The Twelve Days of Christmas

I took a walk through the neighborhood the day after Christmas and noticed a forlorn Christmas tree already lying in the gutter, awaiting the trash truck. It reminded me of an email I'd recently received from my daughter who now shares a house with three other girls in the Pacific Northwest. She said she was thankful that we'd brought up our kids with lots of Advent and Christmas traditions in contrast to one of her housemates who reported that all they did on Christmas was open their presents and then stare at each other and feel sort of depressed. In Biblioland we celebrate four weeks of Advent (including the special feasts of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Nicholas) followed by twelve days of Christmas culminating in the feast of The Epiphany.

Naturally, food plays a big role in all these celebrations, as Darwin Catholic describes in A Taste of Christmas. And I'm with him on the tamales! But this year I have not done any Christmas baking or even any tamale making. (I've been diagnosed with prediabetes, and the only way to keep myself from eating as I oughtn't is just not to have the stuff in the house.)

However, I can still enjoy the other taste of Christmas which is traditional in our family -- reading aloud. Starting on Christmas Eve, Fillius and I have been reading Christmas stories or Christmas related selections from much-loved and familiar books. The list varies from year to year. Here is what we read during the twelve days of Christmas, 2008:

"Christmas" from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Little House books have many good Christmas chapters. This one is an an account of an iconic American Christmas. It's got all the elements: preparing handmade gifts, baking special treats for the big day, extended family coming to visit, playing in the snow with cousins, listening to the grownups talk after you've gone to bed, and the excitement of gifts in your stocking. Laura's ecstasy at receiving her special Christmas gift, a rag doll handmade by Ma, still moves me as much as it did when I first read it as a third-grader.

A Christmas Card for Mr. McFizz by Obren Bokich. Mr. McFizz, a fussy little ground squirrel is appalled when the Griswolds, a family of packrats, move into the hollow tree next to his tidy little burrow. He watches with increasing annoyance as the collection of clutter in their front yard grows larger and larger. Yet despite their messy ways, the Griswolds have many friends. Mr. McFizz, perhaps because he's always so busy cleaning, has none. Most of the time this doesn't bother him much. But as Christmas approaches he becomes melancholy because he never receives any Christmas cards. When the Griswolds' mailbox overflows with them, poor Mr. McFizz goes completely off his head and hatches a plot to squelch their simple happiness. How he has a change of heart and reconciles with his neighbors is one of the better examples of the "learning the true meaning of Chrismas" genre. (I especially liked that even after the reconcilation, Mr. McFizz still dislikes his neighbor's clutter. That seemed a realistic touch.)

"Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves" in Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. I love reading about shy Matthew's valiant attempts to buy a new dress for Anne who, because of Marilla's notions of squelching vanity in children, has never had a pretty, fashionable dress like the other girls -- one with puffed sleeves! (It's hard to believe that there are people who haven't read the Anne books before, but if you're among them, check out the Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge at Reading to Know.)

Spirit Child: A Story of the Nativity translated from the Aztec by John Bierhorst. This story was composed in the sixteenth century by Fray Bernardino Saghagún with the assistance of Aztec poets. The basic story comes from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but it also combines elements from medieval legends and traditional Aztec lore. The style in which the story unfolds is very much in the Aztec tradition. Some portions, such as the angels' song to the shepherds even use Aztec figures of speech. This aspect of the book is reinforced by Barbara Cooney's beautiful illustrations. (I love her depiction of the archangel Gabriel with his green feathered wings and jaguar skin garment.) A beautiful and reverent retelling of the birth of Christ.

The Church Mice At Christmas by Graham Oakley. We're big fans of Oakley's Church Mice books. They take place in the English village of Wortlethorpe where all of the mice in the community have taken up residence in the local Anglican church where, in exchange for sundry chores such as polishing the brasses, the vicar gives them a safe haven in which to live and a weekly allowance of cheese. This book recounts their attempt to acquire the funds for "A real Christmas party with paper hats and crackers and games and things." The problem is that parties cost money, and they're all as poor as, well, church mice. When their attempt to raffle off Sampson (the church cat) is unsuccessful, they attempt to earn money by Christmas caroling, having "spent the whole morning practising their scales and the whole afternoon sorting out the pronunciation of Wenceslas." But their diminutive size is against them, and an inadvertent run-in with the local constabulary results in a mad chase through a toy store. Various other attempts to scrounge up the party fixings fail until Arthur and Humphry, the leaders of the church mice, inadvertently perform a public service which rewards the mice with the party of their dreams -- "In fact it [the party] was so good that they were all ill for three days after it . . . ." My kids always enjoyed poring over Oakley's illustrations which have a lot of humorous detail.

"Godmother's Magic" and "Dumpling Speaks Her Mind" in Family Sabatical by Carol Ryrie Brink. Though better known for her pioneer novels Caddie Woodlawn and Magical Melons, Brink wrote many other novels which were among my childhood favorites and which I read aloud to my own children when they were small. Family Sabatical is about a midwestern American family which spends six months in France while their father, a history professor, is researching a book. The children's discovery of French culture and their attempts to celebrate such American holidays as Halloween and Thanksgiving are very funny. In the first of these Christmas chapters, I loved the description of their visit to Notre Dame on Christmas Eve. This non-Catholic family had never been in such a large church before "nor one so sweetly mysterious. Very quietly they walked all around in it, feeling its strangeness, which was at the same time a kind of warm familiarity." Far back in the candlelit church they discover a life-sized creche. "The children stood and looked at it for a long time, and suddenly this was more like Christmas Eve than any Christmas Eve that they had ever known before." The second chapter is about the family's celebration of Christmas the next morning and about the healing one member of the family experiences when she discovers that home is not a place as such; it's wherever your family is.

