MarysLibrary

Remembering Barbara Walters

In 1969 I got a job as a general assignment reporter at the Passaic (NJ) Herald News. I had no background - I had taken no journalism course, never worked on the year book, never wrote for the school paper. But the editor, Art McMahan, decided to give me a chance and hired me.

When a new reporter showed up in those days - perhaps it's the same now - the old timers razzed him a bit. My name at the time was Mary Clarke but the guys in the composing room set my byline as Mark Clark for a week or two and I got some interesting comments from my colleagues. The compositors tended to have interesting nicknames and for some time I thought the guy who set my work was called Boldface Bodoni. I think it was Dave Carlisle who led me into that error and nobody told me otherwise.

My editor was Gene Murphy. Really great newspaperman. And a bit of a wag. My first serious assignment was to interview a lady in a local nursing home who was about to have her 100th birthday. She was suffering from dementia and her granddaughter had to answer my questions. But she didn't really know what had been going on 100 years before when her gran was born and the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves in the south were just a few years in the past.

So I came back to the office with a pitiful notebook filled with ??where was she born?? and ??was her father a farmer?? No idea. I did know she grew up in Virginia.

There was only one thing to do. I started with the lede: "Hard by the Rappahannock, Mary Smith was born to a humble family . . ." and wrote a lyrical reminiscence of Virginia long ago with a romantic description of tidewater Virginia and the hardships of life as a tobacco farmer. My editor loved it and I thought maybe I'd passed the test and the impossible assignments might be over. But my next assignment was to cover the story of a deaf woman who worked for New Jersey Bell. She turned out to be a brilliant and creative engineer who was helping the phone company find ways to aid deaf people to use the phone. The interview wrote itself.

A few weeks later Gene sent me off to interview a visiting speaker at a college in Wayne. I had never interviewed anyone in my life (except the lady with a hundredth birthday). The interviewee this time was Barbara Walters.

It didn't take her more than 30 seconds to figure out she had a novice on her hands. She could have just blown me off - she was perhaps the most famous American TV interviewer going. So when I stumbled along with, "Um, where were you born?" she decided to take charge. The rest of the interview went like this:

"Well, Mary, you probably want to ask me about growing up visiting my father's New York City nightclub and meeting famous people when I was a small child. I think that was part of what gave me confidence to approach prominent people." And, "I'm sure you're about to ask me . . . " And "Let me tell you about the time . . ." And "I was very lucky when . . ." 

And on it went. She handed me a terrific interview on a silver journalistic platter. I went back to the office and wrote up the best interview Gene Murphy had ever seen. He always leaned his chair way back and put his feet up on his desk and when he started reading this he almost fell over.

None of it was my skill or charm. I had no idea what to ask or how to get someone to talk about her past. The story was a gift from a famous woman who took half an hour and made it a delight for a 20-something would-be reporter at a small and insignificant paper. 

I confessed the next day what happened. Everybody got a laugh out of it. But for about 24 hours the Herald News thought it had discovered the 20th century's greatest reporter-interviewer.

Starting 2021 Right

I looked up this review, the book cover of which Typepad chose to illustrate my review of Great Short Books. It sounds like it was pretty good. He has written a second St John Strafford mystery, The Lock-Up, to be published, in paperback, 6 April 2023.

The first book I finished reading two years ago (2021) is one of the best contemporary mysteries I've read in this millennium. It's Snow by John Banville, the winner of the Booker Prize for his 2005 novel, The Sea. 

This book begins a new mystery series set in 1957, with a detective named St John Strafford (mention is made in passing to Quirke, a previous Banville protagonist, found in books written pseudonymously by Benjamin  Black.) He spends much of the novel sighing wearily each time he has to correction the pronunciation of his first name or the spelling of his last. I figured out about the third time it happened in the first 65 pages that the people in this story were not listening carefully or showing much respect to this detective and that perhaps I had better stay more alert.

