I was almost done with this first book and didn’t want it to sit for three weeks. So I finished it on the plane to Germany. The book is Roast Beef, Medium, by Edna Ferber. I’m pretty sure it was written before WWI, though I don’t have a date. The book is about Emma McChesney, a traveling salesperson. So, yeah, she travels by train for several months a year visiting stores in cities and towns across the Midwest convincing the owners to stock her wares. She’s pretty good at it too. She’s also pretty good at demanding that she be treated with dignity. It was a short and delightful read.
First the title. A traveling salesperson must deal with hotel and restaurant food. All those various dishes may look delicious, but they won’t agree with one’s digestion. Better stick to something safe, the roast beef, cooked medium.
And an excerpt. She has just checked into a hotel and the clerk has given instructions to the bellhop to take her to room nineteen. She follows, then…
“Wait a minute, boy,” she said, pleasantly enough, and walked back to the desk. She eyed the clerk, a half-smile on her lips, one arm, in it neat tailored sleeve, resting on the marble, while her right forefinger, trimly gloved, tapped an imperative little tattoo. …She sees that room sixty-five isn’t in very good shape and hates to think what nineteen must look like.
“You’ve made a mistake, haven’t you?” she inquired.
“Mistake?” repeated the clerk, removing his eyes from their loving contemplation of his right thumb-nail. “Guess not.”
“Oh, think it over,” drawled Emma McChesney. “I’ve never seen nineteen, but I can describe it with both eyes shut, and one hand behind me. It’s an inside room, isn’t it, over the kitchen, and just next to the water butt, where maids come to draw water for their scrubbing at 5 A.M.? And the boiler room gets in the best bumps for nineteen, and the patent ventilators work just next door, and there’s a pet rat that makes his headquarters in the wall between eighteen and nineteen, and the housekeeper whose room is across the hall is afflicted with a bronchial cough, nights. I’m wise to the brand of welcome you fellows hand out to us women on the road. This is new territory for me – my first trip West. Think it over. Don’t – er – say, sixty-five strike you as being nearer my size?”
The clerk stared at Emma McChesney, and Emma McChesney coolly stared back at the clerk.
“Our aim,” began he, loftily, “is to make our guests as comfortable as possible on all occasions. But the last lady drummer who –“
“That’s all right,” interrupted Emma McChesney, “but I’m not the kinds that steals the towels, and I don’t carry an electric iron with me, either. Also, I don’t get chummy with the housekeeper and the dining-room girls half an hour after I move in. Most women drummers live up to their reputations, but some of us are living ‘em down. I’m for revision downward. You haven’t got my number, that’s all.”
A slow gleam of unwilling admiration illuminated the clerk’s chill eye. He turned and extracted another key with its jangling metal tag, from one of the many pigeonholes behind him.
“You win,” he said. He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice discreetly. “Say, girlie, go on into the cafe and have a drink on me.”
“Wrong again,” answered Emma McChesney. “Never use it. Bad for the complexion. Thanks just the same. Nice little hotel you’ve got here.”
Next in my reading was An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield. He got into the Canadian Space Agency, which assigned him to NASA. He had at least one shuttle flight, then spent six months on the International Space Station. There he became famous for his videos of what life in zero gravity is like. I saw the one about what happens when one squeezes a sponge full of water.
It was an enjoyable book, though perhaps I read it too soon after reading Scott Kelly’s book about a year on ISS and the book about the Apollo 8 mission.
As for his advice for life on earth… Many of us are familiar with the Power of Positive Thinking. Hadfield espouses the Power of Negative Thinking. It isn’t about being a pessimist. It is about thinking about the bad things that might happen and training so much that if those bad things ever did happen the response would be straightforward and without panic.
When I was in Australia a year ago I bought The Swan Book by Alexis Wright because the bookstore clerk said it was “Aboriginal science fiction.” Yeah, that alone was intriguing enough to buy it.
It has a science fiction setting – global warming has progressed enough that the world is awash in refugees. But the story seems more about fantasy or Aboriginal Dreamtime (not that I really know what that is). What it’s really about is white control of Aboriginal lives and how bizarre and silly that looks to Aboriginals.
There are a lot of references to swans, enough so that I figured they provided some symbolism. Alas, I didn’t figure out what that symbolism was. I really had to pay attention while reading this one.
On the flight home I started reading Work Song by Ivan Doig. I think this is the fourth book by Doig that I’ve read and I’ve enjoyed all of them.
I had met Morrie Morgan in a previous book, The Whistling Season. In that book Morgan was a teacher in a one-room school in rural Montana. I bought this book simply because it was about Morgan. The story is set ten years later in the mining town of Butte, Montana. Morgan gets a job in the local library and from there can watch the big Anaconda Mining Corporation try to squeeze its workers and the workers fight back.
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