London and other places in England 2002

Posted on December 31, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

London and other places in England, July 22-August 7, 2002

©2002 GraceAnne A. DeCandido

It was a trip of glories indeed. I find London an extremely congenial city. It has an intensity and energy, like New York, though of course in a particularly British way. We were first in London in the autumn of 1997, and I was very eager to go back.

We are museum junkies. My idea of the perfect vacation combines art, architecture, history, good food, and good shopping in more or less equal amounts, and England has all of that. We planned pretty carefully: we made detailed lists of things we wanted to see and do. We tried to alternate days of heavy museum going with days that we took longer trips or did different things. Our hotel left much to be desired – our travel agent and our airline received a very detailed letter about its shortcomings. We were staying right near Kensington Park, a few blocks from Royal Albert Hall, and a ten minute walk in either direction from Tube stops High Street Kensington or Gloucester Road. Henry James lived for many years on our street, De Vere Gardens, and Robert Browning was buried from a house there. You couldn’t beat the location.

Our very first day, stupid with jetlag and very very tired, we stumbled across da Mario, a pizza and pasta place just around the mews from our hotel, run by Italians so devoted to Princess Diana that her name was inscribed in their marble steps. They had wonderful food, and we ate there a lot.

Wed July 24 was our first full day in London, and it was a wonder. We went out to Shakespeare’s Globe for the entire day, taking the Tube and walking across the Millennium Bridge. The morning was spent in their museum and on a tour. The museum had very cool stuff about the theatre reconstruction research, but it also had sound booths where you could listen to, for example, ten different versions of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” by famous actors; or perform Shakespeare karaoke by taking a part and reciting your lines against other famous actors. Our tour of the building was conducted by one of the actors, whose energy and enthusiasm made me sorry we weren’t going to see her in performance. She gave us a key to what followed: she said that acting in the Globe, in daylight, means that you can see every face in the audience, every gesture, and of course with the groundlings there are people standing right at the base of the stage. In regular contemporary theatre, of course, the lights keep the actors from seeing the audience at all. The Globe invites audience participation, and not just from the groundlings, one feels very much a part of the action. We ate lunch in the Globe’s fancy modern British restaurant, overlooking the Thames and St Paul’s, and I was introduced to Beechdean ice cream, which our waitress had described as “delectable.” It was.

We saw a two pm performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream, every word intact. In the past year I have seen the opera (with countertenor David Daniels), the ballet (NYC ballet), and the movie (Kevin Kline, Stanley Tucci), so the play is pretty clear in my mind. It was one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever seen. The cast (in pajamas, with a huge balloon of a white moon suspended above the groundlings) was fluid and engaging and funny, with lovely colors and nuances in their performances. And it felt different, with the sun in my face (they do provide funny paper sunshades) and the acoustics so perfect that every word was audible. The benches have no backs, but you could rent butt pillows (He did) or rent or purchase little folding seats with backs, which I did, thinking it will come in handy for Yankees bleacher games in future. We stopped at St Paul’s on the way home, to hear a female rector offer a prayer for Israelis and Palestinians, and for me to light a candle in memory of my dad and TheInfomancer’s mom.

Thursday July 25: The Victoria and Albert may be my favorite museum in London. It is so full of stuff – wonderful stuff. I revisited Tippoo’s Tiger, which is this half-life size automaton of a tiger devouring a British soldier. I bought TheInfomancer a paper model of it, which you can wind up and run. That should be amusing. What caught my eye this visit, in many of the museums, were small things: exquisitely carved ivories, small panels. The V&A had an entire hall of wrought iron. My favorite was a life-size three dimensional model of roses, full blown, half open, bud, in wrought iron, obviously made as a showpiece and simply magnificent. Lunch, as was our habit, was in the museum cafeteria. London museums all have quite nice cafeterias, with real food well-prepared, and always vegetarian offerings. I discovered some very interesting ways to make couscous. The tomatoes and potatoes were especially good. I am allergic to strawberries, but TheInfomancer assures me there is nothing like English strawberries in all the world. We also became part of an online photographic exhibition at the V&A, called Things and You. If you go there, then type in the date of 25-07-2002, you will see a picture of me, one of him, and one of both of us. They appear as thumbnails in the first set. We spent the latter part of the day in Liberty’s and Fortnum & Mason. The former was having a sale, so there wasn’t much there but it was all reduced. At the latter, we bought as much – more actually – as we could carry. Fortnum & Mason is the source for Golden Raspberry jam, for my money the best jam in the entire world, and I bought us three jars. It is what I beg friends going to London to bring back for me. We had dinner at one of their restaurants, a lovely welsh rabbit.

Friday July 26: The month before coming to London, I had obsessively followed the London weather reports, which showed highs of only 70°, and I packed accordingly. This was wrong. First off, 70° in London is warmer and muggier than here in New York. Secondly, Friday was the beginning of the worst heat wave in London in 15 years. There is no air conditioning in London: not in most of the museums, not in most of the restaurants, certainly not in the Tube. We were marinating. We chose well for Friday, though. We took a boat on the Thames to Greenwich, listening to half-baked but amusing commentary from our guide and seeing much history and architecture along the Thames. We also saw the London Eye, a huge Ferris Wheel that moves very slowly. I imagine the view is spectacular, but I declined. At Greenwich, we visited the Queen’s House, a small jewel of a building with a black and white marble floor whose pattern is reflected in the ceiling. The twinkly-eyed, rosy-cheeked guard (all of the places in Britain have these guys, and they always know everything, and are cute as heck) told us the room was used in the movie Sense and Sensibility. There is also a spiral staircase with a blue wrought iron balustrade in a tulip design that is very beautiful.

The Maritime Museum in Greenwich, outside of which is parked the Cutty Sark in drydock so you can see down to the very bottom, is full of ship models, nautical instruments (I love these, all that curlicued brass and knobbery), and Nelsoniana. If there is a British Superman, he is clearly Nelson. We even saw the jacket and stockings he was wearing when he died. In the blazing sun up the shining green we walked to the Naval Observatory, and once there, I even climbed up to the very top, where the skies used to be studied. Then we stood in line to have our picture taken on the Prime Meridian, and got a certificate to prove it. The steep sloping green up to the Observatory in Greenwich was filled with children, parents, teenagers, cricketers, grandfolks. It brought to mind powerfully Henry James’ comment that the most beautiful words in English are “summer afternoon.”

