Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald

This 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel embeds us in a community living on barges on the Thames in London in the early 1970s. These watercraft lie at anchor, traveling only vertically, subject to tides and storms. Gangplanks connect them to each other and to shore. They are in varying states of disrepair, as are their residents, who live there for lack of money, love of being on the water, or both. 

Nenna, 32-year-old mother of twelve-year-old Martha and six-year-old Tilda, is as close to penniless as a person can get. Her girls scheme to make money: when the tide is low and the light is right, they visit century-old wrecks in the Thames mud, where one lucky day Tilda unearths not one but two beautiful tiles from a long-wrecked cargo. They haggle with an antique dealer who insists the tiles have no value. Martha quickly proves she knows their provenance, and they emerge from the shop with pound notes to buy records in Chelsea. 

Other residents include Maurice, a young man who sings, dances, and turns tricks in swinging London and allows a fence to stash stolen goods. Richard has the best-appointed barge – and the money to keep it shipshape – though his wife grows ever less tolerant of life afloat. Willis, a painter, has the leakiest barge; the whole community supports his efforts to sell it to finance his retirement, conniving to keep his real estate agent in the dark. 

Fitzgerald has a wonderful way with words – here are a couple of examples: 

“Each foot in turn felt the warmth of his hands, and relaxed like an animal who trusts the vet.” 

“As to the exact locality of the pain, it was difficult to convey that it had grown, and that instead of having a pain he was now contained inside it.” 

This delightful novel is a time-capsule of an era: London in the 1960s was The place to be. But while the cost of living was lower than today, it was still precarious for those at the fringe. Then as now, the best support system is one’s community. What a lovely book!

Manifesting Time - an art installation by NC Weil

For at least forty years (I’ve lost track), I’ve been collecting Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap boxes. Originally, my notion was to build a house and use them to wallpaper the bathroom. Well, it’s become unlikely that I will build such a house (darn!) – but I have continued to collect these soap boxes, flattening, bagging, and stashing them deep in cupboards. 

Recently I took a pair of wool gloves off a shelf in my closet, and was alarmed to see that they had been mostly consumed by moths. Other wool garments in there have so far escaped being ravaged, but that discovery spurred a decision – time to put those soap boxes to use, lining the closet with them. The soap is strong-smelling (although the reason I’ve been using it exclusively all these decades is that it lathers up well, cleans effectively, then washes off completely, leaving no residue of scent or soap. I challenge you to find a soap comparable to that!) – so I figured the boxes would deter moths. 

Soap Boxes? 

Since my collection began, the Grandpa Soap Company (“since 1878”) has changed the box design twice, so I have bright green (1971), dark green/ black with a smiling Grandpa (2002), and the current mostly-black version, a Grandpa playing sidekick to his product: 

The last 2 versions have come in 2 sizes, 3.25 oz (per the older style), and 4.25 oz. The factory moved from Cincinnati, OH, across the Ohio River to Erlanger, KY, between versions 1 and 2. The oldest of my boxes recommends “Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Toilet Soap for toilet, bath, and shampoo.” The next iteration touts being Cruelty Free. And now the boxes say it’s plant-based, cruelty free, and vegan, and “Recognized by the National Psoriasis Foundation” as well as being “The Original Wonder Soap.” 

I found it first in a family-owned drugstore; once they discontinued it I had to special-order a dozen at a time. Chain drugstores wouldn’t order it for me, so I requested it from natural foods stores, and at some magic moment in the last decade, they began to stock it. Pine tar soap achieved its pinnacle of visibility in 2021, in a Super Bowl ad(!), when Dr. Squatch put their product in front of a mass audience – such a thrill for a longtime fan! 

I’ve been accused of obsession – my son wrote “A Statistical Analysis of an Obsession” about the hundreds of Scrabble games mi esposo and I have played, whose scorepads I’ve kept. But art often revolves around obsession – Picasso drawing, painting and sculpting bulls; Cezanne repeatedly painting Mont Saint Victoire; Samuel Beckett writing about pointlessness – that compulsion to revisit an image, an idea, a place, is a way of situating ourselves in time. Here’s this subject/object: what’s new? what’s the same? And how have I changed over that same span? So I’m not apologizing for a collection of hundreds of soap boxes, acquired over four decades and saved from mold, rodents, and people who purge. 

