My father read us bedtime stories at night, and our older sister read to us most anytime. Our favorite book was an old cardboard Whitman number which kept getting re-published under various names and with varying cover art, but which contained stories that still seem excellent today.

Whitman Story book

And now that my son is seven, the prime age for listening to stories, any stories at all, as a means of delaying lights-out time, he makes sure I read to him every night. Of course I've been reading to him all his life: picture books, the Whitman story book, some old story-a-day collections, and the Beginner's Bible. But now we've arrived at a new level of bedtime reading: now we like chapter books, we like plots and continuity and characters we get to know. Now we are reading Literature.

Dodecahedron

We started off with Norton Juster's amazing Phantom Tollbooth. If you haven't read it too, well you just simply need to click here before you read another blogograph. And see the movie too, so you can sing the songs. In the meantime, say hello to Dodecahedron boy. You'll want to meet him.

Well, after that, we kind of got into a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle muddle. We read all four titles, one after another. And then we happened to be in New York, at a bookstore, needing desperately to spend money, and there was a brand spanking new Mrs. Piggle Wiggle title, edited and completed by Betty MacDonald's daughter--Happy Birthday Mrs Piggle Wiggle!

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle

The other thing we slipped into was Rufus M., written with great love and subtle skill by Eleanor Estes, a librarian and Newbery Award winner. Rufus M is a second-grader who lives in Connecticut during the First World War--but that setting cannot contain him.

Rufus M

I have loved Rufus M ever since Mrs. Shirley Collier, my fourth grade teacher, read it to the class at Alexander School in 1966. I've read it many times, presented an oral book report on it for which I had to dress up like Rufus, checked out a recorded version of it for the pleasure of having it read to me once again, and written a paper on it for a Children's Literature class. No matter how I've changed since the last read, Rufus always speaks to the best in me. Have you met him? Go and say hello--you'll find him on the front steps of his house, looking for the Duke in a Palmer Cox Brownie book and wondering if his beans have sprouted yet.

And that brings us to our current read, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods. I was afraid Ben might not like it so much, it being about little girls, but we tried it anyway because my much-loved third grade teacher, Miss Ardace Rolph, read it to our class of boys and girls. And indeed he does like it, especially the bears, black panthers, and deer in it, and all the interesting food items. We just finished the chapter about the dance at Grandpa's; I confess to having skipped the descriptions of Aunt Docia and Aunt Ruby's petticoats, corsets, calico dresses, and hair-dos.

UK Cover of LHITBW

It's 9:02 pm!  Time for us to get upstairs and start reading Chapter 9.  Laura and Mary are "Going to Town!"  And what will we read, you ask, after we finish Little House in the Big Woods ?  We will read Robert Lawson's Rabbit Hill, and after that, we might just have a look at Mr. Popper's Penguins. But you never know--Captain Underpants may come looking for us, and catch us up.

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"The period in the campaign of 1812 from the battle of Borodino to the expulsion of the French proved that a battle won is not only not the cause of a conquest, but is not even an invariable sign of conquest; it proved that the force that decided the destiny of nations lies not in conquerors, not even in armies and battles, but in something else."

Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, p. 1032.

War and Peace

Long before I ever tried to read "War and Peace" itself, I read a commentary of it by Percy Lubbock. He argued, in "The Craft of Fiction," that W&P was a flawed book, flawed in that Tolstoy had started out to write a story about the long rise and sweep of time's wheel, the successive march of generations, a story he could have entitled "Youth and Age," but then he allowed a second story to cut across it and distract from it. The second, intruding story was the history of the Napoleonic War in Russia, which should have been merely a distant and "irrelevant uproar," but was allowed, occasionally, to become the focus of the book instead. Lubbock said War and Peace is wasteful of its subject, because of its loose, unstructural form.

So that's the idea of W&P I've been carrying around for maybe 20 years, along with many others from Lubbock's book. He makes a convincing case for it.

But now that I have nearly finished reading the book myself and can survey it from the majestic height of 1,037 pages, I'm not so sure that Lubbock was correct. I think the book is about the convergence of war and peace, the steadily diminishing margin between them, until at last war comes crashing down on the heads of people who have not prepared themselves for it, though they saw it coming from far away--and also about how they put their lives back together again when the war is over.

