I remember when Frank McCourt’s memoir of his impoverished Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes, came out in 1996. I was working at a Barnes and Noble at the time, and it absolutely sold like hotcakes. It seemed like everyone was reading it, from every walk of life. It had something for everyone: men, women, Catholics, Jews, the Irish, the Yanks God bless em, the rich and the poor. I got a lot of gushing recommendations of it from customers, too, people who had read it and adored it and were buying more copies to give as gifts. Personally, I avoided it. I don’t mind reading the occasional misery memoir — my favorite brand is the addiction memoir — but certain kinds of misery memoir are very hard for me to read and they make me unhappy when I do read them. The worst, for me, are the stories of cruelty to children, children at the mercy of life, children cold and hungry and abused, children sick and dying and dead. I had a premonition that, as wonderful as Angela’s Ashes might be, I probably wouldn’t like it much.

Almost fifteen years later, on recommendations from my mother, my sister, and several other people whose taste I trust, I finally read Angela’s Ashes. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a glorious piece of writing. McCourt begins when he is about four years old and ends when he comes to the United States at about the age of nineteen, and his language throughout is absolutely stunning. You can hear the turn of phrase everywhere he goes, from the streets of New York where he begins, with Italian and Jewish neighbors, to the streets of Limerick where his family emigrates after his baby sister dies. The phrases are never heavy-handed, never a brogue you have to decipher. Instead, it’s a lilt, a twist of the tongue that you can hear in your head as you read, and it’s splendidly done.

Another thing that was lightly done, and such beautiful writing it was worth the price of admission, was the child’s-eye viewpoint of the book. Never did it falter, never once did it seem out of true. I know that in every good memoir, there is editing and mature reflection from the adult point of view, on religion, on fate, on the role parents ought to play in a child’s life — but McCourt makes it seem as if all these thoughts come flowing pure and unadulterated straight from little Frank’s mind, at four, six, eight: his love-hate for his alcoholic father, his confusion about the Faith, his fear of illness, his constant hunger for material and intellectual substance.

But despite the wonderful writing, this book was terribly hard for me to read. I read it with my eyes averted, as it were. The father, who takes the dole money that would scarcely be enough to feed his family in the first place, and drinks it all at the pub, made me speechlessly angry. The mother who can’t feed or diaper her children but can always find money for cigarettes? I know it’s an addiction and one of her few pleasures, I don’t mean to be judgmental, but three of her children died, two of pneumonia, you’d think she could lay off the Woodbines. The society that won’t allow the mother to take the father’s paycheck for him, or better yet, get a job herself? The people in charge of “charity” (what a mockery of a word) who publicly shame those receiving aid? All of it, all of it made me writhe. I couldn’t see any humor or forgiveness in it. I did see power and beauty in the writing, and was grateful for the few who show kindness in the book, and I found (again, like almost every time I read about the past in the West) a renewed thankfulness for feminism, but no. No, I didn’t like Angela’s Ashes much.

But then, I think I was doomed from the start. Are there sorts of books that are hard for you to read, and that you don’t get on with even if you know they’re good?

An entire segment of “Democracy Now” is devoted to an interview with Dave Isay who is in the process of launching Story Corps, one of the largest documentary oral history projects ever donated to the Library of Congress. In this interview, Isay says he is determined to make storytelling a national movement whereby ordinary people document their lives and the lives of those close to them. This segment is worth seeing.

For those who don’t know what it is, Munchausen’s by Proxy is when an individual — usually a mother — deliberately makes another person (most often his or her own preschool child) sick or convinces others that the person is sick. The parent or caregiver misleads others into thinking that the child has medical problems by lying and reporting fictitious episodes. He or she may exaggerate, fabricate, or induce symptoms. As a result, doctors usually order tests, try different types of medications, and may even hospitalize the child or perform surgery to determine the cause. (http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sick/munchausen.html)

Anyway, the reason for that little medical summary is because sickened is about Julie Gregory, who spends much of her childhood in doctors’ offices and hospitals, convinced by her mother that she is sick and slow. But don’t worry, her mother will get to the bottom of this, she will find Julie the best medical care possible until they find what is wrong with her, even if it means invasive surgery, open-heart surgery if necessary. And somehow, after all of it, Julie manages to pick herself up again.

