We had softshell crab and swordfish, too!

I went out of town this weekend, so I decided to take a break from Gertrude. I didn't want to bring the weathered Stein book on the airplane because if it didn't just put me to sleep, it would definitely get crushed and bent inside my over-packed purse. So I grabbed Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential." I knew I'd want to read this. I'd started it a while back, but it wasn't until I started obsessing over "No Reservations" on Netflix that I fully realized the Bourdain appeal. I'd say I'm two thirds in, and so far it's everything I expected. I like that I can hear his voice reading it to me in my head. I'm not sure if I like picturing a lot of what he describes through the lens of a restaurant for which I was a starch-shirted waitress. I keep picturing my old alcoholic chef and his crew -- a misanthropic leader of a misfit army -- and all of them reeking of truffle oil. Bourdain's descriptions of the grill man, the expeditor, the dishwasher, the sous chef and the owner bring up long-forgotten faces in my mind. It's an interesting reading experience, but instead of dwelling on my personal interactions with the apparently archetypal personalities, I'm focusing on the business details. I'm remembering studying the menu, tasting wines, eating samples of the specials, catching expeditor mistakes, watching the chef check the reservation list and check things off on a clipboard, hearing gossip about our competition, staring out the window while waiting for tables to walk in.... And I'm also trying to block out all that noise and listen to Tony tell me his story.

Read anything good lately?

I was asked this question by one of my bosses today, and when I replied, "Yeah I started reading this Gertrude Stein book ... " he replied, "So no." What is this magical gentleman reading? "The Hunger Games." A young adult he is not, and I told him so. Then I learned we had already talked about that, and I vaguely remembered because I had been drinking at the time. Well, at least my boss wants to talk to me.

So about that Gertrude Stein, I'm having a little trouble. I'm reading this fantastic copy I picked up at The Strand, and it's called "Three Lives." Three lives equals three short stories. The first was great and super short. It was about a housekeeper and the houses she kept, and the friends and lovers for which she cared. I'll keep it simple there. The second though, is about a girl and her experiences learning about men. She was a bit of a tease for a while, but now she's in a relationship, and apparently they can spend 200 pages worth repeating the same sentences over and over. It seems to go on eternally, because when I try reading it at night, the rhythmic dialogue just puts me straight to sleep. I'll paraphrase: "I know, Melanctha, that when I'm saying to you the things that I am always saying to you, Melanctha, that you really are understanding that I'm feeling just like you would know that I would be feeling when I really do know that you have a good mind, Melanctha, and that I really do like spending time with you, Melanctha, so much that I have a hard time telling you things, Melanctha, but you always seem to know what I'm saying when I'm saying all these things that I'm always saying to you, Melanctha." So yeah. It's a tough one. I find that I can follow it a little better if I am reading aloud, but you know, Melanctha, it just ain't always easy to be doing such a thing.

Help me Daphne du Maurier, you're my only hope

I can't believe I haven't posted here in a year and a half. That is disgusting. I'm seriously disgusted with myself. So just for that, I'm going to copy and paste this half-written blog post that's been sitting in my email drafts for like two years. And then I'll write a real one, because this is pathetic. Yeah that at the bottom? It's the notes I was supposed to report back on. Ugh.

Daphne du Maurier really wanted me to cry on the subway. But I refused. She kept bringing the dramatic death scenes, and I kept biting my bottom lip. I got all excited about writing about this book, but I couldn't stop reading long enough to finish a blog post, even though I found myself crafting sentences in the shower. (I'm sure I forgot them all, maybe I need a waterproof notepad in there.)

There are some really beautiful parallels in the lives of the four family members profiled in this book. Janet, Joseph and Christopher all died in connection with the Janet Coombe, the ship the family built at their own shipyard. Upon the vessel's launch, its namesake's spirit became its primary resident. As a figurehead at sea Janet could enjoy the life she always dreamed of, close to her son Joseph (the ship's skipper) and watching over her family as a sort of matriarchal ghost. She died, it seems, of pure joy -- ecstatic, fulfilled and in compliance with her fate. Her legacy was the foundation of future events she knew would occur but could scarcely predict. It's as if these four generations of sea-loving deep feelers was predestined to be part of a neatly tied package, sad and tedious at the time but inspiring and heartwrenching in legend form.

