Tom's Two Cents: "The Ambassadors" by Henry James

Last week when our little book club finished Henry James's next to-next to last novel (and the one he thought his best) we all pretty much asked ourselves, "Why?"  Why did he think so?  Why did at least some of (but not all) the literary critics think so?  Why does James rank so high in most literary circles?  "The Ambassadors" is not, in my opinion, worth all the fuss.  In fact, none of the last three of his novels are even accessible to the general reading public.  One has to work too hard to hack through his jungle of words and freakish syntax (a subject is hardly ever in sight of a predicate in a typically obtuse and lengthy James sentence) to make any sense at all of what he is saying, and even when one does, it rarely seems worth the trouble.  So then why am I bothering to write this review?  Because I think James is well worth reading, but not the later James.

First, a few words about the author himself.  A fussy, privileged New Englander, he spent most of his life abroad in Europe, especially France and England, where he eventually acquired a country home in Rye, Sussex, and entertained many men and women of letters.  He wrote and published a great many novels, short stories and wrote hundreds of letters, but his forays into the theatre were not successful, and no wonder--he had little or no ear for the dramatic or theatrical, and action, or plot, the fundamental element of a successful turn-of-the-20th century play, was of little or no interest to him.  What did absorb him was the more subtle play of personality against personality, hardly ever in any open conflict, but quietly sparring with each other beneath the surface of events--hence his reputation for being one of the first "psychological" novelists of the 20th century.  What he says is rarely as provocative as what he means, and what he means is often uncertain and ambiguous.

The short story "The Turn of the Screw" is probably his best short work, and certainly a good example of the ghost story genre.  Reading James's short stories has merit in itself because it is the best way to escape his long windedness.  Yet one of his finest works is a novel, "Portrait of a Lady," which revolves around his favorite theme: the American abroad.  Of course the American in this case is a privileged young lady, Isabel Archer, who becomes hopeless entangled in a European social milieu.  Another Jamesian limitation here: like most good writers, he wrote about what he knew, but what he knew was pretty much limited to the upper stratum of high, cultivated society, especially in Europe.  Edith Wharton, his latter-day friend and American author/compatriot, wrote more about the same world in America, and to my mind her work comes off better, because it is more incisively critical of that society.

Should I say read old Henry at your own risk?  That depends on who you are and what you want in a good book!  Mercifully, we are all different, so James will continue to be read and taught, but in my estimation not widely appreciated.

Julie's Journal : Susanna Kearsley

A few months ago, I discovered a new author.  Well, new to me anyway.  Susanna Kearsley began publishing in the mid 90s.  Her books are marketed as romance, but I have found that they are so much more.

I first found The Rose Garden on Overdrive, our e-book app.  It begins with our heroine Eva, returning, after the death of her sister, to the place she feels most at home.  She travels to an Trelowarth House on the Cornish coast in the extreme southwest of England where she spent her childhood summers.  Early in her visit, she begins to experience strange visions.  Although at first she chalks them up to grief and fatigue, the visions continue to become more and more real to her and she gradually comes to realize that they are, in fact, actually happening.  She is slipping through time to an era almost 300 years before her own. 

The early 1700's are a dangerous time.  England is dealing with the Jacobite uprising and Eva meets Daniel Butler, a man working as a free-trader, or smuggler.  He lives in Trelowarth House and uses a cave in the coastline as his headquarters.  I won't give too much away, except to say that eventually Eva must decide whether to remain in her own time or live permanently in the 1700s with Daniel.

The Rose Garden is difficult to review because of how complex it is.  The characters from the Jacobite era are based on real historical figures.  The writing is smooth and transitions seamlessly between time-periods.  The earlier time flows smoothly in part because of the descriptions of clothing and food and food preparation.  And in spite of a premise that seems unbelievable, I fell into the story without hesitation.  There were no moments that caused me to "come out" of the story and question how something was possible. 

In short, I devoured this book and immediately looked for more by Ms. Kearsley.  Eventually the library purchased all of her books.  I immediately recommended them to Christian who became hooked, and together we've been recommending them to all our patrons!  You can find most of them on the Overdrive app as well.

