Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.)
Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s.

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony.

But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern.

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. Ariel Levy says that when she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant.

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.”

Excerpted from The New York Time Sunday Book Review article by Rachel Donadio, March 30, 2008.

Roo Borson, Ten Thousand
Image: Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone

In celebration of Earth Hour, 2008.

Visit Red Star Café for Earth Hour blogging.

Mary Oliver, The Swan

An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Mary Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Oliver has been called “a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms” and “an indefatigable guide to the natural world.”

Image: Mikhail Vrubel, Swan Princess, 1900. Oil on canvas.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing.

A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with his young wife, Hadley, and baby son, Bumby (John), and the ambition to be a great writer. In that small tranquil world there was no need for a formal introduction. Everybody frequented the same cafés and ate in the same restaurants. Acquaintances were easily made and in a very short time Hemingway knew everyone who was someone÷or destined to be.

This was three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe’s cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertrude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une génération perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London.

According to Hemingway, there was nothing lost about his generation. There was no movement, nor any tight bands of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for a cause. There were a lot of people of the same age who had been through the war, and they came to Paris to write or compose or do whatever they had in mind. Paris gave them the freedom they needed.

His territory ran the length of the Boulevard Montparnasse from the Closerie des Lilas at the Observatoire to the Restaurant du Petit Trianon opposite the railway station, and by one route or another down to Saint Germain-des-Prés and the Seine.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway’s rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time in the cafes, drinking and eating rather well for a pittance. His kindest comments are about Sylvia Beach, the American who ran an English bookstore called Shakespeare and Company — it was a hangout for English-speaking authors and others, and was an oasis for individuals seeking English-language books.

He depicts his genteel poverty and his obsession with gambling on horse races. He is deeply in love for most of the book with Hadley, who loses all of his manuscripts at a train station. He courts influential people such as Ford Madox Ford, who is described very unfavourably, and has great admiration for war veterans. His artist friend Pascin invites him to share his models, but he declines.

His friend Ezra Pound is trying to get up a collection for T. S. Eliot to rescue him from mundane bank work. He teaches Pound boxing. He cuts off his friendship with Gertrude Stein, repulsed by her lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. He debates the merits of Dostoevsky with poet Evan Shipman. Ezra Pound charges him with delivering opium to the addicted poet Ralph Dunning, but Dunning rejects the help. Hemingway devotes three chapters to the very annoying F. Scott Fitzgerald and his hawkish and manipulative wife Zelda.

In the bittersweet final chapter, he describes an idyllic time spent in the Austrian Alps with Hadley. Pauline Pfeiffer arrives and an affair develops which eventually destroys his marriage.

It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

This is the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man - a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafés and bookshops that made up the city where he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.

Environmental art is a catch phrase that includes land art, earth-sensitive art and artists working with natural materials. Land art is a phenomenon of the ’60s and ’70s, with artists like Robert Smithson who made his Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, one of those grandiose environmentally insensitive works that transformed the landscape.

Earth-sensitive art is smaller in scale, integrating an assemblage or sculpture in a natural setting, and there is art made with natural materials, which is usually exposed indoors.

~~ John Grande

Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature

Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe.

Grande contends that the egocentricity of modern western society and its infatuation with technology and consumerism have increasingly separated us from the natural world. That separation has an impact on the way our art is conceived, formed, marketed and even displayed. Grande proposes that art return to being more “ecocentric,” reminding us that we are derivative and essentially dependent on natural processes. “In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, and giving these elements an equal voice in the creative process,” he writes, “we are ultimately respecting our integral connectedness to the environment.” Holding such a vision, we will come to see that “nature is the art of which we are a part.”

To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.

As an alternative, Grande proposes that we celebrate the cultural diversity naturally intrinsic to each ecological community or bioregion. Such a preference would nourish the artistic expression of the cultural symbolism and spiritual values unique to that region. It would enhance an intuitive dialogue with nature in the creation of art, encouraging a healthier relationship with the local environment.

John Grande website

I think, a lot of art has as much to do with fashion and the look of things as it has to do with a kind of search for breakthroughs or a higher meaning. In a way we almost have an over-production situation where art is fine and society is in bad shape. It is one of my main concerns right now, The programs are working. Artists are producing. But the actual society is breaking down in many ways as a collectivity and becoming sort of digitalized. We have become digitalized producers and consumers.

