Monday, July 30, 2012

Book Thoughts For the Day

I'm well aware that, as an up-and-coming young Classics major, I should have more significant concerns on the "ancient world" front than choosing between Camp Jupiter and Camp Half-Blood, but I can't help it. I'm delaying the decision. See, I live on Long Island, so Camp Half-Blood seems like an obvious choice, but I prefer Latin to Greek, so maybe I belong with the Romans. But then again, Camp Half-Blood has Percy Jackson. But wait! Camp Jupiter has Leo Valdez! And I prefer the Greek names for the gods, but my current favorite Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, is set in Rome, and Camp Half-Blood is the original camp, but Camp Jupiter is better-run and more efficient, and . . . and . . . and . . .

~

Just in time to comfort me in my Psmith bereavement, someone found a couple of my other favorite offbeat obscure books just lying around somewhere in storage, and I'm tackling them again. Robert McCloskey's Homer Price, which I finished this morning, is always worth a reread. Maybe I'll review it later. Still left to look over: James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks and Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding.

~

Wait, weren't Ransom and I on the immediate precipice of something huge? With Out of the Silent Planet seeming to be gathering all its forces, why did I leave it lying on its spine at the eleventh hour? Certainly not because I was bored. I was taking it in in gulps!

. . . You know what? I think that I'm scared. I think that I'm a little afraid of this fantastic runner-of-the-planet that Ransom is about to meet. How like me. But knowing Ransom, I bet he's afraid, too. Don't worry, Ransom, we'll get through this together. I will now plunk myself down on the porch and not lift my head out of the book until our journey is one hundred percent ended. (Well, maybe occasionally I'll lift my head out, but only to take notes.)

Sunday, July 29, 2012

a blog should not be a place to complain

So I get jealous of other people's characters. Constantly. At the moment I'm sad that I don't own P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith and Mike. A couple months ago it was Jeeves and Wooster. Before that I think it might have been the characters in Krazy Kat or Little Shop of Horrors or something. What is it with this?

Also I envy other people's writing styles. I know perfectly well I'll never write anything as plucky and jaunty and sunny as Wodehouse at his best. Or anything near as hypnotic as Bradbury's stuff, or as idiosyncratic as George Herriman.

I mean my writing's pretty good (I'm only eighteen) and I've got some pretty good folks on my hands. I've got Hate Disguise down to a science, and Donovan Din is starting to listen a little when I whistle for him. Renee is stiff, but serviceable. Why can't I be jealous enough of myself to start writing stuff for myself?

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Links of the moment

Finish Your Novel. I'd been searching for a site like this for some time, but they all fell flat and told me things I already knew. This is practical, motivating stuff that gave me more than a few epiphanies. If I ever meet this man I'll thank him personally for my most recent scene, which is, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, undeniably the goods.

Watercolor Moods, the YA book blog of a friend of a friend. I appreciate good YA, but it's hard to find, and I'll definitely be looking at a few of these.

After My Hat, the illustration blog of the friend who showed me the above blog. Hope she won't mind me linking. I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

Um...that fantastic Psmith commentary I mentioned in my last post. I suppose I should delete that post, since other than the link it's just me fangirling over how great Psmith is, but a blog is really just life served up hastily as it comes, so I'll keep it as it is.

The Definitive Psmith

Sounds like a name for a book collection, doesn't it? But no, there is really no "definitive" set of P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith series out there. If you're fond of Psmith, you have to pseek him out for yourself. (The "p" is psilent.)

Technically I am now finished with the series, as it stands. Still left to read: the magazine version of Leave it to Psmith (somewhat different, I'm told), the stage version of Leave it to Psmith (which would have to be different, unless you had some kind of crazy elaborate set), the US version of The Prince and Betty (which apparently combines Psmith, Journalist with a previous Wodehouse book in an unholy blend), and a few stories featuring Psmith's sidekick Mike Jackson in his schoolboy days. When I'm obsessed I do the thing thoroughly.

But I'm still squealing over Leave it to Psmith, which I just finished; the series, if it had to end, couldn't have ended much better. Surprisingly satisfying stuff. I'm not going to write a review of it until I can be more objective. So on that note I leave you with this fantastic set of posts on the series, which makes observations that never would have occurred to me and increases my enjoyment considerably.