Joseph throws his life into the sea after his mother's death, and eventually dies by literally throwing his life into the sea. He became depressed when his sometimes-fragile son, Christopher, decided to try out his sea legs upon the Janet Coombe, only to abandon ship in London. Joseph had high hopes for his firstborn, and felt betrayed, deciding never to speak to him again. His depression leads to a breakdown in his second marriage, and wife Annie visits her old friend and gentleman caller, Joseph's brother Philip. Joseph discovers this, and his agitated state and verbal rage are enough to kill Annie and her unborn baby. Philip has Joseph committed to an asylum, a move that causes him to live out his days in a mournful stupor, eventually giving up completely.

Meanwhile Christopher has managed a tolerable London life. He returns to Plyn too late to save his father, but brings his family and settles down there.

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298
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boats/boys
missed connections

"R-A-N-T"

I have a half-written post on finishing "The Loving Spirit," but I'm not exactly in the mood to finish it right now. However, since finishing that book, I have read "Invisible Monsters" by Chuck Palahniuk. I'll start by saying how funny it is that on two separate occasions I was approached on the subway while reading this book. The first time, I was standing in a crowded L train when I felt a tapping on my shoulder. Like a good New Yorker, I ignored this, not wanting to be disturbed. If someone needed me to move over, they should've figured that out sooner. If they had been comfortable the first half of the trip, they'd be fine the rest of the way. But when it was about 10 seconds before the train would be dumping out 90 percent of its passengers, the tap came again. I caved and look over. A muscle-head type says to me, "That's a great book. You should read 'Rant' -- r-a-n-t." As though I didn't know how to spell rant, or that I knew nothing of Chuck's other works. I smiled and acknowledged that yes, the book was good, and we each went our ways. The second time, I was on a less crowded N train when a slightly older, less muscle-head type says nearly the same thing, but instead recommends "Snuff" because "it's about a big orgy." Hmph. What else is there to say? If I were looking to meet a guy, this would be the way.

I did enjoy "Invisible Monsters." It was slow to get into, but I let myself be surprised by all the turns. It might be a lazy way to read a book, not overanalyzing anything at all, but I like the element of surprise. I don't really get much satisfaction in figuring out the riddles before they have a chance to reveal themselves. Especially in a book like this, where the riddles are revealed, never left to the reader's imagination. The closest I came was figuring out one major point one paragraph before it happened. I think that was the point at which I began to care about the characters. Each mystery revealed brings the reader closer to understanding.

So now I need to decide what to read next, and today I've created my own riddle. How long do you wait to read something that you've had a negative interaction with someone about? Each page you read is shadowed by this person in your head saying things to you about this book that you never wanted to hear. Maybe it isn't measured in time but number of books read in between. Maybe one or two more unrelated books will get me to the one(s) I'd really like to conquer but can't yet.

dream a little dream

And so Daphne has sucked me in with a plot that seems to be a riddle. It's mysterious without being a mystery. "The Loving Spirit" is divided into four parts -- and I finished the first a couple of days ago. It's devoted to Janet Coombe, begins with her marriage and ends with her death. Her whole life seems to have been one long haunting of herself. She lives one life but is haunted by another. We find that the other life actually belongs to her son Joseph, who is in multiple ways an extension of Janet. He is the male version of her, the other half of her soul -- you might even say her soul mate, in the non-romantic sense. I have read that some mediums believe your soul mate does not always come to you in the form of a lover, but may serve different roles in different lifetimes -- parent, sibling, friend, stranger. It might be nonsense, but it's a perfectly acceptable theory in the literary world. "It was like a union of spirit defying time and eternity -- something that had existed between them before birth, before their physical conception of each other" (p. 67).