Nature is the house that supports us all. We sometimes forget that. The same thing can be said for the world of art. What really nourishes art, more than ideas, is the physical world, and it is the main sustaining feature of any kind of aesthetic, even so-called immaterial ones.

Interview with Mike MacDonald

Interview with John Grande at Green Museum

EcoArt Network

Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande’s reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book, Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.

Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac’s family was French-Canadian, and he was proud of it.

Published in 1967, when Kerouac was at the height of his fame, Satori in Paris tells the story of a ten-day visit to Paris and Brittany in search of his ancestors.

On this hectic odyssey, fascinated by everything and everyone he met, from a faded French beauty in a Montparnasse gangster bar to one of his strange, foppish Breton namesakes, Kerouac experienced a feeling of transcendence, a satori, which was to the Beat generation the culmination of all experience.

Andrew Sarris reviewed Satori in Paris for the New York Times in 1967. Here is is blunt and accurate, in this blogger’s opinion, excerpt.

If the latest spiritual adventures of Jack Kerouac lack the ebullience of earlier explorations, it may be because he is hunting down a pedigree rather than an identity. (”As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name hear, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France.”)

By his own admission, Kerouac was 43 years old when he braved Paris and Brittany. That’s a bit old for a Dharma Bum drunk on Dante’s Beatitude, a Rover Boy with a yen for Zen, a traveler of the fifties who managed to bypass Marx and Freud on the road across the American continent.

Kerouac can still write a blued streak, but his skyrocketing prose no longer illuminates the landscape. He now travels alone, out of his time and place, more like a Babbitt than a beatnik.

He now seems to revel in a calculating callousness, particularly in his country-club put-down of “a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I’ll prove it with this here manuscript called Silence au Lips all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh’”–Ugh, indeed. No there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-and-Grove-go-I feeling in Kerouac’s credit-card sensibility.

At times, his aggressive religiosity resembles Cassius Clay’s: Methinks women love me and then they realize I’m drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I can’t concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I’m a fool in love With God. Yes.”

As for what a satori actually is, he explicates in quasi-religious terms: “Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for ’sudden illumination,’ ’sudden awakening’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.’”

Unfortunately, the illumination comes at the end of a shaggy dog story by a saloon Sartre who manages to get gushy over the straighforwardness of a Paris cab driver.

New York Times Book Review (sign-in may be required)

Hot on the heels of Lance Mackey’s amazing 2008 Iditarod win, back to back with a win on the grueling Yukon Quest, and the second Iditarod championship in a row for Mackey, here are two Alaskan murder mysteries for after-mushing brandy-quaffing by the fire.

Murder on the Iditarod Trail

The Iditarod, sometimes called The Last Great Race, brings thousands of competitors and their dog teams to Anchorage each year. The racers cover 1150 miles of some of Alaska’s roughest, most majestic terrain - jagged mountain ranges, iced-over areas of Norton Sound, frozen rivers, dense forests, desolate tundra and miles of windswept coastline. The temperatures frequently fall well below zero, with winds that can cause complete loss of visibility. Hazards of overflow, long hours of darkness and treacherous climbs and side hills are always present.

It is an arduous sport, but not a deadly one. Until now.

When a veteran musher smashes into a tree and is fatally impaled by a branch, Sergeant Alex Jensen is called in. In the midst of race proceedings, he begins a homicide investigation. The next day, another death. And then another, each one more brutal than the last.

Someone is systematically killing the top competitors. And as the mushers thread their way through the treacherous trails, Jensen races to find the murderer – before more blood stains the frozen Alaskan range.

Jessie Arnold has been training long and hard. This is her big year; for the first time she’s got a shot at winning. But as her position in the race improves, so do her chances of being the killer’s next target. Amid the tensions of the race and the threat of murder, Jessie and Alex Jensen are drawn together.

In a stunning finale, the race and the case come to a close simultaneously, and the savage truth emerges just as the winner crosses the finish line.

Murder on the Yukon Quest

Jessie and her dog team are well prepared for the tough Yukon Quest sled race, but her one regret is that her longtime friend and lover, Alex Jensen, isn’t there to see her off. Alex has been called home to Idaho for a family emergency and Jessie begins the big race without her biggest booster.

