The Gift of Old Magazines

In my line of work, there are always folks who want to donate their used books and magazines to the Library.  They hope that we can use them, distribute them, take the bundles, boxes and bags quickly off their hands and absolve them of the anxiety of having printed matter that they just can’t bring themselves to dispose of in any other way.  For example, there was the time that one of the huge corporations affiliated with our school decided to dismantle their business library, phoning me up to “give” the Library the volumes they were discarding.  It was in the middle of the day, I was distracted, and, ultimately, there is just too much of the Midwestern bargain-hunter gene in me to say no to donated anything, particularly books.  When the books arrived unannounced a couple weeks later, there was another phone call in the middle of the day during one of my research lessons, demanding that I drop everything and organize a concierge and a cart to go get the boxes out of someone’s van.  Quickly, please, I’m in a rush, they made clear.  The boxes were loaded and thrust into my Library and they were full to the brim of outdated, highly technical, absolutely unusable business books that I ended up sorting and recycling and vowing all the while never to accept donation offers again sight unseen.

This past Friday was a day where I was running from one lesson or committee meeting or appointment to another as usual in my Library when the phone rang.  It was our school’s reception desk, and there was a gentleman waiting there who wanted to know if we would like to have a bag of Smithsonian and American Heritage magazines.  I look over at the clock above the door, it’s 1:10 and my 1:1 laptop committee meeting that I’m co-chairing starts at 1:30 p.m.  My mind struggles for a good reason to say no thank you, go away and take your magazines to the recycling center outside the Albert Heijn.  There is no polite way to do that.  So I sigh and tell the nice woman at the front desk that I’ll be out to see what I can do.  I enter the reception area, and an elderly gentleman with a cane is there, distant light blue eyes, uncertain smile.  I knew immediately that I would take the magazines, though I didn’t want them.  The magazines were out in his car in a carrier bag, but he wasn’t able to bring them in himself.  OK, I made a move to go out with him.  He stopped me and said that his wife wanted to keep the bag.  OK, so I had to run back to the Library for a sturdy bag.  It’s 1:15 p.m.  I highjacked an IB Art student from his architectural drawing to go out with the man and bring in the bag full of magazines.  Then I trotted off to my meeting.

This afternoon I opened up the bag and took them out.  They were bundled together with 3 massive rubber bands, Smithsonians from 2006, 2007, 2008, a couple American Heritages, a couple random technology ones as well.  There’s something about the old gentleman that reminded me of my grandfather, I think it was the hitch in his hip or back that made him stand crooked yet defiant like my Grandpa used to.  I could imagine him in his neat Dutch house taking the time to put aside his magazines for the school, carefully wrapping the rubber bands around them width and lengthwise, taking them out to the car in his wife’s shopping bag, driving them to the school, telling me that their children used to go to school here, and then dropping his eyes to his cane when he has to tell me that he can’t bring in the magazines from the parking lot on his own.  So I started sorting them out by year and magazine in the dusky light of the Library on a Saturday afternoon with no kids and no teachers to distract me.  And instead of resenting the magazines, I found myself enjoying opening them up and getting intrigued by their covers.  I started flipping through the stack and the eyes of a Nigerian giraffe on the November 2008 cover of a Smithsonian magazine stared me down and I found myself browsing contentedly through the issue, finding Julia Alvarez’s article about her home town in Weybridge, Vermont, folding the article back and sticking it in my bag to take home and read tonight.  I’m glad I answered the phone this time.

National Poetry Month, Starring My Favorite Poem

Every April, thanks to the Academy of American Poets, is National Poetry Month.  Although only 13 years old and ostensibly developed for celebrating the American poetic tradition, this annual celebration of poetry, poets and poetic traditions is looked forward to in bookstores, schools and libraries all over the world.  Our school here in The Netherlands is no exception.  Our English Department is hosting events in honor of the occasion, including posters of teachers’ favorite poems formatted and printed by English students for classroom doors, National Poetry Month art posters created by Art students to be displayed throughout the building, and a poetry slam afternoon in the High School Library on Wednesday, 22 April.  We will be inviting students to read and/or perform poems in a café-style atmosphere with hot drinks and snacks, imbuing the space to the best of our ability with a salon-esque, literary vibe.  This is our first year hosting a school-wide celebration, and I’m already scheming with my buddy Katie in the English Department to bring Austrailian YA author and poet Steven Herrick to come spend some time with us next April.

