The Arrogant Emu

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“The Office”, from the beginning, very strongly reminded me of “Fawlty Towers”, and not just in its British DNA.   Both employed the same kind of humor of the excruciatingly awkward; of setting their exaggerated situations not in the wacky world where people react to absurdity with absurdity, but in the gray ordinary world where people put their head down and just wait for it to stop.  That uncertainty of how to react passes from the characters to the audience - do they laugh at the whole thing, do they wince?  Can they afford to sympathize with characters who are going to suffer humiliation and worse than humilation - being ridiculous without knowing it?

There’s more than a passing resemblance between the main characters, as well - not in manners, but in nature.  One, the proprietor of a hotel, is desperate to believe himself and his establishment high-class, bathed in the warmth of the approval of the Really Good Kind of People.  The other, the manager of an office, is desperate to believe himself well-liked, cherished by his subordinates and admired by his superiors.  And both, in their pursuit of this self-deception, defeat any possibility of its ever becoming true.

Both heroes are supported by a cast sporting a lesser array of recognizable neuroses - the hopeless self-important assistant, the ungenerous wife, the slacker, the toady. The straight man in both shows is the pretty, put-upon, sensible receptionist who (perhaps because of the lowliness of her station?) has almost no ego with which to injure herself, and who, tellingly, demonstrates a talent for the arts - a vocation that has to do with creating something, rather than with dealing other people.

“The Office” has gone on much longer than “Fawlty Towers” ever did - perhaps than it ever could, for in its American incarnation, and in its longevity, it has changed its nature somewhat.  I have followed it from the beginning until now and I have noticed a distinct trend toward the merciful.  It has begun to pull its punches.  Not only are we increasingly allowed to hope for the success of the self-blinded boss (his schemes becoming steadily less harmful to those around him) but things are working out for the secondary characters as well.  Their own idea of happiness and what would actually be good for them are converging, whereas much of the humour of embarassment derives from the irreconciliability of these notions.

And I can’t wish it otherwise! I would be terribly distressed if Jim and Pam’s romance were to end in other respect than happily ever after.  Because we the viewers are allowed true sympathy (sympathy untainted by mockery and rue) so rarely in such a show, we cherish it all the more when we get it.  And I don’t think the show has the heart to take it away from us, although its very cruelty was part of its attraction in the first place.

Like the slave at Caesar’s ear, these shows remind us of our limits. You are absurd and you don’t know it.  You are absurd because you do not know it.

There’s an ad campaign in DC, which, although it fails in that I don’t actually remember the name of the product being advertised, produces such discomfort, a sort of buzzing in my orthographical ears, that it sticks in my head for ages.  I worry at it, trying to figure out what exactly it is that catches in my linguistical craw.  “UN finding-your-phone-can’t-leave-DC ‘d” reads one, “UN hidden-fee ‘d” reads another.  I have no problem with the compound word, it’s perfectly legible and comprehensible in the layout of the advertisement; it’s even clever.  My problems all stem from the line at the bottom of the poster, which I assume to the tagline of the whole campaign.  “NAME OF PRODUCT” it reads.  “UNWRONGED.”

First, the apostrophe-d construction, being distinctive and somewhat quaint, leads one to expect it as a feature of the campaign’s name.  When it’s not there, one starts wondering why it’s in the various slogans. To indicate that one should not pronounce “ed” as a syllable? No one does that these days anyway.  Probably because it just looks sexier to have “‘d” than “ed” sitting there in different type on a sign.  But they should have carried it through, made the campaign “unwrong’d”

And now we come to it, the core of the dissonance! I assume they must be using “unwronged” by analogy to their slogans, “un - bad thing - ‘d”  (Are there any English words that actually follow this pattern?)  But unwronged is an existing word, and has quite a different meaning.  It does not mean “having had bad things removed from it”.  It means “not having had bad things done to it”.  They are trying to conjure up the image of a system that has been improved.  They wind up invoking a high and holy innocence, a cell phone company that has suffered neither injustice nor humiliation.
Oh that thou could by thy ships be sitting
Unwronged, and with no cause for tears couldst dwell
Beside thy ships, since thou must die so soon!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, and I do believe my first one was for the sculpture garden of this very museum.  I’ve been by it often enough, I’ve sheltered in its courtyard both from heat and from rain, but I’d never actually been inside until my brother, on recounting his visit, said “They have dresses hanging on chunks of meat!”