Well along the trail, Jessie is stunned to learn that a young novice racer she met at the start has been abducted and held for ransom. The girl’s distraught father has been warned that no one but Jessie Arnold is to be told - especially not the police. Feeling isolated and alone, Jessie must decide what to do in the face of terrible odds.

As other mushers push on toward the finish line, Jessie forges ahead in a race all her own.

Sue Henry is the author of six novels in her award-winning Alaska mystery series: Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Termination Dust, Sleeping Lady, Death Takes Passage, Deadfall, and Murder on the Yukon Quest. She has lived in Alaska for almost a quarter of a century, and brings history, Alaskan lore, and the majestic beauty of the vast landscape to her mysteries. Based in Anchorage, she teaches writing at the University of Alaska.

Poet, musician, novelist, ladies’ man, monk, actor… Leonard Norman Cohen, one of Canada’s most influential cultural icons was born on Sept. 21, 1934 in Montreal. Whether from a mountaintop at a Buddhist retreat in California, on the Greek island of Hydra or strolling along the streets of his beloved ville d’amour, the melancholy bard of popular music has delighted fans worldwide with his poetry, novels and music.

Leonard Cohen’s towering songbook fits no category save its own, but they finally found a house big enough to hold him. Cohen’s overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came during Monday night’s ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Between the inductions of Madonna, John Mellencamp, the Ventures, Gamble & Huff and Little Walter, Lou Reed took the podium to offer a generous tribute to his fellow rock poet.

Reed mentioned William S. Burroughs and Cohen as contemporaries, citing Naked Lunch and Beautiful Losers, and saying “one of them got more attention. I was always surprised by that.” Reed then quoted lavishly from the Cohen oeuvre from typewritten remarks, from First We Take Manhattan, Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Anthem and Cohen’s latest work Book of Longing. It was, appropriately, a most writerly induction for Montreal’s greatest living artist.

Cohen pronounced the induction “such and unlikely event” and “not a distinction I coveted,” while joking that music critic Jon Landau once said “I have seen the future of rock ‘n’ roll, and he is not Leonard Cohen.” Then came the perfect recital of Tower of Song before Damien Rice serenaded the hall with Hallelujah.

The evening was doubly celebratory for Montrealers as it was accompanied by the announcement of Cohen’s first live dates in Montreal in 15 years, with three shows at Place des Arts - June 23, 24 and 25 - as part of this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival. There is also talk of an album.

Details at Montreal Gazette

CBC Digital Archives

Leonard Cohen website

“Hard time goes slowly and painfully and leaves a man bitter…. Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.”

Earlier we blogged about Shakespeare & Company, an English-language bookstore which sits just across the Seine from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. In its two incarnations, it served generations of authors such as James Joyce, Alan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

So it was with sweet anticipation that I picked up Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There at the library, hoping for a personal glimpse into the bohemian life in the eccentric world of George Whitman. The book is subtitled “A Paris Sojourn At Shakespeare & Co.                

“In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafes… That night at Polly’s, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”

Mercer’s visit to Paris was not entirely of his own choosing. In 1999, Mercer was a young crime reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, with a couple of true crime books under his belt. Unfortunately, he had indiscreetly outed one of his contacts and, after receiving a threatening note and experiencing a break-in, he fled for his life. He ended up in Paris, penniless.

It did not take him long to discover the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, where George Whitman was legendary for offering bed and sustenance to those in need.

On the book’s dustjacket, one reads that he “found himself invited to a tea party among the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s. Having been inspired by Sylvia Beach’s original store, the present owner, George Whitman, invites writers who are down and out in Paris to live and dream amid the bookshelves in return for work. Jeremy Mercer tumbled into this literary rabbit hole, found a life of camaraderie with the other eccentric residents, and became, for a time, George Whitman’s confidant and right-hand man.”

Mercer does go on, in this reader’s view, about his own importance and the deprivations he suffered. And his titillation at petty crime can be a little wearing.

Regardless, Mercer’s account of life at the bookstore is entertaining, and his portrait of George Whitman lovingly details his whimsies and contradictions. His stories of the other bookstore denizens - exotic Nadia,  rival  Kurt who is constantly polishing his unfinished screenplay, Simon the neurotic British poet - tell us a little about why they are there: travel and adventure, scholarships, disillusionment. The details are there: the petty rivalries; the formation of lifetime friendships; the many rituals adopted as the “tumbleweeds” adapt to the quirky requirements of bookstore residency: writing their biography, reading a book a day, and helping out with the constant cleaning chores.

