Fay Weldon – Tuesday 22 September 1931 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first literature festival I ever attended was The London Festival of Literature 2000 and it was where I first experienced poetry as performance. However, it was Fay Weldon’s appearance on Wednesday 27 September 2000 that was the spark of the festival for me. I was familiar with Fay’s writing through her short story collection, Wicked Women. At the festival Fay talked about her novel, Rhode Island Blues. There was a book signing and Fay wrote the following in my copy of the novel – “To Adrean, with best wishes, Fay Weldon London ‘The Word' – Sept. 2000”.

Excerpt from Chapter 1 in Rhode Island Blues

“My grandmother Felicity had seldom refrained from speaking the truth out of compassion for others, but I was too tired and guilty to argue, let alone murmur that actually she was only eighty-three not eighty-five. Felicity spoke from her white clapboard house on a hillside outside Norwich, Connecticut, with its under-floor music system and giant well-stocked fridge, full of uneatable doughy products in bright ugly bags, Lite this and Lite that, and I listened to her reproaches in a cramped brick apartment in London’s Soho. Her voice echoed through an expensive, languid, graceful, lonely, spacious, carpetless house: she kept the doors unlocked and the windows undraped, squares of dark looking out into even blacker night, where for all anyone knew axe murderers lurked. My voice in reply lacked echo: here in central London the rooms were small and cluttered and the windows were barred, and thick drapes kept out the worst of the late-night surge of noise as the gay pubs below emptied out and the gay clubs began to fill. I felt safer here than I ever did when visiting Felicity on her grassy hillside. A prostitute worked on the storey below mine, sopping up any sexual fury which might feel inclined to stray up the stairs, and a graphic designer worked above me, all fastidious control and expertise, which I liked to think seeped downwards to me.

Mine was a fashionable, expensive and desirable address for London. I could walk to work, which I valued, though it meant pushing my way through crowds both celebratory and perverse: the tight butts of the sexually motivated and the spreading butts of gawking tourists an equal nonsense. Was there no way of averaging them out, turning them all into everyday non-loitering citizens? But then you might as well be living in a suburb, and for my kind of person that meant the end.”


Yesterday’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Weldon, Fay: Rhode Island Blues. Flamingo, 2000. ISBN 0 00 225849 8. Excerpt: pages 1-2

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Rhode Island Blues
Center: Fay Weldon from the website redmood.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Rhode Island Blues

Maria Tatar – 1945 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Remember the fairy tales of your childhood - Rumpelstiltskin, The Golden Goose, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fisherman and His Wife, et. al.? Well, welcome to adulthood and the truth behind the “Once upon a time…they lived happily ever after” stories. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar provides insights to the tales, in all their variety, published by the Brothers Grimm, as well as folklore in general. Fairy tales as you never knew them. Fairy tales as they never were.

Dedication in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
“For Daniel & Lauren”

Excerpt from the chapter FACT And FANTASY: The Art of Reading Fairy Tales in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

“One of the chief sources of irritation for the interpreter of fairly tales is the nature of folklore sources. For nearly every tale, there are at least a dozen versions, in some cases hundreds of extant variants. In other words, rather than a single, stable literary text in which even the finest points of detail may function as bearers if significance, we have an infinite number of corrupt “texts,” spoken and written, each representing one version of a single tale type, and an imperfect version at that. No matter how gifted the transcriber of a tale is, he cannot fully succeed in capturing and recreating the spirit of an oral performance. Much s fairy tales invite interpretation, the facts of their origin and diffusion imply the impossibility of textually grounded interpretation. Even the anthropologist who can go straight to the source, observe the teller, study the community in which a tale flourishes, and record that tale still has nothing more than a single version, one no more and no less authoritative than other oral variants….

When we read and interpret a fairy tale, it is important to bring to it some knowledge of national and international variants of the tale. Once we realize that German female Cinderellas did not outnumber male Cinderellas until the eighteenth century, we look at the Grimms’ version of the story with different eyes. The discovery of male Cinderellas and Snow Whites in modern Turkish folklore invites further meditations and investigations. That Russian folklore has a male Sleeping Beauty reminds us that we must show caution in drawing generalizations about female developmental patterns on the basis of that plot. And we are obliged to think twice about male hero patterns when we come across a collection of tales depicting heroines who carry out tasks normally put to male heroes alone or who denounce fathers too weak to protect them from evil-minded stepmothers.”


Yesterday’s writer – Gloria Steinem
Tomorrow’s writer – Fay Weldon

Source: Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-691-01487-6. Excerpts: pages 42 and 47

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Center: Maria Tatar from the website people.fas.harvard.edu

Gloria Steinem – Sunday 25 March 1934 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Don’t remember when I first heard of Gloria Steinem, this icon of the feminist movement. There was a time when I regularly read the publication she founded, Ms. Magazine, but it has been years since I’ve picked up an issue. In any case, Gloria Steinem has been involved in all aspects of feminism since the late Twentieth century and her collection of essays in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions presents the various topics associated with the second feminist wave.


