November 2009

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Happy Thanksgiving . . . ish

November 30, 2009 in Uncategorized by Claire | 5 comments

Hi, everybody!  (All together now: “Hello, Mrs. LaZebnik.”)

It’s been a while.  Sorry about that.  I’ve been kind of MIA.  Kim very kindly gave me a breather so I could finish up some work and relax over Thanksgiving break–except I wasn’t relaxing because my deadline was today.  But I’m ba-ack.

I figured this would be a good time to toss out some odds and ends, kind of clear the decks before the major explosion that is the winter holidays.   That are the winter holidays?

First of all, run don’t walk to “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”   Oddly enough, it’s based on what I believe is the only Roald Dahl book that no one in my family has ever read.  Maybe that was good: we brought nothing to the movie except a cautious love for Wes Anderson (cautious because we didn’t make it through that last train movie).  FMF is wonderful–possibly the best movie I’ve seen this year.  It’s lively but not frenetic, whimsical without being cloying, oddly relatable and absolutely gorgeous.  As a side note, I have to tell you that after we moved into our current home, a neighbor informed us that Roald Dahl had lived here with his wife, actress Patricia Neal, when she was recovering from her strike.   We’ve changed the house completely, but I still feel like it’s been touched by genius. And so, for that matter, has Wes Anderson.

Moving on.   That vampire movie sequel has broken all sorts of records.  I haven’t seen it or the previous one because I couldn’t get through the first book in the series.  I’m not a difficult reader.  I’m the person who reads junky fantasy novels by the boatload.  I LOVE an excuse to read something that’s fun and stupid–in fact, every vacation we go on, I look for one of those “lending bookshelves” where people leave the books they read on vacation for others to read, and if I find one, I take the junkiest thing I can find, preferably one with “passion,” “fiery,” or “wicked” in the title.  So I’m not haughty and I’m not hard to please.  I just hated the writing in Twilight. I tried to read it twice and didn’t make it more than a few chapters either time.  I realize I’m in the minority here and that millions of readers say I’m just WRONG.  To each his own, right? Read the rest of this entry »

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Recommended Reading for Thanksgiving – The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

November 23, 2009 in book review, holiday, humor, recommended reading by Kim | No comments

9781594484001In The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell makes it very clear that she isn’t writing about the Pilgrims of the Mayflower.  In fact, one of her motivations in writing the book is to highlight the fact that there were very influential Puritans who didn’t 1) arrive on the Mayflower, or 2) hunt witches in Salem.  Sarah’s Puritans are the non-separatists (the Mayflower inhabitants were separatists, an important distinction that Sarah clearly spells out in the book) who arrived about a decade later as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded Boston.  Dust off your American history and these names will sound vaguely familiar:  John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Cotton.  The religious zealots that founded our nation both literally and, as Sarah points out, intellectually.

The foundation of the book is Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity speech in which he invokes “a city upon a hill” from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament.  More than one President took up the phrase from Winthrop.  Sarah explains, “The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritan’s vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.”  She points out that the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony includes an Indian with the words “Come over and help us” coming out of his mouth.  Sarah noted that ever since we have been helping people to death.

A Model of Christian Charity sets out a road map for how the Puritans are to live in community:  the rich are to help the poor, all are to mourn together, rejoice together, take on each others “conditions.”  Sarah calls it a declaration of dependence.  She then sets out to look at how Winthrop and his Puritans lived up to the ideal.  They failed miserably.  Enter stage left, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, on scene to prove that Winthrop’s community is a model of charity as long as everyone agrees with him and the leadership he established. 

Sarah chronicles the founding years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony inhabited by bookish people.  A subject matter that could turn deadly dull in an instant, Sarah describes with humor and a knack for showing the continuing relevance of the events.  Sarah finds Winthrop, with all of his flaws and inconsistencies, laudable and lovable, but hard to like.  Williams and Hutchinson, two people who have come down through history as outcasts for standing up for religious freedom retain their reputation, but are also fanatics.  Quite frankly, I would have been happy to see them go myself.

