Sunday Salon ~ Phillis Wheatley

BOOKS

I ran across Phillis Wheatley this week, in my reading of America's Women by Gail Collins (2003).  A few years ago, I read My Name Is Phillis Wheatley: A Story of Slavery and Freedom by Afua Cooper (2009) and wrote a short teaser from that book (click on the book's title to read it).  Gail Collins, covering 400 years of the history of American women, devoted almost a page and a half to Phillis Wheatley:  born in Senegal, enslaved at age seven or eight, purchased in Boston by John Wheatley as a personal servant for his wife, taught by their daughter to read English, writing poetry by the time she was thirteen.  Phillis was an exceptional person.  John Wheatley freed her, when they returned from England.

Small slave house door on Gorée Island, through which slaves departed Senegal

"Her work began appearing in New England newspapers, and she became a regional celebrity. ... Treated more as a daughter than a servant by the Wheatley family, Phillis became known for her poise and conversation as well as her writing.  In Britain, the Countess of Huntingdon admired one of her poems, and arranged the publication of a book by 'a very Extraordinary female Slave.'  The high point of Phillis Wheatley's life came in 1773, when she traveled to England, where she was taken up by the literary celebrities of the day and invited to be presented at court. ... she was the first American writer to achieve international fame" (p. 77).

Notice that it says Phillis Wheatley was "the first American writer to achieve international fame" — not the first African-American writer.  Benjamin Franklin read her work, and George Washington invited her to visit him during the Revolutionary War.  "None of her three children lived past infancy, and she was working as a servant in a cheap tavern when she died at the age of thirty-one" (p. 78).  What a loss.

My friend Jelani, looking over the Atlantic from that Gorée doorway in 2003

WORDS
The New Yorker gives a brief history of the hashtag, manicule, diple, pilcrow, and ampersand in The Ancient Roots of Punctuation.

This pointing hand is a manicle. The word manicle comes from the Latin maniculum, meaning "little hand."  The writer would draw a little hand in the margin of a manuscript to point out something important.  This manicle points out the fact that Bonnie's Books reportedly had 601 pageviews on August 29th.  I haven't had that many (that I was aware of) since the 749 pageviews on April 16, 2012.  I have no idea what prompted these larger-than-usual numbers.

The pilcrow symbol is related to the cent sign on the right.  Can you see a similarity?  Read the New Yorker article to learn about the hashtag (also called hash mark, octothorpe, and number sign, which is what I call it when I write that I live in apartment #515).

The Sunday Salon's Facebook page has links to other blogs.

Caturday ~ 1Q84

Over at my Book Around the World blog this week, Amy recommended 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami as a good book for our Japan category.  I used a different book cover to illustrate the post, but what fun to find a literary cat reading the same novel.  The size of the book — at 1184 pages — intimidates me.  Have you read this one?  Is it worth the time it will take to read it?

Friday Five ~ Let's eat!

Today's Friday Five topic comes to us from 3dogmom at RevGalBlogPals:

"My first ever Friday Five is dedicated to Nikki MacDonald, sister RevGal, who was hungering for an opportunity to write about Haggis. With that introduction, today’s FF is all about food!"

1)  Is there a food from a foreign land whose reputation led to trepidation when you had a chance to give it a try?  Did you find the courage to sample it anyway?  If so, were you pleasantly surprised or did you endorse the less than favorable reputation that preceded it?

Escargot:  The man I was dining with had gotten his doctorate in France, and he insisted I try the escargot with garlic butter he had ordered.  It didn't taste anything like I expected — on the other hand, neither did I particularly care for it.  He kept trying to give me another bite, another escargot, dripping with butter.  After one or two, I suggested he eat it, since he loved it so.  The taste, to me, seemed bland, like eating the eraser on the end of a pencil.  Not that I've ever eaten an eraser, of course, but that was the image that came to mind that day.

2)  What food from your own country/culture gets a bad rap?

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Okra:  When my mother-in-law moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee — in other words, from the North to the South — someone who didn't know what they were talking about (probably another Northerner) told her to BOIL the okra, as in a gumbo, I suppose.  Never again, for the rest of her life, would she taste okra, and she lived to be 95.  Southerners know okra is supposed to be FRIED.  I have found one restaurant in my entire life that can fry okra that tastes like my mother's.  It's really an odd coincidence that, just this morning, I ran into the man who fries my okra "extra crispy" — I was eating breakfast with a friend and he came in for his own breakfast.  You know the food must be good when an excellent cook buys food at another restaurant on his way to the one he owns!  (Full disclosure:  his doesn't open for breakfast.)

