Friday, December 28, 2018

Book Report: Counting on Snow

35. Maxwell Newhouse, Counting on Snow (2018) (12/24/18)

The other day I was in Santa Cruz waiting for a cousin to arrive—and what better place to wait than a bookstore! Especially Bookshop Santa Cruz, my favorite. I of course browsed the Best New Nonfiction bookcase, and the mystery shelves. And oh, what's this? A small stiff-paged children's book: Counting on Snow. Very simple in design and concept, it took me about two minutes to read—two absolutely delightful minutes.

As we count down from ten crunching caribou to one lonely moose, with owls, seals, wolves, and other northern animals in between, the snow begins and continues to accumulate, becoming a character too. The illustrations are all muted, so perhaps the book isn't perfectly suited to a child learning to count. But I found it beautiful. And the alliterative number-animal pairings are entertaining.

Sadly, no images of the interior spreads exist online, so I can't share those. But if you find yourself in a bookstore anytime soon, you might take a look and see if it's in stock. It's a quick read!

Book Report: Bear and Wolf

34. Daniel Salmieri (story and illustrations),  Bear and Wolf (2018) (12/28/18)

If I'm going to finish fifty books by January 29, I'd better get cracking: I may be spending quite a bit of time in the young children's section of the library the next few weeks.

This book I read about in Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, her year-end post on the "loveliest children's books." And indeed: Bear and Wolf is exquisite, right from the first meeting of these two animals in the snowy whiteness, through their quiet wander through the woods and onto a vast lake, and ending with . . . well, I don't want to give it all away. But overall, the book is very much about being present and experiencing life fully—in good company. Who can argue with that?

And the illustrations! In an interview, Salmieri says that the story itself came very quickly—in an afternoon (well, after a few false starts)—but the illustrations required many steps, starting with black-and-white sketches. It then "took me months to figure out how the final art would look. I obsessively made tests and attempts at final paintings and nothing felt right. I wasn’t getting the softness and texture of the sketches. Finally, I took a close look at the sketches to understand what was working so well about them. I imagined how I could achieve the same subtle, soft textures and values in color. Eventually, I experimented with shaving colored pencil pigments right onto the paper and rubbing them in with my thumb. That was the missing piece that helped me figure out how the book could be colored. I used watercolor, gouache, colored pencils, and crushed colored pencil pigment to make the illustrations. I approached each one as a separate painting to stand on its own and tried to get the feeling right for each spread." (You can see a few of the sketch vs. final pairings in the interview.) From start to finish, the book took four years to bring to fruition.

Here are a few of the spreads:




I will be rereading this book. It left me with a very peaceful, hopeful feeling. I can use as much of that as I can get.


Book Report: To the River

33. Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface (2011) (12/28/18)

To the River is the account of a midsummer week spent following a 42-mile-long river, the Ouse in Suffolk, southern England, by foot, from muddy source to a shingle beach near Newhaven, where the ferry from France docks. The Ouse "is not a major waterway," Laing explains. "It has intersected with the wider currents of history only once or twice: when Virginia Woolf drowned there in 1941 and again, centuries earlier [in 1264], when the Battle of Lewes was fought upon its banks." But in less dramatic moments over time, the river or its surrounding lands have shaped our stories, our occupations, our desires, and our memories.

Much of this book is about time and memory, about change both wished for and not, about how we construct meaning. Laing's own walk is precipitated by a breakup and her desire for solace in a place she knows and loves. As she follows the Ouse Way, her mind strays far and wide: from the immediate—the wildflowers, bird songs, and landscape surrounding her—to the more philosophical. Along the way she tells stories of Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the iguanodon, the first dinosaur known to humans; of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows; of the thirteenth-century royal usurper Simon de Monfort; of Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist behind the hoax of the Piltdown man; of John Bayley and his beloved Iris Murdoch—and of course of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. She dips into poetry, mythology, natural history, etymology, prehistory. Her attention is equally caught by a jeweled dragonfly as by the ways humans have (always) transformed the surface of the land.

