Book Review

Some people might find it surprising that Stephen King writes a lot about love. Many of his greatest stories are love stories at their center. It is love that helps to light the way out of the darkness and love lost that causes the most angst and pain. You can find it in most of his longer tales sometimes front and center jockeying for position amongst the monsters (both human and supernatural) and the nightmares. At other times it is more subtle, dancing like a mote of light in and out of the frame maybe just something caught in the corner of your eye.  But with the last two King books I have read, love has been the featured attraction, the main event as it were. 11/22/1963 was a full blown romance that just happened to have a supernatural element to it. The love between Jack and Sadie was as real and heartbreaking as any that happens when two people who want to be together, need each other, complete each other in some undefinable way are ripped apart and not allowed the happy ending we as the reader all yearn for. Lisey’s story fits in this category too.

I found this copy of Lisey’s Story at a thrift store I frequent for the bargain price of $2.99. Not bad for a hard back that looked like the spine hadn’t even been cracked. It was needed to help complete the Stephen King section of my book shelves and was bought for that purpose, finding it to be such an enjoyable read was an added bonus. It is a seemingly simple story about a widow who is trying to deal with the grief of losing her husband and if King had stopped there and just went with that I think he could have hit it out of the park. The story gets complicated when it turns out that he is a world renowned and successful author so she is not allowed to grieve on her own terms or in her own time but is constantly harassed by “scholars”(or as Lisey calls them, “Incunks”) who want his papers to further their own ends and crazy fans. This is one of King’s most personal novels as he says to us, his constant readers, the idea came to him about his own wife if he had been killed when that car hit him. This book is written by a man who loves his wife very much and tells me that if she loves him back the same way that they are a very lucky and very blessed pair indeed. Unlike Lisey whose beloved is gone, I hope Stephen and Tabitha have many more happy years left to them. This is not to say that Lisey is Tabitha or that Stephen is Scott but I‘m sure that both of them are woven through these characters.

Lisey starts her journey with us while cleaning out her husband’s office, where he would write and where it can seem the most vibrant part of him is still to some degree extant. It has been two years since famous novelist Scott Langdon died in a way that will not be specified until almost the end of the book. Her grief is poignant.

“Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.”

To lose a soul deep love is to go through life a shadow of yourself; it seems that happiness is only a myth told to children and that all you can hope for is that some days you will feel less sad then others. It also seems that time is not the healer everyone touts it to be.

“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”

“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in a while with the old watering-can and it’s so sad—”

But as is with those left behind, you have to go on and go on she does. She has to deal with a mentally ill sister who is a cutter and a crazed #1 fan that wants her husband’s papers and considers a little mutilation and rape of a widow he thinks of as a Yoko just fine if it gets him what he wants. Much of the book is told in flashback and in it we meet Scott, the very epitome of the tortured artist and his well of secrets. He can travel to another world; a world that speeds healing and is beautiful in daylight but deadly after dark. It has dangers in the form of never seen creatures called “laughers” and something called a “long boy” with a mind so alien it can drive you mad. If it looks at you it can follow you back and stalk you in reflections or possess you and turn you into nothing better than a rabid dog. The story of Scott and his family is one of the best and creepiest parts of the book.

For all that I enjoyed this book and felt that there was plenty of gold to be mined; it is not without its flaws. It seemed strange to me that she could experience so much with this man, be married for 25 years and still deliberately forget so much about him but the mind is a curious thing, especially if forgetting is for sanities sake. It is this remembering with Lisey that makes up the bulk of the story telling. We are invited into this marriage and this woman’s head as a member of the family, into the private things that make up the relationship on the most mundane levels. The most jarring thing about this and from what I have read of other reviews, the most annoying is the language of their marriage. To be honest, I felt this too. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the book I hated the word “smucking”, by the middle I never wanted to read it again and thus hear it in my head and by the end I trained my eye to skip over it. Lisey to me seemed like such a boring character with nothing of her own to offer the world (she is no Sadie that’s for sure), she gave it all to Scott and was happy to live in his shadow. I liked her but never fell in love with her and couldn’t really understand why Scott did either. Scott seemed more real and vibrant then she ever did and he spent the entire book dead. But she was a safe place for him with a heart filled with kindness and that was what really mattered, she could holler him home.

