Don't be a shrew--The Quote of the Week

This from a wonderful book called The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by a biologist named David George Haskell. The book is filled with scientific/poetic details on the marvels and interconnectedness to be found in a patch of old growth Tennessee forest.

But nature has its nasty bits as well, and they can make for some pretty riveting reading. Catching a glimpse of a shrew on an early spring morning, Haskell tells us a bit about the little mammal that Shakespeare made famous:

"Shrews live short, violent lives. Only one on ten survives longer than a year; the rest get burned out by their furious metabolism. Shrews breathe so frantically that they cannot survive long aboveground. Their outrageously rapid breathing would dessicate and kill them in the dry air.

Shrews feed by snapping at prey then chewing poisonous saliva into their victims, sometimes killing the animal they have caught, sometimes paralyzing it for storage in a dungeon of horrors, a larder of living but incapacitated prey...

The soil's food web reaches its zenith in the shrew. Only owls will eat shrews; everything else gives them a wide berth, fearing their vicious teeth or the acrid taste of their scent glands.

There is kinship with humans here. The first mammals were shrew-like creatures terrorizing the snails and centipedes of the Mesozoic. Our ancestors were shrill and vicious, leading a caffeinated existence in dark corridors. An analogy with our current state of being is tempting. Thankfully we've lost the poison fangs and pungent glands."

And people think vampires are scary?

The Quote of the Week

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination."

"The imagination is like a drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk to find it. It is an intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes."

--From The Guy Davenport Reader, one of Wander's current staff picks.

A Quote for Snow

"A few light taps on the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

--the final paragraph of James Joyce's short story "The Dead," which is the final story in his 1914 collection, Dubliners.

Quote of the Week

"I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away."

"Living in a dreamland," Bankwell suggested.

"Indeed," said Flowers. "But the rent is coming due."

...............

"...Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy (the soon to be a father guy above) took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

When he got out of his car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino's engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel...."

From pages 210 and 211 in Michael Chabon's latest novel, Telegraph Avenue.

"Reading Books is Fundamental"

 "The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book."

A flat-out wonderful column by Charles M Blow, from the New York Times, on the value and power of reading. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/opinion/blow-reading-books-is-fundamental.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

"The Art of Rejection"

I just read a marvelous blog post by Graywolf Press editor Jeff Schotts, titled "The Art of Rejection"

You MUST read the whole piece, which you can find here: https://www.graywolfpress.org/blogs/craft-jeff-shotts-art-rejection 

Here are a few lines to pique your interest:

"I am an editor, and I am required to practice the art of rejection. It is an art I do not recommend others devote themselves to, but I am that art’s apprentice. There are no masters, and those who claim mastery are, in truth, practicing the arts of pity and condescension, and there are no places for them here....

The first thing to be said is: by practicing this art, you will disappoint, can only disappoint, you will always always disappoint. Your most practiced rejection, however worded, however encouraging you fashion it to be, is still a rejection. It is still a disappointment.

The next thing to say is: the editor must disappoint. Practice this art long enough, and you will disappoint many. Hundreds, and then thousands. You will carry this with you. You will lament that you have to hone a skill that makes you detestable.

You will always have rejected many, many, numerous many more than you can possibly ever accept. You will hope that you will be thought of, if you are thought of, as the editor who accepted the work of this author, and this author, and this author too. But you know, in truth, that the odds are every bit as stacked against you as they are for writers. You may more likely be known, if you are known, as the editor who rejected the work of this author, and this author, and this author too.

There are archives amassing more and more evidence against you. We now know those who rejected the work of Anne Frank and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others. History will expose you. Your ignorance will be marveled at. Your rejection will eventually reject you..." 

Thanks to my old friend David Carr for letting me know about The Art of Rejection. 

Tom Campbell

The Stories of Christmas

I first heard one of my now favorite Christmas stories on NPR on Christmas Eve, ten years ago. I was driving home from work, and let's just say I was not in a receptive mood for any nonsense about sweetness and light. Don't get me wrong, working at the bookstore through the holiday is wonderful—you get to be Santa Claus hour after hour, day after day. But after a month of this, Santa can get tuckered out. 

By six o'clock this particular Christmas Eve I was dog tired and not at all looking forward to our usual holiday rituals of opening presents and a big family dinner. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed, sleep and be left alone. Looking for some help in staying awake on my 20 minute drive, I turned on the radio.

The man on WUNC had a familiar Southern voice, but I couldn't quite place it. He was telling a story, in the first person, of a socially awkward loner named Verne who was managing a pet shop in a mall, somewhere along an interstate in North Carolina. A runaway pregnant teenage girl had taken to hanging out at the mall, and out of sympathy for a fellow outcast, Verne befriended her.

I soon figured out that the voice on the radio belonged to my friend Hillsborough writer Allan Gurganus. And

ten minutes later, as Allan brought his story, “A Fool for Christmas,” to a close, I was reaching for the kleenex. My Scrooge-like heart had been transformed, (thankfully without the intervention of any ghosts), and I was happy that it was Christmas Eve, and that I was coming home to be with my wonderful wife and the family that I loved.

Since that long-ago drive home in 2004, Allan has performed his marvelous tale at the bookshop at least four times. Every time he changes the story a bit, and every time I end up reaching for something to dab my eyes. Allan will reprise “A Fool for Christmas” at The Regulator this Friday evening at 7:00.  Simply put brothers and sisters, Allan Gurganus can flat out Tell a story. And he knocks this one out of the park.

The Christmas season is of course full of grand stories, starting with the one in the Bible. Then back in 1843 a Mr Charles Dickens penned a little story called “A Christmas Carol” that has easily stood the test of time. If you are like most people (and like me until about 5 years ago) and have never actually read “A Christmas Carol,” you should not deprive yourself of this treat much longer. As good as some of the movie versions are, the book is better.

If you have read the book, you will be intrigued by Les Standiford's “The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.”  It seems that after initial fame—but not yet serious fortune—from books like “Oliver Twist” and “The Old Curiosity Shop,” Dickens in 1843 had fallen on hard times after the disappointing sales of his latest novels, “Barnaby Rudge” and “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dispirited and deeply in debt, he walked the streets of London seeking inspiration. The Christmas ghost story that he came up with was initially turned down by his publisher (!) but Dickens found a willing printer, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Grinch is still great, as is “The Polar Express.” Another of my recent favorites, Donald Hall's “Christmas at Eagle Pond “(2012) tells a charming, truly heartwarming story of a Christmas spent at his grandparent's farm in rural New Hampshire in 1940.

Christmas is a time of sharing. And the best holiday stories are all about sharing, so they are, to me, an essential part of what makes Christmas a special time. Share your favorites by reading them out out loud with family and friends.