Excerpt from the chapter Words and Change in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by homemakers who work harder than any other class of worker, and are still called people who “don’t work.” Feminists have always tried to speak of work inside the home or outside the home, of salaried or unsalaried workers. Attributing a financial value to work in the home would go a long way toward making marriage an equal partnership, as the Equal Rights Amendment would also do, and toward ending the semantic slavery inherent in the phrase women who don’t work.

It would also begin to untangle the double-role problem identified in the sixties-that is, the double burden of millions of women who work both inside and outside the home-by defining human maintenance and home care as a job in itself; a job that men can and should do as well as women.

Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the sixties, fell short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto-another new term. Blue-collar workers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually earn far more than workers in mostly female jobs. What did equal pay do for the nurse, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? Equal pay for comparable work has become the new goal, and comparability studies are going forward on the many jobs done largely by men that require less education and fewer skills but still get more pay than jobs done largely by women.”

Yesterday’s writer – Zadie Smith
Tomorrow’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. ISBN 0-03-063236-6. Excerpt: page 155

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Center: Gloria Steinem from the website feminist.com

Zadie Smith – Saturday 25 October 1975 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Here’s the last author that I met at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2001. White Teeth is Zadie Smith’s first novel. And from my journal I wrote: “Zadie read three pieces – part of a letter, excerpt from her next novel, and some writing on her book tour of the States. Really liked the letter. Then the usual Q & A session.” – personal journal, Saturday 25 August 2001. Of course, Zadie signed the copy of White Teeth that I bought.


Dedication in White Teeth

“To my mother and my father And for Jimmi Rahman”

Excerpt from Teething Trouble in White Teeth

“But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots. More specifically, she was from Lambeth (via Jamaica) and she was connected, through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was ugly. And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler’s Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. There was Clara and Ryan for eight months before Clara and Archie were drawn together from opposite ends of a staircase. And Clara might never have run into the arms of Archie Jones if she hadn’t been running quite as fast as she could away from Ryan Topps.”


Yesterday’s writer – Dorothy L. Sayers
Tomorrow’s writer – Gloria Steinem

Source: Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. Penguin, 2000. ISBN 0-140-27633-5. Excerpt: page 27

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of White Teeth
Center: Zadie Smith from the website villagevoice.com

Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of White Teeth

Michèle Roberts – Friday 20 May 1949 – still living as of this post

Introduction

My favorite literary form is short fiction. I appreciate the skill in writing an effective piece within a limited number of pages or words. I have a number of short fiction anthologies, but few single author short fiction collections. At the 2001 Edinburgh International Festival, I bought several single-author collections of short stories, including Michèle Roberts’ Playing Sardines. She was on a panel with Elena Lappin and in my journal I wrote: “Michèle was more animated than Elena, but both were interesting women. Michèle comes to her writing from a feminist perspective and Elena from a Jewish one. They did readings from their latest works. Both of the excerpts had wit, though Michèle’s turned dark at the end. Both bring a sense of identity to their writings.” – personal journal, Friday 24 August 2001. Michèle signed my copy of Playing Sardines as follows: “dear Adrean with best wishes Michèle”.


Dedication in Playing Sardines

“In memoriam Lorna Sage”

Excerpt from Fluency in Playing Sardines

“It is odd, now that I think about it, that I have never considered Paris as a possible home. Yet I’m sure it could have been perfectly feasible. As a photographer I could have worked anywhere. My French is not as fluent as I’d like, but I speak well enough to get by. My French always improves, anyway, when I’m actually in France, surrounded by French sounds; soaked in them; saturated. Perhaps I’ve simply hung on to holiday cliché, a wornout dream of romance, wanted to keep Paris as my special Somewhere Else, my paradise, the golden city in which I experience life as intensively and ecstatically as though I were on acid. This visionary bliss is not designed to survive daily reality. If I lived in Paris then I’d have to become a tourist to somewhere else instead. London, probably.

I’ve carefully kept Paris as my place of pilgrimage by associating it with the pursuit of particular beloved artist or writer ghosts, tracking down their flats and studios and favourite cafés, or with epiphanies of various sorts: those four small Vuillards I discovered in the Musée d’Orsay last year, for example, on that June day smelling of hot dust, lime blossom and vanilla, that day when I wandered into the little gallery in the rue de Seine and met Pierre for the first time. I’ve gone to Paris with all my lovers, for doomed or magical or awkward weekends. Each different lover provided a different view of the city, different museums and art galleries for us to frequent, dawdling hand in hand or arm in arm, different cafés and bars for us to lounge in while we talked. And because I haven’t always had the courage of my convictions and desires, and so haven’t had all that many lovers, I cannot claim to know Paris very well. I need a map, a bus guide, a plan of the metro, to get me around. A few metro stations shine for ever with my lovers’ names superimposed on them, written up above the entrances to those labyrinthine underworlds in loops of stars.