Sickened is terrifying because you can almost see, almost be sucked into that crazy. And how can no one see the truth? How can they? There are some slow moments in the book, specifically near the end, where you want more (more action, more story) but the book is compelling and leaves you wanting more.

Gregory is a good enough writer that I’d love to see if she can write other things. (Other than memoirs I mean. I believe she did write another memoir called My Father’s Keeper that I might check out at some point.)

It’s hard to believe that five years have passed since that fateful day in 2004. I think about it every day and wonder how fate somehow decided to spare me. It’s easy to say things like “You still have things to do in this lifetime” or “It wasn’t your time to go”. Those are the easy things to say. The harder part is struggling still to figure that out.

To say that my life changed that day is a given. How it has changed, I guess is what I am still trying to figure out. As I have written here before, that trip, at the time, was part of a desperate attempt to shake myself out of a haze that I had been in for a long time. I felt that wherever I went, I couldn’t quite do it, so maybe heading to the other side of the world might help.

As I look back to what happened when I got back, where I am now, and where I want to be, I still find it hard to figure that out. And that sometimes makes me mad because I think that I should not only know by now, I should be doing it. After all, the fact that I do have my life, and my health, and that I came very close to losing both shouldn’t allow me to waste any of it. Right? Isn’t that what you are supposed to do? I’ve heard that is part of the survivor guilt that I carry with me, but seriously, shouldn’t I be taking on the world in one way or another?

By August of 2005 I had changed my life completely. I left NY, I moved back “home” and started a new job that after a year I couldn’t stand. Now three years after that, I find myself in a very similar situation.

I wonder sometimes if the move I made back in 2005 would have happened if it weren’t for that trip, or if I would have come to the conclusion anyway. The fact that I was petrified to live and work near water I’m sure had something to do with it, even though by August the acute fear and trauma had lessened. Would I still be in NY today if it wasn’t for that trip?

So, on this anniversary that I always commemorate on my own, I am once again asking myself what the hell I am doing with my life and how do I make it one that counts. I tell myself that if I could survive that day, I can do anything.

I was reading posts for one of the Facebook groups I am a part of and one post really shook me. A guy in Australia was reaching out to other Australian survivors to see if there was anyone interested in forming a group where they could talk about their experience. He went on to say that after five years, he was finally ready to talk about it. Five years. It took me four.

Another poster posted how she this time of year always makes her sad and feels that no one can really understand what happened unless you were there. I’ve felt that way too. In fact, I sometimes feel my own family has forgotten about it. But I don’t like to dwell on the negatives. What I do like to do is focus on the positive that has come out if it all. And the positive things that will continue to come. And the transformation that I can’t deny is about to reach its next step.

Well, I was hoping this post would be an enlightening look back on the last five years, and all the ways I’ve grown and gone after my dreams, and used my story to help people and inspire greatness. Reading back, to me this sounds more melancholy than inspiring. Maybe that means I’m not quite there. Not quite in the place I am meant to be. I guess there is still more work to be done.

I picked this photo up from MSNBC who, in my opinion, had some nice coverage of the Anniversary. These lanterns were released into the sky on Patong Beach in Phuket, Thailand, where I was the morning it happened.

So you’re home for break. And it’s wonderful. But what are you going to do with all that downtime for the next three weeks?

How about do a little reading for pleasure? You know what I’m talking about, right? The kind of reading you can do without a highlighter. Without making annotations. Without a 12lb textbook that hurts your arms as you attempt to read it in bed.

