Baby, Book, and Banjo : Tim Westover's Blog

This is Baby, Book, and Banjo, and there hasn’t been a whole lot of the first one recently. Therefore, here is the baby, sitting in my library.

Among the books her library, her favorite book is Winnie-the-Pooh, which her mother is reading to her in English, and I am reading to her in Esperanto.

2011 was the Year of the Lime — the year that “Book and Banjo” became “Baby, Book, and Banjo.” I’d predicted that having a newborn in the house would cut into my reading time (and it was a tradeoff I’d gladly make). But, having a newborn seemed to give me more time for reading. The iPhone Kindle app helped turn time spent waiting in the doctor’s office into a few pages, as did listening to audiobooks in the car while lulling baby Limelette to sleep. (I consider listening to unabridged audiobooks to be the equivalent of reading the book.)

In 2011, I read the following 70 books. I’ve bolded the ones I especially enjoyed or recommend.

January 2011
Myths, History, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee

February 2011
The Great Gatsby
No Country for Old Men
The Turn of the Screw
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Mile-High Fever
Wizard and Glass
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

March 2011
The Dream of Perpetual Motion
The Kingdom of Ohio
At Home
Wise Blood
Roughing It
The Reivers

April 2011
Pym
Foxfire Book
American Gods
Gilead

May 2011
Deathless
Disappearing Spoon
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

June 2011
Strange Angel
The Possessed
The Spirit Thief
The Tiger’s Wife
Confederates in the Attic
A Visit from the Goon Squad

July 2011
American Lightning
From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore
Rich in Love
Georgia Odyssey
Charlatan
50 Favorite Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright
Children of Fire
Georgia Curiosities
Creating Black Americans
Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege
Flowing Through Time

August 2011
Slavery in the American Mountain South
Their Eyes Were Watching God
That Half-Barbaric Twang
Every Tongue Got to Confess
Bel Canto
African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia
Drunkard’s Walk
The Souls of Black Folks
The Original of Laura

September 2011
Blacking Up
The Language of Science and Faith
Let’s Play White
Moby Dick
Tambo and Bones
Folks Visions & Voices
Musicophilia
Pale Fire
The Signifying Monkey

October 2011
Seal Skin
Swamplandia!
Mail-Order Mysteries
The City & The City
Folk-Songs from the Southern Highlands
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

November 2011
Wolves of the Calla
Bossypants
Pilgrim of the Sky

December 2011
Embassytown
Rise and Fall of the Bible
Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

One of my hobbies is visiting old and forgotten tourist attractions in Georgia. The kinds of places that we value now either didn’t exist or weren’t valued in years gone by. One can learn a lot about a culture from its leisure activities.

Among my favorites of the places I’ve visited is Radium Springs, located near Albany, GA.

Radium Springs

Radium Springs is a natural spring that wells up only a few hundred yards away from the Flint River. The springs, under the name Blue Springs, were popular in the 19th century, but the name was changed in the 1920′s following the discovery of trace amounts of radium in the water. Radium was thought to be a miracle cure for all kinds of medical ailments, and many fad treatments and quack recipes boasted of their radium content.

Radium Springs

The water is very clear and very blue. You can see the bottom of the river bed through the water much more easily than in the nearby Flint River. I still wouldn’t drink it, though…

An elaborate hotel and casino were built at the edge of Radium Springs, which was the site of relaxation, dining, and dancing. The casino survived into the 1990′s and was finally demolished after historic flooding in 2003.

Radium Springs Casino

Source: Geocaching.com

The county purchased Radium Springs and maintains a small parking area and overlook with informational signage. In 2010, the county also renovated a portion of the original spring area, including walkways, gazebos, gardens, and more. Alas, the casino has not been restored. There’s no admission charge, so if you’re ever in Albany, stop by!

Radium Springs Today

Further reading:

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=b47ae67d-7077-422c-a529-aa6d423b22a5

http://radiumsprings.albanyhightimes.com/

I have a new story, entitled “Unbroken Lines”, posted at the website Fantasy Faction, as part of their October Writing Challenge. You can read (and vote) for it there: http://fantasy-faction.com/forum/writers-corner/october-writing-challenge/

A quick excerpt:

In our neighborhood, all the houses were alike; their complex geometry, indistinguishable. But mine was the most splendid of the identical houses, because I framed it with an impeccable lawn. Blades of grass stood in unbroken lines: crew-cut, uniform, regimental green. The lawn was the perfect complement to the red brick of the house itself, and behind that, the vast blue emptiness of sky.

But such a spectacle is paid for in vigilance. I walked the lawn every evening, being careful to vary my path so as not to flatten the zoysia. I suffered no weed to survive the night; I dug out their roots with a thin-bladed knife. My neighbors, dwelling in their own identical houses, let crabgrass spoil their property and lives.

