Miscellany

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Kathy

I recently realized that my current reading is a very weird mix. I’ll describe the books I’m reading in order–from the sublime to the ridiculous, literally.

The most ponderous is a 700+ page biography called Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford, a musician and composer who’s also written biographies of Beethoven and Brahms. A few weeks ago we saw Milos Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus at Severance Hall, with the stunning soundtrack provided by the Cleveland Orchestra. Realizing that the film was fictionalized–poor Salieri, a contemporary composer did not actually murder Mozart–I wondered about Mozart’s childlike (not to say sophomoric) sense of fun, as well as the real story behind his father’s exploitation of his talent.

After a couple of weeks, I’m only about 250 pages in. Mozart in real life was even sillier and more scatological than Tom Hulce’s movie performance. Now and then I take a YouTube break to listen to whatever Mozart piece Swafford is describing. As you no doubt know, there’s a lot to listen to. Though Mozart died at age 35, he began composing music when he was five years old, and he could turn out a symphony in an afternoon. He and his music deserve all 750 pages.

In contrast to sunny Mozart, Edouard Leve’s novel Suicide is also in my current reading rotation. At only a little over 100 pages long, it’s also a contrast to Swafford’s tome. Leve, an author and photographer, born in 1965, committed suicide about ten days after he submitted the Suicide manuscript to his publisher in 2007. As you can imagine, a novelistic suicide note, essentially, appeals to readers’ morbid interest.

But I didn’t know this background when I requested the book. My book group was recently discussing Julie Otsuka’s novel The Swimmers, whose last chapter is written in second person; that is, it’s addressed to a you, ostensibly the daughter of the earlier chapters’ main character, an older woman with dementia. This narrative choice is very unusual. It happens that one of my favorite books, Winter Birds (1994) by Jim Grimsley, also has a second-person narration, where it represents the adult narrator addressing himself as a young boy. When I looked up second person narrators, I found Suicide, and that’s how it made it to my bookshelf. Suicide is as somber as you might imagine, well observed and powerful, but not exactly entertaining.

For occasional relief, I pick up Tears of the Giraffe, the second in a mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith. I recently enjoyed the first installment, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. recommended by a YouTube influencer. These popular books feature a wise and charming Botswanan sleuth named Precious Ramotswe. Smith’s series runs to 23 volumes, which might become a more ambitious reading project even than Mozart.

On an even lighter note, I’m also reading Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of “Airplane” by the movie’s goofball creators Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, a recommendation from our friend Tim. I was attracted by the David Letterman quote on the back cover praising the movie and the prevalence of Letterman quotes inside as well. I like David Letterman. It seems Dave auditioned for the movie and didn’t get a part, which he, like the filmmakers, finds very amusing. Dave kept telling them, “I can’t act. I can’t act. I can’t act.” After his audition, they told him, “You’re right. You can’t act.” Dave says, “I was right, and we all ended up parting as friends. So it was a good time.”

An eclectic mix, to be sure. I usually don’t read four books at a time, but I’m liking them all.

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Connecting (Again)

Posted on October 14, 2023 by Kathy
He did send his beautiful book.

I looked up this old post, which first appeared in 2014, because my niece Frances is working at the Dallas Museum of Art, which features an outdoor sculpture called “Ave” by Mark di Suvero. I wanted to share our family connection to the artist with her. Here’s the old post, updated a little, featuring di Suvero’s Dreambook as our Weekend Edition.

I’ve written here before about my dad’s experiences at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City. Brush-Moore Newspapers, the company that owned the Canton Repository, where my dad worked, sent him to the Institute a number of times for surgeries and rehab, after he became a paraplegic in the early fifties.