"Welcome Yule" by Jan Mark in An Oxford Book of Christmas Stories edited by Dan Pepper. This collection, which I checked out of the library, was a real disappointment. Published in the 1980s, the stories in this collection are mostly grim and gritty, often having very little to do with Christmas. "Welcome Yule" was a delightful exception. The new vicar, who has the personality of an enthusiastic steam roller has organized carol singing on the evening of the feast of St. Thomas despite the strange reluctance of the villagers to go out singing on that date. Their objection? That's the night that the "Waits" always sing. And no one wants to offend them. Who are the Waits? No one in the parish wants to explain it to the Vicar. So no one shows up at the scheduled time except the family of the narrator whose father had been shanghaied into playing a portable harmonium for this gig. Everyone else is hiding behind closed doors. The Vicar, already annoyed, is especially exasperated when they glimpse another group singing curiously antique carols. When he stomps off to confront them, he gets rather more than he bargained for.

The Story of the Three Kings by John of Hildesheim, retold by Margaret B. Freeman. "Of the three worshipful Kings all the world is full of praise from the rising of the sun to its down-going, and what these three Kings did at the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ is written oft in many books and places but what they did after is peradventure to many men unknown." So begins this best seller of the Middle Ages. At the time this book was written, the Magi were among the best loved saints in Christendom. But the author, a Carmelite friar, was the first to gather together the many legends of Balthasar, Melchior and Jaspar into one book. Margaret Freeman based her retelling on a Middle English text of 1399 and managed to preserve the flavor of the original. What I love about this book is that everything is full of meaning. For example, part of the gold which Melchior offered to the Christ Child was thirty gilt pennies. And these same thirty pennies were owned by anyone who was anybody throughout history. They were made by Thara, the father of Abraham. Then Abraham used them to buy a burial ground for himself and his family. Joseph was sold into Egypt for these same gilt pennies; later they were used to buy spices in Saba for Jacob's burial. These self-same pennies were later brought to King Solomon by the Queen of Saba. And after Jerusalem was destroyed, they were brought to the land of Arabia of which Melchior was king. Our Lady lost the thirty pennies during the flight to Egypt. They were later found by a shepherd who had an incurable disease. The shepherd was cured by Christ who recognized the pennies and told the sheherd to offer them to the temple. And wouldn't you know, it was those same thirty pennies with which the temple priests paid Judas to betray Our Lord. Whew! I also love the charming and colorful detail of these stories. For instance, when the star first arose it had in it the form and likeness of a young child and a sign of the cross above him. Out of the star came a voice saying, "Unto us is born this day the King and Lord that folk have long sought. Go then and seek him and do him worship." Not historically accurate, but who cares? In a way, it's early fan fiction!

Library Books

Whenever I mention to my mom that Fillius and I plan to visit the local public library, she shakes her head in disbelief. Why, she wonders, should anyone owning as many books as we do, need to visit a public library? I suppose it's because I don't actually own every book in the world. (It just seems that way.) And because there are books I want to read that I don't necessarily want (or need) to own.

I'm going to visit my daughter on Friday, so I'm checking my stack of library books to see which ones need to go back before I leave. I thought it might be interesting to list the titles I've got checked out at the moment to see what a Catholic reader with catholic tastes has been reading.

Hearts and Hand: The Influence of Women & Quilts on American Society by Pat Ferrero et al. (The author's mildly feminist outlook kept bumping into things, but it was a generally good history of women, their quilts, and the political and reform movements that they supported.)

Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit and Passion edited and illustrated by Bascove. (Lovely paintings, but the selections were not as interesting as I'd hoped, thoughI did get a few good book-related quotes for my collection.)

Ramona's World by Beverly Cleary. (Published in 1999, and I'd somehow missed reading it. Wow! Cleary's still got it.)

Beverly Cleary by Jennifer Peltak. (In the "Who Wrote That?" series of biographies for young readers. Pretty good, though heavily based on Cleary's two volume autobiography.)

Healthy Crockery Cookery by Mable Hoffman.

When Babies Read: A Practical Guide to Help Young Children With Hyperlexia, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism by Audra Jensen. (I checked out this book because I was curious about hyperlexia.)

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by "The Waiter." (Based on the blog of the same name. I really enjoyed this one.)

Noche Buena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories edited by Nicolas Kanellos (Pretty good!)

The Illuminated Alphabet: An Inspirational Introduction to Creating Decorative Calligraphy by Patricia Seligman. Calligraphy by Timothy Noad. (This book is simply gorgeous! I wish this book had been around when I was young and struggling to do calligraphy and illumination on my own.)

Everyday Dress 1650 - 1900 by Elizabeth Ewing. (About ordinary clothing as opposed to "fashion." Lots of good pictures.)

