One of the great wins of the digital age, as far as I’m concerned, is my ability to cherry-pick the news that’s important to me and have access to it around the clock. Since I spent a great deal of my childhood having to wait until 6:30 and the dinner hour in order to find out from Walter Cronkite what went on during the twenty-four hours before—and having it be (in my memory) a grim and unrelenting processions of Vietnam, assassinations, Watergate, and plane hijackings—I’ve got enough perspective to marvel.
So now, in the mornings or after lunch or right before bed, I’ll fire up one of my RSS readers and catch up on the news that’s important to me. Technology news. Science headlines. Theater gossip. Releases of new board games. Recipes from Cakespy. Book reviews. None of that distressing, distracting political nonsense, none of that downer news o’ the world. Just the blinkered subset I enjoy as I munch on a breakfast made from genetically-altered foodstuffs as I bask in the warm glow of an electronic device manufactured by those disgruntled ingrates at Foxconn.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself unhappy with a certain kind of pandering approach various of my long-term sites have been taking. They’ll compose the most incendiary and headlines ever, and then follow through with stories that are spectacularly mundane, or else just plain idiotic—all to garner follow-through clicks from readers.
One that I used to read because it was a fairly reliable source for both interesting scientific stories and Doctor Who-related rumors started posting, over the course of a few months, all kinds of stories about zombie apocalypse. How one could theoretically start. How quickly a zombie apocalypse could spread. What supplies would be best to have on hand in case of a zombie apocalypse. What cities would likely be zombified first.
At first I thought it was pretty amusing that a bunch of nerds who spent the day watching Warehouse 13 reruns while typing out 1300-word stories on spec were seriously assuming that they’d be the survivors of any kind of apocalypse—much less one that required being able to run and clamber any higher than it typically took them to reach for the frozen Hot Pockets. But then I just got tired of not knowing whether the so-called ‘scientific’ headline on which I was about to click was going to lead to a real news story, or one of their paranoid zombie fantasies, and I quietly dropped them from my feed.
Gizmodo was a site I read for years until I unceremoniously dumped it not that long ago. Although years back it used to be a fairly reliable source of tech news, it’s had a long and steady decline into sensationalism that’s been sad to watch. First they started following the trend of posting as gospel truth any back-fence talk that they picked up out of some badly-translated Japanese industry rumor rag. Then, as Apple’s fortunes grew, they hit upon the tactic of posting any kind of outrageous headlines they could with that company’s name in it, so that any reader who saw Does Apple Really Test iPhone Toxins on Helpless Baby Kittens?! and, thinking whaaat? to himself, clicked through, would be confronted with a story that blandly didn’t mention any kind of felines or torture at all.
Then Gizmodo got involved in a scandal of their own making a while back when they purchased a pre-release iPhone that an Apple engineer had accidentally left in a bar. When Apple got the LAPD involved and barred the site from its press events after, the editors acted like they were the company’s creepy schizo stalker ex-boyfriend, alternately sucking up to the company with sycophantic love-fests, begging Hey girl, get back with me and I promise to treat you right!, or turning around and bashing Apple for not putting out because obviously it was frigid, and probably a lesbo. I got tired of the antics and deleted their feed, too.
Both those sites earned my apathy over time. There’s one news source I’d been dubious about for some time—a site oriented toward time and effort-saving techniques that would give my life more leisure and peace of mind. I’d subscribed to it years ago because it carried useful articles about how to pack efficiently for a vacation, or how to iron a shirt more quickly and with fewer wrinkles, or how to fold a fitted sheet squarely. (I still haven’t learned the last. I’ve gotten to the point I just shove the fitted sheets into the cupboard in a wad and pray I never have overnight company.)
Sure, this site obsessed quite a bit on the GTD—Getting Things Done—system, which is one of those highly-organized and methodical ways of organizing your To-Do list so that you’re spending more time writing weekly, monthly, yearly, and five-yearly goals and organizing your To-Do list than actually, you know, getting anything done. But I could skip those articles.
I could not, however, avoid the article with this headline: Store Credit Cards in Peanut Butter to Avoid Impulse Shopping. I saw that and, just as they intended I should, thought Whaaaaaat?, and clicked on through to a story that indeed, as the headlines indicated, recommended shoving one’s credit cards into a full jar of peanut butter so that one wouldn’t be tempted to use them frivolously. Not, you know, put them in a safety deposit box, or at the back of a drawer, or in a piggy bank. Not give them to a loved one with the instructions to hide them. Not get rid of them altogether, if they’re that big a temptation.
Nope. Store them in a freakin’ jar of peanut butter.
That was the day—the exact moment—I removed that particular site from my feeds forever.
Here’s the thing. Yellow journalism is yellow journalism, whether it’s in the newspapers or on the web. Regurgitated rumors don’t hold any attraction for me. Neither do pseudoscience and speculation. Outrageous headlines might attract my curiosity, but when I click through and see something inane or inflammatory behind them—or something that’s just plain inane—it’s just going to make me wary of a site. Jerk with me often enough, and I’d be more likely to stick my credit cards in peanut butter than visit them again.
And I’m sure as heck not going to do that.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Confessions of a Free Sample Connoisseur
Let me admit, via anecdote, to a little folly that doesn’t exactly cast me as candidate for anybody’s brain trust.
When I first moved to Connecticut last year and had spent a day or two in the darkness of our little apartment attempting to recuperate from the trauma of driving cross-country for fourteen hours with two felines, one incontinent and one who protested as if she were being tortured with sharp bamboo stakes for the trip’s duration, I at last ventured outside for a walk into the picturesque surroundings of lovely Old Greenwich. It was the height of springtime. There were ducks on the pond across the street. Flowers bloomed on every tree. I took a deep breath of the fresh air, then began strolling down into the quaint little village.
Along the path, I passed a woman with a double stroller—a stroller of gothic proportions that probably cost more than my car and was roughly of the same bulk and manufacturer as the Munster Mobile. I smiled and nodded at the woman pushing the contraption. Her skin was coal black; the babies in her stroller were blond and white as Wonder Bread.
A couple of minutes later, I passed another dark-skinned woman pushing another stroller with a little blond girl in its seat. When I passed another woman of color with a couple of more little Aryans in tow, I innocently thought to myself, rather impressed, Gosh, there sure are a lot of interracial marriages in this neighborhood.
Then some other part of my brain mocked back, more accurately, You blithering idiot. Those women are NANNIES.
There are indeed a lot of nannies in this particular neck of the woods. They’re far outnumbered, however, by a species I’ve come to think of as the professional Connecticut Mommy. Now, I have to preface my remarks by saying that I know many mothers with small children, and it’s rare that I bear any animosity toward them. Hey, I had a mother myself. It’s hard work. And not all mothers in this state qualify to be a Connecticut Mommy.
When you see one, though, you know them as a breed apart. They’re the younger ones wearing lululemon for every occasion, whose long blond hair is always in pert ponytails. They have a smartphone in one hand, and the keys to their BMWs in the other. They’re the ones who have grooves across the tops of their palms from pushing their strollers, which they strategically use on sidewalks in the same way locomotives have cowcatchers, or which they nose out into traffic at crosswalks to test the volume and velocity of vehicular traffic. They’re an entitled breed with above-average wealth who pick up entire dinners at local caterers so that they can spend their afternoons scrapbooking their baby’s last play date, and who hire babysitters so they can crowd the Cos Cob Starbucks and meet other professional Connecticut Mommies to hog the tables and talk about . . . well, I don’t know what Mommy stuff they talk about, because I can never get a table there. (I swear, I can’t go to that branch any longer. It’s like a Starbucks stocked with identical blond clones from a Talbots catalogue.)
I’ll sum it up thusly: Connecticut Mommies often shop at Whole Foods Market without using a single coupon. Oh yes.
Marvel at that, if you will.
You see, I know much about the Connecticut Mommies because they and I have similar schedules. I have something of an aversion, bordering on morbid phobia, of driving on I-95 anytime between the hours of, oh, noon and midnight., when for a stretch of about fifteen miles the highway becomes a parking lot. So if I need to run an errand to a supermarket beyond the usual trip to Stop ’n’ Shop, or if I have to visit CostCo or head to the mall, I find myself doing it at the same time as all the professional Connecticut Mommies. I narrow my eyes when I see them and know that I’m going to have to do some nimble stroller dodging. Their eyes flick over me, note my sex, and with some special Mommy-only arsenal that you’d think the military might capitalize upon, render me invisible not only to each other, but to any clerks, shop assistants, or cashiers in a fifty-foot vicinity.
A professional Connecticut Mommy will think nothing of making me wait in line for thirty minutes at Kinko’s to pick up a simple completed order, while she makes the life-or-death decision of whether to have the staff there design birthday invitations to her darling’s first birthday in eighteen-point Comic Sans, or sixteen-point Comic Sans. Eighteen? Sixteen? Eighteen? What does the clerk think? In fact, what do all the clerks think? Sixteen? The clerks are rendered helpless by whatever dark magics the Connecticut Mommies work and become utterly helpless to multitask or utter the words Let one of us help this poor schmuck standing behind you, lady, it’ll just take a sec. All they can do, like stone statues before Medusas, is stare slack-jawed and motionless from the place of their final doom.
All right. Maybe I sound bitter. But you know why? It’s because when it comes to free food samples, Connecticut Mommies don’t respect the system.
I’m something of a free sample connoisseur, you see. (Some might say free sample whore. To-may-to, to-mah-to.) In casual conversation, I’ll get all Queen Victoria on the subject: if a supermarket isn’t putting out little samples of crackers and tortilla chips and waffle-cut pretzels, they are not an establishment we care to frequent, I will tell you with an upturned tilt of my nose. Why, when I was living on my own in Detroit and had to economize on groceries, I could get a free lunch out of an hour’s tour of local places that served free samples. An amuse-bouche of frozen chickpeas in Tikka Masala sauce at Trader Joe’s might be first on my menu. It would be followed by a delightful chef’s sampler platter at Costco of fried cheese, animal-shaped chicken fingers, bread-and-butter, and a delicious fruit-flavored chewable kid’s jelly vitamin. Then at Papa Joe’s in Birmingham, the epicenter of sampledom, I could really get down to business with their abundantly-shared cheese breads, fruits, apple slaw, three to four deli meats, scones, various crackers, cookies, and flavored popcorns, and store-made peanut butter if I needed something to stick to my ribs.
And the nicest thing about free samples in stores, as everyone knows, is that they’re completely devoid of calories. Really. I believe there are scientific studies.
There’s a simple system to these free samples. One approaches the station at which they’re being offered. One takes a single sample. One immediately moves on. People in Michigan knew how to do it. Everywhere else I’ve been, children or not, people understood how it worked. The thing about professional Connecticut Mommies, as I was saying, is that they don’t respect the system. Like the U.S. judicial branch, the system is there for a reason. It keeps us all equally protected. It keeps us from devolving into savages, people!
