20 years ago I was on jury duty for a murder and found myself in a room full of people I did not know. But 4 weeks later, I realized there were many connections only one degree away from me in the past and in the future. This book is like that. It has so many twists and turns that kept me glued to the pages. The chapters are short and concise, and the book is only 258 pages, but it tells of a larger world out there.
On social media (and in person), Lolita is the book that will always start a feud. The sides couldn’t be more diametrically opposed: the ones who have read it and think the prose and complex story justify it as a top contender for the Great American Novel. And then, the ones who haven’t read it (or only started it) because of its graphic content. The latter have been spoiled by what TV, songs and magazines have done to the book. But that book (LOLITA) is another story for another day.
I think both sides could come to understand each other better with this book. Although Nabokov had started his book many years before the true story of little Sally Horner, he does use many things from her story. And her story is remarkable. She may be the strongest survivor I have ever known about. But she didn’t survive long. Like Lolita, both died an early tragic death, but much differently. Sally was kidnapped at age 11 and she was nothing like the Lolita in the two movies or even like Humbert Humbert’s version of her in the book.
In a Hitchcock-like move, Sally actually makes a cameo appearance in the novel. But he does it so well, like Hitch, it goes right by most of the readers. And re-readers. But he does name her and the man who abducted and raped her numerous times. He says, “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”
And we have the story as told by the child rapist. Thus, we are duped in (in varying degrees) by the smooth talker Humbert Humbert is. Nabokov personally knew a child rapist who was a professor at Stanford University. And he was a smooth talker. So we can’t trust everything we are told by the dead narrator. But what a device Unreliable Narrator is! It allows the reader to forget what a creep he really is.
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, investigates just how much and when Nabokov knew about the Horner case. It also gives Sally her due justice. Everyone should know about her in America as much as we know about Anne Frank. I think the Novel should be read to gain knowledge into these horrible crimes that continue to this day. I admit, there were a few times that I had to lay this book down because I wasn’t strong enough to handle her story. But after a few days away, I felt that I owed it to Sally to finish. I feel you do too.
This is one of the best true crime books that I have read. She investigates everything. She also gives the novel/Nabokov justice. So even if you do not plan to read the novel or you hate the novel, you should still read this book. And if you like the novel, you’ll love this. There are so many people involved in this story and she follows the story of each life until its end.
All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall.
The stranger at my fireside cannot see The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear; He but perceives what is; while unto me All that has been is visible and clear.
We have no title-deeds to house or lands; Owners and occupants of earlier dates From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands, And hold in mortmain still their old estates.
The spirit-world around this world of sense Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense A vital breath of more ethereal air.
Our little lives are kept in equipoise By opposite attractions and desires; The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, And the more noble instinct that aspires.
These perturbations, this perpetual jar Of earthly wants and aspirations high, Come from the influence of an unseen star An undiscovered planet in our sky.
And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light, Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd Into the realm of mystery and night,—
So from the world of spirits there descends A bridge of light, connecting it with this, O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, a classic of home economics. This copy is rather heavily-worn, as is the fate of all cookbooks in the end. Sorta grody with what I have to assume is century-old spills and dog ears. Link to a scanned non-gross copy in the below article!
Home economics gets a very bad rap. It’s honestly unfair, given that, ideally, these are the skills which everyone needs in order to be self-sufficient. From personal finance and budgeting to cleaning and cooking, home economics is a useful and important class. While it’s sometimes looked down on today, to the point of being re-branded “life skills,” home economics has had a very weird and fascinating history, and the author Fannie Merritt Farmer had an instrumental impact on the development of the field.
The History of Home Economics
Over the course of the first half of the 19th Century, economic forces and increasing mechanization, especially in textile manufacture, shifted the center of production out of the home and into factories. In tandem with this shift, a social movement toward centering the life of (middle class) women in the home resulted in a burgeoning market in literature aimed at these very middle class women, intended to teach them how to be a housewife. If something has to be taught, it’s new.
