Snow Day!

Yeah whatever, not much snow really.

But still. You know how after Christmas you buy yourself all the stuff you wanted? And the mega-online retailer delivers them right before the type of Saturday where you're happy to not leave the house all day?

Bring it, Culture.

Thank You, Internet Retailer

The DVD of a Cyndi Lauper tour I saw, two out of print Hortense Calishers, an Anthony Burgess I remember liking in high school, and yet another Pearl Bailey book of musings.

Someone is gonna have the best weekend ever!

Who Knows? The Owl Knows

This has been a humdinger of a week, and I'm glad to say it's over. I mean, on top of everything else, Food Poisoning?

Anyway, the snowpocalypse (almost a quarter inch outside!) means I have an excuse to stock up on bottled water, ammunition, and hulu. But before that I'm going to hunker down on the couch and catch up with my friend Hortense Calisher. I'm not very far into False Entry, but I'm enjoying it.

Here's something I just stumbled across

All the time I had been reading, the other part of me - the owl that sits on all our shoulders - had been waiting for Miss Pridden's step.

That (for convenience) owl, one knows of its existence from the beginning, long before one meets up with the Freudian phrasers. It is that thing in us which is neither super nor supra, not ego or tibi or illa, but sits in each of us like a pocket of outer space in which all that is qualifying, human, adjectival, dies. It is what presses the wrist of the whining diarist who thought he swore not to temper the wind to his shorn self, and points his pen a compass degree nearer the skin. Back there in the library, I heard its observing, vacuum voice, telling me, as I stood on tiptoe at one of the windows and peered down into the dark tatters of the street, that I waited for the release of Miss Pridden's step, not for her company, but because then I too would have someone to leave behind.

Oh Hortense. How I wish I had discovered you 15 years ago, when I was still filling my books with underlinings and Kinbotian marginalia.

Of Hobbled Unicorns

I'm off to the outlet malls! I'm taking the bus to meet up with my friend Evan and his mom for pancake breakfast then we're hitting the shops. What am I reading on the ride, you ask? Why, False Entry by Hortense Calisher, one of my faves. It's her first novel and I had never read it before.



One thing that bothers me about first novels is how the authors are trying to spit out every clever phrase they've ever thought of in their lives, as if this might well be their only work. Dear Hortense may not have been an exception in 1961, but that doesn't make me adore her any less. Here's the opening line:

Truth. In these days of so many trials by association, where a man A can show, with an infinity of fine brush strokes, how he once was an intimate of the man B, and the man B assert, with what only God might see to be craft of virtue, that he never knew the man A, I see truth as an old, hobbled unicorn limping through the forest of allegation and denial, pausing here and there to try to warm itself at some sun-foil of proof that shines for a moment through the trees.

And now off to buy all the Saucony's!

Past 'tense

Yesterday I read in the NY Times Obits that Hortense Calisher had died. Now, she was 97 and had a good long life, so while death is always sad, hers is one in which we can focus on the good stuff from her almost-century down here on Earth.

Calisher was an unusual writer - she started writing late in life, and would switch genres between novels - sprawling complex family dramas set in New York, then science fiction, then something else again entirely. The novels were never my interest with her, I gravitated more towards the short stories.

One story I really like is "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks." It's about a boy and his relationship to his eccentric mother, with that typically dense Calisher plot. The boy is off at boarding school and his mother rebels against their Upper West Side, somewhat rigid lifestyle. My favorite line has to do with the mother moving back to Greenwich Village, "to those few important blocks where she felt safe and known and loved."

The narrator describes all the eccentrics in the Village who accept his mother, including "the anomalous, sandalled young men." I just love that one.

I met Ms. Calisher once at a reading. After the reading she did a little signing, and since she came without a publicist she also came without a pen. I donated mine to the cause and told her I was just discovering her work for myself. She smiled and said, "I've written a lot. You've got a LONG trip ahead of you."

Bon Voyage to you too, Hortense! Thanks for all the books.