LEISURELY THOUGHTS   from Howard

15 December 2001.   I find myself still thinking about our trip to New York last weekend and wishing we could have stayed longer.  I have always found New Yorkers to be friendly and warm and real (the opposite of the New Yorker stereotype), but this time I felt it even more.  Even though there is an underlying sadness right now, there is nothing like the aliveness of New York, from the too-busy blocks of Times Square to the eerie quiet of the World Trade Center site.  It was the first time I have been on subway cars where people are singing Christmas songs.  New York is going to come out of this period stronger than ever.  And my unasked-for vote, agreeing with a wonderful woman NYC taxi driver that we met,  is to re-build the Twin Towers as they were, except maybe a couple of floors taller.

    It was great, by the way, to see Phantom of the Opera again. Seeing it was like visiting an old, comfortable friend, and I'm glad it's still there.

    I'm enjoying The Water-Method Man but am glad I read Piggy Sneed first:  reading Piggy helped me to better appreciate some of the recurring details (urologists and Iowa City, for instance) of especially the early Irving writings.  And there's even a character in Water-Method Man that is stomped on by a circus elephant.  That, of course,  happens to someone else in A Son of the Circus twenty-some years later.  I wonder if there is anybody that enjoys writing as much as John Irving seems to.

    Well, back to wrapping Christmas gifts... 

06 December 2001.   Shortly after the terror attacks of September 11, New York Mayor Guiliani was asked what people could do to help New York City.  His answer  (a surprise to some, I think) was, Come to New York, see a play, eat in a restaurant, see a ball game:   in other words, we need you, don't be afraid to come here.  I might not be a big fan of the Mayor, or least not up to September 11, but I thought his response was exactly right.

This weekend, to show our support for that great city but mostly because we love being there, Jerry, Joan and I head for New York for a very "New York weekend."  That means, for instance, we're going to see The Phantom of the Opera (which I've seen but never on Broadway), have lunch at the Stage Deli, go to the top of the Empire State Building, all those touristy things.  It will be spooky and heart-wrenching to see that Manhattan skyline without the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, but how wonderful it will be to see everything else that New York still is and to know that life goes on, and life is good.

So, The Water-Method Man is in my backpack, we're outta here Saturday morning, back Monday.  And if you happen to be in New York City this weekend too, and you see three out-of-towners wandering around and one of them is a Mel Gibson lookalike (that's Jerry!), stop us and say Hi.

30 November 2001.

George Harrison, 1943-2001

29 November 2001.   True Confession time:  even though I host this John Irving fan site and am a dedicated admirer, there are still two John Irving books that I have not read -- but I am in the process of dealing with that situation.  One of them is Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a collection of mostly autobiographical essays and short stories, and I am about halfway through that book.  The essays are fun, they give some insight into the thinking and background of Mr. Irving that led to some of the themes or incidentals of the early novels (Enough wrestling!).  I'm into the short stories now.

    The other one I haven't read is The Water-Method Man, his second novel.  That one I am taking for airplane reading when we go to New York next week.  Assuming that I finish them both, I'll be caught up and waiting for the next Irving novel -- or re-reading some of them, maybe.

    Jerry, after he finishes the Danielle Steel he's reading (!), plans on trying his first John Irving -- A Prayer for Owen Meany, he thinks.  And my business partner Greg, another Irving virgin, borrowed my copy of The Fourth Hand;  keep in mind, though, that Greg hasn't read a book since he read The Great Gatsby in high school (where, by the way, he was a wrestler) -- and that was more than 25 years ago!  Greg's wife Dawn ( a former drinking buddy of mine, until I made the grievous error of leaving Burger King wrappers in her precious SUV one day!) reads all the time, so I guess they sort of even each other out.

     My colorful and lovable sister Joan -- I know you're dying to know what Joan is reading these days -- just started The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, I think in anticipation of the film version opening on Christmas Day.  Joan is a big fan of Judi Dench, who apparently stars as that wonderful character, "the aunt".      