The separation of homemaking from production was never complete for women of lower socioeconomic status, and even well into the 20th Century, girls were educated in needlework, crochet, and knitting, not just to make decorative pieces for their own homes, but also as a backup plan, in case they had to earn money for themselves. (A backup plan that my own great-grandmother took advantage of.) Doing fancy work for egg money was commonplace. Looking at vintage needlework, crochet, and knitting patterns and comparing them to modern books in the same genre gives a real sense of just how common these skills were, and just how high the standards of average achievement in them. For reference, here’s a book on filet crochet, from 1914. Just a couple of pages of definitions and basic instructions, and you’re off into the incredibly complicated patterns with absolutely no hand-holding. If it looks like computer code to you, you’re not wrong. It’s effectively code for printing pixel art with thread. This kissing-cousins relationship of the needle arts and early intelligence and computer applications is exactly why women predominated in early calculating, code-cracking, and computer software development.
By the close of the century, the old-school Progressive push to optimize labor resulted in formal education in homemaking, now termed home economics in a bid to add the gravitas of rationality to the field. This is where Fannie Merritt Farmer comes in, as headmaster of the Boston Cooking School, and author of one of the most influential cookbooks ever written.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
If you measure your ingredients by cups and teaspoons, this book is why. Responsible for the standardization of American cooking measures that we all know and love, this book was a breakout hit and shaped every subsequent cook book in the United States. How does it hold up? Well… not so good. As it turns out, there’s a huge section on nutrition, which has very much failed to age well, not the least because the information here predates the discovery of vitamins. What do the food groups look like in 1906? There’s protein, fat, carbohydrates, and water (five pints a day!). The nutritional section doesn’t even mention veggies, and gives a passing nod to fruits, but only if you’re careful to only eat the ripe ones. You might get away with preserves, but watch yourself. Veggies are either poverty food like beets and turnips, or seasonal luxuries like asparagus. Fresh and preserved fruits are firmly in the rare treat category. It’s no wonder everyone was teetering on the edge of scurvy, rickets, and pellagra back then. The recommended ratio of carbs to protein to fat is 36:9:2 by the way. I imagine that a healthy plate in 1906 looks like a gargantuan heap of mashed potato with some meaty gravy and a pat of butter. Yikes.
Here’s a quote from page 3, so you can see the general tone of the nutrition section:
For school children the diet should be varied and abundant, constantly bearing in mind that this is a period of great mental and physical growth. Where children have broken down, supposedly from over-work, the cause has often been traced to impoverished diet.
Mmmm. Yes. Supposedly from over-work. Nothing to do with being a 10 year old coal miner or sweated labor in a sock factory. Cool.
Here are some breaker boys in a coal mine in 1906, the year of this very publication of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Note oversee – I mean “shift supervisor” with a stick. Industrial textile worker, 1909.Cranberry pickers, early 20th Century. I sure am glad that ripe cranberries float, and all you have to do is flood the bog and agitate the bushes to skim the harvest off the surface… or you could hire kids to pick ’em one by one on their hands and knees.
There’s definite reasons that child labor laws exist. To cheer yourself up after all that, here’s some modern cranberry harvesting. With lots of labor-saving devices.
Delicious cranberries.
After that ghastly interlude, here’s some more Fannie Merritt Farmer. So much for the information, how about the recipes? Are there heaps o’ carbs? Boy howdy are there ever.
Here’s a good rough estimate of the place that veggies and fruits have in the diet espoused by Fannie Merritt Farmer: vegetable recipes take up 29 pages, fruits 19 pages, but desserts (counting from the iced ones because puddings weren’t universally dessert back then) take up 122 pages.
I know what you’re really here for, though: weird recipes! Here’s a few that are very achievable:
Baked Bananas II (p. 571)
Arrange bananas in shallow pan, cover, and bake until skins become very dark in color. Remove from skins, and serve hot sprinkled with sugar.
It’s like baked potatoes, but it’s bananas. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the bananas in question are a different strain than our modern Cavendish bananas, more starchy and not as sweet, hence the added sugar. Maybe they were more plantain-ish.
Raspberry Whip (p. 414)
1 1/4 Cup Raspberries, 1 Cup Powdered Sugar, White 1 Egg
Put ingredients in bowl and beat with wire whisk until stiff enough to hold in shape ; about thirty minutes will be required for beating. Pile lightly on dish, chill, surround with lady fingers, and serve with Boiled Custard. Strawberry Whip may be prepared in same way.