Napoleon's Cannons

This book is not a peacetime story that happens to erupt in sporadic battles. Tolstoy introduces his characters in their peacetime pursuits and pleasures, showing their soirees and flirtations and duels, but behind them is a steady drumbeat of approaching war, measuring off so many beats until Price Andrei falls at Borodino, until Pierre is taken prisoner, until Moscow is abandoned and burned.  [The picture of Napoleon's cannons, said to have been left behind in Russia when the French army was turned back in 1812, are from this website.]

Tolstoy spends many pages exploring the nature of the "something else" that decides the destiny of nations. But not in conquest only: it is the same "something else" --the same kind of "something else"-- found at Anna Pavlovna's soirees, but never mentioned; the "something else" that permits Prince Vassily to claim longstanding opinions opposite to those he claimed the week before, or to read a proclamation with exaggerated expression unrelated to its sense; that causes the inhabitants of Moscow to make no plans or preparations for evacuating the city until the final hour has come and preparation is no longer possible; that causes Pierre to become a Mason and his wife to kill herself; and so on through the book.

The Craft of Fiction

"War and Peace" is not a fractured book; it has its unifying theme. but despite this argument with Lubbock, "The Craft of Fiction" is worth reading too, especially his appreciation of Tolstoy:

"[War and Peace] is crowded with life, at whatever point we face it; intensely vivid, inexhaustibly stirring, the broad impression is made by the big prodigality of Tolstoy's invention. If a novel could really be as large as life, Tolstoy could easily fill it; his great masterful reach never seems near its limit; he is always ready to annex another and yet another tract of life, he is only restrained by the mere necessity of bringing a novel somewhere to an end. And then, too, this mighty command of spaces and masses is only half his power. He spread further than any one else, but he also touches the detail of the scene, the single episode, the fine shade of character, with exquisite lightness and precision. Nobody surpasses, in some ways nobody approaches, the easy authority with which he handles the matter immediately before him at the moment, a roomful of people, the brilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, a boy on a horse; whatever his shifting panorama brings into view, he makes of it an image of beauty and truth that is final, complete, unqualified. Before the profusion of War and Peace the question of its general form is scarcely raised. It is enough that such a world should have been pictured; it is idle to look for proportion and design in a book that contains a world."

Now, doesn't that make you want to read War and Peace too? And after you do, you'll forever get to say you have!

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Someone said May is a month that deserves all of its 31 days. True it may be--but where do they go? I distinctly remember being busy every minute of them but did I accomplish anything? I did not. I have as little to show for this month of May as my pitiful lilac bush, which put out buds early in the month but never blossomed. We're just a couple of slackers. Maybe we were too cold, or maybe one of us played Jewel Quest II too much. But we only did it for mental health reasons.

Em suggested that I post a list of books I want to read, for a low-stress blog update. She chose seven titles for hers, a number that sounds good to me. So here I go, and if you notice any stress oozing through, well--it has to do with me not having accomplished doodily percent of all I need to, that's all.

Books I Either Want To Read Or Have To

Tolstoy, Leo.  War and Peace.  This is the September selection for the book discussion group I help lead called Classics Revisited. I've been lugging this four-pound tome around since January, and I'm only on page 802. Had to take time out to read Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow and Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which are also book discussion group selections.

Chabon, Michael.  Gentlemen of the Road
Yes, I did just say I read this already, but I have to read it again in order to be ready to discuss it June 27. The proper nouns are a little tricky. Not as tricky as the ones in War and Peace, but tricky enough when you have to read in the midst of distracting noises such as the Nickelodeon channel on television and a seven-year-old calling "Mom, watch! Watch! Watch! Watch! Watch! Watch till I tell you to stop!"

Carter, Stephen. New England White   Another book discussion title, another four-pounder, though not, mercifully, as weighty in other senses as War and Peace. And it's a mystery; in my experience mysteries do not make for good group discussions. But it looks interesting; we'll see what the experience turns out to be.

