BOOKS FOR THE MASSES

BOOKS FOR THR MASSES

This piece by Elinore Standard first appeared as one in an ongoing series in The Record Review titled "My Reading Life."

Works mentioned in this piece: "City Journal," Love in the Valley, Literary Taste And How To Form It,


BOOKS FOR THE MASSES



In a recent article in the urban policy magazine,“City Journal”, titled “The Classics in the Slums” by Jonathan Rose, the author states that the classics in “the canon” – that is, the received list of “great” books acknowledged as necessary to an education – enabled “the masses” to become thinking individuals. “Until fairly recently,” Rose says, “Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy and music.

In the last part of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, self-taught working class people read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A home library could be built up, Rose says, “by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints,” all offering only yesterday’s authors.

Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) said, “Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me. Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation.”

Rose continues: “In the mining towns of South Wales, colliers had pennies deducted from their wages to support their own libraries, more than 100 of them by 1934. The miners themselves determined which books to buy. There were sophisticated literary debates down in the pits, where one collier heard high praise for George Meredith. That evening, he tried to borrow Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’ from the local miners’ library, only to find 12 names on the waiting list for a single copy.

“‘Every miner has a hobby,’” explained one Welsh collier. “‘It may be a reaction from physical strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light. It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something…Think what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for hours every day!’”

The English playwright, novelist and essayist, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) understood the potential of a vast new reading public and believed in getting this public to read by whatever means. Born in the heart of Staffordshire in what is known as “the potteries”, --six towns that later formed the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Bennett wrote fiction about the drab lives and ugly surroundings of working class and middle class people he grew up with.

He also wrote “Literary Taste: How To Form It” first published by A.P. Watt in 1909. “Literary Taste” is an exhortation, a sermon, a plea for self-improvement through reading. The Education Act of 1870 produced what Bennett called “a new, eager reading public with no tradition of self-culture by means of books.” In a pre-public free library era, he set out to show people how they could develop literary taste by scrimping to buy books, by diligent and regular reading of certain works, and by thinking about this reading.

“Literary Taste” contains three of the most delicious reading lists you’ll ever find and I am happy to announce you can read it all on-line for absolutely nothing if you go to www.readbookonline.net, a site containing 200 of the best novels of the 20th Century. Arnold Bennett would be astounded and pleased to think that many works on his own list can come to your virtual personal library completely free of charge.

In 1909, the total cost of Bennett’s 335-volume library was about £26, or, as Bennett points out, sixpence a day for three years. Figure a pound was worth about $5.00 back then and understand a worker made perhaps that much in a week, it isn’t as inexpensive as it sounds, but still…

“When you have read, wholly or in part,” Bennett says, “a majority of these 335 volumes with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, though to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.”

He divides the literary holdings into three periods: The first is from the beginning of literature to John Dryden or roughly to the end of the 17th Century. He eliminates The Bible from his list because he assumes everybody already has one. This list includes Bede, More, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare, of course.

Period Two goes from William Congreve to Jane Austen or roughly the entire 18th Century into the 19th. Here we find Locke, Newton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Malthus, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Blake and Robert Burns.

Bennett’s Period Three extends from Scott through the 19th Century. As Rose points out in his “City Journal” piece, material under copyright – all the new stuff – then as now, costs more. So Bennett’s third list is the most expensive because it contains a larger proportion of copyright works. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Browning. Lamb, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Stevenson are on the fiction list, and Darwin, Newman, Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Carlyle, among others, are on the non-fiction list.

There is a lot about Arnold Bennett on the website of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council Libraries. www.stoke.gov.uk/council/libraries. This excellent site has many links and you can find information, for example, about the well-known local potteries. You can read a lively and slightly nasty exchange between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf (she says he has a most peculiar accent), you can get maps and find out what is happening locally, and you can print out a recipe for “Omelette Arnold Bennett” created just for him by a famous chef during Bennett’s day.

I like the encouraging tone of “Literary Taste” and for having been compiled 100 years ago, Bennett’s approach and his list hold up today. Often he explains why he has rejected a work one might expect to find included. He is always mindful of the pocketbook. As you’ll notice with us contemporary readers and compilers of lists, there is a passion, an obsession. And there is joy: Bennett says, “the spirit of literature is unifying, it joins the candle and the star.”