But no. These days, Stew Leonard’s is my current mecca for free samples. There the kindly bakers think absolutely nothing of taking muffins hot out of the oven, detaching the muffin tops from the bottoms, and then tossing the halves into an enormous basket for people to enjoy. That’s a whole muffin top, people. Not some measly mini-muffin. A big, fat, dome of fluffy baked goodness. But the moment that basket hits the counter, there’s sure to be a squadron of Connecticut Mommies zooming into formation with their strollers to assemble around it in such a way that no one of a non-Mommy persuasion can infiltrate past the spiked wheels of their rolling artillery.
They stand there. They sample the baked goods. They do not move on. They say "Hmm!" They munch and stare at the muffins as if they’re actually considering buying them. But they don’t. They say "Hmm!" again. And then, horror of horrors, boldly and without remorse or shame they will help themselves to another sample. Sometimes even a third.
In the meantime, I’m standing there hopping from one powerless foot to the other, barely able to restrain myself from yelling out all kinds of misogynistic vulgarities that would end with DAMN WOMAN I JUST WANT TO GET ME MY CALORIE-FREE CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFIN TOP, YO.
If during my muffin deprivation I’ll spy the woman by the hot donut machine setting out a punch bowl of donut holes, I can be sure to find that by the time I fleetly trip over, the Connecticut Mommies will have somehow materialized, like the Doctor’s Tardis, around the greasy machine, and that the bowl will be empty. Every trace of cinnamon sugar will have been sucked up into the time vortex. They might rely on Rosalias and Marias to do the vacuuming at home, but dang, do they know how to Hoover up the thick-cut sweet potato chips from their sample station. They stand in front of the cheese platters, spearing cube after cube of white cheddar, flaunting the unspoken rules of consumption and not even seeming to care. They block the aisles around the table of buffalo chicken spread on tiny crackers, so that no one with male genitalia may sally forth.
They’re even flocking like vultures at the samples of salad in the produce section, and who in their right minds wants a sample of salad? It’s another scientific fact that adding greenery to the free sample diet upsets its delicate nutritional balance.
It’s rude. It’s upsetting. And it’s even, from time to time, forced me to utter a statement so blasphemous that my younger self (that is, a younger self who still believed in the goodness and simplicity of the free sample ecosystem) would be shocked and disillusioned beyond belief to hear it muttered from my traitorous lips: “That’s okay, I didn’t want that stinky free sample, anyway.”
In this state, it only takes four Connecticut Mommies to be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and leave in their horrible wake nothing but ruin, crumbs, and my own personal starvation. Save for disguising myself as a professional Mommy, I know of no recourse. Yet I couldn’t pull it off—I can attest from experience that I look no good in a ponytail and form-fitting yoga clothes.
Plus there’s the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to emulate their poor example and take more than a single serving. After all, my own mommy taught me to share.
When I first moved to Connecticut last year and had spent a day or two in the darkness of our little apartment attempting to recuperate from the trauma of driving cross-country for fourteen hours with two felines, one incontinent and one who protested as if she were being tortured with sharp bamboo stakes for the trip’s duration, I at last ventured outside for a walk into the picturesque surroundings of lovely Old Greenwich. It was the height of springtime. There were ducks on the pond across the street. Flowers bloomed on every tree. I took a deep breath of the fresh air, then began strolling down into the quaint little village.
Along the path, I passed a woman with a double stroller—a stroller of gothic proportions that probably cost more than my car and was roughly of the same bulk and manufacturer as the Munster Mobile. I smiled and nodded at the woman pushing the contraption. Her skin was coal black; the babies in her stroller were blond and white as Wonder Bread.
A couple of minutes later, I passed another dark-skinned woman pushing another stroller with a little blond girl in its seat. When I passed another woman of color with a couple of more little Aryans in tow, I innocently thought to myself, rather impressed, Gosh, there sure are a lot of interracial marriages in this neighborhood.
Then some other part of my brain mocked back, more accurately, You blithering idiot. Those women are NANNIES.
There are indeed a lot of nannies in this particular neck of the woods. They’re far outnumbered, however, by a species I’ve come to think of as the professional Connecticut Mommy. Now, I have to preface my remarks by saying that I know many mothers with small children, and it’s rare that I bear any animosity toward them. Hey, I had a mother myself. It’s hard work. And not all mothers in this state qualify to be a Connecticut Mommy.
When you see one, though, you know them as a breed apart. They’re the younger ones wearing lululemon for every occasion, whose long blond hair is always in pert ponytails. They have a smartphone in one hand, and the keys to their BMWs in the other. They’re the ones who have grooves across the tops of their palms from pushing their strollers, which they strategically use on sidewalks in the same way locomotives have cowcatchers, or which they nose out into traffic at crosswalks to test the volume and velocity of vehicular traffic. They’re an entitled breed with above-average wealth who pick up entire dinners at local caterers so that they can spend their afternoons scrapbooking their baby’s last play date, and who hire babysitters so they can crowd the Cos Cob Starbucks and meet other professional Connecticut Mommies to hog the tables and talk about . . . well, I don’t know what Mommy stuff they talk about, because I can never get a table there. (I swear, I can’t go to that branch any longer. It’s like a Starbucks stocked with identical blond clones from a Talbots catalogue.)
I’ll sum it up thusly: Connecticut Mommies often shop at Whole Foods Market without using a single coupon. Oh yes.
Marvel at that, if you will.
You see, I know much about the Connecticut Mommies because they and I have similar schedules. I have something of an aversion, bordering on morbid phobia, of driving on I-95 anytime between the hours of, oh, noon and midnight., when for a stretch of about fifteen miles the highway becomes a parking lot. So if I need to run an errand to a supermarket beyond the usual trip to Stop ’n’ Shop, or if I have to visit CostCo or head to the mall, I find myself doing it at the same time as all the professional Connecticut Mommies. I narrow my eyes when I see them and know that I’m going to have to do some nimble stroller dodging. Their eyes flick over me, note my sex, and with some special Mommy-only arsenal that you’d think the military might capitalize upon, render me invisible not only to each other, but to any clerks, shop assistants, or cashiers in a fifty-foot vicinity.
A professional Connecticut Mommy will think nothing of making me wait in line for thirty minutes at Kinko’s to pick up a simple completed order, while she makes the life-or-death decision of whether to have the staff there design birthday invitations to her darling’s first birthday in eighteen-point Comic Sans, or sixteen-point Comic Sans. Eighteen? Sixteen? Eighteen? What does the clerk think? In fact, what do all the clerks think? Sixteen? The clerks are rendered helpless by whatever dark magics the Connecticut Mommies work and become utterly helpless to multitask or utter the words Let one of us help this poor schmuck standing behind you, lady, it’ll just take a sec. All they can do, like stone statues before Medusas, is stare slack-jawed and motionless from the place of their final doom.
All right. Maybe I sound bitter. But you know why? It’s because when it comes to free food samples, Connecticut Mommies don’t respect the system.
I’m something of a free sample connoisseur, you see. (Some might say free sample whore. To-may-to, to-mah-to.) In casual conversation, I’ll get all Queen Victoria on the subject: if a supermarket isn’t putting out little samples of crackers and tortilla chips and waffle-cut pretzels, they are not an establishment we care to frequent, I will tell you with an upturned tilt of my nose. Why, when I was living on my own in Detroit and had to economize on groceries, I could get a free lunch out of an hour’s tour of local places that served free samples. An amuse-bouche of frozen chickpeas in Tikka Masala sauce at Trader Joe’s might be first on my menu. It would be followed by a delightful chef’s sampler platter at Costco of fried cheese, animal-shaped chicken fingers, bread-and-butter, and a delicious fruit-flavored chewable kid’s jelly vitamin. Then at Papa Joe’s in Birmingham, the epicenter of sampledom, I could really get down to business with their abundantly-shared cheese breads, fruits, apple slaw, three to four deli meats, scones, various crackers, cookies, and flavored popcorns, and store-made peanut butter if I needed something to stick to my ribs.
And the nicest thing about free samples in stores, as everyone knows, is that they’re completely devoid of calories. Really. I believe there are scientific studies.
There’s a simple system to these free samples. One approaches the station at which they’re being offered. One takes a single sample. One immediately moves on. People in Michigan knew how to do it. Everywhere else I’ve been, children or not, people understood how it worked. The thing about professional Connecticut Mommies, as I was saying, is that they don’t respect the system. Like the U.S. judicial branch, the system is there for a reason. It keeps us all equally protected. It keeps us from devolving into savages, people!
But no. These days, Stew Leonard’s is my current mecca for free samples. There the kindly bakers think absolutely nothing of taking muffins hot out of the oven, detaching the muffin tops from the bottoms, and then tossing the halves into an enormous basket for people to enjoy. That’s a whole muffin top, people. Not some measly mini-muffin. A big, fat, dome of fluffy baked goodness. But the moment that basket hits the counter, there’s sure to be a squadron of Connecticut Mommies zooming into formation with their strollers to assemble around it in such a way that no one of a non-Mommy persuasion can infiltrate past the spiked wheels of their rolling artillery.
They stand there. They sample the baked goods. They do not move on. They say "Hmm!" They munch and stare at the muffins as if they’re actually considering buying them. But they don’t. They say "Hmm!" again. And then, horror of horrors, boldly and without remorse or shame they will help themselves to another sample. Sometimes even a third.
In the meantime, I’m standing there hopping from one powerless foot to the other, barely able to restrain myself from yelling out all kinds of misogynistic vulgarities that would end with DAMN WOMAN I JUST WANT TO GET ME MY CALORIE-FREE CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFIN TOP, YO.
If during my muffin deprivation I’ll spy the woman by the hot donut machine setting out a punch bowl of donut holes, I can be sure to find that by the time I fleetly trip over, the Connecticut Mommies will have somehow materialized, like the Doctor’s Tardis, around the greasy machine, and that the bowl will be empty. Every trace of cinnamon sugar will have been sucked up into the time vortex. They might rely on Rosalias and Marias to do the vacuuming at home, but dang, do they know how to Hoover up the thick-cut sweet potato chips from their sample station. They stand in front of the cheese platters, spearing cube after cube of white cheddar, flaunting the unspoken rules of consumption and not even seeming to care. They block the aisles around the table of buffalo chicken spread on tiny crackers, so that no one with male genitalia may sally forth.
They’re even flocking like vultures at the samples of salad in the produce section, and who in their right minds wants a sample of salad? It’s another scientific fact that adding greenery to the free sample diet upsets its delicate nutritional balance.
It’s rude. It’s upsetting. And it’s even, from time to time, forced me to utter a statement so blasphemous that my younger self (that is, a younger self who still believed in the goodness and simplicity of the free sample ecosystem) would be shocked and disillusioned beyond belief to hear it muttered from my traitorous lips: “That’s okay, I didn’t want that stinky free sample, anyway.”
In this state, it only takes four Connecticut Mommies to be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and leave in their horrible wake nothing but ruin, crumbs, and my own personal starvation. Save for disguising myself as a professional Mommy, I know of no recourse. Yet I couldn’t pull it off—I can attest from experience that I look no good in a ponytail and form-fitting yoga clothes.
