Monthly Archives: July 2024

The Construct of a Neighborhood:  Where Do We Want to Live?

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Not my urban neighborhood, but similar.

What do we mean by neighborhood?

I love dictionaries, not for definitions but for sample phrases and sentences:  a fashionable neighborhood; to move to a nicer neighborhood; located in the neighborhood of Jackson and Vine Streets; the whole neighborhood was there.

We lived for several years in a “nice” but unfashionable neighborhood. It bordered on the edge of an obscenely wealthy neighborhood, dotted with mansions and big estates, and a crime-ridden neighborhood where shopkeepers paid for “protection.”

And, yes, I admit it, my happiest years were spent in that big, rambling, shabby apartment in an urban neighborhood.  I worked at home, at a desk in the dining room.  I typed fiendishly day and night, always just ahead of deadlines, and rushing into the living room to answer the phone. “Smith,” I would say briskly, as if I were in some horrible office. Well, my name isn’t Smith, but you get the gist. As if anybody thought I worked in an office! So funny, looking back. And I took my lunch break walking around a beautiful nearby park. It was heaven in the city!

Despite my indifference to home-making and decorating, I loved the apartment, especially the layout.  You walked into a foyer, where we dropped the mail on my grandmother’s buffet.  Our living room was under-furnished but cozy: two “reading” couches, one for Captain Nemo and one for me, where we spent whole weekends sprawling with our books and newspapers.  There wasn’t a coffee table, but we had several tables, intended for the dining room, I suppose, but we used them to pile up our stuff:  an enormous mahogany thing which would seat 12 people; a 1960s blond wood table with folding leaves; a carved oak table that had belonged to my husband’s great-uncle (which wouldn’t fit in his dining room, and took up half our living room); and a rickety formica kitchen table.  A copy of Interview with the Vampire propped up the air conditioner in the window.

The neighborhood was convenient for transportation, with three different bus lines, and we took advantage of it.  I will never forget the middle-aged Black gentleman who used to “escort” the “ladies” onto the bus.  I always giggled when he took my arm and guided me up the steps. Nowadays, someone would slap a sexual harassment suit on him, but, heavens, he only took our elbows!

What happened to my favorite neighborhood was sudden.  The landlord moved away, and the manager stopped doing repairs. Then the manager began renting apartments to people who, if not criminals, lived on the edge.  Even the shops changed. At the cafe we saw a man pull a switchblade out of his sock.  We did not wait to see what happened, but hustled out the back door. The manager rented the apartment across the hall to a prostitute, whose drunken customers banged on her door at all hours. Then our apartment was burgled.  The burglar didn’t want our tables, or our books, or our typewriters.  No, he she took the VCR and a pack of Royal Lunch Crackers. 

In the next year, everybody moved out of the building.  First, the old ladies.  The most elegant, Gwendolyn Rose, had lived in the same apartment for 20 years, and had paid for the wallpaper and expensive tiled floors. “No, I can’t bear to see what they’re doing to the place,” she said sadly. Then the chatty old lady who had mysteries delivered to her from the library moved to a nursing home.  She was very emotional about embarking on what she knew was the last move of her life.

And then my friends, “professionals” of roughly my age, began to leave.  All of us were sad, because we loved our home. Most found condos or apartments in the neighborhood.  We could have done that, too, but listened to our richer friends who thought it was absurd not to live in a house.  “Everybody passes through that neighborhood, but then they move!” they told us.

Well, we have lived in some great neighborhoods and some terrible ones.  The suburbs can be more crime-ridden than the cities, though people don’t admit this.  A policeman told me it was dangerous to wait at the bus stop because there were suburban gangs and a LOT of drugs. (Yes, I was terrified by the people in the shelter, smoking what was definitely NOT marijuana. I waited pretty far from the shelter when I had to take the bus.) It’s best, if at all possible, to live in an urban neighborhood, where everything is within walking distance, and/or there is a choice of several buses,

Nothing can replace my charming old neighborhood, but it, alas, became a ghost town. All the shops have closed, and the apartment houses are empty or torn down.