The Project 

I was so happy the day I realized that though I wasn’t going to wallpaper a bathroom with them, I’d found another place they could live. I emptied that closet, cleaned out 14 years’ accumulation of dust, and yes, even filled several boxes with things to get rid of. I took off the closet doors, set up a lamp and a stepladder, and measured the space. 

I taped together vertical strips of boxes to fill the different spaces, then glued them onto the walls using regular white glue, nothing volatile or toxic. As I got further into the project I started to play with the variables: 3 Grandpas, 2 sizes, and how many of each I had. 

And, serendipity! For reasons unknown, I had a single 4.25 oz box featuring a Golden Grandpa! This smiling Grandpa style is also described in French or Spanish, tho not both. The apparent gold behind Grandpa’s face in many ovals is an optical trick of my cell phone camera – there’s only one Golden Grandpa; the background of the others is silvery, no matter what it looks like in this photo. 

But, Why? 

In a world overflowing with misery, loneliness, and destruction, I offer walls of Grandpas, lovingly collected and delightedly displayed, albeit in a closet. You bet it’s silly. And over time the boxes have lost their pine tar scent, so it’s unlikely they’ll keep moths at bay. But I don’t care. I have marveled at the printing variations – really bright green vs moderate; Golden Grandpa; and the price tags from places I bought them off the shelf: Lee’s Drugs, Cash Grocer, and the many that didn’t put their name on their price sticker. 

When enough years have rolled by, and you’re still doing something, you have created a through-line from an earlier version of yourself, to your current being. And this collection, this obsession, is an element of your evolution – think of it as your Control Group in the great experiment that is your life.

The Taste of Things, a film by Anh Hung Tran

What a beautiful film! Every frame is sumptuous, steeped in a different time. The background is not a musical score but ambient sounds: a woodpecker, a peacock screaming, birdsong, and naturally the sounds of cooking – searing, boiling, chopping, stirring, assembling. We see patience, timing, meticulous attention to every detail, creation of complex sauces and rich dishes. All this occurs in the kitchen of a country manor owned by Dodin (Benoit Magimel). He is a “Napoleon of cuisine” according to his friends, four men who join him to dine. But the love of his life, his cook, is Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), the genius behind the food, in yet another role in which she fairly glows with inspiration and joy. 

They have a bountiful kitchen garden, neighbors, open land where hunters provide the birds of different seasons – the dappled grace of the French countryside. It is an idyll unmarred by invented conflict. Because of the film’s calm demeanor, we see depth of love expressed through cooking, a shared breakfast, a stroll in a sunny meadow. The drama of creating remarkable food is all the thrill we need – we only wish we could take our places at the table when the friends gather to dine. 

The only thing that made no sense to me was – no bread? My introduction to French food was my husband working the oven at a French bakery, hauling over a thousand baguettes out every night. To me, these crackling-from-the-700-degree-oven loaves are the epitome of French food. But there was not a baguette in sight, nor a batard. The closest we get is a boule filled with vegetables in a dense sauce – but the boule is more packaging than a food in its own right. How is this possible? 

I wept at the end. Perhaps this was due to the beauty and richness of long-developing love – or maybe it was the evocation of my own long-term love, of a man with whom I share the pleasure of good food, especially French, and the creativity manifested in the making of marvelous soups, roasts, fish in cream sauce, the meticulous efforts going into the perfection of each flavor, coaxing its finest form from every ingredient.

Quantum Cowboys, a film by Geoff Marslett

This 2022 film, part rotoscope, part drawings, part live-action, all imagination, is an exploration of time; space; whether the universe has consistency or coincidence or is so overcrowded with multiverses that everything can happen all the time; and how the further we get from a memory/ history, the more we agree on what happened. The grand mystery with the most possible wrong answers is “what did you do yesterday?” 

If you’d rather watch things explode at high volume, then go see the new Mad Max or Godzilla. But if making you think, and wonder, and laugh, is more interesting, Quantum Cowboys is a good bet. 

In brief, Frank and Bruno are shoveling horse manure in a town about to be dedicated as Yuma, Arizona in 18-whatever. Frank becomes entangled in a shooting he doesn’t believe happened, and is so intent that after 3 years in prison he enlists Bruno to help him find the man who died, to prove he didn’t. It’s Schrodinger’s Cat all over again, and again, and again. Sometimes he’s dead, and other times he’s – not? Or only when you look?