Getting back was interesting. A cruise ship was blocking the Thames, and we had to wait for the Tower Bridge to be opened to let it pass. So our tour boat had to make figure-eights for an hour or so to stay out of its path. Now, it was approaching 90°, so this was not a bad place to be in London right then. Friday night we had tickets for the Proms at Royal Albert Hall, just a few blocks from our hotel. This was Knussen’s operatic version of Sendak’s Higgledy Piggledy Pop! and Where the Wild Things Are. These were done as recital rather than full operatic staging with costumes, and that was too bad. The music was modern, somewhat dissonant, and not at all my sort of thing. But it was interesting. Albert Hall holds the best acoustics I have ever experienced, and it is beautiful, red and gold, with comfy seats that swivel.

Sat July 27: a friend is an Oxford librarian and this year, elected one of the proctors of the university. She was kind enough to provide us with tickets for Oxford’s 800-year-old commencement ceremony, at which we got to see her in her robes and reciting Latin. We took the train to Oxford and made our way to the Sheldonian Theatre, to listen to the vice chancellor explain (in English) about the tradition of Oxford graduations, and then proceed to a wondrous Latin ceremony full of bowing, doffing of hats, to-ing and fro-ing. I loved it. Some dons were clearly quite comfortable in Latin, others mumbled through their memorized parts. Students were introduced by degree and by college, processed outside to don their academic colors and then return. Liz managed a lovely lunch with us at a restaurant called Quod (great fries. Panna cotta and raspberries for dessert) before her afternoon’s work (she had two more ceremonies to perform!).

We went off to the Ashmolean and to shopping. The Oxford Covered Market had a Bridgewater Pottery stand, and I managed to buy only one piece there. The Ashmolean is such a delightful hodge-podge: my favorite thing was a large wooden chest painted by Burne-Jones as a wedding present for William Morris. Oxford was full of graduates and their families, and many people like us who had come for the day. There were large random groups of European teenagers. We saw tattooing on the street, and a cappuccino cart constructed on the front of a motorcycle.

Sun July 28: The temperature continued to rise, and so we chose the British Museum on Sunday, thinking it would be cooler. Well, no. Most of the galleries are unairconditioned, and nearly all of them are stuffy. But we found a small gallery of Native American/First Peoples items that was quite air-conditioned (and funded by an American conglomerate) so we retreated there periodically. The British Library’s Reading Room has been incorporated into the BM kind of like the Temple of Dendur at the Met in NYC: they built a lovely shell around it as you enter the museum, and dedicated it to the Queen. It is still a working reading room, with displays of books by the many who have written them in that space, and a nice interactive computer set-up for searching information about the BM’s collections. We saw the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, of course, but I was most enchanted by case after case of jewelry, from ancient to Victorian. These little gold and silver rings and necklaces seemed to have come fresh from someone’s jewel box, and brought one close to those who had worn and cherished them.

We stopped in St Mary Abbot on the way back to the hotel, a Kensington church with a lovely churchyard in full abundant bloom. The air conditioning in our hotel room had stopped working. I basically stood at the desk in the lobby and repeated my request for a different, nonsmoking room where the a/c worked over and over until they gave us one. We had about ten minutes to move all of our stuff before changing our clothes and going off to Rules for dinner. Rules is a wonder: an old club-like atmosphere that serves what I think of as 19th century British food. We had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and scalloped potatoes and spinach. My Guinness came in a half-pint silver tankard. Dessert was an intense raspberry sorbet – with a bit of clotted cream on the side, of course. Whew. We took taxis all day today. It was Sunday, it was hot, and we loved the drivers, all of whom know where they are going, and drive like wizards. I should probably mention here that I have no sense of direction under the best of circumstances, and in London I was completely flamboozled. Crossing streets was terrifying. However, we read maps and followed the Tube, and TheInfomancer studied streets valiantly, and we did OK.

Mon July 29: If I had known London in July was going to be like Rome, I would have dressed for it. It reached 95° today. We began by going, as did Christopher Robin with Alice, to Buckingham Palace, where we hoped to see the Changing of the Guard. On the vast expanse in front of the palace were gathered hundreds of folks in the blazing sun. We decided not to. We did see a troop of guards, in their furry shakos and redcoats, march out playing their brass. Why they didn’t drop dead in their tracks from the heat I do not know. We instead chose to go to the Queen’s Gallery, a beautiful exhibit space full of treasures in honor of the Queen’s Jubilee. We had to get tickets and wait our turn, so I got to wander through St James and Green Park in search of a rest room (never did find it; used the one at the Ritz Hotel, at the edge of the park, instead. It was, well, ritzy, I must say).

The Queen, being the Queen, has some exquisite stuff, and the gallery thankfully was airconditioned to frigid temperatures. The Queen has a beautiful Rembrandt portrait of a woman and a lot of Fabergé. Some royal jewels were on display, a silver table, an Eric Gill imprint. And at the gift shop (I never pass up a gift shop) I got my mother a tea towel that said “Buckingham Palace” embroidered in gold.

From there we went to Somerset House, which holds three galleries. We were focused, however, on the Courtauld, which was closed when we were last in London five years ago. We found lunch in the tiny Courtauld cafeteria, run by Italians under an arbor, so that I flashed on being in Rome again. Restored by mozzarella, tomatoes, tea and sweets, we viewed some very splendid medieval and impressionist masterpieces. The most pristine Duccio I have ever seen, and Renoirs that reminded me why he remains so popular. The calligrapher and type designer Eric Gill had a stone sculpture at the Courtauld that bewitched me. It was an incised grey stone head called The Magdalene, with red lips and blue eyes, a piece vividly tied to Gill’s stone- and type-carving, art deco, and utter sensuality. It was gorgeous. In the courtyard of Somerset House in the winter is a skating rink. On this blazing hot day, it was a series of sprinklers. Children screaming with delight ran through them, often with their mothers behind, in street clothes, but enjoying the cool soaking nonetheless. We retreated hotelward.