Premature Review: Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

I haven't quite finished this book yet, so any opinion stated herein is subject to change. A few spoilers for those who may be reading the series.

You know, up until now I confess I had been a bit resentful of Wodehouse for writing only four Psmith books. His reason, apparently--which didn't suffice for me--was that he thought Psmith didn't work as an adult, and that what was charming in a mere lad bluffing his way through the work force ceased to be funny as soon as he came of age. There's certainly something in that, but now I think the problem lay more in Wodehouse's changing clime. Psmith belonged, by nature, to an atmosphere of dull care--dull care that he could banish with his mere presence, but still, dull care. Stick him down in an Eden like Blandings Castle (complete with his very own Eve), and, even if snakes should enter in the form of impostors with vile intent, he simply won't work the way he should. Psmith's comedy comes from the fact that he's generally in school or the workplace, blackmailing the boss, talking his peers to death, and treating everything as a sort of picnic. At Blandings Castle, everything--even the plotting--actually is a sort of picnic, and it's hard for Psmith's "the cry goes round" to have the same audacious ring.

The only thing that was ever odd about Psmith's accustomed setting was the fact that scarcely anyone found Psmith odd--or, if they did, they declined to comment. His boss found him annoying and his headmaster found him unsettling, but no one ever went to the length of suggesting that he was out of the ordinary. Now here's irony, if you like it; now that he's hightailed it out of the mundane corner of the Wodehouse world and headed into the "musical comedy without music" section--where he would seem to fit like a hand in a glove--people are finally acknowledging how weird he is. (I guess it makes sense, really. If anyone was more insane than Bertie Wooster, it was Sir Roderick Glossop, the mental health specialist who wanted to book him his rightful room at the loony-bin.) A pity, since giggling behind your hand at Psmith--unless you're the reader and safely outside the story--breaks his power in a subtle way.

Of course, it's equally possible that the death of Psmith's father and the subsequent loss of all his doubloons put a bit of a damper on his usual spirits. (That's the only way someone can die in a Wodehouse book--to instigate a plot.) Scheme though Psmith might, his problems in the last two books were solved by his family having a fair amount of the ready, so right away his effectiveness is diminished. Having fallen out with his wealthy uncle, he has nothing left to his name but a smart set of dress clothes and a sense of adventure. The latter drives him to place an advertisement in the newspaper offering his services to anyone with a buck and a bad idea. It's the kind of thing you'd see on Craigslist nowadays, and most readers take it in that spirit--the exception being Freddie Threepwood of Blandings, who really needs someone to steal his aunt's necklace so a few important debts can be paid. (Presumably, the events of the first Blandings book made Freddie wary of his own powers as a thief. He's also paranoid that one of the servants might turn out to be a detective, hinting that the influence of Ashe Marson is still felt.)

Psmith relishes the assignment because it's much the most unlikely thing on the menu. We're told that his closeness with Mike Jackson, ordinary guy extraordinaire, is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to his friendships: "He liked his humanity eccentric." Funny, because if you had asked me I would have said that Psmith liked being the strangest thing in the room at all times, and used the plainclothes presence of Mike to further offset his own oddity. He called himself Psmith in the first place so that he wouldn't be a Smith, not because he wanted anyone else to be called Psmith. (Or did he? Come to think of it, he did say he was going to found his own dynasty...)

Maybe it's because this is a meeting of worlds, but the plot, despite being as complex and knotted together as you'd expect a Blandings plot to be, seems to eschew the usual tightness in favor of multilayeredness. On last count, Psmith coincidentally had three distinct and separate reasons for going to Blandings Castle. Or was that four reasons? Why does he even need one? He could have just showed up and no reader would ever have questioned his right to be there. He's Psmith.