I had assumed I was finished with Paris as a site of assignation. That I could return to it as just another destination and get to know it properly. No more secret passions. No more mad fantasies. I certainly never intended to fall in love again. All that was over and gone. The pain and suffering and loss – all finished. Now I would learn to love Paris as I loved London, with a modicum of calm. Now I’d visit Paris simply as a reasonable adult, as a professional photographer happily trawling the streets.”


Yesterday’s writer - Anaïs Nin
Tomorrow’s writer – Dorothy L. Sayers

Source: Roberts, Michèle, Playing Sardines. Virago, 2001. ISBN 1-86049-814-0. Excerpt: pages 61-62

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Playing Sardines
Center: Michèle Roberts from the website michèleroberts.co.uk
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Playing Sardines

Anne McCaffrey – Thursday 1 April 1926 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I want to be a Dragonrider of a Golden queen and lead my Weyr in the fight against Thread! From the first novel, Dragonflight, I have loved the tales of Pern penned by Anne McCaffrey. They just touch something in my imagination. How wonderful it would be to ride a dragon and have such absolute connection with another living creature. Even though I prefer my science fiction located in space and with extra-terrestrial interaction, the Pern Series is a wonderful, different perspective. And Anne’s book, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, is a part of the Pern story.

Dedication in Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

“This book is dedicated to my daughter Georgeanne Johnson with great affection and respect for her courage”

Excerpt from Chapter I of Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

“Once the Pass was completed…In the act of pulling on a clean undertunic, Moreta paused in surprise. Why, this Pass would end in another eight Turns. No, seven if one counted this Turn a quarter gone. Moreta sternly corrected an optimistic attitude. The Turn was barely seventy days old. Eight Turns then. In eight Turns, she, Moreta, would no longer have to fly with Orlith against Thread. The Red Star would have passed too far to rain the devastating parasitic Thread over Pern’s tired continent. Dragonriders would not have to fly because no Thread would blur the sky.

Did Thread just stop, Moreta wondered as she slipped on her soft brown shoes, like a sudden summer storm? Or did it dribble off like a winter rain?

They could use some rain. Snow would be even better. Or a good hard frost. Frost was always a Weyr ally.

She slipped into the dress now, smoothing it over her rather too broad shoulders, over breasts firm rather than large, a waist that was trim, and buttocks flat from long hours of riding astride. The gown hid muscled thighs that she sometimes resented, but they, too, were the legacy of twenty Turns riding a dragon and little enough inconvenience for being a queen’s rider.”

Yesterday’s writer – Ursula K. Le Guin
Tomorrow’s writer - Anaïs Nin

UPDATE: Anne McCaffrey died on Monday 21 November 2011 in Ireland.

Source: McCaffrey, Anne. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. Ballantine Books, June 1989. ISBN 0-345-29873-X. Dedication: page v. Excerpt: page 4.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
Center: Anne McCaffrey from the website annemccaffrey.net

Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin – Monday 21 October 1929 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Not sure how I came across Ursula K. Le Guin, but I first read The Left Hand of Darkness (spoiler alert) in college. Though-provoking presentation of changing gender reality. What would be the ramifications here if one could switch back and forth from one gender to the other? Self-perception?


Dedication in The Left Hand of Darkness

“For Charles, sine quo non"

Excerpt from the Introduction in The Left Hand of Darkness

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find-if it is a good novel-that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changes a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”

Excerpt from A Parade in Erhenrang in The Left Hand of Darkness

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact my fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide was Odharhahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the Year One. It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One in Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did not know it.”


Yesterday’s writer – Madeleine L’Engle
Tomorrow’s writer – Anne McCaffrey

Source: Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books, 1976. ISBN 0-441-47812-3. Excerpt from A Parade in Erhenrang: pages 1-2

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Left Hand of Darkness

Center: Ursula K. Le Guin from the website ursulakleguin.com

P. D. (Phyllis Dorothy) James – Tuesday 3 August 1920 – still living as of this post

Introduction

It was on the first day (Monday 5 March 2001) of my attendance at the Bath Literature Festival that I met P. D. James. She and Frank Delaney were the two-person panel titled “Facing the Music”. They primarily discussed their different types and modes of writing. There was a book signing afterwards and, although there were copies of her various mystery/crime novels available for purchase; I opted for a different type of book and bought P. D.’s The Children of Men, a novel with a science fiction/futuristic slant to the story. P. D. James signed and dated my copy of her book.