Yeah, that’s right. The good kind. For a reader like me, winter break means catching up on all those books I’ve been missing out on thanks to the hundreds of pages of History reading my professors assign nightly. If you’re looking for some good books to pass that time at home (or on a warm beach somewhere) with the parentals, allow me to recommend a few of my favorites. If you do anything over this break (besides watch TV and eat leftovers) you must pick up at least one of these:

1. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Anyone living in North America has had some experience with Native Americans and the hardships that they face. But how much do we really know about their lives, their world and their culture? “Ceremony” tells the tale of a young Native American war veteran who returns to the reservation where he grew up. To help him cope with the trauma surrounding his experiences, the elders of the community decide to conduct traditional ceremonies and healing rituals. This book provides great insight into the ancient traditions of Native Americans, which is incredibly interesting (who said you can’t learn for pleasure?). It also happens to be a “Penguin Classic” so the writing is most definitely exceptional.

2. What is the What by Dave Eggers
This recommendation comes straight from CollegeCandy’s wonderful editor. She is also probably the tenth person to recommend it, so I decided I had to give it a go. “What is the What” is a fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, a real hero and refugee of the Sudanese civil war. After years trying to piece a life together in refugee camps, Valentino makes his way to America, where he finds that perhaps the hardships of making a life there may be greater than his time in Africa. Most people believe that once a refugee is in America or another “safe” land, their life becomes a fairytale; as we see in this story, that not the case. “What is the What” is a fascinating story and a powerful read; definitely a good one to sink your teeth into over the break.

3. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
Everyone is familiar with the Wizard of Oz and, of course, the mysterious villain, the Wicked Witch of the West. But, just like any other villain, the Wicked Witch has her own story. Gregory Maguire has taken this strange, misunderstood character and weaved an entire biography, explaining every evil thing she does. I just love the creativity of the author and how he leaves no stone unturned, from her strange color to her capture of Dorothy and her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch. The musical “Wicked,” which was inspired by the book, is probably more well-known than the book and certainly a lot “brighter” as far as storyline goes, but the book is captivating. From the way Maguire addresses social issues to creative way he weaves in the story of Oz as we know it, you won’t be able to put this down.

4. Get into a SERIES!
This one is a bit more general, but with all the free time you’ve got for the next few weeks it’s the perfect time to get into a series. There are so many out there, but here are a few recommendations:
Twilight: Duh. The books aren’t worthy of a Pulitzer, but the story will definitely suck you in.
Harry Potter: If you haven’t picked up a HP book, now’s the time. Regardless of the audience these books were intended for, anyone and everyone will enjoy this series.
Something Borrowed: It’s a total beach read. Your typical “girl in New York on her quest for love,” but they’re good. And quick. And really, really good.

There are tons more out there, so get to that bookstore and search!

4 & 1/2. Going Bovine by Libba Bray
I don’t care if I reviewed this one a month ago (that’s why it’s only a half).  YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK. I find myself still thinking of it and how wonderfully it is written. The lesson in this book is just so absolutely profound. I don’t think I can even write down in words how awesome it is and the feeling I got while reading the ending. Just read it. Do it,.

Ah, the holidays. Taking a break and letting things just kinda simmer. I have some new edits to consider but nothing major.

Yet another photo of the exact setting where my final thoughts (for my upcoming book) will take place early in the day on New Years Eve, 2010.

I feel a cleansing coming on – one that’s been about half a decade in the making, and one that will be so very romantic and cathartic that I’ll never be the same, and in a truly wonderful way.

Perhaps this all seems a bit dramatic to you – and I understand if that’s the case, but remember that you too have deep parts of yourself that others might look at as “different” or “weird”, but who cares? It’s your life, isn’t it? Exactly. I’m not working hard on my book or this blog for those who won’t understand…I’m spilling my thoughts in these pages (whether virtual or actual pages) for those who will appreciate and understand them in one way or another.

As Montreal is just days away, I feel like a caterpillar shedding the skin to become a butterfly. That sounds cliche’, I know, but it’s the truth. I really hope that I’ll be able to convey my thoughts through words in the book I’ve created, since that’s why any writer does what they do – to convey their message in the best and most effective way possible, to reach readers most profoundly.

I suppose I’ll simply let it all out, and not “try too hard”, for fear of doing it less than the utmost justice.

Time (and the journey) is beautiful and heart-wrenching at times, though I’d have it no other way. Now back to my manuscript on this calm and relaxed Boxing Day of 2009.