Very sad, and I wish we had taken photos, but who had a camera? It was somewhere, but we never used it.

The Lost Souls’ Book Club:  How the Underemployed Don’t Get Paid

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My friend Lee Ann wished she had not moved back to her hometown after earning a pointless Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Montana, Missoula. But where else could she go?

Now she lived with her golden retriever in a tiny apartment in a not-great urban neighborhood, working 60 hours a week at a chain bookstore, where she “assisted” the manager, i.e., managed the store, booked the readings, supervised the staff, and  ran the book club while the manager read proofs.  On her day off, she and her dog walked for miles around the neighborhood.  

She spent a lot of time at a neighborhood cafe.

“Sit, Marlowe.” She perched on a chair at my table, with the dog adoringly lolling at her feet. The sign said NO DOGS, but the servers made an exception for Marlowe, whom they called the “therapy dog.” 

Lee Ann looked pale.  “Marlowe is acting weird. I’m never home.”

“He seems happy.”

“He eats the furniture.  The arm of a chair is gone.  It’s gone!”

“No!  He couldn’t eat a chair arm.”

“Well, he bit it off.  Something.”

“I could dog-sit occasionally if it would help. We have cats, but Marlowe could stay in the dining room,”  We lived in a huge apartment in a building across the street – the right side of the street, if I may say – though eventually we would have to leave. On the day I had to step over a passed-out john in the hall we began to make plans to move.

“Would you mind looking after Marlowe tonight? I have to lead the book club, but it only lasts an hour. I would rush back! We’re talking about Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens. It won’t be a long discussion,”

“I loved that book!  What a great choice.”

“Hardly anyone comes. There will be a neurosurgeon and three housewives.  That’s all!”

 “At that huge store?”

And then her face turned light green and she threw up her croissant. Ugh! Then she threw up again.  And I agreed to lead the group that night, because she was terrified she’d lose her job.

That night a friend accompanied me to the book group. I was begging her to be my co-leader when the neurosurgeon arrived.

“He’s hellaciously handsome!” she whispered.  “Yes, I WILL be the co-leader.”

It was the usual book group, with coffee, cookies, a few brilliant remarks, much encouragement from me, and several digressions about a sale at Younkers.  The neurosurgeon praised Goldman’s style, humor, vivid characters, and handed out Xerox copies of a diagram of the structure of the book.  I may have looked at the diagram upside down, but was impressed he’d done it at all.

One of the housewives had a meltdown. “I had to get out of the house!  I had to get away from my family! I haven’t had time to read in a year.”

“You could go read in the bookstore cafe if you’d like,” I suggested

How many people have my super-powers saved today, I wondered with a bit of cynicism?  Lee Ann; the book group; the housewife who never got a chance to read… But why did I always try to fix things?

Eventually Lou Ann inherited some money and moved away. And we moved from one bad neighborhood to another until the bus stop was so full of drug-users that I couldn’t take mass transit and we had to reconsider our options.

Still, while the first neighborhood lasted, it was a great, mellow place to live. Why does everything good get ruined? It’s the age, as the narrator of Thomas McGuane’s Panama says.

Surrounded by Invisible Objects:  Thomas McGuane’s “Panama”

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In the 1980s, “yuppiebacks” attracted our attention. Thomas McGuane’s early novels were reissued as yuppiebacks, which were colorful paperbacks with irresistible cover designs, published in the Vintage Contemporaries series and the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series. They featured writers like McGuane, Richard Ford, and Janet Hobson, and were marketed to readers in their twenties and thirties, some of whom were presumably yuppies. 

The cover art of Thomas McGuane’s novel, Panama, reissued by Penguin Contemporary Fiction in 1989,  hints at the exotic but very sad trajectory of this novel .  The cover illustration depicts a striped rectangle, perhaps a towel, on which are placed sunglasses, a mirror and straw, and a flower. These objects reflect the beach setting and the drug problems. 

