Car Trash, Compass, and Atropos - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

When my previous car trash bag was inadvertently left behind at a car wash place, I had to go in search of another. I was surprised at how hard it was to find a store that carried anything that I could use.

The problem is that it has to fit somewhere. In my Ford 500, that means it needs to loop over the stick shift and then hang down on the driver's side of the console, behind my leg when I'm using the accelerator. In my Ford 150 truck, it has to have a strap I can insert in the ashtray (which I have no use for) so it hangs down in easy reach.

The opening needs to stay open, and it has to have enough capacity to hold a reasonable amount of trash. If it can be waterproof, so much the better -- it's nice to be able to throw away wet stuff without having it soak through and cause mold to grow and smells to become endemic.

I couldn't find a store in town that came close to meeting these requirements -- few had any kind of automobile litter bag at all. The kind I had used before, quite happily, had disappeared from the face of the earth.

But I had the happy thought of looking online at Etsy,com (a name perhaps derived from a pronunciation of "Etc."?) A search brought me to Allyson Hill's page.

The concept of Etsy is like that of the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria or the annual Craftsmen's Classic at the Coliseum -- lots of different craftsmen sharing a site. I have found lots of wonderful, high-quality crafts at Etsy -- along with the predictable array of how-sad work that only a mother could love. I have only once been disappointed in something I actually ordered, however -- and it definitely was not this time!

Allyson Hill, who lives and works in upstate New York, makes fabric-covered auto trash bags that do everything I need them to do. For only $19.00, plus shipping, I got adjustable-strap bags that can be fitted with plastic liners (15 biodegradable bags included, though you can also use plastic grocery bags). You have your choice of several fabrics -- and she has recently added some that I like better than the ones I bought several months ago, darn it.

Hill also offers "visor tissue cozies" which can hold those convenient flexible plastic tissue packages in easy reach but out of the way.

Hill is a graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology's School for American Crafts, with a degree in Woodworking and Furniture Design -- and she gets high honors from me. The design is pretty nearly perfect, and the workmanship is excellent.

I've used these bags for months now, and my wife liked them well enough that she bought them for her car, too. Check them out.

For years, I have been telling people that the two finest writers of mainstream fiction in America today are Richard Russo and Anne Tyler.

Unfortunately, I am no longer listing Richard Russo. He's gone the route of John Irving, writing weirdly perverse stories that seem aimed only at literary readers who don't actually want to care about any of the characters. I still recommend his early works, though, back when he still wrote about real people in the real world. (The best is arguably Nobody's Fool, which, when made into a movie, became, in my opinion, Paul Newman's finest role.)

Anne Tyler thus remains as my all-purpose recommendation, though even she has her ups and downs. She seems to alternate between novels that are so tied to a concept that the story stretches both interest and credulity, and novels that are deep and brilliant discoveries of characters who are trying to find their moral compass and a modicum of happiness in a difficult world.

Tyler's newest novel, Noah's Compass, is, in my opinion, one of the great ones, like Back When We Were Grownups, Breathing Lessons, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. (Overprogrammed titles include Digging to America and The Amateur Marriage -- but even these are rewarding reads.)

It's the story of Liam Pennywell, a philosophy graduate who somehow found himself teaching history at a high-toned private high school, and then fifth grade at a not-so-lofty school. Now, at sixty, he has been laid off -- even though he had seniority over the fifth-grade teacher the school opted to keep. He is toying with the idea of simply calling this "retirement," and with that in mind, he moves to a new (and much smaller) apartment.

His first night there, somebody breaks into the house and, in a scuffle, injures him severely enough that he wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the encounter with the burglar.

Though the mystery of who attacked him is eventually resolved, the story is really about Liam's attempt to make his life mean something. He finds himself sharing his new apartment with his youngest daughter, who, at seventeen, decides she'd rather live with her long-absent father than with her demanding mother.

