writing – Page 4 – The Constant Harper

“Community” Delivers Outside the Box

At this time of year sometimes I find myself wishing that Elf would get Scrooged.

Some may suggest that this is merely a sign that I’ve wasted too many hours watching Christmas specials on TV, and I can’t deny it. I think I watch them, repeatedly, in hopes of recovering that twinkling sensation of Potteresque magic, when the story was fresh and Hogwarts School cast its architectural spell in the minds of millions of impressionable viewers.

The wizardry of modern media is such that most of us have become numb to special effects. You see one apocalypse, you’ve seen them all. But at Christmas time, the inner child whines anew. Where’s my Christmas miracle?

I do think Scrooged comes closer than most of the other holiday fare to providing a kind of updated cocktail of cynical materialism and over-the-top Dickensian transformation, and for that I thank Bill Murray, whose performance ranks as one of the all-time best in the Christmas makeover category.

But, after you’ve watched it a couple of dozen times, you find yourself yearning for something new to provide that holiday moment when, okay, maybe you can’t and never were able to believe in Santa, but you could sort of embrace the concept of giddy hope that keeps the myth alive.

This year I found my measure of cheer in Community.

I was already a fan of the NBC show about a group of misfits in a struggling community college in the middle of anywhere USA. The show manages to avoid most of the clichéd tropes of the majority of sitcoms. With a light hand and nimble pacing the show both mocks and celebrates its characters, who are all struggling to find purpose or connection.

The central character, Jeff, a disbarred lawyer trying to make a new fresh start, is played by Seattle native Joel McHale, so Seattle viewers were quick off the mark for this show. But what keeps me tuned in are the brilliant concepts and witty writing. And, of course, Abed, my favorite character, played by Danny Pudi with a kind of understated grace that slips past all my defenses.

So when I saw that the Community Christmas episode was called “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” I was ready to give it a go, even though it was created in stop-motion like the pathetic, albeit classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, never one of my favorites. But Community didn’t let me down. The episode is everything a Christmas special should be, and more, much more, including the wonderful John Oliver as a sort of Christmas wizard.

So, if anyone out there is weary of It’s a Wonderful Life, or simply can’t stomach another minute of Charlie Brown and his sad little tree, I suggest going online and checking out a Community Christmas. It’s special.

I Become English

The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, “Not From Around Here.”

For a shy child, one problem with reading books to escape the difficulties of live human interaction is that if you’re always reading, you’ll never make eye contact with another human. Tunneling into books to escape being alone becomes a kind of self-defeating tactic. You read because you’re alone, and you’re alone because you read.

After sizing up the available companions in my school and new neighborhood, I swiftly came to the conclusion that the only people I could trust not to ridicule or attack me were my family. I read constantly. And when I got my first library card I was elated to have access to a quiet place where I could get as many books as I wanted for free.

All of this reading took its toll on my eyes, I guess, because by the time I was eight I had to get glasses, another nail in the coffin of my socialization. This was long before glasses became the trendy fashion accessory worn by hollow-cheeked models in ads from Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. This was back when young women were trained to accept the axiom “men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” as if that were a bad thing. Since I had no interest in any of the boys my age, I didn’t care. My first pair of glasses was made of red plastic with a brick pattern. I thought they were cool. Which just shows how truly far out of touch with reality I was as an eight-year-old.

However, I went even further after I discovered the literary love of my life on the shelves of the public library. I don’t remember which book it was. At that point in his long career he’d already written probably sixty. But I do know that the first time I encountered the sentences, the vocabulary, the tone, and the timing of P.G. Wodehouse I wanted to live in his world. Of course, it was an imaginary world, an England which had ceased to exist even before the Second World War. But I didn’t know that, nor, I suspect, would I have cared. In Wodehouse’s carefree world no one dies, no one really suffers, and it only rains if it helps the plot along. And the plots are a confection of confusion, quirky characters and adroit literary style that simply made all my childhood angst vanish like an 18th century silver cow creamer. You had to be there.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before I began to act out my allegiance to this rarified literary world. I began to use phrases like “right ho” and “surely not” and to call people in my family “Old Bean.” I affected an English accent and imagined that it convinced strangers that I truly was not from around there.