“Well, that sounds like a suitable subject for my wit,” thought I, “I will have to go.”

Modern art is, I think, one of those things that, outside a certain circle, one is permitted to dislike without losing one’s pretensions to authority.  Mocking either the impenetrability or the transparency of the artist’s point is, I think, my default reaction, and there are few things so enjoyable, in the ordinary way of things, as getting to have an opinion on something. Perhaps deceptively, modern art extends the privilege of having an opinion to everybody.  No esoteric knowledge of a lost cultural context is required, no technical training demanded to appreciate the work that went into the physical creation of the object (”Hey!  My five-year-old could do that!”).  This is specious, of course, and the speciousness cuts both ways, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The Hirshhorn is an exceptionally welcoming building on the outside, a circle lofting itself lightly around a cool courtyard with a great pool and fountain playing in the center.  On entering, however, the first thing and indeed only thing that one encounters is the gift shop, where one must pause whether to go up or down on the claustrophobic little escalators.  No walk left, stand right here!  You are a museum-goer now, not a commuter, and you had best learn to act like one!

I went down, where I found an exhibit called “Black Box” showing videos.  The beautifully lit pomegranate exploding into splatter and seeds on being shot was a perfectly appropriate update to things like this, but “The Forest”,  a slow pan through a dense green wood punctuated by the fall of trees, some with a huge crash like the roar of an express train, others silent, was very affecting even before reading the bit about this being the forest where the artist’s in laws had witnessed the execution of their fellow villagers.

I was already revising my opinion of my right to criticise, when I turned into the “Strange Bodies” exhibit, and it reasserted itself. Why should it not - the artists had gleefully taken it in hand to criticise the human form, and showed a rather disturbing obsession with dismemberment.   The first thing that greeted me as I stepped in was this sprawling figure.  “Oh, this must be by what’s-his-name!” said I.  “Sounds like an author but isn’t - Francis Bacon?  No, Freud, Freud, that’s it.  Lucien Freud, painter of the naked.” For so indeed he is: of all those who take delight in unloveliness Freud has perhaps shown most clearly what it means to be naked, an exposed mass of flesh deprived of the clothes that made it possible to relate to you as another person, a body that is by its imperfection a besmirchment of the human form.  Who told you you were naked?  If it was Lucian Freud, I’d have snatched up some fig leaves as well. Still, it’s an important point, and well taken - at least he had something useful to say, unlike de Kooning, whose works are little better than a snarl of hate. Seeing “Pink Lady” across the room I thought it might be his, and was enormously relieved to discover it was by Niki de St. Phalle, thank goodness, because I don’t want there to be anything about de Kooning that I like.

The Strange Bodies room is dominated by Ron Mueck’s sulky giant.  “Aww, I want to take him home!” cried one visitor, but to me he seemed about to rise from his corner and from the baleful glint in his eyeI didn’t think that it would be good for anyone in the room when he did so.

Upstairs, and upstairs again, onto the circuit of the first floor, which was primarily dedicated to an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois. She’s the one who did the spider outside the museum, a striking piece that one would expect to be horrifying but which is suprisingly comforting. Apparently, according to the text accompanying the exhibit, Bourgeois views the spider as a positive symbol, which makes sense.  Still, there’s only so far an artist’s intent will carry a piece.  Femme Couteau, for instance, seems neither aggressive nor defensive but dismembered, and as such might belong in the rag-and-bone shop of Strange Bodies downstairs. To be sure, sometimes the accompanying directives on how one is to view a piece can be helpful; I walked around “Cell: 12 Oval Mirrors” dutifully contemplating the difference between the distorted images of myself, and I came to some profound realization that I have already forgotten. But should art come with a user’s manual?

