MarysLibrary

Do your homework or go to jail

Picture Remembrance of Things Past as a literary ankle bracelet that keeps you chained to the desk for months.

Some folks in the New Bedford area have come up with an idea for alternative sentencing, i.e., ways to justify not sending someone to jail. It's called Changing Lives Through Literature.

College professors and graduate students, judges and probation officers, and convincted criminals meet to study literature in hopes that the experience will provide self-awareness if not actual change in behavior. Studies of the program's effect on recidivism are too small to be significant.

A group of young men who broke into and vandalized Robert Frost's home were sentenced to read "The Road not Taken," in a particularly apt case of "let the punishment fit the crime." Comparisons are made to the 12-step programs to which criminals are sometimes sentenced as an alternative to incarceration.

“I don’t want to be all negative,” the [parole] officer begins, “but you have to read this book.” Not as in “This is a must-read,” but “We’ve had people go to jail for not reading.”

Every English teacher's dream.

See the complete New York Times article here.

Kindle 2

My Kindle 2 arrived today and it's a beauty. Really sleek, light weight, better design than K1, crisper print, . . . and then there's Tom. Tom is the male voice (there's also a female voice) which reads to you if you ask it to.

I decided to have a drawing for my old Kindle 1 so at our book club meeting on Friday people put names in a hat and our hostess drew a name. Maria won. I just delivered the Kindle 1 to her and she's really pleased. So am I, to know it is going to a good home where it will be loved and wanted.

Meanwhile I've been too busy to play with my new K2. I'm going to do that right now.

The Forger's Spell

The Forger's Spell tells the story of Han van Meegeren, a third-rate Dutch painter who took his revenge on the art establishment of the pre-World War II era by creating "Vermeers" that were, in their day, considered among the finest paintings ever made. His Christ at Emmaus, purportedly by Vermeer and in 1937 one of the most famous paintings in the world, was laughably bad.

One look at it and the casual observer knows it is no more a Vermeer than a wall of Campbell Soup cans. But it fooled the experts and it fooled the Nazis. Hitler and Goering vied with one another to acquire the fakes that van Meegeren cranked out in the late 30s and early 40s, paying millions for them. 

The Forger's Spell tells of how van Meegeren was able to create an oil paint that hardened in a day to look like paint that had hardened for 300 years. The secret was the then-newly created proto-plastic, Bakelite. He devised a way to crack in an oven the surface of his paintings to look like the cracks that an old painting invariably acquire. And he figured out how to use India ink to fill the cracks and mimic centuries of dust and dirt.

The saga of van Meegeren's undoing by a Dutch resistance fighter who had become a police investigator in Amsterdam after war is fascinating. When no one would believe that van Meegeren could have painted these much-valued paintings he volunteered to paint another one. And with guards watching he produced Jesus Teaching in the Temple, with Jesus reading from the Bible to the elders gathered around him.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Edward Dolnick (Harper Collins, 2008) 349 pages.

"Bipartisan" Support for the Stimulus Package

“The bill going forward is one we’re all proud of,” Pelosi told reporters. “It has bipartisan support — at least in the Senate."

Three Republican votes in the entire Congress is not "bipartisan," Nancy. I lived for 35 years in the DC area and watch politics fairly closely. I cannot ever remember a major piece of legislation with so extremely partisan a vote being called "bipartisan."

 

Like Water for Chocolate

The 22nd Ave Book Club has chosen Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate as our next book, to be discussed in March. So today Karla and I watched the movie.

The main character, Tita, is forbidden to marry the man she loves so she expresses her repressed feelings of love and frustration and anger through her cooking. The people who eat her food feel the same emotions she has felt as she cooked.

The story uses magical realism to make a point of the importance of family and of inheritance. I especially liked the last scene where the narrator sits in her kitchen looking at her aunt Tita's cookbook while her mother and daughter stand behind her watching. It's a lovely image of continuity.

Karla teaches Spanish so we experienced the Spanish-language film differently. I was busy reading the subtitles while she was able to enjoy the sound and meaning of the original Spanish, which was not always exactly what I was reading. We both loved the beautiful images and the quick movement of the plot. The movie is gorgeous to look at with lots of saturated color and use of light that is stunning in its beauty and creativity.

