NoraSawyer.com

So, school’s going well. I’m busy, but once I manage to push through the cobwebs of “ohmydogthisissomuchworkandwhatamIevendoinghere” it’s actually kind of fun, and refreshingly straightforward compared to, say, trying to write a decent poem. So why do I, at least once a week, become convinced that I’ll never finish, or that I’ll never find work, or that I’ll be the worst librarian ever? The crazy, I guess.

This week, I’m especially busy, with term papers and group presentations looming on the horizon. And I find myself wishing for all sorts of crazy things, mostly that I’d done this years ago and were securely ensconced in some sort of cushy-shushy library job someplace, wearing cardigan sweaters and stripey socks and, I dunno, flirting with itinerant music men. You know, librarian stuff.

Sometime in July.

For the next year, I’ll be taking part in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read, joining one hundred other bloggers as we read and review 52 books in one year.

The first time I ever heard of Cynthia Ozick I was probably about twelve. Someone gifted my parents with Spy Magazine’s Separated at Birth?, one of those gifty, funny, ephemeral books that you can paw through and giggle at and pretty much rest assured that whomever on your Christmas list still needs a gift will giggle at it, too. The premise is simple: take two celebrities who look alike, or don’t, pair their photos with a witty caption, repeat. It’s because of this book that, in my mind, Carol Channing is twinned forever with Señor Wences’ hand, and Princess Di is interchangeable with Wayne Gretzky. It’s also because of this book that I even know Wayne Gretzky exists.

Anyway, I was twelve (or so), and naïve and curious in the way that twelve year olds tend to be naïve and curious. I wanted to know the world, but my knowledge of it was so haphazard, so strange. Separated at Birth (which I now realize was actually Separated at Birth 2: The Saga Continues), became the shadow puppet theater on the cave wall of my bedroom: Through this book, I learned of the existence of cultural luminaries, but not their context, their names and faces, but not their reason for being. I learned to scoff before I learned to know, and that pretty much explains my entire adulthood, now doesn’t it?

But that’s not where I meant to go with this. What I’m trying to get at here is that the first time I heard of Cynthia Ozick was when I learned she looked like Roger Ebert.

And let me just tell you that I went to the rare books room at the San Francisco Public Library, where they keep a collection of humorous books, and paid fifteen cents for the librarian to copy this page. For you, internet. FOR YOU.

Now, keep in mind that I was twelve. I read a lot, but I didn’t like to stop and look words up, so my sense of the meaning behind words was usually cobbled together from context clues, and more often than not at least a little bit off. A year later, in English class, I would confidently proclaim that the word vicar meant “some sort of criminal.”(Which is where a stash of Andy Capp comics scavenged from the church Christmas sale will get you). So when I read in the caption that Cynthia Ozick’s novels were obscure, I somehow got it into my head that they were difficult and abstract and beyond my ken, that they were the kind of book that would prove, once and for all, that I was too much a dullard for real literature, and that I should stick to Andy Capp if I knew what was good for me.

Which is why it’s taken me twenty years to pick up a book by Cynthia Ozick.

I’m both sorry I waited so long and happy to be here, 32 years old, tasting one for the first time, with a whole shelf of undiscovered Ozick to work through (as an aside, Undiscovered Ozick is the name of my new prog-rock band). She’s so good, hitting it out of the park at every level, from story to idea to language and pacing. I seriously could not put this down. Take that, Spy.

But what I’m trying to get at here is the central tension of Heir to the Glimmering World , namely what things are, how they seem, and how our attempts at interpretation can have ramifications that echo through our lives.

The novel follows Rose Meadows, eighteen years old, “a watcher and a listener,” half-then-fully orphaned and navigating the haunted shadows of 1930’s New York state. When the novel opens, she is living with her father, a morose and deeply flawed geometry professor exiled to Troy, NY after an ignoble career in Thrace, NY’s public high school. Rose is soon pawned off on a distant cousin, whose vivid communist lover, Ninel (that’s Lenin backwards), soon connives to send Rose packing.

Rose finds employment with the Mitwisser family, refugees from a Berlin — and a Europe — that Rose comes to recognize as “a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil.” The patriarch, Rudolph Mitwisser, is a scholar, laboring in exile over his treatise on the Kararites, an obscure Jewish sect. Elsa, the mother, a physicist in Germany, now keeps to her bed, refusing shoes, sanity, and English. But, wonders Rose, is “she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or. . . Ophelia, whom true madness submerges?” The children, except for baby Waltraut, are all tall, long-limbed and dark, Anneliese, the eldest and the house’s de facto head, is regal and aloof, her brothers, Heinrich, Gerhardt and Wilhelm, an indistinguishable mess of rowdy, rapidly Americanizing voices.