You too can have an Emily Dickinson T-Shirt from Poets.org, just click on the image above!

I’m kicking off the month by including my favorite poem by one of my all-time favorite poets, Emily Dickinson.  I discovered her outrageous intellectual and artistic independence when I was in high school in Ansonia, Ohio, in the early eighties.  Her poetry had had to have been assigned, and most likely it was included in our English textbook, because although I wrote notebooks full of absolute drivel and called it poetry at home and at school, I wasn’t reading poetry by “Poets” voluntarily.  I recognized Dickinson immediately as someone who had observed and decreed that it was OK to be selective in who and what you let into your life.  You control how, where, when and why.  Indeed, here was a writer who knew herself and her limits and created her world accordingly, despite what society said or thought.  Her intense internal world, cocooned in the privacy of her parents’ house, meant more to her than any worldly excursions or charms.  For her, the chosen few were infinitely more desirable than the capricious demands of the many.

Her poem “The Soul selects her own Society (303)” stopped me in my tracks.  Meeting this eccentric, reclusive woman-in-white from the late 19th century while squirming in the dull routine and petty boredoms of rural high school life, I felt as if she was speaking directly to me, putting into words the way I often viewed and interacted with the world around me:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

c. 1862

Amen, sister!  What a close-your-eyes-in-relief feeling it was (and is!) to know that I wasn’t the only person who had ever felt the personal need to put some distance between myself and the wear and tear of the outside world.  Re-reading these comforting words at different points in my life, I have come to cherish her no-nonsense acknowledgement of her (my) limits, her (my) need to sift through the hustle and bustle of the world and choose the most important bits and people to cherish, discarding all that is superficial or political (Chariots passing and Emperors kneeling).  This is not a purely anti-social poem, rather a decisivly, selectively-social poem.  Ultimately, it is a brutally truthful poem about how much one can give or take in life.  It’s all about choice and focus.  Poet and critic Michael Ryan believes that Dickinson deliberately created poetry that was to be this kind of revelatory, visceral “experience” for her reader, and to that end, her poetry “is in the service of truth: truth-telling and truth-discovering” regardless of how painful or perhaps unpopular the sentiments are (Ryan Poets.org).

It is hard to set and maintain personal boundaries in an over-committed world full of new ideas, new technologies, new places to go and people to meet.  Thanks to this poem, my touchstone for so many years, I am no longer inarticulate when I find that my well has run dry, when I run out of resources and energy for all the demands I face in my daily round.  My Soul goes into Select mode and my well begins to fill again.

Mental Floss: The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years

March-April 2009 mental_floss Cover

We started subscribing to Mental Floss in my high school library a couple years ago.  My sister-in-law brought a copy with her from the States when they came to visit us in The Netherlands and left it in the bathroom.  Perfect place for it.  However, I thought the short, snappy articles would work great in a library as well.  It was clearly the right kind of nerdtastic read for my students who have already memorized the Guinness Book of World Records, chuckled appreciatively over the Darwin Awards series and read out-loud to their friends the convictions and incriminating evidence supplied by the Smoking Guns’ The Dog Dialed 911.  The fact that I now know that John Green, author of Looking for Alaska and new author-friend, also writes for Mental Floss just confirms its relative genius.

