Do you now know what it's like to risk your one and only self?

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, first published in 1977

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Song of Solomon is a story about exploration, redemption, love, fear, hate, and identity. It chronicles the life of Milkman Dead, only son of Ruth Foster and Macon Dead, brother to Magdalena (Lena) and First Corinthians Dead. Milkman gets his nickname from nursing his mother long into his toddler years, and can't shake the nickname as an adult. The Deads are so named because of a series of mishaps/name modification due to exiting enslavement, and their children are named by picking words from a Bible.

Milkman is raised in a town in the Midwest, a kind of 'anywhere' town in Michigan. His father, Macon, traveled to Michigan from his original hometown in Shalimar, Virginia, with his sister, Pilate, after their father was brutally murdered for his land/farm. Though the siblings are estranged at the novel's beginning, both are living in the same town, and Pilate has a daughter, Reba, who also has a daughter, Hagar, who is about the same age as Milkman. 

Milkman's closest friend is named Guitar, and it becomes clear throughout the course of the novel that Guitar is involved in a kind of secret society, the Seven Days, who are attempting to 'even the racial score' after racially motivated murders take place. Milkman doesn't wholly understand this work, but doesn't expose his friend. The novel climaxes in a trip to Shalimar, VA, where Milkman attempts to hunt down some supposedly long-lost gold treasure, but he finds nothing but his own origin story. Guitar thinks Milkman is trying to steal the gold for himself, as they had originally planned to get it together, and refuses to believe Milkman when he protests that there was no gold to be had. Guitar decides that Milkman's "day has come", as he was interfering with Guitar's work, and makes it his sole focus to murder Milkman. In the end, the two run at each other off a cliff, still at odds.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Hello, dear blobbists!

As a write this particular entry, I have a tortie Twix on my legs and I'm listening to the mockingbird in my backyard say 'pretty-bird, pretty-bird, pretty-bird'. The ice cream truck has also descended, because it's never too cold for ice cream (apparently). 

I can't believe that of Toni Morrison's eleven novels, I've only read three as part of this project -Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and now this one. I don't have many authors whose entire oeuvre I've read (in fact, I'm wondering if there are any? I mean, some of the one-book authors, sure, but multiples...?) but Toni Morrison is definitely someone whose whole canon I'd like to be acquainted with. Song of Solomon was a soulful kind of read; definitely dark in parts, but also witty, and wonderful in its world-building aspect. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It'll make you think about what has and hasn't changed in America since Morrison wrote it, and it will take you on a wild journey. Without further ado, here are my thoughts.

Introducing the Cast of Characters

Macon Dead, the Dead family patriarch, not a very good brother, kind of an awful human

The note I write to myself about Macon Dead was: "these lines read more familiarly than I'd like."

Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. I won't go into this further, but it definitely resonated.

Here's another exchange, when Macon finds out that Milkman met his aunt/Macon's sister. 

Macon: 'What she look like to you? Somebody nice? Somebody normal?'

Milkman: 'Well, she...'

Macon: 'Or somebody cut your throat?'

Milkman: 'She didn't look like that, Daddy.'

Macon: 'Well, she is like that.'

Milkman: 'What'd she do?'

Macon: 'It ain't what she did; it's what she is.'

Milkman: 'What is she?'

Macon: 'A snake, I told you.' Macon has some reasons to be mistrustful of his sister, it turns out, but in the end Pilate is a much better human being than Macon, despite their vastly different lifestyles.

Reba, daughter of Pilate, mother to Hagar, trying to get admitted any way she can

After a scuffle takes place at Pilate's house, she asks if Reba wants to go to the hospital, and though she is barely injured, here's her response: Reba said she wanted to go to the hospital. (It was her dream to be a patient in a hospital; she was forever trying to get admitted, since in her picture-show imagination, it was a nice hotel. She gave blood there as often as they would let her, and stopped only when the blood bank was moved to an office-type clinic some distance away from Mercy.) There's so much tenderness and earnestness in this, especially since we learn throughout the book that Black folk are not seen at the main hospital/are just beginning to be admitted.

Hagar, daughter of Reba, cousin to and lover of Milkman, a woman on a mission

So I neglected to mention in the plot summary that Hagar and Milkman end up seeing each other, and also that he breaks up with her and she gets hyper-fixated on murdering him once a month. 

• She could not get his love (and the possibility that he didn't think of her at all was intolerable) so she settled for his fear. I can't imagine what it would be like to be so entangled with a person that you are desperate for any emotion or notice of theirs, but Hagar was such a tragic and lovable character for me. 

• Luckily for Milkman, she had proved, so far, to be the world's most inept killer. lol.

Pilate, sister to Macon, aunt to Milkman, mother to Reba, grandmother to Hagar

I don't have any particular lines from the novel that I underlined about Pilate, but I can't leave her out of the group, as she's such a pivotal and remarkable character. While Macon is an upright citizen, one of the wealthiest Black people in town, Pilate makes her money by bootlegging, which makes Macon deeply resentful and ashamed. Milkman spends much of the novel getting to know Pilate, and coming to understand his father and aunt's history makes him feel eminently more connected to Pilate. One of my favorite scenes in the novel takes place when Milkman and Guitar come to Pilate's house, and she offers them a soft-boiled egg. As she makes the eggs, she describes her method, and how once you have the egg boiling, you "put a folded newspaper over the pot and do one small obligation (like answering the door)". It makes sense that not everyone had timers/that they're a newish invention, so I loved the idea of timing the egg off of how long it took to do a small activity, a small obligation. It also reminded me of eating soft-boiled eggs as a child, as I have vivid memories of this. I don't know the last time I had a soft-boiled egg, but I very much associate the moment of cracking open a soft-boiled egg to dip my toast in it with youth and a kind of innocence.

Corinthians, sister to Macon and Lena; not quite the right kind of desirable wife

Corinthians and Lena were really interesting characters, particularly because they go from being the most eligible Black women bachelorettes to being 'spinsters' living at home with Ruth and Macon well into their adulthood. Here is a description of why:

• Corinthians was a little too elegant. Bryn Mawr in 1940. France in 1939. That was a bit much. In the novel, the author makes it clear that the most eligible Black bachelors want a woman who can grow and rise with them, and in a way, Corinthians and Lena are "over-aristocratized" and therefore no longer desirable. This really felt resonant in the narrative of 'Lemonade' to me, the idea that Black women are held to such impossible standards and still can't win. I did love the Bryn Mawr reference, though.

Corinthians gets a bit more character exploration in the later parts of the novel as she dates a man, Porter, who it turns out is also a member of the Seven Days with Guitar. I love this scene when Corinthians gets home from Porter's house:

Corinthians blinked. She had just come from a house in which men sat in a lit kitchen talking in loud excited voices, only to meet an identical scene at home. She wondered if this part of the night, a part she was unfamiliar with, belonged, had always belonged, to men. If perhaps it was a secret hour in which men rose like giants from dragon's teeth and, while the women slept, clustered in their kitchens. This is such an incredible image.

Guitar, best friend of Milkman, man about town, soldier of the Seven Days

Guitar is such a fascinating and beautifully drawn character. The Seven Days construct is complex and yet basic - they kill white people in the same way and same numbers as racially motivated killings that take place against Black people, attempting to right the injustice/lack of action on the part of the legal system and even out the impact of the generations of lives lost with each murder. There are seven men, each of whom is assigned a day of the week, and Guitar has this to say when Milkman asks for an explanation:

Guitar: 'I had to do something. And the only thing left to do is balance it; keep things on an even keel. I help keep the numbers the same.'

Milkman: 'And if it isn't done? If it just goes on the way it has?'

Guitar: 'Then the world's a zoo, and I can't live in it.'

Guitar goes on to tell Milkman: Everybody wants the life of a black man. 