The poetry is better than the pictures in “He Vanished”, which is an evocative little piece of nonsense somewhat reminiscent of “The Great Panjandrum”.

Perhaps her sculptures would be more effective alone. The bones holding up the dresses, I’m afraid, seem to me only fodder for a future fad.  Why aren’t cow bones more extensively used in home decorating, anyway?  It’s not as if we don’t have an abundant supply of them. Ventouse is readily recognizable as a votive shrine, Cumul 1 is the best thing about her stone work, and the earnestness of her blending female with male genital shapes in her sculptures was somewhat undermined by the unfortunate resemblance of the third “Lair” to a pile of turds.

I was astounded, on making the round of the exhibition at last, to come upon a recent video of Louise Bourgeois herself.  I don’t know what I’d expected - I think that she’d be be dead by now or something; clearly I hadn’t been paying attention to the dates on the sculptures - but I certainly hadn’t expected her to be an old woman of the brisk, earthy, and intelligent type that one cannot help but respect. Sitting and watching the video of Louise Bourgeois, thoughtful, humorous, vigorously physical, I was compelled by her person into respect for her art.  I went back over the exhibit in my mind, obliging myself to take a second look at what I had dismissed as self-pitying or self-important, and new sides of the works began to emerge.

So what’s the moral* of all this?  I think one should look critically at art, should allow and even encourage oneself to react emotionally as well as intellectually.  Modern art encourages this, volubly, and indeed to the extent where it sometimes descends into navel-gazing.**  Is there a difference between criticism and reaction?  In practice, for the most part criticism is only an articulated reaction. But it is helpful, from time to time, to be brought up against the limits of your criticism, and humbled by revelation of your own ignorance, by the authority of those who worthily bear is, or by a beauty that brooks no articulation.

*What? This is a blog about morals, apparently.
**Just as poetry is not the only fit subject for poetry, so there is only so much art about art I can take.

It was a splendid day, the first full-hearted spring of the season.  For a few weeks now I have seen a crocus here or a daffodil there, splashes of color as grateful to the eyes as a breath of warm air from an opened door on a shivering winter day.  But now the trees begin to show white and scatter their petals like coins, now spears of green appear in front yard and window-box, now the Metro flashes travel advice for the cherry blossom festival, and I pumped up my tires, oiled my sadly rusted chain, and took the road for the Mount Vernon Trail and Alexandria.

More than half the journey there was spent looping around the maze of roads just beyond the mall, trying to avoid dropping myself onto 395 or into the crowds of pedestrians out admiring the flowers. The area could stand to be better signed for bikers, but it is no great matter; a few more such expeditions and I shall have no further difficulty.  The sun was high and brilliant. The heaps of cloud around the basin echoed the clouds of blossom below, and occasionally shook down bright heavy drops.  Once I was over the bridge and well on my way, I began to look about me: whole families out for walks, bulky men running with large gadgets strapped to their large arms, a couple of middle-aged women lying on a blanket out by the airport looking up at the planes, a couple standing square in the middle of the trail, wrapped around each other.  Were they overcome by passion while out jogging together? Did they set out, one from Alexandria and one from Arlington, and against all odds run into each other halfway?  I’d got more interesting things to run my mind on anyway; Ira Glass was chirping away meditatively into my headphones about people who find themselves on the wrong side of history.

I arrived in Alexandria, but the pottery studio was closed, as I had half-known that it would be.  Nothing daunted, I pushed myself up in an easy gear to the Trader Joe’s, where I bought myself a container of yogurt.  Soon it will be warm enough for smoothies, and soon, too, it will be warm enough to buy myself a water filter.  The water from my kitchen faucet has a faint, foul, earthy taste to it, and while in winter I rarely drink it outside the form of a tea or tisane, warmer weather calls for cooler drinks.  I was thirsty, and so I bought a jar of mango-passion fruit juice, with the truly questionable name of “Heart of Darkness”.  What’s next?  “The Waste Land” cocktail crackers?  “Crime and Punishment” tapenade?

