The Literarium


	The Literarium The literary adventures of a spicy, yet tasteless, bookworm.

Friday, January 30, 2004 30 Number 1 Hits by Elvis Presley. Yes, a music review. I bought this used at Coconuts a few weeks ago. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give it an 8. Most of the songs were great (hello, it’s an Elvis hits collection) but a few were stern reminders that oldies songwriting could be very silly. I was a little embarrassed to realize how lazily I had listened to the King before. I hadn’t paid too much attention to his voice or vocalizings. I had just grooved along. I see now that I had let my idea of Elvis solidify as “old fat Vegas Elvis” somewhat eliding “young thin Memphis Elvis.” The CD seems to be in chronological order, starting with Heartbreak Hotel and ending with the bonus track remix of A Little Less Conversation. The official end is Way Down. Young Elvis had a surprisingly light tenor. His voice seemed almost thin at times but that could be because I automatically think of the deeper, more baritone tenor of Vegas Elvis. The voice matures and deepens as the disc progresses. Most of the songs on the disc are beyond familiar, like Jailhouse Rock, Stuck on You, All Shook Up, and Love me Tender. Some were “oh, yeah, I remember that one” familiar, like Devil in Disguise and In the Ghetto. The Notorious G.U.P. loves In the Ghetto. My 2 favorites Elvis tunes are here, Burning Love and Suspicious Minds. Wooden Heart was wonderfully cheesy but then I’m a sucker for half-translated German folk tunes. Actually, Elvis sang incredibly well auf Deutsch. Some songs, like Surrender, were better off not being recorded. They are just silly. On the upside, A Little Less Conversation was definitely worth the hype. This is a great CD that is great to listen to as is but better to mine for tracks to burn for your very own concept albums. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 9:50 PM \| link -------------------- Tuesday, January 27, 2004 The Encyclopedia of Homemaking Ideas by Barbara Taylor Bradford. This was so tiki-fabulous I could die! It’s from 1968 and cost me whopping $0.99 at the thrift store. Did you know Walter Cronkite once had fake redwood veneer floors? I didn’t until I read this thing. The Encyclopedia is a perfect time capsule of late 60s design. It consists of pages of photographs interspersed with connecting advice. Much of the advice is banal. Was it ever radical to advise people to use sturdier fabrics on furniture that will get a lot of use? Most of the advice is on how that stylin’ new vinyl upholstery will be the design trend of the ages. Especially in the period rooms. Nothing says colonial authenticity like turquoise vinyl upholstery. The vinyl floors are a world of glamour in and of themselves. I don’t think there’s anything the great designers of the 60s couldn’t put vinyl on. The glory of the book is its pictures. Most are black and white but a fair number are in color. You need to see the color combinations to believe them. The crayon red and lime green color schemes are perfectly set off by the turquoise blue upholstery. Ooh, the chic avocado appliances. The bold use of the many shades of brown. You know, I can’t see how you can ever have enough wood paneling. The fabric patterns, too, were a joy to behold. Some of these patterns, like the big graphic flowers on white backgrounds, are back in, but it’s the banished to the dustbin of fashion patterns that thrill me. Like the small, busy, orange and gold bouquet patterns. Ooh, the rainbow stripes! Ooh, the orange and brown everything! All that and captions like this: “Cabinets in smoked walnut, raspberry and grape plastic laminate repeat the colors of nature.” Ah, grape plastic laminate nature. How many odes have the poets directed to your easy-clean beauty? Because nothing says “nature” like grape plastic laminate. O fair nature in grape plastic glory What wondrous laminate beauty sublime! Excuse me while I bitchslap Keats. Okay, I’m back. I loved this book. I would have paid up to three whole dollars for it and not even flinched. I did, however, flinch at the orange, pink, and blue flower print fabric laminated onto the window blinds. Still, this book inspired me. I’m going to go out and laminate nature. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 9:09 PM \| link -------------------- Monday, January 19, 2004 UFOs of October by Robert Bove. The sweetest pleasures in life are often the simplest. There are few pleasures sweeter than a good poem and there are few things simpler. Not easy, mind you, nor simplistic, merely simple, direct, and pure. A good poem is the sublime convergence of word, vision and expression. Robert Bove has turned out a book of simply good poetry. UFOs was a pleasure to read. To go back to our sublime convergence, both poetic vision and expression hinge of the word. Vision is nothing if it remains unexpressed and expression is mere noise if it is not accurately conveyed in words. Bove has an excellent command of language and a nicely developed “voice.” There weren’t a whole lot of wasted words here. Most poems managed to be spare without coming off as sparse. Bove’s language is direct and sometimes a bit earthy but never veers into the vulgar. Vulgarity is almost always a disguise for an absence of thought. The benefit of Bove's spare language is that it forges a more immediate connection with the reader. The drawback is that when a poem doesn’t work, there’s no place to hide. Take Gringos II for example. The contrast between the more serious first stanzas and the sing-songy second half just doesn’t hold up. In fact, it is one of the few true stinkers in the book. But on the whole, UFOs uses a deceptively familiar language to draw the reader into the decidedly unfamiliar. I guess I should finally get around to mentioning that UFOs is a series of poem cycles forming a thematic whole. That theme, in case you’ve been