margalo’s blog

Well, I've enjoyed spending time on Vox but have found a new home. Thanks to all those who have commented on or visited my blog.

Best regards,

Margalo

I finished "The Sportswriter" - I did like it.  It seemed to me to be a book about writing, since the main character writes for a living but doesn't view himself as a 'real writer.' At the end, he seems to be getting close to understanding how a 'real writer' might write and in fact describes the workmanlike process which the author himself seems to use:

"When I was writing seriously, I used to sit for hours over a sentence -- usually one I hadn't written yet, and usually without athe first idea of what I was trying to say. (That should've been a clue to me.) But the moment I started writing sports...I got into the habit of putting down whatever occurred to me, and before long the truth of most things turned out to be waiting just over the edge of worried thought..."

 As is typical with the story, the expectation that he might find his way as a 'real writer' are promptly undermined by the events - he doesn't even finish the article he was working on. However, obviously, the author did find his way as a writer, so there is redemption built-in.  It's a quirky, subjective, murky story, but seemed to get at something true about the human condition. I might go ahead and read the rest of the trilogy. What I didn't like is the somewhat dated attitudes and descriptions and the Updike/Cheever way of describing women, as sex objects or members of an alien race and then kind of backhandedly granting them some humanity, some personal reality of their own. I find it annoying. This book was written in the eighties, but it feels like the sixties to me.

February was a blur, but I did get to do some reading:

 

This is a hilarious book, where the author adopts different writers' styles to describe recipes. The first chapter was on Raymond Chandler  "I had a leg of lamb, but no clues..." and is the funniest, but the rest are really well done. The one on Jane Austen was great and Kafka's dinner party where he's making soup for some people and it is not clear who they are or whether or not he invited them to his house. The recipes look pretty good, too!

 "The Mind of Bill James" is about a baseball writer/analyst/philosopher(?). I'm not sure how to describe him, given that he doesn't like to be referred to as a statistician. I first heard of him in a New Yorker article not that long ago. When trying to explain the

connection between his two obsessions - crimes stories and baseball, he said, "I feel a need to be reminded, day in and day out, how easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets."  His message from this is:  "Deal with the life you've got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them."

This struck me as wise and important, and I copied it down somewhere. Scott Gray uses this quote in his preface which got my attention and I ended up reading the whole book, even though I really don't like baseball and I don't know anything about it. I had to skim over the passages that were too baseball-intensive, but many times the baseball part of a story related to something of more general interest, so I was able to follow along. James is a master of language and analogy. He seems to draw on a wide range of influences that enable him to make elegant connections between, say, 'the way evidence is presented to juries in our legal system and the effects of 'babying' pitchers by overly restricting pitch counts".  He "throws himself into the ongoing clash between our simplifications and the real world."  It seems that the need to simplify, to make decisions, to end uncertainty is an overwhelming human imperative, yet uncertainty is what is real.  As usual, some other connection appeared to this very topic when I was listening to NPR and heard an expert on Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, whose message is to 'value perplexity.'

Latin quote of the week:  Audi, vide, tace, si vis vivere in pace (Listen, watch and be silent, if you want to live in peace).

As usual when doing latin sentences, I come up with a bit of wisdom from 2000 years ago. This seems particularly appropos since I am just buried in committees and meetings and volunteer tasks that I end up taking on because I can't keep quiet!

Last week's quote was:  Canis qui mordet mordetur (A dog who bites gets bitten); in today's stressed out times when we are all running around ready to beep our horns, cut each other off at the intersection and maybe speak out inappropriately over something that angers us.....(this last is what I did and has been haunting me) it may be good to remember this cautionary saying. In other words, if people aren't willing to work with you because you act or speak from anger, then it serves you right.

I'm a mild-mannered person usually, but being stressed out and over-committed does take a toll, which leads back up to the first quote....

Vale!

 

The Tin Drum, by Gunther Grasse - I'm not loving this one anymore. It seems to be dragging on and the precocious (and bizarre) narrator, Oscar, is starting to annoy me. Still, I can understand the need for a bizarre narrator, someone out of the ordinary who could be more of a spectator than a participant as events unfolded in Poland and Germany in the 30s and 40s. The early chapters were very grounded, even real, despite the strangeness of the central character, but now that he's joined a traveling circus and is roaming around Germany entertaining the troops, it has lost it's authenticity. 

The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford.  The family book group is reading this one, which is the first book of a trilogy. There was an excerpt from the third book in The New Yorker last fall, which I remember reading and liking a bit. His writing is very workmanlike:  rather quiet and methodical, even a bit repetitive, even a bit slow, but it's as if he's patiently and persistently drilling down, and after awhile he very often turns up a brillian insight.