18 November 2001.   Autumn in Minnesota is beautiful.  The unfortunate thing is that some years we skip autumn entirely and go right from summer into winter, sometimes as early as early October.  Not this year, though:  the weather has been wonderful, especially during the last two or three weeks.  Yesterday, the temperature was about 70 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course).  We don't ask much: to get this far into November with such great weather makes it much easier to face a Minnesota winter.  Today, though, the weather got more back to November normal, rainy and gray and cooler (back to reality!) -- but a good day for sitting here at the keyboard with some "leisurely thoughts".

    Good football day today:  Jerry's team the New York Jets stomped Miami 24-0 and went into first place in their division; my team the Philadelphia Eagles beat Dallas and were already in first place in their division.  We have season tickets to our local favorites, the Minnesota Vikings (who are pathetic this year), and we will be at the New York Giants game here tomorrow night on Monday Night Football, so if you happen to be watching, we'll wave!

    I finished the Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral, the other day and was very disappointed with it.  I had read The Human Stain a couple months ago and liked it immensely and had high hopes for American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize (whatever that means) several years ago.  Philip Roth is a master of prose, he can write paragraphs that are three or four pages long and impress the heck out of me.  I just found that, in my humble opinion,  his propensity for going on and on about a subject got in the way of the story in this book (How many ways can you say that the main character's life was wrecked?).

    Anyway, I'm still pondering that one.  Not sure what I'll read next, but I think I've done enough Philip Roth for a while.

14 November 2001.   My friend Tim in Fort Lauderdale, where I spent the weekend, was a history teacher at Oakcrest High School in southern New Jersey for 29 years, is very educated and well-read and is a great guy to have a conversation with.  He is also a little on the, shall we say, eccentric side (which is usually a plus with me) and can be very entertaining.

    Tim reads a lot.  He always has a book that he is reading -- often mysteries, which he loves.  This time while visiting I paid attention to the books on his book shelves.  He doesn't have that many books, so I wanted to see which books he liked well enough to keep, and in hardback even.  And there taking up a good percentage of shelf space was none other than Graham Greene (see 23 October), so I asked him about that.  It turns out that Graham Greene is one of his all-time favorites, along with Evelyn Waugh and W. Somerset Maugham. 

    We also had a discussion (or, with Tim, it might be more like a lecture -- the teacher in him comes out sometimes) about who the greatest living American novelist is.  I, as you know, pick John Irving.  One of our discussion group people and also somebody in Time magazine a couple months ago say that maybe it is Philip Roth (which I take issue with, having just read American Pastoral).  Tim suggested, what about Norman Mailer?   So I have been thinking about that.  I never have read The Naked and the Dead, and everything that I've read by Norman Mailer has been non-fiction.  And where has he been lately?  So I'm sticking with John Irving for now, but it's fun to listen to other ideas.

    Anyway, back to Tim.  He, like I say, is very entertaining, and, like myself, is from New Jersey and therefore never lacking an opinion.  So I asked him to write something for the Web site, which he has agreed to do, and I have no idea what it will be, but I guarantee it will be worthwhile and fun.  Watch for it.  I think I'll call that part of the site TIM'S WORLD.  

08 November 2001.   Jerry and I are heading off today for a long weekend in one of my favorite places, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to visit our good friends Steven and Tim and hopefully do a little lounging on the beach.  Sound good?

04 November 2001.   I wrote a novel once, you know.  It was back in the 60s when I was 18 and 19 and during my feeble first attempt at doing college.  The title was Eek! Squashed Birds!, and, if I could have articulated such things at the time, I think it was intended to be a cross between Thomas Pynchon and Peyton Place(!).  What I remember most about it was the experience of writing it.  I was obsessed with it.  I carried little notebooks with me wherever I went and was writing everywhere.  I couldn't wait to get the words onto the page.  Unfortunately, I was also writing during all of my classes and instead of doing homework. I especially remember writing all through my History of Civilization class, my grades were terrible in everything, I eventually dropped out of school, got drafted into the Army, etc., etc., and, well, I was a kid. 