Along the way we are treated to anachronism, odd moments that repeat under different circumstances, and slapstick. With the Western genre to play around in, where modern culture (worldwide) imagines the American West to be gunslingers, saguaros and Monument Valley with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, Marslett gives us a version that brings events around until finally some different resolution emerges.

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan

This 2006 novel has multiple narratives – Parts 1 and 2, most of the book, work. But Part 3, the last 30 pages, deus ex machina*, broke it for me. I didn’t believe it, and the fact that Egan included it soured me on the whole tale. That’s too bad, because Parts 1 and 2 had me convinced. 

Without giving away too much, we have Danny who did something terrible to his cousin when they were kids. But now Howard is successful, made so much money that he’s bought a European castle with the intention of turning it into an introspection lens for people trapped in the grip of a reality that’s deadened them. Howard invites Danny to join the renovation team that will turn this crusty ancient place into the hotel of his dreams. Danny comes because he’s between gigs and failing in his life, and he’s curious how Howard survived his trauma. 

The Keep of the title is a tower still inhabited by an ancient Baroness who can’t stop Howard from buying the rest of the place, but will not relinquish her grip on its history, its lineage of which she is part and these interlopers are not. A parallel narrative accompanies Danny’s – a prisoner’s. Then, after we've come so far, a third narrator runs it off the rails. 

Meanwhile, Egan offers some truly creative ideas: an inmate’s prized possession is a shoebox full of odds and ends but mostly dust. Knobs pushed into the side like radio dials, tune in ghosts. I loved the dust radio – the inmate’s logic is unassailable: “But think about it, brother: new technology always looks like magic. When Tom Edison turned on that tin phonograph of his back in 1877, you think people believed that was for real? Hell no. Ventriloquism, they said. Voodoo. They thought no machine could do such a thing.” 

She also invents some apt words: “Danny was himself again, which meant not just knowing things but knowing more things than other people, seeing all the links when everybody else could see only a few. Information… [T]here was a power in just having it, in knowing where everyone stood. And Danny had a word that could say all that. One word: alto.” And she gives us another word: Worm. The eviscerating fear that devours you from the inside, that once it has you, never lets go. 

*“Deus ex machina” is Latin, meaning “God out of the machine” – stage machinery in Greek and Roman drama brought in a god to set everything right. It’s unearned resolution, inherently unsatisfactory. The writer boxed herself in, so she resorted to an extraneous element to tie up the loose ends.

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

This 2022 novel is told in first person plural, an unusual choice, but in this case effective. A group of people who swim laps at a public pool give voice to their collective need to be there, to move and to immerse. One of the swimmers, Alice, a woman with dementia, gradually takes center stage, and the story moves into second person singular, chronicling her descent from function to institutionalization, her patchwork memory all too familiar to those of us who have witnessed this decay close up. 

I almost didn’t finish the book – my mom didn’t sink that far before she died but she was headed into the abyss of not knowing anyone, losing language, losing speech. I wrote a short story about her descent, and that was plenty long for me. To channel more of her failing mind would have ultimately seemed cruel – to expose a person whose wit and talents evaporated, must serve some greater purpose. Otherwise, it lays bare a terrible loss – to tell a story? To make her the star of a vortex? 

When I want to say more, I feel her in my heart, angry and bitter that I am using her to make my own point.

The Animal Dialogues - Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, by Craig Childs

These remarkable stories, published in this fine book in 1997, are as brief as three pages and as long as eighteen. Childs spends time in wild places, primarily the American Southwest, but also ranges from mountains in Mexico to Vancouver Island and the Yukon, writing about creatures as diverse as praying mantis, ravens, mountain goats, smelt, rattlesnakes… Every story has its context, the encounter (sometimes multiples), and opportunities for amazement or amusement. 

For example, he lived some time in a tipi in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Quickly his dwelling was overrun by mice. He obtained a cat, which ran away. He obtained another cat, which hunted mice prolifically in the area outside the tipi while steadfastly ignoring those inside, while Childs was at his wits’ end, astounded at all the places that are not mouse-proof whatever you do. 

