A Certain Slant of Light

Greetings from Minnesota! It has been some time since I posted, but in my defense, travel has kept me quite busy...

Things that have happened in the last week!

1. I continued writing away at Bjorklunden! I wish I had gotten the draft up to the point where I needed to start writing new material before I went to Bjorklunden, as that might have been a better use of my time than minor revisions as I ported material from previous drafts into the current draft... However all work is good work, and I did get those revisions to the point where it's time to dive into new material.

2. After Bjorklunden, I spent a weekend in Appleton, the town where I went to college. The main downtown area has changed some (including the addition of one Voyageur Bakery, where I paid $2.50 for toast and jam and got a PILE of toast, with THREE kinds of bread, white and rye and raisin, and two kinds of jam too, spicy peach and raspberry rhubarb. My God, I would have lived on this as a student), but the college is much the same, and I was pleased to meet up with three of my favorite professors!

I gave each of them a copy of one of my books: my Russian professor got Honeytrap (as the Russian department is name-checked in the historical note), while the two history professors each got The Sleeping Soldier. One of them read the back cover and cried, "Anthony Rotundo!", which was extremely validating as I did indeed draw heavily on Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900"!

3. Then a quick visit to Pepin, where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. There is a replica cabin on roughly the spot where the Little House in the Big Woods stood, although now it's more of a Little House in the Cornfields, but even so I was so delighted to visit the place and walk through the cabin (it's so small! I mean, she calls it a little house, but... so small) and then take the road into Pepin afterward, the very road Laura took when she went into town to cross Lake Pepin on the ice to start out for the prairie.

(The gentleman at the desk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum gift shop kindly assured me that it probably is the very same road, although of course paved now: "There are only so many ways to get around the bluff," he explained. It's very hilly country around Pepin, which I hadn't realized from the book.)

4. Then on to Minnesota! And on and on, and onward still, for while the middle of Minnesota was 98 degrees in the shade, Duluth was a balmy 76... So I went to Duluth and drifted through the Duluth Rose Garden and had a delicious chocolate croissant from Duluth's Best Bread (I did not sample Duluth's Other Bread for comparison, but the chocolate croissant was A+) and at last visited the Lake Superior Railway Museum, where they had among other things vintage train menus!, and also a chance to take a 75-minute train ride, and one of the cars was a vintage 1918 Pullman coach, and no one else wanted to sit in it (they were either in the air-conditioned car or the open car) so it was MINE, ALL MINE.

I also greatly enjoyed the chance see the inside of caboose inside the museum, and clamber up a ladder that was basically just some giant staples in the wall up to some high seats! Not sure if they intended for visitors to do this, but it wasn't actually cordoned off....

5. And now I am in North Branch, where I lived when I first started writing Sage twelve years ago, and on which Sage's hometown is loosely based. (This book is - as Monica Dickens commented on her Mariana - "the novel that is everyone's second book (if it was not their first), based on my childhood and growing up," although transplanted into Minnesota, partly because I was living there at the time but also partly for reasons of plausible deniability.)

Tomorrow and the day after will be devoted to gathering some local color for the book. (In particular, I need to go hiking in Taylors Falls.) Then on to Minneapolis to visit the U and the Museum of Russian Art (again for local color, although the Museum of Russian Art is also just for funzies), and then--

Mankato! A weekend immersed in Betsy-Tacy!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sadly, there is no more “I’m buying you a house whether you like it or not” drama in Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but Rose Wilder Lane remains a spitfire up through to the end. She semi-adopts yet another fourteen-year-old boy, Roger Lea McBride; this one sticks around to the end of her life, which is how he ends up with the copyrights to the Little House book, which is how television got its hot little hands on the property and turned it into the series Little House on the Prairie.

This TV series crushed me as a child because it was so completely unlike the books. I saw about one episode before revolting against not merely this particular show but, briefly, the entire medium of television. Why is their house gigantic? Why do the episodes revolve around Pa rather than Laura? Why doesn’t Pa have whiskers?

It turns out that the answer to all these questions is Michael Landon, who played Pa and was the producer of the series and might be even more self-aggrandizing than Rose Wilder Lane herself, which is saying a lot. Landon turned himself into the star of the series, refused to wear whiskers because he felt he didn’t look good in them, and also did not wear underwear under his britches because he felt that the world deserved the chance to ogle his hindquarters. He also insisted on a gigantic “little house” because he didn’t want his imaginary TV daughters to be, gasp, poor. Clearly the whole point of the books went RIGHT over his head.

I also read James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, which I might have skipped if I had realized it revolved around a false rape accusation, although it becomes clear ( spoilers )

And finally, I finished Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical! The exclamation point is part of the title, but it also feels like appropriate punctuation for this sentence, because this is a hefty book. I suspect ultimately that this is a book meant to be dipped into (“What was it about those Judy Garland/Andy Rooney musicals?”) rather than read straight through, but I did end up with a long list of musicals to watch this way.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. I feel like Yaffe is maybe trying a little too hard to dissociate herself with the Austen fans who were drawn in by the wet shirt scene, but nonetheless it’s interesting reading about all the different ways that Austen mania manifests itself.

I’ve also been rereading David Blaize, as research for a story I’ve been poking at (I’ve been poking at a lot of stories this month, I can’t seem to settle down for one) which actually takes place entirely after boarding school, but our heroes originally met in boarding school so obviously it’s important for BACKGROUND. Then they trooped off to fight in World War I, lost a limb or two, reconnected in a convalescent home etc., banged in a cottage on the coast of Cornwall.

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes and I have been discussing what to read after we finish the Swallows & Amazons series (although we’re only on book six, so this eventuality is a long way off). I commented that we’ve done England (Swallows & Amazons), Canada (two L. M. Montgomery series, Anne and Emily), and Australia (Billabong), so maybe New Zealand next… if we can find an early to mid twentieth century series of beloved New Zealand children’s books. Or even a single book, if no series is in the offing. Anybody have a suggestion?

I can’t believe that I haven’t written about Little House in the Big Woods before: it really ought to be near the top of any list of 100 Books that Influenced Me. Maybe I was having trouble picking which Little House book to write about, because I also adored The Long Winter (the hardship! The cold! The never-ending snow! The kindling twisted out of straw and the wheat ground into flour in the coffee mill!) and over time Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years have grown on me…

I loved what you might call the how-to aspect of the book - because a large part of the narrative is just description after description of how to do things: make butter or smoke meat or make shiny little bullets that burn a little girl’s fingers when she can’t resist touching them. It appeals to the same part of me that loved to sit and watched the bobbin lace maker at GlobalFest for ages: there’s just something wonderful about watching or reading about people making things, especially things that require great skill.

But Little House in the Big Woods remains my favorite. It’s one of the most perfect evocations of the experience of being a five-year-old that’s ever been written; I say this on the authority of having first heard the book when I was four or five and identifying so intensely with Laura that I called my self-insert characters Laura for years afterward.

And the food descriptions! My God, the food! The attic full of pumpkins, the butter colored with carrots (and Laura and Mary snarfing down the milk-soaked grated carrots as a treat: truly a different time), the smokehouse made out of an old hollow leg fed with hickory chips, that releases the faint enticing smell of smoking venison around the house. The entire pig-butchering sequence, with the head cheese, and Laura and Mary cooking the pig’s tail in the open stove. The sugaring off.

The scene where the sugar waxes and the children get to pour it into the snow and it hardens instantly into candy and they can eat as much as they want was basically my ultimate dream of happiness when I was a small child. The whole book gives me the same cozy feeling expressed in the ending of the novel, when Laura lies in her trundle bed and thinks to herself:

“This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.