crooked house

One Line a Day

Seeing this pretty and old-fashioned One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book makes me wonder if anyone is using twitter to write one tweet at the end of each day summing it up. Just one tweet -- no more allowed. Facebook could work like that, too. One status update summing up each day, no more. But both twitter and facebook seem much more ephemeral than a journal. Are all your tweets and status updates saved? If so, for how long?

My mother-in-law kept a five-year diary before she died -- I believe she faithfully jotted just one line or two about each day before she went to bed. And I know my father-in-law does -- he often surprises me with a comment about what we were doing on this day two or three years ago. This is particularly of interest when you have small children who seem to change so fast.

I've often thought of using something like My Quotable Kid: A Parents' Journal of Unforgettable Quotes but I already record almost everything interesting or amusing my children say either here or on my facebook page, which I know drives a lot of people nuts. But I'm even a sucker for the funny things other people's children say, which makes me the perfect audience for sites like My Kid Is Gifted. 

Only A Brain Injury Could Make Martin Amis Write for Children

Only a brain injury could make Martin Amis write for children. Yes, that's what he said. Children's book author and illustrator and cartoonist Patricia Storms had some fun imagining Amis as various characters from classic children's literature. You can read about his comment and see the rest of the cartoons here.

Babies in Literature: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography

According to Alexandra Popoff, author of Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, Leo Tolstoy's wife has been maligned by history. Popoff, who had access to a great deal of previously inaccessible archival materials, explains that it all stems from Tolstoy's final years, when he experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his marriage, his family, and his property (or try to). However much Tolstoy may have believed in his principles of poverty and chastity, this renunciation put his wife in a completely untenable position. Sophia was left to look after the couple's eight surviving children pretty much on her own. Clearly Tolstoy felt some responsibility to his family, because he kept waffling on property and money matters. Admittedly, Sophia kept fighting him on these -- who wouldn't, when she had eight children to feed, clothe, and educate? He also kept waffling on the matter of sex -- he kept sleeping with Sophia and then blaming the matronly woman for being a seductress. Tolstoy's most famous follower, Vladimir Chertkoff, managed to insinuate himself between the couple in Tolstoy's final years and ended up controlling his literary works after his death. Popoff argues that it is he who is most responsible for discrediting Sophia Tolstoy's character. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Tolstoy, and really, anyone who is interested in the concept of marriage and women's historical role within it.

Tolstoy was a literary genius, to be sure, but he also must have been infuriating to be married to. Sophia was not only Tolstoy's muse, she was a  tireless worker who devoted all her efforts to creating the proper environment for her husband to write in. She was Tolstoy's copyist and later his publisher. She managed his home and often his estate and related business matters. She made most of the childrearing and educational decisions on her own. (At one point, when she asked about appropriate education for one of their teenage sons, her husband brushed her off with a comment that he should become a street sweeper or the like because of his own religious beliefs against taking part in a money-based economy.) Sophia gave birth to thirteen children, although she wanted to stop after seven or so -- but Tolstoy wouldn't allow birth control. She breastfed all these babies herself at Tolstoy's insistence even though it never became easy for her (she often developed mastitis) and most women of her position employed wet nurses. And she watched six of her children die. Exhausted and completely emotionally and physically spent, at times Sophia wanted to end these pregnancies:

By now, she was certain of her [twelfth] pregnancy. As she wrote her sister, she felt like "screaming of despair and rage."

Told the news, Tolstoy wrote he was glad they would have a child; Sophia's unhappiness came from her revolté. It would be easier for her and people around her if she assumed a more accepting attitude: "Why can't you surrender?" Sophia thought his position was morally superior and felt crushed. "If I were bad before, now I am loathsome! And if you were good, you have become so much better!" Her pregnancy explained her abnormal state, Tolstoy replied: "I know, I've heard, that it's terribly oppressive for the soul."