Elinore Standard --  ehstandard@gmail.com
There is an excerpt about Arnold Bennett in
“Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading”
Laura Furman and Elinore Standard, Eds. (Carroll& Graf, 1997)

LIBRARY PATRON

This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the (Bedford, Pound Ridge, NY) Record Review as another in an ongoing series "My Reading Life".



LIBRARY PATRON


In pre-computer days, when you browsed through the library, you could look at the signatures on the withdrawal card in the back of the book to see who were the previous borrowers. This was a handy bit of information, lost now to our freak-out for privacy that we know isn’t even remotely private. Those names told you the book you were considering had been read by a fellow appreciator of mystery or romance or biography. I followed the path of people I thought of as good readers and their names were an endorsement, a seal of approval. Sometimes I’d look for a cryptic smiley face or an exclamation point, or an X, and I’d know whose mark it was and from that little sign, what they thought of the book.

Every now and then, I still find a signature card in an older book. The names in ink or pencil go back maybe to the 1950’s, and I take a long look at them in remembrance of readers who have moved away or died. I wonder what was going on in their lives at the time they checked out the book and I try to think about what was happening in the world. I picture them and hear their voices.

There is another kind of silent communication among library patrons, one that librarians would certainly frown upon, and that is the faint pencil corrections or comments made by anonymous proof readers of the many and inexcusable typos so often found in newer books. A book I read recently had one outrageous typo boldly circled on the first page and I thought, “Way to go!” Some books, despite all the spellchecking in the world, don’t seem to have been edited at all. I often itch to make the little circles or checks but I resist because such practice 1.) intrudes upon the reader, 2.) seems a bit priggish, 3.) defaces the book, 4.) might get me found out.

Sometimes I find things in library books, left there as bookmarks by previous readers. In a copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s “The House in Paris” (1936), recently borrowed through the Westchester (NY) Library System from the Eastchester Public Library, I have a student rush ticket from the 2002 season of the New York City Ballet. I will use it as my own bookmark and unless it disappears behind my bed, will tuck it into the book and send it back downcounty.

I’ve found letters and shopping lists and dried leaves in books, all traces of other readers. I know that librarians purge this trash when they check books in, but what escapes them is treasure.

In pre-Google days, when I was a graduate student, I would hurry right after class to the stacks and grab all of the books I’d need to do an assigned paper. If I didn’t get there first, they’d be gone and -- worse – perhaps hidden. Books get mysteriously squirreled away. Like hiding nuts, you need to remember where you put them.

At the Hiram Halle Library in Pound Ridge, years ago there was a patron who took cookbooks. She didn’t take them out, she borrowed them permanently. The librarians knew who she was but they could never really prove it. Cookbooks have always been expensive and the library had (and still has) a fine collection, many of which were gifts. It wasn’t just one book that went missing. The thefts happened regularly. The library was relieved when suspect moved away from town, presumably to become the bane of another library.

Not all the thievery happened on the inside. Once upon a time, the Halle library had a fine, early American weathervane atop the cupola on the old schoolhouse section of the library building. Few people realized it was a treasure until the weathervane was stolen. Yes, thieves must have cased the place and one night climbed up and removed it. Insurance paid a little and a new weathervane was bought, but the original was gone forever.

When I first moved to Pound Ridge, an old tradition of Wednesday half-day closing was observed. The elementary school dismissed at Noon and Schelling’s market closed for the afternoon. The Halle Library was closed all day Tuesday and half-day on Wednesday. One closing afternoon, as a Trustee of the Library, I got a call from the Library’s security monitor to say the alarm had gone off. I threw my little .410 shot gun in the car and drove there quickly. With the gun properly broken and tucked under my arm, I raced up the path only to be followed by the local police who had arrived on my heels. I explained why I had come and they advised me to put the shot gun, away. Today I would have been blown to pieces. The front door was indeed wide open and the police entered cautiously, weapons at the ready. There, in one of the red armchairs in the foyer, a patron was sitting, reading. Except for him, the place was empty and the alarm was making an awful noise. The elderly man finally looked up, astounded, and the policemen asked him what he was doing in there.

“What?”
They faced him and asked again.
“What did you say?” He adjusted his hearing aid.
They asked once more and he responded, “I’m reading.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open.”
“You can’t be in here, the library is closed.”
“No, the library is open,” he insisted.