Detective Inspector Strafford is a man of subtle charm who employs frequent irony and mild sarcasm that are lost on most of the people around him. He spends much of the book wandering about County Wexford seemingly clueless. He thinks at one point that he is falling in love with one of the suspects, a woman it is impossible for the reader to like. 

The thing about this book is the prose. Banville, who has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, certainly has a way with words. I have a bad habit of skimming over descriptive passages, but this paragraph about the old house in which the crime occurs woke me up:

The place in general was seriously in need of repair and renovation. The frames of the big windows were decayed and their putty was crumbling and there were cracks running up the walls where growths of buddleia were lodged, their branches leafless now. When he looked up, craning his neck, he saw how the gutters sagged, and the way the protruding edges of roof slates had been splintered and left jagged by countless winter storms. A warm wave of nostalgia washed over him. Only someone who had been born and brought up in a place like this, as he had, could know the particular, piercing fondness he felt before the sad spectacle of such decay and decrepitude. Hopeless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste.

It's time I tried some of Banville's Booker-worthy prose. (I haven't done it yet, but soon . . . )

Originally posted Jan 2021.

2023

A new year has arrived and I have again been tempted to make New Year's Resolutions. There's always a chance, a slim chance, that I'll follow through on these good intentions, for a while anyhow, but more likely is the letdown in mid-February when I admit that I didn't do what I was going to do and I had best give up. 

The alternative is my Every Day Is the Beginning of a New Year theory which means I can create a new set of resolutions and begin following them on the 13th of February of the 3rd of September or whenever. 

In fact, I did make such a resolution on the 23rd of November 2022. I had gotten my hands on a new book called Great Short Books: A Year of Reading -- Briefly, by Kenneth C Davis. His theory, and I think it's a good one, is that we sometimes do not tackle an author because most of their work is found in 300+ page works and they look too daunting. Whereas anybody can read a book that is less than 200 pages and get a feel for the style of an author. 

Thinking it best to ease into this project I began on 23 November with E B White's Charlotte's Web, then went on to re-read Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Toni Morrison's Sula. One book a week for 52 weeks, every one of them (excepting two I think the author warns us) fewer than 200 pages long and worth reading, in his opinion. I then read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston. Having just re-read Jane Eyre (again) I am I now reading Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.

And it has been as easy as that! A New Year's Resolution kept for six weeks, which is a better record than I've been able to reach for decades. The secret, I think, is to start whenever - any day of any month in the middle of the week - and to keep expectations low.

A Happy New Year to you and may you find your reading resolutions as easy to achieve as these have been for me. So far. 

 

Our Man in the Willows

This book is known in our house as Our Man in the Willows.

In his Christmas sermon years ago our priest referred to "The Wind in the Willows by Graham Greene." At the end of the pew, a bookish friend, Gary Carter, leaned forward to look at me just as I leaned forward to look at him and for much of the rest of the service we had trouble stifling our giggles.

It was only in 2013 that I got around to reading this children's classic (written by Kenneth Grahame) and once again I'm stifling giggles. Mr Toad of Toad Hall is an outrageous, short-cycle bipolar amphibian with an ego unrivaled in literature. His adventures include crashing numerous new cars, which he can afford to buy because he is a very wealthy toad indeed, stealing somebody else's car (twice), disguising himself as a washerwoman, stealing a horse, and eventually joining his friends, Badger, Water Rat, and Mole, to storm Toad Hall, which in his absence has been taken over by the animals from the Wild Wood, ferrets, weasels, and stoats, wicked creatures who have posted lookouts with guns to protect their newly-acquired fortress.

I haven't seen such a book, but I'll bet some scholar has written an academic interpretation of this 1908 story of revolution and restoration, of the foolishness of the governing class, and the importance of solidarity among the proletariat.

But it's much more fun to read it as the story of little animals who are sometimes wise and sometimes not, who work together to rescue one of their own despite his many and egregious character faults, and of course, who "mess about with boats."