I’ve noted in other writing his close encounters with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers shortstop who, injured in a 1958 auto accident, became a paraplegic, and his relationship with Alger Hiss, who visited him regularly when he was in New York for a long stint. Dad entertained us in his letters and after he got home in person with stories about these people, as well as Dr. Howard Rusk, the pioneering doctor who founded the hospital, and also other doctors, nurses, aides, and regular folk he encountered there. One of the people he met at the Institute, as we called it, was the artist Mark di Suvero, who had been seriously injured in a construction accident.

My dad would have been in his fifties by the time they met, when di Suvero was a thirty-something young artist. I remember that his real name was Marco Polo di Suvero and that he was born in Shanghai to Italian parents. He had a beard and apparently wore turtleneck sweaters and was already part of the counter-culture as it was then developing. My dad had educated, liberal sensibilities, but was a straightforward Middle American who eschewed affectation and regarded most eccentricities suspiciously. So, he was bemused and intrigued by di Suvero and liked him, too, all at the same time. They continued to exchange letters after my dad returned home. As far as I know, they’ve been lost.

At some point, a couple of decades ago, my sisters and I checked into di Suvero and discovered that he was a prominent artist, with sculptures at museums and public places all around the world, including the nearby (to us) Akron Museum of Art, who owns his Eagle Wheel. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about Mark di Suvero and realized that in 2014 he probably had a website. Which he does, here.

I ferreted out the contact information and sent Mr. di Suvero a short email, wondering if he remembered my dad and expressed our appreciation to him as someone who befriended (and was befriended by) my dad in far-off New York. Soon after, I received a message, passed along by an assistant.

It begins, “I remember your father from more than 50 years ago. I liked him because he was a good man, intelligent, and he brought something positive to the climate of the room at Rusk.” He goes on to say that he’s still in touch with another roommate, a quadriplegic named Lenny, a name I recall, who played chess with my dad. Lenny recalls that he and my dad continued to play chess after they had graduated from Rusk. It’s true that my dad maintained chess games long-distance. He had a cool cardboard book with little cardboard chess pieces you could fit into slots; you communicated your plays to your antagonist via postcards. Those games, perforce, went on for months.

The message goes on: “I was forced by political conviction (anti-war) to leave the country so I lost contact with your father.” Interesting, this little division caused by the Vietnam War. My dad, too, opposed the war and disagreed with some friends and family and co-workers in doing so. He even grew a modest beard in the late sixties, but soon shaved it off, worried about those affectations I mentioned before. My dad read I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The New Republic and was way ahead of many college students, including me, in opposing the war.

Mr. di Suvero’s email message ends like this: “I am sure that he was one of the bright citizens and has made me think in a deeply positive sense of Canton, Ohio.” It’s a great thing to encounter someone who knew my dad, who was born in 1911 and died in 1971. Not many such people left.

At the end of his message, Mark di Suvero offers to send me a Dreambook, a collection of photos of his work, which I’m waiting for, with great anticipation, now.

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A Daily Word, Not Just for Wednesdays

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Joe Pizzio on Unsplash

Bloggers’ and YouTubers’ apologies for not recently posting are unnecessary and boring, in my opinion, so I’ll skip the regrets and excuses.

Speaking of social media, however, here’s a word you may be noticing as much as I am: journey. Influencers are on a fitness journey, or a weight-loss journey, or a decluttering journey, or a recovery journey. I just now saw a sewing-machine shop website, which suggests you begin your journey with sewing classes. Furniture refinishers are on a restoration journey.

There’s nothing wrong with all these journeys, except that once you start noticing the word, it gets annoying. This is the nature of cliches. Instead of listening to the speaker, I start thinking, “You could say process, maybe, or adventure, or experience. How about undertaking or experiment?” Share your own creative substitutions in the comments.

Journey, like many cliches, began as an original and vivid metaphor. Think about the first time, for example, someone said she was head over heels in love. How startling is that image? Love turns you into Simone Biles spinning around upside down!

Except it’s not startling any more. It washes over you with no effect, because you’ve heard it so many times. The metaphor journey is the same. Originally, the word implied that your new venture felt like traveling, like you’re getting somewhere. Now it just sounds hackneyed and pretentious.