The Graveyard Book

I've just finished reading Neil Gaiman's Newbery winner, The Graveyard Book, and I begin to understand the cleverness and charm that attracts so many adults to his books for young people.

I don't want to read about ghosts, vampires, fairies, unicorns, magic, witches, time travel, or other para-normalities. I don't read Sci Fi and I don't really care all that much for most magical realism. Nonetheless, despite muttering and complaining my way through the first half of this book I ended up rather liking it.

It's a classic bildungsroman, featuring a small child whose parents are killed and who is adopted by ghosts. (It takes a graveyard.) Once I got over the ridiculousness of the premise the story became increasingly interesting and complicated.

The child, called Nobody by his adoptive ghostly Owens family, is tutored by the more learned denizens of the cemetery and finds himself learning to write copperplate, memorizing the humors, and becoming fluent in the etiquette of various periods over some 900 years. He is also taught to Fade (become so unnoticeable that he more or less disappears), and to say "Help" in numerous languages, including Morse Code and the language of the night-gaunts.

In addition to his parents and the tutors from among the ghosts he is also assigned a guardian, Silas, who has a tendency to turn velvety black and swoop away in the dark. He has another protector, Miss Lupescu, who occasionally becomes four-footed and grey-furred. She is a stern taskmistress but her teaching saves his life.

Why did "the man, Jack" kill his family? Why is the same man out to kill him? What can he do to revenge his parents and save his own life? It takes time and maturity to figure these things out, with a lot of help from the other-worldly people and creatures around him (and some back issues of newspapers read by a human friend named Scarlett.)

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Harper Collins, 2008) 307 pages. 3 / 5 stars

 

The Remorseful Day

.

How clear, how lovely bright,

How beautiful to sight

  Those beams of morning play;

How heaven laughs out with glee

Where, like a bird set free,

Up from the eastern sea

  Soars the delightful day.

.

To-day I shall be strong,

No more shall yield to wrong,

  Shall squander life no more;

Days lost, I know not how,

I shall retrieve them now;

Now I shall keep the vow

  I never kept before.

.

Ensanguining the skies

How heavily it dies

  Into the west away;

Past touch and sight and sound

Not further to be found,

How hopeless under ground

  Falls the remorseful day.

-      A E Houseman

.

Saving our children from deadly books

Last year an abominable piece of legislation was passed by Congress called the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act. Among the other frightening dangers this act is designed to protect us from is the threat of deadly books.

Publishers are required under this act to test all the materials that are used in manufacturing books to ascertain whether they are safe for children to be exposed to. That's right, enormous costs are being inflicted on the publishing industry to guard us from an entirely nonexistent risk.

There has been a one-year stay of enforcement of the act, in part because it is so broad and poorly written that no one, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission  and I dare say Congress has any idea what it requires. It does, however, mandate another nail in the coffin of the morbidly ill publishing industry.

Gives a new meaning to banned books.

Novels that blazed a trail for Obama

ABE.com, the used book seller, has compiled a list of 20 books that feature race and racial issues and that have had an influence on how we view race today. “Almost every decade since the conclusion of the American Civil War has seen the publication of a major novel tackling racial inequality,” says ABE.

“Imagine a relay race of novelists, each one taking on an aspect of racial discrimination and then passing the baton to the next. ”

Here’s ABE’s  list of novels (and a play) that may have helped guide Obama into the presidency.

1. Othello by William Shakespeare. Published around 1600

2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published 1852

3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Published 1884

4. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Published 1902

5. A Passage to India by E M Forster. Published 1924

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Published 1932

7. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Published 1948

8. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Published 1952

9. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Published 1958

10. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Published 1960

11. The African by Harold Courlander. Published 1967

12. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Published 1982

13. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Published 1987

14. Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff. Published 1990

15. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Published 1990

16. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. Published 1994

17. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Published 2000

18. Small Island by Andrea Levy. Published 2004.

19. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. Published 2003

20. The Secret River by Kate Grenville. Published 2005

Like all such lists this one is controversial. I would include other novels and I’m not convinced that all of these have been important. But this a good place to begin exploring racial injustice as portrayed in fiction.

ABE also includes a list of Obama’s favorite books.

Inspector Morse

We have been watching the Inspector Morse mysteries for nearly two years and tonight was the last episode. It was very sad, but he went out to Wagner, his last case neatly solved.