This is a scene description from a story.
They passed under a gateway, with the tall gates standing wide, and she was finally inside. TerraeAndrea: inside the city, where instead of shadow flickers, she saw real movement, more movement, more smells, and more people than she had expected to exist anywhere. Paved stones took the place of packed dirt. Buildings, market stalls with their awnings, sellers, buyers, and water troughs lined the stone-flagged lanes. She sidestepped cart wheels, watched the tumbling of coins from one hand to another. She listened to conversations in languages she could not understand, and gestures she could.
The merchants were robed in brown and blue, green and grey, orange and umber, their robes swirling about their bellies, and fluttering the road dust at their feet. Sheep bleated, cows lowed, children wearing scraps of clothing chased each other through the trading stalls and were chased in their turn by the traders. The girl followed the children with her eyes, and the crowd moving slowly along the market stalls with her feet.
Walking with the pace of the crowd, following the pointed finger or the shrugged shoulder, she wound through the city of TerraeAndrea. She dodged the high-smelling sheep, and their manure that clotted the cobblestones and slid toward the gutter in the middle of the way. She skirted the cinnamon-trousered and shouting traders, their embroidered fabrics dangling from poles, their bags of roots set in high stacks, and small pouches. Leather makers displayed shoes and boots and leggings, tunics and overcoats dyed from plants and sea salts and blood. Harlequin clad players juggled copper spheres and patched thieves pilfered. At the edges of the streets were booths displaying food: trays of dried fruit and pans of stew, piles of cinnabar fruit and strings of root dried vegetables. There were bags of grain and strings of colored beads. Where the streets crossed, bins of blue and yellow flowers bloomed.
She watched the people working between the stalls and booths, sometimes moving at the pace of the shoppers, sometimes standing still at the edge of the crowd. The orange-robed merchant laid a thick finger on the side of the scale as he weighed out orris root. A thin boy darted from bag to bag, until he found one with the ties unloosened, and before he could be caught by the neck, had disappeared in the crowd – but not before he had pulled from the sack a handful of coin. Two men stood in a shadowed alleyway, one counting change into the palm of the other, who looked about for watchers. The shoppers held purses and head wraps, bags of dried seaweed and bins of cloth. They spoke in dialect and language.
“Best dried fish you’ll get, else you visit the coast.”
“My leather boots will never wear through.”
“Grain from the plains. Grain from the plains.”
“Dragon’s tooth. Retch seed. Chickleweed berries.”
“You will not find cloth better. Brought here on the boats of Catalpha.”
Much later, she stood noise-dazed and half smiling, peering inside a grey stone archway, up grey stone steps that sagged into the grey stone dimness. On one side, the street at her back was as clogged as any near the gate: this one with merchants selling long sticks with thin strips of colored cloth flying in the wind, bits of leather, feathers and small baskets of sea stones. On the other side of the street, the side where she stood, was a squared building of grey stone, no sellers squatting at its base, no walkers loitering against its walls. Lengths of dun color fabric billowed outward from openings in the walls high above her. There were no people or market stalls on that side of the road near the building, just long pieces of pale fabric, flapping in the wind.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Books and Inspiration
Despite the ease of its acquisition, obtaining information on the Internet is not always the most satisfying avenue. Quick: yes. Colorful and noisy: absolutely. Entertaining: of course. Accurate: generally. Up to date: enough to cause apoplexy hysteria as the daily news streams into our monitors. No matter how enticing browsing the Internet – and we have used it, asking students to locate and evaluate online literary magazines, quickly locating a photo of chrysanthemums, checking an address – the heart of knowledge for some of us, remains books.
Books are a satisfying weight in our hands, a tactile sensation, the smell of old pages from libraries or the fresh, sharp aroma of new paper and fresh ink. Did a hundred forefingers turn this page, or am I the first? Amazon earned points in my book, when it incorporated the used book sellers. [New copy: $23.99; used copies starting at low price of .02]
When we borrow them from the library, we are honor bound to return the books. When we buy them, we not only have them when they call to us, we have stacks of them to search when we don’t quite know what we want to read. In doing so, we find the books we set aside for another day. It’s like rummaging in the refrigerator, but without the worry of finding moldering pears in the vegetable bin. We are not the only people who need to live with books.
C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, described his parents’ house:
“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cistern and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books more emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.”
That, as I tell my English 1 students, is a perfect example of repetition, as well as question-and-answer.