My recommendation is if you love King you will enjoy this; if you love love-stories there is a lot to see and feel here. Many times the way he writes about love brought tears to my eyes and that in itself is enough for me. It is not his best work but it is far from his worst and how can you really dislike anything so filled with love and those who are just waiting for their love to holler them home?

Book Review

To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace

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I have talked on this site about the wonderful BBC show Downton Abbey. I don’t know how many people know this but a book, To Marry an English Lord, was the inspiration for it. This show is also not the first to tackle this fascinating subject, a 90s BBC TV mini-series with Mira Sorvino called The Buccaneers (based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel) was. When I found out about the book, of course I had to have it. I finished it a while ago but am only now getting around to writing a review for it.

This was quite a pithy read and filled with witty anecdotes. It seems that, as always, when the wealthy have more money than they could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes, they choose not to do good with it but to buy more outlandish things. Instead of Islands or private planes or throwing 200K birthday parties for toddlers, the noveau riche daughters of the new world bought titles. They didn’t buy them directly, like going down to the local “Titles R Us”, they had to marry those who could confer them.

At the end of the 19^th century, many sons of the nobility had run down manor houses and a lifestyle of shooting weekends, gambling, and yachting to pay for. The rub was that they no longer had the money needed; these old family scions always exceeded their income. That is where the young American ladies came into the picture. The old money in America was not accepting of the new wealth of the up and coming captains of industry. The gorgon guarding the gates of social acceptability was the indomitable Mrs. Astor, who treated New York as her personal property. It was her that drove so many of the young, obscenely wealthy young ladies across the pond. There, new money was not a hindrance, NOT having money was. Some of the marriages were successful like Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill. Some were a disaster like Consuelo, Duchess of Marlboro. This book takes us into the world of balls, Worth gowns, strict etiquette (at this time the manners were as confining as the clothes), shooting weekends in the country, professional beauties, and the London Season. Sitting at the apex of this small but vicious society was the one they all fought over for recognition and patronage; the person that if he looked your way you deem yourself a success. It seems strange that a fat, pop-eyed, dissolute, libertine was the arbiter of the fashionable world at the turn of the last century. Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the future King, was everything his father was not. He drank too much, had numerous mistresses, was a spendthrift and a constant source of embarrassment to his mother. Sometimes I think the only reason she lived so long was to thwart his ambition to be King. It was while he was waiting that he swirled at the center of this curious phenomenon of our countries shared history.

This was a light, quick read but enjoyable and if you watch Downton Abbey it is definitely worth picking up. I have heard that Julian Fellows the creator of Downton is going to make a prequel series about a young Cora meeting Lord Crawley and their relationship. Lady Mary and her sisters, and all the other children of the marriages of this sort, were the product of women like Cora. Now it’s time to see the genesis, and like Downton, it will be fashion porn. You will read some interesting facts and many of the ladies come off far better than the men they marry. It also takes you deep into the way wealthy people of this time lived. I found myself amazed at how they imprisoned themselves in the rigid society they had constructed. They were never free to speak their mind or socialize with anyone not approved of. Every gesture, every article of clothing, every word, was watched with the steely unforgiving gaze of a hundred eyes. Men and women had to change clothes for every event and it would take hours. I honestly don’t know when they had time to sleep. They had clothes for breakfast, clothes for midmorning riding, clothes for luncheon, clothes for tea, clothes for dinner, clothes for balls, the opera, and court. And god forbid you be seen in anything twice. These wealthy men and women had enough money to do whatever they wanted and choose to construct invisible prisons of propriety around themselves. Those that were happiest were the ones who were strong enough to live life on their own terms; they were few and by far the most interesting.

I have the paperback version of this book, pgs. 403 with many pictures and additions.

Dream a Little Dream

I sometimes like to wonder what I would do if I had unlimited money. I have wild visions of traveling the world first class and expensive clothes but realize that those things, while fun, are not what I really want. If money was completely a non-issue I know exactly what I would do, after I traveled the world of course. I don’t want to die without seeing some of the places I dream about although as the years pass that is probably what will happen.

