Reading Performance Programs

As I have noted before, reading material is everywhere, not just in books and magazines. I have written, for example, about conference programs and, just yesterday, about greeting cards. Going to a wonderful, exciting performance of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival -- yet another reason I love living in the Bay Area -- the other day made me think about programs at concerts, plays, and other performances. Such programs have a utilitarian value, obviously, in providing information about performances, performers, order of performances, and so on. Beyond that, they often give informative notes and context. Some also have ads. Some are large and fancy; some are small and simple. Some are colorful; some are black and white. Some are booklets; some are one piece of paper folded in half. Some cover just the day’s performance; some serve for a whole series of performances. I liked the program for the Ethnic Dance Festival because it was colorful and gave substantial information about each of the eight dance groups performing that day, as well as about all the other dance groups performing throughout the festival. My one quibble was that the background to the print was mostly dark colors, making it harder to read the print. But the information and the splendid photographs of performers made up for it. It would be a great souvenir for those who save programs; I personally stopped doing so some years ago, for reasons of space, and of knowing that it was highly unlikely that I would go back and look through them. But I do appreciate a program that combines clearly presented information with a bit of flair. By the way, my favorite dance performance that day was one combining South Indian dance and Japanese taiko drumming and dancing. Wow!

Choosing, Writing, and Reading Greeting Cards

A non-book kind of reading is reading greeting cards. Stationery stores, drugstores, supermarkets have aisles full of cards for all occasions: birthdays, engagements, weddings, anniversaries, get well, sympathy, new babies, graduations, retirements, and more. Then there are all the holidays: Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. And there are some strange “special days” obviously concocted by, or at least encouraged by, the card companies themselves: Secretaries’ Day (now Administrative Assistants’ Day), for example. Then there are subcategories in the card sections of stores: humorous, spiritual, inspirational, budget, etc. Despite the reams of cards available for sale, I often find it hard to find the right one for a specific person on a specific occasion. Many cards are too sentimental, too sugary, too trite, too awkwardly “funny,” too stiff and formal, too sexist, or too vulgar. I try to find cards with simple greetings: “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Holidays,” “Congratulations on your Graduation,” “With my Deep Sympathy.” If I can’t find the right card, I often use blank cards and simply write my own messages. Despite these negative remarks, I do like the idea of greeting cards, and enjoy sending and receiving them. For one thing, they are one of the last remnants of personal mail that arrives in one’s actual physical mailbox rather than email mailbox (although there are email greeting cards as well, and those are fine too).

"We Had It So Good"

I find myself drawn to novels about my generation, those of us who were adolescents and young adults in the l960s and 1970s (OK, yes, the Baby Boomers…). For all the good and bad of those years, and there was plenty of both, I think most of us still feel that they were a sort of Golden Age. Linda Grant captures this feeling in her novel “We Had It So Good” (Scribner, 2011). Her protagonist, Stephen, an American who moved to England, often romanticizes this period in his life. His wife, Andrea, is more pragmatic and is glad that they have since then achieved a comfortable, upper middle class life. His hedonist friend, Ivan, happily enjoys the “best” of both lives: his habits from the sixties and his comforts from his later adult life. The fourth main character, Grace, is a bit of a lost soul; she is, on the one hand, an independent woman who travels everywhere and acts on her ideals, but on the other hand, always needs a man in her life, and doesn’t really get along well with anyone except her old friend Andrea. These four met when they were all at Oxford, Stephen as a Rhodes Scholar (who met Bill Clinton, another Rhodes Scholar, on the ship from the U.S. to England) and the others as English students. We also learn about Stephen and Andrea’s two children, Marianne and Max, each with her/his own complicated life, and Stephen’s father, Si, who is deeply loving but has his own secrets. But the main focus is on the Boomer generation, and how they come to terms with growing older and, eventually, encounter illness and mortality. They – especially Stephen – have led (mostly) charmed lives (thus the title) and can hardly believe that they too are subject to these calamities. One other point that becomes clear is that those who have had loving parents and happy childhoods are positively influenced by these their whole lives; the only problem is that they, as in Stephen’s example, are not really prepared for anything to go wrong in their lives. This situation really resonates with me. An intriguingly dissonant aspect of this novel, for me, was that I didn’t really connect much with any individual character -- well, maybe a bit with Stephen -- and I found the characters a bit complacent, but on the other hand, I connected a lot with the generational aspect and dilemmas. At the end of the book, Stephen thinks, “I don’t understand. How does it come to this? We were supposed to be so special, we were going to change everything and it turns out we’re just the same….” This novel is an absorbing read, especially for those of the Boomer generation.

Memorable Animals in Fiction

Another in my series of lists of "memorables" in literature: memorable animals.