Sister Anne's Hands by Marybeth Lorbiecki, illustrated by K. Wendy Popp. (This is a lovely picture book. Set in the very early 1960s, the narrator is a seven year old girl describing an incident that took place the year her class was taught by Sister Anne, the first black teacher at the local parochial school. The illustrations are lovely and have a very period feel to them. The only quibble I have is that the text opens, "The summer I turned seven, flowers had power, peace signs were in, and we watched the Ed Sulivan Show every Sunday night." But "flower power" was a slogan from the late 60s and early 70s and the illustrations and story situation seem to be of the early 60s. But what do I know? I was there, but I had my nose in a book.)

The Thought That Counts: A First Hand Account of One Teenager's Experience With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Jared Douglas Kant. (Besides speaking to young people with OCD, I think this book would be helpful for anyone trying to understand and live with a family member who has this disorder.)

California Demon by Julie Kenner. (Billed as "the secret life of a demon-hunting soccer mom," this was a fun read which I previously wrote about here.)

The Corporal Works of Murder by Sister Carol Anne O'Marie. (I seldom read mysteries, but this one caught my eye as I was shelving at the library. I wondered how the author was going to handle her protagonist, an middle-aged modern nun in San Francisco. Not bad, though I guessed the identity of the murderer early on.)

Well, I'll return some of these when I go to work today. Then I have to find some good books to take with me on the plane. If I traveled a lot (and had big bucks) I would certainly be tempted to buy a Kindle. I always worry about running out of things to read when I'm away from home. But now that I'm getting older, it's getting harder to lug around a big stack of books.

Reading About Alzheimer's Disease

As may have been apparent, my previous post was cut and pasted from my other blog, Quilting Bibliophagist. Just to get things back on topic, I thought I'd briefly write about the books I've been reading on the topic of Alzheimer's disease and memory loss.

The first one is The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for Persons with Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss in Later Life by Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins. As might be gathered from its lengthy title, this is the comprehensive book that covers everything you might possibly need to know about caring for a person with dementia. Whether you need general information about getting medical help or specific information about particular problems relating to the daily care of the patient or the the varied behavior problems he may present, this is the book to go to. It's clearly and competently written and I strongly recommend it.

The second is Alzheimer's Early Stages by Daniel Kuhn. The first part of the book focuses on the possible causes of Alzheimer's, its early symptoms, and the most recent progress in its treatment. Parts 2 and 3, which deal with caring for the patient and caring for yourself, have a less clinical and more human tone than The 36-Hour Day. For instance, one chapter deals with the different ways that patients with Alzheimer's experience the disease. (Would you believe that there are actually five books written by people who had Alzheimer's?) This chapter has helped me to both sympathize and empathize with my aunt.

Despite being a voracious reader, I found it difficult to read either of these books for very long at a stretch. It wasn't the writing; it was the subject matter. However, I devoured Carved In Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.

The author is a journalist who began to wonder what was happening to her mind. She felt vague and foggy. She'd barely crossed thethreshold into middle age, but she was losing her edge. She could no longer mentally keep track of her busy calendar. And as a journalist, she was more than a little disconcerted when the precise words she needed for a story began to elude her, and her thoughts became so evanescent that they evaporated even as she picked up a pencil to record them. Then she became aware that many of her friends andcolleagues were suffering from the same problem . Some of them were scared. (One woman, a person whom the author had always considered one of the sharpest people she knew, even quit her job because she could no longer bear the strain of trying to appear as mentally alert as hertwenty-something colleagues.)

The author decided to focus her journalistic skills on the problem. Was middle-aged memory loss normal? Could it be reversed?

(I myself am 56, and I've seriously considered having a T-shirt made with, "Brain Like A Sieve" lettered on the front of it. So I have a personal interest in the author's quest.)

What she discovered is that what we experience in middle age is not simply loss of memory. There is also a change in the speed and manner with which we process information. Yes, menopause really does make you stupider. And (in her case) blows to the head earlier in life will affect your memory years many later. Poor diet can starve your brain; an improved diet and sophisticated supplements may improve your mental abilities but will require an awful lot of prep time. She also tested the effect of both physical and mental exercises. She even tried out a number of drugs reputed to enhance memory, but with varied levels of success. (That part was kind of scary.) Her conclusions are more personal than scientific, but I found her book to be a fascinating read. (I just hope I can remember where I put the book before it's due back at the library!)

On a Tear With Charlotte, or One Book Leads To Another

I've been reading a lot of Charlotte Bronte lately.

It all started in April when I had to drive my mother to the emergency room. The previous day she had attended a birthday picnic, hosted by one of my cousins, where most of the attendees contracted food poisoning. My mother, who is 78 years old, was so ill she had to go to the hospital. I drove her there, and since one never knows how long a visit to the emergency room will take, I made sure to bring a book.

I wanted something dependable and small, so I grabbed my Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Eyre. At 3.5" x 6", it's smaller than most paperbacks and fits nicely in my skirt pocket. I've read Jane Eyre many times before, but it never fails to engross me. Judy Abbot, the protagonist of Daddy-Long-Legs, summed it up for me when she described her first reading of this novel, ". . . as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena and sets fire to bed curtains and tears up wedding veils and bites -- it's melodrama of the purest, but just the same, you read and read and read." And so I did.

My mother was in the hospital for several days, so I spent a good deal of time there too. And whenever she was dozing or undergoing tests, I buried myself in Jane because, as we all know, time moves slowly in a hospital, but reading is a hyperspatial by-pass through tedium.

