since quitting. They talk about how they now have time for Life. Whatever that is. They manage to make it sound as if now they're not playing a computer game, they have time to finish that novel they were working on, and read Proust, and commit themselves to noble and charitable causes. I'm not going to make those claims, and not only because I completed several novels while still managing to have a great deal of fun with the game. And frankly, what I have more time for now is reading and television. One of those might sound noble, but the other involves a lot of reality shows and Top Model, and I'm not going to claim any superiority for it.
No, primarily I can't say I'm better free of the game because I still miss it. Some parts of that world I knew and liked better than my own neighborhood. I still have dreams about flying on dragon wings over mountain ranges and marshes swarming with gurgling Murlocs. I miss working with real, remote people as part of a group and killing imaginary monsters with our magics and weapons. I made some good friends through the game; it's tough to denounce anything that leads to people enjoying each others' company.
But every time I get the itch to return, I think about all the snake eyeballs and the tiny jewels and magical beans I'd have to collect for the in-game quest-givers, and I think about the accumulated hours I've wasted waiting for people in my groups to get back from bathroom breaks, and I think about the monotony of the repeated quests I'd have to do for money, and I think I'm well out of it.
I miss it. But I don't, at the same time. And for now, I'm good with that.
I gave up World of Warcraft, the online multiplayer game that millions play, after a long love affair with the game that lasted over half a decade. My favorite thing to do in the evenings, after the work of the day was over and I had the leisure for it, was to log in, toodle around on one of my characters there, and relax. I played the original game—vanilla WoW, they call it, from close to the original release. I suffered through the indignities of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, as my characters were clad in armor of increasing multi-colored clownishness (for the men) or increasing skimpiness (for the chicks). I plowed through the snows of the Wrath of the Lich King. Then, when the third expansion, Cataclysm, came out . . . well, after a little of it, I was done.
Sometimes when people leave the game and write about it, they have a long laundry list of ills they want to communicate. I really don't. Sure, I was a little underwhelmed by the high-level content in the third expansion, and by the short length of time it took my first character to reach the top level of 85, from the previous cap of 80. I mean, basically all he did was explore the new profession of archaeology with some leisurely digs for artifacts and boom, he was 85 within a week, without having even visited any of the new zones.
And yeah, I had some dissatisfaction with the changes in raiding—the end-game activity that involves large groups of players attacking the same content (over and over, usually for weeks and months) for the game's best treasures. Never mind that for three or four years I'd always been game to be part of other people's groups, often anchoring them as one of the so-called 'tanks' who lead the way and absorb most of the damage from monsters—which I hated, by the way, but agreed to do because someone needed to do it, and the enjoyment of being in a large group outweighed my own reluctance to perform the task. Despite hours and hours over the years doing that, when the changes came out, I was part of no one's group, and there didn't seem to be room for me anywhere, any longer.
No, I had some minor gripes along those lines, but one day I was playing and sending a priest of mine through the desert lands of Uldum, and I thought about all the quests he had yet to do, and the dungeons he'd yet to suffer through the game's random matching system, and then all the crap he'd have to craft, and all the daily quests he'd have to do to get money in order to buy some starting end-game armor for the raids to which I wasn't being invited anyway, and I thought to myself, You know, this is too much like work. The fun had drained out of the game for me.
So I put it away for a week, to see if I felt the same a few days down the road. Then I quietly canceled my account, and deleted the game from my desktop.
That was last April, and I've been WoW-free ever since.
Now, usually people who've quit the game like to pontificate about how much better they are since quitting. They talk about how they now have time for Life. Whatever that is. They manage to make it sound as if now they're not playing a computer game, they have time to finish that novel they were working on, and read Proust, and commit themselves to noble and charitable causes. I'm not going to make those claims, and not only because I completed several novels while still managing to have a great deal of fun with the game. And frankly, what I have more time for now is reading and television. One of those might sound noble, but the other involves a lot of reality shows and Top Model, and I'm not going to claim any superiority for it.
No, primarily I can't say I'm better free of the game because I still miss it. Some parts of that world I knew and liked better than my own neighborhood. I still have dreams about flying on dragon wings over mountain ranges and marshes swarming with gurgling Murlocs. I miss working with real, remote people as part of a group and killing imaginary monsters with our magics and weapons. I made some good friends through the game; it's tough to denounce anything that leads to people enjoying each others' company.
But every time I get the itch to return, I think about all the snake eyeballs and the tiny jewels and magical beans I'd have to collect for the in-game quest-givers, and I think about the accumulated hours I've wasted waiting for people in my groups to get back from bathroom breaks, and I think about the monotony of the repeated quests I'd have to do for money, and I think I'm well out of it.
I miss it. But I don't, at the same time. And for now, I'm good with that.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
R.I.P., Borders
When I first moved to Detroit in 1987, I didn't have a car. If I couldn't walk to a place, I couldn't get to it, pretty basically. I managed to remedy the situation within my first six months, but at that point I didn't really have any idea where to go. So I asked around my fellow grad students. They all had one answer: Borders.