Journey itself has had an interesting journey through Western culture. The root is the Latin diurnus, meaning “daily,” which came from dies, meaning “day” (as in per diem). This evolved into the Old French word jornee, meaning “a day’s travel.” Journey, then, is related to the soup du jour on your menu and the journal in which you confide daily thoughts about your spiritual journey.

Interesting that journey by its very root once connoted a brief jaunt. Now it implies a longer voyage (or a rock band). Like a trip to the center of the earth, or like Sheila Burnford’s incredible chronicle about two lost dogs and a cat finding their way home. No longer a day trip, journey implies long and arduous effort, like, well, fitness, weight loss, and decluttering.

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Read the Label

Posted on September 12, 2023 by Kathy

The Pringle is “a piece of malevolent technical genius, as a product deliberately designed to engineer obesity.” Chris Tulleken

An ultra-processed food (UPF), according to doctor and author Chris Tulleken, can be defined as a product wrapped in plastic and containing at least one ingredient that would not appear in an average home kitchen. My Morningstar Farms veggie burgers, for example, come in a plastic bag and contain wheat gluten, soy protein concentrate, calcium caseinate, and small amounts of methylcellulose, natural flavor, soy protein isolate, yeast extract, and xanthum gum. That’s why they taste so good.

That line is not a joke. In his new book Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, Tulleken writes, “Good cooks can enhance flavours (he’s British) and tastes by combining them, but I think UPF is the nutritional equivalent of speedballing.” Some additives, to be sure, increase shelf life, but many are engineered to mimic real flavors (I’m American) and textures cheaply. They insidiously tempt us to consume more product. Tulleken explains, “By speedballing different tastes and sensations, UPF can force far more calories into us than we could otherwise handle.”

To be sure, he’s writing about Coke in this passage, not veggie burgers, and I can’t say I’ve ever binged on veggie burgers, but the point is the same. Most of us are eating a lot of UPF, which is to say we’re eating a lot that isn’t food. Tulleken argues that this fact explains the British and American obesity epidemic now spreading worldwide, as well as many problems and deaths related to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, among other conditions. Sixty to eighty percent of the UK and USA diet consists of UPF. It’s not good for us.

Maybe try to cut down on your xanthum gum, for instance. It’s a “sugary slime” produced by the bacteria that creates black rot on vegetables. It’s used as a thickener. Xanthum gum feeds a new bacteria appearing in our gut, that is, a bacteria unknown in remote hunter-gatherer groups. Another new species of bacteria feeds on the byproducts of the first new species. Nobody knows the effects of these two new bacteria on our bodies, including our immune systems.

I frequently cook from scratch and eat a good amount of vegetables. I’m currently following a low-carb diet, which has managed to reduce my COVID-lockdown waistline. However, in my pantry currently are Ritz Crackers, McCormick Turkey Gravy mix, Nilla Wafers, Jello Vanilla Pudding Mix, and La Banderita Tortillas (mmm, xanthum gum!). All packaged in plastic, or something similar, and all containing a plethora of weird s—t.

I never imagined I would be a person writing on this topic, but Dr. Tulleken inspired me. He’s not only smart. He’s also funny and compassionate. (He deplores the stigma attached to being overweight, for example.) He makes no judgments on people and their choices. He merely provides information. I recommend his book.

This is the interview that made me request Ultra-Processed People from my local library.

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Stochastic Meandering

Posted on September 6, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Manuel Meurisse on Unsplash

Learning a word’s history at the same time as its meaning helps reinforce our understanding of the word and remember it more effectively. If you know, for example, that volition comes from the Latin word volo, meaning “wish,” you’re likely to remember that volition denotes relying on one’s will or choice, as in doing something of one’s own volition. Then the rarer, related word avolition is easy to decode, if you know that the Greek prefix a means “without,” as in amoral. Avolition, used in psychology, describes a profound lack of motivation, literally “without wishing,” a disinclination to, well, do anything.