My mother must have seen all of this as a cry for help. She kept pushing me to go and make friends with this or that neighborhood child. On the occasions when she would force me out the door and I had to try to play whatever mindless game was the order of the moment – kick the can or hide and seek – I would sneak back at the earliest opportunity and sequester myself in my room with a good book.

I had accepted the idea that I would never have friends, when suddenly, later that same year, I had two. The first was a boy five years older than I and confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy. Tex had two younger brothers, who became friends with two of my brothers, and I was introduced to Tex, who pretty much lived in one room in his house. He was smart and lonely, and when he asked if I wanted to play a card game we began a friendship that lasted for the next two years until he died on Christmas Day. Tex taught me to play chess, and we worked our way through the entire book of Hoyle, as well as playing all varieties of board games. I had never considered the possibility of him dying, and neither his family nor mine ever took me aside and mentioned that it might happen. When it did I was stunned, and completely non-plussed by the “celebration” of his life which took place afterward. All my plans to grow up and find a cure for muscular dystrophy so Tex and I could live happily ever after were shattered.

But my grief was alleviated by the newfound wonder of the girl next door. I never would have met her if my mother hadn’t pushed me outside and told me to go over and knock on the door. It took me hours to work up the courage. This girl was pretty, blonde, blue-eyed and well dressed. I wore hand-me-downs from my older brother, or clothes my mother picked out for me. My hair was not something I understood how to “do” and I had no concept of chitchat.

Yet, in spite of all this, miraculously, Cyndie seemed to want to be friends. Only in retrospect can I see how as an only child of a mother who moved around a lot and was working on her second, or maybe it was third, husband, Cyndie may have had to learn how to make friends fast out of necessity. At any rate, I was elated that she accepted me, Old Beans and all.

Little did I know that my friendship with the sweet, wholesome-looking girl next door would crack open the door to a life of bohemian pretensions and kickstart the motorcycle of rebellion that roared into full-throated life in the mid-sixties.

We called him Uncle Rick. After all, he wasn’t Cyndie’s father. He wasn’t the type. In spite of being married to Cyndie’s mother, he still had the fresh scent of a boyfriend hardly broken in. He was dapper but casual, sort of like Cary Grant on a tropical vacation. He drank, smoked, and told risqué jokes that made my mother laugh. My father took an instant dislike to him. Naturally, I worshipped him. Cyndie and I sang songs for him, planned parties for our parents in an unsuccessful attempt to bring them together, and generally hung out together, even though she was a year ahead of me in school. The year we were together in a mixed class, with fifth and sixth graders studying in the same room, was the highlight of my elementary career. At the end of the year we performed in the school talent show doing an apache dance to the theme from “Peter Gunn.” I played the part of the man, with my longish hair under a hat. At the end of the dance, which was choreographed in classic fifties TV-style by Cyndie’s mom, I took off my hat and let my hair down. The audience ate it up. It was my first, and only, stage success until years later in high school when I made a brief splash in the Junior Jollies as Cher, singing “I Got You Babe” with Mike Willis, who later went on to become a respected professional actor, as Sonny.

But getting back to Uncle Rick. I should have seen the end coming. But of course, in my childish way, I imagined we would live next door to each other forever. Instead, six months after Tex died, Cyndie went off on a trip around the world with her mother and Uncle Rick. She sent me postcards, a present from the Philippines, and eventually a letter from Hawaii explaining how her mother was divorcing Rick, who was on his way to Tahiti alone. Tahiti. Cyndie stayed on in Hawaii for a few years, while I moved on to junior high where I resumed my natural position in the social pecking order, among the solitary geeks for whom the mere prospect of a school dance was a form of cruel and unusual punishment. This was long before geeks acquired the kind of regional chic that provides some social cover in urban areas at least. Back then, there was no technological glamour to protect the socially awkward.

And then, just when it seemed it couldn’t get worse, we moved to a new neighborhood several miles down the highway. The house was bigger. I had my own room for the first time in my life, at age thirteen. For a few months this seemed like it might be the start of something good. But that was before any of us knew that the contagion of recklessness that Uncle Rick had broadcast like a kind of seductive pollen had taken root in my mother, who had made a whole lot of friends in our old neighborhood, including a wild bunch who liked to drink hard and party long. My father hated them all. I think he may have hoped that by moving us a few miles away he could stop their influence over my mother. Of course, at the time, none of us had any idea just how far gone my mother was, and how much farther she would go.