Frequently, when I read a novel like Jane Eyre, I'm so wrapped up in the story that I pay scant attention to the author's technique. But this time I was more aware of how Bronte achieves her effects. I was particularly struck by her use of present tense narrative when the heroine is facing an important turning point. It gives the reader a sense of immediacy, but also conveys the character's feeling of mental distance or dislocation -- that numbing daze when Everything Has Just Become Too Much and one feels cut off from both the future and the past. When Jane narrates in the traditional past tense, you have in the back of your mind the assurance that she has survived her adventures and is looking back on them. But when she switches to present tense you are with her right at that moment, dazed and uncertain.

Well, my mom recovered and returned home. So did I, still reading Jane Eyre. And when I finished I was in the mood for more Bronte. So I checked out Villette from the public library (which I had never read before) and then reread The Professor as a chaser.

I decided I'd like to know a bit more about Bronte so I looked her up in the Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. According to the latter, "her novels are marked by anti-Catholicism." Jane Eyre doesn't really show any signs of it. (Just the bit about her creepy, selfish cousin becoming a nun.) I originally read The Professor many, many years ago and didn't recall much anti-Catholic sentiment -- no more than you'd expect from any British author of that time period. As a bit of a lark, I decided to mark the most egregious anti-Catholic sentiments with Post-it notes.

I think that the examples in The Professor simply reflect the English dislike and distrust of foreigners and foreign ways. Of course the natives of Belgium are dull and stupid. Of course the French are sly and devious. So what else can you expect from Catholics? They haven't had the moral advantages of being upright English Protestants. (As I read the book, the refrain Song of Patriotic Prejudice by Flanders & Swann rang through my mind: "The English, the English, the English are best: I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!"

But the anti-Catholicism in Villette is downright virulent.

Religous issues aside, Villette is a real downer that should not be read by anyone having even the slightest tendency to depression. The heroine is lonely, hopeless, starved for affection, suffers from apparent visitations of the spectre of a murdered nun, has the meanest, most devious boss in the world, and teaches horrid school girls. During the summer vacation she goes through a period of clinical depression that is almost psychotic. The author allows her a brief moment of happiness when she is finally allowed to fall in love with a professor who teaches at her school. But no sooner has she accepted his proposal than his scheming (Catholic) relatives who oppose the marriage, have finagled him into traveling overseas to take care of business concerns, separating the lovers for several years. And then the author whips up an ocean storm to drown him on his return. Actually, at the request of her father, Bronte rewrote the ending to make it just slightly more ambiguous than her original version. If Pollyanna read this revised version she might, just possibly, come away with the impression that the hero could have survived the waves and would yet turn up. But I doubt it. In Villette Bronte has drawn a heroine who has schooled herself to reject hope, and has placed her in circumstances which vindicate that rejection.

By contrast, The Professor was a light hearted romp -- though it is a sedate novel compared to Jane Eyre. It was interesting to discover that Bronte wrote it before Jane Eyre. She wanted to portray a realistic hero in a novel that did not indulge in romantic excess. Alas, no publisher would take it, having instead "a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrilling -- the strange, startling, and harrowing . . . ."* So she went off and wrote Jane Eyre, and it was commercial success.

One thing which the two novels have in common is that the hero is first attracted to and falls in love with the heroine's mind. Both heroines are intelligent, and captivate their beloveds with their pert wit. Both are described at times as a vexing fairy or elf. And both preserve a special companionship with their husbands after marriage. In The Professor, Frances teaches in her own school. And she requires her husband to also teach there an hour a day because, as she says, "people who are only in each other's company for amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together." Jane also works with her husband. She becomes Mr. Rochester's eyes, seeing for him, reading for him, and generally being his right hand. And talking with each other all day long -- ah, what bliss! And how I miss it -- since my late husband and I, like the Rochesters, could say that "to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking."

As a girl I loved the descriptions of these two marriages. Perhaps they gave me hope that I too would someday find romance -- I was certain no one would ever marry me for my looks!

Instead of reading Shirley, I detoured into Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Fascinating. (But I won't talk about it now. This post is already too long.) And then I felt the need to read one of Gaskell's novels. Mary Barton is the only one in our public library, so I'm working my way through that right now.

===============
*from Bronte's introduction to The Professor.

Lenten Reading

Sci Fi Catholic is going to abstain from reading fiction during Lent. Instead, he'll be plowing his way through The New Complete Works of Josephus translated by William Whiston with new editing and additional commentary by Paul L. Maier (who apparently also writes novels).

If you'd like to join The 4o-Day Josephus Read-a-Thon "put the comics and sf novels down, pick up a weighty nonfiction tome, and prove to the world that Sci Fi Catholics don't just read ephemeral garbage; sometimes we read boring stuff, too." I'm tempted to join in, but surprisingly my library has no copy of Josephus in any edition. (I'm watching the budget pretty closely right now, so get thee behind me, Amazon!) Anyway, I've enjoyed reading about his comments about Josephus here and here.

Darwin Catholic is going for a second year of Lenten Meditations on the Divine Comedy. He'll be picking up at book 12 of the Purgatorio. As Darwin points out, modern readers tend to give most of their attention to the Inferno:

For far too many in the modern world, Dante is that medieval guy who wrote the poem about hell. The Inferno is by far the most read, and when it crops up in high school or college reading lists, it's often read quickly with an emphasis on some of the more horrific images involved and Dante's notorious propensity to put real characters (ranging from political enemies to recent popes) in hell. This is a shame, because in focusing on some of the more spectacular surface elements of the first third of the Commedia, one loses the real sense of what Dante was trying to achieve.

