hogglestock

Those that know me know that I love to set myself up for failure when it comes to bookish goals/challenges. Perhaps failure isn’t the right word. I did, after all finish Simon Thomas’s beastly Century of Books. And I have a decent success rate with the infamous TBR dare on James‘ blog. Maybe what I mean to say is that I set myself up to be miserable–but no, even that is too strong.

I guess, like it is for many of you, it’s really a love/hate thing with me and challenges. I love to join them or think them up, but I don’t always love doing them. But then today I bounced over to Lonesome Reader and saw Eric’s post about the shortlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction and I started to get that feeling. He has reviewed five of the six books and possibly read the sixth already. I’ve read none of them. But I think I am going to…oh dear…trying to fight it off…can’t. hold. back. I’m going to read them all. (Cut to image of Kermit the Frog flailing his arms and saying yaaaay.)

I know that part of what has me bamboozled is that I am just in one of those moods where I want to read everything. But there are other reasons as well:

1. This a good opportunity to see what passes for good, prize-worthy fiction these days. Given my predilection for old books, this is a good thing.
2. Simon Savidge has sung the praise of The Bees repeatedly in print and on The Readers.
   The Ali Smith cover is just too cool.
3. I feel like everyone has read Sarah Waters and I haven’t. Given this one is set in 1920s London I think I could like it. Hopefully not too many flappers.
4. Ironically, at a recent book blogger get together Frances of Nonsuch Book couldn’t tempt any of the seven or so bloggers in attendance to take a free hardcover edition of the Anne Tyler. She ended up leaving it on a free table in front of Capitol Hill Books. Now I will have to buy it. The last time I read Tyler was 1989–The Accidental Tourist. Even though I liked it I haven’t tried anything else.
5. The others I know nothing about.

I will not be finishing them prior to the winner being announced, whenever that is. I just know I won’t.

Lucy asked me if she could help announce the winners of my book give away. Look at that face, how could I say no?

The randomly chosen winners are…

Crampton Hodnet 1 – Karen K

Crampton Hodent 2 – Laura C

Civil to Strangers – Jennifer

Famous Last Words – Cal

The Magnificent Spinster – Kathy

Gerald and Elizabeth – [edited 5/6/15] Ellen B

I will leave a reply on the winners’ comments just in case there are duplicate names. If you are a winner please email your mailing address to hogglestock [at] outlook [dot] com

[For those of you wondering what happened to My Porch scroll down past this post.]

Well maybe you haven’t been wondering, but I sure was. I don’t recall when I first saw the meal service pop up on Facebook or somewhere like that but I was intrigued by it from the start. I love any kind of kit that comes in a box and I like food so how could I not be interested? Although I had no intention of ordering the service, I did check out their website and saw a blog post somewhere about someone trying it out. I was totally impressed by the quality of the graphics, copy, and photography. And according to that blog (the name of which I will never remember) the food was good too. Still, didn’t seem like something I would get for myself no matter how cool it looked. Well, I also liked the fact that the service required actual cooking, that these were not prepared foods.

Still, not for me. Because I looked at Blue Apron’s site, I started to get pop-ups for similar services like Plated and Healthy Somethingorother. But neither of them were compelling enough visually to get me to even click on the links. And then these really cheesy ads started to pop up on cable for another service called Hello Fresh. For some reason I poo-pooed all these other services and was loyal to Blue Apron. I’m a sucker for good packing and marketing and the others just didn’t look as cool. Not to mention the fact that, rightly or wrongly, I considered Blue Apron to be the original and all the others to be copies. And I hate copy cats.

All this loyalty and I hadn’t even tried it.  But then I saw some reference to the fact that each meal was 500-700 calories per person. Bingo. That finally did it. I have been cutting down on calorie intake but am terrible at portion size and control when I cook from scratch. Too much calculating. But here was what promised to be tasty meals, perfectly portioned, and fun to cook. And it turned out to be true. The two-person plan gives you three meals a week. It was indeed lots of fun to cook, the recipes were things I would never attempt on a weeknight, the meals were really damn good, and overall totally satisfying. We liked it so much that I have now ordered a second box for the week, but this time vegetarian recipes. This means six original, often unusual, foreign-inspired meals a week. And the total cost is less than I would spend at Whole Foods in a week not to mention all the rotten produce I throw out when my weekday resolve to cook doesn’t match up with my weekend grocery buying.

