Growing

Miriam and Alice have each grown very fast recently. Miriam's measurements are on the left (or top, if your page is narrow), Alice's are on the right (or below):

The National Aquarium, Baltimore

We started with the dolphin show, and then walked through the many displays of sharks, rays, tropical fish, local seascapes, and the big Australian exhibit. We ended with the remarkable jelly fish room. It's a fantastic aquarium.

Miriam's second favorite animal is frogs, so they are well represented. Sharks are her seventeenth favorite, but they aren't easy to photograph.

White House Christmas

This morning we went to an exhibit of the famous Terra Cotta Warriors from the 2200-year-old tomb of the Chinese Emperor, as I illustrated here. Then we walked to the White House to see the Christmas tree, the giant menorah for Hanukkah, and the other Christmas displays. Around the tree are many little villages with lots of toy trains. A huge bonfire burns in a deep pit, and there's a small building housing Santa's workshop.


As we stood in line, we saw Santa's Naughty-Nice-O-Meter, and lots of toys being built and packed up for Santa's sleigh. Finally, we arrived at Santa's seat. First Miriam and alice met one of the elves, and then they talked to Santa and told him they wanted lots of books.

New Tea Set

Here in my china cabinet is the magnificent and tiny tea set that Carol made me! The cups are only around an inch high.

"Armageddon" by Max Hastings

Armageddon is the horrifying story of the last months of World War II. In fact, this book leaves me unable to say anything. I learned too much about the unmitigated suffering of innocent people, especially children, and the corruption of so many who could have been good. See my food blog for a few thoughts on the unimaginable mass starvation that the book described.

My New Bike

Here is my wonderful Hanukkah present. Note: I tested it briefly without a helmet but when I took a ride, I wore mine. It rides beautifully. What luck that we have a brief respite from the deep cold we've been having.

Hanukkah Song

Happy Hanukkah!

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout's book Olive Kitteridge is irresistible. I really couldn't put it down, and that doesn't happen to me very often. A friend loaned it to me yesterday morning, and I've finished reading it.

Olive Kitteridge is a set of nearly independent stories about the people of a town in Maine. Sometimes the story is about Olive, but in some stories there's barely a single glimpse of her -- she appears at a party or a concert, and the character who is central to that story thinks about his or her reaction to Olive. So it's a composite picture of Olive from many points of view. Her students from her career as a junior-high school math teacher, other teachers and colleagues, people with stores in town, her son Christopher, her husband Henry, women that Henry is attracted to (but never is unfaithful with), men that she's attracted to (but never is unfaithful with) -- all see her, but never quite know what's going on to make her act as she does.

Olive is not likeable, but she's horrifyingly clear-sighted. What often makes her unlikeable or odd or gruff or moody is that she sees everything so clearly, and offends people by her reactions or by what she says. Some stories take place when she's younger, but most of the stories are about her late 60s and early 70s, when she's fat, unhappy with herself, and fully clear that everyone gets sick and dies in a depressing and often undignified way. She has no patience for euphemism or comfort on this topic, and is brusque if people treat her as a old woman or try to gloss over what she can't help seeing.

Vivid events and characters make the stories individually very readable and enjoyable. Every other story is inside the mind of a different character, alternating with stories of Olive herself. Each story, whatever its center, advances your understanding of Olive and how she seems to people. In contrast, another novel I read recently, Brooklyn, is 100% inside the mind of the main character, but is named Brooklyn because that's what it's really about, while this one is not about the town where events occur, but about a character who sometimes only pops up for a moment.

The most amazing story in the book (which my friend who loaned me the book also singled out) is about Olive's son's wedding. Olive can't stand the woman her son has chosen, but tries to act like a normal mother of the groom. However, she overhears people making snide remarks about the flower-patterned dress she made for the wedding. She snaps, and acts up -- among other things, she steals one shoe and a bra from the bride's closet. We follow her thought process as she goes through with her bizarre action, hiding the objects in her large purse under a piece of blueberry cake that she plans to enjoy alone -- she doesn't want to eat with all the other guests. I can't quite capture the unique quality of writing that makes this such a good story.

Mona Lisa at work

From Reuters:

Paris's top museums shut on Wednesday and the Mona Lisa kept her fans waiting as staff went on strike, protesting against cost cuts that they see as a threat to priceless art.

I'm just wondering -- is Mona Lisa a union member?

More on Typewriters

From the Guardian online, another article about Cormac McCarthy's typewriter and the views of other authors who used these obsolete machines. Don DeLillo and Frederick Forsyth are the lead examples of typewriter users who insist that typing -- nothing electronic -- must be part of their creative process. Hemingway, we learn, "liked to bash away at a 1940s Royal between bouts of drinking, fighting and chasing women and bulls." And Jack Kerouac typed 100-plus words a minute, which prompted Capote to say: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Typewriters

I always hated typewriters. I could never type a whole sentence without an error. I love word processing software. I loved more primitive mark-up languages at first introduction -- even when the editing was line-oriented and so primitive you can no longer imagine it.

Today, for no apparent reason, I saw four articles with references to typewriters:

• I read about the last typewriter repair man in Ann Arbor. He spends most of his time doing something else. Bigger offices still have a typewriter here or there for filling out forms, but they use them so little that there's not much work to be done on them. Parts are scarce.
  