At root, the Divine Comedy is about the spiritual progress of the soul, from attachment to sin, through repentance and purgation, to virtue and salvation. . . In the Inferno, Dante learns the nature of sin, while in the Purgatory he learns to strive to replace each sin with its opposing virtue. The Paradiso is, in turn, an allegory of prayer and the spiritual life culminating in the beatific vision of God surrounded by a "celestial rose" made of the angels and the ever-rejoicing saints.

In this sense, a prayerful reading of the Divine Comedy is most appropriate for Lent, when we seek to assure that we are on the long road that winds Eastward, and making progress towards our Maker.

I've already got the book for this one, so I'm planning to read along. I'll probably use the Dorothy Sayers translation which has excellent notes. Many people do not care for her translation because she attempted to reproduce in English Dante's terza rima. Personally, I find her translation charming, but my tastes in poetry are very hobbitish.

Fountain Pens and the Lure of Blank Books

I love blank books. But I hardly ever use them.

I would love to have been the sort of person who has a row of hand-written diaries on her bookshelf.

Actually, I do have a shelf-full of diaries, but hardly anything is written in them. It seems that I only resort to a diary when depressed. When life is blithe, when life is gay, I feel no need to write. When it's busy and interesting, I don't have time. And when life is boring -- well, what then is there to write about?

Besides, it's hard to write with a pen. The keyboard has become such a natural extension of my brain that I'm hardly aware of it. The words flow effortlessly through my fingers. The pen lies inert, grasped tensely between fingers that have already to ache with the unaccustomed effort. I awkwardly squeeze out the words. Good heavens! I seem to be writing these words one letter at a time. And such awkward words!

I need to delete! I need to cut and paste!

Yet the romance of pen and ink (a fountain pen, mind you!) and the blank white page continues to haunt me. Perhaps some day I will express myself with these elegant implements of a more genteel age. Nourishing that hope I do own a couple of fountain pens, some chaste white note paper, and even some blotting paper.

Last night, I decided to rehabilitate my husband's old fountain pen. He bought it during our visit to England almost 30 years ago at a shop which offered to customize pen nib to the customer's taste. It's been languishing in a drawer for years. Since the ink in it had been allowed to dry out, it took a good deal of soaking, flushing, and rinsing to bring it once more to a functional condition. Then I had to let it dry overnight. While it rested on its couch of paper towels, I read a little book titled,

The pocket
GUIDE BOOK
for the
PROPER
USE AND CARE
of the
FOUNTAIN PEN

written by Mr. Pier Gustafson.

It is a very little book: 2 x 4.75 inches. Though only 15 pages long, it contains everything the new pen owner will need to know in order to enjoy "the reliable and pleasurable use of the fountain pen." Among the topics covered are the anatomy of the pen (with its charming cross section illustration of a pen being sawn in half), how pens work and how they are filled, proper fountain pen ink, and the necessity of a light touch when writing. The author also discusses the touchy subject of lending your pen, particularly when one suspects that the person requesting it is a barbarian. (Suggested gracious denials range from "I'm so sorry. It is out of ink," to "If you break it I will kill you.") There is advice about the best way to travel with your fountain pen, and the dangers of allowing it to rattle about in your handbag in company with "emery boards, baubles bristling with diamonds in the worst possible taste, keys, melted candy bars, and other such items foreign to the author."

The book's charming tone can best be conveyed by quoting from its introduction:

Psychologists tell us that we, as a species, use only a small portion of the brain's full potential. That is fortunate as there is room for improvement. We have ample cells available for new ideas, comprehending new inventions, and remembering the newly-expanded zip-code. Some of the unused sections of the brain are due to the fact the we have forgotten much. Along with hunting and gathering skills, tree climbing, and the rules of etiquette we have a neglected area of the brain that had once concerned itself with appreciation of the pen.

Since the development of the noisome ball-point pen only a few of that lobe's cells are being used. What had long lain dormant are the myriad of issues dealing with the pen in terms of quality, art, invention and pleasure. Now that you have a fine fountain pen in your hand you'll find the appreciation of that and the world around you will grow as those sleepy neurons and synapses awake and fire.

The aim of this book is to assist you in this noble endeavor.

And so it has.

Reading Elizabeth Borton de Treviño

Christmas gifts in the Bibliophagist household tend to be flat and rectangular. And the ones that are not chocolate bars are books. Fillius Minor gave me a copy of The Hearthstone of My Heart by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño. I'd never heard of it before, so I was delighted to receive it. (She's best known as the author of I, Juan de Pareja which was the Newberry winner in 1966.)

I had previously read My Heart Lies South, her account of how she, a thoroughly modern, American journalist married the very traditional Mexican public relations director who had been assigned to meet her at the border when she arrived to cover a story for The Boston Herald. Because of their cultural differences, she did not at first realize that he was courting her! The role of women in the U.S. had begun to change, so her married life in Mexico in the 1930s seemed like a journey back in time both to her and to her readers in 1950. The book has currently been republished by Bethlehem Books in a slightly revised Young People's Edition "to make it more suitable for general family reading."