Today I got our first vegetarian box with the ingredients for three meals. I am just waiting for John to come home to see which one I should make tonight. And then on Thursday our meat box will show up with three more meals.  Much more I could say, but I will let the pictures do the talking.

I decided recently that I was really tired of the look of my old blogspot blog. I’ve been working on a new blog for work and helping develop a new website and became so dazzled by the possibilities that I began to find My Porch very, very dowdy. For years I’ve been annoyed with the clumsy way Blogger handles text and after seeing what WordPress had to offer and how clean all the text looks, I just couldn’t bear another month with blogspot.

My intention was to just transfer everything from My Porch over but I ran into two challenges. I was trying to figure out how to take my ‘Google juice’ with me. After almost 9 years of blogging I really didn’t want to give up my digital footprint. After much research and even trying to hire someone to migrate my blog to save my Google juice, I just decided I didn’t give a rip. I am going to do a few things to get redirects in place but if they don’t work I guess I will have to start over.

My second challenge was that the title My Porch no longer really worked. I still like the notion of sitting on a porch chatting about books and music and travel and food, but when I put up various banner images on the new blog and none of them were of porches I could barely handle the cognitive dissonance. And then when John brought it up I decided it was a bridge too far. So then I decided to do what I had previously thought unthinkable. I decided to change the name of my blog. Forget the fact that I have been Thomas at My Porch since 2006. Forget that my email address was onmyporch. Forget that my Twitter handle was also My Porch related. It jut seemed like time for a new world order.

So how in the hell did I ever come up with Hogglestock? Since I decided to pay $18 for a domain so that I don’t have a dot wordpress url, I really wanted something that was a single word. After much trying and a little research I discovered that pretty much every word in the English language has been registered as a domain name since about 2006. That would explain why adumbrate.com wasn’t available. Then I thought of choosing a name based on a fictional character. I thought of becoming Mr. Samgrass after the character in Brideshead Revisited. But as much as I love Brideshead I’m not a universal Waugh fan so that seemed a little too specific. Although I must say that the officious partypooper Mr. Samgrass does have more than a few things in common with me.

So then I thought about trying Trollope. Certainly my favorite Victorian novelist and full of made up names and place names. And then I narrowed it down to three possibilities. Bundlesham, Utterden, and Hogglestock. All are fictional place names in Trollope’s novels and each had its pluses and minuses. I swore Amanda at Fig and Thistle to secrecy and asked for her opinion and John also chimed in before I settled on Hogglestock. For those of you who don’t recognize the name right off the bat, Hogglestock was the name of the parish belonging to the Revd Josiah Crawley in the Barsetshire series. It may be a hideous, depressingly poor place, but the name was too good to pass up and I am definitely a fan of the Barsetshire books.

So here we are. My Porch is a thing of the past (although most of my 1,200 posts and your 9,047 comments are available here) and Hogglestock is a fresh new day. Same content, different look. I hope you continue to like me my blog.

It may take a minute or two to get some of my lists posted on Hogglestock, but fear not they will return.

 
In early March Frances of Nonsuch Book and I went to Baltimore to visit a book “store” where all the books are free. She wrote about it here, so I won’t say too much more. What I am going to show you today is how that excursion threw my already full library into turmoil.

In very short order I began finding books that I knew would be coming home with me.

In the first 60 seconds of looking I came across two great finds.

The result was a big old pile of books. 23 of them and all were free. But this meant I was going to have to find room in my already full library.

The chaos that ensued was I started to organize. Lucy occasionally gave advice and instruction.

I love that Nonsuch Book (no relation to Frances) publishes great forgotten literature. But they make them too squat and wide. They don’t feel real good in the hand and they take up too much shelf space.

Then came the issue of how to organize memoirs, bios, and letters. I didn’t have the guts to intershelve them with fiction by the subject as some on Twitter suggested. I ended up Creating a bio/memoir/letters section. That way I could accommodate the few non-literary subjects in my collection (e.g., Mahler and Rorem).

I’ve got a lot of Mitford. And this picture is even missing one volume.

Because of my recently discovered love of Eric Ambler (note the first picture at top) a friend suggested I might enjoy Helen MacInnes. I haven’t read her yet, but I wasn’t about to pass up all of these on the chance that I will like her.

