Prodigal Summer

Day 84 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Karen is reading Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, after reading The Poisonwood Bible with her book group. I hope she will comment here on what her book group thought of Poisonwood Bible, as they were also looking into another book mysteriously similar in construction, as I recall!

Karen is my neighbor, so I know we are both experiencing the spring-as-herald-of-summer- coming-on in its full Midwestern lushness. The grass is tall, violets are spreading, dandelions are rampant. Karen and I both like dandelions; they are pretty, and you can eat them. Our other neighbors are not so fond of dandelions, so it's best to dig them out or mow before they get to the wish-puff seed stage.

Of course, most of the other neighbors use pesticides and lawn services. We do not. Rabbits love it here. (And I expect a return of praying mantis, Karen!) The lawn service guy for the neighbor on the north now scoots some of his little pesticide balls into our side yard, but it's OK, and he hasn't killed any lily-of-the-valley, oh so sweetly blooming right now, along with the mountain bluets.

Blue hosta and two-toned hosta are thriving, their leaves jubilant, raucous. Clematis is opening on the fence, while the bleeding heart is dripping to earth. On Mother's Day weekend I'll choose a few more blooming plants for the garden beds--from a Kiwanis fundraiser garden event that will send kids to camp--and then just try to keep up with the weeding and gentle maintenance of perennials. Next, if they are as astonishingly accommodating-to-the-printed-human-calendar as last year, day lilies will start opening, right on time, starting June 21, the first day of summer.

Wasn't there going to be some talk of a book? Yes! Prodigal Summer is set in Appalachia, with plants and bugs and coyotes. I fondly recall a big fallen hollow tree. The neighbor/pesticide issue weaves into the plot. Here's a book you can judge by its cover (pictured above) and its beautful endpapers, illustrated with moths, including the lovely green Luna.

The Underground Grammarian

Day 83 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Gary, a perpetual reader, is perennially reading The Gift of Fire, a book of essays by Richard Mitchell. He read aloud from his paperback copy of it Sunday morning, over coffee, to delight some houseguests.

Richard Mitchell is the beloved founder of The Underground Grammarian, "an unauthorized journal devoted to the protection of the Mother Tongue," and is the Underground Grammarian himself (rest in peace). You can read (and freely plagiarize from) all of The Underground Grammarian online, but I am crediting him here, using quotation marks (or italics in the extended quotation below), and encouraging you to read the various books available in print format, as well, because that's what I do here.

I think Mitchell would forgive me for my curling of the Mother Tongue here in my goofy blog, but heaven forbid I should commit some of my grammatical errors in formal writing or in print! He would, if alive, stick out his tongue at me.

Because permission is given at the Underground Grammarian website, I will quote a hefty hunk of his practical advice on what, beyond sticking out your tongue, literally or figuratively, you, too, can do when you witness abuse of the English language:

What Can We Do?

The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English.

This month's target is any barbarian who says advisement. We can advise, or give advice, or even do some advising. Advisement permits nothing beyond what we can already mean with the words we have. Perhaps, by analogy to confinement, it might name a condition in which we suffer the consequence of having been advised; or, like government, it might indicate some cloud of loosely related abstractions and institutions. Those who say it to us must simply mean advising, but they fear that a clear naming of what they do will reveal how little it needs doing, and they will find themselves in the streets selling wind-up toys. Such people feel degraded unless what they do ends with -ment or some other official sound such as -ation or -ivity. Work that ends with -ing makes them nervous.

Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian says advisement; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, "Clickety-click-click." This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is "Ding-dong," familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics.

When advisement appears in a document sent by campus mail, smear it with something foul and return it to the sender.

Do NOT take this under advisement. As ever, happy reading!

Brainage a Trois

Days 80, 81, and 82 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. I promised you a three-in-one blog entry to make up for the 3 days I was off to Chicago with the brainy set. Here is a sampling of what people who like to get together and talk about books are reading and talking about:

Ann is reading Crime & Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with her Toronto book group and having 4 dicussions of it. As it's written in 6 sections, they are reading 2 at a time, then discussing what they've read, and then meeting a final time to discuss the work as a whole.

