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I’ve never read a biography about any of the Brontës before so when the publisher offered me the chance to read Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman I said, sure! This year is the two hundredth anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and that we are still reading her and talking about her books and her weird family really says something. Harman’s biography is advertised as “landmark” because it “transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine.” I’ve never thought of Charlotte as being a tragic figure and I didn’t feel like the biography made her out to be a modern heroine. This is not a criticism of the biography itself, only of the book’s marketing.

Because the biography was pretty good. It didn’t spend much time at all analyzing the novels, which is good because while a little analysis is fine, I don’t read literary biographies hoping for a dose of lit crit. Of course the books are talked about, especially in relation to their autobiographical elements that somehow always seem to have much to do with Charlotte’s obsession with Monsieur Heger, her teacher and eventual employer in Belgium.

Let’s talk about that relationship a bit, shall we? Heger was married to the woman who ran the school. It appears that he really did like Charlotte more than he should. But it also seems like he managed to more or less skate along the border of propriety. He knew she liked him and he would write her notes or give her small gifts or “academic encouragement” to egg Charlotte on. But he never told her he loved her or made any overt overtures or promises. Madame Heger was too vigilant for one, and I get the impression that Charlotte was a teacher-student crush that got way out of hand because Heger did not expect Charlotte to crush on him so hard. Charlotte was borderline stalker and if she had been in modern times I could see her doing a Fatal Attraction kind of thing. Because Brontë.

You write about one Brontë you kind of have to write about them all. I knew they were not your normal sort of family but I didn’t realize just how crazy they all were. Anne I think was the most normal of them all and she was doing ok, had a good gig as a governess in a family she liked that also liked her. She even got her no good brother Branwell a job as a tutor for the boy in the family. Only Branwell had to go and have an affair with the lady of the house and Anne had to quit with the shame and humiliation.

Branwell was so full of himself and his entitlement because of Patrick his father who was also full of himself and his entitlement. Patrick is kind of like a male version of Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre and Branwell is like John Reed through and through. And because of those two jerks, all the Brontë women were made to suffer.

Also, their closed little world at the Parsonage was not a mentally healthy situation. If Anne was the most normal, Charlotte was the second most normal. Sure she was a stalker, but she was at least functional and even had friends. Emily on the other hand, totally bananas. If you have ever wondered what sort of quiet retiring person could come up with the sick and twisted relationship that is Cathy and Heathcliff, I tell you this little story about Emily.

She was out walking one day and came upon a dog in the road. Emily liked animals and she stopped to talk to the dog. Only the dog bit her. Terrified she might have rabies but not wanting to tell anyone, she went home and cauterized the dog bite with a hot iron. Good thing women dressed so modestly back then otherwise can you imagine the dinnertime conversation when everyone got an eyeful of dog bite and iron burn? Not something one can easily explain away. Then again we are talking about the Brontës here so maybe they would have been like, Emily you are so badass! Or just made a collective whatever kind of shrug.

The biography details the trials and travails of the sisters trying to get published, goes into detail regarding Charlotte’s writing schedule and relationship with her publisher and her public. It seems she pretty much always refused to make any changes to her manuscripts. She was shy and socially awkward but her publisher treated her kindly, inviting her to London to meet the literati. In spite of his pleasantness, he paid Charlotte significantly less for her books than a man would have been paid. So what else is new, right?

Charlotte eventually did get married to Arthur Nicholls, her father’s curate. Her father was very unhappy about this because he was a mean, old selfish man who, instead of being happy for his only surviving child, was angry at her for not devoting her life to his care and feeding. But Charlotte smoothed it over by continuing to live at the Parsonage, much to her new husband’s displeasure. But that just goes to show how much Nicholls loved her, willing to live under the same roof as Patrick Brontë.

Unfortunately once Charlotte was married she pretty much stopped writing. She dedicated herself to the care of her husband and duties as a curate’s wife. And then she got pregnant and the pregnancy killed her. Her death certificate says she died from tuberculosis, but all evidence indicates that she had hyperemesis gravidarum. The cause is unknown but one theory suggests it to be an extreme reaction to pregnancy hormones resulting in a constantly upset stomach, nausea and other issues. These days she would have been able to go to the hospital like Kate Middleton did, but back then there was no help and Charlotte slowly wasted away and died. Given that she had stopped writing, I can’t help but wonder if, even had she lived, there ever would have been another book. It is too bad we never got to find out.

If you, like me, have never read a bio about Charlotte or the Brontës, this one was pretty good. Knowing a bit about their lives casts their books into a different light. But don’t just take my word for it, Jeanne and Jenny have both read and reviewed the book as well.

I don’t remember where I heard about The Rider by Tim Krabbé. I feel like a broken record lately, how many times have I begun a post “I don’t remember where I heard about this book…”? It is beginning to get ridiculous and I should just stop. Does anyone even care how I found out about a book? I think I am just being lazy with opening sentences.

The Rider is anything but lazy. Along with being a chess champion and novelist, Krabbé also had a career as a professional bicycle racer. He got started in racing late in life at the age of thirty. Thirty is not old but to begin racing professionally at that age, not very common. He had talent though and made a good showing. This book is a kind of memoir of his racing and is it ever good.

The brilliance of the book is how it is structured. Krabbé begins with his arrival before the Tour de Mont Aigoual, a 137 kilometer race that climbs one of the highest peaks in the Cévennes. It is June 26, 1977, cool and cloudy. All the other riders are gathering and warming up. We get some of the dirt on who is good at doing what, who is young and ambitious and who has been around a long time and starting to lose their edge. We get pre-race jitters. They line up and then they are off.

And the narrative changes to a different time in Krabbé’s life in 1973. And then we are back in the race at kilometers 25-30 and back and forth the narrative goes between the race and the events that got him there, past races, past sports experiences when he was a child, histories of other riders and races. Having the narrative of one race interspersed with other things really works to ratchet up the suspense and by the time it gets to the end of the race I didn’t want to put the book down.

You may wonder what anyone could possibly have to say about a 137 kilometer bicycle race. I did. But wow, is it interesting. We get an insider’s view of what it is like to ride in the peloton — I was surprised to learn how much they talk to each other, just chatting to pass the time. We also get racing strategy — most of the time it has nothing to do with how fast you ca go. We learn about how terrifying it is to descend mountains on curving, wet roads. And we learn about what it means to suffer on the bike.

I read a lot about suffering and cycling, a lot of cyclists glorify it. Strava even lets you assign a suffer score to your rides as though the more you suffer the better cyclist you are. I have never understood about the suffering. I understand a little better now.

When you are racing 137 kilometers through the mountains there will be suffering. Your legs are going to hurt and many times you are going to feel as though you have nothing left but the race is not over yet and you can’t quit so somehow you find the will to keep pedaling; pedaling up the mountain, through the wind and the rain and the rain that turns to snow and the cold that settles into you in spite of how hard you are working so that you can’t even feel your hands on your handlebars anymore and can’t feel whether or not you are actually squeezing the brakes enough to keep you from crashing as you get ready to go through a sharp downhill turn on a wet road, can’t feel your feet or your face, or anything but the pain in your tired, cold legs that somehow keep pedaling.

I’ve heard before that bicycle road racing is all about who can suffer the most and longest. It now makes more sense. If racing is about suffering then why do it? Valid question. Krabbé says alpinists have it easy, when asked why they climb mountains and they say “because it is there,” people let them off the hook as though their reason has some deep and mystical meaning. Cyclists have no simple answer and can’t easily explain why they do what they do. It’s multiple reasons, because they can, because it is a challenge, because it is a test of will, because

after the finish all suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately.

He also calls suffering an art.

Doesn’t that make you want to jump on a bike and ride?

The only other book about cycling I have ever read is Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike. I read it long before he admitted to doping when he was still an amazing cyclist with an amazing story. It was a good book as far as the story goes, the writing itself was straightforward and so-so and I am pretty sure Armstrong had help writing it. Krabbé’s book is so much better. It reads almost like a suspense novel. And it is good not just because the story is interesting but because it is well-written too.

You don’t have to be a cyclist to enjoy the book but it certainly helps. But even if you don’t ride a bike and just enjoy being a spectator the book is a lot of fun. Krabbé is Dutch. I’ll have to check if my library has any of his novels that have been translated into English and give one a try. If you know of any other good books about cycling, I’d love to hear about them, fiction or nonfiction!

Reading Roger Deakin’s book Notes from Walnut Tree Farm was a great joy. The book is composed of excerpts from notebooks he kept during the last six years of his life. He wrote in them almost daily his observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings and doings. So while the book is strung across the course of a year from January to December, the entires are pulled from six years of writing. They are not dated with a year and on any given day there might be multiple entries from various years. It sounds complicated and disjointed but it really isn’t. I had intended to read the book a month at a time, to move through the year along with the entries. But I couldn’t stop reading, I was enjoying myself far too much to be able to dribble the goodness out over an entire year.

