Traveling

Photo by Katy Buchanan

Last time I was at the CMOA,  in early February 2020, I actually found out the name of the sculptor. Did I bother to write it down? No. Proof positive that I'm an idiot.

 So. The 2020 spring has upended the known universe.

About two years ago, I kept tentatively making plans to spend a month in Paris. Note the word "tentative."

Here I am, two years later, no Paris trip completed and confined to my ZIP code for the foreseeable future.

One thing I was not tentative about was checking out a pile of books from my local library before it closed last month.

So I'm not a total moron.

I'm pretty close to done with the pile, so I'll be reading online soon, but these books have been a real trip. They've taken me to 19th century Paris and St. Thomas, 18th century London, 20th century London and early 20th century Nepal.
Here are some of the titles:

 "Poison Thread," (Old London) (based on a true story)
"A Marriage of Opposites" (Old St. Thomas and Old Paris) (based on the life of Impressionist artist Camille Pissaro)
 "The Steady Running of the Hour" (Old London, mostly, Iceland and Nepal and Berlin. Also, Paris circa 2013-14. Also, the muddy trenches of WWI.)

I'm now into an anthology edited by Stephen King titled "Six Scary Stories." Two more books to go before online reading (or before a deep dive into my library of New Yorkers, NYTimes and 'Grant' by Ron Chernow, which has been sitting around for ages).

Re: "The Steady Running of the Hour." I grabbed it mostly because of the title. I just love those words. So meditative. An OK novel (it's the author's first) but the love stories that weave together the long-ago yesterday and today were uncompelling. Long-ago Imogen is an awful, dreadful person, trying to get her soldier-lover Ashley to desert. And today-Tristan falls in with people so casually and so without any sense of self-protection that it's hard to take his 'romance' with Mireille seriously. And she's just like Imogen ... begging her lover to quit his duty. She's awful, too. At least Ashley stood up for himself. Tristan just goes along, like a cow with a ring through its nose.

"Steady Running" is also filled with too much research detail (James Michener, anyone?). I'm an experienced enough reader to know when I feel comfortable moving past paragraphs and pages of facts (about, in this instance, guns and terrain and and climbing gear). As the cleaning lady in "The World According To Garp" testified, the mark of a good book is you want to know what happens. That's what keeps you turning the pages. Not lots of detail about how guns work.


That said, I think research-iness and wordiness sometimes speak more to lapses by editors. Authors are understandably proud of their work. Writing is hard. Research is hard. But winnowing words is work that needs to be done, too.

Oh, and here I am, criticizing. Said the person who never made her trip to Paris. Or who never wrote a book.

Carry on. Or, better, Allons' y

About the photo: Last time I was at the CMOA,  in early February 2020, I actually found out the name of the sculptor. Did I bother to write it down? No. Proof positive that I'm not a total moron, but I am, in fact, an idiot.