    Somewhere along the way, though, I must have lost the zeal, or just got entangled in ordinary life, and no more novels.  I even remember the day I burned all of my Eek! Squashed Birds! notebooks in the trash burner in my parents' back yard (This was back when you were still allowed to burn trash in your back yard!).  A lot of hard work went up in smoke, but at least this way I can think fondly of the writing experience while deluding myself into thinking that the book wasn't really as horrible as I know that it was.

    I was thinking about this as I was reading about the current Jonathan Franzen/Oprah Winfrey flap.  Mr. Franzen is the author of a new book, The Corrections, that was chosen for the "Oprah Book Club".  Because Ms. Winfrey's TV talk-show is seen by so many people, being chosen for the book club and appearing on the show to discuss your book practically guarantees sales of 500,000 hardback copies.  Mr. Franzen  had reservations about being chosen, apparently because he thought his book was at a higher literary level than the books that had been picked previously.  So Oprah dropped him.  Which, I'm sure, left Mr. Franzen with even more conflicted feelings.

    Maybe I'm an overly humble person, but I can't imagine having a book published and not wanting to have it read by as many people as possible.  Can't a book be fine literature as well as a commercial success?  Maybe I can also be concerned (or be envious!) that a talk-show host has so much influence about what books are being sold.  But, the way I see it, it's a good thing that Oprah is getting people to turn off their televisions and read a book.  From that standpoint, the Oprah Book Club and this Web site have some of the same goals.

30 October 2001.   This is your brain.

    This is your brain while you're reading Tom Robbins.

    How's this for a great sentence (from Still Life With Woodpecker)?:  "She was not tall, yet the legs that hung out of her skirt seemed a tall woman's legs, and beneath her No-Nukes-Is-Good-Nukes T-shirt, her astonishingly round breasts jiggled ever so slightly, like balls balanced on the noses of Valium-eating seals."

    I just wish I were reading this book in Seattle on a rainy day over a cup of coffee, in a funky coffee shop up in that neighborhood, I forget what it's called, where Kurt Cobain killed himself!

    Speaking of cool coastal cities -- Jerry, Joan and I bought tickets today to fly to New York for a weekend in December.  Mayor Guiliani, we are listening!  (Now if we could just somehow get tickets to The Producers!)

24 October 2001.   Happy birthday, Jerry!

23 October 2001.   Graham Greene, the renowned English novelist (1904-1991), keeps popping up in John Irving books -- A Widow for One Year and A Son of the Circus, at least -- so I read what apparently was Greene's most popular one, The Power and the Glory, over the weekend.  My only previous experience with Greene was The Comedians, a novel that came out in the 1960s and was a dark story that takes place in the Papa Doc Duvalier dictatorship days in Haiti (later made into an even darker film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor).  The Power and the Glory was first published in 1940, is one of Greene's "religious" novels, and takes place in Mexico during a period of oppression of the Catholic church in either the 1920s or 1930s, I'm not exactly sure when.  The main character is a doomed, less-than-perfect priest who is struggling with his faith and his own failures, all the while trying to escape a government that is trying to kill him.  Heavy stuff but beautifully constructed with some great characters, and it left me wanting to read some more Graham Greene.

    For now, though, I am venturing into the world of Tom Robbins, starting with his 1980 novel Still Life with Woodpecker, as recommended by several of our cool discussion group participants.  Fun reading so far and weird, of course, but as my older son Jon says, "Weird is almost always good."

14 October 2001.   I need to add A Son of the Circus to my list of favorite John Irving books.  This may be the most impressive,  most intelligent, and most ambitious of the Irving works.  There are enough oddball characters in this one to fill ten Irving novels, and I marvel at the creative process that must take place in JI's mind as these characters are born and the stories intertwine.  I have the feeling that JI had a hard time letting go of the people in A Son of the Circus as evidenced by the drawn-out epilogue and by his having spent years working on a screenplay for a movie version (Although I wonder if a movie version would more closely follow Dr. Durawalla's screenplay for Limo Roulette).

