How could I resist the back cover blurb?

“Under Platform 13 in one of London’s busiest train stations is an old doorway covered with peeling posters. Behind it is the entrance to a magical kingdom – an island where humans live happily with mermaid, ogres, and mysterious creatures called mistmaker.” (The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson, Puffin Books, copyright 1994)

The whole first two sentences alone were enough to beckon me to read, and – being a very grown-up grown up – I don’t exactly fall into the 8-12 middle school reader category.

London? A busy train station – that turns out to be King’s Cross – where, behind the commotion of everyday life, a doorway to magic lies guarded by ghosts? A magical island with pretty mermaids and ugly ogres? Not to mention there was a cute wizard on the cover sprouting green hair, like he was growing the chia hair from the old Saturday Night Live skit. It was too much whimsy for me to resist.

So, I read Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 which was published in 1994, quite a while ago. The anglophile in me always squeals happily when finding a good story set somewhere in Britain, and fantasy worlds give writers all sorts of license to entertain. This one promised to bring an extra dose of fun, and it delightfully delivered as I zipped through the lovely, touching read.

There were the so-silly-they-must-learn-a-lesson characters of three sisters, nannies who lose their little charge, a baby boy who’s a prince.There is a nice boy who’s wise beyond his years and a spoiled greedy boy who makes trouble. There’s a kind wizard and a goofy monster and a lonely girl witch who isn’t up-to-snuff as far as little hags in the making go. And they all have wonderfully made up names like when you fake a word in Scrabble.

You know the basic story: the lost boy is kidnapped by selfish baddies whom you desperately want to smack they are so ridiculously selfish. Then, a squad of magicals wander into the real world on a search and rescue mission. Mayhem follows, relationships are formed and inner strengths are revealed. And you laugh, too. Throw in the sweet little fantasy creature called a mistmaker, who sighs mist while exhaling a little ‘ahhh’ sound and, well, there’s your cuteness factor (and, it’s a plot device, too.)

If all of this, the plot and word-wizardry, sounds to you a lot like the Harry Potter books, then know that you are not the first to have noticed. But, it should be noted, that Ibboton’s book was published in 1994; Potter in 1997.) Just do a little Google search if the topic interests you, and you’ll find a few opinions and a nice Ibbotson quote about how she felt about Harry Potter. (Totally, okay with it.) If the story in Platform 13 itself doesn’t lure you, a desire to do a little literary comparison might. If nothing else, it shows how two writers can actually have similar – very similar – ideas, and they can each make that idea sing its own tune.

This was truly a fun read for me, and I hope you check it out. Meanwhile, Ibbotson wrote a lot more fantasy lit that I’d like to enjoy. Do you think it would be okay for a very grown-up grown up to embark on a middle-reader magical book binge?

Poetry – thank goodness – follows us through life.

In grammar school, we read poems, in my case obscure poems that I’ve not seen in since Ms. Harney made me reproduce them on loose leaf paper. Then, in high school, there’s classic stuff to read. And, I suspect, it’s the same poems for many of us. I remember Dover Beach, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and, To My Dear and Loving Husband. That last one was pretty unanimously the favorite of the class on the day we studied it; it must be a perennial favorite of dreamy-eyed schoolgirls in lit classes, an endearingly sweet tradition.

Finally, in college we repeat some of our high school poetry studies and raise it to a new level in fat and extraordinarily heavy Norton anthologies with tiny type. I was not a big one for Tintern Abbey (though I wanted to be) or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which still doesn’t hold much allure for me. Poetry seemed like a great thing…but not something I could really get into right at that time.

In school the teachers tried to pry open my literary mind, wedging a foot and two hands in my brain’s doorway and using full body strength to get me to love and see the plain neatness in poetry. The poor things must have been at it all these years – they must be exhausted by now – because, finally, I see it. Finally, I sigh with satisfaction at the reading of a poem.