American Awakening

The first book I've bought in the new year, 2021, is about the problems we are having in America because of identity politics and why, indeed, we are suffering from identity politics at all. The author, Joshua Mitchell, teaches political theory at Georgetown University. American Awakening echoes the former great awakenings in American religious and political history while touching on the "woke" of today who recognize that we are all fallen but who are lacking the promise of Christian grace and so resort to finding scapegoats to bear their sins away.

Note: This book, like several others that have been published recently has real footnotes, i.e., they are at the foot of the page. Perhaps because in my academic day that is where footnotes were always located and because I was taught to look at and read footnotes, I find this more convenient than the collection in the back of the book. A trend I hope continues and flourishes.

Not a Creature War Stirring

Gregor Demarkian gets a mysterious assignment. His priest, Timor, asks him to visit Bryn Mawr millionaire. This wealthy and eccentric man has shown Timor a suitcase filled with $100,000 and says it's his if he convinces the retired FBI agent to spend the evening at his mansion on the Main Line. But when Gregor gets there the driveway is filled with police cars and a full-scale murder investigation is under way. His host is dead and everybody has good reasons to rejoice. The first in a series from which I learned everything I know about Armenian-Americans, their Philadelphia neighborhood, their church, and their food. Book first published in 1990.

Godless

Godless: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann Coulter, was published about 15 years ago. Reading it now, in 2021, is a little like going home for a funeral and reminiscing with your siblings about grammar school. Names you haven't heard in years pop up and long-forgotten achievements (and scandals) are re-examined. It's fun, but not an entirely worthwhile use of your time. Coulter's main point is that folks who no longer believe in God are in search of a replacement and are finding it in progressive politics. That remains true and ever more obvious.

Anecdotal Evidence Blog

In browsing some of my favorite blogs this morning I came across this poem written by Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) and published in the June 28, 1947 issue of The Saturday Review

“O that our living literature could be

Our sustenance, not archaeology! . . .

My scholar shall be brilliantly forbidden

to dig old garbage from a kitchen midden . . .

Far better Alexandria in flames

Than buried beneath unimportant names;

And even Sappho, glory that was Greece’s,

Lives best, I blasphemously think, in pieces.

That Chinese Emperor who burned the books

Succumbed to madness shrewder than it looks;

The minor poets and the minor sages

Went up in smoke. The great shine down the ages.”

It's in today's posting by Patrick Kurp from Houston in his extraordinary blog, Anecdotal Evidence. Do check it out.

A N Wilson's Dickens

A N Wilson has written lots of biographies, the one of Darwin being particularly worthwhile. But so far I'm quite taken with this overview of Dickens and what other biographers have revealed about him. If you like Dickens' novels and have not read a biography you need to read this. (It will lead you on to other bios.) It will change your perspective about the novels.

Lagniappe

The Spokane Public Library has been closed for a while now because of the Chinese virus but like many restaurants they offer curbside pickup. So I've begun requesting books again. 

I wanted to read the new book about Henry Kissinger by Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World. It seemed too expensive to buy so I requested it and though this is the sort of book I normally have to get in line for, because many folks are not bothering to use the library request system at the moment I was first on the waiting list. 

The library lets you sign up for pickup of such books at 15 minute intervals all day, with six pickup spots. A library worker brings the book to your car and away you go. It works well. But one of the things about this system that was a surprise to me is the lagniappe. They offer the opportunity to request four books of the library's choice in eight or ten categories: literary fiction, nonfiction, children's picture books, etc. I chose nonfiction. And here is what they sent me.

Garage Sale America by Bruce Littlefield is all (and I do mean all) about garage sales. They almost never actually take place in the garage but rather on the front driveway and lawn. And they can have almost anything for sale. There is an etiquette that has developed around these weekend activities. You may bargain but you may not use your cell phone, at least not right there in front of the seller, to see what you might get an item for on eBay, for example. As with all of these books, there are lots of photos. And although I am not a garage sale person, nonetheless the book was filled with entertaining info.

