Another Month in the Can

We’ve seen our traffic take a slight dip in the past month. We can only hope it’s evidence that people are enjoying their summer instead of burning their eyes out surfing the information superhighway. To the rest of you, why don’t you go out and have some fun while the weather holds? Don’t worry, we’ll be here when you get back.

As usual, here are our five most popular posts from this past month:

An Inside Look at Shelf Actualization HQ

At the Bindary

What is Oulipo?

Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 5

Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 7

And the many-splendored search terms that led readers here:

Phillis Diller really big hair  >>>>  We've mentioned her once

John updike on the sidewalk  >>>>  I disagree with Updike here

Topless hemingway  >>>>  ...And Twain, Ginsberg and London

How does midnight in paris portray paris  >>>>  See here

To have and have not book  >>>>  The only Hemingway/Faulkner collaboration

Little Lizzy Mann  >>>>  Covered it here

Knut Jensen cyclist  >>>>  Our only cycling post so far

Guy frozen on dance floor  >>>>  This awesome post

The bee gees Saturday night fever album cover  >>>>  The same post again

From the first clang of the rail  >>>>  First Line Friday, Solzhenitsyn style

First Line Friday!

Today’s first line is one that absolutely grabs you by the ears and demands you pay attention. Have a look:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

Excuse me? You were what?  So begins Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middlesex.  

I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story.

Here’s how the next couple lines continue fleshing out the novel’s destination. I think it’s brilliant.

"Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology  in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity.  That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."

Agree? Disagree? Fire away!

Poet's Corner: "Tamed" by George Bilgere

As summer draws to a close (school starts next week here in Georgia- good grief!) I thought it would be good to pass along this poem I stumbled on a while back.

Because of the subject matter, it may remind you of this Ray Bradbury post, but while I think it certainly speaks to “summertime,” I think it also celebrates boyhood, rites of passage, and our relationship to the earth around us. A poem for the common man. Have a look:

Tamed

By George Bilgere

This summer my nephew
is old enough for his first job:
mowing the lawn.

I watch him lean his skinny chest
to the bar of the pushmower,
put his weight into it, and become,

for the first time, a beast in harness,
a laborer on the face of the earth,
somehow withering and expanding at the same time

into something worn and ancient, but still
a kid withal. And I remember
how bitterly I went into the traces,

hating that Saturday ritual
for a while, then growing inexplicably
into it, gradually mastering

the topography of the yard,
sometimes using the back and forth technique,
sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,
or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
that left, at the lawn's center, one
last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

I annihilated with a strange thrill,
then stood back to take a look—
to survey the field. To cast

a critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
at the edge of the mowed clearance.

Taking his own measure. And liking it.

Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

I mentioned my vacation reading material the other day, and thought I’d chime in with a slightly heftier review.

The Night Circus is a pretty captivating book, and one I’d generally recommend to other readers who are looking to escape into another world for a time. As I’ve said before, it won’t soon find its way onto university syllabi, but it’s pretty well-written and full of spell-binding imagery.

At the center of the story are two apprentice magicians who study real magic and pass it off to the world as mere prestidigitation. They are pitted against one another in a sort of competition- a game whose sinister rules are only hinted at, but are never really explained. In the beginning, this vague premise lends a good deal of mystery to the book, but by the end it becomes a drag on the believability of the story. More on that in a moment.

Nevertheless, it’s a book filled with interesting characters. And the most interesting character of all happens to be the circus itself. You discover it through the eyes of both lay circus goers and those on the inside. Momentum builds as you see it develop from a mere idea to a tangible enterprise that attracts its own traveling fan-base. You’re enchanted in the same ways you were first oohed-and-aahed by Hogwarts, or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

But here’s the problem I encountered. I had no problem suspending my disbelief about the magic and mystery of the circus, but I was completely unable to swallow the central premise on which it all rested, not to mention the motivations of the characters as they played out “the game.” That the two main characters could be compelling, strong-willed actors in their own stories, and yet be such naive and hapless pawns in a game they never understood just… didn’t ring true to me.

And on top of that, the resolution of the book’s main crisis seems to break the very rules that created the crisis in the first place. And here’s where the story really rubbed me the wrong way (spoilers follow): there is a desperate need to find a new steward for the circus, lest it and its creators start crumbling out of existence. The action crescendos to this point, and then… wait for it!… a complete nobody is chosen to step in and save the day. Nothing destined, nothing special about him, nothing that even remotely suggests that he could continue where the two magicians had left off, just a force-fed resolution that didn’t really satisfy.

Aggravating. But hey, it was a vacation read, so I lowered the bar just a bit. Anyone else read it? Anyone disagree?

The Writer's Voice: Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling. Fount of manly fiction. Bearer of burly eyebrows. Speaker of… a surprisingly effeminate, mousy little voice. Have a listen:

Could that be the voice of a retirng bank clerk? Sure. Or a sniveling apothecary? Absolutely.  But a spinner of adventure tales? Voice of British Imperialism? And author of “If,” that ultimate poem of manhood?

Whodathunkit? 

(But man, those eyebrows are amazing!)

Library Envy

Fun fact: This site was this close <pinching an inch of air between my index finger and thumb> to being named "The Rolling Ladder." That bit of trivia won't mean a whole heckuvalot to any of you, but I simply offer it up as proof that I have an affection for libraries and library paraphernalia.


It's no wonder that I enjoyed this post ("37 Home Library Design Ideas") over at Freshome:  


I have to say that if I were ever to draw up plans for my own dream library, it would have to contain a mezzanine. It's the greatest architectural feature known to man. Hands down.

And if said mezzanine were accessed via a secret doorway? Well, all the better:

Lots more here. Take a gander.

Thomas Hardy: Graveyard Excavator

Before he quit his day job to pen great works of literature, Thomas Hardy was an award-winning architect. Huh. Who knew? Not me, until I happened upon this piece at Kuriositas.


Click on through to find out his connection to the curious tree pictured above.

First Line Friday

If you’ve had a sneaking suspicion that this blog has been on auto-pilot for the past two and a half weeks, you’re very astute. (Was it the eight straight days of Bookish Nerd Bait that tipped you off? The lack of responsiveness to comments? The dearth of weekend posts? All of the above?) Well, we’re back. And we’re better than ever.*

My vacation spanned three weekends, two countries, and despite my best efforts, only one book. So without further ado, let’s resume First Line Friday by looking at the opening of that particular book:

“The circus arrives without warning. 

“No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

It’s the opening salvo in Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus,  and if you’ve read the title of this book before you get to the first page (hey, I’m not making any assumptions about your crazy reading habits) you already have some vague idea of what it’s going to be about. You know what a circus is, of course, but you may be asking yourself what the devil a night  circus might be.

The first line gets right down to business. There’s no beating around the bush, no backstory or exposition, no long lead-in. Just answers. It’s slightly mysterious, yet it already unveils some of the mystery the reader brings to the reading. It begins to explain and yet it raises new questions. It’s a great hook, and that’s what first lines are all about.

The book is by no means a great work headed for the Western Canon, but it’s a pretty decent opening if you ask me. Check it out.

* We’re not actually better than ever, but we probably feel a bit better post-vacation

Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol 11

Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol 10