This went on, back and forth. The distinguished patron became flustered. The police were adamant. I told them I recognized the man and by this time, the officers realized that with his hearing aid turned off, he couldn’t hear a thing -- not the claxon sounding in the space all around him, not their arrival. Forgetting the days of closing, the patron had walked to the library as usual, found the door unlocked, went in, got comfortable, and had himself a read.

The policemen made the patron leave, although he did so reluctantly. They shut the library door firmly and locked it. They warned me not to run around with a shot gun. They returned to their cruiser to write up the report of another exciting small-town incident.

Nobody got arrested. Nobody was dead.

Happy Ending.

* * *
Elinore Standard is the co-editor of “Bookworms:
Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll & Graf, 1997).

JUNKIE

JUNKIE

"Junkie" -- First published in the "My Reading Life" column of the Record Review, April, 2004

Works Mentioned in this Piece:
Secret Garden, Poor Little Rich Girl, Five Little Peppers, Prince and the Pauper, Boxcar Children, Children of Other Lands, Flying Carpet, Complete Book of Marvels, Red Pony, Wayward Bus, Cluny Brown, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Beach Red, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, American Guerilla in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Up Front, Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Four Saints in Three Acts

JUNKIE

My name is Elinore and I am a reading junkie. If there were a step program for this addiction, I’d be in it. Actually, no I wouldn’t. I really don’t want to change and I don’t see any reason to, not at this point in my life.

If I were a kid, they’d be saying:

“Go outside and get some fresh air.”
“Take your nose out of that book.”
“You’ll ruin your eyes.”
“Sit up straight, you’re all hunched over.”
“Do something useful for a change.”

Then, I read covertly and feared getting caught. I snitched a little time here, sneaked a little there, and experienced the thrill of thinking I was doing something wrong. Once, when I was supposed to be practicing the piano I propped up a novel on the music stand and was running mindless scales just to make the sound and my mother, who had been ironing in the basement, sneaked up and gave me such a whap, it knocked me off the piano stool.

I trudged a mile to the municipal library, going up the steep granite steps, through the heavy bronze doors, and down the hallway, past the police station with the two-cell jail. The library occupied a large one-room space with a corner for children’s books. There I found The Secret Garden, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Five Little Peppers, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Boxcar Children. Some books I read more than once, reviewing the delicious details and thinking about lives and times quite different from my own. Nobody drove me to the library and nobody directed my reading. I got there by walking, and I read what I pleased. My library card was a passport to freedom.

My grandmother gave me Children of Other Lands, a large book that described places such as Lapland and Fiji. It had maps with clouds puffing winds and sea serpents bobbing through wavy waves and compass roses and little vessels making their way under full sail. Some maps had white spaces -- terra incognita -- lands yet unexplored. But a great portion of the world, including Canada and Australia, was colored British Colonial deep pink. Consider this bit written for children late in the 19th Century by Robert Louis Stevenson and understand that since then we have evolved at least a little:

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little Frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Don’t you wish that you were me?

It goes on and it gets worse. You don’t want to know.

Although we may have been reading stuff like the above, we were taught geography as a separate subject. In fifth grade, I was introduced to books by the American adventurer and explorer, Richard Halliburton, who described his world travels to places such as the Taj Mahal and Mt. Everest. In those pre-TV days, Halliburton’s "The Flying Carpet," "Seven League Boots," and "Complete Book of Marvels" included photographs he took from an upside-down airplane! We drew maps (lots more British Colonial pink) and filled in the boundaries, cities and capitols. We drew sheaves of wheat and smoke stacks and sutured the lands with hatch-marked railroads. We memorized all of the counties in the state and named the Great Lakes from West to East. We knew where to find Sault St. Marie and the Skagerrak and the Kaategat. From the geography books of the day, we learned about Suez and the Panama Canal and the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. In quizzes we wrote out the fastest route to get from New York City to, say, Hobart, Tasmania.

At home, there was a six-shelf bookcase which held many works of current fiction that were there because my parents failed to return them to the Book-of-the-Month Club, so I had handy access to books such as Steinbeck’s "The Red Pony," and "The Wayward Bus;" Marjory Sharp’s "Cluny Brown," Betty Smith’s "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," P. Bowman’s "Beach Red," Captain Ted W. Lawson’s "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," Ira Wolfert’s "American Guerrilla in the Philippines" and John Hersey’s "Hiroshima." This kind of reading gave me a kind of premature look into worlds of adult love and war. I memorized all of the captions on the Willy and Joe cartoons in Bill Mauldin’s "Up Front." I read cartoon collections by Bennett Cerf and humor by Max Schulman. At the age of thirteen, I was giving myself a liberal education.

