Hippie candles
Jan. 6th, 2012 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primsongI don't have a lot of 'hippie' in my life, but every now and then the young child I was among them wants to revisit the more interesting parts of those days. My brother sent me a little birthday money and I used part of it to buy myself two boxes of multicolored drip candles, the kind you put on an empty bottle and let drip down it in a funky organic rainbow way.
It may be silly, but Gosh I Love Them, it's one of those happy little things from my youth. Maybe I'll get a bead curtain someday too, I always loved the way they tink and rustle when someone goes through them.
Hee! Now *you* go indulge your inner child. It's a nice day to come out and play a bit.
*watches drips happily*
It may be silly, but Gosh I Love Them, it's one of those happy little things from my youth. Maybe I'll get a bead curtain someday too, I always loved the way they tink and rustle when someone goes through them.
Hee! Now *you* go indulge your inner child. It's a nice day to come out and play a bit.
*watches drips happily*
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Date: 2012-01-06 11:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-07 04:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-07 01:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-07 03:08 am (UTC)I got into a math class that I did not think I had a snowball's chance of getting into! And the teacher is popularly reputed to be THE BEST. (I attended an evening seminar of his once, called Conquering Math Anxiety, and I agree with the general assessment.)
Now... your bead curtain mention reminds me of Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away. I think I will go read them. (Have you read them?) Also, my sister made cookies.
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Date: 2012-01-07 04:11 am (UTC)I haven't read those, the titles don't even look familiar - but I SO enjoyed Septimus Quinn I am more than happy to take any book recs you may have. Are they worth hunting up copies of?
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Date: 2012-01-07 08:40 am (UTC)**************************************
They totally are! I shall ramble at you about them sometime when I can be sure it's not "ramble about you at them" that is correct - I have been up an insanely long time (like thirty-odd hours, I think?) and now I am going to bed. I might sleep all weekend.
Short version, though: they are two books by (one of?) the first writer(s?) to take two Newbery Awards. "Gone-Away Lake" is her second Newbery, IIRC, and much better-deserved than her first one IMO. Her name is Elizabeth Enright, and she wrote summer!fic about kids living or vacationing in upstate New York, mostly. (Exceptions later.) The two "Gone-Away" books are her best, IMO - mature works as they say, written when she'd been writing for twenty years. (Her first Newbery was on her second book, "Thimble Summer", which IMO is her least good.) She also wrote the Melendys books, consisting of "The Saturdays", "The Four-Story Mistake", "Then There Were Five", and "Spiderweb for Two". Any of this ringing a bell? She wrote in the '40s and '50s, so you might not have stumbled across her unless your childhood reading (like mine) was old readers with excerpts from AWESOME BOOOOOOOOKS.
(Other person to ask me about when I am awake: Kate Seredy. If you have not heard of her. Author-illustrators, both of them, though Seredy is the better artsit by ALL THE LONG SHOTS. ...spelling is th last thing to do go. Good night! XD)
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Date: 2012-01-07 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-08 06:53 am (UTC)The first thing to know about her is that she is amazing at turning a phrase. Fabulous, awesome, incredible... you WILL wind up reading gobs of quotes aloud to your family because they made you laugh.
The second thing is that while Thimble Summer is quite good and deserved its Newbery, all her other books are miles better. If it doesn't grab you, try "Gone-Away Lake" before writing her off.
The third thing to know is that her books do not have Plot Action per se, which is why I have such trouble telling people what they're about. They sometimes have story arcs, in the sense of "something happens here which sets up what happens at the end!", but that is not the same thing. But this is not a flaw! It is a Feature! I wish to be very clear on that point. ;-)
Now, stuff about individual books:
* I don't remember "Thimble Summer" very well, but you're probably reading it. *g* It's about a twelve-year-old-ish girl named Garnet, living in upstate New York, who finds a silver thimble and decides this is an omen of a wonderful summer, which she then proceeds to have. Most of her books' heroines are about that age, IIRC - it's classic mid-20th-century American kidlit, and probably helped define the genre.