Her mother and Liam divorced years ago -- in fact, their daughter was the baby who was a last-ditch attempt to save the marriage. But Liam was married once before, to a woman he loved deeply, but who died. He has one daughter from his first marriage, two from his second, as well as an impatient sister. For a long time it seems -- to Liam and to us -- that none of these women actually love him, or even like him, though we gradually come to see them in a different light.

Liam also embarks upon a quixotic courtship of a single woman much his junior, even as he watches his youngest daughter being courted by a young man who is suspected of being the burglar who broke into his house. Meanwhile, Liam frets constantly about his inability to remember things; he is desperate to recover, of all things, the memory of his moment of heroic struggle with the burglar.

If this sounds complicated, it is -- but this is Anne Tyler we're talking about, so all the characters quickly emerge as interesting individuals, and Liam's relationship with each one is unique and important. It isn't long before we love every one of them, and if the climactic discovery resembles a key plot point in a recent Oscar-nominated movie, that's hardly the fault of either writer. It doesn't matter, anyway -- the value comes not from the surprise but from what it means to Liam and what he does about it, the choice it leads him to make.

I loved this book from beginning to end. And that took some doing, because it's one of the worst-read audiobooks I've ever actually suffered through from beginning to end. Reader Arthur Morey apparently thinks that audiobooks have to be read so slowly as to make the readers wish for death just to speed things up. Usually readers who start with a word ... by ... word pace gradually increase their tempo to something tolerable, but Morey is absolutely consistent.

It's not that he made the book boring -- that would not be possible for those of us who love Tyler's work. It's that, because he read all the dialogue with that same maddening slowness, all the characters sound mentally retarded. I say this with complete respect for the mentally challenged: I am perfectly happy to listen to people who cannot speak any faster. But these characters were not supposed to be mentally retarded; sometimes they are actually supposed to be quick-witted, even snappy. So Morey's reading almost defeats the characterization.

So this is one of the rare cases where I urge you to buy the book in print form and read it for yourself. Tyler is such a good writer you'll have no trouble keeping the voices distinct in your own head, and you'll do a much better job of reading it to yourself than the audiobook does.

Speaking of slow readers, it is possible for a reading to be done at a measured pace without killing the book. In witness of that is Nicholas Coster's brilliant reading of the unabridged Hornblower and the Atropos by C.S. Forester.

I read the entire Hornblower series in one wonderful week back in 1976, and I was interested to see if it held up after all these years. Since then I had read several of Patrick O'Brian's series of wooden-ship novels, but found that the relationship between the two main characters became tediously repetitive. (The movie Master and Commander is, in many ways, better than the books.) O'Brian and Forester both based their novels on the same bigger-than-life British captain of the Napoleonic era, so it's quite fair to compare the books.

And Forester wins, hands-down. The writing has every bit as much verisimilitude, but the character of Hornblower is deeper -- and his books are truer in another sense, for he has no "buddies" who make every voyage with him. Each new ship is often an entirely new set of people that he has to learn to get along with -- and command. But Hornblower himself is so depressed, self-doubting, and determined to improve that he is, all by himself, more interesting than anybody in O'Brian's series.

In Atropos, Hornblower, recently promoted to captain and low on the seniority list, is given his first command of an actual ship (a technical class of seacraft, as opposed to sloops and boats, etc.) -- the Atropos, which happens to be the smallest ship in the British Navy.

On his way to take command of the ship, though, Hornblower first travels by canal across England, and, because of an injury to a boatman and his own urgency to reach his new command, has to take the tiller and otherwise help with a form of watercraft that he had previously despised.

The canal trip is, quite by itself, worth the price of admission, I think; but when he arrives in London he not only has to deal with his wife's going into labor at an inn, but also with an assignment to take command of the procession of barges carrying the body of Lord Nelson, who was killed during his great victory at Trafalgar, up the Thames to lie in state for his funeral.