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees.  The next to the last book selection I have to read, this one for August. Looks pretty good.

Ali, Monica.  Brick Lane.  Another September book discussion title, looks interesting.

Progoff, Ira.  At a Journal Workshop. I've owned this book since 1977, when the first edition was published, and have dabbled now and then with its "intensive journaling" methods, which really do seem to work just as the book says they will. I get up early in the morning to work on it: the "twilight imagery" sections require one to be in a half-asleep state and at 6 a.m. I have no trouble producing one.

The New Yorker. Is it cheating to count a magazine? I'm going to say it isn't, if you really plan to read it and then you do. Emily got me a subscription for my birthday and I have been reading it what I call "cover to cover," although truthfully I have skipped some of the reviews in the back, once in awhile. But I read all the short pieces, the profiles, the humor pieces, the feature articles, and the short stories. And the cartoons.

I wish War and Peace had cartoons.

Okay, I'll pick another one, because Emily didn't count on her list all the magazines she reads.

Tufte, Virginia. The Artful Sentence: Syntax as Style.  This book takes a load of pressure off me because it's the book I would like, more than any other, to have written myself. So I can forget all about needing to attain Virginia's level of education, read all that she has read, figure out for myself all that she has understood about language, write all of it down very charmingly and court a publisher. The work is all done for me and I didn't even have to buy a padded envelope. This summer I'd like to be left alone with it long enough to find out how I --I mean Virgina-- brought it all home. I can't wait to see how we handled adverb placement.

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Here is the box of birthday surprises that just arrived from my daughter Emily...

Pink_presents

See, the wonderful thing about having preferences is that people can indulge them for you.

If I hadn't finally figured out that deep down, all these many years, I have secretly loved the color pink best of all but never admitted it even to myself because I thought something must be wrong with liking pink, that it wasn't vigorous enough, and that I ought to prefer a more strenuous color, if I hadn't finally got past all that, I say--then this marvelous box of surprises could never have been assembled with such ingenuity to strike me pink.

My daughter knows me very well. She knows I love my bath products--see the Pink Paradise Bath Fizzies? Notice the Lavender and Chamomile Johnson's? (Originally that product was called "Fussy Baby Bath" and we got it when Ben was little. Then we got it for me and called it "Fussy Mommy Bath." I haven't had any for a long time.)

She knows that I love both New York and the New Yorker magazine, and here is a subscription to it. And I collect bookmarks, and though  you can't see it here, there's a bookmark in the box and it's pretty and pink. And there's even a little pink chapstick tube, because I must have one in my pocket at all times, and a little baby lotion bottle, which I always travel with.

She knows I love fancy socks, and pretty make-up bags, and chocolates, and yes--even that toothpaste is a treat, because it's my absolute favorite but I usually cop out and buy a cheaper kind. And she knows I love hand-made things, so she cut out flowers and laid them on top of the tissue paper, where I saw them first of all.

Emily was always a very generous child who loved giving gifts. At Christmas time, she'd want me to have more presents under the tree, so she'd go around the house finding little doodads and wrapping them up for me. On Christmas morning I'd open her presents and find my own pincushion or some little framed pictures that had been around the house for years and say "Oh, this is so nice, Emily! It's just what I wanted!" She'd be smiling with her whole little body, she was so pleased with it all. And the little doodads she "gave" me became new and special to me after that.

At 23, Emily has a much more profound understanding of shopping than she did at age 5, but her joy and affection in gift-giving are as charming and sound as ever. It still moves her mother to exclaim, "Oh this is so nice, Emily! It's just what I wanted!"

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Today is my birthday. I like my birthday, both the specific day it falls on and the privilege of growing older. I am 51 and happy about it.

Mom

This particular birthday is sad too: it's the first one of my whole life that my Mom hasn't been in the world. She died last October, late at night in the nursing home... She would have been 84 in the morning.  She wouldn't have known it--she didn't know who she was, she didn't know who any of us were, she wanted to go home but she didn't know where home was. So it wasn't sad that by leaving us she didn't have to be confused and frightened anymore.

