Who's to Bless and Who's to Blame

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ My Mark Twain, which is half reminiscences of Howells’ friendship with Mark Twain and half a collection of reviews Howells’ wrote of Twain’s various books. The first half would make an amazing buddy comedy: Mark Twain the eccentric humorist as the comic and Howells as straight man, going on adventures like “visiting Gorky in his hotel room to help him raise money for the Revolution, only to end up embroiled in Publicity when Gorky got kicked out of the hotel the next day for checking in with a woman not his wife.”

The second half unfortunately made me want to read some Mark Twain. I say “unfortunately” because historically I have struggled with Mark Twain, having attempted and failed to finish The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, AND Joan of Arc. But maybe if I try something aside from Twain’s historical romances…? His essays, his autobiographical travel books….? And I’ve always felt a sneaking suspicion that I really ought to read Tom Sawyer.

Gerald Durrell’s Marrying Off Mother and Other Stories, which I thought was more uneven than most of Durrell’s work. A couple of stories struck me as mean-spirited (particularly “Ludwig”), but I really liked “The Jury” and “Miss Booth-Wycherly’s Clothes.” I believe these are both fiction dressed up as memoir, but if anyone was going to run into a former professional hangman who was now a drunk in the jungles of South America, it would be Gerald Durrell.

What I’m Reading Now

After long cogitation, I’ve decided that it’s time to reread Katherine Patterson’s Jacob Have I Loved. As a child I found the narrator unbearably whiny about her perfect sister, but I’ve long harbored the suspicion that I might see something more or at least different in it as an adult. So far, I’ve been appreciating the strong sense of place and time, both in the lyrical landscape descriptions and the clear picture of the community on Rass Island at the beginning of World War II, and noticing that Louise does indeed have some endearing qualities: for instance, she loves to use long words, but often pronounces them wrong, as she’s only ever seen them written.

…I was not however wrong to remember that Louise spends a LOT of time whining about her sister Caroline, enviously recounting that every time they suffered a childhood illness, Caroline nearly DIED, thus making herself the center of attention YET AGAIN. So we’ll see how I feel about this in the end.

What I Plan to Read Next

Fascinated/appalled to discover that American Girl is releasing a novel about grown-up Samantha: Fiona Davis’s Samantha: The Next Chapter. Opposed to the whole endeavor on the grounds that everyone ought to be free to imagine Samantha’s future as they wish, whether it’s marriage to Eddie Ryland or rabble-rousing as a lesbian suffragette. However, I may nonetheless prove unable to resist reading the book.

It’s been three months since I last posted a hobby update, partly because the hobbies have been on hiatus lately. It’s been cold and gray and dark, and after doing so well getting up early for tea and cross stitch in November and December, I’ve slipped back into my slovenly old ways of dragging myself out of bed at the last possible moment.

Also my right shoulder has been acting up, which has impacted my ability to play dulcimer or cross stitch. I have finished but one of the adorable cross stitch advent tags for next year’s Picture Book Advent. And actually I’ve only finished the cross-stitching part; it still needs to be sewn to a felt backing in order to become a true tag.

However, I did manage to decorate MANY paper hearts to brighten up my office door. In fact, I made so many that I took the overflow hearts home to decorate the Hummingbird Cottage, with the intention of making yet more, but then I ran out of steam… However, even this moderate sprinkling of hearts brightened the place up, especially since I’m the fortunate possessor of four Valentine-themed dish towels and six Valentine cloth napkins (black fabric with red and pink hearts, striking).

I have St. Patrick’s Day napkins too, but my search has so far not turned up any St. Patrick’s Day dishtowels. However, I’ve been cutting out paper shamrocks at a remarkable rate, so hopefully the plethora of shamrocks will overcome any defects in the dish towel area. Should perhaps consider a few leprechauns too?

I’ve also been looking through my trusty Irish cookbook and have been thinking it’s time to make lemon curd again, plus perhaps try my hand at brown bread ice cream. (Sprinkle brown bread crumbs with brown sugar, bake till toasty, then fold into softened vanilla ice cream. Crunchy and caramelly, apparently.) Plus of course I’ll be making my usual round of Guinness stew.

After St. Patrick’s Day, I’m thinking the office door will segue to a general spring theme that can last through graduation at the beginning of May. Flowers, probably. But what kind? Paper tulips and daffodils? A crabapple tree in full bloom? (I believe this could be stunning but would require me to cut out MANY pink flowers.) A torrent of general mixed flowers?

For the Hummingbird Cottage I’d also like to do some decorations on a more specifically Easter theme. I have a vision of cut paper pysanki eggs, which may be beyond my somewhat limited paper-cutting skills. But you never know till you try.

As so often happens with nonfiction books, the subtitle of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature is quite misleading. It suggests that the book is full of interesting tidbits about, say, Chaucer, whereas in fact the book is much more focused on the classical authors who shaped the medieval image of the heavens - hence “the discarded image,” largely swept away by later thinkers, but still surviving in odd phrases here and there.

I was particularly fascinated by the chapter about which ancient authors were popular and relatively accessible during the medieval period. For instance, their most direct access to Plato came through a Latin translation of Timaeus, but they had many works by neo-Platonists, and it was through this neo-Platonist filter that they had their own Platonic age of thought. (The neo-Platonists had actually been the last great holdouts against Christianity, so it’s fascinating to see them simply get folded into it here.)