Deakin has a keen eye and a great knowledge of the history of the land. He is a fan of the commons and the wild, an advocate for stewardship. He loves cats and birds and holds a great respect for all living things including the insects that make their way into his study since it seems his window screens are either non-existent or of such a large mesh he is guaranteed to be visited by something while sitting at his desk:

I think, yes, it really is another world, this microscopic insect world, a world apart. But almost at once I realize that to put insects into ‘another world’ or ‘a world apart’ is dangerous. In fact it is the rationale for exterminating them with pesticides. If theirs is ‘another world’, it has nothing to do with us. It is unconnected, and, whatever we choose to do to it, we ourselves are unaffected. The very reverse is the truth of course. Unless we realize we share a single world with the insects, and that if we harm them we harm ourselves and the rest of nature, we will end up destroying ourselves — committing suicide, in fact.

I think we are beginning to discover this with the bees and people are starting to speak out about it. But it has taken far too long to get to this place and we have a long way to go. It is easy to feel sorry for a dead honeybee, not so easy for people to be sorry about ants or flies.

If I can be enchanted by my cat, rolling in joy on the brick terrace before me, why can’t I be enchanted by a green shield bug in my vegetable garden, or two ants meeting and exchanging information with a flourish of their antennae? Or the billowing fizz of cow-parsley in full flower?

But Deakin isn’t all nature yes and civilization no, bugs good, people bad. It is possible to have a balance.

I blame the Romantics for all this self-consciousness about landscape and inspiration. Wandering lonely as a cloud may be the last thing you need sometimes. Going round the corner for breakfast in a steamy cafe may be much more like it.

Deakin has much to say about trees. I learned quite a lot about pollarding and coppicing, two things that seem to be a dying art, as is creating and properly maintaining hedgerows. He is also a person who enjoys working with wood and has considerable skill at turning felled trees into bookshelves or even sculptures. He is the kind of person who respects the tree and the wood, which I believe must infuse his work with respect, passion and love.

How wonderful it must have been to be Deakin’s friend and walk with him around his farm in Suffolk and the surrounding area. Deakin died in 2006, but he has left us his notebooks curated into the beautiful Notes from Walnut Tree Farm through which we may walk with him anytime no matter the weather.

I was planning on telling you about the next essay in The Art of Daring but it has turned out to be a hot and windy day and I feel a bit limp. So, I’m just going to tell you about a funny bit in the prologue to the biography of Keats I just began reading the other day.

The biography is the one by Robert Gittings. In the prologue he tells a little story about the first biography of Keats intended to be published not long after his death in 1821, Memoirs and Remains of John Keats. Apparently friends of Keats were angry and scandalized that someone would so hastily and prematurely publish such a book.

Appointed spokesman of the friends tossed out a barbed insult at Taylor of the publishing firm Taylor and Hessey who were planning on printing the abomination. The insult? Are your ready for it? It’s really bad. Ok, Brown called Taylor “a mere bookseller.” I know, right? It doesn’t get any worse than that. The insult worked so well that the book was never published and no one who knew Keats firsthand ever wrote a full-length biography.

I know, it was a different time and a different publishing landscape. No doubt the epithet probably implied Taylor was a money grubbing opportunist or something like that. But to think that being called a bookseller and a mere bookseller at that, was once insulting is at least worth an amusing snort, don’t you think?

These days if “mere bookseller” were to be used as an insult I am afraid it would mean something more along the lines of “you are a stupid idiot because everyone knows print is dead and no one actually reads any more.” Of course we know differently, which would also make this worth a snort of amusement and perhaps a head shake of pity for the poor fool making the insult. And a sigh. I think a good sigh would also be in order.

After several months of waiting, my turn for Roz Chast’s graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? finally came round. It was worth the wait.

You may already know what it is about. Chast’s parents were aging and she tried several times to talk to them about what they would want to do if something happened. Of course no one likes to think or talk about these sorts of things and trying to talk to your parents about it, especially when they don’t want to talk about it, is no easy thing. So Chast’s attempts went nowhere. And her parents continued to age and everything was fine until it wasn’t.

In their early 90s and becoming more frail, unable to keep the apartment clean and relying on a friendly neighbor to pick up things from the grocery store for them, it was only a matter of time before something happened. The call came at midnight. Chast’s mom had fallen while trying to stand on a ladder to change a light bulb. The fall had actually happened a few days before and she refused to go to the doctor. Nothing a little bed rest couldn’t fix. Until she couldn’t get out of bed. While Chast’s mom spent a few days at the hospital she had her father stay with her and her family. It was then she noticed her dad’s mental acuity was nowhere near what she thought it was. Her mom had been taking care of him and covering up just how bad he had gotten.

Thankfully, her mom was not seriously injured. But it was the beginning of the long decline. After more incidents Chast managed to convince her parents that they needed to move into assisted living. It was a nice facility where they had their own apartment and Chast, her husband and kids were nearby and could visit them frequently. Still, the parents did not go willingly.

The memoir is well told with humor and compassion. The art is cartoon-y but expressive. Chast’s story is the story of so many others that it is no surprise really why the book is so popular. I have family members who have had to take care of their aging parents. I have friends who are in the midst of taking care of theirs. It is not easy and our society doesn’t help make it any easier. Care facilities cost astronomical sums of money. Chast’s parents had scrimped and saved their entire lives and it only took a couple of years before they had nearly run through all their savings. Is that what we work all our lives to save for? Not retirement, but to pay for decent end-of-life care? And what happens when the money runs out? What happens if you have no one like Chast to look out for your best interests when you are not able to? It’s a scary prospect.

Growing old sucks. But the thing is, I don’t believe it has to. I don’t know how to change society and culture so that the golden years truly are golden right up to the last breath. But it is definitely something that needs to change.

I’m over at a site called Bitter Empire today with a review of a new nonfiction book:

Behind Every Great Man: The Forgotten Women Behind the World’s Famous and Infamous by Marlene Wagman-Geller, offers a collection of short biographies, usually six to ten pages, of the wives of famous men. From Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen (aristocratic wife of Karl Marx) to Eva Gabrielsson (common-law wife of Stieg Larsson), from artists and scientists to dictators and activists, Wagman-Gellar investigated women who were both married to historically significant men and seemed to have “dwelled in the shadows.” With her investigations she aimed to pay tribute to the women who influenced their famous husbands. Many of the women profiled were equal partners in the events that brought their husbands’ fame only to find themselves left on the sidelines of history.

Also, it is the final day of my long, four-day weekend. Sigh. It is cold and rainy outside and bookish folk know what that means: perfect reading weather. So please excuse me while I go curl up with a few good books.

One of the books I was reading while having an existential crisis brought on by seed catalogs is Dirty Chick: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer by Antonia Murphy. Far from helping me through my crisis, this book served to make it just a bit worse. I want a farm in New Zealand! Granted, Murphy doesn’t do much in the way of food growing, she is more into eclectic animal collecting. And while her adventures with vicious roosters and alpacas launching gobs of green spit at her are hilarious, I was just a tiny bit jealous of her good fortune.

Murphy and her husband were urban dwellers in San Francisco before they moved to New Zealand. Her also city living parents went on vacation and asked her to take care of their very much pet chickens and lonely duck, his mate having recently died. The chicken coop has to be one of the most well appointed around, it had a small chandelier! But her chicken and duck watching ended in disaster when the lonely duck raped one of the chickens to death. So when Murphy and her programmer husband decided to pull up stakes and sail their boat to New Zealand (Hobbits!), she did not have farming on her mind.

Months later when they arrived in New Zealand, Murphy was pregnant. Her husband got a job in Invercargill where they lived before moving to Purua where they rented a small farm from a German couple who were going to be out of the country for a little over a year. Her husband got a job in the city not far away and Murphy stayed home writing and taking care of the two small children they now had and the farm. They decided to move to Purua because her firstborn, Silas, was diagnosed as developmentally delayed. In this small town her son could be integrated into the regular school and not be made to attend a special needs school.

Murphy’s farming adventures are hilarious. She has no idea about anything and as a result is continually making unpleasant discoveries. Sometimes her humor can be a bit crude, but when the two calves you are transporting in the back of your station wagon have a sudden attack of diarrhea, well, the brand of humor is understandable.