There is a no-kill animal sanctuary in Arizona called Best Friends. It is on many acres and takes in all kinds of animals and offers them safety, healthcare and training as well as the chance to be adopted to loving forever families. No animal is turned away and if no one adopts them they will live out their lives on the property until they cross the Rainbow Bridge. If you have never heard of them check it out. http://www.bestfriends.org/home.aspx 

My dream would be to open a place like this and even take it a step further. I want to buy substantial acreage south of the border, maybe Brazil or Costa Rica. There I would build a sanctuary much like the one in Arizona but it would also be a school for impoverished young people. All of the animals would need veterinary care and many extremely poor children in these countries have limited access to education and job prospects. My sanctuary would offer scholarships to teach them to become world class veterinarians and vet techs for no monetary cost to them or their families. They would have to live on-site in dorms like a college and attend classes and help with the care and feeding of the animals and the grounds. At the end of their training, I would ask only that they stay and work for 1 year as payment and then they are free to take their skills anywhere they choose. For me, it would be extremely important that my students would be sought after the world over. So not only would my animals get the best of care, those who leave my facility will have the sky be the limit for them. My sanctuary would also be green, completely off the grid and self-sustaining with its own gardens and orchards. I would also like to have cabins where people could stay and vacation and maybe take home a new family member. It would be a peaceful, warm, and serene place and hopefully a mecca for local artists and craftspeople to sell their wares. There is so much good that could be done with a place like that. It would be a little piece of heaven and if I ever hit it big I wouldn't let anything stop me from making it a reality.

Prepare to be Charmed!

I want to introduce you to 2 extraordinary people, Ruth Mott and Harry Dodson. By some happy accident I have been able to spend some lovely hours in their company learning from them about long lost kitchen and gardening arts while being charmed by their gentle humor and competent manner. That is the best word to use, they are charming and the TV show that features them is charming. This post will take you back in time to the grand country houses of the Victorian era in "The Victorian Kitchen Garden" and "The Victorian Kitchen".

These were made back in the late 80s for the BBC. The host was a horticultural lecturer named Peter Thoday and his love of the subject is clear in every episode. He, Ruth, and Harry love every minute of what they were doing. The Victorian Kitchen Garden was the first show and it featured Harry who wasn't Victorian but trained under those who were and we follow him as he brings a long neglected walled garden back to glorious life. The show is slow paced much like life was during those times and the work was hard and the days were long. I kept wanting to taste all the delicious produce that the garden brought forth in such abundance. No dangerous pesticides or GMO's here just wonderful foods the way nature intended. Below is the introductory episode.

In the Victorian Kitchen, a long abandoned kitchen of a manor house was allowed again to function the way it was intended and the heart of it was Ruth. She had worked in many a country manor house from the time she was 14.  At 70, she was brought in to be the head cook with one lowly scullery named Alison. I fell in love with Ruth. Her gentle manner and sharp wit make her easy to adore. She was the last of a dying breed and much irreplaceable knowledge passes with her. Ruth introduces us to the way foods were prepared for the gentry in kitchens before we had all of our fancy time saving devices. I can imagine a little better now how time-consuming this was. Breakfast, luncheon, tea, supper, dinners, and picnics, it barely seemed one meal was finished before the next meal was being worked on. The one thing I think this show lacked was a full kitchen assembly, so that we don't quite get the hustle and bustle these great kitchens invariably had at this time. Many times I found my mouth agape at what went into certain dishes, it seems incredible to modern eyes. 

Both of these shows are part gardening/cookery show and part history lesson and all enjoyment. Every time the opening music would play and the camera panned over the lovely table I feel peaceful. I don't know why but it is a bit like meditation, it allows you to slow down too and just enjoy. Unfortunately, both Harry and Ruth have passed on. Ruth just this year in July at the age of 95. She enjoyed a second career from this show including another series that branched from this called the Wartime Kitchen, a cookbook and many television appearances over the years. I was also sad to hear that the beautiful garden that Harry revived has fallen into disuse and been allowed to decay. I think that they lost a golden opportunity. Many people both amateur and professional would probably of jumped at the chance to learn under Harry's tutelage and work in this living bit of the past. It would probably also of been a tourist attraction for the whole family and during the growing season provided a thriving farmers market. The thought of it sitting and moldering alone and neglected seems just such a waste and a loss. At least we have these wonderful programs as well as "The Victorian Flower Garden" to help us recapture in some small way what has been lost. All of the episodes are available in full on youtube.

