National Day of Prayer

I was going to get all shirty about the National Day of Prayer (as I seem to do each year now that I know about it) and various flaps surrounding it, but then this morning I was reminded that May 8th is the feast of the English mystic Julian of Norwich who said "All things will be well," and that just calmed me right down. This flappiness ain't even a molecule of a hazelnut and not worth getting my knickers in a twist.

And then I read President Obama's proclamation for the National Day of Prayer, which is quite lovely and generous of spirit, in my opinion, and I thought that rather than rant, I would do what the president suggests:

Let us remember in our thoughts and prayers those suffering from natural disasters in Haiti, Chile, and elsewhere, and the people from those countries and from around the world who have worked tirelessly and selflessly to render aid. Let us pray for the families of the West Virginia miners, and the people of Poland who so recently and unexpectedly lost many of their beloved leaders. Let us pray for the safety and success of those who have left home to serve in our Armed Forces, putting their lives at risk in order to make the world a safer place. As we remember them, let us not forget their families and the substantial sacrifices that they make every day. Let us remember the unsung heroes who struggle to build their communities, raise their families, and help their neighbors, for they are the wellspring of our greatness. Finally, let us remember in our thoughts and prayers those people everywhere who join us in the aspiration for a world that is just, peaceful, free, and respectful of the dignity of every human being.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 6, 2010, as a National Day of Prayer. I call upon the citizens of our Nation to pray, or otherwise give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I invite all people of faith to join me in asking for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection as we meet the challenges before us.

Amen to that.

Review: From Away

A couple of weeks ago, someone I follow on Twitter was asking for book recommendations. I went to my go-to title: The Full Catastrophe by David Carkeet.

I have no idea why I picked it off the shelf of the Village Green bookstore in Rochester lo these many, many years ago, but I have never regretted it, and have read it many times since. I've also read Carkeet's other novels: Double Negative, a mystery set before The Full Catastrophe with his linguist hero, Jeremy Cook; The Error of our Ways, a follow-up with Jeremy that I didn't like as well; I Been There Before, a fantastical novel about the miraculous return of Mark Twain with Halley's Comet; and The Greatest Slump of All Time, which I confess I don't remember.

All this to say that when I recommended The Full Catastrophe, I asked myself, so what has ol' David Carkeet been up to? And what do you know: a new book of his had just been published in March 2010. That would be From Away which I used as my teaser yesterday.

A new book by David Carkeet! What joy was mine! The first problem was finding it. The library didn't have it in the system, so I broke down while traveling and bought it. I went to the novel section; they said it was in new mysteries. I went to new mysteries; it was in new novels. I snatched up the only copy they had and scurried away with it.

It did not disappoint. Carkeet draws believably peculiar characters better than anyone I know. There's a particular kind of Carkeet character: very bright, but with limited and self-conscious social skills. His characters are always observing themselves, but they don't seem egomanical so much as ill-at-ease in the world without understanding why. I like reading about them and I root for them, but I tend to be glad not to know them personally.

The social inept in this case is named Dennis Braintree who writes for a model train magazine. As you might imagine, he doesn't do this...well, let's just say "normally." Instead, he tries to "enter the scene," asking modelers for the back stories of all the figures in the layouts. His boss complains, "These are little plastic people, Denny. Did you really ask him how long the switchman had been married?" That's the kind of obsessive strangeness we're dealing with.

After a car accident which opens the novel, Denny gets stuck in Montpelier, Vermont, becomes implicated in a murder, assumes the identity of a local named Homer, and bluffs his way through the novel, trying to figure out who done it. Sort of. It's not a typical mystery; Denny's efforts seem half-hearted at best. The pleasure in the book is watching this socially inept guy impersonate a laconic New Englander and wondering how long this can go on.

He's perfectly confident he can carry it off despite all evidence to the contrary. I loved this passage as he starts his impersonation:

Everything was falling into place. What was acting but an extended lie, and what better liar was there than Dennis Braintree? Only once had he been caught in a lie, a little over a year ago. He had been at the zoo, and a small bird had flown low right at his face and then veered away at the last minute. Denny's mouth had been open at the time because he was imitating the face a chimp had just made at him, and it occurred to him that the bird could easily have flown into his mouth. That thought became the account he delivered later, at a meeting of the church mission committee: "A bird flew into my mouth at the zoo." The ladies responded with a mix of surprise and disgust. They made faces, and one made spitting sounds to eject the bird. But afterward, privately, one of them said to him, "That didn't really happen, did it?" As an experiment, he said, "No, it didn't." She said, "You're involved in the church because it's a welcoming institution, correct?" Again he agreed. "There are limits," she said.