3)  Of what food are you fond that others find distasteful?

Sweet potatoes:  My friend Donna insists that sweet potatoes should not be classified as food.  Since we are roommates and sometimes eat together at home, I make a regular baked potato for her when I have a baked sweet potato (or yam) for me.

Click to enlarge

4)  Is there a country’s food, not native to you, that you go out of your way to eat?

Japanese:  I enjoy Japanese food — and watching a chef prepare it on the grill in front of us.  I took this dramatic photo a couple of years ago.

5)  What is your guilty pleasure food?

Glazed donuts:  Yeah, plain ole Krispy Creme glazed donuts.  I generally don't care for desserts, but I can eat several of these at a sitting.

Bonus:  What was your most memorable meal (good or bad), either because of the menu, the occasion, the company, or some other circumstance that makes it stand out?

My children's theatrics at having to eat something they had decided ahead of time they weren't going to like — some of those were memorable.  My rule was one bite.  They had to try a single bite.  One day, Barbara refused to eat spinach.  I told her that MY mother had told ME (that way I didn't quite exactly say whether it was true or not) that our taste changes every seven years.  She said, "I'm seven, so I'll try it."  She did, and she declared, "I like it!" and ate a whole serving.  Whew!  It worked.

Beginning ~ with a beach walk

Intrusions ~ by Ursula Hegi, 1981, fiction

Megan Stone was walking along the deserted beach.

You will probably ask, Why another book about another woman walking along another beach?  Another deserted beach, to be more specific.  And you will sigh impatiently, wondering how soon Megan is going to arrive at some monumental insight..."

Okay, I stopped that long sentence because it's all speculating on what Megan Stone might do — or not.  I don't know if Megan Stone is the protagonist (main character) of this novel or protagonist of the novel within this novel.  The back cover tells me Hegi has written about an author who interacts with her main character.  From the back cover:

Brilliantly stretching literary conventions, Ursula Hegi, author of the best-selling Stones from the River, creates a funny and original novel within a novel to explore the doubts, decisions, and 'might-have-beens' that mark not only the writing process but life itself.  As her 'author' and her fictional heroine deal with their intrusions into each other's lives, Hegi reveals much about the choices women make, the ambiguities they face, and the often surprising ways reality and fiction merge.

Last week, I ran across an email to our book club leader in which I had suggested three books.  I'd read two of them and hadn't read one, I said.  Twelve years later, I recognized the two I'd read and this as the one I still haven't read.  So I ordered it through ABE.com, and it arrived yesterday afternoon.  Knowing this unusual twist — Hegi writing about an author interacting with her book's character — I opened the book at random and read this on page 183:

I want to make a confession.

Something has been bothering me since Chapter 61.

Chapter 61?  I looked, and this was chapter 103.  Must be short chapters.  I can tell it's going to be a weird story.  You have now read as many words from the book as I have.  Do you think Megan Stone is the author inside the book?  Or the author's character?  Both, of course, would be Hegi's characters.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays. Click here for today's Mister Linky.

Library Loot ~ September 4-10

The Witch of Cologne ~ by Tobsha Learner, 2003, fiction

The Inquisitor, Carlos Vicente Solitario, charges a young Jewish midwife, Ruth bas Elazar Saul, with heresy.  Ruth may be the daughter of the city's chief rabbi, but this is no protection against the Inquisition's accusations.    Detlef von Tennen, nobleman and canon, cousin to the Archbishop, suspects that something other than religion drives Solitario to persecute Ruth.  Determined to ensure that justice is done, Detlef joins the investigation -- and finds his passions fully aroused by Ruth's impressive intelligence and darkly exotic beauty.  All her life, Ruth bas Elazar Saul has thirsted for knowledge, despite the price she paid by concealing her gender and being cast out of her father's house.  Her faith sustains her through all, even the attentions of the Inquisition.  Then, in the very heart of danger, God blesses her with the greatest love she has ever known.