• In the New York Times, I read about an auction of writer Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti manual typewriter which came from a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963. He wrote: "I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years." Proceeds will go to the Santa Fe Institute.
• I read that Mark Twain was the first writer ever to submit a typewritten manuscript. But I forgot where I read that.
• And I read that some one has done the famous experiment of seeing whether monkeys will type out the works of Shakespeare. "After one month - admittedly not an 'infinite' amount of time - the monkeys had partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter 's.'" So they probably would never have made it to Romeo and Juliet.
  

Penguins at the Aviary

At the Aviary in Pittsburgh we met Preston the Penguin, and spent around an hour with him. We also toured the kitchen: highlights, a frozen rat and the live insect bins. Many of the birds are in fact vegetarian, though, and eat veggie pellets, chopped kale, or spaghetti. Then there are bald eagles and sea eagles. Rats. Eleven African penguins including Preston live in a beautiful enclosure with all the penguin amenities. We had a wonderful time.

Building Blocks

Thanksgiving Walk

Grandma goes over the river and thru the woods

... from Ann Arbor to Pittsburgh.

An Embarrassed Smile? What!

"Before its airy makeover with the glass pyramid, the Louvre felt like the worst kind of museum–punishingly vast, the walls of its interminable corridors lined with dukes with beards like spades and spoilt, mean-mouthed women in poodle wigs. After some hours, footsore and deafened by culture, we got to the “Mona Lisa”. I remember thinking how small she was. And how podgy. The famous smile hinted at embarrassment that all these people would bother coming so far to see her, when really she was nothing special."

For the complete article, actually about the Rodin Museum not about the Louvre, see RODIN'S SONNETS IN STONE by Allison Pearson. I have mixed feelings about the Rodin museum as we lived quite near it for a year and took so many visitors there that I was maxed out on Rodin.

What does Mona Lisa need?

According to a recent New York Times "Consumed" column, Mona Lisa needs augmented reality --

One assessment of augmented-reality possibilities suggested a future in which you might point a smartphone at the “Mona Lisa” and access a documentary about Leonardo da Vinci. And maybe someday it will seem normal to look at a Burger King location through a portable screen and see Yelp ratings, diners’ tweets and possibly a character from “Avatar” enjoying a $1 Whopper Jr. Perhaps this will seem advantageous. Why just look at a restaurant, a colleague or the “Mona Lisa,” when you can you can “augment” them all?

California Fiction Part 2

Double Indemnity covers the same themes as The Postman Always Rings Twice (which I wrote about earlier today in Back to California Fiction). James M. Cain's narrator-murderer in this one is entirely in control of his choices, though he misjudges his incredibly cold-blooded accomplice. It's a chilling story: the accomplice is an unforgettably awful woman -- beyond description. Similar brief passages of California local color and legal details make the two stories a bit repetitive -- I wish I hadn't read both of them on the same day.

I'd also always heard of the movie Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. I wonder if its director Billy Wilder preserved the timeless quality of the story, which like the other seems less dated than I'd expect.

Back to California Fiction

I had never read anything by James M. Cain before today. The Postman Always Rings Twice is short and suspenseful -- a good read, and not at all dated. I enjoyed the setting in southern California, with just enough local color from the 1930s.

The narrator, Frank Chambers, is an unlikeable, hard-boiled drifter and petty criminal who unthinkingly becomes a cold-blooded murderer. In some ways the narrator makes me think of Camus' The Stranger -- he just doesn't quite know how all these things happen to him, and exists from minute to minute. Chambers constantly drifts downward, manipulated by a woman named Cora -- I see her as very individualized example of a stereotyped temptress. Camus didn't portray any character like Cora.

In the novel, ethnic prejudice against Cora's husband Nick -- a likeable, successful Greek cafe owner -- is a heavy theme. At the very beginning, she asserted her plain-white-American identity: a girl from Iowa, married to a Greek. All she wanted was a secure life, and didn't mind being the cook in Nick's diner kitchen, but she had nothing but hatred and disgust for Nick himself. Cain's first-person narrative is so convincing that you almost (only almost) wish Frank and Cora well with their despicable scheme to get possession of her husband's cafe, car, and money. And the several reversals at the end (which I won't spoil) make it all the better reading.

I just looked up the two films made from this book, which I've heard of but never seen. In 1946, Lana Turner played "Cora Smith" whose husband was "Nick Smith" -- in other words, the film removed the ethnic identity issue. The 1981 remake starred Jack Nicholson as the drifter, Frank Chambers, and Jessica Lange as Cora Papadakis. My guess is that the first film would have become much more dated than the book. Maybe I'll watch the films some time. I definitely want to read another of Cain's stories from the collection I have checked out of the library.

Also see Road Food, 1934 on my food blog for another view of the story.

Jewish Pirates?

Remember the jokes about the world's shortest book? When I saw Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean on the Jewish Book Festival table, I thought it was impossible to have a whole book on the subject. And in fact, the author Edward Kritzler would have had a very short book indeed if he hadn't padded his narrative with Jewish pirates from other places (like North Africa), non-Jewish pirates (like Henry Morgan) and Jews from all over the Sephardic world.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a frustrating mish-mash of historical information. True, its reason for jumping around is that the few actual Jewish pirates had a jumpy background. The real ones, who went after Spanish treasure ships and did other privateering jobs, were connected to Jews in Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, New Amsterdam (that first Jewish colony), England, and many Caribbean islands. If you didn't know a thing about that era, you might find it interesting -- or frustratingly hard to follow. I found it mainly annoying. There just weren't enough real pirates. AAAR.