Plus there’s the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to emulate their poor example and take more than a single serving. After all, my own mommy taught me to share.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Book Review Roundup
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady
by Anita Loos
A master class in the use of the naive--and utterly hilarious--unreliable narrator, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an underrated American classic.
The Pink Hotel
by Patrick Dennis and Dorothy Erskine
So what's a young author to do, immediately after he's become the first author ever to have three comic novels simultaneously on the best-seller list? Apparently Patrick Dennis chose to switch it up a bit and collaborate with a near-unknown on a Deep, Important Novel about Important Issues in which everyone Lives And Dies Alone And Unloved.
Yeah, it's a bit of a train-wreck.
The Pink Hotel has a cast of hundreds of characters, most of whom make a single appearance and then never peek out of their rooms ever again. Among the grotesques are a sordid pair of alcoholics who alternately soliloquize about how much they love each other, drink whiskey, and blacken each other's eyes; a newlywed couple who have no idea what fits where; a suicide in room 1313 (subtle, right?); an elevator operator with a sexual fetish for collecting snippets of women's hair; a movie star; some mob types; and so many other grotesques that it's difficult to keep track of them all.
What's unfortunate is that none of the stories actually go anywhere. There's a cook who is a knowing typhoid carrier, but nothing ever comes of it. There's a vague attempt at a kidnapping somewhere in between the suicides, strokes, and sordid assignations, but it's forgotten within moments. Dennis attempts to wrap up a few loose ends by having his assortment of characters meet at a cocktail party in the novel's later chapters, but there are simply too many to handle gracefully.
And yes, it's entirely possible to make a fairly plausible argument for which of the two collaborators developed and wrote which chapters and characters—the difference in tone between the two voices can be jarring. Dennis' menagerie contains types we've seen in his works before—pretentious snobs, not-so-genteel Southern gentility, scrappy working-class heroes, vicious nelly queens. When he's parodying two sisters who vie in baby-talk and succulent treats for the affection of a surly cat, he's actually quite amusing. He's also responsible for the book's only sympathetic story line: a romance between the hotel's hardboiled detective/assistant manager and its owner's bafflingly stupid secretary.
Dorothy Erskine, on the other hand, seems responsible for the book's worst-written passages and most sordid characters—the typhoid carrier, for example, and the abortionist who buries a fetus on the beach, the suicide, the drunk and abusive couple. Her one longer-term plot involves a married man and the hotel's cashier, a woman whose life is at an end—at an end, I tell you!—because she is unwed and thirty-one.
If only my heaviest problems were so featherweight.
The Pink Hotel is a curiosity, certainly—a literary advent calendar of sorts with something nasty behind every little door one opens. It's also nigh on unreadable, and an anomaly within the works of Patrick Dennis. As scathing as his books could be, particularly later in his career, they were never unwholesome—and that's the currency in which The Pink Hotel heavily trades.
How Firm A Foundation
by Patrick Dennis
There's a portrait of a butler in Patrick Dennis' 1968 novel, How Firm a Foundation, that sheds a fascinating light into the author's life. Despite a checkered and shady past, the butler, Travis, has managed to insinuate himself into the household of the Fennesseys, a family of self-made billionaires, using forged credentials and by painting his background in purely fictional terms. He's jaded, and cynical, and even contemptuous of his employers, but he does a masterful job of keeping it under wraps.
The little literary portrait is fascinating because within five years, Patrick Dennis decided that his brand of comic fiction was out-of-date and unpopular, and as he was in need of a salary, he decided to retire from writing and become a butler—and he did so by using forged credentials and never letting on to his employers that he had a checkered life as a best-selling author. One of his employers was Ray Kroc, the self-made billionaire. Throughout his mystifying career change, Edwards the Butler never let slip that behind his cool and impassive exterior lay all manner of cynical impertinence.
It's really a shame that Eric Myers, in his biography of Dennis, dismisses How Firm a Foundation as second-rate work. It's not. The author's satire is as sharp as ever, his immense cast of characters is deftly chosen and shaded, and his incredulity of what people would do to to make—or save—a buck creates and abundance of laugh-out-loud funny situations.
True, the book does have a couple of weak points. Its premise of collecting a large cast of zanies and having the U.S. government force them into making an art film seems recycled from Genius. And Dennis seems a little confused about how a non-profit foundation actually works, at some points (taxpayers don't pay for the foundation’s electricity bills, certainly). Minor detractions aside, if one likes the sort of thing Dennis writes, this is the sort of Dennis book that one will like.
And watch out for that butler. They're a tricky breed, as Dennis would himself prove.
Love and Mrs. Sargent
by Virginia Rowans, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis
I wasn't surprised to discover, when I checked Eric Myers' biography of Patrick Dennis, Uncle Mame, that the story of Love and Mrs. Sargent had originally intended for the stage. The book reads very much like a novelization of a stage play, with—unusual for Dennis—an extremely limited cast, distinct acts, and dialogue that reads like a script.
Love and Mrs. Sargent, the last of the four books Dennis wrote under his female pseudonym of Virginia Rowans, works best if it's imagined in the context of the film director Douglas Sirk. The novel has all the elements of a Sirk midcentury melodrama; I suspect it's no coincidence that it was imagined and written a year after the release of Imitation of Life. Like that film, it features a mother who gives her all in order to provide the best for her children, only to have them turn against her. As in All that Heaven Allows, it features a torrid and maybe even inappropriate romance between a socialite and a much younger man. Despite its comic secondary characters—Mrs. Flood manages to be both batty and touching at the same time—it's definitely a melodrama, with the glummest ending ever featured in a Patrick Dennis novel.
And perhaps the melodrama that drives the novel would have worked better on the stage, or in a filmed version; the last half of the novel, in which Mrs. Sargent's faults are laid bare, reads less like a Patrick Dennis novel and more like rant against Mom and apple pie. It's a screed in which everything Mrs. Sargent has done is shown to be hypocritical and blindly self-serving. If it weren't so readable, I'd swear the author was working out some of his own mommy issues.
But the book is compulsively readable, even more so than some of his more widely-known and easily-available works. It's fun to see some of the touches here that appear in later Dennis books. The terrible novels that Mrs. Sargent's son, Dicky, writes here—one novel that hints at the character's latent homosexuality, and another set in France with funny bidet stories—are both explicitly mocked in Dennis' much superior Tony, several years on. Dennis' real-life chum Christine Jorgenson, the first widely-known recipient of gender-reassignment surgery, makes a cameo appearance—and perhaps even exists as a sly commentary on the author's moonlighting with a female pseudonym as he continued to write books under his more masculine pseudonym of Patrick Dennis.
Love and Mrs. Sargent would prove to be the last of Dennis' four Virginia Rowans novels; it proved to be an acerbic amuse-bouche for a decade of acid satire that was to come.
The Sugarman Bootlegs
by Robert Rodi
I'd originally wanted to start my review of The Sugarman Bootlegs pointing out the thinness of probabilities in its conceit—that a grainy Betamax video of an unknown lounge singer could go viral on YouTube and propel an elderly woman into the entertainment limelight. But then I thought about the rest of Robert Rodi's oeuvre (maniac fag hags, vengeful comic book fans, body-swap comedies, twin-brotherly switcharoos) and decided that they weren't exactly Chekovian slices of gritty realism, either.
There is one element of Rodi's latest novel that was so jarringly unbelievable, however, that I feel it has to be noted. In one of the early chapters of The Sugarman Bootlegs two male characters make out in the kitchen of a Fire Island cottage. The author intends it as shocking; I merely said, "Wait, what?", because apparently I was supposed to have picked up that one of the characters was straight. I had not. He seemed pretty darned gay to me.
What makes me divided about The Sugarman Bootlegs that it's an unwieldy grafting of two different styles of novels, a Frankenstein's monster in which the novel's first half is a swiftly-moving farce in which two naïfs hatch a scam that quickly and comically gets out of control—the literary equivalent of the Mel Brooks classic The Producers. I really enjoyed this half of the novel, and thought it a return to form after Rodi's dreadful When You Were Me. The book abruptly shifts tone, and point of view, however and becomes a B-movie horror plot—the sort of thing for which a late-career Bette Davis might have picked up her trowel and plastered on her worst eye makeup, for audiences who found Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte too subtle and under-acted.
It's not very good, sadly, and I'm sorry to say that the one-star Grand Guignol theatrics betray the four-star comic potential of the book's first half. If Rodi wanted to make points about how the quest for celebrity brings out the worst in people, he's chosen the most heavy-handed—and ironic—way to do so.
Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain's First Railway Murder
by Kate Colquhoun
The murder of Mr. Thomas Briggs in a locked first-class railway carriage might have been the London trial everyone talked about in 1864, but Kate Coquhoun's account is not as sensational as the title implies. It's a sturdy and dutiful piece of research, to be sure, with an abundance of hats in evidence. Missing hats. Bloodied hats. Crushed hats. Hats with new lining. Hats that had been sewn and not glued. It's a Victorian shell game, with a murderer hidden beneath Colquhoun's avalanche of hats.
Sadly, there's really just not much of substance here in the end, however. The author hints strongly that man convicted and hung for the crime might have been blameless—but introduces no contemporary evidence to support the suggestion, and provides no alternative interpretation of what the police detectives at the time concluded. There's not even much in the way of examining the aftermath of a case that Colquhoun tries repeatedly to claim was game-changing; once the accused meets the hangman, the book's pretty much over.
As a glimpse into detective procedural of the time, Mr Briggs' Hat offers plenty of material. As supposed sensation, though, it's easy to say that the book runs off the tracks.
3D
by Patrick Dennis
Over the course of twenty years, Edward Everett Tanner III (under that more commonly-known pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, and under his other alter ego of Virginia Rowans) produced sixteen sharp and satiric novels. 3D would be his last; disheartened by feeling out-of-step with the publishing industry and the post free-love era of the early nineteen-seventies, 3D had scarcely hit the shelves than its author had withdrawn from friends and family, changed his identity yet again, and spent the rest of his days as a butler to the extremely wealthy.
It's a shame that 3D was the last Patrick Dennis book—it's a fun novel. It's only old-fashioned in a very classic sense; it bases its story of a happily-wed couple both falling blindly in love with a beautiful (but deeply stupid) young man on the same trope as A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a lord of mischief (here, the couple's unambiguously sexual uncle stands in for Puck) temporarily blinds its lovers with temptation and folly, which after a time of topsy-turvy vanishes and is forgotten like a confusing and bad dream. The theme's updated in the context of the swinging seventies, and although the novel is a little less frenetic than many of other Dennis works, it's surprisingly insightful. Like Paradise before it, with its uncanny foresight into the future of American television, 3D anticipates more vividly a vision of human sexuality that's more amorphous and free-flowing than most accepted at the time, but which seems positively at home in today's society.
Dennis was a gay man who married traditionally and fought the demons of his own sexuality and of subsequent through traditional psychiatry. Buried within 3D's many sharp comic portraits is one of a Hungarian psychologist, a vile and craven charlatan who studied with (and was hated by) both Freud and Jung, whose attempts to cure a confused husband of his feelings for another man are ludicrously unhelpful. It's comforting to think that the late-in-life Dennis used his satiric skills to get a little back at a profession that not only had institutionalized him but had forced him into shock treatment therapy for depression related to his sexuality. Certainly the novel sports most of its teeth there.
