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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2023:Books and Music
By
Published: Dec 03, 2020
Category:
Holiday
SPOKEN WORD
Ruth Draper and Her Company of Characters: Selected Monologues
Ruth Draper invented Lily Tomlin. Like this: In a grand 1920’s home, a New York society matron’s Italian lesson is just beginning.”‘Midway along the pathway of our life,’” she recites with a trill, “’I found myself in a forest dark’ — we say: a dark forest, don’t we? — ‘because the direct way was lost.’” But her reading of her beloved Dante (“Dante and Shakespeare: they seemed to know everything”) proceeds no further. First she calls a friend for a quick gossip. Then she consults with the cook, plays with a new puppy, gets her husband’s golf clubs to him, disposes of symphony tickets, thrills to her lover’s call. And so on for 28 minutes as Ruth Draper, the grande dame of the one-woman show, adjusts her voice for each caller and interloper so precisely that, by the end, we know almost everything about this woman — and her world. When a companion said of a Draper performance, “Have you ever seen such acting?” George Bernard Shaw shot back: “That’s not acting, that’s life!”
BOOKS
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World
Twenty years ago, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, decided that trees were more than grist for tables and paper, and he began to lead tours of the forest. He learned that an individual tree is an endangered species, likely to die young. A community of trees is a forest, and there a tree can live for hundreds of years. In that community, “trees experience pain and have memories, and tree parents live together with their children.” They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web.” And much more.
Pema Chodron: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Pema Chodron says that fear is our friend. Or that it’s “a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” Instead, “we freak out when there’s even the merest hint of fear.” Which only makes our situation worse. And then everything falls apart — “we run out of options for escape.” But this crisis isn’t just a test, it’s a healing. We can, we think, “solve” the problem. Only we can’t. And the sooner we learn that, the sooner we’ll feel better.
Alice Munro: Dear Life
When I love a book, I like to say that I started reading and didn’t stop until I was done. Not with these stories. You can’t. One a day is a full meal, and then you have to go away and process it. Because these aren’t really stories — they’re compressed novels, entire lives told in 30 pages. Others writers do something like this, but I can’t think of another who does it within the apparent frame of a traditionally told story.
J.H Moehringer: The Tender Bar
His father, a noted disc jockey, was out of his mother’s life before J.R. was old enough to remember that he was ever around. (“My father was a man of many talents, but his one true genius was disappearing.”) His mother, suddenly poor, moves into her family’s house in Manhasset, Long Island. In that house: J.R.’s mother, grandmother, aunt and five female cousins. Also in that house: Uncle Charlie, a bartender at Dickens, a Manhasset establishment beloved by locals who appreciate liquor in quantity — “every third drink free” — and strong opinions, served with a twist. A boy needs a father. If he doesn’t have one, he needs some kind of man in his life. Or men, because it can indeed take a village.
Citizen: An American Lyric
Six years before there was a Black Lives Matter movement, Claudine Rankine was its Poet Laureate. A sample:
It’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter.
The cashier says, Sir, she was next.
When he turns to you he is truly surprised.
Oh my god, I didn’t see you.
You must be in a hurry, you offer.
No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.
Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent
Furst is a master of a genre that is pretty much his own invention: historical fiction set in a thriller frame. This time out, the main character is Carlo Weisz, who has fled his native Trieste and is now a reporter for Reuters in Paris. He’s also on the editorial board of Liberazione, a Resistance newspaper edited in Paris and distributed in Italy. In the beginning of the book, the head of the paper is assassinated; Weisz is his logical successor.
MUSIC
John Prine: The Tree of Forgiveness
The title is the name of a bar John Prine imagined in Heaven — a sign of his boundless humanity and originality. And if there’s a heaven, he’s there now.
Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
This CD is the poster child for Head Butler. Recorded when Van Morrison was 23, it’s a mystical space shot hurled aloft on butterfly wings and anchored by a voice that starts in Ireland, transits to Mississippi and ultimately resides in that place called Genius. Listen.
Cesaria Evora
It was her fate to be born on a sun-blasted island. Geography was destiny for her — her voice was the living soul of Cape Verde. But Cape Verde is also the reason that one of the greatest singers on the planet died without being better known. Watch/listen.
Jennifer Berezan
“ReTurning” is one idea, 52 minutes long, not quite a loop, definitely a drone. The idea is hymnal — a chant “returning…. to the mother of us all” — with occasional solos in several languages. It is instantly mesmerizing and calming. Watch/listen.
HOLIDAY MUSIC
Phil Spector: A Christmas Gift for You
The best pop holiday album ever made.
Christmas with the Tallis Scholars
Founded in 1973 by Peter Phillips, this English group has released 50 CDs and given 1,600 concerts. Over the decades, the Scholars have become the gold standard of Renaissance music. As this recording proves.