This book also puts Psmith in the oddest of roles--that of the ardent lover. You wouldn't think he'd go in for that sort of thing, but just let one pretty blonde come along and he's trailing her like the Phantom of the Opera. This becomes easier to account for once one takes his previous settings into consideration. After attending an all-boy's school, working at a bank in male-dominated London, and hitting the mean streets of New York City without so much as confronting one lady gangster, it's natural that he'd appreciate feminine beauty. Sadly, Eve, his target, isn't the deepest of Wodehouse's ladies; she reads as Joan from Something New all over again, and she's even less vital to the plot. It's adorable to watch Psmith scramble after her, but I can't help wishing he'd picked a more enterprising mate, or at least someone who could dish the dirt on something like his own level.

Mike, peripheral but still somewhat significant, is now a married man himself. We're told he eloped with the girl in question, and I'm extremely sad that the best part of the story didn't make it into the plot. In my opinion, there's no way Psmith wasn't in on that one. I seem to see him slithering by with the getaway car while Mike hitches the rope up to her window. Good times.

Edit: I'm now a bit ashamed of this post, because I turned out to be utterly wrong about Eve. I doubt if Psmith could have found himself a better match...but maybe I'll explain why another time. In the meantime here's a sketch of Eve pulling on her gloves and looking all determined, which more or less sums up the second half.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I'm glad I like active protagonists

I don't have a tumblr. I'm not going to vow never to cave in, because chances are I'd end up like Benedick at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, surrounded by wit-crackers. I'm just holding off on it because I can see myself wasting hours of my life on there.

The ironic thing is I go on it anyway just to research my various fictional obsessions, and just now I found this: "The protagonists of the last three things you read/watched/played are the members of your zombie apocalypse survival team. How [expletive]d are you?"

And I said to myself, "P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith, C.S. Lewis's Ransom and all those guys with swords from Julius Caesar? I'd say I'm actually pretty well fortified."

<>

[While this isn't the point of this post, one of the protagonists in my current novel actually quit being lazy and delivered a stunning couple of scenes tonight. I am on top of the world.]

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

"Silent Planet" play-by-play: Chapters 13 through 17

Spoilers ahead!

13: It might have seemed as if I was snubbing Ransom in my last two posts, when I called him unimaginative and so on, but actually I was commenting on his character as Lewis intended it; he's all the more compelling because he arrives in Malacandra with room to grow. It wasn't until I read this chapter that his insecurity truly sank in for me, but now I think it's the key to his character. He reminds me of Inglewood from Manalive; he's a scientist who quails in shame before the vastness of the universe, and his faith in his own decisions is limited by a fear of going out of bounds. Now he's finally striking out on his own for what looks like the classic hero's quest, and it seems he gained enough maturity in the last few chapters to get him off to a good running start. The fact that he now has the courage to brave a monster or a pair of gunslingers is no more impressive than the fact that he has the courage, once forgiven, to close his mouth, suppress the whining side of him, and ask for no more pardon. That is brilliant.

I love the way Lewis handles the whole situation of murderous humans vs. peaceful aliens. I didn't think there was a human being in the world who could pull off that cliché to my liking (even my beloved Bradbury fell short!), but then, this is the man who gave us Narnia. By the time he's done with it, it doesn't even feel like a cliché anymore. (But was it even a cliché back then? I'll have to look into that.)

14: I'm willing to bet that Ransom just stumbled into Malacandra's equivalent to the giant's palace in The Silver Chair. The perfect trap for the determined traveler: tempting, cozy, deliciously warm...and full of creatures who see him as a cooking ingredient.

15: And here, in this warm nook, safe from the biting wind, Ransom encounters "the bleakest moment in all his travels".

16. There's a childlikeness to Ransom here, as in a few previous chapters; he rides on the shoulder of a sorn and feels as if he's riding on his father's back. Well, it only makes sense, since he's essentially been born into a new world and has to age accordingly.

I take back what I said about the sorn being evil giants; Ransom and I have changed our minds. They seem more like the opposite, a race of Puddleglums.

17: I love reading about the three different species of sentient life on Malacandra and their separate cultures; almost like an alien Middle-Earth. (The pfifltrig remind me of dwarves, and I suppose that would make the hrossa the hobbits.) So Malacandra is Mars, eh? Well, the back cover of my book kind of spoiled that for me by calling it the "red planet", but I still think it was a smart move on Lewis's part not to name it until he'd already portrayed it in detail--people tend to have preconceived notions of Mars, and they'd get in the way. And what a picture. Seriously, if someone could make a movie of this and do it right, it would blow Avatar out of the water.