- Jeff Emmerson

One year, when I was about four or five, there was a huge boxs with my mom’s name on it under the Christmas tree.  It was a shiny silver wrapped package and it was from my dad.  My mom is a kid at heart and loves, loves, loves, gifts.  She was like a little kid opening the box, with absolutely no idea what could be inside.  We all stopped opening our packages to watch her.  She opened it and inside she found a lot of newspapers and another package wrapped up in silver paper.  She opened that one and she found more crumpled newspapers and another box!  By the time she got to the fourth box and still had not found a present, she was really mad at my dad.  She thought it was a mean joke.  He said it wasn’t and urged her to continue looking for her present.

She opened about three more boxes, each smaller than the one that had held it.  Still no gift.  My dad urged her to keep on going, although by then she had tears in her eyes and was convinced that she was the victim of a cruel joke.

Finally, she came to a very small box wrapped in metallic gold paper, with a large bow on it.  The bow, in fact, was bigger than the box!  Inside that box was a wedding ring set.  She cried as she tried it on.

When my parents had gotten married years before, there had been no money for a wedding ring so my father had taken a silver quarter and made a ring for my mom and a matching one for himself.  That’s what my mom had worn for almost ten years until that one Christmas when she got her “real” wedding set with a diamond!  She was so happy that it made the rest of us happy for her.  I remember crying because my mom was so happy.

That year was one of many happy Christmases in my past.  My brothers and sisters and I were all together with both our parents.  We had each other and we were glad we did.  There were more years like that one but soon enough, reality would creep in on our family and the happy times would end.  But that one year was a sweet one.  No wonder it is a favorite Christmas.

Christmas is another international season that Thai people also snatch this opportunity to celebrate. In fact, we celebrate all occasion whether American, Chinese, and Thai owns. Hence, it should not be surprised to see lots of people were going out to have a party with friends or to photograph road embellished with lights in the city. To be honest, it was my first time that I went out at such a special night.

Siam Center in Christmas night

The Siam Center area was not hectic after all, not until Siam Paragon. We have to walk through the flood of people and I started to ponder if we will have a space to take a photo like a couple of weeks ago. It turned out to be as I had predicted. I hardly hit the shutter, for I felt it was uneasy to take photos in such a status quo. I was so puzzled to see people flooded into the city to celebrate for Christmas. New Year Count Down is coming and it must be more jam-packed!

We spent our time there less than I expected and we were all got defeated, agreeing to get home. Anyway, at least, I could have dinner with friends and got some (though not good enough) photos back. I was not disappointed after all.

Downtown Skyline of Lafayette, Indiana

Today it’s time for a visit to Tippecanoe County, where I first touched down in Indiana. On my first visit to the state, I was so ignorant of its geography that I booked a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago to West Lafayette. The little plane (maybe a dozen passengers) flew so low that we navigated by following the highway from Chicago to the Purdue airport, which apparently no longer has commercial airline service.

Another puzzler for me when I first got there was the way people with expensive homes (deans and the like) were extremely proud of living on ravines. What is this thing with ravines? I wondered. Well, situated in the northern, glacier-flattened half of Indiana, Tippecanoe County does not have a lot of interesting terrain. Ravines are about it.

Tippecanoe is a word that many school children would recognize because of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Few campaign slogans are remembered 170 years later, but that tribute to William Henry Harrison has a pleasing rhythm to it. Should any student wish to learn more about Harrison and the Battle of Tippecanoe, there is always the redoubtable Ginger Smith’s Fourth Grade Class website, created by the students of Battle Ground Elementary School.

Battle Ground is also the site of Historic Prophetstown in Prophetstown State Park, with its 1920s Farmstead, now offering farm produce.  Located south of the town is the Tippecanoe Battlefield Museum, a site run by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. The association also oversees the Fort Ouiatenon Blockhouse and the Feast of the Hunters’ Moon. In Lafayette, the Association runs the Moses Fowler House and the Frank Arganbright Genealogy and Research Center, 1001 South Street. Conveniently located across the street is the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. Over the years all of these organizations have partnered with the Indiana Humanities Council on numerous projects, as have the Tippecanoe County and West Lafayette Public Libraries.

