After the April book club discussion of Bel Canto, the member who had selected Caleb's Crossing for May said she wanted to change her pick. (Damn, I really hated CC, another one of those colonial historical New England novels about an important male figure relayed by an oppressed female subject to the chauvinistic, hyper-Neanderthal Christians of her day and age. Coincidentally, the local paper did a feature story about a group of women who had been convening their book club for 50 years, starting with the Feminine Mystic and teeing up Lean In but talking about Caleb's Crossing. And another tangent, Caleb, the first American Indian to attend Harvard dies from malnutrition and consumption, hardly a stellar launch for an expansion into students of another culture; as contrasted to my taxi driver's story in DC earlier this week: he told me he was going to Boston Friday to attend his nephew's graduation; when I politely asked which school, he said Harvard. His nephew was given a full scholarship to come from Ethiopia and he graduated with a 4.0 in math and computer sciences, going to work in two weeks after a signing bonus, more money focused than his elder brother who was pursuing his PhD at Princeton).
So anyway, back to the story, the host for May changed the book to Portrait of a Marriage - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, as compiled and recalled by their son, Nigel Nicolson. And I will quote at length about Nigel finding his mother's diary after her death in 1962 and then the opening paragraphs of said diary because these two selections are "hookers" perfectly written and reader engaging.
" I took a final look round her sitting room in the tower ... a room I had entered only half a dozen times in the previous thirty years ... and came upon a locked Gladstone bag ... The bag contained something ... and having no key, I cut away the leather from around the lock to open it. Inside there was a large notebook ... page after page filled with her neat pencilled script. I carried it to her writing table and began to read. The sixth page was headed July 23rd, 1920, followed by a narrative in the first person that continued for eighty more. I read through it to the end without stirring from her table. It was an autobiography written when she was twenty-eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love that possessed her ..."
And this hidden away diary that has so much delicious sound, lilting, caressing, scandalizing, whispering, that I had to reread it immediately out loud to my sole audience, JJ:
"Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated. Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass -- for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his -- I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast."
I loved the book. Two things I found wanting: first Nigel Vita's son after admitting that he could not put the diary down once he started reading it has interspersed her chapters with pictures and his backdrop story to explain the characters and the time. Maybe no one would read such interpretation if it was appended as an epilogue; certainly Nigel is too wordy to use footnotes that would make his mother's scandalous life too pendacious and scholarly.
And then there's Vita herself: a girl who romps through childhood unrestrained exploring the natural surroundings unaccompanied. A young woman whose sense of freedom is starkly curtailed by the culture of her family to marry well. Her ultimate selection of Harold as he goes off to war and spends most of his life thereafter in the diplomatic corps oversees mopping up the consequences of the war, again leaving Vita to her own device. Although Vita had several lovers during her marriage, that part reads to much like a travelogue, running off to Paris, Venice wherever with her husband's blithe acceptance, how very English "carry-on" of him. What I want is an exploration of the landscape of Vita's libidinous soul. Her lust motivates her wandering, but I don't want a story of wanderlust, just give me an idea of the lust part. So discrete.
For a woman who lives to be alone, in her tower, in her garden, in her thoughts, she does not disclose to her diary any inner turmoil or side by side analysis of what she has at home and what she seeks away from it. When her lover marries, the boiling pot of her compulsive love is not kept on simmer but seems extinguished. I wanted a candy thermometer reading of this affair. I want my generation's TMI. Wait wasn't I the person who complained about self-promoting celebrities in an earlier blog this year?
Vita's portrait is on the cover of the book. She strikes an aloof, unapproachable pose, almost of indeterminate or questionable gender. Virginia Wolfe wrote Orlando to describe her aura and Tilden Swinton, of similar allure, portrays her in the film, which I cannot find at my library, alas.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Better than Bonk
Well,one could argue that my literary output has been sluggish. Mary Roach's Gulp moves things along. Actually, I preferred her observations about the alimentary canal when laid side to side against her odyssey of all things reproductive. So much of those experiments were resurrected in the recent film Hysteria; but apparently now that scientists have decided they know what women want, now they are dead set on discovering how she goes about enjoying what she wants -- witness the blind tests of something called Lybrido which an entire sector of the world dreads will turn women into nymphomaniacs.
But I digress. That is not to say that there is not an absence of fulfilling the senses. Starting with a vaguely Rolling Stones' reminiscent craving mouth, Roach documents the importance of smell in tasting food, why internal organ meat repulses many and the qualities of saliva. Articles I've read in the past few weeks on the Internet now are touting the benefits of mothers cleaning their children's pacifiers with a quick spit and polish maneuver in mom's mouth. Duh, Roach spends quite some time describing that an infant's first bacterial intestinal bioreme is acquired through the messy exit of birth.
