Shirley Jackson: Life Among the Savages

One of my favorite books while growing up was Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, a chronicle of an unusual mother raising four boisterous children in a decrepit house in rural Vermont. Since the book is so humorous, I didn't realize that the author also wrote horror stories until I was in high school and read "The Lottery," which is Jackson's most famous story about a small town that turns against someone in a brutal and shocking way.

 According to the Bennington, Vermont, Village Website:

On a bright spring morning in 1948, she walked down the Prospect hill with a baby stroller for a round of village errands. An hour or so later, Shirley Jackson pushed the stroller up the hill with newspapers, the mail, groceries -- and a story in mind. Once home, she set her toddler into the playpen and wrote "The Lottery" in less than two hours. It was posted to her agent that evening, and published in The New Yorker three weeks later (June 28, 1948).
The story created an immediate uproar. "The Lottery" describes a communal rite in a tidy Yankee village quite like the author's own. As generations of readers were shocked to learn, community order in the fictional village is nourished by solstice blood. The New Yorker's inbox was filled with complaints and subscription cancellations. Shirley Jackson became a national sensation.

Jackson is also known for her creepy novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle, so it probably comes as a surprise to some readers that she had a very domesticated life as an eccentric stay-at-home mother married to a snarky college professor.


In Life Among the Savages, and again in the sequel, Raising Demons, the voice is not that of the perfect mother stereotype of the 50s and 60s - her children and critics alike agree on that point. According to her biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, which I highly recommend, Shirley drank every afternoon, often lost track of just where her children were, and was surely not the world's best housekeeper - but then she never claimed to be. In some ways she reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men, classically educated and intelligent, leaning towards plump after childbearing, definitely living in the over-sized gothic house. But unlike the rather shallow and perfectly coiffed Betty, as well as the Donna Reeds and Mary Tyler Moores depicted on TV at that time as motherly stereotypes, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only woman at that time in Bennington Vermont who also had a job that paid money. She was a writer. And she was a famous writer of unusual talent - the Stephen King of her day. Yes she made tuna casserole, sorted socks and cleaned out drawers, but then she would sit down at a typewriter, light a cigarette, and write amazing stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's.


Pages from Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
About one thing there's no doubt: Shirley Jackson enjoyed the hell out of being a mother, and she was rather ahead of her time in writing down exactly what her children were saying and doing, no matter how odd or unnerving that was. She wasn't afraid of being honest, so her dialogue is timeless, and that makes these stories of family life refreshing even today.

...Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.

...There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.

...From the girl's room, small voices rose in song and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was to hear a brother and two sisters playing affectionately together; then, suddenly, the words of the song penetrated into my hot mind, and I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. "Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider," was what they were singing.

...Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting "O-U-T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea, with a dirty dishrag turned inside out" . . .

A New Fantasy Series: Castle Crabapple

My good friend Colette Bezio, who is a librarian, writer, humorist, and illustrator extraordinaire, has just published Book One in her Castle Crabapple series.  Congratulations and I wish her great success!

Amazon Link: The Witches of Castle Crabapple (Volume 1)

Sample Chapters, Color Pages, and More Here


Also please Like the Facebook Page and follow her on Blogger

From CreateSpace

Who will be the next Princess of Crabapple Valley? Miggin is sweet but clueless. Druzilla is brave, brilliant, arrogant and nasty. Will they really Influence each other, as the queen hopes, or will they tear each other and the kingdom apart? The potential princesses slug it out with magic and mud as the servants rampage, monsters run amok, and the very castle trembles.

The Witches of Castle Crabapple is a light, comic fantasy and the first in a new series, suitable for middle grades and up. Fans of Patricia C. Wrede's 'Calling on Dragons' series, Eva Ibbotson's children's books, and the Harry Potter series should enjoy a visit to Crabapple Valley, where the witches wreak havoc, magic is only a rhyme away, and the swineherds are all certain to marry princesses.

About the author:
Colette Bezio lives in Wisconsin where she works at the Muehl Public Library in Seymour. She has worked as a freelance comic strip writer for King Features Syndicate, and her writings and illustrations have appeared in many publications.