Poet's Perch : World Poetry Day

March 21st is World Poetry Day as declared by UNESCO in 1999.

From http://www.un.org/en/events/poetryday/ :

"Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings."

Over the last year or so, I (Julie) have published on this blog, famous poems.  I am finding them, for the most part, in a book called The Family Album of Favorite Poems.  I didn't study much poetry in school, and honestly never had much of an interest in it.  However, I have found that many familiar quotations and phrases have their origins in poetry and as I have grown older I have come to appreciate the beauty in many poems. 

Today, I am sharing a poem taken from Hamlet by Shakespeare.  Reading through it, I find several phrases familiar to me that I had forgotten came from Shakespeare.  I chose this poem in particular because Mrs. Laughton (Minnie Birdsong) made us memorize it in our Senior English class. 

To Be Or Not To Be

To be, or not to be:  that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?  To die: to sleep,

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd.  To die, to sleep;

To sleep:  perchance to dream:  ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.  There's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

William Shakespeare

Egg Hunt!

It's time for our annual Egg Hunt in the library!

Every year we hide hundreds of Easter Eggs in the library.  Anytime between now and Easter you can come into the library and participate.  You can find 5 eggs per visit.  You get to keep the treasures inside, but we ask for the eggs back, so we can refill them.  We invite kids of ALL ages to participate!  Happy hunting!

It's Pi Day!

Today is Pi day. Pi = 3.14 and today is 3/14.  I'm sure many of you thought you'd seen the last of pi when you finished high school geometry!  Social media is good about reminding us of things long forgotten, though, and math trivia is no exception.

So, what is pi exactly?  Well, according to  piday.org, Pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Make sense to you?  No?  piday.org also gives us the following history of pi.

"By measuring circular objects, it has always turned out that a circle is a little more than 3 times its width around. In the Old Testament of the Bible (1 Kings 7:23), a circular pool is referred to as being 30 cubits around, and 10 cubits across. The mathematician Archimedes used polygons with many sides to approximate circles and determined that Pi was approximately 22/7. The symbol (Greek letter “π”) was first used in 1706 by William Jones. A ‘p’ was chosen for ‘perimeter’ of circles, and the use of π became popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737. In recent years, Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits past its decimal. Only 39 digits past the decimal are needed to accurately calculate the spherical volume of our entire universe, but because of Pi’s infinite & patternless nature, it’s a fun challenge to memorize, and to computationally calculate more and more digits."

If all that makes no sense to you, never fear.  Most people, including those of us FCL look at pi day as simply a great excuse to eat some pie!

Happy Pi Day!

Chance's Corner: John Wayne + Baby Face + Hays Code

Several boxes of movies were donated to the Franklin County Library recently, filled with classics, musicals, and westerns. Mixed in the lot was a ton of John Wayne films that helped us beef up our John Wayne collection and replace some of the VHS copies we still had on the shelf.

John Wayne was a very prolific actor, credited in 178 movies, dating all the way back to 1926. Granted, some of his early credits are: Extra, Flood Extra, Tall Boy and Richard Thorpe as a corpse. It wasn't until the 1930s that John Wayne actually started to get roles that had a specific name attached to the character.

One such film is Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who knows what's she got, and how to get everything else. Va-va-va-voom! I stumbled upon Baby Face while researching which John Wayne films we still didn't have in our collection, and it sounded like a real humdinger, but John Wayne was only in the movie for a short period of time, so I dismissed it.... until it came on Turner Classic Movies last week.

Baby Face, released in 1933, instantly struck me as something different. From the get go, Stanwyck was chewing men up and spitting them out. She'd smile at a man, flutter her lashes and take him to a dark corner... in an overly-suggestive manner. John Wayne was one of those men, for a mere two or three minutes. Sure, none of that "sexy stuff" is really new for movies today, but for 1933, it was scandalous.