In those days there were only two branches of what was eventually going to be come the massive, and now defunct, Borders chain. There was the original stores in Ann Arbor, and the much-closer and smaller branch in Southfield, Michigan. Borders was my very first off-campus venture that winter. It was supposed to be a great bookstore, and I was a graduate student who collected any book that looked remotely interesting. More importantly, it was a straight shot from campus up a major artery, and I was pretty sure I could find it without getting lost.
Borders was magical then. It simply was the best bookstore in the world. I'd been to Scribner's and Barnes and Noble and other pretenders, and enjoyed them all, but Borders was magical. On my first visit I didn't emerge for four hours. I started to visit every Saturday morning, making a day of it—a bagel in my old clunker of a car on the way, a good three hours among the dense stacks of Borders, then a long lunch somewhere cheap with my find of the day.
Borders had everything, back then. In the days before Amazon or other online retailers, they offered a rich back catalogue of authors past and present. Every favorite author I had at the time was represented on their shelves. They carried books by E. F. Benson of which I'd never heard, and the kind of obscure British novelists that starred in the wettest of my grad school dreams. The place was like Disneyland, drenched in light from its tall windows. It even came complete with a fleet of helpful workers who could answer any questions I ever had. The test that Borders employees had to pass in order to gain employment there was tougher than my literature qualifying exams.
My parents both loved Borders, too. When they'd visited Detroit, the bookstore was the first place they wanted to visit. My dad usually found his patience tried in bookstores, but he could linger for hours in Borders' rich history section. My mother would accumulate a stack of books a couple of feet high, every visit, and walk out with two shopping bags full of volumes, each of which tucked with one of the store's endearing and ugly hand-drawn bookmarks. Together we drove, during one visit, to Ann Arbor and discovered the original store together, a two-story building in which we could all get lost for hours.
I loved Borders for years as they opened up branches throughout the Detroit area. The Ann Arbor branch was always a test balloon for experimental programs—they tried selling software for a few years, and then were the first store to sell CDs and videotapes, well before the others.
Apparently the experiment worked, because when even more branches began to open up in the area, they all had the video and CD sections. Shortly after that, the chain went national—and it changed.
When Borders expanded into a nation-wide chain, the depth of selection disappeared. The titles on the shelves homogenized. Instead of the quirky and unpredictable picks by the branch's booksellers, the end caps and tables were filled with paid placement. The amount of bookshelf space shrank; the amount of games and gifts and notecards and just plain old crap grew.
I became disenchanted with the chain early in the 2000s, roughly around the time I started getting published. I kept getting reports from irate friends who'd walk into Borders and find that none of my books were there—like it's my fault. I kept asking my agent and publisher to figure out what was going on, and it turned out that the woman who ordered juvenile titles was on maternity leave. Apparently the chain didn't delegate her duties to anyone else, or bother to have a backup. Now, Smooch had its own problems, but when one person goes AWOL for months and there's no one to order your books for an entire nationwide chain of stores, there's definitely some kind of problem going on.
It was soon after that I found Borders wasn't a destination any longer. It was the place I'd go when I had time to kill when a Barnes and Noble or independent bookstore wasn't around. I certainly wouldn't go for the book selection, which was spotty, or the CDs, which were hideously overpriced. I couldn't always count on the clerks, some of whom were enthusiastic and knowledgable, but others were so disgruntled or overworked or just plain ornery that they'd grunt and jerk their shoulders in the direction of the computer I was supposed to be using instead of bothering them as they restocked the magnetic poetry section.
I'm sad that Borders is no more. When its doors closed last week, I hadn't stepped foot into a branch in at least a year. Yet in my memories of when I first became acquainted with it, it was heaven itself—a golden, sun-drenched expanse of bookcases filled with interesting things to read and crowded with happy people anxious to discover something new
In those days there were only two branches of what was eventually going to be come the massive, and now defunct, Borders chain. There was the original stores in Ann Arbor, and the much-closer and smaller branch in Southfield, Michigan. Borders was my very first off-campus venture that winter. It was supposed to be a great bookstore, and I was a graduate student who collected any book that looked remotely interesting. More importantly, it was a straight shot from campus up a major artery, and I was pretty sure I could find it without getting lost.
Borders was magical then. It simply was the best bookstore in the world. I'd been to Scribner's and Barnes and Noble and other pretenders, and enjoyed them all, but Borders was magical. On my first visit I didn't emerge for four hours. I started to visit every Saturday morning, making a day of it—a bagel in my old clunker of a car on the way, a good three hours among the dense stacks of Borders, then a long lunch somewhere cheap with my find of the day.
Borders had everything, back then. In the days before Amazon or other online retailers, they offered a rich back catalogue of authors past and present. Every favorite author I had at the time was represented on their shelves. They carried books by E. F. Benson of which I'd never heard, and the kind of obscure British novelists that starred in the wettest of my grad school dreams. The place was like Disneyland, drenched in light from its tall windows. It even came complete with a fleet of helpful workers who could answer any questions I ever had. The test that Borders employees had to pass in order to gain employment there was tougher than my literature qualifying exams.