Boy, did it take a while! But there it is: poetry relieves us of great burdens and dumps them for us by the emotional wayside. We just need to appreciate it. And the relief is not just emotional; poems hit us up for intellectual understanding of philosophical ideas and repay us with a feeling of catharsis when we get it.

It’s a great feeling. That’s just what I was thinking.  Or, I feel the same way; you express it soooo well! Or, thank God someone understands! There’s the joy we feel upon realizing we are the same in one way or another, and then the near delirium that someone else did the work of expressing it for you. So very good, this feeling, as you know.

Personally, I find this especially true in short poetry. For me this can be poetry of a few lines or maybe a few stanzas. I’m poetry newbie, so I really don’t know what a poet would consider particularly short, but for me it’s readable in one sitting and I feel I’ve gotten it, more or less, at least in one way of interpretation.

So, poems – especially the shorter ones – a nice little medicinal shots of catharsis, bites of good stuff for the needy reader’s mental health. And, let’s face it, we are all needy readers. We all need to be understood, and we all need to express big and small ideas, lofty and annoyingly intellectual or ordinary and fun ones… or whatever falls in between.

Nowadays, I find myself wanting to take a bite of poetry every now and then, or when the bottle seems to prescribe it, just like a little medicinal shot of some healthful liquid for a tired metabolism. Here’s a shot of it, right now. This is for whoever has been so in love, they’ve been no use at all to the world. Maybe you? (Thank you, Hilaire Belloc, for helping us all deal…)

Juliet

Any liberal artsy college senior who’s waited months for the announcement of that year’s commencement speaker in the hopes of hearing an artist’s or philosopher’s name knows the disappointment that can come with some of the ultimate choices.  (In my case it was an alumnus, now a CEO, if memory serves correctly – I barely remember the experience.) And, certainly, many who have sat through a commencement address know how yawn-inducing the occasion can be as you sit under the sun or in an auditorium, mortar-board grinding into your head, waiting to get your hands on the only things that really counts in that ceremony. ‘Commencement speaker’ is, I’m thinking, a thankless job not easily performed well.

So, the gift that is a great speech, like writer David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College address, is keenly felt when it happens, even after it happens. Wallace’s speech became a gift book called This is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

How often do you see these little books with only a few words per page using way too much paper – the really good, heavy kind – and looking pretty, often the best thing about them, and think to yourself, All this for a gift your friend is bound to peruse once and throw to the side of a random shelf? Well, if you end up getting this one, don’t think that way; if ever there was a little book with too many sparsely laid out pages that was worth reading and keeping, this is it. Even the sparse layout works for it.

My own experience reading it came as I sate in an indie bookstore. It was a lovely little shop in so many ways, but often so very empty. There was time for reading the inventory, and one of the new books was Wallace’s. I’m sure that once I realized the theme of the book – roughly, you don’t really know why people do what they do or are what they are, so try to be kind; you’re brain can help you – I grew an attachment to it. So I read the whole thing there, easily done because it’s so short.

It’s a good thing I was alone because I sobbed. Granted, sobbing at the raw truth of what life as a human tends to be is not a rare experience for me. But, finding a book that eloquently expresses it in such a stellar, amazing way is rare. The thoughts jumped at me loudly and expressively, and refreshingly; it was the kind of stuff people don’t often wax poetic on in such an colloquially accessible way. Wallace did.

Take a little look for yourself at Wallace’s words:

“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default setting – then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.”

I’ve long since blanked out on what my college’s commencement speaker said. I’m not even sure I was listening to our CEO alum. But this is it, isn’t it? I didn’t know this corporate head or the many other things he surely was besides. And, I didn’t take the opportunity to find out. Clearly, I missed the chance to put the ideas Wallace speaks of into action. Maybe next time I’ll be more likely to give someone his deserved chance. It probably will help that I can go back to a very thoughtful little book version of a speech that was so good I never threw it to the side of some random bookshelf.