The Folks Aren't Home

Hi, y'all.  Candleman and I are on the road again.  Monday we went out to lunch and just in the short jaunt from out house to the restaurant we decided we needed a little trip.  Candleman had invited my brother to take a trip with him this week to Island in the Sky in southern Utah, but he couldn't go because of previous arrangements.   So I stepped up to the plate and said I'd go.  All I need is a small opening when it comes to traveling.  I love roadtrips with my personal driver! 

We rushed home after lunch and quickly packed and hit the road aiming for Moab.  On Tuesday we decided to not go to Island in the Sky so that Candleman and Steve could still do that trip.  Instead we drove south to Blanding, then west to Hall's Landing.  We thought we'd ride the ferry across Lake Powell to Bull Frog and follow the Burr Trail over the Water Pocket Folds.  When we arrived at Hall's Landing we discovered they weren't doing the ferry until spring. 

We didn't feel too bad because the drive was remarkable.  We turned around and back tracked 50 miles and then drove up 95 to Hanksville.  I could not believe how incredibly, strikingly beautiful this route was.  We both commented that it may be the most beautiful place we ever visited.  I'm sure that I was able to enjoy the sights because it was the first part of November rather than the scorching days of July.  We enjoyed temperatures in the 60s  - it's been so pleasant.

Tonight and tomorrow night we are staying in Torrey, Utah.  We'll be doing some sight-seeing tomorrow. 

Check out our travel blog - The Folks Aren't Home.  Candleman is a wonderful writer and has written a couple of really good posts already.  I wish I had his talent for writing but I'm pretty happy to be able to read and appreciate his talent.

Read The Full Article:
http://readfromatoz.blogspot.com/2009/11/folks-arent-home.html

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Final Bouchercon photos

Here's my last batch of photos from Bouchercon 2009. Some are from me, 1, 4 and 6 are from Anita Thompson, and I may add some from Ali Karim if he puts them up.

(Left: A wary waitress.)




(Right: Anita Thompson in profil perdu.)




(Left: The rubber duck that came with my room. The duck looks less cheerful than it ought to, as if wistful for the wide-open ducky spaces far from this bath tub in Indianapolis.)




(Right: Another episode of The Bridesmaids' Quest.)





(Left: Ali Karim, Martyn Waites, Christa Faust on the Sunday comics-buying expedition.)



(Right: Jon McGoran, Scott Phillips, Anthony Neil Smith)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2009/11/final-bouchercon-photos.html

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Berenstain Bears Books to be Made Into Film

USA Today reports that Walden Media has acquired the film rights to the popular Berenstain Bears books. Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) has signed on to direct a film based on the children's book series.

"To stand that kind of test of time is pretty formidable," says Levy, who will produce the film through his company, 21 Laps. "People read them as kids and can now read them to their kids. Any piece of culture that proves that enduring has something special in its DNA."

Though his next film is the more adult Tina Fey-Steve Carell comedy Date Night, the Berenstain films "happen to fit firmly within the wheelhouse of family-genre comedy I do, whether it's Cheaper by the Dozen or Night at the Museum," Levy says. "It's warm-hearted comedy about family, and a different kind of family."

Writers have yet to be hired, but Levy says he wants the film to be an original story incorporating details from some of the more popular Berenstain books.

"I'd like the film to be un-ironic about its family connections but have a wry comedic sensibility that isn't oblivious to the fact that they're bears," Levy says. "The comedy comes from this bear family coexisting in a more recognizably real world."

The USA Today story says the film will combine live-action with animation. It will incorporate some of the original ideas and details from the Berenstain Bears books by Jan and Stan Berenstain. The earliest it will arrive in theatres in 2011.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.readersread.com/blog/1103091

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New York's forgotten underground

I am working on a review of Martin Sandler's Secret Subway about plans and early construction of an 1860s subway system in NYC and while very cool on its own, it has gotten me thinking about underground cities in general and Julia Solis' New York Underground:The Anatomy of a City in particular.