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert.  I couldn't resist borrowing this one from a friend when I saw it on the shelf.

The Unfolding of Language, by Guy Deutscher. This was recommended by someone on the Latin list.

The End, by Lemony Snickett

Not to mention numerous magazines and the "Ideas" section from the Sunday paper. If only we'd have a snow day for hibernating and reading!

While cleaning my office, I came upon an old issue of Mother Jones and started reading an article by Garret Keizer entitled "Left Alone:  On the lure of private life in a time of public peril."  I've been feeling overcommitted and wishing I could pull back from some of my causes and committees, but he makes the claim that being involved in society doesn't automatically negate a private life. He points out that Thoreau wrote both Civil Disobedience and Walden.  He cites Robert D. Putnam's 2000 best-seller, Bowling Alone, which is about the steady decline of 'social capital' in America and states that the American dream seems to be about creating a perfect and private haven 'far from the madding crowd.' Just look at the explosion of Home Depot type stores and HG TV - it's all about being home these days, not going out to meetings, marching at rallies and sitting on committees.

He goes on to say that 'the dreamiest part of the dream consists of the failure to see that private life is largely the creation of public - and progressive- policy. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the right to collective bargaining, Social Security, Medicare - all these help to outfit the hermitage.  In other words, we retreat form activism to the house that activism built."

He quotes Samuel Johnson, who said, "To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends," and concludes, "The progressive will add that it is also an end that ought to include everyone-that needs to include everyone. To be happy at home without giving a damn about anyone else's happiness is an abandonment of hope, including, ultimately, any hope of being happy at home."

 

I think a good question of the day would be to ask everyone whether or not they think they have ADD. I read Hallowell's book Driven to Distraction

 last year from a parent's perspective, but I ended up being convinced that I had it, mostly because I tend to lack follow-through, get bored easily and move on to new things, hate routine, jump from one task to another, etc. Now, I'm breaking my rule against self-help books by reading Finding the Deep River Within by Abby Seixas. I read a review of it in the local paper that made me want to read it. I eschew the self-help genre because I think the books themselves are addictive, it seems like they can solve every problem, and they are often full of anecdotes, and it almost seems that you end up avoiding your problem, or expecting instant solutions, rather than dealing with it in an adult way. Frequently, you are left feeling slightly sick and unsatisfied as if you had chocolate cake for dinner.

 Anyway, so far, it does seem very anecdotal and filled with the language of pop-psychology, but I'm only on Chapter 1. On the plus side, she quoted Hallowell on the high incidence of ADD, who attributed it to 'pseudo-ADD' or 'attention-deficit trait' which he says mimics the symptoms of the neurological disorder but is environmentally induced.  So, maybe we just live in an ADD-prone society, which might be part of the price we pay for technological advances that give us more leisure time (supposedly) and other benefits, like the internet. I can't imagine what life was like before the internet, but emailing, blogging and googling now take up a large portion of my days, and they are all activities that seem to encourage the scattershot approach that I employ, leading to what columnist Michael Ventura (as quoted by Seixas) calls 'the staccato rhythm of doing one thing after another after another....leading to a frustrated sense of continual interruption." 

My plans to blog include finishing my thoughts about Orhan Pamuk from the 01/01/07 New Yorker, writing about the great articles in the 01/08/07 issue and writing about Happiness after reading the articles in The Economist about the new 'science' of happiness, which would involve digging up something I read in the NYer last year about this. While combing through my old blog to see if I referenced the Happiness stuff (not there), I came across this post about MLK, which seems a fitting entry for the upcoming weekend.  I'm off for the weekend. Ciao!

Well, the family book group is convening this weekend to discuss The Daughter of Time by Joesephine Tey. The ultimate question will be whether or not we think Richard III was guilty of the heinous murder of his two young nephews. I agree with Tey that there was no way he could have been guilty, and yet others persist in believing the lies told by the Tudors and their lot, even Shakespeare who was writing under their rule and using their sources.  I did some quick web searching and came up with this great site:

 Supreme Court finds Richard III Not Guilty

Also, Brother Ray can't be at the meeting but is on our side and sent the following testimonial:

 

I got this idea from Words-is-fun - thanks!

My favorite gift was from my Dad who had his old copy of An Approach to Literature  (1939) rebound for me. When I first saw this book, with his pencilled notes in the margins, I realized where I got my love of literature. He never went to college but is a true auto-didact.

My son gave me this one; we've been reading these together since they first came out:

 

 

 

 

My husband got onto my Amazon wishlist and got me a few books for Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are books I gave to others:

To my brother in Africa          To my sister                        To my bro-in-law

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To my teenaged son: