A Brief History of My Reading

Today I tried to come up with an author's name and it just didn't rise to the surface.  That isn't too surprising, not at my age.  I look at my co-workers, people I work with every day, and can't come up with their names although they are wearing name tags.  But I did sort of remember one of the author's books, which I confused with his name (because they are both singular - you know, like "Cher") and because there is the interweb-thingie I can key what I know in and come up with the bit I don't know.  Love the interwebs.

It is frustrating though, for someone who can't remember the names of the pseudepigraphic Pauline letters from one moment to the next (let's see, there's the pestorals and the ones that start with T ... but what about Effusions, Collations, and Fellations?) despite having heard/read about them time after time, to suddenly remember a book from 1979 and some of its content despite not having read it.  And suddenly I remember that I was on page 263/4 of Nabokov's Ada before I gave up (planning to resume later because I kept track of the page ... which is often how I keep track of where I stopped reading when a bookmark isn't handy: I just remember look at the page number and remember it) at about that same time.  Mind you, I don't remember what I've read.  In order to cope with the book discussion group I lead I have to make a note of each character in the book because I just can't remember names (see above co-workers).

This has put me in mind of what I have read over the years.  I go through fads, but cheezy mysteries and non-fiction tend to resurface.

Grade school: the Alfred Hitchcock collections, Nancy Drew, and Roald Dahl.  I was once handed some realistic fiction by a school librarian when I looked hesitant and regarded her with suspicion ever after.  Why would she think I would enjoy a book about a girl whose father was a janitor and who was feeling ostracized by her peers?  Later one handed me James and the Giant Peach and all was well again - but I have been careful since becoming a children's librarian about what I recommend to kids and how I express it.  "Well, I liked it," I might say or "I hear it's popular."  I will never suggest that they would like a book.

Grade school and what was then called Junior High: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a gift from my sister who knew a little martyr when she saw one.  My sister was the The Secret Garden type: pushy and devious ... but in a good way.  I read this book about once a month and cried and cried and spilled Chicken with Stars soup on it.  It's engraved on my heart.  Wish I could remember that little girl's name though.  Nowadays I read some of the stuff written for "teens" and I just can't take the pain and the angst.  I guess we like it at that age.

High school: Mysteries.  I started with Agatha Christie and never stopped.  Preferred the British and the more gentle, but occasionally branched out into the more gruesome.  And fell in love with P. G. Wodehouse and his unique turn of phrase.  Also, I spent high school summers immersing myself in themes such as Epic Poetry and Greek Drama.  This affectation continued in college.  It's an affectation because I didn't take any courses in them, just read them to be able to say I had and shut down conversations with "Well, you know what Aeschylus says ..."  Oh, and I also read a lot of John Barth and Anthony Burgess.

College: More cheezy mysteries to offset the reading I had to do ... in three different languages.  Oh, yeah - I forgot English.  Four different languages.

Grad school: I don't recall reading anything for pleasure during that time.  I was too busy drinking.  Oh, wait - I seem to remember reading popular books about physics - that must have been during the summers. And I got back into the medieval and ancient.


 The South Carolina Years: I worked at a public library and had all the material there to read: More mysteries (especially the Brother Cadfael ones by Ellis Peters), more Wodehouse, lots of non-fiction.  These were also the Shogun years.  It took me six days to read it and I've picked up used copies of it ever since to give away.  Also read an account of the historic Anjin-san Clavell based the book on.  Amazing. 

The New York Years: Mysteries ... and portable Greek philosophers, branching into ancient history.

The Boston years: Mysteries and I discovered that Charles Dickens was actually a fabulous writer if you weren't being forced to read him for school.  I was tricked into this by seeing that he'd written a book with "mystery" right in the title!  Before long, I was staying up until 4 am to finish Bleak House.  This caused me to read Jane Austen as well.  Well, dang!  And Harvard Square has the best bookshops.  I finally got the David Steinberg joke about the Ludwig Wittgenstein book with the red cover because I was back in the philosophy section again ... revisiting my idea about yet another play about the Athenian legal system.  And I became obsessed with The Iliad.  It made me mad, but I loved it.  And I was reading some Aristophanes one day at lunch downtown when it made  Diet Pepsi* come out my nose and I wondered if it could possibly be that funny in Greek.  And that's when I started signing up for the Ancient Greek course in adult education - again and again until it got enough suckers to make it worth a teacher's while.

The Back to SC Years: I moved back here with a Ryder truck full of books in ... several languages (none of which I had learned properly) and immediately got a library card and started reading mysteries again. Although in a book group, I find it really hard to read serious or realistic fiction.  I love satire (Christopher Buckley does a great job coming up with ideas for books, but I don't think he knows how to end them properly) and historical mysteries - but I love popular non-fiction.  I just love learning, even if I don't remember things properly.  But I am assembling a world view from what I have read.

My reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1711341
My books: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marfita/yourlibrary

*I come from a Coca-Cola family, but if I was forced to drink a diet beverage (and I never do anymore), I preferred Diet Pepsi.  Actually, I had a Pepsi Light (now apparently called Pepsi Twist) once and became instantly addicted.  I went out the same day and bought a six-pack, drank it, and suddenly realized I could Never Have It Again.

Advice for the Sleepless

Sleeping on concrete during dance rehearsals seems to have done me no harm.

I was one of those people who could sleep anywhere, anywhere, except her own bed at night. I've slept on a pile of coats on a concrete floor with a musical rehearsal going on around me. But just put me in a nice, comfy bed in the dark at night and suddenly my head keeps me awake. All the bad things that happened, that I did, that I didn't prevent, that might happen, all run through my pointy little head and I can be up for hours. I can't take a nap during the day for fear it would keep me up for hours at bedtime.

Middle age has done nothing to soften this effect. I have more responsibilities, more bad things that did, might, will happen (two elderly parents with dementia was not mitigated by their passing - now I have to worry about my brain). I feel guilty about everything, which I can forget about during the day when I'm busy or desperately searching for distraction on the internet - and that's what that is, isn't it? Searching for a distraction from the Guilt Furies in one's head. [Okay, maybe that's just me.]

Now I have to tell you how much my husband loves me. Sitting on a dresser in our bedroom is the device that has saved me. We had already discovered that a car plus an audiobook is like unto a visit from your friendly neighborhood anesthetist for me. Good thing my husband is driving. When my husband is away, I would pull the little boombox out of the kitchen and load it up with Bart Ehrman or, if I needed cheering, Terry Pratchett to keep me company at bedtime. When it suddenly stopped, I would grope for the next cd in the lecture or the audiobook and insert it (this is where my husband, if he reads this, discovers where the scratches on his Ehrman lectures came from) in the dark, then go back to sleep.

No more! This new device is a Bose clock radio/cd player. We can awaken to radio or the cd. We can also listen to the cd for an hour and it slowly. Fades. Away. When I say "listen for an hour" - I exaggerate. I can manage one or two ten minute segments before I start purring. Who can think unhappy thoughts when Granny Weatherwax is excoriating some miscreant? [And, by the way, how come she's Granny Weatherwax if she's had no children? Is this some honorific upon achieving grey hair?] I have to advance the story one increment each night because I barely hear ten minutes before falling into blissful sleep.

You might think that this was hardly so wonderful for my husband to buy me a clock radio/cd player. He enjoys the benefits of it as well, although hardly anything keeps him awake. [Men are so lucky. How do they fall asleep like that?] He even told me that my reading at night didn't keep him awake. What makes him so wonderful is the fact that he hates Bose. My husband is an audiophile for whom sound means everything. If a brand needs to be advertised, it can't be any good. His audio equipment is labeled with obscure branding ... or none at all. The fact that he went to a Bose store and bought a Bose product for my birthday speaks volumes about how much he loves me. "Don't even ask how much it cost," he said, implying that it was more than the thing was worth.

I am entirely satisfied with this product. First of all, it has a remote. I'm so lazy that I want everything to be operated by remote: the lava lamp (it's plugged into a clicker), the fan (it came with one - I was delirious with delight) - very important to women of a Certain Age who get hot suddenly at night, and now the clock radio/cd player. In fact, it can't be operated at all without the remote. There are no buttons on this machine. If I lose the remote, I'm dead. I've had to memorize the button positions to operate it in the dark. Two down, one over from the right to start the cd. On the left, four down to turn down the volume. One more to the right to up the volume in case someone starts purring or the a/c came on.

This works for me. If you lie awake nights with those nagging thoughts, you might try this. If your spousal unit doesn't want to listen, get a library audiobook on your mp3. I always sleep on my right side, so I've just put both buds into my left ear before. I worry that this has become an addiction, but I'm getting so much more sleep! Now if I can just pull myself away from the internet long enough to lie down.

Cross Posting

Grizzy has issued a statement on how she plans to commemorate 9/11 this year in SL, and I thought I would go along with it - I have put this picture and the following statement on my profile:

"To show solidarity with my Islamic brothers and sisters who have had their faith vilified as a result of the actions of extremists, I will be dressing my avatar in the traditional Islamic hijab for Tues - Sat this week."

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor ...

Having just finished reading a blogpost from a competitor, I am reminded of my own dating mishaps. First of all, I didn't date anyone. I was too homely/annoying/smart [pick one ... or two - what the heck, pick your nose!] to get my own dates, but instead ended up date-sitting instead. What is "date-sitting" you ask? It's the act of occupying the time of someone a friend of yours is trying to pry themselves away from. I was telling my husband an old war story recently about the second time I had done this when it occurred to me ... that I had done it more than once. Hence, the "second time." And there was more after that.

This is like that "Always the bridesmaid, never the bride" thingummy. Three and a half decades later and this guy is still hankering after the one that got away instead of the one that had to listen to him sigh on the phone for hours at a time. Another one, in describing his nightmare blind date, deftly describes the woman he spent months with and that I date-sat him for, which only shows what an impression she made on him that he can't let go. He still asks me about her when I see him. I suppose he doesn't have words to describe me because after he got drunk and passed out, I decided it was safe to go home. For all I know, he just thinks I was a pink elephant with a slightly smaller nose.

Like the male equivalent, Mr. Right Now, I was Miss Right Now. No one bothered to ask me if I really wanted to go out with these guys. Well, except the first one. While I was in high school a friend of mine in college tried to palm her boyfriend off on me and ask if I would mind. He was just too needy. "He needs a hamster, or something," she wrote me, "to lavish his affection on." I had little or no dating experience so I agreed to go out with him. We had one date. He was affectionate. It was good experience for me, sort of training wheels for dating, and he probably went back to pestering her. I don't blame him, I loved her too. She wrote the best letters.

Yes, I love my girlfriends and I will do anything for them ... except ... except ...

No more date-sitting (I have my own permanent date now - whee!) and please, please, please stop calling me when you're drunk. And, I just haven't got the nerve to say this to your face - you need to stop drinking, or at least stop drinking so much ... or so often ... and stop going out with or shacking up with unsuitable guys that are so hard to get rid of just because you think you need to have somebody. I have my own problems now - I can't solve yours.

One Morning In the Month of May ...

Me and Poetry.

We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.

But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.

Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.

Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.

The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!

*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]

By the Footprints In the Jell-O!

Derby Day upcoming, "I am always remember the day I first meet" the parents of a very good friend of mine. He had won me in my first annual "Win A Marf Contest" by submitting many pages of what he would do with me when I got there, letters of recommendation, and an 8" x 10" glossy. My fingers are drumming the keyboard now as I try to remember why my then boyfriend had not won. I think I recall a letter saying, "If you want to come visit, why don't you just say so?" That was not what I was looking for, but says a lot about that relationship.

My friend had me for a week of my vacation from the library. As a house-warming gift, I brought him a glass mug on which I had had etched "I've Been Sacked By" and the name of his employer. To be fair, he'd argued his way back into the job ... for the satisfaction of quitting. The sentiment, though, was appreciated. This was the first time I spent any extended time with this, one of my best friends. It was definitely the first time I stayed over. I hadn't thought much about that, what it entailed. He was renting a part of a house that had two bedrooms (one occupied by a roommate who was even more slovenly), a bath with a tub, and a kitchen. The kitchen was fairly roomy and had a table with chairs, so it was the social point of the ménage.

His bedroom consisted of a mattress on the floor, and a floor covered in loose change. Apparently, when he undressed at night, the change fell out of his pockets and he never bothered to pick it up. I spent each morning lying next to his slippers and desultorily picking up the coins and putting them in the slippers.

I thought it odd that such a young man would have bedroom slippers until I made note of the state of the floors in the place. Each morning he would rise, attempt to put on coin-laden slippers, swear, pour them out, and go on as if nothing unusual had happened. I asked him about it later and he had apparently not been awake enough to register the addition of the coins.

Slippers were a wise choice. Neither of these guys was big on cleaning and the bathroom had dust woofies in it that were about 3 or 4 feet long. Every zephyr that ran through the house and under the door caused these ephemeral caterpillars to ripple. I had this terror of being in the tub and someone opening a door to the outside, causing a woofie to raise its head over the edge of the tub and attach itself to my wet body. Bleagh bleagh bleagh!!!!

I would stay in bed until I ran out of small change to put in the slippers and then get up and cast about for something to do. The kitchen was a disaster. My friend had tried to make rice the week before and lost tract of time. The rice had burned to the bottom of the pan, and about an inch and a half up. He'd scraped out most of it, but just filled it with water and left it in the sink. That pan was the worst of it. I cleaned all the other dishes and worked assiduously on the rice pan.

I was up early one morning, probably a Sunday, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and saw this very surprised looking middle-aged couple standing outside. They were his parents. They asked to see him. He was still in bed, so I had to let them in and go get him. This was the awkward part for me. I was going to have to wake him up, which was not an easy task. It was embarrassing for me that he was still slug-abed and his parents had come. I didn't realize until a little bit later that they didn't know I was visiting.

Hearing that his parents were there helped to wake him a bit, but not totally. He had to get up, dump the coins out of his slippers, swear, and get dressed. Eventually, we all sat down at the kitchen table for what I expected to be the typical semi-awkward cross-generational conversation.

My insouscience probably made me come across as a shameless Jezebel. This is nice, I thought, I get to meet his parents, who were a bit younger than mine, but I had always gotten on well with older people. I really had totally the wrong attitude and I'm sure they left thinking the worst of me, little realizing the relative innocence of our relationship. If anything embarrassed me, it was my friend using a credit card to wine and dine me ... which his parents apparently paid for him.

Anyway, we had a wonderful time other than the parental visit. I laughed myself sick quite a few times while he told elephant jokes, which he normally would not consider to be funny. It got to the point where he could just say, "Shoehorn!" to set me off again. We would sit at the kitchen table and talk and just enjoy each other.

He was making brownies one night, and almost proudly showing his self-sufficiency in opening the box and handling the whole deal himself. In an unusual fit of tidiness, he not only threw the box away, but decided the trash can was full, closed up the bag, and took it out to the bin. He was quite carefree in the process, and I started wondering if he had made note of the time or how long the box said they needed to cook. No matter, I was a brownie expert.

His roommate came into the kitchen, having smelled the brownies.
"Wow, brownies! When will they be done?"
"I don't know," my friend said.
"How long are they supposed to cook?"
"Dunno."
"When'd you put 'em in?"
"Don't remember."
"Where's the box?"
"Threw it away."
"Oh." Pause.
"I took it out to the bin."
"Ah."

Soon they were both gathered around the oven door, peering inside.
"How do you know when they're done?"
"I think you put a knife in and see if it comes out clean."

His roommate lost interest and wandered off again. My friend returned to the kitchen table where I was biting my lip and my shoulders shaking.

"Wha-at?" he said.
"You know how you can tell if the brownies are done?" I asked.

He paused and considered it. "By the footprints in the Jell-O?" And I lost it. I was laughing so hard and he kept asking, "No, really - how do you tell?" And somehow, "When they pull away from the sides" sounded even funnier. Okay, you had to have been there.

"No, really. Tell me! How can you tell when the brownies are done?"

Ummm ...

Must be some other "marfita" - what do you think? Got this from my Lijit.com stats. If you aren't "lijit" you might want to consider it. It tracks who (only as in-depth at the above example, so don't think I have your name or IP address or nuffink) visits my various websites, how they got there (hmmm ...), and what they search for further after they cam-, ummm, after they ente-, ummm ...
Anyway, if you're interested, subscribe to my blogs for Omssake! Put it on your blogroll. I don't blog so often that I'm a nuisance. Yompin' Yiminy!

Crazy White Girl

Crazy White Boy and I did it again last night: we infiltrated a black poetry stronghold. We've done this before, of course. The first time I was really nervous. I had heard there was a regular poetry night going on (my old one had faded away) at the Coffee and Dessert place in the desanctified church and we waltzed in on what I feared was a black sorority meeting. They were, however, very welcoming to us and in time they encouraged CWB to go back to playing guitar.

The group eventually broke up and we missed meeting with them each week. We missed being their pet white folk.

So when one of our old poetry friends told me that there was another poetry group starting up, we dusted off our poetry ears, turned off our computers, and sallied forth. It didn't have the swank of a coffee shop, being in a barber college, and there wasn't anyone we knew. I had been falling asleep right after dinner and we were planning a discreet retreat early (our source said it ran from 7 to many 9 or 10 pm) so I could be put to bed at a decent hour for a change.

Again, they were welcoming although they didn't know who we were. There was a $5 cover charge each and they tried many times to get us to taste the refreshments, but we'd just eaten a huge meal and were full to bursting.

The emcee seemed a bit nervous about us - warning us about the rap style of someone coming up, but I must admit that we do look like a couple of pasty-white, middle-class nerds. I didn't want to protest, "Oh, no! Go ahead and do your worst. We can take it." We're subversive in our own quiet way.

There was a low turn-out, but one of them was an old friend whose handle is "Spoken." There were about 5 reader/speakers and a couple of singers. One brought a keyboard. The next gathering is March 31st. Again, the quality of their creations can be stunning. I was brought to the edge of tears twice. Okay, maybe I was just a bit tired, but the writing is compact and moving.

They were again very nice when we left, shaking our hands and expressing the hope that we would return. I wondered if they packed up, hugged us and each other, waited until we were out of the parking lot, sighed, and turned the lights back on. CWB didn't think so.