Speaking of Legends of Ancient Greece

Ray Harryhausen died yesterday, May 7, 2013, at the age of 92.

Ray Harryhausen was the best known stop-motion special effects expert who worked in film from the mid-1930s to the early 2000s, before computer graphics, and some would say better than computer graphics. Some of Harryhausen's most famous movies included legends of Ancient Greece such as the original "Clash of the Titans" (1981) and "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963).

Saturday, May 4, 2013, 2 PM at the San Leandro Main Library

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

At the end of the book, Michael Ondaatje states that The Cat's Table, although written in the form of an autobiography, is not autobiographical, but glancing at a brief biography from Michael Ondaatje's page on the website of the Postcolonial Studies Department at Emory University shows some parallels in the life events between the fictional Michael and the real one.

Michael Ondaatje was born on September 12, 1943 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The son of Mervyn Ondaatje, a tea and rubber plantation superintendent and Doris Gratiaen, a part-time dancer inspired by Isadora Duncan. As a result of his father’s alcoholism, Ondaatje’s parents eventually separated in 1954 and he moved to England with his mother.

Ondaatje was educated initially at St. Thomas College in Colombo, Ceylon. After moving with his mother to England, he continued his education at Dulwich College in London. Between 1962-64, Ondaatje attended Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. He then went on to obtain his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1965, and his M.A. at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, in 1967. Ondaatje began his teaching career at the University of Western Ontario, London between 1967-71. Today he is a member of the Department of English at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, a position he has held since 1971.

Ondaatje currently resides in Toronto with his wife, novelist/editor Linda Spalding, where they edit a literary magazine. During his career Ondaatje has received numerous awards and honors. He was awarded the Ralph Gustafson Award, 1965; the Epstein Award, 1966; and the President’s Medal from the University of Ontario in 1967. In addition, Ondaatje was the recipient of the Canadian Governor-General’s Award for Literature in 1971 and again in 1980. Also in 1980 he was awarded the Canada-Australia price and in 1992 he was presented with the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient. Anil’s Ghost won the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Medicis, and the Canadian Governor General’s Award.

In this YouTube video, Ondaatje briefly discusses The Cats Table and the relationship of his own experience to the book.


And for your listening pleasure, the great Sidney Bechet (Mr. Mazappa's favorite jazz musician).

Followup from April 6 Meeting

First, another great find from Linda, which she found on the Twitter site of an English book club.

Second, my ongoing doughnut obsession.

I forgot why we got onto the topic of doughnut shops at the last meeting, but here is a link to the article I read in the SF Chronicle called "A doughnut renaissance in Oakland." The shop that I had become obsessed with (triggered by such words as "softball-sized" and "filled") is Donut Dolly, and the shop that Peggy had heard of with the miniature donuts is (from the description in the article) is called Donut Savant. There are several more shops mentioned in the article. Read and resist.

Saturday, April 6, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I had resolved to have this background information posted farther in advance than usual to the time for the meeting, but I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available about Paris in the 1920s and the diverse cast of expatriate artists and their patrons who made up the circles in which Hadley and "Hem" traveled. I was also fascinated by the subject matter, and I found myself reading for hours without having compiled anything for this blog. As time is getting short, I'm going to go with what I have and hope it is not either too little or too much.

First, an Introduction to the Author

On the Random House official website for Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, on the author’s page, you can find the same short bio that is printed on the back of the book jacket, along with an interview with Paula McLain about the book. More interesting to me, on that same site, is a page in which McLain discusses the issue of “fact versus fiction” in The Paris Wife. There are also several videos on YouTube of McLain talking about her book.



The Cast of Characters (definitely not all-inclusive)

Hadley Richardson (1891­–1979): The protagonist of The Paris Wife, Ernest Hemingway’s wife from 1921 to 1927. Hemingway’s book, A Moveable Feast, was about his life in Paris when Hadley was his wife. Her biography is pretty much as it was presented in the book up until the time she and Hemingway split. In 1933, she married Paul Scott Mowrer (described as "a newspaperman and poet). Her second marriage was, by all accounts, a happy marriage, and Hadley and Paul spent much of their time "fishing and drinking." She did not hold any lasting bitterness toward Hemingway, "It just came to an end."

 

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1971): One of the United States’ best-known writers, both as a journalist and a creative writer, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for his short novel, The Old Man and the Sea. The Nobel site contains a brief biography of Hemingway and a list of his extensive writings and also contains a link to the award speech from when his award was presented, giving the Nobel committee’s rationale for presenting the award to Hemingway. The full text of The Sun Also Rises is available for free download on several different sites on the internet.

