"Memory, that winged host that flew above me" - Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is my favorite book. Ever since it was on my summer reading list senior year of high school, I've re-read it about once a year. On every return visit I've changed a little, and so I notice or enjoy new things. The notes my 17 year old self made feverishly in colored pencil seem a little silly today.

I did put BR aside during my year in St. Louis, however. Around this time last year, I raced to see the new film adaptation at the Chase Park Plaza theater. The trip had an air of nostalgic melancholy, like realizing you and an old friend no longer have much in common. I realized I was coming to say goodbye. My days of Oxford Arcadian fantasies were over.

But it wasn't really goodbye, apparently. Like the Flyte family in Charles' life, whole sections of the book keep popping into my mind now that I spend my days at a "museum and country estate."Maybe my old friend and I have found a new way to connect.

"Is the dome by Inigo Jones too? It looks later."
"Oh Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it's pretty?"
"It's the sort of thing I like to know."

On my first visit to Winterthur, I scoffed at its opulence and seemingly redundant acres of antique furniture. Now, as I'm learning to guide tourists through those Chippendale corridors, I'm also discovering the joy of knowing about style and connoisseurship. The other day, I did some exploring one my own and was genuinely wowed by the beauty of the Blackwell Parlor. The information binder in the corner was very helpful. Historical context is the sort of thing I like to know.

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing-room, adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fret-work, from the Pompeian parlor ... to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out over the terrace.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

I think I'm back in one of my detective novel phases. Brother Cadfael, McGurk, and Sherlock Holmes were my good buddies in middle school. Lately, I've rediscovered the Sister Mary Helen mysteries by Sister Carol Anne O'Marie.

These breezy stories feature a semi-retired San Francisco nun with a knack for assisting two Irish homicide cops in their investigations. Re-reading them after a year with the Daughters, I'm amazed at how much I can recognize in Sister Mary Helen's lifestyle. I also suspect that royalties from the novels fund the author's real work at a drop-inn center for homeless women. Sister Carol Anne writes about the world she knows, and makes you feel like you live there. Fun fact: she is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who were founded in - you guessed it - St. Louis.

While I was living in St. Louis, I got hooked on another set of female sleuth novels. Elaine Viets has penned two series about St. Louis detectives. Reporter Francesca Vierling and mystery-shopper single mom Josie Marcus are both no-nonsense girls from South St. Louis. You can bet that at some point in their novels, they will make a crack at residents of wealthy STL neighborhoods, and then go eat pork steak or fried ravioli. Theirs is the midwest where my parents grew up - you chat with your neighbors on their well-manicured rectangular lawns, and the kids all walk past mom-and-pop businesses on their way to school. It's a world I don't inhabit, but appreciate. Through her funny writing and her detective's investigations, Viets takes readers on a tour of STL zip codes and landmarks. Some of the information can sound dated, but overall it's a fun picture of a great city.

Scenes from my 'hood

You know what I don't miss about the DC suburbs? Vinyl siding. None of the houses here have it. Instead, every little house is made of brick, stone, and/or stucco. Their sturdy coziness never gets old as I travel around the neighborhood.



You know what else never gets old? Going to my library for a tote full of books. It's more modern-looking than most buildings near my house, and its insides are eclectic and intriguing. The books aren't the only cool part, the people there are fascinating. There's the tall man with the knit rasta hat who always works the front desk. There are moms with toddlers, people with backpacks napping in chairs, college kids thumbing the DVD cards. And then there are the Orthodox Jewish guys, who fascinate me. They lope along like any guy in his twenties, calling friends on their cells. The only difference is the yarmulkes on their head and the tallis fringe peeking from their fleece jackets. I've always felt like I appreciated my Jewish ancestry, but I've never lived in a town where you can see people walking to synagogue every Saturday afternoon.

I'm not ADD, but my library card is. I always feel like I'll be uncultured or bored if all my books are the same. Here's what I got this time:

Doc In the Box and Accessory to Murder - two of the Elaine Viets mystery novels I am hooked on
The Covenant - a sappy novel in which our Amish heroine battles intrigue. American sects and cults ahoy!
One Hundred Years of Solitude - One of those "books everyone should read" I hear it's about history and memory, which is a bonus
Stalin's Children - Three generations of Russian history. I should also get back in touch with the Eastern European history I used to obsess over.
The Flying Inn - I should also get acquainted with G. K. Chesterton, since he's one of those snarky Catholic authors people always quote.
Oscar Wilde's Short Stories - Once in a while, you need some British witticisms.
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean - How could I not read this book? The author even lives in Kingston, Jamaica.

Whether I will actually read all of these remains to be seen. I suppose if I really want to be a Renaissance woman, I should pick up some science fiction or math theory. That would definitely be thinking outside my usual box!

"Lady Madonna, children at your feet, wonder how you manage to make ends meet." ~ The Beatles

Inadequate nutrition for poor people is always a matter of concern, but it's interesting to see how poverty diets have evolved over time. I'm currently reading Sweetness and Power, in which a anthropologist traces the history of sugar consumption and trade. I skimmed over the complicated mechanics of sugar cane processing, but the social history aspects are pretty cool. How did sugar evolve from the luxury of kings into the obesity-causing bane of school children?

