MarysLibrary

Quotables

I’ve got a story, too, and it’s much better than yours. There’s a girl who helps me here from time to time. She was ten when she first came. They didn’t let her stay in school because there was some rule about not repeating first grade more than three times. They agreed she was feebleminded and she ended up kicking around doing nothing for years. People ignored her. She was just a sweet girl with nothing to do. When she first came here I let her serve and I fed her and gave her some fresh clothes. She came back every day. I watched her work, saw how she put effort into getting the condiments lined up and cleaning the plastic tablecloths. And I got it into my head I could each her to read.

I’d never taught reading before, and  she was painfully slow. She’d take a month to get to know a letter, then forget it. But we kept at it, no hurry; a letter and a letter and then another. We started sixteen years ago and last week she read her first book. It was a grade-two primer but it was a book with a cover and ten pages of text. She cried herself blurry eyed that night, couldn’t sleep, went through it ten more times. She finally read herself unconscious just as the sun was coming up.

That’s nice.

Oh, it’s much more than nice, Siri. It didn’t change the world. It isn’t going to get her a job reading the news over the propaganda airwaves. She’ll still serve noodles and wipe tables. But she’s different inside now. She has a new love in her life, and I gave it to her. Me. I did it all by myself, and I’m every bit as proud of that as I am of anything I did during the resistance. All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don’t measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you’re having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you’re working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age, you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can.

- Colin Cotterill, Anarchy and Old Dogs

The View from my Front Porch

 

A Week at the Airport

The airport in question is the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the author, Alain de Botton spent a week there at the request of the company that owns the airport (and runs Logan.) For reasons that are unclear the company decided it wanted a writer-in-residence. The author was to remain at the airport for a week and to write his impressions of the place.

This is just the ticket for de Botton, who tends to write in an a pensive way about everything he tackles. (Previous books include The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, and Status Anxiety.) Comparing himself to a writer in an earlier age who was commissioned by a nobleman and who was pretty much required to write a fulsome dedication to his patron, de Botton finds his patron to be undemanding. He was given permission to criticize the airport if he desired.

And so a desk is set up for him in the middle of the concourse and he settles into a hotel room provided for him, along with meal vouchers for the airport's many restaurants. He interviews anyone he likes from a shoe shine man who has worked at Heathrow for 30 years to two women who train security personnel, from the women who prepare the airline meals for nearly all the flights out of the airport to the CEO of British Airways.

Regarding his interview with Willie Walsh he says:

It was a daunting prospect, as Walsh was having a busy time of it. His company was losing an average of 1.6 million pounds a day, a total of 148 million over the previous three months. His pilots and cabin crew were planning strikes. Studies showed that his baggage handlers misappropriated more luggage than their counterparts at any other European airline. The government wanted to tax his fuel. Environmental activists had been chaining themselves to his fences. He had infuriated those in the upper echelons at Boeing by telling them that he would not be able to keep up with the prepayment schedule he had committed to for the new 787 aircraft he had ordered. His efforts to merge his airline with Quantas and Iberia had stalled. He had done away with the free chocolates handed round after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.

What does one ask such a man? The interview is not a highlight of the book. The thing that left the most impression on me was his observations of people parting in sorrow and arriving with great joy in their reunion. He talks to people who are awaiting with a banner and balloons the arrival of a lad who has spent a year in Fiji and Australia. He watches parents reuinted with small children from whom they have been separated by divorce. He talks to the men who stand at the arrival area with cards on which the name of a passenger is printed, prepared to drive the foreign businessman to his hotel in London or to Birmingham for a meeting.

He gets to know the women whose voices plead on the PA system for a passenger to report to the BA service desk, he sits in one of the comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace in the Concorde Lounge (a place you and I will never see), he talks to the airport chaplains (who mostly answer questions as to the location of the toilets), and he gets a look at the back rooms where pilots and crew view maps and routes and weather reports. He particularly enjoys visiting the middle of the main runway in the middle of the night.

He pats the nose cone of a plane that is in the hangar for routine maintenance:

What to passengers might have looked like yet another indistinguishable 747 would emerge, during this process, as a machine with a distinct name and medical history: G-BNLH, for example, had come into service in 1990 and in the intervening years had had three hydraulic leaks over the Atlantic, once blown a tyre in San Francisco and, only the previous week, dropped an apparently unimportant part of the wing in Cape Town. New it was coming into the hangar with, among other ailments, twelve malfunctioning seats, a large smear of purple nail polish on a wall panel and an opinionated microwave oven in a rear galley that ignited itself whenever an adjacent basic was used.

I'm failing entirely to convey the charm, the wimsy, the detail, the thoughtfulness, the pure delight the author takes in spending his time with the workers, the travelers, the planes, and the glorious architecture of Terminal 5. This is a short book, easy to read, lots of photos. Next time you're in a bookstore, at least pick it up and look at it. I don't like to say of a book, "You'll love it!" because of course some people won't. But this one is so very appealing and is so engaging I think maybe you will love it.

 

 

A Snowy Day

 

Year-End Wrap-up

We are back on line here at Mary's library after four days without Internet access due to complications ensuing from our attempt to hook up our new Roku, with which we hope to be watching lots of on-demand Netflix movies soon. We had a rescue visit from Artem at Geeks on Site and besides fixing our router connection he defragmented my laptop which was pretty badly . . . well, fragmented . . . and cleaned out a lot of ancient history. Things are moving much more quickly and smoothly today.

