Book Corner 2020.41

History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

A teen-age boy loses his lover, his chemistry teacher, and inherits his journals, which give us all the backstory of his pursuit of the secret elixir of eternal life. It’s always nice to read a book about scientists rather than more writers and writers thinly disguised as artists. This book had a lot of action and mystery, which isn’t what I was expecting from the beginning. The plot seemed to hold together well, though I did get confused about a lot of things, so don’t hold me to that. In the end, though, I didn’t really care very much. (  )

Hard Times, Come Again No More

I’m feeling some eerie parallels with the Hard Times I experienced from 2012 – 2015.

  • Then: While my father was dying, I felt stuck in suspended animation, unable to truly enjoy much of anything, seriously afraid I’d run out of money. Practically speaking I felt unable to leave New England or the tri-state area, afraid what would happen if I did, sure that if I traveled far, THAT would be the trigger.
  • Now: Once again, thanx COVID, I can’t travel. I’m afraid to leave New England or go anywhere on an overnight.
  • Then: I started getting mouth pain. It wasn’t the most excruciating pain in the world, but it was constant, unless you count seconds or minutes where it would be gone and it would be like suddenly noticing silence; and you’d be like, “Hey, I feel pretty good, could it finally be…” nope.
  • And it was impervious to anything – with one strange exception, which was gum chewing. But gum would get tasteless, my jaw would get tired, and you can’t chew while you’re trying to fall asleep. Nothing else helped. No medicine, no position, not hot water or cold, not pressure or relaxation, it would just always there, there, there,
  • Now: I’ve got these headaches. They’re in my sinus areas; but I don’t have any stuffy or runny nose, just headaches. They aren’t excruciating, they’re just constant. (I haven’t tried gum.) Except for some seconds or minutes where I notice they are gone, and I’m like, “Hey, this feels pretty good…” then whoomp. They’re impervious to anything. Sometimes my old pal the mouth pain comes along with them.
  • None of it usually keeps me from sleeping. But gaining consciousness is a strange feeling. I slowly wake up, and there’s no pain at first, but there comes a consciousness threshold where the pain all kicks in again. Sigh, a nice welcome back to reality.
  • Then: My marriage was in its worst shape ever for a while there. It was, until now, hard to remember exactly how haywire it was; but I was miserable, and it was like X was just a mirror of me. We were unhappy and angry with each other all the time. I started to wonder why the hell we were together.
  • Now: X and I blew up at each other last night. Now I remember what that period was like. I’m so unhappy, there’s a weight on me, I cannot be happy with him, and he is not the type that can rise to the occasion and carry us forward when I’m down – far from it.

I’m just seeing these parallels and I’m scared.

Can knowledge & hindsight & wisdom & self-awareness save me from going There again?

Been down one time,

Been down two times,

Never going back again

Merino Silk

Merino/Silk roving I bought a few weeks ago during an outing we took to Waitsfield. Mad River Fiber Arts & Mill, think I mentioned it before. I finally dyed it today.

I’ve been having headaches and depression and sometime insomnia, though thankfully those nights are few & far between. But the headaches just come and go. And for the past few days, the depression has sometimes weighed on my head seemingly physically. I might be ill.

And today’s our first full day of Staycation. I’ve never been so depressed going into a time off. It’s sunny out but deceptively so; it’s cold, too cold for outdoor dining. My upcoming wintertime semi-quarantine isolation is scaring me.

I pull it together because you have to do something. You can’t stare at the wall and drool. Though sometimes I’ve wanted to, sometimes it’s that bad.

But I took trash around. I helped X trim some goat hooves. We went out together to buy useless, pretty gourds and pumpkins. We bought bagels and sat on some warm grass to eat them. He bought things he needed to repair the ever-breaking-down infrastructure around here. I put a pie pumpkin in the oven. I dyed this merino/silk (it really took hardly any time at all). I chose 1/2 teaspoon of amethyst plus 1/16 teaspoon of green, thinking that would both dull it a tiny bit and pull it a tiny bit towards the blue end of the spectrum. Probably should have gone with 1/8. I don’t really like candy-kindergarten colors, I like some subtlety. But purple almost always gets a pass. My plan is to spin it loose and as bulky as I can, which isn’t very; then make a winter hat.

Book Corner 2020.39

The Member of the Wedding

Wow, this was even more amazing than I remembered. I think it had been over 20 years since I read it. I had read more recently HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER – and boy, I thought that I loved that; but I only loved one of the two plots of that story, whereas this was 100% amazing through and through.

I had to look up the year that child actress Anna Paquin starred in the TV movie version of this – 1997. I found that movie too literal, and Paquin cast too young; she was so small, and Frankie was supposed to be so tall. The scenes with the solder were VERY disturbing when played with such a small girl. That said, I’ll never forget her performance in the climactic scene.

I did not recall how close to the end of the book the wedding happened – i.e. how little “happened” afterward, or rather how crammed all the “after” was into so few pages, as was the wedding itself. Which is part of the writing’s power. I think McCullers is just amazing in how she brings her stories to a head, making the payoff as good as the journey, which is not a common thing in a modern novel. Usually you get a really good bunch of pages but summed up with kind of an anti-climax; or, you get a real whopper of a narrative arc and ending, but don’t enjoy the journey so much. MEMBER OF THE WEDDING is flawless – maybe being relatively short at only about 150 pages is a help. Modern novels probably just go on too long.

I won’t bother with much of a plot summary. Southern eccentricity, lots of mood and pictures of intimacy; 12-year-old Frankie spends the dog days of a deep-South summer in anticipation of her big brother’s wedding. She’s on the cusp of big change, and at times truly manic in her passions and her desire to quit town for good. There’s something very powerful in stories about girls this age that always draws me in. McCullers is the best.. (  )

Book Corner 2020.38

The Address Book

I didn’t know exactly what to expect from a book all about addresses, but I was still disappointed. I feel it lacked focus. I mean, it was all over the map. HA HA HA

I was pulled in by the story of the efforts to give everyone in West Virginia an address – how hard it was to find people, as apparently roads don’t have names outside of a few major cities. And darned if the guy whose job it was to name all the roads didn’t dang run out of names long before he was through!

I think my favorite quote was about some elderly Chinese immigrants who referred to streets that their new tenant didn’t recognize. “Mulberry Street, with its many funeral homes, had turned into Dead Person Street… Division Street was Hatsellers Street, Rutgers Street was Garbage Street, and Kosciuszko Bridge, named after a Polish leader who fought in the American Revolutionary War, somehow became ‘the Japanese Guy Bridge.'”

I’m gonna call it that from now on. (  )