Mockingbird

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields, published in 2006, was really interesting, but is just a portrait, a slice of the life of Nelle Harper Lee, rather than a biography. Shields had very little to work with because Nelle Lee doesn't give interviews or talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and hasn't for years. I found his attempt impressive even though it does fall short of the scope of a true biography. In the end, I am glad I read Shields' book. There is some measure of insight into Lee and why she never published another book.

The profound effect of To Kill a Mockingbird is well documented. "Eight percent of public junior high schools and high schools nationwide had added the novel to their reading lists only three years after its publication." Alternately, it is also on "the list of the one hundred novels most often targeted for banning." Many people list it as one of their all time favorite books.

I was surprised at the amount of control her older sister, Alice, had over Nelle's life. When Alice repeatedly called Nelle to come "home" to Monroeville, Alabama, from her apartment in Manhattan, it seemed like way to much power to turn over to a sister. Even so, Nelle allowed Alice that control and more over her life in later years. In the end, Monroeville was probably one of the few places where Nelle Harper Lee could actually have some degree of anonymity in her life since the town's residents could protect her in many ways. To Kill a Mockingbird changed her life but also limited it because it is such a beloved book.

In the end, "Fame had never meant anything to her, and she was not prepared for what To Kill a Mockingbird achieved. Before she knew it, nearly a decade has passed and she was nowhere near finishing a new book. Rather than allow herself to be eternally frustrated, she simply 'forgave herself' and lifted the burden from her shoulders of living up to the book. And refuse to pressure herself into writing another novel unless the muse came to her naturally."

(I appreciated Lee's high school teacher, Miss Watson. "Grammar, she explained over and over, was not a pointless academic exercise, but a tool. Knowing the rules was the quickest route to better writing. Grammatical writing also was the key to developing a clear euphonious style of writing." This is a fact I would love to have instilled in a few teenage minds this year.)

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An offer is in on the house. Any prayers for the negotiations are appreciated. I might come out of this with my sanity.

To Kill a Mockingbird

I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee again in preparation for reading her biography, Mockingbird. Any book review I could compose wouldn't do To Kill a Mockingbird justice. It really is a classic that should be read and reread, often, throughout your life.

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I'm having some more anxiety and depression over the house not selling yet. We really need to sell within the next 3 weeks, if not our lives will become much more complicated. I'm feeling very ineffective and hopeless.

Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King is really an amalgamation of many earlier familiar storylines rewritten into a science fiction tale of an alien invasion being thwarted by a group of friends. Dreamcatcher was originally published in 2001 and is 617 pages. Although King is known for his hefty books, there could have been a tad bit more editing done here without harming the integrity of the story. I'd have to say that I prefer other novels King has written to Dreamcatcher, but since King is such a prolific writer I may be judging this particular story too harshly. And, after all, it was written while he was recovering from the accident that almost killed him, so it could have been partly therapeutic writing. Be forewarned that some descriptions are rather disgusting and there really is more swearing used than usual.

A family picture

Would You Like Me More

Would you like me more
if I were a woman?
Would you treat me better
were I a man?
I am just words, no
not words even, just marks
on a page, tokens of what?
Oh, you know.

Then tell them, will you?
Tell them to stop looking for me.
Tell them that I never left home.
Tell them, if you must,
that I never left my body.
Unlike so many others,
I had no wings, just shoulders.
I was like the snow bunting,
of stout build but moderate size.
Better make that “exceedingly” moderate size.
I neither blessed nor cursed
but that the good suffered
and evil closed the books in triumph.

I cured no one.
When I died, my bones
turned to dust, not diamonds.
At best a tooth or two became coal.
How long it took.
You would have liked me then,
had you been alive still.
Had you survived
the silliness of self,
you would have treated me better.
I never lied to you,
once I had grown up.

When x told you that you were wonderful,
I said only that you existed.
When y said that you were awful,
I said only that life continues.
I did not mean a life like yours.
Not life so proud to be life.
Not life reduced to this life or that life.
Not life as something – to see or own.
Not life as a form of life
which wants wings it doesn’t have
and a skeleton of jewels,
not this one of bones and becoming.

How perfect are my words now,
in your absence!
Ungainly yet mild perhaps,
taking the place of no field,
offering neither to stand in the place of a tree
nor where the water was,
neither under your heel nor floating,
just gradually appearing,
gainless and insubstantial,
near you as always,
asking you to dance.

Marvin Bell
(New Yorker; October 11, 1976)

I found this poem when I was a senior in high school and immediately loved it. In college I actually did a series of 5 illustrations based on it.

Virus X

Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues by Frank Ryan, M.D. was first published in 1997 and is 430 pages long, including an appendix of a time line of emerging viruses, notes, and index. If you've been reading virus books like I've been reading virus books, Virus X holds nothing totally new or startling but it does cover the investigations into some of the world's most deadly viral epidemics. For a general interest, Ryan's book is more successful than the last two books, Virus Hunter and Level 4, written by some of the actual doctors in the field. I would have to agree with reviews that say it is better written early on and falls off a bit in the later chapters, but it is still worth reading if you are interested in the subject.

I did read for the first time (that I can remember) that the Marburg virus carrying monkeys were imported to use their liver tissue for the polio vaccine. When examined postmortem, "The livers, in particular, seemed to be shot to pieces." Of course, it could be I noticed this after reading Polio earlier this year. I find the whole idea that monkey tissue has been used to create vaccinations and then injected into people quite disturbing.

Another interesting note: When [the director of the Arbovirus Laboratory at Yale] is sent a virus from a sick traveler who has arrived in New York City, he will not only diagnose the causative virus but tell you in what country, rain forest, subtropical savannah, town, or district the person picked up that strain of virus."

The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields was an incredible book and worthy of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I read the Penguin paperback edition that was originally published in 1995. It was 365 pages long.

From Amazon:

This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

Part of what made The Stone Diaries so incredible was the breathtaking writing.

"Which for the most part will be a silent meal, both my parents being shy by nature, and each brought up in the belief that conversing and eating are different functions, occupying separate trenches of time."

"She imagines the soft dough entering the bin of her stomach, lining that bitter, bloated vessel with a cottony warmth that absorbs and neutralizes the poisons of her own body."

"She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting."

"The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence."

"When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forebearers were imbued with a deeper sense of purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind... But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today."

"The unfairness of this - that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman's life."

"...[M]ost people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement..."

"Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy's representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt."

"Women, I learned, needed to be bloody, but they didn't need to be mean."

"My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she's over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off."

"I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know, you're drowning."

"In the morning light her hurt seems temporary and manageable, but at night she hears voices, which may just be the sound of her own soul thrashing."

"She knows how memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection..."

"Sometimes she bunches her fists: sometimes tears crowd her eyes as she lies there thinking: another day, another day, and attempting to position herself in the shifting scenes of her life."

"If she's not careful she'll turn into one of those pathetic old fruitcakes who are forever counting their blessings."

"And we require, it seems, in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Fleet has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can't bear."

"Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words, 'I love you, Daisy' uttered aloud (such a simple phrase), and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit (and leisure) to ponder the injustice of this."