Paradise Found

Number four on my Go-To Author list: Stella Gibbons.

Even though only one of her books remains readily available in print, such is the charm of her writing that I sometimes forget that not everyone is a fan of witty parody. After all, the bestseller lists are crammed with works of dark and vicious crime stories, thrillers crafted to make you turn pages at breakneck speed, and twisted fantasies aimed to keep you from ever having another sweet dream.

But for those of us who read to escape the grim violence and numbing predictability of heartbreak inevitable in this fragile human sphere, there still are some writers who attempt to lighten the weight of it all with humor. Some people might consider this frivolous in view of the brevity of life and the gravity of the current world situation – some might say we were teetering on the brink of extinction, etc. However, be that as it may, we can all use a laugh from time to time. And when that time comes for me, I like to curl up with an author who shares my view that the world, while not perfect, still contains some amusing bits.

Stella Gibbons wrote “Cold Comfort Farm” in 1932, a time when the world was recovering from one World War and heading toward another, when the Great Depression cloaked American optimism in a cloud of Dust Bowl fallout, a time before modern technology had stripped the gears of civility and before capitalism had completed its slash and burn takeover of the world economy. It was, in other words, a more innocent time, in some ways.

“Cold Comfort Farm” is a delicious send-up of all the sappy literary conventions of that brief time, when the world still seemed on the verge of becoming a brave new one. The plot revolves around an orphaned young woman who goes to live with her rustic distant relatives in rural England and gradually solves all their problems in spite of their initial resistance.

This description, of course, falls far short of the brilliant triumph of style and characterization which give the novel its timeless charm. But to appreciate it, you must read it. Or, if you have lost the will to deal with printed pages, you could rent the 1995 film which offers a remarkably faithful version of the story. I must confess that I saw the film before I knew the book existed, and I adored the film so much that when I discovered the book I was almost afraid it wouldn’t live up to the screen version, in which Kate Beckinsale delights as the fearless heroine Flora Poste and Rufus Sewell is delicious as the barnyard Lothario Seth Starkadder.

I need not have worried. The book is all that the movie is and more. It entertains with style and wit, without sinking into vulgarity or cheap shots at easy targets.

You could probably get it out of the library if you live near a good library. But if you want to own a treasure, seek out the 2006 paperback version published by Penguin Classics which features an introduction by Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” Truss puts the “Cold Comfort” phenomenon in perspective, and her insights on the book and Gibbons are a pleasure to read.

So. There you have it. Another Book Which Is Not For Everyone. But, for those of you who like this sort of thing, and I trust you know who you are, I strongly recommend spending some time on “Cold Comfort Farm.” It’s more fun than it sounds.

Yankee Go Home

(The following is an excerpt from my work in progress “Not From Around Here.”)

People who speak wistfully about the innocent pleasures of childhood give me a pain. Were these people never children? Did they never have to go out onto a public school playground during that hellish free-for-all called recess?

I have to assume that the law of averages applies to childhood experiences. Thus I can accept that for a certain percentage of the population the years between five and twelve offered carefree delights that vanished once the teen age began. But I never felt at ease in the company of other children. They’re so irrational. So unpredictable. So moody.

I certainly was anyway. I entered first grade in Falls Church, Virginia, shortly after we had moved from Pennsylvania, where we had been living for one year while my father tried to pass the bar there. When he failed, we returned to Virginia, where he went to law school at UVA on the GI Bill. In Falls Church we lived in one of those “Wonder Years” kind of neighborhoods. Small one-story houses with three tiny bedrooms on small lots. Everyone had kids. The fathers went to work. The mothers stayed home and did laundry, cooked and, in some cases, counted the hours until cocktail time. The televisions were housed in cabinets and the screen was small and circular, and there wasn’t much on aside from the Walt Disney show and Ed Sullivan. At five o’clock every day all the kids whose families had TVs ran home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club. I envied Annette Funicello with her beautiful wavy hair and perfect smile.