At her reading at Book Soup earlier this month, Sarah explained that she decided to write the book after hearing the “the city on a hill” image used during Ronald Reagen’s funeral.  The irony that the term was used by Winthrop to describe a city where the poor were helped and everyone contributed to the betterment of the community when Reagen aggressively slashed programs for the poor was not lost on her.  Winthrop declared that Read the rest of this entry »

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Best Gift for Readers and Travelers

November 22, 2009 in travel by Kim | 4 comments

FC9780380727506One of my favorite things about Los Angeles are the Literary Lunches organized by Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs.  The lunches started a few years ago with the Jane Austen Book Club series.  We met for six months, each time discussing a different book.  An English professor at UCLA, Lynn Batten, gave a lecture and then we all discussed the book.  Ever wonder how to make a packed room of grown, successful, mostly married women fall in love with you?  Talk to them about Jane Austen.  We quickly became Lynn Batten groupies.  Since then Lynn has shared  books from various time periods and locations.  Currently, we’re talking about literature from Paris between WWI and WWII.  We wishfully joke about visiting the counties we’re reading about; now we all crave a trip to Paris.  To hold us over until we can all board a plane together, Lynn agreed to share his favorite travel books by modern writers.  Any of these books make the perfect gift for the reader and traveller (or armchair traveller) in your life. 

MY 15 FAVORITE MODERN TRAVEL BOOKS BY 15 DIFFERENT AUTHORS
(A Totally Idiosyncratic List)

Barry, Dave - Dave Barry Does Japan
Bryson, Bill - Notes from a Small Island
FC9780142437193Byron, Robert – The Road to Oxiana
Chatwin, Bruce – In Patagonia
Dalrymple, William - In Xanadu
Fermor, Patrick Leigh – A Time of Gifts
Fleming, Peter – News from Tartary
Greenwald, Jeff - The Size of the World: Once Around Without Leaving the Ground
Iyer, Pico – Video Night in Kathmandu
Kerouac, Jack – On the Road
Naipaul, V. S. – An Area of Darkness
Newby, Eric – Slowly Down the Ganges
Stark, Freya – Alexander’s Path
Steinbeck, John – Travels with Charley
Theroux, Paul - The Great Railway Bazaar

Don’t forget to enter our Holiday Helper giveaway, buy any two books at an independent bookstore before December 31st, send us the receipt(s) and we’ll enter you in a drawing for an ABA Gift Card.

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The Head and the Heart: National Book Award and New Moon

November 20, 2009 in Literary Event, movie, short story by Kim | 1 comment

This week has two major book events (three if you count Going Rogue, but I don’t):  the announcement of the National Book Award winners and the opening of the New Moon movie.  Think you’re in one camp or the other?  Think again.  A Washington Post  article yesterday described how “good, smart, successful women” fall for the Twilight series.  Some women are even naming their kids after characters.  I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m certainly one of the women who went to the Twilight movie as a motherly duty and walked out of the theatre, straight to the books, and inhaled them.  First for the head before we are swept away by the vampires.

2009 National Book Award Winners

The National Book Foundation announced this year’s winner last Wednesday night.  I’ve always been interested in the award winners, but the announcement grew ever more suspenseful watching it on Twitter.  Waiting to pick up my daughter from a New Moon screening, I read each announcement from people attending the event, and then the reaction from the book community.  Prior to the fiction announcement several tweets hoped McCann would win (even people who admitted they hadn’t read the book), and then a cyberspace celebration began.   This years winners:

  • Fiction: Let the Great World Spinby Colum McCann
  • Nonfiction: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. J. Stiles
  • Young people’s literature: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justiceby Phillip Hoose
  • Poetry: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogyby Keith Waldrop

The Foundation honored Gore Vidal with the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Dave Eggers with the 2009 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.  Several of the recipients were previously published in The New Yorker magazine.