Random English thoughts: there are flowers everywhere: window boxes, huge pots on the steps, hanging from streetlamps, on traffic islands. Once outside of London, hollyhocks and bindweed and violas and wild geraniums. “English garden” – words to conjure with. Smoking. It’s everywhere. Does everyone in England smoke? Sometimes I feel like I will never get the smell out of my hair. London had a Cow Parade, as New York and Chicago have in past years. We saw Art Mooooveau at Liberty’s, and a Celtic Cow. But the Harry Potter Cow in Leicester Square was by far the most magnificent.

Tues July 30: We took the train to Brighton. I have wanted to see the Pavilion at Brighton forever, but even I was not prepared for its interior. The outside is this Eastern fantasy of domes surrounded by lovely English landscaping with lush flowers, but the interior! Dragons on the chandeliers! Gold leaf and crystal! A kitchen the size of my house! Painted flowers on the inside of Queen Victoria’s WC! It just dazzled, and it was great fun. We ate lunch at a place called Ha! Ha!, where we could sit and look at the Pavilion, then we explored the small but excellent Brighton Art Gallery, which combines art, craft, history, and culture. An exhibition on movies that were made in Brighton – complete with posters and film clips – charmed. We walked down to the pebbly shore to see the English Channel, and lo, there was a carousel. Now, I collect carousels, and this was a splendid 19th century model. All the horses had names (I rode on one named in TheInfomancer’s honor) and each had two saddles, so parents could sit behind their child. It moved pretty fast, and the music wasn’t bad.

From there we wandered the Lanes, full of tiny shops (lots of interesting jewelry). We stopped for cream tea and lemon squash at the Mock Turtle, wherein I had the best scones of my life: large puffy ones, full of texture and butter, still warm from the oven, with raspberry jam made, our young server assured us, by his mum. Back to London, to have a quick dinner at Giovanni’s (more about our favorite London restaurant anon) and then meet the impossibly charming children of an online buddy. She and I have been on an online list together for some five years or more, but she lives several hours from London. Her son, daughter, and daughter in law all live in London, however, and meet us for pints at the Lamb & Flag, one of London’s oldest pubs. They pointed out to us the brick inscribed with the name of the prostitute, Emma Bowden, whose territory it was, and filled us with London lore as well as beer.

Wed July 31: We were privileged to visit the British Library today, partly in the company of a friend and colleague who had worked at NYPL for a time. We exited from the Tube to the great Victorian pile of St Pancras/Kings Cross station, and what a glory that will be when restored! We wondered if they will add a Platform 9 and three-quarters. We crossed the plaza in front of the Library, past the huge bronze sculpture of Newton based, perhaps unthinkingly, on Blake’s print. It is known informally as “Newton Constipatus.” (There’s an image on the web site, http://www.bl.uk/) The inviting lobby had an information desk graced with a pot of sunflowers and cornflowers, blazing blue and gold, and a nifty reflective clock behind the desk. The King’s Library is encased in glass stacks, and a wonderful bronze bench in the shape of an open book forms a magnet for picture takers. The Library functions as the researcher’s last resort, so we couldn’t actually go into the reading rooms, but after lunch with Alex and his charming daughter we spent the entire afternoon in the Library’s exhibits, including their Treasures show. Wow. Near a manuscript of the ancient “Summer is icumen in” I listened to a recording of the Hillyard Ensemble singing it; near the case of Lennon/McCartney manuscripts I listened to Beatles songs. There was the quavery recorded voice of Florence Nightingale and an interview with the only surviving officer of the Titanic. A manuscript with emendations in what might be Shakespeare’s own hand. Cool interactive toys. Visit the web site, you won’t be sorry. We went back to the hotel and decided to have dinner locally. It had rained heavily in the afternoon, so we took an umbrella. It didn’t matter. The skies opened when we were about as far from the hotel as we could be and not get back, and we were, brollys or not, soaked completely. We dashed into the nearest Indian restaurant and had an acceptable meal while sitting in our wet clothes and listening to the next table, academics from Kent State in Ohio, go on and on and on.

Thurs 1 August, Lammas (Loaf-Mass; Lughnasa): We took a bus tour today of Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Avebury, which while it was too fast and involved getting up early only to hang around and wait, was the easiest way for us to visit these longed-for places. I have dreamed of seeing Salisbury Cathedral since studying both it and the wonderful Constable paintings in art history classes in college these many decades ago. It did not disappoint. The almost impossibly quaint town (the Industrial Revolution passed Salisbury by, so it preserves its ancient and considerable charm) has also kept the green close around the cathedral, so the view does indeed echo that of Constable’s. It is an active, vital church – we were greeted by a sign that said “Welcome! 1 August, Lammas” and smiling church ladies and gents bursting with information to share. Much is old in Salisbury, but there are also a number of recent pieces and dedications among the sculpture. The excellent cafeteria and shop were run by ladies straight out of Barbara Pym, and I was very sorry to go. I touched the stones of the cathedral and mourned that there wasn’t enough time.

On to Stonehenge. It was a glorious, sky-blue day. I found those stones to be powerful and unimaginably old. The place had the same kind of sacred power I know from cathedrals and other holy places, but darker somehow. I found it a little scary. This was an experience for me unlike any other, and I confess to having trouble finding words for it. I spent my time walking around and gazing, so had little for the shop, and had to leave the silver earrings set with bluestone, the same as the bluestone and sarsen that are part of Stonehenge. (I found them, almost a decade later, online.) Avebury was much different: a series of stone circles in which a town grew up, so we could walk around and actually touch the stones, watch the local black-faced sheep wander, and see how whatever its ancient meaning, generations of folk had made the stone circles of Avebury part of their lives. Once again, we were hoarded onto the bus and taken back to London, passing on the way the Silbury Mound and a possible crop circle or two. We were dropped off at Harrods so I could continue shopping, and had dinner at A Bunch of Grapes, a pub with blessed air conditioning and a smoke-free area. To say nothing of Guinness and excellent fries. We walked back to the hotel from there, a long walk, but a lovely evening at last.