By the time we moved there I had gained a couple more brothers, so we all shared rooms. But when my older brother and I started school, he quickly distanced himself from me; he could sense my nerd cooties emanating like some radioactive force field. I walked to school alone, whistling show tunes. In those days there were no ‘gifted and talented’ programs. If you were a kid who demonstrated skills beyond those of the rest of the class, they might suggest to your parents that you skip a grade. But the schools worried that children who moved away from their peers would fail to adjust socially. So they left me in first grade, where I had to steel myself to listen to dozens of my classmates stumbling courageously through sentences like: “See Jane run. Look at Dick. Jane knows Dick.” Yeah. If I hadn’t been a snide little bitch-in-training before public school first grade, I sure as hell soared to the head of that class.

As any geek who has survived public school can tell you, kids are savages, and the process of blunting their claws and muting their shrieks is not for the faint of heart. The teachers loved me, of course, at first. But that only made things worse for me with the squirming masses who saw in my innocent brown eyes and baby soft blonde hair a perfect target for ridicule. And, admittedly, I was, and for most of my life have been, gullible as hell. My brothers never tired of teasing me to the point of tears and beyond. Until the year when, in a flash of focused rage, I lashed out at one of my younger brothers and broke his arm with a single blow. I felt terrible about it immediately afterward, but the event did realign the course of our later friendship, as if I’d passed some unspoken test and proven myself not guilty of total wimpdom.

However, that watershed event hadn’t taken place yet when I first had to endure the rigors of recess in Virginia. At first, slinking out into the brisk sunshine of September on the bare asphalt playground, I looked around for some group of likely shields, a knot of girls perhaps, or, failing that, some chubby boy with glasses. The old safety in numbers concept is embedded deep in the human psyche; sheep gravitate to other sheep.

Unfortunately, the same group-think applies to the wolves. As I stood there trying to work up the nerve to approach a cluster of girls in poodle skirts and crinoline, a loud boy with the musculature of a future footballer and a glint in his eye that would make him a standout in any police line-up ran into me, and as I was regaining my balance he looked down at me as if just noticing I was there and said, “Are you a Rebel or a Yank?”

I stared at him. I had no idea what he was talking about. During my kindergarten year in Pennsylvania we had covered letters, numbers, primary colors and learned to sing “My Country T’is of Thee” but no mention of Rebels or Yanks had been made.

“What?” I responded.

The boy narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down, from saddle shoes to plaid skirt and white cotton shirt with suspenders. “Yer not from around here, are ya?” he said accusingly.

I told him we’d just moved to Virginia.

“Where you from?” he demanded.

“Erie,” I said, my lips barely moving.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“Pennsylvania,” I said.

“Hah!” he barked. “I knew it. Yer a Yankee. A damn Yankee.” He reached out and shoved me, not hard, but enough to let me know that whatever a Yankee was, he wanted nothing to do with it. He ran back to his fellow hooligans, and I could see them hooting and pointing at me, as I stood alone, feeling, I imagine, as a gazelle on the African plains must feel when it notices the rest of the herd edging away and the jackals circling.

I waited until I got home that day to ask my father about the difference between Yankees and Rebels, and my father, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, told me that the Rebels wanted to keep slaves and the Yankees fought to free them. Simple as that. No gray areas, no muddling the debate with sophistry about state’s rights or Southern hospitality. Good old right and wrong, my Dad’s strong suit. He never wavered when it came to the fundamental divide. All his life he struggled with doubts about religion and politics and women, but he never doubted his instinctive grasp of justice. Whether or not he was actually right is, as they say, another story.

But as a child, up until the Nixon-Kennedy debates, I accepted my Dad’s views pretty much without a qualm. I loved my Dad. He was a good man. Ergo, what he said was true.

Armed with this conviction I returned to school and hoped that the issue would not come up again, but if it did, I was prepared to have a dialogue with my inquisitors and set them straight as to the error of their ways. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. What a ninny. Yet, you see, this is what I mean by the earlier assertion that I was never a whiz kid. People then, and now, assume that if you can read early, and you continue to read often, that you must, perforce, be acquiring some sort of smarts in the process. And, to a certain extent, this can be true, if you embark on a course of directed reading with someone knowledgeable, say, a college professor, or perhaps a talk show host – just kidding – guiding your analysis of the texts. However, mere reading alone is not a guaranteed path to wisdom, particularly if all you read is fiction.