In The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjean describes the origin of her story ideas:
“Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Much trash, and more treasure. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specs danced and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times….
“Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted your for something that came to the surface in the upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable, and mentally lost. I was only conscious of my awkward posture and the stifling atmosphere when I had ceased to wander in realms where fancy seemed to me more true than facts, and set sail on voyages of discovery to regions in which fact was often far more curious than fancy. If some of my frequent sore throats were due to the dust in the Little Bookroom, I cannot regret them.
“No servant ever came with duster and broom to polish the dim panes through which the sunlight danced, or sweep from the floor the dust of long-ago. The room would not have been the same without its dust: star-dust, gold-dust, fern-dust, the dust that returns to dust under the earth and comes from her lap in the shape of a hyacinth.”
--
What strikes me as I ponder those passages is the luxury of time and exploration. No one stands by with a schedule of activities, determined these children will conform to their classmates’ mold. And no one censors their books. Maybe the world has changed; maybe to protect our children we must decide what is suitable for their reading and what is not. Maybe we censor the television and not the bookshelves. If a book or a tv show is a pasting-up of only the bits to shock, then it preys on our emotions. If the bits that shock and startle are part of the characters’ stories, perhaps they are included for the plot and not for the readers’ salacious enjoyment.
But when we censor books, we state that we can form imagination according to our preconceived rules. We control ideas. Societies have done that. Those places were also unkind to thinkers, writers, children and animals, and any part of the environment that did not serve those in power. Perhaps if we wish their spirits as well as their bodies to grow, we need to be very, very careful to open our children and ourselves to the complete world of books.
Books are a satisfying weight in our hands, a tactile sensation, the smell of old pages from libraries or the fresh, sharp aroma of new paper and fresh ink. Did a hundred forefingers turn this page, or am I the first? Amazon earned points in my book, when it incorporated the used book sellers. [New copy: $23.99; used copies starting at low price of .02]
When we borrow them from the library, we are honor bound to return the books. When we buy them, we not only have them when they call to us, we have stacks of them to search when we don’t quite know what we want to read. In doing so, we find the books we set aside for another day. It’s like rummaging in the refrigerator, but without the worry of finding moldering pears in the vegetable bin. We are not the only people who need to live with books.
C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, described his parents’ house:
“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cistern and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books more emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.”
That, as I tell my English 1 students, is a perfect example of repetition, as well as question-and-answer.
In The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjean describes the origin of her story ideas:
“Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Much trash, and more treasure. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specs danced and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times….
“Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted your for something that came to the surface in the upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable, and mentally lost. I was only conscious of my awkward posture and the stifling atmosphere when I had ceased to wander in realms where fancy seemed to me more true than facts, and set sail on voyages of discovery to regions in which fact was often far more curious than fancy. If some of my frequent sore throats were due to the dust in the Little Bookroom, I cannot regret them.
“No servant ever came with duster and broom to polish the dim panes through which the sunlight danced, or sweep from the floor the dust of long-ago. The room would not have been the same without its dust: star-dust, gold-dust, fern-dust, the dust that returns to dust under the earth and comes from her lap in the shape of a hyacinth.”
--
What strikes me as I ponder those passages is the luxury of time and exploration. No one stands by with a schedule of activities, determined these children will conform to their classmates’ mold. And no one censors their books. Maybe the world has changed; maybe to protect our children we must decide what is suitable for their reading and what is not. Maybe we censor the television and not the bookshelves. If a book or a tv show is a pasting-up of only the bits to shock, then it preys on our emotions. If the bits that shock and startle are part of the characters’ stories, perhaps they are included for the plot and not for the readers’ salacious enjoyment.
But when we censor books, we state that we can form imagination according to our preconceived rules. We control ideas. Societies have done that. Those places were also unkind to thinkers, writers, children and animals, and any part of the environment that did not serve those in power. Perhaps if we wish their spirits as well as their bodies to grow, we need to be very, very careful to open our children and ourselves to the complete world of books.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Minimalist Decorating
Somewhere in the books, journals, boxes and drawers of things-to-read, there is an article about a decorator whose London home was awe-inspiring in its simplicity and beauty. His entry stairs glowed with light and stairs: no pictures, no stair carpeting. Stairs. His dining room was a table and bench. No pictures on the walls, flowers on the hearth or table runner down the center board. His kitchen countertops were themselves: countertops, and when his wife prepared ten pounds of leeks for a dinner party, she had all the counter space in the kitchen to engage the leeks (since there were no flour or sugar jars, no toaster, no coffee maker or bean grinder staking territories). It was a lovely house. It was a peaceful house, easy to dust and very tidy since there was nothing to put away.