Secret Subway is mostly about Alfred Ely Beach, one of those utterly brilliant and talented people who come up with amazing ideas that get thwarted by power-mad politicians (hello Boss Tweed) and others who are more interested in themselves then the greater good. (More about him here.) Beach's subway idea focused on pneumatics. His two block subway still exists, far beneath the streets (there are pictures in the book of the tunnels and waiting area unearthed in 1912) and he proved that his plan was conceivable - but like a lot of others who are overwhelmed by money and power (hello Nicola Tesla) his dream did not come to pass. The history is stirring enough - and certainly fodder for folks curious about inventors, engineering, New York and MYSTERIOUS UNDERGROUND CITIES!!! - but what intrigued me was that it is still down there, which of course made me think of everything else that is still down there and that led me back to Julia Solis.

Here's a bit about Solis from the publisher of her book of short stories, Scrub Station: Julia Solis conducts archaeological parlor games and investigates ruined urban spaces. As the proprietor of the website darkpassage.com it has been her pleasure to document deteriorating bathrooms, morgues and scrub stations in a variety of abandoned mental hospitals.

Solis is a photographer and New York Underground is full of awesome shots of the areas under Grand Central, the Old Croton Aqueduct and the old gang tunnels below Chinatown. She also has one of those job descriptions that I adore - basically she investigates "ruined urban spaces". There is so much romantic and dark and disturbing and appealing about that image, I can barely stand it. Things fall apart everyday and we barely notice. Solis notices, and she photographs and she writes and she remembers. The historian within me does back flips of joy over this very notion.

Here's a bit more from The Society of Creative Preservation which she founded:

Our aim is to instigate unique perceptions of New York's history by constructing narratives around the city's forgotten relics. Ars Subterranea encourages its audiences to interact with the city's neglected and ruinous locations by recreating obscure but fascinating aspects of its urban development. Our projects include art installations, history-based scavenger hunts, unusual preservation campaigns, and much more.

The tag line for the group is "We like to play inside ruins".

While I was reading Secret Subway I kept thinking of how many teens would read this book and be inspired and wonder about trying to find places Beach's subway and I was so happy to know that at the very least they could go exploring on the internet. I can see this book being an opening to the kind of adventures Solis embraces (and yes - I know that trespassing is wrong and all that so don't trespass, yadda yadda, yadda). Mostly though I'm just happy to see Alfred Beach celebrated again and I'm very happy to know people like Julia Solis are out there looking, and not forgetting who we were and what we accomplished (or tried to) in the past.

Cities fascinate me.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChasingRay/~3/OL-dNc49MA4/new_yorks_forgotten_unde
rgroun.html

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E-books and Online Reading

Let’s talk e-books a bit. I still like my Kindle. I read the Emerson and Carlyle letters on it and I must say it has turned out to be very easy to read on the train with mittens on. I also find that reading while eating is much easier because the cover of my Kindle [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://somanybooksblog.com/2009/11/03/e-books-and-online-reading/

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Selection and juxtaposition

I linked to this piece some years ago, but it bears repeating, I think; at the TLS, Alan Hollinghurst on the novels of Ronald Firbank:

where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator?s complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce ? not merely to condense but to design by elimination. ?I am all design ? once I get going?, he wrote. ?I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.? He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue. Both Proust and Firbank loved describing parties, but where Proust?s parties are occasions for infinitely fine analysis and profound digression, Firbank?s are an abstract mosaic of impressions, in which human intercourse is enacted as a kind of coruscating nonsense. One of his most striking inventions was the depiction of a party as a montage of unrelated fragments, picked up as if by a roving microphone: ?Her dull white face seems to have no connection with her chestnut hair!? ? . . . with him to Palestine last spring. Oh, dear me, I thought I should have died in Joppa!? ?You mix them with olives and a drop of cognac.? [. . . .] ?The only genuine one was Jane.? ?. . . poison.? ?. . . fuss . . . .? ?My husband was always shy. He is shy of everybody. He even runs away from me!?.

