Friday, November 25, 2011

orchid drawings by my Aunt Sarah

Dendrobium cucumerinum
“The Cucumber Orchid”
(Australia)
© Sarah Stifler Jesup

Oncidium arizajulianum
2-14-69
(Dominican Republic)
© Sarah Stifler Jesup
Oncidium bicallosum
(Central America)
©Sarah Stifler Jesup
Paphiopedilum niveum
(Malay Archipelago)
3-29-69
© Sarah Stifler Jesup
Dichaea ciliolata
(Panama)
2-25-69
© Sarah Stifler Jesup

Monday, November 14, 2011

The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

This book bowled me over.

I loved the main character, Gertie, from page one. The first few chapters were blissful, but I knew that the rug would be pulled out from under.

When it was (she moved her children from a Kentucky farm to join her husband in a Detroit tenement), the contrast was stark and heartbreaking and infuriating. And all the more so because I know that Gertie's story is true (this book is fiction, but you know what I mean) and was repeated over and over in the twentieth century.

As an embodiment of rural migration to the city, Gertie's story includes many of the horrors of modern life: living on credit, bearing the war between corporations and unions, children becoming "wiser" in the ways of the world than their parents, enduring the prejudices and religious intolerance of neighbors, and witnessing the degradation of quality (mass-produced goods). Plus the war and anti-communist paranoia and lack of equality for women... but it all stays human because we follow Gertie through each descending step, as her oldest child runs away, as two of her children become accustomed to the city and scornful of the farm, and as her peers and her husband drive her to a betrayal of her fourth child, Cassie Marie, that leads to the girl's unbelievably wrenching death.

The dolls that Gertie whittles undergo a transition, too. To make them ever more cheaply and quickly, she bends to modern ideas and inevitably begins to hate the products. Her grand opus, the sculpture-in-progress on which she labors throughout, becomes the symbol of what has changed in her life, and in the end, the scapegoat -- the Judas -- of her choices and failures.

Beautiful, smart, haunting, and sad.