The March-April 2009 issue stars 25 books that they think shook the cultural bedrock over the past 25 years.  My mission:  To read the article and see how many of these milestones I’ve read (in bold) or want to read.  Here goes:

1.  And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts (1987) – Thinking about this title, I began to rifle through my mind’s late 1980s card catalog of “Books Read When”, asking myself where was I and what was I reading.  In 1987 I was a junior in college in Oxford, Ohio, and AIDS wasn’t going to hit my personal radar until a couple years later, December 1989, when the AIDS Memorial Quilt came to Miami University and I volunteered to help with the event along with my boyfriend at the time (now my husband).  So while I didn’t read Shilts’ book, I was involved in the activism that was part of his writing.  I had almost forgotten about the specifics of this time in my life.  I have let my friend Andy, who was my first openly gay friend, slip away and he was one of the reasons why I wanted to volunteer.  I couldn’t quite remember when the quilt visited Oxford, luckily my librarian’s heightened googlogical skills found the reference in Miami University’s Digital Archive, the Miami Student Newspaper Collection.  Blogging and Facebook are spiralling me back and forth and back again in my personal history, bringing me people and places I thought were lost to me.  But I digress.

2. Maus by Art Spiegelman (1991) – I am a huge fan, both personally and professionally, of graphic novels.  Maus, which won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, is the one I pull out when I want to have some award-winner clout behind me while I argue for the importance of the comic format, for example when I’m talking to skeptical English Department Heads or scowling parents who think comics are all Snoopy or superhero-filled and a waste of time.  I bring it to the table for a variety of reading projects at school:  Memoir genre study for 8th Grade E-Stories classes where they write their own graphic novels, the English 9 Memoir project where students select a Memoir as an independent read, and as part of a recent Facing History assignment “Personal Account: Memoir Study and Reflection” for their study of the Holocaust.  My first exposure to serious comic reading:  my boyfriend’s (now husband) comprehensive, plastic-sleeved collection of Excalibur comics.  My first success in helping to bring a graphic novel to a syllabus:  Persepolis for English 9 here in The Netherlands.

3.  Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer (1993) – Never read it, just living with the cultural consequences as we all are.  Here a pill, there a pill, everywhere a pill-pill. Suddenly I realize that this list is already pretty idiosyncratic in scope.

4.  Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin (1995) -  This woman is one of my unsung heroes, unsung in that I admire her work so intensely, yet I haven’t promoted her books as much as I should and will.  I began reading her book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior but found it so moving I had to put it down for a while.  With all the recent media coverage of the horrors of factory farming, in part thanks to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the way meat is manufactured around the world and particularly in the States, reading about her work developing humane meat processing facilities that reduce animal suffering fills me with gratitude.

5.  Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) – I read this book not so long after my husband and I returned from living abroad in Vienna, Austria, and each of us worked retail jobs while we mourned our lost European lives.  It was tough to pay rent even with two hourly incomes and we immediately started racking up credit card debt, even taking out a loan for a tiny Ford Escort hatchback at a dealership that tried to sell us rust-proofing and a fancy cellphone service while the car paperwork was typed up.  As they trooped us around the sales floor, I wanted to shout them down into their pleather chairs, “We’re buying a crappy little Escort with a 100% loan…how much money do you think we have?”  Aaron worked at Lazarus, a large department store where he sold men’s clothes and I went to Borders Books and Music where I spent more money than I earned on books and music.  I appreciated Ehrenreich’s experiment, and I particularly shuddered when she described how the Merry Maids operate with one bucket of filthy water to clean an entire house in something like an hour, but she bailed herself out of the working-poor mess too many times for me to completely buy into her process.  According to Mental Floss, the Living Wage Campaign used the book to lobby Congress to increase the minimum wage, but the $7.25 that will go into effect in the summer of 2009 still isn’t enough.

6. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997) - Really? One of the 25 Most Powerful Books of the past 25 years?  Really?  Man climbs mountain, does not die on descent. Thrilling, yes, but I’m failing to see the massive cultural implications of his climb and the Mental Floss editors don’t convince me.

7. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988) – Free speech advocates around the world rallied to this novel, including Stephen King who, according to the article’s author Rosemary Ahern, “threatened to withdraw his books and promised that other best-selling author would do the same” if the big chain bookstores pulled the Verses from their shelves.  That’s almost, but not quite enough, to make me consider reading it now.  btw Stephen King appears later on the list which is pretty righteous.

8.  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002) – The premise of an intersexed protagonist who remains true to himself is still as intriguing to me today as it was when it first came out.  Must read.

9.  The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1988) – Unread by me, beloved by my high school students at the international school where I work in The Netherlands. The article has a photo of him covered in translations of his book, and it is worth considering reading, not only because it is a quest story about finding your greatest treasure within yourself, but also because he was one of the first people to offer his work online in translation for free in order to spark interest in his writing and to sell more print editions of his books (Ahern 44).

10.  The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr (1985) – Non-smoker, so non-reader of this one.  But I enjoyed reading the justification for including it on this list.  Odd, odd list.

11.  A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (1986) – This selection is clearly stretching the “most powerful” rubric to its limit.  Clever and fascinating as it must be, I have to think there is a gleeful Mental Floss editor cum le Carré fanboy somewhere in a basement office or “bunker” shaking their skinny white fists shouting “Justice is served!”

12.  What is the What by Dave Eggers (2006) – I worked at a middle school in Upstate New York in 2005 that hosted a group of Lost Boys for a couple of days, and I was stunned by their gripping stories and their patience working with our eighth graders.  There was a passionately committed English teacher there, Gertrude, who made those types of exeperiences happen for her students and I so admire her for her work.  They were beautiful young men, many who had lost their families or who feared that they had lost their families.  I don’t know which is worse.  The serendipity of the founder of the Lost Boys Foundation reading Eggers’ work, asking him to get involved and the “beautiful friendship” that happened between him and Valentino Achak Deng is moving just reading the blurb in the article.  My heart sings when I read at the bottom that Eggers has received no money for the book, that it all is going to Deng’s education fund and to rebuild his village, including a school and a public library (Ahern 46).

13. On Writing by Stephen King (2000) – Fantastic read.  Powerful for writers and readers and folks who think they’ve hit rock bottom but survive.  The excerpt of his first drink on a school trip was used in our grade 9 English classes for their memoir unit.  Jump in anywhere and you are immediately pulled into King’s world where reading and books, any books and any reading, are valued and celebrated.  His descriptions of what it takes to write and be a writer are clear and encouraging, the main point being have a room with a door and be willing to close it (King, On Writing, 155).

14.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994) – It’s only within the past couple of weeks that I’ve started to pay attention to Murakami’s writing, and that’s because I have a Dutch student named Dirk who asked me to order all his books.  Any adult author that inspires that kind of intense interest in a teenage male makes me curious enough to invest the time to see what all the fuss is about.  Then again, this novel, billed by Mental Floss as a “Chandleresque detective story” set in Manchuria during WWII, sounds intriguing enough on its own (Ahern 47).

15.  The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003) – A novel about freed slaves turning around and owning slaves themselves sounds painful and necessary to read.

16. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (1998) – The world will never be the same now that we’ve entered Harry Potter’s world and children will, hopefully, never be underestimated as critical, enthusiastic readers.  When the Jetson’s showcased the unbelievable future where people would talk on video phones ala Skype, can it be too very far off in the future that we have actual Quidditch matches being played in the air?

17.  How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Bottom (1997) – The Dutch love Alain de Bottom.  You can find his books everywhere in The Netherlands, both in Dutch and in English.  Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness are on my shelves at home mostly due to book status anxiety, wanting to see what all the fuss is about.  Snippet essays are his style, and I find that I can dip into them for words of wisdom and clever observations and general brainiac musings, but to read an entire book in one go would make you as miserable as, well, as Proust.

18.  The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987) – Ugh, this book is massive and off-putting no matter how revered by Mental Floss.  Bright Lights, Big City for the pompous.  Ahern writes, “Bonfire is the quintessential novel of the 1980s culture of greed (49)”, what fun to devote hours more of my life to that era!  I sense the list is losing steam, although I sensed it earlier with the dubious The Easy Way to Stop Smoking entry.

