Tales from the Non-Fiction Section, Part II

 I'm writing about non-fiction. Shit gets real here. Shit will get made-up again in my next blog.

Last blog, I wrote about John McWhorter and his illustrious career. I don't know anything about Jason Vuic's career, but he's written a quite good book called The Yugo:The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. He qualifies, or rather negates, his subtitle in the introduction, with a short list of cars worse than the Yugo, but goes on to make a case for the Yugo's status as popularly acknowledged worst car ever. This book is funny. I'm not a car guy, but I like Top Gear and I thought this book would be the next best thing to watching Top Gear at work. Then I realized that this book is better than watching Top Gear at work because I don't have to haul my laptop back and forth.

The Yugo is a very short history of the Yugo in America, as it went from Yugomania in 1986 to utter collapse in 1989. The rest of the book is about the history of Yugoslavia, small car marketing in America in the '70s and '80s, and a man named Malcolm Bricklin. Bricklin is a chronic business starter-upper of the most alarming kind. Vuic never suggests that he's mentally ill as well as incompetent, but it rather comes across. Bricklin started his first company operating a chain of hardware stores, which allowed him to sell the licensing rights to more hardware stores than he had the capacity to supply. After that bankruptucy, he imported small Japanese cars until he nearly went belly-up again and was bought out by competent people, which is why you've heard of Nissan. Bricklin then went on a collaborative venture with the government of New Brunswick, for heaven's sake, to produce an acryllic-bodied car called... The Bricklin. Had the technology existed, the car would have been revolutionary. But it didn't. Have you ever seen an acryllic-bodied car? No you haven't.

The Yugoslav Zastava factory made munitions during World War II, switched to producing a small Fiat-based no-frills automobile, and continued making that same little off-brand Fiat until Yugoslavia's break-up in the '90s when it started producing munitions again. Zastava was already exporting to some European companies, but was not near competent to make a car that would pass American safety and pollution standards. However, Bricklin made promises and everyone worked like dogs and the Yugo was approved for US import. Paying $3,500 for a car was enough to get a segment of Americans extremely excited, and the novelty of an import from a Communist, but not Soviet Bloc country (because Yugoslavia, under Tito, was not part of the Bloc. They were in fact, an American ally. Who knew? I need to research this further, but allying with Tito seems like an unspeakably bad thing.) appealed to an American sense of internationalism that was wafting around in the '80s. The Yugo cheerfully arrived in America, as thousands of people had pre-ordered them. People bought Yugos en masse. One dealer had a "buy a Mercedes, get a free Yugo" scheme. It was all downhill from there. Consumer Reports gave the Yugo an F and the US government gave Yugo a low, but not the lowest, safety rating. The Yugo chronicles a company crumble, restructure, and end, from which Bricklin walked away with $15 million. The Yugo is remembered as a colossal failure, unlike the Crimean War, which we've all forgotten. Honestly, the only person in common memory from the Crimean War is Florence Nightingale, and what other war has ever been remembered only for a female non-combatant? After Florence, people know The Charge of the Light Brigade, which, as a battle, was a clusterfuck on par with the rest of the war. General Raglan sent an messenger to the commander of the Light Brigade, with word to seize back some English guns that the Russians were seizing. The commander said, "Which guns?" The messenger said, "Those guns," pointing at some Russian guns far away across a plain. The commander said, "Really?" and then sent the Light Brigade out to capture them. "It is not ours to question why." The Light Brigade had been itching to do something anyway, as they were underutilized in the first few conflicts of the war.

The Crimean War started out as a bad idea. Orlando Figes starts out with a hundred and fifty pages of the politcial climates of Turkey (sick man of Europe), England (Russophobic newspapers), France (we had an empire), and Russia (God-appointed tsar gone batty). The war itself started out with a Russian invasion of the Danube delta, which failed miserably. With Russia out of the Danube, England had a choice to invade Russia, go home, or leave its soldiers in the delta for another few months to die of cholera. England partially chose against the latter and sailed for Sevastopol, with plans to sail home again in a month or two. The assessment was: the war would be quick, and if it wasn't, they'd be fine. Why send in winter provisions? How bad could a Russian winter be? (If you are ever in an army that underestimates Russia's winter, please desert immediately.) Really, the French were the only army that encouraged the survival of their own troops. England's army was made up of anyone too drunk to have enlisted to go to India, Canada, China, etc., led by a geriatric aristocracy. Russia had a set of equally incompetent generals ruling a serf army fed on bread that dogs wouldn't eat. France, with universal conscription and The Rights of Man, gave their people soup and mittens and Minie rifles, the most important development of the war. France was first army to issue accurate, long-rang rifles to their troops, which proved decisive in most of the first battles of the war.  The Crimean War chronicles the confusing, badly planned battles leading to mostly English/French victories and the eventual taking of Sevastopol.  Along with Minie rifles, the Crimean War introduced newspaper readers to war photography and pioneered the use of the train and telegraph.  

My colleague Ethan, a fiction enthusiast, says he wants to read the definitive work on any non-fiction topic, to save himself the trouble of having to read more than one book about something unliterary and leave himself more lifetime time for novels. Well, Ethan, The Crimean War by Orlando Figes is the only book you ever need to read about the Crimean War. It is the definitive history of the Crimean War for this generation. At only 493 pages, excluding the index, The Crimean War is significantly shorter than Mr. Figes other books. The Whisperers, about Stalinist Russia, which I read a while ago, and Natasha's Dance, which I haven't read yet.  Orlando Figes is good stuff. Read it. Give it a couple months. You'll get through it.

Next up: Places you never ever want to visit.

Tales from the Non-Fiction Section

Apologies, my readers. My internet is down. It's great, really: I've diminished my time faffing about on the internet and have more time to read. This does, however, impact my ability to post timely blog entries.