On the way back, I went over by the Key bridge and found myself at the Lincoln Memorial at sunset.  I twitched my headphones out of my ears and went exploring.  Groups of high-schoolers, astonishingly young, were running up and down the steps, lounging in twos and threes within, curled up with note books staring up at the great speeches on the walls.  There are some wall paintings high up on the wall, but I couldn’t make them out.  Do they need restoring? A party in blue - a sports team, I think - jogged up the steps of the memorial, absorbing by some kind of osmosis the gravity of civil strife.  An Indian couple walked ou, talking together with great animation.

I took my way around the back of the memorial and looked out over the bridge to the west.  The sinking sun turned the shiny leaves red where it touched them; the trees shone as if with Christmas lights.  The scallops in the pillars are just large enough to repose one’s shoulders in.  Eastwards the pale federal buildings blushed, and the Washington monument blinked its baleful little eyes into the sun.

“Nard!  Hey NARD!” shouted a high schooler to a friend.

“En-oh!  H - E - double hockey stick NO!” pronounced another one.

When I left, the clouds, and the trees that mirrored them, were both a pale lavender-grey.  Up into the city now: noises, lights, the smells of food.  A car came swerving into the bikes-and-busses only lane, nearly catching me by the left side.  I cursed him as one in Oedipus’ mold, and then passed him at the next red light, striking out for home, for fried eggs and the rest of the mango juice.

The only cloud upon the pleasure of the day is that it is, perhaps by necessity, a solitary one - for though I should have loved to know that the delights of exertion, light, color, contemplation, were echoed in another soul, I assuredly do not want the bother of having to talk to someone, and indeed that would have spoiled the sort of the day’s pleasure, in which the movement of clouds and crowds alike form a sort of urban weather through which the wanderer sails like a small craft.

So, inspired by Julia and then by Libby, I am here offering, to anyone who wishes, a Thing. Specifically, a knitted thing.  If you would like a knitted thing, post your preferences (socks, hat, gloves, scarf, etc) in the comments.  You can even specify a color if you’d like, though there’s no guarantee that I have it.  If you are of the knitterly persuasion and have a particular pattern you’d like me to try my hand at, by all means!

Are there any restrictions on what you can ask for?  Not really!  I mean, if you ask for an afghan you will get it much much later than the person who asks for a scarf, but I hope to finish all projects of reasonable size within about three months.

It’s cold now; the roads were covered with ice on my way home, and besides, I want another knit-challenge to keep myself occupied with while working through my great-great-grandmother’s lace.   It won’t be so bitterly cold by the time you get your knit thing (so we can hope?) but you can keep it around for next winter.

Sorry about that, readers.  (The extended hiatus, I mean.)  I was going to and fro in the world, and walking up and down in it, and in the course of my perambulations I came into possession of a rather remarkable set of documents: knitting and crochet patterns, mostly for lace, from publications ranging in date from 1900 to 1925.  They are in fact my great-great-grandmother’s (I think that’s the right number of greats?) and I am going to make a project out of them, knitting each of these patterns and documenting the results.  In order to do this properly, though, I need to obtain a camera, but until such time, you may find interest in the other side of the faded pages of Ladies Home Journals and Woman’s Worlds from more than a century ago.

Consider this advertisement for soap, circa 1920.  Read out loud for best effect:

“It is well known that most women dislike to shampoo their own hair.  With ordinary soaps it is such a task to work up a lather, while it is even harder to rinse the sticky, greasy, undissolved soap from the hair.  And the free caustics in many cheap soaps and shampoo powders bite into the scalp and injure the hair.

But a shampoo with JAP ROSE* - the golden transparent soap - is ease and luxury itself.  Just moisten the hair and scalp and dip the pure, golden, transparent cake in the water.  Then just a very little rubbing, and almost instantly, thousands of pure, pearly bubbles cleanse hygienically every strand of the hair - every pore of the skin.  The oil and dust and dirt are cut out and removed as if by magic, without the slightest injury to the hair or scalp.  After that, a dash or two of water, and the hair is left perfectly clean, and healthy and fluffy.