After high school, I went to a major university that had a strong English Literature department. Willy-nilly, I read a lot of good stuff beginning with "Canterbury Tales" and “Beowulf”, but I don’t remember required reading going much beyond literature from the mid-1930s. I went through a bohemian period that amounted to hanging around the one coffee shop downtown, listening to a scratchy recording of Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts.” On my own, I read Arthur Koestler and H.L. Mencken and painted my room black.

After graduation, when real life was supposed to begin, I was so busy working I had to suspend serious reading. About a dozen years passed until my life attained the kind of orderliness and stability I needed to really read. I then embarked on what I can only think of a grand indulgence and what writer and teacher Robert Alter calls a “privileged pleasure.” I read through works by some authors and went from one line of reading to the next and from that on to another. I delved. I wallowed. I basked. I embraced the reading habit and, once again, I was hooked.

* * *

MY READING LIFE is an ongoing series by Elinore Standard, co-editor along with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (NY: Carroll& Graf, 1997.)

THE TOAD CAME HOME

This column in the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard appeared in the Record Review in March, 2005

Works mentioned in the piece: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel.



AND THE TOAD --- CAME --- HOME

On NPR I recently heard children’s book author and reviewer Daniel Pinkwater talk about a new, abridged edition of the 1908 Kenneth Grahame children’s classic, “The Wind in The Willows." Although the characters, Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, seemed familiar, I realized that somehow I neither read it nor was it read to me. What a lack!

I quickly ordered the original 1908 version illustrated in 1961 by Ernest H. Shepard from Amazon, ($5.99), where I also browsed through another young reader’s edition with nice illustrations by Don Daily and re-told by G. C. Barrett. The original text is shortened somewhat but it does retain the spirit of the original so I decided to get it for the beginning reader in our family.

I checked the local library system and found the Pinkwater version, illustrated by Inga Moore, at three libraries. Many have the original with the Shepard illustrations and there are plenty of others. Several libraries have the unabridged audiobook and I discovered an abridged (2 tapes) BBC version read by Alan Bennett. Although there are many videos of “The Wind In The Willows”, the most likely version includes voices of Judy Collins, Roddy McDowall, Jose Ferrer and Eddie Bracken. Netflix (www.netflix.com) will mail DVD’s and is usually good source for movie and TV classics. Although they have several listings for “The Wind In The Willows” I was put off by the Disneyish animation in what I found.

Read this opening line of the original Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) “The Wind In The Willows”, close your eyes, and think what comes to mind:
The mole had been working very hard all the
morning, spring cleaning his little home.”

Don’t you want to snuggle deeper into your cozy chair and keep reading? Don’t you think of warmth and the safety of home? When mole returns to his old underground home after adventuring afar, he looks around at his familiar things and realizes how much it all means to him. He realizes the value of such a base in one’s existence.

“But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

Kenneth Grahame offers sly insights into human nature that may be lost on the young but will delight the older reader, such as when Mole observes, “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kind of like being in Florida and knowing it is 15 degrees and snowing in The North Country.

For “A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections On A Year of Books”, (Farrar, 2004), Alberto Manguel kept a volume of notes, reflections, impressions, sketches, all elicited by his re-reading 12 of his favorite old books. In one chapter, Manguel, an Argentine by birth, is about to buy his own house near Poitiers in France after not having one for a long time, and he begins thinking about “The Wind In The Willows” and the comforts of home. He says, “Kenneth Grahame is masterly at describing comfort,” and so Manguel decided to re-read “The Wind In The Willows”.

Manguel says he is like Mole in that he likes orderly adventures and as an exile he says, “I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree).” He observes, “…throughout my reading year I found myself traveling to many different cities and yet wishing to be back home, in my house in a small village in France, where I keep my books and do my work.” Mole would agree with that, too.