19.  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996) – Speaking of massive and off-putting, at 1,079 pages full of “Americans hell-bent on amusing themselves to death”, I tried this one and could not figure out the hype or the praise.  I just wanted my life back, so most likely I grabbed a Barbara Michaels trashy gothic-thriller from the remainder stacks at Borders where I was working for $6.50 an hour and tucked in.

20.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – Sexy, disturbing and mesmerizing.  All I can see when I think of it is Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day Lewis in the movie along with Lena Olin’s bowler hat burlesque, but I still remember the novel’s original power, the cold inevitability of the Soviet invasion in 1968 and the resulting Communist repression, the futility of trusting anyone.  Reading it again now after the fall of the Berlin Wall would be pretty interesting.

21.  Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) – I remember where I was while I read this, at Cornell University working as a Residence Hall Director, reading it for African American History Month to prepare for a discussion with other staff members. I couldn’t put it down.  The book is haunting and haunted, a memorial to slavery and the unbearable choices human beings had to make, or thought they had to make, in order to survive.  A novel about regret and revenge and, ultimately, redemption.  A mother kills her child to save her from slavery.  A  daughter then haunts her mother, for punishment or love it is impossible to say for sure.  I finished it and as I sat on the couch with tears slipping down my face I thought to myself, I want to remember reading this right here, right now.

22. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) – Books I will never forget include The Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid’s Tale.  Both left scars from reading them, and I think of them in similar ways although they are stories from two ends of a spectrum, the one where civilization disappears and the other where civilization fails.  The Handmaid’s Tale is the portrait of world where humans are clutching at straws to bring themselves back from the brink of destruction, a dystopian warning of the peril we face as a species if we don’t watch the chemicals and drugs that we are ingesting and letting loose on the earth.  In her grim vision, women bear the brunt of ecological disaster by being forced into sexual slavery based on their ability to conceive.  This future, like the Jetson’s video phone, doesn’t seem that unimaginable anymore.  I can still see the images from the religious compounds in the backwaters of the United States where young women and girls dressed in old-fashioned outfits are married off three or four or more at a time to old men spouting hellfire and brimstone.  If you need reminding, Mental Floss has a photo in the article for reference.  The future is getting closer all the time.

23.  Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005) – Fascinating, often hilarious stories where the authors “use financial theories to show why people behave badly” (51).  I can’t think of another economics book that I’ve read for fun.

24.  Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss ( 2003) – One of my linguist husband’s favorite books.  I actually bought him the illustrated, special edition for his very own.  There’s a picture book version out now, I think I’ll start with that one and move up from there.

25.  The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000) – Another one of my husband’s reads.  Does it count if he reads it in bed and I glance over from time to time?  Or that he reads it out loud to me whether I want to hear it or not?  Now that the “tipping point” is such a cultural catch-phrase, I wonder if it’s a respectable life goal to become one of his so-called information “mavens”, sharing information and helping people solve their problems…hang on, that’s what good librarians do!  Hurrah! Mavens rule!

The percentage of books I’ve read from this list is 8/25 or 32%, which does not include books that I have received into my memory either through impromptu, often unwanted late night readings or direct psychic connections with my husband.  That I’ve read a third of the titles by myself from a list that, let’s face it, was created from the same pool of brains that publishes such meaty tidbits as “Lamb Spared the Axe Because of Ridiculous Proportions” definitely gives me pause.

See the Movie, Read the Book: Chocolat by Joanne Harris

Chocolat Movie Tie-In Cover

This month in our High School Library, we have one of our favorite annual displays up:  “See the Movie, Read the Book or Read the Book, See the Movie”.  In honor of this, I am finally reading Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, and am finding it to be as magical as the movie.  I am happily surprised by this.  I remember trying to read the novel right after seeing the movie the first time in 2000, and putting it down, disappointed because it had so little in common with the movie adaptation.  Aside from Vianne and Anouk arriving with the wind in the fictional French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes on Shrove Tuesday, there was little in common between the opening pages of the book and the opening scenes of the film.  Why I was so flabbergasted by this, I don’t know.  It certainly isn’t the first time or the last where the novel and the film bear little more than a passing resemblance to each other.

