She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for Books
They’re small and they’re local…
…and they are a bookstore! Actually, there are three of them, called Barritt’s Books, and you can buy signed copies of my book, Parisian by Heart, there.
Today is Small Business Saturday, and yes, I know the idea is backed by a certain credit card company, I like the idea anyhow. But pay with cash at your local small business, or to the person who makes the homemade gifts or grows the homegrown food, because when you pay cash, trade or barter, there are no fees, you are directly helping out your community, and you don’t get any deeper in debt.
If you are too far away to shop at your local Barritt’s store, contact me (leave a comment here or email me) for info on how to get your signed copy inscribed personally to you, or if you are buying the book for a gift, to your gift recipient. Merci!
On Writing and Death
From Time Regained, by Marcel Proust, who died on November 18th, 1922.
“The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-flashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme. de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book! How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him! To give some idea of this task one would have to borrow comparisons from the loftiest and the most varied arts; for this writer- who, moreover, to indicate the mass, the solidity of each one of his characters must find means to display that character’s most opposite facets- would have to prepare his book with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces like a general conducting an offensive, and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only within worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art. In long books of this kind there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished! The writer feeds his book, he strengthens the parts of it which are weak, he protects it, but afterwards it is the book that grows, that designates its author’s tomb and defends it against the world’s clamour and for awhile against oblivion.”
From the French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, First Vintage Books Edition, September 1982
After the Artisan Festival…
…I have a sunburned face and my feet hurt but I am pleased with the day. The time spent catching up with new and old friends, talking with people about my book and about the various plants that we had there, made the day worthwhile. Some folks brought their copies of Parisian by Heart that they’d read and wanted to have me sign, gave me some words of praise that I appreciated very much.
Thank you to everyone who came out to Knotts Island for the Artisan Festival, and especially to everyone who came to my book signing table there. A big merci to all who purchased a copy and after you read it, please let me know what you think of it, and if you feel so inclined, write a review onAmazon and/or Goodreads– that would be greatly appreciated as well.
Merci beaucoup, a la prochaine!
Parisian by Heart
Parisian by Heart
“I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”
Henry David Thoreau
“From her home on an island in North Carolina, a mysterious longing for Paris, France, leads a budding writer into the world of her dreams and imagination – or so she believes. Her guides and companions on this trip include two writers and an artist who drew so vividly from their lives and imaginations that the world cannot forget their visions. They share stories and memories of times together, and the discovery that their lives are intertwined in unexpected ways. The writers are Marcel Proust and Charles Dickens, and the artist is the tortured and driven Vincent van Gogh.
The story begins in our traveler’s home, within her familiar surroundings, but as the tale unfolds the line between the real world and the realm of dreams ultimately disappears. She finds herself in very different places across the ocean with very different people. She converses with Marcel Proust at his favorite meeting place, the Hotel Ritz inParis. She shares a meal with Vincent van Gogh and watches while he paints in the Arlesian sun.
And she meets with a writer by the name of Charles Dickens who gives her a manuscript in which a woman finds herself humbly serving the needs of a group of well-positioned elderly ladies who have gotten together at a remote guest house to play bridge when they know the night will bring a full moon rising over the water. Before they are finished they have a very unexpected visitor with the strange name of Samael. He knows things about them and offers to make a bargain.
Our lives are marked by our memories, written or unwritten, but which lives and what memories? PARISIAN BY HEART tells the story of one personal journey of discovery and revelation.”
The above (except for the Thoreau quote) is the “pitch” I wrote for my book as its entry into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The book made it into the quarter-final round, but sadly, no further. If the above pitch piques your interest, and you’d like to read more, it is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Parisian-Heart-Mari-Mann/dp/1453679553/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314284764&sr=1-1 and you can ask for it at bookstores as well. Kindle edition available here. Merci, mon amis, et merci beaucoup, Marcel.
International Literacy Day
“September 8 was proclaimed International Literacy Day by UNESCO on November 17, 1965. It was first celebrated in 1966. Its aim is to highlight the importance of literacy to individuals, communities and societies. On International Literacy Day each year, UNESCO reminds the international community of the status of literacy and adult learning globally. Celebrations take place around the world.Some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills; one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women; 72.1 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out.”
Halfway on Friday the 13th
In my last post, I said that I was going to be participating in Nanowrimo and that I would post updates on my word count and maybe an excerpt or two. Here are some stats : I am currently at 27,872 words and am averaging over 2,000 words a day. If I continue in this manner, I will reach 50,000 words on Thanksgiving Day, and will really have something to be thankful for. In honor of my having reached the halfway point on Friday the 13th, here’s an excerpt of a ghostly nature.