All of it was away: in drawers and closets. The decorator’s children were tidy with their toys. The decorator’s wife kept her cosmetics behind cabinet doors. Was it difficult to live in such peace and spareness, one of the magazine article writers asked. “We have a house in the country,” she answered, “where I decorate with cabbage rose prints and lots of swags and ruffles. This is a nice change, and so is that.” Very diplomatic. Instead of moving through the cycle of finding and bringing home, decorating with, and then shoving into a closet in order to reach a modicum of space, one decamps from the city to the country to enjoy the volte face of décor.
Not having the luxury of two houses, we need to decide how spare or how decorated our rooms are to be. Pictures or bare walls? Upholstered furniture with pillows or teak stools? Rugs and carpets? Bibelots - from the pot scouring mesh to the piece of colored glass on our counters? Family heirlooms on the table or put away in the drawers?
The furniture stores’ pseudo room arrangements now feature plastic glasses of plastic orange juice, a cereal bowl half-filled with plastic bran flakes never dissolving in their plastic milk. There’s a mixed drink on the sofa pull-out, and a bowl of fruit on the coffee table. Why? So we the browsers more clearly understand how the furniture would welcome us home. What is home? A place to share our food and our warmth, a place to learn, an operating room for leeks? Home is what each of us searches for: along with peace, and mother and love, it’s a word with strong connotations. Once we arrive, as we build it, what does our home say about us?
“You have an obsession with order and schedule,” someone comments, looking at the clocks in my home. True, though each of them registers a different time. “You like books,” says another visitor, stating the obvious. Books, clocks, places to read, colored glass. Dogs. Cats and children. Finds from our adventures. Photographs and pictures. Memories. Friendships. Leeks jostle the coffee maker and the breadboard where I am slicing homemade honey wheat bread. The dining room table bears school texts, a collection of pens, a jar of colored marbles. It may be cluttered, but it’s home. For some, the spare look works. We do not believe in minimalist decorating.
All of it was away: in drawers and closets. The decorator’s children were tidy with their toys. The decorator’s wife kept her cosmetics behind cabinet doors. Was it difficult to live in such peace and spareness, one of the magazine article writers asked. “We have a house in the country,” she answered, “where I decorate with cabbage rose prints and lots of swags and ruffles. This is a nice change, and so is that.” Very diplomatic. Instead of moving through the cycle of finding and bringing home, decorating with, and then shoving into a closet in order to reach a modicum of space, one decamps from the city to the country to enjoy the volte face of décor.
Not having the luxury of two houses, we need to decide how spare or how decorated our rooms are to be. Pictures or bare walls? Upholstered furniture with pillows or teak stools? Rugs and carpets? Bibelots - from the pot scouring mesh to the piece of colored glass on our counters? Family heirlooms on the table or put away in the drawers?
The furniture stores’ pseudo room arrangements now feature plastic glasses of plastic orange juice, a cereal bowl half-filled with plastic bran flakes never dissolving in their plastic milk. There’s a mixed drink on the sofa pull-out, and a bowl of fruit on the coffee table. Why? So we the browsers more clearly understand how the furniture would welcome us home. What is home? A place to share our food and our warmth, a place to learn, an operating room for leeks? Home is what each of us searches for: along with peace, and mother and love, it’s a word with strong connotations. Once we arrive, as we build it, what does our home say about us?
“You have an obsession with order and schedule,” someone comments, looking at the clocks in my home. True, though each of them registers a different time. “You like books,” says another visitor, stating the obvious. Books, clocks, places to read, colored glass. Dogs. Cats and children. Finds from our adventures. Photographs and pictures. Memories. Friendships. Leeks jostle the coffee maker and the breadboard where I am slicing homemade honey wheat bread. The dining room table bears school texts, a collection of pens, a jar of colored marbles. It may be cluttered, but it’s home. For some, the spare look works. We do not believe in minimalist decorating.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Betrayal
The wife of the man up the street is having an affair with a co-worker. He knows this because his best friend told him so. We are discussing Othello – but as we always do, we’re talking about the ideas behind the story: the plot and its relevance to our lives and times. There’s a lot of betrayal in Othello: friendship, truth, morals. Some of it is real, and some of it is real only in the minds of those who are deceived by their best friends. My students, who approach Shakespeare with as much enthusiasm as they do beets, are no strangers to fear and betrayal. They’ve lost friends, secrets, babysitters, boy and girl-friends, spouses and marriages, jobs and cars, to circumstances, or the economy, or betrayal.
