A compendium of treasures from the Junior League Thrift Shop

My thrift store of choice, the Pennywise, closes down over the summer since folks are down the shore, up in Maine, out in Colorado or Montana or off to Honduras or Fire Island. My backup thrift store is the Junior League Thrift Shop which recently yielded an oboe cleaning kit (which includes an oboe swath, a cleaning brush/duster, cork grease, a polish cloth, a reed guard, and a thumb cushion all for $3.00), a brand new pair of Saucony running shoes, size 6 ($8.00), two collections of easy pieces for beginning piano players and several books: Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia (subtitled 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, and now a major movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams!), A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond and illustrated by Peggy Fortnum whose ink drawings bristle with energy, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead.

The thing about the Junior League Thrift Shop is that while prices run a bit high for clothing – a blouse or skirt is usually $8.00, while at Pennywise they usually are about half that – the socioeconomic milieu of donors is such that there is a rack dedicated to Lily Pulitzer clothes, the kids’ selection usually has beautifully tailored dresses and blue blazers in all sizes which is great for those occasions which demand formal presentation of one’s children (or for a Halloween costume of Clark Kent midway in his transformation into Superman) and you can find an huge selection of hardback novels that have recently been at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list, or which were personally inscribed gifts to people connected to the publishing industry, as was the case in The Brief History of the Dead (“To Penelope, with thanks for raising my wonderful editor”).

The Brief History of the Dead opens in a city populated by those who have recently passed over, where folks seem to stay while they’re still part of the living memory of those who are still on earth; while there are a set number of ways in which people can meet their death, every individual’s experience of crossing into this realm is unique: “Lev Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out of nothing at all. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the flesh of a single peach. Graciella Cavazos would say only that she began to snow – four words – and smile bashfully whenever anyone pressed her for details.”

The conceit of the book, as far as I can tell being a couple of pages into chapter two which is set in an isolated research station in the Antarctic (though I guess when you’re talking about polar research stations the “isolated” is kind of a given), appears to be that a virulent virus is rapidly emptying out the earth’s population, and all those in the city of the living-dead are disappearing more quickly than the newcomers come in – my guess is that the remaining inhabitants of the city are all folks who are tied in some way, shape, or form to the woman at the station whose two co-workers haven’t returned from an expedition to find help after their communication system breaks down. Thus far, the writing is so pleasing that the conceit doesn’t become the driving force of the book, like those buildings under construction or renovation where all you see is the scaffolding.

Otherwise have been spending time with Daniel Raeburn’s monograph on Chris Ware. I’m liking the fact that Raeburn is conveying Ware’s aesthetic not only through the images of selected works (amazing Joseph Cornell-like constructions, contraptions like a vending machine that spits out a small hand-made comic book when the purchaser inserts a house key, a wedding invitation that can be converted into a rocket if the recipient follows the printed directions) as well as through the tone of Raeburn’s own writing; my favorite line is one where he solemnly announces that given the critical and popular success of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, “Ware has escaped the comics ghetto. He recently purchased health insurance for himself and his wife, Marnie, as well as a three-bedroom dwelling and a used Honda Civic.”

Looking for Louise Erdrich

Just finished Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag: early on in the novel, one character is described as “an undisciplined reader” who keeps “a mess of half-read books beside her bed, as well as on the coffee tables and in the bathrooms” who is married to someone whose “reverence for books had started with the cast-off marvels his mother had brought home. The smell of mildewed pages. The broken spine, torn, showing the cardboard. Nothing mattered but that the book be rescued like a human thing….She was a raucous, impertinent, even disrespectful reader. [He] wouldn’t dream of using a Kleenex for a bookmark. He looked at splayed books with anxiety, and always fetched a strip of paper to close gently within the pages. He seemed to think he needed a bookmark at the ready when he shut his books, the way a medic has a bandage handy to stanch a wound once he lifts away direct pressure.”

I (over)identify with both of these characters, as someone who literally can’t leave home without at least three books, maybe seven or more if I’m going away for the whole weekend, just in case I find myself with a stretch of time and realize that what I really need is some poetry/a good novel/something that I’ve already read that I can ease into reading again/a collection of essays/some scary short stories/a specific series of issues of a comic book serial from the 1990s/a guide to foraging for herbs in suburban Philadelphia, etc.

