blundering
A book upon which I am about to embarK: Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions, by Zachary Shore.
Funny, I don’t remember being interviewed for this book. Perhaps a blunder on the part of the author. I could have provided so many illustrative examples.
echoes of lost books
I found a book the other day. It’s one I read so long ago–let’s see, during that trip to Canada when I was what, nine? Too young for this book probably. Something about it stayed with me, though. Now and then it bubbled to the surface of memory, and I wondered if it was real. I didn’t remember thinking it was a particularly great read. I didn’t remember the names of the characters. I didn’t remember the location or whether there was any particular plot. I remembered it was wordy, Edwardian-style writing, and set in a jungle. I remembered a girl plummeting from a tree to her death in a fire…a great tragedy, but always suffused in green and gold light. And birdsong. And surprisingly, now that I’ve found it as an adult, that’s still the way I’ll remember it.
Of course you can find almost anything on Google, and somewhat hilariously, I found that Rima the Jungle Girl gained brief fame in a DC comic book series of the mid 70s…but that’s got nothing to do with me or my experience of Green Mansions.
I still don’t think it’s a great read. But there’s that green and gold thing, and far-off birdsong, behind a door somewhere in my memory–or I think it more likely a window, because now and then it’s open and I catch the echo of a few hours I spent one summer, curled up in a rocking chair somewhere along the Canadian border, rain falling outside, jungle blooming in my mind.
leaving tracks
I started a book list for the year, because it will make me happy later to look back and see where I’ve been.
happiness is a warm biography
A book I want: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. I don’t know about you—you’re probably too young, most of you—I was barely old enough to appreciate this guy, but I did, because my parents had collections of the older Peanuts running way back. I may have been among the last, as I was surely one of the last Compleat Students of Pogo, and for the same reason.
This wry, depressive voice in the wilderness obviously spoke to my parents with overtones that resonated, and to me too, although in the last five years or so, maybe ten, Schulz lost me entirely. Maybe I’m too young after all. Or maybe he should have quit. I’m not qualified to make the distinction.
You Calvin and Hobbes fans, you are the heirs apparent of both Peanuts and Pogo. If you dismiss the former, it’s only because you weren’t there in a timely fashion. (If you dismiss the latter there’s no hope for you, no hope at all….) And no, I wasn’t either, but I had a great talent for projecting backwards. If only I could harness it for novel-writing…and that’s one reason among many I need to read Schulz’s biography.
Happiness is a warm puppy. We always knew that, certainly. We, the family we, the unit indivisible, flawed though it may have been…WE knew. We still make Lucy’s lemon squares straight out of the Peanuts cookbook. We still use “rats” in place of offensive language (well, not me so much—). We still think fleetingly of the Great Pumpkin at this time of year. We still lean against the kite-eating tree, tiny little necks bent at an anatomically unlikely 90 degrees, giant bobble heads full of resignation and yet, still, improbably, prayer.
A small dose of genius, every day, for the price of a newspaper. You can’t quite appreciate it in the Internet Age, you youngsters, you callow youth, you babes lost in the info wood. Fortunately for you, you’ve got 40, 50, maybe 150 geniuses at your fingertips for every one Charles Schulz we were able to find back then. Treasure them all.
And good luck with that. Genius is a lot easier to deal with one comic strip at a time.