Janet's life revolves around three significant moments -- the night Joseph was conceived, the night he was born, and the day he became captain of the ship bearing her likeness and name. Most of her sons were boat builders along with their father, but Joseph was the sailor. As a man, he is able to live the life Janet could only dream of - "he was her second self." Joseph tells Janet that a woman is like a ship: "She'd run like a devil if I let her, laughin' with the joy of escape, but a touch of my hand an' she'd understand, obeyin' my will, recognizin' I was her master an' lovin' me for it" (p. 71). Their relationship is atypical and they both realize it, as they spend their days pining for one another's affection. Daphne manages to throw some humor into it, describing how as a child Joseph fainted after watching his mother successfully scale a rocky coastline and fearing for her life.

Ironically this intense devotion contributes to Janet's demise. After years of physical and emotional strain related to watching her son set sail and return, set sail and return, yearning so hard when apart and loving so hard when reunited, her body can take no more. "Instead of calming her and soothing her, his presence acted like a drug that fortifies for the instant, creating an impression of renewed vigour and strength, but leaves its patient weaker than before" (p. 103). While he was gone, she had functioned like "some mechanical being" (p. 86) but held onto thoughts that life was more than the present moment. "Perhaps there was no end to a living moment, and even now her young self slept secure in the arms of Thomas, on some other plane of time, like the undying ripple on the surface of still water" (p. 90).

Those last two quotes, combined with the scene in which the ghost of adult Joseph appears to her on a night before he is even conceived, show Daphne's first stirrings of "stories of intrigue" to come. She's only writing her first novel but already more than dabbling in the supernatural. In "Myself When Young," she writes of confidence and trepidation associated with writing this book. She wants every word, every sentence to count, but she gets nervous that it's all garbage. But of course the novel was meant to be, inspired by the Jane Slade boat and a vision of Daphne's own: "I walked up to the Castle point, and it seemed to me that I was standing on the cliffs years hence, with a grown-up son, but of course I was only a ghost, being long dead, existing only in his thoughts (p. 154).

Daphne includes a bit from a letter describing her planning of the novel: "And always, no matter what people say to me, there must be Truth. No striving after cleverness, nor cheap and ready-made wit. Sincerity--beauty--purity" (p. 168).

everybody's searching

May already? How did it take me three months to finish "On the Road"? Well, considering it took Jack Kerouac years to live it and only days to write it, it's a pretty good compromise. It was easy enough to go a while without reading, because Kerouac writes with great detail about major events, but skips giant amounts of time. So while I was busy hanging out in New York doing my thing, Kerouac (er, Sal Paradise) was busy hanging out in New York, doing his thing. And it was nice, catching up with an old friend, because Sal was always just catching up with Dean, seeing him for the first time after years, noticing how he had changed or remained the same.

Some of what I've been doing book-wise during the last few months is building up my Daphne du Maurier collection, some from eBay, some from the Strand, some from the Half Price bookstore in Omaha ... you never know. But when I finished reading "On the Road," I jumped into "The Loving Spirit," which is her first novel. She talked a lot about its writing in the memoir I read, "Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer." I guess I didn't write a blog post on that one, but I read it directly after the short-story collection, "Don't Look Now." As I read her shorts, I pictured Daphne in her seaside Cornwall cottage, and I wondered how empty rooms and expansive sky equaled dark, twisted intrigue. And I was able to get a really nice picture of her life before her writing career as well as her penchant for solitude. And even though it's been a while since my mind has imagined the details, I'm finding it pretty easy to recreate that atmosphere while reading "The Loving Spirit." It's such a beautiful mental transformation -- but I am truly glad I've got a more personal view of Daphne now. I'm not sure I would fully appreciate it if "The Loving Spirit" was the first du Maurier book I'd read. Because knowing what I know about the woman, it definitely reads like a first novel. You can clearly see how much of herself she put into her protagonist, but she manages to do it in a most-endearing way. For me, it's all about the context. I feel like I'm reading her work now more as a study than for leisure. I'm giving myself a thesis in du Maurier.

And that thesis is going to extend beyond Daphne, and I'm pretty excited about it. Her sister, Angela, has a series of books, one of which I've already purchased. Her grandfather was a writer and illustrator, George du Maurier. He's got three, one of which is available at the Strand in a lustworthy two-volume British first edition for a mere $60. I can't say that will be easy to ignore for long ... I have a feeling I'll be giving in on that one before it slips away. But I have also collected various related paperbacks, including a short-story collection and a biography of Katherine Mansfield, one of Daphne's inspirations. I'll probably tackle the bit of Mansfield fiction when I finish "The Loving Spirit." But enough gushing ... here is what I've taken from the first 30 pages or so of Daphne's debut.

