My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks. Instinct, not knowledge, led me to them. I had never seen or heard one. Although I had a pen of pheasants and a pen of quail, a flock of turkeys, seventeen geese, a tribe of mallard ducks, three Japanese silky bantams, two Polish Crested ones, and several chickens of a cross between these last and the Rhode Island Red, I felt a lack. I knew that the peacock had been the bird of Hera, the wife of Zeus, but since that time it had probably come down in the world--the Florida Market Bulletin advertised three-year-old peafowl at sixty-five dollars a pair. I had been quietly reading these ads for some years when one day, seized, I circled an ad in the Bulletin and passed it to my mother. The ad was for a peacock and hen with four seven-week-old peabiddies. "I'm going to order me those," I said.

--Flannery O'Connor, "The King of the Birds" in Mystery and Manners

At night these calls take on a minor key and the air for miles around is charged with them. It has been a long time since I let my first peafowl out at dusk to roost in the cedar trees behind the house. Now fifteen or twenty still roost there; but the original old cock from Eustis, Florida, stations himself on top of the barn, the bird who lost his foot in the mowing machine sits on a flat shed near the horse stall, there are others in the trees by the pond, several in the oaks at the side of the house, and one that cannot be disuaded from roosting on the water tower.From all these stations calls and answers echo through the night. The peacock perhaps has violent dreams. Often he wakes and screams "Help! Help!" and then from the pond and the barn and the trees around the house a chorus of adjuration begins:

Lee-yon lee-yon
Mee-yon mee-yon!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!

--Flannery O'Connor, "The King of the Birds"

I tried to explain the postmodern aspects of Don Quixote to R. a few nights back and managed in the process to thoroughly confuse her. Perhaps this summation might to the trick:

For readers whose tastes run to the postmodern, "Don Quixote" has got you covered. The novel's text is presented as having been written in Arabic by a scribe named Cide Hamete Bengali, then translated into Spanish by an unnamed translator in the Toledo market where a fictionalized Cervantes is said to stumbled across the mysterious manuscript. Published by the real Cervantes, the runaway success of the novel's first part inspired a fraudulent sequel. This led an outraged Cervantes to publish a Part Two of his own, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have become famous through the publication within their fictional world of Part One. The characters they meet in Part Two are thus familiar with both Don Quixote's delusion and Sancho Panza's complicity in it, and one pair of loyal fans go so far as to fabricate a world of knight errantry within their castle on his behalf. Either Don Quixote steps out of their favorite novel and into their real lives (which are, of course, fictional), and they in turn re-create the world of his favorite novels around him; or else the readers themselves have stepped into the novel they had been reading, in the novel you are reading; or both. Got that?

--J. Daniel Janzen in Flak Magazine

Of course, this explanation doesn't mention that the Bengali was written, translated, and read by everyone in the month's time between the ending of Part One and the beginning of Part Two . . .

Friday morning cat blogging and a few other things besides

As always, remember to check out The Ark on Fridays and the Carnival of the Cats on Sundays for a round up of the best and latest pet blogging photos.

I was not aware of the fact that Geraldine Brooks has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. This interview with Brooks contains more info on her experiences as a Middle East correspondent and her views on what's happening in Iraq than about her books.

Nextbook has an essay on the historical Sol Star and his portrayal on HBO's Deadwood: "Sol's storyline stands as one of the show's most remarkable revolutions, though it's least remarked upon. Sol may not be the first Jewish character to appear in a Western, but his bold, matter-of-fact portrayal, played neither for laughs nor morality lessons, is pioneering."

Hey, Sol's my favorite character!

Not really Deadwood-related but Bill Bryson mentions a Thomas Nuttall (Nuttall owned the saloon where Wild Bill Hickock was gunned down): a botanist, Nuttall named a climbing shrub, spelled wistaria by purists, for Caspar Wistar. Wistar, of course, failed to recognize the significance of an enormous thighbone found in a creek bank in New Jersey thereby missing his chance to be known as the discoverer of dinosaurs. A Short History of Nearly Everything contains lots of tidbits like that.