Dedication in The Children of Men

“Again, to my daughters Clare and Jane who helped”

Excerpt from Omega of The Children of Men

“Friday 1 January 2021

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years two months and twelve days. If the first reports are to be believed, Joseph Ricardo died as he had lived. The distinction, if one can call it that, of being the last human whose birth was officially recorded, unrelated as it was to any personal virtue or talent, had always been difficult for him to handle. And now he is dead. The news was given to us here in Britain on the nine o’clock programme of the State Radio Service and I heard it fortuitously. I had settled down to begin this diary of the last half of my life when I noticed the time and thought I might as well catch the headlines to the nine o’clock bulletin. Ricardo’s death was the last item mentioned, and then only briefly, a couple of sentences delivered without emphasis in the newscaster’s carefully non-committal voice. But it seemed to me, hearing it, that it was a small additional justification for beginning the diary today; the first day of a new year and my fiftieth birthday. As a child I had always liked that distinction, despite the inconvenience of having it follow Christmas too quickly so that one present — it never seemed notably superior to the one I would in any case have received – had to do for both celebrations.”

UPDATE - P. D. James died in Oxford, England on Thursday 27 November 2014


Yesterday’s writer – Katharine Hepburn
Tomorrow’s writer – Madeleine L’Engle

Source: James, P. D. The Children of Men. Faber and Faber, 2000. ISBN 0-574-20465-1. Excerpt: page 3

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Children of Men
Center: P. D. James from the website faber.co.uk
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of The Children of Men

Mollie Gregory – still living as of this post

Introduction

It was in 2003 that I first attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books which was held at UCLA. Because of my interest in film, on the second day of the two-day event, I went to a panel discussion titled “Women in Hollywood” in which Mollie Gregory participated, along with Norma Barzman, Cari Beauchamp, and Lynda Obst. This is from my journal: “Went to the book signing and decided to buy Mollie Gregory’s book “Women Who Run The Show”. When Mollie signed my book, she asked me what I did. I said…for art I did black and white photography….she mentioned two women in the book I should read.” – personal journal, Sunday 27 April 2003. In my copy of Women Who Run The Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, Mollie wrote: “For Adrean Good luck in all your pursuits! Mollie Gregory April 27 2003.”

Excerpt from Beachhead: The 1970s in Women Who Run The Show

“It felt like a beachhead. Certainly each woman fought and struggled hard in different ways in a kind of war. “Women working today have never been in battle, but we were,” one woman, an entertainment lawyer, said. “I deserved war pay.”

1973 might as well be a century ago, so much has changed.

Before 1973, employment want ads were separated into jobs for men and women. In some states women could not invest in stocks without their husband’s written approval. Most women went to work in high heels and skirts. Society still frowned on women and men living together without benefit of a marriage license, “single parent” and “significant other” were unknown tags to define your personal setup, and baby boomers were a long way from retirement. Abortion was illegal and often dangerous. Face-lifts were something only movie stars did.

There were three networks-ABC, NBC, and CBS-and seven major film studios (Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Columbia, United Artists, MGM and Universal). A few independent producers turned out shows and films so constantly they resembled mini-studios. We went to movies in theaters and watched shows on television. If we missed a TV show, it was gone until rerun time. Video cassettes, VCRs, and personal computers did not exist; neither did CDs, laser discs, Home Box Office, CNN, or Blockbuster.

In January 1973, the Supreme Court made two momentous decisions: ruling on Roe v. Wade, the Court made first trimester abortions legal; it also declared in another case that job advertisements could not specify gender. Imagine scanning an ad for a mechanic that did not specify men only-or a cosmetics sales position not restricted to women. Reading those ads, imagination began to wander outside traditional limits for, perhaps, the first time.”

Author’s Note in Women Who Run The Show

“This book is based on more than 125 interviews conducted mainly in Los Angeles, in person and by telephone. I have also used secondary materials-books, magazine and newspaper articles, and some unpublished studies-to fix events by date, and to augment facts related in the interviews. But the thrust of the book relies on the candor and the memory of those interviewed, their sense of their own experiences, their point of view; their accounts are both factual and subjective, a cousin, perhaps, of the oral history. When accounts differed with others, I have noted it, but generally recollections did not differ much where they interconnected. Some of the women, and men, interviewed, did not want their remarks on the record, or asked that a portion of their remarks by kept confidential; therefore, some comments are noted as “anonymous.” Most interviews were done entirely on the record.”

Yesterday’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin
Tomorrow’s writer – Edith Hamilton

Source: Gregory, Mollie. Women Who Run The Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood. St. Martin’s Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-30182-0. Excerpt: pages 1-2. Author’s Note: page 379.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Women Who Run The Show
Center: Mollie Gregory from the website molliegregory.net
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Women Who Run The Show

Doris Kearns Goodwin – Monday 4 January 1943 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I had vaguely heard of Doris Kearns Goodwin in an academic context (she is an Historian). However, it was as an interviewee in Ken Burn’s excellent documentary film, Baseball (the sequel, The Tenth Inning is scheduled to air on PBS in the Fall of 2010), that Doris’s name has stuck with me. Doris is a baseball fan and in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, she recounts her childhood love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a baseball fan myself, I enjoyed the story of how her love of baseball evolved. I have been a Boston Red Sox fan all my life (Red Sox Box) and Doris became a Red Sox fan in her adulthood.