Janet Coombe is representative of Daphne's heart. She feels obligated to fulfill her "womanly duties," so to speak, but she dreams of the ocean and sailing and even voices regret that she wasn't born a man. In the books first chapter, she marries her cousin Thomas. "She loved Thomas dearly, but she knew in her soul there was something waiting for her greater than this love for Thomas. Something strong and primitive, lit with everlasting beauty." This theme is so clearly a piece of Daphne's life, and I feel I've already seen it recur in some of her other work.

In the third chapter, Janet has her first child, and you get glimpses of her personality in some of her actions related to the baby. Her family members tell her to rest, but she feels strong and annoyed. When they won't leave her alone, she makes her irritation clear. "I wish you'd away, all of you, and go about your business and let me be. I'm not feared o' pain nor trouble, and if I had my way I'd leave you to your ribbon-tyin', and soup-makin' and take myself to the quiet fields to have my baby, I would, 'midst the cattle and the sheep who'd understand." When the baby is born, she finds it annoying that people marvel that the baby looks like it's father as though no baby ever did before.

After another chapter and another child, Janet gets more brazen and tells her husband of her fantasies of being a smuggler. And all I could think of was "Jamaica Inn" and the short story of the ghost ship, where Daphne shows her readers just how knowledgeable she is of boats and smuggling, and you see the author's heart's desire.

yes, please

Jack Kerouac loves the word "lugubrious." As Sal Paradise, he paints his memoir with an engaging mix of earthy and intellectual thoughts. The man of the earth is the poet. The unwashed bum is a secret genius. But so far, his life "on the road" is anything but exaggeratedly sorrowful. A lugubrious nature is merely observed in others and spun into the frame of a catchy sort of American dream, whereby a man can set out across the country with $50 and a few names to throw around and end up happy living 10 different lives in the span of one summer.

At about page 100, "On the Road" could almost end. Sal has spent an amazing summer adventuring across the country, and now he's headed back to New York. But if that were the case, this book would never have become the beat bible. At this point, you can feel that Sal is just getting started, even though he's done more hitching and busing than most people do in a lifetime. There's so much in his mind that Kerouac has only hinted at, but it lies in that fascinating mix of matter-of-fact storytelling and keen insight. It's as if ignorance and intelligence spent some time "alone and mixing up [their] souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by." Alas, that was just the result of stimulating conversation between Sal and his Mexican mistress.

He references a lot of things I have to look up to get. And at the risk of sounding like somebody on Yahoo! Answers, I'll admit even page 2 left me quizzical. But when you type Modigliani into Google, you get a much clearer picture of Marylou. If you want to know what pulling wrists is, you have to weigh arm wrestling against debating, and it's pretty clear which he means, I think. I wonder if people in 1955 sometimes made a point to read next to the encyclopedia shelf? But even if you don't bother to look up hincty or Hassel or fellahin, there's plenty of easy richness to savor: "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries." California, of course. Not far out of this romantic mood, he first sees his exotic princess, and like any good poet he marks the occasion with the familiar sauce of life: "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

Sal's travels bring new meaning to the idea of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Everywhere he travels, he's looking for work, and he'll go as low as picking cotton to find it. Luckily he's got an extremely loving and understanding aunt back in New Jersey, who sends him cash when he's in a pinch. That's the result of living one of the classic American dreams backwards -- you usually try to leave the small towns to make it big in New York, but Sal left New York to try and make it in Hicksville. But he brings New York with him, carrying it in his pocket to rub when he's lonely: "LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle." And for as much enjoyment he got out of living in hotel rooms and tents, riding on truck beds and in rail cars, picking grapes and spending his last dollar on whiskey, he lives with the knowledge that life isn't lived in stillness. He keeps moving, even in solitude, even away from his best friends, his new friends, his love whom he knows he'll never see again: "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."