Via Magnificient Octopus, an interview with Umberto Eco that makes me think I ought to hurry up and read Foucault's Pendulum so I can move on to his latest, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. He owns 50,000 books! (And a jar containing a pair of dog's testicles! And a banjo.)

And last, but certainly not least: I'm spending the afternoon with Carol Peters. I can't think of anything that'd be better than that.

A few quick links

Are our children suffering from nature-deficit disorder? Richard Louv postulates in Last Child in the Woods that they are, and provides evidence that their lives are far the worse for it. (CSM)

Another CSM article, another look at how to get boys to read with a suggested summer reading list for high schoolers from the Haverford School that contains a mixture of quality and junk. Boys today are much less sophisticated readers and require difficult material be presented to them later than in the past, according to educators.

More gloomy news: odds stacked against pleasure reading for high school students.

Does listening to an audio book count as reading? Is it a good way to consume literature?

Who dies in the next Harry Potter book? Are you willing to make a bet on it? Would you be suspicious if most of the bets coming from the town where the book was printed all pointed to the same character? (And, more importantly, will the boys still want to read this book if they know ahead of time who dies?)

And an interview with Ali Smith, whose latest in the UK is called The Accidental. '"Stories can change lives if we're not careful," Smith says. "They will come in and take the shirts off our backs. Tell the right stories and we live better lives."

Maybe she should have a talk with all the high school boys before sending them out to play.

Book Meme

Staci tagged me for the latest book meme:

1. What is the total number of books owned, ever?

I made an attempt to count our books a few years back and I think it was close to 2,000 then. We've definitely not gone down in number since.

2. What is the last book you bought?

Thomas J. Schlereth's Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915

3. What is the last book you read?

Last book I finished is noted in the sidebar. The last book I read from is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

4. Five books that mean a lot to me.

Ack! I hate trying to answer things like this. So, rather randomly, at the moment I'll say:

Anne Tyler's Searching for Caleb and Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold--two discoveries from my freshman year at college. I've read every novel written by them since (although I haven't gotten around to Drabble's latest yet).

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I guess I was in 8th or 9th grade when I got a copy of this. Remember how Beth Ellen Hansen used it in The Long Secret? I didn't do that. It was enough that it helped me not seem such the ignorant hillbilly from out in the county.

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. My copy is all black around the edges and I can't imagine anyone other than me wanting to touch it. My dad read it with his usual greasy hands at his machine shop and he loved Gus and Call as much as I did.

And two by E.C. Spykman: Terrible, Horrible Edie and Edie on the Warpath. Edith Cares got me through some bad times.

Anyone want to consider themselves tagged? I'm not sure who's done this one already.

Calvin & Hobbes & High School Required Reading

I have between now and October to attempt to justify buying the hardback slipcovered Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. I don't think I'm going to be able to do it since we own most of the books in paperback, but dang, this collection is so pretty. . .

R. has signed up for two classes here this first summer session. She's having to reread 1984 and Brave New World for a philosophy class she taking and The Iliad for History of Greece. She's also finally having to read Oedipus Rex.

We were talking a few days ago about what she'd had to read in high school. Being in IB, she missed lots of British and American staples anyone else would have been expected to study, as well as portions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and, of course, Oedipus.

I'm trying to remember the books I was assigned to read in high school. Before 9th grade I'd never been assigned a single one—some years we were supposed to read selections on color-coded cards and answer questions, some years we read from a textbook.

What I can remember being assigned:

Romeo and Juliet
The Pigman
Huck Finn
Lord of the Flies
portions of Edith Hamilton's Mythology
Julius Caesar
Native Son
The Pearl
Old Man and the Sea
Oedipus Rex
Scarlet Letter
The Red Badge of Courage
Moby Dick
The Great Gatsby
Crime and Punishment
The Stranger
The Glass Menagerie
The Crucible
Macbeth
The Grapes of Wrath
Brave New World (for those of us who'd already read 1984)

I wrote research papers on J. D. Salinger's Glass family and Kafka's The Castle. I can remember giving an oral report on Michener's Centennial and chosing vocabulary words from All the President's Men for another assignment. Anything else I read, I'm pretty sure I read outside class.