I work in a bookstore and people often ask me where the non-fiction section is. My job is to explain to them that there is no non-fiction section. Non-fiction is everything that is not fiction, obviously, duh, come on people. If there was a non-fiction section, then books about puppies and books about Hitler would be shelved next to each other. People who are looking for the non-fiction section usually want book about a concept that they have no words for. Ladies, oftentimes, asking for the non-fiction section, want memoirs about women just like them, but they don't know the word for memoir, or they don't understand that the thing they want is a memoir too, because "memoir" sounds more literary than My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler. Men who are looking for the non-fiction section don't know what they want, but if you pick them up and carry them to the military history section and set them down, they will be happy enough.

The true non-fiction section is the clearance section. If a person is simply looking for an interesting book that is not about made-up stuff, he should go to the clearance section, spend a bit of time browsing, and spend $10 for five fine books that matches his whim and interest. However, browsing for books is, to some, a difficult concept. This is compounded at the State Fair Sale, which happens in mid-October and is well worth attending. A person will walk up to me and say, "Do you have any books about gardening?" and I wave my hand at the quarter-acre of non-fiction filling roughly half of the Grandstand and say, "Probably." They are befuddled because I don't have a gardening section, just a non-fiction section. I have to say, "It's kind of a treasure hunt," and smile, and they remember that treasure hunts are fun!, and they must now go on one, and then they buy fifteen pounds of books and have trouble getting them out to their car. I will now tell you about the books that I have been reading, straight from the non-fiction section:

John McWhorter is one of the coolest popular explainers of race and linguistics in America today, and I'm surprised at how he has managed to fly under everyone's, including my, radars for so long, especially because his awesome book Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America was a New York Times bestseller, so someone must have bought it. McWhorter made a series of lectures on The History of World Language for The Teaching Company, that company that sells lecture series in the back of the New York Times Book Review, which is how I found out about him, because I listen to those, although not, of course, for $299.95 NOW $69.95! We have them at work, and the library has them. I recommend the one that I'm talking about right now and Bob Briar's History of Ancient Egypt.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter is a damn fine book if you like linguistics. I would however, recommend his Teaching Company lectures or one of his other books to start off with. This is not a general overview of the history of English or of world languages, both of which McWhorter has written, or of creoles, which are McWhorter's forte. McWhorter's point, this is a very pointy book, is that the standard narrative of the history of the English language is simplistic and flawed in three particular ways.

Firstly, English has more Celtic influence than anyone has acknowledged up to this point. English is an extraordinarily peculiar Germanic language in many ways, but one of its queerest features is the meaningless "do." It's unique among other European languages... except Welsh and the other Gaelics!, and it confuses the hell out of English language learners. Why do we say "Why do we say?" when other languages are perfectly content to say, "Why we say?" "Porque nosotros hablamos?" Chaucer might say, "Why say we 'do'?" to phrase that phrase. We also say "ing." I am explaining this to you in my blog. If I explain this to you in my blog, that takes a slightly different shade of meaning. I do choose to be explaining this to you instead of watching Top Gear on a lazy Friday off. Guess which other language has an "ing" construction? Welsh! And those other Gaelic languages. In the common story of English, a bunch of Angles and Saxons invaded England, killed everybody or shoved them up into Ireland and Wales, and replaced the Gaelic languages with Beowulf Germanic.  McWhorter argues that it was more complicated than that. What probably happened, rather than full-on genocide, was the usual: kill the men, marry the women, and the kids end up speaking a pidgin which takes on features of both parents' languages. This happens again in English, too, in McWhorter's second point of the book, popping the language from Olde to Middle English. The Norsemen invade and suddenly English changes from a language of painfully complex conjugations, worse than good old yo hablo, tu hablas, nosotros hablamos, vosotros huh, usted hables, ellos hablandos Spanish, and maybe horribler than German, with its multiple crazy noun endings, to a nice language, easy on the verb endings, where I go, you go, he/she/it goes, and they go. He argues that this came about, again, by non-native adult speakers of the language not bothering to learn the arcane complexities of their wives' tongue. They were Vikings, after all. Their children dropped endings, and people began speaking something much closer to modern English than the language of Beowulf, in the North at least. A mass migration of Northeners to Southern England in the late middle ages/early modern period, brought the simplified language to the capitol in time for the printing press to codify it as the language of the land. Now let's swing back to one of McWhorter's asides: People don't write as they talk. Especially not in the olden days, when writing was the purview of an elite few. The fact that people were writing a Germanic-sounding, ending-heavy formal English up to the Norman conquest doesn't mean that was how people were speaking. Most English speakers who could write were writing in Latin at the time, and English-speaking English writers could well have been writing a stylized, formal English. McWhorter argues that scholars need to stop assuming that written language and spoken language are the same thing when it comes to tracing English usages.

McWhorter's third point is that the English weirdness among the Germanic languages started before the Angles ever laced up their pants and went invading. He says a third of old, old Germanic words aren't even Germanic. They're funny. And they describe sea things. They seem foreign. Almost Semitic. They seem like Phoenicians established settlements on the west coasts of Europe (now underwater) and made babies with the locals and those babies grew up speaking a Phoenician-influenced Germanic creole that left its mark in words like "sea." McWhorter makes it clear that he has less to back this up than his other points.

Not wanting to become an academic linguist just to find out if McWhorter's theories are on or not, I will take him at his word that these are cogent theories. One assumes that John McWhorter is publishing this stuff in academic journals as well, while writing books about topics in popular linguistics, commenting on African American issues in various news media, writing more books on contemporary African American issues, giving a TED Talk, serving as Carnegie fellow, and owning a cat with a people name. He is so cool.

Next up: More non-fiction.

