Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house, chats up the Red Hook Ladies, attending “every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season,” where she tries to befriend the wives of lobstermen by feigning enthusiasm for rummage sales. But every Fall, Iris returns to New York, to art and to work, and will never, in the eyes of the locals, be anything but a “from away”.
Iris’ father, Mr Kimmelbroad, is indeed “from away”: a real gentleman, a refugee violinist from Prague who still smells of polished wood, rosin, violets and 4711 Kolnisch Wasser. The family are immigrants: bustling, displaced, well educated.
Jane, mother of the groom, is a local: by temperament, by income and by genealogy. Jane is strong from “clomping up and down stairs and hauling laundry and vacuum cleaners.” Jane has been taking care of houses for the “from aways” for a long long time, as had her mother before her. One of these houses is Iris’, which she cleans in the summers and tends all year long.
She [would get] the furnace and the propane tank filled, turn on the water, take down the storm windows and put up the screens, mow the meadow and lawn, replace the water filter, have the piano tuned, and replenish staples like flour, sugar and the fancy teas ….
The story begins in the middle of the wedding, detailing the profusions of fresh flowers, mismatched vases, white lace tablecloths, blues band, bar, hanging lanterns, crab-cakes and lobster puffs and champagne of the reception at Grange Hall, where the mothers find out that the bride and groom are dead. What becomes of the mothers and their other children is part of the story of the wedding, because the wedding joins not only the bride and groom but the mothers; makes them, in Yiddish, Machatainisteh.
It is not unusual for women’s books to lay out women in groups, like a plate of madeleines, a silver tray of cream cakes. But this circle of quilters is not a dainty or delicate array.
Chiaverini quilts stories about a dozen or so women who quilt, whose separate lives come together accidentally and on purpose at Elm Creek quilting camp, where women welcome women into an American tradition. Chiaverini’s women are full-bodied, irregular, problematic. Each one has stories full of children or mothers; Diane, for example, who shows up at the police station to bail out her son:
Well. it certainly does my heart good to know that the citizens of Waterford are being protected so heroically from skateboarders. Now if only you could do something about all those thieves and murderers and terrorists running loose, now I would be really impressed.
Diane is smart and sarcastic and argumentative, Sylvia is a grand old dame and a master quilter, Summer is a sleek hippy daughter of a single feminist academic, Judy is a practical, organized, rational type, Bonnie industrious and busy shopowner-housewife, Sarah, the bitchy domestic manager and co founder of the quilting camp. After eight quilting books, these characters are solid evidentiary structures and Elm Creek is a well elaborated structure of the imagination: safe, supportive, creative, cozy. It is problematic and fun. As fun as a summer camp for big girls who love little pieces of cloth.
It is of course the problems of everyday life that are shared among the quilters, not just the piecing and sewing and binding and basting.Perhaps there is a kinship between these ladies and the medieval craftswomen or ‘spinsters’ who (like the wife of Bath) were good at ‘deceit, weeping and spinning’. Somehow, this medieval picture of women and textiles and discourse is comforting to female readers in 2010.
A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. “What kind of a fellow is the Pope?” they asked him. “44 Medium,” he said.
This is the kind of obsession Buffet is looking for in his managers. “In Warren’s world it is not so much about how smart we are, but how obsessed we are,” says Mary Buffet, in her sweet voice. Find an obsessive with ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images which cannot be ignored or suppressed’ (DSM 300.3). And make sure that he is obsessed with your business.
This is a sweet book read by a sweet voice, easy to hear and easy to understand. Indeed, sometimes it reads like a recipe book, with generous margins for adding ingredients. Sometimes it reads like the ROMPER ROOM list of Do-bees and Don’t-bees. DON’T be greedy when choosing a job. DON’T borrow money. DO delegate. DON’T criticize your employees. Do what you love to do and hire people who love what they do. DO be obsessed. DO choose the right company.
When a company owns a piece of the consumer’s mind, it never has to change its products. That means more profits, and more managerial bonuses. It is good to work for such a company.
When a company sells a unique service, like H & R Block, it doesn’t have to worry about falling demand: “There is never a recession in the tax filing business.” It also doesn’t have to worry about spending lots of money on capital. It is good to work for such a company.
Below-cost buyers and sellers like Walmart’s and Costco also have a competitive advantage; but beware—the stress on keeping prices low puts a great deal of pressure on managers. Still, these chains offer good managerial opportunities.
Sometimes it reads like a macroeconomics textbook, and sometimes like a handbook in human psychology (We all have a deep and honest need to be appreciated.). Or etiquette (When meeting someone for the first time, behave in a friendly way. ).
But mostly this is a manual of common sense with instructions on how to be a good human being, not only a good manager.
