Puzzles

The New York Times today has an article about the slow death of the crossword puzzle. My mother spent a lot of time doing cryptics (craptics, as my father called them), acrostics, and diagramless puzzles. I took a special shine to the "cryptics" (craptics??) and was very proud whenever I could figure out an answer.

I'm not interested in Sudoku. I love the verbal! I want the words, the allusions, the references. I'm not interested in puzzles where a grinning picture of Doogie Hauser or Kelly Ripa beams from the center of the grid.

The Atlantic is giving up the puzzles by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. That, to me, is tragedy. How much consolation Cox and Rathven have provided to me when I have been bereft; how often have the filled a lazy hour with a sense of intellectual urgency.

Stephen Sondheim did a brilliant collection of "Cryptics"--
You can get your own copy (used) for $343.48!

It kept me very busy and happy in 1981--my year of Sondheim cryptics!

I guess you expect me to launch into a fulmination about the dumbing down of crossword puzzles and about the privileging of the number over the word...but I am too sad.

Make your own Glitter Graphics







The Unbearable Tristesse of I Pagliacci
Venice shop window, 2008

Bunnies in the Garden

We tried to succour and protect some baby rabbits in the yard. They did not have much protection when we noticed them so we added a light coating of various twigs, grasses, and vines. I think that their mother made only a couple of fairly brief visits each day. Of course I was afraid that propinquity would give a human odor to the babies but I had to balance that against their being just too visible to raptors, neighborhood cats, and other potential predators. I cared a lot and talked about them much more frequently than when I had my own human babies--- I know that I must not bore people with sagas of infantine smiles or teething. But these bunnies? I felt a certain proprietary pride as if I had written a perfect sonnet.

They kept growing--about 9 or 10 of them lying on top of each other. One morning Nature suddenly blew a whistle and they all scampered away, gained speed, and were gone. We still have rabbits in the yard, but we no longer know if any were from "our" group.

You Or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

Chandler Burr is the scent critic for the

New York Times

and I have always appreciated his approach to the olfactory and the wonderful way he spins all sorts of webs of reference to perfume: for example, of "Notorious" by Ralph Lauren: "Yes, something’s there, but it’s detectable in the way that AM radio picks up ghost-like murmurings."
And what about this scintillating review?
"Perhaps the most impoverished way of conceiving of a perfume (or of describing one) is listing its raw materials. It’s like experiencing Ravel’s “Pavane” by reading the sheet music, or smelling James Heeley’s Menthe Fraîche by looking at its lab formula" in his review of "the sublime l’Eau de Tarocco,...crafted by the Ravel of perfumers, Olivier Pescheux."

When I heard Burr had written a novel, I had to get it. As soon as it was published. And how well it goes with my reading of Middlemarch! You, Or Someone Like You is a novel of ideas--how wonderful to find in a rather barren landscape of new fiction where ideas are typically as welcome as cockroaches. The novel begins as a Utopian fantasy: major Hollywood players are enticed to read John Donne, Anthony Trollope, WH Auden, John Cheeverand many others. A mother perceives her son in terms that she realizes come from Virginia Woolf's Orlando. You want to be in this woman's book club and you dream of discussing literature with Chandler Burr himself and hearing his perceptions of the special readerly but real scents of Wuthering Heights, Persuasion, and Main Street.

It's wonderful to read a book which embraces the intellect and the knowledge that great literature is a timeless guide to humans and deciphering all of your friends, colleagues, and neighbors. It's fantastic to read somebody who seems to understand Auden, Larkin, and Yeats. What makes this book a profound read, as opposed to a Utopian fantasy, is that our cicerone of literature, Anne Rosenbaum, has a crisis involving her husband and a less critical one involving her teen-age son.

Many readers might potentially object to the nitty-gritty of it all. You may feel as if you've been suddenly shunted from the almost idyllic pastoral forest of Ardenne to the rough sea-coast of Bohemia to be pursued by a bear--in the form of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, the book does not turn away from some of the most controversial and burning issues of today. I salute Burr for not trying to soften the issues.

I would say more, but don't want to go into the plot (I read it and found it to be a page-turner without having read any reviews, and I appreciated the freshness). It's a keeper and one to re-read. Highly recommended.

Middlemarch

I've been reading George Eliot's "Middlemarch" for the first time this century (I read it several times during the previous century). Indeed, I plan to inflict this novel of ideas on my students.

I'm enjoying the shapely sentences, none of which is in a hurry.

And my reading of the novel has changed! I appreciate the sensibility of Mrs. Cadwallader enormously. Dorothea really does seem to be a prig. Take your mother's jewels and cherish them! And what's wrong with a little Maltese dog?

Mr. Brooke is not merely a tedious windbag; he's like many of my friends and colleagues who live via their past experiences.

I recently read a wonderful little piece in the NY Times by VERLYN KLINKENBORG
on rereading which I heartily recommend. Take a look at it and let me know what you think! I have always agreed with Nabokov's comment that there is no reading but in rereading.

A Meme for your Indie Rock Band's first album

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More... Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last words (up to four or five) of the very last quotation of the page is the title of your first album.


3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

I like my results; Chambellay is a place in France; "out of focus" is the end of a quotation from Mark Twain. You can probably photo shoppe the picture to make it look great for your album cover.

"I've Missed You So Much"

This picture was taken one year ago today.

"I've missed you so much" I say to my mother when I wake up. I read a good book, I read an intriguing newspaper article, I see a film and I think "I miss you so much!" as I wonder how I would have described it to my mother. There's a subtle shift in verb tense, of which I am well aware.

There are other people in my life, certainly. I do have other people to talk with. Yet it's not the same. I never anticipated this grief. I survived the death of a beloved sister and father when I was young. I miss them, but they don't haunt my days.

I saw the sprightly production of Cenerentola by the Met. The Met HD program is about the best new thing in my life. I've been reading: Shirley Jackson, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis.

And plans are afoot: plans to travel to England again! A Ploughman's lunch, peut-etre, which I just recently learned was an invention of the English Country Cheese Council of less than 50 years ago. And I had had such fantasies of Chaucer and Shakespeare at The Tabard ordering "ye olde ploughman's lunche".