Wordless Wednesday: Two Graduates and A Greyhound

Tuesday Intro: A Moveable Feast

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run cafe where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness.  The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named aperitifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway

Would you keep reading? I love the images of Paris Hemingway's writing paints in my mind. Paris in July begins on Friday.

Tuesday Intros is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.

"A Box to Hide In" by James Thurber

James Thurber always manages to bring a smile to may face. It's been a couple of years since I read "The Unicorn in the Garden" (my post is here), so I was delighted to find Thurber's "A Box to Hide In" featured as last week's Library of America story.

This story opens with a man asking a grocery clerk for a box - one large enough to crawl into and hide. When none is available,  the question is posed (unsuccessfully) at several other groceries.  One confused clerk asks "Whatta you mean?" and our narrator responds,

"It's a form of escape, hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish. You don't see people, either."

The next morning as the cleaning lady arrives, our narrator imagines a scenario (think Walter Mitty) in which he barks or laughs from inside the box as the unsuspecting woman walks past... precipitating her fatal heart attack.

As the story closes, a box has yet to be located.

"I haven't found one yet, but I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box. Maybe it'll go away, maybe I'll be all right. Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say."

In just three pages, Thurber has created a story with universal appeal. Haven't we all dreamed of escape at one time or another?

The story may be read here. Short Story Monday is hosted by John Mutford at The Book Mine Set.

Paris in July

It's almost here. After last summer's huge success,  Karen and Tamara are teaming up again to host another trip to Paris in July. The rules are simple. Karen says:

For those of you who participated last year the guidelines for the event will be pretty much the same (Tamara and I reserve the right to throw in some surprises here and there1). Paris in July will run from the 1st - 31st July 2011 and the aim of the month is to celebrate our French experiences through reading, watching, listening to, observing, cooking and eating all things French.

There will be no rules or targets in terms of how much you need to do or complete in order to be a part of Paris in July - just blog about anything French and you can join in. Some ideas for the month might include:

- Reading a French book - fiction or non-fiction 

- Watching a French movie 

- Listening to French music

- Cooking French food

         - Experiencing French art, architecture or travel 

My pile of books is growing, but I have no expectation of reading them all. With any luck, I'll acquire another Colette novel to add to the stack.  Cheri and The Last of Cheri were high points of my time in Paris last summer.

• The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (in progress)
• Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
• French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle
• Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands

Short Story Mondays will feature French authors all month and my Weekend Cooking posts may take on a French flavor, too.

Departure is just a week away. Will you join us?

Author Birthday: Ian McEwan

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of novelist Ian McEwan (books by this author), born in Aldershot, England (1948). His father served in the army, so the boy grew up all over the world, including Singapore, Germany, and Libya. His father was a working-class Scot who had worked his way up to an officer's rank in the army. He drank too much, and Ian and his mother were both frightened of him. His mother was constantly anxious about trying to fit in with the other officers' wives, who spoke polished English with upper-class accents. McEwan said: "I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got."


When McEwan was 11 years old, living in Libya, his parents sent him off to boarding school in England, where he eventually learned to correct his grammar and write polished sentences. But he kept the tendency to approach language with caution, and he is a notoriously slow and careful writer. He spent more than a year brainstorming before he began Atonement —he said, "I had a number of good descriptions of novels, as if they had already been written," but no actual writing to speak of. Then he took his sons away to a weekend resort and he had a vision of a young woman arranging flowers and thinking about the gardener outside her window. He managed to write a paragraph and a half, and that became the beginning of his second chapter of Atonement (2001). He wrote: "Partly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. The accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along; since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate."

Ian McEwan's other novels include Amsterdam (1998), Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), and Solar (2010). His novels have sold more than 15 million copies.

He said, "My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel."

*photo credit

Tuesday Intro: This Is Where I Leave You

"Dad's dead," Wendy says offhandedly, like its happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy. "He died two hours ago."
     "How's Mom doing?"
     "She's Mom, you know? She wanted to know how much to tip the coroner."
This is Where I Leave You
by Jonathan Tropper

How's that for an opening? Would you keep reading? I'll tell you right now, you'd be very wrong if you didn't.

Although I finished the book last week, this opening is too good not to share. We're off to New York City tomorrow, so the review will have to wait until next week. In the meantime, I'll just say I loved this book. Haven't laughed this hard in ages...

Tuesday Intro is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.

Short Story Monday: "Overseasoned" by Anton Chekhov

There's a hole in my short story reading where Anton Chekhov belongs. Widely regarded as one of the greatest short story writers, he has never been mentioned here at Lakeside Musing.  At least one or two of his collections appear on my amazon wish list, I've read articles and reviews about his stories, but don't recall ever reading an actual story. Surely, he must have been assigned in high school?

A couple of weeks ago, we moved our oldest daughter into her NYU summer housing and I jumped at the opportunity to spend a few minutes at Strand Books. Working under time pressure, I found three books in five or ten minutes (though my husband claims it was closer to thirty), including this edition of Wordsworth Classics Selected Stories.

The first story, "Overseasoned" (1885),  seemed vaguely familiar. A surveyor arrives at a station, only to find that his business is still another thirty or forty miles farther. With no post horses are available, he warily enlists the services of a willing peasant.

They left the station at dusk. To the right stretched a cold, dark plain so boundless and vast that if you crossed it no doubt you would come out the Other End of Nowhere. The cold autumn sunset burnt out slowly where the edge of it melted into the sky. To the left, in the fading light, some little mounds rose up that might have been trees or last year's haystacks. The surveyor could not see what lay ahead, for here the whole landscape was blotted out by the broad, clumsy back of the driver. The air was still, but frosty and cold.

What a vivid picture Chekhov paints! The surveyor soon becomes uncomfortable and more than a little nervous. He begins boasting (falsely) to the driver about a revolver he claims to be carrying, his physical prowess in fighting off would-be robbers, and a group of his friends trying to catch up with the wagon. In a comic twist, his bravado backfires and causes the driver to become afraid of the surveyor.

I have probably read this story before and am curious to see if the others produce a similar feeling of deja vu. A different translation of this story can be read online. Interestingly, it is more aptly titles as "Overdoing It".

Short Story Monday is hosed by John Mutford at The Book Mine Set.