Day 89 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. A not-so-random stranger--that is, a young man who is familiar to me, because he comes in the store often--is reading some Daniel Quinn. I'm pretty sure the book he chose this time was The Story of B, sort of a sequel to Ishmael, because I remember the snail cover and the subtitle, An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, but I might be mistaken, as I have been looking at the Daniel Quinn page at Amazon, and now all the covers are vaguely familiar.

Like all the people in my town! It's nice to live in a place long enough that all the people look familiar and not like strangers. Oddly, this happens when I return to Chicago for a visit, too. Everybody looks familiar, as do the houses, neighborhoods, and flowers in the median strips, and it's like I never left. Then, say, at the zoo, I will see somebody who looks super familiar, and it will turn out to be somebody from the small town I live in now.

I have not yet read Ishmael, borrowed from my dad because he is modeling a novel structure on it--that is, the kind of novel that is a way to present the author's philosophical ideas. I think it is OK to say that, as I think that is exactly what the both of them are doing, or want to do, and I think my dad is up front about that.

Me, I am 1) not a novelist, though 2) I have the usual novel-in-progress that many writers keep in a drawer/computer file, and 3) every time I look it over, I think, "Hey, I want to know what happens next!" which is 4) probably a good thing, and might mean I actually finish it someday, but 5) probably not, because 6) I no longer believe in linear time, and most people do, and 7) poetry uses a different part of the brain. 7 seems a good place to stop this paragraph.

But I have been musing on that novel as thinly-disguised-autobiography thing again. I hate that! I mean, it's OK, and I am always interested to learn the "where I got that novel" story behind a novel, from the novelist, but thinly disguising one's autobiography, especially when used to snipe at people, just annoys me and seems to lack imagination. Plus, it confuses people, especially aspiring writers, who then think that "Write what you know" just means write a story or novel that is thinly-disguised autobiography. It also confuses readers, some of whom think that every single novel ever written is actually real life with the names changed.

Tony keeps calling In Cold Blood a novel, and Truman Capote is surely a self-absorbed author who did that sniping kind of thing, but he openly sniped, in other works, and In Cold Blood is "a non-fiction novel," a new thing in journalism at the time, about things that really happened, in places and with names that are not fictionalized.

That this kind of thing exists, a hybrid form, surely led the way to the recent confusions involving "fictionalized memoirs," or whatever we should call them--fictions presented in the form of memoirs, because the sensationalism of real life...sells. Sigh.

That said, I notice that Salinger has a persistent dead brother in the background in his fictions, and John Irving, likewise, has motifs of loss and wrestling, and plot patterns, etc. that probably relate in some way 1) to his real life and 2) to bestseller status (repeat what sells), and both of them had to find a way to 1) make a living and 2) live with themselves (or not) while doing it.

I was even reminded at the recent discussion of The Scarlet Letter in Chicago that Nathaniel Hawthorne may have had a dalliance with a woman stikingly like Hester Prynne...which makes him, what, as measly and weak and eloquent and angelic and hypocritical as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale? But I can prefer to think that while feminist Margaret Fuller may indeed have been a model for Hester's character, there didn't have to be a dalliance for that to be so.

I can also prefer to believe, about "The Custom-House," the essay that precedes The Scarlet Letter, that Hawthorne really did find a folded-up fabric letter "A," and that this really was the inspiration for the novel! I can prefer to believe almost anything.

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Day 64 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Today I am tying up some loose ends, because if I don't, I might forget, trip over them, and fall over.

Tony is still reading In Cold Blood and is not very far into the book as life keeps him pretty busy. He is in fact on page 19, if we are to respect the evidence of the bookmark, a former grocery list.

The loose end I am tying up here is that, yes, he is reading it because he recently viewed the film Capote, not the film In Cold Blood, which he has never seen. I fear that Robert Blake, who played murderer Perry Smith in that film, is still a loose end, or a loose cannon. Life has creepy little ironies, in that Blake was tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, in real life, in still mysterious circumstances, and called "a miserable human being" by the district attorney. Blake certainly played Perry Smith as a miserable human being, one inspiring pity as well as revulsion, in In Cold Blood.

Speaking of bookmarks, Andrew Hudgins recommends their use in a funny little essay, "Dummies Book for Dummies," in the current issue of River Styx, the 35th anniversary issue. It also has "killer" poems in it by Loren Graham, Jennifer Perrine, and Mather Schneider, to list just the first 3 writers. Mather Schneider is my favorite taxi driver/poet ever, and I was in Tucson once, waiting for a van at the airport, half wishing he'd come along and I'd get to meet him, half scared to get into the cab, but that isn't what happened, anyway. Every poem I read by him punches me in the heart.

Speaking of Tony, I have acquired his birthday present! It is a signed copy of Outcasts United, about the Fugees soccer team and resettling refugees in a small southern community, by Warren St. John, briefly discussed twice before in this blog, as the Tale for Two Cities in this area, and also being read by several communities across the country in the "big read" and "one book, one city" programs going on to encourage reading, thinking, and conversation.