Thirty minutes of beating that egg white, and if there’s any butter or grease anywhere near it, it won’t work. Have fun. When she says to chill it, she means in a literal icebox, or terrifying first-generation refrigerator, both of which were pretty expensive options. This is why anything served chilled in hot weather, anything that involved whipped cream or egg whites, like meringue, and anything jelly-like was automatically fancy. All of these relied on expensive technology, lots of labor, or lots of time. The explosion of jelly recipes in the coming decades was a response to convenience gelatin and refrigeration: now, everyone could serve aspics and molded salads! Now that we have all sorts of kitchen gadgets to make the mincing, pureeing, whipping, and chilling easier, the pendulum has swung the other way, and super-smooth consistencies, jellies, and cold are no longer high-prestige. Our fancy artisan whole grain bread would have been peasant food in the past, and a fresh mango salsa in Winter would have been an inconceivable luxury.
Turkey Soup (p. 120)
Break turkey carcass in pieces, removing all stuffing ; put in kettle with any bits of meat that may have been left over. Cover with cold water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and simmer two hours. Strain, remove fat, and season with salt and pepper. One or two outer stalks of celery may be cooked with carcass to give additional flavor.
This, however, is a perfectly sensible thing to do with a leftover turkey, or any other whole bird, really. I’d use a slow cooker, to make it easier, and just let it go on low for eight hours. I’d probably also add noodles or rice. Some things don’t change that fast.
I listen to Tegan and Sara all of the time. In fact, there was a moment not long ago where it was possibly the ONLY music I listened to, several of their albums on repeat like they were going out of style. Tegan and Sara have had a bit of visibility in the Indie scene over the past couple of decades, but only recently have I dug into their catalog as a whole. At the peak of my obsession, they released a memoir – titled High School – and an accompanying album of songs that they wrote in High School – titled Hey, I’m Just Like You – but revisited them with mature eyes and arranged them in a way to make them sound like new. A “retrospective”, you might call it.
I was so obsessed with Tegan and Sara at the time their memoir came out that I couldn’t help but read it. And it is exactly what you think it might be – a tale of two Queer Canadian twins, trading chapters to tell their high school story. Its rife with angst, punk ideologies, first time recreational drug use, and all of the emotional things that make a teenage personality engaging, like their struggles with identifying as Queer in the 1990’s to their first experiences with live music and the creation of their band.
I got the impression that this narrative came at the right moment for the twins, because it feels like the calm recollection after the youthful storm. Without the context of their musical catalog that statement lacks substance, but their music has always felt raw and energetic. Even with their early, more mild and folky sides, the twins have always had something urgent to say. When they matured into a more pop sensible tone, it still sounded like they had butterflies in their stomach. My favorite era is their mid career, which is the bridge between folk and pop to a very emotional indie rock that cuts the deepest.
Now, with their memoir, they’ve found a new space with only their words to express themselves, and their maturity has cultivated a simple and descriptive way to showcase their honesty. I think they set out to recall their High School experience as a way of understanding how the progression of their identity has benefited their music career. Their honesty is what has brought me and so many others great joy in listening to their music, and by writing it all out and comparing it next to their 20+ year catalog, it helped me place each album in it’s moment in time – seeing the existential characteristics in these musicians just like I might see in myself or my family and friends. It all feels so incredibly personal without feeling invasive, illustrating a unique take on life while still being relatable.
Their accompanying album makes so much more sense in that regard too, harping on old emotions with a more mature sense of reality. When I made this connection to the album title – Hey, I’m Just Like You – I realized that … they aren’t lying! Tegan and Sara ARE just like me! And you! And all of us! We all grow older and learn more things, but there are pivotal moments in our life that we remember and use them to describe ourselves. Whether we want to or not, we’ll likely keep those moments as pillars of our identity but see them in different lights as we grow smarter. It’s a lifelong process, producing a wide variety results, all with their own quirks. For me, its a gentle reminder that life is a series of chapters and doesn’t happen all at once.
Here are links to access their memoir High School in downloadable audiobook and eBook formats, as well as in print from our circulation. Here are links to access their accompanying album Hey, I’m Just Like You in streaming format or on CD. Hoopla offers a lot of Tegan and Sara material, but I might point you directly to The Complete Recollection, which is a compilation of their studio albums from 1999-2010, with tracks 38-78 illustrating my favorite era of the twins. Here, you’ll find music from So Jealous, The Con, and Sainthood, from 2004, 2007, and 2009 respectively. It’s all good, but those three albums are my very favorite.