Gary remembers this one fondly as the first great Russian novel he ever read.

Gary & Pat went to Chile, shortly after the earthquake, with other readers to read and discuss works by Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, and other writers, and to reflect on Chile's troubled history, torture in specific. They read poems, Nobel Prize acceptance speeches, various essays, excerpts from Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Allende's novel The House of the Spirits.

Lindsay is reading Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson, a book of short stories, because she is a short story writer herself and reads all the stories she can. She got her copy at the recent AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference in Denver, and it is signed by the author! It is realistic literary fiction, not science fiction, despite the "aliens" in the title.

Wendy and her poetry reading group in Texas are reading Milton's Paradise Lost, the great poem. Like Ann's group, they are reading and discussing it in parts. Usually they read shorter poems, several at a time by a single poet, working their way through various time periods. Recently they read works by Thomas Campion, an English poet of the Renaissance, who also wrote songs and composed music.

And Lorel and her book group in Oak Park recently read John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, to see how that generation got through its Depression. Now they are reading Cider with Rosie, recommended by a British woman in the group who assures them this is "a beloved British book." It is a memoir by Laurie Lee, first published in 1959. Laurie Lee is a man, raised by women, and evidently beloved by women as well.

They also recently read Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, which Lorel appreciated for its beautiful writing, even though the plot frustrated her because it was dominated by a domineering woman.

And that brings us back to Angle of Repose, Stegner's famous novel of the American West, and my desire to go there, to New Mexico in specific, and to discuss it, the New Mexican landscape, and paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe in a wonderful program called The American Southwest: The Power of Place, offered by Classical Pursuits, a company specializing in travel and literature, based in Toronto. Sigh...

But, just back from visiting Chicago with this brainy set, I am too tired to plan any more travel or to say much more. I'm off to my own angle of repose.

Farewell to The Lost Sisterhood

Day 79 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. By the way, I will be gone for Days 80-82, discussing books with Great Books Chicago (pictured), but you can be sure I will ask people what they are reading, write it down, and post a three-for-one when I return.

Previously on "Wait! I Have a Blog!":

Kathleen accidentally signs up on blogger.com to comment on someone's blog. Wait! She has a blog! Months later, attempting to follow another blog, she accidentally follows herself. Meanwhile, in her day job in a bookstore, she spends her wages buying books. True, they're used, cheap,...and, wait! she has an employee discount! The point being, Kathleen sets aside for herself a book called The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, by Ruth Rosen, mentions this in her blog, but has not yet completed the transaction, so it is still on the shelf behind her, when...in walks Kyle.

OK, don't worry, I'm not going to do TV dialogue.

Kyle is reading Panders and Their White Slaves, by Clifford Griffith Roe, which she was very pleased to find at Babbitt's, as it helps her with continuing research in this area. It's a book from 1910, and has been reprinted, as have other of his books, including The Girl Who Disappeared.

Roe's work is also available free online, but, like me, Kyle likes to have the book in hand and on hand. Which is why I handed her my set-aside copy of The Lost Sisterhood. She was delighted. She has read it before but keeps getting it from the library to do her research. Now she has her very own paperback copy.

Kyle is also reading Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, by James W. Loewen, which ties in to her women's studies/prostitution topic, but is primarily about the systematic exclusion of blacks from small towns, sometimes using the law and signage, and often using violence and ostracism. African Americans might visit or even work in a "sundown town," but they'd better not still be there after dark.

Back in 1909, the small town of Anna, Illinois ran all its black residents out of town virtually overnight after a crime in a town nearby. Loewen's books tracks the trend from the 1890s through the 1960s, when civil rights and fair housing activism helped change things, but, sadly, it lingers today in some areas.

After we'd chatted a while, I asked Kyle if she'd read Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott, about brothels in Chicago and their demise in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. (Oops, I think I called in Sex in the Second City....sigh. Anyway, I got Karen Abbott right.) "He's probably in it," I said.