Ransom's taking a bit of a rest, but his quest isn't over yet. In fact, I suspect he's on the immediate precipice of something huge. Only time, and the final chapters, will tell...

Come not near me

I've reached that stage of my cold where I will use anything as a Kleenex. Even a freshly-laundered sock. Even the torn-out flyleaf of an abandoned book. Even you.

Additionally, I've begun to more or less shed lozenge wrappers as I walk.

I'm a creature of wrath.

So how's this for a weird dream?

Hot off the presses of my dreaming brain:

My sister Mary secretly teamed up with author L.M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame (who wasn't dead in my dream, just elderly and reclusive), and they collaborated on a novel. It was based on our family life and included a mixed-media combination of tweets, texts and diary entries. Some of the latter were mine, unedited; I had no problem with this but could not recall ever having given permission.

The whole thing was published under the pseudonym of L.M. Montgomerowl ("Owl" being Mary's superhero nickname since time out of mind; haha, you're such a punster, dreaming brain). Neither me nor my other sisters had any idea that Mary was up to all this until the advance review copy turned up at our house. However, my mom had been in on it from the start and had arranged all her trips up to Prince Edward Island to see L.M. Montgomery.

And just when we thought she couldn't surprise us anymore, it turned out that while she was at it Mary had eloped with one of the publishers. She said his name was Seth and we'd really like him. Mom had also been in on this.

Monday, July 23, 2012

On Running Low

Well, I haven't yet reached that point in my life when my days are waning instead of waxing. Thank goodness for that. When that happens I'll probably be running around like Lucy in Peanuts screaming "This is the last day!" or something similar.

No, what I'm running low on is a) days of summer and b) P.G. Wodehouse books.

And I'm not even really low on the latter. One of the great things about P.G. Wodehouse is that instead of dallying around trying to write the Great English Novel all the time, he just wrote every day and sent what he wrote to magazines. Unlike me. I'm very much a dallier. Our laptop is back from the Mac repair shop, and I expect to spend what remains of my summer dallying over my novel-in-progress with glazed eyes.

Honestly, I should be proud of myself. I've managed to hold back on Jeeves and Wooster ever since March, so I've still got a ways to go in that series. But then I fell in love with his Psmith series and I just began the last one, so I'm conscious of an acute sense of pain. I don't want to say goodbye to Psmith.

Fine, I tell myself stoutly, remembering that I've got my youth. Here's my ultimatum:

If I run low on books I'll reread the old ones. And from now on, every single day of summer is just going to have to count for two.

[Note: And unfortunately for my summer cold, I'm also running low on lozenges. I'll just have to see what runs out first, the lozenges or the cold. I'm rooting for the latter.]

Sunday, July 22, 2012

"Silent Planet" play-by-play: Chapters 7 through 12

7: Well, Ransom, if you're going to make a break for freedom on an unknown planet, I'd say you picked the right one. This chapter sounds like Ray Bradbury struggling to describe a Dr. Seuss illustration, only with that C.S. Lewis touch.

8. I like the patheticness of Ransom being forced to talk to himself in absence of all others. But really, isn't that how we found him--alone? The author's only calling attention to it again now, and that means some other character's on the horizon. I wonder where his unearthly Man Friday's going to spring from.

9. There you go. And can I just say that Lewis' word choice in this chapter is fantastic? There's such a sense of violent movement even in the motionless. You can't even merely tilt back your head to look at it all--you have to throw your head back.

Maybe that's the reason this Hross creature has all my muscles tentatively tensed to spring, but I think not. I think it's because of that warning in the Narnia series about not trusting something that used to be human but isn't, or should be human and isn't, or is going to be but isn't yet. Like Ransome, I want to like the Hross, but I'm still a little shaky. After all, we just met.

(On a side note--curse you, Lady Gaga. It's your fault that I can't read the word "Malacandra" without mentally setting it to music. "Malacandra, Malacandra...Mala-Malacandra, Mala-Malacandra..." It's making me madder than Ransom.)

