LEISURELY THOUGHTS
from Howard
27 August 2003. Leaving for Amsterdam. Back 11 September.
18 August 2003. We spent the week before last in New Jersey -- family reunion time once again -- and had a great time visiting with family and friends and hanging out in the part of the world that is always home to me, no matter how long I am away. And when I say "New Jersey", of course you have this mental image of Newark, the Jersey Turnpike, toxic waste dumps, etc. No! I take responsibility for none of that. South Jersey is a whole different world from certain horrific parts of North Jersey, thank God, and I still love the South Jersey shore, the Pine Barrens, the Delaware Bay communities, and my home town of Millville. And the realness of the people there.
Upcoming trips for Jerry and me: at the end of next week, we are off for our annual trip to Amsterdam. A week in Amsterdam, then a week in rural Holland, in the village of Woudsend. In Woudsend, we are meeting Elke ("German Mama") (see our reading lists!) and Grietje and their husbands named Peter, who are all coming from Germany to see us.
And then, in late November: Guam! Who ever heard of anybody going to Guam for vacation?.. Well, now you have. Several days in Japan, actually, on the way, then on to Guam in the South Pacific. We will have tales to tell.
29 July 2003. The other evening, my sister Joan went to a book-reading/signing by Arthur Phillips, author of last year's novel, Prague, which Joan recently read. I read it last summer and was a bit disappointed (See 29 August 2002), I think because the critical reviews had been so positive and I was expecting more from it. It was a relatively small group attending, and Joan enjoyed the discussion with Mr. Phillips. She found him to be interesting and funny and easy to talk to.
Someone in the crowd asked him what other novelists he liked, and he answered Nabokov, Greene, Hemingway. "No living writers?" the person asked. And Mr. Phillips told the crowd how much he liked Atonement by Ian McEwan and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
"What about John Irving?" Joan asked him, thinking of her big brother's web site and favorite author.
"John Irving is fabulous!" Arthur Phillips answered. He then told Joan that he had read almost all of John Irving's books, except for the most recent, The Fourth Hand.
So, who knows? Maybe we'll see Arthur Phillips join the needahand discussion group one of these days.
18 July 2003. Excellent book I'm reading (and reading and reading): David McCullough's biography of the man who was President when I was born, Truman. It's one of those books I've been meaning to read for ten years, and, at almost a thousand pages, this will take forever to finish. Might have to take a break in the middle of it, head into something more frivolous (and shorter). Which remind me: Joan and I went to see Olympia Dukakis at a book signing the other night. Olympia Dukakis, who won an Academy Award for her role in my favorite movie, Moonstruck, has written a memoir, and she turned out to be a delightful person to meet.
I've reached a point where I find myself clinging onto this summer, afraid to let it go past the mid-summer point in its rush to winter. It's our first summer in the new house, and I just want to be there enjoying it, enjoying life. I sit there on our balcony, reading, or listening to the church bells, or just vegetating, and I don't get tired of it. Maybe this is my summer to get old.
As I am relishing this beautiful summer, I also think of the U.S. soldiers who are in 115-degree heat in Iraq, aren't having such a great summer, and want to get the heck out of there. This week we have been hearing the disgruntled comments from Army enlisted men in the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad (which happens to my old unit when I was a disgruntled draftee in Germany back in the late sixties). Good for them for speaking out and good for the news media for broadcasting their views -- it's about time. Okay, cheney/rumsfeld, that's enough. Bring them all home.
14 July 2003. Happy Bastille Day!
07 July 2003. Sometime in 1996, Tom, Joan, and I stood in line for a couple of hours at a bookstore in St. Paul to meet Hillary Clinton, to shake the hand of this great lady and to have a signed copy of her new book at that time, It Takes A Village. I would stand in line again (and I hate lines!) to have an autographed copy of her current autobiography, Living History, which I just finished reading and which I recommend.
Living History, a fascinating behind-the-scenes-at-the-Clinton-years memoir, covers, from a personal angle, the accomplishments and the traumas of the Clinton Presidency. In retrospect, when comparing to the right-wing takeover of the past two years, how wonderful the Clinton '90s look! I don't always agree with the votes that Mrs. Clinton has made as a U.S. Senator, especially the Iraq vote, but, unless one of the Democratic candidates for President can somehow win in 2004, I will be ready to start campaigning for Hillary for President in 2008.
Jerry, Tom, and I spent the 4th of July weekend at Jerry's parents' home in southern Illinois, watched a parade and fireworks in Vincennes, Indiana, played a lot of cards. On the flight back to Minneapolis from Indianapolis last night, the woman next to me was also reading Living History. Not everybody is reading the new Harry Potter book, I guess (Hello, Sarah and Matt!).
25 June 2003. The 100th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, author of, among other works, Animal Farm and 1984. If you would like to visit a George Orwell web site for more info, here's one for you to try: www.k-1.com/Orwell.