The addled narrator, Chet Pomeroy, a retired rock star living in Key West, is depicted in the tabloids  as “depraved and licentious.” Yet he has a gift for expressing a poetic, humane, yet critical philosophy that captures our collective consciousness. He blames the mass alienation of Americans on “the age.” Read this as a parable about America, as a prose poem, or a poetic comedy:  there is so much I identify with here, in the way one does with novels that do not reflect our own experience, that I would have had to underline the whole book to do justice to Chet’s nuggets of wisdom.

What is Chet doing in Key West, which he despises for its commercialism and tourism?  Well, he had to go somewhere.  He briefly did a show called “The Dog Ate the Part We Didn’t Like,” but did not become notorious until he came on stage “crawling out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine.”

That was going too far, and Chet knows it. But from day to day, Chet barely remembers what has happened, so there is always a fresh start.  He is an addict, but the drugs replace something in him that is gone. He is not all there. And so he spends most of his time stalking his ex-girlfriend, Catherine, who may or may not have married him in Panama several years ago: neither of them quite remembers. Catherine wants to get a restraining order against him, but doesn’t quite have the energy. Concerned about his memory, she hires a detective to follow him and report to him every day what he’s done.

This is partly a love story, the story of Chet and Catherine, but Chet always goes too far.  High on cocaine, he nails his hand to Catherine’s front door when she doesn’t let him in.  She can hardly let this innocent out on his own, even though she has a new girlfriend, Marcelline, who is by the way, as messed-up as  Chet.  Chet and Catherine begin to spend time together again, and, as is their custom, take too many drugs.   

McGuane’s description of Catherine’s frailty and miserable jitteriness when she doubts she can sit still in a restaurant is grimly realistic. “’My nerves are raw,’ she said.  “We’ll have to go someplace where the service is fast or I’ll jump out of my skin.”  The couple are intertwined, but the drugs may kill Catherine.  Chet alone seems not to realize this.  His brain has lost so many of its finer points, yet he is likable, cheerful, and, as Catherine says, “a lovely man.” He doesn’t mind the drugs as much as she does, though both are addicts.

There is a huge cast of grotesque characters:  Chet’s rich, mad stepmother, Roxy, whose lawyer wants to usurp her land, whether by marriage or theft; two cops, Pratt and Nylon Pindar, who really have it in for Chet; Jorge Cruz, director of the orchestra Chet is determined to hire for a big party, though Jorge doubts the orchestra can play in a huge, weedy field that is the venue;.

And yet, despite the coke-fueled tragedy of Chet’s life, I can read McGuane all day. 

He writes,

“I noticed that many people I saw were surrounded by invisible objects.  Many of the visitors from New York had invisible typewriters right in front of their noses upon which they typed every word they spoke.”

and

“There is a trigger that makes the day begin and all life end and it breaks like a glass rod.  It lies at the middle of everything that breathes or dreams.  It will bend and break, and when it breaks it is night.”

Thomas McGuane, a great novelists and poet!

Women Writers & Their Daughters

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Alice Munro

They are like the girls at school who are too eager to raise their hands.  The minute their famous mother dies, they tell the world that she abused them.  Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But it is the perfect topic to discuss in therapy. 

 I have not read the clickbait articles about Alice Munro’s daughter’s accusations, because (a) it is tacky that she contacted the press, and (b) I don’t believe it.

Anne Sexton

There are many of these tell-all memoirs.  Anne Sexton’s daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, and  Jenny Diski, who lived with Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, during her adolescence, both got books out of it.  Sexton’s daughter claimed her mother had sex with her. At the time, I thought, How horrifying, but I have some doubts about it. Diski made no such claims, but made it clear that she disliked Lessing and thought she was a terrible mother. She raged against Lessing for “leaving” her children from her first marriage in Africa. She left them with their father, not on the streets! And she did take Peter to England, the son from her second marriage, but that annoyed Diski, too.

Some thoughts on the two memoirs. It is true that Anne Sexton was mentally ill, but since she was in love with her psychiatrist, she was probably pretty busy stalking him in her free time. It doesn’t matter how beautiful these women are, they are all out there crouching in their cars outside of their psychiatrists’ houses. And Lessing may not have been the best mother, but she WAS there at home, writing her books, sitting in the kitchen, where she could annoy both Jenny and her son Peter, like mothers everywhere.