The Graphic Novel Discussion Group at the Main Library, founded in 2012, is a group for adults to talk about comics, manga, comic-themed films and television, as well as nerdy pop culture.
This month’s meeting will be held on Monday, July 18, 2022 from 7:00 PM-8:00 PM.
Join us as we discuss the Marvel comic books and television show featuring Moon Knight, created by writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin.
Location: Board Room of the Main Library, located at 301 York Street, Louisville, KY 40203
If you use the library- which you probably do, as you’re reading this post- please read this book. There is so much the general public doesn’t see or understand about the working of public libraries and Amanda Oliver lays it bare here.
Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, Amanda Oliver. Chicago Review Press, 2022, 210 pages
Part memoir, part expository nonfiction, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library illustrates just how much libraries do with what usually amounts to very little money and resources. The author begins by describing a key incident at the branch where she works, immediately clueing the reader in that this portrait will not align with the idealized version of the library the public still holds dear. She leaves much of library history to the first third of the book, even noting how Thomas Fountain Blue, born to formerly enslaved parents, led the first public library branch run entirely by a Black staff here in Louisville. Oliver deliberately acknowledges how exclusionary libraries have been and continue to be –to minorities, poor patrons, unhoused patrons and, those with disabilities, among others. She grapples with how to answer the question “so, what do you do?” when the answer is difficult to explain and how so many public libraries have become de facto homeless shelters. As a library worker, most of the information Oliver relays is not new to me. The value is more that she is arguably the first to gather all these (what for many will be) revelations together in one book accessible to the reading public.
The sort of people drawn to library work are those who give freely of themselves, which is great for the patrons, but for staff it quickly leads to major burnout. Amanda Oliver relates her experience with burnout, first as a school librarian and then as a children’s librarian at one of Washington D.C.’s most beleaguered library branches. She left library work for an MFA program after nearly a year at that branch. That MFA program, in a way, led to this book. And so while Oliver is no longer working in a library, she continues to advocate for libraries. I sent the author a message when I finished reading Overdue, where I told her I felt seen. She captures so well the mixed feelings library workers have about their profession–passion and love combined with stress and fatigue, along with everything in between.
Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library by Amanda Oliver is available in print format as well as ebook and e-audiobook on both Libby and Hoopla.
Part of what I love about reading children’s books as an adult is the ending. In most adult fiction, there is no guaranteed happy ending- unless of course the genre is romance, which always includes a happily ever after (if it doesn’t it isn’t a romance!) – and this is generally more realistic. But children’s literature usually, at the very least, leaves some hope at the end.
Front Deskby Kelly Yang Scholastic Inc. (2018) 286 pages Link to Front Desk in LFPL’s collection Link to titles by Kelly Yang in LFPL’s collection
Front Desk in particular deals with some very heady issues, and what I appreciate most is how it does so in a realistic way that still leaves room for hope. It is not a rags to riches story of the American dream, but instead the all-too-common story of barely getting by. Mia Tang and her parents have been in the United States for several years and are still very much struggling. A glimmer of hope arrives in the form of the opportunity to manage motel in California. Unfortunately, the miserly owner barely allows the family enough profit to survive and is unnecessarily strict. As a student whose first language is not English, Mia has an especially hard time adjusting to middle school, where her thrift store clothes stand out compared to her peers’ new name brand ones. The motel owner’s son gives her a particularly hard time; this tension illustrates the range of immigrant experiences, even from one country: his family is also Chinese, but culturally and economically their circumstances are quite different.
Mia and her parents support a longtime resident of the motel, Hank, when he is racially profiled by the police because he is Black. This is what separates Front Desk from many of the other immigrant stories I’ve read: the author offers the experiences of other marginalized populations in America, not just immigrants, which she easily could have kept to. The Chinese Tangs didn’t have to go out of their way to help Hank, but they did, because their struggles are similar and they have the opportunity to lift each other up. It’s a good entry point to the concepts of intersectionality and solidarity, not only because it’s from a child’s perspective but because it offers some (nuanced!) hope at the end.
Front Desk is the first in a series of books. So far there are three out and another volume scheduled to drop this fall.
I had reached a dead end reading long novels and bios about writers. I was going to take a break from reading, but browsed our shelves on a Friday afternoon hoping to find a new book that was fairly short and I found it right in the section that I shepherd: Biographies. It was new and by a poet that I never heard of. But the title drew me in, Studying with Miss Bishop by Dana Gioia with a picture of Elizabeth Bishop on the cover. I devoured it over the weekend. It was pure gold.