Dedication in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“In memory of my parents MICHAEL AND HELEN KEARNS and to my sisters, CHARLOTTE AND JEANNE”

Excerpt from CHAPTER ONE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“ON A SULTRY FRIDAY evening that same summer, after months of listening to games on the radio, I saw my first game at Ebbets Field. As my father and I walked up the cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue and approached the arched windows of the legendary brick stadium, he explained how, as a boy, he had watched the ballpark being built, since the place where he had been sent to live after his parents died was only two blocks away. He was at the site in 1912, when Dodger owner Charles Ebbets pushed a shovel into the ground to begin the excavation. And when the park opened a year later, he was in the bleachers watching the first official game, against the Philadelphia Phillies. He had seen the Dodgers win their first two pennants in 1916 and 1920, only to lose to the Red Sox and the Indians. He had sustained his love affair with “dem Bums” through the frustrating period of the thirties, when he Dodgers were stuck at the bottom of the division, into the happier era of the forties, when under General Manager Branch Rickey they began to look like a championship team. And now my own pilgrimage was about to begin.

The marble rotunda at the entrance to the shrine looked like a train station in a dream, with dozens of gilded ticket windows scattered around the floor. The floor tiles were embellished with baseball stitches, and in the center of the domed ceiling hung an elaborate chandelier composed of a dozen baseball bats. As we started through a tunneled ramp into the stadium, my father told me that I was about to see the most beautiful sight in the world. Just as he finished speaking, there it was: the reddish-brown diamond, the impossibly green grass, the stands so tightly packed with people that not a single empty seat could be seen. I reached over instinctively to hold my father’s hand as we wended our way to seats between home plate and first base, which, like the thousands of seats in this tiny, comfortable park, were so close to the playing field that we could hear what the ballplayers said to one another as they ran onto the field and could watch their individual gestures and mannerisms as they loosened up in the on-deck circle. There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains-the “hated New York Giants,” an epithet that was to us a single word-Monte Irvin, Sheldon Jones, and the turncoat Leo Durocher.”

Excerpt from the EPILOGUE of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

“Although time and events outdistanced and reconciled my personal losses, my anger over O’Malley’s treason still persisted. At Colby College and in my first year at Harvard-where I would teach for almost a decade before leaving to become a full-time historian-I refused to follow baseball, skipping over the sports pages with their accounts of alien teams called the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. Then, in my second year of studying for my doctorate, a young man invited me to Fenway Park. Allowing my desire for his companionship to overcome my principled reluctance, we took the subway to Kenmore Square in Boston, and together we walked up Lansdowne Street to the park. There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I watched the players, the dirt scars which marked the base paths, the knowledgeable fans shouting their imprecations and exhortations.

For years I had managed to stay away. I had formed the firmest of resolutions. I had given myself irrefutable reasons, expressed the most passionate of rejections. But I could not get away. Addiction or obsession, love or need, I was born a baseball fan and a baseball fan I was fated to remain.”


Yesterday’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Tomorrow’s writer – Mollie Gregory

Source: Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. Touchstone, 1998. ISBN 0-684-84795-7. Dedication: page 7, Excerpt: pages 45-48, Epilogue excerpt: pages 253-254.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
Center: Doris Kearns Goodwin from the website achievement.org

Sandra M. (Mortola) Gilbert – Sunday 27 December 1936 – still living as of this post and Susan Gubar – 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first volume (The War of the Words) of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s three-volume opus – overall title No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century - on women and writing, was a present from a long-time friend, Kathryn. I was so inspired by this first volume, that on a visit to London, I bought volumes two (Sexchanges) and three (Letters From the Front) from a bookstore on famed Charing Cross Road. My experience with actual writing is a hate/love one (hated writing papers in college/loved the positive feedback). Even though I am primarily a visual woman, I do enjoy a well-turned phrase and without the pressure of academic deadlines, I someday may turn some phrases – well I hope.

Dedication in The War of the Words

“In memory of Alexis J. Mortola and Frank W. David”

Excerpt from Chapter 5 – Sexual Linguistics, Women’s Sentence, Men’s Sentencing of The War of the Words

“In this chapter, attempting to integrate the divergent forces of power, language, and meaning, we will examine this relationship between sexual difference and the symbolic contract in an effort primarily to trace the permutations of the modern battle over language and secondarily to place recent ideas about sexual linguistics in a larger historical context. For, as we shall suggest, contemporary language theorists-female and male-participate in a long, bifurcated tradition of feminist and masculinist linguistic fantasy. That such a tradition demonstrably exists, moreover, implies an intuition of the primacy of the mother rather than the father in the process of language acquisition that assimilates the child into what Kristeva calls the “symbolic contract.” Thus questioning Kristeva’s identification of the symbolic contract with the social contract, we will draw upon precisely the complex literary history that we have already discussed-the history of the last one hundred years in England and America-to argue that the female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks.