Happy Christmas!

I sure hope everyone has a wonderful day and are blessed enough to be with the ones they want to be with. Please take a moment to send thoughts to those who cannot.

It hurts so bad...

I was not sure if I wanted to talk about this but I felt I needed to. I have lived through many mass shootings. I'm ashamed to say that I have become immune to them, thus is life in modern America. These incidents always disgusted me but I went on with my life with minimal interruption. But this is different. I have been crying since Friday. I can't sleep, I feel haunted. I imagined their faces in my mind and then they released the photos and I was gutted again. Those angels were even more beautiful than in my imagination. I keep thinking that I am done with tears then I am hit with something else. The bravery of the teachers, President Obama's speech, stories of survivors, the blow by blow of these little ones deaths. It never seems to end, I can't seem to cry enough tears. I am lucky in that I am a stranger to those whose precious children were taken from them. My anguish is but a shadow of what they are going through and I can't even pretend to comprehend what these parents are suffering. I just know that there are so many like me suffering with them. People who don't cry are crying, people who don't pray are praying, people who don't pay attention are standing in solidarity with the fallen and their families.  My heart is breaking. I keep thinking how scared they must have been. How they must have presents under the tree that they will now never open. That these families will never be healed as there is a child sized hole haunting there homes. That all those little faces will never grow up to experience both the pleasures and the pain of a full life. I don't know them, I never would of known them but it doesn't stop me from feeling that the world is a poorer place now that they are no longer in it. I want to remember all of their names. The shooter can disappear but those innocents should always be forefront in our hearts and minds. There was one little boy whose sweet face has come to represent to me all that has been lost in this horror. His name is Noah and his mother's words at his funeral brought forth even more tears from me, even when I thought the well had run dry. I will let her speak for all of us...interchange the name, it is the love of a parent for a child that is now gone for no good reason. I also see in him the son that I might have had if things had been different. He is beautiful as they all were, I will miss them and hope that their parents and siblings will see them again beyond this life.

"The sky is crying, and the flags are at half-mast. It is a sad, sad day. But it is also your day, Noah, my little man. I will miss your forceful and purposeful little steps stomping through our house. I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room.
Most of all, I will miss your visions of your future. You wanted to be a doctor, a soldier, a taco factory manager. It was your favorite food, and no doubt you wanted to ensure that the world kept producing tacos.
You were a little boy whose life force had all the gravitational pull of a celestial body. You were light and love, mischief and pranks. You adored your family with every fiber of your 6-year-old being. We are all of us elevated in our humanity by having known you. A little maverick, who didn't always want to do his schoolwork or clean up his toys, when practicing his ninja moves or Super Mario on the Wii seemed far more important.
Noah, you will not pass through this way again. I can only believe that you were planted on Earth to bloom in heaven. Take flight, my boy. Soar. You now have the wings you always wanted. Go to that peaceful valley that we will all one day come to know. I will join you someday. Not today. I still have lots of mommy love to give to Danielle, Michael, Sophia and Arielle.
Until then, your melody will linger in our hearts forever. Momma loves you, little man.

The Dust Bowl

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A few nights ago I watched another of Ken Burns excellent documentaries, The Dust Bowl (I have seen and enjoyed The Civil War and Jazz, although I must admit I declined to watch the one about baseball). This painful period of our shared history is familiar to me even though I haven’t delved too deeply into studying it, but I know enough to have some strong opinions. I love some of the movies from this period especially Shirley Temple's and Astaire/Rogers who I never tire of watching. Some of the best Jazz was born from the creative fervor that the times engendered. The fashions and the architecture were unsurpassed. But at this time, there were two Americas. One of wealth and privilege and one of soup kitchens and shanty towns and out of this economic despair and disparity rose FDR. I think that Roosevelt was our greatest president and we’ve had some amazing ones. This quote from a so-called class traitor particularly stands out, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Plus  his 2^nd or economic bill of rights still stands as true today as when he wrote it in its intrinsic fairness and embodies what liberals want for our country and planet. The New Deal lifted millions out of poverty and its legacy still lasts today although it is tattered and torn and the Repukes would like nothing better than to wipe it all away. They keep saying they want to take America back and that’s where they want to take it back to, the Gilded Age before Roosevelt to child labor and no regulations, long hours on the clock for pennies, your only right is to work for what they want to pay you until you die. Think of that recent tragic fire on a factory floor in India where 110 people were burned to death is to see what they really aspire to; people are just a casualty or a cost to business, instead of a partner and an asset. Right now these forces are closer than they have ever been in 60 years to this goal. The Dust Bowl highlights this, that everything old really is new again. It seems we learn nothing or maybe its willful blindness, I don’t know which is worse. But the strong helping hand of FDR is all over this documentary and if nothing else will show that government can be and should be a force for good in people’s lives.