But the book is sweetly funny from beginning to end, and Dennis is obviously having fun. The pretty, dumb, unreflective character of Davey is particularly well-done, and once again Dennis employs the streets and sounds of his beloved Mexico to enliven the book's proceedings. It's probably the subtlest of all his offerings, and for that reason alone shouldn't be skipped.
The Joyous Season
by Patrick Dennis
The divorce of popular author Pat Tanner and his wife Louise in the early nineteen-sixties was something of a surprise to their friends; though it was no secret (least of all to Louise) that he was gay and had been in extensive psychiatric care because of the stress of it, the pair were amicable and naturally suited to each other's idiosyncrasies.
It was very much a disappointment to the pair's young son and daughter, however. It was for them that Tanner, under his pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, dedicated and wrote The Joyous Season. A hilarious, sharp, and beautiful jewelry-box of a novel, it addresses the follies of adulthood and divorced from a child's point of view.
Structurally, The Joyous Season shares much in common with Tanner's The Loving Couple, one of his Virginia Rowans novels—a husband and wife quarrel over trivial matters, find themselves railroaded by close-minded in-laws into divorce, take up with social climbers, and (barely) escape with their sanities intact. Along the way, in a fireworks scene in a summer home, there are echoes the climax of another Rowans novel, House Party. And as in Little Me, The Joyous Season features a naive and somewhat unreliable narrator.
But by telling the tale with the voice of ten-year-old Kerrington, whose understanding of the adult world is both untested while often startlingly on point, the book achieves a true sweetness unparalleled by any other Patrick Dennis novel, while still remaining sharp, incisive, and devastatingly critical of adult absurdity—including the author's own.
The Joyous Season is definitely among the very best of the Patrick Dennis canon.
The Plague and I
by Betty MacDonald
Let's be honest: Betty MacDonald's chronicle of a year spent in a sanatorium recuperating from tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics sounds like an unlikely candidate for a humorous memoir.
The Plague and I proves, however, the author's gift of weaving homestyle insight with her funny upbringing and her cock-eyed view of the craziness around her. MacDonald has a genuine gift of interjecting a highly personal and relatable touch into the quite literally antiseptic environment of 'The Pines'—in reality, the former Firlands Sanitarium of Shoreline, Washington—and making the story of her illness and recovery as funny, if not funnier, than her other three books for adults.
The Plague and I provides not only an interesting look into a type of medicine no longer practiced, but gives a startlingly vivid glimpse into the racial tensions of pre-World War II Seattle. MacDonald's sanatorium friend, Kimi, wrote under her real name of Monica Sone a memoir (Nisei Daughter) of growing up torn between American culture and her Japanese-American upbringing, and of her family's internment during the subsequent war. It's a credit to MacDonald that she's able to confront these issues and not let them sidetrack her main intent. Namely, to show that in a life-threatening illness, a positive (and realistic) outlook and a dose of humor can be as important medicines as anything dispensed by a pharmacist.
Anybody Can Do Anything
by Betty MacDonald
Of all Betty MacDonald's comic memoirs, Anybody Can Do Anything is perhaps the most unfocused. The book takes on the years after those chronicled in The Egg and I, as MacDonald fled that unhappy marriage to make a life for herself in the bosom of her family with two young daughters in tow. It focuses primarily on the primal force of Mary Bard, MacDonald's older sister, whose can-do anything propelled MacDonald into unsuitable job after job. Therefore it's tough not to be a touch cynical about the book's concluding chapters, which read very much like promotional material for her older sister's first memoir, which came out roughly at the same time, and from the same publisher.
Still, scattershot as some of the material is, Anybody Can Do Anything is still an engaging delight. MacDonald skillfully weaves personal memoir and hilarious anecdote with sharp-eyed observations about nineteen-thirties Seattle and the insidious reach of the Depression. Frequently reflective and even melancholy—but never mopey—it's just as much a treasure as MacDonald's other adult works.
The Doctor Wears Three Faces
by Mary Bard
Mary Bard is, of course, the older sister of beloved humorist Betty MacDonald, whose The Egg and I was a three-year sensation on the best-seller lists at the end of the nineteen-forties. Apparently spurred by a gentle sisterly competitiveness and a sense that "Anybody Can Do Anything"—the title of MacDonald's third memoir, which focused mainly upon Bard's resourcefulness in the face of the Great Depression—Bard wrote a children's series and trio of humorous memoirs of her own.
The Doctor Wears Three Faces is the first of these, and like The Egg and I, it covers the early years of the author's marriage. To a physician, as the title gently suggests—not a chicken farmer. None of the incidents Bard covers, whether her attempts to mingle with the big boys of medicine instead of the doctors' wives, or her battle with cockroaches, or even her own first pregnancy, are exactly earth-shaking in their depth or content, but Bard relates them with a Betty MacDonald-ish sense of humor and a wry, crackling briskness that carries most of the chapters through in a swift manner.
It's true that there doesn't seem to have been an em dash that Bard didn't like, appropriate, and use in her book, and her writing doesn't have the indefinable sparkle of her younger sister's. There's also some not-so-veiled racism toward a Japanese servant in the book's early chapters that modern readers might find uncomfortable. It's racism of a sort that Betty MacDonald actually protested in dozens of subtle ways in her own books, so it's a little surprising to see it so blatantly on display in Bard's work.
For diehard MacDonald fans, though, the Mary Bard books are tough to put down; their sense of time, place, and humor can be uncannily similar. And like the similarly-structured The Egg and I, The Doctor Wears Three Faces was made into a movie of its own—the Dorothy McGuire vehicle Mother Didn't Tell Me.
by Anita Loos
A master class in the use of the naive--and utterly hilarious--unreliable narrator, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an underrated American classic.
The Pink Hotel
by Patrick Dennis and Dorothy Erskine
So what's a young author to do, immediately after he's become the first author ever to have three comic novels simultaneously on the best-seller list? Apparently Patrick Dennis chose to switch it up a bit and collaborate with a near-unknown on a Deep, Important Novel about Important Issues in which everyone Lives And Dies Alone And Unloved.
Yeah, it's a bit of a train-wreck.
The Pink Hotel has a cast of hundreds of characters, most of whom make a single appearance and then never peek out of their rooms ever again. Among the grotesques are a sordid pair of alcoholics who alternately soliloquize about how much they love each other, drink whiskey, and blacken each other's eyes; a newlywed couple who have no idea what fits where; a suicide in room 1313 (subtle, right?); an elevator operator with a sexual fetish for collecting snippets of women's hair; a movie star; some mob types; and so many other grotesques that it's difficult to keep track of them all.
What's unfortunate is that none of the stories actually go anywhere. There's a cook who is a knowing typhoid carrier, but nothing ever comes of it. There's a vague attempt at a kidnapping somewhere in between the suicides, strokes, and sordid assignations, but it's forgotten within moments. Dennis attempts to wrap up a few loose ends by having his assortment of characters meet at a cocktail party in the novel's later chapters, but there are simply too many to handle gracefully.
And yes, it's entirely possible to make a fairly plausible argument for which of the two collaborators developed and wrote which chapters and characters—the difference in tone between the two voices can be jarring. Dennis' menagerie contains types we've seen in his works before—pretentious snobs, not-so-genteel Southern gentility, scrappy working-class heroes, vicious nelly queens. When he's parodying two sisters who vie in baby-talk and succulent treats for the affection of a surly cat, he's actually quite amusing. He's also responsible for the book's only sympathetic story line: a romance between the hotel's hardboiled detective/assistant manager and its owner's bafflingly stupid secretary.
Dorothy Erskine, on the other hand, seems responsible for the book's worst-written passages and most sordid characters—the typhoid carrier, for example, and the abortionist who buries a fetus on the beach, the suicide, the drunk and abusive couple. Her one longer-term plot involves a married man and the hotel's cashier, a woman whose life is at an end—at an end, I tell you!—because she is unwed and thirty-one.
If only my heaviest problems were so featherweight.
The Pink Hotel is a curiosity, certainly—a literary advent calendar of sorts with something nasty behind every little door one opens. It's also nigh on unreadable, and an anomaly within the works of Patrick Dennis. As scathing as his books could be, particularly later in his career, they were never unwholesome—and that's the currency in which The Pink Hotel heavily trades.
How Firm A Foundation
by Patrick Dennis
There's a portrait of a butler in Patrick Dennis' 1968 novel, How Firm a Foundation, that sheds a fascinating light into the author's life. Despite a checkered and shady past, the butler, Travis, has managed to insinuate himself into the household of the Fennesseys, a family of self-made billionaires, using forged credentials and by painting his background in purely fictional terms. He's jaded, and cynical, and even contemptuous of his employers, but he does a masterful job of keeping it under wraps.
The little literary portrait is fascinating because within five years, Patrick Dennis decided that his brand of comic fiction was out-of-date and unpopular, and as he was in need of a salary, he decided to retire from writing and become a butler—and he did so by using forged credentials and never letting on to his employers that he had a checkered life as a best-selling author. One of his employers was Ray Kroc, the self-made billionaire. Throughout his mystifying career change, Edwards the Butler never let slip that behind his cool and impassive exterior lay all manner of cynical impertinence.
It's really a shame that Eric Myers, in his biography of Dennis, dismisses How Firm a Foundation as second-rate work. It's not. The author's satire is as sharp as ever, his immense cast of characters is deftly chosen and shaded, and his incredulity of what people would do to to make—or save—a buck creates and abundance of laugh-out-loud funny situations.
True, the book does have a couple of weak points. Its premise of collecting a large cast of zanies and having the U.S. government force them into making an art film seems recycled from Genius. And Dennis seems a little confused about how a non-profit foundation actually works, at some points (taxpayers don't pay for the foundation’s electricity bills, certainly). Minor detractions aside, if one likes the sort of thing Dennis writes, this is the sort of Dennis book that one will like.
And watch out for that butler. They're a tricky breed, as Dennis would himself prove.
Love and Mrs. Sargent
by Virginia Rowans, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis
I wasn't surprised to discover, when I checked Eric Myers' biography of Patrick Dennis, Uncle Mame, that the story of Love and Mrs. Sargent had originally intended for the stage. The book reads very much like a novelization of a stage play, with—unusual for Dennis—an extremely limited cast, distinct acts, and dialogue that reads like a script.
Love and Mrs. Sargent, the last of the four books Dennis wrote under his female pseudonym of Virginia Rowans, works best if it's imagined in the context of the film director Douglas Sirk. The novel has all the elements of a Sirk midcentury melodrama; I suspect it's no coincidence that it was imagined and written a year after the release of Imitation of Life. Like that film, it features a mother who gives her all in order to provide the best for her children, only to have them turn against her. As in All that Heaven Allows, it features a torrid and maybe even inappropriate romance between a socialite and a much younger man. Despite its comic secondary characters—Mrs. Flood manages to be both batty and touching at the same time—it's definitely a melodrama, with the glummest ending ever featured in a Patrick Dennis novel.
