The Konigsburg Collective.

E.L. Konigsburg passed away last month. Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you've no idea what I'm talking about. I hope the name sparks something in you. I hope you'll keep reading anyway.

E.L. Konigsburg wrote children's books, two of which have won the Newbery Medal and another the Newbery Honor (she lost to herself that year), and three that are among my top ten favorites of all time, the first books I recommend when any parent or child is asking. In short, she's good. She's the author I want to be — and the one I pretend to be, when by myself on long car rides where sometimes (I don't know, it just happens, you can judge me, really I know) I talk out loud, pretending to be an expert on the writing process so that I can better understand it myself.  But I didn't even know she was gone until I came home to an email from a blog reader. She wrote,

I follow your blog and remembered that you once mentioned your admiration of the author E.L. Konigsburg, whom I also love. I am an aspiring writer of children's stories, a young mother, and I've claimed E.L. Konigsburg as more than a muse through my process, so much so that I was about to write her a letter, like today. And to my surprise, I found out she passed away about a week ago. But I'm related to no one, nor friends with anyone who would understand the great loss I feel at her death. So, you popped into my head and I didn't know if you knew or if you will think this is weird but sometimes you just need someone who gets it, you know? I feel there should be headlines and national readings of her work but, alas, an extraordinary storyteller has died, and I feel it is the saddest secret.

I read Mallory's email as the sun set against the remnants of a day-long storm. Outside the sky was still thick with bruisy black clouds and the light  only managed to cut under them horizontally in great dense discs of orange-gold, making for that lovely strength of light that throws everything into severe relief softened by the late hour. None of which is relevant except to say that I read Mallory's email and then stared out the window for a very long time afterwards. 

E.L. Konigsburg passed away last month, and I hadn't heard a thing. I started researching, wanting to know more, demanding the world provide it. I didn't find much — The New York Times ran an obituary, Publisher's Weekly paid their dues, there are a handful of blog posts marking the date and the Tumblr tag is full of loyal reblogs in her name — and what I did find wasn't the substance I wanted, or maybe just not the substance I thought necessary to reflect an author as substantial as E.L. Konigsburg. Because that's what it always was, wasn't it? Real, solid, straight stuff. Even in the most outrageous situations. What I love about her writing is its unflinching directness while maintaining an essential innocence, that so many of her plot lines involve hard things, tricky things, real things that in this world you need to understand—but she does not bludgeon you bloody with them the way so many other books do, hitting you upside the head and right in the stomach in their determination to prove to you that they are a Very Important Book Dealing with Very Important Things. No. With Konigsburg you follow them quietly, carefully, in a spirit of observation and deduction so that in the end you have begun to interpret them in your own right; not feeling victimized, but free. She is the paragon of what I in my mind have always deemed "intelligent fiction," stories that triumph passion for the world around you down to the deepest details, with a reverence for what we have been given and what more we have to give in engaging with it and making it our own. Stories that reiterate the joy of living, that, like Monica Hesse wrote in a nearly perfect paragraph for the Washington Post, "knowledge is worth possessing, even when it's not publicized, even when it's not Tweeted. It carries its own inherent worth." 

For me, Konigsburg has always been a refuge. I could recount for you any number of afternoons I have fled to the library and straightaway to the Juvenile stacks, K shelf, and I'm not just remembering my elementary school years.  My very last semester of University I returned nearly desperately to The View from Saturday because I knew it would never disappoint me even when I so often found some "higher" texts of the newer literature always did. And that idea, this idea that I could read about Mrs. Olinski and The Souls on their way to Academic Bowl stardom as a sixth grader feeling like I'd discovered the secrets to all words and here, thirteen years later, not only find its magic steady but thirteen times stronger?

Mallory was right. There should be headlines and national readings. There should be library memorials and book club revivals. But there aren't. So between the two of us we endeavored to come up with an offering of our own, which is why starting now until however long it takes us we will be remembering one new Konigsburg book per month, trading small essays in tribute to her bibliography under the banner of The Konigsburg Collective. A book club of sorts, I suppose you could say, though there's no pressure to follow along exactly or even at all. Maybe it's just an excuse for us to read them all over again. Maybe it's an excuse for you to read them for the first time. At any rate . . . one book, once a month . . . can't hurt. And I promise we'll all be the better for it.

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Want to get a head start? The Konigsburg Collective sets off where so many of us first began—Mallory will be back this month with The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. 

field notes // kensington.

london 2012.

Just a small collection of my daily walk from last year in London before I get too far into this new one. Mostly from my phone, unfortunately. January Resolution: take actual pictures with actual camera.

milk, etc.

In England you can buy your milk by the pint, in little jugs exactly like the American gallon size except  obviously not gallon-sized because it is a pint (that's the point) and it fits in the side door of a refrigerator in line with mustard and jam and the pesto jar. I am telling you this because it is one of my favorite things in a small way, and because if I do not blog my Aunty Jules will call my mum and together they will begin to plot the ultimate demise of the turkey feather girl who (admittedly) has lived two months too long at the top of these posts and it is a new year and a new beginning and a new me. Or so the magazines say.

Another one of my favorite things is to walk across bridges and also to watch water move, and it is no secret that I love the Thames even when mostly it is brown and muddied and murk. I like people watching in train stations and reading books on the tube, and the anticipation of reading a book on the tube. I like anywhere to sleep with the windows open and a few nights ago woke to foxes rummaging in the bins outside. They would find good things and sing sad-sounding bird songs to their fox friends and their fox friends would reply from a few streets over to meet in the shadow of the churchyard and circle up to share their good things and laugh.

