The Once and Future King

This book didn’t seem as great the second time I read it. It’s depressing when that happens.

First, I don’t enjoy fiction that tries to teach politics and philosophy.

Second, T. H. White is very good at showing complex motivations. Arthur is no stainless monarch. Lancelot and Guenever are both heroic and annoying. And White is more generous to the medieval Church than most revisionist storytellers today would be. So why couldn’t he make Mordred a full character? I don’t understand how an author who clearly has the skills to resist this kind of thing could fail so badly in creating this character, the purely evil badguy.

Green leafy vegetables that are preferable to lettuce

I have been accused of running a “literary” blog. It’s true that it has veered that direction recently. But is that all we have to offer? In the spirit of my post on March 14, 2004, I offer a decidedly unliterary addition:

Arugula

Don’t ever change

Now I’m thinking those mix-and-match high school yearbook epigrams were wiser than we thought. I recently read Now, Discover Your Strengths and look at my life and my personality differently.

Yes, it’s sort of a cheesy business management book, but it’s very encouraging and freeing. It simply says to concentrate on your strengths and not worry too much about fixing your weaknesses. We seem to go wrong when we dwell on those things, comparing ourselves to others, getting insecure and unhappy. Why not just let everyone admit what they aren’t and be satisfied with what they are?

My signature themes, by the way, are as follows:

Input
Learner
Intellection
Context
Harmony

This confirms that I am the Übergeek, which is sort of liberating. I can’t pretend I am some big social butterfly or motivational speaker or glittering demagogue. It was a strange feeling to read the descriptions and recognize myself. Apparently there are other people like me. Maybe it’s normal and possibly good to be the way I am.

As Elijah said to the Rabbi Jochanan, “Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”

Bloomsday device

Nerzhin alerted me to the machinations of a certain Irish professor, which came to naught this year. Here’s to streets running with rashers, kidneys, and sausages next June!

(If you’re confused, read my recent post on Bloomsday and my yet earlier one.)

Pepys

If you haven’t had time to look at the links over on the right, I encourage you to visit the diary of Samuel Pepys, a blog that has given me much pleasure lately. I fantasize about reading it every day and gradually getting a sense of life in 17th-century London.

I forget how I found it, but for pride’s sake I would like to point out that I was reading it before the Rabbi mentioned it in the May Books & Culture.

It doesn’t take much time, if you don’t try to figure out who all the people are, which I don’t. It’s kind of boring a lot of the time (not understanding much of it doesn’t help) but sometimes there is fun stuff like this:

...and so home to supper and bed, my head aching all the day from my last night’s bad rest, and yesterday’s distempering myself with over walking, and to-day knocking my head against a low door in Mr. Castle’s house. This day the Parliament kept a fast for the present unseasonable weather.

Housekeeping

(See a post and interesting comments on another book by Marilynne Robinson here.)

When you read delightful writing by a somewhat neglected and very unconventionally-raised child narrator, you wonder if it’s fair to enjoy it. You can’t help feeling guilty as you laugh at the absurdities.

There were now many of these cans on the counters and the windowsill, and they would have covered the table long since if Lucille and I had not removed them now and then. We did not object to them, despite the nuisance, because they looked very bright and sound and orderly, especially since Sylvie arranged them open end down, except for the ones she used to store peach pits and the keys from sardine and coffee cans. Frankly we had come to the point where we could hardly object to order in any form, though we hoped that her interest in bottles was a temporary aberration.

Ruth is a strange narrator. She usually seems unbelievably detached, but sometimes she seems so hopeful it hurts:

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole....For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

It’s not exactly a gripping plot, but I found myself reading just to see what she would say next. The book is absolutely beautiful. I would highly recommend it if you can handle such beauty along with some disturbing yuckiness (I don’t mean anything graphic or violent. It’s hard to explain. It’s more of a philosophical uneasiness). But that seems to be the problem with beauty in this world in any case, doesn’t it?

Curse Texas!

Scarcely six weeks after clasping me into her bosom, Texas has spit me out like a piece of gristle.

I used to be pretty gung-ho about running before dawn when it was “cool,” but several times recently I’ve run in the evenings and survived. I thought I had developed tolerance of the heat.

But clearly there is a difference even between 7 in the evening, when I had performed these recent tolerable runs, and 4:30 in the afternoon. Today I was playing the metaphor game to take my mind off the misery. The best comparison I could come up with for my sensations at the moment was the way it feels when you take your bread out of the oven and the hot air comes whooshing up into your face. Unfortunately the whooshing had only occurred when I was running into the wind; on the way back the only movement was life-giving moisture trickling down my body.

Then I saw a happy sight! Ahead there was shade—not tree shade, but cloud shade! A general cloud was providing shelter from the sun just ahead. I thought benevolently of Elijah and his hand-sized cloud. Mine was even bigger and better, befitting this great state.

Then I remembered I was running in the same direction as the wind. The shade was advancing ahead of me! I would never reach it! Curse this abominable state!

I plotted to transfix idle guests at next week’s wedding with my glittering eye, and force upon them my shocking tale.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Something something something something
and cried, “A sail! A sail!”

Why had I memorized such a boring stanza? I wondered to myself. Yet this was the one that kept coming to me.

There was no one to blame for my misery but Texas, who in her laziness chose this angle to sprawl out on the globe, making the entire day inhospitable for humans wishing to take the slightest advantage of their natural mobility.

She has sent me no more glossy water-snakes. The only notable wildlife I saw today was one of those nasty mutant eyeball-looking acorns. Texas, I renounce you!

Catching up too

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

I learned about Philip Pullman while the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was in theaters. He is, according to an article I read somewhere, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis, a writer of children's books for parents who do not want their children polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of religion. The results are quite good and entertaining; I can recommend The Golden Compass (the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials) even to those who do not want their childred polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of atheism. The story is well-crafted and suspenseful, the characters are thick and believable, and it is a very fun book to read.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is about the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a doctor and global health advocate who works ridiculously hard to care for those in the world on the wrong side of "the great epidemiological divide." His story is inspiring and more than a little uncomfortable; Farmer's story has the effect of making you feel guilty, indicted by your wealth and privilege. Reading the book you get the feeling that you aren't doing enough, worse, can never do enough, to earn the medical care and public health you enjoy on your side of the great epi divide. Kidder's prose is not ostentatious but still delightful to read; he draws you in to the true story, reveals not just the actions of his protagonist but also his motivations. The focus is always on Farmer, but Kidder gives you just enough of his own experiences and feelings to put the events and feelings into a friendly human perspective.

A small and fairly contrived connection between the two books: In The Golden Compass, the Church is always evil like Mordor is evil in The Lord of the Rings; there is no moral complexity, no admission that maybe some religious people are pretty okay some of the time. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, though Farmer's work is amazing and is rightly the focus of the book, in his story there are others who are important, in particular an Anglican priest in Haiti and a Catholic priest in Peru, who are not just helpful but completely essential to Farmer's success. So in Pullman's fiction, the Church is always hurting and oppressing; in Kidder's nonfiction, the Church is sometimes working very hard to heal and to save.