Even as a child my passion for imaginary stories far surpassed any interest I had in history, math, geography, etc. However, that first year in public school in Virginia forced me to embrace a previously unknown field of writing. I became a philosopher. It may have been dormant in my crabby baby years, but it really got traction on the playgrounds of Westlawn Elementary, where for several years I endured hours of bullying torment and scathing social ostracism because I wouldn’t back down from my pride in being a Yankee.

This only got worse by the time I reached fourth grade and the school curriculum began to include months of indoctrination into the Southern view of what they like to call The War Between the States, which had, according to our textbooks, nothing to do with slavery, but revolved solely around issues of states’ right to do as they pleased without interference from some know-it-all federal government who only wanted to fund their own fancy lifestyle with taxes squeezed from honest Southern farmers.

In the first years of my schooling in Virginia, this view remained almost unchanged from textbook to textbook until in the early 1960s when the Civil Rights movement finally began to make some progress. When I started as a freshman in high school in Fairfax there were no black students in a school with three thousand students. The next year we had half a dozen. They were from around there, but I suspect in that school they felt farther from home than I did.

Erie Kid

(The following is an excerpt from my work in progress, “Not From Around Here.”)

My first word was no.

I don’t recall the circumstances. Presumably I was wobbling uneasily in someone’s lap and some well-intentioned relative asked me the sort of stupid question that is always posed to the mute and helpless. I’ve seen photographs of a scowling, not particularly adorable infant, and I’ve been told that this was me at the start. In many ways, it’s me now, apart from the infant classification. At this point in the arc of my existence I have passed the apex. While I am not yet hurtling toward the bumpy landing, my view from this moment suspended between the immutable past and the rapidly diminishing future has freed me in a way I never anticipated. I no longer feel the need to placate.

Clint Eastwood once famously said, in one of his laconic roles, “It’s a wise man that knows his limitations.” Though I do not qualify in terms of gender or intelligence, I have finally learned to embrace that line. Others may find ingenious solutions to humankind’s problems. I don’t expect to. I continue to support their efforts in my small way, but I’ve come to accept that the whiz kid dreams of my youth were doomed from the start. In order to be a whiz kid, one must first be a whiz. And, presumably, a kid. As a child, I was neither.

Although I eventually learned how to smile on command, as all good children must, I never lost my inner scowl. My older brother, in contrast, didn’t know the meaning of the word. The sunny first child, born long before my parents’ marriage had lost the blinding luster of romance and entered into the drab plateau of bitterness, brooding and discontent, my brother never once doubted that he was worthy of all the love and attention that was showered upon him. I think I was introduced into the scenario as a kind of bonus playmate for him. What a disappointment I must have been. My brother wanted worship. Yet you can see even in the tiny snapshots of our first encounters the measuring look in my infant eyes. Long before I had the vocabulary to express my impression of this noisy group of cooing, grinning people constantly jostling me and urging me to smile, I can imagine my little brain muttering irritably, “Why should I?”

Of course, a few months later I was sitting up by myself, chewing on non-food items and generally finding some amusement in the family who seemed so intent on pleasing me. I had learned to smile by then, but I still didn’t understand why they all seemed so keen on seeing me do it. Nevertheless, I had become philosophic. I cost me nothing. It meant something to them. I had nothing better to do. I smiled for the camera. But inside, the little scowl was on standby.

It became easier for me as I fell in love with first my mother, then my father, and eventually even my goofy brother. My mother, whose pale blue eyes sparkled like the light on a clear mountain lake, had a dimple which accentuated her easy smile, and she had a voice like birdsong, lilting, melodic and enchanting. All of this would have been even more wonderful if I had not early on perceived that I had arrived on the scene too late, or possibly in the wrong gender, to win her unconditional affection. I think that possibly because I was a girl it made it almost impossible for her to sort out her feelings for me, because her feelings for her own mother and her only sister were such a complex amalgam of resentment, envy and confusion. Nevertheless, I think she did care for me, as much as she could. But it wasn’t like the delirious love that she felt for my older brother. I guess I can’t blame her. He was more lovable from the get-go.