If, by some small chance, you are unfamiliar with the story of “The Wind in the Willows”, it goes like this: Mole emerges from his underground home into the Springtime world above. He meets Rat and together they paddle a little boat around The River. While they are picnicking, Badger makes a brief appearance and Toad appears in a one-man shell, rowing erratically and tipping over. Mole and Rat visit Toad at Toad Hall and find him excited about setting out in his latest passion: a gypsy caravan. Toad convinces them to come along. They’ve not gone far when the caravan is wiped off the road by a speeding motor car and instead of lamenting, Toad is possessed by the newest new thing. A hopelessly bad driver, Toad wrecks one expensive auto after another and Rat and Mole give up. Winter has come and Mole sets off into the Wild Wood where he is terrorized by stoats and weasels. Heavily armed, Rat sets off to find Mole. A snowstorm covers up everything but reunited, they stumble upon the entrance to Badger’s snug burrow. The antisocial but kindly Badger welcomes them and eventually shows them a safe way out of the Wild Wood. Along about Yuletide, Mole realizes he is homesick and invites Rat to visit him for a change. Together they give Mole’s place a makeover and have a happy homecoming. Now it is summer again and Badger, Mole and Rat decide to do an intervention on Toad, who is a menace on the roads. They lecture him about his reckless ways and lock him in his room. He escapes and steals a motorcar outside a pub. Toad is caught and thrown into a dungeon where he stays until he bribes his way out. In the guise of a washerwoman, he wheedles a ride on a railway train and escapes from the pursuing Bobbies. Toad then gets a ride on a barge and is insulting to the bargewoman. Toad steals the barge horse and the barge runs aground. “Ha,, Ha,,” laughs Toad who then sells the horse. With shillings in his pocket, Toad hitches a ride in a passing motorcar, the very one he had taken from the pub. Overcome by his driving obsession, he grabs the wheel and plunges the car into a pond. Chased by the law once again, Toad jumps in the river and is saved by Rat. Rat is disgusted and Toad repents a little, seeing what an awful ass he has made of himself. In his absence, Toad Hall has been taken over by the Wild Wooders who are squatting there, wrecking the place. Badger knows a secret passageway to Toad Hall and together the four friends resolve to reclaim it. Armed with pistols and swords and sticks and accompanied by other friendly animals, they rush in and whack the evildoers. They get the place cleaned up and send out invitations to a celebration banquet. Although Toad has been forbidden to make speeches, he does sing one last little song that begins: “When the Toad ----came----home!”

And the moral of the story is? I was doing fine until I asked. You could say the moral is: you can do whatever you feel like doing if you have enough money to bail yourself out when you get in trouble. As Ratty observes, “Toad is rather rich, you know.” Although he is slightly contrite in the end, you get the feeling Toad is like every other irresponsible rich boy you’ve ever met: his impulse control is set on zero.

Electing to leave the story on a positive note, I prefer to remember the sweetness and loyalty of the animal friendships and Kenneth Grahame’s gorgeous descriptions of the seasons in nature, the fields, the Wild Wood and The River in “The Wind in the Willows."

FACEBOOK

                                                FACEBOOK

            In "The Social Network" we meet a group of seedy college sophomores glued to their computers. The time is night. The space is indoors. The lighting is brown and the set is littered with take-out boxes and frat-boy junk. The year is 2004 and Facebook is aborning. 

            Flip forward to now. Old lady in Vermont living room balances laptop on knees and clicks onto Facebook. Jinks through messages from 75 Friends, almost all of them much younger, and adds a couple of comments. Half-hour passes. Gets up and goes outdoors to clear snow off terrace. What is she thinking? She is too old for this.

            Its youthful image aside, in early 2009 the fastest growing Facebook demographic was women over 55, this at a 175% rate over several months. Women subscribers outnumber men in all age groups. 

            You'd think among older women the techno-factor might be an obstacle to Facebooking but it doesn't seem to hamper women aged 55-65.  In women over 75 (that's me) it certainly is. We are the 1950s females: pre-pill and pre-equal opportunity. We married early and seldom worked outside the home for more than five years. One salary was enough to support our 3.5 children.

            Unlike most of my peers, I got my first computer in 1984 when I was 50 and have evolved as an adept since then. I used it mainly as a word processor, although when the Internet came along, I hopped onto e-mail via a dial-up connection. I spent as much time waiting for the ball to stop going around as I do now clicking in and out of news and shopping sites. 