Along the way he offers insights into the physical capacities, behaviors, and choices of wild creatures, his deep respect for them leading his curiosity. He writes about netting smelt in the tide off Vancouver Island with a group of Native Americans, realizing at some point that the couple hundred fish they have caught will all have to be cleaned. Sort of dampens the thrill of the catch. He writes about a red spotted toad an inch long, a water-loving creature he discovers in a desert canyon far from the nearest possibility of water – and yet, there it is, thriving. 

He writes about an epically-bad mosquito season in the Yukon, and makes this observation, “If a mosquito is released in still air, it will come directly to you even if you are standing one hundred feet away. Through the air, the mosquito senses the carbon dioxide of your breath, lactic acid from your skin, traces of acids emitted by skin bacteria, and the humidity and heat of your body. If there is a slight breeze, a mosquito may find you from across the length of a football field.” He respects the insect’s adaptations and its intricate neurons – by the time you finish this story you realize the mosquitoes are always going to win. 

If you have even the slightest interest in the natural world, you will discover wonders in these pages.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

This lyrical novel, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, explores love as an outpost in a hostile world, occupied in the understanding that it cannot survive the siege – of law, of hierarchy, of propriety, of obedience. The story is revealed slowly, descending through layers, in the eyes of twins, a boy, Estha, and a girl, Rahel, whose father is gone and whose mother, Ammu, lives at the mercy of in-laws who despise her. They live in a poor village in a poor province of India, and from the outset we know that something terrible – more than one thing – has occurred, scarring their lives. 

It takes till nearly the end to fully see those hateful and mournful ghosts, the love not permitted crushed under the bootheels of the intolerance that keeps society in order, order in society. In sensory detail, Roy offers the observations of children, true to their dramatic and playful sensibilities. When the twins are seven, their ten-year-old cousin, half-English, comes to visit with her English mother. During this short visit, the girl dies, though it takes most of the novel for us to find out the true circumstances. 

But in the opening chapter, we are with Rahel in church during the funeral, observing, “… Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a ‘Whatisit? Whathappened?’ and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.” 

This book has made it onto Banned Book lists, not only for brief sexual content but also for the more explosive exploration of love between an Untouchable and a middle-caste woman. Roy deals frankly with social structures and the pull of desire, and it seems likely that the condemnation assailing this work has more to do with the violations of caste, than erotic content. 

She also lays bare the privileges of patriarchy – the twins’ drunken grandfather who beats their grandmother daily with a brass candlestick, the assumptions of the local Marxist leader that his wife will clean him up and clean up after him, available whenever he wants her and out of sight when he doesn’t. 

As with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, there’s a good chance those who seek to ban the book have never actually read it, they’ve just heard something about it, or seen a brief quote. I found the novel both honest about the harm we do to each other, and well-written. Read it then judge for yourself.

Samurai Trilogy, films by Hiroshi Inagaki

Before the Marvel Universe of superheroes, there were noble warriors in film. And the samurai of medieval Japan lend themselves particularly to the combination of physical skill, mental alertness, and spiritual centeredness that make an ordinary man heroic. The finest of these is the great actor Toshiro Mifune, who loves to embody penniless and slovenly characters who possess animal alertness, easily underestimated. 

Director Akira Kurosawa, who made Seven Samurai in 1954, also featured Mifune in later samurai epics: Yojimbo in 1961, Sanjuro in 1962. Between these, Inagaki made Samurai Trilogy, released in 1955. They’re all great for aficionados of the posturing, extended setup, and lightning fight scenes of swordsmen in action. 

Subplots aside, Part I broadly follows the development of a man (Mifune) who rejects his humble beginnings as a farmer and runs away to war, to win renown and to escape his extended family who despise him because he is savage, untamed and unrepentant. His physical prowess brings him to a certain point on his road to becoming a samurai, but as a Buddhist priest tells him, this strength is an obstacle to true development. 

Part II finds him, after three years locked in an attic with books, emerging as a more centered and learned man. He is now a respected and feared warrior, meeting the head of a famed samurai school in a duel. But he still has not learned to calm his spirit. 

In Part III, returning to his farming roots brings contentment – but his reputation has inspired a great young swordsman, played by Koji Tsuruta, to challenge him to a duel. They put off the fight while each develops his skills and fame, then at last they meet, in a memorable confrontation on the shore of an island. 