I laughed when I read this book. A lot. From the very first page:

As I watched my goat eat her placenta, I was mostly impressed. I did experience some other feelings, such as horror and revulsion, and also a hint of nausea. But Pearl had always been a strict vegan, so her sudden craving for raw meat showed a real taste for adventure. Some vegetarians who broaden their menu choices might spring for an egg, or a soup made with chicken stock. But my goat, Pearl, went straight for the autocannibalism. Which was disgusting. And also worth some respect.

A goat and eventually two kids, chickens, a couple of lambs, a couple of calves, a couple of alpacas, and three turkeys that cost so much to feed that by the times they killed them for a proper Thanksgiving Murphy estimates them to been worth $85 each.

Murphy and her husband quickly make a few friends but have difficulty really fitting into the community at first:

Hamish’s skepticism about our credentials was perfectly fair. Farming was his livelihood, and we thought it was some kind of lark. You don’t see dairy farmers moving to the city with big ideas about being cardiologists for fun. ‘How hard could it be?’ they might chortle, spitting tobacco and hitching up their jeans. ‘I’ll just git me a book from the library.’

Which is what Murphy does quite frequently, raiding the local library for every book on raising goats or desperately searching the internet for advice. She also had a tendency to be a bit weird. When you live in a city there is so much more that is permissible than when you live in a small community. Murphy had long hair and she discovered the cat ears she had from a Halloween costume worked great at keeping her hair out of her face. So she ended up with a collection of various sorts of animal ears as well as devil horns. She’d wear these all the time, not just while on her farm. At first she couldn’t understand why people looked at her the way they did when she showed up to get her kids at school or shopped at the local market or visited Hamish across the road to plead for help or colostrum to feed her baby lambs.

Eventually they do manage to fit in and as their time renting the farm from the absent Germans races toward an end, they are frantic to find another farm nearby they can buy for themselves. They find one in the nick of time and all their neighbors help them move their animals to their new home. They end up having a sort of animal parade and after they are settled in to their new farm, they host a big party for everyone.

The writing isn’t always great and sometimes the crude humor is just too much, but as a whole, the book is highly entertaining. Along with the farming adventures we get a glimpse into what seems like a close-knit, friendly and sometimes eccentric community as well as some more serious notes regarding Murphy’s son. If you are looking for something lighthearted and want to laugh at the silliness of someone who thinks she can farm without knowing a thing about it, then, Dirty Chick is your book.

Thanks to Gotham Books for sending me a copy.

I must give a hearty “thank you” to Ian Darling for telling me about Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks after I read The Miracle of Mindfulness. When you read a book like Thich Nhat Hahn’s on meditation and he is telling you how good it is and how it will change your life it is easy to dismiss it because of course this Buddhist monk is going to say that. To then read a book like Parks’s, a personal story that leads him kicking and screaming to meditation where he discovers that it really does work, it makes you pause and think.

Parks’s story begins when he was 51 and tired of suffering from severe pains and trips to the bathroom 5-6 times a night, something that he has been experiencing for years and keeps getting worse. Parks live and teaches in Verona, Italy and happened to have a good friend who is a top urologist in the country. His friend diagnosed him with prostatitis and referred him for tests and consults with top doctors. Through test after test and scan after scan, all the doctors said that if he weren’t having such pain they would say there was nothing wrong with him. The suggested treatment was an invasive and painful surgery that may or may not work, though all the doctors assured him it would. Parks rightly hesitated.

On a trip to India for a conference he decided to visit an Ayurvedic doctor on the spur of the moment. The doctor told him he could give him all kinds of herbs and recommend all sorts of expensive supplements but none of them would work and he would never be cured until he confronted the “profound contradiction” in his character. “There is a tussle in your mind,” the doctor told him. Parks left kicking himself for wasting his time. But he could not get over this idea of there being a tussle in his mind.

On the internet he discovered a place in California that treated men with problems like his. They had a book. Parks ordered the book. Basically, their theory was that his condition was muscle-related, that his body was so full of tension that the muscles around his prostate could not relax. Treatment was an hour of “paradoxical relaxation” and regular prostate massage. Parks decided even though he didn’t feel tense, he’d give the relaxation a go since he had nothing to lose.

“Paradoxical relaxation” is pretty much meditation done laying down. The paradox is that once you are comfortable, you are supposed to focus on an area of your body that feels tense but not try to relax it. Only by not relaxing the tension will the tension go away. And there was to be no verbalization, no talking to yourself in your head, just an empty mind and focus.

Parks was surprised when he quickly learned that the body he thought was not tense at all was nothing but tense. His first few efforts ended up giving him moments of increased pain. But he kept at it and after a few more tries had a moment when something let go and he felt a warm wave wash through him. He was so excited by this that he immediately ruined the moment. But he had made progress. Eventually he had pain-free hours during his day but he still had to get up frequently during the night.

He visited a Shiatsu massage specialist. The massages caused pain but also relieved pain. His masseuse eventually recommended Parks try Vipassana meditation. Parks was reluctant but realized that he had gone as far as he could with his paradoxical relaxation so he signed up for a weekend retreat.

In Vipassana meditation you begin by focusing your attention on feeling your breath move across the top of your lip, in and out. You aren’t supposed to think. You are supposed to sit completely still. Parks quickly discovers how very hard this is. Even with his paradoxical relaxation he had supreme difficulty not thinking, not verbalizing, now it was even harder. But there were exquisite moments when it would all come together and he would feel so calm, relaxed and completely free of pain. After two years and regular meditation, he found himself cured. He still had to get up during the night but only twice a night instead of 5-6 times.

Throughout the book he keeps going back and mulling over what the tussle in his mind could be, and he discovers there are a number of unresolved issues with his parents, especially his father, with his writing and his ambition. At one point he even decides he needed to give up writing entirely but when he told the leader of the retreat he was on when he came to this conclusion, the man just laughed at him and said he had it all wrong.

Eventually he figures it out. He realizes that holding on so tight to language, to words, the “I” that language asks us to create is the problem. Meditating helped him let that go, helped him get out of his head and into his body, gave him a sense of wholeness and calm and taught him that there is pleasure in letting the self disappear.

Of course everyone will have different reasons for meditating and derive different benefits, but Parks’s experience is encouraging and uplifting. He makes you believe that if he could do it, everyone reading his book certainly can do it too.

The Gardener of Versailles by Alain Baraton is a delightful book whether you are interested in gardening or Versailles. Baraton has been the Gardener in Chief at Versailles since 1982. Don’t you just love that title? He was the youngest ever installed in the position. He began working at Versailles in the 1970s with no intent on becoming a gardener. As a teen all he wanted was to have enough money to afford his scooter and the hobby of photography he decided to take up. He mowed lawns and weeded for cash. He had no real aspirations for anything so his parents enrolled him in horticulture school. Afterwards, he got a job at Versailles selling tickets at the gate and after a little while there was an opening for a novice gardener and he was given the job which he only took because the chief gardener at the time told him he would be able to live free in the gardens in one of the employee apartments.

As a young man who didn’t believe himself to be very attractive to women, he found that being a gardener at Versailles and living on the grounds had its perks. He was able to provide private tours to willing young women who suddenly found him very attractive. Heh. Years later he met his wife at Versailles. She was visiting the gardens alone and got caught in a downpour and he invited her into his house to dry off and warm up.

The Gardener of Versailles is an enjoyable mix of memoir, history, and personal opinion from an experienced gardener. I fell in love with Baraton at the start when he talks about the trees of Versailles:

I’m not an overly sentimental or nostalgic person; I don’t wring my hands in pity over a broken vase, and I don’t play Mozart for my hydrangeas. But a tree is a living thing. After living alongside my trees for more than thirty years, I’ve acquired more than simple know-how. I feel something like botanical sympathy; I can tell whether a tree needs attention, whether it is suffering or flourishing.

There was a severe and devastating storm that hit Versailles in 1999. The garden lost more than 18,000 trees that were either uprooted by the storm or were so damaged they had to be cut down. Baraton was heartbroken over the losses and it still haunts him all these years later. Throughout the book he keeps returning to the storm again and again; there was the garden before and the garden after and the garden after is just not the same.

Of course with any top position one finds that one no longer gets to spend as much time doing the things one loves most. Baraton discovered that as Gardener in Chief he spends most of his time worrying about budgets and filling out paperwork. Nonetheless, he still makes it out into the gardens and does he ever have some good stories!

You might think his greatest enemy would be drought or flood or pests but it turns out it is busloads of senior citizens. The elderly women are, more often than not, plant thieves, sometimes uprooting entire plants and stashing them in bags to take home!