What's sad is that the whole, complete person she was is gone. Today there would have been a card from her--always a sweet, pretty, flowery one with the nicest message. Some years I was able to drive up north and spend May 7 with her and my sister; if I couldn't I called her on the phone and always said the same thing, "Thank you for having me!" because it made her laugh. And she always answered, "Well, it was my pleasure."

She taught me how to embroider when I was 6 years old, to crochet when I was 9, and to sew my own clothes when I was 14. She could draw pictures of pretty ladies in ruffled gowns, she sang in a beautiful soprano voice, she planted lilac bushes at each new home she lived in. She loved Glenn Miller, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and all movies with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Toward the end of her life she'd forgotten many things, but she could still play poker.  

Today I am going to spend a little part of the morning at an antique store and see if there's some relic from my childhood I can add to my collection. Then I'll cut out the pieces for a cloth doll, and make a treat to take to work with me. I'll work my reference desk shift, and when I come home from work, my husband and son will take me to dinner anywhere I want to go, and I'll pick Cracker Barrel. And maybe I can work on the doll some more before bedtime. It will be a wonderful day, it just won't include my Mom, and I have to get used to it.

Even so, I know that I am one of the lucky ones. Other people didn't get to have a kind and loving mother like mine was, and that is far sadder than to have had one and lost her. I hope life is finding other ways to bless them.

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Penelope doll has lived in my house without underwear or shoes for 13 years.  It's something of a joke with my other dollmaking friends. But even without underclothes and footwear, she is still a charming doll, and my daughter played happily with her and her sister-Penelope doll. Because one Penny had short curly red hair and the other had long brown braids, Emily played that they were Betsy and her best friend from Carolyn Heywood's Betsy books.

But now Penelope hardly knows how to act. In the last week, she has acquired two pairs of underpants, two pairs of shoes, four dresses, and a flannel nightgown. Moreover, during the day when she has to stay for hours in the sewing room with the other dolls, she sits atop of stack of fabric lengths chosen and purchased with her in mind.

Penelope_greendress

Here she is in her hostess dress, a pattern I designed based on her Norwegian blouse pattern. The grosgrain ribbons are stitched into the side seams, then criss-cross in back to tie in front. Does she need a hostess dress? Well, I don't know that she does. But I know that at 13 years old, she likes to dress up in sophisticated young-lady clothes sometimes, so long as she can jump back into her jeans and camp shirts and go back to being a kid. This Penelope is going to stay 13. Her brown-braided sister is only 10. I'm really going to have to do something different with their names--two sisters called Penelope are kind of confusing.

And she is definitely getting a new wig, probably a chestnut brown short and curly one. Her auburn hair is too limiting, as I want to dress her in my favorite color, pink, and as Anne of Green Gables knew very well, pink and auburn are incompatible.

Img_Mascots

My son requests me to share with the world this picture of his mascots: Racky Raccoon, Foxy Fox, Mounty Mountain Lion, Squirrely Squirrel, and Froggy Frog. They are finger puppets, very realistically and beautifully made by Folkmanis .  He started collecting them when Floyd Raccoon traveled to New York City with us. Floyd and my son got along so well, Floyd sent one of his cousins over to live with us, and the family of mascots has grown since then.

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When I was a girl, I loved ballet very much. I rarely saw anyone actually dance; I just looked at the pictures of dancers in library books. So ballet to me was a series of beautiful but motionless poses, and I thought that ballerinas could stay on their toes forever.

Img_ballet3055

I was thrilled when my parents brought home from the store for me (around 1965) a lovely bedspread with sketches of four different graceful ballerinas. I have a particular reason for showing them to you. Here they are:

The pink kneeling girl was the only one I named: she was Daphne.

Img_ballet2053

I loved the girl tying the ribbons on her slippers: I had a great fascination for toe shoes. (And one day I owned pairs of my own, but that's another story.)

A third girl was the one below, caught in a jump whose name I do not know--maybe it is made-up, as it looks fine in the air but seems like it would be tough to land gracefully. Well anyway, there she is. For our purposes today, we don't need a picture of the fourth ballerina. Though some day I may come back and add her, just for archival purposes.

Img_ballet1051

So now you've seen them all.