Encountering two unfamiliar words in recent New Yorker magazines (I thought), I checked out their etymologies to help me comprehend and retain their meanings. Cynthia Ozick’s story “A French Doll” (7/2423) includes the word ukase. Its meaning is “command” or “edict,” but I had to know where that weird-looking word is from. In Russian, ukaz is a decree issued by the emperor. Because the story concerns Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, many of them Russian, that unusual and interesting word is apropos.

The second unfamiliar word appears not in a New Yorker short story (although I just reread an entire story trying in vain to find it), but in an online interview with author T. Coraghessan Boyle about his story “The End Is Only the Beginning” (8/14/2023). The story concerns the randomness of Covid and the randomness of fate. His main character, Boyle explains to his interviewer in a remarkable sentence, “is not me, or not entirely, but a shadowy simulacrum existing not in our terrifyingly stochastic world but in the orderly paginated one I have created in order to work out my own anxieties.” As it happens, I’m familiar with simalacrum and paginated, but not stochastic, which means “random” or “unpredictable.” This Greek-derived word, which appeared first in English in 1662, related originally to probability; its Greek root means “to aim at a mark, to conjecture, to guess.” Later writers have used it to mean “random.”

I was interested to see that the term, as many of you smart people probably know, is used in mathematics, natural science, physics, computer science, finance, linguistics, medicine, music, and other studies, including geomorphology. Regarding that last science, in case you wanted to know, the direction of a river’s meanderings has been studied as a stochastic process.

Some readers might be annoyed at T. Coraghessan Boyle’s tossing about of such rare and recondite words. Words that you have to look up, at least if you’re me. But at one time all words were unfamiliar to us. How else do we learn new ones? I ask you. And if you read the story, which I recommend, you’ll see that “our terrifyingly stochastic world” encapsulates his story in four perfect words.

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Lessons in Etymology

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

Before I began reading my next book group book, a novel called Lessons in Chemistry, I glanced at author Bonnie Garmus’s bio inside the back cover, where I saw that her dog’s name is 99. I wondered if Garmus had watched the sitcom Get Smart as a kid. Garmus is 66, so it’s just possible.

My dad and I occasionally watched Get Smart, a clever send-up of James Bond created by Mel Brooks. Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams, was a clueless spy, prone to drawing precisely the wrong conclusions. His partner agent’s code name was 99. The lovely Barbara Feldon, who played 99, caused many viewers’ hearts to flutter. It occurs to me now that she was the sitcom counterpart to the svelte Emma Peal (Diana Rigg) from The Avengers.

Several taglines survive from Get Smart, including “Sorry about that, Chief” and “Would you believe . . . ?” One that took hold in my family was “Good thinking, 99,” a compliment Smart would bestow upon his smarter partner. At our house, whenever someone figured something out, such as deciphering a hard clue on Saturday Review’s Double-Crostic, the response would be, “Good thinking, 99.” My husband and I still say this sometimes.

When I read Garmus’s dog’s name, I googled the phrase and found this explanation of its origins:

Maxwell Smart would always be quoted saying, “Good thinking, 99.” 99 is used because it is very close to 100 and is an indication of intelligence, because scoring 99 on any difficult test or project requires intelligence. It is a pop culture reference to an old television show that your parents probably remember.

Whoever wrote that should have asked his or her parents to explain the reference. How dare they overlook the significance of Agent 99?

This is an example of false etymology. Sometimes a similarity between words seems to imply a connection that isn’t there. History, for example, does not derive from his + story (i.e. narrative that leaves out women); rather, it’s from an ancient Greek word meaning “knowledge acquired through research.” Acronyms that sound too good to be true usually are, such as “Gentlemen only, ladies forbidden” to explain golf, which actually derives from some old Scottish word.