Fri 2 August: All of our outside London destinations were about an hour by train – Cambridge is a nice nonstop ride. And it is a very beautiful town, it seems a bit smaller and more compact than Oxford. We were amused by the some of the punters on the Cam, whose dripping wet raiment indicated just how unpracticed they were at this whole business of messing around in boats. We went directly to the Fitzwilliam Museum, whose lobby is a marble porphyry fantasy. Much of the museum was closed for restoration, but we went through what we could of the high-ceilinged galleries, noting a Rubens St Teresa we had never before seen, and a small, still Gwen John. The kindly and knowledgeable staff sent us on the road through town, so we found lunch at Auntie’s Tea Shoppe, just across from Kings College and St Mary the Great. Kings College Chapel, with its oak screen from Henry VIII and the ill-fated Anne B, its trumpeting angels, and its extraordinary tracery of fan vaulting, gave me another one of those heart-stopping moments, like Salisbury, like Stonehenge. I have waited my whole life to see this. To Be Here.

I talked for a time with one of the gents, telling him how I had listened to the choir every Christmas Eve for as long as they have been broadcasting Nine Lessons and Carols from here – about 20 years, I think. It wasn’t term, of course, so the Choir is off touring now, but I have gazed upon that space, and am content. We walked over to the Cambridge Library for the “Beauty and the Book” exhibition, a small show about book illustration with a few choice gems indeed. We walked through impossibly green quadrangles, hedges of laurel and holly both dark and parti-colored, stands of wild geranium in mauve and rose and bunches of tiny violas that were almost black, so dark was their purple. We took the train back and went to Giovanni’s for dinner. We discovered Giovanni’s when we were in London in 1997. The food is excellent and the staff all Italian, and it is really fun to be there. This night I had pasta with rocket (arugula) and black olives; breaded lamb cutlets served with a puree of fresh mint, lemon, and olive oil (a dish named for Angela Georghiu), a plate of veggies including divine haricots verts, and vin santo, parmesan, and grapes for dessert. We took a taxi back. Bliss.

Sat 3 August: The morning was spent shopping. People we love had asked for things, and I was bound to find them. So it was Harrods, and Harvey Nichols. The latter was new to me, and I found its first floor the most girly retail space I had ever entered: my male companion fled in terror. But we both spent some time on the top floor, a supermarket of very chichi stuff, and I found a rather lovely blend of Ceylons to add to the tea collection. Lunch at the Tate cafeteria, where I drank a bottle of Elderberry Pressé. The first sip tasted like hand cream. The second sip tasted like Spring. And after the third, I thought I could drink this a lot. Then rooms full of Turners, walls full of Constable cloud studies. My feet wore out early, though, so it was back to the hotel to rest and eat some blackberries and cream, gathered from Partridge’s, a local gourmet shop that clearly catered to Americans. It was da Mario for dinner again, because pizza was calling my name.

Sunday 4 August: we lazed around for the morning until going off the Museum of London. We lunched in their cafeteria, dazzled by the snaking overhead lighting that ended in a dragon’s head. London from pre-history until 1914 was clearly labeled, full of historical minutiae, and effortlessly teachable. Pictures and sashes from the women’s suffrage movement, a computer model of the interior of the 19th century Crystal Palace. The growth of Londinium through the Romans, then the Saxons, then the French. A worker tucking away a builder’s sacrifice of grain and a chicken in a corner of his structure, perhaps a half-forgotten practice but still followed even when its meaning was near lost. The museum’s garden, dripping in the rain, displayed when various cultivars were introduced to London and by whom, some of whose families were still selling flowers and produce to Londoners to this day. Dinner was a real treat. Cheneston’s – an old variant of Kensington – was right around the corner from our hotel, with gaslight out front, dark oak and leaded glass windows within. We had a perfectly splendid meal: salad, lamb, raspberries, one of those molten chocolate wonders for TheInfomancer. It felt very good indeed.

Monday 5 August: We spent the morning at the National Portrait Gallery. There were two special exhibits there: “She-Bop,” a small show of women in rock&roll, and “Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter” a wonderful series of portraits of famous children’s authors, with quite a splendid catalog. Noel Streatfeild was a woman! Michael Bond looks like Paddington! There were a few actual manuscript pages of Harry Potter, and a few actual manuscript pages of Pooh, specifically, “Sing Ho! for the life of a bear.” We sailed through the rest of the portraits. He thought the Elizabethans had the best outfits, but I really enjoyed the modern portraits best: Germaine Greer, Ian McKellen, Dorothy L. Sayers, the Queen Mum. After a quick lunch in the cafeteria (I plied him with Victorian Lemonade, a fizzy bottled concoction with ginger, as he was getting snurfly) we went across to St Martin in the Fields for a lunchtime concert. Three American choirs from Illinois, mostly teens and mostly girls, performed. Some were pretty good, some were very good indeed, and all of them sang with spirit and enthusiasm. It was wonderful watching their faces, many of them were blissed out from the very act of singing. I didn’t quite do the National Gallery justice after that. But I saw some old friends: the Arnolfini marriage portrait, the Wilton altarpiece, the Lippi annunciation, and the Leonardo cartoon. We hung out at the hotel for a few hours before dinner at the Bombay Brasserie-really excellent tandoori chicken and various breads and condiments. TheInfomancer had a fish curry that made steam come out of his ears.

Tuesday August 6: We spent the morning on Marylebone High Street at the Bridgewater Pottery shop. I did not buy everything, but I wanted to. I love Bridgewater’s satisfying shapes and winsome patterns. Since coming home, I have found a few more places in the US that carry parts of the line, so maybe I won’t be quite so desperate next time. We took the train out to the Gardens at Kew: broad, green, lush, calm. We visited a couple of the greenhouses, saw some splendid sunflowers, and enjoyed a huge display of blooms in every possible variant of yellow. There was a unicorn sculpture atop one of the gates that we took home in a picture; I spent a lot of time in the gift shop, which had delightful and unusual things. Dinner was a last, lovely meal at Giovanni’s.

Wed August 7: We spent the morning, after packing, in Kensington Gardens, walking around in the soft summer day, and seeing Kensington Palace from the outside (and visiting the shop of course) although we didn’t have time for the tour. We had a last lunch at da Mario and went out to the airport. At Heathrow, they don’t post your gate until about an hour before the flight, but it is OK, because Heathrow is one vast mall. If I had known there was so much shopping there, I would have gone out earlier! As it was, I did a little damage at the outposts of Liberty’s and Harrods.

