WBG 2003

2003

History

November/December
The Small Room
May Sarton
Discussion recapped by Helen

Susan K, Susan T, Melissa M, Melissa K, Laura, Rachel, and Helen met at Anne-Marie’s house for a discussion loosely inspired by May Sarton's A Small Room. Most of us enjoyed the book with the exception of one person who thought the characters were too stereotypical and two-dimensional.

Helen began with some details about Sarton's life from the biography by Margot Peters. [Sarton was a voluminous correspondent and Peters had access to her files as well as a number of interviews with Sarton before her death in 1995 and with some of her friends and acquaintances.] Sarton's family migrated from Belgium to the U.S. with 2-year old May shortly after the beginning of World War I. Her father lectured at Harvard and published a journal on the history of science which was his true passion. Her mother was a designer working for a firm that imported Belgian crafts. With her mother frail and often traveling and her father with his head in his work, May was often farmed out for the summer to family friends and struggled throughout her life with needing to feel loved and the center of attention without knowing how to be a true friend in return. After graduating from Cambridge High and Latin, she decided to become an actress and moved to New York to spend several years apprenticing in the theater. She began writing poetry which she promoted through lecture tours on college campuses which she organized herself. She was apparently a riveting speaker and began to develop a following although she rarely made enough to support herself. She was a poor money manager, continually borrowing from her father and friends and spending most of the money she received on others or trips to Europe. Her most creative poetic periods occurred when she fell in love and had passionate affairs—generally with women, frequently with women in long term relationships or marriages, and often when she was in a relationship with someone else. She began writing novels which developed quite a following. Oddly enough, many of Sarton's fans felt that her novels helped them sort out their own lives, an odd accomplishment for someone who's own life was rather messed up.

Of interest to our group, was the period 1960-68 during which Sarton taught creative writing for several semesters at Wellesley. Contrary to popular belief, Appleton is not Wellesley. Sarton had begun A Small Room before she came to Wellesley based on a number of friends and mentors who were teachers and a plagiarism incident that involved one of her friends. The Wellesley News wrote a critical review and Sarton went to see President Clapp to complain. President Clapp defended the students' right to an independent opinion and sent Sarton on her way. Sarton apparently fell head-over-heels for Margaret Clapp and spent several years trying to make lunch dates, sending letters, and writing love poems, apparently all unrequited. Her courses were quite popular although she did not attend department meetings, made few friends among the faculty (although she did have an affair with a female professor given only by an alias in the biography) and complained that the college wasn't using her talents fully. When the former writing instructor returned, Sarton's contract at Wellesley was not renewed.

As suspected, the book prompted more discussion about our own experiences at Wellesley than about the book itself, some directly inspired by the book and some taking off on tangents. Did people have "personal" contact with professors or not? Did they get the kind of close supervision and feedback that happened in the novel? Did the faculty care about the students or just the subject? Anne-Marie recalled a bible professor who invited the class over to his house for a buffet feast the night before the final. Another member shared the experience of trying as a first year student to seek guidance from a philosophy professor to gain perspective on an emotionally difficult family situation and having the professor shut down and end the conversation. We also touched on changes in how the campus health services dealt with psychological problems and pregnancy over the years [In the fifties, one pregnant student was sent to the infirmary and in 1963 another finished senior year commuting from Providence], the transformation of the "freshman class" into "first year" students, the "new dorms" which were actually new when Susan K. and Anne-Marie were on campus still being called "new" years later, how long some of the stalwarts of the music department like William Hermann and Owen Jander were on campus, and the changing openness about and awareness of lesbian students and gay and lesbian faculty. Melissa M. asked for a recipe for Pompadour Pudding and found the more recent graduates saying "What?" [If anybody saved and can find the recipes that were published in the bulletin, please share them with Melissa.] And inevitably, although most people hadn't seen it yet, concern that Mona Lisa Smile's portrayal of Wellesley in the 50s as a finishing school didn't match the experience of those who were there then.