20 June 2003. There is a whole list of books that I intend to read someday, but some of them are intimidating and will have to wait until I reach certain cross-sections of available time, concentration and ambition. One of those books near the top of that list is the 1958 contemporary classic The Tin Drum by German author Günther Grass, "a portrait of German society from the 1930s to the 1950s", a book that John Irving has called "the greatest novel by a living author" (and also an influence on the creation of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany). In the Günther Grass section of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving also says, "Personally, I'd...recommend that one's initial experience with Grass be Cat and Mouse, but Headbirths is broadly entertaining enough to satisfy the most strenuous and demanding of Grass's faithful readers, and it is accessible enough to be inviting to the beginner. In whatever category of reader you see yourself, you can't be called well read today if you haven't read him. Günther Grass is simply the most powerful and versatile writer alive."
Well, I don't know in what category of reader I see myself, and I don't know that anybody would call me particularly well read, but as of this week I have read a Günther Grass novel, Crabwalk, his most recent. This book, which I must say was very "inviting to the beginner", deals with the worst maritime disaster of all time: the sinking of a German ship carrying mostly refugees near the end of World War II and the effects on one survivor and her offspring. Excellent, if sobering, story. Thanks, Joan, for passing it on to me.
And there is one thing about Crabwalk that maybe only I would pay much attention to: the book several times refers to a fictional website, www.blutzeuge.de, which in the story is a neo-Nazi site. Naturally, I had to go on-line to see if there were such a URL and was, of course, pleased that in real-life it isn't a neo-Nazi site. Instead, it is (when it works!) a tasteful little promo site for the book, in German. I guess Günther Grass's publisher wasn't going to take a chance that some nobody from Minneapolis might register the domain name and turn it into God-knows-what!.... :-)
16 June 2003. Okay, let's catch up with what's going on.
Two weekends ago, Jerry and I went to Seattle, visited with some friends, attended a wedding, enjoyed Seattle. I finished reading the new Tom Robbins novel at a very cool little coffee shop, JoeBar Coffee, at Broadway and Roy in the Capitol Hill area. The novel, Villa Incognito, was good Tom Robbins, maybe a little less ambitious than usual. It was also the first novel I have read that had any mention or connection with the real-life events of 11 September 2001.
Last weekend, we co-hosted a fundraiser for Democratic Presidential candidate, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. I, of course, had to ask Governor Dean in a quiet moment whether he had ever met fellow Vermont resident John Irving, and, hmmmm, I got the impression from his response that they might not be big fans of each other. Oh well.
Not getting much reading done so far this summer. Too busy. But making my way through another Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair, and my first encounter with Günther Grass, his new novel, Crabwalk.
26 May 2003. The months of May seem to go faster than, say, the months of January. Beautiful spring weather here in Minnesota. I sit in my new office overlooking the Mississippi and daydream in unstructured leisurely thoughts. Next weekend, Jerry and I head out to Seattle for a few days to visit some friends. My preparation for visiting Seattle: reading the new Tom Robbins novel, Villa Incognito. About half done with it -- good, if off-kilter, spring reading.
My friend in Germany, Elke, with her husband Peter and a shipload of novels, sails off into the North Sea today for the next two months, visiting Norwegian islands and who knows what else. I hope she finds an Internet cafe or two somewhere along the way -- I will miss her daily emails. Funny how such a strong friendship started with the Internet and a John Irving-inspired web site. My son, Tom, just got back from a weekend in Michigan to visit a friend he met on the Internet: he had a great time and wants to go back. Wow. Of course, who am I to talk? Did I ever tell you where I met Jerry four and a half years ago?.. -- In an Internet chat room!
So, anyway, bon voyage, Elke, as we all head into the adventures of the summer of 2003. And, for those of you in the other hemisphere heading into the winter of 2003, well, I'll think about you in January. :-)
11 May 2003. Thursday night, we, along with 900 other people, went to see Margaret Atwood, well-known author of The Blind Assassin, Cat's Eye, and about thirty other books. She was being interviewed for public radio, at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul, primarily about her 1986 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which has been turned into an opera that is receiving its North American premiere this week by the Minnesota Opera.
I just finished reading The Handmaid's Tale right before the Atwood interview. It is similar to the other book that I am currently (slowly) reading, George Orwell's 1984, in that they are both speculative fiction, about a future "dystopia", or negative Utopia. Ms. Atwood in the interview appearance came across to me as very witty and humorous, with some serious moments in discussing how some circumstances in the novel, which she didn't intend to be predictive, have come to pass in 2003.
The Handmaid's Tale assumes a not-too-distant future where civil rights, especially for women (who are valued only for their ovaries), have been eliminated. Margaret Atwood also has a new book that came out last week, Oryx and Crake, another speculative novel. This time, the future holds ecological disaster. Let's hope that Ms. Atwood just has an active imagination and not clairvoyance.
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