A sublime bildungsroman centering on the keen, sensitive, and curious dreamer Francie Nolan.
The setting is from 1901 to about 1917 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Francie is compassionate, sentimental, a believer of everything, and a storyteller. She has an unbeatable spirit and a stirring imagination.
Francie, along with her family, copes against poverty, prejudice, and her father Johnny, a singing waiter who drinks, barely works, and often doesn't come home at night. His alcoholism, which eventually kills him, results from becoming a father at a young age. He's not ready for a family, loses his job, and, unable to handle it all, resorts to drink... Francie grows up lonely and has few friends, but is a voracious reader who is kept company by the books she consumes... She is also troubled by her mother. Katie feels that Francie's brother Neeley needs more encouragement, support, and show of love, leaving Francie to feel unfairly put off...
Certainly, Francie has something indomitable inside her, like her mother. While Johnny responds to his troubles by giving up and becoming an alcoholic, Katie is a hard worker who keeps the family together and believes that hope and a better future for her children are possible. Indeed, the tree referred to in the book's title is the Tree of Heaven, which commonly grows in New York, often through cement. Just as this tree triumphs over its environment, so does Francie grow up to ultimately triumph over her environment.
Smith depicts this coming of age seamlessly. She goes from Johnny and Katie courting to their marrying, to Francie's birth, her childhood, and finally to her becoming a young adult, all as a cohesive, engaging story. Although lonely and out of place as a child, Francie finds acceptance and becomes more aware of the world and adult things as she gets older... All this, and she and her family remember Johnny fondly long after his death.
Although some look down upon her as a dirty, poor scum, Francie finds beauty in her life. It is an inspiration and a pride. Towards the end, when Katie gives birth to a third child, Annie Laurie, she laments to her brother that their sister will not experience the poor, desolate life they have lived, and therefore will not have the happy, fun memories they acquired from such a life.
This is a marvelous book. A new favorite of mine.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Literary Tattoos
We all love books. We have tons of them. We read and read and read. (And, so says Mike Denison, we think superior intellectual thoughts to boot.) But would you put your love of books on yourself as a tattoo? According to this short blurb, literary tattoos are the new rage:
Tattoos may be associated in the public mind with bikers and football hooligans, but the growing popularity of more literary designs is finding an outlet on the internet.
Have your say: What quotation would you choose for a tattoo?
People whose body art is inspired by their favourite novel, poem or song are posting pictures on their tattoos on number of new blogs and websites devoted to the trend.
Many of the designs are short, memorable quotations, but others - often covering the person's entire back - are composed of entire chunks of books.
Posters to contrariwise.org, a literary tattoo site, show a broad range of influences, from William Shakespeare to Dr Seuss.
But a handful of authors, notably Sylvia Plath and Kurt Vonnegut, seem to hold a particular appeal.
Here is the link to the blurb, with numerous pictures of people's literary tattoos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/15/batattoos116.xml
Tattoos may be associated in the public mind with bikers and football hooligans, but the growing popularity of more literary designs is finding an outlet on the internet.
Have your say: What quotation would you choose for a tattoo?
People whose body art is inspired by their favourite novel, poem or song are posting pictures on their tattoos on number of new blogs and websites devoted to the trend.
Many of the designs are short, memorable quotations, but others - often covering the person's entire back - are composed of entire chunks of books.
Posters to contrariwise.org, a literary tattoo site, show a broad range of influences, from William Shakespeare to Dr Seuss.
But a handful of authors, notably Sylvia Plath and Kurt Vonnegut, seem to hold a particular appeal.
Here is the link to the blurb, with numerous pictures of people's literary tattoos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/15/batattoos116.xml
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Impact of Technology: A Helpdesk During the Middle Ages
There has been much discussion on this blog about the affect of technology on our culture, especially upon print. Certainly, whenver something comes along that revolutionizes the way we do things, as computers have, there is an adjustment period where we transition from the old to learning the new. The following Norwegian video quite humorously depicts such a shift, as it shows a helpdesk during the Middle Ages when books first came about.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon (2)
This is my favorite book in the series so far. I've started STREETS OF LAREDO so I'll comment on it later. I suspect I will rank the series as follows:
1) Comanche Moon
2) Lonesome Dove
3) Streets of Laredo
4) Dead Man's Walk
Comanche Moon has a strong plot line, although it tails off at the end. The characters are memorable as they always are with McMurtry. The book is worth reading just to have to fun with the Sculls. It is interesting that the most admirable person in the novel (in my opinion) is a Yankee.
The best parts may be the Indian characters. I like Buffalo Hump even with his brutality. Kicking Wolf is OK, but that Blue Duck is truly evil. Those Indians certainly know how to torture, don't they? Too bad we couldn't use them at Guantanamo.
1) Comanche Moon
2) Lonesome Dove
3) Streets of Laredo
4) Dead Man's Walk
Comanche Moon has a strong plot line, although it tails off at the end. The characters are memorable as they always are with McMurtry. The book is worth reading just to have to fun with the Sculls. It is interesting that the most admirable person in the novel (in my opinion) is a Yankee.
The best parts may be the Indian characters. I like Buffalo Hump even with his brutality. Kicking Wolf is OK, but that Blue Duck is truly evil. Those Indians certainly know how to torture, don't they? Too bad we couldn't use them at Guantanamo.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon
The novel is dedicated to Susan Sontag, who published an influential essay in 1966 in which she said the following:
"America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."
If I ever meet Larry McMurtry, I want to ask him if his dedication had anything to do with this quote.
"America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."
If I ever meet Larry McMurtry, I want to ask him if his dedication had anything to do with this quote.
Ray Bradbury on Censorship
As a staunch believer in intellectual freedom, I abhor censorship. Ray Bradbury addresses this evil in his Coda for the 50th Anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, which I think is worth reading:
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire store should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention - shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried.
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m going out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire store should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention - shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried.
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m going out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Downside of Social Networking
I am fascinated with social networking websites. Thru the miracle of the internet I am glad we have such a valuable tool to use to keep in touch, share thoughts, and make new friends. At the same time, I believe we live more and more in a superficial society. The depth of life comes from actual esperiences, face-to-face contact with other human beings, AND reading, which, as we know, is in serious decline. The article below is appopos.
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 22, 2008
One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name — Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young — and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.
Skip to next paragraph
The Board Blog
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.Go to The Board »
I get the same feeling — vastly multiplied — from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.
I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages — microblog entries of 140 characters or less — to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
More Articles in Opinion »
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 22, 2008
One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name — Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young — and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.
Skip to next paragraph
The Board Blog
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.Go to The Board »
I get the same feeling — vastly multiplied — from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.
I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages — microblog entries of 140 characters or less — to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
More Articles in Opinion »
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