I , on the other hand, was irritatingly intellectual even as a toddler. I taught myself to read before I was six and by the time I got to first grade in public school in Falls Church, Virginia, I was considered something of a freak by the school administrators after I was taken to the principal’s office to demonstrate my prowess and did so by reading the first few pages of “Black Beauty” flawlessly. They didn’t know what to do with me. They seemed to think my uncanny ability to translate symbols on a page into spoken words indicated some unusual intelligence. They didn’t seem to realize that I was not a whiz kid. I was just a kid who loved to read more than almost anything else. But I’m getting ahead if myself.

The point is, I was born with a certain, shall we say, analytical bent, which set me apart from my fellow toddlers. I tried to fit in. I tried to play games, to care about dolls, to giggle. I don’t think I fooled anyone, least of all my cousins who lived in Erie, PA, where I was born. We lived in Erie, too, for the first few years of my existence, but I remember so little of those days that whatever heritage I can claim of Erie comes from the many summer vacations and winter holidays spent there, when, for me, my grandmother’s musty, old house represented a Shangri-La of possibilities. I adored my grandparents, and their house, which was full of secret stairways, creaky sounds, wonderful porches. The room I stayed in had been the nursery, and still had the fading pale blue wallpaper with pink giraffes and elephants, and a window overlooking the giant catalpa tree in the back yard. The room also had a desk and typewriter, on which I composed my earliest journalistic works.

As an adult I have rarely encountered people who know anything about Erie. Once a chatty checkout clerk at some hardware store raised his eyebrows when I told him I’d been born there. “Dreary Erie,” he said, admitting that he had grown up there and couldn’t wait to escape. I wondered if the excitement of being a checkout clerk had satisfied his thirst for adventure.

Perhaps because I was most often only a visitor to Erie, my attitude was different. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the trains, their distant horns calling to each other like land whales, yearning for something always out of reach. I had complete freedom at my grandmother’s. In those days no one worried about child abductions, or gangs or much of anything. The War was over, the Depression was history and everyone was glad to be alive, or so it seemed to me as an eight-year-old kid roller-skating alone on the brick sidewalks around my grandmother’s block. Sometimes friendly neighbors would talk to me as I rolled by. They’d ask who I was, and I was always surprised that they took an interest. And when I told them that I was Lyman Shreve’s grandchild they would smile and wish me well. I didn’t realize at the time that this type of encounter was the tip of the iceberg in my life.

Had I been someone familiar, someone who looked like she belonged there, like as not the neighbors wouldn’t have spoken, or if they had, it would have been to say something different. But they could tell I was not one of them. Only many years later did I begin to wonder why it was that no matter where I went, or how long I stayed anywhere, that sense of not belonging anyplace remained constant. Sooner or later, the question would be asked, always in that same slightly condescending tone: “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Honk If You Love Books

Not everyone does, you know.

If you believe the statistics commonly tossed around on the Internet, 80 percent of Americans didn’t read or buy a book last year.

Yet at the same time, the statistic munchers also assert that 80 percent of Americans claim they’d like to write a book. Picture the Venn diagram.

Well, we all know numbers lie. And words can too. But for my money, words deceive with more grace and wit and style. Thus, I number myself among the 80 percent with authorial ambitions. I’m a consumer of books, a lifelong lover of libraries and a connoisseur of book stores.

If you like bookstores, you’ll love Powell’s.

We visited Portland for the first time this week. I had a number of touristic objectives. We strolled through the famous Japanese Garden, admired the amazing blooms at the International Rose Test Garden, and marveled at the elegant beauty of Lan Su Yuan, the classical Chinese garden in downtown Portland. We stood in line for Voodoo Doughnuts, savored Stumptown Coffee and took in a Bite of Oregon. We heard some blues, some cool jazz, and a lot of high energy street music.

But of all the pleasures of Portland, the only one that made my heart beat faster was the city within the city: Powell’s City of Books.