Finally, after all sorts of complications, Hornblower takes command of the Atropos and sets sail on the kind of expedition that the smallest ship in the navy would be used for: salvaging a quarter of a million pounds in gold and silver from a sunken payroll ship just off the coast of Turkey. Hornblower has to cope with the greed and craftiness of the Turks, who are officially neutral and must not be offended, and the ill temper of the Scotsman who is in charge of the Ceylonese divers who are the only ones who can reach the wreck in such deep water.

Just to make things interesting, he has on board, as a midshipman, the dispossessed young prince of a German state that Napoleon has conquered, along with his prickly chamberlain -- who is appalled that he and his young prince are to be subject to ordinary ship's discipline.

There is not a dull moment in the whole book, and yet in depth and verisimilitude it is exemplary literature.

Through it all, Coster reads every bit as slowly as Morey did with Noah's Compass -- but Coster knows how to do it. He makes the slowness, not an affectation, but an integral part of the Hornblower's own voice. Nobody sounds stupid because they talk so slowly; they just sound British. The pauses are full of thought and intention; far from feeling bogged down in the reading, it actually feels as if things are moving along briskly.

But I have sad news. As far as I can tell, Coster's reading of Hornblower and the Atropos is the only unabridged audiobook version of any of the Hornblower series. There are three books in abridged versions -- but I don't want to miss a word of Forester's magnum opus! And most of the books seem to be unavailable on cd, with only ancient cassette-tape editions to be had on the used-book market.

Hornblower and the Atropos was released in this unabridged version on Audible.com only last year, so I hope that it marks the first of many -- these books should all be available in unabridged audio, especially if they can continue to have Coster's powerful, brilliant readings.

Now, there are some who will say that the Ioan Gruffudd-starring BBC adaptations are quite good enough, and I won't argue that watching these wonderful versions of the Hornblower series is a delight.

But like all film adaptations, they leave out a lot -- too much to really satisfy me. As should be the case, the books are better; and meanwhile, you're free to picture Gruffudd as you read or listen to them.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Thursday, April 1^st -- April Fool's Day!

National Poetry Month begins today. Once upon a time, reading poetry was a vital part of every educated person's life, to the point that many were able to quote significant passages of many poems. But, starting with the critical theories of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and becoming ossified through the unfortunate decision to teach contemporary poetry in the university instead of allowing values to be decided in the marketplace of ideas, the high literary world has taught the general public to regard as "valuable" only certain kinds of poetry: First, poetry that cannot be understood or decoded without the help of university professors; Second, poetry that offends the values of the traditional middle class, particularly those who believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition; Third, poetry of any kind that arises from any tradition, culture, or ethnicity that is not European.

The result is that most ordinary Americans believe that they neither like nor need poetry. In reality, however, most Americans satisfy their hunger for rhythmic, structured, and memorable verse through song lyrics, which actually restores poetry to its roots in music. Without any intervention on the part of academia, ordinary people make highly sophisticated decisions about the quality of the poetry they love, so that the singer-songwriter is now the bard of the modern age, while the poetic exercises of most academy-subservient poets are as irrelevant to our culture as if their poems were folded up and placed in the mouths of random mollusks, acquiring value only to the degree that they happen to irritate pearl-making oysters.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, then, I suggest that you speak aloud to friends and family the lyrics of songs you love, of any genre or era, from hymns to hip-hop; and take note of how many song-poems you can recite from memory. Thus you will see that poetry is, in fact, extremely important in the lives of most people in our culture, even (or especially) when the "poems" are declared not to be poems by the litterati.

Friday, 2^nd -- Hans Christian Anderson's birthday

International Children's Book Day. Some of the best books being written today are for children. Hundreds of thousands of people -- including many adults -- discovered or rediscovered a love of reading because they cared about the story of Harry Potter as told in books for children. But there are thousands of other children's books that are at least as good as Rowling's, ranging from the most rudimentary (the Captain Underpants series, perhaps) to the most literary (try Robert Cormier's brilliant I Am the Cheese), philosophical (I recommend Neil Shusterman's Everlost), and tragic (Mette Ivie Harrison's Mira, Mirror).