For even in cold, hard water JAP ROSE is quickly and absolutely solube.  There being no sediment, the bubbles are easily and completely washed away.

Made of pure oils of the finest grade and chemically pure glycerine, all scientifically blended by experts, JAP ROSE soap is not only pleasant and easy to use, but also healing and beneficial to the hair and skin.

Try a shampoo with JAP ROSE soap Today

Roses in the cheeks, fluffiness in the hair, fragrant
cleanliness everywhere - that’s JAP ROSE
You’ll like it!

An unusual value
at two cakes for a quarter.”

I haven’t included the equally enthusiastic copy at the top of the ad, but it’s much in the same vein. Just look at the second paragraph!  Have you ever read anything that sounds so exactly the way a shampoo commercial looks? And just try imagine a similar product being sold today through force of words rather than through images!

I suppose verbose commercials, in the form of faux-articles in special advertising sections, are making something of a comeback, but that’s verbiage wearing an entirely different outfit, that’s verbiage borrowing the trappings of respectability rather than of - well, what is this trying to be, anyway?  Is it poetry?  What else can it be? Invoking images of beauty and pleasure, with an undercurrent of hoping to persuade a lovely woman to bestow her favor upon you?  Erato, who charms the sight, is this monstrous birth yours?

The next question.  There have been great love-poems adapted to pretty much all manifestations of eros, but has there ever been a great advertisement?**  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee, but as soon as Jap Rose died, died the ads withal. Ads are the opposite of art.

I thought about calling them the opposite of truth, understanding truth to be something of a value and relevance than endures even when removed from its original context, but I think that definition fits art just as well, and there is no ready opposite of art.

*Yes, that name is exactly as ill-advised as it sounds.

**In fact, I think I might eventually argue that there are great advertisements, but the ones I can think of are almost entirely visual.

When I mentioned my interest in wall painting, my interlocutor asked whether I’d been to see the exhibit at the National Gallery.  “The Pompeii one?” I said.  “I thought that was sculpture.”  A headless torso had been the advertising image for it on the metro, after all.  No, on the contrary, the exhibit was arranged, thematically and structurally, as a Roman villa, and that meant, in addition to the various other objets d’art there would be wall paintings.

The entrance to the exhibit has a virtual tour of three villas playing on loop.  Computer reconstruction seems to me to still be rather underutilized in art-archaeological exhibits, for it gives an idea the way little else can of how the elements that we see scattered actually fit together. An idea dependent on our time as well as theirs, to be sure - the House of the Faun looked strangely modern, with Ikea-ish blocks of color on its walls.  As you walk into the exhibit, you tread on a reproduction of the charming “beware of dog” mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet and find yourself in a near life-sized cross section of the House of the Centenary from a drawing of Jules-Léon Chifflot.  It looks awfully American to me, like something out of the 1800s, but I can’t make up my mind as to the beginning or the end of that century.

There was something strangely bitter about seeing those sweeping images, blithely recalling the elaborate structures of the villas of wealthy, cultured Romans grasping at an idea of peace and cultivatation.  What an amount of work must have gone into those - the wearisome human labor of placing stone on stone, the conception of the building, the education of the architect, the cultivation of the taste of the patron, the unknown toil - his or others - by which he rose to wealth.  All this encapsulated in the villa.  Not a monument, but a vacation home.  I looked at the memories of these great edifices, and my heart said “Why bother?”

Oh well.  I had come for fresco, and I was not disappointed.  Sometimes outdoor scenes, sometimes genre scenes (Apollo and the muses adorning the walls of a reconstructed triclinium),  sometimes, in a recursion as amusing as it was disturbing, scenes of buildings.  (I can’t find a picture of that last one, it’s probably not generally considered as much worth looking at.)

