Central New York

It's weird. There are some places that you have to get away from in order to appreciate. When I lived in central New York, I didn't like it much. I had a hard time meeting people and finding things to do. Most of the people my own age had grown up in the area and had a set group of friends already, not to mention kids and family. There was one bar, and it was pretty lame. The nearest movie theater was a half hour away. My apartment building was full of old people who bitched to the apartment manager if I vaccuumed after 7:30 at night. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Now that I am out of there, I appreciate it more. It was very pretty and peaceful. It had Sylvan Beach, a great summer hangout with rides, bars and good food. It had some historic interest. There were a lot of scumbags living there: the police blotter was full of DWIs, domestic violence calls, and welfare fraud complaints. You could see a lot of this stuff firsthand whenever you went out, actually. But looking back, I often think that perhaps I counted the place out too soon and didn't give it enough of a chance.

Geese on the Irrigation Pond, waiting to take off, Fall 2006

Spring Comes to Downtown Oneida, 2007


Sunset over Lake Oneida, 2006

Fire Escape, Oneida, 2007


Sylvan Beach bar interior

Skee-Ball at Sylvan Beach


One of the Oldest Dark Rides in the State


The Galaxi at Sylvan Beach

Disappointment

Worse? April 30, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:01 am

Which is worse?

Finding a book you love and then hating everything else you try by that author, or

Reading a completely disappointing book by an author that you love?

This is an interesting question. I don't think I've ever had the first experience. I have had authors wear on me, though. For a while after I read My Sister's Keeper, I got into Jodi Picoult. I read the one about the Amish girl accused of killing her newborn baby. I read the one about the teenaged boy who was on trial for murdering his lifelong friend and girlfriend. I read the one about the twice-accused, never-guilty-of-pedophilia teacher and the girls who dabbled in witchcraft. Somewhere in there, they all started to blur together. She's got a formula, and once I could spot it, I lost interest. I felt I'd gotten all there was to get out of her books, at least for me.

I do hate reading disappointing books. A. Manette Ansay's book Blue Water leaps to mind, probably because it's in the stack of books I'm going to sell on Amazon, here on my desk. I loved all of her other books. I've read Vinegar Hill and River Angel many times. I thought the latter was an excellent novel about religion and faith, that should appeal to Christians without being overly preachy towards agnostics and atheists. I thought of it when I started that horribly cheesy "Christian" novel, Doesn't She Look Natural? last winter. Nothing in the first half made it Christian except for a few hackneyed references to the main character's belief in God and an unfortunate intolerance of homosexuality.

So, I had very high hopes for Blue Water. I was disappointed. I didn't find the main characters terribly engaging, nor did there seem to be much driving the story forward. You can read my review of it here. It wasn't horrible on its own. If my expectations had been lower, I might have even been keeping it instead of selling it.

So I guess I don't know which is worse. They're both pretty disappointing. But I'd say it's worse to be let down by an author you really like, than to merely find out you don't like a particular author after all.

Grain Elevators of Buffalo

For many years they were underappreciated around here, the rusting, abandoned hulks standing silent watch over the lake shores. I think they're starting to make somewhat of a comeback. A local historical society offers a boat tour three times each summer among them, and they always sell out, so more and more people are getting to see how amazing they are. Riding along the water among them is an indescribeable, eerie sensation. It's virtually silent on that part of the Buffalo River, without even any noise from highways or houses. And on both sides of your boat are these grain elevators, as tall as skyscrapers, as silent as boulders, slowly crumbling to oblivion.

Custom Made for Me

Ever come across something -- a book, a blog, a museum exhibit -- that seems like the perfect intersection of your interests? I found such a book recently, and it's going on my birthday list for sure. The Tavern Lamps Are Burning is a literary journey through New York State since its colonization up until about the 1960s (that's when this book came out). It's edited by Carl Carmer and contains lots of interesting morsels: Rudyard Kipling's description of Buffalo's grain elevators, Charles Dickens' visit to the Shaker colony in Lebannon, NY before it became a museum, and writings by Red Jacket and Mary Jemison. There are short stories, poems, and excerpts from longer works. All in all, it's around 500 pgs long and not the type of work one reads cover to cover.