In the novel, the “villian” is a local priest, Father Reynaud, and not the mayor, the Comte Paul de Reynaud, played so voluptuously by Alfred Molina.  Vianne didn’t have a luscious, sexy South American mother who raised her to purvey the mystical properties of chocolate.  In the novel, her mother is nervous Parisian woman who is wrapped up in self-absorbed, New Age mysticism.  Instead of the sensual, tropical flavor of  La Chocolaterie Maya in the movie, Vianne’s shop in the book is the more refined, completely French La Céleste Praline.  That’s just not what I wanted to read.  I wanted the whole South American, tribal story fleshed out some more.

I also found the novel to be too modern in setting (in fact, while reading this afternoon I just winced at Josephine’s references to microwave pizzas the night she leaves her husband), whereas the film has a wonderful technicolor 50s vibe from the costumes to the simple street games the children play.  The timelessness of the film version of Chocolat, the fairytale atmosphere that pervades the story, stays wonderfully watchable no matter how many times I pop it in the DVD player.  First of all, the soundtrack is fantastic, the music itself is reason enough to watch it again.  Then there’s the entrancing cast of characters, the crone played so wonderfully by Judy Dench and the evil “king” of Molina’s character, the dashing rogue-hero Johnny Depp and the gorgeous, feisty, magic-wielding heroine Juliette Binoche.  She might as well sing to animals, she’s such a film princess, albeit a wordly one with a child born out of wedlock.

My reading this year is different.  The occasional bursts of modernity of the novel, coupled with the original characters and events, create a world that is much darker and deeper than the one created on screen.  It is a satisfying alternate world, one that I am enjoying for its own sake while contrasting it with the Disney-esque film version I continue to love.  I am amazed that, while reading, I am not picturing Juliette Binoche or Johnny Depp.  I am able to read Chocolat as if it were a paralell universe to the film.  Roux is able to have red hair and vacillate in his interest between Joséphine Muscat and Vianne.  Vianne’s relationship to her mother is much more complex in the book, in that there is a real disconnect between her mother’s frantic globe-trotting and Vianne’s anxious, or alternatively detached, view of that life.  Shed of myth-making and exquisite costumes, there is a real sadness that tempers Vianne’s vivacity as little by little the details of her life with her mother are revealed.  There is no handsome, educated father or loving grandparents in her family history as in the movie.  Her father is as unknown as Anouk’s.  There was only ever Vianne and her unstable mother, their peripatetic life underlining the true distance that existed between them, which makes her desperate connection to Anouk all that more passionate and fragile.  Vianne’s relationship with the town and even with Roux, although full of kindness and a wistful hope for connection, are much more indeterminate.  There is no way of knowing whether Vianne will stay or go, and that ambiguity fits the novel perfectly but is totally not Hollywood.  I can see why the film morphed the way it did into something with a happy ending, but it’s not necessay or even desirable in the novel.

Joanne Harris has a lovely site where she’s written her own content, including the backgrounds for her novels along with plot summaries, and her page on Chocolat includes her thoughts about the movie adaptation.  She writes, “it is immensely enjoyable – if the book has a message, then it is that enjoyment matters – and although readers may feel that the film occasionally lacks edge, I think it more than makes up for it in simple charm” (Harris Chocolat).  It was fun to read that she too liked the blend of the Mayan backstory with the nostalgic French 50s setting in the film, finding the interiors and rural setting “stunning” and pointing out that you can almost “smell the chocolate” whenever Juliette Binoche in her bright frock whips more cream into a sensuous bowl full of dark chocolate.  As films go, Harris admits that the adaptation is more milk chocolate than dark, but I have to agree with her that either way, both are delicious.