The writing is remarkable: lyrical, sometimes funny, often melancholy, always full of curiosity and intelligence. Here are a couple of the passages I flagged, which show Laing's ability to transcend the mundane even while embracing it. The first ends her chapter on Mantell and his great discovery:
As I rose I saw a deer drinking. She didn't see me as she climbed the bank; then all of a sudden she did. Her hindquarters bunched the way a horse's will, a motion I knew with my own muscles as the prelude to a buck, and then she sprang away. She moved in an oddly rigid, rocking-horse gait, bounding on stiffened legs across the track and into the darkness of the wood. She was neither rare nor extraordinary, that deer. There were thousands like her, as there were millions like me. But there she was, attending to her own path, which, for a moment, intersected mine. She was as unlikely as the iguanodon, and as imprisoned in time. It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day—the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic—were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.
This next comes in a chapter, "Going Under," in which, among other things, she considers the nature of hell, and then observes a long cloud of yellow pollen, "rolling toward waiting flowers":
Meanwhile, the swallows were screaming the sky into tatters. I sat on a bench and watched them drop, wings akimbo, shrieking as they fell. How strangely we spend our lives: mapping the architecture of Hades or the ornamentation of a pollen grain. No one ever forgets anything. It's all piled up here somewhere, on the surface or under the ground. It never stops, that's the trouble. It keeps on coming, like that golden wind, breeding from out of its own ruin.
She often seems to come back to Leonard Woolf's motto: Nothing matters. Which he later in his life amended to Nothing matters, and everything matters. She quotes the Venerable Bede (672–735), who speaks of the sparrow, "passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all." She speaks of
a whole town of people driving cars or walking the streets, their faces only partially betraying the magic lantern show that flares in utter privacy within the confines of each skull. . . . It seems astonishing to me how alone man is, though he can touch and talk and gaze on others of his kind. But that picture theatre within his head: no one but he will ever see it played, and there is no medium on earth that can accurately catch its luminosity or speed. 
Yet partnered with such sober thoughts are others more uplifting. At the very end of the book, as she leaves a beach where she's had a swim, heading to the station for the train to take her home, she finds herself in a gulley, perhaps a former riverbed of the Ouse itself:
I crunched an apple as I strolled along. There wasn't a soul in sight, though I knew there were hordes of people beyond each ridge. I didn't want to go home, it was true, but I was nonetheless as purely happy as I've ever been right then, in that open passageway beneath the blue vault of sky, walking the measure allotted me, with winter on each side. . . . I walked as if in a dream, among the larks and the valerian. I felt unfettered, almost weightless. . . . I had the sense I'd fallen into some other world, adjacent to our own, and though I would at any moment be pitched back, I thought I might have grasped the knack of slipping to and fro. It struck me as funny then that I was walking at the grassy bottom of the old Ouse, and since no one could see me there's no one to say that I didn't turn at the last a few gay steps of a waltz.
I felt in very good company on this journey, with a wise, witty, attentive, knowledgeable, questioning companion, and am definitely enriched for the effort.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Victorian Christmas Cards

Now that Christmas is past, and we're on to Boxing Day, and soon the new year, I can breathe again. (I really do not like this extended Christmas holiday, especially when it comes to sappy music everywhere you go, for weeks on end.) But yesterday, a Facebook friend spent the day posting all these amazingly bizarre Victorian Christmas cards. So I thought I'd post a few here too. As a farewell to the most stressful holiday of the year.















Friday, December 7, 2018

Book Report: Doktor Proktors Prompepulver

32. Jo Nesbø, Doktor Proktors Prompepulver (2007) (12/5/18)

The third installment in my friend Thelma's and my Norwegian torture series, this one, by the respected crime novelist Jo Nesbø, took us into the land of silly. It's a kids' book—which didn't make it any easier, but at least it made us laugh fairly often. The title in English? Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder. Yes indeed.

The story involves misfits Lise and tiny Bulle who join forces with their neighbor Doctor Proctor to market his fart powder to their fellow classmates. The point of the powder is not to be smelly—in fact, the resulting farts have no scent—but rather to make a loud noise: perfect for the upcoming Independence Day celebrations. There's even an extra-powerful fart powder that sends Bulle blasting up into the sky, which they decide not to tell others about. But the school bullies, Truls and Trym, learn their secret and decide to steal the Fartonaut powder, with the help of their dastardly father, Mr. Thrane (who hopes to sell it to NASA). There's also some powder that makes you glow in the dark, which comes in handy when Bulle has to escape Oslo's dread Dungeon of the Dead and winds up in the city sewers—and is swallowed by a giant anaconda.

It's a bit of a shaggy dog story. And I did mention that it's silly, right?

All turns out well in the end, though: even the anaconda finally gets a substantial meal, in the form of Mr. Thrane. (Good riddance.) And on Independence Day, May 17, Bulle fulfills his dream of playing trumpet in the school marching band, while the Fartonaut powder is finally put to excellent use substituting for the celebratory cannons (whose gunpowder from China went missing—the longshoreman keeps muttering about a giant snake) for the Big and Almost World Famous Royal Salute, with the help of seven royal guardsmen, who provide the official, resounding, celebratory farts.

And if that doesn't make sense, I don't know what will!


Sunday, December 2, 2018

New Traditions

Two years ago, we embarked on a new tradition for us: lighting the Hanukkah candles. Which I wrote about here and here. This year, Hanukkah snuck up on me, and I wasn't prepared! I do have a couple of leftover candles, but the ritual requires two candles per day, and if I use those two up today and my shipment of new ones doesn't arrive until Tuesday, well . . . that won't work. So, I'm waiting. Maybe our Hanukkah—the Festival of Lights—will coincide with my birthday. That makes for a nice synchronicity. We'll just play catch-up, and extend the celebration a couple of days. No harm in that.

But I've now got our menorah on the mantel, waiting for us. And this will give me a chance to seek out some good poems—since that's our ritual: to read poetry while the candles burn down, shedding ever more light, night by night. Oh, the anticipation.

Another two-year-old new tradition is to make Portuguese bean soup and fried rice—a fully Hawaiian pairing (which I wrote about here, complete with recipes). And that's exactly what we're doing this evening. Two years ago, this fabulous meal coincided with that dreadful election, which plunged us into the dark winter that we've endured now for two years. It's a perfect wintry meal, wholesome, rib-sticking, and delicious.




And this year, as we prepare this meal and look forward to lighting the candles, I'm somewhat encouraged that we may be heading back into the light as a nation. The midterm elections (and now the Mueller indictments) have made me hopeful. There's a lot of work ahead, but it's definitely worth the effort.