On the other end of the spectrum are the young couples who think they will have an exciting and romantic time having sex in a secluded part of the garden. Only many times they only think they are out of the way and have been discovered by tour groups, almost run over by a lawn mower or suffered other indignities. Baraton feels for them though and offers some helpful suggestions for would-be lovers:

dress appropriately. Versailles is infested with mosquitoes, and I’ve seen more than one romantic idyll ruined by the impromptu arrival of a swarm of hostile insects. The destination should be the broad, green allées in the depths of the domain — the air is purer and the landscape will lend a charming country atmosphere to your lovemaking. There are also fewer passersby, and with luck, you might even see some wild animals…Above all else these distant destinations allow you the occasion for a long walk — the distance will allow you to get to know one another better, and as the case may be, fan the flames of your companion’s desires or reassure your companions of your good intentions.

Versailles is used to people making love. The various Louiss (Louis’s? Louisies? Louises?), especially the XIVth, had mistresses galore. The statues even tell tales. Louis XIV had a statue of himself as Eloquence made for the garden. His statue was placed so it looked directly at a statue of the nude huntress Diana, made in the likeness of his favorite mistress. When the statues were revealed the affair was made public. Louis’s wife was incensed and had a couple of yews planted to keep the two statues from looking at each other.

And mixed in with all of that is a dose of gardening advice:

But a good gardener should never lose sight of the fact that gardening is a perpetual balancing act of pleasure and necessity. The healthiest plants are obtained by those who know and respect the laws of nature.

And:

What makes a good gardener? The essential ingredient can be reduced to a single word: joy. Our work may be tiring but it is also extremely gratifying.

Baraton may not have started out wanting to be a gardener but he has grown to love the work and the garden he works in. His love for both shines throughout the book making me want to visit Versailles just to meet him and maybe if I am lucky he would show me some of his favorite trees and tell me their stories.

I don’t consider myself much of a memoir reader. Biography, especially literary biography, most definitely, but memoir? Not my first choice. Not that I don’t read them, I do, just that I am not an active seeker of the genre. And when I find one to consider for reading it has to have something more than a “story of my life” thing going on. It is unusual that I found myself reading two memoirs at the same time. How did that happen?

A Farm Dies Once a Year held promise but ended up being a plain “story of my life” kind of book with nothing much on offer but the story that wasn’t all that interesting to begin with. The other book, Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding by Lynn Darling is the kind of memoir I enjoy. Darling takes an idea — being lost — and lifts it to a higher level, goes beyond her personal story and asks the reader to consider all the ways one can be lost and how one goes about finding the way.

Darling, middle-aged, widowed 10+ years years, her only daughter planning to go away to college soon, decides to buy a house just outside of the town of Woodstock in Vermont. Darling had been taking vacations there for a number of years, renting a house in town for a month or so during the summer to get away from New York City. The prospect of her daughter going off to college and leaving her alone in the NYC apartment that held so many memories of both husband and daughter was unbearable. She felt adrift, no longer wife and no longer needed as a mother in quite the same way she had been for the last 18 years, Darling didn’t know who she was anymore.

The day she dropped her daughter off at the dorm at Cornell, she drove to her new house in the woods south of Woodstock. And got really lost on the way. Darling couldn’t afford a nice house like she had been renting in town. What she could afford was a quirky DIY house built by the previous residents. The house backed up to the woods, had only intermittent phone service, and no electricity except what was supplied by a couple of solar panels. After a woodchuck kept chewing through the line for the internet, she gave up and didn’t have that either. The house was almost as off grid as you can get these days.

Darling decided it would be her Fortress of Solitude where she could figure out the next steps of her life in peace and quiet. But soon her Fortress turned into Castle Dismal when so many things needed fixing and she discovered that she was not as self-sufficient as she thought she was. She got a dog, Henry, to keep her company. Henry was not a happy puppy because Darling never took him out for walks in the woods, too afraid was she of getting lost. But finally she and Henry went out, not far, and found themselves having such a wonderful time not far ended up being where did the house go? After several hours of fear and panic they eventually made it back home, Darling determined to never stray from a well-marked path again.

But that’s the thing with paths through the woods and paths through life, they are never as well-marked as we hope they are and sooner or later we find ourselves wondering where we are and how we got there. Darling is worried about how easily she gets lost, considers how, when she was younger she loved getting lost — excitement, discovery, the unknown — and somewhere along the way it stopped being fun. She thinks if she can find the spirit of her younger self things will work out fine, in the woods and in her life. But of course you can’t go back.

Finally, Darling decides to take lessons on wayfinding. Her teacher, Marty, taught all sorts of survival classes for women and agreed to provide her with a two-day private lesson.

What Darling wanted to learn how to do, to walk out into the woods and magically never get lost, she soon discovers is impossible. Darling’s neighbors who could wander through the woods all day and never be truly lost could only do it because they had lived there all their lives. They knew the area, they had created mental maps and noted landmarks to help them find their way. She was both disappointed — it wasn’t a magical talent she could awaken — and relieved — she didn’t have to worry about not having any talent because she could learn. And learn she tried to do.

Marty taught her how to read a topographical map and use a compass, how to plot a course, how to know if she had made a mistake and ways to figure out how to correct it. The secret to finding your way, it turned out was practice:

Finding my way, Marty had said, came down to practice, not merely because practice would make the new exotic techniques of wayfinding more familiar, but because practice led to experience — not only of map and compass, but of the person using them. Learning how not to get lost was about knowing your own limitations, about what you couldn’t do and didn’t know, as much as it was about the reverse.

Direction, Darling discovers means paying attention to what is behind you and what is in front of you. It means seeing what is there, not what you are afraid is there or wish were there. It means being willing to make mistakes and not beat yourself up over them because that is how you learn.

Darling’s is a gentle voice. It is clear she has thought long and deeply about wayfinding in all of its many meanings. She has worked hard for the insights she offers in her story. While she doesn’t offer a map, that would be impossible, she does give a sense of comfort and understanding; we are all on different paths but that doesn’t mean we are completely alone or can’t lend a hand to each other.

Out of the Woods is not a “wow” sort of book. There are no extraordinary events, no biting wit, no name dropping or gossip. Rather it is a personal book filled with every day courage, the kind it takes to find your way through the woods and through a life.

At the end of March when spring still felt so very far away and the seeds I had ordered for my garden were neatly bundled in a box, I received an offer for an e-galley of a book called A Farm Dies Once a Year by Arlo Crawford. I had been wondering at the time if perhaps I had missed my calling; wondering if I were in my mid-twenties again whether I wouldn’t really like owning a farm. My dad grew up on a farm and my mom lived on a farm too for a while when she was a kid so I’ve heard stories, I know it’s hard work. But never having lived or worked on a farm myself, really understanding what that hard work is was beyond me so it is easy to wonder whether I would have enjoyed being a farmer. Of course at this time of my life the point is moot but that doesn’t stop me from wondering what if?

After reading A Farm Dies Once a Year I think I would probably have found the work very satisfying but everything that goes along with farming, not so much. My urban garden will suffice, thanks, but I do wish it were just a little bigger. Ok, a lot bigger, but not acres and acres bigger.

At thirty-one Crawford has a bit of an existential what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life crisis. He had grown up on his parents’ organic vegetable farm, 75 acres in rural southern Pennsylvania. Dissatisfied with city living, and never having lived or worked on a farm before, Crawford’s parents moved to the country, rented some land and started farming. It was hard but satisfying. Soon they bought the land that became New Morning Farm. Crawford’s parents always hoped that he or his younger sister would be interested in taking over the farm from them one day but both of the kids fled to the city as soon as they could.

At the time of his crisis, Crawford is working at a museum in Cambridge, Mass and living with his longtime girlfriend Sarah. He decides that going back to the farm for a growing season will help him figure things out. He convinces Sarah to come too.

The book is written in a plain, straightforward style that fits the subject, but I somehow expected it to be more meditative, more thoughtful about the nature of work and why Crawford, his parents, and even Sarah found working on the farm so very satisfying.

More than anything the book is about Crawford’s parents and the history of the farm. There is also an attempt by Crawford to understand and come to terms with the murder of Bert, his parents’ best friend. Bert, inspired by Crawford’s parents, had also decided to buy a farm not far from them. One day while out in his fields he was shot and killed by a neighbor who was angry about Bert’s dogs getting out and harassing his cows. Bert had a wife and young daughter. His wife was in the field too and saw the whole thing take place.

But when it comes to Crawford himself, it is hard to see how working on the farm for the summer changes him. It does, he tells us it does. But other than his expressing to his father how proud he is to be his son, there is no sense of movement or epiphany. Sure, when he and Sarah leave at the end of the season and move to San Francisco, Crawford takes up work as a produce manager at a natural foods store, but he tells us he still hasn’t figured out what he is going to do with his life. This left me wondering what was the point of the book then? Sure, I got a detailed look into a season on a farm and I am no longer left to wonder just how hard the hard work is. I have a better understanding and a greater appreciation for what small farmers do. But it’s not enough. It’s not so very much more than “this is what I did on my summer vacation.”