And perhaps the melodrama that drives the novel would have worked better on the stage, or in a filmed version; the last half of the novel, in which Mrs. Sargent's faults are laid bare, reads less like a Patrick Dennis novel and more like rant against Mom and apple pie. It's a screed in which everything Mrs. Sargent has done is shown to be hypocritical and blindly self-serving. If it weren't so readable, I'd swear the author was working out some of his own mommy issues.
But the book is compulsively readable, even more so than some of his more widely-known and easily-available works. It's fun to see some of the touches here that appear in later Dennis books. The terrible novels that Mrs. Sargent's son, Dicky, writes here—one novel that hints at the character's latent homosexuality, and another set in France with funny bidet stories—are both explicitly mocked in Dennis' much superior Tony, several years on. Dennis' real-life chum Christine Jorgenson, the first widely-known recipient of gender-reassignment surgery, makes a cameo appearance—and perhaps even exists as a sly commentary on the author's moonlighting with a female pseudonym as he continued to write books under his more masculine pseudonym of Patrick Dennis.
Love and Mrs. Sargent would prove to be the last of Dennis' four Virginia Rowans novels; it proved to be an acerbic amuse-bouche for a decade of acid satire that was to come.
The Sugarman Bootlegs
by Robert Rodi
I'd originally wanted to start my review of The Sugarman Bootlegs pointing out the thinness of probabilities in its conceit—that a grainy Betamax video of an unknown lounge singer could go viral on YouTube and propel an elderly woman into the entertainment limelight. But then I thought about the rest of Robert Rodi's oeuvre (maniac fag hags, vengeful comic book fans, body-swap comedies, twin-brotherly switcharoos) and decided that they weren't exactly Chekovian slices of gritty realism, either.
There is one element of Rodi's latest novel that was so jarringly unbelievable, however, that I feel it has to be noted. In one of the early chapters of The Sugarman Bootlegs two male characters make out in the kitchen of a Fire Island cottage. The author intends it as shocking; I merely said, "Wait, what?", because apparently I was supposed to have picked up that one of the characters was straight. I had not. He seemed pretty darned gay to me.
What makes me divided about The Sugarman Bootlegs that it's an unwieldy grafting of two different styles of novels, a Frankenstein's monster in which the novel's first half is a swiftly-moving farce in which two naïfs hatch a scam that quickly and comically gets out of control—the literary equivalent of the Mel Brooks classic The Producers. I really enjoyed this half of the novel, and thought it a return to form after Rodi's dreadful When You Were Me. The book abruptly shifts tone, and point of view, however and becomes a B-movie horror plot—the sort of thing for which a late-career Bette Davis might have picked up her trowel and plastered on her worst eye makeup, for audiences who found Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte too subtle and under-acted.
It's not very good, sadly, and I'm sorry to say that the one-star Grand Guignol theatrics betray the four-star comic potential of the book's first half. If Rodi wanted to make points about how the quest for celebrity brings out the worst in people, he's chosen the most heavy-handed—and ironic—way to do so.
Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain's First Railway Murder
by Kate Colquhoun
The murder of Mr. Thomas Briggs in a locked first-class railway carriage might have been the London trial everyone talked about in 1864, but Kate Coquhoun's account is not as sensational as the title implies. It's a sturdy and dutiful piece of research, to be sure, with an abundance of hats in evidence. Missing hats. Bloodied hats. Crushed hats. Hats with new lining. Hats that had been sewn and not glued. It's a Victorian shell game, with a murderer hidden beneath Colquhoun's avalanche of hats.
Sadly, there's really just not much of substance here in the end, however. The author hints strongly that man convicted and hung for the crime might have been blameless—but introduces no contemporary evidence to support the suggestion, and provides no alternative interpretation of what the police detectives at the time concluded. There's not even much in the way of examining the aftermath of a case that Colquhoun tries repeatedly to claim was game-changing; once the accused meets the hangman, the book's pretty much over.
As a glimpse into detective procedural of the time, Mr Briggs' Hat offers plenty of material. As supposed sensation, though, it's easy to say that the book runs off the tracks.
3D
by Patrick Dennis
Over the course of twenty years, Edward Everett Tanner III (under that more commonly-known pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, and under his other alter ego of Virginia Rowans) produced sixteen sharp and satiric novels. 3D would be his last; disheartened by feeling out-of-step with the publishing industry and the post free-love era of the early nineteen-seventies, 3D had scarcely hit the shelves than its author had withdrawn from friends and family, changed his identity yet again, and spent the rest of his days as a butler to the extremely wealthy.
It's a shame that 3D was the last Patrick Dennis book—it's a fun novel. It's only old-fashioned in a very classic sense; it bases its story of a happily-wed couple both falling blindly in love with a beautiful (but deeply stupid) young man on the same trope as A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a lord of mischief (here, the couple's unambiguously sexual uncle stands in for Puck) temporarily blinds its lovers with temptation and folly, which after a time of topsy-turvy vanishes and is forgotten like a confusing and bad dream. The theme's updated in the context of the swinging seventies, and although the novel is a little less frenetic than many of other Dennis works, it's surprisingly insightful. Like Paradise before it, with its uncanny foresight into the future of American television, 3D anticipates more vividly a vision of human sexuality that's more amorphous and free-flowing than most accepted at the time, but which seems positively at home in today's society.
Dennis was a gay man who married traditionally and fought the demons of his own sexuality and of subsequent through traditional psychiatry. Buried within 3D's many sharp comic portraits is one of a Hungarian psychologist, a vile and craven charlatan who studied with (and was hated by) both Freud and Jung, whose attempts to cure a confused husband of his feelings for another man are ludicrously unhelpful. It's comforting to think that the late-in-life Dennis used his satiric skills to get a little back at a profession that not only had institutionalized him but had forced him into shock treatment therapy for depression related to his sexuality. Certainly the novel sports most of its teeth there.
But the book is sweetly funny from beginning to end, and Dennis is obviously having fun. The pretty, dumb, unreflective character of Davey is particularly well-done, and once again Dennis employs the streets and sounds of his beloved Mexico to enliven the book's proceedings. It's probably the subtlest of all his offerings, and for that reason alone shouldn't be skipped.
The Joyous Season
by Patrick Dennis
The divorce of popular author Pat Tanner and his wife Louise in the early nineteen-sixties was something of a surprise to their friends; though it was no secret (least of all to Louise) that he was gay and had been in extensive psychiatric care because of the stress of it, the pair were amicable and naturally suited to each other's idiosyncrasies.
It was very much a disappointment to the pair's young son and daughter, however. It was for them that Tanner, under his pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, dedicated and wrote The Joyous Season. A hilarious, sharp, and beautiful jewelry-box of a novel, it addresses the follies of adulthood and divorced from a child's point of view.
Structurally, The Joyous Season shares much in common with Tanner's The Loving Couple, one of his Virginia Rowans novels—a husband and wife quarrel over trivial matters, find themselves railroaded by close-minded in-laws into divorce, take up with social climbers, and (barely) escape with their sanities intact. Along the way, in a fireworks scene in a summer home, there are echoes the climax of another Rowans novel, House Party. And as in Little Me, The Joyous Season features a naive and somewhat unreliable narrator.
But by telling the tale with the voice of ten-year-old Kerrington, whose understanding of the adult world is both untested while often startlingly on point, the book achieves a true sweetness unparalleled by any other Patrick Dennis novel, while still remaining sharp, incisive, and devastatingly critical of adult absurdity—including the author's own.
The Joyous Season is definitely among the very best of the Patrick Dennis canon.
The Plague and I
by Betty MacDonald
Let's be honest: Betty MacDonald's chronicle of a year spent in a sanatorium recuperating from tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics sounds like an unlikely candidate for a humorous memoir.
The Plague and I proves, however, the author's gift of weaving homestyle insight with her funny upbringing and her cock-eyed view of the craziness around her. MacDonald has a genuine gift of interjecting a highly personal and relatable touch into the quite literally antiseptic environment of 'The Pines'—in reality, the former Firlands Sanitarium of Shoreline, Washington—and making the story of her illness and recovery as funny, if not funnier, than her other three books for adults.
The Plague and I provides not only an interesting look into a type of medicine no longer practiced, but gives a startlingly vivid glimpse into the racial tensions of pre-World War II Seattle. MacDonald's sanatorium friend, Kimi, wrote under her real name of Monica Sone a memoir (Nisei Daughter) of growing up torn between American culture and her Japanese-American upbringing, and of her family's internment during the subsequent war. It's a credit to MacDonald that she's able to confront these issues and not let them sidetrack her main intent. Namely, to show that in a life-threatening illness, a positive (and realistic) outlook and a dose of humor can be as important medicines as anything dispensed by a pharmacist.
Anybody Can Do Anything
by Betty MacDonald
Of all Betty MacDonald's comic memoirs, Anybody Can Do Anything is perhaps the most unfocused. The book takes on the years after those chronicled in The Egg and I, as MacDonald fled that unhappy marriage to make a life for herself in the bosom of her family with two young daughters in tow. It focuses primarily on the primal force of Mary Bard, MacDonald's older sister, whose can-do anything propelled MacDonald into unsuitable job after job. Therefore it's tough not to be a touch cynical about the book's concluding chapters, which read very much like promotional material for her older sister's first memoir, which came out roughly at the same time, and from the same publisher.
Still, scattershot as some of the material is, Anybody Can Do Anything is still an engaging delight. MacDonald skillfully weaves personal memoir and hilarious anecdote with sharp-eyed observations about nineteen-thirties Seattle and the insidious reach of the Depression. Frequently reflective and even melancholy—but never mopey—it's just as much a treasure as MacDonald's other adult works.
The Doctor Wears Three Faces
by Mary Bard
Mary Bard is, of course, the older sister of beloved humorist Betty MacDonald, whose The Egg and I was a three-year sensation on the best-seller lists at the end of the nineteen-forties. Apparently spurred by a gentle sisterly competitiveness and a sense that "Anybody Can Do Anything"—the title of MacDonald's third memoir, which focused mainly upon Bard's resourcefulness in the face of the Great Depression—Bard wrote a children's series and trio of humorous memoirs of her own.
The Doctor Wears Three Faces is the first of these, and like The Egg and I, it covers the early years of the author's marriage. To a physician, as the title gently suggests—not a chicken farmer. None of the incidents Bard covers, whether her attempts to mingle with the big boys of medicine instead of the doctors' wives, or her battle with cockroaches, or even her own first pregnancy, are exactly earth-shaking in their depth or content, but Bard relates them with a Betty MacDonald-ish sense of humor and a wry, crackling briskness that carries most of the chapters through in a swift manner.
It's true that there doesn't seem to have been an em dash that Bard didn't like, appropriate, and use in her book, and her writing doesn't have the indefinable sparkle of her younger sister's. There's also some not-so-veiled racism toward a Japanese servant in the book's early chapters that modern readers might find uncomfortable. It's racism of a sort that Betty MacDonald actually protested in dozens of subtle ways in her own books, so it's a little surprising to see it so blatantly on display in Bard's work.