My parents both loved Borders, too. When they'd visited Detroit, the bookstore was the first place they wanted to visit. My dad usually found his patience tried in bookstores, but he could linger for hours in Borders' rich history section. My mother would accumulate a stack of books a couple of feet high, every visit, and walk out with two shopping bags full of volumes, each of which tucked with one of the store's endearing and ugly hand-drawn bookmarks. Together we drove, during one visit, to Ann Arbor and discovered the original store together, a two-story building in which we could all get lost for hours.
I loved Borders for years as they opened up branches throughout the Detroit area. The Ann Arbor branch was always a test balloon for experimental programs—they tried selling software for a few years, and then were the first store to sell CDs and videotapes, well before the others.
Apparently the experiment worked, because when even more branches began to open up in the area, they all had the video and CD sections. Shortly after that, the chain went national—and it changed.
When Borders expanded into a nation-wide chain, the depth of selection disappeared. The titles on the shelves homogenized. Instead of the quirky and unpredictable picks by the branch's booksellers, the end caps and tables were filled with paid placement. The amount of bookshelf space shrank; the amount of games and gifts and notecards and just plain old crap grew.
I became disenchanted with the chain early in the 2000s, roughly around the time I started getting published. I kept getting reports from irate friends who'd walk into Borders and find that none of my books were there—like it's my fault. I kept asking my agent and publisher to figure out what was going on, and it turned out that the woman who ordered juvenile titles was on maternity leave. Apparently the chain didn't delegate her duties to anyone else, or bother to have a backup. Now, Smooch had its own problems, but when one person goes AWOL for months and there's no one to order your books for an entire nationwide chain of stores, there's definitely some kind of problem going on.
It was soon after that I found Borders wasn't a destination any longer. It was the place I'd go when I had time to kill when a Barnes and Noble or independent bookstore wasn't around. I certainly wouldn't go for the book selection, which was spotty, or the CDs, which were hideously overpriced. I couldn't always count on the clerks, some of whom were enthusiastic and knowledgable, but others were so disgruntled or overworked or just plain ornery that they'd grunt and jerk their shoulders in the direction of the computer I was supposed to be using instead of bothering them as they restocked the magnetic poetry section.
I'm sad that Borders is no more. When its doors closed last week, I hadn't stepped foot into a branch in at least a year. Yet in my memories of when I first became acquainted with it, it was heaven itself—a golden, sun-drenched expanse of bookcases filled with interesting things to read and crowded with happy people anxious to discover something new
Monday, August 1, 2011
The New Frugality
To a certain extent, I enjoy watching certain food-related shows on television. I suppose I like the ones in which chefs are engaged in some kind of competition, whether it's to be Top Chef, or the Next Food Network Star. I'm really fond of Chopped, that show in which one of the Queer Eye guys gives the competitors identical picnic baskets containing impossible ingredients—an obscure fruit from Indonesia, a packet of beef jerky, a small twist of chocolate nonpareils, and a pound of rice crackers—and demands that they prepare within thirty minutes for the persnickety judges a delicious, piping hot gourmet entree.
I suppose what I like to see in my food television is the sight of perplexed chefs sweating in their food.
As much as I enjoy the seemingly endless parade of cocky chefs being publicly humiliated on the TV when they're unable in a quickfire competition to create the perfect amuse-bouche solely out of products found in a Krispy Kreme franchise, what I'm not particularly entranced by, of late, is the cult of the celebrity chef. The phenomenon is particularly odious on television, where any hotshot with a set of knives and a tattoo or three can bring his swagger in front of the camera. Bonus points if the chef in question wears douchebag hats and carries a skateboard in his late thirties.
And you know, my attitude with these people, whether they're some hopped-up nobody running a molecular gastronomy deconstructed pizza joint in the Bronx, or Gordon Effing-Eff-Effable-Eff-Eff Ramsey, is something along the lines of Listen, you're about the same to me as the slob at the IHOP griddle, so bitch, get in the damned kitchen and make me a stack of chocolate chip pancakes.
I just dislike the stink of the sanctimony of these people. I disliked it immensely when recently I read a chef autobiography of a particularly spiky and nasty woman who, three-quarters of the way in, ranted about how she didn't understand why the common people ate fast-food meals because she would rather go hungry than eat anything that wasn't made from locally-grown, in-season produce and free-range protein sources that weren't prepared with classical techniques at the hands of trained professionals. Like herself. For fifty dollars a course. Thinking about it only makes me want to go on one of my rants again. Hold me back, boys!
I'm not trying to malign all chefs, here. Just those who think that based on their profession, they're hotshots. To them and to their fellow foodies, consumption is a new religion. They've found a new (and admittedly, probably more delicious than mainstream Christianity) way to divide the faithful few from the great unwashed masses. Just like religious conservatives, they also use every opportunity to rub it in our faces.
I'm indulging in this rant simply to get around to a particularly irritating trend I've noticed floating around the blogosphere lately: frugal foodieism. Really frugal foodieism.