The Dust Bowl may have seemed to be a natural disaster or the wrath of God but it was a manmade environmental catastrophe. Our hubris knows no bounds and we keep thinking that we can do what we want, where we want and there will be no consequences. The tearing up of the Great Plains for the planting of crops that were unsuitable for the environment was the cause of the dust that blew and blanketed the country all the way to New York and which consisted of the formerly rich topsoil decimated by poor farming techniques. These hardy people withstood this year in and year out. They are what is known as “next year people”, no matter how bad things got, they always hoped that NEXT YEAR would be better. What I found most interesting was the amazing stories that those who lived through it had to tell. Just like in Burn’s documentary on the Civil War and the diaries and letters of Mary Chestnut, The Dust Bowl also has a strong woman’s voice to guide us through the events from start to finish, Caroline Henderson. Her erudite testimony both hopeful and heartbreaking is fascinating. I was especially struck by the comment that follows, which is concerning how the WPA made such a difference in the lives most affected by this catastrophe, because of its prescience. 

 “If mere dollars were to be considered, the actually destitute in our section could have undoubtedly been fed or clothed more cheaply then the works projects that have been carried out. But in our national economy, manhood must be considered as well as money. People employed to do some useful work may retain their self-respect to a degree impossible under cash relief. If we must worry so over the ruinous effects of made work on people of this type why haven’t we been worrying for generations over the character of the idlers to whom some accident of birth or inheritance has given wealth unmeasured, unearned, and unappreciated.”

There were many times in the watching that I just had to shake my head, we seem to be in such the same situation now as then, except this time we don’t have Roosevelt to lead us out of the darkness. President Obama is trying but he is no liberal and is no FDR. I also was amazed at the photographs that were presented. Roosevelt put together a project headed by Roy Striker that hired a cadre of talented photographers to travel the length and breadth of America to document the suffering of her citizens. Thanks to this we have the immeasurably precious and iconic visual histories that the cameras of Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post-Walcott, John Vashon, and Dorothea Lange captured. These images are simple but haunting and could probably be recreated today with little effort. I sit in absolute awe of these artists that take such ugliness and make it beautiful and it hits you viscerally.

The show ended with how new farming techniques based on ancient practices could renew the land and make it fertile again. It almost seemed that the land responded to the wise stewardship by ending the drought and the land once again produced bumper crops. Unfortunately, as I stated in the beginning, we learned nothing from this. Big factory farms moved in and for the last 20 years have been farming the land with the same destructive techniques that caused the Dust Bowl in the first place because it costs less. The only thing tying the topsoil to the ground is the water pumped continually out in massive quantities from the Ogallala aquifer while polluting it at the same time. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/polluting-the-ogallala-aquifer.html

Once this water is gone, the Dust Bowl will return guaranteed and with the droughts the region has been going through it will be sooner rather than later. The Ogallala is also one of the main things those who oppose the Keystone Pipeline is trying to protect, the dirty oil would flow right over this irreplaceable resource on its way to Texas refineries and then on ships to markets all over the world. It is the captains of industry who decide who lives and who dies because they can; they hold all the cards and our countries wealth is forever funneled upward. The same barons seem not to realize that they inhabit the same planet as us. I finish this with the words from The Grapes of Wrath, the most famous novel from this period and it is as true now as when the words were first written. We really do seem doomed to repeat a past we refuse to learn from.

“This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".”