It was so scandalous, in fact, that Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, was called upon to form the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code), which was strictly enforced in 1934 - 1954. The objective of the Hays Code was to prevent pictures that would "lower the moral standards of those who see it" from ever seeing the light of day.

Baby Face certainly wasn't the only film that caused the enforcement of the code. Films such as The Blue Angel, Gold Diggers of 1933 and The Sign of the Cross caused quite a stir. Several real life scandals in Hollywood involving well-known stars, including accusations against actor/comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, were also contributing factors.

The times have changed, and the Hays Code has been dead for several years now. However, movie makers are still being held accountable for their content by the Motion Picture Association of America with the use of a rating system (G, PG, etc.). This system is give or take. It allows for more freedom and less censorship, but it still controls audience perceptions of a film and how much a director is willing to cut to make an R movie PG-13 to make more money off younger audiences.

Whew! If it wasn't for John Wayne, I never would have never unearthed Baby Face, and I never would have dove deep into the history of the Hays Code. So again, John Wayne saves the day!

Spring Break Activities!

Happy Spring Break!  We hope you're having a great week in spite of the dismal forecast.  We have a couple of fun activities planned if you need to get out of the house this week.

First up is Wacky Wednesday!

Ms. Christian has lots of cool crafts planned and we will get out our collection of board games tomorrow afternoon at 2:00!

Then we will have a coloring party for both teens and adults on Thursday.

We have coloring books and supplies or you are welcome to bring your own.  Join us at 2:00 for teens and 5:30 for adults! 

Have a safe and happy Spring Break!  We hope to see you soon!

Tom's Two Cents: "Georgia" by Dawn Tripp

In recent years a number of novels have been written about the wives of famous men--Hadley Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald for two--but seldom do we have a book about a couple of equally famous people (unless they are both "celebrities") such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.  Even today, of course, O'Keeffe is still far better known and revered as a modern artist than Alfred Stieglitz, but that was certainly not the case when they first met, around 1917.

In the world of artistic photography Stieglitz was second to none in America, anyway, just after the turn of the 20th century, with his famous gallery of modern art, "291", in New York City.  Dawn Tripp's new novel, "Georgia," is, as the title indicates, O'Keeffe's story first and foremost, but Alfred Stieglitz could hardly be called a secondary character.  In many respects, he fulfills the role of antagonist in this novel to O'Keefe's role as protagonist.  Indeed, the story is told throughout from her viewpoint in first person narrative; thus we see Stieglitz primarily through her eyes; nonetheless, he is forever looming larger than life.

Their relationship, lasting from about 1916 to his death in 1946, is certainly one of the most complex in the history of modern art. I use the word "history" advisedly here because never, or hardly ever, does Tripp take this story outside the realm of the personal.  It is far more a timeless story than a story of the times, despite the centrality of abstract art to the time in which it took place.  It is about two extraordinarily strong-willed people, both of them artistic geniuses, who cannot in any real sense of the word play "second fiddle" to each other.  In a very real sense their love story (and it is a great one) is a fight to the finish.  We will leave it to you, the reader, to determine which (if either) of the two emerges victorious.

Although the novel is framed by retrospection (chapters after and before the relationship begins and ends) it is clearly, and wisely, not the story of O'Keeffe's entire life or career.  Tripp very carefully avoids even a mention of Juan Hamilton, the other great male influence in O'Keeffe's life, until near the end of the book, and he never actually makes an appearance.  There is probably another novel here, and it could become a sequel to this one, if it is as commercially successful as I suspect it will be.  In fact, I smell a movie on the horizon, largely because of the immense personal conflict and explicit sexuality that this book generates. (Let's hope that Brad and Angelina don't get ahold of it, though she certainly could be made to exude the O'Keeffe persona!)

I did not care for the style of this book (lean and fragmentary), though it's probably written in a voice eminently suited to its protagonist, or its deliberately limited point of view, though the choice of first person seems logical enough.  I also object to the endless use of present tense (it starts appropriately enough in past tense and, in my opinion, should have stayed there), but I know I'm the one who's out of sync with today's trends.  With these reservations, I do recommend the book.