The essays start off innocently enough. The author and her husband (it's probably coincidence, but they're all written by women) find themselves in reduced circumstances. They've had to give up the flat in New York City and move to the cheaper suburbs, where there's not even a Le Pain Quotidien in the zip code. And what do they do when they get there? Do they haunt Whole Food Market and substitute flank steak for osso bucco?
No, what they apparently do is go scavaging in nature. They pick wild sorrel and dandelion greens for their salads, and scrape and dry obscure mushrooms found by roadside lay-bys. They harvest seaweed to season their brown rice. They use their high-speed internet connections and Macbooks in order to write genteelly about their poverty and to research which lichens are edible and can be used in a chic post-modern fusion of Japanese and classic French cookery.
It's freakin' irritating. Not only are they claiming the sanctimony of foodieism, but they get to experience a Thoreuvian rush of self-sufficiency from the land and a (probably false) sense of economy as well. It's like the trifecta of poncey cliquishness that makes me want to reach for a bag of taco-flavored Doritos and munch on them sullenly.
Listen. I know I do weird-ass stuff, like make my own jams from fresh fruit (peaches were a dollar a pound! I had to do something with them!), or bake my own bread, or make my own yogurt. But I don't bask in the self-righteousness of it all, after. I eat my good eats and move on.
If I ever start lovingly eyeing my neighbor's dandelion-covered lawn and licking my lips while I contemplate writing an article about The New Frugality, though? Please knock me cold with a box of Bisquick and bury me in the dumpster in the back of the IHOP, thank you very much.
I suppose what I like to see in my food television is the sight of perplexed chefs sweating in their food.
As much as I enjoy the seemingly endless parade of cocky chefs being publicly humiliated on the TV when they're unable in a quickfire competition to create the perfect amuse-bouche solely out of products found in a Krispy Kreme franchise, what I'm not particularly entranced by, of late, is the cult of the celebrity chef. The phenomenon is particularly odious on television, where any hotshot with a set of knives and a tattoo or three can bring his swagger in front of the camera. Bonus points if the chef in question wears douchebag hats and carries a skateboard in his late thirties.
And you know, my attitude with these people, whether they're some hopped-up nobody running a molecular gastronomy deconstructed pizza joint in the Bronx, or Gordon Effing-Eff-Effable-Eff-Eff Ramsey, is something along the lines of Listen, you're about the same to me as the slob at the IHOP griddle, so bitch, get in the damned kitchen and make me a stack of chocolate chip pancakes.
I just dislike the stink of the sanctimony of these people. I disliked it immensely when recently I read a chef autobiography of a particularly spiky and nasty woman who, three-quarters of the way in, ranted about how she didn't understand why the common people ate fast-food meals because she would rather go hungry than eat anything that wasn't made from locally-grown, in-season produce and free-range protein sources that weren't prepared with classical techniques at the hands of trained professionals. Like herself. For fifty dollars a course. Thinking about it only makes me want to go on one of my rants again. Hold me back, boys!
I'm not trying to malign all chefs, here. Just those who think that based on their profession, they're hotshots. To them and to their fellow foodies, consumption is a new religion. They've found a new (and admittedly, probably more delicious than mainstream Christianity) way to divide the faithful few from the great unwashed masses. Just like religious conservatives, they also use every opportunity to rub it in our faces.
I'm indulging in this rant simply to get around to a particularly irritating trend I've noticed floating around the blogosphere lately: frugal foodieism. Really frugal foodieism.
The essays start off innocently enough. The author and her husband (it's probably coincidence, but they're all written by women) find themselves in reduced circumstances. They've had to give up the flat in New York City and move to the cheaper suburbs, where there's not even a Le Pain Quotidien in the zip code. And what do they do when they get there? Do they haunt Whole Food Market and substitute flank steak for osso bucco?
No, what they apparently do is go scavaging in nature. They pick wild sorrel and dandelion greens for their salads, and scrape and dry obscure mushrooms found by roadside lay-bys. They harvest seaweed to season their brown rice. They use their high-speed internet connections and Macbooks in order to write genteelly about their poverty and to research which lichens are edible and can be used in a chic post-modern fusion of Japanese and classic French cookery.
It's freakin' irritating. Not only are they claiming the sanctimony of foodieism, but they get to experience a Thoreuvian rush of self-sufficiency from the land and a (probably false) sense of economy as well. It's like the trifecta of poncey cliquishness that makes me want to reach for a bag of taco-flavored Doritos and munch on them sullenly.
Listen. I know I do weird-ass stuff, like make my own jams from fresh fruit (peaches were a dollar a pound! I had to do something with them!), or bake my own bread, or make my own yogurt. But I don't bask in the self-righteousness of it all, after. I eat my good eats and move on.
If I ever start lovingly eyeing my neighbor's dandelion-covered lawn and licking my lips while I contemplate writing an article about The New Frugality, though? Please knock me cold with a box of Bisquick and bury me in the dumpster in the back of the IHOP, thank you very much.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Goodreads Roundup
Here's another set of books I've recently read, and the reviews I posted at Goodreads.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
by Erik Larson
(Four Stars)
In both the excellent Thunderstruck and The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson fashioned eminently readable and fascinating histories by intertwining two seemingly disparate narratives that, like magic, dovetailed at the climax—the twin tales of Marconi and the murderer Crippen, in the first, and the story of another murderer and the 1893 World's Fair, in the latter.
