(UPDATE: It is Sunday, the last day of the Boston Comic Con. I hadn’t meant to go dark the past few days, but I’ve hardly had a spare moment. In fact, I think the past month or so possibly has been the busiest of my life! That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not complaining, but I’m ready to slow down. As for BCC, I know you expected more in thee way of live coverage, but I will at least recap it for you in the coming days. I do want to say, I have met some wonderful fans from the Boston area, and I thank each of them for coming out. The Comic Con isn’t necessarily the easiest ground to navigate!)
Things are about to get a little crazy around here. Delta permitting, I will leave for Beantown tomorrow morning, where I will be on exhibit at Boston Comic Con Friday-Sunday. I know it costs to get in (I don’t get a cut of that; I’d let my readers in free if I could.), but I hope some of you in the Boston area will come by and see me at table D915. Autographs and handshakes will be free. I ship more books to Massachusetts than any other state, and I’m looking forward to meeting some of you. Also, I will be in Burlington, VT, two weekends later for the Vermont Comic Con. This is an experiment for me. I expect to be the old geezer in the corner fielding questions such as, “Is that strip still around?” It’s true, I’m in the corner, the southeast corner. I don’t know how much time I’ll have, but I definitely plan to send you updates here.
358 responses to “Boston, Home of the Bean and the Cod…”
for Mark and Llee
http://cheezburger.com/8967322624
That reminds me of when my basset hound had a wonderful Christmas Eve with our Christmas cake. More on chalk paint later. The orange kitty looks like baby Elvis.
Re chalk paint I’ll try it, but you know how this usually goes with me: http://www.anniesloan.com/techniques
Debbe your question is the very reason I am rereading Catcher. Why has it been a classic all these years?
Another sensational book of my youth was Tobacco Road, Lolita, quite a few like Catch 22 and others that broke new ground. I am thinking about rereading them to look at them with older eyes and ask?
It is too early for Dickens and I. He isn’t up and Skipper is using his butt for a pillow. Poor little Ghost got put out. And Dickens ate his antibiotics so I must go to vets this morning.
I think much of the fascination with Catcher in the Rye is that it’s told from the perspective of an unbalanced person… which raises some questions regarding the mental/emotional state of both the author and the protagonist he created. Was it in any way autobiographical? Was Salinger using people and events in his life as his source material? How accurately did he portray the thoughts and feelings of someone similarly afflicted?
It’s worth reading once if you care about such questions, much like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was for me when I took my first psychology classes.
Llee and Mark, yay!!!!!
On re-reading books decades later: the book is the same but you are different, so your experience will be different. Hence, you can’t read the same book twice.
I think timing – age and/or life experience – has a lot to do with how you react to books and Catcher in the Rye is for me a prime example. Bob read it as a teenager and loved it; I read it in my 20s (after a few years of working with teenage boys) and was not impressed.
This also reminds me of comments made by a friend about To Kill a Mockingbird. She enjoyed it when she read it as a teenager; looking back she recognized that she was then identifying with the children. She reread it when her boys read it in school and, as Smigz said, it was like a new book since she identified more with the parent.
Then there’s Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I read it as a junior in high school and liked it, even though I wasn’t quite sure I understood it. When I read it again a few years ago, I still liked it plus I understood my teenage reactions. I was also a little amazed – first, that my English teacher had chosen to assign it and, second, that the author of Our Town also wrote a work of “magical realism” in the 1920s that is comparable to some contemporary Latin American writers.
That reading assignment was part of a larger project that we worked on while our regular teacher was out for several weeks due to some sort of surgery. We had four novels to read and a packet of study questions to go with them. The novels were Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Red Badge of Courage, and the Wilder book. For many of my classmates this was their introduction to Cliffs notes 🙂
By the time that I was 10 I was a compulsive reader. I read every word of every page of the World Book Encyclopedia and every book in the house, which included The Count of Monte Christo which I only remember that I enjoyed it and a book named The House of Seven Gables which I remember reading twice because I particularly liked it. I’ll have to read them again although I have more books now than I’ll ever read.
I just read a summary of the House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Forget it. I can’t believe I enjoyed that at age 10.
Never read “The Scarlet Letter”, but have Elaine to thank for telling me the plot, ages ago. Came in handy when a rant Letter to the Editor appeared in The Bemidji Pioneer in the ’70s or ’80s about how atheistic evolutionary biologists [like me, a UMC tither?] were teaching our children to give up morals and “breed like mink.”* Wrote a restrained, item by item rebuttal, which ended with, “Hester Prynne was not seduced by a scientist.” This was before computers, so likely do not have the letter on file.
*I may be conflating two rants here. That phrase may have been in one against birth control. Mink, by the way, breed via rape; the larger male grabs the female by the nose and forcibly mates. So do sea otters, and maybe other mustelids. Most scientists I know don’t condone rape. Some even oppose pre-marital sex.