Though I had bypassed it originally, the statuary was well worth looking at. There was a telling series of imperial busts in the first room, ranging from the lean movie-star handsomeness of Julius to the thick-pated brutish-looking Nero.  The famous headless torso had a great crater where the head should have been, and only the direction of the draperies to show the motion of the arms.  It shouted of futility where the rest of the exhibit only murmured, and I turned quickly and unhappily from it to this, a young patrician girl, pretty, with a sturdy body and a sweet face.  She didn’t always stand there, all sphinx incompris, and one thing I should have liked to have seen them do with their digital reconstruction is to display an image of the statue as it once was, painted with lively colors.

There was a little series of lares, household gods, which looked like nothing so much as action figures.   The Alexander_Mosaic picturing a vivid battle scene, must have been as much fun to design as an action movie to direct.  It’s almost as much fun to watch, and perhaps served much the same purpose.  Perspective, expression, foreshortening -vivid special effects all, and I can certainly imagine young Roman lads exclaiming over how cool the horse spurting blood all over the place is. And speaking of special effects, the exhibitors had digitally reconstructed the missing parts of the image, which made the whole thing much more immediate. The smaller-scale mosaic of Plato’s academy was a more contemplative piece, with the tessererae as small as beads, as small as pixels.

So they went, the Romans.  They painted gardens if they didn’t have the space to build them, and hung them with painted masks.  They had an immense appetite for anything Greek, and bought real Greek statues, fake Greek statues, and Genuine Imitation Greek statues with equal appetite. The gods were home decor, and Apollo made an excellent floor lamp.

Now, viewers have been thinking as they peruse these halls - “A wealthy, workaholic people in search of pleasure, leisure, and luxury, more concerned with the outward signs of cultureness than with culture itself, decking itself in the detritus of lost civilisations in the effort to lend itself some cachet - what does this remind me of?” In its last, somewhat jarring section, the exhibit comes right out and says it - it looks at our fascination with Pompeii. Images of the violent end of the world stand side by side with interested recreations of what it might have looked like, fanciful storytelling, and modern attempts to incorporate its motifs into home decor.

In conclusion, the New York Times does what I’m trying to do only better.

I don’t think I’ve seen an ad in the whole time I’ve been here. I sleep for nine hours a night, wake up, eat some food, go out hiking, make some tea, knit some socks…  What shall I blog about until I return to the world of the Metro? Well, prowling about the new house and looking at its bookshelves I saw all kinds of books that I’d loved and nearly forgotten.  Here they are.  Do you remember any of these from your childhood?  Others?

The Time Garden
I’m just noting down the first book by a particular author that I see as I prowl around the house.  My favorite Edward Eager book is probably Knight’s Castle.

All-of-a-Kind Family
I loved stories about large families, and you’ll see that this will become a theme. Large families in Other Worlds, be they immigrants or pioneers or space travellers.

The Search for Delicious
Drop everything and read this. It’s the quiet, clever, sad story of how a kingdom nearly destroys itself over the definition of the word “delicious”.

The Hundred and One Dalmatians
Have you ever read the sequel, the Starlight Barking?  I didn’t like it at all.  But this book - which is also about a large family of sorts, making its way through someone else’s world.

The Wind in the Willows
This one I only enjoy more as I get older, though the images it established in childhood provided metaphors I still use to understand the world around me: the sense-driven Toad at the wheel of a motorcar, Mole cleaning out his dusty and forgotten home, the stentorian Badger, whom I liked but of whom I was always a bit frightened.

Pippi Longstocking
A book about the beneficial effect of chaos.

The Good Master
A book about the beneficial effect of order.

Number the Stars
This was probably responsible for why we played “Hiding from the Nazis” when we got tired of playing “Runaway Slaves”.

The Bronze Bow
The one of Speare’s historicals that I was most attached to was actually “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”.

The Phantom Tollbooth
For anyone who has ever learned anything ever.  This book made everything take on life - conclusions, expectations, subtraction, nouns… and showed the world of the mind as living and marvellous.