Apparently in the Middle Ages sugar was considered a spice to be liberally sprinkled over meats or mixed into wine. It was also a status-symbol. Sumptuous feasts displayed elaborate sugar figurines or models.
Everything changed with colonization and industrialization. Thanks to the Caribbean, rum and sugar were available in large quantities. At the same time, temperance advocates promoted stimulants tea, coffee, and hot chocolate as alternatives to booze.

Here's where poverty comes in. For a family struggling to put food on the table, hot tea made bread and butter feel more like a meal. It didn't hurt that sugar in the tea provided a few extra calories. I was especially intrigued by the observation that poor Englishmen eventually deserted nutritious oatmeal for bread. Once moms began working in factories outside the home, store-bought bread was a lot easier to serve than all-day-simmering porridge. Jam on bread was also a cheap, tasty, sugary alternative to butter. That's right, fast food was already an issue for busy families in the 1840's. Even then, people were relying on caffeine and sugar to get them through the day.

Two Literary Ladies

Yesterday I ran across an article in the religious journal First Things about the troubling character of Susan Pevensie in the Narnia books. At first, she is a rather sympathetic character. I always identified with her role as the sensible older sister. Her final fate, though, exiled from Narnia for her teenage silliness, always leaves a bad taste in reader's mouths. Her 180-switch in personality and values seems so abrupt and unfair, especially since it's written as a final footnote we never saw coming.
Matthew Alderman's article is unlikely to sway The Golden Compass author Phillip Pullman's opinion that "the author of The Four Loves was an underdeveloped asexual freak bent on keeping his readers in a kiddie time-warp sealed away from the great god Sex."Still, Alderman does present some insight into the dangers of frivolity such as Susan's.
Susan is set to become not a real adult, but a perpetual teenager locked into “the silliest time of one’s life.” She is a child’s caricature of adulthood. “I wish she would grow up!” cries Polly.

"The problem is not that Su’s world was, say, the world of Gidget, but that it could become what Sex and the City looks like in the unflattering light of reality. A never-ending quest for party invitations looks awfully flimsy when stacked up against the deeds of Narnia’s own strong-willed women—like Susan herself, once."

If I were Aslan, I probably wouldn't want Carrie Bradshaw interfering with my magical medieval king land either. You know her shoes wouldn't hold up on a mountain hike or horseback ride.

Speaking of mountains, I just finished reading the story of another young woman who travels to a distant land. Catherine Marshall's Christy is a somewhat fictionalized account of her mother's time teaching poor children in Appalachia. The book is often marketed as an Evangelical tale of inspiration, but it's also the story of one frivolous girl's journey into adulthood. When she arrives in Cutter Gap, TN, Christy must put aside cute shoes and tea parties to face the harsh realities of rural poverty. She learns to love her students; they can be smelly and unruly, but they are also smart, earnest, and in need of love. Fueds, hunger, and disease present real physical challenges, but there are spiritual issues to grapple with as well. As she works in Cutter Gap, Christy deals with questions about theology, morality, sexuality, and friendship.

Of course, my volunteer life is a lot cushier than a remote mountian community, but much of Christy's experience resonated with me. Like her, I have wondered where to draw the line between faith sharing and judgemental preaching. I am discovering that my adult life will not exactly mirror that of my parents. Every day I realize that I have more to learn about the people I serve, and that there are more ways I should open my heart to them. Service is a continual lesson in humility - the more you do it, the more you realize you can't do it without God's help.

On Love and Learning

It's amazing how babies grow constantly in an almost invisible way. Day to day their changes are very subtle. Then someone sees them after week or month and says "Wow, you've gotten so big!" As a child, I hated when adults told me how much I had grown. Now I say it to NFNF clients and my co-workers children all the time! (I must be getting old.) Just yesterday I was holding a Community Outreach Mom's two-month old, and was excited to see that the little girl could now practice lifting her head off my shoulder.

I've been noticing gradual changes in myself, too. Sometimes it's things I had hoped would happen this year - living on a limited budget and interacting with the poor daily no longer intimidate me. Other times I've changed in ways I never expected.

Just this week I discovered that I no longer revere Evelyn Waugh's novels as I once did. (Nerd alert!) I was introduced to his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited when I was 18 and I've re-read it every year since then.

That same senior year of high school I also dove into Waugh's shorter novella The Loved One. It's a satire of the Hollywood funeral industry, revolving around the love triangle of cosmetician Aimee Thanatougenous, mortician Dr. Joyboy, and British poet Dennis Barlow. Parts are very funny and others are horrifying. Being a romantic high schooler, I was most upset by the fact that there was not a "true love" relationship I could root for. I ended the volume confused, but certain there was some deeper meaning I just couldn't figure out. I never read the book again, testing Waugh's other, more famous works instead.

I finally had the idea to give The Loved One another try after watching this year's Oscars. It's much funnier when you aren't 18. I've realized since high school that satire usually involves death or some such calamity, so you really shouldn't get attatched to the characters or project yourself onto them. And the The Loved One is excellent satire, colorful and clever and dreadful.