The online 99 explanation seems like something somebody just made up. The writer seems to be thinking, “99% is a pretty good grade, right?” Either way, I have to assume Bonnie Garmus’s dog is smart, because she’s either named after Agent 99 or scores almost 100% on every test.

Does your family use catchphrases from TV or movies? It will be interesting to see our generational (and other) differences.

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COVID on Our Bookshelves

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

When I was working on A Grandmother’s ABC Book, I worried that sections about COVID would be old news by the time the book came out. Revising, waiting for feedback, and inevitable delays increased my worry. Unfortunately, as we now know, COVID is not quite passé. It’s hanging around in our world, with hundreds dying every day, and in our vivid memories of isolation and lockdown. And sometimes in our grief.

Of course, COVID is cropping up in books, and I’ve just read two good ones: The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, and Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout.

Because I hate to know anything about a novel before I read it, I’m not going to risk ruining these for you. I’ll speak generally. The Sentence is for people who love reading and bookstores. Set in a store very much like Erdrich’s Birch Bark Books in Minneapolis, The Sentence features a cast of original and sometimes hilarious bookstore denizens, including a fictional bookstore owner named Louise, who pops in and out of the story. The humor somehow holds its own amid the sadness of the pandemic and the horrors of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent violence, which take place very near the bookstore. The book ends with a long list of books “recommended” by the novel’s main character, a list worth the price of the book.

Lucy by the Sea features Lucy Barton, the novelist-protagonist of Strout’s earlier books, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, and Oh William. It’s helpful but not essential to have read the previous books in order to appreciate Lucy by the Sea. Strout fans will enjoy cameos from other books: Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess. (I may have found these appearances a little cute. Not sure what to think.)

The Lucy books are like peeling an onion. You perceive intimations of trauma in My Name Is Lucy Barton, but they’re nebulous. Each subsequent book reveals more about Lucy’s painful childhood. You’re brought up to date about her later life as well, including her marriages. Like the earlier books, Lucy by the Sea concerns, in part, parenthood. How do we raise children? How do we relate to them as adults? Aging and COVID force Lucy to confront mortality.

Both Erdrich and Strout evoke the ignorance, fear, and weirdness of the lockdown, as well as some of the blessings, if you were lucky. Sometimes isolation was a relief. Sometimes it got you out into nature. Sometimes it gave you time to read. And both authors vividly show how the epidemic has been much, much harder on some people than on others.

Here’s a list of some novels and other books set during the pandemic. Have you read them? Or is the topic still too close for comfort?

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Bad Air Quality

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Ajithkumar M on Unsplash

Malaria’s in the news, because we’ve seen cases in the US transmitted on our own soil, not carried in by a traveler–the cases totalling eight so far. Worldwide, it’s still a scourge, afflicting almost 250 million people every year, killing about 600,000.

We know that the carrier is the mosquito, or “little fly” in Spanish. The tiny guys (and gals) of various species carry four different types of protozoans; the most dangerous is plasmodium falciparum, which basically means a plasma, or smeary liquid, made up of sickle-shaped cells.

The word malaria’s history is interesting in its simplicity. It’s just what it looks like: bad (mal) air (aria). People used to think the fetid air around marshes caused what they called “marsh fever.” Nobody knew to blame the skeeters.

In around 1880, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army doctor, spotted the culpable organisms swimming in patients’ red blood cells and received the 1907 Nobel Prize for the discovery. Quinine and then chloroquine (remember that?) were found to be effective treatments. In 1898 other scientists found that mosquitoes were helping the plasmodia get around.

Wikipedia shares this cheerful bit of information: “In total, malaria may have killed 50-60 billion people throughout history, or about half of all humans that have ever lived.”

Bad air, indeed.

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One More July?

Posted on July 12, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Jacqueline O’Gara on Unsplash

We’re now well into the seventh month of the year, so it’s high time we examined the history of the name July. The Roman Senate named the month in 44 B.C.E. to honor the assassinated Roman general and dictator Julius Caesar, who was born in July.