(Naturally I had to find out how this edition differed from the original. As it turns out, it was abridged in only two places. The first deletion is a account of her servant problems, the most awkward of which was the tendency of her unmarried maids to become pregnant. The second was a description of one of her husband's aunts who had a deathly fear of being accidentally buried alive. Some of the annecdotes related to this topic might have been considered a bit gruesome for Bethlehem's market. Digression: Apparently the fear of being prematurely buried was very common in the 19th century, giving rise to many patents for coffins with escape hatches or signaling devices like this one. In some areas this fear lingered into the twentieth century.)

I'd always wondered what her life was like before her marriage. In her memoir, The Hearthstone of My Heart, the author begins by describing her childhood in Bakersfield, California in the early part of the 20th century. Not only did she live in a very different world than ours, but she and her family were happy in a way that must have already begun to seem unusual to her audience in 1977. Her respect for the strength and integrity of her parents shines through her narrative. And she also conveys a sense that strong women capable of academic and professional achievement existed well before the advent of "Women's Lib" -- a term she uses several times which now seems somewhat dated and quaint.

The author earned her undergraduate degree in Spanish language and literature, and then went back East to study music. In need of funds, she first worked for a publisher and then segued into journalism, first writing concert reviews and later becoming a reporter. Interviews with well known celebrities became her specialty. At this point, a lot of the references in her stories began to go over my head since I'd never heard of most of the musical and political people she met. Her newspaper also sent her back to California every summer to interview Hollywood actors and actresses. (I knew a few of those, but I guess everyone's heard of W.C. Fields.)

For years she'd been trying to write and sell fiction without success. Interestingly, it was her Hollywood experience that led to her first book contract. She was approached by the publisher of the Pollyanna books and asked to write one set in Hollywood. (The original author had died after writing only two books. Since they were wildly popular, the publisher was continuing the series using various authors who wrote the books on contract and to specifications.) She asked for time to think it over because she was afraid that being associated with Pollyanna and her "glad game" would tarnish her image as a sophisticated and intellectual young woman

"Among my sophisticated friends, this procedure of always being glad about something was anathema. The climate of thinking was changing; it was generally thought to be much more intelligent to be angry about things. This elevation of anger to a position among the virtues has attracted an amazing number of partisans in recent years."

Fortunately she asked the advice of a friend who was already an author. He advised her that if she wanted to be a professional writer she should, "Take every job you are offered, and do it to the best of your ability. Beethoven was not ashamed to work on contract and deliver work that was ordered . . . The publishers are willing to take a chance on you. Grab it, and do as good a job as you possibly can." Then he added what I consider to be the best writing advice ever: "Don't keep anything back, thinking it is too valuable a pearl for this job. Put your best into everything. If you are ever going to be any good, new ideas will come, and you will not find yourself without resources when you need them."

And it turned out she ended up writing four of the Pollyanna novels, and the job was invaluable in teaching her how to structure and write a novel. The exciting part is that I actually have one of them in my collection. But I had never realized that she was the author since it was written while she was still using her maiden name. And she made her peace with Pollyanna's optimism and cheerful, stiff upper lip.

As I reflect now on much of the current writing for children I wonder if it is wise to assume that they must be hurtled into the "real world" of sex, murder, incest, abortions, and violence in all their reading. It is a rougher, harder world than I knew as a child, and I agree that children must be made as wise as possible by their parents before they are allowed to roam freely in it. But aren't children entitled to escape literature , too? Shouldn't the imagination of what could be a beautiful world, be kept, in their stories, in their entertainment? If not, how will they envision it? Man has always dreamed of improvements before he was able to effect them.

Miracle Fiction?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided to have a go at The Song of Bernadette. It's another one of those books that I've always heard of but have never actually read. Since I'm on a tight budget, I borrowed a copy from the public library. They had the 1989 edition from St. Martin's Press. According to the introduction, it was the first book to be published in their new "Religious Miracle Fiction Series."

Naturally I was intrigued. Most of what passes for religious fiction is very badly done. But I'm always on the look-out for the rare exception. This series was to consist of "reissued classic books that bring back the well-known works of popular religious writers of the twentieth century." So what other novels had they published under this imprint? Possibly none -- since both Amazon and Google searches turned up no references except to Song of Bernadette. (If anyone does know of further books in the series, please let me know.)

Why did they attempt this series?

According to the editor, the approach of the new millennium would see both a revived belief in eschatology and "a fervent faith in the arrival and occurrence of religious miracles" which he defines as "often totally inexplicable events, that will be interpreted as saving us from our rational, destructive selves." Huh? Our rational selves are destructive? I thought that was the job of our irrational selves. He also seems to be buying into the assumption that religion and reason have nothing in common. Okay, Mr. Editor, I can tell right now that we are not simpatico.

I'm in the same camp with G.K. Chesterton who says, in the person of Father Brown in "The Blue Cross, "I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason." That's how Father Brown unmasks the thief Flambeau who has been masquerading as a priest. "'You attacked reason, ' said Father Brown. 'It's bad theolgy.'"

Not counting the brief Y2K frenzy, did either of the editor's predicitons of emerging religious themes come true? I don't think so.

Oh, wait a minute. Didn't those Left Behind novels come out around 1995? Shoot! Not that I ever read them. I tried to read the first chapter of one while standing in front of the book display in Costco, but I just couldn't manage it. It was soooo badly written. (And not my cuppa theology, either.) Their popularity boggles the mind. But I suppose that if you really like a novel's message, you'll forgive a lot in the way of bad writing.* Which is probably, as I said earlier, why most religious fiction is so badly done.