On the plane, there were envelopes to collect whatever odds and ends of foreign change you still had, which they give to charity. It was A Very Long Flight home. I cannot read on airplanes, but I was somewhat comforted by my spiffy new earphones, which tune out the sound of the airplane through some electronic magic so you can actually hear what you are listening to. I like the little individual screens, too. While I didn’t want to see any of the movies, I loved watching the path of the plane, displayed for us with altitude, speed, etc. I had brought us dinner from Partridge’s on Gloucester Road, knowing the airplane food would not be worth eating. I also bought a package of Eccles cakes. On Thursday morning at home I heated them up and served them to all. They are small buttery cakes filled with currants, bursting with flavor. So I had a final taste of England on my tongue, safe and sound in our own kitchen.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

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Susan Cooper’s The Shortest Day

Posted on December 21, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

the great Susan Cooper reads her poem/prayer The Shortest Day, which she wrote for The Christmas Revels.

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You Say You Want a Resolution

Posted on December 19, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

You Say You Want A Resolution

With apologies to the Beatles. For the American Library Association Council, June 1999

 

A Day In The Life: Think of writing a resolution as an arrow: it has to have a point, and it has to be aimed at something.

 Let It Be: Ask yourself: what do you want this resolution to do? Do you want to make something happen? Prevent something from happening? Add to something already happening?

 Here Comes The Sun: Figure out what you want to happen, and then state it as clearly as you can. That’s your Resolved clause. That is what people vote on.  You can have more than one Resolved clause, but if you do, it’s more likely your resolution will be amended or divided. 

 Rubber Soul: The Whereas clauses track how you got from Here to There. The Whereas clauses in a resolution set out your thinking on the matter and give the reasons for the action in the Resolved clauses.  Although the actual vote will be on the Resolved clause, what you say in the Whereas clauses will appear in print after the resolution is passed, and has a major influence on whether other Councilors will vote your way. 

 Come Together: Do your homework: what is ALA current policy? Try to find out how the policy got there – it will illuminate pitfalls and pratfalls that those who have gone before have dealt with.

 Can’t Buy Me Love: There are almost always fiscal implications to actions, and nothing can move forward in ALA without decisions being made about how ALA’s money will be spent. Anything with fiscal implications needs to be submitted to BARC for fiscal analysis, which will provide an estimated cost, if possible, or recommend later referral. 

 A Hard Day’s Night: Watch your timing. If you have to get your resolution to BARC, another division, or the Policy Monitoring Committee, or if you need to check with veteran Councilors about previous versions of a question, give yourself enough time.

I Am The Walrus: Watch your language. Many Council resolutions fail because of fuzzy, imprecise, or unnecessarily inflammatory language. Councilors want to know exactly what they are voting on, and many will vote against a resolution whose conclusion they agree with because the language is too broad, too unfocused, or too edgy.

 Helter Skelter: Sometimes, a resolution is meant simply to draw attention to and foster debate about an issue. If that is your arrow, let it fly.

 Sunday June 27, 1999, 9 pm, Marriott LaGalerie #6; followed by dessert

GraceAnne A. DeCandido & Karen G. Schneider

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Consulting – ten things

Posted on December 19, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

Ten Things You Need to Know, if you are thinking about doing work as a consultant

ILEX meeting American Library Association, San Francisco Sunday June 17, 2001

 “Some are born consultants, some achieve consultancy, and some have consultancy thrust upon ‘em.”

With Malvolio in Twelfth Night, I had independence thrust upon me, when I was downsized from the H.W. Wilson Company in early 1997, a year after they ceased publication of the late, lamented Wilson Library Bulletin. Moving smoothly from Shakespeare to paraphrasing Ghostbusters, now I am more inclined to say, “Back off man, I’m a professional.” Or to remind myself, still in Ghostbusters mode: “This is the private sector. They expect results.”

 So like Huck Finn, I promise to tell the truth mainly, and I should start by saying that I did not choose this, it chose me. But if you find yourself in a similar situation, here are ten things you ought to know.

 

1. What is it that you know?

2. Why would anyone want to pay for it?

 3. Tell everyone you know. Then tell them again.

 4. Wait for the opportunity, but create the opportunity also.

 5. Be a professional.

 6. Keep your work separate from your life.

 7. Charge what your work is worth.

8. Give good value.

 9. Surround yourself with the right tools.

 10. Or maybe in the end I should say, “Don’t try this at home.”

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My last keynote address, from 2008

Posted on December 18, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

“Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.” – Laurie Anderson

SEPLA keynote Upper Merion Township Library  King of Prussia PA October 17, 2008

 We are the people who tell stories. Humans are the storytelling animal. We come together this morning with our stories, as they accompany us everywhere. I could begin by telling you the story of how I visited my 85-year-old mother this past weekend, or the story of my son and his cousin living in the same New York apartment building, or the story of how this week I had four deadlines as well as my teaching and I didn’t quite meet all of them.

Instead, I will begin by telling you a story from Hodja Nasruddin:

A man had offended the king, and was sentenced to death.

He fell to his knees before the king and implored, “Oh your majesty! Spare me but for one year, and I will teach your horse to talk!” The king was amazed, and granted his wish.

The man’s close friend and brother upbraided him, saying, “Why did you make such an absurd promise?”

The man shrugged and replied, “In a year, the king may die. In a year, I may die. In a year, the horse may talk!”

I love this story. I first heard it many years ago on WBAI-FM Pacifica radio, identified as a Sufi story. We tell it so often in my household that “the horse may talk” is a family tag line. I knew I wanted to tell you this story, but I also wanted to able to tell you where it came from, so I turned to my online buddies on various lists. It happened as usually happens around the technology campfire: the story may be a Sufi story, but it is also Italian and Indian. It was told on an old Masterpiece Theater series on televison. It is widespread enough to have its own Stith Thompson entry, that marvelous compilation of folktale types.

The performing, and performance, artist Laurie Anderson gave the name to this presentation. She said, “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”  Stories make us human, our lives are our stories. Technology is the source of light, warmth, and heat- our campfire.

It seems a hard thing to distract you from this bright morning, to have you turn your minds to my musings, but I have hope, that by the end, that horse may talk  to all of us.