For diehard MacDonald fans, though, the Mary Bard books are tough to put down; their sense of time, place, and humor can be uncannily similar. And like the similarly-structured The Egg and I, The Doctor Wears Three Faces was made into a movie of its own—the Dorothy McGuire vehicle Mother Didn't Tell Me.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Man at the Desk
The shortest path between the old parsonage where we live and the parking lot where I keep my car is through the church building itself. On a cold or rainy day I appreciate those few seconds of warmth as I cruise past the main office and the copy room, past the auditorium, and out the opposite door. My own back door is just ten swift steps beyond, wedged between fairy-tale banks of boxwoods, tiger lilies, and giant rhododendrons.
There’s a tradeoff to the shortcut, though, and that is whenever I take it, everybody in the church all up in my bidness.
“Off to do some writing?”, one of the front desk volunteers will say as I stride through on the way to the parking lot.
“Sure,” I’ll say, hoping it sounds more plausible than if I admitted that I was really on my way to grab a frappuccino and spend the morning at the beach . . . again.
Or I’ll be walking into the building laden with big bags obviously bulging with groceries, all of them with STOP ’N’ SHOP emblazoned on the side, and one of the women in the office will poke her head out into the hallway. “What have you got there?” she’ll ask.
“Oh, you know. Just liquor and porn,” I’ll reply, in passing.
That’s been the kind of casual relationship I’ve had with the church office over the last year.
After I joined the church in the spring, however, I felt the urge to pitch in and become part of the community. I already play piano fairly regularly for the choirs, but I decided I’d also volunteer at that reception desk I’d walked past hundreds of times. So once a week, for a three-hour shift, I take my book, my knitting, or my iPad over to the office and substitute for one of the regular volunteers who’s out for the day. All the other front desk volunteers are female and almost are all of a certain age. (That age being roughly eighty.) So when people stop in surprise to see me there and ask, “Wow, are you really manning the front desk?” I compliment them on their appropriate choice of verb.
My first day there, I was a little apprehensive about the job because my orientation had consisted of a ten-minute rushed overview that in my memory consisted of two minutes of how to run the postage meter, some vague rushed instructions about doing something with baskets and flowers and church bulletins, some orders to change the sign out by the road that announces the upcoming services, and then an eight-minute detailed lecture on the importance of recycling rubber bands. I arrived to my first shift and learned that everybody—everybody—was heading to an all-day staff retreat, and that I and the rubber bands would be sitting in the church all by our lonesome.
I listened to the doors slam shut on their way out, contemplated the boxes of plastic letters with which I was supposed to construct that week’s roadside sign, and thought that they probably wouldn’t have left me with that kind of temptation if they’d known that at Craig’s last church I rearranged the letters of a Mr. Brian Wright’s door nameplate to read Mr. Writhing Bra. (He didn’t notice for a good four months.)
I resisted temptation. I wanted to be invited back.
My volunteer hours mostly have been spent reading, I have to admit. There are long, long stretches in which the church lives up to its quaint reputation as a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old New England institution, when its office staff are working amiably and with barely a whisper, and when the only sounds are the quiet murmurs of Tai Chi in the memory garden and tentative bids of four-no-trump from the bridge club meeting in the auditorium. But then there are the times that I seem to have wandered into someone’s quirky sitcom of church office life, and frankly, I’m not getting enough residual checks for that crap.
Like the afternoon I was working and the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I said, mellifluously.
“How do you spell Gethsemane?” asked someone. It was a woman, I was guessing somewhere between thirty and fifty.
“G-E-T-H-S-E-M-A-N-E,” I suggested. Click. She hung up.
I went back to my book. The phone rang again. “First Congregational Church,” I said.
“How do you spell Jerusalem?” asked the same woman.
“J-E-R-U-S-A-L-E-M-say, do you have any other words you want me to spell while you’re still on the line? This is fun.”
Her response was both dignified and guilty, as if I’d made a stank-face, waved my hand around, and asked Hey, who cut the cheese? “I thought that a church might know the spelling best.”
“I can see the logic in that,” I conceded. “But I suspect a secular dictionary would do just as well, if I'm ever not here.”
“I think I’m done,” she said. “Yes. I’m done.”
“All righty,” I told her.
Scarcely had I hung up the phone than the frailest old woman came in from the outside, with a dry cleaning bag hanging over her forearm. She had to be at least ninety; her face resembled one of those dolls my sister used to make out of sticks, some corn husks, and a carved dried apple for a head. Her eyes were blue and sweet, though, and I smiled at her as she introduced herself. She’d driven down from Old Saybrook for a garden party in Greenwich that afternoon—I looked out the window and saw she’d parked a shiny Escalade in a space outside—and wondered if she might change into her party dress in the women’s room. You see, she was planning to wear a cocktail dress that was so delicate and light and airy that it would have been crumpled and ruined if she’d worn it for the drive down. Would I be so kind—?
I guided her to the women’s room. She returned in a floral dress that was somewhat gauzy and appropriate enough for a formal garden party with Queen Elizabeth. “You look lovely,” I told her.
“Oh thank you!” she cooed, in that charming way some little old ladies have. She then launched into another story about how hot the drive had been, and how her dress would’ve been ruined, and how kind I was to let her change. She added a chorus of grateful old lady thanks. Then, as she turned to go, she added over her shoulder, “Because if I’d shown up looking even a touch rumpled, I would’ve never heard the end of it from that bitch Mitzi Earnhardt.”
I was still gaping when the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I stammered.
“How do you spell crucifixion?” asked the woman at the other end.
There’s a tradeoff to the shortcut, though, and that is whenever I take it, everybody in the church all up in my bidness.
“Off to do some writing?”, one of the front desk volunteers will say as I stride through on the way to the parking lot.
“Sure,” I’ll say, hoping it sounds more plausible than if I admitted that I was really on my way to grab a frappuccino and spend the morning at the beach . . . again.
Or I’ll be walking into the building laden with big bags obviously bulging with groceries, all of them with STOP ’N’ SHOP emblazoned on the side, and one of the women in the office will poke her head out into the hallway. “What have you got there?” she’ll ask.
“Oh, you know. Just liquor and porn,” I’ll reply, in passing.
That’s been the kind of casual relationship I’ve had with the church office over the last year.
After I joined the church in the spring, however, I felt the urge to pitch in and become part of the community. I already play piano fairly regularly for the choirs, but I decided I’d also volunteer at that reception desk I’d walked past hundreds of times. So once a week, for a three-hour shift, I take my book, my knitting, or my iPad over to the office and substitute for one of the regular volunteers who’s out for the day. All the other front desk volunteers are female and almost are all of a certain age. (That age being roughly eighty.) So when people stop in surprise to see me there and ask, “Wow, are you really manning the front desk?” I compliment them on their appropriate choice of verb.
My first day there, I was a little apprehensive about the job because my orientation had consisted of a ten-minute rushed overview that in my memory consisted of two minutes of how to run the postage meter, some vague rushed instructions about doing something with baskets and flowers and church bulletins, some orders to change the sign out by the road that announces the upcoming services, and then an eight-minute detailed lecture on the importance of recycling rubber bands. I arrived to my first shift and learned that everybody—everybody—was heading to an all-day staff retreat, and that I and the rubber bands would be sitting in the church all by our lonesome.
I listened to the doors slam shut on their way out, contemplated the boxes of plastic letters with which I was supposed to construct that week’s roadside sign, and thought that they probably wouldn’t have left me with that kind of temptation if they’d known that at Craig’s last church I rearranged the letters of a Mr. Brian Wright’s door nameplate to read Mr. Writhing Bra. (He didn’t notice for a good four months.)
I resisted temptation. I wanted to be invited back.
My volunteer hours mostly have been spent reading, I have to admit. There are long, long stretches in which the church lives up to its quaint reputation as a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old New England institution, when its office staff are working amiably and with barely a whisper, and when the only sounds are the quiet murmurs of Tai Chi in the memory garden and tentative bids of four-no-trump from the bridge club meeting in the auditorium. But then there are the times that I seem to have wandered into someone’s quirky sitcom of church office life, and frankly, I’m not getting enough residual checks for that crap.
Like the afternoon I was working and the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I said, mellifluously.
“How do you spell Gethsemane?” asked someone. It was a woman, I was guessing somewhere between thirty and fifty.
“G-E-T-H-S-E-M-A-N-E,” I suggested. Click. She hung up.
I went back to my book. The phone rang again. “First Congregational Church,” I said.
“How do you spell Jerusalem?” asked the same woman.
“J-E-R-U-S-A-L-E-M-say, do you have any other words you want me to spell while you’re still on the line? This is fun.”
Her response was both dignified and guilty, as if I’d made a stank-face, waved my hand around, and asked Hey, who cut the cheese? “I thought that a church might know the spelling best.”
“I can see the logic in that,” I conceded. “But I suspect a secular dictionary would do just as well, if I'm ever not here.”
“I think I’m done,” she said. “Yes. I’m done.”
“All righty,” I told her.
Scarcely had I hung up the phone than the frailest old woman came in from the outside, with a dry cleaning bag hanging over her forearm. She had to be at least ninety; her face resembled one of those dolls my sister used to make out of sticks, some corn husks, and a carved dried apple for a head. Her eyes were blue and sweet, though, and I smiled at her as she introduced herself. She’d driven down from Old Saybrook for a garden party in Greenwich that afternoon—I looked out the window and saw she’d parked a shiny Escalade in a space outside—and wondered if she might change into her party dress in the women’s room. You see, she was planning to wear a cocktail dress that was so delicate and light and airy that it would have been crumpled and ruined if she’d worn it for the drive down. Would I be so kind—?
I guided her to the women’s room. She returned in a floral dress that was somewhat gauzy and appropriate enough for a formal garden party with Queen Elizabeth. “You look lovely,” I told her.
“Oh thank you!” she cooed, in that charming way some little old ladies have. She then launched into another story about how hot the drive had been, and how her dress would’ve been ruined, and how kind I was to let her change. She added a chorus of grateful old lady thanks. Then, as she turned to go, she added over her shoulder, “Because if I’d shown up looking even a touch rumpled, I would’ve never heard the end of it from that bitch Mitzi Earnhardt.”
I was still gaping when the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I stammered.
“How do you spell crucifixion?” asked the woman at the other end.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Cacophonous Village
I live in an archetypal little New England village. My home is in a century-and-a-half old parsonage next to a very old church constructed of stone and sparkling stained glass. A few dozen steps to the north of my front porch, right next to a babbling brook, there’s a white sign with Olde Tyme-y lettering that reads Old Greenwich, 1640. A few dozen steps more, and there’s the cutest, most cunning little colonial-style library. And it’s all across the street from the village green, a lovely park surrounding a tidal pond where flocks of geese overnight during their migrations, and where turtles sun themselves on the banks. I have arrived home late at night to find deer at my back door.