Were I still an idealistic 18 year-old, I would write a paper for English class about Waugh uses his literary skill to criticize the American Culture of Death. Ta da! Instant Catholic literary hero. Today, though, I would say that Waugh takes his skill too far, mocking pretty much everyone who isn't an old-fashioned curmudgeon like himself. The novella could really be shorter, and it's dismal conclusion strikes me as one big "Screw You!" to humanity, especially the American part.
There's no love for anyone in the writing, which makes Waugh's cranky voice sound like a clanging cymbal.

Books = Love, Part II

I've discovered that all I need to feel at home in a new place is a library card on my keychain. Before I left Williamsburg, I was sad to break my ties with Swem and the Williamsburg Regional. Both have given me so many quality books, DVDs, and CDs. Whether I got around to examining everything I checked out is another story. Lucky for me, U City has a public library a short drive from my house.

It's a fairly decent local joint -their movies and music rival the WRL. I had to laugh when I saw the limits on CD checkouts - 6 for pop, rock, and comedy, but there's no limit on the opera and classical. They should just waive the opera late fines while they are at it. U City's history and biography sections are pretty good, and the periodical shelves hold titles I have never heard of. Overall, it has a very calming, orderly atmosphere with its hushed movements, skylit staircase, and overall booksy smell.

I've been to the UCity library twice, both times coming away with a tote bag bursting with 20lbs of books. (I weighed.) They're all stowed away on a shelf in my closet, reminding me to expand my mind during my Metrolink commute. Some, like bios of Mother Teresa and Chris Farley, have been worthwhile. Others have been something of a disappointment, like the misleadingly titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. It's not a thorough study of racism and anti-Catholicism in Indiana. Instead, its a love-fest of ND mythology and only 2 chapters about the actual event inspiring the title. Apparently in the early 1900's the Klan staged a raid on the campus, and fisticuffs ensued.

I'm also slightly ashamed to admit that I have succumbed to a pop-culture phenomenon. Last night Kelly loaned me her copy of the first Twilight book, and I was up until 2am. Stories of romance with emo vampires are apparently literary crack cocaine. She needs to get home from her friend's house so I can get volume 2.

Some of my favorite snarky blogs (The Onion, etc) have mocked the teen lit series, and I used to mock it myself. I'll admit Bella's character is awfully whiny. But overall, Edward's caring protection and quest for noble self-control over his vampire nature have won my heart.
*Geek alert* If you want to get historical, teenage girls squealing over tales of death and the supernatural are nothing new. See: gothic novels by Mrs. Radcliffe See also: Jane Austen's brilliant satire of them in Northanger Abbey. Edgar Allen Poe would have been all over this vampire love stuff.

Books = Love, Part 1

Thomas Jefferson famously said, "I cannot live without books." I'm beginning to realize how much that is true for my life, as well. Books have a way of finding me and working their way into my life, even in unexpected ways. For instance, I found a fellow bibliophile at the recent Art Festival.

By the way, St. Louis loves its festivals. Why not? All the ones I have attended so far feature free admission, the great outdoors, and moderately-priced food and beverages. (Thank you, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church for that weird yet tasty blue Ouzo slushie.) There is also the opportunity to see things a little out of the ordinary, whether that be international folk dancing, wild mandolin solos, or jewelry fashioned from hardware store merchandise.

Nearby Clayton's Art Festival was no exception, spanning several blocks and dozens of vendor tents. I was glad almost all the prices were in the triple digits, so I could ooh and ahh without any impulse to buy. The photographers had some lovely stuff and gave me cool ideas. The swirly necklaces made out of screws and nails were fascinating. There were even digeridoos.

But the best booth by far displayed the used-book/oil painting stylings of a young man whose name I sadly cannot remember. He takes old novels, textbooks, and hymnbooks, which are lovely in their own right, and then adds images from his road trips around the country. I had never thought of cutting a hole in a book for a frame, but now I want to try it. Jessica and I especially loved the tiny, delicate paintings superimposed over pages. For example, a snowy truck stop was layered atop the sheet music for a winter madrigal.

We were the only people in the booth, and spent so long admiring things that we just had to compliment the artist, who shyly lurked in the corner. When we told him how much we loved his work, he was truly touched. I asked about his book collecting habit, and his eyes lit up like someone who knows what their passion is. Joe (I can remember his first name at least), turned out to be quite a kindred spirit. Words, pages, and the American landscape inspire him. An amateur historian, he loves learning about how the places his visits developed.

His favorite piece, and ours, was a large collage that layered aspects of American history. Hymnal pages/History for Catholic schools/highway maps/factories/industrial development/gasoline can? Glorious. It warmed my heart and stirred my brain. It was so good to meet someone else who mulls over the swirling complexity of memory, sightseeing, and past glories. It also gave me hope to see I am not the only one who likes to blend verbal and visual inspiration. History doesn't fit in a box or on a page, and it overlaps art, architecture, medicine, science..........