The Hippies, the Catholics, and the Middle Class in Northern England

Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State is Mary Losure's account of what happened to the anti-Highway 55 movement in the Nokomis neighborhood after those fucking hippies moved in.

I was sixteen and working at the Bridgeman's on Hiawatha next to the old Walgreens location, which is next to the For Pet's Sake and the Chinese restaurant, and on the other end from the Burger King and the gas station. That Dairy Queen across from Minnehaha Falls is around the corner. Jerry and Kathy, the couple who owned the Bridgeman's franchise, were opposed to the 55 reroute. So was I, so were my brother, my parents, the next door neighbors, the across-the-street neighbors, and hundreds of other people who lived within a mile or two of the 55 corridor. I remember a full past capacity meeting in the Roosevelt High School auditorium: Then-mayor Sharon Sayles Belton gave a little speech about "Light rail!" and everyone cheered. The county planning commissioner came up to the microphone and effectively said: "This has been on the books since the '70s. Why are you complaining now?" Then the floor opened up for public comment. People lined up, pro- and anti-reroute, and alternated speaking at the microphone. They ran out of pro-reroute people in twenty minutes. The neighborhood was solidly against the reroute. A few weeks later, I was riding the bus from the U, and I saw a dreadlocked dude walking across the grass, barefoot, in Minnehaha Park. In November. An old lady next to me said, "There are those protesters," and I knew then that the neighborhood had lost because the anti-55 activism had been taken over by unwashed youths who went shoeless to make a point about, presumably, The Man. After that, community meetings stopped being something I went to with my mom and my brother and started being something everyone read about afterwards in the paper.

Our Way or the Highway explains what the protestors were doing wandering around Minnehaha Park for all those months. Apparently, word about the reroute spread to someone who told someone who told someone who was way out West and a veteran of the anti-logging campaigns in Northern California and they and all their friends showed up on Riverview Road, which is one of those weird little roads where the river keeps Minneapolis from being a perfect grid. Several houses on one side of Riverview Road were already slated for demolition; the only hold-out was an older lady named Carol Kratz. The other side of the street was not slated for demolition and remained occupied by good Minneapolitans. Carol Kratz welcomed the Earth First! activists and some tribally unaffiliated Native Americans. They pitched tents and tipis in Carol's yard and along the empty street, drumming and singing all night long and peeing wherever they liked. The neighbors across the street were trying to live their lives and raise their kids. The same neighbors who had been turning up at public meetings for years, saying, "I don't want to look out my front window and see a retaining wall!" were calling their city council members and their legislators saying, "Fine! Get rid of the hippies! We'll take the retaining wall!"

The trouble with the 55 reroute, something that I didn't know until I read the book, and something that the protestors never learned, was that the battle against 55 had been raging for decades. Higway 55 was, on its first imaginings, going to be a major freeway like 94 and 35, ripping through neighborhoods, destroying hundreds of homes and blocking the Nokomis neighborhood from the Mississippi. A couple named Walter and Carola Bratt questioned it. They enjoined neighbors, attended meetings, spoke to every alderman they could find, volunteered on every committee and proposed a four-lane, forty-mile-per-hour, ground level freeway with light rail, which is what it remains to this day. Walter and Carola Bratt saved the city from another massive freeway smashing its way through the neighborhood and ruining everything, and then-Hennepin County chairman Peter McLaughlin respected them as people who could stop a freeway.

The Earth First! camp was raided by police several times, partly for the protestors safety. They had some legislative support until a protestor shoved a vegan cream pie into a 65-year-old, pro-reroute female state representative's face. Ms. Losure's book is well-written and unbiased. She was a reporter for MPR during the 55 shenanigans, and knew many of the protestors well. She weaves an interesting narrative, and fills it in with plenty of history. As we all know, The Man won, as he often does. Honestly, 55 couldn't look better, the green space over the tunnel is seamless and I don't regret the reroute at all. However, it would have been nice to let the neighborhood make the decision itself instead of having the situation wrested from its hands by a bunch of barefoot, dreadlocked, tree-sitters.

Juliet, Naked is no High Fidelity, but it's also no How to be Good. Nick Hornby seems to have his writing powers back, although he's never going to recreate the success of his two brilliant masterworks. Juliet, Naked is a quiet story about British people and an American, who is, thankfully, not as bombastic as British people usually make Americans out to be (see David Lodge). Duncan is obsessed with a reclusive American rock musician to the point of running a fan site. Annie lives with Duncan and works at the local seaside museum. Tucker Crowe is the reclusive American musician. Annie posts an article on Duncan's website and Tucker e-mails her and says, "Watch out for the fan site weirdos," and they strike up a correspondence while Duncan and Annie's relationship falls to pieces. Some great lines, like, regarding Duncan, "“He had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to themselves, 'I'm going to stay here. Where else would I go?' And if another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pieces away, it would be easy to resist temptation. 'Look,' the object of the seducer's admiration would say. 'You're a bit of telephone box, and I'm the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn't look right together.' And that would be that.” Juliet, Naked is a good, solid minor novel hampered only by a weak ending, when there's a strong tension between what the reader expects to happen and the characters' lack of interest in doing that thing, leading to foreplay by googling health concerns. Nothing sexy. The actors on the audiobook are all perfect in their roles.

And Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, author of Half the Sky, the best hiking novel so far, is kicking ass on religious topics in Leap of Faith. Abby stabs her classmate and is forced to go to Catholic school. This book has so much going on but none of it feels forced. The themes are so seamlessly woven that Brubaker Bradley moves from space-cadet parents to love of theater to sexual harassment to Catholic sacraments to friends' parents to anger and makes it all a whole. Leap of Faith is a nearly exquisite novel about the mundane. I'm feeling a little rushed on the Brubaker Bradley, as Leap of Faith came into work right after I reserved her other book, For Freedom, at the library, so I should read two books by the same author one after the other, which I don't really like doing, if I want to get For Freedom back to the library in a sensible amount of time.  