Doris Lessing

Then there was the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, one of my favorite dead science fiction writers.  In 1990, Bradley’s husband was arrested for child abuse. Fifteen years after her mother’s death, the daughter claimed that her mother also sexually abused her. Bradley must have written and edited about 100 books, and co-written, in her old age, several books with other writers, so she was very busy. But, to my knowledge, at least the daughter has not written a book about her mother.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

I strongly believe the therapist’s office is the place to discuss incest and abuse. The thrill of public attention and sympathy lasts about a minute and a half. And it is cowardly to come forth with “posthumous” accusations against famous mothers who aren’t there to defend themselves. 

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? THAT THEY’RE NOT THERE!

Six Quotes from Books You’ll Love

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“Everything’s connected, one distant tremor can eventually shake the whole world…” Germinal, by Zola

“The years changed things, destroyed things, heaped things up, worries and bothers, here they were again.” – The Years, by Virginia Woolf

“But hearing in the full sense is blocked, intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks… Even in Britain, accent intonation and vocabulary often are unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear…” Foreign Affairs, by Alison Lurie

“Everybody at all addicted to letter-writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at large, must feel with Lady Bertram that she was out of luck, having such a capital piece of Mansfield news as the certainty of the Grants going to Bath, at a time when she could make no advantage of it…” Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen\

“I did not think Mr. Millward was a fool, and he believes it all; but however little you may value the opinions of other people, it it not pleasant to be looked upon as a liar and a hypocrite, to be thought to practice what you abhor, and to encourage the vices you would discountenance, to find your good intentions frustrated, and your hands crippled by your supposed unworthiness, and to bring disgrace on the principles you abhor.” – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte

“What does it mean to have read a book? You just have to stand around a square and look around: lots of people talking on their mobile phones, What do they have to say to each other?,,, I tried to set a beautiful ringtone instead of the default one but waking up is still awful. The time machine exists.” – The Hummingbird, by Sandro Veronisi

A Woolfian “The Forsyte Saga”:  Virginia Woolf’s “The Years”

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It began with To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway – rapture! – and A Room of One’s Own. And then I read Virginia Woolf’s other novels and essays, the diaries (still in progress), and Leonard Woolf’s six-volume autobiography.

But why had I not heard of The Years?  The critics apparently hated it. Susan Hill attacks the critics in her introduction to the Vintage edition of The Years: “Open any of their books to see it dismissed in a few lines, accounted patchy at best, a poor thing, disappointing – though patronizingly, they often imply that it needn’t matter – even the greatest writers have off-days.”

I was very lucky a few years ago to come across this Vintage edition in a bookstore, because, as I said, I had never heard of it. Oddly, it has become my favorite of Woolf’s novels. And the Vintage has not one but two introductions, one by Susan Hill and the other by Steven Connor. 

Published in 1937, The Years is more fluid and insightful even than her masterpieces of the 1920s.  It is an ambitious family saga, as absorbing as The Forsyte Saga, only written in Woolf’s running style, poetic, flowing, fragmented, whimsical, describing brass tea kettles and Picadilly with equal verve.  Told from multiple points-of-view, it charts the lives of three generations of the  Pargiter family, from 1880 to the late 1930s.

 The ideal introduction to The Years would be nonverbal:  a family tree.  Dozens of characters appear, disappear, and reappear at different stages, most coming together in the end at a family party. 

But I am fondest of the Abercorn Terrace Pargiters, the bristly Colonel Pargiter and his wary family.   At the center is his daughter Eleanor, a kind, distracted young woman who manages the household while her mother is dying. She also does charity work and more or less keeps track of her siblings, the youngest of whom, Rose, is seven or eight.  There are many comic scenes where Eleanor does the accounts.  She wonders aloud:  what is eight times eight?

Like Eleanor’s multiplication, the offspring of the branches of the family are multitudinous. There are cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, widows, spinsters, housewives, Victorians, Edwardians, and more.  Eleanor is our rock:  she stays with her father at Abercorn Terrace until he dies.  And then she is free.  In her seventies, she joyfully travels to India. 