And when Milkman points out that the white people being killed aren't directly the perpetrators, Guitar describes their collective accountability for the crimes, saying this: What I'm saying is, under certain conditions, they (white people) would all do it. And under the same circumstances we would not.

This is obviously heavy, but I'm honestly surprised there aren't more stories or narratives about a society like this. Maybe it's the influence of white power and privilege, and there are more that are suppressed, or maybe these exist. I'm not saying that violence, in my personal opinion, is a universal response, but I think this fictional exploration of one way that a community might choose to take action is an interesting thought experiment. 

Milkman, son of Macon and Ruth, nephew to Pilate, uncomfortable in his own skin

I love this description of Milkman: By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it - ever. When Lena said, 'Mama, what is he walking like that for?' he said, 'I'll walk any way I want to, including over your ugly face.' It's such a hilarious example of siblings interacting without filters, but also such an apt physical representation of the way that Milkman is off kilter, out of step with life's rhythms.

Milkman really struggles with other people's expectations: My family's driving me crazy. Daddy wants me to be like him and hate my mother. My mother wants me to think like her and hate my father. Corinthians won't speak to me; Lena wants me out. And Hagar wants me chained to her bed or dead. Everybody wants something from me, you know what I mean? Something they think they can't get anywhere else. Something they think I got.

A few general reflections...

On the many kinds of black

I love this line from Pilate: There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

When Guitar tells Milkman he doesn't like sweets

So it turns out there's a dark and deeply disturbing reason for this, but I loved this interaction between Guitar and Milkman. 

Guitar: 'Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don't even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.'

Milkman: Milkman searched for a a physical cause. He wasn't sure he trusted anybody who didn't like sweets. 'You must have sugar diabetes.'

Guitar: 'You don't get sugar diabetes from not eating sugar. You get it from eating too much sugar.'

It turns out Guitar hates sweets because he associates it with the owner of the sawmill's wife giving him divinity candy when his father is brutally killed in the sawmill. But I like that Milkman doesn't trust someone who doesn't like sweets, as I'm the same way. ;)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same)

Perhaps the most resonant and also most profoundly sad part of reading this book in 2024 was thinking about how much of the narrative is still unchanged. Here's a conversation at the barbershop about the killing of Emmett Till, who was murdered for whistling at a white woman on a trip down South.

'But everybody knows about it now. It's all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.'

'You wanna bet? This is sure money!'

'You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain't no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,' said Guitar. 

'They say Till had a knife,' Freddie said.

'They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they'd swear it was a hand grenade.

All I could think of in reading this line was the number of Black men, women, and people who have been slaughtered by white people, by police, by 'keepers of the law/peace', and the constant attempt to justify these murders with claims they had weapons that turn out to be things like a bag of chips, or a bottle of Gatorade. It's unspeakably painful to think that so little has changed in 50 years, or a hundred. What will it take for this to stop? For white people to see? 

And speaking of things that resonated in painful ways, I was also struck by this exchange around Flint, Michigan, in thinking of its symbolism for racial discrimination and negligence after its water crisis: 

"What kind a place is it, Flint? 

Jive. No place you'd want to go to." 

Phrases I plan to start sprinkling into my everyday vernacular

Here are some lines that I really enjoyed, and I would like to start finding ways to include.

• Well, there is a difference between a woman and a lady, and I know you know which one I am. Yes!

• I'm on the thin side of evil and trying not to break through. I love this line so much.

• Your ear is on your head, but it's not connected to your brain. hagh.

Referents and Reverberations

• Fahrenheit-451, Ray Bradbury

This line, from the beginning of the book: 

When the dead doctor's daughter saw Mr. Smith emerge as promptly as he had promised from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them about, up, down, and into small mounds of snow.

Reminded me of this scene from Fahrenheit-451, when Montag meets Clarisse: The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered.

And this line: The house was more prison than palace. Also reminded me of Fahrenheit-451, in describing silence - She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about. It was neither cricket nor correct." 

• Candide, by Voltaire

This line, from Macon: Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Reminded me of the fundamental finding at the end of Candide, which suggests that we must find and cultivate our gardens in life. Granted, the meaning of ownership is vastly more layered in this racial context, but I felt an echo of the sentiment just the same.

Things that were new to me

divi-divi trees - a small tropical American tree (Caesalpinia coriaria) of the legume family with twisted astringent pods that contain a large proportion of tannin

four-in-hand - a necktie tied in a loose knot with two hanging ends, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

galloping disease - an illness progressing rapidly toward a fatal outcome (ok, so I know this is a bad thing, but it sounds kind of fun, right?)

sunshine cake - the internet seems to have a variety of opinions on this one, but generally: sunshine cake is a moist yellow cake, often infused with flavors of citrus fruits

tetter spots - blisters or pimples; any of various skin eruptions, such as eczema

Lines I Particularly Liked

• She did not try to make her meals nauseating; she simply didn't know how not to. lololol.

• She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from a thread of light. I love this line!

• Totally taken over by her anaconda lover, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own. This one cuts so deep.

• Deep down in that pocket where his heart hid, he felt used.

I'll leave you with this passage about the sweet smell of autumn, as I'm enjoying pretending that this transitional weather we're experiencing in Philadelphia is the onset of fall, rather than the beginning whispers of summer. 

On autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An odor like crystallized ginger, or sweet iced tea with a dark clove floating in it. Yet there was this heavy spice-sweet smell that made you think of the East and striped tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets. The people who lived near the lake hadn't noticed the smell for a long time now because when air conditioners came, they shut their windows and slept a light surface sleep under the motor's drone. 

So the ginger sugar blew unnoticed through the streets, around the trees, over roofs, until, thinned out and weakened a little, it reached Southside. There, where some houses didn't even have screens, let alone air conditioners, the windows were thrown wide open to whatever the night had to offer. And there the ginger smell was sharp, sharp enough to distort dreams and make the sleeper believe the things he hungered for were right at hand. To the Southside residents who were awake on such nights, it gave all their thoughts and activity a quality of being both intimate and far away.

May your thoughts and activities feel both intimate and far away this evening, carried to you on a sweet ginger breeze. I'm off to the final four books on my list, starting with a spiritual road trip. Keep safe! Good night!

Tout est bien, tout va bien, tout va le mieux qu'il soit possible. [All's well, all's going well, all's going the best it possibly could.]

 Candide by Voltaire, originally published in 1759

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

I took notes as I read for this one, in part because it takes place in these handy short-ish chapters, and in part because I was reading the French side-by-side with the English and I was getting very confused. I got tired of writing out Candide and Cunégonde, and I don't know if Cunégonde's brother ever gets a name, so I just kept calling him CuBro. Cacambo, who enters the story around chapter 13, is referred to as Cac. Feel free to read it if you like, it's mostly adventures, travel, occasional violence, and shenanigans.

My handwritten and messy summaries

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well, blobbists, I've read another one! I suppose I would say I enjoyed reading this book in the sense that: (a) it was a pleasure to dust off my rather rusty French, but (b) it's rather nonsensical and intermittently deeply violent, in the same style as Gulliver's Travels, which seems to have come out about 30 years prior. So perhaps it was a 'referent' for Voltaire. 

My eldest sister, Lexie, is doing a read-along, so at some point when she finishes, I will post her blob-along. No rush, sister Lexie!

I was impressed with my ability to stick to reading the French, but I lost steam about 3/4 of the way through, as I was starting to get dizzy reading each sentence in French on the left and in English on the right and I was losing the thread and the flow of the book. That said, I'm going to put the quotes that I liked in French so we can enjoy their original stylings. 

Chapter Titles, aka Spoilers

I enjoyed the chapter titles, as they gave one a sense of what was to come. That said, sometimes they were downright spoiler-y, like "When Candide has to murder Cunégonde's brother". Well, gee, I wonder what will happen in THIS chapter, Voltaire?!