Two Books Connected Only by a Reverence to Oscar Wilde

Ethan Marxhausen is being far too modest about his short story that's published in this year's Waterstone Review. From what I've heard, it's bloody good. Ethan has a diverse set of influences. He introduced me to Nicholson Baker, and he told me that he can't get Fifty Shades of Grey out of his head. Ethan was reading J-14 magazine the other week (J-14 is the new Tiger Beat), and he showed me an article in which the former star of a Nickelodeon tween show said he doesn't think being gay is a big deal anymore. I looked at the magazine after Ethan was done with it, and this slightly famous nineteen-year-old did say that being gay hasn't earned him any flack since he came out on YouTube several months ago. Hats off to you, child actor whose name I don't remember!

Times have changed, thank God.

Thank God.

My Uncle Paul was gay back when it was a big deal. He died of AIDS in August 1995. His first cousin and god daughter, Margaret, married her wife in the first legal gay marriage in the State of Minnesota this August last. Uncle Paul was my Grandma Jane's oldest child, born in 1945. Grandma Jane and her sisters, Aunt Ruth, and Aunt Mary, then had seventeen heterosexual children between them, and, in 1964, Aunt Mary had Margaret. That nineteen years meant everything to those cousins' futures. Uncle Paul was already well into his twenties when he read about Stonewall in the papers; Margaret read about it in the queer history books. And, we can't get complacent, but things are even better for kids coming up nowadays.

Thank God.

Two Boys Kissing is the most impressive book of the year and you should read it. I don't care how much you cry, and you will cry, this book needs to be read, by you, right now. Bonus points for David Levithan's lisp on the audiobook. I cried driving to and from places for a week while I was listening. Two Boys Kissing is an ensemble cast story about gay teens narrated by a Greek Chorus of gay men who died of AIDS. Harry and Craig get the most page-time. They are attempting to break the Guinness world record for longest kiss. Neil and Peter are fifteen-year-old boyfriends, and the Greek Chorus marvels at them, "To be fifteen and walking to his boyfriend's house." There's amazement. Because to be fifteen. And gay. In their time, you never could. It came later. To be gay, you had to find that bookstore, that coffee shop, that bar, that city. You could be gay there. You could hide there. The Greek Chorus wishes they could have been gay and safe in their childhood homes like Neil and Peter. I found My Son Eric in my grandma's books years ago and read it. It's written by a woman my grandma's age, a mother's story about how it was when she found out her adult son was the homosexual. Peter's parents love Neil, and Peter's mom drives them all over the place, because they can be fifteen and gay, but they can't drive yet.

Ryan and Avery just met. Avery is trans. The Economist put the trans issue well recently in an article about the LA County school system's new policy of referring to all gender-questioning children by their identified, not born, genders. They said that the percentage of trans people in the population is one half of one percent, so in the LA County school system, this policy will affect 30,000 children. In large population, even small minorities are huge in numbers and deserve our respect and recognition. Ryan and Avery are hanging out at the abandoned mini-golf course and run into Ryan's terrible classmate. They walk out unscathed physically, but it's hard and humiliating.

In a flashback passage, Tariq gets his ribs kicked in for being queer. He's Harry and Craig's friend, the one that inspired their record-breaking kiss, and he's the one running the webcams and the Twitter feed while Harry and Craig are kissing.

Cooper is gay and not doing so well. He's all over Grindr but no IRL friends. Two Boys Kissing takes place over a weekend. Cooper's dad sees Cooper's open laptop on Saturday morning. Cooper runs. He's alone, IMing with strangers in a fast food restaurant, driving aimlessly, crying. On Saturday night, he makes a date with a strange guy. The Greek Chorus mourns the old gay meeting places, the bookstores and coffee shops and bars, and the callow internet that has replaced them. (That night, Cooper is disappointed to find out that he's on a date with a man who thinks he's cute and wants to get to know him better before things get too involved physically. Cooper has too many problems to deal with that.)

Harry and Craig are all over the internet by now, kissing. For ten hours. Twenty. A teacher named Tom takes the overnight shift. Harry and Craig are kissing on school property and they need a teacher and Guinness Book verifier on hand at all times. Tom's gay and out and HIV-positive and married and teaches high school. He survived the plague, his symptoms showed up a bit later, and he lived, and he sat by so many beds and went to so many funerals. He needs to stay up all night to watch Harry and Craig, along with a gathering crowd of supporters. They can't unlock lips, can't be touched by other people, can drink through straws, can't take bathroom breaks, can't wear diapers, can't sit down for thirty three hours and eight minutes.

David Levithan keeps invoking gay authors. "Two Boys Kissing" paraphrases a Whitman poem. He several times mentions Oscar Wilde. And who hosted a party for Oscar Wilde in her home in Washington D.C. one night in 1882? Frances Hodgson Burnett. You may have noticed that I've read more FHB novels than necessary in the last months, and that is because I've been working up to a reading of her biography, Frances Hodgson Burnett: Beyond the Secret Garden, by Ann Thwaite. I needed background. I've never read a biography of someone I wasn't already involved with before this (excepting Sam Walton's. Why did I read that?), and I needed to know her work before I got up to Lass o'Lowrie's and was shamed by my own ignorance. The copy of Beyond the Secret Garden I have is a beautiful British trade paperback, and it deserves an appropriate amount of background to be read properly.