I wanted so much to like this book. I tried hard while reading it to muster up excitement about it. In the end, however, I found it spent too much time on the surface and not enough time diving into the depths looking for meaning and insight.

I picked up Susan Gubar’s book, Memoirs of a Debulked Woman from the library on Saturday. You may recognize Gubar as co-author of Madwoman in the Attic among other important feminist texts. Gubar was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008. Ovarian cancer is nearly always fatal.

Gubar undertook to write the book because there is not much known about the causes of ovarian cancer, there is no early detection to increase a woman’s chances of survival, and the treatment for the disease is so rudimentary that it often causes a host of other problems. By writing the book Gubar hopes that enough attention is drawn to ovarian cancer that more work is put into creating early detection tests and better treatments that might help someone else since it is too late for her.

Part of the problem of early detection of ovarian cancer, besides there being no reliable screening method, is that symptoms resemble so many other things: bloating, fatigue, a feeling of satiety, indigestion, recurrent back or abdominal or pelvic pain, urinary frequency, flatulence, irregular periods, spotting, cramping, constipation, shortness of breath, pain during intercourse, or incontinence. Not every woman has symptoms and if she does, depending on her age, why would she think anything was wrong? Oftentimes women who do have symptoms who feel something isn’t right and see their doctor, are treated for the symptom itself without further investigation. Gubar’s first symptom was indigestion. She went to the doctor and he gave her antacids to take. Given all this, it is not surprising that almost all women diagnosed with ovarian cancer have already reached advanced stages in which the median survival rate is 25 to 30 months.

Gubar’s cancer was already advanced. She decided to follow standard treatment. She was “debulked,” surgery that removes part of a malignant growth that cannot be fully excised. However, during the surgery her colon got accidentally cut in a few places and fluids from her bowels entered he abdominal cavity. She got infections and abscesses in her colon, and ended up having a drainage tube inserted into her abdomen to keep fluid from building up in it. This was then followed by six weeks of debilitating chemotherapy.

I must now admit that I did not read the entire book. It is well-written to be sure, but after the foreword and the first chapter I couldn’t go on. I don’t consider myself a hypochondriac but I couldn’t help but think about all the times I have felt bloated, or had cramps or fatigue or indigestion and wonder if maybe…? It was also clear after the first chapter that the book was about to get really intimate with all that Gubar went through and felt and thought and I was just not up for it. So I skipped to the last chapter and skimmed it.

I discovered that in spite of everything, she had a remission for a year in which she lived almost normally. But at the end of 2010 the cancer had come back. She had another round of chemo and was contemplating more surgery when the book ends. She is still alive but at the end of the book she says she knows she is fighting a losing battle, that eventually the cancer will win.

She also expresses surprise that she has followed the path of doing everything possible to extend her life no matter how demeaning and painful and debilitating the treatment is. Prior to diagnosis she always thought she would be one of those people who, when faced with a terminal illness, would choose to bow out gracefully instead of submitting to the indignities of the medical establishment. But she discovered that she didn’t want to go down without a fight after all. She readily admits how lucky she is to have excellent health insurance coverage, a workplace that was able to let her have time away (she has since retired), a close family and a supportive network of friends. Because of this she has access to some of the best doctors and can even travel to a different state to consult with experts.

I suspect that everything between chapter one and the last chapter is really good and really interesting and raises plenty of questions about ovarian cancer, the practice of medicine, and end of life issues and other important things as well. But it is the gruesome details that kept me from reading those in between chapters. I wouldn’t want Gubar to change them, to make them nicer, to pretend that they are somehow not so bad. I admire her courage and strength and I appreciate that she has written this book. I hope it is successful in bringing about changes in ovarian cancer detection and treatment. I hope that in five or ten years that such huge strides have been made that a diagnosis of ovarian cancer is no longer a death sentence.

It’s been a wonderful Bookman birthday day today. The cake came out so good and it couldn’t have been simpler. It is basically a single-layer chocolate cake with some cherries in it topped with a can of cherry pie filling and then drizzled with chocolate. What could be easier? And because of the cherries we can pretend that it is nutritious!

I began reading My Poets by Maureen McLane today and very quickly became friends with this book.

The first chapter is short and is a “Proem in the form of a Q&A” Here is a sample:

Why do you read poetry?
I caught this morning morning’s minion.

Why do you read poetry?
Batter my heart.

Why to you read poetry?
I have wasted my life.

Other questions include what is the first poem you remember, why poetry, and why do you write poetry? Here are a couple answers to the last question:

Why do you write poetry?
My purpose here is to advance into
the sense of the weather.

Why do you write poetry?
I sing to use the Waiting.

As if that weren’t marvelous enough, chapter two muses about the word “kankedort” which apparently only appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. From there we move to a chapter called “My Impasses” in which McLane talks about two poetry classes she took as a college freshman in 1985, one of them taught by Helen Vendler. She talks about reading poetry and reading poetry, good readings and bad readings, about finding a way into a poem and being stuck on the outside even though you badly want to understand. And she talks about how, years later, a poem that was so confusing and impossible originally can suddenly open up and let you in and mean so much. It is a really wonderful chapter that I might have to reread and write about because she says so much that is true.

And then chapter four. Oh, I had to stop myself in the middle of it so I wouldn’t rush to the end because it is so utterly fun. Chapter four is called “My Elizabeth Bishop / (My Gertrude Stein)” and it is written in the style of Stein. For her undergraduate thesis McLane decided she was going to write about Stein but Stein resisted her and a gift from a mentor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems turned out to be a wonderful discovery and saved her thesis from disaster. I must give you a taste of the chapter so here is how it begins:

My Elizabeth Bishop begins with Gertrude Stein.
This is not usual.
Bishop is unusual but not in the way Stein is unusual.
I was not used to Gertrude Stein and found I could not get used
    to Stein though I tried.
I was struggling to find a topic for my undergraduate thesis.
This seemed the most important thing in the world.
Whatever is the world to you is the most important thing to
    you.
I would be making myself in this thing.
I was always making myself or being made.
This was unavoidable.
I was planning on being made by Gertrude Stein but she was not
    cooperating.
She was operating on another plane a fractured cubist grid I
    could not make out.

And it appears to go on like this for entire 27 pages of the chapter.

I suppose this kind of book might not be for everyone, but oh, I have a little crush on it at the moment and hope that we manage to be best friends by the final page.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson is one of the best literary memoirs I’ve read in a long time. Winterson’s matter-of-fact voice and honesty are hard-hitting. Yet, oddly, there is also a sense of distance, a feeling of disconnect as if Winterson is not writing about her horrific childhood but about the childhood of someone else named Jeanette Winterson with whom she is intimately familiar.

Given up for adoption at the age of six-months by a mother who wanted to her to have a better life than she felt she could give her as a single parent, she enters the Winterson household. She is already a disappointment and wrong because Mrs. Winterson had planned on adopting a boy, was going to have a boy, Paul, but it did not work out and she found herself with Jeanette instead.

Mrs. Winterson, as Jeanette calls her mother, was a strict Pentecostal Christian who regularly locked Jeanette out of the house, even as a small girl, to teach her a lesson. Mrs. Winterson was unhappy, hated life, and was merely waiting for the apocalypse. She did not believe in having any other book in the house except the Bible. Jeanette snuck to the library to read and when she was old enough to get a job she would buy paperback books and hide them under her mattress. Until one day her mother noticed that Jeanette’s bed was getting higher and discovered her paperback stash which she promptly took out to the yard and burned. Jeanette asked her once why they couldn’t have books in the house. Her mother replied, ” ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.’ ” And indeed, books were very dangerous:

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Winterson writes a lot about books and what they did for her, how they gave her an education, helped her figure out life, who she was, that there was a bigger world than Mrs. Winterson let her know about and that she, Jeanette, was connected to it.

When Mrs. Winterson learned Jeanette had a crush on a girl at school, she had the church perform an exorcism on Jeanette to cast out the demon. At sixteen, Jeanette was kicked out of the house once and for all because she admitted to her mother that she liked girls and wasn’t going to change. Jeanette was rescued by her English teacher who was also instrumental in inspiring her and helping her get into Oxford.

There is a theme that runs through Why Be Happy. It is about storytelling and how stories shape who we are, can connect us to others and save us. Also throughout the book Winterson comments on her writing and the things in her life that have influenced how and what she writes:

My mother had to sever some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since. Mrs. Winterson was such a mix of truth and fraud. She invented many bad mothers for me; fallen women, drug addicts, drinkers, men-chasers. The other mother had a lot to carry but I carried it for her, wanting to defend her and feeling ashamed of her all at the same time.