Significantly, the English woman who most publicly entered into the linguistic fray by defining a female literary tradition saw gender-marked words as potentially central to that tradition’s vitality. In one of the most famous yet opaque passages in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of “a woman’s sentence.” Remarking that the early nineteenth-century woman novelist found that “there was no common sentence ready for her use,” she declared that the “man’s sentence” inherited by “Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac” from “Johnson, Gibbon and the rest” was as alien to her mind as “the [hardened and set] older forms of literature” were to her imagination (78-80). Her comment, like the literary history in which it is embedded, seems appealingly empirical. Those of us who wish to understand the relationship between genre and gender, Woolf seems to imply-even those who wish to examine the more ontological connection between sexuality and creativity-need merely analyze and classify linguistic structures.”


Yesterday’s writer – Marilyn French
Tomorrow’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin

Source: Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The War of the Words. Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-04587-5. Dedication: page v, Excerpt: pages 228-229.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The War of the Words

Center Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar from the website virtual.clemson.edu

Marilyn French – Thursday 21 November 1929 – Saturday 2 May 2009

Introduction

Marilyn French’s novel was one of the first feminist themed books I read. Sometimes it’s a struggle to remain self-defined and to know exactly who you are and where you should be. Or what you should do. The Women’s Room presents these wonderings in an era of awakening for women.

Dedication in The Women’s Room

“TO ISABEL, TO JANET- SISTERS, FRIENDS”

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Women’s Room

“Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. “Ladies’ room” was a euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle. However, she also detested what she called vulgarity, and had never in her life, even when handling it, uttered the word shit. But here she was at the age of thirty-eight huddled for safety in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall, gazing at, no, studying that word and others of the same genre, scrawled on the gray enameled door and walls.

She was perched, fully clothed, on the edge of the open toilet seat, feeling stupid and helpless, and constantly looking at her watch. It would all have been redeemed, even translated into excitement, had there been some grim-faced Walter Matthau in a trench coat, his hand in a gun-swollen pocket, or some wild-eyed Anthony Perkins in a turtleneck, his itching strangler’s hands clenching and unclenching-someone glamorous and terrifying at any rate-waiting for her outside in the hall, if she had been sitting in panic searching for another way out. But of course it that were the case, there would also be a cool and desperate Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster sliding along the walls of another hallway, waiting for Walter to show himself. And that by itself, she thought mournfully, feeling somehow terribly put upon, would have been enough. If she had one of them, anyone at all, waiting for her at home, she would not be hiding in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall. She would have been upstairs in a corridor with the other students, leaning against a wall with her books at her feet, or strolling past the unseeing faces. She could have transcended, knowing she had one of them at home, and could therefore move alone in a crowd. She puzzled over that paradox, but only briefly. The graffiti were too interesting.”


Yesterday’ writer – Fannie Flagg
Tomorrow’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubor

Source: French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. Jove/HBI, October 1978. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 7-8

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Women’s Room

Center: Marilyn French from the website washingtonpost.com

Fannie Flagg – Thursday 21 September 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Well here’s another novel - Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg - that I haven’t read, but I did see the movie. My reading list keeps getting longer and longer and longer… I suppose I’d have more time to read if I stop going to the movies. Stop going to the movies?? Nah!

Excerpts from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

“THE WEEMS WEEKLY (WHISTLE STOP, ALABAMA’S WEEKLY BULLETIN) JUNE 12, 1929
Café Opens

The Whistle Stop Café opened up last week, right next door to me at the post office, and owners Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has been good over since. Idgie says that for people who know her not to worry about getting poisoned, she is not cooking. All the cooking is being done by two colored women, Sipsey and Onzell, and the barbecue is being cooked by Big George, who is Onzell’s husband.

If there is anybody that has not been there yet, Idgie says that the breakfast hours are from 5:30-7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red-eye gravy, and coffee for 25¢.

For lunch and supper you can have fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish; chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, your drink and dessert-for 35¢.

She said the vegetables are creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.

And pie for dessert.

My other half, Wilbur, and I ate there the other night, and it was so good he says he might not ever eat at home again. Ha. Ha. I wish this were true. I spend all my time cooking for the big lug, and still can’t keep him filled up.

By the way, Idgie says that one of her hens laid an egg with a ten-dollar bill in it.

