Archive for: July, 2011

Invention of Copyright, Handselling in Dublin, and Three Rules for Raising Your Teenaged Son

Jul 23 2011 Published by under Navel gazing

A few pictures and tales from my recent family trip.
In Ireland, we visited the 15th century Dysert O’Dea castle in County Clare, where I discovered the Irish version of how copyright came to be.

My family a mile ahead of me as I try to take photos

As Edward T. O’Donnell wrote in a 2001 column for the The Irish Echo:

 

One story that captures the essence of his personality involved an altercation with his mentor, Finian.  Columcille loved books, especially a psalter owned by Finian.  Secretly, he copied the manuscript in his room (in the dark with the page lit by light emanating from his fingertips according to one legend).  When Finian found out, he demanded the original and the copy (books were extremely rare in those days).  When Columcille refused to surrender the latter, the case went before King Diarmaid who issued his famous edict: “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy.”  Reluctantly, Columcille handed over the book.    It would not be his last encounter with the king.

 

Dublin is such a literary city. I knew this, because as an undergraduate at Boston College, I worked in the Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections (see beautiful interior shots here), which has a huge collection of papers, letters and manuscripts of Irish writers. My main job was organizing the letters of Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, although I am pretty sure I spent most of my time writing my own love letters, none of which were as lovely as Belloc’s:

“….So again good night – if I could follow the night round her long whirl around the bend of the earth – at last I should come to you….”

– Hilaire Belloc to Elodie Hogan, August 6, 1890

But it’s totally different to be there and actually visit birthplaces and homes. Iris Murdoch, Marian Keyes, Maeve Benchy, Patricia Scanlon, and of course, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, and on and on. Inspired, I read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and I hope to review it soon.

While in Dublin, we visited one of the many bookstores (sorry to say I cannot recall which), and an employee noticed me trying to help my nine year old son choose a book. He came over to us, sussed out our Americaness immediately (I am not sure whether it was the accents, the loud bickering, or the Adidas track pants), and proceeded to hand sell us books for 9-12 year olds by Irish authors, including The Skullduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy, which he LOVES.

 

 

In Baltimore, Ireland we stayed with friends. Who had many siblings, and nieces and nephews. We were surrounded! But it was wonderful to “come to people” as they say. One of the women, who has four grown sons, gave me three rules for parenting through the teenage years:

1. You know nothing

2. Walk several paces behind.

3. Keep hugging him, even if he doesn’t want you to.

Here’s a shot of my pre-teen and his dad playing soccer in Baltimore:

 

We visited the Belfast Northern Ireland area, including the Giant’s Causeway, all of which we loved. The Belfast experience was especially powerful, both in seeing the remaining chicken wire, neighborhood gates, fences, and political murals and memorials to The Troubles, and in seeing the new vitality of the city in the beautiful new shopping mall (Victoria Square, were we saw Harry Potter 7.2), hotels, shops, municipal buildings, and restaurants.

But here’s a shot of the family at The Giant’s Causeway, on a rainy windy day:

 

 

VERY windy:

 

London was great, too, of course. We ended up staying in a heavily Middle Eastern area, with all signs in English and Arabic, the streets lined up and down by men smoking hookah pipes after work, and most women in traditional Muslim clothing, hijabs and ankle length gowns, many with face coverings as well. So that was an entirely new experience for us, but otherwise, the boys and I had fun visiting our usual haunts while the husband researched.

I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, Courtney Milan’s novella Unlocked, the Oscar Wilde mentioned above, Julie Ann Long’s I Kissed an Earl and What I Did for a Duke, and Shannon Stacey’s Yours to Keep, all of which I enjoyed.

Fantastic trip, but we’re all happy to be home. Hope your summer is going well, too.

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Ways in which A Visit from the Goon Squad is and is not just like romance fiction

Jul 21 2011 Published by under Reviews

 

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was my first foray into contemporary “fiction of the highest quality” for some time, during which I have been reading mostly romance novels, with a smattering of YA and SFF. In fact, I found out about VGS because of the romance reading community’s negative reaction to Egan’s disparaging remarks about chick lit after winning the Pulitzer (for which she later apologized).  I was in a London bookstore when I noticed it had just come out in paperback, was intrigued by the many blurbs therein which describe it as a combination of the best of the postmodern and modern novel, and the rest is reading history.

VGS features a large cast of characters all connected in some way to each other via the rock music industry, over a time span from the punk era of the late 1970s t0 some vaguely postapocalyptic point in the near future. Setting is mostly New York City, but also upstate, San Francisco, and a few other locales, including Africa and Naples. Each chapter in this nonlinear narrative offers a new a new point in time, a new place, a new narrator, and often a new point of view as well (first, second and third person all used here). In some cases, a character is introduced, and his or her entire future, and even kids’ futures, are spun out in a quick paragraph (kind of like the snapshot effect in Run Lola Run), after which the narrative returns to the “present”. It took this reader a few pages in each chapter to figure out whose head I was in (or had access to) and how s/he was connected to the previous chapters.  This technique produced, at some times, a fun or moving “aha” moment, and at others, a feeling of being required to spend unreasonable effort doing what the author should be doing (i.e. telling the story). Although some of the connections felt like Crash-ish deus ex machina coincidences, most of them — and that is a lot, since there are dozens of characters — felt remarkably natural.

The best use of what I guess you would call “postmodern” technique in the novel is the startling late chapter done entirely in what looks like Powerpoint slides, from the point of view of a girl talking about her family (both of her parents, the reader eventually figures out, are characters who have been introduced in previous chapters) who live in the vaguely postapocalyptic California dessert. I don’t think one could cram more gimmicks in a chapter than this one has, including, but not limited to, the necessity of turning the book sideways to read the slides, but the narrator’s images of her heartbreaking but fundamentally worthy family life (in particular, her “mildly autistic” younger brother’s attempts, often unsuccessful, to connect with his brilliant, but burdened doctor father, through the language of pauses in rock songs) were the one thing in the novel that brought me to tears. I thought Egan’s ability — not in every case, but in many –  to draw me in emotionally to totally new characters was remarkable. It was my favorite thing about the book. And I suppose that is one of the “realist” elements critics are referring to when they praise the novel.

 

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