So far, I have read The Masters in an old Penguin edition and the edition of The Affair shown here. After I found out that Snow’s work falls in a couple different series, I made a conscious decision not to learn more about them. Otherwise I would feel the need to start at the beginning and read them in order.

I’ve read the first of the Ottley books which is included in this Virago omnibus. Plus I couldn’t pass up the cover. The Magnificent Spinster is one of my all time favorites and I already own this edition so I will be having a give away in the near future. Music in the Hills is totally rare her in the US and impossible to find unless you want to pay big bucks. I paid moderately big buck for the same version of Gerald and Elizabeth so this one will part of a give away as well. And the Ambler I have already talked about.

Thinglass / Shutterstock.com

For those of you unlikely to read or enjoy the review of The Misalliance that I just posted (scroll down) I thought I would throw in this bonus post.

You may recall that I decided to keep track of all the London place names that come up in Anita Brookner’s fiction. Her novels are full of London. Not in an overly conspicuous way, but it leaves you no doubt that Brookner is a creature of the city.

Having now finished re-reading six of Brookner’s 24 novels (and working on number seven at the moment), my Gazetteer of Brookner’s London is starting to take shape. I can’t wait to see the list when I’ve finished re-reading all 24. Part of me wants to do this with every book I read that takes place in London but that would be just short of madness.

At some point I will invest the time and/or money into having a map made. But for now it is a list. I know there are London geeks out there who will enjoy looking at it even if you haven’t read Brookner.

I know Brookner is an acquired taste and many will find any number of faults with her content and style, but good God I love her work. She is like Barbara Pym without a sense of humor. I’m up to number six in my chronological re-read of all of Brookner’s 24 novels. Here is my attempt to ‘review’ it. 

You will also find it crossposted over at the International Anita Brookner Day blog.

Just about every relationship in The Misalliance (or A Misalliance in the UK) could be considered a misalliance.

After being left by her husband of twenty years Blanche spends her days wandering the National Gallery and her solitary evenings with a bottle of wine. She spends a fair amount of time in musing on the reasons why her husband left her and the type of woman he left her for, but I never got the feeling that that was the point of this novel. In many ways Blanche seems rather complacent about her husband’s departure, as if it had been her own fault for not being the right kind of woman. That in itself is tragic given that she devoted her married life to becoming the kind of public and private companion that her husband Bertie seemed to want.

While volunteering at the local hospital one day Blanche is drawn to Sally Beamish, a young mother who is there trying to get help for her three-year old daughter Elinor/Nellie who is mute. Blanche is immediately taken with the child, seeing her as a patient, old soul putting up with a flighty mother and an absent father. Indeed she sees Nellie as a kindred spirit and she moves to offer assistance to Sally whose life is a bit of a self-imposed mess. Her husband Paul is off being a factotum for a wealthy American family who have oddly decided to only pay him in one lump sum at the end of an extended trip. By the end of that trip, however, Paul is essentially accused of embezzling funds and is unlikely to get the pay coming to him. This situation never amounts to anything with legal implications but Blanche is coerced into intervening on Paul’s behalf –a man she has never even seen before.

Throughout all of this Blanche’s ex-husband Bertie continues to drop in most evenings ostensibly to see how Blanche is doing. This struck me as Bertie wanting to have it both ways. Why give up the comforts of a trusted, supportive ex-spouse just because you have moved on to a younger, more dynamic wife? Although Blanche looks forward to these meetings and retains an emotional attachment to Bertie, I never got the feeling that they were necessary to her well-being. If anything I felt they might be keeping her from moving forward. Also part of the story is Patrick, a suitor in the days prior to Bertie with whom she has remained friends over the years. She asks for his advice on how to best help Sally and Nellie  and he ends up falling in love with the much younger Sally. Nothing ever comes of it, Sally uses Patrick for support in the same way she uses Blanche, but it is enough for Blanche to see Patrick for what he really is.

Blanche is a bit of a victim of male behavior and privilege, and although she is a bit stuck trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like she might be on the cusp of something. Perhaps it’s a recognition that the men in her life are really rather weak and certainly not to be relied upon. Blanche’s decision to leave them all behind and go off traveling for an extended, undefined period is, I suppose, at least partly out of desperation. But I couldn’t help projecting my own wishes for Blanche. This was going to be the moment of her triumph. The moment when she leaves it all behind and discovers who she really is.

