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Rikki Don't Lose that Wednesday
Sep. 16th, 2020 09:01 amWhat I've Finished Reading
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm was a lovely relaxing book of comfortable thought-provokers written between 1986 and about 2015. One of the later essays is an appreciation of the Gossip Girl series of books, which left me strongly tempted to get one from the library next time. The earliest is a long and wonderfully gossipy piece from 1986 on the magazine Artforum called "A Girl of the Zeitgeist." There's also an essay about the deep weirdness of Gene Stratton Porter, and one about the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the same Mrs. Cameron who lived next door to Tennyson and kept trying to take his photograph in William Allingham's diaries, among many others equally enjoyable.
I loved that Homecoming was willing to expand its gritty head-down highway realism enough to include a kindly circus couple! who not only let the kids travel with their circus for a little way, but also rescue them from a scary farmer who is trying to kidnap them for unspecified but obviously nefarious purposes. The kids' bitter, prickly grandmother, who lives way out on the water with no car and gets around by boat, is also a treat. Things pick up a lot once they finally make it to Gram's house - and the arguments she gets into with Dicey immediately sharpen and clarify Dicey as a character, seven-eighths of the way through the book. Overall, I was pretty positive on it by the end, but I still regret not reading it when I was ten.
1980s Telephone Mores Check-In
Both "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" and Homecoming feature characters who don't have a telephone. For the poet and art critic Rene Ricard, it's one annoying but not hugely surprising element of a more generally antogonistic and alienating persona. In Homecoming, the Tillerman kids' grandmother threw out her phone when her son was killed in the war as a decisive gesture of self-isolation. The kindly circus couple are also phoneless, since they're always on the road, but they give Dicey the number of their booking agent in case she needs to get in touch.
What I'm Reading Now
I started reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind, which is an ambitious world history for young readers from 1921, extremely brisk and readable and full of illustrations that are (so far) a lot scratchier and smudgier than you'd expect from the sumptuous Golden Treasury Home Library production of this edition. Because it's 1921, van Loon takes an "ascent" model of evolution and early hominid life completely for granted - as illustrated by several vertical diagrams. We've breezed right through the Ice Age and are now getting a look at Ancient Egypt's agricultural economy and hieroglyphics.
For some reason (it's because I didn't bother to look at it closely before sticking it on the to-read shelf) I thought The Lady and the Tycoon was going to be letters between noted twentieth-century trashfire Rose Wilder Lane and her "adopted grandson" and protégé Roger MacBride, but it's actually letters between Lane and Jasper Crane, a VP of DuPont who is interested in free-market stuff, edited and with a vague and fawning intro by MacBride.
Consequently, it's probably going to be more libertarian wonkery/policy daydreaming than the treasure trove of blazingly uncomfortable self-disclosure I was anticipating. But I'm giving it a shot just the same. It's not so much that I don't trust Lane to make every relationship as weird as possible, as that I don't trust MacBride not to cut out the best/worst bits in service of bland mythmaking and/or letting the ideas speak for themselves. His introduction reads like he's trying to compete with the Randians in the field of libertarian idolatry, but the problem with that is you just can't.
What It Takes: The Way to the White House is still breathless, breakneck, stressful, and completely absorbing. I had to look up some of the guys on Wikipedia because I realized I didn't know what they looked like - Michael Dukakis looks exactly like I imagined him, Gephardt and Gary Hart less so. Poor Dick Gephardt continues to be way less interesting than everyone else for no clear reason - I suspect (totally without evidence) that he was Cramer's consolation prize after Cramer failed to get enough interview time with Jesse Jackson.
What I Plan to Read Next
It's time for Dicey's Song, unless someone's already taken it out of the Larger Free Library, in which case it's not yet time for Dicey's Song.
Also, next year will be the 120th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm making good progress on my overall "not getting crushed by books" goal, and the library is open again, so why not celebrate in the laziest and least imaginative way possible: by reading one book by each laureate? List to follow, maybe closer to January. Sully Prudhomme, here I come!
