Re-creating hope

In his book Wonderworks, Angus Fletcher recalls what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about poetic language, how it "rearranges usual speech in order 'to re-create.'" Put another way, poets force us to stop and think.

Fletcher uses the example of a poet writing "a flower blue" instead of the more normal "a blue flower." Merely by rearranging words, the poet makes us pause a split second to picture that "flower blue" in our minds.

Emily Dickinson

Lately I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson's wonderful short poem about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.

She might have written, "Hope is like a bird," but "the thing with feathers" stops us in our tracks. It is what most people remember about this poem.

Dickinson changed the way we think about hope. Birds don't normally come when you call them. They perch where they will. And this bird flies into our soul, each of our souls, perches and stays there. The tune without the words suggests something indefinite. We don't know precisely even what we are hoping for. We simply hear the tune within us that lifts our spirits whatever our circumstances might be.

Emily Dickinson re-created the way many people think about hope. It is not something we can manufacture. "Be positive," we tell each other in vain. Instead hope is just something that flies in and stays there, always singing, always inspiring us to keep going.

The meaning of motions

Who knew there could be so many different gestures with so many different meanings? Francois Caradec enlightens us in his 2005 book Dictionary of Gestures (translated into English in 2018).

Caradec's book is more than 300 pages long, usually with three to five gestures per page. So that's a lot of gestures from around the world, many of them with multiple meanings.

He includes obscene gestures, and there are more of them than you might think, and childhood gestures, and everything in between

Many of these are motions you might not even think of as gestures, such as arm wrestling and playing footsie under the table. Even applause is a gesture that needs explaining in this book.

Most gestures are illustrated, and the drawings often indicate the sex, the age or the nationality of the person most likely to use the gesture. Literary quotations accompany many of the entries.

To make it easier to find the gesture one is looking for, Caradec divides his book into chapters according to the body parts involved in the gesture. Thus, there is a chapter for gestures involving the armpits, the fist, the tongue, teeth, the neck and each finger, as well as every other part of the body.

Because gestures can mean different things in different parts of the world, one needs to be careful. Caradec tells us that American soldiers killed multiple Iraqis who did not stop after being given the halt gesture. It turned out that in the Middle East a raised hand, palm out, is a sign of greeting.

Where ideas are born

Norman Cousins

Norman Cousins once said, "A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life."

Many people may think just the opposite, that a library, whether large or small, is something more like a cemetery where old ideas, old history and old stories are laid to rest. The future, to them, lies elsewhere. Libraries represent the past.

I often think back to high school. Why did our teachers insist that we have a certain number of references for our reports and essays? This was a nuisance to so many students, who preferred to find one good source, usually World Book encyclopedia in my day, and then paraphrase it.

I did not understand it at the time, but I came to realize that different ideas from different sources can produce something new and original when melded together in the mind of an original thinker.

It was much the same when I became a newspaper reporter. A news story with just one source — or worse, from a press release — tended to be weak and uninteresting. But when there were multiple sources, some from each side of an issue, the story had life and originality. It became something new.

The library is a storehouse of ideas, observations, stories and records that, as Cousins suggests, gives birth to something new. The best nonfiction books often have many pages of references at the back. I pulled David McCullough's 1776 off my shelf. It has more than 70 pages of source notes and bibliography. To produce his original book, he clearly spent hours upon hours in various libraries. History came alive, thanks to libraries.

Shopping list

Most of us who go shopping, especially for food, have shopping lists. Otherwise we are certain to forget something we need. I seem able to remember two items, but not three or more. I need a list even when I shop for clothing.

On my list

And I also have a shopping list for books, but it is more than a sheet of paper. It is a small notebook that can fit easily into my shirt pocket, one reason I prefer shirts with pockets.

Whenever I see a book or hear about a book or read a review of a book that interests me, I write the title and author down in my notebook. Sometimes I see a clothbound book in a bookstore that looks like something I might want to read. I enter it into my notebook while waiting for the paperback to come out.

For fiction, I list the books alphabetically by author. Thus there is an A list, a B list and so on. I usually put all nonfiction in one long list.

