I’m an insomniac and can’t go to sleep unless I’ve read at least a few pages of a good book, so I have to go to the library a lot. Sometimes I get biographies of women writers and actresses because I get lazy and they’re so easy to rush through, and sometimes I get books on history because I don’t know nearly as much as I want to know. I’ve also been trying to find new (to me) southern novels, and here are a few I’ve really liked over the last few months. . .
A Long and Happy Life . . . . I found out about this one in the latest issue of Oxford American, which incidentally is my new favorite southern magazine (these days I like magazines that feature better writing than photos). There was an article on A Long and Happy Life and its author, Reynolds Price, and if it was meant to make you go out and get your hands on the book right away it was successful, because there was a waiting list for it at the Atlanta Public Library. I didn’t think I would like the book as much as I did; the article praised its heroine, Rosacoke Mustian, to the skies, which made me dislike her at first, and assume she was just some goody-goody character with a silly name. But as I read on I couldn’t help but fall for her and her stubbornness and quiet sense of humor and strangeness.
The Moviegoer: I always used to get Walker Percy and Reynolds Price confused because they were both southern writers with last names for first names. And when I picked up The Moviegoer I think I half-expected it to be like something Reynolds Price would write, only it wasn’t at all, and I felt pretty stupid for thinking it would be. If anything, Percy’s writing style reminded me of J.D. Salinger’s; it felt a lot more modern, and the New Orleans-in-the-’60s (or is it ’50s?) backdrop is stripped of southern gothic romance.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider: this one is, hands-down, the best thing I’ve read in the last few years, and the reason why I fell so hard for Katherine Anne Porter in the first place. One day I really ought to do a whole post on Porter, because she really was a fascinating person; she grew up dirt-poor in Texas, acted a bit in silent movies, went off to be a journalist in revolutionary Mexico, and eventually became one of the greatest short story writers in the US. Her best stories were her autobiographical ones; Pale Horse, Pale Rider is about her near-death experience during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. My great-grandmother’s parents both died in the pandemic when my grandma was just a toddler, so I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by it, watching PBS documentaries and reading anything I can find on the subject. But I don’t think anything has made me come closer to understanding what it actually felt like to live during that scary time than this book has. The whole thing has a haze over it—from the beginning you know that something’s not quiet right, and it only gets hazier from there.
Photos by Drew
Dress: Blooming Leopold
Jacket: Madewell
Shoes: vintage Ferragamos
Sunglasses: Karen Walker Number One
Sorry for the lack of posting this last week. Drew and I ended up going on a quick trip to New York to celebrate his birthday, which is actually today (happy birthday!). We were going to go this week, but when I found out one of my favorite old bands Pulp was going to be playing in New York we rescheduled and went on the 11th instead. I’ve been wanting to see them for maybe 10 years; I didn’t start listening to them until just after they broke up, and never really thought I’d get the chance to see them live, so actually getting to see them play—and at the super art deco Radio City Music Hall no less—left me speechless for a little while. Jarvis danced just like he did in those funny ’90s Pulp videos, told jokes and drank wine, and sang all the wonderful and dramatic Different Class and His ‘n’ Hers songs I listened to in my angsty mid-twenties.
We stayed three nights in New York, which is longer than we’d stayed on other trips, but there was still so much to do that we didn’t really check off half the things on our list. On Wednesday just after we got there we took the subway to Brooklyn to see the Keith Haring show Drew wanted to see. I liked the older things best: 200-year-old portraits, 1930s furniture, and a Lillian Gish (I think) movie playing in one room. Then there were whole rooms from plantations and even a couple of old New York houses moved and rebuilt inside the museum, and it was fascinating, but kind of sad that they were put there in the first place.
We ate a lot on our trip: sandwiches from No. 7 sub shop, scones, cadbury eggs and stale chocolate donuts (drunk . . . ), dinner at Momofuku noodle bar and crack pie at Milk Bar (I loved it but kind of wished I had gotten something chocolate, which is how I usually feel when I order dessert that’s not chocolate). And we walked and walked, took subways, and walked some more, and my feet hurt and bled, even though I wore sensible shoes and precautionary bandaids.
We shopped, or at least browsed. I didn’t buy anything (too overwhelmed) but got a ton of inspiration at Steven Alan and No. 6, which is one of my new favorite stores. Mostly I just looked around at the buildings and at Central Park (photos soon), and when we’d get back to our hotel to rest I’d go to favorite history blogs like Lost City and Ephemeral New York to find out more about the things we’d seen. Because sometimes I like the city best when I’m in a quiet room reading about it from afar.
