Reading aloud ... be the words
Ideally the following words would be spoken. You would close your eyes, turn off the voices in your head, and just listen as the words are read to you.Being read to, often at naptime or bedtime, slowing down, easing into sleep. Reading aloud, a pleasure we rediscover when we become parents or uncles or aunties. But also, if we are very lucky, a pleasure that we share with other adults.
It’s one of the overlooked luxuries in life and priceless. You might pay someone to read to you, if you had no friends, but how sad that would be. Reading aloud, and being read to, is a joyful time for those who love stories and poems, who love words.
Close your eyes and listen to the words. We read slowly and listen slowly, savoring each gourmet bite. No fast food here, please. Tonight we’re reading Raymond Chandler, here the opening of “Red Wind”:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Now that’s an opening. Maybe not a good bedtime story though. It was Ross Macdonald who said that “Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” Here’s another passage from Chandler, from Farewell, My Lovely:
The smell of sage drifted up from a canyon and made me think of a dead man and a moonless sky. Straggly stucco houses were molded flat to the side of the hill, like bas-reliefs. Then there were no more houses, just the still dark foothills with an early star or two above them, and the concrete ribbon of road and a sheer drop on one side into a tangle of scrub oak and manzanita where sometimes you can hear the call of the quails if you stop and keep still and wait. On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won't go to bed.
The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl. In the evenings I sat on the back steps of a rented shotgun house on Bayou Teche and watched the boats passing in the twilight and listened to the Sunset Limited blowing down the line. Just as the light went out of the sky the moon would rise like an orange planet above the oaks that covered my rented backyard, then I would go inside and fix supper for myself and eat alone at the kitchen table.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon,The moon,The moon,They danced by the light of the moon.
Tags: Dr. Seuss, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Reading, Romance
November 13th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Our Aiea Reading Club’s planning for 2010. In addition to four by McKinney, we’ve a potpourri: The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan; Jude the Obscure or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz; Rain of Gold, Victor Villasenor; Listening Is an Act of Love, Dave Isay; The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan.
We’ll assign youth books for reports, e.g., The Borrowers, Mary Norton; something by Madeline L'Engle; Charlotte's Web, E.B. White; The Secret Garden,Frances, Hodgson Burnett; The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer; From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweller, E.L. Konigsburg.
Any suggestions from you and those out there?
J. Arthur Rath, local reader
November 14th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Wow, Michael, thanks for reminding me how much I love Raymond Chandler. Having been born in LA, I feel his descriptions in my gut.
One of the most romantic things an old flame and I used to do was read to each other - I would read while he cooked, then he would read while I washed up. We read (very quietly!) on long train trips and plane flights. We read on cold winter nights before the fireplace. These days when we are all trying to figure out how to amuse ourselves for less money, this is a tradition I think I'll try with my hubbie!
Arthur, all I can say is the juxtaposition of Feminine Mystique and Tess has my head spinning!
November 15th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Suggestion added to "The Reading Edge," Aiea's reading club's list, thanks to Gayle Sanders:
Paul Tough's "Whatever It Takes, A Quest to Change Harlem and America." It is about Geoffrey Canada whose "Harlem Children's Zone" serves more than 7,000 children, encompassing 97 city blocks. It's an audacious attempt to end poverty within under-served communities--changing everything! Any more suggestions for our us in 2010...to help us gain "The Reading Edge"? Love ideas from any of you:
J. Arthur Rath, local reader
November 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
We'll Also Read in 2010: “Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway (colorless alcohol with Gertrude Stein; gossiping with James Joyce; carousing with fatally insecure Scott Fitzgerald). “The Master Butchers Singing Club,” Louise Erdrich. Small-town life is n-o-t boring. “The Shadow of the Wind,” Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Lucia Graves. Macabre characters linked to grown-up life. “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” Annette Gordon-Reed. Slave family with blood ties to our third president. "A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, "Catfish & Mandala. Odyssey on bicycle.
November 17th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Tattle Tales Time Table:
11.13 @ 9:42-- "The Reading Edge," Aiea Reading Club, unveils 2010 choices, wants ideas for more.
11:15 @ 1:16-- Paul Tough's easy and slick summary arrives.
11:15 @ 3:45-- Five more main courses arrive for our tray.
S-i-g-h...what a site!
J. Arthur Rath, local reader
November 18th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Satisfying though reading aloud may be for some, I prefer the solitary self-absorption of reading to myself, with the words reverberating within mine own brain. The words are still savored and I can go as slow--or fast--as I like.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:14 am
JAR, thank you for all the book tips. PT, I like your description of the joy of reading to oneself, the "solitary self-absorption ... with the words reverberating." I find myself racing through some books, but at times I find a passage that makes me slow down, one that has nothing to do with plot but everything to do with character or setting or just a striking image. The writers I enjoy most take the longest to read, and rereading a favorite book can take even longer!