The book also goes into great detail about the Image itself. I won’t try to summarize it all here, but a few bits I found especially interesting:

1. The medieval model was indeed geocentric, but Lewis points out that this does not mean that medieval thinkers considered the Earth especially important. In fact, they considered the Earth a mere infinitesimal dot, the lowest spot in the universe and the ultimate destination for the universe’s refuse. A person standing on Earth was looking up and up and up into infinitely more beautiful, perfect, higher and more important spheres.

2. The medieval thinker also thought the universe was suffused with sunlight and music (the music of the spheres); the idea of space as cold, dark, and scary came about later.

3. The belief in the influence of the planets on earthly life remained strong, and the Church had to exert a great deal of energy against the idea of astrological determinism.

4. There’s also a chapter about the longaevi, the Good Folk, with a fascinating discussion about the different meanings assigned to these beings - meanings so divergent that Spenser could write The Faerie Queen as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, while at the same time people were sometimes tried for witchcraft on the charge of traffic with the fairy folk. (As Lewis notes, witchcraft trials were far more a Renaissance than a medieval phenomenon.)

Also, book gives insight into certain aspects of Lewis’s own fiction, in particular that bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis starts talking about the seven genders and then just sort of wanders off in the middle of gender #4. “How can you tell us there are seven genders and then only give us four?” I demanded. Well, now I think that to Lewis (the medievalist) it was perfectly obvious that the seven genders were male, female, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The other planets weren’t discovered till later and Earth of course doesn’t count on account of being the cesspit of the universe.

And he didn’t spend much time explaining what exactly Jupiter gender was like because, to his steeped-in-medieval-literature mind, this was perfectly obvious. The Jupiter character is “Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous.” I believe extrapolating this temperament into a gender is Lewis’s innovation, but he could be working off a classical source.

However, sadly, this book does not cast any light on what crimes the star might have committed in order to be banished to an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. However, it seems likely these also have an ancient or medieval source, so perhaps someday I will find out!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Strange Pictures, by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion. Very scary! Made the mistake of reading it in the evening then felt small and scared and sent SOS texts to friends who soothed me with cat pictures. (There’s nothing particularly graphic in the book, but one of the murder methods just struck me as extra scary.)

As with Uketsu’s other novel Strange Houses, the mystery here didn’t strike me as particularly plausible, but who cares when the atmosphere is so impeccable? Propulsively readable. Zipped through the whole thing in one evening and even though I was scared, I wanted another. Maybe there are more Uketsu translations on deck?

I also read Catherine Coneybeare’s Augustine the African, a biography of St. Augustine which focuses on his position as a provincial from North Africa in the late Roman Empire, and the effect this may have had on his theological thought. I’ve long been interested in the Roman Empire, but most of my nonfiction reading has focused on its earlier days, so it was super interesting to learn more about the crumbling of the empire (even after Alaric sacked Rome, it kept chugging along to an amazing extent), and also look at it all from a provincial angle.

I also enjoyed Coneybeare’s emphasis on Augustine’s social networks, and the way the Christian social networks often cut across lines of class and geography - especially after the sack of Rome, when many wealthy Roman Christians fled to North Africa for safety. And she clearly explained both the Donatist and Arian heresies, which have long puzzled me! I’m still working out the details of the Pelagian heresy (too much works, not enough faith?) but one cannot expect to understand all the heresies all at once.

What I’m Reading Now

William Dean Howells’ My Mark Twain, which starts with a description of Twain bursting into the offices of The Atlantic wearing a sealskin coat with the fur out. This is apparently NOT how you wear a sealskin coat, as later on Howells and Twain went walking through Boston together, Howells suffering and Twain exulting in the stares of all the passersby.

What I Plan to Read Next

We’re coming up on my annual St. Patrick’s Day reading! I’m planning to read Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island (about a magical fourth Island of Aran, I believe) and Eve Bunting’s St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning, illustrated by Jan Brett - one of Brett’s earliest books I believe, so I’ll be curious to compare it with her later illustration style.

I was cautiously optimistic about this year’s Newbery winner, Renée Watson’s All the Blues in the Sky, because I liked Watson’s earlier book Piecing Me Together. However, these hopes collapsed when I realized that this is yet another example of my least favorite Newbery genre: Books in Verse About Death.

There is probably someone, someone, who could make me enjoy a Book in Verse about Death, but unfortunate Watson is not that person, or at least this book is not that book.

Our heroine is Sage, who recently lost her best friend when she was hit by a drunk driver while walking to Sage’s house for Sage’s birthday. Sage is now part of the grief group at school, where she sits inwardly sneering at the two members who lost people after a long illness (a grandmother to dementia, and a twin sister to leukemia), because THEY don’t know what it’s like to lose someone unexpectedly.

And, you know, technically this is true. But one feels that at some point someone should point out to Sage that she doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death for years, watching a loved one slowly wither away.

And okay fine, Sage’s Aunt Ini does eventually point out that everyone grieves differently and you can’t directly compare grief etc etc. However, there’s a scene where Sage screams at these girls that they don’t understand anything, and I really, really wanted one of them to scream back that they might not understand her grief but at least they’re TRYING, unlike Sage who very obviously doesn’t give a damn about them. Like, her disdain is so obvious that the other members of Grief Group (the ones who also lost people unexpectedly and are therefore acceptable to Sage) comment that Sage doesn’t like the girls whose relatives died long, slow, agonizing deaths, and Sage responds that it’s because they “don’t know how good they had it.”

But of course no one screams back at Sage. Of course when Sage apologizes, everyone accepts it, instead of telling her to stuff her apology where the sun don’t shine, or at least pointing out the fact that she blew up about how the others don’t understand her pain when she hasn’t been trying even slightly to understand theirs.

And then! And then! ( spoilers for the ending )