Everything’s so green and lovely here. From my house sweeps a massive lawn shaded by mighty oaks. The green is surrounded by trees, and during three seasons of the year, flowers bloom in lurid colors everywhere I look. Our little downtown area, a two-block stretch of Mom and Pop businesses, is anchored by a traditional old schoolhouse at one end, and by a firehouse where on hot days the firemen wash their big red engines out front while a dalmatian thumps its tail contentedly to the side. The train station is over a century old itself—a red barn-like construction that sums up the village’s character. Unpretentious. Quaint. Beautiful, in the simplest sort of way.
You’d think that living here would be idyllic. In many ways, I suppose it is. In one, however, it is not.
This place is freakin’ LOUD.
There’s a road at the bottom of the church lawn, a two-lane stretch of asphalt that separates us from the gorgeous little jewelbox of a park. Two lanes of traffic hell, I meant to say—it’s the only access road to this section of the city of Greenwich, and boy, is it well-traveled. The most common sentence spoken in my household since we’ve moved here is “What?” As in, Craig will say something in his low-talking voice and it will be completely drowned out by the din of the traffic roaring by at high speed.
Or as in me yelling out to Craig to get some silverware for dinner and having him yell back, “WHAT?” from three feet away to make himself heard over the honking and the blare of sirens from that stupid quaint firehouse as those shiny trucks race by on their way to yet another conflagration. There were less fires in Detroit on Devil’s Night than there are here, daily.
The not-so-distant sound of a train horn followed by the rattle of tracks gives me a shivery feel, when I hear it late at night. Multiple times a day, from three blocks away, during peak commuting hours? Well, it’s not so romantic. At five in the morning, summers, we get the diesel-fueled roars of water trucks delivering their chlorinated payloads to the well-off around us with swimming pools, and for the weller-off who are completely redoing their homes for the third time in a decade, construction starts with percussive banging and workmen yelling at seven a.m..
Those geese that occupy the park, autumn and spring, have a tendency to buzz the house as they fly to the park, scaring us and the cats awake at all hours of the night. Once they’re there, they play and scold each other loudly. In springtime, the birds take up at four-thirty in the morning and begin to chirp throughout the many trees found in abundance in our neighborhood. Chirp, hell. They’re basically a lot of non-stop avian Rosie Perezes, yakking and complaining at the top of their shrill little lungs. Raccoons get into slap-fights and screech and yell past midnight like unwanted neighbors, and those picturesque deer knock over trash cans like bums in an alleyway.
Sometimes I find my trips into Manhattan a quiet aural relief. Quaintness has a price. Here, apparently I pay with my eardrums.
Everything’s so green and lovely here. From my house sweeps a massive lawn shaded by mighty oaks. The green is surrounded by trees, and during three seasons of the year, flowers bloom in lurid colors everywhere I look. Our little downtown area, a two-block stretch of Mom and Pop businesses, is anchored by a traditional old schoolhouse at one end, and by a firehouse where on hot days the firemen wash their big red engines out front while a dalmatian thumps its tail contentedly to the side. The train station is over a century old itself—a red barn-like construction that sums up the village’s character. Unpretentious. Quaint. Beautiful, in the simplest sort of way.
You’d think that living here would be idyllic. In many ways, I suppose it is. In one, however, it is not.
This place is freakin’ LOUD.
There’s a road at the bottom of the church lawn, a two-lane stretch of asphalt that separates us from the gorgeous little jewelbox of a park. Two lanes of traffic hell, I meant to say—it’s the only access road to this section of the city of Greenwich, and boy, is it well-traveled. The most common sentence spoken in my household since we’ve moved here is “What?” As in, Craig will say something in his low-talking voice and it will be completely drowned out by the din of the traffic roaring by at high speed.
Or as in me yelling out to Craig to get some silverware for dinner and having him yell back, “WHAT?” from three feet away to make himself heard over the honking and the blare of sirens from that stupid quaint firehouse as those shiny trucks race by on their way to yet another conflagration. There were less fires in Detroit on Devil’s Night than there are here, daily.
The not-so-distant sound of a train horn followed by the rattle of tracks gives me a shivery feel, when I hear it late at night. Multiple times a day, from three blocks away, during peak commuting hours? Well, it’s not so romantic. At five in the morning, summers, we get the diesel-fueled roars of water trucks delivering their chlorinated payloads to the well-off around us with swimming pools, and for the weller-off who are completely redoing their homes for the third time in a decade, construction starts with percussive banging and workmen yelling at seven a.m..
Those geese that occupy the park, autumn and spring, have a tendency to buzz the house as they fly to the park, scaring us and the cats awake at all hours of the night. Once they’re there, they play and scold each other loudly. In springtime, the birds take up at four-thirty in the morning and begin to chirp throughout the many trees found in abundance in our neighborhood. Chirp, hell. They’re basically a lot of non-stop avian Rosie Perezes, yakking and complaining at the top of their shrill little lungs. Raccoons get into slap-fights and screech and yell past midnight like unwanted neighbors, and those picturesque deer knock over trash cans like bums in an alleyway.
Sometimes I find my trips into Manhattan a quiet aural relief. Quaintness has a price. Here, apparently I pay with my eardrums.
Monday, July 2, 2012
The Third Great Book Purge
My parents never threw away a single book.
That’s the kind of statement that might get a casual reader’s head nodding in sympathy. How wise. How true! But when you consider that I had one career academic for a father, and a mother who couldn’t pass a bookstore (new or used) without emerging with an armful of volumes bought on whim, it might lend some understand to the pathological truth that my life was less the stately library of Downton Abbey and a little more along the lines of a particularly grim bibliophile Hoarders.
Some of my earliest memories of my father are of him in his office at the university, where the bookshelves lined every wall and soared to the ceilings—and considering his office was in one of those stately old townhouses with ceilings so high one needed a ladder to reach the uppermost shelves, that’s a lot of books. My mother stored her books in anything that could be pressed into purpose. Not only bookshelves, but dressers, closets, coffee tables, cabinets, kitchen shelves, the piano bench, the pantry. Her paperbacks were double and triple-stacked on each shelf. She even kept the old crossword puzzle books she’d buy at the drugstore, once they’d been filled and completed.
Basically I grew up with the assumption that books were meant to be kept, and for decades I did so. I kept all the childhood books I either bought or received as gifts. I had every college textbook I ever bought, ever obscure graduate school treatise. I had every book I’d picked up for dimes at library used book sales, every book I’d spent my own money on once I had income.
It got, quite frankly, ridiculous. The first time we moved house, the movers complained about the number of books. They were afraid to stack them all on the same side of the house because it might cause the floors to cave in. And when movers are telling you that you have too many books, and they’re looking at your refrigerator and heavy appliances with the light of relief in their eyes, it’s probably time to do something.
So about a decade ago I went on the Great Book Purge. I went through my entire collection, volume by volume, and asked myself the questions, Have I read this since I bought it? Am I likely to read it again? If the answer to either question was no, out it went. I got rid of most of my college and grad school books that way, the volumes of Victorian poetry, anything having to do with Chaucer (sorry, Chaucer), the useless cookbooks. By the time I was done, I’d gotten rid of roughly fifty percent of my collection. I thought I was down to a manageable size.
Until Craig got his new job and we had to move, that is. I was forced to pack all my books in 2010 when we put our house up for sale, because the real estate agent was frank about the fact that no one wanted to look at my damned library when they trooped through our old house. I’d managed not to accumulate quite so many volumes since the Great Book Purge, but I’d picked up a bookcase and a half worth of my own novels—author copies—and I wasn’t throwing out those.
I did get rid of a lot in the Second Great Book Purge, though. I concentrated particularly on public domain novels that I could easily get electronically if I had to. My Dickens collection, for example, or all the Brontes, the editions of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney that I could download to my iPad any old time. I prefer to read ebooks, most of the time these days; it made no sense to cart those heavy tomes thirteen hundred miles across the country.
Since 2010 I haven’t really seen my books. They went from the bookshelves to the garage of my old house for a year, and then from Detroit to Connecticut, where they’re still in storage until we move into somewhere more permanent. But there are still way too many of them. My interest in ebooks was still pretty high. I had almost 700 books on my iPad—a good many of which were volumes I actually owned that had been written by, you know, people who are still alive, or recently were so.
The thought came to me. Why am I holding onto hardbacks that collectively weigh a ton when I can stuff as many of them as I like into a device that weighs a little over a pound?
So the Third Great Book Purge began.
Last month a local library held a used book sale and was looking for donations. I went through the boxes in storage and gave them quite a boost to their bottom line with a massive donation. Science fiction hardbacks, murder mystery hardbacks—anything that I’d managed to purchase in electronic form—gone from my bookshelves (or my library-in-storage, anyway). More than that, I culled a bunch of volumes I re-read on a regular basis—my Patrick Dennis novels, my Betty MacDonalds—and have set them side to scan and turn into ebooks for my personal use, so I can jettison those, too.
I have to confess: it’s been such a freeing experience. It’s scary to see all those volumes, the decades of collecting, the sometimes long process of searching for a rare find, trundled out the door. But in the last couple of years, out of necessity I’ve learned how to make do without my books surrounding me en masse. Decisions like this get easier and easier.
I know the typical arguments about ebooks. I like the feel of a real book. I like the sensation of turning the pages! Whatever, Luddites.
I like real books too. I grew up around them. I find their presence comforting. When I die, I’m still going to have too many books for the tastes of my executors.
But if there’s anything I can do to reduce that number before it happens, I’ll do it.
That’s the kind of statement that might get a casual reader’s head nodding in sympathy. How wise. How true! But when you consider that I had one career academic for a father, and a mother who couldn’t pass a bookstore (new or used) without emerging with an armful of volumes bought on whim, it might lend some understand to the pathological truth that my life was less the stately library of Downton Abbey and a little more along the lines of a particularly grim bibliophile Hoarders.
Some of my earliest memories of my father are of him in his office at the university, where the bookshelves lined every wall and soared to the ceilings—and considering his office was in one of those stately old townhouses with ceilings so high one needed a ladder to reach the uppermost shelves, that’s a lot of books. My mother stored her books in anything that could be pressed into purpose. Not only bookshelves, but dressers, closets, coffee tables, cabinets, kitchen shelves, the piano bench, the pantry. Her paperbacks were double and triple-stacked on each shelf. She even kept the old crossword puzzle books she’d buy at the drugstore, once they’d been filled and completed.
Basically I grew up with the assumption that books were meant to be kept, and for decades I did so. I kept all the childhood books I either bought or received as gifts. I had every college textbook I ever bought, ever obscure graduate school treatise. I had every book I’d picked up for dimes at library used book sales, every book I’d spent my own money on once I had income.
It got, quite frankly, ridiculous. The first time we moved house, the movers complained about the number of books. They were afraid to stack them all on the same side of the house because it might cause the floors to cave in. And when movers are telling you that you have too many books, and they’re looking at your refrigerator and heavy appliances with the light of relief in their eyes, it’s probably time to do something.
So about a decade ago I went on the Great Book Purge. I went through my entire collection, volume by volume, and asked myself the questions, Have I read this since I bought it? Am I likely to read it again? If the answer to either question was no, out it went. I got rid of most of my college and grad school books that way, the volumes of Victorian poetry, anything having to do with Chaucer (sorry, Chaucer), the useless cookbooks. By the time I was done, I’d gotten rid of roughly fifty percent of my collection. I thought I was down to a manageable size.
Until Craig got his new job and we had to move, that is. I was forced to pack all my books in 2010 when we put our house up for sale, because the real estate agent was frank about the fact that no one wanted to look at my damned library when they trooped through our old house. I’d managed not to accumulate quite so many volumes since the Great Book Purge, but I’d picked up a bookcase and a half worth of my own novels—author copies—and I wasn’t throwing out those.
I did get rid of a lot in the Second Great Book Purge, though. I concentrated particularly on public domain novels that I could easily get electronically if I had to. My Dickens collection, for example, or all the Brontes, the editions of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney that I could download to my iPad any old time. I prefer to read ebooks, most of the time these days; it made no sense to cart those heavy tomes thirteen hundred miles across the country.
Since 2010 I haven’t really seen my books. They went from the bookshelves to the garage of my old house for a year, and then from Detroit to Connecticut, where they’re still in storage until we move into somewhere more permanent. But there are still way too many of them. My interest in ebooks was still pretty high. I had almost 700 books on my iPad—a good many of which were volumes I actually owned that had been written by, you know, people who are still alive, or recently were so.
The thought came to me. Why am I holding onto hardbacks that collectively weigh a ton when I can stuff as many of them as I like into a device that weighs a little over a pound?
So the Third Great Book Purge began.
Last month a local library held a used book sale and was looking for donations. I went through the boxes in storage and gave them quite a boost to their bottom line with a massive donation. Science fiction hardbacks, murder mystery hardbacks—anything that I’d managed to purchase in electronic form—gone from my bookshelves (or my library-in-storage, anyway). More than that, I culled a bunch of volumes I re-read on a regular basis—my Patrick Dennis novels, my Betty MacDonalds—and have set them side to scan and turn into ebooks for my personal use, so I can jettison those, too.
I have to confess: it’s been such a freeing experience. It’s scary to see all those volumes, the decades of collecting, the sometimes long process of searching for a rare find, trundled out the door. But in the last couple of years, out of necessity I’ve learned how to make do without my books surrounding me en masse. Decisions like this get easier and easier.
I know the typical arguments about ebooks. I like the feel of a real book. I like the sensation of turning the pages! Whatever, Luddites.
I like real books too. I grew up around them. I find their presence comforting. When I die, I’m still going to have too many books for the tastes of my executors.
But if there’s anything I can do to reduce that number before it happens, I’ll do it.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
A Year
A year has passed since I moved to Connecticut. It was in the first week of June in 2011 that we shoved into our two cars the last of our worldly good, wrestled the two cats into their carriers, and drove out of Michigan toward a new destination. When we arrived, it was after midnight, the cats (and I) were on the verge of nervous breakdowns, and I found myself stumbling into an unfamiliar apartment I’d never seen before, that was intended to be temporary for a couple of months.
I knew the anniversary of the move was rolling around, earlier this month; I had it in mind to write some kind of commemorative essay. Then it arrived, and slipped away—because I simply didn’t really know what to say. Could I write a glowing summary in which I declare that everything is peachy and I am a contented Nutmegger at peace with nature and the world around me? It wouldn’t be all that convincing. Could I write a scathing condemnation of my new home state and everyone in it, and claim that I hate it here? Well, I’m such a cranky old coot sometimes that if I focused on the traffic and the cost of living, I could probably manage to whip up a little something. But it wouldn’t be even half honest. Because I love my new locale.
I’ve noted several times that leaving Michigan often feels like waking up after a long and bad night’s sleep, from one of those grim and endless dreams that seems so real when you’re tossing and turning from it that coming to consciousness feels like sweet relief. It hasn’t hurt that the state has gone completely crazypants since I’ve left. At least in Connecticut I’m pretty sure one can say vagina without being censured.
No, I really love it here. I love being able to walk a short distance into my little two-block downtown area to grab a bite to eat or for a quick trip to the drugstore. I love looking outside and seeing green in every direction. I love that all I have to do is throw on my sunglasses and drive a mile down the road on which I live and I’m at the beach. I love that everything here is so unrelentingly pretty that it makes my eyes ache, no matter the season. I didn’t get any of that in industrial Detroit, with its endless grim winters and its abrupt transition from fleece blanket weather into the height of summer.
I love being only two dozen miles from the center of Manhattan, and being able to hop onto a train at whim to partake of it. I love spending an afternoon reading in Central Park, or hanging out at the Met, or catching a show on a whim.
I love the food here. Even at some cheaper places I’ve had some amazing meals in the city, and the Connecticut pizza at places like Colony Pizza or Frank Pepe’s is crazy-good. The Indian food? Fantastic. Thai food? It sucks. New York and Connecticut, you don’t know. But it gives me an excuse to keep going to Thai restaurants and keep trying. And I’ve made friends. I have friends in the city I enjoy seeing, and new people in the area I’m glad to know. If I walk into a bar for karaoke night, I’m sure to come away with a couple of new names to remember, and some good conversations. I like my church family and friends—and there’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever be typing out.
No, there’s too much I love here and in which I wallow, grateful for having the experience, for me to pretend not to like it. The opportunities here are so much richer and deeper than they ever could have been in Michigan, and I find myself perpetually amazed at some of the things I find myself doing and taking for granted. Experientially, I seem to have been through so much more here than I would have in another year in Michigan.
Even though I look back and think that I’ve done so much in the last year, I simultaneously feel as if I’ve accomplished so little. We still live in the apartment that was intended to be temporary, with eighty percent of our stuff in storage. The compromises I made when it seemed as if we’d only be here for a few months—unpacking only one cookie pan so that I wouldn’t have to pack them all again, or assuming I’d be in a permanent place by the time I needed winter hats or blankets or my snow shoes or the second payment stub book for my car (I don’t know where the hell that thing is), or leaving the TV’s sound system in its boxes thinking that I could make do with the television’s internal speakers for a little while—now seem like major inconveniences.
Craig had a whole year ahead of me to get accustomed to this place; it was old hat to him by the time we sold our house and I joined him. Learning to navigate here has been painful and slow to me. I started in very slow concentric circles, going no further on my own from the house than I could walk. Then I could manage to get to the supermarket down the road, and to Stew Leonard’s, and to Trader Joe’s, but anything more complicated baffled me. I’ve gradually incorporated more locations into my driving repertoire, and have earned the insouciance with which I can toss off casual references to the various exit numbers along I-95, but damn, has it been a slow process of accumulation. I can plot a route between two spots in New York City in my mental MTA subway map more quickly than I can figure out how to get anywhere in Connecticut.
Having to reconstruct a social network, and having to figure out where and what to do here, and having to learn all over again how to get there to do it—all at the same time—has sometimes just seemed so overwhelming. I’ve often let it cloud the fact that I am going places, and doing things, and trying new experiences in abundance.
It’s been a good year. It’s been a rough year. It’s been a long year. It’s only been a year. All of those, all in equal and in varying measure, all at the same time.
I knew the anniversary of the move was rolling around, earlier this month; I had it in mind to write some kind of commemorative essay. Then it arrived, and slipped away—because I simply didn’t really know what to say. Could I write a glowing summary in which I declare that everything is peachy and I am a contented Nutmegger at peace with nature and the world around me? It wouldn’t be all that convincing. Could I write a scathing condemnation of my new home state and everyone in it, and claim that I hate it here? Well, I’m such a cranky old coot sometimes that if I focused on the traffic and the cost of living, I could probably manage to whip up a little something. But it wouldn’t be even half honest. Because I love my new locale.
I’ve noted several times that leaving Michigan often feels like waking up after a long and bad night’s sleep, from one of those grim and endless dreams that seems so real when you’re tossing and turning from it that coming to consciousness feels like sweet relief. It hasn’t hurt that the state has gone completely crazypants since I’ve left. At least in Connecticut I’m pretty sure one can say vagina without being censured.
No, I really love it here. I love being able to walk a short distance into my little two-block downtown area to grab a bite to eat or for a quick trip to the drugstore. I love looking outside and seeing green in every direction. I love that all I have to do is throw on my sunglasses and drive a mile down the road on which I live and I’m at the beach. I love that everything here is so unrelentingly pretty that it makes my eyes ache, no matter the season. I didn’t get any of that in industrial Detroit, with its endless grim winters and its abrupt transition from fleece blanket weather into the height of summer.
I love being only two dozen miles from the center of Manhattan, and being able to hop onto a train at whim to partake of it. I love spending an afternoon reading in Central Park, or hanging out at the Met, or catching a show on a whim.
I love the food here. Even at some cheaper places I’ve had some amazing meals in the city, and the Connecticut pizza at places like Colony Pizza or Frank Pepe’s is crazy-good. The Indian food? Fantastic. Thai food? It sucks. New York and Connecticut, you don’t know. But it gives me an excuse to keep going to Thai restaurants and keep trying. And I’ve made friends. I have friends in the city I enjoy seeing, and new people in the area I’m glad to know. If I walk into a bar for karaoke night, I’m sure to come away with a couple of new names to remember, and some good conversations. I like my church family and friends—and there’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever be typing out.
No, there’s too much I love here and in which I wallow, grateful for having the experience, for me to pretend not to like it. The opportunities here are so much richer and deeper than they ever could have been in Michigan, and I find myself perpetually amazed at some of the things I find myself doing and taking for granted. Experientially, I seem to have been through so much more here than I would have in another year in Michigan.
Even though I look back and think that I’ve done so much in the last year, I simultaneously feel as if I’ve accomplished so little. We still live in the apartment that was intended to be temporary, with eighty percent of our stuff in storage. The compromises I made when it seemed as if we’d only be here for a few months—unpacking only one cookie pan so that I wouldn’t have to pack them all again, or assuming I’d be in a permanent place by the time I needed winter hats or blankets or my snow shoes or the second payment stub book for my car (I don’t know where the hell that thing is), or leaving the TV’s sound system in its boxes thinking that I could make do with the television’s internal speakers for a little while—now seem like major inconveniences.
Craig had a whole year ahead of me to get accustomed to this place; it was old hat to him by the time we sold our house and I joined him. Learning to navigate here has been painful and slow to me. I started in very slow concentric circles, going no further on my own from the house than I could walk. Then I could manage to get to the supermarket down the road, and to Stew Leonard’s, and to Trader Joe’s, but anything more complicated baffled me. I’ve gradually incorporated more locations into my driving repertoire, and have earned the insouciance with which I can toss off casual references to the various exit numbers along I-95, but damn, has it been a slow process of accumulation. I can plot a route between two spots in New York City in my mental MTA subway map more quickly than I can figure out how to get anywhere in Connecticut.
Having to reconstruct a social network, and having to figure out where and what to do here, and having to learn all over again how to get there to do it—all at the same time—has sometimes just seemed so overwhelming. I’ve often let it cloud the fact that I am going places, and doing things, and trying new experiences in abundance.
It’s been a good year. It’s been a rough year. It’s been a long year. It’s only been a year. All of those, all in equal and in varying measure, all at the same time.
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