From reading Little Princess and Secret Garden, you'd think FHB was a daughter of the Raj, but she was born in Manchester. Young Frances was, of course, a born storyteller, intelligent, precocious, with a way about her, and a love of play. Ann Thwaite has some good anecdotes and plenty of details about Manchester, the mills, the desperate poverty, and the middle-class one high step removed from the poor, until the American Civil War stopped the South from sending slave-grown cotton to supply the British textile industry. Frances' mother immigrated the family to Tennessee, and FHB spent her teen years in genteel poverty. At eighteen, she sent her first stories to the magazines as "my object is renumeration." She quickly became one of the top authors in Godey's Lady Book and her family went from poor to an uneasy middle class. She eventually married the man who'd been courting her for seven years; she shouldn't have. They went to Paris so he could study medicine, and she supported the family by her writing while raising their sons, Lionel and Vivian. The family struggled, but her novels were picking up steam. A few years later, when they were back in the States, Frances was in her early thirties and hailed as one of the best literary authors in America, along with Henry James and some people we've never heard of. FHB and James became friends later, and at one point lived in country houses only ten miles apart, but Ms. Thwaite believes the friendship was rather one-sided; James was better at sending excuses than invitations. In D.C., FHB wrote a Washington novel (who knew?) and plenty of other things. With a marriage swirling the drain, FHB visited, and then moved, back to England.

About halfway through Beyond the Secret Garden, I realized that I was reading a sort of biographical Old Yeller and Frances Hodgson Burnett wasn't going to live past the end of the book. Having written fifty-odd novels and a dozen plays and lived into her seventies, FHB provides enough biographical material that Ms. Thwaite can barely list the books, the places, the plays, the editors, the publishers, the successes, the company, the holidays in Italy. No book in BtSG gets more attention than Little Lord Fauntleroy, and that runs four pages, including Frances' insistences to the public that she understood: childhood is not as saccharine as it might appear in her novels. Ms. Thwaite prints a great letter about Lionel and Vivian hanging out windows and lighting fires and knocking over lamps when they weren't laying their heads on her knee and calling her "darling." Fauntleroy was a twist in FHB's career. Ann Thwaite uses the word "albatross." Before Fauntleroy, FHB was an accomplished adult novelist. After Fauntleroy, she struggled to reproduce the success, while separating her other books from Fauntleroy's reputation as cloying..

After the death of her son Lionel from galloping consumption, FHB was rarely happy, worked hard, loved her garden with more passion than anything but her children, and struggled to maintain her life and household on an author's wages. A Secret Garden and The Little Princess came late in her career, and garnered less praise than one would think considering they're now her best known works. Eventually she moved back to America and died in 1924. Beyond the Secret Garden is a great, but too short at 382 pages, for the amount of work that FHB created. Her best and worst adult novels (Making of a Marchioness and A Fair Barbarian; Lady of Quality) get little space. I am inspired to read more of her novels now, namely Through One Administration and T. Tembarom. One almost wants to get a Kindle to read one's Victorian novels more easily. But, other things in life... I'm at least two books behind in my blogging. We've got feckless hippies and modern fiction coming up. Stay tuned.

Top Ten Tuesday

It's Top Ten Tuesday from The Broke and the Bookish: http://brokeandbookish.blogspot.com/  The topic is Top Ten Books to Read During Halloween.  Here are mine:

1. Harriet's Halloween Candy by Nancy Carlson.  Harriet doesn't want to share her Halloween candy with her brother Walt, but will she?  There's something extremely satisfying about this family of square dogs.

2. Scratch and Sniff Halloween from the good people at DK.  I got mine years ago and it's still sniffy.  The apple smell is particularly apple-ish.  Why read when you can sniff?

3. The Ghost of Borley Rectory or something by Jane St. Anthony.  I don't know the exact title and it's not for sale anywhere, but I kept my light on for three nights after I proofread the bloody thing.

4. Our Way or the Highway by Mary Losure has nothing at all to do with Halloween, but I'm reading it here on October 28th and it's quite good.  More on that later.

I didn't quite make it to ten, but thank you for your patience!

Best,
Glyptodon

Short Takes

I've gotten behind on my blogging this last month, so here are some short reviews:

The first is for Gimme Shelter! by Mary Elizabeth Williams. I shoulda known from the title! that the book wouldn't be as good as I hoped. Gimme Shelter! is a book about the housing bubble as experienced by one New Yorker with no insights. Ms. Williams mostly takes her husband and two daughters around to different open houses on weekends. If we're lucky, the houses and condos she's visiting are comically messy, but mostly they're just empty like houses are when people sell them. Occasionally she throws in statistics about skyrocketing real estate prices and future foreclosures, or tells stories about her friends who moved to Ohio and bought a house for $200,000. Ms. Williams and her husband can spend $350,000 and they cannot find a two bedroom in New York for that money. Ms. Williams knows she's in a bubble, but homeownership is an American need and she has two kids. She and her husband finally buy a two bedroom co-op unit and she gets an ulcer in the epilogue. Ms. Williams is a freelance writer in New York, and the reader can tell that one night she went to just the right party: a man from Simon & Schuster was there, thinking, "If only I could find someone to write me a timely book about the housing bubble," and he saw Ms. Williams across the buffet table and said, "What have you been up to, Elizabeth?" and she said, "Jeff and I just bought a house. It's been crazy. I could write a book about it..."