Peace,
Ruth Anne, the phenomenon that you relate about reading a book at different stages of your life is similar to what I find in reading the Bible. I find it to be “Living” because stories in it have different meanings at different times in our lives. The Prodigal Son is a prime example. I was often the jealous son, but as I age, I become more like the forgiving father.
This is an interesting discussion Villagers. I do realize I am reading a different book. I read it originally around age 11 or 12 probably because I had already read it when I went to boarding school in Pennsylvania at age 13. I had a rather Caulfield experience myself for about 5 days in New York City that year.
Because I loved the New Yorker magazine I read all his works there and then bought the books. So about 1965 was when he quit writing.
Yes, he admits the book is autobiographical and based on his boarding schools he went to, things he did.
Steve:
Right, although we may have different takes on “inspiration”, historical accuracy, etc.
As an example, my insight [see posts above] into the tale of the Samarian woman at the well was pretty much like that of Mary Travers in “Jesus met the woman at the well” until I reread it after reading what a faculty member at a Lutheran seminary had to say about it.
Don’t know if the event really happened, or is reported accurately, but that is not its point. The tale is about “living water.”
Peace,
Ooops, that was Mindy, not Debbe, who said Holden Caulfield was whiny all the time. He was. When my friends and I all went to boarding schools it was common for students to claim it was their school he went to.
Heard from Mark earlier this morning. His lung has healed and they took out drain. He was waiting to talk to rehab to see if he qualified for being placed in rehab so he would have care while recovering.. He sounded so much better.
Our library. to which I could walk if I had to, has a basket at the front door into which you can throw magazines that you no longer want. I have thrown car magazines in, gone into the library for 5 minutes and emerged to find them gone. Usually it’s home and garden, sports and guns with a smattering of travel thrown in. I found a stack of the New Yorker there a couple of days ago and picked up three copies. I have browsed through it before, an exercise which is like eating pretzels. They’re not that great, but maybe the next one will be better.
The old New Yorker, like Playboy and many other things. Was better. Or at least we thought so.
The pretzels was funny, Jerry. I don’t much like them either and wouldn’t go out of my way to eat one.
I have been told by health professionals that artificial sweeteners can raise your glucose levels, something that they swore was true but couldn’t explain how it could happen; most just hypothesized that experiencing the sweet taste had a negative effect on your food choices. Today I found a possible explanation:
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20140917/artificial-sweeteners-blood-sugar#1
I am hereby kicking the artificial sweetener habit for at least a month to see what happens. If my glucose levels drop, I’ll report it here.
Over the years I have re read many of my favorite books and writers. Your discussion has been fascinating! But I lack the insight that you guys have, in spite of concentrating on English and American literature in college. You can analyse so well! Reading for entertainment has been my goal. The House of Seven Gables is awfully entertaining. So is Ivanhoe. And on and on.
emb:
I am good friends with Michael Card, who has sold 4 million Christian records, but is also a scholar. He was discussing the woman who was about to be stoned and Jusesu said “He who is without sin, shall cast the first stone”.
When I looked it up in the Bible, the one that I was looking at had a footnote that stated that the story was not in all Bibles. I mentioned it to Mike and he smiled. He said when they were putting the Bible together, there were some groups who did not want to include the story because it would have possibly made Jesus to “appear to be soft on adultery”.
For me, this is one of the most important stories in the New Testament. The other point is that the stories were told as parables. Scientists have proven that the best method to learn something is to have to think about the answer. If someone just gives you the answer, you are more likely to forget it. Between the various translations, a simple answer might have gotten lost, but with the parables, they live on.
Jimmy’s strips make me think too. I like him a lot, but he is not the anointed one! lol
One of the books I read early on was Grapes of Wrath and also Cannery Row. Lots of that period. In fourth and fifth grades, found boxes and boxes of books left at my grandparents by uncle by marriage. No one paid any attention to what I read, since my grand.other read only the bible and my grandfather could barely read.
One aunt became a librarian so I assume she did read but remainder of my aunts and uncles, cousins did not. I devoured books, anything by anyone. I remember loving Moby Dick, the Deers layer, Scarlet Letter, House of z green Gables. Now I hardly read, if you don’t use it, you lose it applies to many things.
Has everyone had a busy day or have we been locked out?
Well, that answers that 🙂 Come on, JJ – we know you’re busy but I think the door is about to close on us!
Ruth Anne, maybe Colorado is a special circumstance. Texas is still unlocked.
Ruth Anne is in Florida. It’s OK in Oklahoma. I took a nap then went back to kitchen cleaning. I am down to stove top and reloading dishwasher and floors.
That sounds discouraging put like that!