And then at the eleventh hour Bertie returns–and seemingly for good. Is this vindication for Blanche and the restoration of her married life? Perhaps, but rather than finding it something to celebrate, I found it no more than a threat to her ultimate happiness. A return to her life in a comfy prison. But Brookner leaves us hanging as to what happens next. My feeling is that if Blanche does take him back it won’t stick.  He may not leave her again but she will realize he isn’t what she wants and this is the real misalliance of the book. Not the first 20 years, not the connection with Sally and Nellie, but what happens after Bertie’s return. His return may delay her self-realization, but it won’t preempt it entirely.

——-

This thought may not be worth much, but it is something I want to memorialize for my own edification. I loved the scenes where Mrs. Duff comes to Blanche’s rescue despite the fact that Blanche has never shown her more than a begrudged politeness. Mrs. Duff’s simple, but helpful assistance when Blanche fell ill seems like the only bit of altruism in the book. Brookner doesn’t make much of it. But she must have had something in mind. I can think of a few things, but I really just mention it because I was warmed by those scenes.

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Back in the mid-1980s when I was in high school and just getting to know the gay world no article or book about gay literature, or gays in literature failed to mention The Well of Loneliness. The only thing I remember about any of that exegesis is that TWoL is a bedrock classic of gay lit, but that it is also a depresso-tragic tale that reinforces the tragic gay stereotype. In college when the book came up in a conversation some Lesbian friends admitted they thought it was boring. Although today I have a predilection for this kind of Virago publishing-niche book, I can understand why some would find it less than compelling–or at least those who don’t have a thing for early 20th century women’s fiction. And god knows Hall could have used a better editor to fix some of her needlessly bad sentence construction. But I digress.

In terms of LGBT issues, things have changed enormously since TWoL was published in 1928, and have even changed enormously since I first heard of the book 25 years ago. Those changes definitely had an impact on how I perceived this text. For sure the Lesbian main character in the book faced great challenges and could not live an open life but she was of an economic class that allowed her much more freedom and opportunity to at least be a Lesbian. A working class woman in the same period would likely not have been so lucky.

I think one of the analyses of this book and others of its ilk is that it seems only able to present gays and Lesbians as leading tragic, depressing, or debauched lives. In my vague recollections it seems like some blame the book for setting or reinforcing that notion, and suggesting that that tragic story line was required in order to get mainstream publishers to consider printing such things. The gays had to pay for their sins somehow or the reading public would burn the place down. Indeed this may have been the case. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice which ultimately puts a positive spin on a gay character was written 1913-1914 but didn’t get published until the 1970s after Forster was dead. I know that Forster wanted it that way, but I wonder if he would have been able to get it published back in the day without killing off Maurice and Scudder? Perhaps there are other books from that period that had happy endings for gays?

One of the ways that today’s political and social climate has changed my view of the story is that I could see the ultimate final tragedy of the book (which I won’t disclose here) as being one that didn’t necessarily have to be about being gay. I could easily see how the final pages could have played out for a straight couple in a similar way if, perhaps not, for similar reasons.

Then there is James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Written in 1956, it has similarities with TWoL in the need for a tragic end, but in many ways Baldwin’s characters are truly self loathing individuals in a way that Hall’s characters were not. Long story short, David is an American in Paris whose girlfriend/fiancee is traipsing around Spain while he falls in love with the beautiful Giovanni. Even from the relative freedom of Paris in the 1950s (I failed to mention that Hall’s book also largely takes place in Paris) society and family weigh heavy on David and cause no end of denial. So much so that even after a prolonged emotional and sexual relationship with Giovanni he seems perfectly able to pretend to himself that he is straight and sets in motion one tragedy after another. No one wins in this book.

Unlike Hall’s book I don’t think one can see this tragedy unfolding without the gay dimension. In fact their is no amount of cowardice in TWoL that comes close the David’s in GR. Happily, Baldwin, and I think to some extent Hall, led lives that were more open and fulfilling than the characters in their books.

One of the odd things about both TWoL and GR was how closely the experiences and feelings tracked with my own in the 1980s. Although things were way better in 1985 than they were in 1928, the emotional roller-coaster felt very similar. I wonder if it still feels that way for kids today.