Saturday, 3^rd -- 150^th anniversary of the Pony Express

The first rider left St. Joseph, Missouri, heading west; the following day another rider headed east from Sacramento, California. For $5.00 an ounce, letters were delivered within 10 days. In those days, five bucks was a lot of money (a week's wages for many). Fedex and UPS are ridiculously cheap by comparison, let alone the U.S. Postal Service. And a lot of things that used to be sent by mail are now going by email, virtually for free.

The Pony Express lasted less than two years, going out of business when the transcontinental telegraph was completed.

Sunday, 4^th -- Easter

For Christians, Easter is the day Jesus was resurrected from the dead. But the choice of date is by no means universal. Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox churches all use the same formula -- "the first Sunday after the full moon that happens upon or is the next after the vernal equinox, which usually falls on March 21^st, though if the full moon is on a Sunday, then Easter is the next Sunday. But the Orthodox still use the old Julian calendar to set the date, instead of the Gregorian calendar used by other Christians -- and the Orthodox also follow the rule that Easter can never precede or coincide with the first day of Passover, since Jesus' "Last Supper" was a Passover Seder. By happy chance, this year both the western and eastern traditions pick the same day (as they will next year, too, but on April 24^th).

In 190 a.d. there was a savage little controversy with those who thought that the crucifixion of Jesus should always be commemorated on the 14^th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, regardless of what day of the week it fell upon. Syrian Christians celebrated the resurrection the Sunday after Passover, while in Alexandria Easter was calculated without reference to Jewish religious practice.

The Irish Christians -- who for many years were one of the strongholds of a Church beleaguered by barbarian invasions -- calculated Easter using an 84-year cycle tied to lunar months, and treating March 25^th as the equinox. But gradually the Irish adopted the "Alexandrine computus," finally extinguishing the Irish Easter date early in the 700s.

Monday, 5^th -- Passover ends at sundown

Since exactness of religious observation is important to Orthodox Jews, I am curious whether "sundown" is defined by the visible horizon (a complicated thing to determine in our tree-fringed area, or in mountainous country), an astronomical mean, the vagueness of time zones, or some other standard.

Birthday of Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (1908-89) and Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (1900-67), arguably two of the greatest American actors who ever lived.

Tuesday, 6^th -- 80^th anniversary of Gandhi making salt

How long as it been since you watched the movie Gandhi? I still regard it as the greatest biopic (biographical picture, pronounced BY-o-pik) ever made. One man can change the world, and Gandhi did -- by turning the simplest acts into gestures of defiance that rocked the powers-that-were.

On this date in 1909, Robert Peary's party, including Matthew Henson and four Eskimo guides, named Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah, were the first human beings to reach the geographical North Pole. Henson and two of the Eskimos arrived first; Peary himself got there about 45 minutes later.

Peary's claim was disputed by Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a surgeon on an 1891-92 Peary expedition, who claimed to have reached the pole the year before (Wikipedia). Some today doubt both men's claims, questioning the reliability of their instruments and calculations. But it seems pointless to argue -- they made difficult and dangerous expeditions, got close enough, and returned to tell about it.

Wednesday, 7^th --

Birthday of jazz singer/songwriter Billie Holiday (1915-1959; born Eleanora Fagan, in Philadelphia), and of English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

Holiday wrote such songs as "God Bless the Child" and "Lady Sings the Blues," and recorded the tragic "Strange Fruit," a bitter song about lynchings.

Wordsworth, with his friend Coleridge, sparked the Romantic movement in poetry and literature -- with an effect opposite to that of the movement of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for they opened the door to great popular interest in poetry that later made rock stars of Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

Wordsworth eventually became Poet Laureate of England, and among his works is the beloved Ode "Intimations of Immortality," which includes these lines:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home

^*Based on information in Chase's Calendar of Events. See http://sn.im/chases. (Full URL: http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?cat=3&isbn=0071627413)