* "The Sea Is All Around", 1941, is odd-book-out: a little girl named Mab goes to an island off the coast of Massachusetts in the wintertime to live with her aunt (she's an orphan). It is neither in New York nor in summer, but I love it because it's odd-book-out - she gets lost in the snow in the middle of the island, and sees the Northern Lights (with illustration! in color!), and buys Christmas presents for her friends at an antique shop, and then it is spring and... oh, lots of stuff happens. See above re: Plot Action. Her best book-endings are all sort of looking-forward "now things are going to go on being awesome!" in a rather peaceful, happy way; this is one of them.
At this point, Thing #4 to know about Elizabeth Enright: she is at her best writing cross-generational friendships, with flashback storytelling to when the grown-ups were little. She got better at that through her life, but it starts here - Mab has at least three different adult friends (counting her aunt) who tell her stories during the book.
* "The Saturdays" is from 1941. It's about a family of four kids who live in a brownstone in New York City (also their dad, a live-in housekeeper, and a furnace guy who comes in by the day; their mom is dead, their dad is an economist by trade). At the beginning of the book, they decide to pool their allowances and take turns each having an Adventure on a Saturday afternoon. Various ones of them go to the opera, and the ballet, and an art gallery, and the circus, and rowing in Central Park, and somebody finds a dog... Each chapter is a really well-written short story on its own, and for the first time she manages to get a coherent feeling, multiple story threads, and an overall plot arc going (though there are still throwaway lines that you will find reused in other books as full-blown story elements. This was my main problem with "Thimble Summer", IMO - I can't recall anything unique to that book except the State Fair.)
* In "The Four-Story Mistake", the Melendys move to the country, to live in the titular house. (It has not four storeys, which was the mistake. It's got a cupola instead, because this is Elizabeth Enright. Thing #5: If it is a cool thing you dreamed of doing / having / seeing as a kid, somebody in Elizabeth Enright's stories has probably done / had / seen it. *g*)
I have sometimes used the Melendy books as an example of How To Do A Series Right: you start with a well-drawn cast of interesting characters, a fun setting, and do all the things you want to do with that cast and setting in the first book. Then you change up something major and do it all over again! XD In the Melendys' case, it's "New York City - country - change the cast focus - change the cast focus again".
So Four-Story Mistake is about all the fun things that four kids do living in the country. They have bicycles, and put on an epically gigantic show to raise money to buy War Bonds (the oldest girl wants to be an actress), and go on picnics, and build a dam to make the swimming hole deeper, and all this stuff. It is awesome.
* And then in "Then There Were Five" - well, I'll not give away all the plot points, but they wind up adopting another kid, obvs. Also, I said "change the cast"; this is the one where Father is away working for the government in D.C., and then the live-in housekeeper's cousin sprains her ankle and the housekeeper has to go take care of her. So the kids are left alone to watch themselves (I think they range from 15 to 9 at this point). It's rather gloriously Farmer Boy, especially when Mona and Randy (the girls) have to do the canning while Cuffy is gone!
(That is "the cooking chapter", as my family calls it, and IT IS THE MOST HILARIOUS THING. I think we can all recite at least half of it. You will not understand what I mean if I try to quote any of it, because it's so cram-packed with Lord-Peter-Wimsey-level nonsense-talking, but I will note that Mona recites a pound-cake recipe with Shakespearean dramatic emotifying at one point, and that's one of the less funny bits. XD)
And I haven't even got to the auction-and-another-show. Or the chapter called "The Citronella Peril"! Or anything. GO READ THEM. READ THEM ALL. ;-)
* Then there is "Spiderweb for Two", which is another cast change-up: the older kids are off at boarding-schools, and the two younger kids are feeling glumpy until a Mysterious Note arrives in the mail with a riddle for them to solve. And basically the whole novel is a treasure-hunt lasting through the whole school year! (And involving emperors and nymphs and graveyards - I randomly quote, "I don't like the big graveyard in Braxton; it feels like a big stone furniture store, so solemn and quiet". And pokeweed forests and nighttime expeditions and the phrase "impersonating bubble-gum".)