Books are a kind of anting-anting for me, yet I’ve left some precious ones on trains, in hotel rooms, on dining hall floors. I have been known to skip to the end of long novels, so I can brace myself for characters’ fates or figure out whether I should make the investment of continuing to live in the universe the writer is crafting. I do not have good boundaries when it comes to other people’s reading materials: when a much-coveted copy of The Passage entered into the household earlier in the summer, I not only would wait until the alpha reader fell asleep to steal it for my own reading pleasure, but also would let slip key plot points that were just too good to keep to myself (“there’s a newspaper report that quotes a person who is trying to reach family members in Johnstown! And it turns out that Philadelphia and its western suburbs are somehow immune from the early waves of sickness, and it is actually true that Philly girls will in fact be the ones who will survive the coming apocalypse!”)

It’s been a summer of trying to catch up with Erdrich’s prodigious output – I finally made some progress through The Master Butchers Singing Club, even while feeling slightly put out by the fact that at some point she not only wrote The Plague of Doves but also published it to great critical acclaim and I am just now realizing that the book exists. I had picked up a copy of Four Souls on the shelves of DogStar Books in Lancaster several weeks ago when I was trying to find a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo since my own is AWOL. I had remembered taking Four Souls out from the Ludington Library last summer (which was a false memory – I actually had Four Souls on the shelves at home), and wanted to reread her description of the construction of a grand mansion that conjures the lives and landscapes that are ravaged to build the house – the ancient trees that are felled, the brownstone carved from an island that the Ojibwe hold sacred, the lead paint that poisons the family, the bricks that take their hue from blood from a slaughterhouse, the animals driven to death over the course of construction, the laborers who lose their lives in the work of the accumulation of one man’s wealth.

Reading this made me want to reread the moment in The Painted Drum in which an estates appraiser who has taken the drum from the attic of a family descended from a corrupt trader braces herself as the local sheriff breaks into her kitchen, since she (and we) believe that she is going to be arrested for theft -- as it turns out, the DEA thinks that she’s a drug runner because she had been seen hiking through a patch of marijuana planted by a ne’er do well in the neighborhood who, as it turns out, is extremely talented in his tending of plants.

I also want to go back and reread all of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse which is one of those books that I read straight through in one 24 hour period and wanted it to never end, and her travel narrative for National Geographic entitled Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country where she writes of modern day miracles such as the fact that her toddler had managed to keep a small stone in her mouth for the better part of the day, with no ill effects or tragic end, and that Erdrich herself has opened an independent bookstore in this era that seems to be so inhospitable to such ventures, places that I think maintain the life of a community.

These stories circulate with others, such as a narrative of a community that literally breaks itself apart when one member falls ill, since they’ve learned that a disease can annihilate a tribe and that the self-imposed diaspora may be the only way of ensuring that they can live on. Thinking of the ways in which our lives have been shaped by such experiences and incidents; wondering what is created and recreated when such stories are told and retold.

From "Everybody Poops" to "Epileptic"

Mira pulled Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops off the shelf to accompany her bowl of dry Trix cereal (yes, I am the kind of parent that allows her offspring to eat ridiculously sugared cereal just moments before bedtime) and we settled down for a fully scatological read; I’m trying to figure out whether the book’s straightforward and extremely aesthetically pleasing take on this most basic bodily function reflects a general Japanese cultural sensibility or if it is all Taro Gomi. It’s just difficult for me to imagine a children’s book writer successfully pitching this project to an American publisher ("I smell a Newberry!").

Among the 350 books that Gomi has created is “a really giant coloring and doodling book” entitled Doodles that includes pages like this, which states on the upper left corner "These elephants have a problem. What is it?"
Gomi published Everyone Poops in Japan back in 1977 as Minna Unchi, and come to think of it, the late ‘70s were a free to be you and me time here in the states when it came to cultural production geared toward children, manifest in what was pretty radical educational experimentation -- thinking here about the “team” classes at Maple Ridge Elementary where the curriculum worked to fully integrate 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes. It seems that the only material trace of things like team classrooms is the fact that now kids’ desks might be grouped together in little pods rather than set up in straight rows, but this material reformulation of the classroom is in and of itself something of note.