drinking too heavily to guess, is alienation. Aliens, the Other, the whole “Not From ‘Round Here, Are Ya, Boy” vibe. No, no, seriously, you will not even once think of those black-clad Poets-Capital-P from high school who wrote self-pitying dirges about nobody understanding them. UFOs treatment of alienation and otherness was quite refreshing. Without cliches and no heavy-handedness, the reader can follow the poet into worlds not their own and to which they will never belong. Pacifico’s Dream, a poem from the fourth cycle, Momentary Gods, best displays the soul of the book. Short, short summary: protagonist ends up in Virginia restoring a Jefferson designed plantation with two others, one of whom is Pacifico. While toiling mightily in the brutal southern sun restoring the farm’s garden, Pacifico dreams of a tranquil, zen-like garden paradise. While on the surface a beautiful poem about dreams and realities (and one that makes use of the very difficult literary technique of simultaneous, contrasting dialogues), Pacifico’s Dream lays bare the impossibility of making those tranquil dreams a reality. The dream drinking tea and philosophizing with his lover in that perfect, tranquil garden is unsustainable. Somebody’s got to brew the tea. Someone has to clean up after it all. Someone has to maintain the garden. Sweet lemon grass to chew on doesn’t just appear. The work Pacifico dreams of escaping will follow him into his dream. His vision of himself, his life, his lover is forever beyond his reach. It is a world that can never be. Other poems are maybe better, and certainly others more direct, but this one shines. To wrap this sucker up before I start capitalizing nouns again, UFOs has five poem cycles, UFOs of October, Cubic Acres, the Shell Line, Momentary Gods, and Short Story. Momentary Gods is the strongest and the Shell Line the weakest. Actually, Shell Line is confusing as hell in some poems. Cubic Acres gets better with each reading and Short Story is the most accessible. UFOs is the most fun and the most disturbing. I truly enjoyed reading these poems. I emphasize that because it’s very important. Poetry should not be literary vegetables. Read Bove, you’ll like him. You can order it at Amazon. P.S. Yes, Bove is my fellow Spinster. That has not let him off the hook in any way or affected my review. Well, okay, I was kind enough to say Gringos II stank instead of sucked. Trust me, if Bob’s book deserved both barrels, it would have gotten them. Oh, and I did invent my own citation standard for this post. Anything in italics is a poem or a poem cycle within the book. The boldface is for the book title itself. It seemed less confusing that way. You don't like it, lump it. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 9:57 PM \| link -------------------- Wednesday, January 14, 2004 Update. I have decided to restart my reading schedule with some brain candy. That's usually a good idea when you fall into a reading rut. When your mind has fallen out of the reading habit, you need to ease back in. Jumping straight into great Literature can overwhelm your reawakening brain. Brain candy, on the other hand, will exercise your reading muscles and make subsequent reading much more pleasurable. The ability to read is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. So without further ado, I am putting The Complete Encyclopedia of Homemaking Ideas by Barbara Taylor Bradford in the Active Roster. Actually, it's been there about a week but I was too lazy to update the site. I don't know if the author is the romance novelist because any author info would be on the missing dust jacket. The Encyclopedia itself is from 1968. Retro kitsch doesn't get any better than fake vinyl wood veneer. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 10:03 PM \| link The How to Book of the Mass by Michael DuBruiel. This was a great book. I heartily recommend it for any Catholic, actual or wannabe. First off, I want to say that this is not “Mass for Dummies.” This is a moment by moment enlightening of the central event of Christian worship. From the entrance procession to the dismissal, this book explains what we do and why. By breaking it down to component parts, DuBruiel (henceforth referred to as “Mike” because he ought to know better than to have a last name with that many vowels) makes what can sometimes seem like obscure sacred aerobics into a clear and reverent event. He shows where each part of the Mass is found in the Bible and how the different liturgies fit together. Yes, there is more than one liturgy. Mike explains that too. I knew that most of the individual prayers of the Mass (which is a big prayer in and of itself) were drawn from the Bible but not which prayer came from which book or why. One of the things that most ticks me off about my years in Catholic school is that they went out of their way to ensure that they never taught anything about the Faith. Well, not much anyway. I knew that the first reading was OT, the second non-Gospel NT, and the third the Gospel and that’s about it. This book reveals the depth of the liturgy without making it seem less than amazing. One of the best features of the book is the many excerpts from other works illustrating or digging deeper into the topic at hand. The Bible figures strongly of course, but Mike quotes from the earliest non-scriptural writings of the Church. Reading Justin Martyr (writing about 100 years after the Crucifixion) describe the exact order of the Mass is wild. I wish I could give a better post on this book but I’m doing this all from memory. I already gave the book away. My Sorella has decided to convert and I gave this book to her. If it opened up a word of wonder for me, it will certainly help her. She has asked me to be her sponsor and giving her this book is one way I’m helping her on her journey into Christ’s Church. It’s that good. You should not only get it for yourself, you should give it to anybody interested in the Faith. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 9:54 PM \| link -------------------- Tuesday, January 06, 2004 Lives of the Saints by Omer Englebert. This was interesting but too fluffy for my tastes. I can’t fault Fr. Omer’s (I ain’t typing that surname again) scholarship, which is undoubtedly top notch for the time period. This is a reprint from a 1951 edition. The entries were well written. That is unsurprising considering the author wrote a series of very popular novels in the early half of the Twentieth Century. Kind of like the Mitford books but set in France and the nice-guy hero is a real priest. Back to the book in question, this was just a little too comfy cozy. Too much of the “much of what we know of St. Thus-and-so is historically unverifiable but here’s the gist of it.” An incredible variety of saints were presented, which is a definite plus. But not enough enthusiasm. All in all, too much quiet piety. I like my saints with more gusto. I did benefit from reading this big a book of saints, though. It does every Christian well to be reminded of the myriad ways to serve God. We tend to compartmentalize the life of faith. And all sainthood is, really, is Faith lived. Christ calls us to obedience in faith, repeatedly enjoining us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to love God with all our strength, and to do unto the least of His children because what we do for them we do for Him. We like to pretend that the sainthood we are all called to is beyond us by associating sanctity with superhuman efforts, as if all holiness is encompassed in martyrdom or the cloistered life or total dedication to a life of service. That attitude helps us ignore our own calling to live our faith. We can stay complacent and self-sated if we convince ourselves that God’s call to holiness is beyond our grasp. I say “self-sated” there because that’s really what we are. Our shallow thirst for the spiritual is sated in our own selves because we never open ourselves to the torrents of true, insatiable desire, the desire for God. That desire for God is the sainthood we are all called to, the desire for God, given by God, quenchable only by God. But we never experience that desire if we muffle God’s call to desire. Saints? Would that I could be a martyr (whew, safe here in America)! Would that I could live a cloistered life of prayer (whew, safely married)! Would that I could give my life wholely to the care of Christ’s needy children (whew, too busy and nobody quaintly leprous around here anyway)! One thing a big book of saints like this does is to brush those complacencies away. There are simply too many normal people. There are too many loving spouses; too many parents. There are too many sanctified nobodies, living Faith purely in the same worldly life we live. It is good to be reminded that saintly desire is ours for the asking. I think I will give this particular book to my Sorella, an ex-Baptist testing the waters of the Tiber. She likes those Mitford books. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 8:08 PM \| link New Links. I linked the great T.S. O’Rama for reasons of pure greatness. I am also linking the Bookslut. She’s interesting but sometimes irritatingly lefty. Get thee to NRO, woman! ::: posted by Lee Ann on 8:06 PM \| link -------------------- Monday, January 05, 2004 Post Game Report. I have decided to add a new feature to my game plan. I am adding a Post Game Report. That’s where I’ll stick books after I finish them so I’ll remember to post on them. Clever, eh? ::: posted by Lee Ann on 7:56 PM \| link -------------------- Friday, January 02, 2004 The Dreaded Re-Alignment. Having run smack dab into a literary flying wedge, I am on a search and destroy mission in my library. The violent mixing of that metaphor is only a hint of things to come. I am cycling all the books on my Active Roster (except the ones I’ve finished, of course) and my Practice Squad back into the stacks. Then I’m going to redraft my read team. There comes a point when your reading life gets so stagnant that you must junk it all and start over. I have finished The How-To Book of the Mass, Lives of the Saints, and UFOs of October. Each will be reported on. But everything else goes. Except the Remini because I’m too close to the end. More updates as I figure out what the heck I’m going to do next. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 8:40 PM \| link Wahoo! Whoopee! I just found out that the 1960’s Dutch Catechism and Wilhelm’s Christ Among Us have both had their imprimaturs revoked. First, I didn’t know you could do that. Second, I own both books! Jenn-u-wine heresy. I may actually have to get around to reading those. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 8:38 PM \| link -------------------- Thursday, January 01, 2004 My New Year’s Resolutions. First off, Happy New Year!!! In honor of the New Year I am making some resolutions. Here they are: 1. I will post more often. I know I have been very lax about posting. The last few months have been awful but that doesn’t excuse me from wallowing. Wallowing is a fine southern tradition. You can do it indoors and avoid scaring the horses. But the time to wallow is over. 2. I will get back on a stronger reading schedule. This may mean rooting through and rearranging my library but it must be done. Expect trades, cuts, and some risky draft picks. Free agency will devastate the fiction lineup but revenue sharing amongst the history shelf will make the library stronger. This resolution makes much more sense when you realize I have the world’s only NFL inspired library. 2b. I will pronounce the word “schedule” as “skedule” the way all good Americans should, instead of as “shedule” like some dopey little Limey. 3. I will eat more, drink more and take less exercise. At least I know I can keep this one. ::: posted by Lee Ann on 6:28 PM \| link -------------------- <$BlogScript$> <