10. The end of this chapter was almost like a dim nightmare version of one of the outdoor feasts that would randomly happen in Narnia.

11. Whoo, turning point! I love how Ransom isn't letting go of this patronizing assumption that the Hross are utterly primitive despite all evidence to the contrary (they have religion! They have poetry!) I thought at first he was just being stupid, and that it was a satire of English superiority to the colonized nations, but maybe it's more than just that--he knows he's wrong, but he's afraid to admit it, so he holds on to the idea he's more comfortable with.

I'm guessing Maleldil the Young is Jesus and the Old One is God the Father--maybe the science fiction equivalents of Aslan and the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

12. The philosophical discussion in this chapter is so artfully pulled off, almost like the poetry it mentions. A lesser author would have made it heavy-handed and dull, but here it's almost like the "eldila", the things you can mistake for a sunbeam, which I suppose are angels.

Ransom knows the words now, but he's still struggling to find the meaning. Maybe the next six chapters will clear things up...

"Silent Planet" play-by-play: Chapters 1 through 6

Well, I was on Facebook moaning to my dear friend Moira about how the mail delivery hadn't coughed up my latest book order yet (Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, to be precise), and she suggested that I read Out of the Silent Planet, a book that I have no excuse for not having read up until now. Furthermore, she said she wanted a play-by-play of my reactions to each chapter. I think she was joking, but she shouldn't have made a joke like that to someone like me who just hangs around waiting all the time for an excuse to ramble about what I'm reading. So I made some tea, changed from my Sunday clothes to my comfortable clothes with all the purposeful energy of Lord Peter Wimsey getting ready to play detective, and set forth on my journey into what feels like the only C.S. Lewis universe I've never visited, pausing between chapters to take notes on my phone.

Admittedly I kind of cheated, treating the first two chapters as one. I was too caught up in the story to notice the chapter break, which I believe is a good sign.

1-2: Crazy, scary. Kind of reminds me of that scene in "The Magician's Nephew" when Polly becomes the guinea pig in Uncle Andrew's ring experiment. I find it interesting that Ransom ended up in the place of the original victim--sort of a heroic sacrifice, even though he didn't intend it? Anyway, not sure who's more shifty--Devine or his friend. Because I insist on drawing more comparisons to Narnia, I think Devine is what Eustace Clarence Scrubb would have grown to be if he hadn't encountered Aslan. Suspense is killing me, so I'll just keep reading.

3: Bang. Loved that chapter ending. I like the fact that Ransom has a common English mindset; he seems to be good at eliminating the impossible, but not so good at accepting whatever remains however improbable, hence the reason he spent this whole chapter in a hovering state of I-could-be-really-excited-but-I-could-also-be-really-scared. A sort of unadventurous Watson aboard an airship.

4: The whole conceit of the spaceship's construction is genius. Makes me want to live in one.

5: Here Ransom is, this unwondering Englishman, and, surrounded by the seas of stars, all he can do is "bask". Meanwhile Devine couldn't care less about the otherworldly view and is only interested in what he can do with the money when he gets home to Earth. Reminds me of how Uncle Andrew wanted to develop Narnia, but everyone with him was too busy staring in awe to pay attention.

6: I know Lewis wasn't technically a Catholic, but it's crazy how much the dividing of space works like the dividing of the Eucharist. The description of the landing sounds like my idea of the worst day ever--hours of moving items out of rooms followed by hours of stomach-wrenching sickness? But of course it would be hell to fall from heaven.

Ransom has landed on Malacandra! What is this strange place? What do his captors have in store for him? Stay tuned for the next installment--because I have no idea either.


Saturday, July 21, 2012

Barrie at the Bat

You've seen me write here about P.G. Wodehouse's Mike--a book that I love, but also a book brimful of a sport that I don't understand. I don't understand sports at the best of times, and I'm an American, so naturally there's nothing more baffling to me than this thing called "cricket".

Nonetheless, I've found my favorite cricket team: the Allahakbarries, a team made up of, apparently, all my favorite authors when they had a spare moment and wanted to show a few artists how we authors do things. Name comes from an Arabic phrase which they thought meant "God help us", combined with the name of J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan and founder of the team.