    My favorite character in the book is Martin Mills, the Jesuit missionary twin brother of Inspector Dhar, and my favorite scene is the night when Martin first arrives in Bombay and is attacked by the transvestite prostitutes.  But there are many great scenes, lots of laughs and plenty of sadness and misery, and it is easy while reading this book to imagine the twinkle in Mr. Irving's eye as he was writing it.  I recommend it to any of the Irving fans who have not read it or not finished it.  For first-time John Irving readers, I would suggest another one of his novels to start with:  this one takes some working up to.

09 October 2001.   Today is my son Tom's 20th birthday.  Happy birthday, Tom!

06 October 2001.   One of my business partners, Todd, may be the only person I know very well that reads John Irving.  Even my sister Joan, who I introduced to you as the most well-informed person I know and who even has a degree in English Literature, has only read A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Todd's wife Colleen also reads some Irving.  They both finished A Widow for One Year this past summer and liked it, although one of them liked the first half of that book much better than the second half and one of them much preferred the second half to the first, I forget who liked which. Todd's favorite Irving novel is A Prayer for Owen Meany, although I think he also has a quirky fondness for The Hotel New Hampshire.

    Todd just finished The Fourth Hand and seems to have liked the Irving style once again, but this one didn't make it onto his list of favorites.  His favorite part of the book, Todd being a hardcore Denver Broncos football fan, was the fateful day (alas, for poor Otto Clausen) that Denver beat the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl.

    Todd, by the way, recently gave a copy of A Prayer to Owen Meany to our office intern, Aaron, a student at the University of St. Thomas.  We have been encouraging him to read it as part of his overall education in LIFE but are finding that Aaron, like too many people of his generation, isn't used to reading books and may be struggling with it, if he is even trying.   If you would like to give Aaron (a good guy!) some encouragement in getting through Owen Meany, please e-mail him at aaron@ddncpas.com.  Thanks!   

01 October 2001.   We are back from a refreshing few days on a houseboat in the middle of Amsterdam.  Holland has become for me a place where I can mentally re-stimulate, and, even though this was a trip with a nervous eye always on CNN and the current world situation, I think that I am ready to head back to work.  Maybe.

    Picture this, if you will:  Beautiful Amsterdam weather (you never know what you will get for weather in Amsterdam in September), me sitting there on the floating terrace attached to our houseboat on the Amstel River, waving at the tour boats as they float by, a cup of tea next to me, an occasional hit of pot, reading what is becoming a favorite John Irving novel for me, A Son of the Circus.

    Back in the mid-1990s, who knows where my head was, but I had difficulty getting into A Son of the Circus when it first came out and ended up not getting too far with it.  I realize that this is heresy to say on a John Irving-influenced Web site, but back in the mid-90s, it never would have occurred to me that I would ever have a John Irving site or any kind of Web site, or I might have felt more of an obligation!  And I will say that it took a hundred pages or so to get into the characters this time too.  But now I am more than 500 pages into it, and it is wonderful! I find myself laughing out loud many times, and Jerry just kind of looks at me and rolls his eyes.  And it does no good to read the excerpts that make me laugh, because how does one explain the whole context of circus dwarfs or cash-filled dildos or people being crushed to death by falling statues of the Virgin Mary?  The plot is so impossibly intricate that I wonder if a sane mind could come up with all this and keep it straight!  I look forward to the last 100 pages to see if and how it all comes together.

    Also while in Holland, I bought a Dutch-language version of The Fourth Hand (De Vierde Hand).  I don't know why I did that, but there it is:  this Web address in English.

    (Okay, okay! -- I might have been kidding about the occasional hit of pot, but, after all, this was AMSTERDAM!)     

20 September 2001.   Well, we came close to canceling the trip to Amsterdam, I will admit that, but we decided that we need to show our support for and confidence in the unity of the civilized world, the airlines, and most of all for normalcy once again.  If all of us don't do that, it seems to me that we've been defeated.  So we leave today.

    I hope this "war" with the terrorists can somehow be resolved without more suffering by innocent people. 