When I buy a book, I cross it off the list. Sometimes, after finding a book in a store, I decide I don't really want it after all. I cross it off my list. There are some books I never find, or I must resort to Amazon.

On my H list right now I have Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz, Burn by Peter Heller and The Life Impossible by Matt Haig. Many other titles have been crossed out. Every title on my E list now has a line through it. Obviously I buy a lot of books.

Serial books about serial killers

Sometimes one serial killer is not enough, or so Alex Grecian seems to think in The Harvest Man (2015) and his other novels

Jack the Ripper remains at large in London in 1890, but he has rivals who also enjoy cutting people up. One of these is Alan Ridgeway, an obvious copycat. Another is called the Harvest Man, an original. He is a small man who thinks himself still a child, and he is looking for his parents. When he finds couples who look something like his parents, he hides in their attics, then attacks at night, rearranging their faces with his knife before killing them.

Scotland Yard has a Murder Squad assigned to tracking down these killers, and the quest occupies a series of novels. In this one, Inspector Walter Day  is still recovering from injuries sustained through torture in The Devil's Workshop. He has a wife and two small daughters he needs to protect while still trying to find the killers. Nevil Hammersmith is a former cop who still acts like one, determined to track down Jack even without a badge. Dr. Kingsley is the coroner who has more work than he can handle in these books. Fiona is Kingsley's daughter, who loves Hammersmith even though he seems too preoccupied to notice.

I tend to prefer novels that have both a beginning and an end, rather than those with stories that, like those serial killers, just keep going and going and going.

Accountability

He'd made a mistake and she could choose to dissect and examine every particle of his actions, or she could try to move on.

Phaedra Patrick, The Little Italian Hotel

The Little Italian Hotel (2023) is the first novel by British author Phaedra Patrick that I've read that I have not enjoyed, and the line above helps explain why. It is all the husband's fault.

Adrian, Ginny's husband, does make a mistake, certainly. He tells her early in the novel that he is leaving her after 25 years of marriage. "There are cracks in our marriage and they are getting wider," he says. He has joined a dating site.

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Ginny, who makes a career giving advice on a radio show, has scheduled a holiday in Italy without discussing the trip with her husband beforehand. The money is nonrefundable.

Such controlling behavior suggests the kind of widening cracks Adrian refers to. Yet her actions are never mentioned again in the novel. Everything is his fault, which may satisfy Patrick's female readers, but to this male reader it all seems a bit unfair, especially after Adrian returns to Ginny and apologizes and after she has developed a passion for her Italian hotel keeper. As far as we know, he has never so much as kissed another woman, but we witness her kissing another man. She, of course, never apologizes.

The gist of the novel is that Ginny, because the trip in nonrefundable, goes to Italy without her husband, inviting along listeners to her program who have also suffered heartbreak — one who has lost a daughter, one who is losing a mother to dementia, one who has lost a dog and one who knows he is dying. The real question, of course, is not whether Ginny can help the others feel more positive about their own situations, but whether she can patch up her own life.

Female readers may read Patrick's conclusion differently than I did.

Behind Heller's novel

Novels, especially first novels, are often as much fact as fiction, and that was true of one of the best novels to come out of World War II — Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Patricia Chapman Meder tells us about it in The True Story of Catch-22 (2012).

Meder is the daughter of Willis F. Chapman, the model for Colonel Cathcart in Heller's novel. This relationship gave her an inside connection with many surviving veterans of the 340th Bomb Group, in which Heller served as a bombardier. Heller, who died in 1999, contributed little to this book other than quotations from his novel, but many of those who served with him in Italy were able to tell their version of events, describing where the novel and the truth parted company.

The term catch-22 was an invention — Heller originally called it catch-18 — but the idea behind it was real. The number of bombing missions required before a flier could be sent home kept increasing as the war went on because of the need for veteran fliers. The only way to avoid these dangerous missions was to claim insanity, which was proof you were not insane. That was the catch.

Heller, the model for Yossarian in the novel, only wanted to survive each mission, his former mates recalled. Whether his bombs actually hit their targets did not matter much to him.

In the end, Meder's book is more military history than literary history. Those with an interest in both will no doubt appreciate it more than those interested in just one or the other.