…Dot Weems”


“FRIED GREEN TOMATOES

1 medium green tomato (per person)
Salt
Pepper
White cornmeal
Bacon drippings

Slice tomatoes about ¼ inch thick, season with salt and pepper and then coat both sides with cornmeal. In a large skillet, heat enough bacon drippings to coat the bottom of the pan and fry tomatoes until lightly browned on both sides.

You’ll think you died and gone to heaven!”



Yesterday’s writer - Noël Riley Fitch
Tomorrow’s writer - Marilyn French

Source: Flagg, Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. McGraw-Hill, 1988.
ISBN 0-07-021257-0. Excerpts: pages 3-4, 403

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.
Center: Fannie Flagg from the website flixster.com

Noël Riley Fitch – 1937 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met Noël on a lovely Parisian June afternoon in 2002 at a reception in her honor and we actually had a brief conversation in which geographical connections were discovered. Here’s the entry from my journal. “Went over to the Abbey Bookshop, but was a little early, so I went for a walk along St. Michel. When I returned to the bookstore, there were a number of people already there. Turns out that Noël Riley Fitch had led a walk on Île St. Louis in the morning and this is where they finished – just in time for Noël to be here for her reception….sign the three books of hers that I had….she has roots in Massachusetts. She and her husband live in LA (Brentwood) from January to April – she teaches at USC and then they spend the summer in Paris where Noel teaches an expatriate literary course at the American University. Her husband writes and edits books on food and wine. And there was wine, cheese and crackers (and water) for the reception. The owner of the bookstore, Brian, gave a little background talk about the street on which the Abbey Bookshop is located and then he introduced Noël Riley Fitch. She talked about the books she has written and told some Paris-related literary stories. After her talk, I hung around and talked to some of the people….There was a violinist playing at the end of the street….having the violinist come over to the bookstore and play. Such a pleasant afternoon – Literature, food and wine, music and meeting new people.” – personal journal, Sunday 23 June 2002. In my copy of her book, Literary Cafes of Paris, that she graciously signed, Noël wrote: “For Adrean With best wishes and happy drinking Noël Riley Fitch 23 June 2002 Paris.”

Dedication in Literary Cafes of Paris

“Dedicated to Gailyn Fitch, café sitter par excellence”

Excerpt from the Café de Flore entry in Literary Cafes of Paris

“’This afternoon I’m upstairs at the Flore, near the window; I can see the wet street, the plane tree swaying in the sharp wind; there are a lot of people, and downstairs there’s a great hubbub.’ So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s, on one of the many days that she worked at a table at the Flore. She wrote portions of her journal, Second Sex and novels such as The Mandarins in this venerable neighborhood café. Flore was founded in 1865 and named for a small statue of Flore, the goddess of flowers and mother of spring, that once stood in front of the door.

The café is homey, with its worn Art Deco interior of red banquettes, mahogany and mirrors. Outside it is characterized by cream-colored awnings with green and gold letters and by its location on the corner of two busy streets: the little Rue St-Benoit is crowded with foot traffic in the evenings when the restaurants are full; on the wide boulevard, the Flore sits between an excellent postcard shop and a distinguished bookstore, La Hune, next to the Deux-Magots.

Beginning with Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont in the late 19th century, nearly every French writer has spent time at the Flore. Yet the Flore has been identified with several distinct groups at different times, and each one has in turn determined the personality of the café. One of the first significant groups to make the Flore home was the political Right. L’Action Française wrote its first manifestos here in 1899 (they were printed nearby in Rue Cassette). The leader of L’Action Française was Charles Maurras, who lived at 60 Rue de Verneuil. He called his political memoirs Souvenirs de vie politique: Au signe de Flore.

In the first decade of this century, Apollinaire and his friends funded Les Soirees de Paris magazine here. The group that dominated the Flore environment in the following decade included Léon-Paul Fargue, André Breton and his Surrealist colleagues, and Picasso. After he moved to live in his studio nearby in Rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso patronized first the Deux-Magots. He moved to the Flore in the late 1930s, where he engaged in lengthy political discussions joined occasionally by Marc Chagall. At the end of an evening the two exiled artists would exchange the matchbooks on which each had doodled. Janet Flanner says she saw Picasso there every night after 1945, sitting at the second table in front of the main door, sipping a small bottle of mineral water and speaking with his Spanish friends.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne Fine
Tomorrow’s writer – Fannie Flagg

Source: Fitch, Noël Riley. Literary Cafes of Paris. Starrhill Press, 1989. ISBN 0-913515-42-6. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 23-24

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris
Center: Noël Riley Fitch from the website noëlrileyfitch.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris

Anne Fine – Sunday 7 December 1947 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met (in the casual, one-of-a-crowd way that occurs at book signings) Anne Fine at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2001. She gave a talk before the obligatory signing and this is what I wrote in my journal. “…Anne Fine…talked about each of the adult books she has written (…mainly known as a children’s writer). Anne was funny – she says her books have a dark humour to them…will enjoy reading her…has an open and easy personality.” – personal journal, Monday 20 August 2001. Anne signed my copy of her book, Taking the Devil’s Advice, as follows: “For Adrean, With all good wishes Anne Fine.”