I personally am fascinated by the concept of bacterial symbiosis. As someone who has ingested horrible chemicals to fight bouts of cancer, Lyme disease and other raging infections, I know firsthand that those side effect warnings really do great harm on the lower digestive tract. I believe as much as the health care industry wants to prescribe by genotype, knowing what kinds of critters keep you alive and healthy given their "undying" role in your body, should hopefully redirect or cause to run in parallel experiments on improving our internal flora.
Once again, Roach brazenly authors satiric footnotes zeroing in like a middle schooler to point out the irony of a person's chosen profession given their name: Sleeter Bull wrote Meat for the Table; and in a longer footnote:
"In a more perfect world, Whitehead would be a dermatologist, just as my gastroenterologist is Dr. Terdiman, and the author of the journal article Gastrointestinal Gas is J. Fardy, and the headquarters of the International Academy of Proctology was Flushing, New York."
And another on folks who unfortunately are employed in the manure pits and sewage tank industry - where a couple of breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation: "Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians ... coined a name for it - dung lung. (FN One of the physicians was a Dr. Crapo, who would, you'd think, have long ago ceased to find that sort of thing amusing.)"
One of my personal favorites: "Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different disease causing bacteria have documented migration ... periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotheraphy."
Roach also flaunts her love of punning and slightly risque readings: "... the soft palate - home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite (FN It's full medical name, and my (Roach) pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula) ..." When debunking Jonah and the whale in her chapter about How to Survive Being Swallowed Alive, she writes and footnotes: "...While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale's stomach would seem to present a new set of problems." True enough and to the point about a watery death at sea, until I read Roach's footnote when I laughed out loud on the train to DC: "I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words, sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me."
Read Gulp to find out more about professional wine tasters, how the folks at Purina come up with a dog food formula and appearance that meets the needs of pet owners; and how Elvis really died.
To end at a less vulgar note, Roach writes about human food preferences; "In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis ... Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days." Hence my dinner menu last night of rib eye buffalo steaks, poached fiddle head ferns, and baked rhubarb pudding. Image is everything and venturesomeness is its fellow traveler.
But I digress. That is not to say that there is not an absence of fulfilling the senses. Starting with a vaguely Rolling Stones' reminiscent craving mouth, Roach documents the importance of smell in tasting food, why internal organ meat repulses many and the qualities of saliva. Articles I've read in the past few weeks on the Internet now are touting the benefits of mothers cleaning their children's pacifiers with a quick spit and polish maneuver in mom's mouth. Duh, Roach spends quite some time describing that an infant's first bacterial intestinal bioreme is acquired through the messy exit of birth.
I personally am fascinated by the concept of bacterial symbiosis. As someone who has ingested horrible chemicals to fight bouts of cancer, Lyme disease and other raging infections, I know firsthand that those side effect warnings really do great harm on the lower digestive tract. I believe as much as the health care industry wants to prescribe by genotype, knowing what kinds of critters keep you alive and healthy given their "undying" role in your body, should hopefully redirect or cause to run in parallel experiments on improving our internal flora.
Once again, Roach brazenly authors satiric footnotes zeroing in like a middle schooler to point out the irony of a person's chosen profession given their name: Sleeter Bull wrote Meat for the Table; and in a longer footnote:
"In a more perfect world, Whitehead would be a dermatologist, just as my gastroenterologist is Dr. Terdiman, and the author of the journal article Gastrointestinal Gas is J. Fardy, and the headquarters of the International Academy of Proctology was Flushing, New York."
And another on folks who unfortunately are employed in the manure pits and sewage tank industry - where a couple of breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation: "Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians ... coined a name for it - dung lung. (FN One of the physicians was a Dr. Crapo, who would, you'd think, have long ago ceased to find that sort of thing amusing.)"
One of my personal favorites: "Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different disease causing bacteria have documented migration ... periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotheraphy."
Roach also flaunts her love of punning and slightly risque readings: "... the soft palate - home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite (FN It's full medical name, and my (Roach) pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula) ..." When debunking Jonah and the whale in her chapter about How to Survive Being Swallowed Alive, she writes and footnotes: "...While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale's stomach would seem to present a new set of problems." True enough and to the point about a watery death at sea, until I read Roach's footnote when I laughed out loud on the train to DC: "I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words, sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me."
Read Gulp to find out more about professional wine tasters, how the folks at Purina come up with a dog food formula and appearance that meets the needs of pet owners; and how Elvis really died.
To end at a less vulgar note, Roach writes about human food preferences; "In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis ... Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days." Hence my dinner menu last night of rib eye buffalo steaks, poached fiddle head ferns, and baked rhubarb pudding. Image is everything and venturesomeness is its fellow traveler.
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