I’ve been to The Strand in New York City. I’ve been to Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. I had high hopes that Powell’s would be their equal. It’s more. Much more. It’s a world of wonders, staffed by acolytes of the written word who not only guide customers through the labyrinth of volumes, but also seem to care about books.

Strong free-spirited independent book stores are a dying breed in this country. Portland is blessed to have Powell’s. Visit if you can.

Loosly Blonde

When you are a girl like I it seems very important to get educated. Because there is a lot to learn, such as French, which is very hard because it seems only French gentlemen speak it and they are very hard to understand for a girl like I. So I am always interested in books because you can learn a lot just by reading them and not have to listen to any French gentlemen.

So yesterday my girlfriend Gladys and I went shopping and we went into a delightful store which had lots of books and one of them was called “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and it was only two dollars which is quite a bargain because it turned out to be two books inside of one. And the really intreeging thing is that I learned they are both by the same arthur who is a lady named Anita Loos.

So I thought this would be a really interesting book for a girl like I because I was blonde for many years and it always seemed that gentlemen were preferring me quite a lot. But it turns out the book is not really about hair but is all about a very refined girl like I who likes to go shopping and drink champagne with gentlemen who buy diamond tiaras for girls like I.

But I was surprised to learn that the book is an anteek, because it was written in 1925, which was before I was even born blonde. Usually anteeks cost ever so much money, which always seems strange to a girl like I because new things seem so much nicer, but this anteek book was quite a bargain even though I have not learned any French from it yet. But maybe that will happen in the second book, which is called “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes” and is a sort of seequell, which is when more things happen, which it seems to me is very true to life.

And so I wreckommend this book to any girls which are interested in getting educated about how to act refined, even if they are not blonde, because in this life you never know when a tiara might come in handy.

Vampyres-R-US

I had thought I was finished with vampires.

You know how it is. One minute you’re obsessed with the whole ‘creature-of-the-night-immortal-love-hunk’ idea and the next . . . not so much.

And with the plethora of vampire-related novels, television shows, and films glutting the marketplace, it seemed inevitable that the mania for all things fangish would play itself out. And I was fine with that. Until I took one last bite. Now I’m ready for more.

Or rather, Moore, as in Christopher Moore, whose hilariously snarky Bite Me simply won my heart. Yes, it’s wildly inventive, raunchy and irreverent, as are all of Moore’s works. But there’s also a cleverly hidden soft delicious core of sappy goodness that—well, I’m a sucker for sappy goodness, what can I say?

It’s not a book designed to appeal to the masses, which is probably just as well. Nor is it likely to win any awards from highbrow literary types who sneer at pop fiction. But, you know what? There are times when I don’t want to read a book that’s going to break my heart, or completely hammer me with the unrelenting misery of much of the world. Yeah, I know it all needs to be fixed. But every now and then, we who hope to make things better need a break from all the angst and anguish. And for that, I’m deeply, truly grateful for Christopher Moore and his brilliant comic gift.

My advice for the world weary? Next time the news makes you want to do something unhealthy, try Bite Me instead. It may surprise you.

What’s News?

The news is old as humankind. It moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to report.

We feed on it, stoke the fires of rumor, inhale the smoke of conjecture. We are a species who thrive on stories. We respond to drama. We want heroes.

For the last few centuries the primary vector of news was paper, but since the advent of the electronic age the medium has undergone a series of rapid changes which for better or for worse have changed, it seems irrevocably, the way in which news is shared.

I am saddened by the diminished power of newspapers in our time. The once great papers of the past are fighting for their economic lives in a world increasingly swayed by the glib sophistry of ranting opinionists on television, radio and internet. Few media outlets have the budget or the time for thoughtful, in-depth analysis anymore. Everyone seems in a race to jump to conclusions, which are refashioned daily, sometimes hourly, depending on the pace of events.

Such flexibility has its virtues. But on the whole, the credibility of the entire news media has been sorely damaged by continuing compromise with economic and social reality. We are no longer a nation of readers, if we ever truly were. A nation of viewers is far more easily misled it seems.