It contains 6 vignettes about his learning. Four were famous writers, one was a dead uncle, and the last was a long forgotten poet that he never met. Two of the writers were also his professors at Harvard – Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald, famous for his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is like taking the juiciest parts of a full load of college classes.
The most famous writer he met was James Dickey, his book Deliverance and then the movie made him extremely well known. He had been a great poet up until his fame took over. Meeting Dickey should have been a great thing except Gioia met him at the wrong time. And he learns that telling the truth is sometimes the hardest decision to make and live up to.
The writer that I was least familiar with was John Cheever. Although, he don’t interest me, I went back and reread his daughter Susan’s bio on one of my favorite poets, E.E. Cummings: A Life.
Gioia is a poet also, and definitely a poet I wish to explore more.
So this also led me back to reading poetry. And I found my way back to one of my favorite poets who is a much overlooked poet, Jim Carroll. I decided to reread his memoirs, The Basketball Diaries, because the last line of the book, “I just want to be pure,” kept floating in my head repeatedly.
I read it about 30 years ago and loved it. At 58, I read it with much different eyes. I was more distanced to it because of mucho personal experience. In my 20’s, he sounded like a punk and smart aleck. Today, it sounds like the purest writing that I have ever read. No wasted words or pretense.
Carroll was 13 when the Diary begins and 16 at the end. In between he discovers drugs and sex, and a lot of both. He experiments with everything and becomes a heroin junkie. He is a star basketball player and good looking, and that is enough to get him through many struggles and into a lot of potential trouble.
There were probably many boring days in the life of a junkie but this doesn’t include any of them. Along the way, I went back and read a bit of The Catcher in the Rye (a must read). Teenage Carroll can be seen as the Vietnam Era’s version of the postwar Holden Caulfield, in proportion to the way America has progressed with the uglier things in life.
Also, I finally got around to reading a book on my TBR shelf, The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs (who – among other things) taught Creative Writing at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado). It is a collection of essays roughly about the art of writing. Basically, what works for him, and what works or doesn’t work for other writers. Also, his thoughts on Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, and Jaws.
Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the smartest man in America. I believe this to be true. Kerouac was my first favorite writer and probably still is. It has been almost 30 years since I read some of his books, so onward to explore them as an old man.
Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World by Danielle Friedman G.P Putnam and Sons (2022) 328 pages Link to Let’s Get Physical in LFPL’s collection Link to titles by Danielle Friedman in LFPL’s collection
In Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World, Danielle Friedman sets out to do something ambitious. Friedman chronicles the rise of women’s exercise in the 20th century, the pioneers and the programs that rose to prominence and became cultural obsessions, as well as the overall trend towards health and fitness. Friedman argues that women came to exercise for aesthetic rewards, the goal being to look good, but that women stuck with exercise because it made them feel good.
Freidman begins her story in the 1950’s when the first calisthenics style exercises for women became popular. Bonnie Pruden was one of the first to become nationally known for encouraging women to “keep fit”. Her work on fitness for women and children would lead her to be on the team that later created the President’s Physical Fitness Test (yes, you have Bonnie to blame for that rope climb). After Bonnie, Freidman takes us through a tour of fitness trends from barre to jogging, yoga to Jane Fonda. This is the part that Freidman does well. We’re given lots of interesting facts and tidbits about the history of fitness. Before “athleisure” was an everyday word we had the women who invented the sports bra. (One of those women would go on to win several Emmy’s for her work costuming the Muppets on Sesame Street.) It’s fun to see how trends emerged and how fitness influencers like Jane Fonda reflect bigger societal and cultural patterns.
Friedman tries to explain that these fitness fads, and indeed all personal fitness, is largely aimed at middle class women who have the leisure time and money to devote to fitness essentials. However, other than asserting this fact time and time again Friedman doesn’t offer a lot of context or definitive proof. She does feature a few Black influencers and talks to them to uncover their struggles to “make it” in a world where no one looked like them. I would have liked to hear more from these women and other women who don’t fit the traditional mold of what an influencer typically looks like. Freidman also states repeatedly that women often come to exercise for physical transformation, but stick with it because it transforms their mental.