The book was published in 1964, as my graduate program was being founded. I thought I'd recognized the author's name, and I'm still not 100% sure I do, but he was a trustee of the museum my program works with, and dedicated this book to one of the founders of my program. I think it would be an excellent project for any institution in the state to update this book. Things have changed a great deal in the state since the book was published, and not always for the better. But many new writers and works would be worthy of excerption and inclusion, such as Richard Russo's Mohawk, The Risk Pool and Bridge of Sighs; Lauren Belfer's City of Light; and many, many others that I can't think of at the moment.

The book also inspired me to share some of my photos on this blog from around New York State. I have quite a few of them, after all. I'm going to be doing that all this week -- certainly not promising an update every day, but who knows?

Today's are from Camp Sagamore, in the Adirondack Mountains. Built by the Vanderbilts in 1897, today it's a tourist attraction. It's also host to overnight programs like Elderhostel and a corporate retreat. Every year, the Upstate History Alliance holds an institute there for museum professionals. I was privileged enough to attend one year. The leaves were beginning to change and it was just gorgeous. Even if the sessions had been absolute crap, it would have been worthwhile. But as it was, I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and enjoyed a truly gorgeous setting in New York State.

Symbolically Speaking

It's that time of the week again! Here's today's question:

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just “tells the story” without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

This one's a pretty challenging question. It's hard to know what to think sometimes. I do think English teachers, particularly English PhD's, sometimes go a bit too far. For example, you don't even want to know what Hermione's magically enlarged satchel from the last Harry Potter book is supposed to symbolize. There's all kinds of scholarship on it, apparently, but I'll leave the reader to Google it for him or herself. You may wish you hadn't.

At the same time, though, I always disliked those whose sole contribution to class was to assert "It don't symbolize nuthin'. It's just a story." That's not exactly the truth of it either. In graduate school, we had to read the Melville short story "Bartleby the Scrivener." I was pretty surprised to be the only one in the room who grasped that the story was about alienation and that Bartleby was a symbolic character. After classes were over for the week, a friend and I argued about that all the way to Friendly's (nearly a 40 minute drive; school was in the middle of nowhere). He was a very black-and-white sort of person and couldn't understand how to tell the difference between a symbolic character and one that's more like a real person. I just couldn't figure out how to explain it, either, though. "You can just tell, they don't act quite right," was the best I could do.

As far as symbolism in modern fiction, I would say that it's still there. It's not trendy in the popular stuff that's meant to be digested easily. But I guess it probably never was. My absolute least favorite use of symbolism is when the writer kills off an animal. I read a short story where a woman and her brother were visiting their family for a holiday. They'd grown up in a rural area that was being developed. They got drunk and rode their horse to a local Wal-Mart, where it fell in a construction pit or retention pond and drowned. They watched it, knowing there was nothing they could do.

When I read that story, I understood intellectually that the horse was supposed to represent the conflict between the rural life they'd grown up with and the development that was threatening it. I think it also symbolized something with the brother's life -- my memory's a little hazy, but I think the sister felt he was drinking too much or in some kind of trouble. But I couldn't get past the horrible image of the horse drowning like that, struggling to get its footing, to keep its head above water, and looking to its owners for some kind of help the entire time.

I have to admit, though, that I'm not usually on a very sharp lookout for symbolism while I'm reading. I mostly read for enjoyment, or in the case of nonfiction, to learn something specific as well. The best writers will write on both levels, so that readers can enjoy the story without getting all the symbols. And at some point, maybe it stops mattering whether the reader makes symbols out of nothing or whether the writer put them there. One of the members of Pink Floyd was once asked about the meaning behind his songs. He replied that it no longer mattered, that now that they were out in the world, it was what the listener took from them that counted, not what he put there. Perhaps that's true of books to an extent, as well.

Gone a Bit Flat

Image from amazon.com


I just finished another Laurie Graham, Gone With the Windsors, and am clearly in a minority with this one. I didn't like it much, which surprised me. I've liked the other four books I've read by her. But this one just didn't do it for me.

As you can read in numerous effervescent reviews, this book is the diary of one Maybell Brumby, young widow and childhood frined of the infamous Wallis Simpson. She comes to London after her husband's death, to catch up with her old friend and also with her sister Violet, married to another, minor royal. Maybell and Wallis resume their old friendship immediately, giving Maybell a front-row seat for the whole divorce/abdication drama.