Like most of us, sometimes they have betrayed their own long-range goals for short-term satisfaction: sleeping in rather than coming to class. They’ve felt betrayed by their bosses, and sometimes the educational system, whether their conclusions are based on fact or emotion. They know betrayal. Shakespeare may sound funny, as they tell me, the costumes may look strange (more unique than multiple face piercings?), but the stories don’t change – and that’s the important reason why we need to keep reading: that, and the beauty of the language.
We need to move into story and outside our private stories to understand and accept the part of those events in our lives. As Earl points out, King Arthur was also familiar with betrayal. Othello killed his wife for it, doing his civic duty, so - as he pointed out - Desdemona would not live to betray more men.
The students already know that betrayal doesn’t just happen to someone like Othello: betrayal is a relationship they can enter or something they can pity and learn from. Our reaction can depend, as Lori and Amber and Earl argue, on how much we still love the people who betrayed us. There are no simple rules, just people in their own stories, hunting for the plot.
Betrayal is part of life. We welcome someone into our lives, our love, our families, our friendship. Sometimes that relationship strengthens and grows. Sometimes we discover that the person or company we trusted has not been true. Sometimes we only believe this: but belief becomes our reality.
Othello’s response to perceived betrayal supported grew from not only his occupation and torment, but the rights of men everywhere to ensure that wives do not trash their husbands’ public reputation. [Then it was husbands; now we’re equal opportunity.] Arthur’s response fractured his heart, his knights, and his kingdom. Fatal flaw? Maybe: If love is a fatal flaw. Depending on what we do with our beliefs and the information we are given.
Maybe out of love we choose to say nothing, do nothing. Peace. Karma. Maybe we react. Maybe we avenge. Maybe, like Othello, we attempt to serve the public good.
Maybe if we read and talk about the betrayal our fictional characters encounter, or the betrayal they believe exists, peace will come more easily to us, in the stories and plots of our lives. We can learn from the past and from the actions of others, as Amber vigorously asserts to her classmates that we do.
Like most of us, sometimes they have betrayed their own long-range goals for short-term satisfaction: sleeping in rather than coming to class. They’ve felt betrayed by their bosses, and sometimes the educational system, whether their conclusions are based on fact or emotion. They know betrayal. Shakespeare may sound funny, as they tell me, the costumes may look strange (more unique than multiple face piercings?), but the stories don’t change – and that’s the important reason why we need to keep reading: that, and the beauty of the language.
We need to move into story and outside our private stories to understand and accept the part of those events in our lives. As Earl points out, King Arthur was also familiar with betrayal. Othello killed his wife for it, doing his civic duty, so - as he pointed out - Desdemona would not live to betray more men.
The students already know that betrayal doesn’t just happen to someone like Othello: betrayal is a relationship they can enter or something they can pity and learn from. Our reaction can depend, as Lori and Amber and Earl argue, on how much we still love the people who betrayed us. There are no simple rules, just people in their own stories, hunting for the plot.
Betrayal is part of life. We welcome someone into our lives, our love, our families, our friendship. Sometimes that relationship strengthens and grows. Sometimes we discover that the person or company we trusted has not been true. Sometimes we only believe this: but belief becomes our reality.
Othello’s response to perceived betrayal supported grew from not only his occupation and torment, but the rights of men everywhere to ensure that wives do not trash their husbands’ public reputation. [Then it was husbands; now we’re equal opportunity.] Arthur’s response fractured his heart, his knights, and his kingdom. Fatal flaw? Maybe: If love is a fatal flaw. Depending on what we do with our beliefs and the information we are given.
Maybe out of love we choose to say nothing, do nothing. Peace. Karma. Maybe we react. Maybe we avenge. Maybe, like Othello, we attempt to serve the public good.
Maybe if we read and talk about the betrayal our fictional characters encounter, or the betrayal they believe exists, peace will come more easily to us, in the stories and plots of our lives. We can learn from the past and from the actions of others, as Amber vigorously asserts to her classmates that we do.
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