Unlikely Loves: 43 Heartwarming True Stories from the Animal Kingdom by Jennifer S. Holland. Animals raised together if they are well-fed and have human interaction can often develop an unlikely "friendship" with the other animals nearby. So you see a giraffe who is best buddies with a goat and a fox and hound and the inevitable owl and the pussycat. The photos are charming. A little sentimentality is welcome once in a while. My sister particularly likes this sort of story and this book will go on the possibles list for a birthday present.

117 Things You Should F*#king Know About Your World by Paul Parson. Sigh. Some people don't seem to understand that rude profanity does not appeal to the book buying public in the same way it perhaps titillates the TV cop show watching adult children. I would have been slightly more receptive to this book if the things it wants to tell us were not so predictably scatological or otherwise aimed at 12-year-old male tastes. But even within the parameters it has set, the book is not appealing or creative nor is the news really new.

A dud.

A real dud.

And the best of the lot: Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong by Paul A Offitt. In fact, so spot on is this book it was lurking in the "Save for Later" section of my Amazon book cart. It tells stories of theories and discoveries in science that were dangerously wrong or destructive in the extreme. The most obvious and least recognized was the banning of DDT when Rachel Carson wrote her erroneous page-turner, Silent Spring. Because the reaction was so dramatic to this book which was filled with errors and poor judgement, DDT was banned world-wide and as a result billions of people have died of malaria who need not have been endangered if DDT had been continued to be used, but more carefully, to kill the parasite-carrying mosquitoes that spread it. Offitt also addresses the trend of using lobotomies to treat mentally ill people and Margaret Sanger's buy-in to the white Aryan superiority to other races and the need to create a clean gene pool by aborting babies with serious diseases such as Down's Syndrome. Not happy reading.

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And the Kissinger book? It is easily a 5 on a scale of 1-5 and so rich and rare that I returned the library book and bought a copy of my own. I'm reading it a second time already. Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, Vietnam, Nixon - there is so very much in this volume that even having read many of Kissinger's books over the years this is a more useful book for tracing his ideas and learning about his theories of realpolitik.

Almost Done

For some time now I've been reading the oeuvre of Agatha Christie. Inspired by the Random Jottings blog, where Elaine has read through the books and also reviewed a biography of Christie, I have read the two series, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. There are many more non-series books which I will be approaching soon. Meanwhile, with Elephants Can Remember I have reached the next to the last book in the Poirot series and I'm stopping for a few days to savor the thirty-some mysteries I've read before I go on to the last of the books, one that was written some years before the author's death and held until the end of her life. 

We have acquired over the years DVDs of the TV adaptations of the novels with the incomparable David Suchet as the mustachioed Belgian detective. I read the mysteries, watched the TV productions,and then re-read the books. A rewarding way to approach these books, which are often dismissed as "genre" fiction whereas they are fine novels with the added pleasure of recurring characters. And a second reading allows the reader to spot the clues (and red herrings) that are larded throughout.

I've also read and re-read the Miss Marple books, watching the TV productions in between. And I now find I'm reading them for the third time in a year or so, this time with my friend Elaine (12) with whom I read every week. She likes picking up new words. I was surprised to find an extensive vocabulary used in these books. (The Nancy Drew novels are also better written and using a more complex vocabulary than they are given credit for. But only the original ones. The re-writes are dumbed down and made to offer current political fads.)

So I'm feeling the let down after finishing so many novels and parting with the people in them. 

However. There are those non-series books to be tackled and I'm hoping to do that as soon as I finish my current project, which is a Great Courses series of lectures on Medieval England and the reading of the booklet that goes along with the DVDs as well as a couple of histories of England. Stay tuned. 

Contagion

A few weeks ago the Economist listed a few books that their staff recommended if one wanted to read about the building crisis due to the Wuhan virus. One of them was Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. That year was 1665 and so it's surprising how relevant it is to our day. People acted the same then as now, ignoring advice and disobeying rules in order to do what they wanted. Even though it often led to the death of their whole family.

That plague of course was the Black Death and deadly it was. We are dealing with a virus that is deadly only to certain segments of the population. But whether spreading like wildfire or creeping around to strike nursing homes and meat processing plants, both have patterns of contagion.