Candide, our hapless hero

Candide, tout stupéfait, ne démêlait pas encore trop bien comment il était un héros. [Candide, utterly astounded, could not yet make out too clearly how he was a hero.] I always a love a hero who doesn't think they're heroic.

Does everything happen as it should? Has life been constructed for good fortune? For evil?

These are just a few of the questions that Voltaire wrestles with in a 'joking-not-joking' sort of way. Here are some of my favorite snippets.

Pangloss, Candide's tutor: Tout ceci est ce qu'il y a de mieux. [All this is the best that can be.] Tout est bien. [All's well.] This is after a tempest, a shipwreck, and an earthquake. 😂 There is also a line that says "les convives arrosaient leur pain de leurs larmes" which translates to [the table companions moistened their bread with their tears]. lolololz

Candide, épouvanté, interdit, éperdu, tout sanglant, tout palpitant, se disait à lui-même: <<Si c'est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres?>> [Candide, terrified, overwhelmed, distraught, bleeding all over, throbbing all over, said to himself, "If this is the best of all possible words, then what can the others be like?"] what indeed, Candide?

Si Pangloss n'avait pas été pendu, dit Candide, il nous donnerait un bon conseil dans cette extrémité, car c'était un grand philosophe. ['If Pangloss hadn't been hanged', said Candide, 'he'd give us good advice in this extremity, for he was a great philosopher.']

<<Quel est donc ce pays, disaient-ils l'un et l'autre, inconnu à tout le reste de la terre, et où toute la nature est d'une espèce si différente de la nôtre? C'est probablement le pays où tout va bien; car il fout absolument qu'il y en ait de cette espèce. Et quoi qu'en dît maître Pangloss, je me suis souvent aperçu que tout allait mal en Westphalie.>> ['What country is this, then' they said to one another, 'unknown to the rest of the world, and where all of nature is of a kind so different from our own? It's probably the country where all goes well; for there absolutely must be such a country somewhere. And whatever Master Pangloss said, I often perceived that everything went badly in Westphalia.'] hehehehehe.

-Eh bien, mon cher Pangloss, lui dit Candide, quand vous avez été pendu, disséqué, roué de coups, et que vous avez ramé aux galères, avez-vous toujours pensé que tout allait le mieux du monde? ['Well, my dear Pangloss,' Candide said to him, 'when you were hanged, dissected, beaten unmercifully and forced to row in the galleys, did you continue to think that everything was going for the very best?']

C'est Cri Cri! C'est Craque Plouf!

There's a line where someone helps Candide, (l'aide à remonter) and it reminded me of a children's rhyme that one of our French exchange students taught us. Perhaps Marine, who lived with AA?

The internet seems to agree that this was a children's song about a cricket named Cri Cri! Here's a darling 90 second video of French children doing it with their teacher. He falls in the water, but he knows how to swim, and climbs back on his branch to sing!

On seasickness

As I discovered on my cruise through the Adriatic that I have rather weak sea legs, I enjoyed this line. 

La moitié des passager, affiablis, expirants de ces angoisses inconcevables que le roulis d'un vaisseau porte dans les nerfs et dans toutes les humeurs du corps agitées en sens contraires, n'avait pas même la force de s'inquiéter du danger. [Half of the passengers, weakened, expiring as a result of those inconceivable agonies that the rolling of a ship causes in the nerves and in all the humors of a body when they are shaken in opposing directions, did not even have the strength to worry about the danger.] Thankfully I did not expire, but I am also not living in Voltaire's satirical world ;)

On marks in books, not bookmarks

As you know if you read my blob, I write in my books, and this one has twice as many notes because I marked up both sides, lol. I think the marks I write tell you what kind of story I read, and in this one, my two most common marks were the exclamation point (!) and laughter (lol). And while I'm sure I missed some if not much of the nuance that Voltaire intended for his readers to experience in the roughly 250 years that have passed since, I think he would be pleased at my overall reading experience.

Oh he's a German? Well that's a horse of a different color!

There's a hilarious passage where a man in charge refuses to meet with Spaniards for more than a few minutes a day, but the situation changes when Candide's heritage is revealed. (BTW, Candide is supposed to be German, not French. I'm not sure why, and I'm sure the internet would tell me, but let's just let it be known that he's German, from a place called Westphalia.) 

Le sergent alla sur-le-champ rendre copmte de ce discours au commandant. <<Dieu soit béni! dit ce seigneur; puisqu'il est Allemand, je peux lui parler; qu'on le mène dans ma feuillée.>> [The sergeant went at once to report this speech to the commandant. 'God be praised! said this lord; 'since he's a German, I can speak to him; have him brought to my bower.'] lololol.

The Optimist's Daughter

I have optimism on the brain after my last read, so I enjoyed this exchange:

Qu'est-ce qu'optimisme? disait Cacambo. -Hélas! dit Candide, c'est la rage de soutenir que tout est bien quand on est mal. ['What is optimism?' said Cacambo. 'Alas!' said Candide, 'it's the mania for affirming that all's well when you're in a bad way.']

The contagiousness of ennui

As I was reading and finishing this novel, I had a bad birding day (I KNOW, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?) and was in a rather foul mood. I found it fitting that Candide found himself plunged into a 'black melancholy', and thought, yes, that's what I'm feeling!

Le sang-froid du juge et celui du patron don't il était volé, alluma sa bile, et le plongea dans une noire mélancolie. La méchanceté des hommes se présentait à son esprit dans toute sa laideur; il ne se nourrissait que d'idées tristes. [The cold-bloodedness of the magistrate and of the captain who had robbed him roused his anger and plunged him into a black melancholy. The wickedness of men presented itself to his mind in all its ugliness; he entertained nothing but gloomy thoughts.]

I only have eyes for Cunégonde.

As with many heros, satirical or not, Candide is SMITTEN with his love, Cunégonde. Here are some of my favorite fairly preposterously grand comments.

Pour moi, je n'ai nulle curiosité de voir la France, dit Candide; vous devinez aisément que, quand on a passé un mois dans Eldorado, on ne se soucie plus de rien voir sur la terre que Mlle Cunégonde. ['As for me, I have no curiosity to see France', said Candide; 'you'll easily understand that when one has spent a month in Eldorado one no longer cares to see anything on earth except Miss Cunégonde.'] lololol.

To his credit, he marries her even when she becomes very ugly and old well beyond her years. But he's in luck because she becomes a TOP NOTCH PASTRY CHEF. So #everybodywins #beautyisonlydonutdeep

The meaning of life, aka none of your beeswax.

I loved that at one point the philosophers and crew decide to consult with a dervish, and he totally just blows them off.

<<Maître, nous venons vous prier de nous dire pourquo un aussi étrange animal que l'homme a été formé.>> <<De quoi te mêles-tu? dit le derviche, est-ce là ton affaire?>> ['Master, we come to beg you to tell us why such a peculiar creature as man was created.' 'What are you meddling in?' said the dervish, 'is that any business of yours?']

We must cultivate our gardens

I very much enjoyed the ending, which seems to suggest that while there may be many crazy, violent, weird, wicked things happening in the world, we are meant to tend to our little corners of the world, aka cultivate our literal and metaphorical gardens.

Je sais aussi, dit Candide, qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin. ['I know also', said Candide, 'that we must cultivate our garden.']