But so little is said about the Paris of the imagination which conjures up visions of poets in cafes and painters in garrets.  Perhaps this reader wanted to see more of that magic and less straight journalism, and perhaps reality never has the same loveliness as dreams. After all, during a return to Paris several years later, even Mercer noted that things had changed since he was part of Shakespeare & Company.

Time Was Soft There is rather like a nice postcard of the Eiffel Tower. It leaves out the soul of the city that has inspired more creativity than any other.

In the exhibition catalog: From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig, at the Jewish Museum, the artist’s daughter, Maggie Steig, recalls a game her father used to play with her: “What would you rather be?

”Would you rather be a tree (sturdy, long-lived, a home for birds) or a flower (a short but exciting life, carried in weddings, pressed into books by princesses)?

What would you rather be, Maggie’s father would also ask, “a knee or an elbow?” Or more adventurously: “A pinch of pus or a pile of puke? A scab or a wart?”

Children may know William Steig as the creator of Shrek, but their grandparents can trace the ornery green ogre’s roots through a body of children’s books, New Yorker cartoons and drawings dating back to the Depression.

The child of immigrants, Steig was fortunate to come of age at an auspicious time for cartoonists. An entire industry of penny weeklies was devoted to boosting morale during the Depression and World War II. He was 23 when he began contributing to The New Yorker in 1930, and the magazine continued to publish his drawings, including several covers, until his death in 2003, at 95.

Brimming with scenes of domestic discord and references to Jewish immigrant life in the tenements, Mr. Steig’s early cartoons and drawings were a radical departure from the upper-crust dinner-party gags of previous New Yorker cartoons.

Steig also made a body of work exploring psychological states, some of which were collected in About People: A Book of Symbolic Drawings (1939). He produced deft images that were considered too serious for The New Yorker of the time, distilling amorphous mental conditions into precisely drawn caricatures. In Melancholia (1939) a woman lies on her belly in a child’s wooden cradle, too large for its enclosure, leaning on her crossed arms, bleakly staring into the distance. Our Marriage Will Be Different (1947) proclaims a cartoon showing a couple heading offstage after a song-and-dance-number; we know the show will be over. Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s editor then, called these works “too personal and not funny enough,” but they caught on with devotees of psychoanalysis.

The novelist Henry Miller put it best, in a letter to Steig that is on display at the museum: “You give a sort of geography of the emotional reactions of man, his tiny little globe built around a microscopic ego.”

Steig’s overwhelming sense of isolation found a more resonant expression in a remarkable series of children’s books he started to produce in the late 1960s. Most have become classics, with grown-up ethical and philosophical dilemmas couched in the antics of lovable farm animals. In these works Steig’s sensitive, wavering line finds a parallel in his expressive writing.

The street life of friends inspired his early series of Small Fry cartoons, in which snowball fights, sibling rivalry and fantasies of glory turned cartooning into a form of emotional documentation: here is how children play, tease, laugh, dream.

The children’s books became a way for Steig to combine and reconcile these ideas and sentiments. Animals are the main characters because they are literally fabulous, condensations of personal traits, elemental even to a child. When we read that Doctor De Soto “outfoxed the fox,” we know exactly what that means and why the dentist-mouse was right to mistrust the animal. Such villainy is part of the natural order.

Exaggeration often makes these tales most affecting. The more bizarre the artifice and the more ornate the language, the more potent they become. A ring of power? That’s the stuff of fiction and fantasy. But a talking bone! Who could have imagined such a thing? And what powers might it possess? “I didn’t know you could do magic!” Pearl the Pig breathlessly tells the bone after it rescues her, as if there had been no previous sign in the bone’s use of German, its imitation of trumpets, or in the sounds of its sneezes.

And of course the magic and the villainy are often both close to home, found in pebbles, bones and home-brewed potions, in ordinary animals and simple yearnings.

We are never fully sure of that adult world, except that it will have both trees and flowers, elbows and knees, scabs and warts. And unpredictable pleasures. Pearl the Pig, restored from the clutches of the fox by the magic bone, brings the bone home and the “two chatterboxes” are often whispering or singing together. The bone joins her family.

“And they all had music whenever they wanted it,” Steig concludes, “and sometimes even when they didn’t.”

New York Times review

William Steig at the Jewish Museum