            I know people who won’t do Facebook because of privacy concerns. But listen to this: privacy doesn't exist. You might not go near a computer but your face is photographed and filed at every intersection, from the overpass and at the ATM. If you use a credit card you are tracked: every purchase, every delinquency. Your habits are charted and shared. 

            Recently, I got G-mail about my granddaughter's homework. Keyword: homework. Ads popped up for various on-line homework helps. Yesterday, in an e-mail, I mentioned a CT scan and right away several ads for cancer sites appeared in my G-mail window, including one for mesothelioma. Something is reading my mail, going in there and picking out words! Anyone think e-mail is private? Forget it. Nothing is.  Nothing is free, either. My husband points out that G-mail appears to be free, but isn't. "What did you expect?" he asks. 

            What the heck: I saw friends doing it, so I opened a Facebook "account" revealing scant personal information but enough to cue the potential "Friend": university, year, hometown, e-mail address. I posted pictures although not too many. I say what I like and I say what is on my mind, understanding that a cranky old lady ought to be discreet – but not too…

            I've connected with people I missed and thought about for years. I can see their

Faces and know what they're doing. I don't feel like a snoop or a voyeur. I love it when I can be in touch with relatives I never knew I had and with people who remember me the way I was. 

            The best is to be in touch with their grandchildren and to follow the You-Tubes and the websites they suggest. They open whole new worlds and keep the little windows on life from closing. Ever hear of "The Hot Club of Cowtown" – a great country/swing trio out of Austin?  Check my

Wall.

                                                 * * *

           

GET ME REWRITE!

This piece appeared in the "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the June 24, 2005 Record Review.

Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian, "Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.


Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning,  can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, I wondered where his editor was.

And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase." Seriously?

Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.

In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.

Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”

This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:

“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”

Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”

Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.

First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.

Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.

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GENTLE READS

This column by Elinore Standard is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series in the Record Review and it appeared in February, 2005.


MY READING LIFE

"Gentle Reads"

Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,

There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.

I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!

On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).

As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.

“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.

Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.

In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.

Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.

“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.

I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
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Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).

TARTAN NOIR

                              


                                          TARTAN NOIR: Novels by Denise Mina

Originally published in the "Record Review" as one in an ongoing series, "My Reading Life" by Elinore Standard

                  Works Mentioned: "Garnethill," "Exile," "Resolution," by Denise Mina.
                  Novels by Ian Rankin and Ken Bruen. "Prime Suspect," by Lynda LaPlante.

           

            OK, You return home so drunk you fail to notice your murdered married lover, tied to a kitchen chair, cut up and bleeding all over your living room floor. You sleep in an alcoholic coma and the next morning, you can’t really explain much to the cops who figure you as the prime suspect. The murder weapon is found in the bottom of the closet where you once hid yourself for hours, until your drug dealer brother discovered you and carried you off to the loony bin. Yes, an alibi will be a little tough to manufacture and your mental health history and current bad temper won’t help.

            Meet Maureen O’Donnell, protagonist and central character of “Garnethill,” “Exile” and “Resolution” a trilogy by Denise Mina set in Glasgow, Scotland. Maureen is one of those edgy characters we cannot love. We want to tell her to get a grip and clean up the blood spot left on the living room floorboards. She needs to stop chain smoking and for heaven sake, ease up on the booze and eat something that for a change isn’t dripping grease. She deals contraband cigarettes in a flea market there being little employment in the art history game, and due mainly to her congenital crossness, she has a lot of trouble in the human relationships department.

            Book reviews are fond of using the word “pluck” about female characters, and this is one who overqualifies. Although people hate her and several want to kill her, she survives. She has survived neglect and poverty and the worst kind of abuse. It is the childhood abuse by her own father that has haunted her into her mid-twenties. It is this cruelty that precipitated the breakdown that put her in the bottom of the closet. And it is the stigma of having been a mental patient that follows her every step, along with the spectre of her father, returning to claim her once again. If you ever want a picture of a young person’s struggle to establish independence and identity and sanity in the face of unbelievable odds, these novels by Denise Mina will provide it.

            Mina (who says a woman can’t do hard-boiled?) will be compared with Ian Rankin, whose seedy Inspector Rebus works in Edinborough and Ken Bruen, whose destructive ex-cop Jack Taylor novels are set mainly in Galway, Ireland. Mina can also be compared with Lynda LaPlante, author of graphic mysteries including “Prime Suspect” a novel later made into a TV series starring Helen Mirren.

