R.I.P., E. L. Konigsburg, 1930-2013

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.”

E. L. Konigsburg, beloved and multiply Newbery-winning author of the wry, quiet, and brainy children’s classics From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. FrankweilerThe View from Saturday; Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth; and many others, passed away at 83 on this past Sunday, April 21.

I can’t count how many times I’ve read From the Mixed-Up Files…, thrilled to the furtive elegance of Claudia and Jamie’s runaway plot, and dreamed about harvesting coins from the Met’s fountains and sleeping in its brocaded beds alongside them. There’s so much to love about Konigsburg’s portraits of watchful, thoughtful, growing kids. With concise wit, she captures their probing intelligence; their capacity for nurturing odd thoughts in secrecy; their pride; and, both humorously and sympathetically, their disaffection. Her affection towards them isn’t so much the fond downward gaze of an adult, but the admiring, good-humored glance of one comrade at another. Thank you, E. L. Konigsburg.

Also, from her obituaries I’ve learned that she was a woman in the sciences (chemistry, specifically) long before it was widely accepted. I feel proud to be following her, and women like her. I would have loved to be able to talk with her about science and writing.

Obituaries:

And see Wikipedia for a full list of her works.

 

– E

“Nashvillians woke up one morning and found that we no longer had a bookstore”

…and Ann Patchett’s “secret was that [she] did not much miss those mall-size Gargantuas.” So she set out, more or less on impulse, to recreate the kind of bookstore experience that she did miss: a cozy space with carefully curated shelves and employees who double as a personal recommendation system. Partnered with Karen Hayes, a former Random House sales rep, Patchett set out to open Nashville’s newest independent bookstore, despite numerous warnings (and her own fears) that “the bookstore is dead.”

Her article in The Atlantic, recounting her experience of the precipitous process, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Highlights: her eager gleaning of bookstore know-how during the signing tour that coincided with Parnassus Books’ incubation period; and the narrative she began to craft, with increasing conviction, during interviews: that the moment of the small independent bookstore is now.

And whether or not Parnassus’ success is replicable, it’s still vicariously thrilling to read about Patchett’s realization of her ability to accomplish every reader’s ultimate social joy: “I could talk strangers into reading books that I love.”

Go to:

Ann Patchett: bio and works reviewed
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett (2001): review by Emera

Bookstores of Boston/Cambridge: Pandemonium Books

4 Pleasant St., Cambridge, Massachusetts (a few blocks away from the Central T stop)

 

(Photo taken during the first of the unrelenting series of snowstorms that hit early in 2011.)

Here’s quick but much overdue tribute to one of my most frequent bookish haunts in Cambridge. Pandemonium is a compact sff and gaming store with a very active schedule of author readings and signings (I’ve gotten to see Cat Valente read there twice, and Caitlín Kiernan once), and a broad representation of genre periodicals; new and used books; comics; and geek paraphernalia like calendars, artbooks, prints, and, obviously, gaming materials. Sadly, they did have to cut back severely on their magazine stock this past summer due to declining sales, and now stock only about half a dozen titles.

As Boston/Cambridge genre bookstores go, Seek Books is significantly more historically exhaustive, offering more in the way of rareties and out-of-print titles; Pandemonium is more up-to-date.

In-town customers may also enjoy their occasional special events, like the yearly holiday Geekfaire, where vendors offer sff-themed goods – Doctor Who scarves and the like.

Out-of-town browsers might like to investigate new titles via their nicely curated online catalogue, which can be searched by handy categories including awards won, character traits, plot elements, and writing style.

 

– E

“Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter”

Marina Warner writes with beautiful force and exuberance about Angela Carter’s fairy tales, sensuality, ethics of the erotic, and more, here in the Paris Review.

A particularly breathtaking passage, arising from a remark on the origin of one of the stories in The Bloody Chamber as a radio play:

‘Very few writers use the imperative as she does—conspiratorially. Carter wanted to practise the atavistic lure, the atavistic power, of voices in the dark. “The writer who gives the words to those voices,” she wrote, “retains some of the authority of the most antique tellers of tales.”