I'm two thirds of the way through Song of Bernadette. So far my response to it is fairly positive -- with one major reservation. More details when I'm finished.

=================
*Is that why Da Vinci Code did so well?

The Song of Bernadette

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, another one of those festal days sprinkled throughout Advent, the celebration of which helps to remind us that we are the party-church. Since we were homeschoolers, I always gave my kids a day off on December 8th, and of course we went to Mass. And we probably had a special dessert. (Someday I'll write a book called The Role of the Stomach in the Assimilation of Catholic Culture.) But unlike the Feast of St. Nicholas, we never had a special book which we always read in honor of the day.

I was thinking about this today when it occurred to me that I had never read The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel. The author of this fictionalized account of St. Bernadette was neither a Catholic nor a Christian. He was a Jewish playwright whose satirical plays lampooning the Nazi regime were a hit in Vienna, so he had to flee to France when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He found refuge in the town of Lourdes where various families took turns sheltering him and his wife. It was there that he heard the story of Bernadette Soubirous and her visions of a Lady who identified herself only as "the Immaculate Conception." In gratitude, he vowed that if he and his wife escaped to safety he would write Bernadette's story as a novel. The book was hot stuff when it was published in 1942. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over a year and was made into a movie in 1943.

It's one of those books I've always heard of, but have never actually read. So just to be seasonal, I think I'll give it a try and will let you know what I think.

In the mean time, have a blessed Advent and "Party on, dudes!"

I Stumble Over John Donne

Among the many authors whom I have never read is John Donne. I mention this more in the nature of a confession than as a boast. It would not be accurate to say that I have read no Donne at all, because many quotations from his work are quite familiar to me. I must have met them in other works or in anthologies of poetry and suchlike.

And of course I knew that Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night liked Donne, so I’d always meant to get around to reading him someday. (One of my little hobbies is reading books mentioned in, or read by the characters of, my favorite novels. I can think of no other good reason for reading Pilgrim’s Progress than that it was a favorite of the March girls in Little Women!)

Anyway, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne is now sitting on my stack of Books to Read Soon, and the way it happened is this:

I was shelving in the literature section and opened the book at random. My eye fell upon poem #2 in a series of seven Holy Sonnets.

ANNUNCIATION

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which alwayes is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye
In prison, in thy wombe; and though he there
Can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he’will weare
Taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie
Ere by the spheares time was created, thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy Sonne, and Brother;
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceive’d; yea thou art now
Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother;
Thou’hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloystered in thy deare womb.

Well, this simply blew me away -- that he should be able to encapsulate the immensity of the Incarnation in this short little poem as well as the consequent sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

So I turned to the book’s intro to relieve my ignorance about the author. (I really don’t know how I managed to graduate as an English major while yet remaining innocent of so many well known writers.) I read that he came of a Roman Catholic family which clung to its faith despite persecution. (His mother was a grand-neice of St. Thomas More.) Many of his closer relatives were exiled or executed for religious reasons. Donne’s first teachers were Jesuits. He later studied at Oxford and Cambridge but could not obtain a degree since he could not take the required Oath of Supremacy. Alas, he eventually went over to the Church of England, though I guess no one knows the precise reason. He wrote two anti-Catholic polemics in 1610 and 1611 and became a C of E clergyman in 1615. It must have improved his financial situation which was pretty dire. Poor fellow.

But I’ve now put him at the top of my To Read pile because he has again nabbed my attention.

Last night my son and I were rewatching the movie version of 84 Charing Cross Road. (It is, by the way, a remarkably good adaptation of a book which, being a series of letters, must have been very difficult to dramatize.) At one point Helene, who has been gifted with a copy of the same Modern Library collection of John Donne that I have, decides to read aloud one of his sermons. This exact scene is not in the book, but thanks to Google, I’ve been able to copy the quotation:

All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is torn out of the book and translated into a better language. And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to another.

Is that not a wonderful image? Is it any surprise that Catholic Biblophagist must now sit down and read this fellow?

Origin of the Dufflepuds

Much unpacking has been going on in BiblioLand. My husband's science books made it onto the shelves yesterday. Now the center island of bookcases is full. I also discovered an overlooked box of books which had to be interfiled with the history section. Much book shifting ensued.

The very last book to come out of the box was Pliny's Natural History, edited by Loyd Haberly. Opening the book at random, my eye fell on the following:

[Ctesias] also speaks of another race of men who are known as Monocoli who have only one leg but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Sciapodae because they are in the habit of lying on their backs during the time of the extreme heat, and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet.

Well! I hadn't realized that the Dufflepuds were another one of C.S. Lewis' borrowings. But I'm an ignorant wight, so I won't be surprised if everyone else already knows this. As you can tell, I've never sat down and read all the way through even this condesed version of the Historia Naturalis.

A Patron Saint for Catholic Bibliophagist

The Man Who Loved Books by Jean Fritz, illustrated by Trina S. Hyman, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NY, 1981.

I sometimes envy my children their childhood. They grew up with book-buying parents. My own parents were proud of my reading ability, and even took me to the library to check out books. But I do not remember our family having any books except the World Book and Childcraft, and I don't think I had any books of my own until sixth grade when I was tapped by my teacher to join an after school reading group which read and discussed children's classics. And we got to keep the books!