You can find a lot of information about these venues and more on the website of the Lafayette-West Lafayette Convention & Visitors Bureau, homeofpurdue.com. Purdue? Oh, yes, Purdue. That brings me back to my first experience in Indiana, which was at Purdue. There I met my husband, Joel, and, 36 years later, I’m not sure whether to praise or blame the university. But, in this season of joy, let us be charitable. Kudos to Tippecanoe County!

Going Nowhere Carefree Wanderlust APPETITE FOR A STROLL.

Travelers.  Wanderers.  Immigrants.

We were surrounded by the unfamiliar and my soul was longing for something to hang on to in this place where all of my cultural cues were misplaced.  The songs were unrecognizable.  There was no snow.  It was midnight and the neighbors were banging on the radiators upstairs in jubilation.  It was Christmas morning and I was thousands of miles away from home.

In the following years as I became acclimated to my surroundings, I began picking up on the nuances of  Noche Buena.  Families would gather late – for a huge meal before going to midnight mass.  It was one of two nights all winter that the heat in the apartment building would be on all night long.  I had to come up with a way that we could stay up late too – albeit our family gathering was only the four of us…sometimes more depending on whatever ex-pats we could host.

Each trip Stateside in the following years, I would visit a favorite children’s book store and leave with armloads of stories about Christmas.  That stack of books became the center piece of our attempt at making the wrong feel right. We had something to keep us up till midnight.  We could eat and we could read together as a family.

Once permanently removed from the foreign back to the familiar – it all fell apart again.  Here there was too much to do.  Almost too much family but we couldn’t say that outloud without great misunderstanding.  We missed the huddling together to read but Best Boy and Shop Girl were churlish teens by then and bored with the whole routine anyway.

Somewhere – sometime – we caught the NPR stories.  We replaced our books with the radio stories that meant Christmas to us.  Do yourself a favor…sit…be quiet…and listen.  That is what Christmas is about anyway.  Listening with our hearts.  My Christmas gift to you – a link.

Audio book for
celeb memoir? No need. Hear
her voice in my head.

At my mother’s suggestion, I started my book back in July 2008, right after I was released from my three week stay at the mental hospital.  She and my sister (a licensed mental health counselor) encouraged me, telling me that my story needed to be told, and that it could help other families going through the same situation that they did.

Faced with the prospect of their daughter, wife, and mother tripping into the unknown world of mental illness, they were desperate for anything that would give them a clue about what I was experiencing and what they could do to help me.  And, more importantly, what to expect. Sadly, there was nothing out there to help them understand the detail they were seeking.

There are a few well-written books out there about mental illness in general, written by mentally ill people. But their perspective was all wrong for the specific situation my family found itself in.  An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamision was more along the lines of the impact of mental illness on professional careers and on life after the psych ward. Though an excellent read, there were few gritty details about the day-to-day stay at a mental hospital and very little about the actual delusions themselves (did she hear voices? What did they say specifically?).  Manic by Terri Cheney focused on her delusions a little. Her delusions weren’t laid out in a specific languages format of “he said this, she said that”. Again, no specific voices telling her she was a Mermaid. None of the books I read detailed exactly what the voices were saying (if there even were any voices) and none of them treated the voices as ESP with specific people ranging from bosses to spectacular friendships with the Dalai Lama, Oprah, etc.

None of them feature delusions identical to mine.  Nobody thought they were a Mermaid named Pangea. There were no talking fish, dogs and cats.  No green-skinned people.  No ESP. No intimate conversations with the likes of the Gateses.  And, most importantly, no involuntary commitments to a psych ward.

My 300 page memoir, I Thought I Was A Mermaid, is a chronological breakdown of the nature of my descent into madness.  Insanity from A to Z. Unlike the books described above, because my meltdown was so fresh, I was able to pinpoint various stages of my breakdown with shocking accuracy.  Sadly,  most of the other authors didn’t suffer immediate breakdowns: they were long-drawn-out affairs starting in most cases around puberty and culminating in the actual book-writing many, many years after their initial onset.  My details were “fresh off the press”, so to speak.  My entire nervous breakdown, almost day by day, blow by blow, laid out for the world to see.