When I was a kid I always loved going with my family to visit my grandparents in the tiny little historic town of Galena, Illinois. I loved wandering around the steep streets and staircases, looking at the brick Victorian houses and all the churches set into the sides of hills, at homes of famous Civil War generals and at a hotel where Abraham Lincoln gave a speech sometime in the 1850s. Galena is probably where I first started loving history, though I didn’t know it yet. History to me was still just a dry subject in school that all the kids complained about. I complained about it too.
At the time I definitely didn’t think it was a love of history that kept my eyes glued to the backseat windows for the entire trip from our house to my grandparents’ house. We would go all back roads so we could avoid the busy Rockford way, and we did a lot of driving through small farm towns and fields and then hills and cliffs after we got to the Mississippi River. I knew that trip by heart; I never had to ask when we would get there, because I had it all landmarked in my head. I knew that once we went by an old abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a field by Mt. Morris that we were on to the prettier, more interesting part of our drive, when abandoned houses and buildings would become more common. We would go by ancient log houses falling apart in the woods, abandoned churches, and the blackened foundation of an old roadside diner we had seen burning to the ground one eerie night on our way home.
My very favorite building was this stone (cement?) structure at an intersection past Mt. Morris. I think it had the words “Wash House” painted over the door, and I never knew exactly what it had been used for or how old it was, but I did know that it probably hadn’t been used in years and years. Trees grew through the empty windows and through cracks in the foundations, and each time we drove by it there would be less building and more rubble in the pile next it. It was there for years and years, but then one day it was gone, and I was sad I never got a picture of it.
All of that is a very long-winded way of saying that I’m glad that books like Brian Vanden Brink’s Ruin exist. Vanden Brink is an architectural photographer who began taking pictures of the abandoned houses and bridges and structures he found himself drawn to. I love it because he covers most of the United States; there are the southern shacks and wrecks of antebellum plantations that I see around here, churches and monuments out West, New England homes, and the silos and farmhouses of the Midwest that sparked my fascination with abandoned buildings in the first place.
Photos by Drew
We spent our Easter with Drew’s family in North Carolina, sitting by a lake on one of the nicest days of the year so far. Half of Drew’s family is Greek, so we celebrated the Greek way, with the traditional egg fight (there may or may not have been cheating involved this year) and lots of amazing food, including spanakopita, Greek salad, and dolmades. I got put in charge of making the Greek bread, because I’ll take any excuse to spend a day baking. Seriously . . . the more things to make, the better. I love recipes with lots of steps, which is probably why I love bread-baking so much. From testing the yeast to mixing up the ingredients, kneading, putting everything in a bowl, not really expecting it to work out and rise, but being amazed when it does . . . I’ve made challah bread before, but never challah with hard-boiled eggs inside, so that was fun to watch how it turned out and how, in the oven, the bread rose around the eggs, almost hiding them under the (wonky) dough crosses I had made to cover them. But dying the eggs might have been the most fun. I waited ’till the last minute and couldn’t get to a Greek grocery store to get the tradional red dye, so I ended up having to do it the old-fashioned way, with just yellow onion skins and vinegar in a pot of water. How a few light-colored onion peels can turn the shells of half a dozen hard-boiled eggs dark red is still beyond me, but it worked, and I hope I can make the Easter bread more often.
Tel Aviv-based label The Hellers’ spring collection was inspired by the idea of Jane Eyre living in the “wild Aeolian Isles of Sicily,” which in iteslf is enough for me to love it. I was obsessed with the book all throughout high school, when I cared more about books than fashion, and as a gawky, awkward, quiet thing, identified with Jane all the way. When I did eventually start to get into clothes and fashion (and it wasn’t until after high school) I sometimes would put outfits together with favorite book heroines in mind: F Scott Fitzgerald’s ingenue flappers, Colette’s French heroines, or even characters out of Jane Austen novels, since the costumes in all those ’90s film adaptations were so good.
As much as I loved Jane Eyre, it never really occurred to dress like her. The Victorian era was never my favorite as far as clothes went—too many corsets, too much fabric, way too dreary. But The Hellers’ updated, world-traveling version of Jane is something I can get on board with. There are hints of Victorian styles in some of the shapes (those wasp waists and full skirts) and in a few of the prints (botanical prints apparently inspired by illustrations from the 19th century). But at the same time it’s super modern, with lots of mixed prints, silk dresses, and amazing kimono jackets.