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm was a lovely relaxing book of comfortable thought-provokers written between 1986 and about 2015. One of the later essays is an appreciation of the Gossip Girl series of books, which left me strongly tempted to get one from the library next time. The earliest is a long and wonderfully gossipy piece from 1986 on the magazine Artforum called "A Girl of the Zeitgeist." There's also an essay about the deep weirdness of Gene Stratton Porter, and one about the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the same Mrs. Cameron who lived next door to Tennyson and kept trying to take his photograph in William Allingham's diaries, among many others equally enjoyable.
I loved that Homecoming was willing to expand its gritty head-down highway realism enough to include a kindly circus couple! who not only let the kids travel with their circus for a little way, but also rescue them from a scary farmer who is trying to kidnap them for unspecified but obviously nefarious purposes. The kids' bitter, prickly grandmother, who lives way out on the water with no car and gets around by boat, is also a treat. Things pick up a lot once they finally make it to Gram's house - and the arguments she gets into with Dicey immediately sharpen and clarify Dicey as a character, seven-eighths of the way through the book. Overall, I was pretty positive on it by the end, but I still regret not reading it when I was ten.
1980s Telephone Mores Check-In
Both "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" and Homecoming feature characters who don't have a telephone. For the poet and art critic Rene Ricard, it's one annoying but not hugely surprising element of a more generally antogonistic and alienating persona. In Homecoming, the Tillerman kids' grandmother threw out her phone when her son was killed in the war as a decisive gesture of self-isolation. The kindly circus couple are also phoneless, since they're always on the road, but they give Dicey the number of their booking agent in case she needs to get in touch.
What I'm Reading Now
I started reading Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind, which is an ambitious world history for young readers from 1921, extremely brisk and readable and full of illustrations that are (so far) a lot scratchier and smudgier than you'd expect from the sumptuous Golden Treasury Home Library production of this edition. Because it's 1921, van Loon takes an "ascent" model of evolution and early hominid life completely for granted - as illustrated by several vertical diagrams. We've breezed right through the Ice Age and are now getting a look at Ancient Egypt's agricultural economy and hieroglyphics.
For some reason (it's because I didn't bother to look at it closely before sticking it on the to-read shelf) I thought The Lady and the Tycoon was going to be letters between noted twentieth-century trashfire Rose Wilder Lane and her "adopted grandson" and protégé Roger MacBride, but it's actually letters between Lane and Jasper Crane, a VP of DuPont who is interested in free-market stuff, edited and with a vague and fawning intro by MacBride.
Consequently, it's probably going to be more libertarian wonkery/policy daydreaming than the treasure trove of blazingly uncomfortable self-disclosure I was anticipating. But I'm giving it a shot just the same. It's not so much that I don't trust Lane to make every relationship as weird as possible, as that I don't trust MacBride not to cut out the best/worst bits in service of bland mythmaking and/or letting the ideas speak for themselves. His introduction reads like he's trying to compete with the Randians in the field of libertarian idolatry, but the problem with that is you just can't.
What It Takes: The Way to the White House is still breathless, breakneck, stressful, and completely absorbing. I had to look up some of the guys on Wikipedia because I realized I didn't know what they looked like - Michael Dukakis looks exactly like I imagined him, Gephardt and Gary Hart less so. Poor Dick Gephardt continues to be way less interesting than everyone else for no clear reason - I suspect (totally without evidence) that he was Cramer's consolation prize after Cramer failed to get enough interview time with Jesse Jackson.
What I Plan to Read Next
It's time for Dicey's Song, unless someone's already taken it out of the Larger Free Library, in which case it's not yet time for Dicey's Song.
Also, next year will be the 120th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm making good progress on my overall "not getting crushed by books" goal, and the library is open again, so why not celebrate in the laziest and least imaginative way possible: by reading one book by each laureate? List to follow, maybe closer to January. Sully Prudhomme, here I come!