Over 10,000 people voted in the Best of National Book Awards Fiction and The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor won.  I was surprised, I thought Ralph Ellison would win, though I voted for John Cheever.  Flannery O’Connor certainly deserves the award, especially after she lost the year she published A Good Man is Hard to Find.

And Now to the Heart:  New Moon

Through a school charity event, I was able to purchase a ticket for my daughter to see a screening of New Moon last Wednesday.  The deal we made:  she could go to the teen screening as long as she agreed to see the movie with me this weekend.  A girlfriend e-mailed me last night asking to tag along, we both need Kelsey to provide cover for our attendance.

I picked up four girls from the screening and listened to surprisingly well reasoned arguments for Team Jacob and Team Edward.  My daughter won a Team Jacob t-shirt, her new favorite item of clothing.  I thought about telling them who won the National Book Awards (that I just learned on Twitter), but realized that would mortify my daughter.

The Washington Post article nailed the attraction of the Twilight  series for adult women, it isn’t about the writing or the story, but about being a teenager:

It’s a time capsule to the breathless period when the world could literally end depending on whether your lab partner touched your hand, when every conversation was so agonizing and so thrilling (and the border between the two emotions was so thin), and your heart was bigger and more delicate than it is now, and everything was just so much more.

It’s fun to watch my daughter experience that time of life and to re-visit it, just for a couple of hours, myself.

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Art History Challenge – The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas by Gertrude Stein

November 18, 2009 in book review, Challenge, Uncategorized by Kim | 2 comments

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Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. When told that it didn't look like her, he replied "it will."

Have you ever read Gertrude Stein?  It isn’t a question you have to ponder, possibly my greatest complement to her writing style is that you won’t forget it.  I just finished The Autobiography of Alicd B. Toklas for a literary lunch and discussion sponsored by Literary Affairs and led by Dr. Lynn Baton, UCLA literature professor extraordinaire.  I am fascinated by Gertrude Stein.  I’ve always imagined her Saturday evening salons which gathered the greats of modern art and literature to be the height of interesting conversation.  How did Gertrude know which art, artist, or writer to friend?  That was her true genius–finding other geniuses. 

Modern Art Up Close and Personal

Gertrude Stein name drops continuously and fills The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with stories of artists and writers.  I loved it.  In Gertrude’s book, Matisse and Picasso recognize the talent in the other, but are very competitive.  Gertrude describes them as friends and enemies:

They exchanged pictures as was the habit in those days.  Each painter chose the one of the other one that presumably interested him the most.  Matisse and Picasso chose each one of the other one the picture that was undoubtedly the least interesting either of them had done.  Later each one used it as an example, the picture he had chosen, of the weaknesses of the other one.  Very evidently in the two pictures chosen the strong qualities of each painter were not much in evidence.

The walls of her apartment (which she shared with Alice and at times her brother Leo) were covered with the work of Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, Gris.   It was the numerous requests to visit the artwork that prompted the Saturday evening salons, it became the set time to view the pictures.  One of my favorite scenes in the book is a lunch that Gertrude hosted for artists, she seated each one across from his art.  She knew that they only wanted to look at their own creation.  Matisse is the first to notice the arrangement and he doesn’t see it until he is leaving.

The reader follows Gertrude (supposedly through the eyes of Alice) from studio to gallery to homes.  The description of Picasso’s early studio in Montmartre is hilarious, there were not any available chairs so guests stood the entire time.  But when I read the later-to-be-famous paintings Picasso was working on when Gertrude visited, names she just mentions in passing, I really felt like I was watching art history come alive.

Gertrude provides insight into two famous dealers.  The all important Vollard who nurtured so many modern artists and from whom Gertrude and Leo Stein bought their initial pictures.  The first forary into his gallery is hilarious as Gertrude and Leo try to describe to Vollard the Cezanne landscape they want to buy Read the rest of this entry »

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