“The old lady sitting next to my bed that night wasn’t the only dead person that visited me; around this same time I was also visited by a man who was either very tall, or was standing on something, or was floating up near the ceiling of my bedroom. All of these visitations were at the house where we lived from when I was about eight years old till I left at about twenty-two. I had three bedrooms in that house; a very small one when we first moved in, then my dad added a family room, bedroom and a laundry room onto the house and my sister moved into the new bedroom so I moved into her old one. Then when she moved out and got married, I moved into the one she left. The second bedroom was the one where I saw the dead people- oh, and a couple of dogs too. They were digging into the floor of the bedroom and I didn’t want to know what they were trying to dig up, so I screamed. As with the other visits, they disappeared when my mom or dad would arrive in my room, wanting to know what I was screaming about now. I never saw any dead people or dogs or anything in the other two rooms that were my bedrooms. I did have other times, in other houses or places, when I saw or heard or felt presences when there shouldn’t have been anyone else there. At least, not anyone in a material body form. Once, when I was working on the ranch where I worked and spent many of my younger years, I was in the old house that we used then as a girls dormitory; it was during the day and everyone else was out working. I had come back to the house to get something that I needed, that I had forgotten that morning to take with me to the barn where I worked. My bunk was downstairs, and while I was trying to find whatever it was I’d come back for, I heard a girl’s voice singing upstairs. I went up to see who it was but as soon as I got to the top of the stairs, it stopped. I looked around in the rooms up there, there was no one in the house except me. I thought, well, it must have been outside, so I went downstairs and outside and walked all the way around the house but there was no one in sight. I shrugged it off, went back inside and resumed my search for the forgotten item. The singing began again, definitely coming from upstairs, and I went back up. The singing stopped again as I reached the top of the stairs. I searched the rooms again. This was a very old house, with just four small rooms upstairs, and no closets to hide in and no way for anyone to sneak around if they were trying to hide from- the floors squeaked too much. The beds were just old Army cots, you couldn’t hide under one, and as with the first time I went up, there was no one there. Whoever was singing was not a “live” person, in the flesh, so to speak, and whatever form the person who was singing was in, they were not going to show themselves to me. I left the building at a faster pace than I came in, and still didn’t have the item I’d come back for. But I wasn’t going back again, not by myself.
When I moved into the house where we live now, after I married my second husband, he would be gone in the evening on many nights, teaching photography at a community college. I would be at home, and on about three occasions I heard someone come in our kitchen door and would feel a presence in the room. Each time I thought it was my husband coming home early, maybe a class had been cancelled or something, and I would go to greet him in the kitchen. But it wouldn’t be him, it would be a short man dressed in a dark suit of clothes that had very long tails on the coat and he would be wearing a top hat, like Abraham Lincoln. But he was too short to be Lincoln. When I would realize it wasn’t my husband, he would disappear, in sort of a slow-motion dissolve. I would be startled but not scared, there was no malevolence in the air or anything frightening about the man. He was just there, and then he wasn’t. This house also is very old, over one hundred years at least, and has seen its share of births and deaths. My husband’s son was born in this room where I am writing. We know the names of some of these people, and know that one of the previous owners has made herself known to us in various ways, although I have never seen her. Her name is Laurel and she doesn’t like for my husband to go away on trips and leave the house by itself, unprotected, I suppose. So she breaks things right before we are to leave on a trip. Like the stove, or the water pump, or the pipes. She also slams doors, or rather I should say she makes noises like a door slamming but no door has slammed, and once when we were talking about Laurel and the things she does, my husband smelled a rose perfume. I don’t wear perfume of any kind, so we believe it was her. She just wanted us to know that she was there, and was listening.”
Why Bother?
“But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
The title of this post and the above quote are from an article in the New York Times (April 20, 2008 ) written by Michael Pollan (author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) in which he talks about why one might want to plant a garden and why one should, if one can, and why one might have to whether one wants to or not. The “Problem We Face”, of course, is global warming. Did we plant our garden because of global warming? Not really, but other reasons that Michael gives for doing so do are, among others, ours as well. You can read the article here.
In a previous post I wrote about the blueberry plants we planted and how I was really hoping they would bear this year; well, one is trying to live up to my hopes. The picture is of our Legacy blueberry with clusters of small, green blueberries. There are still some strawberries in this patch of ground but our two resident foxes generally eat those. Speaking of the foxes (which I believe are gray foxes, because of their black-tipped tails), they are becoming more accustomed to our presence and trot by us unconcernedly as we work outside. One even came onto our porch one night (through the cat door) in search of popcorn.