In In the Garden of Beasts Larson attempts to work the same magic with a story of innocents abroad in a time of ultimate danger and darkness: the stories of William E. Dodd, hapless U.S. ambassador to Germany during Adolf Hitler's ascendancy between the world wars, and of his daughter, Martha Dodd, a free-spirited girl adrift in a city of corruption, deceit, and political intrigue.
The result is fascinating and, like his previous works, both enticing and gripping stuff. Despite the atrocities of the era, however, ultimately the book is a little bit of a disappointment; the father and daughter's tales are not so disparate as the stuff of Larson's other works. Both Dodds are, in their own ways, equally branded and blinded by their own naivete, and neither seems to have made much of a mark on their landscape. They're helpless and ultimate passive flotsam in an unstoppable flood of evil . . . and honestly, how much investment can a reader really make in the end for the detritus that bobs along on the deluge?
I'm not even certain Larson himself much cares, for the stories peter out at the end without any real climax or resolution. Though the writer exquisitely and carefully documents everything that happens between the years of 1933 and 1934 in the Dodd household, the remainder of their five-year term in Germany is dismissed and glossed over in the book's final dozen pages, as if nothing interesting happened either to them or in Nazi Germany during those years. It's a disappointing conclusion.
The Dodds are a fascinating entry point to what should have been a truly remarkable look at a terrible era. Ultimately, however, they simply aren't the heroic protagonists he wishes them to be.
If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't)
by Betty White
(Three Stars)
To say that Betty White's latest book—I suppose we should call it that, as it's tough to deny that it got printed and appears on bookstore and library shelves—is a bit random and scattered, is an understatement. To imply it's a lot like listening to your aged grandmother ramble about the good old days when she's in a talkative mood, would be unkind. To suggest that it's not great literature, or even really readable. . . well, that's kind of missing the point.
I was able to complete this slight little tome in an hour. White's oddball collection of mini-essays reads more like a handful of dictated and unedited blog entries than any kind of memoir. She discusses her health (which is great for her age—she tries to maintain her weight, you know, and all those stairs in her home really keep her exercised!), her guest appearance on Saturday Night Live (it was fun!), and her pets (she had a lot!), and . . . oh damn, I've gone and given away the entire plot of the book. Whoopsie.
The photos of White throughout her long career really glue the whole thing together. They show a smiling, sweet and classy entertainer from her high school years to her dotage, and it's for those that I give the book three stars.
A Queer History of the United States
by Michael Bronski
(Three Stars)
A Queer History of the United States takes the Schoolhouse Rock approach to surveying queer culture in America. It's fast-moving, it hits all the expected high and low points, it's affirming, and it never explores its subject beyond cartoon depth. All it really lacks is a catchy tune.
Though the book alleges to cover a period of time spanning from before 1492 to the present, its pre-colonial and colonial history is at best sketchy—in fact, just about anything before the turn of the twentieth century is simply a quick run-down of the usual literary and political suspects (Walt Whitman might've been gay, y'all!). And by 'the present', Bronski means 1990, the year at which he unapologetically cuts off his narrative.
Bronski's gallop through several hundred years of history certainly covers a lot of territory, and for that it may be worth reading. Anyone expecting analysis or a critical eye may be disappointed to find that the read is a bit like attending a cocktail party and hearing all the expected names dropped, but not being able after to remember if anything interesting about them was said.
Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America
by Jonathan Dixon
(Three Stars)
Whether Tom Brown's Schooldays or the Harry Potter series, I'm a sucker for books in which a neophyte goes to school for the first time, endures its rigors and harsh realities, and emerges a better person after learning some hard-earned truths about himself and the limits of endurance. Ultimately the success of the story depends on the hero's transformation by graduation. While Jonathan Dixon's memoir of his education at the Culinary Institute of America follows the skeleton of the old schoolboy tale archetype, his overall character fails to improve, much less impress.
It's difficult to have such a sad sack as the focal point of a memoir. Dixon is a self-admitted slacker who wasted away his twenties and gambled his and his girlfriend's well-beings and limited resources in order to achieve a career change in his late thirties. (Throughout the book, he's morbidly sensitive about his age, to the point that his readers are embarrassed for his continual apologies for having lived longer than Methuselah. Dude, you're in your thirties. Not your seventies. Even if you were? Get the hell over it.) He's mopey, he's glum, he's continually worried and—let's be frank—obviously not the best student. And at book's end, sad to say, any confidence or mastery he may have achieved as a result of matriculating are squandered when he faces the future with the same aimless apathy as he's spent the rest of his allegedly advanced years.