The hardest part was not knowing.

I have always been interested in stories of disguise and mistaken identity, of naming and knowing, How are you recognised? How do you recognize yourself?

In a moment of reading serendipity, I read an essay by E.L. Doctorow in the May 24th New York Review of Books (I am really behind in reading these but it was fortuitous) in which Doctorow remarks about Faulkner:

But it is possible that the way writers live can find its equivalent in their sense of composition, as if the technical daring of Faulkner’s greatest work has behind it the overreaching desire to hold together in one place the multifarious energies of real, unstorried life.

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All you wonderful women out there who are feminists and SF readers, have you heard about the new column at Tor, Sleeps With Monsters?

You can expect me to look at the successes and failures of media in terms of portraying women. You can expect me to occasionally mention videogames. You can expect me to touch on the history of women in the genre, riffing off the SF Mistressworks project. You can expect me to highlight discussions about women and genre in the blogosphere — if your not-so-humble correspondent fails to miss them. You can expect me to look at recurring tropes that turn up in genre, often to our detriment. And you can expect me to pop up, yelling, “Feminism WOO YAY!” once or twice a month. (Like a bad penny.)

The first post has loads of links to online feminist geek/SF/genre goodness to keep me busy for days. And, Bourke promises to write about lots of feminist genre writers and their books, so TBR piles beware!

One of the most amazing things about this post, however, is the comments. Usually one can expect some real trolls to turn up with stuff like this. And while there were some challenging males that did make an appearance the general tone did not degrade to name calling and mud slinging.

Sadly, it looks like it is only going to be a twice a month column but I am still pleased. Go check it out and add it to your feed reader.

And while I am on the topic of feminism, have you heard the sad news that Susan Gubar, co-author of Madwoman in the Attic and author and co-author of many other books and articles, is dying of ovarian cancer? She has managed to write a memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, that was just published April 30th. I’m number 33 in line for it at the library so will probably find myself reading it in the middle of summer. Of course I will post about it.

Before my turn came round for Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, I thought it was just about Lucretius and a copy of his book that was found during the Renaissance, more a book of ideas than anything else. But what a delightful surprise to discover how very bookish this book really is.

I got a good dose of Renaissance history and Church politics, a history of books and libraries, and a biography of Poggio Bracciolini, apostolic secretary, book hunter, and a man with the most gorgeous handwriting I have ever seen. Here is a sample from Wikipedia of Poggio’s handwriting:

It is not the best resolution, The Swerve has a color high resolution photo of a manuscript in his hand and it took my breath away. His family was not that well off, but managed to get him a good education and Poggio’s handwriting and political savvy along with friends in the right places, got him his job as secretary to the Pope (he served six popes if I am remembering correctly). Poggio was famous for his handwriting in a time when a gorgeous script and a good education could get you very far in life.

It was also that handwriting and education that allowed him to travel all over Europe, riffling through the forgotten and decaying manuscripts in monasteries looking for important and unknown works. Thus in 1417, he eventually discovered the manuscript of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a follower of Epicurean philosophy. The monks would not let Poggio copy it but made him hire a scribe. He then sent the book to his friend Niccolo Niccoli (the inventor of the Italic script on which the printer Aldus Manutius based his first book type). Niccoli was supposed to copy the book and then give it back to Poggio but instead he put on his shelves, ignoring Poggio’s pleas for a good many years before Niccoli relented and allowed Poggio a copy of it.

At that point, Lucretius was finally set free into the world. Even though it was the Renaissance and we, at least I, always think of it as being very liberal time, it was not. The Church was in charge of of everything in Italy and On the Nature of Things turned out to be a very dangerous book.

On the Nature of Things is a 7,400 line hexameter poem written in a very difficult Latin. In the poem Lucretius writes about how everything is made of invisible particles called atoms. These atoms are the seeds of everything – all things are made of atoms – and atoms are eternal and infinite in number. Everything comes into being from the atoms swerving into each other in random collisions and forming endless combinations and recombinations. As if this weren’t enough to rile up the Church, Lucretius also claims that the universe was not created for humans and humans are not the center of it. Humans, in fact, are a product, like everything else, of atoms. He even outlines a kind of evolutionary theory.

But wait, that’s not all. Because we are made of atoms, when we die, the soul dies too because it is also made of atoms and is anchored in the body. Therefore, there is no afterlife and when we are dead all our atoms disperse into the universe to be recombined into something else. There is no divine creator; religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel. Because we only get one life, the highest goal of human beings should be the “enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.” In other words, life is about the pursuit of happiness for oneself and one’s fellow creatures.

Can you see why the Church wouldn’t like Lucretius? But by the time they caught on, it was too late. At least one copy made it out of Italy, beyond the reach of the Church, and to a printing press.

A good many Renaissance artists and thinkers were influenced by

Previously in the Lives of Margaret Fuller, smart girl, no friends, becomes an admirer of Goethe, nearly dies of typhoid, father dies from cholera, and at the age of 25 she decides she needs to earn money for the family.

Fuller wants to write a biography of Goethe but it is a big project and she believes she should visit Germany. Since she needs money she puts off this project and instead works on penning critical articles for American Monthly Magazine and translating some poems by Goethe.

Emerson’s star is on the rise at this time. Fuller probably saw him preach several years earlier and wanted to meet him but was too shy. In late 1834 Fuller gave a manuscript of some poems by the Italian poet Tasso that she has recently translated to her friend Frederic Henry Hedge and asked Hedge to nonchalantly show them to Emerson. He did and Emerson was impressed enough that he wanted to meet her. But Fuller got shy and didn’t go. But she still wanted Emerson to notice her so in May 1836 she wrote an elegy on Emerson’s late brother, Charles. Unfortunately the poem appeared anonymously and Fuller wasn’t sure he’d know she had written it. Fuller’s friend Harriet Martineau praised Fuller to Emerson and his wife Lidian who then invited Fuller for a two-week visit. Finally, on July 21, 1836, Fuller arrived at Emerson’s Concord home. Unfortunately, Emerson was under the impression that Fuller had come to visit his wife, not him.

Fuller was very plain, had a nasal voice and a bad habit of incessantly opening and closing her eyelids. Her domineering and acerbic reputation also preceded her. Emerson was certain he would find it hard being in the same room as Fuller and that they would not likely get along. Nonetheless, Fuller managed to worm her way into Emerson’s good opinion and her two-week visit lasted three.

Emerson got Fuller a job working in Bronson Alcott’s experimental school. Alcott kept her so busy that she generally had only six hours a night to sleep. She had no time to pursue her own writing and study, and she and Alcott began having pedagogical differences. It also didn’t help that after 25 weeks she still hadn’t been paid. Alcott eventually paid her some money before his school closed but not even close to what she was owed.

During this time, however, she became part of the Transcendental Club. Fuller is often called a Transcendentalist but she really wasn’t. She agreed with them on many aspects of their philosophy, but ultimately she found the philosophy to be one only a well-off man could ever completely follow. The mind and soul were supposed to transcend the body but Fuller’s migraines, trouble with exhaustion and depression as well as the fact that she had to work for a living kept her from embracing the philosophy. She liked hanging out with the transcendentalists though because they allowed her to be intelligent and express her opinions because only the mind mattered, they could look beyond her sex. Eventually she edited the Transcendental journal The Dial. For this she was supposed to be paid but the journal never made any money and Fuller made herself ill from exhaustion from all the work she did to produce it.

Fuller really began to come into her own and earn money when she started hosting a series of conversations for women only so they did not have to feel intimidated by the presence of men or feel as though they needed to be deferential. Given Fuller’s need to always be in charge, her role as conversation leader was to “inspire listeners to offer their own reflections on the topic.” She and her conversations were a great success and it won her a large and dedicated following.

As a woman and an intellectual in nineteenth century America, Fuller had to constantly reinvent herself in order to make her way in the male-dominated world. As she struggled

Several years ago when I had my Emerson project and read through all of his essays and then read a biography about him, there was the interesting person of Margaret Fuller. Reading about Emerson, Fuller seemed a strong-willed woman who was in love with him and also shamelessly flirted with all the other Concord men. So back in early December when I was perusing NetGalley to see if there was anything particularly interesting to read, I came across The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson. Since the book is published by Norton and Matteson won a Pulitzer in 2008 for his book Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, I figured the biography of Fuller would be a good one. And it is.

