Kurt Vonnegut special

For Kurt Vonnegut, “the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it.” His tragi-comic novels have earned him a dedicated following and critical acclaim. Their highly imaginative plots—informed by, but not limited to, science fiction—describe a world forced to reenact an entire decade after a temporal disturbance (Timequake), a man who accidentally befriends Adolf Hitler (Deadeye Dick), and a substance that will instantaneously turn all the world’s water into ice (Cat’s Cradle). Although events occur on a worldwide scale, we never lose our intimate perspective into the daily life and personal reactions of Vonnegut’s characters. Their unpredictable presence makes it so that his apocalyptic stories, although grim, never stop being funny. As he said, “[l]aughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Books by Kurt Vonnegut are 10% off this week. Come by and see him: he's nestled in the corner of our new books section.

Review of "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

We have all sat in lecture halls, discerning Shakespearean insight into history textbook drama. We have been seduced by the beautiful portrayals--the high collar lace and bodice of Hollywood--in The Other Boleyn Girl and Showtime’s The Tudors. Countless books have been written. And still our fascination with Henry VIII’s brutal, passionate reign over 16th century England lives on. We are enamored by the soap-like drama: desire, anguish, exultation, deals, spies, decapitations, and fabulous clothes (1). While we are captured and amused by Anne Boleyn’s seduction and Henry’s child-like temper, we forget the sociopolitical backdrop: England was in the midst of a religious upheaval. The man seated in the heavens, pulling the strings of his royal marionettes, was the infamous Thomas Cromwell.

Historically, Cromwell has been painted as a manipulative, power-hungry fiend, concerned only with the guise of pleasing His Majesty in order to climb the social latter into Court. For eight crucial years in the 1530s as the most powerful political figure in Henry VIII’s England, Cromwell orchestrated the King’s momentous break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the seizure of their wealth, and the execution for treason of Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, the Carthusian monks, and many, many others. And, as both The New Yorker and The New York Review have remarked: You cannot achieve total reformation without “breaking some eggs” (1,2).

Therefore, to undertake such a strongly disliked character and make him the subject of a five-hundred-and-thirty-two-page novel would be quite a feat. What’s more, is making him the protagonist, a wise minister and decent man. In Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall (Henry Holt, $27), she concedes to do just that.

Mantel does not negate to tell of the horrific happenings under Cromwell’s leaden hand, nor does she make excuses for his actions. What she so brilliantly does, is shift the historical paradigm and shed light from a different angle. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall has some of the qualities that his enemies feared and detested--toughness, wiliness, worldliness--but as Mantel depicts them, they are qualities in the service of survival, success, and even a measure of decency in a cruel and indecent world (2). Moreover, Mantel succeeds in lighting Cromwell so well by setting him against the perverse, dark religious fanatic, Thomas More. More, as Mantel depicts him, is so clouded by his Catholic duty that he is dangerous to Britain-- he is the only separation between Britain the medieval fiefdom and Britain the modern nation-state (3). Comparatively, in Mantel’s modern secular mindset, Cromwell makes the stronger leader.


In the most fully realized historical fiction, the historical figures are not merely shadows moving the background but engaging, colorful presences with thoughts and feelings and fears. Wolf Hall is written in a third person omniscient narrative, with Thomas Cromwell as its point of view. Readers are brought microscopically close to Cromwell; we are able feel with intensity the growing tension in Court or the pressure mounting in a sixteenth century mind. Mantel writes in a kind of credo:

Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

The historical novel is always, therefore, an act of conjuring: the illusion of reality, the ability to summon up ghosts (2).

Wolf Hall is moving like a freight train caught in Newtonian inertia-- barreling toward nationwide praise and readership and unable to stop. The New Yorker surmises that Mantel should be “congratulated for creating suspense about matter whose outcome we’ve known since high school”. I agree. However, what is more important is that we have an official voice to question our staid belief in the textbook, or more candidly persuade us that history--and reality for that matter-- is subjective.


(1) Taken from The New Yorker
(2) Taken from The New York Review of Books
(3) Taken from The Washington Post

The Monster Den! or: children in literature

All this Where Are the Wild Things stuff made me think of another book about wild things that, for better and for worse, doesn't have any of Sendak, Jonze, and Eggers' uplift. The Monster Den: or Look What Happened At My House-- and To It is a sick and nastily unchildlike collection of rhymes. At first, they're lessons in etiquette, Victorian-style, but that gives way to an account of three childrens' subsequent rebellion and escape from the household to a wild outdoor life. When they return a few years later, their parents flee and "never were heard of again."

Edward Gorey, Ciardi's former student at Harvard, illustrates the book. He does a good job of drawing monster heads, hair tangled into an elaborate pretzel, and other terrible things.