It's a pity, because a great deal of his experiences at the CIA are interesting to outsiders: the rigid curriculum, the tyrannical and eccentric instructors, the obstacles to be overcome and the rigorous hoops to be jumped. The CIA has such a methodical and well-thought-out course structure, however, that it seems pretty obvious that any of the insights of which Dixon writes aren't his, but the school's—the exact realizations the institute wants its students to make at exact points in their training. Nor does it help that many of Dixon's class descriptions sound as if he's summarized his saved syllabi. The other students in the memoir are not much more than cyphers or personality tics who vanish quickly, like anything expendable. The instructors are a bit more fleshed out, but for most Dixon has precious little affection, and imparts a sense that he's settling some personal scores and grinding a few paring knives (if not axes) by giving himself the last word.
The book cured me of any vague wonderings I may have had of wishing for an alternative life path that might have involved the CIA, certainly. I'm just fortunate that, unlike Dixon, I never applied on whim and attended solely for the purpose of being able to host and cook for slightly snobbier dinner parties.
My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir
by Dick Van Dyke
(Two Stars)
Dick Van Dyke's celebrity memoir, spanning his career of sixty years, goes down like mayonnaise on white bread--unobjectionable, but hardly interesting. Everything passes by without much impact or examination. His work on the groundbreaking The Dick Van Dyke Show was fun. Mary Tyler Moore was a sweet gal. Walt Disney was a heck of a guy. Martin Luther King Jr. sure was swell.
It's a little odd that the most emotionally-resonant scene in the book (moreso than either his divorce or the death of a beloved granddaughter, even) involves his relationship with Dinky, a trained chimp for the movie Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N. But hey, it's Hollywood, where every monkey gets a shot at the big time.
The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
(Four Stars)
Sarah Vowell's account of the puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is anything but a typical romp through early American history. She's got her own axe to grind, here—the ways in which modern-day politicians have appropriated (and in some instances, perverted) puritan idealism into something probably not what the small band of colonists had in mind. But along the way in this rambling narrative, which jumps crazily from political landscapes past and present to Vowell's own history, she manages to make very clear how deeply engrained many of the puritan ideals have become in the national dialogue.
The book's short. Whether or not one finds it readable would depend, I think, partly on how closely one's political agenda aligns with Vowell's, and partly on how much one can tolerate the current generation of self-referential hipster NPR commentators.
Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
by Julie Andrews Edwards
(Four Stars)
I confess that in the early pages of Julie Andrews Edwards' memoirs I began to fear I might be overwhelmed in trying to keep straight the names of all her aunts, dogs, and cousins. There seem, in my weary memory, to have been about a dozen of each. More electrifying, however, is the story that unfolds of the three men vying to be the star's father—her mother's first husband, whom she thought of as her dad, the alcoholic artist of a second husband whom Julie supplanted as a headliner on his own tour, and the man later revealed to have been her biological progenitor. Julie's mom kind of got around, basically.
The memoir really gathers steam when Julie's career takes off—which happened at about the same age that most of us hadn't yet finished sixth grade. The narrative of her rise to fame from vaudeville to London revues and pantomimes to the New York stage is fascinating, and the star manages to relate it with characteristic modesty and good humor. In a curious twist, I found myself actually rooting for her to get parts in Camelot and Mary Poppins and worrying that she wouldn't—even though I knew exactly how it would turn out. If that's not a sign of a well-told tale, I don't know what is.
The book concludes at roughly the time of the star's first meetings with Walt Disney: the perfect point at which to whet my appetite for a second volume.
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
by Wendy McClure
(Three Stars)
McClure's account of her lifelong obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder-penned Little House series culminates in a rambling journey through the nation's countryside, visiting all of the childhood homesteads Wilder mentioned in her popular books. McClure's off-kilter and occasionally profane individuality contrasts humorously with the heterodoxy of the many other Wilder enthusiasts she encounters along the way, resulting in an engaging and quick read.
However, the narrative is as meandering and out-of-step as the route McClure takes to her heroine's homesteads. It's ultimately about as pointless, too, as McClure really has no idea why she feels compelled to make the literary pilgrimage, or what she expects from each stop along the way.
That's a pity.
McClure nails her own dilemma fairly early on in the book: she wants to immerse herself in 'Laura World', as she calls it, in order to get a sense of its so-called realness—despite the fact that she's fully aware that the Little House series was written as fiction, is classified as fiction in bookstores and on library shelves, and took on a fictional second life as a television series in the nineteen-seventies. Her visits to the homesteads, amusing and blog-like as the recounting may be, all conclude with her missing and yearning for a certain lacking something—something upon which she is unable to put a finger.
McClure may glibly assert, as she does in her visit to the Almanzo Wilder childhood home, that something is as simple as pancakes. It's not. It's merely that spark of wonder and imagination she experienced upon reading the books in childhood. Attempting to chase that particular quality over the dusty back roads of Kansas and Missouri is hopeless; one would be as likely to book a modern-day bus tour of the principal sights of Narnia. It's a sense of looking within, and reconciling a childhood delight of reading and imagining with modern-day realities, that this particular book lacks. Watching the adult McClure trade in that delight for a long-range, expensive obsession may result in a glib and often funny memoir, but it's ultimately an empty experience for author and reader alike.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
by Erik Larson
(Four Stars)
In both the excellent Thunderstruck and The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson fashioned eminently readable and fascinating histories by intertwining two seemingly disparate narratives that, like magic, dovetailed at the climax—the twin tales of Marconi and the murderer Crippen, in the first, and the story of another murderer and the 1893 World's Fair, in the latter.