Other members include G.K. Chesterton, A.A. Milne, Arthur Conan Doyle (their star player, needless to say), Jerome K. Jerome, H.G. Wells, and yes, P.G. Wodehouse. This was before he wrote the Psmith series; who knows what scenes his cricket-playing fellow-authors might have inspired?

Week's Photos

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Are you reading yourselves, NOOK?

I'm not sure if this is an attempt at deliberate, subliminal deception or just a jealous Freudian slip.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Reviews: Psmith, Journalist and Love Among the Chickens by P.G.Wodehouse

Psmith, Journalist

The trouble with this book is that one always feels it's not quite as good as it could have been. I mean, after one reads the first two books and then gets wind of the fact that Psmith is going toe-to-toe with gangsters in the third, one's mind runs wild. The very premise evokes scary noir music and opening titles chalked on the walls of shady alleyways. "Psmith in the City" or some snappy title like that. (Ironic, since the book actually called "Psmith in the City" was merely about Psmith being cooped up in a London bank and making light of it.) And the stakes seem so much higher than usual that you might as well just call it "Psmith: the movie". (Subtitle: "Psmith just got real".)

But this is still P.G. Wodehouse, and you don't need to borrow Psmith's monocle to see that the stakes are fake stakes--just there for show. Psmith, Journalist has been said to have more of a "social consciousness" than Wodehouse's usual fare, and Neil Gaiman praised it for being "about something" rather than about itself--but the bottom line is that the falling tenements on Pleasant Street are a plot device, not a focal point. All these guys with guns may add a bit of adrenaline, but at heart they're no more dangerous than the uptight housemaster in Mike and Psmith or the nasty manager in City.

I imagine that Psmith owes his continued success to the fact that he's well aware of this, and it's worth the price of admission to see him reveling in his divine immunity among guys who could gun him down at any second. He's a little like a cartoon cat who realizes that the dog is on a chain and starts slapping its face and hitting it with pies. The few glimpses into his head we get reveal that he's improvising most of this, which just makes it even better. It's spur-of-the-moment midsummer madness.

The setup here is that Psmith, who's staying in New York for a spell, gets bored and takes it into his head to commandeer a family journal called "Cosy Moments" (why the British spelling in a New York paper?) while its owner is on vacation. His idea of improvement entails nixing the entire staff of sentimental kiddy-writers and ushering in some muckrakers to pen scathing exposés of tenement housing in New York. This arouses the ire of certain higher-ups with gangsters at their beck and call, who are determined to put Psmith "out of business" (permanently); however, he's equally determined not to give in. It's not clear whether this is more because he wants to improve things for the tenement-dwellers or because he finds all this amusing, or maybe because he knows this story needs a plot. Regardless, in a truly classic touch, no one ever bothers to rename the paper, leading to spit-take catchphrases like "Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!"

Mike, the milk-and-water chaser to Psmith's crazy cocktail, is off on a cricket tour for most of this. He's ceased to be a consistent sidekick and become a device to drop Psmith in New York and abandon him there for thirty chapters. The empty space is filled by reporter Billy Windsor, a fellow who mostly made me resent his presence and get sentimental about Mike. I think he was invented so Wodehouse could have a classic American hero, the type of guy who'd chase gangsters down dark alleyways regardless of reason. An English kid with a craving for cricket wouldn't have really fit the role. Still, Windsor, while handy enough--as all Americans should be--when it comes to beaning gangsters with big sticks, doesn't provide that comfort-food, we're-thrown-together-so-let's-be-allies companionship that Mike offers.

Fortunately for readers, Windsor isn't a permanent fixture, and it's Mike and Psmith's offhanded camaraderie that provides here, as always, the real "cosy moments".

On an irrelevant note, the part in Chapter 3 where Psmith quotes Coleridge made me fall in love with "Kubla Khan" all over again.