When I was growing up in Northern Virginia I was spoiled by The Washington Post, a great international paper which has somehow managed to survive, so far. To maintain correspondents around the world, on the ground, doing actual reporting, is a luxury few modern papers can afford. Most crib their news from the wire services. They reheat the stories with a slab of opinion, serve them with a side of “who cares, it’s not happening here,” and get on with the important news of what happened at the local school board meeting last night. Because, the truth is, for most of us, the news that matters most is the news that hits home. In our schools, on our streets, in our communities.

I learned this when I worked at a small local newspaper in Warrenton, Virginia, where I had the good fortune to see how much work it takes to provide news coverage that was honestly fair and balanced (as opposed to the much-touted and completely bogus “fair and balanced” product so widely dispersed these days). The Fauquier Citizen was an independent newspaper in a county where the leading news source was firmly in the pocket, and lining the pockets, of the old money, who wanted the news, and the county, to stay just the way it had always been, since before the Civil War.

The rivalry was intense between the newspapers, and competition lent zest to our quiet little rural life. But, eventually, after some fifteen years, The Citizen packed up its tents and closed its doors, following the route of hundreds of small independent papers around the nation in the last twenty years.

It saddens me to think there will come a day when no news will be printed on paper. And not just because I will miss all the little things about newspapers, although I will – the sounds alone – the slap of the daily hitting the porch, the rustle of pages over coffee, the snap and crackle of folded sections.

Yet a newspaper is so much more than an information delivery system. A newspaper organization is an ecosystem. An endangered one.

I just read a wonderful book called The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman about one such marvelously complex and perilously fragile newspaper organization. Rachman, a former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press stationed in Rome, also worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and his familiarity with the drama, the dark humor and the human foibles that make newspaper work so maddening and yet so addictive lends authority to the novel. Covering a hundred year period in a series of interelated stories, the novel builds a brilliant portrait of the intricate organism that is a newspaper. The writing is crisp, evocative, moving and even funny at times.

But, ultimately it’s an obituary, mourning and celebrating the extraordinary life of a newspaper. We who have known them must count ourselves lucky.

The Dragons of Summer

Summer’s almost here. The ice cream truck has already made a few tentative sweeps of the neighborhood, tootling its signature “Bicycle Built For Two” theme song. Lawn chairs have been wiped free of spiders, and umbrellas lowered to half mast. Any day now the rains will taper off and the glorious Seattle sunshine will triumph over the gray sky for a few blissful months.

Many people choose summer as a time to travel, to leave home and see exotic new lands. But it’s hard to leave Seattle in the summer, when for two straight months it’s a non-stop hiking, biking, sailing, gardening, ball playing, fireworks dazzling, festival dancing in the street kind of place. The sun comes up around four a.m. and the sky stays light until ten. You have to pace yourself so that you don’t burn out by two in the afternoon. Coffee helps. But for me the best strategy to get the most out of the summer marathon is to partake of a shady spot and a good book midway through the long afternoons.

Currently I’m savoring His Majesty’s Dragon, an exceptional fantasy by Naomi Novik, whose interest in Napoleonic history and experience as a computer programmer working on game design is reflected in the smart plotting and clear vision of her writing. The dragon at the heart of her novel is a fully realized character, and the alternate history in which dragons form an integral part of the military force is brilliantly evoked. I’m so in.

It helps, of course, that the day before I started reading the book I went to see How To Train Your Dragon. The bulk of the matinee audience was made up of fidgeting four-year-olds, a few parents, and a handful of college-age dragon enthusiasts. And then there was me – absolutely mesmerized from start to finish. And not just by the dragon, who is as cute as a kitten, if a kitten were the size of a seaplane. What keeps HTTYD in the air is the snarky humor, the sleight of hand plot exposition, and a core of timeless themes – the tension between father and son, the desire to fit in, to stand out, to find love/acceptance, etc. Yeah. I liked it. It’s a kids’ movie and I liked it. So there.

The common denominator in Novik’s dragon series and the animated film is that the dragons conflate expectations. By avoiding the pitfalls of conventional conceptions of dragons as mere one-dimensional fire-breathing monsters, the author and filmmakers succeed in making dragons heroic. And that’s what I’m looking for these days. The world seems all too well supplied with real monsters. It’s hard to get away from them.

This summer, when I want relief, I’ll take dragons.