That’s the main story line, but this film is also shot beautifully: magnificent huge old pine trees, rolling fields, waterfalls, lush mountainsides, beautiful houses and castles, and hovels and inns full of flies and thieves, all form a compelling visual tapestry. When the plot bogs down in unrequited love, there’s still plenty to look at – your time is not wasted here despite melodramatic interludes. 

One might find oneself longing for a time when honor, courage, and dignity were cardinal virtues, and one needn’t resort to bullying to make one’s power felt. Those of us who love these films are grateful for the presence of Toshiro Mifune, playing the consummate outsider whose sword is, purportedly, for hire, but ultimately wielded in the service of justice.

The Zone of Interest, a film by Jonathan Glazer

The first thing that stood out to me about this movie is the Nazi officers’ haircuts. They are so very ugly, I have to wonder whether that was historically accurate, or a deliberate choice to make the Germans loathsome. I know tastes change, but even Moe, of The Three Stooges, has a better hairdo. Floppy on top, head close-shaved from above the ears down, and with a weird little wanna-be-ducktail point in the back, they’re too broadly hideous to be ignored. Not as hideous as the contrast between the little Eden of the Hoss family, and the back wall of their lovely garden, the razor-wire-topped boundary of Auschwitz death camp. 

This film is hard to write about – what can one say? The Obersturmfuhrer, Rudolph Hoss, played by Christian Friedel, occupies a lovely home (though his wife Hedwig, Sandra Huller, complains it’s not as big as it looks). This idyll is starkly opposed to the adjacent chimneys, barracks, the smoke the servants sometimes close the windows to keep out, the ashes that mulch the soil, the flames, the trains arriving at all hours. 

Hoss hosts the efficiency expert who proposes a design for the crematorium that will make possible continuous operation of the ovens – bodies (except they don’t call them bodies – “units”) go in, the 1000 plus degree heat does its work, then the load is moved to the next room where it cools, and the ashes are soon at 40 degrees, ready to be shoveled out. All that ingeniousness, turned to such a purpose. 

Occasionally the camp next door intrudes – Hoss goes fishing, and two of his children play in the river. He hooks a human jawbone, and suddenly barks at the kids to get out of the water. He hustles them home where they’re subjected to a sanitation treatment – a scrubbing with bleach perhaps, which has them screaming in pain – to expunge the contamination from those people, whose remains have the temerity to end up in the river where he loves to fish. 

Glazer makes clear that it’s possible to ignore something so horrific, so close by – just don’t think about what’s going on, or whether it’s right, or what it means to be on this side of such a wall not that side. It is a willed blindness humans suffer from, and perpetuate suffering through. The veil between what’s behind that wall, and places where we torment each other now, is almost nonexistent.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

My disintegrating paperback copy of this deceptively small novel was printed in 1970, though the copyright is 1963. It is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s fifth published work. And it’s dynamite. Or, should I say, ice-nine, the substance that destroys life on earth. I like to give copies to friends and family as high school graduation gifts, because the book contains so many fundamental truths about life, all in one place. 

Vonnegut creates a scientist and his family, a destructive form of water, and a nihilist religion. In his deadpan way he describes the Hoenikker family – Dr. Felix, the father, genius with no moral compass whatever; his daughter Angela, a tall gawky woman with a gift for playing clarinet; his son Franklin who shuns nearly everyone, spending his time building a model railroad world; and young son Newt, a midget born at their mother’s death, cared for by Angela. Dr. Felix invents a substance the US Marines can use so they don’t have to slog through mud in their forays into battle. But that’s not all the substance does. 

Vonnegut introduces such ideas as one’s karass, the people with whom one is connected; granfalloons, people who imagine they are connected; wampeter, the purpose for which a karass exists; boko-maru, the ecstatic kneading of one another's feet; and foma – lies. He invents other terms too, but these are the most important. They’re delineated in the religion Bokononism, which is outlawed on the island where it is practiced. No one may be a Bokononist – lest they suffer a hideous death – and yet, they are all Bokononists. 

I’ve told too much – if you’ve never read this, you ought to find a copy – preferably a crumbling artifact on a used book store shelf – and collect some fundamental truths you might have overlooked thus far.