In In the Garden of Beasts Larson attempts to work the same magic with a story of innocents abroad in a time of ultimate danger and darkness: the stories of William E. Dodd, hapless U.S. ambassador to Germany during Adolf Hitler's ascendancy between the world wars, and of his daughter, Martha Dodd, a free-spirited girl adrift in a city of corruption, deceit, and political intrigue.
The result is fascinating and, like his previous works, both enticing and gripping stuff. Despite the atrocities of the era, however, ultimately the book is a little bit of a disappointment; the father and daughter's tales are not so disparate as the stuff of Larson's other works. Both Dodds are, in their own ways, equally branded and blinded by their own naivete, and neither seems to have made much of a mark on their landscape. They're helpless and ultimate passive flotsam in an unstoppable flood of evil . . . and honestly, how much investment can a reader really make in the end for the detritus that bobs along on the deluge?
I'm not even certain Larson himself much cares, for the stories peter out at the end without any real climax or resolution. Though the writer exquisitely and carefully documents everything that happens between the years of 1933 and 1934 in the Dodd household, the remainder of their five-year term in Germany is dismissed and glossed over in the book's final dozen pages, as if nothing interesting happened either to them or in Nazi Germany during those years. It's a disappointing conclusion.
The Dodds are a fascinating entry point to what should have been a truly remarkable look at a terrible era. Ultimately, however, they simply aren't the heroic protagonists he wishes them to be.
If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't)
by Betty White
(Three Stars)
To say that Betty White's latest book—I suppose we should call it that, as it's tough to deny that it got printed and appears on bookstore and library shelves—is a bit random and scattered, is an understatement. To imply it's a lot like listening to your aged grandmother ramble about the good old days when she's in a talkative mood, would be unkind. To suggest that it's not great literature, or even really readable. . . well, that's kind of missing the point.
I was able to complete this slight little tome in an hour. White's oddball collection of mini-essays reads more like a handful of dictated and unedited blog entries than any kind of memoir. She discusses her health (which is great for her age—she tries to maintain her weight, you know, and all those stairs in her home really keep her exercised!), her guest appearance on Saturday Night Live (it was fun!), and her pets (she had a lot!), and . . . oh damn, I've gone and given away the entire plot of the book. Whoopsie.
The photos of White throughout her long career really glue the whole thing together. They show a smiling, sweet and classy entertainer from her high school years to her dotage, and it's for those that I give the book three stars.
A Queer History of the United States
by Michael Bronski
(Three Stars)
A Queer History of the United States takes the Schoolhouse Rock approach to surveying queer culture in America. It's fast-moving, it hits all the expected high and low points, it's affirming, and it never explores its subject beyond cartoon depth. All it really lacks is a catchy tune.
Though the book alleges to cover a period of time spanning from before 1492 to the present, its pre-colonial and colonial history is at best sketchy—in fact, just about anything before the turn of the twentieth century is simply a quick run-down of the usual literary and political suspects (Walt Whitman might've been gay, y'all!). And by 'the present', Bronski means 1990, the year at which he unapologetically cuts off his narrative.
Bronski's gallop through several hundred years of history certainly covers a lot of territory, and for that it may be worth reading. Anyone expecting analysis or a critical eye may be disappointed to find that the read is a bit like attending a cocktail party and hearing all the expected names dropped, but not being able after to remember if anything interesting about them was said.
Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America
by Jonathan Dixon
(Three Stars)
Whether Tom Brown's Schooldays or the Harry Potter series, I'm a sucker for books in which a neophyte goes to school for the first time, endures its rigors and harsh realities, and emerges a better person after learning some hard-earned truths about himself and the limits of endurance. Ultimately the success of the story depends on the hero's transformation by graduation. While Jonathan Dixon's memoir of his education at the Culinary Institute of America follows the skeleton of the old schoolboy tale archetype, his overall character fails to improve, much less impress.
It's difficult to have such a sad sack as the focal point of a memoir. Dixon is a self-admitted slacker who wasted away his twenties and gambled his and his girlfriend's well-beings and limited resources in order to achieve a career change in his late thirties. (Throughout the book, he's morbidly sensitive about his age, to the point that his readers are embarrassed for his continual apologies for having lived longer than Methuselah. Dude, you're in your thirties. Not your seventies. Even if you were? Get the hell over it.) He's mopey, he's glum, he's continually worried and—let's be frank—obviously not the best student. And at book's end, sad to say, any confidence or mastery he may have achieved as a result of matriculating are squandered when he faces the future with the same aimless apathy as he's spent the rest of his allegedly advanced years.