Many, if not most, of the mental illness memoirs, tell the story in terms of years and decades. Generally, their stories start at around puberty, which coincides with the onset of most genetic forms of mental illness. Mine, with its onset in the late 40’s, is far easier to write a chronological account of, given its short, compressed nature. The timeframe of my initial breakdown was so compressed (February 2008 to June 2008) that the storytelling behind it is much easier for me.

Initially, my plan was to end the book at the point where I walk into my first Writers Group and announce to them that I’m going to write a book.  At first glance, that seems to be the logical breaking point for my story.

However, I reconsidered that viewpoint today, realizing that the true end is actually the end of my first visit to my psychiatrist. From that point forward, the story is about maintenance of my relative “sanity”, adjustment of medication and medication side effects. Nothing really exciting in that stuff, especially compared to talking fish and friendship with Oprah. I realized today that the timing for the finish of my story is actually the point where the maintenance begins.  So today, I’m officially done with my book, with the exception of the never-ending task of editing.

Wish me luck in finding an agent and publisher!

Aah, I'm speechless. Stay tuned for my actual view.

I just confirmed with the hotel – we’ll be on the 28th floor with the city view of Montreal!!!

I get the feeling that at some point, I’ll just sit in the window, overlook the city, and record my thoughts on my voice recorder for posterity, as well as to help put the finishing touches to my Autobiography.

Wow, am I ever grateful for all the blessings in my life! I’m not a religious man, but I sure am a person who appreciates these moments along the journey.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! MAY 2010 BE YOUR BEST YEAR YET!

- Jeff Emmerson

Ed Lazar was a young CPA living in Phoenix in the late 1960’s.  He was married to Susie and they had two children – a boy named Zachary and a daughter named Stacey.  Things seemed to be going along okay for the young couple, but Ed was restless and wanted more.

Hoping to grab the brass ring, Ed became involved with Ned Warren, a less-than-desirable character, in land deals.  Ned had a shady past, including some jail time for fraud.  It turns out the land deals were more like Ponzi schemes and over-run with fraud.  When investigators started closing in, Ed decided to cooperate and testify against his former business partner, Ned.

Ed refused protection and testified before the grand jury.  His testimony went fine and he was told to come back a week later.  He never made it – he was found brutally murdered in a parking garage stairwell the day before he was to testify again – February 21, 1975.

Ed son’s Zachary was six years old at the time and doesn’t really remember his father or anything about the events.  In a search to know his father, he spent countless hours researching the events that led up to his murder.  Evening’s Empire is the result of all of his research.

I really do understand Zachary Lazar’s motivation for researching and writing this book, but it just didn’t work for me.  I found the details of the land fraud schemes confusing and dry reading.  There were so many people mentioned that it was just impossible to keep up with who all of them were.  Most of the book is told in the third person, but every once in a while, it would change to first person for a short period and I found that confusing as well.  I think there’s a good story in all the land fraud in Arizona at the time, but for me, Evening’s Empire wasn’t it.

Review copy provided by Amazon Vine.  I am an Amazon Associate.

One of my favourite artists died this week – a painter who was an outstanding colourist. Here is his obituary from the Times:

Craigie Aitchison was one of those visionary individualists whom Britain throws up from time to time. The first sight of a picture by him might suggest a dangerous naivety, an outrageously childlike religiosity, a decorative triviality, even technical incompetence; but not for long.

His paintings soon reveal a spontaneity of response followed into supremely calculated form and effect; the intensity that only comes from deep experience; and the brilliance of the true artist who can simplify his images almost to abstract shapes, yet intensify their communication.

Craigie Ronald John Aitchison was born in 1926, the younger son of a distinguished lawyer, Lord Aitchison, who was Labour MP for Kilmarnock, 1929-33, and Lord Advocate for Scotland during those years. He died when Craigie was 15.