If you were to line up all the characters in this novel, you could fill a minor-league ballpark with them. Maybell's social circle is wide-ranging and inconsistent. She has large numbers of shallow acquaintances, and they're hard to track as they're never really developed. Maybell herself? The people who enjoy this book are laughing at her, not with her. They commonly cite her many malapropisms and misstatements of fact. Only one got a real laugh out of me: the piano-playing "coal porter," inexplicably invited to one of the upper-crust events. The book's full of this sort of thing if you get a kick out of them. After a while, it started to feel like the "backseat of a Volkswagen" joke from the movie Mallrats. Funny the first time, less so the second time. By its tenth appearance, you're gritting your teeth every time someone tees it up with the phrase "uncomfortable position."

So, I didn't like Maybell much. There just wasn't much to her, actually. Nora in The Importance of Being Kennedy led an interesting life all her own. Poppy of The Great Husband Hunt was a constant challenge, as you initially rooted for her, then saw your feelings towards her complicate as she took her life in strange directions and rarely softened towards those who'd been less lucky. And it was a joy to see Peg and her friends successfully remake their lives and change with the changing times in Future Homemakers. Maybell inspires few feelings at all.

The ones who interested me got less and less stage time as the book wore on: Maybell's own family. Violet and her traditionalist husband. Her mischevious older son and her untameable daughter. And Maybell's other sister, Doopie, which is short for stupid, the nickname Maybell gave her after a childhood illness took her hearing (and, the family thought, her intelligence too. They were wrong). Wallis and the King are not presented in a very good light. Wallis struck me throughout as a craven materialistic social climber. The King was a strange sort of man-child, easily tired out by any sort of duty, desirous merely of a quiet life of golfing and dogs and Wallis. Strange that a novel about one of the biggest scandals of the twentieth century, let alone one written by the wonderful Laurie Graham, should seem dull to me. But there it is.

Made in the U.S.A

image from Amazon.com


At the beginning of Made in the U.S.A, Billie Letts thanks circus performers, medical professionals, people who guided her through Las Vegas, people who taught her about the survival strategies of the homeless; people knowledgeable about gymnastics, construction sites, golf balls and teenagers; the author of a trivia book; and the people at a piercing and tatoo parlor. You can tell that it's going to be an exciting read.

However, it wasn't quite what I expected. The two protagonists of the book are Lutie and Fate McFee, brother and sister. They've had very rough lives, and it gets worse during the first half of the novel. Their mother's dead, their father was an alcoholic who abandoned them to the care of his most recent girlfriend, who dies at the start of the book. Fleeing the spectre of foster homes, they light out to Las Vegas with less than $200 and only Lutie's learner's permit, in hopes of tracking down their father.

The news is not good, and the book gets very grim indeed at this point, as both tough, independent Lutie and sweet, quirky Fate are forced to grow up in a hurry. Utterly alone, they fend for themselves as best as two homeless children with no identification or permanent address can. You can probably imagine how, but Letts doesn't require you to.

Their luck miraculously turns at the moment when things can't get much worse. A guardian angel in the shape of a broken-down wire walker spirits them away, to the family he's been avoiding for more than fifteen years and to a reckoning for all three of them.

There's something I liked about this book, but it's hard to put my finger on what. The first half was utterly unrelenting. With each turn of the plot, you wonder how things could get worse for Lutie and Fate, only to find out the answer a few pages later. The second, happier half was a bit draggy, though. The ending seemed like a foregone conclusion pretty early on in the second half. The meaning of the title, too, still eludes me.

I'm guessing that what I liked about the book lies somewhere in Lutie and Fate. Lutie's not particularly likeable at first. She's snappish with her little brother, selfish, and constantly angry. But there's also something there that makes you root for her to turn it around. And Fate's just adorable, with his earnestness, his deep well of love and forgiveness, and his encyclopedic knowlege of all things trivial ("Did you know rats can have sex twenty times a day?").

This is my first Billie Letts book, although I've seen some of her others. I feel funny about saying I "enjoyed" a book with such vivid, graphic descriptions of what can become of homeless children, but I would definitely give another one of hers a try, and would reccomend this one.