In response to parents appalled by the violence in his books for kids, Ciardi cited "intensities and losses" that made his childhood a time of "madness" and "disproportion." His own sons and daughter were the inspiration for the three characters in "The Monster Den," and Ciardi decided that the depiction would be good for them: "Children are savages. I think they need fairly strong stuff. As I recall and observe it, childhood is a time of enormous violence. It's emotional violence: everything is out of proportion. My feeling is that if we can take this sort of violence and convert it into play within formality-- make a little dance and rhythm of it-- I don't know what else that could be except theraputic." Although he betrays a pessimism about childhood in these lines, Ciardi also seems artistically taken by the "high-pitched" "imagination" and extravagence of children: their "language and natural metaphors are violent," but they are still just that: language and natural metaphors, a system of expression that behaves with extraordinary passion and a certain unwitting articulation.

As Ciardi says, "the children are a jury that can't be rigged." (But do they have good taste??) Even the author of such an unsentimental collection believes in children's preternatural ability to see clearly. However, it's this same innocent faculty that causes their anguish and incites them to violence. Children are magic. L-O-V-E!

The Daily Local (dailylocal.com), Serving Chester County, PA

Business

A book lover's delight

For expanded Wellington Square Bookshop in Uwchlan, rarer is better

Friday, October 9, 2009

By GRETCHEN METZ, Staff Writer

UWCHLAN — Wellington Square Bookshop may be located in northern Chester County, but its market is much bigger.

"We sell to the world," said shop owner Samuel Hankin. "We've sold to all 50 states many times over and to 50 countries. We know people from all over the world."

The original Wellington Square Bookshop, at 800 square feet, opened in early 2006 and featured an inventory of rare books, some valued at $20,000 or more.

In August, Hankin moved the enterprise two doors down to 543 Wellington Square, a location with 3,700 square feet of space.

"We thought we had years to expand (here) but it is already full and we're building new shelves," Hankin said.

The new store specializes in arcane, eclectic and obscure works, featuring rare, collectible and used books, many from Hankin's personal collection. On

the shelves are such classic writers as H.G. Wells, J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway alongside collections of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi.

It also has a section for contemporary books that Hankin gets through a distributor.

Selling rare books and first editions to such far-flung places Russia, China, Iceland, South America and beyond is the key to competing with the national bookstore chains and online book discounters, Hankin said.

Books at tens of thousands of dollars are not bought locally.

"Lots and lots and lots of people are interested in this kind of book, people where money is no object," Hankin said, sitting in the shop's cozy, private rare book room.

It seems to be working. The 57-year-old Hankin said sales double each month.

Located in Eagleview, the bookshop gets its name from the community's Town Center, Wellington Square.

Sounding so British can throw some folks off, especially customers in England who mistakenly think they are dealing with a local company, said Hankin, who then has to explain he is not calling from Oxford, England.

Hankin is a member of the family that founded and continues to run The Hankin Group, developers of the mixed-use community Eagleview along with a number of other developments in the region. His father, Bernard Hankin, founded the company a half century ago.

Hankin believes the bookstore adds value to the Eagleview community, which has corporate and residential components surrounding a retail center. At Eagleview, the Town Center is home to a doctor, a dentist, a pharmacy, two restaurants and is fast becoming a destination location, he said.

In addition to being a bookstore owner and a partner in The Hankin Group, Hankin is a lawyer with a practice in Florida and Pennsylvania.

The new shop sports a cafe with sweets from Delightful Desserts of West Chester, a children's corner with story times for the little readers, author book signings, open mike night for readings and its own book club for adults, though other book clubs are welcome to meet there as well, Hankin said.

Hankin worked on the store expansion himself, furnishing it with antiques from his personal collection, building his own book shelves and installing the hardwood floor and tin ceiling, common in American stores of the 1890s. The sweat equity meant a considerable savings, bringing the store to completion shy of $50,000.

While the shop has a classic look and feel, its technology is 21st century. Wellington Square has its own Web site and links to its own pages on such social networking sites as FaceBook and Twitter. It also has its own blog to keep the shop's readers informed.

"Our customers really like books," Hankin said.

The Daily Local News : Serving Chester County

The Daily Local News : Serving Chester County

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The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

I recommend the Anthologist. It's Baker's newest novel-- a typically low-key and rambling story about a man trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. There are so many flaws with the book: it constantly refuses significance, mentioning things like Project Runway and Subway; the resolution comes after no noticeable buildup; and, even though it's about poetry, nothing truly poetic happens. But Baker induces sublime acceptance in the reader, directing them to a world of smaller, more everyday pleasures and revelations.

The Windy Day

John and Faith Hubley recorded a rambling conversation between their daughters and animated the interaction in this video. The changing conversation is reflected in the fluid animation as their kids wander casually from one story to another. The Windy Day tries to capture the "real world of children rather than what children do that adults think is cute" (Charles Solomon). The Hubleys animated in watercolor and "threw dust on the cels... worked with grease so the paint would run" (Bill Littlejohn).



The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren, collected by another couple-- Iona Opie and Peter Opie-- in the 1940s treats children like anthropological subjects, “the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out.” (haha) They observed the non-parent-mandated activities of kids on the playground, and recorded their rhymes, games and songs, meticulously describing their meanings, purposes and rules of usage.