My impression of her from reading about Emerson turned out to be completely wrong. She is definitely strong-willed, but she was not in love with Emerson nor did she flirt shamelessly with anyone. In fact, most people, especially men, didn’t like her much. She was not a very attractive woman, had a curved spine, squinted from nearsightedness, fought with her weight her whole life, suffered from bad skin as a teenager, and was pretty much smarter than everyone she else and liked them to know it.

Born Sarah Margaret on May 23, 1810, she was the first child of Timothy Fuller and Margarett Crane Fuller. Timothy had high educational ambitions for his daughter, unusual at the time. He taught her himself and was quite exacting. When Fuller was six, Timothy began teaching her both English and Latin grammar. Not long after that he started her on Greek. By the age of nine she was “reading a compendious list of histories and biographies in English, as well as many of the major works in the Latin canon.” Lucky for Fuller she was very much a child-genius and sucked up the lessons like a Hoover.

As her mother began to have more children, several of which were boys, and as her father got elected to Congress and spent more and more time away, Fuller was no longer the center of her parents’ attention. She genuinely enjoyed learning, but it also became a means for her to garner some small bit of affection from her father and mother.

But so much studying took its toll on her health. She began to suffer from migraines as well as nightmares. As an adult she often wished that her parents had insisted she spend time outdoors running around in the fresh air to counter all the time she spent studying and reading.

Eventually her father enrolled her at Cambridge Port Private Grammar School, a boys’ college preparatory school that admitted girls on a part-time basis. Fuller’s competitive nature and desire to excel and impress her father came to the fore. While being the smartest student in school is great, she had no social skills and no friends. She was lonely, and because she knew she was smarter than everybody she conducted herself with an air of superiority that kept anyone from being inclined to like her.

So Margaret was sent off to Miss Susan Prescott’s Young Ladies’ Seminary to learn how to be a lady. To say she resented this would be an understatement. But Fuller was taken under the wing of Miss Prescott herself who also believed in serious instruction. Fuller made a few friends, though her penchant for making scathing remarks about her peers made it difficult to keep even the friends she did make.

Fuller left Miss Prescott’s just before her fifteenth birthday. He mother wanted her back at home to help take care of and teach her younger siblings. This is when her formal schooling ended and her self-education began.

Oh, how I’ve gone on about her childhood, but it is these early years that really shaped the woman she became.

Her self-education took the form of reading everything she could get her hands on. She discovered Goethe, like so many others about that time, and considered him a model for how she would like to shape her own intellect. She became fri

In the mood for science? Biography? A graphic novel? Then you may want to read Feynman written by Jim Ottaviani and drawn by Leland Myrick. It is a fairly recent publication and will probably find itself ranked up there among the best graphic novels available. Except it isn’t a novel. So what is a graphic novel that isn’t a novel called?

The book is a whirlwind tour of the life and work of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics and a great teacher and personality. The book begins in 1964 with Feynman giving a lecture to a packed hall, then skips back to 1923 when Feynman was a boy and his dad is reading him a bedtime story. Then we jump ahead to 1986 and back to 1927. But none of this is confusing and all the jumping around serves to show how past influenced future. Then there is a good long stretch in the middle that is chronological with Feynman in high school, falling in love, going off to MIT, and beginning his work on Quantum Electrodynamics Theory (QED). The theory belonged to the scientist Dirac but it wasn’t complete and Feynman wanted to figure out how to fill in the gaps. He filled in some but not all of the gaps, graduated with a Ph.D. and then shelved his work on the theory for awhile because his fiance, soon wife, became ill with tuberculosis and he was asked to go work at Los Alamos during WWII. He was part of the group that created the atomic bomb.

During his time at Los Alamos, he also taught himself how to be a safecracker. His wife died on June 16, 1945. He was grief stricken but instead of mourning her loss, he threw himself into his work. Not until a year later, after the war, when he arrived at Cornell to take up teaching was he finally able to allow himself to cry.

He was unable to produce any new work for quite sometime. One day he decided he just needed to play like he did when he was younger and not worry about whether what he was doing was important or not. So he began trying to figure out the motion of a rotating plate tossed into the air and the wobble that happened in that motion. This led him back to QED. At the same time there were two other men working on solving QED, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. They all became aware of the work each was doing and while they didn’t actually collaborate, they did work off of each other and between the three of them they completed QED. For this the three of them shared the Nobel Prize in 1965.

Besides a brilliant physicist, Feynman was also a gifted teacher. He was determined to be able to explain QED to people who were not students or physicists. It took him a long time to be able to do it because, as he explained, even physicists didn’t know why QED worked. But he managed to do it in a series of lectures that he first delivered in New Zealand. They have been printed in a book called QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, or, through the magic of the internet, you can watch him deliver the lectures. If you have time for neither, QED is nicely explained– with pictures!– in the graphic novel. It takes work to follow and is kind of mind-bendy, but it is not impossible.

Feynman eventually goes to teach at Cal Tech in California, remarries and has children. After the Challenger exploded in 1986, he was asked to be on the investigative commission. He was the only one who was not afraid to speak out about the O-ring failure and the other issues at NASA that contributed to the disaster. He wrote a separate report of his own because he could not in good conscious sign his name to the report that the commission wrote. A big argument ensued but a compromise was struck and Feynman signed the commission report and his report was placed, in full, in the appendix. When the report was made public, most people did not even talk about the part the commission wrote but went straight to Feynman’s report.

When offered a review copy of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch I couldn’t say no. I figured a book by anyone who read a book a day for a year would be full of bookish goodness. It was. Sort of. I enjoyed the book, I read to the end after all, but it wasn’t as bookish as I expected. It was more grief memoir than year of reading fun. If you go into it knowing this, then you are much more likely to enjoy it more than I did.

When Sankovitch was 43 her 46-year-old sister, Anne-Marie, died of cancer. Grief stricken and filled with survivor’s guilt, Sankovitch spent the next three years trying to live for herself and her sister in an attempt to make up for her sister’s death. It made her and her family exhausted. Approaching her 46th birthday, Sankovitch decided she would read a book a day for an entire year in an attempt to overcome her grief, to slow down, and to honor the memory of her sister who loved reading and with whom she often talked books. She would read her first book on her birthday and the next day she would write a review about the book for a book website that she had started previously. The rules for her year were:

no author could be read more than once; I couldn’t reread any books I’d already read; I had to write about every book I read. I would read new books and new authors, and read old books by favorite writers. I wouldn’t read War and Peace, but I could read Tolstoy’s last noel, The Forged Coupon. The books would be ones I would have shared with Anne-Marie if I could have, ones we would have talked about, argued over, and some we would have agreed upon.

The year gets off to a rocky start as she tries to find a workable schedule that allowed her to read and write and take care of her four boys and husband. But soon enough she settles into a rhythm that works for everyone.

Sankovitch writes extensively on her grief over her sister’s death, about her childhood, about her own children. She ruminates about loss and memory and reading and what it means to her and occasionally she writes about the books she is reading and what in them has struck a chord for her. She definitely knows what it is to be a reader and sometimes had me nodding my head in agreement like when she writes:

People share books they love. They want to spread to a friend and family member the goodness they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages. In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced. …But it is also a tricky maneuver for both sides. …We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly….

On the other side of the offered book is the taker. If she is at all a sensitive being, she knows that the soul of the offering friend has been laid wide-open and that she, the taker, had better not spit on her friend’s soul.

How many of us have been on both sides when the book ended up not being liked? Uncomfortable!

Sankovitch’s year of reading allowed her the time and space to deal with her grief and figure out how to live with her loss. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair isn’t an especially philosophical or insightful book. It is, however, honest. And there is a list at the back of the book of the 365 books Sankovitch read during her year. But, as I said earlier, the book isn’t particularly about books. Approach it as a memoir by someone who likes to read and your expectations will not be disappointed.

On a whim after finishing May Sarton’s The Small Room, I decided to read e. e. cummings’s The Enormous Room (my copy is an old Modern Library edition not the Penguin edition linked here). I thought it was a novel but the book begins with letters from Edward Cummings to President Wilson and others asking for help in locating his son in France. Edward had received a telegram saying that his son was lost at sea but soon after it was rescinded. So this isn’t a novel then. But everywhere I have seen it listed it is listed as novel. So it is perhaps a hybrid, an autobiographical novel and a fictional memoir. Or something.

Cummings served as an ambulance driver in France during World War I along with his friend known in the book only as “B” but whose name is William Slater Brown. In August 1917, B was arrested by the French for some letters he wrote. Cummings was questioned and supported B and so he was arrested too. In the book we never know what was in the letters that prompted arrest. Cummings makes it seem like he has no idea and just ends up being arrested by accident and because he made some snarky remarks to the police while being questioned. In reality, they were arrested because B’s letters contained anti-war sentiments and cummings agreed with him.