His son abandoned his original inclination towards dress design since he felt he could not draw adequately. The possibility of studying architecture arose, but finally Craigie — who had frequently read with enthusiasm his father’s legal papers, including the appeals against conviction for murder in which his father specialised — decided to follow his father into law, and read British history and jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh, then at the Middle Temple in London. However, he found himself more interested in the human drama of the law than in legal niceties, and began to take painting lessons from Adrian Daintrey.

Aitchison entered the Slade School of Art in 1952 as a fee-paying student, and was delighted to be there — while resisting instruction in painting, anatomy, perspective or art history. However, he did appreciate advice from Robert Medle and accepted Sir William Coldstream’s example, as taught in his select class there, of basing portraiture on strict measurement; Aitchison subsequently always began his portraits from the eyebrows outward.

Aitchison won an Italian government travelling scholarship in 1955, and the light, the landscape, and the art — particularly the early Italian religious works of stylised simplicity — were a revelation to him. Using vivid colours such as purples and yellows as his starting point — and Aitchison is one of the outstanding colourists of the 20th century, even including abstract painters — he began to produce portraits; still-life paintings; landscapes often with reminiscences of Tulliallan, his family home in Scotland; and contemplative religious subjects; mostly Crucifixions, often backed by the elements of this familiar landscape, with its distant profile of Holy Island. These were pared down to minimal detail, with the understated simplicity of early Italian devotional painting. Their strong colour and suffused emotional ground at first recalled Odilon Redon; later, as the highly calculated edges of his forms became sharper, the comparison with Matisse suggested itself.

After early inclusion in group shows at Gimpel and Gallery One, a fellow student, Michael Andrews, commended Aitchison to Helen Lessore, who gave him shows at her Beaux Arts Gallery in 1959, 1961 and 1964; while the Arts Council included his paintings in its New Painting exhibitions in London and on tour, from 1958 to 1961.

An admirer of Gauguin — after Piero della Francesca and Giotto — Aitchison found non-white people “a thousand times more exciting to paint”, if only for the way their skin set off the colours of their clothes; it was the availability of such friends as models that drew Aitchison from the clear air of Arran to set up his studio in South London in Kennington, in a house full of brightly coloured kitsch and bric-a-brac.

It was always inhabited by one, two or three Bedlington terriers, which he loved to paint and which remind one irresistibly of the dog keeping silent watch over the body of a nymph in Piero di Cosimo’s Mythological Subject (otherwise known as The Death of Procris), in the National Gallery.

He also bought a house — with its own chapel — at Montecastelli San Gusme, near Siena.

Despite the suspicions of some critics confronted by Aitchison’s economy of means, his art won a devoted and affectionate following far beyond his many friends from all walks of life; its colour chords became ever more singing, its compositions ever more subtly solid and its objects of contemplation, especially the Crucifixions which could be like flayed skins, ever more audaciously minimal, without losing their intensity or their innocence, or becoming precious. Aitchison maintained a blithely timeless vision, despite his thoroughly contemporary means of expression. “Ever since the world began, there have been the same birds on the same trees,” he said.

He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1978, and a full academician in 1988. He was given a retrospective of his work from 1953 to 1981 at the Arts Council Serpentine Gallery in 1981-82. He won the RA’s Korn Ferry International Award in 1989 and again in 1991, the Jerwood Foundation Award in 1994, and the Nordstern Art Prize in 2000.

In 1996 he was commissioned to paint a mural of Calvary — a landscape illuminated by a mystical light — for the Gothic Revivalist Truro Cathedral in Cornwall. Other sacred works by him are held by Liverpool Cathedral and the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.

In 2003 the Royal Academy held a major retrospective of his work, which was so popular that the RA shop produced cups and saucers, ties, mouse mats and memo pads bearing Aitchison designs. He said he did not mind as long as they asked for his approval first.

Aitchison’s popularity increased as the years went by, and there were solo exhibitions at the Albemarle Gallery, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, a retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, the Timothy Taylor Gallery, the Waddington Galleries and the Long & Ryle gallery among others.The Tate owns four of his works and others are in public collections in Aberdeen, Birmingham, Glasgow, Blackpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Cape Town and Melbourne. He was appointed CBE in 1999.