A few weeks ago at the library, I was working with a book truck full of old Vogue magazines from the 50s and 60s. They had been bound only in cheap cardboard covers, and we were about to send them off to the bindery to have them re-bound in sturdy, gorgeous red covers that would support and protect them better.

And of course, no person could resist looking old Vogues, can she? I couldn't. I opened up an issue from 1958 and idly turned the first pages...Now this is the part where fate steps in, where worlds collide, where, to be less drama-queen about it, a coincidence occurred. Because, over an ad for tampons, this is the picture I saw:

Img_vogue_ad050

Now I have noticed that for some reason, other people are not as bonkers about coincidences as I am. So we will gloss over my likely being the only person in the building  (city, country, world) who knows about the 1965 ballerina bedspread and has seen the 1958 tampon ad. Instead, I'll just say, if I could draw as beautifully as this artist could, and I saw those ballerinas in a tampon ad, I would have wanted to immortalize them too, or at least improve their venue. And I would have been glad to know they made a little girl happy.

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Thanks to Auntie Bunny for choosing my blog for the "Arte y Pico" award! An award for doing a blog that she finds inspiring--what an encouragement to bloggers to be acknowledged in such an exciting way!  Auntie Bunny's blog happens to be one that I find very inspiring as well.

Arte y Pico

Now I have the happy task of choosing five other bloggers who inspire me, and presenting the award to them. I can easily find that many just on Vox. Of course we DO have all the best bloggers on Vox, so that's no surprise!

And thanks to the Arte y pico people (http://www.arteypico.blogspot.com/) for inventing the award. Their blog is in Spanish, but they have some very cool pictures happening!

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Check out AuntieBunny's posting on her vox blog about the book "How to Make Foreign Dolls and Their Costumes" by Julienne Hallen. (Posting headline is "What to Do, What to Do.") http://auntiebunny.vox.com/

It's a 40s-vintage book whose main doll pattern is cute, fun, quaint, and easy--in short, a lovely, low-stress design to have fun with for a challenge. And the book is available in libraries, inter-library loan, ebay, second-hand. etc.

Everyone who makes the doll can post pictures on our Vox blogs and share them with the group. Take a look, and see which of the costumes gets you itching to stitch!

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At first I was not very happy with this "Material Girl" pattern, the one I have named "Marisol." But now that she's been lounging around the sewing room for a few weeks (hard for her to do anything but lounge, since she has no head or lower legs), I'm getting used to her shape. The wide hips bothered me at first, since the illustrations lead you to expect a less extreme curve there.

But then I had another look at my Veronica doll, and noticed that her hourglass figure is just a smidge more bottom-heavy than I would have designed it. But that isn't a fault in her--wide hips hold out her skirts (or will hold them

Doll_Marisol

out if I ever make any skirts) And so it is not a fault in Marisol either.

I think the doll must have been intended to have hips like this, despite the drawings (which aren't to scale elsewhere, either). Because, as you see, the upper thigh pieces fit along the bottom edge just right--only about a quarter inch could be reduced.

So I'll just keep reminding myself that Marisol will look good in her clothes. Unless I mess up her face. Then she isn't going to get any clothes. I still haven't bought one of her $12 costume patterns yet anyway.

One thing I do not like is having to stuff that whole upper body through the neck. That's a tricky, four-piece neck with bias edges she has there, not easily replaced if it gets ruined during the stuffing process. If I make her again I will leave an opening in the upper back to stuff her.

The arms are set-in like sleeves; there is no separation or hinge to give them movement. The answer, according to the instructions, is to stuff them "softly," which is hard for me to do, with my "hard stuffing" habit, but is good for me to learn. In the picture, one is "softly" stuffed and the other is not stuffed at all.

Well, I am waiting on snail-mail delivery of the 45 mm doll joint I need for the neck (though after stuffing through it I may need a 65 mm one)  so I will finish up the lower legs and start thinking about the head before they arrive.

After getting this far on Marisol, I took a break and made Penelope a cozy new flannel nightgown! She still owns no underwear...But the weekend is only half gone!  More Penelope pictures to come...

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