A profession cannot define Virginia Woolf’s characters, but it may give you an idea of the broad spectrum of their interests: Eleanor’s brother Edward teaches at Oxford, their sister Rose becomes a suffragette (and goes to jail), kind cousin Kitty from Oxford becomes Lady Lassdale, and Sara, a whimsical single woman, lives in a flat in a slum and spends most of her time with  her best friend, a gay man (whom many think she should marry, despite his sexuality, because of their close friendship).

At the party at the end of the novel, we can see that the third generation is different, though.  Why are they so wretched? What does this represent? Peggy, a bitter doctor, hates the uselessness of the human race, the constant marriages and reproduction, even the repetitive conversation.  The women of the earlier generations lacked her educational opportunities, but that does not matter:  she dislikes them and is, strangely, the unhappiest person in the room.  Her brother, North, a war veteran and poet-farmer, just home from Africa, is also estranged because London does not embrace him, and his family is kind but vague.  At the end of the party, he meets a girl, and that changes things. He will marry and reproduce…  Peggy pulls herself together.

A significant number of women in the book are single, and they flourish, like Eleanor, who in her seventies is the life of the party.  And Sara, a radical in her rather strange solitude, chooses to defy her class and llive in a noisy, poor neighborhood that is unacceptable to anyone except her bohemian sister, Maggie, who lived with her until she married.

The sentence below will show you what it is like to read The Years.

.. “The swarm of sound, the rush of traffic, the shouts of the hawkers, the single cries and the general cries, came into the upper room of the house in Hyams Place where Sara sat at the piano.”

EDITIONS: The Vintage edition with its beautiful cover and two introductions is excellent, but I also recommend the Wordsworth, which has an introduction and footnotes!!! The cover is not ideal, but it’s the content that matters.

Reading in the Adirondack Chair

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Not an Adirondack chair but the same spirit.

We used to have webbed cloth lawn chairs, which were uncomfortable for reading, but the Adirondack chair is perfect. I sit there drinking “blue” tea (the color of the teabag wrapper) and slouching to avoid the too-friendly bees.  And do you know you’re supposed to talk to the bees?  I learned the latter from a novel by Elizabeth Goudge.

Here’s what I recommend: Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), a family saga about three generations of Native American women.  Written in the present tense, it is told from the points-of-view of three women, Rayona, who runs away from home, her mother, Christine, who grew up in the sixties and worried about her male friends’ Draft numbers, and finally Rayona’s grandmother, Ida.  On the first page: “We play solitaire on the sliding deck pulled across the foot of the electric bed….  [Mom’s] round face is screwed into a mask of concentration, like a stumped contestant on “Jeopardy” with time running out.” 

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s The Years, another family saga about three generations, only this has a multitude of characters. We follow the complex web of the Pargiters from 1880 to the 1930s. One of Woolf’s most traditional novels, but my favorite.

I hope you’re enjoying your summer reading and have a good weekend!

The Quasi-Luddite Reader

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I am a quasi-Luddite.  That, I think, is what my physical therapist admired about me.  “Love the quasi,” she said as she urged me to contort my limbs. I disapprove of cell phones; hence I am a quasi-Luddite. 

The “quasi” is difficult for bibliophiles now, but there were difficult times in the twentieth century, too. During the 1990s, when independent bookstores were crashing like dominoes, booksellers claimed that it was the fall of the book, period.  Borders, the extraordinary bookstore that changed the face of bookselling, was bigger, and I am sorry to say, better than most of the  indies.  Borders closed in 2011, and that was almost the end of bookstores where I live.

But bookstores and book events have long been difficult to navigate.  Here are examples of a typical 20th-century experience.

The 1980s.  The man behind the desk refuses to sell me a copy of Midnight’s Children.  He says I WILL NOT LIKE IT.  Perhaps he thought I was too white-bread.  I bought it at a friendly bookstore, where I shopped loyally for the rest of the decade. 

The  1990s.  At a literary festival, a writer who was beautiful as the dawn gossiped about a writer who sounded very nasty. Since I am a straight talker, too, I was amused and actually relieved that someone else said whatever was on her mind. ALL of us bought her book.