October
In the Hand of Dante
Nick Tosches
Discussion recapped by Fran

Both Susans, Melissa K, Helen, Laura, Anne-Marie, and Fran attended. All of us hated the book—I would say "in varying degrees" but I'm not even sure if the degrees varied that much. Most of us acknowledged that Tosches can write well (in the sense of being able to craft a good sentence when he is moved to do so). As for the rest, it was hard to decide on which was worst—his relentless show-offy wordplay (fashioning verbs out of nouns, digging up arcane words from the OED to sprinkle through lengthy passages ruminating about god knows what, etc.)—his self-aggrandizing posturing—his rants based largely on the "f word"—the confusing, boring leaps between disconnected scenes. I think Susan T used the word "puerile" and Helen a more charitable "immature." Melissa K found the most to admire—maybe it was the long walk from BART that put her in a more positive frame of mind. She suggested he might REALLY be a nice person, who just acts this way when he writes, to make you think he's an arrogant, woman-hating, egotistical, violent, ugly jerk, in order to show how awful those kinds of people really are… or something like that. Melissa can probably express that better than I am doing although I don't think she'll convince me... Out of all of us, she was the one who most appreciated the insight into Dante scholarship that the book did offer; the rest of us were too fed up with Tosches to care, I believe. For some really good rips on this book, I refer you to the amazon reviews—one by a guy named Jerry Roth really hit the nail on the head, I thought. One of the reviews was titled by using the Merriam Webster definition of "horrendous."

September
The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Ann Packer
Discussion recapped by Fran

Last night's meeting at my house was well attended with Alison, Helen, Susan T, Clare (and child to be), Susan K, Anne-Marie, Britt, Melissa M., and, of course, me there. We had an enjoyable evening savaging the book in various respects. We made fun of the sewing and Susan K ridiculed the wealth of detail (dropping the bobbin on the floor, putting the saucer in the right-hand side of the sink, buying the $3.99 curtain rod), suggesting that the book started as a short story and Packer's editor asked for 5,000 more words, which were provided by detailing every move that Carrie made. Carrie's immaturity, the writer's inability to present a true moral conflict despite the terrific premise, the depiction of Madison, WI, as "Anywhere, USA" when in fact it's the Berkeley of the Midwest (no greater compliment can be paid), and the lack of dimension in the other characters. Some of us made an effort to draw more meaning out of these perceived flaws (perhaps the other characters appeared one-dimensional because that's the way Carrie, still a self-centered teenager in many respects, saw them). And several defended Carrie's inability to come to terms with her problems and deal with her conflicts or make use of her talents, or even do anything as simple as make a damn phone call, as being very realistic and true to life, something we Wellesley over-achievers just can't relate to. I wasn't among those who made such efforts, however. In fact, feel a bit guilty this morning because I was having such a good time taking the easy shots that others who were striving to offer a different analysis got a bit drowned out, I'm afraid.

August
The Spectator Bird
Wallace Stegner
Discussion recapped by Fran

We met last night at Susan T's house to discuss Rachel's selection The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner. Present were Susan T., Rachel, Fran, Anne-Marie, Allison, Melissa K., Helen, Laura, Britt (now relocated back to the Bay Area) and Cindy (relocated from Kansas). Debate raged less over the quality of the book, or, at least Stegner's writing (which was not disputed, unless I missed something) than on other, more specific questions: was Joe depressed, or simply unhappy? How much of his emotional state was a function of age or the aging process—unavoidable—and how much a product of his personality and his life circumstances? Did we like him (lovable curmudgeon or annoying sourpuss)? How did the diary fare as a literary device? Were there flaws in the story—inconsistencies or loose threads—or were those deliberate? What's a quisling? (a collaborator) What about Catarrh - what is a catarrh anyway? (nasal discharge) What about the quality of the relationship between Joe and Ruth? Did he treat her well or poorly, in terms of intimacy or valuing her as person? Did he see her as an obligation (though he denied it)? How much did the death of his son affect the story? On nearly every question, there were two or three people who were adamant in one direction, and others adamant the other way. Someone related the fact that Joe was sort of an alter ego for Stegner, who wanted to be an antisocial curmudgeon, but wasn't. This may partly help to explain why it was often hard to tell whether someone was talking about Joe or about Stegner when commenting on some aspect of the book: the narrator's voice struck us very much as Stegner's own.