Well, to be precise, Julius Caesar was born in Quintilis, at one time the fifth month of the ancient calendar, which began in March. If March is the first month of the year, then Quintilis/July is indeed the fifth month. (Think quintet and quintuplet.) The year proceeded through ten months, ending with December, in which you can see words related to ten, such as decade and decimal.

Weirdly, between December and March passed sixty or so unnamed days. I always imagine the Romans hunkered down in their villas and insulae (apartments), tapping their fingers, huddling by the fire, waiting for the winter days to pass until they could once again reach an actual month (Yay! It’s March!).

According to legend, King Numa, who ruled from 715–672 BCE, gave those orphaned days their names, January and February, but originally, they remained at the end of the year, after December. In about 450 BCE (opinions differ) January was promoted to the first month of the year.

Which moved July down to number seven. It’s the quintessential summer month, usually the warmest month of the year, though it’s the coldest in the Southern hemisphere. I imagine the children’s writer Roald Dahl was thinking of the Northern hemisphere when he wrote, “”If I had my way, I’d remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead.”

How about it? Would you want an extra July?

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Writing and Reading Amazon Book Reviews

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Kathy
Photo by Ivars Utināns on Unsplash

An acquaintance recently told me that she might be able to help me do an author talk at the Thurber House in Columbus. The humorist James Thurber’s former home is now a literary center, with workshops, tours, and classes related to all manner of writing. Looking to break out of my Northeast Ohio bailiwick, I was also excited because I am a James Thurber fan from way back. One of my fondest reading memories is My Life and Hard Times. (I probably wouldn’t react the same way now, but in high school I laughed until I cried.)

After this kind acquaintance asked her friends at the Thurber House about booking me, she found that they no longer run a program dedicated to Ohio writers, and, more importantly, they seek out bigger game, more successful writers than me. She wrote, “You may need a bit more promotion of your book (more reviews, shown on Amazon).” A Grandmother’s ABC Book had been out only a week or two at that point, and there were no Amazon reviews.

Nobody needs to tell me that I’m not well known, but that Amazon comment is telling. A book title on Amazon with no reviews (and ABC is still without them) looks pretty forlorn. In order to acquire them, many writers and publishers send advance copies to prolific, highly rated Amazon reviewers ahead of publication, so that reviews are ready to post when the book comes out. That’s too much work for a small publisher like mine, and so, for past books, I have solicited reviews from friends, but also strangers. I searched around the Amazon site for reviewers, contacted them, and asked them to review my book (a process now underway for the ABC book). The reviewers get nothing but the glory and a free book. The writer takes a chance on some so-so reviews, but getting that space filled under your book title is the goal. The same process is more or less true of Goodreads.

This puts me in a bind. I want to support local independent bookstores, not Jeff Bezos’s lifestyle. Therefore, I discourage readers from buying on Amazon (though I believe the occasional desperate last-minute purchase is forgivable). Order from your bookstore instead. Also, Bookshop.org provides an online avenue to support your favorite bookstore.

At the same time, I know that many readers perusing Amazon make judgments about books. I don’t want my books to look sad there. So, I’m in the weird position of asking readers to write Amazon reviews but not to buy books there. Booksellers have told me that some “customers” browse their stores, jotting down titles to purchase on Amazon when they get home. Don’t do that. Browse Amazon, including reviews, to collect titles of interest, and then call or visit your local bookstore to order them.

I probably wouldn’t have been invited to speak at the Thurber House anyway, because they, understandably, want more prominent writers. I can’t help but note, however, that the Amazon deficiency factored in to the decision.

The bottom line. Post reviews on Amazon, if you can in good conscience, especially for small books with a small following. (John Grisham does not need your support.) Do the same on Goodreads. Your local writers and poets (Yes! Review poetry!) will thank you.

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