    Back September 29.  See you then.

19 September 2001.   I find New Yorkers to be astonishing.  New York City is the greatest city on earth in many ways, I love it, and the residents are incredible.  The way they have conducted themselves in the past week after the terrible tragedy that happened to their city and how they have responded to it have made me especially proud of them as fellow American citizens and members of the human race.  New York belongs to all of us, and we need to be there for New York.     

08 September 2001.   My sister Joan, who is a very cool person and also possibly the most well-informed person that I know, has just finished reading a couple of biographies of the 1950s actor James Dean.  In June, she and I, along with our brother Dave, visited (only because we were nearby) James Dean's hometown in Indiana-- I forget the name of the town-- where we saw the James Dean museum, his old high school, his gravesite, etc., so I guess this stirred up her interest (She seems to have a thing about visiting burial places of famous people).  The books, she says, are kind of boring and uninformative: I guess it's hard to fill a biography when a guy only lives to be 24, especially when he spends most of his life in a small town in Indiana.  So now Joan is back to reading Jack Kerouac, one of her favorites.

        Before reading the Dean books, she read the John Adams biography by David McCullough, which she enjoyed and recommends.  Joan is the ultimate US Presidential-trivia freak and found out things about our second President that even she didn't know.  She says that the most disillusioning part of the book is discovering what a creep Thomas Jefferson was!

        For the last couple of weeks, she has been watching US Open tennis on TV -- she's also a Grand Slam freak-- and, even though she's not particularly happy about the Venus-vs.-Serena championship match, she is coming over to my place tonight where we will watch it together (I personally sort of lost interest in tennis when Jana Novotna retired).

        Tomorrow the NFL football season starts, and Jerry and I will be at the Minnesota Vikings/Carolina Panthers game.  Go, Vikes!

        In one of the messages from Chris Everett in the UK, he says that he never could get through the Irving book A Son of the Circus, and I have to admit that, for whatever reason, I didn't finish it either.  So that is the book I'm taking on my trip to Europe this time, leaving on the 20th!  Go ahead, Chris, give it another try!

01 September 2001.    I have a weakness for new, well-reviewed novels with funky titles.  Two of the books I have read within the last year, for instance, were The Lost Legends of New Jersey by Frederick Reiken and The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living by Martin Clark.  Aren't they great titles?  And then there's the one I finished just this week, Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken.

    This one covers several decades in the lives of an Abbott-and-Costello-like comedy act, as they progress from vaudeville in the 1930s, B-movies in the 40s, and early television in the 50s.  The primary strength in Ms. McCracken's writing seems to me to be her creation of colorful, original secondary characters.  As far as the plot, I found myself engrossed in the story for about the first 25% and the last 25% of the book and wandering in the middle 50%.  Overall, a fun book though, and I will look forward to Ms. McCracken's future novels.

    Niagara Falls has very little to do with Niagara Falls, but I was in a Niagara Falls sort of setting (without the Falls, which I love) as I finished reading it -- Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, another tacky, tasteless tourist-trap destination.  But my son Tom and I have a tradition of spending three or four days during the last week of August in Wisconsin Dells, doing the local sites such as Noah's Ark ("The World's Largest Waterpark").  Tom is 19 now, and I'm surprised but glad that he still wants to go off to the Dells with his dad.  This time we had Jerry with us, himself a kid at heart, so I got to sit part of the time, with my feet up, reading on the balcony of our rental condo overlooking Lake Delton, while the two of them were off doing some more waterparking and jet-skiing.  That plus just getting away with the two of them helped to make Wisconsin Dells, well, not awful!

    It's hard to see summer ending in this part of the world where winters are so long!

    Meanwhile, my next trip, with Jerry, is to Amsterdam for a week in late September, where we will be staying on a houseboat on the Amstel River.  Yes!

    Am about half done with the Philip Roth novel, The Human Stain.  So far it's outstanding.  I'm a slow, plodding reader, plus I don't get a chance to read nearly as often as I would like to, but stay tuned!

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