Alice in Wonderland
This too of course, but in a different way. I learned a lot from these books about the world making no sense, or making sense in a nonsensical way.

Mary Poppins
The Mary of these books is far more flawed than her cuddly counterpart of the movies.  She’s vain, arrogant, and can be vindictive. She is also exactly the person you want on your side in the world of the marvellous.

Winnie the Pooh
And the poems. Those are important.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
We had a lovely edition of this book that has since fallen to bits, the illustrations done by an artist with a name of one word that began with M.  Anyone know what I’m talking about?

The Phoenix and the Carpet
British books (see Mary Poppins above) seem much more comfortable with querulous, demanding, cantankerous magical guardians than American books are.  Wonder why?

Hans Brinker
As a child, I would skim past the sections of the book about the boys’ adventure down the river to pay attention to Gretel’s travails with her sick father.

The Jungle Book
I later read “Kim” and found that it was basically the same story - but I like it better in its earlier incarnation.

Around the World in 80 Days
A big annotated copy.  I didn’t know this was French until rather much later in life.

Understood Betsy
This is another motif that I like, whether it appears in Meet the Austins or The Secret Garden or the abovementioned The Good Master - spoiled, fragile city child comes to the country and learns independence, sociability, and good humor.

Magical Melons
This is the sequel to Caddie Woodlawn, another story of a girl growing up on the frontier.  All the girls in the stories when I was growing up expressed their impatience with sewing and cooking and feminine activities, which made me feel quite guilty that these were in fact the activities that I enjoyed.

The Bridge
The first book in a fantasy trilogy of brave princesses escaping from danger.

The Story of Doctor Doolittle
Actually, when you think about it this is also the story of a large family…

Babe the Gallant Pig
And this is a story about the power of courtesy.

Old Yeller
I read this when I was sick.

Little House in the Big Woods
I was just blogging about this.  This was one of my earliest reads and it shaped my imagination, not to mention my image of myself.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
See what I mean about the British and the ambiguity of the marvellous?  Anyway I think it’s healthy. The Vermicious Knids from the sequel gave me nightmares, though.

A Wrinkle in Time
I remember being perfectly astounded when I first read this.  It seemed to me to be telling a story that I had been telling myself without quite realizing it.

The Trumpet of the Swan
It’s thanks to this book I know the word “crepuscular”.

The Enormous Egg
Really, who doesn’t dream of hatching a dinosaur?

The Winged Watchman
A historical novel about… hiding from the Nazis!

Treasure Island
I would pick this up and not get through it, so it was really in having it read to me that I came to appreciate it.

Ordinary Jack
Oh goodness, go and read this one - it’s about a hypercompetitive talented British family and the one ordinary child in the pack.

Arabel and Mortimer
The adventures of a girl and her raven.

Of course these are just the books on the public bookshelves; there are dozens more on the bedroom shelves.  Several of them have come to mind while typing -  The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, The 21 Balloons, Henry Reed Inc., - and of course the major fantasy classics old and new.

What books do you remember fondly, which children’s books shaped your outlook on life?

I got on a flight two days later, on Christmas Eve. (Who has eves any more? Vigils, watches, prolonged anticipation?)  The world, when I descended in the Pacific Northwest, was locked in otherworldly white and blues, a low soft ceiling over a sharp sparkling landscape.  I fell asleep with my mouth hanging open, and woke to find myself on a boat.

On a boat!  My family now lives on an island linked to the mainland by a ferry, which is a floating garage with a cafeteria on top.  And as we neared the dock and I saw the lights of the shore, I felt it at last, the rush of joyful anticipation, the knowledge that something good was about to happen.

That to me is Advent, that is the Christmas spirit, the moment before the boat touches shore.  Coming home to a new world, the promise of the familiar blending with the promise of the unknown.   As soon as you descend to the shore, of course, the new life has to begin, with slodging and truding, striving and quarrelling, eating and drinking, and that’s good.  But there should be a moment for awareness before the new ordinary sets in.