 John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway (AKA Jack or "Bumby")(1923–2000): The only son of Hadley and Ernest Hemingway is best known to many of my generation as the father of Margaux and Mariel Hemingway, supermodels and actresses, but he also had a very interesting life, having worked for the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) as a liaison to the French resistance and having been captured by the Germans in occupied France. He was an ardent fisherman (as were both of his parents) and eventually became a fishing supplies salesman.

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941): Best known for his collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919 and available for viewing free on the internet. Sherwood Anderson was a mentor to both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. It was Anderson who urged Hemingway to go to Paris and sent him letters of introduction to various people in the expatriate literary community there. Hemingway later alienated Anderson when he mocked Anderson’s book, Dark Laughter, in his own book, The Torrents of Spring. Hadley’s disapproval of Hemmingway’s treatment of Anderson was one of the early contributing factors to their estrangement and was probably also the final blow in the rift between Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. More information about Sherwood Anderson’s very interesting life can be found on the website of the foundation that bears his name .

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967): Gertrude Stein is an American writer who is better known as the host of a salon in Paris where modern artists in all fields met. A brief bio can be found on the Academy of American Poets website along with links to some of her poems. She grew up in Oakland, and is most famous in these parts for saying about Oakland, "There's no 'there' there," which is often interpreted by people who don't like Oakland as meaning that Oakland is boring, but taken in context, what she really was saying was that having returned after being away awhile, nothing about Oakland seemed familiar to her.

Alice B. Toklas grew up across the bay in San Francisco and met Gertrude Stein in 1907 in Paris on the first day she arrived there. She was with Gertrude Stein up until Stein died in 1946 of cancer. Alice B. Tolkas is more famous among my generation for having written a cookbook containing a recipe for hashish fudge. In the 60's and 70's, any brownie recipe containing cannabis was known as "Alice B. Toklas brownies".

Bumby's godmothers

Dorothy Shakespear and Ezra Pound

Olga Rudge

Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Dorothy Shakespear (1886–1973), and Olga Rudge (1895–1996): Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakepear were a married couple, an American-born poet and an English-born painter, to whom Hadley and Ernest Hemingway carried a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. During the time the Hemingways lived Paris, Pound was the editor of various literary reviews and published some of Hemingway's early work. Pound and Shakespear had an unconventional marriage. Ezra Pound had numerous affairs and mistresses throughout the marriage, and during the time the Hemingway's were in Paris, Pound met and fell in love with Olga Rudge, an American-born violinist. The affair lasted 50 years, till the end of Pound's life, but Shakespear never divorced Pound. Pound was living in Italy at the outbreak of World War II and embraced the politics of Benito Mussolini.  At the end of the war, Pound was imprisoned by the American authorities and charged with treason, later sent to a mental institution. Both women visited him, supported him, and defended him during his confinement.


Harold Loeb and Lady Mary Duff Twysden, and the whole Pamplona party crowd: In 1925, the Hemingway's traveled to Spain along with several of their friends and acquaintances from Paris in order to watch the running of the bulls in Pamplona and the subsequent bullfights. This trip formed the basis for Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.  The characters of the novel were based on the individuals in the travel party. Publisher Harold Loeb was the model for the character Robert Cohn. The character of Brett Ashely was based on Duff Twysden, with whom Harold Loeb was having an affair. The character of Frances Clyne was based on Kitty Cannell, Harold Loeb's off-and-on girlfriend. Duff Twysden's unhappy fiance, Pat Guthrie, formed the basis for the character of Mike Campbell. Playwright Donald Ogden Stewart was the model for Bill Gorton. No character based on Hadley appears in The Sun Also Rises.

Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden (in hat), Hadley Richardson, Donald Ogden Stewart (obscured), and Pat Guthrie (far right) at a café in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925.

Pauline Pfeiffer (1895­–1951): Paula McLain pretty much buys into Hemingway's depiction of Pauline Pfeiffer as conniving woman and home-wrecker, but according to the bio on the website of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum (located in Piggott, Arkansas):

 "While Hemingway biographers, and even Hemingway himself, often cast Pauline as the aggressor in the breakup of their marriage, there is ample evidence that just the opposite was true. Rather than Hemingway being a great catch when they met, he was a struggling, not-yet-famous writer—and a married man and the father of a son. Pauline was a well-educated, devout Catholic with a great job, a huge trust fund, and countless, more suitable, admirers."

Gerald Murphy, Ginny Carpenter, Cole Porter, Sara Murphy 1923.