The 2000s. The pandemic ruined many bookstores, because most bibliophiles were terrified or locked down, or both. But do read Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an ex-con bookseller who works in Louise’s own bookstore during the Covid area.

Of course we need physical bookstores, but I became quasi-quasi during the pandemic. I miss those quasi-Luddite days! Still, there are small bookstores all over the midwest, if you like to drive.

THE THORNFIELD HALL NEWSLETTER

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Summer 2024, Issue 1

The Podcast Debacle

“We have 2,000 books. Let’s start a podcast,” I said.

It was 90 degrees, I had drunk three Diet Cokes, and was over-caffeinated.  It’s like the pollen count, only it’s soda-related. I’m not a fan of podcasts, but the blog has a podcast feature, you see. And anyone can make a podcast, yes? My  husband was in the middle of a Simenon, and absent-mindedly said, “Yeah,” and when I said, “Let’s call it 2,000 Books,” he absent-mindedly repeated, “Yeah.”  He had not heard a word I said!  As a wife, I know these things.

And so I found the newsletter feature.

The Thornfield Hall Newsletter may appear bimonthly.

A Summer Idyll

Every year I reread  Dorothy Van Doren’s The Country Wife (1950),  a collection of charming essays detailing her summers on a farm in Connecticut.. Dorothy Van Doren was a journalist, novelist, and an editor at The Nation; and her husband, Mark Van Doren, was an English professor, writer, novelist, and critic.  Both are virtually forgotten today.

 The book is not about their lives as writers. It is about living in the country.  Every year they spent four months with their two sons at the farm in Connecticut.  Van Doren has a delightful sense of humor about the idyll of country life, countered by scratches form berry-picking and the odious ritual of canning vegetables. 

The problems begin before they leave New York.  Mark does all the packing himself.  He  crams four suitcases into the car with tennis rackets,  books, records, typewriters, and other paraphernalia. But a few items are jolted loose during the drive, and Dorothy observes that, though the suitcases are stable., “The typewriter table, however, wedged on its side above the piles of books, has moved slightly and one of the legs is threatening to pierce my ear to my brain.”  And then of course there is a flat tire.  A typical family outing!

At the farm her husband pursues his hobby of carpentry from dawn to dusk. One day he drafts her to assist him in building book shelves. Soon she is covered with sawdust and varnish. She writes, “I am sick and tired shelves.  I wish shelves had never been invented.  Much better to put books on the floor, or for that matter, who wants books?  We’ve got thousands of books and hundreds of shelves and – how in heaven’s name did sawdust get inside my shirt around my waist?”

Fans of Gladys Taber and Betty MacDonald will enjoy this book.  Dorothy Van Doren is not laugh-out-loud funny , but her gentle humor is soothing and delightful.   Disappointingly,  her essays fit the template of the ‘40s and ‘50s women’s memoir. She writes beautifully but is very modest, and presents herself as a harried but affectionate wife and mother, never mentioning her job. Her books may be too quiet for modern times, but her voice is wry and vigorous, and it is a shame that The Country Wife is out of print. There is a sequel, The Professor and I.  .

The Least Famous Bronte

Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey is a quiet novel, but the first part of The Tenant of Wildfell is practically silent.  The second part of the book flames into Gothic nerves and passion, but the farmer Gilbert Markham’s narrative about falling in love with Helen Graham, a mysterious artist who moves with her young son into Wildfell Hall, is stilted and strained:  one might conclude that Anne can’t write men.  What she can write is male monsters like Helen’s alcoholic husband, Mr. Huntingdon.

 But as soon as I got to Helen’s diary, t was hooked. Helen made a bad decision when she was young by marrying a handsome alcoholic, without understanding the signs of his addiction. She has to work incessantly to protect their son from his influence. She also avoids the grossness of Huntingdon’s decadent friends. He will not divorce her, though he is having an affair with a woman who is as loose and hard-drinking as he is.