Love Among The Chickens

I suppose I'd better give Ukridge more of a chance before I knock him, but the man doesn't really get to me in the way others of Wodehouse's comic creations have done. He's believable enough--and therein, perhaps, lies the problem. What we want from Wodehouse is someone unbelievable like Psmith, or shrouded in shadow like Jeeves, or a frame-story narrator like Mr. Mulliner, whose stories we don't really buy but are all too happy to listen in on anyway. A mere annoying fellow with a flawed, but not unusual, get-rich-quick scheme seems almost too sane. Then, too, the narrator, so far from being a zany observer of the absurd a la Bertie Wooster, is a straightforward, normal guy, several shades duller than Holmes's Watson and barely able to wring wry commentary out of being along for the ride.

Still, this is P.G. Wodehouse, and not even this early work, in which he's finding his footing as a comedy writer, is without merit. Garnet, the narrator, soon shows he's got both a soul and a sense of humor, as a girl catches his eye and makes him rethink his writing and his life. Pretty soon he indulges in an idiotic plot to win her hand that seems more like a Wooster impulse than anything else, and while it's far from being Wodehouse's finest, at least it gives us a break from Ukridge's chicken-wrangling and lets us in for some sly observations about writing and love.

Even the chicken plot eventually pays off, coming to a conclusion that's unexpectedly hilarious and foreshadows the epic climaxes in Jeeves or Psmith. Definitely worth the read--especially if, like me, you discovered it while your dad was trying to prevent the neighbor behind you from setting up a chicken coop practically in your backyard. But that's another story.

People you may know

It's amusing how much Google's new system for finding famous historical figures resembles Facebook's friend finder. I'm now picturing Mary Shelley "in a relationship" with Percy Bysshe while Wordsworth gets into a poke war with Keats and Lord Byron snaps one brooding profile pic after another with his iPhone camera.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Time with Danielle

More Psmith art

Just stumbled upon an excellent set of Psmith illustrations. I would comment my appreciation, but I'd have to get a Livejournal to do that. Really makes me wish I could get copies of the series with art like that. (Editions of Psmith tend to be ugly and public-domainy, with clip-art covers.)

I especially enjoyed the artist's take on Mike, who frankly isn't appreciated enough. After all, where would Psmith be without his confidential secretary and adviser?

It inspired me a bit, so I doodled this scene from chapter 26 of Mike and Psmith. (Without spoiling anything, Mike has just taken a beating, and Psmith is attempting to give him some advice.)

Monday, July 16, 2012

Julius Caesar rehearsal

So are they all, all honorable men.

A reminder

Pray, hope, and don’t worry! Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer. Prayer is the best weapon we have; it is the key to God’s heart. You must speak to Jesus not only with your lips but with your heart. In fact, on certain occasions, you should speak to Him only with your heart."
- St. Padre Pio

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Thundering Thoughts

The thunder's beating my house about the ears. Or should I say the eaves?

Inside there's the steely whistle of the teakettle. It's steamy and industrial and trying to pretend it's got more point than the thunder, but then someone lifts it from the stove and it shrieks and dies away.

There's a little low lightning. A subdued sparkle like the one thy comes from a frayed wire that lost its coating.

Then the thunder persists, like a stomach growling.

That's the thing about thunder. It's clumsy and ungraceful, thunder, bumbling away down under the horizon where no one can see it. Like some kid crawling under the table cloth. It's the most anti-social of all the elements. It's sullen, but you still feel like it talks too much.

And thunder always gets the last word.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Halliday and Vane

Drawing practice. A little embarrassing. I mean one day to be much better than this. And as if the messiness of the lines and the dissymmetry of the eyes, and so on, weren't bad enough, I didn't realize how wrinkled the paper was.

Anyway, from left to right; Eve Halliday from P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith series and Harriet Vane from Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey series. I haven't read far enough in either series to have encountered these characters yet (Eve appears in Leave it to Psmith while Harriet debuts in Strong Poison), so I decided to take a guess as to what they looked like and see if I was right later. :)

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Some early P.G. Wodehouse

http://www.madameulalie.org/index.html

The above website is one of my favorites, very handy for finding old P.G. Wodehouse stories published in magazines. There's some early Jeeves stuff, but there's also more out-of-the-way material, like school sports pieces and wisecracking Conan Doyle spoofs.