Looking for Cooking on Cable

An assortment of cookbooks from some of my favorite culinary cable shows.
Click the links to order the books or to see more from the same author.

Lidia's Italy in America

After taking us on journeys into her own kitchen and into kitchens across Italy, Lidia Bastianich now invites us on a road trip into the heart of Italian American cooking today. Traveling around the United States, Lidia visits Italian American communities that created something new out of the recipes passed down from their ancestors.





The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook: Every Recipe from the Hit TV Show with Product Ratings and a Look Behind the Scenes

America's Test Kitchen is a 2,500 square foot kitchen located outside of Boston. It is the home of Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines and is the workday destination for over 3 dozen test cooks, editors and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes until we understand how and why they work and arrive at the best version. We also test kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients in search of brands that offer the best value and performance. You can watch us work by tuning in to our public television show, America's Test Kitchen.

Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust

In Barefoot Contessa Foolproof, the Food Network star takes easy a step further, sharing her secrets for pulling off deeply satisfying meals that have that “wow!” factor we all crave. Start with delicious Dukes Cosmopolitans made with freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus Jalapeño Cheddar Crackers that everyone will devour. Lunches include Hot Smoked Salmon, Lobster & Potato Salad, and Easy Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Croutons, all featuring old-fashioned flavors with the volume turned up.

Weeknights with Giada: Quick and Simple Recipes to Revamp Dinner

After a full day, Giada, like most parents, wants nothing more than to sit down for a home-cooked dinner with her husband, Todd, and their daughter, Jade. Weeknights with Giada rises to the challenge, delivering soups, sandwiches, pizzas, pastas, and meat and fish dishes that come together quickly as stand-alone main courses—most in half an hour or less

Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food: More Than 100 Delicious, Super-Fast, and Easy Recipes

Everyone needs quick, healthy, and delicious recipes for feeding a family--and no one's better at providing them than Gordon Ramsay, the three-star chef famous for his no-nonsense cooking. Here he serves up a feast of doable ideas: more than 100 recipes and 15 great menus for putting food on the table each and every day. Many of the dishes take only 15 minutes to prepare and cook; none takes longer than half an hour--and you can put together an entire meal in only 30-45 minutes.

Poetry Passion: Fiery August

Summer Sun

Great is the sun, and wide he goes
Through empty heaven with repose;
And in the blue and glowing days
More thick than rain he showers his rays.

Though closer still the blinds we pull
To keep the shady parlour cool,
Yet he will find a chink or two
To slip his golden fingers through.

The dusty attic spider-clad
He, through the keyhole, maketh glad;
And through the broken edge of tiles
Into the laddered hay-loft smiles.

Meantime his golden face around
He bares to all the garden ground,
And sheds a warm and glittering look
Among the ivy’s inmost nook.

Above the hills, along the blue,
Round the bright air with footing true,
To please the child, to paint the rose,
The gardener of the World, he goes.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson


Summer in the South

The oriole sings in the greening grove
As if he were half-way waiting,
The rosebuds peep from their hoods of green,
Timid, and hesitating.
The rain comes down in a torrent sweep
And the nights smell warm and pinety,
The garden thrives, but the tender shoots
Are yellow-green and tiny.
Then a flash of sun on a waiting hill,
Streams laugh that erst were quiet,
The sky smiles down with a dazzling blue
And the woods run mad with riot.
~ Paul Laurence Dunbar



Ballade Made In The Hot Weather

—To C. M.

Fountains that frisk and sprinkle
The moss they overspill;
Pools that the breezes crinkle;
The wheel beside the mill,
With its wet, weedy frill;
Wind-shadows in the wheat;
A water-cart in the street;
The fringe of foam that girds
An islet’s ferneries;
A green sky’s minor thirds—
To live, I think of these!

Of ice and glass the tinkle,
Pellucid, silver-shrill;
Peaches without a wrinkle;
Cherries and snow at will,
From china bowls that fill
The senses with a sweet
Incuriousness of heat;
A melon’s dripping sherds;
Cream-clotted strawberries;
Dusk dairies set with curds—
To live, I think of these!