I delight in his work and am very proud to have a couple of pieces….

Author:

Neufeld, Josh

Title:

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge

Publisher & Date:

Pantheon, 2009

Recommended Age Range:

14 and up

Plot Summary:

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge introduces readers to seven real-life survivors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

Reader Appeal:

This graphic novel would appeal to fans of nonfiction, memoir, biography, history and graphic novels such as Persepolis, Maus, The Photographer and Waltz with Bashir.

Literary Merit:

This compelling graphic novel is historically accurate and introduces readers to history, biography, first person narrative and memoir in an innovative way.  The graphic novel is only one piece of this story, as in the afterword, one learns that it was originally published online with links to “podcasts, YouTube videos, archived hurricane tracking reports,” “video and audio interviews with the characters, a Hurricane Katrina resource list, and an active blog,” available at www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge

Personal Note:

The personal nature of this story really moved me, especially since my first trip to New Orleans was in June 2006, for the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference.  The trip remains one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences of my life.  I was only able to attend the conference and trip through an amazing program – the ALA Spectrum Scholarship.  In an effort to give back, I asked all of my friends from library school who were attending the conference if they wanted to join me in volunteering for a library clean-up project while we were out there.  About ten of us ended up helping to gut the Nora Navra Branch Library so that it could be ready for rehabbing.  The place had not been opened since the flood, so we all had to wear Tyvek suits to help with the gutting. After the gutting, we were given a secret tour of the 9th Ward, much of which was similar to scenes that Neufeld captured in “A.D.”

[Reposted and modified for your enjoyment.]

It’s Christmas once again and the world is beginning to fill with magic just like I remember from my childhood. Secrets hide behind every corner –good secrets, not the bad ones; grownup secrets about the gifts that are hiding in packages and then the secrets of the children hiding something “naughty” they did that they think no one knows about—especially Santa.

One year, when I was about to turn five, my parents put a miniature tree downstairs in the basement which had been converted into bedrooms for my three brothers. We had not ever had any kind tree, other than the big one we had in the living room and it made us feel that the small tree was really special…two trees in one house! My mother helped us decorate the tree with tiny little ball ornaments. They didn’t put lights on it and it was kind of plain looking so my mom put some little packages she had wrapped up for us under the tree. I remember that the small presents, all wrapped in shiny paper, really made the tree look even more special to us kids.

One weekend, a little over a week before Christmas, my mother and father went shopping. When they had been gone a while, my brothers started talking about the presents. They said we should each open one present. We all had to open one because, according to my brothers who were all older than my sisters and I, if we had all participated, none of us would tattle on the others and we wouldn’t get spanked. They said once we had each opened a present, they would wrap them all up so that my parents would never find out that we had opened them. It would be our secret.

It took them a long time but they finally convinced us to do it. I was elected to be the first to open a package. I picked a shiny red one with a red and green plaid bow. Inside was a white box that now I recognize as one for jewelry but at that time I didn’t know what might be inside. I opened it and found a layer of white fluffy cotton. Once I picked up the cotton, I saw a gold shiny key. On the round end of the key were little pink flowers and clear rhinestones. I picked it up and realized it was a pin to wear on my clothes. Just as I began to smile, we heard the back door open and my parents came in. Before we could hide the evidence, my mother was down the stairs watching us try to hide the package.

She was so angry! She kept asking me why I had done it. I told her everyone was going to open one. In fact, my sister had her box in her hand, ready to open it. My brothers denied it and told her that they were trying to get me not to open one but I wouldn’t listen to them. Besides being angry, my mother was really hurt. I could see it in her eyes. She was disappointed in me and I knew she wanted to cry. The look in her face made me want to cry, or maybe it was knowing that I was going to be spanked! Then she and my father said Santa was not going to bring me any presents because I had been such a bad girl. That was worse than a spanking. I cried even more.

That was a Christmas  I won’t ever forget.   I hurt my parents; I found out that my siblings wouldn’t always get me out of trouble; and I disappointed Santa!