I consider Pyongyang by Guy Delisle to be mandatory reading. Burma Chronicles, was good but not quite as good. It's hard to beat North Korea.  Pyongyang and Shenzhen are memoirs of Guy Delisle's time as a supervising animator for a French production company subcontracting to Asia. Both books are frequently funny stories about trying to get along alone in iffy places. North Korea being the most bizarre country on Earth, the book is better. In Burma Chronicles, Mr. Delisle is easier in his element, which makes a less wacky travelogue. Burma was a British colony, so the architecture is familiar and he meets elderly Anglophonic Burmese apologizing for the country being in such a state, as though he got to Myanmar and its socks were on the floor and it hadn't dusted. Since his last book, Mr. Delisle has got married and had a baby named Louis. His wife works for an NGO, hence the posting to Burma. Louis is more popular with the Burmese than Mr. Delisle is, and he learns the Burmese for "Louis' dad" pretty quickly. Between walking around the neighborhood waving at people who know Louis and spending time with diplomatic wives and their toddlers, Mr. Delisle has less material than when he was leaving flowers at the feet of a giant statue of Kim Il Sung. Mr. Delisle devotes space to the humanitarian crises in Burma, and he's able to spend some time outside of the capitol with his wife, looking at Medicens Sans Frontieres facilities. Mr. Delisle doesn't get a firsthand look at the horrible oppression that Burmese ethnic minorities are victim to, but he meets plenty of people who've seen it, and he tells some of their stories. Burma Chronicles is certainly worth reading, but read Pyongyang first.

I finally read Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton. I saw the movie in the theater ages ago and I've always been intrigued to read it. I was in a peripatetic reading mood a few weeks ago and I wanted something unputdownable, which I figured Michael Crichton would be, considering how much Americans like him. However, this was Ibn Fadn as told by Michael Crichton so pretty good but it was written in the style of a chronicle: This happened, then this happened, then this happened, these Vikings are filthy, then this happened. Ibn Fadn is a scholarly fellow who's sent on an embassy to the Bulgars but, on the banks of the Volga, he runs into a group of Vikings and is recruited to be the lucky thirteenth in a band going north to fight an unspeakable evil. The wendol, which is like a grendel or, Crichton posits, a Neanderthal, is raiding an ostentatious settlement and eating people. On the way up, Ibn Fadn records a bit of Viking ethnography, for realsies. I ran into his account of a Viking funeral years ago in the most salient part of an old book called Daily Life of the Vikings. Free love.

Whether or not Ibn Fadn and twelve other guys slaughtered the mother wendol in the sea cave is historically less interesting than the low but devious fortifications on the great hall and the Vikings' blase attitude toward death. Herger, the Viking who speaks enough Latin to serve as Ibn Fadn's explainer, comes out a good character and there's a lot of randomly chosen description and some adventure spots, but it's all in cloud of befuddlement that the Vikings don't wash or behave like the good Muslims do in the City of Peace, the most civilized place in the world at the time, which is, of course, Baghdad.

Roddy Doyle's A Greyhound of a Girl is a forking beautiful book, but it's a 181-page short story. I was looking forward to it a little too much. The Deportees killed me, as far as his new stuff goes, but cor the jaysis dialogue was left behind for A Greyhound of a Girl. Roddy Doyle is still good, but who wants to read Standard English when you can read an Irish brogue? I liked Mary, and Scarlett, and Emer, and Tansey, but he's getting a little bit too good at describing people.  One page of dialogue, and you already know their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and fears.  And they were all similar to each other, being a great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and daughter.

As for my contention that AGoaG is a short story, here is the plot: Mary's grandmother is dying in hospital, so her dead great-grandmother appears to her and her mother takes them all to visit the family farm one last time. There are other things, details, reminiscences, a hatred for greyhounds, brothers, wide margins, that make up the 181-pages, but I would've got more out of this if it was called A Greyhound of a Girl and Other Stories.

Then there's the first installment of the Saga graphic novel, Brian K. Vaughn's new opus, which everyone I know read quietly sometime in the last year. They are all sitting on the edge of their bottoms now waiting for the second installment to come into work used so they don't have to buy it for full price.

Quick! Name the bestselling American author in 1908? Surprise! You have no idea. You've never even heard about her, and there's nothing wrong with that. Her pseudonym was Frances Little and the book was The Lady of Decoration. I didn't read that, but I read her other book Little Sister Snow. Japan spent two hundred years in isolation so that Sunday school teachers wouldn't write books like this about it. Little Sister Snow manages a dollop of information on top of a big condescension pie. It would be easy to underestimate the Japanese army and their long-range flight capabilities if your first impressions of the country was a prosaic descriptions of peasants failing at globalism. Yuki-chan's parents wanted a child more than anything and eventually got a live one when they were already old and poor because of Yuki-chan's father's ununderstanding of the new economic order.  The book opens with Yuki-chan's favorite sparrow being eaten by a cat. Yuki-chan chases the cat, intending to drown the motherfucker, when an American boy in a rickshaw knocks her down in the road, and, Dick Merrit, smiling, his eyes crinkling, with his nice blond hair hanging in a charmingly carefree way over his forehead, tells her not to drown that poor puss. Then Yuki-chan grows up to become Yuki-san and receive a letter from Dick Merrit, the American boy all grown up, asking if he could stay in Yuki's parents' house for some time, as he is coming to Japan on business and there are no hotels in the area. After I was extremely confused, Ms. Little backtracks to explain that the boy was the son of a teacher at the mission school Yuki-chan attended and they hadn't just met the once in a chance knocking-over. Adult Dick stays with Yuki-san and her parents. He is as loveable and charming as ever an American was and he and Yuki have some jolly times together. He teaches her English, she teaches him Japanese, they walk in the garden. There are some ham-fisted conversations where Dick explains the ever-loving kindness of the Christian God. Yuki falls in love with Dick, of course, although she's engaged to marry an officer she's never met. Duty, obedience, filial piety, and Dick's engagement to a woman offscreen in San Francisco prevent Dick and Yuki from getting together, but when he leaves, he leaves his diary behind and Yuki-san starts her own diary in the broken English that is her inner dialogue: "Ah, Merrit San, you the one big happy in all my life and I never forget all your kindful. You give me the good heart, like sun make flower-bud unclose. You telled me what is soul and purely, and you say be very good wife." Yuki, despite the American leanings in her heart, burns her diary and, at the end of the book, is going to the general's.