Vale-lily and periwinkle;
Wet stone-crop on the sill;
The look of leaves a-twinkle
With windlets clear and still;
The feel of a forest rill
That wimples fresh and fleet
About one’s naked feet;
The muzzles of drinking herds;
Lush flags and bulrushes;
The chirp of rain-bound birds—
To live, I think of these!

Envoy
Dark aisles, new packs of cards,
Mermaidens’ tails, cool swards,
Dawn dews and starlit seas,
White marbles, whiter words—
To live, I think of these!
~ William Ernest Henley




The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out,
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
~ Translated by Ezra Pound


Ode to the end of Summer

Summer, adieu
Adieu gregarious season.
Goodbye, 'revoir, farewell.
Now day comes late; now chillier blows the breeze on
Forsaken beach and boarded-up hotel.
Now wild geese fly together in thin lines
And Tourist Homes take down their lettered signs.

It fades--this green this lavish interval
This time of flowers and fruits,
Of melon ripe along the orchard wall,
Of sun and sails and wrinkled linen suits;
Time when the world seems rather plus than minus
And pollen tickles the allergic sinus.

Now fugitives to farm and shore and highland
Cancel their brief escape.
The Ferris wheel is quiet at Coney Island
And quaintness trades no longer on the Cape;
While meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps
To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.

Turn up the steam. The year is growing older.
The maple boughs are red.
Summer, farewell. Farewell the sunburnt shoulder
Farewell the peasant kerchief on the head.
Farewell the thunderstorm, complete with lightning,
And the white shoe that ever needeth whitening.

Farewell, vacation friendships, sweet but tenuous
Ditto to slacks and shorts,
Farewell, O strange compulsion to be strenuous
Which sends us forth to death on tennis courts.
Farewel, Mosquito, horror of our nights;
Clambakes, iced tea, and transatlantic flights.

The zinnia withers, mortal as the tulip.
Now from the dripping glass
I'll sip no more the amateur mint julep
Nor dine al fresco on the alien grass;
Nor scale the height nor breast the truculent billow
Nor lay my head on any weekend pillow.

Unstintingly I yield myself to Autumn
And Equinoctial sloth.
I hide my swim suit in the bureau's bottom
Nor fear the fury of the after-moth
Forswearing porch and pool and beetled garden,
My heart shall rest, my arteries shall harden.

Welcome, kind Fall, and every month with 'r' in
Whereto my mind is bent.
Come, sedentary season that I star in,
O fire-lit Winter of my deep content!
Amid the snow, the sleet, the blizzard's raw gust
I shall be cozier than I was in August.

Safe from the picnic sleeps the unlittered dell.
The last Good Humor sounds its final bell
And all is silence.
Summer, farewell, farewell.
~ Phyllis McGinley

Bookish Pics

Vintage Agatha Christie Via Shushie Tumblr

By cartoonist Tom Gauld, via MyJetPack Tumblr

From Victoria's Kitchen Facebook

These are for a lady celebrating her 60th Birthday, and feature some of the books that have shaped her life, including Christiano Ronlado's autobiography and Chicken Licken! :)

Art created from Art Forum Magazines via Lion Skeleton Tumblr

Book Nook Via Funktionality Tumblr

Remembering Gore Vidal

Prolific writer, playwright, historian and politician, Gore Vidal has passed away at the age of 86.

Perhaps his best legacy are his many witticisms, earning him the moniker "The American Oscar Wilde." Here are some of his literary quotes, many more here.

