June, Glorious June

 

Rocky Mt Penstemon in the Native Garden

Garden Notes

The June-gloom that started the month meant lots of rain for the emerging garden. Here are two views of the native garden I put in last year--almost eveything came back with just a few bare spots that a trip to the Denver Botanical Gardens annual plant sale enabled me to fill in. The pollinators have been working hard in the garden already, and today I saw two Swallowtail butterflies stop by for a drink.

I grew just about all my flowers from seed this year, with a few pots with Mother's Day offerings. I have a blue garden that I am slowly filling in, and the raised bed veggie garden is looking promising.

Books, Books, Books

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci - after months on the library wait list, I finally got to listen to Stanley Tucci read his latest memoir. I loved his earlier book, Taste, which was about his early life, family, acting career, and, of course, food. I also loved the CNN show, Searching for Italy, and was so disappointed when it was cancelled. This book, as the title screams, is a year in the life and chronicles not only what he ate and where and what he cooked and why and who for, but is the year leading up to the taping of his current food travelogue on National Geographic, Tucci in Italy. I've watched the first three episodes (new ones drop on Sunday nights), and it is wonderful. I love Italian food, I love Italian history, I love visiting Italy, and Stanley Tucci is passionate about what he loves. A fun read!

The Third Gilmore Girl, by Kelly Bishop - Gilmore Girls is such a favorite. I've watched it multiple times over the years, and it never gets stale. Kelly Bishop was the perfect Emily Gilmore, so it was a no-brainer to get on the library waitlist to listen to her talk about her life and career. 

Coincidently, Kelly was born in Colorado Springs, my hometown, and was the same age as my sister, although my parents didn't move there until she was in first grade. She moved to Denver with her family and studied ballet. At nineteen, she headed for NYC--rejected by the American Ballet Theatre, she worked as a dancer on Broadway for years and was the original Sheila Bryant in A Chorus Line, for which she won a Tony in 1976. She transitioned to acting as dancers' careers have an expiration date. Her first major-ish role was as Baby's mother in Dirty Dancing, and she had lots of roles in TV, movies, and plays on Broadway until she hit the jackpot with Gilmore Girls. The show's creator, Amy Sherman Palladino, did the intro to the book, and they were and remain fast friends.

I loved hearing about Kelly's career and the life of an entertainer. Definitely a fun book to listen to.

The Shell House Detectives, by Emylia Hall - Kathy at Reading Matters recently posted about this book, and since it sounded like something I would definitely enjoy, I promptly got it from my library and devoured it. Set in Cornwall in a small town, two unlikely people find themselves working together to solve the case of the disappearing trophy wife. Jayden is a former Leeds cop who has relocated to his wife's hometown after the death of his partner, and Ally is a widow grieving for her police sergeant husband who died about a year earlier. The other townfolk include Saffron, the cafe owner, Tim, the bumbling local cop and his boss, as well as the nasty rich newcomer and his boorish brother. I loved every minute I spent reading this book--first in what promises to be a good series. The characters and setting were marvelous, the writing decent, and the plot interesting. Thanks, Kathy, for a great recommendation. 

The London House, by Katherine Reay - I really wanted to love this one, and I did in parts, but I also had some issues. The basic idea is that Caroline, an American with a rich English father, goes to London to discover the truth about her great aunt. An old boyfriend of Caroline's who is now a historian is writing a story about how Caroline's aunt defected to the Nazis while living in Paris during WWII, and Caroline and her father are distraught at the thought of the world knowing this. The London House is Caroline's father's ancestral home (one of two actually) -- Caroline's mother, now divorced from her father, is living there and gives Caroline stacks of letters and diaries that the disgraced aunt's twin sister saved.

If this sounds like a soap opera, hang on...there's more. There's a love triangle between the twin sisters (i.e., Caroline's great aunts), there's misplaced pride and guilt that wreaked generations of marriages and parent/child relationships, and there's the mystery of why the old boyfriend and Caroline stopped being friends. 

I really enjoyed the history part of this book, and the multiple timelines, and the research that the contemporary characters did. I really enjoyed visiting London and Paris with the modern characters. And, I enjoyed the fashion angle during World War II in Paris, especially since I watched The New Look about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel so hearing about Schiaparelli's fashion house was super interesting, especially that Wallis Simpson's Lobster Dress from the 1937 collection.

I think this novel would have worked much better if the author hadn't succumbed to the idea that every story needs to be a love story. And, families that are as damaged as Caroline's can't heal as fast as this one did. Finding out the truth about Caroline's great-aunt fixed everything--the coldness that had presumably destroyed her parents' marriage and that shrouded her in a cloak of self-doubt and anxiety was suddenly gone and everything was rosy and happy. I don't mind happy endings, but a little reality check seemed to be called for here.