The voice isn’t on its own, ringing in a hollow space. Open any page and a full score rises from its word-notes, of winds howling, teardrops falling, diamond earrings tinkling, snapping teeth, sneezing, and wheezing. Storytelling for Angela Carter was an island full of noises and sweet airs, and like Caliban, who heard a thousand twangling instruments hum about his ears, she was tuned to an ethereal universe packed with sensations, to which she was alive with every organ. Acoustics are not the only means, however, that she draws on to convey the lucid dreams she creates in her action. Her imagination is spatial, an architect’s axonometric vision, as she moves us through palaces and castles, forests and tundras, dungeons and attics, tracking with us down pathways towards her various sealed depositories of secrets, those bloody chambers. What reader does not explore with her these passages and woodland tracks? Who does not feel the Beast’s dark carriage like a hearse rumbling towards his eerily uninhabited domain? And who does not sense, through her powerful evocations, the pricking of thorns, the jaw-cracking stringiness of granny, the jangling of bed springs, the licking of a big cat’s tongue, the soft luxurious furs and velvets and skin, and the piercing contrasts with ice, glass, metal?’

Warner’s essay is from the new Folio edition of The Bloody Chamber. (Folio’s gorgeously illustrated editions might be my new crack, by the way. I’m particularly hankering after the Jillian-Tamaki-illustrated Irish Myths and Legends.)

– E

The worst sentence I have seen

– in recent memory, courtesy who else but H. P. Lovecraft:

“And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.”

from “The Lurking Fear”

 

Don’t you just HATE it when those giant bat-winged gryphons look on your transcosmic gulfs?

(Also, the semi-colon is [sic]. Lovecraft abuses them as if he were being paid by the punctuation error rather than the word.)

I’m reading a fat paperback collection of Lovecraft right now, to get in the Halloween spirit, and thinking of making a drinking game. Drink for every “demoniac,” every “unutterable,” every “hideousness,” every “unutterable cacodaemoniacal hideousness”…

– E

“Recovering Lolita”

Recovering Lolita (via design blog Imprint) is one of the most visually/literarily fascinating and provoking posts I’ve seen this year.

Several years ago, blogger John Bertram held a contest inviting designers to create new covers for Lolita, citing a history of coy misrepresentation of Nabokov’s novel. In Bertram’s words, “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core.” Yet as Imprint points out, “[Lolita is] chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years.”

Bertram was not that much more satisfied with the results of the competition, and invited 60 new designers (most of them women) to contribute images, accompanied by essays by both designers and Nabokov scholars, for a book entitled Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl. The book will come out next spring; in the blog post you can check out a number of the images submitted to the contest, as well as a brief interview with Bertram, in which he touches on the ethical considerations that accompany creating a cover for Lolita (or even simply enjoying it as a novel), and the way that book covers can, indeed, change our perception of a book and its meaning.

Some of the images in the post are visually pleasing but entirely noncommittal from a thematic standpoint (e.g. Kelly Blair’s); I think the best combine cool wit with a deep sense of the ominous and invasive, i.e. Jamie Keenan’s:

 

– E

Aspirational reading

From Carl Sagan’s notes as an undergraduate: have a look at his list of planned “Outside Readings” for the “Autumn Quarter, 1954.” It’s an impressive sampling of scientific and Western thought; there’s Hubble, Oppenheimer, the Bible, André Gide – and also, of course, a science fiction anthology from Ballantine’s Star line. If I’m looking at the right one, it included short novels by Theodore Sturgeon, Lester Del Rey, and Jessamyn West.

– E

A dispatch from SDCC

What Neil Gaiman has been working on for the past 18 months.

If you’d like to cut to the chase: it’s a Sandman prequel, with art by DC artist JH Williams, explaining from what travails Morpheus was returning when he was captured by Roderick Burgess at the very beginning of the series. “This has been an incredibly long time coming. It was one of the few stories that actually felt, when I finished Sandman, like I had failed because I had not told this story.”

See Williams’ first piece of promotional art – which I quite enjoy, it’s a weird slick space-agey Art Deco-ish Klimt-y portrait of Dream – for the comic here! I have mixed feelings about prequels generally (when I saw that there were Watchmen prequels coming out, I… … …), but they’re shaded positive here since this is a story that’s always been a part of the Sandman universe; it just hadn’t yet been shared.

– E

 

Go to:

Neil Gaiman: bio and works reviewed