There’s been more planting in the Native American garden: the Southwest quadrant is planted in Ruby Queen corn; after they have come up we’ll plant Mexican cucumbers (which are supposed to deter the raccoons), King of the Garden lima beans, and Golden Honeymoon and Tigger melons. I also planted nasturtium seeds on the sides of the zucchini and squash hills to keep away borers, and transplanted marigolds to the corners because of their ability to repel all sorts of pests. And speaking of pests, some sort of bug nibbled holes in the basil and tomato seedlings, so yesterday we whipped up a batch of soap spray and sprayed all the seedlings.
Today I sowed some radish seeds in the cucumber hills, as they are supposed to keep away the cucumber beetle. And I planted three mounds with Detroit Dark Red beets. Beet greens are good just steamed by themselves and seasoned with lemon pepper, garlic and butter or olive oil. The beets themselves I like to peel, slice and cook till tender, then add some hard-boiled eggs till the eggs turn a lovely red-purple. Then I use them to make a salad with chickpeas and feta or mozzarella cheese.
Since this garden post seems to be turning into an eating post, I should also mention that our asparagus is coming up thinly, so I bought some from Cullipher’s Farm Market to supplement it. Last night, I steamed them and seasoned them (lemon pepper, garlic, butter and olive oil), sauteed some mushrooms (a la Julia Child: slice some very dry mushrooms, put about half a stick of butter in a pan, heat pan but don’t add mushrooms until the butter foam has just begun to subside, add the mushrooms and brown on both sides, add as much red or white wine as you want, salt and pepper to taste), added some shrimp, combined this with the asparagus and feta cheese and served it all over couscous. There’s leftovers, if you get here quick, and don’t forget to go read Michael Pollan’s article.
Next: A Challenge
The first- line contest has ended and I hope everyone who visited during these past few days, and those who entered, had as much fun giving their brain a work-out as I did coming up with this. Our winner, Surrealist Gesture (read his blog here), was first with all the correct titles and authors. The second entry, from Steve Posin (his entry is in the comments section of this post), also had all of the answers correct. (I would have accepted either A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, In Search of Lost Time or Swann’s Way for the Proust quote. Trust Marcel to make things complicated.) The third entry, from Quinn McDonald, had a couple of answers wrong but she made her entry interesting to read with her remembrances and remarks on the books.
And now, on to the challenge. No, this challenge doesn’t have a goofy acronym like NaNoWriMo (if you are thinking “whut?” like I did the first time I saw this, google it). I’ve seen these GoAcs (goofy acronyms) for everything from comitting to writing every day for a month to doing yoga every day to committing to thinking every day (just kidding on that last one). On second thought, why buck a trend? Let’s have a GoAc for this challenge:
REvBoITConCha!
It’s the Read Every Book in This Contest Challenge! I give you one year. The Prize? There isn’t anything I could give you that would be of greater worth than what reading these authors will give you.
First-line Contest with a Prize
If you know anything about me, you know that I love to read books. I Read. A Lot. Of Books. I was, in honor of the end of the Old Year and the beginning of 2008, going to give you a list of the books I’ve read over the past year, the ones I’m reading now, and the ones lined up waiting to be read. Then I thought: boring. For anybody except me.
So then I thought: Contest! Prize! Everyone loves a contest, right? You love a prize, don’tcha? Well, here’s your chance to show off your literary chops and add to your Christmas booty as well. If you win, that is.
So, here’s the contest: I’m going to list the first line of some of the books I’ve read this year and you get to answer with the author and the book in which the line appears. Put your answers in the comment box below. At the end of the contest time, the person with the most correct answers wins! Simple, no? Oh, and no fair googling (or any other kind of searching) for answers; if you don’t know an answer, say so.
Here are the first lines (or snippets of them):
1. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
2. “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family…”
3. “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
4. “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the particulars about…”
5. “Marley was dead, to begin with.”
6. “On the 24th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.”
7. “Call me Ishmael.”
8. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any body else, these pages must be show.”
Hint: All of the books are considered “classics”. And the prize? (Wait for it.) A $25 gift certificate at Amazon, which I’m sure you will use to buy a book. I would. Oh, and the contest ends January 4th, 2008 at midnite, EST in the US.
Bonne Chance!
(The picture at the top of this post is our latest acquisition of books, the Harper & Brothers Household Edition of Charles Dickens’ works (16 in the edition, we got 14), published in the decade after Dickens’ death in 1870.)
She Brings Me Water 