Dedication in Taking the Devil’s Advice

“For Tik Enif”

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Taking the Devil’s Advice

“Look at this. Look! What a cheek. Look what I’ve found hidden away at the back of the bloody airing cupboard.

She has been writing in my autobiography again. She so annoys me. Why must she poke her nose in everything, meddling and prying, forever insisting on her right to be taken into account? Sometime I think my last few waking hours of Perfect Privacy must have passed by, unnoticed and unvalued, the day before I met Constance. How long is it since we parted – three years? Four? Yet here she is, snooping around my room whenever I’m out, leafing through papers on my table, reading the (few) bits that interest her and scribbling her irritating little comments and additions down the margins and over on the back. I can’t put up with this for three more months. I should never have agreed to spend the summer here in the first place. It was a foolish idea, and I’m not sure it’s even very good for the children. I’ll have to move out and find somewhere else. Or buy a large tin box with a good lock.

And yet, let’s face it, I’m not here by accident, am I? I did choose of my own free will not to spurn Constance’s offer of a place to stay, and I can’t argue that I didn’t live with her long enough to know exactly what she’s like. I must have realized Constance could no more stay peacefully and incuriously outside a room in which her former husband is writing anything of a remotely personal nature than she could fly unaided to the moon. I must have known that she’d be in and out all the time, rooting through, checking, complaining, criticizing; that even the most casual attempt to pin down a few simple dates would turn one mealtime after another into great atavistic wrangles about the reasons for this move, that baby, those blinding arguments; that it would be three months of pure hell. It isn’t even as if what Constance remembers is of any relevance. I’m not writing that sort of autobiography, and if I were, this is the last place on earth I’d choose to write it. I’m here because all my philosophical papers are still in the attic. Why else would I suffer the indignity of living and sleeping up in my old study while this great shambling amiable Ally sleeps in my old bed with my old wife?”


Yesterday’s writer – Colette
Tomorrow’s writer - Noël Riley Fitch

Source: Fine, Anne. Taking the Devil’s Advice. Black Swan, 1999. ISBN 0-552-99826-5. Dedication: page 5, Excerpt: pages 11-12

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Taking the Devil’s Advice
Center: Anne Fine from the website annefine.co.uk

Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Taking the Devil’s Advice

Maeve Binchy – Tuesday 28 May 1940 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I must confess that I have not read Circle of Friends; I only have seen the movie. My book collection contains several additional Maeve Binchy novels and a collection of short stories that I obtained at a garage sale – they haven’t been read either. Time to do a Binchy reading project.

Dedication in Circle of Friends

“To dearest Gordon with all my love”

Excerpt from Chapter One of Circle of Friends

“Benny’s father ran Hogan’s Outfitters, the big menswear shop in the middle of Knockglen. The shop was often at its busiest on a Saturday, when the farmers came in, or the men who had a half day themselves were marched in by wives to have themselves fitted out by Mr. Hogan, or Mike the old assistant, the tailor who had been there since time immemorial. Since the days when young Mr. Hogan had bought the business.

Benny was glad her father would be there for the cake, because that was when she might be given her present. Father had said it was going to be a wonderful surprise. Benny knew that they must have got her the velvet dress with the lacy collar and the pumps to go with it. She had wanted it since last Christmas when they went to the pantomime in Dublin and she had seen the girls on the stage dancing in pink velvet dresses like this.

They had heard that they sold them in Clerys, and that was only a few minutes from where the bus stopped when it went to Dublin.

Benny was large and square, but she wouldn’t look like that in the pink velvet dress. She would be just like the fairy dancers they had seen on the stage, and her feet wouldn’t look big and flat in those shoes because they had lovely pointy toes, and little pom-poms on them.

The invitations to the party had been sent out ten days ago. There would be seven girls from school, farmers’ daughters mainly from outside Knockglen. And Maire Carroll, whose mother and father owned the grocery. The Kennedys from the chemist’s were all boys so they wouldn’t be there, and Dr. Johnson’s children were all too young so they couldn’t come either. Peggy Pine who ran the smart clothes shop said that she might have her young niece staying with her. Benny said she didn’t want anyone they didn’t know, and it was with some relief that they heard the niece Clodagh didn’t want to go amongst strangers either.”


Yesterday’s writer – Jane Austen
Tomorrow’s writer – Pearl S. Buck

UPDATE: Maeve Binchy died on Monday 30 July 2012 in Dublin, Ireland

Source: Binchy, Maeve. Circle of Friends. Dell Publishing, November 1991. ISBN 0-440-21126-3. Excerpt: pages 3-4

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Circle of Friends

Center: Maeve Binchy from the website maevebinchy.com