Thoughts on Vanity Fair

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?--come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

I finished this 1847 masterpiece today and now am motivated to read about the book. I listened to an audio version, and so promptly pulled my paperback copy off my shelf and read the introduction and learned that Thackeray had illustrated it himself. The drawings are simply marvelous and I had completely forgotten about them.

Here's a particularly good one from the collection at the Victorian Web, which was scanned by Gerald Ajam, with the caption by Tiaw Kay Siang and Sabrina Lim.



I also learned that Thackeray's handwritten manuscript of Vanity Fair is owned by the Morgan Library in New York City...yes, the same one that is now offering the Jane Austen exhibition. Since I am Twitter friends with the Morgan, I asked whether Vanity Fair is currently on display. I am planning to visit the Austen exhibit later this month and thought I might get to see Vanity Fair as well. Alas, no, the tweet came back, it is not on display at this time. That would have just been too serendipitous.

Now on to the thoughts...be forewarned, here lurk spoilers for both VF and Gone With the Wind.

Vanity Fair may be subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, but no one disputes the fact that Becky Sharp is the main character by sheer force of personality, despite being out of the action for chapters on end while the other characters' stories are told. As I was listening to the VF, I kept on thinking how much like Scarlett O'Hara Becky is, from her green eyes to her charm and wiles and single-minded ruthlessness to her relationship with Melanie/Amelia to her relationship to Rawdon Crawley. I figured I couldn't be alone in this observation, so I Googled and discovered that Margaret Mitchell vehemently denied having modeled Scarlett on Becky and denied having even read Vanity Fair before writing Gone With the Wind. Methinks she doth protest too much. Back in the day when I was GWTW obsessed, I read a bio of Mitchell and I recall the impression that she was defensive about a lot of things. I probably read about the Becky/Scarlett brouhaha then and just forgot about it until now.

However, I did find some other connections between VF and GWTW, some more significant than others.

Both contain the idiom that someone "wouldn't say boo to a goose" several times. I remember thinking when I read that phrase in GWTW how odd it was--not an expression that I've ever heard anyone actually use--so it jumped off the page when I encountered it twice in VF. If Becky had said "God's nightgown!" there would have been no question from whence Mitchell got that expression of Scarlett's.

I also thought it was really interesting how Dobbin ultimately left Amelia, saying that his constant devotion, unrequited for so long, had finally burned out his love for her and that he wasn't willing to hang around anymore. This is precisely what Rhett Butler tells Scarlett when he leaves her after Melanie dies. Of course, we get to see Dobbin return to Amelia's side, and GWTW ends with Rhett walking out on Scarlett, but the parallel is there.



Further, Becky seeks to marry Amelia's brother, Jos Sedley, and definitely makes him infatuated with her and ultimately ruins him. Scarlett charms the socks off Melanie's brother, Charles Hamilton, and marries him, though he dies of illness at the start of the Civil War before she can make his life a living hell.

The one critical area that is missing from the Scarlett-is-Becky scenario is that of the "long-suffering" Ashley Wilkes. There is no parallel in VF for this part of the GWTW story. We never see Becky in love, ever. In this regard, she brings to mind someone who might be her model, Austen's Lady Susan. I know Thackeray read Austen's novels. I wonder whether he read this epistolary novella as well. Got to look up when it finally made it to print.

Enough with GWTW.

I also thought a lot about the narrator. Considering a couple of other masterpieces also published in 1847, namely Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, I was very aware of how dated Thackeray's obtrusive narrator felt. More like a Fielding narrator, than a Bronte first-person, framed story narrator who is striving for realism, Thackeray's narrator continually reminds the reader that this a is made-up story with dolls and puppets enacting the morality play, except near the end when he inserts himself into the story by saying he was at a dinner party where he heard Becky's and Amelia's histories recounted. I sort of wish he hadn't done that, actually. I liked him better as puppeteer.

I blush to say that I learned more about the Battle of Waterloo from reading this book than I ever learned in school and I'm eager to find out what Brussels was really like on the eve of the battle. Anyone have a book to recommend?

Richard Gilmore from the TV show The Gilmore Girls once quoted someone who said that all great books should be read at least three times. I'm happy to have at least one more reading of Vanity Fair in my future.



Now it's off to start disc 2 of the Andrew Davies mini-series of Vanity Fair. I am loving it, btw. Spot on!