Dogs:
-Pilot in “Jane Eyre” (Bronte)
-White Fang in “White Fang” (London)
-Buck in “Call of the Wild” (London)
-Grizzle in “Mrs. Dalloway” (Woolf)
-Old Yeller in “Old Yeller” (Gipson)
-Lassie in “Lassie Come Home” (Knight)
-Shadow in “Shadow the Sheep Dog” (Blyton)
-Nana in “Peter Pan” (Barrie)
-Yellow Dog Dingo in “Just So Stories” (Kipling)
-Jack in the “Little House” series (Wilder)
-Ribsy in Beverly Cleary’s books for children

Cats:
-Kitty in the “Little House” series (Wilder)
-Ginger in the Narnia books (Lewis)

Other:
-the horse Black Beauty in “Black Beauty” (Sewell)
-the Cowardly Lion in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (Baum)
-Peter Rabbit in the Beatrix Potter children’s books
-the White Rabbit and the March Hare in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (Carroll)
-the spider Charlotte and the pig Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web” (White)
-the monkey Bandar-log in “The Jungle Book” (Kipling)
-the monkey Curious George in the series (Reys)
-the pigs Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer in “Animal Farm” (Orwell)
-the robin in “The Secret Garden (Burnett)

The Story of a Great Chef: Grant Achatz

As regular readers of this blog know, I like to read about restaurants, chefs, and the “foodie” (although I don’t particularly like this term, it is a kind of convenient shorthand) world. (See, for example, my 2/4/10 list of books on these topics, and my 6/10/11 list of “memorable meals in fiction.”) I have just finished reading a fascinating contribution to this genre: “Life, On the Line” (Gotham, 2011), by Chef Grant Achatz and his business partner, Nick Kokonas. Achatz is only in his thirties but has become one of the very best-known chefs in the United States and the world, because of the intensely creative food he produces in his award-winning Chicago restaurant, Alinea. The story of his becoming a chef and of his restaurant is intertwined with the story of his life. A very difficult and frightening occurrence in his life a few years ago was his diagnosis of, and treatment for, Stage IV tongue cancer. This is a terrible illness for anyone, but even more so for a chef, who needs his sense of taste for his livelihood and passion. He underwent an extremely painful and ravaging experimental treatment that, miraculously, cured his cancer and eventually allowed his taste to come back. Throughout, he continued to run the restaurant, create new dishes, and supervise his dedicated group of chefs. Now he and Kokonas have opened a new restaurant in Chicago as well, called Next, a sign of hope for a new beginning. This book catches the reader up in the compelling story it offers, and is informative, enjoyable, sad, and inspiring. I had the privilege and good fortune to dine at Alinea earlier this year, thanks to my friends E., J., and G.; it was an amazing, even thrilling experience. This book is a must-read for anyone at all interested in the world of restaurants.

Literature in the Current Issue of The New Yorker

The New Yorker is, among other things, a literary magazine, one of the reasons I like it so much (as I have posted to say before). The current issue (June 13 & 20, 2011) is particularly focused on literature, with three short stories (rather than the usual one), a literary memoir, and a special section, "Starting Out," comprised of short pieces by various authors about their early years. For me, the highlights are as follows: 1. Jhumpa Lahiri's memoiristic essay, "Trading Stories," about how she became a reader and then a writer, starting in childhood, and how she always felt torn between her Indian and American identities. 2. Jeffrey Eugenides' story, "Asleep in the Lord," about a young American man who goes to do volunteer work in Mother Teresa's home for dying poor people in Calcutta, and about what he learns about himself there. 3. Lauren Groff's wrenching story, "Above and Below," about a female graduate student who loses her connection to academe, becomes destitute and homeless, and suffers much hardship. 4. Salvatore Scibona's short piece about how he disliked school and assigned reading, but somehow heard about and was accepted at St. John's College, which utilized the Great Books approach, and was challenged, exhilarated, and educated through learning Greek and reading "The Iliad," Copernicus, Einstein, Hegel, Darwin, Baudelaire and much much more.

Memorable Villains in Literature

Here is another list in what is becoming an irregular "series" of lists of things memorable in literature. Today's list is of a few memorable villains.

-Iago in “Othello” (Shakespeare)
-Edmund in “King Lear” (Shakespeare)
-Pap Finn in “Huckleberry Finn” (Twain)
-Robert Lovelace in “Clarissa” (Richardson)
-Clare Quilty in “Lolita” (Nabokov)
-Bill Sikes in “Oliver Twist” (Dickens)
-Alec d’Urberville in “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” (Hardy)
-Mr. Hyde in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Stevenson)
-Mr. Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness” (Conrad)
-Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca” (Du Maurier)
-The White Witch in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (Lewis)
-The Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (Baum)