Our Christmas was lovely, with Wilhelm's folks for dinner and exchange of presents, all of which were modest but just what we wanted and needed, including a pair of Uggs for me. Not an actual pair of boots but a gift certificate at Nordstrom that will be turned magically into a pair of boots if we can ever make our way through the snow to get to the store.

This morning we scurried around getting things done (hair cut, allergy shot, library visit) before  tonight's snow, which has triggered a Winter Storm Warning for 3 to 7 inches, followed by another 3 to 5 inches tomorrow. A trip to the grocery store this afternoon for ingredients for Hoppin' John, our traditional New Year's dish, should have us all tucked up and safe until Sunday at the least.

Both Wilhelm and I got lots of books from Santa, including Simon Winchester's The Atlantic, and Agent Zigzagby Ben Macintyre for him, and A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, the Victoria Glendinning biography of Elizabeth Bowen, and Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and their Possessions for me. 2010 is wrapping up very nicely.

Merry Christmas!

Quotables

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked me for my autograph. --Shirley Temple

A Piece of Justice

A Piece of Justice by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some folks like Jill Paton Walsh and some don't. I do. And of all her many books her Imogen Quy (rhymes with Why) series are perhaps my favorites. The first book in the series was The Wyndham Case. A Piece of Justice is the second.

Imogen is the school nurse at St Agatha's College, Cambridge. She is friends with the master's wife, she rents a couple of rooms in her Victorian house to students, and this puts her in the center of college doings. She is alarmed when one of her roomers takes over an academic biography and discovers the three previous biographers who worked on this book have disappeared in what Imogen considers suspicious circumstances.

What can possibly have happened in those three days in 1978 that are missing from the volumious records of the dusty old mathematician whose life held no other mysteries. Everyone knows about his mistress, including his wife, so why is she so defensive about these three days so long ago.

The answer involves an old quilt, a student in Newnham College in the 1920s, and a dangerous trip to rural Wales.
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Fifth Avenue, 5:00 AM

Fifth Avenue, 5:00 AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another book for my 10 Best of 2010 list. This is the story of the making of the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's and its part in Audrey Hepburn's career.

The book is full of anecdotes and detail. The Edith Head/Givenchy contretemps regarding what exactly Holly Golightly would wear (and who would get the credit.) The open cat call to cast the 12 or so cats who acted in the movie. The real story behind that hilarious party. The filming at Tiffany's, and Audrey's being forced (forced) to wear the Schlumberger necklace with Tiffany's 128.54 carat (sic) yellow diamond for a photo shoot. The alternative endings. The unfortunate choice of Micky Rooney to play the Japanese neighbor. And what Truman Capote really thought about the movie. We all know how disappointed he was that Marilyn Monroe didn't get to play Holly.

We won't go into the relationship between Patricia Neal and George Peppard on the set and off.

The book is the best of it's kind and I'm now off to find Sam Wasson's previous book: A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards.

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The False Friend

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A superb exploration of memory, lies, and point of view.

When I read a really good book I usually write this and that to remember on a Post-It note or two and I put a half dozen flags on the pages I want to re-read. I took a picture of Myla Goldberg's most recent novel, The False Friend when I was through reading it. It's almost smothered with Post-It notes and flags. I think the message is that I should re-read the whole thing immediately. 

I can't figure out why Myla Goldberg hasn't been winning prizes and flashing onto the NY Times Best Seller List on the day of publication. She is extraordinarily observant and she manages to find the right words to convey - at least to me - what she has seen and what it means, both to the characters in her books and to the reader.

The False Friend is about a young woman named Celia who suddenly, standing on a street-corner in Chicago, realizes that she is a victim of repressed memory syndrome and that she lied as a teenager when she said a friend, Djuna, was abducted. In reality the girl had run into the woods and disappeared while the narrator watched and did nothing about it. Her love/hate relationship with this other girl was intense. In school, "at any moment Djuna and Celia were a party the others were desperate to attend, or a traffic accident too spectacular to avoid."

She leaves Chicago and goes home to try to set things right. Her description of her now-decaying old neighborhood: "Family homes were acquired by management companies for student rental, the real estate equivalent of inviting tent caterpillars into trees."

A couple of other quotes while I'm admiring her style:

"When he stood, the couch gave a halfhearted creak, as if feigning distress at his departure."

"The school sat on a hill above the banks of the flood-prone Chenango like a giant box waiting to be filled with unwanted kittens and tossed in."

"Becky's smile was the same strange amalgam it had always been, half happy/half distracted as if her brain, while relaying the command to her mouth, had been called away on more pressing business."

"Family conflicts were less often aired than suffocated, civility heaped upon civility until the trouble was somothered under the accumulated weight of so much decorum."

Celia discovers that it's not easy to convince people that she lied so long ago. She goes from one old friend or neighbor or schoolmate to another and is not very successful in getting them to understand what she did that day so long ago. As she talks with the people from her past Celia learns things about herself that she never suspected. She is forced to look at her childhood from other points of view.

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