It does seem in our work lives that whatever particular thing we are trying to do has elements of teaching a horse to speak: can we really create a space for teens that they love, and that doesn’t make adult readers crazy? Can we find a way not to spend all of our budget on printer paper? What about cell phones? And laptops? And Facebook? Are we there yet? Are we anywhere yet?

Today I am going to talk to you in three part harmony: about stories, about technology, about change. The three strands of this talk are braided together in my own mind, and I hope by the end in yours, too. I will talk for about 40 minutes, and then I hope you will talk to me, and to each other, discussing some of the ideas that I have been stewing about. In teaching graduate classes I try to put ideas in my students’ heads that were not there before. If it is a good class, they put ideas in my head that weren’t there before, either. I am hoping that this audience, you and I, will work the same way, in both directions.

“Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.” This connects the information people and the story people – a difference I hope to explore a little later. The social part of my personal work life is almost entirely constructed online via email and blogs. I have been working out of my home office for eleven years now. I have colleagues in California, in Australia, in Norway, in England, that I talk to every single day. That’s where I get my professional gossip, my water-cooler conversation, and my updates about what people are really asking for at the reference desk. No one can tell me to get a life: online is my life.

So you might understand that I am fiercely attached to technology. I teach online; I write on the computer; I research and think about stuff from my local public library’s tiny periodicals collection, from its online databases accessed there and at home, to research libraries, to the much-maligned but much cherished Wikipedia. Welcome to my life.

Do you folks remember how some of us hated answering machines? Then we didn’t want email. Then we didn’t want web sites. Soon we hated cell phones and the myriad small annoyances they bring with them. Right now, we seem to be hating MySpace  and Facebook and fearing bloggers – some of us, at least. Where are we going with that? It is important to think about how we cannot practice our professional lives well without those things that some of us once hated.

Now I would like to read to you one of my favorite passages in  all of library literature.

It comes from the  May 15, 1924 issue of Library Journal,  Helen E. Haines wrote about contemporary fiction – novels – in the library. “Librarians … seldom contemplate modern fiction with serenity. It offers constant problems and perplexities; and their attitude towards it is apt to be one of mingled resignation and severity… The most difficult phase of the problem is that represented by the reactions of … the readers—and their name is legion—who suffer from our national disease of regulatory and supervisory fever… all feel morally called upon to censor the novels in the public library – and if allowed to wreak their will unchecked the results would be both laughable and tragic…”

Even earlier, in a paper given at the Library Association meeting in London in 1889 and published in Library Journal the following year, T. Mason wrote that “this question of fiction has mainly been argued between those who consider all fiction foul or useless and those who see no harm in it at all.” Change the word fiction to the phrase “social networking”  and you get a very up-to-the-minute picture.

Fiction – novels – popular literature – these are basics in the public library now. So are DVDs and audiobooks, although they too in their time were argued over, sometimes bitterly. We have a history. So we have done this before.

We always want new technology to be the same as what we already know. If you have ever seen a Gutenberg Bible, the first printed book in Europe, you know that with its beautiful black letters and illuminated initials it looks like a medieval manuscript. The reason people pursued the idea of moveable type is that they wanted to find a faster and cheaper way of producing books, and they wanted those books to resemble what they already had.

Librarians, historically, have been at the place where new formats and new technologies happen to people in their daily lives. We have a strong role in domesticating those technologies, too. Fiction became safer when you could take a novel home from the public library. We have a long history of learning as we go in mastering new technology, from the typewriter to the online public catalog to e-reference to Second Life. The important part to remember is that we librarians are both learning and doing, and that the job of connecting people to ideas is still very much ours. We know how to organize and how to search and how to be comfortable managing conflicting data, and if we are sometimes not entirely in command of the situation, we can take heart in the maxim attributed to race car driver Mario Andretti, “If you’re in control, you’re not going fast enough.”

I am on Facebook, and that’s a perfect example of personal and  professional, information and story, where the horse does talk. I joined Facebook because a large group of my colleagues on the children’s literature discussion list, called child_lit, joined it. I adore that little “what are you doing right now?” query and I check it once a day to see what everyone’s doing and to post a sentence – sometimes a koan – of my own.

However, a lot of my nieces and nephews and younger cousins are also on Facebook, and I have friended them, too. So each morning, when I see what my colleagues are writing and teaching, I also learn that Vicky is following the Jonas Brothers and Joe is practicing the guitar.  Facebook seems to me to be the small town of the internet, where everyone knows a little bit, or a lot, about everyone else.

I find this juxtaposition of my life as colleague and my life as auntie to be,  well, very odd.

I teach children’s and young adult literature both online and in hybrid format, that is, mostly online but with a few live meetings in person on campus. Teaching online follows quite an ancient model. It struck me that the structure is more like the tutor model at Oxford University England than anything else. My students read several books a week and we gather at that technological campfire online and talk about what we have read, together, and respond to and argue with each other, just like students and fellows in the city of dreaming spires.

In wrestling with censorship and selection issues, my students argue the question, “At what age can I read anything I want? And who decides?” Sometimes that leads them to another, even deeper question. Why do we read? Why do writers write? Why do they write that way? We read for pleasure, for learning, to lose ourselves, to find ourselves. Writers write, more often than not it seems to me, to find out what they mean, to enable us, as Philip Pullman so aptly put it, to “enjoy life, or to endure it.”

We worry some about reading as a skill and a delight that people may be losing. I confess I don’t worry much about that, because stories are what makes us human and there have always been and will always be stories. It might be both instructive and delicious to think about two particular things in this context, an excerpt from Plato, and a video from YouTube.

Plato was concerned that the new-fangled idea of writing stuff down would dilute scholarship and make men lazy. (He wasn’t thinking about women at all.) True knowledge, of course, came from listening and hearing, getting the words straight from the philosopher’s mouth.

And so I quote from Socrates, as Plato said,

“…even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness…”

That view, of course, comes from Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates and Phaedrus discourse on the unreliability of written text. It sounds so much like current discussions about scholarly verification, authentication, the reliability of Wikipedia, and other such concerns that I found it quite startling. To say nothing of how weird it is to see the written word seen as subversive and new-fangled.