How fun to be a stubborn, sensible English widow who takes up decorating or hotelkeeping or moves to Brighton. The kind of fun that takes time: not like those television garden shows that demonstrate
“how to transform an entire garden in a matter of five hours while the lady of the house [goes to] visit her mother in the next town. ...A team would move in. They would spend an inordinate amount of money on mature plants, containers, garden furniture, trellising and ceramic slabs… Towards the end there would be moments of panic because the wife was due to walk in the door in precisely seven minutes time…”
No, Caroline has fun slowly. She sells her old house at Bath slowly, she moves to Brighton slowly, she fixes her old house slowly, and then converts a new house into flats, slowly. Meanwhile she discovers that she’s “...got a wonderful eye for fabrics, window treatments, lighting, decorating, color schemes and so on … even furniture.” Then, very slowly, she turns her builder into her friend and her friend into her partner, slowly, sensibly, with a happy division of labour:
I’m asking you to design while I carry out the practical part.
Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.
In between rolling translations of Anglo-Saxon chronicles, poems, histories, M.C.D. Drout hawks 566 years of kings, pirates, popes, monks, wars, buildings and battles. But most and first of all, he hooks us with language, giving us bits of Anglo-Saxon poems, lists of Old English words (some, siton, foton), Old English websites, including kingalfred.com, where he has written a free Anglo Saxon grammar called “King Alfred’s Grammar” named after his (and soon to be yours) best and biggest hero : King Alfred; and anglosaxon.com where he serves up his recordings of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Whew!
Then he gives us, cut up into nice round 100 year sizes, the history of a “people who lived in a place full of Celtic place-names, surrounded by Roman ruins, bringing with them Germanic legends, and building Christian Churches”. Organized by the MaCGyVr principle, it is a history of 6 ages: Migration, Conversion, Golden, Viking, Reform and Fall.
Throughout, he tells us marvelous stories of the marvelous, noting what historians know, what they fight about, what they hate each other for, and how to read historical interpretations as interpretations, how to consider what makes sense, what doesn’t, and how to fall in love with the material of Anglo-Saxon history, its indeterminacy, its scarcity, its ongoing reconstruction.
In between he does stand-up:
Jefferson came up with the idea that the front of the [great] seal should have a picture of Hengist and Horsa …. and that the backside of the seal … would picture Pharoah, sitting in a chariot, as he road through the parted red sea … with the Israelites on the other side, following the pillar of fire that led them to the promised land. You know, I have to say, the eagle was probably the safe way to go here….
A town is the scene of what people do, become and have.
Stabenow describes happy slow small towns with unusual people who are ever so slightly insane. Who might shoot people over candy bars, or murder them in quaint hotel rooms or share fried bread with a wolf.
There are towns with female elders called “Aunties” who have outlived five or six husbands each, speak English as their third or fourth language, and who have enthusiastically and indiscriminately adopted every stray idiot that crossed their path. They have walnut brown cheeks, wear gold rickrack and are poised between misdemeanors.
Some of these towns are north and some are norther. It is cold:
He wore a balaclava and a knit cap, inside hood Gortex pro shell, ski pants, Patagonia capilene, beneath down parka guaranteed to 20 degrees (below), surround caribous guaranteed to 20 below…
Some are situated where there would be gold if it could be mined. And here there are problems.
Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.
It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”
But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?
How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….
A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?
Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.
“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….
A wagonful of new Agatha Christie audiobooks (“lesser” works?) shows us an Agatha knee-deep in Freud, perhaps, indeed, an “English Freud”. Here she experiments with the entire merde ridden hagiography of psychoanalytic terms: pathologies, neuroses, perversions, deviances, persecutions. Sarah has just finished her M.B. and is interested in psychology. She looks on as an old obese mother, an ugly wheelchaired figure wields a regime of psychological oppression over her “nervy” “nervous” unnerved family. The ugly Mrs. Boynton continues to perform her chores as the warden of a women’s prison, although she no longer performs them inside a prison. Instead she institutes prohibitions against the emotions, liberties, impulses, movements, of her step sons and daughters.
Sarah complains of the rudeness of Raymond Boynton, who ignores her in the presence of his mother, despite their earlier conversation. The tradition of English manners comes to Jerusalem not in opposition to rudeness but rather as a prophylactic to madness; madness is the excess of civilization, the bad habit of civilization. As the narrator in An Appointment With Death tells us about the horrific Mrs. Boynton: “In a savage tribe they would have boiled and eaten her up her years ago”.
L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a screenplay. The screenplay is fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter. The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again) in this town is one property.
The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio, an agent, a casting director, who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.
The characters are mimetic:
The studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming. (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions, at which she arrives hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.