The diary is about voice, voice, and voice.  Helen is a strong woman and a fierce mother who teaches herself to paint so that she can run away with her son and make a living as a painter. Although the language is plain, we recognize a parallel between Helen’s vigor and moral sense and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.  Critics point stress the  similarities to Emily’s Wuthering Heights, but I do not see them.  Emily Bronte is a poet, Anne is a good storyteller. I do agree that the initials are clever: Helen’s house, Wildfell Hall, has the same initials as Emily’s Wuthering Heights.  A sisterly joke?

Am absolutely loving this and am lost in it for hours at a time. 

Until Next Time

Have a lovely summer and may you read only fascinating books! 

Comments may be sent to mirabiledictu.org@gmail.com

The Daily Planner:  Notebooks in a Box, Version with Complete Essay from Notebook

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I used to whine about the closing of The Daily Planner, a New York stationery store that sold its wares online.  I ordered the most splendid notebooks and notepads over the years.

And then The Daily Planner closed.

“Goddamn it!  Where am I supposed to get notebooks now?”

There was Target, there was K-Mart, there were office supply stores.  But I could not find any of the brands from the Daily Planner. 

And then… Eureka!  I was looking through a box today and found four notebooks from the Daily Planner. The orange Nava Notes notebook was still in the cellophane wrapping.  I’m clutching it to my bosom.

Let me very briefly catalogue these notebooks.

  1. An oversized orange Nave Notes paperback notebook. I love the quality of the paper and the spaces for Year, Day, and Month in tiny letters at the top of each page.  I used my first Nava Notes  for a book journal, but plan to be more eclectic now. .
  2. An oversized Clairefontaine green-and-purple pad (size A4, made in France).  Clairefontaine is known for its silky paper,  but, hilariously,  I used it to scribble an essay on the modern obsession with  butts.  (Essay below this list.)
  3.  a Miquelerius black and red spiral notebook, in which I have scribbled a strange story, or God knows what.    
  4. A light blue, aesthetic Apica spiral notebook, made in Japan.  I used it for notes on various Latin stuff I was reading.   There is a whole page on Latin synonyms for “conspire” and “conspiracy.”

And here is , yes, my infamous essay on butts, even cigarette butts.

Nobody ever talked about the Beatles’ butts.

On the cover of Abbey Road, John, Paul, Ringo and George are crossing Abbey Road. Their long suit jackets “cover their asses.” George wears jeans with a denim shirt tucked in. His butt is flat. I guess the question is, do John, Paul, and Ringo have butts? And the second question is: Do we care?

Personally, I’m more interested in their footwear.

John: white sneakers. George: white or tan desert boots. Ringo: black shoes. Paul: barefoot. Paul also holds a cigarette.

It’s 1969.  Were people showing off their butts? I don’t think so. Not unless they were Bridget Bardot. I don’t think Twiggy had  a butt. People “covered their asses” or “saved their asses.” Butts were also the ends of cigarettes. Unfortunate people are the butts of jokes.

But suddenly in the twenty-first century everything was about butts.  Women, by the way, are allowed to be flat-chested again – the first time since the 1920s flappers probably- because everything is about the cute, firm butt. To achieve that miracle, women are expected to work out at gyms and become as muscular as men: people in photos in the 1960’s and ’70s looked softer.

The obsession with butts is perhaps a bit scatological.

I’m too busy to think about it. But it’s very twenty-first century.

I am so silly. This is perfect blog fare. Sorry if I offended anyone.

I am normally in realistic mode, though.  No optimism about the future of the (daily) planet for me! I will use my new-old notebooks to  become a POSITIVE person. YES, I AM GOING TO LIVE MY LIFE AS A FANTASIST!

“Saw a unicorn today.”  Who cares if it’s a deer:  I say it is unicorn.

“Saw Gollum talking on a cell phone at a coffee house.”   

“A Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sighting in Omaha.”

“Shelley Duvall comes back to life and will star in a new movie.”  (I loved Shelley Duvall.)

I’ll fly in my house to the mall this afternoon.  It’s the new transportation.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?  DO YOU KNOW THESE GREAT BRANDS OF NOTEBOOKS?  WHAT BRAND, OR NON-BRAND, DO YOU USE?

LET ME KNOW.