All four are terrific writers and, if you can stand the gloom, they capture an underclass and describe lives on the margin so graphically it hurts. After slogging through Mina’s damp, grim streets and housing projects of Glasgow and listening to regional dialect sometimes needing subtitles, we emerge wanting some country air and maybe a nice, hot bath.

            Unlike other works in this genre, these three Mina novels although qualifying as mystery/thrillers, feature a snoopy young woman with something to prove instead of a private eye or a detective. Maureen just can’t leave things alone. She is about the most stubborn of literary characters and she is also about the most intelligent. Mina has made us love the unlovable and has given us Maureen and her brother, Liam, her motorcycle-driving friend, Leslie, her supremely dysfunctional family, and a large cast of memorable minor characters that live on in imagination long after we’ve stopped reading.

            The most interesting thing they do is to cast brilliantly the crazies, the junkies and the alkies. Usually, these are minor characters, set into a story to contrast with the major ones. Mina makes them all real. She gives them inner lives and insight. She gives them dimension and power and this, I think, is unusually difficult and daring for a writer in a genre that is not always taken too seriously.

THE WEIMARANER COUCH

                                     THE WEIMARANER COUCH

                                              By Elinore Standard

            The mother sits in the middle of the couch, a small white dog next to her. Beside the dog, shoved in close, is the oldest daughter. Next to her is the middle daughterand on the other side of the mother, the youngest. All three girls wear shorts andtee shirts that say something. The mother pulls on the dog's ears and all fourpeople touch each other. The mother's arm drapes across the youngest's shoulders and her hand idly twirls the girl's hair. The two other girls enfold each other and somehow also touch the mother. The dog looks into the room with glassy black eyes. Its tiny pink tongue appears every so often, licking something. 

            The couch party is oblivious to whatever else is happening in the room. Conversation ebbs and flows and people come and go.  Occasional attempts are made to draw them out, to include them in the conversation, but nothing doing. The girls grunt their answers and the mother glares. The general petting continues to the clank of arm jewelry. 

            The white dog begins to root at the couch, its tiny paws digging into the silvery silk velvet. "Cut that out!" cries the mother-in-law whose couch it is. "Get that dog off the couch!"  The four on the couch look blankly, like, what's the matter with her?

            The youngest lifts the cross around her neck and puts it inher mouth. The chain is like a golden mustachio falling from her face. "Smoochey," she says across her mother's lap, "plug your ears and don't listen, you sweetie, doggie." 

            The mother's eyes shift down to Smoochey and she continues to

pet. The two older daughters preen like fancy birds. They pick and scratch and tug and smooth. Juicy Couture fondles Kate Spade and the mother checks her pedicure, stretching her foot out a ways, lifting the heel of the golden sandal and pointing the toe. "We have to go back there tomorrow," she says to the oldest girl who nods. "I don't think she did a very good job and we'll get a free touch-up."

            Noises come from the kitchen but nobody on the couch moves. The table is being set and the smell from the grill wafts in from outside. On the couch, there is zero interest.  All four rigorously diet and it is only the dog who perks up. 

            People in the room shift attention from drinks to what might be coming their way for dinner. Everybody loves rare lamb except the ones on the couch and they wouldn't be caught dead. They check each other's fingernails and compare shades of polish. The spectrum ranges from black (oldest daughter) to very light pink (youngest). The mother's nails – viciously long – are fire engine. 

            The guests gather around the table, four chairs yet unoccupied. "We're waiting for you, and dinner is getting cold," says the husband,  looking at his wife a little uncertainly. She sighs disgustedly and shifts her weight. The girls rise, checking their mother for the OK. The dog gives a little yip, jumps down and heads for the table. Now on her feet, the mother scoops him up and walks like molasses to her place. Behind them, the couch shows jagged claw marks and wet dog-dribble spots.

            "Do not bring that dog to the table," says the mother-in law. The other guests wait to see what happens next. 

            "Smoochie will be in my lap," says the mother, "you'll never

know he's there." No eye contact with anyone. 

           "I'll know she's there, and you can just put him back in the carrier."

            "There's nothing for me to eat, anyway," says the wife. "I'll take

him outside." The girls don't quite know which way to go and secretly they are a little hungry. "You girls sit and have dinner," calls the mother over her shoulder as she opens the screen door, "it should only take ten minutes."

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