I got to hear the author speak on Monday night, and my blue ticket won me a door prize! I shouted "Yay!" (much to the author's delight) as I had returned my copy to the library but really, really wanted Tony to read it, as he is both a coach and a refugee! (Don't worry. Tony, though my husband, does not read my blog, not even, I trust, if I post it at Facebook, so his birthday present is still a surprise! It is hidden in my closet. I am telling you where I have put it, so you can tell me when I forget this little loose end....)

Now to the high-tops. My daughter has outgrown her everyday shoes (retired volleyball shoes, as she has a new pair of those, only for the gym floor), and needed some new ones: Converse All Stars, gray. I needed some new ones, too, as I walk a lot, and had worn holes through the soles of all my tennis shoes. She was horrified that I might choose the same style and color as hers, so I said, "What about red high-tops?" which I have always wanted.

There was eye-rolling and dismay. I was viewed lovingly as a miserable human being.

But now I have some.

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Day 59 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project.

Tim is reading volume one of a paperback edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. He is reading the stories because he liked the new (2009) Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, directed by Guy Ritchie. (This, I hear, is the edgy, cynical, martial arts version of Sherlock Holmes, and great fun.)

Tim read “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in high school and didn’t like it so much. At that age, he preferred Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But he is loving reading the Conan Doyle stories now, starting at the beginning with A Study in Scarlet, which first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a popular magazine, in 1887. Not too many copies of this very, very valuable issue remain. (Hmm, a mystery plot has popped into my head, involving the theft and attempted sale of one of the remaining copies!)

Tim was surprised to recall that we meet Holmes through Dr. Watson, who has been in Afghanistan during the British military occupation and returns “thin as a lath and brown as a nut.” What a coincidence, said Tim, to find Afghanistan in this novel as well as the news, but, indeed, history repeats itself, with variations. (Wait till Tim gets to the part about Mormons in Utah; that may seem surreal.)

Like Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle first published in the magazines. Some of the Sherlock Holmes stories are truly short stories, and some are full novels, published serially. “The Hound of the Baskervilles” was first published in The Strand Magazine, August, 1901 through April, 1902. The Strand went out of publication in 1950—the usual budgetary woes—but, delightfully, as of 1998, is back! How many of you mystery fans read it?

I’m struck by a sentence from A Study in Scarlet, related to its title: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

This is intriguing in several ways:

A working title for A Study in Scarlet was A Tangled Skein.

The skein is “colourless” without the thread of murder, as if life is boring without the threat of its loss at the hands of another, or the thrill of this happening to someone else…which may help account for the avid reading of murder mysteries if not, perhaps, the persistence of murder itself…which seems to have other sources & motives than relief from boredom or the need for a shudder while safe in an armchair.

The duty to unravel and expose the scarlet thread was Conan Doyle’s own passion, as he exposed injustice in some real life cases as well as his fictions. This, too--a longing for justice--helps explains why many people prefer murder mysteries, where the killer is usually caught and justice can prevail, to true crime, or the news, where the truth does not always come out, and injustice sometimes goes unpunished. Not all murder mysteries tie up neatly and let goodness prevail...but "cozy" ones do. (More on that another time.)

I return to “the colourless skein of life” and imagine as well an invisible strand of melancholy in Conan Doyle, saddened by the loss of various loved ones and interested in spiritualism as well as justice and detective fiction.

More on true crime, In Cold Blood (previous entry), and categories of murder mystery…to come.

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Day 58 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Tony, aged 58, is reading In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, for the first time.

He is reading it because he recently saw the film Capote. (I think that's the film he was referring to--maybe he saw the film In Cold Blood somewhere. I will follow up on this. In Cold Blood was filmed at the site of the murder, and I remember it as chilling indeed.)

Since today I have to be off and about early and for much of the day, I will pose a question, write a little here, and get back to you.

What I want to know is this: When did you first read In Cold Blood, if you've read it, and did it scare you?

And, of course, why did you read it? (And why and how did it scare you?)

All the accounts, and the film Capote, inform us that Truman Capote wrote the book because he saw a brief news account of a family murdered in their home in Kansas. Since there was no robbery and no clear motive, the article suggested "a pychopathic killer," a phrase attributed to the sheriff. Capote went to Holcomb, Kansas to learn more about the event, the town, the people there, and, of course, the murderers. The novelist Harper Lee went to Kansas with him and helped him communicate with the townspeople and gather the necessary information.

He wrote his famous "non-fiction novel," blending memory, imagination, and "participant observer" reporting. He and it became a sensation.

I was 10 when the film In Cold Blood came out, so I'm pretty sure I didn't see it then. I think I saw it several years later, on television.

But I remember reading the book in my teens when living with my family in a farmhouse out in the country, surrounded by corn and bean fields. I tried not to read it at night, instead taking it out in the yard, in the sunshine, the wind blowing, my dog nearby.

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