July
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Robert Olen Butler
Discussion recapped by Susan T

Our July meeting was at Clare's house to discuss Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, Members present were the Susans (K and T), Laura, Clare, Rachel, Anne-Marie, and new member Alison. A good turnout for July! Good Scent from a Strange Mountain had something for everyone. Susan K had known N'Orleans area folk whose hilarious (mis)pronunciation of "Versailles" she passed on to us. Other mangled place-names were listed and discussed. Comforting to know it's a real place, in which (sez Susan) the issue of "black racism" is (or was - pub date 1992) a big issue. Consensus was that the author managed quite handily to get into the hearts and minds of his characters, though some of us felt he wrote women, as a group, better than men, and some felt the opposite. Only reservations went to the nature of the short-story format, which Claire and Susan K felt too limited, compared to longer narrative. It seemed to them, and somewhat to the rest of us, that a well-structured short story has room for either plot or for character development, rarely if ever for both. One curiosity was that Anne-Marie's and Claire's books included a couple of extra short stories which, of course, the rest of us hadn't read (or known of the existence of...). One was A-M's fave, which of course didn't get adequate discussion, A-M not wanting to spoil the surprise ending in case the rest of us should manage to find it later.

Theyni. Theydi. Theyci. Melissa M., Susan K. and I conquered our understanding of Nicola Barker's Wide Open. Despite the evening's way-too-warm weather and low turnout (Anne-Marie, hope that your daughter's wedding goes/went as planned!), we enjoyed a lively discussion of this very strange book. My English bull dog was a would-be book-group crasher. But besides being the wrong sex, species and not an alum, he had not read the book!

Actually, we just wished we had been able to conquer our understanding of this book. We agreed that although the book was bizarre—how many books have you read in which someone commits suicide by swallowing a frozen pat of butter wrapped in gold foil, a refuge for black rabbits, an "artist" who creates paint-by-numbers porn, a family who raises boars and a young man who finds epiphany in a painting of Jesus which he is convinced shows a young Jesus masturbating? —we found it absorbing. We all kept turning the page to find out what would happen next. Barker also writes well and her imagery is unusual and creative: She wrapped her arms around the box like pale stamens.

But was she writing to shock? To be hostile? To make social and/or emotional comment? Were Ronnie and the Other Ronnie, one of whom was Jim, but which one?, characters who were meant to convey meaning about identity, connection or the lack thereof, or just part of a strange story? And what about the letters from Monica (which turned out to be a creation of one of the Ronnies) off in the wilds of Indonesia looking for an oranpendic?

Anne-Marie, we agreed this book supplants Geek Love, which we hold fondly in memory and which we understood more easily. All of us said that we still think about Geek Love and its issues remain current.

None of Barker's characters was particularly likable, although some were more benign than others: Lily was hateful, but Connie was quietly sad and obsessed. Jim was gentle, but very vulnerable and isolated. Most of them were isolated either emotionally or physically or both. Were they symbols? Metaphors? What did the white shoes mean? What was in the box, which was never opened? Dark secrets? As I'm writing this I realize that we never discussed the title. Was there a clue there?

Barker has written other books, and I assigned myself the task of reading another to see if the same patterns (or lack thereof) appear.

Last night Laura, Melissa K, Susan T., Susan K., Helen, Anne-Marie, Clare, and I met at my house to discuss Laura's selection Civilization & The Limpet by Martin Wells. Laura knew quite a bit about marine biology, which she claims is a result of a few casual visits to the Aquarium—I wonder. The rest of us pretty much fell into Wells' target audience, the intelligent but ignorant lay person. All of us enjoyed this book and found much to intrigue us. We discussed the animals (my favorite, the octopus, especially when sitting in a flower pot), their interesting reproductive mechanisms, their protective devices, their habitats, extinction, evolution, the research process, and vegetarianism. Generally, we commented favorably on the structure of the book (most of us seemed to like the concept of the very short chapters), while noting that the book lacked a "thread" or something analogous to a plot. Some of us saw this as a weakness, others thought that expecting a plot in a nonfiction work was a sign of being spoiled by a diet of non-fiction lite. Some of us found Wells' tone and/or repeated use of certain stock phrases ("but that's another story") a little annoying. All of us wished for one thing: pictures! At least line drawings, if not full color photos, of the creatures so vividly described. Was this omission intentional (and if so, why?) or just a cost-saving measure?