Thinking about this in light of a comment by Brad Downey, an artist whose work is featured in Francesca Gavin’s Street Renegades: New Underground Art; the design of the book itself plays with strategies deployed by artists whose materials include wheat paste and spray paint by having the title and author’s name affixed to the cover image on a peel-off orange sticker that is precisely the size of those “Hello, my name is” tags. Downey’s work includes installations like one called Madonna and Child (2004) in which he created s small scale version of a street lamp with a bus stop sign and set it up next to the actual bus stop; he notes that “Construction workers are invisible because they are…working for the city….I feel the same way about street objects and control devices….They are the visual manifestations of the rules or the truth.”

Among the artistic interventions showcased in the collection that caught my eye are Carla Ly’s vinyl stickers that look like plasters (to take the British term and avoid the brand name) that she places on broken sidewalks on dented car bumpers and (image at left) the duo Thundercut who essentially give character to those little figures in crosswalk lightboxes that flash to signal when it is safe to walk.


In a graphic moment because I’ve been slowly rereading David B.’s Epileptic, focusing on the way in which the work represents the process of learning how to see. David B. was raised by art teacher parents in Orleans in the late 60s and early 70s, and Epileptic delineates their attempts to cure the narrator’s brother of his epilepsy. This saga brings the Beauchard family in contact with several countercultural communities, most of which seem to fully replicate the hierarchies and dysfunctions of the society for which they're supposedly providing an alternative.

As the narrator explains the basic tenets of a macrobiotic diet -- an introduction to the family’s disastrous visits to macrobiotic communes – he speaks to macrobiotism’s end goal to balance yin and yang in individuals as a means of creating a more peaceful community, and produces a panel in which he invites the reader to identify the yin and yang elements in the image. Thinking about this invitation for some audience participation as a kind of pedagogical moment in the work that asks us as readers, simply, “what do you see?”

In the beginning....(or, late last night)

Last night I fell asleep reading Laocoön, subtitled "an essay on the limits of painting and poetry" by the 18th century German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; this is one of those books that has been surfacing as a citation in essays on art history and visual culture studies, so when I saw it on the shelves on The Title Page (the used bookstore in Bryn Mawr that is holding its own right across the parking lot of the massive Borders) earlier this summer, I picked it up, basking in the proprietor's approval of this particular purchase.

I think this helped counterbalance the fact that I am a known buyer of Stephenie Meyer books, having picked up Eclipse there last summer as part of a haul that included Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemons and a huge volume of essays on feminist art in the 1970s -- which, truth be told, stayed unread until very recently when I was looking for something on Judy Chicago's and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse" project. It is now safely in the hands of a friend who is planning to organize some choreographers to present work in an abandoned squash court - wondering if abandoned squash courts will be the architectural legacy of the 1970s and 1980s, as old knitting and mattress factories are for the 1870s and 1880s, and if architects ever go into a project knowing that some day the structure will be repurposed as an arts space.

Lessing is actually very funny and piquant in his observations, which I wasn't expecting since I was going into the book with a sense of duty rather than of anticipation; he notes at the outset that "We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions" which makes me think that we could probably trace a direct aesthetic genealogy from Lessing to Anthony Lane, who has been the reason I had been justifying a subscription to The New Yorker since I usually flip directly to the back of each issue to see if there is a film review from him.

And I must admit that I was reading Laocoön primarily because I couldn't find my copy of M. T. Anderson's Feed, a young adult novel about a dystopian future in which about three quarters of North Americans have information feeds directly implanted into their brains; this came in the mail from Powell's earlier this week, along with three copies (I hit the wrong button on the on-line ordering system and couldn't figure out how to rectify my error without canceling my whole order; luckily, they were on deep discount and there are several recent and impending births in my circle of friends) of Helen Oxenbury and Mem Fox's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

I have a sentimental attachment to Helen Oxenbury books because they were a great favorite of Sam's when he was much younger, and love the fact that Mem Fox's illustrations of the babies' splayed toes look like Dorothea Lange's photo of her own gnarly feet, which is making me think of Tobin Sieber's book on the aesthetics of disability which compels me to view Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, as beautiful as it is, as a celebration of corporeal normativity. So I'm wondering if any package of books for a new baby should also include some Charles Addams - thinking of the comic in which the parents are cooing over an infant's supernumery digits -- or of a collection of Lucille Clifton poems.

Here is a Lucille Clifton poem from homage to mine collected in good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980:

i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn't understand
the powerful memory of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.