An extremely funny video on YouTube (the URL is in your handout) shows one monk, the tech guy, coming to show another how to make this new technology, The Book, function. The monk wants his scroll back because he cannot make The Book work for him at all. Anyone who has ever been reduced to weepy frustration before the IT person will be both cheered and humbled. Writing and the codex book were indeed new technology once upon a time.  It is good to remember that.

It is lovely to think of ourselves, library workers all, as living in a global village, but sometimes I think the library universe is more akin to the cantina at the Mos Eisley spaceport, the interspecies bar in the first Star Wars movie. That is an image of terrifying diversity in the pursuit, one imagines or hopes, of the same thing. Obiwan, the sage of the movie, describes the town to young Luke, the hero, as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”  “We must be cautious.” he adds. And we are rubbing elbows — and sometimes other, more intimate parts like our intellects or our  iPhones — with people who call themselves librarians but who look and act mighty different from us.

Most of us are doing things in our professional lives that would have been unimaginable to the newly minted librarians we were when we started out, if we started out more than a decade ago. We need to hold on to that knowledge, for change is our only certainty. Let us make that a comfort, for if we are not changing, we are probably dead. And if we aren’t dead, we are victims of psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitudes. Things change – they become more deeply what they are. Change is the story, and sometimes it is a change we can barely imagine – is that horse talking yet? That may or may not be Zen, but Plato and Helen Haines and the Hodja seem to be hinting that.

Which brings us to information people and story people. I have been reviewing books for many years, and my editor at Booklist, Bill Ott, likes to say that librarians are divided into information people and story people. Bill doesn’t say this, but I think he also means that younger librarians – those under 40 – are information people, and that we older types, boomers, somewhat more silvery and less pierced, are story people. We became librarians, he muses, because we loved stories, because we loved books. The librarians with tattoos, those who blog, those who make our MySpace pages and are not fazed by the third iteration of the online catalog and the billionth iteration of the library’s web presence –  Bill calls them information people. They may just possibly terrify him.

They do not terrify me. I teach those folks. My online classes are filled with several generations of people. There are those my age, who read their first graphic novel in my class  and who are on their third or fourth careers. There’s also the next generation or the one after that: students who grew up with Kiki’s Delivery Service and Totoro, with Pedro and Me and Ranma ½; who can parse every informational moment of the Heroes, Lost and of Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. Occasionally,  those generational attributes even overlap in the same student. The combination always makes for really lively online class discussion. It enriches our intellectual dialog, and the interaction certainly enriches the profession.

It is crucially, critically, vitally important that we not let there be a divide between information and story. While I have framed this in part as generational, it isn’t always. But it does illustrate the two ends of the profession.  My old friend and colleague Jamie Larue, director of the Douglas Public Library in Castle Rock, Colorado, calls librarians “the keepers of the books, the answerers of questions, and the tellers of tales.” What I love about that definition is that encompasses both the story people and the information people without using either of those words. I believe that most librarians are at heart both information people and story people. Are you? Aren’t you?

Our job is to keep ideas and make them available.  I take comfort from science fiction:

“Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished.”

That is a grace of invocation from the Handdara, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which is a key text in my professional and personal life. It comes from that famed speculative fiction writer, in a book over thirty years old. Her richly imagined universe, centered on a planet called Winter with very different concepts of gender, seemed to rearrange all my molecules. It forced me to think about what it would mean if light and dark were seen as partners, rather than opposites; what it would mean if making were a journey, not a destination.

What Le Guin’s words remind me of is how important it is to keep ideas that we do not comprehend, or believe in, or agree with; to keep them safe, and to keep them available. If librarians don’t do this, who will? There is no other profession enjoined to preserve and disseminate all the truths of humankind – that is our job.

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas and silly ideas and yes, even dangerous and wicked ideas.

We need to keep dangerous and wicked ideas alive: humankind must never forget that sometimes we have slaughtered our neighbors, lied to our children, studied hatred and turned it into legend. We must remember those things.

But we also need to remember that some ideas thought worthless today may turn out to be the bedrock of tomorrow’s truths. We need to keep the whole of human history ever before us, recalling that the right of women to vote was once considered an idea both silly and dangerous; that the idea of one human being owning another was once as much a part of daily life as getting up with the sun in the morning; and that freedom to worship the Divine in one’s own way was such a radical idea that people who believed in it had to found an entire new country – this country – to practice it.

Ursula Le Guin’s elegant prose constructed a universe unimaginably different from our own. But it is our task to imagine it. Morning and evening, we need to imagine a world where ideas of all kinds might display themselves to the scrutiny of study, to the chastening of wisdom and kindness, to the possibility of joy. We need to do our work in such a way as to make that happen.

We need to remind ourselves that it matters what we do. Our readers need to have available to them truth in all its myriad guises, light and dark, easy and difficult. If the core values of librarianship are access and service, we need to examine anew how we do what we do at the reference desk or in live Chat, at the computer terminal, at the faculty meeting, in the cataloging office or story hour room.  It is that whole thing about change again. Nothing is as different from before as you think, and everything is.  The world is always changing. And so are we. We need to ask, Who are we serving?  Does it satisfy us? Does it satisfy them? Is it good work well done?

Finally, I always like to mention a few books that I think my audiences would enjoy. What fun is there being a librarian if you cannot recommend a few good books? Besides, I teach children’s literature, and that is where so much of the good stuff is, good stuff you don’t always get to read if you have become a grownup.

Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky. The Newbery winner is a truly amazing book: not only exquisitely written with a very clear sense of how children, and one particular child, view the world, especially the world of grownups. It is a story about what makes a family, and how we make the choices that create our selves. Treat yourself to this one.

On my personal Newbery list for this year is Shooting the Moon by Frances O’Roark Dowell. Every single word of this 176-page Vietnam era novel for young people is spare, perfect, inevitable. It has a brilliant first sentence and a heartbreaking last —  the final scene is a jab to the heart.

The next time you need a bedtime picture book, please look at In a Blue Room, with perfect words by Jim Averbeck and perfect pictures by Tricia Tusa.