The director is paid in dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors. The actors are not worth characterizing.
Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.
Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops. None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes signaled by cigarettes. Sometimes by a walk. Much goes unsaid, and unshared.
All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke. The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is skinny, occasionally violent, abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys: mathematics, sex, hacking. She has lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea, for a total of 97,000 kroner.
Chris Faulkener has a new job and a new friend, and comes home to a beautiful mechanic named Carla, who is his wife. He doesn’t believe in violence, but he works for a conflict investment firm, which studies, tracks and finances the small wars of the world.
Once upon a time, in a movie made long ago, there was a beautiful fairy who helped a poor little girl. You do not remember the movie. You remember the voice. It is the voice of Mary Peiffer.
This time the movie is not about a little girl. It is in fact not even a movie. It is a book, about a woman, who comes from Alaska, and lives in the cold, with dogs.
Mary Peiffer’s lovely, ringing, good witch voice, turns every book into a fairy tale. Sometimes the tale is about not so little girls who grow curiouser and curiouser. Sometimes the girls get into trouble and sometimes they almost die. But always they are found by a voice which wraps itself around them like a shawl against time.
Oliver August, correspondent for the Times of London in China is learning Chinese. His teacher asks him what Oliver means. Oliver responds: ‘Since a man that works on a farm was a farmer, a man who harvested olives was an Oliver’. His teacher then couples two radicals – olive (gan) and farmer ( no ). The 26 year old reporter is thereafter laughingly referred to as Farmer.
“Nobody in their right minds called themselves a farmer. Millions are fleeing the land to become city dwellers, to partake in the industrial revolution, to become richer. When I introduced myself people guffawed to each other. A foreign farmer has come to our China… !”
Oliver August is a sieve of a China in transformation from below. We get the language, the images, the words, the emotions, the slogans, the mixture of groundlessness and lawlessness, the sense that a Chinese being can rely neither on the earth nor on the sky for his limits. “Modern China was a magic mirror: you could see whatever you wanted to see…,” writes Oliver.
The country was both free and oppressed, at once anarchic and authoritarian, totally chaotic yet highly regulated.
Lai Changxing is an emblem of this new country; hence his is the story tracked by Oliver.
But alongside the story of the legendary Lai, a rogue reminiscent of America’s 19th century captains of industry, Oliver gives us the gossip, the rumours, the news. And the only way to report this news is “to get out and report what you saw yourself,” in sideways glances, from overnight trains, from hired cars driven by monks, from the streets and the restaurants…
But still more, Oliver gives us economics, politics, philosophy. Not cut and pasted out of wikipedia but lovely, incisive, pieces of thought, fresh from the sea, still smelling of fish.
The more China modernizes the more ravenous its appetite for the past becomes….
These wealthy Chinese who finally thought it safe to return from abroad “were known as sea-turtles who had finally brought home their nest eggs…”
A myo tan low is a building that scratches the sky…
A big-faced building iDam yam zi dasha is a building that gives the owner a lot of face…
There is a kind of being found among artists, a being-with peculiar to art school graduates, children of artists, girlfriends of artists, gallery owners and oglers and agents and wives, proximate to art, attached to it but uncertain of it, what or where or whose it is. Both proximate and remote, like a cat in a black box of which one must say it is both dead and not dead.
Such is art. On occasion, the remoteness of art maddens the artist. Deflects him from himself. Forces him to account for what he both has and doesn’t have. Impossible. A problematic with the face of Chas M. Columbia graduate, with roots on 113th Street and Amsterdam, previously of Oyster Bay.
Someone one said life is just high school, on and on… The obnoxious little shit we recall from ninth grade becomes the obnoxious little shit in the White House.
Forget Harley Street. The latest design in shrinks is a six foot 250 pound lesbian weight lifter who runs a pub with her bosomy girlfriend, and offers bed, morning after breakfast, and laundry service. This is what the 21st century male patient wants: a powerful, intuitive M.D. who can hoist him effortlessly over her shoulder, tuck him into bed without sexual threat or expectation, wash the blood off his shirt and serve up bacon and egg for breakfast.
Such a shrink, and only such a shrink can handle what the Iraq, the national health service and the Metropolitan police have brewed in ex-Lieutenant Charles Acland, now of London, hateful and harijan: untouchable.
Imagine a big black woman, Myrna from Montreal, who decides to drive South, but feels peckish after an hour and a half and so stops and bumps into a one-vache town, a fairy-tale town:
Three Pines had what she craved. It had croissants and cafe au lait. It had steak frites and the New York Times. It had a bakery, a bistro, a B & B, a general store, it had peace and stillness and laughter. It had great joy and great sadness ….