You keep waiting for him to hit the limits throughout the novel. Somehow he never quite does. He continues to blunder about awkwardly, always trying to "enter the scene," always as an outsider, always trying to get the back story, imagining what it would look like as a model train layout. He never quite gets it, but it's fun watching him fumble.

Teaser Tuesday: May 4

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I'm this close to finishing From Away by David Carkeet. Here's the teaser:

Two hours later, he was closer to finding Homer's password only in the sense that he had eliminated a few dozen of the infinite number of candidates. The light was starting to fade.

***

Previously on Teaser Tuesday: I finished Fool which was good but not my favorite Christopher Moore novel (that would be A Dirty Job). I got the sense that Fool was a book he felt obliged to finish but that he really didn't like what it required him to do: follow King Lear around. In the Epilogue, he talks about seeing upteen productions of King Lear and wanting to push the guy off a cliff. Given that the fool in Lear is supposed to be one of Lear's only faithful companions, the fool in Fool can't seem to stand spending any time with him. That was a bit of a problem.

I found myself wishing that Moore hadn't followed his editor's advice (he'd asked this editor if he should write about a generic fool or the fool in Lear, and the editor had said Lear, absolutely). I found myself wishing Moore had written a different book. Ah well.

Happy Star Wars Day

And May the Fourth be with you.

Canon John Vaughan-Jones

This obit, of a C of E cleric who served as a Padre in the Parachute Regiment in WWII, delights me for the names of the places where he served during his long life. 

Starting with his grandfather who was rector of Dagenham (his father was also a priest), Canon John Paschal Vaughan-Jones (born on Easter, don't you know), served in Laindon cum Basildon, St. Martin's, Chipping Ongar (later becoming Rural Dean of Ongar), and Little Bentley in Essex.

I'm sure one or the other of those is close to Dibley.

May his soul, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Book review: Happens Every Day

I heard a review of Happens Every Day on the radio a while back and had to get it strictly for prurient reasons as it is set in Oberlin, the town of my alma mater, and tells the true tale of an English professor leaving his wife for another English professor.   Even aside from the lovely gossipy nature of it (and revenge, as the book became a best-seller--take THAT Mr. Poetry Professor), it was well-written in a breezy and brutal sort of way.

I love Isabel Gillies' sense of humor through it all, and her insider/outsider description of academia.  Here she is describing getting a teaching job at a college:

It's a barbaric process that thousands of hardworking, way overly educated people slog through year after year, dearly hoping to get paid $43,000 at the University of Shagoog in North Who-knows-where Nevada.

Can any anonymous readers out there relate?

Boy does Gillies get the fishbowl nature of the small-town college.  I remember it well from my brief days in Gambier: how everyone knew what car you drove, whether you were at home or not; how even under the most trying of social circumstances, you had to find ways to stay on good terms with everyone.  It was painfully familiar.

At the same time, it's a strange book--or maybe it was just strange for me.  Partly because of the eerily familiar nature of the society, I suppose.  Partly because the (understandable) desperation of the author makes her seem strange.  Partly because though I knew from the outset of the book that her husband is leaving her, the author doesn't know it, no one in her circle really knows or believes it, until the very end and it made me wonder, too.  Partly because there is this salacious desire the book engenders to see this guy get his, and I suppose he does.  He's completely exposed as an utter jackass, and yet somehow that doesn't feel like enough.  Probably because what I really wanted is for none of this to happen in the first place.

I recommend it, but be warned, if you're like me,  it may make for a little squirminess and perhaps an unpleasant taste left in the mouth.  It's not exactly a book of revenge, but it has its revenge nonetheless.

Update: An anonymous commenter who is a friend of the husband in the case says not to presume that this is a fair and balanced account.  I think that is one of the "unpleasant taste" issues with the book: we don't get to hear the husband's side of things.  So take it for what it's worth: a well-written book from one party's side, for what that's worth.

In case you were wondering...

...I've been on an honest to goodness business trip. I don't do that very often, so maybe someone can explain this to me:

I had the complimentary tea instead.