I don't really remember anything about the meetings or the discussions, but I still have a vivid mental image of some of those paperback books: A Christmas Carol, slim and grey; Huckleberry Finn, yellow, brown, and white, radiating the hot Missouri sun; and Little Women, whose pink cover, with its illo of the March sisters grouped around their mother, was a treasured keepsake long after the book itself had fallen apart from much reading. Those paperbacks were the beginning of my own personal library.

My own children had a very different experience growing up. For one thing, their mother had an enormous collection of children's books. (I'd collected them long before I had kids -- even before I had any intention of marrying -- because I like children's lit.) So there was lots of stuff at home for them to read or have read to them. And of course we bought them books as presents on all major gift-giving occasions. But the other major difference was a formative period in their youth when we instituted The Monthly Book Treat. Once a month we'd take them to a very good children's book shop in our area and allow each of them to choose one book for their own private collections.

Obviously, this took place during a rather flush period of our family's financial life. I doubt if it went on for more than a year, but it seems to have been successful in inculcating the bookbuying habit among our progeny.

If you too are trying to raise a brood of little bibliopahgists, you cannot do better than to read about St. Columba, the subject of The Man Who Loved Books. Columba lived at a time when "books were still such a new thing in Ireland, they were hard to come by. If someone wanted to read a new book, he might have to walk the length of the land just to find one. If he wanted to own the book, he would have to copy it by hand."

Thanks to the timely injunction of a prophet, Columba learned to read early. The letters of the alphabet were baked inside a cake, and as soon he'd eaten and digested it he began reading and writing. When he grew up, Columba was determined to read every book in Ireland and to make his own copy of every book he read. But most books were owned by monasteries which sometimes they hid their books from Columba because the monks were proud of owning the only copy of a work.

In one instance Columba's good friend Finian allowed him to read a new book which had just been brought back from Rome, but stipulated that he must not copy it. But the temptation was too much for Columba who secretly sneaked into the library every night to make his own copy. Just as Columba finished it, Finian discovered his deceit.

Both men claimed ownership of the new copy. Columba insisted that the High King judge the case, but the king ruled against him saying, "To every cow belongs her calf, and to every book its son-book." Columba swore to be avenged. His sympathetic kinsfolk fought and killed 3,000 of the High King's men. Then Columba's temper died down and he was SORRY. (You see, there really is going to be a moral to this story!)

The worst penance Columba could think of was to banish himself from Ireland so he sailed to Iona where he built his own monastery. He traveled, preached, built churches, made copies of the Bible, and even converted the King of Scotland. But he missed the joy of seeing new books. (Personally, I think that must have been an even harder punishment than banishment.)

Jean Fritz also recounts some of Columba's later adventures such as his mediation of a dispute between the bards and the kings of Ireland. She says that Columba died doing what he liked best, copying a book. Not a bad way to go.

Book Inscriptions

I recently reread 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff which is an epistolary love story between a brash American writer (poor, but with an antiquarian taste in literature) and an English bookshop which supplies her with beautiful old volumes which she cannot find in the United States.

The book opens in 1949 when meat, eggs, and other foodstuffs were still being rationed in England as a result of World War II. When Helene finds out about these restrictions ("2 ounces of meat per family per week and one egg per person per month"), she is appalled and arranges to send food parcels to the shop's staff through a company in Denmark. The book chronicles her relationship with the people in the shop through 1969. At one point they send her a copy of Elizabethan Poets, a beautiful book "with pages edged all round in gold" as a gift. In her thank you letter she writes,

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading pasages some one long gone has called my attention to.)

So do I. Many of the used books in my library have inscriptions. Most are simply the name of the previous owner, with perhaps a date.

C.W. Ihle. June 28, 1907.

That's an odd surname. Is it an abbreviation?

A few include addresses or phone numbers. I wonder what Mrs. Ellwood N. Hough (or, more likely, her heirs) would think upon receiving a mysterious postcard with the message, "I have your copy of Mamma's Boarding House." And why did she get rid of that book anyway? Or was her library junked by television-watching offspring after she went to that great library in the sky?

A copy of The Colleges of Oxford by Andrew Clark M.A is inscribed to

Robin
With his wife’s dearest love
Sept 27th/92 (That's 1892, by the way; the book was published in 1891.)

Was she interested in Oxford too? Or was she sweetly indulging her husband's favorite hobby horse?

And what is the story behind the inscription in Shakespeare's Songs and Poems?

With the hope that you'll be kept so busy reading these songs you won't have time to sing them. . .

Why Rome was written in 1930 by an Anglican gentleman who converted to Catholicism. My copy is inscribed by the author to:

Mr. George Longley

In appreciation of
past support
in my quest of God’s will.

Stephen Peabody Delany
-1935

I wonder if George Longley is mentioned in the book? I'll have to find out. (There are lots of books in my library I haven't yet read.)

I have a copy of Dr. Seuss's You're Only Old Once with the rueful inscription,

Dear Carmen
Welcome to MediCare!
Love,
Eddie & Ellen

I hope they are all well. My son worries that Carmen might be dead. But I prefer to think that she just laughed at Eddie's retirement gift before donning her red hat and heading off to an overseas adventure.

I recently stumbled across The Book Inscription Project which collects photos of books with interesting inscriptions. I thought this one was poignant:

V.W.O.

Bought many years ago
to read in my old age
—————————-
88-89
I now in old age, and
cannot easily read
this small print.
Buy a new bigger volume.

It was found in Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales. You can see it here.