Five Stories (Some Notes)

Reading Salinger now in this blank hotel room, a bit worried of the psychological effects of this project. His uncanny ability to articulate what I can only vaguely refer to as the intuitive aspects of human interaction disarms me. Though, in life, I am aware of the underlying sadness of the everyday and of the rare moments of ecstatic beauty that interrupt that sadness, experiencing the precise articulation of those moments leaves me craving, both for more of that kind of honesty off the page and for the ability to be that genius on the page.

Each story so far has the same pattern: I resist in the beginning, I am absorbed in the middle, and I am slapped with the ending. If nothing else (and there is everything else), J.D. knows how to end a story.

This charmed me, from "The Laughing Man":

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was Chief's girl, Mary Hudson.

My most-recent favorite line, from "Down at the Dinghy":

Her joke of a name aside [Boo Boo], her general unprettiness aside, she was -- in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces -- a stunning and final girl.

Just a Glimpse (or, I Forgot that BEA is Boring)

I spent most of the day watching booksellers step peppily into the convention halls at 9 am and come out hours later, suitcases full of literary loot, dragging and bleary. The highlight of the day was meeting Alison Bechdel and procuring signed copies of the next dykeread. She good-naturedly tolerated the few but feverish fans, including my blushing, fumbling self. Also good: I only had one conversation about the Da Vinci Code, I was only forced into interacting with one becostumed book creature (Gabby the Six-Foot Literacy Dog), and I successfully avoided excessive thoughts of homicide.

Just a Teaser

Book Expo America: Day One

After a beautiful ride down from Brooklyn, made more interesting by the intermittent Armageddon rains and a speeding ticket, I arrived in DC for Book Expo. This is my third convention, and when I glimpsed the building-sized banners welcoming us and the charmingly crumpled bookpeddlers milling around pre-show, I was met with the same feeling of awe and dread that I have every year. The dread comes from having to attract the attention of the harried booksellers and brutally-efficient publishers long enough to eke out some words about free speech. (And money.) Awe, because I would like to believe that the entire English-language publishing world is gathered here this week, in essence, to celebrate writing. "To sell things," my travel partner interrupted an earlier version of this reverie to point out, but still, the things that they are selling are books, books that started as letters being pecked into some lonely Word document by some hopeful writer. Being confronted with the business end of the writing world makes me want to revisit my less-nuanced moanings about capitalism ... because as a propagator of nice sentences it seems not so evil. (Of course, it's also a pusher of bad sentences, which is cardinal-sin territory ... later in the week I'll review my top bad book finds on the convention floor).

Soon, I'll take you inside.

Green Knowe

A little boy was sitting in the corner of a railway carriage looking out at the rain, which was splashing against the windows and blotching downwards in an ugly, dirty way. He was not the only person in the carriage, but the others were strangers to him. He was alone as usual. There were two women opposite him, a fat one and a thin one, and they talked without stopping, smacking their lips between sentences and seeming to enjoy what they said as much as if it were something to eat. They were knitting all the time, and whenever the train stopped the click-clack of their needles was loud and clear like two clocks.

-- from The Children at Green Knowe, by L.M. Boston

It is a rare children's book that opens with the sense of loneliness and alienation and despairing boredom that everyone who is not lying remembers from childhood, but Lucy Boston was a rare writer. Set in Boston's 900-year old house in England, the Green Knowe books are remarkably true to a child's perspective on what is exciting, what is horrible, and what is worth hiding in order to save.

There is a great deal of magic in these books -- the children who visit the house hear the ghosts of children who lived there in the past; toys move on their own accord or with help from the ghosts; and sometimes at night it is possible to see into the past. There is also a great deal of the real magic of childhood discovery -- watching a field mouse weave a hanging nest of grass, finding treasures in river mud, meeting adults who still wonder at the world. Green Knowe is a haven from all that is regimented and deadening in the outside world, like the oppressive mechanical world of trains and steel and clocks in that opening paragraph.

On a day like today, full of dark rain, I wish I were Tolly, the little boy from the train, being ferried over flood waters by row boat to an ancient house and a wise and kind grandmother like Mrs. Oldknow:

Mr. Boggis handed him the lantern and told him to kneel up in the bows with it and shout it they were likely to bump into anything. They rowed round two corners in the road and then in at a big white gate. Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by a quite strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in electric jigsaw shapes and made gold rings round the tree trunks. At last they came to a still pool reaching to the steps of the house, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel. The windows were all lit up, but it was too dark to see what kind of house it was, only that it was high and narrow like a tower.

"Come along in," said Mr. Boggis, "I'll show you in. I'd like to see Mrs. Oldknow's face when she sees you."

Pedophilia in Palo Alto

Lolita drafted at Stanford
Thank god someone could write there...

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