• You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
• American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
• Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
• To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
• Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

From the New York Times

He wrote for most of the shows that presented hourlong original dramas in the 1950s, including “Studio One,” “Philco Television Playhouse” and “Goodyear Playhouse.” He became so adept, he could knock off an adaptation in a weekend and an original play in a week or two. He turned “Visit to a Small Planet,” his 1955 television drama about an alien who comes to earth to study the art of war, into a successful Broadway play. His most successful play was “The Best Man,” about two contenders for the presidential nomination. It ran for 520 performances on Broadway before it, too, became a successful film, in 1964, with a cast headed by Henry Fonda and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. It was revived on Broadway in 2000 and is now being revived there again as “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.” Mr. Vidal’s reputation as a script doctor was such that in 1956 MGM hired him as a contract writer; among other projects he helped rewrite the screenplay of “Ben-Hur,” though he was denied an official credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams’s play “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

. . . In the years to come his greatest successes came with historical novels, especially what became known as his American Chronicles sextet: “Washington, D.C.,” “Burr” (1973), “1876” (1976), “Lincoln” (1984), “Hollywood” (1990) and “The Golden Age” (2000). He turned out to have a particular gift for this kind of writing. These novels were learned and scrupulously based on fact, but also witty and contemporary-feeling, full of gossip and shrewd asides. Harold Bloom wrote that Mr. Vidal’s imagination of American politics “is so powerful as to compel awe.” Writing in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said, “Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with.”

But Mr. Vidal also persisted in writing books like “Myron” (1974), a sequel to “Myra,” and “Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal” (1992), which were clearly meant as provocations. “Live From Golgotha,” for example, rewrites the Gospels, with Saint Paul as a huckster and pederast and Jesus a buffoon. John Rechy said of it in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, “If God exists and Jesus is His son, then Gore Vidal is going to Hell.”

In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection, “United States: Essays 1952-1992,” R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was “so good that we cannot do without him,” adding, “He is a treasure of state.”

London Olympics Honors Children's Literature

A segment of the London Olympics Opening Ceremony was opened with J. K. Rowling reading a passage from the J. M. Barrie novel Peter Pan. Several characters were included in the Tribute to both books and the National Health Service, including Voldemort, Captain Hook, the Child-Catcher from Ian Fleming's Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, and Mary Poppins.






Via gifsfln.tumblr.com

Irish Novelist Maeve Binchy Gone at Age 72

The Irish authoress of Light a Penny Candle, Tara Road and Circle of Friends is dead at age 72.

From the Irish Times

In all she wrote 16 books, two of which, The Lilac Bus and Echoes, were made into TV films while Circle of Friends, Tara Road and How About You were made into feature films.

She wrote four collections of short stories altogether, a play for RTÉ Deeply Regretted By, which won a Jacob’s award in 1978, and the novella Star Sullivan.

It has been estimated that her books have sold 40 million copies in 37 languages.

In 1999 she received the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

In 2000 it was a People of the Year Award in Ireland. In 2001 she won the WH Smith Book Award for Fiction. In 2007 she received the Irish PEN/AT Cross Award and in 2010 it was a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards.

. . . She once said she would like her motto to be: “We have to make our own happiness.” It was probably her greatest achievement that she did just that and despite illness in later years.

As she told this newspaper on July 3rd last: “I’ve been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.” In Binchy’s case the description “a national treasure” is that rare snug fit.

The Hobbit Trilogy According to Peter Jackson

Director Peter Jackson announced yesterday that his film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit will be made into three movies instead of two. He seems to imply that the screenwriters will stretch-out the backstories of the main characters using material from The Simarillion. Needless to say, the idea of three movies squeezed from one book is rather controversial among fans, who see it as exploitation of Middle Earth's popularity, and at worst, price-gouging.

MTV ~ Are Three Movies Necessary?
Salon: Terrible Idea or Geek Opium?
Washington Post: The Internet Rejoices

From Peter Jackson Via E!Online

"It is only at the end of a shoot that you finally get the chance to sit down and have a look at the film you have made," the Oscar-winning filmmaker wrote on his Facebook page this morning. "Recently [collaborators] Fran [Walsh], Phil [co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens] and I did just this when we watched for the first time an early cut of the first movie—and a large chunk of the second."

Jackson continued: "We were really pleased with the way the story was coming together, in particular, the strength of the characters and the cast who have brought them to life. All of which gave rise to a simple question: Do we take this chance to tell more of the tale? And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.'"

. . ."We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth."

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