Notes in the Margin Weblog

Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca:

In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels.

Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily life and the times she lived in. She was hugely talented and wrote obsessively, through good times and bad, occasionally using her writing as “therapy,” however unwittingly. She suffered through depression, the loss of her second son and the sometimes extreme mental distress of her husband. Through it all, she kept writing.

According to Waterson, Montgomery used writing as therapy. She suffered periods of depression throughout her life but used her own misery to develop powerful characters: “She found it possible to neutralize her miserable thoughts about herself by giving some of her worst traits to characters in her books and making light of them.”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Robert McCloskey, . . . the author and illustrator of children’s books, born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914. He grew up loving music, especially the harmonica. He said, “The musician’s life was the life for me — that is, until I became interested in things electrical and mechanical. … The inventor’s life was the life for me — that is, until I started making drawings for the high school annual.” He got a scholarship to art school in Boston, and he did well there. But afterward, he couldn’t make it as an artist, and all he sold were a few watercolors of Cape Cod. One day, he went to visit an editor of children’s books in New York City, and he brought along his portfolio. It was filled with fantasy scenes, with magic and strange beasts. He took the images and the characters and the stories from life there, and he wrote and illustrated a picture book about a regular boy in a regular Midwestern town. The boy can’t whistle, so he learns to play the harmonica, and the boy and his harmonica save the day when the mayor’s homecoming celebration is almost ruined. This book was called Lentil (1940), and the next year he published Make Way for Ducklings (1941), which won a Caldecott. In 1987, bronze sculptures of Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings from the book were installed in the Boston Public Garden. McCloskey also wrote Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Time of Wonder (1957).

Robert McCloskey said, “I get a lot of letters. Not only from children but from adults, too. Almost every week, every month, clippings come in from some part of the world where ducks are crossing the street.”

The Writer’s Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.

The photo above is of the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston.

Newfound Tapes Offer Clues to Agatha Christie’s Life - NYTimes.com:

Agatha Christie’s only grandson has discovered a box of audiotapes in one of Christie’s former houses:

The tapes — 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours — are filled with Christie’s painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.

David Foster Wallace, Postmodern Writer, Is Found Dead - NYTimes.com:

David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.

Today’s New York Times book section includes “An Appraisal:
Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane” by book critic Michiko Kakutani.

For a brief definition of postmodernism, click here.

Local News | Seattle Public Library celebrates “Libraries For All” in neighborhoods across the city | Seattle Times Newspaper:

“‘Libraries For All,’ a $196.4 million bond measure passed in 1998, promised a face-lift for Seattle public libraries, including a new Central Library and 26 new or renovated branches. Ten years later, the city boasts a series of uniquely tailored and heavily used buildings that reflect the desires of their neighborhoods.”

PASSINGS - Los Angeles Times:

Gregory Mcdonald, 71, a former Boston Globe reporter whose best-selling ‘Fletch’ mystery books also were made into films, died of cancer Sunday at his farm in Pulaski, Tenn., according to his manager, David List.

Book Review - ‘The Time of Their Lives - The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors,’ by Al Silverman - Review - NYTimes.com:

Writer Bruce Jay Friedman reviews a new book about the golden age of publishing, which book author Silverman defines as covering the years between 1946 and the early 1980s. This was an era that ended when “the great ‘bookmen’ stepped aside and the bottom-liners of business took over.”

Friedman’s review certainly makes one want to read this book for the sake of its anecdotes about both the publishers and the writers of the time. Where else could one find such an interesting tidbit of trivia as this:

Doubleday, a proudly ‘middlebrow’ company, was founded by Frank N. Double­day, who suffered from flatulence. As a result, none of the characters in the books he published were allowed to pass wind.

Moving Beyond ‘Catcher’ On School Reading Lists : NPR:

“The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s beloved novel, once banned and full of frank four-letter words, will continue to be assigned to high school reading lists this year.

But Anne Trubek, a professor of English at Oberlin College, argues that it’s time to update Salinger’s coming-of-age tale.

This article provides a link to the sound version of Trubek’s discussion with NPR’s Scott Simon and lists a few of Trubek’s suggestions for books to replace “Catcher” on a list of required reading for today’s teenagers.

As a baby boomer, I’m one of the millions who read about Holden Caulfield while growing up. I reread the book when my daughter was in high school and found it just as compelling the second time. Moreover, my daughter (who, admittedly, is now 30 herself) seemed to have no problem comprehending Holden’s teenaged angst.

What’s your take on this? Is Holden Caulfield outdated for today’s young people? Do you have your own memories of reading “Catcher in the Rye”?

Nation & World | Publisher Robert Giroux: the gold standard of literary taste | Seattle Times Newspaper:

Robert Giroux, an editor who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and who rose to join one of the nation’s most distinguished publishing houses as a partner, making it Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died Friday in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94. . . .

He was also T.S. Eliot’s U.S. editor and published the U.S. edition of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’

Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding. . . .

To his lasting chagrin, Mr. Giroux also saw two major works slip from his grasp, J.D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’

Following the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor | csmonitor.com:

Frederic Hunter reports on a Southern vacation, where he and his wife visit the homes of some writers. He devotes most of the article to discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia. In preparation for the visit he borrowed a book from the library and read some of O’Connor’s stories: “She’s something of an acquired taste: acute insights, penetrating and often humorous observations. Still her characters run to the grotesque. Her stories often jolt even shockproof 21st-century readers.”

This short article is worth reading for Hunter’s discussion of his meeting with a Milledgeville librarian and her stories about O’Connor’s mother, Miss Regina, and how the local people figured in O’Connors’s fiction.

Other places the Hunters visited were the Flannery O’Connor Museum in Savannah, the house in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where poet Carl Sandburg spent his last days, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Site in Asheville, North Carolina, and, also in Asheville, the Grove Park Inn, where F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while his wife, Zelda, was a patient as a nearby mental institution.

“A strange way to spend a holiday, some would say. But it deepens our reading, and our reading enriches our lives.”