Indeed, he is. (I had just forgotten his name!) He's one of the major crusaders against white slavery and brothels in Chicago. He was assistant state's attorney when he heard the account of Mona Marshall, who told him she was seduced, drugged, raped, forced into prostitution, and held against her will, without streetclothes, until one day she threw a note out a window and was rescued. The crusade began. Roe is a key figure in Abbott's book and Panders and other works are heavily cited.

White slavery aside, Kyle and I both appreciate the complexities of prostitution as a profession. The brothels in Chicago were often run by women as successful businesses, a kind of women's empowerment. Women engaged in such entrepreneurship usually after circumstances that left them stranded and alone, needing to make a living. It's not an easy thing to sort out, and I wish Kyle well in her research project.

OK, wish me well in the Second City, where I will try not to sin while discussing The Scarlet Letter, Endgame, and "Sorrow-Acre." I'll tell you what else people are reading when I get back.

What Do Men Read?

Day 78 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project. Brian has been reading The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter. Why? For a men’s book group.

Not the SOBs, another men’s book group you have read about earlier in this blog. It’s a different men’s book group altogether, though perhaps similarly made up of both academics and non-academics, men interested in history, sociology, politics, and big ideas.

The History of White People is one author’s close look at issues of race and definition, bringing together philosophical, cultural, and historical takes on what race is and what it means to be “white.” Apparently, it is hard to say what race is; it’s a blurry thing.

This book was published in March, 2010, and I notice it coincided with television documentaries & entertainments on race and heritage and of course with the United States Census, and its insistence on racial categories.

I had trouble figuring out how to answer the Census questions, which did not, in the first place, seem clear on who I was to count as members of my household. Ultimately, I counted everyone in my nuclear family, even though my son is off at college, because he did happen to be home on April 1…and then we went to Ohio. Should we have been counted as part of my sister’s family? Have I mentioned that I am math-challenged? Anyway, my son was blurry on how his college would count him, so I counted him.

And I did not know what race to call my children. My husband, though Hispanic, is officially white on the Census form, but descends from Spaniards and indigenous Cuban people, who are, what? to begin with, and who may have mixed with African black slaves, as well as Spaniards, like his grandfather, since they survived all the diseases that tended to kill off the natives with vulnerable immune systems.

Likewise, what am I? Why does it matter?

Well, it matters when those in power need it to matter. In The History of White People, Painter points out that Jews and Hispanics were considered “white” in time to fight in the front lines in World War II, afterwards enjoying more of their civil rights and less of the previously routine discrimination and prejudice, as Joseph Heller noticed, among other ironies (such as those found in Catch 22). Political equality happened later, and still not without struggle, for American blacks, as the army wasn’t fully integrated till the Korean War. The Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the United States are naturally linked in this philosophy of the history of white people.

All this and more came out in the men’s book group discussion, as summarized by Brian the second time I interviewed him, at work. (He’s my boss.) The men found Painter’s ancient history a little sparse, but accepted that this is an overview directed at a general audience, not a scholarly one, and that more information is readily available to interested readers. She spent some time discounting dubious race studies but left more valid explorations untouched, and thus open to further research and interpretation.

Brian says she viewed earlier human divisions as tribalism instead of racism and suggests that the Enlightenment created racism. Essentially, the people in power, who were white, set up categories based on differences in appearance, and somehow arranged it so they themselves were on top. Not a big surprise. As Brian put it, summarizing her thesis, “There’s no such thing as race. It’s a cultural construction.”

Brian gets to choose a book when his turn comes around again and might choose Black: The History of a Color, by Michel Pastoureau, who has also written about Blue, Heraldry, and the Devil’s Cloth in other art history books. Black: The History of a Color focuses specifically on Western art, exploring the nature of the color black, its symbolism and, as Brian explained it, its two main kinds, early on: shiny black and matte black. Shiny black, a reflective color, has positive qualities and connotations, and matte black, non-reflective, sucks up all the light and is connected to death and evil and other troubling things. People get them mixed up, different cultures use black in different ways, and color trends change, but maybe Black: The History of a Color can make a few things clearer, at least in terms of uses and perceptions of the color black in Western culture and art.