One last mention of a book for young people – teens, in this case,

Ann Bausum’s With Courage and Cloth: winning the fight for a woman’s right to vote. When I become empress of the world, I am going to require that every high school student and every teacher read this book. It is the story of the last twenty years of the woman suffrage movement, and it describes unflinchingly what it cost our foremothers to gain for us the right to vote. You will never ever not vote again.

Sometimes, I read books written for adults. Sometimes, I love them. Read Deborah Grabien’s Rock and Roll Never Forgets and Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver: a life of Thomas Bewick. Of the former, wrapped inside of a tightly wound murder mystery and some kick-ass writing is all the stuff you ever wanted to know about what it is like to be on the road with a rock and roll band: how they get from here to there, what it is like backstage, who gets in, who stays out, how the music feels — oh lordy, there is a lot about how it feels. In the Bewick biography, it seems only British writers manage that combination of erudition, grace, and scholarship that Jenny Uglow does.

Possibly my favorite book this year, though, actually came out last year: Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On twins, insomnia, and the biggest funeral in the history of the world. I love books that combine stories, as life always does. Here, Doerr writes in achingly beautiful prose about being the parent of fraternal twin boys; about how he and his wife raised them in their first year while he is a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He also writes about writing, about reading Pliny (and Dante, and Keats), and about the city of Rome. It’s just luscious.

I am an information person and a story person.  I strongly suggest that you are, too, no matter which half you think dominates. Technology is our campfire. Change is what happens: it is the only thing we can be certain that tomorrow will bring. And always, I hope and expect that the horse will talk.

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A second look at Free to Be … You and Me

Posted on December 18, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

A second look at Free to Be … You and Me

from the great journal, Horn Book. Written in 2009.

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Ten Graces for New Librarians

Posted on December 16, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

Ten Graces for New Librarians

Probably the best thing I ever wrote professionally. It’s been reprinted many times, and even translated into a few other languages. I still love it.

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How to write a decent book review

Posted on December 16, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

This was first written in 1998. I have now been reviewing books for forty years.

I have been reviewing books for twenty-seven years and counting. I wrote my first book review for the November 1973 issue of Library Journal. I reviewed for LJ for 19 years, until I became editor of Wilson Library Bulletin. I currently review children’s books for Kirkus and children’s and adult books for Booklist. I have also reviewed for other publications, most notably The New York Times Book Review (1983-84). Here are some thoughts on what I have learned.

1. Read the whole book. That is the very least you owe the author. You can’t make a judgment on what they have done until you know all of it.

2. Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish they had written. You can and should point out shortcomings or failures, but don’t criticize the book for not being something it was never intended to be.

3. Don’t review in genres with which you are uncomfortable. There is no point in having a science fiction hater review sf, or someone who doesn’t read romances review them.

4. Think clearly about who the audience for the review is. Is this another librarian who wants to know if s/he should buy the book for their collection? Is this a parent who wants a good read-aloud? Is this review for patrons looking for information on a particular topic, or for patrons searching for a good read?

5. If possible, compare the book to others in the genre or field of study. That helps any reader.

6. Criticize clearly and specifically but gently. A bad book takes as long to write as a good one, and each book is someone’s baby. But a reviewer is charged to make a critical judgment, and fails if s/he does not do so.

7. Know the guidelines of your reviewing medium. Some don’t want plot summaries at all; some insist on them. Some want you to say outright if you are recommending a book, others don’t.

8. Be precise in your language. If this is the best book you have ever read, say so, and say why. If it is yet another nice little book on a nice little topic, say that, too. Find the words to say what you mean: the author did, and so should you.

9. Don’t be cowed by a famous name. Even famous writers sometimes do mediocre books.

10. Don’t review books by people you know, or love, or hate. It isn’t fair. Only review a book once; do not review the same title for more than one venue. This ensures that people who are looking for multiple reviews with multiple opinions will actually get them.

Enjoy! Reviewing is great fun, and deeply rewarding. It puts another spin on always having your nose in a book. And it is a kick to see a quote from your review on the back of the paperback.

GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido, June 1998

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About writing

Posted on December 16, 2013 by girasoleazzurra
sunflower petal

sunflower petal

We wrote this in 2003.

When asked about the whole business of writing for some family members, my son Keith and I wrote what follows: stuff we have picked up from many other writers and teachers along the way.

Keith writes almost entirely fiction; I write nonfiction, mostly book- and research-related. The work is not that different, though!

There is never going to be time to write. If you want to write, you have to make the time for it, preferably five or six days a week. Pick an hour and write for that hour. Writing is like any other skill, you get better at it the more you do it. You don’t just “become” a writer any more than you “become” a concert pianist or a neurosurgeon.

The way to learn to write is to do it, and to read in your chosen area. If you want to write a children’s book, read lots of them. If you want to write a memoir, the library is full of memoirs. If you want to write a book on baseball, read a bunch of them. It always helps to see what other writers have done.

Then write. And write and write and write. Most people think that writing should be easy and come naturally. This is a myth. Writing is hard work, sometimes very hard work. There’s no use waiting for inspiration, it doesn’t come, usually. (The muse is a bad boyfriend. He’s often off smoking weed and not available, though he swears he’ll be there for you.)

A book is written sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. Write one sentence. Then write another. Then another. It is the only way it is going to happen.

Finish what you start. Revise what you finish. Submit what you write.

The library  has reference books like Writers Market that will tell you where you can send your work for publication consideration.

Then move on to the next thing. Once you have finished something, leave it alone. It’s finished. If you pick at it, it’ll never heal. Move along and start your next piece of writing.

It is a perfectly legitimate thing to write as therapy, or as self-discovery. This is a good thing, but it probably won’t be something anyone else wiill care to read. Keep that in mind.

I review hundreds of books a year for Booklist, a review magazine mostly for librarians, and for Kirkus Reviews, a review service for publishers and librarians. Both of these are often available at your library, if you are interested, and amazon.com often quotes them. It gives me a really good overview of publishing in the areas where I review (fiction, mysteries, some memoirs, and children’s books).

Words are what we do, Keith and I. It is a real pleasure to share my profession with my son. Hope offers some small insight into the way it works.

©2003 Keith R.A. DeCandido & GraceAnne A. DeCandido

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It is time.

Posted on December 16, 2013 by girasoleazzurra

A lot of stuff needs to be moved here. And maybe stuff will be added. It could happen.

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