The two are sent to La Ferté-Macé, a detention camp where those who haven’t officially been convicted of anything are sent pending review by a commission. The commission only shows up every three months and cummings and B are brought to La Ferté a few days after the commission had already been there. So they are stuck there for three months.

They live in an enormous room with about 30 or so other detainees. The Americans are lucky enough to have portable beds/cots among their belongings and so become part of the lucky few who don’t have to sleep on a straw mattress on the freezing and filthy floor. Conditions in the enormous room are dreadful. There are several buckets along one wall for urinating in and by the end of the day they are all overflowing. There is a sort of closet with a bucket for defecating in and that too by the end of the day is overflowing. The room is insufficiently heated by a small stove. The prisoners are taken out for air every morning and afternoon. The food is enough to make you wretch. There is good food but that is all confiscated for the meals of the guards. Once a week the men are treated to a bath, said bath amounting to a bucket of cold water poured over their heads.

There are women at the camp too. They are separated into their own room. Their meals and outdoor time is strictly segregated from the men’s time. But of course there is plenty of clandestine fraternizing that goes on.

The Enormous Room has not plot. It is simply the telling of the day-to-day and the sketching of some very interesting characters. Oh, and lots of making fun of the French government. Here, for example, is his description of Monsieur le Gestionnaire who:

looked as if he was trying very hard, with the aid of his beribboned glasses and librarian’s jacket (not to mention a very ponderous gold watch-chain and locket that were supported by his copious equator), to appear possessed of the solemnity necessarily emanating from his lofty and responsible office. This solemnity, however, met its Waterloo in his frank and stupid eyes, not to say his trilogy of cheerful chins–so much so that I felt like crying ‘Wie gehts!’ and cracking him on his huge back. Such an animal! A contented animal, a bulbous animal; the only living hippopotamus in captivity, fresh from the Nile.

He contemplated me with a natural, under the circumstances, curiosity. He even naively contemplated me. A

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I’ve been working my way through Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton since the end of December 2009 and finally I have finished it. Don’t let how long it took me to read it make you think the book isn’t very good, far from it, this book is most excellent. My drawn out reading had everything to do with me and nothing to do with the book. Well, expect that the book is huge–762 pages in my hardcover edition.

Lee is a thorough biographer and a good writer. She must have ate, slept and breathed nothing but Wharton while she was researching and writing this book. The book is full to bursting with the facts of Wharton’s life but Lee turns them into a finely detailed portrait rather than a recitation of dates and a list of acquaintances. Lee has also read everything Wharton ever wrote and interweaves the creation of the books and stories with a fine literary analysis. While it is tempting to find the writer’s life in her fiction, Lee is very cautious about such an approach. She recognizes the influences from Wharton’s life that appear in the fiction but she does not speculate or read into plots and characters anything beyond the story itself.

Wharton had a long and fascinating life. She was a strong woman with definite opinions. She struggled to get out of “old New York” and its customs that oppressed women but ironically she disliked feminism and feminists. I have always thought of Wharton as a very rich woman, and she was wealthy, no doubt about it, but a large portion of her wealth was created by her success as a writer.

While she didn’t have to write for a living she did have to write in order to sustain her lifestyle. Thus she always struggled to find a balance between writing for the art and writing for the money. She did believe that she should be able to write for the art and be well paid and frequently grew frustrated by publishers and magazines that said her work was too intellectual and asked her to change her stories to better suit a more popular audience.

Aside from writing Wharton was quite the decorator and gardener. She loved to travel especially by car. And of course she read. A lot. By her late sixties she had about four thousand books divided between her two houses in France. Her book collection was not for looks. Her books were read and reread and marked up. She insisted books were meant to be used. Of course her library contained plenty of fiction and it had an international range. There was a large number of French fiction, English, Greek and Latin in translation, Italian and German (Goethe was a favorite). In addition to fiction she read poetry (she loved Walt Whitman), philosophy, essays, history, lives of saints and histories of religion. She had books on evolution, astronomy, popular science, gardening, and her battered Baedekers and Blue Guides.

Wharton comes across as a woman who lived life to the fullest. She was writing and making plans almost right up to the end when she had several strokes and her heart finally gave out. I am pretty sure I would have been terrified to be in the same room as Wharton, she could be rather imperious at times, but she was also shy in company she didn’t know well.

I am very glad to have read this biography. After the length of time it took me, I would have thought I’d want to be done with all things Wharton for a very long time. On the contrary, I have a very large desire to delve into Wharton’s work, especially her short stories and her lesser known novels. And Ethan Frome I really want to read that one. I have only seen the movie with Liam Neeson in it and I liked it very much. Now I just have to figure out a way to fit Wharton into my reading schedule.

I’ve been plugging away at Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton since the end of December of 2009. I read a big chunk then and after that set it aside and picked away at it from time to time. Now I’ve gotten back into and am reading it regularly weekends and evenings. And enjoying it very much.

Wharton knew several people Virginia Woolf also knew and I wondered if they had ever met. I’ve read biographies of Woolf and don’t recall it being mentioned. Now I know the answer. They never met. Wharton despised all things Bloomsbury which she associated with “lesbianism, feminism, bad manners, socialism and ‘Bolshevism,’ obscenity, exhibitionism and experimental art.” She did not like stream-of-conciousness writing and a good many of the techniques used by most modern writers. She thought modernism was formulaic and over-theorised and tended to get it tangled up in her ideas of class, race, and democracy.

Mary Berensen tried to persuade her to read Orlando. The novel was illustrated with “alluring” pictures of Vita Sackville-West and Wharton told Mary that it made her “quite ill” to look at it. She said she would read it but I don’t know if she did. I suspect that if she did, she hated it.

In 1925 both Wharton and Woolf had new books published. Wharton was resentful and prickly that her book, The Mother’s Recompense was called “old-fashioned” and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was praised as being “brilliant experimentalism.”

Woolf really ticked her off that same year when she published a somewhat condescending essay on American fiction in the Saturday Review. Wharton wrote to a friend:

Mrs. Virginia Woolf writes a long article…to say that no interesting American fiction is, or should be, written in English; and that Henry Hergesheimer [sic] and I are negligible because we have nothing new to give–not even a language! Well–such discipline is salutary.

I had to laugh because Woolf and Wharton are both snobs. Their differences seem to be generational. Wharton resents not being respected for her age and wisdom and Woolf, as younger generations often do, just wants the old fogey to get out of the way.

So now my question is answered. Woolf and Wharton never met but they knew enough about each other that if they had met it would have been with icy politeness and a hasty departure.

For our discussion this time around the Slaves took a step away from the usual selection of a novel and chose to read a memoir, Bad Blood by Lorna Sage. While I enjoy reading a well written memoir, and this one definitely is that, I never quite know what to say about them. A person’s personal story is not quite the same as a novel so I fall into thinking things like, “wow, what a weird family guess mine isn’t as weird as I thought.”

I could recount for you Sage’s life – growing up in a small Welsh border town in a vicarage run by her philandering grandfather during WWII, a grandmother who lived in a fantasy world where she believed she was of a higher class and deserved to be catered to so never lifted a finger to clean a thing leaving all that to her daughter whose husband was away at the war. Other than being attached to her grandfather and getting some education and a love of books from him, Sage was pretty much left to run wild. The educational system was set up to train girls who were going to get married and have children and boys who were going to be manual laborers. But Sage persevered even after she became a teenage mother. She married the child’s father and together they went off to college and were saved by education. After recounting her life, what do I say about it?

I can note that Sage’s family life while growing up was all about keeping up appearances. Her grandmother was always concerned about what kids she played with even though Sage was as poor and dirty as the lower class poor and dirty kids she was warned away from. Grandfather, at first excited about his living at the vicarage soon became disillusioned by the small town especially after his affair with the nurse was discovered and Grandmother, his wife, made his life a living hell. But the two remained married and he performed his duties as vicar until he died.

Once the was is over and Sage’s father returned, they moved into a tiny council flat and gave the appearance of being a traditional family especially with the addition of a brother for Sage. Sage’s mother would buy smart suits on layaway from the consignment shop to wear for a life she didn’t have and make family dinners of pre-packaged processed meals. Sage’s father worked all the time running his own business and never really seemed part of her life even though they would make public appearances as a family. Her younger brother is not mentioned much at all.

At the conclusion of Sage’s memoir are we supposed to take away some lesson? Maybe how education is redemptive? Or a general feeling for the times? Perhaps there is no lesson to be learned at all. Perhaps it is only about understanding someone else’s truth in order to better see our own?

If you would like to see what the other Slaves thought of the book, visit the blog. And, if you want to follow along and even contribute to additional discussion, join us in the forum.