Random note: it may be interesting right near the end of the book to know that Elizabeth Enright was Frank Lloyd Wright's niece.
Whew! This is so going to be multiple comments.
* Aaaand... here we are! Gone-Away Lake, published in 1957 or so. Twelve-year-old-ish girl and seven-year-old-ish brother go to upstate New York to visit twelve-year-old-ish boy cousin and his family over the summer. I'm going to have to spoil some stuff to explain the rest of the plot, so if you want to be entirely surprised, stop now. (Just know that these are HER BEST BOOKS in my opinion and I love all the characters exceedingly. Also the illustrations! They are by Beth and Joe Krush, who also illustrated "Miracles on Maple Hill" by Virginia Sorensen. This book reminds me a lot of that one in many ways, actually.)
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Now then. The twelve-year-old cousins go exploring in the woods behind his house and find A Swamp that used to be a lake. With several falling-down old houses next to it. And there are two people living in the houses! They are a brother and sister, rather elderly now, whose family used to own a vacation home here when this was a lake. (Whence the title. The lake dried up between Then and Now.) That was right around 1900; there were 12 vacation homes total. Due to Plotty Reasons, they moved back to the by-then-deserted little village during the Depression, and have been keeping house here ever since, wearing old clothes that were in storage and using whatever furniture etc was still in good shape. (Food and other consumable necessities are bought in the nearby town and brought home in A Car. A really old car.)
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book and its sequel, okay? It's the best of Elizabeth Enright's cross-generational friendship stories; it's the most "if you ever daydreamed about doing it, HERE IT IS"; it's the most enthusiastically brilliantly glorious descriptions of nature, scenery, houses, and goats (seriously, YOU WILL LOVE ELIZABETH ENRIGHT, Prim); all her books have Discovering Cool Secrets that were just sitting round waiting to be found (like caves and things), but these have the most; and all the supporting characters, including the ones in the flashback stories, are highly memorable and well-drawn.
Also it is the best at foreshadowing and structure and multiple POVs and storylines, and it is the set in which Elizabeth Enright really goes a bit crazy with her always-obvious love of Old Things and just dances with glee, scattering awesomeness as she goes.
Also the one that bead-curtains reminded me of. You'll know when you get there. XD
* And then there is Return to Gone-Away! Stop right now if you don't want a major spoiler for the ending of "Gone-Away Lake".
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Okay? This is the one where Portia's family (that's the twelve-year-old girl) move into one of the old houses near Gone-Away! It is actually a little ways away from the lake - they only went to it late in the previous book - but as the owner died fifty-odd years before, without a will, and it's been standing vacant all that time, the State owned it and was willing to sell it to Portia's family. And it's a gloriously cram-packed-with-craziness old house. What I said about changing up the characters or setting to make another book in a series? The first book was about exploring the lake and its surrounding; this one is about exploring the house!
And I mean, the house has a SUIT OF ARMOR in it. And a mysterious hidden safe that the boy cousin keeps looking for. And a red-and-gold piano that looks like it ought to make a fire-engine-siren noise. And a harp, and a bronze statue on the end of the bannister, and a Waterford chandelier... I haven't even gotten started! Or mentioned Baron Bloodshed's buttonhook! (Nothing gory, I swear.) Seriously. These are some fabulous books, and I think you will not regret owning them if you buy them.
Also more of the awesome cross-generational friendships from the first book, as well as more same-age friendship stories among the boys and girls. (One thing I really, really love about Elizabeth Enright, to digress a bit, is that she never pulls the stunt of throwing in UST to indicate that the kids are "growing up". Friendship stays friendship, and she has so much fun writing it.)
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Date: 2012-01-08 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-01-07 05:19 pm (UTC)