[...]

Firbank worked in fragments all the way through, amassing phrases in notebooks, and supposedly compiling his early novels on narrow horizontal strips of paper, which could be shuffled and rearranged in a way that sounds prophetic of much later experiments with the cut-up. Everything depended on the instinct for selection and juxtaposition. The Jamesian challenge of ?free selection ? which is the beautiful, terrible whole of art? has not been abandoned, but the terms that govern that selection have been radically revised. There is a paradoxical feeling, especially in his earlier and more experimental novels, that almost everything on the page is irrelevant and yet that nothing could be omitted. The exclamatory inconsequence of social conversation is deployed as a kind of screen, through which the attentive reader will discern hinted patterns, the intermittent unfolding of an anecdote or a joke. As a means of depicting social life in which any contact is transient and any shared understanding unlikely, the technique is wittily appropriate. Had James read Vainglory, when it came out on his seventy-second birthday, he would have found it to infringe almost every canon of Jamesian law ? no centre of consciousness, no unity of effect, no ?action? ? though he might have hesitated to call it loose and baggy when it was so agile, so indirect, so evidently if so mysteriously ?designed?.

Read The Full Article:
http://jennydavidson.blogspot.com/2009/11/selection-and-juxtaposition.html

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High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

'But there was a point below which Carmen and her colleagues would notgo: they referred to this as 'the Whipple line', after Dorothy Whipple,a writer of popular fiction in the Thirties and Forties.'

A quote from Carmen Calill in 'that' 2008 Guardian interview with Rachel Cooke, discussing the history behind Virago books and a quote which we should probably address before embarking on any thought-sharing here about High Wages, the latest Dorothy Whipple book to be republished by Persephone Books and with an excellent introduction by Jane Brocket...except to tell you there's a wonderful tea over at Cornflower to day too.
Oh yes and this book has a lovely Crysede fabric print on the endpapers of which there is a fine display of in the Penlee Museum in Penzance because much of it was hand-blocked in Cornwall in the 1930s.

Carmen Callil's mother had read all of Dorothy Richardson's books, I think in contrast my mum might have read all of Dorothy Whipple's and how I wish she was alive now for me to ask her, but I suspect these were the books for the likes of my mum.
Thirteen, and from a working class family living in Liverpool 8, the Dingle, when the Second World War broke out. My grandmother had been in service, my grandfather worked on the docks where he was tragically killed in 1949 and I love this picture of them.
My mum Vera had been evacuated to Chester but was brought back to Liverpool by her father at the height of the bombing because he had been sent to fetch her by my grandmother. Vera was far too happy in her home in Chester, was adored by a childless couple and had settled into a lovely school, she might never want to come back, my grandmother couldn't bear it. Just like the plot of another Persephone book, Doreen by Barbara Noble.
So for me, to read a Dorothy Whipple is to feel a connection with my mum and the world she grew up in, the difficulties she faced with an education interrupted by the war, and I wouldn't have been any the wiser but for these reissues.
There is something comforting about sneaking off for an afternoon read with a pot of a tea and a Dorothy Whipple but for all that I read so widely, why am I never disappointed by Dorothy?
Jane Carter is Lancashire born and bred (as was Dorothy Whipple), a shop assistant in that twilight world of the drapers' shops those little emporiums that existed before the arrival of  ready-mades. The window displays designed to seduce those with money through the doors, and here you bought your fabric and had your dress made-to-measure, there was haberdashery from which to choose your trimmings and it would be 'a fine thing' if Jane could work in Chadwick's in Tidsley, a step up from Commins' drapers in nearby, and considerably inferior, Elton.
Employment for women remained severely limited in the 1920s and 1930s, it was housemaids or shop work, perhaps some menial office work but not a lot in between and little thought given that women might have ambitions for anything more fulfilling.
Spotting the advert in Chadwicks' window, Jane dons her gloves 'dazzlingly white, fluffy enormous' and proceeds to try and pick the white fluffy bits off her black coat (a hopeless task) before going in to ask about 'the place.'
Jane is successful and ten days later moves in, as was customary, to share the shop-worker's accommodation above the store.
This is the world of fabric unfurled across the counter, the thud of the blot as it unrolls and if you enjoyed Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, here's another utterly worthy 'shop' novel to add to the shelf. Moleskin shoulder capes and underwear called 'neathies', bolts of flannelette, crepe duchine, gaberdine, alpaca, foulard and eolian all vie for madam's attention, most noticeably Mrs Greenwood who has married into the lucrative mill business and is always accompanied by her spoiled-rotten daughter Sylvia.
I quite thought fascinators were a 21st century invention, how wrong I was, but I do wonder quite what this one looked like,