Words that were new to me: (I think for some of these, the translator thought, c'est le même mot en Anglais! But it is not. Or it is not common enough for me to know it ;))

almoner - an official distributor of alms

auto-da-fé - the burning of a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition

caponized - castrated (a male chicken)

moidores - a Portuguese gold coin, current in England in the early 18th century and then worth about 27 shillings

Referents and Reverberations

• This exchange between Candide and Cacambo:<<Comment veux-tu, disait Candide, que je mange du jambon, quand j'ai tué le fils de M. le baron, et que je me vois condamné à ne revoir la belle Cunégonde de ma vie? à quoi me servira de prolonger mes misérables jours, puisque je dois les traîner loin d'elle, dans les remords et dans le désespoir?>> En parlant ainsi, il ne laissa pas de manger. ['How can you expect me to eat ham,' said Candide, 'when I've murdered the baron's son, and find myself doomed never to see the lovely Cunégonde again for the rest of my life? why should I prolong my wretched days, since I must drag them out far from her in remorse and despair? While speaking thus, he did not neglect to eat.] reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from the impeccable Importance of Being Earnest: 

JACK

How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

ALGERNON

Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

JACK

I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

ALGERNON

When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins. [Rising.]

• In ElDorado, they discover a perfect world, but have found their way there very accidentally. When they are speaking to the monarch, he says: Partez quand vous voudrez, mais la sortie est bien difficile. [Leave when you wish, but the way out is very difficult.] This reminded me of Atlas Shrugged, when Dagny crashes into the Colorado settlement, and wasn't really supposed to be there yet.

• Proust - Lots of this book reminded of Proust, but especially the intensity of affection between Cunégonde and Candide, and how it was tender but also preposterous in its grandeur. This line, from a letter from Cunégonde: Le gouverneur de Buenos Aires a tout pris, mais il me reste votre coeur. Venez, votre présence me rendra la vie, ou me fera mourir de plaisir. [The Governor of Buenos Aires took everything, but I still have your heart. Come to me, your presence will either return me to life or cause me to die of pleasure.] reminded me of my favorite line in Swann's Way, from the early days of Swann and Odette's courtship: Swann had left his cigarette-case at her house. 'If only', she wrote, 'you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have that back.'" I've said in other blobs that I have certain writers who I love for particular things, like Pasternak's weather, and Proust's descriptions of music. I think I would like Voltaire and Proust to handle the love department. ;)

Lines I Particularly Liked

• Remarquez bien que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes, aussi avons-nous des lunettes. [Observe that noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles.] Obviously this is the order of things.

• Les homme ne sont fait que pour se secourir les un les autres. [Men were created only in order to help one another.]

• C'est un très grand plaisir de voir et de faire des choses nouvelles. [It's a very great pleasure to see and do new things.]

• Mais, Messieurs, vous ne voudriez pas manger vos amis. [But, gentlemen, you wouldn't want to eat your friends.]

Well, blobbists, I leave you for The Song of Solomon and a world crafted by the great Toni Morrison. I'll leave you with four of my favorite lines.

(1) Nous allons dans un autre univers, disait Candide; c'est dans celui-là sans doute que tout est bien. ['We're going to another world', said Candide; 'undoubtedly it's there that all's well.]

(2) Nous somme au bout de nos peines et au commencement de notre félicité. [We're at the end of our troubles and the beginning of our happiness.] Doesn't that sound lovely?

(3) Tout est bien, tout va bien, tout va le mieux qu'il soit possible. [All's well, all's going well, all's going the best it possibly could.] obviously!

and this last one, a comment from a scholar they speak to for advice:

(4) Je ne lis que pour moi. [I read only for myself.] Off I go, blobbists, reading for no one but me; I hope you do the same! Keep safe, keep faith, good night.

Memory returned like spring.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty, first published in book form in 1972

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Optimist's Daughter is a story about a small and somewhat unique family trio - a father, his daughter, and a very recent stepmother - who are navigating a health scare, and then sadly, the death of the father, in the deep South somewhere in the 19XXs? I'm honestly not sure if there are any date ranges or references, but I'd say maybe 1940s/1950s? The story was initially published in excerpt form in the New Yorker in 1969, I believe. Maybe it's supposed to be earlier, I can't totally tell. Here are the main characters:

Judge Clint McKelva (from Mississippi) + Becky (from West Virginia, d.), then Fay (from Texas)

                         ==Laurel, daughter of Clint and Becky (from Mississippi) + Philip (d.)

There's also a Doctor in the mix, Dr. Courtland, who is both a former neighbor and old friend and a respected doctor in New Orleans, it seems? He is put in charge of Clint's eye surgery, which somehow ends up being fatal. He doesn't die in surgery, but after, kind of just never recovers. Laurel's mother Becky also apparently died of some sort of eye injury? Not sure what's going on there, or if eye injuries were more precarious in previous years, or if it's just dramatic coincidence. 

The book follows Clint, Laurel, and Fay, and then later just Laurel and Fay as they navigate Clint's passing. We start in New Orleans for Clint's eye surgery, and find our way back to Mount Salus, Mississippi, Laurel's hometown and where Clint and Fay reside. It's not a plot-heavy book, so not much more happens other than the neighbors supporting Laurel as she processes having lost both of her parents, and Fay's somewhat wacky family from Texas descending and whisking her away for a bit. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I liked this book, on the whole. It's fairly contemplative, and gentle, but I enjoyed it for what it was, and was pleased to read a woman author, although I am woefully under-read when it comes to BIPOC women authors, especially from the South.

Here are some thoughts!

The Cast of Characters

Clint - the Judge, first Becky's, then Fay's husband, Laurel's father, beloved neighbor

The Judge was an interesting character, particularly because he's only in the narrative for a short while, and then mostly present through Laurel and the neighbors' memories of him.

• Judge McKelva was a tall, heavy man of seventy-one who customarily wore his glasses on a ribbon. Holding them in his hand now, he sat on the raised, thronelike chair above the doctor's stool, flanked by Laurel on one side and Fay on the other. I liked the way Welty painted with words, telling me where each person and each item in the room could be found.

• He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait - as if he had to catch up. He didn't try any more to hold her in his good eye. It was very sad to watch the Judge deteriorate (and so rapidly) after his mysterious eye surgery. 

• Still clinging to the first facing pages were the pair of grayed and stippled home-printed snapshots: Clinton and Becky 'up home', each taken by the other standing in the same spot on a railroad track (a leafy glade), he slender as a wand, his foot on a milepost, swinging his straw hat; she with her hands full of the wildflowers they'd picked along the way. I liked the scenes of Laurel remembering her parents and thinking about 'up home', which for Becky was her family's homestead in West Virginia. It reminded me of seeing old pictures of the family farm at Rosehaven.

• Her father in his domestic gentleness had a horror of any sort of private clash, of divergence from the affectionate and the real and the explainable and the recognizable. 

Becky, Clint's first wife and Laurel's mother, beloved neighbor

We didn't get a lot of information about Becky, as she has already died when the book begins, but I liked this line of someone remembering her: 

'Up home, we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it. We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms wide open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.' During the very bursting of a tornado which carried away half of Mount Salus, she said, 'We were never afraid of a little wind. Up home, we'd welcome a good storm.'

Laurel, the optimist's daughter, Becky's only child, Fay's sometimes-nemesis

Laurel is an interesting character. She's not terribly present in the narrative, in my opinion, but acts more as a vehicle for discovering and unearthing the memories of her parents. 

• Laurel McKelva Hand was a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark. She wore clothes of an interesting cut and texture, although her suit was wintry for New Orleans and had a wrinkle down the skirt. Her dark blue eyes looked sleepless. 

• But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Fay has been taking over the house and doing things that seem upsetting to Laurel, like painting her nails on the fine furniture. ;)

(Wanda) Fay, the silly stepmother, Clint's second wife, of Texan origin

Fay is by far the most interesting character in the novel. She is depicted as a sort of wild card, undeserving of the Judge in his staid home. She initially lies and says her family is dead, and then they inconveniently show up to mourn her husband's passing and she has to admit that they are all very much alive. Here are some Fay-isms:

• Fay, small and pale in her dress with the gold buttons, was tapping her sandaled foot.