It's a pity, because a great deal of his experiences at the CIA are interesting to outsiders: the rigid curriculum, the tyrannical and eccentric instructors, the obstacles to be overcome and the rigorous hoops to be jumped. The CIA has such a methodical and well-thought-out course structure, however, that it seems pretty obvious that any of the insights of which Dixon writes aren't his, but the school's—the exact realizations the institute wants its students to make at exact points in their training. Nor does it help that many of Dixon's class descriptions sound as if he's summarized his saved syllabi. The other students in the memoir are not much more than cyphers or personality tics who vanish quickly, like anything expendable. The instructors are a bit more fleshed out, but for most Dixon has precious little affection, and imparts a sense that he's settling some personal scores and grinding a few paring knives (if not axes) by giving himself the last word.
The book cured me of any vague wonderings I may have had of wishing for an alternative life path that might have involved the CIA, certainly. I'm just fortunate that, unlike Dixon, I never applied on whim and attended solely for the purpose of being able to host and cook for slightly snobbier dinner parties.
My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir
by Dick Van Dyke
(Two Stars)
Dick Van Dyke's celebrity memoir, spanning his career of sixty years, goes down like mayonnaise on white bread--unobjectionable, but hardly interesting. Everything passes by without much impact or examination. His work on the groundbreaking The Dick Van Dyke Show was fun. Mary Tyler Moore was a sweet gal. Walt Disney was a heck of a guy. Martin Luther King Jr. sure was swell.
It's a little odd that the most emotionally-resonant scene in the book (moreso than either his divorce or the death of a beloved granddaughter, even) involves his relationship with Dinky, a trained chimp for the movie Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N. But hey, it's Hollywood, where every monkey gets a shot at the big time.
The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
(Four Stars)
Sarah Vowell's account of the puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is anything but a typical romp through early American history. She's got her own axe to grind, here—the ways in which modern-day politicians have appropriated (and in some instances, perverted) puritan idealism into something probably not what the small band of colonists had in mind. But along the way in this rambling narrative, which jumps crazily from political landscapes past and present to Vowell's own history, she manages to make very clear how deeply engrained many of the puritan ideals have become in the national dialogue.
The book's short. Whether or not one finds it readable would depend, I think, partly on how closely one's political agenda aligns with Vowell's, and partly on how much one can tolerate the current generation of self-referential hipster NPR commentators.
Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
by Julie Andrews Edwards
(Four Stars)
I confess that in the early pages of Julie Andrews Edwards' memoirs I began to fear I might be overwhelmed in trying to keep straight the names of all her aunts, dogs, and cousins. There seem, in my weary memory, to have been about a dozen of each. More electrifying, however, is the story that unfolds of the three men vying to be the star's father—her mother's first husband, whom she thought of as her dad, the alcoholic artist of a second husband whom Julie supplanted as a headliner on his own tour, and the man later revealed to have been her biological progenitor. Julie's mom kind of got around, basically.
The memoir really gathers steam when Julie's career takes off—which happened at about the same age that most of us hadn't yet finished sixth grade. The narrative of her rise to fame from vaudeville to London revues and pantomimes to the New York stage is fascinating, and the star manages to relate it with characteristic modesty and good humor. In a curious twist, I found myself actually rooting for her to get parts in Camelot and Mary Poppins and worrying that she wouldn't—even though I knew exactly how it would turn out. If that's not a sign of a well-told tale, I don't know what is.
The book concludes at roughly the time of the star's first meetings with Walt Disney: the perfect point at which to whet my appetite for a second volume.
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
by Wendy McClure
(Three Stars)
McClure's account of her lifelong obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder-penned Little House series culminates in a rambling journey through the nation's countryside, visiting all of the childhood homesteads Wilder mentioned in her popular books. McClure's off-kilter and occasionally profane individuality contrasts humorously with the heterodoxy of the many other Wilder enthusiasts she encounters along the way, resulting in an engaging and quick read.
However, the narrative is as meandering and out-of-step as the route McClure takes to her heroine's homesteads. It's ultimately about as pointless, too, as McClure really has no idea why she feels compelled to make the literary pilgrimage, or what she expects from each stop along the way.
That's a pity.
McClure nails her own dilemma fairly early on in the book: she wants to immerse herself in 'Laura World', as she calls it, in order to get a sense of its so-called realness—despite the fact that she's fully aware that the Little House series was written as fiction, is classified as fiction in bookstores and on library shelves, and took on a fictional second life as a television series in the nineteen-seventies. Her visits to the homesteads, amusing and blog-like as the recounting may be, all conclude with her missing and yearning for a certain lacking something—something upon which she is unable to put a finger.
McClure may glibly assert, as she does in her visit to the Almanzo Wilder childhood home, that something is as simple as pancakes. It's not. It's merely that spark of wonder and imagination she experienced upon reading the books in childhood. Attempting to chase that particular quality over the dusty back roads of Kansas and Missouri is hopeless; one would be as likely to book a modern-day bus tour of the principal sights of Narnia. It's a sense of looking within, and reconciling a childhood delight of reading and imagining with modern-day realities, that this particular book lacks. Watching the adult McClure trade in that delight for a long-range, expensive obsession may result in a glib and often funny memoir, but it's ultimately an empty experience for author and reader alike.
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