The author of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread -- and Why They Stop, Adam Kucharski, is a statistician who works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has studied Ebola in Africa and various tropical diseases. But he is also interested in other things that are contagious like gun violence. Increase in violence in Rwanda, resembles disease spread in Somalia, for example.

A fascinating book, filled with new ideas (new to me) and potential solutions to problems involving the spreading of everything from financial bubbles to fake news.

American Names

I've long loved this poem by Stephen Vincent Benet, American Names.

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

 

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

 

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

 

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

 

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

 

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Conservatism

I'm reading Andrew J Bacevich's American Conservatism a surprising book. It is a collection of essays about conservatism in America and it is enlightening. It helps me make sense of the positions some politicians and historians have taken. And it points out the error of assuming anybody who calls himself a Republican or a conservative is really what he says he is.

Definitions of what it means to be conservative by Russell Kirk and William F Buckley, Jr clarify the origins of modern American conservatism. And point out where it has gone astray. Pieces by Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, and Allan Bloom are particularly interesting.

Now I need to find a collection like this addressing American Liberalism.

Mitz of Bloomsbury

Mitz is comfort reading for the last days of the lockdown when there is little left in the genre you haven't read and re-read. It's about a marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Wolfe adopted just before World War II. 

If you liked Flush, you will love this.

I Discover Enid Blyton

Recently one of my bookish on-line British friends mentioned, and not for the first time, her love when young of Enid Blyton books. This time I decided to find out what the fuss was all about and so I bought the first of the Malory series, First Term at Malory Towers for the Kindle.

So I got it and I read through it quickly as it's a book apparently aimed at girls 9 to 12 years old. And it was delightful. Comfort reading for lockdown days.

I thought I'd go ahead and read the other 5 or 6 books in the Malory series, but the Kindle versions do not exist. Nor, it would seem, does the Kindle version I bought a week ago. 

Now if this were a Harry Potter book I'd know what happened - Hermione decided these books were taking up valuable time and space and deleted them. But Malory isn't that sort of school. 

So where did they go? The old cloth and paper copies are in the three figures - all those old girls who are now grown and can afford to pay hundreds of pounds or dollars for childhood memories I guess. 

So back to binge reading Agatha Christie.

 

 

Quarantine Reading

In the last few weeks I've been reviewing the books I'v'e read over the years concerning viruses, epidemics, quarantines, and the history of plagues. 

The best? The must-read for those quarantined?

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (published in 1772, but describing the plague year of 1665) You will be shocked at how much the experience of the middle classes in London during that terrible outbreak of Yersinia pestis resembles our experience with the Wuhan virus. It, too, came from China; the bacteria just took longer to get to Europe than our virus.

I first read this many years ago, say 50 or 60 years ago . . . and it was not boring exactly, but I didn't find myself breathlessly turning pages. This time through it's gripping. Defoe's brother and his family hightailed it to the countryside to avoid city contagion. But Defoe decided to stay in the city and watch over their warehouses and other property. 

So did he catch the plague? Read it and find out.

(Yes, I've been away for a while. But a virtual poke in the ribs by Margaret Simpson has me thinking about all the books I've been reading and enjoying for the past while and those that I should share. Thank you, MS.)

Sharpening her oyster knife

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it . . . No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. - Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," from World Tomorrow, 1928

The Mirror and the Light

The Mirror and the Light, the last volume in Hillary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, arrived at 8:14 last night. I watched for it all day as I was finishing Bring Down the Bodies, the second book in the trilogy. having just finished my third reading of the first, Wolf Hall. These re-readings were in anticipation of this book, for which my reading friends and I have been waiting eagerly since 2012.

This is what I think they call a major landmark in the publishing world. Early reviews report it's a splendid novel. Now we wait anxiously to hear whether Mantel wins the prize for this third book. She won it for the first one. And the second. 

Will in the World

This is a splendid biography/literary criticism of Shakespeare. I began seriously re-reading his work recently and Stephen Greenblatt's book enhances it all.