• Fay laughed - a single, high note, as derisive as a jay's.

• On finding out her husband will need an eye operation: 'Just for a scratch? Why didn't those old roses go on and die?' He at first thinks he's sustained an eye scratch from the rose bush in trying to prune it. I love Fay's response. 

• 'I don't see why this had to happen to me.' lololol.

• 'What's the good of a Carnival if we don't get to go, hon?' Fay is very salty that they have come to New Orleans and end up spending Mardi Gras in a hospital.
• It was still incredible to Laurel that her father, at nearly seventy, should have let anyone new, a beginner, walk in on his life, that he had even agreed to pardon such a thing.

• Doctor Courtland: 'He collapsed.'  Fay: 'You picked my birthday to do it on!' There's a theme of things happening TO Fay, in case you hadn't picked that up ;)

• Fay, to Doctor Courtland: 'All I hope is you lie awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!'

• 'All on my birthday. Nobody told me this was going to happen to me!'

• When Fay's family arrives: 'Get back! - Who told them to come?'

The neighbors, a bunch of biddies and a random husband here and there, Laurel-friendly, anti-Fay

The neighbors are sort of a collective character in that we spend most of the second half of the book in Clint and Fay's/Laurel's home, and the neighbors have invited themselves over to organize things.

Miss Tennyson: 'Are we all going to have to feel sorry for her?'

'I hope I never see her again,' said Laurel. 

'There, girlie, you got it out,' said Miss Tennyson. 'She's a trial to us all and nothing else.' On how they really feel about Fay.

To Laurel: 'Once you leave after this, you'll always come back as a visitor. Feel free, of course - but it was always my opinion that people don't really want visitors.' This was interesting. The neighbors are all pretty insistent that Laurel stay in Mount Salus and try to sort of wrest the home from Fay, but Laurel is apparently an artist and lives in Chicago, so she's not swayed.

Some stand-out moments

But when are the big floats coming? 

I loved this exchange: 

'What a way to keep his promise,' said Fay. 'When he told me he'd bring me to New Orleans some day, it was to see the Carnival.' She stared out the window. 'And the Carnival's going on right now. It looks like this is as close as we'll get to a parade.'

Because it reminded me of when I went to visit my sister in New Orleans while she was living there. I didn't really want to go to any of the big Mardi Gras parades because I thought they'd be overwhelming and they're not really my scene, but there are many parades that happen in the weeks leading up to the main events, and so we decided to go to one of those. One of the major parades is 'Rex', so Diana took me to a parade called 'tit Rex' (like a short form of Petite Rex, or little Rex). They call themselves a 'microkrewe' and the parade floats are all miniatures, wheeled on children's playwagons and such. Diana and I were happily enjoying this parade when a couple emerged next to us and told us how they had to see a Mardi Gras parade and had driven something like 14 hours from Kentucky overnight. And they looked at us, and looked at the floats, and said, "When are the big floats coming?" And I felt very sad for them because the major parades were not for a few weeks. But it was also a hilarious moment. Fay's distance from Mardi Gras reminded me of that.

Are you a lady?

I think in various posts I've talked about whether I'd make a good XYZ based on the book's parameters, including things like a whaler, a fisherman, etc. For this book, a made a list of seeming requirements to be a lady:

Can you...

• Make a bed (yes! I make mine every day)
• Play bridge (erm, sort of, long story; parents both played)
• Separate an egg (yes!)
• Cook Sunday dinner (yes!)

So I guess I'm 3/4 of a lady! ;)

Mount Salus, Laurel's hometown and the location of Clint and Fay/Becky's home

I loved this description of the town:

The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.

The chimney swift, aka intruder alert, who lets itself into the home when Laurel is alone

Windows and doors alike were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside the door in the upstairs hall.

   What am I in danger of here? She wondered, her heart pounding. This was an interesting scene, maybe a metaphor for the world coming in to break up Laurel's nostalgia, maybe just a silly bird!

Words or ideas new to me

Straw Hat Day - the day designated for men to switch from winter hats to the straw hats of spring and summer – quietly started in New Orleans in the late 1910s. In April of 1922, Mayor Andrew McShane decided to make it official, issuing a Straw Hat Day proclamation and urging men to “put the old felt lid away and crown your bean with nifty, up-to-the-minute headgear.” Stores filled their windows with straw hats, resulting in record-breaking sales. Straw Hat Day is casually mentioned in the book and I thought, is this a thing I am supposed to know about? 

Referents and Reverberations

This is the section of my blog where I talk about books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referent) or after (reverberation). 

This line about Laurel and Fay keeping watch over Clint at the hospital:

It meant that Laurel and Fay were hardly ever int he same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining - really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord's strip of wallboard. Where there was no intimacy, Laurel shrank from contact; she shrank from that thin board and from the vague apprehension that some night she might hear Fay cry or laugh like a stranger at something she herself would rather not know.

Reminded me of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Charlotte says that her path rarely crosses that of her husband, Mr. Collins, and that she encourages him in pursuits that keep their paths parallel rather than perpendicular. 

And I enjoyed that Laurel has this scene: 

One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father. as Nicholas Nickleby is waiting for me to read it on my kitchen table.

Lines I Particularly Liked

• Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty saraband, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.

• This was like a nowhere.

• In the waiting room, Fay stood being patted by an old woman who was wearing bedroom slippers and holding a half-eaten banana in her free hand.

• She walked on, giving them the wide berth of her desolation. I love this line.

• The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house.

• Set deep in the swamp, where the black trees were welling with buds like red drops, was one low beech that had kept its last year's leaves, and it appeared to Laurel to travel along with their train, gliding at a magic speed through the cypresses they left behind.

• Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? Laurel feels less certain of her enmity for Fay when she catches her dozing, and I loved this line.

• From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning flickering now in the western sky, like the feathers of birds taking a bath.

I'll leave you with a few of my special favorite moments, blobbists. 

#1 - On the title:

Judge: Well, I'm an optimist. 

Dr. Courtland: I didn't know there were any more such animals. 

Judge: Never think you've seen the last of anything. :)

#2 - Laurel, on her parents reading to her and to each other:

She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. These were some of my favorite lines in the novel.

#3 - On Laurel and Phil watching the birds: 

All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world. 

  And they themselves were a part of the confluence.

Enjoy being in the confluence today, dear blobbists! This member of the confluence is off to 18th century France and the world of satire. Keep safe!

I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, first published in 2002

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Middlesex is a story about coming and going, a tale of making and unmaking. It follows the life of Cal, who was AFAB (assigned female at birth), raised as a girl to the age of 14, then discovered that he was intersex and identified as a male from that point forward. It is a fictional story, which I think is generally the case on this blob, but useful to remember, as it does not reflect the experiences of an intersex person, nor does it speak on behalf of or allude to the experiences of all intersex folks. In today's world, Cal may have identified as non-binary or changed their pronouns, but this book came out over 2 decades ago (I know, wild to think that 2002 is that long ago) so it is a product of its moment. Here's the family tree... 

               Euphrosyne, mother of

Lefty (Eleutherios) and Desdemona, parents of       ----    Cousin, Sourmelina, married to Jimmy Zizmo

     Milton              and         Zoe                           Theodora (Tessie), daughter to Sourmelina and Jimmy

Milton marries Tessie, they are the parents to

Cal   +  Chapter Eleven

If that family tree looks incestuous in its growth pattern, then you hit the nail on the head. Again, to be clear, in this work of fiction, Cal's hormonal/chromosomal status is impacted by inbreeding, but this should not be taken to suggest that that is the case for intersex folks writ large. The internet varies in its definition of the term/its expected prevalence, but it seems about 1.7% of the world's population, on the high end, is intersex. 