Gentle racism should ruin books for you, and I almost stopped listening to Little Sister Snow multiple times because of the eeeeeegh. But despite the charming pidgin inanities Yuki speaks in response to Dick's chummy exposition, Yuki is a good, strong girl character. Frances Little's biggest sin is presenting her in isolation. Japan was on the ascendant at the time, and showing a lonely little girl with absolutely no contact except two elderly parents does not do the country justice. With no community or context, Yuki is an inconsequential waif waiting to be rescued by an American's smile, and not a Japanese person living on a dynamic island full of Japanese people. Yuki must face a non-choice between a gay (you know what I mean) American and an officer in the service of the Emperor whom her near-invalid parents have somehow managed to match her with. In the end, Little Sister Snow is not a book about Japan and the Japanese, it's only a book about American concepts of foreign foreigners (the kind who aren't European) in the decades before those foreigners started asserting themselves.

Two Strong Women

Then I read a hiking book that absolutely nailed it. Wow. The only problem with books this good is that they end too quickly, and this one is short to begin with. Halfway to the Sky by Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley is a hiking book, but I bet people in the multiple sclerosis community think it's an MS book with a hiking bent. I keep complaining about books where people go hiking because they have Problems and Pain and Tragedy and Loss, but Halfway to the Sky makes it work. (I may not be complaining about those books in my blog because I always throw them against the wall after one chapter, Cheryl Strayed.) The twelve-year-old protagonist Dani, short for Katahdin, is young enough not to know better than to walk two thousand miles to solve her problems, while still being smart enough to do her hiking homework. Dani's brother died and her parents divorced and everything is horrible and she's twelve, and she's such a damn twelve-year-old in the book, but she pulls it together. A twelve-year-old can research, and train, and buy boots. A twelve-year-old can choose a camp stove and forget matches.

Dani leaves a message for her mom saying that she's going to her dad's house and gets herself to Springer Mountain, start of the Appalachian Trail. She's twelve. People give her funny looks. She tells a seventeen-year-old that her parents gave her permission to hike the Trail alone, of course she does. He's young enough not to question, and they hike together until in the shelter on the third night Dani's mom wakes her up with a flashlight beam in the face and says, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Katahdin and her deceased brother Springer are products of thru-hiking parents who met and married on the Trail, but in recent years have become boring. Dani responds to her mom's, "Why are you hiking the Trail?" with a, "You hiked it." Dani can hike the Trail but she's under-prepared, twelve, and formerly alone. She begs and whines and invokes her brother's death and acts like a stubborn toad, and her mother agrees that they can hike on twenty miles to the next town. They do, mom in tennis shoes and jeans, sleeping in one bag with her mom's coat thrown over the gap where the zipper can't close. Dani is unsatisfied in her little twelve-year-old heart, but she also understands, and her mom reiterates, that she was terrible for running away in the first place and they can't go farther. At Suches, Dani's furious dad picks them up and gives Dani a piece of his mind, though she's entitled to be as angry as she is with him because he left her mom and has just remarried a now-pregnant woman she doesn't much care for. And mom says, "I've been thinking."

Mom's job at the bank allows sabbaticals of up to three months. Mom takes two; it's asking a lot considering that she already took off stacks of time for Springer, and for the funeral, but Dani can have two months. They can go to Catawba but that's it.

Nothing earth shattering happens on the hike, of course. If it did, we would have a rescue book, not a hiking book. Dani and her mom mostly keep to themselves. There's a dearth of over-forties and under-eighteens on the Trail.  Dani and her mom hang around with Vivi, a retired breast cancer survivor, and Trailhead, who's taking a year off from teaching. They meet when Dani is hanging the food at a campsite.

"'I'll have to take your photograph," he said. "I teach high school English and a self-sufficient adolescent is something of a miracle to me." He bugged me, and I guess mom could tell.

'Self-sufficiency is made, not born,' she said."

But Trailhead sticks to them. When he blows his ACL, Dani helps carry him down the mountain and knows his loss: he won't make it to Katahdin and she won't either.

Dani and her mom get into the trail routine. The "eat some oatmeal, witness the miracle of God's creation, tape a blister, eat some peanut butter" of hiking, and then they start having time to talk about Dani's brother who died that winter. Vivi helps. Sullen Dani isn't wandering around sharing the tragedy of her life with strangers but mom is.  Vivi says, "I'm having trouble getting a sense of Springer as a person." Dani resents her mom because she works too much, because she hasn't been there, because her dad left, because her brother is dead. There's an insane only-in-America conversations about health insurance. When Dani and Springer were younger, mom got a job at the bank just to bring in some extra money while they were saving up for the house, and the bank had better insurance so the family switched. Then Springer was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. You can't buy insurance for a terminally ill child, so mom kept working. Dani makes peace, and with Springer not watching her soccer games. She says, "Why wouldn't you let him go to my soccer games?" and mom says, "He didn't want to go. He was embarrassed. He hated it when people stared at him."

When they meet some local kids camping at a shelter, Dani's flattered that they're impressed because they're doing a seven hundred mile segment. They do. They make it. Dani counts herself as one of the AT hiker drop-outs for now, but she has years. She'll go back. Meanwhile, her dad's new child is named Harper and she and her take time to breathe.  I don't know if I've done justice to how splendid this book is, but I can't name a truer book about hiking. Even Bill Bryson's classic A Walk in the Woods doesn't pull you into the act of hiking like Halfway to the Sky. Feet, boots, stoves, water, trees, wind, pack weight, blisters. 