Gerald Murphy (1888–1964) and Sara Sherman Wiborg Murphy (1883–1975):   A wealthy American couple living on the French Riviera. The Murphys formed the nucleus of a circle of the rich, famous, and soon-to-be famous who found their way to the Riviera at that time. The physical descriptions of the characters Nicole and Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, Tender Is the Night, are said to be based on the Murphys (though in personality they more closely resemble Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald). Jack Hemingway once told an interviewer that Sara Murphy looked down on Hadley "as "being from a lower class."

Scott, Scottie, and Zelda Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900–1948):  Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are considered the iconic Jazz Age couple. Fitzgerald was the chronicler of Jazz Age society in such well-known novels as The Great Gatsby (once a Readers Roundtable selection) and Tender Is the Night, while Zelda assigned herself the role of "the first flapper." Hemingway and Fitzgerald traveled in many of the same circles while they were in France and were even friends for a while, though they later fell out. If I recall correctly, Hemingway had very little nice to say about Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast (but I have misplaced my copy, so you'll have to take my word for it). In turn, Fitzgerald would say of Hemingway, "Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up." He also said in 1929, "I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book. There was [Hadley] for the stories and The Sun Also Rises. Now there's Pauline. A Farewell to Arms is a big book. If there's another big book I think we'll find Ernest has another wife."

The Setting:  Paris in the 1920s

Saturday, March 2, 2013, at 2 p.m., San Leandro Main Library

Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn

Donovan Hohn's biography from his official website:  ...[R]ecipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hopwood Awards in essay and poetry, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. Moby-Duck was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism and runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn is now a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has begun work on a second book. Below is a video of him discussing Moby-Duck (via YouTube).


Introducing

Evan "Big Poppa" Drellich, the student who sparked Donovan Hohn's interest in the bath toys lost at sea, now a writer for mlb.com.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, and Beachcombers' Alert.










Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Institute talking about plastic in the environment.


"Iron Eyes Cody"

The plastic duck found in the British Isles, which turned out not to be a Floatee.







Six degrees of freedom.

A TED talk about adaptive aids from Amy Bower, "the blind oceanographer," from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI).


Among many others.

We Are All Floatees, Are We Not?

Before the Fall

When I first heard that Moby-Duck was about bath toys lost at sea, I knew that sooner or later the currents would lead to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (AKA the Pacific Trash Vortex) as currents often do.
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I was not disappointed. In the second sentence of the prologue to Moby-Duck, Donovan Hohn mentions the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which provides me the opportunity to embed a short video, "Plastic Bag," by Ramin Bahrani, one of my favorite young(ish) directors. The role of the plastic bag is voiced by Werner Herzog, one of my favorite old(ish) directors.

Book Suggestions for August through December 2013

And the nominees are...

Listed in alphabetical order. All book descriptions are excerpted from product descriptions on Amazon.com. Choose six books (for August through December plus one alternate in case of tie or book unavailability) and submit your selections to Peggy (psunlane@yahoo.com) no later than Friday, February 8, 2013. (Updated to reflect the changes referenced in Peggy's February 5 email.)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (Fiction)

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

Boy in the Suitcase (The) by Lene Kaaberbol (Fiction)

When her estranged friend Karin leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous project yet. Inside the locker is a suitcase, and inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked and drugged, but alive.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James (Fiction)
In their six years of marriage, Elizabeth and Darcy have forged a peaceful, happy life for their family at Pemberley, Darcy’s impressive estate. Her father is a regular visitor; her sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; the marriage prospects for Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, are favorable. And preparations for their annual autumn ball are proceeding apace. But on the eve of the ball, chaos descends. Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s disgraced sister who, with her husband, has been barred from the estate, arrives in a hysterical state—shrieking that Wickham has been murdered. 

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (Fiction)

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. 

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru (Fiction)

Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power.  Before Raj reappears— inexplicably unharmed, but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, both past and present, who have traveled through this odd, remote town in the shadow of a mysterious rock formation known as the Pinnacles.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Fiction)

On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick's wife Amy disappears. There are signs of struggle in the house and Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect. It doesn't help that Nick hasn't been completely honest with the police and, as Amy's case drags out for weeks, more and more vilifying evidence appears against him. Nick, however, maintains his innocence.

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (Autobiography)

Roger Ebert is the best-known film critic of our time … In 2006, complications from thyroid cancer treatment resulted in the loss of his ability to eat, drink, or speak. But with the loss of his voice, Ebert has only become a more prolific and influential writer. And now, for the first time, he tells the full, dramatic story of his life and career.

Round House (The) by Louise Erdrich (Fiction)

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. … While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own.

Sense of an Ending (The) by Julian Barnes (Fiction)

This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple (Fiction)

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.  Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle—and people in general—has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fiction)

“Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,” says Thomas More, “and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.” England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.