My personal favorites at the moment are the Mike and Psmith stories with the original magazine images, which kind of remind me of Sidney Paget's classic illustrations for the Sherlock serials. They're detailed and deadly serious, with an eerie Viewmaster quality whenever there's a need to convey motion. Psmith, though not as languid or expressive as I'd pictured him, has at least a crackling self-satisfaction, while his sidekick Mike is far more cherubically handsome than he really has any right to be.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Passive Egression

"...I suppose it’s quite the regular thing here. Old school tradition, &c. Men leave the school, and find that they’ve got so accustomed to jumping out of windows that they look on it as a sort of affectation to go out by the door."
- Psmith, Mike and Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today

I'm absent-mindedly reading on my Kindle, and Clair's on her iPhone. "I wish we had a hammock," I say, more to myself than anybody else.

"That'd be awesome," says Clair. "Hey, you should make one. I was just reading about how you can make a hammock with ropes and sheets."

"Sheets?"

"Yeah, they have instructions on Instructable.com and--come on, let's go outside and do it! Adventure!"

The above is almost a direct quote. I swear, sometimes she's like that girl in every movie who teaches the lonely bored guy that life is precious and exciting.

At any rate, we charged out there with old tablecloths and an incriminating-looking length of rope, and below is the result.

(I didn't actually get to sit in it myself, but tomorrow we build hammock number two. In the meantime we sit in the living room, mosquitoed but merry.)

Good times

How to have a fun day in summer (if you're me, at any rate):

Head out to meet some friends at an outlet for The Amazing Spiderman. However, the two sisters who are accompanying you forget to mention where the outlet actually is until it's too late for Mom, your long-suffering chauffeur, to make an earlier start. Cue feeling of relief that you had nothing to do with the planning process and therefore can't be blamed for your sisters' communication problems.

Get there in the nick of time. Unable to find your friends, you resign yourself to seeing them later and sit down to get your ticket's worth. You spend the movie mentally writing a review for your blog ("Andrew Garfield's Pete Parker manages to encapsulate both dorky and dangerous," etc.), but you'll never be able to actually write it, because halfway through the movie some mad scientist fellow injects himself with DNA and undergoes a horrible transformation. You, unable for some reason to mentally separate science fiction from potential reality, get sick and have to be lead from the theater by your sister, face turned downward so you don't have to look at the screen and the horrors emblazoned thereon.

Fortunately it turns out that the rest of your friends came late and couldn't get tickets, so they're just killing time in the outlet. They're the type of people who are more fun than a movie anyway, so after you've stopped furtively examining your arms to see if someone rearranged your DNA while you were off your guard, you hit the outlets with them. And it couldn't be better. They try on sunglasses because they can. They buy you french fries. They run around in a Spiderman mask that Timmy apparently purchased for just such an occasion. Then they all hit the novelty candy store and get bric-a-brac such as Bertie Bott's Beans, to say nothing of a rather large gummy bear on a stick which you buy your sister Clair as a surprise for tomorrow. (You can post about this all you like, because Clair never reads your blog. Muahahahaha.) Chocolate? No, you don't buy any chocolate. Theresa and Timmy have already bought chocolate and are carrying it around in Theresa's bag, since they figure there's probably graham crackers, marshmallows and a fire in their future.

Then, find your sisters, wander around a bit, narrowly miss the Hogwarts Express (in reality a bunch of shopping carts linked together), and go to a record shop.

Then everyone repairs to the Fox's house and has an excellent dinner, followed by s'mores. You have tea, and you force Theresa to drink it with you as a thank-you because she made you cookies. (She doesn't even really care for tea, but where friendship is concerned this is totally irrelevant.) There are thumb wars. Then you talk books with Moira Fox, which makes your day because you like all kinds of relatively-obscure English novels and only she understands. Also, she's an (amazing) artist. This is a great thing, because art, like common sense, fascinates you even as it coyly eludes your ability.

The next day you write a lengthy blog post about all this for some reason, written in second person, and finish by thanking your mom for driving all over the place to make it happen. (Not that she didn't love doing it.)

NOTE: I'm mostly only posting this because I'm bad at keeping up a diary and I want to put my blog to use a little bit. If you weren't there, you may take it for granted that I wish you had been. :)

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Forts

Freedom with the furniture.

(Credit to Jude and Rebecca, aspiring artists and architects both.)