In 1992 I worked for six months in London. My arrival was nicely timed to coincide with Holy Week. Although still somewhat of a practicing Christian at the time, I was perhaps most interested in the musical opportunities that would be available during that period. My first Sunday service upon arrival was Palm Sunday at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

I don’t remember what the music was that Sunday 18 years ago, but I do remember one of the hymns ended with the use of the State Trumpet stop on the organ. The pipes are en chamade (horizontal rather than vertical) and are high above the nave over the enormous West Door of the cathedral. Since the main bits of the organ are in the choir and in the triforium near the huge central dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s magnum opus, the contrast between the trumpet stops over the West Door and the rest of the organ was truly amazing.

I also spent Good Friday at St. Paul’s and had a mystical music experience of another kind that brought tears to my eyes. The choir sang Allegri’s Miserere. When sung well it is a stunning piece with a solo tenor line and a solo (boy) soprano line that goes soaring up to a glorious high C (I think). I am not sure if they still do it, but that year at St. Paul’s they had a temporary altar set up under the Dome and the choir was under the Dome as well rather than back in the choir stalls. For this particular piece they put the soloists somewhere else in the Cathedral–I think they may have been up behind the high altar. Wherever they were the separation of the solo voices from the rest of the choir made the piece even more stunning. The effect was that the building itself became one of the musicians, enveloping all in an ethereal moment that I will never forget.

Here is the superb choir of Kings College, Cambridge singing the Misrere. If you don’t feel like sitting and watching all 9 minutes, I suggest you hit play, open another browser window and continue your journey through your favorite blogs while the music plays. I can guarantee that you will peek back to check out the video once you hear the boy soprano soar over the top of the rest of the ensemble.

  
Thanks to all who left such kind comments on my last post. We definitely feel lucky to have found a house that has what we dreamed of at a price we could afford. We are both in our 40s, are first time homebuyers, and have been looking (in some despair) off and on for the past six years. So we definitely feel like our time has come.

As we did our home inspection today, I couldn’t help but notice that the seller has pretty good taste in books, and while, not seemingly a bookaholic, has more volumes than your average American home. The owner definitely dabbles in the classics, (Shakespeare, Dickens, Wharton, Cather), but also seems to listen to Oprah and the bestseller lists. But nothing looked too frivilous. Two copies of Wolf Hall and one of my favorites The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman.

  
Things in my reading/blogging world have been a little slow lately with work, an overseas guest, and the fact that we are finally (finally!) buying a house. The last time we tried to buy a house was in 2005 at the peak of the housing bubble. So, five years later we have finally found something that will work for us that we can afford. We still have to get through the home inspection and the appraisal, but hopefully there won’t be any challenges there.

Bottom line is, I am finally getting my porch (which we will turn into a screened porch), and…wait for it…a LIBRARY. It actually has a separate room with nothing but bookshelves.

  
NOTE: I wrote this post back on June 25, 2006. Although I read tons of fiction by women, I haven’t made any nod yet to this being Women’s History Month. So I am recycling this old post on these four fabulous women (who all happen to have been authors among other things).

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The recent deaths of writer and urban planning iconoclast-turned-icon Jane Jacobs and feminist godmother Betty Friedan has me pondering how four women altered the contours of American life. I realize that the conversations I have had about these four women and this post are not particularly original thought, but bear repeating anyway.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)
When journalist Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 she helped pull the urban planning profession from its darkest days of “slum” clearance and the worst excesses of 1950s urban renewal. Originally decried by planners of the day, Jacobs’ view of what constituted the components of a healthy neighborhood and a healthy city is the standard by which they are still judged today. Jacobs’ description of her Greenwich Village neighborhood and the ways in which it nurtured its residents provided a powerful example in favor of mixed-use, mixed-income, walkable neighborhoods that are the mantra of virtually every municipal planning department today. Like the other three women discussed here her work is not without its flaws. But, like the others, her clarion call woke up a sleeping nation and defined the terms of discussion for going on fifty years now.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
The marine biologist/zoologist, professor, and author’s 1962 book Silent Spring stood the US and the world on its ear about the connection between chemical pesticides and the degradation of the environment. Her book woke up America and kicked off the modern environmental movement. Of course she has her detractors even today (not being a scientist I am not going to try and wade through the arguments), but the fundamental truth is her work put environmental issues firmly on the policy table and in the minds of the American public.

Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
The 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ushered in the modern feminist movement. Despite the book’s somewhat limited perspective of the white, college-educated, middle class woman (i.e., the typical Smith graduate), the notion that the sexist, conformist expectations of the times had trapped most women into a life of unfulfilled potential had near virtual universal application. (One could also argue that suburban sprawl contributed greatly to the imprisonment of women in the 1950s, but that is the topic for another post.) Friedan’s writing and her co-founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) set the U.S. on an unstoppable path toward the as yet unfulfilled equality of women in America.