But I digress. The novel follows Cal (with an omniscient version of Cal serving as narrator) from his ancestors in Greece (Lefty and Desdemona, siblings and then Cal's grandparents), to his parents (distant cousins), to his early life, and then later jumping to his adult life in Germany.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well hello, blobbists! 

  I am potentially trying to finish up this blobbety blob around my 38th birthday, which is about a month away, so we'll see! There may be more entries in the next few weeks for those who care to read them ;)

 I enjoyed reading Middlesex, as it is a very beautifully written (imo) book. It won the Pulitzer Prize, so I think other people think it was very written as well. I thought Cal was a very relatable and intriguing protagonist, and the cast of characters with Lefty and Desdemona through to Cal was engaging. I think my only complaints about the book are (and sorry if by some Freak chance you read this, Mr. Eugenides, feel free to ignore my opinions as a mere reader):

• The book follows Detroit's history after making its way from a small part of Greece (now Turkey), and while I thought there were some beautiful Detroit historical nuggets, there were times when it felt a bit too much like I was reading a fictionalized history of Detroit. 

• While I believe that anyone should be able to write books from any perspective, and I see the skill and empathy required to do so, there was a part of me that couldn't get over the fact that this book about an intersex, potentially now non-binary person, was written by a cis straight man. More on this later. 

• In the end, I was a little bummed we didn't spend more time with Cal. We ended up rewinding all the way to his grandparents, and then fast-forwarding a bit to see him in the present, but the book kind of wraps when Cal ages back up to 14, so there was a whole wide gap of Cal's adulthood that was absent.

An introduction to some of the cast of characters

Father Mike, jilted lover of Tessie, and surprise last minute villain

I'll let you read the book to find out the villain part, but I liked this line about him: 

• His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.

Desdemona, lifetime worrying, long-suffering, gender prognosticating grandmother to Cal

Desdemona was my favorite character. She had such beautiful complexity to her, and I loved her from the moment we saw her sitting with her silkworms in (then) Greece. I know it probably sounds weird to say it, but I kind of ship an incestuous romance if it's written well (we all know how I feel about Hotel New Hampshire) and while there are obvious social and biological reasons why this is taboo, I also understand how close a sibling relationship can be, and it doesn't seem THAT wild to me that occasionally it would translate into something different, something more, for some folks. Here are some of my favorite Desdemona moments:

• Desdemona would have felt no more ashamed had she herself been for sale, displayed naked on the green sofa, a price tag hanging from her foot. This is after Lefty gambles away their money and they have to have a big yard sale and move in with their son, and it was just such a lovely image.

• The worst had happened. For the first time in her life my grandmother had nothing to worry about. 

• To anyone who never personally experienced it, it's difficult to describe the ominous, storm-gathering quality of my grandmother's fanning. Desdemona had six atrocity fans. I loved this - Desdemona fans herself with historical fans about Greek atrocities, which is obviously not a laughing matter. But the image of it is just so poignant and perfect. 

Lefty, later

Lefty is many different men throughout the book, but I liked him best in his later years, after he experienced speech paralysis after a stroke. Here's a line of how Cal describes their relationship. 

• Although he never said a word to me, I loved my Chaplinesque papou. His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement. It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps, the glaze of his hair. And yet he was not stiff at all but playful, even comedic. When he took me for rides in the car Lefty often pretended to fall asleep at the wheel. Suddenly his eyes would close and he would slump to one side. The car would continue on, unpiloted, drifting toward the curb. I laughed, screamed, pulled my hair and kicked my legs. At the last possible second, Lefty would spring awake, taking the wheel and averting disaster.

Desdemona and Lefty, star-crossed lovers who keep their secret (mostly) by pretending to re-meet as strangers when they immigrate to the US

I love this line:

• Early on, the emotional sympathy she'd felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she'd sometimes forgotten they were separate people. It reminds me of times when my sisters would cry when we were little and I would just plop right down next to them and start crying, too, because obviously we had something to cry about. ;)

Cal - NOTE: I will make reference to Cal's name when he was younger because he does so throughout the novel, but I want to acknowledge that for many trans folks (which Cal does not identify as, per se, but there are similarities of experience) this is considered a 'dead name' and it should not be used. 

• When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It's a little like being possessed. This was such an interesting idea, and I'm sure one that many folks who experience any kind of gender or identity shift have to navigate.

• And here is where my first dates generally go wrong. I lack sufficient data. I loved this line from Cal when he's trying to date a woman named Julie in Germany. She references an ex, and he fears that he will then be asked to share his laundry list of exes, only to be outed as not really having any. I feel this way about many of my dates, and while I could, of course, make up data, it would be so much easier from a societal pressure standpoint, to simply have some!

Milton, son of Desdemona and Lefty, husband (and cousin) of Tessie, father of Cal and Chapter Eleven

• He possessed a flinty self-confidence that protected him like a shell from the world's assaults. What would it feel like to have this, I wonder? Cal wonders at one point looking at German nudists what it would feel like to be so free with one's body without fear of retribution or rejection or ostracization, and I wonder what it would feel like to wear self-confidence like armor. I mean, I'm not un-confident in my self, but sometimes I see people who have this Milton-esque self-confidence and I wonder from whence it came. 

Tessie, aka Theodora, daughter to Sourmelina and Jimmy Zizmo, cousin to Desdemona and Lefty, wife to Milton and mother of Cal and Chapter Eleven

Tessie and Milton have a bit of a 'star-crossed lovers' vibe as well, since Desdemona is aware of how much the family is inter-mixing and wants to 'right her wrongs' at this point. They find their way to each other in the end, anyway, but I loved the scenes of them courting each other as teens. Milton plays the clarinet in an attempt to seduce and amuse Tessie, and we find out that she has picked up the accordion, partly to spite her mother.

• The accordion seemed nearly as big as she was and she played it dutifully, badly, and always with the suggestion of a carnival sadness. I love this sentence so much.

A few general reflections

Smyrna, a city that no longer exists in the same way, a kind of Brigadoon

I loved the descriptions of Smyrna, in part because they were so cosmopolitan and lovely, but also because my grandmother was born in a free city that now has a different name, so I think I've always found something quite romantic about being born somewhere that technically no longer exists. Smyrna, for reference, is where Lefty and Desdemona find themselves en route to the US, and it is undergoing a tumultuous time, including Armenian genocide. Dr. Philobosian, later a good family friend, meets and helps Lefty and Desdemona at this time, after which his family is tragically slaughtered.

• In Smyrna, East and West, opera and politakia, violin and zourna, piano and daouli blended as tastefully as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries. 

• (And did I mention how in the summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan... and the smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)

Balls of yarn to say goodbye

I think this was my favorite moment in the book. I don't know if it truly used to happen, but I love the idea of it either way. When Lefty and Desdemona board a ship, the Giulia, for America, this scene takes place.

• It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing on shore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.

Who do we write as, does it get weird, and why?

 I jotted this note down in my book as I was reading, and I'm still marinating on it. Like I said earlier, I think it's so important that we not dictate who writes as who, and that there is a desire and ability to write from many different identities and perspectives. That being said, there was a part of me that asked about Eugenides' motivation for writing this book, centering on this character. I think in particular I feel that there is still such an underrepresentation of the work of authors who identify as intersex, trans, and/or non-binary, and so it felt a little bit like a space was created for an important conversation, but in another way it was also taken away from someone for whom the story would be more authentic and more true. The cynical part of me also felt a little bit like, well, this feels like a fictionalized memoir of Eugenides' life, with some more historical heft and the 'twist' of an intersex character, since it needed something splashy to get a Pulitzer. But maybe that's harsh! In doing a very small amount of googling about this, I have found things like this: 

As a whole, the community agrees that Middlesex's intersex protagonist is not believable. Most significantly, the intersex community has had issue with the author's decision to make Middlesex's fictional protagonist intersex due to his grandparents being brother and sister. 