Unless you want to stay home and get married. Amelia Alderson Opie wrote Adeline Mowbray in 1804, partly inspired by her friend Mary Wollstonecraft's extra-marital union with a minor radical. The subtitle The Mother and the Daughter references Adeline's submission to and rejection by her mother, which takes up less page space than the scandal but weighs on Adeline's soul. Mrs. Mowbray is a self-educated woman of no discretion: "For her, history, biography, poetry, and discoveries in natural philosophy, had few attractions, while she pored with still unsatisfied delight over abstruse systems of morals and metaphysics, or new theories in politics." Her daughter Adeline is early inducted into the theories of these radical new men, and, taking the season in Bath, the mother-daughter pair meet one of the authors they so admire, a Mr. Glenmurray, who at nineteen penned a tract against marriage which has rumbled him out so that he leads a lonely existence on the margins of high society while trying to recover from consumption. Adeline's mother, being socially obnoxious and out of touch, visits Mr. Glenmurray and allows Adeline to socialize with him, shocking though it is to the better inhabitants of the town. They also make the acquaintance of Sir Patrick, a scoundrel, and it is in this company that Adeline announces that she agrees with Mr. Glenmurray: Marriage is wrong. A tumult of events follow: Sir Patrick says dishonorable things, he and Glenmurray duel even though Glenmurray wrote a tract against dueling, Mrs. Mowbray marries Sir Patrick, Sir Patrick assaults Adeline, Adeline runs away and into Glenmurray's arms, Mrs. Mowbray disowns Adeline, and Sir Patrick dies on a boat. So Adeline and Glenmurray are together, friendless, in a town by the sea waiting to make the crossing to France, when, walking in the park, they run into Glenmurray's old school friend and his wife and sister. The school friend is charmed by Glenmurray's dear wife, and shocked when Glenmurray writes him a letter explaining that Adeline is not his wife at all and that they have fled in the night. This happens again in France and the friend who has met Glenmurray and Adeline walking together feels so deeply that allowing his sisters to meet Glenmurray's mistress has besmirched their honor that he wants to fight a duel with Glenmurray, but Adeline and Glenmurray have fled again. Adeline's maidservant quits and can't find a new position because her old mistress is a mistress. A Quaker woman agrees to hire the maidservant and tells Adeline about the wages of sin at the same time. These passages made me take an inventory all the dishonorable women I know, because speaking or otherwise associating with a dishonorable woman dishonors even the most honorable woman. Fornication, of course, is not limited to the marital, as it were, act, but includes the suspicion of such an act, or similar acts, or letting a certainly-not-a-gentleman-friend sleep over because he respects boundaries. I know who's been doing that lately. The shame! From now on I can only talk to fifteen-year-olds, and Laura because she's married to a girl.

Glenmurray dies willing to marry Adeline, but Adeline believes in Glenmurray's principles and won't call his bluff. On his deathbed, he implores her to marry his cousin Douchemurray and she concedes for his sake. The marriage is an unhappy one, as husbandface has jerky habits that Glenmurray never noticed at Thanksgiving. He doesn't respect Adeline and Adeline, rather than realizing that she was right all along and 1804 marriage is a ridiculous institution, takes her husband's treatment as punishment for her former sin. Their daughter is born and he's disappointed. When business calls him to Jamaica, Adeline realizes the ideal of a "protector" six months away by sailboat and lets him go. But worsening health and a series of mix-ups cause Adeline to lie dying penniless in a cottage near the estate where her mother lives. When the Quaker woman is careening down the road in a runaway oxcart quite nearby, Mrs. Mowbray grabs the reigns. Finding that they are concerned with the same wayward woman, Adeline's mother having long forgiven her, they search for Adeline and find her in time to watch her die. Because that's what happens when you break the rules: you die.

Adeline Mowbray expands and contracts randomly. Big events happen in tiny paragraphs, minutes of conversation take pages. Sir Patrick dies mysteriously on a boat and one assumes he'll be back for a final sword fight, but he stays gone. Despite that, and the crazy moral backwardness, Adeline Mowbray was a good read. How often does one get any insight into the life of a free-thinking woman in 1804? The author refused to articulate Adeline's arguments against marriage, and arguments against marriage are different nowadays, but Adeline's arguments for marriage at the end of the book translate to problems of our time. Marriage for protection and control is a terrible thing and one weeps at the hardship Adeline went through because she did not succumb to a half-hour ceremony mandated by the Church of England to happen before breakfast. A few hundred years before, marriage was contracted between two individuals and the church had nothing to do with it. Adeline has legal autonomy as an heiress, but none as a wife. Because she was one man's life partner, every man she meets thinks she is sexually available. In that kind of world, one understands why marriage is mandatory and cursed. For a better analysis of Adeline Mowbray, please read the Evening All Afternoon blog (http://www.eveningallafternoon.com/2010/11/adeline-mowbray.html).

I have a theory that will blow English literature wide open. Remember when the Quaker woman was careening down the road in an oxcart and Mrs. Mowbray caught the reigns? Adeline's only two friends in the world? What are the chances of that happening? Remember when Nicholas Nickleby overheard those blokes talking about his sister? Remember when the Indian gentleman found Sara Crewe next door? Remember when Darcy and Elizabeth turned up at the same country house? Remember how quickly Sherlock Holmes solved those crimes? How likely is any of that to happen in a normal country full of people? Not very, huh? But, I've figured it out: England only had five hundred people living there during the nineteenth century. Some scholars will argue seven hundred, maybe even one thousand, but the population must have been tiny for coincidences like that to happen with such regularity. And how else did England manage to colonize Arabia, Australia, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Borneo, Botswana, British Guiana, Brunei, Canada, Egypt, the Falklands, Gambia, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Minorca, Namibia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Palestine, Rhodesia, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Virgin Islands and leave that many people at home? As long as the colonial population was sending money and letters, they wouldn't be missed. The middle 97% must have gone abroad, leaving the top one and bottom two percents at home to do the things that people do in nineteenth century British novels. Am I right or are Opie, Hodgson Burnett, Conan Doyle, Austen, Dickens and countless others ineffably lazy authors?