Housed in the outskirts of New York City, the Mitwisser family occupies a sort of fever-dream. Rudolph disappears into the New York City Library during the day and locks himself in his library at night, in pursuit of some dark, mad truth. Elsa plays cards, destroys small objects, and secrets Rose’s money beneath her mattress, while Waltraut keeps to her crib, silently watching for passers-by and shrinking from her mad mother’s touch. They are kept afloat by a mysterious benefactor, James A’Bair, whose childhood antics were captured by father in a successful series of children’s books. Dissolute, profoundly unsatisfied, all image and no essence, James throws the Mitwisser’s world dangerously askew, providing and withholding with an ever-changing, capricious whim.

For Rose, and the Mitwissers, the past is as fickle a patron as James A’Bair, doling out punishment and reward seemingly at random. But the light that glimmers throughout this world does not come only from the past’s broken shards. There’s the glimmer of surprise, of hope, the sense that, in the end, nothing need ever be what it seems.

Why, hello there, Wednesday. Where on earth did you come from?

Here’s what’s hot and not this week. Inspired, once again, by Loobylu.

Hot:

1. Brian! He’s redesigned his website a bit, he’s featured on the Linney Group’s design blog today, and I just found out that the opening for his show at our neighborhood coffeeplatz coincides with December’s Lower Haight Art Walk. I’d better start freezing up some snacks!

2. Moon! The full moon rising over the sparkly Oakland hills Monday night just breathtakingly pretty. It looked almost like a Jean Giraud landscape.

3. Slippers! Hope’s mom was visiting all month, and presented both Brian and I with lovely hand-knit wool booties before she left. They’re super cozy, and I wore them all morning as I padded around the house doing laundry and loafing. It was fun having an octogenarian around the house, and I’m so happy to have a little something to remember her by.

Not:

1. School. I got my first ‘B’ this week on a group project, ruining my perfect 100% average for that class. I’m gonna do an extra credit assignment to bolster my grade, but I still feel like things have gotten a bit off-kitler. And it only serves to enforce my…

2. General feelings of ennui. This week I’ve had trouble shaking the sense that I just straight up fail at living. It’s pretty much passed, but Monday thru Tuesday? No fun at all.

1. I wish I were better at math.

2. I’d like to finish my novel, or write a new one, and see it published.

3. I wish I were better with people.

4. I wish that, instead of sirens, fire engines played ‘the hustle’.

5. I wish I remembered my Latin better.

6. I wish my natural speaking voice was softer.

7. I wish that I were more like my grandmother: unfailingly gentle, courteous, and kind.

8. I’d need to clean out my closet. Wish I’d do that.

9. I’d like to make a rope bed, and a mattress stuffed with straw.

10. I’d like to get out of the city more.

11. I’d like to be able to pay back my parents, financially and otherwise, for all the support they’ve given me over the years.

12. I wish Brian and I were in a place — financially, emotionally, and otherwise — where we could have children. Or child. Whatever. It’d be nice to have the option.

13. I’d like to play more music.

14. I wish I weren’t angry so often.

15. I want to find a library job while I’m in school, or soon after I graduate.

16.  I’d like to live in a place with Brian that’s quiet, private, and ours.

17. I wish Brian had health insurance.

18. I wish we had a lawn.

19. I wish the house didn’t smell so much like cat pee.

20. I wish I were better at having fun.

21. I wish I were better at knowing what I want.

22. I sometimes wish we lived somewhere where it snowed. (Don’t tell Brian).

23. I’d like to travel more.

24. I’d like to live somewhere else — Brazil, Australia, Italy… Somewhere.

25. I wish I saw my family more often.

26. I wish I were better at naming the things that frustrate me.

27. I’d like to learn how to knit.

28. I wish that my income exceeded my expenses.

29.  I wish it were spring.

For the next year, I’ll be taking part in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read, joining one hundred other bloggers as we read and review 52 books in one year.

Today I’ll be reviewing my first book: Stephen Fry’s novel, “Making History.”