'Jane went out to find Mrs Chadwick's head draped in a woollen fascinator, with blue and white bobs around the face.'

The social hierarchy that Dorothy Whipple always exposes so well is clearly evident, there's an inter-war years' pecking order to be observed amongst the women of Tidsley and when Mrs Briggs, married to the other partner in the Greenwood mill empire, confesses to Jane that she feels out of her depth in those remote and chilly social waters, a friendship develops that will most certainly do no harm to Jane's career development.
There's plenty of town romance going on and themes of class, fashion, change and resistance to it prevail, and all beautifully crafted by Dorothy Whipple's pen, this was a world she knew and it's a little bit of a world that I knew too.
My mum was a great needlewoman and I still have her school needlework book from 1939, complete with a few working samples. She was taught the meticulous approach and she never lost it, we tacked to within in a inch of there being no point in sewing the thing together, but it always fitted first time.
My eyes were forever peeking over the top of the counter in Allders or Kennards in Croydon as yards of fabric were rolled out and the Butterick paper pattern consulted. Then we'd match up the cotton and it would be home to the pinning and the cutting out and then out came the Singer treadle sewing machine and we were away. Tacking and darts, tucks, gathers and pleats and eventually a frock.
So jolting myself out of that bout of nostalgic reverie I think it's quite easy to see why I enjoyed High Wages so much and why I'll always happily traverse that Whipple line and read her, though just one very minor worry.
When love interest Wilfred loses an arm in the war and comes back with his sleeve flapping and all much to Jane's distress, I was a bit bemused to find him some time later leaning on his elbows (plural) on a gate...Bookhound says not to be so pernickety, he'd probably only lost a hand really, but no matter, it's a lovely book and don't miss a lovely tea over at Cornflower's today, you've earned a treat if you've read this far.

Read The Full Article:
http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2009/11/high-wages-by-
dorothy-whipple.html

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Professional development

From Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young":

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

Read The Full Article:
http://jennydavidson.blogspot.com/2009/11/professional-development.html

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The Great Wednesday Compare #5- Chuck Palahniuk
VERSUS Douglas Adams

Read The Full Article:
http://bookmineset.blogspot.com/2009/11/great-wednesday-compare-5-chuck.html

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Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

Running from November 1, 2009 to December 1, 2010, this is a challenge that is way outside my comfort zone. I don't think I have ever really read Christian fiction before. Hosted by Amy and Deborah, I am looking forward to trying something new! To find out more about the Christy Awards Challenge you can check out the website.

I think I am going to sign up for the 2nd Tier:

2nd Tier - Any ONE Years Favorite Category - 3-4 Books or mix 3-4 winners from any category

I am going to go with 3-4 winners from any category. This is mainly because I will read most of these from the library and it is hard to say what is available!

I will start with Candle in the Darkness by Lynn Austin. I have heard of the author before and people seem to really like her! The rest of my list will probably be based on recommendations...

Read The Full Article:
http://myreadingbooks.blogspot.com/2009/11/stepping-out-of-comfort-zone.html

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