(There are of course things I don't like. The water pressure (negligible), the laundry machines (nugatory), Super Target (none), the complete impossibility of customer service (not necessarily Britain's fault; America seems to stand alone in this regard and that's fact, not nationalism). I still every single time forget which faucet is what temperature and wash my face with cold water and brush my teeth with hot. Sometimes I wish our oven made more sense.)

Yesterday I met an old friend at church who has just moved here as well and after the service we walked down Exhibition Road and got on the Circle Line and came up out of Westminster station just under the bright face of Big Ben tolling the quarter hour with Boudicca lit up by the Eye behind her and it was just one of those intensely quintessential London moments that constantly knock me off my feet. We crossed over to South Bank and talked about being human and learning to love and also to let go, and in the space between Jubilee Gardens and a saxophonist Tom suddenly turned to me and said "Look at all these people living all these lives!! This is awesome!" And given that I just came back to this blog post long past midnight, I'm going to leave it at that. Hi, 2013. Think I'll like you a whole lot.

self portrait with turkey feathers. in class on a holiday.
to distract me because I needed it. that is all.

footnote.

Because it is relevant to my last post and because I read it last week and have yet to stop thinking about it:

To the Londoner of my generation, the London sky has another dramatic significance which—once our present boredom  with the whole subject is overcome—is memorable. It has been a battlefield. One day in 1940 in the entrance hall of the BBC I heard the sirens howl. One of the maternal ladies at the reception desk called out, "Air Raid, please" (one is inclined in London to say "please" for everything, and one must certainly say it out of deference if a V.I.P. like the Angel of Death is announced), but she was in fact telling the boys to close the steel shutters. I shall not forget that large white cloud bellying against the blue in the afternoon and, as my stomach turned over, seeing a flight of silver Spitfires dive into it. I froze with fear, hope, anger, pity. Many times afterwards, Londoners in the black-out heard the sky grunt, grunt, grunt over them, then howl and rock, or saw it go green instead of black, the whole 700 square miles of it twitching like sick electricity and hammered all over by millions of sharp gold sparks as the barrage beat against it like steel against a steel door. The curling magnesium ribbons that came slowly down were a relief to see, in that unremitting noise.The glasses and plates, the curtains, the favourite vases, ferns, clocks, and photographs, the pens on the desks, the ink in the pots danced in their places throughout the night in evil monotony hard to endure. The sky was extravagant; the earth would occasionally come to life in scattered carrotty fires, and on the bad nights, when the docks, the East End, and the City were burned out, the tide being too low to give the firemen water, London turned crimson. Even then, people made the "historic" remark, the remark of experience. Nothing like this, they said, had been seen since 1666. One cloudless August afternoon near the end of the war, green snow fell in minute insulting particles all over Holborn. We saw them when we got up from under our desks, where we had ducked when a bomb had fallen a mile or so away in  Hyde Park and had blown the leaves off the trees into these mysterious smithereens. It had seemed, for a moment, like a new venture of the London climate, which we knew to be capable of anything. 

        Seven  hundred thousand dwellings were damaged in the County of London, that is to say more than eighty per cent of the total. And  of these, nearly a third were totally destroyed. Little was left of the docks or the City. And about 30,000  people were killed, more than 50,000 injured. On December 29, 1940, all Paternoster Row went, and a favourite phrase, imported from American films, was that "London can take it," whatever that may mean. London did nothing so exhibitionist, showed none of the characteristics of the prize fighters' ring, as seen by publicity agents. London was quite simply morose, fatalistic, frightened, depressed, and fell back on that general practicality of mind that counts as calm. The climate had predisposed us to expect the worst and to disbelieve in the facts. Fatalism is the English religion. "London can take it" is just the beer talking. At the George, in Great Portland Street, I do recall two drunks discussing the kind of funeral they wanted, with a lot of circumstantial detail about the correct amount of flowers, during a bad half hour. And there is no one who could not supply a list of old aunts, grandmothers, and so on who stuck the thing out, immovably, sustained by a vigorous social disapproval of the whole shemozzle. Private life rules the world. 

      It was the silence of London in the early evening that struck one. One had never known it to be dead quiet before. The machine had stopped. One walked down mile after mile of empty streets to the sound of one's own heels only,  and voices carried far, as if across water. I remember two painted old crones sitting out alone on a bench in Lincoln's Inn Fields, when I was fire-watching. They were, no doubt, caretakers, and I could hear their voices far across the square. They were talking about actresses and distant connections of the Royal Family, of course. One night I saw a soldier come fighting out of a pub and get his teeth knocked out.  One could hear them fall as distinctly as pebbles, a hundred yards away.

—V.S. PRITCHETT 

Every Sunday I walk past the V&A on my way to church. During the war the museum was used as a canteen for the RAF and a refuge for children evacuated from Gibraltar. It was hit repeatedly; the worst bomb exploded just outside the Exhibition Road entrance and the façade is to this day mottled with the effect of the shrapnel blast. The doors were blown in and nearly every iron grill, gate, and window destroyed. The museum remained open to the public. Today I walk past the inscription cut into the stone around the wreckage. The damage to these walls is the result of enemy bombing during the Blitz of the Second World War 1939-1945 and is left as a memorial to the enduring values of this great museum in a time of conflict. It makes me proud to be human.