After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story ~ by Michael Hainey, 2013, memoir

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news:  Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack.  Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn.  And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family-and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood.  Finally, roughly his father's age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night.  Died "after visiting friends," the obituaries said.  But the details beyond that were inconsistent.  What friends?  Where?  At the heart of his quest is Michael's all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity — and a steely determination not to look back.  Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father's buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he'd imagined with the one he comes to know — and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother.  A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, this is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists.

Kingdom of Strangers ~ by Zoë Ferraris, 2012, fiction (Saudi Arabia)

A secret grave is unearthed in the desert revealing the bodies of 19 women and the shocking truth that a serial killer has been operating undetected in Jeddah for more than a decade.  However, lead inspector Ibrahim Zahrani is distracted by a mystery closer to home.  His mistress has suddenly disappeared, but he cannot report her missing since adultery is punishable by death.  With nowhere to turn, Ibrahim brings the case to Katya, one of the few women in the police department.  Drawn into both investigations, she must be increasingly careful to hide a secret of her own.  Portraying the lives of women in one of the most closed cultures in the world, award-winning author Zoë Ferraris weaves a tale of psychological suspense around an elusive serial killer and the sinister forces trafficking in human lives in Saudi Arabia.  (A Katya Hijazi and Nayir Sharqi Novel)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.

Palimpsest

I learned the word palimpsest years ago, as I studied Greek and looked at photos showing papyrus scrolls of ancient biblical texts or writings like those found at Nag Hamadi or the Dead Sea scrolls found near Qumran.  Who knew that I'd ever run across this word in a picture like this?  Palimpsest is a rather esoteric word, used mainly by people who study or work with old manuscripts.  Wikipedia defines it thus:

A palimpsest /ˈpælɪmpsɛst/ is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped or washed off and which can be used again.  The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos, “scratched or scraped again”) originally compounded from πάλιν (palin, “again”) and ψάω (psao, “I scrape”) literally meaning “scraped clean and used again.”

Is that definition esoteric enough for you?  Here's an example of a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-used.  (Click to enlarge the image.)  You can clearly see the remains of larger Greek letters.  Someone cleaned it and turned it sideways to write again.  I've seen pictures of war-time letters, where the writer turned the page sideways like this and continued to write — and it was indeed possible to read the words that intersected each other.  That's one way to save paper.

Back to the picture at the top.  Maybe I should consider acquiring a small blackboard and posting a "word of the day" on my patio, to be perused by my neighbors (mostly young adults and college-age couples) as they come and go.  Think they'd kick me out of the apartment complex?

Cross-posted on my word blog.

The Book Seer

The Book Seer has been on the Links to Interesting Sites on my sidebar since at least February 2010, when I first wrote about it.  But I've discovered it again and want to share it with you.  Enter a book title and author, and The Book Seer will suggest other books you might like to read.  I entered:

Honest to God ~ by John A. T. Robinson (a 1963 book I read in the early 1970s and one that's important in my understanding of God and religion)

and the Book Seer came back with this list of similar or related books that might interest me:

• The Plague ~ by Albert Camus (I read this 1948 novel as an English major in college, about the same time I read Honest to God)
• Introducing Liberation Theology ~ by Leonardo Boff (I haven't read this 1987 book, but have read articles by Boff)
• Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 ~ by Thomas Hobbes (I haven't read this 1668 book, but I did study Hobbes as an undergraduate philosophy major)
• On Liberty ~ by John Stuart Mill (same here, I studied and taught Mill, but read only excerpts of this book published in 1859)
• A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born ~ by John Shelby Spong (I read this 2001 book and several others by this author)
• Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology ~ by Rosemary R. Ruether (when I read this 1983 title, I glanced to my right and took it off my shelf)
• Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Library of Theological Ethics) ~ by Joseph Fletcher (I read this 1966 book for a philosophy class and wrote one of my most memorable college papers about situation ethics)
• Waiting for God ~ by Simone Weil (I read this 1951 book several years ago.  Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times.")
• The Trial and Death of Socrates ~ by Plato (I also read this in a college philosophy class)
• Dynamics of Faith ~ by Paul Tillich (I've read this 1957 book on the philosophy of religion and several other books by Tillich)

All in all, I'd say The Book Seer does an excellent job of instantly finding comparable books.