Julia Child (1912-2004)
When I was a child in the 1970s the whole family would gather around the TV on Sunday afternoons to watch The French Chef with Julia Child on PBS. We never made any of her recipes but we sure liked watching. Her show, which began in 1963, and her contribution to the popularization of TV cooking shows is not the most impressive change she brought to American life. Julia introduced Americans to recipes and ingredients that were anathema to the post-World War II salt, pepper, and paprika school of American cooking. When her show began Americans were gorging on TV dinners and canned vegetables. Thanks to Julia and others in her circle or under her influence, we have so much to choose from today when we head to the grocery store. Not all of the “food” created by scientists but those fabulous ingredients that no one had heard of thirty years ago.

 
If you don’t know the amazing blog Book Patrol you should really check it out.  Today it features a really wonderful story on the London Library in St. James Square. It is a private lending library that I had never heard of and it looks like a brilliant place. And last week it had a post on the El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires which is in a splendid old opera house.

Well, that post put me in mind of a bookstore I recently came across in Rochester, Minnesota. It is a Barnes and Noble that has been retrofitted into an old cinema. It isn’t half as grand as El Ateneo, but with its mock medieval interior it sure makes for an interesting place to browse. (All photo credits except for the exterior shot go to J.M. Wetherington.)

How many Barnes & Noble have a lobby, let alone one that looks like this?

From the moment I first saw a few of the volumes in this Penguin English Journeys series I knew I had to own the whole set. I loved the art work, I loved that they were all about the English countryside in one way or another, and perhaps most appealing of all was that they were part of such a well coordinated set. That really appealed to my anal retentive (in)sensibilities. My husband was able to buy me all but one of the 20 volumes through The Book Depository.

One, A Shropshire Lad was on back order and over the course of several months never came back into stock. Which is where Cornflower and her reading club member Jill came to the rescue to help me get the final volume to complete my set.

So for a while now I have had all 20 volumes sitting in my TBR pile. I have toyed off and on with the idea of reading them all at once. I always knew I would read them sequentially, even though the sequence seems to be based solely on alphabetical order. But since none of them are very long, I finally decided that it would be interesting and a fun spring activity to go on a vicarious English Journey during the month of April. So I have decided to read these twenty books during the month of April. And I will, of course, read them in order. I am anxious to start now, but I am going to force myself to wait until April 1 to begin.

Voices of Akenfield – Ronald Blythe

The Wood – John Stewart Collis

From Dover to the Wen – William Cobbett

The Pleasures of English Food – Alan Davidson

Through England on a Side-Saddle – Celia Fiennes

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and other poems – Various

A Shropshire Lad – A.E. Housman

Cathedrals and Castles – Henry James

Walks in the Wheatfields – Richard Jefferies

The Beauties of a Cottage Garden – Gertrude Jekyll

Country Churches – Simon Jenkins

A Wiltshire Diary – Francis Kilvert

Some Country Houses and their Owners – James Lees-Milne

The Clouded Mirror – L.T.C. Rolt

Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens – Vita Sackville-West

One Green Field – Edward Thomas

English Folk Songs – Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd

Country Lore and Legends – Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson

Birds of Selborne – Gilbert White

Life at Grasmere – Dorothy and William Wordsworth

I am terrible at doing reading challenges, even ones that I create for myself. So why in the world I am setting myself a challenge for April? I don’t have the answer to that. Maybe I will know at the end of April.

 Reality and Dreams
Muriel Spark

As usual, Dame Muriel Spark in her 1996 novel Reality and Dreams creates a quirky, dysfunctional, yet highly believable cast of characters. At the center of all the action is aging film director Tom Richards who, by the nature of his profession, has the god-like ability to create whole new worlds, to transfer what is in his head to the screen, indeed to turn dreams into reality. With the opening line Spark foreshadows Tom’s position in his personal universe:

He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.

But just as humans have the free will to diverge from their assigned roles in God’s dreams, so too do the characters surrounding Tom have the tendency to operate freely and independently while maintaining just enough piety and obeisance to keep Tom happy. And he is perhaps much more manipulated than he would ever suspect. The other characters swirling around him include his wealthy wife Claire with whom he shares an open marriage full of his-and-hers infidelity, their grown daughter Marigold who disappoints them in many ways, Tom’s beautiful grown daughter Cora, a taxi driver-confidante, various in-laws, and a few flaky actresses.

The book looks at the blurry lines between reality and dreams from many angles and on many levels, both obvious and subtle. Tom’s movie plots are not just dreams turned into “reality”, but they also take real life events and turn them into cinematic dreams. I also think in some ways that Tom’s reality is more of a dream than he would like to admit.

Reality and Dreams is satirical and often humorous and, like many an Iris Murdoch novel, has lots of mix-and-match bed hopping. The brilliance of Muriel Spark is her ability to create characters and plots that are crazier than most of us encounter in our own lives, but not so crazy as to make them unbelievable. Similarly, we don’t end up liking these characters in the sense that we would want to know them personally, but we do love to watch them and live out some of our darker thoughts and personality disorders vicariously. A kind of safety valve to keep us all from becoming miserable bastards.

For other views:

Novel Insights
Book-Drunk
His Futile Preoccupations