There’s a certain romance to “what if.” At night, when I can’t sleep, I have a box of regrets I like to paw through. What would have changed, I wonder, if I had done x instead of y, chosen this college over that, if my parents had bought a house one town over instead of my childhood home? Would I be a better person now, smarter, thinner, better with money, less prone to late-night ruminations?

Physics offers some comfort: String theory suggests that for every decision we make, each moment when potential paths diverge, an alternate universe is created. Years ago, in some alternate history, the man who was to become my grandfather boarded a ship to Hong Kong instead of going home to his new bride, and was lost along with the rest of its crew. In some other universe, he stayed behind, but moved his family west instead of heading home to North Carolina. My mother grew up in San Francisco, never chose a college in St. Louis, never met a bearded junior who reminded her Little Women’s Dr Bhaer, and I was never born. In some other history, I was born, but did everything differently. I live in Kansas, with kids and a yard and some job involving lots of math. In yet another universe, JFK actually was a jelly donut.

In Making History, actor/novelist Stephen Fry tackles the 20th Century’s most haunting what if: how would the world be changed if Hitler never rose to power? Would Europe have marched quietly past the twentieth century’s halfway mark, innocent of one less genocide? Or was there an inevitability to Hitler’s rise that transcended even the man himself? Could you have Hitler without Hitler?

The novel follows Michael “Pup” Young, a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge who has chosen history, not because its his passion, but because it is his “field of least incompetence.” If only he’d been endowed with more patience, more discipline, he’d have chosen literature. But, he notes,

While I can read Middlemarch or The Dunciad or, I don’t know, Julian Barnes or Jay McInerney say, as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students possess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of Animal Farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at nothing more than the simple progression of sounds. But when it came to writing that thing called an essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start. How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?

But this inability or unwillingness to look beyond literature’s emotionally resonant qualities only shows Pup’s blindness: everything makes him spin and wobble, from his tumultuous relationship with his physicist girlfriend, Jane, to the history that he can’t resist dressing up with  prose-y historical fictions scattered throughout his Ph.D. Thesis. And so, when given the opportunity to tweak history itself, he doesn’t pause for analysis, but instead goes spinning off into an ill-thought-out adventure in historical revisionism.

Ultimately, what saves Pup are the lessons to be had in following his what ifs to their unforseeable conclusions. There is no perfection to be found, no event that, avoided, can save the world from itself. But in embracing his own present, in finding the self that fortune cannot alter, Pup ultimately gains the best outcome we can hope, for both the world and ourselves: he grows up. And in doing so, he comes to terms with history.

Edit: I just realized that, though I finished the book this morning, I started it yesterday, before the official start of Cannonball Read. Oh well. Consider this a practice run.

Another great find at the Mechanic’s Institute: The Gentleman’s Companion, Vol II: Around the World with Jigger, Beaker & Glass. Written by Charles H. Baker, Jr., who apparently traveled the world on Town and Country’s dime in pursuit of interesting recipes for food and drink.

A highlight, chosen at random:

THE AMER PICON “POUFFLE” FIZZ:  Something Native Originally to Paris & Encountered at the Cafe du Dome, where in Spite of the American Inundation of Pseudo-Bohemians Is Still a Moderately Consistent Rondezvous for other Americans Over There Who Do Things with Their Brains & Hands

Simply turn 1 to 1 1/2 jiggers  of Amer Picon into a shaker, add lots of cracked ice, the white of 1 fresh egg, 1/2 jigger of grenadine, shake, then turn everything into a big thin goblet and fill up with club soda to suit taste. This is a fine stomachic, and inspires interest in foods.

There are plenty of other drinks that sound delightful, including:

THE MARTINIQUE CRUSTA, which We Found Waiting for Us in Fort de France on the Occasion of Our First Trip through the West Indes, in 1929

and

THE RANGOON STAR RUBY, a Wonderful & Stimulating Cocktail from Lower-Burmah

Nearly every page includes some enticing concoction, no doubt sipped by idle gentlemen in dress whites on some balcony overlooking the sea, or on some far-off colonial cricket-field. For the temperate, there are even some marvellous-sounding nonalocoholic drinks, including two recipes for homemade, stone-bottled ginger beer. Why stone-bottled, you ask? Baker explains,

Of course this ginger beer may be bottled in glass, but that too is like modernizing any mellowed and ancient custom, or like a charming girl in sport slacks who wears high heels; for then certain of the charm flies out the window, through needless inconsistency.

So there.