I definitely see the problematicness (is that a word?) of this, and portraying it as a sort of scientific basis for Cal's state of being.

Hair

I liked the way that hair came up in the novel, first for Desdemona, and later for Cal. 

• These braids were not delicate like a little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail. Years, seasons, and various weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. I had a friend who kept her hair very long for a very long time, and I like thinking about all the years and moments that were living in those fibers.

• Hair safely restored beneath her hairnet, Desdemona glowered around the yard, submerged in a despair too deep for tears. 

Cal, later: "Cut my hair? Never! I was still growing it out. My dream was to someday live inside it. I loved this line. 

Emotions, and how hard it is to express them

• Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', joy', or 'regret'. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age'. I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants', as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I love this paragraph, and I do wholeheartedly agree.

Unanswered Questions

• Why is Chapter Eleven called that? OK, so I consulted the interwebs, and apparently Eugenides explains this (on page 512) because Cal's brother bankrupts the family, and that's the reference to Chapter Eleven, but that is all they ever call him. But that doesn't make sense because he wouldn't do that until he was much older, so what did they call him before? And also I'm a pretty close reader and I 100% missed the explanation, so maybe it could have been a bit clearer. It felt a little too 'twee' to have a character with a wacky random name when it didn't really have that much meaning in the end.

Referents and Reverberations

There were a few books in particular that this book reminded me of as I read it. 

(1) Proust/In Search of Lost Time - this line from Middlesex: 

• An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my father had it rained that night.

Reminded me of this line from The Guermantes Way, on why we wake up each morning as ourselves and no one else 

• So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.

(2) Hotel New Hampshire - for many reasons, not least of which the siblings/lovers storyline. For some reason this line in particular made me think of HNH:

• For a while we lived with a single lightbulb, which Milton carried from room to room. 'This way I can keep track of how much power we're using', he said, screwing the bulb into the dining room fixture so that we could sit down to dinner.

(3) The Night Watchman - there's a section in the later part of the novel where Cal runs away, not wanting a medical surgery, and ends up being an exhibitionist (Hermaphroditus) of sorts to make a living in San Francisco. It reminded me of a part in The Night Watchman, a Louise Erdrich novel, where Patrice is kidnapped and forced to 'exhibit' herself as Babe the Blue Ox with some excessive cleavage and a skintight suit.

Lines I Liked:

• My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent.

• Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. 

• Automobiles were the new pleasure domes.

• Despite my grandmother's corrective lenses, the world remained out of focus.

• Generally speaking, American's like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. This is specifically in reference to Americans not wanting a Greek president/the failed attempt of Dukakis.

• I never know what I feel until it's too late.

Words that were new to me:

rebetika - Rebetiko, plural rebetika, occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico, is a term used today to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek music which in the 1930s went through a process of musical syncretism and developed into a more distinctive musical genre

Well friends, there you have it! Onwards to Ms. Welty and The Optimist's Daughter. 

Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human.

 Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, first published in 1936

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

This book sort of has a plot. That's not loaded with any good or bad opinions on that, it's just, imo, the truth. It's very lyrical, and very moving, and while a few big things here and there 'happen', it all kind of feels like it's taken place somewhere in the background, and what's really most important is the poetry of the prose. 

Here's our cast of characters: 

Hedvig and Guido Volkbein, parents of...

Felix Volkbein, the 'Baron' (not really a baron, long story), who eventually marries -- Robin Vote     

And who together have a son that they name Guido.

But then Robin leaves Felix for a woman named -- Nora Flood, and for a while they are very passionately in love, until Robin leaves Nora for a woman named == Jenny Petheridge. Nora is still very much in love with Robin, btw. 

Everyone has a mutual friend named Dr. Matthew O'Connor, who appears throughout and tries to console the jilted ex-lovers of Robin, and the story mostly takes place in three cities: Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Hello, blobbists! 

  It is a not-so-crisp day in February, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on my latest book. I finished Nightwood a while ago, and while there isn't much in the way of plot, as I mentioned, there's a lot of exquisite writing, so I found myself taking my time with this post. I don't know that I particularly liked reading Nightwood, but I am very glad that I read it, if that makes any sense. ;) 

My thoughts on the introduction

My copy of the book starts off with an introduction by Jeanette Winterson, who seems to be a rather famous British author. As you know if you read my blob regularly, I don't like to read things that aren't the book before I read the book, so I read the introduction afterwards, and I found it quite surprisingly enchanting, and quite spot-on in terms of the reflections on the book. Here are some of my favorite of Winterson's lines:

• Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined. Isn't this a beautiful image?

• Robin's passivity, Jenny's predatory nature, and Nora's passionate devotion make an impossible triangle. The daily assaults of selfishness and self-harm do not offer a picture of love between women as anything safe or easy. Oooh, this one really stuck with me. I've definitely seen the book described as a lesbian 'cult classic', and I can see why, and how revolutionary it must have been to emerge in the 1930s featuring so many versions of love between women.

• Nightwood is not afraid of feeling. 

• The best texts are time machines; they are of their moment, and can tell it, and they can take us back there later. But they are something more, too - they live on into the future because they were never strapped into time. This is just lovely. 

• Nightwood, peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves. Again, such stunning prose! Perhaps I must find myself some Jeanette Winterson to read!

General reflections

Okay, well enough of other people talking about the book. Let's discuss what I really liked about it. 

Writing (like Proust) about music

Something I've come across in reading 'classic' novels is more prose specifically written to describe classical music, and as a classically-trained cellist, I find it so enchanting. Maybe there's more prose out there in contemporary fiction that discusses music, but it seems to have been more 'au courant' at certain periods to describe things like operas, symphonies, and small quartets, like Proust's spectacular descriptions of music at Madame Verdurin's house. Here's a line I loved:

Three massive pianos (Hedvig had played the waltzes of her time with the masterly stroke of a man, in the tempo of her blood, rapid and rising - that quick mannerliness of touch associated with the playing of the Viennese, who, though pricked with the love of rhythm, execute its demands in the duelling manner) sprawled over the thick dragon's-blood pile of rugs from Madrid.

What you drink based on where you are

There's a great line about beverages and geography that I loved.

Austria and tea could never go together. All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them. What do you think the beverage of your city or town is, blobbist? Do you agree with this sentiment? If Philly had a drink, I think it would be...water ice? LOL. I don't think that counts as a beverage but whatever. It's sort of liquid.

Zeugma

Again, if you've been following along, you know how much of a sucker I am for zeugma. Here's how the internet defines it: zeugma - a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts).

His chest was as heavy as if it were supporting the combined weight of their apparel and their destiny.

The cast of characters, presented in vignettes

Guido #1, on hiding his blood

The elder Guido is hiding from his wife and family that he has Jewish roots, which I thought might end up playing a larger part, but ultimately served as a sort of brewing/festering family secret in a time when anti-Semitism was agressively present. (Not that it's nonexistent today, tbh.)

• on 'family portraits' that are hung on his wall: The likeness was accidental. Had anyone cared to look into the matter they would have discovered these canvases to be reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors. Guido had found them in some forgotten and dusty corner and had purchased them when he had been sure that he would need an alibi for the blood. I love so much about this - it's basically the equivalent of putting up photos with their stock photo in them and being like, yeah, those are my grandparents/cousins/etc. I also think 'alibi for the blood' is a stunning phrase.

'Baron' Felix

Felix is not, in fact a Baron, as his father has made up his lineage as part of his attempt to hide his roots. I don't think Felix actually knows this, though.