The first sign was so small. During my patrol, I found a sapling, almost a foot tall, which had not been there the night before. I am aware of what occurs on my lawn above all other pieces of land in this world. I know it better than my own face in the mirror. Had the sapling instead been a tendril of kudzu, the stalk of a sunflower, even the grasping face of a dandelion, I could have understood its sudden appearance. But a sapling, no matter how small, does not sprout over night. I dug up the sapling and worried about its roots; how far could they have spread in a day?

No singing trees this time, but still plenty of trees.

Gogol’s short story “The Nose” is one of my all-time favorites. When I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2004, we had to track down the house where the main character wakes up to find that his nose has disappeared from his face, and what’s more, it now outranks him. Sure enough, there was a monument to the nose at just the right place:

One of my favorite things is Yuriy Norshteyn’s Russian animated film Ёжик в тумане (Hedgehog in the Fog). It’s a stunningly beautiful piece of work: quiet, mysterious, profound, spooky. Hayao Miyazaki has called in an inspiration, and it won a 2003 Japanese award for the “Best Animated Film of All Time.” So, if that’s not enough to recommend it, I don’t know what would be.

Read more on Wikipedia or just watch it on YouTube (10 minutes long, with subtitles).

When carving our Halloween pumpkins, I thought that some of the images from the film might be appropriately rendered in the medium. Here’s the result:

Hedgehog in the Fog Pumpkin

Of all the pumpkins I’ve made, this may not be the best carving, but it is my favorite.

This was the scene that I was copying:

Hedgehog in the Fog

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! has been getting a lot of buzz (they’re even going to make an HBO miniseries from it). And for the first 83% of the book, I was on board, I was loving it. The premise (the dissolution of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestles following the death of their matriarch) is amazing; the writing is great (orate, lush, and surprising); the characters are intriguing. The rival Hell-themed amusement park is inspired in its details.

But there is a scene 83% of the way through the book that almost made me want to give up, and the book never recovered from this moment.

Spoilers ahoy:

That scene is the rape of the 13-year-old narrator by the seedy “Obi-Wan” of the novel, the Bird Man. I understand that powerful literature deals with dramatic, often profoundly repulsive moments. These moments change the lives of their participants forever. But the scene seems to have very little emotional weight for Ava, the narrator / victim. Her takeaway is “Huh, he raped me, so maybe I shouldn’t trust him anymore.” But maybe that’s the point? That’s how a tough-as-nails 13-year-old from the Florida swamp would deal with the situation? Somehow, I don’t think so. The language that Russell uses for the scene is unpleasant — almost voyeuristic, and I didn’t want to read it.

And then, the plot of the novel goes to pieces. Ava’s familiar, a red baby alligator, who has been an important symbol through the whole novel, is sacrificed uselessly. The quest narrative that had been driving half the book peters into nothingness. Ava doesn’t complete her mission to save her sister; that’s done by accident, when her brother accidentally lands his sea plane and happens to find her.

There is no resolution for the story of the Bigtree clan; no monumental showdown between father and son, children and parents, bank and alligator farm, dream and reality.The denouement plays out too quickly, in just a few pages. The farm is lost, the girls dress up in school uniforms and wrestle no more alligators forever.

The resolution doesn’t seem motivated by the forgoing story. We were acquainted with exceptional characters; they never learn that they aren’t exceptional, but they become ordinary anyway. This basic plot movement, though dark and dispiriting, could be very powerful. And Russell doesn’t deliver on it at all. I can see how it is supposed to work from Ava’s victimization, sacrifice, and ineffectuality, but it just doesn’t come together.

Read Swamplandia! 83% of it is amazing. Stop before the end and imagine a better one.

Fed up with the puddles on Pike Street, a number of Lawrenceville, GA, citizens make their displeasure known:

Protest on Pike Street, Lawrencevile GA, 1915

At the far left, two men are dredging the puddle with a seine. In the middle, the ringleaders – Charles Mason and his son Clarence – are using the tried-and-true “firearm” method of fishing (e.g. they have shotguns). The most successful is the boy on the far right, who’s hauled up a respectable fish using watermelon as bait.

Source: Stancil, W. Dorsey. Vanishing Gwinnett. Lawrenceville, GA: Gwinnett Historical Society, 1984.

My very talented friend Cherry DelRosario made this poster for The Lime, our little one. I love it!

Chloe Charlotte Westover

Here is Mr. and Mrs. Homer Tuggle’s epic collard plant, circa 1951:

Collards

If it’s just one giant collard leaf, is it still a “mess” of collards?

Source: Stancil, W. Dorsey. Vanishing Gwinnett. Lawrenceville, GA: Gwinnett Historical Society, 1984.