It had sweet gay couples and poor married artists and old unmarried women; it had village size problems and village size evil and village style murder. It had Christmas, and at Christmas, “homes full of people there and not there,” yakking away in English and French. Myrna never leaves. Inspector Gamache, on the other hand, comes and goes. Each time there is a murder.
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not only in Three Pines but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable cafe or brasserie or bistro. Then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something that others didn’t. At the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped no doubt, twisted and ugly, but an emotion. One so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost. Gamash’s job was to collect the evidence. But also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was to get to know the people. To watch and listen, to pay attention. And the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual manner, in a deceptively casual setting. Like the bistro.
This was supposed to be about four retired couples, cops and wives, living in Florida and solving crimes (not cases). But Spillane turned it into a study of memory. Imagine a blinded amnesiacal lover secreted away inside a community of retired cops in New Jersey, and rediscovered by her old boyfriend after 25 years? What remains when memory disappears?
How does one lover make himself remembered to another?
If the boyfriend has the grainy voice of Richard Ferrone, and the nouns of a Mickey Spillane novel: doll, honey, kitten, what remains is instinct. And the girlfriend responds to being called a specific name by a specific voice. Hey, doll. All right, kitten.
We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives, elaborations drawing on gossip, rumours, and mother disciplines, percentages, abbreviations, brand-names, phrases in mixed tongues, side notes referencing the inaccuracies of the company we keep and the associations we accumulate.
Dialogue. Which is what McBain does. Consider Carella and Parker questioning an ex-boyfriend:
So tell us how you happened to break up?
It was the Passion. The Mel Gibson movie. I told Alicia it was Anti-semitic. She disagreed. I’m Jewish; we got into an argument.
So whose idea was it to split up?
My mother’s. I live with my mother. She said if we were going to fight already over a farkaktmovie that was just the beginning…..I hate Mel Gibson.
Thirty seconds to peel a character like an egg.
Ollie Weeks is asking Parker for advise because Ollie was kissed in the mouth by Patricia the other night after he played piano for her family. Yes, this is the fat, suspicious, comical sociopath who hates everyone equally. Except that now he has a sweet piano teacher, and a sweet girlfriend and is looking ten pounds less hateful.
Kling, meanwhile, is asking Carella for advise. About Sharon, who he loves and whom he followed and who now refuses to talk to him.
“Everybody’s always innocent, Brown said. Nobody ever did anything. Catch ‘em with the bloody hatchet in their hands they say this ain’t my hatchet this is my uncle’s hatchet…Wonder anybody’s in jail at all there’s so many innocent people around….
Brown and Kling are interviewing the head of Baldwin University’s English Department who is wearing a purple butterfly bow tie and telling Brown that “we’ve never anything like this happen before….”. Brown is wondering if his wife Caroline would go for him in a tie like that one…
Because conversations are never just about information and even information is never just about information. Because even cops hear by drifting in and out of their own conversations. Hearing from where they are being heard.
Another silly and lovable murder mystery written by an out of work real estate agent? Well, let’s see: Dixie Hemingway is a 32 year old ex-deputy living Sarasota, Florida, with her brother, the fireman, and his lover, Pablo, an undercover cop. She is a certified and insured and licensed Cat sitter. She is paid $20 to feed a cat and change the litter once a day; $60 for an over night visit. She also walks dogs and hugs them goodbye. She takes pets seriously and avoids humans. She is, like most Floridians, recovering from humans. Like fat, mad mothers of suicidal children, or overpampered party girls who have aged into overpampered divorcees. Dixie is different. More cat than human; both more curious and curiouser.
If ever there was a language of L.A., a language in which each noun, common or proper, is localized, dated, and cast in a Hollywood movie, it is the language of James M. Cain. And if Cain’s L.A. had a voice, she would sound like Christine Williams. She doesn’t sing, but she could be singing; she doesn’t hawk her words, but she could be a crier of the news that books hold; she doesn’t broadcast, but she could be advertising baby food or soap; or she could be doing all of these things. In her voice vibrates the radio hysteria of the 1920s, showy, fluttery, stagy, but fundamentally sweet and pure and hopeful. Indeed, it is the voice of a big country, of big spaces, with lots of land to cross, lots of square footage. Even indoors.
And so when Cain describes L.A., he talks about Glendale. The overspill. The life just outside the borders, looking in. As if all L.A. was really outside L.A., looking in.
The bathroom that he now whistled in was a utile jewel: it was in green tile and white tile, it was as clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.
And before there were California girls, there were California women. They wore aprons over dresses, slips and stockings, they walked on pumps and pinned up their hair, even at home. They decorated cakes and cooked proper dinners, from scratch. They knew how to run a household and how to save money and how to mend things that broke. They had names like Mildred. And husbands like Pierce.