Meanwhile, Sophia attempted to induce a miscarriage: she took scalding baths and jumped from a dresser. To a nanny who tried to talk her out of it, she said that Tolstoy considered leaving her and their children. When her attempts failed, she approached a midwife in Tula, asking for an abortion. The midwife, afraid of exposure, refused: she would perform an abortion for someone else, but not for Countess Tolstoy.

At times, Sophia Tolstoy wanted to end her own life.

You can read a brief excerpt from the biography here.

Books Take a Long Time to Write

Luke: Books take a long time to write you know, Mommy.

Steph: Yes, I know.

Luke: We started this one yesterday and we didn't finish it until today!

Meg Rosoff: How I Write

Meg Rosoff, author of How I Live Now, an arresting book for young adults -- although why exactly it was marketed solely to teens I do not know -- has some interesting things to say about how she writes. If you want to know how writing is like riding a horse, go read it. Her blog is terrific, too.

Thanks for An Awesome Book of Thanks!

We got this book in the mail today -- appropriately enough, as it's Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is An Awesome Book of Thanks! by Dallas Clayton, who self-published the first book in this series, An Awesome Book!, because he couldn't seem to find a traditional publisher. He finally decided to go the DIY route instead and the book quickly became a phenomenon.

Both books are endearingly quirky, visually appealing, and have great messages about dreaming big and being thankful. But don't take my word for it -- you can read both books for free here. Additionally, Clayton gives away one book for every book that is sold. This is a clever gesture, as well as a kind one.

This time,  An Awesome Book of Thanks! is being published by Amazon Encore. Apparently Amazon Encore targets indie and small press books that have generated a real buzz and good sales on their own and then republishes the books with a little more fanfare. It's a very interesting model, one to watch closely. An Awesome Book of Thanks! is their first picture book.

My favourite spread:

Yes, thank you! (And Happy Thanksgiving, American friends. We're eating turkey tonight, too, in solidarity and thankfulness.)

Luke's Homemade Book

Luke got a couple of magazines in the mail today and, after perusing them for a little while, he asked me if he could make his own book. I was all over that in a heartbeat. Here it is: his "Chickie Book." I suppose in another ten years or so the term "Chickie Book" might have a different meaning for him.

And here is one of the pages, a puzzle page, his favourite.

That says, "Find two strange things." Okay, then. Shouldn't be too difficult, around here.

Mark Twain and Albert Einstein: Separated at Birth?

Or maybe they just had the same hairstylist: no one.

Can you figure out who said what?

1. "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

2. "A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."

3. "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

4. "All generalizations are false, including this one."

5. "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

6. "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

7. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

8. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." (Note the similarity to 3.)

9. "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."

10. "Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others."

11. "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

12. "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

13. "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

14. "To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal."

15. "The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it."

16. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

17. "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today."

18. "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

19. "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it."

20. "Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."

1. E.  2. T  3. E.  4. T  5. T 6. E  7. E. 8. T 9. T  10. T 11. E  12. E  13. E 14. T  15. T 16. E.  17. T  18. E  19. T 20. E

How'd you do? If you can't believe some of the answers, check my sources for the Einstein quotes, and for the Twain. And let me know if I've made any mistakes. It was easy to get very mixed up.

This quiz is in honour of the publication of Autobiography of Mark Twain, the first sample chapter of which I downloaded to my kindle last night. Unfortunately the first chapter consisted of pages and pages of academic notes. I can generally get a good hit off those frees of e-books but not in this case. Because of my kindle, I am beginning to be extremely widely read -- as long as one counts only the first chapters of books. Still, I dare say this makes me more knowledgeable than many a cocktail party guest or book club participant and they don't refrain from commenting. 

My Least Favourite Kindle Screensaver

This is my least favourite of the kindle screensavers. It is James Joyce, momentarily despairing of the difficulty of composing beautiful and tantalizingly layered yet confusing, almost impenetrable text. There is another, less-well-know illustration of him giggling into his shirtsleeve: "One day they'll devote whole university level courses to figuring out this sentence, heeheehee... snort snort chortle." I'd like to smack him.

Typewriter Keyboard

It works. You can buy one  -- or a kit to make your own -- at Etsy's USB Typewriter.