• Felix was heavier than his father and taller. His hair began too far back on his forehead. His face was a long stout oval, suffering a laborious melancholy. Wow. What a stunning portrayal of a man. ;)

• He was usually seen walking or driving alone, dressed as if expecting to participate in some great event, though there was no function in the world for which he could be said to be properly garbed; wishing to be correct at any moment, he was tailored in part for the evening and in part for the day. This is so spectacularly sad, and paints such a perfect picture of Felix, who seems to be living in a sort of permanent stage of FOMO.

• In nineteen hundred and twenty he was in Paris (his blind eye had kept him out of the army), still spatted, still wearing his cutaway, bowing, searching, with quick pendulous movements, for the correct thing with which to pay tribute: the right street, the right cafe, the right building, the right vista. Again, Felix is so perfectly portrayed as a man without a home, without a real sense of self, always trying to find where he fits.

Nora Flood

Nora is the first woman to be Robin's lover, and the one she leaves Felix for. Nora and Jenny are, imho, significantly more likable than Robin, but perhaps that's something about how love works; it doesn't always attract us to the kindest people, and we cannot always control our desires.

• The strangest 'salon' in America was Nora's. It was the 'paupers' salon for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine; all these could be seen sitting about her oak table before the huge fire, Nora listening, her hand on her hound, the firelight throwing her shadow and his high against the wall. Of all that ranting, roaring crew, she alone stood out. Don't you just want to drop everything and go to Nora's salon? I sure do!

• There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own descent. I'm still not really sure what this sentence means, but I love it.

• One missed in her a sense of humour. Her smile was quick and definite, but disengaged.

• Matthew, to Nora: 'You never loved anyone before, and you'll never love anyone again, as you love Robin.' This seems to be the case for anyone who loves Robin, which seems to be unlucky for them in the end.

• Nora, to Matthew: 'There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can't, I can't wait for ever!' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart!' So sad! So heartbreaking!

Jenny Petherbridge

Jenny Petherbridge kind of steals Robin out from under Nora, although again, I'm not so sure Robin is a such a prize. 

• Jenny Petherbridge was a widow, a middle-aged woman who had been married four times. Each husband had wasted away and died; she had been like a squirrel racing a wheel day and night in an endeavour to make them historical; they could not survive it. I love this line so much. 

• She had no sense of humour or peace or rest. Apparently Robin is attracted to women without a sense of humor. 

• The books in her library were other people's selections. This is a real black mark on her character in my book. But at least she has a library!

• She was avid and disorderly in her heart. Oooh, I love this line.

• She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. And this one. 

Little Guido, son of the 'Baron' Felix and Robin

• Mentally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. This is such an amazing sentence to capture little Guido. 

The Doctor (Dr. Matthew O'Connor), an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world

• the Doctor - My mind is so rich that it is always wandering. ME TOO, Matthew, ME TOO.

• Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. Lololll, what makes a liar valuable, I wonder?

• 'Oh,' he cried. 'A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my kind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives?' I love this so much. Matthew is talking to Nora, who is complaining of her heartbreak from Robin, and this is Matthew's comeback. 

• Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Well? Are you? ;)

Robin Vote, the center of the love triangle (or love square?), who may or may not be worth the fuss

• She hates everyone near her. WOW. What a real catch!

• She wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. OK, that's not difficult or problematic at all. 

• She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. What a force! I love this line, because I feel like it so perfectly captures her aura.

And now allow me to present: the three eras of Robin

1 - Courting Robin/The Robin and Felix era

• She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man's image is a figure of doom. Because of this, Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Isn't that just Robin in a nutshell? Painful, but also a happiness?

• Robin took to wandering again, to intermittent travel from which she came back hours, days later, disinterested. People were uneasy when she spoke to them; confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning. God, this is such a beautiful line. 

• Felix, later: Why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark for the rest of my life. Poor Felix! Like Nora, and later Jenny, I think everyone is a bit worse for the wear after loving Robin!

2 - The Robin and Nora Era

• Nora closed her house. They travelled from Munich, Vienna and Budapest into Paris. Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget. This is just so stunning, and feels like such an apt capture of their relationship.

• In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours. 

• Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home. I love this so much, as if Robin is a pet that needs to have a constant scent of home to stay rooted.

• To keep her (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew now that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her. 

• As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce. God, I love this line. I mean, that is a serious and likely often painful kind of love, but just stunning prose.

• Surprising, isn't it, I'm happier when I'm alone now, without her, because when she was here with me, in this house, I had to watch her wanting to go and yet to stay. This seems to be the case with many of Robin's lovers, where the absence of her brings a kind of peace, but also a deep sense of loss.

• Matthew - Oh, for God's sweet sake, didn't she ever disgust you! Weren't you sometimes pleased that you had the night to yourself, wishing, when she did come home, that it was never? LOLOLOLOL I love this line so much. Matthew is talking to Nora, who can't stop waxing poetic about her time with Robin, and he's finally just like, come on, didn't she ever just GET ON YOUR NERVES?!

• Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? There are so many sentences in this book that I feel like could be starters or prompts for entire novels. There's another introduction by T.S. Eliot, who championed this book and its publication, and I can see why he loved the poetry of the lines so much.

• 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything, because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember. Wow. So powerful. 

3 - The Robin and Jenny era

• As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin. She was a 'squatter' by instinct. I love this description of how Jenny covets and then steals Robin. 

• Jenny knew about Nora immediately; to know Robin ten minutes was to know about Nora. Robin spoke of her in long, rambling, impassioned sentences. It had caught Jenny by the ear - she listened, and both loves seemed to be one and her own. From that moment the catastrophe was inevitable. Again, a whole novel could start with that: "from that moment the catastrophe was inevitable".

• She (Jenny) did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence. Jenny walked up and down her darkened hotel room, crying and stumbling. Again, sadly it seems like winning Robin's love is not such a great prize, but Jenny must find this out on her own, just as Felix and Nora did.

Referents and Reverberations

This is the section where I talk about books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referents) or after (reverberations). 

There were two things that this book really reminded me of: 

(1) Proust - The way Proust writes about love, especially unrequited, or jilted love, felt so familiar as I was reading these descriptions of Felix and Nora and Jenny's love for Robin, and their feeling that something absolutely life-alteringly bad would happen if they didn't pursue it, even at their own peril. Here's one of Proust's lines as a reminder: 

And this malady which Swann's love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.

Also, the way Barnes described music was very reminiscent of/made me nostalgic for the way Proust writes about classical music.  

(2) The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, particularly the Virginia Woolf narrative - something about the way that Robin was simultaneously desperately desired by her partners but also kind unable to be fixed in place or time felt very reminiscent of Woolf's wanderings and unwillingness/inability to stay moored to her husband. 

Lines I Liked (this is a trimmed down version, because there were so many!)

• Hedvig had liked things in twos and threes.

• She seemed to be expecting a bird. I love this line so much. What does it mean to be expecting a bird? I love it. 

• He moved with a humble hysteria. Mm. This line is just so fantastic.

• The last muscle of aristocracy is madness. Again. So great.

• Her thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion.

• The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart. This was really in contention for the title, but ultimately I felt like the title captured Robin's intensity better.

• An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

• Bend down the tree of knowledge and you'll unroost a strange bird.

• Do you think there is no lament in this world but your own? Again, could be a whole novel!

• If you don't want to suffer you should tear yourself apart. God, so eloquent. 

I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines, describing some of Robin's intense attachments. 

They were so 'haunted' of each other that separation was impossible.

The louder she cried out the farther away went the floor below, as if Robin and she, in their extremity, were a pair of opera glasses turned to the wrong end, diminishing in their painful love; a speed that ran away with the two ends of the building, stretching her apart.

With hope that you experience love, but perhaps never a love so passionately painful as that of falling in love with Robin Vote, I'll leave you to return to the rest of your day! Keep passing the open windows, keep safe, and keep reading! I'm on to Middlesex.