Carry On Tuesday # 46

The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer

"We are each the love of someone's life." So begins this love story. What is at first an opening line will be echoed throughout the story, will be its theme, and will ultimately drive its characters until their ends. Written by Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli tells the life of a man born backwards, exiting the womb with the body of a seventy year old man and the mind of a baby, growing both old and young at the same time. His life is hopelessly intertwined with those of his two friends, Alice and Hughie, in a love triangle that exists only because its participants remain nearly oblivious of their roles as objects of unattainable affection.

Carry On Tuesday # 45

The Poet And His Song

Paul Laurence Dunbar

A song is but a little thing,

And yet what joy it is to sing!

In hours of toil it gives me zest,

And when at eve I long for rest;

When cows come home along the bars,

  And in the fold I hear the bell,

As Night, the shepherd, herds his stars,

  I sing my song, and all is well.

There are no ears to hear my lays,

No lips to lift a word of praise;

But still, with faith unfaltering,

I live and laugh and love and sing.

What matters yon unheeding throng?

  They cannot feel my spirit’s spell,

Since life is sweet and love is long,

  I sing my song, and all is well.

My days are never days of ease;

I till my ground and prune my trees.

When ripened gold is all the plain,

I put my sickle to the grain.

I labor hard, and toil and sweat,

  While others dream within the dell;

But even while my brow is wet,

  I sing my song, and all is well.

Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,

My garden makes a desert spot;

Sometimes a blight upon the tree

Takes all my fruit away from me;

And then with throes of bitter pain

  Rebellious passions rise and swell;

But—life is more than fruit or grain,

  And so I sing, and all is well.





Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American poet to garner national critical acclaim. Born in Dayton Ohio, in 1872, Dunbar penned a large body of dialect poems, standard English poems, essays, novels and short stories before he died at the age of 33. His work often addressed the difficulties encountered by members of his race and the efforts of African-Americans to achieve equality in America. He was praised both by the prominent literary critics of his time and his literary contemporaries.

Carry On Tuesday # 44

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

An orphan raised in Valparaíso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. She enters a rough-and-tumble world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. With the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, Eliza moves freely in a society of single men and prostitutes, creating an unconventional but independent life for herself. The young Chilean's search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey, and by the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.

Chapter One

Eliza

Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her life-if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice. She used to tell her faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory was like the hold of the ship where they had come to know one another: vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks in which all the events of her life were jammed. Awake it was difficult to find anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama Fresia had taught her in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink. She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. She put as much store in that process as others put in numbers, and she so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent over the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.

"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza. Newborns are like cats, they have no emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times the subject arose.

Possible or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz-colored dress, the loose strands from her bun stirring in the breeze were engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never accept the other explanation of her origins.

"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."

"You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine," Mama Fresia rebutted behind her patrona's back

.

But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child grew accustomed to the mystery. It, along with other delicate matters, was never mentioned between Rose and Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never wavered in her description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the years, embroidered into a fairy tale. According to her, the basket they had found at the office door was woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and topping everything was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in Chile. Over time, other details were added: six gold coins tied up in a silk handkerchief and a note in English explaining that the baby, though illegitimate, was of good stock-although Eliza never set eyes on any of that. The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared, erasing any trace of her birth. Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door one morning at the end of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.

"No mink coverlet, no gold coins. I was there and I remember very well. You were shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater. They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you were covered with your own caca. Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled lobster, with a head full of fuzz like corn silk. That's how it was. Don't get any ideas," she repeated stoutly. "You weren't born to be a princess and if your hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and her brother would have tossed the crate in the trash."

At least everyone agreed that the baby came into their lives on March 15, 1832, a year and a half after the Sommers arrived in Chile, and they adopted that date as her birthday. Everything else was always a tangle of contradictions, and Eliza decided finally that it wasn't worth the effort to keep going over it, because whatever the truth was, she could do nothing to change it. What matters is what you do in this world, not how you come into it, she used to say to Tao Chi'en during the many years of their splendid friendship; he, however, did not agree. It was impossible for him to imagine his own life apart from the long chain of his ancestors, who not only had given him his physical and mental characteristics but bequeathed him his karma. His fate, he believed, had been determined by the acts of his family before him, which was why he had to honor them with daily prayers and fear them when they appeared in their spectral robes to claim their due. Tao Chi'en could recite the names of all his ancestors, back to the most remote and venerable great-great-grandparents dead now for more than a century. His primary concern during the gold madness was to go home in time to die in his village in China and be buried beside his ancestors; if not, his soul would forever wander aimlessly in a foreign land. Eliza, naturally, was drawn to the story of the exquisite basket-no one in her right mind would want to have begun life in a common soap crate-but out of respect for the truth, she could not accept it. Her bloodhound nose remembered very well the first scents of her life, which were not clean batiste sheets but wool, male sweat, and tobacco. The next smell she remembered was the monumental stench of a goat.

Carry On Tuesday # 43

"Love You To" is a song by The Beatles from the album Revolver. It is sung and written by George Harrison and features North Indian classical instrumentation, a tabla, a pair of hand-drums, a sitar and a tambura providing a drone. "Love You To" was the first Beatles song that seriously attempted to incorporate classical Indian music and has even been hailed as the first pop song to emulate a non-western form in structure and instrumentation

Each day just goes so fast

I turn around - it's past

You don't time to hang a sign on me

Love me while you can

Before I'm dead old man

A lifetime is so short

A new one can't be bought

And what you've got means such a lot to me

Make love all day long

Make love singing songs

There's people standing round

Who screw you in the ground

They'll fill your head with all the things you see

I'll make love to you

If you want me too

 

Love You To

Carry On Tuesday # 42

Join spunky Amelia and her charming family for a thrilling new archaeological adventure in Edwardian Egypt. Even on the joyous occasion of the marriage of their Egyptian "son" David to their beloved niece Lia, trouble finds Amelia and hunky hubby Emerson. And this time it is personal.

In London, someone impersonating David is peddling high-quality fake antiquities, and soon the Emerson-Peabody home is burglarized. Once in Egypt, trouble only escalates as Amelia becomes a shooter's target, her son Ramses is implicated in a paternity scandal, and an American girl is found dead in the shaft of the pyramid they are excavating. When the family's impetuous ward Nefret disappears and comes back married, it takes all of their upper-crust British restraint to keep familial relations civil.

Grand Master Elizabeth Peters once again delivers the delectable goods we have come to expect: beloved characters, an intriguing mystery, and alluring settings among the ruins. Romance and danger heighten the excitement, as does Barbara Rosenblat's narration, which is nothing short of perfection.

Carry On Tuesday # 41

State of Fear   Michael Chrichton 2004

In Paris, a physicist dies after performing
a laboratory experiment for a beautiful visitor.

In the jungles of Malaysia, a mysterious buyer
purchases deadly cavitation technology, built to
his specifications.

In Vancouver, a small research submarine is leased
for use in the waters off New Guinea.

And in Tokyo, an intelligence agent tries to
understand what it all means.

Thus begins Michael Crichton's exciting and provocative techno-thriller State of Fear. Only Crichton's unique ability to blend scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction could bring such disparate elements to a heart-stopping conclusion.

This is Crichton's most wide-ranging thriller. State of Fear takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of Los Angeles. The novel races forward on a roller-coaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought provoking, State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.

Carry On Tuesday # 40

To a Skylark Percy Bysshe Shelley Hail to thee, blythe Spirit Bird thou never wert, That from heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run, Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves: Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal Or triumphal chaunt Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then, as I am listening now!